Manhattan, When I Was Young

by Mary Cantwell

  “I knew what you’d look like the minute B. told me about you,” Jerry said. “He always goes for girls who could model for Pepsi-Cola ads.”

  Jerry was the smartest man I’d ever met, one of those people who knew everything and could do anything. We expected great things of Jerry, without being able to define exactly what form his greatness would take. He had so many choices. For now he was making a living designing textiles freelance (B. acted sometimes as his salesman), but he wrote like George Bernard Shaw and painted like Wilfredo Lam, at the same time being a monument to each and every practical skill. He could build bookcases and fix leaks and rewire lamps, and he even knew what to do when I had food poisoning: “Feed her cottage cheese to keep her digestion going and ginger ale every time she vomits.”

  Jerry sent us to Les Enfants du Paradis and Le Diable au Corps, and there was nothing playing at the Thalia and the Beverly, both of them revival houses, that he hadn’t seen. Because of Jerry we subscribed to Cinema 16, a group that showed old and experimental films, and we spent every Sunday morning—those were the cheapest subscription days—in the Needle Trades Auditorium watching Buster Keaton in The Navigator and garbage can explosions and once a kind of homemade movie in which a bit part was played by a girl in my office. I was never comfortable in the Needle Trades Auditorium, because the audience was almost wholly Jewish, including B. and Jerry, and I half expected a raid. In college, B. had seemed like everybody else. Now, association with him struck me as dangerous.

  I couldn’t tell him, though; I couldn’t tell him where my mind went when it wandered. He would say I was crazy, and because I valued his opinion more than I did my own, I would believe him. Besides, I couldn’t bear to have him think me an anti-Semite. Once he had stood in the old playroom of my home in Rhode Island with tears in his eyes and asked, “What’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t she like me?” He was asking about my mother, to whom a Jew—apart from the textile brokers who had been my father’s Providence friends—was Roy Cohn.

  My mother was Catholic, so she feared the pope, and mostly Irish, so she feared the WASP. She saw my future—barred from the Greenbrier and the Homestead, unwelcome at country clubs, and eventually cast into hell—and she wept. Of course my mother didn’t like B. He was endangering my immortal soul. I, though, didn’t worry much about my soul. My eye was on the chair.

  If I wasn’t comfortable in the Needle Trades Auditorium, neither was I comfortable in the apartment on the Lower East Side that Jerry took us to one night. There were a lot of painters there, some of whom are probably famous now, but the only person I remember by name is a woman named Sorietta who sat with her knees apart and had dirt between her toes. We drank tea from glasses while she sang “Come Way from My Window” in a basso so profundo I was afraid the neighbors would complain and the police would come and lead us off to jail, because everyone there was Jewish and probably selling nuclear secrets on the side. I was merely a muddled Catholic, but who would believe me?

  I wasn’t comfortable the night we went to a loft on Sixth Avenue for something called Folksay, either. I have never figured out what Folksay was, only that we had been taken there after an Equity Library Theatre production of a Depression-era play called White Wings, which it had partly sponsored. The room was set up with folding chairs, and soon after we sat down, a large black man strode along the aisle to shouts of “Here comes de Lawd.” He’d played the lead in Green Pastures, had just been released from imprisonment on a rape charge, and was now returning to the hosannas of the faithful. I didn’t care whether the charge had been trumped up, as Jerry said, or not. All I knew was that things were looking pretty pink in there.

  Then another man, an actor—it may have been Will Geer—stood up with his guitar and his reedy tenor to sing some old Wobbly songs, all of them dedicated to Big Bill Heywood. For someone who’d been told by a classmate from Shaker Heights who had money, a horse, and a forehead a quarter of an inch high that her playing of the Weavers’ “Kisses Sweeter than Wine” was tantamount to treason, this was terrifying.

  The evening’s climax was the appearance of Woody Guthrie, small, narrow, stiff, already encased in the disease that killed him. Now I brag about having seen Woody Guthrie, as one would brag about having seen Shelley plain, but then I just wanted out of that loft and into my apartment at 148 Waverly Place, with Allie in her striped pajamas and pincurls and Vivaldi on the phonograph.

