Forever (33 page)
What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life’s page, And be alone on earth as I am now.
—L
ORD
B
YRON
, “C
HILDE
H
AROLD’S
P
ILGRIMAGE
,” 1812
C
ormac eased to his left outside the doorway of the basement room at 7
Cedar Street, trying for a better view of the slaughtered woman on the bed. A tall mustached policeman barred his way. Floor-boards creaked above his head, the heavy tread of a detective named Ford, who was speaking to the owner of the bordello. Cormac put a hand on the stone wall beside the door, trying to steady himself. The wall was scummy with a decade’s worth of damp. He felt as if some dark yellow fluid were beginning to drip through his veins.
He made notes, using pencil on a small cut pad, forcing himself to concentrate on what lay before him. About twenty-five, perhaps younger. Dark brown hair, thickened by blood. Rouged cheeks beneath the drying blood. A red dent above the brow. Her throat cut from the left ear to the right clavicle bone. Her tongue jutting from her mouth. One ear severed. Puncture wounds in her small left breast.
“Do you have a name yet, officer?” Cormac said.
“Dubious,” the policeman said.
“That’s her name?”
“Yeah. Dubious Jones. No wonder he killed her.”
He laughed a cop’s dark laugh.
“Who’s the he?” Cormac said. “The one who killed her.”
“Fucked if I know,” the cop said.
Cormac kept making notes. A single thick candle burned down to a saucer, the wax glazing the table. A wick like a thin stump of charcoal. Her left leg bent at the edge of the bed, one bare foot on the greasy stone floor. A laced black boot on the other foot, caked mud on the heel. Dark blood soaking the bed beneath her buttocks. The dress jerked up. Cut there too.
A rat with a leathery tail appeared under the bed, licking the drying blood.
Cormac turned away, the yellow fluid thickening in his veins. He heard footsteps coming down the stairs behind him. Inspector Ford. And Jennings from the
Journal-Advertiser,
notebook in hand.
“What’s it we’ve got here?” Jennings said.
“What’s it look like we’ve got here?” said Inspector Ford. His reddish mustaches looked fierce, his nostrils flared. “We’ve got a fucking murder.”
“Can I quote you on that?” Jennings said, smiling. He flashed his rabbity front teeth, touched the brim of his bowler hat. Thin, young, a British edge to his accent. “Jesus,” he said, “it smells like a bear’s ass down here.”
“It would smell like that if you filled it with flowers,” Cormac said.
“Ah, an aesthetic observation from the aging veteran of the
Evening Post,
” Jennings said.
“Why don’t you interview the rat under the bed, Jennings?” Cormac said. “He must’ve been an eyewitness.”
“Totally unreliable.”
“Perfect for you,” Cormac said.
“Will you two goddamned shite-for-brains shut up, please?” Inspector Ford said. “I’m trying to work.”
Cormac turned, the bile rising, the yellow fluid surging, and hurried up the stairs. He walked through the barroom, with its watercolors of the Hudson and its worried owner, and made it to Cedar Street. He held on to a tree and then vomited into the gutter.
A fine way to spend a birthday, he thought, walking toward the
Evening Post
on Pine Street. A fine way to celebrate another ninth of September. Puking my guts out on Cedar Street. Happy birthday, in the year of the Lord 1834. And even now, I don’t feel much better. The air is the same as it was before I got sick. And it’s filling me and rotting my guts.
Who killed Dubious Jones? he asked himself.
I don’t care, he answered.
The morning had been cool and quiet, and as always on his birthday, he walked to the edge of the North River and dropped a white rose into the flowing waters. As always, he wished for it to sail out past the many-masted ships and through the Narrows and into the Atlantic. With any luck, it would float all the way to Ireland. He sent that rose each year to his mother. She, after all, had done all the work on the day he was born. She was the one who should be celebrated. As always at the edge of the river, he thought about the coat of many colors and the magical pots simmering on the fire and her dark hair and wonderful smile. Then he went to work.
That morning, as on most weekday mornings for the past twelve years, he left the river’s edge and went to the office of the
Evening Post
on Pine Street. The morning was hot, with steamy August lingering into sweet September. The odor was beginning to rise from the streets, the buildings, the people.
He spent the morning scanning month-old newspapers from London, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Paris, freshly arrived on the Liverpool packet. On slow days, he would cobble together stories from those newspapers, including the dailies in French. In a way, such work was like painting, which he did in the rooms on Cortlandt Street that he’d rented now for sixteen years. You took various elements, you were precise about each one of them, but you made them fresh by the way you arranged them. The process kept his brain alert and alive. Or so he thought, as the months became years, and the years became decades.
