Forever

by Pete Hamill

  She likes saying the word, although when she says “cunt” it sounds shaved. Still, she enjoys it the way Delfina likes saying “motherfucker.” She turns, eases her buttocks onto the corner of her desk. Pressing against wood. Staring at Cormac.

  “I see what you mean,” Cormac says. “Particularly if you turn the O’Keeffe upside down.”

  She smiles in a neutral way.

  In the hall, Cormac hears murmuring from the far end, men and women laughing in the buzzed upper register of alcohol. He can now pick out Warren’s loud guffaw.

  “One more thing,” she says, glancing toward the laughter and opening another door. She flicks a switch.

  Inside, in indirect light, he sees frayed medieval battle flags behind glass, lithographed views of Jerusalem and Acre, dead Crusaders, men holding crosses.

  “My husband’s other museum,” she says. “All pretty ghastly, and very interesting.”

  Cormac’s heart stops. On the wall to the right, hanging from hooks by leather thongs, some jammed into cracked leather scabbards, are five weapons.

  In the center, longer than the others, its corroded face marked by spirals, is his father’s sword.

  100.

  He leaves the party in a state of fevered blur and icy clarity. At the door all mumble the buttery words of social banality: good night see you soon pleasure to meet you we had a fine time. Warren tells Cormac they must lunch at the Century, or right here again at the apartment, once he returns from a ten-day trip to Europe and Israel. No long summer doldrums for a newspaper publisher, are there? Elizabeth gazes at Cormac in a cool way and shakes his hand at the elevator door. On the sidewalk, under the awning, Ripley offers him a ride. The pitching coach suggests drinks at Elaine’s. Cormac smiles and says he’d better walk off the sumptuous meal. He starts down Fifth Avenue.

  His heart is beating hard.

  His father’s sword.

  Hanging like a trophy on a rich man’s wall. And not any rich man: this rich man, descendant of his father’s murderer.

  For years he searched for the sword among collectors and antiquarians, in junk shops and auction rooms. He carried with him sketches of the sword, drawn from memory, showing the spirals. Twice he met with men who tried to sell him clever counterfeits. He held them in his hand, felt their deadness, and knew they were fakes. Once a month, he scrolled through the auction sites of the Internet, saw swords of the same rough design, from the same period in time. All lacked the spirals. Now he has found the sword, through chance or fate. He thinks: I must have it.

  Must devise a plan to go back to that triplex on Fifth Avenue and once more hold my father’s sword.

  And then, for the final time, I must wield it.

  As he walks downtown on Fifth Avenue, he knows this will not be easy. A frontal assault is impossible. There’s a doorman and an elevator operator. And almost certainly a second elevator for deliveries and freight. With another operator. Video cameras. Security alarms, in the building and in the apartment. Hidden buttons and buzzers, at least one connected to the local precinct. The rich live well-defended lives.

  No (he thinks): I must return as an invited guest. And then stops.

  What about Delfina?

  And answers himself: Timing is all.

  101.

  His dreams are turbulent now. Most take place in the first hour after sleep, but they seem to last for years. He is in them, with time stretched, expanded, slowed, the images more vivid than life, and then he wakes up, trembling.

  He sees Delfina in an endless tenement corridor, fleeing a fireball. She wears a terry-cloth robe. The fire is at the far end of the block-long corridor, orange and angry, and she is running toward Cormac. She has an infant bundled in her arms. He extends his arms, unable to move his legs, and can’t reach her, and her face contorts in a scream.

  There is the Earl of Warren, rising from the water near the Battery, his clothes and flesh in shreds, his skull devoid of skin.

  There is Delfina on the ramparts of the Woolworth Building, smiling and barefoot in a gauzy yellow gown riffled by the high wind. She is unaware of the edge of the copper roof. She whirls in delight, calling his name, Cormac, Cormac, come here, Cormac—and goes off the edge. He is calling to her, leaping for her into the air above the city… and wakes up with his heart hammering.

  He sees a horde of men in scarlet, mounted on ten thousand white horses, rising on the rim of the hills around the Sacred Grove, many of them holding machine guns. There is a bellowed command and then they come pounding, the earth shaking, the air filled with explosions, the forest burning, and his mother holds a pike to await their charge, and his father is slashing at them with his sword, and still they come, and one of them waves on his spear the head of Mary Morrigan, and he laughs and sneers.

