Precisely where should he go? As he fled Paris, he had assumed that he would sail directly for one of the English coastal towns, then proceed immediately to London. But did Knowles live in London? Drumont didn’t know—indeed, he realized during his trip north, he knew almost nothing of England. He had killed the girl somewhat rashly; from now on he needed to plan with care.
On the train he had hatched a scheme. He would take time to learn what he needed to know. And so he was sailing for the island of Guernsey, where his cousin Baptiste worked in a shipyard. Drumont had not seen him since Baptiste left Paris in the thirties, but they were the same age, and they had been close as boys on Corsica; he would help; he was Corsican. And while Guernsey was English territory—stolen from France—the residents spoke an old French patois, Guernésiais, that Drumont hoped he could understand. He would reconnoiter on Guernsey for a few weeks, learn what he could about the English and their ways in a half-French place. There was no rush; let Knowles imagine himself safe, let him relax his guard.
From which harbor should he sail? That choice was a more patriotic one. He sailed from Boulogne, of course, because Boulogne was the port from which the Emperor Napoleon had prepared to launch his invasion of England a half century ago. And while Napoleon’s army had been frustrated, perhaps Drumont might now succeed, as a lone guerrilla, and in his small way vindicate the emperor posthumously, as a good son fulfills a father’s incomplete dream.
Might he truly be Bonaparte’s bastard, as his dirty-minded friends used to tease back on Corsica when they were boys? Drumont was born in June of 1800, precisely nine months after Napoleon Bonaparte’s final visit to the island, just before he became emperor. And Gabriel’s mother, like so many of her Corsican generation, claimed she had known Napoleon when she was young, back when his surname was still Corsican, with four syllables, Buona-par-te. Like the emperor himself, Gabriele Tremonti had Frenchified his name when he immigrated to the mainland.
All his life, Gabriel’s wish to believe his mama was not a slut had overridden his wish to believe he was Napoleon Bonaparte’s secret elder son. But now, with his whole family dead, he found himself indulging the wishfulness concerning his patrimony.
In the distance he spotted a bonfire at St. Peter Port, on Guernsey. He had spotted Britain.
9
March 18, 1848
New York City
FOR MORE THAN a year afterward, whenever Skaggs tried to parse out the events and emotions of 1848 for the memoir he intended to write—Wonderstruck, he would call the book—he debated with himself about when and where to fix the start of the present age of wonders.
There could be no doubt, he was certain, that the year constituted a true annus mirabilis. Surely the revolutions in Europe and the discoveries in California and then the cholera everywhere were the equals of the wonders of 1665 and ’66, the original annus mirabilis, when London was wasted by the Plague and the Great Fire, and Isaac Newton explained gravity and invented the calculus. In 1848 God the gamester had certainly spun his wheel again. But for the purposes of the book Skaggs planned to write, when did it make sense to begin?
Was it the instant of magnificent dumb luck in January in California, when the no-account boob from New Jersey, an incompetent mill-builder standing half numb in the waters of the American River (which was at that time still a few days shy of actually being American), leaned down and plucked from the gravel a speck of gold no bigger than a piece of snot? The moment’s absence of spectacle would displease Skaggs when he learned of it.
Or should he begin his chronicle in Europe a month later, when the first of a hundred kings and princes ran from their palaces like a frightened herd of overbred animals? The revolutions were pure spectacle, a whole continent on a spree.
Public events of large consequence did occur a month after that, on the third Saturday in March—democratic passions boiled over in Milan and Berlin, San Francisco’s eight-week-old newspaper reported the discovery of the golden snot in the American River—but it was a date that would be marked in no chronicle save Skaggs’s own as the commencement of the new age.
ON SATURDAY THE eighteenth, admittedly, Skaggs’s judgment may have been colored by the bit of opium he’d stirred into his luncheon tea. He had finished his day’s work for Bobo, a double portrait of the magician Signor Antonio Blitz and his favorite wooden dummy. He decided to use the rest of the afternoon to start writing an essay, inspired by Poe’s talk, on the ways that rail travel and photography and the telegraph were warping the perception of time.
