New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  “The ward, David—that’s the beginning of everything. I could send you to old August Manken’s ward, the sixty-fourth—” The Judge’s voice was dreamy, altogether different from the one in which he had been used to release all that stream of talk which only a strange boy (and chosen for that too?) wouldn’t have recognized as already polished in solitary. He’d never called Edwin David before.

  “August must be dead or retired,” continued the Judge. “The older son’s inherited the mantle. Putzi, the forger.”

  “The what?”

  “Oh, he turned respectable; got a job selling advertising space for one of the dailies—I helped him to that lead, matter of fact. I don’t boast the favor, understand—just want to enlighten you as to method. Anyway—he lives in Garden City now, keeps a voting residence in the ward here. And has modernized his father’s, er, mana. That’s anthropological lingo, David—for pull.”

  “Edwin, sir.” He was filled with terror—was this what happened to one’s personality when a parent cracked up or died—and was found?

  “Sorry, it’s the medicine. Took some after all—guess it doesn’t mix with drink. Yes, a forger—’ve you forgotten your barbershop, so quick? Thing a politician must remember—is that everyone in the world is searching—maybe venally—but for the fairer things in life. To quote a judge. Remember that—if you become one.”

  “Garden cities?”

  “Oh, Putzi is a fart—never wanted to see him again. That doesn’t mean you young ones mustn’t be sent to learn from those people.” The Judge held the cane like an artist’s pencil before him, measuring a horizon. “And you already have what’s invaluable; no Auslander is ever the same. Or ever more than a romantic doctrinaire on the subject. Listen to me, Edwin—David, all of you. It’s no good living in the city unless it’s transformed for you from below—and that you have to practice from a child. Where we lived, on the Drive, my father put in a revolving door to keep the wind out—the first anywhere, he said, in a private house. When he sent me out on a wild night for cigars, I used to think the rain-soaked park would never hold the river back. Eagles were still whizzing in my ears when I got to the stationery store.”

  Was this the talk Anna denied hearing?

  The Judge fitted the cane’s ferrule into a knothole in the old floorboards, fiddling the cane’s silver cap intently as a crystal ball. “As for you, you had your grating you told me the bums walked on—a native son too. We do what we can with our nativity and get power from it—that’s why I say—come home.” The night wind blew in stronger, rustling papers on the desk. “Smell that,” said the Judge. “I actually used to think the Jersey side of the river was Paradise Lost—some child’s Milton I’d read. When the factories sent up their night odors I thought I could smell it, the burning, chocolate souls of the damned. In full view of the city, there’s a pantheon for people like us, isn’t there? We must understand it—to be able to live there. Or it isn’t bearable. Why—when you think of what we must look like to a farmer still getting up in the old christly kine-dark of a farm morning!—thousands of souls in high buildings clenched away—and only their electric ease to comfort them. But even that horror is part of it—if you’re born here. And part of what a father here gives his son—part of his house—if the son has ears to hear.” He twirled the cane, scowling at it. “Walking. Walking. That’s what I’d miss.”

  “Maybe he was Jewish,” said Edwin, as dreamily as if he too had been taking potions, and thinking of his old fantasy of querying the nations of the earth one by one for his paternity.

  “Who?”

  “My father.”

  “Your—Ah yes. Well, why not.” When the Judge thought he’d embarrassed someone, he flushed, a curious revelation on that opaque skin. “Or shall I deed you mine, à la that story? I scrabble on at that little memoir of him now and then—to go with the rest of the collection. ‘How War Never Comes’ is the title of it. From something a friend once said to me. But that’s for another day.” His voice trailed off.

  “Oh, I’m used to him,” said Edwin. “That raping stranger. Ruth told you that, didn’t she? That first day, when she came in here to tell you about who she’d brought home.”

  “What you forget,” said the Judge, almost irritably, “is that it was also my day. Which is why I remember it—and incidentally, you. I was upstairs, writing an important letter. And reading some equally important ones. That I’d never read before.”

  “When Ruth came down, all she said was, your door was open.” He remembered how the word hit him—“Daddy’s”—the idea that people had rooms just for themselves.

