The Long-Winded Lady Page 17

  I went into the Algonquin Hotel and bought a copy of the late city edition of the Times and sat down and began comparing it with my well-worn early edition. In the late edition the Czechoslovakian news had headlines all across the front page, and took up so much space that many items that had been front-paged earlier had been pushed to the back pages, where they, in turn, displaced other items, including the one about George the goldfish and the one about the St. Alban’s Cathedral cleaning lady. But Count Carl-Gustav von Rosen still turned an interested face to the world on page 2, and the South African students held their place on page 3, and their faces still reflected the prophetic challenge of Ludvík Vaculík’s words. I would like to propose a cheer for the South African students and a cheer for Count Carl-Gustav von Rosen. A cheer for Jerry Landay. A cheer for the New York Times. A cheer for little George, whose life was saved by his kind and nimble master, Mr. Peter Humphrey, fifty-five. A cheer for the cleaning lady, Mrs. Ivy Rickman, who said of the bag of jewels, “My eyes popped out. I knew I’d have to tell a cathedral official, but I couldn’t resist first trying on a few rings and bracelets.” No cheers for Ludvík Vaculík. I ask God to bless him and keep him safe to write in freedom soon again. “This spring has just ended and will never return. Everything will be known in the winter.”

  SEPTEMBER 7, 1968

  The Name of Minnie Smith

  I HAD an early dinner last night on the second floor of the Schrafft’s on Fifth Avenue at Forty-sixth Street. When I had nearly finished, two ladies came in and took the table next to mine. They both wore very large hats and had a great many strands of pearls around their necks, and I could not help hearing every word they said, because they talked very loudly. They both owned dress shops (or perhaps they only managed them; I couldn’t be sure), and they had just come from a fashion showing on Seventh Avenue, and they had once worked together in the same dress house, but until this meeting, which was now ending with dinner at Schrafft’s, they had not seen each other for several years. They mentioned the names of a good many people they both knew, and each name was ticked off with a remark or two that defined the absent one’s achievement or lack of it — she had married or she had not married, she was divorced, she had or had not moved away from New York, she had gone into business for herself or she had failed in business and was now working for somebody, and so on. The names clattered between the two ladies, and I had the feeling that everyone in the world was of the same size and of the same unimportance, and that we would all be disposed of very easily if these two women ever got hold of our names. The girl had brought my check and I was counting out my money when another name was mentioned, and I shall say that the name was Minnie Smith. Both ladies were eager talkers, but the more eager one said, “Oh, Minnie Smith. Nice little woman. Counts for nothing.” Then she dropped a new name, but I heard no more, because I was on my way to the cash register to pay what I owed. I rode down to the street floor in Schrafft’s majestic elevator, and I walked out onto Fifth Avenue and up Fifth to Forty-ninth and along Forty-ninth to the hotel where I live, which is very close to Seventh Avenue. On my way, I passed a lot of people, of all sizes and shapes and colors and ages. I passed American soldiers and foreign sailors and delivery boys and waiters and office workers and very young girls in groups and very young boys in groups and fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles and gypsies and bootblacks and priests and policemen and taximen and highly dressed people off for an evening on Broadway. Did I pass Minnie Smith? I shall never know. I kept thinking, Oh, Minnie Smith, what did you do to that awful woman? All the other names were dropped and squashed and left to kick themselves to death, but the name of Minnie Smith had to be obliterated, and in the obliteration she was delineated, and there she is now, larger than life. Imagine the power of Minnie Smith, who counts for nothing and is not there and can still turn the spade they are digging her grave with into a flag with her name on it. I do not expect ever to see the two ladies from Schrafft’s again, and so there is very little chance that I will ever have another glimpse into the very eager one’s disappointed heart, where names are arranged according to the degree of the grudge that is held against them, but one thing I am certain of — on that ever-lengthening roster, the name of Minnie Smith leads all the rest.

