The Long-Winded Lady Page 4

  Well, of course, it wasn’t as bad as all that, but there has been this ugly nagging in my head the last few weeks, and from time to time I have wished that I hadn’t bought that copy of Life or that I had waited to get home, where I could read it properly, first page first. Then, this morning, I was standing at my bedroom window admiring a light snow that fell last night and that makes everything look much better, I must say, and suddenly I remembered what it was that Miss Stutz had called up in my head, and naturally it was the most trivial thing in the world — that old, old story I first heard from a friend of mine years ago about Chinese fortune cookies. This friend of mine told me about a friend of hers who had dinner at this wonderful Chinese restaurant, and after dinner she ordered fortune cookies and the waiter brought four and she broke them all open and read the little messages that were inside. Well, the first three fortune cookies said, “A letter is on its way and will arrive” and “When you are versatile, it will give you confidence” and “Yes, you will be lucky,” but the fourth fortune cookie said, “Help. I am a prisoner in a Chinese bakery.” Well, I was really pleased with myself. “Once you’ve found the right people and set them free, you can’t lose — help, I am a prisoner in a Chinese bakery.” And that is all I was trying to remember all this time, but I am so glad to have the whole matter cleared up.

  MARCH 8, 1958

  From the Hotel Earle

  I HAVE stopped living in the country and was feeling very pleased at the thought of returning to live in the city, but I left the packing until it was too late to be properly organized about it, and by the time the movers had left to take my things to storage, where they will stay until I find the right apartment, I was too disgusted with my own possessions to watch the van crawl down the driveway and too weary to be very pleased about anything at all. Still, after the journey into town, it was very nice to walk into the little hotel on Washington Square where I used to stay at odd times and where I am staying now while I look for an apartment and to notice that everything there is just the same — a familiar face, Smiddy, running the elevator and carrying the bags and selling the evening papers and unlocking the door and turning on the lights and bringing the radio and admiring the waif cat, Minnie, who could not be left at the kennel with my own cats because she has just had kittens. It was something of a shock to find that someone had taken a spatter gun of white-and-gold paint to the walls and ceilings and even to the furniture of the two rooms I used to have and that I was accustomed to seeing in better, if battered, colors, but the stone balustrade outside the windows, which cuts off my view of the square but makes a good perch for pigeons, was still hanging on, and when I looked out the bathroom window, which does not face the square but stares straight across at the flat side of an apartment building, I saw with satisfaction that the tenants there still leave their shades up at night so that it is easy to see into all the rooms, and that the one room I like in particular, a high-up room that has a desk against the wall just inside the window with a green-shaded lamp on top of it, is still the same. I like that room very much, because when all the other lights in the building are out, the green lamp stays lighted on that desk, sometimes with a person sitting at the desk writing, and at night like that, with the rest of the building dead and the square off at an angle and shadowy beyond, the lamp and the desk high in their window make a very satisfactory city picture.

  After I had settled Minnie and showed her where her water bowl and litter box were, I washed my hands and face, reflected for a moment on the extra-sticky properties of moving-day dust, and proceeded out to dinner. I knew where I was going for dinner. I was going to the University Restaurant on West Eighth Street, but there were a couple of things I wanted to do first, and so I turned right from the hotel instead of left. I walked over to Sixth Avenue, along Sixth, and around to Eighth Street, where there is a very good flower shop, Costos, that stays open until nine in the evening. The florist said, “Long time no see,” and sold me a carnation. While I was pinning the carnation on, I reflected briefly on the lack of flower shops in the country. I walked along Eighth, admiring the pastries, the lampshades, the tins of sardines and pots of jam, the leotards, the pink and red stockings, the men’s clothes, the pieces of cheese, the toy furniture, and, in Politi’s, the cashmeres and garnets and the handkerchiefs from France. Then I went into the Eighth Street Bookshop, where I saw not one face I knew behind the counter, but the books were there. I bought Benedict Kiely’s Poor Scholar and a mystery story by Patricia Highsmith. I got the two books for a dollar, a big treasure and a little treasure, a dollar for the two, and as I paid for them I wondered at the curious ways of publishers, who let the good stock go out of their warehouses as what are called “remainders” almost as soon as they have it packed in. Then I was ready for dinner — books under my arm, everything in order — but I was delayed at the curb because there was so much traffic, and while I waited an observation struggled with a hope inside my head. I was looking across at Sam Kramer’s Studio, and there was the same small group of people, three or four people, hurrying up the steps, that I saw there six months ago and a year ago and six and seven and eleven and more years ago. It seemed to me that every time I have ever walked along Eighth Street I have seen this group, or one just like it, in full flight up Sam Kramer’s steps, but I have never seen just one person going up. But mainly I was thinking of the small table by the window in the University Restaurant; the hope I had was that it would be free, so that I could sit there and look out at the street.

