Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  And there shall be upon every high mountain, and upon every high hill, rivers and streams of waters in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall…Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

  Duff ’s next task had been to build two field furnaces just outside the city to heat the Martin’s shells, a new and improved version of incendiary hot shot. A Martin’s shell was a hollow sphere that shattered when it struck a target, spewing the molten iron that filled its center.

  So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

  On the second day of spring, the American bombardment began—from the hot-shot battery, from the giant siege guns Duff and the engineers had dragged ashore, and from the decks of navy battleships in the harbor. He’d stood only two hundred yards from the city wall. For four days he watched the fire and iron rain down, a hundred tons a day smashing and burning not just forts but the ordinary Mexicans’ houses and stables and shops and dispensaries and even—he saw a flaming steeple and cross—their churches.

  Near dawn on Sunday, before the fifth day of shelling began, he and some other men from Company A were sent on a reconnaissance foray. In a little yard behind a ruined, smoldering tavern they’d found five people curled and sprawled on the ground, broken and burned and bleeding, whimpering and groaning, barely alive. Duff had asked his sergeant if they could put the dying Mexicans out of their misery, but a lieutenant accused Duff of recklessness—of proposing to “waste good American ammunition on a few Mexican goners.”

  That was the moment Duff stopped obeying orders.

  His squad continued its way around the edge of Vera Cruz, but he’d fallen back and returned to the tavern, where he’d performed his acts of mercy, then finished a quart of mescal.

  As he stared up at the orange disk of the sun in the cloudless sky, drunk, miserable, tears streaming down his smooth cheeks, from somewhere he was sure he actually heard Saint Paul’s words…

  And I persecuted this way unto the death, binding and delivering into prisons both men and women…As I made my journey, and was come nigh unto Damascus about noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a great light round about me. And I fell unto the ground, and heard a voice saying unto me…“Why persecutest thou me?” And I answered, “Who art thou, Lord?” And he said unto me, “I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom thou persecutest”…And I said, “What shall I do, Lord?” And the Lord said unto me, “Arise, and go…and there it shall be told thee of all things which are appointed for thee to do.”

  The next day the Mexicans had surrendered Vera Cruz. But by then Duff Lucking was long gone, walking west. A week later, he had found the San Patricios.

  “Soy un católico, soy un amigo de su República,” he had said to the Mexican sentries. They’d searched him for knives and pistols, then said “Bienvenidos” and escorted him into the camp. He’d heard a familiar Latin chant in the distance and smelled the incense before he saw his famous fellow deserters, two hundred white Catholics from America, all kneeling outside on blankets in their white canvas trousers and Turkish blue coats with red collars and cuffs—their Mexican officers’ uniforms. It was the end of Easter Mass. Four Mexican priests wearing white robes were blessing the San Patricios, one by one, and sprinkling holy water on each of their guns as they passed down the ranks.

  14

  April 10, 1848

  London

  BARELY A MONTH had passed since Ben had left his family in Kent, but it seemed like an age. The last day at Great Chislington Manor had dawned in standard March fashion, cold and pitilessly gray. Breakfast was the kind of country feast that gave a bad name to English bounty: eggs, anchovies, prawns, kippers, fried lampreys, lobster meat floating in tureens of butter, then chocolate cake, treacle pies, candied bananas, cream and hazelnuts. Throughout the meal, his sister Isabel, eyes rimmed red, clutching a handkerchief, had been unable to speak for fear she would start crying again.

  As the sweets were served, their father had invited Philip to make a wager on when Ben would return to England, chastened and broke, asking for his position back at the firm: would it be before the end of 1848, or after the New Year? Philip had only grinned, shook his head, and kept his Economist, refusing even to acknowledge that his brother was about to do something exceptional. Philip had seemed infuriatingly blithe that morning. Perhaps he was cheered by the prospect of Ben’s departure and presumed failure abroad.

