by Pete Hamill
Now Cormac pauses on the corner. In Tompkins Square Park, there’s a monument to the victims of the General Slocum, but nobody in the neighborhood knows what it’s commemorating. Now merengue music plays from an unseen radio. Now, on stoops and on sidewalks, kids strut and pose and curse. He hears Delfina’s voice: Same old ghetto bullshit.
The telephone rings around midnight. Cormac picks it up, drops his voice, thinking it’s Delfina, whispers hello.
“How seductive… ARE YOU AWAKE?”
Healey.
“I am now.”
“I just opened the MAIL ten days late. And there’s an INVITE to the Metropolitan Museum. Tomorrow night. Some kind of a NEW YORK ART SHOW! And all the biggies, the MIGHTY ASSHOLES OF THE PLANET, will be there. Go with me. It should be a million LAUGHS.”
“What time?” “Seven-THIRTY!”
“I’ll see you on the steps.”
96.
Cormac comes up out of the Lexington Avenue subway at Eighty-sixth Street and walks west toward the park into a dazzle of silver light. The sidewalk is like pewter, tarnished only by the shadows of men and women whose faces are obscured and formless. The sun is behind them. There are silvery reflections on windows, and the upper stories of apartment houses are drained of color by the light. He came here one afternoon long ago in a carriage drawn by two horses, sitting beside Bill Tweed. There were a few rutted dirt roads then and some stands of trees and much scrub. In his wheezy baritone Bill Tweed spoke with excitement about what was coming: streets and apartment houses and a great green park and perhaps even a museum for the city of New York. “It will change before we’re buried,” he said, and laughed. “There won’t be a live rabbit left on the island.” As on so many other things, the Boss was right. He just didn’t live to see it happen.
There’s a milling crowd on the steps of the Metropolitan, made of tourists and visitors from New Jersey and a slew of photographers dressed in formal wear. A huge banner proclaims the name of the show: Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861, and Cormac smiles. Thinking: I’m the only person here who actually lived in that lost city. The photographers stand in a tuxedoed pack at the foot of the stairs, waiting for the heavy doors of arriving limousines to open and for their inhabitants to emerge into the sheet lightning of electronic flash. As he climbs the broad stairs on the far right, dressed in his twenty-seven-year-old tuxedo and wearing his fake plain-glass spectacles, his patent-leather shoes glistening and his hair brushed straight back, Cormac can see Madonna getting out of a stretch limo as if she had arrived at the Academy Awards. Ordinary singer, fair dancer, but a marvelous act. Ahead of him, Healey is standing with some tourists just short of the top step. His tuxedo looks thirty-two years old. He hands Cormac a ticket.
“You see, failure is a fucking COMFORT, pal,” Healey says, waving a huge hand at the crowd and gesturing toward poor Madonna and the engulfing photographers. A few people back away from Healey’s bulky loudness. In the excited din, Cormac hears scraps of French and German. “You’re a certified failure, nobody blinds you with those goddamned FLASHBULBS! Nobody asks you to spell your fucking NAME! Nobody asks you whether you like the show, even if you haven’t SEEN IT! They don’t give a shit. You’re a nobody. They don’t care if you LIVE OR DIE.”
More photographers are inside the main hall, and a few reporters scribbling notes, and several hundred people in what used to be called evening wear. There’s another eruption of flashbulbs as Madonna comes into the museum, smiling broadly, dressed modestly, moving past Cormac and Healey in the direction of the galleries, and then behind her comes Lauren Bacall. She looks at them through hooded eyes and smiles.
“Healey, you big ape,” she says with a growl. “Where’s that play you promised me twenty years ago?”
“It’s coming, Betty, it’s ALMOST DONE! I swear to Yahweh!” She laughs and gives him a shove and keeps moving. At these rituals, celebrities have one basic tactic: smile and keep moving. A young woman photographer confronts Healey with a notebook in hand.
“Excuse me, sir,” she says. “Can you tell me your name?”
“I don’t HAVE a name! I’m a nobody.”
