Manhattan, When I Was Young

by Mary Cantwell

  The big word was “yé-yé, ” used to describe everything from the cut of a skirt to the curve of a curl, and the big song was “Et Maintenant.” When that was played, conversation halted, hips ground together, partner eyeballed partner, and the sound of heavy breathing swamped the room. When Philippe and I danced, my groin hurt, and although we kept a proper inch or two apart, I confused the thought with the deed and deemed myself an adulteress.

  Toward dawn he would drive wildly through the empty Paris streets. Or maybe he was not really driving wildly. Maybe it was only the smallness of his car and the screech it made when he took corners that made me think we were speeding, heading for a crash, careless of our lives. One evening he stopped in front of Notre-Dame, which, the illumination gone, had returned to medieval darkness.

  “This makes me think of François Villon,” I said, “and the wolves that stalked the walls of Paris.”

  “Vous êtes formidable,” he breathed, and took my hand.

  I cried. I was not formidable. I was simply the virgin mother of two experiencing the late adolescence she had never had, too naive to recognize the melt in the stomach, the sense of shiver, as the sensations of the twenty-year-old she had never been.

  On the afternoon I left Paris, Philippe took me to the airport and stayed on the observation desk waving until takeoff. I cried again, cried all the way home. I was on Air France, stretched out on three seats, and an old babushkaed Polish woman across the aisle kept looking over at me, sighing and clucking and nodding and wanting to help. But she had no English, and the babushka and her anxious monkey eyes and baggy coat and fat, spread feet only made me cry the harder.

  B., the children, and Hoppy were at the airport. Margaret, sitting on my lap, wet my skirt on the cab ride into the city. She was eighteen months old, and too hearty even for double diapers and rubber pants. Katie’s hair ribbon was flying and Hoppy was chatting and my husband was silent. He knew me, much better than I knew myself, and he saw my pink eyes and the way they dodged his.

  I am not much given to playing “If I had” or “If I hadn’t,” much preferring to stay with “It would have happened anyway.” But that last is usually a lie, and I am not one to kid myself. I am sorry I went to Paris, because when I returned I was full of myself and starved for more of me. Or am I sorry? I do not know. I am mixed up. But I do know that there have been many years when I wished I could have walked into that little group at the airport, never to emerge again. I see them—the husband who looked like Montgomery Clift in his Harrods’ raincoat, the nurse in her white uniform, the little girl dancing in her hair ribbons, and the baby bulwarked in her diapers—and they haunt me, still there, still waiting at Kennedy.

  My mother had said I was born an old maid. My husband had told me I would make a wonderful widow. Always eager to accept others’ definitions of myself—they saved me the boredom, and the pain, of having to make my own—I argued with both, that being my way, and silently agreed with both, that also being my way But now I had to think, and I could only do that if I was alone. So I made what seemed to me a perfectly logical request: I asked B. to move out for a few weeks.

  So B. moved to a friend’s apartment down the street, more dwindled by my request than I had been by his adultery. Which does not imply that I was the larger character, only that he was, for a while anyway, the more human. And I lived for a month the life that a few years later became the only one I knew.

  In bed at night, the children asleep, I had long talks with me. So satisfying! I said, Papa would not have wanted me to have mourned him for so many years. So I buried him. I thought about Philippe. Who was he, anyway? A figment of my imagination, really. So I buried him. I thought about B. Who was he? The only man I had ever wanted to marry. My father’s surrogate. My floor. My door to the world. So I asked him to come home.

  He came home, and he cried. But I did not know it then. He cried because the relief of being away from me had eclipsed the hurt of being asked to go. He had met someone, or, more likely, someone had been served up to him—when a formerly unavailable man is suddenly made free, all the world turns Pandarus—and he had had fun. He had had a good time. But I am guessing. I do not know what his life was without me, but I think it was like being on parole.

  A few months later, in December, we gave a party to celebrate our eleventh wedding anniversary. “For this I’m coming wrapped in the Israeli flag,” Leo Lerman said. “I never thought you’d make it.”

  Neither did I, and I was tremendously pleased with myself, with my husband, and with the exceptional sanity and staying power that had put us beyond anything so weakminded as divorce. One could defeat anything, death only excluded, if one just put one’s mind to it. Not enough people put their minds to things.

