Home in the city on a broiling Saturday, Carol and I threw in the towel early, opting for an afternoon full retreat to the sixplex on Broadway at Eighty-fourth Street, where a “Parsifal”-length submarine-warfare drama (ping-tongg! ping-tongg!) might keep us cool until almost sundown. On the way, we would stop at Harry’s Shoes, just across Broadway from the theatre, where I’d try to snap up a pair of unfashionable, low-gunwale Keds for our upcoming vacation. Weekend afternoons at Harry’s can remind you of a Marrakesh souk, but when at last, sneaks in hand, I spotted a vacant try-on chair and threw myself into it, the man sitting to my right, putting on his new sneakers, was Alfred Kazin. City etiquette in these circumstances calls for silence, but he and I had met, now and then, at book parties and the like, and I introduced myself.
“Oh, sure,” Kazin said, giving me an engaging smile. Though he is seamed and white-haired, there was a lot more student than prof in his gaze. He made a little swishing gesture through the air with one hand, and I nodded yes, right: I was the baseball guy. Our wives were introduced—both of them, I think, enjoying the odd situation, with the seated gents now lacing and stomping like kids and the women standing momlike before them, looking stern about size and fit. The wives went off together, hunting for a salesman and perhaps for some less bankerish choices for their guys, footwear-wise, while Kazin and I, thickly surrounded by the Reeboky hordes, chatted about our boyhood ballparks, here in the city. I offered the Polo Grounds, name-dropping the likes of Mays and Mize, Ott and Hubbell, but he topped me when he said that he remembered Ebbets Field but not for the Dodgers.
“We used to go to the opera at Ebbets Field when I was a kid,” he told me. “I went to ‘Faust’ with my father once. Nobody knows it now, but the mayor—the first one I can remember, from back in the twenties—sometimes arranged for free opera there for a few summer days. I don’t know which opera company—I can’t imagine they were any good. But he was there in person, walking up and down the aisles and reminding us what he’d done. ‘Are you having fun? Are you having fun?’ he’d ask. ‘It’s courtesy of your mayor, John F. Hylan, and don’t you forget it!’ ”
I said that I’d interviewed Mayor La Guardia once, for my school paper, after waiting all day in his office. I could no longer remember anything he’d said but still kept the vision of his feet, under the vast mayoral desk, not quite touching the floor.
“Yes!” Kazin said. “A small man but a big mayor. The best.”
Judith Dunford, Kazin’s wife, had arrived with a salesman, and while their order was being written up her husband checked his watch and said, “We’re just right.”
They were headed for the sixplex, too, it turned out—and for the same underwater epic. “Judith wanted ‘Little Odessa,’ ” Kazin said, “but I had a different plan. Anything not to think!”
After we said goodbye, Carol and I looked at each other and said, “Isn’t New York great” at the same instant. Just after that, while I was standing at the cashier’s counter, the Kazins came past me, with the critic carrying his Harry’s parcel under his arm. “In New York,” I heard him say, “you go for shoes and meet a writer.”
All this happened exactly a year ago. The name of the movie was “Crimson Tide.” I recall nothing about it except Gene Hackman losing his cool and Denzel Washington really keeping his. Remembering the Kazins at Harry’s Shoes is a different story: that’s easy.
Talk, July, 1996