Half-way through December, and here is the third installment of my novel JUST ACROSS THE STREET IN NEW YORK CITY. What a pleasure to share it with you before its re-release on 2 Februray, 2022. I love the cover art by Sanaan Mazhar

SPRING 1990

§§

MARSHA WINSTON

When she walked through the slushy grey snow to 23rd Street to catch the cross-town bus, Marsha Winston fought with her umbrella until it flipped inside out in the spitting March wind, breaking three of the spines. “Shit,” she said out loud to the world in general and tossed the useless thing in the corner trash barrel stuffed with other umbrellas sticking out at bizarre angles.

At 1st Avenue, she transferred uptown to the M15 bus and finally made it to the American Rose Institute. Harvey Shoat the receptionist called out “Hello, Marsha” when she went through the door. ARI had 34 employees, and they all knew her name, including the janitor and guard, but all Marsha could muster in return to their greetings was, “Shitty weather,” and she went straight to the coffee room. She knew she looked like she’d been dunked at a county fair, but she didn’t care. She needed caffeine.

Carrying a cup of unsweetened black coffee, she headed to her office to peel off her soaked sneakers and coat. She looked at the reflection in the glass door of the bookcase. “You look like shit,” she said to herself. “No one’s going to want to take your picture.” She shrugged and added, “It’s okay. The O’Keefe will be the star of the show.”

At 11:00, Marsha put on high heels and went to the conference room to face six reporters from National Geographic, The Horticulture Research Journal, The German Rose Project Quarterly, Scientific American, The New York Times, and The Audubon Society Journal. Five ARI employees waited in the room too.

From the head of the seminar table, the still-damp assistant research administrator of ARI introduced herself and started her presentation the same way she always did: “I wanted to open with a joke about roses, but all the ones I know are old and tired. Do any of you have a rose joke you can tell?”

Her colleagues knew her technique for getting the attention of visitors so they stayed quiet. Liz Graham from The New York Times spoke up, “Emily Rose sat on a pin. Emily rose.”

There was a beat of silence in the room, then sniggering started, groans followed, and laughter too.

“That’s one I haven’t heard, Liz, and I like it. Simple and wonderful,” Marsha said, still grinning, “just like the new Georgia O’Keefe rose.” From that transition, she rolled into her speech, “The cuttings on the table show that she’s a double-flowered climbing rose similar to the old Sally Holms Rose from England, and just as easy to grow.”

The audience murmured appreciatively, and Marsha went on, “As you can see, its abundant flower is peachy white. The stipule is small and fleeting.” Marsha’s dark hair fell over her right eye, and she pushed it back. It was frizzy from getting rained on. “I particularly like the feathered leaflets of the plant. You see how they’re glossier than typical.”

She figured she was on a roll because the reporters were taking notes instead of sleeping. The room smelled great. Marsha forgot about being soggy and described how long the plant had taken to develop and the remarkable resistance of the new rose. She loved publicity for her flowers and talked like she was on stage at the Oscars.

She flashed a smile and closed with, “The Institute is scheduled to present an O’Keefe plant to the First Lady on her birthday, the 8th of June. We’re certain that it will end up in the White House Rose Garden. You are all invited to the presentation event.”

That was Marsha’s way of dismissing the reporters, but they didn’t leave. She wasn’t surprised. She knew what they were waiting for, so she pushed a potted cutting of the O’Keefe into the hands of each visitor, and they all left happy.

After work, standing at the bus stop shivering in the cool evening, Marsha was still vibrating from the reporters’ appreciation, but her adrenalin had deserted her. Her back and feet hurt as if she were 68 instead of 38 years old.

In her apartment, Marsha watered her plants and put away the laundry, then showered. By 7:30 she was ready for her 8 p.m. date with Greg Cohn, the sculptor she’d met the week before at an opening at the Met. By 7:50, she was at the bar at Carmine’s on West 44th Street with a martini in her hand. She liked being early so she could watch her date’s reaction when he thought he was late.

