What was it, this empathy that swirled about him just out of reach? He could imagine the steel beams expanding, exposed girders faltering and twisting as their critical load strengths were passed, some buckling now where the walls still held, others pushing the walls away from the floors, the floors collapsing and marble stairs spawling like crystal under the torrents of water falling and flooding down toward the basement, swamped in a tide of ash and metal tines of coal and roar of steam. The cornice that had gotten red before coming loose to plummet seven stories all in a piece to the street presaged the belltower sinking into the roof just above that painted image of a woman’s finger, that fragment of some long-lost advertisement, its polished nail still bright. With this—the cornice may or may not have caught someone down below, it was impossible to see over all the shoulders and heads—the collective mood delicately shifted from awe to fear, and the crowd drifted back on itself away from the growing sphere of fire.
Krieger was itching to talk, yet as he studied those around him his mood sank more. The girl standing next to him, holding forth against the retreat, skateboard under her arm, would have to do—they were all morons, anyway, he ascertained even while his own sense of power abruptly faded. “I started this, you know.”
She stepped away from him, held the board against her chest.
“The fire,” Krieger explained. “I started it.”
She looked away, said nothing.
Perhaps she hadn’t heard him. After all, it was noisy out here. He repeated what he’d said, and continued, rather louder, “No, I did in fact, really. There was a little fire already going in there about twenty, twenty-five minutes ago and I, there were these burlap sacks on fire and so I spread them around, gave them a chance to prove themselves.”
Still no riposte.
“You know what else? See up there along the top couple of stories? There was a cattle ranch operating up there, half a dozen head.”
Bullshit, Krieger said to himself, on her behalf.
“I mean it,” aloud in his own voice.
Like you mean a regular cow ranch like?—inventing the voice of the young girl in his head.
“Right,” as Krieger.
You mean with like those mechanical kind of bulls that chick in the Travolta picture, what one was it, where the chick like in the tight jeans rides like she’s getting screwed on the mechanical bull, that brown-haired chick—
“No, no you ever seen Bonanza!”
Huh?
“Sure, Little Joe, Big Joe, Hoss, all that crap? Just like that, painted prairie, seasonal crop, silo, the whole shmear.”
“What?” the girl said for herself, dazed by the strange performance.
Krieger was startled she’d spoken. “Why not?”
The imagined girl: Yeah well, why not, okay. But why’d you want to go burn it down for?
“Hey, honey, why not? right?”
The girl coughed at the rubber smell and looked up at the thick columns of smoke plummeting upward, forming a vast curtain over the streets. The street lights radiated down through the smoke, and produced heavy cones, pink as if it were nightfall. Aside from sirens in the distance, it was very quiet here. The traffic must have been diverted away from the area for blocks around. Cherrypickers carried men in twos up into the curtain, and a tearing sound was made by the water as it hit the stone and bricks. She could also hear, she was sure, the sound of water boiling.
Krieger breathed in. The air was perceptibly warmer. “It’s beautiful though isn’t it?” and his eyes moved up the building which now had begun to collapse in stages under the weight of the water upon the failing architecture. “You kids everybody’s gotten used to thinking fire’s just destructive, but the old cultures thought it had all kinds of different powers, put it to use, forest management, hell they were smart, fire was the souls of their ancestors, I mean they thought fire lived in wood and other things, your boyfriend’s underpants for example, and that it could be sprung to life by friction see? like making the beast with two backs, you’ve done that before haven’t you?”
“What beast?”
“Shakespeare.”
“I better go.”
“Making the goddamn beast with two goddamn backs! Use your head, I mean fucking, fucking and you know what fucking is? all fucking is is friction, you ever heard of the French philosopher Diderot defined love as an emotion caused by the rubbing together of two epidermises, but as I was saying these Herero, South African tribe, these Herero believed both they and their cattle came from fire, dig this at Mostar in Herzogovina? the bride sits her little black maiden pud down on a bag of fruit and here she is and she starts to stoke at the fire in the hearth, one two three times, and this is the only way she’ll conceive, same with the Hindus they pray to fire-gods, same with your Aryans, your Slavs, here you have the bride all hot and bothered ready to get down to it and so she pokes the fire with a stick and as many sparks that fly up so many cattle and male offspring’ll come, it’s true all over so this is like a creative process here, a beautiful act, like fucking it’s like I fucked this building and the fire there it’s like an orgasm.”
Krieger didn’t like what he saw then in the retreating, wide-open eyes that searched his face. He was gazing, he thought, into the eyes of some new species that had dragged itself up out of the murk and shaken off its tail, left it there on the sandy shore and evolved without pause into its civilized stage as apocalyptic pioneer. He found this neither pitiable nor as comical as his temperament usually dictated it to be.
“You’re all a bunch of fucking morons,” he said, simply enough, and turned his back on the vision of the fire and the girl.
He kept a rigid steady pace through the crowd, looking back only once to see the girl talking to a policeman, pointing in his direction. At this Krieger’s heart approvingly lit up.
9.