  In the midst of the “Here comes de Lawd”s and the Wobbly repertoire and the adulation of the rigid, silent Woody, a plump young man in pinstripes leaned toward me and whispered, “I wish to God we were at the Bon Soir.”

  “So do I,” I whispered, and wondered if there were not still time to turn back to young men who called their dates “really great gals,” and evenings in smoky rooms in which someone was singing “Down in the Depths” and “Love Walked In,” where all I had to be was polite and nice and a bit of a bon vivant. One night when I was leaving our apartment for tea (in a glass) at a friend of Jerry’s, Allie said, “I’ll bet there’s nobody in that crowd who even knows how to mix a martini.”

  Jerry had sat in on some Communist trials in Seattle, on the side of the accused, and the young man I was to marry had had a cousin who had died with the Lincoln Brigade. Together they hammered at my allegiance to the religion that had produced Francisco Franco and Joseph McCarthy, not to mention its having prevented the residents of the state of Connecticut from getting birth control information. I myself had a diaphragm, and when the doctor was fitting me with it, the ring sprang from his hands like a mouse and bounced across the room. I hated putting it in and hooking it out, and all my defenses of Catholicism were hampered by the knowledge that my legs were crossed over a gasket-sealed womb.

  Not that it made any difference, really. I was not as quick and glib and bright as Jerry and B., and never sounded more ridiculous than when I was attempting to describe the doctrine of transsubstantiation or rub their noses in Duns Scotus. What I really believed I could never have said aloud, not even to myself. What I really believed was that if I said my prayers nightly, my father would be freed from purgatory and ascend into heaven.

  St. Joseph’s Church was just around the corner, on Sixth Avenue, and the building next door to 148 Waverly Place was a convent. Never had I lived so close to nuns and clergy and incense. But trusting in magic is not the same as having a faith, and I would not have gone to mass if not for Allie. She was contemplating conversion.

  Allies mother, whom I had met at graduation, was tall and thin, so attenuated that she seemed to sway when she walked. That she had converted to Catholicism struck me as logical: she looked like she needed a mooring mast. Allie was also tall and thin and smoked Pall Malls—“Pell Mells” we called them, not knowing we were aping the English—right down to the stub, so I assumed she also needed a mooring mast.

  St. Joseph’s was the kind of church that would appeal to a potential convert, especially one who, like Allie, had belonged to one of the fancier Protestant sects. The windows were the usual stained glass, but the architecture was Greek Revival, so the flamboyance of the first was cooled by the rationality of the second. The statues were few, the stations of the cross inoffensive, the sermons short, and saccharine hymns like “Mother at thy feet is knee-eee-ling” never sounded from the choir loft.

  Most of the choir members belonged to a group of musicians called Pro Musica Antiqua, and the choirmaster was Pro Musica’s harpsichordist, so the music was on a level I, and Allie, had never heard in a church before. Here the hymns were born in the fifteenth or sixteenth century or earlier, and listening to them was like licking an icicle: the same chill, the same purity. Their chastity made me understand why Allie wanted to convert, why Clare Boothe Luce had converted, why my father had kept a breviary by his bed. But hidden in my suitcase at home was a sin made tangible: that diaphragm. To give it up would mean giving up B., and to do that would be like losing my father again. So I never saw the inside of a confessional at St. Joseph
’s, never knelt at its communion rail, never again knew what it was to have one of those flat, dry wafers stick to the roof of my mouth. Instead I marveled that Allie, or anyone, would actually choose Catholicism. There’d been no choice for me—I had only been in the world a few days when I was baptized—but I think I would have picked something simpler if I had had the chance.

  Nevertheless, I loved those Sunday mornings in St. Joseph’s, with the hot summer slipping in over the tilted stained glass windows and the doors open on the traffic noises from Sixth Avenue. I loved walking over to Washington Square with the Sunday papers afterward and sitting on a bench to watch the old Italian men playing chess and checkers on the scored cement tables. Allie did the crossword; I closed my eyes against the elm-dappled light; pigeons scurried after bits torn from somebody’s breakfast bagel. Still marooned in English muffins, we had yet to taste one.

