The Boy Detective Read online

  When it was first presented to the public, a critic noted that while Seward the man was “all head and no legs,” his statue “represents the statesman with unusual length.” Seems that Rogers initially set out to make a statue of Lincoln himself, but ran out of money and at the last minute, switched to Seward. Poor Seward. No one could get things right about him.

  A small coincidence: Directly across Twenty-third Street from Madison Square Park is the Flatiron Building, designed by Daniel H. Burnham. The structure was so tall, New Yorkers thought it would topple. They named it “Burnham’s Folly.” Folly faces folly. The word seems to have disappeared from the national lexicon, perhaps because the original ideas proved not so foolish after all. More likely, modern catastrophes are too big to be called mere follies. Vietnam was deemed no one’s folly, as I recall.

  Madison Square is guarded by statues and monuments, an eclectic bunch. Northeast of Seward a sky-high flagpole serves as a monument to soldiers who died in the First World War, the names of battles carved into the massive marble block at its base—Champagne, Marne, Vittorio, Veneto, Somme, Meuse, Argonne. On the north side of the park, near Madison Avenue, stands a statue of David Glasgow Farragut, Admiral Farragut of the War of 1812, looming over a semicircular white wall in which the figures of two goddesses or spirits carved in relief are facing away from each other. In the northwest corner rises Chester A. Arthur, posed like so many statues of the turn of the century, suggesting that he has just risen from his thronelike chair to make a speech. If it is hard to understand what President Arthur is doing in President Madison’s park, it is more intriguing to account for the prominence of Roscoe Conkling, at the southwest corner. Conkling was a mid-nineteenth-century New York congressman, whom Lincoln had called “well-cultivated, young, handsome, polite, and withal, a good listener.” On the other hand, the secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, called Conkling an “egotistical coxcomb.” And someone else noted that he possessed “the finest torso in public life,” causing one to wonder how torsos were assessed in private life.

  Some other statues in my world included the bronze Peter Stuyvesant in front of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery on Tenth Street and Second Avenue. His tomb lies in the church basement. I saw it as a kid, staring and wondering about the condition of the body and the peg leg. Was the peg intact? In recent years, I’ve read that Stuyvesant was a prick and an anti-Semite. But my mind still gloms on the peg.

  In the center of Gramercy Park, green, bronze Edwin Booth rises from his Hamlet’s throne, superior to all that flesh is heir to. He faces the National Arts Club and the Players Club, on the south side of the park, which Booth founded in 1888. Whatever other purposes they serve, New York’s statues are monuments to stillness, anomalies in the city. When I was in my teens I wrote a poem about the Booth statue, my first published piece, in the Gramercy Graphic, the neighborhood magazine. Something banal and too direct, about pride and adamantine shapes.

  EDWIN BOOTH MAY have loved his brother with a special feeling, because being related to John Wilkes Booth allowed Edwin to play Hamlet with more oomph. He never said so in so many words (or in any words, far as I know), and he probably expressed shame at being related to Lincoln’s assassin. But secretly he must have been grateful to brother John for informing Hamlet’s ambiguities and vacillations. Can you love your brother, whom the world despises? To be or not to be. It was Our American Cousin playing at Ford’s Theatre that dreadful night, everyone knows that. Would it not have been more interesting if Hamlet had been on the boards instead? Hamlet, starring Edwin Booth, the nation’s greatest Shakesthespian, while John Wilkes was sweating, skulking in the wings? At the onset of which scene would the assassination have been most fitting? Not the soliloquies, surely. The swordplay near the end, perhaps. Or the graveyard scene, just as Edwin catches sight of his brother rushing the balcony, popping the president, and leaping, limping away. “Alas, I knew him,” he says, examining his brother’s skull.

  You don’t need to tell me: I am aware of how often I have summoned Lincoln to our walk. This is strange to me. I never have studied Lincoln, never have given him more thought than most people do. Once, though, I read his first inaugural address, I forget why, and when I had finished, I stood to catch my breath. How great was that man’s soul. How strong his embrace of the meaning of the nation. And of us, the people. And our better angels.

