The Boy Detective

by Roger Rosenblatt

  In Weston, I rode my bike for miles every day, past hayfields, pastures, and orchards, meeting no one and looking for crime. Holmes always thought the worst crimes were committed not in the city, but in this brooding quietude of the countryside, the dead calm. Yet it’s hard to spot crime in a rural setting unless you’re Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. The whorls of birds. The shadows of horses. Returning to the house one late afternoon, I saw a patrol car in the driveway, and my mother with a policeman. She was flapping her arms and, in her quiet way, shouting. My father had driven off and a copperhead had been coiled under his car. By the time the police arrived, it had disappeared. I went snake hunting in the tall dry grass.

  I DON’T KNOW a lot about nature, but I know what I like—the feeling of impersonal companionability in the countryside, walking in the woods or fields. Trees tilting at slight angles like cowhands on a break, birds wheeling in the wind, all of nature leading a life independent from your own, yet involved with it by implication. At the age of three, in Chatham, when I would wander away from my parents’ cottage, I never felt any fear, though nature towered over me. Only comfort. At Time, I wrote a series on people who had accomplished heroic things for the environment. I visited a rain forest in Suriname that was dazzling with its red ants, howler monkeys, and bright-colored toads. Nature putting on a show. Yet I’ve always felt more at home in the less dramatic places, such as the New England woods, which is a marketplace of small activities—caterpillars and beetles going about their business as you go about yours.

  In his Confessions, Tolstoy admitted that as a small child he knew next to nothing about nature. He assumed he must have been privy to flowers and leaves, yet up to his fifth or sixth birthday, he had no memory of the natural life. This separation he calls “unnatural,” because he was aware of it, implying that to be away from nature is to yearn for it unconsciously. The separation is akin to a separation from one’s passions—from love, from family, from one’s very senses.

  Most of city life is separated from nature, and citizens, aware of the penalties, seek compensations. No one can imagine New York without Central Park, which makes the autocratic decisions of its chief imaginer and builder, Frederick Law Olmsted, all the more remarkable. In 1857, Olmsted and his partner, Calvert Vaux, could picture 843 acres of greenery, fountains, and footbridges in the midst of the farms and run-down villages that constituted that area of the city, as well as picturing a future of suffocating steel towers. It is as if, by foreseeing the centrality of their park, they were looking into their own hearts.

  Yet, this distant friendship of nature’s is like the city’s friendship, too. A walk in the Village or up Madison seems much like a walk in Vermont in that you feel part of your surroundings without committing yourself to them. You are aware of the bees and of your fellow citizens in casual and indirect ways. I suppose you’re also alert to the fact that an enemy, a mugger or a wolf, can materialize at the drop of a hat. But the presiding feeling is simply that of being with your world, and it with you. And there is nothing either of you wishes to do about it but live and wonder.

  GRAMERCY PARK HAD its local naturalist in Theodore Roosevelt, whose town house stood on Twentieth Street, between Park and Broadway. My mother took me to the Theodore Roosevelt Museum dozens of times before Peter was born, always, it seemed, on rainy days. The museum is easy to miss, tucked like an afterthought inside what was a block of wholesale houses when I was young, and now is squeezed, like the Little House of the children’s story, between a Realtor called New York Living Solutions and a bar called No Idea, affording both the accurate and evasive answer, I suppose, to the accusing question of an angry spouse: Where are you?

  So quiet, the home of the wild man president, he of the Rough Riders and Mount Rushmore and the blank goggle eyes and the grillelike teeth. In fact, the museum is not his original home, but rather a reconstruction of the house he was born in, on October 7, 1858. Here he lived till he was fifteen. The museum stands exactly where his home did, before it was demolished in 1916. The newer house was rebuilt in 1919, funded by prominent New Yorkers who wanted TR to have a proper monument.

