On January 15th Evelyn sends out a press release announcing her retirement. On January 21st her interview with the author of Silver Moon is scheduled to take place, which is, since the announcement, a much bigger deal than it was before What had started off as a little Q and A will now be a cover story, and Evelyn is happy about it. Going out with a bang
Except that the interviewer, Colin Cauldwell, doesn’t want me to be there And he doesn’t want Allison to be there And he will not agree to the stipulation that Evelyn sticks to in all interviews that she will not talk about Michael’s suicide, or about me And he wants it to take place in his office, at nine thirty on a Saturday morning, because he’s a very busy man with very important things to do and cannot spend a whole afternoon on this little interview.
So Evelyn gets the editor of The New York Times, whose granddaughter did an internship at GV last summer, on the phone and explains the situation to him And now Colin Cauldwell is out of a job and twenty-five-year-old Joshua Phillips, author of a new memoir about growing up in a Utopian commune in California, will be coming over to Evelyn’s apartment on a Saturday afternoon, where Evelyn and Allison and I will be waiting, to talk about whatever my mother wants for as long as she wants
Joshua comes over at three o’clock, which is a good time for Evelyn—she doesn’t have to offer anyone more than a beverage Joshua is new to shoe-wearing society and he doesn’t know enough to be intimidated by the shrewish little cabal of Evelyn, Allison, and me, but he’s open and friendly and adorable, with his long hair and smooth skin, and we like him immediately He sets up his tape recorder and tells us that he’s subscribed to the Greenwich Village Review since he was fifteen He’s always dreamed of having his writing published by Evelyn Forrest and now he’ll never have the chance.
“You have no idea,” he says, “what GV has meant to people like me. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t in New York, I wasn’t even in the world. No one read that kind of stuff in the commune.”
“That’s so nice to hear,” says Evelyn, smiling. “No one read where I grew up either. I had an aunt who read romance novels, she was like the big bookworm But I’m surprised people didn’t read in the commune I would have thought they were intellectual ”
“Some people did,” Joshua says, “but it was all practical stuff You know, animal husbandry, agriculture Fiction was considered decadent. So if no one around you read, how did you ever get into books?”
“Oh, I don’t know how that happened It always made everyone so happy when I did well in school. I was going to go to Brooklyn College and become a teacher, my parents were obsessed with this I was going to be the first professional in the family A schoolteacher. So if I was reading, if I was in the library, everyone was happy. But when they found out what I was reading, that was a different story.”
“What were you reading?” Joshua asks
“Oh, all the dirty stuff D H Lawrence, Henry Miller, these were like black market books, you had to know someone who knew someone who could get them for you Once my mother caught me reading Beckett, she saw it had no spaces, no periods, she almost had a heart attack ”
“What were your parents like?” Joshua asks.
“Well, they were typical of their whole generation. Where they were from, in Poland, they were so poor that my mother’s brother died from malnutrition He starved to death His mother couldn’t produce any milk. I think they stowed away to come here ”
“They were already married?”
“I think so. I’m not sure But I know they were just teenagers, and they had known each other in Poland.”
“What did they work at?”
“It was hard for them Luckily my father was a very talented man He did carpentry, cabinetmaking, anything with wood By the time he retired he was really doing well, he did restoration for all the Victorian homes in Brooklyn. So people would pay him cash. But it was hard, he didn’t even have a bank account My parents literally kept their money in the mattress ”
“Did you have siblings?”
“Kind of,” my mother says “Another girl lived with us for a while, a girl from the neighborhood whose parents had died. Eva She died when she was seven ”
“How did she die?”
“She had a congenital heart disease, a hole in her heart, something like that. Well, that was how I really got into books to begin with, when Eva died. I missed her so much, I just wanted to escape ”
Joshua looks a little nervous as he moves on to the next topic “Your first husband, Allen Chernowitz . . he was—”
“A fag,” Evelyn interrupts, saving Joshua the stress “He was gay. I found out after we were married for only like, six months I found him in bed with another man ”
“Did you stay friends?”
“He’s still one of my best friends, Allen. Just a few weeks ago we went back to the old neighborhood together He’s in the wheelchair now, my God did he look old, but of course I wouldn’t tell him that We went back to where he had lived, where my parents had lived None of those people would have anything to do with him, you know, after he came out. He missed them all so much, his parents especially. Oh yes, they were still alive. Can you imagine? Here he was, a millionaire five times over, pining away over a bunch of immigrants in Brooklyn—plumbers, shopkeepers, butchers—who snubbed him I keep telling him, forget about it already, you’ve made all this money with the computers, you’ve got a beautiful boyfriend half your age He doesn’t want to hear it Those fucking bastards ”
I close my eyes and silently repeat shanaishwaraya Allen died of pneumonia in 1989 Joshua must know this, because he quickly changes the subject before Allison or I can intervene, and the rest of the afternoon passes without a hitch. When the article comes out, one month later, there’s no mention of the slip-up A black-and-white picture of Evelyn is on the cover, and when my mother sees it, she thinks they’re celebrating the first issue of the Greenwich Village Review.