New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  He’d never seen the Judge flinch, before.

  “Ah yes, the ultimate medal. To have been—with.”

  “I only meant—my father. His line of work.”

  He weighed that, scanning Austin’s face as if it couldn’t see him do it. What children those two might have. …“You’ll follow your father’s line, when the war’s over?”

  “I hope.” The face bent over its uniform, raised eyes very slightly widened—allowing itself to be scanned. “In London, I hope. I have a—promise.”

  “Ah. London…. Austin—would you do me a fav-vor?”

  “Sir?”

  “When Ruth and that crew come, take care of her for the evening? Air travel excites. I know them—they’ll never want to go to bed. Ruth and I—we’ll talk tomorrow.” He allowed himself a glance in Ninon’s direction. “I want to talk to Madame first.”…Was there scorn in the boy’s face? No, this boy wouldn’t allow himself…bright…

  “I may have—competition.”

  “Eh?”

  “Everyone’s fond of Ruth.”

  “But the boys have just seen her, eh? David, Walter.”

  Austin said nothing. He was good at it, the family always said.

  The Judge’s lips opened…but closed in time. …No. He’s like a son to me. Edwin. No. He’ll never—dare. He comes here for me. And I…why…I’m leaving.

  Judge Mannix’s face hardened. “We may all meet in London yet, Austin. All of us. Say nothing yet. But I may be leaving this house of mine.”

  “Do my best.” Opposite Austin, for one second the eyes seemed to be pleading, an intenser variation of his father’s. …I’m old; I may be evil. Get to me in time, Austin. I wouldn’t wish to disappoint you. Get to me in time. …

  Then they turned back to the others, Leni was saying, “Hot pursuit—and not love?” She shrugged happily. “What could that be? You never told us.”

  Austin spoke ahead of Blount. “Military term. Von Clausewitz.” He bowed at Leni, smiling at a point above her head. “The brief pursuit of an enemy, to finish him off.”

  “War.” Leni gave it the proper, chapfallen stare, then tossed her head. “Half the time, I never know who the enemy is.”

  “I always know,” said Madame.

  Unlike as the two women were, and in spite of their words, they smiled a rare smile at each other. Like women always, like cats bringing prey in to master, they had frivolously brought in the aspect of eternity, useless anywhere to daily living, and now left it there, on the hearth.

  There came upon the dinner party a longer silence. Leaning forward, they communed with themselves—and took their rising warmth for intellect.

  Leni, in that heaven of possibility which was her present, felt her lingerie, silken on her haunches. Beauty was her topic. She no longer felt awed here. Each one of her gaucheries had been successes; she was dimly conscious of arranging them—the nigger, the bidet—like a girl her baubles. One of her sets of eyelashes dragged on the cheekbone like a bird-wing. Sitting there, she saw deeply into her own perfume, a woman who was loved.

  Austin’s rivalry was engaging all his mind. As a Fenno, he was thinking practicably, not of his feelings but of his rivals. In Edwin, he saw a fellow who could never take on more antagonists than two, himself and another. Edwin had to have an answer to his status here. A low answer was what the Edwins would expect. Yet, in Austin’s own line of work, oughtn’t he to know how it felt—to feel status? As for the Judge—since a boy, Austin had viewed the Judge with question; now he could let irony fall for sure, like a headsman the black cloth. The Judge, a man who beld toward holy things perhaps more than Fennos could, was not yet by any means eating with God. … He himself could sit stock-still in his chair now, clasping his good glass with a look almost of middle age, as if he had text already sewn on him: Waiting for Ruth. He waited for her like a rival.

  Pauli, proud of Leni, proud of the Judge, “breathing away” in so far as life had let him teach it to, offered Blount a cigar.

  Blount took it “for later.” Clearheadedly was the only way for the wasp to buzz, politically continuous round the world. Dinner tonight is here. He made a digestive sound, fondling questions-to-come like lances. Even a buffoon knew his effect was to remind each person of what the person was privately in pursuit of. Sufficient unto the day, the news. That was his answer.

