Manhattan, When I Was Young

by Mary Cantwell

  B. read all the letters, from the first, with its big, exuberant handwriting, to the last, almost illegible hen track, and came into the bedroom. He was crying, and he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what it was like.”

  2

  SOME MARRIAGES, at least in the beginning, take three people. The third provides the glue. Our glue was Jerry, who came down every Sunday to use the shower and join us in perusing the real estate section of the New York Times. I had assumed, because I had seen movies like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, that after a certain age—thirty-five, say—every New Yorker who could afford to moved to the suburbs. The kind of people we had begun to know would have died first. Instead they mostly stayed put in one or another inadequate apartment and read the real estate ads over their Sunday breakfast. On the whole, I was told, it was an academic exercise. Anything good was gone by noon, snatched up by somebody who had managed to get a copy of the section before it hit the newsstands. Acquaintance with a Times employee, then, was highly valued.

  “My God!” Jerry would say, his eyes running down the two-and-a-half-rooms column. “If only you could afford $125 a month, you could get anything.” We would sit silent for a moment, each of us visualizing the same thing: an apartment in the Village with a white marble fireplace, dentil moldings, and windowboxes in which I would plant geraniums and trailing ivy. In winter the firelight would dance over the American country furniture that we did not yet own, and in summer a breeze would set the ball-fringed curtains that I would make someday to stirring, and then, finally, I would sit down. Living here, in this faceless apartment in this faceless part of town, was not living at all.

  On this dreary stretch of First Avenue, across the street from a cement playground and two blocks south of a rundown A & P, our only entertainment was each other. In summer, the sun beat down on the musty secondhand bookstores on Fourth Avenue which were our sole diversion and turned them into ovens. In winter, while we waited for the Madison Avenue bus, the wind drove us to huddling together in a quadrant of a bank’s revolving door. At night, with no place to stroll, B. would try to make himself comfortable in the easy chair and I, defeated by the foam rubber couch, would retreat to the bedroom. Oh, we knew we were lucky, especially in those walk-in closets, but we wanted to be cozy.

  Jerry made us cozy. When he was in the apartment, with the Sunday papers scattered at his feet and some cheese he had just discovered at some shop nobody else knew about stinking on the Door Store table and his chatter rising to our low ceiling, we melded. We were young Mr. and Mrs. L. at home. Mr. L. was lighting a cigarette and Mrs. L. was lighting the gas stove and their guest, opinionated, talkative, not-yet-settled-down, older-than-they-were Jerry, was evoking their mutual amusement, their mutual adulthood.

  He was also that invaluable addition to any marriage, the man who would do what the husband was too busy to do. What I wanted to do, more than anything, was find the Ilium that presented itself whenever one drove down the West Side Highway at dusk and saw the lights going on in the skyscrapers and the sun dropping into the Hudson. What I found, however, was infinitely more interesting: all Europe, a bit of Asia, some of Africa, and three centuries dropped indiscriminately on one small island.

  I do not know if Jerry liked me, and I do not even know if I liked him, and he left New York for good while I was still making up my mind. But if I remember him kindly, and I do, it is because we both believed—though neither of us would ever have said anything quite so fancy—that the best way to possess a place was to eat it. We never went uptown. It was years before I saw Morningside Heights, and I knew Harlem only as the place in which, on our one trip to New York, my father told me to push down the lock button on the car door. Downtown was our destination: that was where the food was. Piroghi, cannoli, and dim sum were a kind of sympathetic magic. In consuming them we were consuming the Little Ukraine that was lower First Avenue, Little Italy, and Chinatown.

  We wandered over to the other side of town, too, to Dey Street, which was lined with plant nurseries, and to narrow, musty shops that sold spices and fresh-ground peanut butter, and to a store called Cheese of All Nations, where everyone who had immigrant grandparents or who had spent their junior year abroad went for Muenster and Camembert. Once we went to the old Washington Market. It was soon to close, and half the booths were empty, but I talk about having been there as I would talk about having been on the dock when the survivors of the Titanic came down the gangplank. I cannot remember much, though, only a ceiling like a cathedral’s and light that was like a cathedral’s, too, and hanging chickens, row on row, and eggs still stuck with straw.

