Manhattan, When I Was Young

by Mary Cantwell

  So Allie kept silence and I kept silence, and one evening, while she buried her nose in a book and pretended deafness, I quarreled with B., who loved debate but hated emotion. Lose one’s temper or burst into tears and he would say, “I never realized how sick you really are” and leave. This time I let him go, and as I did I felt a great weight rising off my back. After two years, I was finally free of hands that went where I did not want them to go and assaults on the faith of my father and people who seemed to believe in nothing at all but brains, their own in particular.

  The room was quiet, and Allie, still faking deafness, was brewing tea. In another hour she would be asleep, and the only sounds would be her soft, slow breathing and the occasional yowl from whatever tomcat was strolling in the garden. This was how I wanted to live, in peace, in the light of a reading lamp, with “Glory be to God for dappled things” on my lap.

  My share of the phonograph records was piled next to my couch, and I started to separate those B. had lent me from those I had bought for myself. I would give his back, the Marlene Dietrichs and the Edith Piafs, the Yves Montands and the Jean Sablons, all of them souvenirs of the Paris in which he had lived and for which I longed as ardently as I had once longed for the kind of college at which girls rolled hoops on May Day. I separated out the books, too, the Hopkins he’d given me at Christmas of my senior year and the Woolfs with which he was trying to educate me and the Tristan Corbière with which he was trying to improve my French.

  If it hadn’t been for him, I thought, I would not have heard Montand sing “Les Feuilles Mortes” or read Mrs. Dalloway or tasted Brie or drunk any wine beyond sherry. I would not have known about Shakespeare and Company or Harry and Caresse Crosby or what it was like to live up near the Pantheon and breakfast on croissants. I would never have smelled a Gauloise. Maybe I would not even have had my job at Mademoiselle; he had told me how to behave during the interview. I would not have anything, really, except my virginity. I would be back in the town in which I was born, bouncing from pillar to post because Papa was not there anymore to say, “When you do this . . . when you do that.” Weeping, I went out into the dark hallway, up the shabby stairs to the parlor floor, to the pay phone hanging on the wall. “I’m sorry,” I said when he answered. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  There is only one night that sticks out between that evening and my wedding day, the night Allie and I went to the theater on press passes and she lost me. Misplaced me, really. One could say that I misplaced her, of course, but since I am five-five to her five-nine, I continue to think of myself as the overlooked item.

  She lost me in the lobby of City Center, up on West Fifty-fifth Street, after the curtain fell on Jose Ferrer in Cyrano de Bergerac, and since she was carrying our bus money, she left me with no way to get home. I panicked for a few seconds, hating this place where I knew nobody and nobody knew me and where there was no help on heaven or earth. Then I did what I had always done when I was a child and two or so miles lay between me and the skating pond or the hill for coasting or the meadow for hunting arrowheads. I walked.

  Down Fifth Avenue, I said to myself, that’s the best way. There’ll be people out, looking in the store windows.

  Only there weren’t. Midtown Manhattan, I found out during a hike in a city so quiet I could hear my heels clicking on the sidewalk, shuts down at about eleven, maybe even ten o’clock, and the cars are so few that one can hear the swishing sound their wheels make on the pavement. Elsewhere in the city people were drinking after-dinner coffee in the restaurants I had not yet seen, hanging out in the jazz joints I had only read about. But there was no one on Fifth Avenue besides the mannequins gesturing in the windows of Saks and Lord & Taylor and Franklin Simon and B. Altman, and after I crossed Thirty-fourth Street, the only lights were from the streetlamps. The Flatiron Building, looming like a tall ship in the distance, seemed as desolate as the Marie Celeste.

  Now it is past believing, that I walked those forty or fifty blocks without a hiss from a doorway or a whisper of footsteps behind me. The cars swished, my heels clicked, the rest was silence. No figure slouched against a building; no heap of rags was sleeping over a steam grate. Over on the Bowery drunks were lined up on the sidewalks like sardines in a tin, but Fifth Avenue was the Fifth Avenue of the Steichen photograph: as unsmudged as the moon.

