New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  “Brawn or brain, for Harvard entrance,” said David. “I’m teaching Walter to swim.”

  Walter stuck his thumbs under his armpits. His elderly clothes had dealt him the accompanying gestures. “And my uncle,” Walter said.

  Did they laugh like this always? He listened to them rattle down the steps to the basement, and prepared to slip outside the front door and be off. She’d forgotten him; that had happened to him before on a delivery. And he’d almost forgotten her, meanwhile. All the painful sortings and separations began again in his mind, as his gaze, freed now to wing out and over these rooms, darted here, there, helpless before all this foliage of matter. In his mind, too, one syllable clinked against itself like a glass wind instrument—rich. What did anyone in this house mean—or anyone even remotely connected with it—when he spoke of someone else as “rich”? Meanwhile, he rubbed one blistered heel over the other, propriety suggesting he would less contaminate these shining surfaces—the floor was now a floor—if he shrank into himself within his bag of offensive clothing, and perhaps stood on one leg.

  Yet when the girl came back, he was still there.

  “Thought you were behind me halfway up the stairs,” she said, laughing. “Daddy’s door was open, so I told him about you. Maybe he’ll want to see you.” She resettled the headband which held her hair from her ears, a style whose youth, compared to the extravaganzas of girls her age in the district, confused him also. “Did you see the boys?”

  So they did still call them boys here. Yet he’d seen at once that these young men with strains of childishness in their confab had an awareness to the world’s possibles which rarely came even to the elderly, in his. Not “maturity,” not even “sophistication.” By now, seven years later, he owned as large a vocabulary as any of them, yet he didn’t think the world had a word yet for this quality which entered under their skin very early, from never having to fight, even in a depression, for meat, drink and shelter, from having so many avenues open to them, except where blocked by personal circumstance (like loss or deformity, which then were really personal) or by cataclysm or war. He would call it mobility—scope. The very quality of the human condition changed with its presence, a change in the vital animal underneath. He thought that the Harvard scholars of the social welfare or of men’s economies hadn’t enough noted this, or where they did, hadn’t his opportunity to put the nature of it so precisely.

  On his last visit, he’d tried to describe to the Judge himself the Mannix house and world as it had seemed to him that first afternoon. In order to remember his own former one with an émigré’s passion. And with a growing fear.

  “It wasn’t only your possessions that I didn’t know the names or uses of, that confused me.” Not merely that he couldn’t have told direction because of the very draperies, or that sometimes even now, in this world of marble and the airiest references, he’d had doubts as to which of its surfaces were literally hard or soft. “It was you yourselves, sir, in your heads and souls. It was like I couldn’t even tell, secondary sex characteristics at first, or what was the age of who.”

  “Well, Edwin, you were having a little age trouble yourself, back then.”

  So he supposed he had failed in the end to explain how sometimes, in this wizard’s world, people in their silken approaches to each other appeared to him hermaphrodite, or one sex, or none—and even when he came to understand that they too had emotions—surely transvestite there too. “For a while, until I saw the sequence, you all scarcely had any actions. Just talk. Like magic powder—that explodes.”

  “And you. Edwin, were bare-assed, as far as the emotions are concerned. You scarcely had one to your name.”

  “They weren’t freed.” Sometimes he yearned to have their unfairness, the way they had their table manners. To have it—but not to know. They were in the Judge’s study, where these interviews always took place. “I remember the day I first came here, when you made me step through this window. It was like a wizard’s house.”

  The Judge bowed. “Public schools feed far too much on the fairy-tale literature.”

  “Well, of course!” cried Edwin, “And don’t you see why?” How he had been led on!

  “Tut, tut, Edwin. We are your romance. Just as we are. And I submit you understood it at once, from the moment I caught you buttoning your fly.” He grinned. “But the poor understand us an edge or two less well than we understand them.”