  So the rooms of the museum are as they were between the years 1865 and 1872. I used to go about inspecting the zebra skin on the wall, the tiger skin rug, the full-size taxidermy lion standing on a pedestal. Mounted heads of wild boar, antelope, and mountain sheep. A glass cabinet contained an eyeglass case with a bullet hole in it, which would catch the attention of any detective. A would-be assassin had taken a potshot at TR in Milwaukee, in 1912. He was saved by his own poor eyesight. Victorian dark, the house. Rugs dark green and maroon, black chairs stuffed with horsehair. The stairs creaked as they did in The Spiral Staircase. There were chandeliers once gaslit, like the one in Gaslight. My eyes widened at everything in the place.

  TR’s dad gave the boy a shotgun when he was eleven. The old Abercrombie & Fitch ideal of manhood. I could picture him at my age, his imagination impelling him up and down the staircase, in and out of the rooms. “Charge!” The cry of San Juan Hill. “Charge!” The cry of the nutcase old man in Arsenic and Old Lace, who kept popping up from the basement yelling “Charge!” But TR was only part nutcase. To be sure, he built the Panama Canal by stealing Panama from Colombia, and there was all that loony rough-riding. But he also started the Pure Food and Drug Administration, enacted the first child labor laws, and set up the national parks, which made him our first environmentalist president. Let’s just say he was conflicted—part do-gooder, part do-badder, a tough case to crack. His first wife and his mother died on the same day, Valentine’s Day.

  One photograph in the museum showed TR as a boy about my age then, with shiny blond hair and wearing a formal little jacket. Another showed him at age eight, looking out of a window on Union Square at Lincoln’s funeral cortege. Never would I have served as a sidekick to any other detective, but I gladly would have been his, at least while we both were children. My fearless playmate, both of us lost in gallant fantasies.

  But now I see my mother signaling that it is time to leave, and the two of us, our separate tours complete, smiling to each other at the museum door, proceed to walk home in the rain.

  IT DIDN’T NEED to be TR. I would have been happy with any worthy friend and partner, but I never had one. Guys I knew, and they knew me, and we were friends in the casual sense of the word. What I longed for was a real cohort, someone with whom to follow suspects or write songs or put on plays, an imaginative mind to keep company with my own and to abet and improve my imagination with his. Detectives sometimes have partners, like Sam Spade’s Miles Archer, whose murder drives the moral issue of the story, but who, when it comes down to it, was just another name painted on the glass of the door, easily scraped off. That’s not the sort of partner I had in mind. I wanted someone to share wonder and bright days with, and burdens, too, I guess, though the thought of sharing my burdens with another person also seemed unfair, since everyone has enough of his own. Shoulder to shoulder. Like a teammate in basketball, and you never have to look where he is on the court, because you know where he is and where he will be—in position for a look-away pass.

  In college I found such a friend in Peter Weissman. I knew exactly where he would be on the court, and I know it to this day. Then, we did write songs and plays together, and we played on the same teams, and we laughed at the same nonsense. It would have been especially good to have known Pete in the detective years—to begin each open day with the question “What shall we do now?” And while asking that same question to myself as I went it alone had its many rewards, wouldn’t it have been satisfying to have someone with you who could come up with an adventurous answer.

  A child went forth every day, and the first object he looked upon, that object he became. So every day I looked upon the park and became the park, the first object I saw in the morning and the last I saw at night. The gated garden of my heart greeted its counterpart. The smudge that passed for my soul arranged itself to accommodate self-sati
sfied statues and orderly people. And the patches of lawn. A stone urn here and there. The obligations. The savage courtesies. And in the middle, a prisoner tree reaching up and out for sunlight. Warden, we can’t eat this food. Hey! What do you know! I’m going to get off scot-free. I’m going to walk.

