Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (29 page)

W
ASHINGTON HEIGHTS IS ONE OF THE MOST DRAMATICALLY HILLY SECTIONS OF MANHATTAN. HERE, FOR ONCE, THE GRID HAS BEEN OBLIGED TO ADJUST to topography. There are steep stairs linking one street to another, as in European cities; and the catacomblike subway stations with cavernous, arched ceilings and elaborate tilework are built into the rock face at such a depth as to require elevators. Certain east-west thoroughfares, such as West 181st Street, accommodate the land by gently curving to their termination at the peak of the cliffs. West 181st Street, once the heart of a Jewish neighborhood, retains a few kosher food stores and restaurants; and the street still acts as an unofficial barrier, dividing the southern end of Washington Heights, which is largely hospitals and Hispanic tenements,
from the more Irish and Jewish northern end, with its middle-class cooperative enclaves and nursing homes.

If you walk downhill toward the Hudson River on West 181st Street, you come to Cabrini Boulevard (formerly Northern Avenue), one of New York's tucked-away treasures. Here are some remarkable apartment house enclaves, built during the 1920s and 1930s, when city developers still thought it economically viable to erect castles for the middle class. On the eastern side of the street is the older Hudson View Gardens, a Tudor extravaganza in brown brick, with simulated half-timbering of dark brown wooden diagonals crisscrossing the façade. The apartment houses were built by George F. Pelham in 1924-25, and stand at attention along the street wall, correctly if somewhat stodgily, like a regiment of Tudor cottages on growth hormones. Across the way from them, on the western side of Cabrini Boulevard, is Castle Village, built by Pelham's son, George F. Pelham II, in 1938-39. This is a more frankly up-to-date and, to my mind, fascinating high-rise apartment complex, stretching all the way from West 181st to West 186th Street. It has been maintained in tiptop shape: the white window frames all look newly painted, the apple-red brick façades spanking clean. The “architecture” of Castle Village, if one can call it that, attempts nothing ambitious; it is meant to convey cozy comfort, familiarity. The one original touch is that all five buildings are in the shape of a cross, which maximizes river views (eight out of nine apartments get them on each floor).

It was this X shape that caught the eye of Lewis Mumford, and prompted him to write a “Sky Line” column about Castle Village in
The New Yorker.
Mumford, to his credit, was not merely focused on cutting-edge architecture but was curious about the actual built environment going up around him. After praising the complex's attention to “light, air, space, gardens—the substance and ornament of all good architecture,” and the “simple vernacular of our period: wide, steel casement windows; a plain, unadorned façade,” Mumford nitpicked the brick's color, the “barricade”-like repetition of the five identical buildings, and the X plan's space-wastage compared to “a zigzag or sawtooth layout.” He concluded evenly: “The builder of Castle Village is to be congratulated for going as far as he has gone, but he is to be reproached for not going further, since he had perhaps the finest site remaining in New York for residential purposes.”

It remains a fine site, with the cruciform buildings set discreetly back from the generous grounds. What captivates me most about Castle Village is the broad lawn sweeping down to the ledge that overlooks Fort Washington Park, the George Washington Bridge, and the Hudson River. In the late afternoon, this secluded garden is a pleasance out of an Italian countryside, with quaint stone fence, benches, sitting nooks, and magnificent trees, which give form and shade to the whole. Whether the public has the right to enjoy this view—a sign on the lawn says for residents only—I always partake, and no one ever stops me. The former, Gothicized estate of Dr. Charles Paterno that once rested on the site may be gone, but you can still imagine, from the grounds' placement and from one remaining fragment, a pergola on the northern end of the garden, its picturesque configuration atop this hill overlooking the Palisades of New Jersey.

