The Die-In at the Cathedral

The decade was three weeks old and had not been given a name. Nobody said the nineties yet; people said this year, and meant something whose shape they could not see. The Wall was down and the long argument of the century had been declared over, and the city that had argued it hardest from the sidelines went on doing in January what it did every January. It killed its own at a climbing rate — two thousand of them before the year was out, a record nobody was rooting for, though in January the number was still only a slope, and a slope is a thing you notice from above, afterward. The subway ran clean that winter, every car scrubbed to bare steel the previous spring, and it ran clean through stations still years from their turn, so that a bright train pulled into a ruin twice a minute all day long. On Madison Avenue in the East Fifties the limestone building with the doorman and the brass directory was closing its February issue. February's issue was December's argument, come back up the stairs to be had again.

It had been killed once already. Everybody in the building knew that, and half of them had been in the room.

Nora Kessler had the galley on her desk again, and it was strange to her the way your own handwriting is strange in an old book: hers, and from a version of her she could reconstruct but not reinhabit. Gil Ordway's piece on the die-in at St. Patrick's — four thousand words written in three days in December, the cathedral from the inside, the whistles going up under the vaulting, the young men lying down in the aisle while the Cardinal prayed over them at the volume the room required — carried her December red the full length of both margins, and every mark of it was now load-bearing, because in December she had held the piece for February and it was February, near enough, and the piece was running. The cover, even. She had marked it to bury it. The same marks were raising it now.

She read it through once with the pencil down, which was her rule; you could not weigh a thing and hear it in the same pass. It was as good as it had been in December. It was better, maybe, for the eight weeks — the dailies had run their versions and forgotten them, the shouting on both sides of the bronze doors had cooled to the temperature at which you could actually read it, and the piece stood in the cooled air saying what it had always said, which was that everyone in it was right and it had happened anyway. That was the thing the room had fought about. That was the thing that would bring the mail.

The editor's letter she was writing to run in front of it argued the fight out loud, which she almost never let a letter do. What a magazine owes a story it finds unsympathetic on first read — she had the subject and most of a first paragraph, and the first paragraph kept wanting to apologize, and she kept taking the apology out. A magazine that liked everything it printed was a catalogue. You ran the piece you flinched at because the flinch was information, and the information was that the piece had gotten somewhere the reader had not yet been dragged. She wrote that in a form she would cut by half and went to the eleven-thirty.

The eleven-thirty re-fought December in reverse, which she had known it would, and let it, because a room that did not get to say it had been right about something would find a worse place to spend the grievance.

"February proves the hold," Martin Kaye said. Martin was fifty-nine this year, senior, grey, the Yale ring turned once before he spoke so you'd know to. "We ran it in the one month it could be read as a piece and not as a rebuttal. December it was a fight the Cardinal would have won by having picked it. Now it's ours." He was pleased in the particular way of a man who had lost a vote in December and was collecting on it in January.

"February proves nothing," Julian Cross said, from the writers' side, without heat, which from Julian was a kind of heat. "It was always going to run. It ran late. The hold cost us two months of a thing being alive and bought us the right to say we timed it. We didn't time it. We flinched and then we got over the flinch, and now we're calling the recovery strategy." He had his feet up on an open drawer, conducting the sentence to its end with two fingers. "I'm for running it. I was for running it in December. I'd just like the minutes to reflect that we're brave in arrears."

"The minutes reflect what I say they reflect," Nora said, and the room laughed, and she let it, and then she closed the slot as she closed most of them, one degree more exactly than anyone at the table had managed. "We held it because in December it was hot and we are not in the business of hot. We're running it because it kept, which is the only thing we were ever betting on: that the anger in it wouldn't spoil. It didn't. Gil's cover, the choir-loft frame — Sana's got the negative, the whole aisle from above, the bodies on the marble." She said it flat, a scheduling fact, and watched it not land as one.

"That's a hell of a cover to hand a diocese," the executive editor said.

