The Long-Winded Lady Page 5

  Torres was her waiter. He brought the menu and handed it to her, but she laid it down on the table in front of her without looking at it. When he asked her if she wanted a drink, she shook her head and smiled at him. “You are waiting,” Torres said amiably, and he went off, perhaps not realizing that he was only a figure in the wallpaper. The lost lady smoked a cigarette. She leaned against the back of the booth, perfectly composed, obviously waiting. She was about forty-five years of age, and there was nothing girlish about her. Her husband came in and walked so quickly to her booth that it might have been the train pulling in. He was a tall, narrow man, with sharp corners for shoulders, and he smiled broadly all the way from the door. His hair was faded, shiny, and sparse, and was smoothly brushed back from his forehead. He carried one of those thin imitation-leather cases that are zippered all around and have no handle, and as he bent to kiss his wife he dropped the case on his own seat, opposite hers, and then swung himself into the booth and sat down. He must have been considered very handsome when he was about seventeen, but his clean-cut profile had been impoverished by the years, and all his early promise had atrophied in his anxious blue eyes. He looked around the room and there was no light in his eyes, although they were very eager and he kept smiling. He leaned toward his wife, nodding at her, and then he took her cigarette out of her hand, stubbed it out in the ashtray, and stood up and lifted the ashtray over onto the table of the booth behind him, which was unoccupied. Then he sat down again and reached across and caressed her cheek.

  After a minute, Torres came up with the menu, and the husband took it with both his hands and began looking at it. Torres asked if he would like a drink, and he continued to read as though he hadn’t heard, but then he lifted his eyes and said to his wife, “You’d like a drink, I suppose.” And, without looking at Torres, he said, “A Scotch-and-water for my wife. Nothing for me.” Torres went off, and I thought the lost lady’s face brightened as she watched his progress toward the bar. But she didn’t watch him for long. She fixed her eyes on her husband. She had come to attention when he sat down, and after he took her cigarette she had put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands under her chin. When her drink arrived, she kept one hand under her chin and lifted her glass with the other hand. She had large, even, white teeth that protruded slightly, and she kept closing her lips over her teeth and then pursing her lips, so that she looked as though she were going to give somebody a little goodbye kiss. It was a timid, flirtatious smile, and it was her only response to his chatter — because he never stopped talking. He had put his glasses on and was reading the menu carefully, mentioning certain items out loud, but as he read he also told her about the day he had had and about the people he had contended with and about what he had said to them. As soon as Torres came back, the husband looked up at him and said, smiling ironically, “Is that real onion soup or is it just something they call onion soup?” Then he looked down at the menu and up at Torres again and said, “Are the mashed potatoes fresh? Are they freshly mashed? I like mashed potatoes, but I don’t want them if they’ve been lying around all day.” He asked more questions about the food, lifting his face each time to smile and look Torres in the eye, and then he ordered his dinner slowly and emphatically, in a fussy, metallic voice of the kind that is always on the edge of a grievance. But he kept on smiling, and his wife kept smiling back at him, listening to him as he talked on and on. Only once did he pause. He buttered a piece of bread and began eating it, and as he ate he lifted the bottle of wine on the table — a bottle is put on every table at the University Restaurant — and turned it around in his hands and read the label. When the bread was eaten, he put the wine aside and began talking again — about his day and about himself and, when the food arrived, about the food he was eating. The lost lady had ordered her dinner very quickly, without looking at the menu, and she had been saying nothing, drinking her Scotch-and-water slowly until it was finished. When it was all gone, she put the glass down and looked at the plate Torres had put before her and said, “I’m not really hungry anymore.” Her voice was a surprise — a clear, gentle, definite voice, with no fuzziness or drawl in it — but her tone was even more surprising, because it was the tone in which she might have said, “I am taking the shuttle to Boston” or “I am going to poison you tonight” or “It is time for a new frying pan.” I thought her husband would surely stop for a minute and at least ask her why she was wasting those two nice lamb chops, but he kept on talking as though she had not said a word. It was what happens on the stage when somebody runs on and plunges a dagger into the villain, and the villain keeps right on doing whatever he has been doing, without noticing he has a dagger in his chest, because it is only a paper dagger. Her voice was all her own and made no concession whatever to her husband. I had to leave a few minutes after she spoke, and I was sorry to go, because I thought he would order Fresh Home-made Coconut Chiffon Cream Pie for dessert and I wanted to see if I had guessed right. I think one of those people was a redeemer — or a savior, if you prefer savior — but whether the lost lady married her husband in the hope of saving him from something or other or married him in the hope that he would save her from something or other I do not know.

