The Long-Winded Lady Page 12

  JANUARY 20, 1968

  The Ailanthus, Our Back-Yard Tree

  THE ailanthus, New York City’s back-yard tree, has been appearing around Broadway lately. “Appearing” is the exact word, because the ailanthus appears, like a ghost, like a shade, beyond the vacancy left by the old brownstone houses that are coming down one two three four five these days. From the north and from the south and from the east, Office Space is advancing on Broadway, and the small side streets west of Sixth Avenue are going fast. Behind the old houses, only shreds remain of the original back yards or gardens, but when the houses come down the ailanthus appears — the tenacious ailanthus, growing up, well nourished, in its scrap of earth. The first of the Broadway ailanthuses I saw appeared on Forty-ninth Street, beyond the empty hole left by the brownstone where the gypsies used to be. The gypsies had had the first floor of the house, and they had taken over the front steps as well. The old house hadn’t been changed much, and nine worn steps with iron treads led up to the entrance. Somebody had made the ascent narrower and easier with low iron railings, and on summer nights the gypsies congregated there, and the young women among them stood and leaned against the railings while the small gypsy children swung and tumbled about on the railings. When I looked across the street one day, after the wreckers had been at work on that block for quite a while, and saw the ailanthus — two ailanthuses, in fact — I was startled, and I stood and looked at them, and said to them, “Were you there all the time?” That first day the two ailanthus trees were green under a blue November sky. It was sixty-five degrees that afternoon, unseasonable weather, but the ailanthuses accepted the warm sunshine serenely, and made shadows of themselves against the high, blank wall beyond them. The Forty-ninth Street ailanthus trees are skeletons now — thin skeletons, meticulously defined by the blank wall that juts out from the back of one of the Sixth Avenue buildings. The trees will soon be gone, and so will the blank wall, because that area between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth is being flattened to make way for the latest Rockefeller office building, a fifty-four-story skyscraper that will probably be the new Esso Building, according to the Times. On these Broadway side streets, where the architecture is so mixed and often so unfortunate, the brownstones, the handsomest houses of them all, come down the most quickly. One minute the brownstone is standing, deserted, stripped, and empty, and the next minute its roof is gone and its front is gone and its insides are showing, daylight streaming like cold water over curved staircases and papered walls and small interiors — doors and ceilings and corners that remain secret even with everybody looking at them. Then, when it is all over and the house is gone and the thick white dust has settled, there is the ailanthus, speaking of survival and of ordinary things. These days in New York, when Order and Chaos shadow each other so closely that it is hard to tell the difference between them, the ailanthus stands up like a sign of reality. The new Office Space giants have nothing to do with our daily lives, or with ordinary things, and they are taking away our streets.

  The side streets off Broadway have always been crammed with small enterprises of every description, and with small restaurants. There used to be hundreds of restaurants, of every nationality and of varying degrees of charm and atmosphere and price. What all those restaurants had in common was that each place was owned by the man who stood behind the bar, or by the man who stood behind the cash register, or by the man who came forward to meet you when you walked in. We ordinary New Yorkers were kings and lords in all those places, even where the owner pretended to be surly, even where he really was surly. We could pick and choose and find our favorites, and so enjoy one of the normal ways of making ourselves at home in the city. It is in daily life, looking around for restaurants and shops and for a place to live, that we find our way about the city. And it is necessary to find one’s own way in New York. New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay. When she glitters she is very, very bright, and when she does not glitter she is dirty. New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don’t know why.

  Manhattan is an island, and so she has two horizons — the architectural horizon, impermanent and stony, and the eternal horizon, constantly changing, that is created when water and sky work together in midair. It may be that the secret of Manhattan’s hold over us is lost somewhere between those two horizons, the one hard and vulnerable, the other vague, shifting, and implacable. All we can be sure of is that she has a secret that binds us to her — something unresting and restless, something she shares with us even though we are not allowed to understand it. Other cities are mysterious. Amsterdam and London and Hong Kong are mysterious. Rome and Berlin are mysterious. New York is not mysterious. New York is a mystery. What is this place where Chaos stretches and sits down and makes himself at home? We live here, and we become part of the mystery. With Chaos, we make ourselves at home. We find our way about and establish a daily life for ourselves. But more and more the architecture of this city has nothing to do with our daily lives. The Office Space giants that are going up all over Manhattan are blind above the ground, and on the ground level they are given over to banks and to showrooms, and to businesses run by remote control by companies and corporations rich enough to afford the staggering rents. The smooth, narrow thoroughfares created by the office skyscrapers are deadly to walk through in the daytime, and at night they are silent and dangerous. The newly depressed areas of our city are very rich.

