Morningside Heights by Cheryl Mendelson

From the Publisher

Following the tremendous success of her first book, a nonfiction work on housekeeping that became a surprise bestseller, Cheryl Mendelson brings to her debut novel the same intensely readable style that made Home Comforts so popular. In the spirit of Anthony Trollope, she roots her story very much in a specific time and place—1999, in an old-fashioned New York City neighborhood that’s becoming rapidly gentrified—and the enormously engaging result resembles a twentieth-century version of The Way We Live Now.

Anne and Charles Braithwaite have spent their entire married life in a sedate old apartment building in Morningside Heights, a northern Manhattan neighborhood filled with intellectual, artistic souls like themselves, who thrive on the area’s abundant parks, cultural offferings, and reasonably priced real estate. The Braithwaites, musicians with several young children, are at the core of a circle of friends who make their living as writers, psychiatrists, and professors. But as the novel opens, their comfortable life is being threatened as a buoyant economy sends newly rich Wall Street types scurrying northward in search of good investments and more space. At the same time, the Braithwaites weather the difficult love lives of their friends, and all of the characters confront their fears that the institutions and social values that have until now provided them with meaning and stability—science, religion, the arts—are in increasing decline. Though the group clings to the rituals and promises of such institutions, the Braithwaites’ imminent departure sends shock waves through their community. As the family contemplates theimpossible—a move to the suburbs—their predicament represents the end of a cultured kind of city life that middle-class families can no longer afford.

This intelligent and captivating social chronicle is the first of a trilogy of novels about Morningside Heights; readers sure to be drawn in by Mendelson’s habit-forming prose have much more to look forward to.


From the Hardcover edition.

Publishers Weekly

The busy, intersecting lives of a group of Manhattanites living in the staid but rapidly changing Upper West Side neighborhood of Morningside Heights near Columbia University are the focus of this talky, occasionally stilted debut novel by Mendelson (Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House). Opera singer Charles Braithwaite; his wife, Anne, a pianist; and their three (soon to be four) children are the novel's ostensible protagonists. The book's real hero, however, is their beloved neighborhood, which they fear they will soon have to leave, unable to afford their cramped apartment. They are surrounded by a large cast of the sort of people commonly found on Manhattan's Upper West Side-independent scholars, professors, eccentric neighbors, with rich stockbrokers invading the haunts of the original residents. Narrative drama, such as it is, is provided by the death of an elderly resident of the Braithwaite's building. What were the true circumstances of her death, what role was played by her shifty trustee-and most importantly, who will get her apartment? The incorporation of neighborhood history and description is sometimes a bit stiff, and Mendelson's tone can be stuffy-as befits her subjects-but the accumulation of day-to-day detail, social commentary and emotional insight eventually yields a consistent picture of a rarefied milieu. (June 17) Forecast: Real estate-obsessed New Yorkers will enjoy the apartment drama and local color. Readers elsewhere in the country may find the novel a bit parochial. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

On Manhattan's Upper West Side, between 100th and 122nd streets, is the old-fashioned neighborhood of Morningside Heights. Home to Columbia University and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, it lacks "the hip sadness of Greenwich Village [and] the tight-lipped cool of Chelsea and Tribeca." Its residents are mostly middle-class intellectuals, musicians, librarians, psychotherapists, and others "so unaggressive, unpretentious, and civil that living here...scarcely felt like living in New York City." But gentrification is driving local spots like "the bad-tempered stationer" out of business and threatening the longtime residents of 635 West 117th Street with higher maintenance fees. In her marvelous, richly detailed, and engrossing first novel, Mendelson proves that the success of her best-selling Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House is no fluke. With the same warm and witty prose, she vividly depicts the travails of Anne and Charles Braithwaite of Apt. 9E and their small circle of friends as they confront personal and social changes that could destroy their tight-knit community. Readers will grow quite fond of Mendelson's fully fleshed characters, so human in their frailties and foibles; and even those unfamiliar with New York will prize the unique neighborhood that is Morningside Heights. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/03; see interview with Mendelson on p. 127.]-Wilda Williams, "Library Journal" Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A first novel by Mendelson (Home Comforts, not reviewed) follows the intersecting fortunes of a group of friends and neighbors who live in an enclave of Manhattan's Upper West Side. Morningside Heights is one of those pleasant, dull neighborhoods that used to be common in New York. Built largely as a preserve for the well-to-do, it began a long decline during the Depression and for many decades muddled along with a kind of seedy sophistication that was typical in the pre-Guiliani era. When Anne and Charles Braithwaite moved to the Heights in the early '80s it was a great place to live: adjacent to Columbia University, inexpensive but richly endowed with good schools, bookstores, churches, and parks. Charles was a singer at the Metropolitan Opera, Anne a concert pianist who had stopped performing to devote herself to their three children. By the late '90s, however, soaring real estate prices had changed the character of the place as families and retirees could no longer afford the rents. When Anne discovers she's pregnant again, she and Charles reluctantly decide to look for a bigger place in the suburbs-but just then they learn that Anne has been named primary beneficiary in the will of the late Elizabeth Miller, who had lived across the hall from them. Elizabeth, 103 when she died, had never married and for more than 20 years had placed all her business affairs in the hands of Eugene Becker, a shady lawyer who claims that Elizabeth was essentially bankrupt and that at any rate she had made a later will in his favor. Anne and Charles are willing to let the matter pass, but they can't help wondering: If Elizabeth was truly broke, why did Becker go to the bother of drawing up a new will forher? Thoroughly likable debut fiction (the first of a trilogy), narrated in an old-fashioned leisurely style with enough subplots, mysteries, and denouements to keep any reader engaged for the duration.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Reading Group Guide

