Manhattan, When I Was Young

by Mary Cantwell

  The window of my new office faced Fifty-seventh Street, between Madison and Park, and since the magazine was only six flights up, I had a good view of the browsers and the strollers and, occasionally, the famous. One afternoon, for instance, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip crossed Fifty-seventh from east to west in an open car. The secretaries and assistants from C.A.’s bullpen rushed in, and when one of them, peering over my shoulder, mourned that she had nothing to throw—confetti, say—another said, “I can give you a phone book.” At last I was in the land of smart talk.

  Another time I saw the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, he the size of a jockey, she the width of a hatchet, marooned on a street corner. Whoever was supposed to pick them up was late, so they, helpless as beached fish, stood motionless while pedestrians perused their every inch. Looking out that window was like being at the movies, and I could not get enough of the spectacle. Being junior to Kathy, however, I had the desk by the door.

  Actually, the view out the door wasn’t bad either. After Dylan Thomas died, a girlfriend of his—tall, dark, and lachrymose—sat one long afternoon beside C.A.’s desk (C.A. had known him, and devoted almost an entire issue to Under Milk Wood) and sobbed. Carson McCullers, the fiction editor’s sister, lurched in, tall, pinheaded, and on crutches. Françoise Sagan, too, after Bonjour Tristesse, small and wan and stared at by everyone who suddenly found a reason to be in the bullpen. Living legends called Leo Lerman. When Cary Grant gave the girl who answered the phone his name, she said, “Oh, my God!” and hung up. And everyone was kind to me because I was such a relief after Kathy, who, although keeping dibs on the desk by the window, was now working from home. Kathy had struck terror in the heart.

  I even made it onto the pages of Mademoiselle, in a spread on short haircuts. The beauty editor had me photographed, and there I am for all time, uncharacteristically elfin and slightly bucktoothed. I am also wearing the green suit, but it was on its way out. After going to a few showings—Kathy believed that copywriters should actually see clothes once in a while—I was slowly acquiring samples out of the back room at Claire McCardell. In them I looked like the kind of woman who could dance Appalachian Spring, and that struck me as just about perfect: a little to the right of Village boho and way to the left of Peck & Peck and the Bermuda Shop.

  The fiction editor’s assistant was living in sin, and Rita blamed herself, because she had introduced the girl to her seducer. Sometimes there was sobbing in the ladies’ room, and there were rumors of abortions, all of which seemed to have been performed in Hoboken. Fetuses were swimming in the sewers of New Jersey, and what was spinsterhood after all but cold and rain and a wind that blew up your skirts and chilled your legs? Thank God I was spending my lunch hours in Bloomingdale’s, not knocking back martinis at Barney’s, and thank God for B., who had known better than I what was best for me. I was safe, I was warm, I was married.

  Still, there were those days and nights when I lay in bed in darkness, tears seeping out from under my closed eyes, and B. sat in the living room, hurt and lonely because migraine took me to a place where neither he nor anyone else could follow. Finally, shy and embarrassed but trusting because she was older than I was, I asked Kathy if she knew of a psychiatrist. Of course she did. She had visited one from every school, for disabilities ranging from broken heart to writer’s block to chronic itch. “Rita’s been looking pretty good lately,” she said. “Let’s see who she’s going to these days.”

  Rita’s psychiatrist was named Dr. Franklin. He was plump and pleasant and spoke with a middle European accent that in all the many years I knew him he could not conquer. He did not inquire about my husband, my father, or my sex life. I simply asked him, “Can you help my head?” and he said, “Yes.”

  And then we moved from Twenty-first Street.

  224 West Eleventh Street

  1

  A DAY OR SO after the Blizzard of 1888, a photographer named Cranmer C. Langill focused his camera on Eleventh Street, west of Seventh Avenue. A man in a white apron and visored cap—he probably works at the grocery in the foreground—is shoveling snow. Two men in overcoats and tall hats stand beside him, and a little girl in a coat with shiny buttons is in front of them. The snow in the gutter is piled higher than their heads, and there on the left, next to the portico of the Church of St. John the Evangelist, is 224 West Eleventh Street. Our new home.

