Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (14 page)
Read Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) Online
Authors: Joseph Mitchell
Miss Barnell is disposed to blame circuses for much of the unhappiness in her life. Consequently she does not share her present husband’s enthusiasm for them. O’Boyle was an orphan who ran away to work with a circus, and has never become disenchanted.
Every
week he reads
Billboard
from cover to cover, and he keeps a great stack of back copies of the magazine in their apartment; she rarely reads it. Like most old circus men, he is garrulous about the past. He often tries to get his wife to talk about her circus experiences, but she gives him little satisfaction. O’Boyle is proud of her career. Once he begged her to give him a list of the circuses and carnivals she has worked for; he wanted to send the list to the letters-to-the-editor department of
Billboard
. She mentioned Ringling, Barnum & Bailey, Forepaugh-Sells, Hagenbeck-Wallace, the World of Mirth Carnival, the Royal American Shows, the Rubin & Cherry Exposition, and the Beckmann & Gerety Shows, and then yawned and said, ‘Mr O’Boyle, please go turn on the radio.’ He has never been able to get the full list.
In the last year or so Miss Barnell has become a passionate housekeeper and begrudges every moment spent away from her apartment. About once a week she rearranges the furniture in her two small rooms. On a window sill she keeps two geranium plants in little red pots. On sunny afternoons during her days off she places a pillow on the sill, rests her elbows on it, and stares for hours into Eighth Avenue. People who see her in the window undoubtedly think she is a gray-bearded old man. She spends a lot of time in the kitchen, trying out recipes clipped from newspapers. O’Boyle has gained eleven pounds since they moved into the apartment. Before starting work in the kitchen, she turns on four electric fans in various corners of the apartment and opens all the windows; she does not trust gas and believes that stirring up the air is good for her asthma. While the fans are on, she keeps Edie, the cat, who is susceptible to colds, shut up in a closet. She has developed a phobia about New York City tap water; she is sure there is a strange, lethal acid in it, and boils drinking water for fifteen minutes. She even boils the water in which she gives Edie a bath. In her opinion, the consumption of unboiled water is responsible for most of the sickness in the city. On her bureau she keeps two radios, one of them a short-wave set. On her days off she turns on the short-wave radio right after she gets up and leaves it on until she goes to bed. While in the kitchen, she listens to police calls. The whirring of the fans and the clamor of the radio
do
not bother her in the least. The walls are thin, however, and once the burlesque comedian who lives in the next apartment rapped on the door and said, ‘Pardon me, Madam, but it sounds like you’re murdering a mule in there, or bringing in an oil well.’
Miss Barnell’s attitude toward her work is by no means consistent. In an expansive mood, she will brag that she has the longest female beard in history and will give the impression that she feels superior to less spectacular women. Every so often, however, hurt by a snicker or a brutal remark made by someone in an audience, she undergoes a period of depression which may last a few hours or a week. ‘When I get the blues, I feel like an outcast from society,’ she once said. ‘I used to think when I got old my feelings wouldn’t get hurt, but I was wrong. I got a tougher hide than I once had, but it ain’t tough enough.’ On the road she has to keep on working, no matter how miserable she gets, but in a museum she simply knocks off and goes home. Until she feels better, she does not go out of her apartment, but passes the time listening to the police calls, playing with Edie, reading the
Journal & American
, and studying an old International Correspondence Schools course in stenography which she bought in a secondhand-bookstore in Chicago years ago. Practicing shorthand takes her mind off herself. She is aware that such a thing is hardly possible, but she daydreams about becoming a stenographer the way some women daydream about Hollywood. She says that long ago she learned there is no place in the world outside of a sideshow for a bearded lady. When she was younger she often thought of joining the Catholic Church and going into a nunnery; she had heard of sideshow women who became nuns, although she had never actually known one. A lack of religious conviction deterred her. Religion has been of little solace to her. ‘I used to belong to the Presbyterians, but I never did feel at home in church,’ she says. ‘Everybody eyed me, including the preacher. I rather get my sermons over the radio.’
Most of Miss Barnell’s colleagues are touchy about the word ‘freak,’ preferring to be called artistes or performers. Years ago, because of this, Ringling had to change the name of its sideshow from the Congress of Freaks to the Congress of Strange People. Miss Barnell would like to be considered hardboiled and claims
she
does not care what she is called. ‘No matter how nice a name was put on me,’ she says, ‘I would still have a beard.’ Also, she has a certain professional pride. Sometimes, sitting around with other performers in a dressing room, she will say, with a slight air of defiance, that a freak is just as good as any actor, from the Barrymores on down. ‘If the truth was known, we’re all freaks together,’ she says.
