Thirteen Ways of Looking

by Colum McCann

  On the afternoon of his death, Mendelssohn emerges from the elevator—an uneventful ride, he stands silently alongside Sally James—and they walk together into the lobby.

  It is one of those ancient New York foyers, marble and flowers and chandeliers. Brass wall lights. A mahogany table. Black-and-white tiles. A long strip of carpet down the middle. Bad art on the walls, the sort created expressly not to offend.

  Sally disappears around the corner a moment, and Mendelssohn takes a few steps alone. He wears a long overcoat. A Homburg hat. A drowsy determination on his face. The space awaiting his chronic fate. In zoom the eyes are hooded, the jaw is slack, he wears little half-moons of fatigue beneath his spectacles. A burst of wrinkles from the eyes. Another little burst of hair from the side of his hat. His head deeply veined at the side temples. The small sag of skin and the chickenwattle at his neck. The marks of decades. The detectives can imagine him at home, slackmouthed in sleep, his pajama collar askew, a light snore sailing from the back of his throat.

  But later, when he moves along the corridor, they notice a drop of joy in his shuffle. Not a sideways lean or a bedraggled pull-along. A man still attached to the world. A curmudgeonly grace. The detectives examine the walk, as if the movement might carry a forensic clue to his being. They are well aware that a moment on its own, like a word, means little or nothing, but it is their accumulation that begins to make them matter. Life has been made strange by a series of actions and so there must be a corresponding series of triggers. The past is a key to the future: hidden causes must become plain, time should move to a singular point of revelation. The thrill is in finding the point where the mystery is dismantled. Then they can jigsaw the logic back together. If they can find one piece, they will glimpse another nearby, test it for fit.

  The trick eventually comes in the agility to see the pieces all at once, and then build outward and backward—to commit the solution.

  On the strength of the fluidity of motion alone, simply the way he walks, the detectives are sure that there has been no death threat to Mendelssohn, no advance suggestion of murder, even when he raps his walking stick on the ground and Sally James rounds the corner from the elevator, and seems to put a hand to his throat. His neck looks wattled and slack, as if it might be about to sound out the after-gulps of a sink. But then she gently wraps the scarf around him, and moves forward, supporting his elbow.

  The nurse is, by all appearances, well looked after. She wears a large coat with fur on the collar. On her feet, tall boots.

  They shuffle the length of the corridor and stand inside the double front doors. Sally pauses and turns while Mendelssohn has a word with the doorman, Tony DiSalvo, a man who looks lifted from a Mexican cantina, portly and balding, a hint of violence about him and yet a suggestion, also, of rumbling intelligence. Later, under questioning, it will be revealed that Tony is Puerto Rican, a former philosophy major from the University of Miami, but that the conversation was just yet another of those daily New York exchanges about the weather, how awful it is outside, how much snow there has been this winter, a familiar joke from Mendelssohn about being out to lunch, and how Tony wants Mendelssohn to be careful at the traffic lights, the taxis have been sliding all morning long.

  Tony helps Mendelssohn down the steep steps and watches as the old man and the nurse step out of frame.

  The detectives scrub through the footage from the previous days too, in case they can find something in the patterns of time that will propel them toward a critical epiphany, a mid-verse logic. A meter. An enjambment. Or a rhyme.

  For the week of the murder they watch at a rate of thirty-two by: the world zooming past. A whole day slips along in less than an hour. There is a comic texture to the motion, especially when Mendelssohn, with his nurse, uses his cane and stutterstarts out of the frame. As the days wind down, they slow the picture and go forward at a rate of sixteen by, then eight by. Each minute takes seven and a half seconds. Four hours in half an hour. Their fingers glide over the keys. Looking. Digging. Scratching. Mining. A face seen one two three times. Someone loitering near the awning. A covert glance. A nervous tic. Or maybe something more brazen, more obvious, an assailant with a malevolent fuck-you stare. Every incident with its own peculiar rhythm: the ordinary comings, the goings, the delivery trucks, the doorman shuffle, the tenants, Mendelssohn and his nurse, the arrival of the snowstorm.

