Authors: Richard Bowes
BLOOD YESTERDAY, BLOOD TOMORROW
1.
A
i Ling, show Aunt Lilia and everyone else how you can play the Debussy ‘Claire de Lune,’” Larry said as his partner Boyd beamed at his side. Lilia Gaines was at the dinner party as a friend of one of the hosts, Larry Stepelli.
She had, in fact, been his roommate in the bad old days. Twenty-five years before she and Larry had entered Ichordone therapy as a couple and left it separately and stayed that way.
The exquisitely dressed Asian girl sat, tiny but fully at ease, at the piano. At one time Lilia had wondered if only well-to-do gay couples should be allowed to raise kids.
Behind Ai Ling, the windows of the West Street duplex looked over the Hudson and the lights of New Jersey on a late June evening. And amazingly, almost like a beautifully rendered piece of automata, the child played the piece with scarcely a flaw.
Amidst the applause of the dozen guests and her fathers, Ai Ling curtseyed and went off with her Nana. Lilia, not for the first time, considered Larry’s upward mobility. This dinner party was for some of Boyd’s clients, a few people whom Larry sought to impress and one or two like her whom he liked to taunt with his success.
A woman asked Boyd what preschool his daughter attended. One of his clients dropped the names of two Senators and the President in a single sentence.
A young man who had been brought by an old and famous children’s book illustrator talked about the novel he was writing, “It’s YA and horror lite on what at the moment is a very timely theme,” he said.
Larry smiled and said to Lilia, “I walked past Reliquary yesterday and you were closed.”
“Major redecoration,” she replied. Their connection had once been so close that at times each could still read the other. So they both knew this wasn’t so.
He tilted his handsome head with only a subtle touch of gray and raised his left eyebrow a fraction of an inch.
Lilia knew he was going to ask her something about her shop and how long it could survive. She didn’t want to discuss the subject just then.
Larry’s question went unasked. Right then the young author said, “It’s a theme which sometimes gets overworked but never gets stale. The book I’m doing right now is titled,
Never Blood Today.
You know, a variation on, ‘Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam today’ from
Alice in Wonderland
. In fact the book is Alice with Vampires! Set in a well-to-do private high school!”
The writer looked at Larry with fascination as he spoke. Boyd frowned. The illustrator who had a show up in Larry’s gallery rolled his eyes.
Larry smiled again but just for a moment. For Lilia, the writer’s conversation was an unplanned bonus.
A woman in an enviable apricot silk dress with just a hint of sheath about it changed the subject to a reliably safe one: how nicely real estate prices had bottomed out.
Then Boyd suggested they all sit down to dinner. Boyd Lazlo was a corporate lawyer, solid, polite, nice looking, completely opaque. Lilia Gaines knew he didn’t much trust her.
Lilia and Larry went back to the time when Warhol walked the earth, Manhattan was seamy and corroded, and an unending stream of young people came there to lose their identities and find newer, more exotic ones. Back then Boyd was still a college kid preparing to go to Yale Law.
These many summers later, Manhattan was gripped by nostalgia for old sordid days, and Lilia had something to show Larry that would evoke them. But it was personal, private, and she hadn’t found a moment alone with him.
At the end of the evening he stood at the door saying goodbye to the illustrator. The young writer looked wide-eyed at Larry and even at Lilia. The mystique of old evil: she understood it well.
As Larry wished him farewell, Lilia caught the half wink her old companion gave the kid and was certain Larry was bored.
She remembered him in the Ichordone group therapy standing in tears and swearing that when he walked out of there cured of his habit he would establish a stable relationship and raise children.
Boyd was down the hall at the elevator kissing and shaking hands. Lilia and Larry were alone. Only then did he put his hands on her shoulders and say, “You have a secret; give it up.”
“Something I just found,” she said, reached into her bag, and handed him a folded linen napkin. You’d have had to know him as well as she did to catch the eyes widening by a millimeter. Stitched into the cloth was what, when Lilia first saw it years before, had looked like a small gold crown, a coronet. Curving below the coronet in script were the words “Myrna’s Place.” The same words were above it upside down.
