Through the Children's Gate Read online

  Imprisoned in the present. It seems not to matter when or with how much money you look for an apartment in New York. I've done it officially three times: once as a grad student looking for one room for two, with thirty-five hundred dollars in my pocket to last the year; once as a “yuppie” (we were called that, derisively, before the world was ours), looking for a loft or a one-bedroom; and now as a family guy with a couple of kids. The numbers and the figures change, but the experience remains the same and feels different from the way it feels anywhere else, with a jag of raised hopes and dashed expectations.

  The city is, it's true, shinier than it has ever been. It gleams. It is as if the “broadband pipe,” the philosophers’ stone of our era, had already come into existence as a blast hose and washed off the grime. The newsstands that once seemed to stock mainly SCREW now stock In Style and Business 2.0. Even the smells have changed. The essential New York smell twenty years ago was still Italian and Wasp: tomato and olive oil and oregano, acid and pungent, mingled with the indoor, Bloomingdale's smell of sweet, sprayed perfumes. Now, inside the giant boxes that have arrived from America, from the malls (the Gap and Banana Republic and Staples), there is a new, clean pharmacy smell, a disconcerting absence of smells, the American non-smell.

  The New Yorkers who arrived in the seventies, the post-Annie Hall wave of immigrants, are dismayed by the new shine. They liked the fear and dilapidation that they saw when they came, since it meant that living here required courage. Life in New York was a broken-field run, demanding, even in the “nice” neighborhoods, a continual knowing, sideways-glancing evaluation of everyone else on the street and what kind of threat each person might represent—white faces in dark shoes searching fearfully for dark faces in white shoes. Today the rich stroll down the street as though the place belongs to them. (It always did, but now they show it.) A lot of New York existence is like a fantasy mordantly imagined in the 1970s: Picture a city with polite taxi drivers and children in strollers crowding the avenues, where everyone is addicted to strong, milky coffee.

  The horizon seems so secure that places to live these days seem to be conjugated in the future indefinite—some of the apartments one looks at are purely notional, like Priceline.com profits. Not only do the neighborhoods not quite exist yet—whole blocks are now annexed to Tribeca that five years ago were shabby streets fringing City Hall—but the apartments themselves don't exist. Amid the noise and dust of construction work, you enter a “welcome” shed, where you are shown eight-by-eight-inch samples of “finishes”: brushed aluminum for the kitchen appliances, maple for the floors, white pine for the kitchen cabinets, one blue tile that is meant to stand for the finished bathroom. The eight-by-eight samples are stapled to a sheet of Masonite, like a science project done the night before the science fair.

  You sign a paper promising not to sue if you are killed while examining the nonexistent apartments. This is fair; you are simply acknowledging that searching for an apartment in New York is potentially fatal, like scaling Everest. (“They got up to 3-C in plenty of time, but they dawdled in the kitchen and didn't begin the descent back until it was already growing dark and the squalls were threatening in the service elevator.”) You walk into a vast space, into the dust and crashing sounds of an entire world being emptied out, century-old plaster spilling down chutes. The broker leads you up a steep plank to a two-by-four square hole. You duck down and squeeze through—it is like the entrance that leads the Artful Dodger and Oliver into Fagin's den. Then you are in the remains of the wrecked warehouse, with a row of three windows down at one end and perhaps silver tape laid out on the floor: your home. The second broker leads you to the corner window. “I love this line,” she sighs with pleasure. “Extrapolate from the finishes,” someone orders.

  * * *

  But the Marches have been here, too; you see their Gilded Age forms, like ghosts on North Moore Street, and they are in the same bewildered state: “Mrs. March had out the vertebrate, and was consulting one of its glittering ribs and glancing up from it at a house before which they stood. ‘Yes, it's the number—but do they call this being ready October ist?’ ”

  Isabel boldly goes into the empty place and, “with the female instinct for domiciliation which never failed her,” she begins to settle the family in the still unfinished house as the landlord “lent a hopeful fancy to the solution of all her questions.” Isabel explains to her skeptical husband, “It's the only way I can realize whether it will do for us. I have to dramatize the whole thing.”

