MRS. MACDOUGAL and the building manager sat opposite each other in the building manager’s office, he behind a large desk covered in papers and phones, and she in a vinyl-covered armchair, where she absentmindedly let the pages of a magazine, Today’s Bricks, fall slowly from back to front.
“Elevator Number Two is very old,” she said.
“It is very old,” he said, not looking up from the financial report he was reading.
“The light is dim. The metal is scratched in places. The wood paneling is somewhat discolored. And the marble in the floor is badly cracked. Shoddy. Second-rate. Not modern. With visitors to the building, who may be of some importance . . .”
“. . . some importance,” he said.
“. . . this makes for a bad impression.”
“. . . bad impression . . .”
“What’s more,” continued Mrs. MacDougal, “Elevator Number Two seems to be possessed by a demon. I have on more than one occasion been deposited on the wrong floor. Or taken up when I pushed Down. Or held between floors for minutes at a time. It felt like hours. Horrible!”
“. . . horrible . . .” he said.
“It is fortunate that I live on the fifteenth floor and so may take Elevators Number One and Three as an alternative to Elevator Number Two. But some of those unfortunate enough to live above me must take Elevator Number Two, since it is, as you know, the only one that reaches the highest parts of the building.”
“. . . highest parts . . .”
“So it is almost painfully clear that we must rip out Elevator Number Two and replace it with something new. Something nice. Modern. With some elegant details.”
For the first time the building manager looked up from his papers. He said, “Rip out Elevator Number Two? Rip out? Elevator Number Two? Mrs. Rotterdam-Bottom’s never going to agree to that. Oh no. You can put that thought right out of your mind. Mrs. Rotterdam-Bottom has a thing for Elevator Number Two. She won’t budge on that.” He closed the report. “Do you want to know why?”
•
It was this way.
Mrs. Rotterdam-Bottom is nearly ninety years old and so is Elevator Number Two. It is sometimes called simply “Otis” by the residents because that name, the name of the manufacturer, stares up from a wrought-iron disk in the otherwise cracked, as Mrs. MacDougal pointed out, marble floor. Before her marriage, Mrs. Rotterdam-Bottom was simply Miss Rotterdam. She and Otis were installed in the building at almost the same time. Old Mr. Rotterdam, Miss Rotterdam’s grandfather, had the original elevator replaced with the new Otis just before Miss Rotterdam was born. Though the original elevator had shown no signs of age or debility, old Mr. Rotterdam wanted the newest and the best for his first grandchild. What’s more, the new Otis was one of the very first fully automatic elevators installed in the city. Being fully automatic, Otis eliminated the need for old Mr. Rotterdam to pay an elevator operator’s salary, which old Mr. Rotterdam quietly liked a lot.
Otis arrived with a load capacity of two thousand pounds, a thirty-horsepower motor, and could do the trip from the basement to the twenty-first floor in two minutes and eight seconds. Installing Otis had gone smoothly. It took six weeks, but there were no complications.
Likewise with little Miss Rotterdam, only in her case it required six hours and not six weeks to be born.
Miss Rotterdam arrived weighing eight pounds, nine ounces. She had a tremendous appetite and lots of vim.
Otis carried Mrs. Rotterdam, old Mr. Rotterdam’s daughter-in-law, to the lobby on her way to the hospital maternity ward, and took her with her new baby, Delphinia Rotterdam, up from the lobby, home to the twentieth floor.
Everyone was well pleased.
Nearly coincidentally, that is, about one week later, Otis performed a very similar service for Mr. and Mrs. Bottom, who lived in apartment 7C. Alexander Bottom, a healthy nine pounds, four ounces, with an even bigger appetite than Delphinia’s, came to 777 Garden Avenue to take up his position as chief joy of the Bottom family, where he was known as Sandy.
In a way, Otis, Delphinia, and Sandy made up that year’s freshman class at 777.
The three soon found their voices, their legs, and their call buttons.
