The Man on the Third Floor

by Anne Bernays

  This business about being Jewish in a largely Protestant environment was one I preferred not to bring up more than was absolutely necessary. After all, the Samson family was secular—we didn’t go to temple, we didn’t observe the holidays or holy days, my children were generally ignorant on this subject. But one night Kate asked why the Jews had not accepted Jesus as the messiah. (I suspect they were singing Handel’s oratorio at school.) And I said, somewhat flippantly, that maybe Jesus just wasn’t messiah material. And she said, “Well, an awful lot of people think he was.”

  I didn’t have a clue as to how to proceed with this subject so I let it drop, though Henry and Kate exchanged glances I read as being not entirely favorable. The problem was too large, too complicated. At least we weren’t Negro. Every few months you read in the newspaper about another lynching in Alabama or Mississippi, the poor man strung up by a mob of redneck morons and left swinging in the breeze, eyes open and turned to a delinquent deity.

  THERE WAS one nagging problem and I was smart enough not to blame it on anyone but myself. And if I’d been that sort of man—as so many of my colleagues apparently were—I would have found myself on an analyst’s couch complaining that I couldn’t talk on Sundays. I can just hear him say, “What does the word Sunday suggest to you?” “Well I don’t know, really. Day of rest? You know I’m Jewish?” He makes a “yes” sound. “So that means my Sabbath is on Saturday, not Sunday.” “Everyone else’s Sabbath is on Sunday so the difference is only nominal.” Was I here to hold a theoretical discussion or was I here to fix what was broken? “I try but it’s as if I had something stuck way down in my throat.” “Tears?” “Of course not! Why would I be crying?”

  So I was a mess on Sundays. At the time, I wasn’t inclined to do much soul-searching, or trying to figure out what was going on; I was juggling just about all the balls I could handle. If forced to say why I turned into a mute every seventh day, I would probably suggest that I was only truly at ease at work, and in the embrace of my sweet Barry. (Well, he wasn’t all that sweet, but rather that combination of sweet and peppery the best cooks turn to when they want not only a distinctive but a memorable flavor.) Sundays were a palpable domestic reminder that I was living a life of secrets and shames. This, as much as anything, closed my throat and stopped my tongue.

  Phyllis managed to busy herself or go to the movies with one of her friends, or in several other ways ignored me because she knew perfectly well that nothing would bring me out of my funk. I mostly stayed at home and wandered around the house like a wraith. In 1949, Kate was seven and Henry, ten. Sometimes they would try to tease me into playing a game with them. They loved Monopoly and played for hours on the Persian carpet in the living room. I heard them shouting and tried to avoid being spotted, but Kate saw me and cried, “He’s got both of them, Dad; he’s got Boardwalk and Park Place.”

  “I bought them fair and square,” Henry said, trying to engage my eyes with his.

  “He always gets both of them,” Kate said. “It’s not fair!” Kate’s eyes grew wide, produced tears, and sent them down her lovely cheeks. With a sudden motion, she lifted one side of the board and tilted it high so that houses, hotels, cardboard deeds, variously colored paper money, and game pieces went sliding down over her brother’s knees. Henry looked at them in disgust, as if they were cockroaches.

  “It’s not fair, Dad,” Kate said again, her voice ragged with pain.

  Henry and I stared at each other, abashed, as if it were us and not Kate who had done something startling and shameful. Then Henry said, “I’m not going to play with her anymore. She’s just a baby, a crybaby. She knows I got them by paying for them! That is fair.”

  I wanted to negotiate. Henry was technically right; Kate, younger, more vulnerable, and not yet resigned to the way things worked in adult-land, had a point. He did get the best properties every time. Why? It would have been nice to get down on the floor with them and try to navigate through this maze. Instead, I patted Kate on the head and left the room. I guess I wasn’t the best father in the world, but at least I cared.

