Angel in the Parlor (24 page)

When I was five, Aunt Jessie won a hundred dollars on a radio program called “Name That Tune.” A few days before the New Year, she dropped in to announce her good fortune. As the holiday approached, the house filled up with relatives. The night before New Year's Eve, I heard Aunt Jessie telling my mother about the wonders of Times Square. She was very persuasive. When my mother woke my sister Kirsten and me the next morning, we saw two suitcases in the hall.

“Eat fast,” said Mother. “We're taking the train to New York.”

The train left at six. Mother had risen at four and turned on the electric heater in our room and brought up our breakfast on a tray so we could dress and eat at the same time. All over the house we heard the muffled commotion of aunts and cousins thumping out of bed, running water, flushing toilets, and exhorting each other to hurry. It was understood that my father would stay at home, for he preferred to travel alone. The rest of us traveled in a flock that included all able-bodied relatives, even my grandmother, though she was senile and could not always remember where she was.

The taxi that morning crept down icy streets to the train station. Snow had nearly erased it from the landscape.

In the waiting room the stationmaster was building a fire, parrying it with a poker. Kirsten and I stood as close as we dared and stretched out our hands. Grandmother asked my mother why Grandfather was not coming with us, and my mother reminded her that he had died two years before. A few old men and one elderly couple dozed on the benches, as patiently as if they were sitting in a doctor's office.

Suddenly the old men stood up.

“Train coming!” shrieked my cousin John. He was younger than I but he could yell louder.

Everyone rushed outside to the platform.

“When the train comes—” shouted my mother over the mounting roar, but the hissing of the train swept her words away. The conductor swung through a cloud of steam, threw down the steps for the car nearest us, and helped us inside.

How dark, how quiet everything looked! In the first four cars we passed dozens of soldiers, huddled together or sprawled across the seats. The windows wept steam, the light from the tracks touched a knee here, an elbow there. My mother led the way to the civilian cars, where we found seats but not together.

Because of the darkness, I slept. Day never broke at all. The snow lightened the air outside, but no one could assign it a time or call it afternoon. My cousins and my sister and I played “Old Maid” while Aunt Jessie cheered us with stories of the Automat, where you could choose your own lunch from behind hundreds of glass doors. And Chinatown, where you couldn't read the newspapers, but you could eat your breakfast with chopsticks. And the throngs of people and cars on the streets—ah, she assured us, then you'll know you're in a real city.

At ten that night, the train arrived at Grand Central Station. The main lobby was dark save for one ticket window and the clock over the information booth. Aunt Jessie herded us to the exit, where she reminded us that hundreds of taxis would be swarming like a salmon run. As we stepped outside, she gave a sharp cry of amazement.

Not a single car passed us. Not a person either. Between walls of snow the streets shone like a glacial tunnel. Aunt Jessie asked the ticket seller where she could call a taxi. Behind silver bars he shook his head.

“No taxis, lady, on account of the storm. You got to walk.”

It was at this moment we discovered that nobody had remembered to make hotel reservations.

“I know a good hotel in Gramercy Park,” said Aunt Jessie. “Let's go.”

We walked briskly down the middle of the empty street. My mother and Aunt Jessie skillfully propelled Grandmother between them. The snowbanks on both sides of us seemed to exhale a ghastly breath that numbed my face and hands. We walked to the hotel without meeting another soul and found ourselves in a deserted lobby. Aunt Jessie left us to collapse into the overstuffed chairs and stepped up to the desk and rang for the clerk, who appeared at last, rubbing his eyes. After a brief, inaudible discussion, she returned to us, frowning.

“All the rooms are taken on account of the convention.”

“What convention?” asked my mother, bewildered.

“The convention being held here,” explained Aunt Jessie. “Of chefs,” she added.

The desk clerk, seeing our distress, came forward.

“I can offer you one room, if you're really desperate.”

We all felt better at once.

“A storeroom in the basement is empty now, and I could have cots brought in.”

