The Doorman’s Repose

THEO WAS removing the few drooping petals from an otherwise glowing Noble Redeemer when from somewhere behind his left ear a voice boomed, “Ha!”

Theo began picking up the petals, which had scattered across the floor when he’d leaped two feet off the ground. He said, “Hi, Fred,” and turned to see a smiling man standing patiently behind him.

Fred had lived at 777 Garden Avenue since, well, forever, as far as Theo was concerned—and as far as most of the other residents of the building were concerned, too. Looking at him, you might guess that he was thirty-five years old and had lived a very hard life or, alternatively, that he was sixty-five years old and had lived a very easy life. His skin was papery but his muscles were toned. His eyes were clear but had a faraway look. Certainly, he had great bunches of pencil-gray hair sprouting from the top of his head, the back of his neck, his ears, his chin, his nose, and above the top button of the plaid shirts he liked to wear. He peered at you through thick black-frame glasses. It was, however, definitely known that he had been in some kind of war; which war was not known. Whatever war it was, it was no doubt a loud one, as Fred began most conversations with a kind of verbal explosion. Usually it was his unmistakable “Ha!”—the hand grenade of his rhetorical arsenal.

“Ha!” said Fred again. “The gravity, Theo, the gravity! It’s too strong today.”

Fred moved slowly through the door held open for him by Mr. Bunchley. Theo, following, smiled at the wink Mr. Bunchley gave him.

On the sidewalk, Fred stopped, tilted his head well back, and with his hands on his hips, breathed in deeply.

“That’s better,” he said. “The air’s good today. Very good. Not too sweet and not too salty. Right amount of minerals too, and I put the AQI, that’s the Air Quality Index, in case you’re asking, at forty-two. But that could change. There’s a lot of activity there, a lot of activity. We’ll have to watch that. But it’s the gravity that really needs attending to. First and foremost! We’ve got to bring it down. Are you coming with me on my rounds?”

“I can’t today, Fred,” said Theo. “I’ve promised Mr. Bunchley to help him with some replanting later on.”

“Ho! Ho! Replanting! Digging! Moving! Moving plants! Displacing dirt! Digging dirt! Moving dirt! Moving dug dirt! Dirty dogs. Dirty hands! Hands across the sea! Ho! Ho!” Fred, continuing loudly in this way, turned and moved slowly down Garden Avenue. Theo watched him walk to the end of the block, where, stopping at the corner, he peered into the large trash can. Fred reached deep inside and pulled out a plastic container, which he opened and looked into carefully.

Back at the corner, Fred examined the contents of the plastic container. By his estimate, it held three ounces of pasta salad, two ounces of garden salad, an ounce or so of salad dressing, and at least two ounces of a half-eaten hard roll— about half a pound of food. Removing just the hard roll, Fred closed the container and returned it to the trash. He placed the hard roll in a plastic painter’s bucket, which was slung over his shoulder with a long leather strap.

It was Fred’s habit, on three afternoons out of seven, to sample the city’s trash cans, collecting from them bread, buns, pastries—anything made from grain. Up and down Garden Avenue he went, or Lexington, or even Park, starting from our building at Seventy-seventh Street, traveling as far uptown as Ninety-sixth, and as far down as Forty-second Street. Rain did not deter Fred. Nor did cold. On the normally hot days of summer Fred went shirtless. On the especially hot days Fred tied knots in the corners of his handkerchief, filled the resulting vessel with water from any ornamental fountain, and slapped it on his head.

Our city accepts most spectacles on its streets with equanimity, that is, without much comment. But Fred stood out.

Expensively dressed women turned their noses away from him as he passed. Children on scooters stopped briefly to watch him at his work and then rolled on. The doormen of the avenue, who knew Fred well, smirked or shouted a mocking “Hey, Fred. How’s the gravity?”

On this particular day, a particularly hot one, Fred returned with only a half-full bucket of gatherings. Mr. Bunchley handed a glass of water to him.

“The gravity. The gravity,” Fred said weakly. “I’ve got to lie down now, but then I’ll deal with it first thing. Tell Theo that if he wants to come along and help, I’ll be going out again after I’ve had my Postum at four.”

