CHRYSLER
By
Paul Tudor Owen
Paul Tudor Owen
He was up on the construction site again, looming over Manhattan, pushing a heavy beam into place and straining with the effort, high, impossibly high above the city. The bay shimmered far below him.
He had his suit on, and he was hot. He wanted to pull at his collar, but he was using both hands to steady the beam. The sweat collected where his glasses pinched his nose.
Sunlight glanced off the metal girder and into his eyes as he heaved it to another man on the far side of the building. Together they slotted it into place, and then Robert climbed on to it, teetering for a moment above the abyss until he regained his balance. The streets loomed and receded. His workmate passed him another beam and he lifted it, turned it, and then passed it upwards to a second taciturn Irishman above him.
They sat on the beam and drank coffee. Below them, black automobiles trawled through the broken grid of downtown, the wheels on their backs like tortoise’s shells, nudging past each other and in front of the trolleys. Clerks and secretaries rushed into and out of tiny buildings, and the elevated trains slid north and south. The wind rose, and lifted up smells of dirt and sweat and rust from the factories and the docks further up the island. The smells surrounded him for a moment, and then fell away.
Something caught his eye, something out there in the bay. He looked again, but couldn’t spot it. A ferry rolling in across the water from Liberty Island began to rock slightly. The wind picked up and clouds slid across the sun, and a smattering of rain splashed his face.
He watched the ferry as it swung up the wall of a wave, then dropped into the trough on the other side. The water was getting rough, and he could see the passengers rushing indoors as the waves heaved the boat up and down.
“Storm coming?” said the workman next to him.
“Looks like it,” said Robert, leaning down to put his cup on the floor.
And then his head jolted up. Two waves, one rolling in from the west, one from the east, had crashed together right under the ferry, flinging it up, and a wall of water, churning and heaving, was spraying straight up in front of the island.
“My God,” said Robert, and he stood up and stood back, and clung to the beams he had just put in place behind him. The other workmen had disappeared. The wall of water pushed and churned, towering over downtown, sending streams and rivers racing down the cross-streets and up Broadway, spray saturating Robert’s clothes. Terrified, he backed rapidly away further into the scaffolding, as the clerks, the secretaries and the trains were swept suddenly away by the torrents of rushing water, arms waving, gulping for breath, bodies strung from open windows. He could hear a voice whirling around him, an element like the wind or the rain, and he recognised the voice somehow. “How dare you?” it howled. “How dare you?”
“I’m sorry,” Robert was saying, gripping the beams. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” and then the wall of water collapsed towards him, smashing him off the top of the tower, crashing hard into the centre of the building, scattering brick and wood and metal and glass across block after block after block, cascades of water sweeping the beams and girders away across the island, away into the rivers and the bay. The rivers whipped back in waves over Williamsburg and Hoboken, and then, the shockwave returning, sent sheets of water back over the tip of Manhattan, and Robert turned and tumbled like an acrobat, seeing first the blue skies above and the sun sparkling like the red eye of a moth, and then the curve of the earth, the ground, the Statue looming up from the choppy bay like a crucifix in a graveyard, the pools of water in the streets and the devastated foundations of his greatest triumph racing towards him faster and faster, and before he hit the ground he woke up.
“Darling. Robert, darling, are you all right?” Rosemary was saying, stroking his back as he sat up, panting for breath. It was morning, and the light was slanting in through the slight gap between the thick curtains.
“Oh yes. Fine. I’m fine. Good morning,” he said. He felt vaguely sick, and forced himself carefully to breathe in and out until the feeling began to subside.
“Morning,” replied Rosemary, and after a little while she said, “What’s wrong? Bad dream?”
“Yes,” he said, “Bad dream. I don’t know… I’m worried, I think,” and he slowly swung himself out of bed. He took his robe from the back of the chair and yawned wearily. “I think I’m worried about what Nestor told me last week.”
He pulled his robe on. Rosemary sat watching him. “Don’t worry, Robert. The bank’s doing well. We’re doing well.”
“I know we are. Oh, I can never really–” he said. “I can’t help thinking back to how things were here after the war. The difficulties we were in then. The tariffs nearly broke me. I just find it hard to forget the state we were in then– I wish I could. I wish I could just enjoy what we’ve got now.” And he bent down to the bed and kissed her cheek.
*
Every Sunday for the last twelve years, he had been to visit Samuel’s grave in the cemetery way uptown, but his visits had never really gotten any easier. As Bennington turned through the gates and stopped the car, the memories would hit Robert like a brick wall, and he would find it hard to tear them down and get past them to the graveside. Sometimes – it had happened as recently as last year – Bennington would open the back door and find him sitting there, staring blankly, unable to move, and would have to say, “Mr Fenton. Mr Fenton, we’re here,” before Robert could rouse himself and clamber out of the car. Perhaps this was the reason Rosemary had stopped going to the cemetery – had stopped going with him, anyway.
Bennington would wait by the car, or he would tramp out to the sidewalk to have a cigarette, and Robert would make his way through the rows upon rows of graves until he reached the Fenton tomb. Here he would drop flowers in the pots and stand and stare at the slab of stone that summed up his son, Samuel David Fenton, 1890-1917.
The world was a different place in 1917, a harder place, a more frightening place. Samuel had never known the quality of life that he, Robert, had been able to give to James, and, later, to Emma. The job he’d given James. He thought of his younger son then, his only son, sitting at his desk, smiling and smoking, and the pretty girls with startlingly short hair he occasionally brought to dinner. He thought of the photographs in the newspapers of the trenches. The world had been different then.