IT WAS A procession or a parade, Hannah thought, but here Sunday had come and she had been so entrapped by the necessities—for this is how she would view these days: how the devil else?—necessities of survival, that the holiday being celebrated had slipped her mind. There was Thursday, of course; Thanksgiving. She felt a little remorse at how that festivity had gone uncelebrated this year—Thanksgiving which, despite all, had always been Hannah’s favorite day of the year what with its cranberry sauce, its goose and its rice pudding, the mincemeat and squash pies mama Opal laid out and which, when Hannah could stand chin high to the burners of the stove, she taught her daughter to prepare with the same special, secret enthusiasm she herself had. Hannah shook her head at the overcast sky. Neither she nor mama Opal ever had much to be thankful for. All the mirth with which those pies were made had come unquestioned, as if it were entrusted to the calendar’s logic, like a rationale wryly held there in the date itself lavished every year in praise and sauces. And how accustomed it had become to Hannah’s homage each November, Hannah who, even after mama Opal had disappeared, carried on as its shy new celebrant. The evening of Thanksgiving 1956 had been the only time when uncle LeRoy had lit a fire of old pine logs in the dining-room hearth and helped Hannah wash dishes after supper, even tucked her in bed, awkward and tender and as confused as a sparrow which accidentally had flown in through an open window. That was a night their edges seemed to overlap. Such a moment seldom came again.
Then, what was this? she thought. It couldn’t really have been much of a parade, for there were only a few people that lined the fence at the corner of Fifth Avenue and nth Street. The church behind was massive and dignified.
Hannah stood up on tiptoes to see what the laughter could be about. No, this couldn’t have anything to do with Thanksgiving—that was days ago, although she had to admit it seemed like so much longer, the pleasing vision of Henry, happy, across the table reading from one of LeRoy’s books. What can you say of macaroni, of spaghetti? what are “raised biscuits” and what are “beaten biscuits”? what should be done with bread when it is taken from the oven? what injurious gases are developed i
n foods by bad cooking? why is New Zealand preferable to the common spinach (”because it is so far away,” said Maddie)—and as he read she laughed, as did Hammond who grabbed away the book and read, “What are the bottoms and the choke of the globe artichoke” (which sounded metaphysical)—and then came Hannah’s own turn at it; she turned at random to a page to read aloud, “In rural regions, both in the United States and in Europe, farmers sometimes cooperate in the maintenance of slaughterhouses and storehouses, thus making it easier to obtain fresh meat in hot weather. In a ‘meat club’ in this country, which was said to be successful, the members took turns in providing animals (lambs or heifers) for the slaughtering which was done in a special shed on three Saturdays of each month.”
“Hannah, stop,” Maddie said.
But she hadn’t heard, and continued, “The meat was distributed among the members according to a system previously agreed on, the different cuts going to the different members in rotation. A fixed price per pound was agreed—”
“Hannah.”
“—on at the beginning of the season and at the end of the season accounts were balanced according to the weight of the animals provided by and of the cuts—”
“Hannah, please.”
“—no, cuts supplied to each member. Such a plan seems capable of extension to meet (meat!) a variety of conditions, particu—”
Someone whistled. Someone else pushed his way through the group of people which had gathered, shaking his head. Someone—it was a boy in a Sunday suit, but Hannah could only see him from his elbows up—made whoops of pleasure and bobbed up and down weightless and excited. Uptown there were the sounds of sirens and when Hannah looked up at the stately Gothic central tower of the First Presbyterian at 11th Street she saw a cloud that rose not so many blocks behind it, lifting quantities of blackness up into the sky to form a swirling pool almost precisely the shape of a child’s spinning top. It was very beautiful, in fact, she thought.
More immediate to Hannah’s eye were her cattle here in the grassy courtyard of the church, grazing indifferently at the long grass beside the crab apple trees and the brownstone walls embellished with tracery of quatrefoils. Henry sat on the steps of the church, behind the cast-iron fence. Madeleine could be seen standing in the doorway talking to a gentleman who seemed thoroughly confused by whatever it was she was telling him. The cattle seemed so small in their new surroundings and their delicate fawn coats and faces. The boy in the Sunday suit whose legs spread around the ribs of one of the cattle tired quickly of his game but, unwilling to climb down, lay his head against the back of the animal’s silky neck. Mounted police entered the scene from the square below.
Parts of the building that hadn’t trailed up into the air, or been carried by the overflow of water down into the flooded gutters and thence between the grates of corner drains, were taken away by the city, for the structure—a grand old pile the records showed to have been designed by De Lemos & Cordes so long ago—was, while not completely consumed, adequately weakened as to be condemned on site by the first inspectors who arrived the next afternoon to begin picking through the char. It hissed well into the night, well after many of the auxiliary crews pulled out. Because of the peculiar nature of the fire, which had progressed so extensively within the stories of the warehouse before burning its way outward quite literally in search of air, there was little chance of salvaging the building itself. Hardly a chaotic fire, it seemed to those who had fought it, and to those who began the work of sorting out how it might have started, remarkably systematic, almost—tidy. For one, as a result of the heart of the structure having burned out first, creating a white-hot empty center, almost like a vacuum, once the flames reached the outer walls and roof, the constituent facing, the cast-bronze fluted Cabaret pillars, brickwork, molding, cornices, and all the rest obligingly collapsed, gable by gable, inward on itself and not out into the streets. What was left, then, was a rectangular mass over which stood individual upright supports and shafts, stationed like columns of giant soldiers ordered to stand stationary guard over the devastation.
