Beekman Place
Richard Halliday graduated to the fourth floor about a month after I did and continued to ignore me. When I first saw him in the hallway I blurted out, “Hi, Mr. Halliday!” but his dour “Hello” rejoinder broke my heart. It was bitter medicine. I sometimes sat across from him at the same table in the dining room, stealing glances, but he would not look my way. I talked about it a great deal with Dr. Myers, and why Mr. Halliday’s friendship meant so much to me. Dr. Myers suggested I try apologizing. So I walked up to Mr. Halliday one day and said, “I’m sorry if I did anything to offend you.” Mr. Halliday looked at me and said, “Not at all,” and continued to ignore me.
Then, toward the end of August, out of the clear blue, he stopped me in the hallway and asked if I wanted to be in a walk privilege group with him.
I nearly genuflected. Yes, yes, I assured him, and he said, “Then you better sign up!” I rushed to the nurses’ station to sign for a place in his group, determined I was going to be the best walk privilege partner any psychiatric patient ever had. Since there was a minimum of three people in walk privilege groups, Halliday chose as a third a dour Belgian woman in her forties, whom I hardly knew, nor did Mr. Halliday, it seemed. I couldn’t figure out why he chose her to be the third, or what we would all talk about during our stroll, until the three of us got to the corner of York Avenue and East 68th Street, where the Belgian lady peeled off without saying a word and disappeared up the street.
“Where is she going?” I asked, confused.
“I guess she’s going to get laid,” he shrugged. “In any event, it’s none of your business.” He gave me a withering look. It was smotheringly hot and rivulets of sweat began to trickle down my neck and wet the back of my shirt. “Now, would you like to come to my apartment and visit with Mother?” he asked.
“But that’s against the rules.”
“I thought you’d like to spend some time with Mother,” Mr. Halliday harrumphed, looking down the street for a taxi. “I guess I was mistaken.”
“But what if they find out?”
“The only way they’ll find out is if you tell them.”
I had already cheated once with Mr. Kellogg when we went to the Plaza hotel, and didn’t get caught. Maybe my complicity with Mr. Halliday would reinvigorate our friendship. So despite my misgivings, I agreed that going to his apartment would be a secret between us.
What followed was jarring. A Yellow cab took us to an apartment building in the Beekman Place area. The doorman seemed surprised to see Mr. Halliday, maybe even a little disturbed. “Is Mrs. Halliday out?” Mr. Halliday asked. The doorman said she had gone out, and Mr. Halliday barked, “Ring up when she comes home.”
I didn’t get it. He knew Mother wasn’t home?
We rushed through a dark lobby into a wood-paneled elevator with a tufted bench to sit on. A uniformed elevator man took us up to a small landing with just one apartment door, painted a red enamel so shiny you could see yourself in it. Mr. Halliday led me to a large entrance foyer with a black-and-white marble checkerboard floor. There was striped silk wallpaper, and a curved staircase that led up to the bedroom floor. Ahead of us in the living room everything was lemony yellow, the rugs and walls and sofas and chairs, even the sunshine streaming in a row of tall casement windows overlooking the East River. Everywhere I looked there were exquisitely needlepointed pillows of every shape and size. The only dark object in the room was an immense black grand piano with the top down and dozens of photographs in sterling silver frames of Mother and Mr. Halliday posing with famous people. I was spellbound. I was in Mary Martin’s house.
Halliday led me through the formal dining room into a big, dowdy kitchen that probably hadn’t been updated since the building was built. It had putty-colored tiles on the walls, a six-burner gas range, and a worn porcelain sink so deep you could wash clothes in it. He told me to sit at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table while he rummaged around in the drawers. He put an opened bag of stale chocolate chip cookies in front of me, handed me a day-old newspaper to read, and ordered me to stay put. Then he hurried up a back staircase, taking the steps two at a time.
