Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  Because thousands of gentlemen had lately fled the city, or at least its unwholesome precincts, the parlor houses of New York were empty too. And so proper orgasms by the tens of thousands were denied and dammed, a collective stoppage that, like the unusual heat, exacerbated in some small way the terror and pessimism besetting the city.

  He still indulged his taste for passion—of the animal kind lately only with Mrs. Prime, to whom he had always attended once a month without fail—and of the nobler romantic kind, too, in his quest to find and redeem his bastard offspring, wherever the child had been taken. He had so far spent $545, according to the ledger in front of him. His longing and his search last year for the girl had been a wild whimsy. But his new plan, Prime pleased himself thinking, was an act of atonement, the right thing to do.

  Last autumn, Pinkerton had reported, their Frenchman had tracked Priscilla Christmas to a Mormon camp on the very frontier, where she had planned to marry some fellow rambler. The Frenchman had proceeded to follow them west. Prime wondered if she had given birth on the trail, at a campfire, perhaps with some Indian midwife. And had she gone all the way west to scratch for gold in the ground, like a ragpicker combing through the trash? California gold was a perfect whore’s dream, he thought as he gazed out his window at the river—fortune without merit or industry. Two clerks from Prime’s firm, one of them a senior man, had sailed for California, and a third was about to go. The newspaper said that a ship of gold hunters now left New York every second day, each with dozens of men aboard; such delirium! On the other hand, fortune had smiled on all the Argonauts who had already sailed—by leaving New York, they had escaped this plague.

  It would be convenient if Priscilla Christmas and his child were living near San Francisco, as the detectives believed, for his man could easily bundle the infant aboard one of the returning gold-seekers’ ships for the trip back to New York.

  Prime had already contrived a respectable story, a fiction that Mrs. Prime not only believed but which had inspired in her a new tenderness toward him. The child, he had told her (and would tell his friends if and when it arrived), was the orphan of one of the family’s former charity tenants, Miss Lucking, who had apparently died in California. Prime planned to keep the child away from the filth and temptations of the city at Hurlgate, perhaps in the cottage the Luckings had occupied during their year here.

  “Mr. Prime, sir?” It was Otis, his steward, out of breath. “You wanted to know about the flatboat to Randall’s? I seen the one coming upriver just now. If you wanted to look. And there’s another big trip of hogs you can see too, sir, all the coppers running them north.”

  Prime followed him quickly across the lawn to the water’s edge, asked Otis to have one of the kitchen girls bring him a lemonade. He sat down in the shade of a big elm and aimed his spyglass at Manhattan.

  A hundred and fifty policemen, a fifth of the force, were spending the day as swineherds, as another troop would do tomorrow, and so on, for days to come. They had been ordered to round up and drive away all of New York’s freely ranging street pigs, to chase them past Manhattanville and Bloomingdale and the other suburban villages to an exile in the woods and empty wastes beyond, at the northern end of the island. Like the unclean poor, and the local population of dogs, which bounty-hunting boys all over the city were at that moment clubbing to death for two bits apiece, the swine were among the creatures suspected of causing the cholera.

  With his telescope Prime could make out the pigs—a thousand? two thousand?—as a frantic stream of pink and brown gushing ahead of the police.

  He adjusted his aim downward, to the river channel, and found a steamboat and, at the end of a chain behind it, the cholera barge. Its deck was covered with bodies—two layers, he saw as he studied the scene through his glass. He counted by twos, and estimated two hundred in all. It looked like a cargo of mummies, but mummies hastily prepared. The white canvas sheets wrapped around each body flapped in the wind. He watched the barge dock at Randall’s Island, upriver, where the corpses would be carried to an acre of upturned earth, dug by boys from the adjacent House of Refuge.

  My child may be a whoreson, Prime thought, but at least it shall have a chance at a healthy life.

  Even with the spyglass he could no longer see much of interest at such a distance. He could not, for instance, see the diligent, hungry army of rats swimming across the river from Manhattan to Randall’s Island for their latest feast.

