Metropolis (32 page)

The two ferries pulled up at nearly the same time to the two ferry piers on the two Fulton Streets of the two cities. Harris had a short walk to get home, up the hill and then a mile or so. Undertoe didn’t have a destination at all—he would wander till he found a target. He’d been over in Brooklyn to examine the district on the Heights where he’d heard there was plenty of money just waiting to be liberated and hardly any cops. He’d seen it that night, and it was ideal. As he’d walked along Montague Street, peering into restaurants, the grocery and the butcher shop, Undertoe had thought of two fine things he’d had his sights on last winter, before he got laid out: a certain fur-lined coat that had called to him from the window of a haberdasher’s and the Union Army pistol that he’d put good green money on with Marm Mandelbaum, a pawnbroker. He’d paid more than half what she was asking, but he knew the way she worked: no weekly payment, you lose your claim. All of it had been forfeited when he landed in the can. If he’d had that gun, Undertoe thought, he’d never have gotten rolled that night at the Bowery. Just thinking about it filled him with rage, made him furious at every creature and every thing he saw, and as he disembarked he kicked the sidewall of the pilothouse so hard he dented the metal. There was a crushing pain in his right great toe. A hematoma destined to bloat to the size of a marble before he needled it, two days later, was beginning to form at the tip. A man in a ferry uniform put his head out the door, looked at Undertoe, then drew the door closed behind him and locked it.
If I had that gun,
Undertoe thought,
that mate would be dead.
Undertoe limped a little as he walked west on Fulton Street, but when the ferry had delivered him to the Brooklyn side a couple of hours earlier, he’d been sauntering. He’d been feeling good as he veered off in the direction that most of the passengers didn’t, over to a side street with just a few large houses further up the hill. When a suitable bush presented itself, he’d stepped into its shadow and waited for someone to come along. He passed up any number of servant girls with baskets on their arms before he spied a gentleman walking up the hill with a buoyant foolishness, like he had had a good day or thought he was some sort of jaunty country squire. He wore a yellow checked vest and a straw boater and was whistling “Willy the Weeper.” Bile rose up in Undertoe’s gullet. He’d never liked that song. He coiled his energy in his legs and then, when the angle and distance were right, he pounced. The man was unprepared to defend himself. He just gasped in disbelief, gurgled and slid into the shrubbery. Never even uttered a complaint. It was a wide jugular gash, and most of his five mortal quarts had spilled onto the dirt before Undertoe finished harvesting his jewelry. Then he sorted the man’s money into his own wallet and proceeded up the hill.

26.

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

T
hat winter, John-Henry and Lila finally had themselves a daughter, healthy, wriggling and minute. They called her Liza. Harris paid the baby a visit when she was six days old. He brought a roast chicken from the cook at the Noe house all the way across on the ferry and joined them in an impromptu meal. Lila was propped up on the couch, still recovering, and it was John-Henry who moved about the kitchen and brought out plates, all the while rhapsodizing over his daughter’s marvelous fingers and toes, their tiny nails, the delicate whorls of her ears. Harris took the baby on his knee when she woke and dandled her. He smiled at her and praised her infant loveliness, but somehow all he could think was that she was about the size of a cat, and she mewled like a cat. Why do we bother to reproduce ourselves? he wondered. What good is it? He was thinking the way John-Henry had before the pregnancy, and he couldn’t imagine wanting to bring another person into this difficult world. The baby seemed to feel his anxiety—she fussed and cried in his arms, and he was glad to hand her back to her mother.

That night, Harris didn’t sleep at all, just lay there restless, brooding, sometimes starting from a half slumber only to lie wide awake again for another hour. He knew it was awful of him, he disapproved of his own feelings, but seeing John-Henry’s tired, happy little family had made him miserable. It pointed up all that he himself did not have and had no prospects of ever getting. He’d been throwing all his energy into moving the riverbed out from under the caisson. It was all he had done for months and months. He’d told himself that working on the bridge in any capacity was a grand thing, but the truth was that working in the caisson wasn’t enough. It wasn’t a life. Every day, he watched the hoisting of great stone blocks from the yard and the careful positioning of the stones up above, but the part of the bridge where Harris worked had been invisible virtually from the start. People talked about the bridge incessantly these days, but few ever thought about the men who toiled in the box of soot and smoke and mud and risk down at the bottom of the river. Or if they did, it was with mild horror, and then they quickly turned their minds to prettier heroics. He’d been on the bridge most of a year, and he was beginning to doubt there’d ever be a promotion from the caisson to the tower.

