Guillaudeu walked straight across Broadway, keeping his eyes fixed on Franklin Street sneaking narrowly eastward as if behind Broadway’s back. He was nearly struck by a hackney cab but he didn’t notice. All he felt was fear as he resisted the undertow that would drag him toward the museum. But when he emerged on the other side of Franklin he was suddenly bathed in the light that fell between buildings and he smiled, his face contorting out of its usual creases and angles as he walked into the unknown.
Nineteen
Guillaudeu harbored just two memories of his first day on New York Island. Unlike the predictable images evoked by the Cosmorama salon’s sturdy miniature Paris, these memories shimmered and dissolved; they shape-shifted across the years, and although it wasn’t terribly often that Guillaudeu thought of them, when he did his interpretations inevitably included speculation and unrequited doubt.
He did not remember disembarking from the massive sailing ship that had carried him across the sea. Much later he knew it must have been on one of the piers near Fulton Street. Of the man from the ship who led him into the city, out of kindness or some other motive he did not know, he recalled only the man’s squeezing grip on his hand. It was daytime, he remembered that, and he was very small. Perhaps the man had been a sailor, home after his long voyage. Or he could have been headed to a tavern for the evening, and would return to the ship to sleep.
They must have walked north up Pearl Street, because they ended up deep in the Points, maybe near Cross and Orange. Now, white-haired, with his satchel over his shoulder, and propelled by some obscure but certain need, Guillaudeu walked boldly toward that intersection.
During the years that Guillaudeu had lived in New York, the Points had blossomed into their bloodiest five-petaled glory. The district’s filth now had international standing, and the whole place was buoyed by its own feral pride, which would have easily deflected Guillaudeu had he not been determined to see a certain building that now revealed itself farther down the block. If Linnaeus could scale mountains, he told himself, then surely an old man could walk another half a block.
This was the only part of the city that had been rebuilt with timber after the great fire, and not by the most skilled carpenters, judging by the precarious angles of some roofs and doorways. There were grocers on every corner, but he saw no sign of food in their windows. Men with faces shadowed by wide-brimmed hats brushed past him, and he heard the hum of voices coming from inside shacks and clapboard warehouses.
The building was still there. Its unmistakable brick façade, notched in the Dutch style, loomed. Guillaudeu stood before it, searching the building for the word that had left the indelible memory, but the sign was long gone.
But I’m not an orphan! He had screamed when he saw the wooden sign swinging lightly on its two hooks. The word was in English, but the French was similar enough that he knew. The man tightened his grip on Guillaudeu’s small hand. That man could have been laughing, or his eyes could have been resigned, even sad. As the two of them stood there, a woman rose inside the building and moved toward the worn door. She was silhouetted by small lamps that hung on sconces behind her. This was all he saw before he wriggled around, twisting his captor’s arm and flailing against him.
“It’s better than nothing,” the man whispered in French as Guillaudeu writhed against him. He finally bit the man’s hand and ran.
Now he stepped closer to the old brick orphanage. Its two wide windows were glassless holes. The front porch was missing planks and the awning was held by untrustworthy supports. With the sense that he was testing fate, or at least trespassing upon the sacrosanct boundary of memory, he walked up the steps to the narrow porch. The boarded-up door and wooden windowsills were burned to charcoal along their edges. After the fire, the city had rebuilt itself so dizzyingly quickly that husks like this were rare artifacts. He ran a finger along the vertical edge of one window.
“That’s just about far enough, son.” The growl could have come from the walls themselves; there was something singed, both fallen and constant, in it. “Just be on your way.”
“I mean no harm,” Guillaudeu said weakly.
“But you bring it anyway, don’t you?”
A man disengaged himself from the shadows.
“Scared people bring harm. Usually upon themselves.”
The man’s bright blue eyes gleamed from under thick black brows. With those eyes, his rounded features, and full gray beard, in another life he could have played the part of Irving’s Saint Nicholas. But here, in a decrepit cloak that he had pulled aside to display a handle-less blade at his belt, the man’s potentially jovial face instead seemed to mock credulity itself.
