Then and Now by Barbara Cook Read Free Book Online

seventy-five dollars that I’d saved up from my job in Atlanta, and it was quickly being spent on movies, coffee, and rice pudding. As excited as I was about having made it to the city of my dreams, I didn’t know how I was going to survive there.
    I went to work for Asiatic Petroleum, a subsidiary of Shell Oil, sometime in the summer of 1948. As part of the job I typed lots of letters to Caracas and Maracaibo. Those faraway places seemed dramatic and glamorous to me, although the glamour quickly vanished on the days when I just typed rows and rows of numbers for eight consecutive soul-deadening hours. (In later years I did have a more satisfying temp job reading applications from people applying for a Fulbright scholarship. It was actually fascinating to read about people’s dreams. They may not have been show-business dreams, but they interested me mightily.)
    When my landlord’s sons came back from school, this generous man, understandably enough, needed my bedroom. I answered a classified ad in the New York Times and moved in with a mother and daughter whose apartment on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Fifty-second Street lay on the northernmost edge of the Theater District. The three of us slept in the one bedroom in three separate beds, until the daughter got married and moved out. That’s when Imet Jeanne Meganck, a lovely young Belgian girl who had worked for Sabena Airlines and was now working for Christian Dior. She moved into the apartment, taking over the daughter’s bed. I was paying forty dollars a month to my stingy landlady. Forty dollars out of a total monthly pay of $160 from Shell Oil. Of course I still had it better than Jeanne; knowing that Jeanne worked for Christian Dior, the landlady charged her fifty. Did Mrs. Scrooge think we wouldn’t share that knowledge?
    Jeanne, who was a hell of a lot more worldly-wise than I, summed up the situation pretty quickly, and when the mother went away for a week’s vacation, locking the phone before her departure so that we couldn’t use it in her absence, Jeanne and I reached our collective breaking point. Jeanne began to look for another place the two of us could share and through a connection at Dior found a beautiful apartment in a brownstone in the East Thirties. She also found a third person to share the apartment with us, another Belgian girl, named Mip VanderWaaren. Mip was nice, but the apartment was spectacular. We couldn’t believe our good fortune. There were two bedrooms, a small one for Mip and a larger one that Jeanne and I shared. Oversized windows filled the bedrooms in the back with sunshine, and the front featured a large salon furnished with very beautiful French country antiques. We had struck pay dirt.
    Almost every weekend the apartment was filled with Sabena pilots and flight attendants stopping over between flights. The war had ended only three years before, and although everyone wanted to put the war behind them, occasionally the subject would arise.
    The bravery displayed during the war by women who were only slighter older than I astonished me. One of the women who visited us sometimes was a childhood friend of Jeanne’s who hadlived in Brussels near Jeanne during the war. When, in those days, Jeanne would occasionally ask her where she disappeared to from time to time, it became clear to Jeanne that she was not to ask any more questions. After the war this young woman was decorated by all of the Allied nations; she had saved the lives of many Allied airmen who had lost their planes over Nazi-controlled territory. Those who survived the downing of their planes would be guided to safety by this young woman, undertaking nighttime journeys through Belgium and France to Portugal and safety. Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta began to seem very, very far away.
    I quickly felt stuck at Asiatic Petroleum, so I invented a very satisfying escape. I had learned about the old films that were shown at the Museum