The Boy Detective

by Roger Rosenblatt

  One afternoon, a fellow named Charlie, whom I knew from the shelter, decided to set up a living room on the sidewalk in front of a church on Eighty-sixth and Amsterdam. He had scavenged in the area and had selected a fake Oriental rug, an orange couch, a Barcalounger, two folding chairs, and an end table on which he placed a lamp plugged into nothing. The place looked pretty good. Walking past Charlie’s outdoor living room, I thought I would join him. We sat facing each other discussing this and that. After a while, he stretched and looked bored. “Well, Roger,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed this little chat. But I’m expecting guests.”

  THE OTHER DAY, in the memoir class, a man of, say, seventy who was writing about himself at age ten, described an episode when he had a friend over and his father, whose mind was going fast, had pissed his pants on the stairs. The friend fled hurriedly, and the boy, confused and unable to help his dad, retreated to the TV to watch Casbah, which was playing on Million Dollar Movie. Peter and I watched Casbah together, too, perhaps at the very same time as that student of mine, and we watched it day after day for a week. That was the appealing feature of Million Dollar Movie. It played one movie, all day, every day, for a week.

  So we sat together, afternoon and night, as Tony Martin, playing the master thief Pepe Le Moko, pursued a dark-eyed beauty whose name I forget, as he himself was pursued by Yvonne de Carlo, playing Inez, who loved Pepe unrequitedly, and by Peter Lorre, who played a cop named Slimane. Le Moko was safe from Slimane as long as he remained in the labyrinth of the Casbah, so Slimane arranged for the dark-eyed beauty to lure him out. I also forget how.

  But I still can sing every word of the song Martin sang, about man being meant for woman and woman for man. And I still can see Yvonne de Carlo yearning for him, as he yearned for another, who offered him only imprisonment. And if I had been paying attention, I would have understood the story as a parable about a man unable to avoid the pursuit of his own destruction. But instead I focused on the casbah and how wonderful it must have been to live there forever, in secret.

  I’LL TELL YOU a secret. The children of Gramercy Park stumbled upon a defunct mine shaft from the era of the Gramercy Silver Lode, back in the 1830s, fell in, and did not return. Keep this to yourself. Much was made of the mysterious event at the time, and search parties composed of deputized residents combed the park and its environs for several weeks afterward. But no one could find the mine shaft that swallowed up the children, although for many days one could hear their voices carried in the hedges and the oak trees of Gramercy Park, and in the pillars of clouds that rose over the neighborhood. Loud and excited at first, the voices soon grew faint, during which time the search parties scoured the park inch by inch, frantic that the children’s voices would disappear altogether and leave no sound to follow. This, in fact, happened. After a few more days, nothing was heard of the children of Gramercy Park ever again, and for a great many years the park was occupied only by grown-ups, as the neighborhood was childless.

  The president of the Gramercy Park Association, upon consulting with the membership, proposed that a memorial be established to honor the missing children. Two years passed, and the matter was hotly debated at the National Arts Club by the neighborhood grown-ups, some of whom thought a bench with a bronze plaque would be appropriate, while others envisioned the sculpting of a statue of a child placed in front of the club, bearing a forlorn expression to symbolize all the children who had fallen into the mine shaft. Still others held out for a smaller version of the wall memorializing those lost in the Vietnam War, in Washington, D.C., to emphasize the solemnity of the occasion. But then it was pointed out that those who had heard the voices of the disappeared children reported they had sounded happy, exultant even. No one thought it proper to erect a memorial to exultant missing children, so the discussion reverted to the memorial bench.

  It has been sixty years since the children of Gramercy Park disappeared, and as yet no memorial bench has been placed in the park. Most of the residents who remember the children at all doubt that there ever will be any memorial to them. Since that time, other children slowly have returned to the park, and today one hardly can tell the current Gramercy Park from the one I played in. But Teddy Welles isn’t there anymore, or Pete Krulewich, or Larry Hunt, or Ira Fink, Ruddy Platt, or Spike Abbott, or Bruce Morrell, or Chick Jacobson, or the Vercessi boys, or Jay Westcott, or Parnell Gunn. And Mark and Johnny Morris are not there either. We all fell into a mine shaft, and nothing was heard of us again.

