The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  At South Ferry, she’d never forget it, there used to be a placard advertising some kind of tonic or vitamin booster, the name itself escaped her now but the poster was bright yellow and down along the bottom, in flowery red lettering, was the slogan DON’T GROW OLD – GROW UP.

  On Broadway itself, you could stand right where we were sitting now and look directly uptown, past Trinity Church, as far as the Woolworth Building, and if you saw another citizen living, you’d think they were trespassing, it felt like a sacrilege. ‘Because this was our private place, you see. Before they raped it,’ Ellen said.

  ‘Who raped it?’

  ‘Robert Moses, who else? The man destroyed New York.’

  ‘How destroyed it?’

  ‘He broke up the Aquarium.’

  It had been housed in Battery Park, just over our left shoulders, buried in the dungeons of a mock-medieval fortress. In history, Fort Clinton had been a genuine stronghold. American Independents had built it to fight off the Redcoats; men had borne arms and been prepared to die in its defense. But it did not look genuine. Tarted up and renamed Castle Clinton to sound more imposing, it seemed to come straight out of a storybook – a white-stucco fantasia, spilling over with turrets and fake battlements, rows of flags fluttering.

  To reach the Aquarium itself, you first had to pass through a grim stone portal, twenty feet high, studded with iron bolts. Then you were plunged underwater, into a sea-green Atlantis.

  More than fifty years on, Ellen could still reel off the inhabitants: groupers, toadfish, spotted morays, seals; Japanese veiltails, calico popeyes; X-ray fish, translucent as stained glass; golden dartfish; guppies no bigger than your little finger; and jewfish so hideous, with their big curved snouts and fat blubber lips, their predatory stares, that the Hebrews of Manhattan petitioned to have the name changed to junefish. And all of this was swathed in mysterious half-light, a clinging greenish mist, reminiscent of a funfair Ghost Train. ‘To this day, any time I dream I died and went to heaven, paradise is that same off-green color,’ Ellen said. ‘God punches my ticket, and I go walking among bright fish.’

  And Robert Moses had ripped the Aquarium down. He was a builder, a maker of highways and state parks and later housing projects, also Lincoln Center. But roads were the heart of his empire, in the age when automobiles still ruled America unchallenged; and through them he built up such omnipotence that for decades he was New York’s unofficial boss, its one unchanging power. La Guardia and Lindsay and Wagner, Alfred Smith and the Rockefellers – all came and went. Moses seemed forever.

  He was the nastiest piece of work – vainglorious, megalomaniac, the style of man who made lesser men wax fat just for calling him Master Builder or Mighty Mover of Mud. And his vengeances were terrible. His goal, which he saw as his legacy for the ages, was simply that New York should boast more numerous and more humongous autoroutes than any place else in creation. It didn’t need them, indeed could not contain them. But Robert Moses required them for his greater glory, so the city must somehow endure them.

  To this end he razed neighborhoods, evicted hundreds of thousands of tenants, turned whole communities into outcasts forever. Ellen had spoken no more than the truth – he was indeed the man who’d destroyed her New York. And almost nobody had dared fight him. He was too wealthy, much too strong, both in resources and will. He could bring down mayors and city councils, smash boards of estimate, banks, entire administrations on whim. For thirty years, he held the whole city in pawn. For his reward, Fordham University gave him an honorary degree, called him Doctor of Human Betterment.

  But all that lay in the future. In 1941, when he trashed the Aquarium, neither his viciousness nor his reach was yet public knowledge. It was his first open act of vandalism, his great unmasking. Afterwards, he stood revealed – ‘Genghis Khan in a white suit.’

  He’d only done it for spite. Moses had long been planning to vault a mammoth overhead roadway directly through the Battery. This would have ravaged both port and parkland, poisoned the whole of Lower Manhattan. A pretty show of strength, indeed. But the Master Builder had shown his hand too early, too cavalierly. His say-so was not yet automatic, and just for once he found himself opposed. Eleanor Roosevelt and others clubbed together to outflank him. Moses’ plans were rejected.

  Destroying the Aquarium had given him his revenge. Striking deep in the night, when no city board could stop him, he’d packaged up the bright fish and moved them to the far Bronx, where Ellen Fogarty could not reach them. Instead of sea-green Atlantis, he left only a roofless pit, scattered hillocks of black mud, broken stones, shattered glass.

