The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (26 page)

“I
dreamed up a device,” he says, “a machine, a gadget. I envisioned how the seven
phases of action of magic lantern shows and Herschel’s spinning coin and the
painted parrot flapping in a Zoetrope could be made into something brand-new. A
device that could make the mermaid in the painting swim across a whole wall as
if she were reality itself!”

“I’m
quite sure it’s possible,” Zhu says seriously. Not laughing at him.

“You
are?” At her vigorous nod, “I’m sure, too. The trick is to keep the sequence
continuous with a mechanical device. Perhaps a miniature steam engine?”

“A
steam engine?” Now she laughs.

“Why
not?”

She
shrugs. “Invent this device, then.”

“I
intend to!” He raises his empty glass. “To my moving picture machine! I want
some lunch. Come help me with my plates.”

Zhu
dutifully follows him to the tremendous buffet. The Reception offers free lunch
every day, any time of day, to anyone who buys a drink. Daniel surveys the
platters crowding the sideboard. There’s a Virginia ham baked in champagne. A
whole goose ringed by roast quail. A cheddar cheese the size of a wagon wheel. Grilled
bear steaks, a side of venison, broiled rattlesnake, stewed rabbit, porcupine
cutlets. Plates of salami and sausages, sardines and salmon. Prawns the size of
a man’s thumb. Sweet and sour pickles, celery and gherkins, radishes and water
chestnuts, onions and tomatoes, artichoke hearts. Loaves of rye and
pumpernickel. Pots of mustards, mayonnaises, ketchups, and clarified butter.
More cheese—rounds of brie, gorgonzola, mascarpone. Molded domes of liverwurst,
pates and puddings. And of course, in silver chafing dishes, the famed Maryland
terrapin.

Daniel
heaps two plates with delicacies, hands them to Zhu, then loads up two more for
him to carry, balancing a dish of terrapin between his thumbs.

“This
is obscene, Daniel,” she says, surveying the feast on their table.

“What
is obscene?” He feels so refreshed after the Sazarac, he starts to take her hand,
then forcibly stops himself. What if someone important saw him holding a
coolie’s hand?

“Well!”
She waves her hand at the magnificence before them. “You people treat eating
and drinking like a hobby.”

“And
a very fine hobby it is, too.”

“What
about people who don’t have enough to eat?”

“What
people?” he says, dipping a prawn in clarified butter.

More
men stream into the Reception. Next to the director of the title company and
the investment banker crowd politicians, financiers, newspaper men, merchants.
Corpulent men in striped trousers and fine silk cravats, top hats or brushed
bowlers, gaily colored vests, brocaded waistcoats, sable collars on cashmere
topcoats. Chunks of gold glint at cuffs, on cravats, on fingers and wrists.
Abundant beards and mustaches fur plump-cheeked faces. Though Daniel proudly
boasts a thirty-two inch waist, he would not be unhappy sporting a girth like
the ironworks heir, whose waistcoat is fashioned entirely of silver sealskin.

“The
men of Chinatown, for instance,” she persists, bending near so he can hear her
over the rising din. “Surely you know that peasants are tricked or kidnapped,
forced aboard clipper ships, and sold into slavery in this very city. Slavery
as pernicious as the servitude of black people over which American people were
willing to die.”

“Not
the war again. Mariah was raving about the war today, too.”

“And
what about the women of Chinatown? Surely you also know that Chinese girls,
some as young as five years old, are sold into slavery, then prostitution.
They’re beaten, stripped of their property, starved, and imprisoned.”

Daniel
notices some fellows barging through the Reception’s mahogany doors and
casually turns to look at them. It’s those thugs again, in shabby workingmen’s
togs. Not the sort of swells who are welcome on the Cocktail Route, but there’s
no law against them coming in for a drink. The poor devils can eat like kings
for the price of a beer.

He
doesn’t want to hear this kind of talk from his mistress. It sounds too
familiar, like the dreadful lady on the train, Donaldina Cameron.

“My
dear miss,” he says curtly, “that is their lot in life.”

“They’re
people,
Daniel!”

