Prelude

On a perfect October Saturday in 1997 my friend Gil and I arrived at the side of an old marble quarry nestled in a flat valley in central Vermont. Occasional white and gray clouds loitered overhead, while all around the quarry yellow leaves fell from white birch trees. Under my feet lay an exposed slab of gray granite: the solid earth. I studied the black water in the old quarry. The water rippled clear, and pure, and oh-so-suitable for a dive. We knew little about the place except that the quarry extended far underground, forming a cave. Prudence and caution told us not to go in, but there would be a lot to see, and I was excited.

            I stood on a granite ledge, which rose about four feet from the water. Here and there rusted iron rods and rings embedded into the stone, spoke of the old operation that took marble from the earth, leaving this pit. At my feet I saw no reflection, only clear water, and opportunity. I could see the muted shape of a vehicle, lying upside down. What else waited down there? My excitement mounted.

            Moments later we were in the water, attired in neoprene wetsuits, to protect us from the anticipated cold, and a thousand dollars’ worth of scuba equipment. That car was to be our first waypoint, we agreed, and then we’d see what we’d find. In fifteen feet of water, we encountered a Jeep Cherokee missing all four wheels. How did it get here if it has no wheels? A wrecked dirt bike lay nearby. Just beyond, the water deepened dramatically. Gil and I adjusted our gear so that we neither floated nor sank, but swam across that intriguing depth. We released a small amount of air from our buoyancy vests and slipped downward into a space that reminded me of a cathedral. Neatly chiseled walls on all four sides grew farther apart as we descended. Gil slowly angled away from me, suspended with nothing between us except clear, frigid, motionless water. His underwater lights threw sharp yellow beams, like the light sabers in Star Wars. I examined my gauges and found the water was only forty-two degrees Fahrenheit. The roaring noise of my exhaust bubbles came close, louder and more noticeable: I knew I was swimming at a depth of about one hundred feet. The bottom was still twenty feet below me. I shined my light saber onto the tire of a giant earth-moving vehicle, and a wooden rowboat. Then I studied Gil’s bubbles, which rose inexorably, as ever-expanding mushroom caps gleaming in the yellow beam from my light. Far above, where the walls of this great stone cathedral came almost together, I saw a very small, blue, bright square the surface. I turned round, surveying the rock walls in three quadrants. They defined the experience, and this space. The fourth side was a black cave. That place’s space made me wonder.

            How could this extraordinary place exist?  Only divers come here.  And yet, it was there because something real happened, long ago. There was no marble to be seen—it had been cut out and taken away. As I swam in that old quarry I was puzzled: what do you call this kind of place?

PART 1

 Design

Sequence

At lunch Monday, I stole a few minutes in our firm’s library at lunch to find out what I could about Vermont marble. I had been working at a small architectural firm, Simcoe Verbridge, for about a year, and I had not really explored the library. Of course, I was well acquainted with the Avery Library at Columbia, where I had studied architecture and urban planning, but while there I had never looked up marble. There were quite a few marble buildings in New York, but I never wondered where the material came from.  Now I had a vague idea a marble quarry, of course.

The library at the firm wasn’t much, just a few dozen books randomly shelved in the hall at the top of the stairs to the third floor. Most of the books were engineering texts; one book was a photo collection of Walter Gropius’s work, and several others dealt with urban designs. One book, Drafting Room Practice, had a bookplate indicating the book belonged to one Roy W. Burger of Santa Barbara, California, 1937. My mother was born that year. How did that  book get here?

How did I get here, a young architect at a firm in the still-gritty former mill town of Manchester, the largest city in New Hampshire? I had loved New York’s excitement, its social possibilities, and of course, its varied architecture (except the endless brownstones). But I didn’t want a crowded or fast life. I wanted clean air and to be able to see the stars at night. So I came home and found Simcoe Verbridge. In the interviews, Alan Simcoe and Jayne Verbridge said they would be delighted to find someone with Big City credentials. Within a week I was at work in Manchester.

