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4

Skyscraper

The Depression—as President Hoover christened the economic collapse in an attempt to make it seem less catastrophic than it was—got worse. Unemployment rose and businesses failed, but the spreading malaise did not daunt Michael Sterling. To the contrary, it just stoked his determination to insist that everything was going to be fine in this best of all possible worlds. Almost every day he quoted the president’s assurance that “we have now passed the worst and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover.”

There was a decided quality of religious fervor about Michael’s faith in the future and, like all religious enthusiasts, he felt the need to proselytize—convincing others had the added benefit of helping him convince himself. And he didn’t need to look far for evidence to support his belief. Up above, the soaring new skyscrapers of Manhattan bore testimony to the confidence of their creators. They were the cathedrals of commerce, a statement forged in steel that New York City was the beating heart of a new world of limitless potential.

One building in particular captured Michael’s imagination. As the months passed, he watched the white-and-gray brickwork of the Chrysler Building rising floor by floor on the corner of Lexington Avenue and Forty-Second Street, each one with matching rows of gleaming glass windows reflecting the noonday sun. Oftentimes he would get up early and take the subway to Grand Central and then linger near the building site to try to strike up conversations with the construction workers before walking on to his factory in the Garment District. If successful, he would come away from these encounters armed with mind-numbing statistics that he would memorize and then repeat back to his family at dinner: that the building would require more than three million bricks and nearly four hundred thousand rivets, and that if the electrical wiring was laid out end to end, it would stretch all the way from New York City to Chicago! “ Chicago, ” he would marvel. “Imagine that!”

Michael told them that Walter Chrysler was sparing no expense because this was going to be the tallest and most beautiful building in the world. A monument to the power of human ingenuity and endeavor. His admiration for the automobile tycoon knew no bounds. He was sorely tempted to buy a photograph of Chrysler to hang next to Herbert Hoover and refrained only because he felt that it would be disrespectful to the president. So it came as no surprise that he insisted on Elena and Theo accompanying him on a tour of the building on the first weekend after it had officially opened to the public.

The great day dawned auspiciously bright, and they arrived outside the main entrance ten minutes before opening time. Craning their necks, they gazed up the side of the soaring tower to where the terraced arches of the crown rose through a sunburst pattern of triangular windows to a stainless-steel spire thrust like a spear into the cloudless blue sky.

“The spire was Chrysler’s ace in the hole,” said Michael, pointing upward excitedly. “It’s how he won the game. None of them saw it coming!”

“What game?” asked Elena, disapprovingly. Like all good Catholics, she abhorred gambling. The Roman centurions had drawn lots for Christ’s clothes at the foot of the cross.

“The race to the sky, of course,” said Michael impatiently. “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve been telling you these last months? All this year he’s been in a battle with the Bank of Manhattan to see who can build the highest skyscraper in the world. Taller than the Eiffel Tower, taller than ...” Michael searched for another suitably impressive comparison and came up a blank. But this didn’t faze him, and he returned to his story with redoubled enthusiasm: “So a month ago, the people at the bank were sure they’d won. They even held a victory party over on Wall Street to celebrate, but they’d reckoned without old Walter. A few days later, he hauled his spire up through the roof and won the race in an hour and a half. He’d had it hidden in there the whole time, the sly old goat. The whole building’s one thousand and forty-five feet from top to bottom. An honest-to-God miracle—that’s what it is!”

Michael stared up, awestruck—he might as well have been gazing up at the roof of the Sistine Chapel—but Elena didn’t follow suit; instead, she raised her perfectly symmetrical arched black eyebrows and shook her head and sighed. The building didn’t seem like a miracle to her at all, but rather a blasphemy. A narcissistic attempt by a vain industrialist to masquerade as God that could end only in disaster. She’d come on the expedition reluctantly, unable to say no to her husband’s pressure, but that didn’t mean she was going to pretend to enjoy the experience.

