{"product_id":"metropolis-isbn-9780812970852","title":"Metropolis","description":"On a freezing night in the middle of a New York winter, a young immigrant is suddenly awakened by a fire in P. T. Barnum’s stable, where he works and sleeps, and soon finds himself at the center of a citywide arson investigation. Determined to clear his name and realize the dreams that inspired his hazardous voyage to America, he will change his identity many times, find himself mixed up with one of the city’s toughest and most enterprising gangs, and fall in love with a smart, headstrong, and beautiful woman. Buffeted by the forces of fate, hate, luck, and passion, our hero struggles to build a life–and just to stay alive–on an epic journey that is at once unique and poignantly emblematic of the American experience.“Rewarding . . . vivid tableaus and high drama . . . immigrant dreams and desires on the scrappy streets of Five Points.”\u003cbr\u003e–The New York Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Engaged with history, artfully structured, told with dashing wit . . . full of passions and perils, desire and deceit . . . Metropolis teems with imagined life, as a good page-turner should.”\u003cbr\u003e–San Jose Mercury News\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Brawny, old-school storytelling . . . a novel as strong and heady as the brew [Gaffney’s] rakes and roustabouts swill by the pint.”\u003cbr\u003e–Newsweek\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Metropolis is more than a literary page-turner; it is also a coming-of-age story for a young and strapping New York.”\u003cbr\u003e–Vanity Fair\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Engrossing . . . fraught with suspense.”\u003cbr\u003e–Elle\u003cb\u003eELIZABETH GAFFNEY\u003c\/b\u003e is an advisory editor of The Paris Review. In addition to teaching writing at New York University, she has translated from German The Arbogast Case (Thomas Hettche), The Pollen Room (Zoë Jenny), and Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany (Ika Hugel-Marshall). Her short fiction has appeared in North American Review, Colorado Review, Brooklyn Review, Mississippi Review, The Reading Room\u003ci\u003e,\u003c\/i\u003e and Epiphany. \u003cb\u003eMetropolis\u003c\/b\u003e is her first novel. To learn more about Elizabeth Gaffney, please visit her website at www.elizabethgaffney.netChapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCASTLE GARDEN\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Hot corn, get your hot corn!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHer voice cut through the clamor of Broadway but attracted no customers  as she made her way south through the teeming crowd, bouncing her  basket on her hip. When she reached the gates of the old fort known as  Castle Garden, where the immigration center was, she flashed a smile at  the guard, entered the premises and quickly sold her corn, several  dozen ears, to the usual cast of hollow-cheeked immigrants. The stuff  had been dried on the cob in the fall and had to be soaked two full  days before boiling, but even so, it had tasted good to her, five years  back, after the unrelenting porridge of the passage from Dublin. Here  and there, ears that had been stripped clean lay discarded in the dirt,  kicked up against the pillars, along with every other sort of garbage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo she’d sold her corn, but it didn’t earn her much, just pennies a  piece. She didn’t mind. Selling hot corn wasn’t why she’d come.  Hot-corn girls were notorious for rounding out their incomes by  stepping into corners and lifting their skirts upon request, but that  wasn’t the sort of compromise Beatrice had chosen to make. She’d found  another way to save up the money to bring her younger brother over, and  to keep her dignity, too.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“That was fine, miss,” said a boy, politely swallowing a belch. “Have  you got any more?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe was just about her brother’s age. Her voice had sounded that Irish  when she had first arrived. Now it was more flexible; she could show  her brogue or not, depending on the situation. She let her voice lilt  just enough to tell him he was at home there, too, but her answer was  no, and she didn’t crack a smile. She had too much to do to linger with  him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe and her friend Fiona generally hit the disembarking passengers  together. They were good, the two of them, could make more money as a  pair than the rest of the girls in the gang put together, not least  because they had fun doing it. They’d never been arrested, not even  once. The jobs they pulled brought in plenty of money, but half the  take went to their boss, just for starters, and then they split the  rest between them. It was better than piecework, but it was taking too  long for her to save up enough for Padric’s ticket. She worried about  what would become of him if she didn’t send for him soon. And so she  had been pleased to learn that morning that Fiona was needed to help on  another job, leaving Beatrice free to go out solo. A small lie or two  when the gang did their weekly accounts would mean she could keep four  times as much as on a usual day, bringing Padric over that much faster.  The only problem was, it was also far more perilous, since it wasn’t  just the cops she had to worry about, but the boss as well. He would  break her fingers if he ever discovered she’d kept his cut for herself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe took a sharp breath and stashed her basket behind a vast pile of  luggage. The day was raw, and she was freezing. To do what she was  going to do, she needed her hands to be warm and nimble. Her fingers  fluttered in the dank harbor air, then vanished into her dress, leaving  the sleeves of her overcoat dangling empty. Her hands darted past cheap  gabardine and worn shirting and came to nestle in the heat, the musk,  the fine damp hairs of her armpits. Soon her fingers were starting to  feel warm. But her arms were trussed, and all she could do, when a gust  of wind worked a copper strand loose from its braid and whipped it in  her face, was snort and shake her head. Through it all, she watched the  steamship’s tenders as they were loaded up with trunks, then  passengers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe first-class passengers had long since gone through a genteel  version of immigration and customs on shipboard; their tender landed  them at a well-appointed West Side terminal, not Castle Garden.  