The Dutch House (15 page)

“Maybe on that day,” I would say, running the tips of my fingers along her fascinating curls. “But I would have found you eventually.” I said this because I knew it was what Celeste wanted to hear, this warm girl in my arms who smelled like Ivory soap, but I believed it too, if not romantically then at least statistically: two kids from Jenkintown and Rydal going to college in New York City were likely to bump into one another somewhere along the way.

“The only reason I picked that seat was because I saw the chemistry book. You weren’t even sitting there.”

“That’s right,” I said.

Celeste smiled. “I always did like chemistry.”

Celeste was plenty happy in those days, though in retrospect she was the ultimate victim of bad timing, thinking that because she was good in chemistry she should marry a doctor instead of becoming a doctor herself. Had she come along a few years later she might have missed that trap altogether.

The chemistry book was its own piece of chance. Had I paid attention from the beginning of the semester the way I should have, Dr. Able would have had no reason to put the fear of God into me about failing, and I wouldn’t have turned
Organic Chemistry Today
into an extension of my arm. Who knew a chemistry book could act as bait for pretty girls?

Had I not been close to failing, I wouldn’t have been reading chemistry on the train. Had I not been reading chemistry on the train, I wouldn’t have met Celeste, and my life as I have known it would never have been set in motion.

But to tell this story only in terms of book and train, kinetics and girl, was to miss the reason I had very nearly failed chemistry to begin with.

Maeve scotched any hopes I’d had of trying out for Columbia’s basketball team. She said I’d be distracted from my classwork, wreck my GPA, and lose my chance to liquidate the trust before Norma and Bright could get to it. It wasn’t much of a team anyway. The upshot was I played ball whenever I could find a game, and on a sunny Saturday morning in the beginning of my junior year, I fell in with five guys from Columbia heading over to Mount Morris Park. I had the ball. As a group we were skinny, long-haired, bearded, bespectacled, and in one case, barefoot. Ari, who left his dorm room without shoes, told us he had heard there were always guys looking for a game over at Mount Morris. His authority impressed us, though in retrospect I’m pretty sure he had no idea what he was talking about. Harlem was a bloody mess, and while Mayor Lindsay was willing to walk the streets, Columbia students tended to stay on their own side of the gate. It had been different in 1959 when Maeve went to Barnard. Girls and their dates still got dressed up to go to the Apollo for amateur night, but by 1968 pretty much every representation of hope in the country had been put up against a wall and shot. Boys at Columbia went to class and boys in Harlem went to war, a reality not suspended for a friendly Saturday pick-up game.

Walking to the park, the six of us began to get the message. We kept our eyes open, and so saw the open eyes of everyone we passed—the kids lying out across the stoops and the men clustered on the corner and the women leaning out of open windows—everyone watching. The women and girls walking by suggested that we should go home and fuck ourselves. The trash bags piled up along the curbs split open and spilled into the streets. A man in a white sleeveless undershirt with a pick the size of a dinner plate tucked into the back of his afro leaned into the open window of a car and turned the radio up. A brownstone with its windows boarded over and its front door missing had a notice pasted to the brick:
Tax foreclosure. For sale by public auction
. I could see my father writing down the time and the date of the auction in the small spiral notebook he kept in his breast pocket.

“You see a sign like that,” he said to me once when I was a boy and we were standing in front of an apartment building in North Philadelphia, “it might as well say
Come and get it.
”

I told him I didn’t understand.

“The owners gave up, the bank gave up. The only people who haven’t given up work for the Bureau of Internal Revenue because they never give up. All you have to do to own the building is pay the taxes.”

“Conroy!” a kid from my chemistry class named Wallace called back to me. “Hustle up.” They were already down the block and now I was a white guy alone, holding a basketball.

“Conroy! Move your ass!” said one of the three boys sitting on the steps of the next building, and then another one yelled, “Conroy! Make me a sandwich!”

That was it, the moment of my spiritual awakening on 120th Street.

