Forever (50 page)

He passes a portrait of De Witt Clinton, remembering his delusions of Roman grandeur, his arrogance and gift for respectable larceny, and he nods in salute. Clinton was, when all was carved upon his tomb, still the man who rammed through the Erie Canal and changed New York from a village to a metropolis. If I had time, Cormac thinks, I would write a book about the man and how his immense ambition led to Fernando Wood and then to Bill Tweed and established forever the long, unbreakable tradition of our corruption.

Another painting shows a group of nine men in respectable clothes, painted tightly and painfully, every detail, every object displayed as proof of successful human existence. They are in an anteroom somewhere, with high ceilings and French furniture, presenting to the viewer a framed and lifeless painting of the Hudson River Valley. Beside Cormac now, a man with the long white hair of an aged bohemian removes his glasses to examine the cramped details and says, “I wonder what they’d have thought of Franz Kline?”

Cormac smiles and says, “They might have loved him.” Which they surely would have, had they lived to know that sweet man with his plain worker’s face. The old bohemian turns to Cormac and says, “Yeah, or they might have burned him in City Hall Park.”

They both laugh, and Cormac feels an exuberant conversation about to begin. But then he sees a piece of sculpture against the wall to the right and he is drawn away.

Cormac’s heart thrums as he stands before a marble version of Venus, with both arms mercifully intact, executed in the style of Canova. He knew the sculptor. He knew the model. Her name was Catherine Underwood, and for four years in the mid-1860s, she was Cormac’s wife. His only wife. Catherine something Underwood. He met her at Niblo’s Opera House, three weeks after she arrived with her widowed mother from England, penniless, hopeful, and beautiful. Her mother died of consumption within a year, but by then Cormac and Catherine had married. The mother, of course, disapproved. She wanted a rich husband. Catherine wanted love. Catherine won. Cormac was driven to marriage by loneliness, by the need for a warm human dailiness, by his desire for the permanent presence of her astonishing beauty.

He gazes at her marble face now, in the year 2001, and remembers how they lived in a small, comfortable flat in Horatio Street, financed by his work at newspapers and the sale of an occasional still life or cityscape. She uttered banalities in an exquisite accent. Her manners were excellent too, and she dined with a languid grace, and posed for his brush with a languid grace, and made love in the same vaguely beautiful, languid way. He was bored with her after nine months, and in his solitude often longed for the silky pleasures of the Countess de Chardon. He was certain that she was bored too.

She was. Cormac doesn’t need to bend close to squint at the caption. The sculpture was done by his closest friend, a dashing and drunken genius named Trevor Morris Parker, who stole Catherine from Cormac and took her and his chisels off to Rome. The date on the sculpture is wrong. The piece must have been done in 1868. After she left him. The cold polished marble can’t convey the color of her flesh, of course, the silkiness of her pubic hair, the soapy smell of her neck. But in his Roman studio, Trevor got the firm plumpness of her breasts right and the contours of her belly and buttocks. He got the languor of the pose. He got the emptiness of the eyes.

Cormac walks around the statue twice, the glistening stone as cold as death, remembering her beside him, so warm on winter nights, and remembering the evening when he discovered she was gone: the card propped against the candle in the kitchen, the keys beside it, the armoire emptied of her clothes. And how he picked up the card, his eyes welling with tears, and read the banal words, about how she was sorry to hurt him, but time healed all wounds, and how then he began to laugh. That night he was filled with an enormous surge of freedom. By morning, he was thinking of her as a character in an opera that somebody else had written.

He turns away from Catherine Underwood, his lost languid Venus, and then another picture catches his eye. He crosses the gallery to look at a carefully painted view of dark buildings and a sky lit up by furious orange flames. Engulfed by the flames are chimneys, useless ladders, roofless walls. Crowds are assembled to watch, herded by leather-capped constables on horseback, while firemen work in impotent anger with their frozen, waterless pumps. In the lower corner of the picture, two men stand safely on a stone balcony, one of them wearing a swirling cape. The caption explains that this is the Great Fire of 1835 and the painter is Anonymous. Cormac knows better. It once hung on the wall of Bill Tweed’s suite in the Ludlow Street jail. The painter was Cormac Samuel O’Connor.

Then he senses an odor of perfume. A woman leans in beside him to read the caption.

Elizabeth Warren.

