Growing Up Bank Street. Donna Florio

so, in some ways. While there was occasional crabbiness, I hadn’t ruined their lives by being born, and so my existence was never thrown in my face. I was fine as I was. If one of them was sick, I ran errands and brought food. Neighbors sometimes found fault with my clothes, my hair, or my behavior, but their comments were gentle. I, in turn, could hear their opinions without throwing up a yelling, sarcastic shield, trying to hurt them into shutting up. Being an opera singer was fun, but the people on Bank Street, caring for and about each other, taught me what it means to be human.

My Building

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      The Frydels

      Tiny Annie Frydel upstairs in 4B sneezed like a bull elephant. We yelled blessings up the alley shaft. And when my father’s sneezes shook the walls, Annie, her husband, John, and their daughter, Irene, returned the salute. The Frydels and the Florios have been blessing each other for more than sixty years.

      Annie and her sisters, Sally and Margie, were born in 1920s Little Italy. The family moved to upstate New York in the 1930s, and the girls lost their Noo Yawk accents. Mama Bell later brought them back for Sally’s singing career, but Pop stayed upstate at his fabric-cutter job for the next fifty years. Mama Bell lived in the Village with her girls until Sally and Tony bought a house in the Bronx and took her along.

      In 1948, Sally and Tony started the Amato Opera in a church basement several blocks from Bank Street.

      Enter John Frydel in 1949. A handsome, smiling World War II veteran, and complete hayseed, he somehow found his way from rural Maine to opera. The GI Bill paid for his classes. He and Annie made eyes at each other at rehearsals, and a lifelong romance was born. The newlywed Frydels scraped up $40 a month for a walk-up on Commerce Street. The tub was in the kitchen, so drop-in guests waited in the hall if Annie was undressed. This formality was novel for the Village and wore off as the marriage went on. I just threw Annie a towel, looking away, if I’d barged in on her bath. It was years before I understood that not every American neighbor would cheerfully fix me a tuna sandwich in her underwear.

      Baby Irene leaped onstage in 1954, arriving with a head of long, wild hair that stretched to her feet. I thought her baby photos were cute, like a baby Bride of Frankenstein, but apparently the effect was electrifying. People just stared, pop-eyed.

      Money was always scarce for the Frydels, but the parties went on. When the young parents were close to broke yet again, they splurged on a bottle of gin and tucked it into Irene’s carriage for the haul upstairs.

      Annie sang at Amato, but by day she kept the books for the realtors that managed 63 Bank Street. When two apartments became available in 1955, Annie took 4B and called her pregnant friend, Amato student Ann Florio. My parents’ studio apartment on West Twelfth Street was so small that they slept on a pull-out sofa with their feet under the piano keys. Ann waddled over and grabbed 2B.

      The Frydels and the Florios confounded Bank Streeters for years. We had the same apartment two floors apart. Ann Florio and Annie Frydel were both petite, Italian American, brunette singers. Irene and I were one grade apart at St. Joseph’s School. Both couples and their kids worked at the Amato Opera for the first seven years of my life.

      John Frydel also joined the Metropolitan Opera chorus, and the three of us walked back and forth to the subway together. In the summer, random combinations of adults and daughters trooped to the subway with towels and sand buckets, heading to Rockaway Beach. Either mom would call us in for dinner as we played on the sidewalk. During thunderstorms, I’d run up to 4B to see if Annie or Irene was home. John had to have company or he’d hide in the closet, wringing his hands and praying in Polish.

      Once, a neighbor tentatively asked, “Which one, exactly, is your father, Donna? Irene’s? Or maybe you girls don’t know?” She didn’t mean to be insulting. It was the Village, after all.

      As children’s choristers, Irene and I buttoned each other’s costumes in Amato Opera’s tiny backstage and crouched behind scenery together, waiting for cues to run onstage. Being onstage was fun for us but not exotic. We’d been doing it since we could walk, holding a grown-up’s hand as they whispered directions and turned us this way or that.

      Number 63 was our personal playground. We rigged a doll elevator between our bedroom windows with coffee cans and string. This evolved to a basket and larger toys. We finally decided it was time to haul ourselves. Annie’s mom alarm rang. She ran in as Irene was climbing out of the fourth-floor window.

      Privacy was scarce for the poor neighbors with us around. When we were six and seven, Dan, a newly divorced man who lived in 1B, had a beautiful Great Dane. Deane, a single woman, lived in 4C, and they started coming in for drinks holding hands. Irene and I, pining for dogs of our own, were enthusiastic volunteer dog walkers, although we were puzzled when Dan gave us keys to both apartments. Why was the dog in both places? John cleared his throat and changed the subject.

      Once, when unlocking 4C, I saw Dan, naked, in Deane’s living room. He leaped behind the couch and crouched. Deane wasn’t home, but I took baths at Irene’s house all the time and figured maybe his shower was broken. No big deal. I yelled hi, took the dog, and left. Another time Irene heard them giggling in 4C. Good, she had Girl Scout cookies to sell. She grabbed her order book and marched over. They took a long time answering that door, but Irene kept knocking. What was the problem? They loved Thin Mints.

      Dr. K., a Polish psychiatrist who lived in 4A then, enjoyed talking with John in their native language. He was a young bachelor, and that wasn’t all he enjoyed. It was rarely the same woman twice. “He’s so nice,” we said to our parents after passing him on his way upstairs with that night’s pick. “Cooking dinner for all these ladies.” The men snorted drinks up their noses, and our mothers, trying to keep straight faces, agreed that yes, Dr. K. certainly was hospitable.

      Since he had a common wall with the Frydels, Irene and I could hear a lot of goings-on. One activity sounded like galloping back and forth along the length of his apartment, along with slaps and shrieks. Irene and I put our ears to the walls, trying to figure it out. When we asked our parents if he was playing horsie, they got evasive. He started to come home with only one woman, a quiet lady who limped. When she became pregnant, they married and moved to New Jersey.

      Irene and I, together in the hidebound world of opera, looked out for each other on Bank Street amid the uproar of the 1960s and ’70s Village. She had physical strength but delicate social defenses. I was a runt but had a blasting potty mouth. We dressed dolls, told each other ghost stories during sleepovers, and played Candy Land. We traded Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. Sometimes we played in my apartment, but most of the time, usually at Annie Frydel’s smiling insistence, we stayed in hers.

      It was a long time before I understood that Annie worried about me as my parents jabbed at me and each other. I didn’t realize that she was listening at her alley window as the yelling in 2B started yet again. Until Irene gently told me, when we were in our forties, I never knew that protecting me was a Frydel family mission, one that Irene had been sworn never to divulge. Annie and John had explained to Irene that my rough mannerisms and tough words were self-protection and that Irene should try to ignore them, and that she shouldn’t ever mention the shouting she heard, no matter what. Annie’s frequent, well-timed knocks on our door were not just the lucky prison breaks I’d always thought they were.

      “Hi, Ann, sorry to bother you, but Irene is bored and driving me crazy. Can Donna come up and play? And I made way too much meatloaf again.”

      “Run along upstairs, Donna. No, really, it’s a favor to me. Donna will entertain her.”

      Growing up in the Village was confusing for us both, but we got through it together. Irene declared (rightfully) that I had the style sense of a goat, and she brought home cashmere sweaters and Italian leather skirts on sale from her high school job at Bloomingdale’s while I taught her how to smoke pot. We traded opinions on the latest Star Trek episode. When I threw our Christmas tree downstairs and it punched a hole in the super’s metal steps, Irene flew downstairs and helped me sneak it away.

      Irene stayed in the shelter of parochial schools while I, at