AT ABOUT ELEVEN IN the morning on March 2, 1983, the Greek men working on the roof of Diana Angel Stamoulis’s apartment building banged on her door to tell her, speaking in Greek, that they saw smoke. “Stop making fun,” she said, and closed her door. They banged again. This time she went out into the hall and opened the window. She saw smoke coming up from the fourth floor below. She climbed the stairs to the sixth floor, where she saw smoke coming from under the door of one of the apartments.
Mrs. Angel phoned her daughter, Adrienne, an actress who lived in the building next door. Adrienne came right over, and together the two women left the building, walking down the five flights of stairs. Once outside, where fire engines were already gathering on the Manhattan street, Mrs. Angel decided to go back to save some of her possessions. She had thousands of dollars’ worth of stamp collections, knickknacks, jewelry, a trunk full of fabrics—she had been a dressmaker like her mother before her—as well as valuable papers and correspondence with New York’s Mayor John Lindsay, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and President Lyndon Johnson. Apparently no one saw her reenter to climb the four flights.
Back in her seven-room apartment, Mrs. Angel felt intense heat coming from next door. She heard the crashing of windows exploding from the heat, and when she looked out her kitchen window she saw flames. She sat down on her living room sofa and spoke to God in Greek. “You’re not going to let this building burn,” she said. “But if it’s time for me to go, I’ll go with the building.” At that moment, the large mirror behind her, above the sofa, crashed and splintered, the glass flying right over her without hurting her. Mrs. Angel knew then that God felt it wasn’t time for her to go.
Hot water coming from the ceiling fell on her left shoulder. She thought the building’s boiler must have burst, and wondered how water from the boiler in the basement could have gotten so high up. She soon realized it was water that had been hosed into the floor above and heated by the flames. Mrs. Angel walked to her front window, facing Riverside Park and the Hudson River, thinking the falling water couldn’t reach her there. Up on the hill across from the building, a small crowd of people who had gathered to watch the fire noticed her and waved at her to come down, but she shook her head. She was not afraid. She was “in a sort of trance,” watching the colors of the flames, hearing the loud crashing of glass. She stayed there listening and gazing at the gorgeous black and gray smoke, at the reds and blues and greens. “People don’t realize how beautiful fire is,” she recalled.
A fireman saw her standing at the front window, and very soon two firemen, along with Adrienne, came up the stairs to get her. Mrs. Angel didn’t want to go, but they led her out of the building. About a half hour later the roof of the apartment above collapsed and fell through to her apartment.
Diana Angel was eighty at the time. She was my downstairs neighbor. Together with the people in the other twenty-two apartments, we had been making a kind of urban history, though we didn’t know it then—it was just our daily lives. Nor could we have known that this very local, very intimate history would be suddenly erased.
A year and a half later, living in a place that didn’t feel quite like home, I went back to look at our former apartment, now partially restored. There were light squares on the grayed walls where pictures had hung, and light circles on the blackened floors where chairs had stood. The huge old windows with their elaborately molded frames, through which we had seen the world, were gone, replaced by nondescript square black metal frames. The place was alien, blank, nobody’s. Smaller without the furniture. I remembered the day I arrived there twenty years earlier, pregnant, and we set to work to make it a place we could live in. It had had a future. This place didn’t even seem to have a past. It didn’t seem possible that this was where I had sat watching, far across the river, the lights of the roller coaster of Palisades Amusement Park, itself now vanished. But if not here, where?
It began in 1964, when my husband and I returned from a year in Rome, where Harry had had a Fulbright grant to study urban history and planning. We had no money, no jobs, no place to live, and I was pregnant. We camped at my parents’ house in Rockland County, and Harry would go into the city every day to look for an apartment. One day he came back pleased: six rooms in a nice old building on Riverside Drive, near Columbia University, where we had both been students. I went with him to have a look. I saw mostly that it was big, and that its wide front windows overlooked the green of Riverside Park and the Hudson River. Soon after, Harry got a job at the New York City Planning Commission. It wouldn’t make sense for me to get a job, we agreed, since I would be having the baby in November, and it was almost September.
The day we officially moved in I took a good look around. The ceilings were very high, the walls all brown, and in the long hall, especially, they pressed in with a feeling of hushed desolation. I felt suddenly desolate too, and I cried at the prospect of living in such desolation, especially after the glories of Rome. We began painting; my family came to help. My brother and my nephews painted the hall; my brother, who is very tall, could paint all the way up to the ceiling, past the molding, without a ladder. As he moved smoothly along the hall with his roller, turning it from brown to white, I stopped crying. It would be a place to live, for a while at least. We were nomadic. Before Rome we had lived in one apartment in New York, three in Philadelphia, and two in Boston, in the space of six years, so I expected we would keep moving. Because I was quite pregnant, I painted that segment of wall which could be reached without much bending or stretching. Sometimes I would sit on the floor and creep around the perimeter of a room to do the lower moldings.
Among his many endeavors, my father, by profession a tax lawyer and CPA, had a furniture store in Chinatown. Since we had no furniture, it seemed natural to him that we should go to the store and pick out what we needed. Others like us, young people brought up in provincial sections of Brooklyn, would buy furniture when they set up house: bedroom suites, living room suites, and carpeting to match. But we wanted never to “set up house.” We wanted to be the opposite of the way our families were, and to play house. Wherever we went, we made bookcases out of shelves and bricks and had big pillows in the living room instead of chairs. Our bed was a mattress on a frame. To placate my parents we did go to the store and pick out a few things—a round white kitchen table and four red chairs, a kitchen cabinet, and a couple of simple lamps. I remember my father looking with some contempt at one simple red lamp and saying, “That’s all you want?” What we lacked in furniture we made up for on the walls—lots of posters, prints, and odd hangings; over the years we added works of art done by our children and some real works of art loaned by friends who were painters. Harry also cultivated eighty-two plants, so the place was a bit like a greenhouse.
