Morningside Heights Read online

  also by joshua henkin

  The World Without You

  Matrimony

  Swimming Across the Hudson

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Joshua Henkin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Henkin, Joshua, author.

  Title: Morningside Heights / Joshua Henkin.

  Description: First edition. New York: Pantheon Books, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019034236 (print). LCCN 2019034237 (ebook). ISBN 9781524748357 (hardcover). ISBN 9781524748364 (ebook).

  Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3558.E49594 M67 2020 (print) | LCC PS3558.E49594 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2019034236

  LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2019034237

  Ebook ISBN 9781524748364

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Joshua Henkin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part II

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part III

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part IV

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part V

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part VI

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Part VII

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Part VIII

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  For Orly and Tamar

  Part I

  1

  Growing up in Bexley, in the suburbs of Columbus, Pru had been drawn to the older boys, thinking they could take her far from home. Her father was from Brooklyn, her mother from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but they met in the middle of the country, in Ann Arbor, at a freshman mixer in 1944. Pru’s father was studying engineering, and when he graduated he went to work for GM. But he wasn’t cut out for the auto industry, for its assembly lines and economies of scale, and Pru’s mother didn’t like Detroit and its suburbs—Ten Mile Road, Eleven Mile Road, Twelve Mile Road—everything measured in a car. But Pru’s father was happy in the Midwest, and when an opportunity arose in Columbus, he settled on it. And on Torah Academy, where Pru, as a kindergartner, was dropped off every morning at eight o’clock.

  Pru liked the Hebrew songs, liked apples dipped in honey on Rosh Hashanah, liked staying home on Passover and eating matzo brei. But kindergarten became first grade became second became third, and she started to feel constrained. She had an older brother, Hank, but they weren’t close; it was just her and the other students in her class. “Torah Academy’s so Jewish,” she told her parents.

  “Well, it is a Jewish school,” her mother said.

  In eighth grade, on a trip to New York, the students were taken to the Streit’s Matzo Factory, and to Ratner’s for lunch. Years later, living in New York, Pru went out to La Difference, a kosher French restaurant, ostensibly high-end, but when she tasted her food, she told her friend Camille, “La Difference is this food sucks.”

  Pru’s mother wasn’t Orthodox—she’d agreed to keep a kosher home for Pru’s father—and one time, a friend of Pru’s saw Pru’s mother at a restaurant eating breaded shrimp. When Pru confronted her, her mother said that when Pru turned eighteen she could eat as much breaded shrimp as she wanted to.

  Was that why she was attracted to older men? If she couldn’t be eighteen, she would go out with boys who were eighteen. In seventh grade, she dated a tenth grader, captain of the JV basketball team. In high school, she went out with a young man soon to graduate from Ohio State.

  She was two months shy of her eighteenth birthday when she arrived at Yale in 1972. There was breaded shrimp to be had everywhere, but a curious thing happened those first few weeks at college. It wasn’t that she missed her parents, though late at night, listening to her sleeping roommates, she would think of her family back in Ohio and grow teary-eyed. She lay in her dorm in her ohioans for mcgovern T-shirt while Derek and the Dominos looked down at her from the wall. She shivered: wasn’t it supposed to be warmer on the East Coast? Fall had come early that year, and, walking across Old Campus, she was already wearing a parka. Torah Academy was eons ago—she’d gone to public high school, where her graduating class had been four hundred strong—but she wasn’t prepared to be so far from home. Torah Academy had seemed too small and too Jewish; now Yale seemed too big and not Jewish enough.

  She was no longer forced to keep kosher, but to her surprise, she continued to. Then spring came and along with it Passover, and she was answering questions from her secular Jewish friends, who weren’t quite as secular as she’d thought. Why weren’t peanuts kosher for Passover? Beer they understood, but corn and rice? And was it hypocritical to eat your cheeseburger on matzo?

  She was again dating an older man, a graduate student in history, the president of the Yale chapter of SDS. Returning from services one Friday night, she joined him at an antiwar rally. One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war! Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win! But when someone passed her the megaphone, she handed it back to him because she wasn’t allowed to use a megaphone on Shabbat.

