False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  Certainly the accident which made me choose them wasn’t portentous. About twice a year, until his departure for South Africa, I used to spend an evening with one of our staff, a man of considerable education gone to no seed, whose elaborate after-dinner talk (his term for it “postprandial”) had, for the limits of an evening, the attractive bitterness of the disappointed. In my trade I’d known many nonwriting “writers,” but Norman Schreiber was the only one who, selecting his nom de plume while still in college, had hung on to it as the “first step” ever since, taking it out from cotton wool on occasion to examine its mint shine. He’d a store of wild, full-blown anecdotes also, each told according to an ancient convention, studded with names and dates, as if it had happened to him, most of them with a fancy pornography that belonged more to literature than life. Since I could never quite recognize their sources, I concluded that Norm was his own fantasist, and it sometimes amused me to think of us together. Despite the heavy circumstantiality of his stories, it had never occurred to me to follow any of them up, until the day, about eighteen months ago, shortly after his arrival in the Union. Gaby & Cohn, Ltd., he wrote, the relatives he had gone out to see on his own, hoping to charm them into taking him into the business, had turned out to be not diamond merchants but tailors. This was not unreasonable, since, with his usual bravura, taking their letterhead on assumption, he had not asked. He would be returning shortly. Meanwhile, he wrote, would you do me a favor? Take a hundred bucks from the pay I have coming and send it to Carleen Jones. She won’t be in the book but the madame is, Pontina Sims, a Seventh Avenue address and I don’t seem to have it. There’s not likely to be more than one as you’ll agree, knowing the story. I sort of promised it to little C. It didn’t wholly surprise me that some of Norm’s exploits had their poor, faded antecedents in actuality, but of the lot I should never have taken this as the likely one—one of his most farfetched, containing several classic gambits of sexual adventure—nudes in fur coats on windy street corners, the very young and phthisic, the very grateful prostitute—and over all, like a whiff of anisette from the corner liquor store, a distinct flavor of The Girl with the Golden Eyes. The address was in the book well enough, on Sugar Hill in Harlem. Half annoyed with Norm’s pretensions—he’d signed the letter with his nom de plume—I checked up on him one afternoon.

  The house, its octoroon magnificence just as described, was no great surprise either; such places as I’ve seen seem to me already to have one foot in bookshop erotica. I was more astounded to find that the embellishments I’d marked down as Norm’s were real also, including not only Madame Pontina’s staidly excellent collection of paintings and the very circumstantial sister who was a buyer at Macy’s, but even the girl, the little tan Mimi herself, out of a One Hundred Thirty-fifth Street Bohème. Not until I was back home, about to send off the note she’d given me for him, did the full significance strike me, coming to me over all the seas between us like his breath, choked now with mocking laughter, which had always seemed to me faintly carious with lies. It was all true then—one of his wildest. Then all the stories which, supercilious confidant, I had listened to, might well be. Even poor Norm. Even Norm’s excursions were real. The only phoniness about him might be the one thing which still linked us as brothers—that name. A sense, not of sadness, but of the nadir, whelmed me as I looked down at it. “Walter Diabolus.” It had always tickled me, this mildly collegiate satyriasis appended, most probably from what I knew of Norm, to the mild tinkler, Walter Pater. Walter was a common enough name still, of course, but in all my wanderings I had only known one. I’d not thought of him for some time, a man whose confidences I had always kept honorably apart from my eccentricities, for reasons which I had not cared to phrase. Standing there in my cell, I re-created all that Walter had told me. I remember how I suddenly spoke aloud—the old paneling giving the warning back to me. “No!” This was how the accident occurred. Not many hours later I was already at my researches, to the strumming, from a deeper register, that said “Yes.”

