Pete Hamill - Forever

“There were a few laughs, though, weren’t there?”

“Enough for five lifetimes,” Cormac said.

Tweed was quiet, and then he was gone. Cahill hurried over, took his pulse, and said, “Shit.” Tweed’s fingernails turned black.

The door opened and his daughter Josephine came in with the ice cream. She looked at them, looked at her father, and fell to the floor of the Ludlow Street Jail. The lid came off the pail and the ice cream made a cold white scab on the planked floor.

The envelope contained a bank draft for five thousand dollars and the key to a safe-deposit box at the Bank of New York. And there was a note in Bill Tweed’s hand: “I wish this was more, but it’s something. So long, old friend.”

When Cormac opened the box on the following morning, he found the deed to a house on Duane Street next door to the building where Tweed did business while he was the Boss. He walked down there for a look and realized that he’d passed it many times without ever noticing it. Four stories of red brick on the northeast corner of Church Street. From across the street, he could see a studio on the top floor with windows facing south toward the harbor. A studio. With windows glistening in the sun. While newsboys shouted the story of the death of the Boss.

“Bill Tweed is dead, readallabout it!”

“Get it all in the Herald….”

Cormac’s hands trembled as he gazed at another note in Bill Tweed’s hand. “Fill in the blanks with whatever name you want to use,” the note said. “Then take it to Edelstein.” But that day, and part of the next, he couldn’t move. He lay on the bed in the Leonard Street flat, the newspapers scattered around him, images of Tweed in life gliding into the cartoons of Thomas Nast.

He didn’t go to the wake at the Tweed home on Madison Avenue and couldn’t leave Manhattan for the burial in Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. But he waited under gray skies at Broadway near City Hall and watched the procession of eighteen carriages move south toward State Street and the Hamilton Ferry. Two mounted policemen led the way. Cormac joined those who walked behind the carriages, and then moved away at the ferry. He threw the Boss a salute and started for home. In the sky, a flock of seagulls cried a farewell.

The day after the burial, he went first to his own bank and added the draft to the one hundred and six dollars he had in his account. Then he walked to Hanover Square to see Edelstein.

“I hated yesterday,” Edelstein said.

“Yes.”

“That mayor wouldn’t even lower the flags to half-mast.”

“He’ll be forgotten when Bill is still remembered.”

“You’ve got something for me, right?” Edelstein said.

“I do.”

He handed the paper to Edelstein, the deed to the house on Duane Street.

“What name do you want to use?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“I have,” Edelstein said. “There was a man was killed in Antietam, no family, no relatives. I went to school with him. Francis Aloysius Kavanagh. No U in Kavanagh.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“In a year or two, we can change it to some company. We’ll make one up.”

“Even better.”

He started filling in the blanks on the deed, then took a stamp and some wax and a notary’s seal and thumped on the paper.

“Just sign here, Mister Kavanagh.”

Cormac signed his latest name.

“Done.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all, Mister Kavanagh.”

Edelstein smiled and lit a cigar.

“It’s a fine house, Cormac,” Edelstein said. “You could live there forever.”

Cormac waits for the dark young lady on an evening of steady rain. Not just rain, but an unruly New York rain, pushed by river winds. He is in the backyard of a restaurant called East of Eighth, on Twenty-third Street, next to a movie multiplex. It’s a few minutes after seven on an evening in March. A huge Cinzano umbrella spreads above the table, but the wet breeze toys with it, lifting it along an edge, filling it like a parachute, then dropping it, spraying him with rain. A young bright-blond waiter comes over, shielding his hair with a large menu, and says that he can move Cormac inside to the upstairs room. Cormac smiles and shakes his head.

“I like the rain,” he says. “And I’m meeting someone here.”

“Suit yourself,” the waiter says in an irritated way, and goes back to his place inside the back door that opens to this garden. Cormac does like the rain. Across all the years, it has felt like a gift, a cleansing refreshment of air and skin. And it always puts him, if only for a few seconds, in Ireland long ago. The New York rain is drumming now on the umbrellas of the empty tables the way it long ago drummed upon the roof of a blacksmith’s forge. The way it hammered then on the snug slate roof of the vanished old house. His first house in the world. His truest home. Now, in this fleeting present tense, he watches the rain racing down the brick walls of the adjoining buildings, making a million little glistening rivers. Rain released by the March sky. Falling upon this street where once he lived many days and nights, long ago, in a world now vanished.

The wall he now faces is the wall of an office building. The wall behind him rumbles with explosions from a movie being shown in the multiplex. Images of other Twenty-third Street theaters race through him, quick as rain. The tail end of the nineteenth century, the years after Tweed died, and New York changed again as everything moved uptown. Gaslight and fog. Streetcars and horses. Golden footlights. An orchestra leader in a tux with his back to the audience. The odor of forgotten perfumes. Women in the lobbies of hotels. Rouged faces. Eyes defined by kohl. And there: a wife, now long dead, laughing when she sees him enter the foyer. Betrayal in her laugh. He tries to remember her full name. Catherine something Underwood. The middle name will not come. The rain drums on the umbrella. A fire engine screams through the evening.

When Tweed died, time flowed on, of course, and so did life. Slicker bandits arrived in New York, with even greater appetites than anyone in the Ring. The pigs were gone from the street. Another kind of swine took over the elegant Victorian sties. Electricity killed the darkness of midnight and drove elevators into the high floors of new buildings. Great armies of immigrants arrived at Castle Garden, speaking Yiddish and Sicilian and the English of Ireland. They were coming to the New Jerusalem, and the population soared to more than a million. Tenements rose to house them, while the Brooklyn Bridge soared majestically over the East River. Sailing ships became more and more rare as steam power brought liners to the new piers along the North River.

Cormac fought brain sludge writing dozens of preposterous novels for Beadle & Adams and the other fiction factories, into which he sneaked sympathies for unions, and the poor, and the despised Irish, along with his astonished love for the city itself. He did not exactly think of himself as an American, but he was definitely a New Yorker. That meant that he embraced the city’s culture of work, even though the bounty of Bill Tweed had freed him from the need to earn money to eat. He wrote one dime novel in three days, a nine-part serial in two weeks. To flush his brain, he wrote another entirely in German, and then did it all over again in English. He moved from one newspaper to another, the rhythm of his life falling into a year of work, a year of disappearance. In New York, nobody expected constancy anymore. On newspapers, he welcomed the anonymity of the copy desk, where he corrected the style and grammar of younger men, but he was still thrilled by the chance to go out to the streets as a reporter. He saw the arrival of Pulitzer from St. Louis and worked for him at The World in three different years under three different names, without ever meeting him. He saw the arrival of Hearst too, young and brash and full of the romantic excitements driven into him by the West, convinced that the coming century would belong to him. While Hearst and Pulitzer fought it out along Park Row, the halftone changed the look of newspapers, allowing reproduction of photographs on high-speed presses, and the old pen-and-ink sketch artists were soon gone, to make illustrations for magazines or to draw comic strips or to create paintings that evoked the streets where they had worked for newspapers, instead of some lost European Arcadia full of nymphs and princes. Some of them lived here on Twenty-third Street, others drifted to the small houses west of Greenwich Village.