Greg’s eyes popped open wide when he saw her waiting, but he recovered with ease, gliding up to her and guiding her toward their table. The two bottles of Frascati wine made the dinner conversation easy, with Greg talking sports and weather, Marsha going on about her recent excursion to Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art. After sharing the calamari with white sauce and the manicotti, they each tried the other’s dessert, cheesecake for him, strawberry shortcake for her.

Greg savored his last bite and said, “Next time, I’ll get a slice of the shortcake.”

Marsha was tired and happy and answered, “Oh, no piece for the wicked.”

Greg cocked his head, confused.

Marsha waited a beat for him to understand, got no response, so she explained, “Peace, get it. A piece of strawberry shortcake. It’s a joke. Piece and peace. No peace for the wicked.”

Another few silent seconds passed with both of them taking a breath. Then Greg asked, “Coffee?”

“Do you live close by?” Marsha answered.

She wasn’t surprised when he nodded to the waiter and asked for the check.

After a short cab ride to East 36 Street, they rode an elevator to the 12th floor, and without coffee or chitchat, they fell onto Greg’s bed on top of the duvet. Four minutes later, Greg put his hands under his head and murmured, “You were fantastic.”

Marsha did not return the compliment. She talked to herself during the cab ride back to West 22nd Street, “Four minutes, what a shithead. Four minutes is the time for finding a T.V. channel, not for a romantic encounter after dinner. What are you, Greg Cohn, a 12-year-old adolescent? You’ve never had sex before?” She glanced into the rearview mirror to see whether the driver was listening to her monologue. More quietly, she repeated, “Four shitty minutes.”

By the time she got home and added Greg to her list of lovers, she had become pragmatic. “An excellent free dinner,” she announced to the kitchen as she made herself a cup of decaf coffee, black, no sugar.

§§

Grumbling to herself, Lydia knocked at the door of the apartment beneath hers. She didn’t understand why tenants refused to put the rent check in her mailbox on the first of the month. Why did she have to ask for money on the third or fourth day? Marsha Winston wasn’t the worst she’d ever had, but she sure wasn’t the best. Lydia knocked on the door again.

“Open up. I know you’re there. I saw you come back from the store with groceries.” Lydia surveyed West 22nd Street all day from her bay window on the 2nd floor.

Marsha had muted the television when she heard Lydia Duffy stomping down the steps. She was careful not to do anything to make the witchy landlady happy. She listened to the banging on the door while she filed her fingernails on the couch in the living room.

Marsha’s street-level apartment was a floor-through, three nice rooms plus the smallest kitchen in Manhattan. The apartment didn’t get much light, but it was plenty big enough for Marsha to have lots of potted plants, mostly rose bushes of course, but a schefflera and a king sago palm soaked in artificial light rigged up in the middle room.

From the window in the living room, she could see the trees with their pale leaves lining West 22nd Street. She had a clear view into several apartments on the other side of the street. While she listened to Lydia banging at the door, she looked in a third floor window at a woman in an orange vinyl chair facing a television. Marsha had watched the woman watch T.V. for eight years.

When she first moved into her apartment, she tried not to take note of her neighbors. But it was impossible. The bars across her windows were supposed to keep her safe inside. Instead they seemed magnetic, pulling her to the world outside.

Finally, she heard Lydia stomping back up the stairs to her own apartment, screeching, “You go to hell. You can’t con me, you bitch.”

Her landlady lived overhead in a two-story apartment. Marsha never understood how someone like Lydia Duffy, with her balding head and hanging skin could own an entire building in Chelsea, a lovely old brownstone with a real backyard. It was a treasure worth millions, but still the scrawny woman dressed like a hag, never went out, and had the manners of a rat.

Through the ceiling, Marsha sometimes heard Lydia screaming, telling her daughter how worthless and ugly she was. Other than Lydia and her daughter, no one else came into the building. Marsha thought a mother like that should be hung, or worse.

