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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780446525367 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grand Central Publishing |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2000 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Kevin Sebastian Doyle searched for something to admire in 840 Fifth Avenue, but could only see a musty stack of limestone and money.
At the corner of Fifth Avenue and 65th Street, he stood across the street from the apartment building in the cold, exhaling vapor through his nostrils as he squinted to confirm the number on the gray awning: 840. The building had no invented name like the Beresford or the Dakota. Kevin figured it didn't need one. In this building, the names lived inside— families like Vanderbilt, Lord, and Morgan.
The face of 840 Fifth surprised him. Its location oozed wealth the way the cheap old building he grew up in leaked asbestos. But he'd expected a shimmering tower to fortress these fifteen-room apartments overlooking Central Park. Instead, under the gloomy December sky, 840 Fifth Avenue squatted on the corner of 65th and Fifth like a sullen dowager with dirty skirts.
Kevin's father, a career doorman at another prewar building on Fifth Avenue, had told him that Old Money let the outside of their buildings grow seedy to hide their grand lives from the grumbling peasants. An "eccentricity," he called it.
Kevin's father knew little secrets about Old Money. Over the years, he also tried to identify with it in awkward ways. One day he brought home a moldy 1930s edition of The Emily Post Guide to Etiquette and asked his family to study it. Kevin had opened the Emily Post book and, deadpan, read a line out loud, "Even a tiny home with only one or two servants ..."
His mom had snorted and rolled her eyes at his father's sad efforts toknow his employers, and Kevin felt reality rip through his chest thinking about her.
She had died suddenly just eighteen days ago.
For years he had struggled to make a living as an artist. Now he longed to work on the piece he had dedicated to his mom. Instead, since she was the only family member who had encouraged him, slipping him what little spare cash his conscience let him take, he would be going to work as a doorman.
He gripped the heavy stack of blue-plastic-wrapped uniforms over his shoulder, slippery as a stack of weasels, and crossed the street. The two uniformed doormen standing just inside the black wrought iron and glass double doors of 840 Fifth came to attention as they saw him approach.
One of the doormen poked his head out of the heavy door and blocked the entry.
"Can I help you?"
The large-framed black man with cropped gray hair was in his fifties. His watery eyes appraised Kevin, who probably looked suspicious in his black leather jacket, torn jeans, and scruffed-up Doc Martens.
"I'm Kevin Doyle. Starting the job today." He spoke more slowly than usual, working hard to take the punch out of his voice.
"Take the side alley and come around back to the service door. I'll go meet you."
Inside the building's staff room, the doorman broke into a friendlier grin and offered his white-gloved hand for Kevin to shake, a big man's easy grip.
"Andrew Stiles, fifteen years at this building. I know your dad and your Uncle Eddie. Eddie got you the job, I guess." The older man's lined face softened as he looked closely at Kevin and picked up on his rawness. "Sorry to hear about your mom."
"Thanks." The cork he'd stuffed into his feelings was working loose, but he shoved it back.
He watched Andrew take his doorman cap off and absently wipe his forehead. Under the hat, Andrew Stiles wore a little black skullcap that said, "I love Jesus," with a red heart for the "love" part.
Kevin decided that Andrew wasn't a religious nut, because his eyes seemed gentle, not zealous. But they weren't dulled, either, more like his edge had been sanded off from years of "Very good, sirs." Andrew put his cap back on like a man with a sense of place. The whole building could collapse around him, but Andrew Stiles would dust off his epaulets and man the door.
"You'll find a locker over there with your name on it," Andrew told him. "Suit up and come out to the lobby when you're ready."
So Kevin stood in the empty staff room, painted the same garish yellow as the light in a subway station. Burnt coffee burbled from a stained Mr. Coffee machine, and an ancient floor heater hissed in the corner. Under the secret treasures of this building, Kevin marveled, the staff room could be a museum exhibit of the other New York City, the one where he grew up. He looked at the cracked Formica table and could see his mother in a housedress laying out dinner for his family.
He found the hulking metal time clock bulging out of the wall. On the steel time card organizer beside it, he located the tip of a card sticking up with his name on it. He clocked in at 11:56.
