Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

“Hadn’t you eaten at all?”

  “Just those pasty sandwiches they sell on the train. There wasn’t any diner.”

  “Smoke?”

  “I do, but I’m just too tired. I can get into a hotel all right, don’t you think? If I can’t get in at Arthur’s?”

  “I know the manager of a small one near us,” Peter said. “But if you don’t mind coming to my place, you can use my mother’s room for tonight. Or for as long as you need, probably.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “She’s away. She’ll be away for quite a while.”

  “Not in Reno, by any chance?” There was a roughness, almost a coarseness, in her tone, like that in the overdone camaraderie of the shy.

  “No. My father died when I was eight. Why?”

  “Oh, something in the way you spoke. And then you’re so competent. Does she work?”

  “No. My father left something. Does yours?”

  She stood up and picked up her bedraggled gloves. “No,” she said, and her voice was suddenly distant and delicate again. “She marries.” She turned and walked out ahead of him.

  He paid, rushed out of the restaurant, and caught up with her.

  “Thought maybe you’d run out on me,” he said.

  She got in the car without answering.

  They drove through the Park, toward the address in the East Seventies that she had given him. A weak smell of grass underlay the gas-blended air, but the Park seemed limp and worn, as if the strain of the day’s effluvia had been too much for it. At the Seventy-second Street stop signal, the blank light of a street lamp invaded the car.

  “Thought you might be feeling Mrs. Grundyish at my suggesting the apartment,” Peter said.

  “Mrs. Grundy wasn’t around much when I grew up.” The signal changed and they moved ahead.

  They stopped in a street which had almost no lights along its smartly converted house fronts. This was one of the streets, still sequestered by money, whose houses came alive only under the accelerated, febrile glitter of winter and would dream through the gross summer days, their interiors deadened with muslin or stirred faintly with the subterranean clinkings of caretakers. No. 4 was dark.

  “I would rather stay over at your place, if I have to,” the girl said. Her voice was offhand and prim. “I hate hotels. We always stopped at them in between.”

  “Let’s get out and see.”

  They stepped down into the areaway in front of the entrance, the car door banging hollowly behind them. She fumbled in her purse and took out a key, although it was already obvious that it would not be usable. In his childhood, he had often hung around in the areaways of old brownstones such as this had been. In the corners there had always been a soft, decaying smell, and the ironwork, bent and smeared, always hung loose and brokentoothed. The areaway of this house had been repaved with slippery flag; even in the humid night there was no smell. Black-tongued grillwork, with an oily shine and padlocked, secured the windows and the smooth door. Fastened on the grillwork in front of the door was the neat, square proclamation of a protection agency.

  “You don’t have a key for the padlocks, do you?”

  “No.” She stood on the curb, looking up at the house. “It was a nice room I had there. Nicest one I ever did have, really.” She crossed to the car and got in.

  He followed her over to the car and got in beside her. She had her head in her hands.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll get in touch with somebody in the morning.”

  “I don’t. I don’t care about any of it, really.” She sat up, her face averted. “My parents, or any of the people they tangle with.” She wound the lever on the door slowly, then reversed it. “Robert, or my mother, or Arthur,” she said, “although he was always pleasant enough. Even Vince—even if I’d known him.”

  “He was just a screwed-up kid. It could have been anybody’s window.”

  “No.” Suddenly she turned and faced him. “I should think it would be the best privilege there is, though. To care, I mean.”

  When he did not immediately reply, she gave him a little pat on the arm and sat back. “Excuse it, please. I guess I’m groggy.” She turned around and put her head on the crook of her arm. Her words came faintly through it. “Wake me when we get there.”

  She was asleep by the time they reached his street. He parked the car as quietly as possible beneath his own windows. He himself had never felt more awake in his life. He could have sat there until morning with her sleep-secured beside him. He sat thinking of how different it would be at Rye, or anywhere, with her along, with someone along who was the same age. For they were the same age, whatever that was, whatever the age was of people like them. There was nothing he would be unable to tell her.