  When I was an adolescent, coming home from supper at a friend’s, I often walked through a landscape as still as this one. In Rhode Island I had feared strange men leaping out from behind the elms and maples and oaks and privet hedges. In New York I feared strange men leaping out from behind mailboxes and the old doors that fenced construction sites. But now it seemed that there was no more to fear in this vast city than there had been to fear in my small town. I was relieved when I saw Washington Square Arch, just as I had been relieved when I had seen my grandparents’ big, awkward Victorian beaming like a lighthouse, but sad, too. The only time I ever think about death is on long walks like that one, when I realize that what I am seeing does not depend on me for its existence.

  I never did it again—walk like that in New York, I mean, alone for miles in the middle of the night. But I did it then, taking in the dinosaurs that were those old empty buildings as avidly as I had once taken in rustling trees and sleeping clapboard houses. I took in the smell, that curious confluence of asphalt and automobile exhaust and swill and, surprisingly, tidal flats, and most of all I took in the swollen, purplish sky, in which, in all the years I have stared at it, I have never seen more than two stars.

  B. was ready to settle down; it was as simple as that. So were the boys he had gone to school with. They were all still boys, some of them even younger than he, and they were all as eager to embark on domesticity as he was. First you got your life in order, that was the idea, and then you lived it. Twenty-four, which B. was, was more than old enough to have a wife, have a home, have a real job, and there was no reason to believe you wouldn’t keep all three until the day you died. I, however, had never traveled, never truly been on my own. I wasn’t old enough for anything. But marrying young, a classmate used to say, was like getting to a sale on the first day. God knows what, if anything, would be left if you waited till you were twenty-five or -six.

  Besides, I had slept with him, and the flesh, I believed, was an unbreakable link. Furthermore, he had delivered an ultimatum. If I did not marry him right now, he was not going to hang around any longer.

  We went to Saks Fifth Avenue together for the dress, and he, so pleased and excited to be a groom, lingered for a while over something in green wool, with fake leopard cuffs. Young, and as innocent in his way as I was in mine, he had no idea of what, besides ten yards of tulle, women got married in. Finally we picked a cocktailish kind of thing in beige silk taffeta, with a high neck, a low back, and a big bow. I was wearing my new Capezios, dark red suede with black heels, when I tried it on, and the saleslady, not knowing it was to be my wedding gown, said, “Be sure you wear these shoes with this. They look wonderful.”

  “Oh God, this’ll be a nine-day wonder in Bristol,” my mother said when we called her, but she came to New York anyway. My sister, who was in her senior year at college, came with her, along with my oldest friend and some friends of my father’s with their wives. They, all Protestants, were distressed for Papa’s sake that a judge was to perform the ceremony but determined to do their best for my mother. So they took an enormous suite at the Essex House and made believe they were at the Rhode Island Country Club.

  Allie, my future sister-in-law, and I made the canapés and iced the petits fours, and B. ordered the wedding cake from a Yorkville bakery. My sister-in-law also went down to the flower district on Sixth Avenue for dozens of carnations with which to frame her fake fireplace. The judge was a Supreme Court judge, the gift of a friend of B.’s father’s.

  Before I left the office on Friday night, Joel and Hugh each gave me a ten-dollar bill. “Buy yourself a spatula,” Joel wrote on the accompanying card. “You won
’t be able to live without one.” But I spent most of the money a few minutes later, at Best & Co., on two sheer nightgowns, the first I had ever owned. They constituted my trousseau; the green suit was my going-away suit for our one-night honeymoon at a hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street. Number i Fifth Avenue was the closest we could get to the old Brevoort, which was torn down before it was our turn to be Greenwich Village bohemians and only a block from Washington Square.

  B. had bought a new blue suit, nicer than the Puerto Rican revolutionary suit and the gray flannel, and on the morning of the wedding got a haircut and his first manicure. Jerry, seeing him reclining in the barber’s chair with his hand stretched out to the manicurist, said he looked like a gangster.

