New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  It came out, in his brief summary, even to the girl listening, how very “good” his mother had been, at being silently poor. They had remained in the cellar, escaping censuses, elections, somehow all the numbers which bound most people to outside life. The relief bureau?—no, even if they had known about it, that depended on numbers too. Even if the two of them could have proved their existence, they had no way of proving, in the illegal hole where they lived for a small cash rental without receipts, how long they had been anywhere. No, he had never had anyone to stay with him in babyhood, as far as he knew. He must have picked up his first English when he had begun to accompany his mother; later he did it by imitation consciously, for a while from the priests. For, when he was quite tall, and had already had a few “jobs” on his own, he had remembered for her that she was Catholic, and they had gone to church—and under that influence he had been put in school at last, not the parochial but the public school. He had attended or hadn’t, according to how he and she could manage. After it began to be understood—by him—how “good” he could be at school, he’d taught her that they must manage it and recently had.

  The school—this grayish, battered trough for disinfectant, for a hard-mouthed staff climbed up from others like it, and always for the fleshy noise, weak or wild, of children—was to him, though he didn’t say it, a dreamland. But it came out perhaps, to the teacher listening, how he’d acquired his dexterity with the stupid, with herself. For the rest—the neighborhood, mostly Chinese until one got to the pushcarts, had kept this couple to themselves, and him from the street life of his age, until he’d learned this too, at his “jobs.” As far as could be seen, from his lightish hair and chub face, he was not a Chinee. “No—” The substitute teacher had sighed at the end of it all—“no, you really look Hungarian to me.” This he had taken home with him too.

  For he had no legend; obsessively this seemed to him the only difference between him and others, in the world that he knew. To him—and this would be as much the measure of him as the intelligence many found fresh and uncorrupted as an animal’s—he was in every other way in the prime and natural state of health, as much as any other boy. The existence of riches, or even the modest lift of privilege which would have raised him from the lowest, he bore with indifference, like a moviegoer who had seen only two or three films (as was about his score between school and parish house) to whom all Eldorado was therefore the same. As yet he bore no grudge, for lack of a past for it to spring from. But even in the bars where the Bowery bums got the 25-cent shots and he and his mother sometimes scrubbed, he had heard legend-scraps of family and nativity. In the rat-colored humidity of these lowest depths, often such a brilliant rain of reminiscence came over one of the clouded minds there, so much like a movie-flicker that it was hard not to give it credit for being as real.

  He had begun the filing system with his mother. Patiently as with a cart horse, he had made her go over everything she knew, though at first, seeing the “paper” ready in the shoe box, she was afraid, thinking he’d somehow become involved with the police for whatever she and he must have done wrong without knowing it. Slowly, she’d begun to enjoy his questioning; he even fancied it had left her a little brighter than she came to it. He made her describe over and over, for instance, the man who had come with her sisters to be a pretend husband since this might after all have been a sort of father. He was pleased at the slightest trace she could recall of the old country; once it was a pigsticking, which however stopped short of human detail; at the pig. He began to hope, like the father of an idiot, that she would remember more if she could only express it in her own language, of which, perhaps laid away somewhere, she might have more too. For a while it was his highest ambition to meet another Hungarian, and bring him home. (Instead he was to find two—his aunts, known among the Mannix retinue of suppliers, pensioners and hangers-on, all those below the rank of guest but often fed and tended like these, as “the Halecsy sisters,” the Judge’s sisters’ dressmaker and milliner.) But all that was to be later—and of course his aunts never came to the cellar. Meanwhile, he had investigated everything he could think of, because there was so little, and had stopped at nothing, even helped here by what was special to him and his mother—that she had given him no prior knowledge of what topics, in conversation with her or others, should be stopped at. But she remembered nothing about his father, her attacker. Nor was he able to make any more sequence of the years of their life than he knew for himself.

  Then one night, he had a triumph. For as long as he could remember, his mother had worn the same coat, once black, once of a length and a shape, but now a kind of tireless no-garment suited to her looks and her losses; there was no telling her age from her looks now, but she was tireless too. When he understood that the coat belonged to her “upstairs life,” in the days before the basement, he had to take deep breaths not to leap upon her to squeeze out the knowledge she must hold somewhere within, not to scare it away. The coat had been made for her, she finally said, by a sister—one of the two. It took him all evening to get the names of the sisters from her—her refusal ever to name them to him had been the only departure into emotion (other than her care of him, never expressed as emotion) that he had ever seen in her. He had never even been sure that it was a refusal, not merely that she was unable. But he understood at once that here was where he must probe. Something about the coat, now that she herself studied it, had affected her, perhaps only that like herself, after all the hours since that hallway—under all the morning haulings of water and the chapped candles of evening—it was still here. Before they slept, he had transcribed the two names from her guttural as best he could.