1. Anne Braithwaite is extravagant and feels so entitled to her customary luxuries and privileges that it wouldn’t be far wrong to call her spoiled. Is it consistent, then, to describe her as also generous, warm, and empathic? Why or why not?

2. Is Anne’s optimism a flaw or a virtue? Is she a likeable character?

3. Anne refuses to get a job, insists on staying home to care for her children, and thinks day care is wrong. Both Charles and Anne dislike abortion and divorce. Moreover, despite their politics, both feel entitled to the high status that they are losing as the world changes. Would it be fair to describe them as cultural conservatives? Are the values that guide their private lives consistent or inconsistent with their political left-liberalism? Do you agree or disagree with these values? Do you think your own values are consistent with your political beliefs? Do you identify with Charles and Anne?

4. Merrit thinks her psychotherapy had little or nothing to do with her finally being able to let herself love Morris. Is she right or wrong? Despite her psychotherapy, or, at times even because of it, she grows more and more unhappy until the events described near the end of the book. Would she have been better off if Dr. Freilich had prescribed antidepressants instead of pushing for insights? What’s your own general view on the effectiveness of psychotherapy as opposed to prescriptive anti-depressants?

5. Morris Malcolm, an atheist who hates religion, worships science, and accepts Darwinian evolution as a scientific given, is a Republican who thinks of himself as a social liberal. Although he very much wants his baby with Merrit, he does notdisapprove of abortion per se. And unlike the Braithwaites, he has had many girlfriends and, for years, lived with someone whom he refused to marry. Given these significant differences in values and style, what accounts for the depth of friendship that exists among the three of them? Would you find the terms “conservative” or “liberal” helpful in understanding their differences?

6. Is the friendship between the atheistic Braithwaites and Greg Merriweather, an Episcopalian priest, realistic? Is Greg’s friendship with Morris realistic?

7. Greg seems to have a number of serious religious doubts, an obviously non-literal way of reading the Bible, and questions about his vocation. Should he give up the priesthood? What explains why such a gentle, accommodating, sweet-natured, and just plain good man would be prone to such aggressive religious doubt? Do you think Greg is a believable character? Have you ever met anyone he reminds you of?

8. . Greg thinks, sadly and with compassion, that the Braithwaites and their friends have never really faced up to the fact that someday they have to die. What does he see in them that makes him think so? What connection is the author making between Lizzie’s death and the Braithwaites’ blindness?

9. In some peculiar way, Becker responds emotionally to Anne when she goes with Charles and the priests to his law office. She gets his attention, and he aims a good deal of his persuasive lying at her — even though she mistrusts him and conceals her real attitude towards him. Why does Becker react to her this way? Father Quincy detests Becker. How would you describes Anne’s attitude to Becker? Although the author tells us little of Greg’s response to Becker, do you thinkwould it be more like Father Quincy’s or Anne’s? Justice Jacobs is patient and calm with Becker. She speaks to him “not unkindly” even though she sees through him completely and obviously understands the enormity of his crimes. Given the terrible nature of those crimes, would you prefer that the judge be angrier and more critical–more of a “hanging judge”?

10. Do you blame Lily for agreeing to marry Morris while knowing that she cannot offer him the kind of love and marriage he wants? Do you think she understands her own motives? What is the nature of her feelings for Jonathan Riesbeck? Is their decision to live together, apparently platonically, tragic or happy or something in between?

