Samuel Adams’s Our Square and the People in It gathers linked stories around a small green square in a forgotten corner of New York and the neighbors who live along its edges. Children’s laughter and quarrels fill the place by day; at night a spellbinder holds forth on the corners while young couples murmur on remote benches. One resident leads to the next, each story opening onto the following like doors along the same street.
“Cyrus wondered what this half fairy, half flower, was doing in so grubby an environment (page 7)”
Slums press in on every side, yet the crocuses come up and the birds return, and romance keeps its footing. The square’s people eye strangers with doubt, and the recurring drama is who gets adopted into the community, and how. A sculptor arrives from “the Somewhere Else” and takes eminent domain over the residents within a month; a gaunt young man drifts in from the Outer Darkness and is tolerated, then consulted, then trusted. Around them cluster a dour Scotch tailor, a polyglot cashier, a little red doctor, a policeman named Terry, a minister, a gangster, and a pair of old chess players, one French and one German. Adams writes these lives with affection and a dry comic touch, and the square itself—its benches, its fountain, its Greek church, its Elite Restaurant—holds them together.
How the Square Takes People In
The Square and Its Newcomers
Our Square lies in the forgotten depths of a great city, a broad green space where children shout by day and a spellbinder holds forth on the corners by night, while young couples murmur on remote benches and old folk sigh. Slums press in on every side, yet the crocuses come up and the birds return, and Romance keeps its footing there. Into this place arrives the Bonnie Lassie, from the Somewhere Else, taking the ground floor of the smallest house beside the Greek church. Within a month she holds eminent domain over the residents: MacLachan the dour tailor bursts into song when she passes and gives her her name—the first decent word he has spoken of any living being. She is small, perhaps twenty, with the look of a thoughtful kitten, and when she twinkles, cart-peddlers stop in their tracks.
Cyrus the Gaunt had slipped in earlier from the Outer Darkness, long and loose and melancholy. He first drew notice by giving up his bench to others; when the huskiest man in the Square threatened him, Cyrus threw him into the fountain, held him under, dragged him out, and bought him a drink at Schwartz’s. After that he was tolerated, though counted an outlander. Terry the Cop leads the girl to his bench and introduces them. She studies him with dehumanizing eyes and says, “Yes, I think you’ll do.” He lives around the corner, does nothing much, and has done so too long; when she asks why he doesn’t stop, he calls her Beautiful Incognita and asks if she wrote the Shorter Catechism. She took him for a down-and-outer; he corrects her—he is First Honorary Vice-President of the Life Branch of the Organization.
The Secret in the House
She accuses him of lurking in the dark to stare at her house, and he admits it: there is a secret there, the secret of happiness held by the dancing kiddies in her window. She is a sculptor, the dancers are hers, and she has adopted the Square and is sculpting it. She wants his face for her collection. He asks whether she thinks she could make him happy; she wouldn’t try. Beneath his mask, he insists, he is as merry a little cricket, and when she twinkles and laughs the gray sky seems to open. She offers fifty cents an hour to sit for her. He asks whether the dancers collected pay; some did, she says, others are friends. She suspects him of Settlementing or Sociologizing or Improving the Condition of Somebody Else; he denies it. Her name is Miss Willard; his is Cyrus Murphy. He calls himself a suicide who walked over the edge of life and disappeared but must still eat. Asked his trade, he says machinery eats out of his hand—he could run a steam-roller. Nine o’clock tomorrow, she tells him.
That night he takes his clothes to MacLachan’s Home of Fashion to be pressed, and in the morning, shaved close, tells the Scot to unpress them again—sit on them, roll them, put the wrinkles back. The tailor advises him to leave the whiskey alone. Cyrus plays football with the suit, puts it on satisfied: she wouldn’t want him improved. At the studio she poses him and tells him to make his eyes tired again. He finds it hard, surrounded by a kitten named Fluff and small bronzes—Androcles, Mystery, Remnants, The Knight—and asks why the dancers sit in the window while these stay hidden. The dancers are for outsiders, she says; the rest are for her people, who need joy and laughter, not the tragedy of life. He calls her a very wonderful person.
