Living near New York was a gift to my young, artistic soul. Every trip to The City was an inspiration. The Lincoln Tunnel seemed, to me, a tessering1 to another dimension.
My mother made it a point to expose me to the esoteric, and the mundane, and without understanding how deliberate her intent, I lapped it up.
Sometimes, in the way of adolescence, I found it embarrassing. That was particularly true in a restaurant featuring classic silent films, a black and white decor that somehow bridged deco and the International Style in a way that suggested Bond: James Bond. Servers, scantily clad (for the time) in black leotards with fish net stockings fawned over this shy boy and his mum. I was inarticulate and not sure where to look. Saved by Buster Keaton up on one of several screens.
At other times, it felt as I imagine a young bird feels being pushed out of the nest by a parent who sees a readiness to take flight that is beyond the ken of her boyling. Trust and courage are required.
Near The Park, we were accosted by a beggar whose resentment of our apparent privilege was very clear in word and gesture. I was struck by how fear and compassion and the sense of being unjustly judged through the narrowest of insights could co-exist. I did not see a beggar so much as a mystery, not a thing to fear (though that was there) but a person with depths I could not know. I was young enough to trust that I was safe with my mum, she had courage—and wisdom—enough not to take flight.
The contrast between the two women could not have been more stark. Her straggly gray hair, soiled overcoat and defiant, sneering words “get back to Bellevue” seemed define her space. Mom in black, a Russian style coat, the streetlight catching the softness of her streaked coiffure like a halo. Me, as a defining extension in a pea jacket, brass buttons flashing.
The look between them was but a moment, appraising, wary. Just a moment, but it passed with a kind of acknowledgement of a common humanity. Mom withdrew some bills from the mink muff I had given her as a birthday present just days before. She caught the attention of a hansom cab driver and we walked deliberately to climb in.
The coachman, seeing it as a sort of rescue at the end of his day, took us right into the traffic of the city. We had reservations as a restaurant known for it’s prime ribs, Victorian decor and gaslit ambience. I felt a sense of relief and the enchantment of clip clopping down a major thoroughfare, a sense of travelling back through time. The valet helped us down. It was a theatrical arrival and the doors opened like curtains on a stage. We stepped into the warmth, far removed from the experience of moments before.
It seemed to me that we belonged to this world apart, my mother and I. It all seemed so real. But I knew it was not. Reality lies is somewhere on the line stretched taught between the angry screech of the cold and hungry on the street and the solace of a few bills from a kid gloved hand.
It was the 1960s. I was cocooned in an Auntie Mame2 world, before the riots, before the assassinations. The war was in the background, the draft had no resonance.
Dad’s lawsuits had not yet taken hold.
We had not yet fled.
Madeleine L”Engle introduced “tessering” as a means to span dimensions in her 1962 work, A Wrinkle in Time.
Patrick Dennis’ 1955 memoir of life with his aunt, a character interpreted by Rosalind Russell in a classic 1958 file, remains the lens through which I see the years before everything changed.