  “No, this room is for—” The Judge glanced at his shelves. “Not for that. I always go up there—to the big sitting-room. If you really must know—I was writing to a woman. I still have the letter. When I saw it wasn’t—really addressed to her—I never mailed it. Though it was to say good-bye.” He made one of his half-boyish gestures. “And she never answered.”

  “Maybe Ruth didn’t want to say. She never did like that upstairs room.”

  “Doesn’t she? Nobody ever said.” It was said so quietly, with almost a ventriloquist’s removal. “We did the best we could.”

  No, it was a totally different voice, a natural one, a man’s. If Edwin had dared, he would have put a hand on a shoulder. Ah, you talk. But the Judge immediately gave a practiced eye-slide at the watch he wore projecting just a minim from his right cuff. All that he had once been came back into the room with it. “We must wash, Anna’ll be at us any moment with the gong.”

  “Jesus, I forgot to tell you. The reason dinner was delayed—Anna said to say someone else was coming. A lady. Just tell him ‘the ballet lady,’ she said.” He couldn’t help watching with interest, and felt a pang—would he do that from now on?

  “The bal—oh.” The Judge only laughed. “Pauli Chavez, you’ve met him, old friend of the family, of the Mendeses, before my time.” He always referred to the Mendeses as if all knew who they were, an aristocratic unselfconsciousness he shared with the Fennos, who spoke of their distaff connections, indeed all others, in the same way. “Must’ve been the woman he lives with. Well, well—he’s had a standard invitation to bring her, for years. Ought to be his wife. But she won’t marry him. Blames us, somehow. Doesn’t think she’s good enough for him. Well, well—so he finally got her to come.”

  “Oh yes. Uncle Pauli. I met Ruth and him in the street once.”

  “Ruth’s uncle entirely. As a kid once, she referred to him as her female uncle, to the embarrassment of no one. Pauli’s a certain kind of European, that’s all—he’s simply been a special friend to women all his life.” The Judge always spoke livelier when citing Ruth’s bright sayings. “Leni, the mistress, is a ballerina of the old days.” He hesitated. “Pauli knew my wife.”

  With these timid allusions to the wife who it was commonly agreed had half drawn him into retreat with her, was the Judge then really emerging again, into the society of couples as well? For of course he did literally go out the door from time to time—to committees, official dinners and the like—professional engagements, but must have made it known that he preferred not to dip into that other matrix. And no matter how importantly placed the people who came to dinner here were, they tended to be single, or even stamped with the classless aura of the stray. If family knowledge loomed for him, it must be always across the abstract vision of that absentee. And there was no picture of the wife here in the study—that was the omission—though sketches, portraits and photographs of her alone or among the Mendes clan were everywhere else; a large one stood on the desk in David’s room; Edwin had never been in Ruth’s. “I’ve met Mr. Chavez. Ruth characterizes well. From her own shadowy corner.”

  “Does she seem—?”

  “Shadowy? Not really. Or never when she’s here. Only when she’s away, and you think of it.” She had no power in the house—that was it. They so rarely spoke of her in her absence. There was almost a conspiracy among them—not to speak
of Ruth.

  “I’m going to let her stay away, study, over there, even go on tour, if she wants. Though she doesn’t know it yet. I’m no dictator.”

  “She’s never shadowy when you’re here, sir. You two seem to complement one another.”

  “Oh?”

  “Perhaps that’s father-daughter—which I know nothing about.” Wasn’t he always maneuvered away from the younger ones here—if he had ever been near?

  “I don’t have my children’s confidences any longer, Edwin. I merely keep theirs.” The Judge turned to go—there was a small lavatory off the study. Suddenly he turned round. “Glad you’ll come. Ought to have a conscience about asking you to. With you here, I may never get out after all. Or maybe you won’t like the weather in houses.”

  “I’ll chance it.”

  “We must take long walks if possible. Long, long walks.” He hung the cane on the knob of the lavatory door. “I’ll show you my city. Or what’s left of it.”

