Manhattan, When I Was Young

by Mary Cantwell

  “There’s a man with a raincoat and a shopping bag, and I can see a woman pushing a baby carriage. There’s a little girl crossing the street, and three cabs at the corner.” Naming. I kept naming things, people, eventually emotions, and the naming gave order to chaos.

  But the fear of heights—ah, the fear of heights. Even today I stay away from windows on high floors, and when circumstances push me onto terraces, I sidle along the walls, my fingers looking for crevices among the bricks. It never leaves me, that reminder that once upon a time I was crazy.

  3

  THE FIRST TIME I took Katherine on an outing, on a Sunday afternoon in May when she was six weeks old, the wheel came off her green plaid baby carriage. A garage mechanic repaired it—“On the house, lady,” he said—and set me, grinning, back on West Tenth Street. There could have been no stronger line of demarcation between me and those people up on the Upper East Side, I thought, infatuated with my fecklessness, than the distance between a fabric carriage with dodgy wheels and a Silver Cross pram. Actually, B. might have preferred a Silver Cross pram, but it would not have gone with the new identity I was coining for myself: Village mother.

  That day and many days thereafter I took my daughter to Washington Square, to the southeast corner, where a big sycamore that I came to call the baby tree spread its branches over a large, grubby sandpit. A certain kind of Village mother spent hours there, offering chunks of raw potato to her teething child. The purest example (all struck me as variations on a type) was a sallow, stringy-haired young woman who, talking constantly, made much of her Jewishness and her husband’s blackness. She brandished his color, in fact, as if it were a flag. Meanwhile the baby, scrawny and dun-skinned, was treated with the rough affection due a puppy. But then, rough affection—dumping one’s offspring in its carriage, carrying it more or less upside down on one’s hip—was, like the raw-potato teething tool, a function of Village style.

  I would have loved to talk to someone, especially about Beechnut’s as compared to Gerber’s and whether pacifiers made for buckteeth, but I was too shy to start a conversation, and nobody was inclined to start one with me, probably because my face is stony in repose, and forbidding. Still, it was pleasant under the baby tree—the drunks mostly clustered by the fountain, and the folksingers who preceded the drug dealers hadn’t yet arrived—and membership in the club to which I had so desperately wanted to belong was glorious.

  About four o’clock, about the time the air began to turn blue, I would rise from the bench and kick up the carriage brake and off we would go, past the stern, beautiful houses that were all that was left of Catherine Sloper’s Washington Square to Bleecker Street, where strolled another kind of Village mother. This one pushed an enormous perambulator in which lay, banked in pillows and laces and fleecy wools, a fat little boy who was almost always named Anthony. I know this because a silver tag on a chain, reminiscent of the kind that drapes decanters, invariably swagged his coverlet. There it was, inscribed for all to see: ANTHONY.

  Lucky Anthony, to be going home to a crowd. Like a lot of people with small families and without a strong ethnic identity, I thought the spirits were higher and the sentiments warmer in big Italian and Jewish households. Not in B.’s Jewish household—he had never even had a bar mitzvah, and if his parents knew a word of Yiddish, I never heard it—but in the kind I had glimpsed in old photographs of tenement life. Snug as bugs in a rug those families were. I couldn’t see the poverty for the coziness.

  So when I saw Anthony after Anthony moving like Cleopatra on her barge through the dusk of late afternoon on Bleecker Street, I saw their grandparents and their aunts and uncles and cousins lined up to greet them. I saw first communions and weddings and funerals at Our Lady of Pompeii, and statues of saints dressed in dollar bills, and a network of Philomenas and Angelas and Roses stretched over the whole South Village. I envied Anthony all of them, for Katherine’s sake. For my sake, too.

  My mother, who was forever reminding me that she personally had scrubbed my every diaper and strained my every beet, was nonetheless rich in household help—her mother and her sister and her widowed great-aunt—and when she had walked uptown with me, it had been “Good afternoon” and “Is she teething yet?” all the way. But these were strangers on the streets of Greenwich Village, and I, who had never lost my provincial chattiness, had only an infant to talk to. “Okay,” I would say as I turned the carriage into Ottomanelli’s meat market, “this is where we get the veal scaloppini for Daddy and me. And you, you’re having cereal and banana.”

