New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  But the aunts too meanwhile were moving, peculiarly undulant, like the green fronds in the fishbowl at school, at the approach of the single, golden fish. Between them, the girl stared at him up there on his dais with his towel.

  “So you’re back, Miss Ruth,” said the aunt who held the bundle, but still with that elegant sway, while the other murmured, “And how is it these days, on the other side?” The two backed up in horror at the sight of Schwer’s laden tray, with a “Not whisky, Miss Ruth, Schwer, not for Miss Ruth,” and a last “Watch the tray!” as Schwer, with a “Nonsense, babies get it for the digestion, it’s only kümmel,” handed glasses all round. He saw his mother receive one, with that hollowing of the shoulders which offered her unworthiness for all to see. He saw the girl see it. Then the girl, pushing back her hood, moved forward, holding up her glass. Behind her the aunts muttered in their almost unison, “We are fitting him for a suit, a fine suit of the best wool, Miss Ruth”—though a moment ago it had been cotton crash they had been talking about and only trousers. Then Schwer—with a “Happy birthday, Eric!”—put a glass in his own hand.

  Schwer had misnamed him, but in every fairy tale there was a flaw. The light in the room declined to ordinary. He felt the burden of the three extra years. The aunts’ faces looked foxy; even his mother’s wasn’t quite blank. What was the trap here? But then the girl came forward, all by herself now, and smiled, maybe to assure him that tales here had wonders past their own flaw. Normally he wasn’t a wild-looking boy, only a meager one, but in the past weeks, to spur his aunts’, search, he’d left his hair uncut, and now he felt himself to be that boy-beast, up from the street’s bowels, of later dreams to come. She held out her glass, in a gesture he didn’t know. His empty hand half moved out to take hers before he understood. He reached over his shielding screen as over a balcony; they clicked glasses. In the same flash, he said to himself, She’s smart, meaning perhaps that she was good. Good was a word whose uses he had trouble assigning even now. But she meanwhile had seen, he was sure, how smart he was—meaning smart. She drank from her glass then, and he followed suit, tossing it down in the only way he’d ever seen men booze—and when the liqueur burned its way down, stood his ground.

  “How old are you?” She was the first to ask, in the world of his new age.

  “Eighteen,” he said. The numbers were bright in his head: fifteen plus three, simpler than algebra, but whether loss or gain was yet to be seen.

  “I’m fourteen.”

  He stared back, unblinking. “I was fifteen yesterday.”

  She widened her eyes, gray between lashes lighter than her hair, which made the face somehow recede and seem gentler than it was, but said nothing. The aunts, sipping with Schwer, hadn’t heard.

  Twenty minutes later, he and the girl were walking to the Mannix house, along much the same route he would walk tonight. This girl now knew all about him, at least what the aunts could tell, plus—between the lines, as she watched him listening to his own story—all he didn’t say. If she now knew the reason for his last strange remark, she didn’t mention it. Later, rarely as he saw her, he grew to depend on the reserve in her that was so much easier on him than other people’s openness, particularly those who were as eager as social workers to talk with him about his rise in life, to clock his feelings and to insert their own sympathies, or rather their images of themselves as sympathetic people. Ruth, on the contrary, had a clued, trail-dropping way of assuming you knew she understood what you didn’t say. Perhaps this arose from her own position deep in that family where, as the younger, the petted, the uncrippled, she was so dearly encircled—but they really didn’t want to hear what she had to say.

  Sometimes, with the Judge and Anna, and even with David, he had the strongest impression that they were afraid to hear—and not out of concern for her frailty, but for their own. More probably, this was merely one of the hundred and one ways in which he was still ignorant of the appearance of love. For at times he still couldn’t tell whether his discriminations about people weren’t the commonest in the world, his youth had had so few. The Mannix house had become the laboratory where he learned.