Samuel had been a serious boy, not given to shows of ostentation or of gaudiness. He wondered what he would have thought of the tower. He would have seen, of course, that the squeeze for space on the island, the cost of land– He would have seen it made sense to build tall. But the tallest in the world? To deliberately set out to make it the tallest in the world? It would have embarrassed him, and Robert knew it.
The picture flashed through his head again: the trench, a blast, shouts, cries, blood running from his son’s mouth into the wood and the earth. He never doubted himself more than when he came to the graveyard. It seemed almost indecent that he would drive, today, from the small tomb and the tiny, engraved letters to the huge bank he owned on Wall Street whose office floors, if laid flat, would cover this cemetery twice over. He told himself: we won, and it was hard and bitterly-fought, and now we’re celebrating our victory, and why not? Don’t we deserve it? And then he thought: we are going ahead as if nothing had happened. He looked around at the rows of graves, and felt for a second as if he were building the tower on top of them, on top of the dead boys who had raced to Europe, raced to the countries their parents had left behind, and returned like this, features scoured down to form the cold, bare surfaces of the stones, all their fear, confusion, brutality and disobedience smoothed away into safe, noble blanks which all told the same story. We are going ahead as if nothing had happened.
His mind wandered back to the rumours about Chrysler, what he had planned for his topping-off ceremony. He was obviously trying to keep it quiet, but Chrysler’s workmen and Robert’s workmen all got their liquor from the same speakeasies – Robert’s foremen told him where they all were, in which Village brownstones, down which Harlem cellar steps, behind which reinforced doors on the Hudson waterfront – and Chrysler’s workmen would mutter to each other and laugh, and Robert’s workmen would rib them until they gave something away, a little something, and then word would get up to a foreman, and then up to a foreman’s supervisor, and eventually up to Robert. But there were never any details. Privately, Robert thought Chrysler was probably planning to set off some impressive fireworks, probably from the dome, at the topping-off, make a big song and dance out of it all in order to distract attention from Robert’s achievement. Against his will, he felt a pang of fear, and then suppressed it.
Robert’s building, the Bank of Manhattan at 40 Wall Street, was nearly finished now, and he wondered how he would feel when it was. He pictured himself in his office on the top floor, inside the bronze pyramid that capped the tower, while below him floor after floor of clerks and brokers typed and wrote and made telephone calls and bought and sold, and along the shore of the Hudson smoke rose from the chimneys of the factories, and cranes rose from the docks. He pictured himself in the look-out he’d ordered Severance to design in the spire, his arm around Rosemary, gazing out on the city in front, behind and below them, the busy world of finance spread out beneath them like a rug.
They’d taken him up there two days before, Davis and the others, up to the highest deck that had been completed thus far, the small floor just below the top of the triangle, just below where the look-out and the lantern would be. The elevator had shot them up to the top in about a minute, a nerve-shredding experience. “They should put a chair in here, sir,” Miss McLaren said.
“And some music, and an ashtray, and a couple of bottles of whiskey,” said Davis.
Seventy-two floors of cream limestone washed by the autumn sunlight. A year ago there’d been nothing there. They’d built it so quickly. The gangs Davis had hired were the best in the city, no question. He was a good man, Davis.
“You get the best view from this one here,” Davis said, and ushered him to a window facing south. “There’s no glass in there yet so be careful,” and he waved his hand through the empty pane. Robert held the bottom of the frame, knuckles white, leant out and looked down, feeling as though he were suspended above the city. That summer he and Rosemary had taken a three-week zeppelin trip, and he felt the same way now as he had then, looking out the window as they floated leisurely over the city, impossibly high above the streets and buildings. He could see the sides of the island like the sides of a boat, and the mysterious rushing streets looked clear and still. He tracked the progress of a car down Broadway. The bay was shimmering far below him.
The autumn sun was chilly, but Robert felt hot and he pulled at his collar. The sweat collected where his glasses pinched his nose, and the sun glanced off the metal beams above him and into his eyes. He looked down into the abyss again and for a second felt as if he were about to lose his balance. The streets loomed and receded. Miss McLaren passed him a handkerchief and he mopped his brow.
They sat on a makeshift bench that the workmen had put together for the occasion, had a cup of coffee and watched New York. Black automobiles trawled through the broken grid of downtown, the wheels on their backs like tortoise’s shells, nudging past each other and in front of the trolleys. Clerks and secretaries rushed into and out of tiny buildings, the elevated trains slid north and south, and specs of people disappeared under the train tracks into the shadows below. Davis raised his cup to the Statue of Liberty, as if Lady Liberty were toasting them with her torch. They all laughed. It would be finished soon.
Out there in the bay, in front of the Statue, a ferry rolling in across the water began to rock. The wind picked up and clouds slid across the sun. A smattering of rain splashed Robert’s face and he could feel the tightness in his forehead that meant a headache was coming on. The ferry rocked from side to side in the rough water. He could see the passengers making their way indoors as waves splashed up the sides of the boat.
He leant back nervously to put his coffee cup down, and suddenly something caught his eye through the windows behind him to the north, a shine in the air by the fields of boxy buildings on the East Side, as if the sun had swooped down toward the ground and stayed there, warming the earth. He turned and looked, and then stood up clumsily and moved to the other window and stared uptown. It was the sun, it was the sun reflected in the shiny steel skeleton of the intricate, angled, unfinished dome of Chrysler’s building three miles north, the sun caught at the top in the curving Enduro steel frame as if in a cage. Oh God, he thought, and he felt his coffee rising in his throat. Oh God, it was going to be a marvel.
“Are you all right, Mr Fenton?” asked Miss McLaren.