  JULY 27, 1968

  The Flower Children

  THIS is a Saturday in April. I am living at the moment on Washington Place, between Sixth Avenue and Washington Square Park, and this morning, when I walked out of the house, I found the street completely changed. It is a narrow little street, quite old, with enough small brownstones remaining to show what it looked like once. These days, ordinarily, it is a dirty little street — dirty and neglected and half buried under its two lines of parked cars. In fact, most of the time the street looks like a shortcut to the city dump. This morning, all that was changed. There wasn’t a car in sight, and somebody had been along with a broom, and you could see the difference. Free of cars, and cleared of the debris that has been filling the gutters and overflowing onto the sidewalks, the little street looked young and light, even festive. It had taken on its first touch of festivity a few days ago, when official-looking pale green cards were tied like gardeners’ labels to all the trees and lampposts. The cards were police notices announcing that there would be no parking here today, Saturday, because of a parade. This morning, a great many policemen were walking around out in the clean street, and some of them had already fenced off both sidewalks from one end of the block to the other with their low gray-blue wooden barriers. I asked one of them what the parade was about, and he said, “It’s not a parade, it’s a protest march.” A man passing by, pushing a baby in a striped carriage, said, “It’s a high school students’ demonstration.” It was a protest meeting against the Vietnam war, a preliminary to the huge demonstration scheduled for a week from today.

  I walked toward Sixth, admiring the clean gutters. At the end of the block, one of the wooden barriers stood in the center of the street, shutting out traffic. As I reached the corner, three small boys came along, walking on Sixth Avenue past the open parking lot. The boys spotted the wooden barrier, standing alone and solid in the middle of the street, and ran over to it and began swinging on it, looking about to see if anyone would tell them to stop. Nobody bothered them, and they took a firm hold with their hands and lifted themselves up high, with their arms stiff, and then swung halfway around, so that they were hanging there upside down, looking at Sixth Avenue and at the traffic roaring past on its way uptown. They turned right side up, lowered their feet to the pavement, and then rose up and swung upside down again. They were grinning and making joyful noises at each other. Their grip on the wood was very sure. It was a good game, but as suddenly as it had begun, it finished. The three of them dropped to the ground and ran off, chortling, into our local bazaar, Lamston’s new five-and-ten. I went on my way and did a few errands, and when I got back to Washington Place, there was still no sign of the protest marchers, so I went into Marta’s Restaurant, in the middle of the block, for lunch, and sat down at a table that a
llowed me a view of the street. (Marta’s has been going for decades, in the basement of one of the little brownstones here, and when the restaurant is locked up for the night — heavily locked, behind a barricade of iron — it looks as impenetrable as the Bank of England. But Marta’s was broken into and robbed early yesterday.) The street outside was as it had been all morning — policemen walking about, and a thin stream of people passing along in the usual desultory Saturday way. I wondered where the protest marchers were.

