chapter 13

I had breakfast alone in the morning, all the other boarders gone. I'd lain in bed listening for them, counting them off as they'd come down the hall and gone down the stairs, all within a few minutes of each other. Then I'd dressed, and sat watching by my window till I actually saw Jake Pickering leave. Walking into the parlor now, I saw that it was swept and dusted, and I turned to look at the windows. They were almost entirely clear, wiped or washed clean of frost and drawings both, a new film of frost beginning to creep up the glass again. Turning toward the dining room, I wondered again if I could have avoided the trouble last night. No, and now in the daylight I saw that it didn't matter as much as I'd thought. A man so jealous that a casual stranger evokes it must have done other similar things and would do them again. I hadn't really interfered with the past; something of the sort would sooner or later have happened anyway involving someone else, if I hadn't been here. I sat down at the long dining-room table, and Aunt Ada—listening for me, I think—came in from the kitchen wearing her working clothes: a plain dark cotton dress and a white bib-apron tied in a big bow at the back. She welcomed me, very sweetly and genuinely, asking how I'd slept and if my room were satisfactory. Then, still smiling, anxious not to offend me, she said this was the only morning I could expect breakfast after eight, and I said I'd either get down earlier or do without. She served breakfast then: a fried chop, fried eggs, toast with three kinds of jam, coffee, and the morning Times. Setting these down on the table while I watched, she glanced at me, hesitated, and then—genuinely anxious about my welfare—suggested that if I were looking for work I ought to begin getting up earlier. With the backs of her fingers she felt the base of the silver coffeepot which she'd set onto a thick knitted square, then filled my cup and left, and I opened the Times, and began to eat. The big story of the day was GUITEAU FOUND GUILTY, in the left-hand column of the front page, but I skipped that and read the fourth-column story, THE CHOCTAW RAILWAY GRANT. HOW GOULD AND HUNTINGTON HAVE KILLED OFF COMPETITION WITH THEIR NEWLY ACQUIRED ROAD, though it was a little hard to follow. I did get the idea, though, that a group of "alleged representatives of the Indians," who didn't want a railroad runthrough their land, was soon replaced by "accredited representatives," who thought it was a great idea. And I was fascinated by ARCHBISHOP PURCELL'S DEBT, just below the Choctaw story. For reasons the Times didn't explain—it seemed to be a continuing story, and I think you were assumed to have previous knowledge of it—Archbishop Purcell apparently had five thousand creditors claiming he owed them $4,000,000 and there was some prospect that to settle these claims a number of "houses of worship would ... be sold to the highest bidder." Cardinal McCloskey seemed upset, to say nothing of the congregations, and the Times said, "The case is now ready for trial, and will be one of the most interesting in the history of American jurisprudence," and I thought so, too. Eating my toast and sipping coffee, I was reading a McCreery's ad for "evening shades of Nun's Veiling in white, cream, light blue, ivory, and pink" when Julia came downstairs. We said good-morning as she passed through the dining room; then, as she carried in her own breakfast from the kitchen, I had time to look at her. Today her hair was wound into a soft coil piled on her head, and I thought possibly, though I wasn't sure, that she was wearing makeup or at least powder. Watching her, I realized that she was dressed to go out, in a marvelous dress of purple velvet, the skirt gathered up at the front in a series of scallops, and trimmed at the front just below the waist with a lavender bow that must have been eight inches across. And it had a bustle. But if that dress sounds ridiculous, it was not; she looked great, and I had to recognize as she sat down, picking up her napkin, smiling at me, that every needle on every dial was jumping, and that maybe Jake Pickering hadn't been entirely mistaken last night. I could smile at myself, though, accepting the fact of this girl's appeal clinically and with detachment, because it didn't matter; in a few hours I'd be gone. "I see you are consulting the advertising pages," Julia said conversationally. I'd already decided I'd better get out of the house for the rest of the morning, so just for a reply I said, "Yes, I need some new clothes." She smiled. "Well! You'll be a hummer with new duds! I had noticed that you brought very little." I couldn't resist. "Most of my clothes would look a little strange here. Can you suggest a good store?" Bringing a piece of toast with her, Julia got up, came around to my side of the table, and began turning the pages of my paper, scanning the ads, while I sat back watching her. She moved gracefully, her fingers quick and accurate in taking the page corners. She stopped at a page nearly filled with ads, leaning forward over the table beside me, to search through them. And—this was absurd, I thought, a poor joke on me carried on too long—there was a perfumed scent from her, from her hair, I think, and I felt a flare of excitement so intense it affected my vision, piling up behind my eyeballs, and I leaned away to one side.