“Come on, man—”
Then more white lights explode and the photographer turns away and the rumbling crowd sounds grow louder, with several hundred voices bouncing off glazed marble. Walking in the door are the people Cormac has come to see: William Hancock Warren and his wife, Elizabeth. Warren’s tuxedo is rumpled and he needs a haircut and keeps brushing at his hair while chatting amiably with the reporters. As he listens to a question, the mouth moves into an amused smile. From where Cormac is standing on the fringe of the crowd, he can’t hear a word. But Warren seems relaxed, holding Elizabeth’s hand lightly, and when he says something, the reporters smile too. He is charming them. His wife says nothing to anyone.
“This is hard to BELIEVE,” Healey says. “I mean, this isn’t Vladimir Putin, or Seamus Heaney, or PUFFY FUCKING COMBS! This is a real estate guy that owns a paper!”
“That’s why they like him,” Cormac says. “Especially the free-lancers. He could put them all on the payroll and never miss a meal.”
Then Warren turns toward another shower of flash and sees the mayor come in, police bodyguards behind him wearing dark blue suits and buttons in their ears. The mayor looks hunched and tired. But the mayor’s brain tells the mayor to smile. He smiles. His brain tells him to embrace Warren. He embraces Warren. The embrace is digitally immortalized by the photographers, though only Warren’s newspaper will ever consider running the picture. Elizabeth slips her hand out of her husband’s grip and backs away, a smile fixed on her face. A look of melancholy passes across her face, as if she has long ago grown weary of photographs.
“Shit, look who’s here,” Healey says, gesturing toward a small ruddy man with thinning white hair who has come in with a fat woman, right behind the mayor. “This butterball owes me MONEY!” The fat man is a literary agent named Brookner. Sometimes known as Legs, for the speed of his movements in the William Morris mailroom in the 1950s. He had enriched himself with 10 percent of some fabulous paydays, but now in the years of his wealth and respectability, when he even has a foundation named after himself and the wing of a mediumsized hospital in Sarasota, Legs Brookner insists on being called Irving.
“LEGS!” Healey bellows, and goes off in big-shouldered pursuit. Cormac watches Elizabeth Warren, who is chatting with an elderly woman while her husband and the mayor turn to embrace the arriving governor.
Cormac moves around casually, drawing Elizabeth Warren in his mind. She’s indeed a beauty of a classic English type. Smooth cream-colored skin. Lean, athletic body sheathed in a black Valentino frock. Oval head, with a well-defined jaw. Her dark burnt-sienna hair is pulled back tightly off the clean plane of her brow, and she wears a silver stud in the lobe of each small, slightly protruding ear. There’s a hint of blush on her high cheekbones. She has heavy eyebrows, widely spaced hazel eyes deepened by makeup, and her mouth is wide when she smiles. As Cormac drifts closer, he notices one crooked bicuspid among the otherwise perfect white teeth. All of this rests on a long regal neck, rising off narrow shoulders and emphasized by a silver necklace holding a single lustrous opal. Sargent might have used her as “Madame X.”
Then Warren and the mayor and the governor move forward, the mayor pointing at nothing to give the photographers a bit of fraudulent action, and Elizabeth moves too, smiling and shaking hands with the wife of the governor. Cormac hangs behind; the eyes of two sets of political bodyguards are now scanning him, along with other visitors. He sees the Warrens and the politicians merge with the crowd of several hundred people and tries to move in casually behind them, but they vanish into the blur of black tuxedos.
The glorious high-ceilinged room now smells of perfume, cologne, and money. They all move with practiced ease, shaking hands, embracing, the men smiling, the women offering cheeks to be kissed. Most of them are indifferent to the show-business celebrities among
them. They won’t cross the room to meet Madonna. They won’t tell Steve Martin they admire his work. After all, a few of them own the companies that employ the performers. If the mayor says hello and remembers a name, they will chat with him. If he utters a mere hello, they will nod in a restrained way. He is now a lame duck, forced to leave office at the end of the year because of a law on term limits that he supported. His marriage is a public mess. His popularity ratings are dropping like a stone. He is on his way out, to be rewarded with the customary farewell present of all reasonably well known politicians: a Book Deal. The mayor is important but not that important.
