New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  “Hallo, hallo,” said Anna. “Oh, Mr. Mannix, yayss.” No wonder they’d all adopted her soothing patois, which saw so much in life answerable with its “yayss.” “Oh, you don’t need to worrit,” she said, before he could go on. “She be all right. I give her some hot milk.”

  “Oh…?” He smiled into the phone his recognition once again of how anything this child did worked out well—even her stomachaches. He did not dote. But she was the perfect one, or rather, in a family of two children, not the imperfect one. Even nature seemed to realize it, in the flow of her luck. Anna took Ruth to be his natural excuse for calling; he recalled now that the child had been slightly indisposed. As simply, his call was no longer subterfuge. He nodded back at her. “Hot milk.”

  “I get it out of her, what dey have downtown, dose girls!” said Anna. “Bahninna split, she had. And before dinner, mustard sandwiches! No wonder she can’t keep nothing down.”

  “I’m sure you did, Anna.” Her literalisms were in their humor-book; tomorrow he would whisper to his daughter, I hear she got it out of you—meanwhile savoring too the child to whom one could whisper. “Well, I’m at Mr. Olney’s, Anna, and I’m going to stay a little while. If Mrs. Mannix is in, tell her he’s had a little upset.” Surely this was reportable. And might get the proper reply.

  “Aw,” said Anna. “Aw.” Once in a while Olney was their dinner guest—his and Anna’s, now that Mirriam was almost never his hostess. The “Aw” was for Olney’s impressive age—if Anna didn’t volunteer soup for a man’s ills, then he was done for. But suddenly, she was strictly the servant. “T’ink I hear somebody come in a while ago, Mr. Mannix. You want I go down and see? You want her call you back?”

  “Oh no,” he said. “No, that’s not necessary.” He understood her dilemma well enough. The downstairs rooms all had doors in the oldfashioned way; Mirriam, in the same way or from her English heritage on the Mendes side, kept them closed. “Close the door after you”—the children knew it as well as “Wash your hands.” By the same protocol, well-bred persons opened doors without knocking; servants knocked but immediately entered—both on the proud assumption that no one in this household was ever to be caught naked, or in flagrante delicto of any other kind. Upstairs, on the bedroom floors, one knocked of course—but this was not the question here.

  “Oh no,” he said, almost as equably as until a few months ago he had learned to feel. “Don’t bother Mrs. Mannix, if she has company.” Until then, no matter how noisy or exotic, that had been all it was.

  “Yah, I heard somebody,” Anna said vaguely, as if people as casually swam like shellfish through their respectable, alarm-protected doors—which at times might be the way it seemed to her. “Yah, I tell in the morning, then.” She expected him home, but unlikely to see his late-sleeping wife next morning. Or perhaps not at night either, through the connecting door which bound their bedrooms; no doubt she had calculated that too. All the threads of their life were in her capable hands—and quite safe there. “Thank you, Anna, and good night.”

  “You tell Mr. Olney,” said Anna. “Tomorrow I bring him soup.”

  He chuckled at Olney’s rescue. “Good night, Anna,” he said, warm in the glow of his household, tended, threatened less than some, and more regular than many—and about to hang up, heard with the slight freeze her phone-voice always gave him—his wife’s voice.

  “Soup?” said Mirriam. “What’s this?” For the nth time he marveled at how, at forty-six, her voice, darkly suited to her as it was, had kept its debutante slouch.

  He let Anna hang up, then explained briefly about Olney. And got one of Mirriam’s intense answers; her late-night answers, he always thought of them.

  “The war,” she said. “The war.” She laughed, not for his benefit, he was sure of it. “What some people get away with!” she said. He could tell she had turned away from the phone, to another person no doubt.

  “You’ll find the record player works again,” he said. He had fixed it himself, though he had no bent for such things. Her company were always dancing—or had used to be.