Right away, Delphinia announced her literary ambitions to the world by gnawing on one book after another. She could read by the time she was three and had a good chunk of Dickens under her belt by the time she was eight. She began to write occasional pieces for The Gardenia, our magazine of avenue news, illustrated with photos from the camera Delphinia, now known as Phinny, received from her mother on her ninth birthday.
Sandy, also an early gnawer, differed from Delphinia in that, even at ages three, four, and five, he continued to gnaw, though by five it was no longer so much on non-food items. His gnawing became more refined: corn on the cob, chicken legs, apple pies. By the time he was eight, Sandy could distinguish Jonagold from Mutsu from Red Delicious in a blind taste test of apples fresh from the market.
And Otis? Being an elevator, he matured much more rapidly. There were some misunderstandings in the first few weeks of his life, Otis not being able to distinguish between nine and six, for instance (they do look alike). Also, sometimes he got tired, especially in the late afternoon–early evening, when he was almost constantly on the go. Now and then he took a breather between floors, especially if he was at or near his weight capacity—about seven people. The shouting and hullabaloo this brought on, though, would give him such a headache that he might shut down for the rest of the evening, making everyone have to take Elevator Number One and Elevator Number Three, and then the stairs from floors seventeen to twenty.
But after a few house calls by the elevator specialists, all of these minor complaints were corrected.
By the time he was two years old, Otis was in peak form and running like a top.
And he was beginning to develop a personality. Every once in a while, he liked his little jokes. He might close his door halfway and then open it again, and then close it, which can kind of make any rider think he or she was in a little time warp. Or Otis would slow down or speed up, especially if he had a nice long stretch to do, say from the first floor to the twentieth. Or if a lady was carrying a lot of packages he might close his door on her gently and hold her for a mere second or two, just for a lark.
Occasionally, of course, like anyone else, he got angry. He hated dogs piddling in him. Yuck! Or when someone punched his buttons. Punched his buttons! “Punch nine for me, please.” Really! Who likes being punched? Bouncing a ball, farting, smoking, talking too loud, all got on his nerves. He never held anyone between floors to take his revenge—keeping whoever was so annoying a second longer inside him was the last thing he wanted. However he did scold in his own way. For instance, he might open and shut his door loudly and repeatedly on the floor of any obnoxious resident, sometimes at four in the morning, if he thought it might teach the offender a lesson.
Still, that was rare. For the most part, Otis was a happy and well-adjusted elevator.
By the time Otis was eight, he was a master elevator, one of the finest in the city and a source of some pride to 777 residents. Remember, this was a long time ago and an automatic elevator was already something pretty special. Naturally he knew every resident by name, most of their guests, and, apart from his rare moments of fun, he served them well.
Now it happens in a building like 777 Garden Avenue that, while an elevator knows all its residents and all the residents know their elevator, not all the residents know all the other residents. So it was with Delphinia and Sandy. That is, they knew each other by sight, had seen each other in the building, of course. But they had never spoken.
In those days the idea of high and low society still mattered, much as we might object to this now. Often, whether you were high or low was indicated by where you lived in the building: high society on the high floors, low society on the low floors.
So it was with Delphinia and Sandy. Delphinia’s father, the son of old Mr. Rotterdam, the owner of the building, owned other buildings himself. Delphinia’s mother gave and attended parties. Mr. Bottom worked for the city as an accountant. Mrs. Bottom taught English in a high school in Brooklyn. The two families were not necessarily high and low, perhaps, but let’s say high and middle; two slices of New York society that didn’t much mix.
The same held true for Delphinia’s and Sandy’s schooling. Delphinia attended the Mockingbird School for Girls. Sandy was a proud student of P.S. 158 around the corner. Different paths to school, different friends, different clothes.
None of this mattered to Otis, however. Otis was an elevator and saw the world as an elevator does, that is, without prejudice, and he saw no reason that the two, Delphinia and Sandy, shouldn’t meet and become friends.
