Metropolis (42 page)

There was still a trace of the concussion dulling his mind. He was dizzy, too, in fact. And there was a ringing in his ears. He hid all of this from Mr. Noe’s doctors, fearing it would end his career on the bridge, but Sarah Blacksall came by often enough to notice he wasn’t quite well. She told Mr. Noe, who was then even more insistent that Harris give up his hazardous work on the bridge. The two of them sat on the edge of Harris’s bed and tried to reason with him.

“Haven’t you had your adventures, my boy?” said Mr. Noe. “Isn’t it time to settle down?” Dr. Blacksall cast her eyes at the carpet. Harris just stared at the wall. His head hurt.

The thing that upset him the most was that Mr. Noe and Sarah Blacksall had gotten John-Henry in on the idea of Harris going to work for the factory. In fact, Mr. Noe had already convinced John-Henry to come and work there himself, once it opened. Mr. Noe was thinking that he’d hardly touched the Negro market at all, and John-Henry was the very man he needed. “Every self-respecting person needs at least three brushes,” he explained, “regardless of class, income or even race: A toothbrush, a hairbrush and a clothing brush. And all of them wear out after a time. Therein lies the secret of the industry: repeat custom.” John-Henry figured that with Liza to worry about, he really would prefer a safer line of work. He didn’t mind the sound of the relatively enormous salary either, or the idea of not working with racist Irishmen and explosives anymore.

Just a week after his fall, Harris was feeling much better. The dizziness and the nausea had passed. His arm was out of its sling. Sarah, Mr. Noe, and John-Henry were all urging him to stay home longer and rest, but he got up, dressed and walked over to the bridge to talk to the master mechanic’s assistant about resuming work.

Work and Beatrice were all he could think about, suddenly. It was as if his sense of what mattered had been sharpened by the fall. He knew there was a chance for him with Sarah Blacksall. More than a chance, but he was certain that a life with the kind and intelligent Sarah Blacksall as a helpmeet, selling brushes as a profession, was not what he wanted. He missed the fresh air and the tower, rising ever higher in the air, and he missed Beatrice. On his return from the bridge office, he got an earful from Mr. Noe, whom he had not told where he was going, and then another earful when he mentioned he was going back to work.

“What! When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Harris, that’s absurd.” Clearly, he was disappointed.

“I’m fine,” said Harris. Mr. Noe just shook his head and announced that he was going out—he needed to do a night inspection of the new lighting system at the factory.

Glad for the chance to take an interest in the factory and to divert Mr. Noe’s attention from himself, Harris asked why it was necessary to inspect at night.

“Well, my boy, think about it: Winter’s a key time of year for manufacturing, but one when many shops are forced to reduce their hours and output for lack of natural light. A December afternoon can be dark as night. Not at the new Noe Brush works, though. It’s going to be cutting-edge, just you see.”

It was delightful how much Mr. Noe enjoyed his work, thought Harris; if only he wouldn’t badger Harris to join him.

“I can’t wait to see it,” he said. Mr. Noe clapped him on the shoulder and went off.

It was just getting dark when Mr. Noe arrived at the factory. He was thinking that the gas lamps were beautiful. But were they functional? Had he ordered enough of them to ensure the workrooms were brilliantly lit, even on the darkest days? There was no point in half measures, he felt, not if he expected his employees to produce brushes with the highest standards of workmanship. Orders in the past year had exceeded his ability to fulfill them. Scrub brushes, hairbrushes, clothing brushes, curry and saddle brushes, toothbrushes, every kind of brush. With the new space, he expected to triple his output, but he would never sacrifice quality. He had designed the floor plans himself, according to the model of Bentham’s panopticon, which he’d come across in an industry journal. It was quite the rage in Europe, the new wave in manufacturing. Each level of the new factory was laid out as a single large workroom with windows all around. The workbenches were arranged radially, and management and supervisors’ offices were clustered in central hubs set off by bronze grilles and carved-wood openwork. The hubs would serve as both the brains and the moral seat of the organism that was the factory and its workforce. The idea was to ensure that every worker was at least potentially in constant view of his manager and therefore motivated to exert himself to the utmost. Whether it was his sense of pride, duty or shame that motivated him didn’t matter. Quality and productivity were all. The top floor would be devoted to preparing the raw materials, the middle to assembly and the ground level to finishing work, packaging and storage. There were to be six dumbwaiters positioned at regular intervals around the perimeter to eliminate the need for hauling goods up and down stairs. Mr. Noe had great expectations of the system.

