Metropolis (30 page)

Harris nodded and made the effort to stand up straight. He knew John-Henry was right, but he was miserable anyway. He couldn’t help it.

They continued past the stump of the bridge that stuck up from the river through a white frill of ice, and Harris got a glimpse of the masonry close-up: monumental in scale but elegant. The thought of the arches that were still to come made him crane his neck and peer up into the gray-white patch of sky they were destined to fill. The bridge would be something remarkable, far greater than any church.

On the other side, they found a place where a makeshift gangplank had been set up to help people clamber onto the pier at Fulton Street, just north of the ferry. It wasn’t far to the bridge office, and it was open. They saw ten or twelve men already waiting to apply for jobs, and their hopes dropped a little, but then one after another every man came out of the office with hope in his eyes and a folded paper in his hand. It seemed there was no shortage of jobs. After an hour or so, their turn came. The clerk asked Harris several questions and gave him a form to fill out. He wrote the name Frank Harris. In his gloom, he had forgotten to come up with something new, and so a decision was made: Frank Harris he would remain. The clerk was considerably less than courteous to John-Henry until John-Henry mentioned he’d fought with Colonel Roebling’s brigade and had been encouraged to apply as a blaster. The man brought out a thin ledger. He seemed surprised when he actually found John-Henry’s name on a list, but he gave him the job. In about an hour, they were out on the street again with orders to report to work at 7:45 Monday morning. John-Henry’s reference and experience had gotten him hired at a high level, which wasn’t usual, given his race—there weren’t many colored men on the bridge. Harris would be wielding a shovel at the bottom of the caisson, not working as a mason. Caisson worker was the one position for which there were always openings. The work was grueling, and the turnover was high, but Harris wasn’t worried. He’d told them he had experience cutting and laying stone and working up high. Those were specialized skills that would be needed on such a big project. He was hopeful a promotion would come with time.

“Are you optimistic yet, Harris?” John-Henry asked as they walked to the river.

“I think so, yes.” He was smiling again now, not widely but for real. “You know, John-Henry, the trouble with being a foreigner is you lose your people, your connections, your bearings. I have to thank you. I wouldn’t have got this job on my own.”

“It’s the same for a lot of black folks up from the South—they’ve got no one. But if you’re a good person, if you’re honest and work hard, eventually you’re going to be fine.”

Harris wasn’t so sure the city always treated people as justly as that, but he didn’t want to contradict his friend. “Well, thanks for putting me up last night and for bringing me over here and getting me the job.”

“Oh, come on—you just saw that any fool can get a job hauling dirt down in that hole. The work’s probably a lot worse than putting in dirt-catchers, too. I don’t want you blaming me when it turns out to be awful.”

“But it’s a bridge, not a sewer.”

They climbed back down to the river from the ferry pier and set out across the ice. It was still solid beneath their feet, but they sensed the water rushing under it now, and from time to time the ice would boom or groan, causing people further out on the river to shout and run, afraid it was all giving way beneath them. It didn’t, though, and all across the ice people seemed to be enjoying the risk of it, staying out as long as they dared. Maybe it would hold through the low tide, people said. Boys ran wildly across the wide-open expanse a bit further north, and a group of girls engaged in a snowball fight. A thin snow had begun to fall, and Harris was surprised to see, in the grayed-out, blurry distance, that someone had even brought a horse out. Then he realized the animal stood alone and, in fact, wasn’t a horse at all but a cow. He remembered his dream and that ad. Red cow. White spot. Twenty dollars. He certainly didn’t need the money now, but he thought about what must have happened. Probably the cow had wandered to the river looking for water after getting lost and missing its usual trough. Maybe it wasn’t the same one that had been advertised, maybe it was, but what would happen to it when the ice did break up? He tried to remember the name of the cow in the ad. He opened his lips to explain his concern to John-Henry and realized it was a very odd thing he proposed to do, to chase a cow up a treacherous frozen river. His mouth hung open until his tongue grew cold.

“John-Henry. Stop a moment—do you see that cow?” He pointed north.

“Yeah, Frank,” said John-Henry as if he wished he didn’t. “What about it?”

