About the Author
Valerie Ann Leff lives in Connecticut, where she teaches at the Westport Writers' Workshop.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Better Homes and Husbands
By Leff, Valerie AnnSt. Martin's Griffin
Copyright © 2005 Leff, Valerie Ann
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0312330634
The Building
On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the budding is lime-stone and red brick, a heavy front door of black iron tracery, a gray canvas canopy with its white-lettered address, Nine-eighty Park Avenue. Here, wealthy New Yorkers occupy grand apartments with their children, cooks and maids. A super lives in the basement, managing doormen, handymen. Throughout the year, drivers in long shiny cars wait by the curb. Nannies push strollers to Central Park, and delivery boys bring gro-ceries around to the service entrance. There are dinner parties, guests, cocktails. Greetings exchanged in the lobby, gossip whispered in the back elevator.
Over time, the building changes. Children grow up, go off to prep school, college. Or they flee, disappointing their par-ents. Residents die or sometimes move away. An apartment is vacant, and new families up the ante on multimillion-dollar bids and apply to the co-op board. Many are turned down. Families in the building interact-or they don't. Over time, they watch one another, perceive and misperceive, play out feuds of class and caste with ferocious etiquette. There are quiet revolutions, and the inhabitants of the building adjust-, some gladly, some with dismay.
In 980 Park Avenue, during the last three decades of the twentieth century, stories have layered the walls of high--ceilinged apartments like coats of plaster, wallpaper, paint; voices linger like the scent of spices in the kitchen cabinets. A suicide, a strike, a seventeen-year-old girl pregnant. A scan-dalous arrest in the late 1980s. A lawsuit barely averted by the co-op board. No one knows the whole history, and the truth is understood in pieces by one resident or another, by a daugh-ter, a friend of the family, by a doorman. The truth is told in stories, in voices tinged with opinion, envy, regret. The truth is kept in the building, never completely revealed.
The building is brick, mortar, limestone, lath and plaster. Plumbing and wires run through it. The building is also stories and lives, concurrent and overlapping. On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the building, 980 Park Avenue, holds these stories within its walls, silent, like a book...
i0
Claudia Bloom: Trader Vic's
-1970-
There used to be a hallway in the Plaza that led to Trader Vic's. You walked past creamy white doors with gilded moldings, crystal wall sconces, and turned right, down a flight of red--and-gold-carpeted stairs. Then, suddenly, you found yourself in Polynesia. The carpet became green, a giant canoe hung from the ceiling and the walls were draped with fishing nets. Green, blue and rose-colored lights illuminated starfish and oars. Two tiki statues-blocky, life-size, carved wooden men, dark brown and gleaming-stood guard on either side of the stairway landing. The sound of soft waves and South Seas melodies filled the air.
On a dare, in full view of the coat-check lady, my best friend, Madeline Sapphire, bit the left-hand tiki statue on his chunky rectangular penis. I screeched, "Penicopter!" We held hands and ran, giggling all the way to the maitre d's podium. Madeline's parents, Dick and Lauren Sapphire, were waiting for us, together with her little brother, Ritchie. I patted Ritchie on the head and said hello. We didn't mind Ritchie as much as two eight-year-old girls might disdain a younger boy. After all, he had invented the word "penicopter" the summer before at Westhampton Beach. We even gave him Batman's part when-ever we played Catwoman, though he usually tired pretty quickly of being tied up.
My mother had followed us into Trader Vic's, and when she caught up with us, she reprimanded us as severely as she could while keeping a straight face. "Claudia! Madeline!" She pulled us aside and, leaning one hand on a large tribal drum, whis-pered that she could not imagine where this obsession with penises had come from. We solemnly told her that we didn't know. "Well, I don't know, either!" my mother said. For the past four years, since my father died, she had been desperately trying to find a new husband. Maybe that had something to do with the penis thing?
