After boning up on the subject, in a book, she shows me, on her finger, just how long the child in her womb now is. And it is growing larger, very slowly. And so is she. The child is safe inside her, and she is safe so long as she remains a prisoner in this top-floor apartment. The doctor has forbidden her to use the stairs. Everybody comes to see her, instead — including an emanation from the silent apartment two floors below. A black man, a stranger, suddenly appears at the top of the stairs. His intention, unclear but frightening, shows in his face, in his eyes. But the goddess Bastet is at work again, and the man comes on Albertha’s day, and she, with a stream of such foulmouthed cursing as Margaret has never heard in her life, sends him running down the stairs. If he had come on a day that was not Albertha’s day, when Margaret was there alone — But this holds true for everything, good or bad.
MARGARET’S face grows rounder, and she no longer has a secret that must be kept from me. The days while I am at the office are not lonely, and time is an unbroken landscape of daydreaming. When I get home at six o’clock, I creep in under the roof of the spell she is under, and am allowed into the daydream. But what shall we tell Miss Mattie Gessner when she comes to investigate the way we live?
The apartment, feeling our inattention, begins to withdraw from us sadly. And then something else unexpected happens. The landlord, having achieved perfection, having created the Peaceable Kingdom on Thirty-sixth Street, is restless and wants to begin all over again. “You’ll be sorry,” his wife tells him, stroking Floribunda’s ear, and he is. But by that time they are living uptown, in a much less handsome house in the Nineties — a house that needs fixing from top to bottom. But it will never have any style, and it is filled with disagreeable tenants who do not pay their rent on time. On Thirty-sixth Street we have a new landlord, and in no time his hand is on everything. He hangs a cheap print of van Gogh’s The Drawbridge in the downstairs foyer. We are obliged to take down the cardboard barricade and keep our doors closed. Hardly a day passes without some maddening new improvement. The artist is the first to go. Then we give notice; how is Margaret to carry the baby, the stroller, the package from the drugstore, etc., up four flights of stairs? What better place can there be to bring up a child in? the marble fireplace asks, remembering the eighteen-eighties, when this was a one-family house and our top-floor living room was the nursery. The stairway to the roof was devoted to the previous tenant (the man who lived in the midst of a monumental clutter) and says bitterly, in the night, when we are not awake to hear, They seem as much a part of your life as the doors and windows, and then it turns out that they are not a part of your life at all. The moving men come and cart all the furniture away, and the people go down to the street, and that’s the last you see of them.…
What will the fireplace and the stairway to the roof say when they discover that they are about to be shut off forever from the front room? The landlord is planning to divide our apartment into two apartments and charge the same for each that he is now getting for the floor-through. For every evil under the sun there is a remedy or there is none. I soak the mural of the children flying kites, hoping to remove it intact and put it up somewhere in the house in the country. The paper tears no matter how gently I pull it loose from the wall, and comes off in little pieces, which end up in the wastebasket.
NOW when I walk past that house I look up at the windows that could be in Leningrad or Innsbruck or Dresden or Parma, and I think of the stairway that led only to the trapdoor in the roof, and of the marble fireplace, the bathroom skylight, and the tiny kitchen, and of what school of Italian painting we would have been if we had been a school of Italian painting, and poor Mrs. Pickering sitting in her bedroom chair with her eyes wide open, waiting for help, and the rainy nights on Thirty-sixth Street, and the grey-and-blue thistles, the brown seashells, the Mills Brothers singing Shine, little glowworm, glimmer, glimmer, and the guests who came the wrong night, the guest who was going to die and knew it, the sound of my typewriter, and of a paintbrush clinking in a glass of cloudy water, and Floribunda’s adventure, and Margaret’s empty days, and how it was settled that, although I wanted to put my head on her breast as I was falling asleep, she needed even more (at that point) to put her head on mine. And of our child’s coming, at last, and the black cat who thought she was our child, and of the two friends who didn’t after all get married, and the old woman who found one treasure after another in the trash baskets all up and down Lexington Avenue, and that other old woman, now dead, who was so driven by the need to describe the inner life of very large granite boulders. I think of how Miss Mattie Gessner’s face fell and how she closed her notebook and became a stranger to us, who had been so deeply our friend. I think of the oversexed ironer, and the Holmeses, and the Venables, and the stranger who meant nobody good and was frightened away by Albertha’s cursing, and the hissing of the air brakes of the Lexington Avenue bus, and the curtains moving at the open window, and the baby crying on the other side of the wall. I think of that happy grocery store run by boys, and the horse-drawn flower cart that sometimes waited on the corner, and the sound of footsteps in the night, and the sudden no-sound that meant it was snowing, and I think of the unknown man or woman who found the blue duffel bag with the manuscript of my novel in it and took it to the police station, and the musical instrument (not a lute, but that’s what the artist must have had in mind, only she no longer bothers to look at objects and draws what she remembers them as being like) played in the dark, over our sleeping bodies, while the children flew their kites, and I think if it is true that we are all in the hands of God, what a capacious hand it must be.
