The Boy Detective

by Roger Rosenblatt

  When, in my sophomore year, I heard that he was living out his days at the Prince George Hotel, I went to visit him. He greeted me in the lobby, and we chatted among the faux antiques and the Victorian bric-a-brac in one of the public rooms, sitting in plush purple armchairs with tears in the upholstery. Pastel columns held up the room, in which there also was a dry fountain, faded murals, and a fire going under a cracked marble mantelpiece. A tall mirror rose above the mantelpiece and a crystal chandelier, disproportionately large, above that. He wore a tie and a suit jacket that did not match his pants. The jacket was gray, the pants brown. His vest hung loose. His eyes were bleary, but he had shaved. His shirt cuffs were stained with tobacco. He was pleased to see me, I believe. Perhaps he was pleased to have any visitors at all.

  Walking home, I remember feeling sad and helpless, and that I was losing someone who held the secrets of the life I dimly sought, someone I might trust. A grown-up I might trust. We did not talk long. Half an hour, maybe a little more. He chain-smoked and said interesting things that I forget. He did most of the talking, since I had little to say but thank you.

  SEE WHAT YOU make of this dream, in which I decided to spend the night at the Prince George Hotel myself. When I registered at the desk, I learned from the clerk, who was the spitting image of Elisha Cook Jr. as he appeared in The Maltese Falcon, that Dylan Thomas was staying in the hotel, was in fact living there, since Caitlin had thrown him out for good this time. He had lurched at too many breasts, two too many. No, wait. It wasn’t Dylan Thomas. It was Tennessee Williams, that’s who was there, just for the night. But since I favored poets in those days, I’m saying it was Dylan Thomas staying in the hotel. And when I gathered the courage to introduce myself to him that evening, in the bar, over a grasshopper, I told him I was Tennessee Williams, just to put myself on an even footing with him, and I extended my hand. But, he said, politely but firmly, as southern gentlemen do, “I am Tennessee Williams.” “Are you certain?” I asked. He nodded, smiling. So then I said, feeling bolder by the second, that that must mean I am Dylan Thomas. And before he could recover his composure, because he was meeting Dylan Thomas at last, whom he had admired all those years, while never stooping to say, “I’m a big fan,” I retreated to my room in the hotel, the little red one that shared a bath with Samuel Beckett, who, as luck would have it, was also an overnight guest. And I spent the entire night sleepless, though ecstatic, considering a rapprochement with Caitlin, while writing “The Hunchback in the Park.”

  CRIPPLES, DRUNKS, LECHERS, madmen. Is it possible to sympathize with everyone? That is what we are supposed to do on our illimitable walk, or so they say. How about Pol Pot or the Japanese soldiers in Nanking or our own soldiers at My Lai? Joyce’s Bloom sympathized with everyone, and see where it got him. I don’t know. I like Joyce’s bourgeois Ulysses and Robert Graves’s girl-crazy Ulysses well enough, I suppose, but I much prefer the original wild sailor, or even Tennyson’s old salt who strove, sought, found, and did not yield.

  It is assumed of such heroes, people of certain magnitude, as Aristotle put it and Matthew Arnold repeated, that they are above sympathizing with the lower orders. But there is no evidence of that, one way or the other. What drove Quixote to attack the giants? What drove George C. Scott’s Sherlock Holmes, in all the nuttiness of his quest for Moriarty, but the desire to ennoble the world for everyone, not just for himself? This is the detective’s kind of sympathy. And the writer’s. Both see people for what they are, judging privately, yet leaving cosmic judgment to others—perhaps the deepest sort of sympathy there is.

  And love gets in the act. It does. The detective may seek honor over love, yet ideally he wants both. Love personal and love general. For all his hard-boiled patter, he believes that love defines us, that if love prevailed over all competing emotions in the first place, there would be no cupidity, no crime. He knows we are composed of the choices we make, sometimes imprisoned by them. Yet he also knows, though he does not say so, that love trumps all our choices. If memory acknowledged nothing but love, we would be so light-hearted, we would be able to fly. But we are not able to fly. Even the dumbest PI knows that. The dumbest and the saddest.