  Along about one o’clock, we would rise, push the papers into a trash can, inhale deeply of the only grass we would smell all week, and walk back to Waverly Place to struggle with Sunday dinner. While Allie made martinis out of the Dixie Belle and a drop or two of Noilly Prat, I fought with a stove whose flames were always close to dying, and together we gloried in the grownupness of it all. Once we even entertained.

  On a steaming Sunday in August, B. and Jerry came for dinner. Unfamiliar with the vast terrain between egg salad sandwiches and Thanksgiving feasts, we served roast turkey with stuffing and mashed potatoes. Our motives were different, of course, but we had as frail a sense of the appropriate as Alice Adams’s mother. No matter. Turkey meant gala to us, and to B. and Jerry, too. Jerry carved. Needless to say, he knew how.

  The following weekend Allies father came up from Bethesda and promised us dinner at the Plaza. Leaving 575 Madison that Friday night to walk the four blocks to the hotel, I felt for the first time like one of the pretty girls at Henry Halper’s counter: on the town and on my way. But when I got to the Plaza I couldn’t find the desk, and fearful of revealing my gaucherie even to a bellboy I would never see again, I slunk out past the Palm Court and subwayed home. Already I was possessed of the New York disease: a feverish desire to appear knowing, no matter how deep one’s ignorance.

  The next day, another scorcher, Allies father took us to a famous fish house, Sea Fare I think it was, on Eighth Street, and I ate some clams that must have spent a few hours in the sun. At least I think it was bad clams that had me rushing out of the Thalia—Jerry had sent us to Major Barbara —a few hours later, my cheeks puffed over my returning lunch and B. in tow. We got into a cab, and I remember regretting that I was in no condition to enjoy the very first cab we had ever taken together before I vomited. I vomited, in fact, the length of Ninety-sixth Street, vomited again when we got to B.’s apartment, vomited long past the time there was anything left to spew. Meanwhile, as I lay heaving on the rollaway cot Jerry kept for guests, B. stood at the kitchen sink, rinsing out my gingham skirt. That he would handle that stinking skirt, that he could bear looking at a woman with sticky hair, a flushed face, and underwear as grimly practical as a mop and pail, was as great a proof of love as I could ever ask.

  That night, too weak to return to Waverly Place, I lay on the rollaway cot, between the kitchen sink and the kitchen table. To my left was B., asleep on the studio couch in his tiny bedroom. To his left was Jerry, asleep in his tiny bedroom. To Jerry’s left was Sidney, asleep in his tiny bedroom. My skirt was draped over the sash of the kitchen’s one window, moving slightly in the hot, sooty breeze. My pink shirt, also damp, was on the back of a chair. Nobody had thought to find me a pair of pajamas, nor had I thought to ask for any. I was still wearing my underwear.

  Lying there, listening to the rumble out on Ninety-sixth Street and the snores and snuffles of my three companions, I realized there was no turning back. In losing my virginity to B. during my junior year in college, in the front seat of his Plymouth, wedged against the steering wheel, I had lost my freedom. And in lying here in this railroad flat in my underwear, cheek by jowl with three young men who’d been witness to my vomiting, my dry heaves, and my diarrhea, I had passed the point of no return. There was no bathing me in the blood of the Lamb. I had crossed over.

  3

  SOMETIME TOWARD the end of September the heat began to lift. Now the air was laced with a thin, cool thread and by five o’clock the light was blue. The weddings were winding down—Allie and I had gone to three in July alone—and the classmates who had spent the summer after graduation in Europe were getting apartments on the Upper East Side. Only Allie and I were in the Village, along with everybody else who didn’t want to get dressed up on the weekend. Even today there is something about the Village—a certain seediness, a certain raffishness—that makes its residents feel unbuttoned, ungirdled. The Village is more than a home. It is a hangout.

  When we had moved into 148 Waverly Place, Allie and I had had a few plans for the garden—a couple of chairs, maybe, and a little table. But the weeds and the cracked cement and the broken glass defeated us. Seldom did we sit outside, and the night the weather took a chilly turn and had us shivering on our studio couches was the night one of us got up and locked the back door for good.