11. The Braithwaites are saved from being forced out of Morningside Heights by some fairly unlikely events -- from Greg’s willingness and ability to jump in to help legally, and the peculiarity of Lizzie’s singling them out as her heirs, to the accidental way that they discover what’s in the potato bin, and even the strangeness of relying on something like a potato bin. What point is the author making with such obvious insistence on being unrealistic?

12. The author shows, at various points, that her protagonists rely on religion, the insights of psychoanalysis, science, the classical arts, the liberal arts, the ultimate humanity of our legal system, and progressive humanitarian politics -- but without realizing it, and without realizing how precarious is the survival of all these institutions and cultural artefacts. With these facts in mind, as well those listed in question 11, what do you make of the suggestion, on the book’s last page, that Morningside Heights might be as likely to remake its newcomers as to be remade by them? Of Anne’s optimistic confidence that in thirty years Morningside Heights won’t be much different, in essentials, from what it is today? Do you know any places in your own life that have changed this way? Have similar changes ever profoundly affected your own life or the life of anyone you know?

Read an Excerpt

Read a Sample Chapter

1

This neighborhood was always middle-class and urban. The advent of the subway at the start of the twentieth century transformed the countryside so rapidly that less than a decade after the stations opened, the fields were gone and the massive, sedate apartment buildings that you see today already lined the streets. They were grand places, designed to persuade prosperous New York families that their bourgeois dignities could be preserved as well in an apartment as in a brownstone row house with a stoop. The building at 635 West 117th Street was similar to scores of others built around the same time, and, like them, it filled with tenants as soon as it was completed, in 1906. It had twelve stories, with four ample apartments per floor, each divided into a living and dining room, several bedrooms, two bathrooms, all large and airy, plus a small library, and, behind the kitchen, a miniature bedroom and bathroom for the live-in maid. During the Depression, the landlords carved most of the apartments into two or three, creating the ten to twelve on a floor that you find now. The cut-up layouts made no architectural sense, but in those hard times the new tenants could not afford to be choosy. Only a few apartments in the building retain the original floor plan, with the cramped kitchen and tiny sleeping nook where a lonely girl spent her days and nights in service to the family living in comfort in the other rooms.

In the waning years of the twentieth century, prosperity returned to the neighborhood, if not to the cash-strapped middle-class and poor people who had lived there for many decades. Lobbies were spiffed up, exteriors scrubbed down. One rental buildingafter another transformed itself into an ownership cooperative—“went co-op” in New York City parlance; and rents and prices began climbing out of reach. The elderly residents who had come during the Depression and World War Two barely managed to hang on to the dilapidated studios and one-bedrooms where they had hoped to live out the few years they had left. Except for the lucky ones who were protected by municipal rent-control laws, everyone, old and young, scrambled to meet the higher monthly payments, and when they failed and were forced to move, their apartments were immediately sold or rented for astonishing profits to high-paid business people and profes-sionals. These mobile newcomers formed a growing group of the well-off: working single renters and couples investing in “starter homes” they planned to sell for a profit in order to finance bigger and better ones someplace else—moneyed transients who stayed only two or three years and disappeared, leaving behind not so much as a forwarding address and creating a stock of near-temporary housing that served them much as boardinghouses and residence hotels had served their impoverished counterparts a hundred years earlier. The residential buildings became home to ever more numerous strangers, people who worked long hours, dressed and dined out expensively, and whose names, faces, and circumstances no one knew, except, perhaps, the night doorman. They didn’t say “good morning” or “good night” or hold the elevator for a straggler.

One day in April, apartment 9D came vacant for the first time since the building went up, when the last of its old-time residents died at the age of 103. Elizabeth Miller was the daughter of the original tenants, well-to-do people who had moved in when she was a child. Her father had owned a thriving lithography and printing business. Her mother, who had been left comfortable when he died, later received another substantial inheritance from her aunts. There were stories about Miss Miller: that she had run away to be something in show business—an actress or a dancer—or that her proper parents had thrown her out for leading a scandalous life. It was certain, in any event, that Miss Miller had lived elsewhere for a number of years before returning to care for her elderly widowed mother just after World War II. When her mother died in the late 1950s, Miss Miller inherited enough to support herself, and stayed on in her childhood home, living what seemed, to anyone who bothered to notice, a long, uneventful life in good health.

