Forever

72.

Cormac eased to his left outside the doorway of the basement room at 7 Cedar Street, trying for a better view of the slaughtered woman on the bed. A tall mustached policeman barred his way. Floor-boards creaked above his head, the heavy tread of a detective named Ford, who was speaking to the owner of the bordello. Cormac put a hand on the stone wall beside the door, trying to steady himself. The wall was scummy with a decade’s worth of damp. He felt as if some dark yellow fluid were beginning to drip through his veins.

He made notes, using pencil on a small cut pad, forcing himself to concentrate on what lay before him. About twenty-five, perhaps younger. Dark brown hair, thickened by blood. Rouged cheeks beneath the drying blood. A red dent above the brow. Her throat cut from the left ear to the right clavicle bone. Her tongue jutting from her mouth. One ear severed. Puncture wounds in her small left breast.

“Do you have a name yet, officer?” Cormac said.

“Dubious,” the policeman said.

“That’s her name?”

“Yeah. Dubious Jones. No wonder he killed her.”

He laughed a cop’s dark laugh.

“Who’s the he?” Cormac said. “The one who killed her.”

“Fucked if I know,” the cop said.

Cormac kept making notes. A single thick candle burned down to a saucer, the wax glazing the table. A wick like a thin stump of charcoal. Her left leg bent at the edge of the bed, one bare foot on the greasy stone floor. A laced black boot on the other foot, caked mud on the heel. Dark blood soaking the bed beneath her buttocks. The dress jerked up. Cut there too.

A rat with a leathery tail appeared under the bed, licking the drying blood.

Cormac turned away, the yellow fluid thickening in his veins. He heard footsteps coming down the stairs behind him. Inspector Ford. And Jennings from the Journal-Advertiser, notebook in hand.

“What’s it we’ve got here?” Jennings said.

“What’s it look like we’ve got here?” said Inspector Ford. His reddish mustaches looked fierce, his nostrils flared. “We’ve got a fucking murder.”

“Can I quote you on that?” Jennings said, smiling. He flashed his rabbity front teeth, touched the brim of his bowler hat. Thin, young, a British edge to his accent. “Jesus,” he said, “it smells like a bear’s ass down here.”

“It would smell like that if you filled it with flowers,” Cormac said.

“Ah, an aesthetic observation from the aging veteran of the Evening Post,” Jennings said.

“Why don’t you interview the rat under the bed, Jennings?” Cormac said. “He must’ve been an eyewitness.”

“Totally unreliable.”

“Perfect for you,” Cormac said.

“Will you two goddamned shite-for-brains shut up, please?” Inspector Ford said. “I’m trying to work.”

Cormac turned, the bile rising, the yellow fluid surging, and hurried up the stairs. He walked through the barroom, with its watercolors of the Hudson and its worried owner, and made it to Cedar Street. He held on to a tree and then vomited into the gutter.

A fine way to spend a birthday, he thought, walking toward the Evening Post on Pine Street. A fine way to celebrate another ninth of September. Puking my guts out on Cedar Street. Happy birthday, in the year of the Lord 1834. And even now, I don’t feel much better. The air is the same as it was before I got sick. And it’s filling me and rotting my guts.

Who killed Dubious Jones? he asked himself.

I don’t care, he answered.

The morning had been cool and quiet, and as always on his birthday, he walked to the edge of the North River and dropped a white rose into the flowing waters. As always, he wished for it to sail out past the many-masted ships and through the Narrows and into the Atlantic. With any luck, it would float all the way to Ireland. He sent that rose each year to his mother. She, after all, had done all the work on the day he was born. She was the one who should be celebrated. As always at the edge of the river, he thought about the coat of many colors and the magical pots simmering on the fire and her dark hair and wonderful smile. Then he went to work.

That morning, as on most weekday mornings for the past twelve years, he left the river’s edge and went to the office of the Evening Post on Pine Street. The morning was hot, with steamy August lingering into sweet September. The odor was beginning to rise from the streets, the buildings, the people.

He spent the morning scanning month-old newspapers from London, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Paris, freshly arrived on the Liverpool packet. On slow days, he would cobble together stories from those newspapers, including the dailies in French. In a way, such work was like painting, which he did in the rooms on Cortlandt Street that he’d rented now for sixteen years. You took various elements, you were precise about each one of them, but you made them fresh by the way you arranged them. The process kept his brain alert and alive. Or so he thought, as the months became years, and the years became decades.

He liked the work of journalism from the day he started at the old Commercial-Advertiser just before the century turned. He’d been urged into the craft by a printer who had employed him for night work when his business was heavy. For the first ten years Cormac used the name Ridley Rattigan, but it never mattered what name he used in his new life since no article was ever signed. The same was true at the Evening Post. The skills of the acting craft helped him in several ways. He could make himself gradually look older, so that when he announced his retirement from the Commercial-Advertiser, he could go off, paint for a year on his savings, and then apply for work at the Evening Post as a new young man, eager to work on a newspaper. The other skill of the actor’s trade was technical: He could write in whatever voice was required. He could be a Hamiltonian conservative or a Tom Paine radical. He could be lyrical and melancholy or sarcastic and scathing. And he could supply what his editors most frequently demanded: a tone of numbing banality. Cormac worked at this craft ten hours a day, six days a week, which left him about twenty hours a week for his painting. He soon discovered that he needed both: the journalism to eat time, help it pass swiftly, to give him a sense of human proportion; the painting to slow it down, to allow him to meditate on sky and weather and the endless varieties of the human body.

He had a talent for newspaper work, delighting in the discovery of stories and then writing them in units of five hundred or a thousand words. He became quick and accurate. He enjoyed the company of other journalists, even the unspeakable Jennings. He liked the way the day’s routine could always be interrupted. He’d be assembling a tedious story about the fate of the Bonapartes, a story that would be read by about seventy-five people in New York, and someone would rush in the door, breathless and urgent. As had happened this morning. “Bloody murder! Woman killed at seven Cedar Street.” And out the door he’d go. There were more and more homicides in the town these past ten years, because of the opening of the Erie Canal and the flooding of the town with strangers. The newspaper had to record them. But Cormac knew that the gory details would never make it into the sanitized columns of the Evening Post. Such details, said his editors, Mr. Bryant and Mr. Leggett, were low and common. But still, someone had to go. Someone had to ask a policeman: Who killed Dubious Jones? Even if the answer never appeared in the newspaper.

There was one other part of newspaper writing that he came to need more than all the others, including the regularity of a paycheck.

It was about other people, not himself.

He walked to the office of the Post and paused at a stall on the crowded Broadway corner to buy a cup of mocha coffee and a piece of plain bread from a heavy black woman named Beatriz Machado. She was also selling corn and oysters, but he needed something plain in his trembling stomach.

“You look like you swallered a boiled ferret, Mist’ Co’mac,” she said.

“I feel worse than I look, Beatriz.”

She leaned in and whispered, “You need somethin’ special?”

“No,” he said, “just a hot bath.”

“Now, that’s harder for to get you,” Beatriz said. “Easier for to get a hot woman than a hot bath in this dirty ol’ town.”

In addition to corn, oysters, and mocha coffee (introduced the year before by seamen from Jamaica), Beatriz sold other things, secret things, ranging from magical roots, fried insects, and herbs to opium. These were not displayed in her stall, but she had them for her special customers. Adding and subtracting, Cormac tried to remember how long he’d known her. It was now fifty-seven years since Bantu died, and Big Michael died, and Aaron died and Silver died and Carlito died. Beatriz had been born a slave, up by Albany, but came with her parents to New York when she was seven, right after the Revolution, and had lived to see the final end of slavery in New York. That was just seven years ago. Forty-four years after the Revolution. Cormac had met her with Quaco at the African Bookshop on Lispenard Street when she was seventeen. She had just given birth to her first child. Cormac couldn’t recall the name of her husband but remembered him as a grave, humorless young man who forbade her to talk with white men. He was soon gone, but Cormac didn’t see Beatriz again until Quaco died at ninety-eight years old in 1816. They met at the burial ground. She was then heavier, the mother of four boys, living with her third husband.

“You some strange white man,” she said, “talkin’ that old Africa talk, that Y’ruba talk.”

“I speak French too,” he said. “And Irish. And a little English.” She laughed. “You some strange white man.”

Now she handed him the bread and mocha, and as always refused his money. He sipped in silence as she poured coffee and handed sweets to other customers and dropped their money in an apron pocket. Most took their coffee in cups from Beatriz, but some brought their own cups and carried their coffee away to their offices. Cormac’s coffee was sweet and the bread fresh, but his body was still in a state of runny rebellion. Other people, he told himself. Think of other people, look at other people; you’re a journalist and other people are your business. Who killed Dubious Jones? Who gave her the name?

Down Greenwich Street he could see old black men sleeping in doorways or standing on corners, waiting for work that did not come. Their masters had held them to the end and then were happy to see them go. They no longer had to care for these old men. No longer feed them and clothe them. They’d simply cast them out. Like old dogs. Now the white-haired Africans begged for alms, and Cormac wondered which of them had fought for the Revolution when they were young, which of them had believed all the shiny words from the likes of Cormac O’Connor. He could not look at them without feeling shame. He had trouble listening to them too. Like almost everybody in the city, they asked about a place to wash. They were too old for the treacheries of the summer rivers and there were no baths in the winter churches. They had no homes. After every blizzard, two or three were found dead in alleys, sometimes hugging each other for warmth that finally vanished. All had lost or outlived their children and their women. Sometimes Cormac gave them a few pence and offered his apologies in Yoruba. He could do nothing about the water.

“You can’t do nothin’ for them folk, Mist’ Co’mac,” Beatriz said, following the direction of his gaze.

“I could do more than I do,” he said, finishing the coffee.

“Mist’ Quaco tol’ me long time ago jes’ what you done, Mist’ Co’mac. You done plenty.”

He smiled, took a deep breath, stopped himself, exhaled.

“When are you going to pose for me, Beatriz?”

She giggled. “I’m too old to get naked for no man, Mist’ Co’mac. Not even you. And you the man never gets old.”

73.

For months now, starting in the unseasonably hot days of late April and through the scalding summer, Cormac was like the abandoned Africans on the streets: He longed for water. He did not mind the heat; some secret part of him, chilled by the arctic winter of his Irish youth, would always be cold. He did mind the filth. The aroma that came from his own filthy body. The itching dirtiness of his hair. He wanted to be hot and clean, and wanted the same for all the others in the town: the ancient Africans, the children, the women. In dreams he turned and rolled among dolphins in the ocean sea. He was scoured by salt. He was perfumed by the sun. Upon waking, he washed from the tepid water that waited for him in a bowl. The ritual did not help. There were more and more people in the city and the same small amount of water.

“It’s like money, Mist’ Co’mac,” Beatriz said one morning. “They jus’ ain’t enough to go around.”

At the Evening Post, Cormac could not convince the editors to make New York water as important a cause as independence for Greece or the compromise in Missouri over slavery. Still, Cormac made notes about the scandal of water. He wrote articles that were not published. “Everybody knows that,” said one white-haired editor. “It’s not news.” But no water yet ran from the taps of New York. There were, in fact, very few taps, and they were in the homes of the rich, fed by water tanks erected on the roofs of their private fortresses. For all others, water was still drawn from parched wells and did not run into bathtubs or sinks or toilets; it was dipped, splashed, heated on hearths. It did not run as the rivers ran. And in the articles he wrote, and held in a desk drawer when they were not published, he made clear that the reason was corruption.

