The Long-Winded Lady Read online

  Praise through the decades for the Long-Winded Lady

  “Maeve Brennan … has helped put New York back into The New Yorker, and has written about the city of the sixties with both honesty and affection … She is constantly alert, sharp-eyed as a sparrow for the crumbs of human event, the overheard and the glimpsed and the guessed at, that form a solitary city person’s least expensive amusement.”

  — John Updike, Atlantic Monthly (1969)

  “She has always been able to turn quite ordinary things into ‘moments of recognition’… She does this by a steady accumulation of detail and alternate flashes of passionate statement and raw insight. The accomplishment is formidable — something few writers attempt without sounding precious, dull, or both.”

  — Helen Rogan, Time (1974)

  “Reading this book I was reminded again and again of a very different one that it has something in common with — Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook. The long-winded lady and the great Russian novelist are alike in the openness with which everything — a bad-mannered dog, a little boy crying, a young man waiting for his date in the bar of what turns out to be the wrong hotel — is looked at and felt.”

  — William Maxwell, Wigwag (1988)

  “Maeve had quickness of wit, a sharp tongue, and the gift of style … Bitter, dazzling, talented, tenderhearted, intractable Maeve!”

  — Brendan Gill, A New York Life (1990)

  “She was an artist of the evanescent.”

  — Thomas Flanagan, Washington Post (1998)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Maeve Brennan left Ireland for America in 1934, when she was seventeen. She settled in Manhattan and in 1949 joined the staff of The New Yorker, to which she contributed book reviews, fashion notes, essays, and short stories. Between 1954 and 1981 she wrote, for “The Talk of the Town,” a series of sketches about daily life in Times Square and the Village, most of which are collected in The Long-Winded Lady. She gathered her short fiction in two volumes, In and Out of Never-Never Land (1969) and Christmas Eve (1974); a posthumous selection, The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin, was published in 1997. Maeve Brennan died in 1993, at the age of seventy-six.

  ALSO BY

  Maeve Brennan

  The Springs of Affection:

  Stories of Dublin

  Copyright © 1998 by The Estate of Maeve Brennan.

  Copyright © 1969 by Maeve Brennan. Copyright © 1954, 1955, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. Copyright © 1955, 1962, 1967 by Maeve Brennan. Copyright © 1969, 1970, 1973, 1976, 1981 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

  All but three of the pieces collected here were first published in The New Yorker. “The Solitude of Their Expression,” “The Dark Elevator,” and “The Morning After” first appeared in the original 1969 edition of The Long-Winded Lady.

  The Postscript was edited by Christopher Carduff.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Cover design by Anita van de Ven

  COUNTERPOINT

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  Distributed by Publishers Group West

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  e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-654-4

  To W. S.

