New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  He hadn’t known it was a school.

  “Where do you go?”

  “Thirty-one,” he said. He saw her doubtful look. “P. S. 31. On Monroe and Gouverneur.” He was careful to say as they did in the district, “Gooverneer.” “Before that, Number Four. On Rivington and Pitt.” Suddenly he grinned at her. He had caught her expression. “Street,” he said. “They’re streets.”

  She nodded swiftly. “And how is it? Number Thirty-one?” She was smart too.

  “How is it?” He was playing for time. Right then and there at the bottom of those steps was when he learned it—that everything these people had and were must be under eternal scrutiny by such as him; it was this that helped overwhelm him a few minutes later, when she opened the door. “How do you mean?” He knew the proper answer of course—in the district: “You think yours is strict!” or the currently popular “They chop us in the morning, fry us in the afternoon.” Mostly the word was its own foulest answer. School. He had never dared defend it.

  “Do you like it, I mean.”

  The question disarmed him—that up here it was possible to ask. He thought truly of his loved haven, his adventure-place where people spoke in full words and sentences, knew times and places, where there was always a thunder-clatter of others like him, or nearly, up and down the pie-cut metal steps which went round and round like the days there, on the blissfully neat reassurance of “Hang up your coats” and “Fold your hands.” In the church-warmth of the library, more than half the books were not too torn to read. And in the halls there was a great, breasting wind always blowing; this was the hall-sound of the teachers haranguing like peddlers, selling how to and what to—and the chance of—a thousand 5x8’s.

  But like the Jew vegetable brokers, he would never touch his luck with superlative. He hunted for one of their wry avoidances of even the shadow of the shadow of satisfaction. None came. In the Bowery, however, there had been a spoiled priest who went from one bar to the other in apostrophes to his bottle. (And years later he, Edwin, floating on this wreckage wisdom of the plebs, would gather a reputation for pith, with the people at the top of the stairs.) Now he shrugged. Did he like school? “Keeps the rats down and blessed,” he said. He saw a mouse-flicker of interest in her eyes.

  At the top of the stoop he started to hand over the bundle.

  “No, come on in.” She produced a key hung round, her neck on a ribbon. “Doorkey child,” she said with a grin. “Daddy says he wants us to get a lesson in responsibility. Really Anna made him do it, to save her steps.”

  At his school the key on a string had been a mere fact of life. He glimpsed a difference, between his clear palace-hovel version of life, and theirs. This people were accustomed to instill in their children habits which his underworld of circumstance gave him for free.

  “Who’s Anna?” was all he said.

  “She’s our—housekeeper. But she’s really a member of the family.” And later he would understand too that while Ruth might have been taught this glibness in order to avoid the genteel “our maid,” it was also a muddledly affectionate but exact judgment on Anna’s place. So did they create their own murk. But at the moment, he’d taken the word in the double way the district did; sometimes a “housekeeper” was the helper briefly sent in by the welfare agencies to a motherless family in desperate straits—and sometimes it was what the men, very simply and accurately too, called any woman whom they brought into the home but didn’t marry.

  The housedoor was heavy polished oak with a mail slot; he thought they must have a good landlord. On the lower East Side—a phrase for the district he hadn’t heard yet:—there were plenty of brownstone fronts converted to tenements. The idea of a single house, here in the city, was farther from his ken than were palaces—of which he had heard. In the vaguest way, he knew that there was more money and comfort here than at his aunts’—by the way the aunts deferred to it. He’d never gone home with any schoolmate; though he’d now and then been asked, there were always the jobs.

  So there he had been, worlding on their innocent doorstep, delivered there by himself, on as much of a birthday as he would ever have. When he didn’t come right in after her, the girl reached out, one hand still on the doorknob, and gave him a patting push inward, with the other. She hadn’t seemed to mind the corruption of his clothing, from whose dim, anciently inhabited checkers whatever soul he had shrank with recluse instinct, saying mutely and with all the foundling’s urge, “I’m Hungarian.”

