Face to Face

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Soon my parents groped their way down the stairs. When they got home my mother called to describe to me how strange New York had looked from across the river, black and empty like an abandoned city. All evening, people in our building roamed the stairs and halls with flashlights, seeing if everyone was all right, if everyone had candles. It felt like a great adventure. But later on I was frightened, alone in the dark with a year-old baby. Even when the lights were on I was often afraid that something terrible would befall the baby and that I would not know the right thing to do. How much worse in the dark. It must have been from my mother that I had the notion that for every eventuality—particularly in the case of children—there was a right thing to do, as opposed to any number of wrong things, and that the acquiring of wisdom was learning all those right things in advance. Harry got home around midnight. He had walked all the way from the Lower East Side in stages, stopping off at friends’ houses along the way, resting and gathering strength in the various darknesses. He brought news of the outside, like a courier in the Dark Ages.

  Around this time Harry’s family—mother, sister, cousins, and all—decided to have a surprise party for Harry’s father’s seventieth birthday in our apartment. Well, fine, except we hardly had suitable furniture. We felt we should dignify the occasion with a couch, at the very least. We did have a couch of sorts, but it was ragged and falling apart, having traveled to Philadelphia and to Boston and languished in storage for a year. Harry went to an auction in Brooklyn on the day of the party and found an elegant, old-fashioned tufted couch for eleven dollars, plus twenty-five to have it delivered the same day. The couch was white, which I thought beautiful. I was very proud of it when all the family arrived. Later my mother informed me that, beautiful or not, the white was merely the muslin that belonged under a covering. I didn’t doubt this; she knew all about such things. She said we ought to have it covered. “Slipcovers,” like “bedroom suite” and “carpeting” was a word connoting things Harry and I did not want any connection with. We kept it white for a long time. At last—perhaps our principles began to lapse or perhaps it was simply the dirt—we had it covered (though not with slipcovers) in blue velvet, which, even with my father’s upholstery liaisons, cost many times more than the couch itself and the delivery. Blue velvet was beautiful too; that became the couch our children and our friends’ boys from downstairs jumped on and off for many years. It was destroyed in the fire. Not burned: the living room window frame collapsed on it, doing more damage in one instant than four children over twelve years.

  The feeling of having one’s things desecrated was not new to us, though. Twice, while the babies were small, I came home to find the apartment had been burglarized. Drawers emptied onto the floor, a typewriter my father had given me when I was in high school gone, a watch, cufflinks, jars of pennies, gone. Both times I rang our next-door neighbors’ bell and they came over to commiserate. George and Nena O’Neill, with their sons Michael and Brian, had moved in the same week we did, and we had become friendly comparing notes about painting those fine high-ceilinged rooms with their interminable moldings. George said if I was ever home alone and burglarized, I must bang on his door and he would come with his machete. As anthropologists, he and Nena had traversed jungles in Mexico and South America, and besides the machete had brought back Latin American rugs, wall hangings, and masks that decorated their apartment. Late one afternoon as I was stirring sweet-and-sour chicken in an electric frying pan, I heard footsteps in the hall. Harry was at work, Rachel with a friend down the street, and Miranda in her crib. The sweet-and-sour chicken was for a Barnard College freshman for whom I was a Big Sister, and her visiting parents from Cleveland. I advanced into the hall armed with my vegetable spoon and saw a skinny boy in a porkpie hat coming towards me. My face froze, a prefiguring, for I recognized my end. We both stopped moving at the same time, as in High Noon. After an eon I asked what he wanted, though I thought I knew. I was wearing a striped minidress. Too much of me was exposed, I felt; certainly he would want to rape me and then possibly kill me. He said he came to tell me the house was on fire and the hall was full of smoke. I walked past him to open the door and see. The hall was not full of smoke—he had climbed through a bedroom window. He walked past me and out, turned back to jeer, then went up the steps to the roof. I banged on George’s door. Wearing a bathrobe, he ran for his machete and chased the boy. Buddy Maggart, an actor who lived on the fifth floor, joined in, but they never caught him. The police arrived to do their everlasting paperwork, and I finished cooking the chicken—it seemed pointless not to—and everyone came and ate it. For a year I was nervous about being in the apartment alone, then it passed.