  CONTENTS

  Publisher’s Note

  Author’s Note

  They Were Both about Forty

  A Mysterious Parade of Men

  The Solitude of Their Expression

  On the A Train

  Balzac’s Favorite Food

  The Dark Elevator

  Broccoli

  A Shoe Story

  In the Grosvenor Bar

  A Chinese Fortune

  From the Hotel Earle

  The Farmhouse That Moved Downtown

  A Lost Lady

  The Flower Children

  Wild Money

  Lovers in Washington Square

  I Wish for a Little Street Music

  Jobs

  Little Birds in Torture

  A Young Lady with a Lap

  The Morning After

  The Two Protesters

  Lost Overtures

  The Man Who Combed His Hair

  The Good Adano

  A Busload of Scolds

  Movie Stars at Large

  Faraway Places Near Here

  The Traveler

  Sixth Avenue Shows Its True Self

  I Look Down from the Windows of This Old Broadway Hotel

  Mr. Sam Bidner and His Saxophone

  The Ailanthus, Our Back-Yard Tree

  A Little Boy Crying

  A Young Man with a Menu

  Painful Choice

  The New Girls on West Forty-ninth Street

  The View Chez Paul

  The Sorry Joker

  Giving Money in the Street

  Bad Tiny

  An Irritating Stranger

  The Cheating of Philippe

  West Eighth Street Has Changed and Changed and Changed Again

  Ludvík Vaculík

  The Name of Minnie Smith

  Howard’s Apartment

  POSTSCRIPT

  The Last Days of New York City

  Lessons and Lessons and Then More Lessons

  A Snowy Night on West Forty-ninth Street

  A Visitor from California

  Just a Pair of Show-Offs

  On the Island

  Cold Morning

  A Daydream

  A Blessing

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The first part of this book reprints Maeve Brennan’s The Long-Winded Lady, published by William Morrow & Company in 1969. The arrangement of items, almost all of which first appeared in The New Yorker magazine’s “Talk of the Town” department, is the author’s own.

  Our “Postscript” adds nine “long-winded lady” items to Maeve Brennan’s original selection of forty-seven. Three of these additions — “The Last Days of New York City,” “Lessons and Lessons and Then More Lessons,” and “A Snowy Night on West Forty-ninth Street” — were published in The New Yorker as feature pieces and carried the author’s byline. The remaining items were published, as letters from the long-winded lady, in “The Talk of the Town.”

  “A Snowy Night on West Forty-ninth Street” was included in Maeve Brennan’s story collection Christmas Eve (1974). The other items in the “Postscript” are collected here in book form for the first time.

  THE

  LONG-WINDED

  LADY

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE forty-seven pieces collected here were written for The New Yorker between 1953 and 1968. They appeared in “The Talk of the Town,” where they were introduced by a phrase that varied very little from one time to the next. It was a simple phrase — “We have received another communication from our friend the long-winded lady”; “Our friend the long-winded lady has written to us as follows.” Now when I read through this book I seem to be looking at snapshots. It is as though the long-winded lady were showing snapshots taken during a long, slow journey not through but in the most cumbersome, most reckless, most ambitious, most confused, most comical, the saddest and coldest and most human of cities. Sometimes I think that inside New York there is a Wooden Horse struggling desperately to get out, but more often these days I think of New York as the capsized city. Half-capsized, anyway, with the inhabitants hanging on, most of them still able to laugh as they cling to the island that is their l
ife’s predicament.

  Even after more than twenty-five years the long-winded lady cannot think of herself as a “real” New Yorker. If she has a title, it is one held by many others, that of a traveler in residence. As a traveler she is interested in what she sees, but she is not very curious, not even inquisitive. She is not a sightseer, never an explorer. Little out-of-the-way places have to be right next door to wherever she happens to be living for her to discover them. She has never felt the urge that drives people to investigate the city from top to bottom. Large areas of city living are a blank to her. She knows next to nothing about the Lower East Side, less about the Upper East Side, nothing at all about the Upper West Side. She believes that small, inexpensive restaurants are the home fires of New York City. She seldom goes to the theater or to the movies or to art galleries or museums. She likes parades very much. She wishes we could have music in the streets — strolling violinists, singers, barrel organs without monkeys. She thinks the best view of the city is the one you get from the bar that is on top of the Time-Life Building. She also likes the view from the windows of street-level restaurants. She hates being a shut-in diner. She wishes all the old Longchamps restaurants would come back with all their oranges and mosaic Indians and imitation greenery. She wishes Tim Costello hadn’t died. She likes taxis. She travels in buses and subways only when she is trying to stop smoking. When a famous, good old house is torn down she thinks it is silly to memorialize it by putting a plaque on the concrete walls of the superstructure that takes its place. She regrets Stern Bros. department store, and Wanamaker’s, and all the demolished hotels, including the Astor. When she looks about her, it is not the strange or exotic ways of people that interest her, but the ordinary ways, when something that is familiar to her shows. She is drawn to what she recognizes, or half-recognizes, and these forty-seven pieces are the record of forty-seven moments of recognition. Somebody said, “We are real only in moments of kindness.” Moments of kindness, moments of recognition — if there is a difference it is a faint one. I think the long-winded lady is real when she writes, here, about some of the sights she saw in the city she loves.

