Lunch at the AlgonquinMarjorie PartchJune 12, 2015

When my parents moved us from Brooklyn Heights to Rowayton, Connecticut, everyone joked

that I was 11, going on 21. I was outraged by this infringement on my rights, the loss of freedom and independence that this unilateral decision of theirs thrust upon me, against my will. I had been used to walking or riding my bike around the neighborhood on my own for years, doing the familys shopping for the week, or my own activities, or bringing my younger siblings to their activities, and had even taken the bus to Flatbush and back on my own. Now I was limited to my mothers schedule and willingness to drive me anywhere I had or wanted to go beyond the Town Center. There was actually an old-fashioned pharmacy with a soda fountain in town, a quick bare-foot walk from our converted barn-house. A friend from the Heights and I stumbled into this Twilight Zone 50s time warp on a pre-move weekend visit with my father to fix up the house. Somehow, I forgot about Westchester, and the Town Center seemed to be the only outpost of civilization between say, the Bronx and Boston: The pharmacy, food market, hardware store and post office in Rowayton, all in a row, were IT. The dustily quaint train station to Grand Central was about a mile away, and the trains could be easily an hour or two late, with no warning or announcement. This was all horrifying to me. And I was supposed to suddenly start acting like a kid now that my parents were starting over.While my father continued commuted to Manhattan, as he had from Brooklyn, my mother was embarking on graduate school to get her teaching masters, after years of volun-teering as the VP of the PTA, and being one of the leading proponents of integrating our elementary school in Brooklyn (as her first enactment of her 18-year-old vow to commit her adult life to Civil Rights, not really known to me until after her mini-stroke in 2004). She and many of her Party-Card Carrying comrades shared a vision of creating what would have been a prototype of an early charter school sponsored by the Ford Foundation -- vetoed by the NYC Board of Ed. She said to me, in the full flush of her newly assimilated SAT analogies following our move to the burbs in the famous Summer of 1968: Well, look at it this way, Marj: Rowayton is to Norwalk as the Heights is to Brooklyn! clearly pleased with herself for coming up with this helpful equation. I soon felt remorse for my rapid-fire retort, but what came out was a sterling example of my burgeoning adolescent sarcasm: Yes, Mom (elaborate eye-roll); and Connecticut is to New York as the MOON is to Earth! She gave me one of her stunned and wounded looks, and I explained: Mom! Im dying of lack-of-culture shock here! They read the Norwalk Hour! Theyre so white! Theyre so Republican! Youre killing me! They LOVE Nixon! What are you doing to me !?!Perhaps this state of exile actually intensified my love affair with all things New York and New Yorker magazine, Ill never really know for sure. But I spent every weekend down there that I could, mastering all the subway lines, eventually running away to go back home at the age of 15. I squatted on my best friends classes at the Heights Friends School, which eventually offered me a full scholarship, but my parents wouldnt consent, and I came back to Connecticut with mono. I ended up at the New School for 11th grade though.From about the age of 12, I had been the first one in the house to seize The New Yorker from the Rowayton mailbox every week, and by the age of 14, the wall over one of the two catty-corner beds in my salon / bedroom were covered with David Levine caricatures of the likes of Truman Capote from the New York Review of Books. Which I WAS reading, earnestly, from cover-to-cover every week, and becoming quite the opinionated little wise-ass. There were Indian bedspreads everywhere, and an Underwood typewriter where I practiced my growing craft at a large desk in a directors chair. My best friend in Connecticut and I typed long, prolific letters to each other, holding forth on all kinds of critiques of everything we could think of to analyze under the sun. We would then take turns reviewing one anothers letters. This was far more formative for either of us than the standard-fare middle school curriculum we sardonically indulged and lampooned for the most part.However, I have to say, my love affair with The New Yorker magazine really began before I could even read, back in Brooklyn. My parents collected hard-bound, over-sized annual volumes of the cartoons, which I loved even as a toddler, when they were as tall as my torso sitting on the floor; and at a very early age, I was drawn to Charles Addams and Edward Gorey in first editions given by our friends the Fleischers, who wrote book reviews for radio shows, and Larry looked exactly like Gomez and had a fountain pen and brought me magic tricks, and Leanore, although more zaftig than Morticia, had black hair down to her waist when she took it out of a bun; and I remember distinctly wanting to know for myself what the cartoon captions were saying, at about the age of three or four, sensing