The Man on the Third Floor

by Anne Bernays

  After a couple of months, Forstman—spurred, I imagine, by a touch of retroactive patriotism—announced in a memo to the staff that henceforth Walter Samson, “who did not have to go off to war but volunteered, temporarily putting his career at Griffin House on hold,” would bear the title of senior editor. It was about time! I was given my own secretary, a small but noticeable raise, and new status with the serfs. All this was gratifying, to say the least, and I congratulated myself on being able to let my boss take the credit for MY discovery. Fleming was one of the golden geese of Griffin House, along with a book on soup cookery and the memoirs of a famous heavyweight boxer, ghost-written by a sixty-year-old grandmother, a real pro, who had also written the autobiographies of a polar explorer and a French resistance fighter.

  Family life began to seem like the only life. My mother came to dinner every Tuesday, bringing with her gifts for the children, carefully chosen, prettily wrapped, a book or a pair of angora mittens or a wallet. She and I got along fairly well. This may have been because we were pretty formal with each other; I kept most of what I was thinking to myself and I suspect she did the same. My mother and Phyllis circled each other like two wary dogs. I don’t suppose any woman adores the girl who marries her son, but I never once heard her say anything sharp to my wife—even though her eyes may have said the opposite. I was gratified by what I seemed able to take from a privileged life, but the usual feelings of “isn’t there anymore?” would strike me from time to time, usually around three in the morning, and I would have to rebuke myself: you want too much.

  Along about this time, Phyllis began a campaign to move the family to a larger apartment or, preferably, a house. This wasn’t like her; although she dressed like a diva, she often bought her clothes at thrift shops on Third Avenue where, she said, you could find the most amazing castoffs. She didn’t care about the kinds of things that brought a lot of women an access of pleasure along with a sense of superiority, like luggage from Mark Cross (now that people were allowed to travel abroad again), expensive clothes for the children, crystal chandeliers, modern furniture from Sweden, Georg Jensen silver on the table. So I wondered what was going on. I asked her outright.

  “You’re a senior editor at a major publishing house,” she said. “But we live like you work in the mail room.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” I said.

  “Well, I probably am. But you know what I mean. Just look at the dining room wall.”

  Phyllis and I actually shared the same relatively simple taste in most things. I never bought a lot of expensive clothes—though I did get my suits at J. Press because they made sure of the fit. I didn’t especially like fancy cooking or glitzy parties and, above all, I enjoyed solitude and never felt that being alone was a lonely thing.

  Phyllis reminded me that my father had left me a “fortune,” a word that made me squirm; I preferred a euphemism like “a good deal of money.” “We can afford a bigger place,” she said. “I’d like the children to have their own rooms. They would too.”

  It would have been silly of me to resist what was an obvious choice; besides, I had no good argument with which to counter her proposal.

  So out she went, with a real estate agent whom she referred to as “Sally” after their first meeting. Together Phyllis and Sally toured houses on the Upper East Side (having together decided that an apartment was not what the Samson family was looking for). Phyllis didn’t ask me to look at any of them until she was pretty sure she had found what she wanted. It was a house on Eighty-Ninth Street between Park and Third on the downtown side of the street. It was a block or two uptown of what was considered the most desirable real estate in the city and, for that reason, Sally assured us, “the price is right.” In other words, it was somewhat less costly than a house say, on Seventy-Fourth Street. These are the kinds of nice distinctions that mattered to Sally. I could tell, by looking at Phyllis’ eyes, that she thought this part of the adventure was silly. But we were happy enough to pay what we did. It was a hell of a lot of money but we had a lot of money. “This is an investment,” Sally kept telling us.

  “I wish she’d shut up,” Phyllis said about Sally. “She’s making it harder for me to say yes. Whenever I’m pushed I back off.”

  But Sally kept pushing and, really, the house had everything to recommend it. It was just sitting and waiting for the Samson family. It was a four-storey brownstone whose front steps had been slashed off to meet someone’s aesthetic standard, the stoop having been seen as a holdover from an another era and thus awkward. So you entered by going down three steps into what was originally the basement, and climbed up through the insides of the house along a narrow but graceful staircase. The kitchen and dining room were on the bottom level. Next floor up, the living room and a library I used as my study. The previous owners had installed floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the library, which made me want to live in this house. Climbing rather steeply, you reached the third floor where the bedrooms were: Phyllis’ and mine in front, with windows looking out over the quiet street with its spindly little trees favored by dogs on leashes, and two smaller bedrooms in back for the children. Still higher, half a storey, were several maids’ rooms, and it was in one of these that my life swelled with secret pleasures. Kudos to Phyllis for insisting we move to a larger place; she had no idea, of course, that her urgency would change my life forever.

