Hyman, the mailroom supervisor and my boss, was a high school dropout, about sixty, a former merchant seaman who, after he left the sea, had worked his way up to a high position in the post office bureaucracy in New York. When he retired he could have gone to Florida and died in the sun, but he loved working, loved schmoozing and kibitzing with everyone high and low, so he gladly worked long hours in the company’s vital mailroom. He was the first there, at six thirty or earlier, and the last to leave, which he did slowly and only when the last secretary had left her desk and gone home.
He chatted, he joked, he flirted. He was the company’s clown and, with his Groucho Marx stoop and loping walk, he was allowed everywhere, even permitted to step into—without appointment—the private offices of the reserved, seldom-seen elders, the executives E. J. and F. W. Beinecke. Everyone wondered how he had such license to roam about at will and chat up the bosses and terrorize the secretaries.
“Every company has a company spy,” he said to me one day when he came looking for me in the bathroom and caught me, book in hand, taking a too-long toilet break. “Maybe I’m one, and I’ll report you to the personnel manager”—a skinny middle-aged woman who, he frequently and loudly announced, “had tits like golf balls.”
“Are you the company spy, Hyman?” I asked, not out of concern but out of curiosity that such a strange thing existed.
“I’m no stooge, kid. I hate rats. But I just want you to watch out.”
When he was young, Hyman had read a book a week from a duffel bag of books he hauled onto the merchant ships, leaving the books aboard for others when he finished his tour. He liked Westerns and detective novels, but above all he liked Jack London and Henry Miller. Hyman had sailed the world twenty times over and thought those writers, like himself, had lived, knew life, and were no “sissies.” Hyman was crude and sentimental, loud and fearless. He’d say to secretaries who were snippy with him: “Kiss mein tukhus, I’m Jewish.” He liked to recite to me a merchant seaman’s ditty: “I’ll wipe your brass / I’ll kiss your ass / May I have another trip, sir?”
E. J. Beinecke, a partner of the family that owned the S&H Company, was a lover of literature and a renowned collector of Robert Louis Stevenson first editions and literary papers.11 One day Hyman sent me uptown to a wood-paneled bookstore with mellow lighting and soft carpets to pick up a book for E.J. My world had stopped at Book Row, with its musty, dusty piles of books and sagging shelves. Here the clerks wore suits and ties, spoke in whispers, and handled the books as if they were gold bricks. I brought the wrapped and boxed package back to the office and to Hyman, who made a point of delivering it himself to Beinecke as if he had personally taken on the mission of retrieving and safeguarding it.
“Always keep your boss glad he hired you,” Hyman said, taking the elevator to the upper executive offices.
The bookshop and the mysterious book stayed in my mind, as if I had been to a holy place and had transported a holy relic. I had now seen that there was a world of books, of art, much larger and grander than I had ever imagined, and that there was a world high above the Bronx but that it was not impossibly out of reach.
On his own initiative, Hyman went to E. J. Beinecke and got him to pay for my plane fare, cover tuition for my trip to study at the University of Mexico’s summer program, and give me one hundred dollars toward my expenses. Hyman told E.J. that I was an ace student—not true—and that I wanted to be a writer—true—and that I was a hard worker—somewhat true.
“Go thank him,” Hyman said. “Wear a jacket and a tie. And don’t forget to kiss my ass every day.”
A week passed before I was ushered into E. J. Beinecke’s thickly carpeted office with its burnished wood paneling and lamps that radiated an amber glow of well-being. The rosy-cheeked, white-haired man behind the mahogany battleship of a desk was E. J. himself, on whose two secretaries’ front desks I had daily piled mail without ever once glimpsing the grand man’s face.
He looked me over a few moments before saying, “Good morning, young man.”
“Good morning, sir.”
“I hope you have a successful time well spent in Mexico.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He did not extend his hand, but he gave me a friendly nod and smile and then I was once again out into the arena of one hundred typing desks and fluorescent lights.
