New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  “Luce used to ride. She made the three of us do it. Every Sunday morning.” He pointed a long forefinger at the window. “Right out there, we used to come out of the park.” The force of his glance and the gallery of pictures behind him all but drew that vision of riders through the French window, the three women on their mounts, girl, mother, and Mrs. Olney behind them, stepping through with the ease of apparitions, one by one, lightly equestrian. And Olney, behind them all, was still here.

  “They grow out of it,” said Olney, “all of it. And what about your boy—will he be for the law?”

  “No,” said Mannix. “Got some idea he wants to save the world.”

  “Heh. Won’t ask how. Gather he don’t think that process is synonymous with the courts…Simon—kin I ask you a question?”

  “I know what you’ll ask,” said Mannix with a laugh. “Do I really think orderly process will save?’ Yes I do, you old revolutionary. And you helped on my appointment, nevertheless.”

  “Because,” said Olney. “And because I—never mind. But you find me going along with what’s being done to the Court these days, I’m no radical. I b’lieve in a government of laws, not men, just like the founding fathers did—who got that idea from Harington’s Oceana, by the way. And in the end, I plump for the men. Just like them. But what the hell are we talking about that for—after midnight?” He suddenly bowed his head. “I hope that boy—” he said, gesturing at the pictures on the piano—“I hope that boy had some women, in his time.” Olney lifted his head, not lecherous, but as if poking toward some shrewdness he hoped was in his younger friend. Was he asking Mannix to note how all this evening’s talk might now be seen as circling round that martial mourning they had joined forces for—that this was the way men properly sat up with the spirits of men? Or had Mannix’s own evening, that nervous quick of private reflections, drawn everything from the other’s to itself?

  “What is it, Simon,” said Chauncey, “that you hold against your own boy?”

  He could feel himself shrink into the smallest corner—of not knowing. “I don’t know,” he said, from it, his voice a strangle of relief. Led like any witness into admission never yet made to the witness self, he stared at his clasped hands, seeing what advocacy could be.

  “Not—because he’s deaf?”

  The Judge looked up, with a stiff smile. “I can lipread, Chauncey. I learned it with him, did you know that?”

  Olney shook his head, as against a gnat. “He’s Mirriam’s son, and I can understand how that could—but he’s also yours.”

  He drew a shallow breath—and said nothing.

  “Troubles you, I see it. I had no son.” The old voice hadn’t a quaver, strong with the evening’s supply of life. “I’d have made do with a bastard, if I could’ve got one. But I can see how it would be between you, just now. Simon—we didn’t fight in the wars of our time either, you and I. Are you agin that boy because he can’t?”

  “Judge,” said the Judge. “Let us talk about Geoffrey Audley-Taylor.”

  Then he was ashamed.

  But the other held up a hand. “Haven’t got the time to take offense—or to be polite.” He grinned. “Nor, ’s matter of fact,” he drawled, “to wait out a bet I made with Borkan, about you. On reconsideration, I’d say he was right.”

  “What was that?”

  “He gave you six years—to get there. I gave you ten.”

  He received this in absolute silence. There was no need to ask “Get where?”—any more than there had been to ask Chauncey what he had meant when he had said “the Court.”

  “I didn’t know I was being mentioned for it,” he said then.

  Chauncey squinted. “Don’t know’s you have been, except by us. But you’ve thought of it. You just didn’t know it showed on you. It always shows. Showed on me.”

  “I didn’t know you ever—” The usual verdict on Chauncey Olney was that he had never cared to exert his endowment to the full—though there were those who contended that he was an unremarkable man, exalted into an air of endowment by sheer lifespan.

  “You’d have known, if you’d been around. But I’ll tell you something known to few, now all dead. I was offered it.”

  “You were…offered—” He counted back how many administrations that must have been, which President—never doubting that Olney spoke the truth. Vanity wasn’t in that hooded eye. Perspective was. Even perhaps a surely inapposite—paternity.

  “I turned it down.”

