Forever

The New York Light was not, to be sure, a thriving enterprise. It was a large dull broadsheet, full of Wall Street news and stories from the police blotter. It was the last afternoon newspaper in New York, with a loyal, aging readership that bought it at Grand Central and Penn Station for the long ride to the suburbs or had it delivered to their apartment buildings on the East Side. A few serious gamblers read it for news from West Coast racetracks, and businessmen trusted its closing stock prices and analyses of earnings reports. But its gray pages repelled many other New Yorkers, and reporters from the morning newspapers said that it bridged the generation gap between the living and the dead.

  For eighteen years the Light had been owned by a foundation, whose members stated that they felt a civic obligation to subsidize the second-oldest newspaper in the United States. The staff was small, the advertising thin, the losses substantial, but after all the paper went back to 1835, the year that James Gordon Bennett started modern journalism with the New York Herald. Among the survivors, only the New York Post could trace its lineage back to an earlier time, the year 1801, when Alexander Hamilton assembled a group of New Yorkers to serve his interests and those of the Bank of New York. But as time passed, the clubby old-guard members of the Light Foundation began dying off, carrying what was left of noblesse oblige into their marble crypts, and their children preferred yachts and airplanes and houses in Southampton or Positano to civic duty in New York. One June morning in 1991, on page one of the Light, the board announced that if a new buyer was not found within two weeks, they would fold the paper. Other newspapers wrote mournful editorials, but their owners were rooting for the Light to die. It was a hindrance, another competitor for space on newsstands, and in the privacy of their offices they dismissed any hope for its survival as mere sentimentality. Several semi-insane owners of parking lots and grocery chains offered to buy the Light for a dollar and operate it for at least a year. Each got a few minutes on local television; but sane men knew that it was doubtful that even a one-dollar check from such men would clear at the bank. The surviving members of the foundation didn’t want to be remembered for selling the Light to a lunatic. In stepped William Hancock Warren.

  “New York without the Light,” he said in a press release, “would be like New York without the Statue of Liberty.”

  On the Fourth of July that year, Warren handed the foundation a check for one million dollars, which the surviving members promised would be used to study threats to the First Amendment. The fireworks on the Hudson seemed like acts of celebration for the newspaper. “Re-born on the 4th of July!” their page-one headline said the following day. And when the holiday ended, William Hancock Warren walked into the rat-infested building on West Street where the Light had been published since 1947, its fourth location since its foundation in a three-story building on Beaver Street. He uttered only one sentence to the assembled television cameras, and as Cormac watched that evening on channel 4, the words jolted his heart: “I’m a descendant of people who lived in New York before the Light was born! I hope to see it flourish and live to an even riper old age!”

  Cormac thought that night: This cannot be. His most natural reflex, taught to him by living a very long life, was doubt. A wise old editor had said to him once, “If you want it to be true, it probably isn’t.” But then he saw Warren’s eyes and the familiar features (only marginally altered by the work of generations) and once more resumed a search that had lasted in some ways all his years. He read everything he could find about the man who, in print, was now being called Willie Warren. This wasn’t much, but he subscribed to the Argosy service anyway. Thinking: I don’t want it to be true, so it probably is. If this was the last of one branch of the Warren line, the old vows required him to act. He wished he had the sword. His father’s sword. He wished the sword were there to connect him to the younger man he once was, full of certainties. And there was something else pressing upon him now.

  He wanted more than ever to find the dark lady marked by spirals. She had nothing to do with the Warrens and the curse of Ireland. She was part of a separate story. And yet her story and the story of the Warrens were coming together, forced into union by the pressure of time. He had found a dark lady. Delfina Cintron. But he did not yet know if she bore the markings, if she was the dark lady. Caution kept him from making the discovery. Caution, and a kind of fear. If she did not bear the markings, he would go on and on and on, like the North River. If she did, he could be entering his final days. At last. And he could not go to that ending without completing the unfinished business of the other story, the demand for completion imposed on him by family and tribe. My father first, he thought, and then, with any luck, Delfina Cintron, and finally release and a swift passage into the emerald light.

