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Summary
IV. Tracks
Jimmy and his mother are living at a hotel. Lily never feels well, and Jimmy is sad. He is disconnected from other children and has taken on a caregiver role as Lily’s health has deteriorated. Jimmy uses his imagination to escape his reality. As they prepare to eat a meal delivered by room service, Jimmy asks his mother which historical figure she would like to be during dinner. While they eat, Jimmy shares random facts that he knows. Lily tells Jimmy that he is all she has. When Jimmy returns from buying ice cream after dinner, Lily asks Jimmy to call his Aunt Emily. When his aunt arrives, Jimmy is sent to his room where he reads encyclopedia entries.
Emile tries to convince Madam Rigaud to take him on as an employee. He complains to her that women are only interested in how much money he has.
Nellie arrives at George’s office to end their affair. George tries to convince her to leave Gus and live with him, but she refuses. George finds comfort in throwing himself into his work.
Bud makes a friend, Matty, and they get a drink together. Bud does not tell Matty his real name. Matty gets into a bar fight and punches someone. The two men, now both drunk, go to a seedy bar together.
Phineas P. Blackhead is the corrupt owner of an import and export firm. He watches a ship come into the harbor from his office and tells his employee to meet the inspector at the ship. A dishonest Phineas has told the inspector exactly what he needs to do. Phineas then invites two men into his office to discuss a railroad and docking matter that he is sure can be resolved amicably.
Lily has a stroke, and Jimmy will return to school next week. Jimmy is upset and feels completely alone. He imagines an entire fight with a belligerent boy while he is in his room. Aunt Emily takes him to her home, where he is expected to play with his cousins. He emotionlessly agrees to whatever his Aunt Emily says. Having been sheltered from other children, Jimmy is uncomfortable around James and Maisie. He’s excited when he realizes he can see trainyards from the window of Aunt Emily’s palatial apartment. James and Maisie do not appreciate the trains the way Jimmy does. When the family sits down for dinner with a guest, Emily’s drunk cousin Joe Harland interrupts them. A former stockbroker who has lost everything, Joe tells Jimmy that how things turn out is not always a person’s fault.
Congo is back in town in between stints at sea. Emile has been working at Delmonico’s and has been saving money. He is trying to convince Madame Rigaud to marry him, and she’s putting him off. The two decide it would be a good idea for Emile to try to make her jealous.
Ed is working hard at his accounting job and a man is trying to convince him to invest in the stock market. He promises that it’s a sure thing. Ed turns him down, as he believes in working for his money. He believes that the stock market is full of crooks. Still, he cannot help himself from dreaming about what it would be like to act on the tip and become wealthy.
V. Steamroller
Lily has died. Jimmy wanders the cemetery on the day of her funeral in Yonkers. He’s lost without her, as they were each other’s world. Jimmy thinks back to being a small child in his crib with his mother nearby.
Emile executes his plan to make Madame Rigaud jealous, believing it has worked. He asks her when they will get married, and she says the following month. He tries to get her to agree to marry him the following Wednesday and proceeds to explain how he will expand her business when they move it uptown.
Ellen, now going by the name Elaine, is on a train with John “Jojo” Oglethorpe. The two are married and returning from Atlantic City. It is not yet clear why Ellen married Jojo, as she does not seem happy. She has a flashback to their trip and her careful avoidance of any contact with Jojo as she gets back into bed one night.
Jimmy is sixteen and having lunch with his Uncle Jeff at an affluent club. Uncle Jeff tells him that he will take care of him just as he does his own son James. Jimmy slips into the same robotic agreement that he exercised as a boy. But when he leaves the club, Jimmy decides that he will not take his uncle up on his offer. The idea of working in finance is unacceptable to him.
Bud is living in a shelter. He begins to tell a fellow homeless man his story. As a young boy, he was severely beaten by a man he was told was his father, but Bud knows the man wasn’t his real father. One day, Bud killed the man in a field and calmly went into the house and made coffee. While there was an entire roll of the man’s money in the house, he only took $10 when he left for the city. He wanted to be a needle in a haystack. Bud shares that he dreamed of living in New York City when he was young. Now he’s here and it’s a nightmare. He cannot find work and constantly looks over his shoulder for the police. His shelter mate tells him they should go upstate the next day to retrieve the rest of the money. Bud agrees but has no intention of doing this. He goes out, buys breakfast, and then takes his own life by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge.