  “You…but in God’s name, why?”

  “I thought my…private arrangements—might not bear scrutiny.”

  “But—surely they already had borne—”

  “I did not wish to bring them into full view.”

  He was stunned most of all, he thought, by the conversational difference between the two centuries—and by what the preceding one’s mannerism could conceal, even from its successor’s eye. Few in public life now would openly have dared such a ménage as must have been here, or made such a serene go of its “arrangement”—and this despite all the rapines of passion, and perversion too, nowadays so common on the cocktail tongue.

  “That doesn’t sound like you, Chauncey,” he said, stern as a son who had expected better of his father.

  “It wasn’t,” he answered. “You see…Mary convinced me. Yes, she was the one who persuaded me—that it couldn’t be done. But not even the President knew that.” Olney held out his hand. “Good night, Simon, and thank you. Confidences are tiring—you may find that out one of these days. And I have to take care of myself.” He did look tired now, with dangerous hollows in his face that might not refill. But surely there was a glint in his expression still. “You see—that sudden bout of TB I had? Came on me as a middle-aged man. At just about that time.”

  While the Judge was taking this in, Chauncey pressed the buzzer on the wall. The man Proctor shortly appeared, wearing spectacles which gave him a clerkly look well suited to the house.

  “Proctor’ll drive you.”

  “Oh no, please. I’m looking forward to the walk. No, I really am, Chauncey.”

  “Grown bitter out.” Olney went to the window, peering at an outside thermometer. “What do you know, down to twenty above. But no wind.”

  “I’ll be warm enough. I need the walk.”

  Proctor helped him into his fur-lined coat and handed him the thick French-gray suede gloves which were his sisters’ half-yearly gift, doing it with a measured approval as silent-footed as his service, and as much in evidence. Proctor and his kind held this world up, or what was left of it—which was a lot. He gave Proctor a nod of approval fully exchangeable.

  “Proctor, give the Judge a pair of my earmuffs. Simon, you know that more than half the bodily heat loss is from the head?”

  He submitted, even putting them on. “Almost forgot to tell you,” he said. “Anna’s bringing round some soup, in the morning.”

  “Anna’s soup is always welcome. Not sure you can afford it though, Simon. Last time Anna brought round what she called a little meal, Proctor and I dined happily for three days.”

  So at last they came to the handshake, the good-bye, always at Chauncey’s age to be thought of as perhaps eternal. Mannix took off the earmuffs, which made his own voice sound hollow to him, but dangled them ready, like the obedient child he felt himself to be. Soup, earmuffs and the like, fathers and mothers, aunts or sisters and the like—and always this silent, ceremonious third—how many hundreds of times he seemed to have undergone this ritual departure to the raw, unaffiliated outdoors! It was part of a background Chauncey and he shared in spite of race or against it, one of a sort that the Borkans, no matter how many bets they made with the Olneys, or how many Park Avenue wives they acquired, would never have—and it was more of a human sharing than the Spanish Mendes bunch, in their pose of non-assimilation, would ever admit. Chauncey too, looking down from his height, had a gratified expression.

  Mannix turned to look long at the room, conscious that he didn’t
want to leave even now. And he was owed—one question. “Is that he on the piano? Your great-grandson?”

  “Yes,” said Olney’s voice behind him. “That was Geoffrey. I scarcely knew him. Hard to b’lieve that like Christ, he died for me.” He turned. “But that’s not the picture I was hunting—Proctor!” But Proctor had discreetly gone downstairs again. “Well, never mind.”

  But Mannix, at the door now, had to know it—which end to what story, which lost silhouette?

  “Who? Whose were you hunting?”

  “They had it taken at the railroad station, just the two of them,” Olney said, as if the Judge must know. “A barbarous custom. But it was often done.”