  He is in a cemetery and facing him are all the women he once loved, for a week or a month or a year, and in the center is the Countess de Chardon. They are dancing in morning fog. Some hold lyres. Music comes from beyond the tombstones. They hold hands. He walks forward to join them in the dance, and coming to him is the countess, smiling in welcome, and behind her with her body naked is Delfina.

  Then they are gone. He stands in mournful fog. The music still plays. A flute. The pipes. He tries to dance alone and cannot move. He hears a dog barking and knows it is Bran. Here I am, Bran, he shouts. Come to me. But Bran does not come. Nobody comes. Cormac is alone, mourning his dead.

  102.

  Elizabeth Warren calls and asks Cormac to breakfast on Sunday morning. A wash of betrayal passes through him, as if he were cheating on Delfina, but he agrees to meet Elizabeth in a hotel restaurant just north of Washington Square. On Saturday night, after much splashing in the jacuzzi, and after she had lounged for him on a couch as he traced her body on a charcoal sheet, after he was empty, after she had dozed and purred and said little, he walks to Church Street with Delfina, kisses her good-night, and sends her uptown in a taxi. The following morning, with the fog-thick streets still empty of most human beings, he walks north.

  When he sees a brightening ahead, he knows he is almost at Washington Square. And remembers the small ceremony when they opened this land as a park, and how the politicians and clergymen acted as if everything beneath their feet had been cleansed. All of the others in the small crowd knew they were wrong and that this ground would never be cleansed. For this was the execution ground across five decades, going back to the British. There stood the gallows, down to the left of what they all called the Fifth Avenue. Slaves were hanged from that gallows, and patriots, and Jesuits, and deviates, and even, before 1741, three witches. They were buried in shrouds in the swampy earth, where blackberries grew all the way to Bleecker Street, and wild partridge raced through thickets, and fox held their ground against humans until they finally joined the animal exodus to the north. For a year before fencing off the park, the authorities disinterred the bodies, of course, and drained the marsh. But they did not find all of the dead.

  And when the mansions started rising on the north side of the square, constructed with Holland brick that had come to America as ballast, and when people named Rhinelander and Minturn and Parish began to shape their mannered lives within the walls (preparing the way for Henry James), the disturbed dead rose on foggy nights.

  Cormac knew the dead were there because he had seen them, as he had seen the dead (or the undead, as the Irishman Bram Stoker called them) move through old houses and along those few streets at the tip of the island that still were cobbled. Murderers and Catholics, deviates and freaks, soldiers, seamen, and teamsters driven mad by the city: and then three pale women, the color of ivory, their dresses ragged as fog, walking in the yellow light of gas lamps.

  He had last seen the three pale women in Washington Square on a fog-shrouded night in 1971, after a demonstration in the square had railed against the war, against the bombing in Cambodia, against Richard Nixon. He sat on a bench that night for hours after the protestors had gone home, leaving only the litter
of their slogans, and then saw the women rise from the waters of the fountain, singing a lament. Every language seemed to have been mixed into the words, which mourned the death of the young. He understood them in English and Irish and Yoruba, in Italian and German and Yiddish. The young must not die, the three pale women sang. Old men must not bury their children. Weep for all the young dead.

  After that, he had not seen them again, but he knew they must still be there. Must still inhabit the earth beneath the fountain and the meth dealers, the dog walkers and the Frisbee flingers and the students of semiotics. Preparing fresh laments.

  Cormac crosses the square, past the caged Washington arch, separated for years now by a wire fence from citizens who might actually use it, and remembered Stanford White again, on the day it opened, talking a streak, red-haired, laughing, proud that he had designed the arch, chatting with reporters (including Cormac) as if he and the arch would live forever. That day, a young woman brushed against him, eyes wide. He paused, blinked, stared, whispered, and she went off smiling.

