Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

  The attention did make me feel a bit better, like I existed again.

  It was also Helen’s idea to collaborate on another book, not unlike our etiquette guide, but this one with an eye, of course, toward the how-tos of motherhood.

  So Now You’ve Done It: A Practical Handbook to Handling Baby we called it.

  In my initial drafts, I wanted to tackle such burning questions as:

  Why do people feel they need to have children to act like children? Why not eat Cracker Jack in the street if that’s your pleasure? Why not scuff the leaves or romp in the snow? Cut out the damn middleman and do what you want.

  In the end, though, we aimed at—and hit—the popular middle, offering, as the jacket copy said, to help the consumer enjoy their new baby: “Here, at last, is the book which treats babies not like bundles from heaven, but like a bundle from Macy’s—something you’ve wanted in your home that always arrives C.O.D.”

  Thus was Johnny, both directly and indirectly, a well-documented and inspiring and much doted-upon child.

  Max snapped endless photographs: Johnny in the pram; me in a fur coat, pushing him on a swing in our neighborhood playground; Johnny sitting on a bench, eating an ice cream; me holding him in my lap; Johnny at seven, perhaps, playing the recorder with some lady on the piano accompanying him, or the other way around.

  As Johnny grew up, I wrote poems not only about, but with him, like “Leave Us Batten Down Our Belfries”:

  I dote on cats

  And also kittens

  But I loathe rats

  And all their rittens.

  I feel the same toward bats

  And bittens.

  * * *

  I tried not to smother him. I’m not sure I succeeded. Wholesome neglect is not in my nature; if I decide to do something I don’t hold anything back.

  Max and I turned our hearts over to Johnny. Providentially for us he was a benevolent dictator. We called him Attila, our affectionate pet name, when it was just the two of us, so wholly conquered did we feel. He was a wonderful child, sensitive and kind and extremely musical from an early age.

  And while I hadn’t even been sure I wanted him at first, it hurt my heart slightly as he grew, inevitably, up and away—loving, always, but more and more independent with the passing days. Watching him grow, I sometimes recalled that party long ago on the Upper East Side, and my otherwise-all-but-forgotten date, Bennie, when he, looking out over the city, had spoken of “the way a crane creates, then erases itself, from the skyline.” He’d been referring to how I, as a copywriter, created R.H. Macy’s, but the same metaphor might easily have been applied to how I, as a mother, was creating my son.

  Don’t get me wrong—don’t let my ambivalence distort the story.

  We still had good times.

  Max and I were still in love.

  We had fun with Johnny. The carousel in Central Park. Root beer floats. Fireflies.

  We spent a few weeks each summer at our place in Maine: family vacations at Pin Point, which Max and I had rented on our first out-of-town trip together, then bought back in 1938.

  We’d take Johnny for a swim in the lake, then leave our bathing suits on the green lawn near the white house to dry: pastel remnants of a day well spent beneath a blue sky.

  But also cold skins—old skins we could never quite put back on and feel as warm as we used to, as comfortable in.

  16

  Back to the Stars

  Any day you walk down a street and find nothing new but nothing missing counts as a good day in a city you love. People are forever tearing something down, replacing something irreplaceable.

  Walking north on Church Street, away from Delmonico’s, I can smell the Hudson River—cool and murky, full of hearty but toxic fish, shiny and reeking with fuel from the ferries.

  I want to see the water.

  I’m not on a schedule, and I’ve got the time. Wendy is likely not expecting me at her party at all, and certainly not at any particular hour. Even midnight is a negotiable deadline.

  So I turn left on Vesey. It used to lead all the way to the water’s edge, but not anymore, not exactly.

  Now I have to cross under the wreckage of the West Side Elevated Highway. They shut it down more than ten years ago—shut down the whole highway!—after a dump truck fell through it—a whole dump truck, and a sedan right after it!—at Twelfth and Gansevoort.

