City on Fire (20 page)

Outside the wind was changing, whipping up the wet trees, embattling the birds of Long Island. Armies of them, serried avengers, wheeled against the bruised sky. He slowed on the sidewalk so he wouldn’t have to watch his boots, and then, beneath a burnt-out streetlight, stopped. Be still, he heard. Be still and know thou art with God. Over the white box of the Exxon station darted the shadows of the birds, singly, one after another, as though launched by some catapult on the far side of the roofline. Gulls up there, pigeons, sparrows, jays, and starlings, a congress of birds converging for some reason on Nassau County, every wingèd thing on earth soon to take its place along the barricades.

the reading had said,

Not Charlie’s hand, of course. Somewhere in his borrowed ancestry stood some patriarch to whom various other things had been entrusted, and look what had happened since. The hands now in his pockets could not be counted on, nor could any other, save the Messiah’s. And the Messiah, Charlie knew, was not going to come out of the church across from the gas station until Charlie was no longer here. The Messiah was not ready yet to be seen. But he had come to reclaim the beasts and the fowls and the children of men and Sam, and to save Charlie, personally, from all his sin. His heart was like the beating of wings, and behind it, Charlie heard again the words. But first the earth had to be prepared. And so, under a storm of birds, armed by heaven against the temptation to turn back, Charlie Weisbarger hurried home to await further instruction.

[click here to view a facsimile from the print edition]

May 14,1961

How much do you remember, I wonder, of the old Hamilton place out in Fairfield County? You can’t have been older than three or four the last time you saw it. By that point we were paying a caretaker; the furniture had all been covered with the cream-colored dropcloths under which you and your sister spent the afternoon hiding and seeking, your shouts filling the forsaken rooms.

When I was a boy, though, there were over a dozen of us still living beneath that great slate roof. Back-country Connecticut was the opposite of a city then: rolling meadowland, long lanes and horseshoe drives, trees at what was almost the horizon blotting out the lives of other people. Six mornings a week our driver, Hans, would fetch the black Packard from the car barn and ease up the quarter-mile of gravel to the lip of the front porch. The hand-cranked engine, even at idle, set the whole house atremble. And when I think of my grandfather, your great-grandfather, Roebuck Hamilton, Jr., it is this tremor I think of first. As the breakfast-room chandelier began to shake, a kind of inward agitation would seize him, the violence of the cocked hammer. He was far too disciplined to have leapt straight up from his chair, but he would already have sent a hundred little signals regarding the contingency of his presence among us. The black bowler hat perched on his knee; the cane hooked to the edge of the long table; the pocket watch placed beside his eggcup and the way his eyes kept darting to it as he importuned the eggshell with his spoon … all of this now slightly aquiver, as though, standing between him and the business that awaited, it might as well explode.

According to your great-aunt Agnes, our authority on family history, Grandfather had made his way on foot to West Virginia at age nineteen, after landing in New York from Manchester. His prospecting yielded nothing for over a year, yet he had persisted, tramping all over those hills, shooting game to smoke over green-wood fires. In five years he would own half the coal under the state.

By custom, the very last thing he did before going out to Hans in the morning was shave. He wanted the skin around his moustache at the very peak of depilation when he arrived at his offices in Manhattan, which to my small self seemed as distant as India or Indian Country. He would lock himself into the bathroom under the stairs, against whose door I sometimes liked to put my ear. Such sounds as I could detect beneath the oceanic thrum of the Packard were different, richer somehow, than the sounds my father made shaving. In particular, Grandfather’s razor fascinated me, as what is forbidden will fascinate any child on whom the world has not yet pressed its discipline. I can still see it coming out of its leather kit to be stropped. The monogrammed handle. The blade like honed glass.

One morning, I remember, having excused myself early from breakfast, I stole into the bathroom under the stairs to look at it. The kit was waiting atop a clothes hamper. I unfolded it and extracted the razor carefully, handle-first, from its place between the moustache scissors and the two-tone shaving brush.

