April in Paris

by John J. Healey

  After Scarlett died and I returned to New York on visits, it felt as if the bridge-and-tunnel brigade had taken over. They’d somehow made a lot of money working in the city all that time, commuting from New Jersey and Queens and Long Island City, and had managed to buy bits and pieces of Manhattan. Every time I went to a restaurant, even to the two or three that survived from what I consider a golden age, they were filled with these people; young, well paid, wearing patterned sweaters and awful shoes, what I might call a Fort Lee look.

  Diehards always consider “their” New York to be the cool and stylish one as they gaze upon arrivistes with horror. But I have to say, the New York I grew up in, and knew young adulthood in, and then kept living in as an absurdly rich and essentially useless man, really was much cooler and more stylish than it is now. Now it’s only about money and real estate, celebs and crass social climbing, in a town that continues to be hard-edged, tiring, and uncomfortable, and that is still filled with black plastic garbage bags piled by the gutters every morning. I just couldn’t see myself living there anymore. I carried the New York that had been mine around with me, safe and undisturbed. Mine still had Bonwit Teller and Best & Co., Rumplemayer’s and the Women’s Exchange, Schrafft’s on Madison Avenue, Aggie’s downtown, and the Cedar Tavern on University Place. It had the Second Avenue Deli when it was still on Second Avenue.

  I checked us in to the Bowery Hotel and got my favorite suite on the top floor with the large terrace and outdoor shower. We had dinner downstairs at Gemma at a corner table out of the way. A film star was there with a small coterie, all of them dressed idiotically in black, along with the usual crowd of ambitious youths, all of them with their phones out on the table. But the lighting was appealing, the food and wine good, and the waiters friendly and discreet.

  “I’ve an idea,” Carmen said after we toasted with two glasses of Brunello. “Why not buy that lot?”

  “On Ogden Avenue?” I knew immediately what she was referring to.

  “Yes.”

  “To do what with?”

  “You could rebuild the houses exactly as they were, on the outside, but turn the inside into something else, like a foundation or something.”

  “A foundation.”

  “Yes,” she said, “you could call it something like the Ingrid Anderson Foundation for Children, and the place could provide counseling or something like that.”

  “Why didn’t I think of this?”

  “Because the whole area gives you the heebie-jeebies, but it might be a good thing to do, fitting somehow. I mean, you lived in that actual building, right?”

  “My grandparents and my father and his brothers did,” I said, “but yes, I spent time there.”

  “It might be good for you and constitute a public service. You could probably afford it, no?”

  “It’s a great idea,” I said. “I wouldn’t even have to go and see it. I could just plan it and fund it.”

  “If you’d like.”

  Back in the room she admired the hotel stationery with its Bill the Butcher iconography and I told her how when I was around twelve and beginning to have crushes on girls I’d take stationery from hotels, the fancier the better, and use them to write my love letters. I would be too ashamed to send them from the Bronx and so I’d wait until I got to Manhattan before posting them.

  We showered together out on the terrace before going to bed. We stood there soaping each other, looking at the rooftops across the way and down to the new Trade Center skyscraper. Despite all my grumbling about Manhattan’s decline and fall, it was a moment I did not plan to forget.

  After she fell asleep, I read the end of the trial transcript.

  – 34 –

  Thursday, October 31, 1916.

  Mr. Northshire (for the District Attorney): “If the Court please, the People move for judgment in the case of People against Eugene J. MacBride.”

  The Clerk: “Eugene J. MacBride, have you any cause to show why judgment of death not now be pronounced against you?”

  Mr. Tannenbaum: “I move for an arrest of judgment upon the same grounds specified by me at the time of the rendition of the verdict.”

  The Court: “Motion denied.”

  Mr. Tannenbaum: “I cannot say anything else. The law imposes upon Your Honor your duty.”

