Through the Children's Gate Read online

  But Luke has become a Yankees fan, too, and, further sign of the strange times, I have not done anything to stop him. People like the Yankees now in a way they didn't only a year ago, and though people like to say it has to do with the players, I am beginning to suspect that the real reason for this affection has more to do with the queer doubleness of New York's symbols right now, and a general inversion of sympathies, than with the Yankees themselves.

  What the new love for the Yankees really meant, in fact, only began to become clear for me when Luke started rooting for them. It was just after they had gone down two games to the Oakland A's in the “division championship,” a new concept to me after six years away. I will confess that, even then, well into the New Era, I was not much inclined to root for the Yankees. Not even terrorism, I thought, could make me pull for George Steinbrenner (If you let them make you root for the Yankees, then they've won).

  I hate the Yankees, even after so many years here, for the reasons that decent people have always hated the Yankees—not because they win (nobody hates the Celtics or my beloved Canadiens) but for their smugness while they do it. Since my return to New York, I had been assured by my friends that these new four-time-champion Yankees were improved, decent Yankees, a better kind of Yankees than the old ones, full of class and poise and team spirit and good manners, a kind of reformed or Protestant Yankees—what a diplomat might even call “moderate Yankees.” I knew better; there are no moderate Yankees. There was still enough old Yankees stuff clinging to them—they still played Sinatra singing the only vulgar record that great man ever made, and Steinbrenner, though often invisible, like Dick Cheney, was still there—to keep me from liking them better than decent people ever had. Hating the Yankees had never been forbidden to someone who loved New York; just the opposite, really. Yankees loving was one more optional activity, like clubbing or insider trading. It was available, not compulsory.

  Luke, though, fell hard. Chess and the Yankees became his two obsessions, and what touched and intrigued me was that he fell hard exactly when and exactly because they were losing. I had always made an exception among Yankees fans for local kids who became fans without, so to speak, knowing any better—who became fans because this was what they believed a home team looked like. Not having the Expos or Royals or Phillies or some real home team to root for—a real home team loses every year, except once—I understood that they had to make do with what was around. (I assumed they hadn't chosen to root for the Mets out of some mistake or wrong turn or subway confusion, borough solidarity by other means.)

  We idly watched those first couple of Oakland games together and saw them go down, and Luke asked, “Is it finished?” “No,” I said, “it isn't finished—they still have a chance, but they don't have much of a chance. They're as good as finished. They're done.” “Oh,” he said, and then, more quietly, “I'm sorry they've lost.” He was just discovering baseball and, of course, just discovering loss. For years I told Luke a bedtime story about baseball—a story about a six-year-old pitcher for the old Giants—but I don't think he entirely connects the rather rule-bound sport he sees on television with the game we used to tell stories about. We went out with Jacob to see a game this summer—a Mets game—and they had a good time, but I think they mostly had a good hot-dog-and-Dixie-cup time, with the ball game around as mere atmosphere, snacks being to baseball games for seven-year-old boys what sex is to movies for sixteen-year-old boys: the real activity for which the ostensible activity is just the wraparound excuse.

  Then, together, we watched the Yankees come back, out there in California—a neat pitching performance, and then Jeter's Play, the fabulous backhanded flip for the key out. Luke rooted like crazy, and I found myself rooting, too. I saw that in the midst of so much emotional confusion at home and at school—mostly inarticulate and veiled but evident all the same—what he was seeing was not one more Yankees October but something better and more personal: the underdog coming back against the odds, the defeated and the depressed getting back up. The Yankees were like the firemen; when all hope was lost, they came through. You're never finished. It's not over till it's over, and even when the grown-ups says it's over, it isn't, not really. We can always come back. Losing is for unbelievers.

  This was not entirely wrong, of course—resilience is one of the lessons we want kids to take from sports—but I also saw that it was misleading, even a little dangerous. We don't get up off the mat, not always; the firemen, limitlessly courageous, were also limitedly effective. Yet rooting for the Yankees is, for Luke—and, I'm told, for lots of other New York kids who have developed a similar affection in recent weeks—one more way of turning a frightening, half-understood moment into a reassuring one. With the doggedness of youth, they have made up a positive story of their own out of whatever they could find lying around—firemen and rescue workers and Derek Jeter—and have chosen to trust in that.

  Luke came home the other day and excitedly proposed that we build, in the empty space at the World Trade Center, a new statue: a colossal statue of a Fireman saluting the Lady in the Harbor, a Statue of Bravery to join the Statue of Liberty. I told him it sounded like a fine idea.

