New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  “Still an athlete?”

  “Yes. Track.”

  “Well, now. Your father’d have been mighty pleased at that.”

  “He was the one hauled him off to the Garden, Madison Square, by the time he was four.” Why must he grudge that so? Or that David had never had the usually despairing tantrums of the deaf child but had seemed to know at once, long before the special school, that everyone was trying to help him, even in babyhood taking it in with grave, alert eyes?

  “Favors old Mendes though, doesn’t he? Got his long bones.”

  “Keep forgetting you knew my father-in-law, as well as Dad.” As always, he was glad to get off that other subject.

  Chauncey chuckled. “Don’t know why I call him old; he was younger than me—except that he’s dead.” He turned to his pictures, alert on their easels or against vases or books he had stuffed behind them. Like a class of recalcitrant pupils they stared back at him, with all the inflections of willingness to learn except the one he could not teach them—how not to be what most of them already were. Behind him, the Judge once more wanted to reach up to that humble curve of back which was still marvelously, intricately alive. Then Olney, with a hand-sweep, sent the ranks down before him like ninepins. “Want my brandy. Let’s sit down.”

  They settled themselves in two armchairs near the bow windows on the avenue and park. The Judge always liked to know where he was angled in a house, a farmer’s habit but curiously the New Yorker’s also, in these squared streets easy to see why. Settled here, able to look west, and north-south with a bit of stretching, they were to his mind in the very center of the city. By now, far from the Piedmont as Olney was, it must be his city also.

  “Didn’t rightly know your father-in-law Mendes; only saw him once, as a young man. In the upstairs ballroom of one of the Ralston apartments, the one the owners kept for themselves.”

  “Must have been way back. Never knew Meyer saw them socially.”

  “He didn’t. He went there to buy the land for your house.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard his story of that night—many is the time! But he never said…whatever were you doing there?”

  “It was my father-in-law who represented the Ralstons. Didn’t you know that?”

  “By God—” The Judge sat up, slapping the arm of his chair. “No.” He leaned forward, the way he did when about to affix to his collection of stamps a rare one, lost and turned up again, that he hadn’t known existed any more. “Chauncey—” He felt as if Olney was himself a jar of rare memories that he must very gently tip. “My father-in-law was in his thirties then, about to marry,” he said eagerly. “It was the year before he broke with the family firm in London, threatened to set up an American branch of his own. Got one of the rival music publishers, Rinaldi, I think it was, ready to subsidize him. Told his mother and uncles that, as the heir, if he was expected to run the business some day, he was going to do it then or not at all. So they gave in.” He prized all that history, as much as if he had inherited it along with the house.

  “Oh?” Olney said politely.

  “Excuse me, Chauncey. It’s just that—years later, to have another facet on what I always thought was cut and dried by now—” he poured himself another whisky. “Go on.”

  “Pour me one. The brandy. Thanks.” Chauncey drank, coughed.

  “Well, after the War, I was the poor widow’s mite you know, got through the university somehow, University of Virginia of co’se, came up here just like any carpetbagger, only in the other direction, to see what I could squeeze out of the North. My folks had connections here and I renewed them for all they were worth. I was a sweet-talking young sinner, back then. The time we speak of I wasn’t but twenty-three or so, clerking with another firm entirely. If my father-in-law knew he was going to be that to me, he hadn’t said so, and I sure hadn’t asked him. I was simply at an evening party there at his home. When we left the ladies for the cigars he said, ‘Come along with me later, young fellow, to an appointment I have. Show you something interesting, you might never get to see.’ So, I went.”

  “That ballroom,” said the Judge. “It was like Venice, my father-in-law said, it was Venice—copied as a matter of fact from a room in the Ca’ d’Oro, walls painted to look like marble, and the floors like terrazzo, but done in wood. Unfortunately the pictures, hundreds of them, were copies. But the fountains were real.”

  “That so?” said Olney.

  “Didn’t you—notice?” The year he inherited his present house he’d gone next door to the Ralston houses to ask the tenant of that flat, to let him see if he could find a scrap or two of all that trompe-l’oeil, but the room had been cut up, the walls painted over, the legendary fountains sunk beneath the floor.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Olney, sharply for him. “Studied what I thought I’d been brought there to. I studied Ralston, the balky seller, and how his own lawyer and the buyer helped each other, how they checkmated him from opposite sides of the table, each for his own reasons, two men who’d never met before, our respective fathers-in-law. I studied young Ralston particularly. And I studied—the law.”

