But he missed Charlie, even more than he’d thought he would.
Charlie had died too soon; the very year of his death seemed to proclaim the fact. With all its tragedy, 1968 had been an extraordinary year. There had been the failure of the Tet Offensive, and the huge demonstrations in New York against the Vietnam War. April had seen the terrible assassination of Martin Luther King, and June of Robert Kennedy. There had been the memorable candidacies of Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace for the presidency. In Europe, the student revolution in Paris, and the Russian crushing of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia had changed the history of the Western world. Andy Warhol had been shot and wounded, Jackie Kennedy had married Aristotle Onassis. So many iconic events in modern history had taken place that year, and Charlie Master had not been there to witness and comment upon them. It seemed so unnatural, so wrong.
Yet in some ways, Gorham was almost glad that his father had not lived to see the last few years. For that depressing garbage strike at the start of ’68 had not been the culmination, but only the beginning of New York’s troubles. Year after year the great city his father loved had deteriorated. Huge efforts had been made to market New York to the world as an exciting place. Taking a little-known slang term for a large city that dated back to the twenties, the marketing men called it the Big Apple, and invented a logo to go with the name. Central Park was filled with concerts, plays, every kind of activity. But behind all the razzmatazz, the city was falling apart. The park was turning into a dust bowl, where it was unsafe to walk after dark. Street crime continued to rise. As for the poor neighborhoods like Harlem and the South Bronx, they seemed to be falling into terminal neglect.
Finally, in 1975, the Big Apple confessed it was bankrupt. For years, it seemed, the accounts had been falsified. The city had borrowed money against revenues it did not have. Nobody wanted to buy New York debt, and President Ford refused to bail the city out unless it reformed itself. “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” the Daily News headline had memorably put it. Emergency help from union funds had saved actual collapse, but the Big Apple was still in a state of ongoing crisis.
Charlie would have hated New York’s humiliation. But Gorham still wished that he had his father to talk to. They might disagree, but Charlie was never passive, always informed, and usually had an opinion. Since his passing, Gorham was left to make sense of the world by himself, and when he was alone in the apartment sometimes, he would feel quite sad.
He had performed all his obligations toward his father, of course. He had delivered the little presents to his father’s friends, and heard their words of love and praise for Charlie. That had been a pleasant mission. All, that is, except one. Sarah Adler had been out of town at the time, on a trip to Europe. The present to her had been a drawing, carefully wrapped, so Gorham did not know what it was. He’d meant to deliver it several times, but somehow he’d always had something else to do, and after a year had passed, he had felt rather embarrassed to have waited so long. The gift was still sitting, fully wrapped, in a closet in the apartment. One day, he promised himself, he’d get round to dealing with it. God knows, he meant to.
His banking career had started well. The first choice had been what kind of bank he wanted to go into. Gorham knew that ever since the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 had regulated the banking industry after the great crash, one had to choose between two kinds of banking career: the commercial, high street banks that took ordinary people’s deposits, and the investment banks—the merchants banks, as they were called in London—where the financiers made their deals.
In a commercial bank, people told him, there was less risk, less frenetic hours, and probably a job for life; in an investment bank there were more risks, though maybe higher rewards. On the whole, he felt more attracted to the massive corporate respectability and power of the great commercial banks; he liked the solidity they represented. He’d been offered a position with a major bank, and he’d been very happy.
The life suited him. He did well in the bank’s training program, and he was assigned to the automotive group. He spent long hours preparing the numbers for credit documents, but he worked fast, had an eye for detail, and when he got the chance to study the loan documents, he discovered that he had a natural understanding of contracts and their implications. And unlike some blue bloods, he didn’t only do the work, but he asked for more.
“I see you’re not afraid of hard work,” his boss remarked to him after a long session.
“It’s the way to go up the learning curve,” Gorham replied cheerfully.
And when his boss took him to meet clients, they liked him. Client meetings in the automotive industry were a leisurely business, conducted on the golf course. Charlie had never had a country club, but Gorham had learned to play golf at Groton, and he’d kept up his game ever since. On these occasions, he did well, and his boss took notice. Client relationships were important in banking.
Two years ago, Gorham had made assistant vice president. He was on his way. All he needed now to complete the picture was the perfect corporate wife. He’d had several girlfriends, but none that seemed quite right to be Mrs. Gorham Master. He wasn’t worried about that, however. There was plenty of time.
At seven thirty, Maggie O’Donnell walked out of the Croydon rental building on Eighty-sixth Street, turned up Madison, walked a few blocks, past the Jackson Hole where she got her burgers, up to the tiny, enterprising restaurant where they served a very reasonable prix fixe menu with minimal choice, which changed every night. The Carnegie Hill area, lying as it did at the very top of the Upper East Side, contained a lot of young professionals who were glad of a chance to get an inexpensive meal in amusing surroundings, and the little restaurant’s half-dozen tables were seldom empty.
She was going to meet her brother Martin. If he turned up.
To be fair to Martin, he had been quite specific. The bookstore where he worked had an author reading that evening. If he was needed, he’d have to take a rain check. If not, he’d see her at the restaurant.