  The newspapers told Cormac that on the day Willie Warren moved into the publisher’s office, he took calls of congratulation from the mayor, the governor, and the president of the United States. That day, he also hired Howard Rubenstein to handle his press relations, and his secretary referred all other calls to the Rubenstein office. The trade press cobbled together stories, using words and phrases like “quixotic” and “deep pockets” and “amateur,” while predicting that no matter what Warren did, the Light was doomed. The losses would be immense. The rich boy would eventually turn his attention to other toys. Prepare the obits now. In Cormac’s solitude, he agreed.

  Everybody was wrong.

  In the months that followed the purchase, Cormac’s old newspaperman’s heart quickened as he saw Warren make a series of superb moves. He hired an excellent editor and left him alone on all matters involving the news. He gave the editor a budget that allowed him to expand the tiny staff with a mixture of seasoned professionals and passionate youngsters. He hired Milton Glaser to give the paper a new look, and one Monday morning it became a broadsheet with the graphic energy of a tabloid. Bold and bright, without being loud. He started building a new color-printing plant in Brooklyn, which would get the newspaper around Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island, delivered to doorsteps. His trucks could enter Manhattan when incoming traffic was light and copies of the paper were soon stacked on the newsstands at Penn Station and Grand Central when commuters headed home. He hired away a few star columnists from the News and the Post to add some personality to the Light’s sober news pages, paying them twice the money they were getting at the papers they left behind. He tripled the space in the sports section and encouraged huge action shots from his photographers. He sent handwritten notes to reporters when they did solid stories, gave bonuses to those whose stories were picked up by television, made certain that notes were sent to staff members on their birthdays and wedding anniversaries or when death took place in a family. He advertised heavily in the subways and in the foreign-language press. The editorial pages, which he controlled, became a model of judiciousness, and the op-ed pages were intelligent and well-written without ever talking down to the readers. He added no fuel to any municipal fire. He endorsed Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani and even had nice things to say about Al Sharpton. For the first time in decades, Cormac began to see people reading the Light on the subways.

  William Hancock Warren was also lucky. He bought the newspaper at almost the precise moment when the boom started. His own holdings boomed. But so did the city of New York. Crime was down. Money was flowing. People began going out again at night. New businesses opened every day of the week. Warren expanded his business pages and insisted on covering both the Internet and the media. The young dot-commers began reading the paper and then advertising in it. The Light became the newspaper of the boom. But his editors knew that they needed more than the brash kids to read their paper. Warren read a biography of Joseph Pulitzer and decided to follow the old man’s example by covering the huge immigration wave. The Light became the immigrants’ newspaper, defending them, telling stories of their progress, running a column about green cards and visas and the process of naturalization. The word got around. Those immigrants who were learning English began reading it
, and more important, so did their children. Then, about two years ago, he made a move that drove a tormented ambiguity into Cormac’s heart.

  He announced that the Light was moving into a building on Park Row. Across the street from City Hall. Up the block from J&R Music World. He could do it now, the Rubenstein office explained, because the computer had freed newspapers from the plants in which they were printed. You could write a story on a high floor in Park Row and it would be printed miles away in Brooklyn. The other newspapers were all produced that way. Now it was the turn of the Light. And the city room would be located on Park Row.

  Cormac wanted to weep. Once upon a time, he had worked on thirteen different newspapers on Park Row. As a reporter, a rewrite man, a copy editor, a typesetter. He had watched Walt Whitman sleep on the floor of one of those papers and had shown young Sam Clemens how they set type in New York. After the Civil War, Cormac had seen Father Dongan organize the orphaned newsboys and force the publishers to buy them shoes and get them doctors (the largest donations came from Bill Tweed). He’d walked past Hearst and Pulitzer in the lobbies and drunk with Brisbane in the whorehouses of Chapel Street. In those days, Park Row wasn’t just a distinct neighborhood; it was a kind of civilization, peopled by gaudy men of rapacious ambitions and appetites, great talent, enormous weaknesses, and much fun. Too much fun to last. Cormac had seen the Park Row papers die or move away, until all of them were gone by 1931. And here came a man who said that the past was now the future.

