"I took them off when it became clear that you were going to sleep awhile. Then the police report came: you"re not under suspicion of anything, and they didn"t have your fingerprints. They would like to know how you were shot and slashed, but they"re not going to press."
"Where"s the women"s ward?" Peter Lake asked, wondering if perhaps this little girl were some kind of loony, because she seemed to think that she was in charge, and, besides, she was probably not allowed to be with him.
"It"s on the floor above," she answered, pointing up. As her lovely eyes swept upward, she looked like some sort of mystical icon."Why do you ask?"
"Don"t you think you better get back, dear, before they catch you?" In fact, he wanted her to staya"perhaps because she elicited from him both paternal goodwill and a slightly nagging s.e.xual interest. She laughed at his question, and her amus.e.m.e.nt convinced him that she was an escaped lunatic who had broken out of her chains.
"This is my ward," she volunteered, thinking that he a.s.sumed a female doctor would not be allowed on a male ward. She didn"t suspect that he was ignorant of her position, for her tunic, her paging unit, and the stethoscope sticking out of her breast pocket were obvious signs of her profession.
But Peter Lake had never seen that style of doctor"s tunic, had never seen or heard of a female doctor, had never seen a paging unit, was just nearsighted enough that he could not read the small print of her security badge, and thought that the flesh-colored rubber tubes coming out of her pocket were part of a slingshot.
"Why would theyput you in a men"s ward, missy, when you"re obviously, delightfully, and undeniably a woman?"
After a short silence, she spoke up."Don"t you know that I"m your doctor?" she asked."I"m the physician in charge of this ward. This is my second year as a resident. Is that what"s confusing you?"
Certain that she was mentally ill (though a pure delight), since no adolescent girla"especially one who carried a slingshota"could possibly be chief of a men"s ward in a hospital, Peter Lake decided to go along with her."Oh, now I see," he said."Yes! That was what was confusing me." He smiled. She smiled."But it"s all clear now"a"he hesitated, to give emphasis to the next worda""Doctor."
"Good," she said, pleased that she had gained the confidence and cooperation of a patient she had been told would be difficult and, perhaps, violent (a burly orderly sat on a cart on the other side of the curtain). As Peter Lake took her sweet, rather chunky little hand, and squeezed it, she said,"I"ll be around tomorrow. We have a lot to talk about. I"m going to try my best to see that you can leave here as quickly as possible."
"Thank you, Doctor."
"It"s my job," she said."Meanwhile, believe it or not, you need to sleep some more. So I"m going to give you an injection." She pulled out a needle the size of a meat skewer, and began to top it off in the fiendish way that needles are topped off.
"Now wait a minute!" Peter Lake screamed. He hadn"t bargained on actual treatment, and didn"t know what was in the syringe, or where she wanted to stick him."Let"s not...." It was too late.
With an expert thrust, she got him in the arm, and he dared not move for fear of breaking the needle in his flesh.
"What"s in it?" he asked, as the fluid entered his veins.
"Trioxymetasalicylate, dimethylethyloxitan, and Vipparin."
"Ohhhh..." cried Peter Lake, perhaps one of the most confused beings that had ever been on earth."I hope you know what you"re doing."
She smiled her reply as he drifted off to sleep.
AWAKENING several hours earlier than the young doctor had thought he would, Peter Lake stretched out his arms. At first he had no idea of where he was or what had happened. Then he grew anxious, for he was able to remember that, in fact, he could not remember. He turned his head. The only thing he could see was the white cloth screen, and in that quiet moment he finally understood that he was alone. If there had once been those whom he had loved, who had loved him,. he was now separated from them. Even were they suddenly to appear, he reasoned, he might not know them. Though the way in which he was lost was the most serious way in which a man can be lost, still, he hoped that it would pa.s.s, and that his confusion would dissipate like fog as it burns off the bay on a hot morning in July.
