Through the Children's Gate (42 page)

B
y July, the doctors had passed him right out of even the compassionate trials and were into the world of guesses and radiation. “It's a Hail Mary,” he said of a new radiation therapy that they were proposing. “But, who knows, maybe I'll get the Doug Flutie of radiologists.” Then a slight ache in his back that he thought was a disk he'd hurt water-skiing turned out to be a large tumor in his spine, and the end came quickly.

His wife, Elyn, had to be out of the city, and I spent the last Saturday afternoon of his life with him. In the old way, I went into his office to work on something I was writing. Kirk went to see what was on television. He had, I noticed, a team photograph of the Metrozoids at their last practice propped up on the coffee table. By then he could hardly walk, and his breath came hard.

But he called out, “Yo. You got to come here.”

“What?”

“You won't believe this. Boston College–Miami.”

Damned if it wasn't. ESPN Classics had a “Hail Mary” Saturday, all the great games decided on the last play, and now, twenty years late, they were showing the game from beginning to end: the whole game, with the old graphics and the announcer's promos, exactly as it had first been shown.

So we finally got to watch the game. And it was 1984 again, and the game was still thrilling, even though you knew what the outcome would be and how it would happen. Kirk's brother, Sam, came
around, and he watched, too, the three of us just enjoying a good game, until at last here we were at that famous, miraculous, final Hail Mary, Doug Flutie dropping back and rolling out to heave the ball desperately downfield.

“Look at that!” Kirk cried, and the ball was still in midair out of view, up above the television screen.

“What?” I asked, as the ball made its arc and fell into the hands of Gerard Phelan and the announcers went wild.

“That's no Hail Mary. Watch it again and you'll see. That's a coverage breakdown.” The old defensive-backfield coach spoke evenly, as, twenty years before, the crowd jumped and screamed. “Safety steps up too soon because he doesn't think Flutie can make that throw on the run. What he doesn't see is that Flutie has time to square around and get his feet set on the rollout, which adds fifteen yards to his range. Safety steps up too soon, Phelan runs a standard post route, and that's it. That safety sees Flutie get his feet set, makes the right read, and there's no completion.” Turning to us, he said, “That is no Hail Mary, friends. That's no miracle. That is just the play you make. That is one gentleman making the right read and running the right pattern and the other gentleman making the wrong read.” And for one moment he looked as happy as I had ever known him: one more piece of the world's mysteries demystified without being debunked, a thing legendary and hallowed broken down into the real pattern of human initiative and human weakness and human action that had made it happen. We had been waiting twenty years to see a miracle, and what we saw—what he saw, once again, and showed us—was one more work of art, a pattern made by people out of the possibilities the moment offered to a ready mind. It was no Hail Mary, friends; it was a play you made.

He turned to me and Sam, and, still elated by the revelation of what had really happened all those years ago, we began to talk about Ralph Emerson and Richard Serra. And then Kirk said heavily, “There is nothing in the world I would rather be doing than taking part in this conversation. But I have to lie down.” He died four days afterward, late at night, having spent the day talking about Hitchcock films and eighteenth-century hospital architecture.

Luke and Elyn and I went up to the football field at Williams last fall and, with some other friends, spread his ashes in the end zone, under the goalposts. At his memorial, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Renée Fleming sang and the violinist Arnold Steinhardt played and the art world of New York turned out and listened and recalled him. I think a lot of them must have been puzzled, in the slide show that Elyn had prepared to begin the evening, and which recapitulated his career, from Savannah to Princeton, to see toward the end a separate section gravely entitled “The Giant Metrozoids,” with the big figure surrounded by small boys. But I'm sure he would have been glad to see them there. The Metrozoids are getting back in business again, with an inadequate coach. I've thought about finally making the motivational speech, but I don't think I need to. The Metrozoids don't need to learn how to separate the men from the heroes. They know.

T
he Gates went up in Central Park, and we took the children through them. We entered the park at the Children's Gate, Seventy-sixth and Fifth, but now the pathways and walks, usually so open and Narnian, their old-fashioned streetlamps glowing at twilight, have been hung with countless orange shower curtains, more of them than you had thought possible.

