Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk Read online

  “I am,” I said. “But not a poet like Crane. Though I do admire his work. You should read his first book, White Buildings—although The Bridge seems more the fashion these days. I only understand every third word of his, but it doesn’t matter. Me—my verses are less opaque.”

  “I’d love to read your poems sometime,” said Wendy.

  “That won’t be so easy, I’m afraid, as all my books are out of print.”

  “Books?” Wendy put her hand—pale and sturdy—on my linen sleeve. “Lillian, you write books?”

  “I did,” I said. “In my prime I was even a bit of a celebrity. Everyone read me. But in the latter-day world of poetry it seems that nobody wants to read somebody everybody reads, as Yogi Berra might put it. So I’m quite forgotten now.”

  I was pleased with that bon mot, but Wendy sped past without sparing it a second look. “Well, you must have copies,” she said. “You could loan them to me, couldn’t you?”

  “I could, yes. If I ever see you again. But what would a young go-getter like you want with an old lady like me?”

  As it turned out, she’d want plenty—and I can’t say I’m displeased. Wendy is now one of my best, if most improbable, friends.

  I round the corner of Madison Avenue to East Twenty-Third Street, skirting the south edge of the park, taking the long way to connect to Broadway. As I do, I can’t help looking over my shoulder to see if Wendy might be in the park. She’s not, of course; she has enough sense not to go there after dark.

  And tonight, I remember—I know because she invited me—she and her husband are hosting a New Year’s Eve bash for all their artist friends at their apartment in Chelsea.

  Wendy is like that, now that she knows me. She treats me as if I’m not actually sixty years older than she. Her insistence on including me—her idea that an odd old woman might have any business ringing in 1985 amid her chic bohemian demimonde—is sweet and silly and fantastic. I’m quite touched.

  When Gian and the grandkids were visiting last week, I had Wendy over to meet them, over coffee and hot cocoa. After she’d gone, Gian had remarked how happy he was that I had her in my life, and how she must seem almost like a daughter to me. That’s a pretty sentiment, so I did not correct him. But the truth is, that is not what she feels like, and of that I am glad. She is my friend, not my child, and thus our rapport has been unfraught and egalitarian, unburdened by guilt or disappointment.

  Gian, on the other hand, is my child, not my friend. I love him more than any other human who still breathes upon this planet, but one child—one constant emergency, one ritual madness, one wrecker and remaker of myself—was and remains enough.

  Crossing the street to continue south on Broadway, I don’t even have to wait for the light, there’s so little traffic. I jaywalk with impunity.

  If something happened to me, who would see it?

  If the Subway Vigilante were out and about on these same sidewalks, who would know it was him?

  Wendy and I ended up going to lunch together the day we met. I invited her, and she hesitated, and I thought that maybe, as I had suspected, she didn’t want to spend her years as a young artiste in the company of the aged. When I said as much—blunt, I know—she said no, it was because she didn’t have any money. My treat, I told her, and still she shilly-shallied.

  “What’s the harm in a free egg salad sandwich?” I asked. “I’m going to take us to a deli, not the Ritz.”

  “I don’t want to take advantage,” Wendy said. “My husband—he’s a painter—is always saying that we need to find patrons. Benefactors. People with money to collect and cultivate our art, you know? And that seems so sleazy to me.”

  “Accepting one free meal from a lonely old has-been won’t put your integrity in peril,” I said. “And your husband is right. One must hustle to make money, don’t you think?”

  “Lillian, you’re hysterical,” she said. “But what’ll you get out of it?”

  “Attention,” I said, and off we went.

  Wendy, whose Ohio parents raised her to be too humble, in my estimation, but just the right degree of courteous, worried that we should go somewhere nearby so I would not have to walk too far. I assured her that while I am not much of what I used to be, I am still a walker—that since everything else in my life is mostly gone, I just am in the city. I just like to be here.

