Though I’d long been acquainted with the neighborhood, having now and then visited there, my closer association began two years ago when a friend bought a house on Willow Street. One mild May evening he asked me over to inspect it. I was most impressed; exceedingly envious. There were twenty-eight rooms, high-ceilinged, well proportioned, and twenty-eight workable marble-manteled fireplaces. There was a beautiful staircase floating upward in white, swan-simple curves to a skylight of sunny amber-gold glass. The floors were fine, the real thing, hard lustrous timber; and the walls! In 1820, when the house was built, men knew how to make walls—thick as a buffalo, immune to the mightiest cold, the meanest heat.
French doors led to a spacious rear porch reminiscent of Louisiana. A porch canopied, completely submerged, as though under a lake of leaves, by an ancient but admirably vigorous vine weighty with grapelike bunches of wisteria. Beyond, a garden: a tulip tree, a blossoming pear, a perched black-and-red bird bending a feathery branch of forsythia.
In the twilight, we talked, my friend and I. We sat on the porch consulting martinis—I urged him to have one more, another. It got to be quite late, he began to see my point: Yes, twenty-eight rooms were rather a lot; and yes, it seemed only fair that I should have some of them.
That is how I came to live in the yellow brick house on Willow Street.
Often a week passes without my “going to town,” or “crossing the bridge,” as neighbors call a trip to Manhattan. Mystified friends, suspecting provincial stagnation, inquire, “But what do you do over there?” Let me tell you, life can be pretty exciting around here. Remember Colonel Rudolf Abel, the Russian secret agent, the biggest spy ever caught in America, head of the whole damned apparatus? Know where they nabbed him?
Right here! smack on Fulton Street! Trapped him in a building between David Semple’s fine-foods store and Frank Gambuzza’s television-repair shop. Frank, grinning as though he’d done the job himself, had his picture in Life; so did the waitress at the Music Box Bar, the colonel’s favorite watering hole. A peevish few of us couldn’t fathom why our pictures weren’t in Life too. Frank, the Music Box Bar girl—they weren’t the only people who knew the colonel. Such a gentlemanlike gentleman: one would never have supposed …
I confess, we don’t catch spies every day. But most days are supplied with stimulants: in the harbor some exotic freighter to investigate; a bird of strange plumage resting among the wisteria; or, and how exhilarating an occurrence it is, a newly arrived shipment at Knapp’s. Knapp’s is a set of shops, really a series of storerooms resembling caverns, clustered together on Fulton near Pineapple Street. The proprietor—that is too modest a designation for so commanding a figure—the czar, the Aga Khan of these paradisaic emporiums is Mr. George Knapp, known to his friends as Father.
Father is a world traveler. Cards arrive: he is in Seville, now Copenhagen, now Milan, next week Manchester, everywhere and all the while on a gaudy spending spree. Buying: blue crockery from a Danish castle. Pink apothecary jars from an old London pharmacy. English brass, Barcelona lamps, Battersea boxes, French paperweights, Italian witch balls, Greek icons, Venetian blackamoors, Spanish saints, Korean cabinets; and junk, glorious junk, a jumble of ragged dolls, broken buttons, a stuffed kangaroo, an aviary of owls under a great glass bell, the playing pieces of obsolete games, the paper moneys of defunct governments, an ivory umbrella cane sans umbrella, crested chamber pots and mustache mugs and irreparable clocks, cracked violins, a sundial that weighs seven hundred pounds, skulls, snake vertebrae, elephants’ hoofs, sleigh bells and Eskimo carvings and mounted swordfish, medieval milkmaid stools, rusted firearms and flaking waltz-age mirrors.
Then Father comes home to Brooklyn, his treasures trailing after him. Uncrated, added to the already perilous clutter, the blackamoors prance in the marvelous gloom, the swordfish glide through the store’s Atlantic-depth dusk. Eventually they will go: fancier antiquaires, and anonymous mere beauty lovers, will come, cart them away. Meanwhile, poke around. You’re certain to find a plum; and it may be a peach. That paperweight—the one imprisoning a Baccarat dragonfly. If you want it, take it now: tomorrow, assuredly the day after, will see it on Fifty-seventh Street at quintuple the tariff.
