Forever

  “Who did you visit?”

  “Certain gentlemen who would rather not have their private tastes made public.”

  The mob showed up over the following months at other places run by women but did not return to Duane Street. Hughie Mulligan and his boys had created one of the first true New York rackets: They would protect the houses from themselves. That is, if they were paid a fee, nobody would bother the madams, their women, or their business establishments. And through connections at Tammany Hall, they’d make certain that no fool of a politician would try to pass a law in Albany that would close the houses. They did not try again to move against the countess.

  “But be careful, Cormac. Hughie Mulligan won’t forget what you did.”

  “I know.”

  Then one night, after a mild summer when only 213 New Yorkers died of cholera, the countess came to wake up Cormac in his room. The clock said 1:20. He sat up.

  “What is it?”

  “They have a plan,” she said, her voice breathless. “They’re going to burn out some blocks downtown, get rid of the old wooden houses, and…”

  “Wait, slow down.”

  She calmed herself and explained how she had learned from a favored customer that a certain group was planning to burn out some of the old streets, because the land titles and squatting rights were now too complicated to deal with. Later, they would help move the rich up to the new districts in Greenwich Village, where they could come to work on the new horse-drawn omnibuses. The speculators among them already owned the land up in Greenwich and were investing in the omnibuses. The mechanics, the apprentices, and the poor would be forced into the houses off Chapel Street, where many other poor now lived (including the children of Africans). Others would be directed to the houses of the Five Points. Everything below Wall Street would be rebuilt and devoted to business.

  “And who is this favored customer?”

  “I can’t speak his name. I call him the Wax Man. He likes, well…”

  “And the name of his group?”

  She sighed. “They don’t have a name. But they are real.” “And why would the Wax Man tell you?”

  “He was drinking wine, a lot of wine, he was getting… I suppose the word is sentimental. He wanted me to know—so that I could buy land now, in Greenwich Village, or along Bond Street, or even farther into the country. He was offering me a favor. A piece of the information. It’s not the first time.”

  Cormac wrapped a blanket around himself against the seeping September cold.

  “I should put this in the newspaper,” he said, knowing that Bryant would surely find some excuse to refuse its publication.

  “Never,” she said. “They’ll kill you, and worse…” (smiling broadly) “they’ll kill me.”

  They both laughed. She took Cormac’s hand and led him across the hall to her room, closing the door behind them. She talked a lot about how real estate was the most important of all businesses in the town whose true god was Mammon. That was why she thought the Wax Man’s raving was more than raving. She rang for a maid and ordered two omelettes, fresh bread, and a bottle of water. She swore Cormac to secrecy. “This is not about some stupid thugee like Hughie Mulligan,” she said. “This is about the big boys.” And then mentioned names. Ruggles, Hewett, Vandermeer, Astor. “They’re not thinking about Saturday night,” she said. “They’re thinking about the future. A future we can’t imagine, and they can.”

  Months passed. There was no fire. There was at least serious talk now about building a reservoir in Croton, high in Westchester, and digging a system of pipes to carry fresh water to the city. That was still the distant future, and it was still merely talk, but the newspapers were finally behind it, in the name of the expanding metropolis. In the present, Cormac was more grateful than ever for water and the aroma of lavender and clean flesh. His hands grew a bit looser on the keys of the piano. The playing of the countess, in contrast, was richer and more supple. He understood better the theory of half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, and sixteenth notes, of semiquavers and time stops, but his execution of the theory remained mechanical and crude. The countess was kind and patient.

  Cormac worked hard at the newspaper, mentioned the rumors of an impending fire to Bryant, asked discreet questions of Beatriz and other friends on the streets, but he heard nothing more that was concrete. Neither did the countess, although the Wax Man continued making his Thursday night visits to the various rooms of the house. Sometimes he brought his own candles.

  Cormac was careful in his movements, his eyes searching Duane Street before leaving the house. He avoided the frontiers of the Five Points at night, when the friends and associates of Hughie Mulligan might be watching from ambush. On most days, the sword was too bulky to strap to hip or back, but he did start carrying one of the revolvers he’d taken from Hughie’s boys. He kept this hidden from editors and other reporters, and did not even tell the countess. On several Sundays he went off to the north on a rented horse to practice shooting at targets in the woods.