He liked the work of journalism from the day he started at the old
Commercial-Advertiser
just before the century turned. He’d been urged into the craft by a printer who had employed him for night work when his business was heavy. For the first ten years Cormac used the name Ridley Rattigan, but it never mattered what name he used in his new life since no article was ever signed. The same was true at the
Evening Post
. The skills of the acting craft helped him in several ways. He could make himself gradually look older, so that when he announced his retirement from the
Commercial-Advertiser,
he could go off, paint for a year on his savings, and then apply for work at the
Evening Post
as a new young man, eager to work on a newspaper. The other skill of the actor’s trade was technical: He could write in whatever voice was required. He could be a Hamiltonian conservative or a Tom Paine radical. He could be lyrical and melancholy or sarcastic and scathing. And he could supply what his editors most frequently demanded: a tone of numbing banality. Cormac worked at this craft ten hours a day, six days a week, which left him about twenty hours a week for his painting. He soon discovered that he needed both: the journalism to eat time, help it pass swiftly, to give him a sense of human proportion; the painting to slow it down, to allow him to meditate on sky and weather and the endless varieties of the human body.
He had a talent for newspaper work, delighting in the discovery of stories and then writing them in units of five hundred or a thousand words. He became quick and accurate. He enjoyed the company of other journalists, even the unspeakable Jennings. He liked the way the day’s routine could always be interrupted. He’d be assembling a tedious story about the fate of the Bonapartes, a story that would be read by about seventy-five people in New York, and someone would rush in the door, breathless and urgent. As had happened this morning. “Bloody murder! Woman killed at seven Cedar Street.” And out the door he’d go. There were more and more homicides in the town these past ten years, because of the opening of the Erie Canal and the flooding of the town with strangers. The newspaper had to record them. But Cormac knew that the gory details would never make it into the sanitized columns of the
Evening Post
. Such details, said his editors, Mr. Bryant and Mr. Leggett, were low and common. But still, someone had to go. Someone had to ask a policeman: Who killed Dubious Jones? Even if the answer never appeared in the newspaper.
There was one other part of newspaper writing that he came to need more than all the others, including the regularity of a paycheck.
It was about other people, not himself.
He walked to the office of the
Post
and paused at a stall on the crowded Broadway corner to buy a cup of mocha coffee and a piece of plain bread from a heavy black woman named Beatriz Machado. She was also selling corn and oysters, but he needed something plain in his trembling stomach.
“You look like you swallered a boiled ferret, Mist’ Co’mac,” she said.
“I feel worse than I look, Beatriz.”
She leaned in and whispered, “You need somethin’ special?”
“No,” he said, “just a hot bath.”
“Now, that’s harder for to get you,” Beatriz said. “Easier for to get a hot woman than a hot bath in this dirty ol’ town.”
In addition to corn, oysters, and mocha coffee (introduced the year before by seamen from Jamaica), Beatriz sold other things, secret things, ranging from magical roots, fried insects, and herbs to opium. These were not displayed in her stall, but she had them for her special customers. Adding and subtracting, Cormac tried to remember how long he’d known her. It was now fifty-seven years since Bantu died, and Big Michael died, and Aaron died and Silver died and Carlito died. Beatriz had been born a slave, up by Albany, but came with her parents to New York when she was seven, right after the Revolution, and had lived to see the final end of slavery in New York. That was just seven years ago. Forty-four years after the Revolution. Cormac had met her with Quaco at the African Bookshop on Lispenard Street when she was seventeen. She had just given birth to her first child. Cormac couldn’t recall the name of her husband but remembered him as a grave, humorless young man who forbade her to talk with white men. He was soon gone, but Cormac didn’t see Beatriz again until Quaco died at ninety-eight years old in 1816. They met at the burial ground. She was then heavier, the mother of four boys, living with her third husband.
“You some strange white man,” she said, “talkin’ that old Africa talk, that Y’ruba talk.”
“I speak French too,” he said. “And Irish. And a little English.” She laughed. “You some strange white man.”
Now she handed him the bread and mocha, and as always refused his money. He sipped in silence as she poured coffee and handed sweets to other customers and dropped their money in an apron pocket. Most took their coffee in cups from Beatriz, but some brought their own cups and carried their coffee away to their offices. Cormac’s coffee was sweet and the bread fresh, but his body was still in a state of runny rebellion. Other people, he told himself. Think of other people, look at other people; you’re a journalist and other people are your business. Who killed Dubious Jones? Who gave her the name?
