Forever

by Pete Hamill

  45.

  Twice, Cormac pushed beyond the city’s northern border. He found his way to the Collect Pond and walked around its edges. The Collect was no small body of water. It was sixty feet deep, more spring-fed lake than simple pond. At dawn, men scraped its bottom for oysters. At dusk they trolled in rowboats for bass. It was the primary source of the city’s water. A creek emptied to the west of the pond, meandering down through the farmlands of Lispenard Meadows. Another creek emptied to the south, into the Little Collect and on to the East River. The creeks were sluggish and dark. Each day, cartmen hired by the city heaved unburned garbage into the pond. The shore was littered with broken bottles and battered pails, the gnawed cores of apples and the shells of oysters glittering in the mud. A hill rose abruptly at the southern edge, bald and craggy and vaguely sinister. On this hill (Cormac was told) the hangman plied his trade. After dark in its thickets, young men tried to enter the bodies of young girls. He heard (from a raving preacher) that many succeeded. From the peak of the hill, he could see the island rolling north into thick forests, sliced with the silver lines of streams. Beyond the northern shore of the pond, he smelled grass and rich, loamy earth and a sweetness that helped erase the growing odor of rot from the side of the Collect closest to the city.

  He knew that he would never find the earl in the fields and forests above the town, but they pulled at him in some mysterious way, filling him with memories of Ireland. In turn, the emptiness of that forest, and the longings it provoked, drove him back to the streets of the city. Thinking of Ireland made him think of his father, and then he wanted to find the earl again. There were images he could not shed.

  In the city, he was often in the company of Mr. Partridge, as he searched for a place where he could house his printing press, himself, and Cormac, his apprentice. Along the way, Cormac got to know him better, and liked him even more. Partridge had had very little formal education in England, since schools were generally closed to the children of farmers. “They thought if a farm lad could read and write, he’d leave for the city, and then who’d feed the rich?” he said one bright morning on Pearl Street. “Or the pigs, for that matter! And they were right, of course!” Pausing. “Stupid, but right, from their point of view.” But he’d found his way to the printing trade, apprenticing to a cranky man named Steele, and in the setting of type, and the printing of books, he had learned many things. On their New York walks, he spoke with passion about cloves, elephants, the best way to make paper, the translations of Alexander Pope, the many varieties of sugarcane, and the art of weaving carpets. He knew the history of garbage, and all about the making of aqueducts in ancient Rome, the development of graveyards, and the sexual habits of the Arawak Indians in the Caribbean at the moment of the arrival of the Europeans. He owned several copies of Don Quixote.

  In short, he was as English as roast beef, but an Englishman open to the whole wide world. He was outraged by English cruelties in Ireland and Scotland. He hated kings. In his view, all kings were gangsters. Not just English kings, but kings in every country where they presumed to rule over ordinary people. Their pretensions to nobility made him laugh when he was in a benevolent and ironical mood, or slam walls and tabletops when he was soaring into high democratic rage. Nobody was better suited to being an American.

  “How do they get away with it?” he said to Cormac as they walked down Broad Street one hot and sticky July afternoon. “How do they get armies to carry their stupid flags and march off to die? That’s the mystery. How do they get to sit on a throne in court, dressed in silks and lace and powdered wigs, and get intelligent men to kneel before them? In awe! In bloody supplication!” Such words would have been treasonous to most of His Majesty’s loyal subjects in New York. But Mr. Partridge was also a careful man. He only spoke his republican thoughts to Cormac when there was not another soul in earshot.

