New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  “No,” she said, with deep, extended sadness. “No.”

  At the street door, he said lightly, “Don’t forget to bring Chummie. Next time.” It was cruel, from him. One gawky, agonized glance, from the girl of the boarding-house, told him so. But he had done it. He’d kept at arm’s length that divination of him which reached from Augusta, from those antennae the ugliest beetles were often forced to carry like queens—which would brush and brush over the old, known part of him, to discover the new. He had prevented her from seeing Ruth.

  For already then, not half a month away from the death, his certain duties had shut themselves in with him like lay figures, rising calmly from corners to shut the louvers in on him and bare their effigy teeth in a silent ukase. He’d passed successfully through the special wake left by a suicide; now he had to bear only that nameless shock which was to last him for life, from the moment he’d carried back upstairs the bloodied child.

  For the child herself—whom he meant to bear to a womanhood as protected from the worldly consequence of her act as if she were still in the amniotic sac—was safe from him only. He had to perform all his duties in darkness, without help from instinct, or from her. For he still didn’t know what Ruth knew of her own actions that night. Therefore he was unable to ask her. He would never be able to. Ahead of him, a white cone at the other end of life’s tunnel—and really only that mythical access-to-radiance of which all people kept an image—was the chance that one day she would tell him. Yet he knew this to be as unlikelier each day as if they two could grow old together to mumble their secrets at exactly the same time. Yet he kept that picture too, gradually replaced by the most incontinent of all hopes. This was that in spite of all, she would somehow grow up maybe in the circumstances of a motherless child, an overfathered one, but otherwise in that state known to all but beggaring description, and therefore called normal. And would bring him therefore to a state of the same.

  Things changed. Here—where he sat now in the dun dusk of an afternoon well suited to reading old correspondence and writing farewell letters—was a sitting-room once a woman’s bedroom. Its flowered silks remained as always; her desk, at which he was sitting, still lodged its many pigeonholed archives between the same prettily niched confusions of pinks and greens. Yet the room now smelled harmlessly of chalk, crayons and cleaning fluid and the dozen other domestic tasks and interviews set to dry in the “extra” room. There in that chair the plumber had waited to sign his contracts; on that tall screen the dressmaker hung her cutouts; under their many fingerprints the room was now extra, rainy-day, characterless. Lack of drama was its job. How else could he have sat here, as had begun to be his afternoon habit even before he and Ruth had left the country?

  Now on a week’s return, the long summer just past already seemed a planet away, almost as out of logic for him and his daughter as those who had protested the trip, yet helped them to get there, had said. Actions which were altogether out of logic were different from the merely illogical. If only one could say for sure in all daily life—as easily as one could say it of taking a fourteen-year-old to wartime England—which actions these were.

  Since their return, his afternoon habit here—as distinguished from the morning’s professional hours in the study downstairs—had become fixed. Anna had made the changes in this room, whether in lucky fumbles that became tact, or in some exquisite knowledge which came of servitude, wasn’t his to say. The chaise had vanished, replaced with a sofa come from somewhere in the house, since it looked worn and he had never paid any bill for it. The room’s new name had evolved the best way, as perhaps the protective emotions and habits should also—through use. Opposite him, an ancient wardrobe, where he’d always stored any overflow clothing, from sailing gear to dress suits, still housed these, insuring his natural entry here from his own bedroom from time to time.

  Since the death, his own illogic consisted in coming to this room for all decisions. These had been, in reverse order from the present: to write a parting letter to a woman (which he had just now done), to read and dispose of his wife’s lifetime correspondence (which he had been doing all week), to go abroad with Ruth (accomplished), to write a memoir of his father (still unfinished), to give up his judgeship in order to work full-time at the rescue of legal scholars and others from the fascist countries (decisions not clearly connected but both undertaken that first six months), and—undertaken in that first hour after the death—to do what he had done, about Ruth.

