Just One Catch (25 page)

To the dean of the School of Liberal Arts, Professor Gates wrote that “Mr. Heller is an accomplished writer, particularly of fiction, and he believes that editorial experience will be of benefit to him.” He recommended the leave, and it was approved.

Joe's colleague Joseph Rubin sensed that Joe would not come back. Joe assured him, “I don't hate anybody here.”

On March 20, 1953, Joe wrote to Professor Gates, “It is now certain that Mrs. Heller and I will not return to State College and that I will therefore not resume my teaching duties when my present leave of absence expires.” He offered his formal resignation, and asked Professor Gates to “convey my respects to the other members of the department and express my appreciation for all that was done to make my two years with them as pleasant as they were.”

The following fall, the Army Air Force and Exchange Service, located on West Forty-third Street in Manhattan, wrote to Gates, asking for details about Mr. Joseph Heller's “ability to get along with others, his general stability, his initiative and his ability to think for himself.” The Exchange Service was considering Mr. Heller for a job. Gates responded, in a handwritten note rushed to New York via Western Union, that Mr. Heller had always performed his job well, that he was well liked and talented. He was sorry Mr. Heller had left. In a follow-up note (perhaps with Joseph McCarthy's TV chatter ringing in his head), Professor Gates said Mr. Heller was “honest, dependable, and loyal.”

Many years later, a teacher in the Penn State English Department, Stanley Weintraub, invited Joe back to campus to give a reading of his fiction. “He declined,” Weintraub recalled, “writing on a postcard that he never wanted to set foot in Happy Valley again.”

PART THREE
Live Forever

 

9.
Caught Inside

“
ISN'T THIS THE BUILDING
where they found dead people on the roof?”

This anonymous 2009 posting on a Web site devoted to discussions of New York City real estate rumors captures one of the chief characteristics of the Apthorp Building, located between Broadway and West End Avenue and stretching from Seventy-eighth to Seventy-ninth streets: Once inside, you either dream or fear you'll never escape it, depending on your temperament. Joe and Shirley Heller moved into the Apthorp in the summer of 1952, while Joe was on leave from Penn State.

The building, completed in 1908, has a history to enflame the most overheated gothic imagination. “This is like the House of Usher,” a longtime tenant once said. “Beautiful on the outside, but on the inside it's a corpse, and its guts are rotting away.” Another tenant swore that he once turned on his kitchen faucet and “pigeon feathers … [came] out.” Chandeliers in the old elevators used to chime with the creaky movements up and down: a whispery music conjuring visions of long-gone visitors in diaphanous gowns and suits as white as light. It was a place entirely worthy of the oddities that would distinguish Joe Heller's mature fiction, which began to take shape in Apartment 2K South, situated, strangely enough, on the north side of the Apthorp's interior courtyard.

From around the time of the nation's founding, no plot of ground spoke more volubly of America—and money—than Charles Ward Apthorpe's combined land holdings along what is now known as upper Broadway in Manhattan. The history of this particular sod was irony-soaked, in ways Joe richly appreciated.

Apthorpe was a British Loyalist who built one of the grandest pre-Revolutionary houses on the continent. The house, finished in 1764, known as Elmwood after the stately elms that surrounded it, faced the Hudson. Here, George Washington rested with some of his troops following the Battle of Long Island during the Revolutionary War. After the war, Apthorpe was indicted for high treason, but—in a foretaste of the American way—his wealth enabled him to escape the charges.

His mansion fell in 1891 to make way for Ninetieth and Ninety-first streets. Litigation among his heirs and several other families who claimed parcels of the land, including some of the most famous names in New York history—Astor, McEvers, Van den Heuvel, and Burnham—befogged the courts for years, in grim Dickensian fashion, and was finally settled in the first decade of the twentieth century. One can almost hear the sigh of relief in a
New York Times
article, dated July 24, 1910, celebrating the laying to rest of the “doughty royalist Charles Ward Apthorp.”

