Through the Children's Gate (15 page)

Class distinction in New York is more complicated and subtle than any simple taxonomy of bourgeois and bohemian, or rich and middle-class and poor, can encompass. In New York, as Howells was the first to grasp, the professional classes are the middle classes; here, that great bulk of people between the extremes has more money but less security than its counterpart in the rest of the country. Professional people outside New York have always been, or believed themselves to be, essentially comfortable, so that F. Scott Fitzgerald and Booth Tarkington's midwesterners (hardly more than burghers, really) think of themselves as lords. The professional classes of Manhattan live as middle classes used to do, pushing themselves to send their children to school and afford their housing.

Precarious privilege is the rule. Professional life here, then, acquires an unusual air both of entitlement and of embattlement. This affects politics; people with interests to protect expect to be challenged and demand the right to assert themselves, to hold guns and fear minorities, and they call it liberty. People on the bottom who expect to be sat upon value solidarity and protection, and they call it fairness. New Yorkers in the middle, however well-off they may actually be, feel as if they're being sat upon, or might be, by the rich or squeezed together by the poor and so abide laws—rent protection, equal housing—that they suspect might be in their interests, too, or that they feel might offer some protection from those nearby who really
are
being sat on.

Once again, density is fate, and liberalism the organized wariness of the precariously well-off.

D
ensity has its own pattern of serendipity, its happy accidents. On one of the most beautiful mornings of this beautiful fall, Martha tells me, she was walking home, up the street, and saw, or thought she saw, Olivia at her usual spot, with me as I type, in the corner window, searching the streets for dogs and intimates. (Martha didn't have on her glasses.) She waved violently, extremely, to me. The figure in the window waved back, just as passionately, with all his heart—and Martha realized that she had miscounted floors, and the figure in the window was our downstairs neighbor, the one who writes letters about the noise. She had mistaken him for me, defender of her perfect children; he must have mistaken her for a friend or maybe his own good wife, coming home to endure the noisy neighbors.

They waved, and then, as Martha approached and recognized the mistake and—reluctantly but almost inevitably, from necessity more than affability, from some semi-articulate Manhattan Zen impulse that says when you begin to wave, you must go right on waving until the other waver disappears from sight, from some semiconscious impulse of decency that rises from the decorum of density—they kept on waving to each other, the wave losing some of its enthusiasm, but only some, until Martha crossed the street and was out of view. It felt, Martha said, precariously happy, a bit like the Christmas truce in 1914 on the Western Front.

O
n Thanksgiving morning, friends invited us to their apartment on Central Park West to watch the parade roll down the avenue. I sold it very big to Luke: the giant balloons, the highly trained rope holders—I exaggerated that expertise, I suspect—and the sheer scale of the thing. As he looked out the window, Luke seemed more bemused than impressed, crowding up against it with another ten kids. The balloons, I realized, are at once too big and too small—too big to be cute yet
smaller than they promised you, smaller than you had hoped. The
scale
of Manhattan unscales everything else. The buildings are already so much bigger than you can imagine or understand that even a giant caped dog or a massive cartoon moose passes blithely in their shadows, just another event. I could sense Luke's polite disappointment. Even things they tell you really fly don't fly; they just float below the cornice line of the buildings. They don't attain the sky—just the fifth floor.

A musical family, our hosts sit down to sing to the quickly bored children. Someone checks a watch, noting the morning hour. “Don't play the piano,” she says. “
You
know. The neighbors.” And the music stops.

O
n an airplane over middle America, I sit down to read
Peter Pan,
which we saw once but I have never really read. Maybe, I think, I can find some secret flight formula buried in the Original Text. I read with pleasure, if not with illumination.
Peter Pan,
I see, is about escape, outward motion, the flight beyond to Neverland. For J. M. Barrie, the townhouse, very much like those we envy on Halloween, represented the thing to fly
away
from, the little prison of bourgeois bedtimes. It wasn't that Barrie didn't like the houses he knew; he tried to build one like the one in his book for the real boys who inspired the story. It was that he took the fifth-floor window for granted, as part of the bourgeois entitlement, even though there are no servants in this house, just the dog. (Reading
Mary Poppins
to the children, we were startled to discover that the embattled, harried Banks family has
four
full-time servants before the Divine Nanny even arrives.)

