The Stone War Read online

  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 unsur
prising 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.

  From time to time an armored police car cruised by, slowed to survey him, passed on. Weekends or at night, blockcops rarely stopped anyone passing the grilled buildings; people working late took their chances or hired guards. The street people who lived this far downtown kept to clannish packs, avoiding each other and the daytime workers. After dark a solitary walker like Tietjen was an anomaly; anomalies were best left untested.

  He walked on, heading toward Battery Park. Turning a corner suddenly, he startled a covey of old men huddled together in the shelter of a news kiosk, passing a bottle around. The men drew back, muttered resentfully, powerless to do more than glower at the intruder. Tietjen backed off apologetically.

  As he turned east, then south again, he considered making the trip to Staten Island. Years before, when he started his night walks, he would have taken the ferry across and back, reveling in the breeze and motion, the make-believe sea voyage. The old ferries had been retired for ten years, replaced by newer high-speed ferries, computerized, with plastic seats and air-conditioning and glass windows that kept the salt air out. No resonance, no history.

  “Mister?” The voice was ripe as a broken grape. It was one of the men from the kiosk. Tietjen looked up, nodded. “Change, mister? You got a couple bucks?”

  Tietjen nodded again and reached into his pocket. The drunk reeled closer, carrying a miasma with him, engulfing Tietjen.

  “Thanks.” The man took two dollar pieces. “You know you shu’nt go scaren people like you done.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

  The old drunk insisted belligerently, his face shining red in the lamplight. “People get killt ‘roun here. No’by ever tol’ you that?”

  Tietjen thought of Irene. “Yeah, they’ve told me.”

  The drunk stared a moment at Tietjen, sizing him up, trying blearily to read him: armed, not armed, carrying money? Who walked alone, strolling at this hour? “Fuggit, you fuggin’ crazy.” The drunk shook his head, shuffling back toward the darkness again. “We do’ wan’ no crazies ’n our neighborhood,” he called back.

  Tietjen watched him go, feeling almost affectionate toward the old man. Then he continued on southward to the Customs House just above Battery Park. Tietjen stopped a moment; firelight from the B-Park shacktown nearby cast flickering shadows on the elaborate Beaux Art detailing—paired columns, allegorical friezes, and four marvelous statues at the street level, draped with glittering security grating. At the base of the statues a few dark shapes were settled in for the night, unmoving, but beyond, in Battery Park, the shacktown moved, settled and resettled in the darkness, fires flickering, voices sounding loudly then dropping off. B-Park was one of the worst shacktowns: the most murders, the most drugs. B-Park was what Central Park had been, a decade ago, and now it was a mystery he knew better than to explore. Instead, he began to trace the winding, archaic streets that were all that was left of New Amsterdam’s cow paths. A little after midnight he turned north and west again.

  The air by the Hudson was cool, as fresh as it got anywhere in New York in June. Tietjen walked slowly, marking the sound of his own footfall, watching on his right for the small details of occupancy that occurred from time to time in the buildings near the water. To his left was the river, and the nest of parks and plush event spaces that had taken over the Lower West Side piers in fifteen years. Lit by light reflected from the Jersey shore, most of the piers were ostentatiously off-limits to all but the wealthy, surrounded by grilles, velvet ropes, and blank-faced security. Limousines glided up and rolled away; the hush of money just made the grimness of the warehouses and factories across the street more profound.

  A rustle, a padding noise warned him of another presence behind him on the dock. “Ey, man.” Lilti
ng menace, gang lowspeak: the consonants softened to mush.

  “Hey,” Tietjen returned. He did not turn around. It was not the first time he had been noticed or stopped by the docks. He made himself still despite the silver whisper of metal and leather behind him.

  “What you doin’ here, so late? Y’a cop? You some kinda Uptown?”

  “Just walking.”

  A buzz of murmuring behind him, then a kid in piecemeal leathers, his face obscured by one of the old leather “samurai” helmets favored by some street gangs, slipped up beside him, indicating that Tietjen was to walk with him.

  “Seed you here before, man. Whyfor you come walkin here?”

  Tietjen smiled and spread his hands, but carefully, gently. “I like it. It’s good here, you know?”

  The kid looked at him curiously, Asian eyes set in a Chicano face, glittering in the Jersey light. “You know?” he echoed. There was another whisper from behind them, a prodding. “Man, you got any money?”

  Tietjen nodded, tasting acid. “A little. You want it?”

  The kid watched him, the whispering stopped. “Fuck me,” the kid said, and turned to grin at his followers. “Do we want your money? Gotta pay the toll, man. Give here.”

  Tietjen reached slowly into his pocket for the mugger’s roll he kept on him—enough money to make the kids feel they’d made a score, not enough to make them wonder why the hell he was there in the first place and roll him for his watch, cards, everything else.

  The kid counted the money. “Okay,” he said at last, deliberately, so that the rustling soldiers in the shadows could hear him. “You crazy motherfucker, man, you know? No Uptown come walkin’ here, this Dogs’ turf. What the fuck you doin’?” Before Tietjen could answer, the kid answered himself. “You like it here, right?” His tone was heavily satirical, touched with just a breath of understanding and faith.

  Tietjen nodded.