Down Greenwich Street he could see old black men sleeping in doorways or standing on corners, waiting for work that did not come. Their masters had held them to the end and then were happy to see them go. They no longer had to care for these old men. No longer feed them and clothe them. They’d simply cast them out. Like old dogs. Now the white-haired Africans begged for alms, and Cormac wondered which of them had fought for the Revolution when they were young, which of them had believed all the shiny words from the likes of Cormac O’Connor. He could not look at them without feeling shame. He had trouble listening to them too. Like almost everybody in the city, they asked about a place to wash. They were too old for the treacheries of the summer rivers and there were no baths in the winter churches. They had no homes. After every blizzard, two or three were found dead in alleys, sometimes hugging each other for warmth that finally vanished. All had lost or outlived their children and their women. Sometimes Cormac gave them a few pence and offered his apologies in Yoruba. He could do nothing about the water.
“You can’t do nothin’ for them folk, Mist’ Co’mac,” Beatriz said, following the direction of his gaze.
“I could do more than I do,” he said, finishing the coffee.
“Mist’ Quaco tol’ me long time ago jes’ what you done, Mist’ Co’mac. You done plenty.”
He smiled, took a deep breath, stopped himself, exhaled.
“When are you going to pose for me, Beatriz?”
She giggled. “I’m too old to get naked for
no
man, Mist’ Co’mac. Not even you. And you the man never gets old.”
F
or months now, starting in the unseasonably hot days of late April
and through the scalding summer, Cormac was like the abandoned Africans on the streets: He longed for water. He did not mind the heat; some secret part of him, chilled by the arctic winter of his Irish youth, would always be cold. He did mind the filth. The aroma that came from his own filthy body. The itching dirtiness of his hair. He wanted to be hot and clean, and wanted the same for all the others in the town: the ancient Africans, the children, the women. In dreams he turned and rolled among dolphins in the ocean sea. He was scoured by salt. He was perfumed by the sun. Upon waking, he washed from the tepid water that waited for him in a bowl. The ritual did not help. There were more and more people in the city and the same small amount of water.
“It’s like money, Mist’ Co’mac,” Beatriz said one morning. “They jus’ ain’t enough to go around.”
At the
Evening Post,
Cormac could not convince the editors to make New York water as important a cause as independence for Greece or the compromise in Missouri over slavery. Still, Cormac made notes about the scandal of water. He wrote articles that were not published. “Everybody knows that,” said one white-haired editor. “It’s not news.” But no water yet ran from the taps of New York. There were, in fact, very few taps, and they were in the homes of the rich, fed by water tanks erected on the roofs of their private fortresses. For all others, water was still drawn from parched wells and did not run into bathtubs or sinks or toilets; it was dipped, splashed, heated on hearths. It did not run as the rivers ran. And in the articles he wrote, and held in a desk drawer when they were not published, he made clear that the reason was corruption.
The major agent of the corruption was called the Manhattan Company. For decades after the redcoats sailed away, it had controlled all water supply in New York through a corrupt charter. Even Burr and Hamilton had been allies in the swindle, and its outline was simple. The spring of 1800, the turn of the new American century, the newspapers full of Napoleon in Europe… that year, the Manhattan Company was awarded two million American dollars by Albany for this water project. A generous arrangement, said the Federalist newspapers. An intelligent act of faith in the future of the fine little town at the mouth of the Hudson. Blah, they said, blah, they repeated, blah blah blah. But the deal had a nasty clause: It allowed the directors to use all unspent moneys for whatever purpose they desired. Before supplying a drop of water to citizens, they founded a bank. The aim was to make money. Or
more
money. For themselves, of course, not for the citizens. So they spent one hundred thousand dollars on water and used the rest of the two million to start their bank. The Manhattan Bank.
All of this Cormac wrote in his unpublished articles. All of it he urged upon his editors. All of it he spoke about to friends in taverns and women in bed. Water, he kept saying. Water is a problem of money. And he was laughed at.
“This is New York,” one editor said. “This is the way it is. If people are so desperate for a bath, let them move to Boston. And besides, the Manhattan Bank advertises in this newspaper.”
That was the key to the silence: advertising. The new El Dorado for the twenty-three newspapers struggling for profits. In the years after the charter, nobody would have cared too much about the Manhattan Bank if the Manhattan Company had only supplied the water. But they gave the growing city only a trickle. They hammered together some wooden pipes, which rotted and collapsed. They dug deeper into the existing wells. They used slaves to carry water from the slimy depths of the Collect Pond, right up to the day when the pond was filled with the dirt and gravel of the hangman’s hill.