  On that day he’d trotted after the girl down the four flights of the aunts’ stairs, carrying for her a bundle of repaired dark blue dresses exactly like those she had brought. The aunts had maneuvered his going with her, why so greedily he couldn’t say, over a delivery job for which, as they had carefully whispered to him, he must take no pay—later he appreciated better the role played in the affairs of men by the calculations of the most stupid women. He was willing, already addicted to the electric shocks of newness this world supplied. At the door, the aunts stopped the girl; like any of the old peddler-wives in the market, their most leading conversations took place at the door. From the girl’s slight smile at him, she knew this too.

  “Over there the other side, Miss Ruth sweetheart, how was it? You and your father had a good time?”

  “Well, you know…the war…” the girl said patiently, as if she was teaching the word to them. “Daddy only got us over because of the refugees—you know…the people he brings here.”

  He’d listened dimly. They had the war in the district too of course, loudest in school and in barbershop, and in the Masses for the soldier-dead, in church. But he had to get to Harvard before he heard it much in conversation, and in the very overtone first heard in the voice of this rich young girl. The rich and educated—for so often these still went together, in spite of boys like him—always had the war more on their minds than the poor did. And it wasn’t always because they had more time and perspective or even investment. The rich liked to be rich in conscience too.

  “But the best thing for me—” the girl said eagerly—“was Daddy and Madame Fracca. Madame Ninon Fracca.”

  “Ah?” The aunts repeated the name, softly barring the door. “Madame…a lady?”

  There wasn’t a change in the girl’s calm expression, no suspicion of a smile on her sugar-clean complexion—he didn’t even know why he thought there might be, but observed that she could see through the two aunts as if their small, clockwork motives took place behind glass. There was a whole upper atmosphere of opinions, attitudes, intelligences in and around people, for which he hadn’t the words yet but felt in the periphery of his skin, the way one feels a new countryside. This girl was the first to make him sense its existence. And that afternoon in her house—so quickly to become for him, as for all the Judged house—was to open up, like an avenue to be walked down, his place in it.

  “Mistress at the Royal. The Ballet. She watched me try out. Maybe, when the war’s over, they’ll take me—if I keep on hard. Anyway, she persuaded Daddy to let me go on with it.” The girl said this all in a rush, then drew back, as if she had given the aunts too much for their minds to hold. He watched, from his new and peculiar edge of distance, enthralled by the revelation that he could.

  “Miss Ruth—” Both aunts shook their heads. “For why you want to be a ballet dancer, a girl like you?” Under her cool silence, they retreated, then rallied, together. “Your aunts feel the same.”

  But this girl’s aunts, no matter how much the Halecsy sisters invoked them as patrons or friends, would not be the same. He felt that, when the girl said merely, “Miss Halecsy—my bundle.”

  The bundle was brought at once, flutteringly. Here he spoke—forgetting merely to watch and learn, he was so interested—“But it’s the same one!”—and everybody laughed.

  “Miss Ruth belongs to a club,” said the aunts. “To wear uniforms at school.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Catholic.” He felt brave to speak at all, yet knew somehow that he must begin to.

  “No, not Catholic,” said one aunt. Both shook a heavy frown at him—was it a disgrace to be? “No, the school don’t ask uniforms. But the girls in Miss Ruth’s club they all wear them, so the poor girls don’t feel shame at what the other ones got.” They appealed to him, wispy brows raised, under hair trodden to a brown grass by innum
erable hats. “Now, isn’t that ni-ice?”

  He didn’t get any of this, but he’d already begun to dislike this kind of whine. “Uh-huh.”

  It was then the girl blushed. “Well, thank you, Miss Gerda, Miss Ulla.” She made them give her the bundle, then handed it over to him with a friendly smile—not to a delivery boy, to a boy. “Thank you very much, and good-bye,” she said, in the same cool gush girls at school used, imitating maybe their mothers—and transcending accents. The aunts heard none of this, never would. He took all these soundings.

  “Three inches at the hems!” the aunts called down the stairs after them; “How you girls growing! Every one of them had to be faced.”

