Forever (52 page)

Cormac and Elizabeth enter another room. Photographs of Elizabeth at a girls’ boarding school in Switzerland. With parents, slightly dowdy, in Folkestone. Standing beside Warren on the worn steps of an Anglican church. Some framed letters of thanks from various New York charity organizations. A desk and a Mark Cross blotter upon which sits a leather book of the sort used by hostesses a century ago to arrange seating plans and menus. Books of New York history on six shelves, one shelf devoted to Astors and Vanderbilts and Carnegie. A couch. A smaller desk with a computer and a chair for a secretary.

“This is my study,” she says. “It has no decor at all.”

Then, to the side of the bookcase, Cormac sees a Georgia O’Keeffe painting of a lily, and to the side of the O’Keeffe a graphite drawing he made many years ago. The paper has darkened over time, making it resemble a silverpoint. It shows the secret place of the Countess de Chardon.

“Where did you get this?” he says.

She smiles. Gently tips the door closed. “That? You like that, I suppose? I’m almost sure it’s from Christie’s. They told me it was probably done around 1861 or ’62. In there somewhere.”

Wrong by almost thirty years.

“I already had the Georgia O’Keeffe,” she says. “And when I saw this”—stepping closer—“I thought she might have made the drawing too. She was certainly the greatest twentieth-century painter of cunts.”

She likes saying the word, although when she says “cunt” it sounds shaved. Still, she enjoys it the way Delfina likes saying “motherfucker.” She turns, eases her buttocks onto the corner of her desk. Pressing against wood. Staring at Cormac.

“I see what you mean,” Cormac says. “Particularly if you turn the O’Keeffe upside down.”

She smiles in a neutral way.

In the hall, Cormac hears murmuring from the far end, men and women laughing in the buzzed upper register of alcohol. He can now pick out Warren’s loud guffaw.

“One more thing,” she says, glancing toward the laughter and opening another door. She flicks a switch.

Inside, in indirect light, he sees frayed medieval battle flags behind glass, lithographed views of Jerusalem and Acre, dead Crusaders, men holding crosses.

“My husband’s other museum,” she says. “All pretty ghastly, and very interesting.”

Cormac’s heart stops. On the wall to the right, hanging from hooks by leather thongs, some jammed into cracked leather scabbards, are five weapons.

In the center, longer than the others, its corroded face marked by spirals, is his father’s sword.

100.

H
e leaves the party in a state of fevered blur and icy clarity. At the
door all mumble the buttery words of social banality: good night see you soon pleasure to meet you we had a fine time. Warren tells Cormac they must lunch at the Century, or right here again at the apartment, once he returns from a ten-day trip to Europe and Israel. No long summer doldrums for a newspaper publisher, are there? Elizabeth gazes at Cormac in a cool way and shakes his hand at the elevator door. On the sidewalk, under the awning, Ripley offers him a ride. The pitching coach suggests drinks at Elaine’s. Cormac smiles and says he’d better walk off the sumptuous meal. He starts down Fifth Avenue.

His heart is beating hard.

His father’s sword.

Hanging like a trophy on a rich man’s wall. And not any rich man: this rich man, descendant of his father’s murderer.

For years he searched for the sword among collectors and antiquarians, in junk shops and auction rooms. He carried with him sketches of the sword, drawn from memory, showing the spirals. Twice he met with men who tried to sell him clever counterfeits. He held them in his hand, felt their deadness, and knew they were fakes. Once a month, he scrolled through the auction sites of the Internet, saw swords of the same rough design, from the same period in time. All lacked the spirals. Now he has found the sword, through chance or fate. He thinks: I must have it.

Must devise a plan to go back to that triplex on Fifth Avenue and once more hold my father’s sword.

And then, for the final time, I must wield it.

As he walks downtown on Fifth Avenue, he knows this will not be easy. A frontal assault is impossible. There’s a doorman and an elevator operator. And almost certainly a second elevator for deliveries and freight. With another operator. Video cameras. Security alarms, in the building and in the apartment. Hidden buttons and buzzers, at least one connected to the local precinct. The rich live well-defended lives.

No (he thinks): I must return as an invited guest. And then stops.

What about Delfina?

And answers himself: Timing is all.

101.

H
is dreams are turbulent now. Most take place in the first hour after
sleep, but they seem to last for years. He is in them, with time stretched, expanded, slowed, the images more vivid than life, and then he wakes up, trembling.

He sees Delfina in an endless tenement corridor, fleeing a fireball. She wears a terry-cloth robe. The fire is at the far end of the block-long corridor, orange and angry, and she is running toward Cormac. She has an infant bundled in her arms. He extends his arms, unable to move his legs, and can’t reach her, and her face contorts in a scream.

There is the Earl of Warren, rising from the water near the Battery, his clothes and flesh in shreds, his skull devoid of skin.

