City of Girls

“I didn’t know what else to do with myself. Like I say, he was nice.”

“So many girls get married for that same reason. Find something else to do with yourself, I say. Gosh, ladies, take up a hobby!”

“Why did you get married?” I asked.

“Because I liked him, Vivvie. I liked Billy very much. That’s the only reason to ever marry somebody—if you love them or like them. I still like him, you know. I had dinner with him only last week.”

“You did?”

“Of course I did. Look, I can understand that you’re upset with Billy right now—a lot of people are—but what did I tell you earlier, about my rule in life?”

When I didn’t answer, because I couldn’t remember, she reminded me: “Once I like a person, I can only like them always.”

“Oh, that’s right.” But I still wasn’t convinced.

She smiled at me again. “What’s the matter, Vivvie? You think that rule should only apply to you?”

—

It was evening by the time we arrived in New York City.

It was July 15, 1942.

The town was perched proud and solid on its nest of granite, tucked between its two dark rivers. Its stacks of skyscrapers glittered like columns of fireflies in the velvety summer air. We crossed over the silent, commanding bridge—broad and long as a condor’s wing—and entered the city. This dense place. This meaningful place. The greatest metropolis the world has ever known—or at least that’s what I’ve always thought.

I was overcome with reverence.

I would plant my little life there and never abandon it again.

TWENTY-FOUR

The next morning, I woke up in Billy’s old room all over again. It was just me in the bed this time. No Celia, no hangover, no disasters.

I had to admit: it felt good to have the bed to myself.

For a while I listened to the sounds of the Lily Playhouse coming to life. Sounds I never thought I would hear again. Someone must have been running a bath, because the pipes were banging in protest. Two telephones were already ringing—one upstairs, and one in the offices below. I felt so happy, it made me light-headed.

I put on my robe and wandered forth to make myself some coffee. I found Mr. Herbert sitting at the kitchen table just like always—wearing his undershirt, staring at his notebook, drinking his Sanka, and composing his jokes for an upcoming show.

“Good morning, Mr. Herbert!” I said.

He looked up at me and—to my amazement—he actually smiled.

“I see you’ve been reinstated, Miss Morris,” he said. “Good.”

—

By noon that day, I was at the Brooklyn Navy Yard with Peg and Olive, getting oriented to the job at hand.

We’d taken the subway from midtown to the York Street station, then transferred to a streetcar. Over the next three years, I would make this commute nearly every day and in every kind of weather. I would share that commute with tens of thousands of other workers, all changing shifts like clockwork. The commute would become tedious, and sometimes spirit-breakingly exhausting. But on that day, it was all new and I was excited. I was outfitted in a snazzy lilac suit (although never again would I wear something so nice to that filthy, greasy destination) and my hair was clean and bouncy. I had my paperwork in order so that I could be officially inducted as a Navy employee (Bureau of Yards and Docks, Classification: Skilled Laborer). The job came with a salary of seventy cents an hour, which was a fortune for a girl my age. They even issued me my own pair of safety glasses—although my eyes were never in danger from anything more serious than Peg’s cigarette embers flying up in my face.

This would be my first real job—if you don’t count the work I did in my father’s office back in Clinton, which you shouldn’t.

I’d been nervous to see Olive again. I still felt so ashamed of myself for my shenanigans, and for having needed her to rescue me from the talons of Walter Winchell. I was afraid she might chastise me, or look upon me with contempt. I had my first moment alone with her that morning. She and Peg and I were walking downstairs, on our way out the door to Brooklyn. Peg had to run back up to get her thermos, so for a minute it had just been Olive and me standing there on the landing between the second and third floors of the playhouse. I decided this would be my opportunity to apologize, and to thank her for having gallantly saved me.

“Olive,” I began. “I owe you a great debt—”

“Oh, Vivian,” she interrupted, “don’t be so grasping.”

And that was the end of that.

We had a job to do, and there wasn’t any time for flimflam.

—

Specifically, our job was this:

We were assigned by the military to put on two shows a day at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in a bustling cafeteria located right on Wallabout Bay. You have to understand, Angela, that the Navy Yard was huge—the busiest in the world—with over two hundred acres of buildings and almost a hundred thousand employees working around the clock throughout the war years. There were over forty active cafeterias at the Yard and we were in charge of “entertainment and education” for just one of them. Our cafeteria was number 24, but everyone called it “Sammy.” (I was never clear on why. Maybe because they served so many sandwiches? Or maybe because our head cook was named Mr. Samuelson?) Sammy fed thousands of people a day—serving enormous piles of limp and tired food to equally limp and tired laborers.

It was our task to entertain these weary workers while they ate. But we were more than entertainers; we were also propagandists. The Navy filtered information and inspiration through us. We had to keep everyone angry and fired up at Hitler and Hirohito at all times (we killed Hitler so many times, in so many different skits, that I can’t believe the man wasn’t having nightmares about us all the way over there in Germany). But we also had to keep our workers concerned about the welfare of our boys overseas—reminding them that whenever they slacked off on the job, they put American sailors at risk. We had to issue warnings that spies were everywhere, and that loose lips sink ships. We had to give safety lessons and news updates. And in addition to all that, we had to deal with military censors who often sat in the front row of our performances to make sure we were not deviating from the party line. (My favorite censor was a genial man named Mr. Gershon. I spent so much time with him, we became like a family. I attended his son’s bar mitzvah.)

We had to communicate all this information to our workers in thirty minutes, twice a day.

For three years.

And we had to keep our material fresh and fun, or the audience might start throwing food at us. (“It’s good to be back in the field,” Peg said happily, the first time our audience started booing—and I think she truly meant it.) It was an impossible, thankless, exhausting job, and the Navy gave us precious little to work with, in terms of our “theater.” At the front of the cafeteria was a small stage—a platform, really, built of rough pine. We didn’t have a curtain or stage lighting, and our “orchestra” amounted to a honky-tonk stand-up piano played by a tiny old local named Mrs. Levinson who (incongruously) could pound those keys so hard you could hear the music all the way from Sands Street. Our props were vegetable crates, and our “dressing room” was the back corner of the kitchen, right next to the dishwasher’s station. As for our actors, they were not exactly the cream of the crop. Most of New York’s showbiz community had either gone off to battle or gotten good industrial jobs since the advent of the war. This meant that the only people left for us to recruit were the sorts of folks whom Olive, not very kindly, called “the lost and the lame.” (To which Peg replied, also not very kindly, “How does that differ from any other theater company?”)

So we improvised. We had men in their sixties playing young swains. We had hefty middle-aged women playing the parts of ingénues, or boys. We couldn’t pay our players nearly as much as they could earn working on the line, so we were constantly losing our actors and dancers to the Navy Yard itself. Some pretty young girl would be singing a song on our stage one day, and the next day you’d see her eating at Sammy on her lunch break, with her hair up in a bandanna and coveralls on. She’d have a wrench in her pocket and a hearty paycheck on its way. It’s tough to get a girl back in the spotlight once she’s seen a hearty paycheck—and we didn’t even have a spotlight.

Putting together costumes was, of course, my primary job, although I also wrote the occasional script, and even sometimes penned a song lyric or two. My work had never been more difficult. I had virtually no budget, and, because of the war, there was a nationwide shortage of all the materials I needed. It wasn’t just fabrics that were scarce; you couldn’t get buttons, zippers, or hooks and eyes, either. I became ferociously inventive. In my most shining moment, I created a vest for the character of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy using some two-toned jacquard damask I’d ripped from a rotting, overstuffed sofa I’d found on the corner of Tenth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street one morning, awaiting removal to the dump. (I won’t pretend that the costume smelled good, but our king really looked like a king—and that’s saying something, given the fact that he was portrayed by a sunken-chested old man who only one hour before showtime had been cooking beans in the Sammy kitchen.)

Needless to say, I became a fixture at Lowtsky’s Used Emporium and Notions—even more than before the war. Marjorie Lowtsky, who was now in high school, became my partner in costuming. She was my fixer, really. Lowtsky’s now had a contract to sell textiles and rags to the military, so even they didn’t have as much volume or variety to choose from anymore—but they were still the best game in town. So I gave Marjorie a small cut of my salary and she culled and saved the choicest materials for me. Truly, I could not have done my job without her help. Despite our age difference, the two of us grew genuinely fond of each other as the war dragged on, and I soon came to think of her as a friend—although an odd one.

I can still remember the first time I ever shared a cigarette with Marjorie. I was standing on the loading dock of her parents’ warehouse in the dead of winter, taking a break from sorting through the bins in order to have a quiet smoke.

“Let me have a drag of that?” came a voice next to me.

I looked down, and there was little Marjorie Lowtsky—all ninety-five pounds of her—wrapped up in one of those absurdly giant raccoon fur coats that fraternity boys used to wear to football games in the 1920s. On her head, a Canadian Mountie’s hat.

“I’m not giving you a cigarette,” I said. “You’re only sixteen!”

“Exactly,” she said. “I’ve already been smoking for ten years.”

Charmed, I caved in to her demands and handed over the smoke. She inhaled it with impressive expertise, and said, “This war isn’t satisfying me, Vivian.” She was gazing out at the alleyway with an air of world-weariness that I couldn’t help but find comical. “I’m displeased with it.”

“Displeased with it, are you?” I was trying not to smile. “Well, then, you should do something about it! Write a strongly worded letter to your congressman. Go talk to the president. Put this thing to an end.”

“It’s only that I’ve waited so long to grow up, but now there’s nothing worth growing up for,” she said. “Just all this fighting, fighting, fighting, and working, working, working. It makes a person weary.”

“It’ll all end soon enough,” I said—although I was not sure of that fact myself.

She took another deep drag off the cigarette and said in a very different tone, “All my relatives in Europe are in big trouble, you know. Hitler won’t rest till he’s gotten rid of every last one of them. Mama doesn’t even know where her sisters are anymore, or their kids. My father’s on the phone with embassies all day, trying to get his family over here. I have to translate for him a lot of the time. It doesn’t look like there’s any way for them to get through, though.”

“Oh, Marjorie. I’m so sorry. That’s terrible.”

I didn’t know what else to say. This seemed like too serious a situation for a high school student to be facing. I wanted to hug her, but she wasn’t the sort of person who cared for hugs.

“I’m disappointed in everybody,” she said after a long silence.

“In who, exactly?” I was thinking she would say the Nazis.

“The adults,” she said. “All of them. How did they let the world get so out of control?”

“I don’t know, honey. But I’m not sure anybody out there really knows what they’re doing.”

“Apparently not,” she pronounced with theatrical disdain, flicking the spent cigarette into the alley. “And this is why I’m so eager to grow up, you see. So I won’t be at the mercy anymore of people who have no idea what they’re doing. I figure the sooner I can get full control of things, the better my life will be.”

“That sounds like an excellent plan, Marjorie,” I said. “Of course, I’ve never had a plan for my own life, so I wouldn’t know. But it sounds as though you’ve got it all sorted out.”

“You’ve never had a plan?” Marjorie looked up at me in horror. “How do you get by?”

“Gosh, Marjorie—you sound just like my mother!”

“Well, if you can’t make a plan for your own life, Vivian, then somebody needs to be your mother!”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Stop lecturing me, kid. I’m old enough to be your babysitter.”

“Ha! My parents would never leave me with somebody as irresponsible as you.”

“Well, your parents would probably be right about that.”

“I’m just teasing you,” she said. “You know that, right? You know that I’ve always liked you.”

“Really? You’ve always liked me, have you? Since you were what—in eighth grade?”

“Hey, give me another cigarette, would you?” she asked. “For later?”

“I shouldn’t,” I said, but I handed her a few of them, anyhow. “Just don’t let your mother know I’m supplying you.”

“Since when do my parents need to know what I’m up to?” asked this strange little teenager. She hid the cigarettes in the folds of her enormous fur coat, and gave me a wink. “Now tell me what kind of costumes you came in for today, Vivian, and I’ll set you up with whatever you need.”

—

New York was a different place now than it had been my first time around.

Frivolity was dead—unless it was useful and patriotic frivolity, like dancing with soldiers and sailors at the Stage Door Canteen. The city was weighted with seriousness. At every moment, we were expecting to be attacked or invaded—certain that the Germans would bomb us into dust, just as they’d done to London. There were mandatory blackouts. There were a few nights when the authorities even turned off all the lights in Times Square, and the Great White Way became a dark clot—shining rich and black in the night, like pooled mercury. Everyone was in uniform, or ready to serve. Our own Mr. Herbert volunteered as an air-raid warden, wandering around our neighborhood in the evenings with his official city-issued white helmet and red armband. (As he headed out the door, Peg would say, “Dear Mr. Hitler: Please don’t bomb us until Mr. Herbert has finished alerting all the neighbors. Sincerely, Pegsy Buell.”)

What I most remember about the war years was an overriding sense of coarseness. We didn’t suffer in New York City like so many people across the world were suffering, but nothing was fine anymore—no butter, no pricey cuts of meat, no quality makeup, no fashions from Europe. Nothing was soft. Nothing was a delicacy. The war was a vast, starving colossus that needed everything from us—not just our time and labor, but also our cooking oil, our rubber, our metals, our paper, our coal. We were left with mere scraps. I brushed my teeth with baking soda. I treated my last pair of nylons with such care, you would have thought they were premature babies. (And when those nylons finally died in the middle of 1943, I gave up and started wearing trousers all the time.) I got so busy—and shampoo became so difficult to acquire—that I cut my hair short (very much in the style of Edna Parker Watson’s sleek bob, I must admit) and I’ve never grown it long again.

It was during the war that I became a New Yorker at last. I finally learned my way around the city. I opened a bank account and got my own library card. I had a favorite cobbler now (and I needed one, because of leather rations) and I also had my own dentist. I made friends with my coworkers at the Yard, and we would eat together at the Cumberland Diner after our shift. (I was proud to be able to chip in at the end of those meals, when Mr. Gershon would say, “Folks, let’s pass the hat.”) It was during the war, too, that I learned how to be comfortable sitting alone in a bar or restaurant. For many women, this is a strangely difficult thing to do, but eventually I mastered it. (The trick is to bring a book or newspaper, to ask for the best table nearest to the window, and to order your drink just as soon as you sit down.) Once I got the hang of it, I found that eating alone by the window in a quiet restaurant is one of life’s greatest secret pleasures.

I bought myself a bicycle for three dollars from a kid in Hell’s Kitchen, and this acquisition opened up my world considerably. Freedom of movement was everything, I was learning. I wanted to know that I could get out of New York quickly, in case of an attack. I rode my bike all over the city—it was cheap and effective for running errands—but somewhere in the back of my mind I believed that I could outride the Luftwaffe if I had to. This brought me a certain delusional sense of safety.

I became an explorer of my vast urban surroundings. I prowled the city extensively, and at such odd hours. I especially loved to walk around at night and catch glimpses through windows of strangers living their lives. So many different dinnertimes, so many different work hours. Everyone was different ages, different races. Some people were resting, some laboring, some all alone, some celebrating in boisterous company. I never tired of moving through these scenes. I relished the sensation of being one small dot of humanity in a larger ocean of souls.

When I was younger, I had wanted to be at the very center of all the action in New York, but I slowly came to realize that there is no one center. The center is everywhere—wherever people are living out their lives. It’s a city with a million centers.

Somehow that was even more magical to know.

—

I didn’t pursue any men during the war.

For one thing, they were difficult to come by; most everyone was overseas. For another thing, I didn’t feel like playing around. In keeping with the new spirit of seriousness and sacrifice that blanketed New York, I more or less put my sexual desire away from 1942 until 1945—the way you might cover your good furniture with sheets while you go off on vacation. (Except I wasn’t on vacation; all I did was work.) Soon I grew accustomed to moving about town without a male companion. I forgot that you were supposed to be on a man’s arm at night, if you were a nice girl. This was a rule that seemed archaic now, and furthermore impossible to execute.

There simply weren’t enough men, Angela.

There weren’t enough arms.

—

One afternoon in early 1944, I was riding my bicycle through midtown when I saw my old boyfriend Anthony Roccella stepping out of an arcade. Seeing his face was a shocker, but I should have known I’d run into him someday. As any New Yorker can tell you, you will eventually run into everyone on the sidewalks of this city. For that reason, New York is a terrible town in which to have an enemy.

Anthony looked exactly the same. Hair pomaded, gum in his mouth, cocky smile on his face. He wasn’t in uniform, which was unusual for a man of his age in good health. He must have weaseled his way out of service. (Of course.) He was with a girl—short, cute, blond. My heart did a quick rumba at the sight of him. He was the first man I’d laid eyes on in years who made me feel a rush of desire—but of course, that would make sense. I screeched to a stop just a few feet from him, and stared right at him. Something in me wanted to be seen by him. But he didn’t see me. Alternatively, he saw me, but didn’t recognize me. (With my short hair and trousers, I didn’t look any more like the girl he used to know.) The final possibility, of course, is that he recognized me and elected not to pay me any mind.

That night, I burned with loneliness. I also burned with sexual longing—I will not lie about this. I took care of it myself, though. Thankfully, I had learned how to do that. (Every woman should learn how to do that.)

As for Anthony, I never saw him or heard his name again. Walter Winchell had predicted that the kid would be a movie star. But he never made it.

Or who knows. Maybe he never even bothered to try.

—

Only a few weeks later, I was invited by one of our actors to a benefit at the Savoy Hotel to raise money for war orphans. Harry James and His Orchestra would be playing, which was a fun enticement, so I beat down my tiredness and went to the party. I stayed for just a short while as I didn’t know anybody there, and there weren’t any interesting-looking men to dance with. I decided it would be more fun to go home and sleep. But as I was walking out of the ballroom, I bumped straight into Edna Parker Watson.

“Excuse me,” I mumbled—but in the next instant, my mind calculated that it was her.

I’d forgotten that she lived at the Savoy. I never would have gone there that night had I remembered.

She looked up at me and held my gaze. She was wearing a soft brown gabardine suit with a pert little tangerine blouse. Casually tossed over her shoulder was a gray rabbit stole. As ever, she looked immaculate.

“You are very excused,” she said, with a polite smile.

This time there could be no pretending that I had not been identified. She knew exactly who I was. I was familiar enough with Edna’s face to have caught that quick shimmer of disturbance behind her mask of adamant calm.

For almost four years, I had pondered what I would say to her, if our paths ever crossed. But now all I could do was say, “Edna,” and reach for her arm.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, “but I don’t believe you’re somebody I know.”

Then she walked away.

—

When we are young, Angela, we may fall victim to the misconception that time will heal all wounds and that eventually everything will shake itself out. But as we get older, we learn this sad truth: some things can never be fixed. Some mistakes can never be put right—not by the passage of time, and not by our most fervent wishes, either.

In my experience, this is the hardest lesson of them all.

After a certain age, we are all walking around this world in bodies made of secrets and shame and sorrow and old, unhealed injuries. Our hearts grow sore and misshapen around all this pain—yet somehow, still, we carry on.

TWENTY-FIVE

Now it was late 1944. I had turned twenty-four years old.