A few minutes went by while I tried to nibble on a cookie and browse through the newspaper when suddenly the kitchen door swung open and it was Mother! She was dressed in a navy blue suit with pearl buttons, and she didn’t look any too happy to find me sitting at her kitchen table. I jumped to my feet, not knowing what to do. I guess the doorman forgot to ring up. “Where’s Richard?” she scowled. She was really cross.
“I don’t know,” I said, petrified. “He told me to wait here.”
She rushed off the way she came, the kitchen door flapping behind her.
Soon I heard angry stomping upstairs, and a minute later Mother came down the back stairs into the kitchen and said frostily, “Richard is waiting for you at the elevator.” She turned her back on me and exited stage left. I never saw her fabled exit in South Pacific, but it couldn’t have been any more effective or devastated anybody in the audience more than it did me that day in the apartment.
Mr. Halliday was waiting in the tiny vestibule, red in the face and stiff as a corpse. He didn’t say a word to me in the taxi on the way back to Payne Whitney. I had sense enough to keep my mouth shut. By the time we got to York and 68th Street we were late, and the lady from Belgium was standing on the corner, hopping angry that we would be reported and lose walk privileges. She started to tell off Mr. Halliday, who gave her a look as though he would murder her if she said one more word, so she fumed in silence back to the hospital and up to the fourth floor, where they didn’t even notice we were ten minutes late.
That night at dinner Mr. Halliday had no appetite. When one of the nurses asked him why he didn’t eat his fish, he lashed out at her with such vitriol that everybody in the dining room stared at him. By the next morning his face was contorted in a rictus-like grin. While he was at breakfast they searched his room and found an assortment of amphetamines and barbiturates hidden in his clothing. Evidently when we went to his apartment he raided his secret stash of pills, hidden somewhere upstairs.
He told them he did it because he couldn’t stand the August heat.
Dr. Myers came to the floor and confronted me about accompanying Mr. Halliday to his apartment. I cried, heartfelt heaving and sobbing, and begged not to be thrown out of the hospital for breaking the rule, because I had been duped by Mr. Halliday. Dr. Myers said he understood that I had been used as a pawn—after all, he had listened to hours of my adoration of Mr. Halliday and Mother. But rules were rules. I had to leave. However, instead of discharging me immediately, they decided that I should leave Payne Whitney in two weeks, at the end of August. The new plan was to mainline me back into the world of normal teenagers, and in September I would be enrolled in Erasmus Hall High School, as if I had never missed a day of school.
The Belgian woman was discharged from the hospital twenty-four hours later for going off on a cinq à sept with her inamorato, who was cheating on his wife. She pretended she was upset, but I think she was relieved to be getting out of there.
As for Richard Halliday, instead of discharging him, he faced a worse fate: they moved him up to the sixth floor. A nurse put all of his belongings on a gurney and as they walked him to the elevator a few people on the fourth floor came out of their rooms to say encouraging things like, “You’ll be back down before you know it,” and “We’ll miss you.”
Halliday nodded at them, stony faced, pale, and when he passed by me I said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Halliday,” not certain what I was sorry about.
“Traitor,” he whispered to me.
“Me? You’re blaming me? I didn’t tell them anything.”
“Come along, Mr. Halliday,” the nurse said, coaxing him into the elevator landing.
“It wasn’t me!” I pleaded. “It was probably Mother who told them.”
The big oak door clos
ed and it was done.
At Mr. Halliday’s departure the entire fourth floor fell into a communal depression that was alleviated only by the arrival of an attractive thirty-two-year-old bachelor, the son of a congressman from Washington, DC, who was on the fourth floor for three days before he exposed himself and they sent him up to the sixth floor too.
Dr. Myers refused to tell me if Mother had phoned the hospital to tell them Mr. Halliday had turned up at their apartment. The truth was, nobody had to tell them, because it was pretty obvious from Mr. Halliday’s demeanor when we got back to the hospital that he was on something.