The foyer was dark, so he left the front door ajar to let in the last ambient light from the darkening sky while he tapped his way across the floor with the cane Harris had given him. When he found the Lightolier, he touched a match to its oily wick and gained a small circumference of visibility. He stepped up to the first fixture, opened the valve, reached the tall pole to the jet and lit it, throwing the space into a shadowy twilight. He set his cane against the wall and briskly proceeded to light every lamp on the first floor. Mr. Noe smiled. There were enough fixtures, more than enough. He realized how pleased his wife and his son would have been with this place. They had been there with him when he was just dreaming, planning it all, and he wished they could have seen the fruition, but he didn’t allow himself to wallow in missing them. It was so unexpected, the way he’d begun to move beyond the grief that had gripped him until Harris first showed up at his door with Bella. Harris had become one of his projects, then something more. Mr. Noe had lost so many things the past few years, but the peculiar generosity of Harris’s decision to return Bella to him now seemed to have been a turning point. Harris was such a conundrum, so lucky and unlucky at once. If only he could get him out of the construction business, thought Mr. Noe, the boy might just make it into the realm of respectability.

He closed the front door and proceeded upstairs, lighting the lamps there as well, and then the ones on the third floor. It was delightful how fast and how well the construction had gone. They were nearly ready to move in, ahead of schedule. The dumbwaiters’ sliding oak doors were still waiting in a stack to be installed, and he went from shaft to shaft, checking to see whether any of the units were operational yet. The cables had all been dropped through the shafts, but none of the first five had been completed, and none of the cars was in place. But then, in the last shaft, instead of the dark void stretching up and down, he saw a semienclosed box of iron mesh. He smiled. He tested it by putting a little weight on the car, and the bed felt firm. He tried the crank and found it under tension. When he turned it, the dumbwaiter descended, then rose back up easily. It was an excellent design, capable of lifting four hundred pounds under just the power of a hand crank. He set his hat in the center of the bed. It wasn’t much of a load for a maiden voyage, but nonetheless, he cranked it down to the ground floor. Then he turned off the gas jets and went back downstairs.

He shut off the second-floor jets as well, expecting that the rows of glass bricks in the floor would allow a sufficient glow to shine up from downstairs for him to see by. But to his surprise, he encountered an unexpected dimness—it seemed the ground floor had gone dark, too. Something must have gone wrong with the equipment, and he felt a jolt of panic that the gas was flowing freely into his brand-new factory. But he was a rational man, and he knew that as long as no spark was struck, the gas would not ignite. He felt his way downstairs. He could just make out the contours of the space. His eyes had gradually adjusted to the darkness, making the most of the crescent moonlight and faint glow of street lamps. It was quiet. He didn’t hear the hiss of gas. He reached up to the first fixture and found the jet was already turned firmly off. How odd.

Then an odd glimmer of light caught his eye, off to the right by the stairwell, where no window was, and he turned toward it. He heard heavy steps, saw silver and the twinkling leer of the monkey slashing through the air and down upon him. He raised his arm to shield his eyes and tried to back away, but he was trapped against the bronze grille of the bursar’s window at the central hub.

“No—” he said, and then he heard the grunt of the man who wielded the monkey, just before it landed on his skull.

36.