Hyman, wishing he could still travel as he had when young, loved the idea of my going to Mexico. He booked me on a Mexican airline that made a stopover in Havana. I could stay a week in Cuba if I wanted and resume the flight to Mexico City on the same fare. He also booked a room for me at a hotel a few steps from the ocean and hassled the travel agent to give me a discount lower than even the summer’s reduced rate. “I bring you a lot of company business,” he said to the travel agent on the phone. “Don’t make me take it elsewhere.”
Hyman even set me up with a driver in Havana to show me the town for eight dollars a day plus gas. “He used to drive me around for years, before I got married,” Hyman said. “He’ll take you places you’d never see on your own. His name is Herman, close enough to mine, so you’ll never forget.”
* * *
11THE BEINECKE LIBRARY AND ME
E. J. Beineke was one of the founders of the Beinecke Library at Yale, where, many years later, I did research for my doctoral thesis on James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Bravo, set in eighteenth-century Venice.
Art Deco Eden
Mexico City DF, Calle Michelet, 1956
My 1956 ID card for summer school at the University of Mexico. Studies apart, there were many adventures.
In the summer of 1956, I was nineteen and my whole world up to then had fit inside the boroughs of New York City, from Pelham Parkway to the Bronx Zoo or the Bronx Park or Arthur Avenue. I had taken the subway to City College of New York at 138th Street and Convent Avenue, and sometimes even to the downtown reaches of Manhattan, to the Museum of Modern Art on Fifty-Third Street, to Greenwich Village and coffeehouses like Le Figaro on Bleecker and Rienzi on Macdougal Street, or to my beloved bookshops and stalls along Book Row on Fourth Avenue. I must not forget that I also roamed the movie houses around Forty-Second Street, where, to hide my shame, I went only under the shadow of night, and so saw nothing of normal life in the course of the day.
But now I was in Mexico City, studying pre-Columbian art and mural painting at the University of Mexico’s summer program. A schoolmate from City College and I shared a furnished apartment in a beautiful art deco building on Calle Michelet, in a serene, tree-lined bourgeois neighborhood. Hyman had found this Eden for me through his countless networks of favors given and received, and because of him I came to live in a solid and well-kempt quarter for the monthly rent of one hundred and eight dollars. I understood Hyman, for all his crudity, wanted me to taste the life of a gentleman of some ease.
Diana
Mexico City DF, Calle Michelet, 1956
It was about two on a sunny afternoon and I had just returned home from my classes at the university and was in the vestibule opening my mailbox, when a limo drew up. A blond woman with huge black movie-star sunglasses, a tight black dress, and high heels slowly stepped out of the limo and walked in, a bit wobbly, giving me a wide smile and a smashing “Hello!”
“I’m Diana,” she said. “I’m from Minnesota, and you’re from New York. I can tell by your shoes.” She laughed. Her breath stank of alcohol and minty mouthwash.
“I’m studying at the university,” I said, not mentioning that it was just for the summer.
“You must be a medical student.”
How old does she think I am? I wondered. I said, “I’m considering that, actually.”
“That’s great. The world needs smart doctors.”
“Thanks,” I said, and felt stumped, with no idea how to advance the conversation. But she made it easy for me. “I live here,” she said. “But I supposed you guessed that much, or why would I be looking into my mailbox?”
She did not op
en the mailbox but fumbled with the key in the lock and finally gave up.
“Good-bye,” she said. “Good to meet you, and maybe we’ll run into each other again someday.”
I was excited by her womanly dress and womanly everything, and I was amazed that she had even allowed me a moment of her life. But her good cheer and openness gave me a burst of confidence, and I found in myself a new, sophisticated, urbane, worldly, and totally smooth self and said, “My roommate and I are having some people over for drinks tomorrow. Please come by; I know they would love to meet you. Say around six?”
“Sure,” she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek before disappearing into the elevator.
