New York Dead

Stone said, when they had chosen their food. “I’m told that every time a cop I don’t know looks at me.”
    “All right,” she said, leaning forward, “I want the whole biography, and don’t leave anything out, especially the part about why you’re a cop and not a stockbroker, or something.”
    Stone sighed. “It goes back a generation. My family, on my father’s side, was from western Massachusetts, real Yankees, mill owners.”
    “Barrington, as in Great Barrington, Massachusetts?”
    “I don’t know; I didn’t have a lot of contact with the Massachusetts Barringtons. My father was at Harvard — rather unhappily, I might add — when the stock market crash of ’twenty-nine came. His father and grandfather were hit hard, and Dad had to drop out of school. This troubled him not in the least, because it freed him to do what he really wanted to do.” “Which was?”
    “He wanted to be a carpenter.”
    “A
carpenter
? You mean with saws and hammers?”
    “Exactly. He took it up when he was a schoolboy at Exeter, and he showed great talent. My grandfather was horrified, of course. Carpentry wasn’t the sort of thing a Barrington did. But when he could no longer afford to keep his son in Harvard, well…” “What does this have to do with your being a cop?”
    “I’m coming to that, eventually. Dad got to be something of a radical, politically, as a result of the depression. He gravitated to Greenwich Village, where he fell in with a crowd of leftists, and he earned a living knocking on people’s doors and asking if they wanted anything fixed. He lived in the garage of a town house on West Twelfth Street and didn’t own anything much but his tools.
    “He met my mother in the late thirties. She was a painter and a pianist and from a background much like Dad’s — well-off Connecticut people, the Stones — who’d been wiped out in the crash. She was younger than Dad and very taken with the contrast between his upper-class education and his working-class job.” Cary wrinkled her brow. “Not Matilda Stone.”
    “Yes.”
    “Her work brings good prices these days at the auctions. I hope you have a lot of it.”
    “Only three pictures; her favorites, though.”
    “Go on with the autobiography.”
    “They lived together through the war years — the army wouldn’t take Dad because he was branded as a Communist, even though he never joined the party. They had a tough time. Then, after the war, Dad rented a property on Hudson Street, where he finally was able to have a proper workshop. Some of Mother’s friends, who had done well as artists, began to hire him for cabinetwork in their homes, and, by the time I was born, in ’fifty-two, he was doing pretty well. Mother’s work was selling, too, though she never got anything like the prices it’s bringing now, and, by the time I was old enough to notice, they were living stable, middle-class lives.
    “When I was in my teens, Dad had quite a reputation as an artist-craftsman; he was building libraries in Fifth Avenue apartments and even designing and making one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture. The Barringtons and the Stones were very far away, and I didn’t hear much about my forebears. Somehow, though, my parents’ backgrounds filtered down into my life. There were always books and pictures and music in the house, and I suppose I had a sort of Yankee upbringing, once removed.” “Did you go to Harvard, like your father?”
    “No; that would have infuriated him. I went to NYU and walked to class every day. By about my junior year, I had decided to go to law school. I didn’t have any real clear idea about what lawyers actually did — neither did a lot of my classmates in law school, for that matter — but, somehow, it sounded good. I did all right, I guess, had a decent academic record, and, in my senior year, the New York City Police Department had a program to familiarize law students with police work. I worked part-time in a station house, I rode around in a blue-and-white, and I just loved it. The cops treated me like the whitebread college kid I was, but it didn’t matter, the bug had bit. I took the police exam, and, almost immediately after I got my law degree, I enrolled in the Police Academy. In a way, I think I was imitating my father’s choice of a working-class life.” “You never took the bar?”
    “I couldn’t be bothered with that. I was hot to be a cop.”
    “Are you still?”
    “Yes, sort of. I love