The silence was suddenly broken. Peter Lake rose onto his shoulder to free his ears from the pillow so that he could hear better the sound of horses on the street. This was something he knew, something at last familiar. There was a whole detachment of them, fifty or more, and he could tell from the way they were shod, the way their bits clinked, and the way they were packed close together that they were police mounts changing shift. It must be four o"clock, he thought. They"re on their way downtown, and right now the night horses are stomping as the black boys curry them, and mounted policemen are filing in from all over to begin the rides that end at midnight.
The horses soon pa.s.sed, and he was left with the discomfort of the many things around him that were not familiar. A box that was bracketed to the wall, at a tilt, stared at him with a blank gla.s.s face. It couldn"t have been a cabinet, because it was too high to reach, and, besides, everything in it would have been all jumbled up. He couldn"t imagine what it was. And then, the way things were shaped, and the materials of which they were made, seemed almost otherworldly."There isn"t any iron in this place," he said to himself, or any wood." Everything seemed to have grown smooth, to have lost its texture.
What, in G.o.d"s name, were the panels above his head, that seemed to glow in red and green. He thought at first that they were stove doors, but the light was green as well as scarlet, and he knewthat neither coal nor wood burned green. He propped himself up and got close enough to them to see that they were tiny lights jumping around like fleas. Astonishingly, they made their little pulses and flickered on and off in sympathy with his breathing and his heartbeat, or so it seemed, for when he strained to get near them they went mad with activity, and when he recovered, they did, too. He wondered if he were dreaming.
It was still broad daylight when the girl doctor appeared. Her patient was sitting up in bed, freshly awakened, pensive, and obviously much improved. When they are absorbed in thought, certain people become so paralyzed by the play (or circus) that takes place invisibly before their eyes or in their hearts, that they command a silence that others give them without resentment. Peter Lake had not always been like this, but now he was, perhaps because he needed so badly to solve the riddle into which he had awakened. Even his physician was silent out of respect for his reverie.
"Oh," he said when he saw her."You are a doctor, aren"t you?"
"Yes. I am," she answered.
"I never heard of a girl doctor."
"I"m twenty-seven."
"You don"t look it. You look at best fifteena"forgive mea"and, still, I didn"t know that they made women doctors. Then again, that doesn"t mean very much, does it, seeing that I don"t even know who I am."
"While I was gone," she said,"I checked to be absolutely sure that there were female doctors in Ireland. There are."
"I"m not from Ireland," he said."I"m from New York."
"You speak with an Irish accent."
"That"s true, and it"s a mystery to me. But I"m from the city. I know that."
"You were found in the harbor. You could have been a sailor or a pa.s.senger on a ship. Knocked on the head and all that."
No," Peter Lake a.s.serted."I wouldn"t be so certain except for the police horses. That was about twenty minutes ago. They must nave been on their way downtown to break the shift. Where are we now?"
"St. Vincent"s Hospital."
"That"s on Sixth Avenue and Eleventh Street."
"Yes."
"It would take about ten minutes for them to get from here to the stables, and ten minutes to get in. Therefore, it must be about four o"clock."
Just then, as if to confirm that here was a man of precision, who would and could find his way out of the confusion that had temporarily overcome him, a church bell chimed. He counted silently, moving his lips,"One... two... three... four." The doctor looked at her watch. (He didn"t understand that she was touching it to cue it, and he thought she was petting it the way a railway man does with his chronometer, or a baseball pitcher does with his hat.) It was exactly four.
"That"s an unusual way to tell time," she told him."By horses! It certainly shows that there"s a good chance for you to find out who you are, if only by deduction."
"I don"t need a watch," Peter Lake volunteered."I can tell the quarter-hours by the bells, and (here, he wanted to orient himself and to impress her at the same time) I know that trains will pa.s.s by on the El approximately once every..."
"What El?" she interrupted.
"The El."
"What El?"
"The Sixth Avenue El."
A shiver went up her spine.
"The elevated train," he said, his voice rising."I couldn"t be more positive."
