The Cabin Page 2

  When we left the house we left in good spirits. When we went out to dinner, it was an adventure, which was strange to me, looking back, because many of these dinners ended with my sister or myself being banished, sullen or in tears, from the restaurant, and told to wait in the car, as we were in disgrace.

  These were the excursions that had ended due to her or my intolerable arrogance, as it was explained to us.

  The happy trips were celebrated and capped with a joke. Here is the joke: my stepfather, my mother, my sister, and I would exit the restaurant, my stepfather and mother would walk to the car, telling us that they would pick us up. We children would stand by the restaurant entrance. They would drive up in the car, open the passenger door, and wait until my sister and I had started to get in. They would then drive away.

  They would drive ten or fifteen feet and open the door again, and we would walk up again, and they would drive away again. They sometimes would drive around the block. But they would always come back, and by that time the four of us would be laughing in camaraderie and appreciation of what, I believe, was our only family joke.

  We were doing the lawn, my sister and I. I was raking, and she was stuffing the leaves into a bag. I loathed the job, and my muscles and my mind rebelled, and I was viciously angry, and my sister said something, and I turned and threw the rake at her and it hit her in the face.

  The rake was split bamboo and metal, and a piece of metal caught her lip and cut her badly.

  We were both terrified, and I was sick with guilt, and we ran into the house, my sister holding her hand to her mouth, and her mouth and her hand and the front of her dress covered in blood.

  We ran into the kitchen, where my mother was cooking dinner, and my mother asked what happened.

  Neither of us—myself out of guilt, of course, and my sister out of a desire to avert the terrible punishment she knew I would receive—would say what had occurred.

  My mother pressed us, and neither of us would answer. She said that until one or the other answered, we would not go to the hospital; and so the family sat down to dinner, where my sister clutched a napkin to her face and the blood soaked the napkin and ran down onto her food, which she had to eat; and I also ate my food, and we cleared the table and went to the hospital.

  I remember the walks home from school in the frigid winter, along the cornfield that was, for all its proximity to the city, part of the prairie. The winters were viciously cold. From the remove of years, I can see how the area might and may have been beautiful. One could have walked in the stubble of the cornfields, or hunted birds, or enjoyed any of a number of pleasures naturally occurring.

  Memories of Chelsea

  It was the winter before I married, and I lived alone in one floor of an old row house in New York’s Chelsea. I was sick all winter with a lingering cold or flu, born, I think, at least in part, from loneliness. But I also enjoyed the solitude.

  Every evening—I remember it as every evening, but it cannot actually have been—I took myself to dinner at a restaurant on Ninth Avenue, and sat by myself and read novels.

  I read the entire works of Willa Cather, night after night. I would eat my breaded this or that, and linger on with coffee and several cigarettes until the restaurant closed.

  I was making my living as a writer for the first time in my life. A young man in his late twenties in New York, involved in and very conscious of living a romance.

  I remember one Sunday in October when I washed my windows.

  My apartment had four windows, and I washed them at length on a cool, bright day, happy as I had ever been before or ever have been since.

  I remember evenings in front of the fire. I had used a bearskin rug as a prop in a play of mine in Chicago, and the young woman who had lent the rug to the production later showed up in New York and made me a present of it. I’d lie on the rug in front of the fire and read, my head resting back on the head of the bear.

  When I married, my wife supposed that I had made love to countless women on that bear rug, and suggested that I leave it behind. Which I did. I had made love to one woman on the rug—which story I’ll tell later.

  I adored that apartment. In the summer I’d sit home evenings, with a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, as cold as I could get it, and I’d drink and read. The wine was not expensive—this was just in advance of the vogue for white French wine—and I indulged myself.

  In sum, I was self-sufficient. I was an independent young man of the world. I had an income and a future, and was beginning to have something of a name.

  I was lonely on the weekends, and I remember various street fairs, cruising in search of the woman of my dreams, or, perhaps, for some other version of stability.

