by Amy Waldman
On the veranda Maria was eyeing her quizzically. Claire met her stare and took a drag so dizzying she had to grip the railing for support. She felt only a little guilty. Everything she said had been true except her certainty that the hand reaching up was Cal’s.
Maria switched first. “The Garden,” she said bravely. Claire started to mouth “Thank you,” then thought better of it. The critic came next. “The Garden.” This gave slightly less pleasure: Claire, studying his basset-hound face and poodle hair, had the disappointed sense that he had changed his vote because he was tired. Still, the Garden had eight votes now, which meant victory was in sight. But instead of celebrating, Claire began to sink inside. Tomorrow, absent the memorial competition, her life would lose its last bit of temporary form. She had no need of income, given her inheritance from Cal, and no commanding new cause. Her future was gilded blankness.
Aftermath had filled the two years since Cal’s death, the surge of grief yielding to the slow leak of mourning, the tedium of recovery, bathetic new routines that felt old from the get-go. Forms and more forms. Bulletins from the medical examiner: another fragment of her husband had been found. The cancellation of credit cards, driver’s license, club memberships, magazine subscriptions, contracts to buy works of art; the selling of cars and a sailboat; the scrubbing of his name from trusts and bank accounts and the boards of companies and nonprofits—all of it done with a ruthless efficiency that implicated her in his effacement. Offering her children memories of their father, only to load the past with so much value it strained beneath the weight.
But aftermath had to end. She sensed herself concluding a passage that had begun fourteen years ago, when a blue-eyed man notable less for good looks than for sheer vitality and humor and confidence had stopped her as she came off the tennis court he was taking over and said, “I’m going to marry you.”
The comment, she would come to learn, was typical of Calder Burwell, a man with a temperament so sunny that Claire nicknamed him California, even though it was she, having grown up there, who knew the state’s true fickle weather: the frost and drought that had kept her grandfather, a citrus farmer, perched near ruin for years before her father plunged straight into it. Of all her anguished, unanswerable wonderings about Cal’s death—where, how, how much pain—the worst, somehow, was the fear that his last moments had buckled his abiding optimism. She wanted him to have died believing that he would live. The Garden was an allegory. Like Cal, it insisted that change was not just possible, but certain.
“It’s eleven o’clock,” Paul said. “I think someone may need to reconsider his or her vote. How can we ask this country to come together in healing if this jury can’t?”
Guilty looks. A long silence. And finally, from the historian, an almost speculative “Well …” All bleary eyes turned to him, but he said nothing more, as if he had realized he held the fate of a six-acre chunk of Manhattan in his hands.
“Ian?” Paul prodded.
Even if inebriated, Ian wasn’t going without a lecture. He noted the beginnings of public gardens in suburban cemeteries in eighteenth-century Europe, segued into the garden-based reforms of Daniel Schreber in Germany (“We’re interested in his social reforms, not the ‘reforms’ he carried out on his poor sons”), jumped to the horror conveyed by Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, in which seventy-three thousand names—”Seventy-three thousand!” Ian exclaimed—were inscribed on its interior walls, pondered the difference between “national memory” and “veteran’s memory” at Verdun, and concluded, some fifteen minutes later, with: “And so, the Garden.”
Paul, then, would be the tenth and final vote, and this didn’t displease him. He had insisted, for himself, on not just public neutrality but internal neutrality as well, so that no design had been allowed to catch his fancy. But over the course of the evening he had begun rooting for the Garden. “Stumble on joy”—the phrase had knocked something loose in him. Joy: What did it feel like? Trying to remember, he was overcome by longing. He knew satisfaction, the exhilaration of success, contentment, and happiness to the extent he could identify it. But joy? He must have felt it when his sons were born—that kind of event would surely occasion it—but he couldn’t remember. Joy: it was like a handle with no cupboard, a secret he didn’t know. He wondered if Claire did.
“The Garden,” he said, and the room broke loose, less with pleasure than relief.
“Thank you, Paul. Thank you, everyone,” Claire whispered.