  The Court: “Eugene J. MacBride, the judgment of the court is that you, for the murder and rape in the first degree of one Ingrid Anderson, whereof you are convicted, be you and hereby, sentenced to punishment of death; and it is ordered that within ten days after this day’s session of the Court that the Sheriff of the County of New York deliver you to the Agent and Warden of the State Prison of the State of New York at Sing Sing, where you shall be kept in solitary confinement, until the week beginning on the tenth day of December 1916, and upon some day within the week so appointed the said Agent and Warden of the State Prison at Sing Sing is commanded to do execution upon you in the mode and manner prescribed by the laws of the State of New York.”

  – 35 –

  I told Carmen about MacBride’s verdict and sentence over breakfast. It sort of put a pall on a good part of the day. Before heading out to Southampton, I left Corru with a dog sitter at the hotel and made the mistake of taking Carmen uptown to see Bunky’s place at 820 Fifth, the one Dirk Salisbury gave me so much grief about. I hadn’t been for a long time and thought to show it to her before I would probably follow her suggestion and put it up for sale. Regardless of how things might pan out between us, her notion that I free myself of it seemed a healthy thing to do—but I should have gone on my own.

  The elevator opened directly onto a wide entrance hall that ran parallel to the avenue below. Stepping into the apartment, we were greeted by a minor but very beautiful work by Francisco de Zurbarán. It was one of his many representations of the Immaculate Conception. Carmen was shocked to see it there and was taken with it. It gave me pleasure to watch her marvel at it, especially since I’d always found it a tad depressing, associating it with Bunky’s Catholic upbringing that, like mine, had done considerable damage.

  “Just think,” she said, “it was painted in Sevilla four hundred years ago, and here it is in your apartment!”

  “Bunky’s mother bought it at auction,” I said. “She was very old school and resented the presence of Bill Paley’s kingdom two floors below. When you stepped out of the elevator at the Paleys’, there was Picasso’s Boy with a Horse. This was her Catholic reply. Bunky had a love-hate relationship with it and when he was drunk, which was often, he’d stand here in front of it spewing forth streams of profanity.”

  Both floors of my apartment were a homage to the 1970s, when hostesses like Peggy Bancroft, C. Z. Guest, and Babe Paley made the Upper East Side their fiefdom. Billy Baldwin had decorated it originally and no one had bothered to change anything since. Thick gold drapes framed the many windows looking down at the park. Pineapple-shaped lamps graced tables placed at either end of deep, comfortable, pink and white sofas. Art and photography books popular in the period competed for space on coffee tables strewn with Steuben ashtrays and monogrammed cigarette cases. Small white porcelain monkeys rested on one of the mantels. Framed photographs of family members, long deceased, adorned side tables.

  “None of the other works of art hold a candle to what the Paleys had downstairs,” I continued as we walked about. “Their living room walls were plastered with Gauguins. I spent a lot of time there in my teens. I was close to their daughter. Truman Capote was over a lot, dishing gossip that kept everyone enthralled. Paley was nervous and jumpy and always tasting everyone’s food at restaurants. Ba and Carter Burden would wander in and out like royalty making the other siblings uncomfortable with envy. Whenever you left a room for any reason, all of the cushions were re-fluffed, and all the ashtrays were cleaned by the time you returned. It was a very uptight and weird household but at the same time you felt special being there.”

  She didn’t say anything. We toured the bedrooms on the upper level. Tha
nkfully the closets and bureaus and medicine cabinets were empty. The TVs were old Zeniths. The phones were made of thick black plastic and had push button dial pads. In the library off the living room downstairs there was a mirrored bar and a couch and various comfortable chairs covered in red velvet with numerous needlepointed cushions depicting pugs and horses. Others had phrases embroidered on them, aiming to amuse. One that Carmen picked up read Eat, Drink & Remarry.

