Bear and His Daughter

ABSENCE OF MERCY

MACKAY ONCE described himself as “the last orphan.” He has a forlorn and humorous manner that makes his friends delight in the phrase. Some of them use it behind his back.

As a child of five, Mackay was sent to an institution operated by a Catholic order of teaching brothers. Though it was described as a boarding school, the male children who attended St. Michael’s were all homeless to a greater or lesser degree, and many had lost, one way or another, both parents. About half had been enrolled by surviving relatives, who paid the Pauline Brothers a tuition that, in the mid-1940s, amounted to fifty dollars a year. Others had been placed there by the family-court system through the network of Catholic charities. The children were referred to, quaintly, as “scholars.”

A significant minority of St. Michael’s scholars were statutory delinquents. Many were suffering from emotional disturbances of varying severity. All were unhappy and unloved or unwisely loved or loved ineffectively. All were mildly malnourished; in later life, Mackay would find himself unable to remember the food at St. Michael’s as food, only as the stuff of guilt or sickness. All were subject to unremitting petty violence.

To be a scholar at St. Michael’s was to live on one’s nerves. A good beating was forever at hand. Pale children were always whispering, their jaws rigid like ventriloquists’, about surprise attacks, revenge and retribution. Sometimes it would seem to Mackay that his grade school years were a single continuous process of being found out in transgression and punished. At other times he would recall them as a physical and moral chaos of all against all.

Mackay had been placed in St. Michael’s by reason of his mother’s incapacity. His virgin aunt, a schoolteacher, paid the brothers. Mackay’s mother was a single parent before her time and a paranoid schizophrenic. She was an educated, well-spoken woman, and Mackay could remember that in the years before their separate institutionalization she had often read to him. He could also remember lying with her in a dark room while music that was solemn and frightening played from an ornate wooden radio. Once in St. Michael’s he forgot, for a while, his mother’s face. He thought of her as a vague, troubled, tender presence. He was surprised, as an adult, to learn that she had been known to display a violent side.

Mackay’s own experience of violence began at St. Michael’s, where it appeared in three principal forms. The first was intramural, taking place among the scholars themselves and visited by the strong upon the weak. In obscure corners, in lavatories, showers and the swarming darkness after lights out, boys alone or in combinations fought out the laws of struggle and dominance. St. Michael was a warrior angel and St. Michael’s Institute had the social dynamic of a coral reef.

In its second variation, violence was attendant upon the scholars’ education and correction and was meted out from above by the brothers. Sometimes it was spontaneous and consisted of a clip, with or without a knuckle filling, to the head of a boy skylarking or talking in ranks. Idling in class, insufficiently complete answers to a teacher’s question, or simply wrong ones, might also bring such an expression of displeasure. On one occasion, an unhappy arithmetic teacher lined up his entire third-grade class and slapped each scholar twice, hard across the face. Someone’s slip of the tongue had provoked general unseemly laughter. The teacher; sardonically Mackay later believed, ordered his scholars to offer their humiliations to the Holy Ghost. The corporal punishment Mackay most dreaded was that administered formally, by the prefect of the primary school, with a worn razor strop. The smallest children and those in their first weeks at St. Michael’s were not subject to such rigors, lax deportment in them being seen as the fruit of natural depravity. But for scholars aged six and over, the words “You will stand by my room … tonight!” uttered theatrically in the French-Canadian inflections of Brother Francis, prefect of the grammar school, were an occasion of stark, sick-making terror.

Finally, among the forms of violence, there were the weekly “smokers,” in which a scholar found himself confronting both the authority of the institute and the mob spirit of his fellows. In the smokers, boys six and over were obliged to put on boxing gloves and flail away at each other for three two-minute rounds — time enough, Mackay discovered, to get beaten thoroughly. For years Mackay dreaded Thursday evenings and the smokers. In the middle of his second year; matched against a talented boy from West Virginia, he lost much of the hearing in one ear and years later discovered that his eardrum had been broken and his inner ear injured. Eventually he learned the requisite lessons. He learned to keep his head and to use his own anger. He learned to take blows, to take courage from someone else’s show of pain and to use another’s fear to his own advantage.