UNDERTOE SINGS

J
ohnny Dolan woke up scratching. He hadn’t been bitten by bedbugs in years, but the Bowery lodging house where Piker Ryan lived was infested down to every mattress. He stepped over Piker’s sleeping body, regretting that he’d pulled rank on him—he would have been better off taking the floor himself. He could tell it was going to be a rough morning, after the night they’d had, and there was no point trying to coddle his headache here among the vermin, so he shook out his drawers, put them back on and then slipped into the shirt, vest and suit that lay folded neatly over the back of a chair. If he’d been at home, he would have given the suit a good brushing before he put it on, to freshen it up, but even so hardly a wrinkle showed. Fine clothes were like that, he thought, worth every cent. Last, he pulled on his fighting boots, but not before checking their blades and removing a couple of strands of embedded hair—an old ritual of his, the morning after a wild night, but one he hadn’t carried out in some time. He saw that they could also use a rinsing off. He picked up his cane and polished the monkey head on one of Piker’s filthy socks, then went downstairs to relieve himself. At the pump in the corner, he stopped to splash off his face and hands and run wet fingers through his hair. He gave a few pumps to his shoes and then walked out to the street, where the haze of the warm, early-summer day was just rising from the gutters.

His early rise paid off. Beatrice was still sound asleep, lying on her back with her arms thrown over her head. He’d arrived in plenty of time to wake her exactly as he’d imagined: with a hard right hook to the center of her face. He felt a definitive snap under his knuckle, heard a grunt. Her eyes flew open, then fluttered closed again. He’d woken her up and knocked her out with one blow.

“You conniving, lying whore,” he said, largely for his own benefit.

The first she knew was the tinny taste running down her throat, and then she opened her eyes to Johnny looming over her, blocking out every other sight. She shrank quite reflexively into the corner and clutched the bedsheet about her, but there was no defending herself. She was stunned, he was awake and angry.

“Off your drunk, then, are you?” she finally managed to say. “You gonna kill me? You done with me?”

He snorted. “Went down to the Morgue last night, Beanie, and then Owney’s. There were a lot of people there. I heard some things I didn’t like.”

She closed her eyes. At least she’d done her best, had tried to keep the Whyos alive. But she’d thought she would have more time. She’d underestimated him. Apparently, he had found out her plan. Had it been the Jimster? Maybe even Fiona? Not that it mattered now. She actually smiled a little at the improbable optimism of her scheme. How could she have hoped to pull it off? It was about as ludicrous as her notion of running away with Frank Harris and the Dolans’ money, an idea she had abandoned the day before when she looked through Harris’s window and saw a dark-haired woman sitting by his bed and mopping his brow more tenderly than a nurse would have done. So Harris had moved on, fallen in love.
Good for him,
she thought. He deserved a normal life.

“You think something’s funny, do you?”

It was strange to Beatrice how gorgeous Johnny was when that murderous sneer crossed his face. Cruelty became him like no other emotion. She’d almost forgotten his looks during the period of his dissipation. This was her husband, she reminded herself. She needed to try to keep him from beating her to death. “No, Johnny, nothing’s funny. I’m just a little dizzy. Why don’t you tell me who you saw at the Morgue?”

“I’ll tell you who I saw.” He ripped away the sheet she was hiding under, and she cowered, naked. A worm of blood wriggled from her upper lip. She wiped it away, but it kept coming, slow and steady. She let her red fingers mark the sheet, a beautiful snow-white expanse that was bleached to kingdom come every week by her washerwoman. Whatever happened next, she couldn’t say that being with Dandy Johnny hadn’t raised her standard of living for a while.

“I got talking to Piker,” he said. Her eyes darted to his. If he’d
only
talked to Piker and not to the Jimster, she thought, there was a chance she’d get out of this. Although that would mean Piker would be going after Harris, or perhaps he already had, late last night after she’d gone home. “We got to discussing about Harris, see, and why he hadn’t dealt with that by now.” She closed her eyes, waiting. “Funny thing is, Piker thought I’d changed my mind about Harris.” He threw his jacket to the floor behind him, which wasn’t like him at all, she couldn’t help thinking. Then he rolled up his shirtsleeves and shrugged off his suspenders. “You made me look bad, Beanie. Now Piker knows that my girl is in the habit of opposing me. That makes me look weak. But the thing that really gets my ire up, Beanie, is why. I believe I told you once,
No boyfriends.
Didn’t I?” He leaned toward her, and she braced herself. But he didn’t hit her; he jerked the buttons of his trousers open.
“Didn’t I?”

