Metropolis (14 page)

When the pavers had finished a section, it looked like it was done, but it wasn’t. It was fragile. Just one man walking across the street would have gotten the stones all out of order. That was when the rammers came through with their log butts and drove the blocks down into the sand. Last came the chuckers, who filled the interstices with gravel heated (by Frank Harris, of course) to ensure no moisture was trapped within, where it could freeze in winter, spall the stones, spring the grout. Finally, they sealed the joints with bubbling tar. It was a highly modern style of road building, tested by science and specified by the Common Council of the city for all new construction. People said a road built this way ought to last several lifetimes without a single pothole. Harris liked hearing that kind of talk—he liked its optimism. It justified his toil, even if he knew he was more than qualified to do more skilled work.

The entire first week was a blur of excitement, exhaustion, jammed fingers and nasty burns from working with the coal burners and hot gravel and tar, but nonetheless he enjoyed it, knowing he was helping to build something useful, something important. At night, he fell asleep almost before he’d finished his dinner. He dreamed of high stone towers and didn’t stir till Liam kicked him awake at dawn. Lessons with Beatrice were suspended. He told her he was doing fine, and it was true. Still, it was the first time since the O’Gamhnas took him in that he had gone for more than a day without having an intimate conversation with Beatrice. She had been his full-time tutor and constant companion. He thought of her, but truly he was too tired to handle the complexities of their flirtation, to grapple with why it was happening and whether it was real. That week, he didn’t think of her slim fingers wrapping around his whenever he could steal a moment; he didn’t dread his future obligations to the Whyos. For the most part, he simply watched Liam and the other pavers pause in raking smooth the sand on a section of foundation. The pavers blinked impassively as they examined the grade, agreed that it was off, and out came the protractors, the tape measures, the levels. They were perfectionists, and Harris admired that. While he shoveled hot gravel, he kept his eyes on them and let himself vicariously enjoy the rapid, regular movements of their hands as they left behind row after interlocked row of evenly spaced stones, so regular, so permanent, that they already seemed to have been there forever.

The day that one of the pavers was hit in the face with a grapeshot of broiling gravel was Harris’s day of days. That was the way luck worked in the metropolis—for some to win, others must lose. Cooking the gravel had become one of Harris’s favorite tasks. The flames had to burn blue for an hour under each load to get it dry enough to ensure a stable grout, and the fire had to be fed continuously. He loved watching it and enjoyed the tricky job of tipping the roasting-hot stones out into cooling panniers, especially on cool spring afternoons like that one. Harris just happened to have stepped away from the fire to help another laborer unload a cart when the paver approached the fire to warm his hands. It was not his fault that some covert pocket of rainwater had just then gone to steam, exploding its stony capsule. Indeed, it might very well have been him who was hit. When he turned at the sound of the shout, the man was already on the ground. Liam called Harris over a short time later, as the man was being carted away with white bindings wrapped around his head like a blindfold.

“I told the boss you were a builder back in Ireland, you worked on churches. And that I’d vouch for you. He says do you want to fill in?”

It was Harris’s break. At long last he would be the one to set the stones again. He would be one of the authors of the road they made. “I’m sorry about what happened, but I’ll be glad to do it, more than glad.”

By the end of the third week, he was feeling strong: tossing the big fourteen-pound blocks as lightly as apples. He could look behind him at the end of the shift and see what he had made and that it was good, that it would last. One afternoon, when clouds rolled in and the air took on a spring chill, several of the chuckers and rammers and pavers gathered around the warmth of the gravel fire while they waited for new loads of materials. They were all talking about a man named Parnell, and they were excited. He was some sort of Irish political visionary, and he was coming to New York to lecture. Harris found himself daydreaming, humming a bit of a hymn. Without thinking about it, he had come upon a way to think in German without risking his cover as a taciturn Irishman—for he did miss his language, did feel the strain of always having to be someone he wasn’t: He could listen to the lyrics in his head as he hummed without pronouncing them.