The necessity of accommodating the realities of conflict caused Mackay much inward confusion. He recalled and idealized his mother’s gentleness like a lost kingdom, but pining about it would not do. Homesick brooding made him teary and vulnerable, which was a dangerous way to be. Struggle was the law. During his first years at St. Michael’s, World War II was in progress. The war and the patriotic effort to fight it were presented at St. Michael’s as having a sacred character. The war was an occasion of suffering and death, states that were well regarded there. Death was particularly sublime, the highest form of existence and a condition to be acquired as soon as responsibility permitted. The virtuous dead were the Church triumphant.

Mackay understood the weakness of his position. He felt that he required help from higher powers, but the higher powers seemed firmly on the side of Brother Francis, their earthly representative. Mackay’s religious allegiances shifted with his daily fortunes. One day he would find himself in transports of love for his Father in Heaven, who was after all the only one he knew, and he would pray that God’s will be done on earth. At other times he would desire nothing so much as the defeat and ruin of the United States, on the theory that even the conquering Japanese were bound to be an improvement on the Pauline Brothers. On such days he would address his prayers to Satan, Hitler and Stalin. It would seem at these times that the right side was not for him. Even today he seems to carry a strain of destructive skepticism in his nature, together with a strange credulity.

In the course of his time at St. Michael’s, Mackay was able to laugh off much of the brothers’ absent-minded battery. He joined a school gang, fought for and held a middling status in the primate democracy. He became a friend of one of the gang’s principals, a red-headed boy named Christopher Kiernan, who excelled at the smokers. Mackay himself came to enjoy the smokers and even won a few. The statutory evening punishments he would never forgive or forget.

In the hours before lights out, there were always a few boys aged between six and nine standing in a line outside the cubicle in which the brother prefect slept. Besides serving as the House of Pain, the brother prefect’s room was a place of great mystery, the only adult residence with which many of the scholars were familiar. Those who visited it most frequently would have been hard put to describe it, distracted as they were by their own fear and shame. Mackay remembers the white curtain, like a hospital screen, across the door and the smell of the brother prefect’s pipe tobacco.

After the evening prayer and the bustle of innocent scholars retiring, the standers-by were left in semidarkness with the beating of their own hearts. Very occasionally, on the eve of holidays or simply at a whim, Brother Francis would commute the sentences of the condemned and send them scattering joyfully to bed. This remote possibility added a dimension of suspense to the nightly drama and enabled the children to experience the edifying sensation of vain hopes disappointed.

Ten minutes to a quarter of an hour after the lights had gone out, the prefect would emerge from behind his curtain and eye the quivering scholars like a high priest inspecting the offerings. He would then make a withering remark at their expense; one of his favorites was to address them as “mother’s little darlings,” a characterization hardly appropriate, since they were in fact orphans about to be beaten. Mackay always felt it directed at him in particular.

Then Brother Francis would return inside and consult his dreaded little black book and call the scholars in one by one. Punishment was administered in silence. It was expected to be endured with patience and to be, as the phrase went, “offered up.” It was often pointed out at St. Michael’s that Our Lord himself had cooperated with the authorities who put him to death, meekly obeying their commands in order that the sacrifice be accomplished. And the ceremonial nature of these punishments, the waiting in reverent silence and order; as though for a sacrament, the intensity of feeling undergone by the punished, all conspired to give an atmosphere of perverse religiosity to the business.

Pushing the curtain aside, a guilty scholar would enter the tiny room. Looming hugely overhead was the black-clad figure of Brother Francis. The razor strop was behind his back and he would hold it there until the victim extended a small left hand, palm upward. Three times the strop would descend, and after each blow the scholar; if he wanted to get it all over with, was required to offer his hand for the next. Mackay says he can remember the pain even today. After the left hand, it was time for three on the right.

The worst of it, Mackay says, was the absence of mercy. Once the punishment began, no amount of crying or pleading would stay the prefect’s hand. Each blow followed upon the last, inexorably, like the will of God. It was the will of God. Brother Francis, implacable as a shark or a hurricane, carried out what was ordained on high. If a scholar withheld a trespassing hand, Brother Francis would wait until it was extended. He seemed to have nothing but time, like things themselves. Only in refusing to cry could a boy preserve a remnant of personal dignity. Mackay always tried to hold out. Once he made it through the second blow on the right hand before dissolving. It did not escape Mackay’s notice that, in the end, everyone cried.

