Fred and Theo stepped into the September-cool of 777’s lobby and stood a moment quite literally chilling.
“Look at you two!”
Mrs. MacDougal strode toward them from the direction of the building manager’s office.
“This is disgraceful,” she said. “You can’t stand in the lobby like this, sweaty and malodorous and, ugh, you, Fred, without a shirt! It’s unhygienical. It’s in-aesthetical. It’s anti-antiseptic. It’s . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s intolerable!”
The building manager now appeared at Mrs. MacDougal’s side and spoke somewhat more quietly. “Fred, I would appreciate it if you did wear a shirt in the public areas of the building. It’s common courtesy.”
“Am I not wearing a shirt? Ha! I clean forgot. Ha! I’ll put it right on.”
Fred removed the bread-mash bucket from over his shoulder, placing it carefully on the polished floor. He pulled a crumpled plaid shirt from the pocket of his shorts, slipped it on, and began slowly buttoning it up.
“And what is in that bucket?” said Mrs. MacDougal. “I probably shouldn’t ask.”
“Pigeon mash. Well, bread mash, really. For the pigeons.”
“Ugh!” Mrs. MacDougal staggered back. “For the pigeons!” Mrs. MacDougal stamped her foot. “That’s enough! You are encouraging, aiding, abetting, condoning, and promoting the pigeon population. Vermin!” (It was unclear whether she meant the pigeons or Fred and Theo.) “The flying rats of this city. Fie! You should be poisoning the pigeons! You make me want to scream! It is people like you who give our great city its unfortunate reputation for filth!”
A gleam had come into Fred’s eye, growing stronger as he buttoned each button, becoming a stabbing beam as he came to the last one.
“Don’t you ever say anything about my pigeons. My pigeons! Besides Theo here, they’re the best friends I’ve got!”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Mrs. MacDougal.
“The smallest, meekest, dumbest little pigeon sitting on the head of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle has more brains than you’ll ever have!”
“There, there, Mr. Adams. Fighting in the lobby, I don’t think so!” said the building manager. “Now that you got your shirt on, keep it on. And take your pigeon ma—whatever it is—upstairs to your room.”
“Come on, Theo, let’s go,” said Fred.
“Mark my words, Fred Adams. I will have you removed from this building yet. I will consider it my duty to get you and your filth out of this building! It will be my duty!” shouted Mrs. MacDougal.
After Theo and Fred stepped inside the elevator, its doors closed softly but quickly, seemingly embarrassed at the scene in the lobby. As the elevator rose, Mrs. MacDougal’s shouts grew fainter below them: “I’ll get you yet! I’ll get you yet!”
•
The years went by. The gravity went up and down but, thanks to Fred and the pigeons, the gravity never caused anyone any harm and did no damage.
One fall, a great hurricane threatened the city.
“What will happen to the pigeons?” said Theo, clutching his mug of Postum. “The paper says the winds will be over a hundred miles an hour.”
“Oh, don’t you worry about the pigeons,” said Fred, with a chuckle. “They’ll just see it as a healthy challenge. I won’t be surprised if some of the younger lads don’t spend the days surfing the front. Ha! Ha!”
Fred could see his joking wasn’t making Theo feel less worried.
“Seriously, though, Theo. When it comes time for them to hunker down, they’ll all find a sturdy perch and then once their feet are a-grippin’ that perch, nothing can make them let go. Like steel! They’ll be all right.”
And the pigeons were all right. It took some parts of the city months to get over the storm, but the pigeons were up and about the day after the rain stopped. Fred was out on his rounds as soon as the mayor gave the all clear (actually a little before) to make sure everyone was looked after. Still, he really didn’t need to. There was so much garbage—food to gobble—spilled onto the streets that the pigeons had a fine time.
Everyone survived in good balance.
Another worry loomed during Theo’s last year at home. This time the storm didn’t threaten the pigeons directly. It threatened Fred.
Mrs. MacDougal planned to introduce a new bylaw at the building’s annual meeting which would require that each resident prove that he or she had a bank account with at least five thousand dollars in it.
