Not a story so much as a snapshot of a moment in time, like the street photography of Saul Leiter given voice. It is snowing and New York City is subdued, as Brennan captures in long, ornate sentences:
“At night, when the big Broadway lights go on, when the lights begin to run around high in the sky and up and down the sides of buildings, when rivers of lights start flowing along the edges of roofs, and wreaths and diadems begin sparkling from dark corners, and the windows of empty downtown offices begin streaming with watery reflections of brilliance, at that time, when Broadway lights up to make a nighttime empire out of the tumbledown, makeshift daytime world, a powdery pink glow rises up and spreads over the whole area, a cloudy pink, an emanation, like a tent made of air and color.”
Lonely, the narrator goes to a French café and sits alone observing the regulars and staff playing their roles. Michel the charmer, Betty the secretary, Mrs Dolan the faded beauty, ‘Mees Katie’ the exhausted manager… This is nothing, this is not the New York people will want to remember or preserve, she says, but of course she records it anyway. I’m glad she did.
First published in The New Yorker, January 1967 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in New York Stories, ed. Diana Secker Tesdell, Everyman, 2011
A Personal Anthology 