The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  New York’s style had changed, wholesale, at least twice—if such a thing could even be measured—since James had first observed it. Bern made his way over to Twenty-third Street, taking another circuitous route past the Flatiron Building, past Edith Wharton’s birthplace—an old Anglo-Italian brownstone—and the Hotel Chelsea. At home, he tried to read himself to sleep. “Sweet, sacred, and profane”—this is the “hut dream,” said Ann Cline.

  In the street in front of McGee’s someone yelled obscenities. “She don’t want my skinny brown ass no more!” another man barked into a cell phone. A car horn brayed.

  Bern closed his eyes and tried to picture a garden, a soothing space in which he could slumber, but various thoughts intruded: E. B. White; auburn hair; leaky roofs. Lodoli seems to have believed it was humanity’s aim to perfect Nature. Imperfect in itself, Nature offered materials to men and women of genius who, in choosing certain substances for particular designs, improved the makeup of matter. In this way, the world strove to return to Paradise.

  Bern imagined moss roses, hoping to will himself into a dream. Acres and acres of orange and yellow blossoms around the family house and near his grandfather’s grave, north of Houston: the small granite stone under swelling Gulf Coast clouds, the swoon-inducing sweetness of pollen, and the dense, rich loam underneath.

  3.

  Glasco’s remained closed the following evening. The plumbing sign had been removed. A new sign said, “Vacation. Back in Three Weeks.” Bern suspected something more sinister at work. Elsewhere, he had witnessed the gradual letting-down of clientele, as in the saga of the Gotham Book Mart, which had apparently been dying of high rent for two years now without admitting as much to its customers. No one knew the store was in trouble until the steel fencing came down in front of its windows, shutting out of reach the first edition Joyces and the copies of The Sun Also Rises signed by Papa himself. Had Glasco’s lost its liquor license? Had the building been sold?

  The Cedar was even louder than last night. Bern didn’t see an empty chair until one sailed across his sight line, dragged by a booted foot. The foot—a lovely and perfectly functional ornament—belonged to Kate. “Okay, hut-man. I’ve been waiting for my turkey and mayo for thirty minutes now. I’m hungry and bored. Tell me something crazy,” Kate said.

  Bern sat beside her. “Well, then,” he said. “All right. Have you heard of Carlo Lodoli? History’s greatest architect. He was cursed with ambitious students who distorted his teachings. He felt—or we think he felt—that all architecture, even the ‘primitive,’ had value, but his apprentice Algarotti dismissed whole continents of builders.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “There are peoples on the Earth, Algarotti said, who, lacking materials or a ‘certain kind of intelligence,’ make their huts ‘out of the bones and skins of quadrupeds and marine monsters.’ It’s clear he disapproves.”

  Kate cased the busy room. “I’m thirsty, too,” she said. “Tell me more.”

  “Trouble arises naturally. Pleasure has to be planned for.”

  With cool gray eyes Kate appraised him. “How did you spend your day, Wally?”

  “Sketching, on paper—”

  “Not a computer guy?”

  “Not a computer guy. Sketching, on paper, methods of squeezing a light scoop past a fire escape.”

  “How old are you?” Kate asked. “What’s the matter with computers? … Oh, bless you,” she said to the waitress who arrived with a pint of Guinness and took Bern’s order for a pilsner.

  “Forty-nine. And computers …”

  “No, it’s okay, I get the picture. A Luddite in love with huts … I mean, you know, a little out of touch, aren’t we, Grandpa?”

  “What’s wrong with computers is, they minimize the hand,” Bern said, trying to resist Kate’s humor. This girl, he feared, could make him giddy. Unseemly, at his age. Focus. “Building comes from nerve endings. Fingertips. It’s all about the body. But also”—as he spoke, he twisted the cardboard coaster in perfect little circles on the tabletop, and Kate watched him, amused—“with a sketch, you can’t tell just by looking at it if it predates the structure or if it’s a rendering of something already there. Drawings have this magical quality, past and future all at once … they’re preposterous.”

  “You lost me there,” said Kate.

  “Pre and Post, before and after, all in the same word. Pre-posterous. The ideal architecture.”

