Forever (42 page)
T
he envelope contained a bank draft for five thousand dollars and the
key to a safe-deposit box at the Bank of New York. And there was a note in Bill Tweed’s hand: “I wish this was more, but it’s something. So long, old friend.”
When Cormac opened the box on the following morning, he found the deed to a house on Duane Street next door to the building where Tweed did business while he was the Boss. He walked down there for a look and realized that he’d passed it many times without ever noticing it. Four stories of red brick on the northeast corner of Church Street. From across the street, he could see a studio on the top floor with windows facing south toward the harbor. A studio. With windows glistening in the sun. While newsboys shouted the story of the death of the Boss.
“Bill Tweed is dead, readallabout it!”
“Get it all in the
Herald….”
Cormac’s hands trembled as he gazed at another note in Bill Tweed’s hand. “Fill in the blanks with whatever name you want to use,” the note said. “Then take it to Edelstein.” But that day, and part of the next, he couldn’t move. He lay on the bed in the Leonard Street flat, the newspapers scattered around him, images of Tweed in life gliding into the cartoons of Thomas Nast.
He didn’t go to the wake at the Tweed home on Madison Avenue and couldn’t leave Manhattan for the burial in Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. But he waited under gray skies at Broadway near City Hall and watched the procession of eighteen carriages move south toward State Street and the Hamilton Ferry. Two mounted policemen led the way. Cormac joined those who walked behind the carriages, and then moved away at the ferry. He threw the Boss a salute and started for home. In the sky, a flock of seagulls cried a farewell.
The day after the burial, he went first to his own bank and added the draft to the one hundred and six dollars he had in his account. Then he walked to Hanover Square to see Edelstein.
“I hated yesterday,” Edelstein said.
“Yes.”
“That mayor wouldn’t even lower the flags to half-mast.”
“He’ll be forgotten when Bill is still remembered.”
“You’ve got something for me, right?” Edelstein said.
“I do.”
He handed the paper to Edelstein, the deed to the house on Duane Street.
“What name do you want to use?”
“I haven’t thought about it.”
“I have,” Edelstein said. “There was a man was killed in Antietam, no family, no relatives. I went to school with him. Francis Aloysius Kavanagh. No
U
in Kavanagh.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“In a year or two, we can change it to some company. We’ll make one up.”
“Even better.”
He started filling in the blanks on the deed, then took a stamp and some wax and a notary’s seal and thumped on the paper.
“Just sign here, Mister Kavanagh.”
Cormac signed his latest name.
“Done.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all, Mister Kavanagh.”
Edelstein smiled and lit a cigar.
“It’s a fine house, Cormac,” Edelstein said. “You could live there forever.”
C
ormac waits for the dark young lady on an evening of steady rain.
Not just rain, but an unruly New York rain, pushed by river winds. He is in the backyard of a restaurant called East of Eighth, on Twenty-third Street, next to a movie multiplex. It’s a few minutes after seven on an evening in March. A huge Cinzano umbrella spreads above the table, but the wet breeze toys with it, lifting it along an edge, filling it like a parachute, then dropping it, spraying him with rain. A young bright-blond waiter comes over, shielding his hair with a large menu, and says that he can move Cormac inside to the upstairs room. Cormac smiles and shakes his head.
“I like the rain,” he says. “And I’m meeting someone here.”
“Suit yourself,” the waiter says in an irritated way, and goes back to his place inside the back door that opens to this garden. Cormac does like the rain. Across all the years, it has felt like a gift, a cleansing refreshment of air and skin. And it always puts him, if only for a few seconds, in Ireland long ago. The New York rain is drumming now on the umbrellas of the empty tables the way it long ago drummed upon the roof of a blacksmith’s forge. The way it hammered then on the snug slate roof of the vanished old house. His first house in the world. His truest home. Now, in this fleeting present tense, he watches the rain racing down the brick walls of the adjoining buildings, making a million little glistening rivers. Rain released by the March sky. Falling upon this street where once he lived many days and nights, long ago, in a world now vanished.
The wall he now faces is the wall of an office building. The wall behind him rumbles with explosions from a movie being shown in the multiplex. Images of other Twenty-third Street theaters race through him, quick as rain. The tail end of the nineteenth century, the years after Tweed died, and New York changed again as everything moved uptown. Gaslight and fog. Streetcars and horses. Golden footlights. An orchestra leader in a tux with his back to the audience. The odor of forgotten perfumes. Women in the lobbies of hotels. Rouged faces. Eyes defined by kohl. And there: a wife, now long dead, laughing when she sees him enter the foyer. Betrayal in her laugh. He tries to remember her full name. Catherine something Underwood. The middle name will not come. The rain drums on the umbrella. A fire engine screams through the evening.
When Tweed died, time flowed on, of course, and so did life. Slicker bandits arrived in New York, with even greater appetites than anyone in the Ring. The pigs were gone from the street. Another kind of swine took over the elegant Victorian sties. Electricity killed the darkness of midnight and drove elevators into the high floors of new buildings. Great armies of immigrants arrived at Castle Garden, speaking Yiddish and Sicilian and the English of Ireland. They were coming to the New Jerusalem, and the population soared to more than a million. Tenements rose to house them, while the Brooklyn Bridge soared majestically over the East River. Sailing ships became more and more rare as steam power brought liners to the new piers along the North River.
