It was the problem of excess imagination, of possibility carrying as much weight as reality. My father had lived there for ten years, and he was religious about using only one passenger elevator, his Haughton Elevonics updated with Schindler parts. He knew its wobbles and clanks, its shimmy at the sixth floor. So slavish was he in his devotion to that elevator that he didn’t even know the names of the doormen stationed in the other three lobbies, each one situated at the elbow of each block-long run of apartments. For that matter, he wouldn’t have recognized residents of the other wings of the building. His realm was the fourteenth floor, the West End side, apartments A through F, the outer limits extending just around the corner to 14G, on the other side of the elevator.
Everything beyond was tundra. He might offer a tense, arm-crossed elevator greeting to a few members of the vertical brotherhood who occupied the apartment lines above and below him, but by and large he lived in a world of his own making, into which few were allowed to enter, and out of which he rarely ventured.
No doubt about it: He was nuts. But on the whole, no more nuts than, say, a woman who, upon finding herself in an empty elevator, seizes the opportunity to ball up her cardigan, jam her face into it, and scream all the way to the lobby. People do all sorts of things, and in his line of work, an overactive imagination was hardly a handicap.
My father sighed, gave the bag a twist, and made for the stairwell door.
14.
In the early days of the twentieth century, residents of the Apelles marked holiday celebrations with the defenestration of champagne flutes, dessert plates, hurricane glasses, whatever was lying around on the sideboard. Anything that made a satisfying pop on the cobblestones of the interior courtyard was fair game. What fun! Less festive, but worth noting: Twice, in episodes separated by twenty-five years, the industrialist Alexander Flagg played bombardier with dining room chairs, both times targeting men he suspected of staining his wife’s honor. Both times, building management levied heavy fines.
The first Christmas tree was jettisoned by a freshly discharged Army Air Corps lieutenant in the early hours of New Year’s 1946, and although the building’s management board frowned on what they wrote up as a dangerous act of impertinence, they assigned a token fine of only a halfpenny, as they, like the young pilot, were feeling buoyed at the time. Though the lieutenant was merely happy to have survived the shooting galleries of the Pacific theater, the board was, to a man, ecstatic over the recent atomic annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, which had set off a sustained market rally, which pleased the bankers among them, and had opened up new territory into which to expand American factories and export American goods, which pleased the industrialists among them.
Residents interpreted the halfpenny fine imposed on the lieutenant as an implicit blessing, and the next New Year’s Eve, as fireworks flowered over the Hudson River, a cascade of trees showered the courtyard. The residents, however, had been mistaken. The board, detecting folly, imposed a ten-dollar fine on each tree. They intended to shut this business down just as they’d have shut down a labor union or a socialist revolution.
The residents, who were themselves mostly bankers and industrialists, reacted as the wealthy always have. Their indignity stoked, they retrenched and carried on behaving just as they pleased. When New Year’s 1948 rolled around, even more residents took part in the tree toss. Alexander Flagg, an enemy of regulation in any form, purchased a second tree and had his butler affix a banner that read:
COMPLIMENTS OF ALEXANDER B. FLAGG, ESQ
Duly provoked, the board announced new fines for the following year. One hundred dollars per tree (today about an even thousand, adjusted for inflation). For New Year’s 1949, Alexander Flagg tossed three.
Residents of the Apelles, riding the postwar wave of prosperity curling majestically down an infinite American shore, obviously enjoyed burning up their cash. They were aroused by the thought of being so careless with an instrument that so much of the world was dying for want of. Every year the fines increased, and every year the trees kept flying. But as much as they enjoyed throwing money out the window, they were not entirely without conscience, and in 1955 a proposal was brought before the board by Magda Brunn, Turk’s mother, to put the fines to good use for the poor of New York City. The board, its ranks of aged curmudgeons having been thinned somewhat by infirmity and death, had among its new members some more progressively minded men who managed to push the proposal through in 1956. By then it was part of the fun to affix embroidered identification banners to the trees, and the board’s Xmas fine slush fund was edging close to $100,000. Quite a tradition.
Magda Brunn was put in charge of establishing the charitable organization that would dispense funds to the indigent, and she did a fine job—so fine, in fact, that the organization, known as the Apelles Fund, branched out after only three years of existence and began taking donations from all over the city. On the way out of Bonwit’s or Macy’s with your Christmas gifts, you dropped a coin into a little plastic castle with red plastic flags flying from the turrets, and your donation sponsored after-school programs in the Bronx, soup kitchens in the Bowery, summer camps, single mothers.
Magda died on December 27, 1960, having spent every day post-Thanksgiving soliciting donations for the fund outside Barney’s. Pneumonia. Even though she wasn’t around to ring the little silver triangle anymore, the fund kept going strong.
Over the years, apartments changed hands and the tree-toss lost steam. By 1978,