“It is an outrage and a disgrace, and what’s even worse,” said Mrs. MacDougal, “I fear that it could be damaging to the value of our property here at 777.”

Mrs. MacDougal stood at the building manager’s desk. The building manager stared at the single large golden button on Mrs. MacDougal’s blouse, which, like a UFO in a solar storm, heaved and bucked with every breath and every word that Mrs. MacDougal either drew in or spat out. He rubbed the top of his forehead with the first and second fingers of his right hand. With a sigh, he let his eyes travel up Mrs. MacDougal’s blousy form in a determined attempt to meet her gaze. But this gaze was beamed not at the building manager but along Mrs. MacDougal’s up-turned nose, into some vague middle distance.

She continued, “I know that Fred Adams has been a resident here for many years—”

“Since long before you arrived,” said the building manager almost to himself.

“—nevertheless, this is no reason to allow him to tarnish the reputation of this building. We must put a stop to it.”

“Why, don’t be such an obtuse little man! You know that to which I refer. Fred’s walking up and down Garden Avenue and all over our valuable neighborhood collecting food out of trash cans. Trash cans! Has the man no shame?” At this she snapped her head so forcefully in order to look hard at the

Fred and the Pigeons 17 building manager that the half-moon glasses she sometimes wore on a chain leapt off her nose and then swung helplessly, like a hanged man, on her chest.

“And he sometimes is to be seen in our very lobby without a shirt! Disgusting!”

“Look, Mrs. MacDougal, I don’t like him any more than you do. He gives me a pain. Every time he opens his mouth I want to stick a sock in it. I got enough to worry about without him and his gravity. Sheesh! Have a seat, Mrs. MacD.”

“Listen. If I could get rid of him, I would. Like a shot. But he hasn’t done anything wrong. Technically-like. He hasn’t committed any crimes! If only he’d rob a store or something, then we’d have him!”

“He has already committed enough crimes against good taste to be convicted by any sane body of persons. He need commit nothing more. Can’t you simply make it plain to him that this is not a proper residence for him?”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that.” The building manager removed his finger from inside his ear and then scratched at the nape of his neck. “But maybe I could slow it down a little.”

Mrs. MacDougal pulled her lips together like she was sucking a tiny straw, nodded, and left.

“The gravity’s worse! I can feel it. It’s getting me down. Don’t you feel it?”

“I’ve got to get to work! Can’t sit around all day. Where are my pants?”

“On the bed, Fred! Standing on my head, instead! Ha! I stuck a spoon into Ted, he bled, saw red, I fled! Ha! Ha! Ha!” Fred hopped on one leg as he tried to insert the other into a terribly stained pair of khaki shorts.

He then moved toward the back corner of his room, shifting stacks of books and bric-a-brac as he went, bric-a-brac that seemed almost to lean in his direction, as if begging for attention.

At the back, Fred lifted a three-string guitar from the lid of a barrel and then removed the lid. Taking a ladle from a nail on the wall, he dipped it into the barrel and pulled out a large dollop of brown lumpy pudding.

“The bread mash!” he said. Taking his bucket from another nail, he plopped in the mash. He added a couple more spoonfuls.

Fred replaced the lid and guitar. Choosing a large spoon from a dusty metal bracket and slipping it into his breast pocket, he said, “Let’s go.”

“Precisely. Exactly. You have put your finger on it.” Fred began to walk along the avenue. “Bingo. One hundred percent. You win a cigar.”

“What don’t you see, exactly?” Fred had slung the bucket over his shoulder and was now tapping the spoon against it as they walked.

“Must I spell it out for you? P-I-G-E-O-N-S. Pigeons. You don’t see any pigeons. And I’ll tell you why you don’t see any pigeons. They’re moping.” Fred looked at Theo. “And that’s what’s causing the problems with the gravity. Ha!”

Up in apartment 15B, Mrs. MacDougal, wearing white cotton gloves, dusted her vases. Mrs. MacDougal’s vases were her pride and joy, as they say, and occupied three long shelves stretching across her entire living-room wall. The vases of colored glass, some cut and faceted, others blown into swooping zoomorphic forms, stood near the windows where they could play with the sunlight—catching it, throwing it, absorbing it, fracturing it, in hushed, always changing ways. Farther from the windows stood the vases of ceramic, many frosted in glazes so delicate that Mrs. MacDougal rightly feared the gentlest sunlight might dim them or even crack them. The very farthest end of the shelves was reserved for the antique vases, some of them hundreds of years old, mostly Chinese.