  “Ralston was one of the young aesthetes,” said the Judge. “My father-in-law Mendes had seen his kind back home in London. Dressed plain, he said, all black and white, but everything as if it’d been knitted on him. An aesthete, but a young blood also. Lisped by intention. Boxed at the Athletic Club. And had his hair dyed gray.”

  “He was a builder’s son, Simon,” Olney said gently. “American. Lemme tell his principal characteristic as I saw it, that evening.” He leaned forward and pointed a thumb, giving each word its burden. “He didn’t…want…to—sell.”

  “Ah, well.” The Judge backed away from that thumb, laughing, throwing up his hands before it. “Ah, well. The minute he saw the man, Mendes said—Mendes began to talk opera. You agree to that?”

  “Opera it was,” said Olney. “And how my future father-in-law abetted him, just by knowing nothing about it! I can see the rapscallion’s head shine yet, turning from one to the other—he was one of those men with a bald head all one big freckle, nasturtium color. Puh. And I had to sit there, mum too—felt as if I was in knickerbockers. Which I was.”

  “Mendes happened to have the score of Aida with him. Had just been produced the first time, in Cairo, year or so before, 1871. By this time he was already an entrepreneur. He promised to introduce Ralston in opera circles—seems Ralston had a protégé.” It had taken innumerable renditions of the story before Mendes had happened to mention the protégé had been a castrato, a boy. Mendes was no prude; he’d simply had his mind on another point which had seemed to him the final one.

  Olney nodded. “Maybe so.” He smoothed his chin, staring forth. “My prospective father-in-law didn’t give a damn about the lot itself, or who his client Ralston sold it to, if persuaded to sell at all. It was Ralston’s business agent he was after—fellow’d been asking too much baksheesh on the side. My father-in-law wanted him out of estate matters. This was one of the ways to get at him—and still keep Ralston under his own thumb.”

  He decided not to interrupt again. After all, was there anyone who knew all of it? “So that was it,” he said. “And the end of it, do you remember that? What Ralston said to Mendes, after they’d agreed?” It had been Mendes’s climax, half the reason for his telling the story at all, even to Simon, and when he was telling it out of the family, all of it.

  “Not so’s I could say.”

  “Why, Ralston said, ‘Well, at least this time I’m not letting in one of those god-damned Jews.’ And then Father Mendes had to tell him. Never occurred to him that people sometimes didn’t know what a Mendes was; he was so proud of it. ‘I think I should tell you, Mr. Ralston,’ he said, ‘that I am a Jew.’” The Judge paused—here was the part that had always tickled him. “Mendes always said he also offered at once to let the deal go. I’d like to be sure of that. But I’m not.”

  “Heh,” said Chauncey appreciatively. “Well—and so�
��”

  The Judge lifted a finger, forgetting about interruptions—Olney’s recall seemed sturdy enough, almost impenetrable. “So young Ralston stared. Then, Mendes said, he looked around the room as if he were tallying it. Then back to Mendes again, with a kind of funny smile on his face all that time. Then he shook his head. ‘That may be, Mr. Mendes,’ he said. ‘But at least you’re not one of these god-damned ones.’”

  “Heh-heh.” Chauncey gave a heel-stamp. “Must say I’ve heard that same little twist from others of your co-religionists. So I’d say you were right about Mendes, maybe.” He coughed. “Well now—want to hear the end of the story?”

  The Judge stared. Then he said gently, “Yes, Chauncey. Tell me the end of it.”

