The Boy Detective (2 page)

“Come in, Your Highness,” I called from my chair, while the king remained outside the door of my lodgings and accommodations.

“But how did you know . . . ,” he began as he entered my sitting-room.

“Your crown hit the door as you knocked, Your Excellency,” I told him.

“Amazing, Mr. Holmes!” he said.

“Not to mention”—I smiled slightly—“the faintest odor of sardines.”

 

N
OT TO MENTION
the faintest scent of brine, where I walk now. But what should one expect? This is Twenty-sixth Street, where Herman Melville lived at number 104, embittered for nearly thirty years. By the time he moved into his dreary one-bedroom flat, he had already written
White-Jacket, Pierre,
and
Moby-Dick
. The critics had flogged him. He had no money. He survived by working as a customs inspector, a job he described as “worse than driving geese to water.” Eventually he finished
Billy Budd
five months before he died, in 1891. The book was found among his papers, and was not published till 1924. No evidence of his house today. The lot is occupied by an office building next to the 69th Regiment Armory, a blackened Moby-Dick of a building, where the International Exhibition of Modern Art was held in 1913, and where the neighborhood kids watched the New York Knicks in the early 1950s, before pro basketball got big.

Writers always have been drawn to the Gramercy Park area, which contained what Henry James, another resident, called “the incomparable tone of time.” The park itself was a farm in the 1820s, bought by an entrepreneur, Samuel Ruggles, described as an advocate of open spaces, who spent $180,000 to drain the swamp on the property and create “Gramercy Square.” This he deeded to the owners of forty-two parcels of land surrounding it. The park was enclosed by a fence in 1833, and a landscaper, with the demanding name of James Virtue, planted trees and shrubs, as well as privet hedges inside the fence to enforce the border. Apparently, Ruggles's definition of open spaces was limited to two acres (.08 hectares) of elaborately planned greenery and a gated Eden available only to those who lived directly around it and paid an annual fee for a key.

For myself, I could not stand the studied civility of the place—the perfect rectangular park; the confident benches; the birdhouses, like restored Machu Picchu temples, one at each end; the gravel pathways running among four lawns cut in the shape of piano tops—exclusive, average, tame. That, above all, was what depressed me about Gramercy Park, more than its will for pointless order and enclosure and its smug prettiness—the feeling that the neighborhood might foster and contain creativity, but without the thrill of discovery, or self-discovery, or danger. Sea-level art. Gramercy Park seemed assured that it was better than anyone who lived there, with no evidence to support the assumption. Did Melville sense that as he walked these streets?

Yet the still, green neighborhood offered something for literary New York. Edith Wharton was born in a town house on the site of the Gramercy Park Hotel, now an apartment house on the north side of the park, in 1862. The sister poets, Phoebe and Alice Cary, moved here from Cincinnati in 1850, and established a literary salon that attracted such people as Horace Greeley, the editor of the
New York Tribune,
who advised young men to go west. Greeley had a three-story house at 35 East Nineteenth Street, and kept goats in his backyard. Stephen Crane moved in with three artists, in a run-down building on Twenty-third Street, where he found a fitting quotation from Emerson chalked on a wall: “Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age.” The National Arts Club, founded in 1898 on the south side of the park, included Mark Twain, W. H. Auden, and, more recently, Frank McCourt among its members. E. B. White located
Stuart Little
in Gramercy Park. Hard to know if Stuart counts as a literary figure.

William Sydney Porter, O. Henry to his readers, lived a bit better than most of the area writers, at 55 Irving Place, because he had a steady job writing weekly stories for the
New York World
at $100 a pop. He spent most of his time hanging around Healy's Café across the street, and getting stinko with fellow writers, artists, and musicians. Healy's Café became Pete's Tavern, in which O. Henry was said to have written “The Gift of the Magi.” During Prohibition, Pete's posed as a flower shop. Patrons walked past the cases of refrigerated flowers on their way to the bar. Summers, when we were in college, Ginny and I would sit here at the outdoor tables, nurse beers, and speak of the life ahead of us. Tonight the tables are cold and white with frost.