  Back there, on that most recent visit, in one of the silences which were common with them, he’d thought long, while the Judge fiddled with the day’s mail on stamps; with all his hobbies, welfares and philosophies set in action from this room, his hours were fuller, for a man without a job, than many a gasping executive’s.

  After a while, Edwin raised his head. To bend his face between his hands was a gesture he never used except here. A breeze was now blowing in the same window onto the garden through which, under the owner’s gaze, sharp as a ruler on his knuckle, he had climbed. “Shall I tell you how the basement looked to me though, that first day?”

  “Yes do. Always happy to hear anything which might help me understand what goes on in my son’s world, not to speak of his mind. Even Ruth, who used to be like an open book, is beginning not to confide in me.”

  Edwin stared at him thoughtfully. One of his main reasons for not thinking Ruth an open book was that the Judge so often told people she was. The Judge’s attention had wandered—though one could never tell for sure. On the stamp-wall side of the room, the beauties of his collection were affixed to a great relief map, made for him by an indigent refugee artist, of all the map pink, tan and green places on the dilute blue waters of a cartographer’s planet.

  “Well,” said Edwin. “First off, it was clean. A whiteness which would’ve made my mother kneel. Clean is my mother’s God, you know, all the one she has—maybe that’s why I’ve never been able to get away from the idea that cleanliness must be stupid some way. I think the only thing upheld me in that kitchen was a pride in my own—dirt. Which I’d certainly never had before. And didn’t want. For I saw at once that our basement was a burrow. Our floor had earth in it, where the cellar stone had worn away. There was no dark here, for my shoulder to rub against. There was no animal life here. They say that roaches appear even in the Egyptian hieroglyphs—man’s company. I never thought I would think of a rat’s rustle as something—lost.”

  “I see you’re not ashamed of your origins, that’s what I see. You can go far.” He was no longer looking at his collection on the wall.

  “No, it’s physical,” said Edwin. “The difference between us and you, between us as we were then, and even my aunts. Not just the condition of being warm or cold, starved or fed. Physical in the bloodstream of the mind. Like low blood pressure in the Arctic maybe, from many nights of cold. Or in what the soul expects.”

  The Judge said nothing, here.

  “Anna had just shopped for the week,” said Edwin. “For the week. That notion itself—My first thought was of how dangerous. Your house invited robbery everywhere.” He swallowed. “Or trust.”

  The Judge had put his fingertips together. “And you were the marauder, perhaps? Now, Edwin. The poetry of one’s early self is very affecting, isn’t it. I gather that like every other student in the world, you’ve been reading Freud. My generation was the last, I often think, to read the poetry of the ages instead.” He picked up a paper knife and held it, with a duelist’s pause.

  “I despair of ever saying it,” said Edwin. “To you or myself. And that’s because I’m losing it.” Gnawing a knuckle, he was silent. Then it burst from him. “We were disorderly. But bare.”

  The Judge sighed. “I’m not built to be Socrates. Are you saying our middle-class clutter is the real disorder? Do you go on from there to consider your lost—simplicity—as art?”

  “Not art, not down there!” said Edwin. “No, that’s fakery. To say that.”

  The Judge quickly slid forward so that he could put his feet on the floor�
�he had the clearest, almost rhythmic sense of his physical self—Ruth had it too. “Hm-m, so you’re from that burrow.” He got up and walked about, looking out on the water tower, of which his study had the closest view in the house, across a patch of garden gone to yard. “So you don’t go along with my two. You mean to say, you don’t believe that art or social service is the answer—to all our guilts?” He swiveled quickly. “Middle-class guilts, I mean, of course. You surprise me, Edwin. Should’ve thought you’d acquired that up there, by now. Sincerity is every brewer’s daughter doing rhythmics in a leotard, isn’t it? And a billet in the American Friends Service for every banker’s son.”

  Edwin looked at him with a dismay he hadn’t learned to conceal. This man would be Socrates to him, if only he wouldn’t let every one of their high dialogues finally crumble back into the personal. It had happened every time.

