It became even quieter and cooler. Traffic lights changed from red to green, but a car rarely passed. From somewhere a Negro appeared. He staggered. He stopped not far from Bessie and turned his eyes to her. Then he walked on. Bessie knew that her bag was full of important documents, but for the first time she did not care about her property. Sam had left a fortune; it all had gone for naught. She continued to save for her old age as if she were still young. “How old am I?” Bessie asked herself. “What have I accomplished in all these years? Why didn’t I go somewhere, enjoy my money, help somebody?” Something in her laughed. “I was possessed, completely not myself. How else can it be explained?” Bessie was astounded. She felt as if she had awakened from a long sleep. The broken key had opened a door in her brain that had shut when Sam died.
The moon had shifted to the other side of the roof—unusually large, red, its face obliterated. It was almost cold now. Bessie shivered. She realized that she could easily get pneumonia, but the fear of death was gone, along with her fear of being homeless. Fresh breezes drifted from the Hudson River. New stars appeared in the sky. A black cat approached from the other side of the street. For a while, it stood on the edge of the sidewalk and its green eyes looked straight at Bessie. Then slowly and cautiously it drew near. For years Bessie had hated all animals—dogs, cats, pigeons, even sparrows. They carried sicknesses. They made everything filthy. Bessie believed that there was a demon in every cat. She especially dreaded an encounter with a black cat, which was always an omen of evil. But now Bessie felt love for this creature that had no home, no possessions, no doors or keys, and lived on God’s bounty. Before the cat neared Bessie, it smelled her bag. Then it began to rub its back on her leg, lifting up its tail and meowing. The poor thing is hungry. I wish I could give her something. How can one hate a creature like this, Bessie wondered. O Mother of mine, I was bewitched, bewitched. I’ll begin a new life. A treacherous thought ran through her mind: perhaps remarry?
The night did not pass without adventure. Once, Bessie saw a white butterfly in the air. It hovered for a while over a parked car and then took off. Bessie knew it was a soul of a newborn baby, since real butterflies do not fly after dark. Another time, she wakened to see a ball of fire, a kind of lit-up soap bubble, soar from one roof to another and sink behind it. She was aware that what she saw was the spirit of someone who had just died.
· · ·
Bessie had fallen asleep. She woke up with a start. It was daybreak. From the side of Central Park the sun rose. Bessie could not see it from here, but on Broadway the sky became pink and reddish. On the building to the left, flames kindled in the windows; the panes ran and blinked like the portholes of a ship. A pigeon landed nearby. It hopped on its little red feet and pecked into something that might have been a dirty piece of stale bread or dried mud. Bessie was baffled. How do these birds live? Where do they sleep at night? And how can they survive the rains, the cold, the snow? I will go home, Bessie decided. People will not leave me in the streets.
Getting up was a torment. Her body seemed glued to the step on which she sat. Her back ached and her legs tingled. Nevertheless, she began to walk slowly toward home. She inhaled the moist morning air. It smelled of grass and coffee. She was no longer alone. From the side streets men and women emerged. They were going to work. They bought newspapers at the stand and went down into the subway. They were silent and strangely peaceful, as if they, too, had gone through a night of soul-searching and come out of it cleansed. When do they get up if they are already on their way to work now, Bessie marvelled. No, not all in this neighborhood were gangsters and murderers. One young man even nodded good morning to Bessie. She tried to smile at him, realizing she had forgotten that feminine gesture she knew so well in her youth; it was almost the first lesson her mother had taught her.
She reached her building, and outside stood the Irish super, her deadly enemy. He was talking to the garbage collectors. He was a giant of a man, with a short nose, a long upper lip, sunken cheeks, and a pointed chin. His yellow hair covered a bald spot. He gave Bessie a startled look. “What’s the matter, Grandma?”
Stuttering, Bessie told him what had happened to her. She showed him the handle of the key she had clutched in her hand all night.
“Mother of God!” he called out.
“What shall I do?” Bessie asked.
“I will open your door.”
“But you don’t have a passkey.”
“We have to be able to open all doors in case of fire.”
The super disappeared into his own apartment for a few minutes, then he came out with some tools and a bunch of keys on a large ring. He went up in the elevator with Bessie. The bag of food still stood on the threshold, but it looked depleted. The super busied himself at the lock. He asked, “What are these cards?”
Bessie did not answer.
“Why didn’t you come to me and tell me what happened? To be roaming around all night at your age—my God!” As he poked with his tools, a door opened and a little woman in a housecoat and slippers, her hair bleached and done up in curlers, came out. She said, “What happened to you? Everytime I opened the door, I saw this bag. I took out your butter and milk and put them in my refrigerator.”
Bessie could barely restrain her tears. “O my good people,” she said. “I didn’t know that…”
The super pulled out the other half of Bessie’s key. He worked a little longer. He turned a key and the door opened. The cards fell down. He entered the hallway with Bessie and she sensed the musty odor of an apartment that has not been lived in for a long time. The super said, “Next time, if something like this happens call me. That’s what I’m here for.”