  Walking the surface street, I cannot deny, is scary: a bizarre no-man’s-land. There are people down here, not many, who are as good as ghosts. In order not to bother or be bothered by ghosts, you just act like you’re one of them. That’s what I do.

  And I say to myself—out loud, I mean, I actually say it, because sometimes it is to one’s advantage to sound a bit crazy—the sort of thing I always say when I am walking and need to remember to not be afraid.

  “The city is a city,” I say. “But it is also a house. This city is my house. I live in this city, and this part is being remodeled. The ceiling of the highway has been pulled down, and the floor’s been extended, and the water’s farther away. But this is my house. It is still my house.”

  Beyond the ruins of the elevated highway the old waterfront is unrecognizable. For one thing, it’s not at the front of the water any longer. I haven’t been down here in ages, but they’re building a whole new neighborhood, a planned community, a little slice of suburbanoid life right here at the edge of Manhattan’s tip: Battery Park City, that’s what it’s going to be. Constructed on landfill. Three million cubic yards of it, or so Gian—who loves quantifiable proof of humankind’s colossal ingenuity—told me last week while he was visiting for Christmas. Rock and soil and garbage excavated during the erection of the World Trade Center.

  To my disappointment, I cannot get to the water’s actual edge. The construction site is blockaded with fencing, chain-link here, barbed-wire there. All I can do is stare through the looped diamonds at the river beyond.

  I’ve always been fond of the Hudson. It’s the path by which ocean liners leave the city to take passengers across the Atlantic. That’s how Max and I left Manhattan—twice—to travel together to Italy. The first time was the best: our honeymoon cruise.

  It’s windy here tonight, making me feel less ridiculous, more vindicated, about wearing the mink. I hold on to my hat.

  When we took that first trip in the summer of 1935—June, following our city hall wedding—our vessel carried us way down the Hudson, starting from the New York Passenger Ship Terminal near Midtown. The piers were new and blindingly white, the big passenger ships having just moved there from the Chelsea Piers—more toward Wendy’s party, now that I think of it. When the ships got too big, Chelsea came to be used for cargo only.

  Max had been so excited to show me Italy. I’d been so excited to see it.

  Our second voyage, I’m sorry to say, was quite another matter.

  “Hey!” someone shouts from across the construction site. “Hey! You by the fence! What do you think you’re doing?”

  I turn around to face my inquisitor. Running across the muddy wastes is a short, wiry man in an off-brand uniform: coplike, but decidedly not a real cop.

  “Pardon me?” I say when he’s close enough to hear me without my having to shout. “I was just looking at the river. Is that not allowed?”

  He’s breathing hard from his jog, in front of me now, looking me in the eyes as if to appraise me.

  “It’s all right as long as you’re not going to jump,” he says, his eyebrows furrowing into concerned blond caterpillars.

  “Jump?” I say, and feel insulted. “To commit suicide?”

  “People do,” he says.

  I look at him, then past him. “I’d have to cut through the fence,” I say. “And then the water’s not more than ten feet below. If I were going to kill myself, I wouldn’t do it that way. What a mess. The whole goal would be for me to die quickly, not to pass torturously of blood poisoning or god knows what months after the fact.”

  “Loo
k, lady, I’m sorry I yelled at you,” he says. “I’m just trying to do my job, you know.”

  He looks about thirty. Up close his expression is more sad than angry, and his speaking voice is softer, more reedy, having lost the edge it carried when he first yelled.

  “I respect that,” I say. “When people are committed to a job.”

  The blond caterpillars huddle again. “Are you making fun of me?” he asks.

  With the streetlight behind me I can see his face better than he can see mine. “I most certainly am not,” I say.

  “It’s not even that I’m that committed,” he says. “I actually hate this job. I just don’t want anybody killing themselves or otherwise getting in trouble on my watch.”

  “So you’re a night watchman?”

  “Basically, yeah. Security guard. Rent-a-cop. Whatever you want to call it,” he says. “I don’t have any, like, authority. And it’s boring. Yelling at you is probably the most excitement I’ll have all night. And I don’t particularly get off on yelling at old ladies.”