  IN EVERY DETECTIVE story there comes the moment when the body is discovered, sometimes just one body, and the pursuit of the murderer proceeds from there, sometimes two or three bodies, to deepen the mystery and ratchet up the fear. Whenever the police look upon the corpse, they are businesslike. Nothing tender or sympathetic is ever said, and this makes sense, because at that moment of discovery, the body is not a person but rather a puzzle. First they ask, how was he killed? In Philo Vance’s The Kennel Murder Case, the despicable Archer Coe was done in three different ways, by dagger, bludgeon, and pistol. Vance solved the case by determining the stages at which Coe received each death blow. Only after people determine how the body was killed do they ask who dunnit, and why.

  Occasionally, a murder story involves no body at all at first, just the announcement of a missing person, presumed dead. The body may appear eventually, as in Chinatown, where the mystery is established before the murder is revealed. But sooner or later, a body is a necessary feature of every murder mystery. It lies there, still, on the bed or on the floor, receiving, perhaps, more attention than it received in life. For the moment, beyond its last, it is the center of the universe. Nothing can move without it, though it has stopped moving itself.

  But note the reactions to it. If a housemaid or another stranger or a relative comes upon the body first, that person screams. If it is the private eye who comes upon the body, there is no emotional reaction whatever. Detectives live in a world where dead bodies are to be expected. Death is life. Life is death. Yet if you listen carefully, you can hear a faint sigh of resignation and disappointment issue from his lips—before he calls the cops, before he goes to work solving the crime—as if to say, this is the way of the world, the sad way of the world.

  If only he could have prevented the crime. If only he could prevent all the crimes. The word Gramercy comes not from anything grand or from “thanks” in French, or from “grant us mercy” in Shakespeare, but rather is a corruption of the Dutch krom moersje, the “crooked stream” that ran under the earth in downtown Manhattan, under everything, water in the shape of a knife. Even now, if I tread carefully, I can feel the water running under the world like the Kagera River in Rwanda. I hear it, taste it. What is at stake in a detective story, after all? It is the cry that runs under the earth and drives the PI to do his duty. It is the cry for help, the insistent plea to save some from others. Lives, reputations, happiness are at stake. Time is pressing. Help! Do you hear something?

  FU-UH-UCK! A SHOUT out of nowhere preceded by a car door slamming. City noise. Much is made of New York nightlife. Drunks. Louts. And the city that never sleeps because of them. Little is made about the majority of citizens who sleep the city nights away and dream of terrors from which they are rescued in the morning. Their days are streaked with erasures. They suspect foul play but have no proof of it. Night imagines night, which can be far more nerve-wracking than actually experiencing it. You may think the nightlife of New York is more exciting than the world of sleep, because that is what you’ve been told by the Chamber of Commerce. But beneath the flickering eyelids real tumult reigns. That’s a fact, Jack. Red Mars rises over Gramercy Park in the wintry sky.

  Those nights I lay alone in darkness in my parents’ bedroom—to recall them does not make me sad. Instead, I felt a kind of safety, even though I was anything but safe; imperiled is more like it. Still, I lay there like rags tossed on the cool sheets, steeped in the liquid mercury of the sky over the park, still, quite still, and wracked with more wonder than sorrow. Do country kids feel the same way in their thick-wood country beds, big as sea turtles heavy with eggs, and
their quilts and their cord of wood stacked in the driveway? I lay down in darkness in the city. Memory brings freedom, and freedom is always a blessing, no matter how it arrives. Sounds seep through the wall. My father soothes a patient on the phone. My brother whimpers.

  PETER TOOK UP the trumpet at twelve, and a little later the piano. He was good at both, and I admired his discipline—how he learned to read music quickly and well. In my room with the door shut, I would listen to him practice—the dogged repetition of the scales—wondering what would become of him after I’d left the house forever. He knew that day would come, and that he would be alone with my parents and they with him. He was what kept them together and apart. They had no life without him, and he had no life with them.

  When I was at Harvard, I wrote a long letter to my father imploring him to allow Peter to go to college outside New York. If Peter did not get away from that house, I told my father, he was doomed. My father wrote back a curt note, saying that my letter was “romantic” and that he knew best what my brother required. Peter wound up at NYU’s School of Education, in a program for high school music teachers. Every night during his first year, he told me, he cried.

