Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances Page 2

  “You get used to it after a while. You have to.”

  “No,” Helene said. “I don’t. I’m a mossback. I can’t stand to see the devastation.”

  “You should live in the South Bronx.”

  “God, isn’t that a crime?”

  “Whither are we drifting?”

  “What about Italy? The kidnappings …”

  “What about everywhere. Oy, let’s quit this gloom and doom. Chris, you know what I was thinking about the other day?”

  “No, what?”

  “The time you and Carl were pfft for a while. When he twisted your arm about getting married and you wanted to wait. Money and all that he was earning that teeny-weeny intern’s pay and you told him it wasn’t possible. You were like a zombie at the office, it was when we were still at Elliman’s, you and Meryl and I. We dragged you off to lunch, and you — ”

  “And I cried the whole time. God, Helene. It was Reidy’s. Yeah, sure, of course I remember that, all too well. My crise de coeur. That’s that, Carl told me, when I said no, finding it impossible to think of setting up housekeeping just then, and I just couldn’t believe he meant it, that he’d throw me to the wolves. Then I saw he did mean it, he didn’t call me and he wouldn’t answer my calls. Finished! No more busing down to the Village, the San Remo and Minetta’s and that gloomy cavernous coffee house on MacDougal. No more Waverly Inn, that garden with the big old trees, where a bird messed up my salad once, plopped his shit into it.”

  She laughed. “I started crying there in Reidy’s and Meryl said, ‘Gee,’ and then I spilled my drink trying to get up and leave.”

  “We didn’t go to Reidy’s for a while after that.”

  “It was a disgrace.”

  “Well, you got back together again and you have two kids to show for it.”

  “We all took our lumps in one way or another.”

  “We had a lot of fun, though.”

  Yes, they did, Christine thought with a certain wistfulness. It was light years ago and yet it seemed, in some ways, more real than what had happened just yesterday. Now they were all married, except for Clover, who was a successful travel agent with a prestigious firm on Fifth Avenue, Rockefeller Center. Clover was the one who had eluded the tender trap, with a chic little apartment on East Eight-third Street.

  She was extravagantly pretty, small, slight, honey-blonde, like a stylish waif, somehow. They used to call her “little Clover.” They had all worried about her because she was not “taken care of,” and no children to succor her in her old age, no grandchildren sitting on her knee. They didn’t worry about her anymore, though, but had come to feel faint twinges of envy. Sure, the rest of them had achieved what was reputed to be the goal of woman even if she realized other goals: the rest of them had the chatelaine’s keys firmly in their grasp.

  But they were chained, shackled, when it came right down to it. In a rut and wondering what came next. Not Clover, though. She was free as a sandpiper, with travel perks that enabled her to fly off to Paris for a weekend, or go to Vienna at Christmastime. There were always men in her life, perhaps lovers, perhaps simply escorts, friends. Sometimes for a long period, just as often a passing fancy, here today and gone tomorrow.

  Then, almost five years ago, she had mildly astonished them, with news of a liaison (her word) with a man much older than herself, and now she saw only this man. He was married, with a grown son himself married, and Viennese-born, a refugee of the Hitler era; he was a Jew. Clover said, “Some of his family went to the ovens, I don’t know which ones, he doesn’t enlarge on it. He’s a brilliant man, much too good for me. He was of considerable importance as a journalist in Europe — London, Paris — also a short story writer, but in this country he’s gotten short shrift in that regard, though he has a superlative P.R. job and has reconciled himself to being a writer manqué.”

  By this time Clover spoke, en passant, about Anton (Anton Ehrenberg) just the way the others made mention of their own spouses, and by this time it was accepted by the rest of them that Anton was the man Clover had been waiting for. Or if not waiting, at least hoping for, one imagined. She appeared enormously content with her “situation:” Ruth said that Clover had the best of both worlds, and it did indeed seem that nothing was lacking.

  Christine, over her second martini, studied her friends. They were case histories too. Anyone their ages was bound to be. Pattern set, the die cast. They had reached the point of no return. Maybe Clover was the exception: her destiny seemed unfixed as yet. Aside from that, they were prototypes, alive and well and living in New York, and they would never, alas, have lengthy obituaries in the Times.

