My specialties were beets with caraway seeds and veal scaloppini rolled around Jones Dairy Farm sausages. We were very fond of Kraft’s Seven-Minute Dinner, but I always made a salad to go with it, and never with iceberg lettuce, and I always used red onions, which I had never seen before New York. Once or twice a week we would have wine with dinner—usually a Tavel, because rosé seemed to go with everything—and it began to look as if I might really be a wife. Certainly I was a wife on the nights I stopped at the small Gristede’s near the Petersfield on my way home. Emerging from the store after a bit of byplay with the butcher, I would hug the groceries to my chest and feel myself a virtual Ceres. I was going home to feed my husband, and no more was there anyone to tell me that it was time to come in or to tap on a car window and tell us to stop that stuff. A policeman did that once to us in New London, when I was still in college. “It’s all right, officer,” I said, sobbing. “We’re going to get married.”
The bedroom. Can I go into the bedroom? It held a three-quarter bed, the iron frame and the springs throwaways of my sister-in-law’s and the mattress a Simmons from Macy’s. There was another bed, too, very narrow, with a foam rubber mattress, the duplicate of the couch in the living room. Two unpainted bureaus, also from Macy’s, one long and low, one short and high: both were stained mahogany by Jerry. Glass curtains shielded us from the men working in the cigar-band factory across the airshaft, and because we did not have a bedside table, the telephone was on the floor. The sheets and pillows, two for $25, half goosedown, came from Bloomingdale’s January white sale. And the yellow blanket was a wedding present from my aunt, who inscribed the card “To keep my baby warm.”
What else? Oh yes. Imagine a woman staring at the ceiling until her husband, young and aroused and in love, finally rolls off and away. She gets up, to run scalding water over her hands in the white-tiled bathroom, and returns not to the three-quarter bed but to the little one, where she can tell herself that she is in the maple twin at 232 Hope Street, Bristol, Rhode Island, and that her parents, both of them, are asleep in the next room.
We started entertaining. Jerry, of course, and a few people from our respective offices. I learned to make boeuf bourguignon, and we discovered that you could hardly go wrong with a Beaujolais. I bought linen napkins in lots of colors, but all of them colors that would go with our jute placemats, and put a Spanish earthenware pot into which I had stuck a bunch of strawflowers on the Door Store table.
Burlap was big then, so I contemplated making bedroom curtains from the brightly colored burlaps at a place in the Village called Bon Bazar. But making the living room curtains had more or less done me in, although I never ceased to be proud of them, so I contented myself with a burlap coat, and wore it to weddings. The rest of our classmates were marrying, and those that had not yet, like Allie, lived uptown with roommates and gave cocktail parties that reminded me of Wesleyan’s after-the-game fraternity parties. Unskilled at keeping conversation going for two hours without a lot of help, the guests, myself included, always got drunk.
But there were other friends. No, they were not friends, not really. Rather, they were people we were trying out. There was, for instance, the young man who knew everyone, the kind who looks good leaning on a fireplace with a drink in his hand. We thought he was a possibility.
He claimed to be a protégé of Frank O’Connor’s, one of the names C.A. was fondest of dropping, and took us one night to O’Connor’s vacant apartment in Brooklyn Heights. Now I wonder at his, and our, gall and the way we poked around O’Connor’s small bare living room. So this, I thought, studying the four-square furniture and the pile of paper beside the office typewriter, is where genius resides! B. was as thrilled as I. Neither of us had ever met a famous author, and my only sightings were of Louis MacNeice and Robert Penn Warren when they spoke at Connecticut. We would not have crossed the street for a movie star, and I had already seen quite a few on Fifth Avenue, all of whom seemed to think that keeping their eyes on the sidewalk made them invisible. But we thought good writers were gods.
One evening I came home giddy and silly from an office cocktail party and found the young man having a drink and listening to the Columbia 360 with B.
“I’ll choose the next record,” the young man said. “Any requests?”
“Anything but Palestrina,” I said, giggling. “Palestrina makes me cry.”