that as much as I relished the visuals, I was missing the punchline without the words. I honestly dont remember when I started counting Hirschfelds Ninas in the Sunday Times, but that was definitely back in Brooklyn Where my father insisted on speaking only French at the breakfast table on Sunday mornings meals prepared and served by him, to give my mother a day of rest. My mother really got into making me a Wednesday Addams costume the year I turned eight, I remember distinctly, and it won first prize at the annual Halloween party at the Unitarian Church. That show was one of my obsessive must-see shows after my father fixed the TV the Rossners insisted on leaving on our doorstep when they moved to the Upper West Side when I was about four. My job was to hold the large mirror so that my father could see the screen from behind the set, as he explained FM and AM and TV frequencies to me, miles over my head, and got the huge old broken RCA working, almost in spite of himself, as Bob and Judy knew he would. As a preschooler in the same building adjacent to the Unitarian Church, reading struck me as tedious, and I remember distinctly resenting my fathers pointing out that just writing letters in no particular order didnt really count in the adult world. He shook his head and said with all the authority that he actually did possess as an editor-in-chief: No, you cant do it that way. You have to spell things out. You have to work on your spelling. I asked: You mean, you cant see what Im saying? Dont you know? He said, No. You cant just make it up as you go along. You have to follow the rules of spelling. The way books do. This was an enormous and odious disappointment to me, and I remember the feeling of having to climb a mountain just to cross the street. I thought he was pretending not to know, to make me conform and work harder.I learned much later that when I was in second grade, teachers were concerned that my reading level was a bit behind. My mother decided not to follow the advice to push me more, saying it was too precious a thing to risk ruining with pressure. And then in seventh grade, they said I had a graduate school reading level, and had literally gone off the charts.I dont remember when I really began to study Dorothy Parker. I think that was in Rowayton, but by the time I was a runaway back in Park Slope (equivalent to Silvermine one could say), I was a serious apprentice, writing disparaging reviews of plays and things that never even happened, just to sharpen my tongue. This was a habit I later grew to regret as an adult on a spiritual path, but at the time it was a major source of amusement for a growing circle of similarly inclined budding writer friends. My best friend in New York was practicing Edna St. Vincent Millet at this time, and I feigned polite interest; years later I was taken aback at how many of my one-liners were making their ways into her plays actually being produced by the likes of Playwrights Horizons. We had come back to her Upper West Side floor-through (with white-washed floors at my suggestion), after some production, and she was carefully braced for my coming confrontation. After a lot of pussy-footing around while all the techies partied around us, I blurted out, knowing she would know full-well what I meant: So what do you do? TAKE NOTES?! She smiled and commanded mysteriously: Go to my desk. I went. She said: Look at that green file box. I picked it up. Open it, she continued. I just saw a lot of file cards in alphabetical order. Look under M and there it was, her inventory of my passing remarks and bon mots, collected over the years. After an initial feeling of invasion and outrage, I relented: Well, at least I guess theyre being put to good use. At some point, I dont remember when exactly, probably also at about 14, I had become an ardent admirer of the Algonquin Circle as a whole, and feasted on all their copious output. My parents gave me various tomes for Christmas and birthdays, and I remember the Rowayton librarian giving me a funny look that summer as I returned my biweekly stack of about eight hard-covers. At first I thought it was just the amount of reading I was doing, and I remember defensively wanting her to notice my tan and to know that I had ridden my bike there, and even played tennis during the week. But then I realized it was not the amount, but the juxtaposition: For weeks on end, I had been devouring Edgar Alan Poe along with James Thurber. I didnt know how to explain that they were both feeding different parts of my psyche, so I just met her bemused gaze and shrugged, as if to say, Go figure, dont ask me.At about this age, my father got a job at a business magazine that was actually IN The New Yorker Building on 43rd Street. I was sure my destiny was sealed, and that Harold Ross ghost would spot my talent in the elevator. It was during my phase as a runaway in Park Slope that we inaugurated our routine that was to last more than 20 years, of having our own lunches together in New York. I would pick him up at the office, to get a ride in the famous elevator, and say hello to a few of his staff members, including