  The closing of that door marked the end of college more surely than that hot June afternoon when we sat in Palmer Auditorium drowsing through a commencement address by a former United States commissioner of education. The past three months had been a postscript to school—we were still wearing the same clothes, after all, and we still thought going to the movies on a weeknight was somehow illicit—but that part of our lives was finally, officially over. One Saturday afternoon we strolled through the College Shop at Lord & Taylor, checking out the Shetland sweaters and the Bermuda shorts and the camel’s hair polo coats, sorrowful that they would never be ours again and even a little frightened. We had outgrown them, without yet having anything else to wear. Neither of us knew what we should look like now.

  Some women, of course, never give up the wardrobe. I see it wherever WASPs gather, in the headbands and gold bobby pins that hold back still pageboyed hair, and in little Belgian shoes on little bony feet. But that uniform would never have done for Mademoiselle. Now at lunchtime I studied the clothes at Bonwit’s, puzzled because I couldn’t seem to find anything resembling what the fashion editors wore and ignorant of the fact that not one of them ever went retail for anything. Eventually, when the fabric department had a remnants sale, I bought a length of green tweed, took it to a tailor on West Seventy-second Street (I had found his name in the Yellow Pages), and had it made up into a stern suit which I believed announced intelligence as well as chic.

  The parents of the young man I was to marry arrived from Seattle. The father looked a bit like Fiorello La Guardia and the mother looked a lot like B., and neither of them looked Jewish, which I knew would be a great relief to my mother. We sat together on a bench in Central Park while Mr. L., nearly seventy, teased me and was avuncular and Mrs. L. told me about how her son’s favorite song when he was a boy had been “The Girl That I Marry,” and now here I was.

  One of B.’s twin sisters moved to Paris with her young sons and wrote to us about our wedding present: “I have in mind, for linens, a really good tablecloth . . . perhaps an organdy job from Madeira, or cutwork from Florence. Or would you like a pair of English blankets? Also, if you’d like a complete set of crystal, the one thing that seems to be cheaper in France, let me know and I could bring it back with me.”

  His other twin sister, who wanted to be in the theater but was in advertising instead, said, “Well, you’ve got your man, but I’ve got to go on looking” and gave a cocktail party. One guest recited Vachel Lindsay—“Boomlay, boomlay!” he shouted across the canapés—and my soon-to-be sister-in-law spoke of how Martha Graham had raved about her plié when she was a student at Bennington. I had a nervous moment when I heard some people talking about how you could get off the blacklist if you had the money, but mostly I marveled at how far I had traveled.

&nb
sp; Meanwhile, B. was making the rounds of priests, seeing if there was one who would marry us without his agreeing to sit through religious instructions and sign his children’s lives away, and wherever he went he was received rudely. Or so he said, and I believe it. A rich friend of my father’s tried to bribe the Catholic chaplain up at Columbia into marrying us without any prénuptial fuss. Or so I heard, and I believe that, too. And I just wanted everybody to go away and leave me alone, because while I did not care about offending God, I did not want to disappoint my father. “Oh, Lulubelle,” he would have said, “it’s a terrible thing to lose your faith.”

  “But not,” I would have told him, “as terrible a thing as losing you.”

  Allie and I didn’t discuss my impending wedding. We never discussed religion, we never discussed love, and goodness knows we never discussed sex. Doing so would have implied that the speakers knew something about it, and if we did, we 199 graduates of Connecticut College Class of ’53, we kept it a secret. We all knew that the Playtex panty girdle was the finest of all chastity belts, and Allie and I had known a girl who always inserted two tampons before going out on a date. By the time they were dealt with, she figured, the impulse would be gone. We had also known a girl—she lived down the hall from us—who thought she was pregnant by a boy from Yale, took pills, and then set fire to her room. The smoke, which somebody saw, saved her. But if we gossiped about the girl with the Tampaxes and the girl who tried to incinerate us all, we never gossiped about ourselves. Instead we were silent about where we slept when we went to Yale or Wesleyan or Brown for the weekend, and if we panicked when we studied our calendars, we kept it to ourselves. The night B. became a part of me—indissolubly, I believed—in the parking lot behind my dormitory, I walked on tiptoe afterward to my room. Were one of my dormmates to open her door and see the blood on my legs, she would know the truth about me. But nobody knew the truth about me or, I suspect, about anybody else.