  Half a century later, it did not sound like much. But Ellen believed to her soul that, with the first fish dispossessed, something in New York had been changed forever, something irreplaceable lost: ‘The people,’ she said. ‘Ever since, they haven’t counted. What they think, how they feel, it’s not been worth a jesusbedamn.’

  She spoke without surface rage. Her voice remained the same suppressed undertone, a metronome, as if she were merely intoning responses. ‘I don’t have a screaming mouth. Never had,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I wish I did.’

  She would fall silent for minutes on end, staring slack-mouthed at the cracked concrete slab between her feet. But whatever flickering or guttering fires she might see in its fissures, she was not saying. She smoked Camels; she fussed with her hair. At moments she appeared to be dozing. Then, out of nowhere, her shoulders would straighten, her headscarf rock back, and that changeless rippling murmur would start up anew. ‘Nineteen thirty-eight,’ she said. ‘And in forty-three I met my husband, Dom, and in forty-five we got married; in forty-six we moved to Staten Island.’

  ‘And the Dad?’

  ‘He’d gone before.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘He drowned.’

  When her father departed Broadway, so did she. Already the Fogartys had been uprooted from the casbah, driven out by the three-hundred-pound Turk down the hallway, who favored little boys. ‘Didn’t bother me,’ said Ellen. ‘But the Dad did not believe in it.’

  ‘What did he believe in?’

  ‘The Dad.’

  It was a plain fact. Though her mother dragged her sick self to Mass both morning and evening and three times Sunday, her father had always treated religion with indifference, a breezy condescension, which he’d passed on to her. So when he was taken from her, she could not turn to Mother Mary. All she could do was dance.

  She was sixteen, could pass for twenty, and she was a dancing fool. Her mother had moved her to the East Village, where they practiced hating each other, the two of them spitting snakes across a single room, Fourteenth Street and Avenue A. Down at the corner drugstore, Ellen kissed the boys behind the magazines. When her mother found out, she was kicked out of the house entirely and moved uptown, to fresher air. On West Forty-fifth, she took refuge in a theatrical boardinghouse filled with musicians and magicians, songwriters, acrobats, freaks.

  A bearded lady lived upstairs. They took tea together, and the lady read Ellen’s palm. Her fortune promised pain, and she couldn’t pay the rent, so she took work in a Times Square dance hall. The Carioca or the Casablanca, some such name: ‘Right off Broadway,’ she added slyly, knowing it would please me.

  She was a taxi dancer, two feet for hire, ten cents a dance, and that’s where she met Dom Parisi.

  One slow Friday after midnight, he came in blind drunk. He was too far gone to stand up straight but strangely not to dance. At the table, he slumped, stupefied, his head kept falling in his drink. But out on the floor he moved free and superb; she’d never known a dancer like him, so smooth, so light: ‘A bird. The man was a flyaway bird,’ she said.

  So they got married.

  Right from that first meeting, they did not talk, they just clung, and to Ellen this seemed only proper. Talking she’d done with her father. With her lover, she danced.

  Dom was in the building trade; he worked with his father, Carmine, who had his own co
nstruction company in Brooklyn, in Canarsie. What was ironic – you’d have to cry if you forgot to laugh – was that he’d done business with Robert Moses, and it was Moses who’d made him rich. On her wedding night, courtesy of that Mighty Mover of Mud, Carmine threw a gala reception for three hundred guests in the Sons of Italy Social Club, Flatbush. Fuzzy Campese’s All-Stars played requests, and Dom danced with Ellen the whole night long, every single number. Out on that dance floor they’d been married for real, made one. Then they drove off on their honeymoon, four days in Atlantic City, and never danced again.

  Instead, they moved to Staten Island, where they remained together for thirty-nine years, four months. At the end of Year 32, Dom bought into Tottenville, high on a hillside, at the end of an oak-lined avenue; and there he built his house of dreams.

  All his working life he’d been a lousy builder but well connected. This had made him wealthy, respected – everything but happy. And that was Ellen’s fault, for she’d failed to bear him sons.

  It spoiled everything. Without sons, Dom Parisi’s whole lifework – the contracts and the kickbacks, the civil wars, the fat cars and fatter cigars, the respect – lost its meaning. He was a big man, capo forte, but he had no inheritors, no living monuments to his glory, so he was nothing.

  He sulked; he festered. He died.

