Quarrel & Quandary (29 page)

Mr. Haroulian began at once to tell me about Lillian, his daughter. Since I had never heard him speak, his voice was a surprise: it ran loud and fast, like a motorcycle. Lillian, he boomed, was twenty-two; a student at Juilliard; a superlative violinist. When Lillian wasn’t at school she was practicing—she hardly had a minute, not even to pick up her music. All her time was admirably occupied.

“Schirmer’s on East Forty-third Street. Shake a leg and get over there,” Mr. Haroulian growled. He handed me his daughter’s shopping list; fleetingly, I took in flashes of Mozart, Beethoven, Sibelius. Lillian’s photograph was on Mr. Haroulian’s
desk. A bony royal snippet, heir to the throne, eyes as round as coins—just like Mr. Haroulian himself. All that was missing was Mr. Haroulian’s gray imperious mustache, which at that moment appeared to be sweeping me out of his sight like a diminutive but efficient broom. I understood that in Mr. Haroulian’s opinion, my time was not so admirably occupied.

Walking uptown to Schirmer’s in the thick late-June air, with big raindrops darkening the pavement, I thought of “The Changeling,” a story by Mary Lamb that I remembered from childhood. A nurse, ambitious for her offspring, switches two infants in their cradles. One is her own; the other is the daughter of her aristocratic employers. The nurse’s natural child, dull and with no talent at all, is lovingly reared by the cultivated aristocratic family, though they are quietly disappointed in the undistinguished girl. Meanwhile their real child, brought up by the nurse, is deprived for years of the development of her innate musical gifts. When the ruse is discovered and the musical daughter is at last restored to her rightful parents, she is showered with music lessons and flourishes. Mr. Haroulian, I felt, in sending me on this humiliating errand, could not recognize that his daughter—exactly my age, after all—might be the inauthentic one, while I, plodding onward in rain-soaked shoes in service to
her
, might secretly be the genuine article. It hardly lessened my bitterness that Wellek-and-Warren was a thousand times more to me than any violin.

That was Thursday. On Friday morning my work on the forms unexpectedly improved. As George Berkeley had promised—before the great wave of his disappointment in the New Criticism—I was starting to get the hang of it, and the rows of digits were finally jumping into their proper boxes. Not all of them, to be sure; for every form I struggled to complete, two or three ruined ones went into the wastebasket. Yet even this
minor accomplishment depended on my mastery of the typewriter eraser; I had learned, for example, to erase each carbon separately.

Ten minutes before the lunch hour George Berkeley came to collect Dale Carnegie and Mrs. Margate. “You won’t be needing these,” he said, and swooped them away. That left Wellek-and-Warren exposed on the corner of my desk; he rested his palm on it. “Dale Carnegie may be a bit more famous, but he doesn’t hold a candle to Mrs. Margate. I don’t suppose you’ve even looked into her.”

“Yes, I have,” I said.

“And what did you think?”

I hesitated: my “spunky” might just turn out to be his “pert.” The best answer, I speculated, would be to return diligently to the typewriter.

“Well, never mind. No one here cares
what
you think. Stop typing,” he ordered.

I stopped.

“I’ve always had Mr. Haroulian’s perfect confidence—I’ve had it right along. It’s your sort of thinking that’s put me in trouble with him. I’ve been on the telephone with Mr. Haroulian, and we’ve both decided that you ought to spend the rest of the afternoon just as you please. And you don’t need to come back on Monday. Mr. Haroulian’s attending his daughter’s concert today, or he would be telling you this himself.”

I knew he felt betrayed; he had put his trust in higher education.

Then, as if he were handling an unfamiliar and possibly harmful small animal, George Berkeley picked up Wellek-and-Warren and carefully placed it on the floor. He loosened his tie, something I had never seen him do. His damp neck glowed. “And by the way,” he said politely, “here’s what we here at Margate, Haroulian think of the New Criticism.”

With one crisp thwack of his foot he sent
A Theory of Literature
hurtling against the wall.

I crossed the room, retrieved the sacred text, and escaped into the somnolent molasses sunlight of a New York summer afternoon—a failure and an incompetent, and not a changeling at all.