  The Judge was telling himself what he always did whenever talk of war entered his house seditious as gun smoke, further clouding the citizen-guilt of houses. Civilization is here.

  Ninon was hardest for the silence to crack. Finally she got up and walked about, stiletto heels held back in tribute, as an animal retracts its claws. Though the dress she wore was a clinging one, her waist dipped with each step as if it peacocked a crinoline. But her head bore its own rhythm like any other woman. Victorianly away from the cigars. …I’ve never been home with a lover. Never known love-terror, nor the terror-lack of love. Follow no love; love follows. Dip to the cigars, but avoid the smoke. Always know the enemy in time.

  And Leni, the specialist, leaning forward into her own heliotrope, said with dreamy, sure emphasis: “I remember very well your wife, Judge Mannix. Much more beauty than all these pictures. Even at a restaurant party—such presence. We all met once together. Remember. Before she…was killed.”

  A lesion opened, not in their quiet—in the silence of the house.

  …That’s the feel of it, at that word, like something you see, marsh gas or summer lightning, but think you hear. The house, opening its years like a wound, gives to each the echo he is prepared to hear. …

  So she was killed. So he killed her. Who? The husband? The lover? A hireling?

  Who?…Yes, which was I?…

  Which? All the same under the tsetse fly—accidents are all the same. …

  Where?…So this is you at home, Disraeli. …What…did you see; my dollhouse doll? Breathe it away. …

  How…may I serve you, my sister, my rival is suffering?…

  Why?…So that you might kill yourself, Mirriam—and still stand by…

  Sometimes the years of a house opened to no listener but a passerby or the wind, or a mercury-blot of light gilding an attic window shade. Or to that great legatee of houses, the inheriting dust. Or some houses were left wisely early. But this house, in the old-fashioned way, was dining with its retinue.

  Before pictures could fall from walls, or echoes cease, Austin Fenno, in the cold, cordial voice of a son-in-law who learns too quickly what is expected of him, began to tell them about the war.

  “Down there is the Cen-tral Park, yes? Let us walk there.”

  “I never go there. OK.”

  Strangers here, they listened to the ring of their own steps and said nothing, the city an intermediary which didn’t need to move to stay with them. Now that it was summer, the streets were wetted and softer, the exudate of some long, listless dragon who lay just beyond.

  Edwin’s head was clearing, but he let Krupong lead the way. Few were on the streets. At those who were Krupong nodded approvingly. Under his breath he was chanting or humming, in a nasal language that might be any. When they reached the Fifth Avenue corner, he stopped. “Has a constant shimmer, this city.”

  Across the way, the line of young or stunted trees was abloom with mist, as if, with apple or oleander. Nothing was on their branches. Edwin knew his city, full of other evasive seasons, any time of year. Tonight had fallen from first expectation, but this was the fault of his monologue, not the city’s. He had always kept them separate. “Don’t they all?”

  “The ones by the sea. Naples. Constantinople.”

  Behind them as they crossed, the great, protected avenue looked as usual, glittering idly on its own repose. He’d never thought of this city as a living organism before. That idea belonged to them. The city was an arena to be coped with, and not to starve in. That other was the romance of the rich. Deep behind the sternum an examining army doctor had identified as the barrel chest of early hunger, he l
et out a laugh.

  “Eh?”

  “I was thinking that the poor never say what they are.” Down there he’d never once heard the word itself. They spoke of it between the wishes. “I’d like to cover this dirt floor, some day. With linoleum.” Those dumb wishes, which sometimes couldn’t let themselves be satisfied—his mother, unless commanded, still wore her old coat. He hadn’t yet dared dispose of it, as the aunts had advised.

  “So…but the rich hide their condition too. Look there.” Krupong pointed back at the eastern side of the avenue, at a set of shrouded windows, hoarding their inner light. “He’s not letting you see what paintings he’s got, man.”

  “Right. It’s only the middle who’re always telling you what they are.” His head was clearer, but the wine was still in his shoulders.

  Krupong laughed. “That young warrior. Clever, what he said.”

  “Austin? Pacifist.” One had to be fair, even if classified for home by a healed TB spot one never’d known one had.

