Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  Mary Ann Lucking.

  The audience looked at Claudius and Laertes and Polonius as each delivered his lines, but Ben stared at her. He had never looked so long or hard at an unspeaking player onstage. He felt like a Peeping Tom. He could not glance away.

  “Good Hamlet,” she said to the pouting eight-year-old playing her son the prince, “cast thy nighted color off,/And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.”

  Ben was growing more entranced by the second. Her voice was deep and musical, but her style of acting was the most extremely American he had seen so far—understated, unaffected, almost as natural as genuine conversation. She was like a woman speaking, not an actress playing. Albeit a woman speaking in iambic pentameter and wearing a tiara of paste emeralds and rubies.

  When Claudius whisked her offstage in the middle of the scene, Ben was bereft. Ordinarily he tended not to sympathize with Hamlet (in the prince’s adolescent indecision and funks he saw too much of his own least attractive side), but now he felt real anger against the usurping king for taking Gertrude out of sight.

  For the remainder of the show, when she was absent he paid no attention, and when she returned he gazed only at her. When Polly delivered her final lines (“The drink, the drink! I am poisoned”) and slumped to the floor, dead, Ben’s eyes actually watered. In the play’s last minutes he saw only her body twisted and sprawled on the planks of the stage, and heard only his own mind’s cries of longing for her. To Ben, all the rest—the final, squeaking, tragic speeches by Hamlet, Laertes, and the other little boys, the trumpet-and-drum funeral march, the applause of the crowd—was silence.

  London

  THE FEELING THAT energized Drumont was a mixture of emotions—righteous rage that the murderer had escaped again, a flattered sense of his own power, the simple old pleasure of inspiring fear in other men. He found the very familiarity reassuring, given the odyssey he now faced. But it pleased him too to wield a fearsomeness that was all his own, not on loan from the army or Municipal Guard. And he felt his mission more passionately than ever.

  It astounded him that his hunt had actually caused Knowles, a rich man, to flee his family and country. As I was forced to leave my own, Drumont thought. But he is a coward, running to escape his moral responsibilities. Whereas I am running to fulfill mine. And only a guilty man runs. I must track him as if he were a panicking boar in the swelter of a Corsican August. And I shall finish this round-the-world hunt, this great battue, as I finished the daylong battues of my youth—exhausted but victorious, covered in blood and glory.

  A more prudent man in Drumont’s circumstance might have considered his dwindling capital, now less than two hundred francs, and thought first of securing his own safety and future. A different man, cast out of France by tragedy and history, would have sailed off to fashion a new life in some cheap, warm, and faraway place that was French but not too French—a former colony in the Caribbean like Haiti or Grenada, perhaps.

  But Drumont would not retire from this fight. The moment he had discovered he could buy a one-way fare to New York for only a hundred francs, sailing from Plymouth in a few weeks, his course was certain. For his honor, for Michel and for France, he must be man enough to overcome his hatred and fear of the sea. There would be no turning back.

  And would it not be better to be exiled in America than in enemy England? Montreal and New Orleans, as he understood it, were essentially French. The whole continent was filled with foreigners. Hadn’t Inspector Vidocq once planned to immigrate to America with a stake of stolen francs? And Drumont’s other idol was the ultimate American, a man he imagined to be something like himself—John Charles Frémont, the famous explorer and soldier, bastard son of a penniless Frenchman, a natural leader of men, pushed out of military service by political opponents, a gambler driven to journey west, a man who made and obeyed his own rules.

  New York City

  BEN CALCULATED THAT his money would last him only until winter. And he had no plan yet for earning more, apart from Mr. Skaggs’s suggestion that he deliver lectures about the February Revolution. So he began to husband his coins and notes, denying himself luxuries like wine and books. Yet he paid to see Hamlet again the following night, and a third and fourth time the week following. And then a fifth.