Finally, when he couldn’t stand lying there, he pulled his pants on and went over to the big house, to the cellar, and drew himself a pitcher of beer. It took the edge off, but it didn’t give him rest, just turned him maudlin. He was overcome with nostalgia—for his mother tongue, his mother, his sister, Koch, even his father. For the man—the men—he used to be. The only one not entirely lost to him was Koch, who had taken what should have been his place in his father’s lab. They could so easily have hated each other, but they didn’t. Somehow he had never even resented Koch. He didn’t really want the lab job himself, after all, just his father’s approval. The two young men had spent a lot of time together and discussed all manner of subjects at length, in person and in letters—everything from the haughtiness of Harris’s stepsisters to the origins of igneous rock to war to all kinds of issues in biology. As the years passed, Harris spent less and less time in school, while Koch advanced in his university studies and rose from apprentice to assistant in the laboratory of his father, the great doctor, but they shared a voracity to understand and shape the worlds they knew. Then there was their shared taste for
Weissbier,
their common need to defy his father—for it was clear to both boys from their earliest days of acquaintance that the doctor disapproved of their friendship. Harris reconsidered his old decision to break with everyone and everything from his past and wondered if it had really been necessary. It had seemed to him then that he had no other choice. Now it seemed foolish.

He got out the folder with the stationery he’d used in his first abortive attempt to write Koch. He wasn’t sure what he had to say, but he started with the salutation:
Lieber Koch.
From there he proceeded cautiously, enjoying the flow of the German through his pen and skipping over the difficult parts, such as why he’d left. He described his departure and the trip over and explained his use of the name Frank Harris. Soon, he’d filled a page.

An hour writing, and he had several pages. Then he went back to the cellar to fetch more beer. He started out intending to sketch a lightly sanitized account of his misadventures in New York, but before long he was just dreaming on paper. The epistolary Harris was on the verge of success, becoming acknowledged in America for his stoneworking skills; he worked as a foreman on the tower of the bridge. He also wrote that he had met a girl, a daughter of one of the engineers, and hoped to marry her. At which point his writing hand began to cramp up, half from being so long unaccustomed to holding a pen, half with chagrin at the fantastic nature of what he’d written. He left the letter in midsentence and went to bed; this time, he slept.

The next morning, he was exhausted. On the table he saw a seven-page missive. Foreman of a tower crew indeed. Did he really still need to impress his father so badly? It was a simple leap to think that anything he wrote to Koch would reach his father’s ears. Hadn’t he given up on that when he left? Maybe, but he’d grown so accustomed to leading multiple lives, he began to wonder if truth was no longer one of his options. Experience had taught him that he could be whoever he or someone else wanted him to be. Now he was addicted to it. He considered burning the thing, but then he finished the last sentence and signed the letter two ways:
Johannes
and then, in parentheses,
Frank.

On his way to work, Harris stopped at the post office and sent the letter off in care of the medical school where Koch had studied with his father. He put no return address on the envelope, but he had written Mr. Noe’s address on the last page, beneath his name. It gave him a quavery feeling, seeing that letter dropped by the clerk into a box marked
TRANSATLANTIC.
Soon, the version of himself he’d invented the night before would take the reverse journey from the one he’d made on the
Leibnitz.
If only it were as simple for him to return. He asked himself if he would do it, if he could, if it had been an enormous mistake for him to come here, and whether he had gained anything at all in all his mishaps. The one thing was hope, he decided. He hadn’t had much of that left in Germany. He had it now. A man cannot live without hope, but lately he’d subsisted on little else, it seemed, and his hopes seemed absurdly unrealistic. Loneliness was filling in fast from behind.

Then he saw John-Henry waiting for him at the doughnut cart and heard him shout hello. He was glad to see him, as he always was. He saw now that just because John-Henry had a family didn’t mean he would be less of a friend. It probably had been a mistake, sending that wild letter, but he couldn’t do much about that now. And his life was here. They stood in line for the pressurized air lock, through which just six men could enter the caisson at a time. When the door was screwed shut behind them, the loud clatter of the air pump commenced, and then, when the pressure in the lock equaled that below, a hatch in the floor dropped open. The men climbed through it and down the ladder in the central shaft to the dark, smoky din of the caisson. That shaft was their umbilical cord to the world above, containing the pressurized-air tubes that kept them alive and dry. Parallel to it was the chute through which the debris was removed. Harris waved to John-Henry, who was working in a different sector, and then went and attacked a pile of sand and clay at the edge of the caisson with his shovel.

Around lunchtime, some of the men encountered a huge mass of sandstone obstructing the descent of the caisson along its western bulkhead, and John-Henry called Harris over to assess it for blasting. Against the walls, wherever men were digging, limelights fizzled and flared in sconces, and here and there a candle lantern had been nailed up, to much lesser effect. Many of the men also wore headlamps much like the ones worn by sewer crews. Harris and John-Henry discussed the proper position of the charges to blast through the sandstone, but both of them were worried about an uneven layer of basalt that ran through the boulder. It wouldn’t be the biggest rock they’d blown, but it was sizable and complicated. John-Henry took a torch from the wall to examine the fault more closely, while Harris dug down a little further without finding the bottom of either the boulder or the vein. They tapped at the stone with their pickaxes, listening and feeling for vibrations. It was the sort of problem they dealt with every day, though this time it was fairly interesting. Harris told himself to remember this later on, when his pessimistic gloom descended again. It was engaging, important work they were doing—difficult enough to be satisfying.