  “And I you.”

  The Judge’s tiredness came out in his smile. “City’s only a single story. Only nobody can agree on the same one.” He threw back his head in a characteristic, rejuvenating gesture, and saluted. “Ten minutes then. Here—don’t forget your notebook.”

  “Won’t need it any more.” A wastebasket stood near. With a gesture of his own, he took up the small black leather book, weighed it under the Judge’s gaze, and tossed it in, wishing he had the5 X 8’s too. It was past time.

  “Well! What style!”

  “Don’t make me feel like two cents.”

  Neither wished to leave; did parents and children sometimes meet that way in household pauses, encounter newly, and stand looking hopelessly after each other, down hallways?

  “Dinner’ll taste good,” said Edwin, stretching. “I’m hungry. For company too. It’s a lovely evening, isn’t it. A lovely house.”

  “I can’t wait either,” said the Judge. “For the open air.”

  They turned to go. But the Judge, perhaps more experienced in these moments, once more delayed. If a fly buzzed now into the room, Edwin thought, even it would be important. Everything in the room was as always, yet hyper-revealed. Here is Simon Mannix, of whom I know nothing.

  “Aren’t you afraid I’ll read it?” said Mannix, pointing to the basket.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because—you’re rich.”

  “Rich?”

  “Rich in—” His own glance was still powerfully enough his own to enumerate room, bookshelf, all a great man’s impedimenta down to invisibles in corners; his own being here hadn’t impoverished that. “In conscience.”

  “You don’t know my guilts.”

  He had been flipped the standard social answer. But he saw the man in front of him, always walking the coastline of the intellect, examining its sands. Behind him—what?

  Somewhere within the interior beyond the door, a gong rang, in this house customarily a sign to gather for the one drink before dinner.

  Now it was Edwin who delayed, like one of those strange scholars up from the rear of the class, who never could leave. “That story. Of you and your father.”

  “Call it a bedtime story. Told before dinner.”

  “I never had them.”

  “Not from your mother?”

  “My mother’s like the icons in church. You can talk to one. Or carry it with you. But it seldom talks back.”

  “And your father?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You must have some image of him. Of your own.”

  “A mystery. In a doorway.”

  “So was mine. In the end.”

  “That’s a filial mystery. It’s not the same.” When he stepped too quickly back into those other times, he had the sensation of clambering again through childhood’s undifferentiated gel—and all to be defined over again, over and over defined.

  “Mother, father, son,” Mannix said, raising his head. “Screw that trinity, outside the church. It’s too cheap a religion for—families. Freud was a Jew—he should have known better. There’s more to it than that.”

  “Houses?”

  “If you will.”

  “You said there was a word.”

  “For what?”

  “Fathers.”

  “Fathers…” At the moment when word and pause became unbearable, like the silence between chess plays, the Judge moved. “A father—is an accomplice,” he said.

  “And a son?”

  “A son?” It came too curt for thought. “A son is—made.”

  At the door, Edwin said “Thank you, sir,” as he always did. A definition burst from him. “You’re the richest man in conscience that I know.”

  Mannix made the queerest bow, stretching his neck as if toward a noose, then retracting it. “You must call me Simon,” the Judge said.

  Outside the study door, Edwin said it aloud, testing. Simon. No one heard it but himself. The hall as he crossed was empty, but he could hear murmurs in the big room. So, as always, as with kings and their audiences, he and the Judge hadn’t been disturbed. In the same old washroom, he slicked back his hair, but with his own comb, though on the washstand that old couple, the comb and brush still clasped there, Abelard and Heloise. I could tell that to Ruth; she’d get it. But in the mirror, he shivered. I won’t marry for ages. Mannix had told his story as a son, maybe. But when defining fathers, had spoken as one. Those double realms of the personal were ones to avoid.

