New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  Felix chuckled. Austin smiled at him.

  “And it has a bidet!” said Leni. “Upstairs, in one of the baths. I saw.”

  Chuckles flickered round the table—tentative. Were things going to warm up? Will we be friends here—for a summer evening? Will the floes melt a little closer, merge for a night in the same life-direction—and move on? Down the table, grapefruit halves were withered, gutted, sprung or untouched pearly, according to each person’s habit. It had better happen now.

  “Fin-de-siècle depths,” said the host—and in laughter, the ice broke. Leni bridled like a wit. Pauli clapped his hands.

  “Oh, Dan gets the credit for that remark,” said the Judge. “Long ago. See here, let’s have the wine.” He began serving up an entrée from a tea-wagon at his side. “A little salmon with water chestnut. That’s my choice.” Two decanters stood ready on the long oaken sideboard, whose heavy ox-yoke handles clinked when a drawer was pushed in—a sound unique to the house. “Austin…will you?—that’s right, the white. And Edwin, the red. Thank you.” He patted Leni’s hand. “There, I’ve got the younger ones working…May I tell you your earrings are very handsome?”

  “Aida. Munich. Long ago…Oh look, Pauli, two kinds of wine!”

  Long ago. Memory soup. Edwin, getting up for the decanter, caught the black man watching him, and said quickly, “Taking notes on us?” Sounding nastier than he meant.

  “See what you have been missing, darling,” said Pauli.

  Krupong wrote a word, then closed the notebook. “Not exactly. I make book.” He grinned at Blount. “What’s that in American?”

  Blount grinned back. “Take bets. What odds you give us?”

  “We?” Krupong was watching the wine go round. Decantering might mean either that the host wished to mask an indifferent wine, or knew how to treat a good one. His bet was on the latter.

  The two young men had gone round the table in opposite directions, and now approached him. Both were blond, and in knee breeches would have made a passable pair of footmen, though the nonmilitary one was too short for it, and the other too much at his ease. The short one, who had just now addressed him, the one with the decanter of red, was covertly watching the young man with the white, copying his general style of pouring well enough. But Red hadn’t yet noticed that White was filling his glasses, very properly, only halfway. Krupong watched with interest. Wine protocol was effete only to fools; at home he’d seem similar subtleties served up with the fresh blue entrails of beasts just fallen. “Ah,” he said, as the two drew up on either side of him. “What service. I am the last, eh. I warn you, I like wine.” Red poured first, stanching the drop at the bottle’s lip with a napkin. “Well done.” The glass was filled to the brim. Krupong stole a look at white.

  Austin filled the glass slowly to the halfway mark, a very little more, then stopped. About to return his decanter to the sideboard, he saw Edwin staring at the two circles of glasses down the table, all the red ones full, and Krupong’s eyes on himself. Austin moved to fill Krupong’s glass of white to the brim, thought better of it, and stood fast. Then both young men went to the sideboard to leave the decanters, and resumed their places at table. Like chess, it was. But it was White who flushed.

  “You did well,” Krupong whispered, as his neighbor White sat down. “And you did right, by our laws at home too; you were compassionate. But you blushed for the other one—Mr. Red—who won’t like that.” Lifting a glass, he stole a look at the foot of the table. No, “Ah,” said Krupong, inhaling but not tasting, “I’ve won my bet.”

  “About us?” said the host, who’d seen all this byplay. “Ninon—your glove.” He rescued the glove from her glass. Earrings and a glove, and a dinner, long ago. Stay upstairs. “That thing on your hair, why it’s got a sort of crown on it—just there.” He touched it.