  To the north, above the rooftops, the electric mauve of midtown blanked out any auguries in the sky, but he wasn’t looking for anything like that. Tomorrow he would take her for a drive—whatever the weather. There were a lot of good roads around Greenwich.

  [1950]

  JOHN MCNULTY

  SOME NIGHTS WHEN NOTHING HAPPENS

  ARE THE BEST NIGHTS IN THIS PLACE

  THE BOSS OF THIS SALOON on Third Avenue often says he wishes there was such a thing as a speakeasy license because when all is said and done he’d rather have a speakeasy than an open saloon that everybody can come into the way they all are now. Not that he is exactly opposed to people coming in. They spend money, no denying that. But a speakeasy, you could control who comes in and it was more homelike and more often not crowded the way this saloon is now. Johnny, one of the hackmen outside, put the whole thing in a nutshell one night when they were talking about a certain hangout and Johnny said, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

  The point is that some nights when there’s hardly anybody in a gin mill and nothing happens, why, those are the best nights in one way of thinking. They’re more interesting and not such a hullabaloo of juke-box music and everybody talking at once and all of it not amounting to any interest for the boss or any of the regulars, unless you’d count a lot of money coming in.

  Like the other morning about half past two it was more like a speakeasy, only a few there and odd ones coming in that the boss knew well and didn’t mind any of them, each one different than the other.

  Jack Yee come in first. The boss was having a cup of tea. He’s a regular old woman about having a cup of hot tea down at the far end of the bar every now and then. Jack Yee is a favorite of the boss. Jack is a Chinaman that weighs pradickly nothing at all but he’ll live to be a hundred easy. He starts out from Pell Street or Doyers every night around midnight and comes up Third Avenue on a regular route selling little wooden statues they send over by the millions from China. He sells them to drunks in saloons and about three, four o’clock winds up his route selling them in a couple night clubs.

  The boss asked Jack to have a cup of tea, because he’s always glad to see Jack. He can’t understand how anybody could be as thin as this Chinaman and still keep going up and down the avenue night after night. Coldest night, Jack got no overcoat, just a skinny raincoat tied around him and always smoking a cigarette that’s stuck on his lower lip and bouncing when he talks. So Jack put down his bag of statues and had a cup of tea with the boss, and first thing you know what are they talking about but how tough it is talking Chinese for a language.

  You must know the boss come from Dublin and naturally has no hint of talking Chinese, but like everything else he has ideas about it just the same. It’s no sense trying to tell how Jack talks but what he says to the boss is that there’s the same word means two things in Chinese. Depends on how you say it, this word, high and squeaky or low and groaning.

  Jack says “ioo” if you say it down low it means “mouth.” Then he tells the boss if you say “ioo” up high it means “trolley car.”

  “Oh my God!” says the boss to Jack while they have their cup of tea opposite each other on the bar. “Oh my God, Jack, the same word mean ‘trolley car’
and ‘mouth’?”

  Jack says yes, and then he makes it worse by saying another instance, you might say. He tells the boss when a Chinaman says “pee-lo” something like that, and says it low and moaning it means “a bird,” and if he says the same thing high it means “come in!”

  “Oh my God!” says the boss after another sip of tea. “The same word, Jack, mean ‘come in’ and ‘bird’? And the same word mean ‘mouth’ and ‘trolley car’? Then by God, Jack, if they’re ever gonna make a start at getting anywhere they’ll have to get that ironed out!”

  With that, Jack is laughing because, like the boss says often, Chinamen are great people for laughing. They’d laugh if you shoot them. Fact is, he says that’s what probally discourages the Japs, because the boss figures that Japs only grin but it has no meaning to it and Chinamen laugh from inside. They’re great people, he says.