She shook her head."There"s no elevated train on Sixth Avenue, or anywhere else that I know of. Oh, maybe in the Bronx, or Brooklyn somewhere. But not in downtown Manhattan."
"Don"t be ridiculous," said Peter Lake, sure of himself, yet not sure at all."They"re all over the place. You can"t miss *em. They re everywhere."
"No," she stated emphatically."They"re nowhere. There aren"t any."
"Let me take a look out the window."
"You"re tied into an IV and monitors, and besides, we"re on the side street."
"I"ve got to see."
"Trust me. There hasn"t been an El for half a century."
"That"s why I"ve got to see," he said, starting to move."I"ve got to see the city. It"s the only thing by which to really measure thetime."
"How about your horses?" she asked, sympathetically.
"Horses aren"t enough. They"re too small. You understand? I need the whole city."
"When you recover."
"I am recovered."
"Not quite yet."
"I am" he echoed. He pulled the hospital gown from his shoulders. She went to stop him, but when she saw where his wounds had been, she saw only scars. The man was sound, and in trim as well. He had no business in a needed hospital bed.
She put her hands to her mouth. It was not possible. She herself had dressed the wounds, and she knew his condition exactly. She tried to think of ways in which she could have been fooled. Perhaps it was an elaborate practical joke. No, he was well. Inexplicably, he was well.
"What year is this?" he demanded.
She told him, but he was not ready to believe her until he himself had seen the city, fine and irrefutable clock that it was.
"Show me to the roof," he said.
She helped him disconnect the tubes and sensors, and he got into the clothes that he had been given on the ferry. They walked quietly through the ward and went to the elevator. It would be dark out, but what did that matter in New York?
From the way that he stared at the stainless steel, the thermalb.u.t.tons, and the lights, she knew that he had never seen such things before in his life. She observed, as a physician would, that he was trembling, that his lips were slightly quivering, that his complexion alternated between flush and pallor. And then, as perhaps a Physician would not, she observed that she, too, was trembling."If this is a joke, I"ll kill you," she said, wondering how she could believe what she believed and think what she had thought.
They came to the top floor, which was empty and white. The old building had been redone, but it was familiar enough to make Peter Lake think that he was about to see the city that he knew. The El would be there, as would everything else. Ferries with rows of black smokestacks as tall as top hats would drift across the bay, spitting out sparks as big as oranges. He would see distant girderwork against the sky, but, overall, the city would be the samea"the nineteenth century opening its eyes, casting off its veils of steel and ebony. The dream would end. It would all fall quietly into place.
They came to the roof door."It"s funny," Peter Lake stated."I don"t think that this notion I have could be so, but I"m afraid to open the door."
"Just push it," she said.
He did.
THE SUN.
ON the fifteenth of May, The Sun celebratedits 125th anniversary, and several thousand people embarked upon the Staten Island ferry as it rested in the harbor in a cool fog that drifted across the surface of the water. Harry Penn had decided to celebrate the longevity of his newspapers by taking his employees and their spouses on a spring cruise "up the Hudson and under the Palisades," as it was originally billed, although the phrase "under Palisades" made Hugh Close, the rewrite editor, protest sarcastically that they weren"t going to do any tunneling in rock. The cruise was then to take place "beneath the Palisades," after "in the shadow of the Palisades" was rejected because, as Close pointed out, there would be no moon that night, and, therefore, the Jersey cliffs would cast no shadows.
The brightly lighted ferry was as orange and gold as a bowl of fruit in the sun. Thousands of bottles of champagne and tons of hor d"oeuvres and desserts filled linen-covered tables that ran like ribbons through the long cabins. An orchestra on each deck played at full steam as the celebrants came on board. They were elated and optimistic, because they had put The Sun to bed early that afternoon and received surprise 125th anniversary grants equivalent to a full year"s salary, and letters of praise and thanks from Harry Penn, singling out their heroic, constructive, or generous acts, a.s.suring them of the paper"s fiscal health, and inviting them to stay on and share in its future.
