Full Stop (25 page)

As she drew near the queue for the Circle Line ferry, her path was blocked by a crowd with their backs turned to her, periodically cheering and breaking into applause. In between she could hear grunts and gasps, some sort of strenuous performance taking place, and when she edged round to a gap in the spectators she discovered that the attraction was a troupe of acrobats. They were all men, about a dozen of them, and they worked in groups of two and three, taking long cartwheeling runs and performing spectacular somersaults, leapfrogging over each other and forming human pyramids as though their bodies were spring-loaded. Fathers had hoisted toddlers on to their shoulders to get a better view, as though it was family entertainment, but Loretta was struck by the raw sexual power of the acrobats; they wore shorts and vests in shiny synthetic material, just this side of decency, and perspiration gleamed on their perfectly developed musculature. Her thoughts jumped to Michelangelo's
Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs, a
sculptural relief whose celebration of the male body was disguised in a not dissimilar way, the artist's excuse being a battle, whereas this was presented as a display of gymnastics. She happily handed a five-dollar bill to an older man, also in shorts even though he hadn't so far taken part in the show, who was working the crowd on their behalf.

‘All currencies accepted,' he called out, ‘dollars, pounds, cameras, wallets ...', and there was a ripple of uneasy laughter at this ironic reference to the supposed criminality of black men.

Loretta turned away from the spectacle and joined the end of the ferry queue, discovering almost at once from someone just in front of her that she needed to buy a ticket from an office inside Castle Clinton, the stagey brown fort she had passed on her way through the park. Glancing nervously at her watch, she hurried back to the fort, found the ticket office and arrived back at the jetty just in time to board. Wrinkling her nose at the overpowering smell of engine oil, she shuffled through a long enclosed lounge and went upstairs to the top deck, looking for a seat that would give her an uninterrupted view of Manhattan when the boat pulled away. People were still coming upstairs, talking in half-a-dozen languages — the couple in front of her were Italian, the teenagers behind her Spanish — but the boat wasn't completely full, perhaps because of the broiling heat. It was even muggier on the ferry than it had been on land, the sun beating down on the shadeless deck and reflecting up from the water, trapping the boat like the filling in a toasted sandwich. Within minutes the seat of Loretta's trousers was damp with sweat and she got up again, pulling the clammy fabric away from her skin. To her relief the last passenger had filed on and the ferry started to move, pulling away from the landing-stage on the first leg of its circular route, the crossing to Liberty Island.

Its progress was rapid and a cooling breeze sprang up, the first time Loretta had felt comfortable outdoors all day. She closed her eyes, held on to the rail of the ferry with both hands and leaned back, sucking the fresh air into her lungs, her hair whipped away from her face by the wind, exhilarated beyond all expectation. On the quay they had just left she heard shouting, something to do with the acrobats perhaps, but it was quickly lost under the noise of the engines and the plangent cries of sea–' birds. Gulls wheeled between the boat and the shoreline and she stared across the water at the featureless twin columns of the World Trade Center, the tallest building in Manhattan but out of place there, dwarfing four gleaming blue towers which seemed to have been constructed on the opposite principle, with deliberately asymmetrical pediments. Over on the right, a slender art
deco skyscraper peeped out from a cluster of older buildings, a ragged column of smoke floating mysteriously behind its conical verdigris cap. As the island receded the contrasting colours and shapes seemed to mellow and blend, honey-tinted by the afternoon sun, and the shoreline became very slightly concave, like the view through a wide-angle lens. The effect, thought Loretta, was almost a visual metaphor, the inanimate steel and glass columns seeming to strain upwards in a way that expressed the aspirations of their human designers .. .

She gave her head a slight shake, embarrassed by this flight of fancy. The Italian couple next to her were busily taking pictures and the man turned to her, asking in poor, heavily accented English if she'd mind taking one of himself and his wife on the other side of the boat, against the background of Liberty Island. Loretta assented in halting Italian and they fell into a ponderous, bi-lingual conversation as they struggled for words in each other's language. If Loretta understood them correctly, they were going to Ellis Island to look for an inscription commemorating the arrival of the woman's aunt Sinforosa, who had been brought to the United States as a child, on the wall displaying the names of immigrants who had disembarked there. The man added something in Italian that amused his wife, one of those North Italian honey-blondes, but which Loretta didn't quite catch. She smiled anyway and ushered them across the deck, realising that the boat would soon be too close to the Statue to get the shot they wanted, and posed them against the rail, the man's arm encircling his wife's waist. Loretta stepped back, ignoring a shooting pain in her right ankle as she balanced herself on it; she pressed the shutter twice, from slightly different angles, and passed the camera back, shielding her eyes with her hand as she looked up at Liberty, now looming greenly over the ferry. Close up the Statue was crude and rather masculine, especially the face, and weighed down by absurd, neo-classical draperies, but the Italians seemed genuinely excited by the prospect of exploring it. The man, who seemed more outgoing than his wife,
suddenly asked Loretta if she and her friend would like to join them.

