And then your friends insist on being considered. I had a dream of six rooms on the upper West Side. “But the upper West Side, my dear! You might as well be in Chicago.” Then I had revolutionary longings for a tiny old house with no heat and a sloping roof in Greenwich Village— “I could never go to see you there. They would stone the motor,” ended that. There is just one slice in the center of the city in which a poor but honest widow can live to the satisfaction of everybody but herself. So here I am in the decorous Seventies, between Park Avenue and Lexington, in an eighteen-foot dwelling with floors for light housekeeping.
To enter you go down three steps to a little front door that tries to keep up to the neighborhood by hiding its decrepitude behind an iron grill. That lets you into the smallest vestibule in the world, where four bells are ranged along the door-post and four letter-boxes cling to the wall. Out of this open two more doors, one that gives egress to a narrow flight of stairs without a hand-rail, and the other to the ground-floor apartment, inhabited, so Mrs. Bushey tells me, by a trained nurse and her aunt. There was a tailor there once, but Mrs. Bushey got him out— “Cockroaches, water bugs, and then the sign! It lowered the tone of the house. A person like you,” Mrs. Bushey eyed me approvingly, “would never have stood for a tradesman’s sign.”
I murmured an assent. I always do when credited with exclusive tastes I ought to have and haven’t. It was the day I came to look the place over, and I was nervously anxious to make a good impression on Mrs. Bushey. Then we mounted a narrow stair that rose through a well to upper stories. As it approached the landing it took a spirited curve, as if in the hope of finding something better above. The stairway was dark and a faint thin scent of many things (I know it now to be a composite of cooking, gas leakage and cigars) remained suspended in the airless shaft.
“On this floor,” said Mrs. Bushey, turning on the curve, as if in the hope of finding something better up behind her, “the gas is never put out.”
I took that floor. I don’t know whether the gas decided it, or Mrs. Bushey’s persuasive manners, or an exhaustion that led me to look with favor upon anything that had a chair to sit on and a bed to sleep in. Anyway, I took it, and the next day burst in upon Betty Ferguson, trying to carry it off with a debonair nonchalance: “Well, I’ve got an apartment at last.”
Betty looked serious and asked questions: Was it clean? Did the landlady seem a proper person? Had I seen any of the other lodgers? Then dwelt on the brighter side: It’s not quite a block from Park Avenue. If you don’t like it you can find some excuse to break your lease. There is a servant on the premises who will come in, clean up and cook you one good meal so you won’t starve. Well, it doesn’t sound so bad.
And now I’m in I think it’s even less bad than it sounded. The front room is going to make the impression. It is already getting an atmosphere, the individuality of a lady of uncultivated literary tastes is imposing itself upon the department-store background. The center table—mission style—is beginning to have an air, with Bergson in yellow paper covers and two volumes of Strindberg. No more of him for me after Miss Juliet, but he has his uses thrown carelessly on a table with other gentlemen of the moment. If I am ever written up in the papers I feel sure the reporters will say, “Mrs. Drake’s parlor gave every evidence of being the abode of a woman of culture and refinement.”
The back room (there are only two) is more intimate. I am going to eat there and also sleep. Friends may come in, however; for the bed, during the day, masquerades as a divan. A little group of my ancestors—miniatures and photographs of portraits—hangs on the wall and chaperons me. Between the two rooms stretches a narrow connecting neck of bathroom and kitchenette.
There is only one word that describes the kitchenette—it is cute. When I look at it with a gas stove on one side and tiers of shelves on the other, “cute” instinctively rises to my lips, and I feel that my country has enriched the language with that untranslatable adjective. No one has ever been able to give it a satisfactory definition, but if you got into my kitchenette, which just holds one fair-sized person, and found yourself able to cook with one hand and reach the dishes off the shelves with the other, you would get its full meaning.
Before the house was cut into floors the kitchenette must have been a cupboard. I wonder if a lady’s clothes hung in it or the best china was stored there. There is a delightful mystery about old houses and their former occupants. Haven’t I read somewhere that walls absorb impressions from the lives they have looked on and exhale them to the pleasure or detriment of later comers?