  “I have a name,” I say. “Which is Lillian Boxfish. You?”

  “Stu,” he says. “Stu Koszinski.”

  “How did you end up with this job you don’t like, Stu?”

  Stu opens his mouth, about to tell me that he’s working, that he can’t talk right now. Then he closes it, realizing it doesn’t matter. “I’m a Vietnam vet,” he says. “I used to be in the navy. I kind of lost my footing for a while after I got back. Now here I am, guarding this construction site on the waterfront. Far cry from the high seas.”

  I think about telling him that this place is called Battery Park for the old artillery batteries they built to defend the city—even here, war is not so far off—but instead I say:

  “Thank you for your service. I’m sorry you had to do it.”

  “Really?” he says. “You’re welcome.”

  “I don’t make a habit of saying things I don’t mean, Stu,” I say.

  “A lot of people of your generation seem to think that ’Nam doesn’t rate,” he says. “You guys got the good war. I know all about that, so you don’t have to tell me.”

  “I’d never tell you that. I hate all war. I hated that war, too. My husband was in Italy from 1943 to 1945, and when he got back things between us were never quite as they were before he left.”

  “Me and my old lady got divorced when I came home,” says Stu. “I never even get to see my kid anymore.”

  “Max and I divorced as well. Though by the time we finally did I don’t think the war had much to do with it, at least not directly,” I say. “I’m sorry, Stu.”

  “It’s all right,” he says. “It’s not like it’s your fault. It’s life, right?”

  “Yes, I think so,” I say. “I think it’s life. Do you want to know what job I had and hated most?”

  “Sure,” says Stu. “Fire away.”

  “In the summer of 1945 I was freelancing—I’m a writer—and I was saying yes to everything at that point, because Max had just gotten back from Europe and we weren’t sure what was going to happen. You understand.”

  “I understand,” says Stu. “Gotta make the money while it’s there. Mind if I smoke?”

  “Not at all,” I say. “So I took a job writing limericks. You know what those are, Stu, don’t you?”

  “There once was a man from Nantucket?” he says, taking a drag.

  “Well, the ones I was writing were for a family newspaper,” I say. “But that’s basically the idea. The Sunday New York Journal-American hired me to write limericks—just the first four lines of them, actually—at $10 a pop. A year’s worth, so $520 for the batch.”

  “$520 for incomplete limericks—that’s so much money,” says Stu. “Times have changed.”

  “Don’t get me started, Stu,” I say. “This was for their ‘Best Last Line Contest.’ Readers would mail in their submissions to compete for the weekly prize. Would you like to play? It might cheer you up.”

  “That’s good of you, Lillian,” says Stu, “but I’m okay. I don’t ever get full-on cheerful. And I’m not mad that you’re here or anything. You just caught me in a moment of commitment to duty. Maybe I overreacted. Yelled more than I needed to.”

  He doesn’t need to explain or apologize. Now that he’s relaxed, I can see something clearly in his eyes, in the way he’s standing: He’s terrified to be here alone. Scared of what the job makes him do and scared, too, of whatever made him take the job in the first place. All reasonable fears, I suppose.

  “Oh, come on, Stu,” I say. “Let an old lady show off. I’m proud as a peacock that I can still remember any of them.”

  “All right,” says Stu. “Try me.”

  “Okay,” I say, and then recite, “In a moment off duty, a cop / Told a motorist, speeding, to stop. / Said the arm of the law, / ‘It may stick in your craw—’”

  I look at Stu. He looks at me. “Then what?” he says.

  “Well, then you write the last line,” I say. “That’s how it worked. That was the contest. Come on, Stu. Go for it.”

  Stu shrugs, helpless. “But I need you to take off your top?” he says.

  “Well,” I say. “That rhymes.”

  “Sorry,” says Stu. “Sorry. Just free-associating.”

  “No, no,” I say. “That’s not bad. It wouldn’t have won you any prizes from family newspapers in 1945, but nowadays who knows? One more?”

