The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  Along the bar at the Killarney Rose, five empty Grand Marniers stood in line with five 7UPs, and Stoney called for a sixth. He raised his glass in salutation, his face as bland as the moon’s backside. Just before he drank, he treated himself to the smallest tight smile. ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Did I break your fuckin’ heart?’

  It was way past lunchtime. When we went outdoors, the morning freeze had given way to a soft rain, melancholic as Irish mist. Together we walked out of the side streets, back towards the Battery. ‘So what about the rapture?’ I asked.

  ‘I still got it. Believe me, it’s in me yet,’ Stoney said. But he didn’t look too sure. ‘Course, it’s been gathering rust. Years on the shelf, it’s only natural, it could do with dusting down and a taste of fresh paint, a little bit fine tuning. Rapture be like a race car, time to time it needs a lube job. But that doesn’t mean it can’t run no more. It can,’ he said. ‘And kick ass, too.’

  Strolling through Battery Park, we passed Refugio and Sinbad. They looked glum, but gave no sign of recognition. Outside the South Ferry subway station, Indio gnawed at a pretzel, studiously bored. He had come from Nicaragua, down out of the mountains, with high cheekbones and jet-black hair, eyes so black and deadly that Stoney had renamed him Cholo, after Roberto Duran.

  Along the embankment, another shift of derelicts began to gather, shuffling into place. In the meat of the day, the cops kept them moving, to save the tourists distress. But now the afternoon was running down, already the streetlamps were on. With darkness, the nightstalkers would be free to come creeping back, repossess their cardboard boxes. ‘They claim in New York City you can’t tell the homeless from the rats, but that’s not a fact, you can,’ Stoney said. ‘The rats be fat.’

  The last Liberty ferry was loading, and he came to a snap decision. Normally, it was against his policy to work twice on the same day. ‘Familiarity breeds arrest,’ was his rule. But on this day, turned reckless by confession, he would make an exception.

  At dusk, we cast off again. Floodlit, Liberty looked less like a muse than ever, and more like a gargantuan neon logo: MEAT-O-MAT BEEF PATTIES, writ in flame. On deck, huddled against the rain, the tourists had lost all the Pollyanna glow of the morning. The tired and the hungry, bellies full with sights, they herded together like kine. Instantly, Stoney was one of them.

  Hard to define how he altered. It was nothing to do with disguises. Neither clothes nor features were touched; he even moved the same. Yet somehow he’d ceased to be Stoney, turned into Martin Luther Bisonette.

  It was all in the eyes. Of a sudden, instead of streetwise wariness, they showed only innocence, trust. One glance, and you could tell this boy was country, always would be. Young Carolina pitchforked into the Big Apple, he was out of his league, overwhelmed. So he gazed on Liberty as a stranger, some rube who thought the lady was very big and real impressive, he wished he’d had a camera, but at the same time his feet hurt, rain kept dripping down the back of his neck, and the one thought that haunted him was he would kill for an ice-cold Dr Pepper.

  For the trip back to Manhattan, Indio was positioned near the top of the companionway, black eyes downcast, apparently half-asleep. And next to him was a conventioneer, a man in a seersucker suit, with a nametag that read MAYNARD BAINES and underneath, in smaller letters, EQUESTRIAN ORDER OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE OF JERUSALEM.

  He was a bladder of a man, with purpled cheeks and tom-turkey wattles, the overstuffed look of an alchoholic blood-pressure case. Stick him with a hatpin, you felt, and he’d squitter away like a pricked balloon.

  As the ferry neared land, Stoney took up position tight against Baines’s chest but facing outward, showing only the back of his neck; and slowly he began to inflate. Like a flat tire getting pumped, he swelled and rounded. His color deepened, his flesh grew taut and shiny. By the end of a minute, his whole head looked gorged, a blood clot about to explode. That’s when he swung on his heel, jumped in the equestrian’s face. And Maynard Baines met his twin.

  Baines shied; he reared back. Stumbling, he tripped on his own feet and almost tumbled into the stairwell. Luckily, Indio was right there to catch him.

  On Broadway and Fifty-fourth there was an Irish pub, McGee’s, resplendent with quasi-classical murals, gods and goddesses at sport. The bartender, a purist, refused to serve Grand Marnier with 7UP, so Stoney made do with Pernod and blackcurrant juice. Before he’d finished his second, Indio loomed up in the backbar mirror, framed by Pan and assorted nymphs. His face was a well-kept grave.

