Josephine Blatt Pall, left, with her roommate, Debbie Miller Sankey, in front of the fireplace in their apartment at 288 West 12th Street.

Mothers Lost and Found

By ELLEN PALL

Published: May 8, 2005 in the New York Times

IN 1984, when I first moved to New York, I went to look at an apartment for rent on West 12th Street in Greenwich Village. The building was narrow and old - 1848, according to a small brass plaque - with a thick covering of ivy and the house number painted in fat, curving gold numerals above the front door. As soon as I went inside, I felt that this was a place where I could live. Even the tiny ground-floor vestibule was quiet and snug, comfortable and somehow familiar.

From the vestibule rose a set of wooden stairs whose steps tilted alarmingly toward the middle of the building. The apartment I had gone to see was on the top floor, the fourth, in the back, overlooking a small courtyard. The living room had a working fireplace, the kitchen had a skylight. Everything felt just right. Two weeks later, I moved in.

In those times before e-mail, when telephone tolls could mount up quickly, I communicated mostly by letter with my older sister, Steffi, who lived in Maine. Now, when I sent her my new mailing address, she wrote back to say that she thought our mother might have lived in that neighborhood in the late 1930's, in the days before she met our father.

Our mother, Josephine Blatt Pall, died when I was 7. At various times in my life, learning who she was had become a kind of quest for me. I read what papers of hers I could find (I had a box of them that Steffi rescued from oblivion when our father remarried), spoke to my aunts, asked Steffi and my brother, both substantially older than I. Yet my mother remained a ghostly figure lost in a vanished time, vivid only for her sad and early death from a rare form of anemia. I associated her young years with Boston, where she grew up and went to school; I had more or less forgotten that she ever lived in New York.

Now, to my surprise, Steffi announced that she was still in touch with the woman who had been our mother's roommate in those long ago, pre-marriage, New York days. Her name was Debbie Sankey. I had known Debbie myself when I was little, had sometimes stayed overnight at the house in Northport, on Long Island, where she and her husband, Maury, still lived. But shortly after my father's remarriage - which plunged me into a new, blended family - she had gone out of my life. Steffi, who left home soon after our mother's death, had managed to keep in better touch with the past. She wrote to Debbie and mentioned that I had moved to New York and was living on West 12th Street. Hadn't Debbie and Jo lived around there too?

"About West 12th Street," Debbie wrote back in her loose, loopy scrawl. "Wait till you read the next line. We LIVED on West 12th St. Corner of W. 4th, and only a Villager would believe in that possibility."

Debbie's old address books didn't go back far enough to check exactly where their building had been, she added, "but I seem to have the number 288 W. 12th in my head, a narrow building about 3-4 floors, across the street from a restaurant, the Beatrice Inn at that time, with a garden in the back in summer and a cross-eyed, thin, dark, sad-eyed waiter named Romeo whom we both loved." She and Jo had lived on the ground floor, in front.

No. 288 was my building. And the Beatrice Inn was still in business.

The moment I hung up with my sister, I rushed to paw through the carton of our mother's papers for confirmation of her Village address. Jo had made her living as a commercial artist, but she had always wanted to write, and the carton was full of unpurchased radio scripts and unpublished short stories. There were tax records from her various art jobs, rejection letters from The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post, scores of scribbled penny postcards from her parents and sisters in Boston and, on yellowing paper, a three-part narrative poem on social injustice called "The Boy With the Auburn Hair." On the cover sheet, these words were typed:

"by
JO BLATT
288 W 12th St"

IN a matter of weeks, I was having lunch at the Beatrice Inn with Debbie and her husband. Debbie, too, had grown up in Boston, and she had known my mother when she was a young girl. She knew her laugh, her politics (my mother was an ardent communist), the boyfriend before my father (Jonas, also an aspiring writer and a communist). From Debbie, over the next 20 years, I learned to know Jo as I never could have if the shared address had not drawn us together.

And truthfully, the building at No. 288 seemed not to have changed so much. In 1938, Debbie told me, the rear ground-floor apartment was occupied by the landlord, Denys Wortman, an artist and cartoonist for The World-Telegram and Sun. A few flights up, Rosalyn Tureck, the great Bach pianist, lived and practiced. During my time there, Emily Prager, who had just published her acclaimed short story collection, "A Visit From the Footbinder," lived and wrote on the third floor. My landlord on the fourth (the building had gone co-op, of course) was the comedy writer Anne Beatts, who sublet the second of her two apartments to the singer Heather MacRae.

Ellen and Debbie in 1984.

In the 1980's, the whole building exhaled a delicious scent of the past, an elixir composed of the smells of working fireplaces and the aging wood of the central staircase. No doubt even in 1938, already 90 years old, the place had exuded a similar aroma. Then as now, the sunny apartments were proportioned to slightly shorter humans and fitted with cunning, handmade carpentry: recessed bookshelves, cubbyholes, window seats.

Debbie gave me a photograph of herself and Jo in their apartment, seated before a blazing fireplace of gleaming, dark stone, their hands joined, their young faces dreamily tilted toward the camera. A few weeks ago, I ate dinner at the Beatrice Inn. The apartment across the street, my mother's apartment, was brightly lighted behind uncurtained windows, the dark fireplace in the picture still intact.

Yet like the world around it, the life my mother lived at No. 288 would soon change forever. She had come to the Village an independent young woman, earning $45 a week as an art director at a magazine publisher, Focus Inc. Her evenings, I gathered, were filled with lectures on Marxism, her weekends with books and poetry, dates with Jonas, visits with friends. Sometimes, under a pen name, she freelanced for a left-wing magazine called The Fight Against War and Fascism, once illustrating a story by Dorothy Parker.

In the middle of 1938, though, Focus went out of business. The Depression was not yet over, and among Jo's papers are long, handwritten lists of ad agencies, magazines and department stores, grouped by neighborhood for ease of walking from one to the next to ask for work. In July, she gave up and went home to Boston. The separation strained her romance with Jonas, which ended soon after. A year later, as World War II began, Jo met the young Canadian scientist who would become my father.

My own tenancy at No. 288 was also short. A couple of years after moving in, I married and moved out.

"I got chills and tears and tremors," I wrote in my journal on the night of the great discovery. "It can't be merely coincidence, yet it's unlikely to be anything else." No doubt I had seen my mother's 1938 address on the poem and other papers when I first looked through the carton years before. But had I remembered it? And what real estate god had decreed that an apartment should be available there just when I moved to New York?

However it had happened, learning that my mother once lived where I now lived "comforted and reassured" me that I had landed in the right place, the journal entry from that day went on. "It's one of those rare circumstances that seems to give life some incontrovertible order, and the fact that my mother opened these doors, passed by this railing, pleases me very much."

Josephine Blatt Pall, right, with her roommate, Debbie Miller Sankey, in their West 12th Street apartment in 1938.

Josephine's daughter, Ellen, occupied the apartment 46 years later.

Ellen Pall is the author of the novels "Among the Ginzburgs" and "Slightly Abridged."