At the big round table, Dick Sapphire sat between my mother and Lauren. We children filled in the other side of the circle. Dick immediately ordered drinks and some appetizers. Within minutes, a small hibachi was lit, and platters of butter-fly shrimp and cho-cho beef sticks were slammed down onto our lazy Susan. Madeline, Ritchie and I roasted cho-cho sticks over the blue flames, then dunked them-sizzling and sputter-ing-into glasses of ice water. We stuck them back in the fire, and they steamed. We nibbled on barbecued beef and sucked the crystal-rock-sugar swizzle sticks that came in the grownups' drinks. When we finished our appetizers-the only part of the meal we liked, since the main courses were always gooey, mixed-up messes of unrecognizable meats and strange vegetables-Madeline and I left the table. We ran out past the drums to the powder room, which was not Polynesian but reg-ular Plaza pink-and-green floral, with pink liquid soap. The return from the powder room gave Madeline a crack at the other tiki statue. Just as she bit it, an older couple arrived at the bottom of the stairs from the lobby above. The wife, in a silver fox stole, glared at us, and we fled back into the restau-rant, nearly tripping a Chinese busboy who held a huge tray of dirty dishes. Though our families came to Trader Vic's nearly every Sunday night, no one who worked there ever smiled at us.
Since there were six of us, Dick Sapphire had the doorman whistle for a Checker cab, then handed him a tip and sat up front. Madeline and I grabbed the two folding jump seats, sticking Ritchie in the backseat with our mothers. We rode to Madison and Eighty-seventh Street, where my mother and I got out. The others would cross over and head downtown to the Sapphires' duplex at Park and Eighty-third.
The Sapphires were richer than we were, and their apart-ment was fancier than ours. Their lobby had heavy scrolled ironwork doors, burgundy leather chairs trimmed with brass nail heads and a marble fireplace with an electric log. They had a doorman and an elevator man who knew how to land exactly level at their floor, without adjusting the car up or down. The duplex was enormous, with high ceilings and an Oriental-carpeted staircase. Madeline and I would have loved to bump down the steps on our bottoms or slide on the thick mahogany banister, except we were never allowed to.
Once I asked my mother how much money the Sapphires had, and she said, "Oh, millions."
"Well, how much do you have?"
"About half a million."
"And me?"
"Your trust is worth a little over two hundred and fifty thousand."
"What about Millie?" Millie was my nurse.
"She probably doesn't have as much.'
"Like around one hundred thousand?"
"Something like that."
0
Millie lived in the third bedroom of our apartment, and on her days off she stayed with her sister in the Bronx. She cleaned our house, fed our Siamese cat, Surpy, and changed the litter box. If my mother went out, Millie cooked dinner and let me watch Lawrence Welk in her room. She could do the Irish jig. When the Shannon Sisters came on and the fid-dling started, we jumped off her bed and hopped about on the shag carpet, jigging until we were sweating and thirsty. Millie also sewed her own clothes, and for Christmas that year she sewed me a white silk queen costume with sequined trim and a blue velvet cape.
Madeline Sapphire was jealous of my queen costume and my nurse. In her home, the maids kept quitting, and she and Ritchie were left in the hands of a series of West Indian baby-sitters, all with humongous breasts and bad tempers. When the Sapphires finally found someone permanent, it was Greta, a Swiss nanny from Grindelwald who made the kids eat calves' liver and red cabbage whenever Dick and Lauren went out.
Even when the Sapphires were home, the food wasn't good, because Lauren was always on a diet. The only soda they had was Tab, and one afternoon she told Madeline and me, "If you spread cottage cheese on a piece of toast and sprinkle it with cinnamon sugar, it tastes just like cheesecake."
Our household was a lair of dietary permissiveness, and even though Madeline and I went to different schools, she spent as much time in our apartment as her parents would al-low. We ate every junk food invented-Ho Hos, and Twinkies, fluffernutter sandwiches with the crusts trimmed off, Ding Dongs and Pop-Tarts and Funny Bones. My mother knew how to make real ice-cream sodas. She shook up a bottle of club soda and sprayed it into a glass filled with Hershey's syrup, half-and-half and vanilla ice cream. She cooked us Stouffer's macaroni and cheese, Ronzoni wagon wheels with meat sauce, Swanson turkey TV dinners.
Madeline and I baked Betty Crocker cupcakes dyed turquoise with food coloring. We hardened cookies in my Easy-Bake oven over the heat of a hundred-watt lightbulb. We served each other hors d'oeuvres, spreading chocolate frosting from the can onto Triscuits and Wheat Thins. We sat at our kitchen table with three open gallons of Baskin-Robbins ice cream-peppermint, rocky road, pink bubblegum. We dipped our spoons into the cartons, sucked off the ice cream, spit out the bubblegum bits and saved them to chew later.
We laughed about bras, boys and penises. We wrapped our skinny bodies in silk scarves from a trunk of my mother's dis-carded clothing and then stripped slowly in the living room to the song "Strawberry Fields Forever."