  The partners took a turn around the block. When he returned, alone, Stoney tried to look inscrutable. But grins kept busting out on him; he was dimpled like a tan Liberace. Though he would not specify the haul, his eyes held a dreamy look.

  For the longest while he kept silence, then he shook himself all over, like a dog emerging from bottomless waters. ‘So what do you think?’ he asked. ‘Should I get ordained?’

  3

  Lucky one who for first time is witnessing Broadway at place of its beginnings, Sasha Zim intoned, his voice flat and dead. Thrill of first glimpse of great street curving on way uptown in bobsled run of skyscraper-high steel and concrete, once-in-lifetime sensation.

  Broadway proper starts at Bowling Green. On a mild, rainy morning, Sasha shared my park bench. Spume cut the buildings off at the knees, seemed to coat all things in slime. This made me hunger to get moving, but Sasha Zim wouldn’t hear of it, not till he was done mumbling through his guidebooks.

  Spectacular sightlines, he read. Dutiful, I gazed where directed and it was true, they were. Other city vistas might be more poetical, but in sheer weight and force of stone, Lower Broadway gave no quarter. Behind us sat the Custom House, a beaux arts colossus; before us, like an urban Stonehenge, megaliths moderne and Gothic, space age, mock-baroque; and at our feet, this tiny patch of garden: Grandeur overhead emphasized by flat speck of Bowling Green, which, like teardrop lake in some mountain watershed enveloped by heaven-bent range of stony architecture, gives birth to mighty river.

  History penned us in with concrete clamps. Half of New York’s whole epic, it seemed, had unfolded within sight. In 1626, Peter Minuit had paid the Algonquins twenty-four dollars for Manhattan where we sat. Twenty years afterwards, Peter Stuyvesant had bowled down ninepins on the same ground. George Washington had lived right up the street at the McComb House, 39 Broadway. And Adriaen Block, the Dutch sea captain, had built the island’s first four huts at 45. At Cape’s Tavern, the triumphant Revolutionary army had ended their victory parade. A few yards on, sick of Broadway’s climate, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson had determined to move America’s capital south. Lord Cornbury, the English governor, had flaunted himself in drag here. There Captain Kidd, the pirate, had press-ganged his volunteers. Nathan Hale and Benedict Arnold, Washington Irving and Benjamin Franklin, John Jacob Astor, DeWitt Clinton, Commodore Vanderbilt – Bowling Green had known them all. Now, on the bench next to us, sat a woman covered in pigeons.

  She was feeding them bits of stale wedding cake, and they sat clustered on her shoulders and feet and knees, even perched on her scarfed head. Her name was Ellen Fogarty; she weighed ninety pounds; she was sixty-three years old: ‘Half a lady on my mother’s side,’ she said. ‘But the Dad was County Mayo.’

  She came here two, three times a week and the rest of her life she spent by herself in a house with nine rooms, four baths, and a conservatory in Tottenville, Staten Island. Over there she was Ellen Parisi, a widow. But Parisi was not her right name, and Staten Island wasn’t the place she belonged.

  Where she belonged was Broadway. That’s what she had come from, what she understood, and all that she cared to remember. Not just Broadway itself but the whole of Lower Manhattan in its velvet days – Wall Street and Trinity Place, the Aquarium, the Fulton Fish Market; above all, Bowling Green itself.

  Her father had worked here. Christopher Cornelius Fogarty. Christy. All through her childhood and teens, his office had been right across the street
, 25 Broadway, which was now reduced to a US Post Office but once had been the Cunard Building, back when New York was the world’s great port and Cunard its great steamship line. The Queen Mary was a Cunard boat, and her father went aboard it any time he liked. That was his job, to welcome it when it docked, wave it good-bye when it shipped. It paid him a living wage. He even got to wear a uniform.

  Two uniforms, to be exact. The first was white and shiny with brass buttons, and he wore it only for special, the times when she wasn’t allowed to go with him or even touch. But the second was for everyday, a dark-blue serge, so dark it seemed black, bog-thick and rough against her face. And the smells it held, the Paddy whiskey he drank, the bay rum he slapped his face with, the shag tobacco he smoked, and the aniseed balls he was always chewing – those smells defined him, and so defined herself.

