A Carpet of Snow

A Carpet of Snow

by Bobbie Wayne

Linda sat on her couch, gazing out the window at the sun warming the back walls of the apartments across the alley from hers. The old rosy bricks contrasted with her dark blue living room. She sipped the last of her tea and finished her scone. Normally, she would be preparing for Easter, cleaning and dusting, planning food for the dinner, buying candies, and flowers, setting out little baskets of colorful cellophane grass nests to hold delicate pastel eggs. 

“I have lived in this apartment since 1972,” she thought. “West 99th street has certainly changed over the years.” She pictured the black glassy luxury high-rise which sprang up like a mushroom across the street amidst the 19th century buildings. It towered outlandishly above them like a “finger” being given to the neighborhood. She and her fellow actors, musicians and struggling artists had watched limousines  pull up at the canopied entrance, to drop off groceries ordered from high-end markets on Broadway. In the 1990’s there had been a crack house two buildings down from hers. No one had bothered to do anything about it until the glass building was erected. 

“At least I won’t have to move furniture into Hallie’s room to make room for twelve people and the tables and chairs for Easter dinner this year,” Linda mused, running her gaze across the desk, trunks, overflowing bookcase, steam trunk, Victrola and the musical instruments tucked behind the rocker and the couch. The room resembled a crowded Victorian antique shop. It had been even more cluttered when Paul was still alive and Hallie had been in high school. But with Paul dead these seven years and Hallie sharing a rental with her girlfriend in Brooklyn, Linda had the two bedroom apartment to herself while she, like all of New York City, sheltered in place during the pandemic. 

“It’s odd,” she told her friends who called. “I am a woman alone, but just now, I don’t feel bored or particularly frightened. I spend my days peacefully.” As a singer whose income depended upon performing in schools and historic sites, Linda’s already precarious free-lance way of making a living had shut down. Perhaps the fact that so many others were in similar situations made it easier to bear.

“I have gone through worse and survived,” she told herself, glancing down the dark hallway at the bedroom she had shared with Paul. She stood with a sigh and walked to the apartment’s door. The small entrance-way was crowded with coats, scarves, hats and her floppy cloth pocketbook all hanging on a row of wooden pegs. She chose a colorful woolen shawl and draped her purse over her shoulder as she pulled open the heavy metal door. The 8th floor lobby was deserted. When the elevator arrived, she peered through the small round window at the red interior. She stepped inside and pressed, “lobby.”

“ Nearly every person I have ever loved has ridden in the elevator over the years.” The door opened and Linda got out, pausing to look at the latest posters the children had hung on the walls. “Thank You for Saving Us” had been neatly printed in marking pencils above  drawings of nurses and doctors wearing masks. Linda opened the security doors to the vestibule and then exited the building.

“Aah!” she said, tossing back her long wavy brown hair (now streaked with gray and white.) She re-arranged her shawl. The sun caressed her face like a mother’s hand.

“Where shall I walk today?” she said out loud. Just yesterday, she had shopped at one of the three farmers markets within walking distance; she didn’t really need anything.

“I haven’t visited Riverside Park since all this began,” she told herself, turning left and crossing West Side Avenue. The lack of traffic didn’t surprise her. She followed the path along Riverside Drive south until she found the stairway that led her downhill into the park. This had been the traditional “after dinner” jaunt on Easter for longer than she could recall. 

“How many photos did we take over the years on this stairway? There were the earlier ones with Maris, Margie, Catherine, (what ever happened to her…?) Bobbie and Dan. Paul usually refused to go on our after-feast walks. I can’t remember if we have any photos with him included until Hallie was born. Gayle and her daughter were in a few…” Linda thought to herself. She sighed, stopping to observe the Hudson glistening through the trees before moving on. The path wound through trees, sap-green with new leaves.

“Let’s see,,,way back in the 1980’s, when Bobbie lived near Battery Park, and I hadn’t started attending St. Michaels, we would meet at St. Bart’s and attend the 11:00 Easter service. There was that time when Dan, Maris and Nelson were waiting outside of the church with hot cross buns, which was funny; their all being Jewish. We walked up 5th Avenue to join the crowds of people parading in their spring finery in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. There had been the usual smattering of strangely dressed folk, and out-of-towners who had come to gawk and be gawked at.” 

