New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  “Think me a shit if I asked you—which?” The Judge drew his palms down his cheeks. “I can get rid of the image maybe. Once I know.”

  “I can do better. I’ll tell you what he said when he saw himself. In the mirror.” He told him. In the older man’s stricken look he saw he’d have done better to call him a shit. “He’s got a leg,” he said. “The left.”

  They heard the outer door being tried. Neither man went to help. If I see her come in that door again, Austin asked himself, standing his ground—what will I know?”

  The door was pushed in jauntily. A breeze came with it. Edwin came in, riding the breeze. Not drunk any more, he looked as Austin had used to glimpse him in their coinciding years at Harvard, when he’d already had a reputation, as much for circumstance as mind. In physique nothing much, his face and manner had already had a duality; it was never quite possible to tell from either what Edwin was. This made for a secret power most sensed but few knew, like Austin, the source of—that Edwin himself hadn’t been brought up to know.

  Austin squared his shoulders. No holds barred—will our kind of training be up to that? He saw that his rival was elated.

  Edwin walked straight up to the Judge in his chair in the bay. “Just came back to be sure Krupong told you. Not to wait up.”

  Strange advice, from a secretary! But the old man ignored his presence. In spite of black hair and eyes, Mannix could look old when he needed to. He was examining his own hands like a palmist. “I could mirror-write once, both at a time. But the one thing—they wouldn’t do for me.” He looked up, at Austin. “He—did—what he wanted to. A leg. A leg…You tell him—I would know him anywhere.”

  “I don’t ever expect to see him.” Or tell him, if I do.

  But the Judge was ignoring Austin now. “Edwin—where’s Ruth?”

  “Down the block.”

  A child’s phrase, and a city one; used past childhood it belonged to those who lived their life in the streets.

  “We’re going on the town. Her idea of it.”

  “Where?”

  “Not to a settlement house, Fenno. You wouldn’t enjoy it.”

  “Where?”

  “My old neighborhood.”

  “Is it safe there?”

  “Safe, Aussie? You’ll have to ask her.”

  Not just a street insult. What it said was, “She’s your rival, Aussie, isn’t she? And I know.”

  Krupong and Madame leaned in from the hall, arm in arm. “We’re going into the garden,” he said. “To see your stars.” She waved.

  The Judge smiled at both young men. “Wait up? No. Tell her I won’t.” He made as if to get up then, but his wife’s soft chair held him. He stretched a leg, reflectively. “Not for a girl who’s old enough—to go on tour.”

  “Then she’s going?”

  “Why, yes, Edwin. You’ll be the only young one in the house. Or maybe we’ll all decide to leave…or meet in London.” He was struggling to get up. It became clear to the two young men that he couldn’t. Each reacted in his own way: Red; White. Austin, relic of James, remained quietly waiting. Edwin, relic of nothing beyond his dialogues with the Judge, walked forward to the head chair at the table and picked up the cane beside it.

  “Just a civilian wound,” said the Judge. “Nothing to yours, Austin, or to—Edwin, did you know Austin’d been wounded?”

  Edwin was weighing the cane. “No, Sorry to hear that.” He said it with wooden sincerity, his thoughts elsewhere. “Ill tell Ruth.”

  “Never mind that,” said Austin, in utter fury.

  Edwin didn’t, toying with the cane. “She wants us to go to see a night court session.

  “Night court?” said her father. “She say why?”

  Edwin brought the cane forward. He was carrying it like an equerry, or a street boy acting one, guying a cop—or yesterday’s friend. He presented it. “Good night—” An ancestry came out upon his face men surely. What else was it when a man’s brow narrowed like that, feral but innocent? “Good night, Simon.” Quick-fading as a street runner, he was gone.

  “Who’s in charge here, I wonder.” After a minute Mannix shrugged. “When you say that, I suppose you no longer are.”

  “Shall I go after them?” said Austin.

  “Why?”

  “No holds barred, with him. With them. I can understand that. But with him it’s more than that. With him, you don’t know what holds there are. He doesn’t. And that’s dangerous.”

  “Ruth knows. Ever since she brought him here.” Mannix peered up at him cautiously. “She even says—he and she are alike. In a way.”

