The Boy Detective (11 page)

 

T
HERE WAS A
women's prison of sorts in my own neighborhood, on Eighteenth between Irving Place and Third. Not a prison really, but an institution for unwed mothers who had no place else to go. Founded in 1857 by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, the brownstone stood a few houses down from Pete's Tavern, still and neat, like a cloth coat. I paused there whenever I passed on my wanderings, occasionally catching sight of a resident coming in or out. I had only the vaguest idea of what an unwed mother meant, but it was evident that the term was both accusatory and shunning. And they were mothers, so where were their children? Those were the days, as well, when orphanages were called orphanages, all such places stating clearly and directly what they were about, though there was a little obfuscation in a home for “Friendless” women set up on Twenty-fourth Street. Official places for deserted people. The world was impelled to create a “home” for them. I wondered and noted. Sometimes I would stop in my tracks before the house on Eighteenth, and just stare at the silent door.

 

B
ETWEEN THE SECRET
and the sigh. Between the laughter and the sin. Between the lies. Between the lines. Between the nights and the mornings and the pale shocked face in the glass. Between land and sea, and the silence, and the bursts of anger and the sentimental word. Between the daring and the tremor. Between the real and the weak, and not telling them apart. Between you and me. Between you and me and the lamppost.

 

T
HE MIDDLE OF
nowhere seems to me a more comforting place than the outer limits of nowhere which, logically, must be closer to somewhere. Of course, if one prefers to be somewhere, then this preference of mine must seem nuts. I can hear the Academy members right now, shouting from their tiers of wooden benches in the Academy auditorium, Sir! Who in his right mind would choose the middle of nowhere over the outer rim where, at least, one could get a glimpse of the somewhere everyone in his right mind wants to be? But, gentlemen, I would tell them, if and when I am released from the chains in which I am bound at the front of the room, beside the lectern. . . . Gentlemen, I am in my
left
mind. At which, the president of the Academy will snort, calling it the stupidest thing he has ever heard. I could not agree more, I should say, even if I understood what that meant. Or by no stretch of the imagination, for that matter.

Here in front of Gray's Papaya, at Twenty-third and Third, a boy with a face like mine, only rounder, unscarred and unlined, examines with eyes exactly like mine the people passing. Now he walks down the street amazed. I remain unmoving, like a government official, like a postal inspector, as he goes by. I see what he sees. I know what he knows.
Mon semblable.
Open as the sea. What do I feel for him? Everything. What can I do for him? Nothing. He does not notice me. He walks right through me, through my body. It's just as well. A boy like that? That boy could do anything.

 

“Y
OU MADE ME
drop it!” says the string bean in the red bow tie, about six-six, who has deliberately bumped into me and deliberately dropped his BlackBerry on the sidewalk.

“The hell I did,” I say. “You dropped it yourself.”

“You're going to pay me for it,” he says. I shake my head. “I'm gonna punch you in the face.”

“Take a hike,” I say, and move on.

“Fuck you!” he says, and moves on, too. What did he take me for? A rube?

 

A
RE WE GETTING
anywhere? Luckily, we're not going anywhere, so there's nowhere to get. One of the difficulties of detective work, even for an old pro, is that a false lead can divert you for years, as it does in writing, and by the time you realize you've been moving in circles, the criminal could be living high off the hog in São Paolo. But if your walk is illimitable, no trail goes cold. Such a nice scene in the movie
Body Heat,
when William Hurt, having been framed by Kathleen Turner, sits bolt upright in his prison cot as he realizes, too late, that Turner had faked her own death. She had killed the friend whose identity she had bought and assumed, tossed the body in the boathouse, incinerated it, and boom! “She's alive!” says Hurt. And all at once the scene is Brazil, with that recognizable mountain in the background, and Turner in a chaise, bored, wearing blue-lens sunglasses, and listlessly agreeing with her boy-toy Latin lover that “It's hot.”

In writing, the trail goes cold all the time. The wise old prophet in whom you have placed the telling of your tale ought to have been an idiot boy, or a girl, or a dog. You started your piece of work in the inner city. You should have begun it at a lakeside resort in New Hampshire, and the whole book written in dialogue, or in rhymed couplets. And this happens in more than a single piece. Your entire existence as a writer can follow dead-end trails, and then one morning you sit bolt upright in your bed and boom! She's alive. If your desire to be a writer coincides with your desire to be noticed, why, pal, you can waste decades writing bad stuff or perfectly acceptable stuff that you simply never wanted to write. That person was you, and yet it was not. You can spend an awfully long time pursuing the cold lead of your long and winding life. Believe me. I know.