William Astor commissioned the prominent architects Charles William Clinton and William Hamilton Russell to design the Apthorp Apartments, a twelve-story limestone structure modeled on the Pitti Palace in Florence. Its presence transformed the atmosphere of quaint colonialism that had characterized the area for over a century, and signaled the move toward apartment living that would shape Manhattan's crowded and frenetic future.

The Apthorp's High Renaissance exterior, carved and rusticated, featuring large cornices and a three-story porte cochere leading to a formal courtyard with a garden and two fountains, was elegantly tasteful. There were two arched entrances endowed with bas reliefs of garland-bearing female figures and delicate ironwork in and around the gates. Putti were tucked modestly beneath the rooftop cornice, which overlooked the Italian Romanesque First Baptist Church, built in 1894, just across Seventy-ninth Street.

Originally, the building sheltered ten apartments per floor, each with glass-paneled French doors, room-size foyers with mosaic tiled floors, and Wedgwood friezes. In the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, many of the apartments were divided into smaller units. Because they overlooked an interior courtyard, several of the rooms received poor, indirect lighting: a trade-off for the cozy, private, secure atmosphere created by the design.

When it opened, the courtyard measured 95 by 134 feet and, according to
Architecture
magazine, offered a “display of horticulture that would grace a botanical garden.” Brick walkways surrounded the two bowl-shaped fountains. There were shrubs, yuccas, and flowers; vines hung from boxes placed in upper-story windows. All in all, the Apthorp exuded timelessness, with a mixture of classical styling, ostentation (private living on a public scale), and forward-looking development fever.

The West Side was a blighted area when Joe and Shirley settled there. A citywide housing shortage followed World War II; hastily, owners partitioned residence hotels and apartment buildings to squeeze more people into smaller spaces. The city passed a law encouraging this practice by making it quite lucrative, turning brownstones that had once hosted one or two families into overcrowded rooming houses, attracting hordes of real estate speculators, and driving out modest landlords who had overseen their properties with personal concern.

Many of the new tenants, back from the war and now facing horrid prospects, were in transit, troubled, isolated. At about the time Joe and Shirley moved into their apartment, Mayor Robert F. Wagner, disturbed by the deterioration of West Side housing, appointed the mayor's Slum Clearance Committee, headed by Robert Moses, to rebuild the area. In consequence, huge demolition projects displaced thousands of low-income families for years to come. Several tenements appropriated by redevelopers fell into greater ruin, but with higher rents and poorer care. The city's Welfare Department took over a number of crumbling furnished rooms in ratty hotels in order to stow away society's undesirables. Within a few years of Joe and Shirley's arrival at the Apthorp, West Side streets teemed with former mental patients still in need of treatment, single mothers with hungry children, prostitutes, petty thieves, and all manner of the destitute. Crime rates soared.

In spite of this steady decline, the West Side maintained a unique identity, formed by diversity and turbulence. Joe loved the atmosphere. Chaos it was, but a
cohesive
chaos, able to bind people tightly. For example, the year before the completion of the Apthorp, a nearby charitable foundation built a 350-unit tenement for West Indian domestics. Over sixty years later, 650 people still lived in those rooms, most of them the children and grandchildren of the original tenants.

Simmering cultural tensions made the neighborhoods all the more exciting. Predominantly Protestant throughout the Civil War, the area became the province of Irish Catholics until around 1910, when Jewish immigrants from Russia, Poland, and Germany came crowding in. By the late 1930s, West Side neighborhoods felt European, dotted with bookshops, newspaper stands selling international publications, and sidewalk cafés. Throughout these demographic dances, vestiges of the area's former personalities clung to the streets and walls. To Joe Heller, in 1952, the area had a bit of the carnival, old and new, that he recognized from Coney Island.