  So it had really been she who bent down and took him up and in under that lintel—and for her own reason. There was a reason, clearly as if he had seen it like a gold paper star pasted between her eyes—as the kindergarten teachers sometimes did for those destined to be their favorites. To date he hadn’t discovered what it was—except that all of Harvard couldn’t help him here.

  “Welcome to the Mannix house,” the girl said.

  The Westclox on his desk was glowing; summer dusk had shifted on and he was in danger of being late for his precious audience with the Judge. Yet he lingered. The electric clock was their gift too, the first Christmas here; against sense, he still half-shared his mother’s reluctance to buy too many electrical appliances, from a care not to bleed this witchcraft too far. Lateness was his own small independence in the new world—chosen precisely because it wasn’t the wisest one. He had his luxuries. There was nothing he wouldn’t do if he really wanted to—and in the performance, he knew he had something the Mannixes lacked. For, whatever his own newer, educated self would not do, the old one would—and vice versa. Any tension between, he tried to think of as “caution,” a rope continuously extended between what intellect brought in—cargoes of sparklers every day!—and what his dark, homely reservoir already held. Up to a point, he liked to keep reminiscence within the old language and boundaries, like a horse that half-liked the dim sensation of its blindered days. But to report anything that had happened after that doorstep, and do it in the simple 5x8’s of his old self, was now impossible. Once under that lintel even in memory, his brain now brought to him all its seven-year vision of it.

  He picked up from the desk and pocketed a black leather notebook with attached gold pencil, in which after a visit he recorded the Judge’s sayings, as well as anything else of value that might strike him after he had left the household. This he had bought himself. Only a fool wouldn’t keep record of his life where he could.

  Outside in the street he walked slowly; this was part of the visit too.

  At first, inside the Mannix house, once the door had shut behind them, Ruth had gone ahead and up the stairs, assuming he would follow. But he literally couldn’t. In the long hall and half-visible connected rooms before him, down was up, and sideways lurched against him in shapes which for all he knew might move on toward and through him, like whales on a ghost sea-bottom, or dirigibles tethered in a room; there was everywhere a clutter of soft-hard furnishment which, if he touched his own filth to it, might sting. He saw his charity shoes at a great distance from him, on a floor more polished than any table he had ever seen. Fitted oversize, they helped bring him to balance; after any more than a few blocks walked in them, they made blisters. Raising his head, he saw in the hall mirror, of a greenish antique tint, which he took to be reassuring dirt, his jackstraw hair, his nose-string. Seeing it, he straightened himself like a dandy. Funds for a spectacle frame were still to come, but the fissured lens, always like a mist of error over his eyeball, had been repaired.

  Above his head, several yards away and up, a light hung from a chain, its heavy glass pointed as an icicle, which should make any woodcutter’s boy reluctant to go up that stairway. He stood fast, almost scanning the floor for a running brook or a mire, out of which would leap the stag that lured, or would burst the voice of a stone—after which he would plunge down through realms, to lift the buried haft of a sword. Then he saw the three boys, or young men, standing abreast under the stairwell, and knew that this was ambush indeed.

  They were just
such a queer triumvirate as was said to appear in other people’s dreams and might now be in his own. On the left was a short, hunched creature, surely deformed, yet somehow pleasing in aspect. Then came a very tall middle boy whose good looks were made Frankenstein by a black box wired to his ear, and on the right, the shorter fair-haired boy, pure blond giant of the average—who seemed to have nothing else wrong with him. Seen together, the trio would always have a moment’s staginess—the gargoyle, the ogre and the stooge—broken into at once by their amiable baritone chatter. If they were his dream, they hadn’t yet noticed him or it. They were real.