  It was somehow fitting that the room in which she chose to speak with me was the servants’ TV room off the kitchen, near the door where deliveries were made and where the trash was taken out. We sat in two upholstered chairs that were the worse for wear, frayed about the edges with yellowing antimacassars on the verge of disintegration. The chairs faced a TV that had a lace doily on top of it supporting a large rabbit-ear antenna. I had only vague memories of the immigrant employees who had spent large amounts of time in that room, people who worked for Bunky’s parents and then for Scarlett and me until we moved downtown. They had sat in those same chairs, night after night during the Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon administrations, after their many chores were done, watching American TV.

  Carmen sat us down and I suddenly remembered a night when I woke and found that Scarlett was not at my side. She was not in the bathroom either. I looked for her and finally found her there in that room curled up and asleep in the chair Carmen was sitting in, the TV flickering, showing an old film, the original 1949 version of Mighty Joe Young. I never asked her why she went down there. I covered her with a blanket and sat in the other chair, the one I was sitting in that morning, and watched the rest of the movie.

  “Why are we here?” Carmen said.

  “I wanted you to see it. Just like I wanted you to see the house in Williamstown.”

  “But it was me who wanted to see the house in Williamstown,” she said. “I didn’t ask to come here.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I wanted you to see it because I’m thinking of finally selling it.”

  “I think you should,” she said. “But I didn’t need to see it for that. You could have made that decision on your own. I’ve nothing to do with this. You keep these homes like they were tombs.”

  “You’re right.”

  “All this stuff about the Paleys and Truman Capote and Bunky and his family and your ex-wife, all of the New York social history you find so colorful and that you appear to be so nostalgic about, is a little depressing to me. I’ve nothing to do with it. It’s like leafing through an old issue of Look magazine at a garage sale. I know it’s been part of your life, and to the extent it interests me at all, it’s because of that, because you interest me. But. I don’t know. This place really bums me out.”

  I looked down at the black and white tiles covering the floor.

  “Then maybe going out to visit with Caro might not be such a great idea.”

  “No. That does appeal to me. I’m happy to do that. She’s alive. She’s actually your family. She helped bring you up. But this is something else. I’m not jealous. It’s not that.”

  “I get it,” I said.

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have pushed you to go through the Bronx yesterday. I mean, we were happily on our way out to Long Island.”

  “I’m glad you urged me to do it,” I said. “Well—glad is not the word exactly—but it proved to be a good reality check. Just like coming back here is turning out to be. Come on,” I said, standing up and extending my hand for her to take. “Let’s go.”

  As we stepped back into the elevator, she said, “Whatever you end up doing, keep the Zurbarán.”

  – 36 –

  The land southeast of Main Street in the Southampton I came to as a newborn was mostly dedicated to potato farms owned by the Halsey and Burnett families. The rich built their homes along South Main Street, Gin Lane, First Neck Lane, and Great Plains and Ox Pasture Roads. The Beach Club was constructed opposite the southern end of Lake Agawam adjacent to St. Andrew’s Dune Church. The Meadow Club was put up a bit farther west, set back from the beach next to Coopers Neck Pond where Meadow Lane turns into Dune Road.

  When I was little, I was told that Lake Agawam had no bottom, that divers descended into it and never returned, that it was connected to the ocean by an underground cavern. This explained why during hurricanes the strange gray and cappuccino-like foam that washed up on the beach appeared as well about the southern border of the lake. On one occasion, after a hurricane, I watched ocean waves break over the dunes and merge with the lake.

  The women who worked for us there when I was little, who cooked and cleaned the house and sometimes took care of me, were Shinnecock Indians. One of them took me fishing sometimes in ponds on the reservation. I remember the thin bamboo poles, the little hooks that hurt my fingers, and the small sun perch we caught. I remember the pull of the fish when it grabbed the hook, the sudden tug, the thrill and the sadness of it. The woman would gut them and bring them back to her house to fry and we ate them with untoasted slices of Wonder Bread and heated cans of beans with bits of bacon in them. Sitting at the folding aluminum table, holding my fork, I felt invincible.