Before she married my father, my mother was a fashion man-nequin and the swimsuit fit model for Jantzen. Yet Millie told me that while my mother was surely an attractive woman -with her chestnut-colored flip, full lips and hourglass figure- Lauren Sapphire was a true beauty. Lauren had black bouffant hair, pale skin and blue eyes, and she reminded Millie of the black-Irish lovelies she had known growing up in Sligo. Even if my mother was not a true beauty, she managed to go out on plenty of dates-maybe because she was nicer than Lauren Sapphire. When she came home late, she peeked in on me in bed and kissed me. Sometimes during the winter, she would drape her perfume-scented mink coat over my blanket, and I would sleep the rest of the night under the sweet-smelling, glossy fur.
One of my mother's dates I'd named Baldy. He was a sur-geon, very intelligent, my mother said, and she wondered why I'd chosen to pick on him, since Dick Sapphire was bald, too. But Dick's head was round and tan, and his ring of dark gray hair was always combed back neatly, turning up into tiny curls at his neck like a baby duck's. There was a perfect circle of smooth bronzed skin on the top of his head that made you want to smack a big kiss right in the middle of it. Baldy had a tall, shiny, speckled head, slightly pointed, with a lumpy, leath-ery texture like the dinosaur egg in the Museum of Natural History.
Anyway, Baldy didn't last long. One night he came to dinner, and as we were having cocktails, Surpy-who was such a smart cat that she often brought pipe cleaners or cigarettes over to the couch so we might start a game of fetch-padded into the liv-ing room mewling, with a Tampax grasped lightly between her teeth. "She uses those when she bleeds," I told Baldy, and both adults reddened. Somehow my mother recovered the tampon and her poise, but a few minutes later, after Baldy got up to ex-amine the painting that hung over our fireplace, he sat down on the old cane rocker that Surpy always used to sharpen her claws. I guess that was the day Surpy had scratched too much, or maybe Baldy was heavier than he looked, because the rattan gave way and Baldy fell through the seat. He sat stranded, with his butt grazing the floor, like I had the time Ritchie Sapphire left the toilet seat up and I slid through into the water. I laughed so hard I was sent to my room. We didn't see Baldy anymore.
I could tell whether or not my mother liked a date by how nervous she got before he came over. If 20she really liked him, she stuck Kleenex into the underarms of her dress to keep from staining the fabric with sweat. The evening of her date with Bluebeard-an English professor from Columbia-she sat at her dressing table with her sleeveless dress unzipped, pieces of tissue tucked into her bra and sticking out the arm-holes. Bluebeard was coming over for champagne and caviar, and my mother had instructed Millie to drop me off at the Sapphires' for a sleepover. I sat on the edge of my mother's bed, watching her draw black lines around her eyes to make them pointy, like a cat's. Then she curled her eyelashes. She al-ways kept a few rollers in at the crown of her head until the very last moment. She stopped before brushing lipstick on her mouth to say, "Honey, will you ask Millie to open the caviar and put it in the little crystal bowl on the counter?"
I ran to the kitchen but then called back into my mother's room, "Millie can't find it."
My mother came in, clip-clopping on her high heels, zip-ping up her dress, tissue still sticking out from the armholes. She said, "He'll be here any minute."
"I'm sorry, Rosalind. I don't know what caviar looks like." Millie and my mother both peered into the refrigerator.
"Well, I put it here right on this top shelf. It was in a flat glass jar, about so big." My mother made a circle with her fingers.
All at once Millie's face looked strange. Her eyes dropped and shifted back and forth, as if she were sweeping the white linoleum floor with her gaze. "Did the jar have a gold metal top?"
"Yes!" I could see my mother getting impatient. She pulled the curlers out of her hair, stacking one on each finger of her left hand.
Millie covered her mouth. "Oh my heavens' " she mumbled.
My mother fanned herself with the handful of curlers and stared at her. Color rose in Millie's cheeks like a juice stain.
"I...I thought it was for the cat."
"You what!"
"Well, it was in one of those little jars. And ... and it was all black and smelled so awful . . ."
All three of us looked down the galley of cabinets to the end of the kitchen floor, where, indeed, in Surpy's ceramic bowl, was a dark smear and two or three tiny black eggs. My mother screeched, "That was forty dollars' worth of beluga caviar!" She looked like she might cry.