  AND SO WE WALK—up and down the avenues, past the city’s vertical villages, where most of the people do most of the living. “The celestial ennui of apartments.” That is how Wallace Stevens saw them. And here they are, layer after layer of apartments, and the turmoil therein, and the schemes, the celebrations, the resolve and remorse. But ennui? I don’t know. The woman in King Kong who was sleeping, minding her own business, when the ape reached in and snatched her out of her bed and tossed her to her death, random, casual. The woman in the dark nightgown. Was that ennui? Hardly. In the older apartment houses around Gramercy Park, and on lower Fifth, each apartment seems a drawer in a jewel box, solid and intact. In the newer buildings, the apartments seem to move laterally, as if they were light shows shuffling and sliding between and away from one another. Paper thin walls. The TVs blast color in high definition, more clearly defined than in life. I look straight up to observe the humming hive, but tonight Visigoths seem to have raided the fortress and no life is on display. Only one man, alone on a penthouse balcony.

  Have you read Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”? The story’s title comes from a poem by Sara Teasdale, and both pieces are about the end of the world brought about by people’s self-destructive impulses. In Bradbury, a California house is shown with all its machines turned on and working, but the people have disappeared. Maybe that’s what happened to this apartment house tonight. A limited nuclear holocaust.

  Or the residents may be lying down, so I cannot see them from my vantage point on the street. My voyeur’s vantage point. They may be screwing or sleeping. And they remain celestial in Stevens’s heaven, until that hairy hand, the size of a barn, reaches in the window, plucks them from the sheets, and flings them, nightgown and all, into my waiting arms.

  AS FOR THE man standing at the waist-high Plexiglas wall of the penthouse balcony, he appears to track the stars, but he is thinking of her. She has been asleep since eight. She sleeps a great deal lately, heavy with painkillers. Her voice is faint, like someone heard through a wall. He makes attempts to soothe her. It’ll be okay, he tells her. OK. OK. In a few months we’ll be driving up to Connecticut again, taking the boat out. He used to believe himself when he said things like that.

  Now he thinks of the penthouse apartment behind him, all twelve rooms dark. He wonders how much bigger it will seem when she goes. He wonders how it would have been if they had had children, if he should get a smaller apartment in the same building, or on the other side of town, or in another town, or if he will remarry. He thinks he will get an apartment on a lower floor, nearer the street.

  A story he never read, by Dino Buzzati, involves a hospital where the least serious cases are assigned to the top floor and the most serious cases, those expected to die, are assigned to the floor on the ground level. Buzatti’s story is about a man who enters the hospital suffering from a mild case of flu, and who is assigned to the topmost floor. But soon something goes wrong with the plumbing on that floor, and so the man is asked if he would mind moving down a floor. On that floor they find there are not enough beds, so again the man is forced to move down. This pattern recurs, floor after floor, until the man who entered the hospital with the flu lies motionless on the lower level, gravely ill.

  She coughs twice, then three times, then is quiet again. He remains unmoving on the penthouse balcony. He does not turn his head. In a kind of chorus, like a chant, the rooms of the apartment call his name. They say, we will miss you when you both are gone. You were kind to us, generous. It was good to have you around. But perhaps it is all for the best. The penthouse probably was too big for you, too much for just the two of you, you and the missus.

  GLASS PUNCH BOWL of a night. I step across an oil slick that easily might be mistaken for a small puddle, when I am less alert. But something about tonight, the cold, sharpens one’s senses. I detect the moon where it attempts to hide behind four black mules who (Godknowshow) have trudged up there beside it. When I approach the Dutch doors of a garbage can, I do not enter. But, on a night like this, that is my choice. On a night like this, I have a heart for everything, including, especially, you. To say nothing of the Holy Ghost and the duck (from the fable of the same name) at the rectory connected with the Church of the Transfiguration, known as the “Little Church around the Corner,” at Twenty-ninth Street, which has been around since 1849 and yet has just gone up before my eyes in a confusion of snowflakes. So, to say nothing of it, I won’t.

  WHO COULD TIRE of New York? Dr. Johnson said that anyone who tires of London tires of life. London? Was he kidding? The roses in the window of an old bar and grill. The stick marks on the sidewalk made when the cement was still wet. The courage of small birds. The courage of people coming from work, going to work. Sometimes, when I drive in from Long Island, before teaching, I pull off to the side, stop, and watch. I close the car windows and put on a CD of John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, playing a souped-up version of Bach. Or I play the Rach Three, so that my fellow citizens may go about their errands to the accompaniment of Rachmaninoff. The Rach Three moves as they move, alternately melancholy, sprightly, sweet, bittersweet, aggressive, bombastic, sad, and exultant. How brave are these people. Rachmaninoff weeps without tears.

