On memory, silhouettes, and other people’s houses.
By Gabriela McBride
Illustrations by Kathleen Halley-Segal
Kathleen sat on my blue carpet, a patchwork of tattered fabric held together by white string carried in a bag from my grandparents’ house in Brazil. She was telling me about her grandmother, Lore Segal, who had passed away earlier that day. A few hours later, a building manager knocked on the door of Lore’s apartment, asking when it would be empty. “100th Street” Kathleen called it, over and over, as if it was a figure of her consciousness. The apartment on 100th street and Riverside: where Lore moved after escaping Nazi-occupied Austria on the Kindertransport, where Kathleen’s father and aunt were raised, and where she and her brother spent much of their childhoods. But with Lore’s passing came the end of the rent controlled lease and a lucrative opportunity for the building owner to “correct” the price.
When Kathleen tried to convey to me the kind of person Lore was, she kept returning to 100th street. “This apartment is just so her,” Kathleen said. Throughout her lifelong career as a novelist and translator, and while teaching Creative Writing at Columbia, Lore opened her apartment to both her graduate students and members of the local 92nd Street Y. The apartment is covered in art, Kathleen told me. “She’s the reason I’m an artist, too. She’s the one who showed me art to begin with.” We sat in a suspended moment of silence, and I thought about what it means to lose a muse, a mentor, and a home in the same moment.
“You should come see the apartment, if you want,” said Kathleen.
…
Two days later Kathleen told me it was best for me to visit while her family was sitting shiva, since they would have to start packing up the apartment soon after it ended.
Kathleen pushed the front door open into a short hallway adorned with picture frames and letters. She pointed to the very first one, a vibrant childlike watercolor, and said proudly, “I made that.” Every room I saw was full of people in gentle conversation, many making rounds about the apartment. Kathleen’s father and Lore’s son, Jacob Segal, noted to me later, “She was there for 61 years. A long term resident. A lot of people in the building who came by during the Shiva were focused on that sadness, that the apartment couldn't stay with us."
The windows were wide open, and their long white curtains danced toward us. A cool October breeze, the kind that comes around when the sun is going down, brushed my sweatered skin. Against the window stood a grand piano, and atop it, a large vase with a collection of sticks bound together like a tiny tree. Handmade ornaments hung on the branches.
“What's this?” I asked. Kathleen explained that a large tree grew in the living room for most of her life, but died earlier this year. Although a new tree took its place, Lore saved branches from the original tree and bound them together. I loved the way the interspersed branches collected together preserved the idea of the tree, though its roots and wick insides were gone.
Kathleen’s mother, Jean Halley, joined us, and drew our attention to a black and white photograph of a large family hanging next to the piano. Jean pointed to a little girl in the photo, Rosa, Lore’s grandmother. She noted that Rosa’s daughter and granddaughter, Lore, would be two of the few in the family to survive the Holocaust. After leaving Austria alone in 1938, Lore lived in foster homes in London—Other People’s Houses, which would become the title of her first novel. She eventually left London for the Dominican Republic, one of the only countries in the world willing to take in Jewish refugees. By the ’50s she was able to come to New York City, and by 1963 had moved into the apartment on 100th street.
Beyond a home, the apartment was a refuge—a final harbor where Lore could build her life and start her family. At the same time as Kathleen's family began in an apartment next door, Lore's mother, Franzi Groszmann, lived in another apartment on the first floor. "Four generations … lived in this building at once," Jean said with pride. "Kind of amazing, isn't it?" The weight of the tragic loss of the lineage in the photograph felt held up by the apartment, then. Its black frame hung alongside the paintings on the walls, in a room stirring with family and plants and life.
The living room had jagged edges: In several places, the wall protruded out to small platforms that housed abstract sculptures. These sculptures, like most of the art in the house, came from a person Lore knew closely. Artists flowed through her home. Clement Meadmore, the creator of many of the sculptures, was in a romantic relationship with Lore years ago. In the entryway hung a painting of a playful and intimidating creature, almost as tall as my torso: a portrait of Lore made by Maurice Sendak before writing Where The Wild Things Are.
I wondered what would happen to the juts in the wall when new tenants moved in. I enjoyed the thought of Lore’s imprint on the physical shape of the apartment—how she built her life into the walls in order to cradle the art and artists who passed through. What would the apartment look like a year from now? Would the landlord tear out the built-in shelves and repaint the walls, to photograph the space for resale?
