Metropolis (6 page)

The first blow was his mother, of course. And then, after the funeral, he and his sister, Lottie, were packed off to their uncle’s farm. Their first Christmas back, they’d brought everything home with them, expecting to stay. They had crept down to the parlor to look at their mother’s daguerreotype together, many nights, with a candle, taking turns peering into its mirrored surface from every angle, seeking that elusive instant when her face melded with their own reflections, then returned to the clarity that was almost sharper than life. He was nine, his sister seven. But their father had sent them back to their uncle’s after all, and they didn’t see him for another year. There were letters, empty, benignant letters, and the following year they were invited to arrive the day
after
Christmas. On New Year’s Day their father was remarried, to a widow, a woman of noble title with children of her own. Ever after, it was the same: eleven months, including Christmas, at their uncle’s farm, New Year’s in town, a January full of hope, and then they were sent packing. Their Tante Hedwig gave them her own account of why: “He didn’t marry the kitchen help, this time, and you’d only be an embarrassment.” She didn’t have to mention the other part: that everyone knew their mother’s family had been Jewish till a generation back, making her children not quite the siblings the new wife, the baroness, imagined for her own daughters.

His mind wandered over all of that and more as he shoveled through the night. All the while, one of them was watching him, Fiona or Beanie, sometimes both. The decision Johnny had made when Beanie tracked him down was not to pull him aside as long as Undertoe was near. They were to get him alone. So they waited. And all night long, as they sipped their flasks of gin, they wondered what on Earth he was thinking, what his schemes were, if he was wise to Undertoe or not, whether he would join the Whyos or defy them, making this a wasted night or worse.

If only they could have known his mind. Several times just before morning, he stopped working, stopped walking, to peer into the snowy dimness up the street or at the end of an alley. He kept thinking he saw someone, some girl. He knew there were always urchins out at that hour. Urchins, the mostly nocturnal breed of boys and girls who scavenged alongside the cats and the rats and had been known to fight four-legged rivals over choicer morsels from restaurant-kitchen bins. He kept an eye on them, half worried about the safe return of the equipment, and wondered where they’d come from, what they would become. New York had so many pits for a person to fall into, more than he could fathom, though he’d dipped his own toes into the shallows. He thought of the women he’d seen at Billy’s that night, the colors they wore, slippery and bright, the jade silk shawls and scarlet-trimmed bodices that offset their hard faces. He’d read in his
Stranger’s Guide
about women who only posed as prostitutes to rob the men they lured, and also about gangs of runaway girls who sold flowers or candies, stole watches and lived communally in abandoned buildings on the edge of town. Most of them apparently packed a mean punch and carried knives. But despite these notions, he never suspected that two of the urchins he watched were older than the rest, not even when he looked one of them in the eye.

She was leaning against a hitching post near the lighted doorway of Billy’s when he walked by again, a short while later, and he felt a prick of desire, a yearning for a woman he could press up to on such a frigid night. That’s how good she was at what she did: She could make herself an urchin one minute, then transform herself into a woman and stir up lust in a passerby, just by her posture. As for Beatrice O’Gamhna—for that was the full name of the Why Not more commonly called Beanie—she wasn’t a waif at all, nor a runaway. She was nearly a woman and fairly well off and, truth be told, she wasn’t even chilly, what with Billy’s gin and the plan she was working out and the hustling she’d done that night to keep ahead of this man, their target: Geiermeier, Williams, whatever.

7.

THE UNDERTOE

I
t was Trinity Church that sustained him through the night, the way its bell tolled the hours. Every time he heard it, he paused to take stock: of the city, himself, the other men who stooped and stood and spewed out gray plumes of frost in complex syncopation. A hopeful feeling expanded in his chest with every cold lungful of air. Yes, he thought, he would rise from the ashes of Barnum’s—perhaps as Will Williams, perhaps even as Geiermeier, if he could clear that name, if he could manage to find the one who’d really set the fire.

Now and then, he hacked up a rusty black mass from his lungs, and he could still taste the smoke, but his satisfaction at getting the job of foreman endured. Once, he found himself half dreaming of lying down on one of the carts and letting the men bury him under a blanket of snow, but it wasn’t a gloomy fantasy, just a weary one. He listened again and again, as the hours passed, to the fading reverberations of the church’s bells.