Light flashed on the blade, diffused through the frosted window patterned with the gray shadows of the branches outside. When I turned it, reflections danced over my sweater.

Soon, I was waving it about like a pirate in a book, ordering captives to walk the plank. I was often losing track of the real world then; I somehow failed to hear, over the car engine outside, Grandfather’s footsteps, the stump of his cane, until they were nearly at the bathroom door. There was a voice from farther down the hall, and he paused for a moment with the doorhandle held ninety degrees from rest. Only then did I recognize the scale of my transgression. I had time to shove the razor back into the kit, but there was no escaping the bathroom. There was, however, a large mirrored bureau opposite the medicine chest, and at the very last possible instant, I balled myself up inside and pulled the door shut, and all was rumble and darkness.

At first, I had only the pounding of my heart to mark the time. Which way had the blade been facing when I’d found it? When I’d put it back? Then there was an inch-wide strip of light in front of me; the juddering of the house had dislodged the door of the bureau. I should have pulled it shut, but instead moved closer to the crack. The sight of Grandfather’s nude back led to a ghastly presentiment: I had caught him in some hermetic ritual of the kind my cousins whispered about. In fact, it was only the shirt that was missing. With my eye pressed against the gap, I could see it hanging neatly from a hook on the back of the door, could see his braces hanging from the high waist of his pants. Though the skin of his upper body had mottled with age, the muscles beneath were a younger man’s, and they seemed to twitch or ripple as he flicked the razor across his soapless skin. And he whistled, I remember, as if to increase the degree of danger, or as if genuinely happy (this man I’d never once seen smile), a tune I barely recognized over the rumble of the car as Schubert’s lied about the little trout. Then my forehead again knocked into the door that hid me, swinging it wider, and in the mirror above the sink our eyes met. Next thing I knew, I was being dragged out of the darkness by this looming strange man who lived in my house. The razor floated between us. Well? he demanded.

All I could think to say was: Why don’t you use soap?

There came a single laugh. Almost a bark. Child, there is something one learns when one goes out and lives with nothing (a monitory intensity purpling his face as he pronounced this last word). It’s not soap that makes for the closeness of the shave; it is the razor itself.

He seized my hand and drew the blade across my forefinger so swiftly I felt nothing. Like the tiniest stroke of a calligrapher’s pen, a line of blood appeared, became a drop, two drops. Then he unlocked the door. As I ran off down the hall, I was convinced that he was on my heels, that I could feel his sour hot breath on my neck, but when I looked back, he was still standing half-clothed in the doorway of the bathroom, grinning, blurred by my tears. That was your great-grandfather: a distant and altogether terrifying man.

Peculiarly, it was my own father I would hold responsible for the scar on my finger. I don’t think I ever forgave him for his failure to protect me that day, or for forcing my mother and myself to live in uncomplaining proximity with a person who, it now seemed to me, might kill us while whistling Schubert and then clean his teeth with our bones. Even after we had moved to Upper Fifth Avenue, so that my father could be closer to the offices of the Firm (whose day-to-day operations had been ceded to him), I longed to break away from the family altogether.

I wanted to be a playwright; did your mother ever tell you that? One afternoon when I was not much younger than you are now, Aunt Agnes took me to see Desire Under the Elms, by Mr. Eugene O’Neill. The stage was like a solution to a problem I had not yet formulated. Maybe if I went to school somewhere out in the Middle West, I thought, away from my lonely, crowded life, I might discover it. My father, of course, expected me to follow him to the Firm. How vividly I recall being summoned to see him in his office there (for if you were to see him between eight in the morning and six at night, it would have to be in his office). We sat, just the two of us, under a slowly spinning fan. We had not been alone together in what felt like a decade. What was this he had been hearing about Chicago? he wanted to know; Yale had been good enough for him.

I forced myself to say what I’d long been thinking: But I’m not like you.

At which he put his hands on his trouser-thighs and leaned forward. He had always been something of a ghost to me, my father, an echo of the muffled explosion that had been his father. Part of this may have been the lush moustaches he’d cultivated himself, which hid most of his lower face, and part the pince-nez behind which his eyes now glimmered. Bill, he said mildly. Do you think I’m like me?