  Once I had wrestled the carriage into the areaway of 21 Perry Street, however, the miracle overtook me, the miracle that always overtook me when I unlocked the door to my own home. The stove, its pilot light like a votive candle, was waiting; the refrigerator was purring; the turn of a faucet would set a pot to filling. “Poor Butterfly, though your heart is breaking,” I sang while I settled Katherine into her baby butler; “The most beautiful girl in the world,” while I maneuvered her small silver spoon into her small stubborn mouth; “Bye Bye, Blackbird” as, one hand firm under her rubber-pantied rump, I waltzed her to her crib.

  While I wished that my father had lived to see his grandchild, I no longer felt the curious pain—a strange, slow tearing-apart—that had crossed my chest whenever I thought of him. I gave up the hope, too, never quite lost, that someday he would walk into the room. And, blessedly, a recurring dream gave up on me: a dream in which I met him, in one of his Brooks Brothers suits and a felt fedora, walking down Fifth Avenue.

  “Papa!” I said. “You’re alive!”

  “Yes, I am, Mary Lee, but you must never tell anyone or try to find me, because if you do, I will die.” So I left him in the middle of a crowd on Fifth Avenue and woke up crying.

  “But Mary,” a friend said once, “your father can’t have been flawless.”

  “He was till I was twenty,” I replied.

  Perhaps if he had lived just a little longer, it might have been long enough for me to have grown away from him. But he did not, so I am forever the daughter looking for the lap that disappeared. It is the same with Katherine. If I had not gone back to work, if I had been locked up with her until the morning she left for kindergarten, I might one day have seen her as distinct from me. But I did go back, before she could even talk, and so I retain an image of my baby and myself nestled into each other like a pair of matryoshka dolls. She is perfect; so am I.

  “Sidney,” B. said, naming the owner of a small publishing house, “needs someone to read for him.” “Sterling,” naming a literary agent who was striking out on his own, “needs a reader.” “Jack at Coward-McCann,” naming an editor at a large publishing house, “needs someone to look at this and see if it can be salvaged.” The manuscripts stacked beside the chaise longue, between it and the playpen, constituted the slush pile, the over-the-transom stuff, the stuff that people like me were hired, for next to nothing, to skim through. Only two—a novel and a curious little biography of a bat, both of which had been published earlier in England—were worth consideration. But I read everything, all the way through, remembering Yeats’s “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

  One woman had written a biography of Ruth Chatterton, based on clippings from old movie magazines and a brief dressing-room how-do-you-do when Chatterton was touring and played in her town. I saw it three times—she had submitted it to each of the people for whom I was working—and there cannot have been a publisher’s reader in the city who had not seen it once. In truth, every publisher’s reader in the city had probably seen all the manuscripts beside the chaise longue. If, working on a magazine again in years to come, I was to defend the reading of the slush pile, it was not because I believed it hid a gem. It was because I thought its originators were owed the courtesy. Most of them, after all, were not trying to get rich. They were simply trying to join a church. It was a church I had thought of joining once, but no more. Better to do what I was doing now: read in the morning light and wat
ch my Katie roll over, stand up, spit up. We kept her crib in our bedroom until she was a year old, unable to give up the sight that greeted us when we woke. At dawn her starfish hands grasped the bars, she struggled upward, and her face appeared, like the sun rising.

  Several days a month I lugged the manuscripts uptown in shopping bags, taking the bus because I was not about to spend money on cabs, and curiously nervous about crossing Fourteenth Street. Uptown, I told B.—taking my allusion, as usual, from my reading—was the world of telegrams and anger. It was also a world in which we went to a lot of cocktail parties on hot summer nights. Cold winter nights, too, I suppose, but I do not remember those. I remember the summer parties, though, because usually I was the only wife (the rest were in Amagansett with their children) among a flock of pretty young women, many of whom were sleeping with the young editors whose wives were in Amagansett. The pretty young women were in publishing, too, often fresh out of Radcliffe’s summer course, and I have sometimes wondered what happened to them. They came along a bit too early for publishing houses to place them anywhere but in their textbook departments, and a bit too early for the young editors, too, who did not acquire their second wives until ten or so years later. But whatever became of them, I am sure they remained good sports, just as I am sure that none of them, to this day, would leave the milk bottle on the kitchen table.