I don’t remember anything after that, because I was drunk, though since I carry liquor well, it is hard for others to tell when I’m smashed. But my husband said the young man put on Palestrina, sat down, and waited for the tears.
I didn’t cry. I couldn’t even hear the record above the buzzing in my head, and remember nothing but B. finally ushering the young man out the door. He never asked him over again.
When B. told me of the way the young man watched me, like a hawk eyeing a sparrow, I was frightened. Cruelty I had associated with major events, like the Nazis gassing the Jews, or childish hurts, like the gang going to the movies without me. But adulthood, I had assumed, with World War II over and Girl Scouts behind me, was a plateau on which one walked safely until one fell off into death.
There were other tryouts. There was the couple from my husband’s office who lived in Queens and had us over for dinner. The hostess said “the girls” would do the dishes while “the men” sat and talked. Not our class.
There were the two sisters in their thirties who lived on the Upper West Side and kept a radio on the kitchen table. Not our class.
There was the young Viennese writer, the protégé of Thomas Mann, who lived weekends on Washington Place in the Village with his girlfriend and during the week with his parents in Washington Heights while he finished a novel. Our class.
My Parisian sister-in-law came to town with a Yale professor, and they took us to Luchow’s. The Yale professor, already half seas over, disliked me on sight—I have always aroused hostility in heavy drinkers, maybe because, as one of them said, “You look like the goddamn Virgin Mary”—and was abusive. Angry, I rose from the table and walked home, to throw myself on the bed and cry until I was ill.
An hour later, when B. arrived, he said, “Why are you crying? You were right to get mad. You did so well up till now. I’m ashamed of you.”
I was ashamed of me, too, but not for crying. I was ashamed of showing anger, of walking out. “Never let them see they’ve gotten to you,” my father used to say. “Don’t give them the satisfaction.”
We went to a cocktail party where, at last, we saw celebrity up close. Everyone there was famous, except for the pretty young men, most of whom seemed to sell books at Doubleday and who turned out to be de rigueur at every party that had a legendary writer or two as its centerpiece. The verbal equivalents of boutonnieres, they dressed up the room, scented the conversation.
My husband moved easily among the tweedy men and the women in the rump-sprung skirts, among the people whose faces I had seen on dust jackets and whose names I had read in book reviews. He was charming. He belonged there. But cold sweat was chilling my back, and self-consciousness had pinioned my tongue, and I ended up doing what the shy always do at cocktail parties: I toured the host’s bookcases, staring intently at row after row of titles, no one of which I actually saw.
It was better at Joel and Mil’s. I still called Joel “Mr. Graham” and always would—after a while it turned into a kind of nickname—but I could manage “Mil” for Mildred. They lived in a one-room apartment on Minetta Lane, to which we would go once or twice a month for dinner and stories about the New York they had known when they were our age. Joel would talk about Sandy somebody or other at the Group Theater and John (he called him “Julie”) Garfield, and he told us we could never claim to have seen a great actress because we hadn’t seen Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie. We heard about the Lower East Side, where he grew up after his parents emigrated from Russia, which he could not remember as a country, only as a place in which he had slept, swaddled, on an enormous stove. He and Mil
had seen Gene Kelly in Pal Joey and Marilyn Miller in As Thousands Cheer, and listening to them was like watching a thirties movie: young men in felt fedoras, young women in cute little print dresses, brownstones outside of which milkmen left bottles at dawn, and cobblestone streets that shone like black satin when it rained.
One night while we were eating Joel’s version of beef Stroganoff, a dish I was dying to add to my own repertory, B. announced that he was leaving his slot in the advertising agency’s mailroom. “My God, kid,” Joel said, “you don’t know what it’s like to be out of work.”
Joel and Mil had known the Depression, which we knew only through movies and songs like “Remember My Forgotten Man,” and it had left them fearful in the way my mother was fearful. A job, any job, was the only sure bulwark against chaos. But our world was one in which a young man with a college degree would never have to go without a salary. As for his wife, her mind would have been so enriched by her college education that no household task, however mundane, could possibly bore her, because she could always escape into her well-stocked head.