  “Sure,” says Stu, smiling, finally. “I got nowhere else to be.”

  “All right,” I say. “A gang of young rockets from Mars / Shot to earth, like exploding cigars, / But when they inspected / Our World, they elected—”

  “To turn and head back to the stars?” says Stu, crinkling his face in concentration.

  “Stu, that’s pretty,” I say. “If I were the judge, I’d give you the blue ribbon.”

  “Thanks,” he says, tossing his cigarette butt down toward the Hudson. “I better get back to work. Patrol the site and all.”

  “Of course,” I say. “Thanks for playing. I should be going, too.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “I’m going to a party. For New Year’s Eve. Up in Chelsea.”

  “And you’re walking?”

  “Yes,” I say. “But I’ll be okay.”

  “I don’t know if anyone in this city’s going to be okay,” he says. “But if anybody is, Lillian, I got a feeling it’ll be you.”

  “Stu, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me on a Hudson River construction site,” I say. “Happy New Year. I’ll shove off now. People are expecting me.”

  Not exactly true, not exactly a lie. But a thing it makes him happy to hear, and me happy to say.

  I head back the way I came, east on Vesey, toward Church, thinking of planning and cities, of battlements and landfill, and how the solid rock upon which my success was built turned out to be a snow heap and melted, melted.

  17

  Why People Do Things

  On postcards it never rains. Our honeymoon was like a postcard.

  On June 20, 1935, Max and I boarded a transatlantic liner bound for Italy.

  Lovely day, top sun deck, I wrote in the small travel journal I’d gotten for the trip—a wedding present from Helen McGoldrick and Dwight Zweigert.

  Max and I had stood at the railing together, waving white handkerchiefs—more wedding presents—monogrammed with our initials: his the same as always, mine now with a C in place of the B, although professionally I would continue to go by my real name.

  Our families—both his parents and mine, in from New Jersey and Washington, D.C., respectively—had waved back, presumably until we were out of their sight. They got along swimmingly, to our delight and surprise; they were going to lunch together after seeing us off.

  We watched until Manhattan receded behind the rooftops of Brooklyn and the ship met the open water of Gravesend Bay.

  Then we sat side by side on deck chairs, Max to read and me to write a bit more in the l
ittle blue book labeled LEST WE FORGET. Bound in leather, it had a gold lock, the kind often found on the diaries one received and was encouraged to keep as a child. Eminently pickable, those locks were just for looks; growing up, I always hid my diary from my older brother under the mattress of my bed.

  There were no secrets, though, in this one—nothing dark to confess, just pure happiness. A document boring to anyone but myself, the author.

  The least ecstatic thing I wrote as the wind picked up and the seagulls dropped away was My one regret is that I wish I had met my husband sooner.

  Young Lillian Boxfish had been a scoffer at not only love but also vacations—if we lived better day-to-day, I often suggested, we might not be so desperate to escape—but now I was prepared to sup on my own words. For years I had heard ocean voyages described with implausibly rapturous superlatives, but this particular journey really did prove itself magical.

  Along with everyone else in first class, we dressed up each day and every night. I wore velvet shoes and crêpe de chine dresses and silk nightgowns with collars of handmade lace. It felt less like getting all set for a fancy fête, more like preparing to put on a play—just the way Helen and I used to do, draping ourselves in bedclothes at the Christian Women’s Hotel—only with the whole ship for our stage and a script that we made up on the spot.

  I looked forward to glowing wines and southern sunshine.

  My frozen northern soul thawed. We were beautified by love.

  The longest trips I took prior to meeting Max were delayed rides on the subway, the El, the ferry.

  My mother had given me a book called You Meet the Nicest People on Vacations: The Traveler’s Fun Book—to express her joy, I think, that I was finally taking time to relax. Normally such persistent insistence on a socially circumscribed definition of fun-fun-fun! would have annoyed me. But the title was right: We really were meeting nice people.