During the months of Katherine’s convalescence in Akron, Mrs. Heap came to believe that she would be unable to endure even the briefest of reunions. Again there was no quarrel, no recrimination. She said only to Mr. Heap, after the second week of their daughter’s removal, how pleasant the family atmosphere was: “And it would be a shame for everyone if we were to spoil it, because I don’t think we can call these last few years a success, really.” To which Mr. Heap certainly agreed.
It was not that Katherine had been unhelpful, but that perhaps they had less need of it than they had when the other children were younger. And it was undeniably true that without Katherine, the mood in the house had been beautifully rinsed. Most of all, although she did not say so to her husband, Mrs. Heap thought that if she saw Katherine’s face at their front door again she would want to scream.
Despite this discomfiting new aversion, she still took an active interest in Katherine’s recovery, writing faithfully twice a week and encouraging her attendance at meetings. She also made arrangements for Katherine to go East after her time in Akron, having written to a cousin on her mother’s side of the family who had established himself in New York City after the war, saying it was Katherine’s wish to see something of the country now that the other children were growing up, relating her experience at an Ohio accounting firm, and inquiring whether he might consider writing a letter of recommendation on her behalf—realizing a letter of recommendation was of course itself no guarantee of employment—and assuring him that anything he might do in the way of helping to get Katherine situated would be very welcome, and that her parents would happily contribute some money toward her settlement, if he knew of someplace decent for her to stay. He did know, he would write, and he would be happy to help; as it happened the Peabody firm was almost always looking for reliable girls, and if money was no object knew of a very good hotel. If money were some object he knew of several others, very nearly as good, and after that there were always advertisements to be found in local newspapers.
So Katherine was dispatched, first from the hospital in Akron to the home of a local member of Alcoholics Anonymous during her first few shaky months of sobriety, whom she only ever knew as Dierdre A., then to her parents’ doorstep, where she found arrangements already made for her, a trunk already packed, and a very cheerful chorus of “goodbye and good luck” from everyone she had ever known before while being driven very steadily by her mother to the station in Chillicothe, her father and the children staying behind and waving from the porch. From there, as we already know, she caught the bus bound for Cincinnati before making the Ohio State Limited, which arrived in Manhattan five days a week, a few minutes after 9:30 a.m. By three in the afternoon her trunks were unpacked in a bare room on the Biedermeier’s third floor facing east. It had been as sudden and as sweeping a change as any she had experienced, and she had a distinct feeling of having been delivered, in both a postal and the traditional sense.
By the following Wednesday she had started work as an assistant accounting clerk at Peabody on West Forty-Third Street. There she made fifty-five dollars a week, an amount that at first terrified her, a single paycheck being more money than she had ever handled at once before. It was enough money to think of squandering it. She dreaded the return of the impulse to waste above all things, remembering what a spendthrift she had been with time. There was a perverse appeal in the knowledge that today would be obliterated in the same way yesterday had been (and she had only ever experienced the wasting of time as an inevitability; it had never come to her as a question, to be decided either for or against, or a matter of will that could be accepted or resisted).
Her fellow Ohio AA members had been cheerful almost to the point of irritation on that front. This was a frequent occurrence in the early days of her sobriety—finding that everyone else shared an intimate knowledge of her own fears without, somehow, feeling any longer the weight of them. “Of course you’ll want to waste it,” Deirdre said, after Katherine had called her to confess her anxiety the night before her first payday. “I can’t think of a more sensible impulse. I see a bed, I think of sleep; I see money, and I think of how to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Fifty-five dollars is too steep a responsibility for a good alcoholic. So is fifty-five cents. But you still have to learn how to live in the world with money and other people in it, and you might as well start now.” Dierdre had written her own letter introducing Katherine to several members of AA living in the city, as well as a list of meetings she was to attend regularly. This included the Friday night gathering in the basement of Old First Church, which was where she took her first paycheck still in its envelope, jittery and miserable, and revealed what felt to her like a sign of inexplicable depravity: that somehow, getting the money that was owed to her for two weeks’ worth of work, in exactly the manner she had been promised she was going to get it and precisely on time, felt like an unfair burden, even an insult, and she resented being made responsible for it, because among other things, it meant she would have to open a bank account.