Bessie wanted to give him a tip, but her hands were too weak to open her bag. The neighbor woman brought in the milk and butter. Bessie went into her bedroom and lay down on the bed. There was a pressure on her breast and she felt like vomiting. Something heavy vibrated up from her feet to her chest. Bessie listened to it without alarm, only curious about the whims of the body; the super and the neighbor talked, and Bessie could not make out what they were saying. The same thing had happened to her over thirty years ago when she had been given anesthesia in the hospital before an operation—the doctor and the nurse were talking but their voices seemed to come from far away and in a strange language.
Soon there was silence, and Sam appeared. It was neither day nor night—a strange twilight. In her dream, Bessie knew that Sam was dead but that in some clandestine way he had managed to get away from the grave and visit her. He was feeble and embarrassed. He could not speak. They wandered through a space without a sky, without earth, a tunnel full of debris—the wreckage of a nameless structure—a corridor dark and winding, yet somehow familiar. They came to a region where two mountains met, and the passage between shone like sunset or sunrise. They stood there hesitating and even a little ashamed. It was like that night of their honeymoon when they went to Ellenville in the Catskills and were let by the hotel owner into their bridal suite. She heard the same words he had said to them then, in the same voice and intonation: “You don’t need no key here. Just enter—and mazel tov.”
Special thanks—this is in contrast to the plain-vanilla, ordinary thanks we usually try to fob off on people—go to Pamela McCarthy, Eric Simonoff, Fabio Bertoni, Erin Overbey, Joshua Rothman, John Bennet, Chris Curry, Ann Goldstein, Eleanor Martin, Jennifer Koontz, Mary Hawthorne, Rozina Ali, Nimal Eames-Scott, Parker Henry, Antonia Hitchens, Tammy Kim, David Kortava, Sean Lavery, Peter Licursi, Lev Mendes, and Nicolas Niarchos; and to all the marvelous contributors bylined in the book. At Random House, we benefited from the wisdom of Noah Eaker, the vigilant eye of Vincent La Scala, the Sherpa skills of Nina Arazoza and Emma Caruso, and the design gifts of Simon M. Sullivan. Love beads are owed to Alexandra Schwartz and Sharan Shetty. The sixties were a long time ago. All these people made it feel like now.
Renata Adler joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1962, and contributed reportage, fiction
, criticism, and Talk of the Town pieces to the magazine over the next twenty-five years. A graduate of Bryn Mawr, the Sorbonne, and Yale Law School, she is the author of two novels, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983).
Roger Angell, a senior editor and staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 1944, and became a fiction editor in 1956. Since 1962, he has written more than a hundred Sporting Scene pieces for the magazine, along with film reviews, stories, casuals, and Comments. His writing has appeared in many anthologies, including The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Essays, and The Best American Magazine Writing, and he is the author of several books on baseball. In 2015, he won the National Magazine Award for essays and criticism.
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a writer and political theorist. Her reporting on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, excerpted here, coined the phrase “banality of evil,” and was later published as a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. After escaping Europe during the Holocaust and settling in America, she taught at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the New School. She is the author of several books, including The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution (1963), and On Violence (1970).
Michael J. Arlen joined The New Yorker in 1958, and served as the magazine’s TV critic throughout the 1960s. He also contributed fiction and Comments to the magazine, and his 1975 book, Passage to Ararat, won a National Book Award for Contemporary Affairs.
James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a novelist, critic, activist, and essayist, whose work often explored the racial and sexual tensions of mid-twentieth-century America. After leaving the U.S. in his twenties, Baldwin spent most of the rest of his life in France. He is the author of several novels, including Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Another Country (1962), as well as many essay collections, among them Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963), much of which was first published in The New Yorker.
Whitney Balliett (1926–2007) began writing for The New Yorker in 1952, and was the magazine’s jazz critic from 1957 to 2001. He is the author of Such Sweet Thunder (1966), Improvising (1977), American Musicians (1986), and Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954–2000 (2000), among other books.
Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) published “L’Lapse,” his first story for The New Yorker, in 1963, and was a regular contributor of fiction to the magazine until his death. The bulk of his work first appeared in The New Yorker, and much of it was later published in his eleven short story collections. He also co-founded the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, where he was on faculty from 1980 to 1989.
Jacob Brackman is a journalist, screenwriter, and musical lyricist. Between 1966 and 1968, he wrote more than a dozen pieces for The New Yorker, including Comments and Talk of the Town stories. He later served as a film critic for Esquire, wrote the screenplays for The King of Marvin Gardens and Times Square, and co-wrote dozens of songs for the singer Carly Simon.
Truman Capote (1924–1984) published his first article for The New Yorker, a Talk of the Town piece, in 1944. His books include Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and In Cold Blood (1966), which originated as a series of New Yorker articles published the previous year.
Rachel Carson (1907–1964) was an American writer, conservationist, and marine biologist. Her 1962 book, Silent Spring, was first published in The New Yorker, and is widely acknowledged to have launched the modern environmental movement. She is also the author of The Sea Around Us (1951), which won a National Book Award, and The Edge of the Sea (1955). Both were first serialized in the magazine.