All the ads were one column wide and set completely in type, and now Julia said, "Here," her fingertip touching one of them. "Macy's has some gentlemen's clothing for sale." Trying to ignore the perfume, I leaned closer to read the ad; it said Macy's was selling shirts made to order at ninety-nine cents, which sounded ridiculously low but which I knew was not in a place and time where an able-bodied unskilled man earned two dollars for a day's work of twelve hours. Collars were six and eight cents, said the ad, cotton half-hose eighteen cents a pair. When I reached the bottom of the ad and read, "Our customers may rest assured that we will not be undersold by any other house," I felt a little stab of pleasure at this ancestor of Macy's familiar slogan. "Or you can go to Rogers Peet," Julia said, turning to look at me; our faces were only inches apart, and she stood quickly erect. "They have a brand-new and larger store," she said, walking back to her side of the table, "and will surely have whatever you need." There was a cool note of dismissal in her voice, and I thought I understood; a man's clothing was a subject too intimate for lengthy discussion. I said, "Okay, I'll try Rogers Peet"—people did say "okay," I'd noticed last night—and picked up my coffee cup for a final sip, and to put a period to the subject. And as I raised my cup, Julia saw my hand. It wasn't so red this morning but it was bruised blue at the middle knuckle and even more swollen than last night. She stared but said nothing—I think she knew or guessed the cause; maybe Pickering had done this before—and her face flushed. I didn't know why for a moment, then I saw her eyes: She was furious. She looked from my hand to my face. "Do you know where Rogers Peet is?" she said very quietly. I could only say no. "It's at Broadway and Prince Street, opposite the Metropolitan Hotel, and if you've never been in New York before, you don't know where that is, either." It was true, at least, that I didn't know where Prince Street was, and I'd certainly never heard of the Metropolitan Hotel. I shook my head. Julia nodded, and stood up. "Well, I'm going to the Ladies' Mile," she said, "and I'll take you." I began shaking my head quickly, hunting for a reason to say no, and she watched me for a moment, then said softly, "Are you worried about Jake?" "No, I'm not worried about Jake. But he did say 'fiancée.' " "Yes." Julia stood staring past me. "And has said it before." She looked at me again. "But as I have said to him, I am no one's fiancée until I've said that I am. And I haven't done so yet." She turned toward the living room and the closet in the hallway. "Are you coming?" I knew I wasn't going to say no and let her think Jake had scared me off. And if I was going to say yes I thought I ought to sound as though I meant it. "You bet!" I said, something else I'd heard more than once last night, and I went upstairs to get my hat and overcoat. In my room I took a small sketch pad from my bag and a couple of pencils, one hard and one soft. I caught a glimpse of my own movement in the dresser mirror, and looked quickly at my face. It was pleased and excited, emotion ignoring logic, and I shrugged; events had simply picked me up and carried me along, and if I couldn't help it I thought I might as well enjoy it.
Julia was waiting in the hall in a flowered bonnet tied under her chin, a dark-green coat, and a short black shoulder cape, wearing a tiny black fur muff shoved up onto one wrist. When she heard my step she looked up and smiled, looking great, and I could only grin and shake my head. Lord help us all, what New York City has lost through the years! We walked north to Twenty-third Street, Julia eager and excited; she was about to show me the sights and was enjoying it, and I felt touched, she seemed so innocent. At Twenty-third we turned west toward Madison Square and the Fifth Avenue Hotel a couple of blocks ahead at Broadway and Fifth, the beginning, Julia said, of "the Ladies' Mile." Suddenly I said, "Oh!"—an involuntary sound of pure delight at what I saw ahead—and Julia turned her head to search my face, smiling at the intended effect. To me, living and working in New York City, Madison Square had meant very little; a sun-dried, brown-grassed emptiness of park benches and paths in the summer, filled only at noon, with office workers moodily eating lunches from paper bags, deserted much of the rest of the time except for a few derelicts; in the winter even dirtier, emptier, and more forelorn; and at night in all seasons automatically avoided like every other New York park. At most it provided the relief of empty space from the miles all around it of narrow corridor-streets between high building walls. It didn't seem to have much other meaning or purpose: a drab and pleasureless place. But now at the sight of it I exclaimed in simple delight, because the square ahead was alive and a joy. Under the winter trees and still-glowing gas mantles were countless children: girls in bonnets tied on with shawls; boys in square little lamb's-wool caps with attached earmuffs; girls and boys in pompommed tam-o'-shanters with plaid bands and ribbons down the back; boys in miniature long-pants suits with heavy mufflers around the neck; girls in long shaggy fur coats; everyone in boots or button shoes, half the girls wearing brightly striped stockings, some of them carrying tiny muffs. Strange little winter outfits, but they were still children in the snow, running, falling, throwing, dragging each other on high wooden sleighs whose runners curved gracefully up into bird's-head ornaments, belly-flopping onto low wooden-runnered sleds. On the paths nannies walked in nurselike outfits pushing baby carriages with tall wooden-spoke wheels. And adults were strolling, just strolling through Madison Square, the snow, and the winter for the simple pleasure of it as though being outdoors were something to be enjoyed for itself. Dogs barked, romped, rolled, and cavorted, excited by the snap in the air and the snow. And all around that living, moving square rolled the most glittering parade of carriages you could hope to see. These weren't just black. There were marvelous rich maroons among them, a deep olive-green, and one had a magnificent body of canary-yellow, the wheels and fenders shiny black. Most were enclosed but a few were actually open, and Julia named some of them: fine names like Victorias, five-glassed landaus, barouches, phaetons, and light rockaways. Liveried men drove them, top hats taking and revolving the light, polished boots and white pants displayed under the buttoned-back skirts of silver-buttoned outer coats, which in some instances matched the carriage bodies in color. On more than one, carriage footmen, often a pair of them, sat up behind, arms folded in splendid uselessness.