“I know this place,” Guillaudeu said softly, aware that he was in danger but strangely calm. Could he have grown into a man like this if the circumstance of his arrival to this country had shifted ever so subtly? For a moment he reeled in the chaos of the world: Everyone, without exception, is simply an accumulation of choice and chance; each president, each pauper, each Phineas T. Barnum. And chance, it seemed to him, appeared more often than choice. He was a puppet in someone else’s hand.
“Well I live here now,” said the man in the shadows.
“How do you know I’m scared?”
“How you move. Your eyes. I smelled it as soon as I saw you.”
“I hadn’t noticed. I was feeling rather good today.”
The man laughed, never taking his eyes off Guillaudeu’s face. “Oh, you hadn’t, had you? You were feeling good, you say?”
Guillaudeu clutched his satchel.
“I don’t want anything you’ve got, son. It’s just better for me if no one saw you standing there talking to nobody. Go on back where you came from.”
As a boy fleeing this spot, he’d cut through a narrow passageway somewhere near where he now trotted away from the bearded man. He’d run for blocks, recklessly shouting to any French-speaking person who might have been near. He was thoroughly ignored by everyone on the street, and he’d run until he came upon the thing that had contaminated his dreams for years, the second memory of his first day in New York. In a muddy lot behind a hive of tenements he beheld a mottled monster, with dots for eyes and a double row of protruding, fingerlike teats on its belly, some of which were raw and bleeding. The animal was almost his height, its chapped pink areas marginalized by evil-looking black splotches. It was a terrible, gargantuan pig chewing dripping garbage, and its belly and snout were coated with refuse. Frozen in terror, he watched as the creature shat a pressurized stream of filth onto its own hind legs. The image would never leave him, this foul minotaur lurking just around the next corner, the guardian of this new city. When he could move again, he had run back to the brick orphanage and knocked on the door.
Twenty
As he hurried out of the Points, Guillaudeu was bumped and jostled on the crowded sidewalk. Men in ragged hats spat on the ground and filthy children scurried at the edge of the street. He dared not look back, but he felt someone following him. It wasn’t that he heard footsteps that paused or accelerated with his, but he felt pushed from behind by a steady, unmistakable force. Perhaps it was his fear; apparently he exuded it so clearly it was palpable. He slowed to a brisk walk once he passed Broome. I smelled it, the man had said. Of course he’d been scared. He hadn’t been back to the orphanage in forty-five years. But the man had been referring to something else, something deeper. And then he felt something like gratitude toward the man. Why? For having the decency to point out something that must be obvious to everyone who knew him, but of which, he, himself, had been ignorant. His excitement at being away from the apartment and away from the museum returned. He was confident he would not be harmed, even by whatever was following him. He turned up Prince and shot a quick look backward over his shoulder. Apart from two men standing outside a run-down coffeehouse and a stringy dog sniffing the gutter, the street was empty.
At Broadway, Guillaudeu watched people board an omnibus. The long, glossy carriage ha
d crimson curtains in the windows; inside, he knew, were comfortable benches with matching red cushions. From where he now stood it was a ten-minute ride to the museum. He watched the driver latch the doors behind the last customer and leap into position behind the four horses. It would be even faster by cabriolet, he thought. Feeling eyes staring at his back, he plunged off the curb and again resisted the street’s southward current.
In Washington Square he sat down on a bench to rest his feet. He rubbed his hands through his thin hair, smoothing it as best he could, and then fussed with the ends of his mustache. He stretched out his legs. To the west, a number of students emerged from a university building to lounge in the park. Children threw rubber balls and chased one another on the grass while their mothers stood together like hens. The morning clouds were lifting and the sun — Guillaudeu now closed his eyes and faced it — warmed him. Spring is finally here. Even a taxidermist must go into the field at certain times, and it really should be in spring. It was good.