  Then, when I was finishing lunch, I looked up and saw that the street outside had become crowded. The protest marchers had arrived without making a sound that I had heard, but as I paid my check and hurried out, a voice began to speak from a blue sound truck parked almost directly across from Marta’s. The sidewalk where I stood, just outside Marta’s, was now swarming with people, all moving along very slowly in obedience to the policemen’s “Move along now” and “Keep moving.” The policemen looked and sounded as calm and casual as though they were keeping order in a queue going in to see a football game. There was no great press on the sidewalk, no sense of a closely packed crowd. There were people pushing baby carriages, and people carrying bundles of laundry or bags of groceries, and people walking dogs, and some who had apparently come into the block simply to see what was going on. We all shuffled along by the barriers that kept us inside, on the sidewalk, and we stared across them at the protest marchers, all of whom were very young-looking teenagers. I should think their average age was sixteen. They looked very un-grown-up. There were about four hundred of them, half of them standing in front of the sound truck and half of them behind it. The truck faced in the direction of Washington Square Park and flew the American flag. It was a very well-hidden protest meeting. Only people crossing Washington Place at one end or the other could have noticed that there was anything unusual going on. The protest marchers stood together beyond a line of barriers that had now been placed along the middle of the street, dividing it lengthwise, so that there was a clear space, half the width of the street, between the sidewalk I was on and the sound truck. The clear space belonged to the police, and they were careful to keep it clear. The protest marchers stood close together — not packed tight, but close together — and most of them carried or wore a daffodil, and one or two carried enormous flowers made of yellow paper. They were silent. They were wearing the clothes they might have worn to school on an ordinary school day, and if it had not been for their young faces and their bright hair, they would have seemed drab. They carried no banners or placards, but a fancily lettered homemade streamer on the sound truck said HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS MOBILIZATION. They paid almost no attention to us on the sidewalk, moving along and staring at them. For the most part, they kept their eyes on the blue sound truck.

  From the sound truck a young man was calling for an end to the American involvement in Vietnam. He had dark curly hair, and he wore an open-necked shirt and a woolen pullover. He had the touch of magnetism and the sincerity and the ringing voice that make a good speaker, but he was about half a generation older than the protest marchers, and his speech sounded as though it had been written for delivery to a much older audience. When he had finished, there was a younger speaker — a young man who looked like a high school senior. He wore a tie and a jacket, and he spoke earnestly and with feeling, but he was too unaggressive to make himself heard very well. And there was a small group of girls, of high school age, who tried to get a song going. They put their heads together in a huddle and began singing very bravely, but their voices were a bit off and it was impossible to make out the words of their song. They were repeating one phrase over and over, so the sound they made was singsong and vaguely melodious, but the words were lost. The opening words may have been “A man will” or “A man must” — something like that. After singing the phrase over a few times, the girls stopped and tried to get their audience to sing along with them. One of them, a small, smiling girl, spoke up, telling the boys and girls who stood watching her that the song was very catchy, and encouraging everybody to join in. Then the little group began singing again, to dead silence, and they gave up and sang no more. Next a woman spoke who was also half a generation or more older than the schoolchildren. She was severely dressed in pale khaki, and she was vehement and appeared to be excited. She seemed to have learned her platform manner from one of those movies in which somebody tries to incite the rabble to action. Her voice sounded so hysterical that the simple occasion of listening to her became an immediate crisis that obscured any crisis or cause she might be discussing. The protest marchers watched her with no apparent sympathy.

  At the east end of Washington Place, on the south corner, where the old Holley Hotel and Holley Chambers used to stand, there is now a huge New York University dormitory — a towering, well-kept building that has a luxurious aspect, at least from the outside. This dormitory is called Hayden Residence Hall. In their advertisements, real estate agents speak of ocean frontage — you have to be lucky and rich to get some of it with your house. Hayden Hall is lucky and rich in its frontage. The dormitory faces Washington Square Park, with its trees and grass and footpaths, and one side wall looks down on Washington Place, an interesting Village street even at its worst. On the sidewalk, we were all moving along so slowly, standing still every chance we got, that it took me a little while to cover the short distance from Marta’s to a spot where I faced Hayden Hall, on the other side of the street. There were a few people — young men and a girl or two — up in the windows of the dormitory. They are casement windows, and very tall ones, so anybody standing up there can be seen almost full length. The university students standing in the windows could not see the sound truck or the flag unless they leaned quite far out. They stood looking straight down into Washington Place, and they seemed to be getting an enormous amount of amusement out of what they saw. The protest marchers were apparently unaware that they were being watched from above, and they continued to stand obediently where they had been told to stand. I suppose they were on their best behavior, but their best behavior seemed quite natural to them. Suddenly, from above, something hurtled down on the heads of the protest marchers, who scattered in fright — as well as they could scatter, behind their barriers. They scattered and looked at the ground and looked up. They were being pelted with large wads of white paper that had been soaked in water and now lay squashed and leaking on the street. An elderly, dignified policeman dashed over — a high officer, to judge by the brilliance of his uniform — and pointed angrily up at the windows of Hayden Hall. He wore white gloves, and his hand looked very big. Nothing more was thrown down, and after a minute or so he walked away. I left a minute or so after that. I wondered about those students in Hayden Hall. One soaked lump of paper thrown from above would have caused almost as much fright and humiliation as the two or three they threw. Why did they bother to throw more than one?