The Wager and the Steam-Roller
He sits several times, fifty cents or a dollar entered in a tiny book, until one day the basis changes: she overhears him on a bench with a hopeless lounger, silver passing between them, and something lights a flame of hope in the man. Cyrus becomes a toiler in the Square and then a citizen of it—chance words, offhand nods, invitations to Schwartz’s, at last consultations and confidences. Lank and black in the gleam of his engine, he rolls his appointed course amid firmamental thunderings, learning that driving ten tons of ill-balanced metal demands explicit heed. One misty night the Reverend Morris Cartwright climbs up beside him, amazed, and asks if it is a bet. Cyrus grins: how did he guess? A nervous breakdown last spring, a mixture of things—three of gin to one of Italian, Cartwright suggests. Sick of doing nothing and being nothing, Cyrus had sat one morning after bridge nine hundred to the good, ready to buy painless dope against boredom, when Doc Gerritt looked up from his pink smoothness and told him he was n’t worth wasting time on, was n’t man enough to stop. Cyrus called him a liar; Gerritt bet a thousand he would starve in six months making a living where nobody knew him. Cyrus said “You ‘re on,” and here he is. He has been hungry, lonely, scared, but never bored—the next meal is always a probability to speculate on. Cartwright fetches him frankfurters and milk from Schwartz’s, and no reporter sees the fashionable pastor emerge from a saloon bearing supper to a grimy driver.
Cartwright’s errand, it turns out, is diplomacy; his eye falls on the dancing figures in the window and he disappears through the door. An hour later he comes out harassed, regretful, yet triumphant, and the Bonnie Lassie gazes after him with a drooping flower-face—the world she forsook has sent for her, and the claims drawing her back grow irksome. Not long after, crossing a blind alley’s mouth, she hears a woman scream and swoops in like a swallow entering a cave. A towering bulk speeds past her; when she reaches the passage, Cyrus has pinned a swarthy man against the wall, and with a final shake, like a great magnanimous dog, he releases the Sicilian and stoops to pick up what he has dropped.
The Gnome’s Confession
The Gnome takes up his story where he left it: MacLachan, seated in his room and talking drunken nonsense about Scotch philosophy, called out “Come in” when Vera knocked. She stopped short, startled to find anyone there, and MacLachan rose with solemn, liquor-soaked politeness to say he had not known there was a Mrs. Leon Coventry in the house. Vera flushed but met his eye and answered, “There isn’t.” The Gnome would have thrown MacLachan out the window had Vera not stepped between them, and in the moment she held him back the tailor escaped down the stairs. The feel of her arms left Leon sick with longing. She backed away apologizing, and when he told her they must now be married her face looked as though he had struck her. What she asked him, the Gnome says, was almost what the narrator supposes: “Is that all you have to say to me, Leon?” He missed her meaning entirely, fixed as he was on the bargain that forbade him to make love to her. He proposed the Greek church across the square and asked how soon she could be ready. She walked into her room and he never saw her again. The narrator calls him a fool for never saying he loved her; the Gnome insists a thousand signs must have told her. Since then he has had nothing but a money order for the balance she owed, marked “Just gratitude,” which he scorns and, clutching his pillow jealously, has never cashed. He fears she is in trouble again, being so young and helpless.
The Assault and the Wicker Chair
The next day the Gnome went out to kill MacLachan and was having pretty good luck when Terry the Cop intervened; they carried the tailor home and called the doctor, and MacLachan cried out of one eye, the other being closed. The narrator recalls the tailor’s black eye, and also a chance meeting with Mac in a Fifth Avenue millinery store, where his talk ran to ostriches and he claimed to be lawfully pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp. The narrator suspects Mac was following a lost trail and says nothing to Leon. Meanwhile the sick man reports that at night she comes and sits in the wicker chair; he hears the pressure of her body on the withes and feels her breath, but she never speaks, and he asks whether she is dead. The Little Red Doctor’s visits grow more frequent and his brow more furrowed; nature, he observes, can go only so far without sleep before it cracks, and through that crack come sometimes death, sometimes madness—he prays it will not be madness for the Gnome. Night after night the narrator hears Leon murmuring and the chair creaking and whispering in reply.