“I can’t raise that kind of money and she knows it!” said Fred. He and Theo sat dejectedly on a bench across from the statue of General Sherman.
Theo looked up at the statue and wondered if they could maybe scrape a little bit of the gold flake off, not so that anyone would notice but enough to put into a bank account for Fred.
“My pension is enough to keep me alive and pay my bills. But that’s it. I don’t have enough for a fancy bank account!”
For the first time he could recall, Theo thought his friend Fred looked really rattled.
“If she gets this thing through, I’m finished. I’m done for.”
On the night of the meeting about half of the residents of 777—just enough to pass a new bylaw—were in the lobby, standing, sitting, and leaning against the pillars.
Mrs. MacDougal spoke for fifteen minutes. She spoke gracefully, calmly, and with such a reasonable air that she made it clear that anyone who opposed the new bylaw must be mentally unstable, bad, or, at best, some kind of criminal. Many residents were nodding at her and one another as she spoke. It was important for the health of the building. Sure. It was common sense. It was the right thing to do.
Fred stood next to the door to the stairs, looking small and frightened. For once, he had nothing to say. You could see the fighting sparkle drain out of his eyes. And as it did, Theo could see the fire in Mrs. MacDougal’s eyes grow brighter and brighter.
When at last Mrs. MacDougal sat down in one of the leather lobby chairs, the building manager stepped in front. “Are there any other comments?” he said. You could tell that he felt sure that no one would dare speak against the proposal.
He looked a little less pleased, a little annoyed, when Theo pushed through the crowd to the front and stood next to him.
“I’d like to say something,” said Theo.
“Go ahead, Theo,” said the building manager. “I’m sure we’d all like hear what you have to say.” He smirked.
Theo coughed into his fist.
He said, “It seems to me that this rule is just a bully rule. It’s a rule to bully out all the poor people. And all the small people. I don’t have five thousand dollars in a bank account. I still live with my parents. Some kids do have that kind of money. But I don’t. Does this mean that I’m going to have to leave?”
“Oh, no, kid. Of course not,” said the building manager. “This isn’t meant to get you out. It’s meant to get out the people we don’t like!”
“Oh ho!” said Theo. “You admit it! This isn’t about being reasonable. This isn’t about doing the right thing for the building. This is about getting the people out that you don’t like! You’re the building manager. Not the building dictator!”
There was a lot of back and forth after that. The building manager turned bright red. Mrs. MacDougal slapped the arm of the leather chair quite a lot. And over the hubbub, Theo’s voice rang out, “You don’t even know what you’re playing with. If you get rid of Fred, the whole building could be in danger. If the gravity isn’t taken care of, who knows what could fall down?”
In the end, the new bylaw failed to pass by two votes.
The gravity was safe for the moment.
Theo continued to go on Fred’s rounds whenever he was home from college. By the time Theo was a senior, he couldn’t help notice that Fred was slowing down just a bit. That “Ha!” of Fred’s that used to shake the ferns in the lobby now sounded more like “Heh” and it barely made an African violet tremble. Theo hardly ever jumped in surprise anymore.
At the end of his college days, Theo went off to do graduate work in New England. He had an awful lot of reading to do there, so he almost didn’t have time to think about how Fred, the pigeons, and the gravity in New York were all doing.
Then one cold fall day Theo got a letter from Mr. Bunchley.
This is what it said.
Dear Theo,
I’m so sorry to tell you that Fred Adams has left the building. I mean, he’s moved on. I mean, Fred is dead! Sorry. I mean, he’s gone to another world, maybe to a doorman building in the sky. Some of us will miss him, and I know you are one.
The funeral was last Saturday.
Always holding the door open for you,
Darren Bunchley
Included with this letter was the obituary that had appeared in The New York Times. In it was the answer to our question about whether Fred was a young man who had led a hard life or an old man who had led an easy life.
However, first, you need to hear a few words about how Fred died.