“What’s that hymn?” asked one of the chuckers, and Harris realized he didn’t know the English name, nor had he stopped to ask himself if that song was sung in the Catholic Church. The men had been talking politics, and now it seemed that the chucker had taken offense, had read something into his abstention from their conversation, had heard the Church of England in the melody Harris hummed. He looked up, puzzling how to respond, and noticed the woman who was always hawking hot corn on the corner.

“
Lily-white corn, get your lily-white corn,
” she sang in a tune that was somewhat different from the usual hot-corn girl’s. Somehow, her voice reminded him of Beatrice. He realized he’d been too absorbed by this job. He wanted to talk to Beatrice, he needed it, to smell her skin and get her reassurance, to find out if there was a chance. He could be Frank Harris, if she really wanted him to, he’d proven that. But if she didn’t care, he’d rather be himself, perhaps even if it meant exposure, arrest, being held culpable for Luther Undertoe’s crimes.

Now all the men were staring at him, even Liam. He shrugged. “I don’t really know. I don’t remember the words.” He looked at his hands, still shiny and scarred in places from being burned in the fire, and he thought of his past. In fact, he remembered the words of the hymn very well, could almost hear his mother singing them in the pew beside him. But then he heard Maggie singing “
lily-white corn,
” and something told him,
No, you’re Frank Harris now. You can’t go back.
He jammed his hands in his pockets and went back to work. Better not to think, just to be, he told himself.

That night, he told Beatrice he needed more coaching. His cover had been effective, so far; his accent was convincing; his taciturnity was crucial. But he didn’t know enough about Ireland. He didn’t know what hymns a man might hum, what horses had been famous a decade before, what politicians compelled people and why. He knew the basics, naturally, about the famine, the tenant-farming system, the English landlords, the Orangemen. Everyone had heard of those things, but he didn’t know enough to have an opinion, to feel passion. To be convincing, he needed to.

“That’s a good idea, Harris,” she said. “I’m glad you asked.” He looked at her and wished he could know her mind. Did she know that what he really wanted was anything but a political education? Did she care? He couldn’t tell. But it worked. For the first time in weeks they sat up at the kitchen table till late, sipping beer. He learned that Beatrice did indeed feel fervent about the cause of Irish nationalism. She told him about how her brother had marched with Parnell in Dublin, and she pulled out a bundle of his letters, from which she read to Harris terrible accounts of what the English were still doing to oppress the Irish—starving them, robbing them, arresting anyone who dared to object.

“But I really just want to bring Padric over. I’m saving every penny for that. If he stays there, he’s going to get himself killed.”

“How much more do you need?” He didn’t have more than a few dollars to his name, but he was ready to pledge them all to her brother’s cause.

“Oh,” she said. “I used to send money back whenever I had it, but he spent it just living, you know. And I think he gave some of it to the cause, to buy guns. So now I’m waiting till I can buy the ticket all at once. I’m pretty nearly there.”

The following week, she took him to the Cooper Union to hear Charles Parnell drumming up support from the immigrant community for those they’d left behind. They saw a couple of the men from the paving crew on the line, who nodded and smiled at Harris. The speech was rousing, infuriating, inspiring. It wasn’t Harris’s crisis, but he felt he would have taken to the streets even so if they’d been in Dublin or Derry, not New York. He didn’t stop talking about it on the way home, and at one point he raised his voice and almost shouted that the States had taken their independence from the English by force, so maybe it was time the Irish did the same. Beatrice stepped back and looked at him queerly, as if he were some exotic creature at the zoo.

“Do you really think that, Harris, or are you acting?” she asked.

He was taken aback by the question. “I do think it,” he said at last.

But Parnell’s tour moved on, and Beatrice’s lessons veered away from the political. She came up with topics, such as farming and shipping and cricket and the way to serve mutton, and taught him what he ought to know. She harped on the finer distinctions among prepositions, the names of songbirds, the breeds of hunting dogs, the ingredients of puddings. Harris enjoyed the lessons, but there was a barrier. She did not speak further of herself. She laughed invitingly, but she did not press her leg to his if he brushed her dress under the table. She did not gaze back into his eyes when he tried to engage her that way. She did not exactly give him what he wanted, no, but she did sit close, did take his hands in hers and show him how to gesture, did carefully groom him for and drill him on every situation she could dream up. Surely, he thought, she was doing more than Whyo duty demanded. That must mean something.

