Pete Hamill - Forever

“That was part of it,” says Ridley. “I agree. The illusion was crucial to the thing. But Clinton’s dick didn’t help.”

“Yeah, Frank, but this dickhead in the White House isn’t helping either.”

On the edge of the terrace, flicking ashes into a planter, a former ambassador to Prague is talking to a television reader named Brownlee. Cormac reaches for his pack of cigarettes, but he has none on his person. He knows that if he borrows only one he’ll be smoking again at midnight. A lean, tanned woman named Peggy Ashley, the operator of a Soho gallery, her beige dress accentuating her deep early-season Saint Martin tan, listens to the talking men, her brow furrowing in concentration, while behind her back a film director named Johnson chats with a black banker and a pitching coach for the Yankees. They are people who resemble the subject matter of a newspaper. Emblems of the new century: eclectic and democratic, delegates from the meritocracy.

All remain true to certain New York traditions, which Cormac first saw in the Brownstone Republic in the 1840s. That tradition still insists, among many other things, that it’s bad form at social gatherings to ask a stranger what he or she does for a living. As he’s introduced, Cormac is not asked what he does. Hangover from the 1840s, when no rich New Yorker under fifty had ever done anything at all. In those refined precincts, the children of the rich were trained to be useless. The second wave, after the Civil War, avoided all queries because each of them was a secret gangster. Now they all let you know what they do, to avoid being asked. Cormac notices that they show their identity cards now with hints, angular references, declarations of hard-earned knowledge. Don’t ask, I’ll tell. The blond wife of the pitching coach, with the sun-crinkled, glowing face of a retired airline stewardess, doesn’t know the rules. She asks Cormac what he does. He smiles (wanting to protect her too) and tells her he’s a kind of historian.

“How wonderful,” she says. “Of what?”

“New York City.”

“Cool,” she says. “I must tell Mike. He loves history, ’specially the Civil War and World War Two. He has every book Stephen Ambrose ever wrote. And he must have fifty books at home about the Civil War. He talks about Grant and Lee like he pitched against them….”

The sky is mauve now. When she mentions the Civil War, he sees Bill Tweed shouting for calm. He is in bed in Tweed’s mansion, his thigh taped, his head in bandages, and Tweed says, “What sword?” He mumbles to the former stewardess about the Civil War in New York, and the Irish Legion marching bravely off to die, and General Meagher with his mad courage, and the way the town boomed, selling uniforms and blankets. And all the cripples later. She smiles in a fixed way. She wants Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Not this bore, with his dark visions. She turns in relief to a new tray of drinks.

Proper nouns ricochet around the terrace: Rudy and Donna, Dubya and Clinton, Piazza and Clemens, Gates and Rupert. The verbs don’t matter. What matters is to be current, to speak intimately about public figures. Cormac drifts to the edge of the balcony. The former ambassador to Prague and Peggy from the Soho gallery are discussing Kokoschka. Cormac could mention that he talked one long afternoon in 1909 with Gustav Mahler on a park bench across from the Majestic. The composer loved the sound of Klaxons and bicycle bells, and mumbled about his goddamned wife, Alma. Here, among the guests of the Warrens, Cormac chooses the silence of a lifetime and says nothing. After all, how could he have known Mahler when he looks as if he were born around the time of the Kennedy assassination? All these decades later, he looks about forty.

The Metropolitan is still brightly lit, its roof washed coppery green, and lights mark the paths cut into the blackness of the park. Away off to the right, on the northern rim, is the rosy sky over Harlem. Cormac flashes again on Stanford White: his ruddy face and twinkling eyes as he describes his plans for the Harlem block later called Striver’s Row. Our Bernini, creating the vision of New York the way Bernini invented modern Rome. All of that in a forgotten year before Harlem turned black; before the great exodus from Thirtieth Street and Hudson began (down there where the helicopters land); before Minton’s and Monroe’s Uptown and Frank’s restaurant and Duke Ellington. And then, absurdly, Cormac again sees Washington in his bloodstained shirt, sword in hand, standing straight up, nostrils flaring, shouting to his men to fight these bastards, fight them and they’ll run …. And right up there, Bantu died. And Carlito and Big Michael, Silver and Aaron, and from here it all looks so small and bare when it was once huge and dense with woods.

Then Warren is beside him. He hears Vivaldi playing from the inside room.

“Every time I see this view,” Warren says, “at this time of the evening, I feel like I’ve died and gone to Heaven.”

“It sure is beautiful.”

“So what kind of history are you writing?”

“It’ll be about New York. I guess I’ll write it to find out what it is.”

“I wish we had some history in the paper.”

“Good idea. Although someone once said that journalism was history in a hurry. So, in a way, the paper is filled with history.”

“Yes, but there’s no goddamned context in any of our papers. They write as if everything is happening for the first time.”

“Even if it’s the first time that week,” Cormac says.

“Or that morning.”

He laughs, sips his scotch, and lays a foot on the rim of a flowerpot.

“Hey, what about you taking a crack at doing—I don’t know—a history column for us? You know, giving us some of that goddamned context . If the mayor and his wife have a battle over Gracie Mansion, tell us who Gracie was and where he got his money and how the mansion got there and how the mayor of New York came to live in it. That kind of thing.”

“Good idea,” Cormac hears himself saying. “But I’d better finish what I’m doing first.”

“I mean, who the hell was Major Deegan, anyway?” He smiles broadly. “One of Rupert’s Aussies once looked up from his desk down on South Street, gazed at the FDR Drive, and asked, Who is this F.D.R.? ” He switches to a British accent, very plummy. “Who is this F.D.R., anyway?”

Cormac laughs, encouraging Warren.

“Well, at least I know who Washington Heights is named for, even if I don’t really know where the hell it is.”

“It’s right up there,” Cormac says, pointing up toward the George Washington Bridge. He wants to say, You have an ancestor who lived there once, his bones long scoured by the river and the sea. Instead, he says, “Irving Place, in Gramercy Park, is named for Washington Irving, our first great New York writer, and Irving was named for George Washington too. Everything’s connected.”

“God damn it,” Warren says with enthusiasm, “we could have a weekly feature just on the names of streets! Explain who Irving was, and Beekman, and Bayard, and Mott, all those streets downtown… Of course, we’d get some letters asking who the first Mister Broadway was.”

“Joe Namath, I think.”

“Exactly,” he says. “A great figure of the distant 1960s…”

The former ambassador to Prague puts a cigarette out in a flowerpot, thus licensing the owner of the Soho art gallery to do the same. Brownlee the anchorman doesn’t smoke. Anchormen never smoke. Patrick arrives on the terrace.

“Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served….”

He bows, sweeps an arm toward the interior, and Elizabeth leads the way. Cormac now realizes that the Sargent must be a portrait of a descendant of Bridget Riley. Taller, grander, more at ease. But the same color of hair. Same neck. Same audacious defiance in the eyes. A daughter of Tony Warren, perhaps. He had three children, according to the charts in the Archive, at least one of them a son, before he came to New York to die in the American Revolution. To die, that is, thinks Cormac, at my hands. Had to be late Sargent, just before he left London, sick of painting paugh-traits, as he said, around the time he began subverting his subjects instead of serving them. Painting them as they were instead of as they wished to be. Like Velázquez. Cormac thinks: It’s her, all right. Some kind of Riley. A granddaughter, perhaps. Or great-granddaughter. Of course.