  Of course, sympathy does not imply trust. Detectives find it best not to trust anyone. It’s encumbering, I know, living with mistrust as a constant, but that is how it must be in order to solve a mystery and bring about justice. And it works both ways, after all. I don’t trust you yet, pal. You don’t trust me.

  And all this wariness extends to a mistrust of human nature as well. So sad. I cannot tell you how many cases I’ve been on where someone protests, “Him? He couldn’t have done it. He doesn’t have it in him.” Alas, he had it in him. Everyone has it in him. And before you point out that there’s a logical contradiction between seeking to save people and not believing they are worth saving, allow me to point out that it is not other people the detective is saving. Most of the time, the detective strives to save himself, whom he also doesn’t trust. It’s true. Trust me.

  I SOUND AS though I read a lot as a boy, but, except for detective fiction, I didn’t. More bookstoreish than bookish, I often took my pursuits to the Fourth Avenue bookstores between Ninth and Fourteenth streets. Caves on a boulevard, where the antique books, like shelves of rocks, extended deep into mists. If there had been any order to the inventory, it was buried in the minds of the proprietors, old Commies mainly, who rarely looked up from whatever manifesto they were reading. Each one sat monklike in the front of his shop, by the door, and raised an eyelid or two as you entered. A kid, even a detective, would receive no notice. It hardly mattered. My business was not with the old men, but rather with the books—black, brown, maroon. The sweet-dust smell. The dates of old publications. I bought a biography of Napoleon written in the 1880s, and the essays of Macaulay, and short stories by Jack London. Everything dirt cheap.

  I can’t remember ever reading any of them. What I sought from the books was a connection to past mysteries. In the best detective stories, something terrible that happened long ago erupts in a crime of the present. I would nose around one store after another (there were at least twenty-five of them), as if I were hunting for something specific. The proprietors never questioned my motives. They understood what I wanted. It was the same thing they had wanted when they had relocated their lives to a bookstore. Quiet, strange, dark. No money in it for them. Eventually they moved to Florida.

  Two bookstores are left in the area these days. The Alabastar, between Eleventh and Twelfth streets, is not one of the originals, as it was established in 1996. But it has the look and feel of the great old stores. The Strand, founded in 1927, has hung on all these years, among the newer enterprises of art supply centers, low-rise apartments, and stores that sell Halloween costumes and “fantasy apparel.” Everything looks alike, but so did the old bookstores. They just looked better, alike. A friend of John’s works in the Strand. He reports whenever a book of mine winds up in the one-dollar bin. “Overpriced,” he says. I go to the Strand from time to time, but today it’s a little too café and eager to please for my taste. I think it feels abandoned. I think it misses the companionship of the other stores. I try to picture the day they went out of business. A truck pulls up out front. The books are carried out like patients from a nursing home. And for a moment, before demolition, the obvious vacant walls.

  NOTHING MUCH AT Twenty-fourth and Fifth, though once there was a great arch here. Erected in 1918, it was bigger than the one that stands today at the end of Fifth Avenue in Washington Square Park. That arch was built in 1889, to honor the centennial of George Washington’s first inauguration. The arch on Twenty-fourth was built to honor the soldiers of the city who had died in the First World War. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia denounced the structure as the “altar of extravagance,” and the arch was razed shortly after a victory parade in 1918. What remains is a fifty-one-foot-high obelisk called the Worth Monument, after General William Jenkins Worth, who fought in the Mexican-American War. War dominat
es the city’s monuments, every city’s probably. Yet the monuments evoke no sense of power or glory. Stone generals on stone horses overlook the citizens, who pay no attention to them. A comedian of my childhood years said that he hoped to erect a statue of a pigeon, so that all the generals for miles around could sit on it.

  In a despotic government, the hero is the man who robs a train. But that does not excuse him for relishing his life of crime. Enjoyment of that sort creates a tyranny of its own. I do not know what makes a hero. Something hidden and unnoted, probably, such as you dressing in the morning, and preparing to meet the world, my hero.

