Manhattan, When I Was Young

by Mary Cantwell

Remembering that someone had told him Alice was slightly deaf, B. ran off to find a kiosk—he knew she could hear a telephone’s ring—leaving me to stand on the stair landing, staring down at the courtyard. Suddenly the door to the right of the window opened, and there she stood, “a tiny, hunched woman with dark hair, round glasses, and a Boston voice,” I wrote in my travel diary. “Deaf, closes her eyes when she laughs.”

  Alice asked me if I was Mrs. L. I explained that my husband was in a phone box, and she ushered me down a long dark passageway paved with Picassos. I gasped. I had not known, or perhaps I had forgotten, that these were Alice Toklas’s property now.

  They were hung in no particular order; some were framed, some were not, and when I paused in front of a portrait of a naked young girl holding a bunch of red roses and said, “How beautiful,” Alice said, “That was the first Picasso Gertrude ever bought.”

  I felt like the publisher-lodger in The Aspern Papers when he met Miss Bordereau and first heard the voice heard, and loved, by Jeffrey Aspern, a feeling made even stronger an hour later when B. had returned and we were sipping sherry. Not knowing either of us, Alice was hostessing with anecdotes, most of them about Gertrude. “When T. S. Eliot said to Gertrude, And from whom, Miss Stein, did you learn your habit of splitting infinitives?’ Gertrude said, ‘I learned it from Henry James.’”

  Because her hands were crippled by arthritis, Alice no longer cooked. But she loved to eat—one good meal a day, the rest coffee and an endless consumption of Pall Malls—and the three of us went to a restaurant near the rue Christine. It had banquettes along the walls, flowers on every table, and waiters who genuflected at the sight of Miss Toklas.

  She was fussy about the food—“This sauce,” she said, rolling it around her tongue, “has flour in it”—and anxious to see that B. got enough to eat. I would not hazard offering any theory about Alice B. Toklas’s division of the sexes, except for one. A man, being a man, had a completely different digestive apparatus from a woman and must be stoked like a furnace.

  How proud I was of B. that day, how proud I am still. His appetite was equivalent to mine, but Alice would not let him stop after the langoustines au gratin and the loup sur fenouil that sufficed for her and me. She insisted that he follow them with an entrecôte and the appropriate red wine (we had been drinking a lot of white with the fish) and said that he could not say he had dined there without sampling the glace au vanille, which was sprinkled with the restaurant’s special praline powder. On and on he ate, dying I knew, and I loved him for his courage.

  Alice liked B., as well she might. He was charming, intelligent, and devoted to her book. In the years when she could no longer see to write, he found secretaries to whom she could dictate, and the last few pages were dictated to him. What surprised me was that she appeared to like me, too. But I am not sure: Alice hid extraordinary perversity under a seemingly helpless directness. When the book was published, she wrote in B.’s copy, “To——L——,” giving a wrong first name, “who made only one mistake and never knew what it was.”

  A devout Catholic, devout as only a convert can be—although Alice claimed that hers was no conversion but a return, given that the nurse of her infancy had had her baptized without her Jewish parents’ knowledge—she found a certain link to holy order in my own born Catholicism. Liking clothes—her only coat was made by Balmain—she approved of mine. Very much a lady, she responded to my shyness and good manners, although she may have found me dull.

  There was one day, though, during those two weeks in May when I carried my second child in utero around the city in which I had hoped she would be conceived, when I think Alice truly liked me. The three of us were walking down the rue Christine, which was very narrow, to Lapérouse for lunch. A car came along, and since Alice was too frail to step out of the gutter quickly, I picked her up and put her on the sidewalk. She was mortified: to be lifted like a baby, and by a woman so hugely pregnant.

  “But I do this all the time,” I said. “My grandmother is very fat, and the only way she can get out of her rocker is by rocking back and forth very quickly until she gains momentum. Then she launches herself forward, like a rocket. I always catch her just before she lands in my lap.”

  Alice closed her eyes and laughed, knowing that I was telling the truth, that I thought little of picking up eighty-year-olds. Since her fragility meant little to me, it could, for a little while anyway, mean little to her.