Mrs. MacDougal replaced a flaring octagonal vase, in mustard yellow, of the art nouveau era, to its accustomed spot.

“There now,” she said. “Isn’t that better. All clean.” She backed away from the wall of shelves, all the while gazing at her treasures. She leaned against the arm of her long sofa. Sighing, she said, “If anything happened to my babies, I think I’d just die!”

“You see, Theo, the force of gravity, as we feel it, is not a fixed thing. It’s not a number that doesn’t change. It changes plenty!” Fred removed his heavy glasses, coughed on them, wiped them on his filthy shorts, and then placed them back on his knobby nose. “Mostly it’s in response to the particular distribution of mass on the earth’s surface for any particular area that determines the gravity. Over the whole face of the globe on average gravity stays about even, sure. But at individual locales it varies enormously.”

They crossed over to Lexington Avenue, Fred stirring the bread mash and occasionally waving the spoon to make a point.

“Here in New York City, we’re particularly susceptible to variation because of all the buildings going up and coming down. Messing with the gravity!”

“Ha! Ha! A big mass.” Fred drew his eyebrows together. “But there is another force, a crucial force that is just powerful enough, fluid enough, and intelligent enough to counteract the fluctuations in local mass.”

“Pigeons are what keep us steady. Pigeons are what keep these buildings from falling down all around us.”

Fred let his spoon balance on the edge of the bucket and then teeter and fall into the bread mash.

“You might think that pigeons aren’t massive enough to make much difference. Oh, but they are. Especially when they’re in a flock and flying. Their combined mass is like a tiny hand on an enormous lever. By flying out and up over the city, and then wheeling and diving, a big flock can readjust any kinks in the gravity that some new skyscraper in mid-town is causing. They’re like gravity doctors constantly weaving the loose threads of gravity yarn back in place. Without them, anything could happen. Cyclones, tidal waves, even small earthquakes.”

“Ha! Doesn’t matter. The precise patterns they fly in are important though, of course.” Fred smiled and looked far up, squinting into the sky over midtown. “But sometimes they mope.”

Over the last few blocks, Fred had led them to the right, to the west, coming to the bottom corner of Central Park where the Sherman Monument stood. Fred put his bucket down and pulled from the pocket of his shorts a small red rubber ball. He threw it up several feet into the air and caught it gently in his hand.

He threw it a little higher and caught it again. Then he held the ball at forehead height and dropped it. Theo ran to retrieve it from beneath the bushes where it careened.

As Theo crawled out, Fred said, “It’s what I thought. The gravity’s way off. Much too high. Let’s get to work.”

Fred put his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and let rip a mighty whistle blast that sent several families of tourists skittering away. Then he began hurling great spoonfuls of bread mash onto the tourist-free pavement. It took about three minutes, but only about three minutes, before the space around Fred and Theo, roughly the size of half a basketball court, was wall-to-wall pigeons: gray, blue-gray, bronze, black, white, piebald, big and little, but mostly big, pecking at the pavement, talking, shoving, laughing, and pecking at the pavement some more. Above, three times the number of pigeons that were on the ground flew in three enormous flocks, describing great arabesques in the air, banking, diving, settling in trees for a moment and then leaping up again, following their leaders—presumably ones with PhDs in gravity arts.

When the first flock of pigeons had dined to everyone’s satisfaction, the second flock bellied up to the stones and Fred threw more of his delicious, one guessed, bread mash over their heads. And when the second flock finished and had wiped their mouths and excused themselves, the third and then the fourth flocks fell in and feasted. Throughout this feasting the cooing and scratching—small noises when coming from one pigeon—was a loud roar coming from the great mass.

Have you ever been in a school gymnasium that is also used as the cafeteria at lunchtime? The sound was a lot like that, only without the consonant sounds.