The storeroom had no windows, only chunks of glass in the ceiling, which formed part of the sidewalk overhead; sometimes the shadows of a lone passer-by's feet darkened them, clicking closer and closer, then farther and farther away. Two bellhops rolled in eight cots. There was no other furniture, save a large cardboard Santa Claus holding a bottle of Coca-Cola, leaning against one wall. Mother inquired about the bathroom, and the bellhops pointed into the vast darkness beyond our door.

“If you walk to the end of the boiler room, lady,” said one, “you can use the janitor's toilet.”

We pattered down the dark corridor in our nightgowns, through a place that fitted almost perfectly my primitive idea of hell. Men sat by roaring furnaces, stoking them and watching us sullenly. Waiting.

My mother closed the door and turned off the light and everyone climbed into bed.

We lay on our cots in the darkness, sweating and staring up at the bottoms of boots and galoshes. The disembodied voice of my Aunt Jessie described the excitement of New York at that hour as clearly as if she were seeing it with a third eye, a magic one, that the rest of us lacked. Now crowds were gathering in Times Square, now Guy Lombardo was playing “Auld Lang Syne.” And here we were in New York City, where the new year touched land first, before it flowed out to the rest of America. In spite of the heat, I shivered.

“What would you most like to do in New York?” asked Aunt Jessie suddenly.

As nobody could see to whom she was speaking, nobody answered. Finally I said, “I want to see ‘Let's Pretend.'”

The next morning we set out for CBS to watch the program my sister and my cousin and I had faithfully followed for so many years. I do not remember how far we walked, only that I lost all feeling in my hands and feet, and I saw nothing of note except high hummocks of snow under which, my aunt assured me, lay secret Cadillacs and magnificent limousines.

I had never visited a radio station. Certainly I did not expect to see an empty stage and an empty auditorium. The music that opened the program every Saturday suggested an orchestra and the applause promised huge crowds, not these rows of silent seats. I looked around. Suddenly I realized that on this snowy morning our family was the entire audience of “Let's Pretend.”

Now the actors were gathering around the two microphones standing at either end of the stage, and a man who called himself Uncle Ted was welcoming us to New York and warning us not to whistle as this would unsettle the microphones.

“But when I give you the signal,” he said, “you can clap. Clap as hard as you can. Think of all those kids out there, listening to you. Clap like you were a thousand.”

The story began. It was Hans Christian Andersen's story of the little mermaid who trades her beautiful voice for the chance to be human. To be human, says the mermaid's grandmother, means to be immortal. Only humans have souls.

I watched the actors with growing astonishment. The voices I knew so well did not belong to witches and princesses but to men and women. How I had been deceived into believing in a world more splendid and tragic than this one! Even New York City itself, so hidden from my sight by the snow, seemed an outrageous lie. Why, then, did I feel a rising excitement at being here?

A burst of music announced the end of the story. Now Uncle Ted was waving for us to clap. The mermaid had lost her prince hut won her soul. From mermaid to angel. That story. I clapped for the story. I clapped for the lost city, hidden under its shroud of snow, and for my aunt, who made me believe in it anyhow. I clapped till my palms ached for the children all over America who heard the voices and saw the mermaid. I clapped for the actors on their bare stage. In a world of tables and chairs and very human beings, I clapped for the angel, for the supreme illusion that is art.

9

The Well-tempered Falsehood: The Art of Storytelling

When I was a child, my older sister and I had a game that we played on the long summer afternoons when supper was still hours away and we had nothing to do. We sat in our swings, too hot to move, until one of us started the game, and then we would forget the heat, the small yard with its mosquitoes, the impending supper, everything.

The game was simple. It required two people: the teller and the listener. The teller's task was to describe a place as vividly as possible. The object of the game was to convince the listener she was there. The teller had to carry on the description until the listener said, “Stop. I'm there.”