  AUGUST 31, 1963

  Howard’s Apartment

  I AM back in the Village again, spending a few days in the apartment of a friend who is in London. The apartment is small, orderly, and individual — a one-person place that has remained aloof (friendly but aloof) since I walked in here with my suitcase on Thursday. “We have no secrets,” the two little rooms seem to say, “but we are his.” And I think that when I leave, the day after tomorrow, the same toy voice, whispering out of the walls, will cry, “What has been going on here? Who has been sitting in my chair? Who has been sleeping in my bed?” I know that voice. It is familiar to me, as it is to anyone who lives alone. It is the voice of the Three Bears, echoing one another — the Big Bear, the Smaller Bear, and the Smallest Bear. They start whispering when I open my own front door after I have been away awhile, after I have left my place to itself overnight, or for a week or a month. “Who has been at my kitchen? Who has been reading my books? Who has been touching my things?” The alarm in the Bears’ voices is produced when they put their heads together to prove that they are thinking, and that they are aware, and that they are not sleepy, trusting fools but alert, knowledgeable Bears who know their way around in the world. (In fact, the Bears do not know their way around in the world, and they know that, but do other people know they know that?) At any excuse, they shoulder their cardboard guns and challenge the Darkness. “Who goes there?” “A Friend.” “Pass, Friend.” But wait a minute. “Who goes there?” “A Foe.” “Pass, Foe.” Friend or foe, what does it matter? The Bears have taken their stand, and, very much satisfied with themselves, they go back to sleep.

  My friend’s apartment is on Tenth Street between Fifth and Sixth, on the third floor of a brownstone that would delight its architect if he could come back to life to see how serenely his work has weathered the years. This is the rear apartment, and the people in front are giving a party. It is almost six now, and for the past hour I have been hearing their guests come up the stairs. Just as the new arrivals reach the landing, the door next to mine opens and there are shouts of greeting and breathless complaints in male and female voices about the long climb up, and then the door closes again on the party and the party noises. The door is closed now, but there is a new sound. We had a cloudburst a minute ago, or maybe it was only a few seconds ago. The rain poured down. There was sudden thunder, and lightning, and the sky, which had been white, turned black. When the rain reached its full force, which was immediately after it started to fall, the blue wood floor of the terrace outside these living-room windows vanished under a surprised azure mist as millions of drops of water suddenly hit the boards and bounced back before falling down forever. The big, humble sheepdog of an ailanthus tree that leans its shoulders against the terrace became soaked at once and bowed all its heavy heads in its eternal submission to man’s low opinion of it. The rain made a great noise, but the rose bushes that edge the terrace held themselves calmly up under the violence, and their leaves fluttered in the rush of clean new air. As the rose leaves fluttered, welcoming the downpour, the ailanthus trembled all over, and the flat red-and-black side of a large apartment building half a block away shone with color. Wherever the rain fell there was color, and the rain fell everywhere. At the first moment of the storm, when the lightning flashed and the rain came thundering down, I stood up from the green velvet sofa where I am sitting and walked across to close the door to the terrace, and when I turned back, the room had become dim — nothing left of the brightness that had filled it all day. Now the room is vague and insubstantial, and shows itself for what it really is — the accidental setting of an enigmatic but not disquieting dream that I have dreamed before, in past rooms, and will dream again, in rooms I have not yet seen. It is a
dream without people. The rain has gathered the room and me into the invisible world where there is no night and no day, and where walls and mirrors and trees and bridges are formed of advancing and retreating sound. At this moment it is easy to see how mountains and oceans are created and erased by a shift in the light, and to understand that the solid earth may shrink without warning to the vanishing point underneath our feet. The rain falls steeply, making cliffs as it falls, and its force has turned this room into a cave that is real only because it is hollow — a sounding place in which there is only one sound. In the profound silence that rises here now, even echo and memory fade away.