  “Fight like the devil, some of those do.”

  “Quaker family.”

  “Woo-oo, yes? I rowed with an English one of those. Curious people. Very objective about Africa.” Krupong faced the park. “I would like to go in—it is permitted?”

  “Supposed to be full of knives. But in New York, you’ll find the sinister street is always just beyond the one where you are.” Or the golden one. It took a foreigner to make one feel ownership here. He followed Krupong in.

  After a twisting of byways he hoped his companion would know how to return through, they stood facing the great south wall of buildings that bordered the park. Above that pride of light, the sky was smeared to white, as if foghorns had just left off sounding. The buildings shifted continuously, as stars did in the tear of the eye. “But it is humming too!” Felix said.

  It was, the whole spectacle. It always had. “In winter, the lights snap—like twigs.” He looked about him mazedly. He felt his ambition inside him, a cautious song.

  Once, after a street fight, Felix had seen a man raise his head and speak like that, enlightened from within, “Dark people, you are.” His chuckle faded. What an empty place, really; among these millions, this sad forest—of twigs. “People…” He raised a hand, as if to decree them.

  “You don’t like us?”

  This Halecsy was a plug-ugly when in wine. Or when emerging from it. The brain, clearing, shadowboxed its own violence; Felix had seen it many a time; he was not afraid. “Cities…” he said falsely; leaving London had been a wrench. But no, he didn’t like this New York—producing its own phenomenon higher and higher, while the classics tumbled their warnings. A city so young should have more ambiguity, so that men might be heartened as to what they could still become. A city of any age should at least go veiled, under knowledge of its own sores. The snapping of souls was what this young man was hearing maybe. Et mentem mortalia. There was nothing like a bit of Vergil to light up the modern sky. “You are feeling better,” he said.

  “Tell me what you think, though.”

  “What a catechism! You study to be a priest?” He could see him, a papal secretary—to that judge.”

  “The law.”

  “Ah, to be a judge. Well—in that case—” Felix paused, turning to go. “Well then—does everybody here have the city on his back?”

  They stayed on, silent for some minutes, then turned to go.

  Edwin trotted after him. “You’ve such an excellent sense of direction, one would think you’d been here forever. Is it from—”

  “Africa? No. London.”

  “What’s that you were singing? On the way.”

  “‘Now it was the custom,’” Felix began buoyantly, meanwhile continuing their pace, “‘of the sultan Harun-al-Rashid to go sometimes during the night with his vizier, through the city in disguise, in order to discover whether everything was quiet’—you remember? From The Arabian Nights.” Felix’s chanting died away. It had been English after all.

  They reached the park entrance. Ahead up the long blocks was the house they were bound for—veiled.

  And Fifth Avenue had waited for them. Its traffic tranced by, and would forever, waiting for new observers to be born to it, against all the rural poets of the mind. “Look up there, man.” Felix pointed to a line of second-story windows. Diaphanous curtains fell with the closed radiance of water falls. Behind these, shadows moved sublimely, with the confidence that shadows always had. Felix scooped a handful of gravel from the path. “There, that window! Shall I? And when he opens up, I’ll halloo at him. ‘Ahoy, there! What paintings do you have?’”

  “You would, wouldn’t you. You’d even knock at the front door.”

  Eheu, how nasty! And how explain himself to this weird collegiate with his white canvas shoes, and those spectacles, and bung-all kind of drunk behind them? What Harvard words would there be, to tell him? That when one’s been made to travel fast enough cross-world, with the iron key of Latin around the neck, proud as any Jew, on the snowshoes of poets, over the camel humps of time—such an émigré isn’t to be dazzled by a little savagery that stops short at the skin. …We have racks and pyres still in our psyche—just behind my granddad’s hut, Mr. Halecsy—that could extricate you red as a mullet, dripping at all pulses, from your silvery skin. Language is my juju! The English, a colonial people, understand that, and gave it to me at once….

