Forever (46 page)

88.

C
ormac dials Delfina’s number, but there is no answer. Her answer
ing machine gives only a number, no name, but it’s her voice, hoarse and whispery. He leaves his name and number. He walks around the Studio in the gray afternoon light and begins to sing.
Each time I see a crowd of people… just like a fool I stop and stare…
He loves to sing. He sits at the piano and sings. He walks the streets and sings. Thousands of songs are parked in memory, from Bowery theaters to Prohibition speakeasies, from vaudeville to Rodgers and Hart, many of them fragments, some of them complete, and when he plays Sinatra or Tony Bennett, Johnny Hartman or Lady Day, they are all duets.
I know it’s not the proper thing to do…
He sings to Miles Davis CDs too, and to Ben Webster. He sings French with Piaf and Becaud and in Spanish with Tito Rodriguez… but he never dances. He can’t dance. Or he won’t risk it. Never in public, seldom when alone. Long ago, in the time when Master Juba and John Diamond were inventing tap-dancing in the Five Points, in an exuberant collision of Africa and Ireland, he decided that white people had no gift for dancing. At least not for American dancing. The waltz, perhaps. The minuet. But it was better when the rhythms moved more quickly, when drums and bass came in a rush, to sit this one out. And perhaps it wasn’t white people, for after all, there were Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly and Bob Fosse. It wasn’t white people, it was Cormac Samuel O’Connor. He could not dance. It was as simple as that. He yearned to dance, but had been taught by life that every man has his limitations. Dancing was as far from him as basketball.

Now he goes downstairs to the living area, to the book-lined walls, the dark bedroom. He is bound for his daily nap. Since the 1890s, this has been his indulgence, his pleasure, his necessity. The siesta (he always insists to his friends) is the most civilized of all institutions sent to us from the Mediterranean. The gift of Spain and Italy, and perhaps of Islam. The siesta gives him two mornings. The siesta allows his worries to marinate in his brain, where solutions can be found for riddles, and always grants him on awaking a refreshed clarity. In the back bedroom, thick drapes seal off light and muffle sound. The daily routine is almost always the same: lunch, then a siesta, and then down to the streets for his walk, which he calls his Wordsworth.

He traces this ambulatory habit to reading the great poet when he was young. One variation on the Wordsworth were the years in the 1890s that he spent trying to photograph every building on the island. The years he spent trying to freeze a city that could not be frozen. Now most of those buildings exist only as photographs, and almost every leafy glade in Manhattan has been paved, but he continues walking. Sometimes he takes the subway to some distant stop and does the Wordsworth all the way home. On weekends, when trucks are gone from the streets, along with thousands of suburban cars, he takes his bicycle to the streets and pedals for miles. He never walks fewer than twenty blocks and never pedals less than sixty. In the 1970s, he began riding the bicycle late on summer nights, when the asphalt had cooled, and there he would see mysterious black riders, each a solitary, each on a ten-speed, each with shorts and helmet and backpack, all, like him, indulging the loneliness of the long-distance rider. One night, pedaling into Central Park after midnight, he saw one of these riders and was certain it was Quaco. They glanced at each other. He saw Quaco’s eyes, his nose and mouth and line of jaw, and Cormac said hello in Yoruba, hello and nice night, and the man said yes in Ashanti, yes, a nice night. They pedaled away, and he never saw the man again.

He can’t go more than three days without the Wordsworth. He needs the regular flushing of blood and lungs, particularly in the years when he smokes. But he also wants the multiple layered visions of the changing city and the provocations of memory. A bar called Grogan’s becomes Farrelly’s and then Mangan’s, and then the Flowing Tide, and then Chapo’s, and then the Quisqueya Lounge, and never stops being a bar. One spring, an entire block vanishes from Chelsea to be replaced by white-brick humming apartment houses. A factory is turned into lofts. He needs to see it all, to be in the city as it is and not a prisoner of the city as it was. To watch the change as it happens helps him combat the sludge.

