Fall 2012

by Marshall Marcovitz

I can just imagine her walking into Harry’s Bar in Venice. Her blonde hair is hanging over her right eye. It always covered her right eye, creating an attractive air of mystery audiences were drawn to. There was just a wisp of grey now. Her face was not youthful anymore, but she still had the figure of a 1940’s pin-up girl. Tonight her profile was illuminated by a shaft of light drifting through the room. She had tried everything to stay young in an industry that relied on faces—youthful faces—lotions, massage, mudpacks, even a rubber mask—but not surgery. She hated the way women her age looked with their skin pinned back behind their ears.

She sat down on one of the puffy red bar stools, her body caressed by the arching Art Deco high back. “I’ll have my usual.”

“We’ve got the fresh white peaches tonight,” said Marco the bartender. He knew the secret to making a great Bellini. The cocktail was named after Giovanni Bellini, the magnificent fifteenth century Venetian painter. It was the specialty of the house. Everything—the glasses, the Prosecco, and the white peach puree—would be absolutely as cold as possible, and ordinary yellow peaches were never used. The secret to the extraordinary concoction was in the fresh white peaches. Marco occasionally added a sugar cube into the bubbly mix.

He eyed her over the low, long counter. It was an unusually quiet night and he had time for conversation. Usually there were waves of customers trying to get his attention with their eyes or a slight wave of the hand. The bar counter was his protective wall holding back the besieging customers.

She was one of the regulars and kept returning after all these years. She was loyal, and he liked her for that. She had drunk Bellini’s with all the regulars—Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles and with dear Peggy Guggenheim—but that was a long time ago.

“Remember,” she said, “when Papa Hemingway dropped in that cold winter night and practically never left.”

“He kept trying to get behind the bar and make cocktails with me,” said Marco, “but I wouldn’t let him pass. I’ve always believed the client’s place is on one side of the counter and the barman’s is on the other.”

“That’s the side I stay on,” she said as she gazed at the pink glow of her Bellini. Her tongue was pressed against the slenderness of the perfectly rounded lip of the cocktail glass. It was crystal clear and the pink liquid appeared to change shapes and shades inside the cylinder.

“I’m toasting you tonight, Marco,” she said in a breathy voice.

“Here’s to you,” he said. “A movie star with genuine class … .”

She let his words wash over her. Her movie career had been over for many years now. She was never going to have her Gloria Swanson moment. That was what the business was like for most women her age, and anyway, she had never had that much confidence in her acting ability.

“Marco,” she laughed. “I didn’t have enough talent to fill your left eye.”

“What was your favorite role?” he asked.

She didn’t answer and stared down at her drink. Now she only had regrets about the films she’d never made and the ones she had—those 1940’s and 50’s Hollywood B- movies.

She looked up, “I always loved the one I starred in when the villain said, ‘This man buries himself with his mouth.’ I played the part of the sexy hitchhiker wearing nothing but a tight belted trench coat and spiked high heel red shoes. I walked into a gloomy farm house, the wind slammed the door shut, and the audience heard my terrified high pitched screams—end of scene, end of movie—strictly shock value. I worked constantly—three or even four movies a year—a horror monster movie, a tear-jerker romance, or a crime mystery. They just kept churning them out. And I was the one thinking up catchy titles to draw in the popcorn-eating crowd: I Married a Witch, This Gun for Hire, and All Women Have Secrets.”

“What was your secret?” Marco asked.

“I never did cheesecake,” said Benita. “I just used my hair…that was my secret…”

Marshall Marcovitz spent most of his life in Chicago, the home of the ‘big-shoulders,’ and not many Veronica Lake look-a-likes who drank Bellinis. But a boy can dream. His love of storytelling and writing started when he read Treasure Island. (After all, Venice is an island and so is Manhattan.)

by Harriet Sohmers Zwerling

by Harriet Sohmers Zwerling

ARRIVAL

The car reaches the top of the curve and there, below and beyond, is the bay and Provincetown, like a lost Venice, with its incongruous campanile rising majestically over the low housetops. The shore winds lovingly around the bay, shining blue in the early evening. This first glimpse is a staggering epiphany, like the sudden apparition of Manhattan around a bend of the Belt Parkway or the first sight of Ibiza from the deck of the Barcelona ferry. We race down the road to Beach Point, straight on to Wind and Wave, where my grey-shingled cottage awaits with its faded blue shutters. We pull in smartly and stop; we are here!

