“I don’t care if they’re in love, just friends, or hate each other with a passion, so long as she passes the Opera Singer Inspection, which happens one week from tomorrow.” The building manager strode purposely from the lobby.
On Monday, Miss Myrna Murray-Burdett woke up with just the merest, teensiest bit of a something in the back of her throat, like one fly on a vast windshield, hardly worth mentioning, really.
“It’s nothing,” she said to herself.
That evening the fly felt more like a beetle. She gargled with salt water, took a hot shower, and went to bed.
Tuesday morning, Miss M.-B.’s throat definitely felt wrong. Still, she decided it was nothing to be worried about, and that she would simply blast it, whatever it was, out of her insides with some full-throated vocalizing. She sang loud—she might prefer that we said, forte—during her voice lesson. She sang louder—piu forte—in her afternoon rehearsal. And she sang her loudest—forte fortissimo—in the practice studio she sometimes used off Eighth Avenue, just before drinks with Caswell. By evening her throat felt awful.
“It’s nothing serious, my love, is it?” said Caswell, holding her warm left hand in both of his. “Have a mint?”
Out came Miss M.-B.’s tongue and in went the mint. Then she gargled and went to bed.
By Wednesday the beetle had become a frog. Thursday it was a bullfrog, Friday morning it was a gigantic, prehistoric bullfrog, and by Saturday night, Miss M.-B.’s beautiful soprano voice sounded like some kind of ancient lawn mower biting a stump.
Earlier on that Saturday afternoon, the building manager had been pacing back and forth in the lobby.
“Bunchley,” he said, “have you seen Miss Murray-Burdett today?”
“I have not seen Miss M.-B. in two days, sir.”
“Two days! I hope to God she’s just resting up.” The building manager put his hand to his brow and began rubbing it strongly. “But you’ve heard her, right? Scales and stuff?”
“I have not heard her, sir. Would you like me to knock on her door and inquire as to how her vocal cords are doing?”
“Of course not, Bunchley!” The building manager began twirling the hair behind his ear. “Opera singers are temperamental! One false move, one moment where you show just a little less than total confidence in any opera singer, especially sopranos, and their insides go kerflooey! and they won’t work properly for weeks. They’re like boilers that way.”
The building manager stopped twirling his hair and returned to pacing.
On Sunday morning, Miss M.-B. sat in her bed, opening and shutting her mouth like a goldfish of less than average intelligence, afraid to make any sound at all for fear of the horror that might come out.
There was a sharp tap at the door. Caswell opened it and the building manager strode in looking anxiously around. “Well, Miss Murray-Burdett, how are you today? I see you are still in bed, no doubt resting up for tomorrow’s inspection. Good. Good. Glad to see it. Glad to see you are treating tomorrow’s inspection with the proper seriousness it demands. Not that there is anything for you to worry about. Of course not. Just like always, you’ll sail right through. Right through!”
The building manager put his hands together the way people do when they pray, he probably didn’t even know he was doing this, and smiled at Miss M.-B. He waited for her to say something. He waggled his eyebrows at her and smiled some more.
Miss M.-B., however, said nothing. She just rolled the edge of her comforter back and forth between her fingers and opened her eyes wide at the building manager. She still said nothing, but inside she wondered what she would do if she lost her position as the building’s opera singer. She couldn’t think what she would do—it was unthinkable.
“Saving your voice for tomorrow, eh?” said the building manager. “Good. Good! I’ll just be going then.”
At last, Miss Myrna reached out her hand as the building manager was turning away, and held him by the arm.
When he turned to look at her, she said, that is, she mouthed, “I can’t sing.”
“You what?” said the building manager. “I can’t sing,” she mouthed again. “I’ve lost my voice.” “You’ve lost your voice!” shouted the building manager. Miss M.-B. clapped her hands to her ears and nodded frenetically, wrinkling her forehead in shame and anger.
The building manager shook his hands at the ceiling and shouted again, “She’s lost her voice! And tomorrow is the Opera Singer Inspection!” (From a dramatic standpoint, the building manager might have made an excellent Verdi tenor.)
After this, there was a heavy silence, which was finally broken by Caswell, who said to no one in particular, “Mint?”
