Visible City (23 page)

Sitting in the back row of a community meeting, Jeremy clapped, even though the protest being planned would infuriate the client and cause him countless late nights. He would be forced to draft memos reminding the neighborhood groups of the developers’ legal rights. He’d be the ruthless lawyer who cared for nothing but the bottom line.

He’d come to the meeting as Richard had instructed. Richard had stopped giving him substantive work, treating him as though he had come down with an unmentionable disease. The junior associate, whom Richard had recently recruited for the deal, would normally have been dispatched to cover the meeting, but Richard claimed that he was busy on a document that needed to be drafted right away. As far as Jeremy knew, the junior associate didn’t have a family, wasn’t yet jaded or used up. That he would be one day didn’t matter—there were thousands of billable hours to be wrung from him before this happened. And when, inevitably, it did, there would be other young associates to replace him. Jeremy was sure of this, because when he first started working for Richard, there had been an older associate whom he’d pushed out of the way. The defeat had been present in his eyes, though Jeremy hadn’t yet known how to recognize it.

“Why don’t we get started?” said Barbara Kaufman, a woman whose name he recognized from the irate e-mails she wrote that the client forwarded to him.

Barbara began her presentation by wondering aloud what would happen if every neighborhood looked alike. What if all the stores were identical, all façades the same towering glass, endless reflections of each other but of what else? Jeremy listened, hoping she would announce that they had unearthed the presence of a major work of art hidden in the walls of the building. But she admitted that she had found no rationale to stop the construction. He alone knew about the possible presence of the window.

When several elderly people in the back shouted that they couldn’t hear her, Barbara spoke more directly into the mike, telling everyone assembled how, if the developers were allowed to construct this building, it would send the message that West Siders no longer cared about preserving their neighborhood. In the future, she would push to have the neighborhood rezoned, but it would be too late for this site.

When Barbara stopped to take questions, a man with a nest of white hair spun a conspiracy theory involving MetroCards, transit police, and old cable car wires. It was easy for Jeremy to laugh him off as one of the crazies, the marginal people he walked past and thought little about. Richard portrayed all the local activists as rabble-rousers or gadflies, but at least they cared about their neighborhood.

“Thank you, but we need to move on,” Barbara said in a voice firm enough to dissuade everyone except the owner of a persistent hand in the front row.

“I’ve looked over the information you handed out, and it’s clear to me that if you want to put a stop to this building, you need to take action,” the man said, standing as he spoke. “You have to know how these developers think. They’ll let us have our meetings and hang our signs, but they don’t think anyone cares enough to fight. Hanging signs is nice but trust me, it’s hardly enough.”

Jeremy recognized Dog Man, or Arthur as he was trying now to think of him. When Arthur asked for a show of hands for who would attend a protest, he was met with nearly unanimous support. When the meeting ended, Arthur was surrounded by people wanting to congratulate him on his speech, so Jeremy walked home by himself. In front of the building across the street, he noticed for the first time the grizzled gargoyles adorning the prewar façade. The lover with his curlicue mustache, flowing long hair, and soulful eyes. Next to him, the explorer whose face peeked out from underneath a triangular hat; the mercenary, decorated with gold bullion and crossed swords. Long ago he might have simply enjoyed their decorative presence if he saw them at all, but now he wanted to grab a crowbar from the nearby construction site and wrest them free.

Inside his apartment, Jeremy sat on the living room floor, spreading out the documents he’d been bringing home in the hope that one day he would know what to do with them. They were supposed to be confidential, but he was letting go of all those years of hard work. He no longer wanted to pay the price, nor did he want the reward. He took the copies of the documents he’d drafted and added to them the piles of research he’d compiled. Using Max’s Magic Markers, he copied passages from Claudia Stein’s book which he’d unearthed from the couch. He e-mailed Magellan asking for help and pulled from his briefcase the flag and sunglasses. He’d intended to give them to Max, but he had found someone who needed them more.

Remembering his elation at being underground, Jeremy ran up the flight of stairs and left a thick envelope outside 14B’s door.

In the basement of Grace Episcopal Church, in a suburb of Boston, six wood boxes lay covered with dust. They were in a back corner on the dirt floor, near a pile of discarded books and broken chairs where for decades they had been ignored. The caretaker of the church led Claudia inside and left her alone.

She opened a box and held her breath at the cloud of dust. After all these years, her window might be here in this basement. Slowly, she removed the white sheeting covering the first panel. With a brush, she removed the layer of dirt. Cherubic angels. Garlands of flowers. Squares of bright blue glass.

She released her breath and fought back tears. The handiwork was visibly clumsy, the glass dimmer, the color painted on. Claudia looked at each of the panels, trying to maintain hope. But she wasn’t fooled; she knew his work too well to mistake it for anyone else’s. This window might have been made by one of La Farge’s followers, an honest attempt at imitation, but it wasn’t the work of the artist himself.

Claudia wanted to extract each piece of glass until the floor was a shimmering mess. She wanted to smash each piece into jewel-colored dust. The window was lost anew, as though it had already belonged to her. She thought about calling Leon, wishing he could offer her consolation. “I thought you didn’t believe that the window existed anymore,” Leon had said when she told him she was going to Boston. “I never said that, not definitively,” she had said, unable to hold back her anger. “You haven’t read my article. You don’t care about my work. How could you possibly know what I think about my window? You don’t know what I think about anything.”

