First Papers (14 page)

Her own parents would not be able to visit them until Christmas, and the Paiges had understood when she said, “Please not till it’s finished. I want everything to be right before you see it.”

“Of course not,” Alida Paige had said. “Unless I could help with something.”

“I don’t
need
help, it’s such fun. Even though we’re still sitting on Garry’s books!”

Apart from their clothes and Letty’s hope chest half-filled with linen and silver, their possessions were seven crates of Garry’s books and five heirlooms of Letty’s which could at last be shipped down from Rockland. They had belonged to her English grandmother who had loved eighteenth-century English furniture and had refused to leave it behind when she came to America. There was the “great piece,” a Sheraton breakfront in mahogany, a small table, a four-poster bed, with a highboy and lowboy to go with it.

Even before they had found the place they wanted, Letty had begun to plan rooms around these five, to talk of color schemes, to collect samples, to search through newspapers and magazines for pictures of rooms she admired. Her energy astonished Garry, and made him wonder why he had not been more concerned over her previous inertia, now so exposed in retrospect.

Not that he had deliberately chosen to live on so long in Barnett, in his parents’ house. When Letty and he had married, his pay at Aldrich and Co. was $25 a week. They had been glad to live at home until they could save; they spent nothing from the money they had received as wedding presents, and they saved steadily. But even when he was raised to $27.50 and then a year later to $30, they had too little for a down-payment on a house or even for renting a house and furnishing it. The weeks dribbled away and when they did speak about searching for a place of their own, it was token talk, easily silenced by irresolution.

Then, late in April, he was made assistant to the head of the laboratory. His pay leaped to $40, with a promise of yet another raise for 1912, if the new division for synthetics turned out well.

At once, Letty and he were infused with the juices of resolve. They became devotees of real-estate advertisements, and overnight Letty was transformed into the most indefatigable of house-hunters, investigating everything offered, from small houses in Manhattan or Brooklyn, to suburban cottages in Westchester or Connecticut, to empty lots in new developments as far out as Manhasset or Great Neck or Hempstead, or as close to Barnett as Jamaica or Hollis or Kew Gardens.

Rents ran from $40 to $50 a month for “a nice one-family house,” and the notion of sharing a two-family house was vetoed by Garry as strongly as by Letty. Once, feeling experimental, Letty went to see an apartment, not a house. It was on East Sixty-sixth Street in Manhattan, just off Fifth Avenue. It had seven rooms and a bath and the rent was $50.

“Seven rooms!” Garry said. “What on earth would we furnish seven whole rooms with?”

“Boxes and barrels,” she said. “I’d paint them all gold and red, and they’d be beautiful! And don’t forget my heirlooms.”

They each had grown up in the tradition that “a house of your own” was the universal goal, and they continued their search. But suddenly one evening, Letty said, “If only we could live in New York. Right smack in it. Not here on the Island or up in Scarsdale or out in Brooklyn Heights, but right in the city.”

Before he could answer, she went on, “And not in a house. In an apartment.” Her eyes bright, her voice animated, she sang the joys of city life, the museums, the lecture halls, the concerts and theaters. “And no stairs to sweep,” she raced on, without transition, “no cellar or attic or porches or back stoop, no ashes to lug out, no furnace, no sidewalks to shovel snow from—”

Garry listened, amazed. Had she wanted to live in Manhattan all along, had she wanted to live in an apartment all along, without being able to say so openly? How complex people were, even the people one was closest to; how hidden, how private.

She had begun to be silent and hidden even about the one disappointment they both shared equally, that they still had no baby. Until recently, she had been open and natural about it, and touching each time she told him, “Oh, Gare, not this month either.” At times her eyes would fill, and always she had accepted his comfort and love; when he would say, “We’ll have a baby soon, you’ll see,” she would take it as a promise instead of the voice of his own longing.

But recently she had been silent about what she felt, and now he was discovering that she had been silent, too, about where and how she herself really wanted them to live.

“Darling,” he said. “Did you think I’d insist on a house, if you didn’t want a house?”

“I never thought about it at all. Oh, Garry, New York would be marvelous.”

