We were at the table eating when the doorbell rang. Carol ran to answer it; she was the kind of kid who was always darting to answer the phone or the door, although it was almost never for her. She came back to the table and flounced into her seat.
“It’s Werner. He wants to see you. He won’t come in.”
I went to the door. He wasn’t lounging against the door frame, the way he usually did. He was standing a couple of paces away from it.
“Please come for a walk,” he said. He was looking at his shoes.
“Gee, whyn’t you come in?” I said. “I’m dead.”
“Please,” he said, “I want you please to come for a walk.”
I was practically finished eating anyway. I went back to the table, grabbed up a hard roll and some pastrami, and followed him downstairs.
Summer in the city affects me the same way as open air music. I guess it’s because both of them have such a hard time. Even when the evening breeze smells of nothing but hot brick, you get the feeling that people are carrying around leaves in their hearts. Werner and I walked down to our usual spot on the river, to a low stone wall, which we jumped, over to a little collection of bushes and some grass, on the other side. It was an open enough spot, but it reacted on us more or less like a private cave; we never said much of anything till we got there. This time it was up to Werner to speak. I had the sandwich, so I finished that.
The electric signs across the river on the Jersey side were already busy. Werner’s face was turned parallel with the river, so that it looked as if the sign that gave the time signal were paying out its letters right out of his mouth. THE TIME IS NOW…8:01…Ordinarily I would have called his attention to this effect and changed seats with him so he could see it happen to me, but I didn’t. The sign jazzed out something about salad oil, and then paid out another minute.
Werner turned his head. “You heard…this morning in the elevator?”
I nodded.
“Your father heard too?”
I nodded again.
He pressed his knuckles against his teeth. His words came through them with a chewed sound. “It is because they are servants,” he said.
“Who do you mean?”
“My father and mother.”
“You mean…they don’t like Jews because they have to work for them sometimes?”
“Maybe,” said Werner, “but it is not what I mean.”
“It’s no disgrace, what anybody works at, over here.” I wasn’t sure I believed this, but it was what one was told. “Besides, they have the business.”
Werner turned his back on me, his shoulders humped up against the Palisades. “Inside them, they are servants.”
He turned back to face me, the words tumbling out with the torn confiding of the closemouthed. “They do not care about the quality of anything.” His voice lingered on the word. He jerked his head at the Mazola sign. “Butter maybe, instead of lard. But only because it is good for the business.”
“Everybody has something wrong with his family,” I muttered.
Werner folded his arms almost triumphantly and looked at me. “But we are not a family,” he said.
I got up and walked around the little grass plot. The way he had spoken the word quality stayed with me; it popped into my mind the time in spring when he and I had been sitting near the same old stone wall and two scarlet tanagers lit on it and strutted for a minute against the blue. You aren’t supposed to see tanagers in New York City. Sooner or later, though, you’ll see almost everything in New York. You’ll have almost every lousy kind of feeling too.
The river had a dark shine to it now. It smelled like a packinghouse for fish, but it looked like the melted, dark eyes of a million girls.
“I wish we were going up to the country this year,” I said. “I’d like to be there right now.”
“I hate the country!” Werner said. “That’s where they’re going to have the restaurant. They have almost enough money now.”
Then it all came out—in a rush. “Come on back,” he said. “They’re out. I want to show you something.”
All the way up the hill he talked: how his mother had worked as a housekeeper for a rich merchant after his father had left for America; how he had always been the child in the basement, allowed to play neither with the town children nor the merchant’s; how his mother would not agree to come over until his father had saved a certain sum, and then required that it be sent to her in dollars before she would sail. Then, in Yorkville, where they had only taken a larger room because the landlady insisted, they used to walk the garish streets sometimes, listening to the din from the cafes—“Ist das nicht ein…? Ja, das ist ein…”—but never going in for a snack or a glass of beer. “We breathed quiet,” I remember him saying, “so we would not have to use up too much air.”