  Weekdays I would go to the Chelsea YMCA and exercise, or I would go jog on the West Side Highway.

  The elevated highway was awaiting demolition, and closed to traffic. I would jog from Twenty-third Street along the Hudson River, and, just across from the remaining passenger-ship terminals at Fifty-fourth, I would turn and jog back. On the run back I would occasionally race an ocean liner, just put out in the river and headed south. When they first started up I could keep pace with them for several hundred yards.

  Chelsea was originally a community for the well-to-do in the shipping line. It was built for and housed ship chandlers, naval architects, captains, and others of a respectable middle-class station.

  The great shipping piers spiked out into the Hudson on the west of Chelsea, two blocks from my apartment.

  Ninety years before my tenure, the occupant of my house could have looked out of the kitchen window and seen that actual “forest of masts and spars.”

  The Titanic, had she docked, would have done so literally right down the street; and the reporters awaiting the survivors on the Carpathia drank at the bars right around the corner.

  When I jogged south on the highway, I was alongside the huge deserted pier buildings, which had been appropriated for homosexual encounters and were the scene of much violence.

  South of them I had a view of the Statue of Liberty, which I never saw without reciting some of Emma Lazarus’s poem to pass the time and get myself a bit weepy. And I never saw the statue without feeling I was privileged to have such regular access.

  Down on Eleventh Avenue was, and I hope still is, Madison Men’s Shop, Melvin Madison, owner/proprietor.

  I was lured into the shop by the very sturdy work clothes in the window, arranged alongside paraphernalia of the virtually defunct maritime trades—insignia, uniforms, and so on.

  I became friendly with Melvin, and he allowed me to hang out in his shop, and we would chat about this and that and drink coffee.

  The store had been under his command for many years. He had quite a bit of old, unpacked, unsold, excellent, hardy, and distinctive work clothes in stock. He had jackets and caps from the 1940s, pants and shoes of a durability unimaginable in today’s manufacture.

  I had once spent part of a summer working as a cook on one of the Great Lakes ore boats, so I was an actual—albeit surpassingly cadet—member of the Merchant Marine, and Mel would tell me stories of his life on the ships, and of his life in the neighborhood.

  Some years previous to my residence in Chelsea, I had in fact spent a bit of time around the corner from Mel’s shop, frequenting the hiring hall of the National Maritime Union, trying, unsuccessfully, to get out on a ship.

  Mel and his store were a focus of both romance and comfort to the south of my apartment.

  To the north was Chelsea Stationers, another neighborhood landmark. It was run and owned by Ken.

  Ken, and his father before him, had been in the same spot for thirty years, and they, too, had old stock in the basement.

  I’d buy old 1930s report covers with happy high-stepping footballers printed on them, old pens, and legal-looking blank books in which to write. And, as either Ken or I was usually in the process of getting off cigarettes, we would bum smokes off each other and talk about women and his adventur
es in his community-theater group in New Jersey.

  The stationery store was the first stop on my daily walk home from the Y.

  As I came out of the Y, I was facing the Chelsea Hotel, long touted as a New York City literary landmark.

  The Chelsea had been home to Thomas Wolfe and Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, and other writers no doubt drawn by their tenure there. I had, on my first visit to New York, spent a few nights there myself—a very young man terrified by the squalor and violence and noise. The hotel embodied New York to me. Nothing in my middle-class Chicago experience had prepared me for that hotel. It was not that it was, as it was, beyond romanticizing, filthy and dangerous, but that, being such, it represented itself and was accepted as a cultural landmark, and a good choice for a serious artist looking for a room.

  And everyone pointed out that Virgil Thompson still lived there.

  I met Virgil Thompson around the corner from the hotel, at another of my regular stops on the trek back to my apartment from the Y. I met him at Dr. Herrmann’s optometrical establishment.