And the horses pranced, slim and magnificent, their harnesses and curried bodies shining, heads reined high, manes braided, knees lifting to chests; a lot of them were in matched absolutely identical pairs: black, brown, gray, white. And inside those carriages sat the most stylish, splendid, exciting-to-look-at women I'd ever seen. They were going shopping after a few turns around the square, Julia said—along the Ladies' Mile that stretched down Broadway to the south. We were closer now, and I grinned with pleasure to see that these weren't like the women who sit back, obscure and hidden, almost cowering into the deep corners of expensive, drably chauffeured automobiles; these ladies sat erect and far forward, smiling, showing themselves off behind the glittering glass, looking regal and utterly pleased with themselves. It was absurd, garish, a blatant open display of money and privilege; and it was so innocent it was charming, and I wanted to laugh out loud for joy in it. Now, less than half a block away, we could hear, too: the thin, open-air screams of children, the jink-jink-jink of harness bells, the sharp haughty clip-clop of expensive hoofs on the Belgian-block paving of wood. And today, I saw now, there was someone controlling traffic at Broadway and Fifth: a giant policeman in tall helmet and white gloves, guiding traffic with sharply graceful motions of a slim baton like a man conducting an orchestra—making sure those carriages leaving the square were delayed very little by cruder traffic. It was a marvelous scene, and off across the square through the branches of the winter trees I could see the white facades of strange hotel after hotel, and could read their signs: the Fifth Avenue, Albemarle, Hoffman House, St. James, Victoria, and to the north the Brunswick. It was like nothing in New York I'd ever seen, and I grinned at Julia, and said, "It's Paris!" She was smiling, her face reflecting my own excitement, but she was shaking her head. "No, it isn't," she said proudly, "it's New York!" We walked on to Madison Avenue, stopping at the curb to watch for a break in the circle of carriages, and I nodded toward Broadway just ahead. "How far down does the Ladies' Mile go?" "To Eighth Street." Then, chanting it, " 'From Eighth Street down, the men are earning it. From Eighth Street up, the women are spurning it! That is the way of this great town, from Eighth Street up and Eighth Street down!' " and I could have kissed her. There was a break in the double line of circling carriages, and I grabbed Julia's hand, and we ran across Madison Avenue and into Madison Square. Through the etched branches of the trees I saw something far across the square and ahead to the north, or thought I did: a structure of some kind, but no, not really a structure, something else; an almost familiar shape. We'd entered a path curving ahead to the north and west, and my head was moving from side to side, eyes narrowed, trying to make out what I was glimpsing through the trees and constantly moving people on the path ahead. I had Julia's hand still, after our run across the street, and I stopped so abruptly I yanked her arm, swinging her around to face me, surprised. I was standing motionless, staring across the square. I knew what I was seeing now, and it was impossible.
What I saw off across the paths beyond the people, the benches, snow, and still-lighted lamps couldn't be there but was; and I turned to Julia open-mouthed, my arm rising full length to point. "It's the arm," I said stupidly, then almost shouted it, a man turning to look at me. "My God,"I said, "it's the Statue of Liberty's arm!" and I turned from Julia to stare at it again across the square. I wouldn't have been surprised if it had vanished during the instant I'd looked away, but there it was still, solidly and impossibly there: The erect right arm of the Statue of Liberty was standing on the west side of Madison Square holding the lighted torch of liberty high above the surrounding trees. I couldn't believe it. I walked so fast it was just short of running, Julia hurrying along beside me, her arm under mine, baffled at the intensity of my interest. Then we were there, stopped directly beside it, my head thrown back to sight up the length of that tremendous arm sprouting from a rectangular stone base. I'd never known it was this big; it was gigantic, an enormous forearm ending in a tremendous clenched right hand with fingernails big as a sheet of letter paper, and the great copper torch gripped in that hand was itself as tall as a three-story building. Far above, leaning over the ornate railing surrounding the base of the flame at the tip of the torch, people stared down at us. "The Statue of Liberty," I murmured to Julia, smiling incredulously. "The Statue of Liberty's arm!" "Yes!" She was laughing at me, bewildered, amused. "It's been here for some time, brought from the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition." She glanced up at it idly. "The entire statue is to be erected in the harbor someday," she said without interest. "If they should ever decide where. And manage to collect enough money to do so. No one seems interested in paying for it; some say it will never go up." "Well, I predict that it will!" I said exuberantly, recklessly. "And I'd say Bedloe's Island is just the place for it!" Then I stared again, delighted that the arm wasn't the aged and permanent acid-green I was used to, but new, the copper still coppery and only beginning to dull, the winter sun glinting dully from the knuckles and from the curved edge of the overhead railing, and at the tip and down one side of the torch. We went up into the arm then, climbing the narrow little circular staircase inside, edging past people coming down, then stepping out onto the railed and circular walkway around the base of the torch. I looked out over Madison Square, that wonderful, joyous, wintertime square; looked out over the far-off helmet of the mustached, white-gloved, giant traffic cop toward a still-nonexisting Flatiron Building; looked down onto that narrow Fifth Avenue and strange, strange Broadway, and suddenly I had to close my eyes because actual tears were smarting at the very nearly uncontainable thrill of being