Duly punished, St. Michael’s children would fly weeping toward their pillows, their burning hands tucked under their armpits, scuttling barefoot over the wooden floor like skinny little wingless birds. In bed, in the darkness, they would moan with pain and rage against the state of things, against Brother Francis and God’s will, against their alcoholic fathers, feckless mothers or stepparents. Children can never imagine a suffering greater than their own.

Mackay was an intelligent child who liked books and so was able to mythologize his experience. One of the favorite myths informing his early childhood was the Dickensian one of the highborn orphan, fallen among brutish commoners. Sometimes he would try to identify and encourage in himself those traits of character that gave evidence of his lost eminence. The question of his own courage in the face of danger and enmity often occupied his thoughts. Years later, in navy boot camp, Mackay would discover that in the course of his years at St. Michael’s he had acquired an instinctive cringe. This would be the first indication in adult life that he had not passed altogether unmarked through his early education.

When Mackay’s mother was released from the hospital, Mackay left St. Michael’s and went to live with her in a single bathless room at a welfare hotel on the West Side. He spent as much time as possible out of the room, on the street. In his second year of high school, he began to cut classes. He had become a “junior” of a West Side gang and spent much time drinking beer in Central Park at night and smoking, with a sense of abandon, the occasional reefer.

Once, in the dead hours of a summer night, he was drinking Scotch and Pepsi-Cola with four other youths around the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park called Cleopatra’s Needle when a hostile band happened by. One of Mackay’s friends had a knife, and in the fight that ensued a boy of the other party was stabbed. It was impossible to see everything in the darkness. The fight was almost silent. Mackay found that adrenaline worked against the sense of time; time advanced with his pulse beats, moment by moment. There was a cry of “Shank!” The stabbed boy cursed and groaned. At the height of the battle two mounted policemen from the Central Park precinct came galloping across the Great Lawn, bearing down on the combatants. Everyone scattered for cover.

Mackay and Chris Kiernan escaped over a wall and onto the transverse road across the park at Seventy-ninth Street. There they found the teenager who had been stabbed, standing by the curb watching glassy-eyed as cars sped past him. He had been stabbed twice in the arm, warding off thrusts at his body. The wounds seemed deep and, Mackay thought, might well have killed had they been placed as intended.

The stabbed youth cursed them. Mackay and Kiernan felt compromised. Custom discouraged the promiscuous use of knives against white enemies. It seemed impossible to just leave him there, so they decided to help. Mackay and Kiernan made a tourniquet of his bloody white shirt. They walked him, talking encouragement, to the door of the nearest hospital, a luxurious private establishment off Madison Avenue. His shirt had become suffused with blood. Blood ran off his sneakers onto the pavement. As they approached the inner glass door of the hospital a man in white came forward from behind a reception desk and locked the door. When they protested, the man in white simply shook his head. Mackay and Kiernan somehow got the youth to Bellevue, left him outside Emergency and fled.

The following March, on St. Patrick’s Day, Mackay was one of the drunken youths who, then as now, made the Upper East Side horrible with their carousing after the parade. His mother was back in the hospital and he was staying in an apartment in East Harlem with half a dozen other dropouts. Parents, not unwisely, cautioned their teenage children against association with him.

On the St. Patrick’s Day in question, Mackay was drunk and unhappy. He picked a fight with his friend Kiernan in a poolroom on East Eighty-sixth Street. Kiernan, with what Mackay always felt was a lucky punch, stretched him out cold on the poolroom floor. He actually lay unconscious for a minute or two, whereupon the proprietors of the poolroom ejected him from the premises by throwing him down the many steps that led to the street. Mackay, tasting defeat, learned a certain embittered caution. Kiernan, on the other hand, came to regard his own belligerence too indulgently, as events years later would make clear.

In his last year of high school, Mackay joined the navy. He was fond of sea stories. He took the subway to South Ferry and signed the necessary papers in the offices at Whitehall Street, and by the end of the day he was on his way to the naval training center at Bainbridge, Maryland.

