“Yes,” I say. “But I’ll be okay.”
“I don’t know if anyone in this city’s going to be okay,” he says. “But if anybody is, Lillian, I got a feeling it’ll be you.”
“Stu, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me on a Hudson River construction site,” I say. “Happy New Year. I’ll shove off now. People are expecting me.”
Not exactly true, not exactly a lie. But a thing it makes him happy to hear, and me happy to say.
I head back the way I came, east on Vesey, toward Church, thinking of planning and cities, of battlements and landfill, and how the solid rock upon which my success was built turned out to be a snow heap and melted, melted.
17
Why People Do Things
On postcards it never rains. Our honeymoon was like a postcard.
On June 20, 1935, Max and I boarded a transatlantic liner bound for Italy.
Lovely day, top sun deck, I wrote in the small travel journal I’d gotten for the trip—a wedding present from Helen McGoldrick and Dwight Zweigert.
Max and I had stood at the railing together, waving white handkerchiefs—more wedding presents—monogrammed with our initials: his the same as always, mine now with a C in place of the B, although professionally I would continue to go by my real name.
Our families—both his parents and mine, in from New Jersey and Washington, D.C., respectively—had waved back, presumably until we were out of their sight. They got along swimmingly, to our delight and surprise; they were going to lunch together after seeing us off.
We watched until Manhattan receded behind the rooftops of Brooklyn and the ship met the open water of Gravesend Bay.
Then we sat side by side on deck chairs, Max to read and me to write a bit more in the little blue book labeled LEST WE FORGET. Bound in leather, it had a gold lock, the kind often found on the diaries one received and was encouraged to keep as a child. Eminently pickable, those locks were just for looks; growing up, I always hid my diary from my older brother under the mattress of my bed.
There were no secrets, though, in this one—nothing dark to confess, just pure happiness. A document boring to anyone but myself, the author.
The least ecstatic thing I wrote as the wind picked up and the seagulls dropped away was My one regret is that I wish I had met my husband sooner.
Young Lillian Boxfish had been a scoffer at not only love but also vacations—if we lived better day-to-day, I often suggested, we might not be so desperate to escape—but now I was prepared to sup on my own words. For years I had heard ocean voyages described with implausibly rapturous superlatives, but this particular journey really did prove itself magical.
Along with everyone else in first class, we dressed up each day and every night. I wore velvet shoes and crêpe de chine dresses and silk nightgowns with collars of handmade lace. It felt less like getting all set for a fancy fête, more like preparing to put on a play—just the way Helen and I used to do, draping ourselves in bedclothes at the Christian Women’s Hotel—only with the whole ship for our stage and a script that we made up on the spot.
I looked forward to glowing wines and southern sunshine.
My frozen northern soul thawed. We were beautified by love.
The longest trips I took prior to meeting Max were delayed rides on the subway, the El, the ferry.
My mother had given me a book called You Meet the Nicest People on Vacations: The Traveler’s Fun Book—to express her joy, I think, that I was finally taking time to relax. Normally such persistent insistence on a socially circumscribed definition of fun-fun-fun! would have annoyed me. But the title was right: We really were meeting nice people.
*
When we arrived, we found the land as grand as the sea. The churches and domes, the streets and the railroads, the food and museums, the ruins and the expanse of the sun-drenched countryside.
Every cathedral we saw, every aqueduct and amphitheater, every great work of art delivered a shock: popping up where you’d least expect it, bigger and brighter than life—as if done up in an advertising style they always taught us to avoid at R.H. Macy’s, a style that would come to be known as hellzapoppin’.
Crude but effective, these ads grabbed for attention in an atmosphere of vertiginous zaniness, presenting their wares in odd settings, absurdly out of scale. A standard example might show a gargantuan package of the product dwarfing a surrounding crowd of customers evincing their bug-eyed, spasmodic approval—exactly how Max and I felt standing in the shadow of, say, the Cathedral of Milan, or Michelangelo’s David. Everything in Italy was hellzapoppin’.
*
If someone had asked him, years later, what my tragedy was, Max might have answered that I was a workaholic.