Queenie
Authors: Hortense Calisher
A Novel
Hortense Calisher
For Beecher and Barbara Moore
ONE
Queenie:
COMING AND GOING
A
HAPPY CHILDHOOD CAN’T
be cured. Mine’ll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that’s all, instead of a noose. In today’s world, Miss Piranesi, who doesn’t know which is more practical?
By my age—and whether or not the whole village of Fifty-Seventh-Street-and-penthouse-Seventh Avenue is drawn up at the gates waving Queenie on her way—doesn’t any girl have to get out and start answering the lyric always going on between the legs? Day and night, what a musak, walking us down the street, waltzing us in a car! Safe to listen to only in bed, when it’s loudest. Or dream-boating in a deck chair at ten past five. What’s the difference I know who’s singing it? Only the little man-doll, man-image, all virgins keep down there.
Sweet man-maidenhead, red robin-bobbin of a dollbaby, after doing all those drawings in anatomy, I’m still stuck with you! Just like any ugly orphan of the storm, I still have to deal with you. And I’m going to have to do it in my own style.
I was born and raised to be a kept woman. Nowadays, women are no longer kept. World War Two put an end to it, long before I arrive. I get the bad news when I’m eight, and being dandled on my Uncle Oscar’s knee. He’s an honorary uncle, through my Aunt Aurine. The courts might call him putative.
“That war put the kibosh on it,” old Billy Batong says. “High-steppers like your Aurine and my Vixen; they don’t breed ’em like that anymore. The amateurs are in!” As a one-time owner of the Derby winner, Billy names all his horses for his past mistresses, except for the current mistress, who is named for that horse.
“Girls feel they have to be free to work now, even if they are pretty,” my uncle says. I can hear him worrying about talk like this in front of me. Two years later, when I’m ten and chesty, he won’t dandle me anymore.
“This new war!” Billy has three chins above his collar; all of them gobble. “Oscar—you realize men nowhere near our age,
young
men, are putting all their money in
wives
?”
In my aunt’s arrangements, which include mine, I know well enough what that means. With a great bawl, I slide down off that knee and start running, out Oscar’s huge mahogany front door into the marble hallway, and not waiting for the elevator, up flight after flight of the old joint, past more such doors and more marble, to the skylighted top, then into our own wee door, out across the terrace, and in again, through the French window of the boudoir-bath where at this hour she can always be found attending to her nakedness—(maybe toning and tinting her nipples with the kid-covered nailbuffer whose loss always causes such a furore) meanwhile sitting in a paste of rose water, pumice and almondmeal on her sponge-covered piano stool, slowly revolving for her bottom-skin’s sake. All the way upstairs, I hold the bawl in, so as to deliver it in full at her feet—which I do just as she looks up from rougeing them. “Aurine! Aurine! Why do there have to be wars!”
“Queenie’s questions are always personal,” Oscar says later.
“And why not?” says Aurine. “A sense of proportion is everything.”
Every girl starts out in the same impossible situation, right? Home! But how’s a girl to leave home in the normal way, when the place is a love nest of illicit love love love already?
Look at it now, blushing up at that helicopter in the afterglow! In my real youth, before puberty, I used to wave at them. Used to think they knew everything, those penthouse butterflies. And every house on the route. Maybe they do; don’t they work for the world’s most experienced airline?
Yoo-hoo, Pan A-Am-m! Remember me? I’m the same kid used to spyglass you from down here—that rose-covered farmhouse-type penthouse job just two blocks across the air from the Central Park Sheep Meadow, where you used to land the President. Want to bring me somebody—I don’t know who? Want to airlift me out of here, I don’t know where? I’m a big chick now, ready to be an old man’s plaything or a young man’s darling. In three years, I’ll even be voting….
Bye-bye Pan Am, I Ching of the airlines. I may have to go to college, or dive off this roof into a country marriage, or wait my turn for an Onassis, all because you wouldn’t look back. And inside me, I did wave. I’ll wave at any astronaut who’ll answer one routine question: Little love house, house of one’s youth, how do I get out of here? Without just fucking my way out, like everybody else?
Out here on the terrace, the park is sending up all sorts of perfume feels and messages from the real central-heating-and-plumbing plant of the once and future universe. Rooftops always make me feel like a heroine, even though I grew up on one. Comes of being taken early in life to all those matinee plays with verandahs in them; Aurine’s crowd swarmed to those.
From here, you can see at least five other penthouses, though there weren’t that many, once. Not on those two new high-risers on Central Park South, for one thing, where part of the tenants’ kicks, they say, is having a view by blocking other people’s—if you’re an embezzler, you just naturally make for there. Our little sky-village, that maybe only I keep track of, gets a new bunch of cloud-tenants every time two investment realtors rub together. Six new forty-five-story towers are going up at this moment, between just behind the Plaza, to the northeast, and to the southwest just in front of the MONY tower, which has also lost that little Broadway church which used to crouch behind it like Old Dog Tray. But by flicking an eyelash, I can still see a four-block radius of old-time residents—I gave up the binoculars a long time back.
“Why, you people live in Central Park South’s back yard!” a man once says to my aunt, meanwhile leaning over our parapet in that sporting way the garden-floor types do. “Or, are they in yours?” He’s saying out loud what I often wondered. At going on sixteen, I was just then being fascinated to find out sometimes people do. I still am. What may I be saying out loud that other people only think?