  One Sunday in October, Phyllis had persuaded her younger sister Vera, who lived in Purchase and often filled in when Phyllis was busy, to take Kate to see National Velvet, her favorite movie. She had already seen it a couple of times and had, as far as I could tell, a full-blown crush on Elizabeth Taylor, in every way Kate’s opposite. Henry was in his room with the door closed, no doubt studying, something he was extremely skilled at. Young scholar, surely headed for M.I.T. Phyllis, who had just recovered from the flu, was taking a nap; her post-sickness naps usually lasted an hour or more. I took a chance and began to tiptoe up to Barry’s room on the floor half a storey above ours. Barry had gone to visit his mother in Queens, who had made it known to him that she expected to see him on her doorstep every Sunday—except, of course, if his job interfered. Okay, so he was a dutiful son; I was the neglected lover. I couldn’t help smiling about the role I had opted for. It was ridiculous, as silly as if I had volunteered to be a tree in a children’s play. And still I couldn’t help feeling that he had stolen our time together and did not care as much as I did. He held me in a suspension of doubt for which I had absolutely no grounds. This is how far I had veered away from the routes shown on every civilized map.

  I reached the top step only a little out of breath. The air here was different, musky and smelling like wet rags. Before the war, four or possibly five servants lived in the rooms, but since we’d owned the house, first just Grete the cook and Marie the housemaid occupied them. Then Barry came, making three in all. The others had been converted to storerooms or were simply left vacant and undusted. The hallway, painted tan, was lighted with a couple of sixty-watt bulbs hanging on chains from the ceiling. In each cell there was a sink attached to the wall, with separate spigots for hot and cold water, a small desk and chair. A skinny bed set against the wall, and a very small armchair with a padded seat. Some of the windows looked out over backyards, ours and our neighbors’, and the others on an air shaft. When Barry first saw his room he said, “Well, it certainly ain’t the Ritz.” I reminded him he was getting it for nothing, and he said, “Not exactly for nothing.” There he was, putting me on the debit side again.

  But I didn’t care; he was the deepest, most satisfying love of my life, and though I knew it couldn’t possibly last, I did my best to tamp down the doubts in order to savor what I held tightly in my grasp.

  All three rooms were empty because Sunday was a day off for everyone. I slipped into Barry’s room and closed the door quietly behind me. The room smelled sharply of its occupant, that Kreml hair tonic he overused on his black hair, and something else tingly I couldn’t identify, maybe toothpaste, the remains of which stuck in a pink blob on the edge of the sink. I looked around, not sure what I wanted to find, for, in spite of Barry’s assurances and caresses there lurked this fear that someday he would tire of me and simply take off. Did I find signs of betrayal? Restlessness (as evidenced by a map or a guidebook to the Italian Lakes)? A burgeoning bad habit (drugs? booze?). There were no obvious hiding places in this sad little room and I saw the usual items: several books on fly-fishing piled up on the floor, this odd taste having no outlet so far as I could tell, a Whitman’s Sampler half-full, a pre-war Philco radio he had forgotten to turn off emitting swing music, Benny Goodman I think. I knelt and buried my face in his pillow, feeling sorry for myself for things that were, basically, trivial, not worth dwelling on. The world had very nearly blown apart, the war’s effects lingering still in what some considered a very lucky conclusion. If it had not been for finding the Enigma code machine or the atom bomb, our part of the world would be cracking rocks in Georgia. I had no call to feel rotten simply because my lover had to sleep in a room unworthy of him, and because, in spite of the pleasures it afforded me, my double life required more emotional stamina than I wished to expend.

  It wasn’t easy, after all, keeping a lover under the eaves like a poor orphan while my wife and chi
ldren occupied the rest of the house in style and comfort. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to wonder why I didn’t, at this point, take off and leave with Barry. I thought of it many times; Barry and I talked about it. Something kept me from changing the pattern of my life. It wasn’t just one thing, it was a cluster of them, made up in part by my job, which I loved, my family, especially my children, my own history of caution, the formidable voice of my father prodding me along narrow and straight paths, always maintaining the best posture. All of these formed a tight impenetrable ring around me, holding me firmly inside. If you question why Newland Archer didn’t leave the “abysmally pure” May Welland for juicy, sophisticated Ellen Olenska—I’m thinking about The Age of Innocence again, and how well Edith Wharton could write about inertia without losing the pace of her story—you come up with the same conclusion about Newland that you might have about me: neither of us were brave enough to rock the boat. Some of my earthier mates would substitute “balls” for bravery.

