City of Girls

But then I moved to New York City, and I came to know my Aunt Peg, an unconventional and irresponsible lesbian, who drank too much and spent too much money, and who only wanted to cavort through life with a sort of hop-skip-tralala—and I loved her. She gave me nothing less than my entire world.

And I also met Olive, who didn’t seem lovable—but whom I came to love, nonetheless. Far more than I loved my own mother or father. Olive was not warm or affectionate, but she was loyal and good. She was something of a bodyguard to me. She was our anchoress. She taught me whatever morality I possess.

Then I met Marjorie Lowtsky—an eccentric Hell’s Kitchen teenager whose immigrant parents were in the rag trade. She was not at all the sort of person I was supposed to befriend. But she became not only my business partner, but my sister. I loved her, Angela, with all my heart. I would do anything for her, and she for me.

Then came Marjorie’s son, Nathan—this weak little boy who was allergic to life itself. He was Marjorie’s child, but he was my child, too. If my parents’ vision for my life had gone according to plan, I would surely have had my own children—big, strong, horseback-riding future captains of industry—but instead I got Nathan, and that was better. I chose Nathan and he chose me. I loved him, too.

These random-seeming people were my family, Angela. These people were my real family. I’m telling you all this because I want you to understand that—over the next few years—I came to love your father just as much as I loved any of them.

My heart cannot offer him higher praise than that. He became as close to me as my own, beautiful, random, and real family.

Love like that is a deep well, with steep sides.

Once you fall in, that’s it—you will love that person always.

—

A few nights a week, for years on end, your father would call me at some odd hour and say, “Do you want to get out? I can’t sleep.”

I’d say, “You can never sleep, Frank.”

And he’d say, “Yeah, but tonight I can’t sleep worse than usual.”

It didn’t matter what the season was, or the time of night. I always said yes. I’ve always enjoyed exploring this city, and I have always liked the nighttime. What’s more, I’ve never been a person who needed much sleep. But most of all, I just loved being with Frank. So he would call me, and I would agree to see him, and he would drive over from Brooklyn to pick me up, and we would go someplace together and walk.

It didn’t take us long to walk every neighborhood in Manhattan, and so pretty soon we started exploring the outer boroughs, as well. I never met anybody who knew the city better. He took me to neighborhoods I’d never even heard of, and we would explore them on foot in the wee hours of the morning, talking all the while. We walked all the cemeteries and all the industrial yards. We walked the waterfronts. We walked by the row houses and through the projects. We eventually walked over every single bridge in the greater New York metropolitan area—and there are a lot of them.

Nobody ever bothered us. It was the strangest thing. The city was not a safe place back then, but we walked through it as though we were untouchable. We were often so deep in our own conversations that we often didn’t even notice our surroundings. Miraculously, the streets kept us safe and the people let us be. I wondered at times if people could even see us at all. But then sometimes the police would stop us and ask what we were doing, and Frank would show his badge. He would say, “I’m walking this lady home”—even if we were in a Jamaican neighborhood in Crown Heights. He was always walking me home. That was always the story.

Sometimes, late at night, he would drive me to Long Island to buy fried clams at a place he knew—a twenty-four-hour diner where you could pull right up to the window and order your food from the car. Or we’d go to Sheepshead Bay for littlenecks. We’d eat them while parked on the dock, watching the fishing boats head out to sea. In the spring, he would drive me out to the countryside in New Jersey to pick dandelion leaves in the moonlight, for making bitter salads. It’s something Sicilians enjoy, he taught me.

Driving and walking—those were the things that he could do, without getting too anxious.

He always listened to me. He became the most trusted confidant of my life. There was a clarity about Frank—a deep and unshakable integrity. It was soothing to be with a man who never boasted about himself (so rare, in men of that generation!) and who did not impose himself on the world in any way. If he ever had a fault, or made a mistake, he would tell you before you could find out for yourself. And there was nothing I could ever tell him about myself that he would judge or criticize. My own glints of darkness did not frighten him; he had such darkness of his own that nobody else’s shadows scared him.

Most of all, though, he listened.