I’ve lived in a total of six different apartments all over Manhattan—starting with the Christian Women’s Hotel in Midtown that a friend of my parents found for me when I first moved to the city—but Murray Hill is where I first felt at home, and Murray Hill was where I figured I’d end up returning, eventually—and I did, though not for many years.
Murray Hill is where Helen McGoldrick and I lived—sharing the rent on a one-bedroom, crowded for the sake of independence—after we moved out of the hotel, and not an instant too soon, as that place had been stifling. Thirty-Third Street, between Third and Lexington. We moved in just after she’d begun working at R.H. Macy’s, and so, thanks to her, had I.
Although it’ll make my walk to Grimaldi ever so mildly longer, I want to pass by the old place—days of auld lang syne and all—and I have enough time. Typically neither closeness nor distance matter much to me on my walks. Neither convenience nor difficulty is my objective. Usually I’ll accomplish about five miles a day, perhaps taking Saturday or Sunday off.
I am old and all I have left is time. I don’t mean time to live; I mean free time. Time to fill. Time to kill until time kills me. I walk and walk and think and think. It gets me out, and it keeps me healthy, and no one on the street seems to want to mess with me, as they say on the street. All my friends in New York—back when I still had friends, before everyone moved away or died—had mugging stories, but I’ve never had trouble.
Once, a few years ago, while I was walking down Bowery, I was invited in for a meal at the mission. I don’t fully understand how I might be mistaken for someone in need of a soup kitchen, so I suppose that’s why I went in. It seemed rude to refuse, and I met some nice people. Some of those there were unmeetable: too far gone, either within themselves or on drugs or booze. I don’t judge them, though.
Some of the other people I met were just having a bad year, and some of them were on their way to someplace worse, and I’m not sure that the volunteer who insisted I sit down and have a baloney sandwich was wrong about my belonging there. I am able to afford to feed myself, but I don’t always remember to eat, and sometimes I go days without speaking to anyone but Phoebe—who is a good listener for a cat—and my son on the phone. I stuffed some twenties into the donation box on the way out, and I still send that mission money every Christmas, anonymously.
A police officer walks by with a German shepherd. I used to be on the Murray Hill beautification committee, with a lot of other old ladies, some of them smart and some of them silly, and some of them—who were also on the board of the Morgan Library & Museum—obsessed with the area’s declining wealth. I drifted away, though. Stopped going, and I think by now they must have disbanded.
I am not a believer, but I still go to services at the church around the corner from my apartment, the Church of the Incarnation, not so far from where I’m walking now. A free show. A museum, practically, with work by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Something to do, and some people who know me.
My son, my Gian, my Gianino, my Johnny, learned to play the stately and formidable Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ there. The AA meetings that happen in the basement during the week these days seem more popular than worship. But I don’t judge them, either.
And here it is, the first place of my own. Our own. Plain brown brick fa?ade. Fire escapes descending like strips of black rickrack. Our apartment was on the sixth floor of six. Only the rapture of having escaped the mild and pious confines of the Christian Women’s Hotel made climbing all those flights tolerable.
It was freshly built when Helen and I moved in, completed in 1926. The street noise then was different than now—everything was being constructed, going up, up, up. Progress is loud: riveters riveting, radios blaring.
The decay currently taking place is mostly quiet, a steady dissolution, almost inaudible. But everything was new then. So was I.
A damp wind from the East River blows steam from the subway grates: shiny ghosts.
7
Fast and Loose
By the 1920s, American men no longer received invitations to call on women; instead, they took them out.
Or so they did in free society. Not at the Christian Women’s Hotel in Midtown, though, a low-rise building on West Fifty-Fourth Street, where my parents had insisted on ensconcing me upon my arrival in Manhattan—for my safety, they contended. Thus those of us with an inclination to consort with gentlemen had to devise other schemes to avail ourselves of their company.
Helen McGoldrick, blonde and goddessy, shared that inclination with me.
There in the city, where the fluid and frenetic social jumble proved a challenge for my still-girlish brain to parse—so different was it from Southern, stately, structured Washington, D.C.—I’d acquired the habit of placing new acquaintances into handy categories: Ally, for example, or Enemy, or Lover. Helen from day one was sui generis: Her category could only ever be Best Friend.