  And I? I awakened in a room that I would never see again. My oldest friend was asleep on the other side—Allie had given up her studio couch for the night—and a damp chill was, as usual, seeping in under the back door. My records and books were gone, and so were most of my clothes. The mirror, which the landlord had promised to hang and never did, still leaned against the fireplace, and the light was dim and dirty. It was time to go. I had exhausted this place. Even so, it took my oldest friend to urge me out the door and into her car. “I always thought I’d be with you on your wedding day,” she said as we went up Fifth Avenue, “but I never thought I’d be driving you to the ceremony.”

  When we got to the Essex House, my dress needed hemming, my hair needed doing, and my nails were unpolished. The wife of one of Papa’s friends summoned the hotel housekeeper and handed her the dress. She called the beauty parlor on the first floor and booked me a shampoo, set, and manicure. Another wife took my mother to Bergdorf’s, where Mother bought a lacy garter for my something blue. The same wife gave me a dime to put in my shoes, the red Capezios. They were my something old; the dime was my something borrowed; the dress was my something new. There was nothing for it now but to marry. My reluctant mother and her friends had, without knowing it, put me on a conveyor belt.

  At the wedding reception, the maid who was opening the champagne bottles that my sister-in-law had deposited in ice in her bathtub said she had never seen so many pretty girls. They were my friends from college—triumphs, all of them, of orthodontia and orange juice and poached eggs on toast. They were pretty, I was pretty, everyone was pretty in the Class of ’53. Some years later one of our crowd, or maybe she was a year ahead of us, jumped into the airshaft of the Biltmore Hotel and landed in the Palm Court. I have always thought it was the perfect Conn. College death: she just missed ending up under the Biltmore’s famous clock.

  How could he resist me, a brown-haired shiksa who read Gerard Manley Hopkins and knew all the college songs? How could I resist him, a dark-haired Jew who looked like Montgomery Clift and had studied in Paris and carried a copy of Orlando in his raincoat pocket? Resistance was out of the question. Not walking into the living room, which is what I wanted to do, was out of the question, too. Everyone—my mother in borrowed navy blue crepe, my sister in her best taffeta party dress, the groom in his new suit with polished nails and a hope he would never have again—was waiting for me. On the dot of three, with the back of my head looped by a wreath of white roses and my gloved hands clutching a matching bouquet, I walked out of my sister-in-law’s bedroom.

  The judge, his back to the fake fireplace, looked around at the boys from Wesleyan and the girls from Conn. College, at the three-piece suits that were my father’s friends and the silk crepes that were their wives. “I can see you are all educated people,” he said, and began the ceremony.

  301 East Twenty-first Street

  1

  B. FOUND THE APARTMENT. It was at 301 East Twenty-first Street, on the thirteenth floor of a building named the Petersfield. “Guess what?” he said when he called the office a few days before the wedding. “It’s got walk-in closets!” There had been no closets in his place on Ninety-sixth Street, only a cheap wardrobe, and Allie and I had kept our clothes in our old college suitcases. Walk-in closets told us more surely than my wedding ring, for which we’d spent $18 at Cartier’s, that we were now embarked on adult life.

  Finding a place was not hard, even though B. started only a week or so before the wedding. Nothing seemed to be very hard then. East Twenty-first Street was a nowhere part of town, and although the el was no longer running, the elevated tracks still traveled, dark and spidery, along Third Avenue. But the rent was only $89.90 a month, including utilities. I loved the term “including utilities.” I would roll it over on my tongue. It was New York talk, like “I grabbed the shuttle” and “He works at 30 Rock,” and speaking it meant I was settling in.

  All the apartment’s windows—one in the living room, another in the bedroom—faced an airshaft, and when it snowed the flakes drifted into the warm air toward the bottom of the shaft and then rose, so that looking out a window during a blizzard was like looking into a popcorn machine.

