The Boy Detective

by Roger Rosenblatt

  WALKING. WALKING IN Cambridge, Massachusetts. The bricks jutting out in the uneven sidewalks. The feel of brainless self-satisfaction on Brattle Street and its tributaries. Past the homes of New England aristocrats, who bred like collies, with ever-narrowing heads. Past one’s fellow students who seemed stunned at recurrent news of defeat. Pointless treks. Sisyphus could be grunting beside you.

  That is, unless you were walking with Professor Kelleher along the banks of the Charles, across one bridge, down the riverbank, then across another bridge. That was the way he conducted his tutorials, walking and talking. I studied Irish literature and the eighteenth-century poets with him, about which I knew nothing and cared little at first. But I cared for John Kelleher. Had he been teaching Northeastern Etruscan religious practices I would have taken that. Walks in Cambridge, and long walks in the woods near his home in Westwood, Massachusetts.

  Only in appearance was he confounded by his stammer. His eyes would bulge helplessly as he would do battle with his tongue to get out a sentence. Students who did not know him fled his classes. Had they the patience to wait till his sentences were complete, they would have realized how lucky they were to be in his presence. No one ever knew more about Irish literature and history. Harvard gave him a chair while he still was in his twenties. He never went to the trouble of getting a Ph.D., because he didn’t need one. And he published only one book, a slim volume of poems. He took to the eighteenth century because, like him, it had one foot in reality, the other in hope. For the nineteenth century he had little use because it confused hope with reality. Hope could go anywhere, including hell. He used to say, “Romanticism leads to Dachau.”

  Walking, walking, with long aggressive strides, on the riverbank and in the woods. A huge head and a severe but handsome face beneath thick white hair. Built like the boxer he had been at Dartmouth, where he’d gone by a sort of accident. He’d been repairing a roof with his father, a postman, who moonlighted as a carpenter on weekends, when one of his dad’s friends stopped by to mention that he had just seen an attractive place where young John might want to go to college. When Kelleher returned from his interview, he happily reported that there were no other people there. He had seen it on spring break.

  Everyone at Harvard knew something, but few knew life. Kelleher—with his hidden office in Widener Library, his amused disdain for the “fat asses in the Faculty Club,” and his firm, sure strides—he knew life. He knew how to walk in the world. And so, when he taught Joyce’s “Clay,” he showed how it was for the old woman to be both irritating and human. And when he taught Johnson’s “Vanity of Human Wishes,” he could offer the world’s behavior as evidence of the poem. Only once did he bother to write a scholarly article, on “The Dead.” In his researches into ancient Irish history, Detective Kelleher discovered that Joyce had based the story, moment for moment, on an old Irish legend—something no one had ever pointed out, and that probably had been known to no one but Joyce himself. Then, after proving his airtight case, Kelleher ended the piece by assuring the reader that his discovery had nothing to do with enjoying the story. Ginny and I named our John after him.

  ONE WALK LEADS to another. Walking in the cold mist of a Dublin late afternoon, that year we lived in Ireland. After class, while Ginny stayed at home in our rented house in the suburb of Mount Merrion, Carl growing inside her, I would walk the Dublin streets. Dark and darker. The stones of the street and the stones of the buildings shining with rain. I was twenty-four. All was ahead of us—Carl, Amy, and John, their lives, the wanderings, the jobs, Amy’s death. I could have gone on forever, walking in Dublin in the late afternoons. Something about the melancholy gold of the streetlamps. Something about the woolly glow of the people. I walked in an eternal anticipation of wonders without suffering the disappointment that follows naturally. Walking between high seriousness and silliness, between ambition and weeping fits. Look at those books, like embers in the window. All of life bundled in a Dublin cold mist of a late afternoon.

  And walking in the Gaeltacht, edging around the sharp rocks and the stubble hills that looked like camels’ backs. I thought of J. M. Synge walking in the same place seventy years earlier, picking up the rhythms of Irish Gaelic, taking notes. At night, he sat in his attic room and listened to the rich talk he later made use of in his plays, rising through the floorboards. I picked up a little of the language sitting with my teachers in Teach Mór, Irish for “the big house,” located on the Spidal Road, and taking in their stories. They didn’t as much instruct as simply live, and they let you be part of their lives. They spoke English perfectly, but would not speak English to you. If you wanted anything, you had to figure out how to say it in Irish, which included going to the outhouse, which included swiping chickens, “chickini,” off the seat.

  But the best thing there was walking, as it always is, up and down the hills, with the wind not always at your back, and in the distance, the hard Atlantic. On the beach lay the curraghs, small black fishing boats looking like mussels on the rocks, just as they did when Synge wrote about them in Riders to the Sea. I would pass a farmer and greet him with “Good morning,” which translated as “God to you.” “Dia duit.” And the response would add something to that. “God and Mary to you.” And response to that: “God, Mary, and Joseph to you.” “Dia is Murie agus Padraic duit”—and so on down the biblical line, till you could spend much of the morning exchanging lists of the holy personages. Or speaking of the weather, which had limited but accurate descriptions in Irish as either cold, windy, or rainy, or cold, windy, and rainy. Alone, you walked through the furrows, unbalanced walking, twisting your ankles, indulging mules and sheep. “Dia is moooorie duit,” I told a cow, who apparently had heard that one before.