here. The Ladies' Mile was great, the sidewalks and entrances of the block after block of big glittering ladies' stores crowded with women—the kind of women we'd seen at the square, their carriages waiting for them at the curbs now, and every other kind and age of woman. The display windows were low, down to within a foot or so of the walk, a lot of them guarded by waist-highpolished brass bars, and the protection was needed. Women stood shoulder to shoulder at some of them, staring at the displays, and when one turned away another was usually waiting behind her to slip into her place. I tagged along with Julia and looked at a few of the displays, and actually they weren't much: mostly ribbons and yard goods unfolded from bolts onto supporting stands. It took me a few stores to realize that we hadn't seen any dresses in the windows, and when I said so to Julia she looked puzzled. "But dresses are made at home," she said. Hats seemed to be in separate stores, and so did gloves. I stood with Julia looking at a window full of them, some lying in flat shallow boxes, others on plaster display arms. One group of them on display arms were for evening wear, buttoning from wrist to elbow, and some even higher. I nudged Julia and pointed at one pair dyed purple. "Eighteen buttons," I said. She nodded, then stood, lips moving very slightly as she counted; then she pointed to a black pair. "Twenty." I looked the row over, picked a lavender pair, began counting, but Julia interrupted, pointing to another black pair. "Twenty-one." I nodded, began counting the lavender buttons again, and there were twenty-two buttons from wrist to biceps, and we both laughed when I announced this, turning away. "I'm the champ," I said, and Julia said, "Of course." The street life as we walked, slowly—the only way you could move on those thronged walks —was fantastic: Boys, working against the flow of pedestrian traffic like fish fighting their way upstream, shoved advertising throwaways into every hand that would accept one; and men and women, walking, or standing in doorways, sold everything you could think of, and a lot you never would. I made a few sketches along the way, later on working them up a little. I've included some of them here: This girl of about sixteen stood in a doorway holding a wooden board on which boutonnieres of artificial flowers were fastened. She must have seen me looking at her, because when I glanced up from her board to her face she was waiting to meet my eyes; she smiled hopefully, and then ofcourse I had to buy one. They were ten cents, and when I handed it to Julia she thanked me, looking as though she were wondering what to do with it; she tucked it into her muff. In the same block a man stood at a doorway, a basket at his feet, holding out something in his palm for anyone's inspection. WHEN I looked I saw it was a tiny spitz puppy no more than five inches long. There were six more in his basket, whimpering and squirming, and he was offering them for sale. I turned from him, and two men were walking toward us in the crowd, one passing out leaflets, both of them wearing identical sandwich boards and very high-crowned peaked hats. Each of the two hats and sandwich boards was identically lettered 2 ORPHANS, and though I reached for a leaflet I didn't get one, and never did find out what that pair was all about. At Broadway and Twentieth, passing Lord Taylor's, we had to stop abruptly to let a procession of two sail past us toward the curb, a really magnificent dowager in a little flat hat tied on with a ribbon in a big bow under her chin, and a long fur-trimmed coat, and followed by a bareheaded man—store manager, floorwalker?—in a morning coat, wing collar, striped pants, and obsequious smile, carrying her packages, the footman of the waiting carriage leaping down to take them. At Nineteenth we passed a magnificent store of white marble, and I glanced at a brass sign— one was set into the lower edge of each of the long row of display windows—and it said ARNOLD CONSTABLE CO. Beside the store, a middle-aged woman selling toys from a basket sat on a tiny folding campstool next to a flight of stairs. We passed a man in a dark-blue army overcoat, wearing a blue forage cap—the flat Civil War kind—and he was working his way upstream of the traffic flow with a wooden trayful of apples hung from a leather sling round his neck. We passed an elderly woman selling pressed ferns from a basket; I have no idea what they were for. We passed a one-armed middle-aged man, also wearing a blue forage cap; he had a grind organ hanging from his neck by a strap and supported by a single leg; he was turning the handle with his one arm, cranking out—I listened to be sure, and yes, it was—"Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here!"We were never out of sight of one or another of the great clocks set high above the crowds on elaborate iron pedestals; only the well-off carried watches, I remembered Martin's saying; they were expensive, to be passed on to sons and grandsons after them; no Timexes here. I noticed at least half a dozen women in mourning, and I mean complete mourning, everything a solid black; two of them wore heavy black veils besides. And I saw many more lame and crippled people, and people on crutches, and people with pockmarked and birth-marked faces, than I'd ever seen on the streets before. We walked under a huge wooden pair of pince-nez glasses hanging out over the sidewalk to identify the upstairs office of an optometrist; it must have been six feet long, gilded, and with enormous blue eyes painted behind the lenses. A man stood at a portable table with a sign tacked to its edge. The sign was a bird drawn with incredibly ornate and involved pen flourishes and holding a wide curling ribbon in its beak. The words of the sign were written on the ribbon, so fancifully you could hardly read them, and they said the man behind the table would write your name in the same fancy script on a dozen calling cards while you waited, for ten cents. And there were jewelers, confectioners, drugstores, and we passed a restaurant called Purcell's and another called Maillard's. There were quite a few cigar stores, and we must have passed five or six hotels between Madison