The Long-Winded Lady Page 16

  “Where’s Philippe?” he asked. “I ran into a friend of his in Edinburgh this summer.”

  The host stopped smiling at once. “Oh, Monsieur,” he said, “Philippe is no longer with us.”

  Now the customer stopped smiling. “No longer with you?” he said, almost shouting.

  The host looked wretchedly nervous, and he hesitated, “You see,” he said, “Philippe passed away this summer.”

  There was some murmuring between them that I could not catch, and after that the guest said, almost rudely, “All right, then, I’ll have a Rob Roy. A sweet Rob Roy.” He began to read the menu with great care, holding it close to his face, and when the drink came he reached around the menu for it and began to drink it behind the menu, almost with secrecy, as though he were ashamed of himself. He ordered dinner with no enthusiasm, and I felt very sorry for him, and even more sorry for Philippe, who must have loved his restaurant and would have been dismayed to know that he was now only a ghost at his own feast.

  I left the restaurant then and thought no more about it until a few nights ago, when I remembered how nice it was and went over there for dinner. I arrived just before seven, and there were quite a lot of tables occupied and more people drifting in all the time, and again and again I saw the little host go through the same gloomy explanation that he had given before about Philippe. Many of the people who were coming in were obviously old customers. The host hurried hospitably forward to greet each of the new arrivals, but it was easy to see that although he was glad to see them, he also dreaded seeing them. In the period since my first visit there, Philippe had passed from being a distressing ghost to being the skeleton who rattles and will not get into the cupboard and be still. I was sorry about that. I thought it might have been a good idea for Philippe’s colleagues to greet every returning old customer with a glass of champagne in which to toast their dead friend, but since this was not done, I can only hope that Philippe’s long and dreary wake will soon be over. I think he would have hated it. I hope that his next incarnation, when his bones cease their rattling, will be amid pleasant things that would have been familiar to him, amid sounds — the sounds of a prosperous and friendly restaurant at its best hour, the sounds from the kitchen when it is busiest, and the sounds of corks being drawn from bottles and of ice being shaken and of knives and forks and of waiters’ questioning voices and of customers in cheerful conversation over a good dinner, sounds that we all know and that signify perhaps the most amiable moments of our days, wherever we are, or, as we all happen to be, in the midst of life.

  DECEMBER 31, 1960

  West Eighth Street Has Changed and Changed and Changed Again

  THE view from the University Restaurant, on West Eighth Street, has changed and changed and changed again since the beginning of July, when they began tearing down three small gray apartment houses across the street. One afternoon I walked toward the restaurant from Fifth Avenue and did not notice the houses; they had always been there, and were so familiar as to be invisible. The next afternoon they were completely visible, because workmen were taking out the windows and had already laid a ramp of doors across the sidewalk. The three houses came down quite fast, considering how solid they looked, and how settled and comfortable in their place — next to the Whitney Museum, that lovely house that is now a youth center. As her doomed neighbors came tumbling down — no dignity, all secrets exposed — the Whitney huddled more and more into herself, like a poor old woman pulling her shawl around her shoulders in wintertime. “I may not be what I used to be,” the Whitney seemed to be saying, “but I don’t want to go just yet.” The three gray houses did not want to go, either, but they went anyway, with their thick walls and their good floors and their strong staircases and their many-colored rooms and all their windows — the ordinary square ones and the high-up skylights. Everything ended up down on the ground and was carted off, and what was left was what must have been there originally — a clear view of the backs of the tiny houses on the north side of Macdougal Alley. Mr. Gregory, the proprietor of the University Restaurant, watched the destruction, day by day, with a sort of unemotional disgust. “We had a lot of customers from those apartments,” he said. “A lot of teachers lived there. But the Whitney — that was a wonderful house! A lot of people from the Whitney used to come here when it was a gallery — a lot of the visitors, and a lot of the people who worked there.” For Mr. Gregory, the abandonment of the Whitney house as a museum was the worst, and it is from that event that he dates the decline of West Eighth Street from a Pleasant Place into a Wild Place.

