Crazy for Cornelia (44 page)

New Money must have moved into this building, Kevin noted. The shoulders of Eddie’s new maroon uniform had epaulets to match
the glitz of the renovated lobby. The light of an oversized chandelier bounced off the gilded walls and shiny marble surfaces.
This ornate room had once been old and stuffy. For fifteen years, Kevin’s father had worked the door, sorted mail, and called
each resident by name.

“Where’s my dad?” Kevin wanted to know.

“On a break.” Eddie’s eyes shifted uncomfortably seeing Philip Grace. “What’s this asshole doing here?”

“Capturin’ the real you, fool,” Philip told him, yanking his camera out of his bag and pop-popping off pictures of Eddie covering
his face with his arms like a crook.

“What the hell are you up to, Kevin?” Eddie yelled. He didn’t call him Dumbo now, Kevin noticed. “Andrew, what do you think
you’re doing?”

“I’m with Kevin,” Andrew said with his jaw out, nodding so hard his hat slid back and Kevin could see the base of his “I Love
Jesus” skullcap.

“Chester Lord fired me without cause.” Kevin fished in his pocket and pulled out the page ripped off the staff room bulletin
board. “Here’s the regulation.”

“Two forty-seven.” Eddie Feeney didn’t bother to glance at it, running his tongue over his lips, his eyes drifting in every
direction. “That’s bullshit. You’re a mental case.”

“We’re going on strike, Eddie. With or without you.”

“A strike. You tellin’ me how to do my job, now?”

“You learn something new every day.”

Eddie’s chest bunched up under his coat, his fists tightening. And then Dennis Doyle appeared from the deep corridor of the
rear lobby. Dennis looked like some banana republic colonel in his new uniform.
He looked stunned to see his son. For the first time Kevin could remember, Dennis embraced him in a hug as fierce as a wrestling
lock.

“It’s good to have you back in uniform, son.”

“Dad, we need your help.”

“What for?”

“Job action!” Vlad the Self-Impaler held up the
Globe
page with the photo of Kevin and Corny and shook it in the air. “Wrongful firing at 840 Fifth. The workers unite.”

“Eddie sold us out, Dad. Chester Lord fired me in violation of R247. Eddie won’t do anything.”

Kevin kept an eye on Eddie while he spoke. Not a pretty sight. He could smell his uncle now, the heavy musk of a trapped animal.
He watched him seem to devolve, before his eyes, from
Homo sapiens
doorman into the essential brawling Eddie. His forehead jutted over his eyes, ancient resentment forcing his mouth open with
what looked like roast-beef gristle caught between his teeth.

“So it’s you or Kevin I have to believe, Eddie?” His father gave his uncle a stare of royal contempt Kevin hadn’t seen since
Charles Barkley played for the Suns.

Eddie looked slick and sweaty as he appealed to his father, for the first time ever. “I got you your job. Your kid’s so full
of crap, he can’t even fart straight.”

“Let’s go, men,” Dennis said.

Eddie growled, his fingers flexing in their gloves, and started to block their way. Dennis and Kevin looked at each other,
grabbed him up together and shoved him against the wall.

“Don’t make me tell the union management on you, Eddie,” Dennis said. “You can get fired easier than any of us.”

The delegate looked away defeated, no longer meeting Dennis’s eyes.

“Hey, Eddie,” Kevin said.

Eddie turned back to scowl at him.

“Ping!” Kevin snapped his uncle’s left ear with his finger.

The doormen walked out of 2000 Fifth Avenue, wheeled left, and started downtown from 95th Street. Fifth Avenue sprawled before
them with neat rows of expensive co-op buildings on the east side,
Central Park on the west. Their first stop was next door, an elegant prewar building.

Dennis stuck his head in the lobby. “Charlie… Humberto,” he told the two doormen on duty. “Let’s take a walk.”

“Huh?” An elderly man in a dark blue overcoat and cap with silver trim squinted at them. “We’re on duty here.”

It took Kevin, Dennis, and Andrew only five minutes to talk the first two doormen into joining them, with Vlad holding the
Daily Globe
, and pointing to Kevin’s picture for effect. Then it became a movement. In the next ten minutes, the squad of doormen had
grown to ten. They strode at a military clip, taking the full width of the sidewalk, with Philip Grace leaping beside them
like a border collie. Kevin felt a stirring in his chest. As they greeted the two men tending the next gilt-edged doorway,
he felt that he spoke with the voice of legions.

