New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  The Judge considered that trap. Or proposal? “Why don’t you go now,” he said.

  “You have to hear.”

  So the man knew that. Plainly he himself had no need to speak; he had a giant’s phlegm.

  “Later.” The number was in the address book by the phone, under a dozen others in her sprawling script: Nick.

  “Uh-uh. I go to be a hero, in the morning.”

  He had been right, right. “You’re the champ.” But how he still hated this, that even after she who had mocked his nature was gone, it could not forbear. “So I deduced. On the phone.”

  “Did you deduce she had a gun on me?”

  “But—that was hours ago!” He glanced over his shorter cuff. It was only ten minutes of four.

  “I got it away from her. And put it on the table over there.” He nodded toward the dressing table in the ell, then hesitated. “Give it to you straight. I—don’t normally sleep in other men’s beds, whatever else I do. But it was good-bye. When the girl came in the first time, we were—pretty tangled up.”

  “The first time!” It was a statement. An admission. Maybe the other wouldn’t notice.

  But the man’s lip twitched. He saw everything—that his kind would see. “Mirriam never saw her. I didn’t want to welsh on the kid—she snuck out again. But I got up to go. That’s when it really started.” He thrust hands in pockets. “And that’s the picture. Or nearly.”

  “Finish it,” said Mannix. “Quick.” “You know…how she could be.”

  How innocent each man, somewhere. No, I don’t know. But you’re telling me. He said nothing.

  “She knew I’d volunteered to go. In the service. And that I didn’t have to. She said I’d done it to leave her. And that she’d see me dead first.” He swallowed. “When the kid came in again, I think Mirriam was saying—I think she was saying, ‘I’ll get that gun, I’ll get that gun’—over and over. I was having trouble holding her—she took me by surprise. And the kid, coming in just then—must have thought her mother was saying to her, to get it. The gun that was on the table. But Mirriam meant my gun. Mine.” He glanced at the gun on the floor, still with a frown of puzzlement. “How she could have—Mirriam must have turned when I did. I don’t know whether she saw the girl even, before the kid shot her.”

  “For you,” the Judge said hoarsely. “The shot was for you.” As he spoke, he saw what he had said. So witnesses, establishing what is unthinkable, establish it all.

  “Well, there it is,” said the other. “Quickly.” But his face had suffered a change. Or to the witness, did they always? It had begun to look like a face liars might trust.

  “A slap,” said the Judge, looking down at the gun. “That’s what it sounded like from outside. A slap.”

  The other nodded, shrugged.

  “But Mirriam said something. After.”

  “No, that was the kid.”

  “A—scream?” It hadn’t been, that third oddly trilling voice.

  And again the man’s face made that strange grimace with which it had begun its repertoire, an embarrassed gawk of pity trying to hide in its own lineaments. Involuntarily the Judge turned his own head, as at that first signal, but there was no pajamaed child there now.

  “Ah, what the hell,” the man said, in his roughest voice yet. “The kid must have been trying to tell her mother all evening. She said something about…she said like ‘It’s come like you said, Mummy. The blood.’” Then he turned on his heel, found himself facing that covered mound, and wheeled again, toward the other wall.

  When the Judge finally raised his head from his hands, he thought his tongue had been sounding like a clapper in his throat. Save her. Save. But he must have said nothing.

  “Listen, fella,” said the man. “Before the doctor comes. Go down and get us both some whisky.” He wasn’t looking at the Judge.

  It was several seconds before the Judge answered. Then, rising, he nodded, but faltering, like an old man. “Your—clients. Who are they?”

  “I was in the force once, on the strong-arm squad. Now I—have a few concessions around town.” And some swagger to it. But hesitation too. “There’s a medical examiner I know, down at the morgue. Let me put him wise. From outside. Just to keep it quiet. That’s natural. The wife of a man like you.” He was all hustle now, the cheapness coming out in him after all. A bad time to see it.

  He saw the Judge see it. There was that dimension in him too. “Listen, Mannix. I’m not as honest as you, your kind. But so help me, I’m honest enough for this. You’ll never hear from me any more.”

  The Judge bent his head, and turned to go down.

  “Mannix!”

  He turned back.

  “The kid can shoot, can’t she?”