The major agent of the corruption was called the Manhattan Company. For decades after the redcoats sailed away, it had controlled all water supply in New York through a corrupt charter. Even Burr and Hamilton had been allies in the swindle, and its outline was simple. The spring of 1800, the turn of the new American century, the newspapers full of Napoleon in Europe… that year, the Manhattan Company was awarded two million American dollars by Albany for this water project. A generous arrangement, said the Federalist newspapers. An intelligent act of faith in the future of the fine little town at the mouth of the Hudson. Blah, they said, blah, they repeated, blah blah blah. But the deal had a nasty clause: It allowed the directors to use all unspent moneys for whatever purpose they desired. Before supplying a drop of water to citizens, they founded a bank. The aim was to make money. Or more money. For themselves, of course, not for the citizens. So they spent one hundred thousand dollars on water and used the rest of the two million to start their bank. The Manhattan Bank.

All of this Cormac wrote in his unpublished articles. All of it he urged upon his editors. All of it he spoke about to friends in taverns and women in bed. Water, he kept saying. Water is a problem of money. And he was laughed at.

“This is New York,” one editor said. “This is the way it is. If people are so desperate for a bath, let them move to Boston. And besides, the Manhattan Bank advertises in this newspaper.”

That was the key to the silence: advertising. The new El Dorado for the twenty-three newspapers struggling for profits. In the years after the charter, nobody would have cared too much about the Manhattan Bank if the Manhattan Company had only supplied the water. But they gave the growing city only a trickle. They hammered together some wooden pipes, which rotted and collapsed. They dug deeper into the existing wells. They used slaves to carry water from the slimy depths of the Collect Pond, right up to the day when the pond was filled with the dirt and gravel of the hangman’s hill.

The result was the stinking city through which Cormac still moved each day. Many thousands of human beings were shitting and pissing in privies, emptying slops into the streets. Garbage was piled in the streets to be gathered later, and the mounds served as wormy meals for pigs and dogs and goats and rats. Rain turned the mounds to a vile gray paste; cold froze the mounds; snow buried them. And the animals burrowed noses and snouts and teeth into the mounds, and in summer Cormac saw flies the size of butterflies buzzing above them. While the directors of the Manhattan Bank kept counting money.

Alone in the flat on Cortlandt Street, Cormac was sometimes overwhelmed by rage. Rage against the men who had betrayed the Revolution. Rage against those who had turned all that sacrifice of the brave into empty rhetoric. Rage against the Manhattan Bank. Rage against private deals made in secret clubs. The stinking odor of the town felt moral, a sign of its spreading corruption. And it was personal too, for his own body carried a stench that he could not bring to even a casual coupling with a woman. For months at a time, he was celibate. He made drawings of women from memory, for the drawings did not send out an odor. And he brooded about the impossibility of forging a connection with any woman. They came and went in his life, temporary presences, as fleeting as the seasons. They told him their stories. They revealed their bodies to his pencils and brushes. But how could he truly promise to live with a woman for the rest of his life? That was a ghastly joke. A woman would want children, as he would himself. But how could he bring a child into this world so densely stained by human excretions, solid and moral? And besides: He had learned across the decades that he might never be a father. The way other men were fathers. He entered a woman’s body as any man did; he erupted in ecstasies of the flesh, as any man did; but his seed did not flourish. He did not know if this would always be true. Perhaps it was a curse conferred on him by Bridget Riley or Mary Burton or both. An Irish form of voudon. They still came to him in dreams, smiling in knowing ways, stoking his fears, beckoning, retreating, betraying. The two-headed Irish hydra. Awake, he shrugged them away. But when he met a new woman, when he began to calculate the risks of love and the temptations of hope, they came to him again in the night, whispering of vengeance. Time did not erase them. Sometimes, trying to make himself believe in happiness, Cormac thought that if he did finally trust a woman’s love, he might tell her the story of the gift he was granted in a northern cave. The secret of his life. The guarantee that he would love her for the rest of her life, if not the rest of his own. But he never reached that moment. He could not be certain about the way the woman would react. She could pack up, as so many humans now did in the exploding city, and abruptly vanish. Or she might laugh, mocking him, questioning his sanity, offering to volunteer him as a performer at Mr. Barnum’s museum of freaks on Ann Street.

Sometimes he even stopped drawing and painting. In those times, the longing for beauty seemed trivial in a city drowning in shit. Most of the time, he found refuge in journalism. He took his notebook in hand and moved among other people, merging his odor with theirs, recording their lives and their deaths. He was sure, on this day of smothering heat and rising stench, that Inspector Ford would eventually tell him that Dubious Jones was named by her father, a mechanic in Troy who did not trust his wife’s fidelity, and that her killer was an unemployed Hungarian whose name had more consonants than vowels and who had a wife and four children in Budapest. He killed her, as usual, because he loved her. The details were always different, in the lives of other people. The stories were always the same.

Today, as his body felt sickened in every waking hour, he became obsessed with water. Today, he wanted to be clean. Today, he wanted to taste clean female flesh. Today. The rich had water, of course, bringing hogsheads in by cart from country wells to fill those rooftop tanks. But ordinary folk had no water for washing clothes or sheets or themselves. No water for scrubbing floors or sidewalks or the windows of stores. The little water they could find was used for boiling potatoes. They had that trickle, measured by the bucket, some still drawn from the ancient Tea Water Pump on Chatham Street, and little else. And in winter there was often less than a trickle, as the pond froze and the pumps froze and women melted ice and snow in pails. At all hours in all seasons, the city gave off this rotting stench.

The miasma, they called it.

The hod carrier emerging from a house on Hudson Street: “Sure the miasma’s not bad today, is it, Mick?”

Or Beatriz, presiding over mocha and biscuits: “Damn miasma eat your heart out today, Mist’ Co’mac.”

Women tried to erase the miasma with perfume. Self-proclaimed gentlemen carried perfumed handkerchiefs in their sleeves. When theaters were allowed to flourish after the Revolution, the longer plays were shortened, there were many intervals to allow a breeze to cleanse the rancid air, and there were no plays at all in summer. As the town filled up, and then doubled and tripled in population after the opening of the Erie Canal, the stench grew worse. Crowded Sunday churches used lots of incense to overwhelm the stink of the faithful, and when August broiled the city, sea captains claimed that they could smell New York six miles out to sea.

Some young New Yorkers didn’t care, for they’d been born into the smell of shit. It stained their days and nights, and unless they traveled into the wild country to the north, those patches that had escaped ax and saw during the war, they could not imagine a world that did not smell of shit. The hoariest New York joke (Cormac must have heard it thirty times in two weeks) was about the New Yorker who wandered into the open country, collapsed of some infirmity, and revived only when a handful of shit was held under his nose. New Yorkers told the joke on themselves. It always got a laugh. But Cormac had known the sweet smell of grass in Ireland and the salt air of the sea. And so he never got used to the miasma. It began to feel like the walls of an unseen jail, a trap, a punishment, a purgatory.

Nobody mentioned this in the churches, which Cormac sometimes visited as a reporter on the state of the New York soul. Filth, after all, enforced celibacy. The fanatics on the Common, assembled near the new City Hall, preached that man was in essence filthy and the only hope of true cleanliness depended upon a Christian death and the eventual embrace of pristine angels. They were all offspring of the Rev. Clifford, whose days had ended in the old lunatic asylum on Chambers Street. Their visions brought some small relief. Apparently the angels greeted all new arrivals with tubs, soap, and clean towels. Cormac laughed to himself at the notion that the only way to get a bath was to die. All the while, in spite of the stench, babies kept being conceived and born. They all entered the world of the miasma.

Meanwhile, men and women shit in pots. They shit in boxes. And Cormac was one of them. What they did, he did. There was no choice. He shit in bags and carried them to the privy in the yard behind the house in Cortlandt Street. The landlord finally built a privy, four feet deep, a lined tub. Once a week, teams of filthy men came around to collect the tubs of shit and dump the contents into the rivers. But after the canal opened, the number of shit collectors did not increase. The businessmen who ruled the town through the Common Council didn’t want to spend the money, and the people could do nothing because in this glorious democratic city; they were not allowed to choose the mayor. The overwhelmed shit collectors worked more and more slowly. They dumped their cargoes into the East River too late for the tides to flush them out to sea. The stench then rose from the sluggish river. Indians stopped coming to town. The last of the deer and wolves retreated to the forests of the Catskills and Adirondacks, appalled by the odor of humans. Fish and oysters died. The otters died. Whales remained out past the Narrows now. Ships that had been scoured by the harsh Atlantic came to the New York docks for a few days, unloaded, loaded, and departed coated with shit and slime.

“I hate coming to this town,” one sea captain told Cormac. “I end up puking for a week after I’ve left it and can’t get the stink out of me skin.”

“Try living in it,” Cormac said.

“I’d cut me feckin’ t’roat first.”

The corrupted water made New York a hard-drinking town. Taverns opened everywhere, two or three on the same block. Cormac entered them with other newspapermen, but he didn’t drink, because the taste of alcohol now sickened him. His companions drank his share. They drank beer and rum and flip. They loaded drinks with molasses and brandy and plunged hot pokers into the mess on bitter winter nights. This added the odor of vomit to the miasma. Many drunkards brawled in streets and gutters, and on public holidays such as the Fourth of July or Evacuation Day they celebrated with swords and pistols and increased the number of widows in the town. Others went home to fearful wives and fucked them brutally and passed out, while some went off to the brothels, where even the most forlorn whores backed away from them and their stinking flesh.

The shit and the piss and the rot brought infection and death. The old Africans had carried immunities with them across the Atlantic, and Cormac was certain those immunities had been passed to him through Kongo’s blood, for he never was infected. But his rage was fed by that too. For decades, the Africans saved many white lives during yellow fever seasons, but were seldom honored, and until 1827 in New York, were not given freedom. The old, immune Africans were almost gone from New York, dying in frozen winter streets, begging for alms on stinking summer afternoons. Death huddled in the city’s shit, and in 1832, it had risen in full fury.

Omens preceded the dying. For nine straight mornings in June, old Africans showed Cormac two black spots, like angry eyes, in the scarlet face of the rising sun. “This is very bad,” one said in Yoruba. “Many will die.” There was a report of red water churning from the depths of Hell Gate. A thousand dead fish rose one afternoon from the bottom of the harbor, and the seagulls would not touch them. At the Battery one morning, anxious for a cleansing breeze, Cormac saw a raven.

For months in the offices of the Evening Post, he read ominous reports from abroad. They told of Asiatic cholera in France and then in England, killing thousands, then leaping the Atlantic to Canada. The Common Council read short versions of the same newspaper reports and did nothing. When Cormac approached them for comment, they shrugged and moved away from him as if he were infected. They didn’t even clear away the filth on the streets, for that would have cost money. “They don’t want to hurt business in the city,” said William Cullen Bryant, a dry young poet who was the new editor, “and, of course, they’re correct.” Normalcy was the byword, even when it was a lie.

Then, on a Tuesday morning in June, Cormac heard a tale from a Nassau Street barber. He lived on Cherry Street. The night before, a neighbor named Fitzgerald came home from work as a tailor, and within an hour was simultaneously puking and shitting and bending over with cramps. He went quiet for a while, then groaned with headache, laughed in a giddy way, then drowsed in a jittery slumber. He jerked awake and vomited, heaving hunks of undigested food upon the floor, and then hacked up phlegm that was sticky and glistening in the candlelight. He screamed in thirst: “Water, give me cold water.” His eyes went dull as lead, and his face turned pale blue and his eyes and mouth and skin pinched in tightly and the skin of his hands and feet grew as dark and wrinkled as a prune. And then the body shuddered and the man was very still and quite dead. Five hours after the first symptoms.

