Nana was a Gibson girl, with gleaming auburn hair that fell to her waist when she let it. Every morning a hundred strokes on the right side, a hundred more on the left, then the same again at night, and when she piled it up on top in swirls and twists and spirals and set a monumental hat on top of that she could walk down Broadway as gracefully as a full-rigged schooner parting the waves. Nana had no money, but the guys she hung out with had plenty, and that made all the difference. She dined at Delmonico’s and Luchow’s, danced at the Waldorf, went to the opera twice a week at least, and to the billiard tournaments in Madison Square every month. To the end she retained a canny trace of the British accent she was born with. Her dresses showed an ample and enticing bosom, I’m sure, with necklaces from Cartier’s to set it off. When her daughter- that’s Margery, my mother—came, Nana grew tired of marriage and divorced her husband, a scandal in the 1890s, but then she grew tired of scandal and married again, a man so obnoxious to his step-daughter that Margery ran away at sixteen and never returned. What became of my step- grandfather? I have no idea, but he was shucked one way or another. And Nana lived alone. Once a year she traveled by train up into the awful countryside to visit her grandson and bring him presents from Wanamaker’s, huge boxes wrapped in tinsel. In her fifties she became enthusiastically converted to Christian Science, but then disease attacked-cancer probably, though I don’t know. Imagine her misery, uncured yet hopeful, alone in her hotel on upper Broadway. She grew tired. She flumped, as we newspaper people used to say, from the fifteenth floor, and that was the end of Nana. That was the end of presents from Wanamaker’s. That was the end of watching, once a year, while she brushed her long gleaming tresses with her hairbrush that had a naked woman in silver on the back.
How strange to be thinking of her now, a century gone by, worlds and worlds away, she whom I scarcely knew, a spark in my difficult mind.
Nana was a Gibson girl, with gleaming auburn hair. She went down with her hair flying behind like flame in the scintillating darkness of the Manhattan night.
NANA
Did you enjoy the the artible “NANA” from Hayden Carruth on OZOFE.COM? Do you know anyone who could enjoy it as much as you do? If so, don't hesitate to share this post to them and your other beloved ones.
Leave a Reply