I kept working around the clock at the Navy Yard. I can’t remember ever taking a day off. I was squirreling away good money from my wartime wages, but I was exhausted, and there was nothing to spend it on anyway. I barely had the energy to play gin rummy with Peg and Olive in the evenings anymore. More than once, I fell asleep during my evening commute and woke up in Harlem.

Everyone was bone weary.

Sleep became a golden commodity that everyone longed for but nobody had.

We knew we were winning the war—there was a lot of big talk about what a bruising we were giving the Germans and the Japanese—but we didn’t know when it would all be over. Not knowing, of course, didn’t stop anyone from running their mouths nonstop, spreading fruitless gossip and speculation.

The war would end by Thanksgiving, they all said.

By Christmas, they all said.

But then 1945 rolled in, and the war wasn’t done yet.

Over at the Sammy cafeteria theater, we were still killing Hitler a dozen times a week in our propaganda shows, but it didn’t seem to be slowing him down any.

Don’t worry, everyone said—it’ll all be sewn up by the end of February.

In early March, my parents got a letter from my brother on his aircraft carrier somewhere in the South Pacific, saying, “You’ll be hearing talk of surrender soon. I’m sure of it.”

That was the last we ever heard from him.

—

Angela, I know that you—of all people—know about the USS Franklin. But I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t even know the name of my brother’s ship before we got word that it had been hit by a kamikaze pilot on March 19, 1945, killing Walter and over eight hundred other men. Always the responsible one, Walter had never mentioned the name of the ship in his correspondence, in case his letters fell into enemy hands and state secrets were revealed. I knew only that he was on a large aircraft carrier somewhere in Asia, and that he had promised the war would end soon.

My mother was the one who got the notice of his death. She was riding her horse in a field next to our house when she saw an old black car with one white, non-matching door come speeding up our driveway. It raced right past her, driving far too fast for the gravel road. This was unusual; country people know better than to speed down gravel roads next to grazing horses. But the car was one she recognized. It belonged to Mike Roemer, the telegraph operator at Western Union. My mother stopped what she was doing and watched as both Mike and his wife stepped out of the car and knocked on her door.

The Roemers were not the sort of people with whom my mother socialized. There was no reason they should be knocking on the Morrises’ door except one: a telegram must have come in, and its contents were dire enough that the operator thought he should deliver the news himself—along with his wife, who had presumably come to offer womanly comfort to the grieving family.

My mother saw all of this, and she knew.

I have always wondered if Mother had an impulse in that moment to turn the horse around and ride like hell in the opposite direction—just to run straight away from that horrible news. But my mother wasn’t that sort of person. What she did, instead, was to dismount and walk very slowly toward the house, leading her horse behind her. She told me later that she didn’t think it was prudent for her to be on top of an animal at an emotional moment like this. I can just see her—choosing her steps with care, handling her horse with her typical sense of conscientiousness. She knew exactly what was waiting for her on the doorstep, and she was in no hurry to meet it. Until that telegram was handed over, her son was still alive.

The Roemers could wait for her. And they did.

By the time my mother reached the doorstep of our house, Mrs. Roemer—tears streaming down her face—had her arms open for an embrace.

Which my mother, needless to say, refused.

—

My parents didn’t even have a funeral for Walter.

First of all, there was no body to be buried. The telegram notified us that Lieutenant Walter Morris had been buried at sea with full military honors. The telegram also requested that we not divulge the name of Walter’s ship or his station to our friends and family, so as not to accidentally “give aid to the enemy”—as though our neighbors in Clinton, New York, were saboteurs and spies.

My mother didn’t want a funeral service without a body. She found it too grisly. And my father was too shattered by rage and sorrow to face his community in a state of mourning. He had railed so bitterly against America’s involvement in this war, and had fought against Walter’s enlistment, too. Now he refused to have a ceremony to honor the fact that the government had stolen from him his greatest treasure.

I went home and spent a week with them. I did what I could for my parents, but they barely spoke to me. I asked if they wanted me to stay with them in Clinton—and I would have, too—but they looked at me as though I were a stranger. What possible use could I be to them, if I stayed in Clinton? If anything, I got the sense they wanted me to leave, so I wouldn’t be staring at them all day in their grief. My presence seemed only to remind them that their son was dead.

If they ever thought that the wrong child had been taken from them—that the better and nobler child was gone while the less worthy one remained—I would forgive them for it. I sometimes had that thought myself.

Once I left, they were able to collapse back into their silence.

I probably don’t need to tell you that they were never the same again.

—

Walter’s death utterly shocked me.

I swear to you, Angela, I’d never considered for a minute that my brother could be harmed or killed in this war. This may seem stupid and naïve of me, but if you knew Walter, you’d have understood my confidence. He had always been so competent, so powerful. He had brilliant instincts. He’d never even been injured, in all his years of athletics. Even among his peers, he was seen as semimythical. What harm could ever befall him?

Not only that, I never worried about anybody who served under Walter—although he did. (The one worrying subject my brother mentioned in his letters home was concern for his men’s safety and morale.) I figured anybody who was serving with Walter Morris was safe. He would see to it.

But the problem, of course, was that Walter wasn’t in charge. He was a full lieutenant by then, yes, but the ship wasn’t in his hands. At the helm was Captain Leslie Gehres. The captain was the problem.

But you know all this already—don’t you, Angela?

At least I assume you do?

I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I really don’t know how much your father told you about any of this.

—

Peg and I held our own ceremony for Walter in New York City, at the small Methodist church next to the Lily Playhouse. The minister had become a friend of Peg’s over the years, and he agreed to conduct a small service for my brother, remains or no remains. There were just a handful of us, but it was important for me that something be done in Walter’s name, and Peg had recognized that.

Peg and Olive were there, of course, flanking me like the pillars they were. Mr. Herbert was there. Billy didn’t come, having moved back to Hollywood a year earlier when his Broadway production of City of Girls finally closed. Mr. Gershon, my Navy censor, came. My pianist from the Sammy cafeteria, Mrs. Levinson, also came. The entire Lowtsky family was there. (“Never saw so many Jews at a Methodist funeral,” said Marjorie, scanning the room. This brought me a laugh. Thank you, Marjorie.) A few of Peg’s old friends came. Edna and Arthur Watson were not there. I suppose that should not have been a surprise, although I must admit I’d thought Edna might show up in support of Peg, at least.

The choir sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” and I could not stop crying. I felt a stunned sense of bereavement for Walter—not so much for the brother I lost, but for the brother I’d never had. Aside from a few sweet, sun-dappled, early childhood memories of the two of us riding ponies together (and who knew if those memories were even accurate?), I had no tender recollections of this imposing figure with whom I’d allegedly shared my youth. Perhaps if my parents had expected less of him—if they’d allowed him to be a regular little boy, instead of a scion—he and I could’ve become friends over the years, or confidants. But it was never to be. And now he was gone.

I cried all night but went back to work the next day.

A lot of people had to do that kind of thing during those years.

We cried, Angela, and then we worked.

—

On April 12, 1945, FDR died.

To me, this felt like another family member gone. I could barely remember there ever having been another president. Whatever my father thought of the man, I loved him. Many loved him. Certainly in New York City, all of us did.

The mood the next day at the Yard was somber. At the Sammy cafeteria, I hung the stage with bunting (blackout curtains, actually) and had our actors read from years of Roosevelt’s speeches. At the end of the show, one of the steel workers—a Caribbean man, with dark skin and a white beard—rose spontaneously from his seat and began to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He had a voice like Paul Robeson’s. The rest of us stood in silence while this man’s song shook the walls in doleful sorrow.

President Truman was quickly and quietly ushered in, with no majesty.

We all worked harder.

Still the war did not end.

—

On April 28, 1945, the burned-out, twisted hulk of my brother’s aircraft carrier sailed into the Brooklyn Navy Yard on her own steam. The USS Franklin had somehow managed to limp and list halfway across the world, and through the Panama Canal—piloted by a skeleton crew—to arrive now at our “hospital.” Two thirds of her crew were dead, missing, or injured.

The Franklin was met at the docks by a Navy band playing a dirgeful hymn, and also by Peg and me.

We stood on the dock and saluted as we watched this wounded ship—which I thought of as my brother’s coffin—sailing home to be repaired, as best she could. But even I could tell, just by looking at that blackened, gutted pile of steel, that nobody would ever be able to fix this.

—

On May 7, 1945, Germany finally surrendered.

But the Japanese were still holding out, and they were holding out hard.

That week, Mrs. Levinson and I wrote a song for our workers called “One Down, One to Go.”

We kept working.

—

On June 20, 1945, the Queen Mary sailed into New York Harbor carrying fourteen thousand U.S. servicemen returning home from Europe. Peg and I went to meet them at Pier 90, on the Upper West Side. Peg had painted a sign on the back of an old piece of scenery that said: “Hey, YOU! Welcome HOME!”

“Who are you welcoming home, specifically?” I asked.

“Every last one of them,” she said.

I initially hesitated to join her. The thought of seeing thousands of young men coming home—but none of them Walter—seemed too sad to bear. But she had insisted on it.

“It will be good for you,” she predicted. “More important, it will be good for them. They need to see our faces.”

I was glad I went, in the end. Very glad.

It was a delicious early summer day. I’d been living in New York for more than three years at that point, but I still wasn’t immune to the beauty of my city on a perfect blue-sky afternoon like this—one of those soft, warm days, when you can’t help but feel that the whole town loves you, and wants nothing but your happiness.

The sailors and soldiers (and nurses!) came streaming down the wharf in a delirious wave of celebration. They were met by a large cheering crowd, of which Peg and I constituted a small but enthusiastic delegation. She and I took turns waving her sign, and we cheered till our throats were hoarse. A band on the docks pounded out loud versions of the year’s popular songs. The servicemen were tossing balloons in the air, which I quickly realized were not balloons at all, but blown-up condoms. (I wasn’t the only one who realized this; I couldn’t help laughing as the mothers around me tried to stop their children from picking them up.)

One lanky, sleepy-eyed sailor paused to take a long look at me as he was walking by.

He grinned, and said in a broad southern accent, “Say, honey—what’s the name of this town anyhow?”

I grinned back. “We call it New York City, sailor.”

He pointed to some construction cranes on the other side of the wharf. He said, “Looks like it’ll be a nice enough place, once it’s finished.”

Then he slung his arm around my waist and kissed me—just like you’ve seen in that famous photo from Times Square, on VJ Day. (There was a lot of that going on that year.) But what you never saw in that photo was the girl’s reaction. I’ve always wondered how she felt about her kiss. We will never know, I suppose. But I can tell you how I felt about my kiss—which was long, expert, and considerably passionate.

Well, Angela, I liked it.

I really liked it. I kissed him right back, but then—out of the blue—I started weeping and I couldn’t stop. I buried my face in his neck, clung to him, and bathed him with tears. I cried for my brother, and for all the young men who would never come back. I cried for all the girls who had lost their sweethearts and their youth. I cried because we had given so many years to this infernal, eternal war. I cried because I was so goddamned tired. I cried because I missed kissing boys—and I wanted to kiss so many more of them!—but now I was an ancient hag of twenty-four, and what would become of me? I cried because it was such a beautiful day, and the sun was shining, and all of it was glorious, and none of it was fair.

This was not quite what the sailor had expected, I’m sure, when he’d initially grabbed me. But he rose to the occasion admirably.

“Honey,” he said in my ear, “you ain’t gotta cry no more. We’re the lucky ones.”

He held me tight, and let me boil forth my tears, until finally I got control of myself. Then he pulled back from the embrace, smiled, and said, “Now, how ’bout you let me have another?”

And we kissed again.

It would be three more months before the Japanese surrendered.

But in my mind—in my hazy, peach-colored, summer-day memory—the war ended in that very moment.

TWENTY-SIX

As swiftly as I can, Angela, let me tell you about the next twenty years of my life.

I stayed in New York City (of course I did—where else would I go?), but it was not the same town anymore. So much changed, and so fast. Aunt Peg had warned me about this inevitability back in 1945. She’d said, “Everything is always different after a war ends. I’ve seen it before. If we are wise, we should all be prepared for adjustments.”

Well, she was certainly correct about that.

Postwar New York was a rich, hungry, impatient, and growing beast—especially in midtown, where whole neighborhoods of old brownstones and businesses were knocked down in order to make room for new office complexes and modern apartment buildings. You had to pick through rubble everywhere you walked—almost as though the city had been bombed, after all. Over the next few years, so many of the glamorous places I used to frequent with Celia Ray closed down and were replaced by twenty-story corporate towers. The Spotlite closed. The Downbeat Club closed. The Stork Club closed. Countless theaters closed. Those once-glimmering neighborhoods now looked like weird, broken mouths—with half the old teeth knocked out, and some shiny new false ones randomly stuck in.

But the biggest change happened in 1950—at least in our little circle. That’s when the Lily Playhouse closed.

Mind you, the Lily didn’t simply close: she was demolished. Our beautiful, crooked, bumbling fortress of a theater was destroyed by the city that year in order to make room for the Port Authority Bus Terminal. In fact, our entire neighborhood was torn down. Within the doomed radius of what would eventually become the world’s ugliest bus terminal, every single theater, church, row house, restaurant, bar, Chinese laundry, penny arcade, florist, tattoo parlor, and school—it all came down. Even Lowtsky’s Used Emporium and Notions—gone.

Turned to dust right before our eyes.

At least the city did right by Peg. They offered her fifty-five thousand dollars for the building—which was pretty good cheese back in a time when most folks in our neighborhood were living on four thousand dollars a year. I wanted her to fight it, but she said, “There’s nothing to fight here.”

“I just can’t believe you can walk away from all this!” I wailed.

“You have no idea what I’m capable of walking away from, kiddo.”

Peg was dead right, by the way, about the fact that there was “nothing to fight here.” In taking over the neighborhood, the city was exercising a civic right called “the power of condemnation”—which is every bit as sinister and inescapable as it sounds. I had myself a good sulk over it, but Peg said, “Resist change at your own peril, Vivian. When something ends, let it end. The Lily has outlasted her glory, anyway.”

“That’s not true, Peg,” corrected Olive. “The Lily never had any glory.”

Both of them were right, in their way. We had been limping along since the war ended—barely making a living out of the building. Our shows were more sparsely attended than ever and our best talent had never returned to us after the war. (For instance: Benjamin, our composer, had elected to stay in Europe, settling down in Lyon with a Frenchwoman who owned a nightclub. We loved reading his letters—he was absolutely thriving as an impresario and bandleader—but we sure did miss his music.) What’s more, our neighborhood audience had outgrown us. People were more sophisticated now—even in Hell’s Kitchen. The war had blown the world wide open and filled the air with new ideas and tastes. Our shows had seemed dated even back when I first came to the city, but now they were like something out of the Pleistocene. Nobody wanted to watch cornball, vaudevillelike song-and-dance numbers anymore.

So, yes: whatever slight glory our theater had ever possessed, it was long gone by 1950.

Still, it was painful for me.

I only wish I loved bus terminals as much as I’d loved the Lily Playhouse.

—

When the day came for the actual demolition, Peg insisted on being present for it. (“You can’t be afraid of these things, Vivian,” she said. “You have to see it through.”) So I stood alongside Peg and Olive on that fateful day, watching as the Lily came down. I was not nearly as stoic as they were. To see a wrecking ball take aim at your home and history—at the place that really birthed you—well, that takes a degree of spinal fortitude that I did not yet possess. I couldn’t help but tear up.

The worst part was not when the façade of the building came crashing down, but when the interior lobby wall was demolished. Suddenly you could see the old stage as it was never meant to be seen—naked and exposed under the cruel, unsentimental winter sun. All its shabbiness was dragged into the light for everyone to witness.

Peg had the strength to bear it, though. She didn’t even flinch. She was made of awfully stern stuff, that woman. When the wrecking ball had done all the damage it could do for the day, she smiled at me and said, “I’ll tell you something, Vivian. I have no regrets. When I was a young girl, I honestly believed that a life spent in the theater would be nothing but fun. And God help me, kiddo—it was.”

—

Using the money from the settlement with the city, Peg and Olive bought a nice little apartment on Sutton Place. Peg even had enough money left over after the purchase of the apartment to give a sort of retirement subsidy to Mr. Herbert, who moved down to Virginia to live with his daughter.

Peg and Olive liked their new life. Olive got a job at a local high school working as the principal’s secretary—a position she was born to hold. Peg was hired at the same school to help run their theater department. The women didn’t seem unhappy about the changes. Their new apartment building (brand new, I should say) even had an elevator, which was easier for them, as they were getting older. They also had a doorman with whom Peg could gossip about baseball. (“The only doormen I ever had before were the bums sleeping under the Lily’s proscenium!” she joked.)

Troupers that they were, the two women adapted. They certainly didn’t complain. Still, there is poignancy for me in the fact that the Lily Playhouse was destroyed in 1950—the same year that Peg and Olive purchased their first television set for their modern new apartment. Clearly, the golden age of theater was now over. But Peg had seen that development coming, too.

“Television will run us all out of town in the end,” she’d predicted the first time she ever saw one in action.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Because even I like it better than theater” was her honest response.

—

As for me, with the death of the Lily Playhouse I no longer had a home or a job—or for that matter, a family with whom to share my daily life. I couldn’t exactly move in with Peg and Olive. Not at my age. It would have been embarrassing. I needed to create my own life. But I was a twenty-nine-year-old woman now—unmarried, no college education—so what could that life be?

I wasn’t too worried about how I would support myself. I had a decent amount of money saved and I knew how to work. By that point, I’d learned that as long as I had my sewing machine, my nine-inch shears, a tape measure around my neck, and a pincushion at my wrist, I could always make a living somehow. But the question was: what sort of existence would I now lead?

In the end, I was saved by Marjorie Lowtsky.

—

By 1950, Marjorie Lowtsky and I had become best friends.

It was an unlikely match, but she had never stopped looking out for me—in terms of salvaging treasures from the bottomless Lowtsky’s bins—and I, in turn, had delighted in watching this kid grow up into a charismatic and fascinating young woman. There was something quite special about her. Of course, Marjorie had always been special, but after the war years, she blossomed into an atomically energetic creative force. She still dressed wildly—looking like a Mexican bandito one day, and a Japanese geisha the next—but she had come into her own, as a person. She’d gone to art school at Parsons while still living at home with her parents and running the family business—while at the same time making money on the side as a sketch artist. She’d worked for years at Bonwit Teller, drawing romantic fashion illustrations for their newspaper ads. She also did diagrams for medical journals, and once—quite memorably—was hired by a travel company to illustrate a guidebook to Baltimore with the tragic title: So You’re Coming to Baltimore! So really, Marjorie could do anything and she was always on the hustle.

Marjorie had grown into a young woman who was not only creative, eccentric, and hardworking, but also bold and astute. And when the city announced that it was going to knock down our neighborhood, and Marjorie’s parents decided to take the buyout and retire to Queens, suddenly dear Marjorie Lowtsky was in the same position I was in—out of a home and out of work. Instead of crying about it, Marjorie came to me with a simple and well-thought-out proposal. She suggested that we join forces in the world, by living together and working together.