I meant, I said, that I was not drawn to the family business. Or blessed with Grandfather’s golden touch.

He took another sip of whisky. Chewed a cube of ice. Had I been talking to Aunt Agnes again?

Grandfather told me himself, I said, how he made all of this. Everything around us.

Since we were speaking man to man, my father said (and no doubt since the object of our discussion had by then been dead for five years), why did I think Grandfather had gone about in such a rage all the time? It was because he knew he’d done no such thing. He had wanted, above all, to be a self-made man, like George Hearst or William A. Clark: sufficient unto himself, listening to the earth, chosen by it to run the world. In truth, the earth had wanted little to do with him.

But what about West Virginia? I asked. What about living with nothing?

Your grandfather lost two toes to frostbite, contracted chronic dysentery, and couldn’t keep a mule alive for more than a month, my father said. It was only with Grandmother’s capital (the Sweeneys owned breweries in Belfast) that he had been able to buy up half of the Monongahela Valley, and the premium he’d paid for it had been a lifelong sense of failure and the hyphenation of our last name. He sold his stake during the boom of 1890 and limped back to the city with a trunkful of paper money, because that was where his talent lay: not boring and hewing, but buying, selling, holding. Each additional million only made it clearer that he was not one of the great men.

You see, we Hamilton-Sweeneys are not discoverers, my father said, we are investors. We facilitate the greatness of others. And this is what it means to be a man: learning to see the world not as a question of what you want to be, but of what you are …

But it is late, and I feel myself wandering far from what I set out to say. It is as though in the many years since I last put pen to paper like this, the memories have grown too ripe inside me. Or as if the intervening time were an illusion, and instead of the boxed-up study on Sutton Place in which I now sit, I am back in my first office in the Hamilton-Sweeney Building, under the green-shaded banker’s lamp after everyone has gone. It has ever been easier for me to express myself with a pen. One risks less, somehow, of that entire world inside—or risks more slowly.

William, what I have been trying to show you here is that I understand your anger. That I can imagine how arbitrary my life must appear to you. You think that I am distant and passionless, that I do not see what I’ve sacrificed, that I do not know how to dream of things beyond my control. But you must believe me, as someone who made the same mistakes about his own father, and his father’s father, that what you see is not the whole of me.

A month from now, Felicia Gould and I will be married. I am not asking you to see her many fine qualities, to grow to care for her as I have (which is not, I should say, the same way I cared for your mother). I am not asking you to want what I want, or even predicting that your own ambitions, whatever they may be, will prove as mine did beyond reach. But I am asking you to see me clearly before you decide how to respond. To see that if I choose not to spend the rest of my life in mourning—if I am not as strong or as principled as you might be in the same circumstance—I do so consciously. That your father is a man, Son, as you are: this is the impossibility I ask you to imagine.

I do not need to look back over what I’ve written here to hear the note of self-pity you will no doubt have detected. In fact, I shall probably throw this letter on the fire as soon as I’ve finished it. Start over, in a greeting card that will bank my confessional mood, and simply ask, in a few brief lines, if you’d serve as my best man at the wedding. But even the flames of our fireplace swallowing these pages, burning the paper to the color of ink, will not erase the fact that I sat here well after midnight tonight, dredging up things I thought I’d never tell you, in the perhaps vain hope that you might receive them without the garbling of intentions, suspicions, grievances that seems to pass down through the blood, father to son, Hamilton-Sweeney to Hamilton-Sweeney.

And so one more memory, if you will indulge me. It is how loudly you bellowed, William, when first I held you. You were afraid, Kathryn said; I must hold you tighter. I looked at her, exhausted in the hospital bed, and she looked at you, and you looked at me looking at her with eyes that had never known anything else, and for a moment there I swear we saw each other with a clarity that nothing can alter, not time, not heartbreak, not death. And in some sense, Son, I am still holding you just that tightly to me, remaining

Passionately, however distantly,