Open City (30 page)

I
WAS ALREADY FOURTEEN, NOT ALL THAT YOUNG, WHEN MY FATHER
was buried. The memory of the day wasn’t secure, because it was a public event and was as such taken over by other people’s concerns. His death had been private: there had literally been a deathbed (which struck me at the time, because I had only ever thought of the expression as a metaphor). But it was the burial I remembered more, and not the death. Only at the graveside had I felt that absurd sense
of finality, the sense that he wouldn’t be getting better, or returning after a few months: the feeling hollowed me out. And while I had the elevated thoughts of someone who was about to become a man, while I nurtured stoicism in myself, and a determination to handle the grief in the right way, I also fell to more childish instincts, so that, at the graveside, part of what I remembered, part of the reel that played in my mind as my father’s body was prayed over, included the ghouls and zombies from Michael Jackson’s
Thriller
.

In later years, it was the date of the burial, not that of the death, that I marked as an anniversary. I almost always remembered the former, and on May 9 of this year, I was on the 1 train on the way to work when it came to mind that he had been committed to earth for exactly eighteen years. In that time, I had complicated the memory of the day, not with other burials, of which I had attended only a few, but with depictions of burials—El Greco’s
Burial of the Count of Orgaz
, Courbet’s
Burial at Ornans
—so that the actual event had taken on the characteristics of those images, and in doing so had become faint and unreliable. I couldn’t be sure of the color of the earth, whether it really was the intense red clay I thought I remembered, or whether I had taken the form of the priest’s surplice from El Greco’s painting or from Courbet’s. What I remembered as long, sorrowful faces might have been round, sorrowful faces. Sometimes, in waking dreams, I imagined my father with coins on his eyes, and a solemn boatman collecting them from him, and granting him passage.

T
HERE WAS A MAN
, I
REMEMBER, ON THAT DAY OF THE EIGHTEENTH
anniversary, who was moving around the subway cars. He was inspecting the vents above the automatic doors. He wore a dark blue MTA uniform, and carried some sort of counter with him, into which he pressed numbers and which emitted intermittent beeps. I watched him closely, imagining him a spiritual messenger, an angel of
some sort, though whether for good or ill, I couldn’t tell, and so focused was he on his task that his methodical examination of each vent did nothing to dissuade me from the fanciful ideas working themselves into my head. I looked up at the vents as we hurtled past the uptown stations, 125th, 137th, 145th, I thought of the final terrible moments in the camps, moments that no one has survived to give firsthand testimony of, when the Zyklon B was switched on and all the human captives breathed in their deaths, and how, while all this was happening in the early forties, my oma was on her way north to Berlin as a refugee, bewildered and frightened as everyone around her was. These were the conversations I would have wished to have with her: about the young men in her town who’d marched off to war, and never come back, or those who had come back eventually—like my opa, about whom I had been told almost nothing—or those who’d been rounded up and sent to Mauthausen-Gusen.

At 157th, an Asian girl who had been drowsing suddenly got up, skittish, doelike, and sprang out of the subway car before the doors closed. Someone else came in and, for a brief, startling moment, I thought I recognized one of the boys who had mugged me. But I was mistaken. They had, of course, been floating in and out of my dreams, and the idea, so distasteful to me at the time, that it could have been worse now seemed the most sensible one. But in those dreams, I fought back. I was more badly injured, but I also beat them to the point of bloodiness. One of them fell, and I set on him, punching his face until it became like red paper under my fists, until he lost one of his eyes. When I woke, the pain of hitting him would become congruent with the ache at the back of my left hand.

I left my seat and went to speak with the MTA official as he was about to push open the door connecting our car to the next. He looked like a Guyanese or Trinidadian Indian—there was a touch of African ancestry in him, I guessed—though he could also have been directly from the Indian subcontinent itself. I asked him about his
work. He was an air-conditioning specialist, carrying out temperature checks on the cars. He was friendly, and seemed surprised anyone had noticed him at all.

It is amazing, he said, how a little variation, too hot or too cold, can lead to complaints. We have efficient HVAC systems—that stands for heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning—and in the summer, we try to keep things ten to fifteen degrees cooler than it is outside. We are constantly checking them, so it is a big operation. But of course no one notices the temperature unless it becomes uncomfortable, when the nozzles get blocked, or there’s a local breakdown in the system. And, he added with a laugh, you don’t ever notice your oxygen until it’s gone: something goes wrong with the HVAC, even for fifteen minutes, and people are ready to riot.

