NONFICTION - Sept. 17, 1995

MANHATTAN, WHEN I WAS YOUNG by Mary Cantwell (Houghton Mifflin: $21.95; 214 pp.) Connecticut College, Class of 1953, Cantwell arrived in the Manhattan of the Stork Club, the Palm Court, Bonwit Teller’s, Schraffe’s and the Thalia--the city her father promised would be hers one day, the “place where there’d be lots of people like me.” With aspirations for a literary career, Cantwell, in good Capezio pumps, armed with her mother’s myriad fears and scarred by her father’s death, landed a job as secretary to the press editor of Mademoiselle and an apartment in Greenwich Village. She married “B.,” whose Jewishness loomed larger on the screen of everyday life in provincial New York than one can imagine would be healthy for a marriage. Cantwell was permanently terrified by the Rosenberg trial into believing that any dissenting political views meant the chair and by her mother’s belief that cultural indiscretion meant being socially ostracized. When B. gave her a copy of “The Tropic of Cancer,” she writes, he “might as well have asked me to dash a communion wafer to the floor.” In fact, the man didn’t stand a chance. And Cantwell, in her way, drowns in her past, though her chosen city, which she never abandons (Cantwell is now a member of the editorial board of the New York Times and still lives in Greenwich Village), sustains her in ways frequently seen in women of her generation and background. They get lost in it and they own it at the same time. They learn how to work it. Eventually they (those who move to New York and stay there) shed the patina of effort, the “New York disease: a feverish desire to appear knowing, no matter how deep one’s ignorance” and take possession. B. becomes a literary agent and then a cliche, leaving his wife and two daughters for his secretary, and Cantwell becomes a managing editor for Mademoiselle. As in the best of memoirs, the place is a character in the play, and Cantwell’s courage as wife and working mother also has a life and inspiration of its own.