Through the Children's Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  I didn't say any of this, of course, but listened, made a small squeak of doubt, was silenced, and then went home.

  And the children—are they frightened, too? It is hard to know. There are moments when they seem warped, in some way, by what has happened. Luke is certainly fearful in ways that I don't think I was at his age. Is it him or the time? He quizzes us about the possibilities of catastrophe—what would happen if a tornado hit, an earthquake, a tsunami. But his class did a “theme” project on the Empire State Building, and they don't seem to make any particular connection between height and height, tall building and tall building. They are fearful but not phobic.

  On the train in Canada, we are playing Twenty Questions. Olivia says, “Something that is a thing and isn't a thing.” We ponder it, used to the metaphysics of Twenty Questions as four-year-olds play it. “The Twin Towers,” she says happily, and we shudder—but she doesn't. I think often of that movie Hope and Glory, children of the Blitz, completely nonchalant.

  Luke and I went down to Annapolis this summer to learn to sail. I had dreamed of sailing for so long, so intensely, that it was sad to learn that I would never be any good at it. I couldn't keep straight which direction to turn the wheel—couldn't tell left from right, or port from starboard, whatever they call it. The other students in our boat came from deep in America: They were bass fishermen and recreational boaters, sportsmen who drove up in their SUVs. They wanted to know how much speed you could get up in a sailboat and whether you could hope to sneak up on the salmon in the early morning. (Not much. Yes, certainly.)

  The truth was that, never having learned to drive, I could not now substitute sailing. The necessary reflexes, the coordination of starting and stopping and turning and pointing and docking, wouldn't imprint on my nervous system no matter how I tried. There was too much else in there already, and the bits that could have learned were burnt out, neural chains long ago discarded, like Armani suits from the late seventies. My neural networks are in place now; I am their prisoner, like Jacob Marley of his little bills, enchained by my own neurons, on paths I will never leave.

  It wasn't much better for Luke, even though he is young enough to be making new chains. The sailing teachers, with some combination of safety consciousness and sadism, emphasized the consequence of capsizing a boat, and they turned the boat over in shallow water and had all the kids breathe underneath it. I made encouraging noises when Luke went to do it, it's nothing, but I knew it threw him—and why not? Who wants to cower beneath a capsized boat? Then they showed a safety film: boats exploding, turning over, running into docks, red flame and white smoke. By the time we got back to the motel for a barbecue meal, Luke was alarmed. So was I. He crawled into my bed that night, and the next day, seeing his shoulders droop in the hundred-degree heat, and feeling my own frustration with left and right, I looked at him, and he looked at me; let's get out of here. We rented a taxi, got the train in Baltimore, and went home, playing Five Crowns, a new card game, all the way.

  When we were back outside Penn Station, I could almost see him breathing easier again, could feel my own breathing ease. I thought: I am fit for playing cards on intercity trains, walking the school street beat, doomed to foot-propelled movement, or at least to being a perpetual passenger as other people master speed, a bus and taxi rider, a New Yorker. I bought some fresh tuna and grilled it in the cast-iron pan with the window open, and then we put on our shorts and walked over to First Avenue to Sedutto for a sundae, throwing a tennis ball from baseball glove to baseball glove as we walked and talked, playing our own game, a couple of cockneys, home for good.

  * * *

  The children become more finished every month, less like an image and more like themselves. Luke is more like his mother, graceful, Scandinavian-looking, with narrow almond eyes—good-humored, fair-minded, easily distracted, and a bit dreamy; Olivia is like one of my Sephardic aunts, sharp-jawed and -chinned, quick, soulful and a fresser. He accepts the city, she adores it. She even speaks, for all her four-year-old phonology, like a New Yorker, words tripping over one another, with a mouth full of Spoonerisms: her hometown, New York, becomes New Nork, or often Yew Nork. She doesn't quite care.