The Storm and the Woman of Flesh and Blood
On a night when heat breaks under wild northwest wind and rain sweeping Our Square, the narrator is whirled into No. 7 and pursued upstairs as the light puffs out. The Gnome, working beside a weighted pile of checks, says he will leave a legacy and asks the narrator to be executor, who will “have to find Her.” The narrator naps on the couch and wakes in darkness to a cold draft and the chair whispering. Leon pleads, “My Heart! Oh, my Heart! Have you come back?” The chair sobs; he says it often seemed he could touch her but she was never there, and his soul is tired with waiting. Then the chair rustles with release from weight, and a broken cry of love, fear, and gladness—of this world—sounds, and the narrator knows a woman of flesh and blood lies on the Gnome’s breast kissing his face. She sobs, “Darling fool! Why didn’t you tell me that you loved me?” He thought he had, in every word and look. MacLachan, she says, found her at last, took her by the arm and told her the love of her was the life of him and would go if she did not come back to save him. She asks if she is too late. The narrator tiptoes out and meets the Little Red Doctor on the landing, who asks who went up the stairs; the narrator answers, “Love,” and asks whether he feared it was Death.
MacLachan of Our Square
MacLachan the tailor is Scotch as his name and dour as the Scotch; Our Square patronizes his “Home of Fashion” out of local loyalty without liking him. He has a gray-granite face, a mouth like a snapped spring, toppling brows, a suspicious nose, and the oracle’s habit of dealing in second-hand aphorisms. Once he had a daughter, a wild-rose girl, who lived over the shop and kept him and his house. When she speaks to him in the restaurant he sobers instantly and says only “Oh!”—what men say when shot through the heart. Nelson slides a chair behind his trembling knees and MacLachan sits, glaring into her garishly painted face. A cheerful boyish voice greets “little girl”; she calls him “Jim-boy” and introduces MacLachan as the man who “used to be my old dad.” The young man whistles, remarks “Quite a family party,” and MacLachan demands who he is. “My husband,” she says. MacLachan gulps the lemonade Nelson thrusts into his hand, protests that the husband is a mere laddie, and asks if he can support her. He makes seventy-five a week year-round, she says, and she is good for about that average; she is a movie ingenue, he a set designer, and she is “all gommered up” because she had no time to wash off her make-up. Then the Scot’s devil’s pride rises: he snarls that she gave him no word though she knew he was killing himself for shame of her, and asks what he owes her but a curse. The boy husband says “That’s enough” in a man’s voice; the girl cries “Dad!”
The Duchess and the Diphtheria Epidemic
The woman who now dominates the square spoke with a precision that cut, and dressed always in elegant, rustling black. Mr. Boggs said she walked like a duchess, and the name stuck behind her back. She and Old Sally were meant to live in sumptuous luxury above the sign of the Destroyer at No. 17, where her maternal grandfather had once visited a distant cousin. Occasional excursions westward and uptown, sometimes by automobile and always with Old Sally in escort, let Boggs boast that she was going into Society.
When Old Sally bragged indiscreetly of past glories “back in Fuhginia,” her mistress put ante-bellum principles into practice and beat her with a light but serviceable cane. Boggs rushed up to find the castigation purely formal; when he made himself known, the Duchess coldly explained his exact significance in the cosmic scheme, which he took to be approximately zero. She “wizened” him up, he said, “like a last season’s roach,” and she wizened them all, convincing Our Square she wanted no share in its communal life—aloof, but not alien.
Then came a spring epidemic of diphtheria, when panic barred doors against authorities, medicine, help, and the Little Red Doctor himself. The Duchess appeared, consulted briefly with him, put on black silk, Pinckney laces, and Pemberton diamonds, and went forth like a female St. George. Wherever she appeared, panic gave way to reason and mutiny to obedience; she nursed no dying children but restored courage through sheer authority of personality. Before collapsing, the Little Red Doctor said: “Cold nerve and tradition. Our Square ought to put up a statue to her—in steel.” The Duchess summed him up as “a worthy young man.” Boggs retorted, “God give you understanding!” She merely lifted her eyebrows, being a Pemberton by birth and a Tallafferr by name.
White Roses for Metta Schepstein
She did for Schepstein what she had done in the epidemic. When his twenty-year-old Metta killed herself with poison tablets, certified by mistake, Our Square turned its back on the hated Schepstein, fearing his rebuffs. But when the furtive hearse and one carriage drew up, Madam Rachel Pinckney Pemberton Tallafferr descended, crossed the square in black silk and lace, and scattered white roses from Old Sally over the girl. Schepstein’s lead-gray face flushed and softened; she helped him into the carriage, and two mourners went to little Metta’s funeral.
