Through the Children's Gate Read online

  Manners changed just enough to be traceable. Our time in New York, to use a homely metaphor, was spent waiting for the other shoe to drop; and when it didn't drop—or hasn't dropped, not quite yet—we learned to live on one foot, hopping along spiritually in more or less normal times. It turns out that we can live quite happily on one leg, enough that the memory of two legs seems odd. Every age and city are scared of something, anyway. The real question that pressed itself upon us as parents was how to let our children live in joy in a time of fear, how to give light enough to live in when what we saw were so many shadows.

  * * *

  New York, in times likes these, could seem an unfair place to have and to raise children. But then, there is no right time, never a serene and happy plateau in which to have them. As the great Szymborska reminds us in the little epigraph to this book, there has never been, throughout human history, a good moment to have a child: There is always something enormous and threatening happening, or about to happen, that makes it unwise. The Vandals are coming, the Gothard Pass is closed … we will have to get safely to sunny Acapulco for it to be possible, and we will never get to Acapulco.

  And yet, we have them still and have to bring them up in the moment and the city that the time being gives us. That having them is more volitional than it used to be—no one caught in the snow in the Gothard Pass could imagine debating having kids; they just had them, as one had sex and its consequences—doesn't alter that. Having them in New York is just like having them anywhere else, only more so. The difference is that the speed of the city, its rhythm, accelerates the play between what happens outside in the world and what happens inside in their minds. It all happens, perhaps, one beat faster, sooner, weirder, with more nervous energy and too little breathing room. Their imaginary playmates are as busy as their parents. As Sid Caesar pointed out, playing the part of a feral child in the city, the pigeon does object to being eaten here, but only for a minute. Then it's gone, and another bird is in its place, eating and being eaten. No one mourns the vanished pigeon.

  The odd thing is that a compensatory instinct—or is it merely guilt? In any case, whatever makes us all, in every circumstance, beat back against the current of our time—makes New York parents more concerned to live a life defined, however quaintly, as normal than people elsewhere. In my experience, at least, it is liberal parents who tend to be the most socially conservative—the most queasy at the endless ribbon of violence and squalor that passes for American entertainment, more concerned to protect their children from it. One might have the impression that it is the Upper West Side atheist and the Lancaster County Amish who dispute the prize for who can be most obsessive about having the children around the table at six p.m. for a homemade dinner from farm-raised food. Morals and manners proceed in twisting spirals of contradiction more often than in neat sandwiches of sameness, and the attitudes of the prohibitive and the secular end up resembling each other. We try to find a way to say grace every night, too, although in our own way. We hold hands, and clink glasses.

  In these circumstances, simple elemental things—Christmas shopping, or skating, the whole middle-class carousel of grocery shopping and piano lessons and baseball practice, which until then one had practiced (or at least chronicled) ironically—took on a new edge, not of heroism, certainly, but of poignant significance, at least for the parents.

  In the end, ordinary life, sheltered from the abysmal winds of History, is what we all hope to preserve as long as the universe will allow. In my work for The New Yorker, I am made to be busily conscientious as a reporter can be, spending days on Rikers Island and nights in telecom hotels. In one atypical burst of civic virtue, I helped the High Line happen. But once again I have left most of that writing out of this book. We can write about the world only by writing about a world, and that world the one we think, at least, we really know. Journalism is made from the outside in; but writing is made from the inside out. Applicable metaphors, not all-over views, are what writers and readers trade in. The metaphors of experience each writer finds in his own backyard, or air shaft, or palace gardens, have, of necessity, different colors—some are gold and some are green and some merely gray—but in the end, the shapes we know are all the same: the arc of desire and disappointment, the rising half circle of hope, the descending crescent of aging, the scribble of the city or the oval of the park, or just the long, falling tunnel of life. Each of these shapes is to be found in any life lucky enough to have any shape at all. (The comic-sentimental essay is, in any case, a kind of antimemoir, a nonconfession confession, whose point is not to strip experience bare but to use experience for some other purpose: to draw a moral or construct an argument, make a case or just tell a joke.)

  And so some tiles on the map of the real city of New York, some of its streets and secrets and the games children and adults play within it, are my subject. Manners matter; children count out of all proportion to their size; and the poetic impulse, however small its objects, is usually saner than the polemical imperative, however passionate its certitudes. Comic writers should not have credos, perhaps, but if I had one, that would be the one I would have. These are stories about the manners, the children, and the objects of the professional classes in what was and remains the world's real capital, in a time of generalized panic and particularized pleasures, about the secular rituals of material but not unmindful people, a handful of manners pressed between the pages of a book. They are stories and images of a class in many ways privileged, but one whose privileges are always provisional, as rooted in this year's harvest of symbolic transactions as any farmer's are in this year's harvest of soybeans, and touched always by a certain pre-cariousness, the permanent precariouness of the professional classes in a plutocratic society.

