by Amor Towles
After hesitating, I passed the stairwell and continued down the hall. When I reached the room, I stopped and listened. Hearing no sounds within, I nudged the door with a knuckle. Through the gap, I could see that the bed was empty and unmade. Guessing the occupant was in the bathroom at the other end of the hall, I opened the door the rest of the way.
When my old man and I first came to the Sunshine Hotel in 1948, room 49 was the best one in the house. Not only did it have two windows at the back of the building, where it was quiet, in the center of the ceiling was a Victorian light fixture with a fan—the only such amenity in the whole hotel. Now all that hung from the ceiling was a bare bulb on a wire.
In the corner, the little wooden desk was still there. It was another amenity that added to the value of the room in the eyes of the tenants, despite the fact that no one had written a letter in the Sunshine Hotel in over thirty years. The desk chair was there too, looking as old and upright as the gentleman down the hall.
It may have been the saddest room that I had ever seen.
* * *
Down in the lobby I made sure that Woolly was still waiting in one of the chairs by the window. Then I went to the front desk, where a fat man with a thin moustache was listening to the ball game on the radio.
—Any rooms available?
—For the night or by the hour? he asked, after glancing at Woolly with a knowing look.
It never ceased to amaze me how a guy working in a place like this could still imagine that he knows anything at all. He was lucky I didn’t have a frying pan.
—Two rooms, I said. For the night.
—Four bucks in advance. Another two bits if you want towels.
—We’ll take the towels.
Removing Emmett’s envelope from my pocket, I thumbed slowly through the stack of twenties. That wiped the smirk off his face faster than the frying pan would have. Finding the change that I’d received at the HoJo’s, I took out a five and put it on the counter.
—We’ve got two nice rooms on the third floor, he said, suddenly sounding like a man of service. And my name’s Bernie. If there’s anything you want while you’re here—booze, broads, breakfast—don’t hesitate to ask.
—I don’t think we’ll be needing any of that, but you might be able to help me in another way.
I took another two bucks from the envelope.
—Sure, he said, with a lick of the lips.
—I’m looking for someone who was staying here until recently.
—Which someone?
—The someone in room 42.
—You mean Harry Hewett?
—None other.
—He checked out earlier this week.
—So I gather. Did he say where he was headed?
Bernie struggled to think for a moment, and I do mean struggled, but to no avail. I began to put the bills back from whence they came.
—Wait a second, he said. Wait a second. I don’t know where Harry went. But there’s a guy who used to live here who was very tight with him. If anyone would know where Harry is now, he would.
—What’s his name?
—FitzWilliams.
—Fitzy FitzWilliams?
—That’s the guy.
—Bernie, if you tell me where I can find Fitzy FitzWilliams, I’ll give you a fin. If you’ll loan me your radio for the night, I’ll make it two.
* * *
Back in the 1930s when my father first became friends with Patrick “Fitzy” FitzWilliams, Fitzy was a third-rate performer on vaudeville’s secondary circuit. A reciter of verses, he was generally shoved out onstage in between acts in order to keep the audience in their seats with a few choice stanzas in the patriotic or pornographic vein, sometimes both.
But Fitzy was a genuine man of letters and his first love was the poetry of Walt Whitman. Realizing in 1941 that the fiftieth anniversary of the poet’s death was right around the corner, he decided to grow a beard and buy a floppy hat in the hope of convincing stage managers to let him honor the anniversary by bringing the words of the poet to life.
Now, there are all manner of beards. There’s the Errol Flynn and the Fu Manchu, the Sigmund Freud and the good old Amish underneck. But as luck would have it, Fitzy’s beard came in as white and woolly as Whitman’s, so with the floppy hat on his head and his milky blue eyes, he was every bit the song of himself. And when he premiered his impersonation at a low-budget theater in Brooklyn Heights—singing of the immigrants continually landing, of the ploughmen ploughing and the miners mining, of the mechanics toiling away in the numberless factories—the working-class crowd gave Fitzy the first standing ovation of his life.