“Of course, of course,” he said, mopping his brow again. “Bit of a beauty that – Bit of a beauty, that dome Chrysler’s adding there, isn’t it?”
“Well, it is pretty,” said Miss McLaren.
“It’s just a load of pomp,” said Davis dismissively, getting up, slapping him on the shoulder. “Nothing but flamboyant show. It’s a goddamn circus freak.”
Robert had seen the plans, of course… but it hadn’t looked like that in the plans. It hadn’t shone in the plans. He saw suddenly how it would look when the sheets of steel were fitted over the skeleton, how the dome would glint and glisten from every angle, leading New Yorkers home like a lighthouse. Even now, the frame, the way it attracted the sun— Oh God. He didn’t know. He closed his eyes. It was beautiful.
He took a breath and looked at his feet. But his was taller. At least his was taller.
He had managed to get one of his workmen inside Chrysler’s building with a camera, and the man had brought out photographs of the interior: the dark, three-storey lobby of marble and steel in what they were calling the ‘moderne’ style, the doors which came towards you at odd angles, the strange mural of construction workers looming out of the shadows.
And in the end he’d had to see it for himself, and had walked on to the site in a hat and long coat one afternoon in early autumn with an authoritative nod to the foreman – the nod his father had brought over with them from England – and looked up. The building could not have belonged to anyone but Chrysler. The automobile was everywhere, from the gargoyles modelled after his radiator cap ornaments, to the suggestions of hubcaps, mudguards and wheels running up the sides of the tower. He tried to tell himself it was gaudy, gaudy and vulgar, but he couldn’t. This was a building that had swallowed the automobile whole and spat it out again, defiantly, telling the world: wake up, this is the twentieth century, the century of the car, the world has changed forever. When Robert had first arrived in New York this block had been a goat pasture.
Chrysler had seen quick enough how the automobile would transform American life, and he’d jumped at the chance to get involved, built his way up from mechanic on self-belief; self-belief, and belief in the car. Why, only thirty years ago, you’d have dropped dead if you’d seen an automobile racing towards you. There’d have been many people wouldn’t have even been able to tell you what one was.
He was a shrewd man, Chrysler. This building hadn’t even been his project to start with, but he’d wanted to house his business in the world’s tallest building, and, once he’d come on board, he ordered the architect to up the height to 925 feet. Robert looked away for a moment, controlled his breathing, and reminded himself: the plans for the Bank of Manhattan made it two feet taller.
He craned his neck and stared at the automobiles painted half-way up, where the tower grew thin and began the main drag of its ascent, at the name Chrysler repeated in white paint on every window, at the slab of its next-door neighbour, the Chanin Building on 42nd Street, stubby and artless by comparison. The neat, black-and-white brickwork of the Chrysler was clean and perfect all the way up now, all the way up to the blossoming dome, a hive of activity 700 feet above the ground. He tried to pick out men up there but his eyes couldn’t manage it; all they detected was a vague smudge of movement. It was such a long way up.
“But whose is taller, right, boss?” Davis was saying now, slinging an arm around him, stage-whispering into his ear. He was a good man, Davis was. Robert looked away from the sparkling dome and down into the deep grooves of the streets, one of only a handful of people ever to have seen them from this height, from this angle. “Who gives a damn about a piece of shiny silver when a few blocks downtown you got the world’s tallest building?” continued Davis. “The Bank of Manhattan.”
Robert smiled. It was true. It was true. The only structure taller on earth would be the Eiffel Tower. The tallest building in the world, he’d told Severance. That’s what he wanted. And that’s what it would be. Shiny crown or no shiny crown, that’s what people would come to this city, to this country, to see. His building. The tallest in the world.
That night he dreamt again of the wall of water and the tower collapsing across the bay. “Maybe it’s these buildings,” he said hesitantly to his wife the next morning as they lay in bed. “They’re so high. Nobody’s ever built anything like this before. I guess at the back of my mind I’m thinking – I’m remembering the story of the Tower of Babel, and what God did when they built that.”
“Oh, Robert, don’t think like that…” said Rosemary. “People have always made beautiful buildings. People have always built as high as they could. Look at Europe, look at all the cathedrals in Europe.”
“But the cathedrals were for God,” he said. “This is for money.”
“This is for God, too, Robert. A building like this – it shows Him the wonderful things His children can do.”
“I don’t know if He wants to know that,” said Robert, and he pulled her close to his chest.
“That’s the Old Testament God, the Tower of Babel,” Rosemary said, kissing his neck. “You can just ignore Him. He’s always complaining about something.” She put her hand on his leg. “You know what we need?” she said. “We need a good wedding.”
“Hmm. Perhaps James will finally do the decent thing.”
They both smiled. “Perhaps,” said Rosemary. He stroked her back through her night-dress, and his hand drifted down to the hem, bunched it up and pulled it to the small of her back. He kissed her mouth and then he rolled on top of her. Rosemary put her arms around his neck.
He kissed her face and listened to her sharp breaths in his ear. But when he closed his eyes the sparkle of the sun reflecting at angle after angle over the bones of the half-finished dome– In his mind, the shards of light grew and spread until they covered the skeletal frame, covered the frame with a glow which shone out brightly across the island until he lost sight of his own tower completely.
*
Robert sat in the look-out of his building, with the hot summer sun coursing in from the eight tall windows which faced in each direction. The heat was exhausting, and he mopped his brow. Below him, in the streets, lines of men waited outside businesses and labour exchanges, and they also mopped their brows. Robert poured himself a glass of water from a thin jug.
