Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 67th post, Helena recalls some of the sounds of the old Brooklyn building that was her first adult home. Enjoy!
Sounds: A Moan, A Groan, Thuds, Buzzes and a Shuffle Shuffle Click
Pre-World War II buildings had a grace designed for human beings, and certainly, for the times, moneyed residents. Elegant marble lobbies, and apartments with high ceilings, big rooms, crown moldings from which must have once hung paintings, portraits, grand, gilded mirrors. The walls were layered with eras of paint, the most recent, fresh white, for Ted and me, when we moved into Lincoln Terrace, a section of Brooklyn.
Our apartment on the sixth floor had heavy wood sliding doors between the dining and living rooms, designed to glide into narrow tunnels built into walls left and right of them. Parquet floors that Ted refinished, sanded and coated with varnish. There were fire escapes and cast-iron steam heat radiators. But the landlord was stingy with heat that winter, and maybe it was hard for heat to get up to the top floor through those old pipes.
When the bitter Brooklyn winter winds blew through the old walls and single pane glass windows, the place was cold. So cold it went through our layers of clothes, the sweaters and coats we wore. And though we called to complain to get the heat turned up, it never was. Sometimes, the old boiler broke down. Then we heated our water on the gas stove to wash, its oven door open to warm the kitchen. There were cockroaches, as there were in all of New York’s old buildings. We fought them. But the place was big and bright, and beautiful with our new furniture. My parents bought the bedroom set. Ted’s parents bought the couch, the end tables, the coffee table, and a beautiful printed chair. Danish modern, all of it, bought at Macy’s. We were starting out.
On the fire escape of the room that was first my studio, until our daughter was born and the room became hers, was attached a steel rod. The rod was horizontal to the fire escape, welded to the top railing of one of its corners. Neither of us, Ted nor I, could figure out why it was there. It had some purpose; too much labor was put into fastening it so solidly for it to have served nothing. We settled on the uncomfortable belief that it may have been a lightning rod. But somehow that theory didn’t solve the mystery of its behavior, fixed and inanimate though it seemed—I will call it, its expression. When the wind blew, that rod hummed. It began softly, some middle pitch note, then built, slowly, to a moan that stopped us. Frozen, not just our bodies, but our psyches, riveted, marveling even at the science of an iron rod vibrating in the wind, humming so loudly it took us over—moved through us, our bodies vibrating with it. Until the wind for the moment died, and the night fell quiet again.
The sixth floor was the topmost floor at 446 Kingston Avenue. Our two-month-old daughter came down with pneumonia. We nearly lost her. I was seventeen and still numb. Now, when I grasp that near-loss, I go numb again. One extraordinary doctor saved her life. After that, we ate and slept at Ted’s mother’s place in Flatbush until the cold eased. We moved before the next winter.
Every place has its sounds. The elevator at 446 Kingston groaned, laboring its way up to six, brick walls and concrete passing slowly, slowly, slowly top to bottom, its round glass window. When the elevator, stopped the door waited, maybe minutes, before it suddenly opened with a kind of thud. I didn’t like elevators, and later would stop riding them all together.
There was another sound at 446 Kingston, that I can never forget, for another category of reason. We’d set Theo’s highchair up in the foyer, opposite the kitchen, next to the apartment’s front door. One morning, feeding her, Theo opening her mouth, me sliding her small pink spoon filled with warm rice cereal into her mouth, a mother bird and her little one, I heard a shuffling sound. Shuffle shuffle shuffle shuffle. Then a click! Besides the roaches that scattered when we switched on the kitchen circle-shaped florescent light, a light that hummed too, but in a buzzier, electrical way, the cockroaches we struggled with scattered. Our apartment walls had been opened in several places by the landlord’s electrician, working to update the wiring system of that old, old building, beautiful in spite of that steel rod, and its old elevator, and now we realized, its city of mice that lived in those old, old walls, walls that now opened directly into our apartment.
Shuffle shuffle shuffle shuffle. Click! Where was it coming from? It had to be the mice! Ted was still sleeping, two rooms away, in the room that was once the parlor of that nearly royal place, but was now our bedroom. I grew very still and looked around to identify the sound, hardly breathing. Then I saw it. The front door’s brass knob was turning. Back and forth, back and forth, shuffle shuffle shuffle, click! I put my daughter’s spoon into the ceramic food warmer, resting on the table next to the highchair. I got up slowly. I walked on bare, silent feet to the iron door. That old floor was so solid it didn’t creak. The door had a peeker, eye level, a small round brass-covered peep hole, with its own small hinged door. While that doorknob moved back and forth, shuffle shuffle, click, I opened the peeker slowly. The hall was empty. I could see the door of the apartment opposite ours.
Then I put my hand on to that turning knob. I must have been holding my breath. The doorknob moved, back and forth, shuffle shuffle shuffle against my palm. I turned the doorknob and the small oval knob of the dead bolt, and pulled open the door. The hall was empty. I screamed, “Ted!” In my hand, the knob grew still. Ted came running.
I suppose I was dazed. I must have finished feeding my daughter, maybe laid her in her bassinette, or carried her to the living room to sit us both down on that printed cushion of the walnut, Danish Modern chair.
An hour passed and my mother called. Her mother, so close me, my grandmother, Anna Bailenson, had died. She died at 8:30, the hour that brass doorknob moved on its own.
I never forget that. I never forget that she came to me. I remember it at times I greatly need that consolation.
What sounds trigger memories for you? Have you ever written about them? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: Helena Writes
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