‘Friend?' asked Loretta, beginning a confused explanation to the effect that she was on her own,
sola
, and anyway she didn't have time to see both islands.

'
Ma c'era un uomo
,' the woman said, pointing to the other side of the boat where they'd been standing. They turned to look and she let her arm drop: ‘
E andato via
.'

‘Gone?' asked Loretta, groping for the right phrase in Italian. ‘Who're you talking about? I mean,
che tipo di uomo?
'

The woman made a moue of incomprehension, signalling she must have been mistaken. The couple said goodbye, wishing Loretta a nice journey of Ellis Island, and as soon as they'd gone downstairs she surveyed the deck. More than half the passengers were getting off and among those that remained there were no faces she recognised, but then she'd never seen Pete Dunow or, for that matter, Michael Lindsay. The man had used the word
amico,
definitely a male friend, prompting little rills of anxiety which she tried to repress by working out what could have given him the mistaken impression she was with someone. A man standing or sitting nearby, regarding her in a familiar or possessive way? She pushed her hair back from her damp forehead, thinking it always came back to the same thing: watching, spying, that sense of being observed. But this time she hadn't noticed anything, in spite of all the weird things that had happened in the course of the weekend. She recalled the sensual pleasure she had felt as the ferry left Battery Park, the way she had closed her eyes and thrown back her head, how much the skyline had excited her when she opened them. In effect, she had been oblivious of everything from the moment the boat left Battery Park until the Italian couple engaged her in conversation.

People were starting to come upstairs and in a moment the ferry hooted, announcing it would shortly depart. A few stragglers came down the path from the base of the Statue, followed at a distance by a roly-poly couple, the woman unwisely wearing shorts, although this aspect of her appearance
was as nothing to her head, on which wobbled a green rubber replica of the Statue's crown. Its spokes quivered, Loretta thought, momentarily distracted, like the tendrils of some submarine animal unceremoniously plucked from its natural habitat.

‘Wait for
me
,' the woman called, holding the crown in place with her hand, and there was a round of sarcastic applause as she and her husband reached the gangplank.

The boat began to move again and Loretta sighed, thinking the strange weekend was almost over; in two-and-a-half hours she'd be checking in at Kennedy airport. She had half an hour to go round the museum at Ellis Island, 45 minutes if she had enough dollars left to take a taxi back to Riverside instead of the bus, and she drew out her purse, surreptitiously counting her dollar bills. She'd spent less than she expected, probably because she'd been paying for meals by credit card, and she could easily afford a taxi and something to drink on Ellis Island; she had yet to visit an American tourist attraction that didn't have a café
and
a gift shop. There might also be a phone and she could try Jay's parents again, just in case Toni had come back; the mere thought was enough to make her frown and she was relieved when the ferry swung round, distracting her with a broadside view of Ellis Island. It was closer to the Jersey shore than the Statue of Liberty and dominated by a single building, a grandiose red confectiom, stuccoed white round the windows and surmounted by four copper domes; more like a nineteenth-century town hall in southern Europe than a place where thousands of immigrants had queued to show their documents. It was nothing like the brutal concrete bunker near Heathrow airport which Loretta had visited with one of her students, an English woman whose Chilean husband had been arrested and threatened with deportation, just before she left Oxford for San Francisco. Shortly afterwards he had been put on a plane to Santiago and his wife had been trying to finish her DPhil thesis while her lawyer argued with the Home Office about whether he should be allowed back into the country.

Ellis Island, in contrast, was palatial. Her interest roused, Loretta went downstairs to the airless lounge, braving the engine fumes while the ferry manoeuvred and docked. She was surprised to see how many people had spent the crossing indoors, eating and drinking things they'd bought from the bar at one end; she glanced up and down, not quite knowing what she expected to see, and the result was exactly the same as it had been on the upper deck, no one who looked even remotely familiar. Near the exit, a girl with a harsh north-western twang was describing to her friends how her grandparents had arrived at Ellis Island from Latvia and travelled by train to Seattle in one of the worst winters Washington State had ever known. Loretta followed them off the boat, along the glassed-over path to the main entrance, thinking how much bleaker the island must have seemed on a dark winter morning in the 1920s.