Her plan—and I must give her every bit of credit for it—was: wedding gowns.

—

Her exact proposal was this: “Everyone is getting married, Vivian, and we have to do something about it.”

She had taken me out to lunch at the Automat to talk about her idea. It was the summer of 1950, the Port Authority Bus Terminal was inevitable, and our whole little world was about to come tumbling down. But Marjorie (dressed today like a Peruvian peasant, wearing about five different kinds of embroidered vests and skirts at the same time) was shining with purpose and excitement.

“What do you want me to do about everyone getting married?” I asked. “Stop them?”

“No. Help them. If we can help them, we can profit from them. Look, I’ve been at Bonwit Teller all week doing sketches in the bridal suite. I’ve been listening. The salesclerks say they can’t keep up with orders. And all week I’ve been hearing customers complain about the lack of variety. Nobody wants the same dress as anyone else, but there aren’t that many dresses to choose from. I overheard a girl the other day saying that she would sew her own wedding dress, just to make it unique, if only she knew how.”

“Do you want me to teach girls how to sew their own wedding dresses?” I asked. “Most of those girls couldn’t sew a potholder.”

“No. I think we should make wedding dresses.”

“Too many people make wedding dresses already, Marjorie. It’s an industry of its own.”

“Yeah, but we can make nicer ones. I could sketch the designs and you could sew them. We know materials better than anyone else, don’t we? And our gimmick would be to create new gowns out of old ones. You and I both know that the old silk and satin is better than anything that’s being imported. With my contacts, I can find old silk and satin all over town—hell, I can even buy it in bulk from France; they’re selling everything right now, they’re so hungry over there—and you can use that material to make gowns that are finer than anything at Bonwit Teller. I’ve seen you take good lace off old tablecloths before, to make costumes. Couldn’t you make trims and veils the same way? We could create one-of-a-kind wedding dresses for girls who don’t want to look like everyone else in the department stores. Our dresses wouldn’t be industry; they would be custom tailored. Classic. You could do that, couldn’t you?”

“Nobody wants to wear a used, old wedding dress,” I said.

But as soon as I spoke these words, I remembered my friend Madeleine, back in Clinton at the beginning of the war. Madeleine, whose gown I had created by tearing up both of her grandmothers’ old silk wedding dresses and combining them into one concoction. That gown had been stunning.

Seeing that I was beginning to catch on, Marjorie said, “What I’m picturing is this—we open a boutique. We’ll use your classiness to make the place seem high tone and exclusive. We’ll play up the fact that we import our materials from Paris. People love that. They’ll buy anything if you tell them it came from Paris. It won’t be a total lie—some of the stuff will come from France. Sure, it will come from France in barrels stuffed full of rags, but nobody needs to know this. I’ll sort out the treasures, and you’ll make the treasures into better treasures.”

“Are you talking about having a store?”

“A boutique, Vivian. God, honey, get used to saying the word. Jews have stores; we shall have a boutique.”

“But you are Jewish.”

“Boutique, Vivian. Boutique. Practice saying it with me. Boutique. Let it roll off your tongue.”

“Where do you want to do this?” I asked.

“Down around Gramercy Park,” she said. “That neighborhood will always be fancy. I’d like to see the city try to tear those town houses down! That’s what we’re selling to people—the idea of fancy. The idea of classic. I want to call it L’Atelier. There’s a building down there I’ve been eyeing. My parents told me they’ll give me half the payment from the city when Lowtsky’s gets demolished—as well they should, having worked me like a stevedore ever since I was a babe in arms. My cut will be just enough to buy the place I’m looking at.”

I was watching her mind work and whip—and honestly, it was a little scary. She was moving awfully fast.

“The building I want is on Eighteenth Street, one block from the park,” she went on. “Three stories, with a storefront. Two apartments upstairs. It’s small, but it’s got charm. You could fake that it’s a little boutique on a quaint street in Paris. That’s the feeling we’re looking to create. It’s not in bad shape. I can find people to fix it up. You can live on the top floor. You know how I hate climbing stairs. You’ll like it—there’s a skylight in your apartment. Two skylights, actually.”

“You want us to buy a building, Marjorie?”

“No, honey, I want me to buy a building. I know how much money you’ve got in the bank—and no offense, Vivian, but you couldn’t afford Paramus, much less Manhattan. Although you can afford to buy into the business, so we’ll go halfsies on that. But I’ll be the one who buys the building. It will cost me every dime I have, but I’m willing to shoot the whole works at it. I’m damn sure not going to rent a place—what am I, an immigrant?”

“Yes,” I said. “You are an immigrant.”

“Immigrant or no, the only way people make money in retail in this city is by owning property, not by selling clothes. Ask the Saks family—they know. Ask the Gimbel family—they know. Although we will make money selling clothes, too, because our wedding gowns will be simply lovely, thanks to your considerable talents, and mine. So, yes, Vivian, in conclusion: I want me to buy a building. I want you to design wedding dresses, I want us to run a boutique, and I want both of us to live upstairs. That’s the plan. Let’s live together, and let’s work together. It’s not as though we’ve got anything else going on, right? Just say you’ll do it.”

I gave her proposal deep and serious consideration for about three seconds, and then said, “Sure. Let’s do it.”

—

If you’re wondering whether this decision turned out to be a giant mistake, Angela, it didn’t. In fact, I can tell you right now how it all turned out: Marjorie and I made sublime wedding gowns together for decades; we earned enough money to support ourselves comfortably; we took care of each other like family; and I live in that same building to this day. (I know I’m old, but don’t worry—I can still climb those stairs.)

I never made a better choice than to throw in my lot with Marjorie Lowtsky and to follow her into business.

Sometimes it’s just true that other people have better ideas for your life than you do.

—

All that said, it was not easy work.

As with costumes, wedding gowns are not sewn but built. They are intended to be monumental, and so it takes a monumental amount of effort to make one. My gowns were especially time-consuming because I wasn’t starting with bolts of clean, fresh fabrics. It’s harder to make a new dress from an old dress (or from several old dresses, as in my case), because you must disassemble the old dress first, and then your options will be limited by how much material you are able to glean from it. Besides which, I was working with aging and fragile textiles—antique silks and satins, and ancient spiderwebs of lace—which meant that I had to use an especially careful hand.

Marjorie would bring me sacks of old wedding and christening gowns that she scavenged from God knows where, and I would pick through them judiciously, to see what I could work with. Often the materials were yellowed with age or stained down the bodice. (Never give a bride a glass of red wine!) So my first task would be to soak the garment in ice water and vinegar to clean it. If there was a stain that I couldn’t remove, I’d have to cut around it, and figure out how much I could salvage of the old fabric. Or maybe I would turn that piece inside out, or use it as a lining. I often felt like a diamond cutter—trying to keep as much of the value of the original material as I could while shaving away what was flawed.

Then it was a question of how to create a dress that was unique. At some level, a wedding gown is just a dress—and like all dresses, it’s made of three simple ingredients: a bodice, a skirt, and sleeves. But over the years, with those three limited ingredients, I made thousands of dresses that were not at all alike. I had to do this, because no bride wants to look like another bride.

So it was challenging work, yes—both physically and creatively. I had assistants over the years, and that helped a bit, but I never found anyone who could do what I could do. And since I couldn’t bear to create a L’Atelier dress that was anything less than impeccable, I put in the long hours myself to make sure that each gown was a piece of perfection. If a bride said—on the evening before her wedding—that she wanted more pearls on her bodice, or less lace, then I would be the one up after midnight making those changes. It takes the patience of a monk to do this kind of detail work. You have to believe that what you are creating is sacred.

Fortunately, I happened to believe that.

—

Of course, the greatest challenge in building wedding dresses is learning how to handle the customers themselves.

In offering my service to so many brides over the years, I became delicately attuned to the subtleties of family, money, and power—but mostly, I had to learn how to understand fear. I learned that girls who are about to get married are always afraid. They’re afraid that they don’t love their fiancés enough or that they love them too much. They’re afraid of the sex that is coming to them or the sex that they are leaving behind. They’re afraid of the wedding day going awry. They’re afraid of being looked at by hundreds of eyes—and they’re afraid of not being looked at, in case their dress is all wrong or their maid of honor is more beautiful.

I recognize, Angela, that in the great scale of things, these are not monumental concerns. We had just come through a world war in which millions died and millions more saw their lives destroyed; clearly the anxiety of a nervous bride is not a cataclysmic matter, in comparison. But fears are fears, nonetheless, and they bring strain upon the troubled minds who bear them. I came to see it as my task to alleviate as much fear and strain as I could for these girls. More than anything, then, what I learned over the years at L’Atelier was how to help frightened women—how to humble myself before their needs, and how to lend myself to their wishes.

For me, this education started as soon as we opened for business.

The first week of our boutique’s existence, a young woman wandered in, clutching our advertisement from The New York Times. (This was Marjorie’s sketch of two guests at a wedding admiring a willowy bride. One woman says, “That gown is so poetical! Did she bring it home from Paris?” The second woman replies, “Why, almost! It comes from L’Atelier, and their gowns are the fairest!”)

I could see the girl was nervous. I got her a glass of water and showed her samples of the gowns I was currently working on. Very quickly, she gravitated toward a great big pile of meringue—a dress that resembled a puffy summer cloud. In fact, it looked exactly like the wedding gown that the swan-thin model in our advertisement was wearing. The girl touched her dream dress and her face grew soft with longing. My heart sank. I knew this garment was not right for her. She was so small and roundish; she would look like a marshmallow in it.

“May I try it on?” she asked.

But I couldn’t allow her to do that. If she saw herself in the mirror wearing that dress, she would recognize how farcical she looked, and she would leave my boutique and never come back. But it was worse than that. I didn’t so much mind losing the sale. What I minded was this: I knew that this girl’s feelings would be wounded by seeing herself in that dress—deeply wounded—and I wanted to spare her the pain.

“Sweetheart,” I said, as gently as I could, “you’re a beautiful girl. And I think that particular gown will be a bitter disappointment for you.”

Her face fell. Then she squared her little shoulders and bravely said, “I know why. It’s because I’m too short, isn’t it? And because I’m too plump. I knew it. I’m going to look like a fool on my wedding day.”

There was something about this moment that went straight through the heart of me. There is nothing like the vulnerability of an insecure girl in a bridal shop to make you feel the small but horrible pains of life. I instantly felt nothing but concern for this girl, and I didn’t want her to suffer for another moment.

Also—please remember that up until this time, Angela, I hadn’t worked with civilians. For years, I’d been sewing clothing for professional dancers and actresses. I wasn’t accustomed to normal-looking, regular girls, with all their self-consciousness and perceived flaws. Many of the women whom I had been serving thus far had been passionately in love with their own figures (and for good reason) and were eager to be seen. I was accustomed to women who would shed their clothes and dance around in front of a mirror with joy—not to women who would flinch at their own reflections.

I had forgotten that girls could be anything but vain.

What this girl taught me in my own boutique that day was that the wedding-gown business was going to be considerably different from show business. Because this little human being standing before my eyes was not some sumptuous showgirl; she was just a regular person who wanted to look sumptuous on her wedding day, and who did not know how to get there.

But I knew how to get her there.

I knew she needed a dress that was snug and simple, so she wouldn’t vanish in it. I knew that her dress needed to be made of crepe-backed satin, so it would drape but not cling. Nor could it be a vivid white, because of her somewhat ruddy complexion. No, her gown needed to be a softer, creamier color—which would make her skin look smoother. I knew that she needed a simple crown of flowers, rather than a long veil that would—again—hide her from view. I knew that she needed three-quarter sleeves to show off her pretty wrists and hands. No gloves for this one! Also, I could tell just by looking at her in her street clothes where her natural waist was located (and it was not where her current dress was belted) and I knew that her gown would need to fall from the natural waist, in order to give the illusion of an hourglass figure. And I could feel that she was so modest—so mercilessly self-conscious and self-critical—that she would not be able to bear it if the slightest hint of cleavage was revealed. But her ankles—those, we could show and so we would. I knew exactly how to dress her.

“Oh, sweetheart,” I said, and I quite literally tucked her under my wing. “Don’t you fret. We’re going to take good care of you. You will be a spectacularly beautiful bride, I promise it.”

And so she was.

—

Angela, I will tell you this: I came to love all the girls I ever served at L’Atelier. Every last one of them. This was one of the biggest surprises of my life—the upwelling of love and protectiveness that I felt toward every girl I ever dressed for her wedding. Even when they were demanding and hysterical, I loved them. Even when they were not so beautiful, I saw them as beautiful.

Marjorie and I had gone into this business primarily to make money. My secondary motive had been to practice my craft, which had always brought me fulfillment. A tertiary reason had been that I really didn’t know what else to do with my life. But I never could have anticipated the greatest benefit this business would bestow: the powerful rush of warmth and tenderness that I felt every single time another nervous bride-to-be crossed my threshold and entrusted me with her precious life.

In other words—L’Atelier gave me love.

I could not help it, you see.

They were all young, they were all so afraid, and they were all so dear.

TWENTY-SEVEN

The great irony, of course, is that neither Marjorie nor I was married.

Over the years that we ran L’Atelier, we were up to our eyeballs in wedding gowns, helping thousands of girls prepare for their nuptials—but nobody ever married us, and we never married anybody. There’s that old expression: Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. But we weren’t even bridesmaids!! If anything, Marjorie and I were bride tenders.

We were both too weird, was the problem. That’s how we diagnosed ourselves, anyhow: too weird to wed. (Perhaps that would be the slogan of our next business, we often joked.)

Marjorie’s weirdness was not hard to see. She was just such a kook. It wasn’t only the way she dressed (although her sartorial choices were indeed patently strange); it was also the interests that she had. She was always taking lessons in things like Eastern penmanship and breathing up at the Buddhist temple on Ninety-fourth Street. Or she was learning how to make her own yogurt—and causing our entire building to smell like yogurt in the process. She appreciated avant-garde art, and listened to challenging (to my ear, anyway) music from the Andes. She signed up to be hypnotized by graduate students in psychology, and underwent analysis. She read the Tarot and the I Ching, and she threw runes. She went to a Chinese healer who worked on her feet, which she never stopped talking about to people, no matter how many times I begged her to stop talking to people about her feet. She was always on some kind of fad diet—not to lose weight necessarily, but to become healthier or more transcendent. She spent one summer, as I recall, eating nothing but tinned peaches, which she had read were good for respiration. Then it was on to bean-sprout and wheat-germ sandwiches.

Nobody wants to marry an odd girl who eats bean-sprout and wheat-germ sandwiches.

—

And I was odd, too. I may as well admit it.

For instance: I had my own bizarre way of dressing. I’d grown so accustomed to wearing trousers during the war that now I wore them all the time. I liked being able to ride my bicycle about town with liberty, but it was more than that—I liked wearing clothing that looked like menswear. I thought (and still think) that there is no better way for a woman to look smart and chic than to wear a man’s suit. Good woolens were still difficult to come by in the immediate postwar period, but I discovered that if I bought quality used suits—I’m talking about Savile Row designs from the 1920s and 1930s—I could trim them down for myself and put together outfits that made me look, I liked to imagine, like Greta Garbo.

It was not in style after the war, I should say, for a woman to dress like this. Sure, back in the 1940s a woman could wear a mannish suit. It was considered patriotic, almost. But once the hostilities had ended, femininity came back with a vengeance. Around 1947, the fashion world was taken hostage by Christian Dior and his decadent “New Look” dresses—with the nipped waists, and the voluminous skirts, and the upwardly striving breasts, and the soft shoulder line. The New Look was meant to prove to the world that wartime shortages were over, and now we could squander all the silk and netting we wanted, just to be pretty and feminine and flouncy. It could take up to twenty-five yards of fabric just to make one New Look dress. Try getting out of a taxicab in that.

I hated it. I didn’t have the kind of va-va-voom figure for that sort of dress, for one thing. My long legs, lanky torso, and small breasts were always better suited to slacks and blouses. Also, there was the matter of practicality. I couldn’t work in a billowing dress like that. I spent much of my workday on the floor—kneeling over patterns, and crawling around the women whom I was outfitting. I needed pants and flats in order to be free.

So I rejected the fashion trends of the moment and did my own thing—just as Edna Parker Watson had taught me. This made me a bit of an oddball for the times. Not as odd as Marjorie, of course, but still rather unusual. I did find, however, that my uniform of trousers and a jacket worked well, in terms of serving my female customers. My short hair was also psychologically advantageous. By defeminizing my look, I telegraphed to the young brides (and their mothers) that I was not any sort of threat or rival. This was important because I was an attractive woman, and for the purposes of my profession it was best not to be too attractive. Even in the privacy of the dressing room, one must never outshine the bride. Those girls didn’t want to see a sexy woman standing behind them while they chose the most important dress of their lives; they wanted to see a quiet and respectful tailor, all dressed in black, standing at their service. So I became that quiet and respectful tailor—gladly.

The other thing that was odd about me was how much I had come to love my independence. There was never a time in America when marriage was more of a fetish than in the 1950s, but I found that I simply wasn’t interested. This made me quite the aberration—almost even a deviant. But the trials of the war years had turned me into someone both resourceful and confident, and opening up a business with Marjorie had filled me with a sense of self-determination—so maybe I just didn’t believe anymore that I needed a man for very many purposes. (For one purpose only, really, if I am being honest.)

I had discovered that I rather liked living alone in my charming apartment above the bridal boutique. I liked my little place, with its two happy skylights, with its infinitesimally small bedroom (overlooking a magnolia tree in the alleyway behind me), and with its cherry-red kitchenette that I had painted myself. Once I’d laid claim to my own space, I quickly became accustomed to my own weird habits—like ashing my cigarettes into the flower box outside the kitchen window, or getting up in the middle of the night to turn on all the lights so I could read a mystery novel, or eating cold spaghetti for breakfast. I liked to pad about my home softly in my house slippers—never once touching shoes to the carpet. I liked to keep my fruit not randomly cast about in a bowl, but lined up neatly on my gleaming kitchen counter in a satisfying row. If you had told me that a man was going to move into my pretty little apartment, it would have felt like a home invasion.

Moreover, I had started to think that perhaps marriage wasn’t such a great bargain for women, after all. When I looked around at all the women I knew who’d been married for more than five or ten years, I didn’t see anybody whose lives I envied. Once the romance had faded, these women all seemed to be living in constant service to their husbands. (They either served their men happily or with resentment—but they all served.)

Their husbands didn’t look ecstatically happy about the arrangement, either, I must say.

I would not have traded places with any of them.

—

All right, all right—to be fair, also nobody asked me to marry him.

Not since Jim Larsen, anyhow.

I do think I narrowly escaped a marriage proposal in 1957 from a senior financier at Brown Brothers Harriman, which was a private Wall Street bank, cloaked in hushed discretion and thunderous wealth. It was a temple of money, and Roger Alderman was one of its high priests. He owned a seaplane, if you can imagine it. (What possible use does a person have for a seaplane? Was he a spy? Did he have to drop provisions to his troops on an island? It was ludicrous.) I will say of him that he had the most divine suits, and there has always been something about a good-looking man in a freshly pressed and well-fitted suit that makes me feel a bit faint with desire.