The older guests know this event is just another New York ritual. The celebrities are there to draw the media, which in turn will draw paying customers to the museum. But most of them have contempt for the media too. Cormac has heard that contempt expressed for more than a century. In their view, the reporters and photographers know nothing about how things really work in New York. Fame isn’t the goal; power is. And power is forged over Armagnac and cigars. If any of these men employ public relations counsel, the flacks’ primary task is to keep names out of the newspapers.
Cormac sees some people he knows casually but edges away from them, the habit of a long life. Gazing with lust at the mayor, the governor, and Warren is a once-famous sixties hippie, friend of Jerry and Abbie and the Democratic Republic of the Lower East Side. Cormac used to see him at love-ins and beins and fund-raisers for the Weather Underground. Now his face is clean-shaven and pasty and he’s considered a genius at the deals that have driven the NASDAQ over the moon. “Concept,” he told Charlie Rose one night on channel 13. “Concept is everything.” Cormac thought at the time: Okay, give me five thousand dollars’ worth of symbolic logic. The man would almost certainly have answered, “Is that a derivative?” That was two years ago. On this night, as tech stocks keep tanking, the exhippie’s face looks ashen. Cormac wonders if he knows the dotcommer on the second floor at Duane Street, the fast-talking young man who this morning gave a month’s notice, due, he said, to the decline in the market. Cormac has seen the doomed, ashen look of the ex-hippie before, in 1893, in 1929. One morning, as the bad news becomes a flood, the blessed genius of money starts looking at the faces of strangers as if his brain has turned into an abacus. How much can you invest? How much can you loan me? How can you keep me from suicide?
Over on the side, looking like an enormous soft rock in his tuxedo, is a Cuban exile who burned with a mad fanaticism in the early 1960s. He took CIA money until 1971 and used it to fight Fidel Castro by buying lots in Bergen County while helping clumsy agents from Cali and Medellín peddle the marvelous white-powder exports of Colombia. Now he owns banks in New Jersey, Dade County, and Puerto Rico; controls a Spanish-language television network; has developed more than seven hundred acres along the Hudson below the Palisades; and recently turned down the American ambassadorship to Spain. Cormac has read in Art News that he owns four Frida Kahlos, six Wilfredo Lams, three Picassos, and sixteen Boteros. Two directors of the museum hover near him as if expecting his collection to come to them in a massive bequest in the event of a massive coronary. The Cuban’s large gorged face pulses so vividly that the process could begin at any moment.
Some guests have planted their feet and refuse to move, waiting to be approached by potential partners, political fund-raisers, or aspiring acolytes now available after the dot-com collapse. Others work the room in a restrained way, trying to avoid the unforgivable New York sin of vulgarity, clearly envious of the faded Wasps who have been trained for ten generations to avoid sweating, belching, and farting. Some wear expensive rugs. Some tamp with handkerchiefs at sweaty upper lips. Others perform affection toward their wives, touching their hands as if petting cats. Cormac has lost sight of Healey but assumes he’s all right, gleefully impaling Legs Brookner on a lance in the medieval armor room.
The sound of the event grows louder, amplified by more marble and stone, nouns and verbs caroming off the walls, the stony rumble of blunt consonants punctuated by trills of female laughter. Searching for the Warrens, Cormac sees a few middle-aged men, recent transplants from Kabul or Karachi, who have the feral eyes of those distant ancestors who perched with rifles in mountain passes, awaiting human prey. There are a number of black couples, looking delighted to be here, and a larger number of Asians than is usual at such affairs. The diplomats are present too, invited from the consulates and the United Nations, a few up from Washington for the evening, several of them alone, others clutching wives twenty years their juniors, acquired on some distant posting: a Norwegian with a Mexican wife, a Mexican with a French wife, a Frenchman with an Israeli wife, and none with American wives. Their eyes shift, dart, stare, drift, trying to read the room and its crowd; they look at everything but the art.