  Dramatize the whole thing. You can take the Marches with you everywhere in New York. In their day, too, people were haunted by the sixties—the strife at home—which they had agreed to identify in retrospect as a time of true idealism, since mislaid. And then, one also begins to sense, their boom was like ours in its subtle articulation into two phases. In the first phase, having money became a way of entering an older, existing society; in the second, money created its own society. Howells's early novel The Rise of Silas Lapham described the plight of the typical millionaire-adventurer trying and failing to make his way in Boston society of the 1870s, “hemmed in and left out at every turn by ramifications that forbid him all hope of safe personality in his comments.” By the time of A Hazard, money is the only ramification left.

  Although our boom sometimes seems one continuous curve of money and manners that began around 1984, it, too, has had two phases. In the eighties, the familiar mechanisms that gave new money the appearance of old—turning money into charity or culture—still operated, at times feverishly. Newly rich men in the eighties were driven by the same amalgam of guilt and gilt that drove the robber barons of the Gilded Age to have their portraits made by Sargent and buy Renaissance or even Impressionist pictures. To buy a risky picture in the 1980s—a Fischl, a Salle, a Koons—was to give commercial risk the patina of aesthetic risk. The circles of social life turned more or less the same elaborate machinery that they had turned a century earlier: The cogs in the greed wheel turn the money wheel, which turns the culture wheel, which turns the social wheel, until at last the aspirant gains a seat at the central wheel table, where the hostess is called “Mrs.” (Mrs. Wrightsman, Mrs. Astor), and he has at last arrived.

  By the nineties, new rules had begun to fall into place, just as they did in Howells's nineties. Everyone in A Hazard, rich or poor, is an immigrant: There are no native New Yorkers, no indigenous established society. There are just people with new money, or people dependent on it, having dinners for one another. The unwashed Dryfooses, Isabel discovers to her shock, do not know that they are out of society, because they do not know there is a society to be in. (The Dryfoos daughters don't even take piano lessons; they play the banjo.) Dryfoos buys the magazine to occupy his son, not to achieve a social position; when he wants to have a dinner party to celebrate the new magazine, it turns into a glorified office party, the same old faces. In today's New York, too, the parties that people talk about seem to be glorified office parties, propelled not by hostesses but by verbs and gerunds: launches and start-ups and initial public offerings.

  In a society in which money has gained its sovereign virtue, art—and the ascension it symbolizes—no longer matters in quite the same way. When George Bellows's 1910 painting Polo Crowd was bought by an unnamed millionaire a few months ago, it violated essential Veblenian status-creating principles. The picture was being sold by the Museum of Modern Art because “it did not fit into its collection;” i.e., wasn't good enough. It went for three times the estimate. The guy who paid $27.5 million for the painting didn't buy it because he wished to acquire status from it; its status had been officially denied by the status-granting institution. He bought it because he liked it. Society totters.

  Isabel has the apartment dream, too! “It was something about the children at first,” she tells Basil, and then it was “of a hideous thing with two square eyes and a series of sections growing darker and then lighter, till the tail of the monstrous articulate was quite luminous again.” M
arch says, laughing, “Why, my dear, it was nothing but a harmless New York flat—seven rooms and a bath.”

  Haunted by that dream, Isabel returns to Boston, and Basil, in a fit of resignation, rents a horrible furnished apartment that she has seen and rejected. “He was aware more than ever of its absurdities, he knew that his wife would never cease to hate it,” but he also “felt a comfort in committing himself and exchanging the burden of indecision for the burden of responsibility.”

  The magazine begins to prosper, and March tries to do good with Dryfoos's money by going downtown to offer work to a German-American socialist translator named Lindau, who taught him Heine back in the Midwest when he was a boy. He finds Lindau living in Chinatown, on Mott Street. “But what are you living here for, Lindau?” he asks. Lindau explains that he has come here to see poverty. “How much money can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressing some other man?” Lindau asks, and then answers his question: “It is the landlords and the merchant princes, the railroad kings and the coal barons … it is these that make the millions, but no man earns them. What artist, what physician, what scientist, what poet, was ever a millionaire?”