And always, everything was for the restaurant. At Christmastime and birthdays they did not give each other presents, but bought copper pans, cutlery, equipment for the restaurant. They had their eye on an actual place, on a side road not too far from some of the fancy towns in Jersey; it was owned by a man whose wife was a cousin of Mrs. Hauser’s. It already had a clientele of connoisseurs who came to eat slowly, to wait reverently in a waft of roasting coffee, for the Perlhuhn and the Kaiser-Schmarren. The cousins were smart—they knew that Americans would pay the best for the best, and even wait a little long for it, in order to be thought European. But they had let the place get seedy; they did not have enough discipline for the long, sluggish day before the customers arrived, and they had not learned that while the Americans might wait out of snobbishness, they would not do so because the owners were getting drunk in the kitchen. The Hausers would be smarter still. They would serve everything of the best, at a suitably stately pace for such quality, and they would not get drunk in the kitchen.
He stopped talking when we got to his door. The whole time, he hadn’t raised his voice, but had talked on and on in a voice like shavings being rubbed together.
His room was dark and full of the cloying smell. He stood in front of the window, not turning the light on, and I saw that he was looking over at our place. I saw how it looked to him.
That was the summer radios first really came in. Almost everyone had one now. We hadn’t got one yet, but one of Nora’s boy friends had given her a small table model. There were a couple of them playing now at cross purposes, from different places on the court.
“Thursday nights they are broadcasting the concerts, did you know?” he said softly. “Sometimes someone tunes in on it, and I can hear, if I keep the window open. The echoes are bad…and all the other noises. Sometimes, of course, no one tunes it in.”
I wondered what he had to show me, and why he did not turn on the light.
“Today was my birthday,” he said. “I asked them for a radio, but of course I did not expect it. I am to get working papers. When they leave, I am to leave the high school.”
He walked away from the window and turned on the light. The objects on the bed sprang into sharp black and white: the tie disposed on the starched shirt, which lay neatly between the black jacket and pants. That’s what it was. It was a waiter’s suit.
“Of course I did not expect it,” he said. “I did not.”
It was after this that Werner, when he whistled across the court, started using themes from here and there. Sometimes it was that last little mocking bit from Till Eulenspiegel when Till’s feet kick, sometimes it was the Ho-yo-to-ho from Valkyrie, sometimes the horns from the “Waltz of the Flowers.” It was always something we had heard at the Stadium, something we had heard together. When my father, to whom I had blabbed most of that evening with Werner, heard the whistle, his face would sometimes change red, as if he were holding his breath in anger against someone; then this would be displaced by the sunk, beaten look he sometimes brought home from Seventh Avenue, and he would shrug and turn away. He never said anything to Werner or to me.
The last night, the night it must have happened, was a Thu
rsday a few weeks later. It was one of those humid nights when the rain just will not come, and even the hair on your head seems too much to carry around with you. We were all sitting in the dining room, brushing limply now and then at our foreheads. Nora was in one of her moods—the boy who had given her the radio had not phoned. She had it turned on and sat glowering in front of it, as if she might evoke him from it.
My father was standing at the window, looking up at the sky. The court had its usual noises, children crying, a couple of other radios, and the rumble from the streets. Once or twice some kid catcalled from a higher floor, and a light bulb exploded on the alley below.
My father leaned forward suddenly, and looked across the court, watching intently. Then he walked slowly over to the radio, stood in front of it a moment, and turned it on loud. We all looked at him in surprise. He didn’t think much of the thing, and never monkeyed with it.
I looked across the court at Werner’s window. I couldn’t see into its shadows, but it was open. I thought of the look on his face when he met us outside the Stadium walls and of his voice saying, “Sometimes no one tunes it in.” I would have whistled to him, but I couldn’t have been heard over the music—Scheherazade, it was—which was sweeping out loud and strong into the uneasy air.
My mother whispered a reproach to my father, then took a side look at his face, and subsided. I glanced around at Carol, Nora, all of us sitting there joined together, and for some reason or other I felt sick. It’s the weather, I thought, and wiped my forehead.
Then, in the square across the court, the blackness merged and moved. The window began to grind down. And then we heard Werner’s voice, high and desperate, louder even than the plashing waves of the Princess’s story—a long, loud wail.