  Kate laughed.

  Was she put off by him? Charmed? Bern thought the latter, but he wasn’t sure. She had asked him, the other night, to entertain her. Now, maybe she was just being polite. At least she didn’t get up to leave right away.

  “Forty-nine, eh? So this ‘renewal’ business,” Kate said. “Midlife crisis? Maybe a little late in your case …”

  “I don’t know. What is a midlife crisis?” Bern said. “Something dreamed up by magazine editors to sell copy.”

  “But you all have one, right? Sooner or later? All you guys. Wife?”

  “No.”

  “Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “When was your last affair?”

  “A couple of years ago,” he said before he could check himself, prompted by the easy sway of their conversation. She waited for more. “I was married for two years in my late twenties. A Texas girl who hated the east and went back home. I’m okay, you know, being alone. I like solitude.”

  “Sex?”

  His face burned. “Well, yes.”

  “So what do you …”

  “Are you always this forward with strangers?” Bern asked.

  She smiled. “You’re not a stranger. Life is short, Wally.”

  Her sandwich appeared, and Bern ordered a garden burger. “Okay, old friend,” he said. “How did you spend your day?”

  “I’m a staff writer for a magazine called Theatre News.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. What I said before … I don’t really have a gripe against editors.”

  “It’s okay.” She touched his arm. “Naturally, the old hands get the plum assignments and reviews—Vertical Hour, The Coast of Utopia. I get the off-off-off stuff. But last week I got to meet Wallace Shawn—the lispy guy in all those Woody Allen movies? Another Wally! That was exciting. And the editors let me do a capsule review of Translations over at the Biltmore—the Irish play? It’s the leprechaun in me.”

  “Hence the Guinness?”

  “Cheers.” She raised her glass. “My family’s roots are in Ireland. As whose aren’t? Anyway, we have a small but avid readership and I write small, avid articles.”

  “How long have you been in Manhattan?”

  “Four years.”

  Still a tourist on the island—as was he after two decades. “From?” he asked.

  “New Orleans.” Before he could speak, she added, “I haven’t been back since Katrina. I’d find it too devastating. I want to remember it the way it was.”

  Bern mentioned the muddy bayous of his upbringing.

  “Houston! So! You and me, Wally,” Kate said. “Big storms in common.”

  “Moss roses?”

  “Oh, my god! You should see, in my apartment—I couldn’t get over it when I saw them for sale at a street market here. In January! How do they do that?”

  “Boyfriend? Girlfriend?”

  “Boyfriend. Sort of. A lighting technician over at the Beckett.”

  “Sort of?”

  “We’re … volatile with each other, which is sometimes good, sometimes bad. You know? So we’re on-again, off-again.”

  Bern played with the coaster. Kate watched him. “Tell me, Wally. How’s your hut?”

  “You laugh,” he said, “and of course it’s just a fantasy. But there’s a certain rightness to the notion.”

  She did laugh at him.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “A return to origins. What better place for it? And it needn’t be crude—the savage box most people picture when they hear the word hut.”
/>   “What do you mean?”

  “I mean …” Should he? “Where is your apartment, Kate? Can I walk you home? I’ll show you on the way.”

  “Wally. Are you a weirdo-psycho-creep?”

  “Not weirdo-psycho.”

  “No rolling in feces? That sort of thing?”

  “Not lately.”

  “Okay. Let me finish this.”

  Her apartment was on West Twelfth—part of an old condo, she said, that had been partitioned into hotel rooms and rental units with community baths. On the way, she mused, “I know what your trouble is, Wally. If you’re thinking about Adam and Eve and preposterous and giants on the earth, but you’re spending your days with fire escapes, well then, you’re bound to feel a bit …”

  “Displaced?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps. And the closing of Glasco’s … but …”

  She laughed. “You do like to talk, don’t you? For a quiet sort.”

  A silent beat. Then: “Lodoli—the guy I told you about?—he liked to walk with his apprentices, looking at buildings. He saw his ‘lessons’ as a series of strolls and talks—conversation. His favorite mode was the allegory.”

  “And yours?”

