City of Girls (33 page)

He held me tight, and let me boil forth my tears, until finally I got control of myself. Then he pulled back from the embrace, smiled, and said, “Now, how ’bout you let me have another?”

And we kissed again.

It would be three more months before the Japanese surrendered.

But in my mind—in my hazy, peach-colored, summer-day memory—the war ended in that very moment.

TWENTY-SIX

As swiftly as I can, Angela, let me tell you about the next twenty years of my life.

I stayed in New York City (of course I did—where else would I go?), but it was not the same town anymore. So much changed, and so fast. Aunt Peg had warned me about this inevitability back in 1945. She’d said, “Everything is always different after a war ends. I’ve seen it before. If we are wise,
we should all be prepared for adjustments.”

Well, she was certainly correct about
that
.

Postwar New York was a rich, hungry, impatient, and growing beast—especially in midtown, where whole neighborhoods of old brownstones and businesses were knocked down in order to make room for new office complexes and modern apartment buildings. You had to pick through rubble everywhere you walked—almost
as though the city
had
been bombed, after all. Over the next few years, so many of the glamorous places I used to frequent with Celia Ray closed down and were replaced by twenty-story corporate towers. The Spotlite closed. The Downbeat Club closed. The Stork Club closed. Countless
theaters closed. Those once-glimmering neighborhoods now looked like weird, broken mouths—with half the old teeth
knocked out, and some shiny new false ones randomly stuck in.

But the biggest change happened in 1950—at least in our little circle. That’s when the Lily Playhouse closed.

Mind you, the Lily didn’t simply close: she was demolished. Our beautiful, crooked, bumbling fortress of a theater was destroyed by the city that year in order to make room for the Port Authority Bus Terminal. In fact, our
entire neighborhood was torn down. Within the doomed radius of what would eventually become the world’s ugliest bus terminal, every single theater, church, row house, restaurant, bar, Chinese laundry, penny arcade, florist, tattoo parlor, and school—it all came down. Even Lowtsky’s Used Emporium and Notions—
gone
.

Turned to dust right before our eyes.

At least the city did right by Peg. They
offered her fifty-five thousand dollars for the building—which was pretty good cheese back in a time when most folks in our neighborhood were living on four thousand dollars a year. I wanted her to fight it, but she said, “There’s nothing to fight here.”

“I just can’t believe you can walk away from all this!” I wailed.

“You have no idea what I’m capable of walking away from, kiddo.”

Peg was
dead right, by the way, about the fact that there was “nothing to fight here.” In taking over the neighborhood, the city was exercising a civic right called “the power of condemnation”—which is every bit as sinister and inescapable as it sounds. I had myself a good sulk over it, but Peg said, “Resist change at your own peril, Vivian. When something ends, let it end. The Lily has outlasted her glory,
anyway.”

“That’s not true, Peg,” corrected Olive. “The Lily never had any glory.”

Both of them were right, in their way. We had been limping along since the war ended—barely making a living out of the building. Our shows were more sparsely attended than ever and our best talent had
never returned to us after the war. (For instance: Benjamin, our composer, had elected to stay in Europe, settling
down in Lyon with a Frenchwoman who owned a nightclub. We loved reading his letters—he was absolutely thriving as an impresario and bandleader—but we sure did miss his music.) What’s more, our neighborhood audience had outgrown us. People were more sophisticated now—even in Hell’s Kitchen. The war had blown the world wide open and filled the air with new ideas and tastes. Our shows had seemed
dated even back when I first came to the city, but now they were like something out of the Pleistocene. Nobody wanted to watch cornball, vaudevillelike song-and-dance numbers anymore.

So, yes: whatever slight glory our theater had ever possessed, it was long gone by 1950.

Still, it was painful for me.

I only wish I loved bus terminals as much as I’d loved the Lily Playhouse.

When the day came
for the actual demolition, Peg insisted on being present for it. (“You can’t be afraid of these things, Vivian,” she said. “You have to see it through.”) So I stood alongside Peg and Olive on that fateful day, watching as the Lily came down. I was not nearly as stoic as they were. To see a wrecking ball take aim at your home and history—at the place that really
birthed
you—well, that takes a degree
of spinal fortitude that I did not yet possess. I couldn’t help but tear up.