But to us, the house in
Peter Pan
looks like an unobtainable idyll of domestic pleasure, a place to fly
to,
just as Cherry Tree Lane is the place you want your children to be, not the one you need the magic nanny to lead them out of. The Edwardian-Georgian London, which sits just before and just after the great warning disaster of liberalism, the Great War, nonetheless casts its spell as a place for children's books to come out of.

There is an untieable knot at the heart of child raising: We want both a safe house with a garden and a nursery, and the world beyond, stars and redskins and even a plank to (harmlessly) walk. Unlike our great-grandmothers, we worry less about our children having the power to escape us—our children are more or less forced out in flight by the propulsions of commerce before they know how to walk—than we do about their having a window to fly out of. For the truth is that our own flights are inward; what is beguiling about
Peter Pan
now is the image of the children safe in the house in London. I see that it is what Martha and all the other mothers want for the children, with a passion so ferocious that it transcends all selfishness. They want the children to fly off and then to fly home.

That these two hopes are irreconcilable—that, having flown, they won't fly home, save as we fly home now to our parents, preoccupied with our own lives and pitying theirs—does not alter the pathos of the hope. There's a lovely instance of it in
Macbeth,
of all places. “How will you live?” the mother asks a small boy with gentle mockery, and the boy answers, “As birds do, Mother.” It is the exchange of the generations, the exchange of the, well, the ages: The parents say, “How will you live?,” and the child says that it's really no problem. Birds eat, and so will I. (Jesus, whom Shakespeare was sampling, was on the side of the kids; the lilies of the field get by, sparrows get by, you'll get by.)

We want our children to fly, and we want them to be tethered. We believe in freedom for them, but freedom within narrow channels of liberty, parent-tested and precut. We want them to fly, but we want them to fly as kites do, as Macy's balloons do, safely on the ends of strings, not freely, as birds do, Mother.

P
eter Pan
opened at last. It was wonderful! The force of the story, the children longing to be free, the songs, the sword fights … a great show! Everyone was delighted. And the children flew!
How
they flew! Or, rather, how
did
they fly? Someone had had an inspiration: As the first act ended and the children approached the window with Peter, our Peter, leading, the lights dimmed and then flickered, and then there appeared a small-scale model of the London skyline, the steeple
of Big Ben and the cupola of St. Paul's—and the flying children in their nightclothes around it. Above it, around it, leaning over it, they were … not flying, exactly, but flying enough, certainly running and dancing above the skyline of London. That surely counted, fulfilled the mission: It was dark, they were in clouds, and they were above the city. If it was not flying, it was indubitably flight.

We all gathered around afterward for congratulations and pizza and photographs. It was only later on that one of the parents, in an e-mail we chose to ignore or delete, touched gently on another point: “We didn't really raise the children,” she wrote equably. “We simply lowered the heavens and told them they were flying, as we always do.”

O
ur downstairs neighbors put their apartment on the market and fled to a loft downtown, the place where I, funnily enough, had wanted to be in the first place.

Coming home from work on the same day that
Peter Pan
premiered and the children flew, at a time while they were still looking for a buyer, I actually found myself in the elevator with the man of the house: a decent, serious, sensitive-seeming man. I could not say anything; he could not say anything. We pressed our buttons, too-touchy five and too-noisy six, and then faced front, still as rocks, unmoving, unbreathing, unconnected, eyes fixed tight on the blinking lights of passing floors, as still as cat burglars holding their breath in the presence of a motion sensor alarm in a caper movie. He got off and I watched his herringbone tweed coat recede into the infinitude of apartments. I realized that together we had accomplished the hardest of all New York things. We had at last achieved a moment of perfect silence.