Bob Rossner, who was like an uncle by then. After my father would put out a few deadline fires, we would embark on our mission, riding down in the magic elevator, and walk up the block not always, but frequently to the Algonquin Hotel.This was no small thrill, and I did my best to dress as stylishly hip as possible, while also looking presentable, and after a few awkward meetings, this actually turned into a happy tradition that we both looked forward to and savored for decades. I kind of have the feeling that neither one of us ever really talked about these lunches to anyone, not even my mother or my boyfriend.We relaxed into our routine gradually, and he would have a Becks and I would have a glass of white wine, and we would lean on our elbows European-style as we dove into our two- or three-hour conversations with equal gusto. My mother once stomped out of the living room, when I was well into my 40s, exclaiming, Oh, the two of you are such TALKERS! with such vehement contempt that we just looked at each other with baffled and hurt raised eyebrows of course we were, we always had been. We never knew it bothered her! It took me many more years to understand what lay behind her customary reticence.Well, Ken and I could talk for hours on end, and we did, late at night, or over those lunches of oysters and I dont-remember-what else. We would laugh, joke, debate, discuss, actually argue, then agree, confide, compare notes, like the great friends we gradually became. He would give me a certain look, and say, Did you hear what Stupid said this week? and I would know it was one of two ritual introductions: Either it was another clever victory over his publisher, or hed culled a particularly juicy Bushism, which I would appreciate his delivery on, and try to match with a suitable Yogi Bearism Id researched for the occasion (but we always agreed that Yogi was more enlightened, and actually saying something) OR If it wasnt a Bushism, during that era during which my father was presented with a Points-of-Light Award from his least favorite President of his lifetime, except perhaps his son George Jr. it was some unfortunate blooper by my fathers publisher, who was the unwitting butt of my fathers enormous resentment, ire, and relentless ill humor, because my fathers efforts were making the publisher rich, and not himself We were at a real low point in our complex relationship when my father received the crystal sculpture of intertwined shooting stars at the White House. I feinted an almost-drop at home in the living room, catching the sculpture in mid-air, and deadpanned: I dont know, do you think its diminished in any way, coming, as it does, from Bush? He lurched to catch it, and met my flashing glare steadily with his own when I caught it firmly and handed it to him safely but coldly.Poor Jeffrey, his publisher. Jeffreys main sin, as far as I could detect, was his ability to profit where my father lacked the chutzpah to finagle. My father loved to regale anyone who would listen with tales of Jeffreys malapropisms, into which I would occasionally interject knowingly and annoyingly: Stupid like a fox.At which my father would insist: He dropped out of dental school, for crissakes.My father had skipped two grades, gone to the Bronx High School of Science, and missed City College by two points for failing to do required homework but defiantly acing his regents at the last minute. I liked to say that I would never have existed but for those two points, because he was forced to commute to the second-best Brooklyn College, where he met my Bay Ridge Norwegian mother in her freshman year and his senior, on the GI Bill. They were both switching majors from Science to English at the time, and that was a strong bond throughout their relationship of more than 50 years. And yet, Ken worked for Jeffrey, and not vice versa.I know we were at the Algonquin when hed been visibly bursting at the seams to tell me what was to become a traditional favorite Jeffreyism for the first time. We had barely ordered our lunch and drinks when he defied me to guess what delicious moment of one-upmanship had just transpired, clearly at Jeffreys expense. It was my wont to root for under-dogs, and I know my father did not countenance my apparent lack of blind loyalty lightly. Ken kept careful score cards of every touche he ever achieved at poor Jeffreys expense. I think he was also for many years vindicating himself against my own teenage barb, which I did always regret, when I retaliated to his tiresome recriminations for my being an under-achiever.After years of asking what they were achieving exactly Touch-downs? Straight-As? Prom dates? Cheer-leader cart-wheels, is that what you want me to do? I finally launched an effective counter-attack:Well? What about you?! If you werent going to be the worlds next Hemingway, or write great journalism either if you were going to sell out you could have at least done it for money, and gone into advertising! After a moment of stunned and wounded wide-eyed silence, he bellowed at me: Do you think I need YOU to tell me that?! Well then, talk to yourself, I said, spinning on my heel.

