Boston à la Carte

Susan Sheehan

 

MY MOTHER HAD decided that I would go to Wellesley before my junior year of high school in New York City had begun. It was one of the selective “Seven Sisters” schools; my mother fancied elite places. Wellesley’s advantage over Radcliffe, she informed me, was that Radcliffe was “citified” and we lived in a superior city. Wellesley, in contrast, “looks like a country club,” my mother said approvingly when she, my stepfather, and I were in New England and stopped by to inspect the campus one day in 1953.

My parents drove me, my Smith-Corona portable, and my trunk to Wellesley in the fall of 1954, took me into the town of Wellesley (always referred to as “the Vil”) to buy a bedspread, curtains, a butterfly chair, and a scatter rug at Filene’s, and left. The twenty-four freshmen in my dorm made friends quickly and went out on blind dates arranged by the sophomores in the dorm, who were kind to us in many ways. We had a limited number of times we could stay out until 11:30 p.m. (once a week) and a still more limited number of times we could be abroad until 1 a.m. (a total of fifteen, first semester), so we kept count.

The catalogue offered a pleasing array of courses and set out a half-dozen “distribution requirements,” which conjured up a Chinese menu of that era. Freshman English was the only first-year requirement. I opted for French Literature, Astronomy, Sociology and Anthropology, and History of Art 100. I would have classes six days a week: Saturday-morning classes were impossible for freshmen to avoid.

I was usually glad if an assignment took me out into what I began to consider the real world: everything beyond Wellesley’s gates. It was fun to go into the Vil for a Sociology assignment to observe “Motorists’ Behavior at a Stop Sign Located at a Cross-Traffic Intersection.” Notebook in hand, I stood at the corner of the college bookstore and watched 75 motorists: 41 came to a full stop, 17 to a near stop, 11 slowed down slightly, and 6 continued at high speed. Then, per instructions, I selected “a well-defined norm operative in the community” and worked out “a procedure for observing four or five categories ranging from perfect conformance to disregard of the norm.” I chose the number of dorm mates who were early, on time, slightly late, or very late to dinner. Not surprisingly, Wellesley students were in better conformance to the norm than the motorists. On my own I proffered another example. I counted the amount of drinking done at a suite at a Harvard house one Saturday evening. Three people abstained from any alcoholic beverage, 12 had one or two drinks, 47 had three or four drinks, and 8 had five or more drinks. My professor had the humor to scrawl in red at the bottom of the Dunster experiment: “How did you manage to get this data?”

I rejoiced when Thanksgiving came and I could go home to be with family and old friends, sleep in soft sheets (we rented rough towels, a pillowcase, and one sheet per week from the college linen service, with the top sheet becoming the bottom sheet on weekly change-of-linen day), and eat good food. My mother never cooked, but a succession of housekeepers had been taught to prepare my grandmother’s wonderful dishes from the Austro-Hungarian empire: Wiener schnitzel, veal goulash, and paprika chicken. Mystery meat was the centerpiece of most Wellesley dinners. Lunches featuring carrot and raisin salad were a cultural shock to me. Liver and Friday’s fish were worse. I had sold clothes at a department store the summer before starting Wellesley, and waited on tables at Sun Valley during the three summers between college years, and from my earnings had enough money to pay for textbooks, and for welcome dinners with classmates on Fridays at Howard Johnson’s in the Vil.

