Underfoot In Show Business (9 page)

In the room between Florrie and Mamselle was Gale, a tall, dark-haired, good-looking girl from Texas. She and I were the only young ones on the floor, and a few months after I moved in, we became close friends due to an arithmetic problem posed by the community kitchen.

There were two kitchen cabinets, each with three shelves, which divided evenly into one shelf per tenant (half the shelf for your staples, half for your private kitchen equipment), leaving the sixth shelf for community property: pots, pans, an iron and a hand-operated toaster. But any way you divided it, the stove had only four burners. On nights when all five tenants were cooking dinner at the same time, we were a burner short.

Gale and I solved the problem by pooling our money and cooking and eating together every night. She cooked one week and I cooked the next. Sometimes we put our dinner under the broiler or on one of the two oven racks to save our burner for the coffee pot. On nights when one of us had dinner company, the other obligingly ate out. This was after I’d lived there for a few months and had learned to cook.

Initially, I confined myself to two dinner guests, neither to be envied. Maxine, of course, was the first guest. She came over, on my second Sunday there, to help me hang blue burlap drapes, tack a makeshift blue burlap slipcover to the armchair and cover the stained wooden floor with a fluffy white bathroom rug. As a special treat for helping me, she was invited to eat the first dinner I ever cooked: hamburger and two canned vegetables. But it was Tom Goethals, the Latin and Greek teacher I’d found through the
Saturday Review
Personals column, who was really put through the wringer.

I decided that the least I could do was give him dinner every week before my lesson, in lieu of salary. Like most neophyte cooks, I had an unbridled imagination and a childlike faith in newspaper recipes, so every time Tom came to dinner he came braced. I remember one mess I cooked up, compounded of chicken livers, green peppers, hard-boiled eggs, scallions, and a couple of other things in a dank, livery sauce, which we both gave up on, and I went back to the kitchen and made us an omelet out of my breakfast eggs and the bologna for my lunch sandwiches. But everything else I cooked him Tom gallantly ate, and some of it was just incredible.

With five tenants living a community life in very close quarters, there were bound to be small family fights. We averaged three or four a week. They stemmed from the community kitchen, the community bathroom and the community pay phone in the hall.

The phone fights began whenever a phone call came for Gale or me after 9:45 P.M. By that time the rest of the floor was in bed. The phone would ring at quarter to ten and as Gale or I dashed for it, three doors would open and three heads pop out simultaneously. Then the caterwauling started.

Mamselle would scream that she needed her rest, she got up early and worked hard, and phone calls had got to stop coming in the middle of the night. Whereupon Florrie, who’d been all set to complain herself a moment earlier, would turn on Mamselle and bawl:

“Lissen, Queen Mary Anto-Nette, if you’re so damn stuck on yourself you have to lay down the law to everybody and make a big stink because a couple nice kids get a phone call, you better go live at the Waldorf!”

Whereupon Maudiebird would quiver into the conversation with the tearful announcement that having waked her up out of a sound sleep, we had now given her a headache with all the shouting.

The kitchen fights were incessant. In the first place, who was going to clean it? Each of us cleaned up her own cooking mess, but none of us considered that this included scrubbing the entire kitchen floor, or cleaning the entire stove or the entire refrigerator of which each of us was allotted only half shelf. In open discussion one evening as we cooked, the rest of the tenants hinted that as Gale and I were young and strong, we were chosen by Natural Selection to clean the kitchen. We spent the following Saturday morning at it and then tacked up a sign on the kitchen wall:

“Schedule for Scrubbing Kitchen Floor, Cleaning Stove, Oven and Refrigerator.

First Week of Month: Gale and Helene

Second Week of Month:

Third Week of Month:

Fourth Week of Month:”

But nobody else filled in her name for the available weeks, and after a while the schedule got splattered with grease and we took it down and went on having open discussions, attended by all five tenants and an increasing number of cockroaches.

That was a great kitchen for signs.

“I accidentally overturned the sugar bowl on the middle shelf of the right-hand cabinet.

I cleaned it up.

I will replace sugar if owner will see me.

FLORRIE.”

“Please leave this oven at 350 degrees until my casserole is done. I will take it out at five o’clock.

M.E.B.”

“PLEASE MOVE THIS COFFEE POT ONTO YOUR CLOSET SHELF. IT CAN NOT STAND ON THIS BURNER ALL DAY. OTHER PEOPLE ARE ENTITLED TO USE THIS BURNER.

(unsigned)”

Maudiebird caused a whole series of kitchen spats because her room was next to the kitchen. She ate her meager supper early and generally retired to her room with it just as the rest of us arrived in the kitchen to start our dinners. If one of us sang or laughed or spoke above a library whisper, Birdie was sure to appear in the doorway and say that we would have to stop making so much noise, she was working on her figures.

“How long can it take her,” I demanded when she’d gone back to her room, “to add up twenty hours of companion-sitting and six hours of park-bench-sitting?”

And Florrie, when anybody laughed, would mutter:

“Be quiet: Birdie’s doing her Examples.”

The bathroom crises were caused entirely by Gale and me.

I mentioned that there was a discreetly anonymous building next door to us on the corner. It was six stories high, so that our seventh-floor bathroom overlooked its roof. Gale and I, through the bathroom window, had made the acquaintance of two young men who sunbathed on the roof occasionally, after their work in the discreet building, which was a very upper-class funeral parlor. One Saturday afternoon not long after I moved in, Gale and I were washing our hair and doing our nails in the bathroom when one of the boys called up to us:

“Have you girls got dates for tonight?” For a wonder, we both did.

“Would you like some flowers to wear?” he inquired. We said we’d love some and the boy told us he’d be right back. He and his friend disappeared and came back five minutes later carrying between them a blanket of gardenias.

