Portraits and Observations (39 page)

I confess, we don’t catch spies every day. But most days are supplied with stimulants: in the harbor some exotic freighter to investigate; a bird of strange plumage resting among the wisteria; or, and
how exhilarating an occurrence it is, a newly arrived shipment at Knapp’s. Knapp’s is a set of shops, really a series of storerooms resembling caverns, clustered together on Fulton near Pineapple Street. The proprietor—that is too modest a designation for so commanding a figure—the czar, the Aga Khan of these paradisaic emporiums is Mr. George Knapp, known to his friends as Father.

Father is a world traveler. Cards arrive: he is in Seville, now Copenhagen, now Milan, next week Manchester, everywhere and all the while on a gaudy spending spree. Buying: blue crockery from a Danish castle. Pink apothecary jars from an old London pharmacy. English brass, Barcelona lamps, Battersea boxes, French paperweights, Italian witch balls, Greek icons, Venetian blackamoors, Spanish saints, Korean cabinets; and junk, glorious junk, a jumble of ragged dolls, broken buttons, a stuffed kangaroo, an aviary of owls under a great glass bell, the playing pieces of obsolete games, the paper moneys of defunct governments, an ivory umbrella cane
sans
umbrella, crested chamber pots and mustache mugs and irreparable clocks, cracked violins, a sundial that weighs seven hundred pounds, skulls, snake vertebrae, elephants’ hoofs, sleigh bells and Eskimo carvings and mounted swordfish, medieval milkmaid stools, rusted firearms and flaking waltz-age mirrors.

Then Father comes home to Brooklyn, his treasures trailing after him. Uncrated, added to the already perilous clutter, the blackamoors prance in the marvelous gloom, the swordfish glide through the store’s Atlantic-depth dusk. Eventually they will go: fancier
antiquaires
, and anonymous mere beauty lovers, will come, cart them away. Meanwhile, poke around. You’re certain to find a plum; and it may be a peach. That paperweight—the one imprisoning a Baccarat dragonfly. If you want it, take it now: tomorrow, assuredly the day after, will see it on Fifty-seventh Street at quintuple the tariff.

Father has a partner, his wife Florence. She is from Panama, is
handsome, fresh-colored and tall, trim enough to look well in the trousers she affects, a woman of proud posture and, vis-à-vis customers, of nearly eccentric curtness, take-it-or-go disdain—but then, poor soul, she is under the discipline of not being herself permitted to sell, even quote a price. Only Father, with his Macaulayan memory, his dazzling ability to immediately lay hold of any item in the dizzying maze, is so allowed. Brooklyn-born, waterfront-bred, always hatted and usually wearing a wet cold cigar, a stout, short, round powerhouse with one arm, with a strutting walk, a rough-guy voice, shy nervous sensitive eyes that blink when irritation makes him stutter, Father is nevertheless an aesthete. A tough aesthete who takes no guff, will not quibble over his evaluations, just declares: “Put it down!” and, “Get it Manhattan half the money, I give it yuh free.” They are an excellent couple, the Knapps. I explore their museum several times a week, and toward October, when a Franklin stove in the shape of a witch hut warms the air and Florence serves cider accompanied by a damp delicious date-nut bread she bakes in discarded coffee cans, never miss a day. Occasionally, on these festive afternoons, Father will gaze about him, blink-blink his eyes with vague disbelief, then, as though his romantic accumulations were closing round him in a manner menacing, observe: “I got to be crazy. Putting my heart in a fruitcake business like this. And the
investment
. The money alone! Honest, in your honest opinion, wouldn’t you say I’m crazy?”

Certainly not. If, however, Mrs. Cornelius Oosthuizen were to beg the question—

It seems improbable that someone of Mrs. Oosthuizen’s elevation should have condescended to distinguish me with her acquaintance. I owe it all to a pound of dog meat. What happened was: the butcher’s boy delivered a purchase of mine which, by error, included hamburger meant to go to Mrs. O. Recognizing her name on
the order slip, and having often remarked her house, a garnet-colored château in mood remindful of the old Schwab mansion on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive, I thought of taking round the package myself, not dreaming to meet the fine lady, but, at most, ambitious for a moment’s glance into her fortunate preserve. Fortunate, for it boasted, so I’d had confided to me, a butler and staff of six. Not that this is the Heights’ sole
maison de luxe:
we are blessed with several exponents of limousine life—but unarguably, Mrs. O. is
la regina di tutti
.

Approaching her property, I noticed a person in Persian lamb very vexedly punching the bell, pounding a brass knocker. “God damn you, Mabel,” she said to the door; then turned, glared at me as I climbed the steps—a tall, intimidating replica of frail unforbidding Miss Marianne Moore (who, it may be recalled, is a Brooklyn lady too). Pale lashless eyes, razor lips, hair a silver fuzz. “Ah,
you
. I know you,” she accused me, as behind her the door was opened by an Irish crone wearing an ankle-length apron. “So. I suppose you’ve come to sign the petition? Very good of you, I’m sure.” Mumbling an explanation, muttering servile civilities, I conveyed the butcher’s parcel from my hands to hers; she, as though I’d tossed her a rather rotten fish, dangled it gingerly until the maid remarked, “Ma’am, ’tis Miss Mary’s meat the good lad’s brought.”

