High Read online

  Chapter Two

  The shadow of the building stretched over 8th Avenue to the west of the island, and further past Columbus and Amsterdam, the thin finger of lingering obscurity reaching out across the Hudson River and the higher seventies piers to the suburbs beyond, as the sun rose slowly in the east. For twenty years now it had been the predominant feature on the New York skyline: it had become the symbol of the city, perhaps even of the American Dream - a functional building, not designed like its Chrysler rival for the sake of superficial appearance, the architect’s brief for the Empire State Building was entrepreneurial: the maximum amount of rentable office space in the minimum square footage of realty ground space. Ornamentation on the building had been kept to a relative minimum; what was important was profitability, not aesthetic sensitivity. That is not to say that the new building was a monstrosity, far from it, perhaps only history would be able to truly judge both its artistic and economic merits. Garnet George Wendelson was not greatly interested in either arts or economics, he just liked the view from the top floor terrace. Every weekday morning - except Fridays - he would instruct his helper to wheel him the short distance along the wide tree-lined boulevard of Park Avenue to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and the corner of 50th Street, and from there he would turn right, crossing Madison, before turning left beside St Patrick’s Cathedral onto Fifth Avenue, the pure white structure like a constant moral reprimand to its grosser capitalist-orientated neighbours. Sometimes he would request a halt beneath the striped awnings of Saks so that he could scrutinise the latest window displays; more often than not though, he would be swiftly whisked, uninterrupted, past the grand old department store, onward, past the monumental, towering Rockefeller Center, pointedly never giving that structure the merest glance - there had been some bad blood between his father and John D. in the distant past, the details of which were not known to Garnet but which he felt honour bound to continue to recognise in his own obscure fashion: in the same way that oil and water do not mix, neither, apparently, do oil and molasses. From there it was a relatively short journey along Fifth Avenue, past the offices of The New Yorker at the junction of W. 42nd Street and the two majestic lion statues which guard the entrance to the New York Public Library to the building which was the object of his quest, and which filled the whole city block between 34th and 33rd Street, generally entering the portal of the towering monolith at precisely ten o’clock. This rigid adherence to routine was not due to any great predilection for punctuality on Garnet’s own part - to him it mattered not a jot whether he took in the New York high airs at daybreak, or at sunset, or at any time in between - but it was a successful way of measuring the efficiency of his particular carer par jour: to manage to wake, clothe, perform a toilet upon, and prepare a breakfast for the irascible invalid and still have him making an appointment at a set time - and one so early on in the course of the day at that - was a skill consistently achievable by only a few very talented - and very patient - individuals.

  The view from the top of the building was awesome, though. There was no doubting that. On top of the world - it was the city-dweller’s equivalent of looking down from a high mountain. The Empire State Building: it was the people’s Everest. For Garnet, his daily visit to the urban summit was the equivalent of a regular trip to a Swiss sanatorium; like the young, impressionable Hans Castorp visiting his own Magic Mountain, so were the thoughts and feelings of the young Garnet shaped by the quiet, introspective times he spent looking down upon the streets of his own home city. It is not a luxury of the Gods alone to be able to reflect upon high.

  Of the most popular vistas, it was perhaps the view to the northeast and the Chrysler Building which rejoiced in the most plaudits; people were quick to praise its decor of outlandish gargoyles, jutting out like oversized car hood ornaments, and its spectacular spire of silver sunbursts and triangular windows. Garnet, though, preferred the view to the south: not the far distance with the many blue glimpses of the Hudson River, the Statue of Liberty standing alone in the harbour, and the Brooklyn Bridge, but the view almost directly below, where the Flatiron Building stands as a reminder to the era when the desire to dominate the skies all began. In its day, it would have overshadowed all the other buildings around it, its twenty storeys making it the tallest construction in Manhattan in 1902, now though, it was a curiosity, almost a joke; the shorter brother that its towering neighbours could look down upon patronisingly. Garnet, though, felt a sense of empathy with the Flatiron’s halcyon days: the building, like his own family, gave an impression of having a far more vaunted past than any glorious future.

