J. Morgan Cunningham
Comfort Station
He was doing exactly what Vivian had told him — thinking of what it would be like living with a wife who had only one leg.
ARTHUR HAILEY,
The Final Diagnosis
Persons this book are about
FRED DINGBAT — omnibus operative, proud of his position in intraurban transit. Too proud?
MO MOWGLI — custodian of the Comfort Station. What was there about his past that haunted him?
ARBOGAST SMITH — plainclothes patrolman. In responsibility he found anodyne — and the testing of his strength.
HERBERT Q. LUMINOUS — bookkeeper on the run. What happened to him was almost a cliché.
CAROLINA WEISS — onetime Russian countess now A & E mechanic. In the arms of another man she sought forgetfulness.
GENERAL RAMON SAN MARTINEZ TORTILLA — deposed dictator. What was it he wanted to get off his chest?
FINGERS FOGELHEIMER — mobster. Out of the thrilling days of yesteryear, he returns for vengeance.
LANCE CAVENDISH — Black. With him and thirty-five cents you can take the subway.
6:00 A.M
Rain.
Rain poured down like water out of the cloud-covered sky, which was above the city. Every intricate individual drop of the hydrous stuff, composed of two parts hydrogen for every lonely solitary part oxygen, fell on the already-drenched city like a cloudburst.
It was a cloudburst.
The rain fell everywhere on the city, on rich and on poor, on young and on old, on happy and on unhappy — but not on people inside their houses. If the roofs were okay. The rain fell on a tramp steamer of Liberian registry, Serbo-Croat captain and Siamese crew being loaded with rocking chairs for Terra del Fuego, girlie calendars on a consignment to Ulan Bator, and cartons of Smucker’s strawberry preserves bound for the Cape of Good Hope, at Pier 46, downtown. The rain fell on the Daily News trucks, gaily green, tootling their wares hither and yon throughout the great city, bringing the daily news to the citizens of Metropolis: New York. And throwing the bundles in puddles outside the candy stores, they should be more careful.
This was the third day of rain, drenching the already-drenched city. Odd items flowed in the gutters: Popsicle wrappers, good for stockings if you send them in with a quarter; tickets to hit shows; suicide notes; a bottle with a message inside, dated June 7, 1884; a one-inch-long spaceship from the planet Gu which had inadvertently crash-landed at the intersection of Eighth Avenue and West 49th Street and was now being inexorably swept toward its inexorable doom of both itself and its entire microscopic crew; and here and there the three-sixteenths-inch-long roach of a marijuana reefer, dropped by some doomed ten-year-old staggering through the rain in search of cheap kicks. Oh, the stories those gutters could have told — fiction, perhaps, but a scant raindrop (or could it be a teardrop?) from reality — if only there had been someone, some artisan, some born storyteller, to crawl through them and pick up the nuggets within.
But there was no such. There was only the early-morning workers, out with their lunch buckets at six in the morning on the third day of rain, drenching the already-drenched city, walking through the raindrops with their coat collars turned up against the rain, going to work.
The rain fell on the workers, bound for work. And it fell on the evening before’s revelers, homeward bound after a full evening of reveling, dancing up the center stripe of Fifth Avenue in top hat and tails, kissing one another’s wives in the Plaza Fountain, having a pickle at the Gaiety Delicatessen on West 47th Street off Times Square — and assuring one another they were having fun. And it fell on the cop on the beat, the burglar on the roof, the ambulance rushing across Queens with an emergency appendectomy in the back, the homosexuals cowering under trees in all the city’s parks but one ...
And the rain fell on the buildings. It fell on the new Madison Square Garden, the cupcake-shaped Hall of Culture where last night was seen Poundage, the new rock ’n’ roll sensation, and where tonight world-famed Evangelist Billy Cracker would appear, before a somewhat older group. And it fell on the Brooklyn Bridge, Mecca of so many would-be suicides. And it fell on the Bronx Botanical Gardens, which was nice. And it fell on Grand Army Plaza, with its green statues of the Civil War boys in blue. And it fell on the Bryant Park Comfort Station, crossroads of a million private lives.
The Bryant Park Comfort Station, situated on the south side of West 42nd Street midway between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, stands on land once completely under water, back before the turn of the century when this was the Croton Reservoir. But progress must come, even to reservoirs, and in the first decade of this, our fast-paced twentieth century, busy workmen from all over the civilized world and beyond gathered together, filled with high purpose, to empty the Croton Reservoir and erect on the site of its former standing the new central branch of the New York Public Library, and the leafy landscape called Bryant Park, and last but not least the Bryant Park Comfort Station.
The Bryant Park Comfort Station, a low granite structure of Greek Revival design, was designed by the New York architectural firm of Carrère and Hastings, who threw in plans for the library as well. Approximately twenty feet square, the building is dominated by a large opaque oval window on its north face, facing West 42nd Street, and by a large rectangular door on the west face, surmounted by the stirring inscription MEN. A stone filigree makes a tasty design about the upper walls, alternating ivy garlands with cow skulls, evocative of Death Valley: terribly meaningful in the architects’ overall planned impact of visual and tensile impact.
Constructed as a part of the ninth contract let on the Public Library/Bryant Park construction, a contract that included as well the treatment of the main building’s south court, a second comfort station elsewhere on the grounds for females, the approaches to the main building, and the sculpture on the Fifth Avenue front, the contract was awarded to Norcross Brothers Company on November 5, 1908, they just happening to have been the low bid again. The drawings and specifications had actually been turned over to the Park Department in September of 1907, the previous year prior, but it takes a while in our fast-paced modern world to get major projects like the construction of a comfort station actually under way.
In any event, the Bryant Park Comfort Station was completed in early 1911 and continues to stand to this very day, a mute but not inglorious tribute to the Messrs. Carrère and Hastings, and to the low-bidding Norcross Brothers as well. A fine bunch of men all. And a fine Comfort Station.
It’s funny, thought Fred Dingbat. But it wasn’t funny, not really, not ever. And especially not when it was raining. And especially not when it was raining on the Bryant Park Comfort Station, which Fred could see outside his rain-streaked bus windshield, ahead of him on the right, gray and somehow grim, almost menacing, in the early-morning semidarkness and with all the rain drenching an already-drenched city.
It always reminded him of Korea. But then again, what didn’t? A picnic in the park, an evening in front of the television set, a Mets home game, even the Bryant Park Comfort Station, it could all bring it back, those frozen moments in Korea, when ...
But no. He wasn’t going to dwell on that anymore; that was all done and finished and over and behind him and through and kaput and forgotten and terminated and fini and settled and no longer current now. Now was this bus, the 42nd Street Crosstown, a GM Citycruiser, dark green and light green outside, with light green seats inside all in a row, fluorescent lights warming and comforting him in the rearview mirror as he drove the breadth of the city, from Pier 82 at Twelfth Avenue all the way across 42nd Street to United Nations Headquarters at the avenue called First. A microcosm of America; nay, of the world. Beginning at the Hudson River piers, where the ships from all nations put in to give and to receive, the air alive with a polyglot of tongues and languages, the shouting of stevedores, the guttural imprecations of snared smugglers, the weeping of tiny lost Chinese waifs about to fall off the end of a pier; all there, all vibrant and alive, telling of lands far off across the ocean waves. And across the street, the Sheraton Motor Inn, a modern hostelry of cultured rooms, efficient service, and seething undercover goings-on.