Dinner with Edward

by Isabel Vincent

  In the 1970s, architects and planners held Roosevelt Island out as an urban oasis with a small-­town sensibility. It was conceived in 1969 when the state of New York entrusted the legendary architect Philip Johnson and his partner John Burgee to transform what by then was a derelict penal colony into a vibrant residential community for middle-­ and low-­income families. They developed waterfront parks and hired modernist architects to build large apartments with spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline. In 1971, the island was grandly renamed after Franklin Delano Roosevelt, although New Yorkers still referred to it by its derisive 1920s moniker, Welfare Island.

  Paula and Edward didn’t care. When they made their move back to New York, their old haunts near Washington Square and Greenwich Village had become too pricey. The island seemed like a safe and affordable alternative, and they soon settled into an agreeable routine. Edward walked to Astoria over the Roosevelt Island Bridge, where he patronized a small network of food purveyors—a fishmonger who called him with news of a shipment of Hudson River shad, a butcher who saved him ham bones for stock. When he wanted to go into “the city,” as islanders referred to Manhattan, he squeezed into the tram, then journeyed by foot the more than sixty blocks to Chinatown for the duck he liked to use in his cassoulet and to the French butcher in Chelsea for the best merguez.

  Although Edward and Paula were fully aware of the history of their new community, Roosevelt Island for them seemed to represent a much better life. They re-­explored their beloved Manhattan and spent their last years together taking long walks through Central Park, dining at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central, attending the theater. In fact, they grew to prefer the island, where they soon became well-­known among their circle of friends for their elaborate dinners. And everyone begged Edward for his apple galette. The handwritten Thanksgiving menus I found in his photo albums and scrapbooks always featured Edward’s signature dessert.

  He insisted that the secret was crushed ice, even after my complaints. Crushed ice, he repeated. And lard. Tonight at dinner, after we finished the galette, Edward got up from the table, gathered his cane that was draped on one side of his dining room chairs, and walked slowly to the refrigerator. He opened the freezer, took out a rectangular brick of white lard, wrapped carefully in waxed paper, and presented it to me with a flourish.

  “Voilà,” he said.

  I was so touched, seeing in Edward’s gift such kindness, and even meaning. I lingered, slowly pulling on my heavy coat and boots. Outside, a storm seemed to be winding down, but I wasn’t looking forward to the cold trek to my apartment. At the elevator, Edward kissed me goodbye and said simply, “I hope you’re happy, darling.”

  I trudged through the newly fallen snow, past the silent communal garden and The Octagon. I walked with purpose even as I had no real sense of where I was going until I reached the northernmost point of the island and the Gothic lighthouse, surrounded by the churning waters of Hell Gate. Although it was built in 1872 by James Renwick Jr., who would go on to design St. Patrick’s Cathedral several years later, local legend has it that the inspiration for the lighthouse actually came from one of the patients at the insane asylum.

  John McCarthy feared a British invasion, and the diligence with which he began constructing a fort so impressed his minders at the asylum that they allowed him to finish what became a four-­foot clay structure, perhaps believing that it was a good form of therapy. For me, the late night visits to the lighthouse had also been thera­peutic. As on so many previous occasions, I headed to my usual bench with its view of Manhattan across the river.

  But something had changed tonight.

  It was still snowing lightly, but even the waters of Hell Gate seemed calm. I was alone, on the snowy banks of the river. In the silence immediately following the storm, the lights of the Upper East Side and Harlem seemed to grow brighter. Without any real sense of why I was doing it, I stood up, took out my iPhone, inserted my earphones, and scrolled through iTunes until I found a samba.

  Suddenly, I was immersed in Afro-­Brazilian drumming. I began to move my feet, hesitantly at first, and then the samba just spilled out of me, and I felt my soul move—in my hips, my stomach, my feet, my ass.

  I wanted desperately to call Edward, to shout, “Yes!” into the phone. But it was late, and Edward was probably already asleep.