I do not remember all the places we visited in the course of this game, but I do remember the very last time we played it. I was the teller and the place I wished to evoke was paradise. I did not know then that the damned are generally livelier than the saved, and that even Dante and Milton had wrestled with the problem of making virtue entertaining. Emboldened by ignorance, however, I began.

First of all, I filled paradise with the rich furniture of our own church. I put in the brass angels that held the candles and the stained glass windows in which old men read the Gospel to lions, dragons, and assorted penitent beasts. For how could I make paradise pleasant unless I made it comfortable? And how could I make it comfortable unless I made it familiar?

So I put in the hum of the electric fan behind the pulpit and the smell of peppermint that the head usher gave off instead of sweat. I fear it was a rather tedious description, and if I were to describe paradise for you today, it would be something like spring in San Francisco. And hell would be some bone-melting heat wave in New York City.

But however conventional the line I handed my sister, it was a lot more concrete than any account of the kingdom of God I'd heard in Sunday school, where heaven was treated the way my parents treated sex. Yes, it exists. Now don't ask any more questions.

At the height of my telling, something unforeseen happened. My sister burst into tears.

“Stop!” she cried. “I'm there!”

I looked at her in astonishment. I knew she cried at weddings and funerals. But to cry at a place pieced together out of our common experience and our common language, a place that would vanish the minute I stopped talking! That passed beyond the bounds of the game altogether. I knew I could never equal that performance, and we never played the game again.

The joy of being the teller stayed with me, however, and when people asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I answered, “I want to tell stories.”

And the people to whom I said this always remarked, “Oh, you want to work on a newspaper, do you?”

I grew up thinking that if you wanted to tell stories, you had to go through the initiation rite of working on a newspaper, and that all writers had to do this before they could become proper storytellers. When I was ten, I asked my mother, “How do I get a job on a newspaper?”

For it seemed sensible to get past this hurdle as quickly as possible.

“You apply for the job,” said my mother. “But, of course, nobody will hire you without experience.”

“But how can I get experience if I need experience to get a job?”

“You could start your own newspaper,” said my mother. “You could start it this summer.”

In the summer we lived in a small town on the edge of a lake. On the opposite side of the lake stood a gravel pit, which employed nearly all the men in the town. The quality of life in this town did not encourage reading. There was no library and no bookshop. There was not even a Christian Science reading room.

At night people went fishing or fighting. Lying on my stomach at two in the morning, my face pressed to the bedroom window screen, I watched the man across the street drag his wife by the hair down the front steps of his house while her lover fled out the back window. I wondered how these people would like a neighborhood newspaper. I wondered if they would read it. I knew it would have to be free, as nobody in the whole town would be willing to buy it.

But there was an even bigger problem than finding readers. I hadn't the faintest idea how to gather news. Census takers were badly treated in these parts, and even the Jehovah's Witnesses had learned to leave us alone.

So I put the idea of a newspaper aside, until one night the lady next door dropped by for a visit. She was a large woman who made it her business to know everybody else's. She plunked herself down in our best chair to exchange gossip with my mother, who never had any but who knew how to listen to the great events of the day. What were these events? Ray Lomax was out casting for bass and hooked Mrs. Penny's baby through the ear lobe, John Snyder had been drunk five nights running, Tina O'Brien was pregnant by somebody else's husband, and so it went. These were the plain facts. Our neighbor's description of these facts would have done credit to the
New York Post.

She paused long enough to smile at my sister and me. We were sitting at the dining-room table with our paper and crayons, and we smiled back.

“You like to draw?” she asked.

We nodded. She did not know that we had quit drawing the minute she opened her mouth and were transcribing every word she said. Here was news enough for ten newspapers! After she left, my mother censored what could be construed as libel, and my sister copied out the news in that anonymous schoolgirl hand she saved for thank-you notes and party invitations. We ran off our first edition on the wet face of a hectograph press, and we hung twenty-five copies of the
Stoney Lake News
in the living room to dry. The next day I went forth to deliver it.