Agnes Among the Gargoyles (49 page)

   Bezel checks his pocket for his wallet and his sock for his knife.

In the late Nineteen-Fifties, Agnes drove with her parents on the New Jersey Turnpike. Just above Secaucus she saw something beautiful.

   It was a pile of factories. Some were made of red bricks that looked roasted; others of a glittering micaceous concrete. A sign on each roof proudly announced that factory's product. Dr. Christian's Tooth Powder. Belasco Staples. B.J. Johnson Feed & Fertilizer. Wright Washers, Fans & Belts. Agnes couldn't read the words, but it didn't matter. The signs were lovely in the abstract, each ampersand like a musical clef, and the logos—the stylized men and shovels, the livestock, the flywheels—raised all sorts of interesting questions in her mind. Plumes of white and black and ocher and vermilion trailed from the smokestacks. Boxcars coupled and uncoupled on the freight spurs, hopper cars inched up ramps, there were water towers and sheds and silos and eighteen-wheelers and iron trestles and a man in green overalls hoisting a blue jug from a water cooler on his shoulder.

   Holy Cow! thought little Agnes.

   Arriving at the B.J. Johnson Company were hopper cars filled with phosphate rock, for the phosphorous to be extracted is a major ingredient of both feed and fertilizer. The waste product, full of uranium and thorium, was sold to a manufacturer of building materials for conversion into the synthetic material phosphogypsum—unless the construction industry was slumping, in which case Johnson Feed & Fertilizer, unable to sell the phosphorous waste, would seal it in barrels and bury it in the nearby Meadowlands.

   By 1963, Johnson Feed & Fertilizer was out of business. Now the plant housed a candy manufacturer, the maker of ATOMIC RED HOTS, pellets like buckshot of peppermint astringency. Johnson Feed & Fertilizer saw hard times at the end, split shifts and an empty warehouse and the stigma of Cash on Delivery. The halflife of the business was 24 years. The uranium and thorium and radon daughters leaking out of the buried barrels would be around much longer. In 1963 the glorious Pennsylvania Station was torn down. The rubble was carted out to New Jersey; it, too, was sunk in the Meadowlands. The Tivoli marble and Milford granite, the Doric columns and iron chandeliers, the carved stone maidens, all of it sat in a radioactive garbage heap from 1963 until the first salvaging operations by the Byodo-in Syndicate in 198_.

   The tentacles of Byodo-in stretched all over the world. When the People's Credit Trust of Brazil went bankrupt, Byodo-in acquired South American factories and warehouses, two iron mines, a coffee plantation and a ranch. The Byodoin company jet touched down at a small airfield in Fortaleza, Brazil, and four Japanese gentlemen dispatched themselves to separate destinations in or near Olinda, Paulistana, Quixada and Sobral. The four men inspected irrigation ditches, peered into the mouths of cattle, reconciled fraudulent manifests and pried open perhaps two thousand crates. There had been plans to build a harness racing track at Natal, and the warehouse at Rio Tinto was full of construction supplies. Here was a piece of luck. The Byodo-in agent arranged for transportation of the goods to New York to be used in the rebuilding of Pennsylvania Station.

   Five tons of Portland cement and monazite sand were shipped to New York. Monazite sand is extremely high in radioactive elements; the Atlantic coast of Brazil is known for its monazite sand beaches which, though believed to confer great health benefits, are actually lethal, emitting as many as 20,000 millirems of radiation in certain places.

   The station took shape on Seventh Avenue. The pieces hoisted from the Meadowlands muck were thoroughly contaminated, as was the cement that would hold the new station together. Several of the construction workers brought over from Japan developed immediate symptoms of radiation exposure: nausea, weakness, loss of hair, projectile vomiting. The foremen attributed the workers' illnesses to a combination of homesickness and failure to adjust to an American diet—in short, weakness. These men, with their petty health complaints, were jeopardizing the success of the group effort. They were ostracized. One of the crane operators became so ill he had to be hospitalized; depressed after his release, he did himself in by falling on a pickax.

