Adventures With Jean

I lived in New York City when it was more violent and dangerous than it is now. Needle Park was still a place where people were killed and women were raped, and the Lower East Side was a place where you wanted to be careful. Mobsters shot each other in the city, as in Joey Gallo getting gunned down in Umberto’s clam bar in Little Italy. Morningside Heights was a place to avoid after dark, and Harlem wasn’t as friendly as it had once been. It is hard to evoke the mood of New York in the early 1970s, but it had a whiff of Belfast about it, violent, poor, and seemingly unchangeable.

In those days, I was a graduate student in the newly established MFA program at Columbia, where the novelist and short story writer Jean Stafford was one of my teachers. Jean was in her 50s, slender, her hair short, her face scarred from an automobile accident that her first husband, Robert Lowell, had gotten her into in 1938. He had crashed their car into a concrete embankment, leaving her not only with a scar on one side of her face but also with a broken nose that never properly healed.

My shyness came into play—although I wanted to make friends, I didn’t really know how. Jean was from a different world, accomplished, elegant, and aware of life in a way that I wasn’t. She had taught a class in a building on 110th Street that at one time had been a women’s hospital. (One of my classes was held in its former operating theater, and a woman who sat next to me said, “Shit, you know what? I had two kids in this room.”) The classroom where Jean taught had a view of a courtyard that the university was using for storage. One December day, it began to snow. Having recently arrived from California, I was seeing snow for the first time—it was impossible not to stare out the window. After class, I said to Jean, “I’m sorry that I was distracted in class, but I had never seen snow before.” Her expression was one of delight and keen distress, as though she were thinking of some moment from her past. We went to her office, and she told me she had grown up in Anaheim, on a piece of land that her father had owned and run as a citrus grove, and that Disneyland had been built there.

I approached our relationship with tentativeness, and with the certainty that she would hurt me. Getting to know her seemed risky for us both, given the difference in our ages. She had been married three times—her last marriage, to A. J. Liebling, ending with the journalist’s death in 1963. I thought that maybe I should just leave her alone. Still, I spent time in the renovated outbuilding behind her house in East Hampton, where she and Liebling had lived until his death and which she called the “chicken coop,” since that is what it had been. The two-story, 19th-century main house was faded and sedate, and when I first saw it, it seemed a little Dickensian. Not quite like Mr. Wemmick’s castle in Great Expectations, but Victorian and surprising. Downstairs, the house had a kitchen, a living room, a back parlor, and a bathroom. Jean’s office was upstairs, and one bedroom was there, too, although the two other bedrooms had been made into offices, since Jean didn’t want any overnight guests in the house. Only in the chicken coop.