On Green Dolphin Street (10 page)

“Do you have an idea what you’d like to do?”

“No. I rather hoped you’d have a plan. Perhaps we could go and see some pictures—whatever’s on at the Met, for instance.”

Frank, who was carrying a felt hat and had a raincoat over his arm,
looked worried for a moment as he inspected Mary; but he swallowed whatever misgiving he might have had and took her by the elbow through the revolving doors onto Lexington Avenue, where he hailed a cab.

“Aren’t you working?” said Mary, straightening her skirt over her knees as she settled onto the slippery seat.

“No, I have a few days’ vacation.”

“And you’re not going away anywhere?”

“Oh no. You never know what might turn up.”

Frank barked an instruction to the driver and sat back. “Guy just arrived from Puerto Rico. Doesn’t know where the hell he’s going.”

The morning followed no logical itinerary. Frank’s version of the city was less influenced by architecture or appearance than by stories he had written and people he had met. It began with an hour among the rows of secondhand bookstores on Fourth Avenue, round 10th Street, then went over to Tompkins Square—an interesting district, he explained, because the New York City Housing Authority had built its first project on Avenue A at Third Street. Mary could not see what was noteworthy in the depressed and menacing blocks, with resentful-looking youths playing softball behind wire mesh.

They walked up to Tompkins Square Park, where he showed her a small monument of two children, carved in relief on a stone background, looking at a flowering tree. The girl was seated, the boy carried a hoop; an engraved caption read: “They were earth’s purest children, young and fair.”

“It commemorates the loss of a steamboat,” said Frank. “Over a thousand people from this neighborhood died on it, mostly Germans. Their families couldn’t bear to stay on these streets afterward, so they moved out and it was taken over by Russians for a time. Around here you can still feel that sense of loss. Don’t you think?”

The children reminded Mary of her own, and for a moment she lost track of what Frank was saying, as her mind turned over thoughts of family and bereavement.

“You used to hear them talk Russian in the stores and cafés.”

“Is that so?” She rallied. “And what do they think of Sputnik?”

“I couldn’t say. Most have moved on. A lot of them came before the Revolution and they’re not so crazy about Communism.”

Frank took her back to the Bowery and on to the end of Bleecker Street, where he pointed to a handsome, ornamented building.

“Know who designed that? It’s Louis H. Sullivan, his only building in New York. You ever go to Chicago, you’ll see his best stuff there. We’re pretty proud of him back where I come from.” He smiled. “Is any of this interesting to you?”

Taken aback by his directness, Mary stammered slightly. “Yes, of course. Yes, it’s very interesting.”

“So, do I just keep on talking?”

“Yes. Yes. You do that.”

“We’ll walk down to Chatham Square, where two El tracks used to meet. You got to imagine what it was like, the people in the dark beneath all that ironwork.”

Frank walked quickly, and Mary found herself struggling a little to keep up; she wished she had accepted an earlier invitation to take a break in some Russian, or possibly Greek, café. The lower reaches of the Bowery were lined with discount liquor stores, flophouses, pawnshops and hotels whose imposing names—the Grand Windsor, the Palace, the Crystal—were set in context by their modest claim to offer “Clean Rooms.” Frank strode on, apparently unaware of the fallen men stretched across the doorways, talking of the movements of people and how he felt that, although the city was a thousand neighborhoods, it had a single character as well.

“And what’s that single character?” Mary asked.

“Search me. Jewish, I guess. You find Jewish stores and theaters, you’re pretty close to the real thing.”

He took her suddenly by the elbow and steered her to the right, down Grand Street. “You gotta see this.”

After a few blocks, he stopped in front of an Italian general store, so un-American it might have been transported whole from Verona.

“Louis Sullivan, Little Italy. Another home for you” said Mary.

They went into the store, which sold straw ponies from Positano, devices for making lasagne, plastic gondolas, plaster saints and arlecchinos, colored drinking glasses and 78 rpm shellac recordings of Caruso in brown paper covers. By the cash desk, there was a
Grammatica Accelerata: Italiano—Inglese
. A woman in widow’s black smiled at them from behind a wooden counter; the homesickness was almost palpable.

