Augusta saw how the girl’s eyes went from one to the other, not wandering, just as if in some ballet of entrances all on the right, she’d come in on the left, and was watching her turn. She still held the book, like a clutch of prayer. She’s human. She’s not to be fooled as we are, any more, but in some other way. She has no self-center yet, or not enough. But she’ll—educate herself. Who would come for her, to meet her then—with his own tragedy spread like a bird across his shoulders? “And now,” said Borkan, “by the authority vested in me by the State of New York—”
They were pronounced man and wife.
As they kissed, she saw in his eyes what had made her come here and drew her still—his terror of not being as good as he had set out to be.
“What are you looking at?” he said to her afterwards, at the window. She pointed across the park, to an approximate spot. “Our house.”
“Common life,” said Augusta, grasping the brandy Borkan had brought her. “There’s too much of it.”
By the time Judge Borkan’s Cadillac, cutting around the park via the Plaza, brought them to the Ralston house, it was glowing abovestairs, the reception in full swing. Judge Mannix’s chair (as he’d been explaining to several) was set in the only new patch of floor, where the central staircase had been—now closed over because of the fire laws for a multiple dwelling. What a weight of scorn he put on the word “multiple.” Warren and Margaret Fenno, though near him, had formed no reception line, her Quaker simplicity rising oddly to the fore even to her husband—until he saw that by this device each family was able to greet its own. Fennos were overwhelmingly—Fenno, and had brought the young of Guilford to meet the young of Williamstown. Broughams stood about with luminous looks (as if inwardly painting their own portraits in the manner of Eakins) and were greetable.
Judge Mannix’s list, culled in part from public dinners, was impressive in that style. Judges were present of a rank which thought little of Borkan, and several deans of law who could nod across at Moling, the head of Warren’s foundation, with the “Ah-ha, so you’re here” of men accustomed to meet in narrower categories than were here today. He had wanted a few criminals too—as he had said to Edwin, to whom on certain bases he was talking again—“Respectable, of course.” A few of the more politically responsible had responded. Mulling the choice of a judge to marry the couple, he’d thought of Borkan, as veteran of a mixed marriage, but from his own sentiment too. For, now that by virtue of his column he was out in public—“Print in a London monthly, Moling for dignity; syndicate in the States for money, and give the money to charity”—he’d at last made the great middle-aged jump from feeling to sentiment. It was the house he was really giving this gala for.
Not all the old faithfuls were here, though Blount, stopping at Port Harcourt en route from the vast holdings Krupong had acceded to, had sent one of those garbled, globe-circling telegrams without which no present-day ceremony was complete. Charlie was behind the buffet with Anna, who was watching Ralston’s caterer with a home cook’s eye. Austin’s Harvard roommates were here, and some of Ruth’s troupe; otherwise this was scarcely a young wedding, at least on the Mannix-Mendes side. Most surprising of their arrivals was Leni. A last admitting herself to be at that age when women open shops, and finding herself to be one of the happy ones who lost all ill-ease when they could meet the public on a cost-plus basis, she now called herself Gaby, after her line of corsets, and wore black. Ninon, unable to leave the theatre, sending both Ruth and him notes, had as usual gone to the heart of things. His said, “Thanks, my dear, I don’t approve of first marriages.” To Ruth she had been equally brief. “I’m willing you the house in Clipstone Street.”
All others were accountably absent.
“Nothing happens on these occasions,” the Judge said to Borkan at his elbow. “Certainly not the marriage.”
“Oh, they all hop into bed now right away,” said Borkan.
“Didn’t we.”
“And say they did,” said Borkan. “My God—who owns this place?”
“My sisters found all these spidery chairs,” the Judge said to Margaret Fenno. “Didn’t they do well? Ralston’s enchanted.” And so had he been. “Originally, the place was furnished by Cottier, dealer my father knew well. Rosa and Athalie did quite a research job. It’s given them a terrible mistrust of their own mahogany.”
