“Rifles,” he said in Spanish, to make conversation of a sort with Mrs. Velez, who was sitting in the middle, drawn up against herself for fear of touching either of the two patrons. She had not seen the sign, and had no idea why Harry had said rifles, but she smiled to be polite. Thinking that this had made her more comfortable, Harry said, as they passed a hairdresser on the second floor on the other side of the street, “Parrucchiere,” as if, because it was Italian, she would understand.
Although she didn’t, she said, “Sí.”
“Bueno,” Harry replied.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Cornell asked.
“I don’t know,” Harry answered, and then the taxi rounded Columbus Circle and slingshotted up Broadway. In a minute or two it turned on a side street and disgorged them in front of a tenement. They carried the hamper up four flights of stairs, past brown walls that had aged into black. There was hardly any light, and the floorboards creaked like the timbers of a ship. “What’s in this, anyway?” Harry asked.
“Ham, biscuits, cheese, bread . . . ,” Cornell told him.
“Where’d you get it?”
“My church. They keep them for when someone gets sick or dies. My nephew brought it down.”
“In a truck? Why didn’t he wait?”
“He carried it in the subway.”
“He must be a giant.”
“He’s as skinny as a chicken leg, but he’s fourteen years old. He could probably carry the Titanic.”
Mrs. Velez did not want them to go into her apartment, and they were about to put down the hamper and leave, when one of her children opened the door. A girl of about five or six, she stood on the threshold, her eyes seeming very large for her size, her dress simple and stained, her face smudged. She looked hungry, numb. As they carried the hamper in and put it down, they could hardly make out the apartment’s two small rooms. One was filled with mattresses, some covered and others with the ticking exposed, on which sat or lay half a dozen children, doing nothing. The other room was a kitchen, with a bed in it and a small table covered with dirty dishes.
“Okay,” Harry said, about to repeat what he had told Velez, but he realized that his ersatz Spanish would be insufficient to communicate it, so he just said, “Okay, okay,” as she thanked him in Spanish. They left quickly because they were afraid that she might try to kneel to them again. The children had a great task ahead, and this would be something they would be better off without witnessing.
When Harry and Cornell came out on the street, the light rain and now cooler air were welcome. “That was my family, sixty years ago,” Harry said, “only my grandmother would have kept the place spotless, piecework shirtwaists would have been in neat piles, and the children, far fewer, would have been reading or sewing.”
“And it was mine,” Cornell added, “working or studying. My father told me that my first commandment was never to be a slave. And that there’s only one just way not to be a slave, which is to be a master—neither of another nor of the world, but of oneself.”
“I feel the tenement pulling at my heels,” Harry said. “All I’d have to do would be to close my eyes, and I’d be there.”
“That’s where we’d all be,” Cornell answered, “rich or poor, white or colored. Some people don’t know it, but they find out.”
“In a matter of months, at this rate,” Harry told him as they were striding up Broadway in the rain as darkness fell, “I will have lost all that my mother and father and their mothers and fathers worked to build in the New World.”
“Except you, Harry. The business is just a business. You should close it down and keep what you have.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Defiance.”
“You’re not being very defiant as far as I can tell.”
“It’s more than that. I could never live on Catherine’s money, but that hurts her and she says that everything she has is mine. The problem is the imbalance. All I need is to be a Rockefeller, and we’d be even. I can’t throw our people out of work. I don’t want to close down or give up this business that means such a great deal to so many and has helped so many rise, including me; that makes useful and beautiful things; that’s something into which my father put so much of his life and his heart. If he were alive it would be different. I could. I could pull out and do something else. But he’s not alive, so I have to see it through.”
The rain was heavy enough now that it ran down their necks, backs, and inside their clothes. “My mistake, Cornell, was to think that I was home safe. It just takes different forms. You’re never home, never safe.”
“If you know that,” Cornell said, “then you are home.”
This encouraged them, and they parted. As each walked in the storelight of evening, in the excitement of the end of day, in the freshness of the rain-washed air, neither could know that when they set the hamper down for Guada’s wife, she was a widow.
To the extent that Harry had known him—a conversation or two—he understood that Guada was quiet in the way of someone who, believing that he himself cannot rise, is determined that his children will. Though his English was not perfect and would always be accented, though women on the street or the bus would not look at him or simply did not see him, and though the winters in New York drew him away from his childhood on the south coast of Puerto Rico, he did whatever he could in the hope of the future.
He was a good and dependable worker. He never missed a day and he worked hard. He would fade from the world’s memory faster than those whose lives are spent trying to trick this memory into keeping theirs fresh an instant longer, but his triumph, every day, was his children, whom he loved.
There might not be much to note about him, yet one could not help but notice that this well broken horse was kind and good, and always identifiable by his one indulgence: he smoked cigars, perhaps the only thing he did not do for others. They were small, but not the cheap kind that smell like badly cooked cabbage. Even people who didn’t like the scent of cigars liked these Cubans, his indulgence, his signature, almost like a cologne. A rich scent it was, of the tobacco-drying shed, a combination of earth, wood, smoke, and honey.