“There’s
nothing you or I can do about them, even if we wanted to.”

She
glowers at him. “There
is
something I can do for one girl in this Now.
And there’s plenty you
could
do for a lot of them.”

“Oh,
damn it, Zhu. The coolies and the slave girls, you and Mariah. All women,
really, and the inferior races. You are what you are and where you are due to
the forces of evolution.”

“Oh,
yeah. Muse warned me about that, too. You’re a social Darwinist. Like being
born in a time of war or drought or pestilence or of a certain gender is the
same thing as why some species have bifocal vision or red feathers on their
asses.”

He
starts at her loose language, shakes his finger at her. “Mr. Darwin’s theory
explains much about society, too.”

“I
see. And I suppose it’s your lot in life to wallow in self-pity over the ruin
of your father’s business and punish yourself over your mother’s death. I
suppose it’s your lot in life to smoke and drink and gorge yourself to death.”

He
orders another Sazarac, just to spite her. “I do not wallow, miss. It is my lot
in life to rehabilitate my father’s errors in business. And I shall do so.”

“You
don’t seem to care very much about rehabilitating his business.”

“Of
course I do. I care very much about securing my prosperity in the future.”

“Ah!”
She leans forward, face flushed, green eyes glittering. “Then you do
acknowledge there’s a future?”

“Naturally.”

“If
you care at all about the future, then you must care about the people who don’t
have enough to eat today. Don’t you see? You must care about them because
they’re a part of the future, too.”

“Not
my future.”

“Yes,
your future. Everyone’s future. Everything you do now affects everything else.
It’s all connected. That’s the principle behind cosmicism—that humanity
cocreates reality with the Universal Intelligence. With the Cosmic Mind.”

“Don’t
tell me you’re a communist.”

“No,
no. I said cosmicism.” She flicks her eyes to the side in the peculiar way she
does and mumbles to herself, “All right, all right, Muse. The Tenets. I know.”
To him, “Daniel, the future can only survive because people care. Live
responsibly or die.”

“How
tiresome.” He gulps his second Sazarac. “Pardon me, but you’ve got it all
wrong. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we surely
do
die.”

*  
*   *

The
golden late afternoon deepens into a shadowy dusk and gentlemen throng the
sidewalks, jostling into saloons, tossing coins to beggars beseeching from the
gutters, negotiating with painted ladies clustering at every street corner.

Usually
Daniel loves the hustle-bustle, but now his nerves grow frazzled. Zhu’s
skittishness is contagious. She walks slightly behind him, as is proper for a
manservant, but he’s well aware how wary and somber she is. He glances over his
shoulder, notices those thugs again. They duck around the corner at Post when
he looks. A moment later, when he looks again, there they are.

He
seizes her elbow and hustles her down the street, quickening their pace, which
seems to please her. She moves like a man in her crude sandals, keeping pace
with him. That’s good. Daniel likes speed. Speed is the key to the persistence
of vision, the telegraph, the train, the transoceanic steamships. Modern life
is speed. He hurries to each pleasure along the Cocktail Route as though this
may be the last time he will ever savor pleasure again.

At
Haquette’s Palace of Art on Post near Kearny, Daniel samples the aged Kentucky
bourbon, thick and rich and fragrant, and gazes at the art---paintings of
nudes, nudes, nudes, and more nudes. He’s starving again by the time they
stroll into Flood and O’Brien’s, must sample the corned beef and cabbage plate
washed down with Black Velvets, champagne with a mug of stout. He orders a
crisp gin cocktail at the Peerless, a Pisco Punch at the Bank Exchange.

“You
must try this,” he says, offering Pisco Punch to Zhu. “Go on, no one will
notice.”

“I
don’t drink, Daniel.”

“You’ve
never tasted anything like it,” he insists. Pisco Punch is concocted of a mysterious
fiery Peruvian brandy that one else in the world has been able to procure save
for the proprietor of the Bank Exchange. “Do try it, my angel,” he says,
pressing the glass to her lips. “Smooth as silk, hot as fire, long as love.
Down the hatch.”

