Back Then (5 page)

Five houses closer to Lexington lived Gypsy Rose Lee, the world's classiest stripper, along with her third husband, a theatrical-looking, mustachioed Mexican painter not much over five feet tall. Across the street was the house of Chester Bowles, a former advertising power and diplomat who had worked for President Roosevelt. At the corner was the Barbizon, a hotel for women with swimming pool, library, and daily maid service. A girl could book a room there—for as long as she wanted and/or could afford—only by presenting references that attested to the fact that she was unlikely to pull anything that would embarrass the management. Men were not allowed above the first floor and had to meet their girls in designated “beau rooms.” There must have been plenty of sneaking around the rules. Because of its reputation, this was one of the few places in the city that mothers and fathers in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, felt safe about parking their virgin daughters while they waited for eligible young men to come along and marry them. The rooms were only slightly more deluxe than a convent cell.

Before Bloomingdale's underwent a major face-lift and subsequent personality change in the middle 1950s, it was the somewhat fusty department store you patronized not for dresses, coats or shoes, and assorted items esteemed for their style but for sturdy essentials: bed linen, pajamas, a teakettle, a doormat, and “notions.”
Notions
was a catchall word for small household essentials like needles and thread, dress shields (to keep perspiration from staining your clothes), darning eggs, measuring tape, buttons. My mother also sent the maids to Bloomingdale's Domestics department to buy their uniforms—black dress, white apron, and a cap like those worn by nurses. Perfectly right: maids were employed to nurse the hearth.

Even
as a small child I was aware that each East Side avenue had its own personality. Fifth Avenue was for seeing and being seen on.
Stately
is the word Edith Wharton used to characterize the huge stone palaces built by millionaires Henry Clay Frick, Felix Warburg, and their ilk. In those days before the income tax, there were quite a few of them along Fifth Avenue, as clean swept as a desert after a sandstorm. Between them were apartment houses occupied by people who made more money in a week than some Manhattan families did in a year. If you were far enough above street level you could look out over Central Park—the grandest work of urban artifice in the New World—and try to pretend you were in the country. The park was relatively safe, even at night. Weekly dances with live music, an orchestra, were held in warm weather during the war. It was here I danced to “If I Loved You” with a sailor named Johnny. I was sure I did. Later, Johnny wrote me letters from the South Pacific, telling me about the atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll that he witnessed from the deck of his ship.

Double-decker buses, some open on top, were the chief means of public transportation on Fifth Avenue. The fare was ten cents, one thin dime (twice as much as the fare on other bus lines). You inserted your dime in a slot in a money-collecting device that whirred and dinged and was roughly the size and shape of a hand grenade; this was proffered to you by a conductor in a smart uniform. Fifth Avenue was a two-way street and never very crowded. The first time my parents took me to the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue I asked them where the marching band was. The stretch between Fourteenth and Thirty-fourth Streets was known as Ladies' Mile, presumably because men did not shop. Clustered here was an assortment of stores for every taste and bank account, ranging from pricey Altman's to bargain Klein's on the Square.

Madison Avenue, from Forty-second Street to Seventy-second, had no competition when it came to chic and glitter. It was just one adorable shop after another: Georg Jensen, stocked with Danish silver for arm, neck, and table; Crouch and Fitzgerald for the most fashionable suitcases, handbags, and wallets; Liberty Music, where you could take a record out of its album, step into a carpeted booth, close the door behind you, and play it on a turntable before deciding whether or not you wanted to buy. Outdoorsy men and women patronized Abercrombie and Fitch on Madison Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, a block above Brooks Brothers. Scattered over this area were a great many jewelry stores and boutiques for men and women with both a hankering for high fashion and the money to indulge it. Random House occupied the erstwhile Fahnestock Mansion, at Fiftieth Street, in the same complex with New York's Archdiocesan headquarters, where Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, the world's first television priest, held court.
There was a Chock full o' Nuts on Madison and a couple of Hamburger Heavens, where you sat in a kind of high chair, pulled a small tray table around in front of you, and were served the world's juiciest hamburger on a bun, with sweet pickle slices on the side.