Sandy, the youthful gnawer of note, had in his tenth year turned to cooking and was becoming known, especially on his floor, for the wonderful things he baked after school. He was not afraid to experiment, and like every good artist sought an audience with which to share his work and from which to gain criticism or encouragement. On any given afternoon, usually around four thirty, the door to apartment 7C opened, and out would float alluring aromas with Sandy not far behind, holding a tray of, perhaps, hazelnut cookies or fruit bread. He generally had only to let the wonderful smells do his advertising work for him, to bring out one or two taste testers from the neighboring apartments.
Otis was well aware of this routine. So it happened that on a rainy and cold October afternoon, Sandy, waiting for someone to open his or her apartment door and try his oatmeal snickerdoodles, saw instead the elevator door open, revealing a wet, green-clad schoolgirl, who looked hungry—Delphinia. Delphinia, on her part, expecting to step onto the twentieth floor, the penthouse floor, the floor whose button she had pushed, instead saw a boy holding a tray of snickerdoodles.
Delphinia stepped off the elevator.
Sandy stepped toward the elevator.
“Try a snickerdoodle?” said Sandy.
Delphinia, shaking the wet raincoat hood off her head, took a snickerdoodle.
“Thanks, mmph,” she said, with a snickerdoodle, more crumbly than she expected, half in her mouth.
“What do you think? It’s my first time. Cooking snickerdoodles.”
“Delicious. You’re very good. At snickerdoodles.”
“My name’s Alexander. My family calls me Sandy. You live in the penthouse, right?”
“Yes, I’m Delphinia—Phinny.”
“You want some hot chocolate? The snickerdoodles, I think, are a little dry and could use some.”
Otis, who was standing motionless with his door open, in case Phinny had not liked Sandy’s snickerdoodles, closed his door quietly and returned to the lobby.
The afternoon of the snickerdoodles marked the beginning of Sandy and Phinny’s friendship, which grew naturally and simply over the next years.
Remember, this was still a long time ago—almost eighty years.
By the time they were in high school—Phinny still at Mockingbird and Sandy at Cornelius Van Mooswyck High—they had taken to monthly roams in search of dishes for Sandy to study and other avenues for Phinny to write about, traveling in their quests to every corner of the city: to Queens for schnitzel on Myrtle Avenue, to the Bronx for spaghetti bolognese on Arthur Avenue, to Brooklyn for pierogis on Green-point Avenue, to Staten Island for oysters on Castleton Avenue, and in Manhattan for pizza on Mulberry Street and dump-lings on Mott.
Often Phinny would find notes from Sandy slipped into her family’s mailbox in the building’s mail room, which said things like “They’ve discovered a new kind of chicken with sweet potatoes on Lenox!!! Let’s go!! Can you!? Will you?! I’ve got to try it!!!!” Or “Something mysterious is happening in the risottos on Second Avenue—I think we should check it out!?!” Or even, in a more somber mood, “I’m bored. How ’bout hot dogs on Surf Avenue on Sunday?”
Not unnaturally, Phinny’s parents, who shared this mailbox, were curious about Sandy and, after a year of watching the notes come and go, asked Phinny to introduce her to them, as they had assumed that Sandy was a school chum—a girl, in other words.
Phinny didn’t bother to clear up that misunderstanding. Both she and Sandy knew by instinct that none of their parents would be keen on them traveling around the city together as far and wide as they did. The Bottoms would not object out of any social misgivings, nevertheless they feared that someday Sandy’s feelings might be hurt. Let’s be frank, it was the Rotterdams that Phinny and Sandy had to worry about. Mr. Rotterdam, in particular, would most decidedly not approve. Does it need to be spelled out? Mr. Rotterdam might like Sandy personally very much, he might like his jokes and his good taste in food, but he didn’t want to see his daughter spending so much time with him with the possible result, some years down the road, she might end up Mrs. Delphinia Rotterdam-Bottom!
Phinny and Sandy understood this. And so, without either making a big deal of it, they carefully avoided Mr. Rotterdam altogether.
As high school wore on, they found that this was not too difficult to do, because they barely found time to see each other, and their trips to far distant avenues were few. Also, the war had begun, World War II, that is, and while their city was never under the duress that so much of the rest of the world endured, life was dark, a little down, and they both liked to stay close to home.
