And even though the voice has yelled my name, I jump, shaking with surplus adrenaline.
“Skip?” I say, stopping as the car stops, to stare at his familiar mustachioed face. “What are you doing up in Murray Hill?”
“I dropped my trader guy off at some sex party, and now I’m taking the scenic route home,” he says. “I barely recognized you in that b-boy jacket. What happened to the mink?”
“Oh, I met some young gentlemen. We got on the subject of outerwear and decided to switch.”
“You gave up your mink for some cheap leather and zippers?” he says, leaning out to have a better look.
“Naturally,” I say, striking a catalogue-model pose, hand to hip, gaze over one shoulder. “It’s very figure-flattering, and besides—I’ve got other furs, but I haven’t got one of these.”
“Whatever you say, Lillian,” he says, and I am grateful to him for not pushing it further. “But how about you let me get my 1985 started off right by doing a good turn. It’d be my honor to give you a lift home.”
“Thank you,” I say. “But to ensconce myself in a car when I’ve made it this far with my own powers of locomotion would be a defeat that would set my 1985 off on the wrong foot.”
“What is it with you and walking, Lillian?” Skip asks, and for an irrational moment I worry that he’s going to shepherd me bodily into the back seat, but of course he remains behind the wheel.
“Skip, I’m quite weary and can’t explain it to you properly right now,” I say, and slowly begin to continue my walk. “But I’m not exaggerating when I say that walking has done no less than save my life. Plus, you’ll be relieved to know that this is my street.”
He rolls the limo forward, too, matching my pace. “That does make me feel better, but I’m going to go ahead and walk you home this way.”
“If you insist,” I say, and we proceed the final block to 22 E. Thirty-Sixth, me on two feet, him on four wheels. The distance is so brief that I almost let the interval pass in silence, but then I find myself saying, “Listen, Skip, would you like to meet up and take a walk some day? I can show you what I mean.”
“Aw, Lillian, you don’t have to prove anything to me,” he says, stopping the car and shaking his head. “I don’t mean to insult you.”
“No, really,” I say, extending a hand toward his window. “Give me your telephone number. If you do, I’ll call you. We’ll stroll.”
He hesitates a beat before reaching into his tuxedo jacket and presenting me a card. “You know what? You’re right. I sit on my ass in this limo all the livelong day. A walk could only do me good.”
“Me too,” I say, putting the card in one of Keith’s many zippered pockets and stepping away. “And now I bid you goodnight, as this building right here is my humble castle.”
I wave and he honks once—a gentle salute—when he sees that I’m safely inside my own building, before accelerating into the night.
I reach my apartment door, and fit the key to the lock. Poor famished Phoebe greets me in the entry, mewling and rubbing her rounded skull against my unsteady ankles. From across the otherwise dark apartment I see the insistent blink of the answering machine’s message light—the grandchildren wishing me a Happy New Year, Gian wondering where I was when the children called, Gian telling me that Julia has died.
Nothing that won’t wait until after the cat has been fed. I take off Keith’s coat and drape it over the back of a chair.
I turn on lamps, open drawers, set the opener to the rim of the can. Phoebe watches me from the floor, her pupils green and cavernous.
“Be patient,” I tell her. “Or make yourself useful by growing some thumbs.”
I owned that mink for more than forty years, more than twice the time I was married to Max. I bought it a month after Gian was born, as a way of proving that my life was still my own. For decades it rarely left my closet and never left the apartment. With Max away on business, with Johnny napping in another room, I’d drape it over the bed and run my fingers across it, conspiring with myself, reaffirming my status as an imposter, an agent provocateur. You think that it is a secret but it has never been one.
And then one fall day in 1966—with my long-traitorous brain at last reconciled with my body, with Max dead, with Gian living on his own—I rediscovered that coat, shrouded in plastic at the back of a closet. I put it on. I stepped outside, and the world seemed to accept me as a person who ought to be wearing it.
And then I took a walk.
I walked with no objective in mind beyond a vague interest in finding an old-fashioned cream soda, and six hours later I was seeing the sun set behind the Statue of Liberty from the upper deck of the Staten Island Ferry, watching as the faces of the strangers gathered at the rails were warmed and softened by the orange light, hearing them whisper and shout in four or five languages and a dozen different accents. It was the most clichéd scene imaginable—like the hackwork of Rockwell’s most gauche imitator—and my practiced mind filled with needle-sharp couplets to skewer it.
I didn’t write any of them down, though. I just stood still and watched, hoping that the tears on my cheeks could be plausibly blamed on the biting wind off the Upper Bay. We’ve been here all along, the world seemed to say, waiting for you. What took you so long to find us?
I put Phoebe’s food in her ceramic dish, pour myself a glass of water, and take a seat at the table in the dim kitchen, listening to the dainty smacks of her cat mouth.
The message light flashes on, a red pulse on the wall behind it. Somewhere in the building a party is breaking up; from the stairwell I hear the drunken talk and stumbling steps of those who’ve given up on the ancient elevator. We drift—all of us—farther from the fraught spasm of midnight, settling into the fog of another year.
No one survives the future, of course. Over the years I have rushed it, run from it, tried to shunt myself from its track. That these efforts did not succeed does not mean that I regret them.
Now? The future and I are just about even, our quarrel all but resolved. I welcome its coming, and I resolve to be attentive to the details of its arrival. I plan to meet it at the station in my best white dress, violet corsage in hand. Waving as it comes into view, borne toward the present on its road of anthracite.
