Sebenlist knew trouble when he saw it. My father’s trouble with Turk, though, was not some long-standing feud, not the deep, geological accretion of anger that piled up over years of neighborly friction. She’d babysat for me, cradled me in her arms and sung me to sleep. True, an arrangement fostered almost entirely by my mother, but he hadn’t objected. After I had gotten a little older, Turk would let me rummage around in her storage room, and we’d have tea. My father liked Turk, didn’t he? She’d read his books, and not only that, she treated him as though he belonged to that order of writers he wished to belong to. Sometimes he’d have a cigarette with her in the vestibule and they’d gripe about their latest shared outrage, the Knicks or macrobiotics or Tom Wolfe.
Why, then, oh why, was he trying to knock down her door? Because of the elevator. Because now, in order to throw out the fish, he’d have to take the elevator. And for my father, few modern conveniences were more terrifying.
12.
It was rumored that Turk had acquired a foreign exchange student from some sweltering Oriental backwater where the plant-based diet and nonexistent child labor laws made sure that no one got bigger than an average American ten-year-old. Had anyone ever laid eyes on the exchange student? Perhaps. Fleetingly. All anyone knew for sure was that he was small. Service Swensen, the talkies actress and self-appointed hall monitor who lived in 14A, claimed she had seen him, but, her cataracted peephole eye lacking the ability to tell one Chinaman from the next, she had, in fact, misidentified a delivery boy from Grand Szechuan, the kitchen of which fed fully half the Apelles on Friday nights and had a lock on a quarter of the residents most other nights of the week, and whose employees were as common in the hallways as the residents themselves. Service, who spent much of her day with that cloudy eye pressed to the brass plate in her door, spooning peanut butter into her toothless mouth, had, in fact, on numerous occasions seen the exchange student, our friend Tanawat Kongkatitum, but in every instance assumed him to be a Grand Szechuan delivery boy. For the record, Tanawat was six feet tall.
Turk’s history and my own are a tangle of confluence and coincidence. She was our neighbor, of course, and still is. She was not, as my father claimed in one of the many confabulations he visited on me when I was a girl, Turkish, and though she laughed along with the stories of Ottoman conquest he told me about her, her name was short for Turlough, itself an Anglicized bastardization of Toirdhealbhach, after the blind Irish harper, a national hero, a name chosen by Turk’s German parents in a post–Great War attempt to shield their child from the misanthropy they expected to be visited upon her by her American classmates.
Turk was plenty American, having emigrated in utero, in the aftermath of the Kaiser’s fall, born red white and blue in 1920 (a smack on der Hintern cleared up the blue). Brothers Seamus and Teddy arrived in ’22 and ’24. Turk’s father, formerly a professor of Eastern languages in Bonn, had established a successful language school in Manhattan, then expanded to Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, the last leading to a lucrative government contract training diplomatic attachés heading to the territories. In the late 1920s, the Brunn Institute for Linguistic and Cultural Advancement was the height of intellectual fashion in New York, offering exotic languages such as Hindi, Japanese, Tibetan, Basque, Maa, and Dinka, taught by native speakers who administered pronunciation drills while wearing native dress, and it was not unusual to find classrooms packed on Friday evenings with flappers and swells, who after class would catch a drink and practice the dirty Mandarin phrases they’d been able to extract from their teacher before diving into the oily night. (Lie la zhoo ta ma da!) The schools survived the thirties by floating along on meager government contracts, and when war broke out in Europe, Roosevelt’s Department of State enlisted Turk’s father to increase the readiness of the diplomatic corps. Then the world fell apart and the diplomats were replaced by recruits from the newly formed Office of Strategic Services.
That’s where our family histories first crossed, when my father enrolled in a class to brush up on Polish slang.
Turk and her two younger brothers spent the war unencumbered by concerns more dire than canned pineapple shortages. She cruised through college, picked up master’s degrees in anthropology and sociology, and enrolled in a doctoral program at Columbia (the family business: her unfinished dissertation was titled “Twentieth-century linguistic transformation of the Bahau Dayak”). By the early 1960s, Turk was a familiar face in the West Village bars where NYU professors took their latest conquests, where everyone was arguing politics, high as kites, throwing poses, doing their best impersonations of credible sources.
Who was she to that crowd? A dyke, a cipher, perpetual ABD, here and there auditing a class at the New School, versed in Schopenhauer and Friedman but bored by both, someone who always picked up the check and always went home alone. She smoked with her cigarette wedged tightly into the webbing of her index and middle fingers, and she wore dungarees and a leather jacket, which once led an empress dowager at the Apelles to remark in a public whisper that Turk might as well have been a dockworker. Turk volleyed back that given the spread of the old hag’s ass, she must herself be a welcome sight down at Pier 12.
Her concerns didn’t include the opinions of others; she detested those papery souls who attested at every opportunity
