Through the Children's Gate Read online

  The transformation of the city, and particularly the end of the constant shaping presence of violent crime, has been amazing, past all prediction, despite the facts that the transformation is not entirely complete and the new city is not entirely pleasing to everyone. Twenty some years ago, it was taken for granted that New York was hell, as Stanley Kauffmann wrote flatly in a review of Ralph Bakshi's now oddly forgotten New York cartoon-dystopia Heavy Traffic, and every movie showed it that way, with the steam rising from the manholes to gratify the nostrils of the psychos, as if all the infernal circles, one through thirty, inclusive, were right below. E. B. White was asked to update his famous essay about the city, and that unweepy man, barely able to clear the bitter tears from his prose, declined to write about a city he no longer knew. In the seventies, Robert Caro's life of Robert Moses, blankly subtitled “And the Fall of New York,” was the standard version of What Had Happened.

  Everyone has a moment of personal marvel about how far things have gone or changed: Twenty-three years ago, I recall, they were toting bodies out of the Film Center on Ninth Avenue, and (nice lost word) the degenerates were brooding on it at the Film Center Café. Now the Film Center shines and the café across the street serves mussels and croissant sandwiches, having kept its Art Moderne front, so “period,” if nothing else. The scale of this miracle—and for anyone who remembers the mood of the city in the early seventies, miracle it is—leads inevitably to a rebound of complaint. It Is Not So Miraculous At All. Or: You call that a miracle? The cross-dressers in the Village sniff at the influx of nuclear families as the fleeing nuclear families once sniffed at the cross-dressers. Some of the complaining is offered in a tone of intelligent, disinterested urban commentary: The service and financial and media industries, they say, are too unstable a base for a big city to live and grow on (though, historically speaking, no one seems able to explain why these industries are any more perilous than the paper-box or ladies’ lingerie industries of forgotten days).

  Most of the beefs are aesthetic and offered in a tone of querulous nostalgia: What happened to all that ugliness, all that interesting despair, all that violence and seediness, the cabdrivers in their undershirts and the charming hookers in their heels? This is standard-issue human perversity. After they gentrify hell, the damned will complain that life was much more fun when everyone was running in circles: Say what you will about the devil, at least he wasn't antiseptic. We didn't come to hell for the croissants. But the lament has a subtler and more poignant side, too. All of us, right and left, make the new Times Square a butt of jokes—how sickening it still is to be forced to gaze at so much sleaze and human waste, to watch the sheer degradation of people forced to strut their wares in lust-inducing costumes before lip-licking onlookers, until at last The Lion King is over and you can flee the theater. These jokes are compulsive and irresistible because they speak to our embarrassment about our own relief, and to a certain disappointment, too. Safety and civic order are not sublime; these are awfully high rents to be paying to live, so to speak, in Minneapolis.

  Still, croissants and crime are not lifestyle choices, to be taken according to taste; the reduction of fear, as anyone who has spent time in Harlem can attest, is a grace as large as any imaginable. To revise Chesterton slightly: People who refuse to be sentimental about the normal things don't end up being sentimental about nothing; they end up being sentimental about anything, shedding tears over old muggings and the perfect, glittering shards of the little crack vials, sparkling like diamonds in the gutter. Où sont les neiges d'antan?: Who cares if the snows were all of cocaine? We saw them falling and our hearts were glad.

  The more serious argument is that the transformation is Parisian in the wrong way: the old bits of the city are taken over by the rich (or by yuppies, which somehow has a worse ring) while the poor and the unwashed are crowded right off the island. By a “city,” after all, we mean more than an urban amusement park; we mean a collection of classes, trades, purposes, and functions that become a whole, giving us something more than rich people in their co-ops and condos staring at other rich people in their co-ops and condos. Those who make this argument see not a transformation but an ethnic cleansing, an expulsion of the wrong sort. Still, it is hard to compare the Mad Max blackout of ’77 with the Romper Room blackout of ’03 and insist that something has gone so terribly wrong with the city. No one can credibly infer a decline, which leads us back to the Times Square Disneyfication jokes. And toward remaking the old romance.

