The Boy Detective Read online

  One Saturday afternoon when I was ten and alone, I watched from a distance as she made her rounds. Eventually she veered off and headed toward Twenty-third Street, then up to Twenty-sixth and Park (no Park Avenue South in those days either) to the Horn & Hardart Cafeteria. I followed. She looked to the left and to the right and entered, moving in spurts to the wall of food behind the little glass doors. She dipped her hand into her black purse, extracted several coins, and, with great care, pushed them into one of the slots, opening the little glass door tentatively, as if she were about to be surprised by what lay behind it. She removed a thick wedge of cheesecake on a heavy cream-color plate, and studied it. Then she looked to the right and left again, and, determining that it was safe, moved to a corner table, away from others in the cafeteria, and slowly ate. After that, I tried to dissuade the other kids from calling her the witch—after seeing her and the wedge of cheesecake on the heavy cream-color plate before her, at a table in the Horn & Hardart Cafeteria.

  DO DEAD SPIRITS walk among us? What’s your opinion, pal? From time to time I catch them moving on the streets, dodging cars, and potholes, though for the life of me I can’t see why. What on earth do ghosts have to fear? You wonder if people live with one another or with these spirits. A topic of my memoir class. Everyone dwells in one past or another, and to a greater or lesser extent, is ruled by it. The coarse sleeve of her long black coat. It touches my arm. I shiver. Ghosts address a man on a walk.

  Were I to believe in reincarnation, what would it be like for reborn me to walk these streets again? Would there come to the brand-new mind and body—the Iraqi girl’s, the wheaten terrier’s—a breeze of recollection of my former life, my life as it is now? Would it be a simple flash of déjà vu? Or something more vague, like a tremor of unease, attributed to no objective experience, born only of itself? From time to time, I feel that chill today, so perhaps it is a sign that we live once and again. It better suits me to see such moments as parts of dreams. They may well be dreams.

  In my sleep, my father appears two or three times a year, never confronting me directly. I simply watch him or overhear him as he declaims on one topic or another. Then I wake into dreams, and he is clearer to me. If I concentrate, I probably could see all the ghosts of my life, here at the corner of Thirty-first and Madison, bundled in their winter coats, huddled in a scrum, all of us waiting for the light to change.

  FOR THAT MATTER, I may be a ghost of my own life. Since we never leave our childhood, I see myself as a boy on these streets I walk now as a man. I am the spitting image of myself. How like myself I am. This is why I do not believe in time. How could I if I feel the presence of the boy as completely as I do the man, in many ways more completely since the boy is more completely realized. He who existed in me over half a century ago walks with me today.

  But it makes sense, doesn’t it? We live through future generations, so why shouldn’t past generations live through us? It may be as much of immortality as we can expect, or bear. On this walk, whenever I pass a restaurant with high marble walls and pressed tin ceilings, I know the building was a bank a hundred years ago. I see the restaurant, I see the bank. Possibly it was a trading house a hundred years before that, dealing in horses or slaves. Might have been a cathouse before it was a trading house. Don’t think of it as history. Rather, see the whores, the horses and slaves, the potbellied bankers and the careful eaters as one—all of life packed into a crowded present, each iteration reachable by a mere flick of the imagination. The point is, though time was invented to keep things from happening all at once, things do happen all at once, and all the clocks in the world, including the one at Greenwich, England, can’t do a thing about it. Boy detective, man detective, writer, god-knows-what. Questions then, unanswered now.

  So you can ask me till you are blue in the face, but I have no explanation as to why I sat at the kitchen window at the back of the vast apartment, day after day, that looked out over the courtyard nine stories below, and beyond, past the blackened wooden water tanks on the rooftops of other buildings to the east, and toward the river. There I would remain for hours at a stretch, parked at the windowsill that was a slab of veined marble, white, gray, and darker gray, studious, purposeful, using a butter knife to chisel away at a crack in the marble until the underneath was exposed like the bones of birds. I gouged a crevice, a dark valley in the shape of a delta that deepened and widened with every day’s effort. It may have appeared that I was digging for something buried in the slab. A clue? A fingerprint? Something. For the life of me, I cannot remember what.