  For me, the worst was the day Mr. Joseph Kling packed up his International Book & Art Shop, four doors east of the restaurant, and moved two blocks or so west, to Greenwich Avenue, because he couldn’t afford the new, high Eighth Street rents. Mr. Kling’s shop was below street level, directly across from the three houses that have just come down. When a customer entered, Mr. Kling used to emerge from the gloomy recesses at the far end of his shop wearing a green eyeshade and an expression that was sometimes menacing and sometimes merely distrustful. The shop was long and narrow, with simple shelves that went on and on to the far end, where a jumble and a clutter suddenly occurred, as though the leftover books had had to scramble for their places and were hanging on to the wall for dear life. All down the center of the room, plain wooden tables held maps and prints and photographs and more books. It was a dingy, stubborn, interesting place, and when Mr. Kling walked into view from his lair at the back, the shop took on the haunted air that all true secondhand bookshops have, all over the world. He knew his books, and the books showed that he knew them — there was not a foot of shelf in that shop where the eye would slide along and away without finding something to look at. You could spend hours there without wasting a minute. Even if you bought nothing, you came out much better off than you were when you went in. One night in the winter of 1944, I walked in there quite late in the evening — about nine o’clock. It was terribly cold. That was my fourth winter in New York City, and I still could not get used to the freezing winds that tore along the streets and never seemed to stop blowing. I thought the towering concrete canyons of the middle of Manhattan, where I was working, served to funnel and strengthen the fury of the winds, but even in the Village, where at that time the majority of the buildings were still low, the winds seemed to proceed from a hard ferocity that had nothing in common with ordinary weather or with ordinary times. It was too cold. I was living in one enormous room at the top of a beautiful house on East Tenth Street, just off Fifth Avenue, a few steps from the Grosvenor Hotel. I was six flights up, and my front wall was all windows — a solid row of casement windows looking south. At that time, as I said, the Village was still mostly not built up, and I had a long view of rooftops and chimney pots that even the most critical Parisian would have to admire — rooftops, roof gardens, terraces, studios, and a huge and always changing sweep of sky. But that winter the friendly expanse of rooftops turned into a flat and heartless plain across which the winds raced toward my casement windows; my casement windows had wooden frames and were very old, cracked, and warped, and offered little more protection than a canvas tent. And something had happened to the furnace in the house. For weeks we had no heat and no hot water. Finally, one night, I put on two coats and went out to walk about. There were very few people on the streets. Around nine o’clock, I walked into the International Book & Art Shop. It wasn’t warm there, but it was warmer than my rooftop apartment. Mr. Kling peered out from his corner at the back but did not come forward, and I made my way peacefully down the shop until I got to where he sat talking with a friend. They stopped talking and looked at me, and I imagined there was a question in the air. “My apartment is so cold I couldn’t stay there,” I said. “I had to come out. Even the streets seem warmer than the house I am living in.” The friend said, “It is the kind of weather that makes people get married.” Mr. Kling said nothing for a minute, and then he laughed grimly and said, “Berlin, 1923.”

