Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  With his feeble paternal tools, he had still tried in his own way to break through. For years, he’d invited Cornelia aboard the Lord & Company business jet to fly them both to Palm Beach for Christmas. He wanted to soothe her with the balm of the Florida sun, the lush bougainvillea, and the old banyan trees around the Mediterranean-style house where Elizabeth and Corny had once played. But Cornelia had trembled and refused to board the plane, causing him to cancel at the last minute. Finally, when she was thirteen, she let him take her hand and climb aboard. While the engines still screamed on takeoff, the pilots received word of a severe thunderstorm ahead, and Chester told them to turn back. So they shared a silent ride home from the airport, his daughter lost in a book, responding to his efforts at conversation about school and friends with polite nods.

  The cracks had already formed in Cornelia’s personality by then, small fissures that ran to her core. In the past few years, they’d split open with ferocity. His now remote daughter began to nurse an all-consuming passion she would no longer share with her father.

  The damnable Tesla.

  Cornelia had convinced herself that if Tesla had been allowed to build his free-energy tower, it would have changed the world. The poorest families on earth could have all the free energy they needed. Cars and planes could run on clean electricity. He shook his head and chuckled bitterly at that. Here, take your Exxon card back with a lifetime refund. Tear up those utility bills. Shut down that leaky nuclear power plant next door. And whatever happened to air pollution?

  What an innocent child Cornelia could be.

  No doubt those flinty men who owned energy monopolies at the turn of the century saw a glimpse of that free-energy future, too. The first Chester Lord did, and helped them put a stop to it. Chester I had slyly pulled the plug on Tesla. The inventor died a lonely, discredited recluse who spent his final years in New York City haunting public parks, feeding crumbs to pigeons.

  Chester drained his martini. The warmth of the gin was shrinking the anvil in his chest to something more manageable.

  Cornelia studied Tesla’s life and work so wholeheartedly that she neglected her studies at Gramercy School. A withdrawn teenager, she revealed little sexual interest in boys. Nor in girls either, fortunately. First the child psychologists called her a late bloomer. Then a very late bloomer. Eventually she began spending all her time in activities she would not share with him.

  A year ago, their contact had withered even more. She had begun leaving the apartment with a shiny blue hard hat under her arm at 7:00 A.M., refusing to tell him where she was going. She wouldn’t arrive home until after midnight. When he asked her where she’d been, she’d say, “a museum,” and nothing more. He had feared briefly that she was having an affair with a construction worker. Then he wondered whether wearing a construction hard hat every day for nine months could be a strange, symbolic act of birth. Clearly a matter for a psychiatrist. He insisted that she see a heavy-duty therapist named Dr. Bushberg, recommended by his own doctor, for as many times a week as he deemed necessary to try to break her fever of unresolved grief. She went, but told Chester nothing, though he fished meekly for signs of change.

  For the past year, consciously or not, he had steadily abdicated his responsibility for Cornelia to Dr. Bushberg and Tucker Fisk.

  Tucker Fisk.

  He had come to believe, or to hope so fervently it felt like a belief, that his protégé could save her the way he’d rescued Chester at Lord & Company. The boy seemed to care a great deal about his daughter, courting her in his managerial fashion. Tucker used the force of his personality to shield her from trouble. And she didn’t make it easy.

  The fountain fiasco was only the latest embarrassment. Two years before, Cornelia had left her own debutante party halfway through, simply vanishing into the night. There had been whispers and odd looks within their social set. Next came a wasted half term at Vassar before she dropped out. She was too busy studying Tesla.

  He had tried to phone Dr. Bushberg, conveniently out of town for the weekend. He thought angrily of how he’d grill the psychiatrist to his shoes on Monday to get answers.

  Chester drained the small martini pitcher. The instant that he did, O’Connell appeared with another. It also went down smoothly, a calm glow inside him. Like the fire in his hearth. Then the door chimes jingled and he heard O’Connell’s footsteps marching across the marble foyer. This would be yet another indignity heaped on Corny, a bodyguard Tucker suggested they hire to watch over her.

