
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 2, 1935.
NEW YORK
“Wake up, wake up,” hissed Jimmie Frise through the curtains of my lower berth. “We’re coming into New York.”
“That’s where we started for,” I growled, being one of those few who can sleep in a berth or anywhere else.
“The dawn coming up over New York, come on, let’s see it,” urged Jim.
“I’ve seen it before,” I assured Jim. “Miles of six-storey red tenements. Miles of bleak factories with ten-foot steel fences around them. If I like to wake up in New York at all, it is downtown.”
“You’ve got no soul,” said Jim sadly. “This is one of the wonder cities of the world. Seven million people live here. It is one of the cores, one of the ganglia1, of the human system.”
I slid up the blind.
Just as I expected. Zipping by were vast drab red blocks of high tenement houses and spectral streets in the dawn, like streets excavated in Babylon or Pompeii. A terrible sameness. The same bottle of milk on all the window sills, and the same plate with something wrapped in newspaper. The same quilts flung half way out high windows by early birds already risen.
“Ugh,” I said.
I got up and staggered down to the washroom. There a half a dozen others were ahead of me, snorting, swizzling and gargling.
“New York,” I stated loudly, “gives me the jitters.”
Nobody paid any attention and Jimmie warned me with a shake of the head, his toothbrush twisting his face all out of shape.
“New York gives me an inferiority complex,” I announced, there being no basin empty for me. “I get the same feeling all New Yorkers have. I get intimidated.”
One or two of the gentlemen, drying themselves on scanty towels, gave me a cold look.
“The people of New York are all intimidated,” I repeated, sitting ready with my razor and things. “Their colossal buildings intimidate them. Those monstrous buildings all leaning backward, as if to ignore the millions of slaves crawling about their feet. The speed of New York intimidates them.”
All the gentlemen began coughing, snorting, gargling and snuzzling extra loud to drown me out.
“The people of New York,” I announced, “go about with lowered eyes, hurrying, timid, cold, scared. They are scared by the advertising cards in the subway trains. Cards that frighten them about their cough, warn them about their hair falling out, begging them to be careful of their skins. You can’t raise your eyes in New York, without being scared by something. New York is scared.”
Unseeing Myriads
Just then a gentleman surrendered his basin and I was next. When I was through washing, I sought Jim back in the car.
“Hah,” I said, “I told those New Yorkers a few things, eh? I’m not going to let them get away with the idea that their big town impresses me.”
“Those were all Toronto men in there,” said Jim. “Just before you came in, the porter remarked that everybody in his car this trip is a Toronto man.”
“Well, anyway, I said what I think,” I affirmed.
“You’re just a little excited,” said Jim. “Your approach to New York scares you. So you talk big.”
“I’ve been in New York before,” I asserted.
“And hid in your hotel all day except for little walks nearby the hotel, and a trip by taxicab to a theatre at night, and then, back home to bed.”
“I’ve been around,” I said.
“I bet you never were at Forty-second and Fifth Ave., at five p.m.,” declared Jim, “when the traffic is so thick you could walk across the street on the tops of the cabs! I bet you never yet risked your life in a subway!”
But the porter arrived and we entered a black tunnel where the train roared and thundered, and you felt very uneasy, hoping the engineer wouldn’t miss any switches in the dark.
Thus we came to the fabulous city. The new Ilium2 with its topless towers. Thus we had our suitcases snatched by redcaps who led us at top speed out of the station as if the devil were come to town. Thus we were bundled into taxicabs with their radios blaring, and driven, in a sort of gargantuan, buffalo stampede of cabs, up a broad avenue where the entire traffic was racing, hub to hub and nose to tail, amidst a din of noise rising blasphemously unto the clean, virginal towers, spires, obelisks of serene beauty that aspired to the very sky.
Thus we were, with a lurch of brakes, spewed out at our hotel, where they are never surprised, but always seem to expect you; where all the bell hops seem always to have seen you before; and where, after the first trip in the elevator, they always remember your floor and tell it to you, with a smile.
Thus into the glorious and incredible streets, where a nation of all nations, white, gray, black, brown and all colors, mob past you at top speed, sightless eyes looking neither to the right nor to the left at all the incomparable beauties – the beauty of a window, a vast crystal window set in the foot of a very cathedral of a building, and in that stately vast window, one gown. A fragile, a silver gown.
Windows of incomparable grace, with one hat, one tiny pair of shoes. And windows of delicatessen stores as florid, resplendent, opulent, as if they were the windows of the jewels of Ophir3. And jewelry stores with – one diamond!
Yet to neither right nor left, nor up at the shimmering castellated towers in the sky nor down to the cold and bitter earth, did these passing myriads look.
And in this fabulous city, Jimmie and I walked alone, as if we and we alone were living, breathing, sentient in it.