“Compliments of the corpse!” one of the boys said cheerily. “They came too late for the funeral.”

They upended the gardenia blanket and hoisted it up and Gale and I leaned down and hauled it up and through the window.

Honesty compels me to admit that he did not say “the corpse,” he told us
whose
corpse. It was the body of a distinguished statesman and if I wasn’t afraid the funeral parlor would sue me I’d tell you his name. Gale and I were reluctant to steal his flowers but the boys explained that famous corpses often got flowers from total strangers, with cards reading “An Admirer,” “An Unknown Friend,” and so forth; and when these offerings were too ostentatious or came too late for the funeral, the family of the deceased directed that the flowers be sent to some hospital. Several hospitals having done very well by this particular corpse, the boys saw no reason to consult the family about giving us one gardenia blanket.

Thus reassured, Gale and I sat down on the bathroom floor to detach ourselves a pair of corsages. Let me tell you it was no easy trick. Each flower was wired to the greenery with heavy wire and you nearly ripped your fingers off detaching a corsage spray. It therefore took us some time—and of course, while we were working, there was an importunate knock on the bathroom door.

“Let’s carry it to my room,” I said to Gale.

“I am not,” she said in her Texas drawl, “paradin’ through the hall with a funeral blanket on my head.”

Instead, she turned on the bath faucets to indicate we’d be in there for some time. This brought a stream of French invective from Mamselle, so as soon as I heard her door slam, I tiptoed out of the bathroom with the blanket in my arms, and when I’d made it safely to my room, Gale called loudly to the rest of the hall:

“Bathroom’s free!”

and we finished our corsages in my room.

During the single season the two boys worked next door, we had perfectly glorious flowers to wear and bowls of lilies as centerpieces for our dinette tables. We also got mildly ghoulish. I’d read in
The Times
that a certain famous actress had died and was on view at our parlor, and I’d hurry down the hall, knock on Gale’s door and when she opened it cry: “Guess who’s next door!”

All in all, it was garret living at its best, and it was a sad day for all of us when we received notice that the building was to be renovated and we’d have to move.

This was 1948, and there was a severe post-war housing shortage in New York. Gale and I each found a friend willing to take us in temporarily; Florrie moved in with her recently widowed sister; Mamselle’s school found her a room in a residence club; and Maudiebird, after three months of searching, finally found a fourth-floor walk-up. It gave me a pang to think of her thin old legs climbing four flights several times a day, but she told me wistfully that a room in an elevator building was too expensive for anybody.

We bade each other farewell and went our separate ways. My way took me into the sharp teeth of the housing shortage. The friend who took me in had barely helped me get settled in her apartment when it was completely gutted by fire. The next day I was out on the street with my salvageable clothes in a suitcase in one hand and my portable typewriter in the other, looking for a place to live.

Whole families were living in their cars that year. I met them on Saturday nights when all of us who were homeless gathered at
The New York Times
office to get the earliest edition of the Sunday real estate section. During the next eighteen months I had eleven addresses, most of them two-week and one-month sublets from people going on winter or summer vacations. When there was no sublet I slept at Maxine’s—she had twin beds in her room—until I became so acutely embarrassed at seeming to move in on her that I couldn’t bring myself to do it one more night and paid a doorman to let me sleep on two lobby chairs instead.

So you’ll understand that when, after eighteen homeless months, I finally found a “converted apartment” available, I was past caring that the rent was twice what I could afford.

The building was a five-story greystone on East Ninety-fifth Street and had formerly been a private home. Its larger rooms had been “converted” to apartments by installing ancient kitchen and bathroom equipment in adjoining smaller rooms. The ground-floor apartment I looked at was a large, dark room-in-the-back, its one window looking out on a courtyard below and a stone wall opposite. Beyond it, the kitchen with its ancient stove and leaky refrigerator was all mine, and the adjoining bare room with its iron tub and a chain toilet in a former closet was the first private bathroom of my life. And no mansion could have seemed more beautiful to me than that three-room hovel when I was told it might be mine.

It wasn’t mine for certain. The tenant who was moving out told me his lease had only a month to run and he couldn’t guarantee the rental agency would give me a new lease. I wanted to go directly to the building’s owner but of course that wasn’t possible. When I went down to see the rental agent, he explained that the owner owned several similar buildings and had nothing to do with the running of any of them. Everything was handled by the agency. But the rental agent was kind and said that if my references were satisfactory he saw no reason why I shouldn’t count on a lease. I had to be content with that.

I moved in forthwith and plunged into the job of furnishing and decorating. I furnished the room in what New Yorkers called Early Orange Crate. The super helped me make a bookcase out of wooden planks he found in the cellar, and a dressing table for the bathroom out of an orange crate. One of my brothers donated a dresser his little girls had outgrown, and I bought a secondhand drop-leaf table and chairs and a secondhand studio bed. Add white enamel paint to cover everything, my old white rug, and yards of red burlap which Maxine draped across the top of the window and down over the rusty living-room pipes in an opulent swag—and in our objective opinion the room was simply stunning.

Two thorny problems remained. The kitchen and bathroom floors were covered with stained, faded and cracked linoleum, which clearly had to be replaced. I bought two bright rolls of linoleum at Woolworth’s, brought them home—and wondered what to do with them. What did I know about cutting linoleum and running it around the kitchen pipes and bathroom pipes and under the elderly stove and bathtub? I phoned Maxine.

“How much would it cost me,” I asked, “to hire a man to cut and lay new linoleum for me?”

“A fortune,” said Maxine positively.

“Well, I don’t know what to do!” I said. “I bought all this linoleum and I bought a knife and a ruler they said I’d need, and I’m paralyzed. I don’t know where to start!”

There was a thoughtful pause at the other end.

“What night,” asked Maxine, “is Tom coming for your lesson?”