Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  ON A rainy Sunday afternoon in March, with every door in the school building locked and the corridors braced for the shock of Monday morning, the ancient piano demonstrated for the benefit of the empty practice room that it is one thing to fumble through the vocal line, guided by the chords that accompany it, and something else again to be genuinely musical, to know what the composer intended—the resolution of what cannot be left uncertain, the amorous flirtation of the treble and the bass, notes taking to the air like a flock of startled birds.

  THE faint clicking sounds given off by the telephone in the pantry meant that Iris was dialling on the extension in the master bedroom. And at last there was somebody in the Carringtons’ kitchen again—a black woman in her fifties. They were low on milk, and totally out of oatmeal, canned dog food, and coffee, but the memo pad that was magnetically attached to the side of the Frigidaire was blank. Writing down things they were out of was not something she considered part of her job. When an emergency arose, she put on her coat and went to the store, just as if she were still in North Carolina.

  The sheet of paper that was attached to the clipboard hanging from a nail on the side of the kitchen cupboard had the menus for lunch and dinner all written out, but they were for yesterday’s lunch and dinner. And though it was only nine-thirty, Bessie already felt a mounting indignation at being kept in ignorance about what most deeply concerned her. It was an old-fashioned apartment, with big rooms and high ceilings, and the kitchen was a considerable distance from the master bedroom; nevertheless, it was just barely possible for the two women to live there. Nature had designed them for mutual tormenting, the one with an exaggerated sense of time, always hurrying to meet a deadline that did not exist anywhere but in her own fancy, and calling upon the angels or whoever is in charge of amazing grace to take notice that she had put the food on the hot tray in the dining room at precisely one minute before the moment she had been told to have dinner ready; the other with not only a hatred of planning meals but also a childish reluctance to come to the table. When the minute hand of the electric clock in the kitchen arrived at seven or seven-fifteen or whatever, Bessie went into the dining room and announced in an inaudible voice that dinner was ready. Two rooms away, George heard her by extrasensory perception and leapt to his feet, and Iris, holding out her glass to him, said, “Am I not going to have a second vermouth?”

  To his amazement, on Bessie’s day off, having cooked dinner and put it on the hot plate, Iris drifted away to the front of the apartment and read a magazine, fixed her hair, God knows what, until he discovered the food sitting there and begged her to come to the table.

  “THEY said they lived in Boys Town, and I thought Jimmy let them in because he’s Irish and Catholic,” Iris said. “There was nothing on the list I wanted, so I subscribed to Vogue, to help them out. When I spoke to Jimmy about it, he said he had no idea they were selling subscriptions, and he never lets solicitors get by him—not even nuns and priests. Much as he might want to. So I don’t suppose it will come.”

  “It might,” George said. “Maybe they were honest.”

  “He thought they were workmen because they asked for the eleventh floor. The tenants on the eleventh floor have moved out and Jimmy says the people who are moving in have a five years’ lease and are spending fifty thousand dollars on the place, which they don’t even own. But anyway, what they did was walk through the apartment and then down one floor and start ringing doorbells. The super took them down in the back elevator without asking what they were doing there, and off they went. They tried the same thing at No. 7 and the doorman threw them out.”

  WALKING the dog before breakfast, if he went by the river walk he saw in the Simpsons’ window a black-haired woman who did not wave to him or even look up when he passed. That particular section of the river walk was haunted by an act of despair that nobody had been given a chance to understand. Nothing that he could think of—cancer, thwarted love, melancholia—seemed to fit. He had only spoken to her once, when he and Iris went to a dinner party at the Simpsons’ and she smiled at him as she was helping the maid clear the table between courses. If she didn’t look up when he passed under her window it was as though he had been overtaken by a cloud shadow—until he forgot all about it, a few seconds later. But he could have stopped just once, and he hadn’t. When the window was open he could have called out to her, even if it was only “Good morning,” or “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”

  He could have said, Don’t do it . . . .

  Sometimes he came back by the little house on East End Avenue where he had seen the woman in the red coat. He invariably glanced up, half expecting her to be lying there on the stoop. If she wasn’t there, where was she?

  In the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital was the answer. But not for long. She and the doctor got it straightened out about her mother’s gold thimble, and he gave her a prescription and told her where to go in the building to have it filled, and hoped for the best—which, after all, is all that anybody has to hope for.

  THE weather thermometer blew away one stormy night and after a week or two George brought home a new one. It was round and encased in white plastic, and not meant to be screwed to the window frame but to be kept inside. It registered the temperature outside by means of a wire with what looked like a small bullet attached to the end of it. The directions said to drill a hole through the window frame, but George backed away from all that and, instead, hung the wire across the sill and closed the window on it. What the new thermometer said bore no relation to the actual temperature, and drilling the hole had a high priority on the list of things he meant to do.

  There was also a racial barometer in the apartment that registered Fair or Stormy, according to whether Bessie had spent several days running in the apartment or had just come back from a weekend in her room in Harlem.