  If a physical deformity doesn’t sour or sharpen a man, the excess sometimes goes the other way, giving him a goodness, choired by all his friends as “not of this world,” which, when it is truly unaffected as it was with Walter Stern, makes him one of the rare seraphs they can bear to tolerate “in it.” In 1954, when he and I were among half a dozen patients who took their daily sunning on a porch off the orthopedic wing of Lenox Hill Hospital, it was Walter, then awaiting the operation which would at best lessen the pain he lived with, at worst bring the death it did to his frailly caged heart, who would stand, most attentive of any of us, listening to some disc case tell about his “spasm,” his own wastedly aquiline hunchback’s face hung like a plaque between his shoulder blades, at the angle of a crow’s. Mornings he would go down to the brace shop, chatting with the children there like someone their own size out of Oz, and after my ski-twisted leg had been set in traction, he was forever hopping in and out of the room we shared, busy with the small attentions a man still ambulatory could bring the immobilized. His sympathy was chronic; it was the palely shining aura of his disease. I should have realized that it was somehow involved even with his feeling for David Mannix, had I not been so reverently intent, during our night-light exchanges—and for once with no thought of storing any of this away—on Walter himself. I knew my privilege. I was listening to that goodness which speaks gratuitously, as it can only, to one’s own.

  Characteristically, it was “Diddy’s” goodness of which he was forever speaking, and of course the Mannixes’. In the Letters of David Mannix which he was publishing at his own expense, and from which he read to me up to his last preoperative hours, I was never able to find anything more than the tentative, even jejune observations of an amiable, well-placed young man, hearing rather, in the deep intonations of that outsize voice coming unbelievably from the chest scarcely cramping the covers in the bed opposite, only a hunchback’s idolization of the ordinary, of the better-favored brother. When I was shown their picture at nineteen, it was not the tall, well-muscled young Harvard boy in bathing trunks, holding his oar, whose slackly good-natured face I lingered on, but Walter, fully dressed, beside him, his eyes already as ringed as they were now, above the specially made suit whose peculiarly vamped vest gave him the look of a goldsmith’s apprentice. Walter, though the same age, had gone ahead to Harvard, later acting as doyen and, I suspected, concealed tutor to the boy who had so much else to do besides study and had not even finished, instead edged out imperceptibly into the pleasantly guarded paths open to a young man of his status, of his father’s status, into various imprecise capacities of a social welfare order which had terminated in his service with the Friends, ultimately in the death by air crash which, though now so ordinary, remained the most precise thing about him. “I doubt if I’d’ve dared go to college,” said Walter, “if the Mannixes hadn’t prodded me, on the excuse that it would mean so much to David. All the things they did for me, and always with that same excuse. And all the things they didn’t know they did. Life in that house always seemed to go on in a special way I couldn’t define, warmer, sad only for the rest of the world to have to define. When I first went there as a kid, that’s what I used to call it to myself, ‘the wonderful house.’ It seemed to me they had everything, and gave it away daily. When I came, of course, Mrs. Mannix was already ill, though none of us knew—you remember I told you.”

  Yes, I remembered, all the minutiae he dwelt on so lovingly and more, and I understood his feeling for the Mannixes, walking the corridors of that lavish house better than he knew. When David Mannix had brought him home as a schoolboy, a moneyed boy of much the same background as themselves in everything but fate, his family had already been borne off by catastrophes which had left him, as he must have seemed to the Mannixes, the small, remaining one. I could see how it would have been. He’d become one of those accessory benevolences which all such households have. No doubt, being Walter, he had been its dearest one, but I still knew the
flavor of that relationship, fancying sometimes, as he rambled on in the long night watches, that I even knew the house itself in all its savors and modes. The Mannixes, he told me, were German Jews like himself, the name probably Anglicized during the stay of the Judge’s father’s generation in England, but David had been proudest of his mother’s Sephardic ancestry; she had been a Mendès. Walter’s voice came through the darkness, amused, and I wondered if he knew how little now, after the first, he spoke of David, how much the letters project was his tribute to them all. “Pereira,” I muttered from my bed in answer, and heard him sit up. “That’s a branch. You know them?” I was quick to reply. “Damn these wires, would you press the button? Nope, just my penny-in-the-slot mind.” That night, the eve of his operation, he talked until the nurse came with his sedatives, and in the morning, until they drugged him again, I kept him in the same strain, so that he might carry them with him even up to the ether’s cone. Ruth and her father were abroad for the latter’s health, he had told me, and knew nothing of this. Except as a Backfisch, Ruth scarcely figured in reminiscences which, that night particularly, were all of the earlier time in that house where the four of them had had everything, where he had been a fifth to such a family as had never existed anywhere else on earth. I pretended with him, always, that there had not.