But it was clear he was saving one special moment just for me the way he led into this one particular set-up years later at the Alonguin. I was fine with playing straight-man, because he was so happy in his element as story-teller as he set our stage with food and drink, as I look back on it, probably tolerating my cigarette smoke without a wince, and no greater audience than just me.OK, so a few of us got to the water cooler at the same time one morning.Always a good sign of team spirit, I interjected.He continued: So nobody knew who got there first, and who should go first.Oh no, I said, sensing what was coming. Poor Jeffrey. My eyes widened.Ken knew that I knew exactly where this was going.Yup, he said.No, I said, leaning forward, fully engaged in the moment.Yup. Dramatic pause.He said No, he didnt Circular nod of the head, Yes he did!Oh no, Poor Jeffrey, I said, knowing full well, He walked right into it, and feebly quipped My father finished my sentence: Age before beauty!Oh no. He didnt.And we both gaffawed. Poor Jeffrey. Shaking our heads.I asked: Does he know what building hes in?Apparently not!Pause. And so I said No! You didnt!Yeah, so I said it And we said, in gleeful, taunting unison: Pearls before swine!He went on, And everyone was just on the floor.And we were hysterical ourselves, in the shrinking-reality pun of the Algonquin Hotel.I gasped after a while: Did they all get it?Some of them did. I think they explained it to the others afterwards.But it worked anyway, just in its own context.Yeah, exactly.But really Dad, you should be working with people who know that iconic exchange between Talullah (Bankhead) and Dorothy (Parker) at the magic elevator in their own building.Well, I think it had a lasting after-effect, he said.As the congoscenti explained the footnote to the ignorami, I nodded with my hands folded under my chin.Exactly, he snorted, like that.Elevating your status, so to speak, as The Editor beyond any doubt.