The Vil is still described on Wellesley’s website as “tidy, safe, and sweet.” The Vil was sweet on Friday evenings, but I was a city mouse, not a town or country mouse, and longed to be in Boston or Cambridge during my free time. Like all Wellesley students of our era, we were not permitted to have cars on campus until the last few weeks of senior year. Like many classmates, I lacked a Harvard beau with wheels. And like most of my friends, I didn’t have the money to travel into Boston by cab: I was a prisoner of public transportation. Once, during freshman year, I had to go to the Busch-Reisinger Museum of Germanic Culture in Cambridge to research an Art History 100 paper, an excursion of over two hours each way, which included a bus to Newtonville, a walk to Watertown, and a trolley to Harvard Square. Radcliffe students went easily to the Brattle Theatre, Hasty Pudding productions, Harvard football games, museums, tryouts of Broadway plays, and surely had far more opportunities to imbibe at Dunster. I lamented Wellesley’s farawayness, yet I never did apply to transfer to Radcliffe. In my generation, the primary reason to switch to another college was to be where a fiancé was studying. A considerable number of classmates left Wellesley after a year or two and married before graduation. I remained there and graduated single. On graduation day I resolved to never again board a train in New York and disembark at Route 128, the somnolent stop nearest college. My rail destination in the future would be Boston’s monumental and bustling South Station. That is perhaps the only resolution I have made in life that I have kept. In June 1958 I returned to Manhattan, soon took a job as a fact checker on a magazine, and became a writer for The New Yorker the following year.

I started out writing Talk of the Town stories and “casuals,” as short, light pieces were called, before turning to long, serious pieces of nonfiction that became books. Staff writers were paid by the piece, so to supplement my capricious paychecks, I accepted assignments from other magazines with alacrity. In 1962, in order to write “The Tourist’s New York” for Holiday magazine, I left my modest apartment on East Forty-eighth Street on a Wednesday and taxied to the Hotel Manhattan, at Forty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue. I would diligently practice tourism in my own backyard. I spent a good part of Thursday on a Circle Line boat, sailing counterclockwise around Manhattan, charmed by the sights but not by the guide’s gallimaufry of statistics, sales pitches, and wisecracks. On Friday’s all-day bus tour of Manhattan I was subjected to a verbal drubbing from two prattling guides. Saturday evening, I endured a Gray Line tour of New York with fifty-three other night-lifers. The less written about the Latin Quarter, Sammy’s Bowery Follies, and a deservedly obscure night spot in Brooklyn, the better. I was glad to return home on Sunday, having earned enough to pay the $105 monthly rent on my apartment for a year. I was cured of comprehensive sightseeing excursions. I would in the future travel to Boston/Cambridge (I prefer to think of the two as one place) and other cities and see them à la carte.

 

I have had a couple of dozen reasons to go to Boston over the past half century. On a visit there in the 1970s to sign a book contract with Houghton Mifflin (my publisher back then), I spent an afternoon at Trinity Church, Henry Hobson Richardson’s splendid Romanesque building with its John La Farge stained-glass windows, ventured out to Fenway Park to see my first Red Sox home game, and was treated by my editor to dinner at Locke-Ober, one of the city’s oldest and costliest restaurants. From escargots to baked Alaska, by way of lobster and endive salad, Locke-Ober surpassed my expectations.

On a book publicity tour, also in the seventies, which had me scurrying from TV and radio studios to newspaper offices, I saw the Boston Celtics play, attended a performance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and had coffee at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria. By then I was married to a Harvard alumnus who spoke often of the hours he’d wasted with friends from the Advocate, the college’s literary magazine, at “the Bick.” Like Locke-Ober, the Hayes-Bickford has closed. As E. B. White eloquently put it in a foreword to his jewel box of a book, Here Is New York, when describing a hotel he had frequented a year earlier, “The Lafayette Hotel, mentioned in passing, has passed despite the mention.”

After I chose to write the biography of Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher, I flew to Boston from our home in Washington, in April 1975, and crisscrossed Cambridge and Boston for four days, interviewing fourteen of AAK’s authors, former employees, publisher friends, and historian friends, among them William L. Langer (with whom my husband had studied Ottoman history); Frank Freidel; Henry Laughlin; Julia Child and her husband, Paul (in their kitchen); Louis Kronenberger; Walter Muir Whitehill and his wife, Jane (at the Boston Athenaeum); Wendy Beck (Samuel Eliot Morison’s daughter); Dorothy Abbe (in the William Addison Dwiggins rooms at the Boston Public Library; David Donald and his wife, Hilda; and John Updike, then between marriages and living in a rented apartment on Beacon Street. I didn’t record the weather in my diary, but Updike surely nailed it in his inscription to me of his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair: “in memory of a poorhousy kind of day.”