  In 1888, 224 West Eleventh Street probably housed one family. In the mid-1950s, it housed five. The minister who was our landlord—or, rather, St. John’s Church was our landlord—lived with his family in the bottom duplex. A childless middle-aged couple who seldom made a sound lived in the third-floor back. A Scotswoman had the fourth-floor front; somebody we never laid eyes on had the fourth-floor back. We ourselves had the third-floor front, $120 a month and acquired, as most such apartments were acquired, by word of mouth. It had belonged to Mademoiselle’s office manager and her husband, who were moving to Connecticut, and she passed it on to me.

  There was no proper entrance hall. Open the door and one was in the kitchen, small and painted my favorite mud brown. The refrigerator was full-size, thank God, though the freezer was tiny, and we put a hook on the wall for our first important cooking utensil, a copper-bottomed Revere Ware skillet. The sink leaked, and the only way I could ever get it fixed was to tell Father Graf, the minister, that I was afraid something terrible would happen to his ceiling. The stove was a Royal Rose.

  The living room was the room we had imagined when we sat around the Door Store table, resting our elbows on the Times real estate section: a large square with two tall windows facing north and a white Italian marble fireplace on the east wall. All the walls but the south wall, which was forest green, were white. The white ball-fringed curtains were made by the seamstress at the Little Homemaker Shoppe in Bristol, Rhode Island, and the long quasi-mahogany bureau was now the quasi-mahogany sideboard. In it were towels and sheets, and on top were the sterling silver coffeepot, sugar bowl, and cream pitcher that my Parisian sister-in-law had finally decided on for our wedding present and that we finally had a chance to display.

  The black Ro-tiss-o-mat holder was gone, along with the shag rug, the Door Store table, and the captain’s chairs, but we had brought the couch and the easy chair from Twenty-first Street. There was a real couch, too, a pumpkin-colored Paul McCobb loveseat from Sloane’s, and a real desk, an eighteenth-century pine slant-top from an antique shop near Bristol. A real mahogany table and four real Hitchcock chairs from the same place were between the windows. We had a few prints, by French artists, a floor-to-ceiling bookcase in the southeast corner, and a pair of tiny silver-plated candleholders from the Museum Silver Shop. We were beginning to acquire style.

  The bedroom was just big enough for the three-quarter bed, a bureau (the short Macy’s unpainted) at its foot, and, across a narrow aisle, a bookcase jammed with my detective stories. Two walls were painted white and two the pale blue of the Lautrec lithograph we’d hung above the bureau. There were long white ball-fringed curtains here, too, a windowseat, and a millefleur quilt. “Look,” I would say, feeling racy as I said it, to friends peering in the bedroom door. “Did you ever see anything quite so virginal?”

  I had wanted to come back to Greenwich Village ever since I had left Waverly Place, and since moving to West Eleventh Street, I have never lived anyplace else. I do not want to. That is not because of what the Village is but because of what I have made it, and what I have made it depends on who I am at the time. The Village is amorphous; I can shape it into any place. The rest of Manhattan is rectilinear, its grid an order, a single definition, that I dislike. But the Village is a collection of cow-paths and landfill and subterranean rivers, visible, if you know about them, because they are traced by streets paved to mask them.

  If some areas have a certain architectural unity, it is not because an architect had a grand scheme but because row-houses with common walls were put up hastily for people fleeing a yellow fever epidemic downtown. One of the str
eets is called Little West Twelfth, which distinguishes it from West Twelfth and is a distinction that makes no sense whatsoever, because the two streets are unconnected. Everything in the Village—the way Waverly Place takes a right turn, for instance, and West Thirteenth Street’s sudden transformation into Horatio—seems haphazard, accidental. When we first moved there, the old-timers told us the Village had changed. People still tell me the Village has changed. The Village does not change, not really. The Village—the real Village, the one bounded by Fifth Avenue on the east and the Hudson River on the west—remains an accident.

  In the years on West Eleventh, it became the Europe I had yet to see. On Saturday nights we would walk along West Fourth Street to a store that sold Scandinavian modern everything and served free glogg. I didn’t like Scandinavian modern anything, and I hated glogg, but I loved the store owner’s accent. It and the glogg and the Swedish candleholder that was his best seller—six metal angels that revolved around a candle when it was lighted—raised possibilities, unveiled horizons.

