New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  A strange image, which he’d never had before, of not admitted to—and wasn’t frightened of. A judge could also comprehend the motives germane to the strangler, and why a man might reach for the voice-box instead of the knife. Lawyers like Borkan made a virtue of this kind of criminal understanding—and a large practice. Only Mirriam’s laugh wanted killing, and all it signified in her—her elegantly neurotic mockery of the edifices other people made. Even the children were sometimes seen to flinch from it with him, or for themselves—even David, who could after all see. But all the life-thrashing rest of her, her purebred compassions inherited the way royalty had its horses, they—and he—loved, in strands dark or light. Just so Chauncey, in his own way, hot under the façade of hypocrisy his wife had helped him with, might at times have wished—surely when he was offered the Court—to reach out and tear off that pince-nez which had allowed her to see so tolerantly double.

  There was the house, across one avenue and down one house. Bulwark beneath all other feelings, he felt the paterfamilias gratitude that all his family was safe abed there, from Anna at the top, in the quarters she preferred even though four flights above the basement kitchen, to the children’s floor below her, where slept the one child with his large affliction and the other with her small, winning frailties, and down again one floor—to his wife. There were bright lights on that floor. He glanced at his watch; not quite twenty after three. She was waiting up for him, as promised. Except for a dim permanence of hall light, the rest of the house was dark.

  He crossed the avenue, passed the gnarled side wall of the Ralston houses, whose doors were all on the avenue side, and stopped in front of his own. Behind it, to the rear and above, the water tower still loomed. His house still had its high stoop which led into the parlor-floor level in the old-fashioned way. There were the curtains—taken from an attic stock of them bought with the house, which Anna washed and laid away again yearly—and still veiling the windows of one and a half times the usual frontage, which Mendes had supplied for all these thrifty, château habits. Through their ancient netting, which by day caught the south sun and drew it inward a little more yellowed than it came, he could see that elusive underlay which strangers saw. A vague claret-and-water light came from lamps invisible. Chairs and tables were blotted, in a furnishment which needed forms moving between to identify them further, but nobody was downstairs now. Because he knew where the stairwell was, he could see the twinkle, far above, of a small, prism-hung light. The young Mendeses had had no extra money for chandeliers, or for the cushioned grossities of their era. But could the lady of the earrings, or any stranger, see the fine French touches with which the present mistress had reset old rooms already proportioned for music? On the fringe of his vision, something made him turn aside. A lone car sat at the curb, in front of his stoop. Exhausted at last, he averted his eyes from it, climbed his steps and let himself in. If she could only lie. If she could only lie.

  At once, with an animal motion, he closed the street door behind him, to shut out—though the block was deep in its reserved slumbers—all that other audience. From the long ell of his wife’s bedroom just off the first landing at the top of the stairs, a single, singular voice was haranguing, behind a closed door even now. The doors in his house were heavy ones, to normal sound. But this sound went on in arcs, at an even height of passion or altercation which he had never before heard that voice describe. His wife’s voice discharged steadily, at gasped intervals, like the nasal anguish of a dog injured or pursuing at the height.

  In a flight which had no memory of itself, he found himself on the landing. He was held there by the sound of a man’s laboring answer, shameless and deep, no words in it at all. He put his hand on the doorknob, must have crossed to it, then dropped the hand. At that moment he heard a slight, sharp crack, like the spit of a palm on a cheekbone. Gunshot. Gunshot. From a gun he knew well. Then, from the room’s shorter ell, which led to his own room, a soft shrilling came, and stopped, as if his wife had made an end of lament—or of sex.

  How slowly, quickly, he burst through the door.

  At first he thought it was only passion which confronted him—that this was all. His wife was clasped by the man, from behind. He must have just caught her. The big man held her arched, falling weight as he himself could never have done, the man’s great fists clenched and guiltless under her breast. He knew that already. All of her, wide-open eyes, stretched mouth, black-red bubbling over that throat and breast, was turned toward her husband—faced him.

  “Mirriam. Ah-rr God.” He felt the worst, the bottomless, a sexual deprivation which must last forever, the truth which couldn’t lie.