She
is as tight-lipped as a temperance worker. Oh, fine. Daniel finishes the Pisco
Punch himself. He samples the crab stew at the Occidental, devours roast turkey
at Lucky Baldwin’s. Beneath the jeweled cornucopia chandeliers, his strange
little mistress rails on about the evils of greed.

“My
dear,” he says, throwing an arm around her shoulders. To hell what the other
fellows think. “All this talk of the lower classes, of women and slaves. Of the
future and my responsibility for the suffering of others. All right, I grant
you it’s a shame and a sorrow. But I say, forget all sorrow. That is our
highest duty in life—to live. And to forget.”

“I
believe our highest duty is to live and to remember.”

“By
God, I remember too much. And, somehow, not enough.”

She
rests her hand on his beneath the table. “What don’t you want to remember,
Daniel? Tell me.”

Remember.
His heart tumbles, spinning him around and around. He doesn’t want to remember,
but he does. Bits and pieces. He does.

“It
was 1881,” he says, leaning close, his lips nearly touching her cheek.

Saint
Louis languished beneath incipient summer, the fecund heat ripe with fruit and
disease. Daniel, a lazy boy of seven, sucked on sugar cubes Mama heaped in
silver bowls. He remembered the heat, the smell of mold, of corn whiskey. The
heat squeezed sweat off everyone’s brow, filmed skin beneath cotton and silk.
That smell of mold, mud, mint, Southern Comfort, overripe peaches, and
sickness--it nauseated him just to remember it.

Cholera
was everywhere. Father conferred with the priest, city councilmen, merchants,
the great landowners, shippers who worked the river. They knew the infection
had to do with the heat, with moisture, rot, and perhaps insects, vermin in the
water. But his father and those men were powerless before the slippery devilish
disease that wrung life so painfully from a person’s gut. Even lazy little
Daniel could sense their defeat.

“Yet
it seemed as if she was sick ever since I was born,” Daniel tells Zhu, sipping a
Bonanza. “That’s what she would tell me. ‘Danny, since the day you were born, I
have been sick.’”

“How
did that make you feel?”

“Guilty,
of course.” He glares at her. What kind of damn fool question is that? He
doesn’t want to think about his feelings. He wants to
forget
about his
feelings. But she only smiles at him in the smoky darkness of the bar. “But
that summer she was worse. Much worse. I remember her crying. Crying in the
night.”

“She
contracted cholera?”

“Well,
that cannot be, can it? She would have died, like poor old Tchaikovsky. No, no,
she lingered on for years.”

“Then
dysentery, maybe?”

“You
know, I. . . .I’m not sure. She would have died of that, too, wouldn’t she? Oh,
but her pain! Our doctor put her on the Montgomery Ward iron tonic. A jigger
every two hours. Vile stuff. I tasted it, of course. A concoction of finely
ground beef and grains of citrate of iron dissolved in pure sherry wine.”

“Your
doctor prescribed booze to a chronically ill woman?”

“Now,
now, my angel, it was a tonic, not booze. The tonic calmed her, soothed her.
Father saw an immediate improvement, and so did I. She stopped crying. She was
so ugly when she cried. I wanted her to look beautiful. We all did.”

He
lights his fifteenth ciggie for the evening and draws the smoke down hard. He
welcomes the twitch of pain deep in his lungs. Lets him know he’s alive.

She
seizes the ciggie from his fingers, holds it like a piece of offal. “Why are
you so hell-bent on self-destruction?”

He
seizes the ciggie back. “I am not self-destructing, I am smoking. I love to
smoke. When I haven’t eaten, smoking settles my stomach. And when I’ve eaten
too much, smoking settles my stomach then, too. And one cannot possibly drink
properly without a smoke. What’s wrong with that?”

“Well,
for starters, smoking’s going to kill you. Rot your mouth, your throat, your
lungs, induce other cancers.

“Rot.
I do apologize about my story. I’ve talked too much about rot, and now you’ve
got rot on your mind.”

“You
people know about lung cancer in this Now.”

“And
when will this horror overtake me?”