New York Nocturne (2 page)

“Ah. Your face gives you away.”

“Yes,” I said, “well, I'm from out of town.”

He laughed. “Smart, too. Like your mother.”

I fluttered my lashes and carefully examined the tablecloth, which had suddenly become a still center point around which the awkward, lovely world revolved.

It was a wonderful meal: oysters on the half shell, fleshy gray Belons from Maine; a rich, savory, sea-scented oyster stew as well; then a sumptuous baked stuffed lobster; and finally a sinfully dense cheesecake heaped high with slick sweet strawberries.

Afterward, in the intersection of corridors directly opposite the restaurant's entrance, John showed me the whispering corners. If a person stood facing one stone corner of the square, and another person stood facing the corner diagonally opposite, each could speak to the other in a whisper and still be heard perfectly, despite the crowd churning and chattering between them and behind their backs.

Delighted, I glanced up at the low gray arches overhead. I whispered, “The sound travels along the ceiling!”

“Exactly,” whispered the stones.

“Is this a big secret?” I asked them.

“Well,” they said, “there are still two people in Brooklyn who don't know about it.”

I laughed.

“Come on,” said the stones. “We'll do the town.”

We left the terminal at the Vanderbilt Avenue exit, walked beneath the dark sweep of the bridge above Park Avenue, turned right at Forty-Second Street, and headed west. It was a fabulously sunny day. John's unbuttoned coat flapped and fluttered heroically in the breeze.

We walked past Madison to Fifth Avenue, just north of the wonderful white sprawl of the New York Public Library and its wonderful sprawling lions. We turned right and marched along Fifth up through the Forties. As we walked, John pointed out the sights: the Shepard and the Goelet brownstones, the Church of St. Nicholas, the Vanderbilt mansions, St. Patrick's Cathedral. By then we were in the Fifties, passing all the sparkling storefronts—Steuben Glass, Cartier, Bergdorf Goodman.

It was in the window of Bergdorf Goodman, among an elaborate display of mannequins—slick young papier-mâché men and women frozen in a tableau around a gleaming black Stutz Bearcat automobile—that I saw the hat. I stopped walking.

One of the figures was wearing it. She stood with her left foot on the car's shiny running board, her right arm on the doorframe, as she stared, unblinking, into the unblinking eyes of the resolutely jaunty driver.

“What is it?” asked John.

“Oh, nothing. Just looking.”

“Nice car,” he said.

“I like the hat.” I nodded toward the mannequin.

“Ah,” he said. “Iris Storm.”

I should not have been surprised—although I was, a bit—that he knew of Michael Arlen's novel
The Green Hat
. But of course everyone knew of it that year, even those (very few) who had not read it. Sermons had been preached against the “decadence” of its characters, especially its beautiful and doomed young heroine, Iris Storm. A woman of independent means, Iris spends her time slinking about Europe, striking poses and breaking hearts. She loves. She suffers. She wears the hat in question, a green cloche. In the end, she deliberately runs her huge yellow Hispano-Suiza touring car into a very large tree, very quickly. In the context of the novel, this is presented—and at the time we readers happily accepted it—as an act of great nobility.

“Come along,” said John, tipping off his Panama. “Let's investigate.”

I followed him into the building, into that lovely great welcoming bubble of department store fragrances, of perfumes and colognes and powders. In the millinery department, arranged along a stepped mahogany counter, were cloche hats of every size and color. Several of them were green, and one of those seemed to be my size. I touched it tentatively.

“Try it on,” said John.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I couldn't.”

Casually, he dropped his Panama onto the counter, picked up the cloche, and held it out. “Please. As a favor.”

At that moment, a saleswoman swept down upon us, possibly from the rafters. Tall and sheathed in black, she was at least ten years older than I and at least thirty years more sophisticated. Her bobbed black hair was as sleek and seamless as patent leather. Her long, beautiful face was white against her florid cosmetics—the cheekbones bluntly rouged, the lips brightly painted. Her dark Egyptian eyes were huge. She radiated Chanel No. 5.