The heavy ker-chunk of the hammer jolted him violently like an electrical shock. By reflex, he hit the time clock back, a good slam that stung his hand. Kevin squeezed his eyes shut. Eighteen days after his mother died, he still couldn't let his anger go. His shoulder ached from carrying the plastic-bagged uniforms twenty blocks. To make it through this day, he would need to bite the bullet until his teeth turned to chalk.
One of the banged-up lockers had his name written on a strip of masking tape across the door: "Doyle, Kevin."
He removed the blue bag from one of the winter uniforms and stripped down to his shorts. He unfolded a shirt and slipped his arm through one heavily starched sleeve that felt like sandpaper. Next came the gray wool pants. He knotted the plain black tie, slipped on the scratchy dress-gray jacket. Then he tugged on his snug white gloves, one finger at a time. Finally, he took the officer-style cap with the black patent leather brim and wiped a fingerprint off the shiny surface.
Kevin studied himself in the cheap plastic mirror on the wall next to the lockers. His tight frame filled out the uniform when he pulled his shoulders back, although he wouldn't pop any buttons puffing his chest out. He worked out at home with a cheap set of dumbbells, since he couldn't afford to join a gym.
Kevin put his hat on, angled it to the left, slightly low. Lines had started to creep into his forehead over the last two weeks. Getting middle-aged at twenty-five.
Then he took the chrome whistle on a black lanyard that he would use for calling cabs and slipped it around his neck. He forced a big smile and talked to the mirror, pointing his white-gloved finger.
"Doyle comma Kevin," he snarled. "Don't fuck with my whistle." But under the buzzing fluorescent overhead lights that washed the room with a factory-floor tint, he looked more like a Salvation Army officer with a bad attitude than a guardian.
He definitely needed to push Mr. Leave Me Alone way back on the shelf and practice Mr. Friendly and Helpful.
He crinkled his eyes, improbably blue. Kevin's mother was Black Irish, with Moorish blood that left Kevin with choirboy eyes and jet-black hair. She raised Kevin and his sisters in a walkup on Tenth Avenue, whacking and cajoling them to avoid temptation and soldier on without complaint. She had also chosen to nurture Kevin's artist's eye. She called it the "spark of the divine."
"Who are you?"
Kevin turned to the fleshy man who had appeared beside him, also in doorman's uniform. He had a broad face with drooping jowls and wide, cunning eyes. His body stood almost double-wide— a human wheelbarrow.
"Kevin Doyle." He put out his hand, a little wary.
"I am Vladimir Kosov," the man took it in both of his. "I go off duty now. I was captain of twelve doormen at the Hotel Leningradska in Moscow. We will talk, you and I." He pointed to the door with his forefinger. "Now, Andrew wastes."
"He what?"
"Andrew wastes for you in the lobby."
"Oh. Thanks."
Kevin closed his locker and watched Vladimir drop heavily onto the bench, grunting like a football player under his gear.
He walked down the hall to the end where the cheesy linoleum floor stopped at a door marked "Lobby."
Showtime.
He expected to see crystal chandeliers and velvet furniture, maybe authentic Old Masters mounted on silk wallpaper. But the lobby loomed dark and austere. The gray fabric that covered the walls looked just like his flannel doorman suit. Muted, recessed lights kept the lobby just bright enough to walk through without bumping into furniture. He could barely make out the fragile, maroon-silk upholstered chairs and a small couch perched around a table that appeared to be teak, polished to shine in the dark. They don't want us to read on the job, Kevin decided.
He found Andrew guarding the door with his hands folded behind his back, standing next to a small shelf jutting out from the wall beside the door. The doorman's shelf, which Andrew kept neat and burnished, had a manila file and folded-up newspaper stacked neatly on top.
"So," Kevin struggled to think of something positive to say, "I guess this is the place to be, 840 Fifth."
"Best building in Manhattan. Small enough you get to know all the owners real quick. A nice class of people."
"Nice class of people" jammed sideways in Kevin's head. The cocoon of wealth made people negligent, even criminal, because they stopped thinking about anyone else.
"Where does your dad work again?" Andrew asked him.
"2000 Fifth, with Uncle Eddie. He got my dad his job fifteen years ago."