  The walk was twelve blocks up and four avenues over. She led him. He clasped the bundle, dry-cleaned maybe, but it still smelled like much of the cloth his aunts worked on, cloth that had never really been dirtied, soft with its own worth. His trousers itched and crawled on his thighs from the yellow soap his mother rubbed and steeped them in, but there was nothing to be done with stale cloth. All the way to the Mannix House, he and that bundle exchanged smells. And on the way there, he, Edwin Halecsy of his district, and Ruth Mannix, of hers, had this exchange also:

  “That woman they didn’t introduce me to,” she said. “Who was she? The one with—with a coat on.”

  “My mother.” He shifted the bundle, and walked a way on. “They’re going make her a new one.”

  At the next corner, she said, “Want me to take a turn?”, and he answered no.

  At the next, he said, “Your father—he need you to work? That he won’t let you dance?”

  She walked on a way before she too said no—and while they waited for traffic, “—Not to work, that is.”

  “Your mother work?”

  She never answered that one at all. But they were just turning west, on the corner she indicated, when she said in that other imitative voice, “Your aunts and mine know each other.”

  He nodded matter-of-factly. “Customers.”

  She touched his arm. “The club, it isn’t like that now, not like what your aunts said. It was—we were just kids, we had that idea. But the uniforms turned out too expensive. At first, that is. The cash outlay. Some girls couldn’t always…pay all at once—and—we couldn’t ask the Halecsys to wait. So it all ended up…social. And Diddy, that’s my older brother David, said we had a better lesson in economics than we could even get at Dalton.”

  He never mixed up life with what he learned at school. But he knew the word “economics” of course. “Sure,” he said virtuously, “and my aunts got what to work.” She looked at him cautiously, as if he’d made a joke. “But my father—” She gave a nervous laugh, as people did before a joke of their own. “He said, ‘No, David, a political lesson. Because the girls still have their club.’”

  He nodded, deeply, into that cloth. “Politics, that’s the best mob.” He slung the bundle to the other shoulder. “I wouldn’t mind doing that, not at all.” It was what the number runners always said.

  Another avenue was crossed; they were going down a side street again. “Only two more blocks across,” she said. “But long ones.”

  They were indeed long, for not talking. After a while, she gave that same laugh. “The Moka girls—that’s what Diddy and I call my aunts and yours because they’re always having cocoa together—they keep wondering about it. Whether he’s going to ‘bring another woman into the household,’ they call it. My father. They talk about it all day.”

  From what he knew of Mott Street environs, and the vague, amoral world outside it, he considered which households might have two wives in them. “You Hindu?” he said.

  “What? No, of course not, whyever why!” She peered at him again as if he was tucking back a joke or a riddle. “We’re Jews.” She said it proudly, the way all Jews did, the ones he knew.

  “I know a lot of Jews,” he said. “But I found out I’m not one by my father’s side…No, I mean, you know—two wives.”

  “Oh,” she said. And then quickly—“No, they meant…another woman…after my mother.”

  “Oh.” So she had a gap too. “Or they could mean you,” he said. “Two women in one kitchen.” He spoke with market-stall wisdom.

  “You’re funny,” she said. “How could they mean me?” But she looked dubious. She glanced down at her knees, bare above their knee socks. For some reason, he looked down to where his own knees were in their shuffling pants.

  “Well, maybe not,” he said. But this was a subject he knew well; in school conversation, mothers and fathers mythically arrived and went with rapidity and replacements were made for known reasons: “To mind the kids, he did it,” or “She’s a widow but she can’t get the pension,” or, from the peddlers, “He got hot pants. Better he should have it at home.” And there were often other considerations as discussable. “Well,” he said, as reasonably as he had heard it said and believed it to be. “Maybe they’re right. It’s always another mouth to feed.”

  This time she did laugh right out loud. “Excuse me,” she said. “I know that’s not funny. But you are.” Then she gave him a serious stare. “Diddy would like you,” she said.

  He didn’t respond. Projections of that sort were not real to him. Ahead, at some distance, he could see green. “What park is that?”