“Guys,” he yelled, “the doormen are walking.”

Kevin had never led anyone before. Now a brand-new and giddy confidence glowed from inside out. They were walking down the
glorious stretch of Fifth Avenue known as Museum Mile, bordered by the Museum of the City of New York to the north and the
Frick Collection to the south. In the middle, just twelve blocks down, stood the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Kevin’s
mother had last shown him Giotto’s
Lost Saint Sebastian
.

They worked each door they passed steadily and with conviction. By the time the gathering storm of doormen reached the elegant
Cooper-Hewitt Museum at 91st Street, their ranks had swollen to thirty men falling behind him.

“The doormen are walking, ”
they yelled. But it wasn’t just a walk now.

It was a March of the Doormen.

From every filigreed doorway, men from the ranks of New York City’s private guard enlisted. The polished black brogues began
to tramp on the sidewalk like military boots. The working faces—Irish, Puerto Rican, black, Polish—took on a fresh purpose,
with shining eyes and chins held higher.

“The Artist,” Kevin’s father beamed at him.

They passed the flamboyant Guggenheim Museum on their left. Kevin had walked up the heady, winding aisle of the Guggenheim
many times. He had never agreed with some critics who sneered that the slab addition behind the flared white cylinder made
it look like a toilet.

The
artist
. He was definitely doing something now, pulling these men together in common cause, but was it art?

Well, why not? Nobody ever did it before, and it would offend some people. But if it worked, that was what mattered.

As they marched one hundred strong past the big intersection of 86th Street, spilling out into the street and disturbing traffic,
the word spread down Fifth Avenue as though Central Park were on fire. On this boulevard where the rich, the mighty, the royalty
of New York City looked out their windows at the commotion, none of them would dare face down these marching men. If sanitation
workers struck, the doormen could pile up the garbage on the streets. If the police staged a call-in-sick action, the doormen
would be extra vigilant for burglars and muggers. But each marcher knew in his heart that, once the doormen walked, neither
Old Money nor New Money would open their own doors or whistle for their own cabs.

All the wealth and power and majesty of Fifth Avenue would collapse like a house built of RSVP cards in the face of an organized
doorman strike.

Gently supported by her father’s arm, Cornelia stepped carefully in the outrageous sweeping dress, lace flowing behind her.
Two tiny blond cousins lifted the ends in their small fingers, giggling as they tried to match the bride’s steps.

Ooooh
.

She heard the guests in genuine throes of appreciation or envy as she rounded the corner and revealed herself. She saw family
friends and neighbors. Lily Stern, haughty and mildly disapproving. Old Chip Lindsay, leering. The two Roberts, her old friends,
nudging each other and smirking like schoolboys. Don’t men ever grow up? Especially Robert No. 2, who stared at her gown with
a fascination that went beyond admiration. Envy seemed to roar from his face. Robert No. 2 had always been overly fascinated
by his sister’s clothes closet. And Tina, her maid of honor, crossing her eyes to make Corny laugh. Memories
had begun to flicker as she walked down the aisle, with so many familiar faces.

Madame had coached her in each step. She moved forward, head held high and unwavering as though a stack of twenty volumes
rested on her forehead.

She glanced sideways toward her father. No poker player, her father, his eyes reflecting doubt. He stood near a woman she
dimly remembered, at least six feet tall in a slinky dress, with prominent features and an explosion of hair like a burning
bush. Her eyebrows were dark and arched, her lips wide and somehow comforting.

And now she reached the Wedding Bower where Tucker stood. He stood so proudly and threw off such absolute confidence. Her
father released her arm with a little squeeze, then angled off to the side and left her to the bower, bequeathing her to the
groom.

Tucker steered her gently toward him with his strong hands. She stepped into the fragrant gazebo and the minister greeted
her, bobbing his bald head and several chins.

“Dearly beloved…” the minister began.

By the time Kevin steered them the last block to 840 Fifth Avenue, the March of the Doormen had grown to over two hundred
men thundering in close formation.

Pedestrians stood aside and gawked. Yellow taxis and black Town Cars, locked in that yellow and black checkerboard of New
York streets, screeched and piled up in a jumble of stopped traffic.