MacLachan’s Revolver
She became a local heroine by handling MacLachan the Tailor, who on alcoholic days sang “The Cork Leg” sitting on the fountain coping with his legs in the water, beating time with a revolver. Polyglot Elsa of the Elite Restaurant sent Terry the Cop off to a fictitious Italian riot. The Duchess bade MacLachan hold his peace; he called her a rum-wastrel, pointed the revolver, and said he had a silver bullet for her life. She demanded the pistol; he shot her, grazing her ear. Old Sally hit him with a bottle from her market basket; he concluded he had murdered his aged aunt and surrendered the weapon. The Duchess told Old Sally not to strike him again and marched him home. Next day a deputation brought MacLachan to apologize; she sent compliments and was not at home.
Old Sally’s Secret
Later Boggs confided that madam was losing interest in society—no automobiles, dwindled mail, only the Spirit of Guidance Group letter from Brooklyn—and spent her days at solitaire with Sempronius the black cat. When the Rosser twins fell into the fountain, Old Sally hauled them out, then fell in herself and would not come to; the Little Red Doctor found she was starved, padded to fool her mistress, going without food to buy more for madam. Given port, she told the history: the Duchess had left Virginia to pay a debt of honor of a worthless brother, and investments indicated by the Spirit of Guidance Group had failed. Rent and debt took precedence. The Doctor said madam had enough to eat; Old Sally had not, and her mistress did not know. They sought a way to help without charity. Old Sally revealed she had stolen and hocked the Pemberton diamonds, substituting cheap trash, and put some money on a dream-figure policy that failed; she mentioned the debt of eighteen hundred and forty-five dollars and fifty cents, and named the “tazmun”—a talisman letter from General Stonewall Jackson to old Massah Pemberton, foretelling the war.
The Sign and the Autograph Trade
The Little Red Doctor plotted a “sign”: he had Inky Mike set up a vague newspaper clipping about such a letter. Boggs petitioned for a conference; the Duchess received them in stiff black amid faded splendor, wearing the false diamonds. The Doctor claimed a dream revealed the letter; she asked for the clipping, which he had. She called it the Sign, took a buff envelope from an inlaid box, and valued it at eighteen hundred and forty-five dollars and fifty cents minimum. They bowed out dismayed; Boggs suggested trying the autograph trade.
Mr. Barker’s curio shop conceded the letter’s authenticity but denied special value, dismissing the prophetic line about State rights as no inspired forecast of the Civil War, and offered twenty-five dollars. Boggs refused even to hint at twenty-five dollars and said good day in disgust. At Mr. Pompany’s they got a dim “Twenty dollars, take it or leave it”; they left it, and Boggs delivered a baleful squeak opining that Pompany might be an ignoramus but looked like a swindler. On the sidewalk Boggs piped “Thieves!” The Little Red Doctor proposed Schepstein—”a thief too. But he knows.”
Schepstein’s Telegram
Schepstein received them in his grubby front room with cross-fire from distorted eyes.
The Painter’s Unfinished Portrait
The dominie opens with Paula Varick, whose charm defeated the greatest painter of her day. He caught her flowerlike delicacy and sunlike radiance, even a touch of the old Varick imperiousness, but could not fix the thing that made her lovelier than a dozen women equally lovely: a look of quiet, unconscious waiting deep in her wide gray eyes. A great poet said that was why she had not married; a great cynic said she never would unless a star came down to claim her.
Cyrus the Gaunt and the Return of Two Exiles
At the height of her triumphs, Cyrus the Gaunt arrived in Our Square to run the ten-thousand-pound steam roller at night, sit for sculpture by day, and eventually marry the Bonnie Lassie, settling into the little friendly house almost opposite the Varick mansion. Because Cyrus’s forebears had owned the Square when it was still the Staten Farm, before the first Varick came, Mr. Putnam Varick permitted his daughter to visit Mr. and Mrs. Cyrus Staten, though he had misgivings about their laxly Bohemian dinners, which mixed millionaires, bishops, and diplomats with musicians, explorers, reformers, and other anarchists. So Paula returned to Our Square after fifteen years.