  MY GENERATION—I was born in 1908—had our heads turned by the idea that the United States was a melting pot. (Read some of Henry James’ non-fiction for a contrary view. He considered non-English-speaking immigrants who crowded New York and a few other large cities as riffraff. He was a snob and I’m not.) My parents didn’t want to be seen as anything but true-blue Americans. We German Jews considered ourselves to run right down the middle of the mainstream of American life, pulled along by the same currents as were the old Dutch and English families. Still, we didn’t kid ourselves that everyone who was securely attached to high society would treat us the way we would like them to—with hugs and kisses. There was a lot of Henry James under the water—as well as on the surface. Harvard, when I enrolled, had a quota for Jewish boys that kept our number down to something under five percent. Only the Jewish boys and their families noticed; everyone else failed to notice—or if they did, figured it was okay. You didn’t want too many of these smart but funny-looking youths filling the seats in Sever Hall.

  But while I couldn’t have passed through the front doors of the Union League Club without meeting the frozen gaze of a human barrier wearing a uniform and asking, “Excuse me, sir, are you a member?” I did belong to the Orange Club. Phyllis made fun of me for belonging and almost never went there with me. But I did like it. This institution, housed in a Florentine structure a few feet east of Fifth Avenue, was the equal in elegance and tone to any exclusive social gathering place in the city. You have to be a member of a posh club to appreciate its seductive appeal and the absence of even the remotest possibility of abrasion caused by a social misunderstanding. A private club may be anathema to people like Phyllis, but they do offer the same kind of emotional bonding that summer camp does. The Orange Club’s grand, curling staircase with crimson carpeting anchored at every step by a stout brass rod, formed a pathway between foyer and second floor which was entirely dedicated to eating in a cavernous dining hall. Here, widely spaced linen-draped tables stood beneath the dead gaze of bison and elk, few of which any member had ever seen, much less slaughtered, outside a zoo. The Orange Club exuded the hush, odorless wonder of money and power.

  I confess to having enjoyed myself at the Orange Club without too much guilt about the plight of most of the world’s population. You can’t feel guilty all the time. I often invited authors and agents to have lunch with me there. After we took our place at the table, a well-trained waiter would hand them a menu printed on heavy stock. “I never knew a place like this existed,” I heard more than once, meaning, I guess, that they were surprised to discover that not all Jews ate hot pretzels a
nd franks peddled from a cart on the sidewalk. I tried to convince Phyllis that the Orange Club represented not ostentation but its opposite, as there was nothing vulgar or in questionable taste inside the walls. Only conservatism, everything muted, subtle, the money things cost hidden beneath the ease and quiet, including the fact that you never heard a door bang shut, the clatter of dishes or cutlery; you never heard a burst of loud laughter.

  LOOKING BEHIND me, I’m especially aware of just how chancy it was meeting Barry Rogers. It reminds me of the Thomas Hardy poem about the Titanic and the iceberg. Hardy, of course, believed in fate, believed that the convergence of these twain as he called them, had something of the supernatural about it, the gods were cooking something up for the ship, if not for the iceberg. When you make a connection that could happen only once, that connection takes on an extra significance that you can call anything you want—accident, coincidence, fate.

  I sat in my office one afternoon reading a manuscript sent me by one of the most senior agents, a man who represented H. G. Wells, Somerset Maugham, John Steinbeck, and Daphne du Maurier. He was known to have the most productive and lucrative stable in the business, which meant that when one of his submissions arrived by messenger, you dropped everything to read it. It did not mean, however, that everything he sent over was publishable. This manuscript was crammed with stale ideas, equally stale characters, and an exotic setting about as convincing as the backdrop of jungle in a sixth-grade play. The author was a celebrated storyteller, so I could only conclude that this was something that had been moldering in a bottom drawer of his desk for years.

  Someone knocked on the door. I was delighted by the interruption. I told whoever it was to come in.

  A young man, I guessed to be twenty-seven or eight, entered briskly. I noticed his face first. He had the look of a swarthy angel, radiating beauty like that of an Italian noble in a Renaissance portrait. His mouth was full and slightly crooked. His eyes were dark, almost black—they shone as if polished. My heart beat rapidly and my chest tightened. I couldn’t tell what was going on except that I knew I was looking at this man as if he were a woman.

  “What can I do for you?” I said. He was wearing dark blue pants, thick-soled shoes, and a thin Eisenhower jacket. He carried a clipboard and pencil.

  “I’m supposed to measure your room for a new carpet.”

  “Really?” I said. “No one told me.”

  He consulted his clipboard. “You’re Mr. Samson?”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  “This won’t take more than a few minutes,” he said. “I’ll try not to disturb you.”

  Disturb me? He had disturbed me profoundly. I nodded, meaning nothing, temporizing. I pretended to go back to the manuscript, trying desperately to shake off the effect created by the man’s bent back and powerful legs.

  “What’s your name?” I said. I hadn’t meant to say this out loud but apparently I had because he said “Barry.”

  “Barry?”

  “Barry Rogers.” He took from his jacket pocket a large object which turned out to house a length of metal measuring tape on a reel.

