So … my cage on wheels, my gloomy cellars have become an eyrie in the sky where I can walk unmasked and none to see my face from hell but the passing gulls and the wind from the south. And from here I can even see the finally finished and gleaming roof of my one and single indulgence, my one project that is not dedicated to making more money but to the extraction of revenge.
Far in the distance at West 34th Street stands the newly completed Manhattan Opera House, the rival that will set the snobby Metropolitan by the ears. When I came here I wanted to see opera again, but of course I needed a screened and curtained box at the Met. The committee there, dominated by Mrs Astor and her cronies of the social register, the damnable Four Hundred, required me to appear in person for an interview. Impossible, of course. I sent Darius, but they refused to accept him, demanding to see me in person and face to face. They will pay for that insult. For I found another opera-lover who had been snubbed. Oscar Hammerstein, having already opened one opera house and failed, was financing and designing a new one. I became his invisible partner. It will open in December and will wipe the floor with the Met. No expense will be spared. The great Bonci will star but most of all Melba herself, yes Melba, will come and sing. Even now Hammerstein is at Garnier’s Grand Hotel on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, spending my money to bring her to New York.
An unprecedented feat. I will make those snobs, the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Whitneys, Goulds, Astors and Morgans crawl before they listen to the great Melba.
For the rest, I look out and I look down. Yes, and back. A life of pain and rejection, of fear and hatred: you of me and I of you. Only one showed me kindness, took me from a cage to a cellar and then to a ship when the rest were hunting me like a winded fox; one who was like the mother I hardly had or knew.
And one other, whom I loved but who could not love me. You despise me for that also, Human Race? Because I could not make a woman love me as a man? But there was one moment, one short time, like Chesterton’s donkey ‘one far fierce hour and sweet’ when I thought I might be loved … Ashes, cinders, nothing. Not to be. Never to be. So there can only be the other love, the devotion to the master who never lets me down. And him I will worship all my life.
3
THE DESPAIR OF ARMAND DUFOUR
BROADWAY, NEW YORK CITY, OCTOBER 1906
I HATE THIS CITY. I SHOU
LD NEVER HAVE COME. WHY on earth did I come? Because of the wish of a woman dying in Paris who, for all I know, may well have been deranged. And for the bag of gold Napoleons, of course. But even that, perhaps I should never have taken it.
Where is this man to whom I am supposed to deliver a letter that makes no sense? All Fr Sebastien could tell me was that he is hideously disfigured and should therefore be noticeable. But it is the reverse; he is invisible.
I am becoming every day more sure that he never got here. No doubt he was refused entry by the officers at Ellis Island. I went there - what chaos. The whole world of the poor and the dispossessed seems to be pouring into this country and most of them remain right here in this awful city. I have never seen so many down-and-outs: columns of shabby refugees, smelly, even louse-ridden from the voyage in stinking holds, clutching ragged parcels with all their worldly possessions, filing in endless ranks through those bleak buildings on that hopeless island. Towering over them all from the other island is the statue that we gave them. The lady with the torch. We should have told Bartholdi to keep his damn statue in France and given the Yankees something else instead. A good set of Larousse dictionaries perhaps, so they could have learned a civilized language.
But no, we had to give them something symbolic. Now they have turned it into a magnet for every derelict in Europe and far beyond to come flocking in here looking for a better life. Quelle blague! They are crazy, these Yankees. How do they ever expect to create a nation by letting such people in? The rejects from every country between Bantry Bay and Brest-Litovsk, from Trondheim to Taormino. What do they expect? To make a rich and powerful nation one day out of this rabble?
I went to see the Chief Immigration Officer. Thank God, he had a French-speaker available. But he said though few were turned back those clearly diseased or deformed were rejected, so my man would almost certainly have been among that group. Even if he did get in, it has been twelve years. He could be anywhere in this country and it is three thousand miles from east to west.
