The Ballad of West Tenth Street Read online

  Marjorie Kernan

  The Ballad of West Tenth Street

  to Andre

  Contents

  1

  On Fifth Avenue, in lower Manhattan, at the corner…

  2

  Sadie, like many dedicated drinkers, woke early, with a raging…

  3

  Sadie had bought the house on West Tenth Street with…

  4

  Sadie had a dinner party at the end of the…

  5

  New Yorkers are so wary of personal contact with potentially…

  6

  For every stack of citizens piled and packed into the…

  7

  Sadie kept her car in a lot by the river,…

  8

  Deen’s piano teacher, Elizabeth Schaper, was a very nice young…

  9

  Deen climbed the brownstone steps and read the names by…

  10

  Sadie was on her way home from a meeting with…

  11

  Hamish was beginning to grow and was very often ravenously…

  12

  Gene’s Restaurant on Eleventh near the corner of Sixth Avenue…

  13

  A great lumpy figure in a sheepskin coat belted and…

  14

  In no time at all the Hollander children were spending…

  15

  Gretchen sat in her wheelchair, in her usual corner of…

  16

  Kristen stood at the sink. She was shaking. Her pale…

  17

  Cap’n Meat rolled over and groaned. He wasn’t feeling any…

  18

  Ettie smiled, yes, here was Jaimes to tell her of…

  19

  Ettie announced, “Meez D to see you,” to the colonel,…

  20

  They say that beauty is not easily defined or agreed…

  21

  Kristen walked determinedly up Greenwich Avenue, headed for the Hollander…

  22

  Brian had been taken to St. Elfreda’s Hospital, on the…

  23

  The first morning of Deen’s enforced sojourn chez Dresden, she…

  24

  Brian was alive, though he gave no sign of being…

  25

  A great cloud mass, stretching from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, moved…

  26

  The storm blew out to sea before dawn, leaving the…

  27

  Deen had now been incarcerated chez Dresden for nearly two…

  28

  Munster?”

  29

  Quite honestly, I’m at a bit of a loss,” Mendel-bendel…

  30

  A carved figure of a cow, made of stone, sat…

  31

  Colonel Harrington sat in his armchair by the fire, in…

  32

  The moon rose over a great clean sky, a sky…

  33

  Mrs. D made her report to the Thursday Night Imbibers…

  34

  The colonel stood at the open window of the parlor,…

  35

  Gretchen went down to the kitchen the next morning to…

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  On Fifth Avenue, in lower Manhattan, at the corner of Eleventh Street, stands the First Presbyterian Church, a gloomy edifice made of blackened sandstone. Should you turn there and walk along West Eleventh, you will pass the row house the Weather Underground blew up while dabbling in explosives, then the New School’s glass and steel building, and finally Gene’s Restaurant and the back dining room of Charlie Mom’s, where couples glumly eat sautéed broccoli and mu shu pork.

  Cross Sixth Avenue to West Tenth Street, past where the old Jefferson Market courthouse stands on an island, its clock tower a finger raised to the sky and its booming note a reminder to passersby that they are either late, on time, or free of such cares.

  West of Seventh Avenue the cross streets run off at a southerly angle. With this shift comes a sense of entering another New York, an older and less orderly one. The names of the streets change as well, from utilitarian numbers to names evoking distant landowners, orchards, and inns. The noise of traffic recedes. Sparrows chitter in the trees.

  The remaining Federal townhouses of the West Village keep company with every conceivable architectural fad: high Victorian apartment blocks with Gothic porticos, brick cottages with a galleon in stained glass on each window, stolid Civil War–era merchant’s houses with stables behind, engine companies with arched red doors, twenties white brick garages and brownstones. Most of the buildings have an expensive, well-groomed air but a few tenements survive, brazenly declaring their poverty, their stone facades coated in dingy beige paint and a row of dented trash cans chained to their front.

  Go a little farther and you’ll cross Bleecker Street, with its boutiques and French pastry shops. Near the end of the next block stand a pair of fine old brick townhouses. One has a blue door with a tarnished brass knocker in the shape of a dolphin. The other is empty. A handsome sign declares it For Sale. The Cavendish Group, it reads, Is Pleased to Announce This Very Fine Property. A telephone number is obligingly given below.

  From the house with the blue door, a bang and a clatter comes from the narrow kitchen area below the street. The door opens and a boy with long reddish hair hauls out a carton. “Seven, eight,” he counts as he drops bottles from the carton into a bin, the bottles clanking. He shakes his head and goes back inside.

  Clumping, making as much noise as possible, as is the nature of boys, he climbs three flights of stairs to the attic floor. There he flops down on one end of the blue leather sofa in front of the TV, which is blank.

  “Eight,” he announced to his sister, who sat at the other end of the sofa. “Eight in one week. She’s drinking like mad again.”

  “Uh-huh,” Deen said, not really listening.

  “I’m gonna draw a picture of her liver, all green and purple, and paste it up in her bathroom. Or maybe I’ll do one of her puking it right out.” He took a pad of paper and a box of colored pencils from the table and began some preliminary lines.

  “Hey, Deen?”