  Above her, the man’s big blurred head shook itself sideways, lips smirched back from the teeth as if to a god they must both understand.

  They got her to the chaise, the Judge’s empty hands crooked under her, only guiding, at her hair, at the throat still intact, at her wrist. How quickly she had gone, leaving this behind her. The wound was—impersonal.

  “A doctor!” he said nevertheless, his hand on the phone near the chaise.

  The blond beef-face of the other man broke into a grimace too tender for its own hacked lineaments, the head shaking again—the fearful glance gliding away toward the room’s shorter ell, signaling—what more could it warn him of now?

  Before he could fully turn from the phone, a gun dropped to the floor, not from those big, stained fists the man was pressing round a handkerchief, not from the warm, dead hand. It had been dropped yards away. By whom?

  He was afraid to turn; had already done so. Lines of force drew themselves forever, into the triangle ceaseless, they three. The man was an outsider.

  She stood there, his daughter, in her old laundered-out pajamas, fuzzy with a sleep just come from, yet wide awake: This was all that could be said, now or ever. Like the young of any animal, her clear, limited face couldn’t yet express what was inside it—or know? Her hair fell in a clipped round on her forehead. As always before she was sent to bed, a long strand from either temple had been tied together with a ribbon at the crown. She’d been cleansed with soap after her vomit, her mouth chubby still with the lost innocence of mustard sandwiches, still the sweet babe’s mouth, rarely doleful, staunch not only for him, he knew that now forever, but for brother and mother too. Only he could see behind it—as a father would know from childish mishaps—her bewilderment. Only he would ever see her as a baby again—his Ruth.

  As he went toward her, this upbore him. Her knees buckled in answer. Though she was almost as tall as he, this helped him take her up to him. It was an enormous relief to carry her, his arms grown to iron. He lifted her away and out of there. On the landing, bawling for Anna, this action of itself came to him like an answer. He held on, leaning against the banister, hearing Anna call “What, what?” from that eyrie where she heard nothing of their lives unless rung for. She called again, from the children’s floor above, and again when she saw him, “My hosh, is she sick again? You naughty girl, at the icebox yet, what you boddering down dere?”

  And then he thought: Only I. But Anna too. This came to him like a jewel of deduction he might have polished for years. Or like one Anna herself had picked up and handed him, in the trust which ready servants gave ready masters. Not only he: Anna too.

  “What, what?” she said, reaching them. She took Ruth from him easily, not an ox-strong woman, but solid, in David’s teens able to best him in their fake jousts, until these had stopped for his dignity’s sake. Had she already glanced covertly aside for a moment, at Mirriam’s door, wondering why no response there—and then loyally back to him? But Anna had been trained to expect these nocturnal comings and goings of her mistress—any notion otherwise was his. It was in that minute—and from his lipreading—that he became aware of how careful he must be. Always to remember the gap, even in the most normal lives, between what was said and half believed of most people behind their backs, and the way in which most—against their own knowledge not only of what
might be said but of what was true—walked steadily, steadily on! From now on, the worst of his dangers might be the temptation to create his own whispers. This would be the chess game he could never lay down.

  He gave Ruth up to her. He had a babe, a jewel he must keep hidden; but in the best place—exposed. Everything he did now came to him like a choice, made after long thought—as if, twelve years after his daughter’s birth, she’d been born again out of a dead mother, and he was carrying her into the maw already opening up for them, saying, “I choose her.”

  “Take her back upstairs,” he said. “I think she’s fainted.” He wasn’t sure of it. “Mrs. Mannix has had an accident.” He put his hands on Anna’s shoulders. It would be best if he shocked her with the other news, the final news—already and forever not the worst. “I’m afraid she’s dead, Anna. And Ruth saw it.” He heard his own voice dexterous. “Do you hear, Anna? Mrs. Mannix has—shot herself. It was an accident. I found her dead. And Ruth came in on it. Ruth saw.”

  He helped Anna up the stairs with her burden, hearing in her broad chest deep labored moans almost sexual.

