He clapped his hands, and Merle came out of her room. Merle’s father was a book critic for the World-Telegram & Sun. She was president of the PTA at Music and Art. One of the elevator men pulled on a golden lever, and we shot upstairs in an ancient, shivering car. The building had a doorman in a gray uniform, and elevator operators in identical gray. “I always shiver before an exam.”Īnd so I visited Merle on a Friday night in November. And I was startled when she asked me to study with her. The Bronx had very small purchase on West End Avenue. She had lavender eyes, like Elizabeth Taylor’s, and when she talked of Mehitabel or Natasha in War and Peace, those lavender eyes had all the little explosions of the Milky Way. She wanted to teach world literature at one of the Seven Sisters. She sang in the school choir and could have walked right into Juilliard. She was tall and zaftig, with the ripeness of an opera star. We were both sophomores in the same English class. I had a secret crush on one of them-Merle Messenger. They scribbled poems at night and practiced their acceptance speeches for the Pulitzer Prize. Those boys had one ambition: to get into Harvard or Yale. The boys wore white bucks, shoes that looked like anteaters or rumpled rats, and were the favorite footwear among Ivy Leaguers. I was smitten by Archy and Mehitabel, and by the swagger of all those M&Aers from Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “Toujours gai, kid.” That was her love cry to the cockroach. The kids at Music and Art would quote line after line of Mehitabel’s meditations while I nodded my head. But I had to wait until I attended high school in Manhattan before I would learn about that cockroach and his companion, an alley cat who thought she was Cleopatra. The idea of a cockroach who could write poetry would have appealed to a kid from the Bronx. I had never heard of Archy and Mehitabel.
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