  As I pass the string of photography studios that line this block of Broadway—located here because it’s decrepit and therefore cheap—I find myself imagining her New Year’s Eve party in Chelsea. Loud strange music. Skinny youths in Dumpster-plucked clothes. Various substances stashed upon my arrival. Suspicious neighbors, in one or both senses of suspicious. And her husband, charming and venal. Or brilliant and petulant. Or moony and narcissistic. Wendy’s husband.

  I think her invitation was sincere.

  But whom is she kidding? An octogenarian staying up until midnight to hoot ecstatically at the onset of another year?

  Then again, what else have I got to do? It’s not as though I have to wake up early tomorrow.

  On Broadway the damp wind is cooler and more assertive, and I laugh a little because I realize that this is exactly how I’ve been imagining Wendy’s husband: cooler and more assertive.

  She doesn’t wear a wedding band, I’ve noticed. Then again, I do, and I haven’t been married for almost three decades. Symbols, or their absence, do not always mean what they seem to symbolize.

  Nevertheless, I suppose they always symbolize something.

  I like presenting myself to Wendy—presenting myself as I want to be presented, and being received as such. Maybe I will stop by her party. We’ll see.

  11

  Fleurs de Rocaille

  In my day I was great at parties. And let me say, there were great parties.

  Even after the crash, a number of us in Manhattan just kept smashing along. We all had jobs, and thus a need to unwind and the money to burn in the unwinding. The skyscrapers to which we would all eventually become accustomed were either new then or still going up, getting high, getting higher, with some of us getting high along with them.

  But me, I lived in a low neighborhood—in the low sixties on the Upper East Side. The neighborhood, long ago the site of the old Treadwell Farm, built up quickly after the Civil War, filling in with corny Italianate and French Second Empire confections, including mine, a four-story townhouse. I had the top floor. The place had no river view and no doorman, but it was a small oasis all the same, the street quiet and tree-lined. I’d been there since 1930, and although it was gorgeous, I was almost ready for a change. I’d move to Greenwich Village the following year, and that move would alter my life in ways I had vowed up and down never to let my life be altered.

  One night in late August 1933 I threw an unforgettable party, maybe the best I had when I resided in that particular apartment. It was the party that caused Olive Dodd, my archrival and colleague at R.H. Macy’s, not to speak to me outside of professional contexts for almost a solid year.

  I invited Hattie, the downstairs neighbor, of course, to avoid complaint, and because the more the merrier. She worked at the main branch of the New York Public Library, and luckily for our harmonious neighborliness, she got all the peace and quiet she needed while laboring amid the stacks: A little racket on the weekend was fine by her. She certainly wasn’t shushing anybody present that night.

  I had pulled down the ladder so my guests could avail themselves of the stars and the streetlights and the breeze off the East River. Prohibition would end, finally, later that year, but that evening—just as anyone who enjoyed the night life had been doing since 1920—we were filtering the booze in through the loopholes.

  My gentleman caller, for example—a square-faced man named Benjamin, who went by Bennie—had a physician’s prescription that permitted him to take a pint of liquor home from the pharmacy every ten days. He arrived with one tucked under each arm, each package labeled “Jim Beam: For Medicinal Purposes Only.”

&
nbsp; I’d met him the week prior, while being interviewed by a society reporter about my ongoing reign as the highest-paid female advertising writer in the country, a story that journalists seemed never to tire of. Bennie had been the photographer.

  I was happy to see Bennie’s liquor, if a bit disenchanted by its packaging. The prescription trick worked, but it always struck me as smug, inelegant, the wrong kind of clever. Most of us preferred to get our booze from honest crooks, who tended to be nicer and more interesting. It’s hard to deny that a willingness to risk prison imparts a certain magnetism in social settings.

  Helen McGoldrick, ever golden, was in the kitchen, one of the thirty or so people who’d shown up to my flat. Though none of the guests was fat, they almost seemed so for being crammed into so small a space. I’d just taken a pass through the other rooms to encourage anyone whose dexterity and anxiety would allow them to pioneer the less populous territories of the fire escapes—mine and Hattie’s, as she didn’t mind.

