City of Girls

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  I’ve often wondered what it felt like for you, to have a father who cared so much about you, but who deliberately removed himself from your day-to-day existence. When I asked him if perhaps you longed for more attention from him, he said that you probably did. But he didn’t want to come close enough to damage you. He thought of himself as a person who damaged things.

  That’s what he told me, anyway.

  He thought it was better just to leave you in the care of your mother.

  I haven’t mentioned your mother yet, Angela.

  I want you to know that this hasn’t been out of disrespect, but quite the opposite. I’m not sure how to talk about your mother or about your parents’ marriage. I will tread carefully here so as to not offend or hurt you. But I will also try to be thorough in my report. At the least, you deserve to know everything I know.

  I must start off by saying that I never met your mother—I never even saw a photo of her—and so I know nothing about her, beyond what Frank told me. I tend to believe that his descriptions of her were truthful, only because he was so truthful. But just because he described your mother truthfully doesn’t necessarily mean he described her accurately. I can only assume that she was like all of us—a complicated being, composed of more than one man’s impressions.

  You may have known a completely different woman than the person whom your father described to me, is what I’m saying. I’m sorry if my story, then, clashes with what you perceived.

  But I will convey it to you, nonetheless.

  I learned from Frank that his wife’s name was Rosella, that she was from the neighborhood, and that her parents (also Sicilian immigrants) owned the grocery store down the street from where Frank grew up. As such, Rosella’s family was of higher social stature than Frank’s family, who were mere manual laborers.

  I know that Frank started working for Rosella’s parents when he was in eighth grade, as a delivery boy. He always liked your grandparents, and admired them. They were more gentle and refined people than his own family. And that’s where he met your mother—at the grocery store. She was three years younger. A hard worker. A serious girl. They got married when he was twenty and she was seventeen.

  When I asked if he and Rosella had been in love at the time of their marriage, he said, “Everyone in my neighborhood was born on the same block, raised on the same block, and married someone from the same block. It’s just what you did. She was a good person, and I liked her family.”

  “But did you love her?” I repeated.

  “She was the right sort of person to marry. I trusted her. She knew I would be a good provider. We didn’t go in for luxuries like love.”

  They were married right after Pearl Harbor, like so many other couples, and for the same reasons as everyone else.

  And of course you, Angela, were born in 1942.

  I know that Frank was unable to get much leave during the last few years of the war, so he didn’t see you and Rosella for quite a long time. (It wasn’t easy for the Navy to ship people home from the South Pacific all the way to Brooklyn; a lot of those guys didn’t see their families for years.) Frank spent three Christmases in a row on an aircraft carrier. He wrote letters home but Rosella rarely replied. She had not finished school, and was self-conscious about her handwriting and her spelling. Because Frank’s family was also barely literate, he was one of the sailors on the aircraft carrier who never got mail.

  “Was that painful for you?” I asked him. “Never to hear news from home?”

  “I didn’t hold it against anyone,” he said. “My people weren’t the kind to write letters. But even though Rosella never wrote to me, I knew she was faithful, and that she was taking good care of Angela. She was never the type to go around with other boys. That was more than a lot of men on the ship could say about their wives.”

  Then there was the kamikaze attack, and Frank was burned over 60 percent of his body. (For all his talk of how other guys on his ship had been just as badly injured as him, the truth is that nobody else with burns as severe as Frank’s had ended up surviving. People didn’t survive burns over 60 percent of their bodies back then, Angela—but your father did.) Then there were the long months of torturous recovery at the naval hospital. When Frank finally came home, it was 1946. He was a changed man. A broken man. You were now four years old, and you didn’t know him except from a photo. He told me that when he met you again after all those years, you were so pretty and bright and kind that he could not believe you belonged to him. He could not believe that anything associated with him could be as pure as you. But you were also a little bit afraid of him. Not nearly so afraid, though, as he was of you.

  His wife also felt like a stranger. Over those missing years, Rosella had transformed from a pretty young girl to a matron—heavyset and serious, dressed always in black. She was the sort of woman who went to Mass every morning, and prayed to her saints all day long. She wanted to have more children. But of course that was now impossible, because Frank could not bear to be touched.

  That night as we walked all the way to Brooklyn, Frank told me, “After the war, I started sleeping in a cot out in the shed behind our house. Made a room for myself there, with a coal stove. I’ve been sleeping there for years. It’s better that way. I don’t keep anyone awake with my strange hours. Sometimes I wake up screaming, that sort of thing. My wife and kid, they didn’t need to be hearing that. For me, with sleeping, the whole procedure is a disaster. Better that I do it alone.”

  He respected your mother, Angela. I want you to know that.