“We’re not rich enough for antiques,” said Mrs. Fenno.
Did Quakers still tremble with emotion, in Meeting? In society, his new in-laws gave no sign of it. How neatly they walked between the two bazaars of ethic, Christian and Oriental, settling for no consciences but the best! “Do sit on one anyway!” he said.
“What a fascinating crowd,” said Mrs. Fenno. “So various.”
“The small size of the soul, when it goes out in society! One of the most frightening things in life, isn’t it?” Turning, he saw she didn’t know how to answer him; she must always have thought her own decently large. “And the recurrence of types! I mean—surely you and I’ve seen all these characters before.” He waved at their line of vision—hands with champagne glasses, declined waists, expanded bellies, striped serge crotches with a shrunk hint of “prostate” in them. And one towheaded Fenno chick, and two pliant boys shifting past, sweater dress and corduroy, faultlessly young. “Spoke at Harvard not long ago. Going across the Yard, caught myself saying, ‘Why, there’s young Hayes, and there’s Steinmets!’—till I remembered they’d been upper-classmen even in my day. And at Columbia.”
“Young for your class, weren’t you?” said Warren.
“I’ve never seen him before,” Mrs. Fenno said.
It was Ralston. He was wearing a suit of black horsehair apparently, with pipestem legs. Like so many rich who could indulge themselves, physically he was almost entirely the creature of his own imagination; even his sideburns didn’t cling as convincingly to his cheeks as did Rupert’s, who was near. He wore blue glasses, which he now removed to show bright eyes distraught with intelligences of all the other worlds he wouldn’t have time to join. Plainly his social-worker seriousness had saved him from something sexual, though precisely from what would probably never be clear to anyone, including him. He had each of the bridal couple by a hand. “How you’ve warmed me!” he said.
He professed himself delighted with the ferny bower the foreman had made of the fountain—“A six-sided star!” but went off to see if it couldn’t be made to work. At Warren’s side, his youngest girl exploded into giggles. “A tisket a tasket!” she said.
“He’s hooked on arenas now,” Warren said to Mannix. “Says this is his last house. Says a hundred years from now, everything’s going to be in public performance areas; real estate might as well get ready for it. Hordes of us, just milling around outside. Private homes will be a thing of the past.”
“Everything?” said Mrs. Fenno, faintly.
“With fountains of course,” said the Judge. “One could hide behind them. Well, the rich are always on the side of anarchy, in the end.”
Dr. Hildesheimer came up, in Rosa’s tow.
“Very good of you to come, Doctor,” said the Judge, introducing him.
“Especially since he couldn’t officiate.” From behind Rosa, Athalie waggled a finger at the Fennos. The sisters had agreed to take the jocular approach. And not get too close.
“Modern life!” said the rabbi, spreading hands of amity wide. “Modern times.” It was his newest blessing. He bent confidentially to Mannix’s ear. “Frankly—I was glad to be of use about the picture. Mirriam will be with us in dear memory, just the same.”
Moling, coming up, took away the Judge’s attention.
“Picture?” said Mrs. Fenno, low. “How?”
“Frankly—” The rabbi was a leaner, and a whisperer too. “Salt of the earth, those two women. But a cancer of that type, why should a girl on her wedding day be reminded!” Then he stood back. Clearly he didn’t want to bless this gathering too firmly. “Frankly, I must be going.” He lean
ed over Mannix. “Come to the vestry, hmm?”
“He used to say ‘really,’” the Judge said after him. “I’m coming to love Dr. Aitch—for his uncertainty.”
And Warren asked himself whether he couldn’t come to love this man, for his.
“About what, Judge Mannix?” said Mrs. Fenno. She would not say Simon.
“Eternity, Margaret.” He said it deliberately. “As my father used to say: ‘A true Jew is never guilty of the phrase “modern” life’…And now, if you’ll excuse me—” He wheeled himself off.
“Does he always talk like that?” said Mrs. Fenno to her husband.
“He was a prodigy.”