  I looked again at his black hair, beaky nose and olive skin. There was no way he was Rogers. But this was America, the land of altered names. If he was aware of my staring at him, Barry Rogers did not let on as he measured, wrote, measured again, wrote again, bending, straightening, doing a dance around the room, in fact humming very softly to himself. My reactions to this Figaro suddenly reminded me of Harmon Strout, and what we had done at summer camp came out of my memory’s hospital room, revived, and sent dangerous warmth through my body. Thank god I was sitting. Bits of thought presented themselves, one of them being that somewhere deep there lurked a Walter Samson who might want to be loved by a man more than by a woman. At the same time I dismissed this notion; how could that be true when I was married, had children, and considered my life a model of productive domesticity?

  Was Barry homosexual? Did he know what was going on?

  “I’m just about done,” he said, standing up straight and stowing the tape measure in his pocket. He walked over to the window. “Nice view you’ve got here,” he said. Still he made no movement toward the door.

  “I like it,” I said, swallowing hard. “Who did you say you work for?”

  “Winchester Carpets,” he said. “We do mostly commercial jobs. They all want wall-to-wall these days. If you ask me, I like to see some wood flooring with some nice polish. It’s classier than a rug. But I probably shouldn’t be saying this.”

  I nodded, partly because I agreed with him and partly because I couldn’t trust myself to speak without sounding like I was strangling. What Barry was saying was banal, but to my ears at that moment it was like the prose in the King James version of the Bible. For a second, we looked straight into each other’s eyes. Then we both looked down, gripped by caution.

  “Well, I’ll be going now,” Barry said. “I’m supposed to be doing Mr. Forstman’s room next. He gets the best grade of carpeting we turn out.”

  “Oh?”

  With that stinging remark, the lovely young man turned and headed for the door. My chest tightened. I couldn’t bear the thought that I might never see him again. I coughed.

  “Did you say something?”

  “No. But I was thinking. No, never mind.”

  “No,” he said, “You did say something.”

  “I was wondering if you would like to meet me for a drink later, after work—if you’re free of course.” Truly, I hadn’t meant to say this; the invitation came out involuntarily, like a hiccup. Something I had no control over was drawing me into something that might be risky. My life had been wrinkle-free up until now, a private education, Harvard, a wartime job that kept me on native soil, and a good job in a so-called gentlemen’s profession. Whatever I knew about risk remained largely in my imagination. And now, standing not ten feet from me was a layer of carpets (though he probably didn’t do the actual hammering) who threatened to change the shape and dimensions of my comfortable existence.

  “Sure,” he said. “That’d be okay I guess.” He was casual enough, as if he’d been expecting this invitation from the moment he looked at me sitting behind my white collar desk. I covered my pleasure at his answer and suggested we meet at an out-of-the-way place I sometimes stopped in at after work for a solitary whiskey before heading home to wife and children.

  Barry said he would meet me at about a quarter to six. “Your name’s Samson, right? Like in the Bible?”

  “Samson like in the Bible,” I said. “See you in a while.” I looked at my watch. It was just before three. How could I stand to wait for three hours before seeing him again? I couldn’t work for the rest of the afternoon because I was so scared that he would change his mind and fail to show up.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was several weeks before I told Barry my real name, and when I did he said that he too was traveling through this life under an alias. “It’s the American way, right?” he said. “Like John Garfield, like Kirk Douglas.” He was talking about two movie stars who had transmuted their Jewish-sounding names into something much more American. The war may have taken care of Hitler but anti-Semitism still lingered, like the bad breath of a person with the flu. “Give us a kiss, Shapiro,” he said to me, “and stop looking so worried. What have you got to be so worried about?” Barry had grown far more familiar with me since our first meeting over a carpet, having assumed a kind of cheeky attitude which I three-quarters liked; the rest made me a little nervous.

  “That carpet charade wasn’t really you,” I said.

  “Sure it was, it was my job. I did a good job.”

  “But it wasn’t really you.”

  “Just another side of me,” he said. “We all have a lot of sides. Even you. Especially you.” And he gave one of his melting looks that touched me so deeply I felt my cheeks go hot.

  By this time Barry was fully inserted into our ménage— now à trois. Phyllis had no inkling of
its true nature. After I persuaded Barry to move in with us—and it didn’t take much persuasion as he was living in a crummy room at the Y and hated it—I had to tackle Phyllis’ justifiable reluctance. My imagination went into overdrive: I told her that Barry had been a driver overseas during the war and added—not true—that he had been Omar Bradley’s personal driver for six months. “You couldn’t ask for better than that,” I said.

  “But Walt, we don’t even own a car. We don’t need a car. We take cabs. Why am I telling you this? You know this. I don’t understand . . .”

  She had a point. And editors in publishing houses didn’t generally get driven around town by chauffeurs; they took the bus or the subway or walked just like all the other working stiffs. But I had enough money from my dead father, and I fancied the notion of being alone with Barry at least once a day—although we probably could do no more than look at each other in a meaningful way. I scrambled: “I saw a Mercury today in that showroom on Park; it would suit us very well. It’s nothing fancy, not like a Lincoln or a Cadillac, but it’s a sturdy car and, oh, I don’t know, it would be nice to have our own vehicle.”

  “Stop! It doesn’t matter what kind of vehicle it is.”

  “It’s dark red, sort of muted crimson. You’ll like it, Phyll. I sat in the backseat—it’s very comfortable.”