  He never once said a bad word about her. On the contrary—he approved entirely of the way she raised you, and he admired her stoicism in the face of her life’s many disappointments. They never bickered. They were never at each other’s throats. But after the war, they barely ever spoke other than to make arrangements about the family. He deferred to her on all matters, and turned over his paychecks to her without question. She had taken over management of her parents’ greengrocer business, and had inherited the building that housed the shop. She was a good businesswoman, he said. He was happy that you, Angela, had grown up in the store, chatting with everyone. (“The light of the neighborhood,” he called you.) He was always eyeing you for signs that you, too, might someday be an oddball recluse (which is how he saw himself), but you seemed normal and social. Anyway, Frank trusted your mother’s choices around you completely. But he was always at work on patrol, or walking the city at night. Rosella was always working at the greengrocer, or taking care of you. They were married in name only.

  At one point, he told me, he had offered her a divorce, so she might have the chance to find a more suitable man. With his inability to uphold his duties of marital consortium and companionship, he felt certain they could secure an annulment. She was still young. With another man, she might still have the big family she had always wanted. But even if the Catholic Church had allowed her to divorce, Rosella would never have gone ahead with it.

  “She’s more church than the Church itself,” he said. “She’s not the kind of person who would ever break a vow. And nobody in our neighborhood gets divorced, Vivian, even if things are bad. And with me and Rosella—things were never bad. We just lived separate lives. What you gotta understand about South Brooklyn, is that the neighborhood itself is a family. You can’t break up that family. Really, my wife is married to the neighborhood. It was the neighborhood who took care of her while I was in the service. The neighborhood still takes care of her now—and Angela, too.”

  “But do you like the neighborhood?” I asked.

  He gave a rueful smile. “It’s not a choice, Vivian. The neighborhood is what I am. I’ll always be part of it. But I’m also not part of it anymore, since the war. You come back, everyone expects you to be the same guy you were before you got blown up. I used to have enthusiasms like everyone else—baseball, movies, what have you. The Church feasts on Fourth Street, the big holidays. But I don’t have enthusiasms anymore. I don’t fit there anym
ore. It’s not the neighborhood’s fault. They’re good people. They wanted to take care of us guys who came back from the war. Guys like me, if you had a Purple Heart, everyone wants to buy you a beer, give you a salute, give you free tickets to a show. But I can’t do anything with all that. After a while, people learned to leave me alone. Now it’s like I’m a ghost, when I walk down those streets. Still, though, I belong to that place. It’s hard to explain, if you’re not from there.”

  I asked him, “Do you ever think about moving away from Brooklyn?”

  He said, “Only every day for the last twenty years. But that wouldn’t be fair to Rosella and Angela. Anyhow, I’m not sure I’d be better off anywhere else.”

  As we walked back over the Brooklyn Bridge that night, he said to me, “What about you, Vivian? You never got married?”

  “Almost. But I was saved by the war.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Pearl Harbor came, my guy enlisted, we broke off the engagement.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Don’t be. He wasn’t right for me, and I would have been a disaster for him. He was a fine person, and he deserved better.”

  “And you never found another man?”

  I was quiet for a while, trying to think how to answer that. Finally, I decided to just answer it with the truth.

  “I’ve found many other men, Frank. More than you could count.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  He was quiet after that, and I wasn’t sure how that information had landed on him. This was a moment where another sort of woman might have chosen to be discreet. But something stubborn in me insisted that I be even more clear.

  “I’ve slept with a lot of men, Frank, is what I’m saying.”

  “No, I get it,” he said.

  “And I will be sleeping with a lot more men in the future, I expect. Sleeping with men—lots of men—that’s more or less my way of life.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I understand.”

  He didn’t seem agitated by it. Just thoughtful. But I felt nervous, sharing this truth about myself. And for some reason, I couldn’t stop talking about it.

  “I just wanted to tell you this about me,” I said, “because you should know what kind of woman I am. If we’re going to be friends, I don’t want to run into any judgment from you. If this aspect of my life is going to be a problem . . .”

  He stopped suddenly in his tracks. “Why would I judge you?”

  “Think about where I’m coming from here, Frank. Think about how we first met.”

  “Yeah, I see,” he said. “I get it. But you don’t need to worry about that.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m not that guy, Vivian. I never was.”

  “Thank you. I just wanted to be honest.”

  “Thank you for the tribute of your honesty,” he said—which I thought then, and still think, was one of the most elegant things I’d ever heard anyone say.

  “I’m too old to hide who I am, Frank. And I’m too old to be made to feel ashamed of myself by anyone—do you understand that?”

  “I do.”

  “But what do you think of it, though?” I asked. I couldn’t believe I was pushing this issue. But I couldn’t help but ask. His poise—his lack of shocked response on the matter—was puzzling.

  “What do I think about you sleeping with a lot of men?”

  “Yeah.”

  He thought for a moment, then said, “There’s something that I know about the world now, Vivian, that I didn’t know when I was young.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “The world ain’t straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there’s a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn’t care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain’t straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, they don’t mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.”

  “I don’t think I ever believed that the world was straight,” I said.

  “Well, I did. And I was wrong.”