Inside, the cottage is a box of heat. We open the windows and the sliding glass door to the deck, unload the car, release the cat from her carrier, dump the bags in the two tiny bedrooms. And then, quick, we get out the ice, open the Stoli, grab the olives and pour. Out onto the splintery wooden deck with its ancient blue Adirondack chairs and breathe! Magic Provincetown glows against the rose-gold sunset, more beautiful than Venice itself.

BREAKFAST WITH GEORGE

Coffee and English muffins on the deck as the sun pierces the morning fog. The bay shimmers, pleated by a light breeze. A man is fishing, casting his line gracefully, his arm curved like an ancient discus thrower. Many times he casts and quickly reels in with no result. But, suddenly, he’s got one, a blue, a big one!

Watching me patiently as I eat, is George Seagull, my familiar or, as someone once said, my guardian angel. He’s an old gull with scraggly, pale gray feathers. For the many years I have been coming here, he has been here too. He gobbles up the crusts I throw to him and when other gulls come screeching in, he chases them away, fussing and crying. Sometimes they manage to steal from him anyway. He’s getting weak and sometimes can’t manage to defend his territory.

Now the sun has broken through and the bay turns silver. Diamonds will come later, around noon. WOMR, the local radio station, is playing Bach.

SARAH

Sarah is my cat. She fights being loaded into the carrier but, once the car begins to move, she settles down patiently for the long trip to the Cape. When we arrive she is the first out of the car, leaps from her box and up to the top of the fridge, then to the roof beam and on to the sleeping loft, her favorite perch. She spends much of her time up there, dozing on the bare mattress. When the air begins to cool she comes down to sit at the deck door watching the gulls, the clouds and the restless bay. If I open the screen she slinks out, belly close to the planks of the deck, ready to retreat in case of danger.

Back in the city at the end of August she searches in vain for her beloved aerie. The apartment bores her. I play a tape of sea sounds and when she hears the gull cries, the plash of water, her ears perk up and her green eyes glow…

HURRICANE EDOUARD

The Weather Channel tells us, “Watch out! Edouard is coming!” The wind screams; the skies darken; the bay churns the small boats to frenzied bobbing. We go into town to buy candles and masking tape to cover the windows. I well remember Bob in 1991, how it blew out the glass and left us without electricity for a whole week. How the bay rose up onto the deck, threatening to roll right into the house. How I finally gave up and fled into town.

This time I will be more prepared. It is still calm by evening so we go into town for dinner. Storekeepers are boarding up their windows and most of the restaurants are empty except for the drinkers. At Bubala’s, my friend Beverly, ex-wife of Norman Mailer, is chanting Native American incantations against the storm. We have our clam chowder and wine and leave her to her magic.

The hurricane hits around midnight. The cottage creaks and moans. The wind roars. Luckily, it is coming from the ocean side, leaving the bay relatively calm. But at two AM a terrible banging begins. A giant is pounding the wall with his fist; each blow shakes the cottage. Bill and I throw on plastic ponchos and go outside. Wind and rain fill our mouths and eyes. My poncho blows up over my head. I am naked underneath, nude in a hurricane! Bill laughs but there’s nobody around. All the sane people have gone to shelter in town. We pin back the flapping shutters with rope as best we can.

At daylight the wind has dropped but the bay still boils like the Atlantic seen from the deck of an ocean liner. We still have electricity. Edouard has been merciful.

Next day the sun returns. We sweep the sand and debris off the deck and wipe the big front window with Windex. The gulls are back. Sarah has come down from the loft. We are healed.

TWO LADIES

Two ladies, “of a certain age” like me, come to visit. We sit on my deck in the sun and they walk carefully down to the water to swim. When they return we drink ice cold Stolichnaya and talk.

Jean is the elder of the two. She is a true grande dame with high cheekbones, piercing blue eyes, chalky skin, a cap of short gold hair and long, tobacco-stained fingers. She is a brave swimmer and her skinny bird-like legs carry her wherever she wishes to go. She has had several husbands and two daughters somewhere whom I have never seen. She is an artist, and keeps a blue jay in a giant wicker cage in her tiny apartment. She lives here, alone, all year and seems to like her solitary existence very much, thank you. She is also a Republican.

The other lady, Beverly, the ex-wife of the famous writer, is still beautiful but very unhappy. Her life is a bitter reproach to the husband who left her. She never stops thinking of ways to get back at him. This poison has spoiled the latest part of her life, in spite of her sons and grandchildren. Her long-held anger deprives her of any new joy she might encounter. When she drinks, her rage emerges like a powerful genie.