There is Delfina on the ramparts of the Woolworth Building, smiling and barefoot in a gauzy yellow gown riffled by the high wind. She is unaware of the edge of the copper roof. She whirls in delight, calling his name, Cormac, Cormac, come here, Cormac—and goes off the edge. He is calling to her, leaping for her into the air above the city… and wakes up with his heart hammering.

He sees a horde of men in scarlet, mounted on ten thousand white horses, rising on the rim of the hills around the Sacred Grove, many of them holding machine guns. There is a bellowed command and then they come pounding, the earth shaking, the air filled with explosions, the forest burning, and his mother holds a pike to await their charge, and his father is slashing at them with his sword, and still they come, and one of them waves on his spear the head of Mary Morrigan, and he laughs and sneers.

He is in a cemetery and facing him are all the women he once loved, for a week or a month or a year, and in the center is the Countess de Chardon. They are dancing in morning fog. Some hold lyres. Music comes from beyond the tombstones. They hold hands. He walks forward to join them in the dance, and coming to him is the countess, smiling in welcome, and behind her with her body naked is Delfina.

Then they are gone. He stands in mournful fog. The music still plays. A flute. The pipes. He tries to dance alone and cannot move. He hears a dog barking and knows it is Bran. Here I am, Bran, he shouts. Come to me. But Bran does not come. Nobody comes. Cormac is alone, mourning his dead.

102.

E
lizabeth Warren calls and asks Cormac to breakfast on Sunday
morning. A wash of betrayal passes through him, as if he were cheating on Delfina, but he agrees to meet Elizabeth in a hotel restaurant just north of Washington Square. On Saturday night, after much splashing in the jacuzzi, and after she had lounged for him on a couch as he traced her body on a charcoal sheet, after he was empty, after she had dozed and purred and said little, he walks to Church Street with Delfina, kisses her good-night, and sends her uptown in a taxi. The following morning, with the fog-thick streets still empty of most human beings, he walks north.

When he sees a brightening ahead, he knows he is almost at Washington Square. And remembers the small ceremony when they opened this land as a park, and how the politicians and clergymen acted as if everything beneath their feet had been cleansed. All of the others in the small crowd knew they were wrong and that this ground would never be cleansed. For this was the execution ground across five decades, going back to the British. There stood the gallows, down to the left of what they all called the Fifth Avenue. Slaves were hanged from that gallows, and patriots, and Jesuits, and deviates, and even, before 1741, three witches. They were buried in shrouds in the swampy earth, where blackberries grew all the way to Bleecker Street, and wild partridge raced through thickets, and fox held their ground against humans until they finally joined the animal exodus to the north. For a year before fencing off the park, the authorities disinterred the bodies, of course, and drained the marsh. But they did not find all of the dead.

And when the mansions started rising on the north side of the square, constructed with Holland brick that had come to America as ballast, and when people named Rhinelander and Minturn and Parish began to shape their mannered lives within the walls (preparing the way for Henry James), the disturbed dead rose on foggy nights.

Cormac knew the dead were there because he had seen them, as he had seen the dead (or the undead, as the Irishman Bram Stoker called them) move through old houses and along those few streets at the tip of the island that still were cobbled. Murderers and Catholics, deviates and freaks, soldiers, seamen, and teamsters driven mad by the city: and then three pale women, the color of ivory, their dresses ragged as fog, walking in the yellow light of gas lamps.

He had last seen the three pale women in Washington Square on a fog-shrouded night in 1971, after a demonstration in the square had railed against the war, against the bombing in Cambodia, against Richard Nixon. He sat on a bench that night for hours after the protestors had gone home, leaving only the litter of their slogans, and then saw the women rise from the waters of the fountain, singing a lament. Every language seemed to have been mixed into the words, which mourned the death of the young. He understood them in English and Irish and Yoruba, in Italian and German and Yiddish. The young must not die, the three pale women sang. Old men must not bury their children. Weep for all the young dead.

After that, he had not seen them again, but he knew they must still be there. Must still inhabit the earth beneath the fountain and the meth dealers, the dog walkers and the Frisbee flingers and the students of semiotics. Preparing fresh laments.

Cormac crosses the square, past the caged Washington arch, separated for years now by a wire fence from citizens who might actually use it, and remembered Stanford White again, on the day it opened, talking a streak, red-haired, laughing, proud that he had designed the arch, chatting with reporters (including Cormac) as if he and the arch would live forever. That day, a young woman brushed against him, eyes wide. He paused, blinked, stared, whispered, and she went off smiling.