Andrew pursed his lips. "So I guess you're following in your dad's footsteps. And your Uncle Eddie's."
"Yeah. The Doyles, we own the door."
"So let's start at the beginning." Andrew shifted to what Kevin guessed was his training voice. "This building's a co-op. You know what cooperative ownership is?"
"I know cooperation's the opposite of what they have in mind. The owners can break the Fair Housing laws, only let in who they want as neighbors."
"Well," Andrew had to agree, "this building got famous by who they wouldn't let in." He stopped to open the door for an older man blessed with a strong chin stuck up at an angle, pink skin, and swept-back silver hair. "Good afternoon, Mr. Blanchard."
"What's the Yale-Harvard score?" the man barked to nobody in particular.
"Yale, fourteen-seven, first half, Mr. Blanchard," Andrew told him. "This is Kevin Doyle, new man on the door."
The man stopped in front of Kevin, tipping slightly to the left. "What was the matter with the old one?"
"I hear he retired, Mr. Blanchard." Kevin braced himself against the whiskey fumes.
"Well, there's always room," Mr. Blanchard said, nodding at him.
"Excuse me?"
"Always room at the bottom, son. Remember that."
Was he supposed to answer? His mother had taught him to be patient with old people because they could be fragile and confused. But Blanchard spun on his heel with surprising agility and wandered off toward the brass elevator doors at the other end of the lobby.
"Hey, Andrew," Kevin said. "Wasn't that game yesterday? Harvard won."
"Yeah, but Mr. Blanchard went to Yale, and he can use a little cheerin' up. His son, Bill, he's gettin' a divorce and he just told the old man he's going to tell the world he's homosexual."
"Blanchard told you that?"
"Hell no. The owners don't tell us shit. Maids, butlers, that's who we hear all the information from." Andrew chortled. "They're happy to tell you anything makes their bosses look like fools."
Andrew removed the fat manila file from the doorman shelf and handed it to Kevin.
"So here's all the building rules. No smoking. No drinking. No fraternizing with the owners."
"Uh-huh," Kevin said, flipping through the stack of papers. One fell open to reveal twenty-five neat rows of blocks with handprinted names and apartment numbers. Small head shots of people cut out of newspapers and magazines were pasted in the boxes.
"That's a visual aid for you." Andrew tapped his finger on his collage. "Job one for a doorman is security. That's what we do, keep the building secure. Anybody you don't know shows up, you got to find out politely who they are. That's why you got to know your owners. We got one hundred and twelve people living in forty apartments. This here gives you all their names and apartment numbers so you can memorize 'em. I put in their kids, dogs, servants, everybody they allow in the apartment. Some photos, too, whatever I could find. Hang on, here comes 11B."
Andrew nodded toward the street. Kevin saw a very old man with a skeletal face and wisps of white hair fluttering in the wind. He held his thin, gnarled hands in front of him like a dinosaur's claws, helped along by a young, heart-faced blonde wearing a shiny black fur coat.
"Got 'em. Count Dracula and Courtney Love," Kevin whispered to Andrew as he swung open the door.
Andrew ignored him. "Good afternoon, Mr. Geddy, Mrs. Geddy. This is Kevin Doyle, new man on the job."
Kevin practiced touching the brim of his hat like Andrew, working to keep his smile hoisted up even though his real emotions were scraping bottom and his jaw ached.
Mr. Geddy nodded his skull and exposed his gums in greeting. The woman flickered an interested glance at her new doorman before she turned her eyes back to her husband. Kevin watched her walk hubby to the elevator, expensive haircut bouncing on her fur collar. He wondered what she allowed her husband to do with his claws for the privilege of living in 11B.
"So what'd you do before this?" Andrew asked him.
"Three years, I worked Bellevue, nights," Kevin said, leaving out his art for the time being. "I was a physical aide, no medical training or anything. Mostly I kept the patients company. Or restrained them."
Andrew seemed interested. "Mental patients?"
"Most of them. Some of them were faking it to stay out of jail. 'Had a delusional belief I was Jesse James, made me rob the convenience store,' that kind of stuff. Thirty-days observation in Bellevue buys them a 'get out of jail free' defense."
"Why'd you leave?"