He turned suddenly, opening his eyes and craning his head to search along the park’s periphery. Some distance away, a couple faced away from him on a bench. He scanned the pedestrians walking across the park, but no one looked suspicious. A copper-colored dog sat panting under a tree, and beyond it, on the sidewalk outside the east entrance to the park, someone peddled apples and newspapers.
Ahead of him, people streamed up Fifth Avenue toward 14th Street. In the distance their shapes disappeared into haloes of sunlight. North. He would go into that sunlight. He hoisted himself up, shouldered his bag, and walked on the cobbled path to the northern park gate. He looked back once and saw that the dog had risen from its place in the shade and was following him at a lope. He stopped. The stringy dog stopped but kept its eyes on him as it delicately sniffed a clump of clover.
“A-ha!” Guillaudeu laughed. “The culprit. What did I do to deserve this attention?” When he moved, the dog moved. When he stopped, so did the dog. It would not come closer, but remained fixed on following him. In tandem, they started up Fifth Avenue.
Above 14th Street half the buildings on the broad, tree-shaded avenue appeared to be under construction or undergoing major renovation. The line of sight that he remembered, which included a great swathe of sky above wide-shuttered brick houses, was gone. These new buildings were four, sometimes five stories tall, and so narrow they made the older homes look like startled bullfrogs. Workmen climbed scaffolding to attach wooden embellishments and dainty cupolas to the roofs. An older home that Guillaudeu remembered as being quite pretty was being dismantled, its brick salvaged by a man in rags with a mule-drawn cart. He passed a new house of painted brick with a steeply pitched roof and miniature gothic spires attached, ridiculously, at every possible apex. This is how the city breathes, he told himself. The fire, seven years ago, was its deepest breath, and it blew the rich out of downtown and scattered them here and northward, where they used what imagination they could muster — certainly money was the more plentiful resource — to build a new generation of the city. Each block contained at least three new houses, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with their older neighbors. This is the way of the city, he thought. The world.
The dog ambled silently behind him with its nose to the ground, weaving in between gates and stoops, sometimes tracking into open construction areas, private property. Once, it appeared behind him chewing something, with a pleased look in its eye. Good for you, he thought. You can survive anywhere. He tried whistling but emitted only a pathetic hiss. He laughed. When was the last time he had whistled? He tried again, this time managing the miniaturized sound of a winter storm. Finally he squeaked out a recognizable series of notes, but the dog had not noticed.
He was distracted enough by the construction and the dog that he didn’t quite anticipate how quickly he would arrive at the corner of 19th Street. After all, usually when he traveled this way he was riding in a carriage.
He crept to the corner and looked down the street at John Scudder’s imposing Federal-style home, with its two pillars made, he knew, from the same Westchester marble as the museum’s main stairwell. He knew that inside the door lay the same cobalt, black, and brown Arabian rug that he remembered from all the years of walking over it to Scudder’s study, wondering where in the house Edie was. When he inhaled, Guillaudeu smelled the leather and pipe smoke that Scudder always emanated. Home. A home, one of his homes.
He wouldn’t have survived a week at that Points orphanage, and thankfully the women running it recognized that right away and sent him uptown. He was well dressed, French, and tremendously frightened. A perfect example of who could be successfully saved by the reform societies, and so he was sent up to the boys’ boardinghouse where he’d be seen by the right people. It was a holding place for suitable apprentices, house servants, and even the occasional adopted son of the wealthy, or seemingly wealthy, class. Choice and chance. Again, mostly chance.
He wandered toward the old house, which was flanked on one side by an almost identical twin, and on the other by a strange new edifice, painted an ostentatious yellow and displaying the same gaudy moldings as several others he’d seen. How many times he’d grasped that worn iron gate handle and wondered when Edie’d last touched it, or thought of what he’d learn that day about curing hides or mold making in Scudder’s sunlit laboratory. Just the memory of that work gave him such a feeling of alignment with the world that he smiled.