  “Yeah, Hamish?”

  “You have noticed she’s acting pretty weird again lately? When’s the full moon, do you know?”

  “No. Oh, I get it. Okay, I’ll check—the paper’s right here, hang on a sec. Oh geeze, it’s Saturday.”

  “Aw, shit! And she always drinks more on weekends. What if she goes bonkers again with the pills and all, and this time they don’t pump her stomach out in time? What if she dies and we’re poor pitiful orphans and have to be adopted by some Mormon family or something, some people who do good works and all that shit, and you’ll have to wear gingham dresses down to your ankles and marry some old lech named Jezekial?”

  “Geeze, Hames, what’d you eat for breakfast, a bowl of raw paranoia? Munster’ll be fine. She only lost track of how many pills she’d taken that one time. Besides, Uncle Brian would adopt us.”

  “Yeah, then why’d she bake a tennis shoe for dinner last night? With tomatoes, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Okay,” Deen said wearily. “I tell you what—we’ll get up in the middle of the night to check on her. We can take turns. I’ll find a little mirror to hold over her mouth to make sure she’s still breathing.”

  Hamish responded with a dissatisfied sigh. He began a new drawing. Deen went back to her book.

  “Hey Deen?” he said. “You think we’ll grow up to be like them?”

  “Lushes and pill poppers, you mean? Or junkies?”

  “I
’ve got a theory about it all, you want to hear it?”

  “Be my guest. I’m sure it’s highly scientific.”

  “Well, it is. It’s this: You and I got Pops’s hair, right? And sort of his looks. And Gretchen’s got Munster’s hair and totally her looks. So Munster’s crazy and drinks and Gretchen’s crazy, so that means you and I are more likely to turn out like Pops.”

  “Dead of an overdose at thirty-nine? Thanks, Hames. But I’m happy to inform you that it’s not all that simple. For one thing I’m going to be a classical pianist, not some crazed rocker. And Munster and Gretchen are crazy because Pops died. You and I aren’t, because we were too little to miss him.”

  “I guess. So what do you think I’ll be when I grow up?”

  “I dunno. You’re too young to tell yet. An artist of some kind probably. What’re you drawing?”

  “Pops dead in the hotel room. I made his skin just ever so slightly green, see?”

  “It’s pretty good. You think he really made that big a mess in the room when he died, though?”

  “Naw, he ran around messing everything up before.”

  Hamish Hollander, sometimes called Hames, was twelve. His sister Ondine, whom everyone called Deen, was nearly fourteen. They both had wavy reddish blond hair, pale skin, and long faces with green eyes. They liked each other well enough, finding it convenient to have in each other an ally. Childhood is often a battle waged by two alien nations—one with experience, power, and money; the other with nothing much in the way of weaponry but guile. Deen, of course, sat on her high horse about being so vastly much older, but Hamish was an even-tempered boy and took her loftiness in stride. They pooled their worries and their jokes about the frequently inexplicable behavior of adults.

  Below them, in the basement kitchen, a slender blonde stood swaying barefoot, her feet dusty from the brick floor. Her name was Sadie Hollander. She had a loose-jointed, rackety look, and her tangled hair fell constantly over her eyes and just as constantly she pushed it back, making it even more disheveled, but somehow not diminishing her charm. She had a loopy smile and vague, dark blue eyes. Her white, somewhat grubby jeans rode low on her hips and the man’s shirt she wore had a tear in one sleeve. She exuded wafts of the bygone sixties the way a woman’s scarves are haunted by traces of perfume.

  She looked around the kitchen, unsure what she’d come there to do. She shrugged and went to the counter to make herself a vodka rocks. She sliced a lime and squeezed a wedge over her drink, letting it fall in. “Plop,” she said.

  She took a sip and let out a sigh of pleasure. Ah, the first of the day. Just then a sleek brown mouse raced across the floor, leaped over her feet, then disappeared beneath the dishwasher. It peered out, its eyes like drops of India ink and its nose twitching.

  “Hello,” Sadie said to it, leaning down. “I’m going to have to think of a name for you. Something rather distinguished, I think. Aren’t you lucky I don’t live with some fussbudget husband who would lecture me about leaving food around, or put out traps? Gawd, what a dull life that would be.”

  She stood and said to herself, “I think Mommie’ll have just one more drink before the hellish bore of making dinner.” She often talked to herself, felt it quite a natural thing to do.

  The mouse rose on its hind legs and climbed into the burrow it had made in the yellow insulation. It turned several times then curled up, its tail over its paws. It scratched its belly then slept, dreaming of waving grasses above, of moving below the verdant canopy, silent and hidden, fresh earth letting loose its scent. The mouse let out a squeak and dreamed of a ball of dried grasses tucked among some roots, inside which lay a knot of pink, hairless offspring, his drive solely to care for, their eyes still dark spots beneath their wrinkled skin.

  Sadie, the impatient variety of dreamer, could never bear hanging around waiting for dinner to cook, so after she’d put together the meal she took her drink out to the back garden, to the table under the mulberry tree. September had nearly gone but she could still hear the creaks and whirs of the few remaining insects. The twilights were falling more swiftly, the light fleeing the sky with a whisper.