"I snuck a patient out to see her kids one weekend. The tough part of security at Bellevue was sneaking back in. She got caught, I lost my job. It was just a night job to get by. I was studying—"
They both heard a high-pitched scream from outside.
"Incoming," Andrew said.
They opened both doors for a triple-wide wicker stroller pushed by a stressed-out nanny in a white uniform. Two of the three bundles inside, a baby boy and girl, were asleep, their blond heads slack. The third screamed in a wavy, high-pitched yowl. The parents walked behind them, a fine-featured couple in their thirties, their faces screwed up painfully at the sound.
Kevin bent down and put his face in front of the shrieking baby.
"Hey, gorgeous," he said, wiggling his ears. Gotcha. The little girl stopped bawling in mid-cry, her mouth hanging open in the goofy, wondrous way of all kids, even rich ones.
Kevin used his taxi whistle to chirp for her. She smiled like a burst of sun.
"Mr. and Mrs. Eames, this is Kevin Doyle," Andrew said.
The father smiled at Kevin and pressed a five-dollar bill into his hand.
He waved it away. "That's okay," Kevin told him brusquely. These people probably saw doormen as mutants bred to push doors and perform courtesies, if you kept feeding them treats of currency.
While the Eames family arranged itself in the elevator, Kevin peered at the photos in Andrew's file, memorizing the children's names. Even in the semidarkness, Kevin felt a shadow falling over his shoulders and the little hairs stirred on the back of his neck.
"Hey, Dumbo ...ping!"
The familiar voice growled behind him as he felt a sharp burning in both ears. He turned around to see his Uncle Eddie's round, ruddy face with its heavily ridged forehead set in permanent irritation. His hair was buzz cut with open spaces, like a lawn that needed reseeding. Eddie kept his fingers poised to snap against Kevin's ears again. He wore civilian clothes today, not his doorman uniform. His thick, pub-brawler arms stuck out of rolled-up jacket sleeves with a N.Y. Knicks logo on his pocket.
Kevin knew from experience it would take a moment to hear past the painful ringing. And he'd have to swallow his bile at Eddie. His uncle was the closest thing west of India to a sacred cow, at least to the Doyles. He was the only family member who could provide union jobs, which had kept the other men in the family from decking him for fifteen years.
"You still got big ears, kid." Eddie turned to Andrew. "When he was little, he had ears like Dumbo. I used to sneak up and ping him. We had ourselves a little fun."
"Turned my life around, Uncle Eddie."
"Tell you what, just call me Eddie. We don't want to give hiring relatives a bad name. Did I just see you turn down a tip?"
"I guess."
Eddie shook his head sadly at Andrew. "He's a mutt, but he's my late sister's kid. Kevin, tips are life's blood. Tips are mother's milk. You're a doorman now. You see a resident standing in front of you, that's not a person, okay? That's a bag of groceries."
Eddie handed Kevin a plastic card. "Your union card. Welcome to Local 32A. International Brotherhood of Portal Operators. I'm your delegate now. Your employer is the building manager of this property. But you got a grievance, you come to me."
Eddie handed Kevin a second card.
"This is your Platinum Health Plan card from the union. It gives you the same health care as anybody living in this building. Maybe even better. Choose your own doctor, best hospitals, get your meds, you don't pay squat."
Eddie handed him a piece of paper and a pen. "Sign there, says you got your health plan. I got you a sweet deal, kid. Nobody gets a doorman job two weeks before Christmas."
"Yeah," Andrew agreed. "Just standing there, you get maybe two thousand for Christmas. If you always grab their bags before they ask, always know the right time, weather, you get maybe four, five thousand bucks."
"You owe me, kid," Eddie said. "I'll be around. Take care, Andrew."
Eddie lumbered out the front door, a potbellied fireplug in a team jacket, disappearing just as a gray limousine pulled directly in front of the awning.
"Heads up." Andrew nudged Kevin. "Here comes Chester Lord. He's chairman of the co-op board for the building, makes the rules around here."