  The stranger arrived in November. It was just after midnight, and Cormac was sitting back, deep in a plush chair, while the countess played an aching tune, full of longing. His eyes were closed, and he saw rain-washed streets and gabled rooftops and a river. The music was full of the river, the water flowing through time.

  Then, from beyond the door, he heard the music of a violin.

  Playing in counterpoint to the music of the piano.

  The countess stopped playing, and he saw shock in her eyes. She did not move. The violin continued, picking up the melody of aching loss and an unseen river.

  She got up without looking at Cormac and walked to the door. She paused while the music played, then turned the knob and opened the door.

  A man in a cape was standing there, playing the violin. He didn’t look at her, for his eyes were closed, his square jaw pressed into the chin rest, his brow crumpled into concentrated creases. His left hand moved subtly on the strings, there seemed no movement at all with the bow, yet he was pulling music from his instrument that was charged with enormous delicacy and power. The countess touched her mouth. The stranger kept playing and then glided deftly into a diminishing passage of farewell.

  He finished and stood there, his brow still furrowed.

  “Hello, Monsieur Breton,” she said. “Come in.”

  He stepped across the threshold, his hazel eyes taking in the room and falling upon Cormac, who was now standing. The countess closed the door. The stranger did not move and neither did Cormac. For the first time, he saw the countess appear awkward.

  “Cormac, this is Yves Breton,” she said in French. “Yves, Cormac O’Connor.”

  Cormac stepped forward and offered a hand. M. Breton ignored it, busying his hands with bow and violin. His cape was dirty, his shoes slippery with black city mud.

  “Can I get you a drink?” Cormac said.

  “Yes,” M. Breton said. “Cognac.”

  His tone was dismissive, and he turned to the countess. “You’re playing again,” he said.

  “Yes. I tried to give it up, but—”

  She shrugged and gestured toward a chair. M. Breton looked in an inquisitive way at Cormac, who was returning with a small glass of cognac. He did not take the offered chair. In a sacramental way, he placed the bow and violin on a table, then sipped the cognac, thrust a hand in a trousers pocket, and stared at the countess. Cormac thought: Too theatrical by far.

  “You look well,” M. Breton said to the countess. “Better than I expected after, what? More than five years.”

  “Thank you,” she said, but did not return the compliment. M. Breton stared at her.

  “How did you find me?” she said.

  “I looked. I asked. Someone told me you were in New York, and I thought, She could only be a whore.”

  Cormac’s stomach churned. He felt something new: that he was an intruder in the suite of the Countess de Chardon. Who denied the past, and now clearly had one.

 
“And how was prison?” she said.

  “I survived. I’m here. It doesn’t matter.”

  Now he turned on Cormac.

  “Bring me another cognac,” he said.

  Cormac gestured toward the bar. “The bottle’s over there. Help yourself, Monsieur Breton.”

  The Frenchman turned to the countess. “Is he the butler?’ “No, he’s my lover,” she said.

  Cormac could hear himself breathing now. And the countess breathing. And M. Breton too.

  Then M. Breton stared into his drink, laughed, and shook his head.

  “Well,” he said, “every cunt must have its servant.”

  Cormac stepped before him, anger quickening his pulse.

  “You can leave now, my fiddling friend. There’s the door.”

  “I don’t think so,” M. Breton said.

  The countess stepped between them.

  “Cormac, this is my husband.”

  76.

  That night, as on every night, he retreated to his room down the hall. But now everything was different. No word had passed to him from the countess, but it was clear from her posture, her silence, and her eyes that he must stay away from the suite. This was a complete change. Before the arrival of M. Breton, after food and music and water and bed, they had always kissed good-night and retired to their separate beds for the replenishments of sleep. She wanted it that way, and he came to luxuriate in his own solitude. Alone in his room before sleep, he could read, he could imagine, he could paint, he could hum vagrant melodies. He could think, too, about the strangeness of his life, the long years, the old vows that were printed on him, the names and brief lives of the dead. He could indulge in the secret pleasures of philosophy. He could exercise blankness, wiping away all imagery and all regret.