  “Well.” Olney sat with his hands on the curled paws of his chair, his thin legs uncrossed, the lamplight in the hollows under his cheekbones, the rest of him in shadow; he might have been gowned and in court. He was sitting in judgment, Mannix realized—in judgment on two quite other men that had appeared in Mendes’s version. Seventy years later there was still satisfaction in it. “My father-in-law was rascal-rich, you know, I guess you do. And not used to all his own red velvet yet, slathers of it all over his drawing-room, gold fittings that I didn’t know weren’t brass till I touched them. So you understand why he said what he did. I’ve never forgotten it. ‘So, Olney,’ he said to me when we got out of there. ‘Did you see?’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir, I think I learned something about the law tonight.’ He gaped at me. ‘You smart-allicking me, Mr. Olney?’ But he saw I wasn’t, that I was serious. ‘Why you young poop,’ he said. The law? Didn’t you watch him at all, Ralston? Didn’t you see it?’ When I said I hadn’t seen anything special, that freckle of his turned bright red. ‘Oh, so?’ he said. ‘Oh, so. Not so smart as I thought. Let me tell you something, mister. The way to be rich is the way that young man is rich, the way my own boy is going to be, if I can make him. My girls have got to take their chances; I can only do it once, and I’ll do it for my boy. Only got one.’ He almost choked on it, telling me. ‘Can’t do it for yourself. Has to be done for you. That boy Ralston is miles away from his own money. Don’t know where it’s from, scarcely knows that it comes. Has to be done for you—that.’ He even shook me by the arm, as if to wake me up. ‘Miles away,’ he said, ‘did you see it? Miles and miles away.’”

  Into the dying fall of that other-century voice and Olney’s silence, the Judge said, “Wonderful story, Chauncey. Wonderful telling, too. You’re a past master.”

  “Damn well ought to be, in that one. Far as I know, he didn’t pick me for his daughter’s husband, she did, and I was already after her, I guess, that night. But I was always very careful, later, not to go into his firm.” He sipped from his brandy and dried his lips. “Sometimes I wonder, though. He was rich enough after all to give his girls their own money, in the end. And I was a young carpetbagger. Didn’t I pick him?” The old man made a sly face at him.

  “Oh, Chauncey.”

  “Particularly fond of that story though, I must say,” Olney said, smiling to himself. “Considering—the tail-end of it.”

  “You mean that wasn’t?”

  “Uh-uh.” He let Simon wait, then cocked his chin at the ceiling. “Few weeks later—though I shore never got this from my father-in-law, and we never spoke of it later, b’lieve me—it came out that Ralston himself had already sold away, unbeknownst to anybody, the very room he was standing in that night; he’d sold the whole block of flats. For more money than a parcel like that had ever gone before. And he’d done it all by himself.”

  In the smallish room, so markedly plain for the prospect it fronted on, Chauncey’s laughter rang loud and long, an elder’s laugh and of its era; Mannix’s laugh, though released specially for his friend, seemed of its own era, dimmer by habit, conserved in the chest. Looking around him, he could see yet another end to the story, a subtler one. The taxes on this place, in which one man lived with a servant, must be as high as any private one of its size in the city, for the land alone. The room’s clever shabbiness, resembling some of Boston’s, might be as characteristically Virginian, when there was money too. He smiled secretly, seeing his friend through the other end of the opera glass. Miles away from his money, miles away. And what of other sides of it, Chauncey’s wife, the girl? A name suddenly connected in him—Father Mendes mentioning it, saying it with the honest Jew’s high intellectual smile for Christian graft.

  “Why, Chauncey, your father-in-law—wasn’t he one of the attorneys for the Boss Tweed crowd—why, I’ve got a Thomas Nast drawing I think shows him.”

  “Have you?” said his friend, deep in the wings of his chair. “Yes, that was Mary’s father. Thought you knew, maybe. Your father did, of course.”

  “He never said.”

  “Mirriam knows, mentioned it to me once. Seems there’s lots of that crowd’s great-grandchildren, still stepping out around town.”

  Mannix made no response. Forcibly, he kept his mind on the great double staircase of the city, up which went the thieves on the rise, the fancy girls, the peddlers Jew or Dutch, down which came the dowagers in their diamond dog collars, the race horse collectors and cart horse breeders—and the snake-hipped young men, the egreted women, who had danced at the Savoy.

  “Pour yourself another drink, Simon.”

  “No, I’ve had enough.” He got up and went to the piano, hunting among the pictures. There she was, Olney’s wife, in the pince-nez and stiff bun of that afternoon forty years ago, not ugly even under the glasses, laborer in civic works, faithful helpmate in Chauncey’s career, ever at his side. “She sang Tosti’s ‘Good-bye.’ Your wife. The day I was here with Dad.” He hesitated. “No. It was the other one.”