  He stood up with a mighty effort. He and Tucker would have to put their heads together tonight and come up with a workable plan. He readied himself to greet the woman O’Connell brought into the den.

  “Pleased to meet you.” The woman stuck out her hand. “Sergeant DiBlasi, New York City Police Department, off duty today. The commissioner’s a friend of yours?”

  “Yes, he is.” Chester took the woman’s hand. She gave it a brisk squeeze he could still feel after she withdrew it. He felt concern for his slender daughter in this physically powerful woman’s care.

  Sergeant DiBlasi had a square face with shiny skin. Her straight hair was cut at her shoulders, and she wore a black blazer over a sweater and skirt. Her curveless frame couldn’t be described as girlish, nor did it appear to be a female weight lifter’s.

  “You don’t look… ah…” Chester wanted to offer a small compliment, but these days he measured his words to female employees carefully.

  She flashed a professional smile that she ended as quickly as her handshake.

  “Not as butch as you thought?” She chuckled without mirth. “I’ll meet your daughter anytime. No point trying to hide the fact I’m here to keep her in.”

  “No,” Chester spoke coolly, unfairly resenting the woman. “No point in that.”

  Chapter Three

  Kevin remembered, a half-hour into his second shift, why Andrew told him they called the Russian doorman Vladimir “Vlad the Self-Impaler.”

  In the stuffy heat of the lobby, Vlad fell asleep easily. While Vlad talked, his eyes drooped. Then his jaw sagged onto his chest, and his head flopped over after it. Andrew had told Kevin that one night Vlad fell asleep and crashed over onto the lobby’s umbrella stand. A jeweled Cartier umbrella, which some resident had carelessly stuck in with the tip up, punctured a nasty hole in Vlad’s cheek. Kevin could still see his white scar.

  At least Vlad didn’t snore. The shift passed uneventfully, if the boredom that threatened to saw Kevin’s brain in half didn’t count as an event. Even staying vigilant and on top of details, Kevin found whole hours where nothing at all occurred, leaving his mind cut loose to drift. Only four residents trickled in after midnight, and Kevin would kick Vlad’s shoe to wake him.

  That left Kevin plenty of time to torture himself in the muted good taste of the dark lobby, thinking about how his mother must have felt with her head and arms and legs in a wild, rolling jumble down the hard cement staircase of his parents’ tenement building.

  Kathleen Feeney Doyle fell from the fourth-floor landing, flailing around in the dark because the staircase light, a pathetic 89-cent bulb, had gone out. It hadn’t even burned out. The negligent prick of an absentee landlord, who lived somewhere in Westchester County, hadn’t paid the building’s electric bill on time. Two days later, Kevin saw men installing a thin, slick roll of imitation Astroturf over the cement stairs, to give the impression of a carpet. The dim bulbs lighting the staircase came back on, too. The landlord had raced to pay the building’s Con Ed electric bill before the building inspector came to check.

  Kevin replayed the scene over and over, a horrifying movie projected on the back of his eyelids. Once it started, he couldn’t shut it off.

  She had lost her footing carrying a twenty-pound turkey in a plastic bag. That was going to be their Thanksgiving dinner. She shouldn’t have been carrying it: a couple of hours later, Kevin and his two sisters would be there to help. But his mother could be stubborn as an Irish donkey.

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nbsp; Kevin’s father, Dennis, had heard the commotion from their apartment, ran down the stairs to find her, and yelled for a neighbor to call 911. His dad then called Marne and she called Kevin. He arrived in time to see his mother at St. Agnes Hospital hooked up to tubes, doctors and nurses desperately trying to save her life.

  “I love you, Mom,” Kevin shouted to her.

  But even with all the beeping and shouting and crowding around, the doctors couldn’t reverse the damage.

  Kathleen Doyle had been only fifty-one years old when she died. Born on a slag farm in Bloody Forehead, she had sailed to the U.S. and met Dennis Doyle in Brooklyn, soon becoming mother to Kevin, Marne, and his older sister, Helen. She came with more than a bit of the mystical Irish Catholic about her.