Maggie had organized her time efficiently. She’d scheduled her doctor’s appointment, for a check-up, at five thirty. That was on Park in the Eighties. It gave her time to return home afterward, do the laundry she hadn’t been able to do the previous weekend, then go out to the restaurant. After she’d eaten, she’d take a taxi back to her Midtown office, and work until maybe midnight or one o’clock on a contract she was preparing. Maggie was a lawyer. She worked for Branch & Cabell. And like all the young associates at the big Manhattan law firms, she worked very hard. The lawyers at Branch & Cabell were almost immortals. They did not need to pause for rest or sleep. They worked in their wood-paneled skyscraper, advising the powerful, and sent out their mighty bills for the midnight hours.
Maggie was happy with her life. She’d been born in the city, but when she was eight years old, her parents had moved out. Her father Patrick, whom she sometimes suspected was more interested in baseball than he was in being an insurance broker, always liked to say that after the Giants had departed the city for San Francisco, and the Dodgers for Los Angeles, he couldn’t think of a damn reason to stay there. But the truth was that her parents had been just one of hundreds of thousands of white, middle-class families who, in the fifties and sixties, had deserted the increasingly troubled streets of Manhattan for the peaceful suburbs.
It had worried her parents that her brother had gone to live in the city back in 1969. When she had started working for Branch & Cabell they had been even more concerned. They’d insisted on seeing her apartment before she rented it, and when she told them that she intended to jog around the reservoir in Central Park, which was only minutes from her door, they had made her promise never to do so alone or after dark.
“I’ll only jog when everyone else does,” she told them. And indeed, in the summer months when she went out at seven in the morning, there were dozens of people doing the same thing. “Jackie Onassis jogs round the reservoir, too,” she told her moth
er. Not that she’d ever seen Jackie Onassis, but she’d heard it was true, and she hoped it would help to reassure her.
This summer, there was another threat to worry them.
“I just wish the police would catch this terrible man,” her mother would say, whenever she telephoned. Maggie couldn’t blame her. The Son of Sam, as he called himself, had scared a lot of people in recent months, shooting young women, and sending strange letters to the police and a journalist, stating that he would strike again. His attacks had been in Queens and the Bronx so far, but reminding her mother of this fact had done no good. “How do you know he won’t strike in Manhattan next?” she had said, and of course Maggie hadn’t got an answer.
It had been stiflingly hot and close all day. It felt like the start of a serious heatwave. She had changed into a light cotton skirt and blouse, and she was looking forward to a long, cold drink.
Juan Campos stood on the sidewalk and stared across the great divide. He too had noticed the hot and muggy weather, and right now, he sensed a heavy, electric feel in the air. He expected the rumble of thunder at any time.
He looked toward Central Park. His girlfriend Janet lived on the West Side, on Eighty-sixth near Amsterdam. She was walking across the park to meet him.
An ambulance, siren moaning and horn blaring, came round the corner from Third Avenue and raced along the north side of the street toward Madison. This was nothing out of the ordinary. There were always ambulances making a noise on East Ninety-sixth Street, because the hospital was so nearby.
Juan was standing at the intersection of Ninety-sixth and Park. The apartment he’d recently moved into was the other side of Lexington Avenue, on the north side. He had a sublet for a year, and he had no idea whether he’d be there for longer. Nothing in his life so far had ever been certain, so he didn’t suppose it would be now. But at least one thing was consistent: he was still living on the north side of the great divide.
His street. Ninety-sixth Street. It was a cross street of course, like Eighty-sixth, and Seventy-second, Fifty-seventh, Forty-second, Thirty-fourth and Twenty-third. The traffic moved both ways. If each of these great streets had their particular characters, Ninety-sixth Street, in the year 1977, was something entirely different. It was the border between two worlds. Below Ninety-sixth Street lay the Upper East and Upper West sides. Above it was Harlem, where people like his friend Gorham Master didn’t go. But if most people from outside the city assumed that Harlem was nowadays all black, they would have been quite wrong. There were numerous other communities in Harlem, but the largest of these, by far, lay in the southern portion, above Ninety-sixth and east of Fifth.
El Barrio, Spanish Harlem. The home of the Puerto Ricans.
Juan Campos was Puerto Rican, and he’d lived in El Barrio all his life. When he was seven his father had died and his mother Maria had struggled hard, taking cleaning jobs mostly, to support her only child.
Life in El Barrio was tough, but the spirit of Maria Campos was strong. She was proud of her heritage. She loved to cook the rich, spicy mixture of Spanish, Taino and African dishes that was the Puerto Rican cuisine. Black bean soup, pollo con arroz, stews, mofongo and deep fries, coconut and plantain, okra and passion fruit—these were the staples of Juan’s diet. Sometimes Maria would go out, and dance to the beating drums of the bomba, or the lively guaracha. These were the few times that Juan ever saw his mother truly happy.
Above all, however, Maria Campos was possessed of a burning ambition. She knew that her own life was unlikely to change, but she could dream for her son, and her dreams were grand.
