I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old when I first laid eyes on Harriet. She, however, never quite saw me. Instantly, and forever more, she established the criteria for what it took to set The Heart Throb in motion. One might have termed it crush at first sight. But although the crush was not unique to me, (there were others) from what I can recall of my case of the fever, a few degrees of heat lingered for a mere fifty years. Or to keep the metaphor consistent, my “crush” left traces in my system of several reverberating aftershocks over time.
The neatly clad and astonishing little redhead graced our fourth grade classroom long enough to chronically distract me from more serious pursuits, like schoolwork. Assembling in the schoolyard, lining up, entering class, sitting down, reciting or performing in any way became little more than exercises in watching for Harriet, standing tall before her, trying to catch her attention, seeking out her approval. None of it seemed to work and too many days were spent gawking at her and freezing, motionless, into a disembodied heartbeat each time she talked, gestured or entered a room. I can still see her blue eyes.
It was on a late spring day, deceptively like summer and tantalizingly so, that I was moved to action. Joyce Roth was one of the higher intellects in our class, though not on the Harriet heart throb level, and one of Harriet’s better friends. Moreover she was amicable, understanding and approachable. So I approached Joyce. Did she think Harriet liked me? Would she find out? The day was torn by my impatience and laced with anticipation. Periodically I scanned Joyce’s aisle for a sign, sought encouragement at recess, passed reminder notes when possible. But Joyce was responsible and not likely to forget to inquire on my behalf. She was to meet me after school at three o’ clock, at the school’s south exit on West 173rd street.
The day was still beautiful and the weather warm but I was warmer and did not share in the day’s tranquility. In fact what little remained of that afternoon was an indelible pain and disappointment. There was Joyce, waiting. My heart leapt. I approached her.
“Does Harriet like me?”
“No. Harriet says she doesn’t like you.”
“Why?” I asked, clinging to some hope for specious reasons that I might use to cushion my decimation.
“She says your ears stick out.”
Devastated beyond ruin and somewhat numbed by this new revelation, I hurried home to investigate the matter further. Dashing upstairs I took a position before my mother’s full length mirror. Standing close to it I scrutinized my ears, staring at them and examining the distance at which they stood out from my head. They seemed all right and not particularly alien, although the longer I contemplated the protrusions the stranger they became. It was at that point my mother came into the room.
“What are you doing, dear?” she asked.
“Do my ears stick out?” I moaned, anxious now for this final pronouncement, one that would hopefully mollify and rightfully spurn the derision I had suffered. A mother’s inviolable truth.
“Well,” she said, “just a little, dear.” Alas, she was too truthful.
So the remainder of fourth grade passed as I shrunk from Harriet and could only stare longingly, but from safe distances, at her, hoping with the coming and going of the summer months that I might grow taller and stronger and that my ears might somehow retreat closer to the sides of my head.
It was a little more than a year later I awoke one Sunday morning with the brilliant idea of dressing and sneaking out of our apartment at the outrageously early hour, for me, of nine o’clock. I dressed carefully in what I thought were my most dashing clothes. The jersey was a tight one, showing off what semblance of a build I had, my trousers were creased; my jacket was Air Force Bomber style with manly shoulders. My mission was to traverse J.Hood Wright Park on 176th street and Pinehurst Avenue to emerge on Fort Washington Avenue at 173rd street, just a few short blocks from where Harriet and her family lived.
I made my way briskly up to Pinehurst Avenue from Cabrini Boulevard and over to the park entrance ramp at 176th street. There I paused, as my heart beat strongly in anticipation, as I bravely surveyed the park beyond. Hannibal before the Alps. The great Sunday morning adventure lay ahead. I was ready.
With the somewhat soothing consolation of “what could happen?” I forged ahead, traversing the park. What were the chances, I speculated, of my catching a glimpse of her? What were the chances of her being up at this hour? Of her going out? Of her seeing me? What were the chances of her noticing me…if she was up, if she did go out, if she did see me? Despite all odds, I pressed on, slicing through doubt and fear, marshalling hope, mobilizing energies, mustering determination, cutting through the early morning freshness and chill as I half hoped I somehow would miss her altogether.
Emerging, somewhat more slowly and cautiously than I had entering the park, I looked about as if all of Fort Washington Avenue had been alerted to my arrival. I felt as though I were something of an intruder in the neighborhood. It was really a bit distant from my own. Yes, I attended school here, but as a resident with a support group of friends and neighbors, I was a foreigner. Hands in jacket pocket I whistled my way toward Harriet’s apartment building at 250 Fort Washington Avenue. Even the number of her address was tinged with romance, excitement, adventure and danger. I waited.
And I waited. At first I waited from across the street. Then, as the morning wore on, from in front of the building, before the short flight of steps. At one point, I can remember going up and inside the lobby. Perhaps that might draw her out. It did not. Others came and went. People looked at the young boy and may have wondered what the stranger was doing. For whom he waited. Each outward thrust of the heavy wrought iron and glass lobby door gave a start, blowing a little hope my way from the darkish lobby, ushering forth the chance, the possibility of the morning’s adventure bearing some fruit. I waited the morning away until I got cold and tired. She never came down.
Shortly following the start of what then was known as Junior High School, Harriet moved away, somewhere in or near an area called Forest Hills. I spent the next five years or so not thinking of her.
Somewhere ankle deep into my sophomore year in college, while leafing through an old address book on a particularly desperate date deprived Saturday evening, I found her name. I cannot imagine how I came to procure her Forest Hills telephone number, but there it was. I studied it. I contemplated it. I dismissed it. I allowed it to challenge me. I let it simmer.
