One of These Things First

by Steven Gaines

  Although Gog made only three dollars a day packing robes in the Garment Center, they were able to save enough to open a tiny yarn and knitting shop in a sliver of a storefront on 18th Avenue. Gog bought wool remnants in the Garment Center, a penny for five yards, and Rose tied together skeins of yarn to sell. She taught knitting for free to the neighborhood women, and the little store became a meeting place. In the winter, those who came to knit mittens for children were given free yarn, and in the summer, when it was too warm to knit, the women sat on wood kitchen chairs on the sidewalk “taking in the sun,” while they traded gossip.

  One day, in the winter of 1930, when people were jumping out of windows and living in Hooverville in Central Park, a customer told my grandmother a sad story about a fourteen-year-old orphan, a refuge from the Ukraine, who lived in a shack in New Jersey. Her parents had died of cancer a few months apart after arriving in the United States. The girl was left by herself to scavenge in a train yard for coal she could burn in a tin can to keep warm.

  The story so touched Rose that although there was hardly an inch of space in their one-bedroom apartment, she offered that the unfortunate child could move in with her and Harry and sleep on a cot in the hallway, in exchange for helping her take care of the babies.

  The Little Match Girl who showed up was Katherine Baralecki, a rosy-cheeked Slavic beauty with clear blue eyes. She had only the clothes on her back and a change of underwear in a sack. She seized her new opportunity with enthusiasm. She watched the children, cleaned the house, learned to cook kosher, and she was out of the cot and into my grandfather’s bed in a matter of weeks while my grandmother taught knitting.

  When it dawned on Rose what was happening she called Katherine “every name in the book,” as she put it, and threw her out the door, despite my grandfather’s feeble protests. Then my grandmother packed her own suitcase, tied it closed with rope, and took her daughters out into the street. She stood there shivering, wondering where to go, and when she couldn’t think of any place, she went to the Culver Theater to keep warm. She sat in the dark, her petrified girls clinging to her, and she wept her way through six hours of double features and newsreels. When the theater closed that night, she resigned herself to taking the children home.

  Rose was shocked when she returned to find Katherine sitting on the curb in front of the house. She marched past her, put the girls to sleep, and lay down in the darkness of her bedroom, next to her snoring husband. She lay awake for a while and then crept out of bed, went to the front door, opened it, and said, “Katherine, come in.”

  I don’t know exactly how my grandmother managed to reconcile having Katherine in her life for the next fifty years, but she did; I guess they were like Jewish Mormons. Eventually Katherine became more than the tolerated mistress—she shared matriarchal duties with my grandmother. She held a position of authority and respect in our family. She helped raise all of us. She was the court of appeals for three generations. It was Katherine of the Ukrainian superpowers who walked in front of my grandfather’s Biarritz in a thick fog on the Southern State Parkway, leading the way to Exit 21 with a flashlight. It was Katherine who carried a carved mahogany dining room table up a flight of stairs on her back with no help. And when no one would let me have a chemistry set because it was too dangerous, it was Katherine who overruled the veto and gave me the twenty bucks to buy it. I set myself on fire at the kitchen table, but that was beside the point.

  Curious outsiders were told that Katherine was my grandfather’s sister. She might as well have been, because their relationship turned platonic within a short time. Truth be told, Gog had two wives to deal with, not two lovers, and in later years Katherine got so bossy he nicknamed her “the Sergeant.”

  The little knitting store began to sell ladies’ stockings, and then underwear and gloves, and in the early 1940s my grandfather was able to buy a commercial building down the block with two apartments above it. He opened Rose’s Bras Girdles Sportswear, with the name “Rose’s” spelled out in pink neon script on the sign across the front of the building. The store fared well, benefitting greatly from Fleischman’s gown salon down the block, where they sent customers to Rose’s to buy custom-fitted undergarments every time they sold a dress.

