Pete Hamill - Forever

Cormac smiles and says, “They might have loved him.” Which they surely would have, had they lived to know that sweet man with his plain worker’s face. The old bohemian turns to Cormac and says, “Yeah, or they might have burned him in City Hall Park.”

They both laugh, and Cormac feels an exuberant conversation about to begin. But then he sees a piece of sculpture against the wall to the right and he is drawn away.

Cormac’s heart thrums as he stands before a marble version of Venus, with both arms mercifully intact, executed in the style of Canova. He knew the sculptor. He knew the model. Her name was Catherine Underwood, and for four years in the mid-1860s, she was Cormac’s wife. His only wife. Catherine something Underwood. He met her at Niblo’s Opera House, three weeks after she arrived with her widowed mother from England, penniless, hopeful, and beautiful. Her mother died of consumption within a year, but by then Cormac and Catherine had married. The mother, of course, disapproved. She wanted a rich husband. Catherine wanted love. Catherine won. Cormac was driven to marriage by loneliness, by the need for a warm human dailiness, by his desire for the permanent presence of her astonishing beauty.

He gazes at her marble face now, in the year 2001, and remembers how they lived in a small, comfortable flat in Horatio Street, financed by his work at newspapers and the sale of an occasional still life or cityscape. She uttered banalities in an exquisite accent. Her manners were excellent too, and she dined with a languid grace, and posed for his brush with a languid grace, and made love in the same vaguely beautiful, languid way. He was bored with her after nine months, and in his solitude often longed for the silky pleasures of the Countess de Chardon. He was certain that she was bored too.

She was. Cormac doesn’t need to bend close to squint at the caption. The sculpture was done by his closest friend, a dashing and drunken genius named Trevor Morris Parker, who stole Catherine from Cormac and took her and his chisels off to Rome. The date on the sculpture is wrong. The piece must have been done in 1868. After she left him. The cold polished marble can’t convey the color of her flesh, of course, the silkiness of her pubic hair, the soapy smell of her neck. But in his Roman studio, Trevor got the firm plumpness of her breasts right and the contours of her belly and buttocks. He got the languor of the pose. He got the emptiness of the eyes.

Cormac walks around the statue twice, the glistening stone as cold as death, remembering her beside him, so warm on winter nights, and remembering the evening when he discovered she was gone: the card propped against the candle in the kitchen, the keys beside it, the armoire emptied of her clothes. And how he picked up the card, his eyes welling with tears, and read the banal words, about how she was sorry to hurt him, but time healed all wounds, and how then he began to laugh. That night he was filled with an enormous surge of freedom. By morning, he was thinking of her as a character in an opera that somebody else had written.

He turns away from Catherine Underwood, his lost languid Venus, and then another picture catches his eye. He crosses the gallery to look at a carefully painted view of dark buildings and a sky lit up by furious orange flames. Engulfed by the flames are chimneys, useless ladders, roofless walls. Crowds are assembled to watch, herded by leather-capped constables on horseback, while firemen work in impotent anger with their frozen, waterless pumps. In the lower corner of the picture, two men stand safely on a stone balcony, one of them wearing a swirling cape. The caption explains that this is the Great Fire of 1835 and the painter is Anonymous. Cormac knows better. It once hung on the wall of Bill Tweed’s suite in the Ludlow Street jail. The painter was Cormac Samuel O’Connor.

Then he senses an odor of perfume. A woman leans in beside him to read the caption.

Elizabeth Warren.

“I didn’t know that New York had a great fire too,” she says in a cool way. “London did, of course….”

“This was an amazing fire too,” Cormac says. “It destroyed more than seven hundred buildings, a third of the city.”

“Good God.”

She straightens up, her head rising on her long neck, and she looks at Cormac with those wide-spaced hazel eyes.

“Well, how did it start?”

“Arson.”

“You’re kidding me.”

She has one of those Atlantic accents that are acquired by Brits who spend years in America and Americans who spend parts of their youth in Britain. Precise use of words. Hard consonants. Cormac flashes, absurdly, on Pat Moynihan and George Plimpton. Away off, someone begins playing a piano. “Dancing in the Dark”…

“It was a form of urban renewal,” Cormac says. “The old Dutch houses were too small for profit, and someone—almost certainly a landlord—torched one of them, and then another. Just to get rid of them and rebuild with larger buildings and higher rents.” I have you, love, and we can face the music, togeth-er …. “Then a huge wind came off the harbor, and the thing went out of control. There was no water either. See, in here? It was bitter cold, just before Christmas, and even the river was frozen. Down there? Those are firemen whose pumps are useless.”

“Are you a historian?”

“Well, I’ve read a lot of the city’s history.”

He can’t tell her that he is in the painting too, there in the distance, tiny and furtive in the purple shadows under the orange flames. Making notes and sketches. The piano pushes through the murmur of marbleized voices. The sound of the old tunes pushes in from the other room. “Looking for the light of a new love…”

“New York does have a history, doesn’t it?” she says. “So many American cities have a past but no history.”

Cormac looks at her and smiles.

“That’s true,” he says.

And feels that a last act is beginning.

In the morning, there are five messages on the answering machine. Healey cancels breakfast, promising an explanation later in the day, then explaining he’s got a live one on the line from Hollywood. Delfina says she’s just checking in. The other calls are from the mysterious Area Code 800, the vast hidden limbo of American life, selling services for high-speed telephone lines or newspaper delivery or real estate. Cormac calls Delfina and gets her machine. He leaves a message. In the shower, he feels a jittery nervousness, as if various unseen filaments were trying to form a web.

After the shower, dried, shaved, dressed, he sees the message light blinking again on the answering machine. He plays it.

“Hello, this is Elizabeth Warren. We met last night at the museum. My husband and I are having a dinner party on Friday night and I’d love it if you could come. We could talk more about great fires and such. I think you’d find it amusing….”

He calls back and gets a social secretary with a French accent and writes down the details. He thinks: The rivers are converging.

In the foreground is Delfina, but now, back near the tree line in an imagined landscape, Elizabeth Warren makes her appearance too. In small ways, Delfina is revealing herself, and so is Cormac. They speak by telephone. They send e-mails. On one of his walks, he throws away his cigarettes, and when he tells her this, she says perhaps she’ll do the same. “The smell is disgusting,” she says. “I can’t stand it sometimes…. And I can’t stand going all the way down to the street to smoke with the other addicts. It’s a long way to go in my building….”

He takes her to lunch at Windows on the World, high above the city, and she’s excited by the views, which are even more spectacular than the views from her office, Cormac, in a smaller way, is also impressed. He can see the Bronx and much of New Jersey and the slopes of Brooklyn. Pieces of the undiscovered country. He can see the greensward of Central Park and the roof of the Metropolitan Museum and the mesas of apartment houses, one of which contains the Warrens. He can look down at the pinnacle of the Woolworth Building, where he worked humping steel in 1912 and watched Cass Gilbert gazing from Broadway in troubled acceptance of his own masterpiece. He can see human beings down on Church Street, the size of commas. In Delfina’s presence, he fights off the past: It is gone, finished, unrecoverable (he tells himself), and yet might indeed be parked in what was called a century earlier the Fourth Dimension. Another phrase now lost.