“What happened?” Roberto asked.
“It was early in the revolution. Washington’s army was being chased all over the bay by the British, who had lots of Hessian mercenaries in about a hundred warships. The Americans were nothing but farmers with fowling guns and rowboats. So wherever the British landed, the Americans had to run away. First from Staten Island to Brooklyn. Then when the Brits followed them to Brooklyn, the whole American army rowed across the East River one night in a fog. But then they were down in the Battery, where the town was in those days, and the British crossed the East River at midtown. They could have marched across the island and cut the Americans off and forced them to surrender, but their general Howe was extremely slow. He was so slow that people have wondered if he was trying to lose, so the Tories would be embarrassed back in Parliament, because he was a Whig. Anyway the Americans took advantage of this syrup-head and snuck up Broadway one night, past the Brits who were camped around the UN building, and they reconvened up here at the north end of the island.”
“They snuck up Broadway?”
“It was just a country lane. They even lost it and snuck through the woods. It was a dark night and it was all forest then. So anyway the Americans made it up to here and then the British followed them north. This time they had the Americans caught at the north end of the island, and they marched up here to crush them, but as they were attacking their buglers blew a fox hunting call, and that made some of the Americans mad. A group of riflemen from Marblehead Massachusetts stood their ground right down there, and started to shoot back. It was first time Americans had stood up to the Brits since Bunker Hill, and they fought them to a draw during the course of a long and bloody day. Right down there!”
“Cool,” Roberto said. “So then they won?”
“No, they lost! I mean they were still going to get crushed, it was just a holding action for a day. So they slipped off the island again. They rowed over to Jersey and got away, and the British held Manhattan for the rest of the war. Remember the Headquarters map, remember the Hussar? All that happened after this battle we lost.”
“So what the hell?” Roberto said. “How did we win the revolution if we kept losing all the battles and running away?”
“That was the story of the war,” Mr. Hexter said. “The Americans lost all the battles but won the war. Because when they lost they were still here. It was their home. They would go off and regroup, and the British would follow them and beat on them again somewhere else. There were a couple American victories along the way, but mostly not. Mostly the British won, but even so they eventually wore down, and in the end the Americans surrounded them and kicked them out. The Brits were going to run out of food, so they left.”
He stared down at Morningside Heights, thinking it over. “I wonder if it’s always like that, you know? This battle for the towers, the fight we’re having now over money. All this that we’re seeing. You just keep losing until you win.”
“I don’t get it,” said Roberto.
“Me neither,” Mr. Hexter admitted. “I guess the idea is that since you’re the ones who live here, you just wear them down. Something like that. It’s like a Pyrrhic victory in reverse. I guess you could call it a Pyrrhic defeat. I never thought about the losers of a Pyrrhic victory before. I mean those people are really the winners, right? They lose, then they say to each other, Hey we just lost a Pyrrhic victory! Congratulations!”
Roberto supposed it might be better just to win outright.
Then they were past the Lincoln Towers, and floating over the big roofs of the Javits Center, and finally over the intertidal, where the new platform rafts were now floating in place, each the size of a city block. A stretch of tiny black gondolas tied to a line of tall poles seemed to suggest that the westernmost platform was to serve as a kind of San Marco Square, facing the Hudson. All the blocks were clearly going to have farms on their roofs. Very New York, Mr. Hexter remarked, these little farms. He had once had a friend who gardened in her apartment using thimbles and toothpaste tube caps for pots, toothpicks for tools, an eyedropper for watering. She had grown individual blades of grass.
“Isn’t that where you used to live?” Amelia inquired, pointing down.
“Yes, right there. Thirty-first and Seventh, see it? It’s all gone now. It was right in the middle of this redevelopment.”
“So do you want to move back there when they’ve fixed it up?”
“Oh no. That was just where I washed up when I lost my place before. It wasn’t very nice. In fact it was a shithole. If it weren’t for these boys I would have died there. So now I’ll go wherever they go!” He laughed at them. “You’re always stuck with the people you save. You might as well learn that one now. I won’t burden you too long anyway, and you’ll have learned the lesson.”
“We like having you around,” Stefan ventured.
“What about you guys?” Amelia asked. “Will you move up to your salt marsh?”
“Don’t know,” Roberto said uneasily. “Charlotte wants us to house-sit her room while she’s in Washington. But it’s too small for two people, and she’ll be back a lot, so we don’t know what we’ll do. Maybe get on the list for a different room at the Met. I don’t want to move uptown. And I don’t want to be off the water.”
“Me neither,” Stefan said.
“Well good,” Amelia said. “We’ll all be neighbors for a while more. So hey, do you guys want to go with me on a trip? Around the world in eighty days?”
Stefan and Roberto and Mr. Hexter looked at each other.
“Yes,” they said.
The city is a built dream, a vision incarnated. What makes it grow is its image of itself.
—Peter Conrad
The place where all the aspirations of the world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge.
—H. L. Mencken
But why say more?
—Herman Melville
g) the citizen