New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  Now his head was clipped almost as smooth as a knuckle, and he wore army pants and the scuffed white sneakers which were beginning to be the other sign of his generation’s youth. In the mirror, he could see behind him his jacket hung ready, to one side of a laden set of shelves. Sometimes in his dreams, dressed as of old, he found himself seated at an examination desk, on whose blank white paper he was being required to write down the names and uses of all the objects piled before him in a huge mound of human goods as high as the Resurrection—from shoe polish to tinned soup, to lampshades and coat hangers, even drawers with keys, closets with doors, step-on garbage cans and silver napkin rings—all the paraphernalia of the civilized, and all yet blank to him. Then he always woke with heart-knocking relief, and moving only his eyes, head still thralled to the stone pillow of this almost conservative nightmare, numbered each of these very objects in his shelter now.

  It wasn’t so much as comforts he saw them but as signposts, and faintly ridiculous, the product of elves. No wonder seven years among them had made him younger. Once again he rose from his cot in the cat-piss of the cellar, stuck his feet into his St. Vincent de Paul Society shoes, washed with a sliver of Fels-Naptha, lifted the trapdoor and angled his neck out above the pavement seams, into a morning gray as yer grandmother’s cunt said a bum just passing, or into a Saturday job’s bright burden of sunshine on the noon soot of the gutters, or into a scrubwoman’s midnight, luridly striped as his fondest fancy, a slab of Neapolitan brick ice cream. He sometimes thought that while others in his new world aged properly enough, he might spend his whole life growing ever more greenly superficially innocent, up from the maturity of those streets.

  In this new world, crowded with ideas and objects of which he was daily still discovering the habits and names, people seemed to float calmly atop a wrack of these they had made peace with since the cradle. Fish-naked in his dreams, in his dreams he still walked toward these other denizens of the upper air, a man-fish flapping up the watersteps to their morning, in their own secondhand shoes. In his dreams they waited to receive him, and turn him back. But by day, they none of them seemed to notice what they had with them—the ancient young of the eel, colored with their own depths. By day, crossing Harvard Yard or ascending the Mannix stoop at a Christmas, he never mixed up their streets with his. Or better still for them, seemed not to grudge the difference. He could smile at that now, with an intelligence drawn from both sides: the differences they saw in him were so mild. But by night, by dream, a phone rang in the cellar—and his mother answered it.

  He was knotting his tie when the real phone rang on the sunny desk.

  “Hello—” he said. And as always as if his fists were up. Because he couldn’t help that, but knew who was on the other end and why she mightn’t like or trust him, he added blithely, just for the hell of it, “This is the Halecsy residence.”

  “Hallo,” said Anna. “You don’t say.”

  They were too near each other socially. She must hate to serve him on a par with her darlings (even though they might be his also)—the way nigger messboys in university commons disliked serving their own color when it ate on a fellowship.

  “And how are you, madame, are you feeling the summer?” But he could never strike the right note of chaff with her, the way other young visitors could at once, Austin or Walter, on whom it was as easy as the leather of their shoes.

  “I feel your backside for you, you come again late.” He was the only one she sounded coarse with. If he hadn’t known her secure position in that household, he’d have thought the footing he had there somehow frightened her.

  “What are we having?” he asked, meaning “Who’s coming?” or “Who’ll be home?” by their favorite dishes, he could know. Not ham if David were already home; steak for Austin, a squash player as anyone would know, which Austin would laugh at himself. It might even be veal with olive—the dish of her choice; she had never had a homecoming until now. …Though he would settle for any of the “big” dishes which would mean the presence of them all.

  “What we?” Anna said gruffly.

  It was only what the others always said. But he wouldn’t repeat it. In recesses he’d never known he had until he went to that house, he could now be hurt.