Analysis
A heavy feeling of loss permeates these two chapters. There is the palpable loss of life and a more abstract loss of hope. The city continues to bear down on its inhabitants, blowing grit and soot in their faces and stripping them of their self-worth. When the characters are imagined anywhere but New York, it’s easy to blame the city’s demands and expectations for their self-destructive choices. While some of them, particularly Ellen and George, would have these tendencies anyway, the characters might not be driven to the same fate without the relentless need for status and wealth at their heels. Besides loss, there is constant movement throughout these chapters. Whether the characters themselves are on the move or are still, the city swirls around them nonstop, again giving the sense that the city does not care about the fate of the characters. It's moving forward with or without them.
Emile is trying to establish himself and climb the social ladder by marrying Madame Rigaud. For her part, she has vowed to never give a man power over her again. She will not have to though because it is Emile who has decided that he will be a kept man. By virtue of his marriage to Madame Rigaud, Emile forgoes his dreams of a self-made future. He has accepted that it will be easier to marry himself into a higher class than earn it. While this is not one of the most self-destructive acts in the book by far, as he does seem to enjoy spending time with Madame Rigaud, Emile is giving up happiness so that he can have some comfort in the harsh city. Although he is disgusted by so much of the upper class, he desperately wants to be a part of it. He wants stability and money, and so he becomes bound to the city by marrying Madame Rigaud. He is on the way to fulfilling his goals, yet is not altogether happy despite his actions.
In his only appearance without Ellen, the toxicity of New York City life nearly tempts Ed into making a terrible decision. Ed works incredibly hard and makes an honest living as an accountant, and so he turns down a stock market tip that a co-worker promises is a sure thing. Ed is too wise to believe that the tip can possibly pay off. He is not someone to deal with anything intangible. At a time when the stock market was becoming something more accessible for the common man, Ed steadfastly avoids it. Of course, Ed is correct in ignoring the tip. He knows that he made the right decision to stay away, but Ed can’t help but think about how his life would change if he jumped on the tip and it paid off. Just as he and Ellen used to dream of what they would do with money, Ed daydreams about how he could pay for Ellen’s education, and they could plan an extravagant cruise. Ed is one of many characters who will never experience the wealth the city offers to a select few.
In marrying Jojo Oglethorpe, Ellen takes her first definitive step into an unhappy adulthood. She, like Emile, tries to take a shortcut to success and marries Jojo because the match will improve her career. Having been raised in New York City, Ellen has been surrounded by the wealth that fuels it since childhood. Ed, on the other hand, was raised outside of the city and never falls prey to the glitz and glamor that Ellen finds so irresistible. Ellen did not find the kind of success that she was looking for as an actress in her own right, so she came up with a way to move up New York’s social and economic ranks. The only problem is that she has traded her happiness. She wills herself to be happy in her new marriage, but she is not. The couple changes trains at Manhattan Transfer on the way home from their honeymoon. The sole purpose of this station, which operated from the 1910s through the 1930s, was to allow passengers to board other trains. The train station, in addition to being an example of ubiquitous mass transit, is a stop along the way and not a destination, much like Ellen’s marriage to Jojo. It’s already obvious that this marriage will not be the last of Ellen’s bad decisions.
When Bud tells his sheltermate his story, it is clear why he is always paranoid. The scene he thought about while getting a shave in Chapter II is a flashback to the murder. A chilling detail to the troubling story is how Bud calmly goes into the house after committing murder and makes coffee. The entire story brings Bud’s sanity into question, compounded by how he now sits and matter-of-factly tells a virtual stranger the story. If Bud had been able to find work and dignity in New York, he might have been able to withstand life in the city. New York is not only hostile to Bud’s appearance and lack of money, but he is further marginalized because he does not have a union card. The powerful unions have a monopoly on labor in the city, further keeping Bud from any inclusion. In New York, there is even division among the working class. Bud is left with no hope and nothing but time in which he is haunted by his past. The city in turn succeeds and forces him to give up.