  “Noble!” he said on another day, his voice lathered with sarcasm, the words flowing from him in paragraphs. “Aye, they are noble. Noble bastards, they are. How did it begin? And how will it end? I’ll tell you how. The story’s in the history books, if you know how to read them.” He gestured with his hands in the general direction of England, out beyond the Battery. “There were a few of these swine long ago, readier to kill than decent folk, their mouths full of a line of velvety tripe to turn the ears of the dumber sort. Tripe about Noble England, and the Noble King. All they needed was a handful who believed them, or saw a chance to get rich without work. Together, they stole from weaker people and then used the money to create armed theater. That’s what it was, lad. That’s what it is! Armed theater! Castles and music and fine robes and crowns and jewels—it’s all theater. Acting! Performing! And all of it made possible by the use of swords and muskets and cannon, and driven by jealousy and theft! First they rob the other dukes. Then, out of the stolen money, they give small rewards to the footpads and killers who are not so powerful, those minor actors who are not able to fill the air with flowery rubbish. Then they go on to robbery of the poor, stealing the fruits of their labor—for all kings are determined never to do an honest day’s work! They use the Christian message to convince the poor that they are not meant to be truly happy until they are dead and go on to Heaven. To see the Lord. Who is, of course, English, not Jewish. The farmer, the tradesman, all are willing victims. They bow down before the Great Actor, the King Himself, and work the soil and feed these bastards and then they die, and their sons turn to the same task, while not one of these so-called nobles ever turns a spade in the earth. The poor are robbed by rack rents and taxes. They pay tribute. They even pay for churches so the useless, lazy clergy can tell them how unworthy they are. The kings sneer at them for being fools, and with all that stolen money, they build armies and fleets and export their skills at robbery to the entire world! That’s how it all began, lad. A few cynical actors who fooled entire nations!”

  “And how will it end?”

  “If there’s a God in Heaven,” he said, “it will end at the gallows.”

  He sighed.

  “Any civilized man must be against homicide,” he said. “But regicide seems a most admirable crime.”

  46.

  And so it went as they wandered the town. Mr. Partridge didn’t always rant about cabbages and kings. He fed Cormac’s mind with geography and history, occasionally referring to a map of New York he’d bought in London. He knew exactly where they were on the maps of the world: at 73 degrees and 58 seconds west of the prime meridian, 40 degrees and 47 seconds north latitude, about halfway between the North Pole and the equator, and on a line with Madrid.

  When he pointed across the East River at Brooklyn, he knew that the other island was 118 miles long. “That’s why they call it the long island,” he said. “Brilliant bit of naming, isn’t it?” The East River itself wasn’t a river at all; it was an estuary, with one side running north, the other side south, and a great dangerous place at the top of the estuary called Hell Gate. “Don’t ever try sailing it,” he said. “The water flows in from the Long Island Sound, through a narrow little channel. It tears apart every ship whose captain dares to confront it. Stay away. It’s a true gate to Hell.” And yet there was a simple reason for docking ships here on the East River, instead of the North River. The island protected them from the western winds.

  “The winters are brutal here,” Mr. Partridge said, “and the summers are worse. Spring is very short because the water coming down the North River is still very cold. October is the best month, but the air is never dry—not even in October—because of the rivers and the blessed harbor. Still, it’s a perfect place to build a town, because of that harbor. Mark my words: New York will end up bigger than Boston and Philadelphia combined.”

  This was not easy for Cormac to believe as they wandered through the low, cramped town. The town of shitting horses and rooting pigs. But Mr. Partridge loved it, and saw a city that Cormac didn’t see, the city that was coming. He pointed out the gabled rooftops and yellow-brick facades of
the old Dutch houses, and the arrogant new Georgian houses of the English rich. The names of old families rolled from his lips: Roosevelts and Beekmans, Phillipses and Verplancks, De Peysters and De Lanceys, and, above all, Livingstons. The town was still too small for a district of the rich, as there was now in London, an area made fashionable or aristocratic through guns and money. The homes of the rich shared streets with taverns and shops and markets. “That can’t last,” Mr. Partridge said. “It never does. The rich build private fortresses. That’s part of their triumph.” The old Dutch town, he said, was huddled together, like a primitive castle, behind several pathetic wooden walls (meant to keep out marauding Indians, who no longer existed), and water came from a single well on Broadway because the Collect was too far out into the wilderness.

  “Water is the big problem now,” he said, “and the town can’t grow until it’s solved. How? With aqueducts, the way the Romans solved their problem. The sooner the better. Have you ever smelled such stinking people? They use incense in the churches because the people in a crowd smell like they’ve been dead for nine days. And breakfast: How is it possible, without a major effort, to eat one’s eggs when the room smells like feet?”

