The Boy Detective (19 page)

 

'S
UP,
W
ILLIAM
S
EWARD
? His statue goes neglected in Madison Square Park. Sculpted by Randolph Rogers, it was unveiled in 1876. Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state, and a New York senator before that, not to mention his Alaska, which everyone does—mention Alaska. A quill pen is sculpted in his hand, signifying, one supposes, the signing of the purchase called “Seward's Folly.” He was a worthy man, a prominent man, his “folly” notwithstanding. Yet it is the folly that withstands. And his statue.

When it was first presented to the public, a critic noted that while Seward the man was “all head and no legs,” his statue “represents the statesman with unusual length.” Seems that Rogers initially set out to make a statue of Lincoln himself, but ran out of money and at the last minute, switched to Seward. Poor Seward. No one could get things right about him.

A small coincidence: Directly across Twenty-third Street from Madison Square Park is the Flatiron Building, designed by Daniel H. Burnham. The structure was so tall, New Yorkers thought it would topple. They named it “Burnham's Folly.” Folly faces folly. The word seems to have disappeared from the national lexicon, perhaps because the original ideas proved not so foolish after all. More likely, modern catastrophes are too big to be called mere follies. Vietnam was deemed no one's folly, as I recall.

Madison Square is guarded by statues and monuments, an eclectic bunch. Northeast of Seward a sky-high flagpole serves as a monument to soldiers who died in the First World War, the names of battles carved into the massive marble block at its base—Champagne, Marne, Vittorio, Veneto, Somme, Meuse, Argonne. On the north side of the park, near Madison Avenue, stands a statue of David Glasgow Farragut, Admiral Farragut of the War of 1812, looming over a semicircular white wall in which the figures of two goddesses or spirits carved in relief are facing away from each other. In the northwest corner rises Chester A. Arthur, posed like so many statues of the turn of the century, suggesting that he has just risen from his thronelike chair to make a speech. If it is hard to understand what President Arthur is doing in President Madison's park, it is more intriguing to account for the prominence of Roscoe Conkling, at the southwest corner. Conkling was a mid-nineteenth-century New York congressman, whom Lincoln had called “well-cultivated, young, handsome, polite, and withal, a good listener.” On the other hand, the secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, called Conkling an “egotistical coxcomb.” And someone else noted that he possessed “the finest torso in public life,” causing one to wonder how torsos were assessed in private life.

Some other statues in my world included the bronze Peter Stuyvesant in front of St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery on Tenth Street and Second Avenue. His tomb lies in the church basement. I saw it as a kid, staring and wondering about the condition of the body and the peg leg. Was the peg intact? In recent years, I've read that Stuyvesant was a prick and an anti-Semite. But my mind still gloms on the peg.

In the center of Gramercy Park, green, bronze Edwin Booth rises from his Hamlet's throne, superior to all that flesh is heir to. He faces the National Arts Club and the Players Club, on the south side of the park, which Booth founded in 1888. Whatever other purposes they serve, New York's statues are monuments to stillness, anomalies in the city. When I was in my teens I wrote a poem about the Booth statue, my first published piece, in the
Gramercy Graphic,
the neighborhood magazine. Something banal and too direct, about pride and adamantine shapes.

 

E
DWIN
B
OOTH MAY
have loved his brother with a special feeling, because being related to John Wilkes Booth allowed Edwin to play Hamlet with more oomph. He never said so in so many words (or in any words, far as I know), and he probably expressed shame at being related to Lincoln's assassin. But secretly he must have been grateful to brother John for informing Hamlet's ambiguities and vacillations. Can you love your brother, whom the world despises? To be or not to be. It was
Our American Cousin
playing at Ford's Theatre that dreadful night, everyone knows that. Would it not have been more interesting if
Hamlet
had been on the boards instead? Hamlet, starring Edwin Booth, the nation's greatest Shakesthespian, while John Wilkes was sweating, skulking in the wings? At the onset of which scene would the assassination have been most fitting? Not the soliloquies, surely. The swordplay near the end, perhaps. Or the graveyard scene, just as Edwin catches sight of his brother rushing the balcony, popping the president, and leaping, limping away. “Alas, I knew him,” he says, examining his brother's skull.