  Ruth Alexander, like Christine, had had an uneventful passage from young womanhood to matron, the same “normal” progression from one stage to another. It was Ruth that Christine was closest to, not only because they were near neighbors but because their minds ran in similar directions. You didn’t know who lived next door to you in the Manhattan of today, so it was a joy to run into Ruth on the street, striding along in her Ferragamo shoes, or to bump into her in one of the aisles at d’Agostino, coming toward you behind her overflowing shopping cart. There was a coffee shop on Madison where she and Ruth had many a sandwich together, and they often walked, meeting by chance, down to Washington Square, maybe not even talking very much, but just being together. Ruth was your typical Jewish princess, with a vivid little face like an Irish colleen. You would have sworn she came from County Cork.

  Now Ruth was having migraines.

  Meryl was tall and thin and broad-shouldered, big-boned and flat-chested. Regular features, an oval face and not pretty except when she smiled, then a kind of radiance came over her face. She was the one with really tough times behind her. She had gone into computer programming, eased into a top-flight job at IBM and then, thrown over by a man she loved and had planned to marry, went into a tailspin. Funked out in slow, sinister stages: psychiatric sessions failed to ameliorate the situation and she landed in a psych ward. As a matter of fact, she insisted on being admitted … or else, she told her shrink, she’d overdose, it was up to him. His name was unpronounceable, with a lot of z’s, so that you settled for calling him Dr. Cosy, or something near that. They had all talked to him at the hospital: he was grave and pontifical and he spoke in a kind of iambic pentameter, with an accent like Peter Lorre. “Full of himself,” Ruth said, biting off her words. “She should have gone to a big fat jolly type who’d pinch her fanny. I hate these holier-than-thou shitheads, he really thinks he’s Dr. Freud.”

  When she was released from the psych ward she had a mad, frenetic gaiety, telling them every detail of her experience, and almost at once began hunting down people she had met at the hospital, other patients, filling her apartment with them. You couldn’t find a single line of communication with these crazies, young men with ponytails and beads and girls who drew their mouths with brown eyebrow pencil. Meryl lost her job and was in no condition to look for another and had to go on Welfare. Then she lost her apartment because of the crazies crashing there whenever they felt like it. She would have been put out on the street, except for her friends, who succeeded in getting her into a Y branch, where she had a horrid little room with creepy-crawlies. Bad days for Meryl, but she had pulled out of it. Even boyfriends lent a hand in a spirit of Christian decency, and after a while Meryl got a job at the East End Hotel for Women, renting rooms for them, and had a small but clean room as part of her salary. Also two meals a day, breakfast and dinner.

  Then at a party at the East End Hotel she met a very fine young man who had something to do with television, and it went on from there. Now she was married to the television man and seemed no different from anyone else. You would never have guessed that she had had such horrendous zero hours. She had two children, twin girls, and after that underwent a tubal ligature. She said that with her history she really shouldn’t have reproduced at all.

  It was Helene who had really fooled them, though. Helene, whose father had died when
she was only six years old. An only child, she had had a single-parent upbringing, as her mother never remarried. She put all her chips on her daughter, took really good care of her and worked hard to do it, and then later on became an albatross around Helene’s neck. It was like having a cat: you couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do that because the pet had to be fed and watered and its litter box changed. Helene never went to the movies with them in the evening because she didn’t want to leave her mother alone. There was a reversal of roles as Helene slowly became the mother and her mother became the child.

  Helene was a big, robust, creamy-complexioned girl whose splendid build and dimpled Nordic face easily attracted men, whom Helene invited home to dinner rather than date outside because she didn’t want to leave her mother alone. Therefore, the gentlemen friends never lasted very long: they could easily see that anyone who wedded Helene would be wedding her mother as well.

  Once Ruth, in her blunt way, had suggested to Mrs. Sonnenberg that she must be a little lonely. “You’re so young to remain a widow,” was her wily ploy. “It does seem such a waste, I feel.”

