Since 1960, when Gian left for college, I had written him a minimum of three times a week. A lot, I knew, but not as bad as I used to be. When he first left home I wrote melodramatic poems with titles like “To a Distant College Freshman,” and I longed for the days when measles were the concern, not bouts of going steady.
From the morning that Max and I brought him home from the hospital, Gian had delivered the gratitude and terror that accompany the gift of a beautiful thing: the implicit charge that you, thenceforth, will be responsible for its care and upkeep.
I was not sentimental over him, though I was devoted, as he was to me. He understood my sense of humor. He got me.
For my latest birthday he’d sent me a dopey card with a half a dozen tiny cats on it that looked just like Phoebe; inside he’d written You’re more adorable than a basket full of kittens!!! He’d led all three grandkids in drawing their own cat cards, too, and had mailed them all separately, thus ensuring that the postman was credited with a tour de force on the day they arrived.
I finished the coffee and rose to take my dishes to the dish drop, wondering which of us would vanish first: me or this automat.
When I typed up the letter to Gian, I decided, I wouldn’t tell him about the television studio. Only about the Horn & Hardart, and about the walk, most likely.
I had leaned on him so hard for such a long time—in person, after his father left me for Julia, then in writing, after he himself left home for Bowdoin—that I strove not to do so anymore. We had held each other upright for years; now there had to be distance between us, only a little, if we were ever to learn to travel under our own power.
Even when he was a kid, Gian seemed to understand the absurdity of what his mother did for a living—how my angle was to take common things and reveal them to be strange and attractive, and to thereby relieve the monotony of advertising. The monotony of living, really.
I drew my coat around me and reemerged into the strangeness of Forty-Second Street.
The point of living in the world is just to stay interested.
22
As Good a Day to Die as Any
History is packed with poets more committed to memory than I.
Take, for example, Clement Clarke Moore, the “Bard of Chelsea,” whose country estate provided the name and the entire territory of the neighborhood in which Wendy now resides. Though Moore himself is mostly forgotten, there’s hardly a parent or child in the anglophone world whose ear doesn’t quicken to the words of his single famous verse, even if they know it only by its first line rather than its proper title, “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”
As I lurch toward West Fourteenth—tilted off plumb by my unbalanced burdens, the amaryllis pot proving heavier than I’d guessed—I’m struck anew by admiration for Moore’s poem, which just last week, on Christmas Eve, I performed by heart for my visiting grandchildren. At the time I hadn’t paused to consider the extent of its success, so complete as to be all but invisible in its vastness: Not only did it universalize its image of Saint Nick as a rosy and rotund whitebeard borne from chimney to chimney by flying reindeer, it also erased itself as the source of these notions, allowing them to seem ancient and true, like something everyone has always known.
It was, in a sense, the greatest print advertisement in American history.
Lily was so impressed with my delivery of the poem that she promised to be the one reciting it next year. I have no doubt that she will succeed in her memorization, though whether I will still be around and alive to hear it is a separate question.
“’Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house…” I speak the lines aloud as I turn at the spooky Beaux-Arts fa?ade of the old county bank building, because the street beyond is too desolate and dark for total silence: the bulb of every shepherd’s-crook lamppost has been cracked by some meticulous hoodlum. I fall silent again when I reach St. Bernard’s Church, its steps crowded with bundles of fabric and plastic, some of which are trash, some of which are people.
On this night, at this hour, I am the only moving figure in the landscape, the only person who is not where she means to be.
I am almost to the party. The address that Wendy gave me is on the other side of Ninth Avenue, which is odd, because this is the last residential block between here and the Hudson: Ahead there’s only the brick butte of the Port Authority building to the north, defunct factories and packing plants to the west. For the first time it occurs to me that she might be living—squatting—in a warehouse, and I wonder, if this is true, why she didn’t mention it. I imagine her weighing the wisdom of telling me, thus risking my disapproval when I might not have any real intention of coming, versus not telling me, thus risking getting me lost in a perilous area on New Year’s Eve. Did she really not want me to come?