 

E
XCEPT FOR THE
CHAINS,
I would not mind being a prisoner in Plato's cave. The allegory has it that the prisoners were bound and limited by more than chains because they could not see reality, and thus were deprived of the truth. They could see only the shadows of the puppets that the puppeteers cast on the cave's wall, and believed that the shadows were the puppets themselves. Being unable to turn their heads, they knew nothing of what caused the shadows. If they had seen the shadow of a book, say, or of a man, they would have mistaken appearance for reality—a destructive and unforgiveable error, according to Plato, and the theme of most of modern literature, according to university professors.

But is this so? See here: I recognize that man walking across Park Avenue South toward the Starbucks on the northwest corner of Twenty-ninth Street under the lurid light of a streetlamp. It is Sidney Homer, the man whose apartment on the ninth floor of 36 Gramercy Park mirrored our own. A Wall Street investor, he is the son of Marian Homer, the opera singer, and the grandson of Winslow Homer, the painter. When I was four or five, he used to greet me in his booming voice and ask when I planned to enroll at Harvard. When I got to Harvard eventually, the Homers gave me a leather-bound early edition of Johnson's dictionary, which I keep today in an antique book press. So there is Mr. Homer, tall and elegant, striding across the avenue to get his morning coffee. I see him clear as daylight, though he died thirty-five years ago.

Would you say that he is less real to me than the young man in the baseball cap advertising the
TODAY
show, who actually is crossing to Starbucks? The shadow of Sidney Homer is cast upon the wall of my mind's cave. “What is REAL?” the Velveteen Rabbit asks the Skin Horse, who answers that when you are loved, you begin to become real. “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up?” asks the Rabbit. “It doesn't happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.” If one wants to get technical about it, the Rabbit is no more real for having been loved, or for growing old. Yet only strict Plato would say that he does not represent the truth. They say that no one ever survives old age, but that is hardly true. To the Aborigines, dreaming was the way to prolong the life about them. Here on this walk, I dwell in an eternal gloaming, just like you. We survive and love in an ageless present.

 

N
OW THE YOUNG
man sits in Starbucks, near a young woman who is reading Wallace Stevens. He says hi. She says hi. He asks where she is from. She asks if he likes snow. His arm grazes her shoulder. She comments on the traffic. He remembers the title of an old TV show. She tells him how close she is to her folks. She embraces him impulsively during a laugh. She is embarrassed, a little. He is emboldened, a little. For no reason, he thinks of Nick Nolte. For her part, she likes Nick Nolte. He wonders if she'd care to have dinner with him sometime. She says, “I'd love to have dinner with you sometime.” He mentions how peaceful she seems. She looks away and says, “Thank you,” and asks him something about when he was a kid. They discuss childhood, his and hers. Suddenly they both are silent, and neither says a word for quite a long while. When at last they speak, they speak at the same time, and neither can make out what the other has said. He says he is sorry about something. She says she, too, is sorry about something. But that's all right. That's all right. Now it is spring. He confesses his dreams. She makes him believe they are original and important. He begins to trust his dreams. They sit close to each other in an outdoor restaurant by the water, under a windfall of lights.

 

W
ALKING
. W
ALKING IN
Cambridge, Massachusetts. The bricks jutting out in the uneven sidewalks. The feel of brainless self-satisfaction on Brattle Street and its tributaries. Past the homes of New England aristocrats, who bred like collies, with ever-narrowing heads. Past one's fellow students who seemed stunned at recurrent news of defeat. Pointless treks. Sisyphus could be grunting beside you.

That is, unless you were walking with Professor Kelleher along the banks of the Charles, across one bridge, down the riverbank, then across another bridge. That was the way he conducted his tutorials, walking and talking. I studied Irish literature and the eighteenth-century poets with him, about which I knew nothing and cared little at first. But I cared for John Kelleher. Had he been teaching Northeastern Etruscan religious practices I would have taken that. Walks in Cambridge, and long walks in the woods near his home in Westwood, Massachusetts.

Only in appearance was he confounded by his stammer. His eyes would bulge helplessly as he would do battle with his tongue to get out a sentence. Students who did not know him fled his classes. Had they the patience to wait till his sentences were complete, they would have realized how lucky they were to be in his presence. No one ever knew more about Irish literature and history. Harvard gave him a chair while he still was in his twenties. He never went to the trouble of getting a Ph.D., because he didn't need one. And he published only one book, a slim volume of poems. He took to the eighteenth century because, like him, it had one foot in reality, the other in hope. For the nineteenth century he had little use because it confused hope with reality. Hope could go anywhere, including hell. He used to say, “Romanticism leads to Dachau.”

Walking, walking, with long aggressive strides, on the riverbank and in the woods. A huge head and a severe but handsome face beneath thick white hair. Built like the boxer he had been at Dartmouth, where he'd gone by a sort of accident. He'd been repairing a roof with his father, a postman, who moonlighted as a carpenter on weekends, when one of his dad's friends stopped by to mention that he had just seen an attractive place where young John might want to go to college. When Kelleher returned from his interview, he happily reported that there were no other people there. He had seen it on spring break.

