by Pete Hamill
He watches the young people as he smokes, the giggling girls, the macho boys. All Delfina’s age. They seem decent enough, doing what boys and girls have always done, some of them right here on this street. Flirting, lying, inventing themselves and each other. He wishes he could caution them: Listen, young man, that girl you are inventing does not exist; or, Listen, blissed-out girl, that perfect boy is not the one you’re gazing at. Cuidate, jovenes…. A siren splits the air, and he looks left, toward where Jay Gould’s Opera House once stood on the corner of Eighth Avenue and where, in a different time, Fred Astaire took his first dance lessons. Gone now too. Replaced by an ugly white-brick building that had something to do with a union. The ambulance pushes through traffic, siren screaming its useless tantrum, moving up Eighth Avenue. The last of the young people file into the lobby of the multiplex. Not one of them, he thinks, has ever heard of Jay Gould. Was he related to Jay-Z or something? And who was Fred Astaire? Cormac turns and walks east.
He pauses near the Flatiron Building, driven to a sheltering wall by a squall of rain, looking north over the expanse of Madison Square. Once the great boisterous laughing heart of the city, now a placid remainder of a heart bypass. On this night, flattened against the cowcatcher of the Flatiron, he sees again what nobody else can see. Bill Tweed laughing with his friends in the restaurant of the Hoffman House. The old Madison Square Garden, the first one, rickety and frail, rises across the north wall of the square, with its tentlike rooftops like a vision of Samarkand, and then coming down, after Commodore Vanderbilt, its ruthless owner, added a story and a wall collapsed and killed five people. Cormac stood there, making notes for the Herald as the Commodore’s pleasure palace was smashed into splinters and rubble and hauled away; stood there watching the new Garden rising, and Stanford White gazing at it in wonder, for the second Garden was his, his child, his masterwork, his personal pleasure palace too (in the rooms of the seven floors he occupied in the bell tower), and it was the one that would kill him. As always in the city of memory of which Cormac was the only citizen, Stanny is laughing in a triumphant pleasured way. The architect of desire. If only he had met Bill Tweed. What laughter they’d have shared.
Another siren in the night. A car horn blares.
“Move dat ding! Willya move dat goddam cah?”
That voice. That lovely hard demanding urgent New York accent. An accent like a fist. He wants to embrace the shouting man. To hear him talk. To hear that accent born in the Five Points, with Africans and Irishmen working as collaborators, the accent now almost gone, replaced by some weird (to Cormac) rhythm where every declarative sentence ends with a question mark. I was twenty years old? I need a newspaper? He looks for the faceless old New Yorker, but traffic is moving and the man is gone.
The rain eases now. Cormac crosses Broadway. Almost surely Delfina lives in East Harlem and has taken the Lexington Avenue subway uptown. He will take the same line downtown because he always takes the Lex if it’s possible. He loves it more than all the other lines. It was, after all, the first to cut through the city. And besides, he helped build it. And most important, it always makes him think about his father. On this night, his body trembles slightly. Perhaps soon he will see them all again in the Otherworld.
On the platform, a Chinese woman holds shopping bags in each hand. A man dozes on a bench. Three kids with portfolios talk solemnly about the use of encaustic and how you could get the effect on a Mac. Cormac gazes into the darkness of the tunnel.
He whistles a fragment of “Body and Soul” and remembers working with two dozen other men on the final section of the subway. The job was his own choice. Earth, air, fire, water: Who had urged him toward embracing them all? He’d seen too much fire. He’d helped build the aqueducts that brought the Croton water, and worked on the masonry of the reservoir where the Public Library now stands. He’d worked in the air high above the city. It was earth that was missing, deep earth, earth that was dirt, but earth that was granite.
And so he enlisted and came to 195th Street at St. Nicholas Avenue to work with a team of dynamiters, work that almost nobody else wanted. Most of the railroad had been driven through Manhattan using the technique of cut-and-cover. Up the East Side to Forty-second Street and then west to Longacre Square and north again. A trench was dug, the track laid, and then covered with steel grids, dirt, pulverized rock. Simple. A job where you could always see the sky. But at 195th Street they faced a granite ridge that could not be done that way. Here they must cut through rock sixty feet below the surface, mining a tunnel that was fifteen feet high and fifty feet wide. Deep bore, the technique was called. As was done in London.