John Cheever (1912–1982) sold his first story to The New Yorker in 1935, and was a regular contributor of fiction to the magazine until his death. His books include The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), The Wapshot Scandal (1964), and Falconer (1977).
Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr. (1933–2016) was a journalist and environmentalist who wrote for The New Yorker for thirty-five years. Known for his reporting on space travel, he was also the author of eight books, including Apollo on the Moon (1969) and Thirteen: The Apollo Flight That Failed (2013).
James Dickey (1923–1997) was an American poet and novelist who, starting with “Orpheus Before Hades,” in 1959, published several dozen poems in The New Yorker. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Buckdancer’s Choice, which won a National Book Award in 1966. He taught, and was poet-in-residence, at the University of South Carolina from 1969 until his death.
Jennifer Egan has contributed fiction and commentary to The New Yorker since 1989, when she published “The Stylist,” her first story in the magazine. She is the author of four novels, The Invisible Circus (1995), Look at Me (2001), The Keep (2006), and A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), which won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award.
Mavis Gallant (1922–2014) was a Canadian-born writer. Between 1951 and 1996, she published 116 stories in The New Yorker. Her books include Green Water, Green Sky (1959), The End of the World and Other Stories (1974), and Paris Stories (2002).
Brendan Gill (1914–1997) joined The New Yorker in 1936 and wrote more than twelve hundred pieces for the magazine. He was the magazine’s theatre critic from 1968 to 1987, and the main architecture critic from 1987 to 1996. His books include Tallulah (1972), Here at The New Yorker (1975), and Late Bloomers (1996).
Penelope Gilliatt (1932–1993) wrote film criticism for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1979, alternating reviewing duties with Pauline Kael. She wrote five novels, including A State of Change (1967) and The Cutting Edge (1978), and contributed several short stories to the magazine. She also wrote the screenplay for 1971’s Sunday Bloody Sunday, which won best screenplay awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Writers Guild of America.
Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996. In 2001, he was awarded the National Magazine Award for profiles. He is the author of The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), Outliers (2008), What the Dog Saw (2009), and David and Goliath (2013).
Dana Goodyear, a staff writer, was on the editorial staff of The New Yorker from 1999 to 2007, when she began writing full time for the magazine. She is the author of two collections of poems, Honey and Junk (2005) and The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard (2013). She teaches at the University of Southern California, and her book about foodie culture, Anything That Moves, was published in 2013.
Adam Gopnik began writing for The New Yorker in 1986. He is the recipient of three National Magazine Awards, for essays and for criticism, and the George Polk Award for magazine reporting. His books include Paris to the Moon (2000), The King in the Window (2005), Through the Children’s Gate (2006), Angels and Ages (2009), and The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food (2011).
Emily Hahn (1905–1997) began writing for The New Yorker in 1928, and became the magazine’s China correspondent in 1935. She contributed reportage, poems, and short stories to the magazine until her death. Her more than fifty books include Chiang Kai-shek (1955) and Romantic Rebels (1967).
Geoffrey T. Hellman (1907–1977) began reporting for The Talk of the Town section in 1929. His books include How to Disappear for an Hour (1947), Mrs. De Peyster’s Parties (1963), The Smithsonian: Octopus on the Mall (1967), and Bankers, Bones, and Beetles (1969).
Nat Hentoff is an American historian, novelist, and critic. He has contributed book reviews and Profiles to The New Yorker since the sixties, and is known for his work in The Village Voice, for which he wrote criticism for fifty years, until 2009. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1972, and in 2009 joined the Cato Institute as a senior fellow.
Hendrik Hertzberg originally joined The New Yorker as a reporter in 1969, and left in 1977 for the White House, where he was a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter. In 1992, he returned to the magazine as executive editor, and later became a full-time staff writer. He is the author of Politics: Observations & Arguments (2004), ¡Obámanos!: The Birth of a New Political Era (200
9), and One Million (1970).
Ted Hughes (1930–1998) was an English poet who contributed poetry to The New Yorker from 1957 until his death. He wrote over a dozen collections of poetry, including Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (1970) and Birthday Letters (1998), several children’s books, and a prose study of Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992). He also served as Britain’s poet laureate from 1984 until his death.
Charlayne Hunter-Gault is an American journalist. As one of the first two black students to attend the University of Georgia, she was profiled in Calvin Trillin’s “An Education in Georgia,” excerpted here. In 1963, she was hired by The New Yorker as an editorial assistant, and went on to become the magazine’s first black regular contributor. She later reported for the New York Times, and served as National Public Radio’s chief correspondent in Africa from 1997 to 1999. She won two Emmys and a Peabody Award for her work on PBS’s NewsHour.
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) was a poet and novelist who served as the United States poet laureate from 1956 to 1958. His books include Pictures from an Institution (1954) and The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960), which won a National Book Award.
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) wrote for The New Yorker from 1967 until her retirement in 1991. In 1968, shortly after the publication of her review of Bonnie and Clyde, she became the magazine’s film critic, and went on to write hundreds of Current Cinema columns. She was the author of thirteen books, including I Lost It at the Movies (1965), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1973), 5001 Nights at the Movies (1982), and Deeper into Movies (1973), which won the 1974 National Book Award.
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