Inside was an airy, high-ceilinged room where, according to the caption accompanying a series of blown-up photographs, immigrants gathered to collect their baggage. The grainy, black-and-white pictures showed men in collarless shirts and flat caps patiently searching among trunks and bundles and cheap suitcases for their belongings; women in voluminous late nineteenth-century clothes, babies cradled in their arms and peeping out from their skirts. The main section of the museum was on the next floor and Loretta went upstairs to another great hall with tall arched windows facing the southern tip of Manhattan, too high for anyone to see out. The pathos of this concealed proximity became apparent when Loretta entered a series of smaller rooms, once used for medical examinations and psychological tests, now devoted to lavish displays of documents and explanations of how the system functioned. For an unlucky minority, she read, Ellis Island was as near to New York and the rest of the United States as they got; the museum frankly admitted that the island's main function had been ‘to screen out those considered undesirable — the incurably ill, the impoverished, the disabled, criminals and all others barred by the immigration laws of the United States', sometimes as many as a
thousand people a month. Three-and-a-half thousand, too sick to go back to Europe, died in the island hospital. Doctors examined newcomers for as little as six seconds, chalking a mark on their clothes if they suspected some kind of illness or disability — L for lameness, E for eye conditions, X for suspected ‘mental defects' — and sending them off for tests. It occurred to Loretta that there weren't enough letters in the alphabet for this distasteful sheep-and-goats procedure, and she was reminded of a friend from London who'd been turned back at Kennedy airport after customs officials found his supply of AZT, the anti-AIDS drug, and correctly inferred that he was HIV-positive. No one had actually scrawled P for plague on his shirt collar but he had felt humiliated just the same.

A chilling headline from the
New York Times
— 500
REDS AT ELLIS ISLAND
— revealed that by 1920 the island was being used for deportations as well as arrivals. Trade unionists, Wobblies, anyone suspected of being a Bolshevik or an anarchist, had been rounded up; during one of these mass arrests, a year earlier, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman had been picked up, taken to the island and deported to the Soviet Union. Loretta read that the ship they went on, a US army transport, was apparently nicknamed the ‘Soviet ark'.

Feeling mildly depressed, Loretta went downstairs in search of the café. According to the signs she followed it was at the side of the building, beyond the gift shop, where the woman in shorts and the rubber crown was already looking for more souvenirs. Loretta stepped inside, wondering what it had to offer, and saw it was full of dolls in folksy costumes, supposedly representing the countries the original immigrants had come from, crudely carved wooden spoons, Statue of Liberty key-rings: knick-knacks with only the most tenuous connection to the museum upstairs.

‘Albie,' the woman called across the shop, ‘come look at this cute ice-tray. You think Pammy would like it for her birthday?'

Loretta backed out of the shop and went into the café, ordering black tea and then changing her mind and asking for a
large Coke with ice instead. She carried the full cardboard cup outside, sipping from it to avoid the risk of spilling it, and eyed the outdoor tables where she recognised half-a-dozen people who'd been on the same ferry as herself. She was about to sit down at an empty table when she realised it was possible to walk round to the rear of the building, where the sea wall faced Lower Manhattan. On the way she passed an elderly couple taking photographs of the commemorative wall the Italians had told her about, a simple grey monument in several curving sections which partially enclosed a sizeable lawn planted with shrubs and young trees. It was higher than she expected, around five feet, cutting off her view of the people from the ferry she'd just left behind, and there were hundreds of thousands of names; Toni's family, the Stramiellos, was probably there somewhere, Loretta thought, wondering where the S-section began. She arrived at the sea wall and put down her Coke, shielding her eyes as she stared across the water to the green fringe of Battery Park; she ought to get the next ferry back, she realised, glancing at her watch, but first she wanted tofixthe view in her mind. The light was softer now, the sun striking the skyscrapers at a gentler angle, colouring them pink even though it wouldn't set for hours. She pushed back her hair, which felt heavy and damp, lifting it and holding it away from her head, still not accustomed to the late afternoon heat. Then she took another sip of Coke, rested her elbows on the stone wall and gazed dreamily across the bay.