The spring air—clean, substantial—refreshed me as I headed down Broadway and skirted Columbus Circle. The leaves were just beginning to stipple themselves greenly on the trees, and I thought for a moment of going into Central Park. At this time of day the Literary Walk, with its statues and elm trees, would be as safe as it ever got.
And the elms reminded me of Max, and of Johnny. The elm that we three planted as a family the summer Max got back from the war still grew, up at Pin Point in Maine. Max, stripped to his undershirt and suspenders, had dug its wide hole, then balanced the burlapped ball of roots in the middle; Johnny danced around the edge, waving his little wooden trowel, singing an elaborate tune he’d made up, the only lyric of which was tree. The elm was quite tall now, thirty-five years old to Johnny’s thirty-eight. Our musical son, now a professor of music himself, lived only a few miles from it, more at home there than he’d ever been in the city.
I decided against the detour, though—mostly because I was hungry, but also because it would deject me to see the bronze likenesses of William Shakespeare and Robert Burns and all their illustrious and manly compatriots. In my moment of professional humiliation it might have been nice to take solace in the eternal realm of art—to burn with a hard gemlike flame, et cetera—but there, too, of late I had met only with frustration and defeat.
My final book of verse—a collected, not an original—called Free with Purchase, came out in 1968, by which time my light, dry style was well out of fashion, although the few reviews it received were favorable. R.H. Macy’s even bought an ad in The New York Review of Books to help promote their sale of it, someone having decided that the accompanying illustration should be a chef with a tagline reading: “A book to give your hero or heroine—appetizing, easily digested, and nonfattening, it makes a savory entrée or dessert.”
With my various disappointments displaced for the moment by the notion of savory entrées, I headed lunchward, toward the Horn & Hardart at Forty-Second Street and Third Avenue, the city’s last remaining automat, where I stopped in for a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.
When walking, I generally welcome courteous contact with strangers—the surprising confidences of letter carriers and construction workers, waitresses and beat cops being just the thing to jolt my busy brain from its unproductive churn—but my mood just then was too tenuous to recommend such encounters. Besides, the automat’s coin-fed mediocrity seemed more in keeping with the spirit of the day, and there I could be confident of uninterrupted solitude as I sipped my tomato juice and looked out the window at the jittery parade of truants and delinquents, the lonely and the bored, all headed west toward Times Square. About ninety percent of the passersby, I estimated, were younger than I, most of them considerably.
Old, old, old—I had grown old. No longer did any even faint acquaintance rush toward me as I was grappling alone with a sandwich and a magazine. I’d bolt my food if my aging throat weren’t so loath to open and close as quickly as it used to.
For the longest time, I knew so many people in the city that I couldn’t sit down in Midtown without at least one of them coming up to say hello, maybe even joining me. But little by little they had moved away, or died, or were being held prisoner—by caretakers, by their own bodies—someplace far from the street.
Helen, heartbreakingly, was among those I’d never see again. Like me, she’d been a Manhattan holdout, insisting, over her son’s and stepdaughters’ requests, on staying in the Greenwich Village brownstone where she and Dwight had lived for the duration of their marriage. Dwight, so much older, had died in 1965, but Helen had hung on until just last year. Her son, Merritt, had her shipped back to Birmingham, the old family plot, so there wasn’t even a physical spot in the city where I could visit her memory.
I might have liked to get married again, too—to remarry as Dwight Zweigert had done. But after Max and I split up I was not exactly residing in the Era of the Extra Man, and between mothering Gian and keeping myself together and afloat, I had had little time for the exhausting business of being courted. To be sure, I was also not at the peak of my appeal to most men at that point.
I went back to the vending window, fed it cash, and got a slice of pie—warm apple with vanilla sauce—plus a cup of coffee: black, no sugar or cream.
When I got home to Murray Hill, I would write Johnny—Gian—a letter. I’d type it on my Remington, probably, or on my Hermes if the ribbon got to snarling. I was already composing it in my mind, taking it—as I often did—as an occasion for arranging my own thoughts.