Paul slumped in his chair and allowed himself some sentimental chauvinism. The dark horse had won—he hadn’t thought Claire could trump Ariana—and this seemed appropriately American. Champagne appeared, corks popped, a euphonious clamor filled the room. Paul clinked his flute to command their attention for a moment of silence in the victims’ honor. As heads bowed, he glimpsed the part in Claire’s hair, the line as sharp and white as a jet’s contrail, the intimacy as unexpected as a flash of thigh. Then he remembered to think of the dead.
He thought, too, of the day, as he hadn’t for a long time. He had been stuck in uptown traffic when his secretary called to say there had been an accident or attack and it might affect the markets. He was still going into the office in those days, not having learned yet that in an investment bank, “emeritus” translated to “no longer one of us.” When the traffic stopped completely, Paul got out of the car. Others were standing outside looking south, some shielding their eyes with their hands, all exchanging useless information. Edith called, sobbing “It’s falling down, it’s falling down,” the nursery-rhyme words, then the mobile network went dead. “Hello? Hello? Honey?” all around, then a silence of Pompeian density so disturbing that Paul was grateful when Sami, his driver, broke it to say, “Oh sir, I hope it’s not the Arabs,” which of course it would turn out to be.
Oh sir, I hope it’s not the Arabs. Sami wasn’t Arab, but he was Muslim. (Eighty percent of Muslims were not Arab: this was one of those facts many learned and earnestly repeated in the wake of the attack, without knowing exactly what they were trying to say, or rather knowing that they were trying to say that not all Muslims were as problematic as the Arab ones, but not wanting to say exactly that.) Paul had known his driver was Muslim but never dwelt on it. Now, despite all efforts otherwise, he felt uncomfortable, and three months later, when a sorrowful Sami—was he ever any other way?—begged leave to return to Pakistan because his father was dying, Paul was relieved, although he hated to admit it. He promised Sami an excellent recommendation if he returned, politely declined to take on his cousin, and hired a Russian.
The trauma, for Paul, had come later, when he watched the replay, pledged allegiance to the devastation. You couldn’t call yourself an American if you hadn’t, in solidarity, watched your fellow Americans being pulverized, yet what kind of American did watching create? A traumatized victim? A charged-up avenger? A queasy voyeur? Paul, and he suspected many Americans, harbored all of these protagonists. The memorial was meant to tame them.
Not just any memorial now but the Garden. Paul began his remarks by encouraging the jurors to “go out there and sell it, sell it hard,” then, rethinking his word choice, urged them to “advocate” for it instead. The soft patter of the minute-taker’s typing filled the interstices of his speech, and the specter of the historical record spurred him to unsteady rhetorical heights. He drew all eyes to a gilded round mirror topped with an eagle shedding its ball and chain.
“Now, as at America’s founding, there are forces opposed to the values we stand for, who are threatened by our devotion to freedom.” The governor’s man alone nodded at Paul’s words. “But we have not been bowed, will not be. ‘Despotism can only exist in darkness,’ James Madison said, and all of you, in working so hard to memorialize the dead, have kept the lights burning in the firmament. You handled a sacred trust with grace and dignity, and your country will feel the benefit.”
Time to put a face on the design, a name with it. Another unfamiliar feeling
for Paul: avid, almost childlike curiosity—glee, even—at that rarity, a genuine surprise. Best if the designer was a complete unknown or a famous artist; either would make for a compelling story to sell the design. He clumsily punched away at a cell phone that sat on the table before him. “Please bring the file for submission number 4879,” he said into the phone, enunciating the numbers slowly to avoid misunderstanding. “Four eight seven nine,” he repeated, then waited for the digits to be repeated back to him.
The jury’s chief assistant entered a few minutes later, aglow with his own importance. His long fingers clasped a slim envelope, eight and a half by eleven inches, sealed as protocol demanded. “I am dying with anticipation,” Lanny breathed as he handed the envelope to Paul, who made no reply. The envelope’s numbers and bar code matched those of the Garden; the envelope’s seal was unbroken. Paul made sure both the jurors and the minute-taker noted this and waited for the reluctant assistant to take his leave.
