Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  They worried for Duff, and wondered where he had gone. When they’d returned to the gold district and Ashbyville—accompanied by Ashby—Jack had told them he last saw Duff on “the day with all the deaths.” Duff had told Jack he was going off with the donkey to live by himself and “put things right again.”

  Polly painted a message for her brother on the door of one of the cabins in blue tempera, giving the address of the house she and Ben had rented in San Francisco and letting him know that Skaggs’s remains would be in a grave at New Helvetia Cemetery, near Sutter’s Fort.

  DUFF DID CREEP back into Ashbyville one last time, and found the camp occupied by squatters, a group of miners newly arrived over the Sierras from Kentucky. They had renamed it Burnt Rock.

  74

  August 16, 1849

  San Francisco

  TWO HUNDRED PACKERS and wagoneers were crossing the mountains from the east every day. And hordes continued to arrive by sea. During just the fortnight Ben and Polly and Ashby were gone to bury Skaggs, five thousand new Californians had been deposited in San Francisco by another fifty-one ships, twenty-two of which remained anchored in the harbor as additions to the ghost armada. There were pilings for two new wharves, and another had been extended a hundred feet into the bay. On every block a building had been finished or a new one begun. Where the “Tammany Hall” tent headquarters of the b’hoys’ gang had stood was now a vacant lot, and half of the Tammany Hall toughs had been convicted of riot and murder and would be sent to prison as soon as a prison could be rigged up. A police force had been organized and the first mayor elected. But Stephen Massett assured them that—so far—he had heard of no firm plans to start a theater or a book publishing firm.

  THE EVENING WAS very warm. Ben stood outside in Clay Street, waiting, watching the regular plaza hullabaloo, which tended to reach its first peak now, at sunset. He and Polly and Ashby were to meet at seven and then walk together to a restaurant run by Peruvians in a tent, to have a supper of crispy roast rodent called cuy. Polly had spent the afternoon with Massett in Washington Street, interviewing several young men who might be turned from miners and laborers into stage players for a production of Mose in California. And Ashby was off painting in the Chinese district—he had undertaken a portrait of a launderer’s two children in exchange for the chance to practice his rudimentary Cantonese.

  On the edge of the plaza twenty yards north of where he stood, a handsome fellow with curly hair and a loud voice was exciting a crowd near the offices of the new mayor and city council. He was a military adventurer, but he was not recruiting soldiers. He was a politician, but he was not seeking votes. He was John Charles Frémont, the most famous man in California, in his reckless blowhard’s fashion now making an announcement that he was also among the luckiest. Ben could see men pressing in to look at the rocks in his hands—fist-sized pieces of quartz veined and encrusted with gold. The rocks came from his Rancho de las Mariposas in the south, he said. A few years back, before the discovery at Sutter’s Mill, Frémont had bought the tract of land—“twice as big as New York Island,” Ben heard him say, “and now twice as rich”—for seven cents an acre.

  Ben glanced to his left. Polly was walking toward him quickly from Dupont Street. The sun setting behind her made her radiant, with a golden nimbus, like some enchanted princess. She wore a dress of turquoise silk that exposed her shoulders, and the hem of her skirt had a fringe of dirt. She held her folded parasol in both hands.

  “Good evening, my love. Did you find your Mose?”

  She grimaced and shook her head. “What show are you watching?” she asked.

  “Colonel Frémont, in person, up from the San Joaquin with stories of his new mother lode.”

  “Really?” She looked over at Frémont. “He is so young, so much younger than I imagined.”

  “Skaggs would be pleased to hear it. He mentioned once that he and Frémont were precisely the same age.”

  She squeezed his hand and kissed his cheek. And then he, feeling the speed of life’s passage and breathing in her lavender, put both hands on her waist and kissed her directly on her sweet cherry lips right there in Portsmouth Square.

  “Unhand that fair kicky-wicky, Sir Benjamin—you’re in Dai Fou, man, not Sodom or Gomorrah!” It was Ashby, prancing toward them. From the moment Ashby had discovered that the local Chinese called San Francisco Dai Fou, or “big city,” he had followed suit. In London, he had regularly created a stir with this sort of loud, theatrical remark in public. But here no one gave him even a glance. “Knowles, you are a low, mindless lewdster.”

  How strange. This scene already happened. Eighteen months before, Ben had been waiting in a gay, foreign, venturesome city at sunset for Lloyd Ashby to meet him at a certain corner (where the Rue des Martyrs intersected the Boulevard des Martyrs). A pretty girl in a soiled silk dress (looking like a prostitute or an actress) had walked quickly toward him from his left down an alley, carrying a stick, and spoken to him—and then Ashby had appeared across the street on his right, shouting and teasing about lechery…

  “How strange,” Ben said.