  Her husband, Ree, had been the first, really the only person to notice her habit of watching the end of each day. How she’d drift away to be alone in the garden, or rooftop or balcony. How she never left the beach till all the light was gone, or in winter positioned herself by a window. And he’d understood that it wasn’t because she was an addict of the pyrotechnics of sunset, but simply needed to observe each day’s slide away from the sun. “Leave her be,” he’d say to friends who tried to follow her. “She likes to watch it by herself.”

  Lights came on in the apartment to the west and she got up. “Deen, Hamish!” she called up the stairs. “Dinner’s ready.”

  “Coming!” they yelled back.

  She’d taken a bit of trouble with dinner, a pork tenderloin with rosemary, apples, and bacon, with potatoes and veg. She was vaguely aware that she hadn’t done great things with dinner lately. She did not, in fact, recall the incident of the baked tennis shoe à la Provençal because she often didn’t remember much about the night before, and her children had tactfully not mentioned it. But she did think that perhaps she’d done something silly again. That’s how she always thought of it, as having done something silly. It never particularly bothered her—either the other party would get over it or they wouldn’t.

  Deen and Hamish came down the stairs, Hamish clumping. They looked rather worriedly at her.

  “Oh, don’t give me that look, all that bug-eyed nonsense,” she said to them. “It’s a perfectly good dinner. You should see what I had to eat growing up. The fifties were the most grisly era ever for cooking.”

  Deen got out napkins and silverware while Hamish put out glasses of water and lit the candles. As Sadie served the food, he uncorked a bottle of wine she’d left out and poured her a glass, sniffing it with an air of expertise.

  When they sat down Hamish asked, “Munster, can I play Pops’s Telecaster?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me that. No. Adolescent boys and rare, finicky guitars don’t go together. No, now shush.”

  “How was your visit with Gretchen yesterday?” Deen asked her.

  “Didn’t I tell you last night?” Sadie said, surprised.

  “Not really.”

  “Hmm. Well, she’s drawing a lot, which is good, but you know how she’s stuck on that dog drawing. I’ve been racking my brains to think what it means. The doctors have all kinds of idiotic ideas about it, but I think it has to do with a toy your father gave her when she was quite small that was tragically lost. She wept for days, it was heartbreaking. The younger doctor there though, he seems to have taken a real interest in Gretchen and says its meaning doesn’t really matter, she simply needs to be given bigger paper.

  “She was the easiest child,” Sadie sighed. “Never a problem. We used to carry her around when she was a baby, in a sling I’d made out of an old paisley shawl. All the band members used to beg for a turn carrying her. She went everywhere with us and never ever cried during rehearsals and the noisiest parties you can imagine. She was our good luck talisman.”

  “Maybe she inhaled too much secondhand pot smoke,” Hamish suggested.

  “Certainly not. I know everyone’s trying like mad to teach your generation that drugs are evil, but have some sense. A couple of joints do not make a person crazy. And as the children of someone who died of a heroin overdose I hardly feel the need to stuff your heads with a lot of nonsense from the D.A.R.E. handbook. Stuff’s tommyrot anyway.”

  Above them the front door opened with a bang. Heavy steps were heard overhead.

  “Oi!” a voice called down the stairs. “Where’s the missus?”

  “Uncle Brian!” Hamish cried, and charged up to meet him. He returned to the kitchen with an aging but still jaunty Englishman in a black leather jacket, gray jeans, and boots.

  “Lo, Saids, how’re you, love?” he said, kissing her. “
Hames, fetch us a beer, there’s a good lad. My little Deen, Deen-deenie, give us a kiss too.”

  Deen gave him a peck and he grabbed her, trying to draw her onto his lap as he sat at the table. She squirmed away from him.

  “Oh ta very much,” he said. “Forgot I was contagious.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Brian, stop trying to molest Deen. She’s getting a bit old for you anyway,” Sadie said.

  “Thanks ever so much, Saids. I’ll have you know I draw the line at sixteen. Nice way to welcome me back, and here I was thinking you’d all be glad to see me. Well, I know where I’m not wanted, so I’ll just nip back upstairs, grab my kit, and be gone.” As he spoke in highly injured tones he pulled the platter of food toward him and began picking at it, then stole Deen’s fork to eat some potatoes. “Anyone going to give a poor old man a bloody plate?” he asked.

  Sadie laughed and set a place for him.

  “You have some too, love,” he said to her, noting that her plate had hardly been touched. “Come on, there’s a good girl, have a tiny piece, you look like you could blow away in the first wind.”

  Brian Brain, né Brian Burker, was honorary uncle and protector of the Hollander clan, having been Ree Hollander’s best friend, rhythm guitarist, and collaborator in writing most of their songs. He had dark, sad, exophthalmic eyes and runnels down his cheeks that seemed stained with coal dust. His still dark hair stood up from his scalp and his yellowing, crooked teeth still echoed his famous boyish grin. He now managed bands and had a key to Sadie’s house, where he stayed whenever he was in New York. He sometimes invented reasons to be in the city, so that he could keep an eye on them.