Square and union Square, each with cigar-smoking, top-hatted, important-looking men endlessly passing in and out. There were still other signs hanging over the walk; gilded wooden watches from the jewelers, a wooden boot from a shoe store, and before every cigar store stood a life-size wooden figure holding a bunch of cigars. A couple of the figures were Indians, but one was a beautifully carved and painted Scotch Highlander, and I saw a baseball player, Uncle Sam, and a terrific goateed, broad-brim-hatted figure that I took to be Buffalo Bill. Two of the hotels had below-street-level barbershops, and at the curb before each stood ten-foot-high wooden barber poles striped red-and-white and surmounted by great gilt balls. At the north end of union Square, as we crossed the street toward it, what Julia called "a German band" stood playing: five playing clarinet, a trumpet, and three brass horns includingaslidetrombone.Theyplayed(men) well,rea(a) lly well, and just as we passed all but thetrumpeter paused while he played a series of rising and falling trills that were great. I dropped several coins into the felt hat that lay bottom up at the feet of one of them. Up ahead I saw a horse edge in to the curb out of the Broadway traffic and begin to drink from a stone? horse-trough. At Broadway and Fifteenth on the square we passed Brentano's Literary Emporium, and I'm not certain of this but I thought a far-off sign read TIFFANY'S. I turned to ask Julia, but she was looking at me curiously, and spoke first. She said, "How did you know what it was?" "Know what what was?" "The Statue of Liberty's arm." I had no answer for a moment; how could I have known? "I saw a photograph of it." She didn't doubt me. "Oh? Where?" Well, where might I have seen it? "In Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. I just didn't realize it was here in New York." She nodded, then frowned. "A photograph?" "Yes, of course. I'm certain the woodcut was made directly from a photograph." She nodded, satisfied, and I said, "Look!" not quite sure at what, but changing the subject. Then I saw a little cluster of people standing before a shopwindow and nodded toward them. We walked over; it was a photographer's shop, Sarony's, and they were looking at a display of sepia photographs: actors and actresses in costume, including tights; long-haired, mustached and bearded politicians, writers, poets, Civil War generals. But the little knot of people—some leaving it, others joining it—was staring in at the most prominent part of the display, a long enlarged photograph mounted on a display easel, a vase of daisies standing before it. It was a familiar face, I was certain I knew it: a bareheaded young man with shoulder-length hair and the beginning of a smile, wearing a long black winter coat with a huge shawllike fur collar and foot-long fur cuffs, holding a pair of white gloves. "Oscar Wilde!" I said, and Julia and one or two other people looked at me pityingly. As we turned away Julia said smugly, "I heard his lecture, you know." "What lecture?" "You are a goose; I thought everyone knew. His lecture at Chickering Hall a couple of weeks ago." "Oscar Wilde lectured here? You heard him? You were actually there? What did he say?""Oh, his subject was the English Renaissance. I don't suppose I paid attention as closely as I should have; Jake was annoyed. But I was annoyed at him; nearly everyone laughed when Mr. Wilde appeared, Jake as loudly as any." "At what?" "The way he was dressed: a clawhammer coat, knee breeches, bows on his shoes. And he wore white kid gloves. He has a very large face." "But what did he say? You must remember something." "Well... he was speaking of Byron, Keats, Shelley, the pre-Raphaelites. And he said, 'To know nothing about these great men is one of the necessary elements of English education,' and everyone laughed. I believe he liked that, because then he said, 'They had three things which the English public never forgive: youth, power, and enthusiasm,' and there was loud applause. Then he said, 'Satire paid them the homage which mediocrity pays to genius.' " "You heard him say that?" I grinned, and shook my head. "You actually heard Oscar Wilde say that?" "Of course," she said absently, without interest; she was staring at an old man standing beside a glass case set on a barrel at the curb. He had a stubby white beard, a wooden leg, and wore a short-billed officer's cap, the braid turned green. Walking toward him, we could see a ship model behind the glass under full sail in a sea of cloth waves. On top of the case a hand-lettered sign said ALL THE WORK OF A POOR OLD SAILOR. We stopped to look, and the old man turned to the case, began working a wooden knob in its side, and the ship started to toss, and the waves moved, alternate layers in opposite directions. He stared patiently ahead so as not to seem to beg, but there was a wooden box with a slot beside the sign, and I dropped a quarter into it and felt Julia's arm under mine tug hard. As we turned to walk on, she whispered fiercely, "He is said to own an entire block of fine houses in Brooklyn!" As though she owned it, Julia showed off to me an enormous block-long store between Ninth and Tenth on Broadway, called A.T. Stewart's, and we stopped so that I could stare. I knew about this store; I knew it was going to survive on into the 1950's as Wanamaker's, but I hadn't realized it was white marble. Stepping closer, I saw that it wasn't marble but cast-iron painted white. In the same block was something called Bunnel's Museum, thick with hand-painted signs: FAT WOMEN, SKELETON, MIDGET! ZULUS! DR. LYNN, THE VIVISECTIONIST! HE CUTS MEN UP! HE MAKES PEOPLE LAUGH! And opposite Stewart's, Jackson's Mourning Store, its windows filled with black clothing, men's, women's, and children's, and including silk hats banded with black crepe that hung down at the backs. A sign in the window said they were OFFERING REDUCED PRICES PREPARATORY TO TAKING STOCK, and I made a small joke about thisbeing a good economical time to die, and Julia looked startled, then laughed as though it were a brand-new kind of joke to her, as maybe it was. A shabby-looking man walking toward us had a cigar box full of little pellets of some kind, and