  Polly touched his hand. “Are you quite all right?” She wondered if he had been stricken by the heat, or a new pang of grief over Skaggs, whom his old friend resembled so.

  “Shall we sit down before we walk,” Ashby asked, “and have a cup of something cold?”

  “No, no, I am fine. But what has just happened here, our rendezvous, Polly’s arrival first from over there, then you from that direction, her parasol, the dress, even the words of your jest, Ashby, I—it was a repetition of the first minutes of our night together in Paris, do you remember? A virtual recital. It was uncanny.”

  “A refrain,” Ashby said, then clasped his hands in front of him like a priest. “‘The thing that hath been,’” he said in a reverent drone, “‘it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’” He dropped his hands. “You do not suppose, do you, that as in Paris last February, the noisy fellow over there”—he pointed at Frémont and his crowd—“is electrifying this rabble to take up arms and overthrow the…ah, there’s the rub with your uncanny recurrence, is it not? For what tyranny exists here that one would wish to overthrow?”

  “The tyranny of the male sex, perhaps,” Polly suggested.

  “Or of gold,” said Ben as they walked past Frémont toward Little Chile. “The hunger for it.”

  “The wise heathens of China,” Ashby said, “believe that the cause of all suffering is desire. Perhaps, Knowles, you are a Buddhist. Perhaps your flash of insight, of your life repeating, was a Buddhist revelation.” He explained that the Buddhists believe that the world and the universe have been destroyed and remade over and over again. “Everything repeats, perpetually.”

  Skaggs had once joked that Ben was a devotee of the Buddha, he recalled now.

  Polly had never heard of Buddhism, and she was fascinated. “Over how long a period does this supposed recurrence of events take place?” she asked Ashby. “How long is the cycle?”

  “Longer than eighteen months, I am afraid. A bit more than a thousand million years, by way of four stages—creation, another stage, then another, then destruction, creation once again, and so on.”

  “I wonder,” she said after a while, making slow loops with her forefinger, “if it is best imagined as a circle, round and round exactly the same each thousand million years…or rather a spiral, where nature and mankind changes and improves a little each time. Inches upward.” Polly considered this. “I hope it is an upward spiral.”

  They walked the rest of the way in silence.

  Ben thought of Skaggs again, and their conversation last winter in Ashbyville about the planets and stars springing open like a blossom, then shrinking and dying from gravity’s pull, then reblossoming, on and on forever.

  And Ashby—his recitation of Scripture, his talk of cycles of destruction and creation—had reminded Polly, of course, o
f her missing little brother.

  75

  late 1849 and 1850

  northern California

  DUFF WAS ON an extended retreat, roaming the beaches and woods and cliffs in solitude, mourning Yauka, reciting the rosary and Act of Contrition. He feasted on seeds and insects and wild fruits, catalogued the fragrances of nature in his journal, followed monarchs every which way through the sunlight and ferns to wherever they happened to lead him, slept on beds of moss beside giant sequoias. His remaining share of the Ashbyville gold, eight pounds strapped under Jenny Lind’s saddle, could sustain him for a long, long time, perhaps forever.

  At a store in Bodega, on one of his rare visits to a town or camp to buy supplies, he’d heard men talking of John C. Frémont, and the rich lode he had discovered in the San Joaquin Valley. Duff had turned away and pretended to examine barrels of corn, praying for strength to keep his promise to God—Avenge not myself, vengeance is the Lord’s, forgive those who trespass against us—and made the sign of the cross. Then he’d heard one of the men say that Frémont’s ranch was at the head of Mariposas Creek, the Rancho de las Mariposas. The creek of the butterflies. The ranch of the butterflies. Duff took this as a message from the Lord, and prayed for some understanding of its meaning, and crossed himself again as he stared into an open cask of Chinese oolong tea.

  When the weather turned cool, Duff built himself a small hu, and an adjacent stall for Jenny Lind. After the rainy season began he spoke to no one but the donkey for two months. Finally, one day in December, he returned to Bodega. As he was paying for his pounds of dried beef and beans and flour and salt he read a story in an Alta California on the counter. Peter Burnett, the man he had heard making the speech in the street in Sacramento City urging the extermination of California’s Indians, had been elected the first governor of the territory. And John Charles Frémont had been elected to the U.S. Senate.

  Duff wanted to keep his promise to God. He did not want to kill any more villains. But his rage burned.

  San Francisco

  TWO DAYS BEFORE Christmas of 1849, Duff crept into the city. He attended Sunday Mass at St. Francis of Assisi, and just before midnight he found the address. He stared for a long time in the darkness.