  He had regained himself. “Deaf children…often have target practice.” He spoke as if instructing an interested world, to the air. “Any vibrational synchronizing…is good training. The school thought. She and her mother used to go with him. My son.” Then he went down the stairs.

  Downstairs, he entered the dining-room at the back of the house, and closed the door. Deliberately, he opened a sideboard, set a bottle on a tray and two glasses, and sat down in a chair beside them to wait, his eyes on his shorter sleeve. The doctor had a possible delivery to check on the way, in any case was always slower than intended; there was more time than had been said. And he had a bet on. It wasn’t as certain as his boyhood bets with his own bus fare. But he had more chance of seeing its outcome than Chauncey and Borkan now would ever have, on any bet confabulated around himself. It vamped in his ear like a popular refrain. You won’t hear from me, any more.

  The floors of his house were well tended. He watched, while a great tooth splintered the parquet and grew upward, then another and another, until he was surrounded by them entirely, and the house, utterly rent by them, hung on its own transfixion, curiously stable to the idling wind. Though he could see the house like that—as if from the air above the city—nothing of the city, or of men alone, had sown them. These were the stalagmites of pure accident, in whose unearthly air he now must learn to live. Some accidents melted back into life after suitable mourning—from even the most honorable. But the cones of this one encircled a child, and with her, could only grow.

  He watched for four minutes of the ten he planned to give the man upstairs. All night he had checked his wrist-watch as if it were an hourglass. Yet enormity had occurred. If he believed in God, would he call it no accident, and himself Job? But even he, digging his heels back in the century he’d been born in, was too modern for that belief, and not in arrogance but in the humble, humiliated modern way. He’d been reformed past it, past even those well-meaning Jews who had helped their God reform himself. Of the cleft-foot humors of the Cabala, still faintly a-hoof in his grandfather’s world, he now had little or nothing left. Yet he still believed that each man, out of his own accidents, made his own version of them, was indeed obligated to do so. Was it this made him a Jew? He couldn’t get it out of his bones that each man had an audience in some city. And each a single story which—though there might be no God—only a god could understand.

  On the seventh minute he heard the man he was waiting for, on the stairs like a new-hatched ghost of this household fleeing its own haunt, now out the door—which closed. A car revved up, quietly moved off, and whined away. He reached out and took one glass off the tray. It was still empty, like the other. He filled it, and holding it, opened the dining-room door. The house held that mysterious pressure of a familiar house at night, its routines laid down like brush and comb, but alive in the beating hearts of the sleeping, in the wing-beats of the absent, and in the soul of him awake in it like a hollow whistle in which these histories revolve. Half the bet was now won. Carrying the glass like a toast readied for the other half, he went back up the stairs.

  On the landing outside the room, he paused. Higher in the house, on the children’s floor, Anna was singing, in the Czech she had hummed them to sleep with as babes. An
na and he would never speak further of this night between them; this was the bond, unsure on her side, which would make them both secure. So that they could live with each other daily, this was the advantage he must take of her…Whatever the child said to her, she might keep for her own, as any woman might do with a child’s delirium.

  Beyond, David lay in his keep, where even in ordinary hours a father flinched to surprise him. So awkward, even now, the walking up from behind to touch him aware, the touch of flesh of one’s own with which one was not intimate. In imagination, he now walked into that wire-devised room, in the dark (as he’d sometimes done in the years past, always asking himself the same question), and looked down at his son. If he were sure this was not his son, could he then be free to hate him—or to love? And in imagination he walked out again, unable to bear to mouth news like tonight’s—and watch his son slowly read it in his own face. A boy of seventeen was almost a man, and like men, must take his chances on the morning.

  And now, here was the door of her bedroom, open.

  He stood in front of his wife’s body like a conspirator returning to a crime whose full plot he hadn’t been given. Under the coverlet he traced the same curves of knee and hip, breast and head. The dangling slipper was hidden by the angle he observed from, but the covering hadn’t been moved. A spurt of jealous shame made him lift it. Yes, the man, back turned, had done it while he himself only watched. The eyes were now closed.

  Her one hand still hung down. But beneath it, to a point nearer but not too logically close, the gun had moved. Been moved. He had won his bet in full. Were the fingers above the gun more curved than before, as if newly held around it, and again let drop? He bent to observe, and found himself retching, on his knees. The glass he still held spilled on his hand. He looked down on that glass which held nothing but whisky, drained it, and let it drop to the rug. On his knees still, but with his back turned to that sepulcher, he clutched the deprived root of him, and guarded it. If a woman had been near, he would have thrust himself upon her, to prove that impotence. For he wished to mourn.