"It's a hell of a piece."

"It's a picture of a desecration on the newsstand at eye level next to the register."

"It's a picture of the aisle," Nora said. "The desecration is a sentence on page four and the sentence is fair to the man who did it and fair to the man he did it to, which is more than either of them managed on the day. Run the aisle." She wrote cover — choir loft — Sana on the flat plan, the map of the issue page by page that lived on the corkboard and on the table both, and moved on, and did not reopen it, because she did not reopen the ones that would cost her later. This one would cost her later. She could feel the shape of the letters it would bring, the good stationery and the canceled subscriptions and the one from the archdiocese that would be courteous to the point of violence. She assigned the cover anyway, because the alternative was a cover she'd be ashamed of in March, and Charlie's father's rule about the December issue applied to February too: you could tell a good book by whether it embarrassed you a season on. The brave covers never did.

They did the back of the book in twenty minutes. The animated show came up — the cartoon family, the Fox network's Sunday gamble, which had run a special before Christmas and was moving into its own Sunday slot that week — and the room could not agree it was theirs.

"It's the biggest thing on television that nobody over forty has watched," the executive editor said.

"Then it isn't ours," Martin said. "Our reader is over forty and proud of it. Our reader watches it because his children make him and reports back that it's coarse."

"Our reader's children are our reader in twelve years."

"Our reader's children read us in twelve years or they don't and either way I'm retired." Martin turned the ring. "You don't cover the show. You cover the network. Four hundred pages of advertising decided a cartoon could carry a night, and that's a piece — that's arithmetic, that's the business deciding what the country watches. Call it 'Fox's Arithmetic' and run it in the back and leave the cartoon out of it." And the room agreed, quickly, gratefully, because it let them print the thing without deciding whether they were the kind of magazine the thing was for, and Nora watched the question get converted into a safer question and filed the conversion where she filed those, which was nowhere anyone could see, and said, "Arithmetic. Eight hundred words. Somebody who can count," and it went in the minutes.

She called Ordway at four.

It was the call she'd been not making since December, and she made it as she did the calls she'd rather not, which was on schedule, from the desk, with the door open, so that it stayed a professional call and could not become the other kind. Gil Ordway was sixty-some and had one of the radio voices from the era when writers were given them, and it came up out of the receiver filling her office as it had filled the answering machine in December, when he'd left the message she had not returned — if it's dead I'd rather have it from you than a messenger with a long face — and had then had to wait eight weeks to learn it wasn't.

"Gil. It's Nora. You're running. The cover."

A silence with weight in it. Then the voice, gone careful: "The cover."

"The choir-loft frame. Sana shot the aisle from above. It runs in front of your first line."

"I heard February at the earliest and I made my peace with never," Ordway said, and the sentence had the old grievance in it, thirty years of it, the contributing writer's standing quarrel with the building that used him and made him ask. And then something moved under the grievance, and he let it. "You know Halloran's dead."

"I know."

"The one on page nine. The one lying down third from the rail with the good shoes, that I got the whole afternoon with in the Tombs after. He went in November. Fast, the fast kind." A breath. "So it's the only place he's going to be now, is what I'm telling you. Page nine. Third from the rail. I wrote him alive and you're going to print him and that's — " the voice thickened, and it was not performance, she had heard him perform and this was under the performance, in the room where he kept the thing the performance was for " — that's the whole reason a man does this, Nora, that's the only reason, that a magazine comes out at the end of the month and a fellow who's gone is on page nine with his shoes on, and I want to say to you that holding it, that you were — "

"It's a good piece and it checks," Nora said, and the sentence came down clean and level across the top of his, a half-second before his got where it was going, the pencil finding the line before the line was finished, "and the desk has a query on the arrest count I need you to clear by Monday. A hundred eleven, fifty-three inside — your draft says a hundred twelve. One of them was cut loose at the precinct and never booked, so the number's soft and I need it hard before it's a cover." Because the thing Ordway had been walking toward was a reconciliation, and she was not going to spend it at four o'clock on a Thursday to feel better about a hold she did not regret. She heard him hear the guillotine. She heard him decide, the old pro, to be grateful for it, which was worse.

