Metropolis (35 page)

The Saturday following his promotion, Harris made plans for a celebratory excursion to the country with the Henleys. The weather was brutally hot, and the Irish had rioted in the streets the day before—refighting the Battle of Boyne, as Beanie might have said. Sometimes Harris’s Irish identity was harder for him to own than others. He wondered if the Whyos had gotten mixed up in it. At any rate, he and the Henleys had decided to go to the beach on Staten Island to get away from it all and cool off. When he arrived at their house, he was only slightly surprised to see Susan Smith and Sarah Blacksall. He had grown used to finding them there almost every time he came, but of late he had begun to feel awkward in front of Dr. Blacksall. She was slightly too curious about him, pressed him from time to time to detail his family background, to share his own scientific coming-of-age stories and to explain why he had forsaken the family profession.

“It wasn’t the family profession, just my father’s, and he was not an easy man to follow.”

“Oh,” she said, backing off. “I’m sorry.”

But it wasn’t long before the topic of her sewage-testing project came up—she was hoping to start it up again, unofficially, just by going down and taking samples on her own—and she encouraged him to join forces with her.

Harris blinked. He was not eager to go back there and revisit that world. But Sarah Blacksall wanted only to conduct a study, to collect knowledge to help people. It would be different than before. He had told himself he wanted to do something to make good, and this might be it. It was odd, the idea of a friendship with a woman, but he liked Dr. Blacksall. She had a large straight nose with just a small aristocratic bump at the bridge, a wide intelligent smile, a high furrowed brow. And she was a doctor, like his father. When he envisioned the two of them going down a manhole, it summoned uncontrollable thoughts of Beatrice in the grotto and he went quite red, but finally he stammered yes, he would do it.

“Well,” said Lila, “everything ready, ladies? Let’s go, I want to get out on the water!”

The plan was to take the ferry across the harbor and spend the day on one of the white-sand beaches of Staten Island. Harris hadn’t been there since his first outing, so long ago, when he was still working at Barnum’s, surviving on his own, before the fire and prison, the Whyos and Beatrice, the bridge and Mr. Noe. He’d enjoyed the wide beaches and grassy dunes so much, so innocently then, even though it was winter, and he’d meant to return again as soon as the weather was warm. Now years had passed, but at last the time had come. Harris imagined hot sand, spicy beach flowers sprawling on gray-green foliage across the dunes, the constant, quiet-noisy crashing of the ocean, umbrellas and boardwalks across the dunes.

They all walked down to Whitehall Street together, Harris beside Sarah Blacksall. He asked her more about her study and thought about whether he could ever tell her who he was, ever mention Robert Koch and his father. Probably not, for that would also entail telling her the dark side of his own history. Then, with her impeccable conversational politeness, she asked him about the work he was doing now on the bridge. He told just the usual repertoire of stories of antics and benign mishaps, some of which she’d heard before—a lady who’d gone up the catwalk to the tower and been too frightened to walk back down; a hammer dropped from the top that narrowly missed a man below. Harris was scrupulous about not diverging from his safe set of characters and anecdotes. If he was tempted to say more, he just had to remember Fiona and the possibility that he was being observed at that very moment, and his lust for such things faded.

They weren’t the only New Yorkers with the idea of beating the heat that day. There was a crowd waiting at the terminal to board the next boat. When the iron sides of the steam ferry
Westfield
squealed against the pilings and the crewmen threw the hawser and hauled the gangway into place, the disembarking passengers surged forward. There was nothing unusual about such a throng, given the weather—nothing unusual at all, except for the fact that suddenly Harris saw a face within it. Ruddy cheeks and coppery hair and a rather grim frown on her lips. He blinked, but it was still Beatrice.

“John-Henry!” Harris had entirely forgotten the existence of Sarah Blacksall, though she stood beside him, following his eyes.

“Hmmn?”

“Look. It’s her. Right there.” Harris whispered in the way that makes it louder.

“What, now? Who?”

Harris just stared, didn’t answer.

“Oh, no, not her, not that girl. Harris, you’re done with her, man.”