  The Judge saw them all falling through the water-curtain of the years—Luce, still a girl on her mount, and her grandson at Alamein, Mrs. Olney the wife, and the secretary singer leaving together perhaps for the country in their wide platter hats—even the whole ménage of this house in a dogcart à la Harper’s Weekly, with the father-in-law-progenitor in the center at the reins, his neck ruffed like a sunflower’s as in the Nast cartoon. Then the door shut and he was standing outside on the steps in a steel-blue cold, the touch of his friend’s dry fingers still in his gloveless palm, in his ears Olney’s whisper, their last salute as he fled the drafts of the vestibule. “A picture of Julian. My brother Julian. And the substitute.”

  It was a quarter of three. He put on the gloves and started walking. As he turned north, he caught a glimpse, through a curtain still awry, of the wicker chair in the window, its sidepockets stuffed with reading matter, perhaps some of the New York Reports.

  His steps rang exhilarated on the pavement; the city, solitary under its brindled welkin, was most his now, the breathless cold of its best season his element. Those curtains the lady had so admired were still eighteen blocks away, and the cold needled at the thin soles of his dress shoes, but if a lost taxi had passed him, out of The Flying Dutchman at this hour and on its way to Brooklyn, he wouldn’t have hailed it. As a boy he had often contrarily slogged his way home on foot in the worst weather, the bus fare burning meanwhile in his pocket, a bet he was sure to win.

  He passed a house on a northeast corner, a white marble balustrade; in those days it had been as high as his head. All one winter, his ninth, he’d rounded it on his way to old Basch the ear doctor, to have his bad right one lanced, the first year he’d been allowed to cross the city alone without nurse or mother. Even now, when he flashed by here in a cab, it was still old Basch’s corner, the white mansion on it anonymous still, it being the balustrade that counted, memory floating a Piranesi still only that high. Though he himself now resided here on the “upper East Side,” the phrase and the environs sometimes still had their early dream quality, half villainous too. So it had appeared in his father’s conversations with the other elders—a mysterious stronghold, more than of Gentiles, of other morals and manners too and of course money, to which the old West Side families and their imitative mansions, the Ochses, the Meinhardts, the Littauers, the Mendeses—had themselves at last deserted. These currents were as strong as any that washed the city’s extension, on far Montauk.

  Here was Seventy-ninth Street, one of the old Astor places, wasn’t it, or some other old fur peddler of the seventh-grade civics books, and here behind its balustrade a solitary rose of Sharon bush, left over from what new-century-green landscaping? Gaunt now, but bridging all the summers of his youth, the bush bloomed of a summer still. Such lore was what made a bred New Yorker, slum or upper, refuse even to sneer at those ten-twent’-thirt’-year migrants who presumed to know his city in a parade of restaurants, and who lived here, as they said—now.

  His ears were as cozy as a child’s in Olney’s earmuffs. Above the park the heavens were as widening a scroll as on that wintry dusk when he and the chum had walked the floes on a lake drowning in its violet solitudes and snowy wastes, far across the steppes from the skyscrapers’ lights—and, item for the biographies, two park attendants had rescued from its seal-cold waters a future appellate justice, and Professor Abe Cohn. “Russian?,” his mother, who’d never before seen his chum, had managed to whisper, even into the steaming twin blankets, in which she had wrapped them both—a kind woman, not vile, only wanting her son to stay in his society. And her son, if he had enlarged the society, had certainly kept the principle.

  He was middle-class, of his particular proud race (and no one would ever make him ashamed of either), never servile to any of any race presumed to be above: him—never consciously unkind to those whom, race apart, he presumed to be below him—even dedicated professionally to be of service to them, but not from any sloppy liberalism of the heart. His mother had also bequeathed him her shortness; there was a strain of dwarfism in her family—kept concealed and when found out unmentionable—from which he supposed his six-foot father had saved him, stretching him by a counter effort of the genes to a half-inch or so under five. Her Simon was supposed to have inherited her quickness also. Even now he could not quite bear to be slow. He had had an only son’s obligation not to be. “You’re the champ.” But she hadn’t been an honest person, his mother; like many women of her sort, behind a soft, Israelite amplitude of breast she was a person of many fiddling pretenses and not quite majestic fears. If he himself had the absolute honesty required of a judge, he’d got it from his father, that sportsman-innocent of the business world whom only the florid finances of the era had kept better than solvent, who had bequeathed him honesty general and uncontested, like the fact of always having a dollar in pocket.