Coolest of all are the people of semi-old money, those hard, intelligent men who shoved the old-moneyed Wasps out of real estate and banks and brokerage houses. These are children of the old immigrants, the Jews and Irish and Italians, men shaped by the Depression and the infantry, veterans of the Hürtgen Forest or Anzio or Iwo Jima, finally freed from the receding European past of their parents by combat and the G.I. Bill. They spent twenty years outworking, outthinking the Old Money, vowing in some private way that nobody in their family line would ever be poor again. Cormac likes them very much. They have gone through life without kissing a single ass. They are old now, tennis fit and golf tan, discreet and restrained, and tougher than steel. Their sons and grandsons try playing tough. They shout at waiters. They rail at employees. They sneer at politicians. They curse the business journalists. But (Cormac thinks) all of the children combined are not as tough as one of these men who came home in 1946 with bupkis in their pockets and changed New York forever.
Cormac can’t see Warren, or the mayor or the governor. They must be chatting in a private room. He separates himself from the crowd and drifts into the galleries to look at the remnants of the world where he once lived. There are only six or seven people walking quietly in the first room, glancing at an old print here, a varnished portrait of some stern Protestant there, a crude map. They bow to squint at the explanatory captions. An African-American couple, perfectly groomed, living well-defended lives, gaze together at one lithograph that includes black street musicians and white revelers. Cormac hopes they know the true history. His hope is wan. Not many people know anything about their own past, he thinks, and New Yorkers are most amnesiac of all.
He passes a portrait of De Witt Clinton, remembering his delusions of Roman grandeur, his arrogance and gift for respectable larceny, and he nods in salute. Clinton was, when all was carved upon his tomb, still the man who rammed through the Erie Canal and changed New York from a village to a metropolis. If I had time, Cormac thinks, I would write a book about the man and how his immense ambition led to Fernando Wood and then to Bill Tweed and established forever the long, unbreakable tradition of our corruption.
Another painting shows a group of nine men in respectable clothes, painted tightly and painfully, every detail, every object displayed as proof of successful human existence. They are in an anteroom somewhere, with high ceilings and French furniture, presenting to the viewer a framed and lifeless painting of the Hudson River Valley. Beside Cormac now, a man with the long white hair of an aged bohemian removes his glasses to examine the cramped details and says, “I wonder what they’d have thought of Franz Kline?”
Cormac smiles and says, “They might have loved him.” Which they surely would have, had they lived to know that sweet man with his plain worker’s face. The old bohemian turns to Cormac and says, “Yeah, or they might have burned him in City Hall Park.”
They both laugh, and Cormac feels an exuberant conversation about to begin. But then he sees a piece of sculpture against the wall to the right and he is drawn away.
Cormac’s heart thrums as he stands before a marble version of Venus, with both arms mercifully intact, executed in the style of Canova. He knew the sculptor. He
knew the model. Her name was Catherine Underwood, and for four years in the mid-1860s, she was Cormac’s wife. His only wife. Catherine something Underwood. He met her at Niblo’s Opera House, three weeks after she arrived with her widowed mother from England, penniless, hopeful, and beautiful. Her mother died of consumption within a year, but by then Cormac and Catherine had married. The mother, of course, disapproved. She wanted a rich husband. Catherine wanted love. Catherine won. Cormac was driven to marriage by loneliness, by the need for a warm human dailiness, by his desire for the permanent presence of her astonishing beauty.
He gazes at her marble face now, in the year 2001, and remembers how they lived in a small, comfortable flat in Horatio Street, financed by his work at newspapers and the sale of an occasional still life or cityscape. She uttered banalities in an exquisite accent. Her manners were excellent too, and she dined with a languid grace, and posed for his brush with a languid grace, and made love in the same vaguely beautiful, languid way. He was bored with her after nine months, and in his solitude often longed for the silky pleasures of the Countess de Chardon. He was certain that she was bored too.
She was. Cormac doesn’t need to bend close to squint at the caption. The sculpture was done by his closest friend, a dashing and drunken genius named Trevor Morris Parker, who stole Catherine from Cormac and took her and his chisels off to Rome. The date on the sculpture is wrong. The piece must have been done in 1868. After she left him. The cold polished marble can’t convey the color of her flesh, of course, the silkiness of her pubic hair, the soapy smell of her neck. But in his Roman studio, Trevor got the firm plumpness of her breasts right and the contours of her belly and buttocks. He got the languor of the pose. He got the emptiness of the eyes.