  In the 1950s my grandfather bought a split-level house in Freeport, right next door to the bandleader Archie Bleyer, whose recordings of “Hernando’s Hideaway” and “Mr. Sandman” were on the Hit Parade. Gog treated himself to a succession of Cadillacs and Corvettes, and when he and my grandmother and Katherine rode together in one of his Corvettes with the top down, my grandmother huddled in the passenger seat in a babushka, while Katherine sat on the hump of the gear shift between them, stuck up into the air, being whipped by sixty-mile-an-hour winds, yet intrepid, an incarnate metaphor of their triad.

  Herka

  The afternoon before I was supposed to be committed to Hillside, sitting in the apartment above the store, Gog began to talk about what it was like when he was my age. When he was fifteen he lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side, one of those terrible buildings with thirty families where everybody was sick. Tenements were built of dry tinder and heated by woodstoves in the winter, death-traps that could go up in flames in a second. His cousin Shmuel was burned to death in one of those firetraps, he said, and they were always terrified when they went to bed at night. In the summers the Lower East Side was like a coffin, he said. There wasn’t a blade of grass or even a tree, there was no way to cool off, no place to take a swim, except for the East River, which was polluted by the beef slaughtering plants a mile or two to the north. But they didn’t know about pollution back then. On the hottest days the boys would strip to their underwear shorts and jump off the rotting pier into the murky water. Afterwards they lay down on the splintered wood dock to dry in the sun.

  “One day,” Gog said, “I was looking at myself in the mirror before going swimming, and I reached behind me and I felt a huge hump! I had a big bone sticking out of my back under the skin. I couldn’t believe it. I was deformed. I never knew it before. I had a herka,” he said, using the Yiddish word for hunchback. “So I stopped going swimming. No matter how brutally hot it was, I never went to the river. For many years I never went swimming. Until one day I confessed to my brother Aaron, and he looked at me like I was crazy. I had no herka. It was my own shoulder blade that I was feeling. Everybody’s shoulder blade sticks out when you reach around to touch it. And all those years I could have been swimming.” He shook his head and took a handkerchief out of his back pocket to dab his watery eyes. There was heavy silence in the room except for the hiss of the radiator behind the sofa.

  I knew what he was saying to me. Whatever I thought was my hunchback, it was okay. I was okay. I wanted so badly to thank him for his words, but I was too embarrassed to speak, so I stupidly just nodded in the gloom, and he understood that too, probably.

  “I will pay for Payne Whitney for you, if that’s what you want,” he said, his voice gravelly. “For six months, but no more. I had hoped that one day I would leave you that money, and it hurts me to give it to you now, especially for this purpose. But if you find peace, it will be worth it to all of us.”

  Four

  Seventh Floor

  Mildred DeSantis roamed the hallways of the seventh floor of Payne Whitney like Ophelia searching for a way out of Elsinore, except instead of shadowy stone passageways lit with torches, there were bright hallways painted institutional green and overhead strips of ghastly fluorescent lighting in unbreakable plastic fixtures that cast shadows on our faces like we were gargoyles. The parapet was a double-locked, heavy oak door, and the omnipresent clankety clank of keys on key rings was a constant reminder that you were imprisoned with no way out, with people no less crazy than Ophelia.

  There was a war going on in Mrs. DeSantis’s head, the crazy part trying to kill the sane. She never spoke or made a sound, but evil spirits must have pursued her. She spent hours
in locomotion, like some sort of macabre battery-powered toy, shambling along the hallway with her hands out in front of her like a begging dog, and when she reached a cul-de-sac she’d march in place for a few seconds in her Gucci house slippers until it registered that she was facing an obstacle. Then the tension would rise in her already taut body, and in a Kabuki-like ritual she would hike up her dress to her waist and expose her mons pubis while she elaborately rearranged her panties—

  Jesus Christ what was that all about?

  Mrs. DeSantis did the “Thorazine shuffle.” Thorazine was a new drug at the time, developed by the French and used to treat everything from manic depression to uncontrollable hiccups. It controlled hiccups because the drug put patients into such a stupor that their bodies couldn’t hic: it was the equivalent of a chemical lobotomy. Mrs. DeSantis’s husband was the largest exporter of wine in Portugal, and when her daughters came to visit her on Wednesdays they arrived in a limousine that waited for them in front of the main building. The nurses helped her put on makeup in the morning, and her family paid for her hair to be done every week.