“No, I’m not.” He entirely missed Sarah Blacksall’s pinched smile because now he was staring at Dandy Johnny. The Whyos’ boss was looking especially dapper in a white suit and a boater with a dark-blue ribbon. Harris couldn’t have hated the sight of him any more even if he had known that John Dolan had just been married to Beatrice O’Gamhna by the priest of a small Catholic church on Staten Island, in a secret ceremony attended only by Mrs. Dolan, Fiona and the sexton.

Mrs. Dolan had the bee in her bonnet, and she’d prevailed. She always did. The explanation? She had decided she wanted a grandson. The Dolans had money enough now that Johnny’s child would be able to live a life of leisure, not crime, and she didn’t want her grandchild saddled with being a bastard. It had been lethal for Johnny—that was how she thought of the chain of causality, at least. She didn’t tell him of her notions, but she had badgered and badgered until Johnny had acquiesced. Beatrice had had damn little choice in the matter. She was miserable. It was something she had been determined not to do since she’d first heard the plan, and yet it had been unavoidable, and now there she was, a bride.

Early that morning, before she knew Mother Dolan’s plan for the day, Johnny had awakened her, horny. He was stroking her cheek gently, kissing her neck, pulling her up from the mattress and tugging at her bedclothes. Soon, he was grinding himself against her thigh, and she found that she responded. She wanted it, too. If he was going to be nice, maybe she could even enjoy it. And he was. At least he wasn’t rough like usual. His hands had ranged widely and gently across her body. She hardly knew what to think, it was so unexpected. She felt a slight twinge within her, on the left, just before he put himself inside her. She told herself to relax. She imagined the small pain was an anticipation of the frequent twinges whenever he fucked her, either from him or the lemon rind. But this time there was no lemon.

Beatrice could have no idea of it, of course, but what she had felt was an egg being spat into play by her ovary. She pushed against his push, bent her knees, raised up. They writhed and turned, and he let her get on top of him. But not for long. Suddenly, he flipped her over, and he was on top again, and there was nothing slow about it anymore. His eyes seemed glazed over, but he didn’t strike her once or insult her. She had no idea what she was feeling, but it wasn’t pain. Then it peaked—not much of a peak for Beatrice, but still a peak—and afterward they slept, like regular lovers. So that when he woke her and told her to get dressed nicely, they were going on an outing and getting married, she was won over enough not to argue.

Now she was married to him. She didn’t like the legality of it, and frankly she’d been called
Mrs. Dolan
several times too many on the ferry ride back. She had told herself over and over again that it wasn’t markedly different than before. Her life wouldn’t change. She certainly didn’t expect things to go on being nice, like that morning. That had obviously been a rhetorical move, a seduction, like the first night, and she felt like a sucker, which was part of why she was in such a bad mood.

Then, as the ferry docked and the crowd lurched forward, she looked up at an apparition: Harris, gawping at her.
Harris?
She didn’t believe it. It was just a reaction to the emotions she was feeling, she thought, but she looked again. He wasn’t an apparition. What was he doing there? She didn’t want to see him. Not then.

“Beatrice,” Harris said, not loudly, across the wide space of the pier. But she heard. Her squinty eyes looked straight at him. She didn’t smile or acknowledge him, except that her mouth dropped open and the scowl fell away from her features, leaving them empty, blank.

She pushed forward through the crowd, ahead of Johnny and his mother, eyes fixed on Harris. Then she stopped right next to him, said nothing, looked down, rooted around in her handbag.

“Harris, look the other way,” she said. “What are you doing here? No, don’t look at me, look away.”

So Harris looked out, into the crowd. He saw Dandy Johnny standing by the rail, letting people pass him, but he didn’t know that Johnny was waiting for his mother to get through the crowd. Beatrice did. She had just a few seconds to talk to him in semiprivacy.

“Harris, how are you? Are you all right?”

That was when the trembling began. It started with a hard little rock of mineral deposit that blocked a crucial valve of the
Westfield
’s tremendous boiler. Things would have gone better had a sloppily soldered seam in the coupling that joined the main boiler to the intake valve not been repaired just the week before. But it had been. The system was tight. Too tight. And not redundant enough. There was no backup valve. The pressure mounted and mounted, and soon the copper pipes that interlinked the tanks began to gyrate, straining against their fittings. The main tank was humming ominously a song it had never sung. The glass shield on a pressure gauge cracked, releasing a thin jet of steam, but it was not enough.