That morning, as on other mornings, a foreman named Sullivan packed dynamite against the virgin face of the tunnel. He set the dynamite, then shouted for the men to clear the tunnel, and they retreated as far as they could go, to stand among the bobbing lanterns. Sullivan signaled for the blast, and they all plugged their ears with fingers. Even then the great ka-boom knocked some men down and a whoosh of sandy air sprayed all of them. Cormac heard falling rock, then silence, and all rose, to move forward to shovel the broken rock into mule-drawn carts.
Then came the second explosion.
The world blackened, and Cormac heard screams and the panicky bleats of the mules and rock falling in great heavy slabs and then silence.
When he looked up, there was a high jagged gash in the mine face. And from beyond the gash, he saw the emerald light.
And the figure of a man silhouetted against the light. Behind him, there was almost no passage back to the tunnel, but a man was groaning under one of the slabs. Cormac could hear muffled shouting too.
But he turned and moved forward, toward the dark figure. The light brightened, glowing, luminous, a radiating light that bathed all in its color.
It was his father.
Smiling.
“My son,” he said.
Cormac tried to hurry to him, but his legs felt encased in water.
“I’ll fetch your mother,” he said. “Wait…”
And then there was a rumble, and more slabs fell from the ceiling, and the emerald light vanished, and Cormac felt a thump, sharp cutting pain, and fell into a darkness.
In the hospital, his leg in a cast, his cuts and abrasions bandaged, he met the man who had been trapped. “Did you see it?” Cormac whispered. “Did you see the light? And the man standing in the light?”
“What light?” the man said.
85.
At the building on Duane Street, he uses the elevator key that will let him out on the top floor. He passes the two first floors, occupied by his most recent tenants, two separate groups of young dotcommers who labor above a stationery store. He passes the first of his own two floors and steps out into what he calls the Studio. He doesn’t switch on the lights, for he could walk blindfolded through this space and never knock over a lamp. But more important, the long dark loft shimmers with the illumination of the city. He closes the door behind him and stands for a moment in the magical glow. This is where he always comes to sit on the leather couch and listen to music in the dark or to drowse into skittering images of the past. He knows every inch of the place, the chairs and the tables, the file cabinets, the stacks of art books, and the closets full of drawings. Even when he’s alone, the room is crowded with the faces and names of the past.
He takes off his coat and jacket and loosens his tie, drops all on a brocade armchair, and then goes to a small refrigerator for an icy bottle of Evian water. His back is to the skylight. He twists open the cap, takes a long sip, sloshing his mouth with the cold, clear water. To his left, he can see the silhouette of the easel, holding a canvas completed forty-three years earlier. A painting done from memory. The face of the Countess de Chardon, parts of it lifted from old drawings, but her clothes all different. She is wearing clothes that could have been worn by Lauren Bacall. Clothes worn in this studio by a fashion model who was all over Vogue that year before going off to Europe, never to return. “
That’s not my face,” the model said, looking at the painting. “It’s not even close.” He promised to do a separate drawing of the model, a portrait. “But who is she?” she said in an irritated way. Cormac smiled and said, “A woman I used to know.”
He sits down at the end of the couch, leans back, and looks up. The rain-streaked skylight is made of one hundred and twenty-six panes, nine across and fourteen down, often repaired and strengthened or replaced, but the grid as it was when Bill Tweed gave him the building. The skylight faces south, and he can see the green shimmering lights of the Woolworth Building to the left and the icy towers of the World Trade Center to the right. They give off a light that pulses through all of downtown, every night of the week. Down there, up there, over there, men and women are moving in a thousand offices, speaking eighty languages, working the markets from Tokyo to Geneva, making sales, making bets, creating the light. Capitalism in the midnight hour of its long triumph.
On this night, Cormac can’t see the tops of the towers. They’re shrouded in spring fog.