Towards the end of the pregnancy I would sit at night in a red and white flowered wing chair we had gotten at some thrift shop and look out over the river at the bright lights of Palisades Amusement Park over on the New Jersey shore. I could see the outline of the roller coaster, all its snaking figure eights, and the cars swooping around them. I watched the moving letters on the park’s huge marquee, advertising products I no longer remember, till I had memorized all the slogans in a trance of lethargy and muted panic over having a baby. The baby was late. Thanksgiving came and I called my mother to say I hadn’t the strength to come to Rockland County for her big dinner. She had a solution. Hours later my mother and father and brother, my sister and brother-in-law and their two sons marched in carrying the Thanksgiving dinner and set it up on paper plates, the first of many parties in our apartment. When they left I sat in the dark and watched the lights of Palisades Park, wondering when I would ever have this baby.
Rachel was born two days later. When she was a few months old my mother began coming over one day a week to stay with her so I could, in her words, “get out of the house.” Soon I hired baby-sitters so I could get out some more. I found a part-time job writing publicity material for an open housing program in Harlem, which was close enough to walk to, and my mother remarked, “I always thought a woman should stay home with a baby, but in your case I see you can’t. Go.”
During six years of marriage, I had gone to work, and we had done the housework infrequently and together. Suddenly I found myself in a spacious, solid apartment with a baby it was universally assumed I should take care of, and wondered how on earth this had come about. I suppose my parents were relieved I had married at all, since I had always threatened to do bizarre things with my life, and relieved that I had gone so far as to have a baby and do the conventional things for it like buy a crib and a playpen, dress it and feed it and take it to the park in a carriage with a hood and a row of plastic balls strung across the front. My mother told me things I ought to do for the baby; one was to give her a lamb chop for lunch when she got old enough to hold a bone. My mother believed in lamb chops the way later on people came to believe in yogurt and tofu. And once a week she arrived at around nine-thirty in the morning (my father dropped her off on his way to work) and I would fly out of the house to my job in Harlem.
When we first took the apartment, the real-estate agent told us another couple just back from Rome had moved in on the third floor, both artists. Coming out of the elevator one day, I saw a young man who looked like he might be an artist, and who looked as new to the place as I did. I inquired and he said yes, he was the one, Bob Birmelin. We invited him and his wife, Blair, over for coffee. I tried to heat a frozen Sara Lee banana cake in the oven and ruined it—the frosting melted and dripped and I was embarrassed serving it. Nevertheless we became very good friends, especially Blair and I. I discovered she read Proust and Henry James and liked to sit and talk about books just as I did. Amidst our marathon talks, periodically there would be a new baby. I had a girl, and a year and a half later she had a boy. I visited her in the hospital, bringing books, and when she came home with her baby we talked about childbirth and about the books. Two years later I had another girl, and a year and a half later Blair had another boy. We went to the park together, Riverside Park across the street, and in the course of an afternoon shifted our equipment from the benches near the slide to the benches near the jungle gym to the benches near the sandbox, along with other local mothers, women whose husbands were studying at Columbia or at Union Theological Seminary or Jewish Theological Seminary. I have a photo of Blair and me in heavy wool sweaters and jeans, playing hopscotch in the park. We look intent and defiant, as the children stand by and watch.
In our early years the park had a sprinkler for hot days, but one year it disappeared. Too much vandalism, the park man said. And the kids took water into the sandbox. I never understood what was wrong with taking water into the sandbox, but the park man, a jovial, short, dark man who liked to flirt with the mothers, was adamantly against it. He would sit and talk to any woman alone, as if part of his job for the Parks Department was to keep young mothers company, and it was in fact pleasant to be flirted with at a time when babies and sandboxes constituted so much of the once variegated world. When he hurt his leg and disappeared soon after the sprinkler, I missed him.
After the park, Blair and I would take the children back to one of our apartments and have drinks while they played and fought. We would be talking about books, drinking and smoking, feeling like grown women, when one of the children would rush in insulted or injured, and we would have to mediate. I tried to settle disputes by reason and fairness, but in her house, I remember, she gave the children apples. Blair seemed to have an unlimited supply of McIntosh apples, which soothed all injuries better than sweet reason. The children, especially as they got older, made so much noise that it was a wonder we could manage to keep talking about books, but manage we did, and like my mother she helped rescue me; perhaps I did the same for her.
At night the four of us grown-ups would get together to eat and drink and play games like pick-up-sticks; it seemed all right to leave the children alone on the sixth floor or on the third, and dash out from time to time to check on them. We were all very competitive, and so the games of pick-up-sticks were tense. Especially we women were competitive, for the men were out working at their chosen professions while we had little outlet for our competitiveness. Probably we would have been competitive in any case. On and off we played with a Ouija board, which predicted the date of the birth of Blair and Bob’s first baby, the results of the 1968 presidential election, and later on spelled out the name of Rachel’s nursery school teacher.
After a few years of babies and, for me, graduate school, we began to write fiction, Blair downstairs and I upstairs. She started first, after her second child was born. She had always been the painter and I the writer, at least in my mind. But there she was, writing. If a painter could write, I thought, surely I, a writer, could write too. When I had no private place to work she let me use a room in her apartment, so that sometimes we were both writing there, in different rooms. Years later, what we were both writing was in books and in bookstores, which seems miraculous.
Meanwhile, once a week my mother kept coming over to take care of the children while I got out. When I returned home I would find she had done some laundry and ironing too. She bathed the first baby, but with the second she said she couldn’t anymore—she was older and this baby was heavier; her arm ached. But she took both out to the park, for she believed in fresh air as in lamb chops, and sometimes on her return she would rest for a few moments in the lobby on one of the old high-backed, velvet-cushioned chairs that flanked a large oak breakfront. One day these pieces of furniture vanished. Stolen, our building superintendent, Mrs. Flanagan, said in amazement. The mystery of how and when these massive items could have been stolen was never solved. After that there was no furniture in the lobby.