“Which I know is a perfectly ordinary thing for a person to do,” she said, “only I don’t know how I’m supposed to choose which bank to start an account with, or what I’m supposed to say once I get there, and I didn’t want to ask anyone at work how to do it—it seemed like such a backward question, and it made me feel especially conscious of the fact that almost before I became a person I was a drunk first, and worse than that a drunk who hardly even went anywhere or did anything, a drunk almost without a past—and once I do open it I’m going to have to go to the bank for the rest of my life, and there’s a part of me which really, truly, sensibly would rather die—only I came here tonight instead, so I guess I’m not quite ready to die just yet.” That there was general laughter at this last part she remarkably did not resent, possibly because there was nowhere else she would ever have said anything like it. In meetings she was almost never ashamed of having been a drunk, because it made her useful to others, but everywhere else she felt the weight of it keenly. Another fellow even offered to accompany her the next morning to the branch of her choosing, and somehow or other she had managed to accomplish the task with very little trouble.
That this was regularly the case with the little offices of independent living gave Katherine no little trouble. So often she experienced a sudden, not-very-pleasant revelation about some minor task associated with daily acts of administration: that it was the simplest thing imaginable, that there was nothing in the world that should have prevented her from having done it years ago, that her lapse into alcoholism was as inexcusable as it had been incomprehensible, and that everything she had wasted, her own time and the even more valuable time and energy of her family, her potential, her most receptive and educable years of life, the chance to form lasting friendships with people her own age, had been doubly wasted in her case, without even a colorful history to show for it. A few years only—but what years they had been, and how much had she forfeited in dissipating them! Even after her sober years in New York began to outnumber the years she had spent drinking, the self-consciousness of having burned through a critical period did not leave her, and she maintained a profound dread of failing to “do her share.” When Katherine was not at work, she went to AA meetings; lucky there were more of them in New York than anywhere else, even Ohio. When there were no meetings, she helped out around the Office for General Service, scheduling members for twelfth-step calls, taking hospital referrals, proofing the monthly bulletin, responding to letters of general inquiry, and answering the phone. When the Office for General Service was closed, she made herself useful around the Biedermeier—so useful that before the end of a year she was able to quit the accountants and move her things downstairs to take up the full-time position of first-floor director, which came with the additional benefit of being paid only fifty dollars a week. Katherine’s first arrival to the city had been in the autumn, and her first-floor removal in the height of summer, so for several years she continued to underestimate Stephen, having never seen him in action on Moving Day. Mrs. Mossler had apologized for not being able to afford any more, but Katherine had announced the cut with great relief to her Friday night fellows, seeing it as twenty dollars less to worry about every month. It had lifted a real load off her mind.
Katherine left enough of each paycheck in the bank to keep her account open, and used it for clothes and other incidentals. Her rent, already significantly reduced to begin with since becoming an employee of the hotel, she had persuaded Mrs. Mossler simply to withhold from her salary.
“If only they made more girls like you” was all she had said after Katherine made the request. “You’re very easy to make happy. You just want more responsibilities, so long as those responsibilities don’t extend to money.” In this detail, as in so many others, Mrs. Mossler proved satisfyingly understanding and incurious.
Katherine’s other expenses were few: she had received scrupulous dental care as a child and had no problems with her teeth. She set her own hair, only getting it cut every three months. She seldom went to the movies, contributed a quarter a week when they passed the hat for business expenses during meetings, and got most of her books at either the Biedermeier’s or the public library. The rest she sent home in her monthly letter.
While Katherine had still been convalescing in Ohio, Deirdre and another woman had taken her through the twelve steps. She had no objection to talk of God, especially when it was kept respectfully vague, found the principle of “usefulness to others” an invaluable fortification against the idleness of shame, and when the time came was only all too ready to make amends to her parents. Always conscious of having wronged them seriously, she now felt newly able to see her way toward an honest attempt to repair what she had broken. She did not believe she presumed too much on their affection for her, and had been adequately prepared by Dierdre and Margaret for the very real possibility of a rebuff. She felt, she believed, truly ready to own her prodigality, her selfishness, her perversity, and would not be overwhelmed by any just recrimination that might follow. But she was less well prepared for the serenity of their reception as she enumerated her wrongs to them, along with her intention to make up for them. Where she was repentant, they had been gracious; where she felt grief, they were sanguine. Without dismissing the truth of these admissions, and without ever shading into coolness, they diplomatically accepted her apologies without committing themselves to anything like a calendar of amendment. And Katherine, feeling herself to be very much in their debt, did not wish to press a conversation that they seemed to think unnecessary, if not exactly unwelcome, so it was not until quite some time had passed that she realized nothing at all had been restored between them, that they did not want to repair the ties that had once connected them, that expressing her regret had been not only presumptuous but additionally painful—had been in fact a continuation of the wrongs she had committed against them, not an alleviation. They were amiably fixed against reconciliation, and Katherine could find no purchase on the smooth surface of their politeness. Her mother answered her letters faithfully at the end of every month, acknowledging receipt and offering general updates about the family, but asked no questions and offered no response more personal than “I am glad to hear you are still attending your meetings, and hope they continue to help you.”
