The Long-Winded Lady Page 18

  JULY 16, 1955

  Lessons and Lessons and Then More Lessons

  ON Eighth Street, in the Village, there is a modest restaurant, humanely lighted, not too bright and not too dark, where I used to spend about two hours every day, sometimes in the afternoon and sometimes in the evening, sitting always at a small table by the large street window. The window was recessed, and half curtained, and it was furnished with an oversized Tiffany lamp and an oversized bronze-colored crock that held artificial flowers or artificial leaves, according to the season of the year. I spent a good deal of time by that window. I remember being there on November nights when it was snowing, and all the people hurrying by were brightened by their white crowns and white epaulets, and then there were afternoons in midsummer when I hardly dared look out for fear of seeing some struggling man or woman become finally embedded in the thick heat, to vanish forever as I watched. I was such a faithful customer that a martini usually appeared on the table while I was still arranging my books in the order in which I would look at them. There was a small service bar halfway down the room, which was very long and very narrow, but there was no place where people could just sit and drink. It was a decorous place, with exactly as much style as a nice, plain tearoom. I used to always carry three or four books with me, and if I had just visited the bookshop across the street, I often had six or more to look through when I was not attending to the outside scene.

  One afternoon — it was autumn; there was an armful of flaming, papery leaves in the crock beside me — I glanced up to see two nuns walking by, walking west toward Sixth Avenue. All nuns look alike. Their black draperies, their resolute tread, and their remote air — everything about them was familiar to me. I was surprised to see them, as I am always surprised to see nuns abroad in New York, and I thought, as I had thought at other times, that it is out of the ordinary to see nuns here, and a very ordinary matter to see them in Dublin, where I was born. There was a time, during the years I spent in a convent boarding school and for many years afterward, when the sight of a nun would fill me with apprehensiveness and dislike, and I was glad then, sitting by that restaurant window, to know those years were gone.

  That afternoon I had arrived at the restaurant when the lunch hour was over, and now, except for two waiters, the place was empty. I like empty restaurants, and I had counted on having all the tables and booths to myself. Even the cash register, by the door, was unguarded. I had taken the afternoon off, but why, what excuse I had offered myself, I can’t remember. Perhaps I felt free because it was autumn again. Even so, three o’clock in the afternoon is no hour for anybody to be sitting at a window in a public restaurant with a martini in front of her, or half a martini, as it was by the time the nuns passed, and it seemed miraculous to be able to be so free and independent that I could be in the restaurant I preferred and drink what I liked and eat what I liked and read the books of my choice and see two nuns pass and feel nothing except a slight surprise — no apprehensiveness, no wild survey of a panicky conscience, nothing like that.

  The two nuns who ran that boarding school were violent women. The head nun was short and fat and her assistant was tall and thin, and they both had genteel accents, the fat one speaking low, the thin one high. The head taught English and her assistant conducted singing classes, but they spent most of their time looking for sin. Their task was easy because of course we were all filled with sins, but they worked hard at it. They were always on patrol, sometimes together and sometimes separately. They patrolled the silent study hall, and they patrolled the corridors, and they patrolled the classrooms and the washrooms, and they even patrolled the dormitories, often walking between the beds after the lights were out. We knew what they were hunting for, of course, and as soon as one of them appeared in the doorway of a classroom, or anywhere, we all knew that sin had been stalked home and that at least one person in the room was going to have to answer for herself. The only thing was, we did not know which one of us it would be. I always felt I was the sinner, and I suppose the others felt the same. The Devil works in mysterious ways, and there was never any way of knowing which of our faces he had chosen to reveal himself in. We never knew where we were. Those two nuns tracked him down even in the refractory, where we had breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper. They never seemed to notice what was on our plates. Awful food. It was always tea and bread scraped with butter, except at midday dinner, when it was boiled potatoes. And at supper the tea was replaced with vile cocoa. For breakfast on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays, the tea and b & b were accompanied by one tablespoonful of dates that had been boiled into a thin soup, or, as the nun who cooked would have said, a jam. On Tuesdays and Thursdays breakfast was emboldened by a wafer of cold porridge damped with blue milk, on Saturdays by a spot of marmalade, and on Sundays by an ugly morsel of bacon. Teatime and suppertime were all bread and butter, except that at teatime we were allowed to bring out the jam and cake we had received in packages from home. Some girls got parcels from home and some didn’t. Those who did had the privilege of going around from table to table (there were five long, narrow tables) carrying pots of jam and big cakes and bestowing their favors on the girls they liked and walking past the girls they didn’t like. There were about sixty of us, aged from seven to eighteen, and sometimes the room was quite busy at teatime, especially at the beginning of each term, when everybody had something to walk about with. I can’t remember Sunday dinner, but on Mondays and Wednesdays it was boiled potatoes with black pudding that was nearly all gray, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays it was said to be corned beef. On Fridays something fishy, and on Saturdays a stew — an end-of-the-week stew.