  Louis Herrmann was a fine eye doctor and, rest in peace, a true lover of the theater.

  He was Bernard Herrmann’s brother and, as a kid, had actually been with Bernard in the studios for Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” broadcast. I have never heard anyone speak more lovingly of another than Louis spoke of his brother Bernard.

  He would reminisce about the Mercury Theatre, about Welles, about Bernard and Hitchcock; we would talk about the theater. Often his wife, Ruth, would be working in the office, and we would have coffee together.

  He must have, at that time, been in his early sixties, and it was a revelation to me to see him with his wife, to see two people married thirty or forty years who were so obviously in love. He was a beautiful man.

  Across the street from Louis was the shoe-repair store, where I would go for a shine.

  That store figures prominently in my Chelsea mythology due to the interchange reported below.

  I was out strolling one day with Shel Silverstein, whom I cite as my witness for the following improbable exchange.

  I had broken a strap on my leather shoulder bag, and went into the shoe-repair store to have it fixed. The owner examined the bag at length, and shrugged. “How much to fix it?” I said.

  “That’s gonna cost you twenty dollars,” he said.

  “Twenty dollars?” I said. “Just to fix one strap …?”

  “Well, I can’t get to it,” he said. “I can’t reach it with the machine, I got to take the bag apart, do it by hand, take one man two, three hours, do that job.”

  So I sighed. “Oh, all right,” I said. “When can I come back for it? Thursday? Friday …?”

  “Naaah,” he said. “Go get a cup of coffee—come back ten, fifteen minutes.”

  Down the street from the shoe-repair store was Kenny Fish.

  Ken had a furniture store. He bought and restored and sold Grand Rapids oak. He was a superior craftsman, and he had good taste in what he bought. He was also a good companion, and I spent many hours on my way back from the gym hanging out with Ken and playing gin. He was the worst gin player I have ever met, and my home, to this day, is spotted with heavy durable furniture I won off of Kenny.

  (When I left the neighborhood, Ken was still in my debt for eighty dollars or so. I found him one day, driving a hansom cab at Sixth Avenue and Central Park South. He mentioned the longstanding debt, and I suggested that he and his horse take me up to the Dakota, and we would call it quits. I left him at Seventy-second Street and Central Park West, and have not seen him since.)

  Next to Ken’s store was Milton. He dealt in furniture and bric-a-brac, and went by the soubriquet of Captain Spaulding, perhaps because of the lyric, in the song of the same name, “Did someone call me schnorrer …?”

  Below the captain was Charlie’s Laundromat.

  Charlie was always good for a smoke, or to cash a small check, or to hold or relay a message for the others of the neighborhood confraternity. He was a very nice and generous and accommodating man. His daughter, he told me, married Mark Rothko’s son. And he once bought me a celebratory cup of coffee when the Rothko estate won a large judgment against some art dealer.

  The block also housed Joe Rosenberg and his framing establishment. Joe framed many pictures for me, and gave me two important pieces of advice. He told me never to knock wood because (he had learned after fifty years of solecism) knocking wood was an appeal (through the True Cross) for the intercession of Jesus Christ. He also told me never to marry a non-Jewish girl.

  After Joe and Charlie, I rounded the corner and was almost home. I turned down the residential block, nothing between me and the necessity of actually writing save the construction of instant coffee, and a reflection, perhaps, about Clement Clarke Moore (“ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas”), who at one time had lived next door.

  (Anthony Perkins lived nearby, too. When I moved into my apartment I bought a clear shower-curtain liner and ordered a shower curtain to complement it. The curtain itself never arrived, so I lived with the clear liner, and that did the trick. I always wished, however, that the liner itself were enough of an oddity that someone would one day inquire why I had a clear shower curtain, and I could respond that I lived around the corner from Anthony Perkins. Well, now I have acquitted myself of it, and can get on with my life.)

