Cormac noticed as the years passed that New Yorkers shared a sense that whatever had changed, they could do nothing about it. A kind of optimistic fatalism. Reformers arrived with golden promises and left office in disgrace and impotence. Bill Tweed’s line was a kind of municipal motto: “What are you gonna do about it?” Some of the big changes were welcome. He never met anyone who yearned for the city before the arrival of the Croton water, the city that smelled of shit. Nor did anyone protest the triumph of electricity, except those Uptown women who longed for the softening glow of gaslight. If the past had been reasonably happy, as New York had been before the collapse of 1893, the new present was drowned in permanent mourning, a lot of it dishonest, driven by a longing to return to the lost past. Cormac had gone through all that too many times. He had seen reputations blaze and then end up as burnt offerings. Heroes too often turned into scoundrels. Banks and corporations and newspapers ruled the city, and ended up as a handful of dust. Even language had term limits. In long separate eras, Cormac heard people use words like “fiddlesticks” or “groovy,” and then one morning, as if a secret referendum had been passed, the words vanished. Nobody, of course, ever ran a referendum against the word “bullshit.” That was a word and an emotion as permanent as the rivers. But the past had tremendous power here for the very simple reason that it was an American city that actually had a past. In his strange way (Cormac thinks now, swallowing cold Evian water) he is its custodian, he had been there, had smelled it, touched it, argued in it, fucked in it, killed in it; but he knew the treacheries and dangers of nostalgia. He was, after all, Irish. And he had too much past in his life. His defense against it was will. But even then, as in Madison Square only an hour earlier, will was never enough.
“To hell with the past,” he says out loud in the darkened Studio, gazing at the misty towers before him. And thinks of Simone Signoret, great blowsy actress whose memoir was called Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be.
And yet… And yet, there were moments, here in the loft, when he longed to see the lost city of chimney pots and slate roofs, all blue after rain. He wanted to stand in woods where wolves still howled. He wanted to sit in the Polo Grounds and look at Willie Mays. At such moments, here, or in Madison Square, or at other odd moments in banal places, it was as if the bars of the mental cage had turned elastic and the past had forced its way out. Anything could set it off: the fragment of a tune, a glimpse of sun on cobblestones in a forgotten street, an accidental encounter with a building where he once knew a woman and loved her, even if she did not love him back.
He watches a flock of tiny birds emerge from between the Twin Towers to fly past the upper stories of the Woolworth Building, heading east. They know where they’re going. He envies them for their freedom and their certainty, and lights a cigarette and sits there smoking in the dark.
86.
Cormac picks up his mail from the box he keeps in the post office on Vesey and Church. Big, ugly, solid stone post office, carrying the chiseled names of Robert Moses, master builder, and Fiorello La Guardia, master mayor, and the year of its unveiling, 1935. He riffles a sheaf of mail from his box. Bills. Time Warner cable service. Con Ed. The telephone company. A tax notice. And a plump brown envelope from the Argosy Clipping Service. He slips them into a cloth shopping bag, steps outside, smokes a cigarette. A Jamaican man is selling fruit from a cart. Messengers pedal by on bicycles. Men and women enter and leave the Jean Louis hair salon across Church Street. The sky is bright and traffic moves slowly from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, heading north. Bells toll in St. Peter’s on Barclay Street and are answered by the bells of St. Paul’s. Over everything, melding the sounds, he hears the murmuring, ceaseless drone of the city.
He crosses the street into the Borders bookstore, glances at the new books in paperback and the displays of bestsellers. On each visit, he hopes to be surprised. He seldom is. Today is Saint Patrick’s Day and so one table is stacked with Books of Irish Interest: Joyce, the McCourts, Seamus Heaney, Yeats. Along with cookbooks and guidebooks and songbooks. He moves past them, browsing, touching, his hands caressing covers, allowing images to flash into him: Mayan temples, Brazilian prostitutes, bombed-out London. He chooses a new translation of Dostoyevsky’s Demons, which he has always known as The Possessed. Paperback. Seventeen dollars. A week’s pay in the year the post office opened. Three times what he earned in a week in 1840. When he first read the novel a century earlier, he was reminded of his friends in the Fenian Brotherhood and its endless, sometimes hilarious debates about the use of terror against the English enemy. What if someone innocent dies? What do you mean by innocent? And suppose the fella is not in a state of grace? Will you follow him to Hell? One of their offices was on Cortlandt Street, up above a man who made barrels, the building plowed away in 1969 to make way for the Trade Center. He wrote for their newspaper. Or one of their newspapers. And wondered which of them worked for the police. There were good people among the Fenians, along with a few lunatic true believers. Thinking about them years later, he realized that certain Irish exiles were pure Dostoyevsky.
He pays for the book, adds it to his shopping bag, then goes down the escalator from Borders and out into the endless concourse until he finds an ATM. He has no personal credit cards, but he does have a bank card in the name of ABCDuane Real Estate and he takes two hundred dollars from the company checking account. People in personalized green bunting are hurrying in every direction, buying sandwiches and sushi, cold drinks and coffee. Green ties, green shirts, green slacks, green dresses. Buttons that say, “Kiss me, I’m Irish.” Many move down the escalators to the PATH trains, and Cormac wonders why anybody is going to New Jersey at one-thirty in the afternoon. Then thinks: Who am I to judge? I’ve never been there myself.
He heads south for the exit on Liberty Street, avoiding a hundred possible collisions in the frantic rush of the mall. One window of Sam Goody’s is filled with Irish music. The Chieftains. The Clancy Brothers. Luke Kelly. De Danann. U2. He goes in, wondering for a moment whether it’s time to buy a DVD player, to add one more piece of technology to his life. Come to my house, Delfina, and I’ll explain the journey from a blacksmith’s forge to the DVD version of The French Connection. Thinking: My life is absurd.
He buys a CD of the old music. Celtic music older than Saint Patrick. Along with Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The Berlin Philharmonic conducted by von Karajan. All about the Otherworld and the dark powers of the Queen of Night.
In the Liberty Street vestibule, four homeless men huddle near the doors. Filthy. Eyeless in Gaza. In the 1890s, there were Bed Lines, for men ruined by the collapse, and when the post office was built, there were breadlines. Now there are homeless shelters where nobody wants to sleep. These four men must sleep here, where Cortlandt Street used to be. One of them, his white beard sprouting from dark brown skin, wears a plastic shamrock.
He has lunch in a sushi place, his eyes wandering from laminated views of Kyoto to the swift hands of the chef. He sits at the bar, those hands in front of him, clipping, trimming, carving. Like a great swordsman.