When the four flocks had all been fed, the pigeons left for a bit of after-dinner reflection. Some perambulated in twos and threes on the cobblestones. Most, however, sat quietly or fussed happily over their feathers in tree branches, on traffic-light stanchions, or, if they were really lucky, on the golden head of General Sherman on his golden horse.

“The eyes. It’s in their eyes. It’s not so much that they were hungry. It’s more that they just wanted a little attention. They wanted to know we still cared.”

The pigeons now became very quiet. The last murmuring cooer stopped murmuring. The strollers stopped strolling. A great stillness fell on that particular part of the city. When they themselves weren’t making a racket, the pigeons’ insulation, their feathers, worked like sound dampers, muffling much of the excess city noise.

Half of all the pigeons’ eyes stared at Fred, half because each pigeon had turned his or her head, presenting a profile with a single golden, gray, blue, copper, or green eye fixed on the old man with the bucket.

Fred looked around once at the huge throng. Then, taking Theo’s arm, he stood up, bringing Theo up with him.

Instantly, the pigeons rose up. The force of their wing beats buffeted the air and Theo’s eardrums in a hundred thousand short shock waves. They flew up first slowly, then with more and more speed. How they didn’t all tangle up with one another is a puzzle. The sound was like a helicopter, or a diesel locomotive—anything that concentrates a lot of power in a small place.

Maybe it was due to the noise, or to the way he stood up so quickly, but Theo was quite unsteady on his feet, feeling that either he or the pavement he was standing on was rocking.

The pigeons were flying in a huge cloud, the four flocks perfectly harmonizing in grand swoops and dives, towering climbs, and wide falling spirals.

Again, more than ever, Theo felt dizzy, the whole world around him was spinning and shifting. He clutched at Fred’s arm.

“Don’t worry,” said Fred. “It’s just the gravity readjusting. You feel it because we’re standing right at the center of all the changes.” He smiled at Theo, and then squinted back up at the sky and the pigeons.

After a minute and a half the great cloud of pigeons split into separate flocks, and then these dissolved into smaller flocklets, and doubles, and singles, and everyone traveled on to other parts of the city.

Fred sat back down lightly on the bench, stretching out his legs in front of him.

“Ah! That feels better,” he said. “The gravity is right back down to normal. A healthy level.”

Theo threw the red rubber ball hard onto the pavement, letting it bounce high into the hot evening air, and caught it.

Fred and Theo stepped into the September-cool of 777’s lobby and stood a moment quite literally chilling.

Mrs. MacDougal strode toward them from the direction of the building manager’s office.

“This is disgraceful,” she said. “You can’t stand in the lobby like this, sweaty and malodorous and, ugh, you, Fred, without a shirt! It’s unhygienical. It’s in-aesthetical. It’s anti-antiseptic. It’s . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s intolerable!”

The building manager now appeared at Mrs. MacDougal’s side and spoke somewhat more quietly. “Fred, I would appreciate it if you did wear a shirt in the public areas of the building. It’s common courtesy.”

Fred removed the bread-mash bucket from over his shoulder, placing it carefully on the polished floor. He pulled a crumpled plaid shirt from the pocket of his shorts, slipped it on, and began slowly buttoning it up.

“And what is in that bucket?” said Mrs. MacDougal. “I probably shouldn’t ask.”

“Ugh!” Mrs. MacDougal staggered back. “For the pigeons!” Mrs. MacDougal stamped her foot. “That’s enough! You are encouraging, aiding, abetting, condoning, and promoting the pigeon population. Vermin!” (It was unclear whether she meant the pigeons or Fred and Theo.) “The flying rats of this city. Fie! You should be poisoning the pigeons! You make me want to scream! It is people like you who give our great city its unfortunate reputation for filth!”

A gleam had come into Fred’s eye, growing stronger as he buttoned each button, becoming a stabbing beam as he came to the last one.

“Don’t you ever say anything about my pigeons. My pigeons! Besides Theo here, they’re the best friends I’ve got!”

“The smallest, meekest, dumbest little pigeon sitting on the head of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle has more brains than you’ll ever have!”

“There, there, Mr. Adams. Fighting in the lobby, I don’t think so!” said the building manager. “Now that you got your shirt on, keep it on. And take your pigeon ma—whatever it is—upstairs to your room.”

