I break the silence. “Mr. Ping-pong. Anna knows all our habits to a T, doesn’t she?”
Ruth, leaning against the mural of stamps, tracing a finger from one to another, doesn’t look up. “Alice was a friend of David’s.” Six months later now, if she no longer adds “too,” I take it to be because I now have my own status here. “He was—thinking of marrying her, just before he was killed.” Her finger traces its way toward another stamp. “I’m not sure whether Alice—what Alice was thinking.” Again the finger moved on. “She’s—she’s a deaf-mute, you see. Or rather, she began life as one; she can speak well enough now, in that sort of strange voice they have. And she even works with others. But silence is still more of a habit with her than with—normal people. Not that it doesn’t become her. She’s exquisite to look at—very blonde, slender. Even after you know why she doesn’t speak more, it only makes her seem—enchanted. Natural enough, of course, that David should fall in love with her.” The finger stops. If she is waiting for me to say something, she waits in vain. “I don’t suppose—he ever spoke of her?”
I am ready enough now. “No,” I could say with truth, “I didn’t know.”
Still she does not look up, but I can feel her concentration. She is watching my every movement; she too is aware. I thought I recognized this moment of stillness, how well I knew it—for now she will confide. No. With dismay, I felt myself push against the moment usually so consummately arranged for. If I opened my mouth it would be to warn her. Let’s stay as we are. The listener is never the friend.
“Father couldn’t bear the idea,” said Ruth. “With the way he felt about David, it—it was the last straw. He thought—he thought it was David’s way of getting back at him.” These last words have come in a rush. I know the familiar pace of that too. I force myself to meet her look. Clear-eyed, frank of feature, she was the danger now—and the mystery—but I refused to see it. “I suppose—” she said, and there was a question in her voice, but I didn’t hear it at the time. “I suppose that’s understandable enough.”
“Yes.” I answered from the habit of caution, not really hearing. “Yes, I suppose.”
She is at the door now. What is she saying? “Perhaps,” she says, her voice hard. “But I don’t understand it. I won’t!”
After she’d gone up, I traced a finger along the path hers had, past the triangular stamp that, six months ago, the Judge had pointed out as the rarest. She had all but told me what I still did not know about David, even perhaps what she all but knew about me, but I had not heard her. It was the house I had come for, and if I waited I should hear it in all its restless undertones beneath the public one, a cage of wires, naked to the winds as any other, Walter’s wonderful house. It was time to leave. How canny a dilettante one had to be, how careful, just in time, to move on. Moving on was not as easy as it had been in the old days; I no longer had the anonymity of youth. Middle age luckily had its own powers and wisdoms; in the social way possible in cities I would manage slowly to detach myself from this world I had grown too fond of, mindful to do its inhabitants no harm for their imperfection’s sake.
Anna was just letting in Krupong as I left the library. On his heels, a second ring announced Blount. As Anna took their things, Ruth appeared at the drawing-room door, I opposite, the Judge, slowly descending the stairwell in his movable chair, hand outstretched, between us. To Blount and Krupong, we may well appear already the simulacrum of a family, each member relinquishing some happily unhaunted solo pursuit for the welcome social hour, each punctual at his proper door, and these orange lamps sprung up all about must have appeared to these two, outside on the stoop, quite as an hour earlier they would have seemed to me. I remember Ruth’s voice of six months ago, already gilding with memory now that I am leaving. “We are very beautifully arranged.”
But, of course, I did not leave.
Once two people are physically conscious of one another, only absence can stop that progression. Progression in some form it is, in whatever terms for the two are inevitable; the sexual clock, like any other worth contemplation, has no status quo, cannot be turned back. In the next few weeks I frequented the Mannixes less, but there seemed no immediate way to abscond entirely, my work at the time making it impossible for me to leave the city. Any “break” on emotional grounds was absurd; in the lightly choral tastefulness of our relationship to date there’d been nothing to peg such on. Only a hysteric might have tried to trump such up, and thereby illogically penetrated sooner past the soft diffusion of warmth on the Mannix hearth to whatever truer cold lay beyond—the careful nonviolence, perhaps, of an establishment whose harmonious planes, liming its coterie birds with so many minor attractions, on closer scrutiny dared offer no handgrips for the heart. All this is retrospect; I no more saw this at the time than I marked Ruth’s own attempts to put absence between us for what they were. Firmer than I and actually less free, twice during those same weeks she was off somewhere, the first time (despite a sickness of Anna’s which made her own presence even more than customarily ill-spared) on a visit to an old schoolmate now in Chicago, the second, on a visit of much longer duration, to London, where Austin Fenno, her former husband, now remarried, was living.