  “Judge say you be here six.” She knew well enough, when she bothered to consider, that the Judge was his law. And even she did bother to; they all did, without hierarchy, extending the gift of their solicitude to him who was as yet only a frequenter, just as equally as to Pauli Chavez, their old family friend, and to the Judge’s first cousin Miss Augusta, who were among the solid habitués. His own knowledge of these gradations was even a sign of how they were training him to it. This was how it was when people lived not behind trapdoors but in houses. They all were concerned with what each other felt and did, down to the last and smallest thing. Happy families always were.

  “But dinner’s still at eight?” he said.

  “Yah. Like always.” But she knew his privilege, an hour and a half with the Judge. Tonight, it would be more.

  “Anna…” His voice had lightened and he was holding the phone easily now. “Give the Judge a message for me, huh, a special one.”

  “Yah?”

  “Tell him very carefully, huh?”

  “So, yes?”

  “Tell him—he wants a great copy of Fearne’s Essay on the Learning of Contingent Remainders and Executory Devises—I know where.”

  “Hah?”

  He repeated it joyously. He was learning their mischief, the younger Mannixes’ of course; surely he was learning how to have a humor-book of his own?

  She hung up on him, something he was unsure she’d ever do to one of them. But he was so pleased with himself and all his expectations—life ones, all fined down to the point of this evening, any evening with one or all of them—that he clicked down the phone as lightly as if born to it, and merely thumbed his nose at her, one of the politer gestures from his old repertoire. Since it was only five o’clock and a ten-minute walk, he opened the file again—then, with an affectionate sweep as if he were dismissing a younger brother, he riffled the cards with the back of a thumbnail and closed the drawer.

  The shadows were stealing in; it was going to be one of those fogbound, all of a sudden mystery evenings in which he best loved to approach the house, drifting through the dusk on a kind of waltz time, toward that food, those lights, stepping past the areaways—even cellars thereabouts were high-tone, though he would never live in one—looking proudly about to see other passersby who weren’t going there. He picked up a case he had been studying, pleased to have it negligent now in his hand—Cardozo J. in People v. Defore, 242 N.Y. 13, 21 (1926)—one of the Judge’s favorites, he surmised, from its being so often open there in the study; now that he was in law school himself, the Judge never much talked law. Although the air was turning too lavender for reading, he let it come without lamps, pushing its lilac around him, letting him muse on his anticipations and over and over, seven years over, on their source. He didn’t need the file to remind him; no matter how often he flipped the cards and stared; his first visit was always the one returned to in the end. A major one, most major of all, it had set a pattern for all the others. A major visit was one in which all three members of the family, plus the two boy visitors he had met there that day, were all there. …

  The trouble with a miracle is afterwards—what do you do then? Ever since loaves and fishes had once upon a time fed a multitude, Christians had had to face this problem. In the first weeks afterward, his mother, Marda, did it most primitively and best—she sat and gaped. But the aunts were members of the church. Faced with this awesome revisitation of the blood relative, there on their own frieze sofa that mother and boy sitting upright, raw to the nails with laundry soap but with the mordant air of that other district in every pore—the aunts thought at once of jackets and coats. After all their own trade was cloth—a covering.

  For this occasion, Edwin’s hair had been professionally
cut, at his request instead of his usual cash pay, in the barbershop where he was sometimes a juvenile runner for the policy game whose headquarters were in the back. The barber had done it for nothing in the end, and Edwin, used to the benevolences of the poor, had accepted it, as he would later those of the rich—with the grace of an ignorance where charity began. But though his schoolwork to date had barely warned him of what distinctions life could make once it was able to raise itself a minim above the need to eat and pee, he already could recognize smartness anywhere—and had seen at once that his aunts—only more complex than his mother because there were two of them—didn’t have much of it. At first he had told them that he needed “the facts”—as he called them—for school. The aunts’ instinct, however, after the first flush of anecdote, had been to measure him for trousers, not legend. His reply had been direct; unless they could produce what he wanted, he refused to be made respectable. Blackmail was known to him only in the jiujitsu of the gutter: use any lever handy. His mother of course did whatever he told her. On the sisters’ tan sofa, hard from never being sat on except fleetingly by the soft parts of customers, the pair therefore sat, his mother in her heirloom black, he in his bankers’ lice-gray.