Oscar Wilde lived at Seventeenth Street and Irving Place for a while. Minor literary figures, such as Carl Van Vechten and Paul Rosenfield lived on Irving Place as well. Local dinner parties were jazzed up by the likes of George Gershwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, Ethel Barrymore, and Langston Hughes. They spilled gaily into what Van Vechten had called “the splendid drunken twenties.” In 1927, Nathanael West took a position as night manager of the fleabag Kenmore Hotel on Twenty-third, where he wrote
The Day of the Locust
and snuck other writers into the hotel. Dashiell Hammett registered under the name Mr. T. Victoria Blueberry. West gave him the swankiest suite in the joint, where Hammett wrote
The Maltese Falcon
—telling of wicked women, murderers, and treasure three blocks from where Herman Melville, PI, alone and unnoticed, had tracked evildoers down the vast gray streets of the sea.

 

T
O THIS PRECIOUS
PLACE,
Dr. Milton B. Rosenblatt brought his bride, Mollie Ruth Spruch, in 1939, one year before I was born. Suspicious characters, both. Even their names were aliases. My mother was born Marta, but when she entered grade school, the authorities told my German grandparents that Marta was not an American name, as compared to, say, Mollie. No one seemed to know where my father came from. Whenever I asked, the answer was different each time. Sometimes Poland, sometimes Russia, occasionally Lithuania. As for
his
alias, the B. stood for Barrington, which he picked up on a drive through Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He thought the name gave him WASPy class, which he both sought and derided. He rises from his own ashes, my fastidious father, and dusts himself off.

He wore three-piece suits. He wore hats from Cavanaugh's—gray felt hats in the winters and straw skimmers in the summers. He wore neckties indoors, and smoking jackets, sitting alone in the silent home he made. I have a photograph of him when he was two or three, wearing a girl's dress as all infants did in those days. He looked old even then, with his grim, displeased expression and his Edward G. Robinson jowls. As a child, I was expected to be old, too. “Roger,” he said one day, “that's no way for a twelve-year-old boy to behave.” “Dad,” I said, “I'm eight.”

So angry was he with life, his fury often came out funny. All my childhood, I was assailed by his rules for successful living, such as “Never trust a Hungarian.” At the age of three, it was hard to know how to apply such advice. In my teens, he told me, “Never go out with anyone from Brooklyn,” which expanded to include the Bronx, Queens, and New Jersey as well. Reared on Manhattan's Lower East Side, he hated that fact, too. He spent his remaining years trying to get away from the poverty associated with the Lower East Side, and to shake off Judaism as if it were a local curse. He wanted to be up and out. Up from DeWitt Clinton High School. Up from City College, where he was a boxer. When he became a doctor, he and my mother moved up in the world to Gramercy Park, where he had his first office. Later, he moved his office farther uptown, to 1040 Fifth Avenue at Eighty-fifth Street. When Jackie Kennedy moved into the building in 1964, he complained about the Secret Service men. He hated them. He hated her, with whom, of course, he never spoke. He was made chief of medicine at Doctors Hospital, the ritziest if not the most efficient hospital in the city. Ever combative, he told me he won the position “over all the Harvards and Yales.”

In the 1960s, when I was in my twenties, he became a neocon Republican like many FDR Democrats, and was sneeringly contemptuous of every liberalizing event I celebrated. Often we would argue late into the night, and although I was in the right in our arguments, he always managed to gain the upper hand. One evening, we were seated next to each other in identical red upholstered chairs, watching the seven o'clock news, when Alabama's governor George Wallace came on. This was in 1968, before Wallace had been shot, saw the light, and was crowned a “national treasure.” In those days he was purely a fearmonger with sweet talk. When he addressed the nation, as he did for a full three minutes that evening, you knew you were getting hate and death, unsullied by platform politics. My father, not taking his eyes from the TV screen, thought for a moment, giving himself just the right pause. Finally he said, “You know, in a decent country a jackass like that would not be given ten seconds on television. But now, thanks to you liberals, he can talk his brains out.”

