Saint Mazie: A Novel (30 page)
Read Saint Mazie: A Novel Online
Authors: Jami Attenberg
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.
I suppose I was careless with her.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Death, that’s the real end of the story; am I right? Now will you turn off the recorder, darling, and come to bed?
I heard there was a diary though. Fannie said she’d seen her once with one at the theater, that she’d walked up to her at the ticket booth and startled her. But she saw it, this brown leather diary, the words across the cover in gold, and when Fannie rattled on her cage, Mazie looked up, quite shocked, and shut it closed. A diary, could you imagine? What I wouldn’t give to read it. That was the real story right there. But I never saw it. Did you?
Just for a minute I thought I needed someone to know what I knew, but I can see I was wrong. I’ve been wrong before. I’ve talked to enough people about my life already. I’ve written enough in these pages. It’s enough that it happened. It’s enough that I survived. It’s enough that I have a warm bed to sleep in at night. I got enough. I got more than enough.
of Mazie Phillips-Gordon
Somebody loved them once, and that’s all you need to know.
This book was inspired by the life of a woman who was profiled in the essay “Mazie,” which appeared in Joseph Mitchell’s brilliant and essential essay collection,
Up in the Old Hotel
.
Many thanks to John McCormick and Vannesa Shanks for introducing me to the collection, and to John for naming this book.
Lisa Ng took me on an epic tour of the passageways, stairwells, and gardens of Knickerbocker Village. I am grateful for early reads from Kate Christensen, Bex Schwartz, Lauren Groff, and Courtney Sullivan. Thanks for love, support, and housing to: Rosie Schaap, Wendy McClure, Stefan Block, Molly Dilworth, Sunil Thambidurai, Rien Fertel, Alex Chee, Roxane Gay, Brendan Fitzgerald, Ron Currie, Jr., Kerri Mahoney, Gabrielle Bell, Cinde Boutwell, Matt Laska, Jenn Northington, Maris Kreizman, Rachel Fershleiser, and Amanda Bullock. Bright stars all of you.
The stellar Doug Stewart and Sterling Lord Literistic have given me a decade of unwavering support and invaluable wisdom. I write to impress Helen Atsma, my talented, generous editor. She, along with Sonya Cheuse and Grand Central Publishing, have given me their faith, and have changed my life forever, in no small part because they are all extremely good at their jobs. A thousand thanks, a thousand embraces.
With love, as always, to my family.
by
- Saint Mazie
is told through diary entries and snippets of contemporary interviews. How does this narrative style change the story for you? Did you ever find your sympathies or attitudes about the characters shifting as you heard new perspectives? - Does anything about Mazie’s New York, and the streets she loves, remind you of today’s United States? What lessons might a reader learn from exploring this era of history in fiction? Do you often read historical fiction?
- Is it a compliment or commentary to call Mazie a saint? Is the word
saint
ever used in a negative way? - Why might Mazie, a Jew, feel so drawn to nuns like Sister Tee and Catholicism? Did anything about Mazie’s relationship with Sister Tee surprise you?
- Who belongs to Mazie’s family? To Rosie’s? To Tee’s? What does family mean to the characters in this book?
- In what ways is Mazie’s cage a comfort? A constraint? Are there any nonliteral cages that constrain or comfort her as the story progresses?
- Why do you think Jeanie keeps leaving home? Why does Mazie stay? Does she really stay, or do her and Rosie’s many moves make her more like Jeanie than it might at first seem?
- What do you think motivated Nadine to conduct interviews and track down information about Mazie? In a novel filled with so many first-person perspectives, did you wish you could hear from Nadine in her own words? Why or why not?
- What comfort does Rosie find in the gypsies? Why does she turn to them in times of need? Who or what does Mazie turn to in similar times?
- Everyone seems to fall in love with Mazie, even strangers who read her diary after she’s gone. Can you identify anything about her character that might explain this phenomenon? Did you fall in love with Mazie?
- Should Mazie have broken things off with the Captain? When? Does her participation in adultery diminish the good works she did?
- Did you find the ending of
Saint Mazie
satisfying? Were you left with any questions?
Q. How did you come upon the historical Mazie Phillips?
A. I had a dear friend, John McCormick, tell me about her and suggest I read the essay by Joseph Mitchell in which she originally appeared. (It was first published in
The New Yorker
and then later in the seminal collection
Up in the Old Hotel
.) John had felt deeply inspired by her, so much so that he designed and built a beautiful bar called St. Mazie in Brooklyn. I fell for her instantly too. I was working on another book at the time, but I knew almost immediately that I would write my next book about her.
Q. What kind of research went into the writing of
Saint Mazie
?
A. I read a lot of books. Obviously all of
Up in the Old Hotel
was a huge influence, as was Luc Sante’s
Low Life. Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century
by John F. Kasson was very helpful. Lionel Rogosin’s
On the Bowery
is a gorgeous film, and the patter and the look and the feel from that was an influence, even though it was made in the 1950s. I also spent some time on The Roaring Twenties, a website that maps the sounds of New York City in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Just in general I spent a good deal of time online watching little films and videos here and there. Although the book doesn’t necessarily drip with historical detail, I wanted to know what it looked and sounded like as I was writing it.
Q. Do you keep a journal yourself? Have you always, or ever? What kind of story might it tell, if a stranger were to find it?
A. I do keep a journal, but it’s mostly a jumble of things, to-do lists, story ideas, the occasional letter to myself, reminders of how to be in this life, etc. I think if anyone read it they would find it quite repetitive. I actually committed to keeping a daily journal a few years ago when I spent the winter in New Orleans, and I thought I was writing the most brilliant thing ever, but when I look back at it now I realized that our (or at least my) day-to-day existence is usually pretty dull. But it turned out coincidentally to be a good writing exercise for this book. I realized I didn’t need to document every little bit of Mazie’s life—just the interesting stuff.
Q. Is Mazie your favorite character in the novel? If not, who is?
A. Of course I love Mazie the most! She’s the reason why I wrote this book. I fell in love with her, daydreamed about her, heard her in my head chattering at me until I had no choice but write down everything she had to say. I hope people read her as smart and complicated and sexy and strong and as having a beautiful, generous spirit, much as I imagined the real-life Mazie was. This book is really a tribute to her.
Q. Your previous novel,
The Middlesteins
, followed the lives of a Jewish family. In
Saint Mazie
, the heroine is Jewish but is drawn to Catholicism. Why do you find yourself writing about faith?
A. There are all kinds of faiths, and they can be both specific and fluid. The real-life Mazie did have an interest in Catholicism—she actually did go to Working Man's Mass, for example—but was Jewish. She was also fascinated with true life romance magazines and horoscopes. All of that piqued my interest instantly. It seemed like she was searching for something to believe in, anything that could work for her, could guide her through this life. As a writer I'm compelled by what inspires people, what gives them hope, where people find their strength that enables them to be compassionate and humane. Faith is an excellent place to start.