  I crossed over and went into the restaurant. The table was there, nobody at it. I sat down. Bill Kravit, the waiter, said, “Been away?” and I said yes and that I wanted a martini. When he brought the martini, I ordered dinner, and then I opened my two new books, looked inside them, and began to watch the street. There are always people looking in the window of the Village Smoke Shop, across the way from my restaurant, and they were there that evening, more than usual, all looking in at something in the window. I made up my mind that when I had finished dinner I would go over and see for myself what was there. I kept looking across at the backs of the crowd and then down at one or the other of my books, and then one time I looked up and the crowd had all turned away from the Smoke Shop to look down at the sidewalk. I could see nothing clearly except the tops of their heads, and more and more people kept crowding over to that spot where there was something more interesting than could be seen in the Smoke Shop window. A tiny foreign car was standing by the curb there, and I decided, not thinking much about it, that perhaps a dog was trapped inside the car, or that somebody had fallen asleep inside, or something like that. After several minutes, a policeman came, and his imperturbable air as he looked down, while everybody around looked up at him, told me that the cause of all the excitement, all the darting across the street to look and darting back, all the flurry and uneasiness and hesitation out there, would soon be removed, whatever it was, and I wanted it to be removed. All this time, nobody but me in the restaurant, which is long and narrow, had noticed the confusion outside, but now one of the waiters ran out and spoke to one or two people and came back in. “There’s a dead woman laying across there on the floor,” he said, calm and breathless. “She dropped dead.” Only a few people heard him, and they paid no attention to him. “She’s not dead,” I said. “She just dropped dead,” the waiter said to me. “A woman dropped dead in the street,” he said to the girl at the cash desk, who had just finished making a telephone call. A woman two tables away from me — the other tables were now empty — spoke to me. “Is there really somebody dead out there?” she said. “No,” I said. “Somebody was in a car out there and they were poisoned by gas from the engine, and now they’re being revived.” The woman nodded and went back to her conversation with her companion, and I went back to Benedict Kiely. My coffee ice cream arrived just as the ambulance pulled up. The ambulance doors opened, and after a short delay some men, with the policeman hovering on solid feet, began to lift a stretcher in. The men aimed the str
etcher badly the first time, but the second time, concentrating with all their might, they heaved the stretcher straight into the ambulance, and the doors closed quickly and the ambulance drove off. The policeman turned and walked away, and most of the people in the street strolled off. I finished my ice cream and paid my check and left the restaurant. Across the street, I saw a woman I knew from one of the nearby shops, and I went over and spoke to her. I asked her if it was true there had been an accident. “A woman had a heart attack,” she said. “Quite a young woman. Only about thirty.” “But she’s not dead,” I said. “Oh, yes,” she said, “she had a heart attack.” “But she did die?” I said. “Yes,” she said. I walked along to the hotel and went up to my rooms. Minnie was with her kittens, but she lifted her head when I came in and I could see her ears over the edge of the basket and then her whole small face, her eyes radiant with the steady, resolute anxiety of the devoted mother. Poor waif, she had traveled a long journey with her infants that day. She purred when I touched her, but mechanically, it seemed. She remained on guard and I went to bed. I hoped the woman who died on the street had had a nice day. I don’t know what I didn’t hope for her. I hoped she had no one belonging to her who loved her enough to grieve for years, to cry all their lives over the thought of her lying there like that. Just before I went to sleep, I was roused by a loud screech outside, followed by laughter — a party of people on the street, eight floors below me. I reflected briefly on the fact that you never hear sudden human screeches — and seldom any sudden human sound — in the country. So ended the first evening following my return from where I was to where I am now — home.

