The Long-Winded Lady

by Maeve Brennan

  NOVEMBER 15, 1969

  On the Island

  TONIGHT I stood on the traffic island in the middle of Broadway at Forty-fifth Street and watched a respectably dressed middle-aged woman sing “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” at the top of her lungs to an audience she alone could see. She was blind drunk, and from the sullen expression on her face I would say she wasn’t enjoying herself much. Her face was dark red, and on her short gray-black hair she wore a tiny hat of navy blue felt trimmed with stiff net. She hadn’t enough breath to belt out the song, as she was trying to do, so she screamed the words in a hoarse voice that was colored more by bitterness and defiance than by music, but she kept good time with her umbrella, which she held high, pointed at the hoarding over the marquee of the Astor Theatre. Her hand seemed a lot steadier on the umbrella than her feet were on the ground, and as she sang and waved she did little bumps and grinds with a desperate coquetry that shamed her matronly dress and the sensible black shoes she wore. The last word of each line was a high point:

  Bei mir bist du schön

  Means that you’re grand,

  Bei mir bist du schön . . .

  It means you’re the fairest in the land.

  There were thousands of people on the street. It was just past seven o’clock, and Broadway was well into the evening phase of her everlasting rush hour. The sidewalks were so jammed that you wouldn’t think there was room for one more pair of feet, and on each side of the traffic island the cars raced by, going downtown, speeding for the Battery with the green light all the way, it seemed. But the traffic island was very solid, and even seemed quiet and in darkness, as though the roar and the blazing lights and the frantic movement all around had swallowed it up and made it invisible. There were three of us waiting there besides the drunken woman, but we stood on the safe part, where the cement base of the island widens out to form a little platform, and she was balanced on the narrow runway outside the low cement wall of the “flower bed,” where bits of shrubbery wither in a small wasteland of tin cans and wine bottles and dirty scraps of cloth and paper. It seemed she must either fall forward under the wheels of the cars or fall backward into the rubbish, but she kept her feet somehow. Her umbrella (of beige silk, to match her gloves) was very long and thin and excessively pointed, and her manner with it was vigorous. There was a lot of punch in the way she waved it. The three of us standing on the island with her were just as much afraid of her as we were afraid for her. We just stood and watched her and wished the light would change, so that we might all be released from our oasis. I had seen her a few minutes earlier, on the east side of Broadway, near Forty-eighth Street. We walked alongside each other there for a minute, pressed together by the great crowd. It was a night to be outside. There was that curious feeling along Broadway of walking through darkness while being transfixed by lights that are too bright and not friendly. Those powerful storefront lights and cinema lights are meant for merchandise, not for human beings, and as we pushed along there the deep-dyed neon rays of red and green and blue and white gave each face in the crowd a family likeness, so we all seemed to be related — dubious, discolored copies of one another. I first noticed the woman next to me because of the exhausted way she put her feet to the ground, and when I looked at her face I saw that she was drunk, but although she didn’t seem conscious of the people around her she didn’t seem lost. She seemed to know where she was, all right, as though she took the same route every night on her way home from work. She had a dull, sad face, the face of a derelict who is able to recognize only what is hateful to her, and which would change in sobriety only to grow watchful and, so, harder. She looked about fifty-five. Her figure was heavy in her navy blue winter coat, and she carried a huge black leather handbag with a copy of the Post fitted into its side pocket. As soon as I saw an opening in the wall of backs ahead of me, I hurried forward, and I didn’t see the woman again until she appeared on the edge of the traffic island and began to sing. When the light changed at last, the car that drew up alongside her was a taxi, and as soon as it stopped she slammed her umbrella down flat on the top of it and began staring in at the driver. He prudently raised his arm and grabbed the umbrella and held it tight against the top of the cab, so that she couldn’t lift it or pull it free. “Come on, lady,” he said. He was grinning, but he looked worried. I crossed over to the sidewalk and went along to the bookshop next door to the waxworks museum. It is really not a bookshop but a high-ceilinged cavern stocked with posters and pennants and buttons and all the queer objects manufacturers devise for sale as souvenirs. At the back there is a small book section, with cheap sets of the classics, and popular works on psychology, and paperbacks. I looked until I found a Dorothy Sayers. I took my time, because I didn’t want to go outside and see that woman again. When I finally went out, there was no sign of her. She was gone, or if she was nearby she was quiet. At any rate, she was no longer in her place on the traffic island. I wonder about her, and how she came to be helpless like that in public. I wonder at the power of her nightmare — that it could wait for years and then trap her when she was finding her way home. I wonder how much of all this she will remember tomorrow. Not much, I think. Kind memory will fail her to save her for another day. She will say, “Oh, what a blackout I had last night!” I think that by tomorrow she will have quite forgotten the dangers she survived and the adventures she made for herself on her way home tonight.

