“You said it was just a story,” Davy said. He tucked in his chin and watched his father cautiously.
He couldn’t stop. “Did you know there’s a bronze statue of a sled dog in the park? And one of Alice and everyone in Wonderland, and—from the inside of the Park you can hardly see the tops of the buildings, you can pretend you’re somewhere—” Confronted by two small, unblinking faces, “Look,” he wanted to say. “I love this place. I give it to you.”
“My teacher says Central Park should have been torn up for subsidy housing a long time ago,” Chris said.
“Your teacher—” Tietjen began.
“Mamma said we shoun’t ever go in here. Mamma says people get killed here. All the time. With
knives.”
Davy’s eyes widened at the thought of knives. “I want to go slipskating.”
The knot of failure in Tietjen’s gut tightened. “What about Brooklyn,” he said. “I thought we had a deal.”
“I don’ wanna, Daddy. People in Brooklyn got knives, too.”
What was he going to do, argue with a five-year-old about who in Brooklyn did or didn’t carry a knife, an automatic, a shotgun? “You too, Chris?”
Chris took refuge in superiority. “Really, Dad. I don’t wanna go look at some old trains.” He sounded like Irene.
“Okay.” Tietjen swallowed and sat back. “Okay. Slipskating. We can stay on this bus to Thirty-fourth Street.” He settled into his seat, looking out the window again. What if I dragged them to the exhibit or into the Park? he thought. It wouldn’t make them love it.
By the time the bus reached Thirty-fourth Street he had forgotten the idea and was listening to his sons with gentle, conquered affection.
They went slipskating, ate lunch, saw a movie. The boys enjoyed themselves, and Tietjen enjoyed their pleasure. Still, he felt distant and unsatisfied. He had never learned the knack of compromise between what he wanted and they wanted. He loved everything about his sons, loved watching them unfold a little bit each week, a new layer of baby peeling back to reveal the sturdy enthusiasm and sweetness of boy; loved the peachy glow of their skin in the sunlight, the flinty blue of Davy’s eyes, and Chris’s gap-toothed smile. He looked at them and loved them, and couldn’t say no or force the issue of teaching them what he loved about New York. Each Saturday Tietjen wound up feeling a little cowardly, afraid to see dimming light in his boys’ eyes.
They were back at Irene’s by 5:30, the brassy light of afternoon lighting the upper stories of the red brick towers. As usual when he brought the boys back, Irene invited him in for coffee, and as usual he accepted, wondering if this would be the night when they broke the pattern and he left before a fight started. In the kitchen Tietjen and Irene chatted idly, about the boys mostly. School, friends, dentist appointments, affectionate minutiae. Where he had taken the boys that afternoon. Just as he thought he had handled the question, Davy padded into the room. Tietjen watched as Irene slowly twined her hand through Davy’s thick dark hair, reached down a glass for him, and let the boy pour his own juice. Davy’s face was a study in concentration; Irene’s above him was soft, gentle.
“Daddy was going to take us to the Park, too,” Davy said when he had successfully filled the glass. “Can I get some for Chris?”
Irene, reaching for another glass, fixed Tietjen with a familiar look. She waited until Davy had both glasses carefully balanced in his hands and had made a cautious way back down the hall again. Then she summoned a smile strung tight as wire.
“Central
Park? Jesus, John, you would
not
take my sons—not even
you
would take them in there. Especially not since the City withdrew the police from inside the walls.”
“I’ve never had any trouble there.” Never mind that he hadn’t walked through Central Park in years; never mind that he’d never seriously thought of taking the boys there. “Irene, we didn’t—”
“You have no right to put my sons at risk—”
“I didn’t! Jesus Christ, Reen, I love them too! They’re my sons too! Why the hell would I put them at risk for anything? What I did was say ‘Hey, look, that’s Central Park—’”
“Trying to get them to—”
“Trying to get them to do nothing. I
can’t
get them to do anything, Reen. If I had suggested the Park, you’ve got them so conditioned they’d close down immediately.”