The worst part was not when the façade of the building came crashing down, but when the interior lobby wall was demolished. Suddenly you could see the old stage as it was never meant to be seen—naked and exposed under the cruel, unsentimental winter sun. All its shabbiness was dragged into the light for everyone to witness.

Peg had the strength to bear it, though. She didn’t even flinch. She
was made of awfully stern stuff, that woman. When the wrecking ball had done all the damage it could do for the day, she smiled at me and said, “I’ll tell you something, Vivian. I have no regrets. When I was a young girl, I honestly believed that a life spent in the theater would be nothing but fun. And God help me, kiddo—it
was
.”

Using the money from the settlement with the city, Peg and Olive bought a nice little apartment on Sutton Place. Peg even had enough money left over after the purchase of the apartment to give a sort of retirement subsidy to Mr. Herbert, who moved down to Virginia to live with his daughter.

Peg and Olive liked their new life. Olive got a job at a local high school working as the principal’s
secretary—a position she was born to hold. Peg was hired at the same school to help run their theater department. The women didn’t seem unhappy about the changes. Their new apartment building (brand new, I should say) even had an elevator, which was easier for them, as they were getting older. They also had a doorman with whom Peg could gossip about baseball. (“The only doormen I ever had before
were the bums sleeping under the Lily’s proscenium!” she joked.)

Troupers that they were, the two women adapted. They certainly didn’t complain. Still, there is poignancy for me in the fact that the Lily Playhouse was destroyed in 1950—the same year that Peg and Olive purchased their first television set for their modern new apartment. Clearly, the golden age of theater was now over. But Peg
had seen that development coming, too.

“Television will run us all out of town in the end,” she’d predicted the first time she ever saw one in action.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Because even
I
like it better than theater” was her honest response.

As for me, with the death of the Lily Playhouse I no longer had a home or a job—or for that matter, a family with whom to share my daily life.
I couldn’t exactly move in with Peg and Olive. Not at my age. It would have been embarrassing. I needed to create my own life. But I was a twenty-nine-year-old woman now—unmarried, no college education—so what could that life
be
?

I wasn’t too worried about how I would support myself. I had a decent amount of money saved and I knew how to work. By that point, I’d learned that as long as I had
my sewing machine, my nine-inch shears, a tape measure around my neck, and a pincushion at my wrist, I could always make a living somehow. But the question was: what sort of existence would I now lead?

In the end, I was saved by Marjorie Lowtsky.

By 1950, Marjorie Lowtsky and I had become best friends.

It was an unlikely match, but she had never stopped looking out for me—in terms of salvaging
treasures from the bottomless Lowtsky’s bins—and I, in turn, had delighted in watching this kid grow up into a charismatic and fascinating young woman. There was something quite special about her. Of course, Marjorie had always been special, but after the war years, she blossomed into an atomically energetic creative force. She still dressed wildly—looking like a Mexican bandito one day, and a
Japanese geisha the next—but she had come into her own, as a person. She’d gone to art school at Parsons while still living at home with her parents and running the family business—while at the same time making money on the side as a sketch artist. She’d worked for years at Bonwit Teller, drawing romantic fashion illustrations for their newspaper ads. She also did diagrams for medical
journals,
and once—quite memorably—was hired by a travel company to illustrate a guidebook to Baltimore with the tragic title:
So You’re Coming to Baltimore!
So really, Marjorie could do anything and she was always on the hustle.

Marjorie had grown into a young woman who was not only creative, eccentric, and hardworking, but also bold and astute. And when the city announced that it was going to knock down
our neighborhood, and Marjorie’s parents decided to take the buyout and retire to Queens, suddenly dear Marjorie Lowtsky was in the same position I was in—out of a home and out of work. Instead of crying about it, Marjorie came to me with a simple and well-thought-out proposal. She suggested that we join forces in the world, by living together and working together.

Her plan—and I must give her
every bit of credit for it—was:
wedding gowns.

Her exact proposal was this: “Everyone is getting married, Vivian, and we have to do something about it.”

She had taken me out to lunch at the Automat to talk about her idea. It was the summer of 1950, the Port Authority Bus Terminal was inevitable, and our whole little world was about to come tumbling down. But Marjorie (dressed today like a Peruvian
peasant, wearing about five different kinds of embroidered vests and skirts at the same time) was shining with purpose and excitement.