Steerage would be last off, as usual. But a ship this size carried  people of every level of wealth and class, and her targets, the  second-class passengers, would be the first to disembark here. As the  tender bumped against the pilings, Beatrice extracted her hands from  her armpits, stuck them nonchalantly back through her sleeves into her  pockets and began to move. Her eye followed the parade of ribboned hats  and horn-handled canes that parted the crowds in the frigid brick  rotunda.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“As if there weren’t enough of these people already,” said a woman in a  high velvet toque with a nervous thrust of her chin at the crowds of  steerage passengers from earlier ships. Her husband winced and nodded.  They’d just spent the season in London. Before the war, they had  traveled first class and never had to set foot in Castle Garden, but  most of her money was Southern—which was to say diminished since the  War Between the States—and they’d been forced to make concessions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBeatrice shed her hat, let down the braids that had been twisted under  it and adjusted her posture and face in subtle ways that stripped her  of nearly a decade in a handful of seconds: She was suddenly quite a  little girl. The second-class couple emerged at the north gate,  relieved, with sighs and murmurs of “Ah, New York, so good to be home!”  At the curb, while the coachman raised their trunks to his roof rack  and the gentleman made to hand his lady up onto the tufted leather  carriage bench, Beatrice pressed forward. With her hand outstretched,  she said, “Welcome to America, sir, miss! Have you anything extra to  help me and my ailing mother?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe couple looked away—he to the side, his wife to him. That was the  trick, of course: to force them to look away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBeatrice’s fingers were as fast as her eyes seemed innocent. Watches  were her specialty, but this time she focused on the lady, who wore a  pin on her lapel that reminded Beatrice of her mother’s long-gone  gold-rimmed brooch. She wasn’t sure how good it was, how much it would  bring, so she also grabbed the silk and suede wallet that protruded  from the gentlewoman’s muff, which turned out to be bulging at the  seams, though some of the currency was foreign. Then Beatrice was gone,  and the couple was grateful. The horse left a loamy turd steaming on  the pavement as it strained against its harness. The wheels ground  forward. They were halfway home before they realized what they’d lost,  at which point Beatrice was just pushing through the swinging doors of  Marm Mandelbaum’s pawnshop, wondering what price she’d have to accept  on the brooch in exchange for the old shrew’s discretion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e2.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eINFERNO\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAsleep in the dark, with his limbs tucked up against his belly for  warmth, he had made himself small, just a fetal lump in the middle of  his narrow pallet. His blankets were topped by his overcoat, and he’d  tucked the whole pile tightly around himself to keep it from sliding  off into the night. The floor of the tack room had been strewn with  hay, the wall by the bed decorated with a couple of nails from which,  on warmer nights, he might have hung his clothes. The horseshoe propped  upright on a crossbeam above his head was a relic of a previous  tenant’s superstitions. There was little in that room to suggest who he  was, this stableman, except perhaps the worn cashmere and shredded silk  lining of his coat—it had been a fine garment, once. And on the narrow  shelf made by another beam, a bowie knife and a few whittled figurines:  a bear, a gorilla and a strange hybrid creature, like a griffin, but of  his own imagining, composed of assorted parts of the exotic creatures  he cared for.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was no ordinary stable where he worked. The horse stalls were  inhabited not by hacks but by dancing white Arabians, and there were no  cows at all, but an orangutan, a giraffe, a python, a tiger. He had  never expected this land of dreams to be quite so dreamlike, so  uncanny. The job he had landed through the Labor Exchange was certainly  not what he’d imagined doing in America when he’d left home. What he  wanted to do was build cathedrals or, barring such glory, churches,  houses, even roads. That was his training and, what with the constant  stream of immigration to New York, he’d been sure there would be work  for a man with experience in the building trades. It hadn’t been so  easy, though. So there he was at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum,  shoveling dung and hay and whiling away his few bits of spare time  carving figures from odd chunks of wood he found lying about.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis other possessions included a second shirt, some extra socks, a sack  of apples and a guidebook to New York with a picture postcard tucked  between its pages, one side showing an elegant bath hall at  Baden-Baden, the other a stamp, a postmark from a decade before, a name  and address, a message. His mother had sent her love, said the weather  was fine, she was feeling much better and she would be home soon: the  usual. Only the name above the address was notable—for its difference  from the one by which the stableman was now known, on his documents and  to his employers. He didn’t worry about anyone putting that together,  though. Sometimes even he was incredulous at the great distance that  lay between his present self and that boy who had been missed by his  mother at Baden. How far was it from Germany to New York? He wasn’t  exactly sure. It wasn’t a journey he’d ever meant to take. Things had  happened to him, and he’d responded. Now he was here.