  Going upstairs to her third-floor room, he and the doctor had left the examiner in the bedroom—here. “No need for you to come in here again, Judge,” the examiner had said. Standing in the doorway here, he’d spread his arms across it, barring it to the pair of them on the landing, but also meaning to be kind—and conspiratorial? He’d been a smallish man (though medium-size to the Judge), with a chin of incongruous length and a sidelong, putty nose. It was a confessor’s face. The Judge had an impulse to lean on those arms, so spread for it, to cry Murder to that conniving, tweaked face. But the man turned his back on them. “I’m Ford,” he’d said at the downstairs door, going past them and up to the death-room as if he had the ground plan of all murders in his brain. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  And he had, even to the undertaker, who must have had a tie-in with that kind of trade. “Just leave the door on the latch for my men, please,” he said, striding past the Judge, leaving Joel, the family doctor, on the steps, and except for that passage on the landing they hadn’t seen him again. He had eloped with Mirriam, into the night.

  “Wait a minute. You say she walked in on it?” said Joel, his hand on the knob of Ruth’s door. His father had delivered her. He had inherited the same heavy, internist silences. All his patients were convinced they understood his simple personality better than he possibly could their complicated ones, and this arrangement was satisfactory all around; the magic could go into the medicine.

  “She got her first period. She came to tell.” The faintest sense came to him of how it must be to be female—an appointed day, a certain musk.

  “She know about such things?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Joel. “Even this day and age. I get commissioned to do it all the time. To tell them. Boys too.”

  “Mirriam was good about all that. Open. And I think they have a course at school.” He’d never once made the mistake of the tenses, never again said, “Mirriam is.” He could observe that now.

  “Give her something to rest, Joel,” he said. “For God’s sake, give her something.” He’d inherited a family manner with doctors, or a Jewish one—abject, and imperial.

  “Hold it, Si. Anna may have given her something.” Joel’s relationship here was mostly with Anna, over the children. Once it had been with Mirriam. The Mendes manner with doctors was more regal than the Mannixes’. They lived almost to their deathbeds without them—and lived long.

  “That stuff you give her for her stomach—does it have a narcotic in it?” Or had she been delirious? He’d clutched at a last-minute faith in keywords, specifics which might explain everything.

  “Trace of paregoric, peppermint.” The doctor, listening past him, had had the same bovine stare as when he was auscultating. “But she wouldn’t have heard that popgun anyway, would she, way up here.” He knew all about the family target practice, having sent David to the ear man who’d prescribed it. Now he poked Simon in the chest. “You were still out?”

  He looked down at his dress shirt. “A dinner for me. I stayed late with a friend afterwards.”

  “Oh?” The doctor had the conservative ethic of a man too busy for any but the good life; patients consigned their children to him but took their own sins elsewhere. Any cynicism he had was reserved for the bodies they brought back.

  “He’d had bad news from overseas. He’s ninetyish.”

  “Ah.” In retrospect, Joel’s I-wouldn’t-think-of her wise smile reminded him of Hildesheimer’s—the same unction wi
thout imagination. A mixture widespread, for which he supposed he must give thanks;

  For he’d made a slip then. “Mirriam was waiting up for me.”

  “And it was then she did it?”

  The mind could be emptied. His had. His skull ached around it.

  “I’m not surprised, Si.” The doctor’s words had been like a wand drawing him to his feet again, from where he had sunk back. “I have to tell you—that I’m not surprised at all.” He spoke stiffly. “Ordinarily I—Mirriam was not my patient, Simon.” It was almost the worst he could say. “She was unstable. I have to tell you it. Any medical man could see it.” Especially if he saw only children. “You better let me handle Ruth.”

  “You mean you think she…takes after Mirriam that way?”

  “No, Si. Not at all. I’ve been sticking needles into her long enough to know what a great little kid you’ve got there, straight as a die. But maybe she ought to spill a little before I give her anything. Especially with the other business, or if she’s in shock. You still are. Better let me.”

  “David’s still sleeping.” And my son, what of him?

  The doctor shrugged. “Let him, as long as he can, poor boy. David’s his own man, I could never break him down.” So his own father might have him. “Far’s I know. David doesn’t take after either of you, much. But Ruth, you don’t have to worry—she’s all you.”