Vlad the Self-Impaler marched on point, arms swaying and legs lifted high up in the old Red Army parade ground style. Andrew
had fallen in lockstep with him, eyes gleaming with the gentle fury of the righteous. And even Dennis Doyle was a firebrand
today, his nostrils flaring in defiance as he marched beside his son.

“I won’t forget this, Dad,” Kevin said, squeezing his father’s arm.

“Nor will I.” Dennis winked at him.

The minister’s chins opened like an accordion as he began to speak.

He looks like a frog, Cornelia thought. She had to bite her lower lip to keep from laughing out loud.

“… in the state of grace and this holy company…” the minister croaked. In the shafts of light seeping in through the French
doors to the terrace, his gray hair took on a silvery haze around it, a halo of light.

“A corona,” Cornelia blurted out. The minister stopped speaking, causing Tucker’s face to spin toward her with a look of sudden
horror.

“Excuse me?” the minister asked, perplexed, and she could hear the faintest murmur in the room.

“Nothing,” she apologized in a small voice. “Sorry.”

The odd vision of the halo had gone away. A cloud was passing over the sun outside, and she could see only the minister’s
slicked-back gray hair in the winter light.

Kevin squinted down Fifth Avenue, his chest thrust out against the cold. The unmanned awning of 840 Fifth Avenue came into
sight just as the bleating of police sirens grew louder.

Four blue and white cruisers pulled up to block the entrance to 65th Street. The officers piled out, meeting a crew of eight
police officers who suddenly came huffing around the corner from the side street. They carried yellow “Police: Do Not Enter”
sawhorses to create a barricade in front of the marchers. Kevin saw that Uncle Eddie hustled along in front with the befuddled
building manager Gus Anholdt and a harried police supervisor holding a megaphone.

Kevin didn’t break the march of his men toward 840 Fifth now as the police supervisor, a heavyset officer with deep caramel
skin, raised his megaphone in their direction.

“This is Lieutenant Simms, NYPD. You’ve got no permit to march,” his voice reverberated. “Turn around and go back to your
jobs.”

Philip Grace ran ahead, waving his press pass high in the air, to prance in front of the lieutenant. “Hell, no! Workin’ press
here, plus a whole mess of pissed-off union men. Why you strike-bustin’ for the owners, Lieutenant?”

As the March of the Doormen kept its cadence like a drumroll, advancing on the police line, the officers who manned the barricades
looked uneasy. Kevin put his hand over his eyes to look up to the terrace
of Penthouse A. He could see white silk billowing in the wind, like banners on a parapet.

He threw his white-gloved hand up in the air, and was shocked when the first ranks of the doorman actually halted at his command.
The movement rippled through all the rest as the mass slowed down and finally stopped, men spreading out across the entire
intersection of 65th Street and Fifth Avenue.

Kevin walked briskly to the police lieutenant, who projected an air of authority with no clear idea of how to use it at this
moment.

“Officer, if it’s okay with you, I just need to borrow your megaphone for a second.”

“Are you kidding me?”

One of the police officers tapped their lieutenant on the shoulder and leaned close. “Sir, I’m tellin’ you as your PBA rep,
I think you ought to look at the big picture here.”

The lieutenant, looking ungrateful for his rank today, covered his mouth as he huddled quickly with the Policeman’s Benevolent
Association union man so Kevin couldn’t hear what they were saying.

Andrew moved in, speaking low to the lieutenant. “Get on the right side of this, brother. We’ve got a peaceful situation here.
Keep things steady.”

The lieutenant’s eyes went back and forth unhappily, trying to look at a big picture that had just changed with the new element,
Kevin realized, of a swelling crowd of pedestrians around them. Civilians were running and jogging from every direction for
a better view of the March of the Doormen. Traffic stopped on the street, bumper-to-bumper like rush hour. Horns honked. Drivers
shouted.

Kevin took a breath and took action. He grabbed at the megaphone the lieutenant held loosely in his hand.

The lieutenant gripped it and pulled it back, wide-eyed. “What the hell you think you’re doing? That’s police equipment.”

“C’mon,” Kevin pleaded. “Just for a second.”

The lieutenant looked at his megaphone like it was giving him an ulcer, and let Kevin take it.

Kevin spoke clearly into the megaphone, shouting up to the sky. “Chester Lord! I need to talk to you. Now.” His voice reverberated
with a righteous calm. “And I really need to speak to Cornelia.”