They formulated a plan based on Harris’s understanding of the basalt vein, drilled some holes and went topside to get the explosives. Then they returned to lay the charges, but before they could set them off it was time for Harris and John-Henry to go on break. They discussed having one of the foremen, a fellow named Waugh who had just come off break, set off the charges for them, but after they talked to him John-Henry had second thoughts. They agreed they’d show him exactly how they did it after the break, and then he could do the next one by himself.

As usual, on break, Harris and John-Henry took the opportunity to visit the coffee cart. It was a warm day and a very low tide, and they could smell the fishiness of the river as they drained the last dregs from Lorraine’s tin cups. Then the bell rang again, and they lined up for the air lock. As they waited, John-Henry turned to Harris and said, “Let’s do that blast in two stages. That way, if the basalt section’s bigger than you thought, we won’t risk a blowout. What with the tide as low as it is, it seems safer.”

Harris nodded—it was a good idea. But just as they got below, they both saw a flare coming from the direction of the boulder. Their boulder. Waugh, determined to prove himself, had gone ahead and lit the charges without them. Harris and John-Henry looked at each other wordlessly—it was too late to change anything now—and waited by the shaft to see how it came out. The bang was normal, and when the smoke cleared they smiled in relief. Then a second boom echoed through the great chamber below the bottom of the river and there came a roaring and a rush of air and water. All the lamps and candles went dark, and a flood of river and mud swept Harris off his feet and sucked him under.

When he got his head above water again, everything was black. He could hear the shouts and screams of the forty-odd men on duty as well as sobbing and prayers being said. When he tried to stand, he found that the water was just over his waist, but he could feel that it was rising.

“John-Henry!”

Someone was shouting, “I can’t swim, oh Jesus, I can’t swim,” and Harris called back: “Stand up, it’s not that deep.” But the truth was, all of them were all going to drown pretty soon if the water didn’t stop flooding into the caisson.

“John-Henry!”

“I’m over here by the shaft. I’m still holding on to the steps. Follow my voice. Maybe we can get out this way, or at least stay higher.”

“What about Waugh? Waugh!”

But there was no answer, and Harris went the other direction, away from John-Henry and the shaft, half swimming, half wading into the current of the water flooding the caisson. That was where Waugh would be, somewhere near the boulder, probably knocked out but not necessarily dead.

“Waugh!” he called, reaching wide with his arms and skimming the surface of the water, hoping and fearing to encounter Waugh’s floating body.

“Waugh!”

“He was right there,” said a voice. “He was right there when it blew.”

“He must be down. Help me find him.”

Harris sloshed around in the water a few more paces and noticed it was coming in more slowly now, a good sign. He dove under, groping his way along the edge of the floor where it met the bulkhead until he felt a ledge of stone open onto a deep cavern that seemed to extend outside the caisson, into the riverbed. So now he knew: The vein of basalt had run all the way through the boulder. This hole was his fault. He reached his arm into the hollow space. It was large, certainly large enough for a man to pass through. He went up again for air, then dove again, this time worming his way into the cave. He blindly felt around him. The space was about as large as the air lock and perfectly clean of the rubble and blast debris. Everything had been blown free, blown outside the caisson by the blast. Waugh had been sucked out of the caisson like a turd from a newfangled toilet.

Harris needed air.
Waugh,
he mouthed as he worked his way back out of the cavity toward the caisson. Bubbles floated invisibly up from his lips in the black water; he could feel them sliding like feathers against his face. It was harder getting out than it had been going forward, when his lungs were full of air and hope, but finally he got his shoulders through the hole, and then the rest of him followed. His head broke the surface a second later and he gasped for air. The first thing he heard was John-Henry shouting his name. All he could think was that his decision was at fault. He had killed a man. Not by being a gangster or anything exciting like that, but by incompetence.

“Waugh’s gone,” he choked.

After a thorough head count, they determined no one else to be missing, but the mood was grim. Several of the men climbed up the ladder and tried to operate the air-lock door from beneath, but it wouldn’t give. Somebody said what they were all thinking: “He died fast. We’re going to go slow.”

Harris was thinking that the air compressors ought still to be able to function, but there was no sign of that—it was quieter in the caisson than it had ever been before. The water had stopped flooding in, suggesting the caisson had settled, but there were a hundred ways that their escape route might have been permanently cut off: shaft cracked with the torque of the blow, compressors damaged, some inconceivable mayhem above. Perhaps the tower itself had collapsed above them, in which case the shaft would be entirely gone and any number of men dead. Harris considered the possibility that there would be no bridge at all now, just a vast common grave.