he started to speak but Julia said no so sharply she cut him off, and we left him standing. He was selling "grease erasers," Julia said, to take spots out of clothes, and they didn't work; she'd bought one for a dime once and tried it. Another man was walking slowly toward us, the fingers of both hands flying. Up closer I saw that he had a little contraption in his hand, a needle threader, and he was threading and rethreading the same needle in endless demonstration. Pinned to both lapels were dozens more of them, and as he walked he said, "Ten cents, ten cents, ten cents," over and again. Not far behind him a Turk in red fez, red gold-trimmed vest, white knee breeches, and curled-up red slippers was selling tonka beans from a tray. Before he reached us, I'd turned suddenly aside, pulling Julia along; in a window before which half a dozen people stood staring, sat a baby—it couldn't have been more than two—suspended in some sort of PATENTED BABYSWING, according to the signs pasted on the window and on placards behind it. It sat there apathetically, holding a rattle, a living window-display, and it occurred to me that it might be doped up with one of the laudanum preparations I'd seen advertised in Harper's. But it was a fine and exciting Ladies' Mile, doped-up baby or not, and before we reached the end of it we passed several more old friends: I remember Revillon Frères just below Ninth Street, and W. J. Sloane between Third and Bleecker. And we watched a lightning calculator with his blackboard, doing any kind of mathematical problem anyone called out to him, with really unbelievable speed. He was a marvel. A cigar box with a few coins in it was at his feet, and I dropped a quarter into it, wondering who he could possibly be—or had been.
At Bleecker Julia stepped to the curb beside a lamppost, out of the way of pedestrians, to point down past Houston to what she said was Prince Street, a couple of blocks off, and a new brick building on the northwest corner. That was Rogers Peet, she said; she'd leave me here to go on back and do her shopping. I wasn't sure whether to shake hands with her or not, but I did, and she gave me her hand. I said, "Julia, it's been one of the best times I ever had in my life." She smiled at what seemed like an enormous exaggeration, and said she'd enjoyed it, too, smiling beautifully. Something about the moment, a deceptive intimacy, gave me a sudden courage and I said, "Julia, you can't possibly be seriously considering marrying Jake." She stared. "And why not?" She seemed genuinely puzzled, yet I couldn't believe in it. "Why ... he's far too old for you. And too fat, too homely. And just too all around ridiculous, Julia!" After a long pause she said, "It is you who are ridiculous. He is a fine figure of a man. Far from too old. And he will be an excellent provider." She reached out, put a hand on my arm, and smiled. "A woman must consider these things, you goose. Better to be practical than a spinster." She turned quickly and walked off, up Broadway. I stood watching her: Except for a goodbye later today with whatever excuse I invented, this was the last time I'd see her. Once I'd have thought a girl actually wearing a bustle would look foolish to me, but Julia didn't; she looked graceful, she looked absolutely fine, and I realized that the clothes of all the people passing steadily by, even the shiny silk hats, already looked natural to me. Up ahead Julia was almost lost; there was a final flash of her purple skirt, then she was gone completely, beyond the intervening pedestrians, and I walked on.
It was a dozen blocks or so to City Hall Park, and I walked, but still I arrived much too early. A little wind had come up, and it was too cold to sit in the park and wait; I couldn't risk Pickering's seeing me waiting here anyway; I'd have to move on. But for a few moments I stood beside the little park looking across it at City Hall and at the Court House behind it, marveling at how very much they looked as I remembered them. As well as I could recall, the entire park looked just as it did in my own time, and I brought out my sketch pad, stepped into the park, and sketched it for reference: City Hall and the Court House, the paths, benches, and winter trees. I stood looking at my sketch for a moment, and it could have been done in the latter half of the twentieth century. But now I sketched in a few hurrying pedestrians, and then some of the traffic: a carriage, a waiting hack-line of two-wheeled hansoms at the Broadway corner, an enormous green-andyellow mail truck pulled by four horses on its way to the post office. I looked across the park at Centre Street, and stood remembering how it looked whenever it had been that I'd seen it last— how it was going to look, that is; how the traffic there now would be driven from the streets by the automobile that would follow it. And I sketched that into my scene, too: the automobiles, the enormous diesel buses, the huge trucks that were going to choke this and every other New York street; and I faced them all the same way as though they were not only following but driving the horse-drawn traffic off the scene. I walked on; this was the business and office section of lower Broadway, the area Kate and I had been in, and I crossed the street and walked on along the west wall of the huge, absurd-looking main post office, remembering to look up at the enormous pennant reading POST OFFICE fluttering very stiffly, just now, from a cupola. Just ahead to the south on the other side of Ann Street, I noticed that everyone passing glanced into what looked like a seven-foot-high, extremely narrow sentry box with a gabled roof. It stood at the curb in front of a drugstore in the Herald Building called Hudnut's Pharmacy, and when I passed it I looked in, too. Inside it hung a tremendous thermometer, the biggest I've ever seen, sheltered in the hut from the wind. The temperature 19 degrees, and I was pleased to know the exact temperature, a lot more interested in the w(was) eather somehow than I remembered ever being before. Here in the daylight I was very much aware of what Kate and I hadn't seen in the dark: the incredible profusion of telegraph wires. Like a rube, I walked along for half a block