He never gets tired, even during the years when he smokes. The trick he has learned is a simple one: focus only on the twenty feet directly in front of him. Move with willed looseness through that closed space (eating time along with space), and avoid looking at any point in the distance. That imposing hill will exhaust you, he says to himself. You will never get past that dense warren of factories. Twenty feet: That’s the immediate goal. The habits of the Wordsworth mirror the habits of his life.

Now he removes his clothes and takes an old cotton night-shirt from a wall peg. He lies on the bed, but sleep does not come easily on this afternoon.

The quarry rises in his mind.

89.

T
welve years earlier, nobody in New York knew the name of William
Hancock Warren. Now Cormac is thinking about him each day and seeing him in dreams. He must have been known, of course, by bankers and brokers, by a few well-tipped headwaiters, by the manager of the Plaza or the Pierre, the Stanhope or the Sherry-Netherland. But he didn’t live here and was not yet a public figure. His name was buried in the middle of the
Forbes
and
Fortune
lists, among the largely anonymous people who had more money than they could ever spend but not so much that they faced curiosity and scrutiny. Those who knew him well enough to call him Willie lived in Houston and London and the endless Arab emirates. He was as comfortable in the desert cities of Saudi Arabia as he was in the deserts near Palm Springs. Some of his older friends, including those from the House of Saud, had known his father, a man who’d risen from the oil fields of Oklahoma during the Great Depression and hammered together his own security and wealth with judicious bribes to politicians of both parties and a passion for anonymity. For the first thirty-two years of his life, William Hancock Warren was true to his father’s style.

Nine months after his father died in Texas, aged eighty-one, and buried discreetly, with two of his pallbearers retired officers of the Central Intelligence Agency, the son moved to Manhattan with his wife. They bought a seven-bedroom triplex one block north of the Frick, but this caused no sensation. Such men arrive periodically in New York, tarry awhile, and then leave. William Hancock Warren was among those who stayed, who found life and purpose in Manhattan. But he was here for a year before Cormac saw his name in a gossip column and another three years before the public became aware of his presence. He bought real estate in deals that attracted little attention. A Chelsea warehouse here, some West Side apartment houses there, an ancient office building on William Street, which he quietly closed for rehab. He avoided the fashionable restaurants, the charity ball circuit, the seasonal cycle of opera and theater openings. He stayed away from politicians and so eluded those prying journalists who inspected campaign contributions. He wasn’t part of anyone’s A list for dinner parties. He invested in Internet companies, to be sure, but in those years such companies were not covered by the general press. Occasionally he lunched with a business acquaintance at the Century Association, but he did not become a member. His name did not appear in the columns of Liz Smith, Cindy Adams, or Rush & Malloy, and Page Six did not seem to know of his existence. In the style of his father, William Hancock Warren preferred to be a member of the anonymous rich.

Then, only nine years ago, he emerged as a public figure as if visiting from the planet Krypton. That was when Cormac first saw his photograph. The occasion was an acquisition that he must have known would put him in the public eye. No baseball team was for sale that year and the football teams were prisoners of long leases in New Jersey. So William Hancock Warren did what so many other rich young American men do when they want more than money: He bought a newspaper.

The
New York Light
was not, to be sure, a thriving enterprise. It was a large dull broadsheet, full of Wall Street news and stories from the police blotter. It was the last afternoon newspaper in New York, with a loyal, aging readership that bought it at Grand Central and Penn Station for the long ride to the suburbs or had it delivered to their apartment buildings on the East Side. A few serious gamblers read it for news from West Coast racetracks, and businessmen trusted its closing stock prices and analyses of earnings reports. But its gray pages repelled many other New Yorkers, and reporters from the morning newspapers said that it bridged the generation gap between the living and the dead.

