“Yah, I know,” said Anna to Austin. “I don’t care where you been, you ain’t any older than I know you are. Seventeen. And Diddy and Walter, they ain’t even been away yet. It’s milk. Or chincherale. No beer.”
“Anna darling, Anna my hosh,” said Diddy, his arms around her from behind, “we know you have it. You wouldn’t want us to steal.”
“Mr. Mannix didn’t say for it.” To Ruth only, Anna always said “your father.”
“I’ll go ask,” said Ruth. She sat Edwin down at table next to Walter and left him. They all saw his wild look at her desertion.
It was at this point that David, as the host, came forward to greet him. Edwin, like the Judge, never thought of David under his nickname.
“Oh, the Halecsys.” David repeated, but only because of his deafness. Still, there was a touch of the settlement house grandee about him—those boys so full of libertarian willingness, who came to the slums because it was good for them.
Austin, whose haughty looks would make him a dead duck to the hoi polloi before he even opened his mouth, didn’t smile, from a reserve he extended to all. But he was the first to see that Edwin by intellect belonged among them. In the end it was he, whose extra intelligence was joined to a sensitivity of average thickness only, whom the protégé, the refugee, might best trust. Though at the moment Edwin took this as merely the result of Austin’s having been in jail.
Walter was just as she said; he might have got his very hump from years of delicate scholarship on the subject of other people’s feelings. In the long silences, he was filling everybody’s plate. “We’ll drown like logs,” he said happily, passing the food with the lavishness of one of small, frailly dictated appetites. “They’re going to teach me to swim,” he said to Edwin. “I suppose you know all about that.”
He saw Austin watching him, and gave the district’s shrugging offhand answer, based on how it mostly did learn to swim, in a Y pool. “Oh, I dive for pennies,” he said. There was another lengthy silence.
“Did the Halecsys stuff you with cocoa?” asked David. “I must say, your aunts make better cocoa than mine.”
“We had kümmel,” he said, daring pride—and meanwhile learning what courteous chitchat was, even from the mouth of the deaf—and how to be cavalier about food. For some moments the others ate busily.
“Kümmel?” said Austin at length. “For the bellyache?”
“No,” said Ruth, returning, “it was his birthday.” He hadn’t dared begin to eat yet, and looked up at her, waiting. She saw him—and didn’t go on with her story. He saw that she had never had any intention of doing so. And from this he learned.
“Father says—” said Ruth. “Father says—” All heads arrested, including Anna’s. “He says—Anna, give the boys whisky if that’s what they want. But they’re to eat your cake.”
He’d already grasped the idea that they weren’t hungry on demand, or at the sight of any dish, like him.
“A cake,” David said at once. Anna was made to bring it; there were celebratory remarks. “Let me cut it, it’s mine!” Austin said quickly, as if he, not Anna, were the child. In silence, like a mother who had misunderstood her children but not underestimated them, she brought out from the icebox an enormous bowl as well. “It won’t keep,” she said.
So, though they didn’t eat much of the cake, he learned the delicacy—to a point—of master to servant. But that was minor. For, as he watched the four docile faces which appeared to be “against” no one, he had an extraordinary feeling—in the way even the young with nothing in common snatched these facts from one another—that if they lived somewhere a darker, deeper life than one saw, they kept their innocence not only for this kitchen, but for the whole house. He himself was already tethered to the house by its innocence, a mayfly vision seen from his own wintry basement lair, in the house above which every floor and wall was stained with the afterbirth, the death rattle, and the red hilarity of gangsters, and in whose garbage can only yesterday a withered, purple baby had been found, still in its slime. He had an idea that if they kept him here, it would be on both sides because of that innocence. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the bowl Anna had brought out, in which there was a stiff Neapolitan hill of green, brown and pink ice cream.