Beatrice watched him, imagining he was plotting some strange and masterful theft, some slippery way to escape the setup Undertoe appeared to have put in place, but she was wrong. He was wondering why churches toll their bells. Why keep time? To remind the faithful that God is there through the hours, perhaps, but every time he heard the peal, he thought rather of the sexton whose job it was to stay up all night and heave the heavy bell cord hourly. Then he thought of the bell itself, then the building and last of all of God. God, he thought, was spread out too thin across the world—far thinner than the great blue wasteland of an ocean where, somewhere between Bremerhaven and New York harbor, he’d lost the last vestige of his faith.

In truth, he had always been more attracted to churches as buildings. A cathedral with tall stone spires was the most transcendent thing he knew; a dim side chapel with muted stained glass the most sheltering. And so it was that with every hourly stroke of Trinity’s bells, his resolve somehow to get back to working on stone grew. He would try again, maybe at that papist cathedral he’d heard was going up in the north of the city. And surely there were enough smaller churches being built that he could find a job on one of them.

At home, apprenticeship was the only way in, and since he hadn’t finished his, he’d had no chance there. Here, he understood that it was different. Maybe he had bungled his chances at the Labor Exchange and just now at the hiring office, too, but this was America. There would be other opportunities. Why wait for spring? There were plenty of secular buildings under way, too, and nowadays everything going up was stone. Why wouldn’t they want a man like him, who could work at heights and had all the skills? He’d managed to go from jailbird to foreman; surely in this city of nearly one million people and what seemed like one million buildings, some building crew somewhere would give him a chance to haul a few sacks of lime.

The sky had brightened when he made his last round of the crews. They’d done a lot more than the night manager had dreamed. Broadway was clear from the Battery all the way to Reade, and so were all the major side streets to the east: Wall Street, Whitehall, Fulton and Chambers—the ones that led to ferry piers. He was standing with his hands laced together over his shovel’s grip, surveying one of the crews from half a block away, smiling. Undertoe’s crew. Earlier, Undertoe had gotten the men singing as they shoveled. It was a good idea, and they’d kept it up most of the night, working fast and well, but they were silent now. He tried to discern which one of the ten sets of hunched shoulders was Undertoe, but he wasn’t really eager to speak with him again. He didn’t want to risk being called by his previous name. Then, as he watched, one man broke ranks, thrust his shovel into the snow and rooted around in his pockets for something: tobacco. That was him. He was rolling a cigarette, lighting it, gazing off toward the river. A man had a right to take a break, Will told himself, but in fact, he was annoyed.
He
was the foreman, after all.

“Give me another round of ‘Willy the Weeper,’ boys,” called Undertoe, and they began to sing:

There was a young man called Willy the Weeper,

Made his living as a street sweeper.

He had the hop habit—he had it bad.

Listen, and I’ll tell you ’bout a dream he had.

He went to the Chink’s the other night,

Where he knew the lights would be shining bright
.
.
.

Get back to work, you,
Williams wanted to say, but as he watched, Undertoe disappeared in the shadow of a building’s entryway. When Williams approached, he heard a cough, a grunt, then a cry in a voice too high to be Undertoe’s. He could hardly believe it.

“Mr. Undertoe?” he called.

A bit of rustling, a thump, and there was Undertoe, flushed, doing up his pants and wiping his hands on his thighs, reaching in his pocket for his tobacco and beginning to roll another cigarette.

“Oh, Mr. Geier—” Undertoe said, as a girl who looked twelve years old slunk out from the shadows, pulling down her skirts and daubing at her red face with her sleeve. She spat in the snow before running off. Undertoe smiled—false sheepishness—and struck a match. Williams was disgusted.

“I don’t approve of that, what you just did. You ought to be working.” He was wondering how much Undertoe had paid for that girl, knowing it was too little, could never be enough.

“Now, George—”

“Mr. Undertoe, it’s
Williams.
Will Williams.”

Undertoe laughed. “Williams? Oh,
right.
Williams. Names tell so much about people, I always say.”

