Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

  * * *

  When we arrived, we found the land as grand as the sea. The churches and domes, the streets and the railroads, the food and museums, the ruins and the expanse of the sun-drenched countryside.

  Every cathedral we saw, every aqueduct and amphitheater, every great work of art delivered a shock: popping up where you’d least expect it, bigger and brighter than life—as if done up in an advertising style they always taught us to avoid at R.H. Macy’s, a style that would come to be known as hellzapoppin’.

  Crude but effective, these ads grabbed for attention in an atmosphere of vertiginous zaniness, presenting their wares in odd settings, absurdly out of scale. A standard example might show a gargantuan package of the product dwarfing a surrounding crowd of customers evincing their bug-eyed, spasmodic approval—exactly how Max and I felt standing in the shadow of, say, the Cathedral of Milan, or Michelangelo’s David. Everything in Italy was hellzapoppin’.

  * * *

  If someone had asked him, years later, what my tragedy was, Max might have answered that I was a workaholic.

  I might have answered that that was not my tragedy, actually, but rather was what kept me from tragedy for so long.

  Even on our honeymoon I was working, if only a little. I brought books along—mostly for entertainment, but also for continuing education, because that, to me, was entertaining also. It was light stuff—one called Women in Cosmetic Advertising, for instance—and no more taxing than the women’s magazines I frequently wrote for. The book even had a quiz, which of course I took, writing directly in the margins, because it was my book, and because I liked writing in my books.

  Max and I were sitting on the terrace of our hotel in Milan, hometown of his parents. We had been traveling by rail all over the interior of the country.

  I pulled the book out of my bag and set it on the table with our caffellatte and rolls with jam.

  “Come on, Max,” I said. “Let’s play a game.”

  “All right, Lils,” he said, used, by now, to my penchant for this type of fun; I was equally avid about comment cards and reader surveys.

  “Try answering this list of questions about yourself, sincerely ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’” I read aloud.

  “I can’t be anything but sincere when I’m around you, Lils,” he said.

  And then I read:

  “One. Have you changed your hairstyle at least once in the last five years?”

  Yes for me. No for Max.

  “Two. When you were feeling very ‘down’ did you ever buy a new hat just to cheer yourself up? (Did it?)”

  Yes for me. Yes for Max. Our hat collections were quite formidable.

  “Three. In a train, bus, or streetcar, would you rather study the people around you than read even the most exciting new book?”

  Yes for me. Yes for Max. We’d make up stories about them together.

  “Four. Did you ever speculate—just once—on how false eyelashes would look on you?”

  Yes for me. No for Max. Though he never thought I needed them, and I agreed.

  “Five. Do you read ‘Advice to the Lovelorn’ in your daily paper?”

  Yes for me. Yes for Max. Especially now that we’d found each other. There was something gratifying in reading about the lovelorn when one had reason to believe, however mistakenly, that one would never again be lovelorn.

  “Six. Do you like women—at least as well as you do men?”

  Yes for me. Yes for Max.

  “Seven. Can you think of at least one way to improve the appearance of each of your five best friends?”

  Yes for me, excepting Helen, who looked fantastic, always. Yes for Max. He appreciated stylishness as much as I did. In Milan for one day, we’d already had him fitted for three bespoke suits. One just couldn’t find as high a quality, even in Manhattan.

  “Eight. Are you interested in why people do things? (Are you also interested in what they do?)”

  Yes for me. No for Max, unfortunately.

  “Nine. Do you think requited love should be the most important aim of most women?”

  No for me. Yes for Max.

  “Ten. Have you ever, that you remember, spoken to a stranger in an emergency, a shared emotion, a sudden excess of friendliness—and enjoyed it?”

  Yes for me, a hundred times on this trip already. Yes for Max, to a considerably lesser extent.

  “It’s a ten-question quiz, right?” he said.

  “Correct,” I said. “That’s it. Now let’s score it up.”