I suppose I was feeling lots better about myself during these college days than I had during my younger days at P.S. 173. After all, I was president of my sophomore class now, Grand Regent of my fraternity, I had succeeded in achieving a surprisingly good first year index, I had enjoyed a role, although a minor one, in a campus theater production, and, or so I thought, my ears didn’t stick out…as much anyway. Not noticeably. So I called her number. And my voice had deepened. After several rings Harriet answered the phone. I still recognized her voice. It had a kind of clipped sneer to it.
“Hi,” I began cleverly. “You may not remember me. Gary…from your fourth, fifth and sixth grade class in P.S. 173?”
“I’m afraid not,” she said. There was no hesitation, no doubt in her voice. Same clipped, sneer.
“I lived in Joanie Miller’s building on Cabrini Boulevard? I was Joyce Roth’s friend.” Joan Miller was a good friend of hers. She sometimes visited Joanie. I had lived for those rare afternoons.
“Look, it’s been a long time, and I really don’t remember you at all.”
Well, it really hadn’t been that long a time and those were very formative years for all of us. I thought we had been kind of an item; at least so far as classmates’ teasing and rumors counted. I couldn’t believe her not remembering at all.
“And Evelyn Strawlberg? Don’t you remember the time someone stole your blouse at Evelyn Strawlberg’s house at that little costume party and you had to leave in a borrowed pea coat?”
“I’m sorry,” she clipped out, “I don’t remember any of this. And I really don’t have time to talk. I’m going out.”
“You once said my ears stuck out.”
And she hung up.
It took me a while to forget that conversation and a while to regain some of the old sophomore confidence. I did not, however, risk another phone call to Harriet.
Some years passed and I found myself broadcasting on a 50,000 watt radio station in Boston, Massachusetts. I was performing an afternoon program, spinning records and telling little stories. One of these vignettes was about Harriet. It may have been the Joyce Roth debacle or the try at getting a dinner date disaster. I always ended my programs with the humble phrase: “I await your phone calls in the outer lobby.” No sooner had I uttered this phrase and signed off, I was informed that I indeed had a call…in the outer lobby.
The call was from a guy I didn’t know. Nor did the guy know me. But he had been listening to the show as he was driving across Massachusetts into Boston. He had heard the Harriet anecdote and said he almost drove off the road. It seems his brother, he told me, was engaged to Harriet but he, the caller, had been infatuated with her. “Who wasn’t,” he said? “And,” he confided, “I knew exactly what you meant when you described her. What a b***h!”
When I left Boston for New York, I was in my thirties and found myself running into people I had known years ago. They were mostly school chums from Washington Heights, some High School of Music and Art people and even college pals. It was not unusual since everybody, at one time or another seems to gravitate to New York City. But, as I told an old friend of mine: “Funny. I never ran into Harriet.”
When I nostalgically confessed this, my friend counseled “You can’t go home again!” and advised me to hope I never see Harriet because I would be sure to be deeply disappointed. “Better,” he said, “to remember her as she was. That little redheaded beauty with the sharp blue eyes. By now,” he added sagely, “she is probably fat, old and dumpy. You had best stay with your fantasies.”
More and more of my time was taken with freelance narration work, which afforded me some freedom and took me far and wide during the course of a week. At one point I contracted for a series of jobs in Douglaston, Queens. It was a bit of a trek, but I always harbored the thought of possibly running into Harriet, serendipitously, against the odds, despite my friend’s admonition.
Then, one day, it happened. I was taken completely by surprise. Ascending a long flight of stairs at New York’s Penn Station, tired and on my way home from an arduous day in Douglaston, I noticed a comely redhead some several steps ahead of me. She was dressed in a neat topper just short enough to sport a shapely pair of legs. She was one of the few women in heels, a conservative pair of black pumps, and walked with a confident, unhurried pace. It couldn’t be, I thought, but the closer I drew to her the more this vision seemed to fit my expectations of what Harriet might look like now. She appeared, from the back, to be about the same age and height, as far as my recollections went. My scheme was to cunningly dash ahead and check her from the front. Surely, however, the entire effort rested on a wishful thought that I was mistaken.
Only a few smoothly executed steps taken two and three at a time and I had arrived well in front of the woman. Artfully I turned about and saw her face. It was her! But she didn’t appear as my friend had predicted. She wasn’t old, or fat or unrecognizably smothered by the years. She was lovely, radiant and she sparkled, beyond expectations. Predictions were wrong. And now, in point of actual fact, it had happened. The law of averages had worked out. There she was, walking toward me.
Feigning surprise with just the right measure of confusion, and hoping to dazzle her with my flawless memory for faces and names I said:
“Harriet? Harriet Sinje?”
She smiled a kind, soft and very sweet smile. Encouraging my advance she said, “Thank you.” But then she added, “I wish I looked like Harriet.”
My dismay must have been apparent. She continued, “A lot of people mistake me for Harriet, but I’m not her.”
“You look exactly like her,” I said, shock and incredulity still on my sleeve. “I went to public school with her.”
“She’s changed since then,” said the redhead. “She’s become a lot more beautiful. People stop me all the time and take me for her, but I only wish I looked like she does.”
We chatted a bit about where Harriet lived now, far out on Long Island. That she was married. Her extraordinary looks. I thanked the woman. She walked off.
I never saw Harriet after that and I had not been to Douglaston for more than twenty years. Not that I was planning on it, but I did wonder, if I ever ventured out Queens way, what the odds would be of bumping into the real Harriet after so many years. After all, I had run into just about everyone else. More or less, mostly more I suppose, it may indeed have been statistically about time perhaps for just one sighting. Of course my friend had advised against it. But he was wrong. And don’t they say something about hope springing eternal? I hoped, on the one hand, that my luck would hold and I would never run into Harriet again. On the other hand, I thought, maybe one of these days…who knows? What would be the chances? The odds?
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