You don't need to tell me: I am aware of how often I have summoned Lincoln to our walk. This is strange to me. I never have studied Lincoln, never have given him more thought than most people do. Once, though, I read his first inaugural address, I forget why, and when I had finished, I stood to catch my breath. How great was that man's soul. How strong his embrace of the meaning of the nation. And of us, the people. And our better angels.

 

I
N EVERY DETECTIVE
story there comes the moment when the body is discovered, sometimes just one body, and the pursuit of the murderer proceeds from there, sometimes two or three bodies, to deepen the mystery and ratchet up the fear. Whenever the police look upon the corpse, they are businesslike. Nothing tender or sympathetic is ever said, and this makes sense, because at that moment of discovery, the body is not a person but rather a puzzle. First they ask, how was he killed? In Philo Vance's
The Kennel Murder Case,
the despicable Archer Coe was done in three different ways, by dagger, bludgeon, and pistol. Vance solved the case by determining the stages at which Coe received each death blow. Only after people determine how the body was killed do they ask who dunnit, and why.

Occasionally, a murder story involves no body at all at first, just the announcement of a missing person, presumed dead. The body may appear eventually, as in
Chinatown,
where the mystery is established before the murder is revealed. But sooner or later, a body is a necessary feature of every murder mystery. It lies there, still, on the bed or on the floor, receiving, perhaps, more attention than it received in life. For the moment, beyond its last, it is the center of the universe. Nothing can move without it, though it has stopped moving itself.

But note the reactions to it. If a housemaid or another stranger or a relative comes upon the body first, that person screams. If it is the private eye who comes upon the body, there is no emotional reaction whatever. Detectives live in a world where dead bodies are to be expected. Death is life. Life is death. Yet if you listen carefully, you can hear a faint sigh of resignation and disappointment issue from his lips—before he calls the cops, before he goes to work solving the crime—as if to say, this is the way of the world, the sad way of the world.

If only he could have prevented the crime. If only he could prevent all the crimes. The word
Gramercy
comes not from anything grand or from “thanks” in French, or from “grant us mercy” in Shakespeare, but rather is a corruption of the Dutch
krom moersje,
the “crooked stream” that ran under the earth in downtown Manhattan, under everything, water in the shape of a knife. Even now, if I tread carefully, I can feel the water running under the world like the Kagera River in Rwanda. I hear it, taste it. What is at stake in a detective story, after all? It is the cry that runs under the earth and drives the PI to do his duty. It is the cry for help, the insistent plea to save some from others. Lives, reputations, happiness are at stake. Time is pressing. Help! Do you hear something?

 

F
U-UH-UCK!
A
SHOUT
out of nowhere preceded by a car door slamming. City noise. Much is made of New York nightlife. Drunks. Louts. And the city that never sleeps because of them. Little is made about the majority of citizens who sleep the city nights away and dream of terrors from which they are rescued in the morning. Their days are streaked with erasures. They suspect foul play but have no proof of it. Night imagines night, which can be far more nerve-wracking than actually experiencing it. You may think the nightlife of New York is more exciting than the world of sleep, because that is what you've been told by the Chamber of Commerce. But beneath the flickering eyelids real tumult reigns. That's a fact, Jack. Red Mars rises over Gramercy Park in the wintry sky.

Those nights I lay alone in darkness in my parents' bedroom—to recall them does not make me sad. Instead, I felt a kind of safety, even though I was anything but safe; imperiled is more like it. Still, I lay there like rags tossed on the cool sheets, steeped in the liquid mercury of the sky over the park, still, quite still, and wracked with more wonder than sorrow. Do country kids feel the same way in their thick-wood country beds, big as sea turtles heavy with eggs, and their quilts and their cord of wood stacked in the driveway? I lay down in darkness in the city. Memory brings freedom, and freedom is always a blessing, no matter how it arrives. Sounds seep through the wall. My father soothes a patient on the phone. My brother whimpers.

