all.
As children’s choristers, Irene and I buttoned each other’s costumes in Amato Opera’s tiny backstage and crouched behind scenery together, waiting for cues to run onstage. Being onstage was fun for us but not exotic. We’d been doing it since we could walk, holding a grown-up’s hand as they whispered directions and turned us this way or that.
Number 63 was our personal playground. We rigged a doll elevator between our bedroom windows with coffee cans and string. This evolved to a basket and larger toys. We finally decided it was time to haul ourselves. Annie’s mom alarm rang. She ran in as Irene was climbing out of the fourth-floor window.
Privacy was scarce for the poor neighbors with us around. When we were six and seven, Dan, a newly divorced man who lived in 1B, had a beautiful Great Dane. Deane, a single woman, lived in 4C, and they started coming in for drinks holding hands. Irene and I, pining for dogs of our own, were enthusiastic volunteer dog walkers, although we were puzzled when Dan gave us keys to both apartments. Why was the dog in both places? John cleared his throat and changed the subject.
Once, when unlocking 4C, I saw Dan, naked, in Deane’s living room. He leaped behind the couch and crouched. Deane wasn’t home, but I took baths at Irene’s house all the time and figured maybe his shower was broken. No big deal. I yelled hi, took the dog, and left. Another time Irene heard them giggling in 4C. Good, she had Girl Scout cookies to sell. She grabbed her order book and marched over. They took a long time answering that door, but Irene kept knocking. What was the problem? They loved Thin Mints.
Dr. K., a Polish psychiatrist who lived in 4A then, enjoyed talking with John in their native language. He was a young bachelor, and that wasn’t all he enjoyed. It was rarely the same woman twice. “He’s so nice,” we said to our parents after passing him on his way upstairs with that night’s pick. “Cooking dinner for all these ladies.” The men snorted drinks up their noses, and our mothers, trying to keep straight faces, agreed that yes, Dr. K. certainly was hospitable.
Since he had a common wall with the Frydels, Irene and I could hear a lot of goings-on. One activity sounded like galloping back and forth along the length of his apartment, along with slaps and shrieks. Irene and I put our ears to the walls, trying to figure it out. When we asked our parents if he was playing horsie, they got evasive. He started to come home with only one woman, a quiet lady who limped. When she became pregnant, they married and moved to New Jersey.
Irene and I, together in the hidebound world of opera, looked out for each other on Bank Street amid the uproar of the 1960s and ’70s Village. She had physical strength but delicate social defenses. I was a runt but had a blasting potty mouth. We dressed dolls, told each other ghost stories during sleepovers, and played Candy Land. We traded Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. Sometimes we played in my apartment, but most of the time, usually at Annie Frydel’s smiling insistence, we stayed in hers.
It was a long time before I understood that Annie worried about me as my parents jabbed at me and each other. I didn’t realize that she was listening at her alley window as the yelling in 2B started yet again. Until Irene gently told me, when we were in our forties, I never knew that protecting me was a Frydel family mission, one that Irene had been sworn never to divulge. Annie and John had explained to Irene that my rough mannerisms and tough words were self-protection and that Irene should try to ignore them, and that she shouldn’t ever mention the shouting she heard, no matter what. Annie’s frequent, well-timed knocks on our door were not just the lucky prison breaks I’d always thought they were.
“Hi, Ann, sorry to bother you, but Irene is bored and driving me crazy. Can Donna come up and play? And I made way too much meatloaf again.”
“Run along upstairs, Donna. No, really, it’s a favor to me. Donna will entertain her.”
Growing up in the Village was confusing for us both, but we got through it together. Irene declared (rightfully) that I had the style sense of a goat, and she brought home cashmere sweaters and Italian leather skirts on sale from her high school job at Bloomingdale’s while I taught her how to smoke pot. We traded opinions on the latest Star Trek episode. When I threw our Christmas tree downstairs and it punched a hole in the super’s metal steps, Irene flew downstairs and helped me sneak it away.
Irene stayed in the shelter of parochial schools while I, at ten, left for far hipper public school. It made a huge difference. By the early 1970s, I still sang opera, but I’d started to hang out at the Fillmore East rock club too. Irene dutifully listened to Jefferson Airplane or The Who with me, but she was happy to remain with Amato Opera, in our eccentric, cloistered world.
• • •
During the entire time I lived with my parents, it was safe for me in 4B, even if Irene wasn’t home. I could play in her room or watch TV with her parents. No one was angry. John and I traded Met stories and jokes. Annie complimented my help in her kitchen. I felt blessed, even when I hadn’t sneezed. I, in turn, have not forgotten Irene’s birthday once, ever. When number 63’s building management hassled now-elderly Annie and John, I got local politicians to make them stop. If anything were to happen to Irene, I promised to care for John in his last years, in a flash. I sat in Annie’s hospice during her brave fight with cancer in 2005. On her last night, I sobbed as I walked home.
I was still crying as I passed an animal rescue group and ended up taking home a frightened and neglected old dog “just to board, until he’s adopted.” Of course I was in love by the time I’d made him a bed. Corky limped onto Bank Street just as Annie’s laughing spirit flew free. With affection and whopping vet bills, Corky recovered and reigned for years, the jaunty prince of 2B. He stayed with Irene when I traveled. Corky was a Frydel blessing. Again.
4
Mr. Bendtsen
I have a toddler’s memory of the door to apartment 1A opening as we passed. An old man who looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee in my Alice in Wonderland book stared out. His head resembled a boiled egg. He had a beach-ball belly and toothpick-skinny bowed legs. When he smiled, putty-colored lips curled over brown gums, like my Grandma when she’d put her dentures in the pink plastic cup by her bed. He said, “Good day, Madam,” to Mom in a deep, sibilant voice. She nodded and smiled, but held my hand firmly and kept walking. It took a few more years for me to realize that Mr. Bendtsen was always buck naked, not even wearing boxer shorts, like Daddy wore when he was shaving.
Everyone in the building swapped reads on the first-floor hall radiator back then. There were piles of Art Forum, Horizons, Time, the Daily News, and books by Edgar Cayce and Truman Capote. Franz Bendtsen contributed The New York Times. He’d bounce down the hall naked, sociably bearing sections as he finished them. He wowed my parents, the Frydels, and the rest of the neighbors with his perfect Sunday Times crossword puzzle—in ink—and always finished by early Saturday night. Since the Times truck didn’t deliver to the grocery store around the corner or to our doorstep until 6 p.m. on Saturday, Mr. Bendtsen obviously solved even the most challenging clues without breaking a sweat. His puzzle was on the radiator by 8 p.m., and somehow it always stayed conspicuously on top of the other sections as he finished them and brought them down the hall. Dad tackled the puzzle on Sunday mornings. He was pretty good, but if he was stuck, he’d sneak downstairs to the radiator for a peek. He wasn’t the only one who did that.
Mr. Bendtsen loved to follow world news and was usually excited about some event or another. Rose Moradei in 2C told me that she came home from work one afternoon in 1961, and saw him at the radiator, waving his paper, his eyes dancing.
“Madam! A remarkable day for mankind! Look here!”
Elegant, dignified
