Chapter 4 #2
‘They didn’t think they had to.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Look at the founding fathers, and what they were about.’ She shrugged.
‘How so?’
‘Portraits of them, the ones in the school hall. There’s one of Benjamin Franklin and I think he could just be someone I knew. A guy at school.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They weren’t grand old men. They threw everything out the window. Like now.’
He gave a short, scoffing, chuntering laugh. ‘How’s it like now?’
‘Don’t you see? They were young, they were hardscrabble, they fought. There’re no rules. Everyone’s in a fight for what you want, to change society, build it from the bottom up. That was what they were doing. That’s what people today are trying to do too.’
‘But what about those left behind?’ he said, his eyes boring into her, his cheeks reddening. ‘The normal hard-working American? Who doesn’t want the wholescale chaos and disruption these hippies and so forth threaten to bring with them? Huh? What about them?’
‘That’s interesting.’
‘How?’
‘Because two minutes ago you told me the Indians were in the same position and that they weren’t relevant to that period of history,’ said Alice.
‘Ah!’ He sat back in his chair, fingertips pressed together, watching her. ‘Yes. Very good.’
A bird called outside on the water. Inside, the room was warm, and light, and very still, no fresh air at all, as if everything else was sealed off.
‘You mean a re-examination of the way we’ve sanctified the American Story.’ He was writing it down. ‘I think you’re right. Yes, Alice. Very good. Have another Turkish Delight.’
She shook her head. From outside, she could hear the shouts that were always in the background, pricking her bubble. ‘ Ravenoose! Ravenoose! Ravenoose! ’
‘You were asking about kids dropping out. Another girl left school this week. Her name is Mary-Jane McCarthy, and she went to New York. Her mom and dad went after her, to try to get her to come back, but she’s joined the Hare Krishnas, I guess, and she says she’s going on to California and never coming back. ’
Sometimes she got the distinct feeling that what she told Wilder did not so much inspire and educate him as alarm him. ‘Good lord. “Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” Do you know who said that?’
‘No,’ said Alice, annoyed that she wanted to know.
‘Cicero. Two thousand years ago.’ He carried on writing, furiously. She watched him, coolly. He was like a spider, hunched and scuttling and secretive.
‘Right,’ she said, picking up a pencil and starting to doodle on a blank sheet of paper: the stars and stripes of the flag, with little snails, ants and coiled snakes instead of stars.
After a few moments, Wilder Kynaston rose from his chair and took the sheet from her.
‘Thank you,’ he said, his hand resting on hers for a moment.
‘It’s getting late; I have to get back. My mother and I are going to the city tomorrow morning. Can I go now, Mr Kynaston?’
But she didn’t want to get back to her mother; she never wanted to go home. She wanted to check in on Teddy.
‘Yes,’ he said, looking down at his notes. ‘I have enough for today. Goodbye. Enjoy your time in the city, Alice.’
On the way out she paused, looking for Teddy, but there was no sign of her. Sometimes Alice was too late, and she had gone upstairs. Today was one of those days.
It was the first time Alice had been in New York City for years.
Her dad used to take her to Yankee Stadium.
They’d get a corn dog and sit in the bleachers, he drinking beer and reading the paper in between yelling out for Mickey Mantle while Alice read her book, in between yelling out for Mickey Mantle.
What struck her after several years away was the scale of the place, the Chrysler and the Empire State buildings glinting like blades in the afternoon sun as the train glided over the roofs through the city.
The majesty of Grand Central Station, the cream-white stone halls and the gold zodiac drawings high up on the turquoise-green ceiling, which she had entirely forgotten about. Like the roof of heaven.
They came out into Midtown and her mother looked around briefly. ‘This way, honey. Come now, Alice, keep up.’
The streets smelled of cigarettes, of sweet burned nuts, of metallic warmth.
The sun between buildings flashed and disappeared again, like beams from a lighthouse.
Alice trotted after her mother, running a little when the lights flashed WALK .
The avenues were so wide it seemed they’d never cross in time and would be mown down by the endless yellow taxis, honking at them.
Adrenaline surged within her; it was like opening the window and breathing fresh air.
Yet the city was crowded, something crackling in the atmosphere.