My father would come by after work to pick my mother up, and we would sit and talk for a while, my mother enumerating what wondrous things the baby, and then babies, had done and said that day. During one of these talks the lights suddenly went out. First we thought it was our building alone, but out the window, up and down our side of the river as far as we could see, was blackness. Across the river New Jersey’s lights were bright. We sat in the dark bemused. I unearthed a few candles. Our neighbor from across the hall rang the bell to offer us a huge Christmas candle, and she sat with us for a while. She said she kept a lot of candles around for emergencies. She had the reputation of being eccentric, and indeed she had a touch of the Ancient Mariner about her, stopping us in the hall occasionally when some far-fetched topic seemed to weigh on her mind. She didn’t have a glittering eye, but she did have a pale, waxy-looking face, as if she never went outdoors, and her hair was done in two long braids wound about her head like an Edwardian heroine’s. She wore strange dun-colored shabby clothes that also seemed never to have seen the light of day—there was an overall mustiness to her—and those who had been in the building longer than we had told fantastic tales about primeval chaos in her apartment; and she had some strange habits as well, like reading late at night on the hall steps, to save electricity, she explained when we jumped back, startled, at the elevator door. She was often seen carrying shopping bags in and out, and she drove a repainted mail truck, which took up more than its share of precious street parking space. But with all that she could be pleasant to talk to, and she was intelligent. She was a public school teacher. And so we sat there bemused by the blackout—none of us could remember this happening in New York City before.
Soon my parents groped their way down the stairs. When they got home my mother called to describe to me how strange New York had looked from across the river, black and empty like an abandoned city. All evening, people in our building roamed the stairs and halls with flashlights, seeing if everyone was all right, if everyone had candles. It felt like a great adventure. But later on I was frightened, alone in the dark with a year-old baby. Even when the lights were on I was often afraid that something terrible would befall the baby and that I would not know the right thing to do. How much worse in the dark. It must have been from my mother that I had the notion that for every eventuality—particularly in the case of children—there was a right thing to do, as opposed to any number of wrong things, and that the acquiring of wisdom was learning all those right things in advance. Harry got home around midnight. He had walked all the way from the Lower East Side in stages, stopping off at friends’ houses along the way, resting and gathering strength in the various darknesses. He brought news of the outside, like a courier in the Dark Ages.
Around this time Harry’s family—mother, sister, cousins, and all—decided to have a surprise party for Harry’s father’s seventieth birthday in our apartment. Well, fine, except we hardly had suitable furniture. We felt we should dignify the occasion with a couch, at the very least. We did have a couch of sorts, but it was ragged and falling apart, having traveled to Philadelphia and to Boston and languished in storage for a year. Harry went to an auction in Brooklyn on the day of the party and found an elegant, old-fashioned tufted couch for eleven dollars, plus twenty-five to have it delivered the same day. The couch was white, which I thought beautiful. I was very proud of it when all the family arrived. Later my mother informed me that, beautiful or not, the white was merely the muslin that belonged under a covering. I didn’t doubt this; she knew all about such things. She said we ought to have it covered. “Slipcovers,” like “bedroom suite” and “carpeting” was a word connoting things Harry and I did not want any connection with. We kept it white for a long time. At last—perhaps our principles began to lapse or perhaps it was simply the dirt—we had it covered (though not with slipcovers) in blue velvet, which, even with my father’s upholstery liaisons, cost many times more than the couch itself and the delivery. Blue velvet was beautiful too; that became the couch our children and our friends’ boys from downstairs jumped on and off for many years. It was destroyed in the fire. Not burned: the living room window frame collapsed on it, doing more damage in one instant than four children over twelve years.
The feeling of having one’s things desecrated was not new to us, though. Twice, while the babies were small, I came home to find the apartment had been burglarized. Drawers emptied onto the floor, a typewriter my father had given me when I was in high school gone, a watch, cufflinks, jars of pennies, gone. Both times I rang our next-door neighbors’ bell and they came over to commiserate. George and Nena O’Neill, with their sons Michael and Brian, had moved in the same week we did, and we had become friendly comparing notes about painting those fine high-ceilinged rooms with their interminable moldings. George said if I was ever home alone and burglarized, I must bang on his door and he would come with his machete. As anthropologists, he and Nena had traversed jungles in Mexico and South America, and besides the machete had brought back Latin American rugs, wall hangings, and masks that decorated their apartment. Late one afternoon as I was stirring sweet-and-sour chicken in an electric frying pan, I heard footsteps in the hall. Harry was at work, Rachel with a friend down the street, and Miranda in her crib. The sweet-and-sour chicken was for a Barnard College freshman for whom I was a Big Sister, and her visiting parents from Cleveland. I advanced into the hall armed with my vegetable spoon and saw a skinny boy in a porkpie hat coming towards me. My face froze, a prefiguring, for I recognized my end. We both stopped moving at the same time, as in High Noon. After an eon I asked what he wanted, though I thought I knew. I was wearing a striped minidress. Too much of me was exposed, I felt; certainly he would want to rape me and then possibly kill me. He said he came to tell me the house was on fire and the hall was full of smoke. I walked past him to open the door and see. The hall was not full of smoke—he had climbed through a bedroom window. He walked past me and out, turned back to jeer, then went up the steps to the roof. I banged on George’s door. Wearing a bathrobe, he ran for his machete and chased the boy. Buddy Maggart, an actor who lived on the fifth floor, joined in, but they never caught him. The police arrived to do their everlasting paperwork, and I finished cooking the chicken—it seemed pointless not to—and everyone came and ate it. For a year I was nervous about being in the apartment alone, then it passed.