The last high-school trip they did manage was a glorious one to Twenty-third Avenue in Astoria, Queens, for Greek salads and clams. It took place on a sparkling Columbus Day in the fall of their senior year. Phinny had suggested they ride their bicycles, and Sandy had—somewhat reluctantly—agreed. Crossing first the Harlem River to Randall’s and Wards Islands, then the East River at Hell Gate, where they rode high over the city on the Triborough Bridge, a feeling of equal joy and terror came over both of them as they looked far down into the churning waters beneath them and then south to the towers of Manhattan. They were giddy at the simple fact that this was where they lived, this was what their neighbors before them had made.
And soon after, joy and terror were replaced by relief and contentment at the scrumptiousness of their neighborly meal.
But that was their only trip of the year.
Phinny had been seeing quite a lot of Styne Van Steen, a senior at Horace Mann School, whom her parents were very excited about (he was the son of very old family friends).
It was Styne Van Steen who was Phinny’s date to the big Mockingbird School Spring Ball, but it was Sandy whom Phinny thought about, having left Styne dumbly in the decorated gymnasium, as she walked home down Garden Avenue, thinking that she could go for some good scrambled eggs and waffles.
And there was Sandy walking uptown on Garden Avenue, just coming back from a movie.
They met in front of their building and Sandy said, “How about some scrambled eggs and waffles? There’s a new place on Lexington.”
The sparkle in Phinny’s eyes when she said “Yes” was clear to anyone watching, even from inside the lobby through the glass doors.
Later that night, Otis opened his door for them on the penthouse floor. Sandy had never been that high before, and hesitated on the threshold of the elevator, and so did Phinny. They stood transfixed, looking into each other’s eyes, half in and half out of the elevator. Well, if you stand half in and half out of an elevator, holding the door open too long, you know what happens—an alarm goes off. In Otis’s case, it was a sharp ringing. This so startled both Sandy and Phinny that they leaped back into the elevator and into each other’s arms.
Otis immediately began to descend—all the way to the basement—and then began the return, stopping at no other floors. How it happened that Otis suddenly headed down to the basement and back is anyone’s guess. Did Sandy or Phinny lean against the button unwittingly? Who knows? Certainly not Sandy and Phinny, who knew only the thrill their closeness gave them. Otis just started going down. The full round trip takes, without stops, exactly four minutes and thirty-six seconds (twenty seconds for the door to open and close). Four minutes and thirty-six seconds is plenty of time for one careful first kiss, and then two, three, or even four second kisses that aren’t careful at all. Four minutes and thirty-six seconds is also plenty of time to fall head over heels, top to bottom, in love.
Well, in love or not, soon after this, both of them went to college. Sandy traveled to New Orleans and the university there to study history and Southern cooking, and Phinny to Boston and the college there to study journalism and art, both departures leaving Otis missing their cheery faces, their sensitive hands, their hummed tunes!
Some loves cool when the parties in question are separated by a thousand or so miles for months at a time. Not this one. They wrote several letters a week and sometimes spoke on the phone, though this was kind of a big deal at the time. They also sent each other things; on Sandy’s part historic recipes he had discovered or new ones he concocted himself, and on Phinny’s part articles she had written and photographs of paintings she had seen.
Where would it end, this secret romance?
We’ll see.
For there was one big fly in their otherwise creamy ointment.
If Phinny had a flaw it was that she couldn’t stand up to her father. She could browbeat the toughest student union campaigner to get a good quote for a story; she could endure the bombast of a hoary professor at very close range; she could silence a boozy fraternity classmate with one well-crafted zinger—but she couldn’t stand up to her father.
So when her father suggested Styne Van Steen’s name to her as the perfect husband whom he expected her to marry upon her college graduation, she didn’t say no.
Can you believe it? She didn’t say no. True, she never exactly said yes. But she definitely didn’t say no. The wedding was to be held on the Rotterdams’ spacious northern terrace, nicely shaded from the early-summer sun—a June wedding.