He thinks: I miss the sound of foghorns.
Remembering their mournful baritone voices as the great liners arrived before daylight from Europe. The way they crowded the harbor for the first sixty years of the last century and how they moved so majestically up the North River to the Midtown piers. And the next day the Daily News centerfold would show photographs of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor or Clara Bow or Douglas Fairbanks, all posing on deck, the actresses propped up on piled steamer trunks, showing their legs. And how he sometimes went to the river when the great liners were sailing, the decks crowded with people waving toward the piers as they went off to somewhere else, and how he wished he could go with them, make his escape from Tir-na-Nog, and waved farewell himself, although he did not know a soul.
“What about you?” said Delfina Cintron.
Can he tell her about the foghorns in the morning dark?
“What about you?”
He wishes he could tell her the whole long tale.
* * *
Once he understood that he would live for many years, Cormac had worked hard at placing his nostalgias in a mental jail. This was an act of will and a means of self-defense. For a long time, New York (which is to say, the world) was as people thought it always would be, and then suddenly it changed, and the present was shoved forever into the past. There was never a sense of cataclysmic collapse, no shared admission that Rome was now finished. New Yorkers took for granted that nothing would ever remain the same, and nostalgia was their permanent protest. And because most of them were immigrants, they had begun their New York lives with aching memories of the places left behind. The habit never went away. Even now, in this latest city, they prefaced many remarks in the same way. “In the old days…” Or, “When I was a kid…” Or, “This place has gone into the crapper….” Russians said such things, and Chinese, and Dominicans, and Palestinians. You lived in the present, but that present always contained a past, some image of a ruined paradise.
Cormac noticed as the years passed that New Yorkers shared a sense that whatever had changed, they could do nothing about it. A kind of optimistic fatalism. Reformers arrived with golden promises and left office in disgrace and impotence. Bill Tweed’s line was a kind of municipal motto: “What are you gonna do about it?” Some of the big changes were welcome. He never met anyone who yearned for the city before the arrival of the Croton water, the city that smelled of shit. Nor did anyone protest the triumph of electricity, except those Uptown women who longed for the softening glow of gaslight. If the past had been reasonably happy, as New York had been before the collapse of 1893, the new present was drowned in permanent mourning, a lot of it dishonest, driven by a longing to return to the lost past. Cormac had gone through all that too many times. He had seen reputations blaze and then end up as burnt offerings. Heroes too often turned into scoundrels. Banks and corporations and newspapers ruled the city, and ended up as a handful of dust. Even language had term limits. In long separate eras, Cormac heard people use words like “fiddlesticks” or “groovy,” and then one morning, as if a secret referendum had been passed, the words vanished. Nobody, of course, ever ran a referendum against the word “bullshit.” That was a word and an emotion as permanent as the rivers. But the past had tremendous power here for the very simple reason that it was an American city that actually had a past. In his strange way (Cormac thinks now, swallowing cold Evian water) he is its custodian, he had been there, had smelled it, touched it, argued in it, fucked in it, killed in it; but he knew the treacheries and dangers of nostalgia. He was, after all, Irish. And he had too much past in his life. His defense against it was will. But even then, as in Madison Square only an hour earlier, will was never enough.
“To hell with the past,” he says out loud in the darkened Studio, gazing at the misty towers before him. And thinks of Simone Signoret, great blowsy actress whose memoir was called Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be.
And yet… And yet, there were moments, here in the loft, when he longed to see the lost city of chimney pots and slate roofs, all blue after rain. He wanted to stand in woods where wolves still howled. He wanted to sit in the Polo Grounds and look at Willie Mays. At such moments, here, or in Madison Square, or at other odd moments in banal places, it was as if the bars of the mental cage had turned elastic and the past had forced its way out. Anything could set it off: the fragment of a tune, a glimpse of sun on cobblestones in a forgotten street, an accidental encounter with a building where he once knew a woman and loved her, even if she did not love him back.