She smiled. “Good. They listen.”
“They
listen?
They’ve bought into your terror—it’s no way to live.”
“There is nothing wrong with the way we live. It’s you. I’m the one who’ll have to tell the boys you were killed on one of your damned walks. You don’t think there’s any danger, but people are killed all the time all over this goddamned city.”
There was no point pretending that battle had not been joined. Tietjen felt sorry and defensive. Deeply, wearily familiar anger grew in him.
“Irene, you have no idea where I go—”
“Does it matter? One night you’ll be killed somewhere. God, John, will you wake up? Out there—” She gestured with a fist toward the shrouded window. “People are living in a state of war.”
“That’s just what you read,” he threw back. “You hide up here in this place and everything you know, you learn from the tabloids. You have no idea about the people you share this city with.” He was at the edge of the pit again, about to fall in again, the same way he always did. Tietjen made himself stop for a moment, breathing as if he had been running, reaching for logic and reason and words that would explain.
The right words didn’t come. Instead, “Irene, take a walk with me.” Let the city explain it to her. Maybe this time it would work.
Their eyes met and held. There was a long moment of intensity, and the air seemed to shimmer between them. Then Irene shook her head. “You’re out of your mind.”
Tietjen was reluctant to let the moment go. “Really. Take a walk with
me
. I mean, really outside, away from the bus shelters and the cab stands. I can show you—”
Irene pulled away from his outstretched hand, jarring her coffee cup, and busied herself nervously mopping up spilled coffee. “Come on, John, I don’t want to—”
“A short walk. You won’t be gone more than an hour. You used to ask me where I went when I walked; I’ll show you. You used to think my walks were romantic.”
Irene shook her head, disowning the memory. “I can’t leave the boys.”
“Call a sitter,” Tietjen said persuasively. “Let them go to the playroom—the attendant should still be on duty. Tell the guards downstairs you have to go out for a few minutes. What are you afraid of? The city can’t reach in and grab them.”
That was the wrong thing to say; he knew it as the words left his mouth. The denial that might have been the beginning of acquiescence changed to a hard, flat no in her eyes. Furious at himself, nothing left to gain, still he went on. “Reen, there are two men in your lobby who monitor security cameras all over this building twenty-four hours a day. There are six locks on your door. There’s a brace of guards by the door downstairs itching for the chance to use the guns they’re carrying. You and Chris and Davy could live out your lives in this goddamned fortress and never know there was a world out there, with people in it—”
“I don’t
need
to know.” She stood up. “I don’t
want
to know about them. I know enough: there are people out there waiting to kill you if you give them a chance. That fucking world out there is killing people all the time. Out there—if you weren’t here, if I could afford to, I’d take the boys and get so far away from New York—” She waved her hands disgustedly. “You keep your damned city; one of these days it’ll catch up to you.”
“I’d like my sons to know something more about New York than armed schoolbuses and security patrols.” The coffee in his cup was stone cold.
“I’d
like my sons to live long enough to make a choice about it,” she countered. “I think maybe you’d better go, John.” She turned her head to call down the hall: “Boys! Your father is leaving.”
Tietjen went past her into the living room to wait for his sons. Davy came first, running as usual; Tietjen caught him and swung him in a circle that put the lamps and table at risk. Davy gave him a quick, sloppy kiss. “I had a real good time, Daddy. I love you.” Chris waited in the doorway until Davy was done, then ambled over, unconcerned, and unbent enough to give his father a shy kiss and a back-slapping hug.
“Love you guys. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”
Finally, aware that Irene was waiting with broadly repressed impatience, Tietjen stood and followed her and waited as she unlocked the locks. “Good night, Reen.”
She said nothing. The door closed behind him and as he walked down the hall he could hear the bolts slipping into place.
