I made up my mind to move to New York in the fall of 1977. I drove there in my 1965 Plymouth Fury II, with my cat, my books pared down to the bare essentials, and two hundred dollars. The Fleischmanns, whose grown children had moved out, were still in parental mode, and they befriended me readily. I spent many a cocktail hour in their den, drinking their Heineken and listening to Peter’s stories. Peter drank Scotch-and-water, chain-smoked, and swallowed Maalox by the handful. He told war stories (he was in the Battle of the Bulge) and stories about Yale and about his father, Raoul (the family came from Vienna), and croquet games with Harpo Marx banking a shot off a spare tire that he had sawed apart and wrapped around a tree trunk.
That fall, I had a reverse commute from the financial district to Paterson, New Jersey, where I was washing dishes in a friend’s restaurant. The friend paid my bus fare and gave me all the beer I could drink. In return, I tried not to throw away the silverware when I scraped the dishes. Often I got off the bus and walked over the George Washington Bridge on the way home. I worked on my thesis, and sometimes despaired. Peter pointed out that even if I never finished the thesis or got the master’s degree, it was no reason to despair. Peter had no influence in the editorial department—like his father, he kept business and editorial strictly separate. But he offered to call Bob Bingham, the executive editor, and ask him to talk with me. We met on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Bingham was very nice, but there were no openings.
I quit the dishwashing job and worked as a cashier at Korvettes during the Christmas rush. I could not figure out whether to be sad or relieved when the management did not recognize my talent and keep me on. I did temp work, first at an insurance company in the financial district. It was about a block from the loft I lived in on John Street, and my commute consisted of going down one elevator and up another. A handsome man with coppery hair posed at the Xerox machine. I moved on to a temp job as a statistical typist at a bank in Midtown, filling in interest amounts on tax forms. I was on the verge of trying to get a hack license so that I could drive a cab when Peter, possibly sensing an ambulance in my future, suggested that I give Bingham a follow-up call.
There was an opening! Two, in fact, one in the typing pool and one in the editorial library. I flunked the test for the typing pool. It was on an electric typewriter, and I was used to a manual—at least, that was my excuse. If my hands trembled over the keyboard, the typewriter took off without me. The interview in the editorial library was like the one at the dairy in that I didn’t have to lie to get the job. I wanted to work at The New Yorker, and once I got a whiff of the library—that bookish, dusty, paste-and-paper smell so peculiar to libraries—I felt that I was in my element. Helen Stark, who was only the second person ever to be in charge of the library, had a noble head—you could see her profile on a coin—and strong features. She and three girls sat at desks that faced each other in a cloverleaf arrangement. Helen gave me a typing test—on a manual typewriter, cramming words onto an index card (I aced it)—and borrowed an empty office for the interview. I remember her arranging her skirt, which was black and wide at the hem, when she crossed her legs. (My own skirt was a forest-green Danskin wraparound that a friend had picked up at a thrift shop in New Jersey, and I didn’t realize until the next time I wore it that one end of the hem hung some eight inches longer than the other.) I was all aglow, and Helen warned me that it was not a glamorous job. But she knew from experience that nothing she said could dim my enthusiasm, or overturn my conviction that I would soon be one of the “young friends” whose “letters” were published in Talk of the Town. After the interview, Jeanne Fleischmann took me to lunch at the Algonquin and then to the Russian Tea Room, where I ordered a cup of Russian tea. I was too superstitious to celebrate prematurely.
The call came the next day, a Friday, and I started on Monday. It was snowing, and Helen Stark took me upstairs to the makeup department, on the nineteenth floor. The magazine went to press on Monday afternoon, and the men in makeup, who lived in the Bronx, had come in on the train the night before and stayed in a hotel across the street so that the blizzard wouldn’t prevent them from getting to work. Their job was to do the page layout, fitting columns and cartoons and counting picas. A notice from the editor, William Shawn, went up on the bulletin board, saying that anyone whose work was not “essential” could go home. Nobody wanted to think they were not essential.