Whether it was to be a June wedding because Mr. Rotterdam happened to hear that Sandy was working at a four-star restaurant in Buenos Aires is a matter of debate, but it would indicate that Mr. Rotterdam had wised up a bit since Phinny was a teenager.
After Phinny didn’t say no, she forgot about the whole thing as well as she could. All that spring, Phinny threw herself into her studies and firmly didn’t think about Styne Van Steen. In Boston, as she wrote her papers, she didn’t think about Styne Van Steen; as she took her photographs, she didn’t think about Styne Van Steen; and as she ran around the city with her friends, she didn’t think about Styne Van Steen.
But then on the weekends, when she came down to New York by train, Styne Van Steen was there and it was as if she were in a dream. As if in a dream, she chose the stationery that the wedding announcements went out on. Like a sleepwalker, she moved from wedding-dress fitting to fitting. When Styne Van Steen presented her with an enormous engagement ring over dinner, she had looked like a koala bear, large-eyed and silently munching on a leaf. But apparently she didn’t comprehend what was going on around her or even right in front of her. She was in a dream. A fog. A terrible haze.
Not so her father, Mr. Rotterdam. He steamed ahead, determined to have his daughter married to a suitable husband as soon as it was possible.
And sure enough, Phinny graduated (with high honors) from her college and then returned to 777 Garden Avenue and the dream of her marriage and she stayed in that dream all the way to the altar, which was set up at the end of the terrace where the birdbath usually stood.
But fortune smiled on Phinny, for when the minister said, “If there is anyone here who carries in him an objection to this union between Delphinia and Styne, let him now speak or forever hold his peace,” a voice from somewhere near the back had shouted, “Scrambled eggs and waffles!”
It was enough to break the spell. Phinny blinked a few times. She looked with eyes filled with horror at seeing Styne Van Steen standing a foot to her left. And that look of horror only grew as she shortly took in the minister, the altar, and the gathered audience. All she could do was run, as well as she could in her fancy shoes, in the direction of Sandy’s voice.
How Sandy came to be there at all was like this. Sandy arrived home early the night before, his apprenticeship having come to a premature end due to—through no fault of his own—a deadly mayonnaise. Mr. Hilleboe, the head doorman at that time, taking Sandy’s small suitcase, rode up with Sandy to the seventh floor in Otis and gave Sandy a complete report, beginning at floor one and ending at floor seven, on what was happening, or about to happen, with Phinny on the penthouse floor.
What was now really happening about and around Phinny on the day of her wedding was near total chaos and mayhem. Mr. Rotterdam was shouting. Phinny kept running. Mrs. Rotterdam was crying. Styne Van Steen was staring with his mouth agape.
Sandy grabbed Phinny’s hand and Phinny, who had at last kicked off her high heels, ran with Sandy through the crowded apartment to the front hall and Otis, Sandy practically diving for the elevator call button.
But then a funny thing happened. Though Otis was there, on the penthouse floor, the door didn’t open. Sandy and Phinny looked at the floor indicator above the elevator, which told them that Otis was there. Still the door didn’t open.
They stared at each other for a couple of ticking seconds, but then, as the noise of pursuing family members and perhaps a fiancé coming to his outraged senses grew louder from within the apartment, Phinny said, “The stairs!”
Now she ran ahead of Sandy, pulling him behind her along a passageway around Otis and through swinging doors leading to a tight stairwell. Down they plunged, seven steps, four steps, and another seven steps to the next landing. Seven steps, four steps, seven steps to the next landing. At the fifteenth floor, Sandy said, “Stop! Listen!” The stairs ran next to Otis’s elevator shaft. They stood in the middle of the top seven steps. Sandy put his ear to the wall.
“Otis’s doors just opened.” He was quiet. “He’s moving! Come on!”
They ran again, now taking the steps two at a time. “How could Otis do this to us!” shouted Phinny. “He’s betrayed us!”
They ran and in spite of the loud slapping feet—Phinny’s bare soles, Sandy’s brown loafers—they could clearly hear the slight grating of Otis’s cables.