  And whenever my youngest child perishes, it shall have a respectable burial, in a casket, with a stone.

  But, of course, unbeknownst to Samuel Prime, his child was now a fiction. Priscilla Christmas had had an abortion more than a year before, when the fetus was barely two months along. Prime’s inch-long spawn had been tossed out by Dr. Solis’s nurse among the tons of New York garbage that morning, and promptly became another morsel in the gutter luncheon of one of the pigs now scudding out of the city.

  69

  July 5, 1849

  Sacramento City

  UNLIKE MANY OF the Americans in California, the postmaster at Sacramento City was able to distinguish among foreign accents. Although the stranger had attempted to explain that he was seeking information, not any mail, the postmaster was searching his boxes that held letters from abroad.

  “May I wish you a happy Independence Day, sir, your first as a citizen of a free republic of France.”

  Yesterday had been the Americans’ national day, Drumont knew. He had arrived in the country one year ago. Such a long journey. “Yes, yes, thank you.”

  “And may I ask if you are bound for the Gallic camp up on the Yuba, sir? Where your countrymen have pioneered?” The postmaster was also one of the very few Californians who still scrupled to call strangers “sir,” or to wear a necktie. He was also a busybody.

  Drumont indulged the bureaucrat’s small talk as a necessity, in order to obtain the information he needed. And get it he finally did: Mr. Knowles and his company, the postmaster informed him, lived at a place they called Ashbyville, their petite communauté socialiste on the Middle Fork of the American River, beyond Ford’s Bar.

  “And although our U.S. postal service from San Francisco does not commence officially until next month, in return for small extra sums we have been happy to handle the mail for men at all the camps within fifty miles or so. Mr. Skaggs, who was quite a celebrated author in New York—did you know?—has begun to receive an absolute flood of papers from the States—a déluge, as they would say in France, yes? Look.” He picked up an armful of Skaggs’s latest magazines. “Dozens on every mail boat…” He started to enumerate the titles: “The Knickerbocker, The Literary World, The Flag of Our Union…”

  When Drumont offered to deliver the mail to Ashbyville himself, the prattling fool drew him a map.

  Drumont finally left the post office—he badly wanted a real dinner, a good night’s sleep, and a box of fresh cartridges for his pistol—but before he was two steps out the door, the postmaster yelled out to him.

  “Eureka! Eureka!” He was holding up a letter. “My lucky cubbyhole! Of course, I had presumed your correspondents would be writing from France—but here, ‘Mr. Gabriel Drumont,’ is one for you from Chicago, by way of Panama and San Francisco.”

  Drumont was shocked—impressed as well as ashamed. How on earth had he been found? No one knew where he was. Pinkerton was a true genius, if not all-knowing, then a grand master of intuition, America’s young Vidocq. And now he surely considered Drumont a thief and a liar. He probably had written to the police or the American army in California. Drumont feared he might be apprehended before he had a chance to find Knowles. He had seen troops as he rode into Sacramento City.

  “An epistle from…a loved one?” the postmaster asked as he watched Drumont tear at the envelope and breathlessly read, hurry-scurry—and then stop, and give him a long, hard look.

  “I cannot understand this good. You speak this to me?”

  Not a day passed that the postmaster wasn’
t asked to read a letter aloud. He was delighted.

  “‘…I trust this letter finds you well after your long journey…

  “‘…in addition to our work on behalf of the aforementioned gentleman, I wish you also to investigate a certain Mr. Duff Lucking, an army traitor who is implicated in an arson in New York.’

  “Mr. Lucking! My goodness!

  “‘I have reason to believe that Lucking may have gone to California to hunt for escaped slaves instead of gold…

  “‘…money to cover your passage to New York with the child (should the infant be recovered), and your expenses in California, a draft for two hundred dollars in Mr. P—’s name shall be available to you at the Exchange and Deposit Office at the Parker House, in Kearny Street…’”

  Drumont was grinning. “Incroyable,” he said. Such a stroke of good fortune. “Bizarre.”