  I was thinking of that Saturday stew and admiring the huge menu the waiter had left on my table when the entrance door of the restaurant opened and the two nuns walked in. They had been looking for a nice quiet place to eat, and they had found it. They walked quickly, without making a sound, straight down the restaurant, and I watched them all the way, and watched until they had settled themselves in a distant booth. Then I went back to my menu. The menu was still in my left hand, tilted up, as I had been holding it, but my right hand, with the empty martini glass in it, had somehow gone under the table and was hiding there behind the tablecloth. It was the moment of no comment. It was the moment of no comment.

  NOVEMBER 10, 1962

  A Snowy Night on West Forty-ninth Street

  IT snowed all night last night, and the dawn, which came not as a brightening but as a gray and silent awakening, showed the city vague and passive as a convalescent under light fields of snow that fell quickly and steadily from an expressionless heaven. This Broadway section where I live is all heights of roofs and all shapes of walls all going in different directions and reaching different heights, and there are times when the whole area seems to be a gigantic storehouse of stage flats and stage props that are stacked together as economically as possible and being put to use until something more substantial can be built, something that will last. At night, when the big Broadway lights go on, when the lights begin to run around high in the sky and up and down the sides of buildings, when rivers of lights start flowing along the edges of roofs, and wreaths and diadems begin sparkling from dark corners, and the windows of empty downtown offices begin streaming with watery reflections of brilliance, at that time, when Broadway lights up to make a nighttime empire out of the tumbledown, makeshift daytime world, a powdery pink glow rises up and spreads over the whole area, a cloudy pink, an emanation, like a tent made of air and color. Broadway lights and Broadway nighttime color make a glittering spectacle that throws all around it into darkness. The little side streets that live off Broadway also live in the shadow of Broadway, and there are times, looking from the windows of the hotel where I live at present, on West Forty-ninth Street, when I think that my hotel and all of us here on this street are behind the world instead of in it. But tonight when I looked out of these windows just before going to dinner I saw a kaleidoscope out there, snow and lights whirling sky-high
in a furious wind that seemed to have blown the Empire State Building clear out of the city, because it was not to be seen, although I had my usual good view of it this morning. It was a gray morning and the afternoon was gray, but tonight is very dark, and when I walked out of the hotel into the withering cold of this black-and-white night, West Forty-ninth Street seemed more than ever like an outpost, or a frontier street, or a one-street town that has been thrown together in excitement — a gold rush or an oil gush — and that will tumble into ruin when the excitement ends. This block, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, exists only as a thoroughfare to Broadway, a small, narrow thoroughfare furnished with what was at hand — architectural remnants, architectural mistakes, and architectural experiments. The people who decided to put this street to use for the time that remains to it have behaved with the freedom of children playing in a junkyard. The houses and buildings are of all sizes, some thin and some fat, some ponderous and some small and humble, some that were built for grandeur at the turn of the century, like my hotel, which now has a neon sign hanging all down its fine, many-windowed front, and some that never could have been more than sheds, even if they are built out of cement. In the daytime and especially in the early morning the street has a travel-stained look and an air of hardship, and then the two rows of ill-matched, ill-assorted houses make me think of a team of worn-out horses, collected from everywhere, that are being worked for all the life that is left in them and that will have to keep going until their legs give out. Nobody will care when this street comes down because nobody really lives here. It is a street of restaurants, bars, cheap hotels, rooming houses, garages, all-night coffee shops, quick-lunch counters, delicatessens, short-lived travel agencies, and sightseeing buses, and there are a quick dry-cleaning place, a liquor store, a Chinese laundry, a record shop, a dubious movie house, a young, imperturbable gypsy who shifts her fortune-telling parlor from one doorway to another up and down the street, and a souvenir shop. The people who work here have their homes as far away from the street as they can possibly get, and the hotels and rooming houses are simply hotels and rooming houses, with tenants for a night or a week or a month or an hour, although there are a few old faithfuls who moved in for a little while and stayed on and on until the years turned them into permanent transients. The oldest houses on the street are four thin, retiring brownstones that still stand together on the north side, all of them with restaurants or bars on their ground floor. It was to one of these brownstone houses that I went for dinner tonight, to the Étoile de France. Above the restaurant all the floors of the house are abandoned, the windows staring blankly and the wall scarred, but the falling snow curtained the windows and shaped the roof so that the old house appeared once again as it did in its first snowstorm, when the street was new. I had walked along from the hotel, and I waited to cross over to the Étoile, but the cars were going wild, confined as they were to one uncertain lane by the mountains of snow piled up on both sides, and while I waited I looked back the length of the street. The bewildering snow gave the shabby street an air of melancholy that made it ageless, as it will someday appear in an old photograph. But it will have to be a very old photograph. The inquisitive and sympathetic eyes that will see this street again as I saw it tonight have not yet opened to look at anything in this world. It will have to be a very old photograph, deepened by time and by a regret that will have its source in the loss of all of New York as we know it now. Many trial cities, facsimiles of cities, will have been raised and torn down on Manhattan island before anybody begins to regret this version of West Forty-ninth Street, and perhaps the photograph will never be taken. But on the street level, Forty-ninth Street defied the snow, and business was garish as usual. The Étoile was very bright and cheerful when I walked in, but there were very few customers. There was only one man sitting, lounging sideways at the bar — an old Frenchman who comes in often at night, after having had his dinner at the Automat. Only three of the tables in the bar were occupied, and the big back room, the dining room, was dim and deserted. The Étoile is a very plain place, with plain wooden chairs, very hard chairs, red-and-white-checked tablecloths, a stamped tin ceiling painted cream, and wallpaper decorated with pale, romantic nineteenth-century scenes. I sat at a table across from the bar, which has a long mirror behind it to reflect the bottles and glasses and the back of the bartender’s head and the faces of the customers and the romantic wallpaper on the wall behind me. One waiter was still on duty — Robert — and he brought me a martini and took my order and went off to the kitchen in a hurry. I think the chef must have been making a fuss about getting away early on this stormy night when there were almost no customers and he was going to have trouble getting home. He lives in Long Island City. Mme. Jacquin, who owns the restaurant, had gone home, and her daughter, Mees Katie, was in charge, together with Leo, the bartender. Leo has been working here about fifteen years. He is Dutch, and I think he is in his late fifties, a few years younger than Mme. Jacquin. Mees Katie is about thirty. She has a singularly detached manner, as though she were only working at the Étoile while she waited for her chance to go to some place where she really wants to be, but she spends more and more time here, while her mother, who used to almost live in the place, often does not come in for days at a time. Mees Katie began coming in about five years ago to help during the luncheon hour, but now she is here every night as well. She leaves at ten o’clock, when the chef goes home, and after that Leo manages by himself. On good nights the bar is open until two in the morning, or even later.