So I returned to the city authorities, but they pointed out there were five boroughs and virtually no residence records. The man could be in Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, Staten Island. So I have no choice but to stay here on Manhattan Island and seek this runaway from justice. What a task for a good Frenchman!
They have records at City Hall listing a dozen Muhlheims, and I have tried them all. If his name was Smith I would go home now. They even have many telephones here, and a list of those who own them, but no Erik Muhlheim. I have asked the taxation authorities but they say their records are confidential.
The police were better. I found an Irish sergeant who said he would search, for a fee. I know damn well the ‘fee’ went into his trouser pocket. But he went away and came back to say that no Muhlheim had ever been in trouble with the police but he had half a dozen Mullers if that was any help. Imbecile.
There is a circus out on Long Island and I went there. Another blank. I tried their great hospital called Bellevue but they have no record of a man so deformed ever presenting himself for treatment. I can think of nowhere else to go.
I lodge in a modest hotel in the back streets behind this great boulevard. I eat their horrible stews and drink their awful beer. I sleep in a narrow cot and wish I was back in my apartment on the Ile St Louis, warm and comfortable and pressed against the fine fat buttocks of Mme Dufour. It is getting colder and the money is running short. I want to return to my beloved Paris, to a civilized city where people walk instead of running everywhere, a place where the carriages drive sedately instead of racing like maniacs and the trams are not a danger to life and limb.
To make matters worse I thought I could speak some words of the perfidious language of Shakespeare, for I have seen and heard the English milords who come to race their horses at Auteuil and Chantilly, but here they speak through their noses and very very fast.
Yesterday I saw an Italian coffee-shop on this same street serving good mocha and even Chianti wine. Not Bordeaux, of course, but better than that piss-making Yankee beer. Ah, I see it even now, across this deadly dangerous street. I will take a good strong coffee for my nerves’ sake, then return and book my passage home.
4
THE LUCK OF CHOLLY BLOOM
LOUIE’S BAR, FIFTH AVENUE AT 28TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY, OCTOBER 1906
I TELL YOU GUYS, THERE ARE TIMES WHEN BEING A reporter in the fastest, hummingest city in the world is the greatest job on earth. OK, we all know that there are hours and days of foot-slogging and nothing to show for it; leads that go nowhere, interviews rebuffed, no story. Right? Barney, can we have another round of beers here?
Yep, there are times when there’s no scandal at City Hall (not many, of course), no celebrity divorce, no bodies at dawn in Central Park and life loses its sparkle. Then you think: what am I doing here, why am I wasting my time? Maybe I really should have taken over my dad’s outfitters in Poughkeepsie. We all know the feeling.
But that’s the point. That’s what makes it better than selling men’s pants in Poughkeepsie. Suddenly out of left field something happens and, if you’re smart, you see a great story right within your grasp. Happened to me yesterday. Gotta tell you about it. Thanks, Barney.
It was in this coffee-shop. You know Fellini’s? On Broadway at Twenty-sixth. A bad day. Spent most of it chasing up a new lead on the Central Park murders and nothing. The Mayor’s office is screaming at the Bureau of Detectives and they have nothing new, so they’re in a temper and saying nothing worth printing. I face the prospect of going back to city desk to say I don’t even have a column-inch worth printing. So I thought I’ll go in and have one of Papa Fellini’s fudge sundaes. Plenty of maple. You know the one? Keeps you going.
So it’s crowded. I take the last booth. Ten minutes later a guy walks in looking miserable as sin. He looks around, sees I have a booth to myself and walks over. Very polite. Bows. I nod. He says something in a foreign lingo. I point to the spare chair. He sits down and orders a coffee. Only he doesn’t pronounce it kauphy, he says kaffay. The waiter’s Italian, so that’s fine by him. Only I reckon this guy is probably French. Why? He just looked French. So, being polite, I greeted him. In French.
Do I speak French? Is the Chief Rabbi Jewish? Well, all right, a little French. So I says to him, ‘Bonjewer, Mon-sewer.’ Just trying to be a good New Yorker.