  Now, walking back through many visits to the greenish dark of that hallway, he could examine them as in the leisure of a dream. Nowadays, he always noticed Austin, the blond “average” boy, first. Actually, as he now knew, to be noticed first was Austin’s and the whole Fenno family’s propensity, all the more because they themselves did nothing to further this, and indeed gave no sign of knowing it. They all had a butcher-block solidity of fairness and bone, of rude health and yes, high-level averageness, all of which signaled at once—and especially to anyone with the black hairs of Latin inferiority in his nose—that the Fennos were everything normal to and beloved of the society; any Fenno child on a bus, in male or female navy blue with its schoolbag, was always so obviously the standard, the favorite, not singly but in dozen lots, which those in command of the comfortable and privileged life, or in service to it, had in mind. Brothers and sisters so resembled one another—or the type—in cheekbones and conventions, that this alone enhanced the impression, on meeting one Fenno, that one met the clan. Because of the heartiness of the type, the men stayed handsomer longer but the girls, who wore their wheat-silk hair plain and their breasts flat, had no trouble getting husbands, solid sons of bankers, merchant owners, lawyers, old-fashioned publishers, public servants and occasionally doctors—who might have been their brothers. They were all so nice and pleasant that if one didn’t like them—as those who couldn’t take the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideal head on usually didn’t—the world knew at once whose fault this was.

  In fact, he’d seen the actual Fenno clan only once and unseen by them, on campus one flying, sunny graduation afternoon—1948 this would have been, Austin’s. But at Harvard he almost liked their sort, perhaps not ever individually, but as a fine breed. He had fewer of the inferiorities which prevented certain other onlookers from doing so; this was the luck of having come from too far down even for that. From there, he could better see that although physically the coarser members of the breed sometimes declined to those snootier stockbroker types. whose boys and girls were now spreading out into advertising and country club suburbia, underneath, they remained responsible to some norm of conduct, carried within them less flamboyantly than among Jews or Catholics, like an informal household god. Much of this the Judge had pointed out to him, as with so much else. For if the law was experience, as the Judge so often said, then nowadays, all he wanted to talk about, either with Edwin or the others, was that experience.

  Austin’s family, he’d said, were old New Yorkers in no need of the shallower, new-style “house in Connecticut” roots, and of a sort which had never lived with flair. There was therefore no telling, from the somewhat shabby brownstone on Lexington, near Murray Hill but not on it, whether they’d lost their money or merely kept it; Warren Fenno, the father, who in Britain would have been an upper civil servant perhaps but here was employed by various private foundations, had in the decentest sense of the phrase made “good works” pay. Starting with the Hoover committees, he’d been in on every famine and rescue area of international charity since, the most recent being the refugee distribution committees of the war period, on one of which the Judge had met him, only to find that their boys, Austin and David, were already school friends. There was even a third-generation tie of a minor sort, a Mendes and a Fenno whose business offices had once adjoined—“Never think, Edwin, that New York is a wilderness without connection; this is only the provincial view; even the sea gulls know better, and have their patrons, and their lanes.”

  If clans like the Fennos, truly median (“Not so much the salt of the earth, Edwin, as the sterling silver”) were able to last, according to the Judge it was because of a steadily reappearing intelligence which one might never suspect from their stodgy to handsome exteriors, which never gave itself the racial airs of some, but rather persisted through generation after generation of all those navy-blue-clad children, like some stubbornly recessive but tenacious Mendelian pea. It was a special kind of intelligence, a Protestant one, not over-subtle but confident, on the sunny side of the street—and with this estimate of Austin, Edwin, and no doubt everyone else capable of it, agreed. Yet it was the Judge himself who had started the line, now a byword in the house, that Austin was “so handsome it’s hard to believe he’s that smart.” Perhaps that came out of an envy which Edwin, in looks himself a fair, average sort, didn’t share. Austin was good-looking of course, but what Edwin did envy was that assurance when it talked to the Judge, or sometimes even talked back.

  “Austin,” the Judge had once said, during one of the topical dinner discussions he liked to foster among the young folk, this day on religion, “I’m afraid you’re our pet Gentile.”

  Austin had replied at once, as graciously as if he were returning a compliment, “You must get over your prejudices, sir—after all, you’re not our pet Jew.”

