Farther Away: Essays (25 page)

JF:
That's very kind. But I'm not sure I need a packet.

NEW YORK STATE'S PERSONAL ATTORNEY:
Trust me, you'll want this one. Jeremy, heh heh, gives excellent packet. And not to burst your bubble, but you might find it comes in handy when you go to write your book. Just in case the interview isn't everything you'd hoped for. Are we clear on the ground rules, by the way? Can you repeat them back to me?

JF:
Steer clear of interesting decades?

NEW YORK STATE'S PERSONAL ATTORNEY:
Yes. Good. And also your thing for the little girlies.

JF:
But I was just a kid myself!

NEW YORK STATE'S PERSONAL ATTORNEY:
I am simply warning you she's not going to be receptive to it. Your passion for her and her exciting new projects? Yes! Absolutely! Your passion for some fictional prepubescent Upper East Side chicklet in the brutish 1960s? Not so much. Please follow me back this way.

JF:
Do we have some sort of estimate of when I'm finally going to be able to see her?

NEW YORK STATE'S PERSONAL ATTORNEY:
Jeremy? I'd like you to meet our “literary writer.” A Manhattanite, interestingly.

THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORIAN:
Tolerance . . . Diversity . . . And centrality. Are the three watchwords of New York State's preeminence.

NEW YORK STATE'S PERSONAL ATTORNEY:
I'll leave the two of you to chat a bit.

THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORIAN:
Tolerance . . . Diversity . . . Centrality.

JF:
Hi, nice to meet you.

THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORIAN:
To the north: Puritan New England. To the south: the great chattel-slavery plantation colonies. In between: a splendid deepwater port and system of highly navigable interior waterways, endowed with a wealth of natural resources and settled by the mercantilist and famously tolerant Dutch. They were among the first nations to make explicit the connection between good business and personal freedom—between enrichment and enlightenment; and New Netherland was their brainchild. The Dutch West India Company expressly forbade religious persecution—a stricture against which the autocratic governor Peter Stuyvesant frequently chafed and inveighed. The first Jews reached New York in 1654, joining Quaker immigrants from England and Puritan renegades from Massachusetts, including Anne Hutchinson and her family. Stuyvesant was reprimanded by his Company for harassing the Jews and Quakers. In his defense, he complained that New Netherland was, quote, “peopled by the scrapings of all sorts of nationalities.” Fortunately for all of us, New Netherland's prodigious granddaughter, our dearest Empire State, remains so peopled to this very day. She is the gracious and only conceivable hostess of the United Nations, the ardent champion of equal rights for gays, lesbians, and the transgendered, the ladle of the Melting Pot, the cradle of American feminism. Nearly a hundred and fifty languages are spoken at home by the parents of students in a single school district in Elmhurst, Queens. And yet they all speak the same single universal language of—

JF:
Money?

THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORIAN:
Of tolerance. But, yes, of money, too, of course. The two go hand in hand. New York's epic wealth is a testament to that proposition.

JF:
Right. And this is even somewhat interesting to me, but unfortunately also totally beyond the scope of—

THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORIAN:
The Revolutionary War: one long slog of attrition and attenuation. Slippery General Washington forever dodging definitive engagement. In the course of this lengthy never-quite-war, this awkward game of hide-and-seek, of cut-and-run, of bob-and-weave, of peek-and-boo, two battles in particular stand out as crucial turning points. Both of them early in the war. Both of them relatively minor in terms of casualties. And both of them fought where?

JF:
This is, wow, this is really—

THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORIAN:
Why, in New York, naturally. In centrally located New York. Our first battle of interest: Harlem Heights. Situation dire. Washington and his shaky amateur army perilously bottled up in Manhattan. General William Howe newly arrived in New York Harbor with a veritable armada—upwards of thirty thousand fresh, well-trained troops, including the storied Hessians. Our Continental Army demoralized by heavy losses and available for easy crushing. Critical engagement: Harlem Heights, near present-day Columbia University. Washington's troops fight the British to a draw, allowing the general to escape to New Jersey with his army more or less intact. Terrible lost opportunity for the British, tremendous morale-boosting break for Washington, who lives to fight—or avoid fighting!—another day.