Millie offered to run down and buy another jar. She would pay for it herself. Gristede's had closed, but the A&P would still be open.
She'd run down right now and be back in two seconds.
The buzzer rang. It was the doorman announcing a Dr. Sil-verman. "Yes, Brian," said my mother. "Please. Tell him to wait in the lobby a minute. I'll buzz you back." She hung up. "Jesus Christ, my hair!"
"Shall I go to the store?"
"They don't sell beluga caviar at the A&P! Forget it. Forget it! Just take Claudia and go!"
Millie was lucky she could even grab her purse before my mother pushed us both out the back door. Millie rang for the service elevator with her head bowed, shaking it again and again. Just as the elevator arrived, we heard through our door that terrible sound a cat makes when it has eaten rich food and too much of it. "Ulack-ulack-ulack-ulack-ulack!" I could per-fectly imagine Surpy's spasms and the stinky black puddle gushing from her jaws. My mother's high heels clip-clopped back into the kitchen, and then we heard, "Shit!"
Millie whisked me into the elevator and pushed the button for the lobby. At about the halfway point, our eyes met, and we could contain our laughter no more. Doubled over in the ele-vator car, Millie said between gasps, "I just hope she remem-bers to take the Kleenex out from under her arms."
My mother didn't go on dates the week Dick Sapphire came to stay with us. The phone rang one school night around nine o'clock, and my mother said, "Yes, of course, come over." As she tucked me into bed, she explained that Dick was going to be with us for a couple of days while he and Lauren were "sort-ing things out."
He showed up a few minutes later. Out in the foyer, I heard him say, "Thanks so much, Rosalind. I swear, I must have called five hotels-I couldn't get in anywhere. And Lauren was standing over me screaming bloody murder."
"I know," my mother said. "I could hear it on the phone.'
Dick slept in my mother's room so he could have a private bathroom, and my mother slept on the living room sofa with an extra blanket and pillow. We didn't have our traditional Sunday-night dinner at Trader Vic's that week, and Madeline didn't come over. Dick went home once or twice to visit her and Ritchie. While he was staying with us, he came into my room sometimes to talk.
"Madeline loves Barbie, too." Squatting down, he balanced on his heels. "I'll bet you and she have all the same dolls."
"My Midge is a redhead-hers is brunette. And Madeline has Skipper with lifelike bendable legs. I have Tressy-you press her stomach and her hair grows."
"Um-huh." I didn't know what this man was doing looking at my dolls. He stood up and went back out into the hall.
The last night Dick stayed with us, he woke up the whole household yelling for my mother. "Rosalind!" I ran, and my mother rushed to her room from the couch. Dick stood on top of the bed, his feet planted in the pillows, one arm clutching my mother's headboard to steady himself. He held a closed umbrella in the other hand, extended straight out, as if he were sword-fighting. He wore only a pair of gray silk pajama bot-toms, and his chest was big and sculpted like a Ken doll's, ex-cept Dick's had a thick patch of hair. He looked like a hero. At the foot of the bed was Surpy, her back arched, her fur spiky and her tail pointed to the ceiling. She hissed and emitted soft, low growls.
"Jesus Christ, Rosalind! Get that beast out of here!"
My mother grabbed Surpy, handed her to me and told me to lock her in the powder room. As I was walking out, I heard Dick say, "The damned thing hid under the bed till I turned the light out. Then it jumped up here and attacked me."
When I came home from school the next day, my mother's eyes were puffy, and she was sniffling. Lauren had died during the night. "She took too many sleeping pills," my mother said. "It wasn't really an accident." She packed up Dick's things and gave them to Millie to drop off at the Sapphire's building.
I was sad at first that Lauren had died, because I felt like I was supposed to be sad. But as I lay in bed, I thought about how I'd never liked her that much, and I didn't think I would miss her. I had always liked Dick a lot, and I thought how wonderful it would be if Dick and my mother got married. He could be my father. Madeline and Ritchie could be my sister and brother, Millie could be our nurse, they could fire Greta and we could all live in their duplex on Park. I stayed up late that night, happy, and in my mind I arranged my bedroom furniture into what had been their guest room, sorting my toys and dolls on the built-in shelves.
I had been too young to attend my father's funeral, so Lauren Sapphire's was my first. Frankly, I was disappointed with it. From everything I'd read or seen on television and at the movies, I thought a funeral should be a Gothic affair by the side of a grave on a dark, stormy day. Campbell's Funeral Home on Madison and Eighty-first Street had powder-blue walls, it was clean and there was no coffin in sight. "Honey, Lauren was cremated," my mother whispered. "I'll explain that to you later. Be good, now."
