The Dive………………………..by Leora Freedman

The Dive by Leora FreedmanThe Dive was an apartment Flora and her friends rented in a Greenwich Village brownstone in 1928.  They were all from nice Jewish families and would not have been allowed to live there, but they used it as a student hangout during the day.  The apartment was small:  You could take a bath and cook a meal at the same time because the toilet and bathtub were in the kitchen.  Flora was the only inhabitant of the Dive whose parents knew of its existence.

The landlord was a Yiddish-speaking Jew who preferred to live in the basement of the brownstone rather than uptown with his wealthy family. He enjoyed the company of artists and writers so much that he gave them apartments for free.  The artists and writers left behind wonderful furniture used by Flora and her friends to furnish the Dive.  This landlord also liked to visit the students. Once he showed up while Flora was studying Anglo-Saxon verbs and boiling carrots for her friend Harvey’s lunch.  She never had any domestic skill and had forgotten the carrots until they burned.  However, burning carrots have a delicious smell, and the landlord appeared at the door to tell her:  “You’re a wonderful berriah!” (housewife)

The inhabitants of the Dive did not drink or have sex.  Instead, they sat in front of the big smoky fireplace and talked.  Flora wore a voluminous coat in winter and used it to carry scrap wood she collected from the construction site of the Sixth Avenue El.  Life in the Dive was ordinary.  Yet these people remained each other’s best friends for the rest of their lives, and some of them married each other.  Flora’s brother Edwin met his wife-to-be, Eve, at the Dive, where she was sitting in front of the fireplace studying her law books.  “She was a very small girl reading a very large book,” he remembered, explaining his attraction to her.

Originally, Harvey was engaged to a girl named Rose, another member of the Dive.  Rose, Flora and another girl named Helen were an inseparable threesome, writing poetry together and discussing everything from literature to their love lives.  Rose was known as the feistiest girl in the Dive.  She was the type of girl who always spoke her mind, and many men would not have fallen in love with her as Harvey did.

Rose’s mother was one of the first female doctors in New York, but she died before her time, and a few months later Rose, too, died of a rare disease.  Flora was already engaged at that time, but Helen was unattached.  When Rose knew she was dying, she called Harvey and Helen to her bedside and told them to marry each other.  Mourning Rose drew Harvey and Helen together, and they fell in love.  They kept their promise to Rose and had a very good and long marriage.  It was a romantic life spent partly in a historic home in the Dolomites.

After Rose’s death Harvey had been given a wooden case, which he thought contained clothing and memorabilia.  He put away the case without opening it, assuming all his letters to Rose and hers to him were buried with her as he’d requested.  Sixty-two years later, in the midst of mourning Helen who had died a few months earlier, Harvey opened this case for the first time.  In addition to memorabilia and a poem by Flora titled “To a Friend Who Died Young,” the case held the hundreds of letters he and Rose had written during the five years of their friendship.  He was overwhelmed by grief.  But re-reading the letters at this lonely time was like having company. He immersed himself in the happy years of the Dive which he had forgotten in order to continue living.

Harvey once said that he had preserved every letter ever written to him by anyone from the Dive.  Someone speculated that people used to keep letters because the written word was valued more in those days, but Harvey disagreed.  “It was sentiment,” he insisted.

Copyright © Leora Freedman 2014

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