  At the door of Ruth’s room, the child herself slipped to her own feet, as if to aid them. Her eyes remained closed. She swayed there for a second, fists clenched, heaving—then came the spout of vomit. He caught one sight of her eyes—incredulous, seized from behind by a shame not theirs, as the eyes of children in vomit always were—then Anna bore her off to the toilet, soothing, “Hold it, darling, hold it,” as if this was any ordinary evening with a sick child. But from behind, he had seen that the seat of the child’s pajamas was stained too, with the dark pink smirch of blood.

  He looked down at hands which might have transferred it to her from her mother’s wound, but his hands were clean. Then he went down a flight again, entering that hothouse double room as his daughter must have, through his own half, for its door was open. The connecting door to his wife’s room was open also. Across the dressing-room ell between the two rooms, he could see his wife lying waiting for him on the chaise as in a French boudoir photo, the pompon of one high-heeled slipper trailing the floor.

  In the center of her room, looking down at her, he was beset with a terrible itch to close his eyes. By one of the brain’s shameful commemorations, he was seeing the room not with every worn corner of its familiarity, or from old spatial habits his body knew in the dark, but in that initial whirl of the senses—pleased at these assaults of silk, and transfusions of color—of the day he had first slept here, before their marriage, at the beginning of his affair with the widow whom “everyone”—her phrase for it—had still called Mirriam Mendes, by her maiden name. It was her eyes he must close.

  “It’s—why it’s all Sardou and roses,” he had said, standing right here. He recalled his lurch of inner delight when she had picked up the reference. And he his first intelligence that this woman would be the extraordinary being one waited for, full of references for him. “Oh Sardou, yes!” she’d said—“but there aren’t any roses.”

  He’d seen then that there weren’t, merely a flower-silk Parisian confusion of walls and hangings, in this room so faithfully maintained for her in her father’s house, closed for the summer, that she’d been showing him. Patterns which, if he could only look away from her, he would still see. That day, he’d fingered a tall screen, the one over there, had sat in that chair. And the idle way she had identified screen and chair, in two luxurious words, had lingered in his head like an open sesame, token to the mysterious wealth—not of money but not dissociated from it either—to be found in her flesh. In whose roses not roses he’d bitten and swum his way, past fragrances only teasing in other women, toward an orgy of spirit altogether uncommon for him—and had made lapse with pleasure those Spanish eyes. “Coromandel,” she said again now, like a music box—“brocatelle.” In the international diffusion of love on a morning yellow with summer, he had declared peace with everyone—“Even,” she’d said with her laugh, listening to his biography at her breast, “even—with the French?” It was those eyes he must close.

  He moved to do it, but couldn’t force himself, until, like a tug at his coat skirts as used to be done to him, he remembered his daughter. I choose her, he said to himself, and did it. The eyelid resisted. In a horror to get this underground and away, he picked up the phone—and only now remembered the man’s grimace, rubberized on that blond head of male meat like a bought expression, forcing him, the father, to turn—and see her. The pistol was still on the floor over there, where it had been dropped. But the man himself was gone, no doubt skulked off from a police scrutiny his life couldn’t afford. Yet he’d have been seen with Mirriam somewhere, this evening.

  Very cautiously, a left hand in the Judge’s brain picked up a chess piece marked Suspect: Murder—and was immediately checked by the right hand, which set down another marked Blackmail, or Truth. A course of action must lie somewhere between the two. Before he phoned police or doctor he must know it. A sedative for Ruth, create as much stir as possible, even wake David?—and in the melee put his own prints on the gun, even be seen to do it? Or do that now, and go quietly. A small thing to do for one’s daughter. But not enough. It was not enough to leave.

  He walked over to the chaise again, and stood looking down. The eyes were still wide, brown. Or do one final thing to this, his wife. Almost murder again, it would be, to tie the soft, voluminous, bittersweet cloud of the suicide around that head forever. Much could be hidden in that sticky ectoplasm. Enough? The wound was a possible self-wound. Even he, absentee from wars which informed men more clearly of their own gristle and bone, knew this. Surely her past life too was now its own disadvantage. He saw how it could be used, that evening life. Again, a hand countered, rigid as a stylus, to show him how this could be used against him—the husband, returning from his evening ride.