Tietjen left Irene’s building without plan and began walking south, downtown, walking off his anger, walking into connection. The light was full of fading reflections, sunlight slanting orange through trees on Park Avenue; the air was warm and reedy with voices. He walked with his head up, recording buildings and people, feeling the anger and tension ease out of him as the first mile and then the second went by. Park Avenue—the square, residential blocks of unsurprising granite gave way to glass-faced corporate towers in the Fifties, and then the startling gilded pleasure of Grand Central below that. Tietjen walked through blockcops and peddlers, across to Fifth Avenue and past the offices and stores of Midtown, gradually toward Greenwich Village. He had grown up here before the tidy residential streets in the Village were sealed off by ornate iron fences and gates; now he did not try to chat with the guards who stood at parade rest behind them cradling rifles in their arms, or crane to admire the old brownstones. Instead, he skirted Washington Square, threading through the bazaars on MacDougal and across Houston, through SoHo and into Little Italy. Here the streets were the way he remembered them from his childhood: small buildings, people walking and talking freely, only an occasional policeman or brace of blockcops wandering through the crowds. Families together, mothers leaning out of windows into the soft, heavy June air to call their children in; a cluster of old men playing checkers and arguing sanguinely; kids no older than Chris teaching each other street moves: daring each other into tough poses, eyes lidded, high nervous giggling.
Tietjen walked among them, comfortably unnoticed, observing. A smell of cooking made him veer down a side street seeking the source. He found a street fair, hardly a block long; a few crafts booths, some rickety games, a sausage seller, a banner announcing the whole effort to be on the behalf of Our Lady of something or other. He bought two delicious greasy sausages from a wizened woman who wore an apron stippled with grease and charcoal, and they stood watching children playing tag between the legs of the passersby. He thought of Chris and Davy, wondering what they would make of the fair.
“S‘okay, huh? S’good?” the woman beside him prompted. “The sausage. You want another?”
Tietjen licked the grease from his hand. “No more, but yes, it’s very good.”
“Another hour, pfff!” She made a sweeping motion with one hand. “Gonna be all gone. A week I’m making them, and in a hour they gone. You got to put the right spices in, see. You got to grind it all very fine.” Tietjen listened, captivated, while the old woman described the process in exotic detail, her face lit from below by the flame from the grill she tended. The seasoning, the grinding, stuffing the skins—“the right thinness, you got to get—” He loved this about walking in the city: it seemed he could talk with anyone, with strangers, get past all strangeness and fear.
“Don’t you worry, being out after dark out here?” he asked her, thinking of Irene.
“Here? In this crowd? It’s my home, I live here sixty-seven years. Besides.” She pulled her apron slightly askew, revealing the handle of a small pistol in her skirt waistband. The sight diminished Tietjen’s pleasure in the conversation; he felt saddened, diminished by the sight of it. The old woman smiled at him, smoothed her apron down and turned to serve another customer. He stood a while longer beside her, watching the children, trying to recapture the comfortable companionship the sight of the gun had interrupted. At last Tietjen turned back to the woman and they exchanged good-nights. He started walking south again, toward the dark and quiet of the financial district. He would be walking late tonight, he thought, and he was suddenly eager for the windy echoes to be found farther downtown.
Broadway was empty, an echoing fault in the face of the city. Tietjen walked from streetlamp to streetlamp, skirting the steel-grilled plazas and peddler’s sheds that surrounded the buildings, savoring the feel of soft air, the taste of salt, the way sounds traveled here. He liked the lightless faces of buildings, their evidence of busy occupation uncluttered by its substance. To the west the old World Trade Center rose out of a granite and steel surround, ugly and graceless and compelling. There were security grilles around all but the municipal buildings, where armed city cops swept through periodically to oust the sleeping homeless. The grilles, some of them quite beautiful, made Tietjen think of the buildings and courtyards they encompassed as walled cities, medieval keeps. There was comfort in the huge buildings that loomed over the streets, glass towers and gilded domes, caryatids staring down into atria. Alone in the middle of the street he felt a kinship with the thousands who walked there by day: bankers, messengers, court clerks and lawyers, peddlers and street people. Tietjen found himself smiling at the air and the buildings.