Anniversaries
Page 11
The New York Times was there last night when the Automat on Seventy-Second Street, just off Broadway, closed its doors. The Times observed for us:
– Should auld acquaintance be forgot . . . (“frail, uncertain voices”).
– I’ve come here for fifteen years, every evening: Ida Bess.
– Fifteen years? Thirty years I’m eating here: Rose Katz.
– It’s too bad, I’ve never seen such faithful customers: Steve Kelly.
Another photo shows an old woman near Danang, stiff with age, pencil legs, grimacing face, being carried on a soldier’s back out of an area of heavy fighting to higher ground. “A member of the armed forces helps her”: says The New York Times.
September 19, 1967 Tuesday
Your child just had to go to a private kindergarten, Gesine Cresspahl, and you didn’t mind that it was in a church a Rockefeller had dedicated to God in memory of his mother, clean and spacious classrooms high above the Hudson and Riverside Park, with teachers paid well enough to be patient with middle-class children—Mrs. Jeuken, Mrs. Davidoff, who made Marie believe in a world where kindness and obedience and the absence of envy pay off. For that you pinched and scraped together one and a half months’ salary, and your excuse was that “she should have as easy a time as possible learning the new language.” She was also learning to have high expectations, wasn’t she?
The British have returned the Soviets’ runaway physicist to them. Both sides now agree that he is a sick man, and both powers accuse the other of having acted improperly.
And when your child turned six, Gesine Cresspahl, she still wasn’t sent to public school—to one of the shabby, boxy brick buildings reeking of fiscal stinginess, to an overcrowded classroom where the children of the poor sleep off their parents’ fights and underpaid teachers have to worry more about self-defense than teaching, to a world where what counts is the slap and the punch, the cut and thrust. Did you not like the broken benches, the stinking toilets, the bleak concrete schoolyards behind thick chicken wire? Or was it that your child shouldn’t have to do without school during strikes, like this one, six days long so far and today keeping four-fifths of New York’s teachers out of school, over not just wages but new schools, smaller classes, and the right to discipline disruptive children? Did you not want the police to turn up in Marie’s school and beat representatives of the colored community from the building with billy clubs? Are there some kinds of knowledge you want to keep from your child?
“When Patrolman Clarke was led from the floor with his head bandaged, some of the women demonstrators shouted: ‘I hope you die.’ ”
So, the only place good enough for your child, Mrs. Cresspahl, was a private school on the northern heights of Riverside Drive, a Catholic one too, a concrete block of the finest cut and costliest workmanship, cited in the annals of modern architecture, an institution with a two-year waiting list and annual tuition running as high as three of your paychecks. The discreet bus carrying the children past the slums to pure knowledge didn’t bother you; the school uniform, a blue blazer with a gold crest over the heart, didn’t embarrass you. Your child already deserves to be treated as an individual, autonomous person, her abilities recognized and fostered early. But why by people in long brown habits, white cords around their waists and limited intelligence under their coifs? It’s true that the child will be accepted at exclusive universities with a diploma from this institution, unlike the graduates of P.S. 75, and she will have friends in families wealthier than her own. Why this sham, when two missed tuition payments are enough to blow it apart?
The East Germans are telling the West Germans (according to the New York Times correspondent): Give up your militarism, your neo-Fascism, and your monopoly power, then we’ll negotiate with you.
Not only that, Mrs. Cresspahl, but when your child needs to see a doctor she doesn’t go to a public clinic, doesn’t have to wait in moldy bug-infested corridors next to bleeding, unconscious, or mentally ill people—your child goes to a private practice on Park Avenue, where she is announced like a lady and greeted like a friend for fifteen dollars a visit, blood tests forty. Your child knows her doctor by name, writes him letters, feels comfortable calling him on the phone. Your child’s doctor got his excellent grades not at a state university but at one called Harvard, and for your child he makes house calls. Where can you find that—a New York doctor, bringing in well over a hundred thousand a year, making a house call for a slight temperature and ending his visit with an unhurried conversation, relaxed in his chair, not a professional businessman but practically like a friend just dropping by? The best is barely good enough for your child, Mrs. Cresspahl, is that how you see it? Why for your child? Incidentally, you’ve got some mail, Gesine.
