Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk Read online

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  For Angela, my archivist always,

  and

  For Eric, forever my favorite flâneur

  Acknowledgments

  I extend more gratitude than I have the words to express to:

  Anthony Antolini, Ann Greenleaf, and all of Margaret Fishback’s extended family; Lisa Bankoff, Abby Beckel, Georgia Bellas, Logan Breitbart, Mitchell Brown, Hope Dellon, Sophia Dembling, Bob Drinan, Christen Enos, Elisa Gabbert, Meryl Gross, Silissa Kenney, Olivia Lilley, Angela McClendon Ossar, Dan Nielsen, Hannah O’Grady, Jen K. Olsen, Eric Plattner, Mitchell Rathberger, Beth Rooney, Martin Seay, Rachel Slotnick, Christine Sneed, Dori Weintraub, and Becky Wills; my family; all the poets who do Poems While You Wait; Lynn Eaton and everyone at the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing at Duke University; my students and colleagues at DePaul University; and anyone who has ever taken a walk with me, literally or metaphorically.

  Skiddlee bebop we rock a scoobie doo.

  And guess what, America? We love you!

  ’Cause ya rock and ya roll with so much soul

  you can rock till you’re a hundred-and-one years old.

  —WONDER MIKE, SUGARHILL GANG, 1979

  1

  The Road of Anthracite

  There once was a girl named Phoebe Snow. She wore only white and held tight to a violet corsage, an emblem of modesty. She was not retiring, though, and her life spun out as a series of journeys through mountain tunnels carved from poetry. I never saw her doing anything besides boarding, riding, or disembarking a train, immaculate always, captivating conductors, enchanting other passengers.

  No, there wasn’t. She was just an advertisement: the poster girl for the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad. Her unsoilable Antarctic-colored clothes were proof that the line’s anthracite-powered locomotives were clean-burning, truly—unlike their sooty and outfit-despoiling competitors:

  Her laundry bill for fluff and frill

  Miss Phoebe finds is nearly nil.

  It’s always light, though gowns of white,

  Are worn on Road of Anthracite.

  * * *

  I was five years old when I first laid eyes on her, on a postcard sent me by my dearest aunt, Sadie Boxfish, my father’s youngest sister, daring and unmarried and living in Manhattan. Sadie visited us in the District of Columbia, but not very often. Her rare physical presence she supplemented with correspondence in snips and flashes. After I scrawled back how much I adored Phoebe, star of the story-poems, they became the only kind of card Sadie ever posted.

  The earliest ones my mother read aloud (though I could read):

  Miss Phoebe Snow has stopped to show

  Her ticket at the gate, you know.

  The Guard, polite, declares it right.

  Of course—it’s Road of Anthracite.

  * * *

  Mother clutched me in her lap, talking about the image—Phoebe in a hat, Phoebe in a dining car, Phoebe blue-eyed and mannerly chatting with the engineer—and reciting the poetry:

  Here Phoebe may, by night or day,

  Enjoy her book upon the way.

  Electric light dispels the night

  Upon the Road of Anthracite.

  * * *

  In her clear contralto above my ears I could hear, in her neat bosom behind my head I could feel, her disapproval: not of Phoebe, but of Sadie. My mother—who was well-educated, read widely, passably fluent in German, conversant with the works of Freud and Adler, married at twenty, and never received a dollar of wages in her life—was also a woman who took difference as a slight. Anyone not living a life that fit the mold of her own—wifedom, motherhood—constituted a personal affront, an implied rebuke, an argument against. I thought Sadie quite bold.

  “What a smart girl,” my mother would say of Phoebe, who (I saw later) must have been so light and unburdened for having only air, and not one thought or care, in her golden head. Mother, stroking my own red-gold hair, meant only that Phoebe’s frock was smart, or her little white gloves. Not Phoebe herself. Not smartness of that kind.

  “Aunt Sadie’s a smart girl,” I said only once. To no reply. To my mother, gritting her small neat teeth, pearly and needle-like, reading that day’s card more loudly than usual:

  A cozy seat, a dainty treat

  Make Phoebe’s happiness complete

  With linen white and silver bright

  Upon the Road of Anthracite.

  * * *

  Sadie, career girl, and Phoebe, socialite, embedded inextricably into one another in my mind. Both of them expressed the inexpressible, suggesting that sex appeal existed but probably ought not to be named while one was living at home. Suggesting not so much a passenger train as speed and freedom, not so much a gown as style, not so much a hairdo as beauty.

  Mother saw Sadie as wasting that last, working as hard as a beast of burden as a nurse in a hospital in New York City. Though now I know that Sadie can’t have been living the life of Riley, I wanted to move there and join her. What a smart girl.

  My mother resented Sadie like a stepsister resenting Cinderella, but she was polite. She did her no social violence. Was always hospitable and gracious on Sadie’s visits, both as a point of pride and because my father would not have abided otherwise. Though he, too, a lawyer, thought Sadie’s work beneath her.

  My devotion to both Phoebe and Sadie has remained constant over the decades. When I think of either, I also think of lofty mountain chains and cool delights.