  This confusion of powerful and powerless (or at least of what we perceive as one or the other) became a general rock-solid proposition for me right around the time the Yankees were beating the Mariners. At a cocktail party, I mouthed off about how shocked I was to find, in my walks around the city, that while working New Yorkers were full of hope—basically feeling that they could take anything as long as they were still around to take it—the elite was panicky, hoarding Cipro and heading out of town. A property tycoon (another Canadian émigré, in fact) who happened to overhear me said pretty gently that he would like to take me on a walk around midtown, and the next day we went. It was a cold, crisp fall day, and as we looked at all the great glass skyscrapers of Park Avenue—the Seagram Building and Lever House and the Citicorp Center—he unraveled for me the complicated secrets of their financing and construction: how this one depended on a federal bond, and this one on a legendary thirteen-year lease with a balloon payment, and this one on the unreal (and unprofitable) munificence of a single liquor baron and his daughter, and why each of these formulae, which were the real story behind the glass and steel, could not be duplicated right now.

  A wind blew, and he wrapped his scarf tighter around his throat. In his eyes, above his fine Aquascutum raincoat and Charvet tie, as he stared up at the glass towers, there was not arrogance but a pleading, worried neediness. A kind of lost love. “I'd build if I could,” he said longingly. “I'd love to build. Just show me how to do it.” I mimicked his stare, craning my neck, and suddenly, the glass towers, which for all my life, and theirs, had looked phallic and complacent, now looked vulnerable—as though, coy and nymphlike, they wanted to cover themselves and had been robbed of arms with which to do it.

  “I'd build if I could,” he repeated.

  I asked him, sadly, if New York was doomed, and he cheered right up. “Oh, no,” he said, his voice again full of quick, gravelly expertise, “not at all.” The key long-term demographic fact about the city, he said, lay in the practice of delayed marriage. As long as people were having their first children at thirty-four rather than twenty-four, the city would thrive even in the face of fire and fear and anthrax.

  “This is because,” he went on, “you can ask thirty-year-olds with children to move to New Jersey, but you can't ask a single thirty-year-old to move out there before he or she has found a mate. He or she would basically rather die. I mean it; a twenty-five-year-old without a mate and with no children would rather face anthrax and terrorists and smallpox than leave the city and take his chance to get laid in the suburbs. He'll go somewhere else and find another job … and meanwhile, he's eating in restaurants and buying co-ops, and they're young and fearless, so they're moving into dangerous neighborhoods.” He shrugged. “That's the great secret, the key demographic of New York. Kids at twenty-five, cities die; kids at thir
ty-five, cities thrive. It's just that simple.” Everything good that had happened to restore the city, it seemed, rested on that small demographic, that ten-year delay. People in their twenties would rather risk being killed by anthrax or bombs than give up searching for a mate while practice-mating along the way.

  This is the rock on which New York has built twenty years of prosperity, and on which it must still build. Sex is not only in the city; from a real estate tycoon's point of view, it is the city, all the city's hope. As long as people seek out mates for fifteen years instead of fifteen months, they will need New York.

  “So you're an optimist,” I said. “So in the long run, New York is fine?”

  “No, I'm not an optimist. I'm a—You know that thing of Keynes, how, in the long run, we're all dead? Well, here in New York, in the short run, we're all dead, and we have been for years. But in the long run, we're all fine somehow. Though don't ask me how, or when, or why. And that's always been true, decade after decade. I don't see how we 're going to get out of this. But in the long run, we 're all fine as long as we 're having sex, if you know what I mean. As long as people look for sex for ten years before they start having children, the city will manage. If that changes, we've seen the last tower in our time. But I don't think it will.” Don't worry, he was saying,you just have to trust me.

  We went on into the Mariners series, on frigid fall nights not made for baseball. For Luke and his friends, the Yankees were the Mets—no, the Yankees were the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Yankees were the Senators of Damn Yankees, the Yankees were my Expos. Where, for almost seventy-five years, to be a Yankee fan was to identify with power, now, suddenly, it was to identify with powerlessness—or rather, seeming powerlessness suddenly empowered: They were down, but they were not out. It was exactly the same feeling I had when I looked up at the skyscrapers and imagined them cowering.

  This transformation in perception—the powerful into the powerless, the powerless into the powerful—has great resonance here because New York, pretty much alone among great cities, has always been a two-speed city, one city of power, one city of soul, and all of us racing back and forth between them. That New York has always had two baseball clubs, one clearly marked underdog and one just as clearly marked overdog, is part of that division. The Yankees and the Giants, then the Yankees and the Dodgers, then the Yankees and the Mets—even when the Mets were an overdog back in the eighties, they still made like an underdog. New York is not a Goliath that has become a David; it is a city that combines David and Goliath, and that doubleness is one of the things that draws us to New York. We come here not just or even primarily because we are drawn to power—King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, as they sing at Yankee Stadium—but also because we are intrigued by powerlessness. We come to the city of the overdog in order to have the thrill of feeling like an underdog. Yankee hating, in this way, is an expression of a certain kind of New York loving, a certain kind of New York pride—it is a way of declaring yourself apart from power. When the towers fell and the city wept, many of us thought, in an instant, that it would be the second, David city that we would need to support and cherish.