  “The other one?” said Chauncey. He had sunk all the way back in the chair now, hands folded.

  A sister or sister-in-law? She was nowhere among the pictures, at least the silhouette of her as he remembered it. “A blond woman, I think. Hair in curls on top, one down her neck. Very quiet otherwise. Dark dress.”

  “You must mean my secretary, Mrs. Nevin, who lived with us. She had a daughter Lucy, about sixteen then maybe, who would have been away at school—or maybe not. Older than you. One of those two, it would have been.”

  He’d been ten, both older to him—how would he know? “Good-bye forever,” the silhouette sang, in the dark of the generations.

  “Luce, my granddaughter, is named for that Lucy—Lucretia Nevin. Her mother.”

  “Her—”

  “I adopted Mrs. Nevin’s daughter, since Mary and I had no children of our own. We did. My wife was a remarkable woman, Simon.” Was there a deep twinkle in Olney’s eye, a reminiscence at mouth, meant for Mannix to see? “No, there’s no picture here, matter of fact, but you’ll find a fine drawing of the two, mother and daughter, Mrs. Nevin and Lucy, on the upstairs landing, outside my room. Why don’t you go see?” It was a command—or a wistful, ninetyish request

  Going up a stairwell heavily coddled in pictures far more luxe than down below, Mannix weighed his own father’s odd friendship with Olney, never before seen as so out of their spheres for both—had he been the one to help with such things as adoptions? On the landing, he saw an indifferent line drawing, two laughing women intertwined in the simper of the period, in twin clouds of Charles Dana Gibson hair. In the agelessness of dull drawing they were identical. He tiptoed downstairs again, why on tiptoe, except for all the merged silences here, he couldn’t say.

  “Lovely pair; they must have been very alike.” The Judge peered at his watch. “Isn’t it time for me to go home?” He had spoken to an empty chair, Olney was at the piano, hunting fretfully. “Can’t find him,” he said “Can’t find him anywhere.”

  “Isn’t that—” said Mannix, pointing again to the young Britisher’s picture, but Olney, ignoring, walked past him to the window, recalling to Mannix how at their last dinner he had gained vigor with the late hour, only to fade, almost neatly, into doze—and a health
y rousing—and so off jauntily in the small hours with his man, who seemed used to it, in the car.

  The Judge came and stood beside him. Nobody on the avenue now, not even a bus, and the planes of it, the lovely bones of light that were its trees, seemed to stand at attention, pressed forward by visions of it in other lights and at other hours.

  “I like sometimes to see the young couples coming back from parties,” said Olney. “Summers are better for it. I don’t go away any more. Don’t mind the heat now. Got everything here.” He drew the curtains halfway, with a shy smile of guilt. “Once a girl saw me watching, ran up and knocked at the window, but nobody’s thrown any stones yet.” He chuckled. “Maybe they’re waiting to see what happens to the Court.” Very slowly he bent over the tray, pouring out another brandy. “Yes, they were often taken for sisters, that mother and daughter.” He was humming. “And Mary was a ve-ry remarkable woman.” He’d poured the brandy, the Judge saw with a certain chill, into a third glass. It wasn’t possible to tell whether he was wandering, or with the insouciance of his years was merely plucking down—as one might attempt the crystal plums carried by the wrought-iron maiden in the piano bay—all the themes, still fruiting, which inhabited this house.

  “One for the road, Simon,” said Olney. “And brandy’s best, at evening’s end.”

  “Is it?”

  “’Tis. And you’ve sat up with me long enough.”

  “Sure now?”

  “Often sit up reading. Proctor’s got a buzzer downstairs if I want a snack—he sleeps days, if I do. And there’s always the window, even without girls. Five o’clock in the morning, it’s a marvel.”

  Mannix took the glass.

  “Your own little girl must be growing on, Simon. What’s her name? Saw her with Mirriam once. Looks like you.”

  “Ruth. She’s twelve.” He could feel his face break into the sweet gape of fatherhood—and not only because she was an even smaller, femininely decent replica of him. “Off her feed tonight, Anna said. What girls of that age eat!—great big eyes and a bellyache, all of them. Used to get high fevers with any little thing, seems she’s growing out of it.” He heard his own babble, in this house of mourning.