  As it was crowded, so was it convivial: friends and friends of friends gently embalming themselves in alcohol, curing themselves like wild game in cigarette smoke, being made astringent, citrused with grapefruit juice from cans—little fang marks on opposite sides to permit them to pour.

  Helen’s husband stood beside her, can opener in hand to do the vampiric puncturing. Helen, using the gin they’d brought, doled out generous drinks.

  “With oranges and lemons more expensive all the time,” she said, “there’s nothing to do but mix the cocktails stronger.”

  She and Dwight Zweigert had gotten married in 1931, when she was thirty-one and he forty-seven. I liked him immensely, and I liked them together.

  He had been married before, but his first wife had died. He had two daughters, seven and nine when he and Helen got hitched. Now eleven and thirteen, both girls were at the family abode that night, the Zweigert brownstone in the Village, babysitting one-year-old Merritt. Named for Helen’s Southern patrician father back in Birmingham, he was the first and only child Helen would ever have to have. She doted duly upon him, but had no desire to spring off any further offspring, nor did Dwight want her to; the family budget and his middle age made three the limit.

  When they’d first gotten involved, or rather when they’d first gotten serious, Helen gave each of his daughters a tick in the “pro” column of the list she always totted up in her head. “One and I’m done!” she’d said the night she told me that he’d proposed and she’d accepted. “That’s all he’ll want. All we can afford. I can deliver that.”

  Dwight was a left-winger of a committed, considered, not especially specific sort. He routinely broke bread with a hodgepodge of romantics, pacifists, communists, and Roosevelt liberals in an era—brief—when it seemed they all might find common cause. Such were the circles in which Dwight circulated. Such was the political butter of his daily bread. I found these pursuits silly, but harmless and not without charm. He worked as an art critic for The Nation and assorted little magazines. A still-sizeable though slightly melted berg of postcrash family money made the fees earned by his writing live-off-able, especially with Helen working, too.

  R.H. Macy’s, like all employers, did not permit women time off to push the next generation of little workers and customers into the world. So now Helen freelanced, cartooning and illustrating for women’s magazines, many of them the same ones that published my verses.

  A number of the writers and editors—and their dates—whom we knew from that world were in attendance that night, along with some of the snappier copywriters from R.H. Macy’s, newer girls who worked under me who grasped the effervescence of the in-house style, and who had the joie part of joie de vivre down pat.

  Though not among their number, also present—owing to my having been mannerly—was Olive Dodd, hangdog and predictably unescorted.

  Early on, before I realized how joyless and jealous she had it in her to be, I had invited Olive to such gatherings as these, thinking we might hit it off outside the confines of the office. She was young and reasonably pretty, and she’d read all the right books, so I thought, sure, let’s give this a go. She drank and she smoked.

  But it turned out she was a narrow-minded prig. She decked herself in bohemian trappings because she felt she needed to; there was nothing genuine about it. As Gertrude Stein—whose writing Olive pretended to like—said of the city of Oakland, there was no there there.

  I couldn’t very well exclude her, though—not without being more hurtful than I meant to. Plus I couldn’t very well go on decrying her affectations if I weren’t prepared to stand by my own notions of propriety, could I? So invite her I did.

  And Olive, to be sure, could have mustered the finesse to simply say thanks and then not actually inflict herself on the party. But there she was, wearing an evening dress of periwinkle blue and sipping a ginger ale that must have been half gin.

  Extending hospitality to all, even to the most cloddish, truly is the basis of civilization. The fact that the most cloddish, having nothing better to do, always show up and spoil the party for everyone else probably spells civilization’s ultimate doom.