  What was he like? ‘The Dad? A big red man with a big red face,’ Ellen said. Not fat, never porky, more like a side of raw beef. ‘What he was, he was a man,’ she said.

  She was a hushed woman. Everything about her seemed to carry the whiff of suppression, of too many years spent biting her tongue and knuckles and nails. Her woollen scarf was faded oatmeal, her coat a pale heather mixture, washed out to match her eyes. She spoke in a dead monotone.

  Only the legs showed life. Trim-ankled, still sprung upon high arches, she showed them off in brown lisle stockings neatly rolled. They gave her a childlike look; and this was fitting, for childhood was the time she clung to, truly lived in. ‘The school I went to, Holy Angels of Mercy, was right off Broadway,’ she said. ‘My mother was too much half a lady to go walking. So my father had to take me everywhere. He’d deliver me at school in the cold dark winter mornings and, when we were let out afternoons, it would be dark again but never seemed so cold. And he’d be standing waiting across the street, in the doorway of the pastry store, Bertoni’s. Mrs Angelo Bertoni & Five Sons, it was called. All the mothers and the fathers would be waiting in one group together, but the Dad stood apart, on his own. Course, he had a uniform.’

  They lived on Washington Street off Rector, two minutes’ slow stroll from here. In the twenties and thirties, even after Hitler’s War, the neighborhood had been a sort of casbah, teeming of Syrians and Armenians and Turks. Lost between the skyscrapers had stood low wooden tenements built in Eastern style, with courtyards and exterior stairways, carved balustrades, painted eaves, the smell of incense everywhere. Two doors down from Ellen’s own home was a shop like Ali Baba’s cave, jammed floor to ceiling with halvah and Turkish delight, hubble-bubble pipes, great swathes of bright silks, Persian rugs, brass bowls, carved scimitars, sequined slippers, beads. There was even a one-eyed black cat in the window. ‘You think I’m lying, you could look it up,’ Ellen said. ‘The Arabian Nights wasn’t in it.’

  The Fogartys were the only Irish on their block, a family so alien that their neighbors couldn’t understand them enough to hate them. Ellen’s father chose to live there because it lay close to work and also because he was in love with magic: ‘Would have been a conjurer, only his big red hands, his fingers were fat as sausages. But he did tricks. They never worked, but he did them.’

  All Manhattan had been like that once, a magical land. They’d called it City of Wonders, and so it was. Now people, when she tried to tell them, they looked at her sideways down their noses. On her own street in Tottenville, she’d see the white-lace curtains twitch and flinch, like whisperers, when she walked past. ‘People think I’m lost in mind,’ she said. ‘I’m not.’

  As if to prove it, she rose up off her bench, tugged me behind her to 25 Broadway. ‘Look up. Just look up,’ she commanded. So I did, and there above me was a sixty-five-foot rotunda, gold and silver and deep sea blue, ablaze with frescoes of great ocean voyages down the ages. Sea gods and goddesses stood guard over the portals, ancient sailing ships were carved in the stone walls. ‘A Taj Mahal,’ Ellen called it. ‘Now they use it for losing letters.’

  The Cunard Building was just one example. In the days of its pomp, the Port of New York had been its own kingdom, and Lower Broadway lined with its palaces. The Custom House, whose grandeur seemed today so overblown, irrelevant, had been a maritime senate, the center of a universe. One Broadway, now a Citibank, was the United States Lines; 9–11, now a Radio Shack, had housed the French: ‘The might of empires,’ Ellen said.

  She was transfigured. The wraith that inhabited the present, this forlorn old biddy awash on a park bench, fell away. Borne back to Xanadu, she was reborn, flesh and blood. ‘You want to walk up Broadway the way it’s become, first you have to know the way it was,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t always a cesspool, a pit of hell and jesusbedamn. Heroes used to walk here. The masters of the Seven Seas. Great men. The greatest in the world.’

  Best of all had been the ticker-tape parades. They’d used to be reserved for real-life heroes, not rock bands or New Jersey football teams, most certainly not blacks. The Dad would take Ellen up in his office, then stick her out of the window and let her dangle, upside down and swaying, a hundred feet above the pit, with all the people yelling, the brass bands playing, the confetti flying past her head like snowflakes, in her eyes, clinging to her skin, and the hero himself, a general, a great explorer, a president even, like a cardboard cutout, propped rigid in the back of the open charabanc, his smile stuck on with paste. And she would be screaming, of course, like you scream on a roller coaster, dread and thrill mixed all together, the street rushing up to claim her from below and above, when he swung her round, the Dad: ‘I was safe then,’ she said.

