Attenberg revisits real-life Mitchell subject from 1930s
Special to the Journal Sentinel
Mazie Phillips-Gordon, the brassy proprietor of a seedy 1930s Bowery movie theater, stubbornly refuses to fade into obscurity. The real-life Mazie first appeared in a 1940 New Yorker profile by Joseph Mitchell and later again in his seminal collection “Up in the Old Hotel.” Now Mazie’s latest, and perhaps more powerful incarnation, is in the novel “Saint Mazie” by Jami Attenberg. Here Mazie continues to grab the lapels and hearts of readers — and we are all the more glad for the shake-up she gives us. Mitchell’s portrait of Mazie captured her as a woman in her 40s: short and bosomy, who could “smoke a cigarette down to the end and not take it from her mouth once, even while talking.”
She was already a Bowery celebrity, known for her daily distributions of coins to bums ground down by the Depression.
Attenberg sees her from a different perspective. She rewinds Mazie’s life, initially taking us back to 1907 when 10-year-old Mazie Phillips receives a leather diary as a birthday gift from her volatile older sister, Rosie.
Rosie and her husband, Louis, have just rescued Mazie and the youngest sister, Jeanie, from a father who “is a rat” and a mother “who is a simp,” as Mazie notes dryly. Mazie’s diary entries serve as the novel’s primary voice.
Mazie grows into a wild adolescent and then a wilder young woman, constantly pushing against the anxious Rosie who, the diary reports, “sees a taxi whisking by and she thinks, what’s the hurry? And I think, where’s the party? That’s what I want to tell her. “There’s a party.”
But Mazie’s party days soon end. The motherly Rosie suffers several miscarriages and sinks into depression. Jeanie, the younger sister, runs away to vaudeville, and then quiet Louis, the brother-in-law Mazie can’t turn down, asks her to help him at the theater.
For the remainder of her life she will spend 13 hours a day in a cramped ticket booth.
“The world will pass me by,” she writes. “I will grow old and then die in that cage.”
And yet, despite the cage, she finds new ways to engage with the crowds, the dirt, and the tumult of the streets she loves. Early on she encounters both a nun, Sister Tee, who labors to feed and clothe the poor, and Nance, a young drug addict.
Against her better judgment, Mazie befriends the cunning Nance, whose two children are locked in a basement apartment all day with only a candle and hungry bellies.
With Sister Tee, Mazie struggles to help the children but despite her efforts, one dies and the other is sent to an orphanage. Behind the brass grille of the cage, Mazie’s eyes are red from crying.
As time passes, as Mazie notes her birthdays with less and less pleasure, the cage and the Bowery become her refuge from family calamities. Despairing and angry, Jeanie returns home when a broken leg ends her dancing career.
Rosie spends her days obsessively scrubbing the kitchen floor. And although Louis remains stalwart, Mazie becomes uncomfortably aware that some of his business enterprises stink of criminality. The novel is enriched by a half dozen other voices that are interspersed with Mazie’s.
We hear from, among others, a childhood friend, the great-granddaughter of the theater manager, the son of Mazie’s lover, and a history teacher from Brooklyn who are all interviewed by a present-day film documentarian determined to uncover the ticket-taker’s whole story.
By the end, we understand how the wild adolescent who loved the streets has become the rough angel that Mitchell encountered in 1939.
This is the year that Attenberg’s novel ends and by which time Saint Mazie fittingly achieves immortality in the minds and hearts of readers. Saint Mazie: A Novel.