  In spite of himself, in spite of a terrible ancient vow, in spite of history and memory, part of him began to root for William Hancock Warren.

  For eight years, he watched and compiled his files and secretly applauded Warren’s growing triumph. For those eight years, he gazed at dark-skinned women on his walks through the city and turned away from them. After so many years of too much time, he wanted more time now, to see where Warren’s project would go, to postpone fate, to wait until he found the true dark lady. The century was winding down. The Wall Street boom rolled on.

  Then, on a sweaty day in August, he saw Delfina Cintron.

  She calls after he returns from his walk. She is cool but not distant. They make a date for the theater. Next week. Under the marquee. Then she says good-bye, and he stands there, holding the cordless phone. I must move more quickly, he thinks. I must move closer to her, and soon, to find out if I can love her. I who have loved no woman for so many years. He gazes out toward Church Street, thinking: It’s much more difficult to love than to kill.

  90.

  At ten after eight in the morning, Cormac is in Mary’s Café on the corner of Chambers Street and Broadway. He’s gone past the cakes on baroque display, and the counters where lone men crunched well-done English muffins and read the New York Post, past the booths on the right with their view of rain-swept Chambers Street. He wishes he could bring Delfina here and try to explain who Miss Subways was, as seen in all the posters hung like historical artifacts upon the coffee shop walls. But he is here to meet Healey, his friend, his last friend, who knows all about Miss Subways (and even dated one for three marvelous weeks in 1959), and so he has picked a table as far back in the large rear room as he can go, pushed up against fake leather banquettes. The choice of Mary’s was not entirely up to Cormac. The waitresses here know Healey, and that makes things much easier. And this is Tuesday, the day when Cormac and Healey have their weekly breakfast and the waitresses are prepared for whatever comes their way.

  Cormac is always happy here and not simply because Mary’s is a few blocks from where he lives. The corner of Broadway and Chambers has been part of his life from the beginning. Across the street to the right is the corner of the old Common, where the Africans and Irish were burned or hanged in 1741. To the left stands the building where he once worked as a clerk for Alexander T. Stewart. Forgotten now, but once one of the three richest men in America. And that building (now covered with rigging as part of a rehab) was Stewart’s masterpiece. The Marble Palace, it was called after it opened in 1848, and it was the first department store in New York. With that concept, and fixed prices (no bargaining, but no giving goods to your relatives for half price either), Stewart changed the city. He was a tough, reticent, decent man from Lisburn in Northern Ireland (he sent food and clothes and money to Ireland during the Famine). He started in his twenties, importing linen from the mills of the North, and then gambled everything on the Marble Palace. Everyone predicted disaster: It was on the wrong side of the street, with the Five Points at its back. A department store? In the era of specialized shops? When you visited a button shop for buttons and a lace shop for frills and a haberdasher for hats? The notion was too radical, too… common. But Stewart made it work. Cormac wonders what A. T. Stewart would have made of his friend Healey. He knows what Healey would have made of Bill Tweed, whose twelve-million-dollar courthouse is halfway down the block. He’d have asked the Boss for a list of the places where he wanted him to vote.

  Like some of his other friends over the years, Cormac enjoys Healey’s company too much to tell him the story of his life, even part of it. The rule behind most New York friendships is “don’t ask, don’t tell.” If Healey doesn’t ask, Cormac will not tell. Healey never asks. He’s the last of the old-style bohemians, the author of three good plays that had long runs off Broadway in the early 1960s, which meant he was shaped by the 1950s, when the worst sin of all was to name names. He’s a reformed drunk who now walks twenty-seven blocks, in rain, snow, or summer heat, to meet Cormac for their weekly breakfast. He’s also very loud, which is why the waitresses place them near the coffee shop’s outfield wall. Healey is loud because in the battle for the Chosin Reservoir in 1951, he lost half his hearing when a Chinese mortar exploded fifteen feet away from his left eardrum. “I’ve got a good ear for dialogue,” he used to say. “I just wish I had two.” He doesn’t write anymore, but he lives decently on royalties, since one of his plays is always being performed somewhere. He retired from writing when his stupendous young second wife ran off with a bass player. He now claims that he wrote all of his plays for her and after she left, whenever he tried to write, her face always appeared over his desk. The result was fury and sorrow, followed by paralysis and too much drinking. He stopped writing first, and then stopped drinking. The writing did not come back. He and Cormac have been friends for eleven years, and Healey has never mentioned anything about Cormac’s unchanged features, the absence of marks of age. It’s as if the playwright listens to Cormac but doesn’t see him. He has never been to Cormac’s house, nor has Cormac been to his. They sometimes meet in bars, where Healey drinks great quantities of Diet Pepsi, or here at Mary’s for breakfast.