Dear Mr./Mrs./Miss Cresspahl,
I have been called up on short notice for active military service. Kindly settle any outstanding accounts with my attorney. You may be sure that I will inform you when I return . . .
Washington, Sept. 18 (AP)—The Defense Department today identified the following men killed in action in Vietnam: 2nd Lieut. William D. Huyler, Jr., of Short Hills, N.J., Sgt. Harald J. Canan of Oceanside, Long Island, and Pvt. Laifelt Grier of Brooklyn, from the Army; Lance Cpl. James P. Braswell of the Bronx and PFC Robert C. Wallace of Plattsburgh, N.Y., from the Marines.
September 20, 1967 Wednesday
Thirty-six years ago yesterday or the day after tomorrow, Papenbrock’s youngest daughter received an invitation to join Leslie Danzmann on a trip to Graal. Their beds had been next to each other in the Rostock boarding school; Leslie Danzmann was in fact vacationing in Graal. She was the widow of a naval officer and with his pension could only afford off-season on the Baltic. Leslie Danzmann was always ready to help.
Her friend from Jerichow arrived in Graal after breakfast and wrote postcards late into the afternoon in the dining room of the Strandperle spa hotel. Leslie told her the day trips: Moorhof, Wallenstein’s camp, the haunted forest, the Markgrafenheide Forest Lodge. When they were back at the train station in the woods, they suddenly hugged each other: a country girl in a skirt-suit with checks that were too big, and a pale-haired young lady in a tennis dress. Both were unusually effusive, one at the favor a true friend was doing for her, the other because she was not inclined to warn her unmarried friend. Then Leslie Danzmann went to the post office, signed the first card to Papenbrock, and dropped it in the mailbox.
In the light that the crowns of tall trees held at a distance, between lush fields of bracken, Lisbeth Papenbrock traveled back along the route she had just come. She did not look out the window in Rostock, nor in Bützow. From behind her Berlin Daily, she saw Dr. Erdamer board the train in Bad Kleinen, but Dr. Erdamer walked right past a lady reading a liberal newspaper. In Gneez the express train stopped next to the train to Jerichow, and even though it was pig market day in Gneez, the platform was empty. After five furtive hours she was in Hamburg. It wasn’t at all that she was trying to deceive her parents; she was only trying to keep a secret.
The next morning, she took the streetcar to Fuhlsbüttel, picked up the plane ticket she’d ordered in advance, boarded the airplane to London, landed in Bremen, landed in Amsterdam, landed nine hours later in Croydon, and hired an open car to drive her to Richmond: an exhausted, excited tourist staring with mouth slightly open at the reddish colors of the street made heavier by the afternoon haze, almost startled to find that the New Star and Garter Hotel really existed on Richmond Hill, not only in the Grieben’s guidebook. (Eight shillings. Twenty percent unemployment in England.) When the cabdriver drove away, annoyed at the tip, she wished she could’ve run after him. She didn’t want to start off here with a mistake.
It was already dark, a thick ashen night, when she reached the courtyard of Cresspahl’s workshop. She took her time, she watched him at work, strong and tough in his collarless shirt; he had neglected his blond stubble for days and was busy with some heavy clamps, cursing under his breath. Sometimes he winked to himself, h
e was so sure he was alone. Finally, when he stepped outside with a pipe, he couldn’t see who it was, then he saw who it was.
They were very moved. All the words he had spoken to her about the house and Salomon and Richmond immediately took on for her the shape of his stairs, his kitchen, his room, the gasworks chimney outside his window. His visit to Jerichow grew inexorably more real. She was already afraid of losing him; she hoped she would die first.
