Jami Attenberg - Saint Mazie

Then I realized what I was waiting for. I wanted Tee to show up and walk with me, whisper in my ear, tell me which man was injured and needed my help and which one to let alone, he’s sleeping, just needs to rest for the night. I’ve felt that way before. Not most nights, not anymore anyway. But looking back at you made me remember her, how she walked right next to me on the streets of the Lower East Side. In this city we fight for our space, but Tee was never afraid to be up close.

When he got to the part where he’d managed to lose it all through no fault of his own, I pressed another nickel in his hand and left him. He blessed me, and I blessed him. Our frail blessings. Then I walked up the Bowery, heading toward home. I was with her and without her at the same time. I emptied my pockets of everything they had in them. I didn’t want one cent left at the end of the night.

Excerpt from the unpublished autobiography

of Mazie Phillips-Gordon

I’ll admit sometimes it’s peaceful to watch a man passed out on the street, snoring, curled up, that last lick of whiskey still on their lips. It’s hard to tell if they’re passed out from pleasure or pain, but my prayers for them always are that it’s boozed-up bliss. I never want to wake them up when they’re like that. It wouldn’t be fair. They spent all night getting there.

Phillip Tekverk

I suppose I was careless with her.

Excerpt from the unpublished autobiography

of Mazie Phillips-Gordon

Flophouses are just that, a place you go to flop face-first. There’s only a bit more comfort in sleeping there than on the streets. They’ve got bugs and mold, and sheets like paper and mattresses that suck you in like a dirty old hole in the ground. But they’ve got showers, if you’re the kind who cares about showering, and they’re warmer than the streets in the winter. And sometimes a warm bed is all it takes to make a man feel like he’s champion of the world.

Lydia Wallach

And I wanted to tell you that I was glad that I finally unpacked all of those boxes. A lot of it was garbage, and I just threw it away, but some of it was useful, and even triggered a nice memory or two. So it was good that you asked me these questions, it was good that you wanted me to look. I just wanted to say thanks for that.

Pete Sorensen

Do you remember that day we went down to the Navy Yard? And I pointed to that gap between the fence and the sidewalk? I said that was the exact spot I found the diary but I lied. I couldn’t remember where. I just thought you’d feel better thinking you knew it. I didn’t feel like there was any harm in lying. But now I want you to know: I lied.

And then we played that game where we tried to figure out how that box got there. Like how does something from the 1930s in Manhattan end up on the Brooklyn waterfront in 1999? My best guess was someone was cleaning out her apartment after she died and it ended up stuck in the trunk of a car for a good long while until the car was impounded by the city. But of course we ended up talking about diary thieves and stolen cars and carrier pigeons for a while. You know, you’re just really incredibly good at coming up with elaborate scenarios, Nadine. I never met anyone who knew how to complicate things like you do.

Phillip Tekverk

Ultimately what she delivered to me was unusable. First of all, it was handwritten. I mean, you saw it. I realize it’s a copy but I think you get the gist of it. She had been a drinker for many, many years, and I’m presuming she had the shakes. I hadn’t noticed it whenever she and I met, but that’s really the only explanation for the appearance of it. The papers even smelled as if it had been written in a bar. What little I could translate was entirely useless. She just went on and on about these men, how to care for them, their struggles, their essence. What would I have done with that? I wanted to publish cutting little novels about humanity that people would brag about having read to their friends at dinner, downtown, on a Saturday night. Not a treatise on the care and feeding of the homeless. I kept it though, like I kept every piece of paper that passed across my desk. It felt like something, an artifact.

Pete Sorensen

You let me hold your hand that day and then I put my arm around you and you put your hand around my waist. We kept finding new ways to wrap ourselves around each other. Then we walked down the waterfront to Williamsburg and sat at a dive bar outside on the patio and drank beer and watched the boats. It was a sunny and cool spring day, and it felt like we were a million miles from home, and I thought, “She’s my girl. This is my girl.”

Phillip Tekverk

And I was cold to her. I was too cold. I regret that now. I didn’t even do her the courtesy of coming to meet her in person. I called her at her cage and said I wouldn’t be able to work with her. I said, “No one is interested in this story.” A different kind of a person would have known what to do with it. I was not that person. I am not that person. It is important to know your strengths and weaknesses and work with them and around them. I was too young to realize it then, but by now I see it, and it’s this: I have very little imagination. I think she knew that, because before she hung up on me she said, “Lucky for you, the lord loves all fools.”

Excerpt from the unpublished autobiography

of Mazie Phillips-Gordon

All I ever needed was my walking stick and my flashlight and I felt safe. No one would touch me or trouble me. They all know my name. They knew I was there to help them. Most of them mean no harm. They just have no home.

Phillip Tekverk

Fannie called me the next day. She was furious about my treatment of Mazie. She said, “I will destroy you.” And she did! [Laughs.] For a little while, anyway. She got me fired from my job, and all the new friends I’d made dropped me. But it turned out not to matter in the end because I had my father buy a small, failing publishing company for me that I turned into less of a failure for many years, putting out war sagas by middle-aged men who had never seen a day of combat. Then when I retired my underlings started publishing experimental fiction popular with cerebral midwestern graduate students. For which they win many awards. For which I take all the credit at dinner parties, when I am invited to them. Which is still often. And then six months later Joseph Mitchell wrote about Mazie in the New Yorker . So I guess Fannie found the right person to write about her after all.

Elio Ferrante

This was easier information to find than I thought it would be. Jeanie Fallow was buried beside her husband, Ethan Fallow, in a cemetery in Queens. Rosie was buried next to Al Flicker, also in a cemetery in Queens, but not in the same one, as Rosie and Al were buried in a Jewish cemetery and Jeanie and Ethan were buried in a nondenominational one. Mazie was buried in Boston, in a family plot, where her mother, father, and aunt were all buried. If you want to know the names, I can e-mail them to you, but I can’t remember them now.

Pete Sorensen

And it doesn’t matter anymore that you don’t love me and maybe never did. If you hate me, it’s fine, but I hope that you don’t, because I don’t hate you, at least not anymore. If you met someone new, it’s fine. If you’re obsessed with your work and that’s why you don’t call me anymore, that’s fine. Just disappear, it’s fine. No one understands being obsessed with their work more than me. I love my shop. I know what it’s like. I’m glad you have something to care about at last besides your goddamn haircut. It’s good to have something to care about. But you can’t keep the diary. It’s mine. I didn’t give it to you. I loaned it to you. Whatever you’re doing with it, you need to be done. And especially if you’re not in my life anymore, you need to be done.