The navy Mackay joined in the mid-fifties was the navy of World War II, a tradition-minded, conservative service that prided itself on stiff discipline. It sought to produce individuals who could perform technical tasks under pressure, and its training procedures reflected this requirement. Every morning recruits turned out for inspection. It was summer and whites were the uniform of the day. The whites could not be machine washed or ironed. They were hand washed with a scrub brush and a bar of Ivory soap, then rolled in the regulation manner. If any part of a recruit’s uniform was imperfectly washed or in some way out of order, the drill instructors would make him regret it.

In the second week of boot camp, during a performance of the manual of arms, a drill instructor named Igo discovered Mackay’s cringe. Igo was a first-class boatswain’s mate.

“My word!” Igo exclaimed. He enjoyed using this mild expletive because of the contrast it made with the rest of his vocabulary. “My word! This recruit has the attitude of a dog.”

Mackay himself was surprised. He had never noticed himself cringing.

Igo took to addressing Mackay as “Pooch.” He announced that he would drill the cringe out of him. He made things very unpleasant. Every morning after the training company was dismissed from inspection, Igo would drill him in the manual of arms.

“Here, Pooch,” he would call amiably, to summon Mackay.

At one point Mackay told himself that if Igo called him Pooch once more, he would bash the boatswain’s mate’s brains out with his useless Springfield training rifle. He decided instead to interpret Igo’s drilling as being in his own best interest. He had noticed that in the navy people were rarely actually struck; in that way the navy was unlike St. Michael’s. He noticed also that the food was good, better than he had ever had anywhere.

Every morning he drilled with Igo. When they had gone through the manual of arms, Igo would menace him by waving a variety of objects over his head and try to catch him cringing. It was absurd and comical. Still, Mackay found it very hard to stare straight ahead and not to wince at the expected blows. Mackay thought of his cringe as a rat that lived near his heart, a rat with his own face. He hated it far worse than he hated Igo.

By the time he left boot camp for the fleet, he was able to stare the boatswain’s mate down.

“Congratulations, sailor,” Igo said to Mackay. “You’re too scared to cringe.”

Mastering the shameful reflex had been instructive, and Mackay never forgot it. He often wondered if everyone had a rat at his heart to kill.

Six years or so out of the navy, Mackay beheld himself a family man, married and the father of a baby boy. His mother was dead. Through good luck he was able to find a job as a photographer’s assistant. Eventually the job would lead to his working as a news photographer and then to his becoming an artist, but it was a hard job with long hours and low pay. Mackay enjoyed it nonetheless and supplemented his income by working as a house painter. He lived with his family in a pleasant apartment on the West Side near Central Park. His wife was a graduate of the High School of Music and Art and of Reed College. Their friends were people of spirit and artistic interest. It was the early sixties and a good time to be young in New York. Mackay felt that the city in which he lived was a different city from the one in which he had grown up.

On a bright autumn Saturday Mackay walked over to Columbus Avenue for the morning paper and discovered that there was a picture of his old friend Chris Kiernan on the front page of the Daily News. The accompanying headline read: SAMARITAN KILLED IN SUBWAY SLAYING.

Kiernan had been riding the Seventh Avenue Express down from his in-laws’ new apartment in the north Bronx. His Korean-American wife and their infant child were with him. At the 145th Street station a young man had boarded the train and begun harassing passengers. The young man was an unemployed immigrant from Ecuador and he had been drinking. He went through the cars from one end of the train to the other, making menacing gestures and cursing the subway riders in Spanish. Reaching the car in which Kiernan and his family were riding, he passed by them without comment. But in the same car he began to abuse a lone middle-aged woman. The woman looked at Kiernan, a big man with a practical face, plainly a husband and father wearing a suit and tie. She called to him begging for help. As the train pulled into the 125th Street station, Kiernan went over to the young man and began to struggle with him. When the doors opened Kiernan wrestled him out onto the platform.

“You’re getting off here,” Kiernan was reported to have told the man. He gave the Ecuadorian a shove that sent him flying and returned to sit beside his wife. A ragged cheer went up.