Guards were not needed. There was no looting because nothing worth stealing survived. Within days they were relieved of their dubious duty as a wrecking crew moved in to topple the walls and bulldoze the debris into heaps stacked high in dumpsters so they could then be taken away. The rubble of uncle LeRoy’s possessions would eventually end up half in a landfill on Fountain Avenue in Brooklyn and half on the deck of a garbage barge to be taken some miles out to sea ahead of a churning, burly tugboat, and dumped into the water to mingle with the remains of Henry Hudson and his son, John.
For twenty-four hours it was a cause célèbre, although the sudden appearance of half a dozen head of Guernseys grazing the lawn of a church at the bottom of Fifth Avenue and the destruction by fire of a huge warehouse in Chelsea could in no responsible way be connected. As if they had materialized under the crab apple trees of the lawn the animals appeared to have no owner, and no one stepped forward to take possession of them aside from the man who seemed somewhat befuddled at all the questions that were asked of him, the man in overalls and boots who according to the police report was first to notice them and with the help of his wife pastured them safely off the street and into the fenced parvis.
Insofar as the owner or owners of the said building were not immediately identified (as some surmised, because the city was unable to trace ownership beyond a rural route box in, of all places, Nebraska—unable, that is, within the first day or two in which these events were purported to be news) no one, likewise, came forward to talk about the (as one paper put it) “fiery conflagration.”
After the cinders flamed out into the rotation of what was considered news and what history, a curious situation arose in which some authorities began to construe a connection between the fire and the orphaned animals. At any rate, the woman who had initially offered to take care of them also turned out to be the owner of the building. Her interest in the matter seemed puzzlingly intense. She visited them daily where they were temporarily stalled in the police stables on the Lower West Side. She taped sprigs of mullein foxglove on the walls, claiming it was necessary to prevent evil spirits from entering the compound. She brought flowers which had been woven into daisy chains that could be hung around their necks.
Jonathan recognized neither his sister nor Hannah in the photo in the newspaper, but Henry was unmistakable. He studied the image for many minutes, alone in the library. Madeleine’s back was turned to the camera, to the left of the group, her hair blown from behind to obscure her profile. As he looked at the outline a remembrance of that day in the barbershop emerged, and Madeleine herself emerged, and Jonathan knew immediately what to do. It was easy to trace them down to where they were staying in two small rooms in a run-down hotel near the Port Authority.
The next morning he went up into the offices, calmly entered from the sewing room through the pink door, pulled back all the curtains, and opened up the cages one by one, freeing the mice to make their own way, circumspect and virginal, into the recesses of a less discrete world than the one they were used to. He would explain later his action to Owen. He announced downstairs that he was taking the first train down to New York. As he was leaving, Owen asked him why he was going to New York.
“To bring Maddie home.”
His father had merely hummed, distracted.
“And Henry too,” Jonathan added.
“I see.”
The desk clerk at the hotel said they were at the police stables. He made his statement with a wry smile and a cat’s cradle of wrinkles working at the corners of his eyes and along his white cheeks. Jonathan decided not to wait for them to return. He took a subway downtown.
“Them they left here about half an hour ago,” he was told at the precinct station. He took a cab back up Sixth. There was one more place to look.
The circular lamppost plaques which reproduced the coats of arms of the republics of Nicaragua and Honduras swayed gently, buffeted
by the wind that had swirled at the very top of the avenue around the bronze body of José Martí’s statuary steed, before picking its way along the glass walls of the buildings on the journey here. Having located a fine spot where it could play with delicate, filmy leaves of ash and bits of blackened debris in this large lot where only yesterday it had encountered solid rock, the breeze lingered for a time at the site of the fire, and caused the woman who was there in the middle of it, picking among the rubble, looking in vain for the familiar binding of her Lucretius, to turn up the collar of her coat. Jonathan stepped out into the mist which had tapered down from the sky and was reflected there in the oil-stained pools of water which stood far out from the gutters into the street. Henry and Madeleine were nowhere to be seen, but he approached the woman whose name he knew was Hannah.
“This is—what happened here is terrible,” he said, scoffing at himself at the fumbled words.
She knew, of course, that even if she found it—which she wouldn’t, not in this mess—it would be ruined. And if she discovered it, miraculously saved, what would that mean? Maybe it, too, was better left to pass.
“They’re saying this was tied up somehow with those people who found the cows at that church, but I don’t see how they’re making any connection the one with the other, do you?”
She began to walk away.
“Hannah?” and he ran up beside her.
“How do you know my name.”
“You are Hannah, aren’t you?”
She continued walking. “What do you want?”
“Hannah, I’m Madeleine’s brother.”
Come Sunday Page 48