  And, anyway, he knew. “I hope you’re happy, darling” contained no question mark. In my mind, there was no punctuation at all. It was a floating affirmation, as simple and as complex as smiling.

  9

  Oysters Rockefeller

  Avocado Salad with Homemade Blue Cheese Dressing

  Tarte Citron

  Pinot Blanc

  My transformation didn’t happen overnight. It was gradual. I still took the lonely walks along the East River, but now I plugged headphones into my phone and began to listen to music. I went to parties, to the theater. I ran six miles a day, and I started to reread the poetry I had once loved as a university student.

  The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

  Crushed.

  “The grandeur of God?” I don’t know if I shared poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s religious convictions. If I believed in anything during those years, it was the grandeur of dinner. I believed in the magic of Edward.

  My job also buoyed me. When I first arrived I was unschooled in the world of New York tabloids. When my editor told me to go out and “get a wood,” I had no idea that it was slang for the front-­page story. Nor did I understand when he sent me on a “door knock,” by which he meant an ambush in which you arrive without warning and knock on the potential interviewee’s door. I also had no idea how to proceed when he barked, “Look for more johns.” But I quickly got the hang of it.

  On occasion, Melissa and I bitterly complained about our circumstances at work, both of us veteran reporters approaching middle age and the respectability that was supposed to attend that, but didn’t. Mostly, though, we shook it off, drawing some kind of reassurance that no one else was given any kind of special treatment at the paper. We sought ways to make our workdays more enjoyable.

  We took solace in our mutual love of food, taking turns buying Petrossian croissants—fat, chewy, and buttery—whenever we had to go on a stake out. When on assignments in Flushing, Queens, we conducted “source” meetings at Joe’s Shanghai so that we could order the soup dumplings—pork meatballs encased in delicate little pagodas of white dough, steaming from the broth. We picked up tuna sandwiches—on thick slices of freshly baked, crusty rye bread, with finely chopped iceberg lettuce and tomato slices—from a Westchester deli when we were in the area. It was unlike any other tuna sandwich I’d had, and I am not sure if it was because it was truly great or because food just tasted better outside the newsroom, where on many days we ate three meals at our desks piled high with documents, which, in my case, intermingled with crumbs, stray pouches of Heinz ketchup, and old paper coffee cups.

  Melissa’s desk was, if not quite pristine, always better organized and definitely cleaner than mine. She kept a bottle of hand sanitizer near her computer, and used it several times a day. She had a stash of alcohol wipes from the first aid kit in the newsroom’s small kitchen to wipe off the earpiece on her phone. She did this if I happened to be coughing and had borrowed her phone.

  We were both devoted to our work. The first time we wrote a groundbreaking front-­page story involving shady politicians in Queens that sparked multiple federal investigations, our editors took a page out of All the President’s Men and began calling us Klincent—an amalgam of our last names, Klein and Vincent. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post journalists who brought down President Richard Nixon with their reporting on Watergate, were famously known in their newsroom as “Woodstein” and did most of their work as a team.

  I often joked with Melissa that she could be the
female equivalent of Woodward, tall and patrician with a neat desk and proper files, as played by Robert Redford in the movie. Like Woodward, she also did all the driving in her old but clean Honda. Of course, she pegged me as Bernstein, played by a young, disheveled Dustin Hoffman—tortured, disorganized, brimming with outlandish ideas for stories that more often than not stretched her patience.

  After a hard day’s work, it was especially heartening to know that at least once a week Edward and dinner were waiting for me. Today, whenever I describe my life on Roosevelt Island, I talk about it as the worst time of my life. But I would be lying if I didn’t tell you it was also the best time. Because of Edward.

  One night when I arrived for dinner, he was preparing oysters Rockefeller.

  “What’s the occasion?” I asked as he arranged the oysters on a baking dish and topped them with a mixture of spinach and bread-­crumbs sautéed in butter and Pernod.