  For a moment, until the elder Fenno’s profession was remembered, the table fell silent, then rocked with laughter—the Judge included. If Austin had been the least flashy of smile, it might have been insolent, but he had said it very steadily. Often Austin did answer so readily, one might think he’d already heard the Judge’s remarks in private audiences of his own. But to do that and remain Diddy’s close friend wasn’t probable; more likely the Fennos had a clannish, collective memory of such remarks as the Judge’s—from which the answers came pat.

  Edwin himself had a question he suspected Austin might have an answer to—“Austin, what breed of pet here am I?” Yet the house itself, by admitting him to its affections, had released him from such questions. When there, to be dressed and clean in his present manner was enough for his vanity, though he disagreed with the Judge on the question of good looks in general. David, with his noble length of irregular feature presided over by the remarkable, intent eyes, was far and away his choice over Austin—but if intellect was to count, then everyone knew of course what the Judge considered his son’s to be, or pretended he did. Perhaps this was why the Judge was always so careful to specify that particular requirement for total Adonis—intellect.

  Back there, under the stairwell, the three young men had shortly gone on downstairs to the kitchen without seeing him, the new visitor, behind the corner of wall which kept him from their vision. But he still remembered every word of their paused confab before, how David’s black box turned from side to side in their center, and Walter, half David’s height, cocked his elongated spirit-face at a crow’s angle to his humped body, emitting the heartiest laugh and the deepest at Austin’s sallies, meanwhile clutching his own wishbone sternum with delight. Only past twenty, he was wearing the vest and cutaway jacket which best clothed his deformity; he had been a matter for the tailor since a child. College hadn’t been his hope until David, almost nineteen and still to qualify, had persuaded him; encouraging each other on, they had gone, entering Harvard together the next year. Austin, not quite eighteen, was at that time already a freshman. And he, Edwin, waiting in the hallway, was to go last of all—to meet some of them there.

  “Ran into him on the Merchant’s,” Austin was saying. “Coming down last night, walking through the dining-car. It was a first-class old Dr. Brace encounter. I wished him howdy-do and. was about to go on down the aisle when he said, ‘Good evening, Yortchley’—in class he always confused me with Biff Yortchley—‘And how’s the girl?’”

  “Yortchley’s going in the Navy, I hear,” said Walter. “Instead of
college. Got engaged.”

  “Engaged,” said David, collating black box and lipreading in his usual shadowy, echoing way—to the oddity of which no one except his father ever paid the slightest attention.

  “So I decided it was time old Brace knew I was Fenno, now that I’d graduated. Or maybe it comes of being a freshman all over again. Anyway—I meant to say, ‘Dr. Brace, I’m Fenno, not Yortchley.’ But there he was, looking at me with that goggle stare, and so help me God, I said, ‘I’m not Fenno, Dr. Brace, I’m Yortchley.’”

  The three collapsed in laughter on the bottom stair, David flat out on the floor—like many of the congenitally deaf, he let loose in gesture. Walter prodded him with a toe: “Save it for the rowing machine.” David mouthed that too, grinning to show he’d got it. He had almost no hearing, even with the box. “Come on, let’s go,” he said, getting to his feet. His voice wasn’t high or reedy, but his speech was careful with listening, as if he gave back accuracy to what he heard.

  “Wait, you haven’t heard what Brace said to me,” said Austin. “He looked at me in that way of his, you know? I think he thinks he’s twinkling. And he says to me, ‘Quite all right, Fenno. I always knew you were.’”

  This time, the three fell howling into each other’s arms, which considering their various sizes was a feat that showed old habit.

  In the hallway, the boy concealed from them by its angle and dark, felt his own chest as if it had a wishbone somewhere. The natural way these three were linked—there was plenty of this in the district, even if he’d never had time for it.

  “Wait a minute, you guys, where we going?” said Austin. “You haven’t even said yet.”

  “Didn’t we write you?” said Walter. “I bumped into my rich uncle—they’ve got a swimming pool right in the house. Not in the basement either, right in the living-room floor. He married an Olympics swimmer. So, every time the butler goes for the phone, he has to watch out. All the help know how to swim. There’s a rowing machine too, works in water. I told him about David wanting crew. So he lets us train. Anybody’s welcome.”