Theo had his head thrown back, too, like his father, gazing up and imagining what it would be like for someone to fall head over heels in slow motion past each of the seventy-seven floors to a certain death on the sidewalk below, looking in as he fell at the people at their desks carrying on with their work, oblivious to his cries.

Michael called Theo out of his daydream. The gigantic steel doors were opening, and he hurried his family forward and into the lobby. Theo was completely unprepared for the shock of its beauty. He had expected something loud and brash and monumental, but instead it was intensely quiet inside—an extraordinary contrast to the roar of Forty-Second Street—and the thick walls of African red-and-orange marble made the dimly lit interior seem like a pagan temple. The doors to the elevators with Egyptian designs decked out in elaborate wooden marquetry were like entrances to magical tropical kingdoms straight out of King Solomon’s Mines .

“Walter has his own special elevator, of course, going up to his private apartment at the top. I hear it’s furnished like a sultan’s palace with gold everywhere, even in the bathroom,” said Michael knowingly.

“Which elevator is it, Dad?” asked Theo.

“One of those over there,” said Michael, waving vaguely toward the opposite end of the lobby. “He takes his Ziegfeld girls up there after the show. They say he’s just bought his favorite one a diamond necklace from Cartier, and she wears it at the revue for everyone to see.”

“Michael!” said Elena sharply. “Don’t talk like that in front of Theo. What’s the boy going to think?”

“He’s old enough to think for himself,” said Michael, but he sounded sheepish in the face of his wife’s angry criticism and was temporarily silenced while the elevator operator, a magnificent factotum dressed in a gold braid uniform with a gold-colored mustache to match, inspected their tickets and then pulled back the iron gate to usher them inside.

“Prepare yourself for the longest vertical ride on earth,” said Michael with a return of his earlier excitement. “And the fastest too! Nine hundred feet a minute, if you can believe it!”

It was unimaginable to Theo, but true—he watched the second hand on his father’s watch and yes, it literally took no more than a minute for them to reach the seventy-first floor, where they stepped out onto the observation deck and peered down through the triangular-shaped windows at the great city below.

“Look, there’s my factory,” said Michael, but Theo couldn’t distinguish the lead roof his father was pointing at from all the other lead roofs tangling for space in the Garment District out beyond Seventh Avenue, and he was similarly unsuccessful in picking out his home and school. And now, instead of a fantasy of falling, he felt the city’s towers pushing up toward him from out of the canyon-like avenues, as if they were a multitude of hungry, needle-headed insects, each striving to draw clear of its rivals. Only the still blue water of the Upper Bay, stretching out wide and indifferent beyond the Battery, provided relief from the seething mass of construction on all sides.

Behind him, Michael had followed Theo to the south-facing windows and now took hold of his shoulder with one hand, fixing him in position, as he pointed with the other out toward the bay. “Look, son—over there on the Jersey side, just before you get to the Statue of Liberty. That’s Ellis Island, where they took us from the ship. We had to get through there or be sent back. Do you see it, like a square with the middle bitten out?”

“Yes,” said Theo, shrinking from his father’s intensity, but curious too—his father had never spoken to him before about how he got to America, always preferring to look forward rather than back.

“I remember how the government inspectors were watching us when we went into the big hall and I willed myself to stay upright, which was hard because my body was still rocking with the ship and we were weak and hungry after all those weeks in steerage. And frightened too: more than you can imagine,” said Michael in a faraway voice, as if he’d crossed time and was reliving the experience again. “Everyone was scared. You could smell the fear—it stank worse than the dirt on our bodies—but we knew that if you gave in to it, then they’d say you were sick and chalk a big X on your coat, and maybe you’d have to go back across the sea.

“They came at us with buttonhooks and pulled our eyelids back to check for trachoma. It hurt and my father got angry and that was nearly the end, but I think the inspector we had felt sorry for us, and moved us on, and suddenly there we were on the ferry heading across the bay down there, and I looked up at the towers of Manhattan and the stars blinking and I was happy, happier than I have ever been in all my life, except for the day I met your mother.”

