Authors: Frank Baldwin
“Nobody misses the war, boy,” he said. “You understand?” I nodded. We got in, but Grandpa sat there, the keys in his hand,
staring into the wheel. “Every glass of beer was your last. Every letter home. So you got drunk any chance you could. And
when you wrote, you made your words count.” He looked out the window, across the lawn to the quiet town streets. “It isn’t
the war you miss. It’s the spirit of those days. Some of us, who got lucky and lived through it, learned how to live. Like
we’d be gone tomorrow. Because a lot of us were.” He looked at me. “You got me, boy?” I nodded. “Okay, then,” he said gently.
He slid the key into the ignition, then looked at me again. “Find something that gives you that charge, Jake. That fires your
blood.”
I stand and look into the niche.
Harold Teller, 1922–1999. Charisse Teller, 1919–1992
. The first time he brought me here, I asked him why he wanted to be cremated. He said he’d seen what time does to a corpse.
There was never any b.s. to Grandpa, or to any of his war friends. They were the best men I’ve known. Men in their sixties
and seventies, and in my summers tending bar, I never heard any of them bitch about their aches or their ages. Three more
of them are gone now. Smitty — cancer. Charlie Bell — cancer. Roger Tamper — stroke. But I can close my eyes and see them
all again, see them as I saw them that first night in the Veterans Club as they watched the Berlin Wall come down. There was
a light in the eyes of those men that I’ve never seen again in anyone.
From the stairwell landing, the words of the mother drift out to me. “Brought more light in sixteen years… Remains in our
hearts… Would have wanted this beside him…”
Watching that Wall come down, those men must have felt their lives come full circle. They’d been a part of something vital.
They’d meant something. I think of my friends, try to imagine where we might meet in thirty, forty years. What will we toast
— the Dow?
I breathe onto the glass, wipe it a last time with the cloth, and walk away. I reach the landing, where the family stands
now with bowed heads, then walk down the winding stairwell, through the lobby, out the doorway, and into the late afternoon.
I hurry up the path, across the green common, to Twentieth Street, and back to the subway, stopping on the stairs to let the
strong tunnel wind blow over me.
It was a week after Grandpa died that I followed the woman to the theater and then took her home. She walked ahead of me into
her bedroom. On the door handle hung the silk belt to her bathrobe, and when she turned to me, I held it in my hands. “Give
me your wrists,” I told her. She started to lift them toward me but then backed away, her eyes on me, and sat down on her
bed, running her hands over her stockinged thighs. I nodded and walked out and down the hall to the front door. I was unlocking
the deadbolt when she touched my shoulder. I turned around.
“Please,” she said.
“If I stay, I stay,” I said. She leaned back against the wall, hugging her arms to her, rubbing them. “Please,” she said again,
but I shook my head. She closed her eyes, but when she heard me turn the lock she opened them. “Stay,” she said.
I ride the 6 train to Forty-second Street and then, instead of catching the express for home, walk to the shuttle and take
it across to Times Square. I take the express to Seventy-second Street and then catch the No. 1 local to 116th. I walk through
the turnstile and up the stairs, out into the last fading light of afternoon.
Just ahead of me stand the black iron gates of Columbia University. I don’t know what made me come here, but I step through
them, joining the flow of students, guys with dangling backpacks and coeds in sweatshirts and tattered jeans, books pressed
to their chests. I haven’t walked these red bricks since I was ten, since before IBM lured my father from the business school
and sent us to Japan. I climb the stairs onto Low Plaza and stand for a minute in the fading light. Above me is the familiar
black statue; a woman in robes, holding a staff in one hand, a book open in her lap. Above the statue rise the majestic white
stairs of Low Library. And beside me, just as I remember them, are the fountains. I walk to one and sit down on its wide rim.
The last of the sun glints off the rippling water. I look out over the campus, feeling the gentle spray on my neck as I spot
the field where we played baseball in the summer. It looks impossibly small. I dip my hand in the cold water. I used to wade
in these fountains, once cut my toe badly on a piece of jagged metal. I remember the shock, staring at the blood spilling
back into the water, then being lifted up into Dad’s arms, the world over his shoulder, close and jarring, as he carried me,
running, to the hospital.