  JUST ANOTHER CASE. Open and shut or, more like it, shut and open. Everything is a case. A while ago I was chatting up this meter maid, name of Marisol (her badge), when a guy slammed his Accord into a Civic right before our eyes. Accord, my ass! I nearly said to Marisol. But I held my tongue lest she conclude that I was some candy-ass intellectual, which I sometimes am, or, almost as bad, a cop. It’s easy to mistake us private eyes for cops. So I said, “Shit! Did you see that!” And she said, “Twice a day at least,” while smiling a smile at once coquettish and indicative of “Look, mister, I need to get back to work.” And I didn’t intend to keep her, but “I wanted to ask you,” I said, “what alternate-side-of-the-street parking means, since I hear that phrase on the traffic reports every morning. What exactly constitutes the alternate side?” And the look she gave me, full of contempt and pity, should have been enough to tell me that if you really want to understand the city, or your life for that matter, you need to solve your own mysteries.

  NO MYSTERY TO the Empire State, except that tall as it is, the building never surprises you. Perhaps that’s because it is old and familiar, the city’s favorite uncle, who just plants himself in the middle of the house. Standing on Thirty-fourth Street, I look up to it as ever. Its feeling of calm comfort is what appealed to King Kong, I am sure of it. Not the height, though he might have experienced a wave of fellow feeling with the tallest thing around for miles. He might have thought, This building knows how difficult, how demanding, how embarrassing it is to be the gorilla in the room. In that case, it could be assumed that King Kong did not so much scale the Empire State as embrace it. So that might have been his reason.

  But I think it was something else. I mean, here was this big ape and here was the big uncle of New York City, the old man who implied merely by being: You are safe with me, King Kong. And even if it turns out that you aren’t safe, even if you clamber to the top of me, your massive hairy hand enclosing Faye Wray, with one last chance at love within your grasp, and a swarm of biplanes swoop down out of nowhere and ack-ack at you, and you holding on to my rooftop pike where the blimps tied up, and you begin to lose your grip—even then, it will be all right. You have lived long enough, King Kong. A good life. A big life. The biggest. If you must fall, fall from me.

  UNREAL NEW YORK. E. B. White’s famous essay “Here Is New York,” which is neither half good nor half bad, keeps thumping away at the loneliness of the city and attaches loneliness to privacy. I, born and reared here, have never thought of the city in terms of loneliness and privacy. Perhaps those who hail from outside New York, like White, find things opposed to the life they led wherever they came from. Communities do not exist in the same ways in New York as they do in small towns or smaller cities, where their demands for conformity are more blatant and melodramatic. Transplanted to the big city, the out-of-towner thinks he’s discovered loneliness and privacy by way of contrast.

  Not I. Loneliness and privacy are real, whereas to me it is the unreality of New York that thrills the citizen soul. Wake up, dress, walk out your door, and there you are, my owl, in an area such as the one I wander in now, bathed in an unreal light. The trouble with those who associate New York with a certain condition or goal is that they are in search of conditions or goals. Real New Yorkers do not want anything of the city. Oh, White loved New York, no doubt about that. But he loved it like a swain who has noted and studied everything about the object of his affection, and
then found pleasant words to make cohesive sense of the experience. New Yorkers abjure cohesiveness. We think in images, like detectives. We reason with our senses.

  Want to know the city? A silver-haired gamine stands at the top of the steps of a brownstone apartment house, on the south side of Eighteenth, between Second and Third. She wears black sweatpants and a sailor’s pea jacket a couple of sizes too big. I have been watching her for five minutes, and she hasn’t moved an inch. Just stands there in the black arch of the doorway to the brownstone, craning her neck to the left, toward Third, as if she were on a railroad station platform in rural Alabama, or Arizona, or Russia, waiting for the arrival of a train. The night wind could lift her like a sheet of paper and float her on the cold air over the street, over everything. But she stands her ground. Nothing can shake her or divert her from her purpose—the woman at the top of the steps, peering to her left, and waiting for a train. Here is New York.