The eyes glanced down at the hat in my hands. “It's our most popular color,” she announced. She looked at John, and her eyes flickered once—a quick, avid flicker, immediately disguised as a glance of polite interest. Over the next week, I would see similar flickers and disguises in the eyes of many other women.

I eased the hat on, looked at John, looked at myself in the mirror, adjusted the hat, adjusted the tilt of my head. I imagined how I should feel wearing the hat, if I stood in a pose that was at once sophisticated and louche. I attempted to stand in such a pose. I failed and glanced at John.

He was fiddling with the rest of the display, lifting hats, casually examining their interior, not looking at me at all.

The saleswoman pronounced, “It suits you.”

Still fiddling, still not looking at me, John said, “May I say something?”

I looked at him.

“Did you notice,” he asked, idly fiddling away, “how many women were wearing that hat? Out on the street?” Looking over at me, he nodded toward the cloche on my head. “Exactly that color hat?”

I hadn't; I had been too busy observing the lengths of the hems on the smart skirts and stylish dresses and determining, unhappily, that my own yellow frock was perhaps not as utterly soigné as I had believed.

The saleswoman had been watching him, her lips slightly parted. “It's our most popular color,” she announced.

“Exactly,” said John. “Here,” he said, holding out another cloche, this one a tawny yellow. “Try this?”

I removed the green one, set it down, and took the yellow. I put it on, eased it into place, and turned to look at myself in the mirror. The hat's color, naturally, went much better with my frock and the jacket.

“The lining is green,” said John and smiled.

I knew instantly what he meant—that I could pretend to be Iris Storm in secret with no one the wiser.

I blushed again. Found out.

“Do you like it?” he asked me.

“Yes, but—”

“No buts. Here, let me see something.” He reached forward, put a hand on either side of my face, and gently adjusted the hat.

Over the years, I have noticed a curious phenomenon. Whenever anyone presents to me a physical act of kindness, I experience a peculiar physical response.

I first noticed it, fittingly, in the first grade. We were using watercolors, and on my virgin sheet of paper I had accomplished a plump red apple. The girl who sat beside me—Nancy Warbuton—leaned over, looked at my production, and said, “That's really good. Can I show you something?”

“Sure.”

She dabbed her brush into her palette, leaned over again, and then, judiciously, with precise pink strokes, created a small casement window on the side of my apple, a reflection lovingly distorted by the plump red roundness of the fruit. As she took the time—her time—to demonstrate this, I felt a distinct and agreeable flush that began at the back of my neck and then fanned out across my back and shoulders—a delicious, hidden flush of pleasure unfolding slowly along my skin.

It is not, I believe, at all sexual. Over the years, it has appeared whether the kindness was from a man or a woman or from someone in whom I have any interest. In Borneo once, years later, it showed up when a map, carefully hand-drawn in the sand, was provided by a man I suspected—accurately, as it happened—of being a pederast and a murderer.

And it happened now, in Bergdorf Goodman, as John Burton fine-tuned the altitude and attitude of my new hat.

“If you have to say anything,” he said, “you can say ‘thank you.'”

“Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” he said and smiled. In his blue eyes, those flecks of gold danced.

We walked to his apartment: past the Plaza Hotel, west on Central Park South, north into the park, and along West Drive through the Playground and the Green, and then out across Central Park West onto Seventy-Second Street.

The Dakota was a gorgeous pile of old yellow brick, gabled, dormered, and pinnacled like something from a fairy tale. It was not tall, but it took up an entire block, and John's apartment, on the fourth floor, facing the park, took up a large chunk of the building's side.

It was the first apartment I had ever seen decorated in what was then called “moderne” or “contemporanian” style, which is now called art deco, painted and stained in shades of brown—sienna, umber, and tan. The furniture—richly lacquered wood, light and dark, inlaid with tortoiseshell and mother of pearl—was smooth and streamlined as though it were all planning to take flight.