To tackle stores we went, and saw fishing tackle beyond all dreaming. To book stores and print stores, where we saw prints and paintings and pictures in the care of speechless men and women. Our legs ached with walking, and our eyes smarted with looking.
They Can But They Don’t
We tried to go by subway from 44th St. and Madison Ave. down to Park Pl., and we ended up twenty miles away at the Bronx zoo. We tried to go from the zoo back to our hotel and landed at Park Pl.
We saw a store window with nothing but alligators in it. We saw a man singing only one hymn for a living. It was “Rescue the Perishing,” and he sang it in the morning, and he sang it still, ten miles away at evening, but on the same street, holding before him in the wintry wind an empty cap.
In a magnificent store where they sold flowers, there was in the window one white rose.
Jim led me, on foot, in taxicabs, by underground and by elevated, on bus and on tram car, round and round that incredible mulberry bush which is New York. We lunched at a restaurant where you slip five cents in a slot and your food, beautifully cellophaned, pops out at you on a chromium-plated tongue of steel which secretly slips back again when you take your food from it.
Nobody tried to sell us the Empire State building, so, while we were admiring its unholy height, I selected a few particularly gigolesque4 New Yorkers and tried to sell it to them. But it was no good. They merely looked at me with agate eyes, humorless, remote.
“Everybody in New York,” I said, as I padded painfully and breathlessly alongside of Jimmie, “is small. I have seen only a half a dozen big people all day, amongst the seven million I have seen so far. And they all looked like visitors.”
“Now that you come to mention it,” agreed Jim, “I noticed that, too.”
“Do you suppose,” I asked, “that there might be anything in my theory that the very size and majesty of the city makes the people timid and humble, and that they are actually growing smaller with each generation?”
“All the big people,” said Jim, “have been killed off by traffic. You’ve got to be small and nimble in New York.”
We nimbled our way from the Bowery to Morningside Heights, from the basement of five-cent stores to the needle tip of a fabulous building that points a final, accusing finger at heaven.
And thus we came, at five p.m., to Fifth Ave. at Forty-second St., where the cabs are jammed so thick you can walk across their roofs from one side of the street to the other.
“There you are,” said Jim. “On their roofs, from this side of the street to the other.”
But when I asked a cab driver to let me climb up the side of his cab to make the start, he refused. While we were arguing how much I should pay him for the privilege, whistles screamed, lights flashed, the mighty throb of sound changed its majestic tone, and away went the tide of traffic, rushing and whirling. And Jimmie and I fled across, with five hundred others, under the sheltering wings of ten policemen.
“There you go,” I said, “there you go, Jimmie. You can walk across the roofs of the cabs. But you don’t. That’s New York for you. You can, but you don’t.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” cried Jimmie, “that in all this day, amidst all this splendor, after speeding a mile a minute down in the bowels of the earth and roaring along in the elevated above the roofs of a city, after all those stupendous stores full of fishing tackle and pictures and gowns and guns and alligators, after this glorious day spent rubbing your lonely elbows with ten million others, strange, swift, passing, forever mysterious and unknown, all you can say about New York is that they can, but they don’t!”
Deadliest Complex
“In all this day,” I said, “I haven’t seen a single soul that seems to call to me across the deep.”
“You’re hungry,” said Jimmie. “That’s all’s the matter with you. You need to eat. Now, after showing you the city as it should be seen, I am going to do you a great favor. I am going to take you to the greatest restaurant in America, and one of the five greatest restaurants in the world.”
“Ah, oysters,” said I.
“Oysters, if you like,” said Jim, steering me westward into a district where the buildings were smaller and the lights brighter. “But I advise you to save your capacity for more delectable things. They have a creamed fillet of sole that princesses have wept over. They have a pot roast which is acknowledged to be the greatest stroke of genius in the entire history of cooking.”
“Oysters,” I said. “And little soda biscuits.”
Through the streets all bright with red signs, past huddled little stores wedged in between theatres, every third door a theatre door, with congested cabs patiently, tooting their way all in one direction, packed from curb to curb, we bowed into the winter night wind and came at last to Vincent’s5.
It was a small and cosy restaurant. The lights were tender. The music was faint. The waiters, all pot-bellied and with thin gray hair slicked in two curls on their heads, swayed like adagio dancers among the white linen of the tables.
The menu was as big as a newspaper.
“Oysters,” said I, “and little soda biscuits.”
But Jim, with frequent dreamy gazes about the room, murmured to himself as he read the menu.
The restaurant was filled with people, and Jimmie told me they were the greatest people in New York, actors, owners of banks and radio stations, authors and playwrights, genius of every sort.
“Genius,” I remarked, “sure slurps its food.”