  Cormac started smelling feet everywhere. For two days, he could not eat eggs. Meanwhile, they looked at shops too small, and shops too large, shops that resembled prison cells, and shops made for rallies, and along the way, Mr. Partridge tried to explain the great New York political rivalry between the Livingstons and the De Lanceys. Cormac couldn’t follow its intricacies. He was too busy drinking in the variety of the town, its faces, its languages, its hand-lettered walls. Seeing it with the same joy—in spite of the stench—that filled Mr. Partridge.

  “Look at all these signs, lad,” the older man said. “They’re going to feed the two of us!”

  Posters adorned many walls, advertising dentists and writing teachers, elocutionists and dancing masters, goods freshly arrived from England or taken by some privateer. Shops sold cutlery, pewter, glassware, tobacco, watches, coffee, boots, trunks, tools. Sometimes their owners stood outside, shouting the virtues of their wares to those who could not read the signs. More often, posters did the shouting. Some offered rewards for runaway slaves, or runaway apprentices, or runaway indentured servants. Each of these was written in a mixture of surprise and rage. This trusted slave had stolen a horse. That Irish wench had absconded with clothing. This apprentice had lifted a master’s tools. Cormac thought the physical descriptions sounded like the Sunday customers at Hughson’s. Some probably were.

  In the shops or on the streets, Cormac began seeing Africans who’d passed through Hughson’s, working as tinners and carpenters, butchers and handlers of horses, and they exchanged subtle nods of recognition. Cormac kept seeing them as runaways. Moving through the green forests to the north of the island. Heading for wilderness. And freedom. In his mind, he saw Kongo too. Wherever he was. Getting ready to run.

  On days when Mr. Partridge was following his own trails, Cormac sometimes wandered down to the Slave Market at the foot of Wall Street, hoping for news of Kongo and the others. One morning he watched the landing of seventeen new Africans. Quaco was there, helping to keep them calm, but Cormac didn’t approach him. The Africans were sold at an average of fifty pounds each and then led away to a holding pen to wait for a ship that would carry them to Carolina. Forty-seven Irish men and women were also sold, their indentures assumed by speculators, and sent to separate cages. Then he saw the guard who had hit Kongo on the back with his rifle butt. He went over to him.

  “Excuse me.”

  “What is it?”

  “Do you remember?” Cormac said. “Two weeks ago, I was here and you hit an African with a rifle butt and I asked you to stop.”

  “Yes, you Oirish bastard. I remember you.”

  “I want to apologize.”

  “You do?”

  “I know that you were just doing your work. But you see, we’d all just come off the ship after thirteen terrible weeks together and I was just—”

  “Forget it.”

  Cormac thought: He must know I’m feigning the apology, but he’s English. He accepts the formal hypocrisy; it always makes life easier.

  “Let me ask you,” Cormac said. “Did you ever see those Africans again?”

  The guard’s face tightened as he tried to recall.

  “Well, I don’t know, we see a lot of them here. And they’re all blacker than fecking pitch. This is the season, before the winter. They—”

  “The ones from that day, were they shipped off? To the Carolinas? Or Virginia?”

  “Well, I believe—I think they were divided, actually. Most of them shipped, three or four bought here. Yes. I’m sure at least three of them stayed in New York. Including that surly bastard you were so anxious to protect.”

  Kongo was somewhere in the city.

  “Thanks, uh…”

  Cormac offered his hand and the guard shook it.

  “Adams. Francis Adams. From Liverpool.”

  “You’re a long way from home.”

  “Aren’t we all,” he said. “Aren’t we all.”

  On his second Friday evening at Hughson’s, Cormac dined on ham and roasted potatoes at the bar, sipped a porter, and then passed through the blue door and climbed the stairs to his room. The door was unlocked. When he stepped inside, Mary Burton was pouring hot water into the tub. The curtains were drawn. She nodded a hello. He noticed that her features had softened in the muted yellow light of the lamp. The tub was almost full.

  “Get in,” she said, “while it’s hot.”

  “Thanks.”

  She paused, looking at him.

  “Tonight, I’ll join you,” she said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “That’d be grand.”

  Neither of them moved.

  “I want you to take off me clothes,” she whispered. “And then squeeze the loneliness out of me.”