Mrs. Heap did not understand how sincere parental compassion could have led to such an unnatural and disordered relationship, could not have explained even to her own husband why the idea of seeing their daughter again, even after the years of her sobriety exceeded the term of her drunkenness, would have felt like a violation against decency. They had meant well. Their joint decision to oversee Katherine’s drinking had harmed her, perhaps as much as she had harmed them, and Katherine herself was earnestly penitent, had been steady and consistent in reform, made no inopportune demands for renewed closeness, continued to repay what she had cost them, and furthermore had been genuinely ill, as the Akron doctors had taken pains to inform the Heaps; all this Mrs. Heap could freely admit. But she did not suggest that she visit home again, and if the door to the bedroom that had once been Katherine’s was ever unexpectedly closed at the end of the hall, Mrs. Heap felt a hysterical urge to run down the stairs and out of the house.
She did not encourage Katherine to write to her siblings, and Katherine did not dare to do so without a clear invitation, feeling that to do so would mean provoking disloyalty, even corruption. She was not invited to visit home again, and did not ask; her parents did not suggest she quit New York City and she did not imagine it. She remembered, from what little instruction she had received from the Methodists of her youth, the doctrine of imperatives, which taught, “In essential things, unity; in doubtful things, freedom; in all things, charity,” but she could not bring herself to follow it. When Katherine doubted, she froze in place until some external force released her. She did not look for signs, since she did not trust her own interpretation of them; either something else would lift the spell of uncertainty and immobility, or it would not. In this way she plotted the boundaries of her own understanding as a series of freedoms, bound on all sides by stillness. There had been times when she thought briefly of applying to college, of leaving the city behind and tramping to Yellowstone—but she worried about somehow violating the terms of her semiofficial banishment, of incidentally spreading additional pain and shame in the exercise of too broad an independence.
“Then go and be useful to someone who wants you to be useful to them,” Deirdre had said after allowing Katherine a few minutes for tears. “And unless your parents explicitly tell you not to do it, keep sending money. That’s just about the only amends that nobody ever turns down, because it’s never intrusive. And cheer up—you’re young yet, and you haven’t even killed anybody.”
Privately Katherine thought Deirdre had failed to understand the uniqueness of her situation, that since Katherine’s drinking had been so cloistered and domestic she had relatively few people to try to make amends with, which made any failure loom disproportionately large. Deirdre in fact understood this perfectly well, and said as much: “If you’d had a longer list of people you’d hurt, you’d think that was worse, because it provided further evidence that you’re a truly bad person who’d alienated practically everyone she met. There is no unique situation for any of us. There must be at least fifty other girls in this country with practically the exact same history you’re so sure sets you apart. You just haven’t met any of them yet. But you will, so stay on the lookout.”
Whether there were in fact fifty other women with Katherine’s particular history, who drank almost exclusively indoors and under quiet parental supervision, she did not know. If there were, none of them ever came to her meetings. But nonetheless she did keep a lookout for them, and in the meantime managed to lead many a shaky newcomer through the first few steps herself; in so doing she discovered the real pleasure that came from being of use to other people. This was nothing like the polite fiction about staying at home to help her mother with the rest of the children after high school. Even when she had managed to be of actual help then—and she had been fond of the children, whatever else—it had been incidental and without design, toward no greater end than the pleasant passing of a few dry hours. If anything, these brief moments of alignment with the official story made the underlying lie seem all the more powerful.
If making fifty dollars a week had felt like too great a responsibility for her, somehow listening to someone else haltingly relate the most shameful and intimate episodes of their lives and saying, “Yes, I’ve felt that, too,” was perfectly natural, and her powers entirely equal to it. Elsewhere she might mistrust, even avoid, disclosures of privacy, but in these cases she felt as admirably suited to it as an expert craftsman feels with a sculptor’s chisel in hand. She did not mistake this usefulness for genius—she understood perfectly well that any other member of the fellowship could have served just as effectively in her place—but she no longer sought out evidence of her fatal uniqueness. To feel useful, after having done so little, to feel no more or less useful than anyone else after having so much to be ashamed of, brought with it a satisfaction no less persistent for being quiet.