So gentle was her decline that even when she passed the century mark, no one thought her death was imminent. The only sign of her diminishing vitality in those last years was her difficulty in breathing. There were days when she could say no more than a word or two without pausing to take in air. Then she could do nothing but sit, and her home attendants would take her in a wheelchair down to the lobby or out for a bit of sun, moving her gently, because she might be left gasping by a sudden derangement of her position, or even a high wind. Yet she did not seem to suffer much, from this or anything else. She had a good appetite, smiled graciously at her neighbors, and attempted jokes with the children across the hall. Finally, one of the attendants said, she simply fell asleep at her normal time and never awoke. She had never married, had no children, no surviving relatives or friends, except, perhaps, her trustee, the son of a friend who had died years ago. It was he who paid her bills and hired the quartet of women who had stayed with her day and night on a complicated schedule of shifts.

These facts were familiar to many of her neighbors, who for months after her death missed the sight of her tiny figure, crowned with frizzy white curls, wrapped snugly in blankets, on the sidewalk at the front of the building, or being wheeled through the lobby, or riding in the elevator. But none knew her well enough to feel obliged to attend a funeral. The night attendant, who had been on duty when Miss Miller died, and the morning attendant, who had discovered her death, were shaken, however. After the urban death ritual of summoning ambulance and police, they had gone together to see the trustee, for reasons clear neither to them nor to him. He didn’t want them in his office and quickly bundled them out with their final pay and their final instructions. The next morning, the two women returned to 9D and began cleaning and closing the apartment as he had directed. They gathered several bags of Miss Miller’s things for thrift stores and threw out a great deal more. Then a truck arrived and carried off silver, china, rugs, paintings, furniture. Finally, they swept and scrubbed, and, before the week was out, they shut the door and left the apartment for good.

Anne Braithwaite, Miss Miller’s longtime neighbor, who knew her well enough to call her Lizzie, observed this rapid disassembling of a century of life with uncomfortably mixed feelings. The Braithwaite family, in 9E, directly across the hall from Miss Miller, had been startled by urgent peals of their doorbell early on the morning that Miss Miller died. Charles was out of town, but Anne was at home with their three children, when Claire, the young morning attendant, came to the door, distraught, to say she couldn’t rouse the old woman. Anne went to the bedside and saw for herself that Lizzie was dead. She called an ambulance, and told Claire what to do and say when the police came.

For a day or two, Anne suffered from the painful doublethinking that death induces, both believing in Lizzie’s death and yet looking for her in the elevator or in the lobby. They had not been close, but she had been used to seeing her, with one or another of her attendants, several times a day for more than fifteen years. They had always said a few words, in exchanges that lasted a minute or two, or occasionally as many as five or ten, and Anne had been in Lizzie’s apartment once or twice. These encounters were in the true New York style, full of goodwill that entailed no intimacy and promised no friendship. Nonetheless, they learned a good deal about one another over the years, as New York neighbors do, despite their standoffishness—enough, in fact, that even in the last couple of years, when Lizzie talked so little, Anne could manage a passable conversation with her, carrying the weight of chatter and filling in the blanks left by her sparse words and gestures. Yet almost before the tiny body had grown cold, Anne also found herself wondering guiltily whether the old lady’s apartment would be put up for rent. It was not on her own account that she was interested but for the sake of a friend, who, she had learned only the night before Lizzie’s death, had arranged to spend two years in New York—in fact right in the neighborhood, at Columbia University—and would need a place to live.

Later that week, Anne, returning home from a visit to a doctor with news that had crowded out any thoughts of Lizzie, saw the two attendants handing in their keys to the doorman on their way out of the building. After offering condolences, she got up courage enough to wonder aloud what would happen to the apartment.

“The trustee will try to sublet, I think,” said the older one, Monique, a dignified Jamaican, who had been with Lizzie for many years. Now that her employment had ended, she felt a need to air her grievances. “Miss Miller wouldn’t buy it when they were pushing her to. So now the building will want to sell it at last, but he’ll hold on to it as long as he can, to make money charging ten times Miss Miller’s rent. He’s a cheap man. He grudged every mouthful that old lady ate, and she ate like a bird. He says not to burn so many lights, but that old lady she can’t see. And he says no money for a new coat. He’s so stingy so he can put the money in his own pocket.”