“Breaks your heart, doesn’t it?” Frank said.

“Yours, I think,” said Mary.

They went back onto the Bowery and continued walking south, where the street widened for the approach to the Manhattan Bridge, a square triumphal arch that might have been commissioned by Trajan or Tiberius. A traffic cop stood in the middle of the road, his blue serge jacket double-buttoned beneath his chin, waving his white-gloved hands at the streams of arriving and departing traffic. He was yelling at the cars and trucks, his body a frenzy of agitation as though he was about to dance. Mary thought his wild gestures were those of anger, until he pointed at a truck driver and mimed a festive pulling of the klaxon; she saw the smile of gratification spread across his face as the driver noisily obliged.

Eventually, they reached Chatham Square, a confluence of nine streets, whose buildings still looked unused to the sunlight admitted by the slum clearance of the neighboring green and the removal of its elevated train tracks. One street led south to the financial district, another north into the belly of Chinatown.

“Imagine the view you’d get on the train,” said Frank. “You could look into people’s front rooms in Harlem or Brooklyn. You could see them working, women in sweatshops, men in factories, the guy alone in the office at night, fiddling the books. Then you’d see the East River or maybe the sun setting on the Chrysler Building. And right here underneath, almost in the dark, there’d be movie theaters and newspaper sellers, florists, bums. And up on the platforms there were little frame houses, you know a hundred years old with gables, kind of like England, I guess.”

Mary had begun to laugh. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Maybe you had to be here.”

“I think maybe I did.” She touched his arm lest he should take offense. “But it does sound charming.”

Frank looked at his watch. “Listen. I’ll take you to lunch. Do you like fish? Ever had shad roe? Or a kippered herring?”

“Kippers? We used to have them every Friday breakfast when I was a child.”

“Come on, then.”

“But I didn’t really like them.”

“Me neither. Too many bones.”

“Do we ever take a taxi in this tour?”

“No, it’s just down on South Street, by the market. Maybe after lunch.”

Frank took her beneath the Brooklyn Bridge to a building near the waterfront. While he organized a table and went to make a telephone call, she walked through to the women’s room at the back, which was down an unplastered brick corridor. The door handle was missing, though the tiled surfaces inside seemed clean enough, and she took some minutes to comb her hair and fix her makeup.

When she returned, she found that Frank had ordered her a glass of water and a dry martini. Across the street, they could see the huge open sheds of Fulton Market which disappeared off the edge of the island, their outer parts supported by piles deep in the East River. It was almost one o’clock, and activity was beginning to dwindle; the porters were pushing empty trolleys and men in rubber aprons were starting to hose down the floor.

“You like clams?” said Frank, looking at a board on the wall where the menu was chalked.

“What’s good here?” said Mary, avoiding the clam question.

“Anything’s fine, so long as it’s fish. Why don’t we get some crab?”

“Good idea.”

Mary was relieved to be sitting down at last, and surreptitiously eased off her shoes beneath the table: the giant square paving slabs of Manhattan had drained the life from her calves and heels. She lit a cigarette and
offered the pack to Frank, who was stirring his drink with the end of his fork, since the restaurant had not run to swizzle sticks; he managed to make the same rapid sequence of sounds she had noticed in Georgetown.

There was a change in the atmosphere as the table required them, for the first time that day, to look one another in the eye. Mary was worried that, without the life of the streets to comment on, Frank might become bored by her company.

“So,” she said, “tell me about your work. Why aren’t you traveling somewhere if you’re on holiday?”

“I don’t care much for vacations. I travel a good deal for work, so if I get the chance I like to stay in New York.” He drained the glass and put it back on the table. “Also, I don’t want to miss anything. I think I told you I’m trying to get onto the election. Time’s running out and I don’t want to miss a break if it comes along.”

“I see. And were you reporting on politics before you did whatever it was you did wrong?”