  The hotel dining room is cozy with dark wood and tinted steel engravings of Little Old New York. Elizabeth Warren isn’t there, but a half-dozen people are already working on breakfast: an older couple, some young people. Cormac hears a fragmented conversation in German about the Statue of Liberty and Windows on the World: destinations of the day. He walks to the reception desk, buys the Sunday Daily News, throws away the special sections and the advertising junk, and, back at the table, glances at the sports pages. He’s reading Mike Lupica’s column when he sees her coming in the door.

  She’s wearing one of those expensive pink jogging suits, and dark violet glasses, and a white cotton beret under which she has bundled her hair. She walks in her lean, ratcheting way on thick white running shoes, looking like Monica Vitti leaving the set of a 1960s movie to go to a gym. She sees Cormac, smiles, and he stands as she reaches the table. She brushes his cheek with a kiss, and he can smell a fragrance—apples?—rising from her skin.

  “A ghastly morning,” she says. “It’s like London out there.” “The sun will burn it off in an hour.”

  “One hopes.” She gazes around. “How cozy. And I’m famished.”

  A waiter brings menus. She takes off the sunglasses to read, folding them and tucking them into a pocket of the jogging suit. Her makeup is so subtly applied that she seems to be wearing none at all. There’s a restrained gloss of pale lipstick on her wide mouth.

  “I want one of those gigantic American breakfasts,” she says. “Mounds of pancakes and bacon and sausage. The whole lot. And an OJ. And a steaming mug of coffee. Everything.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “I’m still trying to get over last night,” she says. “We saw this movie about Pearl Harbor, and I exhausted myself laughing. Have you seen it?”

  “I’d rather go to jail.”

  “Oh, you must see it. It’s so ghastly that you can’t help yourself. My husband, as usual, thought I was crazy. But—”

  “How is he?”

  The waiter returns with a coffee pot, pours two cups, takes their orders, moves silently away.

  “How is he? Oh, he’s what he is. A perfectly kind and loving man. Full of mad idealism.”

  She says this like one of those Brits who believe that most Americans are botched Brits.

  “He’s doing a good job with the newspaper,” Cormac says. “Isn’t he, though? Excellent. Even I’ve begun to read it.” “That would make a good commercial.”

  “Yes, wouldn’t it, though. But in that case, I’d rather go to jail.” The food arrives. She eats with the greedy carelessness of someone who believes she’ll always be thin. And Cormac thinks: Delfina eats as if she will die tomorrow. Elizabeth finishes before Cormac. Talking all the while about the president, and missile defense (“Who exactly are the Americans planning to defend themselves from?”). Then, glancing at the engravings, she goes on about New York, and her discoveries, and the energy of the city, and the good manners of its citizens. “It’s come a long way since Mrs. Trollope was here,” she says. “Have you ever read her book?”

  “Yes,” Cormac says (remembering the woman’s pinched, nervous face). “She had an unforgiving eye for human weakness.”

  “Exactly. I should do a sequel. ‘Domestic Manners of the New Americans.’ ”

  Cormac finishes breakfast. A Mexican busboy takes their plates. Cormac yearns for a cigarette and wonders if nicotine withdrawal has been giving him bad dreams.

  “I so wish I could belch,” Elizabeth says. “But the ghost of Mrs. Trollope is intimidating.”

  “If anyone notices, I’ll explain you’re an Arab. New Yorkers believe anything you tell them about Arabs. They’ve become what the Irish were in the nineteenth century.”

  Her eyes bright with schoolgirlish conspiracy, she covers her mouth with a napkin and smothers a gassy belch. Then laughs.

  “I did it, I did it!”

  “Excuse me. I have to call Page Six.”

  “No, no, not that!”

  She talks then about Page Six and the gossip columns in the Daily News and what wicked fun all of them are, unless you are the subject of their wicked scrutiny. The waiter pours fresh coffee. Then Elizabeth Warren seems to wind down, poking a spoon into the coffee, her elbows on the table. She looks up, her face serious.

  “Let me ask you something,” she says.

  “Sure.”

  She seems embarrassed.

  “Are you a free man?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Don’t suppose. You’re not married, I take it. But do you have a woman?”

  A moment of hesitation. “I’m seeing a lot of a woman.”

  She smiles in a rueful way.

  “God damn it.”

  Cormac says nothing.