Michael beckoned to his wife, opening his arm wide to invite her into the family embrace, but Elena refused to come forward. Today, everything her husband said seemed to irritate her.

Though embarrassed by his father’s schoolboy exuberance, Theo was moved, too, by his rapturous love for the great city spread out beneath them, and he was angry with his mother for throwing a dampener on the day. She was being unfair, and Theo felt a keen awareness of the contrast with the efforts she made with her baking and her appearance when she knew that Don Andrés was going to be at the church for Sunday Mass.

Theo had hoped that the Englishman’s visit to raise money for the Knights of Columbus the previous summer would be a one-off, but in this he had been quickly disappointed. Don Andrés had returned at regular intervals since then and made sure to single out Elena for courtly attention whenever he did so, while Theo sat beside her, gripped with an impotent resentment of which the Englishman appeared completely unaware.

Recently, Theo’s irritation had reached a point where he could stay silent no longer, and he’d asked his mother why Don Andrés was such a frequent visitor, but she’d brushed aside the question, saying that he had business in the city.

“So why didn’t he come before?” Theo had asked.

“Because he didn’t know about the church,” Elena had reasonably replied.

“Or about you,” Theo had been sorely tempted to shoot back, but he’d restrained himself, not wanting to precipitate the already existing tension between himself and his mother into open warfare. And he worried, too, that voicing his suspicion could make it come true. He’d seen how animated and talkative his mother became when the Englishman was there. Different from how she was with the other parishioners or with her husband.

Returning to the elevators, Michael stopped in front of a glass case containing an open wooden box of metal tools—calipers and spanners and wrenches—with the name W. P. Chrysler engraved in gold lettering on the front.

“He made most of them himself when he was starting out as a railroad mechanic in Kansas, earning a nickel an hour,” said Michael, gazing reverently at the box. “Do you know why he’s put them here?” he asked his son.

Theo shook his head.

“To show people like us what you can do in this great country if you use your talents to the full. You can build this,” he said, throwing his hands out wide. “You can achieve anything, even if you come from nothing. That’s the point.”

“But what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” said Elena, pronouncing the words slowly, almost as if she was uttering a prophecy or a curse.

“What’s that?” asked Michael, turning to his wife, surprised by her interjection after she had maintained a brooding silence all day up to now.

“It’s the Gospel. It’s what the Lord Jesus told his disciples.” Theo could see that his mother’s small fists were clenched, and he sensed both her anger and the effort that it was costing her to speak out against her husband.

“And if Jesus said it, it must be true. Is that what you’re saying?” asked Michael. Theo could hear the edge of mockery in his voice.

“Yes,” said Elena simply. “I think this place is like the Mount of Temptation that Satan took Christ up to in the desert, where he showed him all the kingdoms of the world and offered them to him if he would just kneel down and worship him. But Jesus refused. Tell your father what the Lord said, Theo. He needs to know.”

But Theo shook his head, refusing to be drawn into this battle between his parents, which made him feel like he was being torn apart inside.

“Very well,” said Elena. “I will, then. Christ said: ‘Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve.’”

For all his irritation at her for spoiling the day, Theo couldn’t help but admire his mother. She was small and delicate, but she had set herself like a boxer with her hands on her hips and her chin jutted forward, refusing to be cowed by the force of her husband’s personality.

Michael met his wife’s stare, and then glanced back down at Walter Chrysler’s tools for a moment before he spoke, softly this time: “You seem to forget that your God is not my God, my dear. Your Christ is not my Messiah. And in case you’ve forgotten, I gave up a great deal to marry you.”

Theo saw his mother’s face go rigid, as if she had sustained a blow, but he understood that it also reflected a determination not to respond, and both his parents remained stonily silent as they rode the elevator back down to the lobby and made their way home. Sitting between them on the subway train, Theo felt both angry and bewildered. He wanted to restore his father’s high spirits and his mother’s placidity, but he was powerless to do either, having no key to unlock the mystery of their marriage.