No one was crying in the entrance hall leading to the chapel. Men stood around in groups, in gray or dark blue suits, talking about business or the war in Vietnam. The only way it differed from a cocktail party was that no one held drinks. My mother greeted a few of her friends and chatted with Elsa Arkin. "What a shame to be doing this on such a lovely day," Elsa said. "Well, I guess it would be a shame anytime."
I didn't see Madeline or her father, and I asked my mother where they were.
"They're in a private room just for the family-'
"So shouldn't we-"
"No." My mother shook her head. "Not now."
We stood around for what seemed like ages. Finally, a pair of white double doors opened, and we were ushered into the chapel. My mother led me to a pew on the right side, about a third of the way from the front. I looked for the kneeling benches I'd seen at Millie's church, but there were none. When everyone was seated, some music came on, and then, from a door at the front of the chapel, Dick, Madeline and Ritchie walked in, together with their grandmother Ethel and other relatives I'd met at their holiday parties. The Sapphire family filled the first two pews, which had been roped off and left empty for them. As Madeline crossed the front of the room, I noticed her eyes were red and tired-looking.
A man in a suit came out and talked about Lauren. More music played, and then the man spoke again, mentioning the names of Madeline and everyone else in her family. Occa-sionally, one of the women would pull a tissue from her purse, or a man would retrieve a handkerchief from his pocket and blow his nose. My mother sat still. I could hear her breathing, but she didn't cry. I picked up her wrist and sniffed it. She wasn't wearing her usual perfume. At the end of the service, we all stood. The Sapphires left first, through the door at the front, then everyone else lined up to say hello to them.
When we reached the family, I nodded at Madeline's grand-mother. Then I said, "I'm sorry," to Ritchie, as my mother had instructed me to do. Greta stood between Ritchie and Made-line, and I mumbled hello to her. When I came to Madeline, I didn't know what to say, so I just looked at her. Her eyes were glazed, her skin was blotchy and her lips and nostrils looked cracked and raw. I had expected her to be soft and sad, but in-stead she glared at me, seeming angry. I tried to think of some way to console her. "Maybe you could sleep over this week-end," I said. She clutched Greta's hand and turned her face into her nanny's thick body, away from me.
Dick Sapphire was the last person in the line. Even with dark circles under his eyes, he was still the handsomest man I'd ever seen. He wore a dark-blue double-breasted suit, a crisp white shirt and a navy-and-gold diagonally striped tie. Stand-ing so still in the line, he reminded me of a navy captain, and I wouldn't have been surprised if someone came and pinned a medal to his dark jacket. He stooped to hug me and said, "Hello, Claudia. Thank you for coming today." He straight-ened and turned to my mother. "Hello, Rosalind." He took her hand and leaned forward to kiss her cheek, as he always had.
My mother let out a soft gasp. She whispered, "Oh my God," and broke into sobs. She shook so hard that Dick couldn't even kiss her. She brought her other hand to his face and caressed his cheek with the back of her trembling hand. She took my hand and pulled me into a hallway. "Stay here, ' she said and slipped into the ladies' room. I waited for her, listening to the conversation of two women in high heels and short black dresses.
"Yes, dreadful," one said.
"Well," said the other one, "I guess it's time to pay our con-dolences to the most eligible bachelor in New York," and they both walked away.
Copyright 2004 by Valerie Ann Leff
Continues...
Excerpted from Better Homes and Husbands by Leff, Valerie Ann Copyright © 2005 by Leff, Valerie Ann. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. The lives being lived cheek by jowl in a luxury Park Avenue apartment building make for a delicious comedy of manners in these artful linked stories. Carrington MacDuffie does an enchanting Angelina Samoza, the Nicaraguan socialite with only slightly crossed eyes who has a slew of Guatamalan illegals living in her maid's room. MacDuffie's perfect Italian accent, quite distinct from her perfect Spanish one, comes into play when Vinnie, the fired doorman, makes a fortune importing couture knockoffs from the Old Country. And Dick Sapphire's long dead Jewish mother chimes in, as wonderfully inflected as a voice from a Woody Allen movie. Leff's vertical slice of New York life is a stylish entertainment on the page and is even more amusing in this wonderful production. B.G. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