The O’Neills’ best-selling book on contemporary mores, Open Marriage, was reviewed in the Village Voice in 1972 by a critic who fantasized about the authors holding group orgies on Mexican rugs with their next-door neighbors. We all had a laugh over this, since all we ever did with the O’Neills was talk lengthily in the hall, and visit now and then for drinks; also we went to their Christmas parties and George came gallantly to my aid with his machete. We were both couples who argued a lot, in loud voices, near our front doors. We never took each other’s arguments very seriously, but we were well aware, tacitly, of their styles and contents, and that knowledge established an intimacy very different from the kind that would have existed had we had group orgies on Mexican rugs. The uncanny thing about the Voice reviewer’s fantasy was that the O’Neills did in fact have Mexican rugs.
For sixteen years we watched their sons and they watched our daughters grow up. I admired Nena’s elegance. She had left Akron, Ohio, years earlier to attend Barnard College and loved New York so much that she stayed to become a warmly earthy, glamorous woman: dark hair streaked with gray, olive complexion and soft, pensive features, tinted glasses and flowing, colorful clothes. She had a distinctively low voice which seldom veered from its mellow composure. A reasonable, tolerant, yet dashing middle-aged woman—everything I had no hopes then of ever becoming. Assiduous, too. Early one morning, when I opened the door to investigate the rapid rhythmic sounds coming from the hall, I found her jumping rope. She seemed faintly abashed to be discovered, but kept on jumping. After that, whenever I heard the morning sound of her rope slapping against the linoleum, I felt the sense of security that rituals—even those of other people—afford.
Then one September evening I met Nena coming into the lobby. I hadn’t seen her all summer and so we fell into each other’s arms. She started to cry and said George was dying. He had septicemia and was in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. I tried to encourage her, but people are usually right about such things, and George died in October of 1980. At the funeral, Jerry Silverstein, an actor and broadcaster who lived just across the hall, spoke long and eloquently about his friendship with George, their late-night talks, their seeing each other through hard times. Jerry and his wife, Selma, had been closer to the O’Neills than we had—though neither had they had orgies on the Mexican rugs. Just long friendship.
This was not our only loss. Ben Irving, an assistant executive secretary of Actors Equity and unofficial mayor of our building—he had lived there since 1956—had also died. Ben used to take care of everyone’s problems, large and small. Particularly if you were having trouble with the landlord, you called Ben. He was universally available and loved for his wit and generous spirit—a big robust man with a ruddy face, a booming voice, and thinning honey-colored hair.
Ben and Inge, his wife, used to give large parties, stretching over afternoons into the late evenings, where food overflowed and neighbors and friends, many of them theater people, drifted in and out with children of all ages. And then one day in 1968, when the Irvings were returning from a vacation, Ben had a heart attack in our lobby. Inge called for help and did mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until the ambulance from St. Luke’s Hospital arrived, too late. He was forty-eight. At his funeral, so crowded that people had to stand at the back, the actor and folk singer Theodore Bikel said the Kaddish. Bikel said that though Ben may not have wanted a religious service, he himself wanted Kaddish said for his friend and so he was going to say it.
I went down to Inge’s the morning after Ben died to offer to buy some groceries. She was sitting in a chair looking weak, surrounded by family. Inge was always a forceful, highly assertive person—it was unsettling to see her weakened. Assertive she still was: she said I could not only get the groceries but also over the weekend perhaps Harry and I could take Victor, her youngest son, out somewhere for a change of scene. We took Victor, who was seven, on a boat ride to the Statue of Liberty, along with Rachel. It started to rain on the ferry, a chill, stinging rain; Rachel cried and we had to take turns carrying her; I was pregnant again and the climb up to the torch was arduous. Later I thought we might have come up with something better. To this day I sometimes think, why, of all places, the Statue of Liberty, which Harry and I had seen before and Rachel was too young to appreciate and Victor, in his state of grief, probably didn’t care about?
A year or so after the Statue of Liberty, Rachel began attending a free nursery school run by the Parks Department in Morningside Park, ten blocks away. Lots of kids from the neighborhood went. On Riverside Drive, Tiemann Place, and Claremont Avenue flourished the oldest established permanent floating cooperative walking pool: each parent made only two trips a week but they were epic—half a mile with six four-year-olds. I took Rachel and Julienne Maggart from the fifth floor, and pushed Miranda in a stroller. Picking up the third and fourth kids was tolerable, but the fifth and sixth stops were harrowing, what with heavy front doors, timed buzzers, stairs, stroller, elevators, traffic, and the nature of children. There existed two imperfect strategies for getting the children safely across wide and heavily traveled Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue—in one mighty swoop or in shifts. I chose the swoop, never daring to let them get behind me. One of the mothers, an experienced one with four children, took a shortcut on snowy days through Cherry Park up on the Drive. Its attraction was an enormous flight of stone steps completely obliterated by snow. She let the kids slide down one by one, then slid down herself.
Julienne’s father, Brandon, or Buddy, as we called him then, did the nursery school trek with the nonchalance of a father of five, and at first my children, each in turn, were thrilled since they saw him daily in the Buddy and Jim comedy skit on Sesame Street. Also, any time Buddy appeared in a television commercial—touting the softness of a baby’s diaper or twirling pizza dough—they would call us to come and watch. But very quickly they grasped that Buddy, however nonchalant, made them hold hands and not run in the street like the rest of us, and the experience became far less thrilling. Soon they would even stop calling us to the TV screen but lackadaisically, hours later, let fall the news that Buddy was now doing wine or chocolate.
