Forever

by Pete Hamill

  He crosses to the park side, walking south, once more in possession of the sword but robbed of elation by what he did to get it. He thinks: I should be rushing home, to examine this old weapon in all of its details, to feels its old power. But I don’t want to go home. Not yet. I want to walk off the details of this night. The mixture of shame, pity, and treachery. To shove them, as I’ve shoved so many other things, into the past. Then he tells himself that such matters must recede before the demands of the old vows. “Now I have the sword,” he says out loud. And then, to himself, Delfina exists for me, as vivid as dawn. If I can join those narratives, I’ll be free. May all gods grant me benediction.

  A cold wind blows from the west, and he wishes Delfina were waiting for him on Duane Street instead of brooding on death and fathers under the forest rains of the Dominican Republic. Wind-dried leaves rattle down from the trees of the park, the autumnal sound denser in the darkness that lies beyond the low stone walls. Taxis move downtown on Fifth Avenue. The cased sword feels heavier, his body more weary. He goes to the curb, hails a taxi, and gets in. He names his destination for the Pakistani driver. Then sits back, the sword in its case on his lap. The window to his left is open to the night air.

  He watches pedestrians walking in couples along Fifth Avenue, and the glittering blur up ahead, and the lights very bright on the Empire State Building.

  The taxi stops for a light at Fifty-ninth Street, with the Sherry-Netherland to his left. Then a figure draws up beside the taxi. A black bicycle rider. His head bare, gazing off to the left. The head turns. The black man smiles.

  “Hello, Cor-mac,” he says.

  It’s Kongo.

  “See you soon,” he says in Yoruba. And then turns the ten-speed against west-bound traffic into a side street where the taxi cannot follow.

  “Kongo!” Cormac calls after him. “Stop, Kongo! Wait!”

  He starts to thrust money at the taxi driver, to open the door. But Kongo has vanished into the night.

  110.

  Across the day, Cormac polishes the sword. He uses sandpaper and emery cloth and a burin to pry time’s corrosion out of the etched spirals. He oils the steel. He sands again. On the CD player, he listens to Ben Webster and Duke Ellington, trying to bring their love and polish to his task. The phone call he wants to receive does not come. He takes a break, laying the sword on a towel, and goes out into the emptied streets.

  He spends an hour at J&R Music World, buying a cell phone, asking a surly clerk to explain its workings. Later, he can add its number to the message on the answering machine, so that Delfina can find him if he’s out. He sits for a shoe shine in the almost empty concourse under the towers, glancing at the tabloids, speaking Spanish with the bootblack, all about how the Yankees are sure to win, then wondering to himself how many pairs of shoes he has worn across the years. Six hundred pairs? A thousand? He remembers the time when all shoes had the same shape, blunt, rough, all-purpose boots, until some ingenious cobbler changed everything by designing shoes for the left and the right foot. And how many pairs of new socks has he pulled over his wide Irish feet and then thrown out as rags?

  He walks north on Church Street, and at Chambers Street turns right to a barbershop. Two barbers. No customers. He asks for a trim, and the questions come again in his head: How many pounds of hair have been trimmed from my head? Thousands? More? The barber is seventy-two years old and from Cuba. His name is Albor, and he has been cutting hair, he says, since he was seventeen. Cormac asks how many tons of hair he has chopped off human heads and chins. He laughs out loud. “I star’ thinkin’ abou’ things like that, ’mano,” he says, “I go nuts.”

  In the afternoon, Cormac plays piano for an hour, noodling Ellington, playing a jokey piece of Satie. His fingers feel oiled from use. Then he works again on the sword, smoothing pitted steel, using steel wool now, digging gently, running fingertips over the blade. On the day he took the sword, he saw Kongo. All streams converge in one river. Now he traces the spirals, thinking of Delfina. With her spirals, she is never nude. Two paintings of her are upstairs in the studio, one with spirals, one without; she asked for the painting without the tattooed markings. “I want to see what I used to look like,” she said. He has the paintings, but she remains somewhere in the Dominican Republic. Call me, mujer. Call now. Call tonight. Call soon. Call.