Every year, Linda recalled, the same family of ladies from down South arranged themselves in ruffled gowns and hoop skirts on the church’s steps, enjoying the attention from photographers. She and Bobbie always wore Easter bonnets and each year, people asked to take their pictures. (“We were still young and blooming, ourselves.”) Sometimes they would walk the whole way through Central Park to Linda’s apartment to begin preparing dinner. 

“Then Maris became my roommate for several years in the mid ‘80s. She, Bobbie and I would squeeze into my tiny kitchen to cook together, laughing at the chaos, chopping ingredients and sipping sherry.”  As Linda made her way past the now-closed playground, she thought of the many times she had brought Hallie here. “I think I still have the photo of Hallie in the yellow smocked dress Bobbie made her when she was four,” she remembered, smiling.

Although, over the years, some of the faces around the table changed, there was always a riotous crowd of actors and musicians present. When Linda began dating Paul, a talented, haunted actor, he and Dan usually were charged with dragging the folding table into the living room, setting up the card table to extend it, and searching the apartment for enough chairs (or usable objects) to seat everyone.  

“The tablecloths and cloth napkins hid the differing heights of the tables, especially when the vases of flowers and candles were placed on top. It all looked very elegant by candlelight! My mis-matched china and silverware didn’t bother anyone…they were waiting for the rolls!”

An excellent cook, Linda was famous for her yeast rolls. The tiny old gas stove that had produced Colonial dinners and holiday meals and feasts was eventually replaced with a more modern gas stove. Quantities of chicken, turkey, (Linda shunned red meat for feasts as Margie was a vegetarian who would eat fowl on special holidays) vegetable dishes and pastry were produced over the years. 

“Of course, all the guests, too, brought food, along with endless bottles of the cheapest wine.”

  Gayle, an actor neighbor, brought her daughter who attended until she grew up and moved away. When Bobbie and Dan moved up-river and then to Nashville in the ’90’s, they still returned for Easter. Then Margy’s friend, Joe, and Eric and Dejure, who were all in theater, became regulars at the Easter feast. 

“I don’t remember them walking after dinner with us, though. Eric and Dejure were always in poor health. Joe often had to run off early for a rehearsal or a job; I’m pretty sure we don’t have those three in any of the Riverside stairway photos,” 

She paused to sit on a bench and watch people pass. “And then, of course, I met Paul.” She looked down at her wedding ring, spreading her fingers on her lap. “And Paul moved in. then moved out, then back in. “

All around Linda, people were walking with their families, pushing strollers, dragging or being dragged by dogs straining at the ends of leashes. The dogs weren’t aware that anything had changed. They went about their doggie business as always, sniffing each others’ butts, peeing on the iron fences protecting the garden and yapping. She smiled at seeing teenagers walking with their parents. “God works in mysterious ways,” she thought. When she came to the community garden, where Maris often worked, Linda admired the tulips, daffodils and hyacinths. Although the weather had been variable, going from the 60’s back to near-freezing, the cherry trees were in bloom. Linda had always loved the cherry trees. She and Paul had walked here after they married, before he left for the second time. When he returned and moved back in with her, she was in her late 30’s. She had Hallie when she was forty-two. Paul had stayed for three years and then moved out again.

Linda reached up and touched a petal on the cherry tree. The ground was littered with white petals. She, Hallie and Paul had walked here when Paul returned for good. They had helped Hallie gather fallen petals. She stooped, her long skirt sweeping the ground, and reached out to grasp a hand-full. 

Linda walked on, absently putting the petals in her purse. She left the path to walk amongst the trees. Something in the branches broke her reverie, catching her eye. She reached up and touched…a poem! Three separate sheets, laminated against the dew hung in the trees, low enough for people to read. It was A. E. Houseman’s “Lovliest of Trees.”

Lovliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with blooms along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

This had always been one of Linda’s favorites, but, reading it on this April morning, 

it took on new life.

Now of my threescore years and ten

Twenty will not come again

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

“How joyous to find this amidst the blossoms!”Linda thought as the tears started from her eyes. “What kindness, for someone to place these here to cheer passers-by like me. Did they have any idea that these would be read by someone to whom it would mean even more, now that I am “threescore and ten” myself?” She wiped her eyes and smiled at a little blonde girl walking by holding hands with her mother. The little girl waved and Linda waved back.

“I must remember to tell Bobbie about this. when we Zoom on Friday,” Linda noted, and headed north on the path to return to her apartment and make lunch.