“No! Please! Scheherazade is speaking!”
Then there were two figures at the window, and the window was flung up again. My mother clapped her hand against her face, ran over to the radio and turned it down low, and stood bent over with her back against it, her fist to her mouth. So it was that we heard Werner again, his words squeezed out, hoarse, but clear. “Bitte, Mutter. Lass mich hören. Scheherazade spricht.”
Then the window came down.
The next evening the house was like a hive with what had happened. The Hausers had gone to the police. There had been one really personal thing in their house after all, and Werner had taken it with him. He had taken the whole of the cache in the wall safe, the whole two thousand dollars for the restaurant.
The detectives came around to question me—two pleasant enough Dutch uncles who had some idea that Werner might have made a pact with me, or that I could give them some clues as to what had been going on inside him. I couldn’t tell them much of use. I wasn’t going to tell them to look over at the Stadium, either outside or in, although for years afterward I myself used to scan the crowds there. And I wasn’t fool enough to try to explain to them what I had hardly figured out yet myself—that nature abhors the vacuums men shape, and sooner or later pushes the hollow in.
Mr. and Mrs. Hauser stayed on, and as far as anyone could tell, kept on with their usual routine. They were still there when we moved—Luba had decided the air was better in Hollis, Queens. During the months while we were still at Hamilton Terrace though, my father acquired an odd habit. If he happened to pass the open dining room window when our large new radio was playing, he was likely to pause there, and look out across the court. Sometimes he shut the sash down hard, and sometimes he let it be, but he always stood there for a time. I never decided whether the look on his face was guilty or proud. I knew well enough why he stood there though. For it was from our house that the music had come. It was from our window that Scheherazade spoke.
Mrs. Fay Dines on Zebra
ARIETTA MINOT FAY, at thirty-seven, still lived in the house in which she, her father and all their known male forebears but the first had been born, a white, Hudson River-bracketed house, much winged and gabled but with a Revolutionary cottage at its core, set in a tiny village, once only a road, on the west shore of the Hudson River, about twenty-five miles from New York. Arietta’s first forebear, Yves Minot, had come to the States in the entourage of Lafayette (some said as a body-servant, although this had never been proved) and had managed to stay near the general’s person throughout all the general’s campaigns except Valley Forge. In 1779, when the general had gone back briefly to France, Yves had stayed behind, first to marry one of the local Dutch girls (receiving the cottage and a large parcel of land as her dowry) and later to leave her at home while he ventured into battle or other forays, whenever he was so minded. In 1824, when Lafayette returned to America for a final visit, Yves was still there, flourishing in all but sons (because of land inheritance, the Minot line usually ran carefully to one) and had accompanied the general on his famous triumphal tour, again in some capacity typical of the Minots, something unidentifiable, profitable and without a doubt enjoyable.
Arietta, if asked to hazard a guess as to what this might have been, usually replied, with the family talent for presenting itself accurately, that Yves’s function probably had something to do with a cap and bells. For, all the Minots took for granted what they had been, were, and hoped to go on being. They were jesters, fonctionnaires attending the private person only, quartermasters supplying the ego, minor affections and spirits of those who were rich enough to keep living standards equal to their own bon viveur tastes, had the intelligence to relish the thrusts of which they were wisely capable, and above all were important enough to enable the Minots to admire them. This was the Minot vanity and their backbone through the years: that managing always to attach themselves to the most honorable patrons, they had meanwhile restricted their own knavish tricks to the surface diablerie required of their profession—that is, to entertainment only. Beneath the skin they were not knaves, beyond a certain French clarity as to the main chance, which in turn had instructed them that a supernormal honesty, shrewdly displayed, was invaluable to him who lived on perquisites.