Now she abandoned every other idea. She saw everything from squalid flats to new apartments on Riverside Drive, she searched Gramercy Park, Fifth Avenue, the side streets, and even a new building a full block in length, fourteen stories high, on Madison Avenue way up in the Eighties, which offered “De Luxe apartments” at rents that started at $200 a month and soared to $325 on the top floor.

She regaled the Paiges with her descriptions of this unbelievable luxury, “with a separate bathroom for every bedroom. Three bedrooms, three bathrooms; five bedrooms, five bathrooms. And I suppose on the top floor with the best apartments, twelve bedrooms, twelve bathrooms.”

Never since their honeymoon had she been so good-natured, so amiable about disappointment or weariness, and when he least expected it, Garry would find himself again pondering what had been wrong that now was righted.

He thought, If we had had a baby right away, it wouldn’t have gone this way for her. She’s out here in Barnett all day with nothing of her own, and she’s been bored and I didn’t notice, not enough to matter. Desire and sadness rose together in his heart, flowed together and became an unspoken pledge to be more loving to her, to be less absorbed in his work, in books, in politics.

And then at the end of May she found “the absolutely most perfect apartment in all New York.”

They had planned to meet at four that afternoon, to see the new library that had opened only the week before. When he arrived at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second, she was already there, and she ran down the white steps toward him, one hand scooping up her skirts, the other holding the brim of her enormous hat.

“I found it,” she called out when she was twenty feet away, “a whole floor.”

“A whole what?” He was as startled as if she had said, “a whole continent.”

“It’s three rooms, and a tiny kitchen, in a house that used to be a mansion. They’ve done it all over, and we have the parlor floor. Wait till you see it—he promised to wait for us. It’s at Eleventh, just off Fifth.”

He glanced up at the noble white building, considering whether it would be wiser to abandon it or hurry through it first. In some indefinable way, the new library looked as if it had been there, unhurried, untroubled, for centuries of man’s learning.

“Let’s not race through it,” he said. “Let’s see your apartment first.”

“You’re sweet.”

Soon they were at the house, going up a flight of wide steps to the floor above the street, being ushered into what the owner called “the drawing room.”

Letty said, “There!” and waited.

The room must have been twenty feet long. Garry looked across it, to the three windows that faced West Eleventh Street, and then he looked up at the ceiling which seemed twenty feet above his head. He walked across the newly polished floor to the old fireplace, perhaps once a pure white marble like the great library, now faintly grey.

“There’s another fireplace in the bedroom,” Letty said.

He stared into the empty fireplace, imagined it hot with burning logs on a winter evening, and he smiled. Then he turned to follow her to the rear of the apartment, past a bathroom (without a window) and a small kitchen (without a window).

“Up there,” Letty said, pointing to an expanse of grillwork near the ceiling. “It’s a ventilator, the latest thing.”

The windowless room wakened an unwillingness in him, but Letty accepted this new condition as if she had spent her life in rooms without windows, where air was sucked in through a lattice of steel.

“This is the small bedroom,” she said behind him. “It’s sort of steep and funny, but it would be big enough for a baby’s room.”

It was a narrow room, no more than seven feet across, though its ceiling was as lofty as in the rest of the rooms. “They made two bedrooms out of the original sitting room back here,” Letty told him. “But don’t worry about this little one. I’ll make the most cunning nursery out of it.”

Their bedroom was a third smaller than the drawing room, but it retained proportions that were pure and pleasing. A fireplace made a central focus in one wall, and the two windows looked down upon a square of lawn. At one side of the lawn there was a flower bed; at the other side there was a leafy tree, standing close to the house, leaning into their windows.

“Darling?” Letty finally said, as he stood gazing down at this city garden, pleased beyond reason with it.

He turned and said, “You’re right, it’s perfect.”

“I’ll make it wonderful, I’m good at fixing a place up, you’ll see. I’m so happy I could die.”

Now as he looked at the candles and flowers on the table set for dinner, he knew that in the two months since then, they had both been happier, close again as in their first year. Passion and need, and delight in both, had always been stronger in him than in Letty; now there was a sweet wholeness in her that aroused him constantly, as if they were newly lovers.