In a matter of weeks, every institution from Washington, DC, to Portland, Maine, that had planned on marking the anniversary of Whitman’s death wanted Fitzy. He was traveling the Northeast Corridor in first-class cars, reciting in Grange halls, liberty halls, libraries, and historical societies, making more money in six months than Whitman made in his life.
Then in November 1942, when he returned to Manhattan for an encore performance at the New-York Historical Society, one Florence Skinner happened to be in attendance. Mrs. Skinner was a prominent socialite who prided herself on giving the most talked-about parties in town. That year she was planning to open the Christmas season with a glamorous affair on the first Thursday in December. When she saw Fitzy, it struck her like a bolt of lightning that with his big white beard and soft blue eyes, he would be the perfect Santa Claus.
Sure enough, a few weeks later when Fitzy appeared at her party with his bowl full of jelly and rattled off The Night Before Christmas, the crowd brimmed over with the joys of the season. The Irish in Fitzy tended to make him thirsty for a dram whenever he had to be on his feet, a fact that proved something of a liability in the theater world. But the Irish in him also made his cheeks go red when he drank, which turned out to be an asset at Mrs. Skinner’s soirée because it provided the perfect polish to his Old Saint Nick.
The day after Mrs. Skinner’s, the phone on the desk of Ned Mosely—Fitzy’s booking agent—rang from dawn till dusk. The Van Whozens, Van Whyzens, and Van Whatsits were all planning holiday parties and they all just had to have Fitzy. Mosely may have been a third-rate agent, but he knew a golden goose when he was sitting on one. With only three weeks left until Christmas, he priced access to Fitzy on an accelerating scale. It was three hundred dollars for an appearance on the tenth of December and fifty bucks more for every day that followed. So if you wanted him to come down your chimney on Christmas Eve, it would cost an even grand. But if you threw in an extra fifty, the children were allowed to tug on his beard just to put their pesky suspicions to rest.
Needless to say, when it came to celebrating the birth of Jesus in this circle, money was no object. Fitzy was often booked for three appearances on a single night. Walt Whitman was sent to the showers, and Fitzy went ho-ho-ho-ing all the way to the bank.
Fitzy’s stature as the uptown Santa grew from year to year, such that by the end of the war—despite working only for the month of December—he lived in a Fifth Avenue apartment, wore three-piece suits, and carried a cane that was topped with the silver head of a reindeer. What’s more, it turned out that there was a whole class of young socialites whose pulse would quicken whenever they saw Saint Nick. So it wasn’t particularly surprising to Fitzy when after performing at a Park Avenue party, the shapely daughter of an industrialist asked if she could call on him a few nights hence.
When she appeared at Fitzy’s apartment, she was wearing a dress that was as provocative as it was elegant. But it turned out that romance was not on her mind. Declining a drink, she explained that she was a member of the Greenwich Village Progressive Society and that they were planning a large event for the first of May. When she had seen Fitzy’s performance, it had occurred to her that with his big white beard, he would be the perfect man to open the gathering by reciting a f
ew passages from the works of Karl Marx.
No doubt Fitzy was taken by the young woman’s allure, swayed by her flattery, and influenced by the promise of a significant fee. But he was also an artist through and through, and he was game to take on the challenge of bringing the old philosopher to life.
When the first of May rolled around and Fitzy was standing backstage, it felt like any other night on the boards. That is, until he peeked from behind the curtain. For not only was the room packed to capacity, it was filled with hardworking men and women. Here were the plumbers and welders and longshoremen, the seamstresses and housemaids who in that dingy hall in Brooklyn Heights all those years ago had given Fitzy his first standing ovation. With a deep sense of gratitude and a surge of populist affection, Fitzy stepped through the gap in the curtain, assumed his place on the podium, and gave the performance of his life.