  I had spent the previous evening making pâtés and dips, deviling eggs, stuffing mushrooms, and baking a ham. We had hired a bartender, but everything else was done by me. My grandmother’s contemptuous “store-bought” had left me with the style of a house-proud nineteenth-century New England housewife.

  My office assistant said our friends were absolutely glamorous. Our apartment was jammed with writers and editors and agents and their pretty, thirtyish wives. No one was divorced or dying yet—that started a few years later—and our children, in their best dresses and hair ribbons, were made much of. Almost everyone there had children, too, all of them about to be launched toward New York’s private schools.

  No one had bad breath; no one was overweight but for one literary agent, who was discovered in the kitchen picking at the hambone. But since her weight served as a metaphor for her arrogant charm, her two hundred plus pounds were considered okay. No one got drunk, since half the guests were drinking dry vermouth on the rocks with a twist of lemon. Several of the writers were stars of the month, just about the right number, because too many of them and everyone would be wondering if he was standing in the right orbit, only one of them and you got awed and silent guests.

  The hostess has had her hair done in a kind of Jackie Kennedy bouffant at the Tempo Beauty Salon on West Twelfth Street (stingy, practical, she will never drop a cent at Kenneth’s), and is elegant in a long gray Donald Brooks cut low over breasts so small (though sweet) that she looks dressed even when she is naked. She is balancing a glass of dry vermouth and a cigarette, keeping an eye on the children, counting the stuffed mushrooms, and greeting all and sundry. She is a wonder. She has crested.

  Casting yourself in character parts is a pleasant way to trundle through life. It promises continuity. Those were the years, I say now, when I was a young matron, thus implying that there were other years when I was a this, other years when I was a that, years to come when I will be something else entirely. Young matron. Yes, I was certainly that.

  Early in the morning I walked Kate and Mag down Hudson Street to their little Episcopal school. Like all our crowd, we had abjured the public schools. They were all, except for the legendary P.S. 6 on the Upper East Side, for which parents fought and killed, “impossible.”

  Rose Red hung on to my right hand, Snow White hung on to my left, until they broke free and ran through the gate and into the little playground. The school was banked by a very old church and early nineteenth-century brick houses—Bret Harte had lived in one of them—and in my memory yellow leaves are forever scudding along the sidewalk and the air is forever crisp and blue.

  Next I would step off the curb, hail a cab, and pick up B., who was waiting, attaché case in hand, on the corner of Jane Street. He would drop me off on Park, next to the alleyway that led to the back of the Graybar Building, with the incantatory “Good luck, I love you” I insisted on before I could start work. Then I would enter the office I shared with two assistants, to laugh a lot and write copy between spurts of gossip.

  Two nights a week I stopped at the Tempo Beauty Salon for a shampoo and set. The Tempo was cheap. Even better, it was reminiscent of the place my mother went to in Bristol for her permanents and manicures, but where hers had a radio on the
windowsill, this one had a television set on the counter. I saw that Vietnamese colonel, I think he was, blow a hole through a captive’s head on that television set. Then I walked home, to Snow White and Rose Red, who were gobbling down fried whiting and collard greens. Hoppy had retired. Our new housekeeper was from North Carolina, and I was running, although I didn’t know it and had not even heard the term, the greatest soul food kitchen in New York.

  We entertained quite often, and if I did not shine in conversation, I did not care. B. was the shine; I was glad to be the chamois. Feeding people was what pleased me. I thought myself a goddess when my hands were in dough or skinning a chicken or hulling strawberries.

  We were invited to many parties, too, but I skipped most of them, and the only evening that sticks in my mind was a New Year’s Eve in the dark, crowded apartment of a literary agent who chain-smoked cigarettes clamped in a roach holder on her index finger. “There we were,” I told my assistants the next workday, “like the audience at a bullfight. The wives were sitting around the ring, and the matadors, the husbands, were strutting in the center. The only woman who got out there with them was Elaine Dundy, but of course she’d had a bestseller.”