When Fred left this earth for that place where no gravity reaches, possibly carried there by the pigeons he loved, he went quietly and alone. Mr. Bunchley had noticed something wrong when for an entire day the calm of the lobby had not been broken by a single soft “Heh,” however, he hadn’t worried much about it. When two days passed, he did worry, and then in the evening of the third day, Mr. Bunchley, along with our superintendent, Oskar, knocked on Fred’s door. And when there was no answer, Oskar let them in with Fred’s extra key.
•
Theo looked at the picture of Fred in The New York Times. There he was, standing on the top step of a rolling ladder, about to climb into the cockpit of a Lockheed Martin X-35, the experimental supersonic jet. He looked young, handsome, proud. His eyes sparkled and his clean-shaven chin was square and daring. Theo quickly scanned the article. The air force was conducting tests on the change of the force of gravity over various altitudes and latitudes of the earth. Fred was their most fearless pilot, taking the tests higher and farther than ever before until his last mission, when the tail of his aircraft had exploded, hurling bits of plane in every direction. Fred had apparently blacked out for several seconds but not before he had initiated the escape protocols. His parachute had landed him on the northern slopes of Greenland. He fought the elements for a week before he stumbled into an Inuit village, where the local medical people had brought him back to health.
When he at last returned to his flight base in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, his fellow pilots didn’t know him. He had aged fifty years in a month.
Fred Adams had retired from the air force on a hero’s pension and lived the rest of his life quietly and unrecognized at 777 Garden Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Theo put the paper down. He placed his chin in his left Fred and the Pigeons 31 hand and looked out the window to the clouds where he thought Fred’s spirit might have gone. He wondered about Fred and what effect his death would have at home.
If Theo had seen the paper again three days later this last question about Fred might have been answered by two small items in the Metropolitan Section. In the first, an apparently unexplained mass bird event occurred over the course of a week on the Upper East Side. Residents expressed annoyance and consternation at the huge concentration of pigeons that seemed to have descended on the city, particularly on the benches, lampposts, marquees, ledges, and rooftops surrounding Seventy-seventh Street and Garden Avenue.
“The cooing was driving us nuts. I mean, we’re used to pigeons, but this was like nothing I ever heard,” the building manager at 777 Garden Avenue is quoted as saying.
Then after a week of cooing, squatting, and milling about, the pigeons left as mysteriously as they arrived, taking flight in a gargantuan gray mass, circling twice and vanishing.
“It was eerie,” said Mr. Bunchley, 777 Garden Avenue’s doorman.
According to Eugene Pinion, an ornithologist with the Parks Department, scientists are baffled. “Maybe it has something to do with the stars,” he said.
The second item was very brief.
A tremor, a small earthquake, not unheard of in New York, occurred Tuesday afternoon, centered on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Some minor damage was reported.
No, Mrs. MacDougal never got him.
Quite the contrary.
At seventeen minutes after two in the afternoon on Tuesday, the day of that small earthquake, Mrs. MacDougal stood with her back against the arm of her living-room sofa, and watched as, singly or in pairs, or threesomes, every one of her vases tottered, tilted, and then fell to the floor, smashing into perhaps millions of pieces. Hundreds of thousands, anyway, without a doubt.
The Opera Singer Inspection
AS EVERYONE who lives in New York City knows, each building must have at least one working opera singer. Each residential building, at any rate. It’s a fact—part of the fabric of the city.
New Yorkers like to come home in the evenings, spring through fall, suffering perhaps from the troubled thoughts of the day, to have these troubled thoughts dispelled by cerulean melodies floating down upon them, like heavenly soot. Maybe it is an aria from La clemenza di Tito by Mozart, or maybe it is one of the parts of the chorus of Otello by Verdi, or maybe it is merely the singing of scales and arpeggios. But these melodies, even when they occupy only half of half of an ear, have become essential to the New Yorker’s life. And this is true even if we hate opera, and some of us do. Still, we need opera singers. Few of us know precisely from which apartment the notes waft down. But we know and count upon the fact that there will be notes wafting down from one little apartment in every corner of the city.