  “To be presented in. Just in case.” When she moved her nose, she knew it pulled her upper lip, in youth too rich a Cockney pulp for some, but now shrunken only to adequate—poor Leni’s was cross-hatched like a bad darn. …Simon always did notice cat-close. There, he’s scratching his crotch just as if he wasn’t born to a sort of crown himself—a Jew, but on the Disraeli side. He could have been a prime minister—with us. And the daughter—an assoluta—but of what? That state picture of the mother, in the drawing-room. I don’t believe it—there must be a better, somewhere. Though I don’t want to know what happened to him. Nothing gets farther away from the truth than the truth. I should know. I want. Must be because I still have all my organs, or never gave birth. Where would we go? I shall drink and eat all I crave; tonight my waist will get its own exercise. Where will we go?…

  For God’s sake sip, mine host, Felix Krupong silently intoned—taste your wine. …He twirled his glass, politely waiting. Was this an uncommon household in America?…Or shall I find it at Princeton too—only one servant but the air so swaddled in safety. “There’s a war on,” as is said here, but the air everywhere seems so dry of swords. In England, the houses were thick with other hypocrisies, but war’s a penny-dreadful they don’t hide. Always some old assegai of a relative hanging about, or the colonial ghost of a limb left on the battlefield. That Little War of the Roses we had a minute ago was interesting. And up there, at the head of the table, is my grandfather, I would swear it, under those lapels. Drink for the love of me, Grandfather. Ah. There. …

  He sipped. After a moment he said a sharp, pleased word in his own Efik dialect.

  “What?” Edwin leaned toward Krupong, across the memo pad set carelessly in one extra service plate Anna hadn’t after all removed.

  …Ah, a researcher; those so often came from the foot of the table. This chap, Mr. Red, bore that with some dignity, or maybe was used to it. But I, Krupong, must keep in mind that there’s no need for me to understand social power here. It’s all white. “And I am black but oh my soul is white”? Nonsense, it’s my tongue that’s white. Like the wine. …

  Felix’s laugh at himself, often so pleasantly disconnected with what it saw that it could be taken for innocent, drew all the table. “Montrachet, yes?” he said.

  On Austin’s left, Leni, fixedly attentive to the Judge and Ninon, said suddenly, in a loud confidential whisper to them, “Imagine, he knows wine. We had one of them like that at the theatre in Vienna, black too as the ace of spades, a woman, a dresser, she could find out anything, for the girls. Any man who came to the stage door, if he was young, she could tell a girl next day how much his inheritance would be, if he was old, the state of his health. Whether he was clean, you know. She could always tell. And she could make a juju—a charm, to help him marry you.” She saw the Judge was listening, and leaned toward him. She had had three framboises, before the wine. “Mmm, those days. But I imagine you never had to wait at the stage door.”

  Pauli clasped his long, silvery hands and shook them nervously. Madame stretched her long neck and lowered her eyes.

  “I am sure, Madame Leni, that you never had to use juju to make any man fall in love with you,” said the Judge.

  “Juju,” said the black man gaily. “Who is talking juju?” And Dan Blount said, “Are you an expert at it?” and Leni, shaking her head, smiling into the creak of her corset, said, “When they are black like that, they are of the blood of kings.”

  Down at the foot, Edwin, fiddling with one of the small table ornaments that stood at each place—a minute porcelain rose-in-basket, found it come apart in his fist. “Oh hell. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, those,” said the Judge, lifting his chin to see. “Whatever possessed Anna; I haven’t seen them in years.” He took up the one at his place. “They’re made to come apart—the children used to know how.” Very carefully he probed, and drew the rose out of the basket on its green china stem. “There. Horrible Nuremberg-style gaiety. They were my mother’s. She used to bring them out at family weddings. Well.” He lifted his glass. “Austin. You haven’t said a word. Not a word. But that’s understandable. Austin’s just returned from the wars. T
o—” He stood up, pushing back his chair, and took up his glass again. “To…this.” He twiddled the rose. “We drink to you, my dear boy.”

  “How lovely old-fashioned it all is,” whispered Leni to Ninon. “Like home.”…Like the Rue de Bellechasse, the Via Angela Masina. Home is always was. Yes, Pauli, why didn’t I come here before?…

  They drank.

  Austin, bowing gravely to the Judge, picked up his rose and raised it in acknowledgment. “To family weddings,” he said, and inserted the rose in his buttonhole.

  “Charming!” said Ninon.

  Pauli stared at Leni, who returned the stare.

  “What hour do the children get home?” asked Blount

  “Any moment.” The Judge sat down.