Hearing this account, Cormac reached for his copy of Boccaccio. In The Decameron, the good doctor had wondered in the fourteenth century as the Black Death raged in Florence how many gallant gentlemen, fair ladies, and sprightly youths, “having breakfasted in the morning with their kinsfolk, acquaintances and friends, supped that same evening with their ancestors in the next world!”

Cormac rushed to see Bryant, waited an hour while the editor chatted with some visiting politician, and, after citing Boccaccio as a way to get Bryant’s attention, explained what he’d been told by the barber. Bryant then was in his early thirties, with a sharp nose and piercing eyes, and was not yet encased in the pomposity that all would remember later. Bryant listened, his eyes narrowing, and whispered, “Good God, it’s the cholera.”

Bryant sent Cormac to the City Hall for more information, but nobody would confirm or deny what had clearly happened on Cherry Street. Back in the office, Bryant told him to wait. To write nothing. To wait for more facts. Above all, to avoid spreading panic. That night Cormac’s friend the barber died, along with his mother, aunt, and oldest child.

They became numbers, as first two died each day, and then twenty, and then the epidemic could no longer be hidden. Too late, the Council began to clear the pestilential mounds of infested garbage. Too late, the slum buildings were emptied and scoured and whitewashed. Old women awoke one stinking morning and then fell back dead. Infants died. Children died. One of Cormac’s friends died, a fine African musician named Michael George; he might have become one of the first great American composers and became instead a corpse at twenty-nine.

As in all plagues, as in Boccaccio, as in Daniel Defoe, all manner of quack and charlatan appeared with cures they were happy to sell. Opium was peddled openly as a curative, along with laudanum, and cayenne pepper, and camphor and calomel. Doctors offered bleedings. People drank salt or mustard, hot punch and hartshorn, or enveloped themselves in tobacco smoke. They still died. The God Cure revived for a week or so, with bellowed pious demands for prayer and fasting and repentance. But then the preachers joined the rich in the flight to the countryside, leaving the souls of the poor to the personal judgment of God. As always, the dead and the dying were blamed for their own fate. Many were Irish, and Cormac heard them condemned by the rich as their carriages trotted away to safety. A filthy lot, the Irish (said one perfumed auctioneer). Papists too. Animals as low as the pigs and rats. In the empty streets at night, Cormac could hear wailing songs in Irish (for many could not speak English) and garbled prayers and the jerking sounds of horror at still another death. Many must have imagined the consolations of the Otherworld or the Christian Heaven. Hundreds died.

Sales of all newspapers fell as their rich readers departed and the illiterate immigrants were left behind. Advertising ceased, for few shops were open. The South Street waterfront was deserted, the streets empty day and night, crews and captains refusing to enter the infected port. There were theories for a few days in the Evening Post about diet being the cause of the deaths. But meat-eaters died in the same streets as vegetarians. Cranks who ate only nuts and grains (while chanting Iroquois prayers) fell as if axed. A week later, the drastic New York weather was blamed. But they died on dry days and damp, in the hammering heat of noon and at the black midnight hour, calling at all hours for water, cold water. The poor died most of all, but so did the favorite daughter of John Jacob Astor in flight to Europe. Shit collectors died and so did insurance peddlers. Some of the infected grew mad after the first symptoms struck and lurched into the streets and reached for strangers to give them the infection, as if insisting they would not go alone on the swift journey to Heaven or Hell. There were many brave doctors who obeyed their oaths, but even they were hampered by much ignorance and not enough hospitals. The cholera is, said one, and that is all we know. New York Hospital slammed its doors to the dying and the new Bellevue, a combination of hospital and almshouse, was transformed into a vast filthy limbo. Nurses died. Doctors died. Too many churches slammed shut their doors too, the clergymen bolting them before departing. Policemen were assigned to the abandoned churches and the empty houses of the rich to prevent looting, but soon they too were gone, fleeing the city or buried in its crowded trenches.

As he had been in the yellow fever epidemics, Cormac discovered he was immune. An immunity to yellow fever could be traced to African blood, to Kongo. Cholera was another matter. But as he roamed among the dead and dying, gathering facts that were written with haste and anger on foolscap but never appeared in the newspaper, or trying to comfort the afflicted with useless words, part of him longed to be taken by the cholera. If this was life, he did not want it. Until that summer, he had never thought such things. Now they came to him almost every day. Life, in this season, was about shit and death.

To keep from thinking, he wrote many stories for the Evening Post while Bryant and his most favored editor, William Leggett, gathered their families together across the Hudson in Hoboken and found shelter from the storm. At last, some stories made their way into the newspaper. Stories about water and corruption. Stories that told people where to go for help but offered no easy hope. Cormac hoped that a person who could read would tell ten persons who could not. He hoped thousands would demand water.

Cormac was ignorant of the causes of the cholera but knew that it wasn’t the Irish (blamed as the Jews were blamed for the Black Death) and knew it wasn’t something as vague as the miasma. Whatever it was, science would discover the cause. He was convinced that the cure would come from water, cold water.

Finally it ended. After nine terrifying weeks. And three thousand five hundred and twenty-six known deaths. The rich slowly returned, sending in their African or Irish servants as the advance patrols, like canaries into a coal mine. Bryant and Leggett returned too, and Cormac urged them to start a crusade in the Evening Post, demanding that the city obtain a big, strong, muscular supply of clean water. They nodded, they listened, they thanked him, they published a few polite editorials.

New York got no clean water.

The miasma returned with the people.

The cholera returned in 1833.

Shit and filth got worse.

The cholera returned in 1834.

All that dying passed through him again as he went home after sundown on his birthday, September 9, 1834. The flat was an oven. He opened the windows, removed his tie and shirt, pulled off his shoes. He sat in a chair, very still, gazing at his books and paintings, at the pots of color and the clean brushes. But his skin was crawling. The room filled with the stink of his feet and his armpits and his balls. He scratched at his skin, which felt as if millions of insects were crawling under the surface. He scratched at his hair. He dipped a cloth into the bowl of water and scrubbed his armpits, feet, and balls. The stench did not leave.

He heard a window breaking somewhere in the night and the barking of dogs and a woman wailing. Tomorrow’s murder. Dubious Jones had named herself, said Inspector Ford in time for the morning edition. Her true name was Mildred Vandeventer, and she was from Rochester. She was nineteen and had been a whore for four years. She was killed by a man named Collins, from Philadelphia, who went back to his boardinghouse on Pearl Street, wrote a note saying how much he loved her, and then hanged himself. Case closed.

But Cormac told himself, There’s no such thing as a closed case. Who will bury Dubious Jones? Why did she choose the name? And when they bury her as Mildred Vandeventer, who will tell her family how she died, and how she lived? She and Collins will be together forever now in the democracy of Potter’s Field. And at least they’re free of the miasma.

He was not.

He scratched and shook and rubbed his back against the wall. His body hair felt as if it were growing inward, follicles fed by the fertilizer of the shit-stained air. He pulled at the curtains. He yanked his hair. Then he dressed again and went into the night. Near Broadway he saw a woman come out of tavern with a basket of wilting geraniums. He bought four of them and a length of string and tied them to his face, the petals tight against his nose.

He walked toward the water, hoping for a breeze, one fresh zephyr of air. But then the smell of shit overwhelmed the flowers. He began to weep. He imagined leaping into the river and swimming away. An act of suicide. Motive: shit.

And instead turned right into Duane Street. His eyes searched the rooftops, looking for a water tower. There, he said. There. Up there. On the roof of the bordello near Chapel Street. There.

74.

She greeted him at the front door.

“Do come in,” she said. “I’m the Countess de Chardon.”

“Cormac O’Connor,” he said.

“I’ve seen you in town,” she said, “but never, alas, in this place.”

She was dressed as if married to one of the richest merchants in the city, with a swelling high-necked bodice that suggested (but did not display) full breasts, her waist impossibly tightened, and a dark maroon crescent-shaped bustle that rose airily behind her when she moved, hinting at layered crinolines and plump hidden cheeks and thighs. Her lustrous brown hair was piled in plaited coils held tight with a bone tiara. Diamond earrings glittered in her ears, matched by a diamond ring on each finger. Her skin was tawny in the shifting light of oil lamps, her cheeks lightly rouged, her full lips painted a muted crimson. They exchanged platitudes in French, hers polished, his as crude as any self-taught language. She closed the door behind him. She was certainly no ordinary madam of a bawdy house.

“Do have a drink, monsieur,” she said, reverting to English to help Cormac out of his clumsy French. As he passed, she gave off a scent of lavender. He told her he didn’t drink. She smiled in relief. She said she had a perfect young woman for him, just recently arrived only months before from the upstate town of Waterloo, and she made a small joke about the fate of Napoleon. “Do not,” she said, “be too daring.”

Cormac paused, and then said he’d much prefer a bath to anything else.

“Yes, it’s been a smothering day,” she said. “I’ll arrange a bath. Can you wait for…”

“I’ve learned to wait for everything,” he said.

She led him to a sitting room where mustached businessmen sat with some of the nine women who worked in the nine upstairs rooms. One young woman played Mozart badly on a stand-up piano. Gilt-framed paintings of ruined castles and the Roman Colosseum adorned the pale papered walls. The lights were muted here too. The men made bad jokes. The women giggled. Cormac sipped water. The countess returned and motioned with her head for him to follow her.

She led him up a back stairway to her suite on the top floor. The music ended when she closed the perfectly carpentered door, and Cormac relaxed. Thick drapes warded off the city, and the smell of shit was replaced by the scent of lavender. The main room of the suite was dominated by a four-poster bed, high off the floor, covered in bridal white, trimmed with purple, and plump with silken cushions. The walls were covered with patterned red plush. The countess pointed out three small landscapes by Asher B. Durand, who was the best American painter so far, she said, and would surely produce even more impressive work. “He needs to paint some human beings,” she said. “If he can.” A tall glass-fronted bookcase was crammed with books in democratic disarray, the sign of a true reader. She was enthusiastic about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (“Only a woman could have written such a book”) and was reading George Sand’s Indiana, which had arrived from France just before the epidemic struck. She loved Boccaccio too, she said, opening the case to bring out a worn volume in French, delighted that Cormac could name four of the seven traveling women: Pampinea, Fiammetta, Filomena, and Emilia.

“They all work here,” she said in an excited voice, “or at least that is what I’ve named them. For everybody in New York must have a public name that is not their own. I’m waiting for the remaining three to arrive on my doorstep, women of the life who can also tell tales: Lauretta, Neifile, and Elissa.”

As she riffled the pages of the book, Cormac noticed that the nails on her slim fingers were long and painted white. Except for the nail on her right forefinger. That nail was severely trimmed.

She casually opened a side door, and in the light of a candle he saw the bathtub. Seven feet long, up on golden lion’s feet, with a drain leading somewhere, and a tap that she explained was attached to an immense tank on the roof. The tub was porcelain, the taps and soap dish gold.

“Would you like your bath now?” she said.

“Yes. I’d like that very much.”

She smiled in an enigmatic way and then pulled a cord. A tall white-haired African man came in and she told him to prepare coffee and the bath. He nodded and slipped away. The countess and Cormac sat near a bay window in facing chairs, and when she heard that he was a newspaperman, a journalist, she asked what he thought about Lord Byron and Coleridge and her own favorite, Shelley, whose death was such an abomination. He gave glib answers. The African came in with coffee on a silver plate and then retreated to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. She asked Cormac about William Cullen Bryant.

“His poetry is dreadful, no?”

“Yes.”

“I have one of his books here,” she said, shaking her head slowly. And then laughed out loud and squeezed his hand.

