The Richest Vein

Steven McCann

Description

‘The Richest Vein’ is a novel about romance, the romance of a young writer named Ben Tomison and his beautiful young girlfriend Eleanor, the fashion model. In a larger sense, it is a romance between Ben and New York City where the story takes place in the early 1970’s. But in the truest, deepest sense it is a romance of a young writer and his art, a romance that fills the life of any artist and the art form they love, struggle with, and remain loyal to throughout their lives, whether the world around them rewards their efforts or not. My novel attempts to capture the atmosphere of our great city at the beginning of that decade and the places the author loves; Central Park, the Met Museum where Ben works, the Shakespeare Festival and Upper Manhattan. Hopefully, it captures the warmth of our city, sometimes stifling and hazy, at other times infectiously fresh and breezy. My hero is twenty-three years old when the story takes place, but like all artists, his spirit lives throughout time.

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 10 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669855477
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE RICHEST VEIN
 
 
 
 
 
 
A Nove l by
Steven McCann
 
Copyright © 2022 by Steven McCann.
 
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6698-5548-4

eBook
978-1-6698-5547-7

 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
Print information available on the last page.
 
 
 
Rev. date: 11/10/2022
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
848635
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter I0
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
 
 
 
 
 
 
“I think the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by divining rod and thin vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.”—Henry David Thoreau
Chapter 1
Summer in the year 1971 had just begun. The soft glow of dawn rising from the east spread over the tall buildings bordering the park as a stir of morning mingled with the cool air. A chorus of sparrows singing in a nearby tree drifted through a wrought iron fence down into a watchman’s booth where a tall young man had dosed off in a chair with his head on a desk. Above him a single lightbulb still glared, and on the desk lay an opened, face down paperback of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury . Next to the book stood a walkie-talkie with night-watchman’s keys hooked onto its antennae. Into this peaceful scene a voice blurted out from the walkie-talkie:
“Dispatch to route five. Dispatch to route five,” the voice repeated several times.
The young man started to life, looked around, and grabbed the walkie-talkie.
“Route five,” he said into the receiver.
“It’s six-twenty, Ben. Do your final trip and come inside.”
“Okay, Zach.”
The young man pulled a chord turning off the light bulb, then rose, slipped on the uniform jacket that had been draped over the chair, put the paperback into his rear pocket, and took the walkie-talkie and the watchman’s keys from the desk. He opened the door of the watchman’s booth and turned onto the sidewalk behind the museum. On his right, up an embankment only a few feet away, rose a spiked, wrought iron fence surrounded by bushes and trees. Beyond it stretched Central Park in the middle of New York City.
As he walked along the sidewalk, he checked the windows and doors by giving each of them a small tug. After several minutes, he came to a gate which he opened, then closed behind himself, leaving him at the back of a large public parking lot. Walking across this empty lot, he could see the southward view of the tops of the buildings along Fifth Avenue as they caught the early rays of sunshine, their narrow, century old cornices and slate gables forming a proud aristocratic community above the highest treetops. A faint breeze smelling of grass and flowers mingled with the drier odor of granite and a hint of macadam. There had been a change of air currents overnight, promising a beautiful day ahead. Ben continued walking at a steady pace, until he reached a farther gate which he opened and locked behind himself. This left him at the south end of the building where he turned to his left and walked through wet grass around the side, then onto the wide sidewalk along Fifth Avenue.
Looking up the street now, he saw the facade of the Metropolitan with its high columned entrance and pyramid of steps facing down to Fifth Avenue. The fountains in front of the museum were turned off and the glassy pools of water, like everything else on the street, stood in perfect silence. Across Fifth Avenue in front of the Stanhope Hotel, an outdoor cafe remained empty with clusters of white chairs upturned on tables arranged on a bright green carpet. From the distance came a lone automobile, making a clanking echo on a manhole cover, whooshing past Ben, and disappearing down the avenue.