“Want more,” said Anna, watching him. He refused it, from her. The bowl was then placed in front of him by Ruth—because of his birthday. By the greatest effort, he didn’t grab. In his ten minutes of darting glances he had learned where elbows should be, and the swan grace of spoons not clutched. In equal effort, he didn’t finish the entire bowl, but uncorrected by any of them, he ate from it. Then he leaned back, replete, and, in token of their mutual interest, offered Austin a remark, like a cigar. After all, they were the hosts, and couldn’t ask him anything. Where he had learned this, he never knew. He leaned forward. “Warwick, Otis—or Highland,” he said. “Which one you were in?”
He’d been careful as a cat not to include Letchworth, the reform school for feebleminded only, and a common insult where he came from. Yet to reel off the big-time prisons, merely because from Leavenworth to Alcatraz he knew them all, would have been putting down Austin in another and subtler way, not the overture he intended. So if Austin was only seventeen, it would have to be reform school only—and probably one of those three.
Walter repeated the names for David, who echoed them doubtfully but earnestly.
“—Or there’s that one in South something,” said Edwin. “Way upstate. I knew a guy from there.”
It was Austin who saved him. Kindness alone wouldn’t have helped. Austin was brilliant as well—but only because it was practicable. “Uh-uh.” He drooped an eyelid, clasped his hands and shook them, in the sign which meant “I’m rooting for you.” “The best and biggest is none too good for Austin. Sing Sing!”
The three laughed dutifully, only David saying, “But that’s a state prison,’” and then, “Oh.”
Across them Austin gave Edwin a business stare, concerned only that he get it: that his blunder had been passed off as a weak joke. Ruth too gave him a tremulous smile. He thought her born to be a sister.
It was all too much for him. In the dark center of all this learning, the kümmel suddenly burned. He had to go pee. He said it to himself like that, like a child opting out. He got up slowly. “Where’s the hall?”
The hall, their faces said, what’s the hall? He might have been deserting them. Once he had joined them, he learned this too. Anything he had lived, which they hadn’t, might be a desertion of them.
Instinctively, he turned to Anna, who’d been watching it all; the role of the servant-watcher still gave him the creeps. She knew what he wanted—liking him no better for it because she did—but took him by the shoulders, propelling him outside the room to an alcove under the back stairs, where she flung open the door of a bathroom he now knew was hers. Her flat-set eyes—Polack, Hungarian?—scanned his Charlie Chaplin trousers, and she left him.
Inside the bathroom, he locked the door for the pleasure of it, but didn’t think to look for a light. The room was brown wood like the water closets he knew but varnished like an old master. A brush and comb lay ghostly on the porcelain tank, cleaving like a couple. Towels, carved out of alabaster, hung above. The narrow widow, paned with a filmy, metal-patterned glass, shone bluish with early evening, from a prospect he couldn’t see but heard. In silence he communed with it, the hall toilet silence of cities. In it he raised his head, like a stag. There was a mirror, but it didn’t interest him. He wanted to butt his head, its new growth—which wasn’t a miracle, but like teeth or hair—from within. He was an upper being like them, like them like them. He found he couldn’t relieve himself here. He dared not drop his dirt here. To contaminate them. Or to be stolen by them. This torsion, though he learned to deal with it, stayed with him always.
He opened the door, found the rear house door off the passage, and sneaked outside. A clothesline in the form of a tree stood there, its arms webbed with wash. Fog
was rolling in. In the coarse crabgrass underneath his feet, a few bits of tinfoil glinted, a city confetti that he knew. A pigeon whirred up, then walked along a wall, over which a branch fretted a familiar ailanthus shape. The garbage cans were not so different. He let go against one of them. Above him, the iron water tower brooded its black arts, under the advance of the apartment houses’ wave after wave of brick. It was more private here than in any of the yards he usually took advantage of, yet he’d never felt so naked. He knew he had come up out of his burrow for good. The city as audience confronted him, waiting for him to apply for his destiny—or not waiting. He prepared to run.
Behind him, a window in the house was raised. The silky light from it, as he whirled, watered his eyes, so that the man moving within its yellow oblong underwent a series of images, at first bending a monk’s bullethead over the sill, then receding, against a confusion of book colors in the room behind him, into the worn silhouette of the second thief in the chapel at St. Boniface’s—and ending up hands in jacket pockets, gently rocking, riding a howdah on the elephant night.