Above Ninety-sixth a great invisible wall had been erected; below it lived the rich white upper-middle class, above it, each in their own ethnic cluster, Negroes, a sprinkling of Puerto Ricans, Eastern Europeans, and other first-generation Americans. The people beyond the wall served those on the other side: waiters, maids, dishwashers, porters, orderlies, messengers, taxi drivers. Although it was a segregated city it was relatively stable, no doubt because only a brave few realized that they could do something other than wield mops and shovel coal. In 1952, five years after Jackie Robinson destroyed major league baseball's color barrier, Ralph Ellison published
Invisible Man
. Bernie Wolfe, a novelist and also Billy Rose's ghostwriter, took me to an evening book party for Ellison in a cramped bookstore on Eighth Street, where I met Robert Penn Warren, southern as all get-out.

Park Avenue was as unexciting as a park bench. Lined on both sides, with luxury apartment houses of similar architectural restraint, these buildings were sturdy and unimaginative, more fortress than palace. One of the few exceptions was the Hotel Marguery, a modestly ornamental structure that occupied an entire block between Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Streets with a dusky courtyard in the middle. This is where Adlai Stevenson, running for president, rented space for his New York headquarters in 1952 and 1956. I was devoted to Stevenson. I stuffed envelopes and ran errands throughout both campaigns, with a sick, pessimistic feeling about the whole enterprise; Stevenson was too thoughtful to be president.

Apartments in the city were not for sale; everything was on a rental basis. Park Avenue from Ninety-sixth, where the subway tracks emerged, down to Grand Central Terminal at Forty-second Street was a stretch of real estate impossible to warm up to, even during the spring, when the city planted tulips in the long brown tongue running down the middle of the avenue. Impossible to warm up to unless you bought into its self-perpetuating myth, namely, that here was the only place for the rich and powerful to live.

I didn't know anyone who lived on Lexington. Most of the apartments there were above small stores, shoes repairers, sandwich shops, antiques stores, modest restaurants. It was a sort of unbuttoned version of Madison, more crowded, less pretentious, less expensive, the first avenue, going east, that gave off a sense that life didn't happen only after you closed the front door behind
you. When we lived at 163 East Sixty-third, we left the house every weekday morning at quarter past eight and walked two blocks up Lexington Avenue to wait for the Brearley bus, passing unassuming shops we had never entered. Our favorite was an antique carpet place with the words
R. Uabozo,
as if it should be followed by a question mark, painted on the front window. I thought it was a joke while Doris thought it was the man's real name: Mr. Rudolf (perhaps) Uabozo. A few blocks down from our grand house and three steps below street level was a plain restaurant my mother occasionally took me to for lunch on a Saturday. The hostess was a middle-aged woman who looked like one of my English teachers. The three or four waiters were beautiful young Korean men whom I couldn't take my eyes off. The menu was simple, running to things like mashed potatoes, tapioca pudding, meat loaf, tomato and rice soup. It occurred to me that, since it was the kind of place that catered to genteel widows on a pension rather than to “career women” like my mother, she found here the kind of food she had eaten as a child and that nourished her in ways you couldn't measure.

A.B. (
left
) and sister, Doris, at Yale Law School prom, 1947.

Almost every Saturday during our junior and senior years, I met my two classmates Katherine “Donnie” Agar and Mary “Moo-face” Myers either at Liggett's or Rexall's where we ate tuna fish or melted cheese sandwiches at the counter and drank calorific frappes. Then we went to one of two movie houses, Loew's Seventy-second Street or RKO Eighty-sixth Street, depending on what was playing. There we saw two movies, a “double feature,” plus a newsreel and maybe a “short,” stumbling out after almost four hours into a wintry dusk. We favored movies with simmering passion, malevolent delusions, and domestic disorder, done to a turn by stars like Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Joseph Cotten, James Mason, Fred MacMurray. One Saturday we watched, horrified, as Richard Widmark pushed Mrs.
Urmy, our Brearley School dramatics teacher, down a tenement staircase as she sat in a wheelchair. Her stage name was Mildred Dunnock; the movie was
Kiss of Death
.