  Sometimes we would stumble upon an early nineteenth-century, maybe even late eighteenth-century house that the march of progress had missed. More often we would see its shadow outlined on the wall of the building it had once stood beside. It had never occurred to me till then that New York had so many strata, that the city that I was trying to know was only the top layer of an enormous archaeological dig, and that no matter how fast and far I traveled, I would never get to know it all.

  Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge was like walking into an enormous spider web, and the financial district on a weekend was as bleak and barren as a desert. One dark afternoon, when a cold wind was sweeping its empty streets, we entered a saloon with white-tiled walls, a shirtsleeved man pounding on an upright piano, and a line of red-faced topers drinking boilermakers and cracking hard-boiled eggs at a long mahogany bar. Now the saloon seems a hallucination, but I will stake my life on its reality. Somewhere in downtown New York, in 1954, was a room in which it was always 1905.

  Sometimes, in Little Italy, we would glimpse old men playing bocce on a scrubby patch of grass behind a coffee shop or restaurant, and one day, in Chinatown, we ran into a funeral procession led by a small band. The music was brassy, like jazz, but sinuous and scary, too. My God, but I was far from home!

  A Michelin is tempting. Two stars for Mother Seton’s convent! Three for the Battery! But I could not concoct one. Half the time I did not know where we were, although I am sure Jerry did, and I was vague about the names of streets because I was always looking at the tops of buildings or peering into windows. In childhood I had tried to swallow the town in which I grew up—“Your eyes are too big for your belly,” my grandmother said, and she meant more than food—and now I was trying to swallow New York. Of course I would never be able to: that was the blessing of it. There would always be another street to turn down, another roofline, another Chinese funeral.

  On Sunday nights the chicken twirled on its spit and the cook, happy because she had worn herself out with walking, rubbed a clove of garlic on the wooden salad bowl. The wineglasses tottered on the lumpy placemats, and Jean Sablon or Charles Trenet sounded sonorously from the Columbia 360. The Rosenbergs were dead, and the young man was on his way up, up, up, and it did not matter that there was nothing but an airshaft to see from the windows, because night had come down and smoothed a blanket over the whole city.

  One afternoon in late winter I was sitting at my typewriter when my head began to ache, on the left side, just behind and around my eye. Confused and a little dizzy, I asked Joel if I could go home. He nodded and murmured the requisite “Hope you feel better,” and I left, to wait for the Second Avenue bus. By now I could scarcely see out of my left eye, and lunch was pushing its way up my throat, but it never occurred to me to take a cab. The only times B. and I had ever taken cabs were when I had food poisoning, on our wedding day, and on the day his office sent him to Brooklyn with a manuscript and he called, excited, to see if Joel would let me out long enough to share the ride.

  Memory, I am told, is selective—but not mine. “Selective” implies choice, and I have none. I recall completely or I am afflicted with amnesia. There is no in-between. So believe me when I say that I can remember how gray the sky was that afternoon, and how bits of paper were scudding across Second Avenue, and how the smell of my egg salad sandwich kept exploding in my mouth. Above a
ll, I can remember the pain. It was as if someone were hammering a spike through my eye socket.

  The light in our bedroom was gray, too, and the cigar-band factory across the airshaft was clanking out its product, and, desperate to lie down, I could not stop to take the dusty-rose cotton spread off the bed. Instead I lay on top, careless for once of wrinkles, and felt my back arching, almost into a bow. Locked into that curious arch and unable to turn my head, I reached my right arm straight behind me, pulled the phone to my side, and managed to dial B.’s office.

