by Jack Finney
Here in the daylight I was very much aware of what Kate and I hadn't seen in the dark: the incredible profusion of telegraph wires. Like a rube, I walked along for half a block staring up at a gray winter sky actually darkened, or so it seemed, by literally hundreds and hundreds of black telegraph wires on both sides of the street and running across it in bunches of sometimes several dozen, an astonishing mess. Every few yards wooden telegraph poles sprouted from the walk, some of them—I stopped and counted—with as many as fourteen crossarms loaded with wires, each pole, I noticed, marked with the name of whatever competing company had put it there.
Traffic was very heavy, rumbling and pounding along on the cobbles, and it occurred to me that this wasn't a very broad way; it was a narrow street, actually, which didn't help the congestion any. There were a great many flat-bedded or low-sided drays hauling barrels or boxes. One dray, labeled MARVINS' SAFE CO. carried a crated safe, and I could see it through the slats, brand-new, black and shiny, a freshly painted little scene—cows in a field—on the upper half of its door. As I watched, a boy ran up behind the dray, scaled the low back gate, and sat down astride it, hitching a ride. In the same block a loaded moving van rolled by, an immense red-painted box on wheels, its driver high up on a seat over the rumps of his team. On the side of the van, under the gilt-painted name BUTLER BROTHERS, MOVING, there was a large painted scene in a wildly ornate gold-painted frame. It was no pastoral scene but a cannon-flashing duel between full-rigged ships, labeled in an oval inset at the bottom THE BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE. The Broadway stages, dozens and dozens of them constantly trundling up and down the street, sometimes three or four in a row, were very much like the Fifth Avenue buses only they were painted red, white, and blue, and they had scenes, too, painted on the sides; mostly pastoral, and pretty much daubs. But they were all different, and I liked this whole idea of scenic decoration of ordinary things. The twentieth century's diesel monsters, I decided, would be improved by some of the same.
There were a great many light, single-horse delivery wagons, and in among the commercial traffic an occasional fine carriage moving uptown, toward the Ladies' Mile, I supposed. And everywhere I looked, there were signs, the names of firms occupying the buildings on which the signs hung. Most were black letters on white, or gold letters on black, and they hung out over the sidewalks or were wired to building ledges just below rows of windows, slanting slightly downward so they could be read from the street.
I liked the street; it was varied, interesting to the eye. The entrances to some of the buildings were four or five steps above street level, the wide flights of stairs often separated by a brass railing into incoming and outgoing sections. Generally there'd be more offices or a barbershop or restaurant or something in the basement section, half below street level, the stairway down to it protected by black iron guard railings with a row of points along the street-level railing to keep loafers from sitting on them. The buildings were constructed from every possible material; there was plenty of brick and wood; there were some whose entire fronts were of cast iron, often as high as three or four stories; there were marble and granite, brownstone, wood, and even stucco. And they were of mixed periods; between newer four- and five-story stone office buildings I passed a lot of small, modest houses of an obviously earlier time, with old-fashioned dormer windows in the upper stories, but the lower stories turned into shops with plate-glass display windows. At one such display window eight or ten men were standing, and I joined them. A girl, looking very prim and a little embarrassed, and never glancing at us, sat demonstrating a typewriter. It was a strange-looking contraption, high and almost completely open, exposing its works, and decorated here and there with gilt-and-red arabesques. Stuck to the window with little dabs of paste were samples of her work, praising the machine, its speed, and its superiority to handwriting. We all watched till she finished what she was doing, a short, sample business letter. Then she stuck that to the window and began a new sample. A man beside me said, "They'll be all the go soon; you watch." But I shook my head and said, "No, they'll never catch on; they lack the personal touch," and he looked thoughtful.