  THAT STORY IS made up, as you suspected, but not wholly made up, as it involves certain accuracies within a whopper of a lie. Here, students, is where fact and fiction meld. And a memoir may make use of either or both. If I wanted to, I could tell you that my brother, for all his frailty and shyness, was a rabid tennis player who gave not an inch on the court, and who, often as not, would aim a forehand at an opponent’s nuts. Or that my father was a secret drinker—gin, mostly, to keep the booze off his breath as he examined patients. Or that my mother had been a belly dancer in the 1920s in a Negro nightclub, in Newark. Not that any of that is true. But I could put it all in a novel, and, believe it or not, in a memoir as well. By the time you’ve told any story, fact or fiction, well enough, you’ve made it up anyway. And if the odd fragments of information I just detailed were consistent with the entire pictures I have drawn of my brother, mother, and father, why not use them?

  I do not urge you, or even encourage you, to toss wholesale lies into your memoirs—though not out of some ethical compunction on my part, or a fear that you’ll be caught in your lies and pilloried or sued. Rather, that the lies (because it is their way) are liable to overtake the facts of your story and run away with it. That you do not want. But a fanciful touch here and there? The fanciful touch, if effective and original, functions as an extension of the truth, a dreaming into the truth. Did I tell you that my grandfather Patta used to sit Indian-style atop the brick chimney of his tenement roof, wearing a fez and puffing on a hookah, watching smoke circles rise through his folded legs? Just messin’ with you.

  ALLOW ME A true story I’ve told elsewhere. It comes to me because it’s about childhood and detectives, though I did not see that when I told it originally, or actually, until now. How the wandering mind works. From the age of ten or so, I developed the irritating penchant of slipping quotes from movies into a normal conversation. Those with whom I was speaking had no idea why a movie line had been introduced, but they recognized that by doing so I was indicating less of an interest in what we were saying than in amusing myself. You may imagine how this practice enhanced my already hectic social life.

  At a dance in high school, I approached my best friend, Peter Valente, who was standing in front of, and nearly concealing, a plumpish girl known to us both. I greeted Valente with a line from Beau Brummell in which Stewart Granger had insulted George III by speaking of him to another party, as though the king were not present. “Who’s your fat friend?” said Granger of the king. I said the same thing to Valente. The hidden girl stepped forward, steaming. How could I explain that I was speaking of George III?

  That was the sort of line I would quote. And if I were patient, I usually would find a conversational slot in which it fit. A line I never got in came from the movie Earthquake, one of the disaster movies of the 1970s. The plot involved a villain who was stalking a young woman. One would think that the prospect of an earthquake would have been enough to distract him. But the man was focused. When the earthquake finally hit, he jumped the woman. George Kennedy—who played a cop because he usually played a cop—pulled the guy off her and shot him dead. Then he said to the woman: “I don’t know what it is. Earthquakes seem to bring out the worst in some guys.” The only place I could think of where that line might have worked was California.

  Which brings me to the line that took me thirty years to find a home for, but it happened. It was delivered by Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson in one of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies I saw on TV. Watson wanted to impre
ss a couple who did not know of Holmes or his exploits. “Haven’t you heard of the giant rat of Sumatra?” he asked them, referring to one of Holmes’s sensational cases. In “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” Holmes delivers the line a bit differently: “Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson. It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared.” I chose to use the movie line. “Haven’t you heard of the giant rat of Sumatra?” It was tricky. There had to be an opening for the surprise at someone’s ignorance, also for the rat, and of course, its size.

  Then one day in 1978, I was lunching with friends, and it happened to be the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of Mickey Mouse. I barely was paying attention to the table talk, when someone asked, “Has there ever been a bigger rodent?”

  THE FIRST OF two times I actually saw Basil Rathbone was in Kennebunkport, Maine. I was with my parents and Peter, and we were taking a tour of the town. As we were walking down a stone embankment to the beach, Basil Rathbone was walking up. He was dressed in slacks and a collared shirt, though without the deerstalker’s hat or the pipe. We smiled. He smiled. I didn’t ask him if he enjoyed playing Sherlock Holmes, because I thought he was Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t say a word.