  Like other Irish country girls from the moonlike rock towns of County Sligo, she was told that mothers whose sons became priests were guaranteed a place in heaven. You couldn’t know that for a fact, she’d said, but he could tell those rural priests had pretty well convinced her. But even his mother realized that Kevin Doyle, child of Tenth Avenue and 17th Street, wasn’t exactly priest material.

  He could forgive himself for not giving the priesthood a shot. It hurt him more to be standing in the lobby with a monkey suit on instead of working on his art for her after she’d stood up for him. As a kid, he was the only Doyle to sit quietly and observe things with what she called his “artist eye.” She made it her business to expose him to the world of art, dragging out her old Time Life books on art appreciation, showing him the pictures inside when he was good, and using the heavy picture books to whack him when he wasn’t. Seeing Kevin as an artist meant a lot to her. She sacrificed so he could go to art school, even if it was only a trade school, the New York Institute of Art and Technology, that advertised on subway posters. His payback would be to perfect the neon sculpture he made just for her.

  He couldn’t save his mother now, but maybe he could still do something that would have made her proud of him.

  Brace this time, Kevin thought, sliding his time card into the slot to punch out.

  Ker-chunk.

  Another jolt screamed through Kevin’s body. As if the time clock was made by the folks who brought you the electric chair. He clocked out at 8:07 A.M. Two shifts, back to back.

  He wondered if the men who ran the building would invent a funny name for him like “Vlad the Self-Impaler.” He would try to earn one closer to “The Artist” than, say, “The Asshole.”

  Kevin had drunk gallons of coffee but eaten nothing, so his stomach made sloshing noises when he walked and he felt jittery. But he had plenty to do before he could even sneak up on the concept of sleep. Most important, he had to check on Saint Sebastian. His sculpture might need dusting, and nobody else would do it.

  Kevin changed into his civilian clothes, thinking about neon. He could never seem to finish the sculpture for his mother. “It’s not right until it’s right,” Max, his instructor, said. A real artist couldn’t think any other way.

  Max had convinced him that Saint Sebastian needed a better halo. He’d work all night if he had to, get two hours sleep, and do the next doorman shift. Sleep deprivation from this job would degrade the hand-eye coordination he needed to make the circle geometrically perfect, with no bumps. But he’d just have to keep bending it until it was right.

  Walking outside onto Fifth Avenue, his face was stung by the fierce wind whipping over the stone wall of Central Park. The trees were stripped bare and rickety under a thin winter sun. His crusty jeans, boots, and leather motorcycle jacket didn’t keep him too warm in late December. But his only winter clothes had been stolen, along with just about everything else in his rat’s nest apartment on Avenue B, in the cold heart of Alphabet City. He bent forward, rounded the corner into another tunnel of biting wind on 65th Street, and headed east.

  A few yards down, he spotted a man leaning against a dented Toyota, acting impatient and fidgety. Somehow Kevin knew this was the tabloid reporter Andrew had warned him about. He sensed the guy watching him through mirrored sunglasses that were stark against his dark-chocolate skin. His head was shaved—it was a pretty good skull, with a couple of lizardy wrinkles on his neck. A once-expensive but faded scarf flapped in the breeze. Over the shoulder of the man’s camel-hair coat, Kevin saw a beat-up brown-leather camera bag.

  As Kevin was about to pass him, the black man took his sunglasses off and separated himself, smooth as an athlete, from his hood-ornament position on the Toyota. Curious, probing eyes were sunk back into their sockets. His wide smile made him look like a man on his way to a party.

  “Young man”—he moved with agility toward Kevin—“I’m Philip Grace. Congratulations on your new job.” He came alongside and touched Kevin’s arm lightly under the elbow. “Let me walk with you. What’s your name?”

  Confidence, Kevin thought. Maybe fake, but that’s what confidence usually was. The guy had a way about him. His features weren’t handsome, but made him look both engaging and disciplined. He also wore a small gold ring in one ear.

  “Name’s Kevin Doyle.” He put out his hand.

  “Well, Kevin Doyle, I see you’re in a hurry.” Philip walked familiarly close. His attention flattered Kevin a little, like a coach warming up a draft pick. Kevin glanced at Grace’s coat. The collar looked shiny, as though the nap had been brushed up too often. He made an effort to camouflage himself, to loiter around 840 Fifth.