It was only the third or fourth time he’d managed to get up into the look-out since the building had been finished; he had had a lot to do lately and there just hadn’t been the time. He’d tried to keep as many of his men on as possible, but it hadn’t been possible to keep them all, and there had been a lot of hard decisions to make and a lot of difficult conversations with a lot of distressed people.
“We managed to – I know it seems like everything has been turned upside down – but we managed to get through it,” Rosemary had said to him that weekend.
“Yes we did,” he said.
“It’ll be all right. Everything will pick up. These funds Hoover has asked Congress for, these construction programs. Ford has gone ahead and given his workers a raise, I heard on the radio.”
“Ford’s a madman,” replied Robert.
He remembered the party they’d had the day 40 Wall Street had been crowned tallest in the world, the groups of twenty or so he’d ushered up into this look-out, the gasps of wonder, the pointing fingers, the laughter, the slaps on the back, the kisses, the champagne, the whiskey. Even Mayor Walker had been drinking. And Robert had sat with his arm around Rosemary in the dark when all his guests had gone home and watched the lights go out all over the city, the sea of lights dancing and flickering and finally disappearing behind his glasses. The tallest building in the world. It seemed a strange and arrogant achievement now, a strange and arrogant ambition to have held. But the world was a different place then. The huge glass entrance-ways of the Chrysler Building seemed to taper like coffins now.
On the day when Chrysler had launched his spire Robert had been sitting uptown in the office of a solicitor friend sharing a drink and a story, and then the telephone rang. It was Rosemary.
“Oh God,” she said. “Oh, Robert, don’t be too upset.”
“What is it?” he said, his heart burning, thinking immediately of James and Emma. And when she told him he smiled, tried to smile, and put his drink back down on the desk. Then he went to the window. Then the telephone rang again. This time it was Davis.
On 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue a crowd had gathered. The dome of Chrysler’s building had opened up like a cocoon, and out of the cocoon a steel needle was slowly emerging, flashing in the afternoon sunlight, rising higher and higher and then being clipped and strapped and fastened into place. It took around an hour and a half for the job to be completed, and Robert stood at his friend’s window and watched the whole thing. But as soon as he had seen that needle edge out he had known what Chrysler was doing, and it had only taken minutes for his spire to sweep past the mark, the invisible line in the sky, that Robert had drawn only weeks earlier, sweep past 40 Wall Street, and keep going, keep on soaring higher, until, at around four pm, as the radio reported in a breathless crackle, it had even overtaken the poor Eiffel Tower standing helpless and usurped 3,000 miles away. Robert turned off the radio and went home.
The cars below him began to move off for the evening like dark chickens going home to roost. Behind the rows of buildings, in the middle of Central Park, men were setting up their tents in the nascent shanty town they were starting to call ‘Hooverville’. Robert took another slug of water, stood up and looked west, letting the last of the heat beat on his face. He felt he could see the whole continent from up there, spreading out ahead of him, tapering, shrinking, hugging the earth, and behind him was the ocean, and behind that, Europe, and, far away, his long-forgotten homeland, England. A sudden memory of his old life washed over him, a rare intrusion: walking out into the countryside with his mother and father as a child, struggling to keep up with their giant strides, sitting on the riverbank swinging his legs as the clear water flowed slowly past. Unbidden, their small house and his father’s low, smoky office swept with the river into his thoughts, and the laughter, and the rough voices and the sharp ones, and strangers ruffling his hair in the street, before the boat journey which seemed to take years carried his proud, excited father, his worried, careful mother and the young Robert, for whom the whole thing was just another strange episode in a short life made up only of strange episodes, racing giddily along the deck with the other children, into the harbour at New York.
How strange it was to think of them, those people from his dream-like past, back there in England still going about their business as they always had done, while here Robert and his long-dead parents and people like them were remaking the world in a brand-new image. He looked north at the building Chrysler had flung proudly into the air like a ringmaster announcing his star acrobat, the sun sparkling clean and cold off the sharp shards of its shiny dome, completed now, and every bit as beautiful as Robert had feared and imagined, a building made from hubcaps and radiators, its gargoyles not dull, ugly things from dark European nightmares but sleek, modern animals bursting from the walls, those blank, faceless wonders that conveyed only speed, a building as shiny and tall as the automobiles and airships the factories had been turning out in droves were fast and loud and huge. He thought suddenly of the tiny new planet that American astronomers said was rushing around the sun somewhere in the distant blackness above them. Chrysler’s spire – that damned spire! – a spire not decorated and ornate like the one on his own building, but shining, crisp and clean, like the blade of a knife on a shelf in a store, seemed to be pointing straight up towards it.
A stump whose height at that moment exactly aligned with the curve of the horizon was gradually growing brick by brick between Robert and the Chrysler Building, a stump they were calling the Empire State Building, the ‘skyscraper’ which, its designers promised, would put both Robert’s tower and Chrysler’s tower utterly in the shade. Literally, in the case of Chrysler’s, it was so close, Robert realised suddenly, and he smiled sadly.
He and Chrysler had been like King Canute, he thought, sitting on the beach, holding their hands up, and nothing could stop the tide coming in. 40 Wall Street had been the tallest, briefly, and then Chrysler’s had been the tallest, and soon this new colossus would take its place. And, soon after that, he was certain, something bigger would outpace them all. Where would it end? Would people really work up here, he asked himself, up with the clouds and the birds, so far from the trees and the grass and the rivers? Would they live up here in the end, when right now people were living in tents in the park and under boxes under bridges? His tower was still half-empty; he couldn’t fill it. Would they buy the new America that Chrysler and Robert and the developers of the Empire State Building were selling? He sat there thinking for a long while. But he didn’t know where it would end. All he knew for sure was that they had begun to construct a kind of city that no one had ever built before. And he was suddenly flushed with pride to be part of it.