Everyone at Harvard knew something, but few knew life. Kelleher—with his hidden office in Widener Library, his amused disdain for the “fat asses in the Faculty Club,” and his firm, sure strides—he knew life. He knew how to walk in the world. And so, when he taught Joyce's “Clay,” he showed how it was for the old woman to be both irritating and human. And when he taught Johnson's “Vanity of Human Wishes,” he could offer the world's behavior as evidence of the poem. Only once did he bother to write a scholarly article, on “The Dead.” In his researches into ancient Irish history, Detective Kelleher discovered that Joyce had based the story, moment for moment, on an old Irish legend—something no one had ever pointed out, and that probably had been known to no one but Joyce himself. Then, after proving his airtight case, Kelleher ended the piece by assuring the reader that his discovery had nothing to do with enjoying the story. Ginny and I named our John after him.

 

O
NE WALK LEADS
to another. Walking in the cold mist of a Dublin late afternoon, that year we lived in Ireland. After class, while Ginny stayed at home in our rented house in the suburb of Mount Merrion, Carl growing inside her, I would walk the Dublin streets. Dark and darker. The stones of the street and the stones of the buildings shining with rain. I was twenty-four. All was ahead of us—Carl, Amy, and John, their lives, the wanderings, the jobs, Amy's death. I could have gone on forever, walking in Dublin in the late afternoons. Something about the melancholy gold of the streetlamps. Something about the woolly glow of the people. I walked in an eternal anticipation of wonders without suffering the disappointment that follows naturally. Walking between high seriousness and silliness, between ambition and weeping fits. Look at those books, like embers in the window. All of life bundled in a Dublin cold mist of a late afternoon.

And walking in the Gaeltacht, edging around the sharp rocks and the stubble hills that looked like camels' backs. I thought of J. M. Synge walking in the same place seventy years earlier, picking up the rhythms of Irish Gaelic, taking notes. At night, he sat in his attic room and listened to the rich talk he later made use of in his plays, rising through the floorboards. I picked up a little of the language sitting with my teachers in Teach Mór, Irish for “the big house,” located on the Spidal Road, and taking in their stories. They didn't as much instruct as simply live, and they let you be part of their lives. They spoke English perfectly, but would not speak English to you. If you wanted anything, you had to figure out how to say it in Irish, which included going to the outhouse, which included swiping chickens, “chickini,” off the seat.

But the best thing there was walking, as it always is, up and down the hills, with the wind not always at your back, and in the distance, the hard Atlantic. On the beach lay the curraghs, small black fishing boats looking like mussels on the rocks, just as they did when Synge wrote about them in
Riders to the Sea.
I would pass a farmer and greet him with “Good morning,” which translated as “God to you.”
“Dia duit.”
And the response would add something to that. “God and Mary to you.” And response to that: “God, Mary, and Joseph to you.”
“Dia is Murie agus Padraic duit”
—and so on down the biblical line, till you could spend much of the morning exchanging lists of the holy personages. Or speaking of the weather, which had limited but accurate descriptions in Irish as either cold, windy, or rainy, or cold, windy,
and
rainy. Alone, you walked through the furrows, unbalanced walking, twisting your ankles, indulging mules and sheep.
“Dia is moooorie duit,”
I told a cow, who apparently had heard that one before.

 

A
ND A FEW
years later, back in Cambridge, after Carl and Amy had joined us, more walking still. Walks were all the entertainment we could afford. So, when we were living in Dunster House, we took walks along Memorial Drive, strollers and clanking fire engines banged around by the winds off the river. And when we were living on Bowden Street, walks on Mass Ave., north as far as Sears, and back home. There was a shop where a little man made violins. And a church with a sign, kind of an ad, behind glass:
THIS ENDS YOUR SEARCH FOR A FRIENDLY CHURCH
. Garden Market, run by a nice guy named Doc, where we got our food. The drugstore where I was careful to buy only the five-pack of razor blades, and the cleaners where we were careful only to have things pressed. The window of an antiques shop displayed a small round wood table I liked. The tag said $7. I thought: We can afford that. The saleswoman tried not to sound condescending. “That means seven hundred,” she said.

On a walk in a different part of Cambridge, Ginny and I passed a shop selling the Eames Chair, new then, with-it, sharp and hopeful, we thought, just as we wanted to be. It too cost $700, but I asked the store owner if I might pay it off in monthly installments, and he said sure. We had no paintings to cover our apartment walls, so I bought some prestretched canvases, and painted them myself. Amateurish geometrical designs, which no one found revolting. From an exposed beam in our apartment we hung the Jolly Jumper, a little seat on elastic cords, on which Amy bounced, endlessly smiling. She loved it. She loved her Marx motorcycle—she and Carl racing on the sidewalks, Ginny and I apologizing to the scattering pedestrians.