A second revenant followed. Sunning on his bench, the dominie felt two sinewy hands on his shoulders and looked up at a big, smiling stranger—grave and stable, yet with a boy’s mobile lips and mirthful black eyes. The man called him “Dominie,” joked about owing him money, and pointed out the fire escape where he used to sleep. He was Carlo Trentano, though he said that name was buried with his father, who had died in the high-roofed house; now he was Charles Trent, all American. He had worked his way through college, gone to the desert country, and seen visions of water brought down from the mountains—cities and farms where dry sand had been—and made others see them too, raising money from the dry country’s people, then New York, then Europe. Accused of preaching government control because he already held all he could get, he answered that he offered to put his companies on the same terms as the rest, with the rights reverting to the people in the end; he laughed that he was an anarchist preaching in Wall Street’s face, and claimed to pass for thirty-five through studied solemnity. His small accumulated interest on the old debt for lessons, he insisted, paid a twenty-five per cent dividend, and he refused all protest.
Asked who remained, the dominie named MacLachan the Tailor and Thornsen of the élite Restaurant, noted that Calder the artist was dead, and withheld Paula’s name—instead inviting Carlo to dine at the pleasantest house in the Square on Wednesday, when Paula was to be there. Carlo agreed and left to call on his old friends. The dominie told the Bonnie Lassie he was not coming to her dinner; she retorted that Paula would be there and he would crawl to San Francisco to see her. He explained his substitute. The delighted romanticist announced that the new Ambassador to Spain was to take Paula in and that Carlo should sit on her left. The dominie proposed introducing Paula as “Miss Mumbleplum” so the two might discover each other; the Bonnie Lassie scorned him for arranging dramatic situations, citing Ethel Bennington and the Little Red Doctor nearly ruined by a toothache, but invited him anyway.
Miss Mumbleplum and the Tiger’s Cage
At the dinner, Charles Trent looked typically American in severely correct clothes until one noticed his individual eyes; Paula looked as only Paula could. The hostess introduced Carlo to “Miss Mumbleplum,” saying Mr. Trent could tell her about her water-rights—a sort of magic lord of the dry desert; he called himself a baron of sand and cactus. The Ambassador arrived and nothing more was said. Paula told Trent she owned ten shares of stock in a company; she named it, and he was amused that her ownership lay in the corporation fighting him most savagely. She did not mention that her father was a principal stockholder and officer; he did not define his position, unwilling to talk politics to this wonderful flower-woman, but determined to keep her eyes on him—achieved by talking so well that the diplomat grew fretful. Carlo told her of the romance of hunting water in a dry land: searches for lost cañons and unmapped rivers, wild gorges run in improvised boats down thousand-foot cracks toward unknown rapids, listening for cataracts, and the gathering of dollars, pounds, francs, marks, and roubles so that a desert might flower and new cities rise.
Asked his narrowest escape, he said it was less than a block away: he fell down between two houses and was saved by a clothesline of wash. Paula asked him to turn, noticed a scar over his temple, and recognition flashed; they laughed like children. They recalled a childhood game: Little Boy came from that cloud; “Do you like gum?”; “What’s gum?”—chewing-gum; “I’m a tiger in my cage. Gr-rr-rr-rr! If I could get out I’d eat you up, Little Boy.” He quoted Blake’s “Tiger! tiger! burning bright,” and leaning close, “‘What immortal hand and eye / Framed thy wondrous symmetry?'”—slightly altered—making Paula blush. She remembered he brought her things to play with, a kite, and gum, which she put in her hair; when found, she said an angel brought it. He was Angel; she was Tiger. The Ambassador, nearly snorting, devoted himself to the hostess.
Over the Coping to the Housetop
Afterward the dominie saw a motor-car arrive at and leave the Bonnie Lassie’s door and delayed Carlo, whose gaze wandered to the wire-mesh cage. He maneuvered Carlo’s seat so he could not see two girlish figures cross the Square and separate at No. 13; the Bonnie Lassie had done her part, and now the dominie must do his.
The Masquerader and the Sculptor
The book’s central pair carries its argument about what people are worth. Cyrus the Gaunt arrives looking like a down-and-outer, and the sculptor—Miss Willard, whom the tailor christens the Bonnie Lassie—sees through the disguise almost at once. She suspects him of “Settlementing or Sociologizing,” of being a masquerader, and she is right, though not in the way she means: he is a man of fortune who walked over the edge of life and disappeared. What she offers him is not reform but work—fifty cents an hour to sit for his face—and the dignity of being needed for exactly what he is. When he has his suit pressed overnight, he makes the tailor unpick the creases and put the wrinkles back, because she would not want him improved. That small scene is the heart of the book: the square does not save people by making them over. It saves them by taking them as they come and giving them something to do.