Cormac fought brain sludge writing dozens of preposterous novels for Beadle & Adams and the other fiction factories, into which he sneaked sympathies for unions, and the poor, and the despised Irish, along with his astonished love for the city itself. He did not exactly think of himself as an American, but he was definitely a New Yorker. That meant that he embraced the city’s culture of work, even though the bounty of Bill Tweed had freed him from the need to earn money to eat. He wrote one dime novel in three days, a nine-part serial in two weeks. To flush his brain, he wrote another entirely in German, and then did it all over again in English. He moved from one newspaper to another, the rhythm of his life falling into a year of work, a year of disappearance. In New York, nobody expected constancy anymore. On newspapers, he welcomed the anonymity of the copy desk, where he corrected the style and grammar of younger men, but he was still thrilled by the chance to go out to the streets as a reporter. He saw the arrival of Pulitzer from St. Louis and worked for him at
The World
in three different years under three different names, without ever meeting him. He saw the arrival of Hearst too, young and brash and full of the romantic excitements driven into him by the West, convinced that the coming century would belong to him. While Hearst and Pulitzer fought it out along Park Row, the halftone changed the look of newspapers, allowing reproduction of photographs on high-speed presses, and the old pen-and-ink sketch artists were soon gone, to make illustrations for magazines or to draw comic strips or to create paintings that evoked the streets where they had worked for newspapers, instead of some lost European Arcadia full of nymphs and princes. Some of them lived here on Twenty-third Street, others drifted to the small houses west of Greenwich Village.
The subjects of Cormac’s scrutiny as a reporter had not changed from the early years of the century: the usual murders, the usual suicides, the usual robberies, the usual schemes for instant wealth. Only the details were different. There were big stories too, from the astonishing beauty of the Blizzard of 1888, when the Battery was turned into a blinding white pasture and the only sound for three days was the rasping of shovels, to the horrors that followed the Panic of 1893 (brokers diving from windows, children found starved in tenements, undertakers working triple time), and, as the century wound down, the jingo fever of the Spanish-American War.
All of this was impersonal, which was the way Cormac wanted it. But in the years after Tweed died, he began to see stories in the newspapers that entered him like knife thrusts. They were all small: social notes, really, in diaries from London, and in the society gossip that flowed from Gramercy Park and Madison Square. They were not the stuff of page-one headlines. But there was a story of a woman at a party in London, and a young man who appeared at an opera opening in Paris. Another was found dead in Australia of heart failure. A fourth was living out West, beyond the Rockies, operating a mine. All were Warrens. All traced their descent to the Earl of Warren. He could not leave Manhattan to pursue them, but he feared their arrival on his granite island.
“Please don’t come to New York,” he said out loud one night in his studio in Duane Street. “Please don’t come here….”
One of them did, Michael Warren, a handsome young fellow (the newspapers said), with a reddish tinge to his dark brown hair, tall, broad-shouldered, witty. He was on his way to London and was staying with friends in Gramercy Park. Cormac read these stories with a weary sense of responsibility. The Warrens were appearing in his life now like the terms of an old curse. From the distant past, he heard Mary Morrigan repeat the rules of the tribe. He remembered the way his father had died. He heard his father speaking: “In our tribe, the murderer must be pursued to the ends of the earth. And his male children too. They must be brought to the end of the line….”
And then Cormac was relieved. One newspaper explained that this Michael Warren was leaving for London on the morning Cormac read the newspapers. That is, he was already gone. There was no need to travel to Gramercy Park, to stand in leafy shadows, to observe, to plan an ambush. No need to replace the lost sword with another weapon. It was a kind of reprieve. But he knew it was not permanent. For certain Americans, all roads led to New York.
Meanwhile, he could only try to live his life. He told himself that change was everything, that it was essential to any life, long or short. One year, he drew and painted with his left hand only, which took the slickness out of his drawing and even made him stand and sit in new ways. In another year, he learned to sign, so that he could speak to deaf-mutes, and wrote an article about them for the
Century
. He bought a camera too, which used 4 × 5 glass plates, and wandered the streets photographing buildings, later pasting them together along one wall of the top-floor studio. He thought of this as a way of seeing more deeply what he had known too familiarly. When he had photographed every house on three blocks, he stopped using the camera and buried himself in the Hall of Records, examining documents and deeds for each building, writing the information on small cards that served as captions for the photographs. His brain sparkled.
Across those years, he had love affairs. He made cautious friendships. He helped bury Cahill in 1894 and a year later did the same for Edelstein. He read many books and listened to much music. He walked each year to the river on his birthday and dropped a flower in the flowing waters, hoping it would sail to Ireland. He sometimes longed for the Countess de Chardon. About once a week, he’d remember Bill Tweed and his marvelous laugh.
Now, as the March rain falls on Twenty-third Street, he rises up again from the past.