Kathleen brought me through an entryway lined with bookshelves. On the side of each bookshelf, from top to bottom, hung a dozen or so dark black objects: little sculptures, old watches, a pair of shears, and a collection of what looked like pliers, each with little crafted feet sticking out of the ends. Every piece sat just-so, in a geometric relationship with the object next to it. The black steel silhouettes juxtaposed with the white paint of the bookshelf. “I associate these trinkets so much with her,” said Kathleen. She later sent me a collection of paintings she made of her grandmother, and I saw the same pairs of pliers floating in the foreground.
We made it to the kitchen, ducking through conversations and around a wooden dining table brimming with food. The entrance was a small doorway, unfurling into a rounded hallway of shelves and cabinets. At the end of the hallway was a small window through which I saw the tops of red brick buildings and old scaffolding remains that stood steadfast on the horizon. I told Kathleen how it reminded me of the kitchen I grew up in: a brief corridor to a window, barely large enough for two people to cook back to back, the efficient use of vertical space. A quintessential New York kitchen. Along the right wall, I noticed a break in cabinetry, and in its place a white wall covered in evenly spaced holes. From the polka-dotted surface hung kitchenware: a ladle, a magnetic strip of knives, an apple slicer. I took a step back and pointed out a set of peculiar, round blades hanging in a row, which Kathleen told me were purely decorative. Each tool, sharp, dark, and angular, seemed arranged on the wall like a gallery display. It struck me that Lore turned a tiny gap into a piece of art, even if it meant losing precious kitchen space, because she found something interesting in the most quotidian of objects.
We wandered down a hallway to Lore’s bedroom. Light poured through the windows, brightening its navy blue walls. Silhouettes floated in a painting above the dresser, playing with the white background. There it is again. Books abounded in the bedroom, some which Lore read and some that she wrote. Kathleen and I flipped through a children’s book of hers, Tell Me a Mitzi, which featured a mother recounting everyday stories of the family’s life to her children, Jacob and Mitzi. The view from the window of her bedroom was strikingly similar to the cover of the book: rows of brownstones lining an Upper West Side street. The apartment felt wound up in the telling of the story like a cat's cradle.
We sat down on the bed, and Kathleen and I talked about how Lore’s stories felt crafted by the same artistic voice that was all around the apartment. To celebrate something like a kitchen knife or a garden tool is “just like her writing,” Kathleen said. Lore’s last book, Ladies’ Lunch described a group of friends meeting for lunch in an apartment to discuss aging, mortality, New York, and the Holocaust. As Kathleen put it, “She had a way of looking at things, and seeing situations, and then … thinking, ‘I can make art about this. I can find a way to reflect on this in a way that's beautiful.”
Throughout the room sat boxes of files, a few accordian folders, and bigger boxes of papers and cutouts. Kathleen brought one out, laying pieces of paper out on the comforter, recalling how she and Lore used to sit together and discuss the images. The folder in her hand was sorted into several sections. One said “Architecture,” another “Faces,” another “Skyscapes,” and within each were collections of images, postcards, and magazine cutouts that related to the label. My favorites were the more eccentric categories like “Angel Music,” which contained a set of photos that Lore thought evoked the feeling of hearing angels sing. As we flipped through the folders, the old papers felt brittle and grainy on my fingers. It felt like a pathway into Lore’s mind, her way of thinking, how she sorted things and imbued them with meaning. “I think Lore had an admiration of the detail and choice that art requires,” Kathleen told me. Lore’s artistic voice surrounded us throughout the apartment, its blacks and whites, sharp edges and open windows and pasted cutouts; an enveloping of her, closing in on a silhouette. Somehow, sitting there, I got a sense of her shape in that room, or rather, the shape of her thoughts.
Walking back uptown, I felt a strange lack of a person I had never felt the presence of. A new sense of closeness soaked in permanent estrangement: an understanding that I could only uncover Lore through negative space, the indentation of her life on others, on Kathleen, her paintings, and the apartment on 100th street.
When life leaves, space holds onto traces of a person. When the space is packed up or taken away, the precious traces are passed down, and the outlines of people they built erode and disappear. I walked around Lore’s apartment on 100th street, swaying through the push and pull of absence, presence, and the ephemerality of material memory. I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget.