An East Village Tale of Elderly Lefties Hanging On

By Richard Eder, Globe Correspondent

August 23, 2009

Instead of “Heroic Measures,’’ Jill Ciment might have called her novella “New York: The View in Winter,’’ mainly for its stoically moving theme, and not incidentally, because it has the faceted perfection and ardent chill of a snowflake.

Alex and Ruth, both over 70, had lived caught up in the intellectual momentum of the city’s 1950s and 1960s - he as a painter, she as a schoolteacher and left-wing activist. They rode a breaking wave; now, their wave has long since flowed out. They are left, like many other old New Yorkers, living obscurely on the margins of their city’s energies.

Their means are limited, their main asset an East Village, fifth-floor walk-up with two bedrooms, one of them Alex’s studio with its 45 years of clutter. Most of their friends have moved to Long Island or New Jersey. They, though, remain attached to New York’s edgy streets, to grueling walks and bus rides for errands and pastimes, to the chatty yet boundary-respecting intimacy of their neighborhood’s daily encounters.

They have no children; instead they have Dorothy, an aging dachshund. At the novella’s start, Dorothy collapses in shrieking agony, her back legs paralyzed from a ruptured disk. It risks mistaking a steely book for a sentimental one to say that Dorothy’s critical and hideously expensive illness is the emotional heart of “Heroic Measures,’’ but Ciment makes it unbearable grief for Ruth and Alex. She goes much farther: She makes it an emblem of the way New York’s relentless shifts pillage the stored-up treasure of old people’s lives and proud memories.

“Alex fears his ebbing hope that art might make a difference, and Ruth’s crumbling belief that a difference can still be made, will surely get lost, and then what will they be left with? A sick little dog.’’ And as they stumble along the icy streets bearing Dorothy to hospital upon a tiny improvised stretcher - their taxi was halted in gridlocked traffic following a possible terrorist threat in the Midtown Tunnel - “it seems to Ruth that she and Alex are carrying the defenseless center of their marriage on a cutting board.’’

Dorothy’s agony and bewilderment, and her terror in the hospital, despite the kindness of the doctors and nurses, is balanced by her utter trust in her masters. And Ciment has given her a voice - worried, observant, wry - that expands the many-sided conversations she draws from her New York.

Two other New York conversations, an unlikely word perhaps, batter at Alex and Ruth. One of them is the city’s terrorist panic over a tanker-truck stalled and abandoned under the East River. Sirens blast by, helicopters swoop, the television goes into nonstop authoritative hysteria replete with non-news updates, talking heads with nothing to say, and imbecile audience polls.

It is, of course, a reprise of the 9/11 storm - one that lives up to the Marxian dictum that history plays out twice: first as tragedy, then as comedy. The driver is a deranged Arab-American who flees the truck, holes up in a store, takes hostages, then meekly surrenders when his mother arrives to scold him.

The tunnel episodes are lively enough but facile. They serve, however, to dramatize the public noise with which the city drowns out private lives. Much cannier and more witty is another archetypical New York story that enmeshes the old couple. It involves real estate, of course.

The walk-up that Alex and Ruth had bought for $5,000, and want to sell for something a little roomier and with an elevator, is now listed at $990,000. Are Mr. and Mrs. Mouse, let us call them, now to become the millionaire Chinchillas? They dazzle, until they realize that they would be lucky to find anything better for that price. And as they agonize through Dorothy’s fate in hospital, Manhattan’s mercurial market is jolted nastily by the panic, teeters and lurches. The first offer comes in at only $850,000. Will they have to decamp to New Jersey?

And so Ciment makes a wry meal of that New York institution of torment, the open house. All kinds come parading through: a fashionable yuppie couple, two women who want to raise seeing-eye puppies, a chiropractor, a woman in yellow boots who lies on the bed for 20 minutes to meditate on the sliver of view through the bedroom window. The bids inch up, and meanwhile, Ruth and Alex have found a nearby elevator apartment, roomier and sunlit. We are in no real suspense as to whether the painfully rising selling price will approach the painfully sinking buying price. Suspense is not what Ciment is after.

What she is after is signaled as the bookish Ruth, amid her ordeals, dips from time to time into a collection of Chekhov stories: among them, of course, “The Lady and the Pet Dog.’’ Chekhov is the fourth conversation in this wonderfully shrewd and delicate book; and Ciment has come astonishingly close to joining in.

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