“Don’t worry so much, Joel,” B. said, already dressed in a professional confidence that would never show a crack. “I’ll manage.” And of course he did. He got a job in the textbook department of a publishing house, not where he wanted to be but a handhold nonetheless. He had tried—my God, how he had tried, with his letters and his suggestions and his outlines—and he had made it. B. was on the circuit.
My father had gone on many business trips, and now here was my husband packing for his first: his shirts strapped to their cardboard backs, his knitted ties laid out on the bed, and his wife folding back the shoulders of his extra jacket so that only the lining showed. He was Odysseus, a joyous Odysseus, at the start of a lifetime’s journey through hotels and expense accounts (“swindle sheets,” my father had called them) and breakfast meetings. And I, who had never spent a single night alone, was terrified.
I got through the first night, waking every hour or so to watch the alarm clock’s minute hand jerk its way around the dial, but on the second there was a knock at the door. A middle-aged stranger stood in the corridor, silently extending a card. Screaming, I slammed the door in his face. The next day the doorman told me he was a deaf-mute who lived in the building and did watch and jewelry repairs at home. Knowing we were new tenants, he had been trying to give me his business card.
If I see him again, I told myself, I’ll smile. I’ll find a bracelet or something he can fix. But of course I never saw him again. In the evening the residents of the Petersfield disappeared behind their deadbolts, and by the time I emerged to take the garbage to the service stairs, the corridor was as silent as a crypt.
You could live in New York, I had begun to realize, without ever having to open your mouth except for life’s necessities. You could even be invisible, not because you were hidden by the crowd but because the crowd was blind to your being a part of it. And unless you were in a park—there were none near us except for Gramercy Park, which was private—you could not sit down. You had to keep on walking until you got home, and if your home was like mine—two rooms in which I could not seem to find a place for myself—you had to go out and start walking all over again. You had to walk and walk and walk until exhaustion set in, and once it did, home—the apartment that faced the airshaft or the basement flat that seemed as dark as a coalhole or the studio that was the size of a closet and maybe even had been—looked good. It looked even better if you could turn it into a fortress. My fortress was built with pots and pans.
I phoned my grandmother for her baked beans recipe and invited people for Saturday night suppers. Friday night I put the beans, California pea beans and yellow-eyes, into a bowl to soak, just like Ganny did, and Saturday morning I stuck them in the oven, and by evening the apartment smelled like her kitchen at 232 Hope Street. The scent loosened my tongue, set me talking.
“In Bristol,” I would say, “there are four funeral homes. There’s the one for the Italians—that tends to be showy. Then there’s the one for the Portuguese, and Connery’s, which is for the local Irish and puts on a very muted, sober production. Strictly speaking, my family should be buried by Connery’s, since we’re Irish, but we’re also old settlers, so we’re buried by Wilburs, the Protestant, not to mention society, mortuary, which makes us, on dying, instant Yankees.
“Then there are the churches,” I’d continue, warmed by the guests’ silence and the discreet little Beaujolais I was waving in my hand. “The lowest rung meets in a former dry-goods store. They’re mostly fallen-off Baptists and swamp Yankees, and they’ve all got cotton-batting hair and blinky blue eyes.
“On the next rung is the Portuguese church, St. Elizabeth’s, which is across the street from the rubber factory and is attended only by the Portuguese, who are, according to Bristol, very clean, good hard workers, and possibly mulattos.
“The Italian church, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, is on the north side of the common and is very cozy, since it’s small and has a baby-blue ceiling painted with gold stars. The Italian church also has a ten o’clock mass, which is handy for the Catholics who go to St. Mary’s, the Irish church, because the service is shorter than St. Mary’s eleven-fifteen high and later than St. Mary’s nine o’clock low.
“On the fourth rung is St. Mary’s, my church, which is a fancy Gothic on the east side of the common and a block from the rubber factory. Some Protestants have been known to attend weddings and funerals at St. Mary’s. We always feel honored.
“Next up is the Baptist church. It’s on the west side of the common and looks like the Parthenon, but half Bristol thinks Baptists are possible snake handlers and speak in tongues, so even though it’s Protestant, it’s not a classy church.