And yet it works; the effect makes its effect. I had been, for what little it's worth, opposed to the idea, on the grounds that Central Park, a perfect and miraculous work of art, hardly needed to be italicized or commented on by an inferior work of art. I opposed it on the grounds of the park not being mere grounds. And yet the scale of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's invention, the expanse, the perspective—orange veils not here and there but everywhere, a vast infestation, yet orderly, obviously human-tailored, premeditated—all of it was, if not artful, then at least impressive, a form of the organized sublime.

They revealed and emphasized the park's expanse. I watched a small boy enter the park at the south end, where the pond and skating rink are, and saw him muttering. Drawing closer, I could hear him: “Sixty-four, sixty-five, sixty-six …” he counted. He intended to check the reported number for himself. (Actually, there were around 7,500.) They showed, also, how small the park is, how man-made: 7,500 is, after all, a number far from nature's millions, an amount a boy can hope to count. Density was transformed into immensity; the close-packed park, usually limited by what is going on right in front of you, by the local proscenium of incident, is transformed by the tick-tock
metronomic regularity of the curtains, marching away in every direction, into something ordered, regimented, overwhelming, and vast. The park, experientially quite segmented, becomes by the repetition of a single measuring unit perceptually quite large. We can no longer see the park in separate chunks. Someone has taken an orange ruler to it: My, how big you've grown!

And grant these gates their good effect on the city. So many people came to walk through them, even in the cold—pushing strollers and reaching up to touch, the children racing beneath and the old folks watching from the benches, as though expecting them to speak, to say something that mattered. The thing worked, no doubt about it. It seemed, in fact, like a regular annual festival that we had somehow forgotten to practice for a while—a festival dreamed up by the king of Central Park, which we had abandoned as we waited for him to come home.

But a festival celebrating what, exactly? A secular ritual for what faith? I could easily imagine generations of betrothed West Siders who had been expected to parade beneath the orange; or that, for a century, no fourteen-year-old East Sider could confidently begin high school without a ramble through the curtains, but of course, none of this was so. The Gates were there as a secular ritual of ritualized secularism, an invented festival of the power of festive inventions, a celebration of themselves.

Perhaps all liberal-secular celebrations are like that. Even this season, our great American Thanksgiving, we know now, does not come to us direct from the Pilgrims but is as invented as the Gates, dreamed up by an aesthetic entrepreneur, a magazine editor, as a festival of festivity. The liberal city constantly invents and forgets itself with its festivals—the marathon, the parades, the Gates—whose primary purpose is entirely frivolous, to break the dull round of the commercial year into the appearance of seasons and to give an occasion for another style of shopping. Sacred ritual is like stories in stained glass: We gaze and hope someday to understand. Secular ritual is a form of mistletoe; we hang it up and wait for something hot to happen underneath.

* * *

T
he children are gliding this year. Mobility and escape are not metaphors for kids; they are kids’ whole purpose in life, and the beautiful thing is that they believe escape exists. They are in training. They glide and scoot and bike and skate, and though they always come home, for now, they believe, effortlessly, that, like POWs in a World War II movie, they are getting ready for the big one, the Great Escape, when they will flee their comfortable quarters for the world beyond, taking with them (we hope) a fond memory of kindly jailors.

The children pretended to fly over London a few years ago; now the hope of levitation has become a more practical daily activity, one of smooth movement in the opposite direction, away from home. We grown-ups, looking at them, see only the illusions of mobility and the possibility of harm: They will fall, break limbs, bruise knees, skin ankles. And so, New York parents, we wrap them up in swaddling of a kind: helmets that perch absurdly oversize on their heads, wrist pads and knee pads. Martha gasps as the children whiz by. But, though they accept the regalia with more or less good grace, they keep on in motion, getting ready for the day when the signal comes from resistance headquarters and they go for the fences.