Before anything more could be said, Boyd came back looking a bit concerned and as if he needed to speak to Larry alone. So Lilia thanked both of them for dinner and took her leave. She noticed that Larry had made the napkin disappear.
Years ago when New York was the wilder, darker place, Larry and Lilia’s apartment was on a marginal street on the Lower East Side, and they pursued careers while watching for their chance. He acted in underground films with Madonna before the name meant anything and took photos; she sold dresses she’d designed to East Village Boutiques.
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe was the model for all the young couples like them: the poker faced serious girl with hair framing her face and the flashy bisexual guy. They were in the crowd at the Pyramid Club, Studio 54, and the Factory. Drugs and alcohol were their playthings. Love did enter into it, of course, and even sex when their stars crossed paths.
Since they needed money, they also had an informal business selling antiques and weird collectibles at the flea market on Sixth Avenue in the Twenties.
In those days that stretch of Manhattan was a place of rundown five story buildings and wide parking lots—fallow land waiting for a developer. On weekends, first one parking lot, then a second, then a third, then more blossomed with tables set up in the open air, tents pitched before dawn.
It became a destination where New Yorkers spent their weekend afternoons sifting through the trash and the gems. Warhol, the pale prince, bought much of his fabled cookie jar collection there.
During the week, Larry and Lilia haunted the auction rooms on Fourth Avenue and Broadway south of Union Square, swooped down on forlorn vases and candy dishes, old toys, unwanted lots of parasols and packets of photos of doughboys and chorus girls, turn of the century nude swimming scenes, elephants wearing bonnets and top hats.
Since it kind of was their livelihood, they both tried to be reasonably straight and sober at the moment Sunday morning stopped being Saturday night. While it was still dark they’d go up to Sixth Avenue with their treasures in shopping carts, rent a few square feet of space and a couple of tables and set up their booth.
In the predawn, out of town antique dealers, edgy interior decorators, compulsive collectors, all bearing flashlights, would circulate among the vans unloading furniture and the tables being carried to their places by the flea market porters.
Beams of light would scan the dark and suddenly, four, five, a dozen of them would circle a booth where strange, interesting, perhaps even valuable stuff was being set up.
Lilia and Larry wanted that attention. Then came the very drowsy weekday auction when they found a lot consisting of several cartons of distressed goods: everything from matchbooks and champagne flutes, to mirrors and table cloths all with the words “Myrna’s Place” in an oval and the gold design that looked like a small crown, a coronet.
The name meant nothing to them. They guessed Myrna’s was some kind of uptown operation—a speakeasy, a bordello, a bohemian salon—they didn’t quite know.
Old, hard-bitten market dealers called themselves “Fleas.”
Larry said, “Fleas call the trash they sell Stuff.”
“And this looks like Stuff,” Lilia replied.
“And plenty of it,” they said at the same moment, which happened with them back then. They bid their last fifty dollars and got the lot.
That Sunday morning they rented their usual space and a couple of tables. Other recent finds included a tackily furnished tin dollhouse, a set of blue and white china bowls, a few slightly decayed leather jackets, several antique corsets, a box of men’s assorted arm garters, and a golf bag and clubs bought at an apartment sale. They had dysfunctional old cameras and a cracked glass jar full of marbles. Prominently displayed was a selection of Myrna’s Place stuff.
The couple in the booth across from theirs seemed to loot a different place each week. That Sunday it was an old hunting lodge. They had a moose head, skis, snow shoes and blunt, heavy ice skates, Adirondack chairs, and gun racks.
Larry and Lilia set up in the pre-dawn dark as flashlights darted about the lot. Then one fell on them. A flat faced woman with rimless glasses and eyes that showed nothing turned her beam on the golf clubs.
She shrugged when she saw them up close. But as she turned to walk away, her light caught a nicely draped tablecloth from Myrna’s Place. “Thirty dollars for the lot,” she said indicating all the Myrna items.
Larry and Lilia hesitated. Thirty dollars would pay the day’s rent for the stall. Then another light found the table. A middle aged man with the thin, drawn look of a veteran of many Manhattan scenes was examining Myrna’s wine glasses. “Five dollars each,” Lilia told him and he didn’t back off.