We three sit on the deck in the glorious late afternoon and talk of sex, children, scandal. Among the three of us, we’ve pretty much done it all: travel, careers, children, affairs, passion, and loss.

SUNSETS

Sunsets are a ritual at Beach Point. We rate them, like movies. We photograph them.

We salute them with cocktails. Some evenings the sunsets are bloody and golden. Sometimes the bay becomes a pale blue pond, reflecting greenish clouds. The boats are still. No gulls fly. At its best, the sunset is like a Tiepolo painting—angels’ wings dyed red, gold and royal blue. Neighbors on their decks raise their glasses to each other and pull out their cameras. The French have a name for places like this. They call them lieux privilegies, privileged places.

 

Harriet Sohmers Zwerling: Ex-expatriate, ex-nude model, ex-school teacher. Forever hedonist, grandmother and of course, writer.

by Elaine Greene Weisburg

After serving seven or eight times on New York County trial juries over the years, I was called to Grand Jury duty in the late spring of 1988. This was a welcome prospect because I was free-lancing at home for a national magazine–a solitary endeavor with not enough assignments to occupy me fully.

In the county clerk’s office I was interviewed and fingerprinted and then after a few weeks was summoned to appear on June 20 for a month’s service, meeting daily from 2 till 5 p.m. On our first day I was excited to learn that evidence on one homicide would take up the entire month. It had to be a big story and indeed it was—I had seen it on page one of the tabloids.

Between 1:30 and 2:00 in the morning on April 27, Maria Barone, age 32, a wife and mother from Fairview, New Jersey, had been driving alone in East Harlem. When she ran a red light at 118th Street and First Avenue, NYPD Sgt. Jack O’Brien saw the infraction from his patrol car and moved to stop her but she sped away. A cinematic car chase ensued covering a square mile and lasting almost ten minutes. Several of the police officers who testified mentioned that Maria Barone was an unusually good driver and her pursuers became more and more numerous. By the time she was cornered under the Metro North Railroad tracks at Park Avenue and 124th Street by nine police radio cars from two precincts, she had minutes left to live. After a month of testimony from 38 witnesses on the possible culpability of six police officers, we knew how she died and who was to blame.

The job of a grand jury as set forth in our national and state constitutions is to decide one thing only: should an individual be indicted, which means charged with a serious crime. The proceedings are not open to the public and are not a trial; defense attorneys are not present. The jury consists of 23 people, a majority of whom must agree on the finding. Jurors are strongly cautioned not to talk about the case outside the jury room [thus these names have been changed]. When I asked permission to take notes, I was told that I could but I would not be allowed to remove them from the custody of the court. I decided just to listen and at this stage of my life, long after college, I learned that I remember better if I do not take notes.

I viewed my responsibility seriously but it was also major entertainment. The case absorbed me like a television police procedural or a suspense novel. I couldn’t wait for each day’s revelations. The fatal event was reconstructed one witness at a time by a very smart ADA (Assistant District Attorney)—a woman in her thirties. She was our Scheherazade, a narration builder more expert than any I had ever seen as a trial juror, leading us to an inevitable conclusion.

The Medical Examiner came first, to establish the death and the five bullets that caused it. He also testified to the presence in the victim’s body of enough cocaine and heroin in addition to methadone and Valium to have caused an overdose reaction in many people. Another expert witness testified about the condition of her car. Street witnesses described their random views of the chase and the fatal fusillade. They were bit players, some unforgettable like the passerby who added to my vocabulary. This young savvy blue-collar New Yorker described squealing brakes as the patrol cars converged on Maria’s with all their “whoopee lights” flashing. The ADA had to ask him to define whoopee lights and I have never seen this aggressive rooftop display again without thinking of their street name.

Six uniformed policemen were subject to indictment. Five had shot the victim at close range. Each recounted his part of the chase and its conclusion. All five thought Maria Barone had a gun herself and that she had fired it during the chase. All had heard one of their fellow officers shout, after Maria was ordered out of her car, “She’s reaching for it.” All thought that “it” was her gun.

Of the five I best remember one of the two Irish-Americans among the shooters, The Irish poet as I thought of him. After the shooting he had requested a medical leave from work; the others were on desk duty until the Grand Jury proceedings concluded. One of the jurors, with permission from the ADA, asked him why he couldn’t work. “Because I shot an unarmed woman,” he answered. We already knew that he had a fragmentary connection with her. He had testified that during the chase his car and Maria’s briefly stopped side by side with their windows adjacent and there was a moment’s eye contact. “She had very beautiful eyes,” he told the jury. To me this was the most personal detail of all the testimony.