  On my first day in Payne Whiteney I decided I would walk up and down the halls with Mrs. DeSantis. I thought perhaps she’d appreciate a friend who treated her like a regular gal. I helped turn her around at a dead end so she wouldn’t do that grotesque thing with her panties. I asked her questions about where she came from, and about her daughters, but of course she never answered, just stared straight ahead with frightened eyes like she was looking into hell.

  “What are you doing?” one of the nurses asked me as Mrs. DeSantis and I strolled by as if we were in the Easter parade. “I’m just walking,” I told the nurse.

  After about an hour of my chattering away at her, Mrs. DeSantis turned toward me and our eyes met. For a second I could see a flicker of the real Mrs. DeSantis, a woman of intelligence with the self-awareness of what was happening to her. She shuffled up close to me and extended the bony forefinger of her right hand and tried to poke out my eye. She went after me with all her strength. I dodged her thrust, but her fingernail gouged out a small crater on my left cheek that began to drip hot blood down my face. She looked at me with triumph and started stamping her feet in tribal cadence, first one foot and then the other, like a little victory dance, and suddenly a shower of urine was pouring down from between her legs. I jumped back because it was splashing on my shoes. Another patient down the hall called out, “Uh-oh, Millie’s having a meltdown!” and the nurses came running.

  One of the nurses washed the gouge in my cheek with hydrogen peroxide and another nurse came to my room and asked me what happened, and if I had disturbed her or provoked her. I explained I did nothing except walk with her, but I could tell they weren’t sure if I was telling the truth. The only reason I could think why she tried to blind me was that I annoyed her with all those questions, and maybe she didn’t need a strolling friend, maybe she needed to be left alone after all.

  As for movie stars, Marilyn Monroe had long ago left the building. The nurses refused to say what room she stayed in and the closest to her movie-star aura I could get was to sit in the phone booth from which she begged Joe DiMaggio to transfer her to the more demure psychiatric facilities at Columbia Presbyterian. Monroe signed herself into Payne Whitney under the name of “Faye Miller,” and Faye didn’t like being on the seventh floor, because the craziest people in the hospital were on seven, a sort of WASP Charenton overlooking Manhattan.

  Monroe wrote to her acting coach, “I’m locked up with these poor nutty people. I’m sure to end up a nut, too, if I stay in this nightmare. Please help me.” She didn’t do herself any favors when she smashed the glass on one of the bathroom doors because it was locked. “Outside of that,” she wrote, “I haven’t done anything that is uncooperative.” In a letter to another friend, she reported, “Everything was under lock and key; things like electric lights, dresser drawers, bathrooms, closets, bars concealed on the windows—the doors have windows so that patients can be visible all the time, also the violence and markings still remain on the walls from former patients. They asked me why I wasn’t happy there. I answered, ‘Well, I’d have to be nuts to like it there.’”

  Mrs. DeSantis was a lighthearted distraction compared to the very rich Chinese man from Hong Kong who had put an expensive antique gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Because the bullet was old he only managed to destroy the back of his throat and part of his tongue, and instead of being dead he wound up speaking a slobbering growl and eating only brown gruel fed to him by a private nurse at mealtime. He wept and moaned that he didn’t want to live that way, and I had to agree with him, he was better off dead.

  I would have gladly assisted in the suicide of Ludovic, a milquetoast cellist with the New York Philharmonic, who obsessively repeated the story of his wife Eleanora’s fatal accident when she slipped and fell on the ice in front of the Beresford apartment building on Central Park West where they lived. In stentorian tones and grandiloquent speech, he repeated the sequence of events of his wife’s death in a monologue worn down into a rut: how they were coming home from a movie, the night was cold and the moon was full, and the sidewalk was slippery. He had taken her arm, but as they approached the building he let go, and she fell and cracked her head on the pavement and died under the canopy before the ambulance arrived. Every time he got to the point, “Had it not been for the fucking hand of fate she could have stepped six inches to the left and missed the ice,” he started to cry, his shoulders jiggling up and down, tears running down from behind his glasses. Once he composed himself he complained that he would have to sell the apartment because he couldn’t stand to walk in and out of the Beresford and look down on the spot where she died. He was pathetic, but annoying.