Father has a partner, his wife Florence. She is from Panama, is handsome, fresh-colored and tall, trim enough to look well in the trousers she affects, a woman of proud posture and, vis-à-vis customers, of nearly eccentric curtness, take-it-or-go disdain—but then, poor soul, she is under the discipline of not being herself permitted to sell, even quote a price. Only Father, with his Macaulayan memory, his dazzling ability to immediately lay hold of any item in the dizzying maze, is so allowed. Brooklyn-born, waterfront-bred, always hatted and usually wearing a wet cold cigar, a stout, short, round powerhouse with one arm, with a strutting walk, a rough-guy voice, shy nervous sensitive eyes that blink when irritation makes him stutter, Father is nevertheless an aesthete.
A tough aesthete who takes no guff, will not quibble over his evaluations, just declares: “Put it down!” and, “Get it Manhattan half the money, I give it yuh free.” They are an excellent couple, the Knapps. I explore their museum several times a week, and toward October, when a Franklin stove in the shape of a witch hut warms the air and Florence serves cider accompanied by a damp delicious date-nut bread she bakes in discarded coffee cans, never miss a day. Occasionally, on these festive afternoons, Father will gaze about him, blink-blink his eyes with vague disbelief, then, as though his romantic accumulations were closing round him in a manner menacing, observe: “I got to be crazy. Putting my heart in a fruitcake business like this. And the investment. The money alone! Honest, in your honest opinion, wouldn’t you say I’m crazy?”
Certainly not. If, however, Mrs. Cornelius Oosthuizen were to beg the question—
It seems improbable that someone of Mrs. Oosthuizen’s elevation should have condescended to distinguish me with her acquaintance. I owe it all to a pound of dog meat. What happened was: the butcher’s boy delivered a purchase of mine which, by error, included hamburger meant to go to Mrs. O. Recognizing her name on the order slip, and having often remarked her house, a garnet-colored château in mood remindful of the old Schwab mansion on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive, I thought of taking round the package myself, not dreaming to meet the fine lady, but, at most, ambitious for a moment’s glance into her fortunate preserve. Fortunate, for it boasted, so I’d had confided to me, a butler and staff of six. Not that this is the Heights’ sole maison de luxe: we are blessed with several exponents of limousine life—but unarguably, Mrs. O. is la regina di tutti.
Approaching her property, I noticed a person in Persian lamb very vexedly punching the bell, pounding a brass knocker. “God damn you, Mabel,” she said to the door; then turned, glared at me as I climbed the steps—a tall, intimidating replica of frail unforbidding Miss Marianne Moore (who, it may be recalled, is a Brooklyn lady too). Pale lashless eyes, razor lips, hair a silver fuzz. “Ah, you.
I know you,” she accused me, as behind her the door was opened by an Irish crone wearing an ankle-length apron. “So. I suppose you’ve come to sign the petition? Very good of you, I’m sure.” Mumbling an explanation, muttering servile civilities, I conveyed the butcher’s parcel from my hands to hers; she, as though I’d tossed her a rather rotten fish, dangled it gingerly until the maid remarked, “Ma’am, ’tis Miss Mary’s meat the good lad’s brought.”
“Indeed. Then don’t stand there, Mabel. Take it.” And, regarding me with a lessening astonishment that I could not, in her behalf, reciprocate: “Wipe your boots, come in. We will discuss the petition. Mabel, send Murphy with some Bristol and biscuit.… Oh? At the dentist’s! When I asked him not to tamper with that tooth. What hellish nonsense,” she swore as we passed into a hatrack-vestibule. “Why didn’t he go to the hypnotist, as I told him? Mary! Mary! Mary,” she said when now appeared a friendly nice dog of cruel pedigree: a spaniel cum chow attached to the legs of a dachshund, “I believe Mabel has your lunch. Mabel, take Miss Mary to the kitchen. And we will have our biscuits in the Red Room.”
The room, in which red could be discerned only in a bowl of porcelain roses and a basket of marzipan strawberries, contained velvet-swagged windows that commanded a pulse-quickening prospect: sky, skyline, far away a wooded slice of Staten Island. In other respects, the room, a heavy confection, cumbersome, humorless, a hunk of Biedermeier pastry, did not recommend itself. “It was my grandmother’s bedroom; my father preferred it as a parlor. Cornelius, Mr. Oosthuizen, died here.
Very suddenly: while listening at the radio to the Roosevelt person. An attack. Brought on by anger and cigars. I’m sure you won’t ask permission to smoke. Sit down.… Not there. There, by the window. Now here, it should be here, somewhere, in this drawer? Could it be upstairs? Damn Murphy, horrid man always meddling with my—No, I have it: the petition.”
The document stated, and objected to, the plans of a certain minor religious sect that had acquired a half-block of houses on the Heights which they planned to flatten and replace with a dormitory