  Now it seems that it was the power city, the symbolic power city, that was wounded and needed to be nursed. It is not so much that the Yankees have become lovable as that the Yankees have become the Mets, just as the Empire State Building has become the Washington Square Mews: an endangered urban artifact that we cherish and protect. The midtown skyscrapers look like naked women, and the Yankees look like hometown boys.

  Last Sunday, Luke played in a chess tournament, won only two games (out of four; he usually nails three), and still got a trophy, a big deal with gilt. I was puzzled—it usually takes three games for him to win a trophy—but what the hell. He looked puzzled, too, and put it down to having had to play with black in his last game (it's harder, apparently, because white goes first).

  We walked the five blocks home, Luke clutching the enormous trophy in his hand, at first humming and then pausing. I turned it over in my head as we walked, coming eventually to a sense that there must have been a mistake, and decided that we ought to turn back and find out. He was silent, thinking hard. We walked another block, and I decided I was going to turn him back by the time we got to Ninetieth Street.

  But it didn't take that long. At the corner of Ninety-second, he stopped. “Let's go back and talk to them. I'll do the talking.” We marched back, and he said to the organizer, simply, “I think there may have been a mistake.” It turned out that there had been a scoring mistake, and the trophy belonged rightly to another, slightly younger child. We got the boy's number and walked his prize over to his apartment building, which, fortunately, wasn't far away, just up on Ninety-sixth.

  When the boy opened his door, Luke said, “I think this is yours,” and took the other, smaller trophy in exchange. Then they played together for hours. The younger boy had a chess computer that he practiced on, and, sweetly, with a tribal sense of obligation, he insisted on loaning it to Luke for a couple of weeks in exchange for the trophy. It was a beautiful thing, and at dinner that night I made a toast to Luke, saying that for me, of all the trophies he would ever win, the best would always be the trophy he took back.

  But we discussed it again the next day, and I asked him, quietly enough, what he thought the Moral of the Incident was—honesty is the best policy, we always feel better when we play fair, etc. He said, ironically but honestly, “To win three games.” And I realized that he was being just as honest at that moment as he had been when he'd taken back the trophy.

  Virtue is not its own reward; virtue is its own punishment. You have to give back the trophy and get a smaller one. Doing the right thing has real costs, and you do it, essentially, not because of the way it feels inside at that moment—at that moment you want the trophy—but because of the way it will feel inside later, when your friends find out. That was what he had been considering as we walked those blocks. Conscience is not the still, small voice in the soul; it is the name we give to the anticipated opinion of our friends, and the pleasure of having the fruits of the unfair advantage isn't worth the shame of having an unfair advantage. Desire takes place in the trophy room; conscience happens on the street. I now know that it takes about ten minutes, and three New York City blocks, to make itself felt in the mind of a bright, good-natured, competitive seven-year-old.

  I recalled that poem by Philip Larkin, the one that begins “None of the books have time / To say how being selfless feels, / They make it sound a superior way / Of getting what you want” and then goes on to say that selflessness is really like wearing a badly fitted suit on a damp morning, or something equally British and uncomfortable. Luke has won a lot—the respect of the tournament masters, the friendship of a nice kid, and a computer chess game, for two weeks, anyway. He has also learned that moral decisions are a form of tactics: seeing four forced moves ahead in the game of life. But he lost the trophy, and he really wanted it. Now he will have to go out and get it honestly.

  A few days later, after we saw the Yankees wallop the Mariners in the fifth game, I had to explain to Luke, who was celebrating, that this was not the end—that though the Bronx Bombers (“Why are they called the Bronx Bombers? ” suddenly anxious. “It's good. Trust me,” I replied) had won the Championship Series, they would now have to move on to the World Series, the really big one.

  He paused and took a deep, dramatic, heaving breath. “Tell me true things,” he said, which is what he says when he really wants the truth from his father—on oath, no teasing. “Tell me true things,” deep breath again, then, in a strangled voice, “Have the New York Yankees ever won the World Series?”

  He was in real doubt, and I recognized in his voice exactly the same tone he uses to ask me if he can stay up until ten o'clock to watch Dexter's Laboratory. He knows he's asking too much of life but, oh well, what's life worth if you don't ask?

  I paused. This seemed like as big a moment as we could ever have. I was in possession of crucial k
nowledge about a subject he had come to consider close to his heart, and I was almost afraid of giving it away too casually, without sufficient buildup or a sense of momentousness. It seemed like the sort of thing you at least sat down to say. (“You see, Luke, the team you've chosen to support—well, they're a very special team, in a way. Most teams, it's normal for them to lose. A lot. But your team …”) Yet to tell him flatly that the Yankees always won was to make him an accessory to power, and what I found beautiful about his attachment was that it was rooted in a feeling of doubt, of powerlessness, of soulfulness. He had been a Yankees rooter for two weeks, five games, at the worst time in the city's history, and to reassure him that he had actually made a good bet on a big-market team would undermine the meaning of his allegiance. It seemed somehow that the better, emotionally apt, appropriate answer was “No, they never have. But you know—they just might this year.”