  JUNE 18, 1960

  The Farmhouse That Moved Downtown

  TONIGHT, Sunday, March 6, I heard on the radio that a two-hundred-year-old wooden farmhouse was moved this morning from Seventy-first Street and York Avenue all the way down to Charles Street, in the Village — a five-mile journey. The move was a rescue. The farmhouse was about to be demolished, because it was in the way of a new building plan. I am staying in the Village, and I thought I’d walk over and see the house — see how it was standing up to its first night away from its birth site. Charles Street is a nice street, a good place for a house to move to. When I left my apartment, it was raining; it has been raining all day today — a long, dim, passive Sunday, with daylight ebbing from minute to minute, blurring the edges of the roofs and making the long distances of the avenues mysterious. Last night, it snowed a little, and tonight it is very dark out. I live on a small street off Washington Square Park, a street where there are always people walking, because it connects the park with Sixth Avenue, but tonight, when I walked out of my house, at a minute or so after ten o’clock, the street was deserted, wet, and lonely, and so was the park, when I glanced over there before turning toward Sixth Avenue, but the tall neon sign over Marta’s Restaurant glowed cheerfully, its red color made foggy and yet intensified by the rain. Important people built these houses for their families years ago, but they have been apartments for a long time now, and Marta’s is one of the old Village places that started out as speakeasies. I walked along Sixth Avenue to Greenwich Avenue, where the big open fruit-and-vegetable market is, and although it is Sunday, the market was busy, as it always is, full of color and of big, good-natured men in aprons weighing and counting and sorting oranges and apples and nuts and green peas and all the other things — pomegranates and avocados and melons, all the delicious food they have heaped up there. I stayed on Greenwich Avenue until I got to Charles Street, and when I turned into Charles I immediately began looking for the farmhouse. I couldn’t imagine where they had put it. Charles is a narrow old street that starts at Greenwich Avenue and would run into the Hudson River except that the West Side Highway stops it. Along Charles, for the most part, are old houses now containing apartments, and an occasional heavy-looking big apartment building. It is an attractive street, except that, like all small New York streets, it takes on a dead, menacing air at night, because of the lines and lines of cars that are parked along its sidewalks — cars jammed together, bumper to bumper, stealing all the life and space out of the place. Even so, it is pleasant to walk there. Some of the residents hadn’t drawn their curtains, so I had glimpses of comfortable, peaceful interiors: corners of rooms, parts of armchairs, nice ceilings, mantelpieces, shelves of books, paintings, people moving about — New Yorkers at home. But I saw no sign of the farmhouse. No sign of it between Greenwich Avenue and Seventh, or between Seventh and West Fourth, or between West Fourth and beautiful, bountiful Bleecker Street. After I crossed Bleecker, Charles Street seemed darker and more deserted. I was walking toward Hudson Street and the warehouse district — the West Village, which is gradually becoming the best part of the Village to live in as people slowly move away from the deteriorating part that was once the heart of the Village. Hudson Street is an awful street to cross, wide and grim and desolate, like an exaggeration of a big-city highway in a gangster movie. But when I stepped up on to the sidewalk on the northwest corner of Hudson and Charles Street I saw the house. It was up in the air, a ghost shape, at the end of the block, on the northeast corner of Charles Street and Greenwich Street. The eastern wall of the farmhouse is painted a dark color, but the front wall, facing Charles Street, is white, and as I approached it I got a sidewise glimmer of it that defined the whole tiny structure. It was a very tiny house — much smaller than I had expected. That must have been a very small farmer who built it. It was sitting up high on a sturdy cage, or raft, of heavy wooden beams, on a wedge-shaped, weedy lot, with the old brick warehouses towering over it like burly nursemaids. It was a crooked little house — askew on its perch but crooked anyway — and it looked as plain and as insubstantial as a child’s chalk drawing, but it was a real house, with real windows and a real door, and a flat roof with a chimney sticking out of it. They hadn’t nailed its western wall back on — it leaned, waiting, against the nearest warehouse — but they had covered the west end of the house with a big sheet of plastic, which flapped and glistened in the rain tonight. Across Greenwich Street, the big arched windows over the loading platforms of Tower’s Warehouses, Inc., stared solemnly back with a darker and more solid shine. The house was protected by a high fence of metal net, going all the way around the corner, and outside the fence, all the way around, there were yellow wooden barricades with POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS lettered on them. The farmhouse met Importance when it arrived down here. The lot it stands on is in an angle formed by the massive side wall of an enormous Greenwich Street warehouse and the narrower side wall of an old Charles Street apartment house. Both of these sheltering walls are blank, with no windows (no eyes to watch, no sneaks to throw garbage into the lot at night), and it is as though the old farmhouse had found itself in one corner of a gigantic brick-walled garden. It is a very private place, with those big walls to the north and east, and with warehouses across both streets, Charles and Greenwich, but I saw domestic lights in the tall windows of the house diagonally across from the farmhouse, on Greenwich Street, and there are people living in the houses going back toward Hudson Street, so it is not deserted there at night or during the weekends. The house could hardly have found a better place to settle in.