The Poor Orphan Girl
THE poor orphan girl had no mother and no father and was raised by her grandmother on one of the wind-swept islands of the Outer Hebrides. When she began running after the boys, her grandmother shipped her off to a cousin in Glasgow. At first the girl was well behaved and lent a hand wherever it was needed, and the cousin thought the grandmother just didn’t understand the younger generation. But then she started staying out late at night and keeping bad company, and the cousin saw what the grandmother was up against. So she had a serious talk with the girl, and the girl made all sorts of promises, which she didn’t keep, and the cousin didn’t want to be blamed if the girl got in the family way, so she took her to an employment agency that specialized in sending servants to America.
“Mercy!” exclaimed the head of the most dependable domestic employment agency in New York City, when she looked at the girl’s folder. “An unspoiled country girl, willing and strong, and with a heart of gold!” The folder was shown to a Class A client with a Fifth Avenue address, who snapped her up. The immigration papers were filled out, and the deposit paid, and the girl found herself on a boat going to America. What she was expecting was, naturally, what she had seen in the flicks. What she got was a six-by-eleven bedroom looking out on the back of another building, with a closet six inches deep, and the customary dwarf’s bathtub that you find in servants’ bathrooms in old apartment buildings. On the other hand, the girl had never before had a bed all to herself and a toilet that wasn’t either outdoors or on the landing and shared by several large families. She wrote home to her grandmother that she was in luck.
She got on all right with the cook, and there was no heavy work, because a cleaning woman came in twice a week and a laundress two days, and the windows were done by a window-washing company, and all the girl had to do was remember what she was told. Unfortunately, this was more than she could manage. During dinner parties she couldn’t decide whether you serve from the right and clear from the left or serve from the left and clear from the right, so she did both, and when she made the beds the top sheet was not securely fastened, and she used the master’s washcloth to clean the tub, and what with one thing and another, including the state of her room, she received notice after two weeks and returned to the employment office looking only a little less fresh than when she arrived from Scotland. The head of the agency said,
“This time suppose we don’t aim quite so high. You don’t mind children?” The girl said no, she liked children — which was true, she did — and off she went to an address on Park Avenue. The interview was successful, and she found herself in the exact same bedroom with the shallow closet and the little bath, only the room looked out on a blank wall instead of the back of another building. The work was harder than before and the hours much longer, but at least there were no dinner parties. She was supposed to have breakfast ready by quarter of eight, which was impossible, but she tried. Then she walked the children to the corner where they took the school bus, and made the children’s beds, and picked up the toys, and ran the vacuum, and stuffed the clothes into the washing machine and the dryer, and so on.
In the afternoon she walked the dog and went to the supermarket, where she soon knew everybody, and Joe, who weighed the vegetables and was old enough to be her father, said, “Here comes my sweetheart,” and Arthur the butcher said, “Tell me — where’d you get those beautyful eyes?” Then she took the children to the Park, and got their supper, and so on. She was supposed to baby-sit when the master and mistress went out, but they didn’t very often go out. Once in a blue moon, to an early movie, was about the extent of it. If she had been in Glasgow, she would have known what to do with her evenings. Here she didn’t know anybody, so she went to bed.
ONE day when she was with the children in the Park, she met a girl named Cathleen, who asked her to go with her to a dance hall on Eighty-sixth Street. This turned out to be very different from the Outer Hebrides, and just like the flicks. The next morning, her head was full of impressions, mostly of a sad young man who said he was in love with her and almost persuaded her to go home with him, and she was simultaneously pleased with herself for resisting temptation and sorry she hadn’t done it. She burned the bacon, and the master wrinkled his nose over the coffee, but by that time she was stretched out on her bed getting forty winks. As the day wore on, a number of things went wrong; the dishwasher foamed all over the kitchen floor, because she had used the washing-machine detergent, and she broke a cup, and put a pair of red corduroy overalls in the washing machine in the same load with some pillowcases and the mistress’s blouses and the children’s underwear. They all were stained a permanent pink, but the mistress forgave her, because anyone can make a mistake now and then, and the cup was too small a matter to make a thing of. During dinner, the telephone rang, and it was for her. Though she had intended to fall into bed as soon as she finished the dinner dishes, she got dressed instead and met Cathleen at a bar on Second Avenue where they fed dimes into a jukebox, and another boy wanted her to go home with him, and she was so tired she almost did, but instead she left before Cathleen was ready, and was home in bed by two o’clock. She overslept, and there wasn’t even time to comb her hair. She managed to stay out of sight until the master had left for his office, but then she forgot, so the mistress did catch her looking like I don’t know what. A queer expression passed over her face, but she didn’t say anything, and the girl realized that the mistress wasn’t ever going to say anything no matter what happened.
The telephone always seemed to ring during dinner, and though there was an extension in the kitchen, the girl didn’t think it was polite for her to answer it, so she let the master get up from the table and go to the phone in the bedroom. Sometimes, after the third or fourth call, she thought she could detect a note of irritation in his voice when he said, “It’s for you.” But she had the tray ready with the whiskey and the ice cubes and the jigger and all when he got home at night, and that he liked. As for the children, at first they didn’t want to have anything to do with her. The mistress explained that they were very attached to the previous mother’s helper — a German girl who had left to get married — and she was not to mind. She didn’t. That is, she didn’t mind anything but the fact they were being brought up as heathens. So she told them about how the Jews crucified Our Lord, and about the Blessed Saints, and Mary and Joseph, and promised to take them to Mass, and in no time they were eating out of her hand.
