New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  Opposite, the lady gathered her wrap and leaned forward, smiling. “Good night!” She paused. Since he had mentioned children but no wife, he might like herself be widowed. “And I’ll look for you!” she cried gaily. “Behind those curtains.”

  The Judge, standing up, rescued the thumb of one opera glove which extended dangerously over her coffee cup, and gave it back to her. Women sometimes deplored his fussiness—which came from the same narrower range of vision which children had—or were excited by it. His wife had once been. Tonight he didn’t notice. He bowed. “Good night.”

  Going down the long room took him some twenty-five minutes, stopped as he was at every hand. At this hour the ones who knew him best had gone—various associate judges of the courts of appeal who had perhaps helped make him one of them, still others from the Federal courts, from Albany, whom he knew from his own practice more than from the courts, which had never really been his sphere, and from dinners more exclusive than this one. These who delayed him now were men who came under that peculiar term “well-wisher,” politicals who clustered at every appointment or election and greeted with a squinted eye and a limp, neutral hand. The party of reform had them as well as any other. How like they were, whether Irish or Jewish—in the old entente of state politics once called “the Sacred Heart of Israel”—or some of the new Italians who since the depression had been coming up very fast, filling the lieutenant-governorships, the state assemblies and the lower courts with graduates of the Catholic law universities. The German influence had begun to wane even before the war’s outcry against the Bund in New Jersey and an ugly putsch or two in the hofbraus of the city, but here and there they still showed. The Judge, tapped for the bench almost straight from his own office into the relatively removed courts of appeal, still savored the unholy-holy mixture of sincere ward heelers, crafty law deans and faithful constituents which made up an everyman’s land between politics and law.

  “Thank you,” he said, moving along hand over hand, “thank you very much.” No doubt some of the same influences would align themselves at the resurrection or the advent of the Messiah, whichever sphere then found itself in charge. No one denied that these pressures still obtained, even in the highest court of the land. True, Cardozo had been appointed to that court when there was already another Jew there. Sainthood, great mental elegance and a wisdom almost exquisite had done it for that candidate. Mannix’s own practice, of a barrister kind rare in America, had been in early emulation of this man, though he hadn’t flattered himself with any personal resemblance to him. For one thing, the other hadn’t married. “Oh yes indeed!” he said, to a surprised old jurist within whose hand his own had suddenly tightened. “And a very good night!”

  Besides, his own admiration had long since passed on. For a while, like almost everyone else of his professional acquaintance on either side of the Atlantic, he’d wanted nothing better than “to be eighty again,” with Oliver Holmes. Still thirty years away from that, he now considered himself fit as any man to be his own mentor.

  “Well, Simon.”

  “Well, McAfee!” He smiled up at the flat-tongued Boston Federal judge who not two months ago, talking of the war in Europe, had asked him what none of Mannix’s own kind had ever bothered or dared to: “Simon, why aren’t you a Zionist?” They smiled at each other now, both remembering his answer. He’d considered quite coolly before he made it. McAfee’s forebears had probably come to Massachusetts during the Irish potato famines of the 1840s—which about coincided with the half of his own which had fled the European revolutions of 1848.

  “Why is it, Francis,” he had said, “that you aren’t Sinn Fein?”

  But later comers of his own kind would never honor any such answer. Now that Jews were dead or dying in thousands which left the head numb, he was no longer as sure as once that he could. Before the war, though one couldn’t hope to explain even to a man like McAfee all the hierarchies, envies and fears which beset the Jews themselves, among themselves they could be funny enough about it. He could have recounted to almost any of them how when he had brought home his schoolboy crony Abe Cohn, his mother had whispered, “Russian?”—even as, thirty years later, he had revealed it to Professor Abraham Cohn. Capping it with the story of how his mother with her eighteen carat German-descended conviction of superiority, had had at last to sit in one of the vestry rooms on a Sunday afternoon in the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue, to hear one of her own daughter-in-law’s relatives warn his congregation against their snobbish condescension to the Ashkenazim—the German Jews.