  AND A FEW years later, back in Cambridge, after Carl and Amy had joined us, more walking still. Walks were all the entertainment we could afford. So, when we were living in Dunster House, we took walks along Memorial Drive, strollers and clanking fire engines banged around by the winds off the river. And when we were living on Bowden Street, walks on Mass Ave., north as far as Sears, and back home. There was a shop where a little man made violins. And a church with a sign, kind of an ad, behind glass: THIS ENDS YOUR SEARCH FOR A FRIENDLY CHURCH. Garden Market, run by a nice guy named Doc, where we got our food. The drugstore where I was careful to buy only the five-pack of razor blades, and the cleaners where we were careful only to have things pressed. The window of an antiques shop displayed a small round wood table I liked. The tag said $7. I thought: We can afford that. The saleswoman tried not to sound condescending. “That means seven hundred,” she said.

  On a walk in a different part of Cambridge, Ginny and I passed a shop selling the Eames Chair, new then, with-it, sharp and hopeful, we thought, just as we wanted to be. It too cost $700, but I asked the store owner if I might pay it off in monthly installments, and he said sure. We had no paintings to cover our apartment walls, so I bought some prestretched canvases, and painted them myself. Amateurish geometrical designs, which no one found revolting. From an exposed beam in our apartment we hung the Jolly Jumper, a little seat on elastic cords, on which Amy bounced, endlessly smiling. She loved it. She loved her Marx motorcycle—she and Carl racing on the sidewalks, Ginny and I apologizing to the scattering pedestrians.

  IN THE SAME way that a magician summons a crystal ball into the air, from a table with a cloth on it—into the air where, mirabile dictu, it hovers suspended, trembling—in the same way as that, I call forth your face, like a light balloon, before my eyes. (How does he do that?) Where do you walk now, my sweet girl?

  DEATH IS A little thing. I do not mean that it lacks significance or pain. Only that it happens. And that’s that. You live with the living and you live with the dead. Here today, gone later today, like the Tutsis in Rwanda, another case I worked on, who were walking with their kids one moment and chopped to death the next. Slack at the top of the waterfall over the Kagera River, the bodies rose and fell. One, two, fifty. I watched them from
where I stood on a bridge—the bright yellow bridge that was not there one day, and one day it was, so that the people of Tanzania could walk to Rwanda, and the people of Rwanda could walk to Tanzania, with baskets of fruit on their heads, and kids at their sides.

  You can never tell where your feet will lead you. Genesis has it that God took a walk one evening and came upon Adam, who was naked and hiding, thus revealing to God that he had eaten from the tree. The first recorded walk. Makes you wonder whether Adam and Eve would still be in Eden transgressing their tails off if God had not felt like taking an evening stroll. One thing for certain: Eden would have been a hell of a lot more interesting.

  What did I start to say to you? Do you recall? At least you’ll remember the nights when the swells of the sea lapped at the screen door. Is that what I started to say? Mountains were involved, I’m pretty certain. And wheat bundled in rolls in a gray field. A giant green Coke bottle embossed on the side of a warehouse. And a warehouse that dissolved into cedars in Vermont. And a water leak that seeped into the walls and made hieroglyphic stains. The transitional light of evening. The tributes at an awards dinner around the table covered with white linen. A herd of boozing sheep. They played a role, too, I think. I can’t be sure.

  WHERE THINGS ARE, where they were. I approach the New York Public Library at Forty-second and Fifth. In high school I used to track down mystery books here, combing the vast marble halls for books and more books, ordering them, and stunned when they magically appeared, just like that. Request a book, get a book. The library opened in 1911, on the site that once held the Croton Distributing Reservoir, built in 1842, to meet the city’s need for fresh water. Fed by the Croton Reservoir north of the city, by way of forty miles of pipes, the Distributing Reservoir was a four-mile, manmade lake, contained by walls fifty feet high and twenty-five feet thick. Citizens strolled the promenade along the top, taking in views of Manhattan. Poe wrote of taking walks there. Water was borne through underground pipes, moving through the thirsty city as books did later. Where things are, where they were. In Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin’s boy detective, John Grimes, beholds the Public Library from the base of the steps on which the two great stone lions perch. The black boy wonders if the lions are there to protect him once inside the library, or to keep him out.

  Forty-second Street. Thirty-eighth Street. Fourteenth. Twenty-second. First Avenue. Second. Third. Avenues A, B, and C. The grid of the city, laid out in 1811 and stretching from Houston Street downtown to 155th Street in Harlem, makes it easy to find where you are going. The numbers are consecutive. East and west divide at Fifth. Plain as the nose on your face. But what lies beneath this neat construction? To learn that takes detective work. The streets have their order, but the houses on them all are different. A deli lit too brightly. A cigar store looking like a crushed hat. And underneath all this? Crocodiles swim in the sewers, so they say. Bloodstained bricks in the walls of deserted tunnels. Dungeons and dragons.

