Through the Children's Gate Read online

  Then I see him at the bottom, at the foot of an unexpected hill, looking back and waiting for me.

  We go down and out into the Great Lawn, where we find a raptor festival being held: hawks and falcons and eagles hooded in cages, tenderly lifted out by their keepers, who hold them on immensely thick gauntlets. The raptors have blank, indifferent killer eyes. (“Could you keep a hawk as a pet?” one New York child asks. “No,” the man with the birds says flatly.) He does let one small hawk free, though, just so we can see how it soars. The hawk flies toward the bank of trees on the east side of the lawn, and before he gets there, a thick, panicked gray cloud of pigeons rises from inside the trees and flies off, a single dense flock, back across the park to the west-side bank of trees. The hawk turns and then flies west, and the pigeons intelligently panic again and fly back, all together, the other way, a dingy gray flapping crowd across the blue sky, heading home. The keeper, nettled, calls back his bewildered raptor. I realize that I am rooting for the pigeons, real New Yorkers, dense, plain, panicky, and acting as a unit only when they have to, when there is a criminal nearby. They fly as New York children really ought to, all together, and only at need.

  Other ways to make the children fly race around by e-mail, are sought on the Internet, are whispered over egg-white omelettes (no toast, no potatoes or carbohydrates of any kind) at the coffee shops (not cafés, God knows, nor coffeehouses) near the school. Pull them up on harnesses or (I like this one) make mock children made of papier-mâché and rubber. Flick the lights off, flick them back on, and then fly these “children” from the wings. Who cares if they fall?

  “Why don't we just push them off a high place? They might fly,” someone said ironically. But for a half second, a nanosecond of possibility, the smile that went around the room was not a mordant one of knowledge but a happy one of promise: Our kids just might.

  While Martha is in charge of flight, I am still the defense counsel for noise, the Perry Mason of my own family, defending them with rancor, sarcasm, and evidence. In other American cities, I discover, no matter how hard I probe, noise stories are hard to find. (Instead, car stories—parking stories, carpooling stories, intense NPR-inflected debates about the ethics of SUVs—are everywhere.) But the moment I am back in Manhattan, I hear noise stories. They seem to have a set form. The herd of elephants, to begin with. “It sounds like a herd of elephants,” everyone says, though how could anyone in a New York apartment know what a herd of elephants sounds like one floor above?

  The rote forms, the familiar aggravation, must point to something, even if not to anything concrete. Is it noisier here than it is elsewhere? I listen on the street and think that, yes, it is noisy here, though I had never really noticed before. The situation can even be said to have improved somewhat, for everything has gone indoors, inside, been internalized. Once there were kids with boom boxes, declaring the strength of their shoulders and their indifference to middle-class opinion by hoisting huge radios to create insulating, almost visible clouds of defiant sound. Now everyone walks with headphones, merely ear-buds; when I walk around Manhattan with my old Walkman and large headphones on, I look, I'm sure, like an air traffic controller in a sixties disaster movie.

  The only noisy talkers are the people with those cell phones that slip around their necks, enabling them to talk directly, disconcertingly, to the air as they walk. You cannot know whether you are dealing with a schizophrenic, or a Realtor trying to talk sense into a disbelieving client, or a man trying to talk love to a disbelieving girl. Yet the background noise, like the incidental sweetness, is overwhelming: the rumble of buses, the constant whistles, a kind of white hush very different from that in other places. No hushed Sunday-morning moments when church bells ring from a distance.

  The noise is a symbol, I see now, and what it signifies is crowding, the this-cheek-to-that-cheek, on-top-of-one-anotherness that is the defining New York phenomenon. For that is the undeniable, the inevitable, the overwhelming fact of life here. Eight million people squeezed into a space that might accommodate a couple of aboriginal tribes, screaming about sound when what they are feeling is the press of density, more humanity per square inch than humanism can bear.