For Hardesty and Virginia, the 125th anniversary grant was quite a windfall, since it meant that their household would receive that year four fully adequate salaries. In addition, the Harvesters and Planters Bank of St. Louis, after five years, had recovered, recapitalized, and sent Hardesty a letter promising to honor his long-dormant check. Altogether, they felt very comfortable. Virginia had had her second child, a girl whom they named Abby. Mrs. Gamely had gotten a letter through, inviting them to visit as soon as they could, and reporting that, in these years just before the millennium Lake of the Coheeries had had hard wintersa"yesa"but also extraordinary summers which had made the village overflow with natural wealth,"in the agrarian and lexicographical senses of the word. There is so much food, everywhere," her friend had written for her,"and so many new and wonderful words being generated, that the storehouses and closets are overflowing. We are tubflooded with neologisms, smoked fish, and fruit pies." She had even enclosed in the letter itself a very thin and very delicious cherry pie.
Hardesty and Virginia began to dance to the concert waltzes even before the ferry pulled out into the harbor, and were among the happiest of the happy couples. Their children were at home, safe, sleepy, and content; they were solvent and advancing; they were 1 perfect health; and they had just finished a hard day"s work. This, plus the few gla.s.ses of champagne (which was so dry that, if spilled" it vanished) made them waltz in perfect ellipses and dips. At times they orbited Asbury and Christiana, who were especially striking in their youth and vitality, and just as happy. With extraordinary ease,hey danced across the ferry"s transformed deck, moving like the planets. They pa.s.sed Praeger de Pinto, who danced with Jessica Penn. They interwove with workers and staffa"the pressmen and the truckers, the mechanics with their long n.o.ble faces and carefully clipped turn-of-the-century mustaches, lovely young secretaries who had never been to such an elegant affair save for the very sedate and civilized Christmas and July parties held in The Sun"s roof garden, the cubs who had just joined the paper and who were as awkward and overly grave as adolescents, the ancient librarians, the cooks, the guards (in their absence, the police were watching the empty Sun building), and Harry Penn himself: wizened, dapper, sagacious, spry, and as thin as a lightning rod. When everyone was on board, the ferry moved out onto the Upper Bay and turned north into the Hudson, which was as smooth as oil. They glided past the deep inner-glowing buildings, and except for the muted orchestras and engines, the ferry was silent. From Manhattan"s streets and highways a singing sound arose. Mist obscured stars and sky, and as they approached the George Washington Bridge, the mist descended to curtain both banks of the river, though not the bridge itself, or its catenary, which sparkled with blue and white diamonds and looked wide enough and broad enough to cradle the world in its curve.
Manhattan"s gla.s.s walls, running in a smooth green glow down the Hudson to the Battery, were as nothing compared to the white curtain that marked the conflict of the season"s. Its chill and purity upon the gla.s.sy river put the ferry on a stage. Soon the celebrants were no longer celebrating. Cathedral walls had been raised about them, and their quiet drifting was like a journey to the world of the deada"all of which suggested that, perhaps, beyond the whitened curtains of mist, was something far more momentous than New Jersey. And it was suddenly quite colda"a message from far beyond the chain of lights that marked the Hudson"s northern turn.
The orchestras stopped the concert waltzes and the engines were stepped down, until the gliding ferry silently held its breath. Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him. The orchestra in the stern soon followed, and the canon swelledthroughout the decks and across the water until the ferry seemed like a musical instrument, a thing of delicate gla.s.s that shone from within and floated upon the same mirror as the city itself.
As the music drifted into the ether, they stood at the rails and on the upper decks, staring outward, away from themselves, transfixed. They had come aboard the ferry without a care, to dance and laugh. Then a white sash had been drawn around them, and they had realized how quick and insubstantial were their lives, how, in a second, in the blink of an eye, all is lost. This brought them far from their worries and ambitions, and, caring only for the music and the laws of which it was part, they stood upon the ferry"s open decks and were deeply moved. Whatever would come, would come. Whatever they would see, they would see. And they would be thankful to have seen it.