  And then I read: “Give yourself ten points for each of these questions you’ve answered with a ‘Yes.’ If you’ve scored a sixty, stay with us—you can earn a living at cosmetics writing; seventy, you should go up in the world if you enter the profession; eighty or above means that you have the makings of a good advertising woman!”

  “Tell me, professor,” Max said, “how’d we stack up?”

  “I got ninety points,” I said.

  “I suppose you might have the makings of a good advertising woman,” he said, and laughed.

  “You got seventy,” I said. “So might you.”

  As we finished our breakfast, I thought of how it was true: Max could be extremely persuasive. The only conflict we’d had on that trip, in fact, came from his attempts to convince me to do what I’d sworn I was unconvinceable on.

  He brought it up again that afternoon, as we strolled through the public gardens. I was thrilling to the exotic flowers, everywhere in bloom.

  “Lils,” he said. “If you like this, you’ll love living in Rutherford. We can have a garden of our own in back of our house. We can fill the whole front yard with flowers that are just like these. My pops can order the seeds.”

  Ever since we’d left the New York Passenger Ship Terminal, Max had been trying off and on to get me to agree that what we really needed to do was move to the suburbs.

  Arguing against comments like these had gotten me nowhere, so I’d taken to simply ignoring them. “Let me take your picture by these roses,” I said.

  While I treasured the occasional rural retreat—I adored Pin Point, for instance, the place in Maine we’d rented together the previous fall—the suburbs had always seemed mealy and unresolved. I understood that their in-between-ness—neither town nor country!—was supposed to be their very appeal, but I didn’t find it appealing. I always wanted either to be in, or get away from the city, not to just be close to the city. Were I off in the pastoral hills shingling my own roof or riding a horse, well then, what fun. And were I catching the subway for a night at the opera, well then, hooray. But in the suburbs I could enjoy none of those pursuits with ease.

  As I snapped the rosy photos of Max for our scrapbook, I tried to convince myself, against my best intuitions, that I might be wrong. That perhaps the suburbs would turn out to be like ocean voyages, or Italian vacations: laden with suspicious superlatives, but actually magical. But where is the shuffleboard in the suburbs? my intuitions asked. Where are the mysterious ports of call? The engaging strangers?

  Max smiled widely until I told him he could relax. He came to my side and put his arm around my shoulder, and I thought about how happy he made me and how badly I wanted to make him happy in return.

  On the ship back to New York late that July, I conceded. A bad idea, I knew, but I had come to see that the only way out of this suburban scheme of his was going to be through it.

  * * *

  After we moved to our “cottage in the Garden State” as the real estate agent called it, I kept paying the rent on my place in Greenwich Village. Thank god I did, because the suburbs were god-awful.

  I lost all my poetry-writing time to catching buses and trains. Worse, there was virtually no more walking, my beloved walking, to get to and from work—just the crushed five-minute dash from Penn Station to R.H. Macy’s.

  Without the walking, I was more exhausted than I’d ever been with it.

  No one walked in the suburbs. Our neighbors noted this with pride, but it was nothing to b
e proud of.

  Max and I were back to living in Manhattan within two months. Whether the bulbs he planted in the first weeks of our Garden State sojourn ever sprouted and bloomed I never learned, and I could never quite bring myself to care. What rescued me, I think, was Max’s realization that he might not want to be within mere blocks of his parents any longer—after living under their roof his entire life—now that he had a wife.

  On the day he agreed with me that we were, undeniably, a city couple, I think I was as happy as I’d been on the day I said yes to his proposal of marriage.

  Because my abode was small, especially for two, we had to look all over again for a new place to reside.

  We settled on East Thirty-Sixth Street in Murray Hill, a space that immediately felt like home to both of us: ten reasonable stories of sturdy red brick, with a doorman and an elevator and a live-in super.

  We chose a three-bedroom, Max populating the extra two with future children in his mind, me mentally decorating the one with the best light as my in-home office. The building had quiet hallways and a burnt-toast smell on the afternoon that we happened to view it.