Accidental gatherings in the halls, the lobby, or at the elevator door propelled the life of the building like the conjunctions that take place at nerve endings. With the Silversteins, we held long and rather grandiose conversations at the elevator door, all about our lives and aspirations. The Silversteins were two of the most energetic and bouncy people I had ever met. They were always jogging or playing tennis, and would turn up at the elevator in their various sporting costumes, with their reverberating actors’ voices and beaming faces, and sometimes they would scold me because, with my babies trailing after me and my vague dreams of being a writer in abeyance, I wasn’t lively enough for their high standards of joie de vivre. They were a wonderfully matched pair, Jerry dark and earnest and cheerful, Selma fair and wry and practical—even their squabbles were entertaining, like a performance. They had married way back in 1947 and spent their early summers acting in summer theater.
But at the time I knew them, Selma was already bouncing on to something new; she was studying for a master’s degree in social work and planned to become a therapist, and naturally she recommended therapy for everyone, in her energetic, wry way. And Jerry was now on TV every week, doing a news program for children, which won countless awards; at the elevator he would stop to tell me the topic of the week—the death of Nasser, or New York City’s water shortage. If I had time I would watch and marvel at the way he conducted panel discussions with kids, inquiring into their opinions with the greatest respect and attention. And always, at the elevator, one of us would finally say, How silly to stand here at the door, let’s get together for an evening. The evening would arrive: we would eat and drink; Jerry would tell jokes and Selma would tell anecdotes about Jerry’s large and forthright family, especially his brother the rabbi, whose pithy pronouncements she rendered so vividly that when I finally met him at one of the Silversteins’ family parties I felt I already knew him. And so these evenings would laugh themselves by, with little said about our grander aspirations. Soon we would meet at the elevator again. ...
The Silversteins’ son Kenny was our baby-sitter, and the O’Neills’ son Brian, and Inge’s three children, Debby, Jonathan, and Victor in turn, and Annie from the third floor, and Yvonne from the first floor. To this day, our children, now grown, can rate them all on the various aspects of baby-sitting. We know which ones slept on the job and which foraged for food and which talked on the phone all evening, as well as their varying degrees of patience and imagination. Jonathan was a favorite because he would let the kids stand on his big shoes, facing him and gripping his hands, then walk them around with giant steps; this they found irresistible. Jonathan wrote a story for Rachel about the adventures of an umbrella, and bound it and presented it to her with a flourish; she still has it. Years later Rachel baby-sat for Joan Regelin’s three children, on the second floor, and doubtless they can rate her too.
Joan was my unemployment companion. When New York City underwent its fiscal collapse in 1975, I lost my job teaching English at Hunter College, and would take the subway to Washington Heights every Monday to claim unemployment insurance. I stood in line in an enormous dingy green room that made everyone in it look dingy. There were about twelve lines stretching the length of the room, and about seventy or eighty people on each. Naturally I looked for the shortest line, but in the end it never made much difference. Joan, then a sporadically employed singer, sometimes collected unemployment at the same hour—three o’clock—and she offered to drive me up. She was a large, dark-haired, dramatic-looking woman of around thirty, with, like many singers, a rich, sensuous, persuasive speaking voice. While she zoomed a tortuous path up the West Side Highway, she told me about growing up the oldest in a family of five children in North Carolina. She told me, too, how her grandparents used to live on our block, three buildings down, in the building that was taken over by Union Theological Seminary and became a dormitory for married students—her grandmother was the last holdout tenant. And she told me some of the adventures and idiosyncrasies of her car, which she spoke of as a member of the family. The car, a plucky 1971 Volvo which for many years had borne North Carolina plates, was something of a local legend, its adventures with crime and bureaucracy making it seem almost human. It had been stolen and retrieved, it had been towed away, it had weathered near-terminal illnesses. On weekends, Christian, Joan’s husband, would often be in front of the house, washing it or applying first aid. (Little did we know then that before long the car would suffer the ultimate indignity of being stolen for good.)
Joan took me to claim unemployment and I gave her outgrown toys and down jackets, and we sent the kids back and forth endlessly for cups of sugar and milk. After a year of standing in line I got my job back, and then the following year lost it again. But this time my unemployment depot was changed to Fifty-fourth Street. I missed the rides with Joan, not least the skill and verve of her driving, the energy with which she hauled that stick shift through its paces.
There were no longer as many children around when Joan’s three were small. Columbia University had bought the building in 1966 and from then on rented mostly to graduate students and junior faculty. But in the early years our daughters were part of a troop, the Maggarts’ five, Blair and Bob’s two boys downstairs, a girl named Carla on the first floor, and Yvonne’s younger brother, Gregory. Traipsing about on Halloween, they could never comprehend how Mrs. Lurier on the first floor, who gave the best treats—individually wrapped packages of homemade cookies—could be the same Mrs. Lurier who the rest of the year yelled to scare them off when they played in the lobby or in the courtyard right under her window.
Mrs. Lurier’s sister, Mrs. Angel, on the fifth floor, was reputed to be strange as well, since, as she let everyone know, she was writing to President Lyndon Johnson, among other leaders, about the disability case connected with a portion of ceiling having fallen on her arm in 1963, aggravating an injury sustained at work two years earlier and making it difficult for her to continue as a dressmaker. She would talk about the evils of bureaucracy to whoever would listen. But I liked her and shared her feelings about the evils of bureaucracy, and given my verbal and vociferous and large family of Russian Jewish immigrants, I saw nothing strange about people expressing themselves in forceful and extreme ways; indeed, it made me nostalgic for my childhood, when stately people like Mrs. Angel—aunts and uncles—sat around oilcloth-covered tables dotted with glasses of amber tea and shouted at each other warmly. I also liked her because she admired my children and said so whenever we met. Since I had long ago given up broiling lamb chops for lunch, her pronouncements were reassuring. And I liked the way she looked, big and squarishly built, a square unlined face, high cheekbones and clear eyes, dark brown hair close to auburn pulled away from her forehead to show a widow’s peak and done in a knot. Stern and formidable, she used to walk erectly down Riverside Drive with the gait of one who has business abroad in the world. I often imagined her up on an outdoor podium, exhorting crowds to justice and righteousness, and in fact she once told me she might have gone into politics like her father, had she been a man, and thought she would have done well, but that now, after three turbulent marriages—one arranged when she was sixteen, one “the love of her life,” and one to an excitable Greek naval officer—and a lifetime crowded with incident, it was too late.