Outside a building on Fifth Avenue a group of young people in plaid shirts and rolled-up jeans and sneakers were holding placards and walking in circles, intoning monotonously: Stop the war.
Stop the war. Stop the war. There were homeless people under awnings being moved on by cops with truncheons; more young people just drifting around, seemingly with no place to go; and, peppered among them all, office workers walking briskly past from lunch, in another world.
‘Come on, Alice.’ Her mother was someone different in the city, smart and collected.
She wore her navy bouclé dress, court heels and a new neat little jacket she’d suddenly bought earlier in the year, slightly to Alice’s surprise, though she had never mentioned it.
She walked faster, her eyes darting around, a muscle ticking in the side of her mouth.
Sirens seemed to follow them wherever they went, the wails slicing into Alice each time, but her mother didn’t appear to notice.
She nodded at the pretzel guy by the subway entrance, shook her finger in censorious fashion at a jaywalker as they were crossing Fifth Avenue and stopped a guy to ask for directions two blocks from Macy’s – this was her mother, who refused to walk into Orchard to get a quart of milk these days.
‘How long did you live here, Mom?’
‘Three years? Look at that jacket, Alice, isn’t it darling?
Yes, three years, right up until the day I got married.
Over there, you see? That street, leading off the square?
That’s Broadway, and it takes you up to Times Square and the park and I lived on the Upper West Side, oh, it was fun.
’ Her mother looked up and clasped her hands together.
‘Four girls; one apartment; our neighbour was an actor on Broadway; our other neighbour, he was a dear man, an antiques dealer who lived with his friend, such a nice man too. This was after the war, and I was at Brooks Brothers, and that’s when I met your father. ’
‘Tell me the story again.’
‘Oh, Alice – mind that manhole, honey. You’ve heard it so often before. He came in to buy a shirt; he tried to buy one with sleeves that were far too long, and I had him try on the right size, and he came out of the changing room and adjusted the cuffs and then he said –’
And they chorused together, ‘ I’ll wear this shirt when I take you dancing .’
‘And I said, “When will that be?” and he said –’
‘ On our third date .’
‘And he did,’ she finished, and then there was an empty silence even in the roar of the city, and Alice looked down, down at the steam rising from the subway, from the depths of the earth.
Something made her look up – perhaps the light falling differently on the ground – and she saw a vast hole in the grid of the block.
‘Wait, Mom.’
‘Alice, we have to get to Macy’s –’
‘Look, though, Mom. It’s the old Penn Station,’ Alice said. ‘It was Dad’s favourite building. Mom? Don’t you remember?’
Her father had taken her to see the great Beaux-Arts Pennsylvania Station before they began the laborious, hateful work of tearing it down.
It had been an entire block between Seventh Avenue and Eighth; a Classical temple with colonnades of columns wrapped around it, wide granite portico entrances that made the passenger feel as though they were participating in a great human project, that they were worthy of the place.
Huge, graceful caryatids, gods and eagles, built for eternity, not to be torn down less than a century later, stood atop the roofs; she remembered walking through the cool beautiful interior, bigger than any palace, one of the final days it was open.
‘Look, Allie. Look at it. This is the last of old New York,’ he’d said, and she’d stood up and stared at the vast exterior leading to the concourse, far more opulent than Grand Central, the station she had thought the most beautiful place in the world till that moment.
‘They thought we were worth all this, you see,’ he’d said.
She remembered it so well. Her small hand in his large one, as the trucks rolled by, wafting the city heat in her face.
Her father had bought her a doughnut from a vendor by the subway station – the smell of it, dough and sugar, the grease on her fingers.
Betsy Jansen had put her foot down when Alice told her, or rather half mumbled to her, that she was going to the prom – which, of course, Betsy was delighted about – with Frank Logan, a deeply serious young man from a good family, which Betsy was even more delighted about.
Frank Logan said things like ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘Golly gosh’ and wore a jacket with leather elbow patches.
He had stopped Alice at school a couple of weeks earlier and asked her to make sure she was ‘dressed like a lady’.
‘So many girls these days don’t keep themselves looking fresh and pretty,’ he’d said, wiping his hands with a pressed cotton square from his blazer pocket, looking darkly at Dolores, standing like a guard dog next to Alice, glowering at him, chewing her gum.