I tend to remember weather only if it is unexpectedly dreadful, as it was on April 6, 1982. I had been in New York City from April 4 to 6, to appear on the Today show and several radio shows for a new book, when it started to snow prettily. Houghton Mifflin canceled the rest of the day’s schedule and insisted I take the next train to Boston, where publicity events deemed more important had been booked for April 7. The train departed New York at 5:40 in the afternoon, but was delayed by frozen track switches along its northward way. At 1 a.m. it reached South Station, where there were no taxis. Snow-bootless, I half walked, half hitchhiked to the Parker House, where the previous night’s guests, stranded there by the late-winter storm, had kept their rooms. I crashed on a sofa in the lobby at 3 a.m. The Boston part of this tour is a blur, with some of the day shows canceled by the deep snow and ice but the late-night shows airing on schedule. After peddling the book sleepily on one program called Five Live All Night, I returned to the Parker House at 3 a.m. and flew home to Washington, which had escaped the blizzard, a few hours later.

In December 1987, I contrived a brief trip to Boston with Brigitte Weeks, editor of the Washington Post’s Book World section. Brigitte and I were serving on the 1988 Pulitzer Prize general-nonfiction jury with Edward O. Wilson, then Harvard’s Baird Professor of Science and its curator in entomology. Professor Wilson was overwhelmed by academic duties and consented to having the jury convene in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. There, in addition to composing citations for the three books the Pulitzer rules permitted us to nominate, in alphabetical order, he graciously obliged us with a private lecture on the 368,419 formicid friends in his office (the number and the words are those of Ed Wilson, the country’s premier insect man). I rarely venture to Boston without walking to the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and did so on that occasion too. It was the last time I would see the latter museum before the 1990 theft of thirteen masterworks from the collection. The museum’s empty frames give the Gardner a melancholy air.

I was frequently in Boston in the 1990s. An assignment to write about Kenneth Noland, the color field painter, took me to an off-limits area of the Fogg Museum (where two Nolands were in storage) and to I. M. Pei’s Jerome Wiesner Building at MIT, where Noland, in collaboration with two other artists, had boldly addressed the use of color in architecture by painting on the building’s metal skin. In the first decade of the new century, when I revisited the Wiesner, Noland’s mural, Here-There, had been restored to its original bright hues. On my first Noland visit I took in a Boston Bruins game. I’d grown up following the New York Yankees, Rangers, and Knicks, and felt I’d completed a Boston trifecta.

When I attended my thirty-fifth Wellesley reunion, in June 1993, I stayed with a classmate in Boston, preferring the reverse commute. My classmate had dedicated a significant part of the previous five years to volunteering at the Vilna Shul, Boston’s last immigrant synagogue, which was in the process of being transformed into a museum and cultural center, and showed me through it with understandable pride. We also meandered through the Cambridge antique shops on Monsignor O’Brien Highway.

 

Whatever happens in your past, you often get second chances, and sometimes even twentieth chances. As a consequence of my travel-lazy college years, I had to play catch-up in getting to know the Boston of centuries past, which has proved to be a fortunate way of making the city’s acquaintance. Boston underwent a building boom in the 1960s and 1970s, so I was able to see the skyline in real time.

Henry N. Cobb of I. M. Pei & Partners designed my favorite skyscraper in Boston, the John Hancock Tower. At sixty stories, it is the city’s tallest building and the one I most admire. At first I was attracted to it because it was mysterious, and I am partial to mysteries. For years, its windowpanes kept breaking and falling to the ground, and, after being repaired, repeated the breaking and crashing cycle. At last, engineers solved the window mystery dilemma and others (the building swayed in the wind, giving occupants of its upper stories motion sickness), and the beautiful blue-windowed, minimalist, parallelogram-shaped Hancock Building was completed in 1976, eight years after construction had begun. I am now especially drawn to the Hancock because it has defied opponents who feared it would detract from its near neighbor, Trinity Church, a National Historic Landmark. Instead, the brown and red granite and sandstone church, finished ninety-nine years earlier, has never appeared more magnificent than when reflected in the Hancock’s icy blue panes.

