her relief, he held up the newspaper. “The astronaut! The Russians have sent this man, Yuri Gagarin, to outer space! Have you seen?”
Rose looked at the headline, still controlling her eyes. “It really is incredible,” she agreed.
He beamed. “We have lived to see this! An amazing day!” As he waddled excitedly down the hall, Rose looked at his sagging buttocks and stifled a laugh. It simply never seemed to occur to Mr. Bendtsen, she said, that his alfresco state altered the discourse. “Keep your eyes up and don’t laugh,” Mom said when I became old enough to find his nudism funny. “He’s a nice old man.”
Mr. Bendtsen wasn’t our only well-aired neighbor. Elderly Jane Gorham in apartment 3B was a photographer. Her late husband had been a painter, and she’d lived in 63 since the 1930s. Once she invited me, Irene, and my mother into her apartment to look at his paintings and at her photos of their Village group. She’d taken them, she said as she pointed, at the summer place the group rented together on Fire Island through the 1930s and 1940s.
Irene and I traded incredulous looks. Jane’s friends, smiling and waving, were all naked. Still mortified by our new pubescence, we couldn’t believe that tall, patrician Jane had cavorted al fresco. Jane, serenely misreading our stupefaction as rapt attention, pulled an illustrated Kama Sutra from a shelf. Now she was talking about how she and her circle had freed their creative powers with “mutual libidinal release.” Irene and I didn’t know what the hell that was, but we were electrified by the few of ancient India’s acrobatic sexual positions we glimpsed before Mom hurried us to the door.
• • •
Rose Moradei remembered Mr. Bendtsen telling her that he and his mother had arrived in 1944 or 1945. “Mrs. Bendtsen died around the time I came,” she told me. “And I think he kept company with a lady across the hall in 1B until she moved away.” Rose was always impressed with his wide knowledge. He shared his opinions about literature, art, science, and politics in his sonorous voice. He charmed her too; few men had his courtly manners, she said.
Rose could never quite put her finger on his slight accent and was hesitant to ask. He’d mentioned being an actor at some point, she recalled, but hadn’t said much else. My parents and other neighbors had the same vague memories of a stage career, but it was enough of a clue to get me started on the hunt in the 1990s.
I combed through the archives at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, searching their actor biography files. When I found a small manila folder with his name, it felt as if I’d discovered buried treasure. I flipped through the clippings, stifling the urge to cheer. I found you, Mr. Bendtsen! And you got great reviews and never bragged about them to Rose or anyone else. That modesty, in his profession, was remarkable by itself. Actors lived all over the Village, and most of the ones I’d met were wildly in love with themselves. I gave up dating them in my early twenties. All they ever talked about was how fabulous they’d been in some show or about some upcoming audition. If they asked a single question about me, it was a miracle.
Normal clothes probably just bored you, Mr. Bendtsen, by the time you moved into 63 Bank Street, I thought as I read. You’d been in costumes for most of your life.
He’d had a full, steady career, a rarity for an actor in any era. Reviews from 1907 through the 1920s praised him as Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, Rodrigo in Othello, and the Cobbler in Julius Caesar. The accent that puzzled Rose may have been a leftover from his native language or stage training. He was born in Denmark, migrated to the States as a child, and studied at the Chicago Musical College, now the Chicago College of Performing Arts. His first name changed quite a bit in the newspapers. Various reviews called him “Franz,” “France,” “Franklin,” and “Francis,” and some got creative with his last name too. Maybe he himself was experimenting with stage names, I thought, or since he was performing around the time of World War I, maybe he was trying to distance himself from any question of German origins.
A 1912 reviewer of As You Like It declared that “France Bendtsen played the epicene Le Beau with precisely the required mince and dandeism.” The year 1916 was a banner year for him. One newspaper noted that “Francis Bendtsen has had two hits in New York in new plays during the present season, as the German professor in ‘Mrs. Boltay’s Daughters’ and as Dickie Wilkes in ‘The Fear Market.’” Another described his day off as follows:
Lots of folks hide their lights under the proverbial bushel, take it from France Bendtsen of ‘The Fear Market’ company. For instance, Bendtsen declares that he never realized just how meritorious was the work of the Subway artistic decorators until he chanced to stroll into the Subway at Times Square on Sunday morning. Then, lo and behold! a big four-sheet poster of himself . . . confronted the young actor and Bendtsen was the best customer . . . for the remainder of the day. He rode to the end of the Bronx line, getting off at every station and viewing his likeness on the posters and then began all over again. . . . The Metropolitan Museum of Art may be all right in its feeble way, but for the genuine article—again take it from Mr. Bendtsen—go to the Subway every time!
He must have loved this, I thought.
His career continued to flourish. In 1919 another admiring review declared that Bendtsen “is a young man of whom Broadway should see more . . . he has versatility as well as cleverness.”
Bendtsen looked handsome in an ordinary, nondescript way in his publicity photos, with neatly combed straight hair slicked back and pleasant, even features. A bit like F. Scott Fitzgerald, I thought, but hard to recognize as my bowlegged old neighbor with warts and liver spots. I squinted hard, trying to find the cheerful old man who’d called me “Little Miss” and thanked me for sharing my Hershey bars with him by bowing low, hands fluttering in the air by his sides, and elaborately kissing my hand. His dramatic thank-you performance was our special time to giggle together. Plus, we both loved chocolate.
“No wonder he beat all of you at that crossword puzzle,” I crowed to my parents and the neighbors, brandishing copies from his file. “And look at these reviews. When did he even sleep?” It was a good question. By 1926 he’d performed in thirty-nine Broadway premieres, thirty revivals, and seventeen Shakespeare plays. He’d acted in works by Molière in French and dramas by Ibsen in Danish. I blew up the photos too, to show the neighbors. “Look at him as a young actor,” I said. “Can you believe it? He did movies, radio shows, and musical comedies too.” They shook their heads as they looked at the pictures. “I had no idea,” Rose said. “This is amazing.”
He managed well on his own despite his advanced years until the early 1960s. Then, maybe after a small stroke or advancing dementia, his behavior went downhill. Rose, luckily, was walking up the steps on her way home as he opened the front door, buck naked, about to step onto the stoop and take a walk. “He’d always put clothes on when he left the building before,” she said. “He was elegant, in fact, with a silk cravat and a silver-headed walking stick. He was mortified when he looked down and realized what he was doing, the poor man. I felt awful for him.”
Mom and the other neighbor ladies brought meals downstairs. Rose made a point of stopping by to check on him on her way home from work. Ramiro, our super, swept his apartment when he cleaned the halls. But our thespian was too fragile to live alone any longer. I was seven or eight. He still thanked me profusely for bars of chocolate as I held them up to him but couldn’t manage to bend into his bow.
A tearful group of us waved goodbye from the sidewalk on the day that white-coated attendants carried him down the steps in a wheelchair. He had a box of chocolate-covered cherries tucked at his side, our parting gift. He was dressed up, with a silk scarf draped theatrically around his neck and a plaid blanket over his legs. I reached out and gave him a hug. He swept those fluttering