  Coming home from the summer after Labor Day, we all went out for pizza, to an open-air place on Second Avenue. Luke, I could sense, was sorry the summer was over, but Olivia was breathing in the joy of another New York fall. One could feel the autumn alteration on the streets: the people in shorts walking one step quicker than they did only two weeks before, the fresh breeze just hinted at in the air blowing into town.

  A man went by, a drunk, and called out the loud empty cry of New York rage: “F——you, a—hole,” he hollered, to no one in particular that I could see.

  Olivia, having no idea what the words meant, still recognized the familiar cry of her familiar jungle, another sound you always hear back where I come from. Her eyes lit up.

  “Daddy,” she said, knowing I would share the feeling, almost sighing with the pleasure, “Daddy, aren't you glad to be back in Yew Nork?”

  The Listening Post keeps on listening. After Christmas they moved it to the Whitney Museum as an “installation.” I took Luke at the height of another terror alert, and together we sat in the dark on a bench and watched and listened as the fragments of other people's dream lives went by, spoke up, made themselves appear and then disappear again. It was a week of unseasonal snow, and the city was suddenly bright white, a peaceful and reassuring sight, but strange. The machine revealed a world of men and women standing on poles, looking down—but gesturing to one another, too, I now saw, cupping their hands over their mouths and calling out: “I am here. Where are you?” The speech synthesizer was really a kind of mental X-ray machine; all that each of these people was doing was writing, merely writing, and the ghostlike voice that enunciated their words was making loud something that was in reality soft and inward, buried deep.

  Some of the sequences were larksome and even obscene, and I worried that Luke would get the wrong impression. Other sequences had a more Joycean flow. Finnegans Terror Alert: “Duct tape and plastic for the White House duct tape, and water in the bathtub, eheh hmmm, i got to wear my orange shoes again i like orange and yellow and pink and red its all a plot by saranwrap and duct tape mcm… we always shave duct tape… always.”

  When the machine was set to take in whole sentences, I found, unsurprisingly, that the music of the world's mind was less monstrous than mundane. At the height of the terror alert, some remarks were crass (“if a womans breasts look like two oranges stuffed in a tubesock ill tell em”), others explanatory (“the plastic bags are to cover the windows incase of chemical or bio warfare”), still others darkly ironic (“damn if only the wtc used duct tape on the windows we wouldn't be in this mess”). Some people were eager for instruction (“they are saying the alert level is ‘High’ … is that orange, red, or purple??”), others eager to instruct (“I looked, duct tape and plastic sheeting don't have a product expiration date”). A few were truly panicky (“Does anyone know how to get duct tape glue off a dog??”).

  No one, not even the machine or its makers, knew where any of this is coming from. The man with duct tape on his dog may be an anxious New Zealander or he may be the president of the United States. Even in moments of crisis, though, the music of the world's mind is remarkably constant: There is a steady bass line of lust (“I am naked, I like my naked butt”), a middle range of appetite (“I like smoked salmon”), and a high tremolo of keening anxiety.

  The world, it seems, is ruled by sex and worry; mankind's two passions are to be safe and satisfied, at once upright and getting laid. Even when most of us are trembling on orange alert, someone somewhere is trembling at the thought of sharing a chat room with a Swedish teenager unencumbered by shame or parents. When it started snowing again outside, the machine was snowing, too, as all that snow passed through all those millions of minds. Some people were indignant (“NE people are a bunch of pansies! Here in North Western Montana,
we've been getting snow like that forever. You environmental pukes screwed up the East and now want to do the same out here. I think we need to put a pack of wolves in central park”), while others used the occasion to focus on the news that really counts (“I don't know, I would probably throw his butt out in the snow and take 60% of what he was worth. If you can't be honest and tell your spouse that you want out, then you deserve to have half of your possessions removed. You don't deserve to be murdered, but I suppose that is a risk you take when you make a fool out of your spouse”).