  Oh man of Uz, he said to himself, wandering the stairs again, striking a hand here, there. But Job, once his kinsman, was dust. He prayed to the god he had deserted—how hast thou forsaken me? But he could mourn only her of his choice, or try. He saw his house as he must keep it for her from now on, a house with all the common drapery burden of houses of its kind, but bare as a birdcage to any piercing eyeball. And on such tremoring middle ground as even he despised. But he must keep it for her as one kept one’s house for one’s child. For all the coming treasures of the snow—and of the hail.

  For there was one loose end that with all his talents he could never bind for sure. Though all he knew of war was what men and books told him, like all who live in houses he had an excellent knowledge of wounds receivable there. A lesson carefully wrapped away for years could split again in an afternoon.

  Grasping the banister as if it were a Bible, he swore, resolved—and yet in the end only imagined—how from this day on he would never say a word of any of those happenings to the child, except in extremis, if she spoke of it, in which case he would answer: “You had a delirium.” Reality came to children as it was made. There was a chance that this was no burial of the truth, but a strewing on the wind as one did with the ashes of the dead—a casting away into life. This was all he could do in that direction for his daughter, who was, ever would be—the loose end.

  Afterwards, he saw how he had left his mark on this house. He saw the gougings on the banister, regular as from the tines of a rake or the close nails of some animal, and he inspected them as an animal did its own mark—as if another of its breed had gone before. Even if he gnawed off his own leg, he couldn’t leave this trap, which he must make for her too. He prayed, this time without kneeling. Then he began to see the true abyss between one like him and one on her threshold, and began truly to mourn.

  When the examiner and the doctor, meeting on the steps, rang the bell together, and he opened the door to them, he was silent. But they had already heard through the door the cry that rose up the stairwell. Afterward, though no record was made of it, it may have puzzled them.

  “That’s the Kaddish he’s saying?” the doctor, who was a Jew had murmured to the examiner, who was not, before they rang. “I only know it in Hebrew. ‘Yis kodol.’” The sound, a whisper now, shivered again at the door before this was opened to them. “There’s nobody young enough here to mourn her. There’s nobody young enough here to mourn.”

  2. A Major Visit

  June 1951

  FROM THE FILE CARDS which recorded all his visits to the Mannix house, Edwin Halecsy, long since dubbed the Judge’s “law clerk,” in sardonic tribute to his own youth and the Judge’s lack of office, was noting before leaving for dinner there that this would be his seventh major visit, if other elements in it went right. He had no need to look at a card in order to know this or any other of the facts recorded on it either in the high-schoolish script of the earliest visits, dated 1944, or the typed ones beginning two years later, after the Judge’s gift to him, on his receipt of a full scholarship to Harvard, of a portable typewriter—a machine which, in Edwin’s whole life before between Mott Street and the high school and his “jobs,” he had never seen up close. To date, June of 1951, at the end of his first year in law school, the total visits numbered twenty-five.

  His card files, however, dated from a period before the Mannixes had entered his life, from the day a bewildered eighth-grade substitute teacher had kept after school, to help her with all she didn’t know about classwork, this brightest boy, a spectacled young snub-face of no particular age, who did. She had paid him the first time with a wad of “five-by-eights” the very name of them, glib on her lips, was new to him—plus a nickel candy bar from her own worn purse, but after that, for the month she was there, at his own hint with the cards only; he was no gourmet. In that school, with its wooden, latrine-style toilets, its luxuriously crayoned decorations, so well matched to the waxy flesh tints of most of its students, she didn’t have to ask why the broken bridge of his glasses, tied with string, wasn’t better repaired, although she did put a finger up to the one cracked lens, with a “T-t-t-t,” but only shaking her head, like the poor, powerless, soon to be jobless creature he already knew her to be, when he replied, “It’s OK. I’m on the list at the clinic now. Here too.”