  The city does not exist without people walking in it. Does not exist, I say. And if you doubt me, recall those scenes in science fiction movies that attempt to show the end of the world. For the scenes to be persuasive, the cameras do not go to the mountains or to the seashore, both of which can do quite well without human company. Show the Rockies as they would look after a nuclear blast, and the picture would be no different from an ordinary spring day. But when the moviemakers seek to indicate total and absolute lifelessness, they shoot the empty city, and it’s almost always New York. Deprived of people, the place is lunar. The buildings look lost. The empty streets look lost. Where people once defined the space, merely by walking here and there, space no longer is.

  This is strange, is it not? People walking create the space in which they walk. The walk lays out its own street. Does this mean that when the walkers are removed, the city itself no longer exists? That the space they defined is unreal? And if that is so, no wonder the city feels like a dream. Why, man, it is a dream. I told you so.

  See there, pal? If you blur your vision, the soldiers’ uniforms become their wars. And instead of merely watching the soldiers on leave as they walk here on Eighteenth and Broadway, you see them in dangerous territories where they earn their stripes, riding in armored MRAPs, in olive, yellow, and brown places where the natives plant IEDs in their path. Not camouflaged in front of Paragon sporting goods, they stand out in a crowd. Earlier, when I passed her, I should have saluted. Even if she blushed or rushed to get by, I should have saluted for the very patch of land that became her uniform. Even if she giggled.

  ’TIS OF THEE, my country, that I sing, feeling in love with it as ever yet estranged these days, removed from politics and policies, more than when we were in Vietnam, more than when we were in Cambodia, out of it, like a guy suddenly flush, who jiggles the change in his pocket, looking for someone to give it to, and finding no takers, shrugs.

  I was in Cambodia, too, not in it exactly but next door, at the Khao I Dang refugee camp in southern Thailand, on another case, talking to children who had escaped Pol Pot’s work camps. Some had buried their parents, digging with their little hands. Many had been tortured. In the refugee camp they danced the water drop dance to entertain the visiting journalists. Outside the tent rose a small Golgotha of prosthetic limbs. The weather was inclement. The rain would explode, soaking us from top to bottom, clothing clinging to our bodies. And just when you thought you might go under and drown, the sun would blast the rain a
way and drape you in a dry heat. You stood where you had stood, unwrinkled as you were before the rains. I felt at home there. Awake. Alive.

  America is a detective story, is it not? It runs from hope to crime to pursuit to justice to regeneration, and back to hope. I’ve always had a special taste for the beginnings of detective stories, when we come upon our hero, who is either glum and disheveled or elegant and cocky, doing nothing but waiting to be called into action. He receives a client. Or the cops need his help. Off he goes, from crime to pursuit to justice to regeneration. But before all that, oh! That first blush of hope, when the case is laid before him like the shores before the sailing ships, and the promise of adventure and decency and virtue is as innocent as daylight. Our private eye has been engaged to solve the most pressing, important problem in the world. He is Einstein. He is Darwin. Once he accomplishes his mission, nothing ever will be the same. He is Columbus.

  WHAT IF THEY had fallen off the flat earth? The early explorers, I mean, who were afraid their tall ships would fall off the flat earth if they sailed to what they supposed was a new world, but sailed anyway, thinking what have we got to lose? Wild men, crazy men, desperados, cutthroats. How could it not be worth a high-stakes gamble for lowlife like that? A chance at riches, homes of their own in a paradisiac place, with a native woman, perhaps, naked from the waist up, red flowers in her hair, black comforting eyes. A second chance at life, just like Lazarus. Who would not risk falling off the flat earth for such a payoff?