Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  She had pledged that she would finish her association with 101 Mercer and with harlotry in general, but her affection for Mr. Skyring was real, and until she definitely had one of the theatrical parts, she wanted his monthly ten dollars. He was the only man with whom she had faddled for money in weeks and weeks. She conceived that she was now passing through a moderate temperance phase before swearing off commercial lewdness altogether.

  As she closed the privy door behind her, she glanced again at the back of the house in Greene Street and saw five Negroes in profile, men and women, country-looking people, standing in the middle of the parlor, as if they were students in a class. How curious. She stopped to watch. But then Mrs. Gibbs appeared at the window and hurriedly reached up to close the draperies. The show was over.

  In the kitchen, one of the new girls stood at the sink. Mrs. Stanhope stood over her, holding a water bottle fitted with a tin valve, spraying mist over the girl, who wore a simple, straight, loose gown of nearly translucent white tulle and muslin. The dress was an old one of Mrs. Stanhope’s, fashionably “classical” when she’d been young. The dampening enhanced its tendency to cling to the curves of the wearer’s body.

  As Polly passed through on her way back upstairs, Mrs. Stanhope made her familiar, loud tsk sound—Polly had used the outdoor privy, which she preferred in the warmer months. Polly rolled her eyes and Mrs. Stanhope said, “Does little Laura not look positively dewy and sweet?”

  “As delicious as an Easter trifle and pretty as an angel,” Polly said.

  “An angel! Yes! Exactly!” Mrs. Stanhope patted Laura’s back to send her upstairs. “We must have a certain conversation before you go, Polly.”

  They sat in the pantry that had been fitted out as a tiny office. Mrs. Stanhope spoke at length about her multiplying competitors and rising expenses. In addition to the cost of the Croton pipe, there were nickel-a-gallon jugs of water from Poland Spring in Maine that she continued to stock for fashion’s sake. And she recounted in great detail the conversation she had had with her landlord, who was proposing to raise her annual rent by 30 percent beginning the first of May. It was customary for houses of bad fame to pay a certain premium. But Mrs. Stanhope had argued that her house was now so well known among the finest gentlemen of New York, and that “101 Mercer” was now such a trusted and desirable name, like Delmonico or Tiffany, that her occupancy had actually increased the value of the landlord’s real estate. And so did she not deserve some financial consideration for the “upper-ten cachet” she had attached to his building? “You conduct a brothel, Mrs. Stanhope,” the landlord had said, and she had practically turned on her heel and left the brute, but then she’d remembered Mr. Skaggs’s clever notion, and told the landlord that she was an “entertainment broker,” no different, really, than Mr. Barnum with his performers.

  “In the end,” she said to Polly, “I agreed to a rent of five hundred sixty dollars, which necessitates that we generate an additional thirty dollars per week of earnings. I am paying the new doctor more than I paid Madame Restell—and did he not, by the way, cure Priscilla’s problem at my expense?” A week earlier, Polly had taken Priscilla to Skaggs’s friend Dr. Solis for an abortion. “And now that you have made such a sudden and extreme reduction in your participation in the affairs of the house, Polly, in the interest of teamwork we must take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves. Mustn’t we?”

  Polly said nothing.

  “Priscilla told me only days ago that she prefers her hours here to all her hours at home in her slum with her beast of a father.”

  Priscilla had said much the same thing to Polly. But Polly made no reply as Mrs. Stanhope twattled on.

  “And I spoke to a quite impressive young fellow from Palmer’s about the spiritualist aspect of the enterprise. He had read about the excitement in Rochester over those sisters and their rappings. He was very enthusiastic.”

  “Palmer’s?” Polly asked. “The coal company? Of what relevance is a coal seller’s opinion?”

  “Palmer’s now conduct an ‘advertising agency’ from their offices as well. They purchase advertisements on behalf of tradespeople. In any newspaper one wishes, or in all of the newspapers.” Mrs. Stanhope wore a supremely pleased expression. She had discovered a new sector of respectable society in which her business was regarded simply as…a business.

  Polly could contain herself no longer. “And you intend to pay this ‘advertising agency’ to place advertisements about Priscilla and her powers in the newspapers? ‘Come one, come all, to experience in person the astounding Magnetic Whore!’”