  “That's Tom and Nicole's, that's Barbra's, that's Bruce's, that's the one Bruce gave to Demi after the divorce, that's Madonna's,” the broker goes, pointing upward at all the great turrets, the high crowning spires, of the classic apartment buildings of Central Park West. Apparently, they all belong, like feudal keeps, to the stars who have immigrated to New York, as Howells did, as the Marches did. Perhaps they wave at one another, tower to tower, in the morning, as neighbors should.

  Isabel and Basil, you realize, were the first victims of a persistent American illusion: Even the upper-middle classes in a plutocratic society, Howells believed, are always in precarious shape and usually don't know it. In New York, they do. Outside New York, the bourgeoisie does tend to live in ways not entirely unlike the rich. The Marches’ little house in Boston, though hardly grand, is a house, with a house's accoutrements and pleasures, as would be the case in Cambridge (or Philadelphia) today. New York tends to invite the middle classes to live alongside the rich, and then makes visible the true space between them, draws a line in outside light. Unlike London and Paris, the two other great capitals of bourgeois civilization, Manhattan has never really been symbolized by middle-class housing. The sweep of semi-detached houses in Knightsbridge or Kensington, the long boulevards filled with bourgeoisie in the sixteenth and eighth arrondissements of Paris, sum up the image of those places. New York, on the other hand, is famous for William Randolph Hearst's penthouse and Sister Eileen's basement apartment, or, more recently, for the Trump Tower aerie and the Tribeca loft. A nuclear family living in a little house in Manhattan is a sight. The old enclaves of the true bourgeoisie, Riverside Drive and York Avenue, were on the margins of the island, and their high period was a short one. (My great-aunt, like everybody else's, moved into a fifteen-room apartment on Riverside Drive in the forties, and it had been broken up by the sixties, barely a generation's worth of extra closets. Each of its divided parts now costs more money than my great-uncle made in a lifetime.)

  At one moment in A Hazard, Isabel and Basil pretend to be millionaires simply to see what lies beyond their means. “They looked at three-thousand- and four-thousand-dollar apartments and rejected them for one reason or another which had nothing to do with the rent; the higher the rent, the more critical they were.” Inspired by them, we decided to do it, too.

  What you find, though, when you search—well, not the spires (what, are you kidding?) but the spaces that hold up the spires—isn't luxury, twisting staircases and panoramic windows, but the old American representations of normalcy and domestic comfort. What you find isn't Fred Astaire's apartment in Daddy Long Legs but Meg Ryan's apartment in a Nora Ephron movie, the apartment where Hannah lived in the Woody Allen film, the flat that Mr. Blandings is desperate to escape in order to build his dream house. There are kitchens that look like kitchens, living rooms like living rooms, bedrooms like bedrooms. A millionaire's life in New York is still what normal life looks like on a cereal box. And this is exactly what draws the people in the spires to live in the spires: The movie star who moves here announces that he likes New York because he can live like a normal person, because his kids can have normal lives, and, in a weird way, he means it.

  For Howells, the inevitable result of plutocracy, exemplified by the apartment madness and Lindau's despair, is popular revolt and its repression. A trainmen's strike threatens to paralyze the city, and Basil, in a fit of reportorial responsibility, goes to “cover” the strike and sees Lindau struck down by a policeman—and then sees Dryfoos's saintly young son lose his life in an attempt to rescue the old socialist.

  Howells himself became a Tolstoyan (i.e., mushy) socialist, and he wrote for Basil March a long concluding speech in which March realizes that the hazard of new fortunes is his, too. “What I object to is this economic chance world in which we live and which we men seem to have created,” he tells Isabel. A workingman should be guaranteed his livelihood and his repose, and it is insupportable that he is not:

  At my time of life—at every time of life—a man ought to feel that if he will keep on doing his duty he shall not suffer in himself or in those who are dear to him, except through natural causes. But no man can feel this as things are now, and so we go on. Pushing and pulling, climbing and crawling, thrusting aside and trampling underfoot, lying, cheating, stealing; and when we get to the end, covered with blood and dirt and sin and shame, and look back over the way we've come to a palace of our own, or the poorhouse, which is about the only possession we can claim in common with our brother men, I don't think the retrospect can be pleasing…. People are greedy and foolish and wish to have and to shine, because having and shining are held up to them by civilization as the chief good of life…. We can't help it. If one were less greedy or less foolish, someone else would have and would shine at his expense.