  When we went to the Peacock to drink espresso, it was because I believed there were a million Peacock Cafés in Italy, and if I sat in this one, on West Third Street, staring at a waitress who looked like a Veronese, I was sitting in all of them. If we had a drink at the San Remo, it was because of its name and not because everybody hung out there. A lot of famous and about-to-be-famous people hung out at the San Remo. I must have seen them all, and cannot remember any of them. They were not the point. Even if they had been, I would have been too timid to strike up a conversation. Working for a fashion magazine, however distinguished its fiction, separated me, in my eyes and doubtless in theirs, from the literati.

  I started walking again, alone. In Bristol I had walked all the time, long walks that would take me to solitary picnics on the low stone wall surrounding an estate a few miles from our house, or to the meadow a mile further on where the grass seemed a thin skin between myself and the Indians I imagined lying in layers beneath my feet. Walking in the Village, I would quickly exhaust the import shops and the bars, into which I peered, believing that all of America’s young literary life was being lived in them, mostly by fast, fluent talkers like Jerry, and head for the docks.

  There was nothing over there then—no gay bars, no young men in leather jackets and button-front Levis—but nineteenth-century warehouses, a few houses, some vacant lots, and beyond them the river. One block I liked especially. It had two trees and ten or so tired old houses, was paved with cobblestones and littered with whatever the sanitation trucks had missed, and led to the garbage pier. The street was wholly desolate and, for someone who was slowly developing a taste for the seedy and the out-of-season, a magnet.

  The garbage pier was precisely that, the pier where the tugs that lugged garbage out to sea made their pickups. No one ever went that far west then, not on weekends anyway, but myself and the young Italians from the South Village who would park their cars on the dock and curry them as if they were horses. They never bothered me; I never bothered them. They would curry their cars, I would lean against a piling and watch the boats, and all of us would allow ourselves to be wrapped in silence. Silence was the cure, if only temporarily, silence and geography. But of what was I being cured? I do not know, have never known. I only know the cure. Silence, and no connections except to landscape.

  Happier thoughts! I learned to cook! And what a cook I was! Rolling out pastry on the quasi-mahogany sideboard because the kitchen had no counter. The Joy of Cooking replaced by Gourmets I and II. Quick ‘n’ Easy Meals for Two, with its inscription “To my wife, in gastronomic appreciation,” gathering dust.

  We entertained, sometimes as many as six at one time, and B. bought a wooden spice rack, which I hung over the sink and filled with a lot of herbs I never got to use. Fenugreek was one of them. What did one do with fenugreek? I didn’t know, nor did anyone else, but we all had a bottle of it, we apprentice gourmets, in our spice racks. God forbid that we should cook the food of our forebears. Instead we bought chorizo and tortillas at Casa Moneo on West Fourteenth Street, and Polish hams over on Second Avenue, and fillets of beef at a place that sold them cheap on Sixth, and by the time we got dinner on the table we felt as if we had run a marathon. Already we were giving up hard liquor, except for martinis. We were attempting wines, and dry vermouth on the rocks.

  The people we had known in college had begun to harden into types. A friend of B.’s, for instance, had gone to work on Wall Street, and when he walked upstairs to our apartment, his steps were slow and measured, his suits were sober, and he was always carrying a dozen roses for his hostess. So predictable!

  After a dinner party, an editor at a publishing house insisted we play “What novel speaks to your?” “Not a novel,” my husband said, “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-up.” I said, “Anything by Graham Greene”; and the book editor said, “Fiesta. The original title for The Sun Also Rises,” he added when our faces blanked. So pretentious!

  The wife of B.’s friend the medical student kept her diaphragm on the toilet tank, and whenever a man lifted the seat, the box was knocked to the floor, where it opened. Such a showoff!

  We went out—to the theater, because that was what you did in those days, and to cocktail parties, which always ended with someone saying, “Let’s all go to Monte’s” or “Let’s go to the Gran Ticino.” So off we’d go to MacDougal Street, to eat veal scaloppini and drink Soave and order zabaglione—because we loved watching the waiter make it, right at the table!—for dessert.