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWas he happy? Not by a long shot. But not sad either. It was more that  he was waiting for the next phase of his life to begin. In the  meantime, his face and features were locked and shuttered like a shop  at sundown, cinched tight like a burlap sack of onions with the  drawstring knotted and wound around. When he was awake, he was  cautiously optimistic—he’d landed on his feet more than once before.  While he slept, he snored. And all around him in the stable, buzzing  flies joined the noise, awakened from their quasihibernation by a  warmth premature for the season and puzzlingly at odds with the weather  outdoors.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat was the first alarm that something was amiss—a quiet one. The  stableman was sleeping too deeply, dreaming too hard, to hear it. The  clear screen of his cornea refracted the image of his optic nerve, and  he saw backward into his own mind. The veins were like road maps  leading to the time when he’d had a family, friends, a proper home. But  that night the subject of the magic-lantern show flashing through his  brain was nearer to hand: a sightseeing jaunt he’d taken on his last  day off.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe’d been walking back from the Battery when he first saw the girl. She  was an average young woman hawking corn from a basket. He’d just eaten.  But suddenly he found he was hungry, even for one of those mushy  lukewarm ears of corn. The stuff was sold on every street corner by  hot-corn girls of every variety: black near Union Square and Irish at  the Battery, German further north and east. Wherever he went in New  York, there was always one of them singing the same song, but he’d  never heard it sung so nonchalantly, so appealingly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hot corn! Get your hot corn! Here’s your lily-white corn.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd so a woman was conjured into being while he slept, conceived from  his memory of seeing Beatrice on the street and a certain strain in the  position of his limbs. But then the pleasure of the dream was stymied  by the same frustration he’d felt that day at the crowded corner of  Broadway and Maiden Lane. There she was, hawking her corn, but just  when he’d nearly caught her, she slipped away from him into the crowd.  In his sleep, in the tack room, which was filling now with smoke, he  thrashed. Shouldn’t he get to taste her corn, if not to hold her, he  wondered, at least in his dream? Something had ignited within him, just  as the building he slept in so soundly was going up in fire. Oh well,  there will be other hot-corn girls, he thought, never guessing, asleep  or awake, that the skirts of his fate swished around that very hot-corn  girl’s ankles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe’d disappeared on him, but the heat she brought on remained. At  least he was no longer cold, he thought, middream. He was standing  before a roaring fire, a marble mantelpiece, a gleaming brass fender.  He was back home in Germany, a boy in his father’s parlor. His mother  was serving tea. But no, he’d gotten rid of his whole complicated  past—or tried to. The dream flickered again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe’d made it to the new world in steerage—no fine Meissen china  anymore—and found himself a bed and a job. He was starting over.  Barnum’s stable was a good enough place to wait for spring, when he  could go out and look for building work. He thought of Raj, the Bengal  tiger, who’d lain shivering in his fourth-story cage in the museum when  last the stableman made his rounds. Of all the animals he cared for,  Raj was the one he most identified with—his grace and frustration, his  power and imprisonment, his obvious desire to burst forth and do  something grander than slouch around Barnum’s. He could devour the  world if he weren’t chained up in that cage. The stableman felt the  same way. He was aware that, cold and poor as he was, the bottom was  miles below. What he didn’t see, though, our stableman, was how close  he lay to the edge of that abyss, how soon he was going to roll off  into it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat early March night had been frigid, so what then was this feeling  that crept over him now—heat? Baking, burning heat. Could it be, he  wondered, that he’d frozen to death? If so, he thought, Hell wasn’t  quite what the faithful imagined. There was no settlement, no  knowledge. Ignorance of Heaven and God persisted, but more  cruelly—devoid now of any suspense or hope. Nor, yet, was it the  nothingness that he’d expected.So what was going on? The smell of  burning horsehair reached him next, and he glimpsed where he was: in a  stable. Not Heaven, not Hell, not with the girl from his dream; but  neither was this his father’s house in the city or his uncle’s farm. He  began to identify the sounds that had roused him: animals’ screams, the  trumpeting of an elephant, the banging of animal bodies into metal bars  and latched stall doors. He was in the circus stable of Barnum’s  Museum, on Broadway, in Manhattan. Yellow flames jetted up in one  corner through the smoke that billowed around him. The splintery barn  wall by his cot was hot against his cheek; dark wisps of smoke swirled  into every orifice. Barnum’s was on fire.[quote] --The New York Times","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304677527781,"sku":"NP9780812970852","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812970852.jpg?v=1767732600","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/metropolis-isbn-9780812970852","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}