Kevin watched a clean-featured man in his early fifties climb out of the back seat of a limo that looked smaller than life, like it was built in the Black Forest by elves. Chester Lord glided into the building. His medium frame, in a striped tie and blue blazer, could have lost ten pounds. Though his sandy hair had thinned a lot, he combed it straight back with no effort to hide the bald spots. A WASP thing, Kevin realized. They never combed their last few strands of hair all the way over their heads or wore hairpieces. A guy like Chester Lord let his dome get shiny and didn't care what anybody thought.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Lord," Andrew said.
"Hello, Andrew." The crisp voice was soft, hard to hear. He arched one eyebrow at Kevin. "Are you the new doorman?"
"Kevin Doyle."
The man squeezed his hand and let it go. In the awkward pause, Kevin sensed a shyness.
"Well, good luck to you."
"Thanks."
Andrew waited until Chester Lord was whooshed up in the elevator. "Something you got to know about the Lords."
He took the folded copy of the day's New York Daily Globe off the shelf and handed it to him. Kevin peered at the newspaper, opened to the fifth page, barely able to decipher the print in the lobby's gloom. He held it close to the weak light to get a better look.
There was a column titled Debwatch. The script typeface looked like a wedding invitation. It was written by somebody named Philip Grace. Under a bold black headline, "Corny's Social Swim," Kevin studied a grainy picture taken at night. A girl of maybe twenty in a soaking-wet dress stood in the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. The column called her a "wilding deb" and "party girl." The girl seemed wired enough. Still, her eyes didn't look to Kevin like she was having any party.
She looked pretty, like his younger sister, Marne, but with finer features. Deb features. Delicate even in the muddy pixels of the newspaper photo. His sister Marne was the anti-deb. A firefighter, she'd had to fight the guys in her Brooklyn squadron for acceptance. She became one of the guys when another firefighter tried to stick his hand down her shirt, and instead of getting huffy like they would have expected and filing a sexual harassment claim, she broke his fingers.
But this girl in the photograph never had to fight for anything in her life. She just slid down a lucky birth canal and popped out an heiress. He tried to wrap his mind around what it would be like to go through life without a financial worry.
"The girl who'll always have everything." Kevin shook his head. "Look what she does with it."
"Maybe." Andrew's forehead twitched. "Son, it's going to be hard on you here if you don't cut the residents a little slack. They got problems, too."
"Sure." Problems like having the chauffeur blow-dry you after a cold swim in front of the Plaza Hotel.
"Anyhow, this young woman is Chester Lord's daughter. Chester, he's a pleasant man, usually. But young Cornelia has got some impulse-control issues. You know what I'm saying?"
"No problem."
"The other thing," Andrew went on, pointing to Philip Grace's byline. "This here's a sneaky reporter. He'll try to get you to tell him when Cornelia might be on her way in or out. He makes a living taking nasty photos. Sticks to this building like a roach on cheesecake, figures Cornelia's always good for some kind of show. He'll offer you money. You take it and anybody finds out, it'll get you fired like you been vaporized. Get me in trouble, too, not training you right."
Kevin stared at the girl in the picture. In his neighborhood, nobody would even notice that kind of behavior. Unless maybe she puked on your new shoes. But the tawdry photo of the debutante both irritated and fascinated him.
His dad would call it another eccentricity, winding up drunk in a public fountain and not even enjoying it. Maybe it was a bored-party-girl thing. Or maybe she was just crazy as a bedbug, and everybody covered up for her.
Either way, he wondered what his mother would think of him now, having to tip his hat to a girl like that, staggering by him giggling, smelling of stale champagne.
Tomorrow, no matter how long he worked, he would need to check on the neon saint he'd dedicated to his mother.
What People are Saying About This
Les Standiford, author of Black Mountain
Once upon a time, I believed that stories had the power to make magic, make anything happen, make the world seem new all over again. And then I read Crazy For Cornelia and remembered that it wasn't a dream at all, that every wonderful bit of it is true.
Crazy For Cornelia is a romantic, witty, fast-paced romp with a serious side: embedded in the plot's cliffhangers and reversals of fortune are deft, seemingly off-the-cuff observations about class, family, art, and sanity. Chris Gilson has created a hero, heroine, and villain worth their salt in a lovely, funny fairy tale with a light but always wise and compassionate heart. (Kate Christensen, author of In the Drink)