  WHILE the boss and Jack Yee were finishing their tea, they gave up the Chinese language as a bad job entirely, and at that minute who came in finally but the sour-beer artist to get his Christmas money and this the middle of February. The sour-beer artist is quite a guy in his own way. In this neighborhood they got a tradition that at the couple of weeks before Christmas there has to be written on the mirror back of the bar “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.” The sour-beer artist goes around and puts that on the mirror. He does it with sour beer saved in the place for the purpose. You write with sour beer on the glass and it makes shiny crystals in the writing. Anybody could do it, of course, if he has sour beer, but this artist writes it with curlicues and that’s the tradition that it has to be written that way. They give him two bucks and a half for it, but he’s a foresighted guy and he can see ahead he’ll be drunk and wandering by Christmas and likely in trouble, so he leaves the two bucks and a half unpaid some places to collect it after Christmas, when he’s broke and hungry. That’s why he just come in the other night, to get the two and a half, and of course he was welcome. Turned out he got a little stretch on the island for fighting around New Year’s and here he was, sober and hungry. So the boss gave him the dough and threw in some soup and a roast-beef sandwich, and out went the sour-beer artist, saying to the boss, “Thanks, Tim. I’ll see you around Christmas time.” And it is true for him that’s about when he’ll show up, no questions asked, in time to write the curlicues on the mirror. In some ways the sour-beer artist is a little unusual, but that’s the kind comes in on the quiet nights nothing happens.

  GIVING out the Christmas money to the sour-beer artist moved things back to Christmas for a few minutes in the place, and the boss got started into giving quite a speech on Christmas.

  “I’m glad it’s over, with office parties for Christmas starting unpleasantness,” the boss says. “I mean I worry every Christmas about those office parties they have around here. Somebody always goes too far at them being chummy with the boss of their office, maybe one of the girls kissing him and then wondering for months afterward did she go too far. But Christmas is over and done with. The thing I remember about this one was something that I had a chance to sit back and have nothing to do with it. I was on a train going up to see a nephew of mine is in a seminary a little ways up in the state and it was Christmas Eve. Well, first of all, it’s the bane of my life around here that if a drunk gets to be a nuisance, by God it is always another drunk only not so far gone that thinks he can handle him.

  “A thousand times in here I’ve seen a man beginning to drive out other customers by noisiness, or butting in, or something like that—well, I’d just have my mind made up I’d do something about him, even throw him out cautious if necessary. And that minute, without fail, up would come another less drunk drunk and say, ‘Lemme handle him! I can handle this cluck!’ That’s the horror of ’em all, because then you got two drunks instead of one.

  “On the train, in come this guy with bundles and his overcoat half on half off, and the minute he got on I shrunk back in my seat. I ran into them like that so many times, I was thanking God I was not in it at all and it was in a train and not here in my place. He begun singing ‘Silent Night’ and so forth and next nudging the guy in the seat with him to sing it, and then got sore because the man wouldn’t sing ‘Silent Night’ with him.

  “Then the drunk started changing seats like they change places at the bar here when they get like that. And he was by then opening up bundles and trying to show presents to a decent, quiet girl in the train. And hollering ‘Silent Night’ all the while. It was bad. And do you know anything about trains? The conductor won’t throw you off if he can help it. They got rules the conductor has to get a railroad cop. That’s because guys sues that get thrown off trains.

  “Now up came the second drunk, the kind there always is. ‘Lemme handle him,’ says the second drunk to the conductor, exactly word for word what the second drunk always says in the place here. ‘No,’ says the conductor, but that wouldn’t do. The second one grabs the first one, and by then we’re pulling into 125th Street. And of course there’s no cop on hand when they wanted him, the cop probally having a Christmas Eve for himself somewhere away from the station. Off goes the first drunk, the second drunk on top of him, the bundles half in the car, and the first one’s overcoat left behind and the train pulls out. I gave thanks to God for once there was two drunks and me no part of it, because I’ve had it so often, even with the ‘Silent Night’ part thrown in for Christmas.”

  IT WAS quite a speech about Christmas, nothing exciting but the boss was launched off on talking about it and it was one of those quiet nights nothing happens.