  On the day of the murder they watch in real time, stopping, starting, chopping, rewinding. Over and over again. Think. Stop. Rethink. Watch Mendelssohn emerge. Gaze at the storm. Adjust his collar. Kick the first of the white snow off his shoe. Lean against his nurse. See Sally laugh. See Tony nod. See Mendelssohn smile. See nothing odd. See Mendelssohn go. See the old man disappear. See the snow coming down.

  They wait, careful with the time stamp, to discover if anything happens in the intervening hour, but it is only the doorway, the awning, the pavement, the street, the increasing white of the storm, the return, back into frame, of Sally from the restaurant, with a nod to Tony and a blow of warm air into her hands, little else. For a while they wait for Mendelssohn to return from lunch, as if the video itself could trump reality.

  They scrub the footage forward a few hours, just in case: a murderer is often known to return to the site of his work. They scan the faces of neighbors, paramedics, delivery boys, voyeurs, all hanging around the front entrance of the apartment building. The detectives dig through the ordinary, looking for any tiny finger-smear of evidence, any face that pops, a shadow that threatens. The evidence could be there in the oddest of moments, the briefest of glances, the slightest of shoulder rubs. They focus in on the son, Elliot Mendelssohn, the hedge fund man, political aspirant, well-known philanderer, parting the crowd. He is tall and broad-shouldered, with a large stomach, as if he has swallowed a bag of rocks. In and out of the building Elliot goes, several times, a cell phone clutched to his ear, a harried look on his face as if he might never have the chance to talk to anyone more interesting than himself.

  Late in the evening Elliot emerges with a torn black ribbon placed over his heart, and the detectives, with their radar for the unusual, find it interesting that he could have so early a showcase of grief especially given the secular nature of the Mendelssohns: did he have the ribbon stored in his jacket beforehand? Did he tear one upstairs in his father’s apartment?

  Later they observe the arrival of nephews and cousins and in-laws and old friends to the apartment: nothing creates a family quite like a murder.

  The detectives slide back on the digital timeline to the moment when Mendelssohn steps out into the snowstorm: there is something of the Greek epic about it, the old gray man with his walking stick, venturing out, into the snow, out of frame and away, like an ancient word stepping off a page.

  VI

  Icicles filled the long window

  With barbaric glass.

  The shadow of the blackbird

  Crossed it, to and fro.

  The mood

  Traced in the shadow

  An indecipherable cause.

  Trusty walking stick. Old reliable. He could, of course, use the Zimmerframe or even the motorized wheelchair upstairs, collecting dust in the rear bedroom, but why draw attention? He’d rather not end up like all those idiots zipping along Fifth Avenue, beep beep, out of the way, colonoscopy call, Fifth Avenue here I come, pave the way, Dr. Jim. He had to use a chair once, a few years ago, when he broke his hip after a tumble outside the Guggenheim. On a patch of ice. Before he knew it, he was sprawled on the pavement. The management was scared that he might sue, but that was not his style, he loved the law, respected it, obeyed it. It wasn’t for trifling idiocies like an old man’s fall. Two weeks in the hospital and then Elliot bought him a motorized chair. More buttons on it than an SOC-3. Magnetos engaged. Radar on. Spin that propeller. Contact! He crashed it into the hospital bed on his very first try. You needed a PhD in civil engineering just to sit in the thing for crying out loud.

  Come on now, Sal
ly.

  Enough chitchat.

  There she is, around the corner, at the daily conference of the housekeeping brigade. The Help, some people say. What a terrible thing to call them, but what other word is there? Not servants. Not domestics. Not aides, God forbid, they’re no disease. They congregate down by the mailboxes. One of them, he knows, is Russian. Another Welsh. Another Slovakian. Their own little United Nations in the lobby. He has often wondered what sort of chinwaggery goes on down there, who pays what, and who shouted at whom, and who got fired when, and why. The Yenta Brigade. All the gossip that’s fit to print. Every building in the city like a village in itself. The penthouse, the castle. The corridors, the streets. The stairwell, the alleyways. The elevator, the main thoroughfare. The storage space, the dump. The boiler room, the factory. The handyman, the cobbler. The doormen, the police. The super, the judge. And the judge himself, well, he’s the village putz, left waiting in the lobby, waiting, waiting.