More than any other metropolis of the Western world, New York disappears. It disappears and then it disappears again; or say that it metamorphoses between disappearances, so that every seventy-five years or so another city bursts out, as if against nature—new shapes, new pursuits, new immigrants with their unfamiliar tongues and worried uneasy bustle. In nature, the daffodil blooms, withers, vanishes, and in the spring returns—always a daffodil, always indistinguishable from its precursor. Not so New York, preternatural New York! Go to Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue: where is the Grand Opera House, with its statuary and carvings, its awnings and Roman-style cornices? Or reconnoiter Thirteenth Street and Broadway: who can find Wallack’s Theatre, where the acclaimed Mrs. Jennings, Miss Plessy Mordaunt, and Mr. J. H. Stoddart once starred, and where, it was said, “even a mean play will be a success”? One hundred years ago, no one imagined the dissolution of these dazzling landmarks; they seemed as inevitable, and as permanent, as our Lincoln Center, with its opera and concerts and plays, and its lively streaming crowds.

In Archaeology 101 they tell a New York joke. It is the year 3000. Archaeologists are sifting through the rubble of overgrown mounds, searching for relics of the lost city that once flourished on this brambly wild site. They dig here and there
without reason for excitement (beer cans, a plastic sherd or two, unbiodegradable grocery bags), until at last they uncover what appears to be a primitive concourse of some kind, along which is placed, at surprisingly even intervals, a row of barbaric-looking poles. The poles are molded of an enduring ancient alloy, and each one is topped by a head with a single glass eye and an inch of crude mouth. “Identical sacrificial cultic stands in homage to the city’s divinity-king,” the archaeologists conclude. What they have found are Second Avenue parking meters: the Ozymandias of the late twentieth century.

The joke may apply to other modern societies (no contemporaneous city, after all, was as modern as Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon), but New York eludes such ironies. New York will never leave town. It will never sink into a desert waste. Catapult us forward a thousand years, and we won’t recognize the place; yet it is certain to be, uninterruptedly, New York, populous, evolving, faithfully inconstant, magnetic, man-made, unnatural—the synthetic sublime. If you walk along Lexington Avenue, say, it isn’t easy to be reminded that Manhattan is an island, or even that it lies, like everything else, under an infinitude of sky. New York’s sky is jigsawed, cut into geometric pieces glimpsed between towers or caught slantwise across a granite-and-glass ravine. There is no horizon; the lucky penthouses and fifteenth-floor apartments and offices may have long views, but the streets have almost none. At night the white glow that fizzes upward from the city—an inverted electric Niagara—obscures the stars, and except for the Planetarium’s windowless mimicry, New York is oblivious of the cosmos. It is nearly as indifferent, by and large, to its marine surround. Walt Whitman once sang of the “tall masts of Mannahatta” and of the “crested and scallop-edg’d waves,” but the Staten Island ferry and the Circle Line beat on mastless, and the drumming ribbon of the West Side Highway bars us from the sound and smell of waters rushing or lapping.
New York pretends that it is inland and keeps dry indoors and feels shoreless; New York water means faucets and hidden pipes and, now and then, a ceiling leak or the crisis of a burst main. Almost in spite of itself, Riverside Drive looks out on the Hudson, and can, if it likes, remember water. On Manhattan’s other flank, the F.D.R. Drive swims alongside the East River like a heavy-chuffing landlubber crocodile, unmindful of the moving water nearby. And here come the bridges, the Queensboro, the Manhattan, the Williamsburg, and finally the Brooklyn, Hart Crane’s fabled “harp and altar.” These varied spans, squat or spidery—together with the grand George Washington to the north and west—may cry out their poetry of arch and tide and steely ingenuity; but when you ride across in car or bus they are only, again, urban roadways. The tunnels are the same, with their line of lights perpetually alert under the river’s tonnage. New York domesticates whatever smacks of sea. And when the two rivers, the Hudson and the East, converge and swallow each other at the Battery’s feet, it is the bays alone, the Upper and the Lower, that hurry out to meet the true deep. New York turns its back on the Atlantic. The power and the roar New York looks to are its own.

And if New York is to be misinterpreted and misunderstood, it will not be by future antiquarians, but by its present-day citizens. The Village stymies Wall Street. Chinatown is Greek to Washington Heights. Harlem and Tribeca are mutual enigmas. Neighborhoods are sealed off from one another by the border police of habit and mindset and need and purpose. And there is another border, even more rigid, and surely more disconsolate, than geography: the divide between then and now, a gash that can occur in a single lifetime. Fourth Avenue, masquerading as Park Avenue South, has lost its venerable name; Sixth Avenue—despite its rebirth, half a century ago, as Avenue of the Americas—has not. Where are the hotels of yesteryear? The
Astor, the Chatham, the Savoy-Plaza? The Biltmore and its legendary clock? Where are the rows and rows of second-hand book stores that crept northward from Astor Place to Fourteenth Street? Where are Klein’s and Wanamaker’s and Gimbel’s and Ohrbach’s? Where are those urban walkers and scribes—Joseph Mitchell, Meyer Berger, Kate Simon, Alfred Kazin? Where is that cloud of gray fedoras that made men in crowds resemble dandelions gone to seed? When, and why, did New York hats give up the ghost? And who was the last to dance in the Rainbow Room?

