Pete Hamill - Forever

The subjects of Cormac’s scrutiny as a reporter had not changed from the early years of the century: the usual murders, the usual suicides, the usual robberies, the usual schemes for instant wealth. Only the details were different. There were big stories too, from the astonishing beauty of the Blizzard of 1888, when the Battery was turned into a blinding white pasture and the only sound for three days was the rasping of shovels, to the horrors that followed the Panic of 1893 (brokers diving from windows, children found starved in tenements, undertakers working triple time), and, as the century wound down, the jingo fever of the Spanish-American War.

All of this was impersonal, which was the way Cormac wanted it. But in the years after Tweed died, he began to see stories in the newspapers that entered him like knife thrusts. They were all small: social notes, really, in diaries from London, and in the society gossip that flowed from Gramercy Park and Madison Square. They were not the stuff of page-one headlines. But there was a story of a woman at a party in London, and a young man who appeared at an opera opening in Paris. Another was found dead in Australia of heart failure. A fourth was living out West, beyond the Rockies, operating a mine. All were Warrens. All traced their descent to the Earl of Warren. He could not leave Manhattan to pursue them, but he feared their arrival on his granite island.

“Please don’t come to New York,” he said out loud one night in his studio in Duane Street. “Please don’t come here….”

One of them did, Michael Warren, a handsome young fellow (the newspapers said), with a reddish tinge to his dark brown hair, tall, broad-shouldered, witty. He was on his way to London and was staying with friends in Gramercy Park. Cormac read these stories with a weary sense of responsibility. The Warrens were appearing in his life now like the terms of an old curse. From the distant past, he heard Mary Morrigan repeat the rules of the tribe. He remembered the way his father had died. He heard his father speaking: “In our tribe, the murderer must be pursued to the ends of the earth. And his male children too. They must be brought to the end of the line….”

And then Cormac was relieved. One newspaper explained that this Michael Warren was leaving for London on the morning Cormac read the newspapers. That is, he was already gone. There was no need to travel to Gramercy Park, to stand in leafy shadows, to observe, to plan an ambush. No need to replace the lost sword with another weapon. It was a kind of reprieve. But he knew it was not permanent. For certain Americans, all roads led to New York.

Meanwhile, he could only try to live his life. He told himself that change was everything, that it was essential to any life, long or short. One year, he drew and painted with his left hand only, which took the slickness out of his drawing and even made him stand and sit in new ways. In another year, he learned to sign, so that he could speak to deaf-mutes, and wrote an article about them for the Century . He bought a camera too, which used 4 × 5 glass plates, and wandered the streets photographing buildings, later pasting them together along one wall of the top-floor studio. He thought of this as a way of seeing more deeply what he had known too familiarly. When he had photographed every house on three blocks, he stopped using the camera and buried himself in the Hall of Records, examining documents and deeds for each building, writing the information on small cards that served as captions for the photographs. His brain sparkled.

Across those years, he had love affairs. He made cautious friendships. He helped bury Cahill in 1894 and a year later did the same for Edelstein. He read many books and listened to much music. He walked each year to the river on his birthday and dropped a flower in the flowing waters, hoping it would sail to Ireland. He sometimes longed for the Countess de Chardon. About once a week, he’d remember Bill Tweed and his marvelous laugh.

Now, as the March rain falls on Twenty-third Street, he rises up again from the past.

“Hello,” a voice says.

He looks up, and she is standing above him, Delfina Cintron. Smiling, her teeth very white in her dark face. She is wearing a wet tan trench coat, the collar up, and her hair is a wild mass of sprouting black curls. She carries no umbrella, for the day had begun with sun. Cormac rises, takes her elbow in greeting.

“We can go inside,” he says. “They have a table upstairs.”

She glances around the yard, with its empty tables and steady drumming of raindrops, and a look of satisfaction crosses her face. It’s as if she accepted the feeling of an intimate fortress, walling off the world.

“This is fine,” she says. “I like the rain.”

He uses a white cloth napkin to wipe a puddle off a chair, and she sits down.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she says. She pronounces the word “sawry.” The long soft vowel of the Caribbean.

“You’re not all that late,” Cormac says. She glances at her watch, with its red plastic wristband.

“Nine minutes,” she says and smiles again. “People used to say Latinos were always late, so I made a big deal out of being on time. My friends called me En Punto Cintron. On-the-dot Cintron. But at the store, the customers never leave on time, so we can’t leave either.”

“Inconsiderate swine,” Cormac says, and they both laugh in a way that is not quite comfortable. Cormac thinks: I don’t know how to do this anymore. I don’t know what to say or how to begin. I don’t know the music or the movies or the slang. Every woman in the world is too young for me. The Queen Mother of England, aged one hundred, is too young for me. This girl: She’s an undiscovered country. And beautiful too.

Delfina Cintron wears no makeup, but her dark ochre skin is reddish with youth. Cinnamon skin. Redolent of Africa and the sun of the Caribbean. An airplane passes overhead, flying very low.

“That guy must be trying to land on Ninety-sixth Street,” she says.

“Or Central Park.”

“If we hear a boom, he missed something.”

The sound of engines roars away into nothing, and they hear only the rain drumming on umbrellas. The waiter arrives, now protecting his yellow hair with a fuchsia umbrella bearing the name of the restaurant. He hands them two menus. He is gym thin, his hair combed into quills. Delfina smiles at him in an amused way.

“Something to drink?” he says. Cormac turns to her. “Delfina? A drink?”

She nibbles the inside of her full lower lip. Actually choosing.

The pause of someone who does not drink.

“A rum an’ tonic,” she says. Her voice is hoarse and furry. “Pellegrino for me,” Cormac says.

The waiter nods and goes away.

The curls of her hair are tiny and fine and very black. For the first time in years, he wants to plunge his hands through hair until he can feel the curved bone of a female skull. Delfina reads the menu as if it were a sacred text. Delfina Cintron. Her body hidden under the raincoat the way her skull is hidden under her exploding hair.

And Cormac remembers seeing her for the first time, walking on Fourteenth Street, on a day thick with August. Last year. Last summer. The year of Our Lord 2000, when all the predictions about the millennium came up empty on the first day of the year. There was no universal computer crash. There were no arrivals of long-dead gods. He had never felt more tired, more thickened by sludge. A sludge made of boring televised repetitions. A sludge of journalistic alarums and diversions that turned out to be nothing. A sludge dominated, day after day, by the tyrannies of clocks and calendars.

And here she came: wearing low-cut jeans and a black halter with part of her smooth brown belly showing. Then he glanced up at her face. She wore her face that day like a mask of defiance. The makeup severe. The eyes dead. The combination of smooth flesh and hardened eyes saying: Go ahead and try, pendejo .