Through the Children's Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  It went over okay. I didn't kill them, but I didn't die, either. They were expecting something more consistently amusing, I suppose, but no one minds a little moral sententiousness in an after-dinner speaker. “Congratulations, that was unusual” or “You obviously spoke from the heart” or “I knew that when we asked you to do the Purimspiel, we would get something different!” or just “Thank you for your interesting remarks” was the general tone when I got back to the table. (I still meet people who were there. They give me exactly the look a father might have after seeing his daughter topless in a progressive-college production of A Midsummer Nights Dream; he respects the sincerity of the intention, but it was extremely embarrassing to be there nonetheless.) I had fund-raising-benefit dessert—something soft and white interspersed with something red and juicy—and went home. As a thank-you present, I was given a little silver grogger, a rattle, meant to be shaken when you heard the name “Haman.”

  Though I am not strangely exhilarated by my experience as a Purimspieler, I did find something significant in the Book of Esther, and I am certainly glad I did it. In one way, it was no different from any other exposure to an ancient, irrational belief-culture. I suppose I would have felt about the same if I had been a young Athenian who finally went to Delphi and heard the oracle: Even if it didn't change the future, it was nice to make the trip. But if there is something particularly Jewish about the experience, it may lie in the odd combination of a narrow gate and a large gathering; the most exclusive and tribal of faiths, Judaism is also the one that sustains the most encompassing of practices, from Moses to Henny Youngman, from Esther to Sammy Davis, Jr., and all of us Irvings. Whether it sustains this because, as the rabbi believes, it is in its nature narrow but infinitely various, or because, as I sometimes suspect, anything ancient and oppressed must be adaptable, still it is so. At least for a certain kind of court Jew, being Jewish remains not an exercise in reading in or reading past but just in reading on, in continuing to turn the pages. The pages have been weird and varied enough in the past to be weird and varied in the future, and there is no telling who will shine in them. The Jewish occasion lay in rising to the occasion. Even if it was too late to be an everyday, starting Jew, one could still be, so to speak, Jewish in the clutch.

  We celebrated our own Seder this past spring and are thinking of joining the synagogue we can see from our window, in part because we want to, in part because there is an excellent nursery school there for our daughter. That is the kind of things Jews do in Persia. I gave the silver grogger to the baby, who holds it at the window and shakes it in warning when she sees a dog. I believe that she now has the first things a Jewish girl in exile needs: a window to see from and a rattle to shake.

  First Thanksgiving: Densities

  New York still looks best in fall. (“April in Paris” is a fiction, but “Autumn in New York,” by the same songwriter, is a glorious fact.) Thanksgiving—not just the holiday, I mean, but the sweep of days it superintends, the long autumn that begins in October and runs, festively, through the Jewish holidays, to Halloween and beyond, with Christmas peeking around the corner—has always been the best time of year in New York. Abroad, I often thought about the lines at Ottomanelli's in the Village the day before Thanksgiving, where everybody who ordered a turkey has his name misspelled in black marker on brown paper—and I thought about the absence of evident warmth combined with the come-one-come-all brown-paper democracy of the scene, the weary procedural dutifulness of the butchers—and I then felt a rush of something like patriotism. These months are nearly perfect in New York, the slow roll up to the great secular feast of shopping and feeling at Christmas. After that comes dread, the winter with shoes in the trees and unbiodegradable plastic bags blowing at your feet, the Lenny-Bruce-in-Times-Square sordidness of the place. To inventory the holidays, Jewish and Christian and creedless, each with its little burst of merchandise and ritual, is to expose the intermingling of the sacred and the secular. But that is our city, and it fits somehow. In London, where they invented the idea of Christmas as middle-class mass ritual, there is still some sense that the festival overflows from the spiritual side; Dickens makes his dutiful, sober asides to the religious holiday before he gets on with the games. In Paris, the old Catholic hardness one hears in French baroque Christmas music, the premonition of tragedy that is so much a part of Christmas for the believer, still reigns. But in New York, heroic materialism is all the heroism we've got, and it goes on: Thanksgiving, secular and greedy, balloons pumped up with helium, leading to the coronation of the department-store Santa Claus.

