Manhattan, When I Was Young

by Mary Cantwell

  I loved living at 21 Perry Street. Finally I could do again what I had done for all the years of my childhood. I could spy.

  My family spied. If my aunt was looking out the window and a neighbor’s car drove by, she would say, “I wonder where the Armstrongs are going this time of day.” The lights going on next door would evoke my mother’s “Guess the Tingleys are home,” and my grandmother, who spent every afternoon sitting in her bay window, was timekeeper for the twice-weekly meetings of the woman who lived across the street and the man with whom she was having an affair. “There goes Ralph,” Ganny would say as he turned his car into her driveway, and “There he goes again” an hour later. But they never gossiped, not even among themselves, nor did they want to know more than what they had seen with their own eyes. Watching the play was sufficient, and the house, with its two porches and big windows, gave them front seats. Small wonder that I, too, grew up a spectator. I had spent too many hours with my grandmother to be otherwise.

  Now, instead of sitting with Ganny, with my head, like hers, turned toward Hope Street, I walked the paths of St. John’s Garden, watching for shadows beyond the windows, pausing to chat with whoever was sitting under the catalpa tree. If I was not really at home with everyone, neither was I a stranger to anyone, and if all my acquaintances were slightly skewed, well then, so was I.

  It was strange, being idle. A skinny little black man—“dustman to the literati” we used to call him, because he worked for a lot of Village editors—did the cleaning while I lay on the chaise longue we had bought for the bedroom and read. I read Dorothy Sayers and thought myself Harriet Vane, I wrote a fan letter to John Dickson Carr, I became the self-styled “greatest living expert” on the British working-class novel, and I argued with B. about Salinger, whom he loved and whom I, with the plodding Gentile’s instinctive distrust of the quicksilver Jew, found too clever by half. Once outside the house, though, I seldom delivered an opinion. It would not have done, not with my not having an official position in our world. The wives I remember from dinner parties, the ones around my age, at least, were usually silent, and those who were not talked too much, anxious to get a word in, anxious to show that they, too, had read Wellek and Warren. The worst of the latter were those married to writers. Tell him you liked chapter seven in particular and she would say, “We worked awfully hard on that one.” Eventually, “writer’s wife” became the term B. and I used for all suckerfish.

  None of us had mastered charm, and the only time we saw it was when the dinner guest was English. A visiting English editor never had to buy a meal or a drink or pay for his own theater ticket, nor did he ever try to. He simply opened his mouth and let the clipped vowels roll out.

  My dinner parties grew ever grander, culminating in the evening I served beef Wellington. “Gourmet’s,” I said, when asked. That was how one answered culinary questions then. Another guest, usually a woman, would raise an inquisitive eyebrow, and the hostess would say “Gourmet’s” or “Dione’s,” and, later, “Michael’s” or “Julia’s.” We all attempted mousse au chocolat, we all aspired to Pavilion, and we all reveled in Joseph Wechsberg. If we had read M. F. K. Fisher (but none of us had yet), we would have reveled in her, too.

  Who were “we”? Mostly we were bright young men and their first wives, and now I can scarcely remember anyone’s name or face, because we were all interchangeable. What I remember better is the recipes clipped from the Times, because this was the age of Craig Claiborne, and copper pots from Bazar Français on Sixth Avenue, and the timid progression from an after-dinner cognac to an after-dinner marc because the latter was earthier, more real somehow. “I am measuring out my life with coffee spoons,” I would say to B. when we came home from that night’s dinner party, and together we would preen our feathers, serene in the belief that we spoke the same language. Certainly we shared allusions.

  But what was I to do with myself? Maybe this was my chance to write. If I italicize the word, it is because the act was something I approached on my knees. Turning out copy and captions took only cleverness, but writing took—oh God, it made me nervous just to think about it. B.’s parents sent me a check for a course in short-story writing at the New School. Terrified at being put to the test, I spent the money on clothes.