 

Before recently flying to Kenya for a week, I didn’t read a guidebook. Instead, I reread Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa and Beryl Markham’s West with the Night. From early childhood, my most vivid visions of places not my own have come from fictional writing. On one of my visits to Cambridge to talk to the Nieman fellows, I booked a room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, an extravagance inspired by E. B. White’s third and final children’s book, The Trumpet of the Swan. Louis, White’s mute and erudite trumpeter swan, had spent the night at this luxurious hostelry before he started playing the trumpet alongside the swan boats on the pond in Boston’s Public Garden.

Landing at Logan isn’t as exotic an experience as, say, landing in Nairobi—no on-the-spot visa to procure, no dollars to convert to shillings, no Swahili phrasebook to memorize—but starting at the baggage claim and continuing to the taxi line, I know from the prevalence of “Pahk your cah in Hahvad Yahd”–accented English that I am not in Kansas. A quick bowl of clam chowder and a side of beans at one of Logan’s airport eateries confirms my presence in Boston.

I experienced fewer difficulties than Louis had when I presented myself at the front desk of the Ritz: I lack plumage, so no clerk could tell me at the outset that the hotel did not accommodate birds. Like Louis, I had luggage—the clerk seemed to consider that another significant requisite for accepting swan-guests—although my suitcase on wheels was less remarkable than Louis’s trumpet, moneybag, slate, chalk pencil, and the shiny medal he had been awarded for saving the life of Applegate Skinner, an obnoxious child who disliked birds but had tipped over a canoe he had been forbidden to take out and was on the verge of drowning. Nor did the clerk express misgivings that I would mess up the room, although surely many previous author-guests had been guilty of the spillage that results from overimbibing. My personal habits were not questioned either, as Louis’s were when he came to the Ritz with the Boatman who would be his employer, starting the following morning.

“I can’t allow a large bird to occupy one of our beds—it might put us out of business,” Louis and the Boatman had been told. “Other guests might complain.”

“I sleep in the bathtub,” Louis wrote on his slate. “Will not disturb bed.”

I registered quickly and rode the elevator to the seventh floor; I had requested a room on the floor to which a bellboy had escorted Louis. I asked for room service, attempting to duplicate Louis’s order of twelve watercress sandwiches, eleven with mayonnaise, one without. After sampling the first sandwich, Louis concluded he didn’t fancy mayo—or sandwich bread either—and really wanted just the watercress. Room service regretted to inform me that no watercress sandwiches were available. I was grateful—I am not fond of watercress—and ordered a cheese omelet. I can’t play the trumpet, as Louis had done before being advised that guests at the Ritz were not allowed to play brass instruments in the bedrooms, so I turned on the television set for diversion. I took a plain bath rather than a swan shower-bath, and didn’t fall asleep in a full tub of cold water. I lay down on a nice firm mattress. With my head on two plump but fluffy down pillows, the feathers supplied by I-didn’t-care-to-know what species of waterfowl, I took my copy of The Trumpet of the Swan from the night table. Our first daughter was born in 1967, our second in 1969; the book had been published in 1970. I had often read it aloud to the girls when they were young, and read it that evening with silent pleasure. Before switching off the light, I turned to the flyleaf to enjoy again the elegance with which E. B. White, who wrote the most lambent prose of all the writers I have known, had inscribed the book: “To Maria Gregory Sheehan and Catherine Fair Sheehan” with “greetings from the old cob, E. B. White.”

The next morning, I rode on one of the swan boats, imagining Louis gliding alongside the painted paddleboat and playing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

. . . Life is but a dream.