As a matter of fact it was politics that brought her to this country. In 1904 her father, George Dalianis, ran for office in his hometown of Amalias, population 26,000, and lost. “In America,” she said, “when they lose they shake hands and make up, but in Greece they could shoot themselves.” To help Mr. Dalianis get over the pain of losing, the family set off on a trip to America.
When Diana Angel spoke of these things, alternately laughing and scowling, her voice would traverse the scales, penetrating the air. She might well have been addressing a group—her narration had that sweep and force of one born for public oratory. But when she laughed she became suddenly girlish and I could see she must have been a beauty. Eventually I even found out what the correspondence with Lyndon Johnson was all about. Because Mrs. Johnson’s private secretary was a girlhood friend of Diana’s daughter Adrienne, the president had actually responded to the pleas about the disability claim as well as sent Diana New Year’s and other greetings, plus a book containing the laws he drew up while in Congress, plus a flag.
One Sunday afternoon Diana got stuck in the elevator. Getting stuck was not unusual; ours was a highly capricious elevator. Among its whims was a periodic refusal to sort out the numbers above 4. During those spells, if your destination was 5 you pressed 6, and if it was 6 you pressed 7, which was the roof. People who got stuck pushed the alarm button, setting loose a loud and terrible clanging which those of us on the top floor had learned to distinguish from the loud and terrible clanging set off when the roof door was illicitly opened. At the sound of the elevator alarm we would stream out in the halls to shout encouragement to the prisoner until Mrs. Flanagan or her brother, Tom Kelly, either fixed it or called the elevator men.
Diana Angel was not a patient victim; invisible, she shouted furiously about her nerves and her stress—everyone of course understood she had been tried to the limit by the ceiling falling. Finally Tom Kelly induced the elevator to come within a foot of our floor, and, even more difficult, induced Diana to climb out, shaken, trembling, and vociferous. She came to our apartment for a cup of tea. Calm at last, her stalwart self emergent, she pronounced as usual that my children were very well brought up.
Tom Kelly lived in the basement apartment with his sister, Anna Flanagan, and helped her out with chores in the building. I was put off by him at first because when he drank he was silent and sullen. He would answer the door looking irritated beyond measure and quickly get his sister to deal with the complaint. But when he wasn’t drinking—and for long periods he would stop, till he stopped altogether—he was wry and witty, with a fund of mordant comments on life in its most grand or petty manifestations. During his dry spells he would often get jobs in other buildings around town as a doorman or elevator operator, and set off for work very well dressed and very brisk. But these jobs never lasted long.
From May to October, Tom and his sister, and the super from next door and her daughter, would sit out on the ledge in front of our building every evening, taking the air. We never had a doorman like more elegant buildings farther south: the party of supers, sharp-eyed and vigilant, was for a long time the closest we got to any sort of guardianship. Comings and goings provided the raw material for their criticism of life. Boyfriends and girlfriends of our teenagers were duly assessed, and reports to the parents submitted promptly, though unsought. Passing by, I would stop to catch up on local news delivered in Tom’s trenchantly satirical style. He liked children and would tease mine, when they were small, asking them to take him along to school or to camp—perhaps he had fantasies of escape from the basement into a life of youthful capers—and at first they were leery because he was gruff, with a low, snarling voice that sounded like it had snaked its way through a wringer, besides which he had an ailment that made his head lean permanently to one side. But once they got past these traits they grew fond of him too. When Tom brought plumbers or plasterers to our apartment, he would hang around diverting me with his snarling opinions on everyone in the building, and also cadge cigarettes, since he had to have a cigarette dangling from his lips at all times. He was a thin, white-haired man with a caved-in chest and a squarish face: rheumy blue eyes, pinkish cheeks, full lips, and a dangling cigarette. While plumbers probed, we would discuss the atrocious state of the apartment across the hall, to which the tenant refused to give Mrs. Flanagan a key, and to which she admitted no repairmen. Yes, Tom would grunt bitterly, it was a terrible fire hazard.
Tom knew I was a writer; in the fall of 1981 he asked if I would write a letter for him to a CBS News commentator who had broadcast a segment about a chewing gum that supposedly helped people stop smoking. He snarled that it was only fair I should do this since I had rung his bell with a complaint while he was watching the TV news, and because of my interruption he hadn’t caught the name of the gum. I wrote to CBS News a few times and finally telephoned. The name of the gum was Nicorette, I reported back to Tom, but it wasn’t yet available in the United States, only in Europe. He accepted this news ruefully, his cigarette drooping. A few months later I was in Italy, where I’d promised him I’d look for the gum, but I didn’t find it. Tom developed lung cancer and would go for what his sister called X-ray treatments. He was glum and resigned about his disease, and when we all tried to encourage him with visions of recovery, he would nod sarcastically and snarl. He grew weak. His chest caved in even more. He kept smoking. He said he might as well, now. Before I left for Iowa in the summer of 1982, where I had a temporary teaching job, he asked me to ring his bell and say hello when I came home for vacations, which I did. He never asked me in—that was not part of our friendship—but at the door he brought me up to date on which elderly neighbors were growing eccentric and exactly how, who was moving out to greener pastures, whose children were getting married or going away to school, and the observable love life of the recently divorced; also how his disease was progressing, and how hard it was to stop smoking. After the fire, Columbia University, the landlord, moved Tom and his sister to a tiny apartment ten blocks south on 113th Street, which they hated. He died about a month later, in the spring of 1983. I was still away and was sorry I could not go to his funeral as a final tribute, but even more sorry that I never got to hear what he would have snarled about the fire. Soon after he died, the gum was approved for sale in the United States.