Author’s Note and Sources
The story of Lillian Boxfish is inspired, in part, by the life and work of the poet and ad woman Margaret Fishback, herself the real highest-paid female advertising copywriter in the world during the 1930s, thanks to her brilliant work for R.H. Macy’s.
Back in 2007, my best friend from high school, Angela McClendon Ossar, was earning her master’s degree in library science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and doing an internship in the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History at Duke University. As part of this job, she got to be the receiving and processing archivist for a recent acquisition: the papers of Margaret Fishback.
Angela, as the first person ever to work professionally with the papers (after Fishback’s son, Anthony Antolini, donated the material), quickly realized that Fishback was a figure—a poet, a protofeminist, a successful career woman, and a mother—who would appeal to me as a poet, a feminist, and a professional myself. She called me up and told me all about Fishback, and I was so fascinated that I applied for a travel-to-collections grant from Duke, which enabled me, in May of 2007, to be the first nonarchivist or librarian to work with Fishback’s archive.
I instantly felt a deep connection to Fishback—an affinity for her writing both of ads and of poems, and her overall sensibility—though she’d been dead since the mid-1980s. I knew that I wanted to do something to bring her story and those of others like her (this whole forgotten generation of pre–Mad Men advertising women) into the light. I gave a lecture at Duke about my findings, focusing particularly on Fishback’s innovative use of humor in her ad copy for Macy’s, but it took me a few years to realize what shape my project should take. At last, stuck inside during a blizzard
in Chicago in 2013, I got the idea to combine my love of Fishback with my love of cities and flânerie; I resolved to write a novel that would bring these two affinities together. Now, almost exactly a decade to the day that I first set eyes upon the Fishback archive, the book has arrived.
To be clear, this is a work of fiction and not a biography of Margaret Fishback. The circumstances of the novel are my invention, and the attitudes and opinions expressed by Lillian Boxfish are entirely imagined. That said, I encourage everyone to read Margaret Fishback’s collections of light verse, which are utterly charming and are as follows:
I Feel Better Now, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1932 (poems originally appearing in the New York World, The New Yorker, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York American, Judge, and Vanity Fair)
I Take It Back, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1935 (poems originally appearing in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, The New York American, The New York Sun, The World, Judge, Vanity Fair, Redbook, Buffalo Town Tidings, The Stage, and The Forum Magazine)
One to a Customer, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1937 (an omnibus comprising I Feel Better Now and Poems Made Up to Take Out, supra, together with two other volumes: Out of My Head and I Take It Back)
Poems Made Up to Take Out, New York: David McKay Co., Inc., 1963 (poems originally appearing in Better Living, Collier’s, Glamour, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, the New York Herald Tribune, Pictorial Review, Reader’s Digest, American Girl, American Home, The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, The Wall Street Journal, This Week, Woman’s Day, and Women’s Wear Daily)
I also recommend taking a look at her how-to books, including the one on etiquette, Safe Conduct: When to Behave—And Why (Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1938), as well as a humorous guide to parenthood called Look Who’s a Mother! A Book About Babies for Parents, Expectant and Otherwise (Simon & Schuster, 1945).
All of the poems and advertisements that appear in the book attributed to Lillian Boxfish—as well as the letter here—were written by Margaret Fishback and appear here with the permission of her estate. Many thanks to Fishback’s son, Anthony Antolini, for granting this permission.
Additionally, the “Women in Cosmetic Advertising” quiz is drawn from Advertising Careers for Women, edited by Dorothy Dignam and Blanche Clair and published in 1939; Fishback’s copy of this book was a part of her archive.
About the Author
KATHLEEN ROONEY is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and has been recognized as one of Newcity Lit’s “Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago 2016.” Her previous work includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Allure, Salon, The Rumpus, and the Chicago Tribune. She teaches a workshop on the Writer as Urban Walker at the University of Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival. Kathleen is married to the novelist Martin Seay. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
EPIGRAPH
1. THE ROAD OF ANTHRACITE
2. NEW YEAR’S EVE
3. YOUR BRAIN IS SHOWING
4. GREAT WITH IMAGINATION
5. LUNCH POEMS
6. A SANDWICH AT THE MISSION
7. FAST AND LOOSE
8. THE PEARL ANNIVERSARY
9. SLAMBANGO
10. BENEFACTORS
11. FLEURS DE ROCAILLE
12. A FIREMAN’S AXE AND A DRACULA CAPE
13. A FLAW IN THE DESIGN
14. MULLIGAN
15. NATURE IN THE ROAR
16. BACK TO THE STARS
17. WHY PEOPLE DO THINGS
18. SULFUR AND MOLASSES
19. A HORRID LITTLE GHOST
20. THE GOLDEN STATE
21. SOLVITUR AMBULANDO
22. AS GOOD A DAY TO DIE AS ANY
23. THE BEST TECHNIQUE
24. A SECRET
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND SOURCES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
LILLIAN BOXFISH TAKES A WALK. Copyright © 2017 by Kathleen Rooney. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover illustrations: hat © Nancy White / Shutterstock; woman © Zita / Shutterstock; footprints © mtmmarek / Shutterstock
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-11332-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-11333-7 (e-book)
eISBN 9781250113337
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First Edition: January 2017
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk Page 26