  We walked on. Below us, the East River—dark and cold—progressed steadily toward the sea, carrying away the pollution of the whole city with its currents.

  “Can I ask you something, Vivian?” he said after a while.

  “Certainly.”

  “Does it make you happy?”

  “Being with all those men, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  I gave this question real consideration. He hadn’t asked it in an accusing way. I think he genuinely wished to comprehend me. And I’m not sure I’d ever pondered it before. I didn’t want to take the question lightly.

  “It makes me satisfied, Frank,” I finally replied. “It’s like this: I believe I have a certain darkness within me, that nobody can see. It’s always in there, far out of reach. And being with all those different men—it satisfies that darkness.”

  “Okay,” Frank said. “I think I can maybe understand that.”

  I had never before spoken this vulnerably about myself. I had never before tried to put words to my experience. But still, I felt that my words fell short. How could I explain that by “darkness” I didn’t mean “sin” or “evil”—I only meant that there was a place within my imagination so fathomlessly deep that the light of the real world could never touch it. Nothing but sex had ever been able to reach it. This place within me was prehuman, almost. Certainly, it was precivilization. It was a place beyond language. Friendship could not reach it. My creative endeavors could not reach it. Awe and joy could not reach it. This hidden part of me could only be reached through sexual intercourse. And when a man went to that darkest, secret place within me, I felt as though I had landed in the very beginning of myself.

  Curiously, it was in that place of dark abandon where I felt the least sullied and most true.

  “But as for happy?” I went on. “You asked if it makes me happy. I don’t think so. Other things in my life make me happy. My work makes me happy. My friendships and the family that I’ve created, they make me happy. New York City makes me happy. Walking over this bridge with you right now makes me happy. But being with all those men, that makes me satisfied, Frank. And I’ve come to learn that this kind of satisfaction is something I need, or else I will become unhappy. I’m not saying that it’s right. I’m just saying—that’s how it is with me, and it’s not something that’s ever going to change. I’m at peace with it. The world ain’t straight, as you say.”

  Frank nodded, listening. Wanting to understand. Able to understand.

  After another long silence, Frank said, “Well, I think you’re fortunate, then.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Because not many people know how to be satisfied.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  I have never loved the people I was supposed to love, Angela.

  Nothing that was ever arranged for me worked out the way it was planned. My parents had pointed me in a specific direction—toward a respectable boarding school and an elite college—such that I could meet the community I was meant to belong to. But apparently, I didn’t belong there, because to this day, I don’t have a single friend from those worlds. Nor did I meet a husband for myself at one of my many school proms.

  Nor did I ever really feel like I belonged to my parents, or that I was meant to reside in the small town where I grew up. I still don’t keep in touch with anybody from Clinton. My mother and I had only the most superficial of relationships, right up until her death. And my father, of course, was never much more than a grumbling political commentator at the far end of the dinner table.

  But then I moved to New York City, and I came to know my Aunt Peg, an unconventional and irresponsible lesbian, who drank too much and spent too much money, and who only wanted to cavort through life with a sort of hop-skip-tralala—and I loved her. She gave me nothing less than my entire world.
/>   And I also met Olive, who didn’t seem lovable—but whom I came to love, nonetheless. Far more than I loved my own mother or father. Olive was not warm or affectionate, but she was loyal and good. She was something of a bodyguard to me. She was our anchoress. She taught me whatever morality I possess.

  Then I met Marjorie Lowtsky—an eccentric Hell’s Kitchen teenager whose immigrant parents were in the rag trade. She was not at all the sort of person I was supposed to befriend. But she became not only my business partner, but my sister. I loved her, Angela, with all my heart. I would do anything for her, and she for me.

  Then came Marjorie’s son, Nathan—this weak little boy who was allergic to life itself. He was Marjorie’s child, but he was my child, too. If my parents’ vision for my life had gone according to plan, I would surely have had my own children—big, strong, horseback-riding future captains of industry—but instead I got Nathan, and that was better. I chose Nathan and he chose me. I loved him, too.

  These random-seeming people were my family, Angela. These people were my real family. I’m telling you all this because I want you to understand that—over the next few years—I came to love your father just as much as I loved any of them.

  My heart cannot offer him higher praise than that. He became as close to me as my own, beautiful, random, and real family.

  Love like that is a deep well, with steep sides.

  Once you fall in, that’s it—you will love that person always.

  A few nights a week, for years on end, your father would call me at some odd hour and say, “Do you want to get out? I can’t sleep.”

  I’d say, “You can never sleep, Frank.”

  And he’d say, “Yeah, but tonight I can’t sleep worse than usual.”

  It didn’t matter what the season was, or the time of night. I always said yes. I’ve always enjoyed exploring this city, and I have always liked the nighttime. What’s more, I’ve never been a person who needed much sleep. But most of all, I just loved being with Frank. So he would call me, and I would agree to see him, and he would drive over from Brooklyn to pick me up, and we would go someplace together and walk.