I rise and walk back down the stairs to the brick path. I remember these red bricks as endless, as stretching as far as I
could see, but really it is just a few minutes’ walk from end to end. I look back at the Broadway gate. I should go through
it and home to my apartment, but instead I turn and follow the bricks the other way, to the far gate, and walk out onto Amsterdam
Avenue. I turn left and walk the old familiar four blocks, uptown but downhill, the buildings of the campus to my left. I
stop at the corner of 120th Street. The light is green, but I don’t cross.
The A&P is a Red Apple now. There is still a cleaners on one corner, a drugstore on another. The same ones? I can’t remember.
And there, on the far corner, is the towering, gray prewar. U-shaped around a walkway that leads from the street to the front
door. Eight twenty-three West 120th Street. I cross to it. The mailbox is still here, the solid green mailbox that marked
one end zone in sidewalk football. I glance at the walkway, but just for a second, then walk past the building and up the
block, across the narrow street to the raised clearing above the entrance to Morningside Park.
As a kid, this was the boundary of my world. I was never allowed down into the park, so the wide staircase and the path through
the trees below held magic for me, terror. Even today they look mystical, cinematic, the thick stone walls along the edge
of the park looming like the walls of a castle. The trees planted on the hillside below rise to the clearing, their branches
dipping over the metal spikes of the railing. I pull off a leaf and rub it between my fingers.
Mimi Lessing. Grace, beauty, purity. I want to take her hand, to stand with her, to wake to those eyes. And I want to take
her apart, button by button. So much inside her, to be taken away. More than she even imagines. A gust of wind finds the skin
under my collar. The sun is gone now, gone behind the trees of the park. I want them both so strongly — to protect Mimi and
to break her. Equally, I want them. I turn from the park entrance and cross the street again.
Not quite equally.
I walk back down to the mailbox in front of my old building. I run my hand along it, thinking of the day three black kids
came down from Harlem and challenged us to a game. I led Tony Collins a step too far, and though he hauled in my pass, he
hit the mailbox at full speed and broke his wrist. I turn and look up to the fifth floor, to the corner window. My old room.
Mom would sit on the radiator and watch out the window as we played. When I scored I would hold the football up to her, and
she would wave.
For the first time, I take a good look at the walkway that leads to the front door. It, too, had seemed so long, but it isn’t
even twenty yards. I can see the doorman in the foyer, looking out. It could be Clete, if he stood a little straighter. Clete,
who always stood like a yardstick, his hands behind his back. I’d stand next to him, as straight as I could, my hands behind
my back, too, and when one of the older tenants turned into the walk with her groceries, I’d say, “Can I get the door, Clete?”
and if it was one who never tipped, Clete would say, “She’s all yours, Jake.” I walk up the path to the stairs. It could still
be Clete, and now I see that it is. Bowed, but the same hard nose, the same mole just under the eye.
“Evening, sir,” he says.
“Hi. Clete?”
“That’s me.” He looks closely at me.
“I used to live here a long time ago.”
“You did? What’s the last name?”
“Teller.”
“Teller… Teller. Apartment fifty-three.”
“That’s right.”
“Mr. Edward and Mrs. Gail. And the boy, Jake. Well, I’ll be.” He offers his hand, and I shake it. “Teller. Left in…‘eighty-three?”
“’Eighty-four.”
“’Eighty-four. Went off to Asia, or some such.”
“Japan.”
“Japan. And here you’ve come back. How are your parents?”
I pause.
“They’re… they’re fine,” I say.
“You tell them Clete says hello.”
“I will.”
He turns with me into the lobby and sits down at the small front desk. In front of him is a big leather book that I recognize
from years ago. The tenant book.
“That’s not the same one,” I say.
“The same one.” He runs his hand over the creased cover. “Columbia housing, so we don’t get computers.”
I look around the small lobby. A sofa and chairs. The fireplace. The mailroom just off the elevator.
“You been okay, Clete?”
“Oh, I been good, I guess. Still livin’ on the wrong side of town. Few more years, though, it just might turn around.” His
hands, clasped together on top of the tenant book, tremble slightly. “Jake, you the boy used to stand with me in the window?”
“That was me.”