  It is a strange thing to be the serpent in one's own garden, the snake in one's own grass. The suburbanization of New York is a fact, and a worrying one, and everyone has moments of real disappointment and distraction. The Soho where we came of age, with its organic intertwinings of art and food, commerce and cutting edge, is unrecognizable to us now—but then that Soho we knew was unrecognizable to its first émigrés, who by then had moved on to Tribeca. This is only to say that in the larger, inevitable human accounting of New York, there are gains and losses, a zero sum of urbanism: The great gain of civility and peace is offset by a loss of creative kinds of vitality and variety. (There are new horizons of Bohemia in Brooklyn and beyond, of course, but Brooklyn has its bards already, to sing its streets and smoke, as they will and do. My heart lies with the old island of small homes and big buildings, the sounds coming from one resonating against the sounding board of the other.)

  But those losses are inevitably specific. There is always a new New York coming into being as the old one disappears. And that city—or cities; there are a lot of different ones on the same map—has its peculiar pleasures and absurdities as keen as any other's. The one I awakened to, and into—partly by intellectual affinity, and much more by the ringing of an alarm clock every morning at seven—was the civilization of childhood in New York. The phrase is owed to Iona Opie, the great scholar of children's games and rhymes, whom I got to interview once. “Childhood is a civilization with its own rules and rituals,” she told me, charmingly but flatly, long before I had children of my own. “Children never refer to each other as children. They call themselves, rightly, people, and tell you what it is that people like them—their people—believe and do.” The Children's Gate exists; you really can go through it.

  But why such a fuss about children in New York, or anywhere? I hear some level head (not you, reader) sigh. Cant we simply accept childhood, really, as children do, as just a preface to personhood? If love of one's children is a natural emotion—Dr. Johnson thought not, but Mrs. Thrale, quite rightly, I'd say, told him he was full of it—to love one's children nearly to the exclusion of, or at least above, all else, is a different thing, at least for a man. An obsessive love of our children is proof that we are unhappy about something else, Queen Marie of Rumania once said—and who am I, are we, to argue with Queen Marie of Rumania?

  Struggling to reflect on a subject about which I cannot help but obsess—my heart lifts when they wake up and falls a little when they go to school, and I feel myself possessed by the kind of compulsive all-day mindfulness once the exclusive province of mothers—I see that this is a product, a “construction,” of one particular period, a paternal archetype no less historical than the distant father who left nursing to the nursery even if the magnitude of the love he felt was no less or greater than we may feel. Kenneth Clark kept his children in an entirely separate house on his property; they were led in to say good evening just before the grown-ups sat down to dinner, and then they were dismissed again. Yet in his autobiography, Clark writes that nothing in his life had given him as much joy as his kids, and I don't doubt that, on his own terms, he was telling the truth.

  The new paternal feeling is partly an effect of feminism, which required that mothers surrender exclusive child-love for freedom, and partly the consequence of many parents’ advanced childbearing age. The father is no longer a kid on the make but a man who has, to some brief degree, been made, and who therefore has more time to cook dinner and wipe noses than his own father di
d. And the self-consciousness that now comes with child rearing comes from that, too. My own dad—father of six, grandfather of fourteen—said once that the greatest difference in life is between having children at (so to speak) twenty and having them at (so to speak) forty: When we're twenty, they are just there, smaller fellow climbers on the same mountain; at forty, we have been up the mountain once already, and we become their Sherpas, carrying their equipment, checking their oxygen supply, hoisting them up to the peak and telling them they did it all themselves, just as generations of Sherpas did for generations of Englishmen. The new love of childhood and parenting is also the consequence of a kind of boot-strapping into “adulthood.” For those of us who lingered in boyishness, child rearing and child-love, far from being regressive, are part of the forced march to maturity: You have to do a thing, and here is a thing you have to do.

  Whatever the origins—and I leave it to some meatier-minded cultural historian to trace them all—what child rearing is, when you live it, is a joy. It should be seen as we really do feel it—less as a responsibility imposed than as a great gift delivered up to us, just as the troubador poets opened up romantic love for everyone, so that it can still serve Lorenz Hart or Paul McCartney.