For they were bobbing and bending to the succulent dishes: their talk, their manners, their laughter was eager but not so eager as their forks and teeth.
“They make me hungry to look at them,” I said. “Maybe I’ll have something more than oysters.”
Jimmie raised his head with shining eyes and a flush on his brow. Reverently he nodded to the waiter. The waiter bowed, ear bent down to Jimmie, his pencil poised. “Baked,” said Jim, with a catch in his voice, “baked Boston scrod!6“
“Baked Boston scrod,” said the waiter, flicking a shrewd appraising glance at Jim, as if to say, “ah, a gourmet.”
“Oysters,” I said, “and little soda biscuits. And then some baked Boston scrod.”
Jim watched me engulf the oysters. I chew my oysters. Jim would watch me manipulate the beauties – Cape Cods, they were – into the cocktail sauce and then up to my mouth. Then he closed his eyes and shuddered while I chewed.
“I’ll say this for New York,” I sighed, as the waiter whisked away the empty shells, “their oysters are good.”
Then came the scrod.
From under glowing dull silver covers, the waiter revealed a vast plate with a magnificent light brown square of fish.
And beside the fish, heaped in a pile, like matches in a poker game, was my deadliest enemy!
My deadliest enemy, potatoes Julienne!
They are little measly French fried potatoes, about the size of a match.
They are brittle and hot and dry.
They are deadly, vicious, ruinous.
Liberated At Last
I thrust my chair back and half rose.
“Jimmie,” I said bitterly, “this is to much! This is the end! I’ve had a feeling all day that something like this would happen, that New York would, in the end, heap a final humiliation upon me.”
“What is it?” asked Jimmie astonished.
“Potatoes Julienne,” I rasped. “Potatoes Julienne, my inferiority complex personified. I hate them. I hate them. They and they alone have stood between me and my social rise. If it had not been for those measly, vicious little potatoes, I might have been a great man. I might have attended scores of dinners at Government House. I might be joined the York Club7. I might have been a member of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club8.”
“Sit down, sit down,” whispered Jimmie, glancing around.
“It is not, as you might have supposed,” I said, “the fact that I look silly in a dress suit that has kept me from rising in society. It is those, those devilish little potatoes Julienne. And to think it was New York that sought out my deepest humiliation like this!”
I covered my face with my hands.
“Eat,” said Jim.
“My only nightmare,” I quavered, “is a vast platter of potatoes Julienne, and away on the far side of the heap, a great concourse of beautiful girls and handsome young men in dress suits, mocking me!”
“What’s the matter with them?” demand Jim.
“Try to eat them,” I cried.
So Jim tried and I tried. They served in a heap, lying end for end. If you put your fork under them sideways, you lift your fork and not one single little sticklet of potatoes Julienne comes up.
You look at your fork in amazement, and try it end ways. You slide the fork under them and lift. And one or at most two of the insignificant sticks comes out of the heap.
I tried a spoon. It was no better. Jimmie began to get red and perspire and cast anxious glances around the neighboring tables.
“Ah,” I said.
The sugar bowl was at hand, and in it, the sugar tongs. I seized the sugar tongs and took a grab at the potatoes Julienne.
And as I raised the tongful to my mouth I looked up and fair into the eyes of Vincent himself, the lean aristocratic proprietor of this famed house.
I signalled to him.
“Vincent,” I said, in a low voice, “forgive me, but will you tell me, in mercy’s name, how do you eat these potatoes Julienne?”
Vincent bowed.
“Wit,” he said, “your feengers!”
“Fingers!” I gasped.
“Feengers,” said Vincent, “like diss.”
And he took a pinch of potatoes Julienne from my plate, lifted them, and popped them into his mouth.
“Princes,” he said, “keengs, dukes, barons, all the people of the great world, eat potatoes Julienne, only like that.”
I rose.
I shook hands with Vincent.
I stepped around and slapped Jimmie on the back with one hand and shook his hand with the other.
“Jimmie,” I said, “it took New York to liberate me from a complex that has had me down for twenty-five years!”
And for the rest of the trip I embraced New York with my arms as wide as I could stretch them.
Editor’s Notes: This story also appeared in So What? (1937).
- Ganglia is a group of neuron cell bodies in the peripheral nervous system. ↩︎
- Ilium is an ancient Greek town. ↩︎
- “Jewels of Ophir” is a nickname for the Jewels of Opar plant, also known as the fame flower. ↩︎
- I looked this up and don’t know what it means. ↩︎
- Vincent’s has been around since 1904. ↩︎
- If you are not familiar with the term, scrod is just a whitefish fillet, served breaded. ↩︎
- The York Club is a private members’ club in Toronto that began in 1909. ↩︎
- The Royal Canadian Yacht Club is another old club in Toronto. ↩︎