My roommate was certain I had invented this blond goddess. Why had he never seen her? I finally convinced him with the argument that she might have a friend—for him. I had already made my claim but knew in my heart that my sophisto pose could not last long, and that this woman—unlike those folk singing lefty girls I knew in the Bronx and at City College—would find me both immature and inexperienced. She was older than I, but I could not judge by how much; in any case, she was of the grand and elegant world of beautiful women who wear perfume and dresses in the afternoon and ride in limos, and I was a boy from the borough famous for its zoo.
My roommate and I went to the local supermercado and stocked up on Scotch and vodka and bourbon and tequila and sparkling sodas, marveling at how inexpensive it all was—ninety cents for a quart bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label! We spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning up our rooms and making some order of the living room. The kitchen sink was soon naked of dishes, and the glasses looked obscenely clean. We scrubbed the bathroom floor and tub and washed the sink until it shone right from the factory. We had no friends to invite for our little cocktail party, so we invented the implausible story that they had all canceled at the last minute because of a pneumonia epidemic that had spread across the university and that, so far, as North Americans, we were resistant to this strain of Mexican germs and had been spared.
At seven she was not there, nor at eight, nine, ten, or eleven. By midnight we turned in. I promised to pay my roommate for his share of the liquor.
The doorbell rang at two in the dark morning. I came out in a T-shirt and boxers. Diana stood at the door wearing a great smile and holding a bottle of champagne.
“Where is everyone?” she asked, walking right in. Spared the pneumonia fiction, I said, “Gone home early. We have classes in the morning.”
“I like educated men,” she said. “It cuts out the small talk.”
“I’ll be right back,” I said, wanting to go to my room and put on my trousers.
“You’re OK as you are,” she said, adding, “This place has no charm. How can you live without charm?”
“It came furnished,” I said, embarrassed mostly by the two large prints of pink flamingos over the credenza.
“I’ll bring you down some things, dress the place up a bit.”
I stood there in my briefs not knowing what to do next. But she saved me from further embarrassment, saying, “Let’s get some glasses and pop the champagne.”
We sat at the table drinking from tall water glasses emblazoned with red palm trees, the only kind we had. And when we finished the champagne in short order—she slugged it down like water—she asked, “What else you got?” I pointed to the credenza, where our newly acquired liquor supply stood unopened and guarded over by the flamingos.
She examined the Scotch bottle label: “Hecho en Mexico. Do you know what that means?”
“It means made in Mexico.”
“No, it means made in a sewer and tastes like sewer water. But it improves with ice. Do you have any?”
“Oh—yes,” I said.
“Better yet, do you have any vodka—even the Mexican kind?”
I brought out from the fridge a bottle whose label with its bulbous turrets and snowy scene proclaimed the Russia of the tsars and Dostoyevsky but whose 80 percent alcohol was distilled in Jalisco. I forgot the ice.
“Don’t worry about the ice, it’s cold enough,” she said, filling our glasses to the rims.
We drank. I sipped; she guzzled. I heard the bedroom door open; it was my roommate in gray flannel pajamas, a robe made from a carpet, and wine-colored slippers. All he needed was a stocking cap to complete the picture of how he—and thus I—was so square. I was so pissed off that he had broken into our little twosome that I almost forgot his name.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Diana.”
He grinned and sat and drank Scotch minus the ice. He didn’t speak. He stared at her with a sleepy grin. He drank more and turned greenish. He tried to kiss her good night but missed her cheek.
“It was fun meeting you,” she said, after he had already left the room. She was almost done with her second glass of vodka; I was an inch into my second when I started to slide a long slide under the table. I was out before I hit the ground. I woke up in a strange bed in a strange room with vases of flowers and with Diana propped up beside me.
“Your come tastes very sweet,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Innocent, I mean.”
A young maid, who said, “Me llamo Theresa,” came to the bed with a tray of cream and sugar and coffee for one: me. She smiled. “Buenos días,” she said, and left with an even wider smile. I had no idea where I was, but I knew where I was.
“Do you smoke?”
“Yes, all the time: Camels,” I said.