At the time, I connected neither of these departures with me. Since I’d met the Mannixes in spring and it was now autumn, their summer pattern was better known to me than their winter one, which might have variables natural to people who were not tethered to an occupation. And Ruth’s license to move about at will except as she was tethered to her father’s needs, which he never appeared to press, seemed to me much broader than most women of her age, and in spite of her own phrase, not at all Edwardian. Had flight still been the woman’s part of courtship, vanity might have made me see hers as such, but women no longer said no so elaborately, whether or not they meant it. In any case, I’d come to that point in my affairs—and in our affair, if it was to be one—where I saw her only as the “object.” In the most ordinary love affair, normal human solipsism grows beyond all bounds, the opposite person becoming the “object,” the “other,” whisked into imaginary beds and conversations while at the same time existing in absolute and peculiar stasis, a pawn swollen to power by the mere fact of being where it is, without motive of its own. And our affair, taken from my side alone, could be no ordinary one. The possibility of her side, therefore, passed me by altogether—and the first warning.
As it happened, I saw her both times she returned. In her first absence, by pleading pressure of work, I had already begun my withdrawal, and this particular evening was the first since that I had dined with her father, this time alone with him. The prospect that Ruth, home the day before and out tonight with Pauli, might come in before I took my leave did not trouble me. Balance had been recovered in the interval, and taking further precaution, I had resumed my visits to an old, if casual friend who in her time had used me to similar purpose. Nanette is a proper hard-soft businesswoman of the day, ruthless to the eye and lissome to the touch, stony as any courtesan where her career as vice-president of a department store is concerned, her secret cartilage appearing in the spot where one would expect it—in her cleavage, sticky and interminable, to an indifferent married man. Except for the added fact that we sleep together, I am her Pauli in those periods of lesser agony when, for one or other of all the reasons available in that sort of cat’s cradle, she is not seeing her part-time lover. In bed she is lively, matter-of-fact and much the good sport, her long servitude having trained her never to obtrude tears or confessions there, and I never advise her that this perhaps is the reason she cannot win her inamorato. In the morning after such a night, we go off from her flat to our separate jobs like two participants in a humdrum, not unamiable marriage which has never risen to rapture or anger, and never will. We had done so that morning.
To my surprise, Ruth, when met in the entrance hall just as I was leaving, appeared ugly to me for the first time. Her looks, so dependent on tint and grace, haven’t the flamboyant regularity
or suburban peachiness that weathers all moods—she looked white-faced and rabbity, as some women did after crying, although the availability of Pauli’s shoulder (he had just departed) did not occur to me then. We chatted briefly in the nonsensical way one does in halls, the Judge meanwhile behind us, waiting to be able to comply with his strict, self-imposed bedtime. Her responsive, eager manner seemed to have vanished—I felt no thread between us. Absence, even such a short one, had done the trick—and perhaps Nanette. Taken aback at the suddenness of my cure, and apparently of hers, I felt the discomfort one does at the sight of the imagined person who has survived untouched all one’s inner dramas of them—or is not even the same. I awkwardly invited her to lunch, which in our early acquaintance we once or twice had done. I both dwelt on her face and avoided it.
“No—no thanks. I’m only here for a few days. I’m—thinking of going to London for a bit.” If this was a sudden decision, I was not quick enough in turning to see that on the Judge’s face. When I did, he seemed tired, and my knowledge of the rules of the house made me leave the more quickly. It had been a dull evening there otherwise, one of those yawning evenings after sexual satiety—Nanette, being desperate, had been particularly lively—when, nulled in the flesh, still nervously unquelled in the mind, one yearns for some improbable sensation beyond the sexual one, knowing well enough that there is none. Going down their steps, I congratulated myself on the satiety I now felt in that house. A musician could have told me better at what stage I really was—at that anomalous place in the fugue where the bouquet of the unfamiliar is subtly exchanged for a preoccupation with the known.
I walked home. It was spikily clear, under the crude blue heaven of one of the best nights of early winter, when walking in this city is a kind of expensive elation at all the brute energy it still shows, and at the same time a lonely tribute, as from some leftover pioneer, to all that it no longer is. On the way, I mused, with a pang, on her ugliness, and tried to excuse it. Most women had such times, and she was thirty—thirty-one. Two blocks from home I passed the florist—in courtesy I must either call Nanette tomorrow or send her roses. To have such a decision to make, to be able to make it clearly, enlivened me almost as much as the wind on my collar. I slipped an order in the florist’s letter slot, and straightway my elation brimmed over into calm. I had seen her. Meanwhile, if it could have done poor Nanette any good, I’d have signed the order for her flowers with the name of the other man, her lover—such bountifulness whelmed me. Going up my own stairs, I told myself that it was not ugliness I had seen in her face but—as in faces long known to one—the sudden, sad prototype of its aging. And having so reconsidered, I went to bed content, and ignorant. There are only two other faces—my mother’s and my uncle’s—that I have watched with the same generic sadness. When one looks that way at a face newly met, it is not the ending of love.
Two months later, I was again at the Mannixes when Ruth came home unexpectedly, and it was no accident that I was there. In the interim, I’d kept to a few afternoon visits there, until a call from Anna a few days before. She was worried about the Judge’s state of health and suggested that I invite myself to dinner and “speak” to him. “He don’t look good, and he don’t listen to no vwooman.”
I could understand his not listening to Anna, to whom people she was fond of so rarely did “look good.” And I could not visualize myself being avuncular to the Judge. But Anna’s pleas flattered, and the Judge liked to be sought after in just this way.
“Okay, Anna. I’ll ask to come, say Thursday.” This was Monday.