If you continue north along Cabrini Boulevard, past Mother Cabrini High School and Cabrini Chapel, the buildings suddenly cease along the western side of the street and give way to a mysterious wooden railing, which overlooks a steeply treacherous, pathless, and largely impassable forest on the border between Fort Washington Park and Fort Tryon Park. When I lived in Inwood, in the mid-1960s, I used to be fascinated by this stretch of rural wildness. With no trouble at all, merely editing out distant traffic noise, I could imagine it the setting for some feral hermit's existence. At twenty, prematurely embarked on my first marriage, I was soothed by the wilderness glimpsed from Cabrini Terrace, so at odds did it seem with the surrounding
gemütlich
apartment buildings and bungalows of Washington Heights and Inwood, where elderly German Jews lived out their span and doctors' families occupied the spacious ground floor. These amiably middle-class homes soothed me as well, but in a different way: we were lucky to have found refuge among them. Upper Manhattan, though thoroughly respectable, wasn't fashionable enough to be pricy; and financially needy newlyweds such as we were could still find decent apartments at bargain rents. I remember living there with Carol during my last year at college, 1964, and several years after, and that feeling of still technically being on Manhattan, but far removed from the careerist energy and pulse and glamour, “the rat race,” as we enviously called it; how East Village poet-friends had to
be coaxed to visit us, and took several books with them on the subway uptown, as if for a three days' journey; how I'd show them around, proud of the area's obscurity, its backwater charm: those private bungalows on Payson Avenue, with bricks the color of dried blood and casement windows with black hinges overlooking hilly Inwood Park, which Carol and I, mocking their propriety, would nonetheless fantasize retiring to in old age.

The dream of that first marriage was to bypass youth and ascend straight to a responsibly shared life in double work-harness. The goal seemed reasonable at the time, since we got along so companionably, but it proved impossible because we were far too young and exaggerated our maturity—a fact that only surfaced when life began to test us.

I was twenty-two when the screws tightened. I mention my age partly to exonerate myself in advance for bad behavior. It was not that I behaved so despicably, which could at least allow me the retrospective allure of villainy, as that I was so passive and overwhelmed and inadequate to the challenge. My wife was also young at the time, but she behaved with far more womanly self-respect; age is not the whole story. Nevertheless, we were babies: two baby literati, presuming ourselves writers with no assurance from the world that we ought to have. For the moment, we supported ourselves by freelance editing, tape transcribing, ghostwriting—“taking in wash,” we called it. We barely survived, using nearby Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital's emergency room as our family physician; and when starvation threatened, Carol went out and got a full-time job. I'm especially embarrassed to recall that part—but there seemed to be an implicit understanding between us, typical of the period, that I was the literary genius of the house and needed to hone my writing, whereas she could develop hers any old time.

One day Carol came home and told me she was pregnant. We had been wondering what had happened to her period, but I took the firm position that there was no point in worrying about what might not be the case. Now it was the case. What to do? We began by taking long walks, up and down the hills of Manhattan's northern tip, analyzing the pros and cons. I cannot think of those discussions without associating them with the terrain, the Cloisters and Fort Tryon Park where we picnicked if the weather was good, the frozen-in-time residential sections of Inwood, and our
feverish agonizing, dropping our voices in the presence of passersby when our vocabulary became too explicit (“curettage,” “trimester”). One night on Broadway, near the Dyckman House, we were stopped in our tracks by a couple clouting each other outside an Irish saloon, and we were unsure how to take this: as a recommendation to start a family or not, since everything that crossed our path seemed an omen.

The most painful part of these increasingly nippy walks (it was autumn, edging over into winter) was that neither one of us seemed able to express a strong opinion about what he or she wanted. We had that young lovers' symbiotic habit of sympathizing with the other's viewpoint; and, like detectives hired to shadow one another, we watched carefully for signs of deep, unequivocal feeling, the better to support it. Not sure what my true feelings were, I told myself: If Carol really wants this baby, I will back her up, we'll somehow make ends meet. I had always imagined having children someday. The fact that the opportunity had come sooner rather than later—well, I could adjust to the challenge of fatherhood, I guessed. I had a great desire to be an adult. I also wanted to act nobly in a crisis, to shoulder my end of responsibility, or at least to appear in public to do so. Why should Carol have to make a sacrifice and give up a baby she wanted? If, however, she feels not yet emotionally ready for a baby, or thinks it will get in the way of her career, I'll support her decision to end the pregnancy. So far, she said she wasn't sure she
did
want it. But perhaps she was only saying that because she was uncertain whether she could depend on me, my being such an egotist. If I were to start saying I was
sure
I wanted this baby—which felt in any case like the mature, adult thing to say—she would undoubtedly—or most probably—come around to a certainty of wanting it. My pretend-decisiveness would conquer her hesitation, and once the baby was born, she would, I felt confident, become a wonderfully devoted mother, and this devotion would in the end dissolve what remained of my own ambivalence. In fact, she might never even notice my ambivalence if I played the pro-baby role with enough conviction.

