Rachel Hadas: Cold Truths in Warm Packages

Rachel Hadas

When I first read “460 Riverside Drive,” probably a day or two after Rachel Hadas’s poem first appeared in The New Yorker on November 26, 2018, the familiarity of its setting was what most appealed to me. Here, after all, at an Upper West Side address only a single avenue west and 13 blocks uptown, was a building of a similar “prewar” vintage to the one I’ve lived in for the last thirty years. 

The title of this wise and chilling poem calls forth a very specific location and, ultimately, a potent poetic space. In the parlance of New York City apartment dwellers, “‘prewar’ speaks volumes,” a New York Times reporter wrote in 2012.  “The term, applied generally to apartment buildings built before World War II, conjures images of high ceilings, thick walls, plaster ornamentation and generous layouts.”

While that description suggests the old-fashioned roominess of the apartments in these 12-story and 13-story structures, Hadas’s poem, which I’ve copied out in full below, welcomes you into the lobby rather than into individual homes.

What goes on behind the locked door of a given apartment typically stays there. A lobby, however, is a common area, a place where what may be known can become known. Often for more than a century (460 Riverside Drive was built in 1910), these gossipy way stations, redolent with the smell of cooking and floor wax, host the comings of goings of infants grown to children grown to college students, owners and pets, emergency medical technicians, stretcher-bearers, and police. Providing a tad of shelter from cold winters and hot summers, each lobby is the site of a seamless flow of fleeting conversations among current tenants as well as a holding pen for the memories of departed ones.

Approaching the poem for the second time a few days ago, I experienced its setting as much more than an occasion for a smile of recognition or a comforting memory. In a comment on Love and Dread, Hadas’s new book of poems, the poet A.E. Stallings notes that although the title poem was published “a few months before the world found itself in the grips of a deadly pandemic,” it seems, eerily, “to speak already to that world of closeness and anxiety[.]” While “406 Riverside Drive” was published years before and isn’t included in the new volume, it too contains a sense of foreboding, of universal vulnerability. 

But Hadas is a poet of balance as well as uneasy prescience. Packed into the lobby depicted in “406 Riverside Drive” are abounding antinomies, conflicts, and clashes between opposites. The form of the poem itself melds two styles. Although it is largely written in free verse, stressing the directness and immediacy of a tale being told, the poem is punctuated by forceful rhymes at significant junctures at which wisdom is being dispensed (“White gloves and can of polish; courtesy./‘Don’t fall down, now!’ he’d admonish me.”). Best of all is its devastating final couplet, which merits a spoiler alert for newcomers to the poem.

Subtly, Hadas roots the poem in divergences of age and class. The youngster, “agile and alive,” is compared with the old ladies “teetering along on their high heels,/hatted and gloved.” The ladies’ gloves also are a mark of a higher economic stratum than those the doorman wears out of courtesy, like a Victorian coachman. Further, there’s an archetypal tension between innocence and experience embodied in the way the poem’s ruefully wise voice describes the vitality of its childhood self (interestingly, the child’s gender is unspecified). In another study in contrasts, the inside of an apartment, with its combination of privacy and fear, is juxtaposed against the loudly public outside world. Much is also suggested by the conflicting aspects of the “smelly” brass polish, which is used to buff the doorknob to an immaculately perfect gleam but which the child knows consist of poison. 

As true as it is for the lobby of an apartment as it is for Hadas’s poem, the doorman is the living center of it all. Although the name Earl may well be factually accurate in term’s of this poet’s autobiograpy, it’s also a perfect representation of both the dignity and officiousness of the man’s job. Hadas, to her credit, offers a complex picture of him in all his contradictions. He’s perfectionistic in polishing the brass, but oblivious to his intrusiveness in rattling the doorknob. Despite the uncouth explosiveness of his sneezes, he courteously wears those white gloves.

More ominously, Earl is, at first, “a ghostly messenger” to the poem’s speaker, who proceeds to rephrase Earl’s early advice to tragic effect in the last line of the poem. Echoing Hamlet’s description of the realm from which no traveler returns, the poet identifies the doorman as “a harbinger/from an undiscovered land.” In “460 Riverside Drive,” Rachel Hadas has delivered cold truths in a warm package.

460 Riverside Drive

By Rachel Hadas

We lived on the ground floor. The doorman Earl
sat in the lobby. From our living room
through the wall we could hear
Earl’s explosive sneezes loud and clear.
The knob of our apartment’s front door
was big and brass, and Earl would vigorously
grasp and twist it, and with rag and smelly polish
noisily buff that knob until it gleamed.
It always gleamed. I knew
that brass polish was poison.
From our side of the door
the knob would visibly
turn as Earl twisted it, apparently
of its own accord,
untouched by human hand.
Visitors didn’t understand.
Who was out there?
What ghostly messenger
was rattling away unseen
on the other side of the door?
Who, sent from where, was trying to get in?
The only polite thing was to ignore
the uncanny energy.
A lifetime later, it is clear to me,
or at least less murky:
I understand
Earl as a harbinger
from an undiscovered land.
White gloves and can of polish; courtesy.
“Don’t fall down, now!” he’d admonish me.
Why should I fall? I wondered. I was five,
six, seven. I was agile and alive.
I roller-skated up and down
outside Grant’s Tomb or on Riverside Drive.
It was the old ladies (these were the Fifties)
teetering along on their high heels,
hatted and gloved, with seams
in their stockings, and with glassy-eyed
fox furs draped over their massive chests,
who might fall down, not me.
Was it because it would have been
rude to warn them
that Earl kept warning me?
Mortality
has caught up with those ladies and with him,
rattled their doorknobs (it was time); gone in.
That lobby was so cold in wintertime,
I still remember;
the stiff wind off the river
so strong that neither Earl nor any tenant
could shut the outer door at all.
Eventually, Earl, everyone will fall.

"'460 Riverside Drive” was originally published in the November 26, 2018, issue of The New Yorker.