The Bonnie Lassie’s own secret is the mirror of his. She sculpts the tragedy of the square—the old woman among builders’ refuse, the boy astride his drunken father—but keeps those pieces for “my people,” and puts only the dancing kiddies in the window for outsiders. She believes the square needs joy and laughter, not the tragedy of life, and the book quietly tests that belief against her own unhappiness. The Very Great Woman who visits warns that she will “make a man of you yet,” a process sometimes painful, like most creative processes. The two of them circle each other through misunderstandings and a legacy engagement before the lights of a swerving truck reveal her face and the embrace comes.
The Whispering Chair and the Uses of Faith
Leon Coventry, the Gnome, gives the collection its strangest and most moving story. A young Hercules who carried his fever around the city until pneumonia felled him, he lies in a top-floor room at No. 7 plotting escape with legs the doctor says have turned to lamp-wicking. The wicker chair beside his bed whispers: it sags and yields as if to a light, sweet burden, and he speaks to it as to the woman who left him—Vera, who knocked at her door one night while the drunken tailor sat in his room, and who went away after Leon, fixed on his foolish bargain never to make love to her, offered her only marriage and the Greek church. The narrator, keeping watch, hears the chair creak and whisper in reply, and the book refuses to say whether the ghost is real. What matters is that the chair keeps his love alive until MacLachan, sobered and ashamed, finds the girl and tells her the love of her is the life of him. When she comes back, the cry on the stairs is “Love,” and the little red doctor, who feared it was Death, is answered.
That story sets the pattern for the whole book: faith in what cannot be proved is what holds the square together. Orpheus, the Greek who plays his pipe at midnight to a single lit window of the Samaritan Hospital, tells the dying Gnome that it is only by faith we hold the dreams that are truer than reality, and then admits he must believe it or there is nothing left. He is a figure out of Euripides, a reader of The Bacchae, and yet his devotion is entirely modern—a man who came to America on commerce and stayed for a light in a window. The book lets him be both ridiculous and noble, which is how it treats almost everyone.
Tailors, Misers, and the Comedy of Redemption
Adams balances the romances with comedy, and the comedy carries its own moral weight. MacLachan the tailor, dour as his name, deals in second-hand aphorisms and drives his daughter away with his pride; when she returns, painted from the movies and married to a boy set designer, he nearly curses her before a photograph of his granddaughter melts him into broad Scotch and tears. The meanest man in the square, Miles Morse, who grudges six dollars a week and puts up a fight over brooms and mops, turns out to have a conscience that can be reached through a housekeeper named Molly Dunstan and a swindler named Wiggett; his check to the Legal Aid Society, amended from ten dollars to a hundred, is the book’s quietest joke and its warmest. The Duchess, Madam Rachel Pinckney Pemberton Tallafferr, rules No. 17 in black silk and false diamonds, starves her maid to keep up appearances, and is finally rescued by a delegation that sells the envelope of a Stonewall Jackson letter for four thousand dollars while returning the letter itself. Even the gangster Pinney the Rat, nursed back from a knife wound in the narrator’s own room, is given his miniature and his cigarettes and his moment of swagger before the book moves on.
A City Square Remembered
The book belongs to the early twentieth century, when the square’s people are still close enough to the old country to argue about the war in Europe across a chessboard. David the Frenchman and Jonathan the German, who have played nightly for ten years and read each other’s letters from their only sons, ratify what the narrator calls the first agreement of total neutrality in the present world conflict—and then the letter comes, “Mort dans la gloire pour la patrie,” and the two old heads sag together while Terry the Cop turns away and huskily orders a sparrow to move on. That scene, and the later one in which the same pair forecast the Entente and the Alliance to a wounded gangster, show how Adams lets the great world press in on the small one without ever letting it overwhelm the small one.
What the book finally offers is a portrait of a neighborhood as a moral economy. Charity is not accepted in Our Square; help must come as a loan, a job, a commission, a game of chess. The narrator, a semi-retired pedagogue, learns this himself when he tries to press money on the Gnome and is shown a pile of checks for advertising sketches instead. Adams wrote as a New Yorker of his time, and the square he describes—with its slums and its Greek church, its pushcarts and its Y.M.C.A. library—has long since been built over. But the book’s real subject is not the place. It is the way a community absorbs the stranger, the failure, and the crank, and gives each of them a bench to sit on and a reason to get up in the morning.