  The O’Neills’ best-selling book on contemporary mores, Open Marriage, was reviewed in the Village Voice in 1972 by a critic who fantasized about the authors holding group orgies on Mexican rugs with their next-door neighbors. We all had a laugh over this, since all we ever did with the O’Neills was talk lengthily in the hall, and visit now and then for drinks; also we went to their Christmas parties and George came gallantly to my aid with his machete. We were both couples who argued a lot, in loud voices, near our front doors. We never took each other’s arguments very seriously, but we were well aware, tacitly, of their styles and contents, and that knowledge established an intimacy very different from the kind that would have existed had we had group orgies on Mexican rugs. The uncanny thing about the Voice reviewer’s fantasy was that the O’Neills did in fact have Mexican rugs.

  For sixteen years we watched their sons and they watched our daughters grow up. I admired Nena’s elegance. She had left Akron, Ohio, years earlier to attend Barnard College and loved New York so much that she stayed to become a warmly earthy, glamorous woman: dark hair streaked with gray, olive complexion and soft, pensive features, tinted glasses and flowing, colorful clothes. She had a distinctively low voice which seldom veered from its mellow composure. A reasonable, tolerant, yet dashing middle-aged woman—everything I had no hopes then of ever becoming. Assiduous, too. Early one morning, when I opened the door to investigate the rapid rhythmic sounds coming from the hall, I found her jumping rope. She seemed faintly abashed to be discovered, but kept on jumping. After that, whenever I heard the morning sound of her rope slapping against the linoleum, I felt the sense of security that rituals—even those of other people—afford.

  Then one September evening I met Nena coming into the lobby. I hadn’t seen her all summer and so we fell into each other’s arms. She started to cry and said George was dying. He had septicemia and was in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. I tried to encourage her, but people are usually right about such things, and George died in October of 1980. At the funeral, Jerry Silverstein, an actor and broadcaster who lived just across the hall, spoke long and eloquently about his friendship with George, their late-night talks, their seeing each other through hard times. Jerry and his wife, Selma, had been closer to the O’Neills than we had—though neither had they had orgies on the Mexican rugs. Just long friendship.

  This was not our only loss. Ben Irving, an assistant executive secretary of Actors Equity and unofficial mayor of our building—he had lived there since 1956—had also died. Ben used to take care of everyone’s problems, large and small. Particularly if you were having trouble with the landlord, you called Ben. He was universally available and loved for his wit and generous spirit—a big robust man with a ruddy face, a booming voice, and thinning honey-colored hair.

  Ben and Inge, his wife, used to give large parties, stretching over afternoons into the late evenings, where food overflowed and neighbors and friends, many of them theater people, drifted in and out with children of all ages. And then one day in 1968, when the Irvings were returning from a vacation, Ben had a heart attack in our lobby. Inge called for help and did mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until the ambulance from St. Luke’s Hospital arrived, too late. He was forty-eight. At his funeral, so crowded that people had to stand at the back, the actor and folk singer The
odore Bikel said the Kaddish. Bikel said that though Ben may not have wanted a religious service, he himself wanted Kaddish said for his friend and so he was going to say it.

  I went down to Inge’s the morning after Ben died to offer to buy some groceries. She was sitting in a chair looking weak, surrounded by family. Inge was always a forceful, highly assertive person—it was unsettling to see her weakened. Assertive she still was: she said I could not only get the groceries but also over the weekend perhaps Harry and I could take Victor, her youngest son, out somewhere for a change of scene. We took Victor, who was seven, on a boat ride to the Statue of Liberty, along with Rachel. It started to rain on the ferry, a chill, stinging rain; Rachel cried and we had to take turns carrying her; I was pregnant again and the climb up to the torch was arduous. Later I thought we might have come up with something better. To this day I sometimes think, why, of all places, the Statue of Liberty, which Harry and I had seen before and Rachel was too young to appreciate and Victor, in his state of grief, probably didn’t care about?