  They made love in the hot, cleansing water and then again on the flat, open bed. She dressed and went down to work. In the nights that followed, they tried squeezing away loneliness on the floor and again on the bed and standing by the window in the darkness with the night sky of America spreading away to the south and west. They almost never spoke. They never once mentioned love. She never once said “feck.”

  47.

  On the Friday morning of his third week in New York, everything changed. Cormac was finishing breakfast in the quiet bar at Hughson’s, reading the New York Gazette. At separate tables, two commercial travelers did the same, preparing for the rigors of the day with bread, butter, and tea. The knocker banged, the front door opened. Cormac heard a few murmured words. Mary Burton appeared, mop in one hand, a sheet of paper in the other.

  “It’s for you,” she said. Her blank stare told Cormac that she’d read the unsealed note. He took it from her and saw Mr. Partridge’s handwriting.

  PACK YOUR BAGS AND COME AT ONCE. I’VE FOUND A PLACE. P

  Cormac thought: At last! At last, I can leave Hughson’s and be in my own small piece of New York, doing work, learning a trade. He glanced up, and Mary Burton’s eyes were drilling holes in his skull.

  “So you’re leaving,” she said.

  “Leaving here. But not leaving New York, Mary. I’ll be back.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I will,” Cormac said, waving the slip of paper. “But this is what I’ve been waiting for. You know that. I told you.”

  “Oh, just go, without the feckin’ blather.”

  “All right.”

  He packed his things quickly and strapped the sword to his hip, letting it show. When he came down the stairs carrying his bag, Sarah Hughson blocked the front door. The blue door to the bar was closed, and Mary Burton was out of sight.

  “You owe us ten shillings,” Sarah Hughson said.

  “I do not,” Cormac said. “I paid for my room in advance. And I’m leaving two days early. You should be returning me—”

  “Yo
u owe us ten shillings,” she repeated. “For the use of Mary Burton.”

  The blue door opened, and Mary Burton burst in, gripping her mop.

  “How feckin’ well dare you!” she shouted at Sarah.

  “Stay out of this, girl.”

  “I never missed a feckin’ minute of labor for you, Mrs. Hughson! I’ve been a perfect wee slave!”

  “Shut up!” Sarah Hughson said.

  “I will not.”

  “This is my place, you dirty wee thing. I make the rules!”

  John Hughson emerged from the bar, large and slow, holding the Gazette.

  “What’s all this?”

  Mary Burton whirled on him. “Your bloody wife wants to charge this boy for the use of me quim.”

  Hughson laughed out loud, and Cormac smiled in relief.

  “You’ve got some mouth on you, Mary,” Hughson said.

  “He owes us, John,” Sarah insisted, her back splayed against the front door.

  Hughson sighed and put a hand on Cormac’s shoulder.

  “Run along now, lad,” he said, “before this gets worse.” Then to Sarah: “Get out of his way, Sarah.”

  There was a kind of fed-up menace in his voice, and Sarah retreated from it, easing away from the door.

  “You’re a bloody softhearted fool, John Hughson,” she said. She pushed past Cormac and Mary and John through the blue door into the bar, slamming it behind her.

  “Thank you,” Cormac said to Hughson. “You’re a very sensible man.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m just soft. Go. Please go.”

  Cormac lifted his bag and opened the door to the New York morning. He turned to say good-bye, but Mary Burton was climbing the stairs.

  48.

  And so he entered the printing trade. Mr. Partridge had found an unused former stable on Cortlandt Street, over by the North River, a place so forlorn and anonymous that they had passed it at least three times on their walks without actually seeing it. When Cormac first walked through the chipped, flaked double doors, his heart sank. The space was dark and cobwebbed, reeking of ancient shit and rotting vegetable matter. The windows were so caked with grime that no light entered. He followed Mr. Partridge across the lumpy brown mat of the floor. High up in the back he saw the trace of a ladder rising to a second-floor loft. Behind them, the double doors on the Cortlandt Street side were immense, built for carriages, but so thick with crusted paint, dampness, and bad care that only one of them moved on its runners. A smaller door opened into the muddy backyard.