  In Chelsea I could look out of my living-room window and see the Empire State Building and reflect that other Chicagoans traveled 880 miles for the privilege. I could walk to the theater district or to the Village. I had a working fireplace and a pair of silver candlesticks that were the only things my grandparents brought with them out of Poland. I had a poster from the Barnum and Bailey Circus, and the bearskin rug I have spoken of before, and it is to that rug and an appurtenant misadventure connected thereto that I now refer.

  To my lovely bachelor flat I had invited this very lovely young woman whom I mentioned earlier in conjunction with the bear rug. I had been pursuing her for some months, and apparently some blandishment or other worked its magic, for she finally said yes, she would come down to New York and spend the weekend with me.

  She arrived in New York in the afternoon. I had promised to take her that evening to a performance of a play of mine uptown.

  I took her from the station back to Chelsea, calculating that there was just enough time for some long-deferred and eagerly awaited sexual intercourse; but she said no, she’d have a bath if I didn’t mind, and we could both have something to look forward to after the theater.

  Well, fine. We went off, in due time, and saw the show. As the actors were taking their final bow, I hurried her through the lobby and out onto the street.

  We were in the process of getting into a cab when I heard my name called, and made the mistake of turning around.

  I had been called by X, an older actor, an acquaintance of mine.

  He hurried up to me, his wife close behind him, told me how much he had enjoyed the show, thanked me for the tickets, and said I didn’t need the cab, as he had driven down, and we could all go back in his car.

  Go back? I said. Yes. And I remembered that I had, some long weeks previously, invited him and his wife to be my guests at the show, and they had extended to me their very kind invitation to join them in their home for an after-the-theater supper.

  Well. My mind raced. I had to allow him to reciprocate my gift of the tickets, and I could not, I thought (having reasoned it out as closely as I could), be so discourteous as to stand him and his wife up.

  So I introduced them to my young friend, explained that she had been traveling quite a long while and was exhausted from the journey, and that we really could not stay long at their house. “Just a snack,” he assured me, “and we’ll send you on your way.”

  We got to his house. He made us a drink, and then another. I less and less subtly hinted that if we were going to eat we should eat, as it was getting late and my friend was very very tired.

&nb
sp; He finally rose and announced that, yes, it was time to eat, and that, in honor of my visit, he himself was going to cook. And he was going to cook matzoh brei.

  Now, gentle reader, what is matzoh brei? It is fried matzoh.

  It is matzoh (that crackerlike unleavened bread) that has been soaked in egg and milk, fried in grease, and served with syrup, sugar, butter, salt, jam, or any combination of the above.

  My mother, rest in peace, used to serve it on Sunday mornings. It is absolutely delicious, stupefyingly filling, and precisely the last thing one wants to eat at 11 P.M. before a scheduled night of love.

  So I demurred. “Don’t put yourself out,” I said. And he said, “Nonsense,” and cooked the matzoh brei.

  He brought it out and served it heaping on my plate. And I had to eat it. Because, of course, it was an honor.

  He was a Jewish Patriarch making a rare and ceremonial foray into the kitchen to cook a traditional Jewish dish to serve to me, a Young Jewish Lad, whom he had invited to his house because he was proud of me.

  So I had to eat it.

  I had that big, heaping plateful, and of course praised it to the skies, and so of course had to have another and a bit of a third. And I said, “That was the most delicious matzoh brei I have ever eaten.”

  And his wife said, “You call that matzoh brei?”

  And she went into the kitchen.

  And she called back that X and his family, in their ignorance, knew nothing of the nature and construction of the dish, and she started cooking her family’s version of matzoh brei.

  As I looked on, stupefied. I tried to leave, but X told us that we could not budge until I had made the comparison and told the world the truth.

  So we sat there and waited while his wife cooked; and I had to eat as many plates of matzoh brei as I had before, and make the ceremonial declaration of the excellence of each recipe.

  I finally extricated myself and my companion, as stuffed and as sleepy as I have ever been in my life.