“Let’s wash him out of our hair,” she murmured.

And led him to the bath. The clear, scented water was heated elsewhere and kept hot by a tray of coals beneath the steel-bottomed porcelain tub. The countess opened his shirt. He opened her bodice, with its eyelets and hooks. She then backed away while he completed his undressing. He hung his trousers on a peg. Then she was back, wearing a thin white gown.

“Get in,” she said.

He slipped into the healing water. The gown fell. She stepped in behind him, uttering a small squeal at the hot water, then squatted and wrapped her hands around his chest. Fingers caressed the ridge of dead flesh on his shoulder.

“I love a man with a scar,” she said. “He’s lived at least some small life.”

In the months that followed, the bath was always the prelude. By day, he worked at the Evening Post. He went home now to the Countess de Chardon, where he lived in a small room down the hall from her suite. She had insisted that he give up his flat, and the promise of water and the scent of lavender convinced him she was right. He paid off his rent and arrived back on Duane Street with his books and clothes and the traveling bag filled with his father’s letter, his mother’s earrings, and the sword.

“You’re a perfect companion,” she said one morning, with a flicker of irony on her face and a taste of France in her accent. “Busy and quiet. Literate, funny, strange, and free of disease. You’re what I need and I hope I’m what you need too.”

“You’ll never know how much I need you,” he said, trying to match the lightness of her tone.

“For God’s sake,” she said, “don’t tell me.”

He certainly didn’t tell the countess that at first he thought of her as an escape. In her company, or alone in his room on the top floor, he escaped the miasma. His flesh had revived with water and the aroma of soap and lavender, and so he also escaped into her body. As he savored her ironies, her private codes, he also understood that with the Countess de Chardon he would be free of any delusion of domesticity. He suspected that she knew what he was thinking, and accepted it, even welcomed it. They just never spoke about the details.

“Human beings want to know too much about each other,” she said. “And that’s why there are so many lies.”

She did tell him some of her own story. She was then thirty-two years old. Or so she said. She was born in Port-au-Prince and was a creole refugee from the uprising on Hispaniola that had driven so many of her class to the United States. Or so she said. If her tale was true, she must have come from the side of the island called Haiti, ruled for so long by the French. But Cormac didn’t know if any part of the Chardon story was true. And it didn’t matter. Many people came to New York with a script, one that allowed them to begin again, to be other than the unhappy persons they’d been in the places they’d left behind. In his own way, Cormac himself was one of them. But Cormac did sense that the countess had seen much horror. Only those who had lived with appalling horror could fully understand the consolations of living flesh. And she did speak excellent French.

When she first saw him unpack his drawings, she was joyful. At Christmas, she bought him a new easel, brushes, paint, and paper. And so that he would not feel like a kept man, she commissioned him to do some drawings that she would use as decoration in the nine rooms of her nine young women. These were nine views of her own vulva, and one view each of the vulvae of the other women. They were drawn in black and red chalk in a Renaissance style on tinted paper and designed in such a way that a casual viewer would not instantly recognize the subjects. They could have been flowers. The countess posed gladly, her knees drawn up, her rosy buttocks high on silken cushions. She had Cormac draw her before the bath and after, before sex and later. The first four drawings were framed by her dark brown silky pubic hair. Then she shaved off all of her hair, and the final five were as bald and naked as drawings of fruit or orchids. Once she was overcome by the sound of chalk on paper and could wait no longer and reached deliriously for the focus of his attention.

The other women were not so enthusiastic about the project but did what the countess ordered, and in the closed space of his studio room often lost their reluctance. Pampinea was universally plump. Fiammetta was shy and lean, lying back with her eyes closed, and kept asking Cormac to tell her it was pretty. Filomena was ashamed of her thick beardlike hair and squirmed to hide it from his sight. Emilia was a large girl with a small buried vulva and an almost invisible button. It always hurts, she whispered. Every man hurts me. Every one of them. In Cormac’s drawing, her lips seemed to whimper. All stared at the finished drawings as if trying to understand something about themselves.

For Cormac, those were the months when there was no water anywhere in New York except in that house, the secret garden of the Countess de Chardon. And water became part of life itself. It was prelude. It was culmination. It was a reward for concentrated work. Or it made work possible. Clear, warm water was a source of entertainment and luxury and sex. In a way, Cormac told himself, I’m a kind of novel for the countess, as she is for me, and water is the connecting device of the tale. The heat departed in cool October, and then, shuddering with winter cold, they would leave the bath and dry themselves and then lie upon the vast white bed. She was lover, mother, teacher.

She taught him, among other things, the joy of fasting. She would stop all sexual play on a certain date and remain aloofly celibate for ten days or two weeks. She would let her desire build slowly, deny it, welcome it, deny it again, until there was some enormous need that always started in her imagination, in some dark cave of denial. He matched her fasting and then erupted with her in a shared paroxysm of flesh and water.

She never once used the word love and said nothing about the two of them forging a private pact. He didn’t even sleep with her through the nights. “Nothing,” she said, “is more horrible than seeing each other after a night of sleep.” She didn’t have any form of conventional jealousy, certainly not about the flesh. And definitely not his flesh. As long as they began each evening with the bath, just she and Cormac, she didn’t even mind if he made love to the other women. It was simply understood, without being said, that he would not develop any emotions for them beyond the simple needs of the flesh. And shared talk. And the details of food and books and music.

“You’re always humming tunes,” she said. “You should learn to play an instrument.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the piano. We have one downstairs, you know.”

He laughed. “If I play it, the customers will revolt, and so will you.”

“The rooms are sealed,” she said. “There’s no one here until the lunch hour. And nobody can hear if you close the door.”

“And who would teach me?” “I would,” she said.

And so she began teaching him the fundamentals, explaining the keys and the correct position of his hands, and then scales and the mysterious notations of music sheets. You need three fingers to make a chord, she said. Your fingers have specific targets, she said, those keys, and you must hit the keys cleanly. He kept hitting between keys, clanging them too hard, and she cried out in mock horror, laughed, and made him try again. She explained about flats and sharps, and how chords were major, minor, or dominant. She showed him the language of music too, and he realized that he had first heard Irish and Yoruba and French as sounds without meaning and then slowly broken them down into individual words, which were here called notes. He told himself that music was a language like any other, and he would learn it.

“Time is everything in music,” she said, demonstrating with a booted foot the way to maintain tempo.

“In life too.”

“Please, cheri, it’s too early for philosophy.”

The tempo of his days was also shifting. He could not always appear beside her at the piano at eleven in the morning. His duties to the Evening Post often had him running from one event to another, and the work had greater urgency now because a Scotsman named James Gordon Bennett was bringing something new to the newspaper trade. He had founded the Herald and, after some false starts, was beginning to find readers. He published the sort of details that Cormac put in his notes and failed to get into the Evening Post. Instead of burying tales of mayhem and horror in the back of the paper, Bennett put them on the front page, which all other journals devoted to advertising. He used crude woodcuts as illustrations. He broke the neutral tone of the writing. As his sales increased, particularly after his accounts of the murder of a prostitute named Helen Jewett, the other editors dismissed him as a cheap vulgarian. But the Evening Post was now selling eight thousand copies each day, delivered to the desks of businessmen, while Bennett was selling thirty-five thousand, peddled on the streets by boys. The Evening Post began to run more tales of murders than before, discreetly, of course, and still buried in the rear of the newspaper. That meant more work for Cormac O’Connor. He moved around the town with a mask pulled across his lower face to reduce the miasma, checking with policemen and lowlifes for stories, humming the tunes that he was taught by the Countess de Chardon.

On slow days, or Sunday mornings, he sat beside her on the piano bench and ran his fingers over the keys, savoring each chord, astonished at the way music brought something from deep inside him. A choppy Celtic anger. A longing for a world already lost.

“You have very good hands,” she said one morning. “But then I already knew that.”

“They’re not good enough for music,” he said.

“They will be.”

She showed him what to do with her own long-fingered hands, telling him to watch the way those fingers moved. Sometimes she lost herself in the music, doing a concert for an audience of one, her eyes closed, her head tilted slightly backward, listening as if the rest of the world were a vast silence. Her music was lyrical and romantic, and he saw her as a girl in some stately white mansion in Port-au-Prince, alone in a vast room, or with some French exile serving as her musical overseer. In his imagination, her instructor looked like the dancing master from John Hughson’s tavern, small, a dandy, and then he wondered: Where did the dancing master go? Where did all of those people go who were in my life for a month or a year and then moved off the stage?

And so music merged with water as he meshed more closely with the Countess de Chardon. A set of rules was being formed between them, unwritten, unposted, but part of their shared time. He understood, as he painted the women of the house in his studio down the hall, that he might finish the night with a token of mutual gratitude. With shrugs, or phrases, the countess encouraged it, for she insisted that jealousy of the flesh was an absurd form of human weakness.

“Jealousy kills,” she said. “It kills love. It kills people. You know that. You see the results at least once a week in your job. The cemeteries are filled with people who thought jealousy was love.”

“But it’s there; it’s part of human nature.”

“No, it’s part of the idea of property. Read Mary Shelley, Cormac. I mean, truly read her. Men think women are their personal property. When women decide that they own their own bodies and will use them as they please, men kill them.”

“Women kill men too,” he said. “Jealous women.”

“To protect themselves. To kill before they are killed. They don’t really care if men go off with other women, as long as they come home, as long as they don’t pick up a disease and carry it into their beds and their bodies. I know. I see certain men here all the time, and then see them with their wives going down to Trinity or St. Paul’s on Sunday mornings. Then I see a notice in a newspaper that poor Missus So-and-so has died after a long illness, and I know she’s died from what he brought home. Not from this place, because I have the doctor to check each woman every week. But from a hundred dives on South Street. My point is simple: More women are murdered by men’s pricks than by gunshots, Cormac.”

“Can I quote you in the Post?” he said, and laughed.

“You can translate me into Latin and chisel it over the courthouse door.”

She implied that when he was alone while she traveled to Philadelphia or Boston on business, she would not care if he sampled the other women of the house. They were there for many men, even Cormac. He was entitled to small pleasures, and so was she.

“I just don’t want your personal report,” she said. “I don’t want you to tell me that Fiammetta is wonderful. If she is, I want to be there myself, with the two of you.” She smiled. “The only way to prevent jealousy is to share one’s flesh. To be generous. To break down the notion of permanent ownership.”

“I don’t want to know what you might do in Philadelphia or Boston, either.”

“Fair enough,” she said. “But I won’t do anything. That’s not a promise to you. That’s a promise to me.”

Together, they often engaged in what the countess called “research.” The suite and the bed and the bath were all part of the laboratory. She wanted to do with her body (and Cormac’s) everything she could imagine as a woman. She guided him on some nights the way she guided him at the piano. There were chords in bed too, and solos, and glissandos. She tried to do things so impossible they both fell laughing into uselessness. But some worked. And then, as a businesswoman, she would offer such services, after the proper training of her young ladies, to all of the customers. Every house in New York had its specialties, and she wanted to keep changing the menu in hers.

“Think of this place as a restaurant,” she said one midnight, after dining with Cormac in the suite. “We have to satisfy certain… basic appetites. Every house must have a fat woman, of course. Every house must have a negress. Every house must have its ugly woman. And its girl dressed as a nun. The menu must contain the basics.” She laughed. “Livened up, of course, with a few… specialties.”