JF:
Excuse me—

THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORIAN:
Second battle: Bemis Heights, Saratoga. The year: 1777. The British plan for winning the war: simple. Unite Howe's overwhelming southern expeditionary force with eight thousand British troops from Canada, under the leadership of General John Burgoyne—the so-called “Gentleman Johnny.” Establish supply lines, control the Hudson and Lake Champlain, sever New England from the southern colonies. Divide and conquer. But it's the boggy northland, the buggy morass. American troops, many of them part-time, dig into Bemis Heights at Saratoga, where, inspired by the heroics of Benedict Arnold, they launch a series of crippling assaults on Gentleman Johnny, who within a week surrenders his entire army. A stirring victory with enormous strategic implications! News of it encourages France to side decisively with the Americans and declare war on England, and through the next six years of war the finest army on the planet proves ever more tentative and ineffectual against the Americans.

JF:
Um?

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
Jeremy?

THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORIAN:
The lesson? Control New York, control the country. New York is the linchpin. The red-hot center. The crux, if you will.

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
Jeremy, excuse me, I'm just going to take our guest down the hall here for a minute. He's looking a little shell-shocked.

THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORIAN:
First capital of the newly formed United States of America, as stipulated by its splendid new Constitution? Site of George Washington's inauguration as our republic's first president? Did someone say . . . New York City? And though our infant state may not have hosted the capital for long, she certainly did have another trick or two up her sleeve! Hemming the young republic in against the Atlantic seaboard: a formidable chain of mountains stretching all the way from Georgia up to Maine. Only three viable ways to get past them and tap the vast economic potential of the mid-continent: far south around Florida through the Gulf of Mexico; far north around Nova Scotia through the inhospitably Canadian waters of the St. Lawrence; or,
centrally, centrally,
through a gap in the mountains cut by the Hudson and Mohawk rivers. All that was needed was to dig a
canal
through some swampy lowlands, and an inexhaustible flood of timber, iron, grain, and meat would funnel down through New York City while a counterflood of manufactured goods went back upriver, enriching its citizens in perpetuity. And lo! Lo!

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
Come on—this way.

THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORIAN:
Lo! It came to pass!

JF:
Hey, thank you!

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
Who the heck sent you in to Jeremy?

JF:
It was Mr. Van Gander.

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
Quite the practical joker, Rick Van Gander. I'm Hal, by the way, I'm the geologist. We can breathe a little better out here. You want a doughnut?

JF:
Thanks, I'm fine. I just want to do my interview. At least, I thought that's what I wanted.

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
Sure thing. (
Dialing
) Janelle? The writer? He's asking about his interview? . . . Okay, will do. (
Hanging up
) She's going to come and get you. If she can remember where my office is. Is there something I can help you with in the meantime?

JF:
Thanks. I'm feeling somewhat bludgeoned. I had this idea that I could just sit down with New York in a café and tell her how much I've always loved her. Just casually, the two of us. And then I would describe her beauty.

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
Ha, that's not the way it works anymore.

JF:
The first time I saw her, I was blown away by how green and lush everything was. The Taconic Parkway, the Palisades Parkway, the Hutchinson River Parkway. It was like a fairy tale, with these beautiful old bridges and mile after mile of forest and parkland on either side. It was so utterly different from the flat asphalt and cornfields out where I came from. The scale of it, the age of it.

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
Sure.

JF:
My mom's little sister lived for a long time in Schenectady with my two girl cousins and her husband, who worked for GE. When I was in high school, they moved him away from manufacturing in Schenectady to their corporate headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut. He spent the last years of his career leading the team that designed the new corporate logo. Which turned out to look almost exactly like the old corporate logo.