  By the fourth visit, a Jewish feast day when the markets were closed, all the tenants of the neat walk-up knew of this couple who “belonged” to the fifth-floor front, of the relationship (not cousins as the aunts had first let get about), and even, in such terms as they could understand it, of the boy’s quest. A bachelor neighbor, a long, mild watchmaker named Schwer, was aiding the Halecsys in this, but old passports were not the easiest to find in the curly forests of a milliner’s world, the other half of which specialized in “alterations.” Had they even kept them, the sisters asked one another? “And what does the boy want from his bastardy?” whispered the oldest sister in Hungarian. “He can’t get a name out of it!” To which the middle sister replied, “But maybe if we find it, we could ask them. Maybe they could get him one.” This significant reference to the Mannixes, and their places in the minds of many of their acquaintances, went half unobserved. While feathers were sifted, plus the hat-and-hem scraps of many decades. Edwin sat on in his many layers of gritty sweater, his mouth full of cake like any boy, but otherwise refuser of the most delicate offers—Schwer’s own discarded pea jacket, a newly bought pair of mittens—though it was on into the cold season outside. He sat primly, still unnerved by this comfort of real tables and chairs and food not scrounged for, and unable to see more than half of it at a time—the spectacle-string dangling on his nose.

  Just before the cocoa boiled, the passports were found, along with a bunch of buckles which brought memories—“Remember these!”—and while he waited breathless, several inspirations for hats.

  “Come, come—now we’re in business,” said old Schwer, and gave the boy a bachelor shrug he never forgot—even now, sitting here in his tortoiseshell rims, their twin lenses both sparkling clear, he treasured it—a first titbit of intimacy, extended the wolf-child. His mother’s passport wasn’t with the sisters’, but those would do, as a beginning. From then on Schwer would have to calculate the intervals—until Marda came over, until she was waylaid, until Edwin was born. …

  Schwer sat them all down at the dining-table under the hanging lamp—milliners’ memories were a feather forest too.

  “No cocoa now,” said Schwer. At last he had his considered entries, set as if in a Bible, on the black-lined guide-page of a school pad, in his spider script. The final interval was the easiest. “And now—” said Schwer, leaning back—“ask her if he was a full-term child.” Schwer had conducted all the inquiry this way, very formally; the boy, watching, saw that he could never have done it that businesslike himself. He didn’t help his mother with her answer, or help them to get it from her—fearful that he might affect its official value. Yes, she nodded, though with a shrug, when at last she understood what was wanted of her—yes, as far as she knew. And so, it was done. And Schwer, after a final calculation, the most workmanlike, checking, and a last midwife flourish of the pen—gave him his age.

  It was a moment less pure than on the doorstep only a few weeks ago, but more powerful, complicated with action, which for all his studies then and now was the element he best knew. The age itself, to a boy that young, was a revelation. Though from body manifestations he’d suspected he must be older than the “school” age by grade, which was all he had, three years more was a shock; at that age many boys in the district were already fathers, and though he had skipped another term just recently, he was still only in the ninth, grade. The evening light itself, coming in the windows just as now but with the steel of winter in it, seemed to him biblical. Through his steaming lenses, the coarse glass lampshade of crude yellow, red and blue, blurred like the coat of many colors, though unlike Joseph, he wasn’t being put out in the desert to die. His mouth was full of bread; he was being received. Around the table he saw the two sisters, more worried now, even aghast; he saw his mother as usual, dependent on him, waiting in her timid way for a cue to smile. Only Schwer, with some sense, put out his hand, with a sweep of accomplishment. “Like a christening,” he said. “We get some schnapps.”

  After a moment, he gave his own hand into Schwer’s, not understanding that allusion, but full of his own. Not to know one’s name or one’s father—this could happen to any foundling. But not to know one’s age, and then, after this saints’ supper of raised and lowered heads, to know it—was the difference between never having been born and—being born.