  “Like!—why, she’s known what she is, every day of her life.”

  “Yes.” The Judge fingered the cane’s silver crook. “Night court. Her mother used to do that in the thirties; it was chic then. But they’re in for a surprise; I don’t think that kind of city court is held any more…What you young remember, eh? Enormous, isn’t it, Austin? But I can’t deal with it any more.” With the aid of the cane, he stood up. Then he tossed it away.

  “You in pain?”

  The Judge looked down at his leg. “Just something for the doctors to settle. Otherwise, if you ask me…may I say ‘Aussie’!”

  “My family calls me that.”

  “Know that drawing feeling in a wound? That’s what I’m in. I’m in healing. The two sides of my life, the two halves—are drawing together. It’s the most extraordinary sensation.”

  “Halves?”

  “Everybody.”

  They heard the two others come in from the garden and go upstairs.

  “We better go up to them.” At the dining-room door, the Judge turned to look back at the chairs ranged round a table shining now and cleared, a court ever in session, waiting for the family to come. “Sorry, what I mentioned to Edwin, about you. Shouldn’t’ve.”

  “It’s all right. Realized that when you told him. Doesn’t help any, not to. Won’t help what I feel.”

  “What’s that”—the Judge drew breath—“my dear boy?”

  They avoided looking at one another. A woman peering in wouldn’t have known that they were both moved.

  “I don’t feel private any more.” It struck him—a mere pebble—that he had come to the end of his youth. “Everything’s in question,” Austin Fenno said. “Everyone. I never knew.”

  The cane had fallen across the entrance. The Judge bent with amazingly convalescent lightness to pick it up. “My grandfather’s. And my father’s too.” He stood it carefully in a corner: “Will he be able to…get about? The Pole?”

  “They’ll—think of something.”

  “I can see I shouldn’t have asked that either. Why do we have to…keep track?”

  “That’s easy. Because you’re a civilian.”

  “That’s honest of you…Aussie. Look at that dining-table. Know what I think to myself, every time I see it like that?” The chairs waited, regal, ugly, comfortable. “Families behind the lines,” said the Judge. “Families behind the lines. I often wonder. Is it only—with us?”

  “Of course not. My own father did fight, but he wouldn’t again; he’s said so. And he wouldn’t. The world is changing. As for mother’s side—” He grinned. “We go to war. But we don’t fight.”

  “That’s honest of you,” the Judge said again. “But as you Quakers say, you’re ‘concerned.’ Publicly. What men do or don’t do privately is harder to—” It was a word he didn’t like to say. But there was no other. “To judge.”

  On the landing at the turn of the stairs up above, the tall clock struck the only hour it was ever known to, the half—known in the family as “the pawnbroker’s hour,” though none of them could tell a guest why. It wasn’t clocks he needed here anyway, but compasses. “I—” said Austin. “We—” It seemed to him that war was contained, nor violence was, like a seed in the vitals, which only some men had a chance to drop. And that such thoughts free-floated eternally, waiting. It wouldn’t take intellect to catch them, but chance again an
d a catalyst.

  For it seemed to him that here in this house, the change of guard was actually occurring; the gap between generations, which moved so slowly in ordinary day, tonight in performance could be seen. At the same time, he knew that these were visions—or that he was haunted by visions which were too much for him, for which he was not the proper vessel. Life as energy and will he could handle, but life as insight, intuition beyond his lights, wasn’t for him. It would have to move on.

  But he would manage to marry her before that, because she, with her clan, gave him the power to think beyond himself. And because there was something wrong.

  “No,” he said. “You people mean to be honest. We only mean to be fair.”

  Together, they went up the stairs. At the top of the stairs, they separated. Krupong and Madame were waiting for them. Krupong took Austin’s arm without a word. The Judge ranged himself beside Madame. After a moment, he climbed one more step of the flight which led to the story above, which put him higher than she, though this didn’t seem his intent. In height he and she were a remarkable pair. Madame herself was standing under a prism-hung light which made a thousand repetitions of itself in a dress thickly sifted with sequins the color of nacre, out of which her shoulders bloomed, fleshly present as a woman’s should be, with the beauty that is for a time. No man could keep his eyes from her, or would want to. She tapped Austin’s arm lightly. “Legs are only the American part of a woman.” This was her good-bye. But as he closed the outer door behind him, he saw that slowly, gazing into nowhere as women did it, with a rhythm for somewhere—she was drawing off her gloves.