  After he’d gone up, I resolved, staring at my swathed foot all the long hours of that morning, that if he did not come down, anything I knew of them should die with him. For more than five years I kept it—my tribute to him. But a year ago, when at last I walked up the steps and inside his wonderful house, I saw how well I had remembered—and how much I’d forgotten. A New York brownstone is nothing like a house in London which must have been twice as wide, and this one, freshly smartened even in Walter’s time, has no trace of Edwardian murkiness, ugly shagreens, is nothing like. I remember only what Walter had, I told myself in the anteroom, looking up at the landing. There was no Knight of Malta in botched glass at the top of the stair. Glancing into a drawing room presided over in the old style by its tribal host of photographs, I remembered for Walter, in his boarding-school cubicle, this Phoenician love of the object, this sense in them, scattered everywhere, of the affections preserved. Perhaps, I told myself, as Christian to his Jew, once poor boy to his rich, I recognize even more keenly this racial aura of an Orientalia practicably restrained, this kitchen-palace odor of comfort—this balm. I came here to meet the Judge, I reminded myself—Mr. Goodman will have his little brush with the law. And this is his household, that has never existed elsewhere, which Walter, who will never be mentioned between us, so aptly described. Anna came toward me to take me into him, not Molly. But as I moved away from the banister, my hand, passing over its smoothness, sought for a newel post, shaped like a pineapple, which might once have been there.

  Consider the Judge. Consider him as, late of an afternoon, he sits there in his house, ready to receive me, looking the very part under the twinned spotlights of his green tôle-shaded student lamp, his daughter beside him or under the lamp that is “hers,” behind them both a good, comfortable century, at the very least, of such arrangements. Between them are the remnants of the day’s correspondence, the only disorder; over there is what appears to be a Francophile corner, and everywhere, everywhere as expected, the bibliotheca of a family with nothing to hide. He is awaiting a man known to him through their brief correspondence and by name, of course, who is very kindly bringing the galley proofs of the Judge’s article for their encyclopedia, taking the opportunity thereby of meeting the Judge—as who would not?—and awarded it the more readily because of the man’s faint linkage, an acquaintanceship just barely pressed, with the Judge’s dead son. The kindness, as both are aware, is the Judge’s. He understands the duties of the admired, the obligations of the bereaved, and is generous in the performance of both. When the doorbell rings, Anna, at his direction, is just carrying out a bowl of flowers which seem to her still fresh, as she loudly says, but flowers are not allowed to grow mephitic in this house. She has the bowl in her hand when she admits the stranger. Consider him too, though you know him better. The perfect unknown, he enters the house of the perfectly known. Consider them both, and take nothing for granted. (How could I have not seen this—little as Ruth had the chance to say today—until now?) Take nothing for granted on either side.

  Anna, who does not know that I already know her by name, lets me in. The family expletive, her “my hosh,” having been even Walter’s, will surely have been David’s also, but I shall go slowly. Give the genie time to grow; he is just barely inside. I have decided that I knew David just well enough to call him Diddy as most did, no better.

  The stage is set, though it seem to be improvised. Judge Simon Mannix sees me enter, a man of forty-odd, young to his (as stated in this year’s issue of Current Biography) seventy-one, somewhat fair to his iron-gray, a dispatch case in hand. His own eyes are notably keen, but as a personage, he takes for granted, no doubt, that the young man already knows more about his life than he may ever care to know about the young man. In the full empressement of this, he extends his hand.

  “You’ll excuse my not rising.” Most have the impression that since the illness of ’53 he has lost the use of his legs entirely, but I know, hearing Walter’s tender retrospect, what even few friends do, that the chair to which Ruth, Anna, and a chauffeur are variously tied only garners his strength for those brave morning and evening hours in the bedroom where he refuses to be valeted. His physiognomy, however, is a surprise; in the pictures, the head, the whole man, does not look so small. For a fraction of a second, I saw the type, that Hebraic miniature which, in the recessed eyes, flat, once ebony hair, recalls the Japanese; I saw the doll-pate (so amazing for that brain), the eyeglass ribbon like the one in Yeats’s pictures, felt the hand, smaller at a glance than his own daughter’s; then the charm, the reputation, all the expected surrounded me and I never saw them that way again—until now.