She took glee in making Lydia wait a couple of extra days each month for the rent. The $970 check for her 700 square-foot apartment was already written and signed, but she’d hold it a while longer before sliding it in the Duffy mailbox. Marsha smiled, unmuted the T.V., and picked up The Sunday Times crossword puzzle.

§§

Marsha didn’t know that Lydia’s father had arrived in New York 100 years ago from Ireland with a suitcase full of money he’d made from betting the horses. Old Duff had bought foreclosed properties around the city and padded his fortune with rent money from other immigrants, until the Irishman was shot dead by a bookie. His wife was hit too, leaving 15-year-old Lydia to manage the rental properties.

Through the years Lydia collected rents, spitting in the face of anyone who gave her grief, but finally, taxes and maintenance caught up with her, so she started selling the buildings, one by one.

Lydia never married, but there had been one man who spit back at her before he dragged her into his apartment. After a few hours, she left with a black eye, and nine months later, Lydia was a mother. She raised the baby in the same West 22 Street apartment where she’d grown up, a home with parquet floors covered with fine old oriental rugs.

The front door of the Duffy apartment opened into a dining room, flanked by the kitchen and living room. Oak tables, silk curtains, and china filled the rooms. The woodwork and doors under the fourteen-foot ceilings were crafted in cherry wood, and the original 1845 cherry staircase led to three upstairs bedrooms and a big white-tiled bathroom where an easy chair and lamp table faced the footed bathtub. An iron staircase led from the back of Lydia’s kitchen down to the backyard.

Servants lived in tiny rooms under the roof back in the time when Lydia was born, and they worked in the low-ceilinged space at street level. But that era was long gone.

To convert the first floor into an apartment, Lydia had covered the 7-foot walls with wood-paneling, so upkeep was minimal, no painting required. She didn’t allow tenants in the backyard, and to stay free of cockroaches and rats, she folded the cost of an exterminator into the rent.

Lydia grumbled to herself, “I will not jump through legal hoops to get that stinking bitch evicted. I will not. But she better watch out or I’ll change my mind.” She figured if she got rid of Marsha Winston, she could squeeze $2000 out of some naïve ingénue.

Lydia let herself back into her apartment, then crabbed her way down the wrought-iron steps from the kitchen into the backyard. The shriveled woman pulled weeds with clawed fingers, wisps of her scraggly hair flying in the breeze. When she saw a stream of water come down from the kitchen landing, she looked up and screeched, “You lazy slob, you’re just now mopping?”

She made her way to the stairs and started up, hanging on the iron rail with one hand and the other hand flailing in the air, “How’d I get stuck with a no-good daughter? We’d live in a pigsty if it was up to you.” At the top of the steps, she hollered, “Get to work, girl. And clean up the dishes. If you’d get your fanny moving, you wouldn’t be such a fat cow.”

Watching her daughter wipe her hands on a dish towel, Lydia shook her head from side to side. “Do you think the pennies you bring home from that so-called job cover what you cost me? Most people earn their space on this earth, young lady.”

Marsha listened to it all from downstairs. It wasn’t as bad in winter when the windows were closed, but from April to October, she heard Lydia’s rants. She didn’t know why the mother kept the daughter around. For that matter, she didn’t understand why the daughter put up with the mother.

Marsha moved to the bedroom at the back of her apartment and kept working on the New York Times cross-word puzzle. A stream of wash-water splashed outside her window. Then she saw Lydia on the steps, walking into the sunshine of the backyard carrying a basket of wet clothes, slumping her way to the rusted clothesline stretched east and west between the two fences. The crabbed woman pinned three white blouses to the sagging line, then socks and underwear.

Marsha watched and cringed when Lydia hung white nylon panties, full-cut from thigh to waist. She imagined Lydia taking the panties down when they were dry, counting out half for herself and half for her daughter, without any distinction.