The rest of that Sunday passed in a storm of phone calls and house calls and calls to all of the musical gods in heaven. The building manager called Miss Murray-Burdett’s doctor, the house doctor, and his own doctor. Each one had a different opinion. Next he called her voice coach, her life coach, and his son’s Little League baseball coach. No help there, either.
“Time,” wailed the building manager, “we don’t have time!”
By nightfall, everyone was exhausted, at wit’s end, and still there was no working soprano in the building.
•
It was a haggard building manager who accepted the chipper “Good morning!” from Mrs. MacDougal as she stepped out of the elevator.
“What’s good about it?” he croaked.
Mrs. MacDougal was looking happy and healthy, just having returned from a week at her summer house in East Hampton, at the far eastern end of Long Island.
“Your trouble is you work too much. You need to spend a little time at the beach,” said Mrs. MacDougal.
“No, my trouble is I got an opera singer what’s got no voice, and an Opera Singer Inspector due to show up here sometime between one and five o’clock this afternoon. You know how these city inspectors don’t give no exact time for showing up. Between one and five. Probably be here about seven.”
“What is that you say? We have an opera singer with no voice? What is the matter with Miss Murray-Burdett? She has never given us any trouble before.”
“She ain’t got no voice, and there’s nothing doing about it.” (The Brooklyn boy in our building manager always seems to emerge in times of stress.) “I had fifty guys in here yesterday looking at her from uptown to downtown, from indoors to the sidewalk, and they couldn’t find nothing.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” said Mrs. MacDougal, waving her hands next to her ears as if shooing flies. “I’m away from here for one little week and the place falls to pieces. Take me to her.”
Caswell Grape opened the door hesitantly to Mrs. MacDougal’s three forceful knocks.
“Don’t you never go home?” said the building manager to Caswell as he pushed past him into the room.
Mrs. MacDougal surveyed the scene of Miss M.-B.’s studio apartment. Miss M.-B.’s several dressing gowns lay crumpled over the backs of her two chairs. Magazines, dog-eared and worn, were spread over most horizontal surfaces and these were covered by empty or nearly empty take-out food containers. And everywhere Mrs. MacDougal looked were the aqua-green boxes, now empty, of chocolate mints, like the dotted line on a treasure map, showing what had been the unswerving route Caswell had taken to Miss Murray-Burdett’s heart.
Mrs. MacDougal moved her eyes, her head and body following slowly around, and when she completed the circle she folded her arms, glowered at poor Miss M.-B., and began tapping her foot.
“What have you got to say for yourself?” said Mrs. MacDougal sharply.
Miss M.-B. opened and closed her shapely mouth hopelessly. It was really pathetic to see it.
Mrs. MacDougal lifted an empty mints box and examined it, held at arm’s length from her.
Miss M.-B. kept opening and closing her mouth.
Mrs. MacDougal placed the mints package down again, gently, smiled first at Miss M.-B., then at Caswell, and finally at the building manager.
At last, she t
urned to Caswell, who sat on the very edge of Miss M.-B.’s bed by her feet.
“And you are?” said Mrs. MacDougal to him. “No, let me guess.” She smiled. “You are Miss Murray-Burdett’s biggest fan.”
Caswell nodded nervously.
“Her new admirer?” Mrs. MacDougal winked broadly. “You would do anything for Miss Murray-Burdett.” The nodding was now constant. “Anything at all, to win her for yourself. And what better way to win her than to bring her something sweet? Mints, for instance?”
Caswell looked like a bobblehead doll on the dash of a car racing down a gravel road in Georgia.
A thick silence fell on the room, like a too-long breath between song phrases.
Then Mrs. MacDougal thundered, “Has no one ever heard of acid reflux around here?” She went on. “You’ve been poisoning our opera singer! Where did you meet this guy?” She wheeled on Miss Murray-Burdett, who merely looked large-eyed and miserable.
“Is he working for the building management at 740 or something?” She whipped back upon Caswell. “Are you?”
“No, no, no, no,” said Caswell, now only shaking his head.
“Okay, listen up, lover boy. We’ve got approximately five hours to fix this. Here’s what I want from you. Firstly, one gallon of whole milk. Secondly, two loaves of white bread. And thirdly, a bottle of Tums. Make it the opera-size. You can even make it the Wagnerian opera-size. Now, be back here with everything in twenty minutes or never show your face again!”
