Thomas R. Crouch is my grandmother’s cousin and an actor living in New York City. My grandmother had been trying to connect us ever since I grew interested in theatre. Fresh off Patti Smith’s “Just Kids” and other tales of ’70s Manhattan, the idea of a long-time artist living in the city seemed to me almost mythical.
I ended up meeting Tommy (as he asked me to call him) for the first time in the months after the sudden death of my grandfather, at a memorial service organized by my family. He is a charming man of 82 who sports oversized suits and wool golfing caps. His face is gaunt, and a flab of skin hangs below his chin. (In the ’90s, in one of his more conspicuous roles, he played a mortician in Tom Petty’s music video for “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.”)
We talked at first about college productions I had been in, about Beat poets and Abstract Expressionism and the Chelsea Hotel. He suggested that I visit him in the city, and I enthusiastically agreed. Perhaps we were both looking for some connection.
Tommy was once a Ph.D. candidate in history. It was while doing research for a dissertation on a 19th-century American general, bored out of his mind, that he decided to switch to acting. In his life he has spent time with the Peace Corps in Botswana, worked at the L.A. Times and performed in plays in New York. I was excited to get to know him.
I took the train down on a snowy Saturday morning in February. He met me at Grand Central wearing much the same outfit as the day we met. We hugged, and he started talking immediately about the places he wanted to show me: veterans’ memorials and a perfectly preserved Victorian-era house on the Lower East Side. Evidently the history student had never left him.
We headed for the subway. His walking pace was slow, and I made a conscious effort to shorten my steps. As we walked, he told me about the history of Grand Central Station, pointing out on the concourse ceiling the one place deliberately left uncleaned from when smoking indoors was legal: a tiny ashy-black rectangle in a wash of blue and gold.
Image courtesy of Noah Duncan.
We got on the 4 train; we kept talking. “In the early ’80s, you know, when I moved here, people would put graffiti, just, everywhere.” He looked at me; we were sitting side-by-side. “It wasn’t the artsy stuff people will put up today. It would be just these lines of paint,” he said, moving his hand to indicate the length of the car, “all around. Like a dog pissing to mark its territory… the city was a different place then.”
A few minutes later we arrived at Bowling Green, pushing through crowds to the center of the plaza, surrounded now by official, old-looking buildings. Tommy pointed one out, telling me it was once the global headquarters of Standard Oil. All around, signs for Citibank and Starbucks hung below ancient-looking gargoyles. One building had inscribed stone seals labeled “PLYMOUTH” and “QUEENSTOWN.” An open-roofed tourist bus drove past us, chock-full, with an ad on its side for the Broadway show “Hell’s Kitchen.”
Tommy pointed to an unassuming black fence a few feet from us. He told me it was more than 300 years old. “The tops of the fence were taken off—see there? They were built with the British Crown on them. Washington’s soldiers sawed them off.”
He says this park once held an equestrian statue of King George III, torn down during the Revolutionary War. Its sign now reads “Immigrant Heritage Plaza.”
Image courtesy of Noah Duncan.
In the next few hours we went, among other places, to a Vietnam veterans’ memorial and a Revolutionary-themed tavern. Over lunch, he had a glass of wine—though only after making sure I was okay with it. (I’m twenty; he said he “wouldn’t want to rub it in my face.”)
We finally got to our main destination: The Merchant’s House Museum on East Fourth Street. It is the former residence of the well-to-do Tredwell family, perfectly preserved from the mid-nineteenth century. The father died in 1865, just at the end of the Civil War, and his three daughters lived out their lives in that house, as the pamphlet says, “surrounded by the familiar possessions of their parents.” The last of the daughters, Gertrude, died in 1933, leaving the home virtually untouched from how it was in her childhood. “She just soldiered on,” Tommy said, “as if nothing had changed.” He explained the story on the way over with such gusto that I felt, as we finally walked up the front steps, like I was visiting a national monument.
We rang the doorbell at the front. After 20 seconds or so, a middle-aged woman wearing a beret opened the door and beckoned us in. I was handed a thick binder—a guide to the place.
But Tommy led me around; we had no need of it. The place was four stories, claustrophobic and ornate: full of paintings, carved pillars and narrow staircases lined with velvet-colored carpet. Tommy pointed out details in the flooring, the walls, the bed-frames. “See how big the doors are? And see the planks?” he would ask, looking at me, smiling.
As Tommy and both employees told me, the Merchant’s House Museum is in danger: Approved construction next door is set to irreparably damage its plaster walls and ceilings. Calls to action were pasted everywhere, urging visitors and passersby to “SAVE MERCHANT’S HOUSE.” “I had to take you,” Tommy said solemnly, “because I don’t know if it’ll be here the next time you come.”
Image courtesy of Noah Duncan.
Eventually we left and headed back to his apartment in Queens, where I was spending the night. The subway under the Hudson was crowded; Tommy and I found separate seats.
We got off at Queens Plaza. A man was sitting against the far platform wall, shaking a paper cup containing a single penny. He did not look up as we passed. Two escalators, a bus ride, a block’s walk and an elevator later, we were at Tommy’s apartment.
His place was spacious, sepia-toned and full of books. As soon as we took off our jackets and shoes, he brought out a photo album, which we pored over for an hour. There were pictures of him there as a child, sitting shirtless with his buddies on the stoop of their Georgia farmhouse. Of him at that same house, recently, smiling with the Black woman who was once his family’s maid. There were photos of long-dead relatives, each of whom he told me about with reverence. I felt guilty knowing I would not remember them.
Image courtesy of Noah Duncan.
We had dinner at a restaurant down the street. He told me, over another glass of wine, about his college days at a small school in Georgia. He told me about a girl named Bonnie, three years his junior, whom he had met through the school paper. When he left to go to grad school in Wisconsin, they had stayed in touch, writing letters back and forth, at length, for years. They talked about history, about politics, their passions, the world. After years of this “intense, intellectual” exchange, as he put it, they had arranged to meet in New Orleans, where he was then studying. He remembered, vividly, her making some gesture of physical intimacy and him recoiling from that touch. They had different interpretations of what their correspondence had meant. “She spent most of that weekend in tears,” he said.
They kept in touch, just barely, after that weekend, though it was never the same. She told him, some decades later, that she had burned all the letters he wrote her.
—
That night, I had trouble sleeping. I woke at 4 a.m. and lay for a moment looking at the ceiling. The floorboards above me occasionally creaked. I tossed and turned, each time feeling the building resettling underneath me. I heard cars going by outside.
Absently, I look at the books on the wall: Dostoevsky, Baldwin, Fitzgerald. Three different biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt. “African Liberation Movements.” “Poetry for Pleasure.” I noticed an intricately carved wooden crocodile on the table next to me—probably from the Peace Corps, from Botswana.
I thought then about what years and years do to a person, to a place—about all the stories and passions and little dramas that take up the time. About a merchant’s house preserved through centuries because the woman who grew up there does not want it to change, and yet whose plaster walls are in danger of falling apart. About the city growing and bustling with new life and new feeling, about the sheer history contained in its every block, floor, building. About a man who goes through it all, who lives a life, and about what it takes for a woman to burn the letters that he wrote to her all those years ago.
A wonderful story!