 

P
ETER TOOK UP
the trumpet at twelve, and a little later the piano. He was good at both, and I admired his discipline—how he learned to read music quickly and well. In my room with the door shut, I would listen to him practice—the dogged repetition of the scales—wondering what would become of him after I'd left the house forever. He knew that day would come, and that he would be alone with my parents and they with him. He was what kept them together and apart. They had no life without him, and he had no life with them.

When I was at Harvard, I wrote a long letter to my father imploring him to allow Peter to go to college outside New York. If Peter did not get away from that house, I told my father, he was doomed. My father wrote back a curt note, saying that my letter was “romantic” and that he knew best what my brother required. Peter wound up at NYU's School of Education, in a program for high school music teachers. Every night during his first year, he told me, he cried.

In the long run, he made better use of his talent. He got into the Mannes School, and later Juilliard, and he became the composer he had wanted to be from the beginning. He did all that on his own, with no real help from me. Had I been a better brother to him as we were growing up, I would have paid him more attention. But I deserted him, who should have been my partner. Detectives tend to dismiss their successes, but they live with their failed cases forever. In another room, my brother plays the scales on his trumpet, and I lie back with my arms behind my head like wings.

 

W
HEN HE WAS
fifteen, and I long gone from the house, Peter witnessed a fight between my parents in which my father broke a vase my mother had made in a ceramics class. The vase stood on a small table in the vestibule between the foyer and my parents' bedroom. It was green, with dark lines bleeding to the base. Peter said the lines looked like the hooves of horses. My father smashed the vase with his fist.

Around that time, Peter bought my mother the gift of a mandolin. She had not played one since she was a young woman. They played duets, my mother and Peter, with Peter at the piano—tunes he had written himself for the two of them—playing long into the afternoons.

 

Y
ET THERE MY
mother sits, harmless as Delft china at the dinette table, reading Emerson and Thoreau. In her mid-seventies, before Alzheimer's or the series of small strokes (the doctors were never certain which), she would teach Emerson and Thoreau to members of a community center on Fourteenth Street, called the Emanuel Brotherhood. She would laugh as she told me that her students would correct both authors at every turn, based on the experiences of their long lives. “He's got it all wrong,” they would tell my mother.

Yet there my father sits in the red chair, reading Bruce Catton. How he loved reading about the Civil War, when he was not reading about the history of medicine. He published articles in a journal put out by Johns Hopkins on the history of medicine. He took a quiet pride in that, and in books he wrote on TB and cancer of the lung, to which he gave “the fault, dear Brutus” epigraph.

I wish only to remind myself that they were people, not just my parents. She in her housedress. He in his smoking jacket. Reading and writing in the vast apartment, and looking up from time to time to consider a fact, or an idea, or a memory. Even
they
had memories. Even
they
could have written a memoir. This I
shall
take from Dr. Johnson: “A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.”

 

O
F HIS
M
ADEMOISELLE,
his nanny as he was growing up, Nabokov writes that he may have missed something essential in his long depiction of her. In his detailed descriptions of her vast size, her Frenchness, did he overlook those qualities that could have accorded her “a permanent soul,” a place in eternity? In short, he wonders, did he salvage her from fiction?

It is one of the matters one worries about in doing a memoir. In class, we spend a lot of time kicking around the idea of memory—how accurate memory is, how selective, where it originates and why. However sketchlike the pictures I draw of my parents—have I salvaged them from fiction? In my mother's temerity, my father's crust, did I overlook the subtle motions of their minds, their troubled consciences? Detective work when applied to one's own family, perhaps especially then, is a bitch. There are too many temptations to follow false clues and rush to solutions. It is too easy to read crimes in mere errors or accidents. What am I recalling here on this walk, as I wander toward my beginnings? The agony of the timid woman, the self-doubt of the bull-headed man? Do I invent what I remember? Memory may be deformed into opinion, and be just as imperfect. I tell the story of my life, the story but not my life. Time is not to be believed in, for then you have to also believe in boundaries and categories as definitions of life. There is a connection between the memoir class I am teaching and this walk I am taking. I must remember what it is.