How brave they are, thought Harry Penn, who had known such moments at the height of war, on the sea, and in looking into children"s eyes. How brave they are to see straight through to their own deaths, and how well they will be rewarded.
Visiting from the summer that was on its way, sheets and chains of silent heat-lightning struck the billowing mist, and the shattering of its tributaries was mirrored in the river. This sight stopped the orchestras and silenced the music as the ferry and its pa.s.sengers glided under the soundless flashes that were battling above. And then, just below the sparkling bridge, the ferry made a silent breathless turn and started for home.
ISAAC Penn had left Hudson, New York, on a whaling ship when he was eleven years old and as skinny as a thread. Never having seen the sea, he was quite astonished when, as they tacked downriver, they came upon the open miles of Haverstraw Bay, and then the broad expanse of the Tappan Zee. As they sailed past Manhattan and the Palisades, the rows of buildings, the distraught wharves, and the thicket of masts tighter and webbier than raspberry bushes near the Lake of the Coheeries impressed him deeply and forever. He took it all in as best he could, and vowed to return to Manhattan someday to partic.i.p.ate in the rise of a city that even he, an eleven-year-oldwhaler boy, could easily see was on an unshakable northward march up the island. His vow was set into steel when he perceived what was beyond the Narrows. Here were no rolling green hills spotted with mobile-jawed, gaudy-colored cows; no reedy bays choked with white herons and swans; no blue mountains in the distance; and no cool and windy evergreen forests along the ridges, but just the sea, and nothing else, in a great circle of water and sky. The whalers then put him to work washing potsa"for three years.
He went to sea again and again. Each time, they tacked down the Hudson and pa.s.sed Manhattan, and, each time, Manhattan had bounded north by several leaps. Isaac Penn was just as steady. He went from galley boy to cabin boy, to apprentice seaman, to able-bodied seaman, to third, second, and first mate, to captain, to shipowner, to owner of a fleet. Just before whaling collapsed, he withdrew his fortune and put it into merchant vessels, manufacturing, land, and a newspaper of his own design.
He knew how to run a tight ship, the best way to treat a crew, the means to navigate through darkness and storms, how to find elusive and valuable whales, and the trick of writing in the log all the news of the day both clearly and economically. He knew how to keep perfect accounts, how to arrange efficiently the plan of the decks, and when to sell his oil. He had placed correspondents in foreign ports to send back news of other fleets, to prepare him for the fluctuations of the market. He had patiencea"he could pursue good fortune relentlessly, or wait for it to come within reacha"and he himself had driven not a few well-placed harpoons.
Thus he was able to design The Sun to be, if not a perfect instrument, then something rather close. On Printing House Square in lower Manhattan, at the quadripart.i.te junction of Dark Willow, Breasted, Tillinghast, and Pine streets, it had been placed near the center of government, for the political news; the wharves, for the collection of foreign dispatches; the Five Points, for crime; the Bowery, for theater and music; and Brooklyn (via the ferry, until they finished the bridge), for human interest."In those days," Harry Penn was fond of saying,"they thought that the only human interest was in Brooklyn."We need a human interest story, * someone would say. Get a kid and send him to Brooklyn." I used to point out that therewere human beings in Manhattan, too. They didn"t really believe me. Off I would go to Brooklyn, searching desperately for a human interest story, which, more often than not, would be about a cow."
Though the downtown location became slightly disadvantageous in view of all that later occurred in midtown, it permitted many of the staff to live on Staten Island and in Brooklyn Heights, and it encouraged a sense of history and activity, because it was the center of a great old hive.
