I lived in New York City when it was more violent and dangerous than it is now. Needle Park was still a place where people were killed and women were raped, and the Lower East Side was a place where you wanted to be careful. Mobsters shot each other in the city, as in Joey Gallo getting gunned down in Umberto's clam bar in Little Italy. Morningside Heights was a place to avoid after dark, and Harlem wasn't as friendly as it had once been. It is hard to evoke the mood of New York in the early 1970s, but it had a whiff of Belfast about it, violent, poor, and seemingly unchangeable.
In those days, I was a graduate student in the newly established MFA program at Columbia, where the novelist and short story writer Jean Stafford was one of my teachers. Jean was in her 50s, slender, her hair short, her face scarred from an automobile accident that her first husband, Robert Lowell, had gotten her into in 1938. He had crashed their car into a concrete embankment, leaving her not only with a scar on one side of her face but also with a broken nose that never properly healed.
My shyness came into play—although I wanted to make friends, I didn't really know how. Jean was