  It was raining very hard by this time, and as I walked away, a police car came along, driving slowly west, and the two policemen inside peered out at the farmhouse — to see if it was still there, I suppose. I walked back the way I’d come and stopped at the newsstand at the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue to buy the News and the Times. When I reached home, I read the news stories about the house, and looked at a picture showing it in its old place at Seventy-first and York, where it was surrounded by towering walls filled with apartment windows. It’s much better off down here with the warehouses, and with the river so close. I read my horoscope in the News, and I read the gossip columns, and then I read this story:

  12 STARVING CATS SPARE PIGEON PAL

  BUDAPEST, March 5 (AP) — Friendship proved stronger than hunger fo
r the 13 pets of an elderly Hungarian woman. Sealed for eight days in a Budapest apartment after their owner died, the pets were rescued when neighbors broke in. The neighbors found the woman’s 12 cats lying around a room, weak with hunger. The 13th pet, a pigeon, was unharmed, although it lay defenseless in a low chair.

  Except in our minds, there is no connection between the little American farmhouse and the Hungarian cats and the Hungarian pigeon, but in our minds these stories remind us that we are always waiting, and remind us of what we are waiting for — a respite, a touch of grace, something simple that starts us wondering. I am reminded of Oliver Goldsmith, who said, two hundred years ago, “Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom.”

  MARCH 18, 1967

  A Lost Lady

  I SAW a lost lady having dinner in the University Restaurant on West Eighth Street yesterday evening. She came in alone, hurrying, with one hand up to her short, straight silver-beige hair, which kept falling forward over her left eye. She wore a very clean raincoat of the usual light-colored cotton and a narrow dress of dark-gray linen. She was svelte and good-looking, with very white skin, and blue eyes that glanced around the restaurant with a fixed, dispassionate expression, as though it were habitual with her not to be interested. As some people give meaning to everything they touch, the lost lady seemed to look merely in order to exclude. She looked at the University Restaurant as though she were looking at a wallpaper painted to look like the University Restaurant, a wallpaper painted by a careful artist who had got everything just right — customers sitting in booths, old-fashioned costume paintings, dark and romantic, on the walls, salt and pepper shakers and lighted candles on all the tables, and, at the far end of the room, the little service bar, with the tall bartender, in his red jacket, standing ready to make drinks. Singular perspective the lady had as she looked about the room in which nothing was real except her blue eyes.