Even from afar, one could distinguish The Sun from those buildings that surrounded, and, over time, nearly overwhelmed it. The Sun was always recognizable because of its flags. These were not like the chorus lines of national underwear hung out to dry in front of the United Nations or around the skating rink in Rockefeller Plaza, but, rather, individual beacons of flamelike color. Five enormous flags played on the wind. In the four corners were the banners of New York the city, New York the state, The Sun, and The Whale, and in the center was the American flag. The Sun"s flag was a bra.s.sy gold sun with a corona of sharp triangles, set on a white satiny field. The Whale"?, flag was half light blue and half navy, scalloped by waves to divide the sea from the sky, with a huge whale resting motionless above the water and flipping his tail in articulated strokes of blue, white, and gray. In the rare case of a demonstrably just and unjust war, in which one side was purely the aggressor and the other merely a victim, the victim"s standard would fly underneath the national flag. Banners decorated the inner courtyard and were hung like tapestries in the city room because Harry Penn held that these were to a building what a tie and a scarf are to a man and a woman."A good tie can make an old gray b.a.s.t.a.r.d like me look like the king of Polynesia," he would say."I love to wear a nice tie, and so does the building."
The building itself was an iron-framed, stone-faced, French, neocla.s.sical rectangle by the nineteenth-century architect Oiseau. It was light on its feet and s.p.a.cious, and yet it was substantial. It had been completely refurbished 110 years after its completion, and now the huge window frames were filled with rimless smoke-colored gla.s.s that looked like large flat gemstones in cla.s.sical foils. At the heart of the building was a large courtyard with gardens and a fountain. Onthe four walls of the courtyard, lighted stairways were hung over the open s.p.a.ce. A conservatory sh.e.l.l of gla.s.s and steel covered this atrium, and in the warmer seasons was cranked open like a cargo hatch and folded conveniently out of the way.
The interior was eggsh.e.l.l white, though some walls were shaded in quiet colors or draped with tapestries; and here and there were enormous paintings of active whaling scenes. Looking into them was to be on the sea; the white water seemed so real that one shied away lest one"s face be slapped by the gleaming tail fin of a fighting whale. The ceilings were three times as high as in the modern idiom, and rimmed with moldings skillfully executed by craftsmen who had gone to their rest many generations before. Throughout the building were Oriental carpets, warm woods, bra.s.s trim, and subtle recessed lighting that was sometimes focused in to make bright pools, and sometimes drawn back for a palatial wash. The flooring was of oak, the staircases of mahogany. The elevator cages were of bra.s.s, teak, and real crystal: they were lifted silently in elevator halls filled with palms and bright spotlights that caught them on the rise and made them sparkle like diamonds.
In the bas.e.m.e.nt were the power plants; one for the generation of electricity, and one solely for the presses. These were ancient and elaborate constructs of iron, bra.s.s, and steel that took up half an acre in a collection of puffing samovars, madly racing wheels, sesquipedalian drive rods in frantic intercourse with capacious cylinders, boilers big enough to cook the entire apricot crop of the Imperial Valley, and a forest of catwalks and ladders to allow access to the valves, levers, tickle pumps, gauges, and dials that made some pa.s.sersby, who saw the whole apparatus through greenhouselike windows set in a moat of air, think that they were looking at a clock factory or a distillery. When both plants were humming, with their lights shining on the cheerful puffs and tiny plumes of escaping steam, they seemed to be the heart of the world. Busloads of schoolchildren were brought from as far away as Ohio just to stare down at The Sun"s power machinery and the aged mechanics who ran and maintained The mechanics alone knew the secrets of the old technology. And even they, who had learned the works from their fathers, did not know the names of half the parts, or what whole inactive appendiceswere for. Much of the machinery sat in place without being used and yet all the gears, wheels, and pistons had to be kept polished and oiled.
Also in the bas.e.m.e.nt were a vault, five squash courts, a seventy-five-foot swimming pool, a gym, saunas, steambaths, and rows of showers.