  Ben had kissed Isabel goodbye, shaken hands with the men, and just climbed into the brougham next to Joseph when Tryphena suddenly ran out the open front door of the house. She wore a red wool dressing gown embroidered with a riot of peacocks and palms. Its top several buttons were unfastened, revealing her chemise, and the belt was slipping loose. Philip was so shocked he said nothing, as if he did not wish to believe it was happening. And Tryphena ignored her husband. She was smiling, with a look on her face of almost horrific excitement.

  “Oh, brother-in-law,” she said to Ben as she ran toward the carriage, “they tell me you are sailing for America! And I had just that instant awoken from the most wonderful dream in which we were children, you and I, living with other children in some red Indian’s lodge built of logs, put up like wickets, on a lake in America! With a telegraph machine that played music!”

  She was at his side, breathless. Isabel approached gingerly, to clothe and calm her. But Tryphena’s dream was still pouring out, as if from a child.

  “The prettiest yellow…orbs, like croquet balls but shiny and ever so bright, were scattered across the ground, around the trees, like big magical nuts! And fires blazed all around, but the flames were soothing! Oh, it was heaven!”

  “Sounds like hell itself,” Archibald Knowles grumbled.

  She kissed Ben’s hand. “Goodbye, dear Benjamin. Will you return before September, so that we may play croquet?” Croquet and the summer flowers were Tryphena’s country passions.

  “I rather doubt it, I am afraid, my dear. We shall play another summer.”

  “If my dream should come true, Benjamin, will you write and tell me?”

  “I shall.” And off he had driven.

  PREPARING TO LEAVE England kept him as busy as he had ever been. He had to choose which of his books and prints and personal effects he would send to a warehouse, and which he would let the secondhand man cart away. Sir Archie owned the house in Bruton Street and offered to “rent it out for too much money to some foreigner for the year, while you are abroad,” but Ben insisted that he sell it, and Sir Archie was happy to oblige, given property prices lately. Ben spent days finding suitable positions for Dennis and Rose, his steward and cook. He spent hours at his desk in King William Street writing to each of his clients about his imminent withdrawal from Knowles, Merdle, Newcome & Shufflebotham. Every few nights he attended a small farewell gathering in his honor, each of which left him a little melancholy—not because he was emigrating but because he realized, with each tired joke about America and each final drunken expression of bafflement over his leave-taking, how little he would miss most of his London friends. The one he would miss dearly was gone already, lost in Paris.

  Ben had looked over the schedule of departures and found himself considering which vessel to book the way he had picked racehorses at Epsom—by his affinity for their names. He liked the idea of sailing to America on the Flying Scud, the Santa Claus, the Climax, the Sweepstakes, the Rip van Winkle, the Skylark, or the Brooklyn. The Mischief, however, was putting out from the London Docks and sailing sooner than the rest, at 1:00 P.M. on Monday the tenth of April. So Mischief it would be.

  And now the morning had arrived. His luggage, nothing but two bags he could carry himself, was packed tight, sitting on each side of him in the hired Hansom cab. One bag bulged where his books and the pieces of his shotgun pressed against the leather. The mist turned intermittentl
y to drizzle. As he rode through Trafalgar Square, past the new statue of Admiral Nelson standing atop its comically tall column, he found himself next to an omnibus pasted with Cunard advertising bills—THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! Weekly sailings!—with the letters spelling the country’s name rendered as if they consisted of rough logs and twigs. Ben smiled—it was his sister-in-law’s dream version of America.

  The two letters he’d received in the post this morning were in his pocket, to be answered from aboard the Mischief. The first was from Roger, his brother-in-law, wishing Ben “an unmolested and uneventful journey” and confirming that, with Philip’s help, he had been named to the government’s new Lunacy Commission at “the remarkable salary of £1,500.” Good for Isabel, Ben thought; poor Isabel, he thought as well. Roger Warfield had once filled an entire weekend in Kent with this lately acquired expertise—how he had discovered, for instance, during his “tour of one of the finest asylums,” that “the madman’s rages can often be calmed by quiet, straightforward conversation.”

