Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk Page 6

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  Back at E.P. Dutton, Artie, needless to say, was spared any temptation to say I told you so as he’d threatened he might. No one could argue with the bottom line.

  “Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises has delivered on its promise!” he’d written in the note he sent with my author’s copies of the second printing.

  Artie would end up editing all my books, or the poetry books anyway: Notes Found in the Street in 1933, A Complaint to the Management in 1935, and All Right, You Win; or, I Admit Defeat in 1936.

  And my pride just went; there was no fall. Not for a long time.

  But E.P. Dutton didn’t publish my final book of original poems. That came out much later, in the 1960s, after Artie was long dead.

  With the help of a new editor, one whom I did not like remotely as much, I’d settled upon the name Nobody’s Darling, which by that point had become an accurate descriptor of my state of being.

  6

  A Sandwich at the Mission

  I step out of the Back Porch bar and the streetlights come on. It feels like magic whenever I catch that moment. Like there ought to be a prize. What do I win?

  The city is dazzling but uncompassionate. It always has been, but I feel it more now.

  Winter, at bay for weeks, has taken sundown as its cue: The wind seems to clear a path for the dark as the chill the weatherman promised gathers in the unruly air. The end-of-shift sidewalk crowds have lost their common purpose and are on more particular errands, some suspect if not outright sinister. So it goes these days in my city.

  A green Dodge on Third guns its engine to beat a light, startling me, although the Negroni has done much to calm my spring-loaded nerves. As it speeds off I notice that its stereo is playing a song I recognize, one that I’ve heard playing many times in recent years from other cars and apartment windows and portable tape players but that I’ve never learned the name of, a song about hotels and motels and hipping and hopping and not stopping, a song without any real singing in it. Rap, I gather, is what this is called. I wish the Dodge had stopped, so I could hear more of it.

  I have always worked hard to keep myself up to date, to be mindful of trends. At first I did this in order to stay sharp at my two jobs, copywriter and poet, which both required me to know what my audience knew. Lately, since I retired, I do it just because I enjoy it, and because it keeps me from feeling old. I very much enjoy that MTV, for instance, those music videos, and I watch them often, though I still find that a long walk through an unfamiliar neighborhood teaches me more about what’s new and exciting than any number of hours of television can. As ever, the street is the source of the latest things humans have invented—culturally speaking, at least. The last new things, maybe, that humans will ever invent.

  These days, when I think of history, it occurs to me that maybe we have stopped moving forward, and are now just oscillating.

  The last new art form I’ve seen was a group of Puerto Rican teenagers on St. Mark’s Place, jerking and spinning acrobatically and robotically atop flattened cardboard boxes. This, I gather, is called breaking. The last new art form I’ve heard is rap music. And I love it. It thrills me. The joyful mastery of language, its sounds and its rhythms. Rhymes and puns and nonsense, ranging from dumb and fun to witty and profound.

  It troubles me that among my few remaining acquaintances there is no one with whom I can share my enthusiasm for these new things.

  It wasn’t always this way. In my youth, before I had made any of my most consequential choices—and isn’t that what we always mean by in my youth?—in the days when my friends and I were the word-mad ones, earning our keep by saying things fastest and best, the new thing then was jazz. Without a second thought we’d ride the East Side Line to Harlem to listen to the bands and dance among the Lindy Hoppers at the Savoy on Lenox Avenue. It was new, but it wasn’t a novelty: We knew it was important. We weren’t tourists, or didn’t think we were; we wanted to be part of it.

  What happened was what always happens. The best Lindy Hoppers earned minor celebrity, became a draw. The ballrooms started paying them, and rightly so. They in turn became more serious, more competitive, more and more skilled, working out heart-stopping flips and spins and somersaults that no casual dancer could ever hope to duplicate without injury. It was amazing. It was also a show, and not—to lift a term from my son’s teenaged lexicon—a scene, not the way it used to be. It put a barrier between us and the Lindy Hoppers, or it shored up barriers that were already there, of which color was only the most obvious.