staring up at a gray winter sky actually darkened, or so it seemed, by literally hundreds and hundreds of black telegraph wires on both sides of the street and running across it in bunches of sometimes several dozen, an astonishing mess. Every few yards wooden telegraph poles sprouted from the walk, some of them—I stopped and counted—with as many as fourteen crossarms loaded with wires, each pole, I noticed, marked with the name of whatever competing company had put it there. Traffic was very heavy, rumbling and pounding along on the cobbles, and it occurred to me that this wasn't a very broad way; it was a narrow street, actually, which didn't help the congestion any. There were a great many flat-bedded or low-sided drays hauling barrels or boxes. One dray, labeled MARVINS' SAFE CO. carried a crated safe, and I could see it through the slats, brand-new, black and shiny, a freshly painted little scene—cows in a field—on the upper half of its door. As I watched, a boy ran up behind the dray, scaled the low back gate, and sat down astride it,hitching a ride. In the same block a loaded moving van rolled by, an immense red-painted box on wheels, its driver high up on a seat over the rumps of his team. On the side of the van, under the gilt-painted name BUTLER BROTHERS, MOVING, there was a large painted scene in a wildly ornate gold-painted frame. It was no pastoral scene but a cannon-flashing duel between full-rigged ships, labeled in an oval inset at the bottom THE BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE. The Broadway stages, dozens and dozens of them constantly trundling up and down the street, sometimes three or four in a row, were very much like the Fifth Avenue buses only they were painted red, white, and blue, and they had scenes, too, painted on the sides; mostly pastoral, and pretty much daubs. But they were all different, and I liked this whole idea of scenic decoration of ordinary things. The twentieth century's diesel monsters, I decided, would be improved by some of the same. There were a great many light, single-horse delivery wagons, and in among the commercial traffic an occasional fine carriage moving uptown, toward the Ladies' Mile, I supposed. And everywhere I looked, there were signs, the names of firms occupying the buildings on which the signs hung. Most were black letters on white, or gold letters on black, and they hung out over the sidewalks were wired to building ledges just below rows of windows, slanting slightly downward so (or) they could be read from the street. I liked the street; it was varied, interesting to the eye. The entrances to some of the buildings were four or five steps above street level, the wide flights of stairs often separated by a brass railing into incoming and outgoing sections. Generally there'd be more offices or a barbershop or restaurant or something in the basement section, half below street level, the stairway down to it protected by black iron guard railings with a row of points along the street-level railing to keep loafers from sitting on them. The buildings were constructed from every possible material; there was plenty of brick and wood; there were some whose entire fronts were of cast iron, often as high as three or four stories; there were marble and granite, brownstone, wood, and even stucco. And they were of mixed periods; between newer four-and five-story stone office buildings I passed a lot of small, modest houses of an obviously earlier time, with old-fashioned dormer windows in the upper stories, but the lower stories turned into shops with plate-glass display windows. At one such display window eight or ten men were standing, and I joined them. A girl, looking very prim and a little embarrassed, and never glancing at us, sat demonstrating a typewriter. It was a strange-looking contraption, high and almost completely open, exposing its works, and decorated here and there with gilt-and-red arabesques. Stuck to the window with little dabs of paste were samples of her work, praising the machine, its speed, and its superiority to handwriting. We all watched till she finished what she was doing, a short, sample business letter. Then she stuck that to the window and began a new sample. A man beside me said, "They'll be all the go soon; you watch." But I shook my head and said, "No, they'll never catch on; they lack the personal touch," and he looked thoughtful. I turned away from the window; the walks were crowded, mostly with men. Were there far more portly and even fat men now than you'd see in the late twentieth century? I thought so. Dozens of boys—why weren't they in school?—darted through the crowd in messenger uniforms, the day's equivalent of the telephone, I supposed. There were occasional other boys, not much older, carrying canvas sacks of what seemed to be actual money; I heard the clink of coins insidethem. And there were younger boys, some no more than six or seven, often literally in rags, their faces and hands permanently dirty. Some of these were selling papers. I saw all the morning papers —the Herald, Times, Tribune, Sun, World—and the first afternoon editions of a lot of the others: the Daily Graphic, Staats Zeitung, Telegram, Express, Post, Brooklyn Times, Brooklyn Eagle, and still others I can't remember. Every one of them carried column headings about the Guiteau verdict, and I heard Guiteau's name mentioned often by passersby. Others of the smaller boys shined shoes and boots from portable stands carried by straps slung over their shoulders. These were the boys, it suddenly occurred to me, that Horatio Alger wrote about; he was alive now, I recalled, maybe writing Tom, the Bootblack at this moment. But the bright, eager, cheerful faces he wrote about weren't down here. These faces, even the six-year-olds', were intent and knowing, shrewd and alert, as they had to be—I thought I could see this in their faces—if they were to eat tonight. Several men suddenly stopped on the walk, stepped to the curb, pulled out their watches and then stood, heads thrown back, staring up and across the street, watches still in hand. Even while I was wondering about it, more men stepped to the curb, dragging watches from their vest pockets. And within less than a minute hundreds