  “Oh, did you?” She neither expected him to nor would praise him for it. She was disorderly in the most practical way, he had once told her, at a time when this had seemed only charm to him; she was easily and fatally moved from person to person—yet always lightly, too; the years since their marriage must be littered with her discards of either sex, though none had risen to lovers, he would have sworn, until now. She was intensely questioning and expected the intensest answers, never herself giving back any. Night-blooming, physically reckless, her particular bent was perhaps the worst possible for a woman who, to the eye, lived so superficially.

  “Nick asked to see some of the old Cosmos Club Pics,” she said. “We’re upstairs.” No resolve or inverted moral made her speak the truth at all times—though he would know that the “pics” of an old river club she had once belonged to were in her bedroom. And her company, for whatever reason, would have asked to see them—of that her husband could be sure. Long ago, when he was marrying her, he’d thought it beautifully ideal for his ambition that her only vice should be truth-speaking; now he could see how it was that she mightn’t even particularly value the truth. Her vice was simpler, like rabid aspirin-eating in a woman who, like her, never drank or took drugs. She could not lie.

  “Oh, Nick’s there, is he,” he said as swiftly as he could manage. “Well then, you’ll have company”—as if she ever lacked it. “I’ll stay and chat with the old man awhile. He doesn’t sleep much any more anyway.”

  “Of course,” she said. “I remember last time. How late he stayed, I mean, Anna said. Four.” She spoke indolently, stretching even her usually lazy accent in a way he somehow recognized but couldn’t identify, except that she wanted to keep him on the phone. She would be standing near the chaise, or lying there, crossing ankles too slenderly perfect for the rich weight they now supported, regarding them absently. “Oh yes”—again the voice sounded turned away from the instrument—“oh yes, I expect to have company, for a long time.” Then she must have turned her head back to the phone; he could hear her breathing—heavy, intent. With a flick, he got it, just as if she’d shown him a picture from the pile of old ones between her and her company; his wife, for her own reasons, was flirting with him. She’d used to show him off like this in the old days. And he’d felt as foolish as now. But only foolish. “Ah well, yes,” he said. “Well, good ni—”

  She cut in. “How was your dinner?”

  “Oh, the usual,” he said. Then that other whisky, which he had added to Chauncey’s, rose in him again. “No, matter of fact, it was—fine.” Other possibilities rose with it, older ones—renewed. Why not? There were courses in life which dragged everything up with them. “Tell you about it. If you’re still up when I come in.”

  “Oh, I’ll be up,” she said lightly. “But I may be out. We just came by to see that picture. One of Nick’s old—clients.” She gave the last word an emphasis. She was flirting. “Or tomorrow.” She said that on a sigh.

  But the daytime was never good for such renewals as they had managed. Funny, when most people would think it was her nights that separated them. “Well,” he said again, “I’ll say good night.”

  “Simon—”

  “Yes?”

  “Why did you call?”

  The whisper, slow, almost harsh, made the phone rasp. He remembered where he was, in this good, old-fashioned house. “Is that so strange?” he said, from a reserve of bitterness he normally never let open. But so much was opening tonight, and perhaps better for it.

  “Because we—never—you know—” Her voice drifted softer, even bewildered, although if he could have seen that high profile with its profusely artful, piled hair, or had had before him the almost unlined forehead, those hooded Spanish eyes—he knew he would think otherwise. What had she ever had to be bewildered about? Her certainty, far beyond possessions, or insouciance, on the way to insulting the world’s fears, was what at
tracted all her fly-by-nights to her—and drew him yet, in the part of him which was still the mirror-writer. It was the way she stayed in her society, her world, yet slanged it, which still got to that innocent, money-lending boy.

  No, they no longer pursued each other’s whereabouts as most couples did, but until now they had never acknowledged it either. Again his spirits lifted, irrationally light, as if tonight there were frail openings, portents everywhere.

  “I’m dizzy with success,” he said carefully. “You should have been there.” And that was the slip he always made. “You’re the champ,” she said.

  “How’s Ruth?” he said at once, in repartee—and sorry for that, too late.