  1969

  They Were Both about Forty

  SOMEBODY said, “A full-grown child is five-sixths memory.” It was half a joke, I suppose, but last night, at a quarter past nine, I saw two full-grown city children — middle-aged people — walking together on Sixth Avenue, and in each of them memory was quite suspended for the sake of the moment they were spending together. They were engrossed in each other. He was besotted. She was proud. She was far gone in hauteur, but her disdainful expression was alien to her harsh face. He was different. The state of beatitude was natural to him, and his expression would normally change only to become more or less intensely pleased with the world and with his own condition. He was from one of the Spanish-speaking countries, and I think he had been here only a very short time. She was showing him her neighborhood — Sixth Avenue in the Forties, where furnished rooms and cheap hotels are still to be found, in spite of the enormous amount of demolition that has taken place around there this year to make way for the new skyscrapers. His hair was black and dense and glossy, like boot polish, and he had big, soft brown eyes and smooth skin. He had a little half-moon mustache. He was a Latin type, and she was Hogarthian, with Plantagenet features. Her forehead was big, and she had small blue eyes, a domineering, bony nose, and a thin mouth. Her upper lip made a perfect cupid’s bow — pale pink, no lipstick — but her skin had the bad, stretched look of the white cotton hand towels they give you in poor hotels. Her hair had been bleached and dyed so often that it was weathered to a rough rust-pink, and it hung stiffly down her back like a mane, or like wig hair before it has been brushed and combed and curled into shape. They were both about forty, and they were the same height (five feet four or so) and about the same weight (a hundred and sixty pounds), and they both had short legs and barrel bodies and short necks. His left arm and hand were locked in her right arm and hand. They paced along together exactly as though they were walking down the long, long aisle leading from the altar where they had been married. To look at them, you could imagine throngs of friends and relatives watching them and waiting to follow them out of the church. When I first saw them, they were approaching the northeast corner of Forty-fourth and Sixth, and were about to cross the street and continue their perambulation downtown. There were numbers of people on the sidewalk, and the full-grown children emerged from the crowd, but, more than that, they emerged from the long, dark distance beyond them. The night view up Sixth Avenue is eerie now that the blocks on the west side of the avenue are half broken down and half gone. It is as though the area had been attacked and then left in pieces, and there is a clear view all the way to Fiftieth Street, where the shimmering cliffs of the Time-Life skyscraper stand up to be seen in their entirety for the first time since they were built, nine years ago. I noticed the two people because of the deliberate way they walked, close together, and because the hem of her dress was about three inches below her knees. She wore a sleeveless, buttoned-down-the-front dress of pale pink cotton printed with green foliage and cream-colored flowers, and it hung straight down from her shoulders to end in a deep flounce. Her bare legs were heavily marked with spots, bruises, and swollen dark-blue veins, and she wore flat brown moccasins embroidered in white and gold, like bedroom slippers. She carried no handbag, not even a change purse — no luggage at all. She was close to home, out for a few minutes, taking a little constitutional with her friend. He attempted to match her informal attire by going tieless and coatless. He wore navy blue trousers, buttoned tightly around his middle, and a plain white shirt with the sleeves folded back to his elbows, and open-toed leather sandals that showed off his striped socks. When the two had crossed Forty-fourth Street and were proceeding downtown, she was attracted by the model kitchen on display in the Hotpoint showroom in the corner building, and they went to the window and stood, side by side, looking in. It was a very fancy kitchen in chocolate brown and ombré yellow, and the flowered partition that served as a background wall had a “window” in it showing a summer sky and branches of dogwood in bloom. “I don’t really care for that color scheme,” she said, and he moved closer to her, so that their bodies were touching from their shoulders to their knees, and he turned his head and beamed into her eyes. He nodded admiringly, but he said nothing. They looked at the kitchen for a minute, and then she stepped back, and so did he, and they looked up and she read the sign over the window. “‘Hotpoint Kitchen Planning,’” she read. He began to spell out the first word. “Hotpoint,” she said. “Ottpoyn,” he seemed to say. “No,” she said. “Hotpoint.” It occurred to me that they might turn around and find me staring at them. His expression would hardly change, but hers would, and I didn’t want to get in its way. When the hauteur slipped from her face, what would I see? Despair, I imagine. Not the passive, withdrawn despair that keeps itself in silence but the raging kind that incinerates all before it. I turned away and went home, leaving them to their English lesson.

