Face to Face Read online

  As a matter of fact it was politics that brought her to this country. In 1904 her father, George Dalianis, ran for office in his hometown of Amalias, population 26,000, and lost. “In America,” she said, “when they lose they shake hands and make up, but in Greece they could shoot themselves.” To help Mr. Dalianis get over the pain of losing, the family set off on a trip to America.

  When Diana Angel spoke of these things, alternately laughing and scowling, her voice would traverse the scales, penetrating the air. She might well have been addressing a group—her narration had that sweep and force of one born for public oratory. But when she laughed she became suddenly girlish and I could see she must have been a beauty. Eventually I even found out what the correspondence with Lyndon Johnson was all about. Because Mrs. Johnson’s private secretary was a girlhood friend of Diana’s daughter Adrienne, the president had actually responded to the pleas about the disability claim as well as sent Diana New Year’s and other greetings, plus a book containing the laws he drew up while in Congress, plus a flag.

  One Sunday afternoon Diana got stuck in the elevator. Getting stuck was not unusual; ours was a highly capricious elevator. Among its whims was a periodic refusal to sort out the numbers above 4. During those spells, if your destination was 5 you pressed 6, and if it was 6 you pressed 7, which was the roof. People who got stuck pushed the alarm button, setting loose a loud and terrible clanging which those of us on the top floor had learned to distinguish from the loud and terrible clanging set off when the roof door was illicitly opened. At the sound of the elevator alarm we would stream out in the halls to shout encouragement to the prisoner until Mrs. Flanagan or her brother, Tom Kelly, either fixed it or called the elevator men.

  Diana Angel was not a patient victim; invisible, she shouted furiously about her nerves and her stress—everyone of course understood she had been tried to the limit by the ceiling falling. Finally Tom Kelly induced the elevator to come within a foot of our floor, and, even more difficult, induced Diana to climb out, shaken, trembling, and vociferous. She came to our apartment for a cup of tea. Calm at last, her stalwart self emergent, she pronounced as usual that my children were very well brought up.

  Tom Kelly lived in the basement apartment with his sister, Anna Flanagan, and helped her out with chores in the building. I was put off by him at first because when he drank he was silent and sullen. He would answer the door looking irritated beyond measure and quickly get his sister to deal with the complaint. But when he wasn’t drinking—and for long periods he would stop, till he stopped altogether—he was wry and witty, with a fund of mordant comments on life in its most grand or petty manifestations. During his dry spells he would often get jobs in other buildings around town as a doorman or elevator operator, and set off for work very well dressed and very brisk. But these jobs never lasted long.

  From May to October, Tom and his sister, and the super from next door and her daughter, would sit out on the ledge in front of our building every evening, taking the air. We never had a doorman like more elegant buildings farther south: the party of supers, sharp-eyed and vigilant, was for a long time the closest we got to any sort of guardianship. Comings and goings provided the raw material for their criticism of life. Boyfriends and girlfriends of our teenagers were duly assessed, and reports to the parents submitted promptly, though unsought. Passing by, I would stop to catch up on local news delivered in Tom’s trenchantly satirical style. He liked children and would tease mine, when they were small, asking them to take him along to school or to camp—perhaps he had fantasies of escape from the basement into a life of youthful capers—and at first they were leery because he was gruff, with a low, snarling voice that sounded like it had snaked its way through a wringer, besides which he had an ailment that made his head lean permanently to one side. But once they got past these traits they grew fond of him too. When Tom brought plumbers or plasterers to our apartment, he would hang around diverting me with his snarling opinions on everyone in the building, and also cadge cigarettes, since he had to have a cigarette dangling from his lips at all times. He was a thin, white-haired man with a caved-in chest and a squarish face: rheumy blue eyes, pinkish cheeks, full lips, and a dangling cigarette. While plumbers probed, we would discuss the atrocious state of the apartment across the hall, to which the tenant refused to give Mrs. Flanagan a key, and to which she admitted no repairmen. Yes, Tom would grunt bitterly, it was a terrible fire hazard.

  Tom knew I was a writer; in the fall of 1981 he asked if I would write a letter for him to a CBS News commentator who had broadcast a segment about a chewing gum that supposedly helped people stop smoking. He snarled that it was only fair I should do this since I had rung his bell with a complaint while he was watching the TV news, and because of my interruption he hadn’t caught the name of the gum. I wrote to CBS News a few times and finally telephoned. The name of the gum was Nicorette, I reported back to Tom, but it wasn’t yet available in the United States, only in Europe. He accepted this news ruefully, his cigarette drooping. A few months later I was in Italy, where I’d promised him I’d look for the gum, but I didn’t find it. Tom developed lung cancer and would go for what his sister called X-ray treatments. He was glum and resigned about his disease, and when we all tried to encourage him with visions of recovery, he would nod sarcastically and snarl. He grew weak. His chest caved in even more. He kept smoking. He said he might as well, now. Before I left for Iowa in the summer of 1982, where I had a temporary teaching job, he asked me to ring his bell and say hello when I came home for vacations, which I did. He never asked me in—that was not part of our friendship—but at the door he brought me up to date on which elderly neighbors were growing eccentric and exactly how, who was moving out to greener pastures, whose children were getting married or going away to school, and the observable love life of the recently divorced; also how his disease was progressing, and how hard it was to stop smoking. After the fire, Columbia University, the landlord, moved Tom and his sister to a tiny apartment ten blocks south on 113th Street, which they hated. He died about a month later, in the spring of 1983. I was still away and was sorry I could not go to his funeral as a final tribute, but even more sorry that I never got to hear what he would have snarled about the fire. Soon after he died, the gum was approved for sale in the United States.

