Pete Hamill - Forever

“You some strange white man,” she said, “talkin’ that old Africa talk, that Y’ruba talk.”

“I speak French too,” he said. “And Irish. And a little English.” She laughed. “You some strange white man.”

Now she handed him the bread and mocha, and as always refused his money. He sipped in silence as she poured coffee and handed sweets to other customers and dropped their money in an apron pocket. Most took their coffee in cups from Beatriz, but some brought their own cups and carried their coffee away to their offices. Cormac’s coffee was sweet and the bread fresh, but his body was still in a state of runny rebellion. Other people, he told himself. Think of other people, look at other people; you’re a journalist and other people are your business. Who killed Dubious Jones? Who gave her the name?

Down Greenwich Street he could see old black men sleeping in doorways or standing on corners, waiting for work that did not come. Their masters had held them to the end and then were happy to see them go. They no longer had to care for these old men. No longer feed them and clothe them. They’d simply cast them out. Like old dogs. Now the white-haired Africans begged for alms, and Cormac wondered which of them had fought for the Revolution when they were young, which of them had believed all the shiny words from the likes of Cormac O’Connor. He could not look at them without feeling shame. He had trouble listening to them too. Like almost everybody in the city, they asked about a place to wash. They were too old for the treacheries of the summer rivers and there were no baths in the winter churches. They had no homes. After every blizzard, two or three were found dead in alleys, sometimes hugging each other for warmth that finally vanished. All had lost or outlived their children and their women. Sometimes Cormac gave them a few pence and offered his apologies in Yoruba. He could do nothing about the water.

“You can’t do nothin’ for them folk, Mist’ Co’mac,” Beatriz said, following the direction of his gaze.

“I could do more than I do,” he said, finishing the coffee.

“Mist’ Quaco tol’ me long time ago jes’ what you done, Mist’ Co’mac. You done plenty.”

He smiled, took a deep breath, stopped himself, exhaled.

“When are you going to pose for me, Beatriz?”

She giggled. “I’m too old to get naked for no man, Mist’ Co’mac. Not even you. And you the man never gets old.”

For months now, starting in the unseasonably hot days of late April and through the scalding summer, Cormac was like the abandoned Africans on the streets: He longed for water. He did not mind the heat; some secret part of him, chilled by the arctic winter of his Irish youth, would always be cold. He did mind the filth. The aroma that came from his own filthy body. The itching dirtiness of his hair. He wanted to be hot and clean, and wanted the same for all the others in the town: the ancient Africans, the children, the women. In dreams he turned and rolled among dolphins in the ocean sea. He was scoured by salt. He was perfumed by the sun. Upon waking, he washed from the tepid water that waited for him in a bowl. The ritual did not help. There were more and more people in the city and the same small amount of water.

“It’s like money, Mist’ Co’mac,” Beatriz said one morning. “They jus’ ain’t enough to go around.”

At the Evening Post, Cormac could not convince the editors to make New York water as important a cause as independence for Greece or the compromise in Missouri over slavery. Still, Cormac made notes about the scandal of water. He wrote articles that were not published. “Everybody knows that,” said one white-haired editor. “It’s not news.” But no water yet ran from the taps of New York. There were, in fact, very few taps, and they were in the homes of the rich, fed by water tanks erected on the roofs of their private fortresses. For all others, water was still drawn from parched wells and did not run into bathtubs or sinks or toilets; it was dipped, splashed, heated on hearths. It did not run as the rivers ran. And in the articles he wrote, and held in a desk drawer when they were not published, he made clear that the reason was corruption.