John-Henry was more or less incredulous at the idea, but he indulged Harris. It was the idea of the cow being stranded on a floe that did it. When they got close enough to see that the cow did indeed, like so many other red cows, have a spot, it saw them, too, and began to walk determinedly away from them. They broke into a trot, and so did it. They stopped, and it slowed and began nosing the ice, as if in search of grass. Harris tried to remember the name.

“Bessy!” he ventured, without raising interest from the cow. “Bessybessybessy.” Still no response. “Stella!” he shouted several times over, but then he remembered the name in the paper
—Bella.

He called, but the cow still ignored them, continuing to browse the ice. There was a loud boom, and they could see a crack had formed in the ice further south, toward the mouth of the harbor. Nothing to worry about yet, he told himself.

“Harris, let’s give it up. The tide’s going out, and I’m cold.”

“One more try,” Harris said, and called out in a voice that belonged to another self, the stableman who had understood animals better than people, the person who’d been lost when Barnum’s had burned—or so he had thought. He used a German phrase he hadn’t uttered since he’d left his uncle’s farm, and he used the same tone of voice that had once calmed his uncle’s cows. More or less, what he said was: “
Moo cow, here moo cow, little moo cow, moo cow cow cow.”

The cow looked up at him and lowed. It stepped closer.

“
Moo cow cow cow.
” He was singing it, really, in German, and for some reason it made his heart soar.

Now the cow trotted over to them. As it approached, Harris could see that it needed its people badly: Its udders were splitting and swollen and crusted with dirty, frozen milk that had seeped out under the pressure from not having been milked for days. He patted her flank and let her nuzzle his hand, and then he knelt on the ice, warmed his palms by rubbing them together, and gently broke away the crusted milk. When he began pulling in a steady rhythm, the cow lowed, and milk spurted out onto the frozen river where it made a steaming, creamy puddle, almost yellow against the snow.

“I’ll be damned,” said John-Henry. “You
are
a country boy, aren’t you?”

“Thirsty?” Harris asked.

They took turns kneeling down and guzzling from the teats of the lost cow whose name was, perhaps, Bella. When she was close to dry, they discussed where to take her.

“Let’s go back over to Brooklyn,” said John-Henry. “Whether it’s the cow you saw listed or not, she sure doesn’t live in the Five Points.” From the Brooklyn shore, they walked up to Fort Greene and knocked on the door of the first house that had a stable and yard behind it. Harris asked the cook who answered if she knew a man who’d lost a cow.

“Oh,
ja,
that old cow of Noe’s. That’s a nice reward you’re going to collect, sir. The Noe place is just up the street. Where’d you find her?” She spoke in a thick German accent that made Harris nervous—it reminded him that he shouldn’t have broken into German himself, back there on the river. Someone might have heard. Sound carried for miles across water, probably ice, too. Still, just the sound of it coming from his own mouth had comforted him profoundly.

“She was out on the ice,” John-Henry said.

They found the Noe house in mourning. There was a black-ribbon wreath on the door, but clearly it had been there for some time—it was scabbed with dingy ice around the edges. Then the door was flung open with joyful exuberance and a cry of “Welcome! What great news! Come, gentlemen, come right in out of the cold.” The man seemed a bit overexcited about his cow. The two friends looked at Bella and then the door and hesitated.

“Oh, yes, you’re right—I don’t guess Bella belongs in the parlor. Why don’t you come around first to the stable and we’ll put her to her bale of hay and her water, and we’ll milk her.” He stepped out into the yard and patted the cow on her neck, then wrapped his arms as far as they would go around her great, rough, red body. “Bella Bella Bella,” he said, in a tone not dissimilar to Harris’s out on the ice. The cow lowed.

25.

BROOKLYN

H
arris could hardly believe his fortune in finding Mr. Noe. They liked each other immediately, and after only the third time he’d stopped by to call on Mr. Noe and Bella—it wasn’t all that much further a walk from the bridge site than the Hotel Montague, where he’d found a room—Mr. Noe made him a proposal: He invited him to live in the apartment over the barn, rent free, in exchange for some occasional help with the animals and around the house. “It’s too empty now. I don’t like it. I could use the company,” he explained.