“Good evening,” said the man. “I understand you want to go into politics.”
3. In the Upstairs Sitting Room
Fall 1944
IN THE NEARLY TWO years since his wife’s death, the Judge had watched his own abnormalities with interest, and of course care. Abnormality was a better word than dishonesty, covering more.
During this apprentice period, the different shocks he had to learn to deal with came to separate themselves. The simplest was the loss of his wife in her social, household and maternal roles, even her sexual one. Compared to her abstracted or eccentric manner of filling these in life, convention now worked things back to a sadder but almost more manageable norm. As a widower, it was easier to sit at home of an evening than it had been not to be seen about as a couple, and now that the living woman no longer could get into bad company, the dead one left off provoking the small keen aches of half-mutilated loving; there was a convenience to the dead. In one simplest sense, she was safe now. Death had brought his wife out of the demimonde.
In the household too, where of late years Anna had been made far too responsible for a manage which still had a mistress, now only his sisters, Athalie and Rosa, had a moment’s qualm—at the propriety of it. This alone showed how far Anna had come. His sisters lived in the permanently thickened girlishness of maiden women maybe encumbered, but in the end toughened, by the presence of every family drapery well preserved, their highest task being to keep the chairs re-covered in identical patterns and the family sayings well oiled. Neither was unmarried because of ugliness or lack of offers, but because for each, to take the one necessary faltering step into the sea of the unrelated had been impossible. His father had never been able to get through his head how this could have happened to his pretty enough, petted darlings; his mother, fairly close to the asexual herself, an alien in that house where young men thronged, and the worst of matchmakers—must have known this about his sisters from the first councils of the cradle, and had helped to make it so. Now sixtyish, they must have passed through at least the heritable physicalities of women, yet had managed to keep all fleshliness at the level of the cough drop and the bowel. To think of servants in terms of sexes went surprisingly beyond their narrow-curtained politics as well.
He’d barely stopped himself from remarking, “Why, I never knew you two had a male thought under your beds”—but younger than they, and an only brother—at one and the same time their “baby” and closest protector—he was well aware that he himself was that male thought, and in fact had been brought up to be. If this was “Freudian” now, like so much in the ancien régime of families, then it had been merely straight Jewishness once. So, on the afternoon, two weeks after the burial, when they broached the question of’ Anna; he had sent them back to their cocoa fast enough, not without a bit of brotherly mischief first, very welcome to him in those first days. In some ways, these menthol-smelling handmaidens of houses (the two had a joint and antique sinus) could be helpful indeed.
“Well, why don’t you two come and live here? Yes, why not?”
What a duet-round of stammerings then, reminding him almost exactly of how they had practiced their sisterhood at the piano, in their teens.
Finally Rosa, who had always taken the bass, brought out, “What—what—will we do with the mahogany?”
“And—with Daisy?” Athalie, the treble, immediately said.
Daisy was their factotum; the shift from white to black in this matter had been a major event of their post-parental years.
But he hadn’t realized how he’d frightened them. For they were loyal. And though birth and death were rightfully their melodrama (and to bring these properly to phone and table talk level their choral function), they’d never yet had to deal with a death like this. If he needed them this much, then it must be like the terrible month when their mother had gone into pawn—and into veiled, cab-shrouded black—for their father! They would have to.
No wonder both of them slid their eyes round to the fourth, up to now silent person in the long room, where they were all clustered over Anna’s tea tray, in a book-shelved corner as far from the portrait over the mantel as was decently possible. Miss Augusta Selig sat there immovably, as usual: gray, rough-cut features good enough for a handsome man—she was a spinster because of them—over a vintage tailored suit of any year but this. She must know that these suits, bought like a dowry on her final inheritance from his mother’s brother, her fool father, gave her a first-glance look of a Lesbian—and that there was nothing else to be done with her. She was impoverished, independent. For the surer second glance, she was accustomed to wear a succession of heirloom onyx-and-pearl butterflies, horn-and-chalcedony scimitars, all as ugly and unmarketable as she, and on her pitifully feminine feet a round of elegantly custom-made shoes, for which somewhere over the years, she had found the ante. Well before the inheritance she must have decided upon what could and would be done with herself. When Augusta entered a room, the Judge always saw the shoes at once—always with the kindest intentions of including them as clues to her womanhood in his treatment of her—and never thought of them again until he watched their heels leaving it. Perhaps she had them made for this reason too.