We were located on the second and third floors in an old mill building in Manchester, New Hampshire. Outside was the Merrimack River, the Amoskeag hydroelectric dam upstream, to the right in my view. Paralleling the other side of the river was Interstate 293. My job there was pretty typical for a small-city architect. I designed houses, additions, and from time to time I worked on municipal projects, like parking garages, or fire stations. I was not a “celebrity architect,” and I didn’t want to be one, either.

As I crouched to look at the books on the bottom shelf, Jayne stepped in behind me and asked if she could help me find something.

“I’m looking for some information about marble as a building material,” I said quietly.

Jayne said nothing.

“There are marble buildings all across the country.” I looked up at the forty year-old partner. I didn’t know much about her except that she was a very talented designer and a part-time rock ’n’ roller with a band in Portsmouth. “The Supreme Court in Washington is one.” I said thinking out loud, as Jayne stood by. “How can I find out where a building’s marble came from?”

“You should be able to look that up.”

“At the Avery Library, not here,” I said, instantly regretting that I had left New York.

“I have something that might help. Come with me to my office, and I’ll show you.” Jayne flipped her long dyed-black hair from her left shoulder to her right. “But tell me, why the interest?”

I described scuba diving in the quarry. “Isn’t that dangerous?” she asked, pulling a slim paperback from the shelves along the wall.

“We know what we’re doing.”

Jayne thumbed through the book, replaced it, and took out another. “ I still have one of my father’s books. It could be helpful, if I remember right.”

“Why would you have that?” I asked. “You do interior designs.”

“My dad gave it to me a long time ago, before he died.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I stammered.

“It’s okay. He was killed in a motorcycle accident when I was in college, more than twenty years ago. He was a structural engineer. He thought this book might interest me. Ah! Here it is. I’d never part with it.”

Jayne handed me the book, with a tan cover, about eight by ten inches, two inches thick, matte pages. “I think there’s a chapter near the beginning on structural marble,” she said. “Why don’t you take it home.”

“This book’s precious to you. I can study it here.”

“Wherever you like,” Jayne said softly. “Just, when you’re done, please tell me what you find.”

Jayne’s book was filled with information I never knew about marble. According to the first chapter, “In the warm, shallow Ordovician sea, primitive life abounded. Five million centuries ago, trilobites, corals, mollusks and other animals colonized the sea floor. After each tiny animal died, its hard shell fell to the sea floor. Over the course of seventy thousand centuries, the shells accumulated. The shells reached astonishing depths: thousands and thousands of feet in some regions of the sea floor.

“The land was forbiddingly stark, barren rock supporting no life. There was no ice anywhere on the planet, either. In the vast, desolate expanses of time, storms eroded the land, bit by bit, little by little.  Minerals, sand and silt washed into the sea, and settled onto the shells layered on the bottom of the ocean..

            “While life thrived and evolved in the sea, the Earth’s surface, too, changed. Its large sections moved slowly, ever so slowly, in such a way as to cause the warm shallow sea, swarming with life, to be displaced by land. As the sea and its life gradually disappeared, the shells eventually solidified into limestone.

            “Over the next ten thousand centuries, the planet’s crust shifted, broke and sheared. Some rock was buried under miles of surface material. Mountains were built up and gradually eroded. Rock layers folded. Newer rock was shoved beneath older rock. Rocks buried deep in mountains now called the Taconics recrystallized. Heat and pressure metamorphosed the rock. The limestone became marble.”

I set the book down on my desk, and stared out the window toward the Merrimack. How many quarries were there, I asked myself. I looked at the book’s cover. Who wrote this? Strange sea animals metamorphosed into limestone and then marble. New Hampshire was the Granite State. Maybe Vermont should have been the Marble State. And Manchester would be the brick city, because all the mill buildings along the river were brick.

