Jami Attenberg - Saint Mazie

George Flicker

We had a mind to take over the world, Alice and me. She was going to help provide better medical care to women in New York City. She had seen so many immigrants on the Lower East Side show up at her hospital, in her emergency room, with all kinds of diseases that could have been tended to much sooner, if they had spoken English, if they’d had someone to look out for them. A clinic for women; that was her aim. My plan was to own every building on the Lower East Side and to make them livable. Don’t get me wrong, I knew that was impossible. If I could even own one in my lifetime I was going to be one lucky fellow. But if I could just have one to start with I promised myself I’d be the best landlord this city had ever seen. Which I assure you most landlords out there, that is not their mission. So I married my girl and off she went to medical school and we saw each other when we could. We worked very hard for a long time to achieve our dreams. She was my best friend. She was beautiful and brilliant. Her mind and my mind together, we were the tops.

Mazie’s Diary, October 15, 1934

It’s all over with George but he won’t tell me why. He’s never home when he used to be home. I’m not going to track him down. I’ve got better things to do with my time, places to go, people to see.

Fine, he doesn’t want me anymore. I won’t chase after a man.

Mazie’s Diary, November 1, 1934

Closer to forty than thirty. What happens when I get to the other side? Do I tip over?

Mazie’s Diary, November 15, 1934

Cold snap. I bought twenty warm wool blankets and handed them out to whoever needed them on the streets. It was pitch dark, only a handful of stars in the sky. Jeanie came with me to help. She brought with her a floppy, coffee-colored hat, a silky red ribbon gathered at the side of it in an enormous bow. It was a real party, this hat. She told me she hadn’t brought much home with her from out west, but somehow it had made the trip. She had no occasion to wear it anymore, though. She couldn’t bear to look at it any longer, but she couldn’t throw it away either. I put it on, and the sides of it collapsed gently around my face and neck. Musk, smoke, California.

Jeanie said: You look very fetching.

She was wearing her hair in braids like she used to when she was a teenager. Her skin looked better, it glowed like the moon again. She rambled on about her life, how everything was fine, great, better than ever, and I was nodding and believing her. She asked me if I was listening and I snapped to it. She’s helping Ethan out with the horses, and by the end of the day, she smells like dung.

She said: But so does he, so that makes two of us, smelling like shit.

I asked her if she missed dancing and she told me she doesn’t even remember who she was before, and it’s easier that way. I got distracted for a second, trying to remember what the moon used to mean to me. Now it’s just another light to guide me while I look after these fellas.

Mazie’s Diary, November 18, 1934

George told me he’s in love with a woman named Alice. A good woman. She’ll be a doctor someday.

I said: You find love, you take it.

Phillip Tekverk

In the spring of 1939 I met Fannie Hurst across the street from the Venice Theater, at a place called the King Kong Bar & Grill, the name of it being the most significant thing about the establishment. The bartender seemed to know Fannie. I asked if she were a regular patron. She said she stopped in from time to time when she was downtown. She said, “I like to have a quick one by myself sometimes. They don’t seem to mind what you do down here. In my neighborhood they whisper a bit more. I wouldn’t call it whispering so much as talking loudly to anyone who might listen. It’s not very polite. Not that I can complain, I’m a gossip like the rest of them, like all writers, like all people with too much time on their hands. And I don’t mind anyway. You get to a certain age, let them whisper, let them talk, let them scream. Fannie Hurst likes to hang out downtown in bars by herself. Doesn’t everyone wish they could do that?”

I said that I could and did all the time, and she said, “But you’re a man.” And even though she was nearly thirty years older than I was, and an affluent, successful woman, she recognized a gap between our privilege. “Sometimes a girl likes to have a quiet drink away from it all. Read into it however you like.” I noticed then she was drinking whiskey, straight. It was one in the afternoon. “Mazie understands,” she said. “She’s a solo artist. A diva. And she’s a warrior queen. Did you know they call her the Queen of the Bowery? I’ll never be the queen of anything.”

“I’ve been to one of your dinner parties,” I said. “You’re a queen, don’t worry.”

Mazie had just had her appendix out and was no longer drinking hard alcohol, so we purchased her some beer, which at the time you could take away in a cardboard container. Together we crossed the street to this run-down theater Mazie called home. A group of bums shifted around in front of the theater. Before we approached the cage Fannie said to me, “Prepare for greatness.”

George Flicker

I’ll fill you in on the good stuff, if you care to know it. The good stuff of my life. I married Alice, as I said, and she became a doctor, an obstetrician. She worked at Presbyterian for a long time, decades, but also she volunteered at a clinic downtown one day a week, working with immigrant women. She did that until we had our son, Mel, named after my father, and once he was old enough she went back to volunteer work again, and there’s a fund set up there now in her name because she was so instrumental in developing its growth. So I couldn’t be any prouder of my wife, Alice. She was a personal hero of mine.

Mel went on to have three children, Max, Miranda, and David, and they each have had two children and they are all gorgeous, just gorgeous. It is never a dull moment at the holidays, I’ll tell you that much. I went on to own not one, not two, not three, but five apartment buildings on the Lower East Side. I know, can you believe it? I wouldn’t believe it myself only I know what kind of work I put into it.

One of the buildings I bought was actually the tenement I grew up in, all crammed into that tiny apartment with my family. It was the fourth building I bought. I had to wait that long for it to be up for sale. I had my eye on it forever. I probably had my eye on it when I was five years old and didn’t even know what that meant yet.

And what I did when I bought it is, I tore everything out. I gutted the place, and I made each floor its own apartment, except for the top two floors, which were joined together in one duplex, which is where Alice and I lived for many years. Each apartment is full of light and space and air. All the things we’re entitled to, or should be anyway.

Oh, it’s tremendous, you should see it. Call my grandson, sweetheart, and have him invite you over. Tell him I sent you. The skylight in the bedroom is something else. When we finished construction and finally moved in, Alice and I would just sit in bed for hours staring up at the sky. We’d go to bed a few hours early and just lay there looking at the moon and the stars, holding hands and talking. She passed in that bed exactly that way. I was next to her. My beautiful Alice, my gorgeous girl. She was blind by then so I told her what I was seeing. There were clouds that day. Winter clouds. It was January. I said, “Alice, the sun is out barely, and the clouds are gray and blue and they’ve got a kind of outline around them and there’s a bit of white from the sun and it looks like it’s going to be a cold, cold day.” And then she let go of my hand and was gone.