  Another month or so lapsed before he did anything about it; he was possessed now by a strange inertia, the reluctance a fish might have before it made itself rise from the brown of the sea bottom, so soft with refuse it had paths through, into the blinding, rainbow air. He told no one about his inquiries once he did begin them, or rather no one of import, like the school registrar, who might help him too rapidly, with one grand push. Now and then, however, he begged hints on how to go about such research from people almost as low in the scale as he and his mother, who would be safe. For, he had the wariest sense that he was meddling with life processes which had brought him forth into conditions which were meant to keep him where he was. And he had to do it on his own.

  “Missink poyson, bureau vom missink poyson, dot’s vat ya van,” said a peddler for whom he sometimes “worked”—at sorting the rotten fruit down into the underlayers of the baskets to be sold, for which he was paid in kind. In an unguarded moment he had answered this with a statement of his own—then quickly taken up his pulpy earnings and gone on. Behind him, he had seen the peddler make a sign to his wife. Meshuggenah, that little goy.” He wasn’t used to being called crazy, but well used to the other—apparently the unknown half of him was neither Chinee nor Jew. For often he was called goy even by peddlers who didn’t know his mother, and he thought of this as one more step along the path of elimination by which he might possibly present himself to all nations of the earth one by one, so that he might get the answer “No—not us.” Definition of what he was might even after that come hard, but he had one, of a sort. “No, we are the missing persons,” he’d said to the peddler. And this he truly believed.

  In the post office, on a rainy off afternoon, he’d inquired for a city directory. “My God, take ya till doomsday, even if I could give ya, kid!” said the idler behind the grating. “Whyn’t ya try the phone?” The man had even held out to him, with a grand sweep of the arm, a last year’s phone book, or he might never have looked in such a place. For several nights, after his lessons, he scanned slowly through the Y’s, the J’s, and at last the H’s. When he found it, he had his first sensation of fear, mixed with awe. Somehow, he had never thought of anyone connected with him and his mother as having a phone.

  Even if he had known for sure how to handle one, he wouldn’t have used it for his purpos
e, and not only because his mother was as ignorant as he; if one rang in a restaurant late at night when the chairs were up, she continued silently scrubbing, or if it persisted, picked it up and listened, shaking her head at how the thing chattered at her. No, the only way to use what he had found was the straight method of the miracle, which was what he viewed it as, and what he told his obedient mother—they were going uptown for a miracle. He had never been uptown, but he committed to memory the line of print in the phone book, and never even put it on a card. It was too big a fact for one.

  On the Sunday then, cleaned and buttoned as if for church, he had set out with her from the cellar, on directions obtained. The finding of the house had that calm rhythm which he thought must precede all miracles; after a smooth subway ride, a short walk and a steep climb to the fifth-floor flat, he rang the bell. The sisters were home—and in a way, all he had believed was true. The door opened, and the sisters recognized each other—three faces nibbled by life. His mother had fainted on the doorstep, tired at last.

  It developed that the two old maids had always been ashamed of this sin of their “youth”—it was understood that they meant their youth in this country, since even at the time of their desertion, these two had not been young. Now that their sister and her boy were here—and he, from quick, sharp glance was certified as no Chinee but under his glasses a plain-featured boy, tall as a middle-sized man but wearing pants still too long for him—well, yes, the two had been missed. Hot chocolate was given them in atonement, and in time he would have his legend too, not too much of a one, as sifted through these two, but with its central fact, for him enough.

  But by that time, the Mannixes, ever acquisitively generous—had him. Under their aegis, more had happened to him externally than a collegium of schoolmen expert at miracles could have chartered. Between then, which had been 1944, and now, June 1951, he had gone (with the aid of summer school and outside reading, in which the Judge had always been happy to guide him) from the ninth grade through Harvard, and one year into law school. On the very day he had met them he had already, discovered—to be concealed from all but them until the oddity of those lost years faded—his real age. But the moment on the doorstep remained the miracle. It was the one in which he’d discovered what his true poverty was. Such a moment—in which emotion, only that instant discovered like a great valve, is at the same instant fulfilled—wasn’t easily counterfeited. It remained the exquisite moment of his life. Despite this, he still kept on with the cards. From sense of duty alone he would have gone to them, the way a man would tend with rake and spade his birthplace, where personality had begun.