Chapter three explained some of the challenges of marble as a building material, as well as things I had never heard of in rock grain, cutters, cracks, coloration, and so on. There were also pen-and-ink sketches of the Supreme Court in Washington, and the New York Public Library. I had seen and studied both, I realized, but I didn’t know they were Vermont marble. What if the stone had came from the quarry we dove last weekend?

I burst into Jayne’s office, without knocking. She was on the phone and putting on lipstick at the same time. I tried not to notice that she must have been going out after work.

“That was fast,” Jayne said, hanging up.

I threw the book down on her uncluttered desk, open to the sketches. “These buildings,” I spluttered excitedly. “I spent quite a lot of time at the New York Public Library when I was at Columbia. If I’d only known.”

“Only known what?” The white straw sticking out of Jayne’s can of Pepsi had red lipstick on it.

“Um, if the marble, the library,” I actually didn’t have any idea.

My girlfriend, Peri, and I had been planning to go to New York to see some graduate school friends, so it was a perfect opportunity for me to see what I could find. She went to nursing school at NYU, lived in Brooklyn. We met at our church, the Fourth Universalist. An old girlfriend had gotten me involved there. It wasn’t near Columbia, and I liked the rector and the welcoming congregation. Peri and I both were in the choir. After a while I realized I was wasting my time with Lyn, and really wanted to be with Peri. So I sent Lyn packing, and before long Peri and I had been together for three years.

She was more eager than I was to return to New York, but once there I made a quick trip to Columbia’s Avery Library of Architecture. I knew that there I would find some answers about the New York Public Library and its marble. After all, I had spent many graduate school hours there, so I knew what I would find. I bent over to kiss Peri at six-three I stood a foot taller than Peri and assured her that I’d be only a few hours.

As a New Hampshire architect designing additions and fire stations, I didn’t really feel entitled to the regal treatment I received when I darkened the Avery’s doorstep. The librarians recognized me! I was merely one of the hundreds of architecture students that pass through Columbia. “Henry Peabody, what brings you here? It seems like yesterday that you graduated,” Priscilla Sukoski, the librarian, greeted me.

            I must have blushed, because I felt my face get hot. I took a seat at her desk, in the same chair I used when I was a graduate student. “It’s only been a little more than a year since I graduated,” I protested mildly.

             “Are you still with that nice girl?”

            “Yes, and we live in Manchester, New Hampshire. Peri found a job in the hospital there, and I joined a local firm. We might get married someday.”

            “Oh, I knew everything would turn out okay for you,” Mrs. Sukoski said, leaning toward me. “But you didn’t come here just to see me.”

            “I wish I could say that, but I’m actually looking for some information.” I had brought only a legal pad and a mechanical pencil with me. “I want to look at a dissertation by C. Channing Blake on the architecture of Carrère & Hastings, you know, the architects who designed the New York Public Library.”

            “Yes, I remember Channing Blake,” the librarian smiled. “I can get that for you.” Mrs. Sukoski efficiently bustled out of the carpeted room to get what I hoped would tell me where the quarry’s marble went.

            I read on pages 233 and 234 of Channing Blake’s dissertation that the New York Public Library’s marble came from The Norcross-West Quarry in Dorset, Vermont, and not from the quarry Gil and I dove. But when I read the dissertation, I realized I wanted to know more about Carrère. I called Jayne to let her know I’d be in New York another day. Peri worked three twelve-hour days a week and wasn't conflicted by another day in the Large Apple.

            The next day I went to the New York Public Library’s archives to study some very obscure manuscript diaries of some of Carrère & Hastings’s employees. The archives had some interesting stuff, and I learned about Carrère, but not much about Hastings. It seems that John Carrère had wanted to write a book about the New York Public Library, but never did.

As an undergraduate I briefly studied classical architecture, but never thought about it again. At Columbia, I learned about Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and the other fantastic modernist architects who changed the world. And then, deep within the New York Public Library, I read about columns and pilasters, vaults, and capitals. It was like a new language to me, and I rubbed my eyes.

