The Man on the Third Floor

by Anne Bernays

  The Man on the

  THIRD FLOOR

  ANNE BERNAYS

  Copyright © 2012 by Anne Bernays

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bernays, Anne–

  The man on the third floor / Anne Bernays.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-57962-285-5

  eISBN 1-57962-339-5

  1. Book editors—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.

  2. Gay men—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.

  3. Homosexuality—History—20th century—Fiction.

  4. Upper East Side (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.E728M36 2012

  813’.54—dc23 2012016407

  Printed in the United States of America.

  For Michael Korda, Ken Siman, and Michael Stein.

  They have my back.

  CHAPTER 1

  After news of the unusual goings-on in my house finally escaped, like a gas leak from a faulty stove, some of my so-called liberal New York City friends characterized my life using words that shocked even me. “Deplorable,” “disgusting,” “unnatural,” “selfish,” “hedonistic,” “bizarre.” I hadn’t hurt them in any way, hadn’t threatened their way of life. Up until then we had had a lot of fun together.

  Actually, this didn’t happen. What did happen was that I was met with looks of incredulity fueled by moral judgment, averted eyes, hems and haws and, in some cases, total silence. I only imagined that they called me those things in the privacy of their own homes and to each other. “Can you believe it, good old Walter—all these years?” One or two of them, I guessed, were secretly envious because I had managed to fool everyone for quite a while and because they would have liked to do as I did but didn’t have the nerve. The years when most of this occurred, a decade or more after the war ended, belonged in a time when there were more secrets held tight to the heart than there were gold-star mothers. In those days, not so long ago, men were supposed to cleave to their wives and women to their husbands. Any other combination was viewed as deviant. Psychologists listed these deviations in their diagnostic bibles under “sickness.”

  I wasn’t sick and I wasn’t angry. I was an easygoing person, someone who kept his temper in check and who listened to what other people told him without yawning or interrupting. I was told by several people that I exuded good will and prudence, and had decent judgment. The people I worked with at Griffin House liked and respected me, my children, Henry and Kate, seemed to enjoy my company; my wife, Phyllis, was attached to me—in her own way. She was an extremely attractive lady and her enthusiasms affected people like a virus. I had my share of enemies—what man doesn’t, especially in a competitive atmosphere like book publishing?—but I know I was an okay guy, generous, flexible, known for my snappy joke-telling, especially during office Christmas parties. I picked up the check more often than not and put up with incompetence as just another little glitch along the way.

  I also know that I didn’t have the courage of a lion or a five-star general like Ike. I kept my public risk-taking to a minimum. The fact that, in Tolstoy’s words, I eventually took on “the habit of passions” was a kind of fluke—I never set out to install a man on the top floor of my house and I kept these passions (actually I prefer the word “love”) hidden from everyone except their object. I think if someone hates you they’re probably doing so for the wrong reason.

  I HAD a fairly easy time of it as a child, considering the disastrous histories of some families—drunkenness, battery, betrayal, absence, and all-round filthy behavior. If my father was off-limits emotionally and unable to empathize, and my mother not quite a whole person, I figure that’s kind of par for the course at our stage of civilization. My mother, Belle Samson—born Gissler, and married at twenty—was a starchy type who couldn’t quite get the hang of how to relax. She was devoted to my father, both sentimentally and as what they used to call a helpmeet. He came first, the children second. We were hardly neglected by if, say, she was reading to us and my father called out to her for something, she would stop reading. I had a younger sister, Constance, smart like me and chubby. When she was twelve she caught diphtheria and died three weeks later. This death virtually eradicated my mother’s ability to laugh or smile for the rest of her life.

  Belle was always persuaded that if God chose the Jews, he was partial to the German branch of this tree; she was something of a snob. My father, Maurice—Morrie to his friends, though not to his wife—the embodiment of Victorian rectitude and habits, died at the age of sixty-seven when he fell from the Super Chief and cracked his skull against the platform in Newton, Kansas. Maurice and his younger brother David ran Belcher’s, founded by their father in the 1880s. This was a department store on lower Fifth Avenue and Nineteenth Street. Belcher’s was the place women headed for whenever they needed curtains, cribs, napkins, kitchen gadgets, lamps, maids’ uniforms, quilts, “notions,” cutlery, dinner plates. In other words, the list of items you couldn’t purchase at Belcher’s was extremely short. Belcher’s made Maurice Samson, née Shapiro, a rich man, and elevated him to that sector of New York society considered “privileged” and therefore obligated to donate money toward the health and security of the “underprivileged.” My father could afford to send me to private school and summer camp, to enable me to move about more or less freely in New York living rooms not generally welcoming to the Jewish community. He was on the board of several charities and was a member of the Orange Club, an establishment that admitted only German Jews. He was considered a real gent. He wore spats, carried a Malacca cane, and called every man he met “sir.”

