by Nadia Gould
Joyce F. Fagan wanted to be an actress also, but she wanted to go to the University of Missouri. I wonder why Esther Friedman’s photo reminded me how serious a student she was. It says that she wants to be a doctor, and I am sure she became a good one. She was the kind of solid citizen who would become a doctor.
I see in my yearbook of 1946 the strangest handwritten autograph from Margaret G. (She said she wanted to be a lawyer). She wrote, “Dina, you certainly know how to treat men and make them like it. Sincerely M. G.” As I look closer at her picture, it dawns on me now that she could have meant something I certainly was not ready to understand when I was sixteen. Under Betty Gross it says, “settle in Palestine,” Alice Kalajan, wanted to be a psychiatrist in 1946! That too seems ahead of her time. Rita Ortiz was the only girl of the entire class yearbook who wanted to be a housewife. Mildred Reich said she wanted to be a traveler, and so did Phyllis J. Saturnine. Nadia Zelenkevich wanted to be a veterinarian. Where are all these girls I knew once, who had dreams and ambitions?
The day of graduation I wore a white dress. Empire style cut that Ingrid’s mother starched for me. I thought I looked good in it. We wore daisies in our hair because it was the tradition. We had cookies after and a big party at someone’s house and we laughed a lot. I didn’t go to the prom because I didn’t know any boys and anyway most of my friends thought it was silly to go to a prom—childish too!
Chapter 13
New York University 1947-49
In my first year in college I met Nelson R. He was a married veteran and a pre-med student. I met many of his friends, Sidney D., for instance, who was also a pre-med student and who liked me. We met in Biology class. Nelson also introduced me to Calypso songs and American folk songs, and I began singing them.
The cafeteria was the center of our social life at Washington Square College in 1946. I met Eleanor sitting on the side of the leftists. I was one of the first to join the NAACP. And I met Vinie who sang Calypso songs in the churches of Harlem. She took me to sing with her. I sang French folk songs and explained them in English. We were very successful. Then Vinie went on to act on Broadway. She, too, was ahead of her time. As a Negro actress her opportunities were limited—practically nil. She did her own thing before the women’s liberation movement: she put together a one-woman show. Everything important in the business life of an artist I learned from her: thrift stores, public relations, news releases, mailing lists. She inspired me to have my one-woman painting shows on my own when no one was doing it. I would always call her for advice.
Vinie lived with her mother in a huge apartment in Harlem. Her mother always greeted us with reproach: “Hello there! What have you been up to, young ladies? I am sure it has been nothing good!” She was intimidating. Vinie was almost as short as I was, but I had not realized it until I saw her talking to her mother. Then Vinie seemed to have melted down to nothing. I couldn’t believe that a mother could be so mean. She was a tyrant, but Vinie understood her. Life had not been easy for her; she had had to raise two children by herself. I believe the father had left them to fend for themselves. To make money she rented rooms. She wanted Vinie to go to college, to be educated, to amount to something.
The years mellowed Vinie’s mother, and I continued visiting her. She liked Philip. She liked men. She was a woman who had had to struggle alone like a man, and yet she loved being a woman when she could.
Eleanor, another friend, was a spirited young woman who befriended me before I knew that it meant she would show me the way. She was fun, and we got along well until her older brother, Milton, who was an artist and whom she looked up to, showed an interest in me. When he asked me to go out, Eleanor was furious and unforgiving until she forgot why she was angry with me. Meanwhile, I enjoyed my friendship with her brother. He took me to the Modern Art Museum for the first time to see an important Rouault retrospective. It was a powerful show that made a strong impression on me. It was as if this was the first art I was seeing as art. Milton told me I had a good eye. He said he could tell by the way I talked about the paintings.
Gloria, the girl I met when we were junior counselors in New Jersey one summer, gave me my first painting lesson in 1945. She told me what I would need for material, and she drew a triangle which she said was my composition. I should always try to have a triangle and balance my shapes. It didn’t matter if the triangle was upside down. That’s how I began to paint on my own.