  The woman who answered said my husband was away from his desk. “Then get him, get him!” I screamed. I had just enough time to say, “Get home. My head!” before I dropped the phone and rolled off the bed to crawl into the bathroom. I vomited into the toilet, pulled myself up by a towel rack, and stumbled back to the bed, where I lay down again, back still arching, head digging into the pillow, my left eye bulging, and tears streaming down my face.

  The key sounded in the lock and in came B., pale, with his raincoat flapping behind him. He had called Jerry, who knew of a doctor at Beth Israel and would meet us there. His arm around my waist, he dragged me the few blocks to the hospital and a doctor who took me into a dingy cubicle and injected something in my arm. My back released, the throbbing dulled, the film—or so it seemed to me—over my left eye slowly cleared.

  “Has anything happened to upset you?” the doctor asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “You’re having a migraine attack.”

  “What’s the cure?” I asked drowsily.

  “A psychiatrist.”

  Home, sinking slowly into that serene sleep that follows migraine, I could hear B. and Jerry moving about the living room and the push of the captain’s chairs. But I could not hear what they were saying, because they were whispering.

  I did go to a psychiatrist—as always, Jerry knew of somebody—one who had positioned his desk against a light-filled window. He could see every pore of his patients’ faces. They could see little of him beyond a bulky outline, out of which came the voice of God. I would say that I hated him on sight, except that I cannot claim to have seen him.

  “Last week,” I said, “I had a very bad headache, and the doctor my husband took me to said it was a migraine attack and that I’d have one again. Can psychiatry cure migraine?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, having been prepped by Jerry, he asked me how and when my father died.

  “Four years ago,” I answered. “But migraine. If I go to a psychiatrist, will that get rid of migraine?”

  He asked me again about my father; I asked him again about psychiatry. In childhood I had always done what the doctor had told me to do, and now I was willing to do what this doctor told me to do. If only he would tell me.

  But he would not. Over and over again he asked me about my father, until finally I did what I always did when forced to remember Papa on his bed, thin where he’d been fat and jaundiced where he’d been ruddy and with a pillow rolled and placed beneath his double chin because now he was dead. I cried.

  The next day the psychiatrist called my husband, which I know only because, emptying his suit pockets for the cleaner’s, I found the notes he had scribbled on scraps of paper during their talk. “Cannot accept father’s death,” they read, and “anxiety neurosis,” and “close to complete collapse.”

  The first I realized, the second I had never heard of, and as for the third, I knew with a certainty that surprises me now that, inviting though the abyss might be, I would not lose my balance. I knew something else, too: that I had been betrayed.

  “Does anyone have anything to say about the photograph on page eighty-seven?” B.T.B., her pearls and her diamond brooch at the neck of her Adele Simpson and her feet squeezed into and slightly overflowing her Delman pumps, is sitting at the head of the conference room table. The beauty editor, who has a nose you could slit envelopes with and a tart tongue—“The rich, they ride in chaises,” she murmurs whenever she contemplates B.T.B.—is fluttering a fan. She is bored.

  So are the fashion editors, but they are always bored when they’re not out in the market or on the phone or at a sitting. They are, they claim, “visual,” which is why they have nothing to say about any of the magazine’s fiction or articles. Most of them don’t even know they’re there.

  C.A.’s assistants and the girls from College and Careers have plenty to say, since they are verbal. If the rest of the world divides people into those who like sugar and those who like salt, magazine editors divide it into those who are visual and those who are verbal. Since Mademoiselle is a fashion magazine, the visuals think the verbals are dowdy. The verbals think the visuals are shallow. When the staff meets once a month, as it is doing now, to review the current issue, the visuals speak solely of the photographs and the verbals speak solely of the prose. The only people who have to look at both, besides B.T.B. and C.A., work in the art department and do not like anything they see or read. For them, perfection is a page on which there is nothing whatsoever.

  B.T.B. turns to this month’s fiction. Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar are unlikely repositories for some of the best American short stories. Everybody thinks those are in The New Yorker. They aren’t. They’re in Mademoiselle and Bazaar, somewhere between the Claire McCardells (Mlle.) and the Balenciagas (Bazaar).