“Cancer,” she said. “The wife. Well, if that’s all it was—”
“Was it. Tried this morning. He wouldn’t give.”
“They always talk about money in the end,” she said.
Austin, coming by, grabbed and spun her round, with the peculiar bonhomie of bridegrooms to mothers. Then he held her off. The huge pin on her bosom quivered. He knew it well, but grinned at his sister. “Who died!” Then, craning over the crowd from his height, he saw who the Judge had gone to. Edwin Halecsy was here.
He’d been invited of course; that is, he’d been sent the formal announcement with reception card enclosed. Though he’d struggled privately over whether or not he wanted to come, it never occurred to him that he was expected not to. He and Simon Mannix now believed the worst of each other. In this guarded business enmity, their column—written alternately, never jointly, but published as the Judge’s in entirety, with Edwin billed as assistant—seemed to go all the better for this. They now spoke only of the “law.” And Edwin was the charity the money was given to.
To Simon, every subtlety he’d taught this boy was now in service to Edwin’s natural depravity—which had come to the fore to show a Mannix how dangerous it was to be loosely libertarian. He’d brought his benefaction inside the home, and this was what had come of it. It never occurred to him that—except for a vicarious filial emotion, which now made Mannix wince for David’s sake (at the waste of it)—all those vaunted subtleties had belonged to the intelligence alone. Or that Edwin had been brought into the house as nowadays intellectual blacks were, to frequent only those influential homes which were culturally safe enough, there to feed on everything they wished except the normal emotions of human intercourse—which it was quietly assumed they practiced somewhere else. All this Edwin now saw. One article he had written with the lyric sob of betrayal in the throat. After that, he merely hated them.
Once so brave, he was afraid of experience now. Like his mother. He would never be stupid. But, in the style of the streets he was born to, he tended to believe the worst of people too quickly, and the better more sullenly slow. In such halls as tonight’s, ignorance of the social insincerities kept him awkward—and effectively concealed that he believed the best of nobody at all. He still wasn’t afraid to dare—if given the direction. He slept once a week with a secretary, but meant to marry well. His once prideful “reservoir” of instinct, he tried never to think of. The one night it had overflowed, it had made him “ill”—a newer word for murder, rape—or honesty.
He was talking at the moment to a girl. He could tell the story of his early life these days, and too often did. “Oh, he knows his age now,” said one of his former professors, after his recent visit there in attendance on the Judge. “Uses the catchwords of modernity like the oldest scholar here.” A second said, “And we thought he was log-cabin material, when he was here! Guy ought to know for himself, what is the best mob. Not ask.” The third, who’d never met Halecsy before, said “I wonder. Usually I can’t stand Mannix’s column. Too florid a view of life for me. But there was one beaut of politics, there was. Called ‘How Villains Are Made.’”
Austin went toward him in the spirit of the day, until he saw who he was talking with. “Didn’t know you knew my cousin Di. Hallo, Di.”
“Didn’t know she was your cousin Di.”
Why should so many gather to these two at once—the Judge, Moling behind him—like fish in an aquarium, behind two up ahead who have seen the same fleck of food? The girl faded back, as women did before duels they hadn’t provoked. Last came the bride herself, followed laggingly by Augusta, in whom the crocus-colored wine, on top of Brokan’s brandy and her own mossy nostalgias, had pro-listening bent headed to other people’s conceptions, which ready now, to live in his house.
“Brought this along,” said Edwin, handing over the folder which was his excuse to himself for coming.
“Anything important?” said the Judge. “For now?”
“That’s for you to say.”
Moling, the foundation man, enormously tall, always listening bent-headed to other people’s conceptions, which he then returned to them more securely knotted, said, “Ah well, your column, Judge, that’s always important.”