I turned away from the window; the walks were crowded, mostly with men. Were there far more portly and even fat men now than you'd see in the late twentieth century? I thought so. Dozens of boys—why weren't they in school?—darted through the crowd in messenger uniforms, the day's equivalent of the telephone, I supposed. There were occasional other boys, not much older, carrying canvas sacks of what seemed to be actual money; I heard the clink of coins inside them. And there were younger boys, some no more than six or seven, often literally in rags, their faces and hands permanently dirty. Some of these were selling papers. I saw all the morning papers—the Herald, Times, Tribune, Sun, World—and the first afternoon editions of a lot of the others: the Daily Graphic, Staats Zeitung, Telegram, Express, Post, Brooklyn Times, Brooklyn Eagle, and still others I can't remember. Every one of them carried column headings about the Guiteau verdict, and I heard Guiteau's name mentioned often by passersby. Others of the smaller boys shined shoes and boots from portable stands carried by straps slung over their shoulders. These were the boys, it suddenly occurred to me, that Horatio Alger wrote about; he was alive now, I recalled, maybe writing Tom, the Bootblack at this moment. But the bright, eager, cheerful faces he wrote about weren't down here. These faces, even the six-year-olds', were intent and knowing, shrewd and alert, as they had to be—I thought I could see this in their faces—if they were to eat tonight. Several men suddenly stopped on the walk, stepped to the curb, pulled out their watches and then stood, heads thrown back, staring up and across the street, watches still in hand. Even while I was wondering about it, more men stepped to the curb, dragging watches from their vest pockets. And within less than a minute hundreds of men lined the curb of Broadway for blocks, glancing from the open watches in their hands to the roof of one of the tallest buildings along here.
The roof was a shingled many-gabled complexity of windowed pyramid-shaped towers of various sizes; rising from their center, and highest of all, was an ornate square tower surrounded at its base by a fenced walk. WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH CO. was painted in a circle on the side of the tower, and now I saw that a great many of the wires lining the street originated from this rooftop. A flagpole rose from the roof of the tower, an American flag fluttering rapidly from it; and at the top of the pole directly behind the flag I saw a large bright-red ball. The ball was made with a hole through it apparently, like a doughnut; it surrounded the pole and must have been visible up there for miles around.
I didn't know what was going on, but I got out my watch—two minutes to twelve, it said—and stood like the hundreds of other men all up and down Broadway as far as I could see. Suddenly, and there was a simultaneous murmur, the red ball dropped the length of the flagpole to its base, and the man next to me murmured, "Noon, exactly." He carefully set his watch, and I did the same, pushing the minute hand forward. All around me I heard the clicks of the covers of gold watches snapping shut. The hundreds of men at the curb turned and became part of the streams of pedestrians again, and I was smiling with pleasure: Something about this small ceremony, momentarily uniting hundreds of us, appealed to me mightily.
Now, just past the stroke of noon, music—chimes—had begun somewhere behind me, and I knew the tune: "Rock of Ages." I turned to look back, and smiled. I'd seen the source of the sound just down the street: it was an old friend, Trinity Church, its chimes clear in the winter air, and I hurried along to it. Then, a couple of dozen steps past the church, my back against a telegraph pole out of the stream of pedestrians, I made a quick reference-sketch which I finished up much later. I'd sketched Trinity before, but this time, incredibly, its tower rose black against the sky, higher than anything else in sight. I finished, making notes in the margins for the final job, stood looking at it, and a messenger boy in a brass-buttoned blue uniform stopped for a moment, looked at my sketch, nodded at me, and walked on. This is the finis
hed sketch and it is absolutely accurate except that I added leaves to show the fine old trees more clearly. This is the Broadway I walked along—in the middle distance at the left you can see the Western Union Building and the time ball which had just dropped to the base of the pole a few minutes before.
Walking back, glancing down at my rough sketch, I was tempted to stop and add the ghosts of the tremendous towers that would someday surround Trinity, burying the tower at the bottom of a canyon. But I was passing the church entrance now, and four or five men hanging around on the sidewalk before it, sizing me up correctly, called, "Visit the steeple, sir! Highest point in the city! Best view in town!" There was just time, and I nodded to the one who looked as though he needed the money most.