  WHO OWNS THIS city, anyway? To go by the self-possessed Fifth Avenue apartment houses and the office buildings on Third, with their shit-eating grins, the answer is easy. Big people own this city. But since there are a lot more little people strolling around in New York, you could say that the city belongs to the vast unnoticed. Yet they are noticed here. Everyone is noticed in New York. You could focus the question on Dominicans. Surely they own the city. Or the Chinese. Or Puerto Ricans, Hassids, Mexicans, Koreans, Muslims. The African Americans definitely own New York. You can tell by the way they walk, the muted swagger. You can tell by the way everybody walks. Every citizen is a Dutch patroon inspecting his property. How about young versus old? Both are well represented on every block of my territory, where a cigar store from the 1940s nudges up against a granite mansion put up last month. Who, then?

  You there! (See that rake standing like Jimmy Walker, his top hat tilted down on his forehead, supported by his silver walking stick? See his spats?) You! Jimmy Walker. Walker. You own this city, don’t you, you sly devil? I thought so.

  I PUT IT to my memoir students: In what do you believe if not in dreams? The pluperfection of experience? The so-called reality of your life? Surely, you’re not saying that you believe in things you can see, touch, hear—things that happen in the world. The kiss? The firing squad? Who could possibly believe in them? Ask yourself if they ever really happened—the embrace, the knife, the tulip. Take an autobiographical inventory of all the disconnected moments, and they will seem like what? A dream. But dreams themselves, which bind the moments together in a night, and blur the tenses—dreams are real. And one reason to use them in your memoir—daydreams, night dreams—is that it allows others, your readers, to enjoy their own dreams without shame.

  So what is the difference, students, between memory and dreams? Are they not the same, each the other? Or will you tell me that memories are accurate and dreams are mere impressions? Of course, you will not. You have never had an accurate memory in your life, whereas your dreams are always on the money. Which is why you wake up in a sweat. Which is why Nabokov held sleep in such contempt. He claimed to hate sleep as an evasion of reality, but I think he hated the reality of dreams. He, too, did not believe in time. How does one dismiss time and dreams, both, since dreams, too, do not believe in time? Such a strange detective.

  GINNY HAD A dream in which she learned (she did not say how) that what she was dreaming constituted the real world, and that the world into which she would awaken constituted a dream. Furthermore, it came to her (she did not say how) that this reversal of states of being made sense to her, since she understood so little of the waking life, she might as well be dreaming. To be sure, one does not find that much understanding in a dream, either, though there usually is a moment of calm or distance when one acknowledges that one is, in fact, dreaming. That, I suppose, is a form of understanding. The problem (is there a problem?) . . . the problem may lie in the criteria for understanding in the first place. If reality is defined by our understanding of experience, of anything at all, well, that’s one thing. But if reality is simply a prolonged state of confusion, why not go for dreams, where mysteries are taken for granted?

  And just as I am trying to work all this out—about dreams and reality, I mean—a scrawny woman in a flower-print dress and a hat with a blue ostrich feather accosts me, gets right up in my face, and asks if I was the one who shot Abe Lincoln. And I say, “Me? Shoot Abe Lincoln? Why, you jackass, Abe Lincoln was done in a hundred and fifty years ago. Do I look a hundred and fifty years old to you?” Make that one hundred and seventy-five years ago, since I would have had to be at least twenty-five when I shot the president. “So you did shoot him,” she said, her voice crackling like cellophane, and trembling with such loathing it filled the street with smoke and darkness. And I tell you: I was more afraid of that look of hers, and her rattling bones, than I ever was the night I leapt from the Ford’s Theatre balcony and broke my leg, after plugging Honest Abe in the ticker.

