Places and Persons

...On a nearer roof a Negro girl sometimes comes out with a wellfilled basket and hangs out clothes whose clear whites, and pale shades of rose, pistache and lemon could not be rivaled by Georgia O'Keeffe...

...Of these, one is by far the grandest, the only one in the neighborhood with what you might call "class...

...They lined the parapet with flower boxes, they planted seeds and bulbs, they tended and watered their bijou garden, she using a gay-colored watering pot and he a small, brass-nozzled hose...

...Of all the three it is the smallest and least pretentious, just a plain stuccoed parallelopipedon facing a tile-paved terrace protected by a straight brick parapet...

...If that's the way you feel about me, it may as well begin now," were the final words I heard him fling at her, and he went away without kissing her goodby...

...a lady in a fur coat daily airs her airedale...

...All summer long this little spot is a veritable oasis in an ocean of ugliness, but it is just then that it is most deserted...

...Workmen are always appearing from nowhere to string wires, to mend the roofs or to paint the pipes and water tanks...

...But the life that goes on on the roofs interests me most...

...They use their terrace very sensibly, like the deck of a ship: for air, for exercise, to read their New York Times of a Sunday morning, to view the panorama of roofs, brick cliffs, sky and river...

...The pent house adjoining this one—and against the sight of which the flower-clad lattice is a somewhat ineffective defense—has scarcely more of the atmosphere of a home for human beings than a gasoline filling station...

...Neither of them seemed to care any more about their gardening, and the place gradually took on a neglected air: the watering pot had lost its sprinkler nozzle and stood in the corner by the hose, which was never uncoiled...

...Then followed a period when I never saw these people, and I concluded that they had moved away...

...At unpredictable times one hears the terrifying siren shriek and rushing roar of the fire wagons, the ominous, inarticulate cry of the hawker of extras, or the hoot of some steamer from the river —a short, frayed ribbon of shining silver beyond the weedy wilderness of roofs, water tanks and chimneys to the east...

...Sometimes there were visitors, when the sound of the gramophone and the rattle of the cocktail-shaker would be added to the other noises of the summer night...

...the pounding wheel and grinding brakes of the stop-and-go street car...

...endlessly up and down the sidewalks on either side crawl the human flies of Manhattan, entering now and then this or that portal intent upon mysterious errands of which I sometimes wish I knew the secret, though probably even less exciting than the errand which takes so many men into that false-faced little corner drug store, the prescription room of which is a bar room where inferior liquor is dispensed at $.50 a glass...

...After that they came less and less upon the terrace, and usually not together: he would come out alone in his shirt sleeves long enough to smoke a cigarette, gloomily, and sometimes after he had gone she would stand and gaze down abstractedly into the street, looking not nearly as pretty as she used to, and never, as she used, humming a song...

...Farther northward, where the buildings are so high as to conceal the river, its presence is still felt in the intricate steel work of the bridge which spans Blackwell's Island, out of which, early on summer mornings, the cloud-encircled sun struggles upward like some brilliant tropical bird escaping from a net...

...There are three pent houses to which my window is like a box at the opera: one is directly beneath, and the others just across the way...

...The rug and chairs had disappeared, all the greenery had died and turned to dirty brown, the awning had at last gone up in flames and its remnants hung in tatters faintly stirred by the wind...

...The florist's assistant, supervised by the butler, comes and goes...

...I dramatize them as sitting listening to Dr...

...They are probably disporting themselves elsewhere, after the manner of their kind...

...Like Browning, hearing Galluppi's ghostly music, I felt "chilly and grown old...

...the irritated squawk of the ram-youdamn-you auto...

...This party appears to have been the high water mark of their happiness together, for the next morning they had a quarrel about something or other...

...This pent house has passed through phases as the others have not: it has "gelebt und geliebt...

...I remember one evening in particular when, looking down, I saw the terrace gay with Japanese lanterns...

...It has a real roof garden, "parva sed apta," showing the skilled touch of the professional florist given a free hand...

...Its sad little romance began on that day when it became a "love nest" for an attractive young couple who made it live with a new life...

...They laid down a rug, put up an awning, and established thereunder wicker chairs with gaycolored cushions where he would sit and smoke and read his paper while she hovered about in adorable garments which in my time would have been considered "meet only for feminine eyes...

...soot had dingied the rug and the cushions, the awning had holes in it burned by the lighted cigarette stubs flung from the hotel windows high above...

...Out of the profits of this traffic the pseudodruggist has bought an apartment house...

...This ruin and decay were so much worse than the place's pristine bareness that I did not like to look at it, and so one morning when the air had a breath of winter, I shut my window and averted my mind as one sometimes does after a sad play...

...May 28, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 99 Places and Persons FROM A HOTEL WINDOW By CLAUDE BRAGDON MY ROOM is half-way up the cliff-side of the hotel Mesa, which stands at the intersection of two city canyons, a lesser and a greater, from which ascend at all hours the din of traffic: the periodical deep roar of the elevated, like the sound of many waters...

...The entire parapet is crowned with greenery, terminating at either end with vine-clad lattices one of which, continuing over the wall of the abutting pent house, forms the background for a handsome fountain...

...But in winter, when the flower boxes are empty and all the foliage brown and sere, a man and woman whom I take to be the Adam and Eve of this particular garden sometimes show themselves on the terrace, lured thither by the clang of fire wagons in the street below or the droning of motors overhead...

...they seem directed by some group-soul, flying unchangeably in the same orbit, the white undersides of their myriad wings recurrently gleaming bright for a segment of their circuit, and then returning almost to invisibility again...

...Endlessly up the cross street dash the automobugs of Manhattan, looking indeed like shiny black beetles or yellow potato bugs...

...the maid, in neat cap and apron, throws open the French windows, and sometimes languidly shakes a rug, but of master or mistress I see never a sign...

...Cadman's council on a mechanically perfect radio set, reading Liberty and the Ladies' Home Journal by the light of a C2 "daylight" Mazda lamp, going to Roxy s or the Paramount on one particular night every week and playing bridge on another...

...My love birds were giving a party and I was kept long awake by the drone of jazz, the rhythmic shuffle of dancing feet, the hum of talk, the shrill note of feminine laughter...

...an old man in a cap and sweater tries unsuccessfully to fly a queershaped kite...

...I like to watch the pigeons being exercised by a man who waves to and fro a piece of cloth on the end of a fishing pole...

...But it is pent house number three, the one just underneath my window which interests me most, which seems dramatic, since drama is the leading up to and recession from some crisis...

...the rattle of emptied ash cans and the clip-clip-clip of horses' hoofs in the early morning...

...I am sure that the man and woman who live there are 100 percent Americans...

...Directly opposite and near at hand rises the great brick wall of another hotel through whose glazed rectangles one gets so many momentary glimpses of the human comedy as to constitute, when pieced together in the mind, an epitome of the cellular life of this section of New York—novel- and newspaper-reading, bridge-playing, cocktail-imbibing, jazzing, kidding, little old New York...

...To all appearances it is presided over by a butler and a maid, with doubtless a cook somewhere in the background...

...Everything about it is bleak, tidy and efficient, from the green lattice arbor, leading from nowhere to nowhere, guiltless of a vine, to the yellow and red striped awning, which rolls up as it retreats, shop-window style...