Harris’s job in the caisson of the bridge was overwhelming—loud, dirty and grueling—but he liked it anyway, and he greatly liked coming home to Mr. Noe’s every night. His apartment had a little potbelly stove, a chifforobe for his few clothes, a table and a bed with a great thick pile of blankets and sheets that the housekeeper changed every Monday. They were the big house’s castoffs, of course, which meant that though they were somewhat worn, they were of as fine a quality as anything he’d slept under since the eiderdowned nights of his childhood. There also was a large braided rug so that when he climbed out of bed, his bare feet were spared the shock of the bone-cold floor. He had his own washtub, and in the evenings he heated himself a pan of water on his stove and had himself a splash bath. It wasn’t quite the sewermen’s bath hall, but it was private. And he needed a washing just as much or more: His actual work clothes he left in a cubby at the site, but even so he came home smudged with lime soot from the lamps that lit the underground excavation and splattered with river mud. Indeed, his bath was once again one of the pleasantest parts of Harris’s day. When he stepped out of it and rubbed his chest dry and sat before the stove to bake the last drops of moisture from his hair, he could almost call himself happy. From here, he thought, he could manage to forge a life. Then he went downstairs and over to the kitchen for a word with the cook and a plate of something savory. Sometimes Mr. Noe would knock on his apartment door to ask how he thought the mare’s coat looked or if Bella seemed well, and did he still think they should calve her this year? Then, one evening, Mr. Noe asked Harris to join him for dinner.

Mr. Noe, he learned, had been alone in the house for half a year, since the yellow-fever scourge of the previous summer had struck both his wife and son, Bobby. Harris was playing an ambiguous role as they sat at the dining-room table—not quite servant or employee, not friend or family either—but over soup they found that their initial bond was true, and they did indeed have plenty to talk about, more than just Bella. Possibly, they had too much to talk about for Harris’s own good. By the end of the evening, Mr. Noe was quite clearly puzzled about just what sort of person Harris was, what class, of what education. He evaded specifying his background too fully that night, but Mr. Noe invited him again the following week. Harris tried to be obscure, but it was difficult. A mention of his father triggered questions about where he’d grown up, and he had to answer them as the Irishman Frank Harris.

Surely it would have been easier for Harris just to tell Mr. Noe the truth, but he didn’t know him that well. He dared not trust him and would not burden him. He was still wanted as Will Williams, alias George the Torch, after all. John-Henry had accepted it, but Harris knew John-Henry was not an ordinary man. It simply was not a very sympathetic story. Instead, he took the principle the Whyos had taught him—use the truth to cloak your lies—and winged it, telling Mr. Noe the true fact that his father had been a doctor, but he placed him in Dublin and added that he’d died when Harris was just a boy. He didn’t have to lie about his mother. That got him to his childhood on his uncle’s farm—his Uncle Willie, he called him, which made him smile, giving Mr. Noe quite the wrong impression. He could hardly skip his truncated apprenticeship, since that was why he wanted to work on the bridge, so he set that in Dublin, too, despite his total ignorance of its churches. As for his history since he’d arrived in New York, he was on somewhat better footing, but he avoided giving too much detail or any names. And seeing that talking about the past could quickly grow perilous, he tried to suggest that his past was painful to him, a subject best avoided. At least that was honest.

Mr. Noe listened, not so much gullible as trusting. He had no reason to doubt the man who’d refused a reward for returning his cow. He told Harris his own stories about growing up in Fort Greene when it was just a country village and the Noe house was still a pig and dairy farm. As different as the quality of their lives had been, both of them fondly remembered certain things about rural life, such as how the years were divided less into months than seasons: times for sowing, tilling, reaping, threshing, cheese making, slaughtering, sausage making, tanning. Because of their pigs, the Noes had spent the quiet winter months making the pig-bristle brushes that had later become their manufacturing specialty, once the land became too valuable to farm. Mr. Noe had sold off much of it to developers, regretfully, but all the other farmers were doing the same.