  He carries the sword to the Studio, lays it on the low table beside the couch. He gazes at the two portraits of Delfina, thinking: If I have time, I can fix the eyelashes. I can make her painted flesh seem to breathe. I can make a viewer hear her voice.

  He thinks about Kongo, out there in the city. Visiting from the eighteenth century. He sleeps. And dreams of Willie Mays, racing in the outfield grass of the Polo Grounds, his back to Cormac, his back to Jimmy Walker, home from European exile, sitting beside Cormac in a box, the three of them blended in the timelessness of dream. Willie’s back is to the world, running and running and running. The centerfield wall keeps receding. And Willie Mays runs toward eternity.

  When he awakes, the Studio is dark. The towers glitter against a mauve sky. He lies there for a long moment, and then sees the room fill with versions of himself: shadowy figures, faces barely visible but all looking like his own. He is bearded and he is clean-shaven, he wears waxed mustaches or long sideburns, his hair is down to his shoulders, or cut to a balding pate: the disguises of a shadowy man. He wears the suit made for him on the Fury by Mr. Partridge, and the rough clothes he wore laying cobblestones or digging the subway or catching rivets high on the Woolworth Building. There he is in the worsted suit he wore for two decades while working at the Herald. There he is in a suit and vest he wore to so many other newspapers. There he is in a blacksmith’s leather apron and a painter’s smock. One of him wears a Five Points derby and another a hoodlum’s stovepipe hat, a plain cloth cap or a thirties gray fedora. All the Cormac O’Connors stare at him, and at the object gleaming on the low table.

  The sword.

  The sword glows now in the dimness, as if soaking up all the free-floating illumination of the city. It points north.

  He reaches for the sword. Grips it. And all the versions of himself vanish.

  He steps into the dark open space, plants his feet, then thrusts with the sword. Then cuts back with the sword. Then slashes with the sword. And then does it again, faster. And then faster. Feeling the power surging through his arm. Surging to his shoulder. Surging through his heart and guts.

  On his evening walk, he searches the blank streets for Kongo but does not find him. He feels observed, as if the windows with their closed shades are watching him and tracking his movements. Did Wordsworth feel observed by trees and meadows? He pauses for a stoplight and laughs. Is anyone else in this city thinking at this moment of William Wordsworth? Maybe. Up near Columbia, in housing provided to faculty by the university. Somewhere in the city, almost every subject is being pondered by someone.

  He sees a young Muslim woman in black, her head covered and her handsome face bared, crossing Astor Place, passing the liquor store, heading west toward NYU. How did she find her way here? Where is her family? What language does she dream in?

  Cormac dreams sometimes in Irish, and in Yoruba, and in German or Yiddish. He thinks: Dead languages live in my head at all hours. He walks north on Fourth Avenue, remembering vanished bookstores, and the many volumes he discovered in their dusty bins, books that are now on the shelves of Duane Street. He flashes on Cicero’s Murder Trials, describing the stuff of tabloids in elegant Latin. And then thinking: I must make a will.

  He passes a synagogue and remembers the way he has memorialized his mother’s death every fifty years. On January 17, 1737, the day she fell into Irish mud under the black coach. Across his American years, he has visited synagogues to bond himself forever to her and to Noah’s lost daughters. In all those years, he was a man without faith in a single God, blind to the Torah, filled with Celtic mists and Celtic goddesses. But still he retreated to those ever-larger rooms, t
o the places of her secret faith, in which he whispered kaddish. In 1787, and in 1837, and in 1887, and in 1937, and in 1987. Every fifty years. Not world enough, but with more time than most other men. Whispered her name in Hebrew, learned slowly from one old Brazilian rabbi. Whispered prayers in bookish Yiddish, absorbed from the exiled socialists of Kleindeutschland. Yiddish was one of the secret rivers of blood and history. And each time he prayed, he yearned for a cloak of many colors.

  Here where Kongo has arrived at last to be his Virgil, to lead him to the secret city of emerald light.

  For the first time in many years, he doesn’t want to go.

  111.