“I didn’t know that New York had a great fire too,” she says in a cool way. “London did, of course….”

“This was an amazing fire too,” Cormac says. “It destroyed more than seven hundred buildings, a third of the city.”

“Good God.”

She straightens up, her head rising on her long neck, and she looks at Cormac with those wide-spaced hazel eyes.

“Well, how did it start?”

“Arson.”

“You’re kidding me.”

She has one of those Atlantic accents that are acquired by Brits who spend years in America and Americans who spend parts of their youth in Britain. Precise use of words. Hard consonants. Cormac flashes, absurdly, on Pat Moynihan and George Plimpton. Away off, someone begins playing a piano. “Dancing in the Dark”…

“It was a form of urban renewal,” Cormac says. “The old Dutch houses were too small for profit, and someone—almost certainly a landlord—torched one of them, and then another. Just to get rid of them and rebuild with larger buildings and higher rents.”
I have you, love, and we can face the music, togeth-er
…. “Then a huge wind came off the harbor, and the thing went out of control. There was no water either. See, in here? It was bitter cold, just before Christmas, and even the river was frozen. Down there? Those are firemen whose pumps are useless.”

“Are you a historian?”

“Well, I’ve read a lot of the city’s history.”

He can’t tell her that he is in the painting too, there in the distance, tiny and furtive in the purple shadows under the orange flames. Making notes and sketches. The piano pushes through the murmur of marbleized voices. The sound of the old tunes pushes in from the other room.
“Looking for the light of a new love…”

“New York
does
have a history, doesn’t it?” she says. “So many American cities have a past but no history.”

Cormac looks at her and smiles.

“That’s true,” he says.

And feels that a last act is beginning.

97.

I
n the morning, there are five messages on the answering machine.
Healey cancels breakfast, promising an explanation later in the day, then explaining he’s got a live one on the line from Hollywood. Delfina says she’s just checking in. The other calls are from the mysterious Area Code 800, the vast hidden limbo of American life, selling services for high-speed telephone lines or newspaper delivery or real estate. Cormac calls Delfina and gets her machine. He leaves a message. In the shower, he feels a jittery nervousness, as if various unseen filaments were trying to form a web.

After the shower, dried, shaved, dressed, he sees the message light blinking again on the answering machine. He plays it.

“Hello, this is Elizabeth Warren. We met last night at the museum. My husband and I are having a dinner party on Friday night and I’d love it if you could come. We could talk more about great fires and such. I think you’d find it amusing….”

He calls back and gets a social secretary with a French accent and writes down the details. He thinks: The rivers are converging.

98.

I
n the foreground is Delfina, but now, back near the tree line in an
imagined landscape, Elizabeth Warren makes her appearance too. In small ways, Delfina is revealing herself, and so is Cormac. They speak by telephone. They send e-mails. On one of his walks, he throws away his cigarettes, and when he tells her this, she says perhaps she’ll do the same. “The smell is disgusting,” she says. “I can’t stand it sometimes…. And I can’t stand going all the way down to the street to smoke with the other addicts. It’s a long way to go in my building….”

He takes her to lunch at Windows on the World, high above the city, and she’s excited by the views, which are even more spectacular than the views from her office, Cormac, in a smaller way, is also impressed. He can see the Bronx and much of New Jersey and the slopes of Brooklyn. Pieces of the undiscovered country. He can see the greensward of Central Park and the roof of the Metropolitan Museum and the mesas of apartment houses, one of which contains the Warrens. He can look down at the pinnacle of the Woolworth Building, where he worked humping steel in 1912 and watched Cass Gilbert gazing from Broadway in troubled acceptance of his own masterpiece. He can see human beings down on Church Street, the size of commas. In Delfina’s presence, he fights off the past: It is gone, finished, unrecoverable (he tells himself), and yet might indeed be parked in what was called a century earlier the Fourth Dimension. Another phrase now lost.

Delfina begins to relax with him. To make bad jokes. To drop the street language. To be at once younger and older. She makes no moves at all toward permanence. Time is provisional. Perhaps they will meet tomorrow. Perhaps after work she will come to his bed. Perhaps she will not. She loves the bookshelves in his loft and borrows a book about Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the Benefactor, who tortured and killed some of her relatives in the Dominican Republic. Then she talks about the mayor’s long year of tabloid agony, and how if Donna, the mayor’s wife, were Dominican, she’d have cut off his thing and thrown herself on the mercy of the court.