  I—we, really, because it was B. who invariably propelled me to action—wrote to Columbia for the graduate school catalogue. It was not too late to become the academic my father had always wanted me to be. But reading it, sprawled as always on the chaise longue, I suddenly remembered how it was to have to scrawl teeny-tiny notes—“outgrowth of Copernican cosmogony,” “antithetical contradiction in metaphysical tradition”—in the margins of my anthologies, and how the late-afternoon sun caught chalk dust and suspended it in midair. I remembered how hard it was to keep one’s lids from dropping over one’s eyes and that I never wanted to read Thomas Hobbes again. The next day I stuck the catalogue in the wastepaper basket under the kitchen sink.

  “Mees Cantwell,” said Dr. Franklin, plump in his Barcelona chair. “Tell me one thing that you want.” As if I knew! If I had known, I would not have been sitting in this small office, clearly the “junior” bedroom of 4½ rms., util. inch, while traffic whined on West End Avenue and other people went about their business.

  Maybe it’s different if you were born here. Maybe then you are deaf to the buzzing and the beating of wings. But I had come from out of town, and to me New York was a hive. You could not just live here. You had to be somebody, do something, it didn’t matter what. You were not a part of the city unless you were on a bus or a subway and on your way to an office or a factory or a schoolroom. How could you know New York if you had not bolted your lunch in a coffee shop or had not had your subway stall under the East River or had not had to stand on the bus for thirty blocks because it was rush hour? You could not. The best way to know New York, to learn to love New York, was to let it wear you out. When B. came home at night, I envied him his exhaustion.

  I had always assumed that someday I would have a baby. Once, when we had lived on East Twenty-first Street, we had even had a scare. At least, it was a scare for me. A doctor thought I was pregnant and insisted on a test, and over the weekend while we were waiting for the results, I stared at the ruin of my undefined ambitions and B. smiled foolishly and called me his “little seed-bearer.”

  By now, though, a lot of our college classmates had had children and I had taken to staring at Best & Co.’s ads for its Lilliputian Bazaar. They were of fat-cheeked babies, dream babies, like the babies in The Blue Bird, who toddled about heaven waiting until their names were called for the journey down to earth. When I visualized a child of my own, I visualized one of those babies. I never gave it a gender; I never even gave it a face. I simply saw myself with something to love lying swaddled in my arms.

  “You may have waited too long,” my gynecologist said, the same gynecologist who had told me that I must not get pregnant because I was too thin and anemic to carry a child. Now he was telling me that I probably had endometriosis, which he described as a “premature aging of the womb.” I was still in my twenties. Stunned and dizzy, I wept, and he, eager to get me out of his office, called B. and told him to take me home.

  We went to Europe for five weeks, but all that remains of the trip is an image of myself taking a shortcut through the food section of Fortnum & Mason on the way to our hotel, a shabby old place on Jermyn Street. It was about five o’clock, and customers were flocking the counters to buy vol-au-vents and those ghastly English gâteaux before going home to happy families. I was going to a high-ceilinged hotel room that lacked only a hanging man to perfect its décor, and nobody needed me anywhere. That my husband might have needed me was beyond imagining.

  I thought I could be necessary to a child; it was impossible to believe that someone like myself had anything to offer an adult. I was sterile, mentally as well as physically, and I was sick. B. had said so. By now his “I didn’t know how sick you really are” had the force of my
mother’s long-ago “Why can’t you be like everybody else?”

  When I looked into a mirror, I was surprised to find a face looking back at me. I know I was skinny, but I do not know if I had nice breasts or a flat stomach or firm thighs. But my hands I remember: the nails short and neatly filed, the only ring my wedding band, the fingers long as a spider’s legs. How my husband and I complemented each other! His certainties fed my nothingness; my nothingness fed his certainties; and to this day I can find no fault in either of us. We could not help it.

  At the end of the five weeks, B. was to return to New York and I was to take a month’s tour of Italy. He had worked out the itinerary with a man who had lived in Rome for many years and knew each and every odd corner, right down to which doorway I should peer through for which view, and was excited for me. What an introduction to the Italian Renaissance! What a way to improve my mind! But a few days before I was to leave, while we were still in London, I canceled the trip.