A very different Irishman, Sgt. Jack O’Brien was the sixth uniformed police officer whose responsibility for a civilian death was our concern. He was not only a loose cannon but was deeply dishonest. After he started the chase, it was he who shot three times at Maria’s tires although it is a well-known violation of police department rules to fire a gun to stop a car. Only O’Brien’s partner knew he had done so. When the sergeant radioed his station that gunshots were heard, he did not say that he was the source. In the aftermath of the killing, the sergeant surreptitiously borrowed three fresh cartridges from a fellow policeman so that he could hand the departmental investigators a fully loaded gun. His cover-up failed—too many others knew what he had done.

Before we deliberated, Sgt. O’Brien was given permission to address us. He told us that his wedding had been postponed because of this occurrence and his mother had had a heart attack. He asked for our consideration. We indicted him by a large majority for tampering with evidence in an attempt to conceal his role in the killing. We did not indict the five policemen whose bullets killed Maria Barone. It was O’Brien who caused her death.

There was one other, innocent cause, a poignant detail I learned when I picked up the autopsy report that was lying on the ADA’s desk for anyone to read. What I learned never came up in testimony, wasn’t needed for a just decision, and more than anything makes my heart still ache for poor Maria Barone, who will never complete her drug rehabilitation program, never reclaim her young son being brought up in Italy by her parents.

The report describes her body and notes that her fingernails and toenails were freshly polished. This addicted woman still kept up appearances and tried to look like a lady. It also describes the clothing she was wearing. She had on blue jeans and they were unzipped. When I read that, I knew the whole story. Poor Maria, her pants were tight and she was driving with them open. But she had to get out of her car in front of a large group of men so she reached to zip them up. And the fusillade hit her.

For more than three decades Elaine Greene Weisburg was an editor-writer at House & Garden and House Beautiful. Although also a memoirist, she only dared to try poetry in an IRP class.

by Elaine Greene Weisburg

When we heard that Anna Wintour—a little known thirty-something fashion editor from London—was about to replace our beloved editor-in-chief Lou Gropp at House & Garden in the late summer of 1987, a weird kind of panic set in. We knew that our wardrobes were out of date and they suddenly mattered. Mini skirts were newly back in style, but in the easy-going culture established by our departing boss, whose values had to do with the quality of our magazine and not our personal outfits or hair styles, we were fashion laggards. Everyone agreed that we had to catch up fast, especially our hemlines.

“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” said Henry David Thoreau. Yes indeed. But when I rushed into the city from the East End of Long Island on the morning of September 2nd wearing limp sportswear and scuffed white fisherman’s sandals, I was carrying hundreds of dollars worth of new stuff from the Southampton Saks Fifth Avenue: short skirt, business-style blouse, pumps with heels.

Anna has not started yet but she is there interviewing current staff in a borrowed managerial office. Lou’s secretary Louisa, a kapo type who is already a passionate Anna loyalist, says Anna wants to see me. I ask for ten minutes to organize my thoughts. Behind my locked door clothing flies around the room as I cut off hang tags, fling the country things into a file drawer, jump into my dress-for-success duds, and tease my saltwater-sticky hair into shape.

Anna in her Chanel suit and dark sunglasses is not hard to read: zero warmth. You can’t see her eyes but you can see whether she smiles. She does not. When my husband asked me what it was like, I said it was like meeting your brain surgeon. “What do you think of House & Garden,” she asks. I have been there for over 22 years but only say, “I am proud of the work we do although I sometimes find it a bit too reverential.” It doesn’t really matter what I say; it matters how frumpy she finds me at twenty years her senior in my pathetically new clothes. I later learn that she refers to people with this age handicap as “wrinklies”—typical annoying British slang like “preggers” for pregnant. Still I thought my job was secure because I was the senior writer and magazines always need writers.

A week later, Anna is installed in the corner office with its private bathroom. She is brought around to meet everyone. When she gets to my room she says she has already met me, sticks her hand out, does not smile, and comments before rushing away, “You have a window.” Uh-oh.

Now begins the week that feels like a month. Anna is in the art department reviewing the editors’ photo inventories, standing over the light tables in her dark glasses, saying “No” more than 90 percent of the time. Anna has changed the magazine name to HG. Nothing about it will be the same as the publication that under Lou Gropp—for the only time in its 85-year history—won two National Magazine Awards for excellence at the industry’s annual Oscar-type ceremony. Memos fly and meetings run throughout each day, but not for me. When one of the decorating editors asks me which meetings I have been invited to I have to answer “None.”