Inside the folder was a single copy of an Israeli newspaper Edwin often put there—though the column had never spoken of Israel. To the Judge’s eager glance, it held nothing new—current stories of Ben-Zwi and Ben-Gurion, pictures of desert military in their protective beards, Tel Aviv holy men in their consecrated ones, and the usual diplomats, clean-shaven for the chancelleries of the West. “All the gossips and accomplishments of a country with God behind and heavy business ahead,” said the Judge. “Edwin’s always wanting me to do a piece on Israel. Or go there.” He no longer cared how Edwin had found him out. To him it was appropriate. That this boy—even in his way—should be the only one to lend credence to the hope that David might be alive. A light torture was better than no belief at all. And a loose end opening out, out into living life.
“Chaim Weizmann,” Moling said softly. “How many people remember he created the acetone Britain needed for explosives in World War One?”
“It’s hard to be a lion of Judah,” Mannix said.
A waiter offered Edwin a tray. He took a glass. “Filled too full,” he said to Austin. Half-tones he did learn, he never forgot.
“Not today,” Austin said. Arm round his bride, he could afford to view Edwin objectively. If he married, Austin thought, it could be taken for granted—unless his mother’s heredity came proudly to the fore, creating once again some stolid, pleasantly dumb reminder of the basic human lot—that his children would go to Harvard, or at least try for Yale. As for a house—it was Austin’s surmise that Edwin knew of one without heirs live, or willing—and meant to inherit it.
Edwin drank, held out the glass. “Congratulations,” he said to the bride. Not telling whether he had innocently mixed up his wishes. “Fenno—” He made it sound like the clan rather than the man—“Good luck.”
A moment later they saw him halfway down the room, moved there so dexterously that none had seen it done. As he stood there, in hornrims and a suit too Ivy League only for snobs, glass in hand, a hungry sparkle on his lip, over his head the two palm trees of any ad that now brought environments together, he looked appealing enough—in the modern way. One saw such legions of him everywhere.
“Who is that young man?” asked Moling.
“Edwin?” The wheelchair swung itself around. “He’s what the world’s going to be. And it won’t be like us.”
“Edwin?” It was the bride, just barely putting herself to the fore, in the softer accents Moling approved. Her hand lay on the back of the wheelchair—dutiful. “My father—was his protégé.”
A bowknot of the bride’s friends from the troupe hung near, too abashed to approach, in their center an accordionist. Taking sudden heart, they joined arms—surrounding the couple with their lovely, fluctuating barrier. At their edge was Ralston, in the crook of his arm an object of chrome.
“Modern life,” said Moling, unable to better the phrase, and stood on tiptoe, all seven feet of him, to go forward to it.
Borkan, coming up, heard him. “Rabbi is selling his story everywhere.”
“You still say ‘Rabbi’ direct,” said the Judge. “At home we
already said ‘the rabbi.’ Or ‘Doctor.’ Therein lies a whole history of religious reform. Or social.”
“So? Simon—have dinner with me, after this?”
They looked at each other. Two widowers? It was like saying it.
One of the old politicos from the Judge’s list, seeing them in confab, came up to them, white-haired and wing-collared, a tottering charcoal of a man, with a little Irish glow left to him, at the long lip. “You look gay.”
“Married off my daughter today.”
“And you—not so gay.”
“I buried my wife, some months ago.”
“Ah yes, ah and yes. That takes a long time.” He doddered off, away from death, toward Austin’s young cousin, who was chatting with Augusta.
“My old cousin looks all the better for a little wear,” said the Judge. “Or I need my glasses. Dinner? If you can wait until I can leave. Where’ll we go?”
“How about my club?”
“The Harmonie?” Which his own father and Mendes had never joined.
“No. Not the Harmonie.”
Something in Borkan’s tone alerted the Judge. “Not—?”
Before he could let the august name drop, Borkan nodded, his face carefully grave.
“Why, yes. That would be appropriate.” Borkan must have had a willing brother-in-law somewhere. Or times had changed. “That was Chauncey Olney’s club.”
“Olney? I’d almost forgotten him.”
“I suppose it’s still the same.”
Borkan was proud. “Just the same…Is that music?”
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