The white smoke around him sometimes seemed like gossamer robes, and was the constant frame for his black hair, his khaki clothing, and his patient, ever-enduring expression—except when in winter the merciless winds shot through the canyons, and cold dry air without the slightest compassion for either sight or the preservation of scent made away with the soft white cloud as if it had never existed.
29. James George Vanderlyn
THOUGH HIS LIFE was calm and gracious, and everything around him was beautiful, he lived in sorrow. Having come out of the First World War with high rank and great distinction, and the Second with greater distinction still in running a major portion of the clandestine services of the United States against enemy fronts in Europe, he was now in his late fifties and content with investment banking, serving his sentence there for the sake not only of his compensation, but of family, propriety, and the part of his soul that had yearned for peace. He had not had to serve, but when with the father’s exploits in mind his son had gone into uniform, it became impossible for the father to sit out the war.
Although his wife lived with him in the same house and slept with him in the same bed, she had begun to leave him before the war had permanently sealed their lack of a bargain. She was a charming hostess, still physically attractive, and always amusing, but love is indifferent to talent, and the something deeper from which love springs had in the case of the Vanderlyns become dust billowing in the air. Like an ancient and abandoned nest beneath an eave or at the inside peak of a barn roof, their marriage, held by inertia alone, was a powder ready to be taken on the wind, a very sad thing.
He believed that the best things he had done, he had done. In the years remaining, having missed his further chances, he would find satisfaction where he could—in modest beauties that passed unnoticed a
nd without acclaim, in small symmetries, private action, remembrances of early sensations and loves. These now seemed so much more important than they had when he had left them in the wake of his striving. In the powerlessness of childhood, life had been most vivid, and as he began to fade into the powerlessness of old age it was becoming vivid again, if less surprising and less sharp. Despite certain things moving into place, he thought that for him action and accomplishment were over. He would be proven wrong.
On a Friday morning late in September, when hurricane season was not entirely finished and a storm against which all mariners had been warned was tracking up from the Outer Banks, having missed Florida but neither the Bahamas nor the Carolinas, Vanderlyn walked across the wide porch of his house in Oyster Bay and went down a path to the water. Past lawns as closely clipped as carpets, rhododendron long out of bloom, and a thick stand of fragrant pines planted to weaken gales as they came off the Sound, he descended to a cove made by the left hook of a pristine beach. There are some days at the end of summer, after the heat has broken and everything is dry and gleaming, when the crickets sound as metallic as bells. But those had passed, and even at midday it was wet and dark.
After tossing a rucksack into his sixteen-foot Winabout, he loosed the painter, dropped the centerboard, and when the wind in bare rigging had pushed him halfway across the inlet, raised mainsail and jib, tacking out to open wind-lined waters already running with a two-foot swell. Despite the weather and size of the boat, his plan was to sail to New London and up the Thames, leave the boat for the winter with a friend, and pick it up on the way home from a trip to Boston in late spring. The winds ahead of the storm went northeast. It would be a quick but dangerous run, and he would take the train back on Sunday, having been through enough difficulty and privation, he guessed, to keep him for a few months, and having touched upon the state of life in which nothing was assumed, all was at risk, and even things thought dead can come alive.
The track of the storm, however, had moved unfavorably and confused the winds, which now clashed in the Sound in unexpected violence, deepening the swell almost unbearably for the little boat and subjecting it to life-threatening concussions. This was before the rain and the dark, and just the work of the wind, when land was close by and easy to reach, though far enough away for drowning. Vanderlyn could have come about and made for home. To go east he had to tack now anyway. He could have sought shelter on any of the beaches to the south, the mansions behind them unperturbed by the winds through which, like his own, they had long held.
But he didn’t, guiding his boat instead between the two pillars of Greenwich and Oyster Bay and out to the middle where small boats were in great danger. The wind screamed through the few short stays. The boat ceased to be propelled solely by the air, and was made by gravity to slide down the slopes of swells, sometimes fast enough to luff the sails, sometimes fast enough to give rise within Vanderlyn to a giddy feeling of disconnection, as if physics were abridged and this boat were soon to be lifted into the thin of the atmosphere.
Perhaps it was adrenaline or something greater, but in the storm the world seemed full, and he slowly cut his way east, tacking now broadly, now tight, according to what was happening far out at sea and its repercussions in the Sound. Somehow the eastern-driving winds were a narrative of his life, and opened the truth of it to him in their pattern and their beat, and thus the truth of the lives of others, which in essence were the same.