  A year or so after the Statue of Liberty, Rachel began attending a free nursery school run by the Parks Department in Morningside Park, ten blocks away. Lots of kids from the neighborhood went. On Riverside Drive, Tiemann Place, and Claremont Avenue flourished the oldest established permanent floating cooperative walking pool: each parent made only two trips a week but they were epic—half a mile with six four-year-olds. I took Rachel and Julienne Maggart from the fifth floor, and pushed Miranda in a stroller. Picking up the third and fourth kids was tolerable, but the fifth and sixth stops were harrowing, what with heavy front doors, timed buzzers, stairs, stroller, elevators, traffic, and the nature of children. There existed two imperfect strategies for getting the children safely across wide and heavily traveled Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue—in one mighty swoop or in shifts. I chose the swoop, never daring to let them get behind me. One of the mothers, an experienced one with four children, took a shortcut on snowy days through Cherry Park up on the Drive. Its attraction was an enormous flight of stone steps completely obliterated by snow. She let the kids slide down one by one, then slid down herself.

  Julienne’s father, Brandon, or Buddy, as we called him then, did the nursery school trek with the nonchalance of a father of five, and at first my children, each in turn, were thrilled since they saw him daily in the Buddy and Jim comedy skit on Sesame Street. Also, any time Buddy appeared in a television commercial—touting the softness of a baby’s diaper or twirling pizza dough—they would call us to come and watch. But very quickly they grasped that Buddy, however nonchalant, made them hold hands and not run in the street like the rest of us, and the experience became far less thrilling. Soon they would even stop calling us to the TV screen but lackadaisically, hours later, let fall the news that Buddy was now doing wine or chocolate.

  Accidental gatherings in the halls, the lobby, or at the elevator door propelled the life of the building like the conjunctions that take place at nerve endings. With the Silversteins, we held long and rather grandiose conversations at the elevator door, all about our lives and aspirations. The Silversteins were two of the most energetic and bouncy people I had ever met. They were always jogging or playing tennis, and would turn up at the elevator in their various sporting costumes, with their reverberating actors’ voices and beaming faces, and sometimes they would scold me because, with my babies trailing after me and my vague dreams of being a writer in abeyance, I wasn’t lively enough for their high standards of joie de vivre. They were a wonderfully matched pair, Jerry dark and earnest and cheerful, Selma fair and wry and practical—even their squabbles were entertaining, like a performance. They had married way back in 1947 and spent their early summers acting in summer theater.

  But at the time I knew them, Selma was already bouncing on to something new; she was studying for a master’s degree in social work and planned to become a therapist, and naturally she recommended therapy for everyone, in her energetic, wry way. And Jerry was now on TV every week, doing a news program for children, which won countless awards; at the elevator he would stop to tell me the topic of the week—the death of Nasser, or New York City’s water shortage. If I had time I would watch and marvel at the way he conducted panel discussions with kids, inquiring into their opinions with the greatest respect and attention. And always, at the elevator, one of us would finally say, How silly to stand here at the door, let’s get together for an evening. The evening would arrive: we would eat and drink; Jerry would tell jokes and Selma would tell anecdotes about Jerry’s large and forthright family, especially his brother the rabbi, whose pithy pronouncements she rendered so vividly that when I finally met him at one of the Silversteins’ family parties I felt I already knew him. And so these evenings would laugh themselves by, with little said about our grander aspirations. Soon we would meet at the elevator again. …

  The Silversteins’ son Kenny was our baby-sitter, and the O’Neills’ son Brian, and Inge’s three children, Debby, Jonathan, and Victor in turn, and Annie from the third floor, and Yvonne from the first floor. To this day, our children, now grown, can rate them all on the various aspects of baby-sitting. We know which ones slept on the job and which foraged for food and which talked on the phone all evening, as well as their varying degrees of patience and imagination. Jonathan was a favorite because he would let the kids stand on his big shoes, facing him and gripping his hands, then walk them around with giant steps; this they found irresistible. Jonathan wrote a story for Rachel about the adventures of an umbrella, and bound it and presented it to her with a flourish; she still has it. Years later Rachel baby-sat for Joan Regelin’s three children, on the second floor, and doubtless they can rate her too.