She avoids asking now about his past. And she never mentions the future. She has a new job and wants to do well, but the job, like Cormac, is part of the present tense. Along with food, drink, and bed.

When he’s alone, he realizes that she is living one narrative and he is living another. He doesn’t mention Elizabeth Warren. And he is not certain what Delfina’s hidden narrative contains. His own contains too many secrets.

99.

T
he butler is tall, dark-haired, about forty. He nods at Cormac’s
name, takes a drink order, and says, “They’re all out on the terrace, Mister O’Connor.” A
landsman,
the accent pure Belfast. No sentence from the North is ever declarative; every statement contains the possibility of some other way of seeing the same set of facts. Like Yiddish, a language that contains escape. In his nod, and the slight smile, Cormac senses an acknowledgment of old conspiracies. Across a long, quietly lit room he sees glass doors with silhouettes moving behind them against the darkening sky. Then Elizabeth Warren is coming to greet him.

“Oh, Cormac, welcome, welcome.”

Dressed in a black Armani frock, knee-length with a scoop neck, short sleeves. Her lean, flawless arms. A sudden glitter of diamonds from her earrings. Cartier, of course. And those shoes Cormac saw in a story in the
Times
. Manolo something. Her tan darker in the muted light.

“Did Patrick take your drink order?”

“He did.”

She grasps each of his hands in greeting, her own hands cool, then leads him toward the balcony. They’re on the top floor of a triplex, high above Fifth Avenue, a few blocks north of the Frick. A story on the Internet told him that the Warrens occupy sixteen rooms here, but the place has a sense of planned, cultivated intimacy. He glances in passing around this wide sitting room that opens to the deep terrace and wonders if the terrace counts as a room. Off to the right: a huge silvery Sargent portrait of a redhaired woman in a full silk gown; Sargent, as always, makes the silk whisper. Luscious paint, buttery skin. Two Corots. Real ones. A Degas view of a racecourse. A wall of leathery books, tooled morocco, complete works and matching sets. Cormac remembers a party forty years earlier, a few blocks from this place, where the ex-chorus-girl wife of a real estate operator gazed at a similar wall of collected works and argued with a friend: “That can’t be Thackeray. Thackeray is
green
.”

Then Willie Warren himself comes forward and Elizabeth introduces them. He smiles in a tentative way, lifts a tumbler of scotch in salute, brushes at his untended hair with the other hand. Dark business suit. Violet tie. His face is fleshy, sweaty, but not yet fat. He has a pleasant smile.

“Ah, yes, Mister O’Connor. You’re a kind of historian, I take it. I’ve heard so much about you from Elizabeth. Welcome.”

A small tuxedoed Latino man arrives with Cormac’s cut-glass tumbler of ice water, the cold base wrapped in a cloth napkin.

“Thanks for having me,” Cormac says to Warren. “And by the way, this morning’s paper was terrific.”

“Well,
that’s
refreshing to hear. Usually people come to me with some kind of complaint, bitch, bitch, bitch, the usual New York thing—and I have to keep saying, ‘I’m just the
publisher!
’ ” He laughs. “But please, tell my editor, will you? Oh, Mister James, here’s a
fan.
”

And then it’s like an anthology of a thousand other New York dinner parties: drinks, remarks, and rehearsed wit, mixed with testing, auditioning, seducing. Warren introduces Cormac to Max James, his small, intense editor. Thinning gray hair. A bitter slash of mouth. Cormac says he was a copy boy at the
Post
in the three months before Dolly Schiff sold it to Rupert Murdoch (a lie, of course), and James says it’s much more fun running a paper for Warren—a tabloid in a broadsheet dress—than hanging around the bowels of the
New York Times,
where he worked for twenty-three years. Nobody mentions the story in
New York
magazine the year before, the article that said Max James left the
Times
for Warren’s rowdier broadsheet because he’d been told he was completely out of the running for the top editor’s job. “He’s too much of a prick,” said one anonymous source. “Even for the
Times
.” They chat now about Punch and Mort and Rupert and the problems that all of them are having and how the papers would be in a lot better shape if the Mets would start playing the way they did the year before, since nobody likes reading about losers. But Cormac can see the editor’s eyes wandering, longing to talk to the other guests, to Someone Important, instead of wasting time (at Warren’s command) with this unknown. Cormac wishes Healey could appear at his side, with his genius for disruption. And then Elizabeth is there to take him away.