Mrs. Dolan would have been overjoyed if she had known that Johnny’s sperm was just then merging with Beatrice’s ovum. Two gametes fused; a zygote was born; Beanie’s X met Johnny’s Y. Meg Dolan had no idea how well her little plan had worked—how
promptly—
to produce an heir. She was thinking of another baby while the pressure in the engine mounted, recalling how lovely an infant her Johnny-boy had been. She was musing on how handsome he’d looked that morning at the altar. Meg Dolan was delighted in all the most conventional ways that morning. Her dreams for her son had come true, if not quite in the ways she might once have planned. She was feeling more religious than she had in years. She had enjoyed the wedding immensely. She was feeling grateful to God. So she barely noticed the vibrations at first, what with the throng of passengers and the usual thrumming of the ferryboat engine beneath the deck. But then came the first loud bang, and it was definitely not normal. Then a jolt. Her head jerked, and she looked in front of her and caught a brief and baffling glimpse of Beatrice and none other than Frank Harris, staring into one another’s eyes like lovers.
Frank Harris.
It had to be a mistake. The crease between her eyebrows deepened.

Then came the shrieking sound of metal and the blast that shattered windows all across the harbor and resounded up the two rivers, into Brooklyn and New Jersey, and as far north as Twenty-third Street. The fireball itself consumed everything within a fifty-foot circle. Mrs. Dolan was gone. Johnny was just far away enough to be hurtled forward by the blast, and he went somersaulting through the air, ax-blade boots over boater. He landed against a railing on the pier and found he couldn’t see. Blood was dripping into his eyes. He could not stand.

“Mother!”

Beatrice was facing the other way, looking at Harris, when the screeching of metal began. She never saw Mrs. Dolan’s end nor Johnny’s flight, but Harris had seen it all.

“Harris!” she shrieked, turning around, pressing into him. He couldn’t actually hear her voice through the blast, but he saw her mouth his name. Then hot soot filled the air, and they were moved forward by the undulations of the panicking crowd. Harris grasped her around the waist and she clung to him, and they strove together just to remain upright, not to be trampled.

When the air began to clear, he looked down at her, then back at the boat. The ferry was sinking fast, what remained of it, and there were still passengers clinging to the rails. Some of them would soon be sucked under by the
Westfield
’s pull. Others were so badly burned it was irrelevant. Plenty were already dead. Maybe, Harris thought, Johnny would be one of those. Harris had entirely forgotten the rest of his outing party: the Henleys, Susan Smith, Sarah Blacksall. There were screams and cries and groans in the air, and soon one of them singled itself out from the others: a full-throated, musical, undisguised whyo of the unsubtle kind the boys used back in Googy Corcoran’s day, except sadder, more desperate, and somehow more beautiful. Then Johnny called out again, in English: “
Beanie!
”

Then Harris saw him: Johnny was staggering, grasping a rail. His face was bloody. Behind him, Harris could see the stern of the boat tipping up and slowly sinking from sight. Johnny’s light summer suit was all black and red and seemed to be getting redder as he stood there, blindly crying Beanie’s name into the crowd. Perhaps he was dying, thought Harris with an unexpected pity as Johnny bellowed. But he was not, alas. In the end, Johnny’s only permanent physical mark from the accident would be a shallow, curved scar that followed the contour of his eyebrow and stretched toward his cheekbone.

“Harris, I’m so sorry about everything,” he heard Beanie say. She was very pale. “I
was
in love with you. But now I have to go.” Then she stepped away from him and ran to her husband, who was now bellowing,
“Mother!”

Harris watched her go. He saw that the spreading stain on Johnny’s suit was not his own blood. It came from something he was holding: an arm. It was all that was left of her. The rest of Meg Dolan’s body was in bits.

Harris thought of all the baths she had drawn for him, of the letter she had given him that had stayed his execution. He looked back at Johnny and saw Beatrice was with him. They cradled the arm in an unholy pietà. Harris was crying for so many reasons.

Some time later, John-Henry found him. “There you are. Let’s get out of here, Harris. You can’t do anything. And your girlfriend, she’s got her own people now. Come on.”