Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(71)
When I typed up the letter to Gian, I decided, I wouldn’t tell him about the television studio. Only about the Horn & Hardart, and about the walk, most likely.
I had leaned on him so hard for such a long time—in person, after his father left me for Julia, then in writing, after he himself left home for Bowdoin—that I strove not to do so anymore. We had held each other upright for years; now there had to be distance between us, only a little, if we were ever to learn to travel under our own power.
Even when he was a kid, Gian seemed to understand the absurdity of what his mother did for a living—how my angle was to take common things and reveal them to be strange and attractive, and to thereby relieve the monotony of advertising. The monotony of living, really.
I drew my coat around me and reemerged into the strangeness of Forty-Second Street.
The point of living in the world is just to stay interested.
22
As Good a Day to Die as Any
History is packed with poets more committed to memory than I.
Take, for example, Clement Clarke Moore, the “Bard of Chelsea,” whose country estate provided the name and the entire territory of the neighborhood in which Wendy now resides. Though Moore himself is mostly forgotten, there’s hardly a parent or child in the anglophone world whose ear doesn’t quicken to the words of his single famous verse, even if they know it only by its first line rather than its proper title, “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”
As I lurch toward West Fourteenth—tilted off plumb by my unbalanced burdens, the amaryllis pot proving heavier than I’d guessed—I’m struck anew by admiration for Moore’s poem, which just last week, on Christmas Eve, I performed by heart for my visiting grandchildren. At the time I hadn’t paused to consider the extent of its success, so complete as to be all but invisible in its vastness: Not only did it universalize its image of Saint Nick as a rosy and rotund whitebeard borne from chimney to chimney by flying reindeer, it also erased itself as the source of these notions, allowing them to seem ancient and true, like something everyone has always known.
It was, in a sense, the greatest print advertisement in American history.
Lily was so impressed with my delivery of the poem that she promised to be the one reciting it next year. I have no doubt that she will succeed in her memorization, though whether I will still be around and alive to hear it is a separate question.
“’Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house…” I speak the lines aloud as I turn at the spooky Beaux-Arts fa?ade of the old county bank building, because the street beyond is too desolate and dark for total silence: the bulb of every shepherd’s-crook lamppost has been cracked by some meticulous hoodlum. I fall silent again when I reach St. Bernard’s Church, its steps crowded with bundles of fabric and plastic, some of which are trash, some of which are people.
On this night, at this hour, I am the only moving figure in the landscape, the only person who is not where she means to be.
I am almost to the party. The address that Wendy gave me is on the other side of Ninth Avenue, which is odd, because this is the last residential block between here and the Hudson: Ahead there’s only the brick butte of the Port Authority building to the north, defunct factories and packing plants to the west. For the first time it occurs to me that she might be living—squatting—in a warehouse, and I wonder, if this is true, why she didn’t mention it. I imagine her weighing the wisdom of telling me, thus risking my disapproval when I might not have any real intention of coming, versus not telling me, thus risking getting me lost in a perilous area on New Year’s Eve. Did she really not want me to come?
At the end of the block ahead I can see the tracks of the West Side Line where they pass through the walls of the old industrial structures. I remember when they opened the elevated line in 1934: the West Side Improvement Project. What a brilliant idea it had seemed at the time, getting those freight trains up off street level.
I remember, as well, when the line closed in 1980. The last shipment they sent down the rails was a load of frozen turkeys, cargo that seemed like a punchline for a joke that no one could be bothered to write. Now most people seem to think it should be torn down, and I expect it will be, once the city finds the money. I wish they could leave it standing, fix it up, run trains on it again—or come up with some other function for it, though I can’t imagine what that might be. Everyone is always too quick to discard things.
When I get to Wendy’s block there are no marked addresses, only a cramped compound of interconnected brick buildings that stretches to all four bordering streets—and indeed beyond, by way of a pedestrian skywalk that spans the space above my head like a latter-day Bridge of Sighs. Some of the buildings are windowless; some that aren’t are boarded up with graffitied sheets of plywood. Not one betrays so much as a flicker of light.
The stubborn insistence of the human body—even an old one like mine—on keeping itself alive is a source of increasing amusement for me. On this deserted street, my unreasoning heart and lungs have commenced their rote double time, my pupils yawn, and even my steady knees have acquired a quiver.
But like all impulses, the desire to preserve oneself can be mastered, controlled. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to walk all the way back to Murray Hill tonight still lugging this incipient amaryllis.
About halfway along the block, amid a line of boarded windows, I find a set of double doors propped with a mop bucket; from the bucket’s handle rises a spray of helium balloons. The door opens—with a haunted-house groan and no small effort on my part—on a hallway lit at its far end by a platoon of votive candles. There’s no buzzer, and from the music I can now hear pounding above, it’s unlikely that anyone would be able to hear it if there were one.