And he’d decided that a taste of opium, just five or six grains, would be a propitious way to prime his pan for the task.
And so it was. By the time he stepped out into West Broadway at five o’clock, he had filled two large double-elephant sheets and started on a third.
No! Not merely five o’clock, he noticed as he looked in at the clock-maker’s, but precisely seven past five—no, seven minutes forty-three, -four, forty-five seconds past. He had been writing all afternoon about “the useful tyranny of clock time,” and here it was, displayed two dozen different ways in a shopwindow. Today he had scribbled out his theory: because watches in every pocket and clocks in every factory and railroad station had stimulated in people an acute awareness of time passing, that new awareness had in turn stimulated an unhappiness with the status quo, and the new demands for still-speedier progress. “Shall we adapt and submit to the useful tyranny,” Skaggs had asked in his final sentences today,
and all of us become automatons in wrappings of skin and blood, mere androids? Or will the ultimate ism of our day, this driving precisionism of schedules timed to the very minute, instead so fire our impatience that we revolt against the clock-mad bosses in the factories and countinghouses and railway offices? Lovers of liberty and poetic justice must hope for the latter.
Ten square feet of fresh words! Sentences that trickled and flowed over his mind’s topography all in their own time and for their own sakes, not forced out on some publisher’s account for ten-words-a-penny.
“Schveep for half a cent?”
Skaggs blinked. Occupied by his own overheated thoughts, he had hardly registered the presence of the city, let alone its people. He saw now that he was in the crowd huddling along Broadway, waiting for a landau and a city wagon to pass. In the landau were a pair of rich ladies dressed for a party, each smiling and holding a tiny candle out the windows of the carriage. Piled in the wagon were dozens of street carcasses—mostly dogs, some rats and cats, a couple of pigs, the whole heap covered in an inch of lime, which sifted out between the boards as the wagon rolled, leaving a fuzzy trail of white on the pavement.
“Schveep for you, sir, please?” A street arab of nine or ten was tugging at his coat with one hand and with the other held a broom as tall as she. A patina of filth made her chestnut hair black, and she had no right eye.
“Ja, bitte,” he said, tapping his walking stick on the stone.
The girl smiled.
“Which I’m afraid,” he continued, “is practically the entire extent of my German, which I acquired in Buffalo. Haben sie von Buffalo? Und million Deutsche im Buffalo!”
The girl giggled now at this wirklich verrückt American, this crazy New Yorker, and started furiously brushing away the dirty feathers and bits of dried manure from the patch of Broadway in front of him, making the odors and motes rise and swirl as she cleared a place for him to step. When she came for her wage he noticed that his writing pencil was still gripped tight in his hand, so he ceremoniously placed both it and a penny in the girl’s open palm. She glanced up quizzically, registered his smile, winked her good eye, and plunged the pencil like a bodkin into one of her braids, shouting “Danken Sie!” as she dashed off down …Worth Street, Skaggs saw on the sign bolted to the lamppost. The single Negro among the city’s troop of lamplighters stood on his ladder wiping soot from the street sign with a rag.
Skaggs had walked quite far, he realized now, in this pleasantly addled state
. And that was part of the problem with his current life, he reckoned—his familiarity with almost every board and stone and step of Manhattan, his habitat by now so well known that even in an opium haze he was able to wander for a mile in a trance, chatting silently with himself.
As he crossed Worth, he watched the lamplighter gingerly poke his torch, like a wizard’s wand, up inside the glass globe toward the jet of gas. Duff Lucking had suggested Skaggs make a portrait of this man to include in his eventual “Daguerreian of Fire” exhibition.
The bloom of light surged and enveloped Skaggs. A moment earlier it had been late afternoon, the sky still indigo; now, from within the glamorous bubble of white-hot golden glow, it seemed as if night had fallen over the rest of the city. Skaggs’s favorite hours in New York had always been the gradual, liminal recession of day into night, the daily autumn, with each of its slow, soft, ambiguous gradations of deepening color and shadow. But twilight had been rendered obsolete by the New York Gas Light Company. Half the city’s streetlamps were gas now.