  She did theater at Yale, and when she moved to New York she tried to make a go of it as an actor. Camille had done theater at Yale, too, and they dreamed of starring onstage together. They found an apartment in the West Village and worked as temps. When their b
osses weren’t looking, they would leave work early for auditions. “Ah, the casting couch,” Camille said.

  “Would you do that?” Pru said. “Sleep with someone to get a part?”

  “Why not?”

  Pru wondered: Was she less ambitious than Camille? Was she simply a prude?

  One day, Camille announced that she was quitting theater. She was tired of temping, tired of auditioning for terrible parts. Secretly she’d applied to law school. She was starting NYU in the fall.

  Maybe she was wrong, Pru thought: maybe she was the more ambitious one.

  Or maybe she just clung to things. She had a new boyfriend, forty-seven when she was only twenty-two. “My God,” she told Camille, as if she’d only just realized it. “Matthew’s more than double my age.”

  “Well, good for you!” Camille said.

  For a time there was talk about marrying Matthew. At least Matthew was talking about it, and Pru, flattered, started to talk about it, too. Convention be damned, she thought, even as she cleaved to her own conventions, keeping two sets of dishes, one for milk and one for meat, making sure on Friday evenings before the sun set to extinguish the joint she’d been smoking.

  But eventually, she and Matthew broke up, and she moved uptown and started graduate school at Columbia, in the doctoral program in English literature.

  Her first day of class she looked up from her seminar table and saw Spence Robin, her Shakespeare professor, enter the room. He was only six years older than she was, but he was the professor, Columbia’s rising star, so when she passed him on a snowy afternoon outside Chock full o’Nuts, she glanced away.

  “Are you pretending to be shy, Ms. Steiner?” That was how he addressed the class—Ms. Steiner, Mr. Jones, Mr. Thompson, Ms. Dunleavy—doing it with an edge of humor, as if it were a mild joke. “We do spend most of our day outside the classroom. It’s not like we just materialize in Philosophy Hall.”

  A gale blew past them, and Spence’s jacket collar flapped up to his ears. His shock of auburn hair was covered in snow, and Pru was tempted to offer him her hat. But her hat was pink, and if she gave it to him, then she would get covered in snow, and she knew he wouldn’t countenance that.

  They seated themselves in Chock full o’Nuts. “The coffee’s terrible here,” Spence said.

  Pru agreed, though she was inured to terrible coffee. She drank terrible coffee most days, often from Chock full o’Nuts.

  Spence removed a packet of peanuts. It was an old habit, he explained, a product of his fast metabolism. He’d been so thin as a boy he’d been sent to summer camp by the Fresh Air Fund, and when he failed to gain more than a few pounds, he got to stay for an extra two weeks.

  The snow was falling harder now; at this rate, they’d be skiing home. Pru said, “Are we going to talk about Coriolanus?”

  “Do you want to talk about Coriolanus?”

  “As long as you don’t make me recite.” It was what Spence did in class, saying that word, recite, with the same little ironical smile he wore when he called her Ms. Steiner.

  “How about you tell me where you’re from?”

  Under the influence of the coffee, and urged on by the wind coming through the open door, Pru started to loosen. She was from the suburbs of Columbus, she said.

  “Sounds like a tautology to me.”

  She surprised herself by saying, “You little snob!”

  “Little?”

  It was true: he must have been six feet tall.

  “And what’s in the suburbs of Columbus?”

  “Oh, just a bunch of complicated Jewish families like mine.”

  “Another tautology?”

  “So you know about complicated Jewish families?”

  “I come from one.”

  This surprised her. With his rangy, slender frame, his pale face, and thatch of red hair, he put her in mind of the Irish countryside. And Spence—she thought of Spencer Tracy—not to mention his last name—Robin—well, you could have fooled her.

  “My Christian name is Shulem,” he said.

  “That doesn’t sound very Christian to me.”

  In kindergarten, he said, he’d changed his name to Spence. At five, he became an Anglo-Saxon, at six a Francophile. “It’s the old immigrant story. I was trying to escape the Lower East Side.”