  Children reconnect us to romance. For children, as my sister Alison, the developmental psychologist who makes sapient, recurring appearances in these tales, has written, every morning is the first morning in Paris, every day is the first day of love: The passions that for us grown-ups rise and fall only in exceptional circumstances, unexpected storms on the dull normal beach where the tide breaks unchangingly, rise every day for them. Shock, hatred, infatuation: “I hate you,” they cry, slamming the door, and they mean it; and then the door opens fifteen minutes later for dessert. They compel us to see the world as an unusual place again. Sharing a life with them is sharing a life with lovers, explorers, scientists, pirates, poets. It makes for interesting mornings.

  And then they are not here to do better, or to be smarter, or to get ready: They are here to be, and they know it. We delight in children because they keep the seven notes of enlightenment, as the Buddha noted them. Keep them? They sing them, they are them: energy, joy, concentration, attentiveness, mindfulness, curiosity, equanimity. (Well, not the last, maybe, but they still keep it better than we do; they are often in pain but rarely in panic.) Detachment, too—they are detached from us in ways that we know only after; they study us exactly as monks contemplate the world, to free themselves from needing us. Their ultimate enlightenment lies in that emancipation. What we didn't grasp before is how badly the world feels about being abandoned by the monks. As parents we are, briefly, objects of intellectual desire; we are, for a moment, worlds. We should be proud to have been as large as worlds, but instead, we are merely sad to be abandoned. The risk of sentimentality lies only in failing to see that the most charmed thing they will do is leave us. They have to renounce their attachment to us as the adept abandons his attachment to the world. All we can hope for is the pleasure the world takes in once having been seductive enough to attach somebody to it. All we can expect from children is the memory the monk has of the time he was attached. We can hope for their pity, and their tolerance, and a spring visit after we have been banished to Florida and white shorts and socks.

  There's no bad place to watch children grow, but Manhattan is a good one. The intersection of two very small points with one very big place, the constant daily back-and-forth between small emerging consciousness and huge indifferent stuff, is always instructive. Having them, you get a much clearer sense of the city's sharp edges and smooth spots, of the grace it gives to things—the literature of epiphanies received at the Museum of Natural History by now is larger than that of miracles found at Lourdes—and of the grace it denies, as well, of its overwhelmingness. When you get on the subway together at five o'clock, you have to hold them tight, as if you were white-water rafting and they might fall into the river; they could just get swept away by the crowd. They show you quiet places—my son, Luke, once gave me a back massage on Father's Day in a little glade in the park that time and man had forgotten—and they get you to take them to noisy ones you had sworn off for good. My daughter, Olivia, and I go every year at Christmas to Tiffany to window-shop and gape at the giant diamonds, and the sheer press of tourists seems for once like a benediction, not a curse.

  Your children make their own maps, which enlarge and improve your own. They inscribe permanent illustrative features on your map, like the spouting beasts on medieval ones. There's a spot on University Place where Olivia, furious at being too small to go bowling at Bowlmor Lanes nearby, yelled at me, “I used to love you! And now I don't even like you!” When I pass it now, she is still there, still indignant and still yelling. And if their maps are mutable, well, you believe, every child's map is meant to be, only to emerge in adulthood as the Only Map There Is, the one they're stuck with. The image of me they settle on, I would shudder to see—but I hope their map of New York will be bright and plain: That's where we grew up, weirdly enough. My two, I hardly need add, though distinct enough for me, here in these pages stand in for, if not a million, than many others: They could be Jacob and Sasha, or Ben and Sophie, or Emma and Gabriel. The miraculous thing about children is that they really are all alike—boom, here comes three and an imaginary friend; whoosh, there goes eleven and the first stirrings of passion—and all utterly unique. They are radically themselves and entirely of their kind. Just like us, actually. The city doesn't change that, but it does italicize it: among eight million souls, these two.