  Happily, his parents and governesses and vicars and schoolmasters had all neglected to hector him as a boy about the debilitating consequences of the sinful and abominable practice of onanism. And so for the last two weeks, now that he had ogled Mary Ann Lucking directly for hours on the stage (luminous, supine, eyes shut, lids barely fluttering, lips parted ) and knew her name and the sound of her voice, his flat in Sullivan Street had become a regular den of self-pollution, night after solitary night.

  But that pleasure had come now to seem like a pitiful, snively ritual. Thus he found himself this evening with a condom in his pocket listening to a pianist play as he chatted with a young woman called Debby in the parlor of a house operated by a Mrs. Shannon downtown near Columbia College. He had last visited a bordello at Christmas, with Ashby in Soho. Debby was a plumpish brunette with a nasal voice and too many ringlets bouncing around her face. She had an exceedingly familiar manner.

  He finished the cocktail Mrs. Shannon had brought him—gin with lemon and cherries and a great deal of sugar, what Debby called a “Seminole Sunshine”—and had a second.

  “Can I ask a question?” she said.

  “Of course you may.”

  “As a foreigner, how much superior do our American ways here strike you, as a foreigner? Is this country so much better than England and France and the rest? I’ve never been to anywhere else, except Long Island. And Morristown.”

  “Well, Debby, I myself have visited only Jersey City and Brooklyn and New York to Fortieth Street. And I have been delighted thus far by almost everything I have seen and everyone I have met in this small strip of America.” In fact, his single disappointing day was the one in Brooklyn, only a penny each way across the East River, but no wonder—no gas streetlamps, too many churches, too little strangeness, too much of a provincial air, like one of the forgettable cities in the north of England, Bristol or Sheffield.

  “Delighted by every bit, including and perhaps especially the very lovely present company.”

  She smiled. “Aw, you’re buttering me now, huh?”

  “‘Buttering’ you?”

  “Uh-huh.” She poked his necktie with her forefinger. “You tell me you’re some kind of gallivanting guy”—this is what she had called him earlier after Ben said he’d sailed to America without prospects and only a general hankering for adventure—“but you’re also my own sweet English King Albert!” She touched his necktie again. “Ain’t you?”

  “Prince Albert is German, actually. I read philosophy with him in Bonn.” Why did he say such a thing?

  “Skylarkers with education and manners too. Those are the guys I favor.”

  “You do?”

  She nodded slowly, very deliberately, and put her own glass of Seminole Sunshine on the mantelpiece. “You set?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She leaned close and said softly, “Are you OK to go upstairs now?” She lowered her voice more, to a squeaky whisper. “Shall we have our nice fuck, then?”

  Ben was fairly staggered. His face reddened. But he closed his mouth, offered his arm, and let Debby lead him to her netherworld. Embracing her nakedness against him in the darkness, he tried to make himself believe that she was not Debby, a foulmouthed whore who smelled of patchouli, but Miss Mary Ann Lucking, the luminescent actress. Or Mrs. Lucking, he feared.

  LESS THAN AN hour later, Ben was walking home, thinking about a possible new use of Knowles & Company’s Malay rubber. Ashby’s old pig-bladder oil paint tubes had been replaced by pliable tin…and if gutta-percha could be molded thinly enough to insulate even telegraph wires, why, he wondered, could condoms not be manufactured from gutta-percha or India rubber? And would Sir Archie be disgusted or amused or int
rigued by such a business proposal?

  He had gone only a few blocks when he spotted three young men posting advertisements for a circus.

  The foreman wore a peacoat and glazed leather cap, and held the sheaf of dry posters. He glanced up and down West Broadway, watching for policemen. The two other, younger boys did the work, one holding a bucket and brush and the other using a two-by-four scantling to smooth down the pasted bills.

  As Ben approached, Duff heard his footfalls clicking on the stones and turned to look. Each man recognized the other with a start.

  The shaggy aristo rifleman who eyed me in Barnum’s basement.

  The man who dined with Mary Ann Lucking at the Astor House.

  Both looked away quickly.