“Indeed. Then don’t stand there, Mabel. Take it.” And, regarding me with a lessening astonishment that I could not, in her behalf, reciprocate: “Wipe your boots, come in. We will discuss the petition. Mabel, send Murphy with some Bristol and biscuit.… Oh? At the dentist’s! When I
asked
him
not
to tamper with that tooth. What hellish nonsense,” she swore as we passed into a hatrack-vestibule. “Why didn’t he go to the hypnotist, as I told him? Mary! Mary! Mary,” she said when now appeared a friendly nice dog of cruel pedigree: a spaniel
cum
chow attached to the legs of a dachshund, “I
believe Mabel has your lunch. Mabel, take Miss Mary to the kitchen. And we will have our biscuits in the Red Room.”

The room, in which red could be discerned only in a bowl of porcelain roses and a basket of marzipan strawberries, contained velvet-swagged windows that commanded a pulse-quickening prospect: sky, skyline, far away a wooded slice of Staten Island. In other respects, the room, a heavy confection, cumbersome, humorless, a hunk of Biedermeier pastry, did not recommend itself. “It was my grandmother’s bedroom; my father preferred it as a parlor. Cornelius, Mr. Oosthuizen, died here. Very suddenly: while listening at the radio to the Roosevelt person. An attack. Brought on by anger and cigars. I’m sure you won’t ask permission to smoke. Sit down.… Not there. There, by the window. Now here, it
should
be here, somewhere, in this drawer? Could it be upstairs? Damn Murphy, horrid man always meddling with my—No, I have it: the petition.”

The document stated, and objected to, the plans of a certain minor religious sect that had acquired a half-block of houses on the Heights which they planned to flatten and replace with a dormitory building for the benefit of their Believers. Appended to it were some dozen protesting signatures; the Misses Seeley had signed, and Mr. Arthur Veere Vinson, Mrs. K. Mackaye Brownlowe—descendants of the children in the meadow, the old-guard survivors of
their
neighborhood’s evilest hours, those happy few who regularly attended Mrs. O.’s black-tie-sit-downs. She wasted no eloquence on the considerable merit of their complaint; simply, “Sign it,” she ordered, a Lady Catherine de Bourgh instructing a Mr. Collins.

Sherry came; and with it an assembly of cats. Scarred battlers with leprous fur and punch-drunk eyes. Mrs. O., motioning toward the least respectable of these, a tiger-striped marauder, told me, “This is the one you may take home. He’s been with us a month, we’ve put him in splendid condition, I’m sure you’ll be devoted.
Dogs? What
sort
of dogs have you? Well, I don’t approve the pure breeds. Anyone will give
them
a home. I took Miss Mary off the street. And Lovely Louise, Mouse and Sweet William—my dogs, all my cats, too, came off the streets. Look below, there in the garden. Under the heaven tree. Those markings: graves are what you see, some as old as my childhood. The seashells are goldfish. The yellow coral, canaries. That white stone is a rabbit; that cross of pebbles: my favorite, the first Mary—angel girl, went bathing in the river and caught a fatal chill. I used to tease Cornelius, Mr. Oosthuizen, told him, ha-ha, told him I planned to put him there with the rest of my darlings. Ha-ha, he wasn’t amused, not at all. So, I mean to say, your having dogs doesn’t signify: Billy here has such spirit,
he
can hold his own. No, I insist you have him. For I can’t keep him much longer, he’s a disturbing influence; and if I let him loose, he’ll run back to his bad old life in the St. George alley. I wouldn’t want
that
on my conscience if I were you.”

Her persuasions failed; in consequence our parting was cool. Yet at Christmas she sent me a card, a Cartier engraving of the heaven tree protecting the bones in its sad care. And once, encountering her at the bakery, where we both were buying brownies, we discussed the impudent disregard her petition had received: alas, the wreckers had wrecked, the brethren were building. On the same occasion, she shame-on-you informed me that Billy the cat, released from her patronage, had indeed returned to the sinful ways of the St. George alley.