  When I was very young, my father raised his voice while talking to me as if I was deaf or a foreigner. It was very annoying. “Eat your vegetables,” he would shout, “sit up straight.” “Stop crying!” “Sportsmanship!” All of these instructions had a legitimate basis because I wasn’t anything like the exemplary boy he wanted me to be. I was a crybaby; I was afraid of the dark, I wet my bed until I was almost ten. In spite of this, he was determined to instill the traits of manliness in me—sensing or seeing that this was an area that needed a lot of help—by demonstrating how to stand “like a man” with my hands in the pockets of my knickers and one leg thrown to the front and side, a sort of devil-may-care gesture.

  He would have liked me to call other boys by their last names and give and receive noogies without a twinge. But instead of sneaking around with the boys to light up a forbidden cigarette, I preferred to read in my room: Treasure Island—“Them that die’ll be the lucky ones,” a sentence that scared me into imagining varieties of torture so awful they kept me awake at night, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Tom Sawyer, and an assortment of childhood classics. I loved to read and listen to music, Mozart, Bach, Debussy—especially Mozart, who seemed to be singing directly into my inner ear—and to walk around the city by myself. The mean kids in my class at school called me sissy because I was a clumsy athlete and because I just didn’t seem to have the stuff of an all-American boy. That was okay with me; I figured it was better to be a sissy than a bully—I never fancied making people afraid of me. But all this was hard on father, who never stopped trying to make me into someone I clearly wasn’t. My mother, who had a somewhat more generous nature, comforted me whenever she could, but she was afraid of my father’s tem
per and hadn’t the grit to defy him.

  I promised myself that if I ever had a son of my own, I would never say the things to him that my father said to me; and if he turned out to be a professional wrestler, or a cook in a chop house, I’d keep my mouth shut and give him a hug.

  By the time I was thirteen or so, I had decided that it was easier to try to get along with my parents and especially my father, than to act sullen or provocative. I decided that I wouldn’t reveal to them who I was or what I was thinking. I felt like an actor in my own play, taking the starring role and being the nice obedient child and young man they wanted me to be. It was hard at first, but I got adept at it and gradually my father stopped picking on me, though he never stopped asking me about which sports I was taking at school. He wanted it to be football but it was tennis and chess.

  Camp Nayiwuk was nestled along the piney shore of New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee, where it was so cold in August that ice formed on the top of your bucket of water overnight. I was a camper there for three years, starting when I was thirteen. I was by far the smartest kid at camp so that although I was no good at any sport but tennis (another fluke), the other boys left me pretty much alone. Intelligence will propel you far; but if you’re born with an outsized I.Q., as I was, being smart is hardly different from having acute hearing or the sense of smell of a hound dog. It’s just something you’re born with, a gift from your parents that they didn’t have much to do with. I was quicker than the other boys, the counselors, and even the head of the camp—a beefy man who had been a major in the First World War where his right hand had been blown off in the Battle of the Somme. We had to call him “Major,” and whenever he forgot the name of a camper, he would lift his collar in back to read the name tape. Major blew the bugle to wake us up, summon us to the dining hall, which was half open to the elements, and send us off to bed. His taps was perfect. But he was not as smart as I was and never knew that I had brought an air rifle to camp, never knew that I walked off alone into the woods where I shot at rabbits and other small animals, never discovered that I got out of most athletic activities merely by walking away from the field. The others boys seemed to be afraid of my brain, which struck me as peculiar. What could I do to them? “Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me.” Most of them could have wrestled me to the mat in two seconds, but what could I do to them? Nevertheless, I was intimidating enough to keep them from beating me up. I had one special friend, Stanley Jacobs. Stanley and I would take long walks through the woods and talk about Herman Hesse, Thomas Mann, Stravinsky and other cultural icons. We must have been insufferable.

  During my second year at camp I sprained my ankle tripping over a root; I wasn’t the most graceful boy in the world. While the others kids worked up a sweat on the baseball diamond and basketball court, I lay on my bunk for five days reading the collected poems of Lord Byron. One afternoon during this vacation, Harmon Strout, a counselor, ducked into the tent I shared with three other boys. The counselors at Nayiwuk were clean-cut college students who needed school tuition money. Most of them had been there since the time they were campers; the place had about it an air of a grand secret society, with fire rites and pledges, and rituals. It was run with a strict autocratic hand that most of the boys found irresistible. Harmon was by far the most popular counselor at camp; he had a frankly Aryan glow, blond, tousled hair, bulging muscles and a touch of condescension that made you desperate to impress him. He could pitch a baseball clocked at eighty miles an hour, he was the fastest runner, he had earned every nature and boating badge. Most of the campers, especially the little boys, had crushes on Harmon.

  Inside the tent, Harmon began to talk to me—something he had never done before; as a matter of fact, I was sure he was as oblivious of me as I was aware of him. And for me, it wasn’t a physical thing; it was more like a mortal in the presence of a god. Harmon sat down opposite me, and looking into my eyes, told me he admired me. “You’re one of the few brainy ones,” he said. “And you go for nature. I like that.” He inquired about my ankle. I made light of it. My heart was racing; I could feel my cheeks getting hot. Apollo was sitting on Dannie Nussbaum’s bed. He told me he had almost flunked out of Bucknell but had managed to hold on. “I’m on probation,” he said proudly. “I think you’re my type.” I didn’t know what he meant. “I’ve brought some Vaseline,” he said, digging into the pocket of his shorts and holding up a small jar for me to see. He stood up and slowly drew his polo shirt up over his head and out along his bronzed arms. I was having a hard time breathing as it dawned on me what he was up to. He stepped out of his white shorts; he wasn’t wearing underpants. His penis looked huge and upright like the ones on Greek vases. I wanted to run away from him, I wanted to stay where I was. It was all happening slowly and fast at the same time, and I had the odd sensation that I was off to the side and above, watching. “I won’t hurt your ankle, I promise,” he said gently. “Turn over.” I turned over and he pulled off my shorts. “Now turn on your side, away from me.”