Mr. Noe was a down-to-earth, funny, kind man. And odd. For one thing, his commitment to boar-bristle brushes was extreme. “It’s a great business, Frank, let me tell you. If you ever want to get out of bridges, I recommend it. We’ve got jobs, we’re always expanding. I ask you, what other toilet accoutrement is so beautiful, so utilitarian, so essential to every self-respecting person’s wardrobe—gentlewoman and Bowery boy alike—and so impervious to the whims of fashion and the conventions of social class? Hmmn? The brush is the one. And nothing but boar bristle, my boy—that’s the top of the line.” As Mr. Noe saw it, whoever one was, whatever one wore, one’s clothing had to be natty and fresh and free of lint or pill. Yes, he told Harris, brushes were a grand, thriving business. He’d never regretted going into them. His company bought the bristles as by-products from farms and slaughterhouses now, rather than raising the pigs. Harris had to suppress a laugh, Mr. Noe’s rhapsody on brushes went on so long.

The day after that dinner, Harris found a small box wrapped in paper on the bench by his door. It was a fine brush with a walnut handle and black bristles, and beginning that day he used it daily to keep his rather shabby wardrobe in the best shape possible.

Soon, it was twice a week that Harris sat down to bone china and silver and the household cook’s good meats and gravies. Over a turkey stew, Mr. Noe told the story of the snowy February afternoon in his youth when he first saw the exorbitant prices a Manhattan haberdasher was asking for the brushes Mr. Noe’s family made. The handles were a particular shape, there were details that the maker knew without doubt. “I loved making the brushes, and I had loved seeing a crate of my perfectly made brushes, ready to go to the merchants’ warehouse. But that day I saw that there was more than just the craft—it could be a good living. Markup, my boy, it’s all about who gets the markup.”

After hearing several of Mr. Noe’s ruminations on making money as a small manufacturer (there were other disquisitions during which it was “all about distribution”) and also a short monologue on the contentment that came from making good and useful things, Harris took a risk and told his landlord an anecdote from his own life, the story of how he came to choose his apprenticeship. He had set out for a walk one fall day after the harvest was in on his uncle’s farm and noticed a remote section of a stone wall and its gateway that had fallen into disrepair. He’d spent whatever free time he found in the following week tinkering with mortar and stones, and after begging a favor of the village blacksmith he eventually had not just the wall back together but the iron gate swinging smoothly shut on its weighted hinges after it was opened. The project was modest, but it had required dedication for him to fit it in between his lessons from the village priest and his duties on the farm. Only when he’d gotten the whole fence in top shape did he tell his uncle. He could still hear the reply: “Yes, well, there was always a fence there, wasn’t there, boy? What have you got to be so boastful about?” He had known then that he really was just an orphan, but he’d taken great solace in the work itself and continued repairing fences, not for his uncle but for the cows, for himself, for the mere pleasure of doing it. It took longer to find a way to turn building stone walls into a trade.

“How did you get your apprenticeship, then?” asked Mr. Noe, and Harris regretted his candor. He’d launched into the dangerous land of details, necessitating lies he didn’t want to tell. Mr. Noe went on to ask about his master. Harris renamed Meister Teichold
Mr. Tynan
but otherwise stayed true to the man who had been his first and only mentor. He allowed himself to relive the pleasures of learning the craft and to describe the ways that different types of stone responded to the tools. Shyly, he spoke of the gratification of being told he had talent, and finally he spared no detail of the episode when he was hauled back to the farm for nonpayment of apprenticeship fees, despite his master’s objections.

“Yes, it must have been a marvelous thing, to work up on the spires,” Mr. Noe mused. “I’ve seen pictures of the Dublin cathedral. What sort of stone is it, marble?”

Harris’s stomach dropped. He had no idea what the cathedral looked like, much less what stone it was made of. “It was wonderful up there,” he said, awkwardly avoiding an answer. “That’s what I’m hoping to feel again. I’m going to work my way right on up—from the sewers and the streets to the caisson to the bridge itself. It’s going to be hundreds of feet high, just imagine!”