  We did not watch television, because nobody we knew did, and we did not own one, besides. But we fell in love with What’s My Line and on summer Sunday nights would walk over to Gay Street to watch the show with a man, a classmate of B.’s but older, who was “in theater” and had been given a Mexican silver cigarette lighter by Tennessee Williams. The flame heated the silver to scorching, but never mind. It put us in touch with genius.

  My husband’s aunt and uncle from Montreal came to call and thought our apartment awfully small. The son of a viscount came to call, and he, too, found it awfully small. But what could they know of New York? My secretary (twenty-four and I had a secretary!), who was crazy, recently tossed out of Radcliffe and into Reichian therapy, came to call and brought Isaiah Berlin’s stepson. He said I had delightful feet. I do.

  In college, almost everyone I knew spent the summer before their senior, or maybe their junior, year abroad, and Allie had even spent a winter vacation with her parents there, embarking on KLM, I remember, all done up in her sheared beaver coat. Some were part of the Experiment in International Living and spoke soberly of sharing chores with their host families, but most just traveled around Europe, getting lost a lot, marveling at the toilets (“You should have seen the ones in Marseilles! I thought I’d die!”), and soaking their feet in bidets. When one of our English professors, lecturing us on Henry James, said, “When you’re in the Uffizi, you must . . .,” he was assuming correctly. Of course we would be in the Uffizi someday. Next summer, in fact.

  B. had been in the Uffizi. B. had been everywhere. B. had even cruised to Scandinavia, in a ship so notorious for its bad food that gulls knew better than to track its garbage.

  He had spent his junior year at the Sorbonne, where he’d run into Jerry, whom he had known slightly in Seattle and who had been living in England. They took rooms in a place called l’Hôtel des Grands Hommes, near the Pantheon, and then they looked for Hemingway’s Paris.

  B. had sat in caves where one drank cherry brandy and applauded the entertainment—young, leftish Americans, many of them, singing “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder, ladder, LADDER”—with repeated snaps of the fingers. He had eaten crêpes and used jetons and been accosted by young men whispering that if he was interested, he could see an exhibition just around the corner, two flights up. I ransacked his memory for details. “What exactly does crème fraîche taste like?” I would ask.

  For my classmates, for B., for our friends, Europe was
a rite of passage. Once you had been to Europe, you could settle down—but not before. Because if you did not go, you would be haunted all your life by not having run the bulls at Pamplona while you still had the legs to do it. You would not have the demitasse cups you could trot out after dinner, saying, “We bought these in Venice before Muffie was born.” You would not be able to say to your old roommate, “Remember Pierre? That boy we met at Versailles? Remember that terrible friend of his? Philippe?”

  B. and I saved money and vacation days, and at last, during our first September on West Eleventh Street, we went to Europe, with our clothes in two cheap green plaid suitcases I had bought in a luggage shop that gave discounts to magazine people and a maroon leather diary, gilt-inscribed “Trip Abroad,” that my mother had given me. I was frightened of flying, but Jerry, who came to see us off at the East Side Airlines Terminal, told me to imagine that I was rolling across an empty highway, and by the time we had been two hours in the air I was a familiar of the aisle, a sightseer who crabwalked from one side of the plane to the other to peer at the Atlantic, which looked marceled, and at minute boats, which I believed to be strung across our route, ready and able to pick us up if the plane dumped.

  In Paris our hotel was on a quay and our room faced the Seine, and below the tiny balcony on which I stepped on our first morning an old man was pushing the water that ran along the gutter with bunched twigs tied to a wooden handle. “It’s like François Villon,” I said with a gasp. “François Villon!” I loved Paris, I loved everything about Paris, and above all else I loved my husband most in Paris.

  Both of us spoke French with awkward American accents, but B.’s was fluent and idiomatic, so he did all the talking for us. He knew how to order breakfast from room service—“Deux cafés complets, s’il vous plait” —and how to go where on the métro and how you ordered une fine rather than a cognac. I was dizzy with worship.