“What do you want
me
to do about everyone getting married?” I asked. “Stop them?”

“No.
Help
them. If we can help them, we can profit from them. Look, I’ve been at Bonwit Teller all week doing sketches in the bridal suite. I’ve been
listening
. The salesclerks
say they can’t keep up with orders. And all week I’ve been hearing customers complain about the
lack of variety. Nobody wants the same dress as anyone else, but there aren’t that many dresses to choose from. I overheard a girl the other day saying that she would sew her own wedding dress, just to make it unique, if only she knew how.”

“Do you want me to teach girls how to sew their own wedding
dresses?” I asked. “Most of those girls couldn’t sew a potholder.”

“No. I think
we
should make wedding dresses.”

“Too many people make wedding dresses already, Marjorie. It’s an industry of its own.”

“Yeah, but we can make nicer ones. I could sketch the designs and you could sew them. We know materials better than anyone else, don’t we? And our gimmick would be to create new gowns out of old
ones. You and I both know that the old silk and satin is better than anything that’s being imported. With my contacts, I can find old silk and satin all over town—hell, I can even buy it in bulk from France; they’re selling everything right now, they’re so hungry over there—and you can use that material to make gowns that are finer than anything at Bonwit Teller. I’ve seen you take good lace off
old tablecloths before, to make costumes. Couldn’t you make trims and veils the same way? We could create one-of-a-kind wedding dresses for girls who don’t want to look like everyone else in the department stores. Our dresses wouldn’t be
industry;
they would be custom tailored. Classic. You could do that, couldn’t you?”

“Nobody wants to wear a used, old wedding dress,” I said.

But as soon as
I spoke these words, I remembered my friend Madeleine, back in Clinton at the beginning of the war. Madeleine, whose gown I had created by tearing up both of her grandmothers’ old silk wedding dresses and combining them into one concoction. That gown had been stunning.

Seeing that I was beginning to catch on, Marjorie said, “What I’m picturing is this—we open a boutique. We’ll use your classiness
to
make the place seem high tone and exclusive. We’ll play up the fact that we import our materials from Paris. People love that. They’ll buy anything if you tell them it came from Paris. It won’t be a total lie—some of the stuff
will
come from France. Sure, it will come from France in barrels stuffed full of rags, but nobody needs to know this. I’ll sort out the treasures, and you’ll make the
treasures into better treasures.”

“Are you talking about having a
store
?”

“A boutique, Vivian. God, honey, get used to saying the word. Jews have
stores;
we shall have a
boutique
.”

“But you are Jewish.”

“Boutique, Vivian. Boutique. Practice saying it with me.
Boutique
. Let it roll off your tongue.”

“Where do you want to do this?” I asked.

“Down around Gramercy Park,” she said. “That neighborhood
will always be fancy. I’d like to see the city try to tear
those
town houses down! That’s what we’re selling to people—the idea of
fancy
. The idea of
classic
. I want to call it L’Atelier. There’s a building down there I’ve been eyeing. My parents told me they’ll give me half the payment from the city when Lowtsky’s gets demolished—as well they
should,
having worked me like a stevedore ever since
I was a babe in arms. My cut will be just enough to buy the place I’m looking at.”

I was watching her mind work and whip—and honestly, it was a little scary. She was moving awfully fast.

“The building I want is on Eighteenth Street, one block from the park,” she went on. “Three stories, with a storefront. Two apartments upstairs. It’s small, but it’s got charm. You could fake that it’s a little
boutique on a quaint street in Paris. That’s the feeling we’re looking to create. It’s not in bad shape. I can find people to fix it up. You can live on the top floor. You know how I hate climbing stairs. You’ll like it—there’s a skylight in your apartment. Two skylights, actually.”

“You want us to buy a
building,
Marjorie?”

“No, honey, I want
me
to buy a building. I know how much money you’ve
got in the bank—and no offense, Vivian, but you couldn’t afford Paramus, much less Manhattan. Although you
can
afford to buy into the business, so we’ll go halfsies on that. But I’ll be the one who buys the building. It will cost me every dime I have, but I’m willing to shoot the whole works at it. I’m damn sure not going to rent a place—what am I, an
immigrant
?”