He was really giving it because Bunty, small deal as he was, was carrying away a piece of the guy’s life. The Monteith life.
“Thanks. Thanks very much.” The card said “President.”
“Branch of course. Of the St. Regis Paper Company.”
“Oh I went to camp up there.” Their three-word slogan had dotted the virgin forest for five hundred miles. In spite of himself, the urge to swap a piece of life was too strong. “Raped a twelve-year-old girl in those woods once. Mentally. Well—Keep Maine Green.”
In the airport, he hoisted the bag Buddy had insisted on sending him from the safari place where he had bought Bunty’s presents ever since the thirteenth birthday one—a Camping Companion, otherwise a knife with variously notched blades and many pocket-tools on the side, whose total claimed uses were a minimum of thirty-nine. “No bar mitzvah,” Buddy said. “But from now on, you’re a pioneer.” Beginning to count, from corkscrew to thimble, tiny slide rule to measuring cups, nailfile, pliers and compass, his son had wondered whether his success with Paulina showed. The knife had been stolen from him somewhere back, maybe in the government bar in Amsterdam—El Paradiso—where he had spent a lot of time. But he could still tally its uses, even after he’d lost it, though never getting beyond the guaranteed number. Maybe Tarzan had taken it.
He tucked his head in his chest now and said an admonishing string of syllables to himself; though K-k-k and the concentration camps had gone, the impulse or tic had kept on—some nonsense-score that his subconscious kept. Now and then one of these phrases endured long enough for him to link its language with himself more definitely, as people did their dreams. He thought the habit might come from his Catholic heritage, confessive to the end—though it might just as well be a kind of Jewish “touch wood.” Once a girl he’d spend a lot of time with, Jasmin Straight—on marital leave from a psychiatrist elsewhere in New York, but going back—had been sharp enough to notice, and they had spent an afternoon making up fake examples of these blurtings out, for both her and him, and guessing at them in turn. “Bill made” turned out to be the day she had charged an expensive dress to her husband, and first cuckolded him; “Blood Soy” was when he thought of Vietnam in a Chinese restaurant. But when Jasmin got out of bed, tucking her chin in her chest in mock of him, she’d leaned over him with a last one she wouldn’t explain. “Uh-uh, too worthy a guilt.” Though he took her back to bed, he never wormed it out of her.
He was home now. Where the non-repetition of people in his life could still so worry him, the way they jogged companionably alongside, or intensely, then vanished only to reappear—in the African shadows of a dream, a plain American face mask-hanging—or in daytime memory a Tenniel cat in the trees. The worst was when you saw the face within a strange face, as he had seen Jasmin’s once. But he had a vow that if he were ever to meet again any of these discards that had been winnowed out of the catalogue, it would have to be by the chance that would then be destiny. He would never call Jasmin up. Even though he still wanted to believe that, beginning with the beginning—after that he would take it on trust—his fate would be to re-encounter them all.
HE SAW BUDDY AT the gate, feeling his own pride in him. Little fellow you’d never catch wearing elevator shoes. Or those two-hundred-dollar elephant-hide ones either. The car that drew up for them had a chauffeur in it, but wasn’t a limousine. Since Buddy had become an investment broker without leaving off being a lawyer, and had subsequently become a consultant without leaving off being a broker—after which Bunt was unsure of the details except that Buddy would never leave anything behind—his father had taken on the style of business money with real money, wherever this saved him time, but always kept the style subservient—like making the chauffeur-hire give him a smaller car. And he had never been persuaded—how Maeve had tried!—to make his success physical to himself.