I saw him one last time. The day before I was discharged I ran into him on the eighth-floor elevator landing. I was on my way to the occupational therapy room to get the ceramic ashtray I made (I thought it would be charming to have it on the coffee table later in life and say, “Oh this is the ashtray that I made when I was in Payne Whitney”) when the elevator door opened to reveal Mr. Halliday and a group of patients standing inside. He was herded out of the elevator by the nurses, and I could see by the way he moved that he was on Thorazine. It was awful. He stared at me and I said, “Mr. Halliday, I wanted to say goodbye. I’m being discharged.”
There was a blank pause, and then he said “Right,” before a nurse led him away.
What did that mean, “Right”? Right meaning that he understood that I was leaving? Or that was I right? Did I do the right thing? Or did he say, “Write”? Did he mean that I should write to him? So I did, the following week after I was released, I wrote him three letters, one to the hospital address and two to his home, but they went unanswered and I had no idea if he ever received them. Then I decided that what he was really saying to me was not to write to him, but that I should write it all down. Write. Or did he?
On August 31 I packed my bags and, dressed in my Brooks penny loafers, chinos, and a madras shirt, I tearfully said goodbye to the nurses and patients. Dr. Myers was in the lobby to shake my hand. I climbed in the back of my dad’s old Mercury and as we drove away I turned around to see the hospital building and all its secrets and characters disappear, and I whispered “Goodbye.”
Six months later, when Wayne Myers finished his residency at Payne Whitney, he went into private practice and opened an office on East 75th Street off Madison Avenue, in a chic townhouse, where I went into full Freudian analysis with him. For most of the next twelve years I spent forty-
five minutes, three or four days a week, lying on a black leather sofa that faced a framed print of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights hanging on the wall. I don’t know how much the actual tab for all those years of trying to cure my homosexuality with Dr. Myers cost, but I do know that when my father asked, “Who’s going to pay for this?” the answer was that he was going to pay for it. My mother and father made a great sacrifice hoping to cure their homosexual son. The doctor bills kept us poor, locked in the flat above the store, driving around in old cars, with no savings. To what end we were never certain.
Never-Never Land
One last thing.
When Richard Halliday left Payne Whitney he and Mother moved to a twelve-hundred-acre ranch in Brazil, where they grew coffee beans and raised chickens. To amuse themselves they opened a small needlepoint and gift shop in the local village. He died in Brasilia in 1973 at the age of sixty-seven from an intestinal blockage. Mary Martin sold the ranch and spent summers on Martha’s Vineyard and winters in Rancho Mirage, California. In 1982 she was riding in a taxi in San Francisco when the cab was broadsided by a car running a red light. She never fully recovered, but it wasn’t the accident that killed Mother, it was colorectal cancer at age seventy-six, in 1990.
Years after his death I discovered how detested Richard Halliday was in the Broadway theater. He was regarded as a monster, the vile side of his personality fed by amphetamines. Larry Hagman, Mary Martin’s son from a previous marriage, hated him so much growing up that he fantasized about shooting him with a rifle from their Manhattan apartment window. Gossip says that Halliday was homosexual and Mary Martin a lesbian, but I saw none of that. Clearly, the love they had for their creation of Mary Martin-the-Broadway-Star transcended whatever their sexual preferences were.
Fifteen years after I left Payne Whitney I saw Mary Martin in a crowded Greenwich Village nightclub called the Bottom Line. It was a popular venue for record companies to debut talent, and Atlantic Records was holding some glittery premiere that night. Mary Martin was the guest of Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary founder of Atlantic Records, and his wife, Mica. People in the music business recognized the Erteguns, but I don’t think another soul in the place knew or cared who Mary Martin was. I wended my way through the crush of people to where she sat and stood next to her chair. She looked up at me—she was so different, an old woman, her eyes frosted over, her hair done, lipstick, a church lady—and words began to fall out of my mouth: You probably won’t remember me but I met you and your husband Richard when I was in the hospital—I didn’t say which one—and you sent books for me to read, and knowing you and your husband helped set my life on a new tack …” I wanted to tell her about Richard saying I should write my family stories down and that I had become a writer and newspaper columnist, but I didn’t get to tell her that part because Ahmet Ertegun was furious that I had intruded at his table and he was loudly demanding that I go away. Mary Martin, who probably heard only every other word I said in the din of the nightclub, smiled pleasantly at me and said, “That’s nice.”