 

I
N THE SAME
way that a magician summons a crystal ball into the air, from a table with a cloth on it—into the air where, mirabile dictu, it hovers suspended, trembling—in the same way as that, I call forth your face, like a light balloon, before my eyes. (How does he
do
that?) Where do you walk now, my sweet girl?

 

D
EATH IS A
little thing. I do not mean that it lacks significance or pain. Only that it happens. And that's that. You live with the living and you live with the dead. Here today, gone later today, like the Tutsis in Rwanda, another case I worked on, who were walking with their kids one moment and chopped to death the next. Slack at the top of the waterfall over the Kagera River, the bodies rose and fell. One, two, fifty. I watched them from where I stood on a bridge—the bright yellow bridge that was not there one day, and one day it was, so that the people of Tanzania could walk to Rwanda, and the people of Rwanda could walk to Tanzania, with baskets of fruit on their heads, and kids at their sides.

You can never tell where your feet will lead you. Genesis has it that God took a walk one evening and came upon Adam, who was naked and hiding, thus revealing to God that he had eaten from the tree. The first recorded walk. Makes you wonder whether Adam and Eve would still be in Eden transgressing their tails off if God had not felt like taking an evening stroll. One thing for certain: Eden would have been a hell of a lot more interesting.

What did I start to say to you? Do you recall? At least you'll remember the nights when the swells of the sea lapped at the screen door. Is that what I started to say? Mountains were involved, I'm pretty certain. And wheat bundled in rolls in a gray field. A giant green Coke bottle embossed on the side of a warehouse. And a warehouse that dissolved into cedars in Vermont. And a water leak that seeped into the walls and made hieroglyphic stains. The transitional light of evening. The tributes at an awards dinner around the table covered with white linen. A herd of boozing sheep. They played a role, too, I think. I can't be sure.

 

W
HERE THINGS ARE,
where they were. I approach the New York Public Library at Forty-second and Fifth. In high school I used to track down mystery books here, combing the vast marble halls for books and more books, ordering them, and stunned when they magically appeared, just like that. Request a book, get a book. The library opened in 1911, on the site that once held the Croton Distributing Reservoir, built in 1842, to meet the city's need for fresh water. Fed by the Croton Reservoir north of the city, by way of forty miles of pipes, the Distributing Reservoir was a four-mile, manmade lake, contained by walls fifty feet high and twenty-five feet thick. Citizens strolled the promenade along the top, taking in views of Manhattan. Poe wrote of taking walks there. Water was borne through underground pipes, moving through the thirsty city as books did later. Where things are, where they were. In
Go Tell It on the Mountain,
James Baldwin's boy detective, John Grimes, beholds the Public Library from the base of the steps on which the two great stone lions perch. The black boy wonders if the lions are there to protect him once inside the library, or to keep him out.

Forty-second Street. Thirty-eighth Street. Fourteenth. Twenty-second. First Avenue. Second. Third. Avenues A, B, and C. The grid of the city, laid out in 1811 and stretching from Houston Street downtown to 155th Street in Harlem, makes it easy to find where you are going. The numbers are consecutive. East and west divide at Fifth. Plain as the nose on your face. But what lies beneath this neat construction? To learn that takes detective work. The streets have their order, but the houses on them all are different. A deli lit too brightly. A cigar store looking like a crushed hat. And underneath all this? Crocodiles swim in the sewers, so they say. Bloodstained bricks in the walls of deserted tunnels. Dungeons and dragons.

The city planners made the grids deliberately, I think—to give the impression of control on the surface, the way a face controls itself, smiles brightly, and greets the day. But see the confusion and the desperation below. The lower depths, full of broken china and live cables. Screams and anarchy. Twentieth Street. Twenty-first Street. Dig there.

 

Y
ET HERE'S HOW
memory can let you down, students: The back of 36 Gramercy, the side opposite the park, faces a courtyard roughly twenty-five feet deep and eighty feet wide. We used to ride bikes there, and play baseball. Over the years, I smashed more than one window in number 34, the back of which also faced the courtyard and served as center field. One or another of us kids would hit a shot, glass would crash and fly, and we were bats out of hell.

It was, in fact, a hellish place, the courtyard. Unlike the white terra-cotta facade of 36, the other side of the building was composed of bricks blackened by soot. If the front of the building was shimmering upper-middle-class New York, the rear was the gloom of the city, a tenement built into a wall. And in that wall was a small tunnel, no more than four feet high and six feet long, which led to an airshaft that shot up the full height of the building. You would bend low and move carefully through the tight confines of the lightless tunnel and emerge into the tarnished silver light of the sky cast into the airshaft.