Peri’s Kia was an inexpensive, lightweight shell of a car. Even when I put the seat all the way back, there wasn’t enough room for my long legs. She drove carefully, often too slowly, in the Merritt Parkway’s right lane. We were passed all the time by expensive, new BMWs and Saabs. The Kia, though, got great gas mileage, and I didn’t complain.

            “You were in the library for a long time,” she said.

            Peri hadn’t ever been to the New York Public Library, so I tried to explain what it was like. “I went to the archives, a room with several large tables off the main reading room. They bring the materials to you.”

            “You must have found something; you’re kinda quiet.” She looked quickly at me, and then glanced in the rearview mirror.

            I waited a few minutes before addressing this. Peri shifted to the left lane to pass an old, slow-moving Cadillac. I clasped my hands behind my head. “I think I’m onto something very important.”

            Peri whipped me a glance. “How can you know it’s important?”

            “Well, you see, there were two architects, Thomas Hastings and John Carrère. Carrère & Hastings was their firm.”

“I thought you were trying to find out about the marble quarry,” Peri interrupted.

“Well, that turned out to be easy. Marble was taken from different parts of Vermont, not just the quarry Gil and I had visited. I went to the library, since it’s of Vermont marble, to see if there was anything else.” Peri washed the windshield; the wipers oscillated back and forth. “There must be more, and I’ll just have to see where it leads.” I put my hands in my lap, feeling satisfied for now. As the Kia whined back to New Hampshire, I fell asleep.

            Months passed. I thought marble and libraries when I could. Jayne was a dedicated boss. She hectored my to produce, produce, produce—drawings, engineering information, and ideas. I sometimes envied Peri’s job, even though her hours at the hospital were very scattered. She certainly didn’t have such a demanding employer.

            Gradually I started to think about Carrère’s book. I wanted to know more about the marble, and why Carrère wanted to write a book. What was it going to be? Why didn’t he finish, or even start? What were Hastings’s methods, and did they provoke Carrère somehow? I learned that the Library of Congress in Washington was in possession of Carrère’s diaries, so I went there to read them. The Library of Congress had only two volumes of the eleven that Carrère supposedly wrote. Perhaps there were clues to the unwritten book in the missing volumes.

            At the Library of Congress red carpet stretched in front of me for miles and miles along a corridor leading toward discovery and accomplishment. Building additions and fire stations somehow weren’t so interesting any more. I looked into Carrère’s family history. He had had three daughters. One died an infant; one lived into her twenties; and the other, Anna, never married, but lived to about eighty. There was only one living descendant of John Carrère, but he didn’t know anything about his ancestor the architect.

            Carrère was one of three brothers, as was I. Only one survived him, and in 1949, that brother’s house had burned down. I wondered whether the missing diaries went up with the house. I’d never know. I took back what I had just said about fire stations.

            Back in New Hampshire, I was awakened early one morning in May by the vernal songs of robins and chickadees outside our bedroom window. I had never heard spring songbirds in New York. Peri rolled over. Before I let her go back to sleep, I whispered, “I’ve started writing Carrère’s book.”

            “When?” she sleepily asked.

            “Every day, all the time,” I said, sitting up, dazzled by the early morning sunlight streaming through the crack between the window shade and the casing. Little did I know how one thing would lead to another, and to another.

            Peri nodded off again, saying, “That’s fine, honey.”

Carrère

Carrère waited as his partner Thomas Hastings made another change to the drawings for a client’s country house. It was time for lunch. “One more thing, here. Another thing here, and here,” Hastings bubbled. He furiously erased, drew, erased, and drew again. His eyes seemed to pop out of his head; his every nerve was on fire. And as Carrère watched, he wondered; Does Hastings own the drawing, or is it the other way around?

“Let’s go to lunch,” Carrère finally suggested. “Aren’t you done yet?”