  “Well, you’ve done a good job.” He was the youngest tenured member of the English department; the author, at thirty, of an award-winning book; a guest on PBS with Bill Moyers. “You’re not still religious, are you?”

  He laughed. His paternal grandfather had been a rabbi in Lithuania, but his parents’ god had been Communism. He hadn’t even been Bar Mitzvahed. One Yom Kippur, he’d gone to the Museum of Natural History to stare up at the great blue whale.

  She told him about growing up Orthodox in the Midwest, how she’d moved to New York to become an actor. “So here I am,” she said, as if everything she’d done—leaving Columbus, going to Yale, moving to New York to do theater—was in order to be seated where she was now, having coffee with Spence Robin.

  “I could never be an actor,” he said. “I don’t like to perform.”

  “That’s not what I heard.” His lectures were said to be packed to the rafters; people were up in the nosebleed seats.

  “Acting’s different,” he said. “I’m a shy man.”

  Yet here he was, talking to her—talking to this stranger.

  But then he stopped talking, and she became shy herself. The snow had tapered off, and with the weather no longer keeping them indoors, she thought she should make her getaway. She got up, and he followed her.

  “That’s me,” she said, in front of her building.

  “And that’s me.” Spence pointed up Claremont Avenue. “If I work on my arm, I could throw snowballs at your balcony.”

  “I’d like that.” And then, feeling foolish—she wanted him to throw snowballs at her balcony?—she rushed inside.

  * * *

  —

  She started to run into him everywhere: in front of Daitch Shopwell, in front of Woolworth’s, in front of the West End Bar.

  “It seems our moons are in alignment.”

  She regarded him mildly. “I didn’t realize you had a moon.”

  “I think you’re following me,” he said.

  “Well, I think you’re following me.”

  She saw him on Broadway, riding a moped, and she called out, “Hey, you! Hey, Spence! Hey, Professor Robin!”

  He pulled over.

  “The picture becomes clearer,” she said. “You’re the rock-star professor.”

  “Then you really don’t know me.”

  “Then why the moped?”

  “Because it gets me places.”

  She said, “Can I hop on?”

  He took off his helmet and handed it to her.

  “Shouldn’t the driver wear a helmet?”

  “In that case, you drive.”

  She’d never ridden a moped before, but if Spence could be reckless, so could she. Through the streets they went, the pavement slick like the back of a seal, the rain puddling in the gutters. She could feel his breath against her neck, his hands on her shoulders, large as lion’s paws.

  They parked in front of her building.

  He said, “You took those streets like a native.”

  “I’ve always had a good sense of direction.”

  “Wasted on someone who lives in New York.”

  He leaned over and kissed her. He smelled of musk and cinnamon. She cupped her palm behind his neck and felt a line of perspiration, delicate as a silkworm. She rested her hand beneath his shoulder blades. She pressed her nose to his cheek.

  * * *

  —

  She was neither the most nor the least talkative student in seminar, but at the next meeting she
couldn’t even look up. The class was discussing Cymbeline. Was that why no one else was talking, either? Because it was a difficult play? Or had the other girls kissed him, too? Did he meet them all at Chock full o’Nuts? Did he sit across from them, eating peanuts?

  Maybe she would have to drop the course. It was too bad: she loved Shakespeare.

  The class ended at 4:00, and at 3:59 she was already out the door.

  But when she stepped out of her building the next night, he was standing there, beside his moped.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

  “It’s me,” he agreed.

  “I was wondering if you forgot about me.”

  “Forgot about you? I’ve been waiting here for the last two hours. You didn’t tell me you were such a stowaway.”

  “You could have rung up.”

  “I thought it was better to smoke you out. I was getting ready to drive off.” He pointed at the exhaust coming from his tailpipe.

  “Do you want to come upstairs?”

  “I thought you were leaving.”

  I was just going on an errand. It can wait.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But first let me take you for a spin.”

  This time he drove, and as they sped along the streets, she pressed her nose to his neck, felt the hum of her breath against him.

  * * *