Inside he led me up a steep endlessly winding stone staircase, on up past the bell-ringing rooms, then past the bells, clanging so deafeningly here that you couldn't make out the separate notes. Finally, at the top, we reached a wooden-floored ledge running under several narrow open windows. My knees felt the climb, and I was trying to hide my puffing. I reached out and tried one of the stone windowsills, making sure it was solid, and the guide laughed. "I was waiting to see whether you'd try that sill; they all do. Not one man in ten will lean up against it till he's sure it'll hold. I've had men up here wouldn't stand within two feet of it when the windows was open. And I've had ladies get sick the minute they looked down." He kept up the chatter while I looked out: The steeple was 284 feet high, he said; it was the highest point in the city, 16 feet taller than even the Brooklyn Bridge towers, and the church stood on a higher piece of ground besides. At least 5,000 people visited this steeple every year, and probably more, but very seldom a New Yorker alone; no one had ever tried suicide by jumping; and so on and on, while I stared out at the entire upper Bay.
The sky was steel-gray, the air very clear, everything sharply etched. Over the low rooftops I could see both rivers, the water—of the Hudson especially—ruffled, gray as hammered lead. Lining South Street off to my left were hundreds and hundreds of masts; I watched the ferries, great paddle wheels churning; I stared out at the church spires high over the rooftops in every direction; I saw the astonishing number of trees, to the west especially, and thought of Paris again; and I looked down at the walks onto the heads of passersby in Broadway, the tiny circles which were the tops of silk hats tilting and winking dully in the clear winter light. At an opposite window I looked uptown, across the roof of the post office toward City Hall Park. Beyond it, off to the east and sharp against the winter sky, stood the great towers of newly cut stone supporting the immense cables from which the roadway of Brooklyn Bridge would hang; now I could see workmen moving along temporary planking laid here and there across great open gaps of the unfinished roadway, the river far below clearly visible.
It was a great view of the city from what was, of course, the day's sightseeing equivalent of the Empire State Building far in the future. But there was nothing laughable in the comparison, I thought, staring out at the city; this was the highest view in town just now, however lost among incredibly higher buildings it was going to become. And if someday I'd have to go up ninety-odd stories to get a murky, smog-ruined view of New York instead of this brilliantly defined closer look at a lower and far pleasanter city, then who should be doing the laughing? I wanted to sketch the view, but it would have taken hours just to rough it in, and now I had to hurry. Downstairs I gave my guide a quarter, which made him happy; then, moving fast, I walked back toward City Hall Park.
14
At twenty-four minutes past noon, standing at a first-floor rear window of the post office, I stood looking across the street to the north at the little wintertime park and the people moving along its crisscrossing paths, and the strangeness of what I was doing took hold of me. Staring out that soot-dirtied window, I was remembering the note I'd seen in Kate's apartment, the paper yellowing at the edges, its once-black ink rusted with time. And the meeting in this park, arranged by that note, became an ancient event, decades old and long since forgotten.
Could it really be about to happen? I wasn't able to believe that it would. People, strangers, continued to walk out of and into the park and along the walks all around it. Just ahead and across the street to my right, Park Row, stood the five-story New York Times Building I'd seen the night Kate and I walked to the El station, and again it was strange knowing it still stood in twentieth-century Manhattan. Now in daylight, I read the long narrow signs, suspended just below windowsill level, of other lower-floor tenants of the building: FOREST, STREAM, ROD & GUN ... LEGGO BROS.... The Times Building shared a common wall with another five-story stone building right behind it almost directly across the street to my right. It was nondescript, with tall narrow windows, its front—like the Times Building beside it and like most other such buildings in this area—hung with narrow gilt-on-black or black-on-white signs suspended just below the windows of the tenants. Then my eyes dropped to the street-level entrance, and Jake Pickering was standing in it.