For eighteen years the
Light
had been owned by a foundation, whose members stated that they felt a civic obligation to subsidize the second-oldest newspaper in the United States. The staff was small, the advertising thin, the losses substantial, but after all the paper went back to 1835, the year that James Gordon Bennett started modern journalism with the
New York Herald
. Among the survivors, only the
New York Post
could trace its lineage back to an earlier time, the year 1801, when Alexander Hamilton assembled a group of New Yorkers to serve his interests and those of the Bank of New York. But as time passed, the clubby old-guard members of the Light Foundation began dying off, carrying what was left of
noblesse oblige
into their marble crypts, and their children preferred yachts and airplanes and houses in Southampton or Positano to civic duty in New York. One June morning in 1991, on page one of the
Light,
the board announced that if a new buyer was not found within two weeks, they would fold the paper. Other newspapers wrote mournful editorials, but their owners were rooting for the
Light
to die. It was a hindrance, another competitor for space on newsstands, and in the privacy of their offices they dismissed any hope for its survival as mere sentimentality. Several semi-insane owners of parking lots and grocery chains offered to buy the
Light
for a dollar and operate it for at least a year. Each got a few minutes on local television; but sane men knew that it was doubtful that even a one-dollar check from such men would clear at the bank. The surviving members of the foundation didn’t want to be remembered for selling the
Light
to a lunatic. In stepped William Hancock Warren.

“New York without the
Light,
” he said in a press release, “would be like New York without the Statue of Liberty.”

On the Fourth of July that year, Warren handed the foundation a check for one million dollars, which the surviving members promised would be used to study threats to the First Amendment. The fireworks on the Hudson seemed like acts of celebration for the newspaper. “Re-born on the 4th of July!” their page-one headline said the following day. And when the holiday ended, William Hancock Warren walked into the rat-infested building on West Street where the
Light
had been published since 1947, its fourth location since its foundation in a three-story building on Beaver Street. He uttered only one sentence to the assembled television cameras, and as Cormac watched that evening on channel 4, the words jolted his heart: “I’m a descendant of people who lived in New York before the
Light
was born! I hope to see it flourish and live to an even riper old age!”

Cormac thought that night: This cannot be. His most natural reflex, taught to him by living a very long life, was doubt. A wise old editor had said to him once, “If you want it to be true, it probably isn’t.” But then he saw Warren’s eyes and the familiar features (only marginally altered by the work of generations) and once more resumed a search that had lasted in some ways all his years. He read everything he could find about the man who, in print, was now being called Willie Warren. This wasn’t much, but he subscribed to the Argosy service anyway. Thinking: I don’t want it to be true, so it probably is. If this was the last of one branch of the Warren line, the old vows required him to act. He wished he had the sword. His father’s sword. He wished the sword were there to connect him to the younger man he once was, full of certainties. And there was something else pressing upon him now.

He wanted more than ever to find the dark lady marked by spirals. She had nothing to do with the Warrens and the curse of Ireland. She was part of a separate story. And yet her story and the story of the Warrens were coming together, forced into union by the pressure of time. He had found a dark lady. Delfina Cintron. But he did not yet know if she bore the markings, if she was
the
dark lady. Caution kept him from making the discovery. Caution, and a kind of fear. If she did not bear the markings, he would go on and on and on, like the North River. If she did, he could be entering his final days. At last. And he could not go to that ending without completing the unfinished business of the other story, the demand for completion imposed on him by family and tribe. My father first, he thought, and then, with any luck, Delfina Cintron, and finally release and a swift passage into the emerald light.

The newspapers told Cormac that on the day Willie Warren moved into the publisher’s office, he took calls of congratulation from the mayor, the governor, and the president of the United States. That day, he also hired Howard Rubenstein to handle his press relations, and his secretary referred all other calls to the Rubenstein office. The trade press cobbled together stories, using words and phrases like “quixotic” and “deep pockets” and “amateur,” while predicting that no matter what Warren did, the
Light
was doomed. The losses would be immense. The rich boy would eventually turn his attention to other toys. Prepare the obits now. In Cormac’s solitude, he agreed.

Everybody was wrong.