His suits made me feel so faint, in fact, that I convinced myself to romance this man for over a year—despite the fact that, whenever I gazed into my heart for signs of love toward Roger Alderman, I could find no trace of love’s existence. Then one day he started talking about what kind of house we might like to inhabit in New Rochelle, should we someday decide to get out of this god-awful city. That’s when I woke up. (There is nothing intrinsically wrong with New Rochelle, mind you—except that I know for a fact that I could not live in New Rochelle for even a single day without wanting to break my own neck with my own two hands.)

Soon after this, I gently excused myself from our arrangement.

But I enjoyed the sex that I had with Roger while it lasted. It wasn’t the world’s most electrifying or creative lovemaking, but it did the trick. It took me “over the top,” as Celia and I used to say. It has always astonished me, Angela, how easily I can convince my body to become free and unstuck during sex—even with the most unappealing man. Roger was not unappealing in terms of handsomeness, of course. He was quite becoming, actually (and although I wish sometimes that I were not quite so susceptible to handsomeness, there’s no way around it: I just am). But he did not stir my heart. Yet still, my body was grateful for its encounters with him. Indeed, I had found over the years that I could always rise to a grand finale in bed—not only with Roger Alderman, but with just about anybody. No matter how indifferent my mind and heart might have been toward a man, my body could always respond with enthusiasm and delight.

And after we were done? I always wanted the man to go home.

—

Perhaps I should back up here a bit and explain that I had recommenced my sexual activities after the war ended—and with considerable enthusiasm, too. Despite the picture I may be painting of myself in the 1950s as a cross-dressing, short-haired, solitary-dwelling spinster, let me make one thing clear: just because I didn’t want to get married doesn’t mean I didn’t want to have sex.

Also, I was still quite pretty. (I’ve always looked terrific with short hair, Angela. I didn’t come here to lie to you.)

The truth is, I emerged from the war with a hunger for sex that was deeper than ever. I was tired of deprivation, you see. Those three coarse years of hard work in the Navy Yard (and, by extension, three dry years of celibacy) had left my body not only tired, but dissatisfied. There was a sense I had after the war that this is not what my body was for. I was not built only to labor, and then to sleep, and then to labor again the next day—with no pleasure or excitement. There had to be more to life than toil and travail.

So my appetites returned, right along with the global peace. Moreover, I found that as I matured, my appetites had grown more specific, more curious, and more confident. I wanted to explore. I was fascinated by the differences in men’s lust—by the curious ways that they each expressed themselves in bed. I never tired of the profound intimacy of finding out who is bashful in the sexual act and who is not. (Hint: It’s never what you expect.) I was touched by the surprising noises that men made in their moments of abandon. I was curious about the endless variation in their fantasies. I was thrilled by the ways a man could rush me in one moment, all guns blazing, only to be overcome in the next moment by tenderness and uncertainty.

But I also had different rules of conduct now. Or, rather, I had one rule: I refused to engage in sexual activity with a married man. I am certain, Angela, that I do not need to tell you why. (But in case I do need to tell you, here’s why: because after the catastrophe with Edna Parker Watson, I refused to ever again harm another woman as a result of my sexual activity.)

I would not even engage in sexual congress with a man who claimed to be going through a divorce—because who really knows? I’ve met a lot of men who always seemed to be going through a divorce, but who never quite managed to complete one. I once went on a dinner date with a man who confessed to me during the dessert course that he was married, but claimed that it didn’t count, because he was on his fourth wife—and can you honestly even call that married?

I could see his point, to a certain extent. But still: no.

If you’re wondering where I found my men, Angela, I shall inform you that never in human history has it been difficult for a woman to find a man who will have sex with her, if that woman is easy.

So, generally speaking, I found my men everywhere. But if you want the specifics: I most often found them at the bar at the Grosvenor Hotel, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street. I had always appreciated the Grosvenor. It was old and staid and unassuming—elegant, but not off-puttingly elegant. The barroom had a few tables with white tablecloths set near the window. I liked to go there in the late afternoons, after my long days of sewing, and sit at one of those window-side tables, reading a novel and enjoying a martini.

Nine times out of ten, all I did was read and sip my drink and relax. But every so often, a male guest at the bar would send over a drink. And then something might or might not transpire between us—depending on how things went.

I usually knew fairly quickly if this gentleman was somebody with whom I wished to engage. Once I knew, I liked to move things right along. I’ve never been one to game a man, or pretend to be coy. Also, if I’m being honest, I often found the conversations tiring. The postwar period in America was a terrible time, Angela, when it came to the problem of men talking boastfully about themselves. American men had not only won the war; they had won the world, and they were feeling pretty damn proud of themselves about it. And they liked to talk about it. I became quite good at cutting short all the chitchat by being sexually direct. (“I find you attractive. Shall we go someplace where we can be alone together?”) Also, I liked to witness the man’s surprise and joy at being propositioned so blatantly by a good-looking woman. They would light up every time. I have always loved that moment. It is as though you have brought Christmas to an orphanage.

The bartender at the Grosvenor was named Bobby, and he was so gracious to me. Whenever he saw me leaving the bar with one of his hotel guests—heading to the elevators with a man I’d met only an hour earlier—Bobby would ever so discreetly bow his head over his newspaper, not noticing a thing. Behind his spiffy uniform and professional demeanor, you see, Bobby was quite the bohemian himself. He lived in the Village, and went away to the Catskills for two weeks every summer to paint watercolors and wander about in the nude at an art retreat for “naturists.” Needless to say, Bobby was not the sort to cast judgments. And if a man ever gave me unwelcome attention, Bobby would intervene and ask the gentleman to please leave the lady alone. I adored Bobby, and I probably would have had an affair with him at some point over the years, but I needed him as my sentry more than I needed him as my lover.

As for the men in the hotel rooms, we would have our adventure together, and then I would usually never see them again.

I liked to leave their beds before they started telling me things about themselves that I didn’t want to know.

—

If you are wondering whether I ever fell in love with any of those gentlemen, Angela, the answer is no. I had lovers, but not loves. Some of those lovers turned into boyfriends, and a precious handful of those boyfriends turned into friends (the best outcome of all). But nothing advanced into the realm of what you might call true love. Maybe I just wasn’t looking for it. Or maybe I was being spared from it. Nothing will uproot your life more violently than true love—at least as far as I’ve always witnessed.

I was often quite fond of them, though. For a while, I had a fun affair with a young—very young—Hungarian painter, whom I met at an art exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory. His name was Botond and he was an absolute lamb. I brought him home to my apartment the night I met him, and—right on the brink of sex—he told me that he didn’t need to use a prophylactic because “you are a nice woman, and I’m sure you are clean.” I sat up in bed, turned on the light, and said to this boy who was practically young enough to be my son, “Botond, now listen to me. I am a nice woman. But I need to tell you something important that you must never forget: if a woman is willing to go home and have sex with you after she’s only known you for an hour, she has done it before. Always, always, always use a prophylactic.”

Sweet Botond, with his round cheeks and his terrible haircut!

And then there was Hugh—a quiet, kind-faced widower who came in with his daughter one day to buy her a wedding dress. I found him to be so dear and attractive that after our business was completed, I slipped him my private phone number, saying, “Please call me any time you would like to spend a night together.”

I could tell that I’d embarrassed him, but I didn’t want to let him get away!

About two years later, I received a phone call one Saturday afternoon. It was Hugh! Once he had reintroduced himself—stammering nervously—he clearly had no idea how to continue the conversation. Smiling into the phone, I rescued him as quickly as I could. “Hugh,” I said, “it’s wonderful to hear from you. And you needn’t be embarrassed. I did say any time. Why don’t you come right on over?”

If you’re wondering if any of those men ever fell in love with me—well, sometimes they did. But I always managed to talk them out of it. It’s easy for a man who has just experienced good sex to believe that he is now in love. And I was good at sex, Angela, by this point. I’d certainly had enough practice at it. (As I said once to Marjorie, “The only two things I’ve ever been good at in this world are sex and sewing.” To which she responded: “Well, honey—at least you chose the right one to monetize.”) When men became too dewy-eyed with me, I merely explained to them that they were not in love with me, but with the sexual act itself, and they would usually calm down.

If you’re wondering whether I was ever in any physical danger from my nocturnal encounters with all these strange and unknown men, the only honest answer is yes. But it did not stop me. I was as careful as I could be, but I had nothing to go on but my instincts when choosing my men. Sometimes, I chose wrong. This is bound to happen. There were times, behind closed doors, when things got rougher and more dicey than I might have preferred. Not often, but sometimes. When that happened, I rode it out like an experienced sailor in a bad squall. I don’t know how else to explain it. And while I did have an unpleasant night every so often, I never felt enduringly harmed. Nor did the threat of danger ever deter me. These were risks I was willing to take. It was more important for me to feel free than safe.

And if you’re wondering whether I ever had crises of conscience about my promiscuity, I can honestly tell you: no. I did believe that my behavior made me unusual—because it didn’t seem to match the behavior of other women—but I didn’t believe that it made me bad.

I used to think that I was bad, mind you. During the dry years of the war, I still carried such a burden of shame about the incident with Edna Parker Watson, and the words “dirty little whore” never fully left my consciousness. But by the time the war ended, I was finished with all that. I think it had something to do with my brother being killed, and the painful belief that Walter had died without ever having enjoyed his life. The war had invested me with an understanding that life is both dangerous and fleeting, and thus there is no point in denying yourself pleasure or adventure while you are here.

I could have spent the rest of my life trying to prove that I was a good girl—but that would have been unfaithful to who I really was. I believed that I was a good person, if not a good girl. But my appetites were what they were. So I gave up on the idea of denying myself what I truly wanted. Then I sought ways to delight myself. As long as I stayed away from married men, I felt that I was doing no harm.

Anyway, at some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time.

After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.

TWENTY-EIGHT

As for female friends, I had many.

Of course, Marjorie was my best friend, and Peg and Olive would always be my family. But Marjorie and I had a lot of other women around, too.

There was Marty—a doctoral candidate in literature at NYU, brilliant and funny, whom we’d met one day at a free concert on Rutherford Place. There was Karen—a receptionist at the Museum of Modern Art, who wanted to be a painter, and who had attended Parsons with Marjorie. There was Rowan, who was a gynecologist—which we all found terribly impressive, and also useful. There was Susan—a grade-school teacher with a passion for modern dance. There was Callie, who owned the flower shop around the corner. There was Anita, who came from money and never did anything at all—but she did get us a pirated key to Gramercy Park, so we appreciated her forever.

There were more women, too, who came and went out of my life. Sometimes Marjorie and I would lose a friend to marriage; other times we would gain a friend after a divorce. Sometimes a woman would move out of the city, sometimes she would move back. The tides of life came in and out. The circles of friendship grew, then shrank, then grew again.

But the gathering place for us women was always the same—our rooftop on Eighteenth Street, which we could access from the fire escape outside my bedroom window. Marjorie and I dragged a bunch of cheap folding chairs up there, and we would spend our evenings on the roof with our friends, anytime the weather was fine. Summer after summer, our little group of females would sit together under what passes for starlight in New York City, smoking our cigarettes, drinking our rotgut wine, listening to music on a transistor radio, and sharing with each other our big and small concerns of life.

During one brutally airless August heat wave, Marjorie managed to haul a big stand-up fan up onto our roof. This she plugged into my kitchen outlet, using a long industrial extension cord. As far as the rest of us were concerned, this made her a genius at the level of Leonardo da Vinci. We would sit in the artificial breeze of the fan, lifting our shirts to cool our breasts, and pretending that we were at a beach somewhere exotic.

Those are some of my happiest memories of the 1950s.

It was on the rooftop of our little bridal boutique that I learned this truth: when women are gathered together with no men around, they don’t have to be anything in particular; they can just be.

—

Then in 1955, Marjorie got pregnant.

I’d always feared it was going to be me who ended up pregnant—the smart bet would have been on me, obviously—but poor Marjorie was the one who got hit.

The culprit was an old married art professor, with whom she’d been having an affair for years. (Although Marjorie would have said that the culprit was herself, for wasting so much of her life with a married man who kept promising that he would leave his wife for her, if only Marjorie would “stop acting so Jewish.”)

A bunch of us were on the rooftop one night when she told us the news.

“Are you sure?” asked Rowan, the gynecologist. “Do you want to come into my office for a test?”

“I don’t need a test,” said Marjorie. “My period is gone, gone, gone.”

“Gone, how long?” said Rowan.

“Well, I’ve never been regular, but maybe three months?”

There’s a tense silence that women fall into when they hear that one of their own has become accidentally pregnant. This is a matter of highest gravity. I could feel that none of us wanted to say another word until Marjorie had told us more. We wanted to know what her plan was, so that we could support it, whatever the plan may have been. But she just sat there in silence, after dropping this bomb, and added no further information.

Finally, I asked, “What does George have to say about this?” George, of course, being the anti-Semitic married art professor who apparently loved having sex with Jewish girls.

“Why do you assume it’s George?” she joked.

We all knew it was George. It was always George. Of course it was George. She had been infatuated with George since she was a wide-eyed student in his Sculpture of Modern Europe class, so many years earlier.

Then she said, “No, I haven’t told him. I think I won’t tell him. I just won’t see him anymore. I’ll cut it off from here. If nothing else, this is finally a good excuse to stop sleeping with George.”

Rowan cut right to the chase: “Have you considered a termination?”

“No. I wouldn’t do that. Or, rather, maybe I would do that. But it’s too late.”

She lit another cigarette and took another drink of wine—because that’s what pregnancy looked like in the 1950s.

She said, “I found out about a place in Canada. It’s sort of a home for unwed mothers, but more deluxe than the usual fare. You get your own room, and all that. My understanding is that the clientele is a bit older. Women with some money. I can go there toward the end, when I can’t hide it anymore. Tell people I’m on vacation—even though I’ve never taken a vacation in my life, so nobody will believe me, but that’s all I can do. They even said they could place the baby in a Jewish family—although where they aim to find a Jewish family in Canada, who knows? Anyway, I don’t care about religion, you all know that. As long as it’s a good home. It seems like a nice enough facility. Plenty expensive, but I can swing it. I’ll use the Paris money.”

It was typical of Marjorie to have solved a problem on her own before reaching out to her friends for help, and certainly her plan was sound. Still, my heart hurt. Marjorie didn’t want any of this. She and I had been saving our money for years, planning to take a trip to Paris together. As soon as we had enough cash gathered, our plan was to close the boutique for the entire month of August, get on the Queen Elizabeth, and sail to France. This was our shared dream. We were almost there with our savings, too. We had worked for years without so much as a weekend off. And now this.

I knew right then that I would go to Canada with her. We would close down L’Atelier for however long was necessary. Wherever she was going, I would go with her. I would stay with her through the birth of her baby. I would spend my share of the Paris money to buy a car. Whatever she needed.

I scooted my chair over next to Marjorie’s and took her hand. “That all sounds wise, honey,” I said. “I’ll be right there with you.”

“It does sound wise, doesn’t it?” Marjorie took another drag off her cigarette, and looked around at the circle of her friends. We all had the same loving, pitying, and somewhat panicked expressions on our faces.

Then the most unexpected thing happened. Suddenly Marjorie grinned at me, in a slightly crazed-looking, lopsided manner. She said, “Goddamn it to hell, but I don’t think I’ll go to Canada. Oh, Christ, Vivian, I must be out of my mind. But I just decided it right now. I have a better plan. No, not a better plan. But a different plan. I’ll keep it.”

“You’re going to keep the baby?” Karen asked, in open shock.

“What about George?” Anita asked.

Marjorie stuck her chin up in the air like the tough little bantamweight fighter she’d always been. “I don’t need stinkin’ George. Vivian and I are gonna raise this kid ourselves. Aren’t we, Vivian?”

I gave it only a moment’s thought. I knew my friend. Once she had decided something, that was it. She would somehow make it work. And I would make it work with her, like always.

So once again I said to Marjorie Lowtsky: “Sure. Let’s do it.”

And once again, my life completely changed.

—

So that’s what we did, Angela.

We had a kid.

And that kid was our beautiful, difficult, tender little Nathan.

—

Everything about it was hard.

Her pregnancy wasn’t so bad, but the delivery itself was something from a horror movie. They ended up doing a cesarian, but not before she’d suffered through eighteen hours of labor. They really hacked her up during the procedure, too. Then she didn’t stop bleeding, and there was a concern they would lose her. They nicked the baby’s face with the scalpel during the cesarian, and very nearly took out his eye. Then Marjorie got an infection and was in the hospital for almost four weeks.

I still maintain that all this carelessness at the hospital was due to the fact that Nathan was what they called a “non-marital infant” (politely sinister 1950s terminology for “bastard”). As a result, the doctors weren’t especially attentive to Marjorie during her labor, and the nurses weren’t particularly kind, either.

It was Marjorie’s and my girlfriends who took care of her when she was recovering. Marjorie’s family—for the same reason as the nurses—didn’t want much to do with her and the baby. That may sound extremely unkind (and it was), but you can’t imagine what a stigma it was for a woman at that time to bear a child out of wedlock—even in liberal New York. Even for a mature woman like Marjorie, who ran her own business and owned her own building, undergoing a pregnancy without a husband attached was disgraceful.

So she was brave, is what I’m driving at. And she was on her own. Thus it came down to our circle of friends to take care of Marjorie and Nathan as best we could. It was good that we had so much backup. I couldn’t be with Marjorie all the time at the hospital, because I was the one taking care of the baby while she was recovering. This was like its own horror movie as I had no idea what I was doing. I hadn’t grown up with babies, nor had I ever longed for a child myself. I had no instinct or aptitude for it. Moreover, I hadn’t bothered to learn much about babies while Marjorie was pregnant. I didn’t even really know what they ate. The plan had never been that Nathan would be my baby, anyhow; the plan had been that he would be Marjorie’s baby, and that I would work doubly hard to support all three of us. But for that first month, he was my baby, and he was not in the most expert hands, I’m sorry to say.

Moreover, Nathan was not easy. He was colicky and underweight, and it was a struggle to get him to take the bottle. He had rampant cradle cap and diaper rash (“catastrophes at both ends,” as Marjorie said) and I couldn’t seem to get any of it to go away. Our assistants at L’Atelier managed the boutique as best they could, but it was June—wedding season—and I had to be at work at least sometimes or the business wouldn’t function at all. I had to do Marjorie’s work for her, as well, while she was absent. But every time I set Nathan down so I could attend to my duties, he would scream until I picked him back up again.

The mother of one of my brides-to-be saw me struggling with the infant one morning, and gave me the name of an older Italian woman who had helped out her own daughter, when her twin grandchildren were born. That older nursemaid’s name was Palma, and she turned out to be St. Michael and all the angels. We kept Palma on as Nathan’s nanny for years, and she truly saved us—especially during that brutal first year. But Palma was expensive. In fact, everything about Nathan was expensive. He was a sickly baby, and then he was a sickly toddler, and then he was a sickly little boy. I swear he spent more time in the doctor’s office during those first five years of his life than he did at home. If there was anything a child could come down with, he came down with it. He always had trouble with his breathing, and he was constantly on penicillin, which upset his stomach, and then you couldn’t feed him—which led to its own problems.