  He must be some kind of investigating detective, Duff thought. Dispatched by whom? The Primes? The army? Some secret association of bankers and distillers? He felt lucky to have the two boys at his side. He glanced up the street. The stranger is not stopping, or slowing. He’s conducting a surveillance is what he’s doing, pretending to happen by…At half past midnight! Duff decided he must begin carrying his pistol.

  Ben had never felt such instant unreasoning anger toward a stranger. That £2-a-week American yob, a dirty billsticker, is her lover…the bastard, with his monster mark.

  But by the time he arrived in Sullivan Street, his jealous rage was spent, and he had begun chastising himself as a dirty un-American whoremonger who performed no useful work and longed pointlessly, like a boy, for a woman he would never meet.

  CHARLIE STRAUSBAUGH, the smartest man in Hose Company 25, was shaking his head. “It wasn’t no colored burglars you saw the other night in Greene Street, Fatty. Sure as anything those were slaves, run away from somewheres. That house next to your bakery must be one of their hiding places. Like they say about Downing’s, the oyster house. One of the cellars where they lodge during the run to Canada.”

  “But the Downings are niggers,” said Toby Warfield, “and I don’t think no nigger owns such a nice house there in Greene Street.”

  This remark triggered one of the regular 25 Hose amusements—teasing Toby.

  “The old lady that owns that house is whiter than you, Warfield,” Fatty said.

  “Toby, ya dolt,” Charlie added, “most of the abolitioners are white. You think Horace Greeley’s a colored man, do you?”

  Everyone snorted and chuckled.

  “The sugarhouse down there in Duane,” added Bill Boyce more seriously, “the last one that burned, Collins’s, that’s owned by Wall Street, the Herald said, and that’s part of their ‘Underground Railway’ too, it had been.”

  It was after midnight, and five of the Hose 25 boys were passing the flask, having a nightcap at their firehouse on Anthony Street.

  “Goddamned rich bedpressers,” Fatty said after he took his next swallow of whiskey. “When you spend it to help niggers like that, it means you got too much.”

  “Well,” said Charlie after a while, “I reckon we might’ve got a way here to make us a few dollars. More than a few.”

  “Sell the tip to a blackbirder, you mean?” Dick Owen asked.

  “No, I mean doing a bit of blackbirding ourselves, and keeping the bounty for ourselves.”

  Charlie’s plan was for all five of them to bunk at the firehouse for a week or two, as long as it took, and post one of the young lads each night as a watcher near Mrs. Gibbs’s house on Greene Street. When any suspicious Negroes appeared on that block, the lantern boy would sprint the five minutes down to Anthony Street and they would all come running, with weapons and chains. And in the morning turn in the runaway slaves for their cash.

  “Turn ’em in to who?”

  “For how much money?”

  “Boys, boys—I only just hatched the scheme! I reckon I still have a little time to parse the details.”

  “But wait,” Bill said, “if we did that, wouldn’t it make us…snitches?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  “They break the law of the land by escaping,” Charlie replied. “Wherever they come here from, they’re criminals.”

  Everyone nodded. And Fatty went straight to the real point. “Besides,” he said, “killing a rat ain’t murder, and snitching on niggers ain’t really snitching.”

  25

  May 18, 1848

  New York City

  SHE WAS FLORENCE DOMBEY. That is, she was wearing one of the new Florence Dombey costumes she had bought at Stewart’s. It was dark blue twill with a high silk collar, plainer and a little more chaste than she would ordinarily wear, particularly to a dinner and dance party on Gramercy Park. But it was new. And tonight she wished in her appearance to err on the side of respectability. She had applied color to her lips and cheeks, but only a little. Her favorite bonnet, the red velvet that flared out to expose her cheeks and ears, sat on the table just in front of her. She looked into the mirror as she pinned little pink and cream flowers into her hair.

  Duff had come to Third Street to escort her, and sat behind her, studying the passages he had marked in one of his etiquette books. He looked up at his sister.

  “The flowers are pretty,” he said.

  “Thank you, brother.”

  “And expensive.”

  “They’re narcissus. And less than a dime.”

  “Not daffodils? They look like the daffodils Ma grew in the Clove.”

