As the bus disgorged this revolting creature, I caught sight of another figure waiting for him on the side of the road, illumined faintly by the lights of autos that had stopped behind the bus, evidently unable to get around because of traffic in the other lane. She was as tattered and loathsome of aspect as he, with a face that, like his, was a death-mask now burned dreadfully into my memory. They embraced loathsomely as the bus pulled away, and they were grinning cadaverously at each other as the night swallowed them up again. Would to heaven that I had taken my gaze from them a moment earlier—in the dark I might not have noticed. Oh God, I might not have noticed!
I might not have noticed that the woman, in all her charnel ghastliness, was obviously eight or nine months pregnant.
THE PEWTER RING
BY PETER CANNON
HIS COMING TO NEW YORK HAD PROBABLY BEEN THE SMARTEST move of his life—though he had not begun to think so until, after months of monotonous job-hunting, he had settled on some stimulating and marginally profitable publishing work. Scion of an ancient French Huguenot family, Edmund Aymar had left suburban Westchester for the metropolis of his forefathers, who had been among the island’s earlierand more prominent citizens. There he had anticipated making his mark on the world—not as a lawyer or banker or stockbroker, professions customarily pursued by Aymar men—but in one or another of the more Bohemian, less financially remunerative trades.
With the support of inherited money, wisely husbanded by the intervening generations since his great-great-grandfather, John Marshall Aymar, laid the foundation of the modern family fortune before the Civil War, Edmund Aymar was used to enjoying all the privileges of his class. (Educated privately, he had always been a dreamer who felt himself apart from the conventional classroom routine. Given his prep school record as an underachiever, he had failed like many of his background in these latter days to gain entrance to the Ivy League college traditionally attended by his people.) His independent income covered his basic needs: a one-bedroom, ground-floor rear West Side apartment; a wardrobe of Brooks Brothers clothes; and a freezer filled with Stouffer’s dinners. Freed from the anxieties faced by most young men embarking upon careers in the city, Aymar could indulge in cultivating his already richly refined aesthetic sensibilities.
An avid amateur student of architecture, Aymar delighted in strolling past the quaint brownstones that lined the side streets of his neighborhood, picking out such pleasing details as an elegant cornice here or an exquisite balustrade there. On occasion he ventured farther afield, exploring the curved lanes and irregular by-ways of Greenwich Village and other antique districts of the city. At first the imposing Manhattan skyline served only to oppress his spirit, but in time he came to relish the rugged beauty of those concrete and glass monoliths that soared, especially at night, like so many Arabian Nights arabesques to the starless haze above.
He took a keen interest in the history of New York, in particular in the activities of his ancestor, John Marshall Aymar, who had figured so eminently in the city’s business, political, and social life in the eighteen-forties and fifties. Spending much of his free time either at the New York Historical Society near him or else at the Museum of the City of New York (a brisk twenty-minute walk across Central Park), Aymar became increasingly fascinated with his great-great-grandfather the more he learned of him. The official accounts depicted the conscientious man of affairs, who had built a shipping empire, contributed generously to the Whig Party, and entertained lavishly at his Fifth Avenue mansion. Contemporary letters and diaries, however, gave hints of the inner man: a seeker after truth and beauty, sensitive and retiring, a poet, author of a slim volume of verse privately published in 1849. Portraits showed him to be slender, youthful, and fair, with the trace of an ethereal smile on delicate lips. (Oddly enough perhaps, Aymar looked nothing like his ancestor—but then everyone told him he strongly resembled his mother.) In no portrait did John Marshall Aymar betray the encroachment of age, for he had died in his forties of a queer, lingering disease that had baffled his physicians.
Immersed in his researches, Aymar learned as well of the past literary life of the city. He took particular satisfaction in knowing that in 1844 Edgar Allan Poe had lived in a farmhouse, where he had finished The Raven, at a site just two blocks away from him on Broadway. Old photographs showed a white wooden-framed home surrounded by shade trees on a hillside. By the end of the century the house had been razed, the trees cut, the hill leveled. Only a plaque affixed to the present-day Health Spa and Fitness Center reminds the passer-by that on this spot once dwelled America’s most illustrious author. Aymar was among those who petitioned the mayor to rename a stretch of West 84th Street in Poe’s honor; later he was one of those who wrote testy letters to the Times regarding the misspelling “Allen” for “Allan” on the street signs erected by the city.
During the first several years of his New York sojourn, Edmund Aymar took a quiet pride in residing in an almost forgotten, no longer fashionable neighborhood, inhabited at its core by a sizeable community of poor Hispanics. As the city as a whole recovered from a period of economic decline, however, prosperity like some insidious, viscous sea-creature began to spread its tentacles north from Lincoln Center along the broad, decayed avenues. In shockingly short time the mom-and-pop variety stores, the laundromats and shoe repairers, the ethnic bars and social clubs, and the plain, low-cost American eateries gave way to chic boutiques, trendy foreign restaurants, and slick singles joints catering to the BBQ crowd. Appalled, Aymar witnessed the pokey, two-story commercial buildings along Broadway succumb in a fever of real estate gluttony to hideous, high-rise apartment houses, whose tacky twin towers grotesquely aped the tasteful originals on Central Park West. Like a child who discovers too soon that instead of the stork leaving him under a cabbage leaf his parents had to engage in a gross physical act to bring about his existence, Aymar realized that the rapid, radical development of the city was not confined to some distant era in the history books, but was happening literally around the corner from him.
Disillusioned, Edmund Aymar retreated increasingly into those arcane studies that already had such a hold on his imagination. He withdrew to the billiards rooms and libraries of certain venerable clubs, where the old traditions were still esteemed among the genteel and bigoted members. His great-great-grandfather had helped to found the athletic club, where according to locker-room legend he had habitually escaped to avoid the demands and cares of business and family. The club library contained his volume of poetry, Damon and Pythias and Ganymede, tenuous verses celebrating the manly ideals of the classical world, which Aymar read and reread for inspiration.
A potent dreamer (in the usual sense of the word) from youth, Aymar often dreamed vividly of early New York: of bands of stoic Red Men stalking meager game over marsh and meadow; of comical Dutchmen with broad-bore muskets strutting between stepped-gabled houses and a wooden wall that would in time become Wall Street; of Negro slaves rioting amidst fire and smoke; of redcoated soldiers, more grimly determined than their Dutch predecessors, seizing illicit arms and being quartered in private homes; of sailors jostling one another on wharves stacked high with barrels and boxes before a forest of ships’ masts; of men parading in the street carrying torches and anti-draft placards; of a gloomy, long-bearded fellow inspecting a waterfront warehouse; of a slight, wispy-goateed gentleman supervising the construction of a gigantic pedestal on an island off the tip of Manhattan; and—most strikingly—of a blond, bland handsome figure with an enigmatic smile who seemed to be addressing him, teasing him with some maddening half-memory and the promise of titanic wonders just beyond the limit of ordinary human comprehension. This latter personage, he recognized with a thrill as soon as he woke up, was of course his own great-great-grandfather, John Marshall Aymar.