I
was invited to John Musson’s apartment for a party. It was in Washington Heights, just a little ways north of the hospital. The apartment overlooked the Hudson, Moji said, when she called me, and had a remarkable view, of water and trees and the George Washington Bridge, I simply had to come see it. She did not live with him, having her own apartment in Riverdale in the Bronx, but she spent many nights at his place, she said, and she was co-host of this party. I hadn’t seen her since our day out in the park, but she had called me three or four times, and we had had brief, friendly conversations, usually late at night. Once, she had abruptly asked me how my mother was doing. I was silent, then told her that I didn’t know, that we weren’t in touch. Oh, that’s too bad, she said, in a weirdly cheerful tone of voice. I remember meeting her. She was such a nice person.

In the days leading up to the gathering, I suppose I made some effort to edge out of it, but then the date arrived, in the middle of
May, and I found that I was without a good excuse and would have to attend. That day, I left work early, around five-thirty. I had time to kill, so instead of taking the subway, I decided to walk. I came around from Harkness to the intersection of Broadway and St. Nicholas, and the streets, as expected at that hour, were invaded in every lane and in both directions by impatient drivers. Mitchel Square Park, where the two main streets crossed, a vantage point of less than an acre, was dominated by a gently rising rock outcrop, from which one could read the overlay of buildings that had brought the medical campus to its current form. The new constructions not only sat close to the older buildings but were in many cases grafted right into them, shiny and strange as prosthetic limbs. Milstein, the central hospital building, was an amalgam of Victorian stone and a recent triangular frontage of glass and steel that gave it the aspect of a glittering pyramid in a dour and stately setting.

Such juxtapositions were common to the many buildings around, and the same layering extended to their names, which recounted the history of institutions that had begun as civic establishments and gradually become dependent on philanthropic and corporate benefactors. In the ornately carved stone lintel of one of the older buildings were the words
BABIES AND CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL 1887;
next door to it, in modern sans-serif font and glossy blue paint, was
MORGAN STANLEY CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL
. From Mitchel Square Park—dedicated to veterans of the First World War and named for a New York City mayor who had died in the war—I could see the Mary Woodard Lasker Biomedical Research Building, the Irving Cancer Research Center, the Sloane Hospital for Women, and the Russ Berrie Medical Science Pavilion. Parked in front of the Children’s Hospital was yet another donation, an ambulance of the FDNY Fire Family Transportation Foundation. Some of these were older, many were recent endowments, but all established the powerful link between modern medical care and memorials on the one hand, and memorials and money on the other. A hospital is not a neutral space,
it is not a purely scientific space, nor is it the religious one it had been in medieval times; the reality now involves commerce, and the direct correlation between donating large sums of money and having a building named in memoriam. Names matter. Everything has a name.

On the great rock of the square, some boys were playing on skateboards, negotiating the gentle but craggy gradient up and down, and laughing. I read the plaque at the 166th Street entrance memorializing Mitchel. He had been the city’s youngest mayor when he was elected to office at the age of thirty-four, at the beginning of the war, and his death in Louisiana four years later, while he was flying with the Army Aviation Corps, had occasioned a great outpouring of public grief. As I read the plaque, musing on the strange middle name Purroy, a man in a large Yankees jacket came into the park. He stood next to me, and asked for two dollars for the bus, but I refused him wordlessly, and went back out to Broadway. Just north of the park, beyond the bronze and granite World War I memorial, its three heroes arrested forever in battle—one standing, one kneeling, the third slumped in mortal injury—the temper of the neighborhood changed, and the hospital campus, as though the past had suddenly transformed into the present, gave way to the barrio.

Almost immediately, there were fewer of the white medical professionals who had been milling about the entrance to Milstein, and the streets were full now of Dominican and other Latin-American shoppers, workers, and residents. Someone coming toward me waved, exuberant. It was a tall, middle-aged woman with an infant, but I didn’t recognize the face. Mary, it’s Mary, she said. I worked with the old fellow, you remember? She shook her head with the surprise of having seen me. I reminded her of my name. And it was indeed her; she lived up in Washington Heights now, and was going to begin a nursing program at Columbia once her little boy went to day care. I congratulated her, and felt in myself an amazement at how quickly life went through its paces. We spoke a little about Professor
Saito. The old man was good, you know, she said. He always enjoyed your visits so much, I don’t know if he told you. It was difficult to see him go like that, to see him have it so difficult at the end. I thanked her for having taken care of him. Her baby started crying, and we bid each other goodbye.