  Mees Katie was sitting as she always sits, facing toward the door, so that she could jump up when the customers came in. She often sits alone at the table for one by the street window, a huge window partly curtained in colorless gauze, and when there is a rush on, she stands in the arch that leads from the front room to the back and watches both rooms. She never sits at the bar. Tonight she was sitting beside a lady I have never seen at the Étoile before, a very wide, stout, elderly lady whose elaborate makeup — eyes, complexion, and mouth — looked as though it had been applied several days ago and then repaired here and there as patches of it wore off. Her hair was dyed gold and curled in tiny rings all over her head, and her face and neck were covered with a dark beige powder. Her face had spread so that it was very big, but her nose and mouth were quite small, and she had enormous brown eyes that had no light in them. She had put on a great deal of black mascara, and blue eyeshadow. The shadow had melted down into the corners of her eyes and settled into the wrinkles. She was all covered up in a closely fitted dark blue velvet dress that was cut into a ring around her neck and had long tight sleeves that strained at her arms every time she lifted her spoon to her mouth. She was eating pears in wine, and she ate very carefully, looking into the dish as she chose each morsel. When she wasn’t attending to the pears, she watched the man sitting opposite Mees Katie, and she listened to him, and Mees Katie listened to him, and he listened to himself. His name is Michel, and he never stops talking. He has something to do with importing foreign movies, or with promoting them, and he is always busy. He is always on the run, going in all directions. He never finishes his dinner without jumping up from his chair at least once to dash into the back room, where the telephone is, to make a call, and it is always an urgent call. If the phone is busy, if there is someone ahead of him, he stands waiting impatiently in the arch between the two rooms, looking importantly about him, and when he has finally gotten into the telephone booth and put his call through, he keeps the door open until he is halfway through his conversation. His voice can be heard all over the restaurant until suddenly there is a little clatter as he shuts himself away with his secrets. He has a very high, harsh voice, and he twists each word so that only half of it sounds like English. Leo makes fun of him. Once, when Michel had pulled the phone booth door shut on himself, Leo called from the bar to Mees Katie, who was sitting at a table with some people, just as she was tonight, “Michel is talking with the weatherman again,” and Mees Katie looked ann
oyed, although she smiled. She gets impatient with the Étoile, and with the people there, and especially with Michel, because he pesters her, but she has a kind heart, and she is always polite.

  Michel always comes into the restaurant alone, looking for company, and once in a while when there is no acquaintance he can join for dinner he sits by himself. When he is alone, all his animation dies away and he looks old and tired. He has a very broad dark face, with loose wrinkles, furrows, running up and down it and overlapping its outline. His forehead is high, and he has kinky coal-black hair and a neat, thin mouth. When he sits at his table with nobody to talk to or to pay any attention to him, he looks deserted, as though he had been brought to the restaurant and left there by someone who had no intention of coming back to claim him. Alone, he is morose and dignified, as though humiliation had taken him unawares but had not found him unprepared. On nights like that, when he knows he is doomed to solitude, he stands at the bar with his drink, sweet vermouth, until his dinner is brought, and then he goes to his table and sits down very deliberately and shakes out his napkin very fussily. He places the napkin across his lap and folds it closely around him so that his jacket hangs free of it. He always wears a double-breasted suit, and a waistcoat. When the napkin is safely in place, he picks up his knife and fork and sounds all the food on his plate and looks severely at his green salad. Then he cuts off a piece of meat and places it in his mouth and begins to chew it. While he is chewing, his knife and fork lie on his plate, and his wrists rest against the edge of the table, with his hands limp, and he chews patiently, looking as proud and as indifferent as though he were facing a firing squad.