  For us, at least, these five years, the children's sober buoyancy bounced us through the gate and into the park even in the darkest times. It might have done so in any circumstances, but it really did so then. I ended the story of the five years we lived in Paris with the birth of a baby—on, as it happened, September 11,1999, the happy end of a rich decade spent under a Pax Americana as vast and essentially benevolent as the British nineties had been a century before, with an optimistic material civilization at the height of a power so absolute as to be nearly absurd in its creation of a soft empire of signs.

  Two years later, we were preparing to celebrate that baby's second birthday when a phone call came. The rest is history, as we say of an unforgettable event with a unsettled meaning, unsettled because the meanings assigned to catastrophic events fluctuate so entirely as the rest of what happens unfolds that to claim to understand an event's meaning even long after, much less right away, is absurd. Was this the first Gothic sack of Rome, or Sarajevo 1914, or simply the Manson family to the power of ten? Or the sinking of the Lusitania for our time? We don't know yet, and we might not know for a long time, or ever. Searching for a remotely adequate historical parallel for the destruction of a capital's two biggest buildings in a single morning, one finds it only in the catastrophes that signal the ends of civilizations: the sacking of the Temple, the overthrow of Rome.

  Anyone with a minimal sense of history recognizes that it must have changed everything, and anyone with a minimal sense of reality knows that it has not. For the other truth, almost unsayable to this day, was that the disaster left, and leaves, the rituals and facts and even the comforts of the city practically unaltered. There was an assault, but no sack. We went home that night, even a mile from the site, to phones that worked and refrigerators that hummed in the background as we tried to make sense of a catastrophe that had not, as catastrophes had usually before, left a devastated epicenter emanating waves of other destruction. This catastrophe was as specific and exact in its place as it was nightmarish in its murderousness. As I wrote at the time, it was as though the Titanic had been sunk on the street before us, and we had watched it go down and then walked home.

  The amazing thing was to witness the recovery and to learn from it. Those of us who had walked in through the Children's Gate had to choose to flee or stay; and choosing to stay, we chose to live, and so we chose to hope—to secure as much happiness for our kids as we could find, or ma
ke. Our own tiny family predicament echoed the larger one: We had, from then on, both to honor the memory of September n and to celebrate Olivia's birthday, and we had to do both, at once, as well as we could. (We were doing two things at once, the minimal number necessary for life.) There isn't any heroism in carrying on, because there isn't any choice. But not having any choice at least puts you in hailing distance of what real heroes do when they don't have any choice about what to do and do it anyway.

  What was certainly true (and moving) was that New York was transformed and, for the first time in its history, became, in the world's eyes, vulnerable and fragile. New York, the Rome of the virtual age, suddenly became the Venice of the new millennium: the beautiful endangered place that could just shatter and be flooded and break. This was very different from what it had been back in the seventies, when it was ruined and doomed. Now the ruin was less but the fear, for a while anyway, larger. All the secular rituals of existence in New York went on, made newly poignant by a recognition that they could not be practiced complacently. A charge of fragility entered every family snapshot, every picnic on the Great Lawn, every New Age birthday party with a yoga mat given to each child. It even took the comic form of an awareness that filled the children's eyes, of how low low-flying planes ought to be.

  Flight was a rational possibility and—who knows?—may yet turn out to have been the rational response. But not very many fled, perhaps as much out of stolidity and fatigue as anything, and as we all went on living and choosing to live, we had no choice but to go on hoping. The tenor of our lives and the shape of our manners, in that space between sporadic fear and real pleasure, did change, in subtle ways worth setting down. There is, I think, no sense in talking about a “post-9/11” New York: History and individual experience don't intersect that neatly except in cheap journalism and bad novels. History and experience run on different tracks, and when history knocks experience off its own, we know the force of the collision from the dents on the people's hats and hearts. Fear changes minds, and minds change the forms of manners—but it changes as smoke changes the air in a room, subtly and in ways that can be recorded only by sensing the atmosphere. (The best novel about World War I is Mrs. Dalloway, in which the consequences of that catastrophe lie not in some overt transformation of that city and its manners, which are proceeding more or less just as they have for so long, but in the small tugs of gravity that work on hearts, coming from a new but still-distant planet: the mad veteran in the park on the shining morning with the party at its end.)