  He was standing on the dais the aunts used for fitting customers, waiting to be measured for trousers, a Roman-striped kitchen towel pinned round his waist over his ragged BVD’s, when Schwer came back with a bottle, letting enter in front of him a girl staggering under such a long, lumpy bundle of clothing that the only parts of her visible were her mittened arms clasped round it, and her head in its winter parka, above. Schwer, his whole lank personality blooming under the afternoon’s accomplishment, moved forward with an air of having brought the girl along with his schnapps, and even said largely, “Here he is, the famous nephew”; each aunt said, “Miss Ruth!”, then one muttered, “Our nephew—we found each other only a few weeks ago,” and the other moved forward to take the bundle, saying “Miss Ruth…here …let me.”

  A screen had hastily been placed around his lower half and he was left to stand there, accepting this too as reasonable; things happened to him up here that he would have punched for or kicked out at, blindly or with vicious aim, in the district, but up here he merely suffered them, absorbed in every newness. The word “nephew” for instance. Of course he’d known its meaning and could spell it the way he could spell almost anything. But it had been years before he’d finally met all the relationships in the human family and could refer to them easily. This was only to be expected of a boy reared under such a scant list of them and three of those mythical: Mother, Son, Father, Sisters, Aunts. As for physical shame, his mother, dressing in front of him in the basement, and having to let him do the same, had given him what little differentiations she could; they had turned their backs on one another, they’d been as modest as hall toilets allowed, and never slept in their clothes if they had a change of them. Nose-picking, farting and belching-crotch-scratching and blowing the nose through the fingers, had all had to be learned away. As he once more cast back, he knew that although dozens of other novelties had over the years been tabulated, if he went deep enough the supply was inexhaustible.

  Oddly, the girl, in her parka and with her bundle, enough resembled those at school so that at first she was merely another of a sex which had already given him his adolescent heats, but with whom as yet—as with all beings outside the fiercely sequestered circle of his and his mother’s needs—he had had little to do. By rights, this particular girl, for her effect on his destiny, should have had a yellow nimbus scratched in the air above the white bunny-hat he didn’t yet know wasn’t fake fur like the others’. When she took her m
ittens off, the bitten nails, childishly swollen at the tips like half the kids he did know, made him feel, for the first time in this cocoa-and-whisper-soaked haunt of old-maid women, at home. Later, her sex itself would overtake him, but in her case almost inconveniently added to what else was already there.

  …For, of all the people to come in the next seven years of his life, Ruth Mannix, in some central way he couldn’t fathom, was the least strange. Recently, if she’d become dizzily sweet or light in his dreams of her, a modest pastel of gaieties and reflections, he knew this was more her environment sparkling down on him, molding her into manners and prettinesses whose style, met around Harvard was the same as many girls’. Sexually, she was never the solitary occupant of his young man’s dream. Something else, central to her, had made them at once natural with each other. She and he were not like. He didn’t have with her the intellectual kinship he was as oddly to find with her father. Nor was it “sympathy” she gave him, unlike her brother David, who gave it too broadly to everyone.

  Except for the seven years of his association with her family, what did he have in common with this calm, sweetly cool girl who hadn’t even gone to college so far, and still spent her time at the ballet bar except when, in her lovely, filial way that moved even young people—she was companioning her father? Yet she, for all her legend, and he, Edwin the half nameless—shared. That was the feeling. She’d found him of course, and brought him home to that family for the afternoon, for seven years, for—he couldn’t help hoping—forever. But the feeling antedated that; therefore he’d given up hunting for its source. He’d never before or since been met so intuitively. Therefore, what she and he shared must be something native to both their lives before. …

  So Schwer had moved on into the room after her with his pint bottle. A pint, in the pocket or empty in the gutter, was what one had in the district too. “Come, come,” said Schwer, who’d had a few drinks on the way, capering over behind the aunts’ backs to broach the sacred china closet for its red-and-gilt glasses.