Pete Hamill - Forever

And so the talk goes back and forth, sometimes joined by all the guests, sometimes breaking down to knots of two or three. Globalization and the Middle East and Alaskan oil drilling and stem cell research. Or, in several ways, What do the Palestinians want? Elizabeth is cool and distracted, ushering in each new course with the tinkle of a golden bell, providing paragraph breaks for the chatter. She says little. She does not flirt. Not with Cormac. Not with anyone. Beyond reproach, they’d have said in the corseted gloom of Gramercy Park. He hears someone say, without irony, “Only the strong survive.” And turns his gaze on the Rubens drawing. A muscled man with a warrior’s shield, an imagining of a scene Rubens surely never saw. Cormac thinks: The truth is that the strong don’t always survive. Usually the weak survive and the cowardly and the mediocre. They gather their forces to destroy the strong, because the strong are at the core of their fear. They burned strong Africans at the stake and reduced others to tortured rubble. Cormac used to think of them as the League of Frightened White Men. Some of them are here at this table. Frightened of change. Frightened of the new. Frightened of losing secret powers, privileges, and control. Imagining apocalypse. The kind of people who destroyed Bill Tweed.

Criswell, the black banker, rises to offer a toast. “I’d like to salute our host and his lovely wife,” he says. “They have brought a measure of grace and glamour to our city. They have begun to make it more just, to use what they have to help the process of healing. I don’t want to embarrass them by reciting their accomplishments. Everyone at this table knows them.” Pause. An image of Tomora brushes through Cormac. “But all of us have benefited from their presence, and we thank them for their friendship.” He raises his glass. Max James shouts, “Hear! Hear!” All sip, including Cormac. Then all sit. Warren remains standing.

“If I have one more glass of wine, I’m likely to start believing such kind words, Mister Criswell,” he says. “But I do want to thank all of you for your presence, for your kindness to us these past few years, for your support in what we’re doing at the newspaper—and for what I hope shall be long and enduring friendships. I toast all of you.”

“Hear, hear,” shouts James. Cormac notices Patrick hovering in the adjoining room, hands at his side. In his chilly eyes, the deepest kind of skepticism. Elizabeth tinkles a bell.

“Now,” she says, “some brandy and cigars.”

Cohibas, of course.

Cormac longs for a cigarette.

They all rise and begin to drift and scatter. A few slip away home, their minds already on breakfast meetings. Cormac pauses to look more carefully at the Rubens, at the extraordinary confidence of his hand as it laid down charcoal and washes. Then he strolls down one of the corridors. Some doors are open. He glimpses a mahogany four-poster covered with a handmade quilt. Then Elizabeth is behind him, with Brownlee the anchorman.

“It’s the fourth door on the right,” she says. “If you need the little-boys’ room, Cormac.”

He bows and thanks her. Into the men’s room. A lithograph by Francisco Toledo above the toilet. The master of Oaxaca. Individual Brazilian napkins for drying hands. The Internet story about the Warrens said they had six bathrooms in addition to sixteen rooms. Cormac thinks: I have lived in quarters smaller than this bathroom. Outside again, he faces a drawing by Pascin, delicate and erotic. Another door is open. Elizabeth waves him in. She’s explaining the decor to the anchorman. Each room has a kind of theme, she says, tracing the history of the United States through furniture, art, interior decoration. “My husband’s idea,” she says. “The Warrens have been here a long time.” Yes. Since 1741. Here, for example, are the 1930s, with first editions of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson. Framed sheet music by Rodgers and Hart. Photographs made in Sacramento of Warren’s father and grandfather. All standing by automobiles whose license plates provide the year.

In the next room, through a connecting door, World War One, and a doughboy helmet, and photographs from the AEF, and a framed 78 rpm recording of Enrico Caruso’s version of “Over There.” Cormac thinks of Jack London dying of pills and booze, Carnegie and Frick dying in the same year, while Wilson blathered about war and peace and civilization above the rumble of parades, drums, funerals, and memorials. The anchorman seems touched.

“My grandfather died over there,” he says.

Elizabeth says, “So did mine.”

They pass from the Gold Rush to the Mauve Decade (or the Gilded Age, Elizabeth says, or the Gay Nineties) to Prohibition, a room for each. San Francisco newspaper headlines. Photos of costume parties. Ostrich feathers and a battered hip flask. Flappers by John Held Jr. In each room, a bed, or a couch, or a desk. The anchorman excuses himself, and now Elizabeth directs him to the boys’ room.

Cormac and Elizabeth enter another room. Photographs of Elizabeth at a girls’ boarding school in Switzerland. With parents, slightly dowdy, in Folkestone. Standing beside Warren on the worn steps of an Anglican church. Some framed letters of thanks from various New York charity organizations. A desk and a Mark Cross blotter upon which sits a leather book of the sort used by hostesses a century ago to arrange seating plans and menus. Books of New York history on six shelves, one shelf devoted to Astors and Vanderbilts and Carnegie. A couch. A smaller desk with a computer and a chair for a secretary.

“This is my study,” she says. “It has no decor at all.”

Then, to the side of the bookcase, Cormac sees a Georgia O’Keeffe painting of a lily, and to the side of the O’Keeffe a graphite drawing he made many years ago. The paper has darkened over time, making it resemble a silverpoint. It shows the secret place of the Countess de Chardon.

“Where did you get this?” he says.

She smiles. Gently tips the door closed. “That? You like that, I suppose? I’m almost sure it’s from Christie’s. They told me it was probably done around 1861 or ’62. In there somewhere.”

Wrong by almost thirty years.

“I already had the Georgia O’Keeffe,” she says. “And when I saw this”—stepping closer—“I thought she might have made the drawing too. She was certainly the greatest twentieth-century painter of cunts.”

She likes saying the word, although when she says “cunt” it sounds shaved. Still, she enjoys it the way Delfina likes saying “motherfucker.” She turns, eases her buttocks onto the corner of her desk. Pressing against wood. Staring at Cormac.

“I see what you mean,” Cormac says. “Particularly if you turn the O’Keeffe upside down.”

She smiles in a neutral way.

In the hall, Cormac hears murmuring from the far end, men and women laughing in the buzzed upper register of alcohol. He can now pick out Warren’s loud guffaw.

“One more thing,” she says, glancing toward the laughter and opening another door. She flicks a switch.

Inside, in indirect light, he sees frayed medieval battle flags behind glass, lithographed views of Jerusalem and Acre, dead Crusaders, men holding crosses.

“My husband’s other museum,” she says. “All pretty ghastly, and very interesting.”

Cormac’s heart stops. On the wall to the right, hanging from hooks by leather thongs, some jammed into cracked leather scabbards, are five weapons.

In the center, longer than the others, its corroded face marked by spirals, is his father’s sword.

He leaves the party in a state of fevered blur and icy clarity. At the door all mumble the buttery words of social banality: good night see you soon pleasure to meet you we had a fine time. Warren tells Cormac they must lunch at the Century, or right here again at the apartment, once he returns from a ten-day trip to Europe and Israel. No long summer doldrums for a newspaper publisher, are there? Elizabeth gazes at Cormac in a cool way and shakes his hand at the elevator door. On the sidewalk, under the awning, Ripley offers him a ride. The pitching coach suggests drinks at Elaine’s. Cormac smiles and says he’d better walk off the sumptuous meal. He starts down Fifth Avenue.