  He was vexed with this frippery of garden visions, conversations invested always with these double realms, yet always at stasis. Staring at his own eyes, he resolved to live the plainer life of the visual, saw fat pleb dinners, dockside cigars. Yet the shadows of this house beguiled him. By such slow-blooming family courtyards, interior from war shrieks and cavalry falling, a certain part of life went on being transacted, not divided from the rest, maybe, or even apart—harbored rather, like a bitterly fed, persistent glow. He felt the bones of his coccyx move to it, to the slow bloom of life here, as apes were moved to music, and men were led by snuff and spells up the ages, to the smell of ideas,

  Coming out of the washroom, at the back of the hallway, he had a long view of the Judge, just pausing at the broad door of the big room on the right. He must have seen that the front door was open a crack again, though this time the fault couldn’t have been his. Using the cane, he was tiptoeing to close it. That done, turning back to the room, he stopped again, looked down at the cane, half moved to discard it in the umbrella stand, then gripped it and stepped forward. Edwin, on the way down the hall toward him, heard the Judge, entering the room, say pleasantly, “Pauli. And Leni. How glad I am that you could come. Let me see, it’s been years.”

  Over the Judge’s shoulder, he saw Pauli Chavez, slender, silver-haired, and in his usual gray perfection of clothing European style—a man whose sweetness of nature and handsomeness were both instantly apparent even to men—along with the appraisal that Pauli had never taken or got full advantage of either. He was bearing on his arm a short, thickish woman, plaintively made up, whose greenish velvet only emphasized an all-over froggishness, in the pushed Slav face, and in the limbs too—a certain outward turn of the joints. Her hair was badly disposed. She looked triumphant, ready to be hostile.

  “I bring two guests,” said Pauli’s voice, polished, accentless, yet European in its care. “We phoned Anna.”

  Then from the far end of the room, just below the picture of Mirriam Mannix, a laugh came from an unseen person sitting in the depths of an armchair beneath it—a pizzicato laugh, French as an arched glove.

  “In this fauteuil you cannot see me, Simon, eh?”

  The cane dropped, clattering.

  “Ninon!” said its owner. “My God. Ninon.”

  Behind him, Edwin picked up the cane, made a retainer’s effort to hand it back to the Judge, and desisted. He would have had to follow a man who was traveling the thirty feet or so of rug with his arms stretched for bal
ance, or in welcome. Whose gait had a faint halt in it, but whose face as he bent it to the chair hadn’t the look of a lame man, but of one blind.

  Halfway down the room, Austin Fenno, in uniform, also stood up from a chair to greet him, but the Judge’s voice had already gone by him. Under the picture at the far end, a passage of sorts had already taken place, between the Judge and whoever was in the armchair. Only a sentence. But already an absent bird had been flushed from its shadowy brake to its corner, where it hovered over all, not asking to but accepting, on quiet wing.

  “Ninon—how glad—” said the Judge. And then, “But why? Is Ruth all right?”

  II

  Families Behind the Lines

  7. Accessory People

  June 1951

  PAULI CHAVEZ HAD A loving submission to what clothes did to him, and often put on a tattersall vest and walked in Central Park. There, in the beautiful, spring morning haze, if people mistook his air of the theatre, they went wrong only in putting him down for an actor, oftener than not a star, of the European kind to whom middle age was no handicap—none of which verdicts he had the vanity to see. As the son (rather a long time ago now, for he was the same age as the century) of a young maestro of the provincial European opera houses of the eighties, and of an older ballerina whose dead, wreathed name was still known to the devoted, Pauli was content to be one of the theatre’s countless circus children, those who never got to the real trapezes, but to whom the tent and the snuffle from the cages was home. From his father, earlier deceased, he had inherited a small conducting talent, which he applied strictly to life. From his mother, forty when she bore him between seasons, he had as her gift, rather than by discipline, the golden-shallow Viennese temperament which, to the delight of her audiences, had been forever peeping from behind her triste Russian nom-de-plume. He himself was born pleasedly into adulthood every morning, often with a phrase of his mother’s trembling on his lips or sure to be cited over what some hour had either brought him or must be spent toward: “Joy is in what is breathed away!” No wonder, then, that he walked the park as if he came to it from the Plaza, and could never be made to see any misfortune in having a mistress who made any apartment they inhabited into a furnished room.