  In the long run, he made better use of his talent. He got into the Mannes School, and later Juilliard, and he became the composer he had wanted to be from the beginning. He did all that on his own, with no real help from me. Had I been a better brother to him as we were growing up, I would have paid him more attention. But I deserted him, who should have been my partner. Detectives tend to dismiss their successes, but they live with their failed cases forever. In another room, my brother plays the scales on his trumpet, and I lie back with my arms behind my head like wings.

  WHEN HE WAS fifteen, and I long gone from the house, Peter witnessed a fight between my parents in which my father broke a vase my mother had made in a ceramics class. The vase stood on a small table in the vestibule between the foyer and my parents’ bedroom. It was green, with dark lines bleeding to the base. Peter said the lines looked like the hooves of horses. My father smashed the vase with his fist.

  Around that time, Peter bought my mother the gift of a mandolin. She had not played one since she was a young woman. They played duets, my mother and Peter, with Peter at the piano—tunes he had written himself for the two of them—playing long into the afternoons.

  YET THERE MY mother sits, harmless as Delft china at the dinette table, reading Emerson and Thoreau. In her mid-seventies, before Alzheimer’s or the series of small strokes (the doctors were never certain which), she would teach Emerson and Thoreau to members of a community center on Fourteenth Street, called the Emanuel Brotherhood. She would laugh as she told me that her students would correct both authors at every turn, based on the experiences of their long lives. “He’s got it all wrong,” they would tell my mother.

  Yet there my father sits in the red chair, reading Bruce Catton. How he loved reading about the Civil War, when he was not reading about the history of medicine. He published articles in a journal put out by Johns Hopkins on the history of medicine. He took a quiet pride in that, and in books he wrote on TB and cancer of the lung, to which he gave “the fault, dear Brutus” epigraph.

  I wish only to remind myself that they were people, not just my parents. She in her housedress. He in his smoking jacket. Reading and writing in the vast apartment, and looking up from time to time to consider a fact, or an idea, or a memory. Even they had memories. Even they could have written a memoir. This I shall take from Dr. Johnson: “A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.”

  OF HIS MADEMOISELLE, his nanny as he was growing up, Nabokov writes that he may have missed something essential in his long depiction of her. In his detailed descriptions of her vast size, her Frenchness, did he overlook those qualities that could have accorded her “a permanent soul,” a place in eternity? In short, he wonders, did he salvage her from fiction?

  It is one of the matters one worries about in doing a memoir. In class, we spend a lot of time kicking around the idea of memory—how accurate memory is, how selective, where it originates and why. However sketchlike the pictures I draw of my parents—have I salvaged them from fiction? In my mother’s temerity, my father’s crust, did I overlook the subtle motions of their minds, their troubled consciences? Detective work when applied to one’s own family, perhaps especially then, is a bitch. There are too many temptations to follow false clues and rush to solutions. It is too easy to read crimes in mere errors or accidents. What am I recalling here on this walk, as I wander toward my beginnings? The agony of the timid woman, the self-doubt of the bull-headed man? Do I invent what I remember? Memory may be deformed into opinion, and be just as imperfect. I tell the story of my life, the story but not my life. Time is not to be believed in, for then you have to also believe in boundaries and categories as definitions of life. There is a connection between the memoir class I am teaching and this walk I am taking. I must remember what it is.

  AND THERE YOU are, Dad, dying of congestive heart failure, which you tried to treat yourself, as I am flying back through the fog, on a winter night like this, trying to reach you. Officially, the El Al flight did not exist, since the plane was flying on a Saturday—no flights in Israel on Shabbat. I had arrived only the day before with a group of journalists invited to write about the country. At the airport, officials greeted me with the news of your dying. I spent the afternoon at the Wailing Wall doing my level best to pray, and the following morning I was off in the empty jet, trying to get back to you. I could not do it. New York was socked in. The fog was so thick, we had to land at Dulles and wait it out. I could not see past the window. Ginny and the children were with Mom and Peter. Peter answered the phone, and when he hesitated, I knew you were dead. In fact, I knew you were dead when I still was over the Atlantic, on my nonexistent flight.