  But now, all his legal rescue work for these many scholarly or humble refugee Jews for whom he had often made himself responsible in purse as well, couldn’t convince certain of his “co-religionists” that—unless he was also for Zion, a Zion he was sure would end in the political—he was not a renegade. What strange tightropes a Jew like himself—a lace-curtain Jew and a lapsed one—had to walk! Now that a suffering not yet his had made his honesty suspect, and the whole history of his family’s “assimilation” (which latecomers had perhaps coveted) traitorous! No wonder he yearned to escape into that larger court of justice for humanity at large, which they would see only as an escape. To them, if he was to be a lion, then he must be a lion of Judah still.

  Strange path to walk for a man brought up to be as stiffishly proud of his race as he! To have to wonder now whether it was only pride—and to be damnably sure meanwhile that probably fifty percent of the “Americans” who might be fighting over there for his kind would still have reservations about them, over here. But perhaps this too was the strange, yeasty working of what one day might be humanity in the large. His own wife, one of whose family was in history books on the American Revolution, and another in Queen Victoria’s government (and whose first husband and what other prior lovers he preferred not to know, had been Christians) had once whispered to him in one of “their” drawing-rooms, “Do you really ever feel comfortable with them? No me. Not me.”

  “Why—hello, August, Mr. Manken,” he said to a man looming beyond the several around McAfee.

  “Gut evening, Simon. You see, I come to your dinner.”

  Here was one feeling he could be sure of—his anti-Germanism—even if he secretly knew its roots to be deep in familiar dislike of those maternal cousins and uncles of his youth who had been as assimilatedly Teutonic as if ghettos had never been heard of, down to the dumpling creases in the neck, the Bavarian blue-green of the eye. A subtler tragedy of the later wave of well-to-do cousins who were coming over now—he himself had sponsored over twenty-five of them—was that they had not been alien to the German spirit but embedded in it, and hadn’t ever conceived of themselves otherwise. August Manken here, this huge walrus of a man with his Hindenburg whiskers, was no relative. As the Judge’s maternal grandfather’s next-door neighbor, Catholic of course, in the brownstone to brownstone “German” enclave of Yorkville, he had been the grandfather’s lifelong friend, in a way; certainly their wives and daughters had been almost as deep in the kaffeeklatsches as if all went to the same church—almost, if not quite. As a boy, Simon had been much in this maternal grandfather’s home, whose circle had even then been referred to as “the Germans,” his mother taking on the habit of his father’s pro-English side. He and his father had seen eye to eye on them. “Even when a German takes a friendly pinch of you, Simon, he has no real feeling under the thumb.” It was this lack, a kind of gross stupidity of the emotions, which would have kept old Manken ignorant of how the German-American stance on the war had ruined Yorkville as a political force forever, or of why its street of bierstubes was now all but deserted. And it was their Christmas-annual sentimentality—a sweet always saved in the end for themselves—which would have brought Manken here.

  “Zo, little Simon. I come to see your triumph.” The Judge could have chortled aloud at this prime corroboration of his thoughts. He caught Borkan, the Grand Street boy, staring curiously at this encounter—let him. “Thank you, Mr. Manken, August.
And how is Mutti?”

  And Gusti junior, in his white linen Sunday knicks and sailor-ribboned hatful of nasty jokes to play on the girls—how is he? And Putzi, the elder junior and aptly so, in tennis blazer, cream-vanilla pompadour above its blue, in one hand his racquet, the other at the keyboard of a piano bevied with girls whose hourglass waists had seemingly sent the laced-away inches to their full cheeks—how were all they? Maitzie Manken, hot in a hall closet—Simon, do this!—had technically been his first woman, girl. How indelibly those afternoons on that Seventy-ninth Street block of about 1905 came back to him, the tall kitchens looking out on the laundried gardens, the younger children, clip-necked, smelling of cough syrup and powdered down to the navel, set out on the front stoops but forbidden to kneel, the brown living-rooms, their mantels marching with steins, verboten the rugs thick as cranberry sauce, coffee pouring like sap from every corner where an aunt knitted, the beds’ blue clouds of comfort forbidden in the daytime too, the cakes and the sips of kümmel, and the ripe indigestions of dusk. It all came back to him from the awful concaves of those Sunday afternoons.

