My Father’s Mistress

In the elevator of the Chelsea Hotel, the woman pulls herself back into the corner of the cab as if to make room for me. I am about ten years old and on my way to visit my father, who keeps a suite of rooms on the second floor. I know these rooms well, having stayed in them before. Some summers I would travel from Kansas City to join my parents in New York to make a patched-up trinity of a family at the Chelsea Hotel or sometimes in a rented farmhouse upstate. I would use the sofa in the apartment’s living room, and my mother and father would sleep in the maple double bed in the second room. But recently my mother has moved into the back rooms of a bookstore on East End Avenue in which she has an interest. The Chelsea Hotel is a dump, she has declared, and I took her complaint as sufficient to break up the family we had shared before she farmed me out to my grandparents’ home in Kansas City. I was not unhappy with the arrangement of living with them.

It is only a two-floor trip on the clunky elevator, and I anticipate my father’s jaunty greeting at the door of his apartment. I knock and the heavy door swings wide, as a flood of brilliance spills over me from the bay windows that encircle his walnut worktable at the end of the room.

“There you are, Mr. It. Come in and have a chaw.” He pulls me to him and soon my face is pillowed against his soft belly. Beyond his embrace I can see his morning’s work sprawled across the table: thick reference books and a heavy dictionary seem to shore up the manuscripts, and to one side a dark pipe lolls in a pink marble ashtray and a tin of Prince Albert tobacco stands in readiness.

The woman in the elevator has passed upward and on to her floor, with the discreet Sydney, the black bell captain, at the controls. My mature sensibility has freshened this tableau, so I can now aptly describe the woman who stands at the rear of the elevator cab. Her expression is not coy, nor is she strikingly attractive, but instead poised; and she seems ready to introduce herself in some expression of the hotel’s protocol. Yes, she does look ready to say something to me but changes her mind just as Sydney closes the lattice entrance to the elevator.

I am only visiting. My mother and I have taken up different rooms elsewhere, and my father remains swathed in the smoky pursuit of inspirations that threaten to elude him; his words hold their places on the page in his unreadable handwriting. These separate accommodations express our different life appointments. My mother’s notes for her graduate thesis at Columbia University are neatly filed in the bookstore’s storage closet, while my father’s industry is spread out on a table with brass lion’s feet. Books are important properties in both regions—and, wherever the day’s schedule may place me, I will have libraries to furnish the solitude of these occupancies. At the Chelsea my father’s shelves of classics both puzzle and delight me—Homer’s was like no other journey begun on Roberts Street in Kansas City—but the lending library on East End Avenue delivers installments of adventure and romance that are more familiar, thrills like those I have seen on the screen at the Chief Theatre in Kansas City. All these narratives fascinate me and raise omens after lunch on Twenty-third Street as urgent as any Hermes brought from Zeus.

Each time I meet the woman in the elevator she seems ready to introduce herself, but her narrow lips purse, their articulation seemingly silenced by some house rule. I am to learn that she is a typist, a stenographer who hires herself out to residents who need important letters prepared or contracts made ready or manuscripts to finish, and in fact Thomas Wolfe recommended her to my father. The novelist...