  IS HE A memory or a dream—southern, courtly Carroll, the doorman at 36 Gramercy, who wore his gray uniform with the epaulets like a soldier, like Emil Jannings in The Doorman, only Carroll was gentle and proud to be what he was. That was when people were proud to be what they were. Much of my little life was spent with Carroll greeting my mother and me and the other residents with such official politeness. He stood tall like a column of mercury in front of two gray stone knights on pedestals, who guarded the building with him. Above him was a long dark green awning. So dramatically classy was Carroll that a director put him in a movie for which they were using number 36—East Side, West Side—with James Mason, as the philandering husband of Barbara Stanwyck, on whom he cheats with Ava Gardner. My building was in the opening scene, as Mason and Stanwyck arrived in a yellow taxi. The movie people had cordoned off the entrance. I stood in a crowd beside my mother. Turner Classic Movies showed East Side, West Side some years ago. I watched it to see Carroll open a taxi door as no one could ever open a taxi door, and shut it as no one could ever shut it.

  BEHOLD THE upright people.

  Behold their dogs.

  Make way for princes, to say nothing of kings.

  Say nothing of kings.

  Prosperous folks to the left.

  Phosphorous folks to the right. Stay in line, please.

  “Hello, Charlie! Howzitgoin?”

  Behold the military heroes, women as well as men.

  And the citizens of Gramercy Park in their frightful dignity, and the trees with their shorn boughs shaking. Behold them.

  I love a parade.

  MORTON STAMPS. WHAT the painted sign read in the barely lit hallway. What Mr. Morton called his one-room shop on Twenty-third between Park and Madison. Tonight I stand looking up at the whitewashed window no longer his, which bears an incomprehensible sign: WWW.UNDISPUTEDCORP. And beneath that: FOR RENT. Morton Stamps. The shop was like a hideout, located one long flight up a metal staircase. Mr. Morton hardly acknowledged me when I entered, which was at least twice a week when I was eleven and twelve. He never addressed me by name, just stood behind the glass-and-wood cabinets in which the stamps were displayed. Heavy and bald, his face bearing no character, like linoleum. I took to him the way children take to people who do not like children. He regarded me only as a paying customer—the meager dollar or two I could spend on the cheapest stamps. I don’t know why I collected stamps. I am not a collector by nature. I think I simply enjoyed looking at them. The colorful ones from Ivory Coast and Togo. And the German stamps, with the profiles of Hitler.

  He was German, Morton; his accent was German. A war criminal perhaps—Morton stamps on Jews—or a Jewish refugee himself. I had my eye on him. I took notes. Nazi or Jew, he was secretive and dour enough for either, like the man who outlived the concentration camps in The Pawnbroker and who slammed his hand on the pike that held store receipts, to see if he had any feeling left. Never did I encounter another customer in Morton Stamps. I would sidle silently from display case to display case, peering in for half an hour or more. Morton wo
uld watch me through eyeglasses with thick brown rims. Occasionally he would produce what he thought was an interesting stamp within my price range. Usually I went away with prepackaged bags of the cheapest stamps, hoping that the one with the upside-down biplane, the most valuable stamp in the world, had slipped in by mistake.

  At the Jerusalem Book Fair in 1985, Milan Kundera surveyed the gorgeous auditorium of gleaming wood, addressed the attendees, and said he was looking at all the culture of Europe. I sat with other writers in the audience. Several people wept. What time is it in Israel? What time is it here? Do you have the time? What time was it when my Berliner cousins, whose names I will never know, were hauled off to Birkenau and tossed into ovens, while I played capture the flag in Gramercy Park? Was it the same time? By your watch, I mean.

  NOT THAT ANY of this could explain Ira Fink, one of the neighborhood kids who used to play with us in the park and blurt out, “I’m Hitler!,” after which we all would pummel him. No one was quite sure why Ira, otherwise a nice, quiet kid, would ask for it by claiming to be Hitler, unless it was an attention-getting device, which certainly worked. The matter was made more confusing whenever we played hide-and-seek, and Ira would yell, “I’m hit” instead of “it.” Did he have a speech impediment that caused him to mispronounce h’s? If so, when he was announcing that he was the Führer, was he really saying, “I’m Itler,” which made even less sense? In any case, Ira reminded us kids that a war was going on. He, and the radio news reports, and the air raid drills—my father with his warden’s armband, the neighborhood pitch-dark.