  The second letter was from Paris. The Count de Tocqueville had responded to Ben’s plea for information concerning the whereabouts of Ashby’s remains; no word and no encouraging prospects, alas, for the provisional government remained terribly disorganized. But he said he was “pleased beyond measure” that Ben was headed for America, “a democracy in which I invest more hope than my own. You inquire about my view of the volcano that erupted here in February. You saw it—did you not have the feeling that my countrymen and I had staged a play about the French Revolution, rather than continuing it in actuality?” Indeed, he wrote Ben,

  the new Government laid down the rule that we must all wear the dress of members of the revolutionary Convention of 1792—the white waistcoat with turned-down collar as they are always worn by actors playing Robespierre on the stage.

  And on this wet, dark Monday morning in London, as his driver headed east along the Thames toward the docks, Ben saw no one quaking or laughing. At several large intersections he saw groups of impassive soldiers and constables gathered around sawhorse barricades, requiring carriages and wagons to turn away, and pedestrians to pass through in single file. And he saw thousands of Englishmen diligently trying to join in the Springtime of the Peoples, making their way toward the bridges. The Chartists had called a rally for eleven at Kensington Common to hip hip hooray their charter one last time, and then finally deliver their millions of petition signatures to Parliament. These were England’s revolutionists, Ben thought as he watched them waiting silently to cross Fleet Street and head toward Blackfriars Bridge. In England, the revolutionists carried affidavits and umbrellas.

  The drizzle became a steady rain and then a deluge. Ben saw lightning over the Houses of Parliament. The costermongers outside Hungerford Market rushed to cover their carts with canvas. And there was the new iron and steel footbridge over the river, packed with hundreds of soggy radicals shuffling to the south bank for their demonstration. Tasteful people loved to hate the Hungerford Bridge; Ben found its giant swooping iron chains not only impressive but actually beautiful—as he did its architect’s greatest work, the new tunnel beneath the Thames that had been under construction during Ben’s entire youth.

  He burned to be on his way to America. But a few minutes after arriving at the docks he’d discovered that the sailing of the Mischief was canceled due to the weather and, according to one of the ship’s officers, “circumstances beyond the control of management of the line.” A porter told him that “a quarter of the crew are off marching from Kensington Common up to Whitehall, even after the captain stood right there under that boom and called them mutineers who deserved to hang.”

  Ben put down his bags and looked up at his ship, considering his situation. He would not be leaving for America today. There were no cabs in sight. And even if he had found one, the crowds would make the drive even more tediously slow, if not actually impossible.

  He left his two bags at a luggage shed, unable to bear the ignominy of returning home this afternoon. Perhaps he would take a room at Brown’s Hotel until he could book a new passage. That would deprive Philip and his father of the pleasure of his setback. Well, how perfectly apt, one of them would be sure to say, unbearably, that it was your Chartist mob, your own revolutionary chums, who prevented you from taking your clipper to America! But one of their friends might well spot him at Brown’s, his subterfuge thus producing an even worse comeuppance. He sighed. He would amble upstream, get a bite to eat, then head home to Bruton Street after all.

  The last time he had walked along quays, in Paris, Ben had seen and heard and smelled revolution. These docksides were calm. Insurgency had not broken out. No shots had been fired, no omnibuses burned, no rocks thrown, not a single shopwindow cracked. The rain stopped.

  Finally he leaned against a stone embankment, ignoring the schooners and sloops, watching each ferry pass right to left, packed to the gills with marchers now heading home to Greenwich or Barking.

  A steam packet, the Gravesend, landed noisily thirty yards in front of him. He watched its first passengers, most of them carrying luggage, step onto the pier.