  The first few weeks back from France are precious, because naive vision is a capital sum, quickly depleted, and for a few months, New York—the Great Home, Our Place—can be seen again. On our first morning back, woken early by the jet lag, I took Luke for a long dawn walk down Fifth Avenue, past the University Club and St. Patrick's Cathedral and Saks. This is all from another place, I thought, shocked by the derivativeness of Fifth Avenue architecture. I felt, I saw, for the first time ever, the adolescent absurdity of so many Manhattan monuments—the sad, wilderness, opera-house-in-the-Arctic and Amazon pathos of copying old European styles in a New World city. This isn't a true Gothic cathedral, I thought, staring at St. Patrick's. There are such things, I've seen them, and this is just a … copy, a raw inflated thing thrown up in emulation of a far-off and distant thing! That Renaissance palazzo on Fifty-fourth Street is no Renaissance palazzo—it's a cheap stage-set imitation!

  This perception—of New York as a blown-up Inflato city, aspirational rather than achieved, gawkily imitating its models, the proper cities of Europe—which was once so obvious and embarrassing (to Henry James, much less to Tocqueville), has faded away now, and I no longer see it that way. For that single early morning, though, it seemed that the architecture of New York was not quite real, not organic, coming from elsewhere and imposed, a delirium of old styles and other people's European visions: the Gothic vision of sublime verticality, or, for that matter, the Bauhaus vision of the glass tower. For a moment New York seemed unnatural, the anti-matter city. “You're not real!” I wanted to cry out, to the city. “Yes, we are,” the buildings cried back blankly. “It is the old thing that is the lie; the true thing is our re-creation of it.” But the moment passed quickly, and now New York just looks like New York: old as time, worn as Rome, mysterious as life.

  * * *

  The children are flying above our heads, the neighbors are sighing below our feet, and between them we are trying to return to a life we thought we knew already. A full life is what we said we wanted when we left Paris, and full it is, in moments already too full. We fill our eyes and heads with things already seen and known, and try to see them and know them again.

  The city looks wonderful no matter how you squint at it, there's no denying that: the park restored, the shops freed from their goalie masks of protective cages, even Times Square, through which I had to trudge by night twenty years ago to extract Martha from seedy out-of-the-way film-cutting rooms. Where we once threaded our way among Dumpsters in which bodies turned up is now gleaming, but the cutting rooms have become condos, and the film editors have fled to some other place, as yet unknown.

  The children are even happier to be here than I'd hoped. On that first morning, once the stores were open (the coffee shops, I had forgotten, never close), I bought Luke the one thing he wanted: a Razor-brand scooter, the kind that was invented while we were away and that now fills the streets here. (They have not yet made it to Paris.) They are one of those simple, amazing things that make you wonder enviously why no one—why not you!—had thought of it before: three pieces of hinged aluminum, a pair of plastic wheels, and you're whooshing off down the avenue to the delight of other children and to the doom of the calves of a thousand old ladies on Madison.

  As he rushes down the streets, Luke's ears are still attuned to the new sounds of the city. I see him stop his scooter and leap from it in ecstasy: “Those girls are speaking Engl
ish,” he informs me. “I think I'll talk to them.” This delivery to his long-dreamed-of paradise, the English-speaking city, is still beyond his comprehension. The density of space produces, famously, a wild variety of people. Luke, hostage to Parisian food, cannot believe the range of cheap takeout, the empire of menus. You press a button, and all the world's spices come obsequiously to your door: Indian food, Chinese food; the baby loves chicken in pancakes, the boy loves steak fajitas, and without saying so, I see that he likes the sweetness of New York food, the way that, as I had forgotten, Americans put sugar in everything, in ketchup and mustard and cereal and bread. The incidental sweetness of American life is, to an unaccustomed palate like his, overwhelming and quickly addictive.