For eight hours until dark he struggled every second, always alert, ignoring everything but what was instantly required. The first thing to go was the jib, nipped at the base until it broke half free and flew hysterically from the top of the mast like linens on a clothesline. He let it go—daring to leave the tiller and dash to the mast for the seconds it took to uncleat the halyard—and watched as it climbed on the wind. Rather than flopping upon the waves and sinking like a handkerchief, it rose violently, lines snapping, compressing upon itself in folds, falling back and unfolding as if in regret, and then, when open, rocketing up again. It would take two steps down but twelve up, and in this way it ascended until he could no longer distinguish it from the streaks of gray and white that scored the charcoal-colored clouds.
He had never seen anything like that. Sails were heavy. No matter what the force of the wind, when detached from the rigging they hit the water within a boat’s length or two at most. The departure was welcome. Like watching for the largest wave or listening for the loudest crack of thunder, it served more than curiosity or entertainment but something related to a greater expectation. Things lifting on the wind, seas violent such as no one had ever seen, the world shaken by majestic events: this was the way out. In this seemed to be answers, although they were not clear and perhaps never would be. But on the edge—rain now lashing, the rucksack overboard with his possessions, the shore no longer visible, the ribs and stays threatening to explode with strain—nature seemed just, its elemental assertions against which he now struggled the theme and answer he had sought all his life. It was good to get such a strong answer from such a strong hand. He imagined that unexpectedly and contrary to all the fixed laws by which the world lived, he might possibly follow the ascending sail, and that this would be his death. Though in general he could barely see, he did see when the friction and collision of two great waves sent up columns of oxygenated white water, bursting the darkness like fireworks that bloom, upwell, and disappear with a sigh.
At almost three, when, had he been sensible, he should have been camped in a harvested field close to the water, with the boat pulled up safely on the sand, he checked his watch. It glowed back at him, and he tapped it, thinking it had stopped in the afternoon, though he didn’t bother trying to listen for ticking that could not possibly be heard. Had he guessed, he might have said it was not the middle of the night but no later than eight in the evening. Perhaps he had been taken so fast that he had sped past Montauk and Block Island and was now in the open sea. The water seemed very wide, the waves were of a class that lifted great liners, and there were no lights, horns, ships, or ports. And then, in a blast of wind like a hammer blow, the mast cracked and knifed into the water, pulling the tiny bit of mainsail with it and the boom as well. Like a sea anchor, drawing after it wire stays far too strong to unfasten at a stroke, it swamped the boat and sent Vanderlyn into water that, though cold, seemed to him to be a pleasing temperature and, rather than a shock, a relief.
Though by now beyond the realm of deliberation, he still had to decide whether to stay with the boat or let himself be carried by the sea. Like his life, were it not to sink completely, the wreckage would keep his head above water if he could but hold on to it, for in daylight the swamped sailboat would be far more visible than a man alone. From the rails of many an ocean liner on the North Atlantic he had seen clumps of flotsam stuck in place as he steamed by. In comparison to the empty expanses they were an irresistible target for the eye. Even on a destroyer pressing thirty knots one scanned these things for clues of life. The crews of fishing boats, freighters, or warships would look closely, the watch-standers lifting their binoculars. So he clung to the gunwales, now at water level, and stayed with the broken vessel.
This was not easy. The water had retained enough of the summer heat not to be that cold in early fall, but it eventually numbed his hands and fingers. Waves struck with great force, threatening to break his hold. The mast twisted, clubbed at him, and sometimes wrapped its guy wires around him like the tentacles of a squid. Salt water was shot into his mouth by high-pressure winds and attacking waves. And at four or five, after what seemed like a week, the lightning began, bringing intermittent floods of illumination that froze the swells as if in a slide show.
But the lightning enabled Vanderlyn to make out a coastline so low it might have been an illusion were not the land of eastern Long Island shallow after epochs of grading by the sea. It was unlike a hallucination in that it was homely and indistinct. And then, still offshore, the remains of his boat caught on a shoa
l. The waves broke over him, but the varnished timbers dug into the sand and held fast, and he knew they would stay.
At dawn he found that his grip had closed like rigor mortis around the half-broken gunwale that had saved his life. The sky was the color of long-tarnished silver, and the waves now were only a foot high and running as evenly as if they were apologizing. He looked about. The shore was a mile or two away, a concave necklace of beach and low dunes, in the center of which was an inlet. He recognized this. Sitting on the sand, the little waves crossing over him never more than chest high, he turned his head as if he were rowing, hands still on the gunwales, and saw behind him, at the same distance as the shore, the southern tip of Gardiners Island. As a child, passing by on sailboats, he had seen workers there harvesting grain by hand, like medieval peasants. No one was allowed to land, but his father had beached their boat and gone in to speak to them. “Either they’re all Shakespearean actors hired to amaze trespassers, or we’ve stumbled upon a remnant of the Elizabethan age,” he had said. In college, Vanderlyn had sailed there at night with a girl from Vassar, and, in for a penny, in for a pound, they had swum naked in a warm freshwater pond, as disconnected from the world as if they had been shot back a million years.