  IN THE WALK, Jeffrey C. Robinson calls walking a “quintessentially Romantic image” because it is associated with happiness. Not that Romanticism was always all that happy, but I see his point. The walks or marches for civil rights had a goal of happiness before them in the betterment of lives. Walks in the nineteenth century were meant to offer a leisurely opposition to the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution. There are religious pilgrimages undertaken with the hope of a sort of happiness. The idea of progress is also associated with walks, by seeking to go one step further. Gulley Jimson, the loony painter of Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, had as his life’s ambition the creation of a gigantic wall depicting human feet, indicating that the part of us we walk on is the noblest part.

  Am I taking this walk to find happiness? I did not think so at first. I thought I was simply dwelling in a mystery. Yet meandering like this, sans pressure, feels akin to happiness. So yes, it is possible that I have undertaken this walk of mine to feel better about myself, about everything. If I walk from the present into the past, as I have been doing, I may even feel better about the past. Happiness in the past. Is that possible?

  “DO YOU KNOW,” said my mother, “that you sang ‘Daisy, Daisy’ while you were still in the carriage?”

  “I did?”

  “And in your crib. You stood up, hanging on to the wooden railing, and sang, ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true.’ ”

  “ ‘Give me your answer true,’ ” I repeated.

  She continued to sing. “ ‘I’m half crazy . . .’ ”

  And I: “ ‘ . . . all for the love of you.’ ”

  WHAT’S ALL THIS about not stepping on a shadow? What exactly are you afraid of? That the shadows will feel your hobnail boot on them and cry out in pain? That they will suck you into the pavement like quicksand, your arms flailing, beseeching, as you go under, hands reaching out from the grave? Why, there were kids in our neighborhood who would sooner step on a crack and break their mothers’ back, before they ever would step on a shadow. If they spotted a shadow ahead of them, especially at night when shadows are hard to spot, they would rev up like racing cars in order to leap over the terrible blot. One boy I knew, who lived on Eighteenth and Third, name of Daley, was so afraid of shadows he’d turn back if he saw one, returning to where he came from, or travel all the way round Robin Hood’s barn rather than confront the dark ghost on the street. Not me. I was hardly brave, but fear a shadow? Never. Shadows are too potent. They contain one’s inner value. A private eye would no more avoid a shadow than a pilot would the sky. One time, I took a picture of my shadow under a traffic light, so that it appeared like a person with a traffic light for a head. Why I did this I have no clue. But it goes to show how comfortable I felt with shadows, that I would become one. Besides, using a traffic light that way made it easier to direct the stories I made up, or did not make up.

  STOP HERE: the Jewish cemetery on Eleventh Street between Fifth and the Avenue of the Americas. A sign denotes the Second Cemetery of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue congregation, Shereath Israel (1805–1829). The First Cemetery of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue congregation, on Chatham Square in Chinatown, dates back to the 1640s and contains soldiers who fought in Washington’s army. There is yet a Third, on Twenty-first Street. But this is the one I kept returning to as a kid. Just standing and peering in at the haphazard triangle, the unkempt garden tucked between buildings.

  Maybe thirty-five, thirty-six graves here, with three scrawny trees and a sapling standing among the headstones. Only one substantial monument, consisting of a square stone base beneath a chunky obelisk. Two flat stone markers. One crypt the size of a largish hope chest. The other graves are marked by whitish stones leaning against the cemetery’s back wall, like wallflowers at a dance. Some are small, suggesting the graves of children. One has the shape of a cartoon ghost, sculpted by rain and erosion. All the inscriptions are worn away. Mute inglorious Miltons. Does anyone read Thomas Gray these days?

  Charles Ives occupied the town house next to the cemetery. I don’t know what he made of it. As a boy, I don’t know what I made of it either, except to acknowledge how unusual, even startling it was to come upon a cemetery in the middle of the city. I may have taken to it simply because it was so easy to overlook, like a tiny clue. Yet it has been where it is for centuries. All one needs to do is notice it, as I do now, again. Atop the low wall on either side of the iron gate out front, on a six-inch ledge, lie small stones and seashells. They seem deliberately placed, perhaps as signs of respect.

