Early in my stay—drunk on city life, glad for its free tickets and dollar pizza and standing room, I told my new friend Robert how much I really loved it here. Really. I admitted that my dingy minuscule apartment reminded me of van Gogh’s simple room at Aries—bed, chair, desk—everything a guy might ever need. Robert laughed his pirate baritone. “You know what you are, Hartley, pal? Down deep, you’re basically a happy person.”

“No!” I said, looking around, half-shamed. I stood here, on public view, accused of having “a talent for happiness.”

“Well, yes and no.” The compliment seemed to undercut my serious intellectual credentials. Sure, I knew pain. I just preferred the other. Colette advised: “Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.”

Wasn’t that natural: expecting contentment in New York after just two months here? “Happy” meant work done well, done so well that grudging acceptance, then inevitable fame must follow. How ambitious was our group? We were so ambitious, we did not know we were.

That young, we believed most every myth. We certainly believed Manhattan’s. It had just drafted us.

My parents introduced me to the city at age eight.

My starter purchase was, alas, a tiny maroon paisley ascot from a tie-shop in Times Square. I recall my folks’ worried glances. “I guess it’s his money, Richard.” Mother sounded exhausted in advance. Did my folks consider this baby ascot a prediction of my show biz queerness or, maybe worse, some indication I was finally home?

We saw My Fair Lady (original cast), we Christmas shopped (the old Bergdorf, the old F.A.O. Schwarz, original locations, both, like so much, gone). I stuffed my piggy bank’s nickels into skyscraper telescopes. The Rockettes made me cry.

Manhattan seduces even the sternest. It specializes in the sternest.

Even my proper mom, my war-hero dad, succumbed to unlikely dandyisms. Dressed for a nightclub, she wore her reddest mouth and the real pearls. His cuff links matched his onyx tie tack. His hair was oversleek in some new way that gave his whole blond head an eerie prettiness. Dad had worked hard convincing one white pocket hankie into three distinct Chrysler Building points.

The hotel provided a baby-sitter, one swart old woman I believed would undress my kid brother and me the very second our handsome folks waltzed out. (Instead, she ordered many room service hot fudge sundaes, smoked her whole pack of Luckies, then snored like some stevedore. Disappointing.)

Leaving, Dad bent over our bed. Wanting to commemorate our whereabouts, he did the most charming thing. Eyes on his sons, he simply pointed to the white peaks of his own perfect hankie. “Boys?” he said as his pink forefinger moved, a magician’s, showing how the trick is done. “One, two, three. —New York, look out!”