Mrs. MacDougal turned to Miss M.-B. as Caswell Grape scurried out the door.
“Have you got a toaster?”
•
Behind the closed door of Miss Murray-Burdett’s apartment there was a lot of tearful murmuring until Mrs. MacDougal’s voice was heard clearly and commandingly. “Shut it!” she said. “Save it for later.”
The rest of the morning, for those closely involved, had all the tension of a hospital waiting room on the occasion of a first baby.
The building manager returned to pacing in the lobby, now with added vigor. Caswell, having procured the required items, hovered in the hall outside of Miss M.-B.’s door.
At ten o’clock, the door was wrenched open and Mrs. MacDougal held out a crumpled burgundy evening dress along with a pair of black pumps.
“Get the dress cleaned, the shoes polished, and have it for us by noon.”
•
As Caswell walked up the hall with the clean dress and shined shoes his heart did a double bump. In the quiet of the empty hallway he, her biggest and most remorseful fan, definitely could hear the stirrings of the true voice of Miss Murray-Burdett. That hideous frog was changing into the gorgeous princess it should be.
•
At one twenty-five, Mr. Bunchley walked through the front door to the lobby, announcing that the Opera Singer Inspector was a block away.
The office manager said a brief prayer and stepped out onto the sidewalk to meet him.
And just as the Opera Singer Inspector, a Mr. Celimontana originally from Milan, reached the door, the lilting passage from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, act II, scene ii, floated down from somewhere above, not like celestial soot this time but like miraculous flakes of heavy summer snow.
Mr. Celimontana raised his fingers and thumb to his mouth and kissed them, and when he did his fingers sprang open as his hand fell away, like a blooming flower.
“Brava,” he said, “brava.” He smiled and nodded at the building manager, and added, “Va bene.” (All is well.)
The Forgotten Room
THE BUILDING we live in, 777 Garden Avenue, was built in the second decade of the twentieth century, which makes it, as we are now in the twenty-first century, nearly a hundred. The building’s centennial is coming up, and what a party we’ll have.
Garden Avenue itself is approximately twice as old, having been laid out in the grand street plan of 1811. Like Manhattan Avenue of the West Side, which runs only from 100th Street to 125th Street, Garden Avenue is one of the short avenues, starting at Seventy-second and also ending at 125th, tucked in between Lexington Avenue and Third Avenue. And just like Manhattan Avenue, even many lifelong New Yorkers have never heard of it, exclaiming in surprise when they first, sometimes literally, stumble upon it.
However, some New York wags have scoffed at the avenue over the years, calling it Wannabe Park Avenue, or Poor Man’s Park, or Park Avenue Lite. “What’s next?” they say. “Backyard Avenue? Croquet Lawn Boulevard? Rolled Sod Drive?”
There may be some truth in this, but for those New Yorkers who live there (and have a little sense of humor) the avenue offers them a wonderful mix of the high and the low, the rare and the common, salmon tartare and a bagel with a schmear.
•
Number 777 was constructed at a time when large apartment buildings were taking over the avenues from downtown going up, knocking down and replacing the large family mansions, which were themselves at that time only about thirty years old. Still, times were changing in the city, many people were moving in, and the families in these mansions were selling their homes and either moving out or moving into the new buildings, sometimes into the very buildings standing on the bones of their old houses.
Naturally, this was a great time to be an architect. The architects of 777 were two gentlemen, Solomon Archer and Nathaniel Stone, of the firm Archer, Archer, Stone and Green. While Mr. Archer made sure the buildings were solid and unlikely to fall over, Mr. Stone saw to it that they looked good. Mr. Stone was a bit of a romantic, constantly falling in love with building styles of the past from all of history and from all over the world. Sometimes his designs looked like Aztec pyramids. Sometimes they looked like Egyptian palaces. And sometimes they looked like the tops of Gothic cathedrals. Mr. Stone had traveled a great deal as a young man—he grew up in Iowa—and always had a pencil and a book to draw in. The world became his department store. Having become a successful architect in New York, and traveling again, he might say, “I’ll have that tower”—pointing to the top of an Italian palazzo—“on my building at Eighty-sixth and Lex.” Or, “That Gothic entrance is just what I want for my apartments at Broadway and 103rd.” And he would busily draw everything in his sketchbook.
