The Apartment

By Frank Schmidt

Well, it finally happened. After 54 years, Mom has to leave the apartment in the Bronx. My brothers and I are clearing it out. going through dresser drawers and closets that contain the artifacts of that other world we came from. We all grew up in the apartment. It’s really all we knew until we went into the Navy. Rumor has it that when we grew too big to pass Dad in the foyer, we had to ship out. And we did, one by one. The apartment was a fifth floor apartment with two bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, bathroom – and of course, a foyer. Years ago it also had a working dumbwaiter, but that got sealed up as the neighborhood calcified. The apartment picked up the hum of Eastern Boulevard (which became Bruckner Boulevard) in the early days, and then picked up the muffled roar of the New England Thruway as the East Bronx underwent renovation. You could see the Whitestone Bridge, and then, later, the Throggs Neck Bridge very clearly from the fifth floor window of the apartment. We grew up I with the hum, roar, and view, that only a fifth floor Bronx apartment could provide. I thought it would be tougher leaving the apartment. But things happened that changed some of the old memories, like getting rid of the old toilet that didn’t have a tank, and replacing the old bedroom windows that had six frames with new modern windows that had a modern single frame. The biggest change was replacing the old bathroom window that had a frosted surface with an ordinary see-through window. As a kid I used to look at that old bathroom window on a winter morning and instantly knew from the glare of the bathroom window whether it had snowed during the night. Recently, the elevator was renovated and the old buttons were replaced with new, modern looking buttons. So, the toilet, the windows, the elevator buttons, all that were part of the feeling of the apartment were gone. Takes the sting out of it, I guess. We’re keeping the apartment for the month of September, even though Mom moved out at the end of August. There’s still some “stuff’ to work through. The secretary in the foyer is a family heirloom and we can’t leave it (better to leave the T.V.) and there may be some things still up in the far reaches of the closets that have been hidden for 30 or 40 years. But, on Oct. 1 we will be out of the apartment and years of memories, attending PS71; playing in the OLA schoolyard; Pelham Bay Park; the candy store we called “Garbers;” staying out after dark when we were kids, throwing crayons out of the window to see the sidewalk turn colors when the sun came up; trading comics on the apartment house stairs on a rainy Saturday; taking the garbage down to the mysterious basement; setting up the Christmas train table and tree; keeping food fresh on the fire escape; listening to the sounds in the hall outside of the apartment door after midnight; making snowballs from the slushy snow on the brick windowsill ledge; playing “Lavball” with a rolled up sock and ruler in the living room/foyer space; falling in love with the girl on the fourth floor-but getting nowhere; going down the stairs two at a time; watching a developing snowstorm obliterate the boulevard; listening to the caretaker cutting the grass in the Indian museum across the way; lying in bed with the flu listening to “Baby Snooks,” and “Captain Midnight; listening to my first rock and roll song:
“Earth Angel”; getting dressed for my first dance (St. Helena’s, of course…); knocking off half a bottle of J&B with my brother in our old bedroom while we got dressed for our youngest brother’s wedding; listening to my mother and father talking late into the night about the war; waiting in the bedroom while Santa Claus came down the fire escape and through the window into the living room; entering the living room with the magic of Christmas eve all around me; lying in bed on a Saturday morning with the sun coming through the bedroom window thinking about baseball; listening to Glenn Miller playing “Sleepy lagoon” on the hi-fi in the living room while the curtains blew softly in the summer breeze; listening to Mel Allen and the Yankee games in our bedroom on that old wooden radio; frying Italian sausage in the kitchen on a winter morning; coming up from the street with my cotton gloves all wet from the snow and balls of ice sticking to the cotton; putting on a white shirt and a red tie for the PS71 color guard; coming up from the street all sweaty from a game of ringaleaveo; eating flank steak in the kitchen with my brothers, Mother, Father and Grandma; going to Bronx Beach for the day and just looking at the ceiling of the bedroom that I shared with my brothers; all will be pure memory without the apartment.

It had to happen one day.

But, maybe it was happening all along…