  “Central.”

  “I was there once. They took us. From school.” He was about to walk on in that direction when, she touched his arm again.

  “No, we go one more block north now,” she said. “I don’t know why I always do it this way, but I always leave this one block.”

  This was clearly a ritual, like step-on-a-crack, break-your-mother’s-back; he had them too. “I know. It’s what called an o-bession.” He read whatever he could get, understood only by osmosis or not at all, and had no dictionary. “It’s like for me, revolving doors. Like when I meet them on some restaurant job. I always have to let it go twice around before I duck in.”

  She nodded, and for the first time they swapped glances, in some warmth, and walked on comfortably.

  “Your mother,” he said. “Which D?”

  She moved her head very slowly. Her hands stopped swinging. “I don’t—what do you mean?”

  It was the common ordinary way in which his schoolmates asked one another about family gaps; to do it was a friendly sign—Which D was yours?

  “Dead, divorced, or disappeared,” he said.

  She stopped in her tracks. “It’s this block,” she said in a muffled voice, and made no move to go on. He didn’t know anything to do but wait. Suddenly she reached over and grabbed the bundle from him, glaring at him as if he’d stolen it. Then she put her chin in it and started walking again, her face half hidden in it. He walked beside her, shifting pace so that they were in stride. “Dead,” she finally said.

  They went another half-block in silence before she said, “There, toward the end of the next one. Down there, across the street. Second from the corner. That’s our house.”

  That brought him to. Before, he had been walking through a mist of streets, though it was a bright enough day. This was like the moment when he raised the trapdoor into a clear sky, climbed out of it, and stood erect. On some mornings, his flesh yearned backward, to his hole; cellar living wasn’t all bad, even for the mind. But now he had come up into a street abandoned by the Saturday jostle he knew, or never entered by it. Here and there, on both sides, parlor bays were set festive for robbery, curtains parted on the gleams of tables and silver pitchers; one showed a tall column topped by a stone bust. Down where she pointed, a continuous blur of high stoops and entrances paused at a peaked house, then the stooped one which was hers, and ended at a larger building on the corner, with a speared iron fence that made more sense. Above the park at the end, clouds flew like pennants. There were no pushcarts. The street had chosen itself, like a drawing. It had not been decreed.

  “Give me the bundle back.” He took it from her. It felt warm against him, a half hiding-place.r />
  She looked sideways at him, as if she knew this. They were standing still again. She was meditating a question. Her lip trembled; he saw with a kind of relief that there was a smudge on it, of soot. She tossed her head. “Your father,” she said. “Which D?”

  Before then, he’d always answered, “Disappeared.” Saying that had been a real convenience to him, like all the other phrases in which it was safest to converse. The truth, told once to the head worker in a settlement house, had come out in her face like a dirty word.

  “Well, what?” said the girl. “I told you.” She no longer looked hostile. “It can’t be worse than—” A frown bemused her face, clouding it as if she were searching for a better word or a new one. “Than—dead.”

  He wasn’t seeing her either, but that word, read but never heard aloud, which he now pronounced just, as he had in the settlement house. “My mother, she was rapped,” he said. “So about him, I don’t know what.”

  “She was what?” she said, puzzled.

  For fourteen, she wasn’t wise to much. Or else he’d said it wrong, as often with the commonest word, from never hearing it at home. “Rapped,” he said, like in a class spelling bee. “R-a-p-e-d, rapped.”

  She said it to herself in an undertone, “R-a-p—” then “Oh,” and then “Oh, I see.”

  After a minute they began walking again, slow. He was having a trouble. The rich saliva of confession had backfilled his throat, making him want to cry there, though he did not want to do so in his mind. Already a lightness was there, and a rest. He stole a look at her face, but the word hadn’t come out on it.

  Almost at the steps of her house, the learner in him came to his rescue. “What school do you—attend?” he said. He could never get enough of formal language, even now.

  “Dalton.” Her tone reminded him that she had already said it.