  Phyllis barely tolerated servants in the house, although I could get her to admit to liking the concrete results of their presence. “Buzz, buzz, buzz,” she said. “They’re worse than mosquitoes.” My view is that, being the daughter of an academic father and a musical stay-at-home mother, she was uncomfortable being waited on. She was not a princess. She preferred doing things for herself, and she made the children straighten their rooms and put their soiled clothes in the hamper, scrub the ring from the tub, and never leave towels on the floor. Shortly after we bought the house I persuaded Phyllis to hire Grete to cook our meals (Phyllis didn’t like to cook and as a result was a poor one). Marie, the maid, came somewhat later when Phyllis discovered dust balls beneath the sofas and chairs in the living room and study, and Grete wouldn’t clean anything except the kitchen table and her precious knives, insisting that was not what she was hired for.

  I admired Phyllis’ independence of mind and refusal to let our money make her lazy, but there were several things about her that got under my skin, like having opinions with a capital O. Once started on a charged topic, like the Taft-Hartley Act, and she had something to say about it—in this case that it was “evil”—she had a difficult time letting it go. Dog with bone on which strands of meat still cling. Kate would roll her eyes at me—“There she goes again”—but wisely keep her pretty little mouth shut.

  Getting to my feet, I took one last look around Barry’s room. A damp towel lay on the floor under the sink. I picked it up and stuffed it into the space between the rod and the wall, noticing as I did this that the wall was streaked with tears of rain leaking through cracks in the ceiling.

  I checked my watch, having lost track of time. Phyllis might be awake and wondering where I was. I was sure she didn’t suspect what was going on or, if she had suspicions, she kept them buried so far beneath the surface that even she would have a hard time recognizing what they were. I walked softly back downstairs to where Phyllis and I shared a wide bed. I squared my shoulders and opened the door softly. Phyllis was lying on top of the spread with a light blanket drawn up just past her waist. Her eyes were closed and one plump arm lay on top of my pillow. A sudden pang of love—not desire—sprang up inside me. This middle-aged woman, the mother of my children, had a good heart; what had she done to earn a scamp like me? She opened her eyes and smiled at me. “What time is it?”

  “It’s almost three,” I said.

  “I was testing to see if you’d answer.”

  I asked her what she meant.

  “I mean you never talk to me on Sundays. You never talk to anyone.” Phyllis raised herself on an elbow. One of her large, dangly breasts revealed itself over the edge of her robe. Her aureole was a target, the nipple a bull’s-eye. “Your vow of silence on Sundays. You’re a monk.”

  “That’s nonsense,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m talking now, aren’t I?”

  “For a change,” she said. She got out of bed, pulling her robe tightly around her. “Would you like to go for a walk in the park,” she said. “It’s one of those good October days. And I feel much better.”

  I told her I was glad she felt better and sorry that I couldn’t go for a walk; I had a lot of work to finish.

  “Well, then,” she said, “I think I’ll go by myself,” and she trotted off to her dressing room closet. “I need some fresh air.”

  I could have gone with her. I don’t know why I said no. A walk would have been very nice. Who was I punishing?

  CHAPTER 4

  Six years slid by with few surprises, which I suppose is, all things considered, a good thing, since surprises more often than not deliver the kind of news you can do without. My one impressive surprise was that Barry hadn’t left me. Like a hypochondriac, I was anxious a good deal of the time: would the “blister” turn out to be malignant? As for my legal mate, she hung on as well; I was going to add “wouldn’t you know?” But I admit that I was more comfortable in my eccentric situation than, in hindsight, I should have been, the comfort arising from my success in pulling off what some might call a double life—although, at the time, I didn’t think of it as double. Doubled maybe, which is one, as in a double serving of mashed potatoes, while double is two—twins or vision or scoops of ice cream.