  “Shhhh.”

  “‘Ten dollars for twenty minutes!’”

  Mrs. Stanhope was both crestfallen and disgusted. “Polly, nooooo.”

  “‘Communicate with your grandfather as you tidder a girl as young as your own granddaughter! Every familiarity available, in the here and now and the hereafter!’”

  “Shush now with your joking, Polly. Nothing vulgar or blatant. Only discreet notices in the papers. The man from Palmer’s mentioned The Flash and The Scorpion, but he said that even the Sun and the Herald were possibilities. And we would pay not a penny for Palmer’s services,” she added gleefully. “The newspapers pay their fee!”

  Polly stood. “No, Margaret. I said from the first that Priscilla’s arrangement would be limited, involving only Mr. Prime. And now I have decided it is also temporary.” She would wait until later to ask Mrs. Stanhope for any of Prime’s money that Priscilla was owed, and for Priscilla’s velveteen dress from the locker upstairs.

  Mrs. Stanhope stood as well. “But, Polly, we are friends, are we not? How shall I possibly manage?”

  “We must all manage ourselves, Margaret,” Polly said, and left the little office without another word. As she put on her gloves and bonnet, she heard from upstairs the canaries’ nervous tweets and a familiar plummy southern voice instructing Laura to “be very sure to convey to Miss Bennet Mr. Skyring’s dearest, fondest farewell.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir, Miss …who?” Polly heard Laura reply to Skyring. The new girl had not been informed of Polly’s various aliases. She had never heard of “Elizabeth Bennet,” “Catherine Morland,” “Emma Woodhouse,” “Betsy Bowditch,” or “Presence Goodnight.” And never would.

  18

  April 25, 1848

  in the Atlantic

  BEN STOOD ON the foredeck looking out at the long, fractured reflection of the moon in the water off the starboard side. The ceaseless steam-powered breeze rustled his hair and the bottom of his coat. The streak of moonlight moved along in the water at exactly ten knots. Up here, one could almost ignore the pitchy odor of coal smoke and the muffled clash and thunder of the engines.

  He was alone. It was not yet eleven o’clock, so both bars were open, and most of the hundred saloon passengers were working conscientiously to finish their daily quotas of wine—twenty-one glasses apiece, a ship’s officer had told him, including six of champagne. Ben was failing to consume even half his fair share, although the alternative to a perpetual bibulous haze was drinking the fetid water stored in giant iron tanks below deck.

  He was happy to be alone. He had finished reading the new Melville novel, Omoo, and had repelled two English shipmates when he had informed them that the tale was “more or less a comedy whose hero engages in mutiny.” He’d repelled several others one afternoon when he read Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei sitting in the sun on the foredeck. Ben’s desire for company had been sated after spending his first few nights aboard in the main saloon listening to the same string quartets performed in the same order, listening to the same grumps complain about the constant rumbling and the cheap papier-mâché paintings, playing whist and backgammon with the same several strangers.

  And only now, forty-eight hours after their endless and exceptionally boozy Easter dinner, did he feel fully resurrected. Rough weather had struck during the meal. The ship pitched even more violently than during the storm a week earl
ier, since it had in the meantime burned through a million pounds of coal that had served as ballast.

  “Whales-a! Whales-a there, sweeming, off the port!” The voice came from the other side of the bow, ten yards away.

  Ben had seen shoals of porpoises swimming alongside and then racing away twice as fast as the fast ship could move. But whales, alive, swimming in the open sea? He hurried over to the port side to take a look.

  The man who’d called out was a slight Italian of about forty. Some nights earlier they had stood near each other on deck in the darkness, squinting to see the lamps of the Black Ball Line’s United States as it steamed east on its way to Liverpool. When the America had fired twelve Roman candle balls to signal the other ship, the faces of the gawking Cunard passengers were illuminated in the blue light, which made them nervously, gigglingly sociable. Now it was just the two of them, and the Italian was pointing with his left hand and holding a monocle to his right eye with the other.

  Ben spotted the three distant forms, like rocky hills on the dark horizon. Whales!

  “They appear to be, what, at least five hundred yards away,” he said.