(1940)
Evening with a Gifted Child
PHILIPPA DUKE SCHUYLER
is probably the best example in New York City of what psychologists call a gifted child. She is nine years old. Her mental age, according to the Clinic for Gifted Children at New York University, which tests her periodically, is sixteen. She has an I.Q. of 185. Phillipa reads Plutarch on train trips, eats steaks raw, writes poems in honor of her dolls, plays poker, and is the composer of more than sixty pieces for the piano. Most of these compositions are descriptive, with such titles as ‘Spanish Harlem,’ ‘Men at Work,’ ‘The Cockroach Ballet,’ and ‘At the Circus.’ She began composing before she was four, and has been playing the piano in public, often for money, since she was six. She has an agreement with the National Broadcasting Company by which she plays new compositions for the first time in public on a Sunday-morning broadcast called ‘Coast to Coast on a Bus,’ and she frequently plays on other radio and television programs. A Schuyler album, ‘Five Little Pieces,’ has been published. She has gone on tour several times, playing compositions by Bach, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Debussy, Schumann, and herself in Grand Rapids, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Columbus, Youngstown, Atlantic City, Trenton, and other cities. On one tour she averaged $175 an engagement, plus all expenses. Philippa is often called a genius by admiring strangers, and her parents find this displeasing. To them, her development is explained not by genius but by diet. They believe that humans should live on uncooked meats, fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and are convinced that the food Philippa has eaten most of her life is largely responsible for her precocity. She particularly likes raw green peas, raw corn on the cob, raw yams, and raw sirloin steaks.
Philippa’s father, George S. Schuyler, whom she calls by his first name, is a Negro essayist and novelist, the son of a diningcar chef on the New York Central. He writes an influential column on national and world affairs for the Pittsburgh
Courier
,
a
weekly Negro newspaper, and is business manager of the
Crisis
, which is the official organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He wrote often for the
American Mercury
when H. L. Mencken edited it. Mr Schuyler’s skin is jet black. He comes from one of the oldest Negro families in New York; long before the Revolutionary War, ancestors of his in Albany began using Schuyler as a surname. Since then, Negro Schuylers have occasionally also used the Christian names of distinguished white Schuylers. Philippa is named for Philip John Schuyler, the Revolutionary general. Philippa’s mother, Mrs Josephine Schuyler, is white. She is, in fact, a golden-haired blonde. She is a member of a pioneer west Texas ranching and banking family, and speaks with a Southern accent. When she was in her teens, she ran away from home and went to California; since then she has considered herself ‘a rebel.’ Before she and Mr Schuyler were married in 1928, she had been, successively, a Mack Sennett bathing beauty, a ballet dancer in a San Francisco opera company, a painter, a poet, and a writer for the Negro press. She met Mr Schuyler in New York when she visited the office of a magazine of which he was an editor and to which she had contributed poems and articles. This magazine was the
Messenger
, the official organ of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Mrs Schuyler acquired her dietary convictions in California years ago; her husband is a more recent convert and is not quite as dead set. Mrs Schuyler feels that both alcohol and tobacco are utterly unnecessary; her husband, however, drinks beer and smokes cigars. Mrs Schuyler still writes occasionally for Negro newspapers under various names, but devotes most of her time to painting and Philippa. On tour, she serves as Philippa’s manager. Philippa calls her Jody. The Schuylers live in a large apartment house on Convent Avenue. This house, which is tenanted by both white and Negro families, is on a hill overlooking the western fringe of Harlem, and is several blocks from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, where Philippa is in Grade 6A.
The Schuylers recently invited me to come and hear Philippa play. I went up one evening around eight o’clock. Mrs Schuyler met me at the door and said that Philippa was in her own room
transcribing
a composition called ‘Caprice No. 2,’ which she had finished just before dinner. We went into the living room, where Mr Schuyler, in shirtsleeves, was hunched over a desk. At his elbow was a stack of clippings about Philippa from newspapers in the cities in which she had played. He was pasting these in a large scrapbook. ‘We have nine scrapbooks full of stuff about Philippa, one for each year,’ he said. ‘She’s never seen them. In fact, so far as we know, she’s never seen a clipping about herself. We’re afraid it might make her self-conscious. When she gets to be a young woman, we’ll bring out all her scrapbooks and say, “Here are some things you might find interesting.”’