  Power. It was a sensation that had sat easily with the Wendelsons for generations: in work, in the community, in society. For the youngest member of the clan, though, the only time that Garnet came close to genuinely experiencing what it must feel like to exercise total power was when he felt the breeze on his face at the summit of the tallest structure made by man, and gazed out above all the millions of little lives being enacted below him. But it was not just power that he felt, there was something else. Freedom. Despite his limited interaction with the family business, there could be no doubt that he could still exert power there if he so chose, it would be power without respect, but it would be power nevertheless. His wealth bought him power too, the kind of power that comes with being able to control others’ lives, even to the point of whether they are able to put food in their mouths the next day, but that was power without fun: in the same way that there is no real enjoyment in slowly manipulating the pawns in a game of chess, the excitement coming from the bold, large moves and sweeping stratagems, a knight diagonally traversing the length of the board or an avenue opening up in front of a rook to allow it free reign, so it was with people. His relationship with his carer - Garnet preferred that word to nursemaid, besides which many of his attendants had been male - was a case in point. Although Garnet exercised financial control over whichever individual currently held the uninvidious position, and felt that as part of the agreement between employer and employee part of what he was paying for was the luxury to indulge himself in a degree of ‘difficult behaviour’ at the expense of either his carer’s physical or mental well-being, it was a habitual activity, a minor cruelty which actually gave him no pleasure. Power and liberty. That was it. That was what his interludes looking down upon the world offered him. A mouth-watering combination. Influence without responsibility. Perfection for a lazy dictator. It might be a daydream - after all here, of all places, was one of the few situations where he actually had no more power than any of his fellow gawpers: his money could not buy him a better vantage point; could not buy him exclusivity - but a daydream was preferential to his usual waking nightmares and dark, melancholic thoughts. Time for introspection offers many paths, the lucky few may find genuine enlightenment, but the majority only discover a maze of ill-lit tunnels and dead-ends; a labyrinthine depression from which only those with the foresight of Theseus can hope to escape.

  Some people dream about flying, not in aeroplanes or by using other artificial means of propulsion, but totally free and unfettered, like a bird. Arms, presumably, stretched wide, soaring upwards, spiralling ever higher, looking down upon an ever increasingly diminishing land. Experts - so-called - would say that such dreams revealed a suppressed desire to be free: from work, perhaps from a bad relationship, from responsibility. Garnet had never had such a dream. True, he wanted to be free, not just from his wheelchair, but from his upbringing and from the weight of expectation that accompanied it, but, despite certain pretensions in that direction, he was largely an unimaginative man and not one subject to idle unconscious thoughts, more generally requiring a physical actuality to stimulate his mental processes. He liked symbols. The Statue of Liberty was a perfect example. The monumental figure standing at the entrance of New York Harbour depicts Liberty freeing herself of her shackles and holding aloft a flaming beacon to illuminate the world. It was a clear, unequivocal symbol, requi
ring very little brain power to translate the message of the straightforward lines of white stone to the mental idea of the American Dream.

  On top of the world. It was a good feeling.

  ••••••••••

  Previously a sound sleeper, since his accident Garnet had found the realm of Somnus a difficult territory into which to gain access: nights, which should have provided him with a brief escape from his disability, instead only served to mock him by their protracted length; his legs which were now useless for supporting his weight - the muscles wasted and inactive - nevertheless were alive with shooting pains, from which only the oblivion of slumber could provide even the most temporary respite. His personal physician pronounced this a positive sign - “where there is feeling there is hope - everything is achievable” - meanwhile, across town, the stenographer at the New York Times was preparing himself to take down the particulars for the latest Position Vacant advertisement from the Wendelson account.

  It was halfway through one typically troubled summer night that Garnet awoke from a short sleep, his hair wet and matted, the pillow dark from the sweat from his forehead, the bed clothes flung back as though a powerful storm had rushed through his chamber, his mind still reeling from the intensity of his dream, the substance of which he was fleetingly able to retain - and recount - before the ephemeral thoughts were lost to him. Garnet’s night-time nursemaid at that time - Miss Heather Sinclair - recalls the incident in her 1980 self-published autobiography Bedpans Over Broadway.  She had only been a young woman at the time, just a year or two junior to the invalid himself, and Garnet, despite his habitual cantankerousness, must have felt some point of connection between himself and his young nurse, because if her account is to be believed, he was unusually - almost uniquely - loquacious.  The incident, recalled in her own words - and style, and with her own unsubstantiated allusions - is reproduced in its entirety below.

