The household gods that have lain four years in storage are grouped
round me, showing familiar faces. It’s nice of them not to have
changed more, grown up as children do or got older like one’s friends.
They don’t harmonize with the furniture--this is an _appartement
meublé_--but I can melt them in with cushions and hangings.
It’s going to be very snug and cozy when I get settled. This room--the
parlor--is a good shape, an oblong ending in a bulge of bay window.
Plenty of sun in the morning--I can have plants. Outside the window is
a small tin roof with a list to starboard where rain-water lodges and
sparrows come to take fussy excited baths. Across the street stands a
row of brownstone fronts, blank-visaged houses with a white curtain
in every window. The faces of such houses are like the faces of the
people who live in them. They tell you nothing about what’s going on
inside. It’s a peculiarity of New York--after living in a house with an
expressionless front wall you get an expressionless front wall yourself.
From the windows of the back room I look out on the flank of the big
apartment-house that stands on the corner, and little slips of yard,
side by side, with fences between. Among them ours has a lost or
strayed appearance. Never did an unaspiring, city-bred yard look more
homesick and out of place. It has a sun-dial in the middle, circled
by a flagged path, and in its corners, sheltered by a few discouraged
shrubs, several weather-worn stone ornaments. It suggests a cemetery
of small things that had to have correspondingly small tombstones. I
hear from Mrs. Bushey, the landlady, that a sculptress once lived on
the lower floor and spent three hundred dollars lifting it out of the
sphere in which it was born.
I am going to like it here. I am going to make myself like it, get out
of the negative habit into the positive. That’s why I came back from
Europe, that a sudden longing for home, for Broadway, and the lights
along the Battery, and dear little Diana poised against the sky.
Four years of pension tables and third-class railway carriages do not
develop the positive habit. I was becoming negative to the point of
annihilation. I wanted to be braced by the savage energies of my native
city. And also I did want some other society than that of American
spinsters and widows. The Europeans must wonder how the land of the
free and the home of the brave keeps up its birth-rate-- But I digress.
When you have an income of one hundred and sixty-five dollars a month
and no way of adding to it, are thirty-three and a widow of creditable
antecedents, the difficulties of living in New York are almost
insurmountable. If you were a pauper or a millionaire it would be an
easy matter. They represent the upper and the nether millstones between
which people like me are crushed.
And then your friends insist on being considered. I had a dream of six
rooms on the upper West Side. “But the upper West Side, my dear! You
might as well be in Chicago.” Then I had revolutionary longings for a
tiny old house with no heat and a sloping roof in Greenwich Village--
“I could never go to see you there. They would stone the motor,” ended
that. There is just one slice in the center of the city in which a
poor but honest widow can live to the satisfaction of everybody but
herself. So here I am in the decorous Seventies, between Park Avenue
and Lexington, in an eighteen-foot dwelling with floors for light
housekeeping.
To enter you go down three steps to a little front door that tries to
keep up to the neighborhood by hiding its decrepitude behind an iron
grill. That lets you into the smallest vestibule in the world, where
four bells are ranged along the door-post and four letter-boxes cling
to the wall. Out of this open two more doors, one that gives egress
to a narrow flight of stairs without a hand-rail, and the other to
the ground-floor apartment, inhabited, so Mrs. Bushey tells me, by a
trained nurse and her aunt. There was a tailor there once, but Mrs.
Bushey got him out-- “Cockroaches, water bugs, and then the sign! It
lowered the tone of the house. A person like you,” Mrs. Bushey eyed me
approvingly, “would never have stood for a tradesman’s sign.”
I murmured an assent. I always do when credited with exclusive tastes
I ought to have and haven’t. It was the day I came to look the place
over, and I was nervously anxious to make a good impression on Mrs.
Bushey. Then we mounted a narrow stair that rose through a well to
upper stories. As it approached the landing it took a spirited curve,
as if in the hope of finding something better above. The stairway was
dark and a faint thin scent of many things (I know it now to be a
composite of cooking, gas leakage and cigars) remained suspended in the
airless shaft.
“On this floor,” said Mrs. Bushey, turning on the curve, as if in the
hope of finding something better up behind her, “the gas is never put
out.”