What I could never bring to the surface in these Jeffrey exchanges at this point, was the undercurrent of pain that I always felt for my younger learning-disabled siblings, who could never join in this kind of bantering tennis game in the subtext, and reflect his own clever scores back to himself. I sometimes wondered how much I was truly valued beyond my level of audience to his rarefied performances; but then again on some level I think I always knew we were close beyond my ability to feed his ego. Our intellects, I later understood, were an accessible point of connection, not only a mirror for him, as it sometimes seemed. He loved the others, tenderly and fiercely, I gradually realized, but couldnt connect readily, and it was painful on all sides. Probably when I was in my late 20s or early 30s, one day, we were carrying on as usual, elbows on the white tablecloth, but using the proper silver forks, laughing and talking and having a great time. But on this particular occasion, mid-sentence, I suddenly noticed that people were staring at us. I stopped on a dime and whispered, Are people looking at us? He nodded Yes. I asked, Are we being too loud? glancing down surreptitiously at our glasses, and he said, No, I dont think so, also answering my unspoken question about being a little tipsy. I looked around the room, and it seemed deathly still. We ate in silence for a few moments, on good behavior. I asked again, Do you really think people are looking at us? He hissed, Yes. At least I wasnt paranoid.I didnt know what to do with my face. I took an elbow off the table and used my fork more delicately. After what I hoped was a dainty sip of my wine, I asked, OK, so: Why do you think theyre looking at us?He paused, and his best dastardly grin spread across his face as he decided to level with me. He said, leaning across the table to whisper, I think theyre trying to figure out what we are.What we ARE?He nodded and took a swig of his beer.What we ARE?He nodded and grinned again before he added by way of explanation: To each other.I just looked at him. I felt like everyone else knew something I didnt know. Why?Finally, he met my eyes sincerely and asked rhetorically: Do you think all these men are here having lunch with their daughters?For the first time, without moving my head, I swiveled my eyes around the restaurant and noticed the conspicuous number of older men with younger women. I had honestly never noticed that phenomenon before. It was all kind of a happy blur for me, and a background for our own movie.I looked back at him frankly and said, I never thought about it. Theyre not?And he snorted and shook his head and mouthed No with his mouth full, and wiped his chin casually with his white cloth napkin.I said, Oh. And for one of the only times that I remember in my life, I blushed in front of my father.Ohhhh I guess not. I guess theyre Oh.He just nodded, with that grin back on his face.And when I looked around again, I realized nobody was looking at us with disapproval or unkindly, but actually with a friendly, tentative kind of interest, especially the young women. Maybe even a bit of envy. Because we were having such a good time together, and being so completely real. We were so comfortable with each other, and taking each other seriously, but also sharing in one big extended private joke that we both knew we both got. Looking at us from the outside, I realized that we were surrounded by a palpable bubble of rapport. Thats what it was. We had a wavelength and actually liked the Hell out of each other, and were kindred spirits beyond any category of predetermined relationship. And it always went without saying that my mother was too. She and I often spent leisurely afternoons together in the Morgan Library, sharing a more reserved and serious wavelength as we pondered manuscripts. And I was always impressed by how much they had to say to each other, especially after one of my fathers frequent business trips. It was cute the way he followed her around when he got back, as he seemed to court her attention in order to recount every single conversation hed had verbatim, eager for her deeper understanding and feedback, dispensed in turn in her succinct comments and appreciative laughs as she rustled up a late-night supper of gourmet leftovers for his return.But our time together was unique. I dont think I really realized before that moment over lunch what good friends he and I had become, or how unusual that was, or how lucky I was. He wasnt a father figure. He was my father. And he was truly one of my very best friends. The years showed me that he would have walked through fire for me, or any of us; and actually, in many ways, he did.And I lived with a tall, handsome guy my own age, with jet black hair and beautiful blue eyes, who drew hilarious cartoons that made me laugh.Once when we were nearing a potential break-up, he said without even thinking: Well, why dont we just burn that bridge when we get to it?, renewing our contract for at least another two years right then and there.It was more powerful than she ever could have imagined, when a sister comrade in the same Refugee-from-Injustice status, suffering the same indignities of legal abuse in the seizure of our family assets, so many years later handed me a well-worn New Yorker. She apologized for its condition, and said, Youre going to be the fourth reader. Pass it on to others, if you like, or just keep it. Its a way of recycling. Im giving it to you to remind you of WHO YOU REALLY ARE. It was a powerful reminder. I had all but forgotten the civilized world of the New Yorker. At first it was painful, but then comforting to re-enter the safety of those pages. My mother had always renewed my subscription for my birthday when I was on my own. I dedicate this chapter to C.W. in gratitude for that incredible sensitivity, and touching that spot in not only my mind, but also my heart, more than she ever knew. At first I cried, and then I tried to explain, and may have even babbled something about loving the classic editions and the Algonquin Hotel, but soon gave up, saying simply that it meant more than she could possibly know. And she nodded quietly. As if maybe she did.

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