"A hundred eleven," he said, back in the professional register, both of them there now, repairing nothing and scheduling everything. "I'll clear it Monday. Halloran was fifty-three of them."

"Then say so on page nine," Nora said. "It's a better sentence with the number in it," and it was, and he knew it was, and they got off the phone having given each other the one thing either of them could stand to take.

Julian caught her in the corridor after, at the walking speed of two people who had walked that floor together for twenty years.

"You cut him off."

"I cleared a query."

"You heard him coming and you put a fact in front of it." He was not accusing her; he was reading a galley, out loud, as they read each other. "He was about to thank you for holding his piece and you'd rather he stayed sore."

"He works better sore. So do you." She let a beat go. "You argued the same fight backward in that room this morning, Julian. You'd rather be right in arrears than have run it happy in December."

"I would," Julian said, comfortable, "and I know it, which is the difference between us I keep hoping you'll develop." He peeled off toward his office. "The cover's right, incidentally. The aisle from above. She's a better editor than half the desk and she says four words a year."

"She said five," Nora said. "I was counting," and went in, and the door did its one soft click, and the letter that wanted to apologize was still on the desk wanting to, and she took the apology out again.

Dez Washington checked the die-in piece on the second night of the close, after the eighth floor had gone dark in its order and the checking desk sat in its one pool of light at the window end of seven with the takeout going cold in the blue-and-white cups.

The cups were everywhere that winter, the paper ones with the Greek discus-throwers and WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU in the blue that meant a cart or a diner and not the machine on six. Somebody at the desk — it might have been the personals checker, it might have been nobody, it was the kind of thing the desk knew without a source — said the man who had drawn the cup came over after the war with a number on his arm. Nobody checked it. The coffee came in it either way, and the desk drank the coffee, and the piece was on Dez's blotter squared to the corner, four thousand words about a Sunday morning she had spent uptown at her mother's church not knowing it was happening forty blocks south.

She read it once straight through, no pen. Then she took it apart.

The arrest count she had already, from December — a hundred eleven, she had called the precinct's press office herself for the City item that ran in January, and the number had held then and she confirmed it held now, because numbers moved and the desk's whole religion was that you checked the same fact twice on two different days and did not trust the version of yourself that had checked it the first time. A hundred eleven arrested, fifty-three inside the cathedral. Ordway's draft had said a hundred twelve. She flagged it, green, her initials under the query, and did not spend a thought on being right, because being right about a number was the floor of the job and not a thing you stood on top of.

The organist detail she confirmed against the archdiocese and against a stringer's notes and against the parish bulletin, which the desk had in a folder because the desk had everything in a folder: the organ had played through the disruption, loud, the piece the Cardinal had asked for, a wall of it thrown up over the whistles, and that was on the record three ways and she checked it three ways and green-dotted it.

The wafer would not hold still.

The piece had it in one sentence on page four, fair and terrible: a demonstrator taking the host from a priest's hand, breaking it, letting the pieces go to the marble, then lying down among them. It was the sentence the mail would be about. It was the sentence the Cardinal's people would read first and the ACT UP people would wish had never happened, and Dez had three accounts of it and the three accounts did not agree about the hands. One witness had the man taking the host in his own cupped hands and crumbling it there. One had the priest still holding it when it broke, the man's fingers over the priest's. One, the parish's, had it snatched. Which hand held the bread when the bread came apart was, on the marble that morning, the whole moral weight of the act, and it was exactly the kind of thing that no tape and no photograph had caught and three sober adults remembered three ways because they had each been watching their own fear.