  No, there’s another evening that also sticks in my mind. We were dining, on the Upper West Side, with a man who had been famous because of his talent and was famous now mostly because of his eight wives. The eighth was there, a former movie actress whose eyes swam in their sockets like guppies in a bowl and who kept repeating, her fist pounding her palm, that her husband was a real man.

  He, balding, was on the other side of the room talking about Spinoza, about whom he could quote reams of other people’s opinions. You could not beat him in debate. Disagree with one of his assessments, which were never his to begin with, and he would hit you with Kierkegaard, say, quoted in toto.

  Later, in the cab, I told B. that if I had ever been mad enough to marry that man, I would still be his first and only wife. “I can’t see that divorce solves anything.”

  “I know you can’t,” he said, and kept silence all the way home.

  The silences are what I remember, not conversations, not even arguments. But then, we never did argue, not really. We had too much in common.

  We read a lot, for instance, and we were as one when it came to our children’s educations. We were accomplished eaters, drank only grape derivatives, and enjoyed driving through Europe. We even looked a bit alike. “If we were meeting for the first time,” I said the day before he left, “you’d like me.”

  Perhaps it was, in the end, a matter of style, not content. Myself, holding Kate’s hand, emerging on Easter Sunday from a church he hated as only a man whose cousin, the Lochinvar of his childhood, had died in the Lincoln Brigade could hate it. Myself, bustling in from a Sunday afternoon movie in which quantities of cognac had been consumed, pouring myself a stiff two fingers in emulation of the heroine and describing the film in the breathlessly chatty manner I had osmosed in assorted country clubs (no Jews allowed, Catholics, provided they looked and talked like me, only bearable) and Connecticut College. Myself, enthusing about a gymnastics class and demonstrating a headstand to a man whose last participatory athletic event had been a softball game when he was twenty-three. Myself, anxious to get sex over with so I could get to sleep. Myself, desperate with migraine and nursing an ulcer and smilin’ through. Myself, talking, talking, talking to reach someone who was receding, irretrievably, into the distance. Suddenly there was so much of myself, so much to choose from, and none of it wanted.

  3

  THE MANAGING EDITOR, the one with all the famous friends, resigned. She was going to Seventeen, where the increase in salary would more than make up for no longer being able to publish such unlikely contributers to Mademoiselle as Cabot Lodge and Alistair Cooke, and the personnel department—mysterious women stuffed with more secrets than the Sphinx—was shipping candidate after candidate to B.T.B.’s boudoir. All we ever saw of them was a coat, usually expensive, folded over a chair beside B.T.B.’s secretary’s desk, but that was enough to set the office, Leo Lerman in particular, to trembling. We liked Mademoiselle just the way it was.

  Leo’s kingdom was a shoebox of a room crammed with a filing cabinet that might have come out of Front Page, an old glass-fronted bookcase, an ancient typewriter, and a big desk spilling over with papers, photographs, pens, pencils, and once, in a drawer, a family of mice. I had never known him to like any of Mlle.’s managing editors—they either threatened his pages or cramped his style, or both—so he was pleased when I suggested myself for the job. It was about then, I think, that he, who lived and breathed every English novel that ever was, started calling me “our Mary.”

  There was a certain amateurishness, a beguiling raffishness to Mademoiselle. One of the fashion editors was hanging out at Tim Leary’s place in Millbrook, forever racing out the back door as the police were racing in the front; another, fresh from California, had framed her bulletin board with lollipops and wore skirts so short the world gasped when she bent over. B. claimed that if he was standing around the Graybar Building’s lobby, he could always identify the Mademoiselle girls by the way they dressed (“oddly,” he said) and by “something funny about their knees.”

  So if I felt a bit timid about going to the gym teacher who still ruled the personnel department and telling her I would like to be the next managing editor, I was not the least timid about thinking I could handle the job. Mademoiselle was the kind of place where you could make things up as you went along, not because anybody was ever thinking seriously about innovation or would even dream of using the word but because most of the staff was imbued with the spirit of a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musical. We were forever planning a show in the back yard.

  Magisterial behind her bosom and her desk, the gym teacher pondered. Could I, she wondered aloud, “handle” B.T.B.? I was younger than my predecessors, had two small children, and could not be counted on to stay an hour or so after the staff went home, chatting in her office and sharing a nip or two of vodka.

