In a picture window branches encased in ice beckon him, like the gnarled fingers of old women. He steps into the frame and looks down to the avenue on which he was a boy, on which he did boyish things. The buildings across the park are lost in a crosshatched blur. Up and down this street, strings of Christmas lights flail like spastic jump ropes.
Through a cut in the skyline he can see a fragment of the East River. A light passes there, police boat, garbage barge, the luminescent ice floes running to the harbor, the water ferrying them a black and silent broth, strangely, he knows, now almost level with the road. Everything is flooded. Things north have melted. But that river has always given him a childish obsession, a thrilling fright, even more than the Hudson, which is four times as wide. The Hudson-five avenues behind him-is all relaxed grandeur with its Rip van Winkle history and its source supposedly that little mossy Lake Tear of the Clouds up in the Adirondacks. A tour of America, all of it-its sail boats and water-skiers and skim ice-sliding between Westchester's old-money mansions and New jersey's Palisades. The East River on the other hand is a moat, a razor-wire fence, all rawness and urban fuckup. Running heat, eddies of unnamed spew splitting off into competing currents, rivers within rivers, one with waves and whirlpools while the next is all smooth secrets, all of it accelerating through the Bronx, then Harlem, racing down here between mid-Manhattan and the fallow cranes and dumps of Long Island City and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the barred dry docks gaping eye-sockets staring unblinking at the sky. Nathan has seen them all up close. More than one client of his has turned up broken like a rag doll at the weedy bottom. The East River is his river; that river he will take, even if it kills him. The soul thrives on its sufferings. Keep the Hudson, its sailboats, its boatdocks.
A long, tympanic roll of thunder. The window pane trembles. In the sky, the clouds are climbing, feeding on themselves. A wind has kicked up, sending waves through the trees of Central Park below, the stripped heads boiling. Something in the jagged strength of the skyline, in the designed wildness of the park, seems to be shouting at him, a voice whose cry is familiar, some youthful passion, some point of pride, the desire to do, he thinks, what is right. The tasks materialize before him one after the other, Isabel, the Russian weasel, Rikers Island, his pills, his diagnosis, his sentence, Isabel-
He quickly turns from all of it, and, sitting back on the windowsill with his legs stretched before him, looks at the room and its gaudy furniture, at the darkened doorways leading right and left into still more familiar regions, and with fascination remembers that occasionally he once knew great happiness here. Happiness: yet it was, he knows, a life lying in wait for annual rituals to give meaning to the dead space between. So it was a sort of life, the roads out of it to this place here where he stands already overgrown. Childhood and what? What is that? And what, he wonders, looking around the shadows of the room, at the streetlight playing through the branches on the wall-of course knowing the answer all along-was that?
That one late autumn morning, the last day of his childhood, a clean line between before and after. He was eighteen, home for Thanksgiving from his first semester of college in already frozen Syracuse. His father had once again invited to the apartment the citizens of his own strange country, his specially cultivated blend of Treasury agents, cocaine merchants, soap opera stars, convicted rapists, gold shield detectives, a virtuoso soprano from the Met, a Colombian money launderer, a famous composer; and sprinkled throughout, a small legion of anonymous women in tight wool sheaths who might have been models, who might have been prostitutes, who were probably a little of both, coming and going without introduction. The presentations of names and occupations were carried out in code. "Pedro is in sales," "William is in protection," "Barbra sings," "Leonard writes"-not to conceal or to be cute, but as though to leave what you did at the door with your hat and coat in order for things to settle to a better level, to the spirit of the day. These meetings were an annual suspension of hostilities, during which Milton's guests stood crowded at the bar and picture windows in virtual cease-fire. Sharing paper plates sagging with bagels and nova and whitefish salad, talking about the Giants, kids, the weather, anything. Below, between them and the park, passed the Macy’s parade. The solemn marching bands, the human snowflakes, the sanitation department brigades, the goliath balloons, happy heroes and quacky demons inflated to the size of buildings. Milton's guests gazed downward, giddily talkative, as though relieved by their proximity not to the parade but to each other. Broadway's Little Orphan Annie and smalltime Harlem dealer, District Attorney and money launderer for a Chinese crime family. As if this, this day and this food and this glass-enclosed apartment, were real life and their occupations were the contrivance, things to engage them untiI they slept again, those long days and nights until this meeting same time next year. Liquor flowed and the hills of food slowly leveled off, then flattened. The air was alive with sexual tension, the sense of abandon that comes with twiddling the forbidden fruit, punctuated by the rhythms of the passing drum corps below. It was the middle of the day, late morning even, crisp and blustery, but inside this sprawl it was midnight in a moonlit garden in springtime. People overate and drank too much.
Nathan was standing at the window of his parents' bedroom, which had a view downtown, fielding questions about college. Directly behind him, alone in the corner, stood the city's latest hero, champion of law and order, a thin, stooped, bookish man with an unruly beard, a narrow, meatless head, sunken temples, narrow beakish nose. He had the vacant, preoccupied look of a discouraged Jesus. He spoke to no one; he looked on the verge of speaking to himself. The month before, he had killed an aggressive subway beggar with a penknife. The tabloids had dubbed him the Philosopher King of New York, model of decisiveness and integrity and moral action. And Milton Stein had stepped forward as Christ's champion and spokesman, his John the Baptist, a model of generosity himself, having offered his legal and publicrelations services free of charge. Standing at the window in his ragged clothes, the parade passing below him, the man spoke to no one. The heaping plate of food had been foisted upon him, and he did not touch it. He looked about the room disapprovingly, more angry, still more discouraged. The experiment-his, presumably-had gone awry. He was a lunatic and everyone knew it, but he had taken on the role of an expensive and exotic pet.
And Nathan was beautiful. His adolescent features had come into focus. He had grown tall and trim, and the frame made by his cleft chin and high forehead converged nicely at the tip of his Grecian nose. He had watery, feminine eyes deep with character that outran his own. His stature as the best-looking man in whatever room was an obligation. And here he stood, before a woman as old as his mother, who, holding him by the elbow, cheerfully drank everyone at the party under the table. Nathan could have 'd nothing, it would not have mattered. The woman referred to her Kandinskys, her Picassos, to her schedule-her husband's evenings away at poker, her maid's days off-and the silence and loneliness of a Park Avenue triplex. And all those ridiculous paintings staring down at you, accusing you, so why not-the old lyric-give them something to accuse you of Nathan's father was simply divine. Now she had to know, like father like son?