Anything but Still Lives: The Worlds of Edward Hopper
sure. Ringling Brothers Circus is still in town till the end of August. Or maybe we could get tickets to Oklahoma – it’s been on since March so things should have quietened down a bit by now. Or there’s a Block Dance on the Mall …’
‘Oh?’
‘Mmmmm, it’s to start a drive to collect phonograph records for the boys overseas. Good idea, don’t you think?’ She finished breakfast, stood and stretched. Everything tingled with self-knowledge and anticipation. ‘Bella will be over sometime to collect her stuff. Maybe I should take the chance to wash mine out as well.’
‘What time is he fetching you?’
‘Three.’
‘Well, I need to sort out these coupons and get down to the store.’ Only the radio was left in the room to make conversation with itself.
Bella had come and gone with tales of last evening’s concert and the boys they’d met on the train back down to Manhattan. The sodas (only sodas?) they’d had at a milk bar near Times Square. Angie had stayed quiet. She hadn’t wanted to share her special treat with anyone yet.
Now she was alone. Alone with her body. Taking care with those preparations. Yes. Long blonde hair loose and free at her back. Yes. Smooth legs leading down to high black pumps. Yes. A dab of rouge and a slick of red lipstick. Yes. And her eyes. Their natural blue edged with black. Oh, and how simple the choice of dress! Her white muslin frock from Prom Night a couple of years back. Tight now across the bust, but that was all to the better. No buttons. Pulled in beautifully at the waist. Billowy to her knees.
No. No petticoat. I want to be seen, she thought. I want him to know that I want to be seen. Her girdle hugged her hips. Everything was smooth, taut, expectant, prepared.
It was almost three. She grabbed her wide straw hat, the one with the black band, and headed out through the parlour. Her mother was there, click-clicking over yet another pair of socks with Gershwin as mood music.
‘Such a perfect song for a perfect day,’ her mother explained. ‘I just had to pull out that old record.’ She watched her daughter’s sensuous presence disappear out the door. ‘You’ll let me know when you’re going?’ she called.
‘Sure, Mama.’ In any case, the apartment door stood open, as too did the door of the building to catch the breeze.
It had been dark and cool in the parlour. Out here in the street it was baking, heat rising up off the pavement in a sizzle of steam. She stood on the bottom step and let the sun strike her full in the face, closed her eyes to better feel its kiss. Perspiration started to rise, she waited and grew damp with the expectancy of touch, that light touch of hesitant hands that grows surer with each quickening breath.
Fish are jumpin’
And the cotton is high …
The music flicked in and out of her reverie as surely as the breeze tugged the parlour curtains apart. All the while waiting.
‘Isn’t it getting too warm out there?’ her mother called. ‘He knows which house, doesn’t he? Why not come in where it’s cool?’ But no. In the absence of Toby, she’d let the sun take her higher, to – rise up singing, spread her wings, take to the sky …
She could hear the phone from the pavement. That long shrill bb-rrrr-iiiii-nn-gg seemed to hang in the still sticky air long past her mother’s answering voice. ‘Phone for you,’ she called through the curtain. ‘It’s Missus Danner.’
Angie turned carefully, slowly, on the teeter-totter heels she was now not used to wearing, felt the sweat of fantasy drip and stream down her inner thighs. Moved inside to the shade and cool of the hall, the open apartment door, her mother.
‘Angie, love, I just thought I’d call and let you know. Toby won’t be stopping by this afternoon for a soda. He got a telegram first thing – and what do you think! He’s been asked to report to Newport immediately to help with commissioning the Intrepid. He made sure he was on the first train out of Penn Station this morning. He was that excited! And I’m just so proud of him!’ The words chirruped in her ear like baby sparrow-talk.
‘Thanks for letting me know, Missus D,’ she sighed, sweat caked and pooling where it lay, grubbiness lapping the edges of her pure white muslin.
‘Aw honey – that’s the least I could do! I remember you from school fairs and the like. You were always such a pretty thing and Toby came in last night just a-gushing how sweet you are now. He was right looking forward to seeing you again, sugar, and chatting about old times. But well, there’s a war on,’ she finished brightly.
