Metropolis (31 page)

The best part of his days now were the mornings, when he and John-Henry visited before the start of work. They met at the doughnut cart just outside the site. The doughnut girl, Lorraine, was a friend of John-Henry’s—she lived on his block, too—and she always had their coffee ready by the time they stepped up: John-Henry’s light, Harris’s black with sugar. Standing around eating crullers and leaning up against the construction fence, Harris and John-Henry would talk for a half an hour or so about what really mattered to them. Harris fantasized about proving his innocence in the Barnum’s arson case, mused about his old life in Germany, fretted over flaws in the fabric of the self he presented to Susan and Sarah and Mr. Noe. John-Henry talked about wanting a family, but then sometimes he said he thought it would be better not to bring children into a world where even in the North, even in New York, even after that whole damned war, blacks were still barely thought of as men. The racism of the mostly Irish caisson workers was inescapable, and although John-Henry was a foreman and in charge of all the blasting down below, nearly every day he faced some new insult from one of the men, some rudeness or act of insubordination.

“You know,” he said, “I’m glad you’re not a real Irishman. The Irish are pigs.”

“Germans are no better.”

“I guess that’s true. I even know some Negroes who can be pretty awful, time to time.”

“And what about women?” But Harris was thinking of just one woman: Beatrice.

“And half this country was fighting the Negro vote, despite the war, despite the Fourteenth Amendment.”

“People are pigs,” said Harris.

“
Ah, humanity.
Now let’s get to work, what do you say?”

One morning in the spring, when the air was frothy with the scent of crab-apple blossoms and underlain with the rich scent of mud, John-Henry gave Harris the news that he and Lila were expecting a baby. He was excited, delighted, proud—not thinking of Negro suffrage now. Harris laughed and congratulated him, but later in the day, down in the caisson, he realized the news had made him sad. He imagined the Henleys would be preoccupied with just their little family when the child came and he would see less of them. It reminded him sharply of how alone he was, really, how far he was from having a family of his own. He had mistaken something awful for the emotion of love, once; he doubted he could ever find his way to feeling so strongly again. And a really intimate relationship didn’t seem possible so long as he had to lie to the world about his life.

No one had yet uncovered his masquerade or come to arrest or murder him, but there were times Harris felt an eerie chill beneath his collar and found himself looking over his shoulder, fearing that someone was watching him suspiciously, looking at him strangely—someone who wished him no good. He thought increasingly about trying to clear his name—or his aliases, rather—but he couldn’t fathom how to do it. He didn’t want to lose what peace and community he’d found.

He was right that he was being followed. Fiona had been making occasional trips across the river to check up on him, on Mother Dolan’s instructions, ever since Beanie was promoted. What she saw wasn’t very interesting. Harris’s life was entirely regular, week in, week out, as far as she could tell. Fiona, on Mother Dolan’s instruction and her own intuition, had not told Beatrice what she was doing. She knew well enough that Beatrice was still in love with Harris. It wouldn’t help her to hear that he was still being monitored by the Dolans, which suggested to Fiona that he might not really be as free as Beanie thought. And it would only depress her, Fiona thought, to hear that the fruit of her sacrifice for Harris was a grim and dreary workaday existence.

That was how Fiona saw his life. Of course, she never felt the lurch of his heart when a blast was ignited in the caisson, deep below the river. She didn’t duck the flying debris or hear the roar. She didn’t watch men crumple with the agony of the caisson disease, which no one could cure, or know the lurking anxiety that he or John-Henry might fall victim to it next, for it seemed a robust constitution was no protection. Harris, to himself, was a shade more complex: There were days when he felt morose; there were also times he was actually optimistic. As time passed, he was gaining a bit of distance on the Beatrice affair. He felt puzzled now rather than bitter, at the queer blend of luck and misfortune that had marked his life. There was much he was grateful for, even including the way that Beatrice had set him free. He even thought of her wistfully, now and then, when he was tired or his mind wandered, but he couldn’t sustain the fantasy of being in love with her anymore. He didn’t have any doubt that he was better off living with Mr. Noe and working on the bridge than he would have been working for the gang, hopelessly smitten with the boss’s girlfriend, but there was something missing, something like love. He went to the Pilgrim church with Mr. Noe most Sunday mornings, partly in the hope of meeting a young woman. Mr. Noe was aggressive in introducing his lodger to the ladies of Brooklyn Heights and Fort Greene at the coffee hour, but realistically there wasn’t much hope for Harris. He was too much of a hybrid. None of those girls was likely to join herself to a Irishman whose job was shoveling mud, even if he was well-spoken and attractive. He might be connected with a wealthy merchant, but he wasn’t his son.