And if sometimes she still felt an uneasy lurch at the sudden conjecture of what her mother thought of her, or a flash of profound loathing at the unsolicited memory of something particularly degrading, she followed the advice she had been given by the good-humored old Irishwoman whose name was, incredibly, Colleen, and who had made herself Katherine’s first sponsor in the New York fellowship.
“That sort of shame is above our pay grade, and has to be kicked upstairs,” she had said, meaning there was nothing to do but pray about it. Prayer, she had given Katherine to understand, was better utilized as a system of disposal for useless things like excessive guilt, self-pity, morbid dwelling on the past, impatience, and officiousness rather than as a department of inquiry. Besides which, she had said, if feeling ashamed over being drunk could have gotten anybody sober, there wouldn’t be a single alcoholic left in the country. So Katherine prayed that she might be relieved of shame, and spent a moment or two wondering whether the prayer had worked before she gave up worrying about it. She could never discover to her own satisfaction whether this chain of events was a genuine spiritual practice or mere sleight of hand, but something about declaring herself unqualified to cope with shame, rather than merely averse to the experience, worked in dispersing it.
It was not lost on Katherine that she had in some ways simply exchanged the framework of her parents’ house for the Biedermeier’s slightly larger one, and that any seeming difference between her old life and the new was cosmetic, not structural. Here she was not contained but essential, perched on the edge of a hundred other small independences, moving among them only as she was needed or wanted, bound only by the laws of ordinary politeness. She found life in New York often amusing, her duties in the hotel light and satisfactory, and her work in AA meaningful. If she was also convinced that life could not hold out any very exciting possibilities for her, she might very well be excused in thinking she had already used up her fair share of them.
The Biedermeier had many comfortable qualities, and some of its residents certainly considered it their home, but no hotel, however intimate, could ever be mistaken for a house. It would never have been possible for Katherine to hide in her room here, or to be locked and confined within it. Her room made up the entirety of her residence there; there was only one door. Like an atom, it could not be any further partitioned into any constituent parts that might be cut off from one another or set somehow at odds. It possessed the admirable quality of indivisibility, which often bolstered Katherine’s spirits on particularly dull or dispiriting afternoons. There was nothing that could be called subterranean in her room, no chamber that could be shut up and hidden from itself or its owner. Subversion, repression, and compartmentalization were structurally impossible. She was nonetheless conscious that her work and residence at the Biedermeier constituted a material step downward for her socially; her grandmothers and great-grandmothers had been mistresses of staffed households and occasionally members of trained profession, who would certainly have understood a “first-floor director,” whatever that might mean in theory, to in practice refer to someone junior to a housekeeper.
But practically everyone in her grandmothers’ generation had been either a mistress or a servant, most of them servants. Why compare herself to the dead ranks of the old world, especially now that she had so decisively quit it? If the compass of her life was less grand than theirs, nevertheless it was more securely her own, and she was not ultimately responsible for anyone except herself. (Did this contradict the first principle of usefulness to others? Surely not—surely a person could only be useful insofar as they had not been counted on in advance.) They might have shuddered at the prospect of having to enter a shared hallway before reaching the bathroom; she might have cringed on being helped out of a tub by a maid.
Yet if the whole world had seemed made up of mistresses and servants to Katherine’s grandmothers’ generation, theirs had never been the only world on record. Not everyone at the Biedermeier considered their residence there an indicator of decline. Pauline Carter, of the second floor, moved into the hotel only a few years after Katherine, but might have come from an entirely different planet altogether.
She had grown up in Yorkville, where she had been raised chiefly by her paternal grandparents, Judith and Clarence Carter. They were committed anarchists of the old school of the “propaganda of the deed,” and both as firm as two sinews. They had never married, although they lied about this to the census man every decade and occasionally wore cheap rings until they broke or fell off. It still deeply distressed them that several of their children had fallen into matrimony, even thirty years after the lapse. Family life, two wars, television, and the entirety of the twentieth century had failed to make any real impression on them. They dated the fall of man to 1848, to the Springtime of the Nations, that year when more than fifty European nations had, without any formal coordination, begun to throw off their governments—and within a year almost all had either been beaten into counterrevolutionary repression or given up and gone back to sleep after acquiring a new head of parliament or being granted a nominally independent second newspaper. As far as Judith and Clarence were concerned, the world had deteriorated in both strength and spirit with each subsequent year, and by rights should have gone up in flames at least twenty times over. Their own children proved, at least in comparison with the rest of the world, only mildly disappointing; some of them married, but at least none ever became useful. Both of Pauline’s parents had left New York shortly after her birth, her mother joining up with a constellation of hitchhikers with vague ambitions of traveling to Black Mountain College, her father joining the Mohegan Colony upstate. Judith and Clarence considered the baby something between an apology and a tribute, and set to work trying to redeem something out of her.