  12. Red Rooms

  June 1951

  “COROMANDEL, BROCATELLE.” HAD HE really said aloud that old musical direction, less faded than the furnishings it stood for? He’d pushed her in there, naked already from one bout of love in his own bed, through the dressing-room, past that table, neatly laid with silver-backed brushes not guns, to the room where in spite of all a servant could do, his wife waited up for him…

  Had she said it after him with stage obedience, taking in at a glance the old drowned French-de-chine of a room whose nacre must once have outshimmered the dress she had already dropped for him, adagio, in the other, sucking in her cheeks for what that pale vinaigrette of a desk must hold, going up to that wasp-stomachered, foreshortened drawing, plainly not all caricature, of the wife he so clearly wanted her to mention. Staring into its eyes, which must have been as oversize as the artist had made them, shaking her head over a yearning in them she couldn’t speak for, in just the way her own lively little ballerinas shook theirs over some dead, pictures arabesque of absolute lie, “This is no coryphée!” Meanwhile lightly fingering herself where hair had been let stay—being dun not white, and all the time saying to herself, not to any other person ever, “Well, Ninon—you have once more taken off your gloves.”…

  Old musical directions, I know that, you don’t have to tell me; on this couch, set where once a bed or chaise must have been, were they murmuring only this to each other, tongues meanwhile lodged like ruby sparks in each other’s mouths? Or much more, that even at their age was yet to be said?

  The upstairs room was glowing with sexual light, hot as those rooms always were which existed behind the foreheads of bodies still joined at the Venus-point, the eyes still closed. On their opening them, its red light might be real dawn, or the mosque of a lamp. They were still in that valleyland of the flesh whose images waited ready between the thighs, as the retina waits for light, were satisfied by love as the eye is by opening, but went on breeding afterward. They held on, as sorry to leave as any pair. After forty years of the satisfaction itself, in this valleyland they were virgins still.

  He opened his eyes. Below him, hers were closed, but he wondered if she hadn’t really been first; she rendered the smaller services and tacts with the grace of a woman who never doubted her own lone path—and would never call these obediences. He arched himself, in animal listening. To the rear of this room, in the usual extension, windowless at the sides, of most brownstones, his own room, the smaller and altogether windowless, gave on the backstairs landing, otherwise exactly like the center rooms of the old railroad flats of the tenements of the same era: even the mansions had had these cells. He liked that innerness, but this front room had the weather. The air now had that dead cool just before the night took its first bluish step away. He’d heard nothing downstairs. Breathing an emperor’s forgotten air, he cared nothing. Houses livened to a birth, were publicized in deaths that would not die. His body, swan-smooth, without malaise, reminded him that only copulation made them private. Below him, the woman’s eyes opened, became Ninon’s, still candid; no, she hadn’t preceded him. Slowly, her half of the central red they had made between them retreated behind her forehead as his had done behind his own. They were separate.

  Beneath him, the bird-bones of a true miniature made his weight a delight to him. Raising himself with arms powered as much by this as by sailing, he stood up, lifted her against him and carried her back into the rear room. A brown and white one, all his, down to the memory tufting Moroccan under his toes as he held her, on the spot where the obsessive valleys of the invisible had assailed him, octopal arms and owl-septumed faces advancing to clothe the nakedness he had desired to hold against their ranks. If honesty was nakedness, then this was a better way. Behind, in the room they’d left, the sewing-room sofa he’d brought her to as to a chaise became a chaise, the draperies regained their roses in the international yellow of a summer morning that would not fade. The woman in the wasp-drawing on the wall hadn’t yet begun to wait. Halves of a life could be forced together, not kept in a lily-shaped box like his father’s. One half must be made to violate the other if necessary. Even at sixty not all the luxuria in a life needed to be of the past.