  “Before we moved here,” she says, “one of my friends warned me. All the attractive men, she said, are married, or drunks, or gay.”

  She sips her coffee.

  “But I’d like to see more of you. You look like a man who can keep a secret. And there’s something you can help me do.”

  Cormac does not ask her to define that something.

  “And you’re cautious too,” she says. “That always helps.” Now there’s a hint of hardness in her voice and she glances at her watch. “I have to see my husband, alas.”

  She gets up, forces a smile, and shakes Cormac’s hand.

  “I’d better go,” she says. “The agents of Page Six are everywhere.” She leans close, kisses him on the mouth. Then she turns and walks across the restaurant, hips ratcheting, and goes out to the city.

  103.

  Before leaving the hotel, he buys a pack of Vantage cigarettes. Outside, the fog has lifted and he uses book matches to light his first cigarette in nine days. He feels a mixture of failure and relief. Then, walking east along the edge of the park, with children now playing in the grass with their fathers or mothers (the nannies all off for the day), and a few stray homeless men scouting benches, he inhales deeply and thinks about Elizabeth Warren. Nicotine, after all, is a clarifying drug. He is groping for clarity.

  There’s something about Elizabeth Warren, he thinks (dropping his cigarette butt down a sewer opening), that is not Elizabeth Warren. She faces left when she should be facing right. In one way, she’s the woman she presents to the world: cool and smooth and intelligent. But the woman at breakfast was a flopped tracing of that original, the reverse of what she seems to be, while remaining the same woman. The cool Elizabeth at breakfast revealed someone hotter and darker. Clearly, she’s pulling me, a total stranger, into something that she wants me to do. The lure is familiar: the hidden pleasures between her lean thighs. But she hints at something else. Something about her husband. As if her need has detected my need.

  As if she wants help in a killing.

  104.

  He reaches the Astor Place station and then he sees a man coming up the stairs. His name is Bobby Simmons, and he has skin the color of tea with
milk, hair almost white, a hunched stance. He’s carrying a worn saxophone case covered with hotel decals and old clearances from customs. Cormac blocks his way. The old man looks at his face as if he’s being challenged, and then smiles.

  “Gahdamn,” Simmons says. “It’s you for sure, ain’t it? Cormac O’Connor himself.”

  They embrace as Simmons reaches the street. People move around them, glancing at fresh newspapers, taking Metrocards from their wallets.

  “Hello, Bobby,” Cormac says.

  “Gahdamn, such a long time.”

  Simmons is breathless from climbing the subway stairs and from the seventy-six years he carries on his spare frame.

  “I didn’t know you were back from Europe,” Cormac says. “Six weeks now, and damn, the dirty ol’ Apple looks good. Never seen so many good-lookin’ women all at one time.” He grins and starts walking west, Cormac beside him. “I was gone fourteen months, ya know. Paris—mostly Paris—but Copenhagen too, and London, and Prague, and hey, even Dublin, man. With your people. Crazy motherfuckers, your people. They got music comin’ outta they asses. Hey—where you going?”

  “Home.”

  “No, you ain’t. You comin’ with me. I gotta gig down here on Eleven Street, in…” He glances at his wristwatch. “In three minutes. And I need a piano player.” He pronounces it “pianner,” in the old New York style, and grins when he says the word. “Who says they ain’t a god? You come out of the subway, and there’s the pianner player.”

  “Hell, Bobby, I can’t play with you guys, no rehearsal, no—”

  “Come on. It’s just you, me, and a bass player. Some kid from Juilliard. We’ll play the old stuff. Nothin’ fancy.”

  He grabs Cormac’s arm, leaning on him for support.

  The place is called the Riff Club and fills an old dining room off the lobby of a small hotel. The operators of the club are experimenting with afternoon concerts on weekends, Simmons says, and about forty people are waiting when they arrive. At the back of the room there’s a bar and a dozen people with cigarettes sending a blue nicotine haze to the ceiling. Cormac smiles. The place is like five hundred other joints where he’s done time since the nights and days of Prohibition. The crowd is mixed. About half white, half black, half young, half old: a 200 percent saloon crowd. Cormac sees a few graying faces from vanished nights at the Vanguard and the Five Spot. Everybody is drinking.