  So who was to blame? The dancers, for taking what they’d earned? The crowds of Midtown gawkers who brought the dollars in? Or we young bohemians who blazed the trail they’d followed? Maybe there’s a natural order in all this: New things pop up at the edges, but the middle’s where the money is. I did that dance myself over the years. I got rich doing it. And now here I am, an old white lady in a fur coat on a Murray Hill sidewalk, eavesdropping on passersby, wondering what I’m missing.

  Nostalgia for what’s new: The French probably have a word for that. In any case, there’s precious little trace of the avant-garde in this neighborhood, which has been successfully staving off the advances of fashion since J.P. Morgan moved in a hundred years ago. I’ve come to prize its stodgy constancy.

  I’ve lived in a total of six different apartments all over Manhattan—starting with the Christian Women’s Hotel in Midtown that a friend of my parents found for me when I first moved to the city—but Murray Hill is where I first felt at home, and Murray Hill was where I figured I’d end up returning, eventually—and I did, though not for many years.

  Murray Hill is where Helen McGoldrick and I lived—sharing the rent on a one-bedroom, crowded for the sake of independence—after we moved out of the hotel, and not an instant too soon, as that place had been stifling. Thirty-Third Street, between Third and Lexington. We moved in just after she’d begun working at R.H. Macy’s, and so, thanks to her, had I.

  Although it’ll make my walk to Grimaldi ever so mildly longer, I want to pass by the old place—days of auld lang syne and all—and I have enough time. Typically neither closeness nor distance matter much to me on my walks. Neither convenience nor difficulty is my objective. Usually I’ll accomplish about five miles a day, perhaps taking Saturday or Sunday off.

  I am old and all I have left is time. I don’t mean time to live; I mean free time. Time to fill. Time to kill until time kills me. I walk and walk and think and think. It gets me out, and it keeps me healthy, and no one on the street seems to want to mess with me, as they say on the street. All my friends in New York—back when I still had friends, before everyone moved away or died—had mugging stories, but I’ve never had trouble.

  Once, a few years ago, while I was walking down Bowery, I was invited in for a meal at the mission. I don’t fully understand how I might be mistaken for someone in need of a soup kitchen, so I suppose that’s why I went in. It seemed rude to refuse, and I met some nice people. Some of those there were unmeetable: too far gone, either within themselves or on drugs or booze. I don’t judge them, though.

  Some of the other people I met were just having a bad year, and some of them were on their way to someplace worse, and I’m not sure that the volunteer who insisted I sit down and have a baloney sandwich was wrong about my belonging there. I am able to afford to feed myself, but I don’t always remember to eat, and sometimes I go days without speaking to anyone but Phoebe—who is a good listener for a cat—and my son on the phone. I stuffed some twenties into the donation box on the way out, and I still send that mission money every Christmas, anonymously.

  A police officer walks by with a German shepherd. I used to be on the Murray Hill beautification committee, with a lot of other old ladies, some of them smart and some of them silly, and some of them—who were also on the board of the Morgan Library & Museum—obsessed with the area’s declining wealth. I drifted away, though. Stopped going, and I think by now they must have disbanded.

&nbs
p; I am not a believer, but I still go to services at the church around the corner from my apartment, the Church of the Incarnation, not so far from where I’m walking now. A free show. A museum, practically, with work by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Something to do, and some people who know me.

  My son, my Gian, my Gianino, my Johnny, learned to play the stately and formidable Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ there. The AA meetings that happen in the basement during the week these days seem more popular than worship. But I don’t judge them, either.

  And here it is, the first place of my own. Our own. Plain brown brick façade. Fire escapes descending like strips of black rickrack. Our apartment was on the sixth floor of six. Only the rapture of having escaped the mild and pious confines of the Christian Women’s Hotel made climbing all those flights tolerable.

  It was freshly built when Helen and I moved in, completed in 1926. The street noise then was different than now—everything was being constructed, going up, up, up. Progress is loud: riveters riveting, radios blaring.