To the woman who had offered thirty for the entire lot, Larry said, “Thirty for the tablecloth.”
The woman ground them down to twenty. The thin, drawn man bought four wine glasses for fifteen dollars and continued examining the merchandise.
Lilia and Larry’s booth attracted the pre-dawn flashlights. It was like being attacked by giant fireflies. Nobody was interested in anything else. It was all Myrna’s Place. Old Fleas paused and looked their way.
As dawn began to slide in between the buildings, the thin, drawn man found a small ivory box.
“Myrna Lavaliere, who and where are you now?” he asked, and opened the lid. It was full of business cards bearing the usual double Myrna’s Place and coronet logo. Below that was an address on the Upper East Side, a Butterfield 8 telephone number and the motto, “Halfway between Park Avenue and Heaven.”
“More like far from Heaven and down the street from Hell,” the man said. “You kids have any idea what you have here?”
Larry and Lilia shrugged. Other customers wanted their attention.
“Wickedness always sells,” the man told them. “And after the war in the late 1940s, rumor had it this place was wicked. Myrna’s was a townhouse where you went in human and came out quite otherwise.”
A tall woman with a black lace kerchief tied around her long neck and wearing sunglasses in the dawn light had stopped examining a pair of Myrna’s Place candlesticks and paused to listen.
She gave a short, contemptuous laugh and said in an unplacable accent, “Oh please, spare these not-terribly-innocent children all the sour grape stories spread by all the ones who couldn’t get inside the front door of Myrna’s. What happened there happened before and will happen again. If you know anything about these phenomena at all you know that.”
She faced him and raised the glasses off her eyes for a moment. Neither Larry nor Lilia could see her face. But apparently her stare was enough to cause the man to first back away, then scuttle off.
“Fifty gets you the candlesticks,” Larry told her. They were getting bold.
“I just wanted to make sure these weren’t as good as the pair I have. But I will let others know about you. I think the time is right.”
Then the wizened pack rats and sleek interior decorators were all at the booth hissing at each other as they pawed through the items. Lilia and Larry tried to spot people they thought might actually have gone to Myrna’s.
As morning sunlight began to hit the Sixth Avenue Market, club kids coming from Danceteria in ’50s drag found Larry and Lilia’s stall. Dolled up boys in pompadours, girls in satin evening gowns who looked like inner tension was all that held them together, stopped on their way downtown. They seemed fascinated, whispered and giggled, but didn’t buy much: a handkerchief, a cigarette holder.
But the stock of Myrna’s Place items was almost cleaned out when a lone Death Punk girl, her eye shadow and black hair with green highlights looking sad in the growing light, appeared. She pawed through the remaining items, dug in her pockets, and gave Larry three dollars and seventeen cents, all she had with her, for a stained coaster.
Around then Lilia realized that if she held any of the items at a certain angle, the Myrna’s Place design looked like an upper and lower lip and the coronet was sharp, gold teeth. Once she saw that and pointed it out to Larry they couldn’t see them any other way.
They weren’t naive. In the demimonde they inhabited, gossip lately concerned ones called the Nightwalkers. About then they began wondering about Myrna’s Place.
2.
Thirty years later on the morning after the dinner party, Larry called Lilia on her cell phone several times. But she was on an errand that took her uptown and onto the tram to Roosevelt Island. Though this situation hadn’t occurred recently, Lilia remembered how to play Larry when she had something that he wanted.
Roosevelt Island lies in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. On that small spot in the midst of a great city is a little river town of apartment houses. Along the main street, the buildings project out over the sidewalks, providing a covered way.
In one period of Lilia’s life the sun was unbearable and had to be avoided. Now walking under cover, she was glad the habit had remained and helped her avoid skin cancer.
Lilia remembered the others who took the cure when she and Larry did: the old man with wild white hair and gleaming eyes who required three times as much Ichordone as anyone else in the program and wore a muzzle like a dog because he tried to bite; the mousy woman who had been turned into a vampire when she saw Bela Lugosi as Dracula on TV twenty years before.
Generations ago, Roosevelt Island was called Welfare Island. It was where hospitals for contagious diseases were located. Their ruins still dot the place. Hospitals are still located there, most of them quite ordinary.