It then became Mr. Archer’s somewhat tedious task to make it all fit.
Number 777 Garden Avenue is perhaps the grandest building Archer and Stone ever built together. At street level it rises right up out of the ground, sheer, with no hemming or hawing. There is no moat, or hedge, or black fence holding you away from the smooth pink granite walls that form the first two floors. There are no steps up into the lobby, nor is there a carriage turnaround. Mr. Stone may have been a romantic, but he knew that carriages were on their way out. One minute you stroll on the sidewalk, and the next minute you are through the doors and into the magnificent lobby.
Stylistically, you would have to call the whole thing neo-proto-Aztec-Egyptian-Gothic.
Mr. Stone really let himself go. Zigzaggy, smooth stone surrounds the exterior doors. Swoopy Egyptian columns with terra-cotta plumes hold up the lobby ceiling. And in the oddest places both inside and out, you’ll come upon something vaguely Viking—maybe runes woven into the balustrade here, a dragon-headed downspout there.
The building goes up cleanly and evenly enough for twelve floors, as mentioned, but then breaks into all manner of ziggurat shapes—ziggurats are ancient zigzaggy pyramids— ending in a soaring tower that conceals the water tank. The odd setbacks created by the zigzagging shape allow for many strangely configured terraces on the top nine floors. In the courtyard, on the back side of the building, two three-story chimneys stand next to the central tower connected by flying arches, like a piece of a grand Roman aqueduct, just to mix things up even more.
Do you know your Norse sagas?
The top nine floors of 777 Garden Avenue are Nathaniel Stone’s vivid imagining of what Valhalla, the palace of the dead Viking warriors, should look like.
Maybe you picture it differently.
&n
bsp; Inside, Mr. Stone let his imagination run pretty freely, as well. While you aren’t likely to be suddenly face-to-face with a grinning Viking-ship dragon head, like you might be on the outside, the layout of each floor is still kind of reptilian, if you can think of long, twisting hallways and weirdly shaped rooms in that way. Most of the floors two through twelve (there are no apartments on the ground floor) are divided into five, six, or seven apartments. Then floors fourteen through seventeen (there is no thirteen) into two, three, or four apartments, floors eighteen and nineteen have one apartment each, and the very top two floors, twenty and twenty-one, are combined into one duplex apartment. This is now the apartment of old Mrs. Rotterdam-Bottom, who owns the building—she is the granddaughter of Mr. Theophilus Rotterdam, who hired Mr. Archer and Mr. Stone in the first place.
Apartments were large and many-roomed when the building was new. Most families then still had people to help them, like a maid or a cook, and these helpers often had their own rooms in the apartment. Dumbwaiters, a small kind of hand-operated elevator, brought food and dishes from one floor to the next and laundry up from the basement. Apartments didn’t have dishwashers, microwaves, or flat-screen TVs. Instead, they had maid’s rooms, pantries, and nooks and crannies.
It was a comfortable, roomy life in the city at 777 Garden Avenue one hundred years ago.
In one of the grand, full-floor apartments, on the nineteenth floor to be exact, lived old Mr. Waterby, who had been there since the building’s doors were first opened. In fact, his former mansion was the one that was knocked down to build 777 in the first place. He didn’t much miss his old house. No, he preferred his airy apartment, the wonderful views down the avenues, the simpler living, no more fussing with the roof, and so on. He doted on his apartment. It had nineteen rooms: four bedrooms, a dining room, a living room, a library, maid’s and cook’s rooms, a front hall, a back hall, and so on. But Mr. Waterby’s favorite room was at the back of the apartment, behind the elevator and stairs that run up through the center of the building. The music room. You entered the room by one of two doors, one north, one south, facing each other, which gave the room a certain formality. It was small, sun-filled. Then turning to the center of the room, where the piano stood, you faced west and the French doors that opened onto a narrow terrace, just big enough to hold the small audiences that attended the impromptu concerts Mrs. Waterby gave, seated at the piano with the French doors open.
The Doorman's Repose Page 4