The car doors should have closed then but they did not. Instead of continuing on to 116th Street, the train remained in the 125th Street station and the doors stayed open. Out on the platform the angry Ecuadorian struggled to his feet. According to witnesses, he went halfway up the stairs to the next level but then seemed to change his mind and came back down. Still the doors failed to close. The drunk young man got back on the express and stabbed Kiernan through the heart. Kiernan stood up and tried to chase him. The man fled up the stairs. Kiernan fell dead on the station platform in what the Daily News described as “a pool of blood.”

Mackay stood transfixed on the corner of Columbus Avenue in the rare autumn sunshine reading about Kiernan’s murder. He and Chris Kiernan had known each other since they were both six years old. The Daily News story mentioned the fact that Kiernan had once been a scholar at St. Michael’s. He had gone on to attend St. Peter’s College in New Jersey and later became an army officer. At the time of his death he was an account executive at Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn. His friends were quoted regarding his excellence of character.

Mackay was shaken. A thrill of fear went through him as he picked up the Times and paid for both papers and started home. Although they had not seen each other for ten years they had once been very close. They had suffered shame and pain together that could never be explained to anyone. They were of the same stuff. Mackay felt his existence threatened by Kiernan’s death. He felt diminished.

In Albany, a legislator introduced a bill to benefit the survivors of people who incurred injury or death assisting their fellow citizens in an emergency. It was referred to as the “Christopher Kiernan Bill.” Reading about it all, Mackay smiled uncomfortably and shook his head. Kiernan had always had naive notions of high life. He was terribly ashamed of his origins and even ashamed of his Irish name. He had dressed in a collegiate manner and attempted to eliminate his New York accent. Mackay believed that Kiernan would have changed his face if he could. Like Mackay, he had wanted to leave a great deal behind. How he would have hated the Tammany politician’s “Christopher Kiernan Bill,” Mackay thought. How he must have hated to die in the subway.

It occurred to Mackay over the weekend that he ought somehow to honor Kiernan’s memory. He thought about going to the funeral, about writing to Kiernan’s wife or stopping by the wake to sign the book. In the end he did nothing. He did not want the world of his childhood to touch him. He wanted it gone, buried with Kiernan. It seemed to him that Kiernan would have been the first to understand.

Afterward Mackay would wonder if the bits and pieces of violence he and Kiernan had lived out together had not conditioned the future and led Kiernan to his death. He suspected that past successes had encouraged Kiernan to action. Of course, it had been the right thing, the brave thing. But in spite of his horror, Mackay felt himself considering Kiernan’s undoing with a fascination that might be mistaken for guilty satisfaction.

One thing he knew for certain was that he wanted no part of violence anymore, on any scale. He swore that he would never strike his children or allow them to be hit by anyone. He adopted a mode of politics he believed would place him in opposition to war. He felt a deep commitment to the good causes of the sixties. He felt as though he had earned the right to work for peace and human brotherhood. He embraced those things with joy.

Mackay could not know then that he would one day take a coarse satisfaction in the middle-class elegance of his grown children, whom he would raise in an atmosphere of progressive right-mindedness that would present them with problems of their own. Or that he would brag to them of the rigors of his own upbringing. His life was not to be the irresistible moral progress for which he might have hoped.

The year after Kiernan’s death, Mackay was painting and papering an apartment on Jane Street. About four in the afternoon on a Thursday in March, the first warm spring day of the year, he walked to the Fourteenth Street station and boarded the IRT uptown express for home. A few minutes later he got out at Seventy-second Street to change for the local train.

Standing near him on the platform was an elderly woman in a black cloth coat. She appeared very frail and a little confused. Mackay, perhaps thinking of his mother felt well disposed toward her.

A tall, fair-skinned man in a light-colored plaid suit came walking down the platform. For some reason, Mackay noticed him at once. The man was whistling between his teeth as he went. He seemed to be looking for someone. His manner was ebullient. Every once in a while he would stop and appear to chat with someone waiting for the local. The people addressed would either look away or simply stare at him expressionless. He had gray hair, a lean foxy face and lively blue eyes.