“Yeah, pretty much. I did the Eisenhower-Stevenson election in ’52. I guess that was the beginning of the problem. Eisenhower did this terrible thing in Milwaukee right at the end of the campaign. He rewrote his speech to please McCarthy. The local governor, a guy named Kohler, was frightened that if Eisenhower said good things about General Marshall, who McCarthy was trying to make out as some sort of Red, then McCarthy would make trouble for him. So Kohler got Ike to cut all the Marshall stuff out and Ike embraced McCarthy on the platform. But Marshall was not only a fine man, he had virtually created Ike as a politician, and here was Eisenhower crawling to this toad McCarthy who was trying to ruin Marshall. It was a terrible moment.”

“But why on earth would Eisenhower be so frightened of McCarthy?”

“He was trying to please Kohler, the local Republican. But everyone was frightened of McCarthy, all the politicians. He showed he could get them beaten at the polls if he backed the other candidate. In the end it was as simple as that. They were scared of losing their seats. No one really believed all those Communist accusations. Not even Nixon.”

“Did you meet McCarthy?”

“Sure, he was a very friendly guy. He loved journalists. The press made him, by reporting his fantasies, so he was always buying drinks. I mean, really a lot of drinks. You know he died of cirrhosis? But it wasn’t just trying to buy our friendship, he liked being one of the guys. He liked getting drunk with other men. I remember he ran a tab at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee. Unbelievable.”

“So he was an alcoholic?”

“I guess so. He was kind of amusing to be with, to pass an hour with. I think he didn’t like women. He preferred men, if you see what I mean.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“That’s where we parted company. That and the question of these Communists.”

“So what happened? You said that was where the problem began.”

While Frank was explaining, the waiter brought the crabs with a bowl of mayonnaise and some ketchup in small paper cups. Frank told her that the FBI had helped to create the fog of distrust in which McCarthy had worked; knowing people were ready to spy on their neighbors, the Bureau had been able to accumulate files on individuals who had only the most circumstantial connection with any left-wing activity—a foreign name, the purchase of a magazine, a wrong friend. Hardly any were believing Communists, but all were afraid of being reported, denounced and barred from work, knowing that they would not be offered a chance to defend themselves.

“They mounted a big attack on the press,” said Frank. “Agents would just turn up at an office and tell the editor who to fire. I wrote a story about Eisenhower’s speech. I’d been told by one of his aides how he’d cut out the pro-Marshall stuff. Even his own staff was appalled. My editor got a call a week or so later from the FBI. I was one of half a dozen reporters he was told to keep an eye on. He just told them to get lost, so I was okay for the time being.”

“The FBI came to your paper just because you’d been rude about McCarthy?”

“Pretty much. They could turn up at a newspaper or even a women’s magazine and tell the editor to fire someone and that was it. McCarthy and the FBI worked hand in glove. Hoover fed McCarthy a lot of material. McCarthy had this famous sidekick, Roy Cohn, a revolting man, and Hoover was right up his ass. Pardon me.”

Frank looked momentarily embarrassed, and Mary found herself smiling at his attack of decorum.

“I remember Cohn,” she said. “But if your editor stood up for you, what finally went wrong?”

“I’ll tell you about it another time.”

“But you weren’t a sympathizer in any way?”

“Christ, no, Mary. I’m a reporter, I’m not a political guy. I mean, sometimes I don’t vote, or maybe I’ll have met one of the candidates and vote for him. The first time I ever went to the polls I voted Republican. I was sixteen years old and they came to my part of Chicago and handed out voting cards. All the kids on my block voted for Landon, not Roosevelt. They’d enfranchised us. So why not?”

As Frank continued to talk, waving a crab leg, then cracking it at the joint, Mary watched his face in an absent sort of way. She had never, she thought, met anyone with eyes of quite his color: they were pale blue, but round the edges of the irises were splinters of brown, like shards of cracked cobnut. Beneath the eyes, where the skin was discolored with fatigue, she could just make out a handful of faded freckles of the same pale brown. She wondered what he had looked like as a boy, whether the freckles had bloomed then in soft skin, like Richard’s.

The other thing she kept noticing was that, however much he disavowed any political belief, there seemed to be a sinewy sense in his conversation of right and wrong; he appeared indignant about certain things, committed to others. She wondered if he had inherited a Catholic morality from his family, but it didn’t seem to be a spiritual quality; she had the feeling that, however droll and dismissive his way of concealing it, there were a number of things he wanted to see done, by himself or others.