  First his blood went bad, then his heart. Before he passed away, however, he finished the big house down to the tiniest detail, complete with swimming pool, a billiards room, a sauna, and a solarium; and he gave it four extra rooms, which stood empty, for the four sons he’d craved and Ellen had failed to deliver.

  The day the last nail was in place, he smashed a bottle of French champagne across the front door. Three weeks later, he fell down choking on his blood and left Ellen alone in his house to rattle.

  Even this she told without drama, as though it was a tale that everyone knew already and so wasn’t worth embellishing. ‘He was a made man and prideful, a take-care man, and you must never cross him,’ she simply said. ‘I crossed him.’

  At the end of thirty-nine years, four months, it was her only summation, the one thing speakable. Now Dom was dead, and only his house remained. For weeks and months after the funeral, Ellen had stayed inside it, immured, and could not stop herself from shaking. Then one Wednesday in November, don’t ask her why, she rose up out of her bed at first light, drove herself across the island to the ferry, and she came back here to Bowling Green: ‘To set,’ she said.

  That was four years ago; four years and two months. ‘The first time back, I threw up. I stood outside 25 Broadway and rained my guts in the gutter,’ she said. ‘Four days later, I was here again.’

  She had not missed a week since. One of her neighbors, who worked in a pastry shop, supplied her with bags of old wedding cake, and the pigeons did the rest.

  So she thought about the Dad. And she thought about Dom Parisi. The thing he’d hated worst, second only to having no heirs, was when his buildings fell down. It caused scenes and harsh words, lawsuits, every manner of aggravation. Dark men in dark suits would come to his house late at night, talk with Dom behind closed doors, and when they went away again, he’d be so mad, he looked like he should go kill someone.

  One night in particular, she’d never forget it, he woke her up at three in the morning and insisted on taking her out for a drive. They rode the darkness in silence, down to his newest construction site. He’d only just laid the foundations and already there was trouble. And when they reached the site, Dom rolled down his car window, and he stared for a long, long time. All you could see was mud and cement, and the cement was still half-wet, glinting in the headlights. The black night, the muck and mire, the cement. And Dom said just one thing. Wet cement is sorry stuff, he said. And sorrier still when you’re buried beneath.

  At the time, she was so taken aback she couldn’t speak. Later on, nothing seemed worth the trouble of saying. ‘It wasn’t what I was used to. Not what I once knew,’ was all that she murmured now. And she went on feeding the pigeons.

  4

  I needed a base, so I moved into a walk-up hotel in the West Forties, hard by Times Square. In the next room lived a girl so beautiful it hurt. Her name of choice was Lush Life, but on her welfare checks it said Geraldo Cruz.

  Sasha Zim saw her first. Or she saw him. When we pulled up in his Checker, Lush Life was slouched on the hotel stoop painting her fingernails Passion Pink. She wore a yellow silk dress with embroidered dragons rampant, skintight and slit high on the thigh, a look pirated from Susie Wong. But her face – high Spanish cheekbones, black cannibal eyes, blue-black hair swirling wild, as sleek as a raven’s wing – was strictly Ava Gardner. And her legs were Cyd Charisse.

  Sasha was sunk on sight. Before he could even climb out of the cab, Lush Life had laid aside her paintpot, hula-hooped her hips across the street. Putting her red mouth in at his open window, she breathed on him just once, a scent of cinnamon and cloves. ‘Wanna get fresh?’ she asked.

  Ten minutes later, Sasha Zim came back alone, the scimitar birthmark on his cheek so incandescent, it looked about to burst into flames, spontaneously combust. ‘Nice ride?’ I inquired.

  ‘Yob tvoyu mat! Is revisionist,’ he hissed. And chucking my belongings wholesale on the sidewalk, he drove off with no good-bye.

  The hotel was run by two Greek brothers, Mike and Petros Kassimatis. Both were short, wide and bald, fire hydrants with feet, in the style of Two-ton Tony Galento, and what hair they lacked on top, they more than made up elsewhere. Impenetrable black jungles sprouted at their wrists and throats, escaped their sweatshirts at the waist, even curled up vinelike from under their trouser cuffs. Mike wore glasses and many gold chains; Petros had a wart on his nose. Otherwise, they might have come off a conveyor belt: ‘Two piss in a pot,’ in Sasha’s phrase.

