November 27, 2013
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving and Chaunukkah coming, too, Manhattan is quiet. I walk to the Metropolitan Museum through Central Park, which is empty, save for a few dedicated runners and one sole cyclist. It is so pleasurable to walk through the park in the middle of the day when no one is there. Even at the 90th Street entrance to the running path along the reservoir, Fred Lebow's bronze statue stands alone. There are no cars in the park. The weather is cool and wet and I am dressed for it, so have a lovely stroll.
Arriving at the museum, I encounter a different constellation: there is a line to wait on to enter and have bags checked by the security guards; the great hall, while not wall-to-wall (as it is most days now), is still packed. I buy a ticket, but decide I will stay only briefly: The crowds at the Museum are good business for the institution, but don't suit me.
In the four bays endowed by Enid Haupt and the Information desk in the center of the hall, five beautiful seasonal floral displays once again stun my eye. Few things in the museum please me as much as these, changed weekly thanks to the bequest, allowing visitors to feast on outstanding examples of the floral arranging art.
The other artworks that are personal favorites are the 18th century pastels in the museum's collection, particularly the study of the handsome and lubricious Louis XV by Quentin de la Tour; and another of the simply ravishing Olivier Journu of Bordeaux. In his portrait, Olivier Journu wears a pale rose velvet waistcoat adorned with a corsage of matching roses in the top buttonhole: He looks amazingly like Gary Cooper in a powdered wig, his turquoise eyes and open smile beguiling and winsome.
The displays of porcelain figures in the European Decorative Arts galleries behind and to the left of the Grand Staircase are reliably empty. Bustelli, Luck, Lücke, Kändler-- the finest modelers, created delectable figures of comedia dell'arte characters --Scapin, Harlequin, Isabella, Columbine-- for the finest porcelain factories: Meissen, Höchst, Capodimonte. The figures' tiny faces are so lifelike and animated, modern versions don't compare, both because today's porcelain mixture is not quite the same, but also because the modelers of the 20th and 21st century don't have the immersion in the period from which the characters sprang that the great 18th modelers in porcelain did. They are just copyists, however skilled.
Finally, I go to see the bedroom from the Palazzo Sagredo in Venice built in 1742, a room at the end of the British Decorative Arts Galleries few people know about or take the trouble to find. The bedroom is lined with rich green silk wall coverings in a brocatelle pattern. There is an appropriately ethereal oval painting with large gilded frame, The Triumph Of Dawn Over Night by Diziani in the center of the ceiling. In the corners of the room, beautifully molded armorini, life-sized figures of winged children, flutter. If I wanted to dream of heaven, this bedroom is the one in which I believe I could summon the empyrean.
My visit over, I walk across the park again, this time leaving it via the Tennis Courts near 94th Street. These are part of my childhood: my elementary school is on 95th Street and I knew of at least one parent who played on the courts before picking up her son, David Weston, a classmate of my sister's. Mrs. Weston could have stepped out of a Claire McCardell ad: tall, slender, brunette hair swept up, red gingham shirt, navy blue trousers and needle-nose sneakers, wood tennis racket in hand, a long-haired collie on a leash.
I decide to walk down 95th Street from Central Park West to Columbus and past the school, a tiny private school founded by a Scotsman named Alexander Robertson in 1789. It was a school which had in its first classes the children of black freemen. Indeed, I had a classmate, Wendy Jones, who was of African descent, at a time (the late 1950s) when African-American children were rarely students in private schools in Manhattan. I can still remember walking with Wendy to the bus stop and noticing that her eyes were tearing as we talked. Knowing that blacks were less well-treated than other Americans, I thought that perhaps something I had said was insensitive and had provoked her tears. I asked her, and she quickly told me not to worry, that her eyes watered from the wind. (I hope that was the truth.)
The school is so small I had only six classmates in my sixth grade graduating class. The building on 95th Street feeds directly into a room that contains part of Andrew Carnegie's library, as well as a statue of Robert Burns. Beyond that room is the entrance to the Second Presbyterian Church, which was founded in 1756. It was there that we had our "Christmas Pageant" --which is now a multi-cultural holiday celebration with no religious connection.
