Every kid needs an Auntie Mame.
My Auntie Mame was born in 1895. Her name was Dorothy and she was my grandfather’s sister. She took a liking to me from the very beginning. In fact, when I was first learning to walk, my mother and Dorothy were on opposite sides of the room and each called out to me to come to them. Since I had two choices, I couldn’t go to both, so I headed towards Dorothy. Perhaps as a toddler I knew that one day Dorothy would treat me to three days in Manhattan. As for Mom, she was gracious about the slight. After all, since I lived with Mom I saw her everyday but that was not the case with Dorothy.
Aunt Dorothy was really my introduction to the world. When I was 13, she announced that she wanted to take me to New York City for a long weekend. Mom had no problems about letting me go, since I was already spending several weekends a year at Aunt Dorothy’s apartment in Philadelphia. In a sense, I grew up having two mothers.
When at last the coveted Manhattan weekend came, Aunt Dorothy drove me to her place and then the following day we headed to the Trailways bus depot in Center City. Boarding the New York City bus, we were served coffee and Danish pastries in our seats by a bus hostess who was dressed like an airline stewardess. It’s amazing to think that both Greyhound and Trailways buses used to have hostesses on board. Now you’re lucky if those buses have a clean bathroom.
When we arrived in New York, Aunt Dorothy hailed a taxi to the Hotel New Yorker. I watched as she stepped out into the street and waved down a yellow cab. The gesture seemed so grown up and confident to me. It was definitely a side of Auntie that I had never seen before. In the hotel, a bellhop escorted us to our room, which had a great view of the city. Auntie had insisted on a room with a view. The room had twin beds and an intercom on the wall that doubled as a radio. The Hotel New Yorker was my first hotel experience and it was love at first sight. Checking into a hotel, inspecting the room and the view has always been, for me, one of life’s extreme pleasures and I owe this feeling to Aunt Dorothy.
Watching Auntie tip the bellhop was another life lesson. She did it with a flourish, as if telling me, “This is how it’s done, dear.” I remember wondering whether I would ever have the know-how to do what Auntie was doing.
Once we were situated, Auntie said it was time to head to Saint Patrick’s cathedral to “make a little visit.” Making a visit meant visiting Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Auntie and I had made many visits to churches in downtown Philadelphia, especially Saint John’s on 13th Street, so we were excited to visit one in New York. It was like visiting an old friend, only in this case it was visiting God, paying our respects and then getting on with things. On the way to the cathedral it began to rain and Auntie went into panic mode. She had just gotten her hair done and since rain ruins everything, she took my hand and dashed into a department store where she bought a big umbrella.
Now we were able to walk to the cathedral in comfort. Saint Patrick’s, to my child’s eye, seemed immense. I was especially taken with a life sized statue of Pope Pius XII in a large glass case that was placed in the cathedral’s vestibule.
Before lunch at Stouffer’s on that first day, I was already in love with New York. After lunch we headed to Rockefeller Center where we saw The Rockettes. Then we headed to the Empire State building and took the elevator up to the observation deck, our ears popping all the way up. It had always been a fantasy of mine to throw pennies off the top of the Empire State Building, so I had a good number of them in my pocket. On the observation deck, it was easy to flick individual coins out into the open air through the openings in the protective fence. I suppose I saw this exercise as the New York equivalent of throwing three coins into Rome’s Trevi Fountain, although I never stopped to think about the force the pennies would gather as they fell almost 1,454 feet to the ground. Auntie did not see me throw the coins, but had she I am sure she would have given me a stark reprimand. Long after the trip, I would wonder if any of the coins had hit a Fifth Avenue shopper and caused an injury, or worse.
In the amazing world of New York, I was forever looking out of the windows of our hotel room and thinking how different life there was from the life of growing up in the country, or “the sticks”, as many called Chester County then. Auntie was showing me a world that was much bigger than Chester County and the six house village with a red barn that I called home.
Although Frank Sinatra had not yet recorded his iconic “New York, New York”, I was already humming something like that in my adolescent head.
That first evening, Auntie took me to the most popular restaurant in Manhattan at that time, The Top of the Six’s, or 666. The restaurant has a strange name no matter how you slice it since 666, traditionally, is the mark of the Devil. The restaurant had floor to ceiling windows overlooking the Empire State Building, Central Park and scores of other New York skyscrapers. Dressed in a jacket and tie with Auntie in pearls and a dress that looked very Elizabethan, we marched into the dining room like two fallen aristocrats.
When Auntie asked for a window seat next to the gleaming skyscrapers, the maître d’ announced, “Madame, that would not be possible because all the window tables are taken, but I will be happy to seat you as close to a window as possible.” Auntie let out a long “Oh dear,” informing him that it was her grand nephew’s birthday and that she would not consider anything but a window table since this was “the boy’s first trip to Manhattan.” Then I saw Auntie hand the maître d’ a crisp folded bill of an unknown denomination, whereupon the grateful recipient did an about face and remembered that there was one window table still standing.
Struck by this magical transformation and by the power of money, I followed Auntie as she followed the maître d’ to the sought after prize. I was more amazed than ever at Auntie’s ability to handle almost any disappointing situation and turn it into a victory.
We had a long and leisurely dinner that evening, during which I would periodically wonder what it would feel like to jump from a place so high, whether your body would go into somersault mode or drop straight down like a huge sack of flour.
The next morning we went to Saint Patrick’s for Mass. When the consecration came, Auntie told me to keep in mind that Christ was physically in the church, not as a symbol or imagined but as an authentic Real Presence that happened after the priest said, “This is my body and this is my blood.” I tried to ascertain shadows or images among the cathedral columns but the limitations of human consciousness prevented me from seeing anything beyond the pale.
After a New York breakfast at Chock Full o’Nuts, we headed over to the United Nations building. The next stop was the NBC building where I had hoped to run into Johnny Carson of The Tonight Show, my first boyhood crush outside of a childhood friend, Maureen.
At some point during the day Auntie and I got into an argument. We had had a few arguments before, such as when I became so angry at her that I dumped all my toys on the floor of her apartment and began stomping on them. I don’t know what my problem was but I did have a slight destructive streak as a child. On my first day of kindergarten, for instance, I took to roaming around the room knocking over all the kids’ building blocks they had spent 30 minutes constructing into pretend houses. I suppose my discontent was the result of my not wanting to be in kindergarten. My stomping on Auntie’s toy blocks hurt her deeply. Sometimes there’s no logical reason for a child’s tantrum, but whatever had caused my outburst vanished as my Auntie and I made up, collapsing into each other’s arms on one of her old Victorian sofas.
Our New York argument caused me to pout and distance myself from her while we were sailing on the Circle Line around Manhattan. I was dressed in a cream colored sports jacket and tie and remember walking away from her while looking over into Hell’s Kitchen. As in the apartment argument, we made up quickly before the boat hit West Point and long after it had passed Bellevue, where Marilyn Monroe had just been committed.
By the time we went to dinner at Mamma Leone’s in the Theatre District, the famous Italian restaurant with statues of male and female nudes looming over the dinner tables, we were in perfect harmony, laughing and pointing at the marble images of women with voluptuous breasts and curvy buttocks and uttering “uh oh” when we glimpsed the statues of male athletes in Caesar laurel wreaths with their shapely thighs and torsos and voluminous packages hidden beneath fig leafs. •
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