“Oh Christ,” she said as he reached out and yanked her toward him by the ankles. Her head snapped back and hit the back of the bedstead as he dropped down on top of her. “See, I don’t like it when you don’t listen to what I say, wife.” When she tried to break free, he pinned both her wrists under one hand and used the other to knock her in the nose again. Something moved in it that should have been solid, and she felt sick with pain. She stopped fighting. He sidled his pants down around his ass and pressed her to the mattress. She was his wife, she reminded herself. It could be worse than this. She could be a whore on the street. This could be normal.

“So what we did,” he announced, looking at the wall behind her and kneeing her legs apart, “was, me and Piker Ryan, we went out to Brooklyn and took care of the job. Made a real night of it, actually.” He jammed himself in with about the same force he’d hit her with. It took her breath away. “So, like you said last night,
everything’s under control—
now. No thanks to you.”

“What did you do, Johnny? Johnny?” She saw him smile, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes and he wasn’t talking anymore. The top of her skull smacked plaster in rhythm with the thrusting of his hips. There were bursts of pain in her head, a spreading pain in her face, occasional jabs of pain in her guts. But that was nothing compared to the pain that was general across her, because it was clear she’d been wrong just now: It
couldn’t
be worse. They had gone out after Harris last night and finished the job. And she had gone home to bed just when she should have been there to stop him. She closed her eyes and pictured Harris’s splendid, slightly lumpy face. Why hadn’t she tried to warn him?

Undertoe woke up with blood beneath his nails. His neck rash was a pulsing, violent purple, streaked with fresh, self-administered gashes, but his head was blissfully quiet. He banged his spittoon on the floor for his landlady to bring him his coffee, and after she did the sourness of it settled his stomach. He sat up in bed and counted the money he’d taken in the night before. It had been a profitable, pleasurable evening, and he was feeling well for once. Then he dressed and strolled over to the summer baths along the East River.

He walked out onto the bulkhead and surveyed the great rectangle of floating docks that enclosed the edge of the river there, turning it into a placid bathing area, while beyond the piers the river was choppy with cresting waves. There were several dozen men engaged in their ablutions, but no one was swimming per se. The city had recently begun setting up such baths in the fair months—the fever months—to encourage bathing and cleanliness among the populace. Undertoe squatted, raised his arms like a knife blade over his head, and dove. His form was surprisingly fine, and the spring-loaded force in his legs propelled him into the water so powerfully that every particle of dreck, every sloughed bit of skin, every dried cell of blood, his own or another’s, was expelled from beneath his horny nails. His inflamed cuticles were washed clean. He rose with a splash, said
Ahh,
and rolled onto his back. The water was cold but invigorating, and it brought him to a pleasurable realization. He was done with the whole Williams-Geiermeier affair. He didn’t need to go back to Jones and prove the case, not anymore. Who cared, really, about that Barnum’s bounty when there was so much money and better satisfaction to be had elsewhere?

And Harris?

Harris managed to be boring on a morning when everyone else was embroiled in existential turmoil. He was at work. But the day wasn’t a dull one for him: It was his first one back on the job, and he was feeling pretty good. He’d risen early, taken the lunch bucket the cook had left for him the night before and arrived a good half hour early on the Manhattan side. His new foreman joined him for the walk to the top, just to see how he handled the height. Harris was as comfortable and confident as ever, but then they returned to the ground. He was going to put in two weeks of light duty in the yard while he got his strength back.

All morning, men kept congratulating him on his recovery, but he realized he was going to miss working with his old crew. When they broke for lunch, someone told Harris he was wanted in the office. There was no cause for alarm. He walked into the office a common worker and back out a foreman. When he did go up top, he would be the assistant to the head cutter on his crew, in charge of tools and hardware. All afternoon, his head was full of ideas about how they might get things done both more quickly and more safely with just a couple of minor changes in the way the men worked. He looked forward to breaking his news and celebrating with Mr. Noe, Sarah Blacksall and the Henleys that night. Despite their disapproval, everyone would be convening at the house in Fort Greene for dinner. He also thought about the letters he could now write to his father and Robert Koch. He’d actually become what he claimed to be to Koch more than a year before. It now seemed as if it hadn’t been pure fantasy, just a bit premature. Harris had no idea that Mr. Noe had not come home. Nor did even the cook until she went knocking on his door, asking if he were quite well.