Marjorie and I had to work harder than ever to pay the bills, now that there were three of us—and one of us was always sick. So work harder, we did.

You wouldn’t believe the number of wedding gowns we churned out during those years. Thank God people were getting married in higher numbers than ever.

Neither of us talked about going to Paris anymore.

—

Time passed and Nathan grew older but not much bigger. He was such a squirt of a thing—so dear in his affections, so tenderhearted and gentle, but also so nervous and easily frightened. And always sick.

We loved him so. It was impossible not to love him; he was such a sweetheart. You never met a more kind little person. He never got into trouble, or was disobedient. The problem was only that he was so fragile. Maybe we babied him too much. Almost certainly we babied him too much. Let’s be clear: this child grew up in a bridal boutique surrounded by hordes of women (customers and employees alike) who were more than willing to indulge his fears and his clinginess. (“Oh, God, Vivian, he’s gonna be such a queer,” Marjorie said to me once, when she saw her son twirling in a wedding veil in front of a mirror. That may sound harsh, but to be fair to Marjorie, it was difficult to imagine how Nathan could grow up to be anything else. We used to joke that Olive was the only masculine figure in his life.)

As Nathan approached the age of five, we realized that we could not possibly enroll this kid in public school. He weighed in at about twenty-five pounds dripping wet, and the presence of other children alarmed him. He wasn’t a stickball-playing, tree-climbing, rock-throwing, knee-skinning sort of boy. He liked puzzles. He liked to look at books, but nothing too scary. (Swiss Family Robinson: too scary. Snow White: too scary. Make Way for Ducklings: just about right.) Nathan was the kind of child who would have been brutalized at a public school in New York City. We pictured him being pounded like bread dough by tough city bullies, and we couldn’t bear the thought. So we enrolled him in Friends Seminary (at two thousand dollars a year tuition, thank you very much) so that the gentle Quakers could take all our hard-earned money and teach our boy how to be non-violent, which was never going to be a problem anyhow.

When the other children asked Nathan where his daddy was, we taught him to say, “My daddy was killed in the war”—which didn’t even make sense, because Nathan was born in 1956. But we figured kindergartners were too dumb to do the math, so his answer would keep them at bay for a while. As Nathan got older, we’d come up with a better story.

One bright winter’s day, when Nathan was around six years old, Marjorie and I were sitting in Gramercy Park with him. I was doing beadwork on a bodice and Marjorie was trying to read The New York Review of Books, despite the wind that kept whipping at her pages. Marjorie was wearing a poncho (in a puzzling plaid of violet and mustard) and some kind of crazy Turkish shoes with curled-up toes. Wrapped around her head was a white silk pilot’s scarf. She looked like a medieval guildsman with a toothache.

At one point, we both paused what we were doing to watch Nathan. He was carefully drawing stick figures in chalk on the pathway. But then he became scared of some pigeons—some very innocuous pigeons, which were minding their own business and pecking at the ground a few feet away from where Nathan sat. He stopped drawing and froze. We watched as the boy grew wide-eyed with terror at the sight of the birds.

Under her breath, Marjorie said, “Look at him. He’s afraid of everything.”

“That’s right,” I agreed, because it was true. He really was.

She said, “I can’t even give him a bath without him thinking I’m trying to drown him. Where did he even hear of mothers drowning their children? Why would that idea even be in his head? You never tried to drown him in the bath, did you, Vivian?”

“I’m almost certain I didn’t. But you know how I get when I’m angry. . . .”

I was trying to make her laugh but it didn’t work.

“I don’t know about this child,” she said, her face overcome by worry. “He’s even afraid of his red hat. I think it’s the color. I tried to put it on him this morning, and he burst into tears. I had to let him have the blue one. Do you know something, Vivian? He has utterly ruined my life.”

“Oh, Marjorie, don’t say that,” I said, laughing.

“No, it’s true, Vivian. He’s ruined everything. Let’s just admit it. I should’ve gone to Canada and given him up for adoption. Then we would still have money, and I would have some freedom. I’d be able to sleep through the night, without listening for his coughing. I wouldn’t be seen as a fallen woman with a bastard child. I wouldn’t be so tired. Maybe I would have time to paint. I would still have a figure. Maybe I could even have a boyfriend. Let’s just call a spade a spade: I never should’ve had this kid.”

“Marjorie! Stop it. You don’t mean that.”

But she wasn’t done. “No, I do mean it, Vivian. He was the worst decision I ever made in my life. You can’t deny that. Nobody could deny that.”

I was starting to get terribly worried, but then she said, “The only problem is, I love him so much, I can’t even bear it. I mean—look at him.”

And there he was. There was that touching little broken figurine of a boy, trying to get as far away as possible from any and all pigeons (which is not easy in a New York City park). There was our little Nathan, in his snowsuit, with his chapped lips and his cheeks all red with eczema. There was his sweet, peaked face—glancing around in panic for somebody to protect him from some nine-ounce birds who were completely ignoring him. He was perfect. He was made of spun glass. He was a reedy little disaster and I adored him.

I glanced over at Marjorie, and could see that she was now crying. This was significant because Marjorie never cried. (That had always been my department.) I’d never seen her looking so rueful and so tired.

Marjorie said, “Do you think Nathan’s father might claim him someday, if he ever stops acting so Jewish?”

I punched her in the arm. “Stop it, Marjorie!”

“I’m just so weary, Vivian. But I love this kid so much, sometimes I think it will break me in half. Is that the dirty trick? Is this how they get mothers to ruin their lives for their children? By tricking them into loving them so much?”

“Maybe. It’s not a bad strategy.”

We watched Nathan for a while longer, as he braved the specter of the harmless, oblivious, retreating pigeons.

“Hey, don’t forget that my son ruined your life, too,” Marjorie said, after a long silence.

I shrugged. “A little bit, sure. But I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s not as though I had anything more important to attend to.”

—

The years passed.

The city continued to change. Midtown Manhattan became wilted and moldy and sinister and vile. We never went near Times Square anymore. It was a latrine.

In 1963, Walter Winchell lost his newspaper column.

Death started to pick at my community.

In 1964, Uncle Billy died in Hollywood of a sudden heart attack while dining with a starlet at the Beverly Hills Hotel. We all had to admit that this was just exactly the death Billy Buell would’ve wanted. (“He floated away on a river of champagne” was Peg’s take.)

Only ten months later, my father died. His was not such a peaceful death, I’m afraid. Driving home from the country club one afternoon, he hit black ice and crashed into a tree. He lived for a few days, but succumbed to complications after emergency spine surgery.

My father died an angry man. He was no longer a captain of industry—hadn’t been one for years. He had lost his hematite mine after the war. He got into such a ferocious battle against union activists that he drove the company into the ground—spending nearly all his fortune on legal battles against his workers. His had become a scorched-earth policy of negotiation: If I cannot control this business, then nobody can. He died never having forgiven the American government for having taken his son in the war, or the unions for having taken his business, or the modern world itself for having chipped away over the decades at every last one of his cherished, narrow, old-fashioned beliefs.

We all drove up to Clinton for the funeral: me, Peg, Olive, Marjorie, and Nathan. My mother was silently appalled by the spectacle of my friend Marjorie in her strange clothes with her strange child. My mother had become a deeply unhappy woman over the years, and she responded to no gestures of kindness from anyone. She didn’t want us there.

We stayed only one night, and hustled back to the city just as fast as we could.

Home was New York City now, anyway. It had been for years.

—

More time passed.

After a certain age, Angela, time just drizzles down upon your head like rain in the month of March: you’re always surprised at how much of it can accumulate, and how fast.

One night in 1964, I was watching Jack Paar on television. I was only halfway paying attention, as I was working on disassembling an old Belgian wedding gown without destroying its ancient fibers in the process. Then the ads came on, and I heard a familiar female voice—gruff, tough, and sarcastic. The cigarette-roughened voice of a real old New York City broad. Before I could even register it in my mind, that voice set off a depth charge in my gut.

I looked up at the screen and caught a glimpse of a thickset, chestnut-haired woman with a great prow of a bosom, shouting in a funny Bronx accent about all her problems with floor wax. (“It’s not enough that I gotta deal with these crazy kids of mine, but now it’s sticky floors, too?!”) She could have been any middle-aged brunette, by the sight of her. But I would’ve known that voice anywhere: it was Celia Ray!

I had thought of Celia so many times over the years—with guilt, with curiosity, with anxiety. All I could ever imagine for her life were bad outcomes. In my darkest fantasies, the story was this: After being exiled from the Lily Playhouse, Celia had lived a life of doom and ruin. Perhaps she had died in the streets somewhere along the way, brutalized by the kind of man she had once so effortlessly controlled. Other times, I imagined her as an old prostitute. Sometimes I would pass by a drunken, middle-aged woman on the street who looked (there is no other word for it) trashy, and I would wonder if it was Celia. Had she dyed her hair so blond that it had turned brittle and orange? Was she that woman over there in the tottering heels, with the bare, veined legs? Was that her, with the bruised circles under the eyes? Was that her, picking through the garbage can? Was that her red lipstick on that collapsing mouth?

But I’d been wrong: Celia was fine. Better than fine—she was selling floor wax on TV! Oh, that stubborn, determined, little survivor. Still fighting her way into the spotlight.

I never saw the ad again, and I never tried to track Celia down. I didn’t want to interfere with her life, and I knew better than to assume that she and I would have anything in common anymore. We’d never really had anything in common in the first place. Scandal or no scandal, I believe that our friendship was always destined to have been momentary—a collision of two vain young girls who intersected at the zenith of their beauty and the nadir of their intelligence, and who had blatantly used each other to acquire status and turn men’s heads. That’s all it had ever been, really, and that was perfect. That’s all it had ever needed to be. I’d found deeper and richer female friendships later on in life, and I hoped that Celia had, too.

So, no, I never sought her out.

But it is impossible for me to convey the amount of delight and pride that it gave me to hear her voice blasting out of my television set that evening.

It made me want to cheer.

A quarter of a century later, folks, and Celia Ray was still in show business!

TWENTY-NINE

In the late summer of 1965, my Aunt Peg received a curious letter in the mail.

It was from the commissioner of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The letter explained that the Navy Yard would soon be closing down forever. The city was transforming, and the Navy had decided that it was no longer feasible to maintain a shipbuilding industry in such an expensive urban area. Before it closed, however, the Yard would host a ceremonial reunion—throwing open the gates once more, in celebration of all the Brooklyn workers who had labored there so heroically during World War II. Since it was the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war, this kind of celebration seemed particularly appropriate.

The commissioner’s office had gone through their files and found Peg’s name on some old paperwork, listing her as having been an “independent entertainment contractor.” They’d managed to track her down through city tax records and now they were wondering whether Mrs. Buell might consider producing a small commemorative show on the day of the Navy Yard reunion, to celebrate the accomplishments of the wartime laborers? They were looking for something of a nostalgia piece—just twenty minutes or so of old-time singing and dancing, in the style of the war days.

Now, Peg would have enjoyed nothing more than to take on this job. The only problem was, she was no longer in good health. That big, tall body of hers was starting to break down. She was suffering from emphysema—not surprising after her lifetime of chain-smoking—and she also had arthritis, and her eyes were starting to go. As she explained it: “The doctor says that there’s nothing much wrong with me, kiddo, but there’s nothing much right with me, either.”

She had retired from her job at the high school a few years earlier, due to her failing health, and she didn’t get around easily anymore. Marjorie and Nathan and I had dinner with Peg and Olive a few nights a week, but that was about all Peg could handle in terms of excitement. Most evenings, she would just stretch across the couch with her eyes closed, trying to catch her breath, while Olive read to her from the sports pages. So, no, unfortunately, it wasn’t going to be possible for Peg to produce a commemorative show at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

But I could do it.

—

It turned out to be easier than I thought—and far more fun.

I’d helped to create so many hundreds of skits back in the day, and I guess I never lost the knack for it. I hired some of the drama students from Olive’s high school as my actors and dancers. Susan (my friend with the passion for modern dance) said she would handle the choreography, though it didn’t need to be anything complex. I borrowed the organist from the church down the street, and worked with him on writing some elementary, corny songs. And of course, I created the costumes, which were simple enough: just a bunch of dungarees and overalls for both the boys and the girls. I threw some red kerchiefs around the girls’ heads and the same red kerchiefs around the boys’ necks, and voilà—now they were industrial workers from the 1940s.

On September 18, 1965, we hauled all of our theatrical gear over to the ratty old Navy Yard and got ready for our show. It was a bright and windy morning on the waterfront, and gusts kept rising off the bay and knocking people’s hats off. But a fairly decent-sized crowd had shown up, and there was a carnival-type feeling to the festivities. There was a Navy band playing old songs and a women’s auxiliary group serving cookies and refreshments. A few high-ranking Navy officials spoke about how we had won that war, and how we would win all the wars to come until the end of days. The first woman ever licensed to work as a welder at the Yard during World War II gave a short, nervous speech in a voice much meeker than you might expect from a lady of such accomplishment. And a ten-year-old girl with chapped knees sang the National Anthem, wearing a dress that was not going to fit her next summer, and was not keeping her warm right now.

Then it was time for our little show.

—

I had been asked by the commissioner of the Navy Yard to introduce myself and to explain our skit. I’m not crazy about public speaking, but I managed to pull through it without bringing down ruin upon my head. I told the audience who I was, and what my role had been at the Yard during the war. I made a joke about the poor quality of food at the Sammy cafeteria, which earned a few scattered laughs from those who remembered. I thanked the veterans in the audience for their service, and the families of Brooklyn for their sacrifice. I said that my own brother had been a naval officer who lost his life in the final days of the war. (I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get through that section of my remarks without losing my composure, but I managed it.) Then I explained that we were going to be re-creating a typical propaganda skit, which I hoped would boost the morale of the current audience just as much as it used to cheer on the workers during their lunch breaks.

The show I had written was about a typical day on the line at the Navy Yard, building battleships in Brooklyn. The high school kids in their overalls played the workers who sang and danced with joy as they did their part to make the world safe for democracy. Pandering to my constituency, I’d peppered the script with slangy dialogue that I hoped the old Navy Yard workers would remember.

“Coming through with the general’s car!” shouted one of my young actresses, pushing a wheelbarrow.

“No carping!” shouted another girl to a character who was complaining about the long hours and the dirty conditions.

I named the factory manager Mr. Goldbricker, which I knew all the old laborers would appreciate (“goldbricker” being the favorite old Yard term for “one who slacks off at work”).

Look, it wasn’t exactly Tennessee Williams, but the audience seemed to like it. What’s more, the high school drama club was having fun performing it. For me, though, the best part was seeing little Nathan—my ten-year-old sweetheart, my dear boy—sitting in the front row with his mother, watching the production with such wonder and amazement, you would’ve thought he was at the circus.

Our big finale was a number called “No Time for Coffee!” about how important it was at the Navy Yard to keep on schedule at all costs. The song contained the ever-so-catchy line: “Even if we had coffee, we wouldn’t have had the milk! / War rations made coffee just as valuable as silk!” (I don’t like to boast, but I did write that snazzy bit of brilliance all by myself—so move over, Cole Porter.)

Then we killed Hitler, and the show was over, and everyone was happy.

—

As we were packing up our cast and our props into the school bus we had borrowed for the day, a uniformed patrolman approached me.

“May I have a word with you, ma’am?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry we’re parked here but it will just be a moment.”

“Could you step away from the vehicle, please?”

He looked terribly serious, and now I was concerned. What had we done wrong? Should we not have set up a stage? I’d assumed there were permits for all this.

I followed him over to his patrol car, where he leaned against the door and fixed me with a grave stare.

“I heard you speaking earlier,” he said. “Did I hear you correctly when you said your name is Vivian Morris?” His accent identified him as pure Brooklyn. He could have been born right on this very spot of dirt, by the sound of that voice.

“That’s right, sir.”

“You said your brother was killed in the war?”

“That’s correct.”

The patrolman took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair. His hands were trembling. I wondered if perhaps he was a veteran himself. He was the right age for it. Sometimes they were shaky like this. I studied him more closely. He was a tall man in his middle forties. Painfully thin. Olive skin and large, dark-brown eyes—further darkened by the circles beneath them and by the lines of worry above. Then I saw what looked like burn scars, running up the right side of his neck. Ropes of scars, twisted in red, pink, and yellowish flesh. Now I knew he was a veteran. I had a feeling I was about to hear a war story, and that it would be a tough one.

But then he shocked me.

“Your brother was Walter Morris, wasn’t he?” he asked.

Now I was the one who felt shaky. My knees almost went out of business. I had not mentioned Walter by name during my speech.

Before I could speak, the patrolman said, “I knew your brother, ma’am. I served with him on the Franklin.”

I put my hand over my mouth to stop the involuntary little sob that had risen in my throat.

“You knew Walter?” Despite my effort to control my voice, the words came out choked. “You were there?”

I didn’t elaborate upon my question, but clearly he knew what I meant. I was asking him: You were there on March 19, 1945? You were there when a kamikaze pilot crashed right through the flight deck of the USS Franklin, detonating the fuel storages, igniting the onboard aircraft, and turning the ship itself into a bomb? You were there when my brother and over eight hundred other men died? You were there, when my brother was buried at sea?

He nodded several times—a nervous, jerky bobbing of the head.

Yes. He was there.

I told my eyes not to glance again at the burn marks on this man’s neck.

My eyes glanced there anyhow, goddamn it.

I looked away. Now I didn’t know where to look.

Seeing me so uncomfortable, the man himself became only more nervous. His face looked almost panic-stricken. He seemed legitimately distraught. He was either terrified of upsetting me, or he was reliving his own nightmare. Maybe both. Witnessing this, I gathered my senses about me, took a deep breath, and set myself to the task of trying to put this poor man at ease. What was my pain, after all, compared to what he had lived through?

“Thank you for telling me,” I said, in a slightly more steady voice. “I’m sorry for my reaction. It’s just a shock to hear my brother’s name after all these years. But it’s an honor to meet you.”

I put my hand on his arm, to give him a little squeeze of gratitude. He cringed as though I had attacked him. I pulled back my hand, but slowly. He reminded me of the sort of horses my mother was always good with—the jumpy ones, the agitated ones. The timorous and troubled ones that nobody but she could handle. I instinctively took the tiniest step back, and dropped my arms to my sides. I wanted to show him that I was no threat.

I tried a different tack.

“What’s your name, sailor?” I asked in a more gentle voice—almost a teasing voice.

“I’m Frank Grecco.”

He didn’t reach out for a handshake, so I didn’t, either.

“How well did you know my brother, Frank?”

He nodded once more. Again, with that nervous bobbing. “We were officers together on the flight deck. Walter was my division commander. We’d been ninety-day wonders together, too. Went in different directions at first, but ended up on the same ship at the end of the war. By then, he outranked me.”

