Amounting to Something

The recently widowed are often given to small but significant gestures signaling independence. One I know of, whose husband had long insisted that music ends with Mozart, went out and bought a record of Mahler’s First Symphony; another moved to New Jersey. Ruth Berenson had the furniture reupholstered: “Whenever I mentioned it, Norbert used to have a fit. ‘It’s shabby,’ he would say. ‘Don’t you like things shabby?’ ”

Indeed, the lady is, in her civilized way, kicking up her heels: new job, new quarters; not a whole new life, but one veering noticeably. And a new city, Washington, which occasions grumbles from a longtime New Yorker. To reach her new spread, one is vetted by the doorman, then by the desk man with his ever-shifting TV monitors; she has an even harder time: up to the garage entrance, out with the silvery futuristic doodad that, put in its slot, guarantees that she is she and opens the iron gate; park the car, use doodad again to penetrate building; up umpteen floors, fish out two separate keys, determine which opens which lock, home at last. “It’s so dangerous here, you know.” Not dangerous on the Upper West Side? “Oh, yes, but I know New York.”

CS

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C. H. Simonds

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The recently widowed are often given to small but significant gestures signaling independence. One I know of, whose husband had long insisted that music ends with Mozart, went out and bought a record of Mahler’s First Symphony; another moved to New Jersey. Ruth Berenson had the furniture reupholstered: “Whenever I mentioned it, Norbert used to have a fit. ‘It’s shabby,’ he would say. ‘Don’t you like things shabby?’ ”

Indeed, the lady is, in her civilized way, kicking up her heels: new job, new quarters; not a whole new life, but one veering noticeably. And a new city, Washington, which occasions grumbles from a longtime New Yorker. To reach her new spread, one is vetted by the doorman, then by the desk man with his ever-shifting TV monitors; she has an even harder time: up to the garage entrance, out with the silvery futuristic doodad that, put in its slot, guarantees that she is she and opens the iron gate; park the car, use doodad again to penetrate building; up umpteen floors, fish out two separate keys, determine which opens which lock, home at last. “It’s so dangerous here, you know.” Not dangerous on the Upper West Side? “Oh, yes, but I know New York.”