It is now law, codified sometime during the 1930s under Mayor La Guardia. The city ordinance was passed nearly unanimously—there was a small but tenacious anti-opera block, polka players and libertarians, mostly. Whether the opera singer is a soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, or bass, whether lyric, dramatic, heroic, or a member of the chorus, is, of course, left to the discretion of each building’s board of directors.
This legislation, having been written so long ago, is now simply an accepted and expected part of everyday life. Every building must have an opera singer. We’re speaking of buildings with five stories or more, or buildings with twenty or more units. Every New Yorker knows this.
But perhaps you live out of town and don’t know this. Now you know.
However, what even many New Yorkers don’t know is that these opera singers, from time to time, must be inspected.
This second law came about as the result of a famous tragedy that occurred in the 1960s.
An elderly gentleman, a banker named Brown, was returning to his home on the Upper West Side, lost in thoughts of the ratio of dollars to rubles in the wool industry, when he was struck by a falling high E. It came not from his own building’s opera singer but from the opera singer next door, who was making such a hash of the Queen of the Night’s aria from The Magic Flute, that when she came to the high E, it fell and struck Mr. Brown so hard in between the ears that it caused a massive brain hemorrhage and he died.
A tragedy all around. The opera singer felt terrible. She admitted later, when questioned by the police sergeant, that she was not in good form that day, that she had been out of practice.
Naturally, the incident was taken up by the city council, and the result of their many-weeks-long investigation was the drafting and pushing through of what has come to be known as Local Law 27, more commonly known as the Opera Singer Inspection.
We at 777 have had our opera singer now for many years. Unfortunately, they don’t last forever, but ours has been going strong and shows no need for replacement. Still, when every five years the inspection rolls around we all get a little nervous. The costs of repairing or replacing an opera singer can be enormous and can lead to complicated financial obligations for the building. Something best avoided if possible.
Miss Myrna Murray-Burdett is our opera singer. She is a lyric soprano. Of course, w
e like to think that the best buildings have sopranos. Nothing wrong with a fine tenor, but a soprano gives the building just a little more polish. (The snobs at 740 Garden Avenue insist that the soprano must be a coloratura—the snobs!) Myrna is known for her wonderful Micaela, which brought such praise to her from all the people in Chattanooga who heard her in the role there. We’ve never had any trouble with her. Day in, day out, year in, year out, she runs her scales and arpeggios, and when her accompanist, Timothy Noon, sits down with her for selections from Der Freischütz or The Barber of Seville or La Traviata, we all breathe easier: The building has its opera singer.
That is, we have never had any trouble with our opera singer until last Sunday evening, exactly one week and a day before the Opera Singer Inspector was due to arrive.
Miss Myrna Murray-Burdett came in that evening on the arm of, well, actually, he was on her arm—she’s a big woman —let’s say she came into the lobby in the company of a new admirer. Naturally, she was aglow, beaming, effervescent to the point of bubbling over.
Miss Murray-Burdett said to Mr. Bunchley, “Bunchley, I’d like you to meet Mr. Caswell Grape.”
“How do you do?” said Mr. Bunchley.
“I’m the biggest fan of Miss M.-B. She rocks my world!” said Mr. Grape.
“Oh, Cas!” said Miss M.-B. “You sound like a teenager!”
“I feel like a teenager. Have another mint?” Caswell, with a rakish smile on his face, pulled out from a brown paper bag a long, aqua-green box, which he held open toward Miss M.-B.
“Oh, Caswell, you do know the way to my heart,” said Miss M.-B. and she took the mint, opening the wrapper with an easy twist and placing it delicately on the tip of her tongue, which then retreated instantly into her mouth like a shy chipmunk to its underground den.
“Mmm, hm, hm, hm, hee, hee, hee,” she said, and they giggled, and nearly skipped over to the elevators.
After the elevator doors had closed, Mr. Bunchley said to the building manager, who was just crossing the lobby from his office with a clipboard under his arm, “They certainly seem in love.”
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