  It was OK for him; as long as he could see the means up ahead; time as yet meant nothing much to him. Down where he was with his mother, there wasn’t much sense of time anyway and he had never much missed it, only later on getting the hang of what people scraped up and grieved over. He’d always known what it meant to be “on time” of course, this being required in his mother’s life and very soon of his; at whatever his walking age had been:—whereupon he had graduated from being left alone in the house to going along on the job with her, to help. But that other sense, of time past or lost, though it had got through to him like one of the luxuries he didn’t want, even now never much bedeviled him. Nevertheless, it was after the girl teacher had asked him a certain question that he had started his file system. “How old are you, Edwin?” she had asked, on her face a puzzlement he had seen on others before. Many in the grade were taller than he, more patchily bearded than his blond cheeks were; some were eighteen—but none of these were that smart. She could see he didn’t want to answer. “I don’t know,” he said, at last. This was true.

  To her, a dumbhead as they both agreed, he’d seemed to know, in the line of lessons, about everything else, yet his school record went back, on and off, only about four years. She herself could have been only a few money grades above his, but in every other respect—little as she had in brain or hope or family situation—miles beyond. In her face, whose small range of expression helped him assess this new one, he began to glimpse, as she listened to his story of why he didn’t know his age, that there was something very special about his poverty, even to her. Few could have expressed
to him what that was, certainly not she. But she had situations, in the world and with it, that he knew nothing of; this he could see in her listening face—and that there was another kind of dumbness which surrounded him. “But you can’t stay…like in a cellar…all your life—a boy with your…Bubele, you gotta come upstairs!”

  The “cellar” was literal, a reference to where he and his mother did live, in itself nothing unusual in the streets the school drew from, or even on her own Bronx one. But out of that patriotism toward life which teacher-study had brought her, she had made a metaphor to be proud of. Both of them felt it. “I tell you what!” she said in triumph. “Pick one. How you could come even this far without it—! Pick an age!” From cracked lens to clear, a faded, flag-pink feeling was exchanged, the way teacher and class did at the daily “pledge of allegiance,” and with the same echo, as from an order behind. A day later he saw her go out of his life and felt neither gladness nor cost, not being much accustomed to either where people were concerned. These vanishings, shadowy replacements, were to him—except for his mother, who was in her own way a shadow—normal to all human constituents. A day or so later, he couldn’t have told the girl’s name. But the minute she had said “Pick!” he’d taken it as an order, from somewhere behind them both too. Until then, he hadn’t understood what the hoarded 5x8’s were for.

  The story he’d told her was simple in its extremity. His mother, Marda or Marta Jalecsy or Halecsy—he didn’t know the correct spelling—had come to the U.S. as the youngest of a trio of sisters, the two elder of whom had come first, later sending her the fare. A job had been lined up for her, and he thought perhaps a husband—at least a man had appeared at the immigration dock to claim her but had disappeared after; perhaps the man had been paid. She hadn’t been very good at jobs. Neither Edwin nor she had much idea of how long ago this was. Here he’d hesitated, not out of shame, but incapacity; it was always hard to explain to people about his mother, how she wasn’t a moron or mixed up, and in some plodding ways very strong—merely how very simple she was. Perhaps this came over anyway, as he told how, after an indefinite time here, she had one night been attacked in a dark hallway, but never told her sisters of this or of her pregnancy—“She just let it grow,” he said. When she came out of the hospital ward, the two sisters had already picked up and gone; among other things, because of the neighborhood, they had been afraid the baby might be Chinee. She had lost her papers, was illiterate, and actually couldn’t say what country she was from, knowing only the name of the “small” town, the big town nearby, and the province. She had almost no stories of either. The modern names of the Slovak countries were unknown to her. He had no real knowledge of whether his own name was Edgar or Edwin. Only recently he’d discovered that the thick dialect they spoke together—he very haltingly, for she said little—must be Hungarian. He had found that out one night in a restaurant where she scrubbed—from a stray customer. The restaurant jobs were always the luckiest for them, since she could scarcely cook. He learned to. Earliest, she had worked “for the Jews,” for a Jewish chicken butcher, until it was found she wasn’t Jewish as assumed—this she did know and would have told them—and she’d been dismissed. Either because she couldn’t learn the ritual for slaughter or because her presence was against it; she had never known which. But she was strong and knew a few good things—how to clean and to be clean was one of them—and she had found the cellar, passing meanwhile from one scrub job to another, mostly in stores, for she wasn’t smart or “good” enough for the domestic trade.