Once the door shut, Paul picked up the silver letter opener the young man had left behind—he did have a flair for detail—and slit the flap, taking care (again, the specter of history) not to tear the envelope. His caution somehow recalled Jacob, his eldest son, at a childhood birthday party, obsessively trying not to rip the wrapping paper, even then misunderstanding where value lay. An impatient Paul had told him to hurry it along.
Hurry it along: the same message from the room’s quiet, in which the jurors seemed to breathe as one. He pulled out the paper, sensing thirteen pairs of eyes upon him. To know the winner’s identity before the jury, not to mention the mayor or governor or president, should have been a small but satisfying token of his stature. What better measure of how high Paul Joseph Rubin, grandson of a Russian Jewish peasant, had climbed? And yet reading the name brought no pleasure, only a painful tightening in his jaw.
A dark horse indeed.
2
The piece of paper containing the winner’s name was passed from palm to palm like a fragile folio. There were a few gasps and “hmmms,” an “interesting,” an “oh my.” Then: “Jesus fucking Christ! It’s a goddamn Muslim!” The paper had reached the governor’s man.
Paul sighed. It wasn’t Bob Wilner’s fault they were in this situation, if indeed they were in a situation, but Paul resented him for forcing them to confront that they were, possibly, in a situation. Until Wilner spoke, no one had voiced what was written, as if to do so would bring the problem, even the person, to life before them.
“Ms. Costello.” Paul addressed the minute-taker in an almost musing tone, without meeting her eyes. “That will be expunged, naturally. We’d like to keep the record free of—of profanity.” He knew this sounded ridiculous: What New York City body cared about profanity? What minute-taker bothered to transcribe it? “Perhaps you could step out for a few minutes. Go help yourself to some more dessert.”
“Oh, Ms. Costello,” Paul called as she walked toward the door, his tone as light as her back was stiff. “If you could, please make sure no one’s hanging around outside the door. And let’s remember our confidentiality agreements, shall we?”
The door shut. He waited a few seconds before saying, “Let’s stay calm here.”
“What the fuck are we supposed to do?”
“We know nothing about him, Bob.”
“Is he even American?”
“Yes, it says right here under nationality, American.”
“That actually makes it harder.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How did this happen?”
“What are the odds?”
“I can’t believe it.”
“It’s Maya Lin all over again. But worse.”
“What are the odds?” the mayor’s aide kept repeating. “What are the odds?”
“One in five thousand!” Wilner barked at her. “Those are the odds.”
“Maybe more,” the historian mused, “if more than one Muslim entered.”
“We don’t know. Maybe it’s just his name,” Maria said. “He could be a Jew, for all we know.”
“Don’t be an idiot.” Wilner again. “How many Jews do you know named Mohammad?”
“It’s true though,” the art critic said; “maybe he converted to another religion. I became a Buddhist three years ago. Or a Jew-Bu, I guess.”
“Well maybe he’s a woman!” Wilner said sarcastically. “Maybe he had a sex change! Wake up; it’s on the page in black and white.”
“I think we need to assume the worst—I mean, that he’s a Muslim,” the mayor’s aide said. “Not that that’s the worst”—she was flustered now—”I don’t mean to say that at all, just that in this case it is.” Her name was Violet, and she was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it. But even she hadn’t seen this coming.
“It could be a healing gesture,” observed Leo. He was a retired university president, of sonorous voice and Pavarottian girth.
“That’s not the gesture that comes to mind,” Wilner said. “The families will feel very offended. This is no time for multicultural pandering.”
“Please don’t forget you have a family member right here,” Claire said.
“Fine, Claire, I apologize. Many of them will feel offended.”
“I ran three universities, and in none of them was I known for pandering to multiculturalists,” Leo said.
“There’s a lot of confusion,” Maria said. “We still don’t know what most Muslims think—”
“About?”
“I don’t know—us, or holy war, or—”
“We don’t know if he’s really the practicing kind—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Wilner said. “You can’t opt out of the religion. They don’t let you.”
“I didn’t know you had a degree in theology,” said Leo. “Whatever kind he is, he had the right to enter the competition.”