A man called Luther Undertoe
ought to know,
thought Will, though he didn’t guess the half of it, not knowing Undertoe’s name on the street: the Undertaker. He’d had it since his mother died, when he was fifteen. She’d just nursed him through a horrendous, humiliating case of the mumps when she suddenly took ill herself. He hadn’t paid much attention to her complaints, because he was half mad with the ringing that had started in his ears when he was sick and wouldn’t stop. The doctor said he’d gotten the mumps too late—he was practically a man—and that was why it happened—and why his gonads swelled up so badly, too. Possibly he would never have children. He’d been a soloist in the Newsboys’ Choir before his illness, but now with the ringing in his ears his pitch was spoiled, and he had to give it up. With his mother dead, he’d moved into the Newsboys’ Lodging House, but he hated it, especially now that he wasn’t in the choir. Luther had been cruising the Five Points, gloomy and desperate for something easy to steal one night, when he’d stopped in a doorway to light a cigarette butt he’d found on the street, a pretty good one, with a full inch of tobacco left to be smoked. Not until his match flared had he noticed the wizened old man sleeping in the shadows. On closer inspection, he had sores on his hands and an outsized goiter. The geezer had woken and reached out to Luther, grabbed his ankle—right up under the pants cuff, horny nails and scabrous fingers touching his skin. “Penny for an old soul?” he’d begged.

It started off with just a single kick in the belly, to teach him a lesson, but Undertoe found the old man’s whimpering made him angry, so he kept on kicking till there was silence. After that, it became a bit of a habit for him to nix some half-dead vagrant whenever his mood grew foul. It wasn’t so much that he was murdering anyone as that he was expressing himself. The leatherheads certainly never investigated deaths like the ones he caused, but people in the Points came to know of Luther’s penchant for hastening death, thus the name.

Undertoe smiled at Williams. “Oh, come on, now, let’s be friends,” he said, and put out his hand. Undertoe flicked his cigarette into the snow and proposed they repair to Billy’s for a warm-up. Bars were closed from 6:00
A.M.
to noon on Sundays, but it wasn’t yet five. Will noticed that the men on Undertoe’s crew had gone on to another song: “Amazing Grace.”

“I can’t do that. Besides, I’m the foreman.” Not that he wanted to.

“Oh, the
foreman.
Is that the way you are? I thought we were going to be friends, George.”

Williams felt sweat break out across his back, despite the chill, but his face remained flat, impassive. He considered whether it would be wiser to go with Undertoe, to make friends, so he could explain the change in his name, tell him he wasn’t hiding from the law, just moving forward. Probably it would be, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He just picked up his shovel. “Maybe another time—and it’s Williams.”

“Oh right, Williams.
Hey, boys,
” Undertoe shouted over to the others on his crew. “How about we give the foreman here another round of ‘Willy the Weeper’?”

Now even Undertoe cocked his shovel and dug in as he intoned the words of the ballad’s first line. He was a tenor, Williams realized, but not such a pure one after all—it was somehow off-key, a half tone wrong. The other men joined him in their lower, rougher voices, and it was true that the snow flew faster all of a sudden.

The tune, however imperfect, rang out beautifully through the streets, but the
words—
it was just a song, just a popular song, the same one they’d been singing earlier, but now the name of the protagonist and reference to visiting an opium den seemed a little too close to the bone.
There’s no such thing as coincidence,
Williams thought.

He let his shovel strike the ground, which was well enough shoveled now for the metal to clang on the frozen paving stones. Then he moved on to the next crew, forcibly excluding Undertoe from his thoughts.

Trinity Church,
he thought as he walked back down Broadway and saw it before him again. It was nothing like the Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, which he’d worked on, nothing near as grand, and yet it had a steeple that soared. How could he have let that man off the hook for what he did to that girl? How could he just have stood by? He kicked a big chunk of snow from the curb into the middle of the street and kept punting it along until it crumbled into bits. Why had he stayed at Barnum’s so long, why hadn’t he had the courage, on one of his days off, to go get a job in the building trade? Instead, he’d let Barnum’s burn, he’d been arrested, he’d let his name be changed to the implausibly English-sounding Will Williams, and now he’d allowed himself to be engaged in a creepy conversation with Luther Undertoe, a man who’d never deigned to speak to him before the fire. It seemed to him that part of it was that he didn’t feel in control. He was off, somehow. All that death. Also, how could he ever have power over his life if he couldn’t communicate properly? His English sounded pretty good, he didn’t make many mistakes, but he was always slightly misunderstanding what people told him, and often he couldn’t make his own meaning clear enough. It had started the very day they brought him out of quarantine and he went through Castle Garden. His rough but generally serviceable English had somehow completely failed him. His accent had been out of control, his vocabulary worse.

“Any skills? Trade?” the man at the immigration desk had asked. “Guild memberships in the old country? What work do you do?”