   More workers were brought to New York. A large shed of corrugated tin was erected in the Meadowlands. As the pieces of the station were dug up—this process was carefully monitored by several degree candidates in archeology from Princeton—they were brought to the shed to be numbered and catalogued and sorted into lots, ready to be transported by underground rail to New York City.

 Illness, suicide, and excavation delays notwithstanding, the Japanese worked with great efficiency. While the granite facades were being assembled in the Meadowlands, workers erected the concourse roof of glass and recast steel on Seventh Avenue. The foundation needed to be reinforced, but since the tunnels and tracks and platforms were already in place, it was possible for the rebuilt station to be assembled on its site like a Levitt ranch house.

   A few days before the opening, Tollivetti was standing on the 34th Street platform of the Seventh Avenue IRT. He was eating his favorite snack, cheese flavored popcorn, and doing what he always did while waiting for a train: leaning over the edge of the platform, watching the rats. They scooted along the rails and clustered in the spaces between the ties; they stopped dead in their tracks, cocked their pointed faces to the tunnel and scampered down the rat holes as the train approached. On this day, as Tollivetti watched with growing interest, one rat wouldn't leave. He was a big white fellow, and he just crawled listlessly from one side of the track to the other, tail dragging, apparently addled. Tollivetti threw a piece of popcorn at him. It landed beside him; he sniffed it idly but showed no further interest in it. Then Tollivetti took a closer look. The rat wasn't white—he was hairless. Bald as a cue ball, except for two tufts on the back of his neck.

   Now Tollivetti could see that there appeared to be some kind of wound or ulceration at the place where his tail met his body. The Number Two to White Plains Road chugged into the station. The rat looked up at the approaching train. His only movement was to turn his head away an instant before being crushed. The train pulled out and took the carcass with it.

   Tollivetti was troubled by what he had witnessed. He threw away the rest of his cheese popcorn. Never before had he seen a rat's committing suicide.

   There were no ceremonies to mark the reopening of Pennsylvania Station. At nine o'clock on a Sunday morning the doors were simply opened with no fanfare.

To acknowledge the reopening of the station would have meant too many reminders of its initial closing. New York was just going to pretend that October 28, 1963, when the first demolition crew arrived, had simply never happened.

   On that Sunday over 100,000 people visited the rebuilt station. They stood on the Grand Stairway and marveled at the vast space of the main waiting room. Their pulses quickened in the concourse, a dim portal of steel arches and great stark clocks, where swift good-byes would once again be shouted above the din of departing trains. They paid homage at the statues of Alexander Cassatt, the builder of the original station, and David Eitoku, the Executive Director of Byodo-in. The imperfection of the station's reassembly, the visible seams between the old and the new, the jigsaw puzzles of marble and concrete, the odd gaps where a column, for example, simply could not be found, gave to the station a feeling of great antiquity; the sunbeams through the lunette windows were like an endorsement from the Creator himself. Strolling down the arcades of elegant shops was like taking a walk through the ruins of Pompeii.

   "I have to have a picture. Not that I can capture it, of course."

 Every staircase and landing became a photographer's perch. The film shop in the arcade sold out its Kodachrome and Fuji and disposable cameras and everything else that first day. Every nook and cranny of the station was photographed at every possible speed and exposure.

 The photographers were right. The station couldn't be captured. None of the pictures came out.

   That day, more people called in sick to work at Macy's, across the street from the station, than on any previous day that year. Management blamed the absenteeism on the excitement of the new station, even when some of the workers stayed out a week or more.

   That first night, the porters in Pennsylvania Station commented that the bathrooms smelled terrible. The drugstore in the main waiting room had sold all of its Tylenol. The photography shop had to make good on scores of rolls of defective film. Kodak and Fuji were shocked and apologetic, and new stock was rushed right over. That film was no good, either. A team of technicians came down from Rochester. They were the ones who discovered that the station was emitting alpha and beta particles and gamma rays, which were exposing the film before it left the shop.

 The city panicked. There was scattered evacuation. The Upper West Side looked like a ghost town. The residents of Washington Heights stayed put, more or less.

   That station had to go.

   Again.

