Pete Hamill - Forever

He knew that he would never find the earl in the fields and forests above the town, but they pulled at him in some mysterious way, filling him with memories of Ireland. In turn, the emptiness of that forest, and the longings it provoked, drove him back to the streets of the city. Thinking of Ireland made him think of his father, and then he wanted to find the earl again. There were images he could not shed.

In the city, he was often in the company of Mr. Partridge, as he searched for a place where he could house his printing press, himself, and Cormac, his apprentice. Along the way, Cormac got to know him better, and liked him even more. Partridge had had very little formal education in England, since schools were generally closed to the children of farmers. “They thought if a farm lad could read and write, he’d leave for the city, and then who’d feed the rich?” he said one bright morning on Pearl Street. “Or the pigs, for that matter! And they were right, of course!” Pausing. “Stupid, but right, from their point of view.” But he’d found his way to the printing trade, apprenticing to a cranky man named Steele, and in the setting of type, and the printing of books, he had learned many things. On their New York walks, he spoke with passion about cloves, elephants, the best way to make paper, the translations of Alexander Pope, the many varieties of sugarcane, and the art of weaving carpets. He knew the history of garbage, and all about the making of aqueducts in ancient Rome, the development of graveyards, and the sexual habits of the Arawak Indians in the Caribbean at the moment of the arrival of the Europeans. He owned several copies of Don Quixote .

In short, he was as English as roast beef, but an Englishman open to the whole wide world. He was outraged by English cruelties in Ireland and Scotland. He hated kings. In his view, all kings were gangsters. Not just English kings, but kings in every country where they presumed to rule over ordinary people. Their pretensions to nobility made him laugh when he was in a benevolent and ironical mood, or slam walls and tabletops when he was soaring into high democratic rage. Nobody was better suited to being an American.

“How do they get away with it?” he said to Cormac as they walked down Broad Street one hot and sticky July afternoon. “How do they get armies to carry their stupid flags and march off to die? That’s the mystery. How do they get to sit on a throne in court, dressed in silks and lace and powdered wigs, and get intelligent men to kneel before them? In awe! In bloody suppli cation! ” Such words would have been treasonous to most of His Majesty’s loyal subjects in New York. But Mr. Partridge was also a careful man. He only spoke his republican thoughts to Cormac when there was not another soul in earshot.

“Noble!” he said on another day, his voice lathered with sarcasm, the words flowing from him in paragraphs. “Aye, they are noble. Noble bastards, they are. How did it begin? And how will it end? I’ll tell you how. The story’s in the history books, if you know how to read them.” He gestured with his hands in the general direction of England, out beyond the Battery. “There were a few of these swine long ago, readier to kill than decent folk, their mouths full of a line of velvety tripe to turn the ears of the dumber sort. Tripe about Noble England, and the Noble King. All they needed was a handful who believed them, or saw a chance to get rich without work. Together, they stole from weaker people and then used the money to create armed theater . That’s what it was, lad. That’s what it is! Armed theater! Castles and music and fine robes and crowns and jewels—it’s all theater. Acting! Performing! And all of it made possible by the use of swords and muskets and cannon, and driven by jealousy and theft! First they rob the other dukes. Then, out of the stolen money, they give small rewards to the footpads and killers who are not so powerful, those minor actors who are not able to fill the air with flowery rubbish. Then they go on to robbery of the poor, stealing the fruits of their labor—for all kings are determined never to do an honest day’s work! They use the Christian message to convince the poor that they are not meant to be truly happy until they are dead and go on to Heaven. To see the Lord. Who is, of course, English, not Jewish. The farmer, the tradesman, all are willing victims. They bow down before the Great Actor, the King Himself, and work the soil and feed these bastards and then they die, and their sons turn to the same task, while not one of these so-called nobles ever turns a spade in the earth. The poor are robbed by rack rents and taxes. They pay tribute. They even pay for churches so the useless, lazy clergy can tell them how unworthy they are. The kings sneer at them for being fools, and with all that stolen money, they build armies and fleets and export their skills at robbery to the entire world! That’s how it all began, lad. A few cynical actors who fooled entire nations!”

“And how will it end?”

“If there’s a God in Heaven,” he said, “it will end at the gallows.”

He sighed.

“Any civilized man must be against homicide,” he said. “But regicide seems a most admirable crime.”

And so it went as they wandered the town. Mr. Partridge didn’t always rant about cabbages and kings. He fed Cormac’s mind with geography and history, occasionally referring to a map of New York he’d bought in London. He knew exactly where they were on the maps of the world: at 73 degrees and 58 seconds west of the prime meridian, 40 degrees and 47 seconds north latitude, about halfway between the North Pole and the equator, and on a line with Madrid.

When he pointed across the East River at Brooklyn, he knew that the other island was 118 miles long. “That’s why they call it the long island,” he said. “Brilliant bit of naming, isn’t it?” The East River itself wasn’t a river at all; it was an estuary, with one side running north, the other side south, and a great dangerous place at the top of the estuary called Hell Gate. “Don’t ever try sailing it,” he said. “The water flows in from the Long Island Sound, through a narrow little channel. It tears apart every ship whose captain dares to confront it. Stay away. It’s a true gate to Hell.” And yet there was a simple reason for docking ships here on the East River, instead of the North River. The island protected them from the western winds.

“The winters are brutal here,” Mr. Partridge said, “and the summers are worse. Spring is very short because the water coming down the North River is still very cold. October is the best month, but the air is never dry—not even in October—because of the rivers and the blessed harbor. Still, it’s a perfect place to build a town, because of that harbor. Mark my words: New York will end up bigger than Boston and Philadelphia combined.”

This was not easy for Cormac to believe as they wandered through the low, cramped town. The town of shitting horses and rooting pigs. But Mr. Partridge loved it, and saw a city that Cormac didn’t see, the city that was coming. He pointed out the gabled rooftops and yellow-brick facades of the old Dutch houses, and the arrogant new Georgian houses of the English rich. The names of old families rolled from his lips: Roosevelts and Beekmans, Phillipses and Verplancks, De Peysters and De Lanceys, and, above all, Livingstons. The town was still too small for a district of the rich, as there was now in London, an area made fashionable or aristocratic through guns and money. The homes of the rich shared streets with taverns and shops and markets. “That can’t last,” Mr. Partridge said. “It never does. The rich build private fortresses. That’s part of their triumph.” The old Dutch town, he said, was huddled together, like a primitive castle, behind several pathetic wooden walls (meant to keep out marauding Indians, who no longer existed), and water came from a single well on Broadway because the Collect was too far out into the wilderness.