Sitting by his father on the familiar way in from Kennedy, his excitement grew; this time he knew why. The city demanded conclusions of him. False or true didn’t matter; he’d lived in sight of its demands all his life. First came the blind warehouses, black with the dirt of years, full of mysterious industrial guilts heaped in wood and slag and zinc. Then came the flat-topped houses of people who worked there, and lived in streets out of a policeman’s gazette. Then the newer factories, in whose clean halls the plastics refined themselves out of the living air, leaving behind a smell of Faust. A knot of viaducts, then old kiosks placarded with damp, then a spray of rumbling bridge over a slime of water. There, over there, the bristle of leafage and stone that had always been the Manhattan side. Scarabs of slum; then gradually that burden lessened. They were approaching the East Sixties; a mile north were the blocks where he had once been an Ambassador. Though they weren’t going that far, even here the family sense was already strong. Maeve scrubbing city out of her neck with a nailbrush every evening. Buddy’s collar wilting with it the big morning he went to borrow a stake from the bank. The city was against your finding it irresistible. And it was anti-memory too. Like some sporting, sparring uncle who slapped you on the mended collarbone saying “That where I hit you, boy?”
“There’s the Manhattan Eye and Ear.”
“Yeah, you had your tonsils out there. Maeve took you without telling you first.” Buddy’d always resented this for him.
Calm and self-knowing, a nurse whose hidden white smell was still with him now, had sat down gripping him between her knees, and held out under his chin the paper cup of the terrible, thick stuff. Milk of magnesia, nothing. He knew it came from her. But he got it down, the white potion that made you mad or loved, lame or invulnerable. It was the dram you had to drink.
“From Central Park West. All the places we moved, Buddy. Do you ever mind?” Travel had made him blunter. Or his whole situation.
His father folded his arms, like a man who recalls he has soft parts to protect. He glanced at the chauffeur’s barrier, as if the man out there could hear. “Hardest part is the philanthropy. You have to give to the opera, so you go to the opera.”
Even with this, when they drew up on Fifth Avenue he still hadn’t understood what his father was trying to say. Though the new building, new not just to them, had black marble bays bucking out of its white—as if the builder had dreamed of Byzantine while at the dentist, and the canopy was a gold-braided and draped palanquin you could scarcely emerge from with propriety unless you were on a horse—to him it was still only an apartment house. He did note that inside their state uniforms, the doormen were worse types every year.
In the elevator, Buddy said “Maeve’s parties are still the same, Bunt. But I should warn you. She thinks this one’s for you.”
He nodded. They were at their floor. “Wow. One apartment to a floor. The Bronstein floor?”
Buddy nodded. There was a careworn look that some businessmen put on whenever their expenditure pointed to their own successes; he had never done that: his sadnesses would be his own. He brightened. “Jesus, I forgot.” He took out two yarmulkas. “Found these in my chifforobe.” Solemnly, they donned them, then broke up. “Congratulations, kid. Glad you’re home.” They shook hands.
“How’s Maeve?” His chin dropped to his chest. What a sod he was, to wait until now to ask.
A shrug. The same complicitous one his grandfather used to exchange with the other men before they went into Sunday dinner, after conversations which were over a child’s head. He could smell the yellow fricassee, and hear the uncles. The shrug that Jewish men made before they went in to join the women.
“I don’t rock the boat.” Buddy took out a bunch of keys, then thought better of it and rang, his head held high. Family life was a magnetic tape on which you were pulled along, hearing through walls maybe, but never speaking the ultimate—the process should not be disturbed.
Two locks were needed here, and a buzzer went off before a maid appeared—so ethnic she looked English to him—took his father’s coat, scanned him for one, and left on the double, as if they were both str
angers. Always before, he had been introduced. The postmistress in Wales, would she gawp now—or know how to spell this too? The Bronsteins had been on the up again while he was away; it had been that way each time he stood in front of a new door. One could have programmed the whole thing years ago; use his parents as the knowns—how well he knew them!—and a stipulated equation for the money rise, and get your answer. Here.
Idly he wondered what kind of trip Maeve was on now. He no longer cared about his room, though he knew there would be one. Europe had cured him of room-keeping, as even school never had; to the last there he had cherished his pinups, and a mock-up of Rockefeller Center he had made of construction paper and dried fishbone. But now the Bronsteins could do what they wanted with his corner of them. He had an architecture in his head now that wouldn’t go away, plus all those penny-weights of knowledge that might come in handy someday; his head was now his house.