He led me on a tour: a huge kitchen that held a sit-down circular mahogany table and smoothly sculpted mahogany chairs; a formal dining room; a bi-level living room with a broad fieldstone fireplace, its mantle a thick ledge of bright stainless steel, and a sweeping picture window that overlooked the luminous green park; a library, three walls stacked with beautiful old leather books, the fourth sporting another fireplace, this of onyx and polished chrome; and three bedrooms, each exquisitely appointed, each with its own bath. One of these, he told me, belonged to Albert, who used it during the week. On weekends, John said, Albert stayed with a friend in Queens—a lady friend, he added.

“What does Albert do?” I asked him.

John smiled. “About what?”

“What does he do for you?”

He shrugged. “This and that. He helps out. He's a friend.”

Not an especially helpful answer, but I was too polite to press the issue.

The third bedroom was mine, and my suitcase stood upright beside the white sprawl of my king-size bed. Stretching across the hardwood floor was something I had never seen before: a wide Greek flokati rug, as white and shaggy as a polar bear.

The promised food was in the icebox, and before we went out again, we had “a little snack.” For the first time in my life, I ate Beluga caviar on buttered toast points. This was accompanied by another agreeable novelty: a half glass of Dom Perignon champagne.

Afterward, we took a taxicab down to Broadway, where we saw the Marx Brothers in a play called
I'll Say She Is
. Perhaps the champagne was partly responsible, but I have never laughed so hard in my life, before or since. I would have been embarrassed had John, beside me, not been laughing equally as hard.

By the time I went to bed that night, I had begun to feel that I was, myself, something from a fairy tale.

I was very much looking forward to the rest of my summer with John Burton.

Unfortunately, we would have only one week together.

Chapter Two

It was a busy week.

I had arrived on a Friday. Over the weekend, John took me all around the city: to Ferrara's on Grand Street, the Empire Room at the Waldorf Astoria, the Oak Room at the Plaza, the Café Julien on University Place, around the corner from Washington Square. On Saturday night, we watched Douglas Fairbanks, the Thief of Baghdad, zoom about Arabia on a rather wobbly magic carpet. At a Sunday matinee at the Earl Carroll Theater, we watched Eddie Cantor flash his banjo eyes and prance through Ziegfeld's
Kid Boots
.

That evening, we took a taxi down to a speakeasy on East Fourth Street called the Red Head. John knew the owners, a Mr. Berns and a Mr. Kreindler—Charlie and Jack—and, as we ate thick rare steaks and crispy fried potatoes, they joined us at our table. Mr. Kreindler told me that at the beginning of 1919, when alcohol was last legally served in New York, there had been fifteen thousand bars in the city. Now, five years after the start of Prohibition, when they had all been outlawed, there were thirty thousand of them. Mr. Kreindler was clearly quite tickled by this.

John Burton knew almost everyone, it seemed, and everyone knew him. Restaurant owners, headwaiters, maître d's, hostesses, they all greeted him by name. He introduced me as “my niece, Amanda,” and they looked at me with a kind of smiling, bland politeness that masked, I was certain, a roiling curiosity. John was invariably the most handsome and the best dressed man in any restaurant, café, or club—why was he hauling this gawky young albatross from place to place?

I was still feeling as though I had wandered into a fairy tale.

On Sunday night before I went to bed, John told me that he would be leaving for work early in the morning. (Like my father, he did mysterious things with stocks and bonds.) We were in the kitchen sitting at the table, John with a King's Ransom Scotch and soda in front of him, me with a Coca-Cola. John had loosened the knot of his tie, and he sat back in his chair, easy and relaxed.

He reminded me that Albert would be there when I awoke.

“I still don't understand what Albert does,” I said.

“He helps out with things,” said John. “Cooking, housecleaning, whatever.”

“Sort of like a butler.”

“Sort of. And he's a friend. He helps out if I need something. And if
you
need something tomorrow, while I'm gone, you just ask him.”