Looming over Third Avenue was the East Side's elevated railway—the El—blocking out great patches of sunlight and creating embroidered shadows on the pavement below. Every time a train rumbled past, the walls of our house vibrated as if we were in the middle of an earthquake. If I was on the phone I would have to stop talking until the train had gone by. I loved riding on the El, mainly because you could look in through the windows of the houses flanking Third Avenue and see people going about their domestic business. They must have hated the trains' noise and shaking. It was something you don't get used to. To me, the El was a novelty, like a nonthreatening ride at an amusement park. The El was demolished in 1955.

East of Third Avenue were ethnic clusters, mostly European. I rarely ventured east of Third. What for? I didn't know anyone who lived there, and my curiosity had not yet extended beyond my own neighborhood and those adjacent to it. Had my mother somehow discouraged me from tasting other foods, smelling other smells, and sticking my toes in foreign waters? She had warned me away from Yorkville, an area in the eighties, from Lexington to Second Avenue—“Nazis live there”—that was all. Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island, Harlem, the Lower East Side—my horizon did not stretch that far. I knew Westchester County, Coney Island, and Long Beach on Long Island, and South Orange, New Jersey, where my cousin lived, but I had never set foot in Park Slope or Brownsville or even the Botanical Gardens. I knew Cannery Row and Yoknapatawpha County better than I knew 125th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. It wasn't that I felt menaced by places whose only reality was their name, it was that they didn't make even the tiniest blip on my radar.

I was born and lived on the placid East Side, played there, shopped, walked, and went to school there—in a building virtually lapped by the East River. The only times I went to the Other Side was to visit the Museum of Natural History and its planetarium and to get my weekly allergy shot from Dr. Peshkin, whose office was on West End Avenue. I associated the West Side so completely with Jews that I thought the natural history museum was “Jewish.” That both my grandmothers lived in apartment hotels on the West Side I saw as a kind of natural progression from old-fashioned ethnicity to the newest of the new, the world my father yearned for, where distinctions like Jew and Christian would be deemed as socially irrelevant as shoe size.

Barnard
College, with its scruffy campus on Morningside Heights (where one day on my way to a nine o'clock class a man whipped open his raincoat and showed me his equipment), was an entire book compared with Wellesley—from which I transferred after sophomore year—which was a chapter only.

An institution with a serious endowment, Wellesley was steered, when I arrived in 1948, by Mildred McAfee Horton, head of the wartime WAVES, the women's arm of the U.S. Navy. Although accepted by Radcliffe, where my sister was about to become a sophomore, I chose Wellesley mainly because my Brearley teachers, having taught my sister the year before, and apparently not able to tell us apart, insisted on calling me Doris. Besides, two admirable girls from Doris's class had gone to Wellesley and reported back that it was good. Something like that. So are life decisions made. My father was disappointed: Wellesley was just girls; Radcliffe, at least in his mind, was Harvard.

The Wellesley campus hub, surrounded by a sea of green grass, consisted of vast stone buildings, faux Gothic in style, somewhat like Yale. Wellesley College, about forty-five minutes from Boston by car, longer by bus, was elegant and dead-ish; rarely would you see anyone strolling its many meandering paths or sitting on its kempt lawns. There was an eighteen-hole golf course across the road from the main campus and a lake, named Waban, where in springtime the Wellesley crew oared its way to national prominence. Every year during graduation weekend, the entire senior class tucked up their academic gowns and rolled hoops down the hill from the main tower, named for the female Midas, Hetty Green. The winner of this hoop race would be, according to legend, first in the class to be married.