When John reached the exposed overlook of Freedom Place, the Hudson lobbed pillars of snow at him, possessed, it seemed, of an animal intelligence intent on driving him back where he’d come from. The long iron stairway down to the yard was ramped with snow, and he held fast to the frozen railing with his good hand, skiing the descent. At the bottom, a tin signal shed was peeling apart in the wind.
Once inside the YMCA, he shuddered off the snow and slipped between the thick curtains hung in the library vestibule. Up the mezzanine stairs, he held out three dollar bills, awaiting the flashlight beam from the cutout in the booth. Beam lit the bills. Sal’s hand emerged and took two. Nothing new tonight. John knew not to speak to Sal. He descended the stairs. He knew not to tombstone anyone, not to lean in and ask what was showing. Simple courtesies, house rules. The sacred observances.
He took some satisfaction from adherence to these shibboleths, the same satisfaction his father had once taken at restaurants where he was welcomed warmly, seated expediently, attended to with precision. One earned one’s place of value, his father believed, by understanding what was expected of him—not politesse or, worse, friendliness, but adherence to the standards that defined a gentleman. If a plate of food failed to satisfy Albert’s expectations, he sent it back; it would have been disrespectful to the chef, he explained to his son, to accept substandard fare. What were they, women, falling all over themselves out of fear some stranger might dislike them? How was anyone supposed to know how to act if they weren’t all playing by the same rules? This was the compact, broken at the risk of sacrificing civilization, a precious concept each man carried within him when he went forth into the world. Like explorers into the heart of Africa, said Albert.
Like Jameson? John said, seventeen at the time.
That’s a point of contention and you know it, Albert said.
I read the diaries, John said. What’s the point of contention?
That goddamn school, his father said around a load of pommes frites. Jameson, he said, sacrificed his own legacy when he purchased that girl’s life. And he did it so no man need ever again go through the trial of watching such a thing. Why else would he have made a visual record of the event? He was an observer. He never touched the girl! You can’t apply the standards of the modern age to that benighted era.
He bought her for six handkerchiefs and watched them carve her into pieces, John said. How much would you sell Fil and Tracy for?
How do you think her life would have turned out in a place where the tribal elder would sell her for six handkerchiefs? said Albert. Hm? Do you think this was a place where she would marry and raise children and spend her afternoons drinking iced tea in front of the television? She didn’t even put up a fight. She knew her fate. She might even have been exalted for it.
Like we can trust Jameson’s story, anyway, John said.
Albert put down his fork. Civilization is tectonic plates heaving against one another, he said. Glaciers carving valleys. Vast, collective movements. Individual lives are ground up and forgotten in an instant. These things unavoidably exceed the understanding of a teenager.
Not all teenagers, John said.
All teenagers, Albert said with a laugh. They were talking about the war now. It was a slow, murky river of disagreement from which flowed the tributary arguments that had come to define their relationship. Albert had forbidden John from enlisting though he agreed that there was no substitute for the lessons learned in war. It cooled a man’s impulses, made him less susceptible to the trifles that plagued weaker men, more perfectly oriented him to succeed in the world. If he survived. But what of those whose bodies survived but whose minds didn’t? Albert’s first apartment in New York, 1931, had been in the West Seventies, and if he craned his head out the window and looked west across the rail yard (the same rail yard where John sat at that very moment in 1978) he could see the squatters colony called Camp Thomas Paine. The camp had been populated by forgotten soldiers of the 1917 war. They kept the pathways swept clean and ran the camp with a semblance of military order, but it was unmistakably a place for the lunatic and socially unfit. There was the outcome as likely as death: survival in name alone. No, not for his son. John could locate his sense of purpose without the war. A fair trade in exchange for not having to risk getting his head blown off.
I’m a pacifist now, John said.
A wise indulgence, Albert said.
Better a pacifist than a coward, John said.
Wait until you have a family of your own. Then you’ll see what cowardice is, Albert said, forking steak into his mouth.
Albert Caldwell was not one to be caught in the tectonic meat grinder. He lived as though he’d created an extra dimension beyond time and space, one that enabled him to stand out from the dull grain of the city like a chess piece atop an empty board. Over time John recognized his father’s godliness as the true seat of their disagreement.
Fifteen years later, the father’s omniscience was as secure as ever. Whether John was buying apples or on an audition or in bed with a woman, his father was there, peering over his glasses, judging, praising, chastising, casting aspersions, opining on the quality of his son’s choices, from clothes to bus route to meal to mate. So present was the old man’s voice that John rarely had a thought that didn’t lead to an internal dialogue with his father.
John lit his pipe. He’d recognized the movie immediately. The French Connection. Has Hackman ever not worn a raincoat? Does he have some kind of contractual thing with London Fog? It’s a short man’s solution, of course, a way to elongate the torso, but in Hackman’s case it just looks like he’s a perv. No, wait. This isn’t The French Connection. It’s The Conversation. Oh hell. The only thing good about it is the first scene. The whole film’s a gimmick. A theory with a movie built around it. A movie made to convince everyone that the director is an artist, that’s what it is. A showpiece. There’s no story, and the whole premise is based on a misunderstanding. A cheap, stupid idea. John kept flexing his hand to irritate the skin over the knuckles, each one a fat baked ham about to split open.
He’d moved into a sublet after she left. Out of a misguided sense of hope that she’d return, he’d held on to the lease at their apartment, though he couldn’t bear to stay there anymore, not after what had happened. The sublet was a studio so claustrophobic that it might have been the cabin of a sailboat with a single hazy porthole at the bow. It was at the top of a set of comically narrow and crooked stairs, a dark, snaking flight of risers that could have been carved into sandstone in some prehistoric cliff dwelling. Climbing them predisposed him to the queasiness that overtook him when he was inside.
Even now it made him sick, a tapping at the back of his throat, when he pictured it, the crooked plywood cabinets, the daybed piled with deflated pillows of various sizes, the spindle-legged desk the color of eggnog, the single wobbly dining chair with a ripped wicker seat, the stuffed chintz chair with greasy armrests. The fireplace had been jammed full of cardboard boxes of clothes, not his. The gap between daybed and chintz chair was just wide enough to allow passage to the filthy window, through which it was sometimes possible to assemble an approximate sense of the weather. Candlesticks encrusted with dusty wax were fused to the air conditioner casing. The kitchen was four squares of linoleum, an oven that whanged into the refrigerator when he opened it. Inside were shoes, not his. The bathroom was wedged in behind the kitchen. Heavy porcelain fixtures, H&C, a standing waste, crumbling grout and crooked tiles and a tub streaked ochre. The little casement window operated by a rusty crank. It was in the ancient ruin of a sink that he threw up every morning, exhausted, his body a sack of wet bones he willed into a standing position long enough for him to complete the expulsive ritual. Then he went back to bed and lay there for another hour of sweaty recriminations. He saw her everywhere, and he saw his boy everywhere. Through a crowd on Columbus, getting on a bus, the two of them holding hands.