“Remember the great José Celso Barbosa,” she would tell him. Barbosa had been a poor Puerto Rican, with imperfect sight, who’d worked his way out of poverty, become the first Puerto Rican to gain an American medical degree, and ended his life as a hero and benefactor of his fellow countrymen. “You could be like him, Juan,” she’d told the little boy. Barbosa had been dead a long time, and Juan would have been the living hero, like Roberto Clemente the baseball star. But since he was small and short-sighted, Juan knew he couldn’t hope for that destiny. All the same, he did his best to follow his mother’s precepts—except in one respect.
“Stay away from your cousin Carlos,” she always told him. But Juan had soon figured out that if he wanted to survive on the mean streets of El Barrio, then the person he needed more than anyone else was his tall and handsome cousin Carlos.
Every street has its gang, and every gang its leader. Among the kids where Juan lived, Carlos’s word was law. If a boy wanted to rob a store, or sell drugs, or anything else, then he’d be a fool to try it without Juan’s permission. If anyone laid a finger on a kid under Carlos’s protection, they could expect a beating they’d never forget.
If Juan was small and didn’t see too well, God had given him talents to make up for these disadvantages. He was lively, he was naturally kind, and he was funny. It wasn’t long before Carlos had decided that his little cousin belonged under his wing. The gang adopted him as a kind of mascot. If Juan’s mother wanted him to study at school, that was okay. What else could a kid like that do? For the rest of his childhood, no one gave Juan any trouble.
And Maria did want Juan to study at school. She was passionate about it. “You want a better life, you get an education,” she told him, time and again. And maybe if Juan had been big and strong he wouldn’t have listened to her so much, but a little voice inside him seemed to tell him she was right. So though he played with the other kids in the street, he’d often pretend to be more tired than he was and go back indoors to study.
Juan and his mother lived in two dingy rooms on Lexington Avenue, near 116th street. Though there were Catholic schools, Juan, like most Puerto Ricans, went to the public school. There were several kinds of kid at his school, and depending who they were, one could usually predict where they lived. The black kids lived west of Park, the Puerto Ricans from Park to Pleasant, and the Italians, whose families had usually been in Harlem longest, from east of Pleasant. There were Jewish kids in that school too, and several of the teachers were Jewish.
Juan was very fortunate in his school, because if one chose to take advantage of it, the teaching there was good, and Juan was happy enough. He found that most of the work came to him easily, especially mathematics, for which he seemed to have a natural talent.
It didn’t take him long to make friends, and one of the kids he spent time with was a Jewish boy named Michael. And it was Michael who said to him one day, “When I get out of here, my parents hope I can get to Stuyvesant.” Juan didn’t know what Stuyvesant was, so Michael explained to him that the three best high schools in the city for the public-school kids were Hunter, Bronx Science and Stuyvesant down in the Financial District. The schools were free, Michael said, but the exams for entry were tough, and competition was high.
When Juan told his mother about Michael’s plans for high school, he didn’t think such information applied to him. So he was astonished, and rather embarrassed when, the very next day, Maria called at the school and asked one of the Jewish teachers how her son could get to such a place too.
The teacher had looked rather surprised, but a week later, he had taken Juan to one side and asked him a lot of questions about how he liked it at school, what subjects he enjoyed most, and what he hoped for in his future life. And since Juan wanted to please his mother, who worked so hard for him, he said that he really wanted to go to Stuyvesant.
The teacher had looked rather doubtful. At the time Juan had supposed that this was because his grades weren’t high enough, but later he realized that the teacher had been worried because Stuyvesant wasn’t known for taking black Puerto Ricans. “To have any hope,” the teacher told him, “you’ll have to get grades at least as good as your friend Michael.”
After that, Juan worked as hard as he could, and his grades were as good as Michael’s. He sensed also that some of the teachers were paying him a little extra attention, and sometimes they would be tough on h
im, or give him more work to do, but he figured they were trying to help him, so he didn’t complain. And in due course, when they took the exam, both he and Michael were accepted into Stuyvesant. He was excited, naturally, but when his mother got the news, she broke down and wept.
So Juan Campos had gone to Stuyvesant. Luckily his cousin Carlos decided to treat this strange circumstance as a kind of victory for the gang. Their mascot was going to get an education and maybe become a lawyer, or something like that, and learn how to beat the white people at their own dirty game. During their years at Stuyvesant, he and Michael would take the subway together every morning and evening. During the vacations, he worked at any job he could find, delivering food for pizza parlors or restaurants mostly, down in Carnegie Hill, where the tips were good, to help pay for his keep at home.
But in his last year at school, Juan’s life had changed.
“I suppose,” he told Gorham years later, “I was really a child until then.”
He’d come home one evening to find that his mother had had a fall and hurt her leg. The next day she hadn’t been able to go to work. For several days she’d been laid up, and Juan had looked after her each evening when he’d got back from school. She didn’t want to see a doctor, but finally the pain and swelling in her ankle got so bad that she agreed. And then the truth had come out.