I pointed to the building with the auction notice. “Who lives there?” I asked the kid who thought I’d come to fix his lunch.

“How the fuck do I know?” he said in ten-year-old parlance.

“He’s a cop,” the second boy said.

“Cops don’t have balls,” the third boy said, and this sent all three of them into rolling hysterics.

My team had been waiting and now, moving a little faster, they circled back. “Time to go, man,” Ari said.

“He’s a cop,” the boy said again, then held out his finger like a gun. “All of you, cops.”

I threw a chest pass to the kid in the red T-shirt and he threw it straight back—one, two.

“Throw it here,” the next one said.

“Take these guys to the park,” I said to the boys. “I’m going to be one minute.” None of them seemed to think that this was a good idea, not my teammates and not the boys on the stoop, but I was already turning back to the liquor store on the corner to see if I could borrow a pen. Everything I needed to know could be written on the palm of my hand.

On my way to look for a pick-up game at Mount Morris I became the sole beneficiary to an inheritance greater than my father’s business or his house. My entire life snapped into sudden Technicolor clarity: I needed a building, specifically the one on 120th near Lenox, in order to be who I was meant to be. I would put the windows in and replace the door myself. I would patch the dry wall and sand the floors and someday I would collect the rent on Saturdays. Maeve believed that medical school was my destiny and Celeste believed that she was my destiny and both of them were wrong. On Monday I called Lawyer Gooch and explained my situation: my father had made provisions for my education, yes, but wouldn’t it be so much more in keeping with his wishes to use that money instead to buy a building and launch myself in the career he’d intended me to have? Looking past the violence and filth, the pockets of impenetrable wealth, Manhattan was an island, after all, and this part of the island was next to an ever-expanding university. Couldn’t he petition the trust on my behalf? Lawyer Gooch listened patiently before explaining that wishes and logic were not applicable to trusts. My father had made arrangements for my education, not my career in real estate. Two weeks later I attended the public auction of the building that was meant to change my life. It sold for $1,800. I had no plans to recover.

But as usual, it turned out I was wrong. There were a lot of buildings in the neighborhood I now haunted, and it wasn’t impossible to find another one that was burned out, full of squatters, and scheduled for auction. I spent so much time in Harlem I felt suspicious even to myself. A white person was someone who either had something to buy or to sell, or he had plans to disrupt the commerce of others. I was included in this, even though I meant to buy something bigger than a bag of weed, and I meant to stay. While most Columbia students had never been to Harlem, I could have given tours. I did labor intensive searches at the library and the records office to find the property taxes and price comps in a ten-block radius. I made appointments to see buildings that were for sale and tracked foreclosures in the paper. The only thing I neglected was chemistry, until I began to neglect Latin, physiology and European history as well.

My father had taught me how to check the joists beneath a porch for rot, how to talk an angry tenant down and how to ground an outlet, but I had never seen him buy anything bigger than a sandwich. I realized I had two narratives for his life: the one in which he lived in Brooklyn and was poor, and the one in which he owned and ran a substantial construction and real estate company and was rich. What I lacked was the bridge. I didn’t know how he’d gotten from one side to the other.

“Real estate,” Maeve said.

I’d called her at home on a Saturday, a sack of quarters I should have been saving on the metal shelf in front of the dorm pay phone. “I know it was real estate, but what was the deal? What did he buy? Who would have given him a loan if he was really as poor as he always said he was?”

The line was quiet for a minute. “What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to understand what happened in our life. I’m trying to do the thing you’re always doing, I’m decoding the past.”

“On a Saturday morning,” she asked. “Long distance?”

Maeve was exactly the person I should have talked to, because she was my sister and because she had a knack for money. If anyone could have helped me solve the problem it was her, but Maeve wasn’t going to listen to anything that might sidetrack me from her dream of medical school. And even if I could have told her, what would I have said? I’d found another building in Harlem up for auction? A rooming house with a single bathroom on every floor? “I’m just trying to figure out what happened,” I said, and that much was true. I had spent countless hours in my father’s company and never asked him a thing. The operator came on and said I needed to put in another seventy-five cents for the next three minutes, and when I declined to do so the line went dead.