  “Ah, Mr. Halecsy, remember Harun?” His tongue began of itself in the Arabic, then changed gait. “Remember? ‘They knock at the door of a household, he and his vizier, and are admitted, by Zobeide. And she says to them—’”

  “Does she.” Under a streetlamp, strange as a moon in its own cloud, Edwin’s glasses were still raised to those windows. Mist condensed on one lens and ran down it like a crack. The eye didn’t blink. Suddenly Felix’s companion relaxed, fell into a mock crouch, shuffled his feet and sparred at him, with a mock fist. “OK, Harun. I’m not drunk any more.”

  “Good, Mr. Halecsy.” He felt the social pleasure he often had had, escorting home safe some companion whose rickety Norman frame couldn’t hold the Merrydown cider like his own. Look at him now, smooth as a clerk, wiping his glasses. “Maybe by now, Mr. Halecsy, the three will be home.”

  A bus groaned by before he was answered. “Call me Edwin, chappie. Your vizier was a doorkey child.”

  The traffic signal changed. They stepped off the curb. Felix often asked what a phrase meant, even if he knew. At times one ceded that to them, like a handicap. But not now. Under the signal light he saw the pink sow-glare of the face, for one second intent.

  “Righto,” he said carefully, as they reached the other curb. He cast a look over his shoulder, whistled. Every man here carried the city on his back. But this man, how dangerous it was for him! How dangerous a man is, grandson, who lacks pride.

  Going down the side street, he gave a humble, conciliating laugh. “Edwin.”

  “Hmmm.” Grunted. Hands in pockets.

  “I know too many languages now. Going home in August, I’ll be bloody scared. We always are.”

  “Don’t give me that stuff. We’re always the same. As we started.”

  They covered the next block in double time.

  “You rowed, Krupong, Blount said.”

  “Yes.”

  “David Mannix—at college he rowed.”

  “Ah, the son.”

  “He’s deaf.” A pause. “But he can lipread up a storm.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Lipreading. He’s a whiz at it. And so is his father.”

  “Ah.” After a moment, Felix said, “A joke on me it was, then. How very friendly of you. To tell me.”…And a hyena to who else, comrade?…

  At the last corner he said, “Interesting, those houses here. Rather British.”

  “The old Ralston houses. Are they.”

  “Well—here we are.”…And I’m not sorry….

  “Here we are.” Edwin hesitated. “Wait here a minute, will you?” He gave F
elix another buffet with his fist, coaxing, almost shy. …Why, how charming he was when elated, or sober! The face good-featured again, conventional as dozens here, the snub nose only merry, the eyes extra laughing because of their slant. When he was brash it nickered all over him, like his intelligence.

  “Be my juju,” Edwin said, walking backward while smiling at him. “Don’t go till I come.” He waved, and disappeared around, the back of the house.

  Mr. Krupong gazed up at the entrance, so warmly lit for welcome. A long window box, carefully crammed with green, had been set out on the stoop. This house must give many the feeling that only they were specially bound for it. Yet when its owner said, “Come again,” he’d felt trapped. Nothing happened there except in those granular scenes one was taught to call society—in which each and everybody merely grew the heavier in what he already was. Yet he felt drawn to it, as animals sometimes were drawn to cages. It was such a civilized house, fatally attractive to so recent a citizen of the open air.

  Krupong gave a short laugh, and stepped farther back to regard it. A temple of the hidden? He could scarcely believe what Blount had told him. Like so many temples, it might have nothing within except what one saw—a tinkle of cymbals, or the brass prayers of the English. Yet he couldn’t help himself—who could, with temples? He would come again—back.

  He looked to the right and left, down the street. Such an open city. And this house—veiled? And Zobeide said, “You are welcome. But while you have eyes, have no tongues; you must not ask the reason of anything you may see, nor speak of anything that does not concern you, lest you hear and see what will by no means please you.”

  Looking up at that façade, he declaimed the succeeding passages, as if the house were waiting for him to inscribe them there.

  In the garden behind the house, Edwin checked the rear windows, dark all the way up from the study, then urinated. The water tower’s light had gone out at twelve. He was where he belonged. Now and then in his swift little pilgrimages here, some late pigeon walked the wall, and he always watched it, savoring the breeze naked on his cold boyhood; he would never be fifteen again.