  “My daughter, Mrs. Fenno.” She comes forward from behind the lamp a little as if evoked, I think, a little as in that child’s game “Simon says,” although there is nothing of the Griselda in her looks or in anything I have heard. Yet it is there. “Simon says take three steps forward.” Or perhaps I am thinking of her as Walter first saw her, aged about eleven. She looks in her mid-twenties now, is thirty-one. Oval-faced, and much taller, except in coloring she does not resemble the Judge—the eyes very large. Narrow feet, slender hands, hair high, she is all ovals and narrownesses, with the grisette waist, the aquarelle tints peculiar these days to cultivated young women attached to the arts. The well-bred look of those trained to a performing art they never need use. Of course I know this about her too, as I know that her first name, a little harsh for her, is Ruth. The mark just discernible on her left cheekbone is the toothmark of an Airedale belonging to Diddy’s friend Austin Fenno, when the latter was twelve. They make their friends early, these people, sometimes marrying them as the Ptolemies married their brothers and sisters. And Fenno—but I must address myself to the Judge.

  He and I spend some token minutes over the galley proof, which I have had our law editor go over, having no wish to immerse myself that deeply in the mazes of its erudition, seeing no need. “Mannix is sure the scholar’s scholar in this one,” this man had commented. “I had no idea! Sure thrown the book at us!” and reading the manuscript over in the light of Mannix as publicized, as the reputation we had solicited, I saw what he meant. Mannix’s career, resting on the delivery of a considerable body of opinions, nothing so homogeneous as Holmes, no single one so memorable as Woolsey’s or Hand’s, but always sufficiently in the public interest to maintain him in the public eye, did not happen to be a scholar’s. It was a sober enough show, and quite honorable, but on reflection, it was a show. That was why and how one knew him. Why had he taken the pains then to throw the book at us, unless for the very reason that in a sense we were the book, and it was his nature to take such things under consideration? I put the thoug
ht aside, as what we often ran across in our business, the small vanities of otherwise incorruptible men. I didn’t stop to wonder whether such heights of “judgeship” as I anticipated in Mannix were rarely envisioned except by men like Dobbin, who had never attained one, or men whose devotional madness ignored the public altogether, like Fourchette. And that night, reading the Judge’s manuscript over his shoulder, in the soft, guardian light of all his guerdons around him, I have no mind to see in him any such mannerisms as might remind me of other small men historically dependent on other people’s impressions—so eager am I for him to make the impression on me that I crave.

  When we are finished, he makes the round of his possessions with me, of his Mannixiana as it were, I taking this to be the courteous method, met before in other personages, by which men who have to be much on display keep their real privacies, meanwhile letting these serve. Corner by corner, by decade, by generation, it is a display to envy now if one had not done that beforehand, if one were not already busy, among bibelots, framed faces and family papers all so open to the process, uniting what one knows to what one does not. And all the time, as the three of us go round, we do so on a rising perception of the sympathy of our tastes. I use a light hand, a stroke here and there, never too gross. We pass the corner devoted to the collection of French objets d’art (which I know to be her mother’s, although she does not tell me so), without any comment on my part except admiration, although I have recently studied a book of plates on some of the same. Before we get to the Judge’s study, however, I chance to inform him—and he is confounded to hear—that I have just last week bought a Deming, a small pastel of a Navaho, horsed, on a hill. He hasn’t heard a mention of the man in thirty years; in there he has two. I’m interested in Indian stuff, then, as the Judge is? No (lightly, lightly), it appears that ordinarily I am not. All of which is true. Maartens turned the thing up for me on request, and I like it well enough. I’ve long since learned the wisdom of having enough background palette and to spare, of being able to choose spontaneously from one’s resources, never depending (a weakness of mine) too much on “objects” of this sort, and always keeping one’s independence of spirit—how absurd, for a quick effect, to make myself out a china collector! Sometimes, however, there are small jokes that one would like to share. In the study, the Judge offers me a cigar, an Upmann, and the smile with which I let him see I know it for what it is broadens slightly at the thought of two such at that very moment in my breast pocket, bought this morning, which, if it had suited, I might have offered him.