Metropolis (48 page)

“You see that building there, with the charred windows? That’s the Whyos.”

At the center of this arena there lay, like the yolk of an egg, the Tombs itself, and the bloody strand in the yolk, the center’s center, was the double gallows, its pale new wood gleaming in the early-morning light.

Part of the curious remove of Beatrice O’Gamhna and Frank Harris’s vantage point was the silence. There was no noise from the street, just the slightest hum, which lent an unreal quality to the tableau below, as if it were an enactment, a trial run, a figment of their dual imaginations, perhaps. The world down below was loud and tawdry and desperate—just this side of a riot, in fact—but up there it was so calm as almost to be boring. After a while, Harris noticed that Beatrice wasn’t even looking down at the Tombs but out at the harbor. And just then the distant scene began to change.

“Bea,” said Harris. “Look.”

A small phalanx of buglike figures had come into the courtyard. They spread out and took up places at and around the gallows. One of them walked beneath the raised structure, and a moment later first one and then another black square appeared on the light wooden platform. For a moment, they seemed to be the blackest spots in the universe, holes deep enough to suck every living creature into them. Then the trapdoors shut again and the holes disappeared. One of them was the hole through which Dandy Johnny would fall. Of course, it wouldn’t be the hole itself that killed him. The condemned man’s own weight would release the latch. Then the rope loop over the crossbar would tighten and, depending on the suddenness of the action, either snap Johnny’s neck or more slowly stop his breath.

“I’m the one that’s killing them,” Beatrice said as two figures finally emerged from a small doorway. But which was which? It hadn’t occurred to Harris the height would be so great as to obliterate the difference between them. They ascended the platform, but before stepping forward to have the noose secured around his neck, one of the figures paused. He turned slowly around in a circle, scanning the crowd, it seemed. So that was Johnny, on the left. Beatrice knew he was looking for her and, though sound couldn’t possibly have carried so far, she perceived that he was whyoing. Cold sweat rose everywhere on her body. Her hairs bristled. He was free to communicate with the Whyos, free to tell them anything, free to accuse her of any crime he could think of, free to set them on her.
What was he saying?
She focused intently, trying to make it out through the wind.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, God.”

“What?” Harris asked her, but she didn’t answer.

A few minutes later Dandy Johnny refused the hood that was offered him by the executioner, choosing to die open-eyed. He didn’t fight while the rope was placed around his neck. All that remained was for him to step forward and plunge to his end. Harris held his breath and reached for Beatrice’s hand, waiting for everything to be over, but before that could happen, Beatrice jumped up from the barrel and turned to him. Her face was wet and blotchy.

“Don’t get so close to the edge, Bea—”

“This was your plan, wasn’t it? To get me up here and wait till he was hanged and then ask me to marry you. Isn’t that it? Isn’t that basically what you told me last night?”

It wasn’t really true that he’d planned it like that, not at all, but neither could Harris quite defend himself against the accusation. He tried, not very successfully, to shake his head, but she was gripping his jaw in her hands.

“Goddamnit, Harris. A hanging is a Hell of an unromantic moment to start a life. I can’t even bear to watch it. I’m going. I don’t know why I came.”

She turned from him and made for the footbridge, choking and wiping her eyes, but Harris caught up and firmly pulled her to him. He didn’t want her out on that footbridge, not right now. She was stiff in his arms, but she didn’t buck away. They were each looking out past the other’s shoulder, he up the river, she down it, neither of them at the Tombs. He said softly into her ear: “It doesn’t start here—it started years ago. A couple of months ago it changed completely. Now it changes again.”

He wasn’t watching, he didn’t know the perfection of his timing, but at just that moment their lives had indeed changed. Dandy Johnny Dolan’s body had ceased to jerk. Instead of a notorious gangster, there was just a terrible pendulum swinging at the end of the hemp loop.

“I thought I heard him whyoing, just now,” Beatrice said. “I thought I heard him saying that he loved me.”

“Not like I do.”

“I know,” she said. And then, after a pause: “So are you going to do it?”

“You mean, ask you?”

She nodded.

“Do you want me to?”

“Goddamnit, Harris.”