  “Not black enough for right whales, eh?” the Italian replied. “Belugas, maybe, because they white, eh?”

  As far as Ben knew, all whales were gray. “They seem to be moving very slowly,” he said. “And remaining above the surface for a considerable period of time.”

  “Is now understand why we can so very easy to kill them with the gaff, huh?” He made a harpoon-throwing motion with his left arm. The America was heading toward the whale pod. “We pursue them now, huh? Ha!”

  The stranger introduced himself as Mr. Memmo, and the two men stood watching and chatting for another five minutes before Ben realized that the whales were not a few hundred yards off but some miles away, that they were not right whales or belugas or bowheads, and that the vertical outcroppings were not dorsal fins. They were three icebergs, huddled together and slowly, grandly rotating in the vortex of Atlantic currents. They looked in the moonlight like the skyline of a fairyland. Both men stared together silently for a long time. Around eleven, when the windows of the main saloon were opened to clear it of tobacco smoke, Ben heard the musicians playing Mozart, the string quartet called Dissonance. If opera were like this—no singing, no libretto, nothing but exquisite playing and magnificent natural scenery—then he might become a devotee.

  The ship came no closer than a half mile, but near enough that Ben and Memmo could see that each piece of ice was a hundred feet high. Before they passed completely, a score of fellow passengers had gathered at the bow for their first and last peep at icebergs.

  But soon the Italian was aiming his monocle in a different direction. A twinkling point of light was straight ahead. They had made landfall. “We arrive New York in the morning after tomorrow, eh? What a spanker we are, eh?” Across the Atlantic in less than thirteen days would indeed count as a spanking fast run. Memmo pointed with both hands toward the light, as if he were introducing Ben to an old friend. “Mr. Knowles? America!”

  “Yes, yes indeed.” But Ben knew that he remained within the British Empire. He had not yet escaped. “Canada, actually.”

  “This, sir, I know, of course. New-found-land. The discovery of Caboto.” He bowed his head slightly, as if accepting congratulations. “The discoverer ‘Mr. John Cabot,’ before he made himself English, he was Signor Giovanni Caboto, the citizen of Venice. Like myself, before.”

  Memmo tucked his monocle into his breast pocket and held out his hand, which Ben took. The Italian’s handshake was more violent than any he had ever felt, as if he were about to wrestle.

  “And I take it that you, sir,” Ben asked, “no longer reside in Venice?”

  “No!” he said, his tone of bemused surprise verging on offense. “I live in New York City for seven years. American! I make myself American. And you, Mr. Knowles?”

  19

  April 27, 1848

  New York City

  GIVEN THAT HE had to board the newspapers’ steamboat this morning at the inhuman hour of six, Skaggs had stayed up all night. He had finished drinking at midnight—“To temperance,” he said to himself as he’d clinked his glass against the empty brandy bottle—and switched to an herbal tea of his own concoction, nutmeg and pennyroyal fortified with the tiniest pinch of opium.

  Just as the sun rose, he strolled down to the foot of Cortlandt Street. The air really was cleaner at this early hour, as people said. And as much as he enjoyed the ordinary fleshy commotion and clangor of midday and evening, he had to admit the superior beauty of these quiet, nearly empty streets, the unpeopled city gently frosted in immaculate pinks and yellows. At six in the morning, an hour he had rarely experienced since leaving New Hampshire (and until this morning never sober), the stinking, skimble-skamble metropolis was actually sublime. If he could force himself awake and out into the early-morning streets regularly, imagine the photographs he might chance to take.

  “I presume this is the SS Monopoly,” Skaggs said as he stopped at the little gangway of the Newsboy. He was already acquainted with his boat mates from the various papers, including upright young Dickie Shepherd of the Herald. Shepherd carried with him a neat list of every passenger ship scheduled to sail to New York from every European and Pacific port since the first of the year, with their respective dates of departure.

  As the Newsboy steamed slowly and noisily into the river channel, Skaggs watched a sloop loaded with chickens glide across its bow and wondered how many years remained until steam mooted sails and wind entirely. Closer to New Jersey, he saw gulls circle above two oystermen kneeling on the bottom of their boat and raking the invisible bottom mud with their long tongs. In the water, bobbing in the Newsboy’s wake, he spotted a rusty tin cup atop a large snarl of string and wondered what had become of the little spaniel Polly and Priscilla had failed to save.