  At this moment I am sitting at a table in the English Grill and I am looking out into Rockefeller Plaza. The Promenade Café is bright and cheerful, with the vaguely institutional air common to restaurants run by remote control — restaurants where the host is not the owner. It is a benign institutionalism, not bad at all once you get used to it. Sitting here by the big glass wall, I am a part of the crowd outside in the plaza. The plaza is spectacular, with its stone terraces and stone steps, and with the long and lingering vistas of stone and light and shadow that occur between and through the surrounding towers of Rockefeller Center. In the skating rink the skaters go round and round. I wonder if the ailanthus will ever appear in Rockefeller Plaza. I suppose not. The ailanthus is a back-yard tree, and Rockefeller Plaza is a private back yard only one day each year. Every July, for the length of one Sunday, the plaza is closed to the public. On all the other days, members of the public are allowed to come and go in the plaza, free of charge. And the ailanthus is wild. It grows like a weed. There are no weeds in Rockefeller Plaza. The plaza is monumentally correct in every detail, and its key monument, the massive John D. Rockefeller, Jr., memorial stone, has not a scratch on it, not even a smudge. The memorial stone is a huge, severely cut wedge of polished dark green marble, and it is set into the top of the steps at the eastern end of the skating rink. The side of the stone facing the rink bears a bas-relief in bronze of Mr. Rockefeller’s head and, underneath:

  JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, JR.

  1874–1960

  FOUNDER OF ROCKEFELLER CENTER

  The reverse side of the stone, facing the flowered promenade that leads to Fifth Avenue, is slanted for easy reading, and is deeply engraved with the ten points of Mr. Rockefeller’s personal credo, his “I Believe.” To anyone approaching the stone from Fifth Avenue, the engraved words stare out with the dark and awful command of a prophecy. Here are Mr. Rockefeller’s words:

  I BELIEVE

  I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

  I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.

 
; I believe that the law was made for man and not man for the law; that government is the servant of the people and not their master.

  I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.

  I believe that thrift is essential to well ordered living and that economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs.

  I believe that truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social order.

  I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man’s word should be as good as his bond; that character — not wealth or power or position — is of supreme worth.

  I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.

  I believe in an all-wise and all-loving God, named by whatever name, and that the individual’s highest fulfillment, greatest happiness, and widest usefulness are to be found in living in harmony with His will.

  I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might.

  — JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, JR.

  Architecturally, very little that was notable has been lost in the destruction of the Broadway area. What has been lost is another strip of the common ground we share with each other and with our city — the common ground that is all that separates us from the Machine. Mr. Rockefeller’s words stand up to be read by everyone who walks through Rockefeller Plaza. Perhaps the architects of the proposed Esso Building will consider memorializing the words of another New Yorker, a man whose only house was made of wood and built on sand. How enjoyable to see engraved, in marble, on a wall of the new Rockefeller skyscraper: “Where it all will end, knows God! — Wolcott Gibbs.”

  MARCH 23, 1968

  A Little Boy Crying

  I SAW a little boy on the street today, and he cried so eloquently that I will never forget him. He was going down the subway steps into the station at Seventy-seventh Street and Lexington Avenue. There is a big flower shop on the corner there, and its window overlooks the steps. The window was filled high with spring flowers today, a calm and silent conflagration behind the glass, and across the middle of the glass, like skywriting, a single line of red neon spelled out DANA’S FLOWER SHOP. On this gray day the flowers in the window glowed, but the red of the neon sign was both raw and suffused — the color of pressure, if we could see pressure. The little boy who cried was six or seven years old, and he was bundled up too tightly in heavy clothes. He wore his dark winter clothes, although we were having one of those damp, irresolute days that turn with the wind from mild to chilly. The boy was carrying a schoolbag, a kind of fat briefcase, and it banged against his legs as he came along Lexington toward the subway entrance — partly through his own fault, because he was running from side to side behind his mother, peering up at her, trying to find which side gave him a better view of her face. He wanted to be sure she heard his scolding. His voice went on and on. He had an enormous amount of energy in his voice — hard energy. She was carrying two shopping bags and a large handbag and a large, square parcel, which she held high against her chest. The parcel forced her chin up. The child hadn’t a chance of seeing her face, and, in any case, her expression said that all she was thinking of was when she would get a chance to sit down. She was young and fat and walking very fast, with her black raincoat swinging open. The little boy and his schoolbag tumbled around behind her as though they were attached to the back of her coat collar by elastic string. There was another child, a boy of about nine, who strode beside the mother in independence, carrying a bigger schoolbag in one hand and a loaded shopping bag in the other. I first saw the three of them as they approached Dana’s doorway, which is only a step from the subway entrance. As they passed the doorway, the little boy stopped harrying his mother and began harrying his brother, who glanced absently at him, as if he were a chair, and got him out of the way with a good push of the big schoolbag. The little boy stopped scolding and ran back to his mother to demand justice. She had turned the corner by the flower shop, and, very carefully, she started down the steps. She was concentrating on keeping her balance, and her attention was farther than ever from her younger son. The older boy had slipped ahead of his mother and run down the steps, and he was waiting at the bottom, not looking up but looking away into the station. The smaller boy, following his mother, put his right hand up to the handrail to steady himself, and so had to change his schoolbag from his right hand to his left. When he realized that both his hands were now held, one by the rail and the other by the schoolbag, he stood still on the step and gathered his strength and began to denounce his mother while continuing to try to explain to her that his brother had pushed him. But the anger that had been churning around inside him while he was in motion must have gained in power when he stopped moving, because all his words turned into gasps that imprisoned him so that he could cry only two sounds — or, rather, two notes on one sound. The sound was “Aaaaaaaah!” and the notes were of denunciation and reproach. Denunciation was the hard note and reproach was the pitiful minor note. While he continued to cry with all his strength, his face turned a solid pale red that was closer in color and feeling to Dana’s neon sign than it was to any of the flowers in the window. The two notes continued like a lament. It was a lament. The little boy was singing on two notes. There was no end to his grief. He was completely betrayed, his song said, and it continued even after he began to climb slowly down the steps to his mother, who was calling desperately to him from below. His lament went on and on, growing fainter but remaining unmistakable as he descended. He might have been the last bird in the world, except that if he had been the last bird there would have been no one to hear him.

