Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(19)
My son, my Gian, my Gianino, my Johnny, learned to play the stately and formidable Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ there. The AA meetings that happen in the basement during the week these days seem more popular than worship. But I don’t judge them, either.
And here it is, the first place of my own. Our own. Plain brown brick fa?ade. Fire escapes descending like strips of black rickrack. Our apartment was on the sixth floor of six. Only the rapture of having escaped the mild and pious confines of the Christian Women’s Hotel made climbing all those flights tolerable.
It was freshly built when Helen and I moved in, completed in 1926. The street noise then was different than now—everything was being constructed, going up, up, up. Progress is loud: riveters riveting, radios blaring.
The decay currently taking place is mostly quiet, a steady dissolution, almost inaudible. But everything was new then. So was I.
A damp wind from the East River blows steam from the subway grates: shiny ghosts.
7
Fast and Loose
By the 1920s, American men no longer received invitations to call on women; instead, they took them out.
Or so they did in free society. Not at the Christian Women’s Hotel in Midtown, though, a low-rise building on West Fifty-Fourth Street, where my parents had insisted on ensconcing me upon my arrival in Manhattan—for my safety, they contended. Thus those of us with an inclination to consort with gentlemen had to devise other schemes to avail ourselves of their company.
Helen McGoldrick, blonde and goddessy, shared that inclination with me.
There in the city, where the fluid and frenetic social jumble proved a challenge for my still-girlish brain to parse—so different was it from Southern, stately, structured Washington, D.C.—I’d acquired the habit of placing new acquaintances into handy categories: Ally, for example, or Enemy, or Lover. Helen from day one was sui generis: Her category could only ever be Best Friend.
The daughter of a steel executive from Birmingham, Alabama, she’d come north after college at Newcomb in New Orleans, to seek adventure, she said, and the opportunity to be more than a dizzy ringing belle.
I thanked every star in the light-polluted sky for aligning to make Helen arrive in that girls’ club on the same day as I did in January 1926, and also to place her in my class at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, where we took lessons for a while—both of us stagestruck, like so many young things with the bee of New York City buzzing in our minds.
One Sunday afternoon in May, Helen stood in the first-floor parlor, which we’d converted into a theater, declaiming her lines in a velvety drawl.
“Nay, sister, reject me not, but let me die with thee, and duly honor the dead.”
We were putting on Antigone. No Greek tragedian, I was sure, had ever spoken that way, but it didn’t matter; our audience was rapt.
“Share thou not my death, nor claim deeds to which thou hast not put thy hand: My death will suffice,” I said in answer.
The cream-colored lace curtains blew back from the open windows as if in agreement with my defiance.
I was playing Antigone—whose name has been suggested to mean “opposed to motherhood,” hence the casting. Helen was Ismene, Antigone’s hesitating sister, though Helen herself would never be so quaking and cowardly. Creon was played by a girl named Ginny, a natural authoritarian; so, too, did she play the chorus, but a chorus of one, so we didn’t have to split the house take too many ways. Ginny’s shift between parts was a trick effected with masks and voices. Helen was also playing Haemon, Antigone’s faulty suitor, transitioning between the role of sister and never-quite-husband by means of a nappy and timeworn beard.
These productions were fairly ridiculous, but that was beside the point.
Since February, Helen and I had been staging monthly shows in the girls’ club’s first floor, charging admission at the door for anyone not actually performing, whether they lived there or not. This balmy afternoon, the front room was lit honey-yellow by the sun, and packed.
Miss Bernice Lockhart, our matron, had her usual seat of honor in the very front row, practically in the actresses’ laps. Her posture, as ever, was erect to the point of pain, and gave the impression that she was trying to balance a book—the Bible, probably—atop her mouse-brown head.
The ballet was fun, and it kept us limber, and Helen and I even went on at the Met a few times: We’d don our flower crowns and throw our arms in the air amongst the other nymphs and sprites, and for that we’d receive one dollar a performance. Not so remunerative.
And so we’d devised these plays. If our amateurishness was a deterrent to some, the faintly illicit thrill of being admitted to our forbidden parlor proved irresistible to others, particularly young male others. By following a standard theater schedule—Friday and Saturday evening performances, and a Sunday matinee—with a single set of shows every month, we’d been building up our escape fund.
Miss Lockhart was a shining disciplinarian, but not the brightest coin in the fountain, and we’d had to convince her of the legitimacy of our theatrical endeavors. The Christian Women’s Hotel had been built in 1920 for single professional women, but most of our fellow lodgers were professional husband hunters. Therein hid the secret to our persuasion of the middle-aged Miss Lockhart: We framed our thespian undertakings as a sophisticated mantrap—a means of getting doctors and lawyers in the door.
Miss Lockhart missed that rebelliousness was the thrust of Antigone, seeing only that it was old, a classic, and Greek. To her mind, this kind of material would attract the right kinds of fiancés, men with college degrees and social mobility. The script had uplift and values, and had withstood the onslaught of time.