  He could not bring himself to knock at the door. They were surely asleep. And besides, what if Timothy had told Polly about all of Duff ’s lies and dark deeds? If so, Duff could not bear for her to see him. She might say she still loved him, but he knew that only God could forgive such sins as his.

  He was pleased to see the house where she and Ben lived, however, to smell the flowers on the alder trees growing in their little front yard and the piñon smoke coming from their chimney.

  It also relieved him that their house was a full mile west of downtown, safely away from the wicked, dangerous hurly-burly around the plaza.

  What’s more, a stiff wind was blowing from the west that night.

  AROUND SIX O’CLOCK in the morning, a fire started in Dennison’s Exchange, on the corner of the plaza. Dennison’s was the only San Francisco gambling hell Duff had ever visited, the night with Polly and Ben when they heard the Hutchinsons’ song about California and learned that Abby Hutchinson had married a Wall Street man, and seen the Maidu whores.

  The fire spread quickly back through the block, with the west wind, toward the water. By dawn on the morning of the day before Christmas, fifty buildings between Kearny and the wharves—brothels, saloons, banks—were ablaze. The Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.

  THREE WEEKS LATER, a small earthquake struck San Francisco. On the same day, the city’s first dramatic production premiered at a new theater in Washington Street. Its author, James Sheridan Knowles (an Irishman and no relation), was also the author of The Hunchback and the Dumb Belle, the comedy Polly considered one of her New York stage triumphs. The play that was produced in San Francisco had been mounted in London originally, years before, at Covent Garden. In fact, it was the first play Ben had ever attended, and he remembered it fondly. It was called The Wife.

  A NEW SALOON and gambling hall was built almost immediately on the ashes of Dennison’s after the Christmas Eve fire, but on the following fourth of May, during its first weeks of operation, the new place caught fire and started a blaze that burned once again through the same block, this time destroying several times as many brothels and saloons and banks…. brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities…They were rebuilt. In June, a third great third fire destroyed 125 buildings.

  They were all rebuilt. Three more big fires burned downtown San Francisco that year. But all those hundreds of buildings, too, were rebuilt, and more after those, which burned again, and were rebuilt.

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  ON A SUMMER night nearly a year to the day after Timothy Skaggs died, a photographer and an astronomer used the Great Refractor at Harvard to take the first stellar photograph using a telescope. It required an exposure of one hundred seconds. The star was Vega.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SUZANNE GLUCK IS the perfect agent, and her colleague Erin Malone a delight.

  At Random House, Peter Olson and Ann Godoff believed in this book when it was just an idea; Gina Centrello kept the faith; and Jennifer Hershey—with the cheerful, unfailing assistance of Laura Ford—not only believed in it but made the actual thing much better, single-handedly disproving the notion that book editors no longer edit. The copy editing by Amy Robbins and Steve Messina was intelligent and scrupulous far beyond the call of duty. And the designers Gabrielle Bordwin, Robbin Schiff, and Stephanie Huntwork made the book look perfect. Thanks to them all.

  Tom Dyja and Michael Jackson each provided important bits of research, and I am indebted to the work of many dozens of authors and scholars. Three online reference resources were indispensable every day: Making of America, the library of hundreds of nineteenth-century books and periodicals assembled and digitized by Cornell University and the University of Michigan; Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, maintained by a company called Christian Technologies; and Douglas Harper’s amazing Online Etymology Dictionary.

  Martin Pedersen enthusiastically published early portions of chapters 2 and 26 in Metropolis. Joanne Gruber’s editorial suggestions and corrections were brilliant and invaluable. Susanna Moore and Alessandra Stanley were acute, generous readers as well—and Alessandra, along with Susan Horton and Eric Rayman, helped me get the French right.

  And thank heavens for Anne Kreamer, who is essential.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KURT ANDERSEN is the author of the novel Turn of the Century and The Real Thing, a collection of essays. He writes for New York magazine, of which he was previously editor in chief, and has written columns for The New Yorker and Time as well. He was also a co-founder and editor of Spy and hosts the public radio program Studio 360. Andersen lives with his wife and daughters in New York City.

  ALSO BY KURT ANDERSEN

  The Real Thing

  Turn of the Century

  Heyday is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Kurt Andersen

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-581-1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Andersen, Kurt.

  Heyday : a novel / Kurt Andersen.

  p. cm.

  1. United States—History—1815–1861—Fiction. 2. California—Histor
y— 1846–1850—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3551.N3455W66 2006

  813'.54—dc22 2006045165

  www.atrandom.com

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