  He raps his walking stick on the marble floor. Once. Twice. They’re gossiping still around the corner. A high laugh and then a low whisper and then another cackle from Sally herself. What was it like in the Garden of Eden before there was a snake? No wonder Adam went for the apple. Or was it Eve who ate the apple? Strange how the simplest things slip from our minds. The original tale, and he can’t even recall who it was that transgressed. Or maybe nobody transgressed at all. Maybe they bit the apple together. Shared it. And why not? There was an old rhyme he knew as a ten-year-old: Wouldn’t it have been jolly if Eve’s leaf had been holly? What a marvelous thing, a woman’s body. Curved and designed for delight. Full and glorious and open for invitation, invocation, inhalation. Lord, he loved lying with Eileen on a Sunday morning, especially after high-jinks if they got the chance. They would watch the light crawl into the room, beckon it, good days, the horn of plenty, so to speak, once upon a time.

  He hits his walking stick on the floor once more. Oh, come on now, Sally. Lord above. Onwards. Old men grow older quicker. Sally up, Sally forth, Sally sixth.

  —Right there, Mr. J.

  —I haven’t got all day, you know.

  She pops her head around the corner.

  —Right with you, Mr. J.

  And then he hears a complicated sigh. And a giggle.

  I hope to God that she isn’t telling them about my adventures in the diaper trade. You work your whole life to become a pillar of the community and then it all disappears in front of your eyes.

  Perhaps he should just strike out into the snow on his own. Hand me my oxygen tank. Pull my hat down around my ears. Sir Edmund, hitting the slopes. Once he climbed the mountains in Italy with Eileen. Up in the beautiful Dolomites. They stayed in a chalet under the shadows of the mountains and in the mornings, after breakfast, they climbed up through the spectacular forests, hand in hand, and then used carabiners to clip themselves in to scale the via ferrate, high into the sky. The amazing thing about the Italians was that they had rifugios on the top of the mountains. You could eat a bowl of pasta and drink a glass of pinot grigio twelve thousand feet in the air. A civilized bunch. He often wishes that he had a little of the Italian blood in him, that big expansive generosity, that color, that style, but it’s all Lithuanian, which, of course, is its own little mishmash, Polish and Russian and German and Viking too.

  Curious thing, the blood we inherit. Slapping around inside, making us who we are: the landscape itself gets a say in the outcome of the mind. Tobago with its beaches and sunlight and palm trees, no doubt, where life is designed to slow things down. Still, Sally somehow gets things done, it always amazes him at the end of the day the place is clean, the laundry is folded, the dishes are washed, the beds are tucked, and she disappears to her little room, where she keeps a picture of her nephew, or her grandson, on the table, and once or twice he has heard her weeping, but most of the time she goes happily off to sleep, or so it seems. Oh, nature’s soft nurse, how I have frighted thee.

  Still and all, he wishes she would get a move on. He gazes the length of the lobby towards the snow falling white and fat-flaked outside. Strange how life becomes a telescope: the distance lengthening the older we get. He has lived in this building the best part of twenty years and the lobby has never been longer. He raises a salutary finger to Tony the doorman who is outside sprinkling rock salt on the ground. He has known Tony for two decades now. Seen him age and bloom and indeed balloon. Time. The great leveler. Since when did Tony suddenly hit the far side of middle age? It’s not as if this sort of thing happens overnight, or is it? Found him once reading a copy of Kant. Tried to make a joke. I tried Kant, but couldn’t. Fell flat. To Tony anyway. Which I might well do right now. Flat on my face in the lobby, waiting. Come on, Sally, for crying out loud.