He had his suit on, and he was hot. He wanted to pull at his collar, but he was using both hands to steady the beam. The sweat collected where his glasses pinched his nose.
Sunlight glanced off the metal girder and into his eyes as he heaved it to another man on the far side of the building. Together they slotted it into place, and then Robert climbed on to it, teetering for a moment above the abyss until he regained his balance. The streets loomed and receded. His workmate passed him another beam and he lifted it, turned it, and then passed it upwards to a second taciturn Irishman above him.
They sat on the beam and drank coffee. Below them, black automobiles trawled through the broken grid of downtown, the wheels on their backs like tortoise’s shells, nudging past each other and in front of the trolleys. Clerks and secretaries rushed into and out of tiny buildings, and the elevated trains slid north and south. The wind rose, and lifted up smells of dirt and sweat and rust from the factories and the docks further up the island. The smells surrounded him for a moment, and then fell away.
Something caught his eye, something out there in the bay. He looked again, but couldn’t spot it. A ferry rolling in across the water from Liberty Island began to rock slightly. The wind picked up and clouds slid across the sun, and a smattering of rain splashed his face.
He watched the ferry as it swung up the wall of a wave, then dropped into the trough on the other side. The water was getting rough, and he could see the passengers rushing indoors as the waves heaved the boat up and down.
“Storm coming?” said the workman next to him.
“Looks like it,” said Robert, leaning down to put his cup on the floor.
And then his head jolted up. Two waves, one rolling in from the west, one from the east, had crashed together right under the ferry, flinging it up, and a wall of water, churning and heaving, was spraying straight up in front of the island.
“My God,” said Robert, and he stood up and stood back, and clung to the beams he had just put in place behind him. The other workmen had disappeared. The wall of water pushed and churned, towering over downtown, sending streams and rivers racing down the cross-streets and up Broadway, spray saturating Robert’s clothes. Terrified, he backed rapidly away further into the scaffolding, as the clerks, the secretaries and the trains were swept suddenly away by the torrents of rushing water, arms waving, gulping for breath, bodies strung from open windows. He could hear a voice whirling around him, an element like the wind or the rain, and he recognised the voice somehow. “How dare you?” it howled. “How dare you?”
“I’m sorry,” Robert was saying, gripping the beams. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” and then the wall of water collapsed towards him, smashing him off the top of the tower, crashing hard into the centre of the building, scattering brick and wood and metal and glass across block after block after block, cascades of water sweeping the beams and girders away across the island, away into the rivers and the bay. The rivers whipped back in waves over Williamsburg and Hoboken, and then, the shockwave returning, sent sheets of water back over the tip of Manhattan, and Robert turned and tumbled like an acrobat, seeing first the blue skies above and the sun sparkling like the red eye of a moth, and then the curve of the earth, the ground, the Statue looming up from the choppy bay like a crucifix in a graveyard, the pools of water in the streets and the devastated foundations of his greatest triumph racing towards him faster and faster, and before he hit the ground he woke up.
“Darling. Robert, darling, are you all right?” Rosemary was saying, stroking his back as he sat up, panting for breath. It was morning, and the light was slanting in through the slight gap between the thick curtains.
“Oh yes. Fine. I’m fine. Good morning,” he said. He felt vaguely sick, and forced himself carefully to breathe in and out until the feeling began to subside.
“Morning,” replied Rosemary, and after a little while she said, “What’s wrong? Bad dream?”
“Yes,” he said, “Bad dream. I don’t know… I’m worried, I think,” and he slowly swung himself out of bed. He took his robe from the back of the chair and yawned wearily. “I think I’m worried about what Nestor told me last week.”
He pulled his robe on. Rosemary sat watching him. “Don’t worry, Robert. The bank’s doing well. We’re doing well.”
“I know we are. Oh, I can never really–” he said. “I can’t help thinking back to how things were here after the war. The difficulties we were in then. The tariffs nearly broke me. I just find it hard to forget the state we were in then– I wish I could. I wish I could just enjoy what we’ve got now.” And he bent down to the bed and kissed her cheek.
*
Every Sunday for the last twelve years, he had been to visit Samuel’s grave in the cemetery way uptown, but his visits had never really gotten any easier. As Bennington turned through the gates and stopped the car, the memories would hit Robert like a brick wall, and he would find it hard to tear them down and get past them to the graveside. Sometimes – it had happened as recently as last year – Bennington would open the back door and find him sitting there, staring blankly, unable to move, and would have to say, “Mr Fenton. Mr Fenton, we’re here,” before Robert could rouse himself and clamber out of the car. Perhaps this was the reason Rosemary had stopped going to the cemetery – had stopped going with him, anyway.
Bennington would wait by the car, or he would tramp out to the sidewalk to have a cigarette, and Robert would make his way through the rows upon rows of graves until he reached the Fenton tomb. Here he would drop flowers in the pots and stand and stare at the slab of stone that summed up his son, Samuel David Fenton, 1890-1917.
The world was a different place in 1917, a harder place, a more frightening place. Samuel had never known the quality of life that he, Robert, had been able to give to James, and, later, to Emma. The job he’d given James. He thought of his younger son then, his only son, sitting at his desk, smiling and smoking, and the pretty girls with startlingly short hair he occasionally brought to dinner. He thought of the photographs in the newspapers of the trenches. The world had been different then.
Samuel had been a serious boy, not given to shows of ostentation or of gaudiness. He wondered what he would have thought of the tower. He would have seen, of course, that the squeeze for space on the island, the cost of land– He would have seen it made sense to build tall. But the tallest in the world? To deliberately set out to make it the tallest in the world? It would have embarrassed him, and Robert knew it.