“Oh. All right.”

I wasn’t sure what any of those words meant, but I didn’t want him to stop talking. There was somebody standing right in front of me who had known my brother. I wanted to find out everything about this man.

“Did you grow up around here, Frank?” I asked, already knowing the answer from his accent. But I was trying to make things as easy for him as I could. I would give him the simple questions first.

Again, the twitchy nod. “South Brooklyn.”

“And were you and my brother good friends?”

He winced.

“Miss Morris, I need to tell you something.” The patrolman took off his hat once more and jammed his trembling fingers through his hair. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

“Why would I recognize you?”

“Because I already know you, and you already know me. Please don’t walk away, ma’am.”

“Why on earth would I walk away?”

“Because I met you back in 1941,” he said. “I was the guy who drove you home to your parents’ house.”

—

The past came roaring up at me like a dragon woken from a deep slumber. I felt dizzy with the heat and the force of it. In a vertiginous series of flashes, I saw Edna’s face, Arthur’s face, Celia’s face, Winchell’s face. I saw my own young face in the back of that beat-up Ford—shamed and shattered.

This was the driver.

This was the guy who had called me a dirty little whore, right in front of my brother.

“Ma’am,” he said—and now he was the one grabbing my arm. “Please don’t walk away.”

“Stop saying that.” My voice came out ragged. Why did he keep saying that, when I wasn’t going anywhere? I just wanted him to stop saying that.

But he did it again: “Please don’t walk away, ma’am. I need to talk to you.”

I shook my head. “I can’t—”

“You need to understand—I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Could you let go of my arm, please?”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, but he dropped my arm.

What did I feel?

Repulsion. Pure repulsion.

I couldn’t tell, though, if it was repulsion for him or for me. Whatever it was, it was growing out of a trove of shame that I thought I’d buried long ago.

I hated this guy. That’s what I felt: hate.

“I was a stupid kid,” he said. “I didn’t know how to act.”

“I really must go now.”

“Please don’t walk away, Vivian.”

His voice was rising, which disturbed me. But hearing him call me by my name was even worse. I hated it, that he knew my name. I hated that he’d watched me onstage today, and knew who I was the whole time—that he knew this much about me. I hated that he’d seen me get choked up about my brother. I hated that he probably knew my brother better than I did. I hated that Walter had attacked me in front of him. I hated that this man had once called me a dirty little whore. Who did he think he was, approaching me now, after all these years? This sense of rage and disgust compounded, and it strengthened something in my spine: I needed to leave right now.

“I have a bus full of kids waiting for me,” I said.

I started walking away.

“I need to talk to you, Vivian!” he cried out after me. “Please.”

But I got on the bus and left him standing there by his patrol car—hat in hand, like a man begging for alms.

And that, Angela, is how I officially met your father.

—

Somehow, I managed to do all the things I needed to get done that day.

I dropped the kids back at the high school and helped unload the props. We returned the bus to its parking space. Marjorie and I walked home with Nathan, who could not stop chattering on about how much he had loved the show, and how when he grew up he wanted to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Of course, Marjorie could tell I was upset. She kept casting glances at me, over Nathan’s head. But I just nodded at her, to indicate that I was fine. Which I decidedly was not.

Then—just as soon as I was free—I ran straight to Aunt Peg’s house.

—

I had never before told anybody about that car ride home to Clinton back in 1941.

Nobody knew how my brother had savaged me up one side and down the other—eviscerating me with rebuke, and allowing his disgust to rain down upon me in buckets. I had certainly never told anyone about the double disgrace of having this attack occur in front of a witness—a stranger—who had then added his own coup de grâce to my punishment by calling me a dirty little whore. Nobody knew that Walter had not so much rescued me from New York City as dumped me like a bag of garbage on my parents’ doorstep—too sickened by my behavior to even look at my face for a moment longer than he had to.

But now I rushed over to Sutton Place, to bring the story to Peg.

I found my aunt stretched out on her couch, as she was wont to do those days—alternating between smoking and coughing. She was listening to radio coverage of the Yankees. As soon as I walked in, she told me that it was Mickey Mantle Day over at Yankee Stadium—that they were honoring his stellar fifteen-year career in baseball. In fact, when I burst into the apartment and started talking, Peg put up her hand: Joe DiMaggio was speaking, and she didn’t want him interrupted.

“Have some respect, Vivvie,” she said, all business.

So I shut my mouth and let her have her moment. I knew she would have liked to be there at the stadium in person, but she wasn’t strong enough anymore for such a strenuous excursion. But Peg’s face was awash with rapture and emotion as she listened to DiMaggio honoring Mantle. By the end of his speech, she had fat tears running down her cheeks. (Peg could handle anything—war, catastrophe, failure, death of a relative, a cheating husband, the demolition of her beloved theater—without shedding a tear, but great moments in sports history always made her weepy.)

I’ve often wondered if our conversation would have gone differently, had she not been so saturated with emotion for the Yankees that day. There’s no way of telling. I did sense that it was frustrating for her to turn off the radio once DiMaggio was done talking and give her full attention to me—but she was a generous person, so she did it anyhow. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Coughed some more. Lit another cigarette. Then she listened to me with full absorption, as I began to tell her my tale of woe.

Midway through my saga, Olive came in. She had been out shopping at the market. I stopped talking in order to help her put away groceries, and then Peg said, “Vivvie, start from the beginning again. Tell Olive everything you’ve been telling me.”

This wouldn’t have been my preference. I had learned to love Olive Thompson over the years, but she would not be the first candidate I would run to if I needed a shoulder to cry on. Olive wasn’t exactly a soft bosom of overflowing sympathy. Still, she was there, and she and Peg—as they had gotten older—had increasingly become my parental figures.

Seeing my hesitation, Peg said, “Just tell her about it, Vivvie. Trust me—Olive is better at this kind of stuff than any of us.”

So I backed up, and started my saga all over again. The car ride in 1941, Walter’s disgracing of me, the driver calling me a dirty little whore, my dark time of shame and banishment in upstate New York, and now the return of the driver—a patrolman with burn scars who had been on the Franklin. Who knew my brother. Who knew everything.

The women listened to me attentively. And when I got to the end they stayed attentive—as though they were waiting for more of the story.

“And then what happened?” asked Peg when she realized I wasn’t talking anymore.

“Nothing. After that, I left.”

“You left?”

“I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to see him.”

“Vivian, he knew your brother. He was on the Franklin. From your description, it sounds as though he was gravely wounded in that attack. And you didn’t want to talk to him?”

“He hurt me,” I said.

“He hurt you? He hurt your feelings twenty-five years ago, and you just walked away from him? This person who knew your brother? This veteran?”

I said, “That car ride was the worst thing that ever happened to me, Peg.”

“Oh, was it?” snapped Peg. “Did you think to ask the man about the worst thing that ever happened to him?”

She was becoming agitated, in a manner that was not at all in character. This was not what I had come for. I wanted comfort, but I was being scolded. I was starting to feel foolish and embarrassed.

“Never mind,” I said. “It’s nothing. I shouldn’t have bothered you today.”

“Don’t be stupid—it’s not nothing.”

She had never spoken to me this sharply.

“I should never have brought it up,” I said. “I interrupted your game—you’re just irritated with me about that. I’m sorry I burst in here.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the goddamn baseball game, Vivian.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just upset and I wanted to talk to someone.”

“You’re upset? You walked away from that wounded veteran and then came here to me, because you wanted to talk about your difficult life?”

“Jesus, Peg—don’t come down on me like this. Just forget it. Forget I said anything.”

“How can I?”

Then she started coughing—one of her awful, jagged, coughing fits. Her lungs sounded barbed and brittle. She sat up, and Olive pounded on her back for a bit. Then Olive lit another cigarette for Peg, who took the deepest drags she could, interspersed with more fits of coughing.

Peg composed herself. Dummy that I was, I was hoping she was about to apologize for having been so mean to me. Instead she said, “Look, kiddo, I give up here. I don’t understand what you want out of this situation. I don’t understand you at all right now. I’m just very disappointed in you.”

She had never said that. Not even all those years ago, when I had betrayed her friend and nearly capsized her hit show.

Then she turned to Olive, and said, “I don’t know. What do you think, boss?”

Olive sat quietly with her hands folded over her lap, looking down at the floor. I listened to Peg’s labored breathing, and to the sound of a window shade on the other side of the room, tapping in the breeze. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what Olive thought. But there we were.

Finally Olive looked up at me. Her expression was stern, as always. But as she chose her words, I could sense that she was choosing them carefully, so as to not do unnecessary harm.

“The field of honor is a painful field, Vivian,” she said.

I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t.

Peg started laughing—and again coughing. “Well, thank you for your contribution, Olive. That settles everything.”

We sat there quietly for a long time. I got up and helped myself to one of Peg’s cigarettes, even though I’d quit a few weeks earlier. Or had sort of quit.

“The field of honor is a painful field,” Olive went on at last, as though Peg had not spoken. “That’s what my father taught me when I was young. He taught me that the field of honor is not a place where children can play. Children don’t have any honor, you see, and they aren’t expected to, because it’s too difficult for them. It’s too painful. But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged. If you make mistakes, you must account for them. There will be instances when you must cast aside your impulses and take a higher stance than another person—a person without honor—might take. Such instances may hurt, but that’s why honor is a painful field. Do you understand?”

I nodded. The words, I understood. What this had to do with Walter and Frank Grecco and me, I had no clue. But I was listening. I had a feeling her words would make more sense to me later, once I had time to give them more consideration. But as I say—I was listening. This was the longest speech I’d ever heard Olive make, so I knew this was an important moment. Actually, I don’t think I’d ever listened more carefully to anyone.

“Of course, nobody is required to stand in the field of honor,” Olive continued. “If you find it too challenging, you may always exit, and then you can remain a child. But if you wish to be a person of character, I’m afraid this is the only way. But it may be painful.”

Olive turned her hands over on her lap, exposing her palms.

“All this, my father taught me when I was young. It constitutes everything I know. I try to apply it to my life. I’m not always successful, but I try. If any of this is helpful to you, Vivian, you are welcome to put it to use.”

—

It took me over a week to contact him.

The difficulty wasn’t in finding him—that part had been easy. Peg’s doorman’s older brother was a police captain, and it took him no time at all to confirm that, yes, there was a Francis Grecco stationed as a patrolman in the 76th Precinct in Brooklyn. They gave me the phone number for the precinct desk, and that was that.

Picking up the phone was the hard part.

It always is.

I will admit that the first few times I called, I hung up just as soon as somebody answered. The next day, I talked myself out of calling back. The next few days, too. When I found my courage to try again, and to actually stay on the line, I was told that Patrolman Grecco was not there. He was out on the job. Did I want to leave a message? No.

I tried a couple more times over the next few days and always got the same message: he was out on patrol. Patrolman Grecco clearly did not have a desk job. Finally I agreed to leave a message. I gave my name, and left the number for L’Atelier. (Let his fellow officers wonder why a nervous broad from a bridal shop was calling him so insistently.)

Not one hour later, the phone rang and it was him.

We exchanged awkward greetings. I told him that I would like to meet him in person, if he would be amenable to that idea? He said he would. I asked if it would be easier for me to go out to Brooklyn, or for him to come to Manhattan. He said Manhattan would be fine; he had a car and he liked to drive. I asked when he was free. He said he would be free later that very afternoon. I suggested that he meet me at Pete’s Tavern at five o’clock. He hesitated, then said, “I’m sorry, Vivian, but I’m not good at restaurants.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I didn’t want to put him on the spot.

I said, “How about we meet in Stuyvesant Square, then? On the west side of the park. Would that be better?”

He allowed that this would be better.

“By the fountain,” I said, and he agreed—yes, by the fountain.

—

I didn’t know how to go about any of this. I really didn’t want to see him again, Angela. But I kept hearing what Olive had said to me: You can remain a child. . . .

Children run away from problems. Children hide.

I didn’t want to remain a child.

I couldn’t help but think back to the time when Olive had rescued me from Walter Winchell. I could see now that she’d saved me in 1941 precisely because she had known that I was still a child. She could tell that I was not yet somebody who was accountable for her own actions. When Olive had told Winchell that I was an innocent who’d been seduced, it had not been a ploy. She had really meant it. Olive had seen me for what I was—an immature and unformed girl, who could not yet be expected to stand in the painful field of honor. I had needed a wise and caring adult to save me, and Olive had been that champion. She had stood in the field of honor on my behalf.

But I had been young then. I wasn’t young anymore. I would have to do this myself. But what would an adult—a formed person, a person of honor—do in this circumstance?

Face the music, I suppose. Fight her own corner, as Winchell had said. Forgive somebody, perhaps.

But how?

Then I remembered what Peg had told me years earlier, about the British army engineers during the Great War, who used to say: “We can do it, whether it can be done or not.”

Eventually, all of us will be called upon to do the thing that cannot be done.

That is the painful field, Angela.

That is what caused me to reach for the phone.

—

Your father was already at the park when I arrived, Angela—and I was early, and had only three blocks to walk.

He was pacing before the fountain. I’m sure you remember the way he used to pace. He was dressed in civilian clothes: brown wool pants, a light blue nylon sports shirt, and a dark green Harrington jacket. The clothing hung loosely on his frame. He was awfully thin.

I approached him. “Hi, there.”

“Hello,” he said.

I wasn’t certain if I should shake his hand. He didn’t seem sure of protocol, either, so we did nothing but stand with our hands in our pockets. I’d never seen a man more uncomfortable.

I gestured to a bench and asked, “Would you care to sit down and talk with me for a moment?”

I felt stupid—as though I were offering him a chair in my own home, rather than a seat in a public park.

He said, “I’m not good at sitting down. If you don’t mind, can we walk?”

“I don’t mind at all.”

We started walking the perimeter of the park, under the lindens and the elms. He had a long stride, but that was fine—so do I.

“Frank,” I said, “I apologize for running off the other day.”

“No, I apologize to you.”

“No, I should have stayed and heard you out. That would’ve been the mature thing to do. But you have to understand—meeting you again after all these years gave me quite a start.”

“I knew you would walk away when you found out who I was. You should have.”

“Look, Frank—all that was long ago.”

“I was a stupid kid,” he said. He stopped and turned to face me. “Who the hell did I think I was, talking to you like that?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“I had no right. I was such a stupid goddamn kid.”

“If we’re going to get down to brass tacks about it,” I said, “I was just a stupid kid, too. I was surely the stupidest kid in New York City that week. You may recall the details of the situation in which I had found myself?”

I was attempting to introduce a little levity, but Frank was all business.

“All I was trying to do was impress your brother, Vivian—you gotta believe that. He’d never talked to me before that day—never took notice of me at all. And why would he talk to me—a popular guy like him? Then all of a sudden, there he is waking me up in the middle of the night. Frank, I need your car. I was the only guy at OCS with a car. He knew that. Everyone knew that. Guys were always wanting to borrow my car. Well, the thing is—it wasn’t my car, Vivian. It was my old man’s car. I was allowed to use it, but I couldn’t give it to anyone. Here I am, middle of the night, talking to Walter Morris for the first time—a guy I admire with all my heart—telling him that I can’t give him my old man’s car. I’m trying to explain all this from a dead sleep, and I don’t even know what it’s all about.”

As Frank spoke, his native accent thickened. It was as if, by going back in time, he was going back deeper into himself—even deeper into his Brooklyn-ness.

“It’s all right, Frank,” I said. “It’s over.”

“Vivian, you gotta let me say this. You gotta let me tell you how sorry I am. For years, I wanted to find you, tell you I was sorry. But I didn’t have the courage to look for you. Please, you gotta let me tell you how it happened. See, I told Walter, I can’t help you, buddy. Then he deals me the facts. Tells me his sister’s gone and got herself in trouble. He needs to get her out of the city, pronto. He says I gotta help him save his sister. What was I gonna do, Vivian? Say no? It was Walter Morris. You know how he was.”

I did. I knew how he was.

Nobody ever said no to my brother.

“So I tell him the only way I can lend him the car is if I drive. Thinking to myself, How am I gonna explain the mileage to my old man. Thinking to myself, Maybe me and Walter will be friends after this. Thinking, How are we gonna just walk away from OCS like this, in the middle of the night? But Walter sorted it all out. Got permission from the commander for both of us to leave for a day—for twenty-four hours only. No one but Walter who could’ve gotten that permission in the middle of the night, but he did it. I don’t know what he had to say, or promise, to get that leave, but he got it. Next thing I know, we’re in midtown, and I’m throwing your suitcases in my old man’s car, getting ready to drive six hours, to a town I’ve never heard of, for what reason I don’t even know. I don’t even know who you are, but you’re the prettiest-looking girl I ever saw in my life.”

There was nothing flirtatious in the way he said this. He was just relaying the facts, cop that he was.

“Now we’re in the car, I’m driving, and then Walter starts giving you the fifth degree. I never heard anyone go at someone as hard as that. What am I supposed to do while he’s reaming you out? Where am I supposed to go? I can’t be hearing all this. I’ve never been in a situation like this. I’m from South Brooklyn, Vivian, and it can be a tough neighborhood, but you gotta understand—I’m a bookish kid, I’m a shy kid. I don’t get involved in fights. I’m the kind of kid who keeps his head down. Something goes on, people start yelling, I leave the scene. But I can’t leave this scene, ’cause I’m driving. And he wasn’t yelling—even though I think it might’ve been better if he was yelling. He was just taking you apart, so cold. Do you remember that?”

Oh, I remembered.

“Add to it all, I don’t know anything about women. The things he was talking about, the things he said you were up to? I don’t know anything about all that. And your picture is in the papers, he says—a picture of you messing around with two people? One of them is a movie star of some kind? Another one is a showgirl? I never heard of anything like that. But he just keeps going at you and going at you—and you’re just there in the backseat, smoking cigarettes and taking it. I look in the rearview mirror, you aren’t even blinking. It’s like water off a duck’s back, everything he’s saying to you. I could see it was making Walter crazy, that you weren’t responding. That was just firing him up more. But I swear to God, I never saw anyone looking so coolheaded as you.”

“I wasn’t coolheaded, Frank,” I said. “I was in shock.”

“Well, whatever it was, you kept your cool. Like you didn’t even care. Meanwhile, I’m sweating bullets, wondering, is this how you people talk all the time? Is this what rich people are like?”

Rich people, I thought. How had Frank been able to tell that Walter and I were rich people? And then I realized: Oh, yes, of course. The same way we’d been able to tell that he was a poor person. Someone not even worth acknowledging.