She did what the desk did with a thing that came through memory and would not resolve to syllables: she checked it for substance and flagged the syllables soft. The substance was that a consecrated host was broken and dropped and a man lay down in the fragments. That held three ways. The hands did not, and she wrote the query up plainly — p. 4, "took the host from the priest's hand and crumbled it": three accounts conflict on whether taken or still held; recommend "the host was broken and let fall," substance confirmed, agency soft — and stapled it to the margin, and it was the best sentence she wrote that night and it was a fact-checker's query and nobody would ever read it but the writer and the writer's editor.

Around her the desk ran its night economy. The personals checker had the Voice open and her ad running again, the long one, and she played the mailbox back with the receiver held off her ear so the desk could vote, the men's recorded voices coming small and hopeful into the pool of light at a dollar ninety-nine a minute of their money and none of hers, and the desk voted by lifted chopstick and went back to work. Somebody who had been to the Sound Factory on Saturday was explaining it to somebody who had not, the room the size of an airplane hangar and the sun up by the time you left and the particular thing the music did around four that you could not describe to a person at a desk on a Tuesday, and the person at the desk on a Tuesday said it sounded loud, and the Saturday person said you had no idea and meant it kindly.

The oldest checker, a man who had verified the magazine's facts through four editors and did not raise his voice, said the thing about the close-nights and the far end of the floor to Dez without turning from his own galley, the way you tell someone which train.

"When it runs late and you take the back stairs down," he said, "the men's room on eight, the far one by the flat files — that door sticks, and it stays propped, and it isn't broken. Use the near one." A green mark, a page turned. "That's all. It isn't broken and it isn't your business and the near one's cleaner anyway." He said it in the register of a man telling you the almanac was on the second shelf, and Dez took it as it was given, filed without comment, the building handing her one more of its rules out of the air as it handed her all of them, and she understood exactly enough of it — a colleague, a diagnosis nobody said out loud, a door left kind — to know that the comment the desk did not make was the whole content of the instruction, and she made none either.

At reception, on the way in, there had been a clipboard: a blood drive, the Red Cross van on Thursday, a sign-up sheet with the times ruled off in a secretary's hand. Charlie Whitfield had come through the lobby at nine while Dez was signing the log and had looked at the sheet and said, to the room, warm, "Put me down for a pint — God knows they'll want to test it, tell them to keep whatever they find," and got his laugh, the publisher's easy laugh that cost him nothing, and signed. And under his name the sheet had gone down the times and there was a slot at ten-fifteen with a name half-started and crossed out, one downstroke of a pen and then a scribble over it, where a man on the floor had put himself down and then had not, because a man on that floor in that winter did what the questionnaire on the van told him he had to do, which was disqualify himself in advance and not say why, and the crossed-out downstroke sat on the sheet at reception all week saying it in the one language the building had for the thing, which was a mark withdrawn. Dez saw it going in and going out and both times did the desk's own move, which was to see the fact and check it against nothing and carry it nowhere.

By the coffee machine on seven, on her way to the flat files with the checked galley, Julian Cross and Susan Drake were arguing a comma. Not a comma in the die-in piece; a comma from 1984, a serial comma in a sentence in a book review both of them could quote and neither of them would concede, six years old and still warm, the senior writer and the senior copy editor going at a punctuation mark with the pleasure of people who had found, in a building that paid them to disagree, the one disagreement that would never cost either of them anything and would never run out. Dez went past with the galley and neither of them saw her, and the argument closed over the gap she left.

She walked the die-in up to eight herself, past the near men's room, and left it squared on the secretary's tray, and rode home to the Bronx with the wafer still not resolving in her, three hands and one host, the counter running in her head the way a tape runs after you've turned it off. At Tremont the cold came down off the Concourse and she walked the blocks with her heels in her bag, and the getting-home five came home unspent, and she did not, on the platform or the stairs or in the kitchen where her mother's light was on, say to anyone that she had spent the evening deciding what a broken thing had touched on its way down. It wasn't hers to carry home. She hung the blazer on the door and brushed it flat, twice, and that was the day put away.