Dr. Able alone had seen me slip away, and it was Dr. Able who called me into his office to bring me back to the righteous path of chemistry. He sent me to the department secretary to schedule appointments so that I could meet with him once a week during office hours. He said I had no absences left, and from then on would be expected to be present in class regardless of my health. While the rest of the students would be assigned four or five questions from the end of every chapter, I was to answer all of the questions and come in to have my answers checked. I was never sure if I’d been singled out for punishment or benevolence, but either way I didn’t think I deserved it.

“Bring your parents by,” he said to me a few days before parents’ visiting weekend. “I’ll tell them how well you’re doing, relieve their troubled minds.”

I was standing at the door of Dr. Able’s office and took an extra beat to decide whether to tell him the truth or just say thank you and leave it at that. I liked my persecutor, but my story was complicated and tended to engender a kind of sympathy in other people I’d never been able to tolerate.

“What?” he said, waiting for my answer. “No parents?”

He meant it as I joke and so I laughed. “No parents,” I said.

“Well, I’ll be in the office on Saturday as part of the festivities if you and your legal guardian want to come by.”

“We might do that,” I said, and thanked him as I left.

I put it together easily enough, and years later, Maurice Able, whom everyone called Morey, confirmed my suspicion: he went to the registrar’s office to look at my file. He never asked about my parents again, but he started to suggest we hold our weekly meetings over lunch at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. He invited me to the dinners he and his wife hosted for the graduate students in chemistry. He checked to see how I was doing in my other classes and alerted those teachers to my situation. Morey Able took pity on me and became my advisor, thinking it had been my parentless state that had put me in academic peril, when in fact it was my father. Halfway through college, I had come to see I was a great deal like my father.

Archimedes’ Principle states that any body completely or partially submerged in a fluid at rest is acted upon by an upward force, the magnitude of which is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the body. Or to put it another way, you can hold a beach ball under water but the second you stop it’s going to shoot straight back up. And so throughout my interminable academic career I suppressed my nature. I did everything that was required of me while keeping a furtive list of the buildings I passed that were for sale: asking price, selling price, weeks on the market. I lurked at the periphery of foreclosure auctions, a habit I found hard to break. Like Celeste, I got an A in Organic Chemistry. I then went on to biochemistry second semester and followed that with a year of physics with a lab my senior year. Dr. Able, who had met me when I was drowning, never took his eye off me again. With the exception of that one half-semester, I was a good student, but even after I had recovered my standing, he always had it in his mind I could do better. He taught me how to learn and then relearn, to study until the answer to every question was coded in my fingerprints. I had told him I wanted to be a doctor and he believed me. When the time came to apply, he not only wrote me a letter of recommendation, he walked my application twenty blocks uptown and handed it to the director of admissions at the medical school at Columbia himself.

The fact that I had never wanted to be a doctor was nothing more than a footnote to a story that interested no one. You wouldn’t think a person could succeed in something as difficult as medicine without wanting to do it, but it turned out I was part of a long and noble tradition of self-subjugation. I would guess at least half the students in my class would rather have been anywhere else. We were fulfilling the expectations that had been set for us: the sons of doctors were expected to become doctors so as to honor the tradition; the sons of immigrants were expected to become doctors in order to make a better life for their families; the sons who had been driven to work the hardest and be the smartest were expected to become doctors because back in the day medicine was still where the smart kids went. Women had yet to be allowed to enroll at Columbia as undergraduates but there were a handful of them in my medical school class. Who knows, maybe they were the ones who actually wanted to be there. No one expected their daughters to become doctors in 1970, the daughters still had to fight for it. PS, as the College of Physicians Surgeons was known, had a thriving theater troupe made up of medical student actors, and to watch the shows the PS Club put on—the dreary soon-to-be radiologists and urologists in half an inch of eyeliner bursting into gleeful song—was to see what they might have done with their lives had their lives belonged only to them.