  APRIL 27, 1968

  A Young Man with a Menu

  LATE this afternoon, in the Longchamps at Twelfth Street and Fifth Avenue, I watched a young man persuade a girl to join him for dinner by reading the menu to her over the telephone. He stood in the glass telephone booth by the huge street window and read here and there from the menu, suggesting things to eat, and from time to time he fell silent and listened to whatever the voice at the other end of the phone was saying. The voice seemed to have a good deal more to say than he had, and each time, after he had listened to it for a while, he stopped staring and lifted the menu in front of himself as though it were a hook that would drag her back to the point he wanted to make. He wanted her to have dinner with him. There was snow falling outside — a steady fluttering of modest little flakes that turned into gray fluff as soon as they touched the sidewalk. Every once in a while, a fierce gale tore down the avenue from the north, sending the snowflakes streaming away toward Washington Square, and then the whole view seemed to blow up, and looked white and dangerous. It was getting dark. Across the street, the heavy stone of the massive building where the Macmillan Company used to be made a somber background for the pandemonium, and the bookshop next door, Dauber & Pine, had all its lights on but still managed to suggest a shadowy and mysterious interior, making it the very picture of an old bookshop seen through the dusk of a wintry day — a wintry day in spring, as it is now. The great sheet of glass that allows this theatrical view of Fifth Avenue is really a movable wall that rolls back in the good weather to open the restaurant to the sidewalk café. It is an arrangement that turns the whole Fifth Avenue front of the restaurant into a stage set.

  Tonight, shut in from all the wildness and clamor outside, Longchamps was very quiet and warm, and almost deserted. The young man who read the menu over the phone had not yet made his appearance when I arrived. There was hardly anyone at the long, long bar, which looked lonely; only a few people were having drinks or dinner; there were mostly empty tables in the big, comfortable room; and the back room, which is even bigger, was just as quiet. Some years ago they lowe
red the ceilings in this branch of Longchamps and made a great many other alterations that banished every trace of the awkward, cavernous, romantic atmosphere the place used to have, but the front room is saved from being completely conventional by the arrangement of the sidewalk café. The café is carpeted in green and has a low marbled wall of faded pink coral with a miniature hedge of green box along the top of it, so that in summer people sitting out there are half hidden from the passersby, and all year round all we in the restaurant can see of the passersby is what shows of them above the hedge — the upper parts of their bodies, their shoulders and heads. The café awning, printed on the inside with pink apple blossoms, extends down to within a couple of feet of the top of the little hedge, so that the view of the Avenue, wild and snowy tonight, is sliced off at the top by apple blossoms and from below by the spiky green box, making the setting even more theatrical. Tonight, with darkness coming on and everything tossing about out there, it seemed as though that scrap of Fifth Avenue had been set up as the starting point of a very interesting movie. Any minute now, the star of the movie would come into view, walking past the hedge with the rest of the people who were struggling along out there, but he would turn away from the crowd and walk through the opening in the hedge and push his way through the revolving door. We would get only glimpses of him across the top of the hedge and then see him vaguely through the glass panels of the door, but after that he would step into the restaurant and look decisively about him, registering his personality, before he walked straight to the bar, or straight to a certain table. He would be wearing a raincoat. It would be a spy movie, with perhaps a murder and certainly a chase. All these empty tables would make good hurdling, and there were just about enough customers to register fear, horror, glee, and so on. And all the waiters and waitresses were at their stations, in full fig. Full fig for the waitresses at this Longchamps means a blue-and-gray-striped dress — a very unfair garb, unbecoming to the girls and depressing for the customers, but one that might lend itself to all kinds of sinister effects in the eye of an imaginative cameraman, though it takes only a little imagination to connect those stripes with crime and punishment. Almost any restaurant provides a good opening scene for a movie about spies, but the Longchamps at Twelfth and Fifth is ready-made for episodes of intrigue and pursuit, because, in spite of all the remodeling that has been done there, the back of the restaurant — the far end of the back room — still seems to stretch off into infinity. And across the avenue there is the haunted-looking bookshop, the dour gray front of the publishers’ building, and the old Presbyterian church, with its gardens and its railings. The noseless architecture we are all growing accustomed to has dulled our view and will soon cure us of our habit of gazing at the city we live in, but this part of lower Fifth Avenue still allows us to dream that there is room for life to go here and there in human ways, off the mechanical paths.