  “Lonely?” was the instant reply. “With Helene? Why, we have the happiest life! We’re like sisters! Why should I be lonely?”

  “What will happen to Helene when she dies?” became an almost tedious refrain. Then they decided darkly that she would outlive Helene. “She’ll bury us all.” She did die, though, at the age of forty-nine, and it just went to show that the things you didn’t expect to happen sometimes did, while the things you did expect often never came to pass. It was a seven-months’ illness, cancer of course, and it left Helene many, many pounds lighter and hollow in the face. Her friends outdid themselves in making things bearable for her, taking her to dinner at Longchamps and Gaetano’s and Giovanni’s and every place they could think of, places Helene had never been before.

  Then after about three months Helene announced that she was going to Italy for a “breather.” She said maybe a month or two, maybe longer, she’d see. Well, there must have been some money, insurance or whatever, but you would have thought it would be France, because Helene was a French major, using a lot of French phrases like faute de mieux, and so forth. But she said she had always wanted to go to Italy, and go she did. Not only that, but she stayed for almost a year, sending postcards of the Blue Grotto and Capri and Firenze and Verona and just about everywhere. She loved the hill towns, she wrote, and made X’s to indicate her room at the hotels where she stayed. “This is my room, note the balcony. I sit there after a day’s wandering, with a glass of Campari. Everything sublime, love Helene.”

  When she came back it was with a husband, a man she met in Anacapri and married in Rome. There were two daughters as well, Diane and Lucy. Their father, Harold, was a widower of four years and he simply adored Helene. He treated her as if she were made of Murano glass, of which he had shipped back a great quantity to the States. There was the usual uneasiness between stepmother and stepchildren, but time told the tale: Helene had catered to her mother for a good bit of her life, she was well equipped to take on the challenge of another woman’s children. There was no question of any more additions, she told them. She had all she could handle, and Harold was in full agreement: he got himself vasectomized.

  This was all, of course, yesterday’s news by now, assimilated, digested and part of their history, running through Christine’s mind because she was in an analytical frame of mind. What they had come from and what they had done. That was unchangeable. And now there they sat, five women of varying backgrounds but now with parallel outlooks, women who lived within a radius of a few miles, in the city they had been born and raised in, and who had “kept up.” They saw each other at regular intervals, gathered together like the disciples, drank martinis and broke bread and were more real to Christine, more substantial and enduring than almost everything else. Their concerns would very likely be meshed until they died, one by one. She couldn’t imagine life ending without their spirits wishing her Godspeed in her final journey and then remembering her, lifting a glass at some reunion far in the future, making a toast to the dear departed.

  “Gee, it’s weird not to have Chris here. Remember how she used to imitate Marlon Brando as the Godfather? Hell, she was so damned much fun …”

  2.

  There were the usual protracted leavetakings outside the restaurant, though Clover, who had to get back to her office, dashed off with promises to keep in touch, sure, and see you next time, ladies. “I’m coming down fast,” Ruth said. “How about a walk, anyone?”

  “Let’s go to Bloomie’s,” Helene suggested.

  Meryl was game, but Ruth said no, it was too nice a day to stay indoors, she wanted a brisk hike, “Christine?”

  “You’ve got it. Alongside the park?”

  “Be fine.”

  “Well, have a pleasant stroll, you two, and be well. See you eftsoons.”

  “Eftsoons? How Elizabethan can you get?”

  “An acrostic word. Chic, ain’t it?”

  “If you say so,” Ruth agreed, chuckling. “Okay, go shopping, spend the old man’s money, serve him right. Bye bye.”

  Waves and smiles, and then Meryl and Helene headed over to Lex. “You don’t mind if we stop in that outlet place of Carrano’s first?” Meryl asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “Carrano’s, you don’t know the store? They have stunning shoes, and they have this cut-rate store on Fifty-sixth. Okay?”

  “Why not?”

  Meryl didn’t find anything, but Helene did, as a matter of fact two pairs. “Never been here before, thanks for telling me,” she said when they left. “Terribly good stuff.”