Inside the Apthorp, a similar sensibility—continuity spiced with variety—rang out in hallway greetings. One of the first people Joe and Shirley learned about was Elizabeth Kirwin. For thirty-five years, she had operated elevators in the building's northern wing, after replacing her brother once he entered the army in World War I. She had thought her time in the building would be temporary, but her brother got another job after demobilization, so she stayed on. “She never had a cross word with a tenant or an employee. If a tenant fell ill, she paid a call and brought flowers. She did thousands of little services outside her job, always courteously and cheerfully. We found out later that her blood pressure rose to 280, but no one heard a word of complaint from her,” said Mrs. William Byrne, one of Joe and Shirley's neighbors. After Kirwin collapsed in a locker room of a cerebral hemorrhage, most of the Apthorp's tenants—men and women of many faiths—gathered in Calvary Cemetery to pay their respects. The scene, a coming together of vastly different types, epitomized the Apthorp in those days. In the years ahead, growing differences would nudge aside communal gestures: In mid-February 1997, when a dead woman was discovered on the roof, no one in the building claimed to know her. Later identified as Gabriele Opferman, forty-one years old, she was apparently a German tourist. No illnesses or wounds. She was not intoxicated. An autopsy determined she had died of exposure. What she was doing at the Apthorp and how she got on the roof without anyone knowing or seeing her remained a mystery, and spoke to some of what the Apthorp had become.

By this time, Joe had left the building, but Shirley stayed on. Rumors spread, like water damage, that management hoped to force everyone out so it could drive up rents or turn the apartments into condos. Asbestos leaked from the walls, toxins poured from the radiators, my god, we'll all die in a flood when the plumbing bursts.…

But in the beginning, Joe and Shirley loved their four small rooms, secured with financial help from Dottie and Barney. A daughter, Erica Jill, had joined them on February 1, 1952, right before they found a place at the Apthorp. Joe was in his last semester of teaching at Penn State. He made arrangements to be back in New York when Erica arrived. “I was born at French Hospital, a place with
nuns,
of all things,” Erica says. The hospital, now gone, once stood on West Thirty-fourth Street, opposite what is now the Lincoln Tunnel exit. It had been built in 1904 by the French Benevolent Society, a nonsectarian organization determined, in its early days, to treat patients free of charge. William Carlos Williams interned there. It was Willa Cather's favorite infirmary.

“Erica, for Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, and Jill from Jack and Jill,” Jerome Taub recalls learning from Dottie. “Joe named her.”

By mid-summer 1952, father, mother, and daughter were ensconced in the Apthorp. Erica, blessed with her mother's fair coloring, was delighted by the flowers in the courtyard (where children were not allowed to play) and by the trembling glass pendants in the slow, gently swaying elevators.

*   *   *

“NOW HERE'S
how it was … in the … fifties,” wrote Shirley Polykoff, one of the most respected women in American advertising. “On T.V., women were having love affairs with refrigerators.… Bufferin … were racing Aspirin … from the stomach to the seat of the pain, while sinus cavities were being lit up and cleared out fast, fast, fast. The sell was hard, the voice-over was the voice of authority and the models mostly male because the research showed that, in the fifties, viewers were much too fine to watch a woman suffer.” On the other hand, “magazine ads … were almost entirely peopled with high-fashion, overly made-up, overly groomed ‘Park Avenue penthouse' types whose brilliant smiles reflected the sheer pleasure of mopping floors, baking cakes, and gentle laxative relief.”

Joe would meet Polykoff at a cocktail party sometime in the late 1960s. By then, she knew him as one of the few former advertising copywriters to make a leap to literary success; certainly no one had pulled it off with as much panache as he had. In her memoir,
Does She … or Doesn't She?
Polykoff recalls her encounter with Joe. The exchange captures the easy sophistication men and women effected in that time and place (as well as Joe's rough charm):

“Your name is familiar.…” [Joe said.] “You're in advertising.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I once wrote you a letter asking for a job.”

“You did?”

“But you didn't give me a job. Even though I'm Jewish.”

“I can't go around giving everyone a job who's Jewish.”

“But you could have given me one.”

“No, I couldn't.”

“Why?”

“Because you're a man. And I only hire women writers.”

… Late in the evening he offered to take me home—to Park Avenue and 62nd Street.

“I don't live on Park and 62nd Street,” I protested. “I live on Park and 82nd.”

“I can only take you to Park and 62nd.”

“How come?”

“That's where I'm meeting my wife.”