His monologue was drawn straight from The Communist Manifesto, and as he spoke he had that audience stirred to the soul. So much so, when he reached his fiery conclusion, they would have leapt to their feet and broken into thunderous applause—had not every door of the auditorium suddenly burst open to admit a small battalion of police officers blowing whistles and wielding billy clubs under the pretext of a fire code violation.
On the following morning, the headline in the Daily News read:
PARK AVENUE SANTA DOUBLES AS COMMIE PROVOCATEUR
And that was the end of the high life for Fitzy FitzWilliams.
Having tripped over the end of his own beard, Fitzy tumbled down the stairs of good fortune. The Irish whiskey that had once put the jovial blush in his yuletide cheeks assumed command over his general welfare by emptying his coffers and severing his connections to clean clothes and polite society. By 1949, Fitzy was reciting dirty limericks on the subways with his hat in his hand and living in room 43 of the Sunshine Hotel—right across the hall from me and my old man.
I was looking forward to seeing him.
Emmett
In the late afternoon as the train began to slow, Ulysses raised his head briefly out of the hatch, then came back down the ladder.
—This is where we get off, he said.
After helping Billy put on his backpack, Emmett took a step toward the door by which he and his brother had entered, but Ulysses gestured to the other side of the car.
—This way.
Emmett had imagined that they would be disembarking into a sprawling freight yard—like the one in Lewis, only larger—situated somewhere on the outskirts of the city, with the skyline marking the horizon. He imagined they would need to slip from the car with caution in order to make their way past railwaymen and security guards. But when Ulysses slid the door open, there was no sign of a freight yard, no sign of other trains or other people. Instead, what filled the doorway was the city itself. They appeared to be on a narrow stretch of track suspended three stories above the streets, with commercial buildings rising around them and taller buildings in the distance.
—Where are we? Emmett asked as Ulysses jumped to the ground.
—It’s the West Side Elevated. A freight track.
Ulysses raised a hand to help Billy down, leaving Emmett to help himself.
—And the camp you mentioned?
—Not far.
Ulysses began walking in the narrow space between the train and the guardrail at the elevated’s edge.
—Watch the ties, he warned without turning back.
For all the celebration of the New York City skyline in poetry and song, as Emmett walked he barely paid it notice. In his youth, he had never dreamed of coming to Manhattan. He hadn’t read the books or watched the movies with an envious eye. He had come to New York for one reason and one reason alone—to reclaim his car. Now that they were here, Emmett’s attention could turn to finding Duchess by finding his father.
When he’d awoken that morning, the first word on his lips had been Statler, as if his mind had continued sorting through the alphabetical combinations in his sleep. That’s where Duchess had said the booking agencies were: the Statler Building. As soon as they arrived in the city, Emmett figured, he and Billy would go straight to Times Square to obtain Mr. Hewett’s address.
When Emmett had explained his intentions to Ulysses, Ulysses frowned. He pointed out that they wouldn’t be arriving in New York until five o’clock, so by the time he made it to Times Square, the agencies would be closed. It made more sense for Emmett to wait until morning. Ulysses said that he would take Emmett and Billy to a camp where they could sleep safely for the night; and on the following day he would watch over Billy while Emmett went uptown.
Ulysses had a way of saying what you should do as if it were a foregone conclusion, a trait that quickly got under Emmett’s skin. But Emmett couldn’t argue with the reasoning. If they arrived at five o’clock, it would be too late to go in search of the office. And when Emmett went to Times Square in the morning, it would be much more efficient if he could go alone.
* * *
• • •
On the elevated, Ulysses was walking with a long and purposeful stride, as if he were the one who had urgent business in the city.
While trying to catch up, Emmett checked to see where they were going. Earlier that afternoon, the train had shed two thirds of its freight cars, but there were still seventy cars between theirs and the locomotive. As he looked ahead, all Emmett could see was the same narrow gap between the boxcars and the guardrail receding into the distance.
