The Biology of Luck Read Online Free

the establishment, Riverside Church and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, shielded from harm’s way by the no-man’s land that is Morningside Park, and rent stabilization, and the twenty-four-hour security service of Columbia University, the sleepy Westside suburb north of 110th Street offers an oasis of public buildings and wide concourses where budding scholars stroll oblivious to their surroundings and elderly Chinese couples shake the ginkgo trees to collect nuts for roasting. The community boasts its own share of minor catastrophes, four-alarm blazes, limousines driven through storefront plate glass, widows beaten and strangled in prewar apartments, but if one excludes second-tier Beat poet Lucien Carr’s stabbing of a male admirer in Riverside Park, an event more farcical than tragic, the area surrounding Grant’s Tomb has avoided the Triangle Shirtwaist Fires and General Slocum explosions and Crown Heights race riots which keep the tabloids on the newsstands and remind surviving New Yorkers of their perennial good fortune. Larry Bloom can attest to this tranquility. He is a resident. He is also an uncredentialed expert. His incomplete dissertation on the subject, “The Fire Last Time: Public Disaster and Private Response in New York City, 1869—1914,” yellows in a footlocker beside his nightstand. Perhaps that is why he welcomes the spectacle on Riverside Drive with temperedamusement, the cynical relief of one who has been waiting from the get-go for lightning to strike.
    There is a police cordon composed of blue wooden sawhorses and cops in riot gear. It bisects the granite plaza in front of the mausoleum, separating harmony from discord, suggesting that both are sides of a commemorative coin minted specifically for the occasion. On one side of the barricade, all is order. The Dutch contingent has paid good money to mingle with minor dignitaries, to sip champagne on the steps of the Grant family vault, to admire the size of the caskets, the plenitude of the buffet offerings, the intricate weave of the tricolor bunting. They cluster beneath the banner touting the Dutch-American Heritage Bruncheon, ruddy-cheeked and bespectacled in the spirit of a Van Dyke portrait, deeply concerned that the term
bruncheon
is not to be found in their pocket dictionaries, absorbing the surrounding uproar as a matter of course. Japanese tourists might view the scene as a photo-op, Israelis as fodder for political harangue, but the Dutch are too sanguine, too constrained, for such antics. Funny Americans, they think. Cowboy President, McPuritan culture. An odious word pops into Larry’s thoughts, a word he associates with nineteenth-century novels and whalebone corsets and his ever-practical father, Mort, warning him not to place his feet on the coffee table that his parents “plan to die with”: Bourgeoisie.
    Beyond the cordon lies chaos. Ordered, orchestrated chaos, the worst variety of confusion, the Old Left’s vision of its own Armageddon. The crowd sports gold chains, denim jackets, military fatigues, full feather headdresses, Mao pajamas, tie-dyes, vintage coonskin caps, even a conspicuous wimple. There are gourd rattles, cane flutes, chirimias. Also banjos, kitchen pots, bullhorns. Also a topless woman whipping a wooden cigar store Indian with a leather strap. Sharp young men in freshly pressed suits navigate the throng, the crimson “inverted-A” badges of the Organized Anarchist League conspicuous on their lapels. They make notations on clipboards, calculating the size of the protest, or its longevity, or possibly its karmic energy. They distribute water bottles, folded pamphlets. They compete with thepurveyors of pocket-sized New Testaments, little red books, gardenia wreaths, with the men vending snow cones and glow-in-the-dark yo-yos and oracular crystals. But all is not mayhem. When you’ve given up sniffing for the starch on the organizers’ collars, resigned