Free Visible City by Tova Mirvis Page A

and once again reachable, his dread descended. He had one message from Nina, four from Richard. He’d call Nina later, but Richard couldn’t be put off so easily. Afraid that the sounds of the street would give him away, Jeremy waited to call Richard until he’d snuck back into his office.
    “Where were you?” Richard demanded when Jeremy reached him. “You can’t be out of touch like this. The client has been waiting all afternoon. The neighborhood activists convinced the local community board that there’s support to block the project. There’s an emergency meeting of the Land Use Committee tomorrow. The client’s already in a hurry, and now these reactionary groups with no sense of financial realities are determined to create a series of roadblocks.”
    It was a speech Jeremy had heard countless times, and until now he had agreed without thinking about it. But the words remade themselves. Richard was speaking a language he’d ceased to understand.
    “Some of these old buildings really should be landmarked. They’re beautiful,” Jeremy said.
    Richard laughed, though it sounded more like he was choking. “No one has touched this building in forty years. Are we supposed to save it just for the sake of saving it?” he asked, and rattled off a list of what needed to be done. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, Jeremy, but your heart isn’t in your work.”
    Jeremy was afraid to say anything, except to promise that he would get started right away. He followed Richard’s instructions but did the bare minimum, producing the kind of sloppy work he’d always derided in other lawyers. He’d once worked so slavishly, paying attention to every last detail, in order to see another Royalton building fill in the skyline, to reap millions for clients who didn’t know his name. All those nights of never coming home when he said he would, of forgetting he was anything other than his work. If the deal fell apart, all he’d feel was relief.
    He printed out extra copies of the documents he had drafted and put them in his briefcase, not yet sure what he was planning to do with them. Taking newfound pleasure in defiance, Jeremy read Claudia Stein’s article about John La Farge’s work for Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s mansion, which had once stood on the corner of 58th Street and Fifth Avenue. Cornelius died unexpectedly in 1899, and in 1926, with commercial buildings encroaching all around, his wife sold it to make way for what would eventually become Bergdorf Goodman. Knowing what the house and its art meant to her husband, she tried to preserve many of the great works contained inside, dividing them among museums and family residences.
    Many of La Farge’s murals and windows were moved either to museums in the city or to the Breakers, the Vanderbilts’ summer home in Newport, Rhode Island. But not everything could be accounted for, and while most scholars believed that any missing works were of little consequence, Claudia Stein had become convinced that there had once existed inside that mansion a stained-glass window as important as any others La Farge had made.
    Jeremy kept reading, no longer caring how late it was. She had identified several cartoon paintings that were studies for figures that didn’t correspond to any La Farge creation that existed. In his studio records, she found expenditures for orders of glass billed to the Vanderbilt family that didn’t correspond to any known project. She detailed an interview with a Vanderbilt descendant who remembered a striking window in the house with a blue background unlike any he’d ever seen. A relative’s photo album produced a grainy image in which, she claimed, the outline of an unidentified window appeared faintly in the background.
    When Jeremy next looked out the window, he imagined stained-glass windows unveiled from behind walls, and dark subway tunnels giving way to unexpected bursts of light.

     
     
     
     
    Nina spent the night in front of the