  We took him to Luke's Bar and Grill, a hamburger joint on Third Avenue, because we thought he would like the idea of a place with a name the same as his own.

  “Hey,” I said as he searched the menu and then the room. “Do you see why I brought you here?” I point to the menu: his place. “Yes,” he said solemnly. “Because you wanted me to know a place where, if I got lost, I could go where everybody speaks English.”

  They all speak English here. It is one of the things that makes life so full and then so dense. Every exit from the house threatens to become an encounter, and every encounter threatens to become an entanglement. The joy of isolation is hard to find. Coming home has been strange and hard for Luke's parents, even though, or perhaps because, it is home. The taxi wars and rituals, for instance, are so odd. In France, we became accustomed to the rigorous conventions of taxi hailing. You walk to a corner, you see the blue sign, taxi, and you wait in line, uncomplaining, however long it takes. (You can send for a taxi by telephone, and if there's one available, you will get one. But if there isn't one, the phone line goes dead. You don't even get to whine about it, much less talk to the supervisor.) If, on your own, you find a taxi on the boulevard, you may hail it; but the driver may choose not to stop, and he may not be allowed to stop at all if he is anywhere near a taxi station.

  Here at home, I am shocked, amazed, searching for a taxi to get us to a dinner or to take the children to the doctor, to rediscover what I once knew: It's every man or woman for himself or herself, and no rules at all. A man—or, more often, a woman—steps right in front of you half a block away, back turned but entirely conscious of your presence (the New Yorker knows that sly half-look around), hand raised in taxi-hailing salute.

  And there is nothing to be done: no reproach, no appeal to fairness, no pointing to the implicit social contract the philosophers love to write about, whereby we, in the ideal city, would grant one another a full city block of taxi-hailing rights, or at the very least adhere to some grandfather clause: We cannot cut in front of another human being who is late for the pediatrician and had his hand raised already.

  The rule is not even conflict aversion. Perpetually hot headed in life if not on the page, I often grumble and mutter impotently, “That's piggish behavior,” or the like. The Other just stares or even smirks. The rule is combat avoidance. We won't actually come to blows over this taxi, but apart from that, anything goes. Absolute anarchy is a rule regulated not by the state but by a kind of wary understanding that fistfights have costs in the long term and should be avoided. Financial prudence about the outcome of lawsuits sometimes seems to be the only moral arbiter left in New York.

  Yet not entirely so. The impressive thing, on reflection, is that even nonviolent confrontation is almost always evaded, and not by following rules but by following social instincts. When you do see conflict—one taxi driver yelling at another, a cop yelling at a trucker—it is rare enough to, well, stop traffic. What an unbelievable concord of invisible trust is required to live in the city at all! This is true of every city, but in New York, it somehow has the force of a daily miracle. Even more amazing than the taxi truce is the car compact, the social contract grumbling at you from every car engine stopped at this light for this moment but still ready to launch. Thousands of tons of metal crash down the avenues, while thousands of pedestrians play a wary game of chicken with them, and all that holds one back from destroying the other is a kind of minimal trust between the reckless walker and the reckless driver. There are no zebra crossings, as in London, and not many scowling traffic policemen, as in Paris; there is simply an understanding, like the understandings among neighbors, that though we may hate and resent one another, we will not kill one another, at least no more often than we have to. Untune that string, and New York would become what by all rights it ought to be, what it was: hell, a place of absolute anarchy, the Hobbesian universe.

  But who tuned the string? Cities are self-organizing, but they also once seemed self-devouring. Even at its most Hobbesian, New York was never entirely so (more Wellsian, actually, with the Eloi on one side and the Morlocks down below). Even then the cascading, flowing trust that enabled the city to go on was there. Coming home, though, I am overwhelmed not just by the fact that the city doesn't explode into murderous conflict more often than it does, but by the sedation, the domestication, of the place. A city of cars and strollers; even the subway is cleaner now, shocking as that may be. A strenuously considerate male voice regularly announces, “Stand clear of the closing doors!”—a voice of benevolent oversight, like the celebrity voices urging you to buckle up in the backseats of the taxis. Pedestrians cross the street even earlier than I recalled, treating Second Avenue as a country lane: One peek, nothing oncoming, and you walk. And yet all the cars wait for the light to change, even when the pedestrians, crazily, don't.

