Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  “It contains one verb, one subject, and one complement.”

  “Very good, excellent. Now run down and get the Camembert, the salade escarole, the hard water crackers, and the demitasse for Mr. Frank Munsey on Table Eighty-six.”

  THE day was one of the rare ones when Mespoulets and I had a guest at our tables. Our station was on the low rear balcony of the main dining room of a hotel I shall call the Splendide, a vast and luxurious structure which, I regret to say, gave up its unequal struggle with economics not long after the boom days and has since been converted into an office building.

  Before coming to America I had worked a short while in a hotel in the Tyrol that belonged to my uncle. German was my native language and I knew enough English to get along in New York City, but my French was extremely bad. The French language in all its aspects was a passion with Mespoulets, and he had plenty of time to teach it to me. Our tables—Nos. 81, 82, and 86—were in a noisy, drafty corner of the balcony. They stood facing the stairs from the dining room and were between two doors. One door led to the pantry and was hung on whining hinges. On wet days it sounded like an angry cat and it was continually kicked by the boots of waiters rushing in and out with trays in their hands. The other door led to a linen closet.

  The waiters and bus boys squeezed by our tables, carrying trays. The ones with trays full of food carried them high over their heads; the ones with dirty dishes carried them low, extended in front. They frequently bumped into each other and there would be a crash of silver, glasses, and china, and cream trickling over the edges of the trays in thin streams. When this happened, Monsieur Victor would race to our section, followed by his captains, to direct the cleaning up of the mess and pacify the guests. It was a common sight to see people standing in our section, napkins in hand, complaining and brushing themselves off and waving their arms angrily in the air.

  Monsieur Victor used our tables as a kind of penal colony to which he sent guests who were notorious cranks, people who had forgotten to tip him over a long period of time and needed a reminder, undesirables who looked out of place in better sections of the dining room, and guests who were known to linger for hours over an order of hors-d’oeuvres and a glass of milk while well-paying guests had to stand at the door waiting for a table.

  Mespoulets was the ideal man for Monsieur Victor’s purposes. He complemented Monsieur Victor’s plan of punishment. He was probably the worst waiter in the world and I had become his bus boy after I fell down the stairs into the main part of the dining room with twelve pheasants à la Souvaroff. When I was sent to him to take up my duties as his assistant, he introduced himself by saying, “My name is easy to remember. Just think of ‘my chickens’—‘mes poulets’—Mespoulets.”

  He was a kind man and I suppose that is one reason he was never fired for his magnificent incompetence. In a hotel conducted in the European tradition, as the Splendide was, an employee’s personal virtues were justly weighed against his professional shortcomings, and men who might have been better at their jobs were kept on because they were good fathers or because they played an interesting game of chess. Mespoulets, besides being kind, was a talented penman. It was he who wrote the menus for private parties, he who, with beautiful flourishes, made out the cards for banquets.

  Rarely did any guest who was seated at one of our tables leave the hotel with a desire to come back again. If there was any broken glass around the dining room, it was always in our spinach. The occupants of Tables Nos. 81, 82, and 86 shifted in their chairs, stared at the pantry door, looked around and made signs of distress at other waiters and captains while they waited for their food. When the food finally came, it was cold and was often not what had been ordered. While Mespoulets explained what the unordered food was, telling in detail how it was made and what the ingredients were, and offered hollow excuses, he dribbled mayonnaise, soup, or mint sauce over the guests, upset the coffee, and sometimes even managed to break a plate or two. I helped him as best I could.

  At the end of a meal, Mespoulets usually presented the guest with somebody else’s check, or it turned out that he had neglected to adjust the difference in price between what the guest had ordered and what he had got. By then the guest just held out his hand and cried, “Never mind, never mind, give it to me, just give it to me! I’ll pay just to get out of here! Give it to me, for God’s sake!” Then the guest would pay and go. He would stop on the way out at the maître d’hôtel’s desk and show Monsieur Victor and his captains the spots on his clothes, bang on the desk, and swear he would never come back again. Monsieur Victor and his captains would listen, make faces of compassion, say “Oh!” and “Ah!”, and look darkly toward us across the room and promise that we would be fired the same day. But the next day we would still be there.