  I heard a cry from the young gentleman’s bedroom, nothing unusual this, I was generally called upon to look in on him several times each night, either to administer his tablets, or sometimes to make sure that his pillows were comfortable or his sheets still intact.  Sometimes I think he was just lonely, waking up scared and alone, and unable to attend to himself; sometimes it made me just want to cry when I think of the despair that he suffered; if it would not have been considered unprofessional I often imagined taking him in my arms and embracing him, but he was not someone who welcomed physical contact or the intimacy of a shared confidence.  The eternal orphan, I wonder if he ever knew what it was to be loved, or to love.  On this particular occasion, I discovered Mr. Wendelson in a state of great excitement: immediately, he called for a pen and some paper so that he could write down the details of a dream that he had just experienced, something that had affected him very greatly indeed, judging by the uncharacteristically wild expression upon his face, and the feverish anxiety with which he conveyed his request.  I tried to feel his brow and take his temperature assuming that he was in the grip of some delusionary fever, but he pushed my hand away and bade me sit next to him and listen, while he tried to make sense of his own nocturnal vision: I think that he was conscious even then what an important moment this was for him and that unless he assembled his dreams into rational thought there and then, the one chance he had to give his life some meaning might be lost forever to a world of half-remembered ideas and ambitions.  Having failed to provide the necessary writing implements for his purposes as swiftly as his impatient condition demanded, instead I was required to be an audience for his unfolding narrative; making me a conduit between his dreamlike stream of consciousness outpouring and the hard reality of fact and certainty; a reservoir from which he would later draw clarification as to small details of his dream that had since slipped his own mind.  I feel greatly honoured that perhaps in some small way I may have contributed to Mr. Wendelson’s current epic undertaking.  Not wishing to betray a confidence by relaying a verbatim account of that evening’s conversation, nor wishing to further bore an already patient reader with a full report of a monologue which lasted the best part of an hour in the telling, the substance of his words were that he had seen himself walking in the skies, free and unfettered like a simple bird; not flying, not floating, not even wheeling himself in his chair, but walking, in the clouds, as effortlessly as you or I might walk along the road to our corner shop. I asked him how this was possible, but he halted my words with an upturned palm: he had the answer, and he was about to tell me.  He would build a structure, a tall structure; the tallest structure: the pathway to his own personal heaven would not be achieved through good deeds and saintly acts, but by pure material construction: I recall his very words were “by throwing money at the problem”.  He went on to repeat, what he described at the time were the words of advice he had received from his doctor, although I felt, even then, that he had twisted that poor medic’s words around, or if not his actual words certainly that respected man's sentiments: “Everything is achievable”.

  History could be forgiven for thinking that Garnet did not give his dream a second thought for the next two decades, certainly there were no outward indications to reveal that he still fostered ambitions to create the world’s tallest building, either by public word or action from the man himself, or by the physical presence of any plans or foundations that might have suggested the initial stages of a colossal new structure.  The actuality couldn’t be further from the truth, not a day had passed by without Garnet having given his project some considerable period of thought.  Twenty years is a long time in anyone’s life: for a young man - with a massive, largely unenjoyable fortune - confined to a wheelchair, it is an eternity. Ariel, trapped in a tree by Sycorax’s magic, was only a prisoner for twelve years before Prospero released the spirit: for Garnet there was no such simple hope for an end to his own confinement. Despite his withered limbs, Garnet’s prison was not so much his physical injuries but the mental inhibitions which prevented him from fully expressing himself in his words or deeds. Garnet wore social constraint like a straightjacket; felt the weight of his family history like Atlas’s burden on his back. The imagined words of criticism from his dead father rang ever loud in his ears. He was a failure - not in terms of the business, which still continued to flourish, not even in a social sense, where the Wendelson name still managed to occupy a considerable column-width in every society magazine and newspaper gossip column, but in his father’s eyes he had failed simply as a man, as someone that his father would have been able to respect and feel proud of, as someone that he would have taken to the ball game, shared a joke with, drunk a beer with. Every day Garnet met the gaze of the portrait above the fireplace and knew what it was to feel despised from beyond the grave. And every day Garnet’s resolve grew stronger: one day, he would show him.