  I remember a summer Saturday afternoon, too, when we rented a car and drove to Westport for lunch with Sheilah Graham. Sheilah was a Hollywood gossip columnist whose affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald had lent her a certain literary shine, and B. was her editor. She was plump and blond and blue-eyed, the kind of woman who looks as edible as a bonbon, and when Katherine was born she had given her a pleated nylon bedjacket. So Hollywood, I thought, and tied it round the baby’s tiny shoulders whenever we had dinner guests.

  Sheilah made me laugh—she was sharp as a needle—and never more so than that afternoon. Katherine was in her infant seat, on the kitchen table, when Sheilah called her teenage son in to see her. “Fair warning, Rob,” she said, pointing at Kate. “The wages of sin.”

  But there was no sin in Katherine’s conception: a judge had sanctioned it. Rather than being the restriction I had feared, marriage had turned out to be roomy. It allowed for all sorts of stuff. Except, of course, for flirtations. When a young man who had not noticed my wedding ring spoke of seeing me again—we were at a cocktail party—I backed away as if presented with a snake. “Lock Mary Lee into an igloo with Mastroianni for two years,” B. boasted once, “and nothing would happen.” At least, I thought he was boasting.

  I remember something else as well, the nights when Katherine squalled and condemned me to blurred and stumbling walks around the living room. I remember a paperbound copy of Dr. Spock hurled against a wall, the spine splintering on impact and the pages cascading to the floor. I remember thinking I would do anything for sleep. And because of all that, I remember Bloomingdale’s as I would paradise.

  There was a morning when I was tired, so tired I was having dizzy spells. I’ll faint, I told myself, and something terrible will happen to the baby. She’ll catch her head between the crib bars or pull herself over them and fall. Or she’ll stop breathing, like little Lewis did, because I am not watching. If I take my eyes off her, she will die. But I am going to take my eyes off her, because I cannot keep them open.

  We seldom had a babysitter unless we were going to the movies or to someone’s house for dinner. But the woman who usually cared for Katherine then was home, thank God, and free. I was dizzy until the moment she walked into the kitchen, all white uniform and rubber-soled Oxfords and competence. I was about to say, “If you could just watch Katherine while I nap” when my head cleared and exhaustion dropped from my shoulders. I would go to Bloomingdale’s instead. I would look at the model rooms.

  I have never known the name of a plant that has long stems and round leaves and that, dried, smells of spices and pepper. Antique dealers love it. So do the owners of “country” shops. But Bloomingdale’s was the first place I ever smelled those leaves. Smell them now and I have just traversed the Directional couches and the rosewood room dividers to join the shoppers who, barred from entrance by a velvet rope, are viewing the model rooms.

  Even when they were supposed to evoke the South of France or a corner of Tuscany or somebody’s Maine hideaway, the model rooms evoked New York. It was their scale and their extravagance and sometimes the sheer nonsense of them. All I ever bought at Bloomingdale’s, besides white-sale linens, were lamps with black paper shades and cheeses from the delicacy department, but I returned again and again to those rooms. None of them, really, were to my sober, strait-laced taste. Still, I was proud of them, even proprietary. “You don’t see raisin bread like this at home,” a visiting friend of my mother’s said one day when I gave her tea and toast. You didn’t see rooms like these, either.

  Once in a while a salesman would unhook the rope and escort a customer inside. The customer was always a woman, always thin, always ash blond, and almost always, I assumed, from out of town. She and the salesman would pause over a fruitwood armoire, a terra-cotta urn deep enough to hide a thief, an enormous Rya rug. He would whip out his order book; the viewers’ eyes would shift to the right, where a discreet sheet of plastic-covered paper listing items and prices hung on the wall. God! That woman had just spent $500 on—oh, let’s say a beaten copper tray from Morocco.