  At the moment when I stood up to close the terrace door, the people in the front apartment must have hurried to close their windows. They have no terrace. Their windows look out on Tenth Street, which is quite narrow, and across at a row of houses that share a long iron balcony — a straight tier of openwork iron, like a foreign postmark across their fronts. Every year the people who live along the balcony can see a miracle on this side of the street, on this house, where a vigorous old wisteria embraces the front wall from the sidewalk to the roof. When it is ready to bloom, the wisteria turns to face the world, offering itself to our eyes with all its strength. Only the sparrows flying up and down the wall can describe the wisteria in full bloom, as they touch it here and there, showing how their perch and refuge has become a tall cloud of purple and green that billows around and above the entrance and then flows royally up the front of the house from earth to sky. Mr. Ainsworth, who owns this house, lives downstairs, and he regards his big ailanthus tree and his big wisteria as his pets. Anyone seeing him look at them knows he would love to bring them both in every night, maybe even take them for a walk sometimes. He cares for them with fierce devotion, leaning far out of the high front windows and much too far out over the edge of this terrace, watching for the first sign of malaise in the tenacious, bony vines of his wisteria, or in the leaves and branches of his ailanthus. The ailanthus is fortunate, and the wisteria is fortunate, too, and so is this house — fortunate and well loved.

  The rain is falling fast and as black as ever. The windows of the front apartment where the party is must be streaming with rain — frothing, almost — and Tenth Street must be streaming, too, and frothing black. But a cocktail party has to expand, if it can, and now the people in front have opened their door and left it open. What a lot of noise they are making with glasses and bottles and music and voices! They must have hundreds of people in there. Once in a while, over the low roar of conversation, there is a loud laugh, and once in a while a little shriek. Outside, all the noise in the world is being hammered into the earth by the rain, and, inside, all the noise there is is effervescing at the cocktail party. Only in this room there is stillness, and the stillness has gone tense. The room is waiting for something to happen. I could light the fire, but my friend forgot to leave me any logs. I could turn on a lamp, but there is no animal feeling in electricity. I stand up again and walk over to the phonograph and switch it on without changing the record that I played this morning. The music strengthens and moves about, catching the pictures, the books, and the discolored white marble mantelpiece as firelight might have done. Now the place is no longer a cave but a room with walls that listen in peace. I hear the music and I watch the voice. I can see it. It is a voice to follow with your mind’s eye. “La Brave, c’est elle.” There is no other. Billie Holiday is singing.

  NOVEMBER 11, 1967

  POSTSCRIPT

  The Last Days of New York City

  I BORROW detective stories from a very small lending library at the back of one of the many gift-and-card shops that now crowd the Village streets. Last night, not being able to find a book, I stared around at the shelves of handwoven baskets, modern china, ceramic ashtrays, and so on, and I saw a house made of playing cards but standing very solidly, because the cards were slit so that they fitted together. I bought a pack of the cards, and then I continued on home to the hotel on Washington Square where I live at present. I have two rooms, eight floors up. A clumsy iron balcony, beloved of pigeons, is built close up against the windows so that it cuts off most of the view. It was a lovely clear evening, and I climbed out onto the balcony to take a look at the scene that it denied me.

  There, eight stories down, was Washington Square. The sidewalks that bound the park, the paths that flow north, south, east, and west from the fountain to join the sidewalks, and the benches at the edge of the grass all were crowded. On the corner diagonally across from me, an ice-cream man had anchored his cart — a square white cart, with a tall umbrella upright and full-blown in stripes of red and yellow. Not far from the ice-cream cart but on the grass, a woman stood alone, tossing her arms about. She might have been having a fit or placing a curse by her gestures, but there was a great commotion of pigeons around her, and I judged that she was feeding them, or that she had fed them and was explaining that the crumb bag was empty. A minute later the pigeons rose up in a crowd and swooped off between the trees. The woman walked away.

  I heard lately — it is only a rumor, I suppose — that there is talk of cutting an underpass through Washington Square. I suppose that means that part of the square, anyway, will be dug up. It will hardly look the same after that.