“I mean Mary Jane.”
She laughed and cupped my balls. It was then that I realized I was naked under the covers. My clothes were piled neatly on the chair by the door.
She poured my coffee and doused it with cream. “One sugar or two—or three?” She laughed.
This was deeply familiar, and joyful. Francesca, my grandmother, had given me coffee and hot milk and semolina bread when I came home from grade school. My friends went home to chocolate milk and cookies, in the all-American model. To fit in, I lied that I did, too.
Theresa reappeared with an ice bucket with a bottle of French champagne and a bottle of vodka. “It’s the real stuff,” Diana said, pointing to the label. I drank the coffee and she downed the champagne, chased with more gulps of vodka. She lit up a very fat joint and offered me the first hit. I declined politely, telling her the story of my last smoke, when the world went spinning and my heart pounded to get out of my chest.
“That’s a tragedy,” she said, “like having an allergy to life. I hope you don’t mind if I smoke.”
“Not at all,” I said, slowly trying to piece together what had happened after I passed out the night before, wondering how I ever got to the elevator and into her bed.
The sun powered through the large, clean window; the sky was cloudless and exciting in its blueness. She smelled of a stale perfume that still had the power to make me lovesick. I turned to kiss her. We kissed and I went for more.
“It’s too early,” she said. “Anyway, don’t you have to go to school?”
I had forgotten the university, and I no longer cared if I ever went again if I could wake each morning with her.
The night table clock said a quarter past one. On a normal day I would have finished classes and headed home by this time. I was home but just missed the earlier step.
“It’s a very informal university,” I said. “It’s a just-go-when-I-feel-like-it kind of thing.”
She gave me a look that said, “Stop the bullshit.” So I added, “Well, I’m pretty serious about it most of the time.”
“What do you actually do there, anyway? Chase girls?”
“I study Mexican mural painting and pre-Columbian art,” I said defensively.
She laughed. “The commie art. Are you a little commie like everyone else from New York?”
“Well, I’m not a fascist. And you?”
“Don’t get so hot under the collar. I’m just playing.”
“I apologize,” I said, not meaning it.
&nbs
p; “Loosen up, Freddy. The world’s worse than you think but not as bad as you think.”
“What?”
“Figure it out some other time.” She kissed me.
Theresa walked in with a sheet of lilac-scented paper on a silver tray. Diana looked it over and I took a peek: it was a list of five first names with phone numbers.
“This is from the last two hours,” Theresa said. Then, turning to me, she asked if I wanted an aspirina before I left.
“You don’t need one, do you?” Diana asked. I was slow but I got the point and waited for Theresa to leave before I got out of bed and dressed. Diana gave me a big, sisterly kiss on the cheek.
“Mind if I don’t see you to the door?”
“That’s OK. Sure,” I said, wondering if she was being impolite by an etiquette standard I did not know. Then I thought: She is shy about my seeing her nude in the daylight.
I got as far as the hallway when she called out, “Wait a minute.” I halted. She was beautifully naked. She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me again and said, “You’re sweet. Stay sweet.”
Mexican Skies and Dark Cantinas
Xochimilco and Plaza Garibaldi, 1956
For all my desire and dreaming of Diana, I was not sitting alone in my room waiting for her knock at the door. I was absorbed with my love for Mexico City and for Mexican art, going to all the places in the city that had the murals of the giants, Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros. I took a bus as far as Chapingo to see Rivera’s fresco of juicy Mother Earth watching over us from up high. I had seen Francisco Goitia’s famous Old Man on a Garbage Heap in Bernard Myers’s book and was fascinated by the painting and the man who had authored it. Goitia himself had become a hermit and a mystic and was known for sometimes burying himself in the earth, his eyes toward the sky and God.
I learned that the man considered the grandfather of Mexican art lived less than an hour’s trolley ride away in Xochimilco, but the address I was given was very general. I was told not to worry; everyone knew where he lived; just ask the trolley conductor.
My Young Life Page 14