I painted the back of the house I saw from my tenement building on Fifty-fifth Street. I put in a sign in letters, “garage,” which I made up. My mother’s cousin bought this first painting and became my first collector. I was on my way to a painting career. When you first start painting and make art, it is like a miracle, just as it is when you begin to write for the first time. Then it is a struggle until you reach another first time, and so it is up the ladder.
During my high school years I was in a drama group conducted by Eve Daniel. It was a French drama group, and Madame Daniel was a demanding teacher who intimidated me. She had me learn the part of Agnes in Moliere’s “L’Ecole des Femmes.” She told me to be innocent as only a woman of fifty can be. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I wonder if I know now. But I learned from her that acting was hard work. In the group there was an American girl, Stella, who was a great actress, and whom I admired. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen with golden hair and large blue eyes. Were they dark blue or gray? She was a modest and pleasant girl and years later I discovered her again, but she had lost some of her bloom and she was not acting anymore.
I can count on my fingers the number of times I went to Brooklyn when I was young. One time I went with Olga to visit Janine who had just given birth to a girl with a strawberry mark on her belly. Olga has forgotten this visit when I reminded her that we had taken the subway. I remember it so well. It was the first time I saw the bridges and the commercial buildings from the elevated train. It seemed like a long journey, and I was thinking how odd it was that Janine should have moved there, it seemed so foreign—Brooklyn.
Janine had come to visit me on Fifty-fifth Street and introduced me to the poet with whom she was in love. I was moved that they climbed the five flights just to visit me. He was very handsome, with soulful brown eyes. They made a beautiful couple, and they looked very happy together. When I met Philip I took him to visit them. By that time they were living in Manhattan.
I went to Coney Island and Brighton Beach several times in the hot days of summer when there was no air-conditioning and the sultry heat and odors of poverty were unbearable in tenement houses. Otherwise Brooklyn was foreign territory where they spoke with an accent that in those days even the Board of Education didn’t recognize as legal.
Washington Square College was the college of my choice because it was co-ed. It was a rather mediocre school at that time. I had just graduated from an all-girls high school, and I decided, this time, I was going to meet boys in college. I wanted to get married and I wanted a career. I knew for sure I wanted to get married, but I didn’t know what career I wanted. I didn’t want to be a housewife. I wanted to have children. It seemed easy enough to have both career and children.
My favorite subject in high school had been English because I loved reading. The House of the Seven Gables and Silas Marner. I saw literature as a way to gossip about the lives of the characters. I thought I would choose English Literature as my major in college. It seemed the easiest subject.
My social worker insisted that I pass an aptitude test before I requested a college scholarship from my agency. I was still a ward of the Children’s Aid Society. The results of the test were humiliating: I was not college material. I would do better as a secretary. I refused to accept this ruling and persisted with my application. I asked my English teacher to write letters on my behalf. In order to apply for money I also had to justify why I needed a private school. I couldn’t say that I wanted to get married and didn’t want a women’s college. Hunter, which was for girls only, at that t
ime, would have been my only prospect. Fortunately, I learned that only NYU of all the colleges in the city was going to offer Russian in its curriculum. This was a fair reason to present the Scholarship Committee. I applied in person, made my case, and was given a scholarship.
The year 1946 was a good year to be starting college: the returning soldiers were going to school on the GI Bill. The GI Bill money and the veterans’ maturity delighted the professors who saw the intellectual level of their classes raised.