He laughs. “Damn, you got big. And here I’m getting smaller. Well, it’s good to see you again. We don’t get many, come back
after all that time.”
“I’m going to go walk around, Clete, if that’s okay.”
“You go ahead.”
I walk past the elevator to the stairs. I turn around.
“Who’s in fifty-three now?”
“Three girls, Jake. Stewardesses, I think. Gone a lot.”
I climb the stairs, my hand along the wide stone handrail. I was always running down these stairs. Racing against the elevator,
against the envelopes I’d drop down the stone mail chute on the fifth floor. I walk quietly now, as if I might give myself
away. I reach the fifth floor, turn right, walk to the end of the hallway, and turn left. There it is, down at the far end.
The same small lettering in the middle of the door.
53
. I walk to it. The buzzer is where it’s always been, just below the eyehole. From inside I can hear music and laughter.
I press the button.
Ten seconds later the door opens to a young woman in a white belly T and gold drawstring pants. She is beautiful, her shining
black hair falling almost to her waist. One tan arm is braceleted to the elbow, and she has four small silver earrings clipped
to the top of one ear.
“Hi,” she says. “Who are you?”
“I’m Jake Teller,” I say.
“Sasha’s friend?”
“No. I wasn’t invited. I used to live here a long time ago. I just wanted to see the apartment again.”
She considers this. “Prove it,” she says playfully.
I smile. “Behind you, to the right, is the main hallway. Straight ahead is the living room. Off that, the dining room. To
the right, the kitchen. The bedrooms are to the left.”
“Wild,” she says, smiling. “Come on in. Look around.”
She turns and walks down the hallway. In the small of her back, in the tanned skin below her T-shirt, is a tiny tattoo. A
sideways figure eight. I look up from it to see the old living room, the far windows where they should be, looking out onto
Amsterdam Avenue. Mom hung the
Casablanca
poster in one of them, so that I could pick out our window on the walk home from school. Nothing else in the apartment looks
the same. It is clearly a woman’s place now — soft furniture, soft colors. And on the couch, another soft young woman, maybe
twenty-five, a guy next to her. On the love seat beside them is another young couple. A third guy stands alone by the stereo.
The guys wear Dockers, khakis, confidence. Everyone holds a drink. A couples night in.
“Hey,” says my guide, “this is Jake. Believe it or not, he lived here.” She turns to me. “When, Jake?”
“As a kid.”
“And he picked tonight to come back,” she says.
“I’m Tracy,” says Tracy, from the couch, with a wave.
“Pierce,” says the guy next to her.
“Sasha,” says the woman in the love seat.
“Kevin,” says her guy.
“Scott,” says the guy by the stereo.
There’s a second of silence. “Would you like a drink, Jake?” says my guide. “I’m Elise, by the way.”
“Our reservation’s at seven,” says Scott, looking at Elise, then down at the CD case in his hands.
“And the restaurant’s ten blocks away,” says Elise. “Jake?”
“Sure.”
Elise steps into the kitchen. The rest of us are quiet as I take in the living room, the dining room, the tiny room off the
kitchen that Mom used for her paintings.
“Does it look familiar?” asks Pierce.
“Barely,” I say.
Elise comes back with a bottle of beer.
“Thanks,” I say, and after another second of silence I gesture down the far hallway. “Do you guys mind? I’ll be two minutes.”
“Go for it,” says Elise. Scott shoots her a look.
I walk the few steps down the hall and stand in the doorway of my old room. The closet is the same, that’s all. It smells
of petals now, of oils, of a hundred soft scents. I see bracelets on the dresser. From the living room I hear Scott’s voice,
not quite a whisper. “I just think it’s weird, that’s all.”
Her bed is where mine was, against the far wall. I had a bunk bed, for some reason. It must have come with the apartment.
I slept on the bottom, always, defeating my eight o’clock bedtime with the tiny transistor radio I kept pressed between pillow
and ear. I remember its tinny smell, the voice of Marv Albert calling the Knicks. “Yes! And it counts!” he would say. “A gorgeous
move.”
Beneath the window is the radiator. I walk to it and sit down. I can see the mailbox on the street below, see the whole wide
block. A streetlight flickers on across the way.
“Your old room.”
I look up to see Elise in the doorway.