Frank kept going: “And I’m thinking, they don’t even know I’m here. I’m nothing to these people. Walter Morris isn’t my friend. He’s just using me. And you—you hadn’t even looked at me. Back at the theater, you told me, ‘Take down those two suitcases.’ Like I was a porter, or something. Walter, he didn’t even introduce me. I mean, I know you were all under duress, but it’s like, in his eyes, I’m nobody, you know? I’m just a tool that he needs—just somebody to drive the machine. And I’m trying to figure out how to stop being so invisible, you know? So then I think, Hey, I’ll jump on the bandwagon. Join the conversation. Try to act like him—talk the way he’s talking, the way he’s going after you. So that’s when I said it. That’s when I called you what I called you. Then I see how it lands. I look in the rearview mirror and I see your face. I see what my words just did to you. It was like I killed you. Then I see his face—it’s like he just got hit by a baseball bat. I thought it was gonna be nothing, me saying that. I thought it was gonna make me seem cool, too—but, no, it was like mustard gas. Because no matter how bad it was, the way your brother was reaming you out, he hadn’t used a word like that. I see him try to figure out what to do about it. Then I see him decide to do nothing. That was the worst part.”

“That was the worst part,” I agreed.

“I gotta tell you, Vivian—hand on the Bible—I never used a word like that to anybody in my life. Never in my life. Not before, not since. I’m not that guy. Where did it come from, that day? Over the years, I’ve watched that scene a thousand times in my mind. I watch myself say it, and I think—Frank, what’s the matter with you? But those words, I swear to God, they just came flying out of my mouth. Then Walter clams up. Remember that?”

“I do.”

“He doesn’t defend you, doesn’t tell me to shut my hole. Now we gotta drive for hours in that silence. And I can’t tell anyone I’m sorry, ’cause I feel like I’m never supposed to open my mouth around the two of you again. Like I wasn’t hired to open my mouth around you in the first place—not that I was hired, but you know what I mean. Then we get to your family’s house—and I never saw a house like that in my life—and Walter doesn’t even introduce me to your parents. Like I don’t exist. Back in the car, all the way back to OCS, he doesn’t say a word to me. Doesn’t say a word to me the whole rest of training. Acts like it never happened. Looks at me like he never saw me before. Then we graduate, and thank God I never have to see him again. But still, I gotta think about this thing forever, and there’s nothing I can ever do to put it right. Then two years later, I end up transferred to the same ship as him. Of all the luck. Now he outranks me, no surprise there. He acts like he doesn’t know me. And I gotta sit with it. I gotta live with it all over again, every day.”

At that point, Frank seemed to run out of words.

There was somebody that he’d reminded me of, as he was spinning out his story and struggling to explain himself. Then I realized: it was myself. He reminded me of myself that night in Edna Parker Watson’s dressing room, when I had desperately tried to talk my way out of something that could never be put right. He was doing the same thing I had done. He was trying to talk his way into absolution.

In that moment, I felt overcome by a sense of mercy—not only for Frank, but also for that younger version of myself. I even felt mercy for Walter, with all his pride and condemnation. How humiliated Walter must have felt by me, and how dreadful it must have been for him to feel exposed like that in front of someone he considered a subordinate—and Walter considered everyone a subordinate. How angry he must have been, to have to clean up my mess in the middle of the night. Then my mercy swelled, and for just a moment I felt mercy for everyone who has ever gotten involved in an impossibly messy story. All those predicaments that we humans find ourselves in—predicaments that we never see coming, do not know how to handle, and then cannot fix.

“Have you really been thinking about this forever, Frank?” I asked.

“Always.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said—and I meant it.

“You’re not the one who needs to be sorry, Vivian.”

“In some ways I am. There’s a great deal that I’m very sorry about, surrounding that incident. Even more so now that I’ve heard all this.”

“Have you thought about it forever?” he asked.

“I thought about that car ride for a long time,” I admitted. “Your words especially. It was hard on me. I won’t pretend it wasn’t. But I put it away some years ago, and I haven’t thought about it in a long time. So don’t worry, Frank Grecco—you didn’t ruin my life, or anything. How about we just agree to strike this whole sad event from the books?”

Abruptly, he stopped walking. He spun and looked at me, wide-eyed. “I don’t know if that’s possible.”

“Of course it is,” I said. “Let’s chalk it up to people being young, and not knowing how to behave.”

I put my hand on his arm, wanting him to feel that it was all going to be all right now—that it was over.

Again, just as he had done on the first day we met, he yanked his arm away, almost violently.

This time, I must have been the one who flinched.

He still finds me repulsive was how I read it. Once a dirty little whore, always a dirty little whore.

Seeing my expression, Frank grimaced, and said, “Oh, Jesus, Vivian, I’m sorry. I gotta tell you. It’s not you. I just can’t . . .” He trailed off, looking around the park hopelessly, as though searching for someone who was going to rescue him from this moment, or explain him to me. Bravely, he tried again. “I don’t know how to say this. I hate like heck to talk about it. But I can’t be touched, Vivian. It’s a problem I have.”

“Oh.” I took a step back.

“It’s not you,” he said. “It’s everybody. I can’t be touched by anybody. It’s been that way ever since this.” He waved his hand in a general way over the right side of his body—where the burn scars came crawling up his neck.

“You were injured,” I said, like an idiot. Of course he was injured. “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand.”

“Yeah, that’s okay, why would you?”

“No, I’m very sorry, Frank.”

“You know what? You didn’t do it to me.”

“Nonetheless.”

“Other guys, they were injured that day, too. I woke up on a hospital ship with hundreds of guys—some of them burned even as bad as me. We were the ones they pulled out of the burning water. But a lot of those guys are fine now. I don’t understand it. They don’t have this thing I have.”

“This thing,” I said.

“This thing of not being able to be touched. Not being able to sit still. That thing I have about enclosed spaces. I can’t do it. I’m okay in a car as long as I’m the one in the driver’s seat, but anything else, if I have to sit still too long, I can’t do it. I have to stay on my feet, all the time.”

This was why he hadn’t wanted to meet me in a restaurant, or even sit with me on a park bench. He couldn’t be in an enclosed space, and he couldn’t sit still. And he couldn’t be touched. This was probably why he was so thin—from needing to pace all the time.

Dear God, this poor man.

I could see that he was getting agitated so I asked, “Would you like to walk around the park with me some more? It’s a nice evening, and I enjoy walking.”

“Please,” he said.

So that’s what we did, Angela.

We just walked and walked and walked.

THIRTY

Of course I fell in love with your father, Angela.

I fell in love with him, and it made no sense for me to fall in love with him. We could not possibly have been more different. But maybe that’s where love grows best—in the deep space that exists between polarities.

I was a woman who had always lived in privilege and comfort, and thus I had always been fortunate enough to skate quite lightly across life. During the most violent century of human history, I had never really suffered any harm—aside from the small troubles that I brought down upon my own head through my own carelessness. (Lucky is the soul whose only troubles are self-inflicted.) Yes, I had worked hard, but so do a lot of people—and my job was the relatively inconsequential task of sewing pretty dresses for pretty girls. And in addition to all that, I was a freethinking, unbridled sensualist who had made the pursuit of sexual pleasure one of the guiding forces in her life.

And then there was Frank.

He was such a weighty person—by which I mean, heavy in his very essence. He was a person whose life had been hard from the beginning. He was a man who did nothing casually, thoughtlessly, or carelessly. He was from a poor immigrant family; he couldn’t afford to make mistakes. He was a devout Catholic, a police officer, and a veteran who had been through hell in service to his country. There was nothing of the sensualist about him. He could not bear to be touched, yes—but it was not only that. He had no hedonic traces within him whatsoever. He dressed in clothing that was purely utilitarian. He ate food merely in order to fuel his body. He didn’t socialize; he didn’t go out for entertainment; he had never been to a play in his life. He didn’t drink. He didn’t dance. He didn’t smoke. He’d never been in a fight. He was frugal and responsible. He didn’t engage in irony, teasing, or tomfoolery. He only ever told the truth.

And, of course, he was faithfully married—with a beautiful daughter whom he’d named after God’s angels.

In a sane or reasonable world, how would a serious man like Frank Grecco ever have crossed paths with a lightweight individual like me? What had brought us together? Aside from our shared connection to my brother, Walter—a person who had made both of us feel intimidated and minimized—we had no other commonalities. And our only shared history was a sad one. We had spent one dreadful day together, back in 1941—a day that had left the both of us shamed and scarred.

Why would that day have led us to falling in love, twenty years later?

I don’t know.

I only know that we don’t live in a sane or reasonable world, Angela.

—

So here is what happened.

Patrolman Frank Grecco called me a few days after our first meeting and asked if we could go for another walk.

The call came in to L’Atelier rather late at night—well after nine o’clock. It had startled me to hear the boutique’s phone ringing. I happened to be there, because I had just finished up some alterations. I was feeling stagnant and bleary-eyed. My plan had been to go upstairs and watch television with Marjorie and Nathan, and then call it a night. I had almost ignored the ringing phone. But then I picked it up, and there was Frank on the line, asking me if I would go walking with him.

“Right now?” I asked. “You want to go for a walk now?”

“If you would. I’m feeling restless tonight. I’ll be out walking, anyway, and I hoped maybe you would join me.”

Something about this intrigued me, and touched me, too. I’d gotten plenty of calls from men at this hour of the night—but not because they wanted to go for a walk.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I’ll take the streets, not the expressway.”

We ended up walking all the way over to the East River that night—through some neighborhoods that were not so safe back then, by the way—and then we kept on walking along the deteriorating waterfront until we got to the Brooklyn Bridge. Once we got to the bridge, we walked right over it. It was cold out, but there was no breeze, and our exercise kept us warm. There was a new moon, and you could almost see some stars.

That was the night when we told each other everything about ourselves.

—

That was the night I found out that Frank had become a patrolman expressly because of his inability to sit still. Walking a beat for eight hours a day was exactly what he needed, he said, in order not to crawl out of his own skin. This is also why he took so many extra shifts—always volunteering to fill in for the other cops who needed a day off. If he was lucky enough to get a double shift, he might be able to walk a beat for sixteen straight hours. Only then might he be sufficiently tired to sleep through the night. Every time he was offered a promotion on the force, he turned it down. A promotion would have meant a desk job, and he couldn’t manage that.

He told me, “Being a patrolman is the only job beyond street sweeper that I’m qualified to do.”

But it was a job that was far below his mental capacities. Your father was a brilliant man, Angela. I don’t know if you are aware of this, because he was so modest. But he was something close to a genius. He’d been born to illiterate parents, sure, and he’d been neglected in a tumble of siblings, but he was a mathematical prodigy. As a child, he may have looked like a thousand other kids in Sacred Heart parish—all children of dockworkers and bricklayers, born to be dockworkers and bricklayers, themselves—but Frank was different. Frank was exceptionally smart.

From an early age, he’d been singled out by the nuns as something special. His own mother and father believed that school was a waste of time—why study, when you could work?—and when they did send him to school, they were superstitious enough to tie a knot of garlic around his neck, to keep away the evil spirits. But Frank bloomed in school. And the Irish nuns who taught him—distracted and tough though they were, and often viciously discriminatory against Italian children—could not help but notice the brains on this kid. They skipped him a few grades ahead, gave him extra assignments, and marveled at his skill with numbers. He excelled at every level.

He got placed in Brooklyn Technical High School, easily. He finished at the top of his class. Then he put in two years at Cooper Union studying aeronautical engineering before he enrolled in Officer Candidate School and joined the Navy. Why did he even join the Navy? He was fascinated by airplanes and was studying them; you would’ve thought he’d have wanted to be a flier. But he went into the Navy, because he wanted to see the ocean.

Imagine that, Angela. Imagine being a kid from Brooklyn—a place that is almost entirely surrounded by ocean—and growing up with the dream of someday seeing the ocean. But the thing was, he never had seen it. Not properly, anyhow. All he’d seen of Brooklyn were dirty streets and tenements, and the filthy docks of Red Hook, where his father worked in a longshoreman’s gang. But Frank had romantic dreams of ships and naval heroes. So he quit college and signed up for the Navy, just like my brother had done, before the war had even been declared.

“What a waste,” he told me that night. “If I’d wanted to see the ocean, I could have just walked to Coney Island. I had no idea it was so close.”

His intention had always been to return to school after the war, finish that degree, and get a good job. But then came the attack on his ship, and he had very nearly been burned alive. And the physical pain was the least of it, to hear him tell it. While recovering in Pearl Harbor at the Navy hospital with third-degree burns over half his body, he had been served with a court-martial order. Captain Gehres, the captain of the USS Franklin, had court-martialed every single man who’d ended up in the water on the day of the attack. The captain claimed that those men had deserted, against direct orders. Those men—many of whom, like Frank, had been blown off the ship in flames—were accused of being cowards.

This was the worst of it for Frank. The branding of “coward” burned him more deeply than the branding of fire. And even though the Navy eventually dropped the case, recognizing it for what it was (an attempt by an incompetent captain to shift attention from his many errors that fateful day, by blaming innocent men), the psychological damage had been done. Frank knew that many of the men who had stayed aboard the ship during the attack still considered the men in the water to have been deserters. The other survivors were given medals of valor. The dead were called heroes. But not the guys in the water—not the guys who had gone overboard in flames. They were the cowards. The shame had never left him.

He came home to Brooklyn after the war. But because of his injuries and his trauma (they called it a “neuro-psychopathic condition” back then, and had no treatment for it), he was never the same. There was no way he could go back to college now. He couldn’t sit in a classroom anymore. He tried to finish his degree, but he constantly had to leave the building, run outside, and hyperventilate. (“I can’t be in rooms with people,” as he put it.) And even if he had been able to complete his degree, what kind of job could he have gotten? The man couldn’t sit in an office. He couldn’t sit through a meeting. He could barely sit through a telephone call without feeling like his chest was going to implode from agitation and dread.

How could I—in my easy, comfortable life—understand pain like that?

I couldn’t.

But I could listen.

—

I’m telling you all this now, Angela, because I promised myself I would tell you everything. But I’m also telling you all this because I’m fairly certain that Frank never told you any of it.

Your father was proud of you and he loved you. But he did not want you to know the details of his life. He was ashamed that he had never made good on his early academic promise. He was embarrassed to be working in a job that was so far below his intellectual capacities. He was sick in the heart about the fact that he had never finished his education. And he felt constantly humiliated by his psychological condition. He was disgusted with himself that he couldn’t sit still, or sleep through the night, or be touched, or have a proper career.

He kept all this from you as much as possible because he wanted you to be able to establish your own life—free from his bleak history. He saw you as a fresh and unsullied creation. He thought it was best if he stayed somewhat distant from you so that you would not be infected by his shadows. That’s what he told me, in any case, and I don’t have any reason not to believe it. He didn’t want you to know him very well, Angela, because he didn’t want his life to hurt your life.

I’ve often wondered what it felt like for you, to have a father who cared so much about you, but who deliberately removed himself from your day-to-day existence. When I asked him if perhaps you longed for more attention from him, he said that you probably did. But he didn’t want to come close enough to damage you. He thought of himself as a person who damaged things.

That’s what he told me, anyway.

He thought it was better just to leave you in the care of your mother.

—

I haven’t mentioned your mother yet, Angela.

I want you to know that this hasn’t been out of disrespect, but quite the opposite. I’m not sure how to talk about your mother or about your parents’ marriage. I will tread carefully here so as to not offend or hurt you. But I will also try to be thorough in my report. At the least, you deserve to know everything I know.

I must start off by saying that I never met your mother—I never even saw a photo of her—and so I know nothing about her, beyond what Frank told me. I tend to believe that his descriptions of her were truthful, only because he was so truthful. But just because he described your mother truthfully doesn’t necessarily mean he described her accurately. I can only assume that she was like all of us—a complicated being, composed of more than one man’s impressions.

You may have known a completely different woman than the person whom your father described to me, is what I’m saying. I’m sorry if my story, then, clashes with what you perceived.

But I will convey it to you, nonetheless.

—

I learned from Frank that his wife’s name was Rosella, that she was from the neighborhood, and that her parents (also Sicilian immigrants) owned the grocery store down the street from where Frank grew up. As such, Rosella’s family was of higher social stature than Frank’s family, who were mere manual laborers.

I know that Frank started working for Rosella’s parents when he was in eighth grade, as a delivery boy. He always liked your grandparents, and admired them. They were more gentle and refined people than his own family. And that’s where he met your mother—at the grocery store. She was three years younger. A hard worker. A serious girl. They got married when he was twenty and she was seventeen.

When I asked if he and Rosella had been in love at the time of their marriage, he said, “Everyone in my neighborhood was born on the same block, raised on the same block, and married someone from the same block. It’s just what you did. She was a good person, and I liked her family.”

“But did you love her?” I repeated.

“She was the right sort of person to marry. I trusted her. She knew I would be a good provider. We didn’t go in for luxuries like love.”

They were married right after Pearl Harbor, like so many other couples, and for the same reasons as everyone else.

And of course you, Angela, were born in 1942.

I know that Frank was unable to get much leave during the last few years of the war, so he didn’t see you and Rosella for quite a long time. (It wasn’t easy for the Navy to ship people home from the South Pacific all the way to Brooklyn; a lot of those guys didn’t see their families for years.) Frank spent three Christmases in a row on an aircraft carrier. He wrote letters home but Rosella rarely replied. She had not finished school, and was self-conscious about her handwriting and her spelling. Because Frank’s family was also barely literate, he was one of the sailors on the aircraft carrier who never got mail.

“Was that painful for you?” I asked him. “Never to hear news from home?”

“I didn’t hold it against anyone,” he said. “My people weren’t the kind to write letters. But even though Rosella never wrote to me, I knew she was faithful, and that she was taking good care of Angela. She was never the type to go around with other boys. That was more than a lot of men on the ship could say about their wives.”

Then there was the kamikaze attack, and Frank was burned over 60 percent of his body. (For all his talk of how other guys on his ship had been just as badly injured as him, the truth is that nobody else with burns as severe as Frank’s had ended up surviving. People didn’t survive burns over 60 percent of their bodies back then, Angela—but your father did.) Then there were the long months of torturous recovery at the naval hospital. When Frank finally came home, it was 1946. He was a changed man. A broken man. You were now four years old, and you didn’t know him except from a photo. He told me that when he met you again after all those years, you were so pretty and bright and kind that he could not believe you belonged to him. He could not believe that anything associated with him could be as pure as you. But you were also a little bit afraid of him. Not nearly so afraid, though, as he was of you.

His wife also felt like a stranger. Over those missing years, Rosella had transformed from a pretty young girl to a matron—heavyset and serious, dressed always in black. She was the sort of woman who went to Mass every morning, and prayed to her saints all day long. She wanted to have more children. But of course that was now impossible, because Frank could not bear to be touched.

That night as we walked all the way to Brooklyn, Frank told me, “After the war, I started sleeping in a cot out in the shed behind our house. Made a room for myself there, with a coal stove. I’ve been sleeping there for years. It’s better that way. I don’t keep anyone awake with my strange hours. Sometimes I wake up screaming, that sort of thing. My wife and kid, they didn’t need to be hearing that. For me, with sleeping, the whole procedure is a disaster. Better that I do it alone.”

He respected your mother, Angela. I want you to know that.