  Checking me in, Mike looked me up, looked me down, and spat on the tiled floor. But when he saw my typewriter, a battered Adler portable, he shied like Count Dracula zapped by a cross. ‘You a writer? You gonna write about this place?’ he growled.

  I grunted, noncommittal.

  ‘You write about this place, you better not write nothing bad. You write something bad, you gonna be writing with busted hands.’

  ‘No, he won’t. Won’t be writing with no busted hands,’ Petros corrected him. ‘Won’t have no hands left to bust.’

  By neighborhood standards, they ran a tight ship. There were washbasins and blankets in every room, the towels were changed weekly, crack-smoking was discretionary, and any guest who spray-painted graffiti in the hallways was requested to leave feet first. Five floors held twenty-eight rooms and one telephone: INTIMATE ACCOMMODATIONS FOR THE DISCERNING FEW, read the faded notice, cyclostyled, tacked up inside my door.

  My room was a cell, ten feet by eight, but not ungracious. Beneath the naked lightbulb, there were flowers. Nosegays of blue and pink roses bloomed on the wallpaper, and marigolds peeped coyly through the stains on the coverlet. It was true that my window faced an airshaft, a concrete wall, metal pipes. But if I stuck my head out far enough, then craned my neck and twisted, I could see sky.

  In Times Square mythology, this place was known as the Hotel Moose. Nobody knew the reason, except that there was also a Hotel Elk, out beyond Eighth Avenue: ‘And this ain’t it.’

  My first night alone, I sat reading Struggles and Triumphs, the autobiography of P. T. Barnum. He was Broadway’s spiritual father, and his story, stuck in the fifty-cent rack at Isaac Mendoza, had seemed the perfect vade mecum.

  It proved a sore disappointment. As a writer, Barnum’s prime gift was for transmuting gold into dross. Still I persevered. By midnight, I’d reached the passage where General Tom Thumb is presented to Queen Victoria. He is twenty-five inches tall, advertised as eleven years old and fifteen pounds seven ounces, and Barnum drives him to Buckingham Palace in a carriage drawn by four snow-white dwarf horses. Dressed in a brown silk-velvet cutaway coat and matching britches, the general deports himself w
ith gravity and poise, scores a thwacking success. For a full hour, he keeps the court entertained with songs, dances, and his imitation of Napoleon. Then he takes his leave.

  As etiquette demands, he exits backwards. And he has almost covered the long gallery, reached shelter, when he is set on by the queen’s pet poodle. Using his cane as an épée, the general defends himself with vigor. But the beast is too huge, too fierce, and he is overwhelmed. The poodle towers above him. A massive paw descends, blocking out the light. Queen, court, and palace all vanish; the poodle roars: ‘Don’t ask,’ said Lush Life. ‘Just don’t ask.’

  She had come to borrow my eyebrow tweezers. When I had none to give her, she did not act shocked. One glance at my beard and hat and Buster Brown boots, my thrift-store Donegal overcoat, and she’d guessed that I did not vogue. ‘Doesn’t make you a bad person,’ she said.

  Up close, she looked quite different. Outside in the street by daylight, she had given off mere glamour, a secondhand Hollywood glitz. In this room, in the glare of its white light, she made me want to cry out.

  It was the nakedness. In my life, I had never seen flesh so fine grained. Backlit, it seemed almost translucent, as if half the layers of skin had been stripped off. She wore a kimono, two sizes too big and loosely tied by a sash-cord. It was studded with rips and cigarette burns. Some greedy claw had torn off an arm at the elbow and left great rents in the back and breast; had left her without camouflage. When she stood over me where I lay, sprawled out across the marigolds, I felt I was looking clean through, kimono and flesh and all, every bone laid bare, every flinch of muscle and nerve. ‘Turn out the light, why don’t you?’ Lush Life said, shivering. ‘Do you want me to burn up?’

  She was waiting for her girlfriend, Denise Denise. But her girlfriend was late, or maybe she wasn’t coming. Lush Life had bought herself a pint of Night Train; already she was half-cut, softly slurring. The bottle, what was left of it, dangled from one hand; with the other, butterfingered, she tried to light a candle. ‘Night Train, it’s good,’ she said. ‘Thunderbird is not so good. But Night Train, it’s better.’ She reached out the dregs towards me, proffering. She beckoned me in. ‘Have a drink. Do you good. No, it won’t,’ she said, and she snatched back her hand, drained off the last drops herself.