“Come, you must meet the others,” she says.

She introduces Cormac to a few guests. Casually, smiling, then slipping away. Cormac exchanges polite nods, pleased-to-meet-yous. Men sipping. Ice clinking. He hears Billie Holiday singing from the inside room: “He’s Funny That Way.” Across the park, the tall broad-shouldered buildings of Central Park West are forming a black wall pierced with diamonds. The plump Dakota. Rosemary’s terrible baby. John Lennon lying in his blood.
“Just glad I’m living…”
The sky over New Jersey is orange streaked with purple. An airliner heads north before the right turn to LaGuardia, using the black line of the river as a guide. Much lower, helicopters beat toward Thirtieth Street. Cormac can see the Twin Towers in the distance, flashes on Delfina,
the spirals,
turns back into the party, remembering when all of this was fields and sky.

He shakes hands with a small pinched investment banker who reminds him of John Jay when he came back to New York after the signing of the peace treaty in Paris. The treaty that brought independence from the British. Jay in turn reminded him of the little dance teacher who used to come to Hughson’s to marvel at the Africans. Jay and his dreadful wife, her large pointed bosom always at attention… The investment banker’s name is Ridley. He has no interest in Cormac, of course, and why should he? He shakes hands and keeps talking. He’s saying that anybody with a tenth of a brain could have foreseen the death of the dot-coms. “But nobody wanted to face it,” he says. “They thought they could have capitalism without profits.”

“They were putting money in the NASDAQ without even knowing what the initials stood for,” says a tall, smiling man whose teeth are very white against his tanned skin. His name is Farragut and Cormac knows from the
Post
business pages that he’s in real estate. “By the way, what
do
they stand for?”

They all laugh.

“Everybody made mistakes,” says a balding, heavyset man named Sterman. He works for some vague foundation. The National Institute of Some Kind of Policy. A major fund-raiser for the Democratic party. “Even Clinton. He should have blocked that goddamned suit against Bill Gates. Microsoft was the El Dorado, the real thing, a technology outfit with real profits. It made a thousand other people think they could hit the same jackpot. When that asshole judge found Microsoft guilty, the gold rush ended.”

“That was part of it,” says Ridley. “I agree. The illusion was crucial to the thing. But Clinton’s dick didn’t help.”

“Yeah, Frank, but this dickhead in the White House isn’t helping either.”

On the edge of the terrace, flicking ashes into a planter, a former ambassador to Prague is talking to a television reader named Brownlee. Cormac reaches for his pack of cigarettes, but he has none on his person. He knows that if he borrows only one he’ll be smoking again at midnight. A lean, tanned woman named Peggy Ashley, the operator of a Soho gallery, her beige dress accentuating her deep early-season Saint Martin tan, listens to the talking men, her brow furrowing in concentration, while behind her back a film director named Johnson chats with a black banker and a pitching coach for the Yankees. They are people who resemble the subject matter of a newspaper. Emblems of the new century: eclectic and democratic, delegates from the meritocracy.

All remain true to certain New York traditions, which Cormac first saw in the Brownstone Republic in the 1840s. That tradition still insists, among many other things, that it’s bad form at social gatherings to ask a stranger what he or she does for a living. As he’s introduced, Cormac is not asked what he does. Hangover from the 1840s, when no rich New Yorker under fifty had ever done anything at all. In those refined precincts, the children of the rich were trained to be useless. The second wave, after the Civil War, avoided all queries because each of them was a secret gangster. Now they all let you know what they do, to avoid being asked. Cormac notices that they show their identity cards now with hints, angular references, declarations of hard-earned knowledge. Don’t ask, I’ll tell. The blond wife of the pitching coach, with the sun-crinkled, glowing face of a retired airline stewardess, doesn’t know the rules. She asks Cormac what he does. He smiles (wanting to protect her too) and tells her he’s a kind of historian.

“How wonderful,” she says. “Of what?”

“New York City.”

“Cool,” she says. “I must tell Mike. He loves history, ’specially the Civil War and World War Two. He has every book Stephen Ambrose ever wrote. And he must have fifty books at home about the Civil War. He talks about Grant and Lee like he pitched against them….”