  She was sentimental about my pregnancies. Maybe she thought I was doing what a woman should do, unless she was a Gertrude or a Janet Flanner, in which case other rules applied. I remember her praising Picasso’s wife Jacqueline because, or so it sounded to me, she was a slave. When she heard that mutual friends were finally divorcing—Alice seemed to be the only person in Paris who did not know they had not spoken in years, or did she?—she told me of her concern for their children, then wondered aloud if anyone who dressed as badly as the wife did could have made any man happy.

  When she died, she was buried in a dark Balmain suit (“Pierre has given Gertrude a black bride,” Janet Flanner, or somebody like Janet Flanner, said) in Père Lachaise, to which I plan to go sometime, to put flowers on her grave. We always took Alice yellow roses, in memory of Gertrude. I will take yellow roses that day as well, in memory of her, and in memory of me. In memory of Paris, too.

  Alice was not to die for nearly ten years yet, though, and now we are sitting in Chez L’Ami Louis, watching as she tips a snail shell to her mouth and drinks the garlic butter. Tomorrow B. and I will lunch at La Tour d’Argent for the very first (and my very last) time, sitting by a tall window and watching raindrops dimple the Seine. In the afternoon we will take the boat-train to Le Havre, to the United States. We have bought a case of Taittinger Blanc de Blancs, more copper pots, and a pile of tabliers, those little smocks French children wear, for Kate. B. reclines in the top bunk reading manuscripts and I recline in the bottom bunk rereading Evelyn Waugh, and together we are as rich as Croesus and as soigné as Gerald and Sara Murphy.

  Six weeks later, on a hot July night, our second child arrives, on a sea of Richebourg because we have been at a dinner party and all that talk about alcohol in pregnancy is far in the future. She is the girl we knew she would be, and right away we name her Margaret, after my grandmother.

  Margaret is very plump, has a thicket of black hair and no space between her eyebrows. “She looks,” B. says, “like an Armenian innkeeper.”

  “She has my father’s eyes,” I say. Brown (eventually), turned down at the outer corners, they are the mark the Lord set on her.

  44 Jane Street

  1

  KATHERINE, who had just learned to drink from a cup, returned to the bottle, pulling desperately on the nipple, her eyes anxious and her fat hands gripping fiercely. But she was kind, so kind, brushing her sister’s hair at bedtime and retreating quietly to her little back bedroom after we had put on her sleep cap, a felt cone that had come with her copy of Goodnight Moon. But first we had taken her out to the areaway to wave to the one star (I think it is Venus) that faithfully shines upon New York City. Margaret, sleepy as a dormouse, was ensconced in the bassinet beside our bed. And we had begun the hunt for the most elusive of all Manhattan spaces, a Village apartment big enough for four.

  On the Upper West Side you could find big apartments—“If worse comes to worst, we can always move to the Upper West Side” was said at least once during any Village dinner party featuring new parents. But giving up Greenwich Village would have meant giving up not only its sweet, seedy streets but a certain self-image. B. and I were Villagers; we bore (I told myself) a noble heritage. Never mind that the cobwebs at Julius’s bar were fake, or that the historically literary Chumley’s seemed as fusty as a provincial museum. Marianne Moore had worked at the Hudson Street branch of the New York Public Library! Mary McCarthy had lived on Bank Street! And e. e. cummings still lived on Patchin Place! Once, as I was leaving a Sixth Avenue grocery, I noticed that the brown paper ba
gs that were to be delivered to me were nestled against the brown paper bags that were to be delivered to Djuna Barnes. “You’ll never guess whose order was next to ours,” I said to B. when I got home. ”Djuna Barnes! Nightwood!”

  Early one morning, about to share a cab to our respective offices (“My talent is my bank account,” B. would boom when I complained of the extravagance. “I can’t afford to arrive frazzled”), we walked instead into a real estate agency. The agent was on the phone. “It doesn’t have anything right now but space,” she was saying to somebody, “but the landlord’s willing to do some work on it. So let me know if you’re interested.”

  Ten minutes later we ourselves were looking at the place that didn’t have anything but space: a basement and parlor floor on Jane Street, way over west near the garbage pier.

