Growing Up Bank Street. Donna Florio

Irene dutifully listened to Jefferson Airplane or The Who with me, but she was happy to remain with Amato Opera, in our eccentric, cloistered world.

      • • •

      During the entire time I lived with my parents, it was safe for me in 4B, even if Irene wasn’t home. I could play in her room or watch TV with her parents. No one was angry. John and I traded Met stories and jokes. Annie complimented my help in her kitchen. I felt blessed, even when I hadn’t sneezed. I, in turn, have not forgotten Irene’s birthday once, ever. When number 63’s building management hassled now-elderly Annie and John, I got local politicians to make them stop. If anything were to happen to Irene, I promised to care for John in his last years, in a flash. I sat in Annie’s hospice during her brave fight with cancer in 2005. On her last night, I sobbed as I walked home.

      I was still crying as I passed an animal rescue group and ended up taking home a frightened and neglected old dog “just to board, until he’s adopted.” Of course I was in love by the time I’d made him a bed. Corky limped onto Bank Street just as Annie’s laughing spirit flew free. With affection and whopping vet bills, Corky recovered and reigned for years, the jaunty prince of 2B. He stayed with Irene when I traveled. Corky was a Frydel blessing. Again.

      4

      Mr. Bendtsen

      I have a toddler’s memory of the door to apartment 1A opening as we passed. An old man who looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee in my Alice in Wonderland book stared out. His head resembled a boiled egg. He had a beach-ball belly and toothpick-skinny bowed legs. When he smiled, putty-colored lips curled over brown gums, like my Grandma when she’d put her dentures in the pink plastic cup by her bed. He said, “Good day, Madam,” to Mom in a deep, sibilant voice. She nodded and smiled, but held my hand firmly and kept walking. It took a few more years for me to realize that Mr. Bendtsen was always buck naked, not even wearing boxer shorts, like Daddy wore when he was shaving.

      Everyone in the building swapped reads on the first-floor hall radiator back then. There were piles of Art Forum, Horizons, Time, the Daily News, and books by Edgar Cayce and Truman Capote. Franz Bendtsen contributed The New York Times. He’d bounce down the hall naked, sociably bearing sections as he finished them. He wowed my parents, the Frydels, and the rest of the neighbors with his perfect Sunday Times crossword puzzle—in ink—and always finished by early Saturday night. Since the Times truck didn’t deliver to the grocery store around the corner or to our doorstep until 6 p.m. on Saturday, Mr. Bendtsen obviously solved even the most challenging clues without breaking a sweat. His puzzle was on the radiator by 8 p.m., and somehow it always stayed conspicuously on top of the other sections as he finished them and brought them down the hall. Dad tackled the puzzle on Sunday mornings. He was pretty good, but if he was stuck, he’d sneak downstairs to the radiator for a peek. He wasn’t the only one who did that.

      Mr. Bendtsen loved to follow world news and was usually excited about some event or another. Rose Moradei in 2C told me that she came home from work one afternoon in 1961, and saw him at the radiator, waving his paper, his eyes dancing.

      “Madam! A remarkable day for mankind! Look here!”

      Elegant, dignified Rose wasn’t quite sure what he meant by “remarkable day for mankind” or where exactly “here” was, so she kept her eyes firmly focused on his face.

      To her relief, he held up the newspaper. “The astronaut! The Russians have sent this man, Yuri Gagarin, to outer space! Have you seen?”

      Rose looked at the headline, still controlling her eyes. “It really is incredible,” she agreed.

      He beamed. “We have lived to see this! An amazing day!” As he waddled excitedly down the hall, Rose looked at his sagging buttocks and stifled a laugh. It simply never seemed to occur to Mr. Bendtsen, she said, that his alfresco state altered the discourse. “Keep your eyes up and don’t laugh,” Mom said when I became old enough to find his nudism funny. “He’s a nice old man.”

      Mr. Bendtsen wasn’t our only well-aired neighbor. Elderly Jane Gorham in apartment 3B was a photographer. Her late husband had been a painter, and she’d lived in 63 since the 1930s. Once she invited me, Irene, and my mother into her apartment to look at his paintings and at her photos of their Village group. She’d taken them, she said as she pointed, at the summer place the group rented together on Fire Island through the 1930s and 1940s.

      Irene and I traded incredulous looks. Jane’s friends, smiling and waving, were all naked. Still mortified by our new pubescence, we couldn’t believe that tall, patrician Jane had cavorted al fresco. Jane, serenely misreading our stupefaction as rapt attention, pulled an illustrated Kama Sutra from a shelf. Now she was talking about how she and her circle had freed their creative powers with “mutual libidinal release.” Irene and I didn’t know what the hell that was, but we were electrified by the few of ancient India’s acrobatic sexual positions we glimpsed before Mom hurried us to the door.

      • • •

      Rose Moradei remembered Mr. Bendtsen telling her that he and his mother had arrived in 1944 or 1945. “Mrs. Bendtsen died around the time I came,” she told me. “And I think he kept company with a lady across the hall in 1B until she moved away.” Rose was always impressed with his wide knowledge. He shared his opinions about literature, art, science, and politics in his sonorous voice. He charmed her too; few men had his courtly manners, she said.

      Rose could never quite put her finger on his slight accent and was hesitant to ask. He’d mentioned being an actor at some point, she recalled, but hadn’t said much else. My parents and other neighbors had the same vague memories of a stage career, but it was enough of a clue to get me started on the hunt in the 1990s.

      I combed through the archives at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, searching their actor biography files. When I found a small manila folder with his name, it felt as if I’d discovered buried treasure. I flipped through the clippings, stifling the urge to cheer. I found you, Mr. Bendtsen! And you got great reviews and never bragged about them to Rose or anyone else. That modesty, in his profession, was remarkable by itself. Actors lived all over the Village, and most of the ones I’d met were wildly in love with themselves. I gave up dating them in my early twenties. All they ever talked about was how fabulous they’d been in some show or about some upcoming audition. If they asked a single question about me, it was a miracle.

      Normal clothes probably just bored you, Mr. Bendtsen, by the time you moved into 63 Bank Street, I thought as I read. You’d been in costumes for most of your life.

      He’d had a full, steady career, a rarity for an actor in any era. Reviews from 1907 through the 1920s praised him as Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, Rodrigo in Othello, and the Cobbler in Julius Caesar. The accent that puzzled Rose may have been a leftover from his native language or stage training. He was born in Denmark, migrated to the States as a child, and studied at the Chicago Musical College, now the Chicago College of Performing Arts. His first name changed quite a bit in the newspapers. Various reviews called him “Franz,” “France,” “Franklin,” and “Francis,” and some got creative with his last name too. Maybe he himself was experimenting with stage names, I thought, or since he was performing around the time of World War I, maybe he was trying to distance himself from any question of German origins.

      A 1912 reviewer of As You Like It declared that “France Bendtsen played the epicene Le Beau with precisely the required mince and dandeism.” The year 1916 was a banner year for him. One newspaper noted that “Francis Bendtsen has had two hits in New York in new plays during the present season, as the German professor in ‘Mrs. Boltay’s Daughters’ and as Dickie Wilkes in ‘The Fear Market.’” Another described his day off as follows:

      Lots of folks hide their lights under the proverbial bushel, take it from France Bendtsen of ‘The Fear Market’ company. For instance, Bendtsen declares that he never realized just how meritorious was the work of the Subway artistic decorators until he chanced to stroll into the Subway at Times Square on Sunday morning. Then, lo and behold! a big four-sheet poster