“And plenty of it,” they said at the same moment, something that happened with them back then. They bid fifty dollars, which was all the money they had, and got the lot.
That Sunday morning they rented their usual space and a couple of tables. Other recent finds included a tackily furnished tin dollhouse, a set of blue-and-white china bowls, a few slightly decayed leather jackets, several antique corsets, a box of men’s assorted arm garters, and a golf bag and clubs bought at an apartment sale. They had dysfunctional old cameras and a cracked glass jar full of marbles. Prominently displayed was a selection of Myrna’s Place stuff.
The couple in the booth across from theirs seemed to loot a different place each week. That Sunday it was an old hunting lodge. They had a moose head, skis, snowshoes, and blunt heavy ice skates; Adirondack chairs, and gun racks.
Larry and Lilia set up in the predawn dark as flashlights darted about the lot. Then one beam fell on them. A flat-faced woman with rimless glasses, and eyes that showed nothing turned her light on the golf clubs.
She shrugged when she saw them up close. But as she turned to walk away, her flashlight caught a nicely draped tablecloth from Myrna’s Place. “Thirty dollars for that lot,” she said indicating all the Myrna items.
Larry and Lilia hesitated. Thirty dollars would pay the day’s rent for the stall.
Then another light found the table. A middle-aged man with the thin, drawn look of a veteran of many Manhattan scenes was examining Myrna’s wine glasses.
“Five dollars each,” Lilia told him and he didn’t back off.
To the woman who had offered thirty for the entire lot, Larry said, “Thirty for the tablecloth.”
The woman ground them down to twenty. The thin, drawn man bought four wine glasses for fifteen dollars and continued examining the merchandise.
That morning, Lilia and Larry had the booth that attracted the flashlights. It was like being attacked by giant fireflies. It was all Myrna’s Place. Nobody was interested in anything else. Old Fleas paused and looked their way.
As dawn began to slide in between the buildings, the thin, drawn man found a small ivory box.
“Myrna Lavaliere, who and where are you now?” he asked and opened the lid. It was full of business cards bearing the usual double Myrna’s Place-and-coronet logo. Below that was an address on the Upper East Side, a Butterfield 8 telephone number and the motto, “Halfway between Park Avenue and Heaven.”
“More like far from Heaven and down the street from Hell,” the man said. “You kids have any idea what you have here?”
Larry and Lilia shrugged. Other customers wanted their attention.
“Wickedness always sells,” the man told them. “And after the war in the late 1940s, rumor had it this place was wicked. Myrna’s was a townhouse where you went in human and came out quite otherwise.”
A tall woman with a black lace kerchief tied around her long neck and wearing sunglasses in the dawn light had stopped examining a pair of Myrna’s Place candlesticks and paused to listen.
She gave a short, contemptuous laugh and said in an unplaceable accent, “Oh please, spare these not-terribly-innocent children all the sour grape stories spread by all the ones who couldn’t get inside the front door of Myrna’s. What happened there happened before and will happen again. If you know anything about these phenomena at all you know that.”
She faced him and raised the glasses off her eyes for a moment. Neither Larry nor Lilia could see her face. But apparently her stare was enough to cause the man to first back away then scuttle off.
“Fifty gets you the candlesticks,” Larry told her. They were getting bold.
“I just wanted to make sure these weren’t as good as the pair I have. But I will let others know about you. I think the time is right.”
That morning the wizened pack rats and sleek interior decorators were all at the booth hissing at each other as they pawed through the items. Lilia and Larry tried to spot people they thought might actually have gone to Myrna’s.
As morning sunlight began to hit the Sixth Avenue Market, club kids coming from Danceteria in fifties drag found Larry and Lilia’s stall. Dolled up boys in pompadours, girls in satin evening gowns who looked like inner tension was all that held them together, stopped on their way downtown. They seemed fascinated, whispered and giggled, but didn’t buy much: a handkerchief, a cigarette holder.
But the stock of Myrna’s Place items was almost cleaned out when a lone deathpunk girl, her eye shadow and black hair with green highlights looking sad in the growing light, appeared. She pawed through the remaining items, dug in her pockets and gave Larry three dollars and seventeen cents, all that she had with her, for a stained coaster.
Around then Lilia realized that if she held any of the items at a certain angle, the Myrna’s Place design looked like an upper and lower lip and the coronet was a sharp, gold tooth. Once she saw that and pointed it out to Larry they couldn’t see them any other way.
They weren’t naive. In the demimonde they inhabited gossip lately concerned ones called the Nightwalkers. That morning they began wondering about Myrna’s Place.
2.
Thirty years later, on the morning after the dinner party, Larry called Lilia on her cell phone several times.
But she was on an errand that took her uptown and onto the tram to Roosevelt Island. Though this situation hadn’t occurred recently, Lilia remembered how to play Larry when she had something that he wanted.
Roosevelt Island lies in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. On that small spot in the midst of a great city is a little river town of apartment houses. Along the main street the buildings project out over the sidewalks providing a covered way.
In one period of Lilia’s life the sun was unbearable and had to be avoided. Now walking under cover she was glad the habit had remained and helped her avoid skin cancer.
Lilia remembered the others who took the cure when she and Larry did: the old man with wild white hair and gleaming eyes who required three times as much Ichordone as anyone else in the program and wore a muzzle like a dog because he tried to bite, the mousy woman who had been turned into a vampire when she saw Bela Lugosi as Dracula on TV twenty years before.
Generations ago Roosevelt Island was called Welfare Island. It was where hospitals for contagious diseases were located. Their ruins still dot the place. Hospitals are still located there, most of them quite ordinary.
But in one there is a ward for patients with polymorphous light eruption (allergy to the sun) and hemophagia (strange reactions to blood) and several other exotic diseases. Behind that hospital are cottages.