  So he’d given up, unknowing, his great opportunity. All his life might have equipped him to be the seismograph here, and love as well, but to the doctor, both his love and his shock disqualified him. Now he could see where these might have been the talismans. The next night he’d gone alone to her, prepared for honesty from her if that came, or bewilderment. And ready for either with words agonizedly chosen neither to lead her on nor put in her mind things which—might not be there. Could there have been such words? What he’d really done was to leave it to her.

  “I’ll take care of her,” said Joel. “As a patient.” And so he had, pushing in the door, that lightest of barricades.

  A blue lamp was burning, though it was already day. Though the Judge knew all the moods of the house, how it blended inner cloud and outer, he scarcely recognized this milky rain of light washing the window, above a horse race of clouds. The bulb of the lamp had been wrapped with the paper from a box of absorbent cotton, an old sickroom trick even of his time, of the women who made childhoods. Since the days of bedtime stories he had scarcely been in this room. Now he quivered for all fathers who meant to get to know their children in time. In an alcove, the enormous dollhouse still squatted in its dusty fairyland shrubbery, not to be got rid of except to younger children or one day to a charity; it had lights and linens on the beds and a doghouse, he remembered from the day of its arrival, and was the kind only a poor man like Pauli Chavez would give. On a rack to one side of it, a half-dozen school dresses hung in strict attendance. Ruth wasn’t in the tumbled bed. Anna was sitting on the side of it, head bent.

  “Dr. Choel.” She seized on the doctor, yet was hopeless. “She has cramps yet. I give her Midol.”

  His own father used to give his sisters a little Holland gin for the same reason—had his father felt as clumsy, hangdog, as this? He wished he had only his father’s reasons. Then Ruth came out of the adjoining bathroom in a nightgown, saw them, slid into bed like a truant, and closed her eyes. It wasn’t a child’s way of doing it.

  “Are you in pain?” said the doctor.

  She shook her head. Her eyes opened. Then she closed them.

  “Is there much flow?” said the doctor in a stage whisper to Anna, who faintly signaled no. The doctor advanced to the bed and looked down on the brown topknot newly tied. “Ruth dear. What’s happening to you happens to all women. You understand that.”

  Her eyes opened directly into her father’s, to one side of the doctor. She kept them that way.

  “We used to give Holland gin for it,” he said. “To Rosa and Athalie.” He smiled weakly, reaching for her hand above the coverlet, but the doctor’s strong fingers, feeling for her wrist, barred his. The doctor spoke over a shoulder to Anna. “Was she delirious? Earlier?”

  “I don’t think—” said Anna. “I don’t know.”

  “She was delirious,” he said loudly, looking around him in each face. But no one regarded him, except the child.

  “Going to put you to sleep,” said the doctor. “Like an old office injection, that’s all.” He spoke again over his shoulder, as if she couldn’t hear him, “I don’t want to give her anything more by mouth.” Then he turned back to her, but his double-speaking hadn’t nullified her force, only his. “But Ruth darling, maybe you want to talk a little first.” He meant that he did.

  She would not answer. And he scarcely waited.

  “The other that’s happened to you. That’s not ordinary; no one could say it. You’ve lost a mother, in a terrible way. But it should help to know your mother was sick, dear, in her mind. That can happen.” The doctor’s tenderness was like the rabbi’s—for a large practice.

  And he, the husband, did not deny it. Didn’t say: “Not sick—angry, wild, intransigent, spoiled at forty-six, but until now never really despoiling!” (And maybe in your mother’s flights of anger, my child, maybe even the spiritual assertion, against my calculating chess-ways, of the other beauty in the universe?) Would this have been a better legacy? But paralyzed, he couldn’t say no to anything.

  “Cry a little,” said the doctor. “Be brave, but cry a little too.” He offered a shoulder, but she refused it, with the same stare.

  “Shall I leave the room?” said Joel. “Want to talk to Anna and Daddy?”

  But her stare had been for them as well. She would take her sins somewhere else.