  It was the cold. I was so cold if B. was not there to give me blood. Sometimes I wonder if he knew that for me, being away from him was like being severed from a transfusion tube. It is odd. I never used my married name and bristled when other people did. Alone, however, I whispered it over and over again—“Mrs. L., Mrs. L.”—putting myself under its protection.

  Back in New York, I applied myself to the asexual, unloving acrobatics of a woman bent on pregnancy, and once a month awoke to the same slow trickle. I would jump from the bed before the blood spotted the sheet, rummage for the Kotex on the closet shelf and the stringy elastic belt in the bureau drawer, and slide into five days of depression, watching my life drain into a boxful of sanitary napkins.

  Coincidentally I saw a second gynecologist—I never again wanted to lay eyes on the first—about the recurrent cysts in my breasts. They were painful, but I could not keep my hands away from them, certain that in touching them I was touching my death. The doctor said they were unimportant, but why did I keep covering my chin?

  “I guess I’m self-conscious about these pimples.”

  “Have you ever had acne before?”

  “No.”

  “Are you taking any kind of medication?”

  “Yes.”

  I described the pills the first gynecologist had given me to regulate my menstrual flow.

  “Did you know they prevent conception?”

  “No. He never mentioned that.”

  “Do you want children?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Well, stop those pills and let me check you out and we’ll see what happens.”

  The next month my period didn’t arrive.

  On the Saturday night of the weekend over which we waited to hear if the frog had died—“the frog died” was code then for “pregnant”—Jerry, B., and I saw The Nun’s Story at Radio City Music Hall. “You are, you are,” my husband said. “I know it.” I knew it, too, and made B. and Jerry shield me from the crowds as we left the theater. One bump and that fertilized egg might be dislodged.

  On Monday morning I called the doctor’s office, and yes, the frog had died. I do not remember whether I called B. I do not remember whether we celebrated; I do not remember anything except feeling as cleansed, as scrubbed and laundered and turned inside out, as I did when, in childhood, I left the confessional. I thought God had punished me for having sealed my womb as if it were a Mason jar. But he had not. God loved me.

  2

  MY FACE WAS green and nausea was constant, and before the obstetrician prescribed some little pills that were pink on one side and blue on the other, I lived on crackers and mashed potatoes and Schweppes tonic water. At night I would lie in bed fingering the small bumps that surrounded my nipples and pressing my interlaced hands just above the pubic hair to feel that minute swell. And Jerry disappeared.

  No, he did not really disappear. He went back to Seattle, I think, but I am not sure, because I was blind and deaf to anything that did not have to do with my baby. There must have been a leavetaking, and probably a farewell dinner, too, but memory stops at The Nun’s Story and his guiding hand on my elbow. So Jerry left without my noticing, on what I suppose was a summer day, while the Vermont shopkeeper we met a few months later, a gimpy little bird who said, “That’s the stuff!” when B. told him I was pregnant, is stamped forever on my mind. My husband photographed me that afternoon, standing beside our tiny car, exultant, hair flying, Shetland pullover caching the tiny bulge. Our first photograph: my daughter’s and mine.

  Now when I lay on the chaise longue it was to unpack and pack again the little sweaters knitted by my mother-in-law and the lucky booties sent me by the old woman who lived next door to Ganny and the lacy white blanket, sweater, and cap I made for the day we brought the baby home. Each was held up, smoothed out, refolded, then laid reverently in white tissue paper and returned to the quasi-mahogany sideboard, which was once again a quasi-mahogany bureau. I read Alan Guttmacher on babies until the book was tattered, showing B. line drawings of the fetus at four months, five months. “Now she’s got fingernails,” I’d say. “Now she can suck her thumb . . . has hair . . . would live if she were premature.” At a cocktail party, a man told me I was the most attractive woman in the room, not remembering (though I did) that we had met a year before, when I was thin and empty and invisible.

  My happiness was a blanket around our house, around B., too. The night the diaper service man came, B. marveled at the choices and was tempted by polka dots. I, matronly and self-assured, smiled fondly at my little boy, my husband, and said the plain bird’s-eye would do.