The next morning, when I woke up and looked at the clock on the nightstand, I saw that it was nearly nine o'clock. I took a quick shower and threw on some clothing, ending up in another lightweight summer dress, this one of pale blue cotton.

Albert was in the kitchen. He sat in John's chair, studying the
New York Times
, his square face still looking as though it had been run into, or over.

Opposite him, the table had been set for one: a white linen placemat, a white linen napkin folded into a triangle, silverware, a porcelain plate, a butter dish, a porcelain cup and saucer, and a cut crystal glass filled with orange juice.

“Good morning,” I said.

He turned to me and lowered the paper. “Oh, hey, miss,” he said, and standing up, he set the paper on the table. He wore a white shirt, a black tie, and black slacks. Around his thick waist, reaching to just below his knees, was a spotless white apron imprinted with delicate little daisies. He grabbed a shiny metal spatula from the table, raised it up, and swung it in a kind of circular salute beside his head. “What is your pleasure, if I may ask?”

“Pardon me?”

He lowered the spatula. “Food-wise, I mean. What I am thinking, see, is along the lines of flapjacks. In certain circles, my flapjacks are very highly regarded, if I do say so myself.” He said this with a perfectly straight face. As I was to learn, Albert said almost everything with a perfectly straight face.

“Flapjacks would be wonderful,” I said. “If they're not too much trouble.”

“No trouble whatsoever,” he said. “In point of fact, these I make already. Also, there is orange juice, and this I squoze only five minutes ago. Scientifically speaking, according to those in the know, fresh orange juice is one of the most healthful beverages known to man.”

“Thank you. Can I help with anything?”

“Nothing whatsoever. You just sit yourself down, miss.”

I did.

“Now,” he said, “tell me this.” He put his hands together over his beefy chest, palms joined and fingers straight as though praying and cocked his big square head. “Are you the sort of individual who enjoys a nice hot cup of coffee in the morning?”

“Yes. Very much.”

“Right-o.” He lowered his hands, turned, and walked to the stove. “The thing of it is, see, I do not number among my acquaintances many individuals of the youthful sort.” He lifted a percolator from the stove and a small tray from the nearby counter, turned, and walked back. His movements were precise, almost dainty. “So I am not exactly in the know as to their preferences, eat- and drink-wise.”

“Sure,” I said. “Of course not.”

He set the tray on the table. A small pitcher of cream, a small bowl of sugar. He poured some coffee into my cup. “There is a message for you,” he said. “From your uncle. Right there. On the book.”

To my right on the table, a folded sheet of paper lay atop a small book. I took the sheet and opened it.

Dear Amanda,

Good morning.

I'm leaving you a guide to the city. If you need anything, ask Albert. I'll be back at six tonight. See you then.

Regards,

John

I picked up the book.
New York City and Its Environs
. Sticking out from the center of the pages, at the top, like a bookmark, was the crisp tip of a twenty-dollar bill.

Twenty dollars, back then, was rather a lot of money. And every day for the next four days, even after I protested to John about it, another twenty would await me at the kitchen table. By the end of the week, I still had change left from the second twenty and another sixty dollars. My plan was to return the money to John at some point. For reasons that will soon become clear, this I was unable to do.

Albert had set the tray on the counter, opened the door to the oven, and removed a platter wrapped in aluminum foil. He set the platter on the table beside my plate along with a small white porcelain pitcher of maple syrup. He peeled away the foil to reveal a steaming stack of golden brown pancakes. The air in the room grew dense with their rich, moist scent.

Albert said, “What I am thinking, see, as an accompaniment, is maybe some nice fried eggs. This morning, on my way over, I obtained the eggs from a source known to me personally. I can vouch for their freshness, totally.”

“Eggs would be great,” I said.

“And your preference here would be what? Over easy? Sunny-side up?”

“Over easy, please.”

“The yolk still in a runny condition, am I correct?”

“Correct. Yes.”

“An ace? A deuce?”

“Um—a deuce, please.”