  The Judge came up closer, still wandering negligently, in a professor’s track. “Tell me—in one word, Edwin.” Then he smiled. “Had French teachers made me do that. Unfair. But a good lesson in rhetoric—if anybody remembers rhetoric except the French—who are notably unfair. Tell me about that kitchen of mine, six years ago—in one word.” He shrugged. “Maybe a legal one. I still remember some of my law.”

  Edwin felt the good pupil’s rush of elated blood. He could do better; he could use a political word, which would please the Judge even more. It seemed to him he’d had the word in his head always. That first Christmas, when Ruth and David had taken it upon themselves to walk him and his mother—as if they were their children—through the chiming Fifth Avenue stores, as his mother and he had finally had it caroled into their heads, she perhaps never quite, that all this charade was for sale, could be bought by someone—then the word had begun to form in his head like a three-pronged bird ready to fly. Later, his mother had a new coat, but not a new face, or head. The word persisted. When they’d sent him to Harvard, the word became once more merely a word—yet telling the Judge, he had to rest his face in his hands again before he could say it as politely as was required by this house. “It was—”

  He saw the Judge shake his head, raising a finger like a croupier. “Only one,” said the Judge’s lips; often he didn’t seem to know that he talked like that, voiceless, watching lips opposite like a mute, or perhaps because his height prevented him from looking at most men eye to eye.

  Edwin found his own voice, angrier than intended. “Anarchy!” he said.

  By rights, the dialogue should have ended there. But the Judge chose to terminate it once again on the personal. “Why, Edwin,” he said, “You’re no longer calling me ‘sir.’” And on that same last visit—in the fall, just before he returned to Cambridge for his first semester of law—on their saying good-bye, the Judge had made him another presentation for his own minute library. That day he hadn’t been made to climb up and get it down from the Judge’s own shelves; it had already been waiting for him in the study desk at the beginning of their interview, one of the dark green packages of the British bookseller who was always pleased to hunt specialties for this prime American customer whose interests—philately, law, semantics, the history of the Jews from Zion to Israel and of religious thought in general, criminology, the psychiatry of women, and a touch of ordinary pornography—ranged so far. On Edwin’s request, the Judge had inscribed each book according to his own dictate—Simon Mannix to Edwin Halecsy, September 19th, 1950. This time only two of the books had been older ones, Victorian editions and both American: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s The Common Law, 1881, Boston, Little, Brown, and an early form book, Potter’s Every Man His Own Lawyer, published in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1834. The other two had been modern: Thurman Arnold’s Folklore of Capitalism (which he’d already come across in college, along with Thorstein Veblen, Randolph Bourne and all that lot) and a current volume of essays, a number of these political, by a man named George Orwell, published in London that same year. “I’m bringing you up slowly, Edwin, eh, out of the dark ages where you were, into our anarchy.” Nothing revealed by Edwin was ever left unused.

  Nine months later now, walking through the summery evening at that point of city year and air when there were always country catches of green in it which even the island’s lower tip, breath-fed on the rotten stews of the harbor, recognized and waited for. Edwin found himself following almost the same pattern of streets he and Ruth had done that first time. How much plainer it could have been if he’d had the nerve to say to the Judge’s request, “There’s no one word! Come down among us to the world of your children—that basement you say you never see, but which is full of you—and see me as I saw it for the first time.”…

  “Wait—” he’d said to the smiling girl back there. “You went up these stairs. But you came back from there.” He pointed down the hallway, which conducted one toward the rear regions through brownish reflections of old furnishings, an aisle not quite shadowy, never brilliant, which he came to love. “There’s a back way, huh?”

  She nodded. Probably nobody before him had entered that house in such guerrilla caution over ingress and egress. Only a housecat, if they’d had one, would have taken for granted, as he did, a street training which sniffed at every old cul-de-sac and in new places kept its back to walls in which there were exits. But she said, with another little nod, “You like to—know how to get out.”

