Their temple was a dingy brick outpost amid a wide, flat waste of black earth crisscrossed by arcing railroad tracks, peppered with piles of scrap metal and creosote-soaked ties, electrical cabinets looted for their copper wire. A sad collection of former trees held up a latticework of power lines. Abandoned freight cars, like caskets awaiting the gravedigger’s backhoe, peeked out from the tunnel at the north end.
Yet on that night the snow was smothering it all, obscuring the tracks, burying the elevated Miller Highway that passed over the yard (a more recent addition than the YMCA, which had sacrificed its roof to the roadway’s substructure), and by the water the jagged black pilings and disintegrated piers were outlined in white, almost glowing against the river.
John had walked south from the tobacco shop, humming Tamino’s aria from The Magic Flute, the tempo a little hot to match his pace, thoughtlessly looping from coda back to the opening bars. The snow had picked up, and the wind was cutting into his coat. His injured hand, the skin split at the knuckles of his first and second fingers, across the transverse metacarpal ligaments, notable because during neither of his hospital visits later that night would he avail himself of medical services, was mercifully numb from the cold.
When John reached the exposed overlook of Freedom Place, the Hudson lobbed pillars of snow at him, possessed, it seemed, of an animal intelligence intent on driving him back where he’d come from. The long iron stairway down to the yard was ramped with snow, and he held fast to the frozen railing with his good hand, skiing the descent. At the bottom, a tin signal shed was peeling apart in the wind.
Once inside the YMCA, he shuddered off the snow and slipped between the thick curtains hung in the library vestibule. Up the mezzanine stairs, he held out three dollar bills, awaiting the flashlight beam from the cutout in the booth. Beam lit the bills. Sal’s hand emerged and took two. Nothing new tonight. John knew not to speak to Sal. He descended the stairs. He knew not to tombstone anyone, not to lean in and ask what was showing. Simple courtesies, house rules. The sacred observances.
He took some satisfaction from adherence to these shibboleths, the same satisfaction his father had once taken at restaurants where he was welcomed warmly, seated expediently, attended to with precision. One earned one’s place of value, his father believed, by understanding what was expected of him—not politesse or, worse, friendliness, but adherence to the standards that defined a gentleman. If a plate of food failed to satisfy Albert’s expectations, he sent it back; it would have been disrespectful to the chef, he explained to his son, to accept substandard fare. What were they, women, falling all over themselves out of fear some stranger might dislike them? How was anyone supposed to know how to act if they weren’t all playing by the same rules? This was the compact, broken at the risk of sacrificing civilization, a precious concept each man carried within him when he went forth into the world. Like explorers into the heart of Africa, said Albert.
Like Jameson? John said, seventeen at the time.
That’s a point of contention and you know it, Albert said.
I read the diaries, John said. What’s the point of contention?
That goddamn school, his father said around a load of pommes frites. Jameson, he said, sacrificed his own legacy when he purchased that girl’s life. And he did it so no man need ever again go through the trial of watching such a thing. Why else would he have made a visual record of the event? He was an observer. He never touched the girl! You can’t apply the standards of the modern age to that benighted era.
He bought her for six handkerchiefs and watched them carve her into pieces, John said. How much would you sell Fil and Tracy for?
How do you think her life would have turned out in a place where the tribal elder would sell her for six handkerchiefs? said Albert. Hm? Do you think this was a place where she would marry and raise children and spend her afternoons drinking iced tea in front of the television? She didn’t even put up a fight. She knew her fate. She might even have been exalted for it.
Like we can trust Jameson’s story, anyway, John said.
Albert put down his fork. Civilization is tectonic plates heaving against one another, he said. Glaciers carving valleys. Vast, collective movements. Individual lives are ground up and forgotten in an instant. These things unavoidably exceed the understanding of a teenager.
Not all teenagers, John said.
All teenagers, Albert said with a laugh. They were talking about the war now. It was a slow, murky river of disagreement from which flowed the tributary arguments that had come to define their relationship. Albert had forbidden John from enlisting though he agreed that there was no substitute for the lessons learned in war. It cooled a man’s impulses, made him less susceptible to the trifles that plagued weaker men, more perfectly oriented him to succeed in the world. If he survived. But what of those whose bodies survived but whose minds didn’t? Albert’s first apartment in New York, 1931, had been in the West Seventies, and if he craned his head out the window and looked west across the rail yard (the same rail yard where John sat at that very moment in 1978) he could see the squatters colony called Camp Thomas Paine. The camp had been populated by forgotten soldiers of the 1917 war. They kept the pathways swept clean and ran the camp with a semblance of military order, but it was unmistakably a place for the lunatic and socially unfit.