The sky is mauve now. When she mentions the Civil War, he sees Bill Tweed shouting for calm. He is in bed in Tweed’s mansion, his thigh taped, his head in bandages, and Tweed says, “What sword?” He mumbles to the former stewardess about the Civil War in New York, and the Irish Legion marching bravely off to die, and General Meagher with his mad courage, and the way the town boomed, selling uniforms and blankets. And all the cripples later. She smiles in a fixed way. She wants Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Not this bore, with his dark visions. She turns in relief to a new tray of drinks.

Proper nouns ricochet around the terrace: Rudy and Donna, Dubya and Clinton, Piazza and Clemens, Gates and Rupert. The verbs don’t matter. What matters is to be current, to speak intimately about public figures. Cormac drifts to the edge of the balcony. The former ambassador to Prague and Peggy from the Soho gallery are discussing Kokoschka. Cormac could mention that he talked one long afternoon in 1909 with Gustav Mahler on a park bench across from the Majestic. The composer loved the sound of Klaxons and bicycle bells, and mumbled about his goddamned wife, Alma. Here, among the guests of the Warrens, Cormac chooses the silence of a lifetime and says nothing. After all, how could he have known Mahler when he looks as if he were born around the time of the Kennedy assassination? All these decades later, he looks about forty.

The Metropolitan is still brightly lit, its roof washed coppery green, and lights mark the paths cut into the blackness of the park. Away off to the right, on the northern rim, is the rosy sky over Harlem. Cormac flashes again on Stanford White: his ruddy face and twinkling eyes as he describes his plans for the Harlem block later called Striver’s Row. Our Bernini, creating the vision of New York the way Bernini invented modern Rome. All of that in a forgotten year before Harlem turned black; before the great exodus from Thirtieth Street and Hudson began (down there where the helicopters land); before Minton’s and Monroe’s Uptown and Frank’s restaurant and Duke Ellington. And then, absurdly, Cormac again sees Washington in his bloodstained shirt, sword in hand, standing straight up, nostrils flaring, shouting to his men to fight these bastards, fight them and they’ll
run
…. And right up there, Bantu died. And Carlito and Big Michael, Silver and Aaron, and from here it all looks so small and bare when it was once huge and dense with woods.

Then Warren is beside him. He hears Vivaldi playing from the inside room.

“Every time I see this view,” Warren says, “at this time of the evening, I feel like I’ve died and gone to Heaven.”

“It sure is beautiful.”

“So what kind of history are you writing?”

“It’ll be about New York. I guess I’ll write it to find out what it is.”

“I wish we had some history in the paper.”

“Good idea. Although someone once said that journalism was history in a hurry. So, in a way, the paper is filled with history.”

“Yes, but there’s no goddamned context in
any
of our papers. They write as if everything is happening for the first time.”

“Even if it’s the first time that week,” Cormac says.

“Or that morning.”

He laughs, sips his scotch, and lays a foot on the rim of a flowerpot.

“Hey, what about you taking a crack at doing—I don’t know—a history column for us? You know, giving us some of that goddamned
context
. If the mayor and his wife have a battle over Gracie Mansion, tell us who Gracie was and where he got his money and how the mansion got there and how the mayor of New York came to live in it.
That
kind of thing.”

“Good idea,” Cormac hears himself saying. “But I’d better finish what I’m doing first.”

“I mean, who the hell was Major
Deegan,
anyway?” He smiles broadly. “One of Rupert’s Aussies once looked up from his desk down on South Street, gazed at the FDR Drive, and asked, Who is this
F.D.R.?
” He switches to a British accent, very plummy. “Who
is
this F.D.R., anyway?”

Cormac laughs, encouraging Warren.

“Well, at least I know who Washington Heights is named for, even if I don’t really know where the hell it is.”

“It’s right up there,” Cormac says, pointing up toward the George Washington Bridge. He wants to say, You have an ancestor who lived there once, his bones long scoured by the river and the sea. Instead, he says, “Irving Place, in Gramercy Park, is named for Washington Irving, our first great New York writer, and Irving was named for George Washington too. Everything’s connected.”

“God damn it,” Warren says with enthusiasm, “we could have a weekly feature just on the names of streets! Explain who Irving was, and Beekman, and Bayard, and Mott, all those streets downtown… Of course, we’d get some letters asking who the first Mister Broadway was.”

“Joe Namath, I think.”

“Exactly,” he says. “A great figure of the distant 1960s…”