Skaggs did not believe, as many people did, that gaslight harmed one’s eyes. But expanding its territory in every direction, the new light allowed New York—forced it, really—to remain awake longer, to ignore the earth’s rotations. The interminable glow had turned tens of thousands of New Yorkers into night-crawling scamps, instead of the select fraternity that stayed out late carousing when Skaggs had first arrived. Back then a city inspector had patrolled every gassed street every evening, and by midnight would pound his cane on the sidewalk and yell “Lights-out.” Now the lights burned practically all night long. And Skaggs did wonder if the city’s gas-fired wakefulness had begun to overstimulate its inhabitants, make them merrier, louder, funnier, stranger, greedier, crazed. As he stepped now from the luminous Worth Street blossom back into the ordinary mid-block evening, the whole view down Broadway struck him as unusually bright, saturated with light.
To be modern, he thought, is to be artificially aglow.
Nor was the new luminosity only a matter of gaslight spreading into every parlor and respectable street. There were also the laughably large new panes of plate glass that amounted to architectural magician’s tricks, erasing the boundary between indoors and out. And the unearthly rays of light beaming from burning lime that transformed any actor on a stage into a shining angelic or demonic figure; the magic-lantern shows of Jesus on the cross and Halley’s comet scaring a tribe of Indians; the new, exceptionally yellow yellow paints and bright red printer’s inks, all mixed up by chemists in laboratories; the telegraph wires that sparked and blushed against the night skies like grapevines beset by St. Elmo’s fire.
Skaggs thought of his Latin master at school, forefinger extended at Skaggs, warning him yet again, “Cave ignis fatuus!” Beware the fictitious fire!
Modernity glows.
Then, however, he recalled the world’s other great modern metropolis—murky, sullen, dun-colored London, which he had visited for the first time last winter en route to Bavaria. It was a city that seemed to darken a little more every day from the soot belched by smokestacks and chimneys.
All right then, an amended declaration: Modern America glows.
On the sidewalk in front of him, a telescope man had set up for business: five cents for a five-minute look, money Skaggs had often spent to gawk at the moon’s craters and Saturn’s rings and the nearest stars, such as Vega, in the constellation Lyra. Tonight there was already a queue of people hoping to see GOD’S OWN ILLUMINATIONS, as the man’s wooden sign promised.
What a funny puff to peddle astronomy, Skaggs thought as he prepared to cross Thomas Street—when five drummers in army uniforms stepped directly in front of him. He had bumped the nearest man.
“Oops, pardon me,” he said, and only then noticed behind the drummers a whole band—ten trumpets, ten trombones, another ten men carrying larger horns. They were all silent but for the soft rhythmic stomping of their boots as they marched in place. And then, all at once, they moved forward into Broadway and began playing “Yankee Doodle” so loudly that Skaggs was blown backward by the sound. He thumped his right elbow against a bystander’s belly—and as he jerked away and prepared to apologize, accidentally brushed his left hand across the lightly upholstered buttocks of the man’s young wife.
Modern America: artificially aglow, preternaturally loud—and unreasonably crowded. Then Skaggs remembered why. Tonight was the peace festival, to celebrate our crushing of Mexico. The bands and General Scott and some of his New York troops marching up Broadway from the Battery and, by order of the mayor, the illuminations, a patriotic obligation for all New Yorkers to stick candles in windowsills, twist open the valve on every gas lamp, wave torches, build bonfires—that is, to come as close as possible to burning down this flammable city without actually setting it afire.
In the short pause after the first verse of “Yankee Doodle,” Skaggs heard another familiar tune insert itself. He turned and saw that behind him, marching out of Worth, another regimental band had appeared, playing one of the inescapable songs of the moment, “Strike for Your Rights, Avenge Your Wrongs.” The musicians were arrayed in a single line from Broadway curb to Broadway curb. Leading them were a pair of ensigns, one carrying the regular twenty-nine-star American flag, the other a gray banner painted with a crude red star and crude red silhouette of a bear—a replica of the flag raised by the American rebels in Mexican California back in ’46.
