75
A couple of hours later, at 10:10 A.M. that Monday, Amalia and Malcolm and I disembarked from the city bus at the corner of National Avenue a
nd 52nd Street, as we had done the previous Thursday. Across the avenue stood Kalomirakis Pinakotheke, where Europe in the Age of Monarchy had finished its run on Sunday. First National Bank and its thirty-story financial center towered behind us, and for a couple of blocks in every direction stood imposing and richly detailed historic buildings.
On the ride in from our neighborhood, I’d discovered that Amalia knew almost as much about architecture as she did about art, and she had stories to tell about the buildings and the people who designed them. She never acted like a know-it-all, never made me feel clueless by comparison. Instead, knowledge flowed from that girl like cool air from an electric fan. The longer you listened, the more you wanted to hear, because the things she knew and the words she used to convey them made the world around you clearer, brighter.
“Where do we start?” I asked.
Malcolm said, “Right here, the bank, it’s so radical. You’ll love it.”
I had never been inside a bank before, and I thought they must be kidding me. “But we don’t have any money to put in or take out.”
“The lobby is a public space,” Amalia explained. “And one of the most beautiful. Anyone can go inside. Anyone. There was a time, not so long ago, when architecture was as much about beauty as function. This place opened in 1931. It’s brilliant Deco. It always gives me goose bumps.”
The facade of the bank, before the tower began above it, was perhaps forty feet high and at least four times that wide. A vast rectangular frieze spanned the front of the limestone structure, a pattern of geometric shapes—mostly circles and triangles—arranged in an arresting pattern. At the top of the steps were eight pairs of bronze-and-beveled-glass doors, and we entered at the north end.
I know Amalia had much to say about the immense, spectacular lobby, but I don’t remember any of that. It is lost to me as a consequence of what happened next. The last words of hers I remember that day were spoken as I passed through the heavy door behind her and looked up in wonder at the massive columns supporting the barrel-vaulted ceiling. Perhaps forty feet overhead, suspended from the apex of the vault and racing its length were stylized horses, studies in the liquidity of equine grace, cast from stainless steel.
“Isn’t it glorious, Jonah?” When I turned my attention from the ceiling to her lovely face, she looked so happy when she said, “Isn’t it glorious what people can do, what wonderful things they can create when they’re free and when they believe everything is important, everything has meaning, when they think even a bank lobby has to please the eye and lift the heart?”
A few dozen people were doing their banking. There were maybe twenty tellers. Behind a stainless-steel balustrade, bank officers of rank unknown to me were stationed at a fleet of desks, working on documents or manning their phones, or serving customers who sat with them. Considering its grand dimensions and hard surfaces of stone and metal, the lobby should have been noisy, voices ricocheting from vault to floor, to pillar, to post. Due to the amazing finesse of the architects, however, the enormous chamber was hushed, as though everyone must be whispering to one another when in fact they weren’t.
Although I can’t remember what Amalia said to me and Malcolm, I recall wandering through the lobby almost as if through a joyous, exhilarating fantasy film. Each time that I thought I had seen the best of the layered Deco details, I noticed another more enchanting than anything before.
Each teller’s window flanked by shimmering stainless-steel fluting and surmounted by a semicircular pediment of steel in which had been cast the head of the Statue of Liberty, the rays of her crown each pointing to a stylized star …
The pale-gold granite floor inlaid with intricate medallions of black, blue, and green marble, surrounded by a border of the same …
Four evenly spaced enormous chandeliers of stainless steel, each with many bulbs and six branches, a bronze sculpture of what seemed to be the robed Miss Liberty seated at the end of each branch …
Spaced along the center of the lobby were tall tables of carved green marble, at which people stood to prepare deposit slips and to endorse checks before going to the tellers’ windows. As I was passing one of these, a small golden feather floated down before my face, in every way identical to the one that had turned from white to gold in the pendant that I wore under my shirt.
I halted, startled, and the feather floated in a fixed position less than an arm’s length in front of my face, as though the draft that had brought it to me now held it motionless for my inspection.
If the architecture and exquisite decoration of the bank lobby had drawn me into a state of quiet rapture, the feather added to that the quality of a dream, specifically the singularity of movement in some dreams, when the dreamer and everything he experiences progress in slow motion.
I reached to my throat and pinched the silver chain and pulled the pendant from beneath my shirt.
The Lucite heart, transparent in the chandelier light, remained intact, but it contained no feather.
As the pendant slipped from my fingers and dangled at chain’s end, the airborne feather began to move south through the lobby.
The voices in the hushed chamber faded to silence, and though people moved in slow motion around me, not one foot struck a sound from the stone floor.
I could hear only my heart, which beat as slow as a drum in a funeral cortege, surely too slow to sustain me.
Like a deep-sea diver walking against a resisting mass of water, I followed the feather farther toward the southern end of the lobby.
Although I didn’t understand what was happening, I knew I moved now toward the moment that I’d been anticipating for so long.
I seemed to float, to drift, my feet not quite touching the floor.
A sensation that should have been exhilarating instead became a source of fear, as though I might slip the bonds of gravity and never come down again.
I passed two of the tall marble tables, and the feather stopped at a third.
As it had drifted down into my line of sight, so now it settled farther, until I saw beneath the table a brown-leather briefcase.