Mr. Noe looked at him, noticing the evasion, smiling at the dream, not knowing if it was realistic or not, then called for more wine.

Their conversations were constantly marred by such moments, or by tangents Harris wanted to go off on but couldn’t, as he couldn’t assimilate them into his Irish story. When an outbreak of smallpox was described in the
Eagle
and half of New York was staying home in fear, he’d have liked to bring up Robert Koch, who had been studying traditional vaccines when Harris last had heard from him, trying to determine if the cause of cowpox and smallpox was the same. But how could he explain the existence of the friend who was his father’s protégé when his father was supposed to be dead? Or open up the question of hospitals and laboratories when he had no idea what the names of the Irish ones were, much less if such research had ever been done there or if Mr. Noe might somehow be familiar with epidemiology? He’d learned from Sarah Blacksall that it was becoming quite well known. Harris had been thinking a lot about Koch lately. He’d even begun a letter to him, only to tear it up. How could he explain what had become of him, what he had done to get away? How could he begin to explain where he had landed? Koch would be a proper doctor by now, a professor, had quite possibly made important discoveries. Meanwhile, Harris was a laborer, a fugitive.

It was a relief, therefore, to spend time with the Henleys, who at least knew who he really was. They often had him over for Sunday supper, and all week long he would look forward to Lila’s good stews and the feeling that was almost like that of coming home. He frequently retold the Henleys the same stories he’d told Mr. Noe, but the Henleys got the true, unedited versions. It was as if Harris had to get the right version out, to correct the lies he’d spun for Mr. Noe. Unless, of course, they had other guests—Sarah Blacksall or her young partner, Susan Smith, who was black, or commonly both of them, since their clinic was just down the block. On those nights, Harris found he listened more than talked, and when he did speak he stuck to the present.

At first, Harris doubted he could keep the sham existence up indefinitely, but when the warm weather came his life was still stable. With Mr. Noe to vouch for him, he had even opened a bank account, where he deposited his wages and the money Piker Ryan had given him. The money from Johnny and Beatrice he had given away, some to the Henleys to put on a new roof, but most of it to the Women’s Medical College. He had been so taken by the idea of those two improbable doctors: the white woman with her phials and microscopes and her dream of curing disease in the slums, and the black woman whose passion was bringing free care to the indigent, especially women. Sometimes Harris wished he were a woman so he could have gone to the Women’s Medical College—it seemed such a visionary place. But he was not, he knew, a scientist. He was a builder, and the thing that made his day, every morning, was seeing how much taller the tower had crept since the day before. Even if they weren’t his stones up top, it was resting on his foundation, he felt.

The foundation he and John-Henry were helping to bring down to bedrock was a vast, sturdy, hollow, rectangular form, built something like a ship’s hull, but its walls were many times thicker. When they began construction on the bridge, the first step had been to sink the caisson carefully into position on the river bottom, open end down. Then the water within it was pumped out with pressurized air, creating an underwater bubble where dozens of men would toil, working around the clock to excavate the riverbed, except for Sundays. Often they encountered boulders under one edge of the caisson, and that was where John-Henry’s talents came in: blasting the impediment to kingdom come—or to gravel, really. To provide such a tall tower with a stable base, they would have to keep digging till there was nothing but solid rock beneath. Two inches a day was a brisk pace, but eventually they would get there—perhaps, Harris speculated over coffee and Lila’s cobbler, in a year.

“At which point,” said John-Henry, “they’ll fill up the hole we work in with cement, and the two of us will be out of a job.”

“There’s always the second tower—but I plan to work
on top
of that one, not under it.”

The technology of the air pumps, the mechanically ingenious chutes they used to take the refuse away, the painful illness that afflicted some of the men, the strange way lantern lights blazed in the unnatural air of that cavern—all this made for good dinner conversation, but often, while he and John-Henry were explaining some curious facet of the project, Harris felt himself growing remote from the group. There was so much in his mind that he could not share with anyone but the Henleys. He would have liked to feel he really knew Sarah Blacksall and Susan Smith, to feel they knew him. But he was constrained by his situation to keep his talk painfully impersonal.