Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(51)

Max and I turned our hearts over to Johnny. Providentially for us he was a benevolent dictator. We called him Attila, our affectionate pet name, when it was just the two of us, so wholly conquered did we feel. He was a wonderful child, sensitive and kind and extremely musical from an early age.

And while I hadn’t even been sure I wanted him at first, it hurt my heart slightly as he grew, inevitably, up and away—loving, always, but more and more independent with the passing days. Watching him grow, I sometimes recalled that party long ago on the Upper East Side, and my otherwise-all-but-forgotten date, Bennie, when he, looking out over the city, had spoken of “the way a crane creates, then erases itself, from the skyline.” He’d been referring to how I, as a copywriter, created R.H. Macy’s, but the same metaphor might easily have been applied to how I, as a mother, was creating my son.

Don’t get me wrong—don’t let my ambivalence distort the story.

We still had good times.

Max and I were still in love.

We had fun with Johnny. The carousel in Central Park. Root beer floats. Fireflies.

We spent a few weeks each summer at our place in Maine: family vacations at Pin Point, which Max and I had rented on our first out-of-town trip together, then bought back in 1938.

We’d take Johnny for a swim in the lake, then leave our bathing suits on the green lawn near the white house to dry: pastel remnants of a day well spent beneath a blue sky.

But also cold skins—old skins we could never quite put back on and feel as warm as we used to, as comfortable in.





16

Back to the Stars

Any day you walk down a street and find nothing new but nothing missing counts as a good day in a city you love. People are forever tearing something down, replacing something irreplaceable.

Walking north on Church Street, away from Delmonico’s, I can smell the Hudson River—cool and murky, full of hearty but toxic fish, shiny and reeking with fuel from the ferries.

I want to see the water.

I’m not on a schedule, and I’ve got the time. Wendy is likely not expecting me at her party at all, and certainly not at any particular hour. Even midnight is a negotiable deadline.

So I turn left on Vesey. It used to lead all the way to the water’s edge, but not anymore, not exactly.

Now I have to cross under the wreckage of the West Side Elevated Highway. They shut it down more than ten years ago—shut down the whole highway!—after a dump truck fell through it—a whole dump truck, and a sedan right after it!—at Twelfth and Gansevoort.

Walking the surface street, I cannot deny, is scary: a bizarre no-man’s-land. There are people down here, not many, who are as good as ghosts. In order not to bother or be bothered by ghosts, you just act like you’re one of them. That’s what I do.

And I say to myself—out loud, I mean, I actually say it, because sometimes it is to one’s advantage to sound a bit crazy—the sort of thing I always say when I am walking and need to remember to not be afraid.

“The city is a city,” I say. “But it is also a house. This city is my house. I live in this city, and this part is being remodeled. The ceiling of the highway has been pulled down, and the floor’s been extended, and the water’s farther away. But this is my house. It is still my house.”

Beyond the ruins of the elevated highway the old waterfront is unrecognizable. For one thing, it’s not at the front of the water any longer. I haven’t been down here in ages, but they’re building a whole new neighborhood, a planned community, a little slice of suburbanoid life right here at the edge of Manhattan’s tip: Battery Park City, that’s what it’s going to be. Constructed on landfill. Three million cubic yards of it, or so Gian—who loves quantifiable proof of humankind’s colossal ingenuity—told me last week while he was visiting for Christmas. Rock and soil and garbage excavated during the erection of the World Trade Center.

To my disappointment, I cannot get to the water’s actual edge. The construction site is blockaded with fencing, chain-link here, barbed-wire there. All I can do is stare through the looped diamonds at the river beyond.

I’ve always been fond of the Hudson. It’s the path by which ocean liners leave the city to take passengers across the Atlantic. That’s how Max and I left Manhattan—twice—to travel together to Italy. The first time was the best: our honeymoon cruise.

It’s windy here tonight, making me feel less ridiculous, more vindicated, about wearing the mink. I hold on to my hat.

When we took that first trip in the summer of 1935—June, following our city hall wedding—our vessel carried us way down the Hudson, starting from the New York Passenger Ship Terminal near Midtown. The piers were new and blindingly white, the big passenger ships having just moved there from the Chelsea Piers—more toward Wendy’s party, now that I think of it. When the ships got too big, Chelsea came to be used for cargo only.

Max had been so excited to show me Italy. I’d been so excited to see it.

Our second voyage, I’m sorry to say, was quite another matter.

“Hey!” someone shouts from across the construction site. “Hey! You by the fence! What do you think you’re doing?”

I turn around to face my inquisitor. Running across the muddy wastes is a short, wiry man in an off-brand uniform: coplike, but decidedly not a real cop.