  The fellow from the Express had stepped to Skaggs’s side and caught him staring at the twine. “You know, when Professor Morse and the rest finally lay their submarine cables,” he said, “goodbye to old-fashioned harbor journalism, eh, Skaggs?”

  “That is true, sir.” Skaggs filled his lungs with the cool air. “And do you know what else? Good riddance.”

  An hour later, as they approached Sandy Hook, they saw four ships anchored behind the long, skinny finger of land, and a fifth out in the open sea. Dickie Shepherd studied the nearby vessels, referred to his list as it fluttered in the wind, then announced that the packet was the Oscar from Rotterdam; the famous Sea Witch, recognizable by her Chinese dragon figurehead, now about to set off once more around the Horn to Hong Kong; the clipper Samuel Russell, arrived from China in twelve weeks—a week longer, Dickie noted, than the record time set last month by the Sea Witch; and the steamer, Cunard’s new America, out of Liverpool only the Saturday before last.

  Dickie Shepherd decided he would go aboard the arriving China clipper, while all the others but Skaggs picked the ship that had come from the Continent. The consensus was that the Liverpool steamer would prove useless—filled with two hundred John Bulls who had nothing useful to say about wars in Asia or revolutions in Europe and six hundred tween-decks Irish who had nothing useful to say about anything.

  So Skaggs was hoisted onto the Royal Mail Steamship America all by himself. He was on the hunt for Europeans, particularly Prussians and Italians, whose regimes had been the latest to fall. Interviews with Britons or returning Americans would likely be a waste of time; therefore, as he scanned the tables in the dining saloon, he immediately eliminated from consideration the passengers speaking English, eating crimped cod, drinking water, or chewing tobacco. An Indian chap wearing a white dress and brimless black cap and gold medal looked interesting, but unpromising for the Tribune’s purposes. There was one likely prospect—a middle-aged fellow with a bright blue jacket and a mustache, using a monocle to examine his toast and slice of cold peppered tongue. French? Prussian? Milanese? Certainly foreign, certainly not
a Yankee or English.

  “Bonjour, monsieur,” Skaggs said quickly as he pulled out his pencil and notebook and sat down across from the man, who was plainly not comprehending, “ich schreibe für die New York Tribüne—eine Zeitung, un journal, un periódico? Scusi prego—sprechen, parler, comunicare?”

  “Hallo,” Memmo said, extending his hand, “John Memmo of New York City. Mr. Greeley’s paper I read her every day! I subscribe!”

  “I see, fine, I’m Timothy Skaggs.” He would resign that afternoon. He was too old for such foolishness. But since he was aboard and mortified already, he might as well earn his three dollars. “As a member of the Tribune clan, sir, perhaps you will help—I could deputize you for the morning.”

  “‘Deputize’? This word ‘deputize’ I do not know.”

  “To assist me, by making introductions to any gentlemen or ladies aboard who might wish to share their personal accounts of the uprisings in Europe.”

  “I have now the very man for you!” Memmo said to Skaggs, jumping to his feet and scampering toward the door. Ben was just entering the saloon for breakfast. “Mr. Knowles!” he shouted in Ben’s ear as he grabbed and shook his forearm. “This good newspaperman depends on a conversation with you to collect his necessary intelligence. Please, come to join us now for breakfast!”

  Skaggs glanced left and right as he stood, noting which nearby diners were most visibly appalled by Mr. Memmo’s outburst. The crimped-cod eaters—that is, the English. The young man Memmo had called over, on the other hand, looked English but was responding casually, even jauntily. He reminded Skaggs of his brother when Jonah was young, before he had married and become a lawyer and stiffened up.

  WHEN BEN FINALLY directed his attention to the face of the man next to Memmo, he was startled, and for the briefest moment stepped forward to greet him as a long-lost pal. He was five or ten years older and two stone heavier, he wore eyeglasses and scruffy tweeds, but otherwise this bearded man was Lloyd Ashby’s doppelgänger.