It was just as well Marsha didn’t have backyard privileges. For one thing, the space was a wasteland, with a couple of tufts of grass coming through the rocky dirt, and three dead bushes along the back fence. If she spent time there, for her own sanity she’d have to cultivate a garden, full of roses and bulbs and a luxurious carpet of grass, with a few small fruit trees. It would be nice to sunbathe in private, but it was better to keep as far away from Lydia Duffy as possible. She thought she’d kill herself if Lydia were her mother instead of her landlady. That was an exaggeration, but not by much.

§§

Sherri and Fran were with him at the news studio Saturday morning. The producer said it would increase the human interest if his daughters sat with him during the interview. At a saucy seventeen, Fran Levine loved it, preening as she waited for the interview. Sherri was the problem.

The producer shot a command toward younger Levine girl, “When Mary Lou asks your father how he found out he was listed on the Memorial, lean into him and take his hand.”

“Dad, what if someone sees me?”

Mike said, “It’s true. Someone may see you, Sherri.”

“Of course someone’s going to see you, sweetie,” the producer said loudly. He thought the kid was shy, and he went on, waving his big hands in the air, “This is New York City. I don’t do things people don’t watch.”

Sherri wasn’t being coy. “What you’re asking me to do is exploitation. It’s not right.”

The producer looked at Mike Levine who shrugged. He turned back to Sherri who had her arms folded across her chest. Adding a couple of decibels to his volume, the producer said, “All you’re doing, kid, is sitting next to your goddamned dad.”

“Hold on there,” Mike jumped up, his fists clinched. “You can’t talk to her that way.”

Before he finished his sentence, a dark-haired woman stepped in front of the producer, flashed a set of teeth, and offered her hand. “Hi there, Mr. Levine. I’m Mary Lou Fredrick.” She turned and went on, “And you must be Sherri, right?” She gestured toward Fran. “Is that your sister?”

Sherri took a breath and nodded.

“Come on over here,” she said to the girls, like she was calling them to open Christmas presents. “This is going to be great. We’re going to show how this monument thing has affected your family. I bet you’re glad the inscription is wrong, huh?” she asked, winking at both girls.

Sherri looked over her shoulder at her father, her chin quivering. “But Dad, what am I going to tell David? He’ll see me being exploited for ratings.”

Mike put his arm around Sherri and said, “How about this? We’ll invite David to the apartment tonight. You can decide together whether you want to watch the news show or not.”

“Really, Dad?”

Mike nodded.

Sherri turned to the reporter. “Okay. I guess it’ll be okay.” Then she added, “I hate being called ‘sweetie’ and ‘kid’.”

Mary Lou Fredrick patted Sherri’s shoulder, gave Mike an appreciative glance, and told Fran, “Your blond hair looks fabulous.”

The producer counted down with his fingers, three, two, one, and the camera rolled with Mary Lou Fredrick asking Michael Levine, “How did you tell your daughters that your name is on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the famous monolith inscribed with names of 300,000 Americans who died during our involvement in the ten year ‘conflict’ in Southeast Asia?”

He wanted to repeat what he said at cocktail parties, that he’d be happy if the government sent him dependent survivor benefits every month. Mike always smirked when he said it, and then asked for another drink to help drown memories of shells exploding, the smell of shit rising from dead bodies, and the pools of blood that sent him back to memories of Nicky’s gushing red neck.

But he said what he thought Mary Lou wanted the T.V. audience to hear, “I’m just happy to be alive. My family and I, we mourned with all the other families who lost someone listed on the Memorial. Their deaths were a loss for all Americans.” By the time she had gone through the interview the third time, he knew it all by heart.

On the 6:00 o’clock news, Channel 2 ran a segment about Michelle MacDonald, glamour actress with the botched face lift, who had committed suicide the previous week. After a commercial break, the newscast switched to a shot of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., fading into the spot about Michael Levine.

Mike mouthed the lines of the interview while his daughters and David watched the taped newscast. If it had been an interview about a successful play he was in, or if it had shown him and his daughters wearing Statue of Liberty costumes in front of his Liberty Tax storefront, Mike would have been thrilled to be recognized. But no, his 15 minutes of fame came from a government mistake.