  The New York I moved to eventually was empty of Sadie, though I’ve since walked by St. Vincent’s, the hospital where she worked, I don’t know how many times. She died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.

  Phoebe, deathless, simply faded from public consciousness like a once-popular song. Anthracite, needed to fight the Great War, was not to be used on railroads anymore. The world changed, and Phoebe disappeared forever:

  On time the trip ends without a slip

  And Phoebe sadly takes her grip

  Loath to alight, bows left and right,

  “Good-bye, Dear Road of Anthracite.”

  * * *

  But I never forgot her. I didn’t want to be her, so much as to have her—to create her.

  Sadie led me to Manhattan, but Phoebe led me to poetry, and to advertising. So enrapt was I at her entrancing rhymes that when the time came to apply for jobs, I rhymed my letters and my samples alike:

  To work for you

  Is my fondest wish

  Signed your ever-true

  Lillian Boxfish

  * * *

  Fifteen inquiries. Five favorable replies. Including one by telegram from R.H. Macy’s. This was the one I chose: my first serious job in New York City. A job which in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it. What a smart girl.

  2

  New Year’s Eve

  The only man I ever birthed, though not the only one I
mothered, is on the other end of the line, and he is giving me news that is sad and bad and that makes me jealous. Julia, my ex-husband’s second wife, has been hospitalized after a heart attack, her third. She will likely not survive. She is much younger than I—fifteen years if you go by my age as I’ve been lying about it forever, sixteen if you go by my age as I am pretty sure is correct. Either way, she is 68.

  Either way, it is 1984, and she is with them, and I am alone on New Year’s Eve in New York City, and it’s too warm. I wish it were snowing, but gently, gently, like sugar falling on a great, gray cookie.

  Unlike Julia, my health is and always has been—physically—impeccable.

  “She was struggling in all this Maine snow, when there’s none in California,” says Johnny, says Gianino, my Little John, says my son, says Gian, as he asked to be called back in junior high school, when it occurred to him that he had the wherewithal. “She collapsed coming up the driveway after taking the kids to the library. It’s pretty grim this time, Ma.”

  “Ma,” he calls me—incongruous, ugly—but I enjoy it. Max, my ex-husband, taught him that: the harsh monosyllable sounding working-class, hardly our income bracket. But that was part of what I loved about Max. The blue of his collar to the white of mine. I was not entirely un-maternal toward Max. Of course when, finally, I needed his unconditional support, he could not afford the same care to me.

  “Dreadful,” I say. “I hope the ambulance didn’t founder getting out to Pin Point.”

  Gian spends his time between semesters at Pin Point, the summer home Max and I bought in the thirties; perversely, he likes it in winter, too.

  “No, they made it all right,” he says. “I’m at the hospital now. Claire’s mom took the train up from Boston to help out with the kids so I can stay here with Julia. The university’s not back in session until the third week of January, so this honestly couldn’t have happened at a better time.”

  This announcement that Gian is calling from the hospital forces me to revise the image of him in my mind, an image I wasn’t even aware of until I knew it was wrong. I picture him now in an overly bright lounge among grim institutional furniture, murmuring into an oft-disinfected courtesy phone. He rests his free hand atop his shaggy head in his distracted fashion—the absentminded professor, father of three, black hair threaded with gray at the temples, forty-three years old next month—and that imagined gesture recalls another, from what seems like yesterday: Gian placing a flat palm on the crown of his skull to measure his height against his bedroom wall.

  The line goes quiet: He’s stopped talking, and I realize I’d stopped listening. “How are the kids taking it?” I ask. I picture the three as last I saw them, the day after Christmas, bundled up like ornaments in red and green coats, and boarding the train north. I want to know how they will react when I die.

  “They’re upset. They’re old enough to understand that this is it. That death is it. They’re excited, though, that their aunt is going to fly in from California. We can’t move Julia back there because she’s too sick. She’s going to be buried here anyway.”

  I imagine Gian’s much younger half-sister, the second child Max wanted, then got, standing graveside with him there in Maine. I’ll be buried in that same boneyard. On Max’s other side. It galls me to share. But where else would they put me? By then I won’t care.

  “If you want to send the kids back down here while you’re dealing with this, you should,” I say, knowing he’ll never take me up on it, wishing he would. I only got to see them for a week at Christmas; there’s so much more I could show them in the city, and I like when this apartment feels crowded—when they stay here to save money and avoid the fleabag hotels.

  “I think they kind of ought to stick around, Ma, since their grandmother is about to die. They’re grown up enough to go to a funeral.”

  “Step-grandmother,” I say. I am interested in politeness; I am not interested in propriety. “And I don’t know how character building a funeral is for a young person, or how much that will help Julia, past help as she’ll be.”

  “Thanks anyway, Ma,” he says. “How are you doing?”

  “You just saw me. Healthy and hardworking as a Central Park carriage horse.”

  “Is that lady who comes to check on you still checking through the holidays?”

  “Vera moved to Texas with her husband when he got that oil-field job six months ago,” I say. “I’ve told you three times.”

  “Who’s taking care of you now?”