The two sisters’ eyes wandered, apprehensive of her, firm because of him. Since Augusta, from all their cradles on, had either known or suspected everything about him, these days he was wary of her too. During all the Mannix childhoods, even Augusta’s succession of dogs, each one named Chummie, always knew, perhaps through some muscle communication, what had never been written on the walls of their well-ordered youth—that “Augusta loved Simon.” This gave her the most minutely observant knowledge of him, satiric as from a concubine kept faithfully in attendance but never slept with, not to be feared for the sake of outsiders, for she was as loyal as Rosa and Athalie, but to be reckoned with for its sources of intelligence. The one thing she didn’t know about him was that he knew of it. His sisters, in a more Oriental household, might have been made to marry, or under the more orthodox clan-to-clan surety, found themselves capable of it; even as themselves, they weren’t too far from those dumb wives beloved of Jewish men in the folklore. But Augusta’s good brain, already married to that exterior, would have evaded second-best in any age. Cynically amused now—for her only pose was to show exactly, what she felt—she regarded them, the first cousin of them all.
“Augusta could come,” said the sisters, characteristically to Simon. And then to Augusta, brave in having ranged him behind them, “You.”
Augusta said nothing. The sisters meant to be kind. Any remote affection of hers, clumsily adhered to their sacred brother, they assumed had vanished, like the ill-starred, crepe-backed satin ball dresses of their own untreasured youth. No one had ever been able to think of Augusta in terms of passion except herself, an early safety the sisters as girls would have rejoiced in, and saw Augusta as enjoying the fruits of now. No one could
think it wrong if she and Simon lived here together—with Anna then clearly a servant. And for Augusta, what an accession, to come from what had to be called a “theatrical” hotel, back to the heavily beneficed air of all their childhoods, safe again in the orris root and beeswax of what was now the family house! Plainly they had talked it over, how to reoffer this poor daughter of an unfortunate uncle—for the annals of money, unlike those of love, were never to be let die from a family history—this chance at a destiny she had spent thirty independent years working away from.
“Eh, Augusta? Hah, Augusta?” said the bass and the treble. They smiled at her, deaconesses of a middle age they had worked toward also had now wore diadem, entrenched enough in its honors to spare some too. Then they couldn’t avoid a quick, transparent look at one another. And Simon, whose taste in women had proved so tragic? They weren’t certain what it would do for him (not liking to think too clearly on the needs of men or brothers)—but surely it would be safer than the dark freedoms of bachelordom, or those experienced candidates out to hook a man “in public life.” They saw these in a henna-haired chorus line, pinkly presenting its widowed charms, maybe under some of the best banking names in the hierarchy, and from ball dresses worn all too well. Whereas Augusta, with a little coaching, might even be persuaded to keep an eye on his bowel. “She could be your hostess, Simon,” they said.
Across their two innocent heads, Simon and Augusta exchanged their own smiles. He knew that these exchanges, even the sisters’ presence to stimulate them, were the breath of necessity to her, silently confirming, like the secret looks between two cleverer brothers, her own image of herself as a personage independently spirited, and without sham. To him she was much too much like a good, gray elder brother whom the distaff side had almost provided him with, only at the last moment welshing out in the genes again, with a “Here’s no dwarf in this one. But it will have to be female.” To his shame, he’d once made Mirriam laugh—she hadn’t the patience to mind Augusta herself, but was always intolerant of the sexually starved—by saying, “Every time I offer Augusta the after-dinner brandy she’s so devoted to, I have to restrain myself from also handing her the cigars.”
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