Hastings agreed, “There’s one more thing, though. I’ve got . . . to . . .” He was reluctant to stop what he was doing. “It’s good for now. I can always change it later, if I want.”

They bounded down the stairs to Broadway. “Compare New York to Paris,” Carrère barked as they jostled their way through the crowd. Unbroken lines of men dodged and weaved in and out like runners on a football field, crowding the sidewalk, each man in pursuit of an objective. Carrère was 39, making a living as an architect in New York. Before that he studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He lived in Lausanne as an adolescent, was born in Rio to American parents. “Paris has a monument in every public square,” said Carrère. A gentleman stopped abruptly in front of him to gaze into a shop window, and Carrère bumped into him. “’Scuse me,” he said.

It was almost noon on that bright late April day in 1897. “The Arc de Triomphe is one,” agreed Hastings, who was two years younger than Carrère. A stooped man walking head-down nearly collided with him. The partners ducked down the three steps into their usual lunch spot at 163 Broadway. The pale yellow sign hanging out front proclaimed “Homemade” in black letters. The small café was dark; it always took a moment for their eyes to adjust.

“Will it be the usual?” called out Vincent, the counter clerk upon seeing the architects. Vincent was an older man with bushy, graying eyebrows, reminiscent of an amiable cobbler Carrère had visited one summer long ago while vacationing with his grandmother in Dieppe. Gran had brought him to Maurice’s shoe repair because the heel of one of his shoes had started to fall off. Maurice had given the young Carrère a chocolate candy.

“Soup and crackers for me,” Carrère called out to Vincent.

“Minestrone?”

Carrère nodded.

Vincent reached for a plate and two bowls. “What about you, Mister Hastings?”

“Tomato and celery soup, and rye crackers,” said Hastings, ready with his reply.

Hastings and Carrère made themselves comfortable at the counter, side-by side on wooden stools. Carrère leaned on the counter and studied Hastings. All he saw was clear, unalloyed ambition—nothing to suggest anything like what had happened to Carrère’s friend Horace Avery.

Hastings shook his head slowly, then smiled, “The Arc de Triomphe at the head of the Champs-Elysses. I love Paris.” 

Carrère’s thoughts turned back to his sick friend. It seemed like a very long time ago that Horace, the prolific portrait artist, had gone into the hospital. He had simply vanished, disappearing from Carrère’s life, from society. Horace had gone crazy; Carrère wanted to know why.

They had become friends at a farm stand in Staten Island. Carrère loved telling the tale: a bin of summer squash at a farmer’s market tipped over and dumped its contents on a woman whose arms were already full with vegetables. They both had rushed to assist the woman. In the commotion Horace and Carrère became acquainted, and by chance discovered that they were in related professions. Within a couple of months they were dining together, discussing art, each enjoying the company of the other introspective artist.

Carrère thought of his first visit with Avery in the hospital. “Horace, it’s me, your friend, John Carrère,” he announced cautiously. In the air hung a faint medicinal odor which reminded him of the infirmary at school in France, when he was young. It was not an infirmary, though. It was a place for people who are sick-of-the-mind. Horace had been there for a few months.

Avery was seated toward the window, back to the door, in a brown wicker chair, his shoulders covered with a white blanket. At first Carrère could see only the top of Horace’s head. He walked slowly around to see his artist-friend, whose white angular hands were folded on his lap. Avery’s blue hospital gown was open at the neck; his collarbones protruded unnaturally, plainly revealing how much weight he had lost. His once thick mop of brown hair was now thin, tangled and substantially gray. Carrère was stunned at the change in his friend’s appearance: Horace was only 31.

A half-empty glass of water sat on a table beside the chair. The dirty window was open a few inches, and spring breezes drifted into Avery’s room, carrying vernal aromas of life and hope. Alas, Horace appeared hopeless, and his condition made Carrère uneasy. “It’s a nice day to be outside, Horace.”