Oh, so we’re richer, we’re that kind of rich now, was all he thought, shedding his bag just inside the door on a floor that wasn’t wood or even marble but some kind of inlaid brick. Real old brick, on second glance, Italian again. How did it feel here, transported like him, but begun and fabricated somewhere else?
“What’s that?” A long black construct, like orange crates gone crenellated Moorish, but with some elusive presence that organized it out of junk—perhaps a bat or mouse that lived in it. “Why Bud—isn’t that a Nevelson?”
“Bought it for the office opening. But when we placed the really big piece of hardware—the Zebel thing—Zebel wouldn’t have it near. Said it detracted.” Buddy shrugged. “I love her stuff, to me it looks like Brooklyn. But I just buy the tax deductions; against these art-boys who am I? And against Zebel. So I persuaded your mother the Nevelson would look better here than some Merovingian hatrack.” They exchanged grins. Bronstein took off his tarboosh and hung it on one black spire, with what he thought was flair.
“Go ahead, why not?” his father said. “You know her father ran a lumberyard in Rockland, Maine? Now that’s what I call artistic development.”
And already twice today, that Maine had come up. But you couldn’t depend on it—that in the end, everything in a life would.
In an anteroom all mirrors—Maeve had always loved these, but had never attained octagons before—he stopped short. “Mother came to the office?”
A yarmulka had never looked right on Buddy’s middle-aged Manhattan-sharpie haircut, over his oyster-white, too-silky ties. Now, with the hair longer, even though smartly grayed by some barber, and in spite of one of those wide ties, by some designer who had been on Turkish kif maybe, it blended in.
“Once she did. Once.”
“How come?”
“For the opening. You didn’t see the papers? I had Blum send clips. No—of course.” The yarmulka nodded, sideways, in the old style; it did have an influence. “The Mayor came, the Arts Council people too. A lot of, you know—people.” Buddy looked down his own length, always a sign of modesty. “I do a little work for things like the Odyssey House—dope rehabilitation you know—and certain other city questions. Prisons, landmarks even—” He flashed a kinship smile. “I keep out of the arts, except to give.” He sighed. “That opera…. And to buy. But any other city question, they know I’ll go for it. From your grampa I get it, maybe—remember his wayward boys?”
“Sure do.”
They had come in their Sunday suits from the orphanage or the reform school, and his grandfather had taken them to the ballgame. Limp hands in Bunty’s—they seemed not to know how to shake it—and flinty eyes on him and his house. Or scared ones. He knew that look, from the PS before PS 6. They were afraid they weren’t to be trusted. There was always such a progression of them; that was the trouble. One had lasted long enough in his grandfather’s esteem for the boy to be given a job, but it hadn’t worked out.
“How’d it work out down there? With Maeve?”
“So-so. No, not good, why should I lie to you? She looked beautiful, absolutely. Your mother’s still a—” His father smeared two fingers over an eye and stretched his mouth. “But it doesn’t seem to help. Sit down, boy. Sit down.”
He sat on a satin bergère, on the edge.
Through his father’s account, he saw the whole scene: the reception line, the photographer’s fireworks.
“She hostessed it all just fine, just as if she hadn’t walked in cold on the arrangements, but had done it all herself. Cool she was, like born to it. And I thought, now I’ve got it for her, it’s all turned out right. She even posed with Mrs. Blum.”
His father’s secretary, from way back when. Whom Maeve had displaced. Who had again taken Maeve’s place. What a continuity, now that one thought of it.
“Then some confounded girl reporter—big tall girl with a shiv in her purse instead of a pen—asked her if she hadn’t been my secretary, once. And I could see it begin to fall apart.” His father leaned into one of the mirrors as if he was seeing it there. “Once again.” Buddy smoothed his shave, clenched a fist and rested his chin on it, wide-eyeing himself in the glass—there was a picture of him in that posture as a newsboy, in knickers and shouldersack. “I shouldn’t have started that secretary joke with her, years ago. When a person hurts, and you keep rubbing it in—maybe it all started with that secretary joke.”
“I don’t buy that.”