“Now, the Congregational church is another thing entirely. It’s super-respectable. Congregational men tend to show up only once a year, to pass the plate, and Congregational women run the best church suppers and crochet the best Christmas bazaar potholders. The Congregational church is also the one that the Italians join when they have a fight with the priest. As for St. Michael’s, the Episcopal church . . . it’s the same as Bailey’s Beach and the Agawam Hunt. It’s more than a church. It’s a club.”
On and on I would go, revisiting a town I would never truly leave, glad I could finally, or so it seemed, laugh at it. And as I did, I felt my bones taking on flesh and my skin taking on color. But when the guests left, I would drop into a crying jag and tell my husband about my father, about how much I wished they had known each other, about how he had had a crush on Margaret Sullavan, about how he used to say that just walking around the ground floor of Brooks Brothers could cheer him up, about how we read poetry together and cried together, about how much he had wanted to name me Maeve and about how he was overruled by my mother, which is why I was Mary. And B. would clear the table and pile the dishes in the sink and fold his lips into a long thin line and go silently to bed. Until, that is, the night he opened them and said he couldn’t stand hearing about my father anymore.
I could not stop, I could not give it up. I gave him the packet of letters my father had sent me my sophomore year in college, the letters I had tied with a black grosgrain ribbon and kept with my handkerchiefs.
Papa wrote about money. There wasn’t much. I was desperate to stay in school. He was desperate, too, wanting to equip me and my sister for the world and knowing he would die before he could finish the job. “I may have to will my massive brain to Harvard Medical or something, but don’t worry, I’ll keep you in college. . . . I’m enclosing a check to pay for your Herald-Tribune subscription, and please don’t go broke. I won’t be able to send much but I’ll always be able to scrape up a buck or two. . . . Sorry to hear you didn’t order a class ring. It’s part of school life to have it in later years, and I’ll see that the balance is paid when necessary. . . . Sorry you had to call yesterday and use that money. You could have had a hamburg sandwich or something with it. . . . Enclosed is your vacation check
. I wish I could send more but I can’t. You won’t need to pay it back. When your tax refund comes I’ll deposit it in your account which now has $82.93, interest as of Feb. 1. Your train fare should be $10.00 or so,
Then you’ll have tips. Your plans make me homesick for New York. How I love that town.”
His own life almost over, he held on to the future by planning mine. “I was very pleased to hear of your good marks, have always wanted to wear a Phi Beta Kappa key. . . . Any As lately? . . .Have you asked yet about graduate schools, maybe Yale? . . . I am proud of you. . . . Your success means a great deal to me.”
He asked about my boyfriends. “That new one sounds nice. . . . Don’t pass too many up. . . . There’s no reason you can’t do graduate work and marry, too. . . . I don’t care who or what you and Diana marry, so long as he’s a nice guy.”
He busied himself with minutiae. “Have ordered your new stationery. . . . Judy’s mother is knitting knee socks for you. Do you want cable stitch? . . . Is your desk lamp all right? . . .Have already bought your Christmas presents: a green sweater to go with your new skirt, and a long wool scarf.”
He talked about his health, but because he had not told me yet that he was dying, I did not understand what he was telling me. “Am going into the hospital for a transfusion. Don’t worry, it’s just that my blood is a little thin. . . . Couldn’t go to work today because I felt so tired, but don’t worry. I guess I won’t be as cute in my old age as I had hoped. . . . My hip ached today. Can you imaginer? I think I have neuritis of the backside.”
Descriptions of movies to be seen were replaced by radio programs to be heard. “Rudolf Serkin is playing the Emperor today. . . . T. S. Eliot is reading his poetry this afternoon.” He no longer climbed stairs. “My bed has been moved downstairs to the bay window and it’s nice—I can see everything going on. . . . Today the weather is bad, just a good day to listen to good music, some smart talk, and perhaps have someone read to me. . . . I love you very much. . . . I am so proud of my daughters. . . . Good night, sweet princess.”
Manhattan, When I Was Young Page 5