  “The apology, I think.” He stumbled over a curb. “Among Lodoli’s students were young women. Unusual for that day and time.”

  “Is that what I am tonight? Your student?”

  Was she flirting? Was he?

  “Not at all. But here,” Bern said. “Here we are.”

  They had come to the Presbyterian church. Bern took Kate’s shoulders and positioned her in front of the grand entrance. At first, she winced at his touch, but then she seemed to settle. “All right. Imagine this building made of wood instead of stone,” he said. “Slender tree trunks framing the entry, and the arch at the top formed by flexible willow limbs, curved and tied together. Can you see it?”

  “Yes!” Kate said.

  “Good. And the ornamentation, the busy carvings above the doorway—like foliage. In the spring, when the rooted willows sprout new life—”

  “Is that where the design comes from? Those Gothic monsters in Europe?”

  “It’s a theory. So: simple wooden construction—the hut—as prototype for our greatest creations. The echo of origins. It needs to be there, like an old message in a bottle, for anything we make to have meaning.”

  “At Ground Zero?”

  “Anywhere,” Bern said. Lodoli would object. Apparently, the lost master was anything but a traditionalist. Still, if you love him, you must fight him, Bern thought. How else to keep the mental conversation going?

  Kate nodded at Bern but looked uncertain.

  “You’re cold. I’ll get you home,” Bern said.

  They strolled quietly up West Eleventh. Near Gene’s, the Italian restaurant where Bern had eaten lunch the other day, they came upon a clump of small, mossy stones just off the sidewalk. “What’s this?” Kate said.

  Twenty or so jagged markers in the shadows, behind a tiny iron gate. “A cemetery,” Bern said. “Of the old Spanish and Portuguese synagogue. Some of the city’s first Jewish immigrants are buried here. In fact, this is one of the oldest graveyards in Manhattan.”

  “It’s lovely.”

  “Yes, it’s a favorite spot of mine. I walk by here every day.”

  They squinted to read the dates on the stones. 1683. 1734. 1825.

  “This plot used to be much larger,” Bern explained, “but city commissioners ran a road through West Eleventh and cut it in half about 1830 or so, disturbing a few unlucky souls.”

  He started to point out the unusual number of relief carvings on the headstones—remarkable, given the Jewish aversion to graven images. A snipped-off flower (life cut short), the Angel of Destruction waving a flaming sword at Gotham. He stopped himself. No more Teacher tonight, he decided. Why did he go on so, hiding behind his moldy old facts? To protect his thin and shabby inner life? From what? Kate seemed to enjoy him in a smirky sort of way—an Irish tolerance for blather?—but he didn’t want to press his luck. He didn’t flatter himself he was sexy; on the other hand, he didn’t want her to think him an old pedant.

  A green Mystic Oil truck rumbled past them. Garbage spilled from ripped bags on the corner. A rat scurried behind a low stone wall. Bern glanced down Seventh to the Vanguard. When he had first come to the city in the early 1980s, he spent an evening in the club listening to Woody Shaw. Shaw was dead now. So was Max Gordon, the club’s old owner. Ghosts of jazz. Bern remembered Shaw’s drummer as ham-handed and loud.

  A man in a motorized wheelchair, hunched and smoking madly, whizzed past them, nearly knocking Kate over. Bern steadied her, touching her arm. Two men in blue cotton overcoats strolled by them. “What I’m saying is, all of our daily encounters with people, even with our friends, are essentially financial in nature,” one man said to the other.

  Kate led him up West Twelfth. She pointed to a lighted window in her building. “There. Can you see?” she said. Bern followed her gesture to the fifth or sixth story: creamy yellow light through rippled panes of glass. A wrought-iron railing just inside the window frame. Wrapped around the railing, orange blossoms. “Moss roses!” he cried.

  “Welcome home,” Kate said. “Thank you, Wally. For the lesson, the tour.”

  “I’m sorry, Kate. I get carried away. Pompous.”

  “It was fun.”

  “Sleep well.”

  “You too. Forget about fire escapes, just for tonight. Dream of …”

  Bern pecked her cheek and backed away.

  4.