Then the lights started to go down, and she looked away, and I went back to my table and took a seat in the dark.
Seven
4315 18th Avenue
I promise myself that I won’t go back there anymore. Nostalgia is dangerous. I continue to try to remember my childhood so I can understand it better, yet I don’t know what it is I’m trying to understand. Anyway, it’s not as if something particularly astounding happened there. We were just another frayed thread in an infinite tapestry. Every family has its eccentricities and stories. It’s only human to want to leave a mark. Every cabdriver thinks he should write a book. We all believe our lives are in some way special. We wouldn’t be us if we didn’t.
So against my better judgment, I occasionally drive to Brooklyn and park on 18th Avenue right in front of what was once Rose’s Bras Girdles Sportswear, and I sit and I wait. And if I wait long enough, lulled into a stupor by the rhythmic rumble of the trains on the elevated line behind me, out of the corner of my eye I can see the specters spazieren down the street in ghostly cavalcade, my mom and dad, Muna, Gog and Katherine, the saleswomen waltzing with Old Man McGlynn in a top hat, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, and me, round-faced, frightened, hopeful, somewhere in the middle.
The stage set of my youth has been disassembled. One autumn day in the 1970s old man Fleischman of the gown shop had a stroke, and his son with the pinky ring took over the store. Exactly as expected, the son gambled the money away on the ponies. The shop was padlocked and the creditors came and sold off the remaining stock of bridal and cocktail dresses for few dollars. Without Fleischman’s foundation-garment referrals, the bread-and-butter trade of Rose’s Bras Girdles Sportswear was all but over, and the store became dependent solely on Katherine’s fashion taste. We tried to tell her the clothing she was buying wasn’t going over on 18th Avenue, but she insisted she knew better. I think, looking back over her life, that buying the clothing for the store those last few years was the only creative thing she ever got to do, and she relished it. Right into the ground. Eventually Rose’s Bras Girdles Sportswear ran out of money, and the store closed in the late 1970s, after a good run of over forty years.
The harpy salesgirl chorus dispersed. Lily Williams and her husband, Earl, moved to Palm Grove, Florida. Ten years later Earl died of a heart attack in his sleep, and Lily moved to an assisted living center, where she lived until she was ninety-one. Dodie moved to New Paltz, New York, where her son
had a dental practice. Fat Anna became severely diabetic and rarely went out anymore.
My movie palace is gone too. The Culver Theater was sold to Chemical Bank and summarily demolished. Nobody noticed, nobody grieved. Only a few references to it on the Internet prove it ever existed. The secrets and intimacies the theater and I shared in the dark are now only mine.
I don’t know what happened to my Culver Luncheonette antagonist Irv, but many years later I ran into Arnie. He had worked his way up in the food business from luncheonette owner to manager of a small restaurant on 10th Street in Greenwich Village. I was in a group of gay professional men going out for Sunday brunch, and when we came in the door he recognized me, grown up, and we smiled and shook hands. Then he asked us, “What can I do for you ladies?” Can you imagine? All those years later. We walked out.
A few weeks after that incident I remembered to relate the story to my mother, and she said that I must have seen him just before he died. She had heard from neighbors a few days before that Arnie had a heart attack while stuck in traffic on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and when the traffic jam eased up, they found him dead behind the wheel in the middle lane.
As for my grandparents, the delicate balance of Muna and Katherine and Gog was upset by a young woman named Carmela Carbone, of the pendulous breasts and heavy blue eye shadow. He was sixty-five, she was twenty-six. “You must understand this,” he confided in me one day. “This isn’t about money. This is love. Stevie, she’s a gift to me.”
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