T
he city of New York sits on a power grid. This is not the power grid one reads about in magazines, where rich men reassure one another of their existence by eating the same food in the same place at the same time. It is an honest-to-God grid, consisting of thousands of miles of cables and wires and pipes, all carrying electrons—organized into do-with-me-what-you-will currents and let-me-tell-you-what-I'm-thinking pulses—and it runs on just about every street in the city, below the ground in Manhattan and mostly aboveground outside it. Strange animals and objects erupt on the grid, and two of the strangest of these are the feral parakeets of Flatbush and the switch hotels of lower Manhattan. Feral parakeets are (probably) pet birds that have escaped and gone to live in the wild or, anyway, on the power poles of Flatbush. They are flourishing, and their presence has raised interesting ornithological, and even legal, issues, not to mention a hell of a racket in Flatbush. A switch hotel—often called a carrier or telecom hotel—is a great big building that eighteen months ago might have been filled with people and is now inhabited exclusively by switches, both servers and routers, who rent small locked rooms in which they exchange electrons, making dreamy machine love to other machines all night long, and sucking more power from the grid below than any tenants ever have before. Both the birds and the buildings resonate to the deepest, alligator-in-the-sewers myth of New York—to the notion that we have introduced strangers among us who not only have made themselves at home but have actually moved out on their own. The parakeets can be found in a couple of different places and
approached in a couple of different ways. There is a large colony of them in Green-Wood Cemetery, but the densest concentration, according to Jen Uscher, a Columbia graduate student and bird lover who is working on a thesis about New York birds, is right on and around the campus of Brooklyn College, at the end of the number 2 line. The neighborhood there, apart from the parakeets, is an outer-borough mixture of long-established African-Americans, new East Indian immigrants (whose stores dominate the shopping streets), and Orthodox Jews (whose small shuls are set along the residential avenues).

In the early morning, Jen often takes the number 2 out from Park Slope, where she lives, to look at the parakeets, and she is often with her boyfriend, Jason. Jen is a birder but a democratic one. As a girl in Fairfax, Virginia, she kept pigeons—real city pigeons. She is a small, intently pretty young woman who has the eager eyes, quick mind, and you'd-be-amazed-how-much-fun-the-subway-can-be avidity of the new New Yorker.

As she and Jason turned down Avenue I toward Twenty-eighth Street one recent Friday morning, she said, “The parakeets were supposed to be eradicated in the early seventies, but here they are. Can't you hear them already?” First there was nothing, then a distant static-electricity crackle, and finally, an intense chattering, like a chorus line shaking maracas in a forties South American musical. The sound filled the quiet street of one-family houses with napkin front yards. “You
hear
them first, but they're not hard to see,” Jen went on. “These birds are so bold. They're real New Yorkers. They have so much attitude. I'm amazed they don't drive more people crazy. They're tough, social birds who live in colonies. Look right there!” She pointed to a flock of about ten feral parakeets sitting on the wires running between power poles.

The term “feral parakeet” calls to mind a furtive escaped songbird, perky but vulnerable, its small heart fluttering, a hunted look in its eye. This image does not apply to the feral parakeets of Flatbush. What they got in Flatbush are not feral parakeets. What they got in Flatbush are wild parrots. (Technically, a parrot is just a big parakeet; there is no sharp line between the species.) Filling the trees and power lines along
Avenue I are great big bright green pirate-ready parrots, with sharp, hooked beaks and blue wing feathers and raucous, jeering voices, tens and tens of tens of them, chattering like Mike and the Mad Dog after a Giants game. Their nests, of twigs and sticks, are immense hanging
trulli,
with multiple entrances—only slightly smaller than the spaces that are usually rented in the city to people like Jen and Jason for nine hundred dollars a month.

“They usually build their nests on high-voltage power poles—there's something about power entrances—and if their nests catch on fire, they can cause outages,” Jason said. “There's even a website that offers solutions for infestations. The power companies regard them as a major pest.”