The Chrysler Building didn’t hold the title of the world’s tallest building for long. As Theo and his parents walked the observation deck on that spring day in 1930, work had already begun ten streets away on the Empire State Building, destined within a year to eclipse Chrysler’s gleaming spire by more than two hundred feet. But the wealthy’s insatiable thirst for aerial construction couldn’t hide the reality of what was happening in the suffering city down below, where the Depression had started to exert a viselike grip on the lives of the inhabitants.

Out on Fourteenth Street—the nearest thoroughfare to the Sterling apartment—there was still the same crazy noise. Phonographs in the dime record shops with horns hung over their doorways blared hot jazz out onto the sidewalks where street peddlers were still hawking their wares, yelling out rock-bottom prices for rayon socks and candy bars and worthless watches in black leather bags, all striving to be heard above the roar of the traffic. And outside the department stores, pullers were still urging passersby not to miss out on bargain prices, pointing back at the heavily rouged girls in the show windows behind them as they slowly circled their narrow, gilded cages in dresses and furs, opening them out at each pass to display beautiful linings and an enticing glimpse of leg.

But there was a sense that they were all going through the motions. Consumer confidence had evaporated, and not just in the stock market. Watching the barkers, Theo sensed that they shouted until they were hoarse not just to attract customers but also to try to convince themselves that things were not as bad as they seemed. But behind them, the stores were half empty and the cash registers were silent, and in the windows the girls’ faces beneath their makeup were pinched and pale with anxiety. Every worker in the city feared that the next payday would be their last and that they would soon be returning to their families with the dreaded pink slip clutched in their shaking hands.

Those who’d lost their jobs trudged the streets, looking for work until their shoes were worn to shreds. For some, selling apples provided a small temporary hope that they might stay on their feet. They could make a dime if they sold a crate, but even that soon became impossible when so many were doing the same, and this pathetic last attempt at self-reliance gave way beneath them like the last rung of a broken ladder as they joined the long queues for bread and soup snaking around the decayed street corners of the Bowery. There was no dignity to be hoped for there, except perhaps in death. Louis Armstrong’s rasping voice and soulful New Orleans trumpet ran through Theo’s memory of those years, telling the truth in “St. James Infirmary Blues” in a way his father never could:

When I die, want you to dress me in straight-lace shoes

Box-back coat and a Stetson hat

Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain

So the boys’ll know that I died standin’ pat.

Theo’s father still kept faith with his beleaguered president, but for many in the city, the name Hoover had become a term of abuse. Hoover blankets were the sheets of old newspapers that the homeless wrapped themselves in to keep warm, Hoover leather was the cardboard they used to cover the holes in the soles of their shoes, and Hoover flags were their empty pants pockets turned inside out—the visible proof of their destitution as they held out their hands for alms. And at night they slept in Hoovervilles—shantytowns made of cardboard, tin, and scraps of broken wood. There was even one in the old drained reservoir in Central Park, where Theo ran sometimes with his teammates in the afternoons.

In the winter evenings, coming back from school, Theo saw these ragged men, and women and children too, pawing over the contents of restaurant garbage cans set out for the sanitation trucks—or, on one occasion, fighting like animals over waste lumber being given away on a half-finished building site. Mostly, however, they seemed too tired and cold and beaten to fight, standing around makeshift fires in empty ash cans, stamping their feet to keep warm, and periodically taking off their old battered hats to hold them over the blaze before quickly clamping them back on their heads, sighing as they felt the momentary heat penetrate their frozen skulls.

Beside the stop on Fourteenth Street where Theo got off the bus on his way back from school, a gun shop called attention to its wares with a huge imitation black revolver hanging upside down over the sidewalk. Each time Theo passed beneath the jet-black barrel, he shuddered, feeling its inhuman, pitiless aim down through the center of his head.