—How do we get down from here? he asked Ulysses.
—We don’t.
—Are you saying the camp is up here on the tracks?
—That’s what I’m saying.
—But where?
Ulysses stopped and turned to Emmett.
—Did I say I was going to take you there?
—Yes.
—Then why don’t you let me do so.
Ulysses let his gaze linger on Emmett for a second to make sure that his point had been made, then he looked over Emmett’s shoulder.
—Where’s your brother?
Turning, Emmett was startled to find that Billy wasn’t there. So distracted had he been by his own thoughts and by trying to keep up with Ulysses, he had lost his awareness of his brother’s whereabouts.
Seeing the expression on Emmett’s face, Ulysses’s own expression turned to one of consternation. Saying something curt under his breath, Ulysses brushed past Emmett and began walking back the way they’d come as Emmett tried to catch up, the color rising to his cheeks.
They found Billy right where they had left him—beside the boxcar in which they had ridden. Because if Emmett was not enraptured by the sight of New York, the same could not be said of Billy. When they had disembarked, he had taken two steps toward the railing, climbed on top of an old wooden crate, and looked out into the cityscape, mesmerized by its scale and verticality.
—Billy . . . , said Emmett.
Billy looked up at his brother, clearly no more aware of their separation than Emmett had been.
—Isn’t it just like you imagined, Emmett?
—Billy, we’ve got to keep moving.
Billy looked up at Ulysses.
—Which one is the Empire State Building, Ulysses?
—The Empire State Building?
Ulysses said this with an impatience that sprang more from habit than urgency. But upon hearing his own voice, he softened his tone and pointed uptown.
—It’s the one with the spire. But your brother’s right. We’ve got to move along. And you need to keep closer. If at any time you can’t reach out and touch one of the two of us, then you’re not close enough. Understand?
—I understand.
—All right then. Let’s go.
As the three resumed walking over the uneven ground, Emmett noticed that for the third time the train rolled forward for a
few seconds, then stopped. He was wondering why it would do that, when Billy took his hand and looked up with a smile.
—That was the answer, he said.
—The answer to what, Billy?
—The Empire State Building. It’s the tallest building in the world.
* * *
• • •
After they had walked past half of the boxcars, Emmett saw that some fifty yards ahead the elevated angled to the left. Due to a trick in perspective, just beyond the bend an eight-story building seemed to be rising straight from the tracks. But when they got closer, Emmett could see that it hadn’t been a trick of perspective, after all. The building actually rose directly over the tracks—because the rails ran right through the middle of it. On the wall above the opening was a large yellow sign reading:
Private Property
No Admittance
Fifteen feet short, Ulysses signaled for them to stop.
From where they were standing, they could hear the sounds of activity up ahead on the other side of the train: the sliding of freight-car doors, the squeaking of dollies, and the shouting of men.
—That’s where we’re going, said Ulysses in a lowered voice.
—Through the building? whispered Emmett.
—It’s the only way to get where we’re headed.
Ulysses explained that at the moment there were five boxcars in the bay. Once the crew finished unloading them, the train would roll forward so that the crew could unload the next five. That’s when they would go. And as long as they stayed behind the boxcar and moved at the same pace as the train, no one was going to see them.
This struck Emmett as a bad idea. He wanted to express his concern to Ulysses and explore whether there was an alternative route, but from farther up the tracks came a release of steam and the train began to move.
—Here we go, said Ulysses.
He led them into the building, walking in the narrow space between the boxcar and the wall at the exact same pace as the train. Half of the way through, the train suddenly stopped and they stopped with it. The sounds of the warehouse activity were louder now and Emmett could see the rapid movements of the laborers expressed by the shadows that flitted between the boxcars. Billy looked up as if intending to ask a question, but Emmett held a finger to his lips. Eventually, there was another release of steam and the train began to roll again. Being careful to move at the same speed as the car, the three emerged on the other side of the building unnoticed.