  And I didn’t speak to him the second time either, when I caught sight of him in the Indian Walk children’s shoes store on Madison Avenue. This time I was there just with my dad. As we walked in, Basil Rathbone was walking out, once again he and I passing like consulting detectives in the night. It seemed odd to me that he was in a children’s shoes store without a child, but I figured he was on a case, which was another reason I never would have presumed to speak to him. I imagined he thought the same thing about me.

  THINK OF THE names in small print at the end of a movie, after the end to be precise, when the movie is done and the audience shuffles out, turning their backs on the names that roll down forever, so fast you can hardly read them, yet they count for something. All the people it takes to make a movie. Eventually, though it lasts many minutes, and hundreds and hundreds of names are displayed, they are gone. And here they come now, down Thirty-seventh Street, my fellow citizens, extras, my fellow walkers, who have slid off the screen at the end of the movie and have filled the streets around me. How they multiply.

  What, I wonder, did Noah make of the sight of his passengers when the waters finally receded and they spilled out onto dry land, and two became four became hundreds. Billions. When the crowd got out of hand, Noah may have had trouble recalling exactly what his role had been in the repopulation of the earth. He was six hundred years old, after all. Similarly, I stand in wonder at all the people of my world, and how many of them it takes to make a movie.

  CUE THE PEDESTRIANS on their way up First, in the direction of the UN building. I do not follow. I have little interest in nations, united or otherwise. Besides, detective work when applied to nations means espionage, and nothing could bore me more than espionage. Who cares about the crimes of governments? You can’t solve them, and much of the time, that’s what governments do anyway—commit crimes. Crimes with little variety. As clients, governments will always let you down, and when you think you’ve done the right thing for this government or that, you soon will be shown that it was the wrong thing, because there is no side to take in government but that of government itself. In espionage, detectives are merely spies. No one weeps for spies. No one cares. I could take every one of John le Carré’s so-called heroes in all their gray, bleak, self-congratulatory splendor, and toss them in the drink, just east of the United Nations building. The only time the UN served a good mystery was in North by Northwest, and even then it merely provided a lofty setting for an ordinary stab in the back. Real detectives do not go to the United Nations building. I keep my distance.

  INSTEAD, I VEER toward the cold comfort of Murray Hill, whose boundaries are Thirty-fourth Street to Fortieth, and Madison Avenue to Third. I see the area now as then, not as a neighborhood really, but as a loose collection of city blocks with pretty town houses, pastel colors, browns, pinks, and light grays, each standing in a distracted elegance. Window boxes, flowerless in winter. Gleaming doors. Windows tall or round, like portholes. And Sniffin Court, on Thirty-sixth Street between Third and Lex, an enclave of two facing rows of lovely carriage-house-size homes, with a slate path running between them. Neither snooty nor familiar, the houses of Murray Hill tend to their own business.

  This was uptown New York in the nineteenth century. J. P. Morgan built his mansion here, at Thirty-sixth and Madison, a portion of which became the Morgan Library. In the eighteenth century, the land was a farm belonging to a merchant, Robert Murray, covering twenty-nine acres, rising to a hill at Thirty-fourth Street and sloping toward Forty-second and Lex. Crops were grown on some of the estates, but their main purpose simply was to be admired. Ginny and I were married in Murray Hill, in the Unitarian Community Church at Thirty-fifth between Madison and Park. As religions go, Unitarianism seemed to have few standards, making it suitable for us.

  For anyone in the detective trade the best thing about Murray Hill was Philo Vance, the courtly, effete, haughty, overeducated, overdressed consulting detective, created by S. S. Van Dine. And just as the name S. S. Van Dine is unbelievable, unless it also is the name of a steamship, Vance, too, was a story for which the world was not prepared, or ever would be. He had an apartment on East Thirty-eighth Street, with a roof garden, and a manservant named Curry. Van Dine described him as “a marked Nordic type,” with an aquiline nose and gray, wide eyes, and a mouth that displayed “cynical cruelty.” He was a three-handicap golfer, a champion archer and polo player, a master at poker, and a connoisseur of fine wine, food, and Chinese ceramics and tapestries. He was “largely educated in Europe,” whatever that meant. He smoked Régie cigarettes, whatever they were. As a boy, I barely understood a word Vance said. He swore, “My word!” and “By Jove!” He came out with things like “I shouldn’t miss it for all the lost comedies of Menander!”