It seemed to rain every afternoon that spring, and the drops would cool his sweat and wash the black grime from his face and forearms in tiny rivulets. Harris’s name was on a list of those whose skills might bring them above sea level, but there were very few openings, and he was not by any means at the top of this list. And so he and John-Henry and their fellow workers dug and blasted and hacked away at the riverbed under the caisson, lowering it inch by inch, while the tower grew above their heads, stone upon stone, every day or so another row. Tuesday never seemed much mightier than Monday, but May was a jutting promontory compared to February’s bulwark. Harris never tired of watching the men up above do their work when he was standing around in the yard, waiting to go down below.

Most days, Harris was on a shovel, moving gravel and mud, but whenever John-Henry needed helpers he pulled Harris off of his usual crew. Harris had an uncanny sense of the stone and an intuition for how it would react. He could say after just a few taps and pings with his hammer where the fault lines lay in a gigantic erratic boulder that was lodged beneath the caisson’s shoe and thus how the stone would break. Never in John-Henry’s experience, not even in the tunnels of the railroad lines where he’d first learned how to set charges into rock, had the precision of the blasting been so essential. They were working far beneath the bottom of the river now. If they blew out a piece of rock much larger than planned, leaving the caisson askew, the pressurized air they relied on might be blown out through the blast hole, along with debris, allowing the harbor in and drowning the men trapped below. Every time they detonated a charge, the life of every man below was put at risk. He felt grateful and honored to be working with a man he so trusted and who, despite everything, trusted him.

They had stood by him, John-Henry and Lila, and they also inspired him. John-Henry had taken great risks to fight in the war, leaving Boston, where he was safe, to go south, where blacks faced the distinct possibility of being captured and enslaved, in addition to the usual military hazards of rifle fire and bayonet thrust, dysentery and gangrene. When he thought of John-Henry fighting in the war, he would think of Robert Koch following the Prussian army, healing the soldiers fallen in fighting the French. Koch had once told him that the best laboratory was on the nearest front, wherever the fever outbreaks were worst and doctors were needed most. The two men he had counted as close friends in his life were both heroes, in their ways, whereas all he’d ever done by way of taking risks was to mix himself up with a gang.

One Sunday evening that summer, the lady doctors were there for supper, and Sarah Blacksall delivered a piece of news that was for her both personal and political. She knew it would interest John-Henry and Harris, too. Her uncle, Superintendent Towle, had been sacked and the dirt-catcher project suspended, despite its brilliant results. Harris figured the mayor and Boss Tweed would not have been pleased, not at all, when they requested their next withdrawal from the tunnel and it turned out the caches were empty. They would have suspected a traitor in their ranks, namely, Towle. It was not right or fair.

“The whole program was shut down?” he said, frustrated that he could not say what he knew about why Towle had really been canned. He had felt there was something Robin Hoodish about the Tammany job—they were stealing money from the rich, after all—but now he saw that his reconnaissance for the Whyos had brought down the sanitary-hygiene project. What he had done was even worse than he thought. “All that work,” he said, “for naught.”

“That’s not true, Harris,” said John-Henry. “We put in three of those dirt-catchers. At least those three are keeping the sewage flowing, keeping the people who live near them healthy.”

“I suppose.”

That night, as he walked to the ferry terminal, Harris had that creeping feeling down his neck again. He turned to look behind him, but as usual the street was empty. Just a couple of mongrels scrapping in the dust. He imagined it was just his growing anxiety, his low mood, but in fact it was Fiona—and the Jimster. They’d been keeping pace with him for a block before he felt their presence. It wasn’t quite proper for Fiona to have the Jimster along when she was watching Harris—the Jimster had once worked for Undertoe, after all. But Undertoe had been sent upriver after the p.o. job, and Jimmy had sworn to her he hated the guy. In fact, Fiona had been trying to bring Johnny and Beanie around to tapping the Jimster for the Whyos. She liked him too well to let him wander back to working for some other gang or, God forbid, Undertoe, who would be getting out before long. As they tailed Harris, the Jimster quite oblivious to the identity of their mark, they passed a Whyo-controlled building where the cellar was used for both storage and as a route to the other side of the block. Fiona happened to know it would be empty at the moment. She mentioned it to Jimmy. They ducked inside, and in no time skirts and suspender straps were flying. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and he lifted her up by the ass while her booted feet climbed the doorjamb. In short, they lost track of Harris. Not that it mattered much, as far as Fiona could see. For as long as she’d been watching him, Harris had never yet done anything unpredictable.