  Jane Street is in an area of docks and warehouses, a few tenements, a few big apartment buildings, and a lot of nineteenth-century houses. Some Irish still lived there then—it was the old Eighth Ward—and even though it had started to “come up,” as the real estate agent put it, it was so far from the subways and so close to the meat market (where turn a corner and you were apt to run smack into a carcass dangling from a chain) that many people regarded moving there as the same as moving to hell and gone. Still do, for that matter.

  Not I. When the wind blows from the west one can smell the Hudson, and the houses are low, and there are field mice in the gardens. Even now, when the old refrigeration plant and some of the old livery stables have been turned into apartments, the only nightwalkers tend to be drunks shaking their fists at fire hydrants and yelling “Motherfucker!” at the dust-obscured sky.

  Dogs bark as in the country here, deep-throated roars from collies and big mongrels, and the soprano yips of Yorkies and Lhasa Apsos are only just beginning to be heard. In those days there were not even any supermarkets near Jane Street, only one newsstand, one delicatessen, and a tattered triangular park with metal swings and a sandpit. Jane Street was on the edge—of the city, of the river, of respectability—and it was a hideout. Walking home from the subway, the houses and people dwindling as I traveled west, the trees growing fewer, the river smell coming up stronger, the traffic quieting, almost disappearing, I felt as if I were entering a stockade.

  The house faced north, an ordinary red brick with a fire escape that spoiled its facade. I have no idea what the interior looks like now, but once the first two floors were beautiful. Or so we thought, and so I still think, even though the ground floor was torrid in summer and the parlor floor, with an air conditioner blasting from either end, like a meat locker.

  Our landlord was a small, skinny Irishman with five children (a year or two later they were six) and a small, trim wife on whom he doted. His grandparents and their parents had worked the docks and run the livery stables, and it was from them that he had inherited the house. “The minute anybody around here got any money,” he told us, “they put down parquet floors. On Saturday nights you’d get a trio—a sax, maybe, and a drummer, and if you had a piano, a guy to play it—and there’d be dancing in the living room. Now the Italians . . . they liked to put down linoleum.” The Village was to him what Bristol was to me: a place where the streets were as thronged with the dead as with the living.

  Matty—his name was Matty—had had to gut the top two floors of the house to make bedrooms for his kids, most of whom were at parochial school. But our two floors he could return to what they had once been, balking only at ripping up the parquet to expose what I was convinced would be pumpkin pine floorboards beneath.

  He installed a new kitchen sink, out of which rats ran until the plumber discovered an unplugged hole that led to a tortuous tunnel that led to the sewer system. He had some of the stones in the little drying yard raised so we could plant a garden and replaced the sagging board fence with wooden palings. He cut off a corner of the parlor floor linen closet and put in a small second bathroom, and he had the old shutters prised from their niches in the dining room and our bedroom.

  And we? We were giddy with wallpaper, which we put in the hall and the children’s room and the tiny guest room. We installed stair carpeting, a washing machine that emptied into the downstairs tub, and a dryer that was vented out the bathroom window. B. and a friend of his worked night after night building bookcases, then gave up and let a carpenter take over. “Please, Matty,” we begged, “can we have a new refrigerator?” He smiled and gave us $150 toward a fourteen-cubic-footer from Sears. Oh my! Let me walk through that house again. It makes me happy to walk through that house.

  The dining room was on the ground-floor front, but it was not really a dining room yet, because we did not have a table. We visualized something oval, something mahogany, something, we said, “like an Irish hunt table.” Not that we had ever seen an Irish hunt table, you understand, or had the foggiest notion of how to go about finding one. But we loved the term “Irish hunt table.” We loved it like we loved “Georgian silver” and “Chinese export porcelain.” Own them, we thought, and you are armored for life.

  The walls were cream, and on three of them were floor-to-ceiling bookcases, packed with books left over from college, books we had bought at the secondhand stores on Fourth Avenue, books sent to B. by friends in publishing, and what B. called “the New Yorker collection,” which is to say the collected works of Liebling, White, McNulty, and Mitchell, all of whom we idolized. The slate fireplace on the west wall didn’t work, so we put an old metal milk-bottle basket sprayed yellow on the hearth and stuffed it with dried flowers. The slant-top desk and Windsor chair were in a corner by the window, and an outsize blue wing chair lighted by one of the standing lamps from West Eleventh Street was by the door.