  ALL THAT I am, all that we are, will come to nothing. Think of that. This frozen skin, this pile of bones, these tears, these flying dreams, ferocious glee, careless whims, these dark ambitions and darker memories, and recriminations, darker still. All to nothing. In one moment, our squalling birth. In the next, the death of our regrets. Our minds are peopled by entire civilizations, which will be gone, just like that. Just like that. When we die, history dies. Can you believe it? Our songs. Even our songs. Even this thought. Perish the thought.

  Is there a roaring after this? A blast of light? Something, anything that might serve as a postscript? P.S., Kilroy, we were here. Would it not greatly gratify us to be like a star and live in our own afterburn? I don’t know. The eventual streets and avenues that lie before me today, to which I shall proceed. And the citizens yet to be encountered. And the impressive edifices yet to be remarked upon, and surveyed in wonder. They live in nothing until I approach. So it is possible to exist in nothing. Don’t you think? One can remove the owls and the tulips, and all the glories of the earth, amen, and have them still. My temples ache.

  The sweetest thought is the smile of a girl in a dress with pale yellow florets, who walks toward me at the end of a summer evening, when the sun, done with lighting beech trees, larks, and the lot, hunches its shoulders along the disappearing line. She, then, assumes the sun’s role. Hard to believe, but it is true . . . Hard to believe that she too will come to nothing. Do we leave a trace? Only after you speak do I know what you mean.

  THE BODY IS that of a normally developed white male, measuring seventy inches in length and weighing 175 pounds, and appearing generally consistent with his age, as given, of seventy-one years. The body is cold to the touch and uninvolved with declining rigor mortis. There is no lividity. X-rays suggest several former fractures to the left shoulder, the right cheekbone, the fifth cervical vertebra, as well as multiple wounds of undetermined origins to the heart. Toxology reveals traces of Advil, Prilosec, and Lipitor, and food fragments indicating a poorly balanced diet, if said diet could be defined as balanced at all. Anomaly: as coroner was about to cover the body and place it back in the file cabinet, it sat up straight, smiled, said “It isn’t over yet,” and sang “Daisy, Daisy.” This made it difficult to determine cause of death.

  IT WAS ONE thing to wander the streets like a shadow, shadowing shady people. Silent, stealthy. How divinely removed it felt to be driven by a suspicion of everything, wondering if all things bright and beautiful were in fact bright and beautiful, or if I peeled them down to the nub like an onion, would they show themselves to be black at the core, themselves shadows of shadows in the city of mystery, mixing and matching, as shadows do, without the ability to speak.

  But it was quite another thing to wonder if that wandering would ever come to an end, the illimitable walk reaching it
s limits, or would I become like Cain, with no wind disclosing my whereabouts. I would never be considered a missing person, since no one would report me missing because there would have been no place for me to be missing from, and therefore I would not be missing, officially. For who would be there in nowhere to report me missing? Who would be nowhere to indicate I was ever a person?

  And it was a third thing to imagine where I would be if I were to move among the objects, the suspects, of my wandering, as someone who never would return to the world that might have been interested in them, and then might act upon information about them—to discover all that I had discovered, and thus punish the guilty and free the innocent, and reward me for my keen eyes and ears, but instead of all that, to blend in with the targets of my scrutiny, knowing that I had no authority to turn them in. I would be one of them, powerless. A shadow like them. Me and my shadow, walking down the avenue.

  And if that were so, would I then identify with all whom I pursued, being one of them, and drop my standards and my guard, because I would know how it felt to live under a microscope, or a magnifying glass, to be precise? Probably not. I think not. I know me. I was the world in which I walked. Though I was assured there would be no returning from my wanderings to the land of light and judgment, I trust that I would continue to shadow the shadows anyway, for even in the world of the lost there are those who know what must be done, and I would be one of those persons, missing or not. And that was the fourth thing.

  ODD TO SAY, but in New York even the lost do not seem lost. Years ago, when we were living on the Upper West Side, I did a little work with a project for the homeless. Clients were given medical treatment. Some held jobs. Most drifted in and out of the shelter. One woman lived in a tree in Central Park. All seemed relatively content with their lot.