  Olive was a clod, and I was loath to suffer clods. To do the kind of ad writing that I did, and to be good at it, you couldn’t just echo conventional opinion back at itself; you had to catch people by surprise. You had to bring something more to the party, so to speak. R.H. Macy’s institutional advertising was not the height of the avant-garde, certainly—not like Olive’s favorite desk prop Ms. Stein, for instance, or the artists whose work Dwight championed in the pages of his little magazines. But it wasn’t the Sunday homily, either. That calibrated understanding was what Olive lacked, and that lack was what made her seek—and fail—to copy me. And it was sinister.

  That evening, as ever, Olive had made herself up quite too much like the vamp. Unspeaking, she leaned against the kitchen counter watching Helen mix drinks.

  In Olive’s earshot, one of Helen’s magazine friends, waiting for a cocktail, remarked, “It is true most men dislike looking at a drippy, blood-red, oleaginous pair of lips during dinner.”

  An office mate of Olive’s and mine replied, “And prefer nails that don’t remind them of Dracula, even when crimson claws are fashionable.”

  “It simply reminds them,” said Helen’s friend, receiving her glass tumbler, “of our old hot primitive instinct to trap ourselves a man.”

  And our colleague, receiving her own, clinked glasses with her in a sarcastic toast, saying, “Ah, we women are savages at heart.”

  They went giggling to the living room to rejoin their dates. Bennie, mine, passed them on the way in, as Olive, happy to have been wounded, wound her way toward me to complain.

  “The character, Lillian, of some of your guests leaves something to be desired,” she said.

  I could have apologized, but I was so tired of Olive.

  Instead I said, “I prefer witty friends to friends of character.”

  That was a lie. I preferred friends who were witty and had character. But I wanted Olive to shut up, and the quickest course was to simply throw myself upon her poniard, knowing it to be sharp as a wet noodle. If shock was the way to stopper the drivel always rivering from her mouth, well, fine.

  “This type of atmosphere is all right for a while,” she said, gesturing around the crowded kitchen with sham nonchalance, “but eventually you won’t find it so homey.”

  “Nothing ruins a good thing faster than a family atmosphere,” I said.

  She gave me a look that was meant to be cool and appraising—probably something she’d seen in a film. “You’re a queer thing, Lillian,” she said. “Surely every girl dreams of her wedding day.”

  I could see why she thought this; the desire was endemic to our set, though I did not share it. But I also thought she ought to try thinking for herself. The walls around the main portion of R.H. Macy’s thirteenth floor went just partway to the ceiling, so all day, whenever I left my own office—which had a proper door
—to walk through to find someone, I heard, as Olive did, the steady drone of colleagues’ lives lived by telephone: ranting to husbands or raving to beaux.

  “Sure,” I said. “Lace and satin and showers of rice. Nice if it stops you from thinking of the years ahead, when you’ll be boiling that rice into mush to feed a screaming infant while your husband’s out on the town, trying to find someone new.”

  Something changed in Olive’s face; all her studied mannerisms drifting in different directions. When she spoke again, her usual breathy coo was gone—gone low and harsh. I thought that, for all her yapping, I might be hearing her real voice for the first time.

  “I don’t buy it,” she said. “That you don’t want a family. Is this all there is, Lillian? Drinking on fire escapes? It’s frivolous, I think. It’s just childish. The most successful woman in advertising, the red-headed poet princess of Midtown—cold comforts when you’re fifty and dried up and have no one to show your clippings to, don’t you think?”

  Here’s a secret about me: My entire life, whenever I’ve found myself under attack by a relative stranger, or someone who means little to me, my reaction—which I gather is uncommon—has been to grow calmer, more controlled. I would have made a fine gunfighter, I suppose. Born too late! As usual.

  “You don’t have to buy it, Olive,” I said, exhaling a smoke ring to the side of her head. “We’re not at the office. I don’t plan on selling anything until Monday morning.”

  She tore the smoke ring with her index finger, nearly losing her balance in the process. “Everyone thinks you’re so smart,” she said. “You think you’re so smart. You’re so funny. But the truth is that you’re the biggest cynic of all time.”

  “I think you’ve had enough to drink, Olive,” I said. “Maybe you don’t quite realize what you’re saying.”