As Mackay watched, the man approached the elderly woman nearby. Mackay saw him speak to her and saw her look away. The man appeared to be delivering himself of some casual pleasantry, but the woman ignored him and moved down the platform. The tall man followed her; smiling, and spoke to her again. At first Mackay thought that the two must know each other. Then he saw that the woman was frightened. She tried to step around the man and move toward Mackay. The man blocked her way and laughed. Mackay could not hear the words the tall man spoke but he heard the laugh. It was loud and witless. The elderly woman turned her back on her tormentor hugging her pocketbook close. The laughing man stepped around to face her. Mackay drew nearer and quietly moved where he could see the old woman’s face. He saw it convulsed with feat; sheeplike, vacant and repellent. The man reached out and touched an ornament on the woman’s coat collar.

The Seventy-second Street IRT station was the one from which Mackay, not yet dispossessed of his cringe, had set out to enlist in the navy. Its platforms were narrow. Its stairways ascended from the middle of the platform to form a central pyramid, so that there was really only one way out. Fifteen feet from where he stood, Mackay saw the old woman begin to cry. She was trying to pull away. The man held her by the coat ornament. Her loose aged lips were trembling. The platform was crowded with people but, looking about him again, Mackay realized that no one else was watching.

Mackay stepped forward. He still hoped that somehow the situation would unmake itself, that some word or action would occur to show its normalcy and innocence. Just before intervening, Mackay took a last decisive look at the man on the platform. What he saw gave him pause. Although he was a day or two unshaven, there was something rather distinguished about the man’s appearance. His bearing was firm and confident. His features were delicate and more pleasant than otherwise. He was neatly and tastefully dressed in a jacket and tie. His hair was wavy and slightly long in the back like an old-fashioned Middle European musician’s. His eyes were happy, although wide and staring.

“Anything wrong?” Mackay asked the elderly woman. She looked at him in desperation.

When the tall man turned to him, Mackay saw that the man was sturdier and younger than he had appeared at a distance. He was looking at Mackay in blue-eyed amazement.

“You!” he said. As though he knew Mackay and recognized him. “You!” the man half screamed. His cry of recognition seemed to transcend the merely personal. He seemed indeed to be recognizing in the person of Mackay everything that had ever been wrong with his life, which Mackay suspected had been quite a lot.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mackay saw the woman who had been menaced edging away.

“Take a walk,” Mackay told the man sternly. Immediately he regretted the pathetic suburban bravado of his words. In his own ears his voice had the quality of a dream. It was as though, upon addressing the man, he had entered something like a dream state. Events thereafter seemed lit in an unnatural light.

“You are from Doc,” the man said. He spoke with a Germanic accent. At first it sounded as though he had said, “You are from God.” When the man repeated it, Mackay got it straight. “You are from Doc.”

Mackay saw the unnatural brightness of his eyes and the starvation gauntness of his bony face. It was frightening to imagine what kind of life had to be endured behind such eyes. They were without order or justice or reason. For a moment, the two men stood motionless on the platform, facing each other. Mackay listened to the older man’s shrill dreamlike laughter.

“You are an English queer,” the man said to Mackay and attacked him.

When Mackay raised his fists the man slipped easily around his guard. Like an inexperienced fighter Mackay had raised his chin contentiously. The man punched him in the throat and for a moment he could not draw breath. He stepped back in confusion, then quickly decided he was unhurt. The man came at him again.

Grappling hand to hand, Mackay realized with horror his opponent’s strength. His first impression of the older man’s age and fragility had been mistaken altogether As they wrestled, he heard the local train approaching in the tunnel behind him. It was the train for which he had been waiting. Mackay felt himself sliding toward the edge of the platform. Braced against an advertising poster, the gray-haired man was kicking at his legs, trying to hook and trip him. Mackay fought for his life.

As the local pulled into the station, the man tried to shove Mackay against it. When the doors opened, people hurried past them, getting on the train or off it. For a moment he caught a glimpse of the old woman he had thought to protect. She was inside the train now, watching through the window with a disapproving frown. Then he had to turn his head away to keep the madman’s fingers out of his eyes.

Aware of the unheeding crowd, Mackay felt bound all the deeper in his dreaming state. In one of his recurring dreams, he would always find himself alone in a crowd, a foreign unregarded presence, the representative of Otherness. At the height of the nightmare some guilty secret or possession of his would be exposed to the crowd and draw their pitiless alien laughter.

