The Versaille

Mimi Zieman

Word Count 1122

After surviving Nazi Germany, my grandmother walked off the Flying Tiger flight from Munich to New York City in 1956 wearing clunky orthopedic shoes on her size ten, bunioned feet. Like her shoes, nothing about our matriarch was delicate. Tall, with thin limbs, a round middle pinched in a sheath dress, Amama combed her thinning hair over a balding head. She lived at the intersection where Broadway, the longest avenue in Manhattan and one of the longest in the world, crosses 91st street, one of 11,500 street corners in the borough. Her descendants are still anchored there, sixty-five years later. The six-floor apartment building where she would rent a room, had double glass doors adorned with gold letters in rolled cursive, The Versaille. The name evokes gilded chandeliers and rich tapestries, but inside she found a lobby with ornate moldings buried under thick layers of cracked paint, the inlay of a star barely visible on the scuffed marble floor.

When my parents–two immigrants from Europe–joined her two years later, they moved into Amama’s railroad apartment in The Versaille, along with six other people living in different rooms that branched off two long hallways meeting to form an “L.” Eventually, all but one of the lodgers moved out—as did Amama, who moved to Queens—and my parents took over the lease. The remaining lodger, Mr. Thomas L. Montefront, lived in the tiniest room with an equally tiny bathroom next to the kitchen, called the “maid’s room.” Mr. Montefront shuffled into the kitchen after a day of work, his huge galoshes squishing over the linoleum, and greeted my mother politely, “Hello, Mrs. Zieman. How are you?” Sometimes, he mentioned the weather or placed a single strawberry Dannon yogurt in the refrigerator. Mom never asked Mr. Montefront to move out. He had no family, and refugees take people in, they don’t put them out. She also appreciated his paltry rent, paid in dollar bills left on the stove.

My mother boasted that Mary Pickford once lived in the building, as well as the makers of Hellman’s mayonnaise. Pickford was an academy award-winning actor known as “the queen of movies.” Maybe she had also been the queen of The Versaille at one point, but by the time my parents moved in, the building was in major disrepair with most of the tenants benefiting from rent control.

My parents separated when I was seven and my father moved twenty blocks downtown. Soon, drawn back to 91ststreet, he moved into an apartment on Central Park West. This marked the beginning of countless walks I took up and down 91st between the two apartments. Walks dominated by fear.

The neighborhood was perilous in the 1960s and 1970s, tense with tales of muggings on every corner, a city tundra of wildness. Needles littered the sidewalk cracks, and catcalls chased the girls block to block. With parents at work all day, the neighborhood kids roamed the streets, played in the parks, and rode the buses alone. While we loved the freedom of life outside, our freedom was tinged with terror.

My mother drilled my brother and me like soldiers once we reached grade school. Armed with keys clenched between knuckles, we were instructed to avoid the avenues with gangs and walk the safer cross streets. I was trained to be vigilant, my stomach always in a knot. I marched briskly up 91st street to my father’s apartment, fighting the wind, glancing sideways and backwards when crossing the avenues, sweaty fingers clutching the keys inside my pockets.

Our first experience escaping the tension of The City, as we called it, was before my parents’ divorce. We visited The Country, a bungalow colony in the Catskills, filled mostly with Holocaust survivors, including my father, the sole survivor of his family from Latvia.

The Country introduced me to a different freedom, and to the delights of the natural world. My feet trod on dirt paths instead of dense concrete. When the sky blackened with the tremble of thunder, breezes as soft as feathers transformed into shuddering gusts. Crawling through the grass, freshly cut and smelling herbal, I watched shadows sway beneath leafy woods, touched leathery lizards, and smelled wet earth after the rain.

During summer I did not clench keys. I beaded necklaces, knotted macrame, and climbed a fort in a treetop so high my hair rustled beside the leaves.

Here, wilderness replaced wildness. Adventure replaced adversity.

Summer trips to The Country were the first of my leavings and returnings to The City.

At twenty-two, I slung on a backpack to trek solo through Nepal in search of another wilderness. Well into my second month hiking, I met a woman on a remote mountain ridge in the Everest region. I learned she lived on 91ststreet, one block away from me, on one of the 2,872 blocks in Manhattan, in one of the 10,000 cities in the world. It was inconceivable, the world so vast and so small at the same time.

More recently, my son and his wife searched for an apartment on the subway I.R.T. line to accommodate their separate commutes to Battery Park and the Bronx. After visiting several apartments, they chose one on 91st street. Years later, I realized it was the same building that houses the woman I met in Nepal. Out of 852,575 housing units in Manhattan, she still lives there, 36 years after we met, one floor below my son. We’ve become Facebook friends.

On my returns to The City now, after pulling up anchor and moving to Atlanta, I add to the tally of walks up and down 91st street. Instead of visiting my father who has passed on, I visit his third wife still living in his old apartment. She no longer recognizes me, her brain spotty with dementia. Walking back to Broadway, I pass my son’s apartment, and find my mother in hers, the original railroad one. She is immobile from strokes and unable to speak, but I like to think she knows who I am.

My daughter lives with my mother. Son and daughter, one block away from each other, the vibrant fourth generation anchored to 91st.

The neighborhood is no longer wild or tense, but The Versaille has continued its decline. The golden letters on the glass panels are now barely legible, the mice intractable tenants, refugees from nearby building renovations.

My daughter has befriended an elderly neighbor who claims Marlon Brando once lived in our apartment. Brando would have brought a sheen befitting the marquee name of The Versaille in its heyday. He may have played the godfather, and Mary Pickford called the queen, but we had my grandmother. The definitive grand dame of 91st.

Mimi is an OB/GYN, author of 16 editions of a medical guide, Managing Contraception, and an advocate for women’s reproductive rights. She is working on a memoir about her journey from N.Y.C. to becoming the doctor and only woman on an Everest expedition in Tibet, while she was a medical student in the Bronx (in 1988). You can subscribe to her women’s health newsletter at wwwmimiziemanmd.com, or follow her on twitter and instagram.