As the band reached the last bars of their first verse, pedestrians around Skaggs began shouting the words and clapping along in time.
“Felt Mexico’s foul tyranny,
Upon the Rio Gran-dee!”
More voices joined in on the chorus:
“Sing to the Rio Gran-dee,
The rolling Rio Gran-dee,
Our foe shall bow the knee!”
Almost none of the enthusiastic citizens knew any of the lyrics except the chorus and the final lines of each verse. All the words people had memorized, and now gloried in shouting out, were the angry ones, the ones that smelled of bile and gunpowder and blood.
Skaggs watched a group of girls tossing bouquets at the survivors of New York’s decimated Second Regiment. One of the men stopped to pick up a hyacinth and began to place it in the tip of his musket barrel when a large bomb detonated in the sky—followed shortly by a second, smaller explosion. The soldiers and the girls and everyone in the street stopped and smiled and looked south. The fireworks were going up from the Battery. Skaggs adored fireworks, and these days the displays were beyond brilliant—not the pale flashes and pops of his childhood, but reds and blues and greens burning in apocalyptic splendor. At one astounding bloom of purple, he cooed and chuckled along with the rest of the crowd.
Artificially glowing, artificially noisy, artificially jolly America… and in these protean times, it occurred to Skaggs as he stared at the fire in the sky, modern artifices turn from toy to tool to toy and back again: gas lamps had begun as theatrical geegaws, just as weapons of war had been turned by the pyrotechnicians into entertainments.
He hustled down Duane Street back toward West Broadway, away from the mob, against a column of people holding tiny star-spangled banners on foot-long sticks and all eager to join the bloody-minded festival of peace. Ten yards ahead of him one other escapee was making his way west. The fellow had both hands shoved into his coat pockets, and his glazed leather cap was pulled down low.
“Señor Lucking, please to be halting now!”
DUFF STOPPED SHORT. Who was calling his name? Should he run? Should he stand his ground and deny everything? But then there was no more time to decide: he felt the tip of a gun barrel poke between his shoulder blades. His left hand froze around the thick roll of cord in his pocket, the right around his pistol-shaped match safe.
“Ees tonight la fiesta of victoria, Meester Señor Lucking?”
The voice was a few feet away. The man had a long gun, not a pistol. Still, Duff thought, perhaps he should run. Wouldn’t it be bette
r to die in the street here and now, shot from behind by a cowardly foreigner? Rather than have the whole truth about his time in Mexico revealed to Polly and the world? No, even better: he would pull the tin toy gun from his pocket and turn toward the man, surprise him, force the stranger to fire point-blank, guaranteeing Duff his own hero’s death…
No, no, no: why should some aggrieved Mexican want to assassinate Duff Lucking, of all people? The poor fellow is simply misinformed. Duff could tell him the truth. He had to tell him the truth.
Who are you? “¿Quién es usted, hombre?” Duff asked. He had not spoken a word of Spanish in six months.
The assailant did not answer.
“Por favor, señor,” Duff asked, “¿de dónde es en Mexico? ¿Cómo se llama, hombre?” Please, where are you from, what is your name?
“No, señor!” came the reply.
Why did none of the flag-waving New Yorkers stop to intervene? Were they so jaded? The man had a gun!
Duff tried again to engage the man, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Este no es una victoria para mí—soy un amigo de su República. Viva la República…” And then he reduced his voice to a whisper. “¿Conoce la Legión de Extranjeros?”
Still no reply, but finally he felt the tip of the gun barrel lift away from his spine. His resort to plain dealing had worked. Duff opened his hands wide and removed them gingerly from his pockets, then, with a hopeful smile, twisted his head around slowly to look over his shoulder and find…
Heyday: A Novel Page 17