  Our apartment had a big living room and dining room joined by an archway, both rooms facing west, graced by large windows overlooking the park and the river with its boats going by. We painted that windowed wall red, and it framed the outdoors. North, we could see all the way up to the George Washington Bridge. In spring and summer the trees in the park were so lushly leaved we could barely see the water through them, but in winter and fall the view was broad and clear. On windy days there were whitecaps all along the river so that it looked like a printed fabric billowing about, or the wet fur of a large beast with the shivers. Often in winter ice would clog it for weeks at a time, huge chunks of jagged ice like cold driftwood, and for those weeks no ships could pass. Sometimes a ship got stuck and stayed there for days at a time, till the ice melted. Most of the ships we saw were barges or small cargo ships or the Circle Line taking tourists on a pleasure cruise around Manhattan Island, but now and then a good-sized ship would float by, and when the children were small I would call them to watch. Even when they were older, I still sometimes called them for a truly spectacular ship.

  Also out the living room windows, across in Riverside Park, was the big hill all the neighborhood kids and their parents used for sledding. Early on, Harry and I would go out sledding with the kids; in later years we could keep an eye on them from the window as they skimmed down and trudged up, dragging the sleds behind them. But the finest things we watched from the window were the sunsets, especially the late ones, June through October. We abandoned cooking, eating, or homework to rush to the window, for once it began, each instant’s configuration of clouds and color above the Palisades, of light and shadow on the surface of the water, could vanish
in a trice. Irreverent, we even rated them—better than yesterday’s, not so fine as last Sunday’s—and sometimes on summer evenings we were lured out to walk along the Drive, to get closer up. We grew to be connoisseurs, knowing from the way each sinking began whether it would be drawn out or abrupt, magnificent or humble, whether it would start out splendid and dissipate, or start out nondescript and turn splendid, whether the best part would be just before or just after the sun went down. We could tell from the formations of the clouds and the color of the air, pink or violet or amber, and sometimes even a pale weird lime green.

  Off the once-desolate long hall were three bedrooms, medium-sized, small, and very small. The advantage of the very small one was its own private bathroom—it must have been a maid’s room in the days when the building housed the rich. Harry and I always had the small back bedroom as our own, but the other two rooms went through countless changes of role over nineteen years, mostly depending on the phases of our children. When they could live and sleep peaceably together we used the tiny room as a study, two desks crowded in. When they couldn’t we moved our desks elsewhere: in the end, I wrote three books under our loft bed. But way back in the sixties, I don’t remember what I expected to do at a desk—I don’t remember any plans except a vague notion that somehow I would become a writer, as if it happened to a person like puberty or gray hair. Eventually I went to graduate school, then dropped out to write, because being a writer showed no signs of happening to me like puberty or gray hair. In the tiny bedroom I wrote my first published article, a Watergate satire, in June of 1974 and Harry made a big party with all our friends to celebrate; there was a feeling of buoyancy abroad over the climax of Watergate, with its satisfying cast of heroes and villains.

  That party took its place in the annals of parties held in the vanished apartment, parties like the snows of yesteryear: the New Year’s Day party thrown together that morning, where Rachel at a mere twelve years old concocted a triumphant egg-nog; and the surprise party for Harry’s father which occasioned our getting the white couch; and then the party for Harry’s fortieth birthday, when he got piles of presents like a child; and the July 4 party in the bicentennial year, when friends gathered on our tarred roof to watch the glorious procession of tall-masted and bannered ships parade up the Hudson all that long sunny summer afternoon. Parties the children cannot remember, Halloween parties where guests masqueraded as their secret selves, a frog, a toad, Lolita and Superman and Al Capone. Not to mention the two children’s birthday parties a year with the requisite balloons and whistles, parties I smiled through because I poured Scotch—which can pass for apple juice—into my paper cup.