  On the morning of Labor Day, he uses the cell phone to call Healey.

  “Where ARE you?” Healey shouts. “In Central Booking?”

  Cormac explains that he’s on a bench in City Hall Park, facing the Woolworth Building. That accounts for the background noise.

  “You mean you GOT one? You got one of those goddamned YELL phones?”

  “Guilty with an explanation,” Cormac says. “As with everything in this life. A Labor Day sale at J and R…”

  “I don’t want to HEAR it! What about lunch, comrade?”

  They meet in a coffee shop on Twenty-third Street off Seventh Avenue and sit in a booth in the back, engulfed by orange plastic. The Greek owners and waiters all know Healey, and laugh with him as his voice booms around the place.

  “They like me ’cause I speak Greek with them,” he says. “In the second year at my high school, the Jesuits offered me a choice: Greek or German. Along with four years of Latin. I took Greek instead of German because I hated the fucking NAZIS, little knowing that I’d end up working with them in the theater.”

  But he’s happy about other things. The check from Legs Brookner actually cleared at the bank. The producer is off in the south of France, and they will meet again in two weeks.

  “It’s a SCORE. Any Hollywood score is a good score. Just as long as they never make the MOVIE!”

  The word “movie” makes heads turn in three booths jammed with unemployed dot-commers. For years, most young people told you they were working on movie scripts. Then they talked about start-ups. Now they are back to movie scripts.

  “Don’t think about it!” Healey yells at the young people. “Movies are the worst work in the world. I mean, there’s a movie playing down the block that’s all about FARTS! Learn honest trades. Be carpenters. Repair plumbing. Take the FIREMAN’S test! Be HAPPY!”

  The three booths break into applause. Healey gives Cormac a look that says: Am I nuts or are they?

  The e-mail is waiting when Cormac gets home. From Delfina. Across the miles.

  Cormac, querido: I’m writing this in a cyber cafe. I’ve been upset since talking to you—upset with myself, not with you—and now I want to talk some truth. About me. And about us. I felt in your voice that you were jealous somehow, maybe about Mr. Reynoso.

  The truth is that my father was really dying, and is now dead. But the truth gets more complicated. When I went to see Mr. Reynoso to get some time off, he was very understanding. Not only did he give me the time I needed, he paid for the round-trip ticket to Santo Domingo. I wanted you to come but somehow I knew you couldn’t. I mean, you can’t even go to Brooklyn. So I went to the airport alone, in a car service from East Harlem.

  When I got there, who’s in first class? Mr. Reynoso. When I see him, I’m irritated. This was, like, too neat, too easy. He said he had some business in Santo Domingo, that this was a real coincidence, etc. I thought, Man, you’re so full of shit. But once we got there, he was a model citizen. A car was waiting, and after he got off at his hotel, he sent the car off to the hills with me in it, to go to my aunt Lourdes’s house.

  A day passed, then another, as I meet all my endless relatives and my father is lying there in the hospital. On the third night, I come to the hospital, and Mr. Reynoso is there. He’s checking up on the nurses, the doctors, the care, making sure money isn’t the problem. He was doing this very low-key, not playing a big shot. I was touched. When he asked me to go to dinner, I said yes.

  That was a mistake. You know how it goes. One thing led to another. I slept with him in his suite at the hotel, and cried all the way home in the limo. I cried over my own weakness. I cried for you. Or to say it more clearly, I cried for us.

  Until coming here, I had this idea in my head, you know, not spelled out, not anything I could say to you, but there—that we might be together for a long time. And yet that night I knew I couldn’t tell you the truth about what happened with Mr. Reynoso. You might never trust me again. You might think of me as a weak and trivial person. You might throw up your hands and take a walk.

  But I also knew something else. There are things about me you don’t know. Some of them are very important. I keep them hidden, because I don’t know how you would react to them. I’m not ashamed of them. I just don’t know if you—if anyone—could understand them. This trip has reminded me that the two of us just might not be a true fit. I don’t know, even now, sitting in this fucking cyber cafe at 10:30 on a Saturday night.