From the intersection of 172nd Street, the George Washington Bridge came into view for the first time, its lights soft yellow points in the gray distance. I walked past small shops selling knickknacks, the sprawling window display of El Mundo Department Store, and the perpetually popular restaurant El Malecon, to which I occasionally came for dinner. Across the street from El Malecon was a massive and architecturally bizarre building. It had been built in 1930, and was known back then as the Loews 175th Street Theatre. Designed by Thomas W. Lamb, it was filled with glamorous detail—chandeliers, red carpeting, a profusion of architectural ornament within and without—and the terra-cotta elements on the façade drew from Egyptian, Moorish, Persian, and Art Deco styles. Lamb’s stated aim was to cast a spell of the mysterious on the “occidental mind,” with the use of “exotic ornaments, colors, and schemes.”

Now the building had a marquee sign, with white letters on a black background, that read:
COME ON IN OR SMILE AS YOU PASS
. It had become a church, but the gilded-age excess remained. This religious function had begun in 1969, and the theater, renamed the United Palace, still hosted several congregations. The best-known and longest-running of them was the one shepherded by the Right Reverend Frederick Eikerenkoetter. Reverend Ike, as he was popularly known, preached prosperity and lived in the princely manner befitting, in his view, a faithful servant of God’s word. Parked in front of the church, and weirdly congruent with its false Assyrian battlements and decontextualized pomp, was his green Rolls-Royce, one of several luxury cars he owned. His church, the United Church Science of Living Institute, once numbered in the tens of thousands.
It was sparser now. But, still, the people gave freely, as they had done since the sixties.

The theater, America’s third largest when it was built, seating over three thousand, had hosted films as well as vaudeville shows in its earlier incarnation. Al Jolson had played there, as had Lucille Ball, and back then it had been surrounded by expensive restaurants and luxury goods shops. Now, from the doorway of El Malecon, in the waning light of a Friday evening, it looked quiet. The jumble of architectural styles failed, more than seventy-five years on, to resolve themselves into anything meaningful. Even in its best days, it must have looked alien in the environment. It looked more so now, still reasonably well maintained, but utterly out of place, its architecture a world away from that of the small shops, its grand columns and arches irrelevant to the fatigued immigrants who rarely raised their heads to look above street level. The spell had faded.

The door of a parked minivan opened. A young boy stuck his head out, and vomited into the gutter, and from within the minivan, the reassuring voice of a woman spoke to him. The boy vomited again, then he looked up, with a cherubic expression, and caught my eye. I walked on, farther up Broadway, drawn, it seemed, into the fast-changing face of the neighborhood. There was another ornate building at the 181st Street corner. And here was the old competitor to the Loews 175th Street Theatre, the Coliseum, which, in its own time, before the Loews was built, was the third largest theater in the country. A brief and sad claim to fame: to have once been the third largest. Now, greatly altered, it had become the New Coliseum Theatre, and it shared space with a large pharmacy and a hodgepodge of other storefronts; only above its first floor were there hints of the 1920s architecture.

I turned left at 181st, and walked down to Fort Washington, past the A train station and the Fort Washington Collegiate Church, and then to Pinehurst, which was connected to 181st not directly but by
a long and narrow flight of stairs rising into a small wooded tangle that opened out into the street proper. The stairs, vertiginous and reminiscent of the much longer stairs leading up to Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre, were in the shade of trees, fringed on both sides with dense, weed-choked plots, and bifurcated by a double rank of iron railings in a manner that evoked a funicular railway; I half-expected a tramcar to come chugging down the left side while I walked up the right. The stairs brought me out into the dead end of Pinehurst, a different world from the busy street life a few dozen yards below: residential buildings, a richer, whiter neighborhood. And so I proceeded among the whites, entering their quieter street life, feeling for minutes that I was the only person walking around a depopulated world, and reassured only by occasional signs of life: an old lady at the end of the block carrying a bag of groceries, a pair of neighbors in conversation in front of an apartment building, and the appearance, one after the other, of glimmering lights from within the windows of lovely brick houses set back from the street. To my right was Bennett Park, still and silent, animated only by the occasional fluttering of the American flag and the black POW flag hoisted below it. Pinehurst ended at 187th, and that brought me around to Cabrini, which ran alongside the river.