Angie let the phone slide back onto the receiver and, blinking back memories unmade, moved past clicking needles and Gershwin to the easy chair by the window.
Now hush little baby,
don’t you cry …
The Canvas of Innocence
(inspired by Hopper’s Hotel Lobby, 1943, in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art)
My name is Janet Isobel Langley. And today, Saturday, the twenty-first day of October in the year 2006, is my ninetieth birthday.
It will be quite a celebration (just family, mind, I don’t have many contemporaries left anymore) but, as you can imagine, I’ve been absolved of any organisational responsibility. I can just sit here in the living room and watch all their flurry and carry-on. When the time is right, they’ll hand me a glass of Prosecco (that’s Italy’s version champagne – my granddaughter married into a good Sicilian family) and toast my continuing robust health.
‘Bravo Granny,’ they’ll say. And – ‘Here’s to ninety more.’
But for now I’m being left to my own devices while the preparations are underway. To patiently wait my turn to be feted.
It’s been a long time since birthdays were significant for me. It doesn’t mean I don’t revere my time here on Earth, just that each day could be cause for celebration as much as any other. I’d like to celebrate Blue Sky Day as many days of the year as I can, for example, or First Daffodil Day for as many more years as I can. But those are more personal, singular. Perhaps that is the sense of the birthday as a landmark, so to speak – an agreed communal opportunity to celebrate. So, I’ll let them carry on with their preparations while I patiently wait.
It’s been a good skill to cultivate – patience. They say it’s a precursor to a long and healthy life. Just the other day I read an obituary in the New York Times (when you get to my age, that’s regular practice) about the death of purportedly the oldest man in the world. A Cuban, Benito someone, after about 120 years.
He smoked until the age of 108, but in these politically correct times, no one wants to suggest this was a factor in his longevity. Instead they dwelt on his peasant lifestyle – rationed food, work on the land, stoicism in bus queues. Sounds to me like a lifetime of patient waiting.
And yes, I could probably describe my life lessons similarly. The Depression. Thrift – not a word I hear used very much these days. Living without. Living with less. Living with loss. And the War. More living without, living with less, living with loss. By that stage I was married with a child. People often asked why I never had more kids. But the War made me think hard about what was important; I decided to concentrate on Jenna’s welfare, not divide my loyalties, my time, my thrift. Stanley. He understood. We took precautions.
Living in the hotel also gave me good practice in patient waiting. By then, Stanley had been promoted to duty manager at the Franklin on the Upper East Side. He’d wanted to join the war effort but with those flat feet of his and that wonky eye, they wanted to give him a desk job. What was the point of that? He already had a desk job helping run an essential industry!
The Franklin was a sweet establishment. Only nine floors. Nice art deco design. Well-kept, well-maintained, homey even, with all that dark wood, comfy furniture. A gentle breakfast room off the lobby. Gentle. Yes. It’s nice to be treated gentle in the mornings.
We were given the suite on the top floor as our living apartment. (Well, it was wartime. No one took a suite in wartime.)
I still have a photo from those years at the Franklin. Brought it with me
when I moved in here with the family. I mean, at my age, there aren’t many things which are precious, which you want to end your life with – to have, to hold, to remember.
Yes, this old black and white photo was taken in the lobby in 1943 – Stanley behind the reception desk, smiling, me reading a book in one of the lounge chairs. It was for an advertisement we were going to place in the newspaper, its headline: A Restful Place For Your New York R&R. A photographer had come and set up the whole scene quite nicely so we could get our message across.
You know, so many establishments were catering for the goodtime Charlies and their party girls. But we wanted a different clientele. We wanted to attract the sort of custom that needed a retreat from the everyday of wartime just outside their door. So that’s the image we presented in the paper. A woman quietly reading, a man smiling, ready to serve. A portrait of patient waiting.
Amazing, the response we had. And you know from whom? Whom we didn’t expect? Older clientele, from before the war, ones who had shied away from coming down to the City because of how glitzy and loud it had become, because of the locust plagues of sailor boys roaming the avenues each time a ship docked.
I didn’t begrudge those boys a good time. I didn’t begrudge the girls who wanted to show it to them. But it had sent a lot of Manhattan regulars fleeing the city. Funny how a simple placement