  A fight over noise is a displaced fight over space. You struggle so hard to claim a few hundred, a bare thousand, square feet that anything intruding—a take-out menu, a neighbor's piano—becomes an affront to your privacy, to your selfhood. The dancing overhead, the barking down below, however harmless, encroach on your dearly bought and long-fought-for solitude. We fight about noise as people in Venice might have fought—did fight—about water rights at the Palazzo. As we do, they blamed the malice of their neighbors for the fact of their circumstances. The annual flooding, the damp mold creeping into your basement, the certain fatality of wet; it all got referred to an argument with your neighbor about where he left his gondola.

  Even the building where we have been accommodated is enormous, dense with so many kinds. The building is a layer cake of the original inhabitants, who began as renters back in the sixties, were part of the original co-op, and now are the stunned (and imprisoned, really; where can they go?) inheritors of million-dollar apartments, schoolteachers and cookbook writers who contribute the odd recipe to the Wednesday Times and really believe in City Opera; true yuppies of the eighties generation, still in sneakers and skirts, upwardly mobile; single men in studios and lonesome Eleanor Rigbys who have occasional shouted telephone conversations with distant children, audible at seven o'clock in the morning and then again at the same time that night.

  There is an impossibly elegant older couple, a veteran television anchor and his perfect European wife, up in the penthouse, with vast views, and then there is Sally, our favorite neighbor, the writer who lives above us and comes down, like a character in an old radio comedy, every day around six as I cook dinner, to consult and crack wise. She in turn lives just below a strange woman who complains every day about a noise that the catlike and solitary and unmusical Sally is incapable of making. The family of Orthodox Jews lives down the hall, sweating on Saturdays; a solitary stockbroker lives alongside. As on some huge, improbable advent calendar, you could not open a door without finding a Type, and could not peel back the Type without finding something more. We live within spitting—within shouting—distance of all of these, and the miracle is that we manage, save for our neighbors below, with whom we war.

  The other night I had a dream that Sally and I walked from apartment to apartment searching for my door, looking for the children. Door after door, floor after floor, we knocked and buzzed: happy neighbors, sad neighbors, poor men, rich men, vast apartments and tiny sad studios … and then we realized, to Sally's satisfaction, to my growing and gnawing panic, that the building had no end. I had forgotten what floor we lived on, as one does in dreams, and that we were living not just in the Colossal Co-op but in the Infinite Apartment House; like the library of Babel in Borges, in which every possible book has been shelved, the dream version of our apartment building was one in which every possible interior decor, every possible neighbor, every possible New York life, existed. We would knock forever and see infinite numbers of coffee tables and couches, and I would never find my way home. I woke up bewildered and frightened and then listened for a minute to the sounds—the Today show in the next apartment, the skittering of the child above us getting ready for school—of the building waking up.

  Yet density has its gaieties, too. Halloween—this is our first real one in years, the Paris version being entirely ersatz—has become a Manhattan festival of neatly encoded exchanges of privileges. Downtown Halloween had kept some of its ancient charge of the pagan and the simply weird—“Why do we need another holiday celebrating how bizarre life can be here?” Martha had said plaintively, when still a girl with the snows of Canada in her hair—but uptown Halloween has become as American as Meet Me in St. Louis, with a fillip of class difference, which in New York is always property difference.

  It is beautiful: The child
ren walk up and down the streets and dart into the townhouses. Once there was something kind of sad about the parade of Halloween children we witnessed in the buildings of friends with kids, racing up and down in elevators to designated apartments; in our own building, you have to put a sign, a pumpkin, on the door to let people know that you are child-friendly. The new Halloween, though, is like the old Halloween of my Philadelphia childhood, outside and door-to-door, with a slight air of unspoken condescension to greet us.

  On the Upper West and Upper East sides, it is the wealthy in their townhouses on the side streets who really make the holiday. They decorate their beautiful reclaimed brownstones with dangling skeletons and witches’ silhouettes and reams of spray spiderweb. There are cut-paper pumpkins taped to the windows; there are real jack-o’-lanterns, each carved with a different style of grin, terraced on the flagstone staircases.