Some of her competitors had their own restricted menus. In one house, the customers would not be admitted if they were older than eighteen, a shameless play for the Columbia College trade. The older women, said the countess, loved working there, in spite of the low wages. Another house provided a silk-lined coffin for necrophiliac men. A dozen catered to those who wanted lashings. We can’t offer everything here, said the Countess de Chardon. But we can give them the odd surprise. Variety was good for business, and all these bored men, bored with wives, bored with life, needed those surprises. But there was a personal motive too for her own experiments. “I don’t want to die without trying everything, at least once,” she whispered to Cormac one night. “I don’t know anything about the soul, but I want to know everything about flesh. Everything that I can possibly know. To see it. To feel it. To do it. For I could die tomorrow.”

So Cormac realized that he was also living with a woman who knew something about mortality. In a room on the top floor of a building on Duane Street. The palace of water and flesh and music.

One Tuesday morning, she moved a new piano into the suite, and across the long evenings, while the countess mingled with the customers, flirting, teasing, confiding, Cormac played. He learned to read music without much of a struggle; it was, as he’d thought, another language, and if he could think in Yoruba and Irish, if he could teach himself French, if he could decode Latin, then these notations, which were a kind of drawing too, did not intimidate him. Execution was another matter. Sometimes his hands felt encased in wool. He hit the wrong keys, smashed chords, lost the tempo. And started over.

On some solitary nights, he ignored the music sheets and allowed his hands to drift, to caress each key, to discover music he had never heard and could not imagine. It was as if he were bringing forth some hidden spirit from the secret caves within the piano, revealing its desperate yearning for pleasure. He could feel Ireland in the music. And Africa. And the ocean sea.

On other nights, he felt music as a form of landscape, with rolling hills and a placid river and trees with rustling leaves. He could feel it in his painter’s hands, which were not yet the hands of a musician. The terrain was not made of earth, or paint, but sound. He would try to find paths through the hills of sound, he would try to find a way to the river. He always failed. His hands were too crude. The paths were not marked. Then he would try again. He did not feel frustrated. Frustration, after all, was an impatience with the ticking of clocks. He had all the time in the world.

On some nights in early spring, after their bath, the countess would sit naked at the piano, commanding him to lie on the bed. Teaching him had brought back the passion she felt, long ago, for music. Or so she said. A passion she’d erased through an act of will. Now it rose from her again, like a ghost. Here is Vivaldi, she said. Here is Scarlatti. Here is something without a composer. Here is France. Here is Haiti. She would play then as if the notes were licking his flesh and entering his body. The music of such nights always made him hard.

The countess was one of his best sources. She knew stockbrokers and real estate speculators, police spies and politicians. She knew who was planning the newest financial scheme that would reward those who knew before others did. She sometimes invested her own money and made even more than the men in the know. She knew too which marriages were disasters, which rich young men were bound for personal calamities. She discreetly fed private information to Cormac, who put some of it in the newspaper and held some of it for himself. She knew, above all, how New York worked.

“Nothing is as it seems,” she said. “Not here and not in France. Not anywhere. And everything is driven by money. The thing you must do is find out what is truly happening, not what seems to be happening. Understand the lie, and you’ll see the truth. Start off by believing that everything is a lie.”

She paused. “The God story is a lie, told by archbishops to enrich themselves. Democracy is a lie. The police are a lie.”

“And us?”

“We’re a lie too,” she said with a smile. “A good lie.”

75.

Cormac didn’t hear them come in. It was after midnight on a frigid January night, and he was putting final touches on a somber portrait of a woman named Millicent. She was from Poughkeepsie and the other women called her Millie the Weeper. She cried the way other people laughed. That was her specialty. She cried when she heard a sad song. She cried reading a sad tale in the newspaper. She cried when the weather was beautiful and cried when the weather was ugly. If a customer performed with unusual vigor, she wept torrents. If a customer failed to perform at all, she wept as if the apocalypse were due in an hour.

On this night, she was off in her own room, and Cormac was alone, adding highlights to her painted raw sienna hair, humming Scarlatti. Then he heard a door slam down below. Then voices raised. Then something shattering. He went to the landing and looked down.

Three men wearing rough cloth caps were confronting the countess. One growling voice came up the stairwell.

“We’ll close ye down, ye bloody whore, if you don’t do what we say.”

“Get out of here now,” she shouted back. “Go now, and I’ll do nothing. Stay, and keep this up, and there’ll be hell to pay.”

The heaviest man, his face still hidden to Cormac’s view, shoved her hard against a banister.

Cormac went into his room and took the sword off its hook on the wall. Then he moved silently down the stairs.

“It’s a hundred a month,” the big man was saying. “If you don’t pay the hundred, we’ll close ye shut.”

Cormac saw him clearly now. Most reporters were coming to know him. Hughie Mulligan from the Five Points. One of the gang of young men called the Dead Rabbits. As a reporter, Cormac had witnessed him a year ago, standing before a judge in the courthouse, charged with gouging a man’s eyes out in a brawl. His mother sat weeping without conviction. “My son, my son,” she moaned, “my poor wee boy.” But the judge was fixed and Hughie Mulligan walked free, while his fellow Dead Rabbits cheered.

His face was veined and red now, his eyes glittery with danger, his arms hanging from his shoulders as if prepared to punch. Two others, smaller and younger, stood behind him. Most of the women were on the stairs, peering down, while the night’s last customers huddled in the rooms. Mulligan glanced at Cormac as he came down the final flight of stairs. And saw the sword.

“Look, lads, this poof’s got him a sword.”

The two smaller men grinned and each drew a new English-style revolver, made to fire five bullets without reloading. The countess backed up, eyes wide. The women on the staircase made a sighing sound. Millie the Weeper was weeping.

“You’re in the wrong house, aren’t you, Hughie?” Cormac said. “If you want a woman, you should be at thirteen Baxter Street, isn’t that the case, Hughie?” He smiled and moved around, turning his shoulder toward the three men to make himself a smaller target. “That is where your mother lives, isn’t it?”

Mulligan howled Youdirtybastardofawhoringponce and charged, and Cormac turned into the charge and put the tip of the sword under the larger man’s chin. Everything stopped. Mulligan seemed to stop breathing.

“Oh, poor Hughie Mulligan!” Cormac said. “What’s that red stuff coming from your neck?”

Mulligan’s face went pale. He started moving a hand to his neck, and Cormac jabbed with the tip of the sword and then blood actually did trickle down the man’s neck.

“Now, tell these two midgets of yours to hand those pistols to the countess. If you don’t, this sword will come out the back of your fucking head.”

Mulligan made a gesture with his hands, directing the two smaller men to hand over the guns.

“Hold the barrel with your thumb and forefinger, boys. You know which fingers they are? That’s it. Nice and easy, now. Real dainty-like.”

The countess took the guns, gazing at them with a curious respect.

“Countess, you can now shoot these three idiots for breaking into your establishment.”

“What a marvelous idea,” she said. “Look what they’ve done. Those three vases are worth, oh, a hundred dollars. And the door…” She shouted up the stairs. “Ladies, you saw what happened, didn’t you?”

A chorus of yeses.

“Should I shoot them?”

The words came rolling down from above: Right now, of course, between the eyes, why not?

Cormac took the tip of the sword away from Mulligan’s chin, and the big man swiped at his neck and saw blood on his finger-tips. His nostrils widened in rage.

“You’ve got some nerve,” he said.

Cormac laughed out loud.

“You come in here to break the place up and try to extort money, and we’ve got some nerve?”

“You’re foolin’ wit’ the wrong people.”

“In that case, we should kill you. To make sure you never come back.”

Mulligan turned as if to leave, then charged. He shoved Cormac against the banister of the stairwell, and Cormac fell, rolled, came up with the sword in both hands, and put its point against Mulligan’s heart.

“That was stupid.”

He turned to the countess, who was holding both revolvers. He nodded. She aimed.

“Take off your shoes,” Cormac said to Mulligan. Then turned to the other two. “And you two idiots: shoes, jackets, and trousers.”

The two smaller men were alarmed. They looked at Mulligan’s back, at Cormac, and the guns in the hands of the countess. They started undressing.

“You too, big boy,” Cormac said to Mulligan.

“I’ll not do that.”

“Let me help.”

He sliced Mulligan’s belt and the man’s trousers fell. He wasn’t wearing drawers. From the stairs came giggles and titters and one woman’s loud sob.

“The rest,” Cormac said.

Within minutes, all three men were naked, using hands to cover themselves, and the chorus on the stairs erupted in applause. Even the countess was grinning.

“Now go home.”

“It’s ten bloody degrees out there!” one of the younger men said. His teeth were already clacking.

“If you run hard, you’ll be warm enough, boys.”

They went out, and Cormac saw that it was snowing.

The next afternoon, with a foot of snow upon the ground, a mob showed up at the door of the brothel of the Countess de Chardon. It was led by clergymen, who declared themselves firmly against sin. One Methodist, one Anglican, one Presbyterian. They prayed. They hurled anathemas. They chanted. They sang. A few policemen watched carefully but did nothing. There were no laws against prostitution, since, as the countess observed, the laws were written by men. The age of consent in New York was ten. Watching with the countess from a high window, Cormac saw Hughie Mulligan and a dozen other Dead Rabbits on the edge of the crowd.

“I hope I haven’t caused more trouble than it’s worth,” he said.

“It was worth it,” she said, and giggled.

“What will you do?”

“Pay a few visits.”

While the mob still chanted, the countess slipped out the back door, dressed warmly against the cold. When she returned three hours later, the mob was gone.

“They won’t be back,” she said.

“Who did you visit?”

“Certain gentlemen who would rather not have their private tastes made public.”

The mob showed up over the following months at other places run by women but did not return to Duane Street. Hughie Mulligan and his boys had created one of the first true New York rackets: They would protect the houses from themselves. That is, if they were paid a fee, nobody would bother the madams, their women, or their business establishments. And through connections at Tammany Hall, they’d make certain that no fool of a politician would try to pass a law in Albany that would close the houses. They did not try again to move against the countess.

“But be careful, Cormac. Hughie Mulligan won’t forget what you did.”

“I know.”

Then one night, after a mild summer when only 213 New Yorkers died of cholera, the countess came to wake up Cormac in his room. The clock said 1:20. He sat up.

“What is it?”

“They have a plan,” she said, her voice breathless. “They’re going to burn out some blocks downtown, get rid of the old wooden houses, and…”

“Wait, slow down.”

She calmed herself and explained how she had learned from a favored customer that a certain group was planning to burn out some of the old streets, because the land titles and squatting rights were now too complicated to deal with. Later, they would help move the rich up to the new districts in Greenwich Village, where they could come to work on the new horse-drawn omnibuses. The speculators among them already owned the land up in Greenwich and were investing in the omnibuses. The mechanics, the apprentices, and the poor would be forced into the houses off Chapel Street, where many other poor now lived (including the children of Africans). Others would be directed to the houses of the Five Points. Everything below Wall Street would be rebuilt and devoted to business.

“And who is this favored customer?”

“I can’t speak his name. I call him the Wax Man. He likes, well…”

“And the name of his group?”

She sighed. “They don’t have a name. But they are real.” “And why would the Wax Man tell you?”

“He was drinking wine, a lot of wine, he was getting… I suppose the word is sentimental. He wanted me to know—so that I could buy land now, in Greenwich Village, or along Bond Street, or even farther into the country. He was offering me a favor. A piece of the information. It’s not the first time.”

Cormac wrapped a blanket around himself against the seeping September cold.

“I should put this in the newspaper,” he said, knowing that Bryant would surely find some excuse to refuse its publication.

“Never,” she said. “They’ll kill you, and worse…” (smiling broadly) “they’ll kill me.”