No, she said, that was her day off. “You ask for Friday.” She was insistent. “I make chicken paprikash.”
It was as easily arranged. If the Judge had assigned any cause to my recent neglect, he had not shown it on my visits, always proffering unaffectedly neutral news of Ruth. And if he had taken offense, I could hear my request repair it—to be asked for something always affords him a perhaps disproportionate glee. “Miss Augusta is coming too,” he added.
“Can I bring her? I know it’s Charlie’s day off.” That pleases him too—to have the routines there remembered. As I hung up I felt oddly young, a rebellious but good boy received back into grace, into a household whose intimate scents settled round me again like the stoppered air of an old amphora, powerful as Pompeii when released. What if the Mannixes, wheeling in a circle of obligations, contredansed by observances of the same on the part of their satellites, reminded me somewhat of a court—why should I pamphleteer against it? Theirs was only a highly refined version of the family stigmata to be found, once one entered that nest, anywhere—the sign of man budded domestic on a wild planet. And why not? Even if it was never as flawless, once one got inside it, this was the way, made Ishmael enough by the elements, men clung to their crag. So, in this mixed state of mind, limed but still struggling, I walked up that familiar stoop again behind old Miss Selig, carrying her ancient dog Chummie, who could no longer take the high steps and could not be left at home because he cried. It was an easy entrance, one that he and I had made before. Ruth was not there or expected, and any glances exchanged by Anna and me, under the eyes of the Judge and two strangers, were absorbed by the dog, who made one submissive tour of the guests and then settled to his corner like one of those nineteenth-century infants who were reputed to have been seen but not heard, Miss Selig having reared him exactly as she would a child. And he must serve for one here, I thought idly—I had never seen any other.
That night, one of the two other guests was a personage, a vivid young British M.P. named Stukely, whose reputation, somewhat fluidly unsound on his home side of the water, had gained the instant solidity we still extend such exports, once they touch ours. He was an old hand at their game of talking brilliantly wide, and his angular wife, whose painfully brave décolleté, at first blink, made her seem clad only in her excessively heavy earrings, was equally good at seconding him, either by one of those strangulations with which some upper-class British replace the animalities of converse, or, at his best sallies, a sympathetic reddening down to her shoulder blades. I should have found them, in their own word, “amusing,” but could not; after all these years they are still the people who make me remember my class, or that I once had one. If Mrs. Stukely, turning, were to ask if we had not met before, again inquiring my name, I was not sure that I would not nod and humbly give her the real one. In the presence of their high-nosed sense of place I was at once their parvenu, beneath what personal flourishes I had added to it, and at the same time, safe on this emigrant shore, more American than I ever felt anywhere else. I could tell myself that both they and I were wrong, that “place” for me was now some moral-emotional position, the echoes of which some repercussion from their “social” one had merely touched off. It made no matter; narrow as they were, there was something solid in them which made us award them more solidity than they had. In its presence, I could feel the terrible moral burden imposed on the single, wandering personality by the American scene. And resting my personal burden on that one, I could better understand my mother’s cry, “This would never have happened at home!”
After dinner the Judge, as if my silence had infected him with its cause, began speaking of Edgar Halecsy, who was collaborating with him on a book of essays after the manner of the article he had contributed to our office. All through dinner he had held his end up animatedly, but observing him now, I thought I saw why Anna had called. Diminutive people, offering less surface, often show physical change less than the vapidly large, and the Judge, still as unwrinkled as the Oriental he resembles, did not look ill, but one had a stronger sense now of how small he was, as one sees the constricted figure of a small boy who has just been punished. Who could have been punishing the Judge?
“A milliner’s son, mind you, Stukely. Harvard now, and all the rest of it—on his way to being one of the best legal scholars of his generation. Oh, I know that sort of thing happens with you all the time. But Edgar won’t have to suffer for it, as y
ou still make yours do, for his rise. He’s done it individually; that’s our strength. But he was already as good as anybody, right from the beginning.”
“Ah yes,” said Stukely, tugging his beard. “Poor chap. Oh, right you are, of course. Matter of fact, we’re doing our best to imitate you.”
“Guy says—” Everyone looked with surprise at Mrs. Stukely, stirred by her husband’s modesty to her first clear statement of the evening.
“Yes, my dear? What is it I say?”
“That our way is better. People popping up and down all the time, but inside the class structure. One gets just as much new blood that way. And keeps one’s standards!” Her blush of allegiance spread down to her sternum, if that was what this declivity of her person should be called.
True enough, I thought, loyal little bitch-rabbit, but the telltale sign was in her use of “one.”
“Hairdresser’s son, Judge,” I said, “the aunt was the milliner,” for even though I did not much like the absent Edgar, I wanted to flick them all. By control I had kept my voice dry, but dizzily wondered whether I was going to be ill, feeling the gorge of confession swelling in my throat. In another moment I should tell them who I was and how I had got there, for was I not their rounded pebble, the perfectly public, perfectly private individual man whom they did not really believe in, who had got where he was all on his own? “Let me tell you who I am,” I should say, only to be struck dumb when, turning, they said, “Who?”
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