At the eleventh floor Phinny said, “Oh my goodness! I have to stop a minute,” and she sat down heavily at the top of the four-step turn. Sandy stood above her, leaning on the banister.
They looked at each other and then at the stairway wall. The cables creaked. And then they could hear the muffled voices of the passengers inside as Otis drew nearer. It was about to pass them when the creaking of the cables suddenly stopped.
There was a momentary silence from within.
Then Styne Van Steen’s voice was heard, saying, “Hey, we’ve stopped?”
“Young man, that is rather obvious, I should think,” said Phinny’s father’s voice.
“Punch the buttons! Punch the buttons! Punch them! Punch the buttons!” said Styne.
“Young man . . .”
Then the sound of, presumably, Styne, banging on Otis’s insides, punching buttons, kicking doors.
Next a very eerie silence fell all around them; it was the silence of a noble elevator who will not be moved.
“I don’t like this!” shouted Styne. “I think I can’t breathe! I’m having one of my attacks! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
“Let’s go,” said Sandy, quietly.
Phinny started to walk down again, glancing up briefly to say, “My poor father.” And then with calm determination they got away down the remaining ten flights of stairs, through the lobby, and into the taxicab that Mr. Hilleboe hailed for them.
Thus began their life together. For the next twenty years, Sandy and Phinny roamed the world in search of interesting food to eat and fascinating avenues to walk, and both to be written about, photographed, and turned into articles and stories that were sent home to be published in sundry magazines. In those days, the hot stories were cabled not e-mailed, the cool stories were airmailed not saved to a cloud. They were dispatched from telegraph and post offices from all of the oddest of the earth’s corners.
On the way to one of these offices, some say it was in Rio de Janeiro, and some say it was Kankakee, Illinois, they stopped at the local magistrate’s office and were married.
They boarded streetcars on Zinkensdamm in Stockholm to eat boiled eels and potatoes, they came out of the subway at Moctezuma in Mexico City to eat burritos made with ancient maize tortillas, they hailed taxicabs in Singapore to take them to Clarke Quay to eat pepper crab in tamarind sauce.
Naturally, they traveled to Garden Avenue now and then. After several years, when Sandy and Phinny’s articles had made them both literary stars in New York and respected journalists the world over, Mr. Rotterdam forgave them both for having run off together so abruptly and turning his world upside down. He even allowed Sandy to cook him dinners from time to time. Mr. and Mrs. Bottom were a bit perplexed by Sandy’s good fortune, missed him terribly when he was away, but beamed with pride when they saw his byline at the top of a column of text, sometimes even on page one. Mrs. Rotterdam, too, thrilled at the sight of “D. Rotterdam” beneath a photograph, or “D. Rotterdam” running boldly with “by” above a fascinating traveler’s tale.
Even Styne Van Steen was not unhappy, as he had, the very next June, been able to marry the daughter of the owner of 740 Park Avenue, which was, after all, a better address.
When they were at 777, they rested. But after a month or two of sleeping in late, taking steam baths, and watching television in the evenings, a little something began to itch in the backs of their brains, and Sandy and Phinny were once again ready to go. Sandy inevitably would have found some hitherto unnoticed reference to far-flung foods and locales as he prowled the back stacks of quiet libraries.
“Wouldn’t you like to stay at home with us for a bit? Do a little decorating? Make some of those great home-cooked meals of yours?” pleaded Mr. Rotterdam. “I could give you a building of your very own. How about it?”
“No, thanks, Dad,” Phinny always said. “We still haven’t eaten and seen enough of the world.” So you see, along with being fearless when it came to crossing international borders, she was no longer afraid of her father, even unafraid of hurting his feelings, which was what her trouble always had been. Perhaps to soften her refusal, she always added, “But we’ll settle down someday. I promise.”
In their twentieth summer together, Sandy and Phinny found themselves in Rangoon, in Burma, with not much to do. They had each just posted a packet of stories and pictures to New York. And now the problem was what to do next. Sandy spent his afternoons in the Rangoon library. Then one day he came back to their hotel room to say, “I’ve found it!”
