IN NEW YORK CITY, the twenty-fifth of April 1988 was a warm and blue day, and daylight savings time held the sun in the sky after dinner and all the way from the restaurant to Lincoln Center, where we were supposed to be at eight o’clock. The way from the restaurant to Lincoln Center was sidewalks, nearly all of them with curbs and no curb cuts, and streets with traffic; and we were with my friend David Novak, and my friend and agent, Philip Spitzer, pushing my wheelchair and pulling it up curbs and easing it down them while I watched the grills and windshields of cars. I call David the Skipper because he was a Marine lieutenant then captain in Vietnam and led troops in combat, so I defer to his rank, although I was a peacetime captain while he was still a civilian. Philip is the brother I never had by blood.
Philip of course lives in New York. I happily do not. Neither does the Skipper. He lives here in Massachusetts, and he and his wife drove to New York that day, a Monday, and my daughter Suzanne and son Andre and friends and I came in two more cars, because Andre and I were reading that night at Lincoln Center with Mary Morris and Diana Davenport. In Massachusetts we had very little sun and warmth during the spring, and that afternoon, somewhere in Connecticut, we drove into sunlight, and soon the trees along the road were green with leaves. We had not seen those either at home, only the promise of buds.
At close to eight o’clock the sky was still blue and the Skipper pushed me across the final street, then turned my chair and leaned it backward and pulled it up steps to the Plaza outside the Center. We began crossing the greyish white concrete floor and, as Philip spoke and pointed up, I looked at the tall buildings flanking the Plaza, angles of grey-white, of city color, against the sky, deepening now, but not much, still the bright blue of spring after such a long winter of short days, lived in bed, in the wheelchair, in physical therapy, in the courthouse losing my wife and two little girls. Philip told us of a Frenchman last year tightrope walking across the space between these buildings, without a net.
Then I looked at the people walking on the Plaza. My only good memories of New York are watching people walk on the streets, and watching people in bars and restaurants, and some meals or drinks with friends, and being with Philip. But one summer I spent five days with him and for the first time truly saw the homeless day after day and night after night, and from then on, whenever I went there, I knew the New York I was in, the penthouses and apartments and cabs and restaurants, were not New York, anymore than the Czar’s Russia was the Russia of Chekhov’s freed serfs, with their hopes destroyed long before they were born. Still on that spring Monday I loved watching the faces on the Plaza.
Like Boston, New York has beautiful women to look at, though in New York the women, in general, are made up more harshly, and they dress more self-consciously; there is something insular about their cosmetics and clothing, as if they have come to believe that sitting at a mirror with brushes and tubes and vials, and putting on a dress of a certain cut and color starts them on the long march to spiritual fulfillment with a second wind. And in New York the women walk as though in the rain; in Boston many women stroll. But then most New Yorkers walk like people in rain, leaving the stroll to police officers, hookers, beggars and wandering homeless, and teenagers who are yet unharried by whatever preoccupations preoccupy so many from their driving preoccupation with loneliness and death.
Women were on the Plaza, their pace slower as they neared the building, and looking to my right I saw a lovely one. She could have been thirty, or five years on either side of it. She wore a dark brown miniskirt, or perhaps it was black; I saw it and her strong legs in net stockings for only a moment, because they were in my natural field of vision from my chair. But a woman’s face is what I love. She was in profile and had soft thick brown hair swaying at her shoulders as she strode with purpose but not hurry, only grace. She was about forty feet away, enough distance so that, when I looked up, I saw her face against the sky.
“Skipper,” I said. “Accidently push me into her.”
The forward motion of her legs and arms did not pause, but she immediately turned to me and, as immediately, her lips spread in a smile, and her face softened with it, and her eyes did, all at once from a sudden release in her heart that was soft too in her voice: “I heard that.”
She veered toward me, smiling still, with brightened eyes.
“It was a compliment,” I said.
The Skipper was pushing my chair, Philip was beside me, and she was coming closer. Then she said: “I know.”
She angled back to her first path, as though it were painted there for her to follow, and Philip said: “That never happens in New York.”
“It’s the wheelchair,” I said. “I’m harmless.”
But I knew that was not true. There was no time to explain it then, and anyway I wanted to hold her gift for a while before giving it away with words.
Living in the world as a cripple allows you to see more clearly the crippled hearts of some people whose bodies are whole and sound. All of us, from time to time, suffer this crippling. Some suffer it daily and nightly; and while most of us, nearly all of us, have compassion and love in our hearts, we cannot or will not see these barely visible wounds of other human beings, and so cannot or will not pick up the telephone or travel to someone’s home or write a note or make some other seemingly trifling gesture to give to someone what only we, and God, can give: an hour’s respite, or a day’s, or a night’s; and sometimes more than respite: sometimes joy.
Yet in a city whose very sidewalks show the failure of love, the failure to make agape a bureaucracy, a young woman turned to me with instinctive anger or pride, and seeing me in a wheelchair she at once felt not pity but lighthearted compassion. For seeing one of her kind wounded, she lay down the shield and sword she had learned to carry (I dried my tears/ And armed my fears/ With ten thousand/ shields and spears, William Blake wrote), and with the light of the sun between us, ten or fifteen feet between us, her face and voice embraced me.
For there is a universality to a wounded person: again and again, for nearly two years, my body has drawn sudden tenderness from men and women I have seen for only those moments in their lives when they helped me with their hands or their whole bodies or only their eyes and lips and tongues. They see, in their short time with me, a man injured, as they could be; a man always needing the care of others, as they could too. Only the children stare with frightened curiosity, as they do at funeral processions and the spoken news of death, for they know in their hearts that they too will die, and they believe they will grow up and marry and have children, but they cannot yet believe they will die.
But I am a particular kind of cripple. In New York I was not sitting on a sidewalk, my back against a wall, and decades of misfortune and suffering in my heart. I was not wearing dirty clothes on an unwashed body. Philip and the Skipper wore suits and ties. I rode in a nine-hundred-dollar wheelchair, and rolled across the Plaza at Lincoln Center. Yet I do not ask that woman, on seeing my body, to be struck there in the sunlight, to stand absolutely still and silent and hear like rushing tide the voices of all who suffer in body and in spirit and in both, then to turn before my dazzled eyes and go back to her home and begin next morning to live as Mother Teresa, as Dorothy Day. No: she is one of us, and what she said and did on that April evening was, like the warm sunlit sky, enough: for me, for the end of winter, for the infinite possibilities of the human heart.
1988