  The laundress, so enormously fat that she had to maneuver her body around, as if she were the captain of an ocean liner, was a Muslim and hated all white people and most black people as well. She was never satisfied with the lunch Bessie cooked for her, and Bessie objected to having to get lunch for her, and the problem was solved temporarily by having her eat in the luncheonette across the street.

  She quit. The new laundress was half the size of the old one, and sang alto in her church choir, and was good-tempered, and fussy about what she had for lunch. Bessie sometimes considered her a friend and sometimes an object of derision, because she believed in spirits.

  So did Bessie, but not to the same extent or in the same way. Bessie’s mother had appeared to her and her sister and brother, shortly after her death. They were quarreling together, and her mother’s head and shoulders appeared up near the ceiling, and she said they were to love one another. And sometimes when Bessie was walking along the street she felt a coolness and knew that a spirit was beside her. But the laundress said, “All right, go ahead, then, if you want to,” to the empty air and, since there wasn’t room for both of them, let the spirit precede her through the pantry. She even knew who the spirit was.

  IT WAS now spring on the river, and the river walk was a Chinese scroll which could be unrolled, by people who like to do things in the usual way, from right to left—starting at Gracie Square and walking north. Depicted were:

  A hockey game between Loyola and St. Francis de Sales

  Five boys shooting baskets on the basketball court

  A seagull

  An old man sitting on a bench doing columns of figures

  A child drawing a track for his toy trains on the pavement with a piece of chalk

  A paper drinking cup floating on the troubled surface of the water

  A child in pink rompers pushing his own stroller

  A woman sitting on a bench alone, with her face lifted to the sun

  A Puerto Rican boy with a transistor radio

  Two middle-aged women speaking German

  A bored and fretful baby, too hot in his perambulator, with nothing to look at or play with, while
his nurse reads

  The tugboat Chicago pulling a long string of empty barges upstream

  A little girl feeding her mother an apple

  A helicopter

  A kindergarten class, in two sections

  Clouds in a blue sky

  A flowering cherry tree

  Seven freight cars moving imperceptibly, against the tidal current, in the wake of the Herbert E. Smith

  A man with a pipe in his mouth and a can of Prince Albert smoking tobacco on the bench beside him

  A man sorting his possessions into two canvas bags, one of which contains a concertina

  Six very small children playing in the sandpile, under the watchful eyes of their mothers or nursemaids

  An oil tanker

  A red-haired priest reading a pocket-size New Testament

  A man scattering bread crumbs for the pigeons

  The Coast Guard cutter CG 40435 turning around just north of the lighthouse and heading back towards Hell Gate Bridge

  A sweeper with his bag and a ferruled stick

  A little boy pointing a red plastic pistol at his father’s head

  A pleasure yacht

  An airplane

  A man and a woman speaking French

  A child on a tricycle A boy on roller skates

  A reception under a striped tent on the lawn of the mayor’s house

  The fireboat station

  The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive, a cinder path, a warehouse, seagulls, and so on

  Who said Happiness is the light shining on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep . . . .

  “IT’S perfectly insane,” George said when he met Iris coming from Gristede’s with a big brown paper bag heavy as lead under each arm and relieved her of them. “Don’t we still have that cart?”

  “Nobody in the building uses them.”

  “But couldn’t you?”

  “No,” Iris said.

  “ALL children,” Cindy said wisely, leaning against him, with her head in the hollow of his neck, “all children think their mommy and daddy are the nicest.”

  “And what about you? Are you satisfied?”

  She gave him a hug and a kiss and said, “I think you and Mommy are the nicest mommy and daddy in the whole world.”

  “And I think you are the nicest Cindy,” he said, his eyes moist with tears. They sat and rocked each other gently.

  AFTER Bessie had taken the breakfast dishes out of the dishwasher, she went into the front, dragging the vacuum cleaner, to do the children’s rooms. She stood sometimes for five or ten minutes, looking down at East End Avenue—at the drugstore, the luncheonette, the rival cleaning establishments (side by side and, according to rumor, both owned by the same person), the hairstyling salon, and the branch office of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Together they made a canvas backdrop for a procession of people Bessie had never seen before, or would not recognize if she had, and so she couldn’t say to herself, “There goes old Mrs. Maltby,” but she looked anyway, she took it all in. The sight of other human beings nourished her mind. She read them as people read books. Pieces of toys, pieces of puzzles that she found on the floor she put on one shelf or another of the toy closet in Cindy’s room, gradually introducing a disorder that Iris dealt with periodically, taking a whole day out of her life. But nobody told Bessie she was supposed to find the box the piece came out of, and it is questionable whether she could have anyway. The thickness of the lenses in her eyeglasses suggested that her eyesight was poorer than she let on.