Nonetheless, it was nice to walk by the building, which is in good condition, thanks to the building on top of the school of a luxury high-rise. The school sold the air rights and the luxury apartment building is actually consistent with those on the rest of the block and surrounding area. The present headmistress, Reverend Leslie Merlin, has been there many years, although she did not succeed James G. Spence, the Scotsman who was headmaster as well as Reverend of Second Presbyterian when I and my sister were students.
Dr. Spence was married to a Lebanese Christian (the school librarian, and a terror), with whom he had three children, Ian, Doreen, and Colin. There was also another Scottish girl, Fiona, who was in Doreen's class. In my class we had Hans Vogel, a German boy, Kathy Voinoff, (Russian descent), Susan Agay (Hungarian), Paulette Tunis (French), Wendy Metelitz, Todd Walker and Richard Kirsch (American Jewish); Cheryl Cosgrove and Christopher Norris (Amerian Protestant). Yul Brynner's niece, Laura Linda Raymond, was a class ahead of me; in my sister's class was the son of Frank Sutton, the actor who played the irascible sergeant to Jim Nabor's rube on the TV's "Gomer Pyle". Cheryl and Christopher's parents were all in show business, too.
To give you an idea what "show business" meant in those days, Paulette Tunis' mother, a beautiful woman with short black hair, sparkling light green eyes and a beautiful figure, worked as a photographer at the Copacabana, wearing a skimpy outfit to take snaps of celebrities, a big camera with a giant flash on her hip, ever at the ready. Christopher Norris, a lovely girl with long, very blond hair, was a working performer: in the second grade, she was in a musical based on Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", in which she played Mitty's daughter, "Penina". Christopher's father was a bandleader, in an era when that was still a glamorous occupation. The whole fair-haired family lived in a "classic six" apartment at The Turin, at 333 Central Park West, not far from the school. I remember visiting once, and discovering they had a white grand piano in the sunken living room, which was carpeted with a white shag rug. A white shag rug!
Cheryl Cosgrove's parents did commercials for a living. They, like Christopher's parents, were tall, slender and looked as thought they stepped out of "Look" magazine --the dads slightly tanned, in expensive suits of classic cut, the mothers tall and able to carry off the pouffed skirts that became fashionable after Dior premiered the "New Look". These parents were more sophisticated than the others, as was obvious in Christopher's case the Halloween she and I were both in the first grade, when her mother dressed her as a Playboy bunny. (I went as a hobo --each in our way shocked our first grade teacher, Mrs. de Castro, of whom more later.) Through these fancy parents I and my classmates got to attend the first of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, to get on TV shows that needed kids (including one with Jack Gilford, who was the first "Hysterium" in "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum"). Also, in 1962 we also got to cut an album with Vaughn Meader, the voice impersonator who began a promising career with pitch-perfect imitations of John F. Kennedy, only to have it all turn to ashes on November 22, 1963.
We lost a few of the original group through the years, so there were only seven of us by the time we graduated, in the sixth grade. Of course, I remember my teachers: Mrs. Ceath (kindergarten), Mrs. de Castro (1st grade), Mrs. Walton (3rd and 4th grades), and Mrs. Goldsmith (5th and 6th grades).
Nonetheless, it was a shock to walk past the school and see my first grade classroom through the windows, intact. The stair down to the room, the place where the teacher sat, the play area, the bookcases, were all in the same places. I even remember the corner where, if you misbehaved, you were put.
Miriam Perkins de Castro, my first grade teacher, was a high-born Maine lady in her sixties who fell in love with and married Mr. de Castro, a bald, tanned, tennis-playing Cuban, whom she always called "De". "Mrs. de" loved anything in a shade of purple, and only wore clothes in that color. She spoke in a plummy New England accent and once confessed her family were all Republicans, a daring admission in New York anytime. She was incapable of a mean thought or action. For some reason, one Christmas season, she invited my mother and my sister and I to tea at the apartment she shared with "De" at 360 Central Park West, around the corner from the school. We had Ritz crackers for the first time, and thought we had gone to heaven. "Mrs. de" had a Swedish angel chime, a four candle holder whose heat caused the tiny chimes suspended from angel figures to turn and strike small bells for so long as the tapers burned. The effect was magical, and we were rapt.
When I remember my childhood this way I think, "How wonderful New York was!" I was a child, and life was kind.
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