Our apartment had a big living room and dining room joined by an archway, both rooms facing west, graced by large windows overlooking the park and the river with its boats going by. We painted that windowed wall red, and it framed the outdoors. North, we could see all the way up to the George Washington Bridge. In spring and summer the trees in the park were so lushly leaved we could barely see the water through them, but in winter and fall the view was broad and clear. On windy days there were whitecaps all along the river so that it looked like a printed fabric billowing about, or the wet fur of a large beast with the shivers. Often in winter ice would clog it for weeks at a time, huge chunks of jagged ice like cold driftwood, and for those weeks no ships could pass. Sometimes a ship got stuck and stayed there for days at a time, till the ice melted. Most of the ships we saw were barges or small cargo ships or the Circle Line taking tourists on a pleasure cruise around Manhattan Island, but now and then a good-sized ship would float by, and when the children were small I would call them to watch. Even when they were older, I still sometimes called them for a truly spectacular ship.
Also out the living room windows, across in Riverside Park, was the big hill all the neighborhood kids and their parents used for sledding. Early on, Harry and I would go out sledding with the kids; in later years we could keep an eye on them from the window as they skimmed down and trudged up, dragging the sleds behind them. But the finest things we watched from the window were the sunsets, especially the late ones, June through October. We abandoned cooking, eating, or homework to rush to the window, for once it began, each instant’s configuration of clouds and color above the Palisades, of light and shadow on the surface of the water, could vanish in a trice. Irreverent, we even rated them—better than yesterday’s, not so fine as last Sunday’s—and sometimes on summer evenings we were lured out to walk along the Drive, to get closer up. We grew to be connoisseurs, knowing from the way each sinking began whether it would be drawn out or abrupt, magnificent or humble, whether it would start out splendid and dissipate, or start out nondescript and turn splendid, whether the best part would be just before or just after the sun went down. We could tell from the formations of the clouds and the color of the air, pink or violet or amber, and sometimes even a pale weird lime green.
Off the once-desolate long hall were three bedrooms, medium-sized, small, and very small. The advantage of the very small one was its own private bathroom—it must have been a maid’s room in the days when the building housed the rich. Harry and I always had the small back bedroom as our own, but the other two rooms went through countless changes of role over nineteen years, mostly depending on the phases of our children. When they could live and sleep peaceably together we used the tiny room as a study, two desks crowded in. When they couldn’t we moved our desks elsewhere: in the end, I wrote three books under our loft bed. But way back in the sixties, I don’t remember what I expected to do at a desk—I don’t remember any plans except a vague notion that somehow I would become a writer, as if it happened to a person like puberty or gray hair. Eventually I went to graduate school, then dropped out to write, because being a writer showed no signs of happening to me like puberty or gray hair. In the tiny bedroom I wrote my first published article, a Watergate satire, in June of 1974 and Harry made a big party with all our friends to celebrate; there was a feeling of buoyancy abroad over the climax of Watergate, with its satisfying cast of heroes and villains.
That party took its place in the annals of parties held in the vanished apartment, parties like the snows of yesteryear: the New Year’s Day party thrown together that morning, where Rachel at a mere twelve years old concocted a triumphant egg-nog; and the surprise party for Harry’s father which occasioned our getting the white couch; and then the party for Harry’s fortieth birthday, when he got piles of presents like a child; and the July 4 party in the bicentennial year, when friends gathered on our tarred roof to watch the glorious procession of tall-masted and bannered ships parade up the Hudson all that long sunny summer afternoon. Parties the children cannot remember, Halloween parties where guests masqueraded as their secret selves, a frog, a toad, Lolita and Superman and Al Capone. Not to mention the two children’s birthday parties a year with the requisite balloons and whistles, parties I smiled through because I poured Scotch—which can pass for apple juice—into my paper cup.
Like a person, the apartment had a few chronic ailments. The bedroom doors never closed completely. The closet in the largest bedroom had no door. We never got around to asking the landlord for one, and hung up a curtain instead. The shower didn’t drain properly—one stood ankle-deep in water. The plumbers who came to remedy this once and for all were a merry troop who stayed for days, creating chaos out of order, but in the end nothing much was changed. In the tiny bathroom in the erstwhile maid’s room, a leak in the pipes in the wall would spring mysteriously every New Year’s Day. We had no evidence of it, but Inge, downstairs, would call to report that water was pouring from the ceiling. Eventually Inge had only to call on New Year’s, say hello in a certain wry tone, and we would know. After a few years the plumbers didn’t bother to plaster up the wall when they were finished, but simply put in a wooden panel that could be easily removed the following New Year’s.
I knew every person in every one of those twenty-four apartments until the last few years, when Columbia began housing students there, and the students, just passing through, were not interested in knowing their neighbors. But for most of the nineteen years I knew the feel of people’s apartments, the furnishings and the quality of the light on the different floors, people’s relatives—Jerry’s brother the rabbi, Inge’s sister Eva and Ben’s sister Esther—and their children, what schools they went to and how they turned out. I watched as Yvonne, our baby-sitter, a slender, shy, soft-spoken girl, became a beauty at fifteen or sixteen; for a year or so we all endured crowds of boys mooning outside on the front step waiting for an appearance, a word, a glance. Together we also endured the summer Columbia replaced our ever-ailing boiler, when those of us with no vacation plans learned how to take cold showers, which is not so hard once you get used to it. Worse to endure was the collapse of the wall separating our back courtyard from the opposite building, on Claremont Avenue—a mighty and prolonged roar on a still Saturday afternoon. We were in the papers, notorious. For weeks our gigantic heap of rubble was a place of interest for the locals, less historically evocative than Riverside Church or Grant’s Tomb, where tourists went, but more dramatic for those in the know. Apparently Columbia had been aware of the tremulous wall for some time, but had been haggling with the Claremont Avenue landlord over whose responsibility it was to fix it. At last workmen arrived with cement trucks and sacks of sand and gravel. They began their dragging and drilling at six in the morning, which incensed Buddy Maggart most of all since he worked nights and slept mornings. When the wall was rebuilt months later, Mrs. Flanagan and Tom complained bitterly, since the courtyard they had used to hang out wash and grow plants and cool off in on hot nights was a third of its original size.