  I associated that smell with comfort and safety forever after. Sometimes, in my darker hours, I would lightly burn toast in our toaster—from R.H. Macy’s, naturally—and it would make me feel better.

  Years later, I would come to wonder why I even had that memory of standing in the empty apartment, soon to be ours, Max holding my hand and me breathing in toast. I couldn’t access that beauty—tangibly, it was as lost to me as that first trip to Italy: trivial and evanescent, but still so real.

  18

  Sulfur and Molasses

  I never like to walk back the same way that I came if I can help it, but sometimes I can’t help it.

  To get away from the waterfront I have to take Vesey again, but at Church Street I head north so as not to duplicate my earlier route down Broadway, and also because I need to keep west to get to Chelsea.

  I bear left onto Sixth Avenue, now Avenue of the Americas, though nobody outside of travel guides really calls it that. The new name came just after the war, courtesy of Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor whom both I and Max’s family’s cherished above all others: I owing to his reform politics, the Caputos owing to his being Italian. “The Little Flower,” they always called him, which is what his first name literally meant, and he was small and florid, five-or-so feet tall.

  The buildings on my left fall away into Beach Street Park, a triangle of darkness gathered behind the ghostly column of a plane-tree trunk. Across the street, the AT&T Long Lines Building blacks out the eastern sky, interrupted by a sifting of lit windows: devoted souls tending the pulse in the wires that speed voices around the globe—the voice of Skip’s fare maybe among them, dealing with the shit going down in Tokyo. I quicken my pace until I’m among street lamps and shop windows again.

  Oftentimes, what causes old people to become poor walkers is poor walking. One must bend one’s knees. One must lift one’s feet up. One must be unceasing. One mustn’t shuffle.

  As I move ahead, I notice that my gait has taken on an uncharacteristic glide, and I realize that it’s trying to match the beat of the song I heard earlier tonight from the window of that Dodge in Murray Hill, a beat that’s been playing unobtrusively in my head ever since. A disco rhythm, I suppose. I never warmed to disco—which always struck me as crass yet flaccid, all buildup with no payoff—but rap I like. That’s because of the words, of course, which instead of being chained to some inane melody are freed to lead the rappers where they will, by way of their own intrinsic music. So it seems, at least, to my untrained ear. Much of it is utter nonsense, to be sure. As with the best nonsense, some of it seems as if it were made up on the spot, and also as if it could be a thousand years old.

  It makes me happy, and also sad, to think that this is where playful language is cherished now, and where the verbosity that I and my clever friends prized in our youth has gone to reside: the slums. Words don’t cost a penny; during the Depression, they were all many of us had. I used them to make a fortune.

  Later, people got richer, and they seemed to lose interest in what could be gotten for free. The way I spoke to them changed accordingly. I think back sometimes in near disbelief on my professional vocabulary of 1929, the ads of yesteryear that could never fly today. Our ads changed with the times, of course. Did the times change with our ads? Did the world change or did I change it?

  The blocks around Washington Square Park are best avoided in the dark, and now’s a fine time to commence my westward drift: I have a quick stop I’d like to make for auld lang syne. Left on Greenwich, toward Seventh Avenue.

  At this moment—the last hours of 1984, in a decaying city populated by bums and dope addicts and thuggish teenagers and the pistol-packing commuters who apparently shoot them for sport—it is difficult to believe that the residents of Manhattan ever did anything so refined as “call on” one another. It’s harder still to believe that the making of these social calls necessitated the ownership of cards—calling cards—that they would present in order to announce a visit, or to commemorate an attempt at one in instances where the resident was indisposed or not at home. Upon such cards, various ornaments—roses, perhaps, or doves—often occupied a spot below the bearer’s name. My Aunt Sadie Boxfish had forget-me-nots on hers. She always left me one on her rare visits to Washington, D.C., when I was a child, and I kept them all.