  “Ruth? She was all right when she and I came home.” He heard her turn aside and call up to Anna from the landing, no doubt carrying the phone out there on its long cord—and this intimate house-bawling as always reassured him. His house.

  She returned. “She’s all right, Anna says—” He couldn’t tell whether she was being distant to him or merely nonchalant in the way the Mendeses always were about health and children, both of these always acceptable and glorious—as theirs—even when afflicted, and neither ever paramount in their lives. “Quite all right, Simon.” She was a good mother, but unable to conceal that she was a better one, a more natural one, to David. Her clarity got through the muffle around David as if it were speech. But their quiet Ruth, who could speak up for herself well enough to her father, could only half adore her mother in silence; Mirriam kept herself at an eagle’s distance from this dove they had hatched between them. “You didn’t call about that,” she said, not severe, teasing—and again as if she’d turned from the phone.

  “No.” His truth-telling was different from hers, not a rash freedom but an abstention—from biblical wrong. “Matter of fact, Chauncey assumed I’d phone. He told me to go do it.” He could smile at himself. “So, I went.”

  She burst out laughing. Her laugh was very slightly on a scale; if it charmed one, she did; all her friends were of that persuasion. She had charmed him in spite of it. The “lady’s laugh” he used to call it, in the days when they spoke in lovers’ bowknots flung one to the other—and he feared it yet. All her intensity—or imbalance—was there. At times, in place of this elegant shake of the bells, he wouldn’t have minded the harridan parrot-screech that some men got, or a bit of good old Xantippe-nagging like his mother’s. But Mirriam at her most reckless was always elegantly on chime.

  “Oh, Si.” This was a nickname even long ago used at rare times, seldom except at the best ones. “I can just see it—see you,” she said, “Oh, Si.” And she’d stopped laughing.

  “Mirriam?” he said. “Wait up for me.” There was a long pause. Then he said, “It’s been an extraordinary evening. Night, I mean.” He had no idea why he added that, tribute maybe to the window’s cold blue even here in this tiny study, and to Chauncey waiting.

  After a longer pause, she spoke. “I’ll…wait up,” she said.

  “Good. I’ll ring off now.” But he waited for her to.

  “Give my love to Chauncey,” She said it as if it were soup.

  “I will.”

  “And…Simon—”

  A minute later, he could have sworn that he had already closed his eyes in reflex when she spoke, that the spot between his eyes had already tingled, prepared. The aim was in the way she said it, so softly, indescribable—unmistakable. “Nick wants to be remembered to you,” she said.

  As he stopped in the bathroom on the way back to rejoin Chauncey he had to look down at his hands, they were trembling so—for him a new experience. He had just learned something: his and Mirriam’s habitual under-acknowledgment of the crosscurrents in their lives had become next door to the most powerful communication. So that when time came to acknowledge her lover, a system with its own language and cues, quickly interpretable, lay ready for it. This was the way it had been done. It seemed to him that if he concentrated on this thing he had learned, an insight on life, and not on the other, his hands would stop their trembling. He washed them thoroughly, as if they had blood on them.

  On his way back through the rooms which led to the front of the house, he stopped and stared at a velvet wall, a framed engraving here, a greenish old hanging there, as if he wanted to scrutinize the style of decoration, or name its period. It was the least identifiable period possible, the mixture he’d been brought up in, loved and knew.