  We visit them in wonder, with a peasant's sense of privilege Just to Be Allowed. In the October dusk, the children walk up and down the avenues in their costumes, grim reapers and witches, and many of them still just ghosts. (The primal force of the sheet with two holes punched in it remains quite startling, stunning the way that the triangle and two circles of fabric on the mannequins in the lingerie store down the street are; that simple, that powerful.) There are store-bought costumes—Spider-Man and Wonder Woman, her lasso trailing behind her, her skintight unitard paired with a light but sensible coat—and then there are creative costumes made at home by the more poetically minded parents: Charlotte and Wilbur, a man without a head, a figure from Dante, one child made by a nimble-fingered mother to look like the Thinker. Luke, with some of the old-fashioned gold dust of Paris lingering in his eyes for just another month, decided to go as Zeus, with thunderbolts made of cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil. Olivia went as a witch, a baby witch, in peaked cap.

  My own childhood Halloweens still resonate. Apart from the artistic ambition of my mother—who would dress us as a Chinese dragon, as Poseidon and his court, and would have had us parade naked and painted blue, like Picts, if we could have won the neighborhood costume contest that way—Halloween had, I would insist, a significant air of ritual about it: We shouted, “Trick or treat!,” and the grown-ups oohed and ahhed at our costumes. Now, in New York, it is a much more jaded exchange of incidental sugar for deference. The children walk up the stairs to the houses for candy, but no one admires the children; the children admire the houses. Since the people in the town-houses are, as a rule, older, people who either bought early and smart or else graduated upward after selling the old apartment at some immense profit, there is also a generational exchange of display signs. No one even asks the kids the obvious question: “And who are you supposed to be?” Instead, we, the trick-or-treaters, are expected to ask the houses what they are supposed to be. “My goodness, you've done a beautiful job this year,” we say to the owners as they come to the door, carefully encouraging the kids, “Look at the skeletons up there; do you see how they hang on the sill? That ghoul in the window. It looks so scary!” (Why do the richest New Yorkers all live in sunless brown-stones, while so many who live in middle-sized buildings get some light?) Our possession of the children, of the burgeoning future and present, is real, but it is not the trump. We ve got the kids, we announce as we knock; yes, but we have the real estate, they say as they open the door. It is unanswerable. In other cities, they congratulate the children on their disguises; here, we congratulate the houses on their costumes.

  * * *

  The next morning, the march of the children to private schools is the same kind of Veblenian parade on the same streets, though this one happens every day. The Catholic schoolgirls wear uniforms that for some reason feature kneesocks with pleated skirts at Mary Quant length, which, on a gamine fourteen-year-old, look as though they were designed by Al Goldstein. A scene of absolute privilege, but anxious—privilege without a secure sense of entitlement on the part of the parents. Howells's great secret, his great discovery, registers here, too: New York knocks the comfortable down to the anxious, the anxious to the indigent, the indigent to the criminal, and only the truly rich find true comfort. Howells's line between Fifth Avenue and the rest still holds.

  Class distinction in New York is more complicated and subtle than any simple taxonomy of bourgeois and bohemian, or rich and middle-class and poor, can encompass. In New York, as Howells was the first to grasp, the professional classes are the middle classes; here, that great bulk of people between the extremes has more money but less security than its counterpart in the rest of the country. Professional people outside New York have always been, or believed themselves to be, essentially comfortable, so that F. Scott Fitzgerald and Booth Tarkington's midwesterners (hardly more than burghers, really) think of themselves as lords. The professional classes of Manhattan live as middle classes used to do, pushing themselves to send their children to school and afford their housing.

  Precarious privilege is the rule. Professional life here, then, acquires an unusual air both of entitlement and of embattlement. This affects politics; people with interests to protect expect to be challenged and demand the right to assert themselves, to hold guns and fear minorities, and they call it liberty. People on the bottom who expect to be sat upon value solidarity and protection, and they call it fairness. New Yorkers in the middle, however well-off they may actually be, feel as if they're being sat upon, or might be, by the rich or squeezed together by the poor and so abide laws—rent protection, equal housing—that they suspect might be in their interests, too, or that they feel might offer some protection from those nearby who really are being sat on.