I was inside the post office, across the street from the south end of City Hall Park. The doorway in which Jake Pickering stood was recessed, several yards back from the street and up two or three steps from street level; it was almost directly to my right so that I could see him, but from the park ahead I knew he couldn't be seen. And he took care not to be seen, standing on the steps close beside the stone wall of the recessed doorway. He was searching the park across the street from him and ahead. Then, satisfied, he stepped quickly out, moved across the walk, and dodging through the traffic, he crossed Park Row and walked swiftly into the park, and directly to the center, where most of the walks converged. There he stood, hat on the back of his head, outer coat unbuttoned, hands jammed into his pants pockets, his jaws clenched on a cigar, angling it upward, and he waited.
Five minutes passed. I could see Pickering's breath; it was cold out there, and he felt it and began strolling slowly back and forth, a dozen yards each way from the center of the park. But he didn't button his coat or take his hands from his pockets or his cigar from his mouth. From time to time he puffed the cigar, its blue smoke mingling with the white vapor of his breath, and I realized that he was posing, offering a picture of a man at ease. And succeeding: His posture and slow walk, everything about him, said that he was relaxed and content, that he didn't even notice the cold.
Five minutes more passed; the City Hall clock across the park said twelve thirty-five. And when I looked down from the clock the second man was well inside the park walking swiftly toward its center from the west. And I knew that the fleck of blue in his gloved hand (the event was no longer ancient; a chill moved along my spine at knowing that here I stood watching it begin) was the envelope I'd seen Pickering mail, held in the other man's hand now as a symbol of recognition.
Pickering had seen him and was walking toward him; my breath was clouding the dirty pane, I was leaning so close, and I stepped back a grudging inch or so. Now Pickering was smiling, and the two men stopped, facing each other. As the second man tucked the blue envelope into an inner coat pocket, Pickering removed the cigar from his mouth, and I saw his beard move as he spoke, then the slight waggle of the other man's beard as he answered. At this distance they might have been black-bearded twins standing there on the path, each in shiny silk hat, dressed virtually alike, each with the portly figure of the day. Their heads turned as they glanced around, searching the park, and I resisted an impulse to duck from sight. Then Pickering pointed, and they angled across the park, toward me and toward a bench protected from the wind by the high stone base of the statue against which it stood. They reached it, and sat down almost hidden from my view by the statue's base, only the left knee and shoulder of one of them in my line of sight.
I had to hear them, had to, and I walked swiftly out the rear doors, ran across the street behind the tail gate of a brewery wagon piled with wooden barrels, then walked into City Hall Park to the base of the statue. I turned around, and with my back nearly touchi
ng the base I stood frowning a little, occasionally glancing irritably along the path as though waiting for someone who was late. "...don't understand why," one voice was saying reasonably. "It's below freezing, turning colder momentarily, and there is a wind besides; no one sits in a park on a day like this. If you have no office of your own, there's the Astor House lobby just across the street; I'll stand treat at the bar."
"Oh, I have an office of my own," Jake Pickering's voice said; there was a fat chuckle in it. "Not much of an office. Nothing like yours, I'll warrant. But still, you'd like to see it, wouldn't you? You won't, though. Not yet. No one sits in a park on a day like this; true. But that's why we're going to sit here; what I have to say is strictly between the two of us. The subject is Carrara marble; it brought you here. On the run. And it'll keep you here. In the cold. Andrew Carmody, the ever-so-eminent millionaire."
"It brought me here," the other man replied levelly. "But not to be played with. So keep your remarks about my eminence to yourself, and say what you want without further ado, or I'll stand up, walk off, and be damned to you."
"Good enough. You'll have to forgive me, but I have reached the culmination of several years' work and am enjoying my little triumph."
"What do you want?"
"Money."
"Assuredly. As who does not? Get to the point."
"All right. Cigar?"
"No, thank you; I'll smoke my own."
There was a silence, the strike of a match, the sound of cigars puffed into life; then Pickering spoke again. "I work in City Hall where I am a clerk, the lowest of the low. Yet I sought the job, sir! Leaving employment much more remunerative. Now, why? Why, you ask."
"I didn't"—I heard Carmody puff at his cigar—"but continue."