“She was always trying to give us presents, and he kept warning us not to take anything,” said Claire, who looked uneasy, “but I bet he took plenty.” Still shaken by her first encounter with death, Anne thought. She had protective, maternal feelings toward Claire, who had been barely eighteen when the trustee hired her several years ago—deceived by her matronly air and figure, no doubt, into thinking her older. Anne knew her real age, just as she knew that money had been tight for Lizzie. These were the sort of domestic details about the household that she had gleaned in the years of hallway chats. The complaints about the trustee were new to her. She did not dismiss them, having confidence in both women after years of watching them care for Lizzie, but their suspicions amplified her queasy guilt about her own motives.

Monique and Claire looked pained and troubled after confiding these disturbing thoughts, and lingered aimlessly in the lobby. Anne saw that they disliked their roles as decent bystanders, awkwardly and unfeelingly ministering the intimate after-rites of death for this unmourned soul. Feeling officious yet unable to stop, she found herself offering them the speech proper to the occasion, which no one else seemed to be available to make. They had been good to Lizzie; Lizzie knew it; and Lizzie had died happy because, as she had told Anne a couple of years ago, “I just want to stay in my own apartment and keep my girls. That’s all I want.” They were kind and diligent even though, as Lizzie had declined and grown more and more silent, there was never anyone to thank them for all the little extra things they did, cooking up dishes she liked and taking her to see her favorite flowers on a spring day. But people here knew all this, Anne assured them, while wondering if anyone did but herself.

Now, Anne having said what a son or daughter should have said, they could behave the way they felt they should, and they replied with self-respecting modesty. Oh, she was no trouble, such a nice lady—to which Anne countered, graciously, that Lizzie’s time was up and that we should all hope to be lucky enough to die painlessly in our sleep at 103. They nodded in vigorous agreement. Yes, yes, she had had a long life, not much trouble, no real want, and no suffering in her death.

And after a few more moments of good-hearted banalities, some tears, hands grasped, phone numbers scribbled on paper scraps, the two women went away, with sad but more peaceful faces. The doorman, Willie, who was putting the keys in an envelope and labeling it 9d—eugene becker, had listened carefully to the whole exchange.

“They were good to the old lady,” he said, suppressed thoughts and emotions erupting in ephemeral twitches around his lips and eyes. “Lots of old people in this building have problems. But those ladies made a nice life for Miss Miller.”

Charles Braithwaite got home from his out-of-town trip soon after this and heard the story of Lizzie, first the children’s excited version and then Anne’s, in which he quickly detected Anne’s idea of getting Lizzie’s apartment for his old friend Morris, a not entirely satisfactory plan from his point of view, although he could not bring himself to oppose it. And just as quickly he scented that Anne had a worrying secret that she could not tell in the presence of the children. As it happened, it was hours later before she found a chance to tell him in a questioning, apologetic voice that she was pregnant. And, as they were neither young nor rich and had three children already, this news was nearly as unwelcome as it was unexpected.

The Braithwaite family were among the middling people of the neighborhood. Middle-aged and middle-income, they had rented a portion of one of the original large apartments many years before, bought it when the building went co-op, and lived there for their entire married life. Over the years, as their three children came along, they began to feel squeezed in every way. Space and money got tighter and tighter until, now, they regularly exceeded their income by an alarming amount, falling deeper into debt each year. The children were still young. Besides Stuart, a three-year-old boy, who slept in the living room, there were Jane, almost thirteen, and Ellen, seven, who shared a bedroom. Anne believed that each child needed plenty of time as the youngest before the next one was born, and managed to produce her babies at intervals of at least four years. Charles thought this schedule was the product of sheer strength of will, as neither caution nor the lack of it seemed to affect the timing of her pregnancies.

Charles was a singer, a solidly second-rank baritone at the Met, who had accepted that he would never rise further. Still, he was well respected, with a modest international reputation, known for his versatility and scholarly knowledge and sought out by students as a master teacher; he had a broad operatic range and was also an accomplished recitalist and singer of art songs. What prevented his greater success was, in part, the lingering consequences of vocal inconsistencies that had plagued him at the start of his career. But friends who knew him well said that Charles’s character had more to do with it. Unlike most people with courage enough to dare the uncertainties of a career in professional singing, Charles was modest, skilled at advancing his students’ interests, but incapable of the ordinary tricks of self-promotion. The effects of this were amplified by stubbornness and by his inability to conceal his dislikes. For these reasons, he was incapable of navigating the star system and was fated forever to sing Leporello, never Don Giovanni. He didn’t mind terribly, so long as the best students still begged him to take them on and he kept the respect of a small circle of admirers whose judgment he respected and so long as somewhere, if not at the Met, he found opportunities to sing what he wanted.