He swallowed, not knowing what to do. She had rejected him any number of times. She had more or less just told him
not
to do it. Did she want him to?

“Oh, Christ, all right.
I’ll
do it then.” And then she asked him, which somehow made everything all right.

Just as they began to kiss, one of the young men from Harris’s crew came onto the tower platform. He did a double take and then swore loudly in astonishment at the sight of his foreman embracing a teenage boy.

Harris and Beatrice turned to him, and Beatrice pulled off the cap into which her hair had been tucked.

“This is my good friend Miss O’Gamhna,” Harris said, “so don’t go spreading funny rumors. And have some respect.”

Then they turned back to the gallows. Piker and Johnny were dangling. They had missed the execution after all. They walked out onto the footbridge, into the atmosphere above the harbor.

There they were—just them, no impediments that they knew of.

The city was different from how it had been when they reached the tower an hour before, and the city would never change. Deals had been made for tens of thousands of dollars and breakfast had been eaten by hundreds of thousands of mouths. Several bloody babies had been born, and all of them were crying, and five New Yorkers had died: two in sickbeds; one of a heart attack on the floor of a law office, soiling his pin-striped trousers and a Persian rug; the other two there in the yard at the Tombs. But for everyone who died, another entered, if not two, to vie for the open position. There were still the same number of mothers and babies and bankers and bakers and crooks in the world. No single man, woman or child was needed to define the whole. The city was so big, even then, and there were so many people in it that someone was always there waiting in the wings to cover for those who fell away. Maybe it wouldn’t be the Jimster and Fiona who would dominate organized crime in the Five Points in the following decade—they weren’t that ruthless, really—but someone would. That’s how the city made its citizens free: free to defy expectation, free to spit at fate, free to work the chaos in the system, free to fail. And so were Frank Harris (if that’s what you choose to call him) and Beatrice O’Gamhna free.

A baby’s born shrieking in the night. A sullen child matures to better temper. A family arrives at the Port of New York unable to imagine the misery and joy that await them. A man learns who he is. A woman leaves a life of crime. And over on the West Side, at the Barclay Street ferry pier, a girl who’s just been tapped to join a secret gang tosses aside a stripped twopenny ear of fresh, sweet, lily-white summer hot corn and licks her lips. She flexes her fingers and steels her nerves, and a few brief minutes later she reaches as deftly as she can into a pocket, hoping to come away undetected with something of value in her fist, imagining that if only she accumulates enough such stuff she’ll be able to revise her life according to her dreams. That girl doesn’t know the first thing about the currency of happiness, yet. And whether she ever learns it or not, the waves of the harbor will take the same scallop-edged forms, ever changing, never varying, capping endlessly white against the wind that fans her hair, that girl’s, then gusts past Harris and O’Gamhna on their transit back to solid ground, swirls between the two outrageous towers of the great bridge and blows the whole way across Brooklyn, over Staten Island, out to sea and beyond.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

M
any actual historical details shaped the writing of this novel: A Bengal tiger really leapt from an upper story of P. T. Barnum’s burning American Museum on the corner of Broadway and Spring on March 2, 1868, and was shot by a policeman. There really was a gang called the Whyos with a boss named John Dolan, known as Dandy Johnny, who was hanged in the Tombs for a murder resembling the one that takes place toward the end of this book. The Whyos were said by Herbert Asbury in his marvelous (if not always rigorously factual) folk history
The Gangs of New York
to have gotten their name from a call they used to communicate with one another while they worked. There are a few mug shots of Whyos in that book, including one of a supremely stupid-looking brute named Piker Ryan, whom I couldn’t resist making into a character. In general, though, the Whyo gang is not very well documented, which I saw as an opportunity to invent freely to suit my tale.

My stableman’s childhood was inspired by the life story of the German histologist Jacob Henle, who was a mentor to the pioneering microbiologist Robert Koch, and who was by all accounts a much nicer man than the stableman’s father in the book. Back in the United States, the character Susan Smith is based on an actual black woman doctor who practiced progressive medicine and provided safe abortions and other medical care to indigent women; her colleague in the book, Sarah Blacksall, is based in part on Elizabeth Blackwell, who was a professor at the amazingly radical Women’s Medical College, where black and white women not only dissected cadavers in the anatomy lab but did so side by side, in an integrated setting.