The picture flashed through his head again: the trench, a blast, shouts, cries, blood running from his son’s mouth into the wood and the earth. He never doubted himself more than when he came to the graveyard. It seemed almost indecent that he would drive, today, from the small tomb and the tiny, engraved letters to the huge bank he owned on Wall Street whose office floors, if laid flat, would cover this cemetery twice over. He told himself: we won, and it was hard and bitterly-fought, and now we’re celebrating our victory, and why not? Don’t we deserve it? And then he thought: we are going ahead as if nothing had happened. He looked around at the rows of graves, and felt for a second as if he were building the tower on top of them, on top of the dead boys who had raced to Europe, raced to the countries their parents had left behind, and returned like this, features scoured down to form the cold, bare surfaces of the stones, all their fear, confusion, brutality and disobedience smoothed away into safe, noble blanks which all told the same story. We are going ahead as if nothing had happened.
His mind wandered back to the rumours about Chrysler, what he had planned for his topping-off ceremony. He was obviously trying to keep it quiet, but Chrysler’s workmen and Robert’s workmen all got their liquor from the same speakeasies – Robert’s foremen told him where they all were, in which Village brownstones, down which Harlem cellar steps, behind which reinforced doors on the Hudson waterfront – and Chrysler’s workmen would mutter to each other and laugh, and Robert’s workmen would rib them until they gave something away, a little something, and then word would get up to a foreman, and then up to a foreman’s supervisor, and eventually up to Robert. But there were never any details. Privately, Robert thought Chrysler was probably planning to set off some impressive fireworks, probably from the dome, at the topping-off, make a big song and dance out of it all in order to distract attention from Robert’s achievement. Against his will, he felt a pang of fear, and then suppressed it.
Robert’s building, the Bank of Manhattan at 40 Wall Street, was nearly finished now, and he wondered how he would feel when it was. He pictured himself in his office on the top floor, inside the bronze pyramid that capped the tower, while below him floor after floor of clerks and brokers typed and wrote and made telephone calls and bought and sold, and along the shore of the Hudson smoke rose from the chimneys of the factories, and cranes rose from the docks. He pictured himself in the look-out he’d ordered Severance to design in the spire, his arm around Rosemary, gazing out on the city in front, behind and below them, the busy world of finance spread out beneath them like a rug.
They’d taken him up there two days before, Davis and the others, up to the highest deck that had been completed thus far, the small floor just below the top of the triangle, just below where the look-out and the lantern would be. The elevator had shot them up to the top in about a minute, a nerve-shredding experience. “They should put a chair in here, sir,” Miss McLaren said.
“And some music, and an ashtray, and a couple of bottles of whiskey,” said Davis.
Seventy-two floors of cream limestone washed by the autumn sunlight. A year ago there’d been nothing there. They’d built it so quickly. The gangs Davis had hired were the best in the city, no question. He was a good man, Davis.
“You get the best view from this one here,” Davis said, and ushered him to a window facing south. “There’s no glass in there yet so be careful,” and he waved his hand through the empty pane. Robert held the bottom of the frame, knuckles white, leant out and looked down, feeling as though he were suspended above the city. That summer he and Rosemary had taken a three-week zeppelin trip, and he felt the same way now as he had then, looking out the window as they floated leisurely over the city, impossibly high above the streets and buildings. He could see the sides of the island like the sides of a boat, and the mysterious rushing streets looked clear and still. He tracked the progress of a car down Broadway. The bay was shimmering far below him.
The autumn sun was chilly, but Robert felt hot and he pulled at his collar. The sweat collected where his glasses pinched his nose, and the sun glanced off the metal beams above him and into his eyes. He looked down into the abyss again and for a second felt as if he were about to lose his balance. The streets loomed and receded. Miss McLaren passed him a handkerchief and he mopped his brow.
They sat on a makeshift bench that the workmen had put together for the occasion, had a cup of coffee and watched New York. Black automobiles trawled through the broken grid of downtown, the wheels on their backs like tortoise’s shells, nudging past each other and in front of the trolleys. Clerks and secretaries rushed into and out of tiny buildings, the elevated trains slid north and south, and specs of people disappeared under the train tracks into the shadows below. Davis raised his cup to the Statue of Liberty, as if Lady Liberty were toasting them with her torch. They all laughed. It would be finished soon.
Out there in the bay, in front of the Statue, a ferry rolling in across the water began to rock. The wind picked up and clouds slid across the sun. A smattering of rain splashed Robert’s face and he could feel the tightness in his forehead that meant a headache was coming on. The ferry rocked from side to side in the rough water. He could see the passengers making their way indoors as waves splashed up the sides of the boat.
He leant back nervously to put his coffee cup down, and suddenly something caught his eye through the windows behind him to the north, a shine in the air by the fields of boxy buildings on the East Side, as if the sun had swooped down toward the ground and stayed there, warming the earth. He turned and looked, and then stood up clumsily and moved to the other window and stared uptown. It was the sun, it was the sun reflected in the shiny steel skeleton of the intricate, angled, unfinished dome of Chrysler’s building three miles north, the sun caught at the top in the curving Enduro steel frame as if in a cage. Oh God, he thought, and he felt his coffee rising in his throat. Oh God, it was going to be a marvel.
“Are you all right, Mr Fenton?” asked Miss McLaren.
“Of course, of course,” he said, mopping his brow again. “Bit of a beauty that – Bit of a beauty, that dome Chrysler’s adding there, isn’t it?”