  The Nigerian turned to the young man at the foot. “Ah,” he said low. “But you have really broken yours now though, haven’t you.” He regarded the ornament under Edwin’s fist. “Look. I will show you my juju.” He showed Edwin his note pad. On it was a diagram of eight crude circles in an oval roughly corresponding to the positions of those at table, some inscribed within. “I used to do it in England. Here, they said the society would be simpler.” Edwin naturally looked first at his own circle—which said RED, just as Austin’s said WHITE. “I think you show everybody his own juju,” said Edwin. “Isn’t that it?”

  “How quick you are, yes. But no, not everybody.” Over Edwin’s shoulder, Felix pointed, left of the Judge’s circle to Madame Fracca’s, above which was inscribed: “She is only as French as her kiss.” To Edwin, he added in a whisper, “And would kiss me.”

  When Edwin laughed, showing strong square teeth, his somewhat morose face brightened, more in line with its fair complexion, but above the pug nose, the Slavic crease of his eyes lengthened.

  “You have better teeth here than the English,” said Krupong.

  “Not as good as yours.”

  “Oh, we have lion’s teeth, yes.”

  “From diet?”

  “Of Christians?” Felix extended the old joke out of courtesy. “No, no, those are the Yoraghum, the real cannibals. My tribe is Efik.” Privately he felt that most Westerners had teeth like baby crocodiles. From eating us. “And you, sir—are you perhaps Mongolian?”

  “Hungarian.”

  Almost frightened, Felix snapped shut the memo pad. He was careful not to see the thin red trickle beginning to come from Edwin’s fist, bearing down on the china bits on the cloth. Had the Judge been confused—surely this must be the young man who had been to the wars?

  The young man spoke. “I’m interested in what you have on the graph, about the Judge.”

  “Ah, yes, Mr.—excuse me?”

  “Halecsy. Just what is—‘A member of the Egbo’?”

  “The Egbo are a great secret society,” said Felix in an undertone. “Were. In my grandfather’s time.” Yes, this young man’s dissociation from himself, from his own flesh, was fearsome. Primitive. He could not bear it. “Mr. Halecsy, excuse me, sir. But you have cut your hand.”

  Luckily the cloth wasn’t too badly stained. And the young man was full of manners about it, very Harvard after all. Anna would have his head off, he said.

  Austin, disengaging himself from the bathrooms of Vienna on his left, was amused to hear the tail-end of Edwin’s remark—“unless you’re a witch doctor, too?” and the Nigerian’s response. “Oh no, sir, I could not help put a head back on. I am only an economist.”

  And Anna came, bearing the soup on a second tea-wagon which she set at the Judge’s side, the dishes on the shelf beneath, and on top a huge casserole and ladle. All heads turned toward her and obediently away again. She wore a dark brown but silky dress with a deep lace collar, above a token apron which any housewife might wear on maid’s-night-out, but her hair was netted, as a good servant’s should be. She removed the first and second-course dishes to the original tea-wagon and wheeled that away, without a glance at anything above table level.

  “Sehr elegant,” said Leni airily, adding some even more foreign syllables in an aside to Pauli.

  “Now, what language was the end of that?” said Blount.

  “Polish,” said Pauli meekly. “Leni has never taught me it.”

  “Two tea-wagons, is what I said. What a useful system, I have never seen. Did she think of it?” Like women immemorially, Leni, who had never had a servant of her own in her life, when nodding toward the kitchen lowered her voice.

  “No, my wife did, as a matter of fact. She had quite a hand for such things, people used to say. The tables were already here.”

  “Very like what Ruth would do,” said Madame. “Do you know, Simon, she is beginning to be a very good little ensemble choreographer, in a small way.”

  The Judge was ladling out the soup, a steaming yellow in which dumplings bobbed. “Very like Ruth?” He steadied with his left hand and poured slowly. “It is?” he added, and gave Madame the first soup.

  “Ah-ha, you two know each other well,” said Leni.

  “Of course they do, have you forgotten—over Ruth.” Pauli was consulting his exquisite watch. “They should be calling us from the airport. She said they would.”

  “You don’t forget her.” Leni turned to the table at large. “They write each other like—father and child.”

  Simon handed her plate. “Yes, we know each other, Ninon and I. Very well.”