  There were only three more avenue-blocks now. The Judge took off the earmuffs. Kept the head warm maybe, but induced a simple herbalist style of thought which would never do by day.

  He stood quiet in numbing air already damp with a promise that came not to the eye but to the whole animal. He was well aware of that other guerrilla-haunted world of emotions, dissidences, opinions and temperaments which kept some men further apart from society than circumstances or money ever did. In that world too, he felt himself if not full-square at least somewhere near center, well within the balustrade.

  His glance swiveled past the high clouds and down again to buildings west and south, in the radius of those beacons the city allowed to be played on it from dreadnoughts in the river. All his early life, lucky in his place and temperament, beneath both he’d felt that such a city had to be stormed by every man. By day, he’d credited himself with no longer believing it. Curious how at an hour dampened to most sound, freed most of men’s atmosphere, the city rose again, in the dragons’ teeth sown in its dwellers forever, once more, even to the solitary, conquering rider, an audience.

  Three blocks on, he turned east, down his own cross street. Many times he’d walked toward many things down this street. Toward old Mendes’s death and the vast clearings-out and movings-in which had left the house tribally fair to both generations. Toward Ruth’s birth and the honeymoon closeness of those few after-months when all four of them had seemed to be fed on mother’s milk. Toward that sub-life of his children in some mythical belowstairs he became aware of only when it erupted into real accident. To the rackety phonograph evenings which sat on the old rooftop like paper hats—and to his own study, below all activity and behind it, calm and free as such cells were. Always, he walked toward the power of-his house. If the nature of this was biblical, it had taken a Christian to point that out to him—as was the habit of Christians with other people’s testaments, and their agonies too. Though if he could have said this to Borkan and Olney, interrupting that lipread exchange, it would have been Olney who smiled.

  “Don’t single us out,” pleaded Borkan, because he was Borkan, and in that was all one ever needed to know about the hierarchies of the Jews. “If we are not singled out,” preached the rabbis, “we are nothing; all our history is nil.” And that went for a man personally too if he had the brains and the bootstraps. Though of this the rabbis preferred to say nothing. “Otherwise, we in our turn”—so went a man’s own s
ecret addendum—“are nothing but the coral reef, the aggregate, the sediment of cities.” This is the power of my house.

  Tonight, what he walked toward in it was Mirriam. Even now, through all this, they weren’t a divided couple, merely one not joined. Often, after their separate stimulations of the night, they met in bed, coupling with the excitement of strangers met in a dream house, in one of those exotically prepared way stations of sexual daydream which had somehow been legalized for them—and in the morning was seen to be their own. His six months of worry must stand, would be corroborated, if he spoke. But tonight’s was an error, an over-subtlety of the nerves. Not to speak was merely the subtlety he and his wife had resorted to in these matters; why should she break it now that there was no need?

  For all this time he had been going over their dialogue as in an examination; beneath the righthand flow of thought on which he walked, the left hand mirror-wrote also, to convince him that he understood her words on the phone as he understood her character—dark of motive until she chose to reveal it, jangled as a bacchante’s when in action, but in utterance flashing pure. The fellow was leaving for the war, or war was his excuse—and in the brittle way she had when piqued, she’d been talking to the fellow ail along. Dropping people, the privilege of it, was in her foolish, still debutante rationale, all hers. He’d so often before seen it exercised in her vague, demi-primrose wanderings from his house—which she would never leave. She’d used him, her own husband, but of pique. And now it was over or soon would be, and there was no blood on anyone’s hands. But in the core of the bedroom, between the sheets when he had got her there—if he did not strangle her, he would speak.