He had understood the questions. He knew he should have known what to say in response. He had prepared it. But at that moment he’d been so overwhelmed he couldn’t summon the words, the English words. “
Ich bin Steinmetz,
” he’d said, knowing it meant nothing to the man. In the absence of official guild papers, he must at least manage to name his profession in English, but he had faltered, failed.

“Okay, no English—but you look like a burly man. We’ll put down ‘able-bodied laborer,’ okay? Welcome to America, Mr. Geermeer.”

“No,” he’d said. “I have a trade. I’ve done two years’ apprenticeship as a mason on Hamburg’s St. Nicholas Cathedral, the third tallest church in the world.” But it came out all wrong, starting with
Nein.
It came out in German
—Steinmetz . . . Praktikum . . . Nikolaikirche . . . drittgrößte Kirche der Welt.
It might as well have been gibberish. The man gave Will a quizzical look and said, “All right, move along now. Next.”

That was how stone was taken from him the second time.

Mason,
he’d remembered a moment later. Or
stoneworker.
That was the other term. But he’d stammered at the crucial moment. To be a stableman again, a snow shoveler, was not why he’d crossed the Atlantic.

But in a way he could never know, it wasn’t just his lack of English that did it—it was luck, it was timing. It was how it had to be. The afternoon of the day he got the job scooping up elephant dung, a paving contractor had filed forms with the Labor Exchange to hire a half a hundred newly landed men for crews that would cut and lay curb and cobbles. An hour later, and he’d have been one of them. Most of the men that were called for those jobs had never worked with stone at all. There were streets to pave in Manhattan and Brooklyn, so many they couldn’t just wait around for men with experience. The fifty new men would be given jobs they could hardly botch at first. They would start out hauling loads or stoking fires under reeking tar pots and sizzling pans of broken stone, but some of them would eventually progress to greater responsibilities and higher wages. A man who clearly knew what he was doing would have stood out, risen faster. And if he’d managed to get
mason
on his papers, he’d have gotten an even better job, the job of his dreams, a position in the yard at St. Patrick’s. Such were the opportunities he missed. Either would seem preferable to the fire, the incarceration, the shoveling of snow, the Undertoe.

But no. Not if we look further forward: If he’d gotten that job, on the paving crew, say, where might he have gone? Nowhere but on to other paving crews, all across the greater metropolitan area, on to a lifetime of paving but always the grunt, the lug, never the foreman, never having the freedom to think beyond the arcing rows of Belgian blocks that he’d have laid out in endless fans and herringbone patterns, depending on the volume and direction of traffic, all across the avenues of the metropolis. It would have led to cabbage and sausage three times a week, boiled too long by a wife less feisty than the Maria of his dreams but no less dour. Never to a promotion, because he was German and paving was mostly an Irish trade, because he was dark and could be taken for a Jew (there was indeed a Reb Diespeck in his family tree). Despite the two years he’d spent in Hamburg learning to carve tracery and set vast stones perfectly in place at the tops of delicate fluted spires, he would still have been roasting gravel, the lowliest of jobs, two years down the line. His life would have been uneventful and grim. And if he’d gotten that job at the cathedral, what then? He would have had the chance to put to use a bit more of what his teacher, Meister Teichold, had taught him; he’d have been the author of a pair of marvelously humorous gargoyles perched way up high, entirely out of sight except to God and roof repairmen; he’d have gotten to enjoy the thrill and danger of working at the top, insanely high, and looking out over the city and the river, the same way he’d loved to take in the harbor view in Hamburg. It looks better at first, I grant you, but no, down the road, that was not going to be a good option. It would have put him squarely on the bench of a certain mule cart, one August afternoon about a decade hence, a cart hauling statuary for a minor chapel, a cart that was just about to break an axle. And that cart would have toppled and the bowl of a basin designed to hold holy water would have bounced from the truck bed and cracked in half on its way to breaking his ribs and exploding two lobes of poor Geiermeier’s lungs like wax-paper lanterns. For what we in all good faith want in this world isn’t always for the best. The stableman was hapless, with a doleful past, and the city was a place of inconceivable complexity. Frankly, his chances for happiness were slim enough to start. I’d rather not lay his fate in his own burned, blistered hands—not till his English is stronger and his confidence up. For the moment, let’s lay his fate with luck. For he was, in fact, a very lucky man. It just didn’t always feel that way to him.