I took that floor. I don’t know whether the gas decided it, or Mrs.
Bushey’s persuasive manners, or an exhaustion that led me to look with
favor upon anything that had a chair to sit on and a bed to sleep in.
Anyway, I took it, and the next day burst in upon Betty Ferguson,
trying to carry it off with a debonair nonchalance: “Well, I’ve got an
apartment at last.”
Betty looked serious and asked questions: Was it clean? Did the
landlady seem a proper person? Had I seen any of the other lodgers?
Then dwelt on the brighter side: It’s not quite a block from Park
Avenue. If you don’t like it you can find some excuse to break your
lease. There _is_ a servant on the premises who will come in, clean up
and cook you one good meal so you won’t starve. Well, it doesn’t sound
so bad.
And now I’m in I think it’s even less bad than it sounded. The front
room is going to make the impression. It is already getting an
atmosphere, the individuality of a lady of uncultivated literary tastes
is imposing itself upon the department-store background. The center
table--mission style--is beginning to have an air, with Bergson in
yellow paper covers and two volumes of Strindberg. No more of him for
me after _Miss Juliet_, but he has his uses thrown carelessly on a
table with other gentlemen of the moment. If I am ever written up in
the papers I feel sure the reporters will say, “Mrs. Drake’s parlor
gave every evidence of being the abode of a woman of culture and
refinement.”
The back room (there are only two) is more intimate. I am going to
eat there and also sleep. Friends may come in, however; for the
bed, during the day, masquerades as a divan. A little group of my
ancestors--miniatures and photographs of portraits--hangs on the wall
and chaperons me. Between the two rooms stretches a narrow connecting
neck of bathroom and kitchenette.
There is only one word that describes the kitchenette--it is cute.
When I look at it with a gas stove on one side and tiers of shelves on
the other, “cute” instinctively rises to my lips, and I feel that my
country has enriched the language with that untranslatable adjective.
No one has ever been able to give it a satisfactory definition, but if
you got into my kitchenette, which just holds one fair-sized person,
and found yourself able to cook with one hand and reach the dishes off
the shelves with the other, you would get its full meaning.
Before the house was cut into floors the kitchenette must have been a
cupboard. I wonder if a lady’s clothes hung in it or the best china
was stored there. There is a delightful mystery about old houses and
their former occupants. Haven’t I read somewhere that walls absorb
impressions from the lives they have looked on and exhale them to the
pleasure or detriment of later comers?
Last night, as I was reading in bed--a habit acquired at the age of
twelve and adhered to ever since--I remembered this and wondered what
the walls would exhale on me. The paper has a trailing design of roses
on it, very ugly and evidently old. I wondered if the roses had bloomed
round tragedy or comedy, or just that fluctuation between the two
which makes up the lives of most of us--an alternate rise and fall,
soaring upward to a height, dropping downward to a hollow.
Five years ago mine dropped to its hollow, and ever since has been
struggling up to the dead level where it is now--the place where things
come without joy or pain, the edge off everything. Thirty-three and
the high throb of expectancy over, the big possibilities left behind.
The hiring of two rooms, the hanging of a curtain, the placing of a
vase--these are the things that for me must take the place that love
and home and children take in other women’s lives.
I got this far and stopped. No, I wouldn’t. I came back from Europe
to get away from that. I put out the light and cuddled down in the
new bed. Quite a good bed if it is a divan, and the room is going
to be fairly quiet. Muffled by walls I could hear the clanging
passage of cars. And then far away it seemed, though it couldn’t have
been, a gramophone, the Caruso record of _La Donna e Mobile_. What
a fine swaggering song and what an outrageous falsehood! Woman is
changeable--is she? That’s the man’s privilege. We, poor fools, haven’t
the sense to do anything but cling, if not to actualities to memories.
I felt tears coming--_that_ hasn’t happened for years. My memories
don’t bring them, they only bring a sort of weary bitterness. It was
the new surroundings, the loneliness, that did it. I stopped them and
listened to the gramophone, and the wretched thing had begun on a new
record, _Una Lagrima Furtiva_--a furtive tear!
With my own furtive tears, wet on the pillow, I couldn’t help laughing.