Manhattan, When I Was Young

by Mary Cantwell

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  148 Waverly Place

  1

  2

  3

  301 East Twenty-first Street

  1

  2

  224 West Eleventh Street

  1

  2

  21 Perry Street

  1

  2

  3

  4

  44 Jane Street

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Afterword

  Endpapers

  Author Bio

  Copyright © 1995 by Mary Cantwell

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cantwell, Mary.

  Manhattan, when I was young / Mary Cantwell.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-395-74441-5

  1. Cantwell, Mary. 2. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—

  Social life and customs. 3. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—

  Biography. 4. New York (N.Y.)—Social life and customs.

  5. New York (N.Y.)—Biography. I. Title.

  F128.54.C36A3 1995

  974.7’1—dc20 95-13278

  CIP

  eISBN 978-0-547-72826-1

  v2.1017

  For Katie and Margaret,

  the best part of the journey

  “I think one remains the same person throughout,

  merely passing, as it were, in these lapses of time

  from one room to another, but all in the same house.”

  —J. M. BARRIE

  Prologue

  THERE IS A HOUSE I pass every night on my way home from work. It is nineteenth-century brick, with a fire escape that spoils its facade and Con-Tac paper in imitation of stained glass pasted in the fanlight. I lost a bloodstone ring in that house, and one of my younger daughters red-ear turtles walked off into the darkness there. So I wonder sometimes if the present tenants have ever found that ring or, under a radiator perhaps, a dried turtle shell.

  There is another house, on West Eleventh Street, whose windowboxes, crumbling now, were built by my husband’s friend Jerry. And a third, on Perry Street, with a granite urn in the areaway in which I used to plant petunias. Because I am the kind who cannot escape a hotel room without leaving a toothbrush behind, I am sure that all three houses still hold, still hidden, some remnants of myself.

  There is a fourth house, a big apartment building on the other side of town. I turn my head whenever I pass that one, because I remember the girl who lived there and she is painful to contemplate. One Saturday, shopping at a shabby Twenty-third Street A & P, she stuck her hand in the meat bin and, awakened suddenly by the sight of her long thin fingers poised over a rolled roast, said, “How did I get here?” I’m afraid that if I look at that apartment building I’ll reenter it, put her on again, and go back to sleep.

  I have a remarkable memory for objects. If I were to go into any one of those four houses, I could show you where the couch was, where I kept the pots, name the color of the walls. About the people who lived in them I cannot be so precise. Myself, for instance. I think I know her, but friends tell me I am wrong, that the person I describe lives solely in my head. Well, she does. But then, so do I.

  But wait. There is a fifth house, which is in fact the first house and in which I left nothing behind. To begin with, I took to it only a wardrobe of unsuitable clothes, a few records, five or so anthologies of English literature, and a copy of The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The last was a kind of intellectual bona fide, a reminder that I had once contemplated graduate work and that Columbia University, though not the Yale at which I had imagined myself, was not yet out of the question.

  This house has had its face lifted, its bricks steamed of their soot, and its windows refitted. There’s new wiring and surely there’s new plumbing—when I lived there the kitchen sink doubled as a bathroom sink, and four of us shared the toilet in the hall—and I doubt that water seeps under the back door and into the ground-floor rear apartment anymore when it rains. But it did, it did. Many were the dawns when I swung my feet off the studio couch and onto a damp floor.

  I can see us now, me with my wet-soled feet on one side of the room and a college classmate named Allie with her wet-soled feet on the other. Both of us are wearing pajamas with fly fronts and rope ties, because the fashion in the women’s college from which we have just graduated was to dress like a boy unless you were going away for a football weekend, in which case you packed a sheath so you could look like a vamp. Allies hair is in pincurls, mine is in kidskin rollers, and there are a few dots of Acnomel on my chin.

  In a few minutes I will struggle into my Sarong girdle—so named because of its sarong-like curves and seaming—which I don’t need, because on my fattest day I weigh only 118 pounds. Then I will put on a sternly constructed cotton broadcloth bra, which I also don’t need, a full-breasted nylon slip, and the pink Brooks Brothers shirt and black-and-white-checked gingham skirt that constitute my version of office garb. My shoes are black suede pumps, leftovers from my sheath days. But first I have to beat the men who share the room next door to the hall toilet and take a shower in the kitchen and toast an English muffin over our stove’s very low flame and drink a cup of the coffee Allie has made in our five-and-ten percolator.

  Allie is long and lean, with a deep voice and a way of dragging on a cigarette that is pure Lauren Bacall, who, come to think of it, she resembles. Allie is also the reason I take my coffee black. One morning of our junior year, while we were having breakfast in our dorm’s dining room, she noticed the big glass of milk beside my plate.

  “Funny,” she said. “You look like the kind that drinks black coffee.” The next morning I stood at the big urn, whose spigot I didn’t even know how to operate, and poured myself a cup. It was the first coffee I had ever tasted. To this day I have no idea what coffee is like with cream and sugar. Even though I am now many years older and many pounds heavier, I like to think of myself as still looking like the type that takes her coffee black.