“Mark my words, Fred Adams. I will have you removed from this building yet. I will consider it my duty to get you and your filth out of this building! It will be my duty!” shouted Mrs. MacDougal.

After Theo and Fred stepped inside the elevator, its doors closed softly but quickly, seemingly embarrassed at the scene in the lobby. As the elevator rose, Mrs. MacDougal’s shouts grew fainter below them: “I’ll get you yet! I’ll get you yet!”

The years went by. The gravity went up and down but, thanks to Fred and the pigeons, the gravity never caused anyone any harm and did no damage.

“What will happen to the pigeons?” said Theo, clutching his mug of Postum. “The paper says the winds will be over a hundred miles an hour.”

“Oh, don’t you worry about the pigeons,” said Fred, with a chuckle. “They’ll just see it as a healthy challenge. I won’t be surprised if some of the younger lads don’t spend the days surfing the front. Ha! Ha!”

“Seriously, though, Theo. When it comes time for them to hunker down, they’ll all find a sturdy perch and then once their feet are a-grippin’ that perch, nothing can make them let go. Like steel! They’ll be all right.”

And the pigeons were all right. It took some parts of the city months to get over the storm, but the pigeons were up and about the day after the rain stopped. Fred was out on his rounds as soon as the mayor gave the all clear (actually a little before) to make sure everyone was looked after. Still, he really didn’t need to. There was so much garbage—food to gobble—spilled onto the streets that the pigeons had a fine time.

Another worry loomed during Theo’s last year at home. This time the storm didn’t threaten the pigeons directly. It threatened Fred.

Mrs. MacDougal planned to introduce a new bylaw at the building’s annual meeting which would require that each resident prove that he or she had a bank account with at least five thousand dollars in it.

“I can’t raise that kind of money and she knows it!” said Fred. He and Theo sat dejectedly on a bench across from the statue of General Sherman.

Theo looked up at the statue and wondered if they could maybe scrape a little bit of the gold flake off, not so that anyone would notice but enough to put into a bank account for Fred.

“My pension is enough to keep me alive and pay my bills. But that’s it. I don’t have enough for a fancy bank account!”

For the first time he could recall, Theo thought his friend Fred looked really rattled.

On the night of the meeting about half of the residents of 777—just enough to pass a new bylaw—were in the lobby, standing, sitting, and leaning against the pillars.

Mrs. MacDougal spoke for fifteen minutes. She spoke gracefully, calmly, and with such a reasonable air that she made it clear that anyone who opposed the new bylaw must be mentally unstable, bad, or, at best, some kind of criminal. Many residents were nodding at her and one another as she spoke. It was important for the health of the building. Sure. It was common sense. It was the right thing to do.

Fred stood next to the door to the stairs, looking small and frightened. For once, he had nothing to say. You could see the fighting sparkle drain out of his eyes. And as it did, Theo could see the fire in Mrs. MacDougal’s eyes grow brighter and brighter.

When at last Mrs. MacDougal sat down in one of the leather lobby chairs, the building manager stepped in front. “Are there any other comments?” he said. You could tell that he felt sure that no one would dare speak against the proposal.

He looked a little less pleased, a little annoyed, when Theo pushed through the crowd to the front and stood next to him.

“Go ahead, Theo,” said the building manager. “I’m sure we’d all like hear what you have to say.” He smirked.

He said, “It seems to me that this rule is just a bully rule. It’s a rule to bully out all the poor people. And all the small people. I don’t have five thousand dollars in a bank account. I still live with my parents. Some kids do have that kind of money. But I don’t. Does this mean that I’m going to have to leave?”

“Oh, no, kid. Of course not,” said the building manager. “This isn’t meant to get you out. It’s meant to get out the people we don’t like!”

“Oh ho!” said Theo. “You admit it! This isn’t about being reasonable. This isn’t about doing the right thing for the building. This is about getting the people out that you don’t like! You’re the building manager. Not the building dictator!”

There was a lot of back and forth after that. The building manager turned bright red. Mrs. MacDougal slapped the arm of the leather chair quite a lot. And over the hubbub, Theo’s voice rang out, “You don’t even know what you’re playing with. If you get rid of Fred, the whole building could be in danger. If the gravity isn’t taken care of, who knows what could fall down?”