“What have you found, dear?” said Phinny, looking up from the writing desk.
“The most exotic food in the world! Listen to this.” Sandy began to read from a small book, bound in leather.
“ ‘As Mount Everest is to the mountaineer, as the North Pole is to the Arctic trekker, as the Mariana Trench is to the bathysphere diver, so is the Angel’s Welcome to the culinary explorer. The Angel’s Welcome—as it is known to the monks who prepare it—can only be found at one ancient monastery standing deep in a tropical forest between the toes of the foothills of the Himalayas, and is the rarest, most elusive, and most dangerous food in the world.’ ” Sandy looked up at Phinny for a moment with large eyes and a spreading smile before he continued reading. “ ‘The Angel’s Welcome is a dish made of the fruit of the Burmese Tree of Heaven, along with coconut, mango, breadfruit, durian, mushrooms, turmeric, paprika, ginger’—and a hundred other spices and oils you’ve never heard of, which I’m skipping over—‘and including a tincture of the skin secretions of the Flamboyant Heart frog, the pureed venom sac of the Bengal viper, and the ground claws of the Sumatran skink. It is so exquisite that when it is eaten by one with a palate refined to perfection by years of study, it sometimes happens that the third bite will be fatal. However, the one tasting it will pass away with an indescribable smile of peace on his lips. Serve over rice.’ ” Sandy closed the book. “What do you think?”
“Darling, but . . .” said Phinny, standing up quickly from her desk.
Sandy, stepping to her in a rush, folded her in his ample arms like a friendly bear—he had added quite a few pounds over the years. “Darling,” he said, “I know what you’re thinking. What if . . . What if . . . But what if I don’t? What if I don’t try it? I’ll be a broken man, a beaten food explorer. I’ll have to hang up my combination spoon, fork, and knife. I’ll end my days on a large sofa, with a heated frozen dinner on my spindly knees, watching daytime game shows with a faraway look in my eyes, gibbering, gibbering, What if . . . What if . . .”
Sandy hugged Phinny tighter, who squeaked a bit. “I’ve got to try it!”
He tried it.
And on the third bite, Sandy, with an indescribable smile of peace on his lips, was welcomed by the angels.
Brother Walter was very helpful. All the monks, in fact, assured and reassured and re-reassured Phinny that this was the greatest possible outcome for Sandy and each of the monks themselves aspired to this end. Still, Phinny was left heartbroken without Sandy. He had passed down an avenue she was not yet prepared to take.
“Would you like to take him home with you?” Brother Walter asked. When Phinny nodded quietly, he said, “Wait here.” Then the monks sang and chanted for seven days, at the end of which time they presented Phinny with a kind of casserole dish of Sandy’s ashes.
It took another couple of months for Phinny and Sandy to get home. When they did, most of the residents of 777 were gathered in the lobby and Otis’s door stood open.
When Phinny, her family around her, Sandy in her arms, stepped into Elevator Number Two, sometimes called Otis, and turned to face the door, the bell that usually rang quietly only once to announce the door’s closing rang slowly, loudly, sadly three times, once for Sandy, once for Phinny, and once for Otis himself, before the door rolled softly shut.
The usual two-minute ride to the penthouse took four and the ceiling light stayed dim.
Sandy’s ashes were sprinkled among the shrubbery on the north terrace. Many of the building residents had tea on the south terrace. Later, Phinny stepped into the elevator to escape the well-wishing crowd and rode up and down to have a bit of a cry with Otis.
•
There was a long, a very long silence in the building manager’s office.
“So you see, Mrs. MacDougal,” said the building manager at last, rearranging a few more reports on his desk, “old Mrs. Rotterdam-Bottom will never allow Elevator Number Two, sometimes called Otis, to be modernized. Not,” the building manager leaned forward, “until after she pushes her own last call button.”
Mrs. MacDougal picked at a little pill of wool on the front of her sweater. She pressed her lips together and sniffed. However, she had nothing to say.