  Across the park, outside a coffee shop, a drunken derelict stood begging. He was a grotesque, all scabs and strings of drool, and as adhesive as birdlime. Anyone who blundered within lunging distance was not merely accosted but instantly grappled tight to his bosom, clutched and clung to with such an octopus tenacity that twenty-five cents for ransom seemed cheap at half the price.

  An altercation sprang up. An unwary STAB (suit, tie, and briefcase), emerging from breakfast, found himself first cornered, then passionately embraced. When he tried to bust loose, the embrace turned into a full-body tackle. The beggar’s face thrust close to his own. The toothless maw breathed out, a dragon’s reek; then breathed back in, and seemed to swallow him whole.

  For an instant the STAB was lost. Then a frenzy of pure panic surged up out of his bowels, and he managed to wrestle half-free, bull his way across the sidewalk. For two or three yards, he dragged the beggar along bodily, a humanoid ball and chain. Then, pivoting, his briefcase swung wide for balance, he kicked him in the groin with his tasseled right loafer.

  Guccis were not designed for putting in the boot. Though the tassels danced like tiny flags of war, the thud of impact was mushy, the drunk not much discomfited. If anything, the blow recharged his batteries. Spinning blind, exultant, he flung himself on the next passerby.

  It was a cop.

  From the fastness of the Green, Ellen Fogarty had followed this mime with relish, a certain preening smugness, as though it was staged for her private savoring. By the time that the panhandler had been frog-marched away, she was almost smacking her lips. ‘Lindbergh. Grover Whalen. General MacArthur,’ she mused. ‘Now there were men.’

  ‘Were also great pigs,’ Sasha said.

  This was his cue to dematerialize. He needed a fat day in the taxi, a windfall, so that he could pay back a loan from Alexei Alexandrovich and rescue his drums from the bath, where they’d sat hostage too long. ‘Is farce. Is total stupidity absolutely,’ he said. ‘I cannot play, and Alexei can’t wash, and starving children everywhere.’

  Already a pattern was forming. Each day he would set me afloat upon a different pond, then leave me to sail it or sink. If I made safe harbor, well and good. If not, it was not in his contract to stick around and fish me out.

  Watching him depart, trailing guidebooks and bumf, Ellen sucked down hard on her gums, which set her dentures clicking like castanets. ‘Is that the class of person you’d call an émigré, or
did he just wash up with the tide?’ she inquired.

  ‘Bit of both, I imagine.’

  ‘The Dad was neither.’

  ‘Then what was he?’

  ‘Required,’ Ellen said.

  The necessary man. All week he would toil, the first on board each great liner as it docked, first to shake the captain’s hand, first to hoist the welcoming glass. Weekends he rested and took his daughter on treats.

  Mostly they just walked. In those years, Lower Manhattan was still self-contained; Uptown was another land. From City Hall southwards, Friday evening to Monday morning, not a bar or restaurant was open along Broadway, not a body stirred on the side streets. Father and daughter had the run of the entire neighborhood, their personal secret city. ‘A cathedral,’ Ellen called it. ‘You’d walk for a mile and hear no sound, just the echo of your footsteps. And the streets so narrow and dark, the skyscrapers up to heaven, it felt as if you were treading the ocean bed. Way deep down in a bottomless pit. So then, when you came out at last in the open, the light would blind you, you were stunned. Bedazzled.’

  What thrilled her every time was when they emerged from the chasms into Battery Park and suddenly there was the sea, the great port itself, a thousand different boats all shapes and sizes, tugs and pleasure trippers, barges and freighters and tramp steamers, motorboats riding the waves like bucking broncos, the old-style ferryboats with their dirty brasswork and stubby little funnels belching black smoke, the ocean liners sheer and towering as moving skyscrapers, and then the yachts with their bright sails unfurled, reaching clear out to the horizon, to infinity, it seemed. In stormy weather, the waters would turn a deep bottle-green, almost black, and the wind’s howling like a lion’s roar sent her clinging in the depths of her father’s coat, drowning out her dreads in the warm frowst of aniseed and bay rum and shag. But on calm days, blue days, the slapping and the kissing of the waves against the harbor wall seemed the sweetest song.