  SEPTEMBER 28, 1968

  A Mysterious Parade of Men

  THERE are more parades in this city than any of us know about. There was one yesterday that went unwitnessed and unadmired except by two policemen and me, and it was a real parade, with marching men, all in line and all in step, and martial music. This was about a quarter to eight in the morning, and it was Sunday. I was thinking about coffee, and I was standing in the middle of the block on Forty-fourth Street between Fifth and Sixth wondering whether to go along to the Algonquin, which is so small and familiar, or to walk a little farther, and east, to the Biltmore, which is so large and familiar, when I heard the music striking up on Fifth Avenue, and I hurried along to the corner to see what was happening. I can’t say how many men were marching, but there were enough of them to fill the avenue for a block, leaving good margins of space all around, and that is how they were marching — neatly, keeping their margins straight. They were all dressed in dark su
its, and they went shoulder to shoulder along the empty avenue, with the empty buildings and the empty windows keeping them incognito. In all these buildings, there was nobody to hear them and nobody to see them. They were passing Forty-fifth Street when I first saw them, moving along uptown at a steady tread. At that distance, they were geometric, private, and solemn, and I thought of funeral marches, drummings out of the corps, hunger marches, executions, revolutions, conscription, and strikes. One of the two policemen I had noticed was on the opposite side of the avenue at Forty-seventh Street, but the other was quite close to me at Forty-fifth. I walked along to him and asked him what the parade was. “I don’t know,” he said. He was very tall and pink-faced, with a cheerful smile. I said, “Have you really no idea what it is?” and he shook his head and said, “No idea.” I said, “But it could be anything,” and I thought of nuclear weapons, the Russians, conspirators, political plots, assassinations, and Trojan horses. The city seemed more deserted than ever, with everybody asleep, and I thought, It is just a step to chaos. I was wondering about the policeman. Then he asked, “Are you thinking of going after them?” and I said no, and turned back down the avenue and decided on the Biltmore and went over there and had coffee. The reason I had to make that choice between the Algonquin and the Biltmore is that Schrafft’s is closed on Sundays.