“Eh?” he says, wheeling around to me with a great air of sudden notice, though at the time I am quite a tall pre-sixteen. He’d been pretty busy noticing my aunt of course; maybe that’s why Oscar brings them, a constant stream of what she calls “Oscar’s art guests”—men who appreciate beauty, and Aurine. She tends to dismiss them with the plainest hint that she considers them unsafe, for whom and what is made clear. Oscar and I watch these brush-offs with pride; they’re expected. She’s our joint treasure. But it all begins in her being Oscar’s. And ends there. She wants us both to know that. Him because to make a man feel sole possessor is part of her professional training. And me because, though she half-denies this, it is someday to be part of mine.
“Eh, little lady?” says the man. He has a face like a mastiff, and maybe’s caught onto some of this. “Who’s in who’s back yard? What do
you
think?”
Trouble is, I never can decide. Our building is on the Mayor’s landmark list; compared to us, the ones that face north to the park, Essex and Hampshire House, the New York Athletic Club, all that muck, are johnnies come very late. The old joint was here first—and the old joint faces south. So aren’t all of them in our back yard?
But it’s only by courtesy—and legal setback—that we still see the park, not entire like we used to, only little swatches of it. At first look, only the long, tree-pillowed path up Central Park West to the Beresford. But then, if you move way east on the terrace, suddenly all up Fifth Avenue. The mysterious east, all the way to the Bronx! By courtesy of the wild, jumbled surprises in a city’s upper air. Still, we’re the ones who have to move to see it. So aren’t
we
behind
them
?
I’m so glad he sees the problem, I blurt more than I mean to. “But that’s one of
my
questions!”
Everybody laughs. But you always get something by letting a real feeling drop, even if you haven’t intended it. I see Aurine hadn’t known I had any she couldn’t answer. And that Oscar already knows I have a lot.
Just then two of our neighbors, a couple who have a terrace halfway up that nameless building to the northwest about a block and a half away, come out on it. They grow things, you can tell the seasons by them, and that they’re devoted. Things get much homier, over toward Eighth Avenue. Our guest sees me watching them. “We call them the Doves,” I say. “John and Mary. Because they’re a love pair. And because we never see them in the street.”
“My God—suburbia!” says the man, I never got his name. Once in awhile, though Oscar himself doesn’t see it, I’ve a feeling the men he brings aren’t giving their real ones. “Ever speak to the ones you do see?”
“No, it wouldn’t work out.”
“Oh?” He gives me a sharper look, from that doggy face. “Who are some more?”
“Look down there.” I point at an older terrace, low down across Fifty-Eighth. It’s been screened-in lately, but there’s still nothing on it but the feeder for the Dane. “She’s blonde and tough, German we think, around forty-eight. Always wears beige. Whittled-down trousers and wraparound glasses, old ski-and-Garbo stuff.” She’s always on the street, buying a newspaper at the stand on Seventh—or in the park. Once I got near enough to read a charm bracelet, halfway up her collection, that said
URSULA
. Which fits fine, but is enough. “Oscar and I call her The General’s Girl Friend. She sometimes talks, but only to the fags with the really big dogs. We think the General’s been dead a long time.” And now her dog isn’t a Dane anymore.
“Really. I gather they weren’t a love pair.” He squinted down over a passing pigeon. “What dya feed the livestock up here, Queenie? Cocktail nuts?”
“Nothing.” We discourage them. Building rules for one thing, though everybody knows the grocery downstairs stocks feed for a few old lady rebels’ windowsills. And for me once. Who Aurine let keep the dirty one flew in my bedroom, as well as all the kittens and pups I might yearn for, never telling me how the pipi and shit went against her French ways. Oh it’s been a happy childhood all right.
“Nothing? For shame. What kind of a village is this?” And he reaches over for a handful of Oscar’s favorite pistachios and throws them over the side.
We all freeze. Strictest rule bar none, even climbing, from the time I was first let stay alone out here. Up here, a pebble becomes a missile. Straight across from us, in the newest high-riser over there, is the largest terrace yet—though a cheap crowd lived there then, junk piled back of their bedroom draperies….Beginning terracers can be funny even when they’re nice; they’re like people who think private houses are private….But like Oscar says, that kind are New York’s scariest—corporation hipsters on a two-year stand and expense-account bread, next year the vice-presidency in Phoenix. The kid rode a two-wheeler round and round, and the week before he was dropping rocks on cars. We called the police, of course, though we didn’t give our name. We’re citizens.
“Sorry,” the man says when he sees us. “Broke the house rule, did I? Guess I ought to be on my way. But what a dear house. That chimney, and the oval window. Duplex, too, isn’t it?” He passes his eye over the black-and-white awnings from Normandy, torn now, and the espaliers that died, and the boxbushes due for burlap pretty soon now, that everyone advised Aurine no. “I never saw anything that reminded me more of Cornwall. Not even on Bleecker Street.”
“Good-bye,” Aurine says at once. It wasn’t that she minded him. She was smiling, though I wasn’t sure she saw the joke. It’s just that she never urges any man to stay. Not even Oscar. Besides being very literal, as most all the beauties in our set are.
“’Bye, Mr. Selwyn,” he says. Those who didn’t know my uncle well enough to first name him always interested me; they were from outside. Oscar was running a lecture bureau just then, his usual sideline when he’s brokest. This man could be the big-game hunter, or the ex-Commie ex-Catholic convert to Zen, or maybe the dolphin expert. He wasn’t the pygmy or the Navaho, I could see that. “’Bye Queenie. I like your village.”