There were paintings, chiefly nudes, on two walls of the living room. I noticed Mrs Schuyler’s signature in the corner of one. Bookcases lined another wall, and arranged on their top shelves were a number of pieces of African sculpture. Mrs Schuyler pointed to one, a female fetish. ‘George brought that back from Africa in 1931,’ she said. ‘He was down there getting material for a book. Most of these things, however, belong to Philippa. They were sent to her by people in Liberia, Nigeria, and the Ivory Coast who heard her play on the radio. They listen in on short-wave. They write to her, and she answers their letters. They know that part of her background is African, and are proud of her. Their presents to Philippa are brought here by Africans who work on ships plying between New York and various West African ports. She has a slew of medals and prizes she won in tournaments held by the New York Philharmonic, the National Guild of Piano Teachers, and similar organizations, and she keeps them in a fancy inlaid chest that was sent to her by a craftsman in Africa. Philippa is extremely proud of her Negro blood.’
Mr Schuyler looked up from the scrapbook. ‘She has radio fans all over the world, not only in Africa,’ he said. ‘On her last birthday she received six sable skins and a black pearl from Alaska, a scarf from Portugal, and a doll from the Virgin Islands. However, most of her presents did come from Africa.’
While we were looking at an ebony elephant, Philippa came into the room. Mr Schuyler unobtrusively closed the scrapbook and put it in a drawer of the desk. Then he introduced me to
Philippa
. She shook hands, not awkwardly, as most children do, but with assurance. She is slender, erect, and exquisitely boned. Her face is oval, and she has serious black eyes, black curls, and perfect teeth. Her skin is light brown. She is a beautiful child.
‘Did you get through with the piece?’ her mother asked her.
‘Oh, yes,’ Philippa said. ‘Half an hour ago. Look, Jody, do you remember that silly little riddle book I bought at the newsstand in the station at Cincinnati and never got a chance to look at?’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘Well, I’ve just been looking through it, and some of the riddles are funny. May I ask one, please?’
Mrs Schuyler nodded, and Philippa asked, ‘What has four wheels and flies?’
We were silent a minute, and then Philippa said impatiently, ‘Give up, please, so I can tell you.’
‘We give up,’ Mrs Schuyler said.
‘A garbage wagon,’ Philippa said.
Mr Schuyler groaned, and Philippa looked at him and burst out laughing.
‘Was it that bad, George?’ she asked. ‘Wait until you hear some of the others.’
‘Not now, Philippa,’ Mrs Schuyler said, rather hastily. ‘Instead, maybe you’d like to play for us in your room.’
‘I’d like to very much,’ Philippa said.
Mr Schuyler said that he would stay in the living room and listen. Mrs Schuyler and I followed Philippa down the hall. A large red balloon was tethered by a string to the doorknob of Philippa’s room. ‘I like balloons,’ she said, spanking it into the air with the heel of her hand. ‘They remind me of the circus.’
The Schuylers have a four-room apartment. I noticed that Philippa’s room was the largest. In it there was a grand piano, a bed, an adult-size dressing table, two small chairs, and a cabinet. Mrs Schuyler opened the doors of the cabinet. ‘Philippa keeps her music and dolls in here,’ she said. ‘She made this doll house. She knitted the little rug herself and sewed dresses for the dolls. She sews very well. She made me an apron the other day.’ On top of Philippa’s piano there was a Modern Library giant edition
of
Plutarch, a peach kernel, a mystery novel called ‘The Corpse with the Floating Foot,’ a copy of the New York
Post
opened to the comic-strip page, a teacup half full of raw green peas, a train made of adhesive-tape spools and cardboard, a Stravinsky sonata, a pack of playing cards, a photograph of Lily Pons clipped from a magazine, and an uninflated balloon. I was standing beside the piano, examining this rather surrealistic group of objects, when Mrs Schuyler suddenly snapped her fingers and said, ‘I forgot the peaches!’ She started out of the room, then paused at the door and said, ‘It’s a kind of ice cream I make. We’re going to have some later on, and I forgot to put the peaches in the icebox. I’ll leave you two alone for a few minutes. Philippa, don’t start playing until I get back.’ I took one of the chairs and Philippa sat on the piano bench. Left alone with her, I felt ill at ease. I didn’t know how to go about making small talk with a gifted child.