Horace’s sunken eyes were gray and lifeless. Not a flicker of recognition— not even a shrug—indicated he was aware of Carrère’s presence. Carrère looked around the room for another chair. He found a steel one near the porcelain sink, carefully moved it near Horace’s, and sat. “Horace,” he repeated in a strong, clear voice, “it’s John Carrère here to see you. Miss Bough told me you were here.”

Horace stirred, shifting his weight in the chair, and looked at Carrère, this time with recognition. He mumbled something unintelligible. A rotund, well-endowed nurse entered carrying a tray with an apple and a fresh glass of water. She wore the customary white nurse’s dress, white cap, and round-toed white shoes. Seeing Carrère she demanded to know who he was, and with whose permission he was there.

“My name is John Carrère, and I am visiting my friend, ma’am,” he said. “I want to see if there’s any way I can help to make him well again.”

“Oh, I don’t think you can,” the haughty nurse said. He’s going to be here a long time, and you shouldn’t be here at all.”

With the nurse’s arrival, Horace became agitated. “I wish you would leave,” he growled at the nurse. He spit into a bowl reserved for the purpose.

“That’s the first thing he has said all day,” the nurse sneered. “He’s not well. Anyone can see that.”

Carrère waited, not knowing what to say or do. This was the first time he had ever visited a mental hospital. Miss Bough, his secretary at work, had warned him that there might be some tension between Horace and the nurses. Then the fat nurse said, ”You have fifteen minutes.” She placed the apple and glass of water on a bedstand beyond Avery’s reach and abruptly left.

“I hate her,” Horace said in a low voice. “I hate this place.” It was an unusual pronouncement from him. Carrère had always known him to keep his opinions to himself. Horace Avery, the fine portrait artist, communicated with a paintbrush. He was a master of visual detail, always finding a unique way of expressing something. And he usually let his paintings express himself rather than words, of all things.

“I can see why,” Carrère agreed. “She’s harsh. I wouldn’t want to see her every morning.”

“It’s worse that that,” Avery explained, straightening in the chair again. “She’s taken away my pencils and books. She won’t let me do anything. I can’t even draw. What’s the point?”

Carrère leaned forward, elbows on his knees, recognizing his friend’s lost, forbidden activity, “This nurse is a witch. I see why you hate her, especially after Miss Bough.  Did you know Miss Bough came to us after you came here? You lost a lot more than your freedom, I’d say.”

Avery stroked a scraggly beard on his chin, and said, “I loved her sweet smile, the way she organized my things, her love of all the things I did but my work! It was everything, my whole life, until-”

“I know.” Carrère slid backward in his chair, and looked at Horace again. He remembered how Horace began to lose weight, couldn’t do his work any more because, as he complained, he wasn’t sleeping well. He babbled incessantly about Poe’s pit, a pit with high steel walls. He wondered if there was some connection between his friend’s artistic sensibilities and his deteriorating state of mind. If this ever happened to his partner, an exuberant artist himself, the firm would be ruined because most of the creative energy would be lost.

Carrère crossed his legs, “You know, Horace, New York is going to build a public library, and we’re going to bid the job.”

“A library?”

“That’s right, a library,” Carrère adjusted a cuff-link. “We haven’t built one before. We’ll have to work hard, and not let anything get in our way if we are going to win this commission.”

“How are you going to make sure of that?” Avery sank a little deeper in his chair.

The nurse reappeared, this time with a clipboard and a thermometer. “Time to take your temperature,” she called out.

Avery sipped from the glass of water. His voice concealed and low, he said, “At least she takes it from my mouth. It used to be from my ass.” He trembled with rage at the thought. “I wish I could get out of here."

“You must leave now, Mister Carrère,” the nurse instructed.

Carrère stood to move out of the nurse’s way. She’s a brute, he thought. “I’ll update you if we win the commission. Please­­” he said as Horace’s figure huddled pathetically in the chair.

“Oh, I’ll be okay,” Horace said in a clarion voice, as if to annoy the nurse. “I want to see this library when it’s done.”

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