  JULY 14, 1962

  The Solitude of Their Expression

  YESTERDAY afternoon — I was in a taxi — I watched a very tall old man walking north on Seventh Avenue. He was passing the Metropole Café, which is almost directly across the avenue from the Latin Quarter and Playland. The Metropole is a Twist palace, and it has huge glass doors that reveal its shadowy interior. There is always something going on in there, but I have never been able to make out exactly what, because of the crowd that collects in front of the doors, people peering around each other’s heads and necks and shoulders to see what they can see. Even in the furnace heat of yesterday the crowd was there. It was a dreadful day. There was no air except what was left over, and in the heat the big pictures of the Metropole’s next-to-naked performers glowed with even more than their usual fleshiness. The old man walked past all this damp confusion as though it did not exist. There was no contempt in his indifference. He lives around here, and I imagine he takes Broadway for granted. I have seen him before, but like many very old people he looks more isolated and more fragile in this oppressive weather. Yesterday he had left his jacket at home, and he wore no tie. He wore a white shirt that was buttoned up at the neck and wrists, and his trousers, which were roomy, especially around the waist, were held up by dark striped suspenders. His hat was made of cream-colored straw, he wore big black boots, and his walking stick would have marked a very firm track in the dust if that overworked Broadway concrete ever had the chance to collect dust. He walked in his usual way, holding himself as straight as he could, and not going very fast. You could see his knees working. He paid no attention to anyone and he asked for no attention. You would think he relied on the solitude of his expression to get him to his destination. There are a good many very old people living in this highly charged part of the city, which you would never think of as being residential. The shabby side-street hotels and rooming houses are camping grounds for all the theaters and nightclubs and restaurants that provide the bright lights of Broadway, and some of the campers stay on awhile and then they become settlers. At present I have two big rooms in a Forty-ninth Street hotel that is sixty years old this year. I have very high ceilings and windows on three sides. My place is in the rear wing of the hotel, on the eleventh floor, and I look straight across the low roofs of the little Forty-eighth Street houses to the big flat back of another hotel that appears to be about the same age and height as this one. My hotel is twelve stories high and there is an arrangement of rooms called the penthouse on top of the roof. In the penthouse there are six bedrooms and two public baths. That hotel I see over there also has a penthouse. The hotel is made of brick, faded and dirty, pink and yellow. I don’t know what the penthouse is built of, but it is painted black. It is a cabin in the sky and it makes a deck of the roof it sits on. At one end there is enough roof left over to make a terrace, which has a low stone wall that is painted a pale pink. I consider myself to be quite high up in the sky, eleven flights up, and the black cabin with its pink terrace is about on eye level with me, but as I look past the cabin, looking south across the city, the view goes up and up as the buildings go higher and higher and the walls grow more and more blank and closed. It is an irregular ascending view, split down here and there by a narrow shaft of light that shows where the big buildings do not quite meet, or are prevented from meeting by some small, stubborn survivor like the old five-story Forty-eighth Street houses down here at my feet. If I look over to the west I can see, where Seventh Avenue meets Broadway, the Latin Quarter building, which is not much bigger than a very big shed. I can see the sidewalk by the Latin Quarter and the people passing along, going about their business or hesitating to stare in through the glass walls of Playland. Playland is the indoor amusement park that takes up most of the street floor of the Latin Quarter building. The passersby and the loiterers are reflected in the glass of Playland, and there is also reflected the constantly flowing stream of traffic on its way downtown. That is to the west, only half a block away from me. To the east I can see the Empire State Building for most of its ugly length. The Empire State is at least fifteen long blocks from here. It seems to be very close, but then, no matter where you stand, the Empire State always seems to have that effect of trying to be on nudging terms with every other building in the city. The hotel with the black penthouse and the pink terrace presents a flat, unadorned back full of little windows that are covered with white curtains and shades that pull up and down. In one of the rooms two floors down from the roof a very old lady makes her home. I see her at her window. Now in the hot weather she pulls her window up as far as it will go and leaves it so, and her curtains, the white net of hotel room curtains and worn thin, I suppose, like the ones I have here, are fastened back so that she can get all the light and air there is. She has two red geraniums and some sort of very small green plant in pots on her windowsill. Sometimes she anchors a square of white cloth under the two geraniums. The cloth, stretched tightly across on two of its corners, is limp until it starts to dry, and then it comes to life with little flutters. One evening lately I saw the old lady sitting at her window, facing west or, rather, facing the west wall of her room. Her hair is completely white. She was reading what appeared to be a letter, holding it at an angle in front of her as you would a newspaper. It was one of those lucky evenings when the white summer day turns to amber before it begins to break up into the separate shades of twilight, and in the strange glow the towering outline of the city to the south turned monumental and lonely. The Empire State changed color suddenly, and lost its air of self-satisfaction. Nothing was really certain anymore, except the row of pigeons standing motionless on the western wall of the pink terrace, and beneath, the old lady calmly reading her letter. Without turning her head she put her right hand with the sheet of paper in it out the window, stretched her arm to full length, and let the paper go. It fluttered down and away, and she went on reading. There was a second sheet to the letter. She did not look out. She did not see the amber air, and she did not notice the violet blue vapor that drifted in transparency across her window, carried on a very timid little eastern breeze. A second time she stretched out her arm and let a sheet of paper go, and she continued to read. The third sheet followed the first two uncertainly down the wall of the hotel, and then she stood up and vanished at once into the dimness of her room. There was something very housewifely about the decisive way she left her window and her geraniums. She is on the tenth floor, but she might just as well have been leaving her ground-floor window after having spent an hour gossiping with her neighbors and watching the market bags to see who was having what for dinner. A good many of the ordinary ways of living go when people begin to l
ive up in the air.