  “Do we need one?” he replied, the slight lilt in his voice indicating that I had asked a silly question. “Paula and I never needed an occasion,” he continued. “We never gave each other presents, either, because every ­day we spent together was a gift.”

  I imagined that Edward had lived some kind of fairy tale with Paula—a relationship so rare and fantastical that it could surely never happen to me, or anyone else I knew. At first, it might have seemed an unlikely match. He was a Southern boy, raised in genteel poverty, and she was an urbane Jewish intellectual from Philadelphia, five years his senior. But, as Edward remembered his first glimpse of Paula, it was love at first sight when they met in 1940 at a Greenwich Village theater—both of them aspiring actors, hoping to land a role with the Provincetown Players.

  The group’s playhouse, in a brownstone on Mac­Dougal Street, had been set up in 1916 by some of the original founders who had started the company during their summer vacations in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Early members included Eugene O’Neill and the poet and journalist John Reed. Although the founding group had largely disbanded by 1929, the theater was still known for independent, experimental productions when Edward knocked on its door. But he clearly had more than acting on his mind. During that first tryout, he found himself auditioning for an audience of one—the tall, brown-­eyed actress he had seen when he first walked in.

  Paula had come to New York to be an actress, although her day job was painting cheap jewelry in a factory. She loved to be onstage, both inside and outside the theater. She enjoyed pranks. Sometimes she would tell people that she had grown up in China, the child of missionaries; other times, that she was a secret agent.

  Edward also dreamed of the stage. At 19, he arrived in New York City on a sweltering day in late August, stiff and sweaty from the trip sandwiched between two beefy and seemingly immobile passengers in the backseat of the car that brought him from Nashville. Years later, when he told me about his two-­day ride, he could still remember driving through the Holland Tunnel “in amazement,” patting his jacket pocket where he had stashed the envelope with a recommendation letter and $12—the equivalent of about $200 today—from his high-­school drama teacher. In the letter, she praised his acting in the school production of Death Takes a Holiday, and she had given him the money toward his new life in the Big City.

  Edward was determined to become an actor in a place that back then was still considered foreign and exotic to many Southerners, an American Babel. “All we knew about New York at that time was that there were people from all over the world who all spoke different languages,” he said. “It might as well have been a different country.”

  Edward’s mother had arranged for him to stay with a man she had once done business with in the South. His name was John, a German émigré who lived at University Place and Eighth Street. Edward rang his doorbell at 12:30 the night he arrived but there was no answer. Which is why he decided to settle into an armchair in the lobby of the nearby Lafayette Hotel and, before he knew it, he awoke at daybreak.

  Edward returned to John’s studio apartment, and this time the wiry, red-­faced man opened the door. It would take a month of sleeping on John’s daybed but finally Edward secured his own place on the second floor of a MacDougal Street tenement where he was to be the building’s superintendent. The job entitled him to free rent and he could make his own hours. Now, he would have his days free to work with real actors. And on that first day at the Provincetown, he met the woman of his dreams.

  Eager to impress Paula on their first date, he went shopping for a bottle of wine. He couldn’t afford the French wine that a salesman suggested and ended up buying “the sweet wine that the bums on the Bowery drank.” He didn’t own any wine glasses; on that romantic night they clinked coffee cups.

  “I asked her if she wanted to sleep over, and she said ‘yes,’ ” Edward told me matter-­of-­factly. To my mock-­shocked expression, he explained, “I had two beds and I was damned if I was going to let her sleep alone, so I crawled in beside her.” They soon became inseparable, eagerly planning their lives together over the 50-­cent plates of Chinese food at the Dragon Inn in the Village and on long walks in Central Park.