  As for living within ambiguities and seeing two things at once while you do, well, children do it all the time. Olivia, at three, always cried when she entered a New York cab, “I want to see New York! I want to see New York!,” meaning that she wanted to look at the schematic map of Manhattan posted on the back of the front seat, and she 'd stare at it while the city sped along beside her. The picture and the city were, to her, about equally interesting. This book is like that map, like that moment: a picture of a place that remains intrinsically elsewhere, out the window. New York is always somewhere else, across the river or on the back of the front seat, someplace else, while the wind of the city just beyond our reach rushes in the windows. We keep coming home to New York to try and look for it again.

  Through it all that first feeling, on a night more than forty years ago, remains my major feeling: I am so pleased to be here that I can hardly believe I am. What New York represents, perfectly and consistently, in literature and life alike, is the idea of Hope. Hope for a new life, for something big to happen, hope for a better life or a bigger apartment. When I leave Paris, I think, I was there. When I leave New York, I still think: Where was I? I was there, of course, and I still couldn't grasp it all. I love Paris, but I believe in New York and in its trinity of values: plurality, verticality, possibility. These are stories of happiness in shadow: the shadow of a darkening time and the shadow of human mortality both. I feel the shadows, as we all do, and cringe maybe even more than most. But I try to remember that darkness is a subject, too, and need not always be too sad a one. Shadows are all we have to show us the shapes that light can make.

  A Hazard of No Fortune

  Home again, to begin once again at the beginning. Apartment-hunting is the permanent New York romance, and the broker and his couple the eternal triangle. A man and woman are looking for a place to live, and they call up a broker, and he shows them apartments that are for sale or rent, but the relationship between those three people is much more complicated than the relationship between someone who knows where homes can be found and two people who would like to find one. For one thing, the places are not really his to sell, not really theirs to buy. A tangle of clients and banks, bids and mortgages, co-op boards and co-op skeptics surrounds thei
r relationship. Hypothèque is the French word for mortgage, and a hypothetical air attends every step you take: if you could … if they would … if the bank said … if the board allows….

  Yet the broker, at the top of the triangle, is a happy man. First he forms a liaison with the wife, which unites them against all the things that husbands have—doubt, penury, a stunted imagination. Together, the broker winks at the wife; they will scale the heights, find a poetic space, a wking brk frplce, something. But by late morning he has formed a second, darker, homoerotic alliance with the husband. The two guys share musky common sense, and their eyes exchange glances—she's so demanding, pretty much impossible. Now, a couple of guys like us, we could be happy together, take what we can get, fix a place up. The skilled broker keeps the husband and wife in a perpetual state of uncertainty about whose desires will be satisfied.

  Over lunch, it becomes plain that the broker has a past, as lovers will. He did something else before—he was a journalist, or a banker, or in advertising. He chose to be a broker because it gave him freedom, and then (he admits) in the nineties it began to give him money, more money than he ever thought possible. He looks sleek in his Italian suit, while his couple feel for the moment like out-of-towners, hicks in cloth coats and rubber boots. As coffee arrives, the couple hear his cell phone buzzing, muffled somewhere near his heart. He finds the phone, mutters into it, then speaks up: “Hey, I'm in the middle of lunch.” But the husband and wife are temporarily bound together: There is another—one he may love more than us.

  The only time the broker loses his poise is when the Rival Broker is waiting for him in the lobby of the building where she has the “exclusive.” Ethics and tradition insist that the two brokers show the apartment together, and suddenly the broker, so suave, so sexy, becomes an ex-husband, the two brokers like a couple after a bad divorce, polite only for the sake of the child—the apartment.

  The billets-doux of the couple's relationship with the broker are the layouts, the small black-and-white schematic maps of apartments, with key descriptive points set off in bullets: “Triple mint” (meaning not actually falling down); “Room to roam” (a large, dark back room); “Paris rooftops” (a water tower looms in the window of the bedroom). A New York apartment layout is the only known instance of a blueprint that is more humanly appealing than the thing it represents.

  One apartment succeeds another. There are the absurd apartments, nestled in towers among towering buildings four feet away, so that every sunless window shows another sunless window, and you could wake every morning to reach out and touch your pallid neighbor with your pallid hand. There are the half-shrunk apartments, with a reasonable living room and two more rooms carved out behind that you have to enter sideways. Then there are the apartments that are genuinely unique to New York. A hugely expensive “duplex” in the West Seventies, for instance, turns out to be a basement and a sub-basement—the basement where you used to put up your sloppy cousin from Schenectady, the one who never took off his Rangers sweater, and the windowless sub-basement where the janitor was once found molesting children. The apartment's chief attraction is wistfully announced on its blueprint. It is “Near Restaurants.”