  “Relax, kid,” he said. “This is supposed to be fun.” Then he instructed me—not in the tone he used while coaching tennis, but in a sweet whisper—what I was supposed to do. When his penis entered me I felt an electric shock so violent it made me scream. He told me “for crissake, be quiet.” I held onto my voice as the shock melted and turned into a sensation of delight. I almost passed out. “There,” he said finally. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” I couldn’t talk. He put on his shirt and shorts. “Can’t say anything? I couldn’t my first time either.”

  “Harmon?”

  “What is it, kid?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Okay then. I want you to promise you’re not going to tell anybody about what we just did. Not anybody, not even your best friend. You have to swear. Or I might have to hurt you.”

  “I swear,” I said.

  AFTER THIS experience I tried to bury my memory of it—the fear, the pain, and above all, the pleasure. I was afraid to tell anyone, and it didn’t occur to me until much later that I could hardly have been the first, or last, object of Harman’s affection—or whatever it was that brought him into my tent. I bring up this childish adventure mainly because it has some bearing on what eventually happened.

  That morsel of luck, my swollen I.Q., got me into Harvard, a school with a quota system that counted Jews as if they were apples on the edge of rotting. At Harvard, I concentrated on Philology and minored in Psychology, a discipline that looked on the theories of Freud and Jung with an unhealthy skepticism. We learned mainly about the brain and its neurons and what makes monkeys different from men. No mention of the unconscious or, god forbid, the Oedipus complex or penis envy. I graduated from Harvard in ’29, a memorable year to say the least. With money given me by my old man, I traveled a little, stopped in Paris for a while, got to know some people who later became famous, and realized that the thing I most wanted to do was to be involved in the publishing of books, and specifically, editing them. The creation of a book from the tiniest seed of an idea to the blossom you can hold in your hand seemed sacerdotal. It was a priestly calling. So when I got back to New York in ’34, I applied and got, right off the bat, a job at Griffin House. Not incidentally, Griffin was owned by my mother’s second cousin. I don’t pretend to have the sort of personality that can walk in off the street and be immediately seated at a desk and given the services of a secretary. As a matter of fact, I was not seated at a desk, not for several years. I was sent on the road as a traveler, a somewhat fancier word for traveling salesman. The personnel director assured me that this was the way you put your feet on the first rungs of the ladder to publishing success. This meant reading the books on the list, getting to know the booksellers, being part of the process from idea to cash money. It wasn’t easy—sleeping in crummy hotels, eating undistinguished food, being lonely—but in its own way it was satisfying, because I was learning the business from the business side, not the editorial side, where men made decis
ions based more on aesthetics than money. Actually, few people had the money to buy new books; books were a luxury, just as a car was, and a Harvard education. I would hang around in the little stores dotted here and there across the New England countryside and shoot the breeze with the employees who, most of the time, stood around reading the books they weren’t selling.

  So I had a good eight years at Griffin before I went off to enlist in the fight for Democracy. Meanwhile, I had met Phyllis Weiner at a party in the Village, a place I often went because I liked hanging around artists and writers more than the men I had gone to school with, most of whom had vanished into businesses or one of the weighty professions. I preferred to think of myself, while not creative in the conventional sense—I didn’t paint, I didn’t write, and I didn’t make pots on wheels or take pictures of naked women in grayish light—I thought I understood why they did what they did (earning almost no money for their efforts). The party where I met Phyllis was given by one of the junior editors at Griffin House.

  Jonathan Lehmann lived on the top floor of a house on Ninth Street between Fifth and Sixth; its rent was partly taken care of by his rich parents. Johnnie was someone endlessly attracted to new people and things, a collector of both. He was known for his parties and generosity with his liquor, just recently available again on the legal market. Johnnie was, as my colleagues told me, “going places” on the strength of having recommended a book that made it on to The New York Times best-seller list, every publisher’s dream. Phyllis was a copywriter at the advertising agency that produced the ads for Griffin’s books. Having this job when most of her circle was having babies set her apart.

  “Who’s that girl?” I said.

  “That’s the infamous Phyllis Weiner,” Johnnie said. “She writes copy for Hollis. Forget it. She has a boyfriend.”

  I was surprised, not that she had a boyfriend, but that Johnnie would assume that was why I’d asked, when I was simply struck by her style, a sort of Isadora Duncan gauziness when the prevailing style was sleek and satiny, Ginger Rogers as caryatid. Phyllis certainly stood out. Furthermore, she was smoking a cigarette in a holder that looked like ivory.