Charlie Whitfield read the January bookings on Monday with the subscriber mail, in that order, because you read the pleasant thing first so your face was arranged before you got to the other one.

The mail was good the way it was always good — a man in Ohio renewing for a thirty-first year and mentioning it, a schoolteacher in Oregon with a correction about a poet's dates that turned out, when Charlie sent it down, to be right, the desk conceding it in green — and under the mail was the interoffice envelope from six with the January numbers set against last January's, and Charlie unwound the string and read that as he read everything, fully, without hurry. January was soft. January was always soft; his father had said so, the January book is for the readers because the advertisers are still in Palm Beach, and Charlie had said it to Nora in December in his father's words with his father's confidence. But last January had been soft against a fat winter, and this January was soft against a January that had already been thinning, and softness measured against softness stopped being a season and started being a slope, the same slope the city was on and had not noticed, and Charlie noticed it, worth knowing about and not worth saying at ten in the morning to a business manager who wanted to be reassured.

There was a letter clipped to the sheet. A liquor house, a good one, three pages a year for eleven years, writing to regret — that was the word, they always used the word, they regretted, as if a page were a dinner they'd been asked to and couldn't make — that in the current climate they would be reducing their commitment for the coming year, with every good wish for the magazine's continued et cetera. It was the second one. The first had come in December, a car company, and Charlie had folded it into thirds and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket where a folded sheet does not show, and now he took that one out, unfolded it, read it again to be sure he had the tone right, and folded the liquor house in with it, two sheets now in the pocket over his heart, the tenants of his jacket, the things he kept for other people.

He did not put his head into Nora's office about it. There was nothing yet to say that would not, in the saying, become larger than it was.

The piece that crossed his desk that morning on its way to the front of the book made him laugh, and then made him wish he hadn't. "A Sculptor Uninvited" — a paragraph and a half for the Index of the Close, the sculptor of the enormous rusted beams, the guest of honor at his own award dinner at the club on the park, arriving on the seventh of December to be told at the door by the same doorman who had held it for him going in that his open collar would not do, and being lent a jacket and a tie off the club's own rack, and putting the jacket on backwards, and being turned away from the dinner in his honor while two hundred and forty people in the room upstairs kept his chair warm and drank his health.

Charlie laughed, once, because it was funny — the man wore the jacket backwards, you had to love it — and then heard how he had laughed, which was from the inside, from the warm side of the door, because it was his club, or had been, the same rack, the same doorman very likely, the same rule that had survived letting women in the way it had survived everything, by being older than whoever objected to it. He had eaten a hundred dinners in that room. He had lent his own jacket, once, to a young writer he'd brought as a guest, and had felt, doing it, generous. The item was fair and dry and it ran the club through with a single clause about the chair kept warm, and Charlie read it as a member and laughed as a member and knew that when it ran, in his magazine, over his masthead, the club would know exactly which member had let it through, and he let it through, because the alternative was killing a true funny thing to keep a dinner reservation, and a man who did that was a guest in his own magazine.

Then he wrote the liquor house back. Not the form; the form went out over the business manager's signature and said we understand and we'll hold your rate. Charlie wrote the chairman, whom he knew, longhand, on the good paper, three sentences that did not mention the pages: that he'd thought of him at the funeral in the fall and been sorry not to have said more; that the magazine was closing a February book he'd have liked, a piece on a protest that would make everybody angry and was fair to all of them; that he hoped they'd get a lunch in before the spring. It cost him twenty minutes and a stamp and the small risk of a man's knowing he'd been courted, and it was not nothing, which was the point of doing it in his own hand: he was not going to run the magazine his father built by being silent at men he could still buy lunch.

Tomás Vega came by at six with the rent.

He sublet the apartment in Gramercy through a lease Charlie had co-signed two years back and kept in the deep drawer with a spare key on a tagged ring, and he paid on the first, in person, by check, which he did not have to do — he could have mailed it — and which was, Charlie understood, the visit dressed as an errand, as men their age arranged to see each other without either of them having to call it that.