  This economic chance world in which we live. A hundred years ago, the one thing that Howells—and Henry Adams and so many others—knew for sure was that a society with a tiny plutocratic class, a precarious middle class, and a large and immigration-fed proletariat simply could not go on. Now, at the turn of another century, we find it is the only thing that has gone on, in nearly perfect duplicate. August Belmont celebrated the last fin de siècle in a suit of golden armor; everyone who celebrated this fin de siècle in costume with the Soroses came away, we're told, with a bronze medallion embossed with the hosts’ profiles. Three-star chefs are flown in from Paris for a night's diversion; ghost mining towns in Colorado are revived and fully peopled for two weeks each summer as “camps” where the rich can entertain their courtiers. Someone has just bought the International Center of Photography, a grand old mansion on Fifth Avenue, in order to turn it back into a private house, reversing the century-old process by which the mansions of the fin de siècle rich became institutions. The plutocracy has never been so plutocratic.

  What makes it possible for the economic chance world to go on so peaceably now, with hardly a hint of the opposition that Howells took for granted? It is that a sense of Hazard has been replaced by Hope. It seemed to Howells that hazard and fortune were as right together as pride and lions, that risk and moneymaking were one. What's striking about this new Gilded Age isn't just that people are selling hope but that everyone is buying it. All the folk memories of busts and depressions past seem to have vanished; the rhetoric of hope has overcome even the romance of risk, the sinister glamour of greed.

  The new tycoons are not in industry, like Howells's, or in asset stripping, like Tom Wolfe's. They don't look like old man Dryfoos, grasping and raw. They look, more often, like his son, Conrad, all quivering sensitivity and high-minded devotion to the future. The places of the new fortunes are not sweatshops or mines—not here, anyway—but ateliers reclaimed from the light-industrial Old New York the Marches knew. Six computers, a server, a wall of glass brick, a st
amped-tin ceiling, a bright post-ironic attitude—these are the materials of a dot-com company, of the new fortunes. It is hope (and its Siamese twin, debt) that empties out the buildings on North Moore Street and calls on you to extrapolate from the samples, hope that keeps you looking, that gets you to dramatize the whole thing. If it is a bubble—and common sense tells you that it must be—it has a bubble's bright, single highlight, and it encloses Manhattan from Ninety-sixth Street to the harbor. Hope is what gives this age its odd and original gleam, a strange ingenuous glow different from that of the Marches’ age, a century ago, when even the people who had the gold knew the age was merely gilded. “Having and shining, having and shining”: We still believe it. But now we shine first and assume that, if the glow is bright enough, we will all have later.

  Howells, like Basil, was radicalized by his experience in New York in the 1890s. “I abhor it,” he wrote to Henry James of American capitalism, “and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew on a real equality.” But, like Isabel, he also learned that New York is a city of accommodations. This double movement gives his masterpiece its pathos and its enduring moral. Later, he wrote of himself and his wife, “We are theoretical socialists, and practical aristocrats. But it is a comfort to be right theoretically, and to be ashamed of one's self practically.” “Practical aristocrats”: a lovely calling, nice work if you can get it.

  It is at least a relief to discover that at the end of A Hazard of New Fortunes, the Marches find a place to live for good. If the explicit moral of the novel is radical, its dramatic point is liberal: Isabel's acceptance of New York domestic arrangements and her education in the irony necessary to accept them. Dryfoos, after the death of his son, goes off to Paris, selling Every Other Week to Basil and his publisher for a song. There is a big empty space on the second floor of the building, right above the editorial offices, and Basil and Isabel decide to live there with the kids. It is a sign of Isabel's transformation that this idea—in Boston, she thinks, fit only for Irish laundresses—is now acceptable to her. She has become as diffident and ironic as her husband, as someone seeing life pass by from the El. She has become a New Yorker, and she will live above the store. “In New York,” she reflects at last, “you may do anything.”