The Clock Tower

Patrick Fitzgerald asked his grandson to drive him down to the old City Hall before the wreckers were finished with it, and Jack, who was on the four-to-midnight that week and had the morning free, said he would, and so on a gray Tuesday in the fall of 1963 the two of them stood across First Street and looked at the building where Patrick had spent forty years of his life.

He was eighty-three. He had joined the Reno police as a young man at the start of the century, when the department still ran out of a brick shack that the newspaper had called unspeakable, and he had been there when they moved into this building in 1907, the new City Hall at the corner of First and Center, two stories of brick on a granite foundation with an ornamental clock tower rising over the entrance, the finest thing the town had built for itself up to then. The police had the ground floor, the jail and the courtroom and the two-room hospital where they took the men who were too far gone to book. Patrick had walked through that south door six days a week for most of his working life. He had brought drunks and thieves and once a murderer up those steps. He had stood in that courtroom and given his testimony in a voice he had trained to be flat. He had sat in the basement they called the dungeon and waited out a flood with the water rising in the street outside.

Now the windows were gone and the doors were off and a crane stood in the lot with a ball hung from it, and half the roof was already down, the laths showing like the ribs of something, and the clock tower stood up out of the wreckage with its four faces still on it, stopped, the hands at different hours because the works had been pulled and the faces left for last.

“First National bought the whole corner,” Jack said. He had his hands in the pockets of his civilian coat and he was watching his grandfather more than the building. “They’re putting up a parking garage. For the bank.”

“I know what they’re putting up,” Patrick said.

He had read it in the paper two years ago, the spring they announced the sale, and he had thought at the time that he would have something to say about it, some feeling, and the feeling had never quite arrived, the way feelings did not arrive anymore on schedule but came to him days late, in the night, about the wrong things. He had felt nothing about the sale. He had felt nothing through the months of emptying the building, the department moving its files and its men out to temporary quarters while the new City Hall went up over on South Center, on the old Southside School lot. He had expected to feel nothing today. He had brought Jack down half believing that he was only curious, the way an old man is curious about whether a thing is really as gone as they say.

But the clock tower was hard to look at. He had not expected that.

“They keep the clock?” he asked.

“Took the works out last week,” Jack said. “I don’t know about the faces. Probably comes down with the rest.”

Patrick nodded. He looked at the four faces stopped at their four wrong hours and he thought about how that clock had run the night shift’s lives more than any clock he ever owned. You came on at the hour by that clock and you went off at the hour by that clock and in between, on the slow nights, you stood on the corner and heard it strike and counted, and the men in the cells heard it too, the same strokes, the free men and the held men keeping the same time off the same tower, and that had meant something to Patrick once that he could not have put a word to and could not put a word to now.

“Your great-grandmother used to bring me my dinner here when I had the desk,” he said. “Bridget. She’d walk it down from the hotel in a pail. They wouldn’t let her past the front room so she’d stand in the doorway there and hand it across.” He lifted his chin at the gap where the south door had been. “Forty years that door was there. They take a thing down faster than they put it up. Always have.”

Jack didn’t say anything. He was a good listener, the boy, better than Patrick had been at his age. He had the family in him, the line of cooks and police and the riveter, Patrick’s own son Michael up on the high steel of the Riverside and then down in the river mud building the walls for the government, all of them people who made the town with their hands or held it together with their bodies, and now Jack on the four-to-midnight with a badge, the fourth of them to wear one or carry one or build one thing or another, and Patrick looked at his grandson and thought that this was the thing that lasted, this, not the building.

The crane swung. The ball came around slow and almost gentle and took the corner of the tower, and a whole face of the clock leaned out and let go and fell into the rubble with a sound that was not as loud as Patrick expected, a flat collapsing sound, dust going up gray into the gray sky, and then the crane swung back for another pass and the men down in the lot went on with their morning as if nothing had happened, because to them nothing had.

“You want to stay and watch them finish?” Jack asked.

Patrick considered it. He looked at the tower, three faces now, and at the crane drawing back its arm, and he found that the feeling had finally come, days early for once, right on time, and it was not grief exactly and it was not anger. It was something closer to the way you feel when you finally put down a weight you have carried so long you forgot it was heavy. The building had never kept the town safe. He had kept the town safe, he and the men like him and the men before him and the boy standing beside him now, and the building had only been the place they did it, and a place could come down and the work would still need doing tonight, on the four-to-midnight, by Jack, on a corner somewhere with no clock to strike the hours.

“No,” Patrick said. He put his hand on his grandson’s arm, not heavily, just to turn him. “No, I’ve seen enough of it come down. Take me home before your shift. And tell me who they’ve got you working with these days, because if it’s that Pelham boy I’ve got something to say about him.”

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