“You go ahead,” he said and fluttered his fingers twice at the food in front of me. “Please. Eat, miss.”

I forked some pancakes onto my plate, buttered them, and poured on some syrup.

At the stove, Albert held a lighted match to the burner. The gas lit with a small
thump
.

“Your uncle tells me,” he said as he put a frying pan onto the burner, “that you will probably wish to see more of the city, this being your first occasion to visit here. I would be pleased to volunteer my assistance, in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. What I mean is, I can act as a guide, like. If you want me to, I mean to say.”

“Thank you,” I said. “That's very kind.”

“Not at all, miss. The thing of it is this: Any person who is a friend of your uncle, that person is a friend of mine also.”

The frying pan was sizzling. He turned down the gas and plucked a large brown egg from a bowl on the counter. Nimbly, he cracked it against the edge of the counter, held it over the pan, separated the halves of shell with a twist of his fingers, and then deftly raised his hand. The yolk and the white slipped smoothly out and crackled merrily in the hot fat.

“If you don't mind,” I told him, “I think I'd like to look around on my own.”

He nodded. “Right-o. I totally understand.” He plucked another egg from the bowl and expertly cracked it into the frying pan.

I took another bite of pancake. “How long have you known John?”

“Since the Great War.” He gave the pan a little shake and picked up his spatula.

“You met him in the army?”

He was examining the eggs. “Correct.”

“And you work with him now?”

“Correct.”

“What kind of things do you do?”

He looked at me. “That would depend, miss, on what needs doing. A little bit of this, a little bit of that.”

This was almost exactly what John had said, and almost exactly as helpful.

For that week, this became the pattern of my days. First, I would breakfast with Albert. Sometimes we talked about the sights and sounds of New York. Sometimes Albert would make suggestions—where to go, what to see, what to avoid.

After breakfast, I would set out on an expedition around the city. Sometimes I took the subway, sometimes the elevated train along Sixth Avenue, but usually I walked. All that week the weather was perfect: bright and sunny and warm. With the tour book as my Virgil, I journeyed everywhere, from Battery Park to Columbus Circle, from the East River to the Hudson.

I admired the Woolworth Building at Broadway and Park Place, the tallest building in the world. I admired the expansive Roman bath magnificence of Pennsylvania Station on Seventh Avenue. I admired the Flatiron Building at Madison Square, that thin preposterous wedge of stone and steel that rose twenty stories high.

Every day I ate some new, delicious food: knishes, soft pretzels, bagels and lox, hot dogs with sauerkraut on a steamed bun, Horn & Hardart apple pie.

I loved New York, loved everything about it. Larger and brighter than Boston, it was glib and flashy and magnificently loud. Horns honked, whistles shrieked, autos grumbled and growled, people shouted and bellowed. It was the Land of More, and sometimes, when I stepped out onto the sidewalk, I could feel the concrete throbbing beneath my feet as the entire city roared, cometlike, toward the center, the wild unguessable heart, of the Roaring Twenties. It was, for a sixteen-year-old girl, really quite breathtaking.

All that it lacked—or I lacked—was someone with whom to share it. Sometimes I would see a couple, a man and a woman not much older than I, strolling along the sidewalk, their fingers interlaced, their heads inclining toward each other, and I would feel a tart pang of envy, and then a long, slow, cheerless breath would sigh through my empty chest, and I would wonder whether someone would ever hold my hand in just that way, or incline his head at just that tilt toward mine.

In the evenings, John and I would go out. We saw Paul Robeson in
All God's Chillun Got Wings
at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. On Broadway, we saw Sophie Tucker's stage review, and Buster Keaton's latest movie,
Sherlock Jr
. We saw Fletcher Henderson and his band at Roseland, accompanied by an amazing young trumpet player named Louis Armstrong.

So it went, all week—dinner at some charming restaurant, then a play or a review or a film, then a nightcap (Cherry Coke for me) at some club or speakeasy.

That Friday, Friday the thirteenth, was no exception.

But, unlike the other nights, it ended very badly.