  The Judge took me deep sea fishing for bluefish and striped bass in cabin cruisers rented from the Montauk docks. From the beach in front of our house at Fair Lea, he and my uncles, but never my father, would surf-cast. The lures they used were wooden and colorful with metal joints and multiple hooks and they made a satisfying splash clearing the waves fifty or sixty yards out. What they mostly caught were sea robins, sand sharks, and skate.

  I remember Dusty Miller and the papyrus-like long grass growing on the ocean side of the dunes and the wild rose hip and beach plum shrubs growing on the land side. I remember the sandy path we took to access the beach, hot at times, that went from the lawn at Fair Lea up through the shrubs. In early September during the hurricane season the beach plums would be ripe for picking and back in the kitchen the Judge would drive Aunt Jane mad making a great mess—the boiling of the berries, the bags of white sugar, straining everything through yards of gauze, adding the pectin and melting the wax to cap each jar before fastening down the tin lids that later would only pry open with a knife blade.

  I remember the milkman and his truck and the man who cut our lawns, a handsome tattooed vet who drove an oily green Ford tractor while wearing aviator sunglasses, who always had a pack of Lucky Strikes tucked in a sleeve. I loved the poppy seed buns and jelly donuts from the Hampton Bakery, Crutchley’s donut holes in powdered sugar that we got after buying the newspapers at Jack’s. The stores along Main Street: Hobbyland, Herricks and Hildreths, Hildegard Peter, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Silver’s next to a pharmacy that had a soda fountain. Shep Miller on Job’s Lane, and Peck & Peck, and Jax, and Lillywhites that smelled of new bicycle tires for the English racers sold there, and the Act IV ice cream parlor run by Stan and Clyde, a theatrically gay couple from Florida. The grassy square with the piled cannon balls, Shippy’s and his pretty wife who often had a black eye, the Windmill Diner where locals went, the movie theater up the hill when it only had one screen.

  I remember Mr. Dox who ran the gymnastics classes at the Beach Club, and Artie and Sven, the Norwegian lifeguards who put out the barrels at the beginning of each summer and who migrated with the members to Palm Beach and the Everglades Club during the winter season. I remember having lunch with Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, Millicent, the former dance hall girl, and her sister Anita, when I used a finger bowl for the first time. She asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I told her I wanted to be a painter, and she replied, “Study Rubens. Study Rubens.”

  And I remember fixating on the young Mrs. Dan Topping’s beautiful breasts as she basted them with Bain de Soleil, not minding me because I was so little, and then winking at me before closing her eyes and lying back down in the sun. I remember my father hitting fungo on the lawn at Fair Lea using actual New York Yankee baseballs. I remember my mother alive there. And I remember the summer after she died, and then the
summer five years later when we began to live with Caro at her house.

  But I didn’t share any of these recollections with Carmen that day. We drove out without stopping, talking about American and European politics, her favorite places in Spain, and a bit more about what might be done with the vacant lots on Ogden Avenue. Then she looked up Sing Sing on her phone and learned that the electric chair used there was called “Old Sparky.” She looked that up as well and read me the following Wikipedia entry:

  In 1887, New York State established a committee to determine a new, more humane system of execution to replace hanging. Alfred P. Southwick, a member of the committee, developed the idea of putting electric current through a device after hearing about how relatively painlessly and quickly a drunken man died after touching exposed power lines. As Southwick was a dentist accustomed to performing procedures on sitting subjects, his electrical device appeared in the form of a chair.

  On June 4, 1888, Governor David B. Hill authorized the introduction of the electric chair. It was first used two years later when William Kemmler became the first person in the world to be executed by electricity at Auburn Prison, Auburn, New York on August 6, 1890.

  “Old Sparky” was first used at Sing Sing prison in 1891. The chair was situated in a purpose-built building known as the Death House, which was a prison within the high-security Sing Sing prison. The block, which had its own hospital, kitchen, visiting room, and exercise yard, had twenty-four single cells plus an additional three cells for condemned women. A chamber where a prisoner spent their last day was nicknamed the “Dance Hall.” A corridor, known as the “Last Mile,” connected the anteroom to the execution chamber.