But of course, nothing goes unnoticed in marriage. And the fact that it was thought of as a role, not intrinsic to my character, meant that it could be superseded by another role (“If you really want this abortion, I will support you all the way”), which is indeed what happened, until the two roles
began alternating in such quick succession, as we went over and over the same ground, that in the end, understandably, she stopped listening to me. She turned inward. I began to sense a quiet will gathering inside her and hunkering down; we were no longer belaboring the topic as much. In truth, I began to miss that operatic agonizing; a part of me could have gone on and on with it. At about that time, my wife began seeing a woman psychotherapist, and I suspected that they were working it out between themselves. Whether or not this suspicion was correct, the day came when Carol calmly informed me that she had made up her mind to have an abortion. It was fixed, final, no more discussion.

As abortions were illegal in 1966, we would have to become outlaws. We asked around, and heard about a saintly woman physician whom I'll call Dr. Elizabeth, in Philadelphia. Carol made an appointment to see her, and we took the train to Philadelphia. At first it seemed like a tourist adventure: we talked about seeing the Philadelphia Museum, and exploring a city neither of us knew. On the day in question we were too nervous to look at paintings, but we killed an hour or two walking around the historic district, admiring the old iron lampposts and cobblestone streets and Federal-style rowhouses in which ordinary people still lived; and, with that hunger for normal life which must have sprung from the desperate little act we were contemplating, I predicted aloud that we would someday come to live here, in one of these same charming historic townhouses, as a reward for our current hardships.

The doctor's waiting room was crowded. We sat there patiently, and finally it was Carol's turn. I glimpsed Dr. Elizabeth for a few seconds, beckoning my wife inside; she was an elegantly poised brunette in a navy blue angora sweater, nicely put together (I placed her in my harem of erotic fantasies instantly, jerk that I am). Thirty minutes later Carol reemerged, looking thoughtful and sad. For some reason I can no longer remember, Dr. Elizabeth had refused to perform the abortion. Perhaps she felt the police were watching her too closely, or she had decided to perform abortions only for in-state women, or else truly indigent cases. Whatever her reasons, they could not have been mercenary, because afterward we did not think critically of her, only of ourselves: you would think we had failed a stiff entrance exam. We had a hollow feeling, as though our insides were already scraped out, while we waited at 30th Street Station to catch the
return train. Someone at the food counter had on a soul station, Diana Ross singing “My World Is Empty Without You, Babe,” and this, too, seemed an omen.

Back in New York, Carol found another abortionist, on the Lower East Side, and went alone to the appointment. The first curettage did not take; she was obliged to return to the same bungler (we could not afford two fees) and have it done all over again. I shudder to think how close we came to tragedy. No, I don't want to think about it. Half a lifetime later, she's alive, I'm alive. Both married to different people.

I cannot say that the abortion alone inflicted a mortal blow to our marriage (there would be others), but it did uncover veins of mutual mistrust we had not known existed. It left me feeling ashamed of myself, aware of my untrustworthiness and eager to cover it up better next time. And I think it left Carol not only wounded and weary, but resentful—either because I'd been unable to protect her from the sorrow she had gone through, more or less alone, or because my failure to lobby harder for baby and family had alerted her to a secret (even secret to myself at the time) inconstancy on my part toward the marriage, a footloose streak that would one day lead me to go off and fulfill some bachelor destiny.

“Destiny” is what you know about your life in hindsight. Or maybe it's the stubbornness that takes over once your character, colliding with the world's barriers, has coalesced into a set of rigidities. “There is a point beyond which there is no going back. That is the point that we must reach,” said Kierkegaard. He was speaking of faith, but I would apply the same idea to love, monogamy, or the decision to have a child. Precisely what I was missing as a young man—now I have it almost too much—was a conviction of limits and the irrevocable: many paths seemed equally provisional, equally capricious (like the choice of trails from the Cloisters down to the street below), and so I felt a fraud asserting any one in particular.