Pete Hamill - Forever

“Hey, who are you? The Phantom of the Opera? What are you doing here?”

A heavy black nurse with a tough face stands in the doorway, hands on her hips.

“This is my wife,” Cormac says. “I’ve been looking for her for two days.”

“You can’t—”

“She was in the North Tower.”

The nurse picks up a clipboard from the foot of the bed. She still looks professionally angry.

“She’s pregnant too,” Cormac says. “Or she was.”

The nurse squints at the case file.

“She still is,” she says. “Some kind of miracle.”

“I want to take her home.”

She looks at him more carefully now. “Sorry for your trouble,” she said. “But I’m sure that ain’t possible. It sure ain’t advisable. Let me go find a supervisor. You can wait right here.”

When she leaves, Cormac wraps Delfina in the cape, lifts her heavy body, feeling its warmth, and carries her down the deserted hallways to the stairwell. Easy, boy, don’t make a move, just take a ride now. All the way down to the loading area, Delfina makes small whimpering sounds, tiny protests, but says no words, not even when Cormac moves with her into the rain.

Columbus Circle is slick with rain and Cormac can see lights downtown in Times Square and nothing at all in the far distance. Traffic is light. A dozen yellow cabs. A few buses. No police cars at all. When the street is empty, he hurries into the park, straining against the weight of Delfina. As promised, Kongo is waiting in a grove of dripping maples.

With Thunder.

He is here again, as he was on the night when Cormac and Kongo rode him north, blood merging, language merging, gods merging. Thunder: back from the place where he has been waiting.

The great horse paws the earth, stretches in pleasure and renewal, shudders, but makes no other sound. The sword is slung from the saddle horn, the black bag beneath it. Kongo hands Cormac the reins and holds Delfina in his own arms, her face masked by the cape against the rain. Cormac strokes the great horse and whispers in Irish. We go now to see Da. Then he swings into the saddle. Kongo passes Delfina to him. Her eyes are closed, her face bleary. She faces Cormac, her body against his, her legs spread in the saddle, burrowed against him. He pulls the cape tight around her body, steadying her with his elbows, gripping the reins.

“I’ll see you there,” Kongo says, and slaps Thunder’s haunch.

They move north through the park to the place of farewell, to the hid den cave. Delfina is pressed against him and he can feel her breath against his chest. A woman dressed like an Eskimo in a fur-trimmed coat comes toward them on the path, holding seven dogs on seven leashes. All are docile, heads pressed to the ground, anxious to be taken to dry rooms. Neither the Eskimo nor her dogs seem surprised by the presence of a horse in the rain, holding two riders.

They make good time. Away in the distance to the east, he sees the bright lights of the Metropolitan Museum, and suddenly imagines an airliner packed with fuel smashing into it and destroying the finest works of man. They could do it. They want to do it. Here, and everywhere. He turns Thunder to the west, away from the revealing lights of the Metropolitan. He hopes the musicians are back on its steps. He wishes he could take Delfina there and dance. You will dance on marble terraces, boy. You will feel candle wax dripping on your shoulders from the chandeliers. You will waltz. You will mambo. Vaya. Raindrops now look like a shower of atoms in the more distant lights of the park lamps. The rain fills the world with a steady drumming sound, without accents from bata or toques, without congas or bongo, just steady drumming, erasing the sounds of the city, mashing time, cleansing the filthy air. Delfina murmurs through unconsciousness. Oh, shit… oh, shit… Her head stirs, her nose sounds clogged. He holds her closer with a free hand, her head flat against his chest.

He can see the turrets and battlements of Belvedere Castle as they move across the Great Lawn into the North Meadow, empty now of people, of children, of ballplayers. He loves this place. A place created long ago by the sweat and muscle of Irishmen and Africans and Germans who came here from the Bloody Ould Sixth when Cormac was already old, who loved one another, who married one another, who huddled together in the shacks of Seneca Village. All these eight hundred and forty-three acres were then a wilderness of rock and scrub and shanties, where men and women and children shared the land with the last of the free animals and five hundred thousand birds. They were the same people who changed the place, who moved the earth and drained the swamps and cut the roads from a master plan, knowing that when they were finished they could not come back to live, only to visit. Cormac thinks: They left us this tamed sylvan man-shaped place, and all of them are dead and buried, and I am still here. The only man left alive who ever saw them work. Now, on a wet, moonless night in the wounded city, the lawns drink the rain, the last birds huddle in nests, and even the ghosts are silent.

Thunder carries them out of the park at 106th Street, following the smell of earth westward into the strip of Riverside Park. Man, woman, and horse are joined now, like a single creature, pelted by the rain. They pass the gloomy monument they visited together in the summer, and Cormac remembers Delfina saying, “I want to be buried in Grant’s Tomb.” You will be buried nowhere, he says now. Not for a long, long time. Thinking: You will see Rome, you will stroll in the piazzas of Florence, you will see our child walk and read and dance. I will not. But you and the boy will swim in the azure waters of the Mediterranean, off the point named for Palinurus. You will read The Aeneid at a table where lemons await you in a white ceramic bowl. You will teach the child to be strong and kind.

Through the rain, he sees a rusting freighter plowing toward Albany. He glimpses it between buildings, and then the ship is gone. The rain is now washing away the city’s cargo of fine ash. The great swooping arc of the George Washington Bridge is dotted with the red taillights of stalled commuters heading for New Jersey. No cars are coming into Manhattan. Cormac feels Harlem’s presence from the heights to the right, here where Washington fled to the killing plains of New Jersey. He was not a face on a dollar bill, boy, he was a great big tough son-of-a-bitch who made a country. Cormac sees Washington as he always sees him: slashing the air with his own swift sword. And sees Bantu and the others, sees them fighting for the liberty that Washington did not deliver. All of that in a year when he was still too young to know that most great hopes end with a broken heart.

Then Washington disappears, and now Cormac feels Duke Ellington beckoning him to a table at Frank’s, in a year when he was writing about music for the New York Sun, and there too is Charlie Parker raising his alto to the night and Lady Day whispering through the rain. What was the name of the hotel on 118th Street where Minton’s Playhouse opened the stage to the true geniuses of the wretched twentieth century? Cormac can no longer remember, but there was Max behind the drums and here came Birks and there was Bird and in from the coast one night came Art Tatum. That was the night, hearing Tatum shower the room with music, when he knew his own work on a piano was a pathetic counterfeit. His hand drops to Delfina’s belly.

You will hear them all, son, the greatest artists of the century; you will hear their music smile, or protest, or console, and you will hear in them what the Africans made of America, all of them in you, as I am in you, and Ireland is in you, and the Jews are in you, and the Caribbean is in you, from me, from your mother, even in the blood I carry still from Kongo, and always, in all years, no matter where you go, son, you will be of New York.