“But we have no obligation to pick him!” Wilner exclaimed. “Look, it’s not his fault, whoever he is, but we have to consider the associations people will bring to him. And what if he is one of the problematic ones? Would you still say he has every right to design the memorial?”
Violet sighed. “I … I need to talk to the mayor.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Claire said. Her words were tougher than her voice, which wavered. “The vote’s been taken. It’s over.”
“Nothing’s over unless we say it is, Claire.”
“Bob, you’re the lawyer. You’re supposed to be preventing that kind of stuff, not encouraging it. Our votes are on the record.”
“The record of our proceedings is a fungible thing, Claire, and you know it. Paul’s had the lady—what’s her name?—Costello do minutes only when there would be nothing spicy in them.”
“Bob, you voted for the Garden. That was the design you wanted.”
“Well, I’ll be honest here. I’ll be honest.” The governor’s man glared around the table, as if defying anyone to tell him not to be. “I’m not sure I want it with the name Mohammad attached to it. It doesn’t matter who he is. They’ll feel like they’ve won. All over the Muslim world they’ll be jumping up and down at our stupidity, our stupid tolerance.”
“Tolerance isn’t stupid,” Claire said in a schoolmarmish tone. “Prejudice is.”
Her color was high. She had to be recoiling. Paul’s own head throbbed: the aftereffects of the wine, the prelude to a storm.
“Look, I’m not pretending this isn’t a surprise,” she continued. “But, but … it will send a message, a good message, that in America, it doesn’t matter what your name is—and we don’t have much more here than a name—that your name is no bar to entering a competition like this, or to winning it.” She twisted her napkin as if trying to squeeze water from it.
“Yes, of course,” said Maria. “And every American has the right to create—it’s our birthright. We all understand that. We’re New Yorkers! But will the heartland? They’re much more
narrow-minded. Trust me, I’m from there.”
“Perhaps we’re missing the point.” Ariana’s voice unfurled into the fray. There were a few nods, even though no one knew what the artist had to say. “It’s absolutely unconscionable to say he should be denied if he won. Imagine if Maya had been stripped of her commission.” Claire looked relieved—Ariana had pronounced—but Ariana wasn’t done. “I will say, however, that the circumstances are dramatically different this time. To somehow make a connection between Maya being Chinese American and Vietnam being an Asian war—it was absurd, a red herring raised by philistines who didn’t like her memorial. But this time, if this guy is a Muslim, it’s going to be much, much more sensitive, and rightly so, perhaps, until we know more about him, and—well, I’m just not sure the design’s strong enough to withstand that kind of resistance. Maya’s could. I wonder if we should reconsider our decision.”
“Now hold on—” Claire said.
“It’s true,” Violet interrupted. “This—this Mohammad hasn’t technically won the competition yet. I mean, there are safeguards built in, right, against criminals. Or terrorists.”
“Are you saying he’s a terrorist?”
“No, no, I’m not saying anything. Nothing at all. I’m just saying if he were, we wouldn’t let him build the memorial, would we?”
“Any more than if, say, Charles Manson submitted a design from prison, we would let him build it,” the critic said.
“This is hardly comparable to Charles Manson.”
“To some it might be,” said the historian. “Not to me, of course. But to some.”
“The bylaws say that if the designer selected is deemed ‘unsuitable,’ the jury has the right to select another finalist,” Paul said. This proviso he had insisted on himself, as a safety valve: he considered the memorial too important to risk an anonymous competition, especially one open to all. He would have preferred to solicit designs from noted artists and architects. History’s great monuments and memorials—from the Sistine Chapel to the St. Louis Arch—had been elite commissions, not left to, in Edmund Burke’s apt phrase, “warm and inexperienced enthusiasts.” Only in America did those enthusiasts reign, enthroned by politicians who feared nothing more than appearing undemocratic. Over Paul’s protests the decision had been made to provide a channel for the citizenry’s sluicing feelings, and the families of the dead had cheered this, eager for the outpouring of interest, of caring. Caring there was, to judge by the number of submissions, but Paul wondered what the families would have to say about their precious democratic process now.