  Then, downstairs, they heard the sound of that man’s minions—the sound of stretcher-bearers—in houses with staircases, and maybe even those without them, one of the unique sounds of the world. He’d heard it three times before in a dwelling of his, the last in this particular one, when old Mendes had left it. In their sudden silence, the doctor gave her the needle.

  “I go down,” said Anna, hushed. There ought to be some respect paid, by someone from the inner house, as a body went out a door. He couldn’t move, lulled into letting Joel take his place with his daughter,, leaving it to Anna to find, between known limits and unspoken excesses, her anomalous place.

  As Anna passed the blue lamp, she turned it off. On the half-drawn window shade, the red-penciled glow along its lower edge deepened. A golden blot of light ran like mercury to its center and hung there gleaming, moving on and off with the wind. Then a moan came from the bed, and Anna without comment turned the blue light on again and went out, shutting the door.

  “Well…” said the doctor. “You’ve got them to live for, Simon. A fine girl and boy.” He must announce births the same way.

  Outside, the street was rising in beautiful health and clatter. The blue light seemed to melt, not quite to fade. The doctor gave a final pat to the girl, who lay with her palms upturned now, lids slipping. In the small profile, neat as marble, he saw his fatherhood. “Well, good-bye, old girl,” the doctor said, in a voice like a punch. “You’ll be all right. Come and see me later in the week.” And to Simon, in the voice which ran back and forth between’ the generations—and got nowhere—“She’ll be the bright little mother of this house, you wait and see. She’s going to live to make you and David happy.”

  “And herself,” he said—as if he gave and answered the responses here. To his sole credit he had said that, though her lids were closed now. “And herself.”

  The doctor shook his hand.

  Downstairs, he heard or interpreted a murmur between Anna and the doctor at the door. The house had the acoustical whims of an old dwelling; sometimes he imagined it let each inhabitant hear only what he wanted to hear.

  When Anna came up again, the smallish room, not dormered like Anna’s fourth-floor quarters, but narrowing as brownstone third floors seemed to do against a
ll actual measurement, was filled with the girl’s regular breathing. They could marvel at how, in a sickroom, the patient’s breath was consoling beyond anything else—and could leave her.

  Outside, summoning all his failed strength, he said to Anna, “What did she say? Did she say anything more? When you brought her up.” But Anna was weeping and he saw that she hadn’t broken down until now. The red tears made channels in her face, ran from the corners of her mouth. Her lips swelled with them. He put his arms round her, for the only time in their history. He thought she made as if to put him off, but she was only finding room between sobs, to speak. “She ask me for the blue paper on the light,” said Anna. “Dey were babies, Mrs. Mannix teach me how to do it. So I do it. Then she don’t say nothing. She was being sick both ways, vomit and the other, but after we fix her, and it was over, she creep to me but she don’t say nothing, only one thing.” The sob choked her; he could see it in her throat there, a red bit of meat in the throat of this red woman. From the skylight above, the sun in its great morning vibration shed for one passing minute a claret warmth straight down through the landings of the house. “‘Make it the night before this one, Anna,’” said Anna. “That’s all she say to me. ‘Anna, Anna, make it the night before.’”

  And after that—he could go to his son. When Anna saw the direction his steps took, she said David’s name and gestured she would come along, but he resisted the temptation to take her with him, to save himself from the ordeal before him—by David’s one sight of her: tear-blinded mime—and went down the hall alone.

  David’s room, allotted the firstborn, was much larger, and providentially so, since—from the moment his total deafness had been confirmed at the age of fourteen months—the room had begun to fill with apparatus, from all the electrostimulatory devices, wired and graphed and belled, which could be made to correlate sight and sound, to the merely practical audiovisual alerts and signals, plus a range of stereopticons and oscillators purchased on advices now lost. A sight of the room gave pause to any man who thought he knew the boundary between scientific and quack. David insisted on keeping them all, toy and grim; they were, as he said, his auditory memory. For this, their Smithsonian clutter, neatly as he tended it, was cheap enough price to pay. But these apparatuses had done even more. In the first years, for the Judge, rising early for a workout with the child as other men rose to cold showers and barbells, these devices had been the bridge to his actual belief in the deafness of the child.