She found out there were more bars and dance halls than you could shake a stick at, and she was in one or another of them five nights out of seven. The other two nights she went straight to bed as soon as she had pressed the button on the dishwashing machine. In a hamburger bar she met a boy with blond wavy hair who was an orphan like her, only he had been raised in a Home. Though he didn’t say he was in love with her, still and all she liked him. He was interesting to talk to, because so many things seemed to have happened to him, and he didn’t ask her to go home with him, so she had no chance to refuse. She didn’t really expect to hear from him again, but he called the very next night. She met him in front of the movie house, and during the movie she could feel his arm resting lightly on the back of her seat, and once or twice he gave her shoulder a squeeze, but she didn’t have to move her leg away or say “Don’t.” Afterward, they went to a bar on First Avenue. She told him all about her cousin’s family in Glasgow, and about coming over on the boat, and the things she liked about Cathleen and the things she didn’t like, and about the way it used to be at home before her mother died and she went to live with her grandmother. Finally she was all talked out, and she just sat there, feeling happy and peaceful. He said, “Another beer?” and she said no, and he had one last one, which he didn’t spend any time over, and then he put his hand on the back of her neck and said, “Come on, baby, I’ll walk you to your domicile.” And that was what she thought they were doing, only when she looked up they were standing in front of the building where he lived. He said, “I just want to get a coat, I’m chilly,” and she said, “I’ll wait here,” and he said, “At this time of night, in this neighborhood? Are you out of your mind?” So she followed him up six flights of stairs, and the first thing she knew she was having her clothes torn off her, and the rest she didn’t remember. It was daylight when she got home, and she had to wake the night elevator man, who was married and cranky, and he made a fresh remark, which she ignored.
SHE went to church but she was afraid to go to confession, for fear the priest would find out she was an orphan and put her in a Home. If she had only saved her money, she could have got on the boat and gone back to Scotland, but she had bought clothes instead. Lots of clothes. The children’s closets were full of them. She could hear her grandmother’s voice saying, “You’re going to the dogs,” and it was true, she was. She also had a stomach-ache, and it didn’t go away. For three days she went around doubled up with the pain, and then the mistress noticed it and made her go to a doctor. They paid her wages while she was in the hospital having her appendix out, and for two weeks afterward, but they didn’t want her to come back, because they had this colored woman, so she went to see the lady at the employment agency who had been so nice to her, only this time she was busy and somebody else gave her an address on Lexington Avenue, and on the way there she passed a bar-and-grill she liked the looks of. It was called Home on the Range, and it was pitch dark even in the daytime. Maybe I ought to start a New Life, the girl thought, and it turned out they did need a waitress, so that was that. Except that she wasn’t forgotten. The children remembered her. Of all the maids, they liked her the best, and never forgot what she told them. And one night about a year after she left, the master was awakened out of a sound sleep by the ringing of the telephone, and a sad-voiced young man asked to speak to her. “No, you can’t speak to her!” the master said indignantly. “Do you realize what time it is?” The sad voice seemed surprised to learn that it was the middle of the night, and unable to understand why anybody should mind being called at that hour, and unwilling to believe that the girl wasn’t there.
The Lily-White Boys
THE Follansbees’ Christmas party was at teatime on Christmas Day, and it was for all ages. Ignoring the fire laws, the big Christmas tree standing between the two front windows in the living room of the Park Avenue apartment had candles on it. When the last one was lit, somebody flipped a l
ight switch, and in the hush that fell over the room the soft yellow candlelight fell on the upturned faces of the children sitting on the floor in a ring around the base of the tree, bringing tears to the eyes of the susceptible. The tree was strung with loops of gold and silver tinsel and popcorn and colored paper, and some of the glass ornaments — the hardy tin soldier, the drum, the nutmeg, and the Man in the Moon — went all the way back to Beth Follansbee’s childhood. While the presents were being distributed, Mark Follansbee stood by with a bucket of water and a broom. The room smelled of warm wax and balsam.
The big red candles on the mantelpiece burned down slowly in their nest of holly. In the dining room, presiding over the cut-glass punch bowl, Beth Follansbee said, “You let the peaches sit all day in a quart of vodka, and then you add two bottles of white wine and a bottle of champagne — be a little careful, it isn’t as innocuous as you might think,” and with her eyebrows she signaled to the maid that the plate of watercress sandwiches needed refilling. Those that liked to sing had gathered around the piano in the living room and, having done justice to all the familiar carols, were singing with gusto, “Seven for the seven stars in the sky and six for the six proud walkers. Five for the symbols at your door and four for the Gospel makers, Three, three, the rivals, Two, two, the lily-white boys, clothèd all in green-ho. One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.” And an overexcited little boy with a plastic spaceship was running up and down the hall and shouting “Blast off!”