  THE POSTMASTER, for all his presumptuous familiarity with other people’s business, was unaware that Mr. Knowles and Miss Lucking had left their mining camp on the summer solstice to reside in San Francisco, and that Mr. Lucking now lived with his digger wife somewhere back in the hills. That is, he did not know enough to tell his rugged, fervent inquisitor that Ashbyville’s full-time population had lately shrunk to one, the author and astronomer Mr. Skaggs, in whom the fellow from Paris had no interest whatsoever.

  Ashbyville was not officially defunct. At their last community meeting, they had voted to declare the collective mining enterprise—as distinct from “the Mount Aetna Observatory, T. Skaggs, founder & director”—in a state of “suspended animation.” When they’d pulled the treasury out of its hole that same afternoon to divide it up, it had looked somewhat unimpressive. That was in part because Skaggs had already withdrawn some of his share to pay for the observatory dome. The rest of their eight months’ accumulated profit—every ounce of remaining dust, every speck, fleck, flake, and plinker, packed tight inside the redwood chest—was the size of a large loaf of bread. However, the loaf weighed forty-nine pounds, and it was worth $13,000. In New York or London, each share would have provided a comfortable living for years.

  Ben and Polly had said they might “rerusticate” one day, when their thirsts for the civilization and chaos of the city were slaked, but no one, including they themselves, quite believed it. Skaggs would continue to work the placers (with Duff ’s help) two days a week, just enough to pay for the essentials—food, brandy, soap, lamp oil, daguerreotype plates, chemicals, books, magazines. When Priscilla and Billy arrived, Polly had said, the community would spring back to life, and they could take the cabin she and Ben abandoned. Ashbyville had not dissolved, but its heyday was over.

  AS THAT SUMMER began, the heyday of California was either ending or beginning, depending upon where one looked. An era of acute uncertainty had begun. In the north, June of ’49 seemed like the fantastic summer of ’48 all over again. On the North Fork of the American River, someone pulled a forty-ounce nugget from the sludge—and then, days later, someone else a twenty-five-pound chunk. And up on the Yuba’s North Fork, two brothers found nuggets scattered on the bank in piles like stones on a beach, half-pounders here, two-pounders there, and yet another twenty-five-pounder…

  The excitement was an echo of last year’s, but everything else had changed. During 1848, luck had shone on everyone. Not only had there been more gold in the ground and fewer people looking for it, but all of the men (and the several women) at the mines in ’48 had managed to get there fortuitously—they happened to live in Oregon or Mexico or California already, or their regiment happened to muster out in San Diego or Los Angeles or Monterey, or they happened to be racing from New York to the frontier on quests for utopia and adventure and true love.

  Each of these new “forty-niners,” on the other hand, had made a large and risky investment. Each had abandoned his family and friends and job and familiar surroundings on a bet, persuaded by mere stories in newspapers, equipped with no special advantage, nothing but a longing for good luck. And so each of the bonanza stories in 1849 filled the hearts of ten times as many lonely greenhorns with envy and desperate desire, inciting them to dig and wash more and more dirt faster and faster, hoping that they, dear God, might be among the fewer and fewer lucky ones. The Eden of 1848 was disappearing. Economic life was returning to normal. The losers and middling survivors would once again vastly outnumber the winners, as they always had.

  WHEN BEN AND Polly stopped in Coloma and Sacramento City on their way out of the gold district, the new mood had been palpable. It reminded Ben of the roundelay game called the Sea During a Storm that Lydia had loved to play at London dancing parties. Each round ended when the music stopped unexpectedly, one girl left the dance, the men all scrambled to find new partners, and the man left alone was expelled from the game. Ben had hated the artificial scarcity and panic of the game. He was happy that in California, he and his dance partner were retiring from the party early.

  On the day they’d spent in Sacramento City waiting for Duff to join them directly from Hembem, the temperature had reached 91 degrees. In scarcely four months since their previous visit, the population of the city had grown tenfold.

  “My Lord, it is like the summer in New York,” Ben had said as they’d walked down the crowded Embarcadero. “We need a parasol and Panama hats.”