“Well, it is pretty,” said Miss McLaren.
“It’s just a load of pomp,” said Davis dismissively, getting up, slapping him on the shoulder. “Nothing but flamboyant show. It’s a goddamn circus freak.”
Robert had seen the plans, of course… but it hadn’t looked like that in the plans. It hadn’t shone in the plans. He saw suddenly how it would look when the sheets of steel were fitted over the skeleton, how the dome would glint and glisten from every angle, leading New Yorkers home like a lighthouse. Even now, the frame, the way it attracted the sun— Oh God. He didn’t know. He closed his eyes. It was beautiful.
He took a breath and looked at his feet. But his was taller. At least his was taller.
He had managed to get one of his workmen inside Chrysler’s building with a camera, and the man had brought out photographs of the interior: the dark, three-storey lobby of marble and steel in what they were calling the ‘moderne’ style, the doors which came towards you at odd angles, the strange mural of construction workers looming out of the shadows.
And in the end he’d had to see it for himself, and had walked on to the site in a hat and long coat one afternoon in early autumn with an authoritative nod to the foreman – the nod his father had brought over with them from England – and looked up. The building could not have belonged to anyone but Chrysler. The automobile was everywhere, from the gargoyles modelled after his radiator cap ornaments, to the suggestions of hubcaps, mudguards and wheels running up the sides of the tower. He tried to tell himself it was gaudy, gaudy and vulgar, but he couldn’t. This was a building that had swallowed the automobile whole and spat it out again, defiantly, telling the world: wake up, this is the twentieth century, the century of the car, the world has changed forever. When Robert had first arrived in New York this block had been a goat pasture.
Chrysler had seen quick enough how the automobile would transform American life, and he’d jumped at the chance to get involved, built his way up from mechanic on self-belief; self-belief, and belief in the car. Why, only thirty years ago, you’d have dropped dead if you’d seen an automobile racing towards you. There’d have been many people wouldn’t have even been able to tell you what one was.
He was a shrewd man, Chrysler. This building hadn’t even been his project to start with, but he’d wanted to house his business in the world’s tallest building, and, once he’d come on board, he ordered the architect to up the height to 925 feet. Robert looked away for a moment, controlled his breathing, and reminded himself: the plans for the Bank of Manhattan made it two feet taller.
He craned his neck and stared at the automobiles painted half-way up, where the tower grew thin and began the main drag of its ascent, at the name Chrysler repeated in white paint on every window, at the slab of its next-door neighbour, the Chanin Building on 42nd Street, stubby and artless by comparison. The neat, black-and-white brickwork of the Chrysler was clean and perfect all the way up now, all the way up to the blossoming dome, a hive of activity 700 feet above the ground. He tried to pick out men up there but his eyes couldn’t manage it; all they detected was a vague smudge of movement. It was such a long way up.
“But whose is taller, right, boss?” Davis was saying now, slinging an arm around him, stage-whispering into his ear. He was a good man, Davis was. Robert looked away from the sparkling dome and down into the deep grooves of the streets, one of only a handful of people ever to have seen them from this height, from this angle. “Who gives a damn about a piece of shiny silver when a few blocks downtown you got the world’s tallest building?” continued Davis. “The Bank of Manhattan.”
Robert smiled. It was true. It was true. The only structure taller on earth would be the Eiffel Tower. The tallest building in the world, he’d told Severance. That’s what he wanted. And that’s what it would be. Shiny crown or no shiny crown, that’s what people would come to this city, to this country, to see. His building. The tallest in the world.
That night he dreamt again of the wall of water and the tower collapsing across the bay. “Maybe it’s these buildings,” he said hesitantly to his wife the next morning as they lay in bed. “They’re so high. Nobody’s ever built anything like this before. I guess at the back of my mind I’m thinking – I’m remembering the story of the Tower of Babel, and what God did when they built that.”
“Oh, Robert, don’t think like that…” said Rosemary. “People have always made beautiful buildings. People have always built as high as they could. Look at Europe, look at all the cathedrals in Europe.”
“But the cathedrals were for God,” he said. “This is for money.”
“This is for God, too, Robert. A building like this – it shows Him the wonderful things His children can do.”
“I don’t know if He wants to know that,” said Robert, and he pulled her close to his chest.
“That’s the Old Testament God, the Tower of Babel,” Rosemary said, kissing his neck. “You can just ignore Him. He’s always complaining about something.” She put her hand on his leg. “You know what we need?” she said. “We need a good wedding.”
“Hmm. Perhaps James will finally do the decent thing.”
They both smiled. “Perhaps,” said Rosemary. He stroked her back through her night-dress, and his hand drifted down to the hem, bunched it up and pulled it to the small of her back. He kissed her mouth and then he rolled on top of her. Rosemary put her arms around his neck.
He kissed her face and listened to her sharp breaths in his ear. But when he closed his eyes the sparkle of the sun reflecting at angle after angle over the bones of the half-finished dome– In his mind, the shards of light grew and spread until they covered the skeletal frame, covered the frame with a glow which shone out brightly across the island until he lost sight of his own tower completely.
*
Robert sat in the look-out of his building, with the hot summer sun coursing in from the eight tall windows which faced in each direction. The heat was exhausting, and he mopped his brow. Below him, in the streets, lines of men waited outside businesses and labour exchanges, and they also mopped their brows. Robert poured himself a glass of water from a thin jug.
It was only the third or fourth time he’d managed to get up into the look-out since the building had been finished; he had had a lot to do lately and there just hadn’t been the time. He’d tried to keep as many of his men on as possible, but it hadn’t been possible to keep them all, and there had been a lot of hard decisions to make and a lot of difficult conversations with a lot of distressed people.