“Hello,” a voice says.
He looks up, and she is standing above him, Delfina Cintron. Smiling, her teeth very white in her dark face. She is wearing a wet tan trench coat, the collar up, and her hair is a wild mass of sprouting black curls. She carries no umbrella, for the day had begun with sun. Cormac rises, takes her elbow in greeting.
“We can go inside,” he says. “They have a table upstairs.”
She glances around the yard, with its empty tables and steady drumming of raindrops, and a look of satisfaction crosses her face. It’s as if she accepted the feeling of an intimate fortress, walling off the world.
“This is fine,” she says. “I like the rain.”
He uses a white cloth napkin to wipe a puddle off a chair, and she sits down.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” she says. She pronounces the word “sawry.” The long soft vowel of the Caribbean.
“You’re not all that late,” Cormac says. She glances at her watch, with its red plastic wristband.
“Nine minutes,” she says and smiles again. “People used to say Latinos were always late, so I made a big deal out of being on time. My friends called me En Punto Cintron. On-the-dot Cintron. But at the store, the customers never leave on time, so we can’t leave either.”
“Inconsiderate swine,” Cormac says, and they both laugh in a way that is not quite comfortable. Cormac thinks: I don’t know how to do this anymore. I don’t know what to say or how to begin. I don’t know the music or the movies or the slang. Every woman in the world is too young for me. The Queen Mother of England, aged one hundred, is too young for me. This girl: She’s an undiscovered country. And beautiful too.
Delfina Cintron wears no makeup, but her dark ochre skin is reddish with youth. Cinnamon skin. Redolent of Africa and the sun of the Caribbean. An airplane passes overhead, flying very low.
“That guy must be trying to land on Ninety-sixth Street,” she says.
“Or Central Park.”
“If we hear a boom, he missed something.”
The sound of engines roars away into nothing, and they hear only the rain drumming on umbrellas. The waiter arrives, now protecting his yellow hair with a fuchsia umbrella bearing the name of the restaurant. He hands them two menus. He is gym thin, his hair combed into quills. Delfina smiles at him in an amused way.
“Something to drink?” he says. Cormac turns to her. “Delfina? A drink?”
She nibbles the inside of her full lower lip. Actually choosing.
The pause of someone who does not drink.
“A rum an’ tonic,” she says. Her voice is hoarse and furry. “Pellegrino for me,” Cormac says.
The waiter nods and goes away.
The curls of her hair are tiny and fine and very black. For the first time in years, he wants to plunge his hands through hair until he can feel the curved bone of a female skull. Delfina reads the menu as if it were a sacred text. Delfina Cintron. Her body hidden under the raincoat the way her skull is hidden under her exploding hair.
And Cormac remembers seeing her for the first time, walking on Fourteenth Street, on a day thick with August. Last year. Last summer. The year of Our Lord 2000, when all the predictions about the millennium came up empty on the first day of the year. There was no universal computer crash. There were no arrivals of long-dead gods. He had never felt more tired, more thickened by sludge. A sludge made of boring televised repetitions. A sludge of journalistic alarums and diversions that turned out to be nothing. A sludge dominated, day after day, by the tyrannies of clocks and calendars.
And here she came: wearing low-cut jeans and a black halter with part of her smooth brown belly showing. Then he glanced up at her face. She wore her face that day like a mask of defiance. The makeup severe. The eyes dead. The combination of smooth flesh and hardened eyes saying: Go ahead and try,
pendejo
.
“How is the food here?”
“Okay,” Cormac says. “But don’t try anything fancy.” “Maybe pasta, no?”
“Sí.”
“Tu español está mejorando, Señor O’Connor.”
“Ojalá, Señorita Cintron.”
Remembering how he had stopped that August day as she went by. Stunned. Short of breath. His heart pounding. Fourteenth Street jammed with shoppers and junkies, cops and schoolboys, telephone repairmen, cable installers, women with kids in strollers, delivery boys, homeless men in winter coats. Her hair bobbing as she cut a path through the crowd. Then there was a surge of pedestrians, and he lost her. Cursing himself for a goddamned fool. Cursing his slowness, his caution. Looking and looking and looking, then cursing the gods for playing with him. He came again to Fourteenth Street, at the same time, the same corner, arrived day after day for three weeks: hoping to see her in the crowd. To approach her. To try to know if this dark lady was
the
dark lady, sketched for him long ago in a cave in Inwood. And then thought: Perhaps she was an illusion, a specter created by August heat, by lack of water, or by my own need. She might have been just another ghost in the haunted city.
In September he saw her again at last, coming out of the New School on Fifth Avenue, cutting across Fourteenth Street to the north side of the street, then moving west. He followed her like a detective on the trail of a murder suspect, watching the bobbing hair, the rhythmic walk, the long tawny legs (for this time she wore a skirt and blouse), while car horns blared at a double-parked sanitation truck and an ambulance screamed for passage. She hurried into a drugstore, pushing the door sharply before her. A Rite Aid. On the corner. She vanished through that front door. And didn’t come out.