They both laughed. She took Cormac’s hand and led him across the hall to her room, closing the door behind them. She talked a lot about how real estate was the most important of all businesses in the town whose true god was Mammon. That was why she thought the Wax Man’s raving was more than raving. She rang for a maid and ordered two omelettes, fresh bread, and a bottle of water. She swore Cormac to secrecy. “This is not about some stupid thugee like Hughie Mulligan,” she said. “This is about the big boys.” And then mentioned names. Ruggles, Hewett, Vandermeer, Astor. “They’re not thinking about Saturday night,” she said. “They’re thinking about the future. A future we can’t imagine, and they can.”

Months passed. There was no fire. There was at least serious talk now about building a reservoir in Croton, high in Westchester, and digging a system of pipes to carry fresh water to the city. That was still the distant future, and it was still merely talk, but the newspapers were finally behind it, in the name of the expanding metropolis. In the present, Cormac was more grateful than ever for water and the aroma of lavender and clean flesh. His hands grew a bit looser on the keys of the piano. The playing of the countess, in contrast, was richer and more supple. He understood better the theory of half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, and sixteenth notes, of semiquavers and time stops, but his execution of the theory remained mechanical and crude. The countess was kind and patient.

Cormac worked hard at the newspaper, mentioned the rumors of an impending fire to Bryant, asked discreet questions of Beatriz and other friends on the streets, but he heard nothing more that was concrete. Neither did the countess, although the Wax Man continued making his Thursday night visits to the various rooms of the house. Sometimes he brought his own candles.

Cormac was careful in his movements, his eyes searching Duane Street before leaving the house. He avoided the frontiers of the Five Points at night, when the friends and associates of Hughie Mulligan might be watching from ambush. On most days, the sword was too bulky to strap to hip or back, but he did start carrying one of the revolvers he’d taken from Hughie’s boys. He kept this hidden from editors and other reporters, and did not even tell the countess. On several Sundays he went off to the north on a rented horse to practice shooting at targets in the woods.

The stranger arrived in November. It was just after midnight, and Cormac was sitting back, deep in a plush chair, while the countess played an aching tune, full of longing. His eyes were closed, and he saw rain-washed streets and gabled rooftops and a river. The music was full of the river, the water flowing through time.

Then, from beyond the door, he heard the music of a violin.

Playing in counterpoint to the music of the piano.

The countess stopped playing, and he saw shock in her eyes. She did not move. The violin continued, picking up the melody of aching loss and an unseen river.

She got up without looking at Cormac and walked to the door. She paused while the music played, then turned the knob and opened the door.

A man in a cape was standing there, playing the violin. He didn’t look at her, for his eyes were closed, his square jaw pressed into the chin rest, his brow crumpled into concentrated creases. His left hand moved subtly on the strings, there seemed no movement at all with the bow, yet he was pulling music from his instrument that was charged with enormous delicacy and power. The countess touched her mouth. The stranger kept playing and then glided deftly into a diminishing passage of farewell.

He finished and stood there, his brow still furrowed.

“Hello, Monsieur Breton,” she said. “Come in.”

He stepped across the threshold, his hazel eyes taking in the room and falling upon Cormac, who was now standing. The countess closed the door. The stranger did not move and neither did Cormac. For the first time, he saw the countess appear awkward.

“Cormac, this is Yves Breton,” she said in French. “Yves, Cormac O’Connor.”

Cormac stepped forward and offered a hand. M. Breton ignored it, busying his hands with bow and violin. His cape was dirty, his shoes slippery with black city mud.

“Can I get you a drink?” Cormac said.

“Yes,” M. Breton said. “Cognac.”

His tone was dismissive, and he turned to the countess. “You’re playing again,” he said.

“Yes. I tried to give it up, but—”

She shrugged and gestured toward a chair. M. Breton looked in an inquisitive way at Cormac, who was returning with a small glass of cognac. He did not take the offered chair. In a sacramental way, he placed the bow and violin on a table, then sipped the cognac, thrust a hand in a trousers pocket, and stared at the countess. Cormac thought: Too theatrical by far.

“You look well,” M. Breton said to the countess. “Better than I expected after, what? More than five years.”

“Thank you,” she said, but did not return the compliment. M. Breton stared at her.

“How did you find me?” she said.

“I looked. I asked. Someone told me you were in New York, and I thought, She could only be a whore.”

Cormac’s stomach churned. He felt something new: that he was an intruder in the suite of the Countess de Chardon. Who denied the past, and now clearly had one.

“And how was prison?” she said.

“I survived. I’m here. It doesn’t matter.”

Now he turned on Cormac.

“Bring me another cognac,” he said.

Cormac gestured toward the bar. “The bottle’s over there. Help yourself, Monsieur Breton.”

The Frenchman turned to the countess. “Is he the butler?’ “No, he’s my lover,” she said.

Cormac could hear himself breathing now. And the countess breathing. And M. Breton too.

Then M. Breton stared into his drink, laughed, and shook his head.

“Well,” he said, “every cunt must have its servant.”

Cormac stepped before him, anger quickening his pulse.

“You can leave now, my fiddling friend. There’s the door.”

“I don’t think so,” M. Breton said.

The countess stepped between them.

“Cormac, this is my husband.”

76.

That night, as on every night, he retreated to his room down the hall. But now everything was different. No word had passed to him from the countess, but it was clear from her posture, her silence, and her eyes that he must stay away from the suite. This was a complete change. Before the arrival of M. Breton, after food and music and water and bed, they had always kissed good-night and retired to their separate beds for the replenishments of sleep. She wanted it that way, and he came to luxuriate in his own solitude. Alone in his room before sleep, he could read, he could imagine, he could paint, he could hum vagrant melodies. He could think, too, about the strangeness of his life, the long years, the old vows that were printed on him, the names and brief lives of the dead. He could indulge in the secret pleasures of philosophy. He could exercise blankness, wiping away all imagery and all regret.

On the second night, the countess stopped him in the hall and kissed his cheek.

“He’ll stay with me,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

He said, “Fine, no, no, I understand. I don’t mind.”

But, of course, he did mind. Part of it was the impression made upon him by Yves Breton. He was arrogant and vain, convinced, it seemed, of his genius as a violinist and the superior rights that must be granted to him as a result. Who the hell was he to show up after many years and move back into his wife’s bed? Cormac lay in his own bed thinking these things, and felt his anger growing in spite of his attempts to control it with his will. How could she take such a man to her bed? She had never told him everything about her past, and that was all right with Cormac. The past was the past. It could not be changed. If she did not tell him everything about her past, then he had no obligation to reveal his own, even if what he told her was an elaborate lie concocted to hide the truth. She would have laughed at the truth and suggested he take a room in the madhouse. But the past never completely passed, and here came her past, embodied in M. Breton, walking into their present.

He told himself that the countess might only be testing him, creating through this surprise a way to see whether Cormac was indeed free of jealousy. If so, she was playing a silly and dangerous game. Too French by far. He told himself he was not jealous but angry over a breach of manners. And then realized that he was indeed suffering from a slippery attack of jealousy. To his own complete surprise.

His ruminations were interrupted by a knock on the door. He got up quickly and cracked it open.

Fiammetta was there, in a sheer nightgown, holding a candle.

“Madame says you need me,” the girl said.

“Thank you, Fiammetta,” he said. “But I don’t.”

Her face was trembling.

“I can help you sleep,” she said.

“I’ll be all right.”

“Okay, Mister O’Connor. Sleep tight.”

“I’ll try.”

He did not sleep well that night or the next night or the night after that. He plunged into reporting, moving from hearings into the Croton water project to the murder of an apprentice boy on Baxter Street to the burning of a ship at the dock on Coenties Slip. He was cut off from the piano in the closed suite of the Countess de Chardon and put his energies into painting. He did not see M. Breton. He saw the countess on the fourth day after her husband’s arrival in their lives.

“I can explain,” she said. “But not now.”

Jennings was in the doorway of the house on Hudson Street when Cormac arrived. His face looked pale and wasted, his eyes rheumy with horror. He was smoking a thin rum-soaked cigarillo.

“Even you don’t want to see this one, Cormac,” he said, a tremble in his voice. His eyes wandered to the small crowd on the sidewalk, and the horse-drawn carts beyond, and the old black men huddled in the doorways. Jennings clearly wanted to see something banal and comforting and familiar on this morning gray with the threat of rain.

“How bad is it?” Cormac asked.

“Two babies, their brains beaten out of their skulls. A woman shot three times in the face. A man with a bullet in his brow. They think he’s the woman’s son, and the babies belong to him.”

“Oh, God…”

“The babies…” Jennings had lost all his mannerisms. His mouth trembled. “Oh, Jesus, Cormac…”

He seemed about to cry, then clamped the cigarillo in his teeth and slipped a whiskey flask from his jacket pocket.

“Who’s on it?” Cormac said.

“Ford. Who else?”

“I don’t envy his dreams.”

Jennings took a swig from the flask, offered it to Cormac, who declined.

“How do you handle your dreams—without drink?” Jennings said.

“I don’t.”

Cormac patted Jennings on the back and entered the house of the newly dead. A young doctor pushed past him, climbing the stairs to the third floor. Children and adults peered from the partly opened doors, white faces and black. The odors of soup and shit and sewage filled the air. On the second landing a thin mustached cop blocked his way.

“Who are you?” the policeman said.

Cormac showed a press identity card. The cop squinted at it and handed it back.

“It’s pretty bad up there,” he said.

“So I’ve heard.”

“All niggers,” the cop said. “And a lot of opium too.” Cormac moved past him up the stairs. The egglike odor of soft coal now mixed with the stench of shit and blood. Another policeman blocked his way.

“Not now,” he said. “They’re still working.”

“Ask the inspector if he can give his friend Cormac some names.”

They were not friends, but he wanted the names.

“Ask him yourself,” the cop said.

Cormac leaned past him, glimpsing blood on polished plank floors. “Inspector Ford, it’s Cormac O’Connor…. I need some names.”

Ford emerged from another room. His face was pale too, as if the crime were draining blood from the living.

“Come in, Cormac,” he said softly. “I think you know this woman.”

That night, his story written coldly and set in type, his stomach empty to fight off the nausea, he made drawings of Beatriz Machado. He drew her as she was in life. He drew her as a young woman in the bookstore in Lispenard Street. He drew her as she was at Quaco’s funeral, an American in the presence of the oldest Africans. He drew her rich with fat, as she sold corn and oysters and opium from her stall on Broadway. He drew her with charcoal and sepia chalk, pulling her into life from memory, from the river of time. He hummed music as he used line and shadow and volume to make her as she was in life. He hummed the melodies that came from the hands of the countess. He hummed music that had never been written on paper, music that came from gourds and fiddles in a lost year in a vanished century. He worked in a kind of anguished frenzy, sweat pouring from his body.

Then, his hands black with chalk, he fell on the narrow bed, pulled a pillow over his face, and wept. He was sick of the things human beings did to one another. He was angry too. Too many people were chopped out of the world before you had a chance to say good-bye.

He did not hear the door open. But he felt the bed sag as she sat on its edge, felt her hands in his hair.

“Poor Cormac,” the countess said.

He looked at her, expecting some gloss of irony. All he saw was care.

“You’re hurting,” she said.

“I am.”

“And I’m one of the reasons you’re hurting.”

He sighed in a reluctant way.

“Yes,” he said.

“But she—the woman in these drawings—she’s a reason too.”

“She is,” he said. He sat up now on the edge of the bed and stared at his blackened hands.

“Tell me the story.”

He stood up and went to the sink and began washing his hands.

“I knew her for many years,” he said. “She sold oysters and other things from a stall on Broadway. She was warm and human and funny. At some point last night, she was murdered.”

“My God.”