The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky—born in Leningrad, exiled to New York, buried in Venice—used to say that he wrote to please his predecessors, not his contemporaries. Often enough New York works toward the opposite: it means to impress the here-and-now, which it autographs with an insouciant wrecking ball. Gone is the cleaner-and-dyer; gone is the shoe-repair man. In their stead, a stylish boutique and a fancy-cookie shop. To see—close at hand—how the present is displaced by a newer present, how streets long confident of their particularity can rapidly molt into streets of a startlingly unexpected character, is to be a bit of a god: what is Time, what is Change, to the gods? For New Yorkers, a millennium’s worth of difference can be encompassed in six months. Downtown lofts on spooky dark blocks that once creaked under the weight and thunder and grime of industrial machinery are suddenly filled with sofas upholstered in white linen and oak bars on wheels and paintings under track lighting and polyurethaned coffee tables heaped with European magazines. Bryant Park, notorious shady hangout, blossoms into a cherished noonday amenity. Or else the deserted tenements along the Metro-North line, staring out eyeless and shamefaced at the commuters’ train down from Stamford, will, overnight, have had their burnt-out hollows covered over with painted plywood—trompe l’oeil windows and flower
pots pretending, Potemkin-like, and by municipal decree, that human habitation has resumed.

Yet despite New York’s sleight-of-hand transmutations and fool-the-eye pranks, the lady isn’t really sawed in half; she leaps up, alive and smiling. If physical excision is the city’s ongoing principle, there are, anyhow, certain surprising tenacities and keepsake intuitions. Wait, for instance, for the downtown No. 104 at the bus stop on Broadway and Seventy-second Street, look across the way, and be amazed—what Renaissance palazzo is this? A tall facade with draped female sculptures on either side, arched cornices, patterned polychrome bricks: ornamental flourish vying with ornamental flourish. And then gaze down the road to your right: one vast slab after another, the uncompromising severity of straight lines, brilliantly winking windows climbing and climbing, not a curve or entablature or parapet or embrasure ruffling the sleek skin of these new residential monoliths. In sharp winter light, a dazzling juxtaposition, filigreed cheek by modernist jowl. The paradox of New York is that its disappearances contain constancies—and not only because some buildings from an earlier generation survive to prod us toward historical self-consciousness. What is most steadfast in New York has the fleet look of the mercurial: the city’s persistent daring, vivacity, enchantment, experiment; the marvel of new forms fired by old passions, the rekindling of the snuffed.

The Lower East Side, those tenement-and-pushcart streets of a century ago, once the venue of synagogues and succahs and religious-goods stores and a painful density of population, and later the habitat of creeps and druggies, is now the neighborhood of choice for the great-grandchildren of earlier tenants who were only too happy to escape to the Bronx. The talismanic old Rainbow Room has shut its doors? Never mind: its drama and urgent charm have migrated south. The downtown bands and their girl
singers have a different sound, but the bands are there, and the girl singers too. At the Knitting Factory and other clubs—with names like Arlene Grocery, Luna Lounge, Baby Jupiter—you may catch up with Motel Girl, a band specializing in “Las Vegas stripper noir”: avant-garde jazz described as jarring, seedy, sexy, Movietone-violent, dark. Even Ratner’s on Delancey, the destination of senior citizens with an appetite for potato pancakes and blintzes, has succumbed to bands and poetry readings. Many of the singers and musicians live in the old tenement flats (toilet down the hall) on Avenue B, with monthly rents as high as a thousand dollars. Broadway and Prince, where Dean & DeLuca boasts three hundred varieties of cheese, was home to a notions shop two generations ago; not far away, on Orchard Street, the Tenement Museum stands as an emblem of nostalgic consecration, ignored by its trendy neighbors. You can still buy pickles out of the barrel at Guss’s, but the cutting-edge young who come down to Ludlow and Stanton for the music or the glitz rarely find those legendary greenhorn warrens of much historic interest; their turf is the East Village. The Lower East Side’s current inhabitants, despite their fascination with the louche, are educated and middle-class, with mothers back on Long Island wishing their guitar-playing daughters had gone to medical school. What these seekers on A, B, and C are after—like Scott and Zelda plunging into fountains to jump-start the Jazz Age—is New York’s insuperable constant: the sense of belonging to the glamorous marrow of one’s own time.