  IN THE hours between meals, while the other waiters were occupied filling salt and pepper shakers, oil and vinegar bottles, and mustard pots, and counting the dirty linen and dusting the chairs, Mespoulets would walk to a table near the entrance, right next to Monsieur Victor’s own desk, overlooking the lounge of the hotel. There he adjusted a special reading lamp which he had demanded and obtained from the management, spread a piece of billiard cloth over the table, and arranged on top of this a large blotter and a small one, an inkstand, and half a dozen penholders. Then he drew up a chair and seated himself. He had a large assortment of fine copper pen points of various sizes, and he sharpened them on a piece of sandpaper. He would select the pen point and the holder he wanted and begin to make circles in the air. Then, drawing toward him a gilt-edged place card or a crested one, on which menus were written, he would go to work. When he had finished, he arranged the cards all over the table to let them dry, and sat there at ease, only a step or two from Monsieur Victor’s desk, in a sector invaded by other waiters only when they were to be called down or to be discharged, waiters who came with nervous hands and frightened eyes to face Monsieur Victor. Mespoulet’s special talent set him apart, and he was further distinguished by the fact that he was permitted to wear glasses, a privilege denied all other waiters no matter how nearsighted or astigmatic. He was permitted to wear glasses, of course, because he was a penman.

  It was said of Mespoulets variously that he was the father, the uncle, or the brother of Monsieur Victor. It was also said of him that he had once been the director of a lycée in Paris. The truth was that he had never known Monsieur Victor on the other side, and I do not think there was any secret between them, only an understanding, a subtle sympathy of some kind. I got to know Mespoulets intimately. I learned that at one time he had been a tutor to a family in which there was a very beautiful daughter and that this was something he did not like to talk about. He loved animals almost as dearly as he loved the French language. He had taken it upon himself to watch over the fish which were in an aquarium in the outer lobby of the hotel, he fed the pigeons in the courtyard, and he extended his interest to the birds and beasts and crustaceans that came alive to the kitchen. He begged the cooks to deal quickly, as painlessly as could be, with lobsters and terrapins. If a guest brought a dog to our section, Mespoulets was mostly under the table with the dog. It got well fed and it left with a bone between its teeth, trailing happily after its master, who usually was fuming.

  AT MEALTIME, while we waited for the few guests who came our way, Mespoulets sat out in the linen closet on a small box where he could keep an eye on our tables through the partly open door. He leaned comfortably against a pile of tablecloths and napkins. At his side was an ancient “Grammaire Française,” and while his hands were folded in his lap, the palms up, the thumbs cruising over them in small, silent circles, he made me repeat exercises, simple, compact, and easy to remember. He knew them all by heart and soon I did, too. He made me go over and over them until my pronunciation was right. All of them were about animals. There were: “The Sage Salmon,” “The Cat and the Old Woman,” “The Society of Beavers,” “The Bear in the Swiss Mountains,” “The Intelligence of the Partridge,” “The Lion of
Florence,” and “The Bird in a Cage.”

  We started with “The Sage Salmon” in January that year and were at the end of “The Bear in the Swiss Mountains” when the summer garden opened in May. At that season business fell off for dinner, and all during the summer we were busy only at luncheon. Mespoulets had time to go home in the afternoons and he suggested that I continue studying there.

  He lived in the house of a relative on West Twenty-fourth Street. On the sidewalk in front of the house next door stood a large wooden horse, painted red, the sign of a saddlemaker. Across the street was a place where horses were auctioned off, and up the block was an Italian poultry market with a picture of a chicken painted on its front. Hens and roosters crowded the market every morning.

  Mespoulets occupied a room and bath on the second floor rear. The room was papered green and over an old couch hung a print of van Gogh’s “Bridge at Arles,” which was not a common picture then. There were bookshelves, a desk covered with papers, and over the desk a large bird cage hanging from the ceiling.