The result was the stinking city through which Cormac still moved each day. Many thousands of human beings were shitting and pissing in privies, emptying slops into the streets. Garbage was piled in the streets to be gathered later, and the mounds served as wormy meals for pigs and dogs and goats and rats. Rain turned the mounds to a vile gray paste; cold froze the mounds; snow buried them. And the animals burrowed noses and snouts and teeth into the mounds, and in summer Cormac saw flies the size of butterflies buzzing above them. While the directors of the Manhattan Bank kept counting money.
Alone in the flat on Cortlandt Street, Cormac was sometimes overwhelmed by rage. Rage against the men who had betrayed the Revolution. Rage against those who had turned all that sacrifice of the brave into empty rhetoric. Rage against the Manhattan Bank. Rage against private deals made in secret clubs. The stinking odor of the town felt moral, a sign of its spreading corruption. And it was personal too, for his own body carried a stench that he could not bring to even a casual coupling with a woman. For months at a time, he was celibate. He made drawings of women from memory, for the drawings did not send out an odor. And he brooded about the impossibility of forging a connection with any woman. They came and went in his life, temporary presences, as fleeting as the seasons. They told him their stories. They revealed their bodies to his pencils and brushes. But how could he truly promise to live with a woman for the rest of his life? That was a ghastly joke. A woman would want children, as he would himself. But how could he bring a child into this world so densely stained by human excretions, solid and moral? And besides: He had learned across the decades that he might never be a father. The way other men were fathers. He entered a woman’s body as any man did; he erupted in ecstasies of the flesh, as any man did; but his seed did not flourish. He did not know if this would always be true. Perhaps it was a curse conferred on him by Bridget Riley or Mary Burton or both. An Irish form of
voudon
. They still came to him in dreams, smiling in knowing ways, stoking his fears, beckoning, retreating, betraying. The two-headed Irish hydra. Awake, he shrugged them away. But when he met a new woman, when he began to calculate the risks of love and the temptations of hope, they came to him again in the night, whispering of vengeance. Time did not erase them. Sometimes, trying to make himself believe in happiness, Cormac thought that if he did finally trust a woman’s love, he might tell her the story of the gift he was granted in a northern cave. The secret of his life. The guarantee that he would love her for the rest of her life, if not the rest of his own. But he never reached that moment. He could not be certain about the way the woman would react. She could pack up, as so many humans now did in the exploding city, and abruptly vanish. Or she might laugh, mocking him, questioning his sanity, offering to volunteer him as a performer at Mr. Barnum’s museum of freaks on Ann Street.
Sometimes he even stopped drawing and painting. In those times, the longing for beauty seemed trivial in a city drowning in shit. Most of the time, he found refuge in journalism. He took his notebook in hand and moved among other people, merging his odor with theirs, recording their lives and their deaths. He was sure, on this day of smothering heat and rising stench, that Inspector Ford would eventually tell him that Dubious Jones was named by her father, a mechanic in Troy who did not trust his wife’s fidelity, and that her killer was an unemployed Hungarian whose name had more consonants than vowels and who had a wife and four children in Budapest. He killed her, as usual, because he loved her. The details were always different, in the lives of other people. The stories were always the same.
Today, as his body felt sickened in every waking hour, he became obsessed with water. Today, he wanted to be clean. Today, he wanted to taste clean female flesh. Today. The rich had water, of course, bringing hogsheads in by cart from country wells to fill those rooftop tanks. But ordinary folk had no water for washing clothes or sheets or themselves. No water for scrubbing floors or sidewalks or the windows of stores. The little water they could find was used for boiling potatoes. They had that trickle, measured by the bucket, some still drawn from the ancient Tea Water Pump on Chatham Street, and little else. And in winter there was often less than a trickle, as the pond froze and the pumps froze and women melted ice and snow in pails. At all hours in all seasons, the city gave off this rotting stench.
The miasma, they called it.
The hod carrier emerging from a house on Hudson Street: “Sure the miasma’s not bad today, is it, Mick?”
Or Beatriz, presiding over mocha and biscuits: “Damn miasma eat your heart out today, Mist’ Co’mac.”