  This month’s story is “The Geranium,” by William Goyen, and the assistant art director hates it. “Honest to God,” she barks. “Save me from the sensitive.”

  She looks around the room for the expected laugh, and gets it. But not from me. The assistant art director sounds just like the bullies I knew in third grade, the ones who used to back the brightest boy in the class into the coatroom corner with their derisive “Think you’re so smart!” I had defended him; I would defend William Goyen.

  Someday I mean to track down that story, because all I can recall of it now is its title and its author. But whatever I said about it (and truly, I have no idea) caught C.A.’s ear. The next day a messenger from up front, one of the tall, brainy girls who talked out of the sides of their mouths, arrived at my desk with several manuscripts and a blue-penciled note. Would I please read these for the fiction editor, it said, and let her know what I thought of them.

  The names on the cover sheets startled me. I hadn’t realized that the famous had to submit stuff like everybody else, that being published once was not a ticket to being published forever. Nor had I realized how much I missed the nights when I sat up late in my dorm room with some obscure sixteenth-century poet or seventeenth-century polemicist whispering in my ear. Mostly, though, I hadn’t realized how much I needed to use my head, and that if I did not, my head would use me. “Look what I’ve got,” I said when I went home that night. “Work!”

  A few years ago, weeding out a desk, I came upon copies of those careful little reports—I had been so proud of being asked to do them that I had made carbons—and was pleased by my seeming judiciousness, my seeming good sense. Still, it is sobering to think that the bench before which so many writers, some of them distinguished, had to appear was occupied by somebody who was barely out of college. “Rejected John van Druten today,” I would tell B., “and passed Tennessee Williams on for a second reading.” The nerve of me! The gall! Yet had I ever met John van Druten or Tennessee Williams in the flesh, I would have been speechless. If I could look at the product with a cool critical eye, I could not look at the producer without awe.

  To me, Mademoiselle’s fashion copy also constituted literature, though on a far lower plane. Kathy and her assistant, whom one of the fashion editors described as dressing like an assistant buyer, that is, strictly a la mode, favored literary conceits along the lines of “Put these flowers in water immediately!” under a photograph of a floral-print swimsuit. So I was joyous the day Kathy left her office to stroll languorously down the long corridor to the promotion department. “My assistant’s leaving to get married,” she said. “Do you want to try out?”

  At home I sp
read the photostats, rejects, and merch sheets—clothes were “merch,” and merch sheets listed sizes, fabrics, and brief descriptions—on the desk and, skipping supper, struggled for hours over five or so captions. Then I passed them on to B., who studied them as intently as he would The Partisan Review. “I don’t think you need ‘glossy,’” he said, and “Haven’t you got a better word than ‘snappy’?”

  “They’re a start,” Kathy said.

  I took home a second set of stats, rejects, and merch sheets, and once more I wrote and B. edited. “Better” was Kathy’s response. “But there’s a lot of competition for this job. You’ll have to do another.”

  I could not do another. I was tired, I told B., and it was hopeless anyway.

  “Jesus!” he yelled. “You’re a goof-off! You’ll never amount to anything, because you just won’t try.”

  I cried, and sat naked at the plywood writing surface all one hot July night, writing a third tryout. A few days later, Kathy, who always walked as if preceded by altar boys, arrived at my desk to say I had the job.

  Without B.’s prodding and pushing, I was nothing. With them, I could be anything. I had lost God, lost my father, and now, thank you Lord, I had recovered both.

  …

  Joel and B. were thrilled for me: I was, in the old report card phrase, living up to my potential. But B. was also angry. While talking to an employment agency from which he was hiring a secretary, he had found out that Mademoiselle had listed the job with the agency and offered to pay $10,000 a year. I, young and “promoted from within,” would make less than half that. B.’s outrage rolled right off my back. Like most of my friends from college, I thought being offered a job for which no one was going to check my typing speed a great compliment. We knew we were bright, but we did not think we were worth much.