  But the gun, blessedly the gun was Mirriam’s, blessedly. He fought down that hysteria and walked to the window for air. For the world, perhaps the more confusion the better, but he knew his own limits. Whatever he did, and no matter the consequence, he must talk to that man after—get his version of it. He had to know what he lived by. There must be no more loose ends. He flung the window up, a front one overlooking his own stoop. The air doused his head, clearing it as if he were only a householder leaning out for his headache. At the curb, the single car was still there.

  “Yes, Judge, I’m still here.” The man came out of the bathroom—whose door was always closed—wiping his hands with a towel, its lace edge hanging lavishly. Just so this man would look when he rose from a woman’s bed—raddled but stolid, not to be moved more than he had been, or an inch from his own world, but ready for more of the same.

  By an effort which made him shake, he restrained the fists that urged him on the big man. He forced them down at his sides, in the discipline that all his life had left him no reserve for humor. All his life he’d had to know first, before others saw it, what actions would make him ridiculous. He walked to the phone.

  “I wouldn’t, yet.”

  The man stared, an expert measuring a learner. He turned. “What would you do? What did you do?” shook his head slowly, or rather, spoke with his face, again that pliable gesture; he must do this habitually. That won’t wash, it said now; un-uh, don’t try that. Then he pointed to the gun on the floor. “Yours?”

  “Mirriam’s.”

  Again the face made its move. “Your alibi.” He palmed his own side, brought the hand forward. A gun had formed there, held flat. “Mine.” His pistol had a capable gray shine, long and thin. He put it away and stepped over to the other snub, dark blue toy, not quite touching it with a sleek toe, no cop’s shoe. “A Beretta twenty-five, looks like, but—”

  “Damascus. Any tourist.”

  “And any child can fire it?” He had thick brows, grayblond like his hair. These now cocked faintly, the mouth drew down, the nostril dilated, and again the whole head negated firmly from side to side, a head one and a half times the size of Ma
nnix’s own. Pantomime on a face of such scale was unusual—it could be slum habit, pushcart expressive, but from the neck up only, the rest being required for the gun—and the voice kept neutral. “How is the kid?”

  In answer, the Judge took up the phone. Waiting for his number, his eyes traversed the man unseeing; he was now absorbed in giving evidence—a mode of behavior he had observed many times. “Doctor, please…Joel? Simon. Please come at once.” He waited for a question. “An accident.” As each question came, he answered carefully, “Mirriam…She shot herself…No…When I got in…Dead.” The phone squawked to a silence.

  The Judge hung up. He seemed to consider, then raised his eyes to those watching him. “What kid?” he said. It took all his strength, against all the tenor of his life. Turning his back on that, and on the dead, he grasped the arm of the brocatelle chair, and sat down.

  “You make people talk, mister, don’t you.” The other was now on the far side of the big room, in the alcove where Mirriam’s desk stood between a tea tray and the armoire where the “pics” were kept, both movie and “still”—all that adored film which best asserted the crowd’s transiency, being kindred to it. The chaise Was between him and Mannix. He stepped around in front of it, his bulk hiding some action he performed there. Then he walked to the window, shut it. The Judge saw that he had pulled a great oyster-white eiderdown over the body. The chaise reared between them like a shrouded piece of furniture, or a catafalque.

  Bile rose in his own throat. He subdued it. He and the man were on opposing sides now, circling, each with a pink-stained guerdon of love in his pocket? His hands trembled. I choose her. “The doctor will be coming in twenty minutes,” he said.

  The other came toward him, his eyes direct and blue—and troubled? Up that close, it was clearer how the shadow of their hallway encounter had maligned this man or failed properly to reveal him. Everything in his style might still be as the Judge had appraised, but the face, handsome by any standard, lacked the expected thickness or coarseness; the nose was chiseled, the mouth brutally well cut under the kisses women would give it, but wreathed too in the complex lines of its own pantomime. The voice was a New York one, battered half a dozen ways. “Her prints?” He said it very softly, urgently. “On the gun.”