&nb
sp; Berlin, 1923. New York City, 1944. And now it is New York City in the autumn of 1966. We are having Indian summer, and a sunny haze hangs over the trees in Washington Square. Tall, frail-looking, boxy new apartment houses confront each other flatly across lower Fifth Avenue, but the shape of the avenue — the marvelous sweep from Washington Square Arch straight uptown and into the far distance — remains unchanged. Over on Greenwich Avenue, Mr. Kling is still in business, still wearing his green eyeshade and his two expressions. The Grosvenor Hotel has been turned into a student residence, and the Brevoort and the Lafayette and the Holley are gone, but the small Hotel Earle, shabby and elegant, still holds the place it has held for more than sixty years at the corner of Waverly Place and Macdougal Street, and the Albert looks romantic and foreign at night when the lights go on in the dining room and in the bar and over the sidewalk café. The Albert is on University Place between Tenth and Eleventh streets, and Thomas Wolfe used to live there. This is a very autumnal Indian summer, and in the cool sunlight the side streets off Fifth and the winding Village streets to the west and south are filled with dreams and shadows, and there seems to be room for everyone. I am sitting by the street window of the University Restaurant, looking out at the dark blue wooden paling that hides the empty place where those gray apartment houses were. Mr. Gregory, at his desk, seems to be intoning a litany in his gravelly voice, but he is only dictating the menus for tomorrow’s lunch and tomorrow’s dinner to his printer over the telephone. “Russian shashlik,” Mr. Gregory says, and then he says, “Ham steak.” It was in July 1941, when I was a visitor to New York, that I first walked into this restaurant and ordered a dinner of lamb chops. Now, in the hazy afternoon, I eat broiled bluefish and mashed potatoes, and I look across the street at the dark blue paling and at the shuddering specter of the long-gone Whitney Museum, and I think: What next? What next?

  NOVEMBER 12, 1966

  Ludvík Vaculík

  “THE truth is not in triumphing. It is merely what remains when everything else has been squandered away.” “This spring has just ended and will never return. Everything will be known in the winter.” These are the words of a Czech writer, Ludvík Vaculík, and they are taken from his “Manifesto of Two Thousand Words,” which was published in several Czech newspapers last June, at a time when Czechoslovakia was jubilant. The “Manifesto” was signed by over seventy Czechs — “from sports to science, Communist and non-Communist,” according to Jerry Landay, a news commentator on station WINS, who has recently returned from Prague. Mr. Landay talked about the “Manifesto” and read excerpts from it on WINS at intervals from about midnight until dawn Wednesday, August 21, when we in New York had just heard of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Russians. WINS is an all-news station, and we were told that tanks were moving through the streets of Prague, and that the Central Committee building and Radio Prague were being surrounded, and that Alexander Dubček and other high government officials had been taken away, their destination unknown, and over and over again we were told that “some Czech citizens are trying to stop advancing Russian tanks with their bodies.” And from time to time Mr. Landay would repeat his speech, telling us that he had returned from Prague with a souvenir he values highly — six pieces of paper containing an English translation of Mr. Vaculík’s “Manifesto.” The “Manifesto” was not authorized by the Dubček government, but neither did the government forbid or suppress it. Each time Mr. Landay spoke of the “Manifesto” and its signatories, he said the same thing: “It was both the vibrant symbol of Czech rebirth — its unofficial Declaration of Independence — and suddenly its Last Will and Testament.” While I listened to WINS, I looked through the city edition of the New York Times, which had gone to press just as the first bulletins of disaster came from Prague. There were three-column headlines on the front page saying, “PRAGUE REPORTS INVASION BY TROOPS OF THE SOVIET, POLAND AND EAST GERMANY,” and the story that followed gave all the news that was available up to about ten-thirty. I read all of that issue of the Times — all about the Democrats getting ready for their Convention, all about everybody. I read about the Londoner who saved his pet goldfish, George, from drowning and may receive an award from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for his act. And I read about another Londoner, a cleaning lady in St. Alban’s Cathedral, who picked up a rumpled brown paper bag from under one of the pews and found inside not the stale sandwiches she expected but seventy-five hundred dollars’ worth of gold and platinum, diamonds, bloodstones, and onyxes — a dazzling haul. On page 2 of the Times there was a photograph of Count Carl-Gustav von Rosen, the Swedish aviator who broke the Nigerian blockade of Biafra and got food in to the starving Biafran people. And on page 3 there was a photograph I kept turning back to look at, because I thought the two faces shown there reflected the spirit of Ludvík Vaculík’s words. It was a photograph of two white South African students standing still with their heads up while other white students threw white paint at them. According to the Times, a group of students drove thirty miles from Witwatersrand University to Prime Minister Vorster’s residence in Pretoria to present a petition protesting a government veto of the appointment of a black African social anthropologist to a lecturing post at Capetown University. The two photographed are nineteen or twenty years old, and they have conventional haircuts — boys’ haircuts — and they are wearing conventional suits. One of them has on a shirt and tie under his jacket, but the other is so covered with paint that it is hard to tell if he is wearing a tie or not. In any case, they put on good clothes for the occasion of presenting the petition, and their clothes are ruined. They stand with their hands down — holding books, I think — and the only sign they give of self-defense is to half close their eyes. Their faces are grim but not angry or distressed, and they look as though they were standing their ground not for the present only but also for the future. There was a lot to read in that copy of the Times, while I listened to WINS and Jerry Landay, but I kept turning back to the two South African boys.