  “Narcissus and daffodil are the same flower. And jonquil.”

  He considered making a note in his journal. “May I read another part of my book out loud, Polly? Just one more passage.”

  She sighed and smiled as she glanced at him in the mirror.

  “Cramming to be convivial,” she said, “seems a cross-purpose.”

  “This is about intercourse with the help. You are to speak to them as little as possible. Did you know that? Will there be many servants at this shindig, do you think?”

  Polly was finishing with her last flower. “Skaggs said it is to be a large party, one of the largest of the season.” Polly blushed; she had never before used “the season” in reference to any subjects but the weather and the availability of fruits and oysters. “So I imagine there will be servants galore.”

  “‘A good servant is never awkward,’” Duff read. “‘His boots never creak; he never breathes hard, has a cold, is obliged to cough, treads on a lady’s dress, or breaks a dish’…”

  “It sounds as if the perfect servant,” she said, “is a dead servant.”

  Duff still had his finger on the passage, and resumed reading. “‘Dish after dish comes round, as if by magic; and nothing remains but to eat and be happy…’”

  ON THE SIGN behind Ben were the words “Colored Persons Allowed,” but not one of his fellow bus passengers was a Negro. One sunny afternoon earlier in the month, riding up Broadway, he had been appalled to see his driver flick a whip at the hand of a black man about to step aboard, causing several passengers up front to laugh. Ever since, he had, whenever possible, hailed buses bearing “Colored Persons Allowed” signs. Tonight’s was one of the larger, brighter coaches, with a glassed-in clerestory roof and benches running the length of each side. The man sitting next to him smelled of onions and spices and wore loose canvas pants and a soft yellow flannel shirt that looked like the costume of a prison inmate. A book of children’s stories lay open on his lap, and he silently formed the words with his mouth as he read.

  Ben checked his watch. Half seven, the very time he was to meet Skaggs. And then he looked again at the address Skaggs had scribbled—No. 57 Gramercy Park North. Such remarkable American hospitality: who in London invited a complete stranger (let alone a foreign stranger) to attend a friend’s private soiree? Ashby would have, but no one else.

  The fragrant passenger suddenly touched a forefinger to the page he was reading and turned to face Ben, as if they had been conversing. “Tell me, sir…”

  Ben ought to have been accustomed to it, but every time a stranger touched his arm or spoke to
him out of the blue, he was still taken aback.

  “You read English, yes?” the fellow asked. Astounding. His accent seemed Polish or Hungarian, eastern.

  “I can,” Ben replied as softly as he could without actually whispering.

  “Yes.”

  “You please say these words for me, please? To pronounce correct in English?”

  “You—you wish me to read a sentence from your book aloud?”

  “Yes.” The man tapped a spot on the page with his finger. “This.”

  “‘During the next fortnight,’” Ben read in a whisper, “‘little Jemima walked one hundred miles along rocky trails and through muddy gulches.’” The man watched Ben’s mouth as closely as if he were examining some rare wiggling insect.

  “One houn-dred,” the fellow said carefully, and then, with greater difficulty: “Moody gulches. Moody gulches. I do not know this ‘gulch.’ What is this, ‘gulch’?”

  “I’m afraid, sir, that I don’t know either.”

  The bus was nearing Gramercy Park. Ben pulled the strap and stood, smoothing the back of his tailcoat. The man regarded him with a wounded, skeptical look.

  “It must be an Americanism,” Ben offered. “I am sorry.”

  “You joke. OK.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  But the man snapped his book shut and turned pointedly, proudly away.

  Ben stood and reached up through the hole in the roof to pay the driver—another Americanism.

  As he walked down Twentieth Street, the noise of Broadway faded. Ahead he saw the green edge and iron railing of a large garden, and a moment later, as he entered the square, he stopped. If the other afternoon he’d had the uncanny experience of stumbling from a back slum directly into High Street, just now he had passed directly from New York City to London, from the teeming commercial clank of Union Square into hushed, pretty, respectable Bedford Square. Gramercy Park, it turned out, was a reproduction of the city he had fled.