Women tried to erase the miasma with perfume. Self-proclaimed gentlemen carried perfumed handkerchiefs in their sleeves. When theaters were allowed to flourish after the Revolution, the longer plays were shortened, there were many intervals to allow a breeze to cleanse the rancid air, and there were no plays at all in summer. As the town filled up, and then doubled and tripled in population after the opening of the Erie Canal, the stench grew worse. Crowded Sunday churches used lots of incense to overwhelm the stink of the faithful, and when August broiled the city, sea captains claimed that they could smell New York six miles out to sea.
Some young New Yorkers didn’t care, for they’d been born into the smell of shit. It stained their days and nights, and unless they traveled into the wild country to the north, those patches that had escaped ax and saw during the war, they could not imagine a world that did not smell of shit. The hoariest New York joke (Cormac must have heard it thirty times in two weeks) was about the New Yorker who wandered into the open country, collapsed of some infirmity, and revived only when a handful of shit was held under his nose. New Yorkers told the joke on themselves. It always got a laugh. But Cormac had known the sweet smell of grass in Ireland and the salt air of the sea. And so he never got used to the miasma. It began to feel like the walls of an unseen jail, a trap, a punishment, a purgatory.
Nobody mentioned this in the churches, which Cormac sometimes visited as a reporter on the state of the New York soul. Filth, after all, enforced celibacy. The fanatics on the Common, assembled near the new City Hall, preached that man was in essence filthy and the only hope of true cleanliness depended upon a Christian death and the eventual embrace of pristine angels. They were all offspring of the Rev. Clifford, whose days had ended in the old lunatic asylum on Chambers Street. Their visions brought some small relief. Apparently the angels greeted all new arrivals with tubs, soap, and clean towels. Cormac laughed to himself at the notion that the only way to get a bath was to die. All the while, in spite of the stench, babies kept being conceived and born. They all entered the world of the miasma.
Meanwhile, men and women shit in pots. They shit in boxes. And Cormac was one of them. What they did, he did. There was no choice. He shit in bags and carried them to the privy in the yard behind the house in Cortlandt Street. The landlord finally built a privy, four feet deep, a lined tub. Once a week, teams of filthy men came around to collect the tubs of shit and dump the contents into the rivers. But after the canal opened, the number of shit collectors did not increase. The businessmen who ruled the town through the Common Council didn’t want to spend the money, and the people could do nothing because in this glorious democratic city; they were not allowed to choose the mayor. The overwhelmed shit collectors worked more and more slowly. They dumped their cargoes into the East River too late for the tides to flush them out to sea. The stench then rose from the sluggish river. Indians stopped coming to town. The last of the deer and wolves retreated to the forests of the Catskills and Adirondacks, appalled by the odor of humans. Fish and oysters died. The otters died. Whales remained out past the Narrows now. Ships that had been scoured by the harsh Atlantic came to the New York docks for a few days, unloaded, loaded, and departed coated with shit and slime.
“I hate coming to this town,” one sea captain told Cormac. “I end up puking for a week after I’ve left it and can’t get the stink out of me skin.”
“Try living in it,” Cormac said.
“I’d cut me feckin’ t’roat first.”
The corrupted water made New York a hard-drinking town. Taverns opened everywhere, two or three on the same block. Cormac entered them with other newspapermen, but he didn’t drink, because the taste of alcohol now sickened him. His companions drank his share. They drank beer and rum and flip. They loaded drinks with molasses and brandy and plunged hot pokers into the mess on bitter winter nights. This added the odor of vomit to the miasma. Many drunkards brawled in streets and gutters, and on public holidays such as the Fourth of July or Evacuation Day they celebrated with swords and pistols and increased the number of widows in the town. Others went home to fearful wives and fucked them brutally and passed out, while some went off to the brothels, where even the most forlorn whores backed away from them and their stinking flesh.
The shit and the piss and the rot brought infection and death. The old Africans had carried immunities with them across the Atlantic, and Cormac was certain those immunities had been passed to him through Kongo’s blood, for he never was infected. But his rage was fed by that too. For decades, the Africans saved many white lives during yellow fever seasons, but were seldom honored, and until 1827 in New York, were not given freedom. The old, immune Africans were almost gone from New York, dying in frozen winter streets, begging for alms on stinking summer afternoons. Death huddled in the city’s shit, and in 1832, it had risen in full fury.
Omens preceded the dying. For nine straight mornings in June, old Africans showed Cormac two black spots, like angry eyes, in the scarlet face of the rising sun. “This is very bad,” one said in Yoruba. “Many will die.” There was a report of red water churning from the depths of Hell Gate. A thousand dead fish rose one afternoon from the bottom of the harbor, and the seagulls would not touch them. At the Battery one morning, anxious for a cleansing breeze, Cormac saw a raven.