  Like a person, the apartment had a few chronic ailments. The bedroom doors never closed completely. The closet in the largest bedroom had no door. We never got around to asking the landlord for one, and hung up a curtain instead. The shower didn’t drain properly—one stood ankle-deep in water. The plumbers who came to remedy this once and for all were a merry troop who stayed for days, creating chaos out of order, but in the end nothing much was changed. In the tiny bathroom in the erstwhile maid’s room, a leak in the pipes in the wall would spring mysteriously every New Year’s Day. We had no evidence of it, but Inge, downstairs, would call to report that water was pouring from the ceiling. Eventually Inge had only to call on New Year’s, say hello in a certain wry tone, and we would know. After a few years the plumbers didn’t bother to plaster up the wall when they were finished, but simply put in a wooden panel that could be easily removed the following New Year’s.

  I knew every person in every one of those twenty-four apartments until the last few years, when Columbia began housing students there, and the students, just passing through, were not interested in knowing their neighbors. But for most of the nineteen years I knew the feel of people’s apartments, the furnishings and the quality of the light on the different floors, people’s relatives—Jerry’s brother the rabbi, Inge’s sister Eva and Ben’s sister Esther—and their children, what schools they went to and how they turned out. I watched as Yvonne, our baby-sitter, a slender, shy, soft-spoken girl, became a beauty at fifteen or sixteen; for a year or so we all endured crowds of boys mooning outside on the front step waiting for an appearance, a word, a glance. Together we also endured the summer Columbia replaced our ever-ailing boiler, when those of us with no vacation plans learned how to take cold showers, which is not so hard once you get used to it. Worse to endure was the collapse of the wall separating our back courtyard from the opposite building, on Claremont Avenue—a mighty and prolonged roar on a still Saturday afternoon. We were in the papers, notorious. For weeks our gigantic heap of rubble was a place of interest for the locals, less historically evocative than Riverside Church or Grant’s Tomb, where tourists went, but more dramatic for those in the know. Apparently Columbia had been aware of the tremulous wall for some time, but had been haggling with the Claremont Avenue landlord over whose responsibility it was to fix it. At last workmen arrived with cement trucks and sacks of sand and gravel. They began their dragging and drilling at six in the morning, which incensed Buddy Maggart most of all since he worked nights and slept mornings. When the wall was rebuilt months later, Mrs. Flanagan and Tom complained bitterly, since the courtyard they had used to hang out wash and grow plants and cool off in on hot nights was a third of its original size.

  I knew when Mrs. Flanagan’s son had a heart attack and exactly how overweight he was. I could even remember the days when Mrs. Flanagan, a talkative kind of super, complained that her son and his wife had no children; then, overnight it seemed, there were four, and her talk switched to anecdotes of the grandchildren. When they visited she brought them up to display them. I knew when Joan’s son hurt his head and she feared there might be serious damage but there wasn’t, and when Jerry Silverstein suffered from tennis elbow. Likewise everyone knew when Rachel tumbled off the back of Yvonne’s bike in the park and I rushed her, holding the torn ball of the bleeding finger in place with a towel, to the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital in the back of a passing police car. Police don’t like to take passengers, but they didn’t refuse. Everyone knew, too, when a man in the building next door was killed by a speeding car at the corner, and then finally the city put up the traffic light we had long been asking for, with a pedestrian button as a bonus.

  I had been inside Grant’s Tomb and climbed to the top of Riverside Church during the ringing of the carillon bells, and ridden my bike in Riverside Park; I knew who played tennis there and who ran, and who, like us, had picnics. Where people walked their dogs, who cleaned up after them and who didn’t. Who walked around late at night and who was afraid to. Who was mugged, when and where and how. Mrs. Lurier of the Halloween cookies, beaten up in her apartment and no one heard her scream—an empty Saturday afternoon in spring. Inge, coming home from work, by a boy with a knife. Joan, bringing home groceries. Nena, on the subway steps. We organized a tenants’ association on the block. Harry was the chairman. With money from those willing to pay, we hired a uniformed guard to patrol at night: genteel Mr. Crawford, who reported for duty in a shiny black Cadillac. The supers taking the air resented his presence, as if it impugned their ability to keep the street safe; still, they included him in their nightly conferences on the ledge.

  It was hardly possible to get down that street without stopping to talk. Over the years we came to know people all up and down the block, and when the old ones stopped appearing we knew they had died. I didn’t like everyone equally, but it was scarcely a question of liking. They came with the territory, and when they moved or died I missed them. It is possible to miss even people you don’t like.

  I never liked the apartment that much either, or never thought I did. I found it cramped. Despite its six rooms there never seemed to be enough privacy, though perhaps it was the way we lived, with no clear boundaries and turfs, that deterred privacy. And the neighborhood wasn’t safe, especially at night, even during the years Mr. Crawford patrolled with his reassuri
ng black Cadillac. I also never quite forgot the three dreadful spells when we had mice, and how Jonathan Irving of the big shoes came up and baited our traps with chocolate—he claimed mice preferred chocolate to cheese and judging from the results he was right. Yet now it strikes me that I lived in that apartment longer than any other place in my life, and the placement of the furniture and the pots and pans and the pictures on the walls seems fixed and preordained, the only way we could have lived.