The two had known Johann Most from his days working at an explosives plant in New Jersey (in fact it had been through Most that they were first introduced), gathering information for the pamphlet he would later publish as Military Science for Revolutionaries. Most hoped to make up for the woeful gap in bomb-manufacturing knowledge between German and Austrian anarchists, whose explosives failed often and with embarrassing regularity, and Russian nihilists, who counted a number of skilled technicians in their ranks and whose explosives were reliable. He had almost no faith that Americans could be persuaded to blow up anything important, and scarcely bothered to try; the greatest violence he had experienced in-country was when Emma Goldman once horsewhipped him across the face after he ignored her during a lecture. This impressed him, but he considered it a singular act, rather than an indicator that the national spirit was worth rousing further. Both Judith and Clarence remained passionately attached to Most, since it was from him they first learned how to mix dynamite, and regularly took him into their home between prison sentences until a few months before his death in 1906. That Most’s own grandson served as an air force gunner during the Second World War and later a radio announcer for the Boston Celtics seemed to them the most hideous mutilation of his legacy imaginable, and they often tried to cheer one another up by saying that if only they had known, they would have strangled him in his crib in honor of his grandfather’s legacy.
They had named Pauline in honor of typesetter and failed assassin Paulí Pallàs, whose execution inspired a friend and comrade to bomb the Liceu opera house in Barcelona in 1893, possibly as a reminder that failure could always be turned to revolutionary account. Failure was of primary interest to Pauline’s grandparents, who had watched the world decay from a place full of anarchists to socialists to trade unionists and finally to federal employees. The family’s origins were a jumbled assortment of German Jewish, Swedish, Irish, and some Slavic strains, most of whom had found their way to Yorkville by way of Dutchland, or Little Germany, as the East Village was often referred to in the mid-nineteenth century by its neighbors. Most of these ancestors continued to slowly drift uptown for the next half century, picking up the pace after the General Slocum disaster of 1904, when more than a thousand Germans, mostly women and children, drowned during a church outing in the East River. The community’s survivors subsequently removed up to Yorkville almost at once. Pauline’s grandparents took no chances with her; she was taught to swim first as an infant in the sink, then a little later in the washtub, and when she was four was dragged down every summer to the WPA pool by her grandfather, who tied a rope around her waist and held on to the other end, walking alongside the water’s edge and keeping pace with her while she thrashed around. They often impressed upon her not only the importance of mourning the benighted state of a world that had been so rapidly drained of its revolutionary fire, but also a sense of personal responsibility to compensate for the inadequacy of her parents’ generation.
They used the Godwin family tree by way of illustrating this inherited tendency toward moral degradation, and inculcated in Pauline an early horror of the life of the only surviving child of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sir Percy Florence Shelley. Sir—what a descent in two short generations! Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, dissenters and free lovers, a radical and an atheist, gave way to Mary Shelley, a novelist and reformist, who gave way to the Third Baronet of Castle Goring, a member of the Royal Thames Yacht Club, the High Sheriff of Sussex, who was called a “gentleman” by Vanity Fair and hosted private theatricals in his home. Privacy! Privacy! Always the hateful retreat into privacy, which was the enemy of thought and progress. That this couple, who had once hoped to live to see the yoke of marriage dismantled, might have their legacy wiped away by a single worthless grandson, who lived to amuse himself and his friends on his own personal stage, on his own personal yacht—“He ought to have been strangled in his crib,” Judith would say, nearly shaking with indignation.
“It’s a wonder I survived my own infancy,” Pauline said to Judith once. “I must have been as strong as Hercules, living with you two snakes.” To this crack Judith, who had been a terribly affectionate parent, laughed with undismayed pleasure.
For Pauline, the Biedermeier was a necessary, if temporary, compromise with the world after the many sacrifices her grandparents had made to raise her. As far as she was concerned, it was located about halfway between the Ritz-Carlton and the fleshpots of Babylon. Where Katherine was delicate, Pauline was frank; where Katherine was morbid, Pauline was healthy. “Living between the two of you is terribly restful. It makes me feel so balanced by comparison,” Lucianne often said.