  Sound drifted upward, too, from the apartment directly below us, where a woman whose romantic life kept us sleepless fought with a long series of boyfriends. “That’s what I think of Latex International,” we heard her say one night, and we got to the window just in time to see a female hand fling an open briefcase into the airshaft and the papers spiral as they hit the updraft. Which of the women we saw leaving for work in the morning was she? we wondered. And which of the men was the homosexual who had gone to a costume party naked but for a coat of gold paint on his penis? Living in a big apartment house, with our ears forever to the wall or out the window, we knew more about our neighbors than our parents knew about the people with whom they had exchanged “Good morning’s and ”Looks like we’ve got another nice day’s for years. But we preserved silence in the building’s elevators, as did the rest of the residents of 301 East Twenty-first Street, and we could not have matched a voice to a person to save our lives.

  We could not have said what we liked in the way of furniture, either, although we had spent hours in Bloomingdale’s looking at the rosewood room dividers and the Paul McCobb couches and B. had bought a home improvement magazine whose pages he marked with “What we do want” and “What we don’t want.” So, but for a table from the Door Store flanked by four unpainted captain’s chairs from Macy’s, Jerry made most of it: a couch, which was merely a wooden frame on black iron legs on which was set a mattress and three pillows covered with fake nubby linen; a rosewood coffee table; and a so-called easy chair, which was not easy at all because it was only a wooden frame pillowed with two squares of Naugahyde-covered foam rubber.

  Jerry’s masterwork was a black boxlike structure he had designed and built to house a Ro-tiss-o-mat, our major wedding present. Once you pulled down a lid, the Ro-tiss-o-mat was revealed, and when a roaster was revolving on the spit, you could no more take your eyes off it than you could a fireplace. We treated the box like a fireplace, too. On cold nights of that first married winter—the wedding was just before Christmas—Jerry and B. and I would sit around it, staring into the dripping fat and marveling as the chicken went from white to gold.

  We also had a Swedish crystal bud vase, silver-plated candlesticks, and, at the far end of the living room, a wall (again Jerry’s work) that combined bookshelves, a niche for the Columbia 360, slots for the records, a plywood writing surface, and, cleverest of all, a small coffin into which one could slide the typewriter table. My only contribution to the room’s décor was a pair of brown, black, and white curtains made, badly, on a rented sewing machine with fabric from B. Altman’s Young Homemaker’s Shop. B. contributed three lithographs he had bought in Paris, two Rouaults and a Matisse: proof positive of the junior year abroad, about which I could never hear enough. “Tell me again about the night your uncle took you to the Café de Paris,” I would say. “Tell me again what snails taste like.” He would smile and begin. “Well, the Café de Paris—I think it’s closed now—had men dressed like Cossacks standing at the entrance, and. . . . ” I would smile, too, the best audience then that he could ev
er hope to have.

  Jerry gave us our plates, red Russel Wright rejects a friend of his was throwing out, and B. found our serving platter, the lid of a broken oval pottery casserole a friend of his was throwing out. Oh yes, there was a shag rug, deep green, over which I occasionally pushed the old Hoover B.’s sister was throwing out. The silver, a stainless steel imitation of Danish work, came from the Pottery Barn and was paid for by my mother’s $50 wedding check.

  If the apartment had a flaw, aside from its perpetual gloom, it was the kitchen, which was the size of a closet and painted mud brown. The refrigerator was under the stovetop and the oven on the wall. I knew nothing about cleaning ovens, and the day ours caught fire and the doorman came up with a fire extinguisher, I reddened with shame, because when he opened the oven door he saw two frozen dinners sitting inside. By that time I fancied myself quite a cook, having gone through every recipe in a book called Quick ‘n’ Easy Meals for Two that B. had given me, and I kept telling the doorman that we hardly ever had frozen dinners. He nodded and walked out, leaving me desperate for the casual chatter that had attended my childhood’s every transaction. Was there no one in this city who, as my mother would have put it, “took an interest”?