  On the second night, the countess stopped him in the hall and kissed his cheek.

  “He’ll stay with me,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  He said, “Fine, no, no, I understand. I don’t mind.”

  But, of course, he did mind. Part of it was the impression made upon him by Yves Breton. He was arrogant and vain, convinced, it seemed, of his genius as a violinist and the superior rights that must be granted to him as a result. Who the hell was he to show up after many years and move back into his wife’s bed? Cormac lay in his own bed thinking these things, and felt his anger growing in spite of his attempts to control it with his will. How could she take such a man to her bed? She had never told him everything about her past, and that was all right with Cormac. The past was the past. It could not be changed. If she did not tell him everything about her past, then he had no obligation to reveal his own, even if what he told her was an elaborate lie concocted to hide the truth. She would have laughed at the truth and suggested he take a room in the madhouse. But the past never completely passed, and here came her past, embodied in M. Breton, walking into their present.

  He told himself that the countess might only be testing him, creating through this surprise a way to see whether Cormac was indeed free of jealousy. If so, she was playing a silly and dangerous game. Too French by far. He told himself he was not jealous but angry over a breach of manners. And then realized that he was indeed suffering from a slippery attack of jealousy. To his own complete surprise.

  His ruminations were interrupted by a knock on the door. He got up quickly and cracked it open.

  Fiammetta was there, in a sheer nightgown, holding a candle.

  “Madame says you need me,” the girl said.

  “Thank you, Fiammetta,” he said. “But I don’t.”

  Her face was trembling.

  “I can help you sleep,” she said.

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “Okay, Mister O’Connor. Sleep tight.”

  “I’ll try.”

  He did not sleep well that night or the next night or the night after that. He plunged into reporting, moving from hearings into the Croton water project to the murder of an apprentice boy on Baxter Street to the burning of a ship at the dock on Coenties Slip. He was cut off from the piano in the closed suite of the Countess de Chardon and put his energies into painting. He did not see M. Breton. He saw the countess on the fourth day after her husband’s arrival in their lives.

  “I can explain,” she said. “But not now.”

  Jennings was in the doorway of the house on Hudson Street when Cormac arrived. His face looked pale and wasted, his eyes rheumy with horror. He was smoking a thin rum-soaked cigarillo.

  “Even you don’t want to see this one, Cormac,” he said, a tremble in his voice. His eyes wandered to the small crowd on the sidewalk, and the horse-drawn carts beyond, and the old black men huddled in the doorways. Jennings clearly wanted to see something banal and comforting and familiar on this morning gray with the threat of rain.

  “How bad is it?” Cormac asked.

  “Two babies, their brains beaten out of their skulls. A woman shot three times in the face. A man with a bullet in his brow. They think he’s the woman’s son, and the babies belong to him.”

  “Oh, God…”

  “The babies…” Jennings had lost all his mannerisms. His mouth trembled. “Oh, Jesus, Cormac…”

  He seemed about to cry, then clamped the cigarillo in his teeth and slipped a whiskey flask from his jacket pocket.

  “Who’s on it?” Cormac said.

  “Ford. Who else?”

  “I don’t envy his dreams.”

  Jennings took a swig from the flask, offered it to Cormac, who declined.

  “How do you handle your dreams—without drink?” Jennings said.

  “I don’t.”

  Cormac patted Jennings on the back and entered the house of the newly dead. A young doctor pushed past him, climbing the stairs to the third floor. Children and adults peered from the partly opened doors, white faces and black. The odors of soup and shit and sewage filled the air. On the second landing a thin mustached cop blocked his way.

  “Who are you?” the policeman said.

  Cormac showed a press identity card. The cop squinted at it and handed it back.

  “It’s pretty bad up there,” he said.