He didn’t see the figure at the window until it was too late; the figure had already smiled back. John Scudder was paler than the last time Guillaudeu had seen him, which made his thick black eyebrows, under the fine white hair, even blacker, and his lips, stretched in greeting, an almost grotesque red. Was it a phantom? Scudder disappeared from the window. Guillaudeu took a step back. He couldn’t see Scudder right now! This day, which had started with his defiance on Broadway only two hours ago, could not narrow so soon into familiarity. He was just now shaking loose the old binds, he realized. Too soon! The door above him creaked open. Even the creak was familiar. Scudder’s visage appeared again, and this time his too-red mouth opened to speak.
“No!” Guillaudeu let the word fall from his lips to the ground at Scudder’s feet as he ran away. The dog, who had been behind him, was now in front, leaping ahead of him and barking.
“Emile!” Scudder’s voice was strong, magnetic. “Emile, come back! Why are you running? Where are you going?”
At the corner Guillaudeu looked back. There was Scudder at his own gate, shuffling onto the sidewalk after him. And then, nightmarishly, tripping over his own feet. The old man fell to his knees. Guillaudeu ran from him, raising a hand to his mouth. He had not run in years, maybe a decade, and it felt dangerous. His bones were brittle. He was not a man of action. Tears sprang to the corners of his eyes and cooled as he ran. I can smell it on you. He kept his blurry sights on the lean coppery streak of a dog who bounded ahead toward the orchards of Murray Hill.
After running only a few minutes, he limped and could not catch his breath. He slowed to a lopsided walk. There was a cramp in his abdomen, and the biggest toe of his left foot throbbed from jamming into the end of his shoe. Scudder would be all right, he told himself. How old would he be now? I hadn’t wanted to be seen, he thought childishly. He couldn’t see the dog anymore, and this made him sadder than the glimpse of Scudder falling down.
The sun had broken entirely free of clouds and washed him in that undiluted glare that one feels only in the harsh beginning of spring. But the city that the sun now illuminated was completely foreign. The few handsomely dressed pedestrians on this stretch of Fifth Avenue seemed unaware that they walked upon cobble that had been dirt … only yesterday, wasn’t it? When had they gone to the tavern on Murray Hill? Could it have been a year ago? Celia had insisted on the trip, so it must have been two, even three? He remembered coming home from the museum to her sly smile. She’d told him there was an exhibit of specimens in Murray Hill, a private collection. Once they’d boarded a carriage and ri
dden it out of the city she gaily confessed that there was no exhibit, just a beautiful summer evening.
“We can dine in the open air! I can smell orchard grass on the breeze already, can’t you, Emile? It feels good to leave the city.”
She was wearing her orange coat, the one he’d never liked. She had been happy, almost girlish, though the hair that sprang loose from under her hat was already showing silver. Absurdly late, he regretted the scowl he’d given her in response.
As he walked, Guillaudeu became more and more perplexed. All around him arose amplified versions of the steeply spired and gaudy houses he’d seen below Scudder’s. He passed a massive brick edifice boasting twin turrets and too-wide shutters that flanked each window like exaggerated eyelashes. The next building was blindingly white and designed to emulate a Greek temple, complete with Corinthian columns and an ornate cornice that included a frieze sculpted in low relief, depicting a nude woman bent over an open trunk that emanated the glow of riches. Or all the ills of the world, Guillaudeu thought. What had the city become? Where was it going? As he walked north he passed house after house in these astonishing styles. None of them, he felt certain, had been there a year ago.
Sitting by the iron gate of one of the mansions, the dog waited for him.
“You’re still around, eh?” He was glad to see it. He opened his satchel and tore off some of the bread he’d packed. “It’s not the heartiest fare, but I’ve got some sausage, too, for later.” He knelt near the dog, who daintily rose to its feet and leaned toward him, sniffing. It would not come closer, so he tossed it the bread. The dog caught it in its jaws and lowered its front end, stretching out its forelegs. When Guillaudeu started walking, the dog backed away, but he noticed that as he went, it followed him at a closer distance than before.
Among the Wonderful Page 13
