His “business trips,” my father called them. My brother George and I took turns, one of us going every other Friday. The first time I would have been five or six years old. It took only an hour or so to get there, but as far as I was concerned we might as well have been blasting off for the far side of the moon.
We rode in Papa’s Simca, an off-white Chatelaine station wagon with white walls and a split tailgate. I’d watch him work the gearshift, a thin chrome shaft with a pear-shaped white knob at the end, an object of fascination that I’d secretly commandeer when he went into the post office or the bank, mimicking the engine’s winding roar with my voice, ignorant of such things as clutches.
As Papa backed the Simca past the toadstool-laden white birch in the turnaround, I’d see my mother and George standing there, my mother waving, my brother crying—as I’d cry a week from then when it would be his turn. At the end of the long driveway we’d turn right on Wooster Street and drive through Danbury, past the War Memorial and the fairgrounds, take the back road to Ridgefield and from there to Croton Falls.
Interstate 684 had yet to be built, so we took what today would qualify as “back roads,” numbered 202, 22, 6, and 35, past shady suburbs, nurseries and reservoirs, down the Sawmill Parkway through exotic places like Katonah and Chappaqua, tallying bridges and groundhogs and other novelties—a trail of spilled treasures paving the way to Ali Baba’s cave. With each mile gained the city loomed closer, its buildings and spires crouching beyond the next hill, around the next bend. Even the air roaring through the Simca’s side vent window smelled different.
While driving with his elbow out the window Papa hummed a favorite tune, the Blue Danube or an old Maurice Chevaliar song, a Kent cigarette hanging from his lip. A confident driver with a passion for shortcuts, he dispensed with the electric turn signal, preferring his arm. The Simca’s glove compartment brimmed with maps, but I never saw him use one. Papa knew those roads by heart, or seemed to, and what he didn’t know he’d improvise. The city’s outskirts were a tangle of thruways, expressways, and turnpikes. That my father could untangle them amazed me.
But then those roads seemed to belong to him, as did the city and everything on the way to it. It was Papa’s New York, that city I first saw as a child. We crossed over the Henry Hudson toll bridge. My father tossed a nickel into the basket. We glided under the girders of the George Washington Bridge. Here the city began in earnest. We passed the Cloisters and Grants Tomb. Peering into the distance, among hazy gray shapes I saw patches of color, the funnels of passenger ships lined up at their berths. Meanwhile to our right along the pothole paved stretch of highway a beautiful garden of skyscrapers flourished, the Empire State Building rising like a fountain at its center. Somewhere along the same bumpy highway, amid that profusion of buildings, docks and passenger ships, rose what looked like a gigantic corrugated hat box with the words GAS HEATS BEST painted in enormous black letters on its side. To me then this crass utilitarian structure was no less inspiring than those ships or the Empire State Building. Between fuel storage tanks and skyscrapers my appreciative eye didn’t discriminate.
We drove all the way downtown—to Canal Street, where my father foraged for plastic and other scrap parts for his inventions—and from there to Chinatown for lunch. As we navigated the sidewalks (my hand gripped tight in my father’s) I took in the buildings and crowds. Compared to the buildings the people didn’t seem quite real. They were like the decorations on a Christmas tree, amusing and attractive but not indispensable. There were no dogs and very few children. It struck me that New York was a place for grown-ups. Children were only allowed to visit.
In Chinatown we toured shops of lacquered trays and jade carvings. The colored lights and banners strung up along the narrow twisted streets appealed to me enormously. The profusion of signs here was more dramatic than in other parts of the city, their bright letters transformed into ornaments by virtue of being illegible. They hung like bright butterflies caught in a web of light poles, utility lines, and fire escapes. The air smelled of fish and roasted meats. In one of the shops my father bought me a carved wooden box. (I still have it; it sits atop a reference bookcase next to my writing desk).
From Chinatown we’d go to Greenwich Village and take in the little shops scented with incense and crowded with clothing, jewelry, and beads. The Village had its own atmosphere, its own pacing and rhythms, its own textures and palette. Already I began to see that the city was made of many discrete parts, and that it was best understood as the sum of those parts and not in the aggregate. It was like a giant art museum, with paintings hung in different rooms according to their styles. If Midtown was where they hung Fritz Kline and Clifford Still, the Village was where you went to see Rousseau, Lautrec, and the other post-impressionists.
From the Village we drove back uptown, stopping on the way at Manganaro’s grocery store, where Papa bought a pound of Parmesan cheese, a golden jagged hunk broken off an imposing wheel and wrapped in paper, a gift for mommy. By then the air had dimmed. As we drove up Broadway the lights of Times Square burned vividly against dark buildings. A square-jawed giant blew smoke rings into the dusk. B-O-A-C. Castro Convertibles. Canadian Club. Pepsi-Cola. The effect was like a fireplace at Christmas, with neon signs and movie marquees blazing like yuletide logs.
Then up West End Avenue to 96th Street, to the hotel where we’d spend the night, the Hotel Paris. I think of all parts of the city that hotel may have been my favorite. A wedding-caked shaped building of garnet-colored bricks, topped by a crenelated turret with a tall flagpole jutting straight up into the air. I recall a lobby of pink marble walls with a mirrored dining room next door, and a caged old-fashioned elevator attended by a African American woman whose beehive of fire-engine red hair was as imposing as she was small. She let me man the elevator’s controls, a courtesy for which I will never forget her. You had to pull back on the knob just so or the elevator wouldn’t line up. The first few stops she put her brown hand over mine; I felt its rough warmth and pressure as she guided me. At each floor the elevator’s doors opened to a different pattern of carpeting, arabesques of pure bright color which in their mysterious intricacies mimicked the teaming city outdoors.
Our room was small and smelled of the last occupant’s cigarettes, but that was okay by me. Like everything else I accepted the odor as part of the city itself—my father’s city, so it seemed to me then, as if he’d laid every cobblestone and build every skyscraper by hand. As he unpacked his suitcase that he had opened on his bed I watched carefully. A pair of socks, underwear, a suit, a can of foot powder, his razor and battered shaving brush, a shoe horn, a necktie.
It was the necktie which fascinated me. Though I’d seen the same necktie a hundred times before hanging in his closet, in its new context it took on a whole new aspect. With its tiny yellow paisley drops against a maroon background, it was no longer just my father’s tie. It was his New York City tie. In fact the tie was New York City for me then, just as the stale cigarette smell in that room was New York City, and the hallway carpeting, and the red-haired elevator operator, and the daunting search for a parking space, and the golden hunk of Parmesan cheese, and the ocean liners in their berths, and the groundhogs lining the Saw Mill River Parkway.
It was all New York City to me back then, courtesy of my father, who had invented it just for me.
Driving to his half-time teaching job in New Jersey (how he hates this gloomy morning commute, especially now that Daylight Savings Time has robbed him of an hour, turning 5 a.m. into 6 a.m.—the lights on, defroster blowing, wipers thwacking ineffectually at frost, the radio filling the car with the latest floods, genocides, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, floods and famines) he relives the fight he had with his wife over the weekend.