  There was a while in his own life, in his late thirties, when everything just fell away so suddenly: the hair, the ease, the grace. Walked around with a big lump of anxiety in his heart. A midlife crisis they called it. Didn’t begin to feel reinvigorated, really, until he reached the age of fifty. Elected, then, to Supreme Court, Kings County. Hardly a runaway election, but the party backed him, they even made him little buttons and leaflets to hand out at the polling stations around Brooklyn. Truth was they needed a liberal Jew and he just about fit the bill. They liked his Catholic wife as well, two birds with one poll. They lived in the Heights, so they had the cachet. Dugan Brothers Bakery Delivered to Your Door. He walked every day to the courts on Adams Street. The great thing about being a justice of the court was that you didn’t have to retire until seventy, seventy-six if you pushed it. It was written there under Judiciary Law, three two-year extensions. Sure, they put the thumbscrews on and the inevitable hints were dropped, especially because he moved to Manhattan—he was no longer their Brooklyn boy, how dare he move to the city?—but he hung in there until the end, especially after Eileen left, oh Lord, the day. He was in the bathroom on Eighty-sixth Street having a shave, half his face covered in foam, when he heard the thumping fall outside the door. She’d been sick for a long time but he had no idea that she was going to pass just like that—a quick fall as she stepped out of bed—and there she was, Eileen, lying on the carpet, gone, gone, a chuisle mo chroí. He leaned down and stroked her hair. That’s what he would remember, the feel of her hair. They say that it’s one of the last things to go. That it keeps on growing. Even days after. That’s why they have to shave the dead.

  —Isn’t that right, Sally?

  She has come, at last, around the corner, the little hem of her nurse whites showing beneath the dark of her coat.

  —What’s that Mr. J.?

  —I was just thinking—

  —Yes? she says with a swell of boredom. She reaches up and adjusts his scarf tight around his neck.

  —About Mrs. Mendelssohn.

  —Yes, sir, Mr. J., sir. A fine woman, Miss Eileen.

  —I do, I do.

  —Excuse me, sir?

  —Oh, don’t worry about me, Sally.

  —On you go, Mr. J., I got you.

  The dead are with us. They glide along behind us on our endless journeys, they accompany us in our smallest gestures, tuck themselves into our dark shadows, they even come along on our little lunchtime sojourns to Chialli’s. She used to comb her hair with a gold-handled brush. He loved watching her by the mirror, the stroke of the brush and the fan of her hair, pressing the long strands together with thumb and forefinger.

  —Lovely once and always.

  —Mr. J.?

  —It’s an old tune.

  —Yes, sir. Of course.

  —Lovely once and always, moonlight in her hair.

  —Yes, sir.

  Sally is of course quite thoroughly confused, but how could she have any idea in heaven or hell what he’s talking about, unless the song got diverted and made it all the way to Tobago. And damn it all anyway. He can feel a little tremor in his pocket but he’s not about to stop out here, now, in the lobby, no matter who’s calling, God or Elliot or Job or anyone else for that
matter. How odd to get that little vibration down below. A wocket in my pocket. He used to read Dr. Seuss to Katya long ago. They were good days, reading to the children when he had the time. Odd thing, time. So much of it now and we spend it all looking back. Lovely once and always with moonlight in her hair.

  —Lord above, says Sally, looking out to the weather. You sure you want to venture out, Mr. J.?

  He loves this, too, about Sally, the way every now and then she will burst forth with a word that he doesn’t expect. Venture indeed. Add venture, dear Sally. Upwards. Away.

  He pauses on the lip of the first glass door, at the steps. A cold blast of air hits him as Tony hurries in to help.

  —Young man.

  —How are we today, Mr. Mendelssohn?

  —Out to lunch.

  His old joke. Guaranteed to bring a smile to Tony’s lips. It’s the repetition that makes it funnier: he says it almost every single day, rain, hail, shine. What would happen, one fine day, if he didn’t say it at all? The world would hardly stop spinning, but it might just hiccup a little on its axis. We Kan, we Kant.

  —And who’s this lovely lady?

  Tony the charmer. A beam from Sally. Yes, indeed, he loves that smile. It’s a good world, this, in its odd little moments.

  —We just got married in the elevator, didn’t we, Sally?

  —Yes, sir, we did.

  —Hope you picked up all the confetti.

  —Check the recycle bin.

  —You’re very considerate, Mr. Mendelssohn.

  It’s a high step down from the lobby into the street and getting higher every day. Feels like I’m lowering myself from a crane. Into the recyclables indeed. Maybe Katya and Elliot should hang handles along the length of Eighty-sixth Street: from the streetlamps, swinging along, like Johnny Weissmuller through the jungle, here we come.

  —Careful now, says Tony. Can’t have the newlyweds crash.

  There is still only a light dusting on the ground, but the storm is gathering force. Best get out and about now, quick and early. Who knows how long he might be housebound if it truly comes tumbling down?