  She was “Michel,” this dolphin that swam inside my belly, rolling and diving and kicking, because we thought the name nondefinitive, but she was really Katherine because we were sure she was a girl. Even so, it was “Michel due”—no sense in tempting fate—that I wrote in my pocket diary under March 17, amused by our baby’s birthday. Papa would have laughed and sent her green carnations.

  I, too, was swimming, covering the city with the slow, easy crawl with which my aunt traveled Bristol Harbor, accompanied by my baby. We would go for walks, my child and I, and converse for miles. I had always talked to myself, moving my lips and tightening my eyebrows and catching odd glances from passersby, and now I talked to her. “Look, Michel,” I would say when we passed the old Northern Dispensary down on Christopher Street. “This is where Edgar Allan Poe went when he had a bad cold.” And, as I settled heavily into my seat at Carnegie Hall, “Now, Michel, we’re going to listen to Beethoven.” My baby was safe, so safe, because she was enclosed in me, and nothing and no one could hurt her while I lived. And if I died? Well, then, we would die together and neither of us would be lonely in paradise.

  Old ladies were to the left and right of me in the balcony at Carnegie Hall, old ladies who said, “Oh, that Lenny,” even when Lenny wasn’t conducting. To them, any dark-haired young man on the podium was Bernstein, and to me, too, who never really heard the music, only floated in the sound.

  Before the concert—I had subscribed to a Friday afternoon series—I invariably lunched with Sally, a copy editor I had known at Mademoiselle, and caught up on the gossip in a country from which I was now very far away. Charm, “The Magazine for the Working Woman,” had folded, and its editors had been shipped over to Mlle., which meant two people for every job. C.A. had lost her chair early, to a former Hungarian baroness who, blond, blue-eyed, and zaftig, was said to look like something painted on a ceiling in Dresden. But B.T.B. was prepared to outsit everyone, and did. So was the beauty editor, the one with the nose that could slit envelopes.

  “Really, Mary, you’ve got to have nerves of steel to survive the tension,” Sally would say, and I, knowing that I did not have nerves of steel, would count myself blessed for being able to sit on Ararat and watch the flotsam and jetsam pass by. There was no place I had to be, no appointment but for the doctor’s I had to keep, no demand I had to make on myself. All I had to do was be. Be, and prepare a place and a wardrobe for my baby.
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br />   Lord & Taylor would not do for a layette, being inextricably linked with the sweaters and Bermuda shorts of a girl I was beginning to forget and would not remember again for a long, long time. Saks Fifth Avenue appealed, because both my high school graduation dress and my wedding dress had come from there and I was infatuated with what seemed a sort of symmetry. But on the day I went to the children’s floor, customers, too many for me to have a saleslady’s undivided attention, crowded the long counters. I wanted a serious talk about undershirts and sacques and those little nightgowns that tie with a string at the bottom. I wanted to know about snowsuits.

  The Lilliputian Bazaar did not live up to its newspaper advertisements—nothing could have—and in the end I wandered into Bergdorf’s, where my wedding garter had come from. Here was a cushioned chair, and a perfumed hush, and a middle-aged woman who spoke of receiving blankets and terry-cloth bibs and baby’s little bonnets.

  “You’ll want at least three or four of these little sheets,” she said, “and I like these little shirts that tie at the side—so much easier than pulling them over baby’s head. Oh, and diaper pins. I’ll bet you never even thought of diaper pins. See these, how the point is covered so that baby can’t possibly be pricked, even if the pin opens by mistake? And then, of course, you’ll need rubber pants. Aren’t these cute?”

  I was joining a club; I was learning the rules, the secret code even. I had never heard of a receiving blanket or a special pin for diapers or a little shirt that tied at the side. “See, B.?” I said when the packages, along with a bassinet, arrived from Bergdorf’s. “These shirts are much easier to use than the ones you have to pull over their heads, and the thing about these diaper pins is that they. . . . ” He was as thrilled as I.