The first floor held paper-storage facilities, the presses, truck bays, and a reception hall. The second floor was taken up entirely by linotype and computer composing rooms, and the cla.s.sified department. Advertising, layout, accounting, personnel, and payroll were on the third floor. The fourth floor was the city room. Instead of horrible metal desks jammed together in an overlit airplane hangar, The Sun"s center of operations was contained in four s.p.a.cious rectangular rooms arranged around the courtyard, with rows of tables running along their lengths. Affixed to the tables were green gla.s.s lamps, and underneath were cabinets, drawers, and the electronic cables that connected each reporter"s desk with the library, the morgue, the composing rooms, and the data banks. In the four corners were pulpitlike rewrite desks from which the various departments received their a.s.signments, and to which a reporter advanced humbly with story in hand, or, if he had a hot potato, like Caesar crossing the Rubicon. The divisions, each with its own electronic status board, specialized library, data terminals, and director, were as follows: City, National, Washington, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe & the U. S. S. R., the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, Africa, Science, Arts, Finance, and Editorial. One entire division was simply designated ad hoc, and was used to pick up the pieces or take up the slack. Unlike most city rooms, The Sun"s, was tranquil and well ordered. On one side was a quiet courtyard, and on the other a long view of the city.
Spiral staircases punched up through the ceiling to the fifth-floor offices of department heads, columnists, editors, and the publisher. Harry Penn"s office, which once had belonged to Isaac, took up half of one of the building"s long sides. It was probably the world"s only indoor harpoon range. Racks of the finest harpoons lined the walls. When someone wanted to practice, he took up one of the lances and stepped into a box that simulated the prow of a rockingwhaleboat. Ahead, at thirty feet, wooden representations of whales were towed across the room.
The sixth floor was the site of the communications, computer, facsimile, meeting, and board rooms. The seventh floor was comprised of common rooms and a restaurant. The eighth and ninth floors housed the library. It had several million volumes in open stacks, all the major newspapers and periodicals either bound or on computer, and a map section. Expert librarians maneuvered a seemingly limitless budget to keep it well maintained and up-to-date. The reference collections were wonders of the world.
On the roof were a conservatory, a greenhouse, a sundeck, a promenade, and an outdoor cafe from which one could see the harbor, the bridges, a magnificent cityscape, and sections of open sky bluer than the sky above Montmartre. Here, the flags flew, and here, on summer afternoons and evenings when the paper was working with vigor and grace, a string quartet sometimes played.
The Sun building was so perfect in execution and so full of energy that, upon looking at it from a distance, one could easily imagine that it was on the verge of coming alive. Just like Isaac Penn"s ships, which gathered in riches from across the seas, The Sun"s writers and reporters had packed it with memories of all the wonders they had seen and a.s.sessed. Though the lights were never off, because either The Sun or The Whale was always in the works, it was said that were they to be extinguished there would still be more than enough light by which to see, for 125 years of clarity were impounded in the timbers and arches.
No less ingenious than the physical quarters of The Sun was itssocial and economic organization. Perhaps owing to Isaac"s hard days washing pots, the Penns had always believed in a high minimum wage. Their editorial columns persistently inveighed against the idea of welfare for the ablebodied, and government social programs that were little more than elaborate patronage schemes. For this, they were repeatedly condemned in liberal circles. On the other hand, they were just as persistent in advocating what was considered to be a sky-high minimum wage. (They believed that hard and good work deserved its reward, and responded to arguments from conservatives that such a wage would create unemployment and dampen entrepreneurial drive, with the counterargument that the latter could be sustained and would flourish with the concomitant business-tax reductions made possible by greater income equality and a smaller welfare burden.) The Penns were not a hundredth as rich as the Binkys, and whereas the Binkys had acc.u.mulated their wealth by grinding people into the ground, the Penns had done nothing of the sort. First everyone on The Sun, from a kitchen helper who had been there for an hour, to Harry Penn himself, received exactly the same wage and benefit packagea"exactly. And it was a good one, too, good enough to make any job on the paper a great prize. Every Sun employee enjoyed equal privileges in regard to pension, health care, access to the athletic facilities in the bas.e.m.e.nt, and admission to the cafe and restaurant. Anyone could take advantage of the generous educational benefits, and throw in music lessons on the side. And yet, there was every reason to work hard and advance within the organization.