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “All niggers,” the cop said. “And a lot of opium too.” Cormac moved past him up the stairs. The egglike odor of soft coal now mixed with the stench of shit and blood. Another policeman blocked his way.

  “Not now,” he said. “They’re still working.”

  “Ask the inspector if he can give his friend Cormac some names.”

  They were not friends, but he wanted the names.

  “Ask him yourself,” the cop said.

  Cormac leaned past him, glimpsing blood on polished plank floors. “Inspector Ford, it’s Cormac O’Connor…. I need some names.”

  Ford emerged from another room. His face was pale too, as if the crime were draining blood from the living.

  “Come in, Cormac,” he said softly. “I think you know this woman.”

  That night, his story written coldly and set in type, his stomach empty to fight off the nausea, he made drawings of Beatriz Machado. He drew her as she was in life. He drew her as a young woman in the bookstore in Lispenard Street. He drew her as she was at Quaco’s funeral, an American in the presence of the oldest Africans. He drew her rich with fat, as she sold corn and oysters and opium from her stall on Broadway. He drew her with charcoal and sepia chalk, pulling her into life from memory, from the river of time. He hummed music as he used line and shadow and volume to make her as she was in life. He hummed the melodies that came from the hands of the countess. He hummed music that had never been written on paper, music that came from gourds and fiddles in a lost year in a vanished century. He worked in a kind of anguished frenzy, sweat pouring from his body.

  Then, his hands black with chalk, he fell on the narrow bed, pulled a pillow over his face, and wept. He was sick of the things human beings did to one another. He was angry too. Too many people were chopped out of the world before you
had a chance to say good-bye.

  He did not hear the door open. But he felt the bed sag as she sat on its edge, felt her hands in his hair.

  “Poor Cormac,” the countess said.

  He looked at her, expecting some gloss of irony. All he saw was care.

  “You’re hurting,” she said.

  “I am.”

  “And I’m one of the reasons you’re hurting.”

  He sighed in a reluctant way.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “But she—the woman in these drawings—she’s a reason too.”

  “She is,” he said. He sat up now on the edge of the bed and stared at his blackened hands.

  “Tell me the story.”

  He stood up and went to the sink and began washing his hands.

  “I knew her for many years,” he said. “She sold oysters and other things from a stall on Broadway. She was warm and human and funny. At some point last night, she was murdered.”

  “My God.”

  The black would not come off his fingers. He pulled at it with a towel.

  “Her own son killed her, along with two of his own children, and then shot himself in the brow.” He heard his voice as if the voice alone were the cold teller of a tale. “He beat out the brains of the children. He shot off his mother’s face.” Then he took a deep breath, not looking at the countess for the effect of his words. “He told a woman on the first floor that he hated his mother because she laughed at him. That was probably true. She laughed at everyone and everything. She laughed at me, as well she should. She laughed at life.” He paused, turned to look at the countess, whose face was lost in imagining.“The same woman on the first floor saw the son yesterday, in the morning. He told her he had been out of work for eleven months. He was tired of depending on his mother. He was tired of being black.”

  He glanced at the black lines dug into his fingertips, and the sanguine chalk red as blood. The countess looked up at him.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  Then she told him some of her story: how she’d met Yves Breton in Paris, where her mother had taken her to study at the Conservatory. They were living then in New Orleans, which was still French, the place to which she and her mother had fled in 1802 when the slave revolt had come upon them. She remembered the cemeteries above ground because of the high level of the water, the porous soil full of writhing stone monuments, and how the one of her father was a kind of boast, because there was nothing of her father inside the tomb. His body had been hacked to pieces in Haiti. She was eight years old when her father was murdered, and her mother rose out of a cellar hideout a day later, packed up jewels and cash and some paintings and pastels, and left for Louisiana, dry-eyed and angry. She was angry in some obscure way at the countess (who was not, of course, a countess) and angry with her dead husband, for failing to take the black revolutionists seriously until they walked into his drawing room; she was angry with Napoleon Bonaparte, the consul for life, for failing to protect them; she was angry at leaving the life they had made in the Caribbean.