  On his reawakened bed, her undergarments, flung there, lay precise as a game of colored dominoes; she never wore black—too thin for it, she said once (or because black was a whore’s choice, or mauve or scarlet;—but seeing this pale orange frilled with peacock, he remembered hennas, Francophile mists of nude or navy, other erotic in-betweens of a taste that like her accent was still top original. On the floor at the bed’s opposite side, her dress lay stiltedly, its encrusted bodice returning the bedlamp’s fire; like his owner upon the bed it could make tasteful the crudest contortions asked of it, by being too poised for love. A second time, she had led him back to the sexual, but she was perfect for a purpose beyond that. He congratulated himself on his choice.

  The owner of the dress returned his gaze. Estimation of what time had done to each other’s bodies had been taken care of in the first lightning glance. Satisfaction was a fact. Other nuances were now lulled forward into the present again. Years past the age for a young man’s biography to lisped against a breast, or a young girl’s to be clenched behind the teeth or coolly manufactured—they still had to define. Out of the valleyland again, any couple, any encounter found themselves asking it. What’s new in this? For me. For us.

  She put a prettily shrunken figleaf of a hand on him, in the proper place for it; he shook his head. She shook hers. Sitting up in the embrace of gossips, they drew each other onto the pillows, silent over these last charioteering moments of the flesh.

  On her belly, once muscled strong enough to stand on, there was now a scapular-shaped dimple, just above the hair. He touched it.

  “Not what you think.”

  “What do I think?”

  “I have all my organs.”

  So the years had done at least that to her self-confidence—God knows, not much. But like a sultan who had slept only with virgins, he saw those years in her, a whole era of women he had missed.

  “A hernia op. So—I don’t teach any more. I won’t let others demonstrate for me.”

  “An immortal.”

  “No, Simon. Only as old as you.”

  Plus one. He smiled at her, wishing he could say how much he preferred a woman who could lie, instead
put a hand on her loins. “You let it grow again.”

  “I haven’t been—dancing.” Her upper lip twitched for him. Liar or not, she had a whore’s sense of the proprieties, or a flirt’s.

  “I prefer it this way. More—unprofessional. Tell me something…were you and Pauli before he knew Leni, or after?”

  She laughed herself straight up against the pillows, legs squarely in front of her as a doll’s—the poupée valsante, with a small-of-the-back of steel. “So that either way I answer…are judges barristers too?”

  “Matter of fact I was, almost. Cardozo was an early god of mine.” (Barrister law, rare in America, Simon. Do you really admire that man so much? Altogether too refined, for us Olneys.) He began to laugh—with Chauncey, that ever-present audient. Who would have been an interested onlooker. But to bring poor Benjamin to bed here!

  “Who?”

  “Supreme Court Justice. Second Jew.”

  Even a younger woman might have drawn the covers over herself, but her honesty was here, or a vanity not crossing its arms over its breasts. Small, they hadn’t much dropped; the nipples were like her lips, not yet shrunken brown with permanent cold. Only the quality of all the flesh had changed, dead-sugary where it had been taut, hard gloss at the shins, certain nuances of the underarm, navel and knee lost forever to a millimeter of slack. And everywhere, under the once subtle, tender powder of pores that had concealed it, now rising ever more intricately green, this organism’s map of the world. He was surprised, pressing in his hand, that none of this damaged lust, which as of old multiplied in him with use.

  “A Disraeli, you might have been. With us.”

  Lazily, he remembered her politics—all patronage. “Royalists, all you women. Even in bed. Most of all, in bed.” His hand probed. “Does that mean, if I come over, you’ll have me about?”

  Her lance swept over and past them both, to the wings. With a choreographer’s sense of her own body in space-time, she’d once told him her vision of her own inner anatomy during the love-ballet of the thighs—the clitoris, a fleshy sea anemone waving in its grotto, ready to receive. Like so much in the ballet—from the misalliances of princes and birds to that wildly misconceived stage set of herself (the flower was apparently at the bottom of the grotto)—what was anatomically wrong was somehow made lyrically possible. He’d never told her of her error. By whatever grand jeté, Nijinsky had always arrived.