The Girl in the Pictures

 

Inwood neighborhood, northern Manhattan, 1930s. 

https://myinwood.net/map-oval/ 

On the day before my mother died, she lay fully dressed and propped against pillows atop her neatly made bed. As always, she wore a silk scarf around her neck.

By the time I arrived in the early afternoon, she felt very sick. In a few weeks she would be 96 years old and something was catching up with her. 

Though pleased to have a visitor, she spoke little and spent much of our time together looking at a wall by the bed where hung two portraits of herself at a very young age.

Once, breaking the silence, she gestured toward the pictures and said that she liked looking at them.

They had hung on that wall since she moved into the apartment seven years earlier. I’m now certain that they were there by some grand design:  for the moments she still inhabited and those that followed the next morning until she was gone. 

My mother shared very few memories of growing up as an only child in a one-bedroom apartment in New York City with her grandmother and parents.  

Yet it happens that she shared the stories of the portraits.

One weekend in September 1929, perhaps a month before the stock market crashed, my 1-1/2 year old mother toddled happily along Dyckman Street, a busy shopping street in her northern Manhattan neighborhood, Inwood.  

Her delight was captured in a photo snapped by her father (most likely), but it was her mother who decided to have it enlarged and colorized. She must have hung it on the living room wall.

The second picture came to be in 1932, the worst year of the Depression. My mother’s parents operated a luncheonette on East 20^th Street in what is now called the Flatiron District. 

In the luncheonette, my grandmother worked the cash register and my grandfather cooked. Their four-year old daughter, my mother, accompanied them downtown when no one could watch her at home. 

One day a penniless artist came by. He offered to draw my mother in return for a meal. Afterward, my grandmother folded the drawing and stuck it in a drawer, surely under some handkerchiefs. She had many. It was retrieved and framed after her death in 1968. 

The two pictures are my closest point of reference for understanding my mother. Gazing at them evoked something inside her—not so much a jolly childhood as the city where she was born in 1928, which she adored throughout her life.

“I was in love with New York,” wrote Joan Didion.

 

I do not mean love in any “colloquial” way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who touches you, and you never love anyone quite that way again. 

My mother told me that she never asked her parents and grandmother about their escape from Ukraine during the first decade of the twentieth century. The bleakness and horror that once filled their eyes and ears became deep wounds that one would not share with a child, even if she were to inquire.   

For the little girl, however, there was New York City. It stretched as far as she could see in every direction, hers to discover:  first, with the three adults; then on her own.

Her neighborhood at the top of the island, its old-growth forest crowned with schist and marble formations, ran down to meet the Hudson River.

The George Washington Bridge rose 40-odd blocks south.

The “A” train’s last stop was 207^th Street, whose steps she flounced down or ran up thousands of times.

It’s an old story. The daughter of immigrants who have the great fortune to come to America, she finds herself at home in the city. The two pictures were the beginning.  

George Washington Bridge, 1931

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/