  Dawn came about six — a thick, dark orange dawn that cleared slowly to show the morning sky pale and unenthusiastic over the city. As soon as it was full light, I started over to Seventy-fourth Street and Second Avenue. I wanted to see if any kind of early-morning service was being held at the Jan Hus Presbyterian Church there, but no one was around or near the church except one man sitting on the front steps reading a newspaper. I walked a bit. That is a wide-open, airy section of the city, close to the river, with the usual tall, new, balconied apartment houses looking very clean and big next to the older buildings, smaller, darker, and out of fashion. There were numbers of people out, all of them walking dogs, but First Avenue is wide and free-looking, and there is little traffic there at that hour — seven-fifteen or so — and the dogs and their owners looked natural and happy, as though they were in the city because they enjoyed it, not because they had to be here. At one time the Czech and Slovak citizens of New York were concentrated in the area from Seventy-first to Seventy-fifth Street, and there are still many Czech and Slovak restaurants and shops, a Czech funeral home, Czech and Slovak names everywhere. In the doorway of a tiny Czech gift shop, the proprietor stood reading the Times, but except for the expression on his face, there was no sign around that a blow had been struck that might smash the globe and would in any case leave deep and lengthening fissures in it. My walk took me past the Jan Hus Presbyterian Church again. The man with the newspaper still sat there alone, engrossed in his reading. I took a taxi to Fifty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue and walked downtown from there. It was getting on to eight o’clock, and there were people walking along the street, walking to work — a peaceful big-city scene, dominated by St. Patrick’s Cathedral on the east side of the avenue and Rockefeller Center on the west side. A thin, dark young man hurried past me reading a French-language newspaper that had headlines about the Russians and the Czechs. When I got to the corner of Forty-fourth and Fifth, I looked along the block and saw, way at the end, a little crowd of people g
athered around the window of the Hammond Organ store, looking in. I thought: The organ people have put a television set in their window, and everybody is looking at the news from Prague. I hurried along to join them and made a place for myself between two distinguished-looking men, one black, one pinky white, both dressed for the day in neat business suits. Being short, I had to forage for my view, and when I finally got a look through the window I saw no television set but only a gray-haired lady sitting by a large organ and smiling out above our heads at something. I turned, and in front of the luncheonette across the street was a tall camera, and then I saw the familiar moviemaking truck — one truck only. They were making a movie. I turned back and stared in at the lady again. Not for long. A tall young man with black, curly hair came across the street and asked us to move away to the side — not all of us, only some. Apparently, a few of those at the window were bona fide members of the acting company. The two distinguished-looking men and I moved away and formed up again in a row on the sidewalk, where we stood staring at the curly-haired man, who did not seem pleased with us. “Farther back,” he said patiently. “Move back, please. Back to the door, please.” The three of us hurried to move about ten yards farther back, and when we had formed up again, our director was crossing the street, returning to his camera and its crew. We all suddenly realized whatever it was we realized, and we scattered hastily, going our different ways.