Theo continued to go on Fred’s rounds whenever he was home from college. By the time Theo was a senior, he couldn’t help notice that Fred was slowing down just a bit. That “Ha!” of Fred’s that used to shake the ferns in the lobby now sounded more like “Heh” and it barely made an African violet tremble. Theo hardly ever jumped in surprise anymore.

At the end of his college days, Theo went off to do graduate work in New England. He had an awful lot of reading to do there, so he almost didn’t have time to think about how Fred, the pigeons, and the gravity in New York were all doing.

Dear Theo,

I’m so sorry to tell you that Fred Adams has left the building. I mean, he’s moved on. I mean, Fred is dead! Sorry. I mean, he’s gone to another world, maybe to a doorman building in the sky. Some of us will miss him, and I know you are one.

The funeral was last Saturday.

Always holding the door open for you,
Darren Bunchley

Included with this letter was the obituary that had appeared in The New York Times. In it was the answer to our question about whether Fred was a young man who had led a hard life or an old man who had led an easy life.

When Fred left this earth for that place where no gravity reaches, possibly carried there by the pigeons he loved, he went quietly and alone. Mr. Bunchley had noticed something wrong when for an entire day the calm of the lobby had not been broken by a single soft “Heh,” however, he hadn’t worried much about it. When two days passed, he did worry, and then in the evening of the third day, Mr. Bunchley, along with our superintendent, Oskar, knocked on Fred’s door. And when there was no answer, Oskar let them in with Fred’s extra key.

Theo looked at the picture of Fred in The New York Times. There he was, standing on the top step of a rolling ladder, about to climb into the cockpit of a Lockheed Martin X-35, the experimental supersonic jet. He looked young, handsome, proud. His eyes sparkled and his clean-shaven chin was square and daring. Theo quickly scanned the article. The air force was conducting tests on the change of the force of gravity over various altitudes and latitudes of the earth. Fred was their most fearless pilot, taking the tests higher and farther than ever before until his last mission, when the tail of his aircraft had exploded, hurling bits of plane in every direction. Fred had apparently blacked out for several seconds but not before he had initiated the escape protocols. His parachute had landed him on the northern slopes of Greenland. He fought the elements for a week before he stumbled into an Inuit village, where the local medical people had brought him back to health.

When he at last returned to his flight base in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, his fellow pilots didn’t know him. He had aged fifty years in a month.

Fred Adams had retired from the air force on a hero’s pension and lived the rest of his life quietly and unrecognized at 777 Garden Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Theo put the paper down. He placed his chin in his left Fred and the Pigeons 31 hand and looked out the window to the clouds where he thought Fred’s spirit might have gone. He wondered about Fred and what effect his death would have at home.

If Theo had seen the paper again three days later this last question about Fred might have been answered by two small items in the Metropolitan Section. In the first, an apparently unexplained mass bird event occurred over the course of a week on the Upper East Side. Residents expressed annoyance and consternation at the huge concentration of pigeons that seemed to have descended on the city, particularly on the benches, lampposts, marquees, ledges, and rooftops surrounding Seventy-seventh Street and Garden Avenue.

“The cooing was driving us nuts. I mean, we’re used to pigeons, but this was like nothing I ever heard,” the building manager at 777 Garden Avenue is quoted as saying.

Then after a week of cooing, squatting, and milling about, the pigeons left as mysteriously as they arrived, taking flight in a gargantuan gray mass, circling twice and vanishing.

“It was eerie,” said Mr. Bunchley, 777 Garden Avenue’s doorman.

According to Eugene Pinion, an ornithologist with the Parks Department, scientists are baffled. “Maybe it has something to do with the stars,” he said.

A tremor, a small earthquake, not unheard of in New York, occurred Tuesday afternoon, centered on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Some minor damage was reported.

At seventeen minutes after two in the afternoon on Tuesday, the day of that small earthquake, Mrs. MacDougal stood with her back against the arm of her living-room sofa, and watched as, singly or in pairs, or threesomes, every one of her vases tottered, tilted, and then fell to the floor, smashing into perhaps millions of pieces. Hundreds of thousands, anyway, without a doubt.