of men lined the curb of Broadway for blocks, glancing from the open watches in their hands to the roof of one of the tallest buildings along here. The roof was a shingled many-gabled complexity of windowed pyramid-shaped towers of various sizes; rising from their center, and highest of all, was an ornate square tower surrounded at its base by a fenced walk. WESTERN union TELEGRAPH CO. was painted in a circle on the side of the tower, and now I saw that a great many of the wires lining the street originated from this rooftop. A flagpole rose from the roof of the tower, an American flag fluttering rapidly from it; and at the top of the pole directly behind the flag I saw a large bright-red ball. The ball was made with a hole through it apparently, like a doughnut; it surrounded the pole and must have been visible up there for miles around. I didn't know what was going on, but I got out my watch—two minutes to twelve, it said—and stood like the hundreds of other men all up and down Broadway as far as I could see. Suddenly, and there was a simultaneous murmur, the red ball dropped the length of the flagpole to its base, and the man next to me murmured, "Noon, exactly." He carefully set his watch, and I did the same, pushing the minute hand forward. All around me I heard the clicks of the covers of gold watches snapping shut. The hundreds of men at the curb turned and became part of the streams of pedestrians again, and I was smiling with pleasure: Something about this small ceremony, momentarily uniting hundreds of us, appealed to me mightily. Now, just past the stroke of noon, music—chimes—had begun somewhere behind me, and I knew the tune: "Rock of Ages." I turned to look back, and smiled. I'd seen the source of the sound just down the street: it was an old friend, Trinity Church, its chimes clear in the winter air, and I hurried along to it. Then, a couple of dozen steps past the church, my back against a telegraph pole out of the stream of pedestrians, I made a quick reference-sketch which I finished up much later. I'd sketched Trinity before, but this time, incredibly, its tower rose black against the sky, higher than anything else in sight. I finished, making notes in the margins for the final job, stood looking at it, and a messenger boy in a brass-buttoned blue uniform stopped for a moment, looked at my sketch, nodded at me, and walked on. This is the finished sketch and it is absolutely accurateexcept that I added leaves to show the fine old trees more clearly. This is the Broadway I walked along—in the middle distance at the left you can see the Western union Building and the time ball which had just dropped to the base of the pole a few minutes before. Walking back, glancing down at my rough sketch, I was tempted to stop and add the ghosts of the tremendous towers that would someday surround Trinity, burying the tower at the bottom of a canyon. But I was passing the church entrance now, and four or five men hanging around on the sidewalk before it, sizing me up correctly, called, "Visit the steeple, sir! Highest point in the city! Best view in town!" There was just time, and I nodded to the one who looked as though he needed the money most. Inside he led me up a steep endlessly winding stone staircase, on up past the bell-ringing rooms, then past the bells, clanging so deafeningly here that you couldn't make out the separate notes. Finally, at the top, we reached a wooden-floored ledge running under several narrow open windows. My knees felt the climb, and I was trying to hide my puffing. I reached out and tried one of the stone windowsills, making sure it was solid, and the guide laughed. "I was waiting to see whether you'd try that sill; they all do. Not one man in ten will lean up against it till he's sure it'll hold. I've had men up here wouldn't stand within two feet of it when the windows was open. And I've had ladies get sick the minute they looked down." He kept up the chatter while I looked out: The steeple was 284 feet high, he said; it was the highest point in the city, 16 feet taller than even the Brooklyn Bridge towers, and the church stood on a higher piece of ground besides. At least 5,000 people visited this steeple every year, and probably more, but very seldom a New Yorker alone; no one had ever tried suicide by jumping; and so on and on, while I stared out at the entire upper Bay.
The sky was steel-gray, the air very clear, everything sharply etched. Over the low rooftops I could see both rivers, the water—of the Hudson especially—ruffled, gray as hammered lead. Lining South Street off to my left were hundreds and hundreds of masts; I watched the ferries, great paddle wheels churning; I stared out at the church spires high over the rooftops in every direction; I saw the astonishing number of trees, to the west especially, and thought of Paris again; and I looked down at the walks onto the heads of passersby in Broadway, the tiny circles which were the tops of silk hats tilting and winking dully in the clear winter light. At an opposite window I looked uptown, across the roof of the post office toward City Hall Park. Beyond it, off to the east and sharp against the winter sky, stood the great towers of newly cut stone supporting the immense cables from which the roadway of Brooklyn Bridge would hang; now I could see workmen moving along temporary planking laid here and there across great open gaps of the unfinished roadway, the river far below clearly visible. It was a great view of the city from what was, of course, the day's sightseeing equivalent of the Empire State Building far in the future. But there was nothing laughable in the comparison, I thought, staring out at the city; this was the highest view in town just now, however lost among incredibly higher buildings it was going to become. And if someday I'd have to go up ninety-odd stories to get a murky, smog-ruined view of New York instead of this brilliantly defined closer look at a lower and far pleasanter city, then who should be doing the laughing? I wanted to sketch the view, but it would have taken hours just to rough it in, and now I had to hurry. Downstairs I gave my guide a quarter, which made him happy; then, moving fast, I walked back toward City Hall Park.