“Mr. Noe? Mr. Noe, sir?”

But Mr. Noe wasn’t there.

He came to on the floor of the factory shortly after dawn, head throbbing, breathing shallow, dazed. He was aware of little more at first than the fact that he was fully dressed, which seemed a strange thing, since he seemed to be awakening from a deep slumber. He struggled to discern where he was and to recall what had made him fall asleep in his clothing, but he couldn’t. Nor could he open his eyes; they were crusted shut. With effort, he raised his hand and rubbed the sleep away, but still he could barely see, could focus no further than a foot or two away. Then he touched his fingers together and understood that the sticky, crumbly substance was not the usual eye goo, and that the blotchy, dark vista before him was no landscape but his shirtfront, stiff and black with blood. He wasn’t afraid until he found he couldn’t raise himself, but then his breaths came faster. His senses were so dulled that he had no knowledge of the flies that fed at the meaty edge of the gash in his scalp and in the thick puddle he lay in. At the outskirts of his limited field of vision, he sensed brightness. He felt a bit of breeze. He mustered what breath he was able and let out a keening, wordless cry.

A ragpicker on her way back from an early-morning visit to one of the East River dumps heard his wail. Why should it be a surprise to anyone that her name was Francie Harris? It was a very common name. She passed this way every day and had monitored the progress of the factory. She’d seen the scaffolding come down and the painting and finishing crews go in but knew the place wasn’t occupied yet—and certainly not by families with babies. Yet she’d heard crying. Then it came again, the wail of a baby. Well, Francie Harris had never been married, never had a child, but she’d always loved the wee ones. She couldn’t let a baby lie crying in an empty building. The door was ajar, and she opened it wider, peering cautiously inside. Then she heard a dragging sound and jumped with fright—could it be a trap? She fixed her eyes where the sound was coming from and made out a form. It was not a baby, it was a man. He was crawling.

“Are you hurt?” she called. Clearly, he was.

“Who is it? Who’s there?” Mr. Noe’s voice was a whisper.

She leaned over so he could see her face and said, “It’s just me, Francie Harris, sir. I’m going to get you help.”

“Oh, Harris, thank God,” he murmured. He hadn’t seen her face at all, just a pattern: eyes, nose, mouth. He’d heard
Harris
and been glad that his boy, his second son, was there.

In his mind, there was no juncture between that moment and the one half a day later when he roused again, in the bed of his Fort Greene farmhouse, the right Harris now there with him, attending to him in the sickbed that had been set up in the front parlor for Harris. Mr. Noe knew nothing of the simultaneous arrival of the fire department, the police and the newspapermen in response to Francie Harris’s alarm. He knew nothing of the doctor at Bellevue Hospital who’d bandaged him and then, after they’d figured out who he was and where he lived, announced that the patient could little be helped and would best be sent back to Brooklyn to die in the comfort of his home.

Both Beatrice’s eyes were black when she woke, and her nose sat like a great tumor on her face; it would surely heal with a prominent new hook. But the thing she was concerned about was Johnny. He was dead sober now, and he was sorting and arranging his equipment. She was afraid. Around noon, she was feeling a bit recovered and dragged herself out of bed, but when she dressed and made as if to go out, he told her to take her hat off.

“You’re not going anywhere. Fix me some eggs.” He was right, of course. She would have run and not stopped if she’d gotten out that door. They had turned a certain corner, and both of them were aware of it.

Johnny spent the day looking through the account books and occasionally whyoing to the gang from the roof. Late in the afternoon, he told her to bring him a glass of whiskey. When she went to the pantry to fetch it, her eye fell on the several phials of hydrate of chloral they kept on hand on a low shelf among the slungshots, bowie knives, gougers and the rest of their gangsters’ larder. She mixed it very light, just a drop, then a little heavier on his second round. She was lucky, he was thirsty, and the third one had a lot of the stuff in it. He’d barely touched it before he nodded off, and then she grew bolder: She tipped back his head and dribbled it onto his tongue. That would give her a head start, at least.