  She was an exile, far from home, among people who were not like the white people she knew and understood. She was here because down home she was getting forty dollars a week and she had her old age to think of. She and Iris alternated between irritation at one another and sudden acts of kindness. It was the situation that was at fault. Given halfway decent circumstances, men can work cheerfully and happily for other men, in offices, stores, and even factories. And so can women. But if Iris opened the cupboard or the icebox to see what they did or didn’t contain, Bessie popped out of her room and said, “Did you want something?” And Iris withdrew, angry because she had been driven out of her own kitchen. In her mind, Bessie always thought of the Carringtons as “my people,” but until she had taught them to think of themselves as her people her profound capacity for devotion would go unused; would not even be suspected.

  You can say that life is a fountain if you want to, but what it more nearly resembles is a jack-in-the-box.

  HALF awake, he heard the soft whimpering that meant Iris was having a nightmare, and he shook her. “I dreamed you were having a heart attack,” she said.

  “Should you be dreaming that?” he said. But the dream was still too real to be joked about. They were in a public place. And he couldn’t be moved. He didn’t die, and she consulted with doctors. Though the dream did not progress, she could not extricate herself from it but went on and on, feeling the appropriate emotions but in a circular way. Till finally the sounds she made in her sleep brought about her deliverance.

  THE conversation at the other end of the hall continued steadily—not loud but enough to keep them from sleeping, and he had already spoken to the children once. So he got up and went down the hall. Laurie and Cindy were both in their bathroom, and Cindy was sitting on the toilet. “I have a stomach ache,” she said.

  He started to say, “You need to do bizz,” and then remembered that the time before she had been sitting on the toilet doing just that.

  “And I feel dizzy,” Laurie said.

  “I heard it,” Iris said as he got back into bed.

  “That’s why she was so pale yesterday.”

  And half an hour later, when he got up again, Iris did too. To his surprise. Looking as if she had lost her last friend. So he took her in his arms.

  “I hate everything,” she said.

  ON THE top shelf of his clothes closet he keeps all sorts of things—the overflow of phonograph records, and the photograph albums, which are too large for the bookcases in the living room. The snapshots show nothing but joy. Year after year of it.

  ON THE stage of the school auditorium, girls from Class Eight, in pastel-colored costumes and holding arches of crêpe-paper flowers, made a tunnel from the front of the stage to the rear right-hand corner. The pianist took her hands from the keys, and the headmistress, in sensible navy blue, with her hair cut short like a man’s, announced, “Class B becomes Class One.”

  Twenty very little girls in white dresses marched up on the stage two by two, holding hands.

  George and Iris Carrington turned to each other and smiled, for Cindy was among them, looking proud and happy as she hurried through the tunnel of flowers and out of sight.

  “Class One becomes Class Two.” Another wave of little girls left their place in the audience and went up on the stage and disappeared into the wings.

  “Class Two becomes Class Three.”

  Laurie Carrington, her red hair shining from the hairbrush, rose from her seat with the others and started up on the stage.

  “It’s too much!” George said, under his breath.

  Class Three became Class Four, Class Four became Class Five, Class Five became Class Six, and George Carrington took a handkerchief out of his right hip pocket and wiped his eyes. It was their eagerness that undid him. Their absolute trust in the Arrangements. Class Six became Class Seven, Class Seven became Class Eight. The generations of man, growing up, growing old, dying in order to make room for more.

  “Class Eight becomes Class Nine, and is now in the Upper School,” the headmistress said, triumphantly. The two girls at the front ducked and went under the arches, taking their crêpe-paper flowers with them. And then the next two, and the next, and finally the audience was left applauding an empty stage.

  “COME here and sit on my lap,” he said, by no means sure Laurie would think it worth the trouble. But she came. Folding her onto his lap, he was aware of the length of her legs, and the difference of her body; the babyness had
departed forever, and when he was affectionate with her it was always as if the moment were slightly out of focus; he felt a restraint. He worried lest it be too close to making love to her. The difference was not great, and he was not sure whether it existed at all.

  “Would you like to hear a riddle?” she asked.

  “All right.”

  “Who was the fastest runner in history?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, smiling at her. “Who was?”

  “Adam. He was the first in the human race . . . . Teeheeheeheehee, wasn’t that a good one?”

  WAKING in the night, Cindy heard her mother and father laughing behind the closed door of their room. It was a sound she liked to hear, and she turned over and went right back to sleep.

  “WHAT was that?”

  He raised his head from the pillow and listened.

  “Somebody crying ‘Help!’” Iris said.

  He got up and went to the window. There was no one in the street except a taxi-driver brushing out the back seat of his hack. Again he heard it. Somebody being robbed. Or raped. Or murdered.

  “Help . . .” Faintly this time. And not from the direction of the park. The taxi-driver did not look up at the sound, which must be coming from inside a building somewhere. With his face to the window, George waited for the sound to come again and it didn’t. Nothing but silence. If he called the police, what could he say? He got back into bed and lay there, sick with horror, his knees shaking. In the morning maybe the Daily News would have what happened.