  The decay currently taking place is mostly quiet, a steady dissolution, almost inaudible. But everything was new then. So was I.

  A damp wind from the East River blows steam from the subway grates: shiny ghosts.

  7

  Fast and Loose

  By the 1920s, American men no longer received invitations to call on women; instead, they took them out.

  Or so they did in free society. Not at the Christian Women’s Hotel in Midtown, though, a low-rise building on West Fifty-Fourth Street, where my parents had insisted on ensconcing me upon my arrival in Manhattan—for my safety, they contended. Thus those of us with an inclination to consort with gentlemen had to devise other schemes to avail ourselves of their company.

  Helen McGoldrick, blonde and goddessy, shared that inclination with me.

  There in the city, where the fluid and frenetic social jumble proved a challenge for my still-girlish brain to parse—so different was it from Southern, stately, structured Washington, D.C.—I’d acquired the habit of placing new acquaintances into handy categories: Ally, for example, or Enemy, or Lover. Helen from day one was sui generis: Her category could only ever be Best Friend.

  The daughter of a steel executive from Birmingham, Alabama, she’d come north after college at Newcomb in New Orleans, to seek adventure, she said, and the opportunity to be more than a dizzy ringing belle.

  I thanked every star in the light-polluted sky for aligning to make Helen arrive in that girls’ club on the same day as I did in January 1926, and also to place her in my class at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, where we took lessons for a while—both of us stagestruck, like so many young things with the bee of New York City buzzing in our minds.

  One Sunday afternoon in May, Helen stood in the first-floor parlor, which we’d converted into a theater, declaiming her lines in a velvety drawl.

  “Nay, sister, reject me not, but let me die with thee, and duly honor the dead.”

  We were putting on Antigone. No Greek tragedian, I was sure, had ever spoken that way, but it didn’t matter; our audience was rapt.

  “Share thou not my death, nor claim deeds to which thou hast not put thy hand: My death will suffice,” I said in answer.

  The cream-colored lace curtains blew back from the open windows as if in agreement with my defiance.

  I was playing Antigone—whose name has been suggested to mean “opposed to motherhood,” hence the casting. Helen was Ismene, Antigone’s hesitating sister, though Helen herself would never be so quaking and cowardly. Creon was played by a girl named Ginny, a natural authoritarian; so, too, did she play the chorus, but a chorus of one, so we didn’t have to split the house take too many ways. Ginny’s shift between parts was a trick effected with masks and voices. Helen was also playing Haemon, Antigone’s faulty suitor, transitioning between the role of sister and never-quite-husband by means of a nappy and timeworn beard.

  These productions were fairly ridiculous, but that was beside the point.

  Since February, Helen and I had been staging monthly shows in the girls’ club’s first floor, charging admission at the door for anyone not actually performing, whether they lived there or not. This balmy afternoon, the front room was lit honey-yellow by the sun, and packed.

  Miss Bernice Lockhart, our matron, had her usual seat of honor in the very front row, practically in the actresses’ laps. Her posture, as ever, was erect to the point of pain, and gave the impression that she was trying to balance a book—the Bible, probably—atop her mouse-brown head.

  The ballet was fun, and it kept us limber, and Helen and I even went on at the Met a few times: We’d don our flower crowns and throw our arms in the air amongst the other nymphs and sprites, and for that we’d receive one dollar a performance. Not so remunerative.

  And so we’d devised these plays. If our amateurishness was a deterrent to some, the faintly illicit thrill of being admitted to our forbidden parlor proved irresistible to others, particularly young male others. By following a standard theater schedule—Friday and Saturday evening performances, and a Sunday matinee—with a single set of shows every month, we’d been building up our escape fund.

  Miss Lockhart was a shining disciplinarian, but not the brightest coin in the fountain, and we’d had to convince her of the legitimacy of our theatrical endeavors. The Christian Women’s Hotel had been built in 1920 for single professional women, but most of our fellow lodgers were professional husband hunters. Therein hid the secret to our persuasion of the middle-aged Miss Lockhart: We framed our thespian undertakings as a sophisticated mantrap—a means of getting doctors and lawyers in the door.