  The big square kitchen had a brick fireplace that didn’t work, either, an old Chambers stove (no more Royal Rose for me!), enameled cabinets brought from Perry Street, a round deal table and rush-seated chairs, a high chair and a playpen. In that roomy kitchen, I told myself when I first saw it, I would put up jellies. I would attempt croissants. I would finally make the veau Prince Orloff, from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One, that I and all my fellow cooks aspired to.

  The living room, on the parlor floor, was a measure of how far we had come. The wing chair, couch, and loveseat traveled with us from Perry Street, but now we had a Portuguese needlepoint rug and a mahogany sideboard (eighteenth century, English) and a round, cloth-covered table centered by a lamp from Bloomingdale’s that had cost $75. There were many more pictures and, eventually, tucked in a drawer in the sideboard, a pen-and-ink by Andrew Wyeth (gift of the artist), a Cruikshank sketchbook (gift to me from my husband), and a caricature by Max Beerbohm (gift to my husband from a friend). The living room also had, as did the bedroom, dentil moldings and a slate fireplace that worked.

  The living room opened onto the bedroom, which was actually the front parlor, and although they could be closed off from each other by huge sliding doors, they seldom were, because we liked the long view into that serene white room. Also, we liked to show it off.

  Like all my bedrooms, this one was impossibly virginal, suitable for a nun with a passion for pillows. The walls, curtains, bedspread, the flokati rug, even the flowers in the ironstone pitcher on the fireplace mantel were white. A wing chair and the chaise longue were blue and white toile. The three-quarter bed had been replaced at last, by a brand-new Bloom-ingdale’s queen-size with an artfully rustic Spanish headboard, also Bloomingdale’s. The quasi-mahogany sideboard had gone to the dump, and now we had an early eighteenth-century American pine blanket chest. All that remained of Twenty-first Street, but for a few glasses, prints, and odds and ends of china, was the quasi-mahogany bureau.

  With a fire in the fireplace, B. on the chaise longue with one book, and me in bed with another, we could imagine we were in the ultimate country inn, the inn that, in the autumn I was pregnant with Katherine, we had looked for all over Vermont. Here it was, just like the bluebird of happiness, right in our own back yard.


  Meanwhile, as we read, two little girls slept as if couched on zephyrs on the south side of the parlor floor, in a room that had bunny wallpaper, a nightlight that looked like a Staffordshire cottage, and a bookcase crammed with the collected Beatrix Potter. Snow White was in a youth bed and Rose Red was in a crib, and next to them was the little blue and white guest room that one of them would have one day.

  Because I recognize emotions only in retrospect, I didn’t know that I was happy. As always, there was something nagging at my mind’s corners. But I did know that I had all that it is proper in this world to wish for.

  Soon after she was born, and just before we moved to 44 Jane Street, our little one, our Margaret, got funny patches on her face. Her hair started falling out in huge clumps, with bits of her scalp attached, and we became afraid to comb or brush it. Her eyes shrank to slits, and stuff oozed from under the lids and out her ears. There were cracks at the creases in her elbows and behind her knees, out of which the same stuff oozed. Eventually the cracks widened and began to bleed. The pediatrician said she had eczema and sent us to a dermatologist. When he saw her, tears sprouted in his eyes and scared us into speechlessness. “This is bad,” he answered to our unasked question. “She can’t retain skin.”

  The dermatologist sent us to an allergist, who said infant eczema was inherited, and did either of us come from families with a history of eczema or asthma? My husband said he did. I called his mother. Oh yes, she said, B. had had asthma as a child, and his nephews had had eczema. I had married a killer.

  My mother had said that I had a nasty tongue, that someday I would call my husband a dirty Jew. The words were not in my head until she put them there, and I had spent so much of my life keeping my mouth shut that I didn’t know what kind of tongue I had, if any. But now I feared that this dreadful mouth of mine would open and devils would leap out. So I clamped my lips, and “If I had known about those allergies I never would have married you” was written all over my face. My husband was silent, too, because he was ashamed and guilty, and because there was no way to expiate original sin. Between us lay our baby, who we thought was dying, and words that, unspoken, were as loud as cymbals clashing.