  By the time I went back alone the following day, even the snow had passed out of the machine, along with all that orange, and the world was back to its usual muddle of fear (“When people refer to Israelis as Zionists …”) and appetite (“I am looking for a girl who wants …”) The false colors of the world are orange and yellow and red, the bright artificial colors of fear, the overstressed scarlet flush of the onset of Bitterosity. Leaving the Whitney for the slushy street outside, I felt that the inside of all of our heads had, for a moment at least, returned, like the city itself, to the world's true colors, gray and green.

  Under One Roof

  The great department stores of New York now lie on the avenues like luxury liners becalmed in a lagoon, big ships in shallow water. All around them, the dhows and junks and speedboats of the new national retailing, Staples and Victoria's Secret and Banana Republic and the Gap, honk at them and insult their sisters and get in their way. (And the newcomers hunt in pairs, so that no Duane Reade appears without a Starbucks nearby, no Staples without a Victoria's Secret minding its rear, as though the urge to tickle your husband and the urge to buy discounted stationery goods, the urge to caffeine and the urge to Coricidin were twinned deep in the desire system of the brain.) Saks and Bergdorfs and Bloomingdale's, immense and slow, look down at them and try to continue on a stately course, but the water is ebbing from around their keels.

  Our sense of this, our mental image of it, is real and grounded in what we read—just this summer, Lord & Taylor, whose New York store is the southernmost ship of the Fifth Avenue fleet, and which is owned by the May company, lost nearly four thousand employees and thirty-two sister stores and was sent back to dry dock to be remade, nothing left but its signature. “Lackluster upon lackluster” is how a Piper Jaffray analyst describes the department-store sector. The professional retail trade papers worry about the disappearance of the department store exactly as the theater people worry about Broadway. But the decline is also intuitive and grounded in what we feel about the city. As recently as the early nineties, when Bloomies almost fell and women wept, department stores still mattered; they mattered as talk shows mattered then, as cable news matters now. One day we feel that something is big, and the next day we know that it is not. Without even looking at a receipt, we know somehow that the romance of the department store is fading, and we wonder what life will be like when it is gone.

  Some of the department stores in town are in good shape—chiefly those that have been narrowly redefined as upscale clothing stores with small secondary lines in furniture and cosmetics. The seventh floor of Bergdorf Goodman hums, the eighth floor of Saks sings, and there are few places that seem more entirely of Manhattan than Fred's at Barneys on a Saturday at noon. But we miss the big stores, because they defined a world, little duchies of commerce, with their faith in literal display: not the cunning and Duchampian show windows of a Simon Doonan but the things themselves shown as the things themselves, these shirts, these ties—the wooden escalators and crowded elevators, and the ghosts of elevator operators wearing small hats and announcing, “Notions.” (There is a beautiful, forgotten song in the old Johnny Mercer show Top Banana, sung in the elevator of a department store, listing the contents of the floors as though they were poem enough: “Third floor rat-traps and radios, cheesecloth, cupcakes and cameos / Fourth floor peanuts and piccolos / leftover ushers from Loews.”)

  Lord & Taylor still gives one a sense of the department store as it once was, a last lingering resonance of the old dispensation. It is not a very distant world. The first floor of the store, at Thirty-eighth and Fifth, is laid out sweetly and expectantly, all mirrors and cosmetics; the salespeople in the Clinique department look serious in their white coats, as though actually about to attempt something cliniqual. There are no divisions, no urgency, no one spraying perfume—it is a ground floor seemingly arranged by the hand of God for displaying goods. There are striped men's ties placed like salmon fillets and men's shirts hanging like partridge. There are hats. The store plays the national anthem at ten o'clock every morning. On the sixth floor, the restaurateur Larry Forgione has opened a new café, complete with wine by the glass and a sweeping panoramic view of sturdy ladies’ coats. The chowder is tasty, the wine decent. But there is something about Forgione himself—someone who has become a brand without ever quite having been a name—that extends the sense of a time warp, another era of hope. The old Lord & Taylor implies a rhythm of time, of women's time, in particular, a pace not slowed but purposeful and expansive: It takes a morning and lunch, or tea and an afternoon, to make a survey of the place, shopping as a setting out rather than a dropping in.

