Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(36)
I was still at the top of my advertising game. Still making plenty of money. And it was a glorious summer, so far, in the city, with liquor once again flowing freely.
But recently, even on the hottest nights, I couldn’t fall asleep without being covered up, couldn’t quite rest without at least the lightest sheet settled lightly over me. In my mind, I’d come to see it as the physical remedy for a vulnerability I’d begun to feel—a material attempt to ward off my own light sheet of anxiety, ever-present, ever-covering.
12
A Fireman’s Axe and a Dracula Cape
In certain instances, walking alone in Manhattan is actually safer at night.
Passing by the Strand, for example, at Twelfth and Broadway. I usually walk past that bookstore with intense ambivalence: delight because I have been frequenting it since the 1930s, when it was over on Fourth Avenue, just one among nearly fifty similar shops; dread because on more than one occasion in the past two decades I have found my own poetry collections derelict on the sidewalk carts, on sale for mere cents, and with no one watching over them because if they get stolen, well, who cares? At night, at least, the carts have been rolled away and there’s no chance I’ll be confronted with evidence of my grim literary fate.
The Strand is something like two miles behind me now. I am making good time, nearing Lower Manhattan. Feeling the simple satisfaction of a well-executed plan, as I am close to Delmonico’s and beginning to feel peckish.
Broadway takes me west of Little Italy, but among my fellow pedestrians I find many hints of its closeness: dapper hats and open collars, boxes of pastry wrapped tightly in twine, a brash and urgent music in voices—both Italian and Chinese, who increasingly are the actual inhabitants of the neighborhood. I think of how many times I came here with Max to meet his parents—when we were first involved, and also when they’d visit the city on weekends to see Johnny, their only grandchild. Back when I met Max, I was surprised and disappointed that his parents didn’t reside in Little Italy, but, rather, in New Jersey—Rutherford, where they’d been for years, Max living with them. Little Italy, I learned, was really Little Naples, and Max’s parents were northerners, Milanese. They also had the deeply held, received idea—received from friends and neighbors, and the parents of friends and neighbors, who remembered a time when Mulberry Street was the worst of Manhattan’s slums—and also, to be sure, received from advertising—that success meant to pass through the city quickly and settle in the suburbs.
Within a couple of blocks, the foot traffic has thinned almost to nothing. This part of the walk—approaching the financial district, emptied for the holiday—feels like passing through a ghost town or the backlot of a movie studio. I am the only moving figure in sight.
Passing the grand French Renaissance exterior of city hall, I am reminded of good manners. Max and I got married there. He was a Catholic, I an Episcopalian, and it was easier just to do it that way, civilly and with a nondenominational party for both of our families after, rather than trying to unify the two faiths. Plus we were able to save the money that a more stately wedding would have cost and use it to take a boat to Italy.
The funny part, the manners part, is that I was working on an etiquette book at the time: a guide that I had been invited by the publisher—thanks to the success of my verses, and to my prominence as a writer for R.H. Macy’s—to compose. Helen was illustrating. We called it Little Better than Beasts: A Guide to Rudeness and How to Avoid It, and all of her drawings were of anthropomorphic animals. In the chapter on weddings, I advised blushing brides such as myself to work hard to reconcile the families but also to recognize—as I had—when such a reconciliation would not be possible, and to navigate the differences with grace.
For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility. Please note that I do not call my faith “politeness.” That’s part of it, yes, but I say civility because I believe that good manners are essential to the preservation of humanity—one’s own and others’—but only to the extent that that civility is honest and reasonable, not merely the mindless handmaiden of propriety.
I suppose I came to hold this belief for the same reason I came to work so hard: Civility and work gave me, respectively, a rationale and an opportunity for evading my family, my mother in particular. Work always provided an excuse not to see them when I didn’t want to, and work always kept me from being indebted to them.
My mother understood the world to be a place where one’s behavior was determined by rules, and rules determined by beholdenness. That understanding is not mine. If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant. Solutions of style have a greater moral force than those of obligation.
You could, of course, read all about this in my preface to Little Better than Beasts, were that book not long out of print. If fortune smiles, perhaps one day you’ll come across a cheap copy on the sidewalk outside the Strand—one mute tirade among many.
About six blocks from Delmonico’s I pause at Cortlandt Street, because Cortlandt Street always gives me pause. It used to be small and dense—full of trade—until they shut it down to build the World Trade Center.
It went by the name of Radio Row before the Port Authority—that practically paramilitary factotum of the odious Robert Moses—demolished it all in 1966, citing eminent domain. Social priorities are always changing, but these changes sadden me even when they don’t affect me directly. Good-bye, Radio Row. Good-bye days when men—mostly men—came down to Cortlandt Street to comb the wholesalers in search of replacements for broken components that might Lazarus their radios, resurrect the dead machines. Max used to bring Johnny down here. But people don’t repair very much these days.