Only the Socialists preaching Marx from atop their soapboxes in Union Square seemed to have a solution to the general malaise. “Which side are you on?” they shouted, and Theo wasn’t sure. “Why do five percent of the population own ninety-five percent of the wealth?” they asked, and Theo didn’t know. “Look up above your heads! See what the rich waste their money on while the poor starve,” they cried, pointing up at the skyscrapers, and Theo did as they said, wondering whether his father was right. Were these buildings a triumph of the human spirit, as he claimed, or an obscene exercise in narcissism by selfish men who had more money than they knew what to do with, fiddling like modern-day Neros while Rome burned?

“Capitalism isn’t working anymore,” the Communists thundered. “Anyone can see that. It’s labor that produces wealth, and therefore wealth should go back to labor.” Theo could see the raw justice in that, although he had sense enough to keep his thoughts to himself. His parents were united in their hatred of the Reds.

But united in little else. It took all Michael’s energy to maintain his belief in his own capitalist destiny when the half-empty clothing stores spelled ever fewer orders coming in to his factory, and he was quick to take out his frustration on his wife when he came home, complaining about overspending on the household and even implying that the headaches that he’d begun to suffer from were a contagion that she’d infected him with.

In response, Elena withdrew further into herself and spent more time at the Spanish church, where Don Andrés remained a regular visitor. In December, he brought Theo a big vellum-bound copy of The Romance of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table illustrated by Arthur Rackham. On the flyleaf, it was inscribed in beautiful calligraphy:

For Theodore Sterling from Sir Andrew Campion-Bennett with best wishes for Christmas 1930

Theo loved books, and this was the most beautiful one he had ever seen. The haunting pictures, alternately romantic and sinister, stirred his imagination in a way he had never before experienced, but that didn’t make him grateful to Sir Andrew for the present. He had given the Englishman no reason to like him in the eighteen months since they had first met, and he was sure that the gift was designed to curry favor not with him but with his mother. Theo felt used, and he regretted now that he had not refused the book when Sir Andrew gave it to him. But there had been no time, which Theo realized must have been Sir Andrew’s intention, because he had put it in Theo’s hands just as he was leaving the presbytery, and he had not been back since. Father Juan said that he had gone back to England.

Theo knew that the gift compromised him, particularly after he agreed to his mother’s request not to show it to his father. He understood her motives: the book’s rich binding made its value obvious even to an intellectual philistine like Michael Sterling, and Theo was sure that his father would start asking questions as soon as he saw it. Questions that would lead to suspicion of his wife, which would further poison the already febrile atmosphere in the apartment.

Theo had his suspicions, too, and keeping the book secret felt like a betrayal of his father. So much so that he gave serious thought to telling his mother that she needed to take the book back to Father Juan to give to Sir Andrew, but each time he was about to broach the subject with her, the words dried up in his mouth and he continued to keep it hidden in the back of his wardrobe, from where he took it out at night to turn the pages and gaze spellbound at Rackham’s pictures with the aid of a flashlight.

He worried about his father, and not just because of the book. Now, instead of listening to the radio after dinner, he would sit hunched over his bureau in the corner of the living room, muttering to himself as he puzzled over invoices and bank statements and added up columns of figures again and again in the hope of finding more dollars to pay his creditors.

One evening he asked Theo for help. “You have a go, son. My eyes are strained. I can’t tell my sixes from my eights,” he said, standing up and running his hands through his thinning hair in exasperation.

Theo had no such issues but, try as he might, he couldn’t make the numbers change. He was expecting his father to become angry, but instead, to his surprise, Michael patted him affectionately on the shoulder. “We’re going to make a good team, you and I,” he said. “‘Sterling and Son’—it’s got a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”

Theo went rigid. They were almost the same words that his father had spoken to him in Washington Square on the day he was taken by his grandfather. Back then he’d still been half a child, and the prospect of working in his father’s factory had seemed unreal, part of a future that had no relationship to his eleven-year-old life. But now all that had changed. Soon his father would have the right to take him out of school, and Theo knew that there would be no more books and no more running once he had become the son in Sterling and Son. It would be the end of everything that made his life his own.

