It came as a surprise to me when I discovered that there were families who went out to dinner as a matter of course. When I was in college I knew a boy whose family went to a Howard Johnson in Westfield, New Jersey, for pancakes every Sunday night, and a girl to whom Sunday night supper meant eating with her grandparents at Lutèce. One girl I knew always celebrated Thanksgiving at Patsy’s, an Italian restaurant in the theater district. Other families had other rituals. Recently a friend told me a tale of exotica. When her mother was a little girl she and her sisters were sent for the summer to a sleep-away camp in Maine. Before they left, they were taken to dinner at the St. Regis Hotel. On their return, nine weeks later, they were picked up at Grand Central Station, driven back to the St. Regis, deposited in the tub and scrubbed, and room service was ordered. It was spaghetti, which they were not allowed to eat at home. Suffice it to say my own childhood experiences do not equal this. Once a year, my mother took me shopping with her. In those days, the mirrors in the dressing rooms were mirrored on two sides, and you could see yourself reflected smaller and smaller, diminishing into the silver distance. I looked to myself like a fish, white and unappetizing in the glass. Afterward, a treat, I was allowed to order a mint chocolate chip ice cream soda at the lunch counter at Bonwit Teller. I can still feel the taste of that green froth, slightly medicinal on my tongue.
The other day, it was the last day of school for my youngest daughter, and we had listened to the bell ringers and the songs—“Over the Rainbow” and “Ukrainian Folk Tune.” The girls were magically transformed from fifth into sixth graders, pinching themselves to see if they felt any different, and the older girls, stricken with tears, graduated from Middle to Upper School, already dragooned by the idea of loss. We had arranged as usual to have a celebratory lunch with her friend Ellen, and her mother, who as it happens had been a girl at that same school, so there was the feeling of the past being present, and the girls as somehow doubling us. The sister who ate every week at the Chinese restaurant had graduated the year before from that same school, so as I watched the girls file out, she was there too, at every age except the one she is now, in my mind, crossing that stage and the podium.
We usually went with the girls to a restaurant called Quatorze Bis, on the north side of Seventy-ninth Street. It was satisfyingly far from school, four long blocks, far enough to feel that you had left the school’s force field but close enough to walk. When my daughter was very small, all she would order in a restaurant was pasta with butter, but more recently she will order an omelet with mushrooms, or roast chicken, and eat happily. If she could, she would order mashed potatoes on the side. The waiters were ceremonious with the little girls. Quatorze had on the menu things that she liked and recognized, and served profiteroles the size of spaceships, and the mothers, grown up, could have a glass of white wine and congratulate each other on another year in which the children had done well in school, and practiced their volleyball skills and learned the provinces of Canada, and we had muddled through. That year, I think, I had a broken heart.
But this year when we left the school it was hot. It had been crowded in the lobby. One backpack had been lost, then found. The girls were in their special day dresses, not uniforms, as befit Last Day, and they were pulling at the elastic on the unfamiliar shoulder straps of their sundresses. Suddenly Quatorze seemed too far to walk on the hot pavement. We suggested the Mansion, around the corner, what passes in New York for a diner, and used to be called a luncheonette, where they could get pancakes. Nothing appealed. The feeling of celebration petered. Wistfully, one of the girls said, I wish we could go swimming.
It turned out we could. At our friends’ apartment three short blocks away bathing suits were unearthed. The week before my friend had joined a club where the children could play tennis. Her parents had belonged to this club, and she had gone there as a child, in the welter of the last days of school—because she also taught at the school, and had another child, who was also finishing school that week—she had forgotten she had joined. We waited while the dog was fussed over and fed and left barking in the apartment, and then took a taxi. We emerged on the East Side near the river in the Fifties, in a neighborhood remote from my map of the city. I had been taken there as a child to visit an elderly family connection. The door to a cavernous echoing apartment was opened by a uniformed maid, and the rooms were filled with objects that seemed even to me then to be fated: there had been no choice but these lamps, these rugs and armchairs, which had been rooted to the spot for fifty years. The last time I had been to the neighborhood, silent as a grave, was for the reception after a memorial service for an art dealer and collector known for his eye and his irascibility, whom my husband had befriended. He had a young wife whose mascara ran, and three sharp middle-aged daughters, the reverse of a fairy tale.