  Ludovic had a loyal fan, a woman in her twenties named Melon who had a wandering eye so you never knew where she was looking, a problem complicated by a nervous tic she had, moving her head back and forth as she spoke so that her ponytail swished from side to side, like a horse’s tail shooing away flies. Melon was Ludovic’s claque. She murmured the appropriate sympathies every time he told his story, creepily assuring him, “Never forgotten. Never forgotten.”

  Finally, after Ludovic’s fifth telling in fifteen minutes, a skinny guy with squinty eyes sitting in a chair nearby, so twitchy he practically vibrated, observed with a bright, childlike innocence, “You just told us that story!”

  “What story?” Ludovic demanded, incredulous, drawing himself up as if his cello solo had just been interrupted by a catcall from the audience.

  “The story about your wife dying,” the twitchy man said.

  Suddenly, shockingly, the morbidly depressed cellist leaped from the sofa and grabbed the twitchy guy by his throat, shaking him like it was an Apache dance. The guy was so scared he didn’t even put up a fight, his arms just flailed around at his side as he was strangled. In another second a nurse and a male aide pried Ludovic’s hands away. Although smiling again now, the twitchy guy had peed in his pants, and he was hustled off to the bathroom to change.

  The nurse asked Ludovic if he wanted to spend some time in the “Quiet Room,” or would he agree to take a sedative and have a nap in his own room? The Quiet Room was for agitated patients, ye olde padded cell, where they most likely put Marilyn Monroe when she smashed the bathroom window. It had floor-to-ceiling panels of wadding on the walls and floor, and a mattress pad to sleep on.

  Ludovic cocked his head and asked the nurse earnestly, “How can I live this life?” This was the real Ludovic speaking for the first time, not the mourner. “Sometimes, when you love someone as much as I loved her, you simply cannot go on. Truth is, I’m scared.”

  “Now, Ludovic …,” the nurse said gently, taking his arm. “We all suffer loss, and grieve, and learn to move on.”

  The male aide took his other arm, but Ludovic shrugged him off. “I’m coming with you,” he assured them. “I’ll do anything
you say. But tell me first. She was everything. Sometimes we wanted to murder each other, but we were together forty-one years. We were intertwined. She was the mother of my son who killed himself. And she slipped. An ignominious death for such an elegant soul, no? She slipped away from me. That’s how I lost her.” His shoulders slumped. He was a husk again.

  “Ludovic, come with us,” the nurse said.

  “Yes, shoot me full of sedatives,” Ludovic encouraged, allowing himself to be led off. “I just want to sleep and not wake up again into this fucking nightmare.”

  They took him to his room and gave him an injection and an aide sat with him until he fell asleep.

  After Ludovic was led away Melon came up to me, cheery and bright, as if we had just run into each other at the PTA meeting. “I have a question,” she said. “Now that you’re institutionalized, do you think you’ll be stigmatized forever? I mean, you’re a mental patient. Personally, I don’t want to be ashamed forever.”

  Quiet Room

  Late in the afternoon my first day in Payne Whitney, scared and homesick, I wandered down the north hallway to get away from the other patients and discovered an empty lounge. It was dingy and dimly lit; the Naugahyde furniture looked like it came from a Greyhound bus stop. Its saving grace was the tall windows overlooking the East River, practically just below me, separated from the hospital only by the East River Drive, which was streaming with rush hour traffic. The river was a majestic force coursing by so close, powerful and rough. It was dark out and snowflakes were blowing around in the wind like ashes. There was a tugboat with strings of lights like a carnival booth, hauling a dirty tanker through the foamy chop. Across from where I stood the river was breached by Roosevelt Island, where the crumbling shell of an abandoned prison and lunatic asylum was covered in a caul of ivy turned brackish-green by the cold. All of this was dominated in size and beauty by the 59th Street Bridge ten blocks to the south, its triple crescents anchoring Manhattan to the borough of Queens and Long Island beyond.