  “Oh, the Mutti has her bad legs—and how are the girls?”

  The “girls” were the Judge’s maiden elder sisters, who lived now in a large apartment house built on that very site; August himself must live somewhere near it.

  “Very well, thank you. Just the same.” And indeed they were—like the Mutti’s legs, which even back then had been varicosed with comfort and her own mutton fat. Friendship between the two families, mostly on the distaff side, had really been a matter of housekeeping sympathies. The Judge’s grandfather, as thick in his own way as his neighbor, had never seemed to see that beyond an occasional glass of Manken schnapps, the society of the editor of the Staats-Zeitung, the German consul-general, plus the Rupperts and Piels, the Heides and the Muschenheims, those brewers, candy millionaires and hotel operators, was—very politely—not for him. But young Simon had only had to be with the women and children, and the maids too, to hear another undercurrent already, perhaps in the same way that only yesterday his own twelve-year-old daughter had claimed to see a Hitler-face in the small, pugnacious scowl of a rose.

  His grandfather had stood by the Mankens during the 1914 wartime, when whole blocks of “Kraut” windows had been smashed, the Mannixes’ own along with theirs, and everything German from Wagner to knitting from the left had been removed from the repertory of living. Whether or not August remembered this, tonight he had come to stand at attention, even to bow as he had been taught—at a “triumph.”

  “And how are things in Yorkville, August?”

  “Not so good. Business going down, riffraff coming in the Turnverein, the district club too. Why you don’t come down to the neighborhood, one day? We could use a smart man like your father was, like you. You were a smart boy, Simon. You had better luck than our Putzi.”

  To compare the Judge’s “luck” with Putzi the forger’s could still be a father’s pathetic arrogance. To claim a share of that luck was no old man’s naïveté, but the bluntest statement of what was felt to be sentimentally owed. Taken together, these could well be the beginnings of just that German national character which now and then had to help the world militarily to an understanding of it. But Manken’s other sad, city-park phrase—the neighborhood—could still strike a chord. “The girls, my sisters, live in that house now, August, did you know? The one which was put up on the old block.”

  The big head inclined deeply, its gray hair brush-cut in a mode which had long preceded the GI’s. Manken’s wing collar and black silk tie with gold-headed stickpin, a mask of comedy with a diamond in its stretched jaws, brought back other segments of that majestic household—fanged bearskin rugs, beetling cupboards and the snarling Orientalia which was thought to be imperial. “Mutti likes the elevators too. We share rooms not far from there, with Gusti. He has a fine wife.” He sighed, for whatever contradiction? “You do not bring yours?”

  The Judge, eye level with the stickpin, raised his glance sharply. Nothing had been intended; it was just a question of thumbs.

  “Regards home, Mr. Manken,” he said gently, and was about to thank him and move on when a disturbance at the gold-and-red-portiered end of the ballroom drew his attention. Down at that end, heads were turning from some rumor. A hollow-eyed servingman in green livery was coming toward him, carrying no salver but the very emissary of disaster; before the man came near the Judge had raked through most possibles in their likely order—first Mirriam, in a smashed mirror of alternatives, then David, hurt from behind by a car, then little Ruth, so poised but so vulnerable to people—but just then Borkan spoke from behind him: “It’s Chauncey. He’s had bad news, will you come?”

  Beyond the curtains, across the club’s central hallway, the door of a library closed except to members was now open, revealing floor lamps equidistant along the moroccoed silence, each glowing down on its table and leather chair, forming an island for the financier’s solitude, the divorcé’s meditation, the octogenarian’s brandied sleep. The Judge had never seen it before, not being a member of this club or likely to be, though he knew its more public rooms well—since the depression, clubs like these had opened them to certain functions where some members were also involved.