  At last, up on the tenth floor, in the men's department, one can find an awe-inspiring demonstration of the sheer numbing stasis that capitalism can achieve—for it is insensitivity to the immediate pressure of the market that separates big-ticket capitalism from the rug bazaar and the vegetable stall. Capital slows down the market and places it within the shell of The Firm, firm in every sense, so that things can linger after their appeal to the market has passed. The brand names are Jack Victor and Grant Thomas, name brands that are neither really names nor really brands, and seem to set off the commercial logic of brand-naming in a twilight zone of pure performance: No one wants to wear Jack Victor slacks, but there they are, hanging in poignant rows, their creases abjectly offered. It is a kind of installation piece: the department store as an abstract exercise in naming and branding and display, without commercial urgency and, mostly, without customers.

  To understand the department store's decline, you have to go back to the department store's founding, according to Richard S. Tedlow, a professor at the Harvard Business School who has written a lot on retailing. “The department store began in an era of a hub-and-spoke transportation system for cities, before the automobile,” Tedlow says. “In Chicago, for instance, the large downtown department store, Marshall Field's, became in and of itself The Brand. And for a store like that in, say, 1870 or 1880, the competition was basically mom-and-pop shops. Department stores were a new mode of retailing. They became destinations—they became places where you shopped not solely for procurement but for entertainment.”

  At the same time, Tedlow explains, the nature of the transaction changed. Before that, shopping was still done by barter, with each party expecting to be cheated. Department stores had fixed prices. The phrase “Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back” was radical, introducing a new kind of merchandising. As Tedlow says, “The department stores were one of America's first commercial institutions of trust. They worked to take your mind off price.”

  For over half a century, in New York particularly, department stores presided over everything from Thanksgiving Day parades and patriotic lectures to Cubist exhibitions. John Wanamaker was one of the greatest merchants in America, and his store at Astor Place and Broadway, which had an entrance hall and an art gallery and was said to have more windows than the Empire State Building, was the model and master of the department store as a civic-seeming institution.

  Historians of retail will tell you that it was Wanamaker, more than anyone else, who transformed the department store from a place where women bought stuff to a place where they simply and necessarily went, the way people had once wandered into and out of church. With the usual acceleration of New York retailing, the zone of the stores moved uptown with astonishing speed: The cast-iron Ladies’ Mile of department stores, between Eighth and Twenty-thi
rd streets and between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, reigned for a generation before it was replaced by Fifth Avenue farther uptown. But the continuity of purpose, and even of names, was there.

  Tedlow dates the beginning of the decline to the period just after World War II, when what seemed at first to be a great gift to the growth of the department store—the mall—first appeared, in places like Minneapolis and Kansas City. The spatial arrangement of the department store within the mall, he thinks, helped spell its doom. “Malls depended on being anchored by two department stores, one at either end,” he says. “What's in between those two stores? Small stuff at first. But eventually, there's a Gap, a Limited, a Banana Republic. By going out to the malls and anchoring them, these department stores created traffic for a great many specialty stores that otherwise would have had a hard time creating any demand—essentially because they couldn't afford the advertising, which is a necessary cost of doing business in a department store. The boutique businesses could attack the department store from the safety of the shadow of the department store. What has replaced the department store is the mall itself, which now plays the role of amusement place and social center.”

  Another revolution in retailing began with sharp competition in price, making Wal-Mart by far the biggest retailer in the country. Then came the heavily advertised national boutique brand, bringing a Victoria's Secret and a Gap to every mall. The department stores fought back by attempting to re-create the mall environment of boutiques within each store. But, by bringing in the boutique, by building the idea of the brand, they created an appetite for true brands. A Bloomingdale 's filled with boutiques is not so much a brand of its own as a street filled with boutiques—which, sooner or later, it comes to resemble.