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A Country Girls Urban Tree House

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Nearly 20 years ago — when she was a young mother who had recently earned a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Columbia University — Ms. Redel’s father, Irving, gave her the down payment to buy a three-bedroom 12th-floor apartment with panoramic Hudson River views on Riverside Drive and 81st Street.

“My father decided that he would help each of his daughters buy a house while he was alive,” said Ms. Redel, a poet and novelist, whose 85-year-old father still lives on the Upper East Side.

At the time, Ms. Redel was married and living on Grove Street in Greenwich Village. Her landlords and upstairs neighbors were the writer Calvin Trillin and his wife, Alice, his wry sidekick in life and letters. “They were loving people,” said Ms. Redel, who would call Alice with baby questions after her first son, Jonah Redel-Traub, was born. “Bud Trillin used to call and say: ‘I’m done working. Can Jonah come up and play?’ Their daughter was our first baby sitter.”

As much as she liked having guardian angels from the literary establishment watching out for her, Ms. Redel decided to move. “I knew I should not be paying rent,” she said.

She initially thought about buying in then up-and-coming Fort Greene, Brooklyn, but she was persuaded to look uptown. “My husband had lived at 158th and Riverside Drive, and he extolled the virtues of living on the Hudson River,” she said.

When they found the apartment at Riverside and 81st, Ms. Redel acquiesced to the men in her life. “This apartment seemed like it would make my husband and father happy,” she said.

Ms. Redel worried that they were overpaying. “The apartment cost $900,000” in 1991, she said haltingly, making it clear that she still considers that a large sum. “I thought there was no chance I would ever recoup the money. Obviously, it turned out to be a good deal. I feel completely grateful that I live in this apartment.”

A few years after she moved to the apartment and gave birth to her second son, Gabriel Redel-Traub, now 16, she and her husband divorced.

Ms. Redel has made few changes to the apartment, although she knows others might have gutted it. She met a woman who had almost bought the place. “She backed out because there was too much work to do — she said all the bathrooms had to be redone,” Ms. Redel said, laughing. “I have lived here for 17 years and I have not touched them.” She is quite fond of her vintage bathroom, where she can sit in the tub and watch the sunset.

She renovated the kitchen, so that she and her sons could eat in it, and installed single-pane windows that frame the views as if they were landscape paintings. “And I built the window seat in the living room,” said Ms. Redel, who was curled up on it with a cup of tea, watching red-tailed hawks fly by her window. “It’s like being in a fantastic tree house.”

The proximity to Riverside Park is important to Ms. Redel, who thinks of herself as a country girl at heart. (Her summer home is a tiny lake cabin with an outhouse in Putnam County.)

A child of the suburbs who attended the free-spirited Scarsdale Alternative School, she decided to go to college at rural Dartmouth College, which had recently become coeducational, because she loved to hike.

Country life agreed with her and after graduating with a fine arts degree in 1980, she moved to rural Montague, Mass., and worked with recovering addicts at the Beacon House for Women. “My only qualification was that I was empathetic,” she said.

When she discovered that the feminist poet Adrienne Rich lived up the road, she asked her for a job and helped to work on Sinister Wisdom, a lesbian literary journal. She then moved to Concord, Mass., because she planned to attend graduate school at Boston University. But she decided to go to Columbia instead, and relocated to New York, where both her sisters lived.

The city has nurtured her creative ambitions, and she said her neighborhood provided the catalyst for her second novel, “The Border of Truth” (Counterpoint, 2007), a story about a contemporary middle-aged Manhattan woman’s discovery that her Upper East Side father, a Belgian refugee from Hitler’s Europe, has hidden from her the true story of his passage to America.

Ms. Redel remembers the precise moment when inspiration struck.

“I was in a chair shop at 78th and Amsterdam — it’s now a yoga place — and I had these ladder-back chairs that were falling apart and I brought them in to see if they could be fixed,” she recalled. “A woman in the store heard my name and asked if I was my father’s daughter. She had traveled with my father to America. My novel is loosely based on my father’s journey. This was the first time I took someone else’s story and turned it into fiction.”

Nevertheless, the book’s protagonist resembles Ms. Redel in several ways. Both are academics (Ms. Redel teaches at Sarah Lawrence College) who don’t like to work at home (they both write at the New York Society Library on East 79th).

Ms. Redel started going to the library after dropping off her children at school. “One was at Rodeph Sholom and one went to Hunter and the Society Library formed the triangle, so it made sense to go there and work,” she said. “It was hard to write in my house — the home claims my attention. The laundry calls; I think about dinner.”

She considers “The Border of Truth” a New York novel, a testament to her becoming a true New Yorker. “Maybe that is strange from someone who billed herself as the one who wanted to live in the country,” she said. “But the book, I suppose, was my way of saying that New York has been my home as a writer and a mother.”

Posted in: Runaway Love May 2008

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