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
Schenectady ain't doing so well anymore. None of those old manufacturing towns are.

JF:
My aunt and uncle escaped to arty Westport. The summer I turned seventeen, my parents and I drove out to see them there. The first thing that happened was I conceived a huge crush on my cousin Martha. She was eighteen and tall and funny and vivacious and had poor eyesight, and I could actually talk to her halfway comfortably, because we were cousins. And somehow it got arranged—somehow my parents signed off on it—that Martha and I would drive into Manhattan and spend a day there by ourselves. It was August 1976. Hot, smelly, polleny, thundery, weedy. Martha was working as the babysitter and driver for three Westport girls whose father had gone to South America for two months with his wife and his mistress. The girls were sixteen, fourteen, and eleven, all of them incredibly tiny and obsessed with body weight. The middle one played the flute and was precocious and constantly bugging Martha to take her to high school parties where she could meet some older boys. The vehicle Martha chauffeured them in was an enormous black Town Car. By August, she'd already smashed one Town Car and had had to call her employer's office to arrange for another. We sailed down the Merritt Parkway in the left lane at high speed, with all the windows open and furnace-hot air blowing through and the three princesses splayed out across the backseat—the older two of them cute enough and close enough to me in age that I could barely say a word to them. Not that they showed the slightest interest in me anyway. We landed on the Upper East Side, by the art museum, where the girls' grandmother had an apartment. The most impressive thing to me was that the middle girl had come to the city for the day without any shoes. I remember her walking up the hot Fifth Avenue sidewalk barefoot, in her sleeveless top and tiny shorts and carrying her flute. I'd never seen entitlement like this, never even imagined it. It was simultaneously beyond my ken and totally intoxicating. My parents were ur-Midwestern and went through life apologizing and feeling the opposite of entitled. You know, and the hazy blue-gray sky with big white clouds drifting over Central Park. And the buildings of stone and the doormen, and Fifth Avenue like a solid column of yellow cabs receding uptown into this bromine-brown pall of smog. The vast urbanity of it all. And to be there with Martha, my exciting New York cousin, and to spend an afternoon wandering the streets with her, and then have dinner like two adults, and go to a free concert in the park: the self I felt myself to be that day was a self I recognized only because I'd longed for it for so long. I met, in myself, on my first day in New York City, the person I wanted to become. We picked up the girls from their grandmother's around eleven and went to get the Town Car out of the art museum garage, and that was when we discovered that the right-rear tire was flat. A puddle of black rubber. So Martha and I worked shoulder to shoulder, sweating, like a couple, and got the car jacked up and the tire changed while the middle girl sat cross-legged on the trunk of somebody else's car, the soles of her feet all black with the city, and played the flute. And then, after midnight, we drove out of there. The girls asleep in back, like they were the kids I'd had with Martha, and the windows down and the air still sultry but cooler now and smelling of the Sound, and the roads potholed and empty, and the streetlights a mysterious sodium orange, unlike the bluish mercury-vapor lights that were still the standard in St. Louis. And over the Whitestone Bridge we went. And that's when I had the clinching vision. That's when I fell irretrievably for New York: when I saw Co-Op City late at night.

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
Get outta here.

JF:
Seriously. I'd already spent the day in Manhattan. I'd already seen the biggest and most city-like city in the world. And now we'd been driving away from it for fifteen or twenty minutes, which in St. Louis would have been enough to get you out into pitch-dark river-bottom cornfields, and suddenly, as far as I could see, there were these huge towers of habitation, and every single one of them was as tall as the tallest building in St. Louis, and there were more of them than I could count. The most distant ones were over by the water and otherworldly in the haze. Tens of thousands of city lives all stacked and packed against each other. The sheer number of apartments that you could see out here in the southeast Bronx: it all seemed unknowably and excitingly vast, the way my own future seemed to me at that moment, with Martha sitting next to me doing seventy.