The East River did in fact freeze solid several times in the late nineteenth century, which has been called by climatologists and historians a “mini–ice age.” A ferry called the
Westfield
did blow up at the Whitehall Street terminal, a disaster that remains, as of 2004, the most lethal ferryboat accident ever to take place in New York harbor. Finally, a workman named Frank Harris did in fact fall from the tower of the Brooklyn Bridge while it was under construction, and, incredibly, he lived.

Such people and events were the true-life framework around which I constructed many other aspects of my fictional metropolis, including the culture of the sewermen and their custom of washing up after work in a city-run bath hall; the language and skewed utopian vision of the Whyos and the existence of the Why Nots (though there were several girl gangs in operation in 1870s New York, notably the Forty Little Thieves, affiliated with the male gang called the Forty Thieves); the extent to which the nascent New York City sewer system could have been navigated underground; and the blowout in the Brooklyn caisson (though a somewhat similar accident did occur on a Sunday, when no one was working below, caused simply by a confluence of low tide and high internal air pressure).

I drew from many books and other sources in researching
Metropolis.
Among the most important to me were
The Great Bridge
by David McCullough,
Paris Sewers and Sewermen
by Donald Reid, Asbury’s
Gangs of New York, Low Life
by Luc Sante and
Gotham
by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace. Some of my favorite sources were contemporary: old technical volumes on subjects ranging from street construction to lighting technology to sewerage, the annual corporation manuals of the City of New York, George E. Waring’s 1886
Report on the Social Statistics of Cities,
period travel guides and directories and, crucially, daily and weekly newspapers, especially
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, Harper’s Illustrated,
the New York
Sun
and the Brooklyn
Eagle.
(The full-text archives of the
Eagle
are now available online, in fully searchable format, through a marvelous project of the Brooklyn Public Library.)

For those curious for more detail about what in the book is true (and what isn’t), I have posted a hypertext map of New York in 1870, with links to images, documents, websites and various facts relating to New York and the novel, on my website, at www.elizabethgaffney.net.

Much of this book was written while I was in residence at the Blue Mountain Center, the MacDowell Colony, the Medway Institute and Yaddo. Thanks to all the people who keep those wonderful places going.

For their generosity, encouragement and sound advice to me while I worked on this book, I am enormously grateful to Andrea Barrett, Emily Boro, Michael Chabon, Andrea Chapin, Amanda Davis (1971–2003), Jeffrey Eugenides, Brigid Hughes, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, George Plimpton (1927–2003), Elissa Schappell and Ayelet Waldman.

For their tireless efforts on behalf of
Metropolis,
I am indebted to my agent, Leigh Feldman; to my editor, Kate Medina; and to Frankie Jones, Kristin Lang, Ros Perotta and Danielle Posen.

And profoundest thanks to my family: Ann Walker Gaffney, who taught me her love for the city; Walker Gaffney, who saw the view from the top of the tower; and Alex Boro, the best man I know, for everything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

E
LIZABETH
G
AFFNEY
is an advisory editor of the literary quarterly
The Paris Review.
In addition to teaching writing at New York University, she has translated from German
The Arbogast Case, The Pollen Room
and
Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany.
Her short fiction has appeared in
North American Review, Colorado Review, Brooklyn Review, Mississippi Review, Reading Room
and
Epiphany. Metropolis
is her first novel.

This is a work of fiction. Though some characters, incidents, and dialogues are based on the historical record, the work as a whole is a product of the author’s imagination.

Copyright © 2005 by Elizabeth Gaffney

Map © 2005 by David Lindroth

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gaffney, Elizabeth.
Metropolis: a novel / Elizabeth Gaffney.
p.                  cm.
1. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction.                  2. Bridges—Design and construction—Fiction.                  3. Arson—Investigation—Fiction.                  4. German Americans—Fiction.                  5. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.                  6. Immigrants—Fiction.                  7. Circus—Fiction.                  8. Gangs—Fiction.                  I. Title.

PS3607.A355M47 2005
813'.6—dc22                                                      2004050804

Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com

eISBN: 978-1-58836-457-9

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