When we got out of the cab with the two girls, the silent street was hot as a bread oven. Each building had a funereal black or green awning shading a brass or gold door. Although we were almost at the river it was impossible to have any sense of it, for the street was that unusual thing in New York, a dead end, all sight of the highway cut off by a high wall at the end, which now bisected the residential neighborhood from the gulls and barges. We passed from the dream of heat into a door marked —— , and the clock went back forty years. There was the board in which members were “in” or “out,” the old red carpet never replaced, the ladies’ room with the carefully folded hand towels and bowl for change. There was a moment of panic when my daughter thought she had left off the bottom of her borrowed bathing suit, but there it was, on her bottom, under her sundress, which was printed with sailboats.
It was too early to swim: it was “adult time” in the pool, which was indoors, and had glass windows with huge casements facing a sunken garden, so that it looked and felt like an aquarium. An elderly couple were paddling, wearing bathing caps. The place was absolutely still. There were a few gliders, covered with plastic cushions printed with flowers. The cushions smelled of damp, and Lysol, and something else indefinable—mold, or the indrawn breath of a different era. The girls were starving. I think, said my friend, there’s food. There was a telephone on a stand. It was a black phone with a handle and a dial, of the kind you hardly ever see anymore. She picked up the receiver, and in a moment, apparently, there was a voice at the other end. This is Mrs. —— she said, and I’d like to order some lunch. Then she nodded and put down the phone. After a long moment in which nothing happened at all, in a hush broken only by the sound of slow paddling from the pool, a waiter in black trousers and a mustard-colored double-breasted jacket glided out of a door at the far end of the room, holding a gigantic menu. The girls pored over it. They would have, they said, BLTs and lemonade. Order dessert now, we urged, and then it can come at the same time. I think we both felt that the waiter was an apparition, and we could not count on him, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, appearing often again. The choices were ice cream or Nesselrode pie, and since we could not come up with an explanation of the latter—I had a vague idea of creaminess but had not seen it on a menu for forty years—they chose ice cream. The waiter bowed to the girls, a gesture they had not seen before, and vanished, nodding.
After an interminable time, during which the girls played hangman on a crumpled napkin I found in my handbag, the waiter reappeared. He was pushing a small silver cart with tiny wheels, and on the cart was a small Byzantine city of silver domes. The girls sat up straighter at the table. With another bow, he whisked the plates off the cart, placed them in front of them, and whisked off the domes. Underneath were their sandwiches, three slices of white bread each, with the crusts cut off, festooned with toothpicks decorated with tiny streamers of green, yellow, and red cellophane. On the side were some tiny cornichons, which my daughter loves. Next to the plates were two smaller covered silver domes, shiny with cold. Beneath them were two scoops of the chocolate ice cream of my childhood—pale, faintly crystallized at the edges, in a j
ust melted lake of paler cream.
Because it was Last Day and since everything had come at the same time and the ice cream would melt, they ate the it first, before their sandwiches, with an air of surreptitious, surprised glee. The silver bowl was so cold that when my daughter’s fingers touched the stem she left a print in the condensation and I felt it on my own fingers; the cold, and then the cold ice cream on her tongue, and the slight grittiness of the ice. My friend and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows and rolled our eyes: Where do they get this stuff? the look asked. The silver domes, the white bread with the crust cut off, the toothpicks, the Nesselrode pie, even the waiter? We drank the iced tea we had ordered, which came in tall glasses with lots of ice, and straws from which the bottom half of the paper had been torn, but not the top, so it was guaranteed that no hand had touched the part of the straw from which you were about to drink, and I thought of the months, long ago, I had worked for an old man and how he liked his straws that way, with his lunch. Since he was a man who operated out of a deep sense of embarrassment and deference to others, I wondered briefly how he had made that desire—that necessity to him, that no one touch the straw—clear. The girls immediately blew hard through their straws, with snorting noises, so that the little bits of paper flew off and landed across the room, on the cool green tiles, and we reprimanded them, idly.