“We managed to – I know it seems like everything has been turned upside down – but we managed to get through it,” Rosemary had said to him that weekend.
“Yes we did,” he said.
“It’ll be all right. Everything will pick up. These funds Hoover has asked Congress for, these construction programs. Ford has gone ahead and given his workers a raise, I heard on the radio.”
“Ford’s a madman,” replied Robert.
He remembered the party they’d had the day 40 Wall Street had been crowned tallest in the world, the groups of twenty or so he’d ushered up into this look-out, the gasps of wonder, the pointing fingers, the laughter, the slaps on the back, the kisses, the champagne, the whiskey. Even Mayor Walker had been drinking. And Robert had sat with his arm around Rosemary in the dark when all his guests had gone home and watched the lights go out all over the city, the sea of lights dancing and flickering and finally disappearing behind his glasses. The tallest building in the world. It seemed a strange and arrogant achievement now, a strange and arrogant ambition to have held. But the world was a different place then. The huge glass entrance-ways of the Chrysler Building seemed to taper like coffins now.
On the day when Chrysler had launched his spire Robert had been sitting uptown in the office of a solicitor friend sharing a drink and a story, and then the telephone rang. It was Rosemary.
“Oh God,” she said. “Oh, Robert, don’t be too upset.”
“What is it?” he said, his heart burning, thinking immediately of James and Emma. And when she told him he smiled, tried to smile, and put his drink back down on the desk. Then he went to the window. Then the telephone rang again. This time it was Davis.
On 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue a crowd had gathered. The dome of Chrysler’s building had opened up like a cocoon, and out of the cocoon a steel needle was slowly emerging, flashing in the afternoon sunlight, rising higher and higher and then being clipped and strapped and fastened into place. It took around an hour and a half for the job to be completed, and Robert stood at his friend’s window and watched the whole thing. But as soon as he had seen that needle edge out he had known what Chrysler was doing, and it had only taken minutes for his spire to sweep past the mark, the invisible line in the sky, that Robert had drawn only weeks earlier, sweep past 40 Wall Street, and keep going, keep on soaring higher, until, at around four pm, as the radio reported in a breathless crackle, it had even overtaken the poor Eiffel Tower standing helpless and usurped 3,000 miles away. Robert turned off the radio and went home.
The cars below him began to move off for the evening like dark chickens going home to roost. Behind the rows of buildings, in the middle of Central Park, men were setting up their tents in the nascent shanty town they were starting to call ‘Hooverville’. Robert took another slug of water, stood up and looked west, letting the last of the heat beat on his face. He felt he could see the whole continent from up there, spreading out ahead of him, tapering, shrinking, hugging the earth, and behind him was the ocean, and behind that, Europe, and, far away, his long-forgotten homeland, England. A sudden memory of his old life washed over him, a rare intrusion: walking out into the countryside with his mother and father as a child, struggling to keep up with their giant strides, sitting on the riverbank swinging his legs as the clear water flowed slowly past. Unbidden, their small house and his father’s low, smoky office swept with the river into his thoughts, and the laughter, and the rough voices and the sharp ones, and strangers ruffling his hair in the street, before the boat journey which seemed to take years carried his proud, excited father, his worried, careful mother and the young Robert, for whom the whole thing was just another strange episode in a short life made up only of strange episodes, racing giddily along the deck with the other children, into the harbour at New York.
How strange it was to think of them, those people from his dream-like past, back there in England still going about their business as they always had done, while here Robert and his long-dead parents and people like them were remaking the world in a brand-new image. He looked north at the building Chrysler had flung proudly into the air like a ringmaster announcing his star acrobat, the sun sparkling clean and cold off the sharp shards of its shiny dome, completed now, and every bit as beautiful as Robert had feared and imagined, a building made from hubcaps and radiators, its gargoyles not dull, ugly things from dark European nightmares but sleek, modern animals bursting from the walls, those blank, faceless wonders that conveyed only speed, a building as shiny and tall as the automobiles and airships the factories had been turning out in droves were fast and loud and huge. He thought suddenly of the tiny new planet that American astronomers said was rushing around the sun somewhere in the distant blackness above them. Chrysler’s spire – that damned spire! – a spire not decorated and ornate like the one on his own building, but shining, crisp and clean, like the blade of a knife on a shelf in a store, seemed to be pointing straight up towards it.
A stump whose height at that moment exactly aligned with the curve of the horizon was gradually growing brick by brick between Robert and the Chrysler Building, a stump they were calling the Empire State Building, the ‘skyscraper’ which, its designers promised, would put both Robert’s tower and Chrysler’s tower utterly in the shade. Literally, in the case of Chrysler’s, it was so close, Robert realised suddenly, and he smiled sadly.
He and Chrysler had been like King Canute, he thought, sitting on the beach, holding their hands up, and nothing could stop the tide coming in. 40 Wall Street had been the tallest, briefly, and then Chrysler’s had been the tallest, and soon this new colossus would take its place. And, soon after that, he was certain, something bigger would outpace them all. Where would it end? Would people really work up here, he asked himself, up with the clouds and the birds, so far from the trees and the grass and the rivers? Would they live up here in the end, when right now people were living in tents in the park and under boxes under bridges? His tower was still half-empty; he couldn’t fill it. Would they buy the new America that Chrysler and Robert and the developers of the Empire State Building were selling? He sat there thinking for a long while. But he didn’t know where it would end. All he knew for sure was that they had begun to construct a kind of city that no one had ever built before. And he was suddenly flushed with pride to be part of it.