  “So I’ll just get right down,” Grace said. “I bet you found out you’re going to be making about thirty-two grand your first year with overtime. Let me suggest a way you could establish an extra income stream.”

  “You make it sound tempting, selling you stuff,” Kevin said. “But I guess tempting is your business.”

  Philip Grace gave him a mock-rueful smile. “I see you been talkin’ to my friend Andrew. Good man of his generation. Keepin’ his place, and all. Now you look to me like a young man with a plan. What’s your real life? My bet is, you’re a creative guy. Writer, somethin’ like that.”

  “Something like that,” Kevin allowed.

  Philip waited. “So are you a writer? Keepin’ a journal on those people in the building? Ways of the WASP?”

  “I’m an artist.”

  “Well,” Philip told him, “some would say that if you make your money workin’ as a doorman, then you’re a doorman ‘stead of an artist. But I say, you gotta give a creative person time and inspiration. What kind of art?”

  “I do neon sculpture.”

  “Pink flamingos ’n’ shit?”

  “My dad thought I ought to do beer signs.” It felt easy talking to Philip, so long as he could sniff the way the reporter’s questions were headed. “He worked as a brewer for Schaeffer a long time ago.”

  “I remember Schaeffer. New York beer,” Philip Grace said.

  “Nobody else does,” Kevin told him. “But I got involved making this sculpture of Saint Sebastian instead. You know the martyr with the arrows in his chest?”

  “Long way from Schaeffer to saints.” Grace chewed that over. “Like Hallmark stuff? Little red St. Valentine neon guy, with pudgy cheeks?”

  “Bigger,” Kevin said. “Life-sized.”

  Grace looked lost. “You mean neon art? Is it good?”

  “Well…” The cold numbing his face, Kevin knocked his hands together and took a breath. “I can tell you it’s almost perfect technically, except the halo’s a little off and I can’t get the neon to shimmer the way I’d like. I got it in a gallery, but like the owner says, ‘It’s not creative unless it sells.’ So I guess the jury’s still out on how good it is.”

  “’Cause I was thinkin’,” Grace went on, and Kevin had to give him credit for plugging away, “maybe we could swing by St. Patrick’s, ask if they need it for the altar.”

  Kevin cackled loudly at the thought of his Sebastian in the Irish saint’s cathedral on Fifth Avenue. Yeah, they’d love it at St. Pat’s, the priests probably throwing holy water to chase it out.
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br />   The two of them had already walked two blocks crosstown, were coming to the light on Park Avenue.

  “Whoa.” Philip put his hand in front of Kevin, holding him back.

  A bicycle messenger from hell shot in front of them unexpectedly, wearing a black helmet and gloves.

  “Thanks,” Kevin said.

  The city had hung festive white holiday lights on the spare trees in the center of the avenue, but they wouldn’t start glittering until after dark. On top of all the coffee, hunger made Kevin feel light-headed. Philip Grace bounced along with him, just as hungry for information.

  “I read your story yesterday,” Kevin said. “What’s your column called?”

  Philip slipped his hand into the pocket of his once elegant coat and handed Kevin a glossy business card, fancy white letters on a black background.

  Philip Grace. Debwatch. The New York Daily Globe.

  He saw an office number and a pager. No address.

  “I thought it up myself,” Grace said. “A debutante watch. ‘Debutante,’ you look up the word, that’s a girl gets it all handed to her, parents throw this comin’ out party when she’s eighteen. She’s introduced to society, meanin’ the white power structure. The ‘watch’ part, that’s my job. I keep my nose down, see what all those debs get up to, ’specially if they like to run around, get into trouble.”

  Kevin waited. “Why?”

  Philip Grace gave him an All-Star glower. “Kevin Doyle, the debutante is the last gasp of the great let-’em-eat-cake, guzzle-champagne-on-the-backs-of-the-poor American class system. The Golden Goddess of Inequality is what she is. When one of ’em falls off the pedestal, it’s got social significance.”