I knew when Mrs. Flanagan’s son had a heart attack and exactly how overweight he was. I could even remember the days when Mrs. Flanagan, a talkative kind of super, complained that her son and his wife had no children; then, overnight it seemed, there were four, and her talk switched to anecdotes of the grandchildren. When they visited she brought them up to display them. I knew when Joan’s son hurt his head and she feared there might be serious damage but there wasn’t, and when Jerry Silverstein suffered from tennis elbow. Likewise everyone knew when Rachel tumbled off the back of Yvonne’s bike in the park and I rushed her, holding the torn ball of the bleeding finger in place with a towel, to the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital in the back of a passing police car. Police don’t like to take passengers, but they didn’t refuse. Everyone knew, too, when a man in the building next door was killed by a speeding car at the corner, and then finally the city put up the traffic light we had long been asking for, with a pedestrian button as a bonus.
I had been inside Grant’s Tomb and climbed to the top of Riverside Church during the ringing of the carillon bells, and ridden my bike in Riverside Park; I knew who played tennis there and who ran, and who, like us, had picnics. Where people walked their dogs, who cleaned up after them and who didn’t. Who walked around late at night and who was afraid to. Who was mugged, when and where and how. Mrs. Lurier of the Halloween cookies, beaten up in her apartment and no one heard her scream—an empty Saturday afternoon in spring. Inge, coming home from work, by a boy with a knife. Joan, bringing home groceries. Nena, on the subway steps. We organized a tenants’ association on the block. Harry was the chairman. With money from those willing to pay, we hired a uniformed guard to patrol at night: genteel Mr. Crawford, who reported for duty in a shiny black Cadillac. The supers taking the air resented his presence, as if it impugned their ability to keep the street safe; still, they included him in their nightly conferences on the ledge.
It was hardly possible to get down that street without stopping to talk. Over the years we came to know people all up and down the block, and when the old ones stopped appearing we knew they had died. I didn’t like everyone equally, but it was scarcely a question of liking. They came with the territory, and when they moved or died I missed them. It is possible to miss even people you don’t like.
I never liked the apartment that much either, or never thought I did. I found it cramped. Despite its six rooms there never seemed to be enough privacy, though perhaps it was the way we lived, with no clear boundaries and turfs, that deterred privacy. And the neighborhood wasn’t safe, especially at night, even during the years Mr. Crawford patrolled with his reassuring black Cadillac. I also never quite forgot the three dreadful spells when we had mice, and how Jonathan Irving of the big shoes came up and baited our traps with chocolate—he claimed mice preferred chocolate to cheese and judging from the results he was right. Yet now it strikes me that I lived in that apartment longer than any other place in my life, and the placement of the furniture and the pots and pans and the pictures on the walls seems fixed and preordained, the only way we could have lived.
There are times, opening my eyes in the morning, when I am astonished to find myself in alien surroundings; I close my eyes, not yet fully awake, and imagine taking my old route through the morning, first to the front windows to look out at the park and river and see what kind of day it might be. Not until long after the fire could I bear to remember in detail how it was to move through those rooms in patterns developed over the years; how, when it rained, I whisked from room to room in a well-worn path closing windows, then stood in the front watching it pour into the abundant river; how we put speakers in the kitchen so I could hear music while I cooked; how I was lulled to sleep watching old movies on TV up in the loft bed; and how, as I talked on the kitchen wall phone, my eyes panned every plane of the room, so every square foot is now forever printed on my retina—yellow walls, dark green cabinets, striped curtain, the arrangement of pots and pans on a dark red board; the plastic magnetic letters on the refrigerator that our grown children still fooled with, messages like Happy Anniversary or Good Luck on SATs, or messages from their friends—Julie Was Here; and the round white table which, to my father’s gratification, we bought at his store, and the orange chairs. For after my father’s red plastic chairs gave out we replaced them with wooden ones bought for a dollar each from a local synagogue that was clearing out old furniture. I made covers out of bright printed corduroy for their ugly plastic seats, covers that looked like shower caps, and the children, aware of my limitations in the domestic arts, laughed at them, but when stretched out they fit perfectly.
I remember most of all being pregnant with my first baby in that apartment, and toward the end, when it was an effort even to move, sitting in the old wing chair looking out over the river, watching the moving lights over Palisades Amusement Park advertising things I cannot remember now but which twenty years ago I knew by heart. I would watch the letters slide by again and again, wondering what it would be like to be a family in that apartment, wanting the pregnancy over but fearing the birth, and falling into a trance induced by the glitter of the faraway roller coaster. Maybe I might live in that static condition, pregnant forever, a permanent trance. Years later they tore down Palisades Amusement Park to replace it with two high-rise apartment buildings which were nothing at all to look at. But on clear nights we could still lean out the window and see the strand of lights that was the George Washington Bridge looping above the water.
We were ignorant then, our lives full of vast and unformed possibilities that narrowed and congealed to specifics. In that apartment we raised two children, and I made myself into a writer instead of dreaming it, and I learned that the getting of wisdom is something other and more fruitful than finding out the right things to do on every occasion. By the end, we were four grown people, two of whom had never known any other home.