Cresspahl was alarmed. (He didn’t mind about the money she had thrown away to take the trip; he was uncomfortable with the frugal budget they had agreed on.) He was alarmed at the sudden impulses that after this one he would have to expect from her in the future. He found it bizarre how blindly she seemed to believe that she had joined him in a single bound, in an instant—while he still chafed under a feeling of strangeness and distance, she no longer felt any distance at all. She seemed to him like the child in an egg-and-spoon race who gets so carried away that he forgets his playmates with their own fragile burdens are also trying to reach the goal, playing dirty tricks if necessary; now he felt an added obligation to make sure she got home safely. Now he was her superior in more than age. She had made herself dependent. That’s not what he’d wanted.
She let him work during the day, and by evening he had thought of so much he wanted to tell her that he started talking and talking. They felt so sure of each other that they talked back at each other, and not always joking. Deeply moved, they told each other where and when they might have met sooner: in 1914, at the Whitsuntide market in Malchow; in 1920, in the Waren town hall; in 1923, in Amsterdam; in August 1931, for exactly one minute, at the Schwerin train station. All these deprivations seemed inconceivable. Now they were in the clear.
They took each other out to dinner (the German cash-export limit of a hundred marks had just been lifted), and while Cresspahl wanted to take her to Schmidt’s, a German restaurant on Charlotte Street, she wanted to go to an English restaurant. (Leslie Danzmann had given her one of her dresses.) He had her order from the menu. She understood that to mean that he wanted her to practice the language, and he saw the waiter tuck his smile under his mustache. (It wasn’t so long ago that he’d gone out to the White Horse in Dorking with Elizabeth T. He had to give up the Black Horse, too.) She wasn’t trying to reform him when she bought him a safety razor, but she wanted to seem like she was. She was so deliriously happy on the top level of a double-decker streetcar at rush hour that the people sitting nearby had smiles for her, and for Cresspahl too. One time, with her purse on the table, she had paid a bill and put her hand on his tobacco pouch and stuck it in her handbag, so he wouldn’t have to carry it, and so he could ask her for it back later, and so she would have something she could give him.
He had made a table, a light and sturdy oak frame, where they and four children could sit. That sounded good to her. He showed her his designs for beds, and she picked one where they could lie together. That sounded good to him.
She told him all about her walks in Richmond, about what she thought of the various shops. The meandering main street reminded her of Gneez, as did the buildings that each had a different facade, the small shops, the often overcrowded sidewalks. (He looked at her; he didn’t notice she talked longest about the Parish Church.) He wanted to return the favor and asked about Jerichow, and she turned Jerichow into a series of disparaging stories:
Molten the baker had a hand-painted sign in his shopwindow: Germans, Eat German Bread! She hadn’t thought to laugh about it at home, but in front of a window full of pastries on George Street she couldn’t hold back a dark-throated titter.
(She didn’t tell him that Pastor Methling had thundered down from the pulpit against the surveying of Jerichow land for a Catholic church. “So come to church on Reformation Day in your top hat!” he’d cried. Since Jerichow’s tradesmen were counting on large orders from the commission, Pahl the tailor had to put a new top hat in his window every day. Jerichow’s tradesmen would give Pastor Methling his top hats all right, though not for his reasons.)
She made her brother sound ridiculous, to please Cresspahl: Horst Papenbrock, showing up for dinner in his brown shirt and shoulder belt, marching up and down Town Street with Griem, who was wearing the same uniform, just because the government had lifted the ban on the Brownshirts. They were giving notice. Horst Papenbrock, who can’t get anywhere in the SA because his father refuses to spring for a truck for propaganda trips around the countryside. Horst Papenbrock, whose voice suddenly turns small, almost flaccid, whenever he begs his father for donations for the SA.
Daddy you can’t possibly want your son to go around as a common foot soldier.
Berlin has lifted the ban off your necks. Thats all youre gonna get.