  And I can see how everything is reversed, like coming back through a mirror, and not being able to adjust to seeing things the right way round. At the gym we went to inspect, there are actually screen monitors on every stationary bicycle, where you can read your e-mail as you pedal, and check your stock market quotations as you pant. I took the children on the carousel in Central Park. It whirls and heaves at a truly frightening speed. It makes music at its center, old-fashioned wheezing fairground organ music, from the turn of the last century. The children hang on for dear life, where in Paris they turned in stately time to the cranking of the ancient motor and chain, with silence all around.

  Martha still has dreams of another place. She tells me she has the New York dream, as common among New Yorkers as the student-anxiety nightmare in which you are facing the final exam for a class that you registered for but then forgot all about (I still have that one). In the New York dream, you discover that your apartment has one more room than you remembered, one more room than you realized when you moved in. You open a closet door, and there it is—another room! She has it every other night.

  She dreams of escape, too, of flying away. As she always has, when we have a long way to go downtown at night, Martha will ask cab-drivers to take the “East Side Highway”—and no matter how often, or how obnoxiously, I tell her that there is no East Side Highway, that it is called the FDR Drive, or just the Drive or the FDR, she persists. The East Side Highway is a sacred place for her somehow, the Yellow Brick Road of her mind and heart, never really settled in New York, still dreaming of Canada or Paris and a road to take you there.

  She also always gives the cabbies intense, complicated local information: “We're going to ABC Carpet? At Nineteenth Street? But not the old building on the east side of Broadway; the other one, across the way.” Or she tells them to take her to Bergdorfs, “men's-store side.” The drivers give her patient, wary, opaque looks. Her mental map of New York is still so minutely drawn, so realized in intricate curlicues of familiar places and imaginary retreats, that even after years away, it is hard for her, as for all of us, to realize that her map is only hers, hers uniquely, and that the little sign that says you are here ! points only to the place that she is standing, all alone.

  Combat is avoided, but conflict cannot always be, it seems, not if the irritant is sufficiently small. We are already at war with our downstairs neighbors because, they say, we are too loud. They complain th
at the children's footsteps drum into their consciousness, giving them broken days and sleepless nights (though how could they? The kids are asleep by eight or nine, sometimes ten). The neighbors send us letters, they knock on our door, they call the doorman, and they complain.

  We write back; they write again. A correspondence, almost eighteenth-century in its variety and viciousness, ensues. The solution—carpeting and tolerance—is obvious, just as the solution to the Middle East problem is two states. It's getting there that's hard, requiring a road map and a leap of faith. To concede anything would be to concede everything; it would make the other side's story the true story. We shop for carpet, sufficiently thick to absorb all sound, sufficiently lovely to avoid any obvious sign of concession. I write long, ornate, indignant, elaborately Madisonian letters, full of “not with standings” and “urge you to remind your clients.”

  I feel the need for the intercession of some other, more mordantly combative sensibility—S. J. Perelman, say. (“Laughing gaily at the implication that our offspring—a light-footed lad of some twenty stone and a bright-eyed sylph of a girl, banished from ballet class not, as rumored, as a danger to the other performers but out of the sheer spite of her teacher, Madame Offenskoff—could be causing them to lose sleep, I dashed off a quick feuilleton of indignation, a screed to rival for length The Federalist Papers and for satirical verve the collected works of H. L. Mencken, and that would have caused them to abandon their petty plaints like the French government abandoning Paris in 1940—had I not, as my doxy pointed out, chosen in my haste to write it with the secret-spy pen from the young lad's Intelligence play set, leaving it readable only to those specially equipped with a plastic decoder ring and Bunsen burner …”) High-spirited comic indignation, the old sensibility.