This side of her had been hidden, and it was an important side, her talented side, her ability to plan and create. “Taste” was as mysterious as other talent, but now it was clear that Letty had it, though she could never put it into words for him.

When she began to search the big stores for what they needed, her taste was offended and she came home empty-handed day after day. Her handbag was stuffed with lists, made out in her neat handwriting, of things to see; occasionally Garry would read them, wanting to share her problems.

“Five-piece panne plush parlor suite,” he read aloud. “Was one hundred and fifty dollars, now seventy-five. What’s panne plush?”

“Terrible.” She laughed as he went on, male and bewildered.

“Bird’s-eye maple dresser, regularly twenty dollars, now twelve-fifty. Buffet, quartered oak, regularly forty dollars, now twenty-five. Brass bed, reduced from fifty to twenty-five.”

“Stop it! I saw all of it and it makes you seasick.”

“Smyrna rugs, nine by twelve,” he read from another list. “Reduced to twenty-two dollars and forty-nine cents. Aubusson rugs, nineteen dollars and seventy-four cents. Ladies’ Black Satin Duchesse suit, twenty-six dollars and ninety-five cents, now fourteen dollars and ninety-five cents, instep length.”

“I didn’t buy a dollar’s worth of anything. Yes, I did. One pair of chamois gloves for me, seventy-five cents. And a pigskin belt for you, fifty cents. Your old one’s coming apart.”

In another few days, she began wandering around the city in search of second-hand dealers. At once, her hopes revived. This was the only way, she said, to do what she wanted without going bankrupt.

As her first purchases arrived, Garry looked at them in disbelief. There were a chest and two small tables crusted with paint, and a set of four chairs which she called “Queen Anne,” such wrecks that their springs hung down like torn tendrils of a climbing vine after a storm.

“The wood’s there, you wait and see,” she said with joy, as a mother might say of a sick child, “His heart is strong.”

With these derelicts and with others still to come, she began back-breaking work that made her sing. She would strip them of their layers of paint or varnish, rub them smooth with sheets of emery paper, returning to them day by day until she had restored their natural woods. And then she would wax and polish them, treating each one for a certain time each day until it shone.

But she gave part of each day to a search for old fabrics, and for an upholsterer who would “teach me what I have to know.” At last, in the slums of Avenue A near the East River, she found an old Pole willing to show her, right there in his store, for a price of five dollars, how to tie back the broken springs of a chair, how to replace its tattered crisscross of webbing, how to re-cover its seat with the tan fleur-de-lis brocade she had found.

Because the old man liked her, he later taught her, for an extra two dollars, how to make “headed draperies” for the living-room windows.

The days went by, turned into weeks, and still she was not done. They needed a bookcase; shelves could be put up for a song (she found a wonder of a little German carpenter) and they could paint them themselves.

“I’m still within our budget,” she would often say. “I’m watching every penny. I’ve got a head for business, I think.”

He looked at her with an exaggerated surprise. “Are you the girl I married?” he asked. “Letty Brooks? Of Rockland, Maine?”

“A Yankee horse-trader,” she agreed. “Oh, Gare, it’s such fun.”

Dinner was a triumph. The Paiges took the apartment to their hearts as if it were a living thing, and Alida kept bringing the talk back to Letty’s achievement, her sense of design, her use of color.

“You have a flair for it,” Alida said, “a real gift. The way people are gifted at painting, or composing.”

“It’s just that I love doing it.” She sounded diffident, but cannons of pride thundered a private salute within her.

“Flair?” Garry said. “It’s downright genius. I might put her to work one of these days, fixing up houses for the Four Hundred, at fat, dishonest fees.”

“I’d like it,” Letty said. “I’ve started to worry about what I’ll do all day.”

“It’s too hot to worry,” her father-in-law said comfortably, tapping at his forehead with his neatly folded handkerchief. “Did you happen to notice Alexander Graham Bell in the Sunday paper?”

“With his Ice Stove!” Garry said. “I certainly did.”

“What ‘Ice Stove’?” both women asked.

“It’s a contraption that looks like a coal stove,” Evan said, “with a step in front of it, and a pipe going up and out the window. The paper said it was down to sixty-one degrees in Bell’s study, while the asphalt melted away on the street outside his house in Washington.”