  The light changed at Fifty-seventh Street and they crossed to the other side of the avenue. Lexington, at this point, was like a sewer, junky, odorous and a cacophany of hideous sounds, a spot where you had to keep a firm grasp on your pocketbook. Alexander’s, the mecca of bargain hunters from points all over, was on one corner and a fast food place, from which hot and greasy smells emerged, on the other. There was a subway entrance that spewed forth hordes of milling bodies, much jostling and clamor, and street kids who looked as if they had never seen the inside of a school scrambled about chaotically, screaming and cackling with an ear-splitting intensity.

  One of these kids, out of his mind with mischievous deviltry, ran to the curb, unzipped the fly of his ragged jeans, and peed in the gutter. He was about nine, rips in his dirty shirt, a little Hispanic kid with wild, handsome dark eyes that were snapping with delight at the way people darted away from his stream of urine. The other kids squawked with delirious laughter; he was a hero in their eyes.

  “What chance does someone like that have?” Helene wondered “He’ll O.D. before he’s fourteen.”

  “Bet you a dollar he ends up on the City Council, maybe will be mayor some day.”

  “You may be right, he looked smart. He certainly has chutzpah.”

  A big, battered car, an old Chevy, was parked on the side next to the fast food place. The trunk was open, displaying great plastic-wrapped cuts of meat, bloody red slabs that were plainly steaks, nicely marbleized; you wouldn’t mind having some of them in your freezer. That was, if you didn’t quail at the thought of the probable consequences, salmonella or whatever. Maybe it was horse meat at that. We were almost a hundred percent sure it was hot, stolen, but there it was, massed in the car trunk in crimson heaps, peddled by two tough-looking men who looked as if they spent their spare time stuffing bodies under bridges, and they had every reason to be nonchalant about what they were doing without a license: there was never a patrolman in this vicinity.

  Across the way, hunkered down and fiddling with some object on the sidewalk, a workman, or bum, squatted, a big, burly creature with an enormous behind. He looked prehistoric crouching there, clad on top with a skimpy sweatshirt that, positioned as he was, bared his massive back from midsection to buttocks as his pants strained down due to his crouch. You could practically see hi
s sit-down, though thankfully not quite the whole of it, but the cleft between the two beefy haunches was almost fully exposed, and hairy as an ape.

  He wasn’t mooning, it wasn’t exhibitionism. He was simply absorbed in something only he was cognizant of, and oblivious to anything else. It was his street, his city, his territory. He wasn’t aware of the unlovely spectacle he presented, and wouldn’t have cared if he had been.

  Meryl said she had once seen a bag lady doing her business where the meat truck was today. She even had toilet paper, with which she wiped herself and then dropped alongside the pile she’d made. “It was so depressing, I couldn’t think of anything else all day.”

  “And here I am with two new pairs of shoes.”

  “As if that would help, not buying shoes. I just always tell myself I’ll avoid that side of the street down here, and then I always forget.”

  A block later the Boschian scene was left behind, and they slowed their steps. “You can’t help appreciating this beautiful day,” Helene murmured. “I think I’m getting spring fever.”

  “Yeah. There ought to be a hurdy-gurdy. Like when you were a kid, that tinkling music, it was like a siren song. And the monkey in his little suit. I’d love to see a hurdy-gurdy right now.”

  “I don’t think they have them any more,” Helene said, and they went into Bloomingdale’s.

  • • •

  Clover, reaching Fifth, scratched the idea of taking a cab downtown. It would be no faster than walking, or not enough to make a difference; a few minutes more or less wouldn’t mean anything. She had a lot of work to knock off this afternoon, though, so she walked rapidly, mentally deciding what to tackle first when she got back.

  She didn’t work late on the evenings she was going to be with Anton, and she was seeing him tonight, so she hoped there would be no hitches. Air fares were fluctuating so dizzyingly these days it was impossible to keep up with them. You quoted a price and the next day it went up, which was difficult for clients to understand. They thought you were gypping them. Some of them did, anyway, though in the main she had a comfy little nucleus of tried and true regulars who trusted her and she made it a point not to handle the “pushcart” trade, the people who were out to make deals.