My friends Nelson and Sidney were also war veterans and much older than I. We became a trio and lounged in Washington Square Park where the green grass smelled like the country. The dignified houses around the square gave it a refined atmosphere. The square was our campus, but we also took leisurely walks a block or two away in Greenwich Village. We enjoyed the stores where they made on order leather sandals that were copies of those worn by the Greek gods. People stared at them in disbelief they looked so nude. I had a pair made with the thong between the big toes. There was a famous jeweler who made silver necklaces and earrings in modern designs, the kind of jewelry Eleanor’s brother had advised me to wear on a plain black dress. In those days, the height of fashion was a dress made from tubular jersey-knit cloth. One bought the material and sewed the straight top leaving the space for the neck and arms. Imagine a tube and sewing just two sides on top leaving a hole for the head and the arms on the sides.
The sophisticated students met in the cafes and restaurants that had a European ambience. It was only in my last years that I discovered these secret hidden spots in small streets: a cafe where you had to knock on the door to enter like a speakeasy, or Eddie Condon’s where they played serious jazz.
In my first year of college I had a party. We were living on Fifty-fifth Street, and I invited almost everyone I met. I had never had a party before, I didn’t realize there might be a space problem if I didn’t keep track of my invitations. As it turned out, the apartment was too small. Some of us sprawled on the stairs, others spread into the street. Since we lived on the top floor this was literally a long party. The party was a success, but my neighbors were horrified because I had so many black guests: “So dark, you couldn’t see them,” one lady told me. They also called me “Nigger lover.”
At that time, Olga was my best friend. She was older than I, and had come over with her family on the same boat as Gaby and her parents. On that boat Olga had met the young man she was going to marry. She told me how much of a pest Gaby had been on the boat, following the two of them everywhere and spying on them.
My mother found a studio apartment for Olga and her boyfriend just across the street from our building. He was studying to be a doctor with the US Army, but I thought he was terribly spoiled. Olga was crazy about him. She was in graduate school, but she treated me as her confidant, which infuriated her husband. She gave me advice and arranged blind dates for me. On a blind date in those days one went to the big movie theaters that had live vaudeville or shows, sometimes to a supper club. Once I went to the Versailles with the son of one of my mother’s friends. Charles Trenet was singing to an empty room because he was not well known in America. I ordered a glass of milk because I didn’t know what else to order. When the waiter brought it, it was followed by a spotlight. I tried to act as if the milk was for someone else at the table but the waiter, who thought it was a big joke, insisted on placing the glass in front of me. Everyone thought it was a big joke, too.
I was embarrassed on dates because I felt I was not well dressed, not pretty and therefore the boy I was with was discontented and unhappy to have to pay for me. But I was also often disappointed myself. I never enjoyed dates in these early years because you had to kiss your date good night. That was the tradition and the expectation: he treated you all night and a kiss was his due. I hated that and mostly when the boys had pimples on their face.
Olga decided early in life to be a scientist. She was earnest, idealistic and intellectual. I loved being able to speak French with her. She had an ethnic North African look with black frizzy hair, deep-set, piercing brown eyes and sensuous lips. But to have been considered attractive in those years you had to have been blond with soft curly hair and blue eyes. Her life was a fairy tale for me, I couldn’t hear enough about how she had met her husband and how much in love they were. “Why do you butter his toast? Don’t you think he could do that for himself?” I would ask and she answered “I don’t mind doing it if he likes it.”
When the war was over, we got news through the Free French in Washington that my father was safe and wanted us to join him in Africa. Although he had been part of the second landing in France, he wanted to go back in Africa. My mother suggested he come and see America first.
When my father got to New York, he began to work at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, which was the most expensive hotel in New York City at the time. He worked in the cold food section, and he had to buy his own knives. We moved to Payson Avenue in Inwood where friends found us an attractive apartment near the park. Inwood Park was more like forest than a park. It looked like a wild and completely natural setting untouched by man. There were trails rather than alleys to walk on and no open spaces.
In the new apartment I had my own room. We had a living room with windows on the street facing the park and its huge trees. It was like living in the country. The side of the street along the park had benches where women sat in the afternoon after they finished their housework. My mother found friends from Harbin on Payson Avenue, and I found life in Inwood fun, except for the neighbors sitting guard on the benches, watching all my movements. They commented on my clothes and my friends. I wished they would go to the tearoom on Dyckman Street where they served delicious Viennese pastry and fresh rye bread, or to the big movie house next door.