  He ran forward now with the short steps which from the rear made him seem like a boy in a dinner jacket, or like a quick-flying little prelate, if he had had a cape. A small group of men halfway down the room parted to let him through. Chauncey Olney was sitting in one of the chairs. He must once have been very tall, this man who would never see ninety again, his head still high and Venetian against the wing-back, his knees angled sharply, cloth-gaitered feet easily touching the floor. A silvery quiet surrounded him, an invisible weapon from which the other men had fallen back. The Judge had seen old people in his own family use their age like this. They lacked embarrassment. This was all they had. A house doctor, who had just come forward with his black bag, was motioned away.

  “A body this age doesn’t shock, Doctor, don’t you know that? It just sits down.” Olney saw the Judge and gave him a rueful grimace, as if asking to be rescued from his own incontinence. “Simon.” He reached for a daily paper folded back on a pile of others and handed it over—a London Times. The Judge glanced automatically at the date: December 10, 1942—two months old.

  “Read it aloud,” said Olney. “He might at least have that.”

  The paper was creased to the obits page. The Judge read where Olney pointed, an ordinary family notice, not the casualty list.

  Died in action, last October 23rd at Alamein, Geoffrey Edward Audley-Taylor, only sort of Lucretia Olney and Charles Audley-Taylor. Services private.

  “They thought I mustn’t know,” said Olney. “My granddaughter Luce and her husband. Old people must be spared—that’s natural, isn’t it?” He stared at the circle of men. “They were hoping to smuggle it under. What’s unnatural about it? Even in war, the middle-aged have time for conspiracy. A natural disrespect for youth and age.” He seemed perfectly all right except for his little spate of talk. “I was too young to go, in ’61,” he said, conversationally. “Not yet twelve. But my mother, who was already a widow, bought my elder brother Julian a substitute; that was what was sometimes done. There’s that to be said for those of us who stayed at home in those days; we didn’t just pay for a walkie-talkie collections of wires and TNT, we bought us a full-grown, full-blooded man we could see. Oftentimes, it was somebody we knew.” His accent had Southerned; up to now, the Judge hadn’t recalled he was from there. “Wasn’t anything on the battlefield he couldn’t see by the dawn’s early light either, that substitute,” said Olney. “Or so they tell me. I was the wrong age for all the wars, all down the line. Like my father before me.”

  There was a whispering among the men around the doctor. “He’ll wear himself out. Can’t somebody get him home?”

  “There’s families that breed like that,” said Olney’s old voice, pursuing its thread. Whether
he had heard them wasn’t clear, or was merely answering from the generalized determination of old men—to break in on events with what they thought they had. “Families that go on breeding behind the lines, or in the intervals. Or have men that for some reason or other get saved out. Or have daughters. Parlor breeds, you might say—but there’s no shame to it, when it’s accident. Somebody has to sit and talk. And breed.”

  The Judge understood at once what he was getting at, if not why. His own father had been the wrong age for all the wars of his time and had often talked about it; he himself had been the right age in 1917, but the wrong size. His own son, too young now, in any event would be saved. And he had a daughter. He wouldn’t mind hearing what further the old man had to say—but pushed by the glances of the men around, he placed a hand on Olney’s shoulder.

  “Mostly people say ‘at the front,’ don’t they still, Simon?” Olney looked up briefly, and—Simon, would have sworn it—shrewdly, then began counting on his fingers. “‘With the Blue’ or ‘with the Gray’ I b’lieve we said, or else the names of places, like you do in any war. Then, in the Spanish one, maybe we’d say of a man that he was with the Rough Riders, or yes, ‘with the Fleet.’ Wasn’t that it? And then—” He began chanting, nodding with it too. “Over there, o-ver there—”

  “Chauncey,” said Borkan, coming up on his other side, “don’t you think you better—”

  “But what’s it they say now, Simon?” said Chauncey, ignoring the other. “It escapes my mind.” He rat-tatted impatiently on the death notice. “What’s it they say now?”

  The Judge thought a moment. “‘Overseas,’ do you mean? But they’ll still say ‘at Alamein’ about your grandson, or ‘in North Africa,’ Chauncey. Things don’t change that much.” It was always best to bring the old back to the concrete. In spite of all, they appreciated it.