  But he was so damn smart. The Bishop Murder Case, The Benson Murder Case, The Kennel, The Greene, The Scarab, The Canary murder cases, and more. Using not ratiocination but rather “his knowledge of human psychology,” he brought evildoers to their knees. And every crime occurred in the wealthy houses of New York, fancier than Gramercy Park but close enough for me to recognize the places where secret sins abounded and motives remained in hiding behind substantial closed doors. I might have been Vance, I thought, minus the affectations—the man apart who is aware of the terrors people are capable of, and of the justice that awaits them, solving the mysteries of the world and then returning to my home with a rooftop garden on East Thirty-eighth Street.

  YET THERE WERE times in the dream of days when I patrolled Murray Hill looking at the lovely houses with casual melancholy, knowing that the happy and sophisticated faces therein could never be mine. The sky was a gray silence, and the fires flared in the slits of the drapes. And all sorts of clever talk transpired therein, and all sorts of exciting news was announced, and confidence contained each house like skin. But these things were not mine. The families who lived with such stately ebullience did not belong to me. And so, while I stared at the great windows, tall as medieval towers, or at the lower level kitchens, blazing with their brass pots caressed in the thick arms of cook, arms glistening with sweat, my heart leapt from joy to envy thence to despair.

  For even as I coveted, I knew that the lives that seemed like glittering smiles would inevitably be revealed with a parting of the drapes as no less drab than my own. When I walked on, the moon would swing away toward stone villages elsewhere, and the stars as well, and I would be left bearing the weight of darkness. And in that—writer detective, detective writer—I felt at home.

  EVERY BLOCK AROUND here has a history, but you can’t see history. Dashiell Hammett, who moved around a lot, lived at 155 East Thirtieth when he was writing The Glass Key. At 19 East Thirty-first, the Herald Square Hotel,
were the offices of Life—not the picture magazine but rather a sophisticated humor magazine, whose name was bought by Time Inc. in 1936. The Herald Square Hotel was also where Charles Dana Gibson created the fashionable “Gibson Girl.” The golden cherub above the doorway is flanked by the words Wit and Humor.

  At the corner of Thirty-third Street and Park stands a Lewis Mumford skyscraper, built in 1927. Ayn Rand worked as a typist here while researching The Fountainhead. Rand lived at 120 East Thirty-fourth, till her death in 1982. In The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer moves to East Thirty-ninth Street after his marriage. The publisher Charles Scribner lived at 64 East Thirty-fourth. Henry Miller lived in the area. Enrico Caruso, too, briefly.

  It’s nice to know the history of these streets, but the present crowds out the past. The least interesting-looking pedestrian pushes Ayn Rand, Caruso, even Hammett out of my thoughts. There is a great deal of history in New York, but, as they say, nothing like the present. One feels the breath of history in places like Boston and Philadelphia. Not here. The present is the tense of the city. Tonight, you are here-and-now. Me, too.

  THAT PLACE WE lived in on the Upper West Side was on the second story of a brownstone on Eighty-seventh. The downstairs apartment was occupied by a woman in her thirties whose working routine was known to Ginny and me—out by eight in the morning, back by six. She was a pleasant neighbor. We greeted one another by name, but were no more familiar than that.

  One morning, as I was walking our dog, I noticed that the woman’s apartment door was wide open and the lights were on. It was well after eight, but I presumed nothing was amiss, even after I returned from my dog walk twenty minutes later. An hour or so after that, Ginny and I were headed out when I glanced at the woman’s apartment, which remained as it had been earlier. Door wide open, lights on. I called her name. Nothing. Louder. Still nothing. Hesitantly, I approached her door and called her name again. When there was no response this time, I decided to look inside, full of trepidation. The apartment was lit brightly. A PBS coffee mug on the counter. A yellow bowl with remnants of corn flakes or Special K clinging to the sides. A beige bra drooped over a ladder-back chair. An unmade bed. No one in the bathroom. And no young woman, dead or alive. She’d probably been in a rush that morning and left the door open.