  In this cage, shaded with a piece of the hotel’s billiard cloth, lived a miserable old canary. It was bald-headed, its eyes were like peppercorns, its feet were no longer able to cling to the roost, and it sat in the sand, in a corner, looking like a withered chrysanthemum that had been thrown away. On summer afternoons, near the bird, we studied “The Intelligence of the Partridge” and “The Lion of Florence.”

  Late in August, on a chilly day that seemed like fall, Mespoulets and I began “The Bird in the Cage.” The lesson was:

  L’OISEAU EN CAGE

  Voilà sur ma fenêtre un oiseau qui vient visiter le mien. Il a peur, il s’en va, et le pauvre prisonnier s’attriste, s’agite comme pour s’échapper. Je ferais comme lui, si j’étais à sa place, et cependant je le retiens. Vais-je lui ouvrir? Il irait voler, chanter, faire son nid; il serait heureux; mais je ne l’aurais plus, et je l’aime, et je veux l’avoir. Je le garde. Pauvre petit, tu seras toujours prisonnier; je jouis de toi aux dépens de ta liberté, je te plains, et je te garde. Voilà comme le plaisir remporte sur la justice.

  Mespoulets looked up at the bird and said to me, “Find some adjective to use with ‘fenêtre,’ ‘oiseau,’ ‘peur,’ ‘nid,’ ‘liberté,’ ‘plaisir,’ and ‘justice’,” and while I searched for them in our dictionary, he went to a shelf and took from it a cigar box. There was one cigar in it. He took this out, wiped off the box with his handkerchief, and then went to a drawer and got a large penknife, which he opened. He felt the blade. Then he went to the cage, took the bird out, laid it on the closed cigar box, and quickly cut off its head. A little pond of transparent, oily blood appeared on the cigar box. One claw opened slowly and the bird and its head lay still.

  Mespoulets washed his hands, rolled the box, the bird, and knife into a newspaper, put it under his arm, and took his hat from a stand. We went out and walked up Eighth Avenue. At Thirty-fourth Street he stopped at a trash can and put his bundle into it. “I don’t think he wanted to live any more,” he said.

  [1940]

  WILLIAM MAXWELL

  OVER BY THE RIVER

  THE SUN ROSE SOMEWHERE in the middle of Queens, the exact moment of its appearance shrouded in uncertainty because of a cloud bank. The lights on the bridges went off, and so did the red light in the lantern of the lighthouse at the north end of Welfare Island. Seagulls settled on the water. A newspaper truck went from building to building dropping off heavy bundles of, for the most part, bad news, which little boys carried inside on their shoulders. Doormen smoking a pipe and dressed for a walk in the country came to work after a long subway ride and disappeared into the service entrances. When they reappeared, by way of the front elevator, they had put on with their uniforms a false amiability and were prepared for eight solid hours to make conversation about the weather. With the morning sun on them, the apartment buildings far to the west, on Lexington Avenue, looked like an orange mesa. The pigeons made bubbling noises in their throats as they strutted on windowsills high above the street.

  All night long, there had been plenty of time. Now suddenly there wasn’t, and this touched off a chain explosion of alarm clocks, though in some instances the point was driven home without a sound: Time is interior to animals as well as exterior. A bare arm with a wristwatch on it emerged from under the covers and turned until the dial was toward the light from the windows.

  “What time is it?”

  “Ten after.”

  “It’s always ten after,” Iris Carrington said despairingly, and turned over in bed and shut her eyes against the light. Also against the clamor of her desk calendar: Tuesday 11, L. 3:30 Dr. de Santillo . . . 5:30-7:30? . . . Wednesday 1:45, Mrs. McIntosh speaks on the changing status of women. 3:30 Dr. F . . . Friday 11C. Get Albertha . . . Saturday, call Mrs. Stokes. Ordering pads. L ballet 10:30. 2 Laurie to Sashas. Remaining books due at library. Explore dentists. Supper at 5. Call Margot . . . .

  Several minutes passed.

  “Oh my God, I don’t think I can make it,” George Carrington said, and put his feet over the side of the bed, and found he could make it, after all. He could bend over and pick up his bathrobe from the floor, and put it on, and find his slippers, and close the window, and turn on the radiator valve. Each act was easier than the one before. He went back to the bed and drew the covers closer around his wife’s shoulders.