 This time, there were no protests. The Telamones Society did not raise its voice. To a man, its membership was terrified of radiation.

   Byodo-in went into receivership. Who would do the demolition work? Who would do the cleanup? The National Guard was given the assignment. How strange it was to see men in yellow radiation-proof gear wielding jackhammers and shovels and dynamite! The rubble of the station was carted back to the Meadowlands, where the watchdogs stood, making sure it wasn't buried again. Instead it was loaded into unmarked boxcars, hitched to a set of diesels, and sent west. So happy were the people of New Jersey to have the contaminated materials out of their state that no one kept tabs on exactly where it went once it had crossed the border. It disappeared over the horizon, and if you ever find yourself in the caboose of a freight train, drinking coffee and playing cards with the crew, you are bound to hear the legend of Pennsylvania Station and the Phoenix Express, the freight that no one wants, that is doomed to cross the country forever, from St. Paul to Galveston, from Milwaukee to Fresno to Fried Apple Island, down to Miami and back to Seattle.

   "There never was a sound as mournful as that train whistle," say the railroad men who claim to have encountered the Phoenix Express, and you may feel rising hackles on the back of your neck. Take a sip of coffee. Try not to misplay your cards. "Somehow, it's always on the horizon when you hear it," they say, "and you strain your eyes to see it, but you can't make out a train—just a kind of soft glow, sometimes blue and sometimes orange, like the Northern Lights."

The clouds are almost comically huge and billowing and as motionless as tethered balloons in the midday sky. A steady breeze blows off the Isar River. The beer garden at Chinesischer Turm might be the most pleasant spot in Munich.

   You never really know your parents until you hang out with them, Agnes thinks, and by hanging out she doesn't mean sharing the periodic holiday turkey. Since moving to Germany, Agnes and Hannah have done lots of hanging out at coffeehouses and beer halls. Agnes has learned that her mother is the sort of person who attracts strangers to the table. Today, their companion, Karl, is wall-eyed and deferential, somewhere in his Twenties, dressed in a fake leather jacket and with his hair cut in a shaggy Bobby Sherman do.

   Karl is a coin collector. He possesses coins from nearly every country in the world. Not old coins or rare coins, not new issues or minting errors, just the basic currency. It strikes Agnes as a simpleminded, childish hobby, like collecting seashells; she is impatient with its lack of profit-making possibility.

   "God, these things are already starting to seem worthless to me," says Hannah, proffering the last few American coins she has dug out of the bottom of her purse. "I feel like I'm carrying around bingo markers."

   "Bingo?" says Karl.

   "A game played by senior citizens with nothing else to do," Hannah explains.

   "There is no respect for age in America," says Karl.

   He has an almost sexual interest in the United States: when not complaining about its money-grubbing ways and desire to pollute the world and vapid beer he wants to know everything there is to know about Vanna White and Cher, freeways, Pismo Beach, Spring Break at Daytona, Kansas City steaks, foot-long wieners and Ronald Wegeman. Hannah is willing to answer all his questions in great detail, and he finds her answers pleasing.

   "Let me tell you about those ski resorts," she says after he throws out the phrase
Hunter Mountain.
"Skiing is the last sport on anybody's mind. They're nothing but meat markets."

   His eyes widen at this charming idiom. "Meat markets!"

   Hannah smiles patronizingly. "Tell him, Agnes."

   "Ma, you know I've never been skiing in my life."

   Karl leers at Agnes. "You should go sometime. You might have fun. Maybe get away from your mother for a while."

   Karl and Hannah laugh suggestively.

   Food arrives: shank of veal and radishes and dumplings like bocci balls. Hannah and Karl eat from one another's plates. Together they read the
International
Herald-Tribune.
They come upon an article about Ronald Wegeman, who is being sued by the stockholders of the Palace of Versailles.

   "Wegeman," says Karl with apparent contempt. "I hate that guy. I hope they put him in jail."

   "He is one of our more flamboyant characters," says Hannah.

   "Pretty soon he'll be mopping out toilets," says Karl.

   "My daughter works for him," says Hannah.