He never once said a bad word about her. On the contrary—he approved entirely of the way she raised you, and he admired her stoicism in the face of her life’s many disappointments. They never bickered. They were never at each other’s throats. But after the war, they barely ever spoke other than to make arrangements about the family. He deferred to her on all matters, and turned over his paychecks to her without question. She had taken over management of her parents’ greengrocer business, and had inherited the building that housed the shop. She was a good businesswoman, he said. He was happy that you, Angela, had grown up in the store, chatting with everyone. (“The light of the neighborhood,” he called you.) He was always eyeing you for signs that you, too, might someday be an oddball recluse (which is how he saw himself), but you seemed normal and social. Anyway, Frank trusted your mother’s choices around you completely. But he was always at work on patrol, or walking the city at night. Rosella was always working at the greengrocer, or taking care of you. They were married in name only.

At one point, he told me, he had offered her a divorce, so she might have the chance to find a more suitable man. With his inability to uphold his duties of marital consortium and companionship, he felt certain they could secure an annulment. She was still young. With another man, she might still have the big family she had always wanted. But even if the Catholic Church had allowed her to divorce, Rosella would never have gone ahead with it.

“She’s more church than the Church itself,” he said. “She’s not the kind of person who would ever break a vow. And nobody in our neighborhood gets divorced, Vivian, even if things are bad. And with me and Rosella—things were never bad. We just lived separate lives. What you gotta understand about South Brooklyn, is that the neighborhood itself is a family. You can’t break up that family. Really, my wife is married to the neighborhood. It was the neighborhood who took care of her while I was in the service. The neighborhood still takes care of her now—and Angela, too.”

“But do you like the neighborhood?” I asked.

He gave a rueful smile. “It’s not a choice, Vivian. The neighborhood is what I am. I’ll always be part of it. But I’m also not part of it anymore, since the war. You come back, everyone expects you to be the same guy you were before you got blown up. I used to have enthusiasms like everyone else—baseball, movies, what have you. The Church feasts on Fourth Street, the big holidays. But I don’t have enthusiasms anymore. I don’t fit there anymore. It’s not the neighborhood’s fault. They’re good people. They wanted to take care of us guys who came back from the war. Guys like me, if you had a Purple Heart, everyone wants to buy you a beer, give you a salute, give you free tickets to a show. But I can’t do anything with all that. After a while, people learned to leave me alone. Now it’s like I’m a ghost, when I walk down those streets. Still, though, I belong to that place. It’s hard to explain, if you’re not from there.”

I asked him, “Do you ever think about moving away from Brooklyn?”

He said, “Only every day for the last twenty years. But that wouldn’t be fair to Rosella and Angela. Anyhow, I’m not sure I’d be better off anywhere else.”

—

As we walked back over the Brooklyn Bridge that night, he said to me, “What about you, Vivian? You never got married?”

“Almost. But I was saved by the war.”

“What does that mean?”

“Pearl Harbor came, my guy enlisted, we broke off the engagement.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be. He wasn’t right for me, and I would have been a disaster for him. He was a fine person, and he deserved better.”

“And you never found another man?”

I was quiet for a while, trying to think how to answer that. Finally, I decided to just answer it with the truth.

“I’ve found many other men, Frank. More than you could count.”

“Oh,” he said.

He was quiet after that, and I wasn’t sure how that information had landed on him. This was a moment where another sort of woman might have chosen to be discreet. But something stubborn in me insisted that I be even more clear.

“I’ve slept with a lot of men, Frank, is what I’m saying.”

“No, I get it,” he said.

“And I will be sleeping with a lot more men in the future, I expect. Sleeping with men—lots of men—that’s more or less my way of life.”

“Okay,” he said. “I understand.”

He didn’t seem agitated by it. Just thoughtful. But I felt nervous, sharing this truth about myself. And for some reason, I couldn’t stop talking about it.

“I just wanted to tell you this about me,” I said, “because you should know what kind of woman I am. If we’re going to be friends, I don’t want to run into any judgment from you. If this aspect of my life is going to be a problem . . .”

He stopped suddenly in his tracks. “Why would I judge you?”

“Think about where I’m coming from here, Frank. Think about how we first met.”

“Yeah, I see,” he said. “I get it. But you don’t need to worry about that.”

“Good.”

“I’m not that guy, Vivian. I never was.”

“Thank you. I just wanted to be honest.”

“Thank you for the tribute of your honesty,” he said—which I thought then, and still think, was one of the most elegant things I’d ever heard anyone say.

“I’m too old to hide who I am, Frank. And I’m too old to be made to feel ashamed of myself by anyone—do you understand that?”

“I do.”

“But what do you think of it, though?” I asked. I couldn’t believe I was pushing this issue. But I couldn’t help but ask. His poise—his lack of shocked response on the matter—was puzzling.

“What do I think about you sleeping with a lot of men?”

“Yeah.”

He thought for a moment, then said, “There’s something that I know about the world now, Vivian, that I didn’t know when I was young.”

“And what’s that?”

“The world ain’t straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there’s a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn’t care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain’t straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, they don’t mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.”

“I don’t think I ever believed that the world was straight,” I said.

“Well, I did. And I was wrong.”

We walked on. Below us, the East River—dark and cold—progressed steadily toward the sea, carrying away the pollution of the whole city with its currents.

“Can I ask you something, Vivian?” he said after a while.

“Certainly.”

“Does it make you happy?”

“Being with all those men, you mean?”

“Yes.”

I gave this question real consideration. He hadn’t asked it in an accusing way. I think he genuinely wished to comprehend me. And I’m not sure I’d ever pondered it before. I didn’t want to take the question lightly.

“It makes me satisfied, Frank,” I finally replied. “It’s like this: I believe I have a certain darkness within me, that nobody can see. It’s always in there, far out of reach. And being with all those different men—it satisfies that darkness.”

“Okay,” Frank said. “I think I can maybe understand that.”

I had never before spoken this vulnerably about myself. I had never before tried to put words to my experience. But still, I felt that my words fell short. How could I explain that by “darkness” I didn’t mean “sin” or “evil”—I only meant that there was a place within my imagination so fathomlessly deep that the light of the real world could never touch it. Nothing but sex had ever been able to reach it. This place within me was prehuman, almost. Certainly, it was precivilization. It was a place beyond language. Friendship could not reach it. My creative endeavors could not reach it. Awe and joy could not reach it. This hidden part of me could only be reached through sexual intercourse. And when a man went to that darkest, secret place within me, I felt as though I had landed in the very beginning of myself.

Curiously, it was in that place of dark abandon where I felt the least sullied and most true.

“But as for happy?” I went on. “You asked if it makes me happy. I don’t think so. Other things in my life make me happy. My work makes me happy. My friendships and the family that I’ve created, they make me happy. New York City makes me happy. Walking over this bridge with you right now makes me happy. But being with all those men, that makes me satisfied, Frank. And I’ve come to learn that this kind of satisfaction is something I need, or else I will become unhappy. I’m not saying that it’s right. I’m just saying—that’s how it is with me, and it’s not something that’s ever going to change. I’m at peace with it. The world ain’t straight, as you say.”

Frank nodded, listening. Wanting to understand. Able to understand.

After another long silence, Frank said, “Well, I think you’re fortunate, then.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Because not many people know how to be satisfied.”

THIRTY-ONE

I have never loved the people I was supposed to love, Angela.

Nothing that was ever arranged for me worked out the way it was planned. My parents had pointed me in a specific direction—toward a respectable boarding school and an elite college—such that I could meet the community I was meant to belong to. But apparently, I didn’t belong there, because to this day, I don’t have a single friend from those worlds. Nor did I meet a husband for myself at one of my many school proms.

Nor did I ever really feel like I belonged to my parents, or that I was meant to reside in the small town where I grew up. I still don’t keep in touch with anybody from Clinton. My mother and I had only the most superficial of relationships, right up until her death. And my father, of course, was never much more than a grumbling political commentator at the far end of the dinner table.

But then I moved to New York City, and I came to know my Aunt Peg, an unconventional and irresponsible lesbian, who drank too much and spent too much money, and who only wanted to cavort through life with a sort of hop-skip-tralala—and I loved her. She gave me nothing less than my entire world.

And I also met Olive, who didn’t seem lovable—but whom I came to love, nonetheless. Far more than I loved my own mother or father. Olive was not warm or affectionate, but she was loyal and good. She was something of a bodyguard to me. She was our anchoress. She taught me whatever morality I possess.

Then I met Marjorie Lowtsky—an eccentric Hell’s Kitchen teenager whose immigrant parents were in the rag trade. She was not at all the sort of person I was supposed to befriend. But she became not only my business partner, but my sister. I loved her, Angela, with all my heart. I would do anything for her, and she for me.

Then came Marjorie’s son, Nathan—this weak little boy who was allergic to life itself. He was Marjorie’s child, but he was my child, too. If my parents’ vision for my life had gone according to plan, I would surely have had my own children—big, strong, horseback-riding future captains of industry—but instead I got Nathan, and that was better. I chose Nathan and he chose me. I loved him, too.

These random-seeming people were my family, Angela. These people were my real family. I’m telling you all this because I want you to understand that—over the next few years—I came to love your father just as much as I loved any of them.

My heart cannot offer him higher praise than that. He became as close to me as my own, beautiful, random, and real family.

Love like that is a deep well, with steep sides.

Once you fall in, that’s it—you will love that person always.

—

A few nights a week, for years on end, your father would call me at some odd hour and say, “Do you want to get out? I can’t sleep.”

I’d say, “You can never sleep, Frank.”

And he’d say, “Yeah, but tonight I can’t sleep worse than usual.”

It didn’t matter what the season was, or the time of night. I always said yes. I’ve always enjoyed exploring this city, and I have always liked the nighttime. What’s more, I’ve never been a person who needed much sleep. But most of all, I just loved being with Frank. So he would call me, and I would agree to see him, and he would drive over from Brooklyn to pick me up, and we would go someplace together and walk.

It didn’t take us long to walk every neighborhood in Manhattan, and so pretty soon we started exploring the outer boroughs, as well. I never met anybody who knew the city better. He took me to neighborhoods I’d never even heard of, and we would explore them on foot in the wee hours of the morning, talking all the while. We walked all the cemeteries and all the industrial yards. We walked the waterfronts. We walked by the row houses and through the projects. We eventually walked over every single bridge in the greater New York metropolitan area—and there are a lot of them.

Nobody ever bothered us. It was the strangest thing. The city was not a safe place back then, but we walked through it as though we were untouchable. We were often so deep in our own conversations that we often didn’t even notice our surroundings. Miraculously, the streets kept us safe and the people let us be. I wondered at times if people could even see us at all. But then sometimes the police would stop us and ask what we were doing, and Frank would show his badge. He would say, “I’m walking this lady home”—even if we were in a Jamaican neighborhood in Crown Heights. He was always walking me home. That was always the story.

Sometimes, late at night, he would drive me to Long Island to buy fried clams at a place he knew—a twenty-four-hour diner where you could pull right up to the window and order your food from the car. Or we’d go to Sheepshead Bay for littlenecks. We’d eat them while parked on the dock, watching the fishing boats head out to sea. In the spring, he would drive me out to the countryside in New Jersey to pick dandelion leaves in the moonlight, for making bitter salads. It’s something Sicilians enjoy, he taught me.

Driving and walking—those were the things that he could do, without getting too anxious.

He always listened to me. He became the most trusted confidant of my life. There was a clarity about Frank—a deep and unshakable integrity. It was soothing to be with a man who never boasted about himself (so rare, in men of that generation!) and who did not impose himself on the world in any way. If he ever had a fault, or made a mistake, he would tell you before you could find out for yourself. And there was nothing I could ever tell him about myself that he would judge or criticize. My own glints of darkness did not frighten him; he had such darkness of his own that nobody else’s shadows scared him.

Most of all, though, he listened.

I told him everything. When I had a new lover, I told him. When I had a fear, I told him. When I had a victory, I told him. I was not accustomed, Angela, to having men listen to me.

And as for your father, he was not accustomed to being with a woman who would walk five miles with him in the middle of the night, in the rain, in Queens, just to keep him company when he could not sleep.

—

He was never going to leave his wife and daughter. I knew that, Angela. That’s not who he was. And I was never going to lure him into bed. Aside from the fact that his injuries and his trauma made a sexual life impossible for him, I was not a woman who could have an affair with a married man. That’s not who I was. Not anymore.

Moreover, I can’t say I ever fantasized about marrying him. In general, of course, the thought of marriage gave me a hemmed-in feeling, and I didn’t long for it with anyone. But certainly not with Frank. I couldn’t imagine us sitting at a breakfast table, talking over a newspaper. Planning vacations. That picture didn’t look like either of us.

Lastly, I can’t be certain that Frank and I would have shared the same depth of love and tenderness for each other, had sex ever been part of our story. Sex is so often a cheat—a shortcut of intimacy. A way to skip over knowing somebody’s heart by knowing, instead, their mere body.

So we were devoted to each other, in our own way, but we kept our lives separate. The one New York City neighborhood that we never explored together on foot was his—South Brooklyn. (Or Carroll Gardens, as the realtors eventually named it, although your father never called it that.) This was the neighborhood that belonged to his family—to his tribe, really. Out of respect, we left it quietly untouched by our footsteps.

He never came to know my people and I never came to know his.

I introduced him briefly to Marjorie—and certainly my friends knew about him—but Frank was not somebody who could socialize. (What was I going to do—have a dinner party, and show him off? Expect a man with his nervous condition to stand in a crowded room and make idle chitchat with strangers while holding a cocktail? No.) To my friends, Frank was just the walking phantom. They accepted that he was important to me because I said that he was important to me. But they never understood him. How could they have?

For a while, I’ll admit, I’d indulged a fantasy that he and Nathan might meet someday, and that he could become a father figure to that dear little boy. But that wasn’t going to work, either. He could barely be a father figure to you, Angela—his actual child, whom he loved with all his heart. Why would I ask him to take on another child to feel guilty about?

I asked nothing of him, Angela. And he asked nothing of me. (Other than, “Do you want to go for a walk?”)

So what were we to each other? What would you call it? We were something more than friends—that was certain. Was he my boyfriend? Was I his mistress?

Those words all fall short.

Those words all describe something that we were not.

Yet I can tell you that there was a lonely and untenanted corner of my heart that I’d never known was there—and Frank moved right into it. Holding him in my heart made me feel like I belonged to love itself. Although we never lived together or shared a bed, he was always a part of me. I saved stories for him all week, so I would have good things to tell him. I asked for his opinions, because I respected his ethics. I came to cherish his face precisely because it was his. Even his burn scars became beautiful to my eye. (His skin looked like the weathered binding of some ancient, sacred book.) I was enchanted by the hours that we kept and the mysterious places we went—both in the course of our conversations, and in the city itself.

The time we spent together happened outside of the world, is how it felt.

Nothing about us was normal.

We always ate in the car.

What were we?

We were Frank and Vivian, walking through New York City together, while everyone else slept.

—

Frank normally reached out to me at night, but on one roastingly hot day in the summer of 1966, I got a call from him in the middle of the afternoon, asking if he could please see me immediately. He sounded frantic, and when he arrived at L’Atelier, he leapt out of the car and started pacing in front of the boutique with more nervousness than I’d ever before witnessed. I quickly handed over my work to an assistant, and hopped into the car, saying, “Let’s go, Frank. Come, now. Just drive.”

He drove all the way out to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn—speeding the entire time, and not saying a word. He parked in a patch of dirt at the end of a runway, where we could watch the Naval Air Reserve planes come in for landings. I knew that he must have been profoundly agitated: he always went to Floyd Bennett Field to watch the planes land when nothing else would calm him. The roar of the engines settled his nerves.

I knew better than to ask him what was wrong. Eventually, once he had caught his breath, I knew he would tell me.

So we sat in the crushing July heat with the car off, listening to the engine tick and cool. Silence, then a landing plane, then silence again. I cranked down my window, to bring in some air, but Frank didn’t seem to notice. He hadn’t yet taken his white-knuckled hands off the steering wheel. He was wearing his patrolman’s uniform, which must’ve been sweltering. But again, he didn’t appear to notice. Another plane landed and shook the ground.

“I went to court today,” he said.

“All right,” I said—just to let him know that I was listening.

“I had to testify about a break-in last year. A hardware store. Some kids on dope, looking for things to fence. They beat up the owner, so there were assault charges. I was the first officer on the scene, so.”

“I understand.”

Your father often had to appear in court, Angela, on some police matter or another. He never liked it (sitting in a crowded courtroom was hell for him, of course), but it had never caused him to have a panicked reaction like this. Something more troubling must have occurred.

I waited for it.

“I saw somebody I used to know today, Vivian,” he said at last. His hands were still not off the wheel, and he was still staring straight ahead. “A guy from the Navy. Southern guy. He was on the Franklin with me. Tom Denno. I haven’t thought of that name in years. He was a guy who came from Tennessee. I didn’t even know he lived up here. Those southern guys, you’d think they would’ve all gone back home after the war, right? But he didn’t, I guess. Moved here to New York. Lives way the hell up on West End Avenue. He’s a lawyer now. He was in court today, representing one of the kids who broke into the hardware store. I guess that kid’s parents must have some money. They got a lawyer. Tom Denno. Of all people.”

“That must have surprised you.” Again, just letting him know I was there.

“I can still remember Tom when he was brand new on the ship,” Frank went on. “I don’t know the date—don’t own me to it—but he come on in something like early forty-four. He came straight off the farm. Country boy. You think city kids are tough, but you should see those country boys. Most of them, they came from such poverty, you never saw anything like it. I thought I grew up poor, but it was nothing compared to these kids. They never saw food before, like the amounts of food on the ship. They ate like they were starving, I remember. First time in their lives they hadn’t shared dinner with ten brothers. Some of them had hardly ever worn shoes. Accents like you never heard. You could barely understand them. But they were tough as hell in battle. Even when we weren’t under fire, they were tough. Fighting with one another all the time, or mouthing off to the marines who were guarding the admiral, when the admiral was onboard. They didn’t know how to do anything except come at life hard, you know? Tom Denno was the hardest of them all.”

I nodded. Frank rarely talked in such detail about life onboard the ship, or about anyone he’d known in the war. I didn’t know where this was all going, but I knew it was important.

“Vivian, I was never tough like those guys.” He was still gripping that steering wheel like it was a life preserver—like it was the only thing in the world keeping him afloat. “One day on the flight deck, one of my men—young kid from Maryland—stopped paying attention for a second. He took a step in the wrong direction, and his head got sucked right off his body, right into a plane propeller. Just pulled his head right off him, right in front of me. We weren’t even under fire—just a routine day on the deck. Now we have a headless body on the deck, and you better hurry and clean it up, because more planes are coming in, landing every two minutes. You gotta keep the flight deck clear at all times. But I just freeze. Now here comes Tom Denno, and he grabs the body by its feet and drags it away—probably the way he used to drag pig carcasses back on the farm. He doesn’t even flinch, just knows what to do. Meanwhile, I can’t even move. And then Tom’s gotta come and pull me out of the way, too, so I won’t be the next one killed. Me—an officer! Him, an enlisted kid. This was a kid who’d never been to a dentist, Vivian. How the hell did he end up as a Manhattan lawyer?”