  The city planners made the grids deliberately, I think—to give the impression of control on the surface, the way a face controls itself, smiles brightly, and greets the day. But see the confusion and the desperation below. The lower depths, full of broken china and live cables. Screams and anarchy. Twentieth Street. Twenty-first Street. Dig there.

  YET HERE’S HOW memory can let you down, students: The back of 36 Gramercy, the side opposite the park, faces a courtyard roughly twenty-five feet deep and eighty feet wide. We used to ride bikes there, and play baseball. Over the years, I smashed more than one window in number 34, the back of which also faced the courtyard and served as center field. One or another of us kids would hit a shot, glass would crash and fly, and we were bats out of hell.

  It was, in fact, a hellish place, the courtyard. Unlike the white terra-cotta facade of 36, the other side of the building was composed of bricks blackened by soot. If the front of the building was shimmering upper-middle-class New York, the rear was the gloom of the city, a tenement built into a wall. And in that wall was a small tunnel, no more than four feet high and six feet long, which led to an airshaft that shot up the full height of the building. You would bend low and move carefully through the tight confines of the lightless tunnel and emerge into the tarnished silver light of the sky cast into the airshaft.

  We named our tunnel the Peanut Gallery, after the kids’ section of the live audience of the Howdy Doody Show. But our Peanut Gallery had no laughter of delight. It was a place where forbidden things happened. Exchanges of contraband, toy guns, were transacted there. And bullying. And the lighting of Chinese firecrackers. Photos of naked women were given scrupulous examination. In the Peanut Gallery, girls showed you theirs if you showed them yours.

  All well and good, or not so good, but here’s the thing, as Detective Monk is wont to say: At any time of my life, had you asked me where the Peanut Gallery was, I would have told you unhesitatingly that it was located to the left of the back door of 36. To the left, without a doubt, about twenty feet in. A few years ago, I happened to be in the old neighborhood, and I was moved to walk through the gilded lobby of the building, straight to the back and out the door, into the courtyard. I looked to my left, and saw only the wall. I looked to my right, and there the entrance to the Peanut Gallery yawned like a black cave. To my right. Now, tell me why, all these years, did I get it wrong. Was I so afraid or ashamed of the sinful hole that my mind hid it from itself? Or was I thinking of another place entirely, even darker and more dreadful, that I had obliterated into forgetfulness?

  Sometimes I wondered, whenever I crawled through that dark place alone, what would happen if the roof of the little tunnel collapsed and I was imprisoned in the airshaft and buried in the ruins. Did I have the strength and skill to shimmy up the drainpipe that ran along the side of the shaft to the roof of the building? Could I climb twelve stories, and then stand on the roof and look down upon the world of crimes?

  WE GET THIS every so often: a disaster story about the collapse of a coal mine in Wales or Kentucky, men trapped in the shaft. Or people caught under the rubble after an earthquake, or a tornado or an avalanche. No sound emits from the survivors. And then there comes what the newspeople call a “miracle.” Someone stuck beneath the piles of rocks or the debris of a house makes a little signal to announce “I’m alive!” And the earthmovers go into action, and the forklifts. And the rescue workers paw frantically at the floorboards and at the boulders to get to the source of the sound. “It was pure luck that I happened to hear it,” they say. The clink of a spoon against a wall, the sound so faint it is hard to know what inspires it. Could be desperation. Could be impatience. A tapping from the ruins.

  The thing about ruins is that they are enjoyed both for what they are and for what they were. The former engages an appreciation of the present, the latter of an imagined past. The evidence of both lies in chipped noses and decayed arms and legs, pillars sprawled like white logs in a cleared wood. We can picture the stages of disintegration of the Roman theater, or of Nineveh or Babylon, each place once a confident paradise before it fell gradually into sand and dust. Columns standing without the roofs of temples. Gods with human heads. The claws of beasts, winged lions, bulls, blank-staring kings in Syria, South America, Cambodia. The world in ruins, each pile a monument to art and power. Greek cities taken by Croesus, then Cyrus, then Darius, glorified by Ptolemies, destroyed by Seleucids, swallowed up by Rome, ravaged by Turks, and then the Crusaders, and then the Turks again.

  Everyone buries someone or something. Evidence lies in bones. Ricardo Montalban starred in Mystery Street as a dogged policeman who partners with a forensic expert. They begin with the discovery of a woman’s skeleton, no clues as to her identity, and end catching the blackguard who killed her. The movie was based on a true case, in a small town in Massachusetts. The waste remains, as William Empson says in “Missing Dates.” And what is left is as significant as what originally was intact. Rome. Nineveh. Babylon. The gaping holes, like mouths. The places where w
alls were. All the plundered haunts, a shrine to lizards and a plaza for owls.

  Give thanks for the owls. Give thanks for the ghosts. For the paper and the clay jars. For the golden stripes of the sun. Give thanks for the pain. For the faint music playing in the stranger’s house. I pass by it now, on Fifteenth Street between First and Second, with the deep purple curtains drawn like a mood and the heavy black door with the brass knocker and the chipped paint. Give thanks for the chipped paint, and for all that is broken and missing. For the dark geometry of the streets, and the ornamental streetlamps, and the dead trees. And for the ruins. By all means, for the ruins.