  JANUARY 10, 1970

  Cold Morning

  IT is ten degrees above zero, five o’clock in the morning, and I have just returned to this hotel after a visit to Bickford’s, where I had a cup of coffee. I had to get the elevator man to let me out of the hotel. The outer doors are locked for security reasons, and in the little vestibule between the inner and outer doors such a blast of hot air was pouring up that I was glad to get out of it into the icy cold outside. There is no wind. The morning is still and dark, with the touch of anxiety that comes with waiting. It is time for the day to begin. For the moment, as I hurried around the corner to reach brightly lighted Bickford’s as quickly as possible, I saw that the avenue — Sixth Avenue — was swept clean of traffic and pedestrians. It was a tall angular oasis of stillness, very hard and remote in outline but not unfriendly. I couldn’t even hear my own footsteps. I am wearing fur mukluks I bought at Lord & Taylor, and I pad along making no sound. I didn’t look up at the sky to see if I could find moon or stars, but I did take a quick look back up along Sixth Avenue and saw that uptown a little forest of Christmas trees was still glimmering whitely, seeming tall even against the high glass cliffs that ought to dwarf it.

  Bickford’s, which used to be a place of gay pastel plastic décor and bucket-shaped seats, is now comparatively somber, with shiny brown paneling on the walls, and countrified wooden stools, but the background array of jello and pie and fruit salad is as dominant as always, and the orange juice still bubbles away in its big glass dome. And the coffee is very hot. The waitresses wear white nylon uniforms, with woolly colored cardigans to ward off the drafts. My waitress was a middle-aged woman with gray hair and a hard, kind face. She told me she was very tired. “I’m not used to night work,” she said. She brought over one of those heavy metal baskets of glasses to be put away, and as she set it down she knocked her elbow against the edge of the basket, hurting herself. “See, knocked my funny-bone,” she said as she rubbed her elbow. “I’m asleep on my feet. I’m not used to night work. That’s what I’m telling you. I’ve been working days always.” Bickford’s was well lighted, as usual, but it was quiet there. About fifteen customers stood or sat around, scattered here and there at the counters, some of them talking in murmurs and some of them stony still, with their hands holding their coffee cups. One man was fast asleep with his face in the Daily News. A thin woman in a drab brown coat and with a little brown hat on her head was making a telephone call. It was so dark and cold outside, and so quiet, so warm and quiet, inside, that we all seemed to be sitting in the half-light — a sequestered feeling.

/>   When I finished my coffee, I thought of having a second cup, but I didn’t. Bickford’s seemed sad, in contrast to its usual brassy air, and I didn’t want to stay there. I hurried along Sixth Avenue, and there were two people ahead of me — a man and a woman with their arms around each other’s shoulders but walking quite quickly just the same. They were in haste, and I got the impression they had a long way to go. I rang the bell to get back into the hotel, and this time I was glad of that blast of warm air in the little vestibule.

  JANUARY 20, 1973

  A Daydream

  THIS is a daydream: I am lying in the sand just below the dunes on the beach in East Hampton, where I lived for several years. It is a warm, sunless day, with a cool breeze blowing in from the ocean. My eyes are closed. I like the beach, and the sand. There is a big Turkish towel between me and the sand, and I am quite alone. The cats and my dog, Bluebell, walked over here with me, but two of the cats dropped out at the walled rose garden a short distance back, and the four others are hiding in the long dune grass just above me. Bluebell is down by the water. She is a black Labrador retriever, and she swims and rolls in the water and watches for a seagull to play with, but the gulls fly off shrieking with outrage at the sight of her. I won’t stay here much longer. In a few minutes, I’ll get up and start for home — a five-minute walk through dune grass and between trees and across the wide, sloping lawn that leads to the big house where the walled rose garden is. I live at the foot of that lawn. I’ll just lie here a few more minutes and then I’ll go back.