  Allie has a certain mystery about her. Sometimes she drinks too much, not in the absent-minded way I’m apt to, but deliberately; and I know that on her mother’s side, at least, she comes from a long line of the rich and scatty. I am always attracted to people who seem one way or another to be doomed, provided they carry their fate stylishly, and Allie reminds me of Temple Drake and Lady Brett Ashley. So she is right up my alley and I guess I am right up hers, although I don’t know why. Both of us are prone to long silences, however, and we could listen to the cast recording of Pal Joey till the cows come home. “Take him,” we sing along with Vivienne Segal, “I won’t make a play for him. Take him, he’s yours.”

  Washed, fed, and dressed, Allie and I pull on our short white cotton gloves, lock up, and travel a dimly lit corridor painted the dead amber of tobacco juice to a short flight of stairs. They lead to a shabby front hall with a big double door that opens onto a narrow street lined with tired brick houses like ours, a convent, and several small turn-of-the-century apartment houses, one of which has a Mexican restaurant in the basement. This is Waverly Place. Sixth Avenue is to our right, and Christopher Street starts a block or so to our left. We live in Greenwich Village because we had heard of it, and becau
se the only other parts of New York City we know are the theater district, the Biltmore Hotel, and a Third Avenue beer hall called the G.A.

  We’re heading for the E train (the subway stop is at our corner), which will take us to Fifty-third and Fifth. There we’ll wait in line for the escalator, because walking up that horrendous flight of stairs, Allie says, will give us legs like Cornell girls. Cornell girls, cursed with a hilly campus, are rumored to have bowling-pin calves. Once on the street, Allie will walk east toward Park Avenue and her secretarial job at an advertising agency. I will walk north to my secretarial job at a fashion magazine.

  Behind us, our apartment—our one room plus kitchen/ bath—is dark and silent. Little light penetrates the one ground-level window, and the garden, to which we have sole access, is a wasteland of weeds and broken glass. The furniture—two studio couches, a big table, a couple of hard chairs, and a pier glass leaning against the fireplace—belongs to the landlord. We have our reading lamps from college, though, and Allies phonograph, an ironing board and iron from’S. Klein’s on Union Square, some pots and pans, a small bottle of vermouth, and a fifth of Dixie Belle gin.

  We have, in short, everything we need. Everything I need, anyway. There are nights when, cross-legged on my studio couch, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on the phonograph and stray cats scrabbling in the weeds outside the kitchen window, I can feel joy exploding in my chest. Because from this house I emerge every morning into the place my father promised would be mine one day. The place where there’d be lots of people like me.

  148 Waverly Place

  1

  “IT WAS A QUEER, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs. . . . ” That’s how Sylvia Plath started The Bell jar and how I want to start this. Because that’s the way I remember my first summer in New York, too. It was hot, and before we went to bed Allie and I would set our version of a burglar alarm along the threshold of the door that led to the garden so we could leave it open all night. Any intruder, we figured, would be deterred by that fearsome lineup of juice glasses and dented pots and pans from Woolworth’s. Sometimes, soaked in sweat and sucking at the cottony air, I would wake and look toward the black rectangle that was the yawning doorway and wonder if we weren’t being pretty stupid. But we would smother without that little breeze from the south, and besides, this was the Village! Afraid to take the subway, afraid of getting lost, afraid even to ask the women in the office where the ladies’ room was (instead I used the one at Bonwit Teller), I felt peace whenever, after one of my long, lazy strolls down Fifth Avenue, I saw Washington Square Arch beckoning in the distance.

  There was a newsstand near our subway stop, and every day the tabloids screamed the Rosenbergs’ impending death. The headlines terrified me, because my boyfriend was Jewish. When my mother, back home in Rhode Island, met him for the first time, she asked him his religion, and he told her he was an atheist. She paused, and said in her nicest voice, “Does that mean you’re a Communist?” He said no, but I knew his aunt and uncle had been, and the weekend we spent at their cabin in the Catskills smearing cream cheese on toast was torture, because they reminded me of the Rosenbergs and I thought we would all be arrested and that I, too, would die in the chair.

  Somewhere I’ve read that the Lindbergh kidnapping marked a generation of children; that, knowing about the ladder propped against the second-story window and the empty crib, they had nightmares of being whisked away. Myself, I was marked by Bruno Hauptmann’s execution. The radio must have been on the day he died—all I know of the 1930s, really, is what my ears picked up as I wandered around the living room during the six o’clock news—because I remember once asking an uncle what electrocution was. “It means,” he said, “that somebody sets your hair on fire.”

  So I believed—a belief never wholly lost (and is the reality preferable?)—that one sat in the chair, the switch was pulled, the current streamed upward from the toes and erupted in a halo of flames around one’s face, and whoosh! out brief candle. The chair. In childhood I thought about the chair, the slow climb and the fast flambé, all the time. And now, years later, I thought of Ethel Rosenberg’s peanut face, which became mine. So when I neared the newsstand, I would turn my head and fix my eyes on the dirty stone steps that led down into the West Fourth Street station and the cars with the yellow straw seats that ripped your nylons if you didn’t smooth your skirt along the back of your thighs before you sat down. But what I dodged during the day I met at night, in dreams, when I waddled down a long green corridor to the chair.