  Several months later, when they decided to try their luck in Hollywood, Paula insisted that she travel to California as an honest woman. “Our intention had been to marry at city hall but when we tried to take out the license several days before, Paula’s birth certificate showed her name as ‘Pearl’ and the bureaucrats said no dice. Not the same person.” So, the day before their trip to the West Coast they went from church to church in Manhattan, hoping they could convince someone to marry them in a hurry. The pastor at Trinity Church in lower Manhattan agreed, but could they come back in a month? Edward took Paula’s hand and they returned to the Village, determined to get married that afternoon.

  It happened at the Washington Square Methodist Episcopal Church on West Fourth Street across from Washington Square Park and around the corner from the Provincetown Playhouse, where they first met.

  “On November 8, 1941, Paula and Edward were married in this church,” reads the index card next to a yellowing newspaper photo of the Washington Square Church in Edward’s scrapbook. Their friend Lenny Black served as best man. Before the ceremony, as he waited with Paula and Lenny at the entrance to the church, Edward debated how much he was going to pay the pastor to perform the service. Edward sheepishly asked if he would accept $2.

  “I’ll accept whatever you’re willing to give,” said the pastor, who didn’t ask any questions of the young couple.

  A few minutes later the chords of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” boomed throughout the Romanesque Revival building. “Paula and I both cried, maybe with relief,” wrote Edward on the index card next to the only photograph of their wedding. Both Paula and Edward are beaming in the black-­and-­white picture. Edward wore his only suit. Paula sported a fitted, knee-­length peplum plaid dress borrowed from her friend Mitzi. “It was red,” said Edward.

  Later that day, they stopped in Philadelphia on their way to California to visit Paula’s parents. Then Lenny and his friend Mac drove them in Lenny’s beat-­up Dodge to the West Coast. On the first leg of their journey they stopped at Front Royal at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. At the modest tourist home, all four of them spent the night in one room with two double beds.

  “I made love to her,” said Edward, smiling at the memory of his crowded wedding night. “I don’t know what Lenny and Mac did, but I couldn’t wait to make love to her.”

  After a few moments of reflection, his blue-­gray eyes growing shiny with the beginning of tears, he returned to preparing the oysters. “She melted my heart,” he said. “Paradise was me and Paula.”

  As we sat down to eat Edward’s oysters Rockefeller—a riot of green served on the craggy half-­shells—I moved the bottle of wine and reached over the breadbasket to squeeze his hand.

  I THOUGHT I HAD found paradise, too. It was on the old Constantinople road between Belgrade and Pristina, as I was making my way to Kosovo, weeks befo
re the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia. My companion—the man who would become my husband—was a war photographer, as addicted as I was to the adrenaline rush, the excitement mixed with the utter sense of dread that comes from negotiating your way through a guerrilla checkpoint using nothing more than charm and a pack of Marlboros.

  We drove in a clunky, rented Hyundai, so wrapped up in each other that we seemed oblivious to any danger, even as the car caught fire just outside Kosovo’s capital. In Pristina, blackbirds sang at night amid the crackle of gunfire and swarthy mobsters in black leather jackets swarmed the bar of the Grand Hotel, which seemed forever enveloped in a cloud of smoke. I am convinced our daughter was conceived in one of that establishment’s luxury suites, where the walls were punctured with bullet holes and the floors were littered with the cigarette butts of previous guests.

  By the time NATO bombs started falling on Serbia in the spring of 1999, I was too pregnant to travel. For the sake of the baby, we decided we’d had enough of international conflict. But a normal life with a backyard, trips to Home Depot, and family barbecues seemed to elude us. Restless, we eventually found ourselves driving through the Holland Tunnel on a blustery day in February when my daughter was eight years old.

  Like Edward more than half a century before, I drove through that tunnel in amazement. I was determined to make my way as an investigative reporter in New York City, a place I’d loved since I was a teenager obsessed with Woody Allen and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I’d longed to work at a New York daily, imagining myself as the tough-­talking star reporter Hildy Johnson with the stylish, boxy 1940s suits, working for a Cary Grant-­like editor á la His Girl Friday.