  He’d given Leni three dumplings, a reward over which she exclaimed, and saw Pauli put a restraining hand on her tendoned arm, which could have used a glove. …It’s all right, Pauli. I don’t mind who knows, even the children. You be their father, tonight. Stay upstairs, Mirriam. I don’t mind, even if you know. …

  Madame was looking at the ladle, as it slowly served, Edwin stretched forward, carelessly. He’d put a butter plate over the stain on the cloth, and the scratches on his hand had dried immediately, as all cuts did with him; whatever chemical in the blood did that, his was in good supply. The wine had elated him also, giving him sway over both his reservoirs, the one above the salt, and the one below. “Was it you in the garden, Madame, before dinner?”

  “Ah-ha, you caught me there, young man. Simon was talking; you didn’t see me, Simon.”…I heard him. When he talks, a Disraeli. No man like that stays here, like a widowed banker, he and his Anna, unless he’s in hiding. …

  She watched the Judge rise and this time go round with the wine himself. No one would mistake him for a sommelier.

  “No, I didn’t see you. But I’d have taken you for a vision anyway.” He refilled Edwin’s glass. “Who let you in, Ninon?

  “The door was open.”

  Both Blount and Pauli laughed. “That door.”

  “Wasn’t me,” said the Judge, filling Krupong’s dry glass. “I haven’t been out since—” The doctor that morning. “Must have been Edwin.”

  “Anna will have your head, yes?” Felix whispered to the Judge, smiling at his surprise. …No grandfather, only a deduction. I have not your juju. Who does?…

  “Or a ghost maybe,” said Leni. “In the garden, eh? What solos we dream of there. Eh, Ninon?”

  “We have lots of ghosts,” said the Judge, smiling at Ninon over Austin’s glass. … Let them all watch. …At a sign from Pauli he passed over Leni’s glass, then found Blount’s still almost full, and sat down again.

  “Why is good Jewish soup always so wonderfully the same?” said Blount. “All over the world.”

  “Is it the same, Dan? Heard you say you were just in Germany.” For the moment, only the busy soup spoons answered the Judge, clinking from bowl to mouth, like petitioners satisfied. “No, don’t answer, Dan. Let’s not get into that. Though I live to hear you make a statement. And I suppose these are matzoh balls. Hasn’t been kosher cooking on either side of the family for a hundred years, but I still know that, somehow. Curious, isn’t it. And though Anna herself is Christian.”

  “They are all the same to me, yes?” said the Nigerian. Everybody laughed, except Leni, who was busy stealing Pauli’s fr
esh glass across the table, and now sipped from it defiantly.

  “Are Jews all alike basically, Judge Mannix?” said Austin, almost harshly. In an allegiance which even his Jewish friends didn’t always sustain, he hated to hear them say so.

  “Maybe Krupong can tell you more. He’s our sociologist.”

  “Oh no, sir, classicist.”

  “Really? Better still. Much better.”

  “Thought you were an economist,” said Edwin.

  “That is for America, yes,” said Felix, again to laughter. “The other was for England.”

  “So you are that guy,” Blount said, softly for him.

  “Yes I am that poor scubby, yes.”…And home, Grandfather—what will I be for home?…

  “Edwin. You’ve known other Jews. What do you say?”

  “They were pushcart Jews. But they all have the same pride in what they are. Even those who paid me in rotten fruit.”

  Austin turned to look at him. “Sounds pretty sociological to me.”

  “What’s wrong with sociology?” said Blount.

  “Sociology has no principles, that’s why.” The Judge held out his hand for the empty soup plates, which were passed to him to be slipped on the lower tray of the tea-wagon, Leni watching admiringly. “It merely records. That’s why it’s always so easily and dangerously for hire.”

  “Jesus,” said Blount. “And I been doing it all the time!”

  “Hurray!” said Mannix, chuckling. “A statement, boys, at last.” He touched a little bell he used instead of the electric buzzer Mirriam had had installed under the carpet, too far for his foot to reach. At the same time, he checked his watch, then softly lifted Madame’s wrist, pushed back the glove with a proprietary finger, and checked hers. The whole table saw, as well as the way the pink-pearled wrist was held for a moment before released.

  Madame looked down at it herself. Then she touched her pointed fingernail to his wrist. Everyone heard the intimacy, though not all understood. “Your short cuff.” Everybody took a sip of wine, or water.