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By Root 12271 0

ground floor was agreeably spacious, airy, sun-filled, and clean as a Dutch parlor. Furthermore, it possessed the luxury of a kitchenette and a small private bathroom in which the toilet and tub appeared almost jarringly white against the prevailing peppermint. I found the privacy itself seduction enough, but there was also a bidet, which lent a risqué note and, electrically, unconscionably stirred my expectations. I also was greatly taken by Mrs. Zimmerman’s overview of her establishment, which she expounded as she led me around the premises. “I call this place Yetta’s Liberty Hall,” she said, every now and then giving me a nudge. “What I like to see is my tenants enjoy life. They’re usually young people, my tenants, and I like to see them enjoy life. Not that I don’t gotta have rules.” She lifted the pudgy nub of a forefinger and began to tick them off. “Rule number one: no playing the radio after eleven o’clock. Rule number two: you gotta turn off all lights when you leave the room, I got no need to pay extra to Con Edison. Rule three: positively no smoking in bed, you get caught smoking in bed—out. My late husband, Sol, had a cousin burned himself up that way, plus a whole house. Rule number four: full week’s payment due every Friday. End of the rules! Everything else is Yetta’s Liberty Hall. Like what I mean is, this place is for grownups. Understand, I’m running no brothel, but you wanta have a girl in your room once in a while, have a girl in your room. You be a gentleman and quiet and have her out of there at a reasonable hour, you’ll have no quarrel with Yetta about a girl in your room. And the same thing goes for the young ladies in my house, if they want to entertain a boyfriend now and then. What’s good for the gander is good for the goose, I say, and if there’s one thing I hate, it’s hypocrisy.”

This extraordinary broad-mindedness—deriving from what I could only assume was an Old World appreciation of volupté—put the final seal on my decision to move to Yetta Zimmerman’s, despite the all too problematical nature of the free hand I had been given. Where would I get a girl? I wondered. Then I was suddenly furious at myself for my lack of enterprise. Certainly the license that Yetta (we were soon on a first-name basis) had given me meant that this important problem would soon take care of itself. The salmon-hued walls seemed to acquire a wanton glow, and I vibrated with inward pleasure. And a few days later I took up residence there, warmly anticipating a summer of carnal fulfillment, philosophical ripening and steady achievement in the creative task I had cut out for myself.

My first morning—a Saturday—I rose late and strolled over to a stationery store on Flatbush Avenue and bought two dozen Number 2 Venus Velvet pencils, ten lined yellow legal pads and a “Boston” pencil sharpener, which I got permission from Yetta to screw to the frame of my bathroom door. Then I sat down in a pink straight-backed wicker chair at an oaken desk, also painted pink, whose coarse-grained and sturdy construction reminded me of the desks used by schoolmarms in the grammar-school classrooms of my childhood, and with a pencil between thumb and forefinger confronted the first page of the yellow legal pad, its barrenness baneful to my eye. How simultaneously enfeebling and insulting is an empty page! Devoid of inspiration, I found that nothing would come, and although I sat there for half an hour while my mind fiddled with half-jelled ideas and nebulous conceits, I refused to let myself panic at my stagnation; after all, I reasoned, I had barely settled into these strange surroundings. The previous February, during my first few days at the University Residence Club, before starting work at McGraw-Hill, I had written a dozen pages of what I planned to be the prologue of the novel—a description of a ride on a railroad train to the small Virginia city which was to provide the book’s locale. Heavily indebted in tone to the opening passages of All the King’s Men, using similar rhythms and even the same second-person singular to achieve the