The local gathered speed and pulled away. Mackay began to feel his strength ebbing, subverted by guilt, by weakness, by fear and indecision and lack of confidence. Somewhere in the darkness the next express was on its way. With his back to the tracks, Mackay held on.

They fell together to the filthy platform and rolled over, struggling in the half-light. The platform was deserted now. Distant voices echoed in tiled corridors. Mackay’s assailant struggled to his feet and began to kick him. Mackay tried to dodge away; he was caught and kicked. Unable to escape, he dove at the man’s legs and brought him down.

Again they rolled across the platform. Mackay took hold of the other man’s hair and tried to ram his head against a steel pillar. The man butted him, breaking teeth, bloodying his mouth. Struggling to his feet, Mackay turned to run, but feeling the man’s grip, turned to face him. He knew that was better than turning his back. The tunnel rang with the screech and roar of another train, bearing down on the express track.

Mackay took hold of his assailant’s jacket and tried to bind him in the cloth. The man broke free and got an arm around Mackay’s neck. The man’s body had an evil smell. Driven by terror, Mackay somehow broke the hold and they were face to face again and literally hand to hand. The lunatic was pushing forward. He seized Mackay’s arms at the biceps, trying to gather strength for the shove that would impel him off the platform.

Freeing his right arm, Mackay landed a lucky punch that brought his knuckles hard against the older man’s collarbone. The man raised both hands to protect his throat. Explosively, an empty darkened train roared out of the tunnel and along the express track, passing through the station without stopping.

With his arms free, Mackay hurled punch after punch in panic and desperation. He heard, or thought that he heard, bone crack and felt the contours of his opponent’s face yield to his fists. Sensing indecision in the older man’s movements, he was driven to a blind fury, swinging hard and wild until his arms hung useless at his sides. Many hours later; when both his hands seemed to have swollen to the size of outfielders’ gloves, he would discover that he had sustained multiple fractures in both hands.

Pale-faced and vacant-eyed, the strange German sat down on the platform and shouted. It took Mackay several seconds to realize that the man was shouting for help.

“Help!” the man called at the top of his voice. “Help me someone please!”

Mackay leaned against a signboard, breathing with difficulty. He was so tired that he was afraid of losing consciousness. His vision seemed peculiar; it was as if he saw the dim empty station around him in spasms of perception, framed in separated fragments of time. The disconnectedness of things, he saw, was fundamental. Years later, photographing a civil war in Nigeria, he would find the scenes of combat strangely familiar. The mode of perception discovered in the course of his absurd subway battle would serve him well. He would go where the wars and mobs were, photographing bad history in fragmented time. He had the eye.

At his feet, a bleeding man sat shouting for help. Mackay moved panting toward the subway stairs. There was blood on his hands. When he reached the foot of the stairs, he saw for the first time that the stairway was crowded with people and that many of the people were shouting as well. At first he could make no sense of it.

Then it came to him that the people on the stairs had come down and seen him beating a well-dressed older man. Mackay was wearing his navy peacoat, which was too warm for the weather and his painting clothes. It was March 1965, and his hair hung down halfway to his shoulders. He had grown a beard from the first of the year. The people had been afraid to come down to the platform.

“Police!” someone shouted. “Call the police!”

Mackay remembered the mounted policeman bearing down on him in the park years before. His impulse was toward flight. He imagined a summoned policeman coming down the stairs. He imagined his own panic-stricken flight to the dead end of the platform. He saw himself shot down.

Burning with fear and outrage, Mackay hurled himself up the stairway and shoved his way, bloody-handed, through the crowd. The people nearest him snarled in terror as he passed.

“Police!” someone else shouted. Mackay shook off a hand on his arm. Someone punched him from behind. The crowd seemed monstrous, like the mob in a Brueghel crucifixion. A driven creature, with fists and elbows, he cut his way up to the light.

Headlong into the intersection Mackay ran. Cars swerved and skidded to a halt around him. Scattering pensioners and pigeons in Verdi Square, he kept on, faster and faster; increasing speed with every block. For neither the first nor the last time then, he wondered just how far he would run and where it was that he thought to go.