The black would not come off his fingers. He pulled at it with a towel.

“Her own son killed her, along with two of his own children, and then shot himself in the brow.” He heard his voice as if the voice alone were the cold teller of a tale. “He beat out the brains of the children. He shot off his mother’s face.” Then he took a deep breath, not looking at the countess for the effect of his words. “He told a woman on the first floor that he hated his mother because she laughed at him. That was probably true. She laughed at everyone and everything. She laughed at me, as well she should. She laughed at life.” He paused, turned to look at the countess, whose face was lost in imagining.“The same woman on the first floor saw the son yesterday, in the morning. He told her he had been out of work for eleven months. He was tired of depending on his mother. He was tired of being black.”

He glanced at the black lines dug into his fingertips, and the sanguine chalk red as blood. The countess looked up at him.

“Sit down,” she said.

Then she told him some of her story: how she’d met Yves Breton in Paris, where her mother had taken her to study at the Conservatory. They were living then in New Orleans, which was still French, the place to which she and her mother had fled in 1802 when the slave revolt had come upon them. She remembered the cemeteries above ground because of the high level of the water, the porous soil full of writhing stone monuments, and how the one of her father was a kind of boast, because there was nothing of her father inside the tomb. His body had been hacked to pieces in Haiti. She was eight years old when her father was murdered, and her mother rose out of a cellar hideout a day later, packed up jewels and cash and some paintings and pastels, and left for Louisiana, dry-eyed and angry. She was angry in some obscure way at the countess (who was not, of course, a countess) and angry with her dead husband, for failing to take the black revolutionists seriously until they walked into his drawing room; she was angry with Napoleon Bonaparte, the consul for life, for failing to protect them; she was angry at leaving the life they had made in the Caribbean.

“She never stopped being angry,” the countess said. “And when Napoleon sold Louisiana to the Americans, she was angrier than ever. Anger kept her alive. It was her food.”

They had a small house with a garden on Royal Street and a piano in the front parlor. They had two slaves, both women: a cook and a woman who cleaned. When the Americans arrived after 1804, all wild and bearded and wearing the skins of animals, drunk and mean-eyed men, as they said, from the back of beyond, whooping and raising rifles in the air, her mother had added a male slave to guard the doors, armed with an ax. His name was Jacques. The piano teacher stayed on, and the countess played every day, escaping from the anger of her mother, and the growing disorder of the town. And finally, when she was sixteen, after pleading and sobbing and many tantrums, she convinced her mother that they must go to Paris.

“She sold the women slaves,” she said, “and freed Jacques, closed the house, and we sailed away.”

She met M. Breton at the Conservatory, where he was teaching harmonics and violin. She tried to explain to Cormac how handsome M. Breton was then, in spite of the way he limped (from a wound at the Battle of Wagram), how reckless he was, how charged with passion. He talked without pause, about Goethe and Schiller and Madame de Staël, names she’d never heard in New Orleans, about the endless possibilities of music, about painters, about the way Napoleon was changing all of Europe and all of history. He became the first man she ever slept with.

“It was like a summer storm,” she said, “without warning, without time for escape, and I have never regretted it. Everyone should fall in love in such a way, at least once.”

M. Breton was eleven years older than she was, twenty-eight to her seventeen, a brilliant violinist, his music brooding with regret or exploding into exaltation. He had been too young to savor the enormous excitements of the Revolution, but he remained, in that year before Moscow, a passionate follower of Bonaparte, who had repaired all the errors and excesses of the Jacobins and restored the nation to glory. Or so he said. The loss of three toes on his right foot and part of his right femur at Wagram kept him out of the Grand Armée. But as he limped along the marble halls of the Conservatory, and through the streets of Paris, he kept telling her that all French honor, all European honor, was now derived from Bonaparte. M. Breton played his violin for soldiers in hospitals and at the funerals of the fallen. He cheered at parades.

“That was the only thing he did without sarcasm: cheer,” the countess said. “And I cheered too.”

Then came Moscow, and the end of the myth of invincibility, and the long, slow, violent fall that followed. When M. Breton looked up with clear eyes, the streets were filling with cripples and widows, and Napoleon Bonaparte was on Elba.

“By then, my mother and I were gone,” the countess said. “We were back in New Orleans. We arrived three weeks after Andrew Jackson defeated the British, and my mother found her two women, and Jacques too, paid them for their services this time, and we tried to make the house a home. Now I gave lessons too, for there was not enough money, and my mother was still angry.”

Nine months later, M. Breton arrived like a corsair. He courted her again, courted her mother too, charmed their friends, who were enchanted by his music. And so they married. A year later, a child died stillborn. One rainy summer night, M. Breton sat down and wrote a letter to his wife, explaining that he could not look at her without thinking of death, and then he vanished. There were a few letters over the next few years, from Mexico, from Havana, from Italy. A few lines here, a few lines there. She did not see him again. Until now.

“All true stories are unhappy ones,” she said, once more protected by irony. “That’s the essence of the romantic.”

When she was gone, he fell into bed in the dark, thinking of the Countess de Chardon, and remembered where he was living when she was in Paris: that small sweaty room on Reade Street, and a woman whose face was now dim in memory and whose name was gone. Those were the years when he began thinking about women in categories that he knew were unfair: episodes, chapters, events, stories. As if each woman were a mere book taken down from a shelf, to be examined, pondered, and closed. He had no more women than other unmarried men, just more time. Year after year after year. All the time in the world. Everything could wait, including the possibilities of love. He learned in those years to avoid learning too much about a woman, because knowledge would make parting more wrenching, for her and for him. It was unfair, and in some cases cruel, but that came with the strangeness of his life.

Now he knew much more about the countess than he had learned in all the months that came before, but the knowledge gave him no comfort. His stomach churned. He wanted to go down the hall and lie with her. He wanted to confront M. Breton. He lay there until night melted into dawn.

77.

He paid for the burial of Beatriz Machado and her son and the girls. The adult coffins cost two dollars each and the children’s seventy-five cents. A preacher from the African Methodist Church spoke over the coffins, and they were placed in the earth of a small cemetery near the Bowery. Some of the neighbors were there, and when it was over they hugged, whispered words of regret, and went their separate ways. Cormac thought: I have gone to too many funerals.

For four days he worked harder than ever at the newspaper. On one of the days, he talked to three politicians about the way New Yorkers were at last able to elect a mayor, and what that would mean to the future. He covered the suicide of a stockbroker, caught embezzling, and wrote a story that was not printed. “I know the poor lad’s family,” said Bryant, waving the story away. “They’ve suffered enough.” On the following day, he visited a house overrun by rats, where women were beating at them with shovels while policemen laughed and small boys took target practice with rocks. He wrote a story about the American settlers in Texas and their revolt against Mexico, which refused to let them own slaves. He interviewed Samuel Colt, visiting from Hartford, who was showing off his new invention, the six-shooter. He did an article about the men who were paving lower Broadway, all of them Irish. He wrote for the Evening Post. He read the New York Herald.

He left the house on Duane Street early each day and returned late. He dined one night with Jennings, who was still sickened by the slaughter of Beatriz and her grandchildren, and did his best to console the man. He found an inn where the steak was tender. On the third night, he bathed alone in the room where the women of the house washed away the aromas of their work. He saw little of the countess. Then, on a rainy Saturday night, he was at his pad of paper again, working up finished drawings from tiny sketches made on the street. His fingers ached for the piano, wanting to bring music out of his head and into the air. The door burst open and M. Breton stood in the frame. His hair was unruly. His shirt was open to his chest. His mustache needed trimming.

“You, Irishman,” he said in English. He had been drinking.

“Come in,” Cormac said.

“I am in.”

“Then close the fucking door.”

M. Breton closed the door and gazed around the small studio. He glanced at the books and studied the drawings.

“Laurence Sterne?” he said. “Jonathan Swift. Théophile Gautier? Goethe… You’re a reader.”

“When there’s time.”

“I’m a musician,” he said with a shrug. “Musicians don’t read. They feel. They play.”

“I’ve heard you play,” Cormac said.

M. Breton waited as if expecting a blow.

“You’re very good,” Cormac said.

M. Breton sighed. “Not as good as I once dreamed of being.”

“But very good, nevertheless.”

“Merci. Do you have anything—”

“I don’t drink. But I can pull that cord near the door and—”

“Cognac,” he said, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Cormac ordered cognac from the black servant who answered the pull of the cord.

“I came to apologize,” M. Breton said, and asked if Cormac understood French, and switched with Cormac’s affirmative nod. “I’ve come here, Irishman, to apologize.” There was a scatter of rain on the windowpanes. “I have disrupted your life. My wife has told me the story, and of your… arrangement, and of how you have comforted her.”

The hall porter arrived with a bottle of cognac and two glasses. M. Breton poured a glass for himself, offered the bottle to Cormac, who declined, then inhaled the aroma of the drink. His features seemed to loosen.

“I loved her from the day I met her,” he said, staring into the glass. “She was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen.”

“She’s beautiful now.”

“Of course. But then she was still innocent. Then she was still flowering in music. I would see her, and sing. I would think of her, and play.”

Cormac thought: Please don’t say “We were meant for each other.”

“We were certain to destroy each other,” M. Breton said. “Music made her innocent. It made me corrupt. And corruption is always stronger than innocence.”

He drained the cognac and poured another. The rain spattered the windowpanes now, and from away off to the west, Cormac heard thunder.

“So, Monsieur Breton, why did you come here?”

He looked at Cormac for a long beat.

“To die.”

He didn’t know where he had picked up syphilis. He was sure it was after he abandoned his wife in New Orleans. It could have been in Mexico City, where he played violin in a bordello on the Calle de la Esperanza; or in Vera Cruz, among the Africans and Indians and mestizos of the waterfront; or in Havana, where he lived for three years in a house on the Malecón facing the sea. He wanted the sun, not the cold drizzle of Paris. He wanted bodies warmed with the sun. He wanted to coarsen his talent with drink and women and the smothering stupor of heat. He found his way to Martinique, so that he could speak in French, and cursed Bonaparte for a fool, with his dreams of conquering arctic Russia while he had Louisiana and New Orleans and the islands of the southern sea.

“He could have ended his days glazed by the sun, a free man,” he said. “But his vanity was too strong. He ruined himself. He ruined France. He ruined Europe.”

He was happiest in Italy, where he landed in 1829, playing in Frenchified Milano, wandering on foot south to Tuscany, to Florence, listening to madrigals in cathedrals, on to Rome, then back again, instructing the children of the Italian rich. He was already sick, although the first stage had faded, and cognac was the only consolation. Until suddenly some guttering ember of his youth burst into flame. Charles X in France decided to bring back the hard old authority of the hard old regime, smashing freedom of the press and dissolving parliament, and M. Breton knew what would happen next. He took a coach to Paris in time for the July Revolution.

“I wanted to die on the barricades,” he said. “A properly romantic death. One that would absolve all my sins.”

He was wounded in the taking of the Hôtel de Ville, with a bullet through his side that just missed his kidneys, and did not see the celebrations after the August abdication. A woman nursed him back to health, a woman who loved him, who took him to the countryside near Lyons, who fed him, who dressed him and bathed him. When he could walk again, he fled.

“I could not give such a woman what I had,” he said. “Could not kill her with my prick.”

He shrugged again, shook his head. He was quiet for a long time. The storm rumbled around the New York streets. The windows trembled.

“I don’t sleep with her,” he said, motioning at the door and the apartment of the Countess de Chardon. “You should not worry.”

He stood up heavily.

“I wish you’d play something,” Cormac said. “There’s some melody of yours that I’ve never heard before….”