The funny thing was, though, Harris still had that eerie feeling, even after they’d left him. The ferry was quick to come and quick to pull away, and he thought about whether it was even necessary, the crazy, enormous structure he was employed in building. Sure, when the harbor froze it would be helpful, but that was at most a couple of days a year. Otherwise, traffic flowed swiftly between the cities already. If a person wanted to go to Manhattan, he could do it from a dozen different places without waiting more than a few minutes, whatever the hour. It was cheap and convenient and democratic, for every sort of person rode the ferry: magnates, match girls and the likes of him, all of them together in the salons and at the rails. There wasn’t a first-class section because there wasn’t time to sort out such distinctions; that’s how fast the crossing was. That evening, it was him and a bunch of elegant ladies, one of them with a couple of expensive-looking oriental dogs, no noses to speak of, prancing at the ends of long silk leads.

As Harris’s boat rode across the current that last Sunday of August, angling downstream of its true destination to outwit the flooding tide, another ferry passed it, going to Manhattan. As usual, they crossed closely enough for the two ferry captains to wave hello, close enough for the passengers of the
Robert Fulton
to get a look inside the windows of the
Abraham Lincoln,
glimpse the faces of the people going the other way. And on that other boat, there sat a man whom Harris knew. Luther Undertoe was only recently down from Sing Sing, and he was looking out across the water, staring idly in the direction of the
Robert Fulton,
thinking about how best to restart his career. Harris was on his mind again. Actually, the whole of the Barnum’s snafu was irking him, and the man on his mind was still known to him only as Will Williams and George Geiermeier. Undertoe didn’t realize he’d seen him from afar, but facial recognition is something primal, deep, inarticulate. Undertoe had looked into the lighted cabin of the
Robert Fulton,
Harris’s face flashed past him, and suddenly he was mad all over again about the way the Barnum’s fire had gone down.

That had been the first thing to go wrong in what had turned out to be an abysmal couple of years. He’d had a run of rotten luck during which it seemed he couldn’t get anything going without getting busted and thrown in the lockup. Now he was back, but they’d gotten wise to him at police headquarters. And he’d quickly seen he could no longer count on the boys he’d had working for him before. The Jimster had grown up and gotten independent while Undertoe was in the can. It was bad, he thought, when even your toadies abandoned you. It was partly his doing—he hadn’t been thinking straight that day in the precinct house, that was for sure, especially not when he’d tried to pin that big job on Johnny Dolan. But someone had put him there. There was someone else to blame. And now that he’d thought of Barnum’s, he thought of Williams and wondered if possibly
he
’d been involved. Williams had turned out to be cleverer than he’d expected. It was no mean feat to vanish the way he had. And of course the guy would have it in for him, once he realized Undertoe had set him up. Yes, it seemed disturbingly likely to him now that it was his old dupe the German stableman who’d laid him low and gotten him sent upstate. He determined to renew his search for him and, if he found him, to make things even.

Harris himself was just that moment indulging in a bit of nostalgia, the corollary, perhaps, to Undertoe’s ruminations: He was recalling the moment Piker Ryan had passed him his flask, wondering if he could have made it as a gangster after all. He was thinking fondly and unwisely of the bad old times. He was wondering if he could ever fall in love with a girl who didn’t know he’d done those things. They were part of him, for better or worse. The truth was, working for the Whyos was the most interesting job he’d ever done, aside from his apprenticeship. The work he did now down in the caisson was arduous and repetitive. He’d had autonomy in the sewers, thanks to McGinty’s boots and his secret criminal mission. He didn’t approve of killing and stealing, and he felt bad about the fate of the dirt-catcher project, but there had been something vital about it, something that he missed. He wondered what jobs the gang was pulling now.