  Still and all, Eddie Clancarty at the other end of the bar, drinking alone the way he mostly does, was trying to start an argument. He was hollering for a drink while the boss was talking about Christmas. People keep away from Eddie. He’s quarrelsome. Came over here from the old country as a gossoon, and hardly made any friends because he’d take issue with everybody about everything. You can’t say a word but what Eddie Clancarty would take you up on it.

  “You bums, why don’t you go into the Army?” Eddie hollered back at the other few in the place. “Whyn’t you go into the Army?”

  Without Clancarty hearing, one customer said to the boss, “Why don’t you throw him out, he’s always starting a fight?”

  “Oh, leave him alone,” says the boss. “He’s going into the Army tomorrow.” He went up and served Eddie a drink, then got away from him quick.

  Well, it got to be near four o’clock, time to put the chairs on top of the tables and close up the place.

  “We’ll go over to Bickford’s and have some scrambled eggs when I get the joint closed,” said the boss to a couple of the customers with him, saying it low so Clancarty couldn’t hear. The boss likes to wind up the night in Bickford’s having some eggs and some more tea before he goes home, and reading who’s dead in the Tribune and having a look at the entries in the Mirror.

  “What’re you heels talking about?” said nosy Clancarty. But nobody answered.

  “Drink up, Eddie, we’re closing!” said the boss. Eddie hollered some more but drank his drink.

  In a minute or two they all had gone out on the sidewalk, some waiting in a little bunch while the boss locked the door. Clancarty was cursing at nothing at all, just in general, and started away by himself.

  “Let him go,” said the boss, though there was no need of it, with nobody stopping such a quarrelsome guy from going. The boss and the others started for Bickford’s, and Clancarty was off the other way. The boss looked back at him going and said, “Now, isn’t that a terrible thing? Sure I just bethought of it now! There he is, going into the Army tomorrow, and I can see plain as day what’s the matter with him. The poor man has nobody at all to say good-bye to.”

  [1943]

  J. D. SALINGER

  SLIGHT REBELLION OFF MADISON

  ON VACATION FROM PENCEY Preparatory School for Boys (“An Instructor for Every Ten Students”), Holden Morrisey Caulfield usually wore his chesterfield and a hat with a cuttin
g edge at the “V” in the crown. While riding in Fifth Avenue buses, girls who knew Holden often thought they saw him walking past Saks’ or Altman’s or Lord & Taylor’s, but it was usually somebody else.

  This year, Holden’s Christmas vacation from Pencey Prep broke at the same time as Sally Hayes’ from the Mary A. Woodruff School for Girls (“Special Attention to Those Interested in Dramatics”). On vacation from Mary A. Woodruff, Sally usually went hatless and wore her new silverblu muskrat coat. While riding in Fifth Avenue buses, boys who knew Sally often thought they saw her walking past Saks’ or Altman’s or Lord & Taylor’s. It was usually somebody else.

  As soon as Holden got into New York, he took a cab home, dropped his Gladstone in the foyer, kissed his mother, lumped his hat and coat into a convenient chair, and dialed Sally’s number.

  “Hey!” he said into the mouthpiece. “Sally?”

  “Yes. Who’s that?”

  “Holden Caulfield. How are ya?”

  “Holden! I’m fine! How are you?”

  “Swell,” said Holden. “Listen. How are ya, anyway? I mean how’s school?”

  “Fine,” said Sally. “I mean—you know.”

  “Swell,” said Holden. “Well, listen. What are you doing tonight?”

  Holden took her to the Wedgwood Room that night, and they both dressed, Sally wearing her new turquoise job. They danced a lot. Holden’s style was long, slow side steps back and forth, as though he were dancing over an open manhole. They danced cheek to cheek, and when their faces got sticky from contact, neither of them minded. It was a long time between vacations.

  They made a wonderful thing out of the taxi ride home. Twice, when the cab stopped short in traffic, Holden fell off the seat.

  “I love you,” he swore to Sally, removing his mouth from hers.

  “Oh, darling, I love you, too,” Sally said, and added, less passionately, “Promise me you’ll let your hair grow out. Crew cuts are corny.”