  Once again, density is fate, and liberalism the organized wariness of the precariously well-off.

  Density has its own pattern of serendipity, its happy accidents. On one of the most beautiful mornings of this beautiful fall, Martha tells me, she was walking home, up the street, and saw, or thought she saw, Olivia at her usual spot, with me as I type, in the corner window, searching the streets for dogs and intimates. (Martha didn't have on her glasses.) She waved violently, extremely, to me. The figure in the window waved back, just as passionately, with all his heart—and Martha realized that she had miscounted floors, and the figure in the window was our downstairs neighbor, the one who writes letters about the noise. She had mistaken him for me, defender of her perfect children; he must have mistaken her for a friend or maybe his own good wife, coming home to endure the noisy neighbors.

  They waved, and then, as Martha approached and recognized the mistake and—reluctantly but almost inevitably, from necessity more than affability, from some semi-articulate Manhattan Zen impulse that says when you begin to wave, you must go right on waving until the other waver disappears from sight, from some semiconscious impulse of decency that rises from the decorum of density—they kept on waving to each other, the wave losing some of its enthusiasm, but only some, until Martha crossed the street and was out of view. It felt, Martha said, precariously happy, a bit like the Christmas truce in 1914 on the Western Front.

  On Thanksgiving morning, friends invited us to their apartment on Central Park West to watch the parade roll down the avenue. I sold it very big to Luke: the giant balloons, the highly trained rope holders—I exaggerated that expertise, I suspect—and the sheer scale of the thing. As he looked out the window, Luke seemed more bemused than impressed, crowding up against it with another ten kids. The balloons, I realized, are at once too big and too small—too big to be cute yet smaller than they promised you, smaller than you had hoped. The scale of Manhattan unscales everything else. The buildings are already so much bigger than you can imagine or understand that even a giant caped dog or a massive cartoon moose passes blithely in their shadows, just another event. I could sense Luke's polite disappointment. Even things they tell you really fly don't fly; they just float below the cornice line of the buildings. They don't attain the sky—just the fifth floor.

  A musical family, our hosts sit down to sing to the quickly bore
d children. Someone checks a watch, noting the morning hour. “Don't play the piano,” she says. “You know. The neighbors.” And the music stops.

  On an airplane over middle America, I sit down to read Peter Pan, which we saw once but I have never really read. Maybe, I think, I can find some secret flight formula buried in the Original Text. I read with pleasure, if not with illumination. Peter Pan, I see, is about escape, outward motion, the flight beyond to Neverland. For J. M. Barrie, the townhouse, very much like those we envy on Halloween, represented the thing to fly away from, the little prison of bourgeois bedtimes. It wasn't that Barrie didn't like the houses he knew; he tried to build one like the one in his book for the real boys who inspired the story. It was that he took the fifth-floor window for granted, as part of the bourgeois entitlement, even though there are no servants in this house, just the dog. (Reading Mary Poppins to the children, we were startled to discover that the embattled, harried Banks family has four full-time servants before the Divine Nanny even arrives.)

  But to us, the house in Peter Pan looks like an unobtainable idyll of domestic pleasure, a place to fly to, just as Cherry Tree Lane is the place you want your children to be, not the one you need the magic nanny to lead them out of. The Edwardian-Georgian London, which sits just before and just after the great warning disaster of liberalism, the Great War, nonetheless casts its spell as a place for children's books to come out of.

  There is an untieable knot at the heart of child raising: We want both a safe house with a garden and a nursery, and the world beyond, stars and redskins and even a plank to (harmlessly) walk. Unlike our great-grandmothers, we worry less about our children having the power to escape us—our children are more or less forced out in flight by the propulsions of commerce before they know how to walk—than we do about their having a window to fly out of. For the truth is that our own flights are inward; what is beguiling about Peter Pan now is the image of the children safe in the house in London. I see that it is what Martha and all the other mothers want for the children, with a passion so ferocious that it transcends all selfishness. They want the children to fly off and then to fly home.