  Now Healey is making his entrance again, huge and wide-eyed, dressed in a plaid Irish hat, his anorak dripping with the morning rain. His shoes make a squishing sound as he passes alarmed customers. When he reaches the table, smiling with his mouthful of yellow teeth, he heaves his soaked shoulder bag to Cormac’s side of the banquette. He rips off the anorak and hangs it on a wall hook and leaves the hat on top of his head.

  “Jesus Christ, what a filthy morning!” he bellows. “And there’s nothing left to look forward to now when you wake up! Kathie Lee is gone! No more slave labor in Thailand to worry about! Jesus Christ, no more infernos on cruise ships! What will we do without her, man? What will keep the pulse of the metropolis pulsing after breakfast? We’re doomed, man! Kathie Lee is history!”

  Cormac suggests (as Healey sits down heavily, making the banquette wheeze) that maybe there’d be some Kathie Lee videos he could buy. Kathie Lee’s Greatest Hits. The Golden Age of Kathie Lee.

  “No, no. No, they can’t do that, man! What made her so great—what made her an artist, man—is it was LIVE! No script! It was happening right there in front of your fucking eyes, man. That’s why she’s such a great artist, you dig?”

  A waitress named Millie comes over. Everybody named Dotty, Penny, Ginger, and Bridget has passed into history, and here must be the last
Millie left in Manhattan. Mary’s Café is that kind of place; nobody is ever named Heather and everybody knows about Miss Subways. Millie is fifty, heavy, with a wicked mouth on her when she wants to be wicked. Cormac cherishes her.

  “What’s yours, hon?” she says, meaning both of them.

  “The usual,” Healey says.

  “Let’s see: scramble three, crisp bacon, whole wheat toast, coffee, no milk, fake sugar.”

  “As always, you got it perfect, Millie.”

  “You the same?”

  “Why not?” Cormac says.

  “He actually likes oatmeal,” Healey says. “It’s an Irish thing.”

  “Our oatmeal tastes like cement,” Millie says.

  “That’s why he likes it.”

  “I’ll take the egg,” Cormac says. “Four minutes, rye toast.” “You got it, sweetheart,” Millie says, and hurries away.

  “I love waitresses who call me ‘sweetheart,’ ” Cormac says.

  “So marry her.”

  “Why ruin a romance?”

  Healey takes the News and the Post from his bag, the headlines filled with RUDY and DONNA, the latest chapter in the pathetic saga of the mayor in love.

  “You read the papers yet? I mean, watching Rudy manage women is like watching an ostrich shit.”

  Cormac laughs. Millie comes back with a basket of rolls, Danish, butter and marmalade, and a tall white plastic pot of coffee. Healey and Cormac start eating out of the basket. Healey taps the tabloids.

  “I gotta terrible confession to make,” he says. “I’m starting to feel sorry for that Giuliani. I mean, his whole life story changed in the last year. Cancer! His wife splits! A new broad shows up! He drops out of the Senate race! He goes walking with the new broad, along with a bunch of photographers, and he doesn’t even realize he looks like a fucking idiot. Then they make his father for a hoodlum in the thirties! Doing time. Breaking heads. Stuff from sixty fucking years ago! Fact is, you weren’t doing time in the thirties, you were some kind of pussy, man. I want to go across the street to City Hall, see Giuliani, put an arm around him, and say, Come on, Rudy, LET’S GO GET A BLOW JOB!!”