  But I opened my eyes too suddenly, for no reason at all, and the beach at East Hampton has vanished, along with Bluebell and the cats, all of them dead for years now. The Turkish towel is in reality the nubbly white counterpane of the bed I am lying on, and the cool ocean breeze is being provided by the blessed air conditioner. It is ninety-three degrees outside — a terrible day in New York City. So much for my daydream of sand and sea and roses. The daydream was, after all, only a mild attack of homesickness. The reason it was a mild attack instead of a fierce one is that there are a number of places I am homesick for. East Hampton is only one of them.

  SEPTEMBER 20, 1976

  A Blessing

  I THOUGHT if I got the three words “cold and sunny” into a first sentence, I could write you a letter. And there you are. I did it. I have no news, only a few observations and they are not even random observations. They are very solid observations, and if I am not careful they will hem me in and eventually turn into secrets and then, worse and worse, into convictions.

  Thirty minutes later. I went off to make some coffee for myself, and while I waited for the water to boil I considered all the nonrandom “observations” I had so portentously lined up for your inspection. While I looked them over, they began to vanish, and finally they had all vanished — all gone, and a good thing, too. They would have made very dull reading.

  They were a stilted crowd and rather disagreeable, as though they had found themselves at a party that was not quite what they’d expected and where their clothes were all wrong. They all wore elaborate taffeta ball gowns that seemed to belong to the eighteenth century, and each ball gown was a different shade of green.

  They vanished one by one, but their departure seemed sudden, and I think now that they weren’t observations at all but complaints, and, if so, they have gone into the complaints department, where I never look around at all. I am never to be found anywhere near the complaints department. There are too many mirrors in there for my liking.

  The complaints department becomes empty every once in a while — stone-cold empty, and quite deserted. I always know when it is empty. When I am happy, I know that it is empty. That is, when I am especially happy. Furthermore, I believe that all the unhappy ones in there in that dismal department then turn into angels, or into something like angels, and go far, far away.

  Yesterday afternoon, as I walked along Forty-second Street directly across from Bryant Park, I saw a three-cornered shadow on the pavement in the angle where two walls meet. I didn’t step on the shadow, but I stood a minute in the thin winter sunlight and looked at it. I recognized it at once. It was exactly the same shadow that used to fall on the cement part of our garden in Dublin, more than fifty-five years ago.

  We lived in that house thirteen years. It was one of a long row of houses that faced, across the quiet little street, another long row of houses, just like them, each with a little front garden and a good-sized back garden. Every time my father came into the house, coming home, he went first into the back sitting room to look through the big window at his wife’s garden and see for himself what changes she had made there during the hours he had been away.

  I celebrated my fifth birthday in that house, and I also celebrated my seventeenth birthday there, and I feel absolutely impelled to tell you that five is closer to seventeen than seventeen is to five. What do you think of that? And, of course, all my birthdays between five and seventeen were celebrated there. The birthdays of all of us were celebrated with presents in the morning and a very special birthday-cake high tea in the evening.

  One New Year’s Eve, something marvelous happened on our little street. It wasn’t called a street; it was called an avenue. Cherryfield Avenue. And it was closed at the far end — no “thru” traffic. What happened that New Year’s Eve was that in the late afternoon word went around from house to house that a minute or so before midnight we would all step out into our front gardens, or even into the street, leaving the front doors open, so that the light streamed out after us, and there we would wait to hear the bells ringing in the New Year. I nearly went mad with excitement and happiness. I know I jumped for joy. That New Year’s Eve was one of the great occasions of our lives.

  I must tell you now that I am praying to Almighty God for blessings on your house, with extra blessings to go with you whenever you leave the house, so that wherever you are you will be safe.

  Blessings on your house. Happy New Year.

  JANUARY 5, 1981