Mainly I am waiting now, while I try to think of ways to become visible again, pondering who can help me achieve this. I develop certain routines including a daily solitary lunch on the Grand Central Terminal balcony: chicken potpie and a scotch and soda. This is a menu I never chose before, but fatty food and alcohol are instinctively selected balms that work– a little. Nevertheless, I am beginning to have insomnia and brief private crying fits. I keep my office door closed most of the time with a radio playing and a “Knock and Enter” sign taped outside. I hear people rushing by, flurries when meetings begin and end. I am finishing stories already in the works for weeks, writing proposals to change Anna’s mind should I ever get her ear. One sweet girl stops by every day to say hello, but most of my colleagues don’t want Anna to see them with me and steer clear. Sauve qui peut.

The other wrinklie, Danielle, a beautifully educated woman who has been there a decade longer than I, is also cut out of meetings and left off the roster for the constant memos. Danielle soon decides she might as well be seen with me and suggests lunch at the Harvard Club. I have my now-usual scotch and soda but with the club’s famous rarebit. We agree that it looks bad.

I solicit the help of my litigator son. Phoning him at home in the evening I say “I may need a lawyer soon.” He says “If that’s what you think, you need one now. You don’t wait till the shit hits the fan.” He will find me one. He calls me with a firm name the next day at work, asking me first whether my phone is secure. No one ever asked me that before. When I call the firm, the operator asks whether it is about a case. No one ever asked me that before either. I quickly answer yes although I just want advice. I meet the labor lawyer and he tells me to make notes but only in private (“Don’t appear to be spoiling for a law suit”). Listen for “fresh,” “young.” Voice your suspicions that age seems to be involved and note the answers. Anna has killed one of my steady features–Mark Hampton on Decorating–which would later become a best-selling anthology, and she has assigned my shopping column to a colleague. The new lawyer says that in employment law this is called “evicting” me from my job. It’s actionable.

On September 17th Anna finally invites me into her office for a talk. I arrive with my list of hot ideas for her hot magazine but she doesn’t give me a chance to read then. She says she is sorry she has made me wait but she has finally looked my work over in past issues. She sees that I am from the previous regime and “would not fit in” (pronounced “fit tin”) with the new one. Talking fast and breathing as though in a tap-dancing climax, I say I wrote the way I did because the magazine was about splendor and authenticity. I can do what she wants too. I tell her I wrote about cockroach control for Woman’s Day and satin bed sheets for Cosmopolitan. No dice. I say “You made up your mind the minute you saw me. You don’t know that age is inside the head, not outside on the skin.” Anna says she is sorry I am taking it like this. I say “How the hell would you take it, a careerist like you?” Both of us are standing and shouting by now. She is rushing to the door to open it and get rid of me. I say, “I hope you fall on your face.” And exit. Louisa the kapo has heard the loud parts and looks at me angrily.

I have never seen Anna in person again but was glad to note, when she appeared on the Letterman show a year or so ago, that when you look at her profile with those side curtains of hair, all you can see is her nose. Which is getting bigger.

For more than three decades Elaine Greene Weisburg was an editor-writer at House & Garden and House Beautiful. Although also a memoirist, she only dared to try poetry in an IRP class.

by Charles Troob

Call me Schlemiel.

I put on my Facebook profile, “in search of a white whale.” I thought I was being poetic.

M.—man or woman, I wasn’t sure—sent a message: “I think of myself as an endangered species, a world traveler. I love the sunrise in the Bay of Biscay and the sunset in the Bay of Bengal. These days, though, I find myself in New York harbor. Meet me at the aquarium.”

I got on the F train, dreaming of sun-kissed lagoons….

One look at those enormous eyes and that pale skin, and I was hooked. Sure, sure, you shouldn’t get emotionally involved with a prisoner—but hey, M. was cute!! And the size was an unexpected turn-on.

It was a crazy time, a wild ride. I’m not proud of some of the things I did to please M., but I guess I had needs and issues that I had to work through.

Now I’m with someone much more stable. She carries a torch for me that you can see for miles.

Charles Troob: An eager member since 2010 of two wonderful study groups–Lessons in The Art of Writing, and Reading and Writing Poetry–Charles is grateful for the opportunity to share some of the results.