  He and his mother lived now in affluence, in fifty-dollar-a-month rooms which the Judge’s sisters had found for them near some of their own properties in the Czech-Slovak part of Yorkville, two rooms with an inside toilet, in a bathroom tiled with many remnant colors by a landlord who was also a housewrecker by trade, but still a tiled bath. By the accident of the city, the rooms, in a neat tenement between church property and the Mannix sisters’, were less than ten blocks from the Mannix house itself. And because the place was his, whether he came home to it from that other house or from the ivied stone and bear rugs of the Harvard dormitories, it was still the ultimate in luxury. He’d already known about inside toilets of course, from the restaurants. Sophistication can only come to a man once. After that—as after his own first visit to the Mannix house—he can only be surprised.

  The sunlight came in now on the wooden filing case, used as a desk also, which had supplanted the old, heavy-paper accordion files he used to steal; once he had taken a particular after-school job because on a man’s desk in that office, he had caught sight of such a file. All change in him since his slow, natural reaction to circumstance. “If I had to choose an epitaph to put on your tombstone, Edwin, I know what it would be,” the Judge had once joshed him. “Edwin Halecsy, a learner.”

  The Judge was a deadpan josher, with a great sense of humor, sour and raw, with flashes even of obscenity, all of which went with basics Edwin had learned too early ever to forget—and was part of why he could learn so well from the Judge. For there were certain kinds of fakery—the fake irony of many of his instructors was one—which sank to nothing the minute he remembered to test them against the badlands of his youth. Curiously, he didn’t hate his early years; these remained to him his integrity, persisting alongside his pleasanter path like an always accessible reservoir, plumbless with monsters but known, necessary as water to life, and with the same taste to it as water—plumbless too, but what every man knows. He knew a lot about himself he never bothered with. If asked whether a learned honesty, acquired so late and so clinically, was different from the usual, his answer, to himself at least, would have come at once from that reservoir: “Yes.”

  The late sun was casting its beams through a window he valued, both for the colored reflections from the window of the yellow brick parish-house wing of the church next door, and because of its own light, interrupted by the strong, ugly steeple, had a look of the view at the northwest rear of the Mannix house, blocked by a water tower, of whose influence on their history the Judge had told him. That same visit—on Edwin’s declaring for the law—the Judge, silent but upright, behind the desk in that study known to be the hallowed scene of all his days, had then said, “Reach up there! No, up there!” When Edwin handed down the designated volume, he’d been presented with it—an old calf copy of John Bouvier’s law dictionary, dated 1839. “Devise realty; bequeath personality,” the Judge said with a glint. “First thing I learned, though not from there.”

  In the room here, aside from a row of other presentation books kept separate from those he had acquired in Cambridge, there were small touches of gifts the Mannixes had given him unwittingly, bought at Woolworth’s with his “own money—a jar of cut flowers whose form Anna might have recognized, a green, tin-shaded lamp like the Judge’s own tole. For the rest, the room was cleaner than the usual student’s, kept so by his mother, but otherwise not elaborate, if one could forget—as neither of them ever quite did—that its light flowed never-failing from a meter, and its water ran.

  His mother had changed little externally; internally much more than he. Cellar living had forced her intelligence, even as a caged animal could learn to walk a treadmill. Now, humanized by this unexpected warmth, giving herself over entirely to her sisters and to him, she had stopped. By day, she sometimes worked as a cleaning attendant in a nearby beauty salon—from which came the fiction given out by his aunts that their sister was a hairdresser. Often, there or at home, in the simple pleasure of being where she was she forgot what she was at, but since a very little push served to activate her again, she was never troublesome. In the evening, as she sat in the steam-heated apartment, her eyes, used to cellar cold, streamed continually. Sometimes, staring at her across the table, he wasn’t sure that these tears were only rheum. In the early years of their partnership, her person had been a heavy blank to him, dependable hindrance as well as help. Now, in the way a good Catholic, or a half-one, might begin to over-interpret the heavy image of the Madonna lugged with him through the years, she began to seem wise. She had a new black coat.

  It was time to shave and dress. He resisted—anticipation at these times was always part of the pleasure, and the recall also—then went into the bathroom to turn on and wait for the hot water, which ran slow. Seven years had made him younger only in what he thought of as the surface of his mind. Physically, he seemed to himself to have grown younger also, though this was mostly because of his clothes. In the slums, children’s-size clothes were never as cheap secondhand as the tramp-trousers sold at stalls for under a dollar. For years he had lived in the anonymous crotch-smell of others, and had rarely seen, as other boys did daily, the gradual rising of his own knees. His hair, grown in a thick sprout from his crown, had been cut with scissors, one of their few tools, kept safe from the roaches with some bits of cutlery in a tin box, which the rats could knock over but never pris
e.