“You don’t? Bunty, wanna know something? Neither do I. But the psychiatrist does.”
“She going to one?”
“No. Mine.”
“You? What do you need a—”
“Thanks, pal. Because she wouldn’t. Better than nothing, they said. She’s in a bad state of equilibrium.”
He hung back, then. Why was his father hanging back? “Will I find her—changed?”
“No, son.” His father said it mildly. “Just the same.” He got up suddenly. “Say Bunt, take a look through here.”
His father was applying his left eye to what looked like a metal-rimmed hole in one of the mirrors.
“What is it?”
“No secrets, no more secrets.” Buddy applied the other eye to the hole. “Came with the house. A spyglass. From room-to-room. The public ones. First I thought I’d block them off; now I can’t do without. Who’s ever at the party I wanna bypass, I can. Right up to my room. Take a look.”
He saw a room in reverse opera-glass scale, at first only the floor. The device had a swivel, and a lens adjuster, very clever. There was nobody in the next room.
“Your room’s on the same line as mine. Next to the armory.”
“Armory?”
“The guy was a military buff. Wanna wash up?”
“No thanks.” He couldn’t resist though. “What’s it like?”
“Living like this? Aren’t I used?”
“My room.”
“Not so bad, you know. She gave a lotta thought.”
“Hell. I won’t be staying, Buddy.”
“She knew that, Bunty. She knew that. I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like a room in an Italian hotel.”
His father closed the little round door of the spyhole, wiped its mirror with a handkerchief. You could hardly see it was there. “Smart, always so smart, isn’t she?” Buddy said. “When I pushed about the doctor. ‘What’ll he tell me—’ she says. ‘That I’m a quick learner? Who learns only dreck?’ … Excuse me, Bunty—you understand that language?”
He’d forgotten his father’s delicacy with a son’s other half. “Why not? She does.”
“Dreck. That an Irish girl should learn only that from us. From New York.”
“Why New York?” It burst from him. “Why not from Amenia?”
At once—echoes. Blaming the suburbs. He smiled to himself. Hadn’t thought of Witkower in a long time.
“You think? You think?”
“Now I remember, Buddy—” he said, grinning “—whenever you have one of those things on your head, you start talking like Gramps.”
“Right. City College dr
ops from me like a lei.” His father took off the embroidered circle, smoothed it. “Or maybe because I went back to Amenia, enn wye. A while back, Bunt. She was so low. I thought—up there’s the only audience Maeve ever wanted; maybe I never tried hard enough to get it down here.”
“You tried. Lots of times.”
“I never went down on my knees before. Catholics love the knee position.” He folded the yarmulka and put it in his pocket. “Brace yourself, Bunty, your Granma’s here.”
“Mother MacNeil?”
“Herself. Her winsome self and all her broomsticks. She finally sold the farm. She had it up for sale for a long time.”
“Sold it, huh.” He’d like to think of it there, regardless.
Quentin smiled at him. “To me. Oh she doesn’t know that. Through an agent. Yeah. I worked hard.”
“And mother—how did she—?”
“With her mother? Oh Maeve hated the idea—gave her something to live for. That’s when we moved here—remember?”
“Sort of.” He recalled a letter, that must have been asking him if he wanted to come to the office gala, though Quentin hadn’t called it that, or even made quite plain that it was an invite. Said letter, and its successor reminding him to write to the office until they got settled—because he hadn’t written at all, of course—had been left behind on the washbasin of a convenience hotel in Montmartre; he remembered the basin very well, and the girl he’d picked up at the American Express—a last resort—and had spent a day with her until he tipped she was on speed. Streaking around the room after him like a candidate for Dracula: “Sure, I’m still Algiers-nutty; when it’s gone I’ll lay off. Done it before.” He’d had a time getting her down. Bundled in her ski-cap and cape, she looked as pink and princess-faced as when they met. “Being in the skin always sets me off, though. Ta-ta, Bunny.” She went off to meet her folks, who were picking her up to see Paris with them, before college. She never did get his name right, which had annoyed him. And now he couldn’t dig up hers.
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