The hotel dining room is cozy with dark wood and tinted steel engravings of Little Old New York. Elizabeth Warren isn’t there, but a half-dozen people are already working on breakfast: an older couple, some young people. Cormac hears a fragmented conversation in German about the Statue of Liberty and Windows on the World: destinations of the day. He walks to the reception desk, buys the Sunday
Daily News,
throws away the special sections and the advertising junk, and, back at the table, glances at the sports pages. He’s reading Mike Lupica’s column when he sees her coming in the door.

She’s wearing one of those expensive pink jogging suits, and dark violet glasses, and a white cotton beret under which she has bundled her hair. She walks in her lean, ratcheting way on thick white running shoes, looking like Monica Vitti leaving the set of a 1960s movie to go to a gym. She sees Cormac, smiles, and he stands as she reaches the table. She brushes his cheek with a kiss, and he can smell a fragrance—apples?—rising from her skin.

“A ghastly morning,” she says. “It’s like London out there.” “The sun will burn it off in an hour.”

“One hopes.” She gazes around. “How cozy. And I’m famished.”

A waiter brings menus. She takes off the sunglasses to read, folding them and tucking them into a pocket of the jogging suit. Her makeup is so subtly applied that she seems to be wearing none at all. There’s a restrained gloss of pale lipstick on her wide mouth.

“I want one of those gigantic American breakfasts,” she says. “Mounds of pancakes and bacon and sausage. The whole lot. And an OJ. And a steaming mug of coffee. Everything.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“I’m still trying to get over last night,” she says. “We saw this movie about Pearl Harbor, and I exhausted myself laughing. Have you seen it?”

“I’d rather go to jail.”

“Oh, you
must
see it. It’s so ghastly that you can’t help yourself. My husband, as usual, thought I was crazy. But—”

“How is he?”

The waiter returns with a coffee pot, pours two cups, takes their orders, moves silently away.

“How is he? Oh, he’s what he is. A perfectly kind and loving man. Full of mad idealism.”

She says this like one of those Brits who believe that most Americans are botched Brits.

“He’s doing a good job with the newspaper,” Cormac says. “Isn’t he, though? Excellent. Even
I’ve
begun to read it.” “That would make a good commercial.”

“Yes, wouldn’t it, though. But in that case,
I’d
rather go to jail.” The food arrives. She eats with the greedy carelessness of someone who believes she’ll always be thin. And Cormac thinks: Delfina eats as if she will die tomorrow. Elizabeth finishes before Cormac. Talking all the while about the president, and missile defense (“Who exactly are the Americans planning to defend themselves from?”). Then, glancing at the engravings, she goes on about New York, and her discoveries, and the energy of the city, and the good manners of its citizens. “It’s come a long way since Mrs. Trollope was here,” she says. “Have you ever read her book?”

“Yes,” Cormac says (remembering the woman’s pinched, nervous face). “She had an unforgiving eye for human weakness.”

“Exactly. I should do a sequel. ‘Domestic Manners of the New Americans.’ ”

Cormac finishes breakfast. A Mexican busboy takes their plates. Cormac yearns for a cigarette and wonders if nicotine withdrawal has been giving him bad dreams.

“I so wish I could belch,” Elizabeth says. “But the ghost of Mrs. Trollope is intimidating.”

“If anyone notices, I’ll explain you’re an Arab. New Yorkers believe anything you tell them about Arabs. They’ve become what the Irish were in the nineteenth century.”

Her eyes bright with schoolgirlish conspiracy, she covers her mouth with a napkin and smothers a gassy belch. Then laughs.

“I did it, I did it!”

“Excuse me. I have to call Page Six.”

“No, no, not
that!
”

She talks then about Page Six and the gossip columns in the
Daily News
and what wicked fun all of them are, unless you are the subject of their wicked scrutiny. The waiter pours fresh coffee. Then Elizabeth Warren seems to wind down, poking a spoon into the coffee, her elbows on the table. She looks up, her face serious.

“Let me ask you something,” she says.

“Sure.”

She seems embarrassed.

“Are you a free man?”

“I suppose.”

“Don’t suppose. You’re not married, I take it. But do you have a woman?”

A moment of hesitation. “I’m seeing a lot of a woman.”

She smiles in a rueful way.

“God damn it.”

Cormac says nothing.

“Before we moved here,” she says, “one of my friends warned me. All the attractive men, she said, are married, or drunks, or gay.”

She sips her coffee.

“But I’d like to see more of you. You look like a man who can keep a secret. And there’s something you can help me do.”

Cormac does not ask her to define that something.

“And you’re cautious too,” she says. “That always helps.” Now there’s a hint of hardness in her voice and she glances at her watch. “I have to see my husband, alas.”

She gets up, forces a smile, and shakes Cormac’s hand.

“I’d better go,” she says. “The agents of Page Six are everywhere.” She leans close, kisses him on the mouth. Then she turns and walks across the restaurant, hips ratcheting, and goes out to the city.