  Phyllis was always an active presence, never reluctant to speak her mind—that is, when a cogent thought was in the forefront. She still withheld that last bit of herself, the part that informed her basic temperament, the thing about a person that cannot be changed, as in “shy” or “sweet” or “argumentative.” She made it clear that she expected to have sex several times a week (sometimes I thought that for her sex was like a sort of beauty treatment or vitamin regime). And I had no trouble getting it up; my sex drive was apparently more catholic than parochial. Phyllis rarely talked during the act but made little humming noises indicating pleasure. She often complimented me on making her feel good. This was, to say the least, accidental. Not that I didn’t want to please her, but when we were making love it would not be too difficult to imagine who I was thinking about. Let’s say the difference between applesauce and raspberry mousse.

  By 1954, a lot had happened in the world beyond my home, beyond my office. The so-called Cold War had hardened into slabs of seemingly impenetrable ice. Phyllis went berserk when the Rosenbergs were executed, absolutely convinced of their innocence. She inveighed against the people in charge just as she had when they put Alger Hiss behind bars for perjury a couple of years earlier. Phyllis wasn’t just a leftist ideologue; she was profoundly suspicious of Republicans, whom she called “skunks,” “liars,” and when really riled up, “pigs.” It wasn’t all that easy having a conversation with her, partly because of the heat she generated and partly because, as I told her once or twice when I couldn’t help myself, that she was a broken record. Of course I agreed with most of her views, but felt I had to take a moderating stance or our life at home would have sounded like Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park and the children would have fled. Wisely, Barry wouldn’t talk about Phyllis with me except in the vaguest terms.

  If there are ironies to be found in this story—and I don’t turn to this concept lightly as I don’t think it should be wasted on mere coincidence—they were that, as left-wing as Phyllis was, my money-making and close pal, Edgar Fleming (I considered myself the midwife of his literary offspring), was about as right-wing as one could get without falling off into the void. Whenever Fleming came to our house for dinner, I would make Phyllis swear that she wouldn’t approach any subject that might lead to a food fight. More than once I had told Fleming about Phyllis’ politics, making her sound a little maniacal. “Please,” I said to him, “if you want to have a good time, stay away from anything that smells remotely like politics. You know Phyllis.”

  Fleming was more than willing; he didn’t like to be harangued while eating his roast lamb and lyonnaise potatoes. Who would?

  Edgar Fleming and I were still firm friends. For a man whose politics and attitudes contrasted sh
arply with my own, he still charmed me with his lack of pretension, his sense of the ridiculous, and his openness to other people. Also his amazing literary output. This was not inconsequential. We often met over lunch. If I was pressed for time we met at a restaurant near my office; if not, we went to the Orange Club. I shared Phyllis’ view that this restrictive policy was stupid, especially considering that every last one of us had come this close to being wiped out entirely, and that the fine distinction between Russian and German Jews was invisible to everyone who wasn’t Jewish. But I liked the Orange Club, as much for its muted atmosphere, purchased with a lot of money, as for its excellent menu and first-rate staff. You don’t get that kind of quiet in a bus terminal. At the Orange Club, there was no check-grabbing between me and Fleming. The meal was automatically charged to me, and I then automatically put in for it on my generous expense account. This is the way it was done. Editor plies author with food and drink in a gesture of continued friendship and an ongoing business relationship. Fleming seemed to enjoy this unusual place near the peak of New York society’s mountain but destined never to reach the pinnacle—at least not until both of us were long gone and Jews were accepted like other white men, and maybe not even then. But who knew, sometime in the future New York might even elect a Jewish mayor.

  Fleming reached for a warm, chubby little roll, sprinkled with salt. He was still single and seemed in no hurry to alter his life. His attitude was, “Why buy a cow when milk is so cheap?” Fleming drank more than his share of milk. He had not quite symmetrical features and penetrating eyes that seemed to drive a wedge between girls and their scruples.

  Fleming was what some called a “cocksman,” a term I didn’t especially like but which he didn’t seem to mind. During the war, when we worked in the same outfit, some of Fleming’s girls hung around outside the front doors while others sent him presents—tie clips, handkerchiefs, Gene Krupa records, net bags full of pecans. I never saw him wear a tie clip.