  Sylvia Plath was already a familiar name. I was secretary to the press editor of Mademoiselle, where she’d been a guest editor just a month before, and my first task was to scour the newspapers for notices of her suicide attempt. “Smith Girl Missing,” they read, followed by “Smith Girl Found,” and I would cut and paste the clips for my boss’s scrapbook of press notices, unclear whether all this publicity was good or bad for the magazine’s forthcoming College Issue. In retrospect, I suspect it was good. Just as one studies the photograph of the parachutist before the fatal jump, so in the August Mademoiselle one could study the Smithie before the sleeping pills and the slide under the front porch. I studied her pictures myself. “What was she like, Mr. Graham?” I asked my boss. “Like all the others,” he replied. “Eager.”

  Many years later I saw a television documentary on the life of Sylvia Plath, but all I recall of it now is a clip of seniors, black as crows in their graduation robes, in procession along a route lined by girls in white dresses who held an endless chain of daisies. The scene reminded me of my own long march into the Connecticut College Arboretum on Class Day. Our daisy chain was a laurel chain, but everything else was the same: the June day, the pageboy hairdos, the cloud of Arpége. Trust me on that last point. I was delicious then. We were all delicious, and we all smelled of Arpége.

  That Allie worked for an advertising agency and I for a fashion magazine was improbable, but no more improbable than our being employed at all. Strictly speaking, we had no skills, and skills were very important in those days. In fact, some of our classmates had gone to Katie Gibbs to get them. Still, New York was full of girls like us—graduates of women’s colleges with good looks and good manners and, though not in my case, money from home—and we were all working. Wearing the store-prescribed little black dress, we sold expensive glassware at Steuben. (Often we sold it to our friends, because everyone was getting married that first year after college, and a Steuben compote or a Georg Jensen bottle opener, the one with the acorn, was our wedding present of choice.) We were researchers and news-clippers at Time-Life, whose recruiters had made it very clear when they came to our schools that reporting was not in our future. A few of us had jobs in book publishing, mostly in the textbook departments, and in some of the smaller art galleries. A lot of us were, like Allie, in advertising, and the luckiest of us were on fashion magazines. True, we were poorly paid—it was assumed by our bosses, even out loud, that we had other income—but at least we weren’t locked up in a back room with the out-of-town newspapers and a rip stick.

  When I came to New York, on the same train that had taken me from Providence to New London for four years, I had $80 and the Smith-Corona portable my father had given me for my high school graduation. Allie, who had come up from her home in Maryland, had a bit more cash and a sterling silver brush, comb, and mirror given her by a great-aunt. Between us, we thought, we had enough. The funny thing is, we were right. I can’t believe it now, that the city opened before us like some land of dreams, but it did.

  Of course there were disappointments. We had assumed that the cute little houses in the Village would have cute little signs —APARTMENT FOR RENT— dangling beside their front doors, and that you just walked right in off the street and said to your friendly landlord, “I’ll take it!” So it was a bit of a letdown when, after hours of walking, we finally had to call on a real estate agent. That the one-room apartment he showed us was the back half of a basement was also a bit of
a letdown, but that we would have to share the toilet in the hall with the tenants of the front apartment was no problem whatsoever. After all, it had taken us only a day to find this place. And what was a toilet shared with two men compared to a multistalled bathroom shared with forty girls? We were used to communal living.

  Finding jobs was easy, too. Allie had majored in art and thought she’d like to do “something” with it. But people who ran art departments wanted people who knew layout and paste-ups, and that kind of practical training was as foreign to our college as a course in typing would have been. I thought I’d like to do “something” with my English major, but what, besides teach, can one do with Chaucer? So instead we registered at a Seven Sisters outpost called the Alumnae Placement Agency, which sent Allie to the ad agency and me to the Metropolitan Museum and Mademoiselle.

  The job at the Met—working on the museum bulletin, I think it was—was the one I wanted. There I would improve my mind, which the young man who was half the reason I was in New York was very anxious to have me do. “How can you read this stuff when you could be reading Virginia Woolf?” he would say when he saw me with yet another John Dickson Carr. “God! You haven’t even read Tristram Shandy.”

  The job at Mademoiselle, however, was the one I got.

  Mademoiselle’s famous College Issue was all I knew of the magazine. For four years I had wallowed in the photographs of that happy land where all the girls had shiny hair and long legs and all the boys had good jawlines. I wallowed in the text, too, about what was happening at Wellesley! At Skidmore! At Smith! I, too, was a student at one of those zippy schools, one of those girls in the Shetland sweaters and gray flannel Bermuda shorts, and this was our club bulletin. But work at Mademoiselle? That was no place for me, the aspiring . . . well, actually, I didn’t know quite what I was aspiring to, but it had something to do with library stacks and a lonely but well-lighted carrel. My father had hoped I would be an English professor. When he died, when I was twenty, his authority was transferred to the young man who wanted me to improve my mind. Sometimes, even then, I thought of myself as the creation I know now was called Trilby. Only never having read the novel, I thought she was named Svengali.