“Berlioz,” he said. “It’s from the Symphonie Fantastique.…”

“It’s beautiful.”

M. Breton sighed. “Yes.” He gazed around the room. “But not tonight.”

Three nights later, M. Breton insisted on a dinner for three in the suite of the countess. The service was handsomely laid out, with golden light from gas lamps and candles and the silver gleaming. There were oysters, and cheeses, and chilled wines, and veal and asparagus and small roasted potatoes. He had bathed and was crisply dressed, his shoes polished, his cravat precise, his fingernails scrubbed. The countess looked at him in a cautious way, laughing at his jokes, accepting his pouring of the wine, nodding at his ruminations on the fevers of politics.

“I must play,” he said, and then took his violin and limped a few feet to the side, and gave them the aching, then soaring melodies of the Symphonie Fantastique.

Cormac saw tears welling in the eyes of the countess and held her hand. She placed her other hand on top of his. When M. Breton finished, he took a mock bow, and they applauded him.

Around three-thirty that morning, M. Breton hanged himself.

She buried him in St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie. Cormac did not attend. She returned with her face dry, and he sensed her anger struggling with her pity, as it must have struggled within her mother after Haiti. But she said nothing and he asked no questions. She had his own old custom of closing a book and leaving it closed. With his door open, he heard her tell the maids to air out the rooms and cast out the clothing of M. Breton, and place his violin in its case on a high shelf of a closet. That night, they resumed the habits of their lives together. In the morning, he sat down again to run his fingers on the keys of the piano.

And yet it was not the same. A shadow had fallen upon them, as indefinite as any shadow. On a primitive level, it was simple: He knew too much about her now and she knew nothing of consequence about him. The old symmetry of unknowability had been upset. But he’d learned something about himself too. After so many years, he could be jealous. He could tremble with anger and weakness and need. As old as he was, that tangle of nerves still lived within him. And he knew a larger truth: He loved this woman.

Just after dark on December 16, the countess came to his room.

“They’ve done it,” she said. “Pearl Street is burning.”

Cormac dressed quickly in warm clothes, with beaver hat and lined gloves, for it was a frigid night, pocketed a sketchbook and pencils, and went out. High up on Duane Street, he could smell smoke, carried by the north-blowing wind, and peering down Broadway he saw a glow in the skies above the First Ward. He heard the dong-donging of warning bells and shouts of alarm and the strangled din of human voices. He turned his back to the wind, which blew more fiercely as he came closer to the harbor, clogging his eyes with cold tears. Thinking: Fire again. Like the fire that took my father’s body to the Otherworld. Like the fire that destroyed the earl’s mansion in Ireland. Like the fire that leveled the fort in 1741. Or the fires from the start of the Revolution, those great blazing, wind-driven fires that even toppled Trinity Church. Earth, air, fire, and water: the elements of the world.

When he arrived at Pearl Street, the firemen were already wild with panic. The icy wind whipped the flames, shifting, turning, creating immense orange flames and whirlpools of fire, as if playing some evil game with the puny structures made by men. The pumps didn’t deliver the water that was needed. The water itself was frozen beneath the ground, in the shallow wells, in the rotting wooden pipes of the Manhattan Company. The water that did flow quickly froze in the canvas hoses. In the orange light of the flames, Cormac saw cobblers and coopers backing away from their burning homes, blankets draped across their shoulders, their children wailing, their wives mad with loss. A woman in a shawl raced toward the flames, screaming, “Our silver, our wedding silver!” A fireman tried to stop her, but she plunged through the great orange wall and didn’t come back.

“Fucked,” a fireman said. “Too much wind and too little water. We’re absolutely fucked.”

And so they were.

For hours, with his fingers freezing in their gloves, Cormac moved through the crowds, swollen now by other New Yorkers who had come to witness the calamity (or to bring blankets and soup to the dispossessed). There was no control, nobody in charge. Sparks and embers rose into the purple sky, and to Cormac looked oddly beautiful, like very slow fireworks. Those sparks and embers fell upon the shingled rooftops of other buildings. Beams crackled, bottles exploded and popped, and then there was a great whooshing sound as a roof came down upon an upper floor. Followed by the sound of an immense coal chute as the roof brought down everything with it: beds and books and nightgowns, silverware and tools, crockery and etchings, boots and crinolines and andirons. Some people wailed as the artifacts of their lives vanished. Some looked too stunned for human feeling. The smoke made all of them choke and cough, and Cormac tied a handkerchief across his mouth and nose. Men were leading horses to safety up Broadway, but he could smell burned horseflesh from the midst of burning buildings. Dogs howled. Men cursed. Carts arrived to help evacuate houses in the path of the flames, the cartmen tripling their prices for the night. Cormac the painter made sketches. Cormac the newspaperman made notes. One fireman told him that the fire had started at 88 Pearl Street, near the corner of Exchange, and was discovered by a watchman named Hayes. Another said that fifty buildings had been burned in the first fifteen minutes. Some citizens blamed the volunteer firemen for the chaos, saying they were nothing but amateurs, if not criminal gangs. And what was more, some were looting the burning homes, stuffing their pockets with silver and tools and pistols.

“We shouldn’t pay them,” one outraged citizen shouted. “We should hang them!”

This had some truth to it. Around two in the morning, he saw Hughie Mulligan and his boys moving out of buildings on the far side of the densest fire. All wore the leather helmets of the volunteer fire departments. All wore heavy coats with bulging pockets. They moved quickly, darting in and out of smoke, then vanishing toward their carts.

About four in the morning, Cormac hurried to the Post on Pine Street and wrote a story (one of three that made the newspaper that morning), left some broad-brushed sketches for the engraver Fasanella, and then returned to the fire. It burned for two days, and firemen came to help from as far away as Philadelphia. When it was over, twenty square blocks and 697 buildings had been destroyed. It wasn’t known how many died, because no bodies were found in the ashes. Twenty-two of the city’s twenty-four insurance companies went bankrupt. The stench of the fire lay over the downtown streets for months, and one thing was absolutely certain: The old wooden town was gone forever.

“I warned you,” said the Countess de Chardon as Cormac stretched in her bath on the afternoon of the seventeenth and tried to scrub the soot and grime out of his hair and off his exhausted body.

“And I kept my word and kept my silence.”

“So you did.”

“But you’re in danger, Countess. You must understand that.”

“Why am I in danger?” she said in an amused way.

“Because they know that you know.”

She pondered this, her face darkening. “I know more than just this, alas. The Wax Man loves to babble.”

“That’s the problem.”

That night she decided that it was time for a vacation in Paris. She would place a friend in charge of the house and vanish for a year. Would Cormac come with her? She could show him all the secret places that she saw when she was sixteen. They could try to meet this writer named Balzac whose name was in all the gazettes. He wanted her to stay but knew she had to leave. Cormac told her that he couldn’t go to Paris. But he would be waiting for her in New York when she returned.

“It’s nice of you to say that,” she said in a melancholy way.

“I’ll be here. I swear it.”

She shrugged. And began the rituals of departure. She packed trunks. She went alone to purchase a ticket on the Black Flag packet that went south to the Caribbean before crossing the winter sea to Le Havre. She said that a heavy, sweet-voiced woman named Sara Long would run the house, and introduced her to Cormac. “She’s a delight,” the countess said, while the woman blushed. “Particularly in bed.” Then she wrote out a long letter filled with what she knew about the conspiracy to set the fires and sealed it, appropriately, with wax.

“Before I leave, I’ll let the Wax Man’s friends know that this exists,” she said. “And that it will be made public if anything happens to me. If anything does happen, I want you to put this in your newspaper.”

“I’ll do my best. It’s never up to me.”

“Yes. I understand. I know, better than most, who decides what goes into newspapers….” She sighed. “Just do your best.”

She then opened a panel above the bed, slipped the letter into a small safe, and handed Cormac the key. Then she sat down hard on one of her chairs, while snow fell steadily beyond the windowpanes behind her.

“I don’t want you to go,” he said.

“But for us, the timing might be right, no?”

“What do you mean?”

He sat beside her and she huddled against him while he played his fingers in her hair.

“I mean something has happened to us,” she said. “When Monsieur Breton arrived, it meant that each of us had a past, and that was too much to carry. The fire was just… a kind of way to end things.”

“I can’t accept that.”

“You didn’t think we would grow old together, did you? Sitting in chairs somewhere, gray and full of years, looking at the sea?”

“No.”

“Nor did I.”

“But you could move with me somewhere else for a while. Say you’re going to Paris and actually live in a house up on top of the island until they forget you. They’ll know you’ve said nothing because there’ll be nothing in the newspapers.”

“Yes, and one night, some fool is passing by, lost and needing directions. And he sees my face, and they come for both of us.”

She eased away from him, poured a glass of white wine. “And you? In such an arrangement, you’d be a prisoner. You’d be living my life, protecting me, my Irish knight, and slowly going crazy. No, that won’t work. And if I’m quiet, you’ll think I’m remembering Monsieur Breton. And if I play piano, you’ll think of him with his violin. And you might be correct.”

She stood up and stared out at the snow.

“Sooner or later, you would go.”

“I don’t think so.”

She turned to him and smiled a radiant smile.

“If you wouldn’t go, then I would,” she said.

He returned her smile.

“Who will teach me to play piano?” he said.

“You will.”

Later that night, they made love while snow fell upon the wounded city. She left for South Street before dawn.

For three days and three nights, he never left the house on Duane Street. He told the Evening Post that he was exhausted, sick from the smoke of the Great Fire, and needed some time to recover. They gave it to him graciously. The women came to offer him flesh and biscuits. He accepted the biscuits. All day, he played the piano, caressing the keys, trying to remember the melody of Berlioz while failing to club it out of the piano. At night, he lay alone, his mind full of death.

They all danced for him in the flickering light of a single gas lamp. His father waltzed with his mother. Bridget Riley danced with Mary Burton. The Earl of Warren danced alone, juggling three balls in three-quarter time. Here came all the black women, dancing with Bantu and Silver and Aaron, Big Michael and Carlito, all young and free. There was Quaco dancing with his wife, safe from the fires of the fort. And Dubious Jones with Beatriz Machado. While Kongo watched in the shadows. Cormac hummed as the dance unfolded in the gaslit room and the snow fell steadily and he ached with loneliness.

It’s time to go, he told himself. It’s time to move on. I have lived too long in this refuge, with its water and scent of lavender. I have lived in a parenthesis of time, and now it has come to an end. The countess is gone, and I must go too. I can’t live in a haunted house.

He found new lodgings on Mott Street, avoiding the pillowy consolations of Sara Long. Four days later, a mob of puritanical zealots, including Hughie Mulligan, newly converted to the banners of God, stormed the house on Duane Street, beating the women, rousting the customers, carting away the art and the candelabra and the furnishing, and then set the building on fire. When Cormac arrived the next day, scavengers were poking in the rubble. He looked for the safe for hours and in late afternoon found it under some glistening timbers. The metal was still hot. He wrapped it in burlap, cooled it in some blackened snow, carried it to Mott Street, and opened it with a key (using oil to lubricate the lock). The last note of the Countess de Chardon had been baked into ashes.

Two weeks after that, he was in the office at the Post when news arrived that the Black Flag packet to Le Havre had been lost at sea. There were 216 passengers on board. Cormac scanned the list. The name of the Countess de Chardon did not appear, but he knew she was among them.

That same week, the clearing of the ruined houses was well under way. The work was done quickly, efficiently, almost ruthlessly. New buildings made of granite blocks and Corinthian pillars began to rise from the rubble. The most important of them looked like temples, dedicated, of course, to Mammon.