  And there you are, Dad, dead. And I am thirty-four, and sitting shiva with Peter and Mom, because Mom wanted the ceremony, with the mirrors covered with bedsheets and the dark apartment darker than ever. Mom’s friends came, women with whom she had taught school so many years ago. And others from your old neighborhood. You would have cringed. Ginny had taken the kids home to Washington. I sank into the red upholstered chair as though a dense fluid were filling my body and weighing it down. A teacher friend of Mom’s addressed me sympathetically. I looked so tired, she said. I started to answer her and fell asleep in midsentence. I must have spent that night in the apartment, but I cannot recall what room I slept in.

  SO LET US now praise Dad for taking me to The Band Wagon when I was twelve. We often went to movies together, just the two of us, while my mother stayed home with Peter. And The Band Wagon was playing in the neighborhood, at the Gramercy Cinema on Twenty-third near Lex. I am passing the place right now. Today the theater shows live music groups. Back then it showed Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Oscar Levant, Nanette Fabray, and Jack Buchanan, an English music hall star who was wonderful in The Band Wagon. I could have watched that movie forever. I don’t know why. The songs, perhaps, and a kind of sweet sadness to the story, though it ended well. It was a musical, after all. Maybe it was simply Fred Astaire, who, late in his career, seemed to swoop and glide over life like a melancholy tern.

  The very next day, after school, I went over to the record store on Twenty-third, near Morton Stamps, but they only had The Band Wagon music on a 33⅓ rpm record, which my phonograph could not play. Yes, they could get me an album of 78s, but it would cost a fortune of $25. So I saved up. I clutched the album to my chest. At home, I played the set of records, everything in the movie, over and over. The triplets song, “Dancing in the Dark,” “You and the Night and the Music,” “I’ll Go My Way by Myself,” and “Oh, Give Me Something to Remember You By.”

  And let us praise him for a quiet sweetness that crept in from time to time, in spite of his efforts to keep it at bay. That nightly ritual, for instance, when he’d settle
in his easy chair, a Scotch in hand, and watch Perry Mason reruns. For a detective like me, especially in my hypercritical teenage years, Perry Mason was clownish—those oversize people solving crimes in a courtroom, every suspect looking guilty but the killer. But Dad loved the neatness of the show. And I watched it with him, as if I liked it too.

  And who can forget the time I told my parents I’d rather spend that Saturday wandering around the neighborhood alone than go for a ride with them and Peter, and after they had driven off, and I regretted rejecting their offer, Dad had circled the park to give me a chance to change my mind, which I did. That time. Or the time (where’s the ledger?) I came upon a sparrow with a broken leg, lying on its side in a corner of the park. I brought it to my dad, whose office then was at number 45. It occupied the ground floor opposite another doctor, a man with a handlebar mustache who kept a talking parrot on a wooden perch on the sidewalk outside his office. I carried my sparrow inside, and my dad rigged a tiny splint. The bird looked surprised to be alive and to be wearing a splint. “What should we do now, Dad?” He said we should create a nestlike place on the sill outside my ninth-story window. When the sparrow felt strong enough it would fly, he said. One day, it did.

  AND LET US now praise Peter, who could be funny when we needed it, who, when we were sitting in the professionally somber waiting room at the Frank E. Campbell funeral home on Madison, arranging for Dad’s cremation, having just spoken with the professionally somber funeral director, glanced at the box of Kleenex on a table and said, “I’m surprised the Kleenex isn’t black.” And thoughtful. Some weeks ago he sent me a masterly charcoal drawing he’d made of Poe’s raven, along with “The Black Cat,” in Pictorial National Library, the original magazine in which it was published in 1848. A first edition of the story. He found it in New York’s old Argosy Book Shop many years ago and bought it because he loves Poe. But he knows that I am a detective, and so he just decided to give it to me. The other day, I was startled to read, for the first time, Poe’s poem “Alone”: “Then in my childhood, in the dawn / Of a most stormy life—was drawn / From every depth of good and ill / The mystery which binds me still.”