She carried with her the skeptical look in his eyes, the pity that had taken shape as he looked at her. All he saw was her hopeless search. But he had turned out to be right. In more arenas than she cared to admit, she had let herself be fooled by hope. She had given in to the fallacy of believing that what existed in her mind also existed in the world. She had been fooled into seeing what she wished to be there.

She needed to see the windows again, the ones that had first kindled her love. For the first time in decades, she drove to North Easton. She’d forgotten how close it was to Boston where she’d been so many times over the years. She went first to Unity Church, where the
Wisdom
window was visible from the street, although from the exterior, it looked like a study yet to be completed. But once she walked in, the world was recast with color. The windows were living creatures, and she approached them as though she were greeting someone she loved. It didn’t matter that she could lecture about each plate of glass, or that she knew the minute painstaking process with which such creations were made. A part of her still believed that these windows had always been in existence, as though someone had dug deep enough and extracted them from below the layers of earth, or built high enough and found them hidden in the far reaches of the sky.

In the
Wisdom
window, made in 1901 and La Farge’s largest, a Madonna-like figure was seated, haloed, on a throne. The rose lines of her dress were so supple it appeared to be made of cloth. Some of the shards of glass were so small, so brittle, that few glassmakers would be daring enough to use them today. A verse from Proverbs surrounded the window:
Wisdom is more precious than rubies and all the things that thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her.

The
Angel of Help
window, across the room, was done in 1882, its background made of broken glass jewels, blue stones embedded along the bottom, ridged nuggets of purple stone along the top, fractured bottle-green roundels of glass at the base. The eye was immediately drawn upward by the jeweled sarcophagus which rose to heaven surrounded by a flock of angels. And at the center was the Angel of Help, bearing a face so gentle and lifelike, Claudia had always felt sure she had been seen by her.

Were there words to describe the shock of so much color, the feeling of having entered into a supernatural world in which there existed such light? It was like falling in love, only the feeling didn’t fade. Both windows were commissioned as mourning icons for members of the Ames family, yet these blazing colors were a celebration, not just of familial loss but of love, not just of death but of life.

She traced the path she had taken every day toward home. The same ten-minute walk, the same quiet, winding street. The leaves were already changing color, the sky dappled with orange and red. She passed the factory buildings of tan stone that had once housed the Ames family shovel companies, and the stone Romanesque-style buildings; they were so heavy that they seemed to have sprouted from the rock on which they were built, so solid and impermeable they could never be knocked down.

She turned the corner onto her former street, but the house in which she’d grown up wasn’t there. In place of the small, nondescript white Cape was a gleaming McMansion with pillars and a portico that looked as though they were made of plastic. The intended style may have been Greek Revival, but the result was American gaudy.

All these years she thought she had left this house behind, and though it no longer existed, it had been fully preserved in her mind. Her regret surged. What if she and her mother had, for one moment, stopped fighting? What if they had found some other way to see one another? She thought she had run, but however winding it was, the path led her back to this very place. The mother she had become was inextricably tied to the daughter she had been. She had wanted to give her daughter so much. Yet Emma wasn’t a window through which she might have seen all the different possibilities of who her daughter might become. She had viewed her as a mirror, in which she had primarily seen herself.

Claudia called Leon and left him a message that she was staying in Boston longer than planned. She didn’t ask if he minded, didn’t say she would call back later. After living for so long with his absence, she wanted to inflict her own.

The only way to feel better was to sink inside her work. She spent her days at the Boston Public Library where the words flowed as though emanating directly from her hands, her fingers containing her thoughts, as if she too were a craftsman fashioning a majestic work of art. At night, in her hotel room, she propped herself up in bed, her computer perched on her lap. She fell asleep with her books spread open around her.

She took breaks only to walk around Boston. She went to Trinity Church, where she gazed at La Farge’s famed
Christ in Majesty,
the astonishing blue background of which made the actual sky seem like a poor imitation of itself. She went to the MFA and stood before La Farge’s
Peonies Blown in the Wind,
staying until the museum closed. She wanted to disobey the museum guards and run her hands along the glass; she wanted to believe that when no one was looking, the guards indulged this urge as well.

When she had been away for four days and still didn’t want to return home, Claudia sat at a table in the library where, next to her, was a copy of an obscure American history journal someone had left behind. Leafing through it, she found an article that traced the more recent generations of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s extended family.

She knew most of what was recounted there, but on the next-to-last page of the article was a footnote that she almost skipped over. There was one little-known branch of the family in whom Vanderbilt had taken a special interest. A niece, a young woman whose husband had died young, was left penniless, and she and her newborn daughter were taken to live in the 58th Street mansion. Eventually it became clear that the woman was mentally ill, and though the family tried to keep her from the public eye, they had allowed her to remain in the house. Later her own daughter too began to show signs of this mental illness—a form of paranoid schizophrenia that would continue to be passed down from one generation to the next. After Cornelius died and the mansion was demolished, the family honored his request to care for his compromised relatives and moved them into an apartment on the newly developing Upper West Side. No one knew how long that apartment had stayed in the family, but it was probable that it, like the mental illness, had continued to be passed down.