  Together they emerged, the woman flushed with the pride of someone who can spend $500 on foolishness, the salesman saying something about delivery in ten days. The line of viewers parted to let them through, then moved slowly on to the next room. No one spoke; we were too busy inhaling opulence.

  Dreamily I would descend the escalators and eventually the stairs to the basement. Lackadaisically I would make my way to the subway and the Fourteenth Street stop of the West Side IRT. Emerging at Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue, I was still sedated—by the scent of the dried round leaves and the rip-rip-rip of sales slips being torn from order books. A few blocks south, a few yards west, and I was unhooking the gate into the areaway, as refreshed as if I had been hours in deep sleep. I had not spent a cent. I had not wanted to. The bustle was sufficient, and the traffic and the noise, and above all the Lethe that was Bloomingdale’s fifth floor.

  The rooms I thought of, still think of, as my kind of rooms I never saw. But I know where they were. They were in one, or maybe all, of five houses that stood on the corner of Greenwich Street and Dey Street in 1810. The first, at the left, is white clapboard with two dormer windows, green shutters, and a Dutch door, on the bottom half of which a man and a woman are leaning their elbows. Next to it is a brick house, much bigger and grander, with a rail-backed bench on either side of the front door. A boy is sitting on one of them.

  The remaining houses are on Dey Street. The one at the corner, which is also brick, is big and grand indeed and has two entrances. Maybe the second—two men are standing on its steps—is for servants. But the one next to it, and the one beyond that, both of them white clapboard and comparatively modest, also have two entrances. So I am confused. It is a winter day, though, I am sure of that, because the trees are naked, and the sky is the same dull gray I wake up to on January mornings in New York.

  But the rooms? What do I know of these rooms, some of which are shuttered? Nothing, really, only that they are spare and clean and that they have wide floorboards and small fireplaces. These are the rooms in which I have always wanted to live, the material equivalent of Jane Austen’s prose, and that they once existed in Greenwich Village is reason enough for me to believe that some of them still do. Up and down the narrow streets and all the way down toward what was later called SoHo we would go, Kate in her carriage or, later, her stroller and me in my pants and sneakers. Sometimes I could see the outline of a pitched-roof house on the bigger, newer building that had stood next door and survived it. I saw boarded-up dormer windows, too, and incised stone lintels crumbling before my very eyes.r />
  Nothing of those five houses, however, remained at the corner of Greenwich Street and Dey Street. I had been there with Jerry long before I had bought a print of that 1810 watercolor at the New York Public Library’s gift counter, for plants for the windowboxes at 224 West Eleventh. The nurseries that were there then, though, are now as vanished as those five houses, and I suppose that whatever is there now will have vanished in another few decades, too. Fix it before it disappears! Fix it before it disappears! I knew I was never going to live in those rooms. I knew I was never going to find more than their traces. But what I could find I would fix, so that one day I could walk those streets again whether they had lasted or not.

  I have fixed Kate and me, too, on our long late-afternoon strolls along the western shores of Greenwich Village. The boat horns—one does not hear those anymore—are lowing, and the police are riding their horses to the stables (they are vanished, too) on West Twelfth Street, and the three old musicians—Italians from the South Village, I think—who used to play songs like “Deep Purple” for change thrown from Village windows are just starting out for their evening tour.

  It is time to go indoors, time to get under a roof, time for the cereal and the banana, the bath and the waltz round the living room, and if I speak as if we, too, have vanished, it is because we have. Never again would I be Kate’s alone, nor would Kate be mine alone, because when she was eighteen months old I went back to work. For me to do that, she had to be born again, into another woman’s care, and I had to be born again, too, to become someone who was not wholly, solely a mother. The Kate who is here now is not the Kate who was there at the beginning. That one is still in a stroller, being pushed along Hudson Street. And the woman who pushed her is still gripping the stroller’s handles, still looking for rooms that are as clean and spare as a bone.