Pete Hamill - Forever

The glorious high-ceilinged room now smells of perfume, cologne, and money. They all move with practiced ease, shaking hands, embracing, the men smiling, the women offering cheeks to be kissed. Most of them are indifferent to the show-business celebrities among them. They won’t cross the room to meet Madonna. They won’t tell Steve Martin they admire his work. After all, a few of them own the companies that employ the performers. If the mayor says hello and remembers a name, they will chat with him. If he utters a mere hello, they will nod in a restrained way. He is now a lame duck, forced to leave office at the end of the year because of a law on term limits that he supported. His marriage is a public mess. His popularity ratings are dropping like a stone. He is on his way out, to be rewarded with the customary farewell present of all reasonably well known politicians: a Book Deal. The mayor is important but not that important.

The older guests know this event is just another New York ritual. The celebrities are there to draw the media, which in turn will draw paying customers to the museum. But most of them have contempt for the media too. Cormac has heard that contempt expressed for more than a century. In their view, the reporters and photographers know nothing about how things really work in New York. Fame isn’t the goal; power is. And power is forged over Armagnac and cigars. If any of these men employ public relations counsel, the flacks’ primary task is to keep names out of the newspapers.

Cormac sees some people he knows casually but edges away from them, the habit of a long life. Gazing with lust at the mayor, the governor, and Warren is a once-famous sixties hippie, friend of Jerry and Abbie and the Democratic Republic of the Lower East Side. Cormac used to see him at love-ins and beins and fund-raisers for the Weather Underground. Now his face is clean-shaven and pasty and he’s considered a genius at the deals that have driven the NASDAQ over the moon. “Concept,” he told Charlie Rose one night on channel 13. “Concept is everything.” Cormac thought at the time: Okay, give me five thousand dollars’ worth of symbolic logic. The man would almost certainly have answered, “Is that a derivative?” That was two years ago. On this night, as tech stocks keep tanking, the exhippie’s face looks ashen. Cormac wonders if he knows the dotcommer on the second floor at Duane Street, the fast-talking young man who this morning gave a month’s notice, due, he said, to the decline in the market. Cormac has seen the doomed, ashen look of the ex-hippie before, in 1893, in 1929. One morning, as the bad news becomes a flood, the blessed genius of money starts looking at the faces of strangers as if his brain has turned into an abacus. How much can you invest? How much can you loan me? How can you keep me from suicide?

Over on the side, looking like an enormous soft rock in his tuxedo, is a Cuban exile who burned with a mad fanaticism in the early 1960s. He took CIA money until 1971 and used it to fight Fidel Castro by buying lots in Bergen County while helping clumsy agents from Cali and Medellín peddle the marvelous white-powder exports of Colombia. Now he owns banks in New Jersey, Dade County, and Puerto Rico; controls a Spanish-language television network; has developed more than seven hundred acres along the Hudson below the Palisades; and recently turned down the American ambassadorship to Spain. Cormac has read in Art News that he owns four Frida Kahlos, six Wilfredo Lams, three Picassos, and sixteen Boteros. Two directors of the museum hover near him as if expecting his collection to come to them in a massive bequest in the event of a massive coronary. The Cuban’s large gorged face pulses so vividly that the process could begin at any moment.

Some guests have planted their feet and refuse to move, waiting to be approached by potential partners, political fund-raisers, or aspiring acolytes now available after the dot-com collapse. Others work the room in a restrained way, trying to avoid the unforgivable New York sin of vulgarity, clearly envious of the faded Wasps who have been trained for ten generations to avoid sweating, belching, and farting. Some wear expensive rugs. Some tamp with handkerchiefs at sweaty upper lips. Others perform affection toward their wives, touching their hands as if petting cats. Cormac has lost sight of Healey but assumes he’s all right, gleefully impaling Legs Brookner on a lance in the medieval armor room.

The sound of the event grows louder, amplified by more marble and stone, nouns and verbs caroming off the walls, the stony rumble of blunt consonants punctuated by trills of female laughter. Searching for the Warrens, Cormac sees a few middle-aged men, recent transplants from Kabul or Karachi, who have the feral eyes of those distant ancestors who perched with rifles in mountain passes, awaiting human prey. There are a number of black couples, looking delighted to be here, and a larger number of Asians than is usual at such affairs. The diplomats are present too, invited from the consulates and the United Nations, a few up from Washington for the evening, several of them alone, others clutching wives twenty years their juniors, acquired on some distant posting: a Norwegian with a Mexican wife, a Mexican with a French wife, a Frenchman with an Israeli wife, and none with American wives. Their eyes shift, dart, stare, drift, trying to read the room and its crowd; they look at everything but the art.

Coolest of all are the people of semi-old money, those hard, intelligent men who shoved the old-moneyed Wasps out of real estate and banks and brokerage houses. These are children of the old immigrants, the Jews and Irish and Italians, men shaped by the Depression and the infantry, veterans of the Hürtgen Forest or Anzio or Iwo Jima, finally freed from the receding European past of their parents by combat and the G.I. Bill. They spent twenty years outworking, outthinking the Old Money, vowing in some private way that nobody in their family line would ever be poor again. Cormac likes them very much. They have gone through life without kissing a single ass. They are old now, tennis fit and golf tan, discreet and restrained, and tougher than steel. Their sons and grandsons try playing tough. They shout at waiters. They rail at employees. They sneer at politicians. They curse the business journalists. But (Cormac thinks) all of the children combined are not as tough as one of these men who came home in 1946 with bupkis in their pockets and changed New York forever.

Cormac can’t see Warren, or the mayor or the governor. They must be chatting in a private room. He separates himself from the crowd and drifts into the galleries to look at the remnants of the world where he once lived. There are only six or seven people walking quietly in the first room, glancing at an old print here, a varnished portrait of some stern Protestant there, a crude map. They bow to squint at the explanatory captions. An African-American couple, perfectly groomed, living well-defended lives, gaze together at one lithograph that includes black street musicians and white revelers. Cormac hopes they know the true history. His hope is wan. Not many people know anything about their own past, he thinks, and New Yorkers are most amnesiac of all.

He passes a portrait of De Witt Clinton, remembering his delusions of Roman grandeur, his arrogance and gift for respectable larceny, and he nods in salute. Clinton was, when all was carved upon his tomb, still the man who rammed through the Erie Canal and changed New York from a village to a metropolis. If I had time, Cormac thinks, I would write a book about the man and how his immense ambition led to Fernando Wood and then to Bill Tweed and established forever the long, unbreakable tradition of our corruption.

Another painting shows a group of nine men in respectable clothes, painted tightly and painfully, every detail, every object displayed as proof of successful human existence. They are in an anteroom somewhere, with high ceilings and French furniture, presenting to the viewer a framed and lifeless painting of the Hudson River Valley. Beside Cormac now, a man with the long white hair of an aged bohemian removes his glasses to examine the cramped details and says, “I wonder what they’d have thought of Franz Kline?”