  “Except that in New York as well as Panama,” Polly had said, “one never quite—” She had stopped short, struck dumb by the sign in front of a half-finished building. The interior walls were being made of sails stripped from abandoned ships, and at the back of the large main room they could see cargo chests pushed and nailed together to make a platform—a stage, in fact. THE EAGLE THEATER COMPANY, the outside sign had read, FIRST STAGE IN CALIFORNIA—OPENING FALL, TICKETS $3 & $5.

  She’d looked at Ben, suddenly fascinated by a new prospect.

  “Perhaps I should act as your representative and ask them,” he’d said.

  “What is my question?”

  “Have they cast their first plays, and what are the principal female roles?”

  She shook her head. “I should like to know the costs of erecting such a place,” she’d said. “And whether there are plans afoot for a theater in San Francisco.”

  Ben and Polly had decided to use their capital and some of Duff ’s, a little more than $8,000 in all, to set themselves up in San Francisco as entrepreneurs of some kind—and to parcel out to each employee small bits of the enterprise as well as a wage. Once they’d become certain that Skaggs was determined to remain in the countryside and pursue his astronomy, they’d dropped their notion of starting a magazine, The Illustrated California News, to be printed on the Alta California’s new steam press. Lately they had discussed becoming book publishers instead, or manufacturers of Knowles’s Waterproof Boots—knee-high mining boots to be made of rubber. The idea of operating a theater had not yet been broached. That day, Ben enjoyed imagining how the news—the proprietor of a theater in California—would appall his brother and titillate his London friends. He was delighted to consider it.

  He was delighted to consider almost any new venture, no matter how capricious or improbable, ever since Polly’s return from the German painter’s tent. That night she had offered to marry, if he “still wished it.” And so on a clear and cool Saturday evening in May, Skaggs’s new Mexican friend, Judge Suárez, had presided over a wedding ceremony atop Mount Aetna, inside the observatory, with the new dome open to the blazing western sky. All of Ashbyville—as well as Yauka, Jack, and Badger—had been in attendance.

  Two months later, as they stood in the heat of Sacramento City watching the Eagle Theater take shape before them, Ben had grasped his wife’s sweaty hand in his. “We shall become impresarios, do you think?”

  “Perhaps so. If they’re getting three dollars for a cheap seat.”

  “Or rather, the great theatrical impresaria and her trusty aide-de-camp?”

  She’d smiled and performed a small, quick bow.

  70

&n
bsp; June 30 and July 1, 1849

  San Francisco

  THEIR FIRST FULL day as residents of San Francisco was the last day of June, a Saturday. They spent the morning and most of the afternoon, accompanied by Duff, inspecting the city with a real estate broker. They had not heard prices denominated in dollars for a year. The real estate man showed them an empty store on the plaza—only six varas wide, sixteen and a half feet—that he’d rented out the day before for $2,000 a month. The new Parker House, he said, brought in rents of more than $10,000 a month from the hotel, the gambling saloon, and the bank, which meant that it would earn back its cost of construction by the end of July, its third month of existence.

  He showed them a small adobe warehouse some blocks up toward Little Chile, as he called the South American neighborhood, that might be bargained away for as little as $1,500, or rented for $300 a month. Duff said it looked reasonably well built, and that finishing it as a theater or publishing house or waterproof-boot factory was a matter of only a few weeks’ work.

  At the end of the day, Ben and Polly and Duff retired to the wharf to watch the sunset and relax. They sat on an empty chest that had carried bags of filberts and jars of Worcestershire sauce fourteen thousand miles from New York. It was one of hundreds of boxes scattered along the wharf, broken and discarded. The cargoes—sperm candles, packs of playing cards, claw hatchets, gilt buttons, blue flannel shirts and denim pants, hinges, quilts, bathtubs, carbines, Russian hemp rope, Milanese steel, French wine, English linseed oil, Irish linen, Havana cigars—had been scooped out like fruit and taken away to sell, the boxes left behind like rinds on the docks where the stevedores had chanced to drop them.