Ben proceeded steadily along the facade of the Metropolitan, checking the doors at the south end. Then he climbed the pyramid of steps, checked the front entrance doors, and skipped down the other side. There was nothing amiss with the austere stone facade and not a soul to be met with along the way. Under the gathering of small trees at the north end, he found a few overturned benches and set them aright. He saw occasional litter, but knew the day crew would soon be there to sweep up the front of the building.
At Eighty-Fifth Street a middle-aged woman walking her dog entered the park. Passing Ben on the sidewalk and following the woman came two joggers having a conversation as they ran past. The city began waking up. Distant traffic noises became faintly audible and somewhere over on Madison Avenue a bus droned past. Ben walked around the northern end of the building and entered the employees’ parking lot through a tall iron gate.
“Entering north gate on route five,” he said into the walkie-talkie.
When he had walked halfway across the lot, a set of red painted metal doors on the north wall of the building swung automatically open, disclosing another watchman on the threshold, a slender, middle-aged man with a shock of white gray hair and wearing a guard uniform without a tie.
“Morning, Zach,” Ben greeted the man in a cheerful baritone.
“Morning, Ben. You must be tired.”
“I got a few winks in the chair. I need the overtime, though, Zach.”
“That makes three OT’s in the last week, doesn’t it?”
“It does. But I have the weekend to recuperate.”
“Don’t spend it all before Monday.”
Ben passed through the doors and they closed behind him, leaving the two men at the end of a long high corridor with crates of boxes at the sides. Ben followed his companion through a nearby doorway into a large dispatch room with an alarm console against the far wall. Several desks and chairs filled the room and another watchman sat at the console, busily turning off alarms on a switchboard and talking into a microphone. Ben and Zach each sat down at one of the desks.
“Once you get some savings behind you, you’ll be okay. Everyone needs a little savings,” resumed Zach.
“My girlfriend likes to go out a lot. She comes from a wealthy family.”
“Don’t spend it all on your girlfriend, not if you’re doing three double shifts a week.”
“I used to do overtime, once upon a time,” announced Irving, the man behind the console. He turned and faced them, smiling pleasantly from a small round forty-year-old face with a full head of curly brown hair, strands of which fell down onto his forehead.
“Four years ago, I opened my own photography business and did overtime constantly to make ends meet.”
“What happened to your business?” Ben asked.
“I did it for about a year. Kept my job here and did both things. I didn’t really sleep for a year and a half. Finally, I had to make a choice and decided on this.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t like all the running around. The photography jobs were okay once you got them. It was the process of getting jobs that did it. I still do some photography, though, now and then.”
“I’d like to get my own apartment soon,” Ben mused openly.
“Get a place in Queens. Apartments are cheap and the commute isn’t bad.”
“I can’t. I have to stay close to my girlfriend. She’s on the upper East Side.”
“You’re doing exactly what I did when I first met my wife,” said Irving. “I lived in two places for months. Finally, I got tired of it, married her, and moved into her place.”
“Ben doesn’t want to get married, do you Ben?” Zach asked.
“Not now. Sometime, maybe. My girlfriend is terrific, It’s not that. I just don’t want to get married, until I’m ready. I’m a long way off.”
They spoke for several minutes about marriage and all its ramifications. Then Zach decided he had some duties to attend to in the basement of the building and left the room. Irving resumed his work at the console and Ben sat at the desk thumbing through an old magazine. As he did so, he wondered about Irving’s photography business and why he chose instead to spend his life as a nightwatchman. Ben was constantly learning new things about the lives of his fellow workers, many of whom were multi-talented men, artists of one kind or another, who’d eventually settled into the sedate life of the nightshift. He knew that his own experience would be different, that life would somehow propel him onwards to more active circumstances. His two years at the Metropolitan would be a foundation, a time to read and get some writing done.
At about seven thirty, men from the day shift entered the dispatch room and two other men took over Irving’s job. Irving and Ben walked into the hallway and stepped onto a small elevator that took them up a flight to the men’s locker room. There they went to their lockers and changed, got back on the elevator, took it down to the basement level again, and walked the short distance up the hallway to the time cloc