  A few days later he read in the Times that St. Vincent’s Hospital, which had “lost money for several years,” planned to demolish its current building and erect a sleeker, more efficient facility across the street. The paper cited “New York’s shrinking hospital industry” and said that St. Vincent’s old “mazelike layout,” with some rooms dating to the 1930s, had become too expensive to heat, light, and cool.

  In the early afternoon, walking up Fifth to scope out a new project he had been assigned, he saw that a shop for skin creams and facial care now occupied the high-windowed space (with old leaded frames) where Scribner’s Bookstore had formerly displayed its treasures. The culture had declared its priorities: vanity over history, art, and literature.

  Well, Bern thought, recalling Kate’s gray eyes. On one level, hard to argue.

  I like solitude. Had he really told her this? However true it was, she had tapped into a deeper reality. “Rut,” she said. “You get in a rut.” Loneliness had become a habit with him—a common enough malady, he supposed. Especially here. Especially now.

  Kate had evened his keel. Nowadays, his melancholy over the rapid changes all around him was mitigated by the pleasure she took from the regular walks they made together, from “his knowledge,” she said, “of the city’s many layers.”

  “This talk of many layers,” he said uneasily one afternoon. “There are scads of books …”

  She squeezed his arm. “But you’re my personal Baedeker.”

  “Me?” he thought. What about Lewis Mumford? E. B. White? But he held his tongue. That day with Kate, Bern worked assiduously to stem his commentary—he faced no such problem alone, but now, in her presence, he became aware that his thinking could be antisocial, a hostile, distancing act if it wasn’t parceled out.

  “Like this neighborhood,” Kate said abruptly, tugging his sleeve.

  They had turned onto Greenwich Street, between Rector and Carlisle, just south of Ground Zero. The Pussycat Lounge. A peep show, a topless bar. “Your timing is uncanny,” Bern told Kate. “This is actually a very interesting area.”

  “I knew it!”

  What was he to do? It was difficult not to recede behind lectures when she prompted him like this, encouraging his natural propensity. Like dear old Lodoli, Bern considered strolling—the cold experience of touching buildings—a means of learning “in blood.” “You really want to know?” he said.


  “Absolutely.”

  “From, say, the 1790s to about 1820, this was the poshest real estate in Manhattan.”

  “Mansions?”

  “Sure.”

  “To-die-for clubs?”

  “The jet set of the eighteenth century wouldn’t party anywhere else. New York City got its start here at the southern tip of the island.” He waved his arm. “This was the home of the mercantile elite until waterfront shipping changed the dynamic.”

  “Hey, Professor,” a greasy-haired man with an eight-ball tattooed on his chin called to Bern from a smoky doorway, “we got lap dances from ten bucks. Your lady friend’s welcome too.”

  Kate pressed close to Bern without actually touching him. He ignored the man’s black chin. “A developer wants to tear all this out now.”

  “Good riddance, yes?” Kate said. “Like when they cleaned up Forty-second Street.”

  “Except—and there’s always an exception—the building housing the Pussycat, here, is over two hundred years old, a Federal-era townhouse and, as such, unique and valuable. It’s the old story. The developer claims to envision a better New York—wiping out blight, hmm? The Pussycat’s owner claims to want to preserve the city’s rich heritage. Up to a point, both men have a legitimate position. And of course, no one’s listening to the ghosts of the old well-to-do, who gave the city its start and were swept away long ago.”

  “What kind of ice cream do you like?” Kate asked. On most afternoons, despite her apparent interest in his stories, she had about a twenty-minute limit for his oratory.

  “Plain vanilla, I’m afraid.”

  “I could have guessed it. Let’s go. I know a place just around the corner here, and it won’t be crowded this time of year.”

  Her bounciness, an almost desperate craving for distraction, convinced him his “lessons” really did delight her—”All Southerners are history buffs,” she said. “You’ve read Faulkner, right?”—and this helped Bern swallow her first principle: “No sex between us, okay, Wally? It’s not an age deal, or anything.” Bern judged her to be around twenty-five—she wouldn’t come right out and say. “It’s just that, what with Gary”—her man—“I need a friend.”