  It was the first small ripple of their peculiar sympathy. On her part it might be merely womanly—not like his market beldames and clam-lipped teachers, or even the warm dopiness of the junior substitute—but the way women were in the library books, and up here. Until he went to Harvard and met others of her kind who didn’t have it, he wasn’t sure it was unique to her. Quiet and cool as her face was, it was never sad, though its features—replica of the Judge but with hints of a larger-faced heredity;—could have stretched to that, he grew to think, if there had been reason for it.

  “Yes, I saw them,” he’d said. “The—boys.” If one has started the day aged fifteen and is ending it at eighteen, one can’t be blamed for uncertainties of all sorts.

  “Well, then, come on. Aren’t you starving?”

  Sometimes the locutions of this world still amused him.

  “Who are they? The—the little one—is that your older brother?”

  “Oh no, that’s Walter Stern, our dear friend. He’s the absolute dear of all time—and it doesn’t even matter if I say so, it won’t put you off, you’ll like him just the same. You’ll see. No, Diddy’s the tall one.”

  “The one with the—” He touched his ear.

  She nodded, courtly. “Just be sure to face him when you talk to him.”

  “And the third one? What’s wrong with him?” He was used to seeing the lame, the halt and the blind hang about together for natural protection.

  “Austin?” She burst out laughing, clapping her hands—she always took full advantage of merriment, as if one should. “Yes, that’s Austin to a T—there’s nothing wrong with him.”

  “They all live here?”

  “Walter used to, in the holidays sometimes; he’s an orphan. Now he’s got a place of his own, a whole apartment. They all went to school together, until Austin went away. Anna’s putting on a feast, because he’s back.”

  As she led him downstairs, he thought first, that it mightn’t be smart to let himself in for three against one, second, that if Austin had been “away”—which in the district was a politer way of saying he’d been in jail, in jug, in stir—then there was already plenty enough wrong with him. It occurred to him that the house here might be a kind of placement home, on the settlement order but live-in style, for rich boys when they came home from their reform schools. With her stay-at-home father at the head of it.

  The Judge and he had long since laughed together at this unilateral assumption—that the upper classes would have their own facilities all along the line. David and Austin had never been told it. both being uneasy laughers at any but their own kind—David because he couldn’t be
ar to hurt, Austin from the depths of his own reserve. Walter, who could have been told anything, was always with them. Though the three, polite enough with Edwin, would have said of themselves that they did their best to be friendly, he knew they didn’t trust his entente with the Judge. He himself had an upstart’s jealous, awareness that his standards of honesty mightn’t satisfy theirs. Oh, he knew enough about the underskin forces between him and them to prove the Judge utterly wrong on who knew best about who! Back there, the succeeding ten minutes had been the most hated learning period of his life. Entering, he’d known at once that he belonged here, in this world—just as a natural designate of either heaven or hell, on entering either, would sense at once that this was where he belonged. They’d treated him tenderly, neither laughing at him nor with him. He was as bound to them, by then, brothers though they never would be, as if they’d scarred his cheeks like a committee of Abyssinian elders. And to the house also, beyond all its other enticements, because he had received his scarring there.

  The kitchen as he knew it now was brown wood and stove-polished iron, with many seams of honorable use. The white dazzle of fixtures and floor had been mainly in his own mind. Anna had looked up at his approach, plump and in housewifely command, but in her eyes that dog’s devotion to these others—which always betrayed her. That first time, she breathed him in and then out again, like an odor she recognized. As for him, he was grateful to her forever. Whenever he looked into her domesticated eyes he knew afresh that whatever else he might be, he was not a servant, here or anywhere.

  The three young men stared bright-eyed at what the sister was bringing in. He entered chin lifted, like any male introduced by the female. Of his other braveries, in cul-de-sac and out of burrow, they couldn’t know. The table already had a fruity whiteness of the sandwiches, milk and cookies Anna had provided: at their pleading she was just freshly studding it with delicatessen with whose window prices, black as iron bars, he was familiar; the three were nagging for beer as well.