  Yawning, stretching, any number of people got up and started the business of the day. Turning on the shower. Dressing. Putting their hair up in plastic curlers. Squeezing toothpaste out of tubes that were all but empty. Squeezing orange juice. Separating strips of bacon.

  The park keepers unlocked the big iron gates that closed the river walk off between Eighty-third and Eighty-fourth Streets. A taxi coming from Doctors Hospital was snagged by a doorman’s whistle. The wind picked up the dry filth under the wheels of parked cars and blew it now this way, now that. A child got into an orange minibus and started on the long, devious ride to nursery school and social adjustment.

  “Have you been a good girl?” George inquired lovingly, through the closed door of the unused extra maid’s room, where the dog slept on a square of carpet. Puppy had not been a good girl. There was a puddle of urine—not on the open newspaper he had left for her, just in case, but two feet away from it, on the black-and-white plastic-tile floor. Her tail quivering with apology, she watched while he mopped the puddle up and disposed of the wet newspaper in the garbage can in the back hall. Then she followed him through the apartment to the foyer, and into the elevator when it came.

  There were signs all along the river walk:

  NO DOGS

  NO BICYCLES

  NO THIS

  NO THAT

  He ignored them with a clear conscience. If he curbed the dog beforehand, there was no reason not to turn her loose and let her run—except that sometimes she stopped and arched her back a second time. When shouting and waving his hands didn’t discourage her from moving her bowels, he took some newspaper from a trash container and cleaned up after her.

  At the flagpole, he stood looking out across the river. The lights went off all the way up the airplane beacon, producing an effect of silence—as if somebody had started to say something and then decided not to. The tidal current was flowing south. He raised his head and sniffed, hoping for a breath of the sea, and smelled gasoline fumes instead.

  Coming back, the dog stopped to sniff at trash baskets, at cement copings, and had to be restrained from greeting the only other person on the river walk—a marvelloused man who jogged there every morning in a gym suit and was afraid of dogs. He smiled pleasantly at George, and watched Puppy out of the corner of his eyes, so as to be ready when she marvelous his throat.

  A tanker, freshly painted, all yellow and white, and flying the flag of George had no idea what country until he read the lettering on the stern, overtook him, close in to shore—so close he could see the captain talking to a sailor in the wheelhouse. To be sailing down the East River on a
ship that was headed for open water . . . He waved to them and they waved back, but they didn’t call out to him Come on, if you want to, and it was too far to jump. It came to him with the seriousness of a discovery that there was no place in the world he would not like to see. Concealed in this statement was another that he had admitted to himself for the first time only recently. There were places he would never see, experiences of the first importance that he would never have. He might die without ever having heard a nightingale.

  When they stepped out of the elevator, the dog hurried off to the kitchen to see if there was something in her dish she didn’t know about, and George settled down in the living room with the Times on his lap and waited for a glass of orange juice to appear at his place at the dining-room table. The rushing sound inside the walls, as of an underground river, was Iris running her bath. The orange juice was in no hurry to get to the dining-room table. Iris had been on the phone daily with the employment agency and for the moment this was the best they could offer: twenty-seven years old, pale, with dirty blond hair, unmarried, overattached to her mother, and given to burning herself on the antiquated gas stove. She lived on tea and cigarettes. Breakfast was all the cooking she was entrusted with; Iris did the rest. Morning after morning his boiled egg was hard enough to take on a picnic. A blind man could not have made a greater hash of half a grapefruit. The coffee was indescribable. After six weeks there was a film of grease over everything in the kitchen. Round, jolly, neat, professionally trained, a marvelous cook, the mother was everything that is desirable in a servant except that, alas, she worked for somebody else. She drifted in and out of the apartment at odd hours, deluding Iris with the hope that some of her accomplishments would, if one were only patient, rub off on her daughter. “Read,” a voice said, bringing him all the way back from Outer Mongolia. “Tonight, Cindy.”