The newspapers told Cormac that on the day Willie Warren moved into the publisher’s office, he took calls of congratulation from the mayor, the governor, and the president of the United States. That day, he also hired Howard Rubenstein to handle his press relations, and his secretary referred all other calls to the Rubenstein office. The trade press cobbled together stories, using words and phrases like “quixotic” and “deep pockets” and “amateur,” while predicting that no matter what Warren did, the Light was doomed. The losses would be immense. The rich boy would eventually turn his attention to other toys. Prepare the obits now. In Cormac’s solitude, he agreed.
Everybody was wrong.
In the months that followed the purchase, Cormac’s old newspaperman’s heart quickened as he saw Warren make a series of superb moves. He hired an excellent editor and left him alone on all matters involving the news. He gave the editor a budget that allowed him to expand the tiny staff with a mixture of seasoned professionals and passionate youngsters. He hired Milton Glaser to give the paper a new look, and one Monday morning it became a broadsheet with the graphic energy of a tabloid. Bold and bright, without being loud. He started building a new color-printing plant in Brooklyn, which would get the newspaper around Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island, delivered to doorsteps. His trucks could enter Manhattan when incoming traffic was light and copies of the paper were soon stacked on the newsstands at Penn Station and Grand Central when commuters headed home. He hired away a few star columnists from the News and the Post to add some personality to the Light’s sober news pages, paying them twice the money they were getting at the papers they left behind. He tripled the space in the sports section and encouraged huge action shots from his photographers. He sent handwritten notes to reporters when they did solid stories, gave bonuses to those whose stories were picked up by television, made certain that notes were sent to staff members on their birthdays and wedding anniversaries or when death took place in a family. He advertised heavily in the subways and in the foreign-language press. The editorial pages, which he controlled, became a model of judiciousness, and the op-ed pages were intelligent and well-written without ever talking down to the readers. He added no fuel to any municipal fire. He endorsed Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani and even had nice things to say about Al Sharpton. For the first time in decades, Cormac began to see people reading the Light on the subways.
William Hancock Warren was also lucky. He bought the newspaper at almost the precise moment when the boom started. His own holdings boomed. But so did the city of New York. Crime was down. Money was flowing. People began going out again at night. New businesses opened every day of the week. Warren expanded his business pages and insisted on covering both the Internet and the media. The young dot-commers began reading the paper and then advertising in it. The Light became the newspaper of the boom. But his editors knew that they needed more than the brash kids to read their paper. Warren read a biography of Joseph Pulitzer and decided to follow the old man’s example by covering the huge immigration wave. The Light became the immigrants’ newspaper, defending them, telling stories of their progress, running a column about green cards and visas and the process of naturalization. The word got around. Those immigrants who were learning English began reading it, and more important, so did their children. Then, about two years ago, he made a move that drove a tormented ambiguity into Cormac’s heart.
He announced that the Light was moving into a building on Park Row. Across the street from City Hall. Up the block from J&R Music World. He could do it now, the Rubenstein office explained, because the computer had freed newspapers from the plants in which they were printed. You could write a story on a high floor in Park Row and it would be printed miles away in Brooklyn. The other newspapers were all produced that way. Now it was the turn of the Light. And the city room would be located on Park Row.
Cormac wanted to weep. Once upon a time, he had worked on thirteen different newspapers on Park Row. As a reporter, a rewrite man, a copy editor, a typesetter. He had watched Walt Whitman sleep on the floor of one of those papers and had shown young Sam Clemens how they set type in New York. After the Civil War, Cormac had seen Father Dongan organize the orphaned newsboys and force the publishers to buy them shoes and get them doctors (the largest donations came from Bill Tweed). He’d walked past Hearst and Pulitzer in the lobbies and drunk with Brisbane in the whorehouses of Chapel Street. In those days, Park Row wasn’t just a distinct neighborhood; it was a kind of civilization, peopled by gaudy men of rapacious ambitions and appetites, great talent, enormous weaknesses, and much fun. Too much fun to last. Cormac had seen the Park Row papers die or move away, until all of them were gone by 1931. And here came a man who said that the past was now the future.
In spite of himself, in spite of a terrible ancient vow, in spite of history and memory, part of him began to root for William Hancock Warren.
For eight years, he watched and compiled his files and secretly applauded Warren’s growing triumph. For those eight years, he gazed at dark-skinned women on his walks through the city and turned away from them. After so many years of too much time, he wanted more time now, to see where Warren’s project would go, to postpone fate, to wait until he found the true dark lady. The century was winding down. The Wall Street boom rolled on.
Then, on a sweaty day in August, he saw Delfina Cintron.
She calls after he returns from his walk. She is cool but not distant. They make a date for the theater. Next week. Under the marquee. Then she says good-bye, and he stands there, holding the cordless phone. I must move more quickly, he thinks. I must move closer to her, and soon, to find out if I can love her. I who have loved no woman for so many years. He gazes out toward Church Street, thinking: It’s much more difficult to love than to kill.
90.
At ten after eight in the morning, Cormac is in Mary’s Café on the corner of Chambers Street and Broadway. He’s gone past the cakes on baroque display, and the counters where lone men crunched well-done English muffins and read the New York Post, past the booths on the right with their view of rain-swept Chambers Street. He wishes he could bring Delfina here and try to explain who Miss Subways was, as seen in all the posters hung like historical artifacts upon the coffee shop walls. But he is here to meet Healey, his friend, his last friend, who knows all about Miss Subways (and even dated one for three marvelous weeks in 1959), and so he has picked a table as far back in the large rear room as he can go, pushed up against fake leather banquettes. The choice of Mary’s was not entirely up to Cormac. The waitresses here know Healey, and that makes things much easier. And this is Tuesday, the day when Cormac and Healey have their weekly breakfast and the waitresses are prepared for whatever comes their way.
Cormac is always happy here and not simply because Mary’s is a few blocks from where he lives. The corner of Broadway and Chambers has been part of his life from the beginning. Across the street to the right is the corner of the old Common, where the Africans and Irish were burned or hanged in 1741. To the left stands the building where he once worked as a clerk for Alexander T. Stewart. Forgotten now, but once one of the three richest men in America. And that building (now covered with rigging as part of a rehab) was Stewart’s masterpiece. The Marble Palace, it was called after it opened in 1848, and it was the first department store in New York. With that concept, and fixed prices (no bargaining, but no giving goods to your relatives for half price either), Stewart changed the city. He was a tough, reticent, decent man from Lisburn in Northern Ireland (he sent food and clothes and money to Ireland during the Famine). He started in his twenties, importing linen from the mills of the North, and then gambled everything on the Marble Palace. Everyone predicted disaster: It was on the wrong side of the street, with the Five Points at its back. A department store? In the era of specialized shops? When you visited a button shop for buttons and a lace shop for frills and a haberdasher for hats? The notion was too radical, too… common. But Stewart made it work. Cormac wonders what A. T. Stewart would have made of his friend Healey. He knows what Healey would have made of Bill Tweed, whose twelve-million-dollar courthouse is halfway down the block. He’d have asked the Boss for a list of the places where he wanted him to vote.