The St. George alley, adjoining a small cinema, is a shadowy shelter for vagrants: wino derelicts wandered over the bridge from Chinatown and the Bowery share it with other orphaned, gone-wild creatures; cats, as many as minnows in a stream, who gather in their greatest numbers toward nightfall; for then, as darkness happens, strange-eyed women, not unlike those black-clothed fanatics
who haunt the cat arenas in Rome, go stealing through the alley with caressing hisses and sacks of crumbled salmon. (Which isn’t to suggest that Mrs. O. is one who indulges in this somehow unhealthy hobby: regarding animals, her actions, while perhaps a bit overboard, are kindly meant, and not untypical of the Heights, where a high percentage of the pet population has been adopted off the streets. Astonishing, really, the amount of lost strays who roam their way into the neighborhood, as though instinct informed them they’d find someone here who couldn’t abide being followed through the rain, but would, instead, lead them home, boil milk and call Dr. Wasserman, Bernie, our smart-as-they-come young vet whose immaculate hospital resounds with the music of Bach concertos and the barkings of mending beasts.)

Just now, in connection with these notes, I was hunting through a hieroglyphic shambles I call my journal. Odd, indeed the oddest, jottings—a majority of which conceal from me their meanings. God knows what “Thunder on Cobra Street” refers to. Or “A diarrhea of platitudes in seventeen tongues.” Unless it is intended to describe a most tiresome local person, a linguist terribly talkative in many languages though articulate in none. However, “Took T&G to G&T” does make sense.

The first initials represent two friends, the latter a restaurant not far away. You must have heard of it, Gage & Tollner. Like Kolb’s and Antoine’s in New Orleans, Gage & Tollner is a last-century enterprise that has kept in large degree its founding character. The shaky dance of its gaslight chandeliers is not a period-piece hoax; nor do the good plain marble-topped tables, the magnificent array of gold-edged mirrors, seem sentimental affectations—rather, it is a testament to the seriousness of the proprietors, who have obliged us by letting the place stay much as it was that opening day in 1874. One mightn’t suppose it, for in the atmosphere there is none of the
briny falderal familiar to such aquariums, but the specialty is sea food. The best. Chowders the doughtiest Down Easter must approve. Lobsters that would appease Nero. Myself, I am a soft-shelled-crab
aficionado:
a plate of sautéed crabs, a halved lemon, a glass of chilled Chablis—most satisfactory. The waiters, too, dignified but swift-to-smile Negroes who take pride in their work, contribute to the goodness of Gage & Tollner; on the sleeves of their very laundered jackets they sport military-style chevrons awarded according to the number of years each has served; and,
were
this the Army, some would be generals.

Nearby, there is another restaurant, a fraction less distinguished, but of similar vintage and virtually the same menu: Joe’s—Joe being, by the way, an attractive young lady. On the far fringes of the Heights, just before Brooklyn becomes Brooklyn again, there is a street of gypsies, with gypsy cafés (have your future foretold and be tattooed while sipping tankards of Moorish tea); there is also an Arab-Armenian quarter sprinkled with spice-saturated restaurants where one can buy, hot from the oven, a crusty sort of pancake frosted with sesame seed—once in a while I carry mine down to the waterfront, intending to share with the gulls; but gobbling as I go, none is ever left. On a summer’s evening a stroll across the bridge, with cool winds singing through the steel shrouds, with stars moving about above and ships below, can be intoxicating, particularly if you are headed toward the roasting-pork, sweet-and-sour aromas of Chinatown.

Another journal notation reads: “At last a face in the ghost hotel!” Which means; after months of observation, in all climates at all hours, I’d sighted someone in a window of a haunted-seeming riverfront building that stands on Water Street at the foot of the Heights. A lonely hotel I often make the destination of my walks: because I think it romantic, in aggravated moments imagine retiring
there, for it is as secluded as Mt. Athos, remoter than the Krak Chevalier in the mountains of wildest Syria. Daytimes the location, a dead-end Chiricoesque piazza facing the river, is little disturbed; at night, not at all: not a sound, except foghorns and a distant traffic whisper from the bridge which bulks above. Peace, and the shivering glow of gliding-by tugs and ferries.

The hotel is three-storied. Sunstruck scraps of reflected river-shine, and broken, jigsaw images of the bridge waver across the windows; but beyond the glass nothing stirs: the rooms, despite contradictory evidence, milk bottles on sills, a hat on a hook, unmade beds and burning bulbs, appear unoccupied: never a soul to be seen. Like the sailors of the
Marie Celeste
, the guests, hearing a knock, must have opened their doors to a stranger who swallowed them whole. Could it be, perhaps it
was
, the stranger himself that I saw?—“At last a face in the ghost hotel!” I glimpsed him just the once, one April afternoon one cloudless blue day; and he, a balding man in an undershirt, hurled up a window, flexed hairy arms, yawned hugely, hugely inhaled the river breeze—was gone. No, on careful second thought, I will never set foot in that hotel. For I should either be devoured or have my mystery dispelled. As children we are sensitive to mystery: locked boxes, whisperings behind closed doors, the what-thing that lurks yonder in the trees, waits in every stretch between street lamps; but as we grow older all is too explainable, the capacity to invent pleasurable alarm recedes: too bad, a pity—throughout our lives we ought to believe in ghost hotels.