The current rage in the civilization of childhood in New York is still for those Heelys—sneakers with small wheels embedded in their soles. They enable a walking child suddenly to become a whizzing, gliding child, floating down the sidewalk, free. Luke found his pair at Modell's in September and began practicing on the sidewalk outside our building; it is harder to do than it looks, and it took him a while to get it right: the stutter-start beginning, the almost imperceptible push and one-footed glide that follow, the long whoosh home with the second foot dragging behind. The Heely has erased the Razor scooter, the child mover of five years ago (which can now be had, I've noticed, for thirty dollars, on sale at Modell's).

The more specific appeal, I think, lies in the secretive nature of the wheels; a normal kid becomes a super-kid, rolling down Eighty-ninth Street like a motorcyclist. It is the revelation, as much as the glide, that stirs them. Luke went to visit the M's, where Emily was sitting shiva for her mother, and solemnly, beautifully glided down their long Riverside Drive hall to take her hand in sorrow.

Olivia tags along, desperate to catch up with her brother and his mates and their fads, the latest thing. She is too small, so far, for Heelys, which do not come in her size. On the evening we had a bunch of boys over for chili and a World Series game,
all
the boys had their Heelys on, and they went outside to go for a roll (having been forbidden by a scuff- and neighbor-conscious mother to do it inside). Olivia disappeared into Luke's room while the boys were away. We looked in later. She had, we saw, tried to Scotch-tape, and then to glue, two AA batteries to the soles of her sneakers, to create a makeshift homemade wheel. Heartbreaking ingenuity of the smaller nation!

We found Heelys in her size at last—but now Luke, of course, has moved on, indifferently, to the Next Cool Thing, which for the moment is not scooting, or flying, or gliding, but making things. He and the rest of the ten-year-old boys have discovered a new game. It is called Warhammer, and it involves neither screens nor even cards but actual miniature figures, some taken from
The Lord of the Rings,
which you painstakingly assemble and then even more painstakingly prime and paint, in order—eventually—to stage a battle. (“Warhammer” actually refers to an earlier game made by the same company, but is used as a generic term for the activity.)

The game itself, which, like all such games, never actually seems to happen—any more than Yu-Gi-Oh! games happened, or any more than Major League Baseball Showdown led to major-league showdowns—is another of those bafflingly complicated sword-and-sorcery book games. You present a particular situation from Tolkien—the confrontation at the Mines of Moria, the Uruk-hai outside Helm's Deep—with enough variation (this troll here, that Rider of Rohan moved there) to create a different outcome from the one in the books. You find out what the new outcome ought to be by consulting the telephone-book-thick manuals that go with the game, which give the precise appropriate result for each confrontation: Two trolls confronting six Riders of Rohan, armed with swords, in the presence of a Wizard, produces one lost troll and three wounded riders, and so on. As with his other games, the narrative can be transformed into an infinite number of possibilities. This time the Tower may not fall….

Of all the games he has obsessively played—or prepared to play—
it is the most baffling. The preparation is endless: Constructing the miniatures takes forever and must be done in a ventilated room, which means, in a New York apartment, the kitchen with the window wide open to the November wind. The priming takes another day, and then the painting is meticulously detailed and painstaking, including—according to the honor code of ten-year-old boys—intensely realized modeling and shading, down to splashes of bright red blood around the troll's horrible mouth. Luke has decided to specialize in Evil Armies, on the reasonable grounds that goodness is already popular among his friends; an army of Orcs and trolls and Ringwraiths will give him an edge. “I'm interested in good,” he said seriously to the equally serious vendor at the hobby store, which promotes the games as relentlessly as Bloomingdale 's promotes perfumes, “but I thought I'd sort of concentrate on evil first.”

The game combines, so far as I can see, the joys of being a Malaysian child laborer in a small-goods sweatshop with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping. But it is their addiction, and they spend hours and hours on it. Our fears that they would be swallowed up by the screens are passing. Fashion, replacing last year's enthusiasm with this year's passion, neutralizes the seduction of the screens by promoting a new and opposed seduction, a much more effective force than parental disapproval. Hemlines go up because hemlines were down before, and the children escape the screens not because they have been liberated by their parents but because they have become fatigued with their enslavement.