In the months that followed the purchase, Cormac’s old newspaperman’s heart quickened as he saw Warren make a series of superb moves. He hired an excellent editor and left him alone on all matters involving the news. He gave the editor a budget that allowed him to expand the tiny staff with a mixture of seasoned professionals and passionate youngsters. He hired Milton Glaser to give the paper a new look, and one Monday morning it became a broadsheet with the graphic energy of a tabloid. Bold and bright, without being loud. He started building a new color-printing plant in Brooklyn, which would get the newspaper around Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island, delivered to doorsteps. His trucks could enter Manhattan when incoming traffic was light and copies of the paper were soon stacked on the newsstands at Penn Station and Grand Central when commuters headed home. He hired away a few star columnists from the
News
and the
Post
to add some personality to the
Light
’s sober news pages, paying them twice the money they were getting at the papers they left behind. He tripled the space in the sports section and encouraged huge action shots from his photographers. He sent handwritten notes to reporters when they did solid stories, gave bonuses to those whose stories were picked up by television, made certain that notes were sent to staff members on their birthdays and wedding anniversaries or when death took place in a family. He advertised heavily in the subways and in the foreign-language press. The editorial pages, which he controlled, became a model of judiciousness, and the op-ed pages were intelligent and well-written without ever talking down to the readers. He added no fuel to any municipal fire. He endorsed Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani and even had nice things to say about Al Sharpton. For the first time in decades, Cormac began to see people reading the
Light
on the subways.

William Hancock Warren was also lucky. He bought the newspaper at almost the precise moment when the boom started. His own holdings boomed. But so did the city of New York. Crime was down. Money was flowing. People began going out again at night. New businesses opened every day of the week. Warren expanded his business pages and insisted on covering both the Internet and the media. The young dot-commers began reading the paper and then advertising in it. The
Light
became the newspaper of the boom. But his editors knew that they needed more than the brash kids to read their paper. Warren read a biography of Joseph Pulitzer and decided to follow the old man’s example by covering the huge immigration wave. The
Light
became the immigrants’ newspaper, defending them, telling stories of their progress, running a column about green cards and visas and the process of naturalization. The word got around. Those immigrants who were learning English began reading it, and more important, so did their children. Then, about two years ago, he made a move that drove a tormented ambiguity into Cormac’s heart.

He announced that the
Light
was moving into a building on Park Row. Across the street from City Hall. Up the block from J&R Music World. He could do it now, the Rubenstein office explained, because the computer had freed newspapers from the plants in which they were printed. You could write a story on a high floor in Park Row and it would be printed miles away in Brooklyn. The other newspapers were all produced that way. Now it was the turn of the
Light
. And the city room would be located on Park Row.

Cormac wanted to weep. Once upon a time, he had worked on thirteen different newspapers on Park Row. As a reporter, a rewrite man, a copy editor, a typesetter. He had watched Walt Whitman sleep on the floor of one of those papers and had shown young Sam Clemens how they set type in New York. After the Civil War, Cormac had seen Father Dongan organize the orphaned newsboys and force the publishers to buy them shoes and get them doctors (the largest donations came from Bill Tweed). He’d walked past Hearst and Pulitzer in the lobbies and drunk with Brisbane in the whorehouses of Chapel Street. In those days, Park Row wasn’t just a distinct neighborhood; it was a kind of civilization, peopled by gaudy men of rapacious ambitions and appetites, great talent, enormous weaknesses, and much fun. Too much fun to last. Cormac had seen the Park Row papers die or move away, until all of them were gone by 1931. And here came a man who said that the past was now the future.

In spite of himself, in spite of a terrible ancient vow, in spite of history and memory, part of him began to root for William Hancock Warren.

For eight years, he watched and compiled his files and secretly applauded Warren’s growing triumph. For those eight years, he gazed at dark-skinned women on his walks through the city and turned away from them. After so many years of too much time, he wanted more time now, to see where Warren’s project would go, to postpone fate, to wait until he found the true dark lady. The century was winding down. The Wall Street boom rolled on.