  When you're in a tiny hotel room, apartments begin to crowd your imagination and haunt your nights. They turn into bright-eyed monsters, snaking through your dreams like subway cars. Last Christmas, having decided to try to bring my family home after five years abroad, I found myself walking in fact, and then in spirit, through all these apartments, again and again. As a distraction, I picked up a book I had packed for the journey, William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes. A little over a hundred years old, it's still the best book about middle-class life—or is it upper-middle? anyway, the lives of salaried professionals—in New York, a great American novel. Instead of fussing about hunting whales or riding rafts or fighting wars, or any of those other small-time subjects, it concerns something really epic: a guy in the magazine business looking for an apartment in Manhattan.

  Howells is out of favor now. All literary reputation-making is unjust, but Howells is the victim of perhaps the single greatest injustice in American literary history. The period from 1880 to 1900, Henry Adams once said, was “our Howells-and-James epoch,” and the two bearded grandees stood on terms as equal as the Smith Brothers on a cough-drop box. But then Howells got identified, unfairly, with a Bostonian “genteel” tradition, nice and dull. Now James gets Nicole Kidman and Helena Bonham Carter, even for his late, fuzzy-sweater novels, along with biography after biography and collection after collection, and Howells gets one brave, doomed defense every thirty years. Yet Howells, though an immeasurably less original sensibility than James, may be the better novelist, meaning that Howells on almost any subject strikes you as right, while James on almost any subject strikes you as James. Howells's description in A Hazard of New York, and of New York apartment-hunting, at the turn of the century comes from so deep a knowledge of what capitalism does to the middle classes, and how it does it to them, that it remains uncannily contemporary. We've spent billions of dollars to prevent our computers’ mistaking 2000 for 1900; A Hazard of New Fortunes suggests that the error may have been a kind of truth.

  In the novel, a diffident and ironic literary man, Basil March, sublets his house in Boston and comes to New York to edit a new magazine, a fortnightly to be called Every Other Week. It is to be the first “syndicate” magazine, with the contributors sharing in the profits. (These days it would be an Internet launch.) Gradually, we learn that the money behind the magazine comes from a backwoods Pennsylvania Dutch natural-gas millionaire named Dryfoos, who, newly arrived in New York, has invested in the magazine as a worldly diversion for his unworldly son, Conrad, who dreams of becoming a priest. (How-ells began writing A Hazard in the late eighties, when he moved to New York from Cambridge, after editing The Atlantic Monthly for ten years.)

  Although the action of A Hazard eventually takes in the more “panoramic” material of strikes and riots, Howells's genius was to devote the first hundred or so pages of his book to the Marches’ apartment-hunting. Isabel March, Basil's wife, who is an old Bostonian, joins him for the search, leaving the children behind in Beantown. They begin with the blithe certainty that it will take a couple of days. “I cut a lot of things out of the Herald as we came on,” she tells her husband at their hotel on the first morning, taking “a long strip of paper out of her handbag with minute advertisements pinned transversely upon it, and forming the effect of some glittering nondescript vertebrate.” She goes on, “We must not forget just what kind of flat we are going to look for”:

  “The sine qua nons are an elevator and steam heat, not above the third floor, to begin with. Then we must each have a room, and you must have your study and I must have my parlor; and the two girls must each have a room. With the kitchen and dining room, how many does that make?”

  “Ten.”

  “I thought eight. Well, no matter…. And the rooms must all have outside light. And the rent must not be over eight hundred for the winter. We only get a thousand for our whole house, and we must save something out of that, so as to cover the expenses of moving. Now, do you think you can remember all of that?”

  The modern reader waits for the shock to strike, and it does. They wander from one apartment building to another—all named, with unchanged real estate developers’ pretension, after classical writers. (“There is a vacant flat in the Herodotus for eighteen hundred a year, and one in the Thucydides for fifteen,” she sees, lamenting, “What prices!”) They visit six apartments in the afternoon, then four more that night. They are all too small, too expensive, too strange—too, well, New York.

  One or two rooms might be at the front, the rest crooked and cornered backward through increasing and then decreasing darkness till they reached a light bedroom or kitchen at the rear…. If the flats were advertised as having “all light rooms” [the janitor] explained that any room with a window giving into the open air of a court or shaft was coun
ted a light room.

  Basil blames the brokers: “There seems to be something in the human habitation that corrupts the natures of those who deal in it, to buy or sell it, to hire or let it. You go to an agent and tell him what kind of a house you want. He has no such house, and he sends you to look at something altogether different upon the well-ascertained principle that if you can't get what you want, you will take what you can get.” And yet the Marches become not repelled by apartment-seeking but addicted to it:

  It went on all day and continued far into the night, until it was too late to go to the theater, too late to do anything but tumble into bed and simultaneously fall on sleep. They groaned over their reiterated disappointments, but they could not deny that the interest was unfailing.

  The Marches become mesmerized by the ads, the layouts, the language. “Elegant large single and outside flats” were offered with “all improvements—bath, icebox, etc.” Soon the search for an apartment becomes a consuming activity in itself, self-propelling, self-defining—a quest. “Now we are imprisoned in the present,” Basil says of New York, “and we have to make the worst of it.”