  When I first came to New York, I lived for a while at the Holley Hotel, on the west side of the square. The Holley was torn down this year, and lately, when I pass that way, I see the narrow gap — surprisingly narrow — where the little old hotel used to crouch between its tall apartment-building neighbors. At the time I lived there, only twelve years ago, a row of worn-looking studio buildings stretched partway across the south side of the Square. I thought those buildings were beautiful and romantic, and I used to long for an apartment, or even a room, in one of them, but they were always full up. Now they are gone, and a dull-faced educational edifice stands in their places. At that time and later, I tramped in and out of most of the handsome old houses on the north side of the Square, looking for a place to live. Some of those houses were demolished to make way for a set of brand-new, drearily uniform apartments, and most of the rest have been turned into offices. The hotel in which I now live is elderly, and last night I wondered, not for the first time, whether its last days might not be approaching. The pleasant side entrance has been sealed off, which is a discouraging sign.

  I climbed in off the balcony and sat down on the comfortable little sofa that is the chief decoration of my sitting room. It is a nice room, with folding doors going into the bedroom. The fireplace no longer works, of course. I took the cards I had bought out of their box and looked at them. They were the shape and texture of playing cards, but instead of the hearts and diamonds and all, these cards were decorated with flowers and geometric designs. I wondered why I’d bought them. I was never enthusiastic about trying to build houses with cards.

  I work in a building in midtown. My office is twenty stories up in the air, and from this eminence yesterday morning I watched the demolition of a red brick building far below. I must have stared down at the roof of that building a thousand times, but now that it was gone, I found I really could not recall what it looked like. In the afternoon, when I went to lunch, I found a whole block of Sixth Avenue gone, and I hadn’t any recollection at all of those vanished houses, except that I thought they might have been a reddish color. Or maybe they were gray. It is very disconcerting to have a gap suddenly appear in a spot where you can’t remember ever having seen a wall.

  The walls in my hotel rooms are a bright green-blue, a sort of bird’s-egg color. It is a lovely color, although I would never have had the nerve to choose it myself if I had been painting the room. I always liked white walls, but I have grown very fond of this cheerful color. Now, looking at the walls, I found myself thinking they should be even brighter, with more blue in them, so that they’d really assert themselves. When? When the hotel comes down, as it seems bound to do. I saw the inside walls of the building that’s coming down below my office to
day. Yellow, green, brown, ugly pale shades of those three colors, the walls made a poor show. They looked sad, as though they had never expected anything better than to be thrown away. This hotel room of mine won’t look sad when they take the roof off. The tenants of the towering apartment building across the street are going to remark on this color. It will never be confused with the rubble that will litter the floor here.

  I had white walls in the little Ninth Street apartment that was torn out from under me last year by the wreckers. My front windows peered up at a big, flat-fronted apartment building very similar to the one that faces me in the hotel here. I’m afraid my white walls must have looked forlorn when they were exposed to view. A blinding purple or a coat of scarlet might have saved them from nonentity.

  I had been setting those grooved cards around on the table, looking at their patterns, but now I gathered them up and put them back in their box. It was too much. The city was tottering around me, the floor beneath my feet was already shivering under the wreckers’ boots, so to speak, and I was about to build a house of cards that was guaranteed to stand. I was irritated by the picture, but it nagged at me. I wished I’d never seen the cards, with their bland, obvious little burden of intimations. Here I was admiring my room because it would look well after the roof was off. I was congratulating my room, and myself, because it would make a creditable corpse.

  All my life, I suppose, I’ll be scurrying out of buildings just ahead of the wreckers, and I can’t afford to start wondering, every time I have the place painted, if the walls will speak up after the room has been laid open.

  These cards might become a craze. I can see people all over the city sitting in doomed apartments building houses of cards that will last. And painting their walls in noisy colors to astonish the tenants of the high buildings around. Mass hysteria might set in, with the house painters celebrating. I’m going to give these cards away. I’ll give them away separately and pretend they’re bookmarks. I used to like to play patience, though. I might buy a set of plain old playing cards. No reflection, no significance, no fancies, just patience, and the game as I play it, impatiently, will be quite enough for me.