He watches a flock of tiny birds emerge from between the Twin Towers to fly past the upper stories of the Woolworth Building, heading east. They know where they’re going. He envies them for their freedom and their certainty, and lights a cigarette and sits there smoking in the dark.
86.
Cormac picks up his mail from the box he keeps in the post office on Vesey and Church. Big, ugly, solid stone post office, carrying the chiseled names of Robert Moses, master builder, and Fiorello La Guardia, master mayor, and the year of its unveiling, 1935. He riffles a sheaf of mail from his box. Bills. Time Warner cable service. Con Ed. The telephone company. A tax notice. And a plump brown envelope from the Argosy Clipping Service. He slips them into a cloth shopping bag, steps outside, smokes a cigarette. A Jamaican man is selling fruit from a cart. Messengers pedal by on bicycles. Men and women enter and leave the Jean Louis hair salon across Church Street. The sky is bright and traffic moves slowly from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, heading north. Bells toll in St. Peter’s on Barclay Street and are answered by the bells of St. Paul’s. Over everything, melding the sounds, he hears the murmuring, ceaseless drone of the city.
He crosses the street into the Borders bookstore, glances at the new books in paperback and the displays of bestsellers. On each visit, he hopes to be surprised. He seldom is. Today is Saint Patrick’s Day and so one table is stacked with Books of Irish Interest: Joyce, the McCourts, Seamus Heaney, Yeats. Along with cookbooks and guidebooks and songbooks. He moves past them, browsing, touching, his hands caressing covers, allowing images to flash into him: Mayan temples, Brazilian prostitutes, bombed-out London. He chooses a new translation of Dostoyevsky’s Demons, which he has always known as The Possessed. Paperback. Seventeen dollars. A week’s pay in the year the post office opened. Three times what he earned in a week in 1840. When he first read the novel a century earlier, he was reminded of his friends in the Fenian Brotherhood and its endless, sometimes hilarious debates about the use of terror against the English enemy. What if someone innocent dies? What do you mean by innocent? And suppose the fella is not in a state of grace? Will you follow him to Hell? One of their offices was on Cortlandt Street, up above a man who made barrels, the building plowed away in 1969 to make way for the Trade Center. He wrote for their newspaper. Or one of their newspapers. And wondered which of them worked for the police. There were good people among the Fenians, along with a few lunatic t
rue believers. Thinking about them years later, he realized that certain Irish exiles were pure Dostoyevsky.
He pays for the book, adds it to his shopping bag, then goes down the escalator from Borders and out into the endless concourse until he finds an ATM. He has no personal credit cards, but he does have a bank card in the name of ABCDuane Real Estate and he takes two hundred dollars from the company checking account. People in personalized green bunting are hurrying in every direction, buying sandwiches and sushi, cold drinks and coffee. Green ties, green shirts, green slacks, green dresses. Buttons that say, “Kiss me, I’m Irish.” Many move down the escalators to the PATH trains, and Cormac wonders why anybody is going to New Jersey at one-thirty in the afternoon. Then thinks: Who am I to judge? I’ve never been there myself.
He heads south for the exit on Liberty Street, avoiding a hundred possible collisions in the frantic rush of the mall. One window of Sam Goody’s is filled with Irish music. The Chieftains. The Clancy Brothers. Luke Kelly. De Danann. U2. He goes in, wondering for a moment whether it’s time to buy a DVD player, to add one more piece of technology to his life. Come to my house, Delfina, and I’ll explain the journey from a blacksmith’s forge to the DVD version of The French Connection. Thinking: My life is absurd.
He buys a CD of the old music. Celtic music older than Saint Patrick. Along with Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The Berlin Philharmonic conducted by von Karajan. All about the Otherworld and the dark powers of the Queen of Night.
In the Liberty Street vestibule, four homeless men huddle near the doors. Filthy. Eyeless in Gaza. In the 1890s, there were Bed Lines, for men ruined by the collapse, and when the post office was built, there were breadlines. Now there are homeless shelters where nobody wants to sleep. These four men must sleep here, where Cortlandt Street used to be. One of them, his white beard sprouting from dark brown skin, wears a plastic shamrock.