After a bit I had some errands to do across town, and I did them, and then I returned to the club in the terrible heat. The girls had had a wonderful time, swimming. By then my friend had left, and the girls were with a babysitter, a Russian woman who didn’t speak English, so we bowed to each other in the lobby, and my daughter and I walked up York Avenue, in search of a taxi. There were none. It was so hot that you could see the city air in furred bands, rising from the buses. For a while it seemed that it would not be possible to get home at all: no buses came, and because it was 5 p.m., all the taxis, the way they do inexplicably, in New York, at the busiest times, had gone off duty. I found myself thinking, wildly, for a moment, that we could not get home because we were stuck in time—there was no way to get from the cool glade of that pool, and the waiter and the silver domes, and the toothpicks, to the next place we were meant to be, meeting her brother at a pizza place, in West Harlem, where we live. The force field of the past was strong, a whirlpool—it was inexplicable to me that I was the mother of the girl, in a damp sundress, and not the girl herself, forty years earlier, eating an identical sandwich under a silver dome, at a different club, with my cousin’s grandmother, who wore stockings in the summer, before we would have to wait for thirty minutes to get into the pool.
We crossed the smoky street and I bought two bottles of water from a Mexican vendor, on the corner of Sixty-first. We drank them down. I tried to remind myself that my daughter and I would certainly reach home. That it was only three miles, if we needed to walk, when we got there we could order in, if we liked, and turn on the air conditioner in the bedroom, and take a cool shower. That this was infinitely better than the plight of other women and children around the globe, or even, I knew, in the city in which we lived, and I should stop feeling sorry for myself. It worked, a little, but not enough. I wanted, still, to be the girl in the Speedo tank suit who was told I had to wait thirty minutes before getting into the water.
The west side of the street was a little cooler. Up its artery swam a taxi whose light blinked on. My daughter ran toward it and flagged it down. It was full of priests. Smiling and nodding they got out, and the last one, a Russian Orthodox priest dressed in full black regalia in the heat, held the door open, and we sped uptown, to meet her brother at a restaurant that had sprung up two blocks from our house, an address from which only a few years ago, there had been not one restaurant in a radius of eight blocks, which is a continent in the city. It was called, inexplicably, the Bad Horse. The children liked it because the pizza was good, and it was cool, and I like it because they turn the music down if you can make yourself heard to ask.
The Bad Horse had not been there, three weeks ago. A young couple, my neighbor had told me, was trying to make a go of it. I tried to remember what had been there before, and hoped it had not been another restaurant, which would mean that even the neighborhood, waking itself from its slumber, had already developed its own impossibilities, its particular Bermuda Triangles where nothing could flourish but FOR RENT signs.
Does a horse bark? The waiters didn’t know. But the name made me think of another new restaurant, on the site of an old one. This one, the old one, was a restaurant I had been to a hundred times, over the years. I had begun coming to it in the butterflied chicken phase when we were feeling flush, and momentarily poised to enter another life, in which we could regularly afford the mediocre food and the good drink it afforded, under its once risqué murals of woodland nymphets. Later, I went to drink pear champagne at the bar, with a man I would marry, who, my father said, was the only man he ever knew who didn’t look like a gangster in a double-breasted suit—he was too fey, too elegant—and when we moved from the bar we would sit at table thirty-eight, where we had decided to get married, catty-corner to the mirrors. Later, we took the children, and they ate pasta with butter and later, roast chicken. The restaurant was in the lobby of the apartment building where the poet Robert Lowell had died, in a taxi, outside the front door, returning to his second wife after a hiatus, so there was that, too. In a room across the lobby, which also belonged to the restaurant, the “Little Bar,” you could still smoke, and sit at small tables where your knees knocked into the knees of whoever you were with, which was the point, anyway. The last time I was there it was to meet a friend, a playwright, who was dying, and whose nurse took her to the door and then she made her way to the table where I was waiting, with a walker, and when she sat down said, Thank God for drink.