  Then he saw a face he knew. The sharp, high cheekbones were familiar, and the long nose, the pouty lips, the black hair…but the mustache? Was it the newsagent from Berkeley Square—or his former bootmaker, the Italian? Or—Lord—could it be the old head clerk dismissed from Knowles, Merdle, Newcome & Shufflebotham after he was caught rogering one of the errand boys in the cellar? But that poor fellow had not worn a mustache.

  Then Ben imagined the face shaved clean. He recalled the expression of ice-cold rage; the hand gripping the pistol, and the high-pitched yowl.

  It was the sergeant from Paris.

  No. The soldier had been younger and much taller, Ben was sure. This fellow was probably a cabdriver he had once hired, or a doorkeeper at the Athenaeum, or no one at all.

  The instant the man happened to glance up and meet Ben’s stare, even before his dark eyes squinted and widened and squinted again, both of them knew.

  Ben steadied himself. This was London! No French maniac could simply throttle or shoot him in broad daylight in the middle of Wapping High Street. But the Frenchman was dead set. Ben watched him stride through the crowd of passengers on the gangway shoving men and even women out of his way as he made for the landing stage.

  Ben bolted.

  A minute later, he reached the gray stone tower that led down into the Thames Tunnel, and he blasted through the doors without pausing, taking two slick steps at a time, nearly slipping—“Careful, sir,” said one of the special constables—surprising the crowd shuffling through the exit turnstile as he rushed past them, barely stopping at the tollbooth, throwing his penny across the counter toward the agent, who opened his palm flat to catch it when it fell.

  Ben rounded the bend and entered the narrower space of the tunnel proper, a barrel vault of a million bricks glazed white and illuminated by the flames of hundreds of coal-gas spigots, an otherworldly tube that seemed to extend infinitely, like a telegraph wire in which he and the others passing to and fro were electrical dots and dashes, each person a particle of energy, unconscious of his final destination or the message he carried.

  From well behind him, back at the gate, he heard snatches of a loud argument, commands and threats in French and English echoing off the brick and stone. The tollbooth agent would not accept Drumont’s Guernsey coins, but Drumont shouted in French that he had no time to wait for change from his British banknote. The three lounging special constables, happy at last for the chance to suppress some insurgency, surrounded this wild and—good God! armed—foreign troublemaker.

  By the time one of the specials ended the exchange by pulling his baton against Drumont’s neck from behind, Ben was almost halfway to the other side, running at full speed into the depthless white glow.

  New York City

  THIS, POLLY DECIDED the moment she stepped out of her building and took a breath, was the sort of sun
ny spring day that required celebration. So she bought carrots and cheese and a loaf of raisin bread as well as some butterscotch candies, packed her art things in a basket with the food, and waved down a big two-horse, two-seat landau. First down to West Broadway, where she awakened Skaggs and dragged him downstairs while the driver waited. His sleepy confusion and wild, uncombed hair and Turkish slippers made her laugh. And then they drove far to the east, toward a block of rotting, unpainted wooden houses.

  Skaggs and the driver were having an argument about whether he would make the turn into the alley—too narrow and muddy, the man said, too many animals and children messing about in the road. But then Polly spotted Priscilla, a bucket in hand, walking down a boardwalk. She was moving in a careful zigzag, attempting to avoid the jets of green and brown muck each of her steps caused to spurt up from between the boards.

  “Miss Christmas!” Polly said, more loudly than respectable women spoke in public. “We are here to kidnap you!”

  Priscilla looked up, a slight panic in her eyes. The fear turned to mere bewilderment, and then—her embarrassment about the squalor of Daggle-Tail Alley overcome by the appearance of a large carriage containing Polly in a pretty dress and Mr. Skaggs—to joy.

  “Polly Lucking!” Priscilla said. “How did you find me here? And…and why?”

  Polly felt like crying, so she laughed and said, “Why? Because today is the start of your Easter holiday and because I have never seen a sweeter spring morning. We are off to have a picnic and draw pictures and enjoy the bliss of profligate leisure on a regular working day. Come along!”