"January," Tomás said, and put the check on the blotter.

"You could mail it."

"I could." He didn't sit. He had the strap-crease still faint in the shoulder of the good coat, four days back from wherever the last one had been, and a spring already on him, the next one. "I'm going to want the place watched end of February. Two, three weeks. Nicaragua's voting the twenty-fifth."

"Voting."

"An election. The real kind, or the kind they'll call real. The government the revolution built against the government Washington bought, and everybody's certain how it comes out and nobody agrees which way." He was warming, as he did when it was the work and not the weather. "It's the end of the whole story down there, Charlie, one way or the other, and it's going to happen in a country with three phone lines to the outside, and I want to be in the room when the number that ends it comes up on a bad connection."

And Charlie, who loved him and had co-signed his life, heard the three phone lines and the bad connection and the room where a thing ended, and what came up in him was not the election. What came up was water. "My father took me out past the Narrows once in a blow we had no business being in," he said, "and the radio went, and there was a good hour we were just a boat and the weather, and I have never in my life felt so — " he opened his hand, looking for it " — so accounted for. Nobody knew where we were. Not the Coast Guard, not my mother. It was the last time I was ever properly lost." He smiled at Tomás, warm, entirely missing him. "Take a good coat. It gets cold on a bad connection."

Tomás looked at him for a second longer than the moment asked, the way you look at a man who has answered a different question than the one you're in, kindly, and let it go.

"I'll take the coat," Tomás said. "Watch the plants. There's one that lies about being dead. Water it anyway."

"I know the one," Charlie said, and he did.

The February book closed clean on a Thursday, as the ordinary ones did, the last board walked to the elevator flat on a production man's palms at a quarter to midnight. The die-in cover came off the corkboard and went to the type house on the wire and then to the plant in New Jersey where the press ran the length of the hall and three stories of it, and the aisle came up out of the grey sixty times a minute — the bodies on the marble seen from the choir loft, small and deliberate, the whistles you couldn't hear and the organ you couldn't hear and page nine's Halloran third from the rail with his good shoes on, alive in it because Ordway had written him alive and the number was hard now and the sentence was better for it.

It went out into the world at the end of the month at $3.95, into the steel racks at the kiosks, shoulder to shoulder with the competition, and the competition that month was covered in the general — a face in fatigues behind bars, the strongman surrendered and flown north, a story the dailies had owned for weeks and the weeklies were now explaining, everyone's cover the same cover of the same soldier the same way. Meridian's was an aisle seen from above, and a Sunday nobody's cover would touch, and a fair sentence about a broken thing, and it said, in the rack, the one thing none of the generals said, which the reader would not be able to name and would buy the magazine to keep failing to.

Sana Farid passed a kiosk on Sixth Avenue in the last week of January and stopped a moment in front of it — the aisle from above, her negative, the frame the room had fought about now in a steel rack with her name nowhere on the cover of it — and did not buy a copy, because she had the negative, and went on to the shoot she was late for.

And in the East Nineties, on a Sunday evening, in the apartment that was curated to the point of looking unoccupied, Nora Kessler came off an hour on the telephone with her father in Berlin — his knee still a liar, the city still smelling different, Frau Schneider in 4B still showing the chip of Wall at the mailboxes — and sat for a while with the receiver in her lap and the lamp making its one pool, and in the drawer of the little table, where it had lived since December, the letter in the upright careful hand, opened now these two months and read and folded back along its own folds, the letter she had not answered and was not, that Sunday, going to answer, because she had already not answered for two months and a Sunday changed nothing — the arithmetic that had gotten her this far and would get her, at that rate, most of the way to Berlin. She turned off the lamp. The February issue was on the newsstands and the March issue was already late, because it was a monthly, and the machine did not stop for the people who ran it.