Every day, I took the subway at 204th Street and got off at West Fourth Street. It took just under one hour to get to classes, but I kept myself busy during the trip. I, also, met interesting people on the subway. Once I met an actor who started talking to me. “You read French, Balzac?” “Yes,” I answered flustered although no one was paying any attention to us. We were sitting side by side. He said, “I love French. It is a beautiful language.” “ What do you do?” I asked him. “I am an actor, I’m in a Broadway musical.” “I like the theater,” I said, overwhelmed. I didn’t know what to say. A real actor in a musical, and he was speaking to me.
“I want to meet you again. Give me your phone number, and here is mine.”
I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. I said impulsively before I realized what I was saying, “Why don’t you come for dinner?”
I was dumbfounded when he accepted the invitation. “We have Monday off. May I come on Monday?”
I rushed home to tell my mother that I had met an actor on the train who would be coming to dinner on Monday. My mother was pleased for me and agreed to make a nice supper.
I couldn’t wait for Monday. I thought perhaps he wouldn’t come and prepared myself to be disappointed. But at seven that night the bell rang, and he was there.
I opened the door, and he gave me a big bouquet. Then my parents came into the anteroom, and I saw the actor’s face drop. Only then did I realize he had expected me to be living alone. He didn’t think I was that young, and I realized he was old—much too old for me. We had dinner, and he was very polite, but I could tell he was anxious for dinner to end. When he said he had to rush home, I offered to walk him to the subway. We didn’t talk on the way, and he hardly said good-bye. I never heard from him again but I didn’t regret it because for a moment I had had something to dream about.
When I went to Washington Square College I lived an hour away, too far to go home between my classes. I spent most of my time in the cafeteria on the ground floor, facing the park. Everybody gathered at the table of their special interests, even non bona fide students. I gravitated to the Communist table.
It must have been the friendliest table or perhaps it was instinctive. The people there were alway
s busy organizing fundraisers and dances. They asked me to be an usher at the Fair Employment Rally in Madison Square Garden. This rally was to fight discrimination for jobs because of race. Mayor LaGuardia hugged me at the end of the program, because I had done a good job. They sent me places where I sang French songs for money under the name of Yvonne. I had an intuition about not using my own name and shortly after we had the McCarthy years.
I met Philip in the cafeteria at school. Angelo, a classmate, introduced us. Philip had been staring at me for a long time. Many boys looked at me, and I was used to it. It didn’t go to my head because inside I felt alone, and I didn’t have many dates. I had noticed Philip. Lanky with dark brown eyes, he looked like a poet. He was also Jewish looking, like Janine’s boyfriend, and I liked that. When we first met I didn’t know that Philip had seen me sing for the French Club. Later he told me that he had assumed I was a famous singer because I ran out as soon as I was finished singing. He presumed my chauffeur had picked me up in a limousine. The truth was that I could sing in front of a big audience, but I was shy with people. After my singing I couldn’t hang around and socialize. Philip told Angelo he would like to meet me. Angelo had proudly said, “I know her. I’ll introduce you.” “How do you know her?” “She is in my classes.” “She’s a student?” “Yes.”
When Angelo brought Philip to my table and said, “I want you to meet Philip,” I stood up to shake hands, Philip towered over me, and we both felt awkward. Would it be possible, I wondered, to go out with someone as tall as that? I liked him, and, best of all, he liked me. Before that, I usually didn’t like the boys who liked me. This was the first time I liked someone as much as I had liked Jean-Marie. He asked me to go to a restaurant with him and his friends. Philip was an art student, and I knew at that dinner that we would become serious. He had a warm smile and regular, white teeth. How extraordinary I thought to meet a person and know he will become your husband.