The major agent of the corruption was called the Manhattan Company. For decades after the redcoats sailed away, it had controlled all water supply in New York through a corrupt charter. Even Burr and Hamilton had been allies in the swindle, and its outline was simple. The spring of 1800, the turn of the new American century, the newspapers full of Napoleon in Europe… that year, the Manhattan Company was awarded two million American dollars by Albany for this water project. A generous arrangement, said the Federalist newspapers. An intelligent act of faith in the future of the fine little town at the mouth of the Hudson. Blah, they said, blah, they repeated, blah blah blah. But the deal had a nasty clause: It allowed the directors to use all unspent moneys for whatever purpose they desired. Before supplying a drop of water to citizens, they founded a bank. The aim was to make money. Or more money. For themselves, of course, not for the citizens. So they spent one hundred thousand dollars on water and used the rest of the two million to start their bank. The Manhattan Bank.

All of this Cormac wrote in his unpublished articles. All of it he urged upon his editors. All of it he spoke about to friends in taverns and women in bed. Water, he kept saying. Water is a problem of money. And he was laughed at.

“This is New York,” one editor said. “This is the way it is. If people are so desperate for a bath, let them move to Boston. And besides, the Manhattan Bank advertises in this newspaper.”

That was the key to the silence: advertising. The new El Dorado for the twenty-three newspapers struggling for profits. In the years after the charter, nobody would have cared too much about the Manhattan Bank if the Manhattan Company had only supplied the water. But they gave the growing city only a trickle. They hammered together some wooden pipes, which rotted and collapsed. They dug deeper into the existing wells. They used slaves to carry water from the slimy depths of the Collect Pond, right up to the day when the pond was filled with the dirt and gravel of the hangman’s hill.

The result was the stinking city through which Cormac still moved each day. Many thousands of human beings were shitting and pissing in privies, emptying slops into the streets. Garbage was piled in the streets to be gathered later, and the mounds served as wormy meals for pigs and dogs and goats and rats. Rain turned the mounds to a vile gray paste; cold froze the mounds; snow buried them. And the animals burrowed noses and snouts and teeth into the mounds, and in summer Cormac saw flies the size of butterflies buzzing above them. While the directors of the Manhattan Bank kept counting money.

Alone in the flat on Cortlandt Street, Cormac was sometimes overwhelmed by rage. Rage against the men who had betrayed the Revolution. Rage against those who had turned all that sacrifice of the brave into empty rhetoric. Rage against the Manhattan Bank. Rage against private deals made in secret clubs. The stinking odor of the town felt moral, a sign of its spreading corruption. And it was personal too, for his own body carried a stench that he could not bring to even a casual coupling with a woman. For months at a time, he was celibate. He made drawings of women from memory, for the drawings did not send out an odor. And he brooded about the impossibility of forging a connection with any woman. They came and went in his life, temporary presences, as fleeting as the seasons. They told him their stories. They revealed their bodies to his pencils and brushes. But how could he truly promise to live with a woman for the rest of his life? That was a ghastly joke. A woman would want children, as he would himself. But how could he bring a child into this world so densely stained by human excretions, solid and moral? And besides: He had learned across the decades that he might never be a father. The way other men were fathers. He entered a woman’s body as any man did; he erupted in ecstasies of the flesh, as any man did; but his seed did not flourish. He did not know if this would always be true. Perhaps it was a curse conferred on him by Bridget Riley or Mary Burton or both. An Irish form of voudon . They still came to him in dreams, smiling in knowing ways, stoking his fears, beckoning, retreating, betraying. The two-headed Irish hydra. Awake, he shrugged them away. But when he met a new woman, when he began to calculate the risks of love and the temptations of hope, they came to him again in the night, whispering of vengeance. Time did not erase them. Sometimes, trying to make himself believe in happiness, Cormac thought that if he did finally trust a woman’s love, he might tell her the story of the gift he was granted in a northern cave. The secret of his life. The guarantee that he would love her for the rest of her life, if not the rest of his own. But he never reached that moment. He could not be certain about the way the woman would react. She could pack up, as so many humans now did in the exploding city, and abruptly vanish. Or she might laugh, mocking him, questioning his sanity, offering to volunteer him as a performer at Mr. Barnum’s museum of freaks on Ann Street.