For no Minot had ever had a salary, or had gone, as the phrase is, “to work.” Every male Minot had attended a university as a matter of course, to be refined for his trade, and occasionally to pick up there some symbiotic relationship that had lasted him for life. Arietta’s father, of the first generation to have no sons, had done his best by sending her to Vassar, where three members of the Rensselaer (an old dining-club of which he was secretary) had sent their girls that same year—the three men representing respectively money with family, money with politics, and—since the Minots had had to lower their standards along with the rest of the world, though belatedly—money with money. For until her father’s time—and he, poor man, was in no way responsible for the monstrous change in the world—all had gone marvelously well with the Minots in both comfort and reputation. And deservedly, for all had worked hard. Although their perquisites had often been extraordinarily vague, ranging from small properties given them to manage and subsequently inherited either in part or in toto, from careers as retainers (they retained so gracefully) or as incumbents of benefices that never had to be explained to them or by them, all the way down to the latter-day vulgarities of stockmarket tips—no Minot had ever boondoggled at the earning of what he received. Until well past the First World War, one could imagine two important men murmuring of a third, as in another context they might mention that his chef was the great-nephew of Brillat-Savarin—“Lucky man, he has a Minot.”
Even in the non-Venetian world of post-’29, the world that had begun to be so hard on those useful types for which there never seemed to be any but foreign names: the cavalière servante, the fidus Achates, the condottiere, the…Minot—the family had still managed, amiably using its talents where there was still scope for them, but for the first time dangerously using its resources when there was not. Over a hundred years in this country had weakened their French pith, making them less antipathetic than they should have been to eating their capital and selling their land. Marrying by in
clination had been an even earlier symptom to appear, but here perhaps they had been lucky, for like so many reared nobly, their inclinations had always been a little bit coarse—and this had kept the line remarkably healthy. This meant that Arietta, when she came on the market, did so from a long line of non-idiots, non-hemophiliacs with a minimum life-expectancy of eighty. It also meant that, with one thing and another, she hadn’t much expectancy of anything else except the uses to which she might put her share of Minot temperament—that merriment spiked with truth-telling, suppleness just short of servility, and love of ease combined with a wonderfully circuitous energy for pursuing it. Like so many of her ancestors, Arietta was willing to burn any number of ergs in the process, as long as neither dishonor nor the usual channels of attainment were involved.
On this particular summer Saturday evening at about seven o’clock, Arietta, dressed to go out in her one still respectable cocktail dress, sat in the dimming upstairs parlor of the house that had been hers since the death a year ago, within a few months of each other, of her father and her husband, and gazed out on the river, musing, moodily for her, on the narrow area of play offered that temperament by the modern world. Saturday was shopping day for the week, and that morning, hold back as she might on things like paper napkins—they would use the linen ones—she had not been able to avoid spending eighteen dollars on food. Her nine-year-old son Roger, away for the night at a friend’s house, would consume that almost unaided during the school week. One of the sweet-voiced robot-ladies from the telephone company had phoned twice during the past few days, and even the Light & Power, usually so kindly, had begun to press her about last winter’s heating bill. This week, to the bewilderment of her friends, she had taken to answering the phone in French, ready to aver that “Madame” was away. There had been no cleaning-woman for a year. Behind her, the rooms, receding wing on wing into the hillside with the depressed elegance of a miniature château, showed, besides the distinguished stainings of a hundred and fifty years, the thin, gradual grime of amateur care. The house, free and clear for a century until the thirties, was hers thanks to her father’s single quirk of hereditary thrift, hidden from them until the otherwise worthless will was read—mortgage insurance. It was worth about twenty thousand dollars, possibly a little more to one of that new race of antiquarians who had debouched upon these hills aching to “restore” some old place electrically, and able to—viz. the Lampeys, where she was going that evening. But its sale, if she could bring herself to sell, would be slow. Here she sat in it then, in the richest country in the world. In addition to the house, she had a few marketable “old pieces,” small ones to be culled from among the massive bedsteads and armoires, but nothing on which to rear a nine-year-old boy. She was sitting at Great-grandmother Marie-Claire’s tambour desk; Roger could eat it in two months. She had the pawn tickets for Marie-Claire’s rose-diamonds, and for Marie-Claire’s daughter-in-law’s épergne. And she had $126.35 in the bank.
Tale for the Mirror Page 14