  “Oh, yes,” I said, and got the job.

  In truth, I never had to “handle” B.T.B. We got along because she was always loyal to her editors in public, even if she disagreed with them in private, and because I was not remotely duplicitous. Sometimes, though, I think I puzzled her, being perhaps the only Irish Catholic she had ever known who was neither the cook’s daughter nor the child of a family like the Kennedys or the McDonnells. “But of course, the Irish ruined Southampton,” I had once overheard her say to the managing editor with the famous friends. The latter, born in Boston and raised among the pink-cheeked and high-nosed, shared the sentiment.

  Not being able to place me forced B.T.B. to put me on something like par; and besides, her snobberies were essentially innocent. “Did you know her mother was a trained nurse?” she once asked about an editor who, eager to ingratiate herself with a woman whose son had belonged to the Knickerbocker Grays, was overfond of mentioning her own membership in the Junior League. Trained nurses, I knew from childhood eavesdropping, had seen men who were not their husbands (assuming they had any) naked, and knew more than they should about birth control.

  “Take me to the Plaza!” I said to B. when I phoned to tell him that I was the new managing editor. The Plaza was in honor of Fitzgerald, just as the Ritz was in honor of Hemingway. “Take me to the Ritz Bar!” I had said on the day six years before when I arrived on the boat-train from Le Havre, seven months pregnant and glowing like a lamp. I had two martinis and stole an ashtray, and B. caught my every word and tossed it into the air. Now, though, he smiled and said the right things, whatever they were, but my words never reached their target, not really. Instead they simply dropped into space.

  If it wasn’t like the day at the Ritz, neither was it like the last time I had been in the Plaza. That had been a few years before, when Leo Lerman and Roger Schoening, who was the art director, and I sneaked out of the office late one afternoon to see The Leather Boys. Suddenly
the screen went blank and the little lights at the end of the aisles died and we went out onto Fifty-seventh Street, where people were scurrying like ants just dislodged from an anthill. The sky was a chill November gray, still light enough for us to see clearly, and all that told us that something was very wrong were the darkened windows of Tiffany’s and Bergdorf’s and Van Cleef. “Let us go to the Plaza,” Leo said grandly. “They will know what is happening.”

  Roger and I followed him—it was like following stately, plump Buck Mulligan—into the Palm Court, where the waiters were bringing candles and the little orchestra was sawing away at Viennese waltzes. “The last night on the Titanic,” Leo said, delighted, and waved us to a table, where we sat for hours, Roger and I drinking whatever the waiters came up with and Leo abstemious as usual, in what we learned later was the great blackout of 1965.

  The phones were not out yet, so after a long wait in a line downstairs I managed to call home and tell B. that I was not only not stuck in an elevator but ensconced in the Palm Court. Then there was nothing to do but enjoy the shadows and the candles and the Blue Danube waltz.

  Once we realized that the electric power was not going to come back anytime soon, Leo started the long walk home, fifty or so blocks to his house, a raddled old beauty way up on Lexington Avenue. Along the way, he informed us later, he helped direct traffic. We were stunned.

  Roger and I walked him as far as Fifth Avenue, then waited at what we assumed was a bus stop because of all the people clustered there. When a bus came, perhaps an hour later, it was as crowded as a Mexican jitney. The mood was Mexican, too. Or rather, what I imagined a Mexican mood to be. We were cheerful, we were happy, we all but danced in place.

  Once in the Village, we walked west through a city that was close to invisible. I do not remember stars (although I have been told there was a full moon), or people, or sound, only Roger falling over a fire hydrant in front of the Greenwich Theater. He left me on Jane Street, then limped to his place on Greenwich Street, and I walked into a house that smelled of the chicken Hoppy had roasted in the gas oven. Her daughter was there—B. had fished her out of a nearby subway station—and was to sleep on the living room couch. Hoppy was taking the little bedroom next to the children’s. A smile split B.’s face when I came in the door, and the children, bathed and in their bathrobes, capered around my knees. There we all were, safe under one roof, and there was nothing the darkness could do to any of us.