A while ago, after the ballet, we would go and sit at the bar. The bartender’s name was Victor, and he would put a stand of boiled eggs in front of me, because he knew I liked them, and we drank champagne. There was a man who almost always sat at the very end of the bar, whom my husband didn’t like—he felt he had been criminal, about some deal, that I never quite understood—so we avoided his glance in the mirror, and he usually left before we did. Victor had a son at the Naval Academy, in Annapolis. Sometimes, but not often, we had a little something to eat; often even if we didn’t order Victor would give us a something, anyway, a bit of smoked salmon, or a piece of cake. At that time I had a fur coat, that a friend had given me and I had had made over, with a blue silk lining, and I held it on my lap rather than check it. Sometimes in the winter I draped it over my shoulders. Victor always asked my husband what I would have. What he said was, “And for Mrs. Joe?”
When he said it I felt that all was right with the world, the world I had made, or tried to make. I liked having the warm, light coat and the glass of champagne, or sometimes Sancerre, and the little plate of something to eat, and the man my husband didn’t like at the end of the bar. I knew, I felt, how to be that person. That that person was someone invented out of another time, and if her constellate points had vanished it didn’t concern me, then, nor that the wavery mirror in the leaf green powder room where I sometimes went to check my reflection showed me the girl in the Speedo suit, waiting to get into the water. About the time we decided we couldn’t afford to go to the ballet every week during the season, nor could we afford other things, the restaurant closed. The owner, a Hungarian, had died, too, and it was sold.
To me at the time the restaurant closing seemed to be of a piece, another square filled in the ghost grid. When I spoke to my friend who lives in the country, I told him about it, and he said, “Well, another thing we won’t ever do again.” The other night I was walking past Sixty-seventh Street with another old friend, with whom I had never been to the restaurant, although we had each been there many times, with other people. Let’s look, I said. I had heard it had recently been reopened, in the same spot. You could no longer go
into the restaurant through the lobby of the apartment building; this had been regularized. There was a door marked “The Leopard.” We went in, hesitant. Some of the murals had been kept, and the odd way you had to climb a small step to get to the back where the bar was. But the bar was on the other side of the restaurant, the wrong side, sleek, an expanse of shining wood. Victor wasn’t there. The girl in the Speedo suit put her toe in the water, and withdrew it.
Mr. Ferri and the Furrier
When I saw, in the newspaper, that Mr. Ferri had died I immediately thought of the furrier. It may have been the association of consonants or vowels—I almost wrote “consolation,” and “constellation” would be most accurate—of a hands-on caress, a kind of attention to detail and to the customer that barely exists anymore, like cigarette lighters, or loose powder, or the still click of a phone being lifted up, somewhere else in the house, when you are speaking on it, too softly, in another room. Mr. Ferri, who as far as I know was no relation to the great ballerina, Alessandra Ferri, though he shared some of the dancer’s wit and grace, her deft movements, although his were often close to the ground, and he danced, always, as a partner rather than a soloist—a wren of a man with pins flashing in his teeth. Mr. Ferri was a tailor. His shop was four flights above Madison Avenue, in the East Sixties. On the street level was a fashionable restaurant, and across the street was and is a line of some of the most expensive jewelers in the world: in one, a bird of paradise made entirely of diamonds, the size of the flower; in another, a sapphire large as a robin’s egg. But the door to Mr. Ferri’s was sandwiched between the restaurant and a dress shop that catered to fairies of the woodland, the dresses all tulle and peau de soie; some of which, secretly, would make their way to Mr. Ferri’s agency a half hour, or a decade, after they left the shop.
An Enlarged Heart Page 11