Often, when he turned in at night after one of their lessons in which he once again couldn’t tell if she was flirting or not, his mind drifted to the Whyos, Undertoe, the frame-up, whether there was any way for him to clear his old name and how long he would have to go on pretending to be an Irishman. He knew that some day soon Beatrice would tap him on the shoulder and tell him it was time, instruct him to do something awful. Those thoughts gave rise to the fantasy of running away—from her, the Whyos, the cops, Undertoe, his past. The thing that stopped him was Beatrice was so oddly contradictory—jailer and crush, caring and unresponsive, always obsessive about the details of his life but often secretive about her own. One day, it was politics, and it seemed he could kiss her, if he only had the courage; the next day, she was distant and schoolmarmish as she explained what the weave of a sweater said about the woman who knit it. What, he wondered, did she do on behalf of the Whyos when she wasn’t home with him? Had she killed, betrayed, abducted someone new? Was that what drove her mood swings? He knew she worked for the gang, and he’d seen her in action—and it was scary—but somehow Harris just couldn’t believe that Beatrice could be as bad as he knew she was, nor that she would really force him into a life of crime.

Perhaps it was nervous energy or a creative force within him that had been rekindled by his promotion to paving, but he resumed his old habit of whittling, to while away the time on the several nights a week when Beatrice wasn’t around. He spent a dollar on a good knife and began picking up scraps of wood wherever he found them. Every week or so, he produced another figurine, sometimes boats or bears or other toys for the O’Gamhna boys, sometimes gargoyles that were exact replicas of the ones that he had worked on or had seen being carved at the Nikolaikirche, sometimes fanciful beasts of his own imagining. When he finished them, he would sweep the tailings from the floor and throw them into the grate of the stove. Except in the case of the toys, which he gave to the boys, the tailings were usually followed by the small, beautifully wrought lump of wood. It had taken him a dozen hours to find the shape within the chunk of raw wood, but he was never satisfied with what he’d done.

Harris also took to buying a paper in the evening or sometimes going to the Cooper Union after work, if he knew Beatrice was going to be out, to do the reading that was part of his ongoing education. He struggled with the temptation just to pick up and glance at the front page of the
Frankfurter Zeitung.
He knew he must not, but invariably he strayed casually toward the German-language section and scanned whatever headlines were visible at the top of the racks. The Franco-Prussian War was tearing through the country of his birth. Towns that would always be part of his mental landscape of home had been burned to the ground. He thought about his father and his friend Robert Koch and wondered if they’d read the same headlines in the same editions a couple weeks before. Or had they experienced the news more directly? Were they all right? And what was happening now? The New York papers covered the European war to a much lesser extent. But he stuck to his cover, purchased just the local illustrateds and newspapers and studied them. The more he read—about France and Prussia at war, about Ulysses S. Grant, about the latest scandal—the better. He found that English came almost naturally from between his lips now, but reading it was still work for him, and so he practiced it.

Then at the end of summer, on an evening some three months since Harris had begun working for the paving company, Beatrice came home late, reeking of cigars and ale, and gave him the message he’d been dreading: his first instruction from Dandy Johnny. Harris was to get himself fired the following day. The Whyos had something else lined up for him. There was no smile or breathy whisper to the way she delivered it, just business.

“What?” he said. “How can I? I love this job. I don’t want to get fired.”

She raised her eyebrows and waited for him to absorb the fact that this was not optional. Really, it wasn’t a big deal, she explained, compared to lots of things they might have wanted—they didn’t want him to kill anyone, after all. But Harris believed that turning this corner and beginning to do what the Whyos wanted was a kind of suicide. If she had allowed him to imagine that she loved him, perhaps he wouldn’t have minded, would have gone with her to the other side, but she had not made that clear, and he balked.