  I do want to be with you. Forever. When I get home, I’ll try to explain everything. All about who I really am. And maybe for once, you’ll tell me about yourself. Then we can decide. If it’s good-bye, I understand. With all my love, Delfina

  Cormac prints out the letter, reads it again, full of a deep, aching sadness. He walks around the rooms, looking at the places where she has been with him, at tables, in bed, on the model’s stand, along the packed shelves of books, in the kitchen. He sees her peering into the refrigerator that first night, trying to read his character from juice and water and fruit. And then thinks: Jesus Christ, I love her.

  He sits down and writes a reply to her e-mail address, hoping she’ll open it somehow and somewhere.

  Delfina, mi amor. Received your letter and want you more than ever. Let me know when you are coming back. Bring clothes and appetite, and we’ll talk for as long as we need. Much love, C

  He speaks out loud in a voice full of amazement and sorrow.

  “I love her,” he says. “I love her.”

  112.

  Tuesday, and a sense of imminence in the air. The sky is gray and bleak. In the streets, there are a few lonesome joggers and dog walkers, engulfed in solitude. Cormac walks to the Battery and back, nodding at the firemen in their ancient house on Liberty Street, passing the old New York Post building on West Street where he worked his last shifts on night rewrite. It’s a condo now, filled with young businesspeople and students from NYU.

  At the Battery, whitecaps rise on the surly harbor. A freighter plods toward the Atlantic. Seagulls move in widening arcs. The sky is a smear, vacant of horsemen. He hears the voice of Mary Morrigan: Something bad is coming.

  He writes a will. He types a long detailed note to Delfina explaining which books and paintings are valuable. He gives her the name of his lawyer. He explains how to sell what she doesn’t want. The note becomes a letter of thirty-six pages. On Tuesday, he goes to the lawyer’s office near Foley Square, signs the will, and has the letter attached and sealed, as a kind of codicil.

  While copies are being made, Cormac gazes out the window of the lawyer’s office. Down on the sidewalk, dressed in black, his arms folded across his chest, is Kongo. He doesn’t even try to open the window.

  Delfina calls from the airport around eight o’clock on Wednesday night. She sounds drained.

  “I want to come to your house,” she says. “But it’s been a long day. I’m tired and dirty and—”

  “Tomorrow night is fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then come to my house tomorrow night,” she says. “I brought some things from the D.R.”

  “Great.”

  “And Cormac? Thanks for that e-mail. I know I’m a god-damned fool for telling you anything, but it made me feel better.”

  He hears his voice lower. “It’s great to he
ar your voice.”

  A pause. “Yours too.”

  Twenty minutes later, there’s another call. Elizabeth Warren. Cool, but not cold. She tells him she’s in Ottawa at a three-day conference.

  “But that’s not why I called,” she says, her voice rising into anger. “I called to tell you what you already know. You’re a god-damned thief.”

  “Let me explain—”

  “What can you explain? You’re a thief, Cormac. My husband comes home this weekend and I want that sword back on its hook!”

  “I’ll bring it to Willie myself.”

  “That’s no good.”

  A wire of hysteria enters her voice.

  “My husband owns that sword!”

  He lowers his own voice, thinking: Don’t argue.

  “Elizabeth, those spirals were cut into that blade by my own flesh and blood, back in Ireland,” Cormac says. “More than two hundred and fifty years ago. I’ve been looking for it a long time now….”

  “Please, no fairy tales.”

  “I’ve been cleaning it, polishing it.”

  “It’s not your property. It’s Willie’s.”

  “I know, and I’ll return it to him when—”

  He hears a sob.

  “How could you have done that to me the other night?” A pause. “I trusted you.” A longer pause. “I—I said things I would never say to—”

  “I know.”

  “I wanted one simple thing from you. Intimacy. Just that, just simple intimacy, some hope that for an hour or a minute, we—” She stops. “And all you had in mind was theft.”

  She’s right, of course, but he can’t explain. He thinks: I can’t explain almost anything.

  “I’ll call you when I get back,” she says. “If you don’t bring the sword, I’ll call the police.”