Still gripping his father’s pen, he swallowed and his heart hurt where it beat against his chest, and he had to shut his eyes to stop the tears from leaking out onto his cheeks. He felt he couldn’t breathe, but he knew he had to say something. He had to protest. Not to do so would be to acquiesce. And it had to be now—before his oblivious father withdrew his hand and moved away.

“I want to stay at school,” he said at last. The words came out half choked in a dry whisper as his fear of his father squeezed his throat.

“What’s that?” Michael said, not understanding.

“I want to run. My coach, Mr. Eames, he says that I’ve got a talent, that I can be special. I—”

“Run? What are you talking about?” Michael looked bewildered. Theo had never mentioned running to him before.

“I run for the school. In competitions. And I win my races too. All of them.”

“I don’t care if you win them or lose them,” said Michael angrily. “Running doesn’t matter. You can run from here to Philadelphia and it won’t make any difference. It won’t put food on the table; it won’t pay the rent.” His voice had risen dangerously as he started to take in the fact of his son’s defiance. “You need to grow up, young man, and get your ideas in order, and stop listening to idiots like this Eames man. If that’s what they’re teaching you in that school, then the sooner you’re out of it the better. Do you hear me?”

Michael was holding Theo’s shoulder again, but the gentle touch of before had been replaced by a fierce grip.

Theo had no strength left to argue, but he stayed mute, refusing to give way until Michael reached down with his other hand and seized his chin, twisting it up and around so that he was looking his son in the eye.

“I said: Do you hear me?” he said, spitting out the words between his teeth.

Theo looked into his father’s staring eyes and quailed. And when his father let go of his head, he did what he had to do and nodded.

Once, but once was enough. “Good,” said Michael, relaxing. “And now we’ll hear no more about it.”

Released from his father’s grip, Theo got up from the desk, accidentally scattering the pile of papers onto the floor. He couldn’t help crying now. Thick, wrenching sobs jolted his body. All he felt was the need to get away into his bedroom and shut the door. Nothing else mattered. But in his blind rush, he almost collided with his mother, who’d heard the raised voices and come into the room to find out what was going on.

“Stop,” she said breathlessly, catching hold of Theo’s arm. “What’s happened? What have you done to him?” she demanded, turning on her husband.

“Nothing,” said Michael defensively.

“It’s not nothing; it’s something,” Elena shot back. “He wouldn’t be crying like this otherwise. What did you say to him?”

“I said he was going to come and work with me in the factory when he turns fourteen in the fall, just like we always agreed. But he said no; he wants to stay at school and run.”

“Run?” It was Elena’s turn now to look bemused.

“Yes, he says he’s got a coach who’s been taking him to competitions and filling his head full of crazy ideas. It’s the first I’ve heard about it, and it looks like the first you have too. But I set him right, which is what matters. Running—I’ve never heard anything more ridiculous!” Michael snorted.

“But I want to run,” said Theo, plucking up courage again, now that his mother was in the room. “And it’s not just that: I want to learn, too, and make something of myself.”

“Make something of yourself! Which you wouldn’t with me, I suppose?” said Michael bitterly. “Having a business, supporting your family—that’s worthless, is it?”

“He’s not saying that,” said Elena. “There’s nothing wrong with having ambition.”

“Maybe I could go to college—Coach Eames says I might get a scholarship,” said Theo, hoping to further enlist his mother’s support.

“Coach Eames this; Coach Eames that! The boy talks about him like he’s some kind of know-it-all Svengali who’s got an answer to everything,” said Michael, starting to lose his temper again. “But he’s just a stupid athletics coach. That’s all. And he’s not your father; I am. You’d do well to remember that, Theo.”

“Don’t shout at him. Can’t you see he’s scared?” said Elena, angry now too. “Theo, go to your room. We can talk about this some other time when everyone’s calmed down.”

Theo didn’t have to be told twice. Released from his mother’s hold, he ran into his room and slammed the door before collapsing on the bed. He could hear the sound of raised voices outside, but he didn’t want to hear what they were saying and pulled the pillow over his head, covering his ears. He felt as if he’d ventured all he had and lost, and now he had nothing left except despair.