  Now it is evening, and Washington Place looks its usual self again. The cars are back, parked bumper to bumper in two lines along the sidewalks, and the street has reassumed the shifty, neglected air that is typical of New York streets at night, especially in this area of narrow places. This is how the street must have looked the Friday morning, in the hour before daybreak, when a young man ran along here carrying a sawed-off shotgun. He was running away from the spot, around the corner, where he had stood when he shot away the face of another young man. The dead young man was home on leave from Vietnam. And this is how the street looked yesterday, when thieves smashed their way into Marta’s Restaurant, doing a great deal of damage and running a severe risk for the sake of a few packages of cigarettes and a few bottles of liquor and a little money. I remember how the street looked this morning, when it was clean and swept and waiting, while the three little boys whirled round and round on the police barrier.

  APRIL 29, 1967

  Wild Money

  ONE night, I found a twenty-dollar bill blowing about in the snow outside a restaurant called The Old Place, on West Tenth Street. The Old Pl
ace was owned by a lady named Theresa Tarigo, who kept restaurants in the Village for years and years and years — for decades — and this was her last place. It was down three steps, in a commodious and cozy basement, and she used to have a blazing fire going on cold nights. There was no one to be seen on Tenth Street the night I found the twenty dollars, but the night I found a dollar bill drifting along the sidewalk outside Le Steak de Paris, on West Forty-ninth Street, the block was crowded, as that block practically always is, because it leads to the theater district, and, anyway, it was a warm summer night and all the tourists in town were wandering toward Broadway and watching the Forty-ninth Street sideshow on the way. Then, last Decoration Day, I was walking along Macdougal Street toward Eighth Street. It was close to one o’clock in the afternoon, and Washington Square, the park, and the four streets that enclose it and all the streets leading into it were crowded with people out to see the art show and to welcome the bright weather that had come at last after the storm and rain of the first two days of the long weekend. The open-air artists were grinning with joy and turning their faces from side to side, like prizewinners, at finding themselves in luck at last, while their paintings glowed modestly in the cool sunlight. Outside the Hotel Earle, beside the steps leading to the side entrance, which has been kept locked for years, I picked up a penny and handed it to the nearest artist — an elderly man crouched on a campstool. He took the penny and looked at it unpleasantly, as if it were a live worm, and he was still holding it and looking at it when I wished him luck and went on to Eighth Street — still the Village boulevard — and so to Sixth Avenue, which was streaming with men and women and children, who all had an air of having walked in a festival procession from far away, from the far distance, downtown, where the roof line fades into the sky. It was a holiday boardwalk crowd — untidy, interested, and raffish. The artists were having an uproariously appreciative audience. I was going to lunch, taking the long way around to Marta’s Restaurant, on Washington Place. Marta’s is three steps down into a pleasant basement, as The Old Place was, and, like Le Steak de Paris, it has a view — a window on the street. Marta’s window is partly below street level, so what you see going by, as you sit inside, are halves of men and women, whole children, and dogs complete from nose to tip of tail. It is both soothing and interesting to watch people without being able to see their faces. It is like counting sheep. I never found any money outside Marta’s Restaurant — no money blowing about and none lying on the ground. Somebody else got it, I suppose.