And what does The New York Times have to offer us today from the life of Stalin’s daughter? “It was May. Flowers were in bloom outside the dacha. ‘So you want to get married, do you?’ my father said. For a long time he stared at the trees and said nothing. ‘Yes, it’s spring,’ he remarked all of a sudden. ‘To hell with you. Do as you like.’ ” (1944)
She’d made sure that he too would get one of the postcards mailed after her departure, showing the steamship port in Graal (with warm greetings from Leslie Danzmann).
I wanted to sleep with you again before we got married, Heinrich Cresspahl. In a bed, I mean.
September 21, 1967 Thursday
Our building on Riverside Drive has another, basement entrance, where Ninety-Sixth Street runs below the overpass—after the yawning caverns of the three garages, before the blackish arch of the bridge, an unexpected lead-gray door opens into a passage between zigzagging walls. Behind this open door, which today has sucked in soggy brown leaves from the park, all the others are locked: the one to the inside fire-escape stairwell, the one to the elevators, the others hiding the maintenance equipment and garbage incinerators. Today, the low passageway is too narrow for Mrs. Cresspahl, and it is with unusual urgency that she presses the button to summon down Mr. Robinson: not because she is rain-soaked, not because she wouldn’t be able to defend herself with shopping bags in both arms, but because, in just such a passageway (according to The New York Times)
in the basement of a building on West 181st Street
near Fort Washington Avenue
right around the corner the whole time—when we transferred from the subway to the long-distance bus, when we took out-of-town visitors up to the George Washington Bridge, when we ate chicken made Jewish-style, not far from that respectable building, bricks bundled in elegant sandstone wrapping, just a few steps away from that basement, so close the whole time
the superintendent, Mr. Hartnett, found two steamer trunks yesterday: “Property of Anne Solomon,” the tags said. Her widower knew nothing about any such trunks and gave Mr. Hartnett permission to open them. One was empty. The other held the bodies of three children, as well preserved as mummies, wrapped in roofing tar paper and evening newspapers from January 1920, March 1922, and October 1923. According to Mr. Solomon, who married his wife, Anne, only in 1933, she had previously been a domestic in White Plains. She must have secretly moved the trunk into the basement after 1935, when they moved to 181st Street, so that she could live above it until her own death in 1954.
– An American mother: Mr. Robinson says, because he notices Mrs. Cresspahl’s glance at the Daily News spread out on the stool next to him in the elevator. He stands facing the scissor gate as he takes her upstairs from the basement level. – An American mother: he says, in his thin hard Spanish voice. First one at fourteen, another at sixteen, another at seventeen, then finally got married at twenty-seven. What should she have told Jacob Solomon?
Mr. Robinson, “Robinson with the aquiline profile,” one of the three elevator operators in the building for the past two years, early on started greeting Mrs. Cresspahl with phrases that sounded like Auff’eedesehn or Gudnmong’ and only reluctantly settled for replies in English. Mr. Robinson had spent some years of his youth in Germany. He
thinks he understands this foreigner.
– The landscape in Germany is vunnebah: he would say. He happily took refuge in repeating this sentence, so as not to have to speak certain others—he was trying to be nice to this German lady. For while this refugee from Cuba had been able to buy his citizenship faster by joining the army voluntarily, and before he left North Carolina was grateful for his training as a low-frequency radio technician, the army had held up a mirror to him in the restricted military zone around Schwarzer Berg near Grafenwöhr, and in this mirror he saw his red, almost Indian skin, and the black hair reaching down to his neck in tight shining curls so stiff that his patting pushing fingers never moved it out of place. Technician Fourth Grade Robinson had to be reprimanded over a brawl with pink-skinned individuals outside the Bayreuth train station before he learned to go drinking with the dark-skinned ones, in the dirtier bars where the rum cost more and the girls showed their contempt more openly and for higher prices. The landscape was that of the Upper Palatine Forest, which he saw at night out the window of the radar truck near Flossenbürg on the border of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.