  A wild idea assailed him—to ring back and ask the two of them over. Come on over was a constant phrase of the callers on Mirriam’s evening network, between any two of whom the phone acted as stimulus, a connective between that same afternoon—when they had last seen each other—and the hours to come, when they must again meet; After school, his children often did the same. He would ask those two to come over here, his wife sure to be dressed in one of those marvelously unglittering ensembles in which she believed the riches of her pocket and of her body, that long monolith, could go “anywhere”—and her escort, one Nick Pecora, or Padona or Posloty, quondam detective-sergeant or captain of the New York police force, whether forcibly resigned not known, though retirement was out of line either for the man’s age, less past forty than Mirriam, or for one with his physical cast. A man almost a head above her five-foot-seven yet too thick-bodied to seem that tall—his was the type which got its energy from do-nothing days plus the beefblood of sports arenas and late cabaret steaks, with a body which took its workouts in sexual exercise, slept off these bouts in some haven of mother or landlady unknown to its other women, and got its money in some manly form of underworld squeeze. If there’d been an urge to know the man’s name precisely, to get a line on him in one of the means open to judges, the Judge had not allowed himself it. Mirriam referred to him as Big Nick. Though he might not be a gangster, this suggested environs and precincts; he had probably grown up as a big Slavic Nick among a lot of little Italian ones. From a certain cast of blondness, he was probably a Pole. The Judge had met him once in his own hallway, once on the phone, and increasingly on the fringes Of Mirriam’s conversational silences. This man, as instructed beyond a doubt by Mirriam, had wished to be remembered to her husband. And the Judge, equally instructed, had remembered him.

  The phone would bring them. Mirriam, like the Judge, had been taught to honor age. She would come, this wife who in girlhood had been taught all the old-fashioned compassions, and still held to them as to an etiquette. She would stand here in the hallway of this house antecedent to her own, with the assured, half rebellious manner she always had in such houses, even in her own. The man with her would stand at her side as he had in the Judge’s hallway, his eyes shrewd yet offhand; he’d been in places like this before, let nobody think otherwise; and his attitude, yes, would be just that: he was with her. Everything in their connection would be brought a step further, by one of those improbably social impulses a telephone made possible. What then? Would she and the man, looking about them here, see how impossible a couple they were, or would Mirriam alone see it, as earlier she must have seen it for herself and Simon—meanwhile aware even that this mutual impossibility of them for her, her for them, was what had brought the three of them together here?

  He saw that vision and certified it as wild. For a minute only, he’d entered that mad, modern telephonic world of hers where everything was viable.

  At the library door, he said, “Sorry I took so long—” and then paused. His host, bent over the piano, on the closed lid of which there were now ranged dozens of photographs taken apparently from the open bench and the wide drawers of an old breakfront, had his back turned to him, poring over them.

  “Everything all right at home?” said Chauncey.

  The Judge took a shallow breath. It was with these, not the expansive kind, that one lied. “Everything.”

  He went and stood by the old man’s shoulder.

  “Can’t find him,” said Chauncey. “Damnedest thing. Can’t find him anywhere.”

  The Judge put a h
and on that shoulder, reaching up to do so, and not only to console, to give him one of the few real gifts the old could use, to say—it’s not only you need me; I need to be here, with you. Family had taught him this, his mother tucking his grandmother’s specs into his five-year-old fist, saying, “Ask her to read to you”; his father taking him along on a visit to his father in the nursing home, to see the old man blush with pleasure at his son’s laying the firm’s books on the bedspread, his “Papa, I hate to bother you, but could you give me a word or two on this?” His father had needed the help; those needs, not the pretended ones, were the best. And he did, now. He would stay here all night, and welcome.

  “Damnedest thing!”

  On the piano, at least three generations stared in the wistfulness of all dead sitters—hoopskirted and mutton-chopped, bustled and nautical-jacketed, after these the platter hats and bowlers, a little sprightlier from being still perhaps in the land of the living, then a scattering from the latter-day twenties and thirties, alive and crude. To see Chauncey’s own visage, recognizable all down his long span, was the familiar shock one always had.

  “There—” Mannix indicated a young man among the moderns, not in uniform but with a British haircut. “Isn’t that your great-grandson?”

  There was no reply. Chauncey, turning around, mightn’t have heard, though his faculties, if performing variously, were keen enough. “How’s that handsome son of yours?”

  The Judge flushed, an often regretted reaction to mention of his son, not due to the boy’s affliction, or not directly. “He’s—thank you, he’s doing very well. Actually, one tends to forget how well he’s doing—it’s, almost no problem to him, any more. Except that he doesn’t hear from behind or a distance, you’d never know.”