 

W
HOA
! S
PEAKING OF
TALKING:
Here's a guy, underdressed for the weather in jeans, a T-shirt, and a blazer, quick-stepping up Thirtieth and braying into his cell in behalf of a business deal he hopes to pull off. I can't make out the particulars. He yammers on into a small crowd ahead of me, gaining speed, and explaining about how “It's a
lock,
Phil” and “Let's just
do
it!” It is evident that Phil is not ready to just do it, if he ever will be, and sensing this, our public speaker grows louder and more dramatic in his self-promotion. A self-revving engine. The crowd expects that he'll take off. And just as this thought occurs, why
yes
, his left foot rises on the air and then his right, and all at once he is lifting into the cold dark, two or three inches off the ground, speaking ever more urgently. “You don't see this
happening
, Phil? Of
course
you do! Of
course
you do!”

At first, finding him merely pathetic, I listen to his pitch with a disinterested malice, waiting for his voice to sink in despair as he grows aware of his inevitable failure. Phil says no, emphatically. My man droops his head, held so high until that moment. But now, as he approaches Thirty-second, I find myself quietly cheering his lusty desperation, as if he were speaking for all mankind knocking its head against a brick wall. And you can feel others on the street pulling for him, too, though not a syllable of encouragement is uttered. In his relentless effort to win Phil over, he has become the leader of our pack of strangers, our head bird. We are swept along in his tail wind. “Come
on
,
Phil. You
know
it's going to happen. It's
gotta
happen!”—the last words we hear from him as he goose-steps toward the moon.

 

I
F YOU DON'T
want to be around people who talk their brains out, why live in New York? Talking freely is the city's thing—you can feel it—what the city does, and has done from the start, when the Dutch carried the prizes of tolerance and openness from Holland across the Atlantic and planted those bright, fat tulips here. Free thought became free markets. The Dutch republic of the 1600s boasted the most gloriously diverse culture in Europe. Bertrand Russell called seventeenth-century Holland the birthplace of “freedom of speculation.” I cannot claim that as a boy I was aware of any of this history, but even a nine-year-old could feel the city's extravagant freedom in the air—every block, every home inviting you to speak your mind. On my detective's walks, though I hardly knew it, I strutted as a young colonial, escaping the tyranny of a silent house.

Who, after all, is more suited to the liberal life than the detective, who, by dint of his very profession, defies restrictions of government, of the police, and of conventional, predictable thinking? If in some ways detectives are also arch conservatives, in that they tame the behavior of their clients, indeed tame society itself, and make it orderly, still, they function according to their own rules of honor and justice arrived at independently. The private enterprise of the private op. Every detective story depends on their freedom of speculation without which no mystery can be solved.

As I wandered the city on my cases, I did not think that I existed anywhere other than where I happened to be at the time—in Madison Square Park or the Village or Murray Hill or St. Marks Place. Yet I could not help but sense that I was also treading a path that had been laid out before me centuries earlier by those who believed the human mind was built to confront mysteries. The detective story is that of free speculation at work. And the Dutch wrote it for the world long before Holmes pursued Moriarty, or I, the bad guys of my own manufacture.

 

Y
OU'D THINK IT
would have been Edgar Allan Poe who coined the word
detective,
because Poe wrote the first detective stories, that is, stories with the now-familiar components of the know-it-all sleuth, the invaluable stooge or sidekick, the bumbling police, and so forth. But though Poe created “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Gold Bug,” along with C. Auguste Dupin, the little genius who solved his crimes, the term for Dupin was not
detective.
Poe might have used that term had he written his mysteries after 1843. That was when Sir James Graham, the British home secretary, seeking to give the ablest officers in the London police force a special designation, formed a unit called “the detectives.” Even if Poe had known the word, he would not have pinned it on Dupin without prefixing the word
private,
because, like all great independent or “consulting” detectives, Dupin never would have been associated with the police. A detective worth his salt has no use for institutions—not only because he's smarter than the institutions, but also because he cannot survive in a group.