  “Vera is my friend, not my caretaker. Rest assured that if I should drop dead I won’t be reeking in the apartment for weeks, with the cat gnawing my carcass. There are a few people who would miss me. Not many.”

  “I wish you’d just come up to Brunswick for good, Ma. We’ve got the room. Murray Hill’s not what it used to be. The city’s not what it used to be. You’re not safe.”

  I had hoped that the impending death of the false mother, of Julia, would have spared me another round of his entreaties to migrate permanently to Maine, if only because these efforts would be unseemly, would cast him in a bad light: my Gian, the Bluebeard of mothers. Once Julia’s been in the ground for a few weeks, I’d reckoned, his Vacationland campaign would resume in earnest.

  But no such luck. “I’m not leaving, Gian,” I tell him. “The city has been unsafe for twenty years, and I’ve survived.”

  “Well, you’re twenty years older now,” he says. “And the city’s getting worse. It’s never been such a cesspool. The crime and disorder. The murders. The Subway Vigilante, Ma! It’s out of control. What if you’d been on that train? What if you’d been on it with the kids?”

  This, more and more, is Gian’s attitude when I speak with him: a skittishness about the city’s numberless perils. It strikes me as odd: He was never a nervous child. But as his own kids have grown older and more independent, his inventory of potential threats has steadily expanded—as, apparently, has his authority to give advice on such matters. Like many parents in middle age, he’s quick to spot changes in the world, slow to note shifts in his own perspective.

  That said, he is not incorrect. The city I inhabit now is not the city that I moved to in 1926; it has become a mean-spirited action movie complete with repulsive plot twists and preposterous dialogue.

  Last week a man—neatly dressed, wearing wire-rimmed glasses—snapped on a downtown 2 express. Midafternoon, on a train full of people. Four teenagers surrounded him, asking for five dollars; people have been killed for refusing less. The paper says he says they threatened him with sharpened screwdrivers. The man pulled a gun from his waistband. I have five dollars for each of you, he is said to have said—as if he had practiced—before shooting them all. Two women collapsed at the end of the car in fright, and like a gallant gentleman, he helped them up before fleeing into the darkness of the tunnel at Chambers Street. Mayor Koch has said vigilantism won’t be tolerated, and it seems he is right: Callers have been flooding the tips hotline the police set up, but their calls congratulate the shooter, thank him, offer to pay his bail if he turns himself in. The Subway Vigilante is not being tolerated; he is being idolized.

  Gian just about about-faced the family back to Maine when it happened, even though we’d been uptown at the Museum of Natural History at the time, safe beneath the blue whale hanging by its dorsal fin, unarmed and pacific, silent as ever, a sentinel in the lurid tabloid nightmare this city’s been dreaming.

  “I walk everywhere, dearest,” I say. And it’s true: I like the exercise, and the subway cars are graffitied with so much text it’s like being screamed at, like the voices inside my head and everyone else’s have manifested their yelling outside, ill-spelled with spray paint. “And we weren’t on that train. And he isn’t shooting elderly ladies and adorable tots.”

  “But guys like the guys he shot are everywhere. Hoods. Gangs. Toughs. Whatever you want to call them.”

  “I would not resist if young thugs approached me for money,” I say. “I would acquie
sce. I agree with Governor Cuomo that a vigilante spirit is dangerous. Rude, too.”

  “Rude?” he says.

  “Yes, Gian. Incivility is not incivility’s antidote. I don’t know whether I believe that vigilante really had reason to think those young men were going to harm him. It sounds to me like he planned to shoot someone regardless—like he’d seen those I Want Death movies one too many times.”

  “Death Wish?” says Gian.

  “One of those young men is paralyzed. Eighteen years old. Never going to walk again.”

  “Maybe they deserved it, Ma. The city’s a sick place. People are sick.”

  “This city may be a rotten egg,” I say, “but I’ll still be the last one out. What have I got to lose?”

  “Ma, you sound depressed again.”

  “Of course I do. This time of year is depressing. New Year’s Eve is a bigger thug than any mugger, the way it makes people feel. Being old is depressing. The Subway Vigilante is depressing. But I love it here, this big rotten apple. I’m near my old haunts, my sycamore trees, my trusty R.H. Macy’s.”

  “I will never understand,” Gian says, “why living near Macy’s is more important than living near your grandkids. You haven’t written an ad for them in twenty-five years.”

  “It’s not just R.H. Macy’s, Johnny,” I say, though I’d miss the department store like I’d miss a parent; the company gave me a life that I would not have lived otherwise. “In Murray Hill I don’t have to drive. I don’t have to rely on anybody. If I came to Brunswick, my brain would waste into a raisin and I’d break both my hips.”

  He goes on, and I listen, but he won’t persuade me. I’m not leaving this city no matter how far it falls in its hellward slide. Over the years I have entertained the idea of moving. I adore my son, the kids, adore the idea of usurping the fake mother. And yet.

  “Gianino, darling,” I say. “I thought this call was about Julia, not your old ma. What will you do with the evening? I imagine this heart attack has quashed your plans?”