  Miss Lockhart missed that rebelliousness was the thrust of Antigone, seeing only that it was old, a classic, and Greek. To her mind, this kind of material would attract the right kinds of fiancés, men with college degrees and social mobility. The script had uplift and values, and had withstood the onslaught of time.

  I gazed across the stage at Helen as she recited her Ismene lines, a bedsheet toga over her jumper of forest green gabardine. We’d both have preferred to have nothing between the white cotton and our skins—the better to be unfettered and authentic—but such costuming would be too risqué for the likes of Miss Lockhart, keeping our virtues under lock and key.

  Both Helen and I had the men we were seeing—the men whom we let take us around town—in the audience: Dickie Prestwick, who worked in bonds, for me; and his colleague Abe Strong for Helen. In this way we could parade them respectably before the appraisal of Miss Lockhart, who would then permit them to take us out for dinner.

  They’d met us at the ballet. They had wealthy fathers and money to spend on us, and aside from all that, we enjoyed their company.

  Helen and I abridged the scripts ourselves so that the shows would not drag on, the better to have time for entertainment afterwards.

  The end was nigh. Ginny was uttering her Creon lines, dooming me to death by being buried alive: “Away with her—away! And when ye have enclosed her, according to my word in her vaulted grave, leave her alone, forlorn—whether she wishes to die, or to live a buried life in such a home.”

  Typecasting was not always a bad idea. Ginny had been born for that part, a goody-goody girl prone to tattling. Like Helen and me, Ginny wanted a career of some nebulous kind, having also arrived at the Christian Women’s Hotel to seek a profession and not just a husband. And Helen and I wanted to like her for being like us, for using the girls’ club as a port of call for a trip that differed from that of most of our peers.

  Trouble was, Ginny was annoying, obedient to rules even if the rules were stupid. Full, too, of rules of her own imposition, like “Make a friend of receptionists in big offices,” as she’d told us once. “To have a friend, be one. These girls can help get the names of key executives, so your résumé will shoot the mark.” Or “Make at least three new friends every day, and keep driving!”

  Involving her in the plays and allowing her a cut of
the proceeds was our bribe to keep her from telling Miss Lockhart how late we snuck back onto the floor we shared after seeing Dickie and Abe.

  As I let my Antigone-self be led away to die for my transgression, I could not see for certain, because Miss Lockhart’s watery blue eyes were behind the lenses of her spectacles, but I felt fairly sure I’d succeeded in bringing tears to them.

  “Tomb, bridal chamber, eternal prison in the caverned rock, whither go to find mine own, those many who have perished, and whom Persephone hath received among the dead!” I cried to great applause.

  We received a standing ovation from our fellow lodgers and their marriage-minded beaux, crowded though it was to stand among the makeshift theater seats consisting of every mismatched chair available in the Christian Women’s Hotel.

  Miss Lockhart swept forward, after we’d taken our bows, to embrace and congratulate Helen and me.

  “Another splendid run, ladies,” she said, clasping her hands to her chest and beaming. “That Antigone is spun from such strong moral fiber. Even if, historically speaking, she must have been a pagan.”

  “Thank you, Miss Lockhart,” I said, careful not to look at Helen for fear of betraying inappropriate mirth.

  “And Helen,” said Miss Lockhart, raising a hand to Helen’s radiant curls, marcelled and flaxen. “I doubt the boards have ever been walked by a more pulchritudinous Ismene.”

  Helen answered with a curtsy at Miss Lockhart and a wink at me.

  “Now what charity will we be donating the proceeds to, ladies?” said Miss Lockhart.

  Then Helen looked at me with such mischief that I couldn’t not laugh, because the charity was the same, of course, as always: The Get Helen and Lillian Out of the Damn Christian Women’s Hotel Fund. But Helen, with grace, lifted the cash box from the matron’s hands as gently as if it were a kitten, and said: