J. Donleavy - Wrong Information is Being Given Out at Princeton

How deep is your affection

Tell me soon so I ’ ll know

Is it skin-deep, oceans-deep

Or shallow like a piece of glass

As darkness attempts to descend upon this city, the lights as they always do, light and glow back up high into the sky. And I did go try impromptu again to meet the lady in the top of the Hampshire House, but they wouldn’t let me in without an appointment. Even though their attitude suggested that by the look of me it was inconceivable that I might try and steal one of her valuable paintings. And now on the corner of Canal and Mulberry streets, a yellow-and-black-and-white Checker cab squealing to a stop. Sylvia, minus her suitcase, climbing in. As I follow. The destination eliciting a preferred polite attitude from the driver. His ears alive to the silence of our conversation. Up and over to First Avenue. Through the Gashouse District, once a neighborhood of shabbiness and grime where the Irish once lived later joined by the Germans and Jews. At Twenty-sixth Street, passing by block after block, the massive grim complex of Bellevue Hospital. Treating the sick and injured, who on stretchers pour in its doors. And where, along its massive corridors, the dead under their white sheets are wheeled away into the cold silence of the morgue in there beyond the windows. Without a relative or friend, unmourned, get given to a private embalming school for practice. No sorrow so deep nor anguish so torn. The living screams inside the barred psychiatric wards. Where each face must desperately look to find a kindly smile. The kidney of New York ridding the city of its waste. A derrick lowering unclaimed bodies and amputated arms and legs into a barge moored on the river. Taking them to Hart Island for burial in a pauper’s grave beneath the legend HE CALLETH HIS CHILDREN BY NAME.

The taxi turning into these emptier streets, where the rich live on Sutton Place. And other socialites calleth by telephone. The windows of the buildings polished, gleaming. The acolyte doormen who adorn their entrance lobbies. In this my city. My town. My streets. Where I was born and grew up. Defiled by these pretentious interlopers with their sacks of gold hidden somewhere, who use precious space as a dormitory to come and occasionally play in. I detoured one day up the wide steps of the New York Public Library to find out more. And, heels clicking along its great marble halls, went to inquire how this street we now headed for had achieved its mystique of becoming such a bastion for the elite. Where the residents came to sit in quiet composure to defecate and ladies to urinate in the carved marble toilet bowls. In the vast reading room of the library and sitting an hour at a desk, I read in the pages of The New York City Guide for 1939 that this so unobtrusively situated location on a rocky high overlooking the swift-flowing East River was named after Effingham Sutton, an owner of a line of clipper ships. Here the East River briefly widened and yachts were moored, and the slum children came to swim from a wooden pier at the end of this dead-end street.

The taxi drawing up at the front entrance of this somberly elegant building. Sylvia, who complains of no money, giving the driver one of her new crisp twenty-dollar bills from the bank built like a mansion over on Madison Avenue and, after handing back a big tip, stuffing all the change in a secret side pocket of her mink coat. Follow the rich. As I do in trepidatious anticipation as one approaches the mausoleumlike solemnity of this entrance. The chiseled stone. The perfume scent. The polished brass. The green-uniformed doorman holding open the door.

“Good evening, Miss Sylvia. How nice to see you. Good evening, sir.”

No recognition of our marriage in his greeting, you bastard. Or that Sylvia had ever recently been staying at Sutton Place. At least he didn’t say, Hey, bud, where do you think you’re going. And don’t try to steal the flowers off the marble table in the lobby. And why don’t you get your zoot-suit shoes shined.

The elevator operator smiling at Sylvia and at least a little more polite, nodding his head at me. Takes the shiny brass knob in his white-gloved hand and turns it downward. And upward we go. In the darkly paneled chamber smelling of lavender wax. Past doors on each floor. And so that New Yorkers can avoid bad luck, no thirteenth floor. And no need to worry, as we’re not going that high. Slowing gently to a stop. At the Witherspoon Triumphingtons’ private entrance on their private floor. Step out into the glowing light of this domed vestibule. With its pillars flanking marble busts in niches around the wall. Philosophers upon their plinths. Drusilla standing there. In the center of this white marble area.

“Why hello. Didn’t expect you quite this early. But come in.”

Sylvia flinging her fur onto a chair. A stooped white-haired butler in a crimson brass-buttoned waistcoat emerging from the shadows. Takes my torn overcoat and Sylvia’s mink. Drusilla, a long ivory cigarette holder waving as she leads along a long hall to a vast drawing room. She’d only very occasionally smoked but always liked to have something in her hand. Just walking on the gleaming parquet from the domed entrance hall, you could see in the different directions, all the doors, and that ten families could easily live here and squeeze in a few more families of their relatives, and still have room for family wars. And with every architectural nuance to make you uncomfortably feel you were something the cat dragged in.

“Sylvia, I know, hates daiquiris. Even though she has them. But you’ll have your usual grapefruit juice, won’t you, my dear. What would you like, Stephen.”

“I’ll have a beer.”

“Gilbert does make wonderful daiquiris. He will be along in a moment. Poor old fellow, he’s only just recovering from the flu. He is, you know, rather getting on, takes an afternoon nap. I’m having a daiquiri.”

As we sit surveying the array of canapés in the sitting room, the stooped-over Gilbert ferrying in his tray of drinks. Out of his black coat and now in his white, the light flashing on the brass buttons of his crimson satin waistcoat. These Witherspoon Triumphingtons have a butler in the country, a butler in town. The hoot of a tugboat on the river below. Out the windows, the lights of Brooklyn in the distance. Walls along the hall decorated with etchings and glass cabinets full of snuffboxes. And in this room one or two fabled paintings I have actually seen pictures of in books. A portrait of a woman in a great black hat and black gown holding a small bouquet of purple flowers and a hound on a lead in front of her.

“Ah, Stephen, I see you’re looking at that painting. Are you perhaps a connoisseur.”

“Hardly that, ma’am. But, as the saying goes, I know what I like and I like that painting. Might it by any manner of chance be a Boldini.”

“My, you are a connoisseur.”

“Well, I have now and again visited a few galleries and looked at a few auction catalogs.”

Drusilla stands and moves to serve canapés. A curvaceously stunning figure revealed in a long dress of raw silk. Décolletage exposing the gentle outline of her creamy soft breasts. The delicate fragrance of her perfume. One’s own mother, by dint of a large family, always seemed to smell of her kitchen and had no choice but to be in an apron all her life. Sewing and mending, she further enveloped herself with her children, keeping them around her like a great protective cloak. And was never to be found in restaurants for dinner or in nightclubs all night for champagne. The Irish always like to say they worked their fingers to the bone and endured every sacrifice for their progeny. Certainly my mother’s hands were calloused and certainly were less tapered and fingernails less long than this elegant Drusilla’s, upon whose wrists diamond bracelets glitter blue-white and bright.