  Joan was my unemployment companion. When New York City underwent its fiscal collapse in 1975, I lost my job teaching English at Hunter College, and would take the subway to Washington Heights every Monday to claim unemployment insurance. I stood in line in an enormous dingy green room that made everyone in it look dingy. There were about twelve lines stretching the length of the room, and about seventy or eighty people on each. Naturally I looked for the shortest line, but in the end it never made much difference. Joan, then a sporadically employed singer, sometimes collected unemployment at the same hour—three o’clock—and she offered to drive me up. She was a large, dark-haired, dramatic-looking woman of around thirty, with, like many singers, a rich, sensuous, persuasive speaking voice. While she zoomed a tortuous path up the West Side Highway, she told me about growing up the oldest in a family of five children in North Carolina. She told me, too, how her grandparents used to live on our block, three buildings down, in the building that was taken over by Union Theological Seminary and became a dormitory for married students—her grandmother was the last holdout tenant. And she told me some of the adventures and idiosyncrasies of her car, which she spoke of as a member of the family. The car, a plucky 1971 Volvo which for many years had borne North Carolina plates, was something of a local legend, its adventures with crime and bureaucracy making it seem almost human. It had been stolen and retrieved, it had been towed away, it had weathered near-terminal illnesses. On weekends, Christian, Joan’s husband, would often be in front of the house, washing it or applying first aid. (Little did we know then that before long the car would suffer the ultimate indignity of being stolen for good.)

  Joan took me to claim unemployment and I gave her outgrown toys and down jackets, and we sent the kids back and forth endlessly for cups of sugar and milk. After a year of standing in line I got my job back, and then the following year lost it again. But this time my unemployment depot was changed to Fifty-fourth Street. I missed the rides with Joan, not least the skill and verve of her driving, the energy with which she hauled that stick shift through its paces.

  There were no longer as many children around when Joan’s three were small. Columbia University had bought the building in 1966 and from then on rented mostly to graduate students and junior faculty. But in the early years our daughters
were part of a troop, the Maggarts’ five, Blair and Bob’s two boys downstairs, a girl named Carla on the first floor, and Yvonne’s younger brother, Gregory. Traipsing about on Halloween, they could never comprehend how Mrs. Lurier on the first floor, who gave the best treats—individually wrapped packages of homemade cookies—could be the same Mrs. Lurier who the rest of the year yelled to scare them off when they played in the lobby or in the courtyard right under her window.

  Mrs. Lurier’s sister, Mrs. Angel, on the fifth floor, was reputed to be strange as well, since, as she let everyone know, she was writing to President Lyndon Johnson, among other leaders, about the disability case connected with a portion of ceiling having fallen on her arm in 1963, aggravating an injury sustained at work two years earlier and making it difficult for her to continue as a dressmaker. She would talk about the evils of bureaucracy to whoever would listen. But I liked her and shared her feelings about the evils of bureaucracy, and given my verbal and vociferous and large family of Russian Jewish immigrants, I saw nothing strange about people expressing themselves in forceful and extreme ways; indeed, it made me nostalgic for my childhood, when stately people like Mrs. Angel—aunts and uncles—sat around oilcloth-covered tables dotted with glasses of amber tea and shouted at each other warmly. I also liked her because she admired my children and said so whenever we met. Since I had long ago given up broiling lamb chops for lunch, her pronouncements were reassuring. And I liked the way she looked, big and squarishly built, a square unlined face, high cheekbones and clear eyes, dark brown hair close to auburn pulled away from her forehead to show a widow’s peak and done in a knot. Stern and formidable, she used to walk erectly down Riverside Drive with the gait of one who has business abroad in the world. I often imagined her up on an outdoor podium, exhorting crowds to justice and righteousness, and in fact she once told me she might have gone into politics like her father, had she been a man, and thought she would have done well, but that now, after three turbulent marriages—one arranged when she was sixteen, one “the love of her life,” and one to an excitable Greek naval officer—and a lifetime crowded with incident, it was too late.