  Aunt Sadie worked as a nurse at St. Vincent’s Hospital, right where I stand.

  She went to the school of nursing here, in fact. This is where she was “capped,” as they called it, with her trim white hat, back in the days when horse-drawn ambulances still clattered over cobblestones.

  In 1911 she had seen, but had not treated—they had been untreatable for being dead—the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Garment workers, she told me when she visited us the summer after that disaster, those were the victims. Trapped in a sweatshop, locked in by the owners, 146 people—123 of them women—alive and at work and then suddenly dead. Some weren’t much older than I was at the time: as young as fourteen. Most were under twenty-three. Most had burned to death. Some had kissed or held hands and then jumped from the windows and died that way.

  The only time I saw my Aunt Sadie cry was when she told me that story. We were on a bench at the National Zoo, where we’d often go to talk outside of Mother’s disapproving earshot; my memories of her tales are all incongruously accompanied by the hoots and howls of jungle creatures that we rarely actually got around to seeing. Sadie felt it was important for a young person like me to hear accounts of the injustices she’d witnessed, which at any rate were never far from her mind. Mother, naturally, thought that people of good character ought to limit their consideration of such things to policies that might prevent them, and not to dwell on the indignity of their miserable particulars. I, naturally, was entirely with Sadie on this issue—but in my typical fashion, what I took from her stories was often not what she’d meant them to impart. When I finally left home, my aim was not to bring succor to the oppressed, but rather to find adventure in the wilds of Manhattan.

  Sadie was at St. Vincent’s, too, when the Titanic sank, not much more than a year after the factory fire. A cold night for April, she said—the temperature probably about what it is tonight: a warm night for late December, but colder by the minute.

  Ambulances pass in and out, their sirens wailing, and people on foot in various forms of distress walk or are assisted inside. Standing curbside, I watch them through the clouds of my own breath.

  As much a listener as a talker, Sadie was the first person I remember encouraging me to write, treating my girlish verses with seriousness. I like to imagine her among the nurses who helped save the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s uncle, thereby earning that poet her middle name. By 1953, when Dylan Thomas was brought here to die after his alcoholic self-poisoning, Sadie was long gone: lost in the flu epidemic of 1918, only fifty years o
ld.

  She was even longer gone in early 1955, when I was admitted briefly to St. Vincent’s, before they handed me off to specialists. I hope her ghost was nowhere on the premises, since the sorry shape I was in was bound to have upset her. I’m glad I was too far out of my wits at the time to consider what her shade might have made of me.

  “What do you think you’re staring at?”

  The voice—female, with a Spanish accent—comes from a small, wide figure leaning against a pillar just outside the sliding glass doors of the emergency room entrance.

  “Oh dear,” I say. “Was I staring?”

  “You were looking right at me,” she says. “What, you never saw a pregnant lady before?”

  She is pregnant, it’s true: Her coat is open at the front despite the cold, presumably because she is too rotund to zip it. She hasn’t got a hat, and her thick black hair is curly and disheveled.

  “Seen one?” I say. “I’ve been one. But I apologize. I was off somewhere else in my mind. Are you all right?”

  “Not really,” she says, clutching her abdomen. “I’m in a lot of pain. I’m about to have this baby.”

  “Oh my,” I say, and step slowly closer. “Is anyone coming to help you?”

  “The father,” she says. “He dropped me off. He’s trying to park. He wanted to drive, this being such a big occasion. Back when we were thinking this over months ago, I said we should just take the train. But with that vigilante guy on the loose, no way. Now Luis is trying to park, and I don’t even know where he’s at.”

  “Why didn’t you just take a cab?”

  “Lady,” she says, “we got a lot on our minds right now.”

  “I suppose you do.”

  “I was crazy to have a baby,” she says. “I hate this.”

  “It is awful,” I say. “I only had one, and I still remember. But it’ll be over soon. And do you know the best part? With a baby, you’ll go crazy twice as fast.”