New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  Months past the diagnosis, he had remained unconvinced. There was no heredity of it for one thing; on either side,, the hearing of grandparents, their collaterals, and even their parents had remained acute. Though he knew well enough that Mendelian laws allowed for this, to the end that anybody could inherit anything—including the will to disbelieve it.

  But David himself had confounded the doctor. At times he appeared to turn at a voice behind him—or to the current of warmth behind it, as even now. In the physiotherapist’s office of the school David had ultimately gone to, there was a sign Use the tantrum—it is their way; for it was a cliché that a deaf child was frustrate. And here came David, never saintly, not passive, but equable and busy even at two; from the first, his rage, if it was there, had refused to remain incommunicado with life. No child, even the handicapped one, it was said smartly to them, is ever average to his parents. But by what exquisite joinings of sight to sound, night to day, had this child taught himself not to be mute?

  Going down the hall to his son’s room that night, he wished for one of those mornings of uncertain agonies but happinesses too, both hallowed now. For, such exercises, with such a child, were a bridge to love also. Already he’d been unsure this boy was his son. By the time he had taught himself and them all, in these devoted mornings, that the boy was truly deaf, he had also convinced himself of the other thing. By exquisitely non-electrified communication with the past (Mirriam’s) through the quality of the present he and she manufactured daily, or even with the boy himself (all means which he knew were suspect), he had decided it. The boy was not his son—if only because he could still think of him as “the boy.” Doggedly, he searched out stories of real offspring who disavowed real fathers, counseled his own ego once more to give up its games—and took up lipreading. It was possible that real fathers went through stations of trial like these to get to their sons; contrarily he himself had known fathers of adopted ones, who were to paternity born. There was ground for his doubts—one. He would not ask. If Mirriam had ever said, or hinted, late as it was he would have accepted either way, with lip, heart and loin. He even craved it. Meanwhile, as the boy steadily grew independent, the mornings lapsed, the bridges were left untended, the boy went to school to better tutors; he himself grew as used to a six-foot son as his own father must have done to one of his height—never used to it. Only the machines in David’s room remained as was. And in the end, as often in the concerns of those who lived with Mirriam, he himself had been left unsure of anything.

  At David’s door that night, he did not hesitate. In spite of himself he slipped the knob as always, as if not to startle that deafness. In the dark, he stood by the bedside while the miracle of the retina took place, and looked long at that fine head, incandescent almost in its fastness. Men must take their chances with the morning. But this was only a boy of seventeen. On the pillow the fair head otherwise so aquilinely reminiscent of old Mendes on his deathbed grew clearer, at its ear the rigged telephone, center of other alarums here that would not ring but glow. There was something holy in such a trust in light.

  He touched a switch, intending one lamp’s softness. He knew all the wiring here—or had once. Or else his hand had expressed its real intention. The room flooded harshly, from overhead. “I’m sorry—” he said.

  The eyes flew open, just as if the boy on the pillow had heard. The person behind them wasn’t quite awake. It was that blank moment when the human returned to animal tensing toward danger, or kin. Then the boy sat up. He slept nude. Large as the tendons were in that big brown shoulder, it was still a boy’s. The Judge put his own small hand there, if not a father’s, a man’s. “I’m sorry,” he said again. At once in the patient face opposite, he saw the monitoring being—and found he himself couldn’t go on. His mouth would not voice or shape. He was mute.

  “Father, Father, what is it? Are you sick?”

  At his own motion, a pad and pencil were pushed toward him. Sometimes he and David had done that in those mornings, though in certain exercises it was forbidden. He managed to write on the pad: Bad news.

  But then, when he tried to go on with it, his trembling fingers also failed him, as if each member of his own body, when applied to, refused. He found himself staring at the boy’s face, David’s face, thinking in sacrilege that if it had been blind, then he could tell it the news, with his voice.

  As if in answer, the boy knelt before him in the old posture and place, and put his own large but discerning hand against his father’s lips—which again moved. But because they did not do well, the son with the half-smile closed his eyes, the better to feel the words, as performed by the blind and mute. And so to that face above him, grown longer and equine with youth, but still to the hand of that divining child, the Judge spoke. “Shot. Your mother. It was an accident.”

  Surely that was what his lips had said. In that order. But the hand feeling his mouth read otherwise, or like a true divining rod. He saw the shoulder at his own eye level shrink back in reflex. Then the hand struck him full across the mouth.

  Bleeding from nose and lip, in the strangest sensation of having been saved, he watched his son flee the room.

  Luckily Anna had been outside the door after all. For he himself was useless. Now I can sleep was what he said to himself. The concussion was nothing, its blood stanched with a handkerchief. Yet “Now I can sleep” he had said to himself with an exquisite lulling, cast back with a bit of hurt for himself. And staggering into his room he had done so, fallen on his bed.

  Where and how David had spent the few hours between when Anna left him for her own bed and the phones began to ring, could be seen from his track. He must have come first to this room where the Judge was now sitting, his mother’s room—to find the body already taken from him. The smashing must have begun here. In here it had been merely a rending and a tearing—of the coverlet that had wrapped her, which the minions had dropped. The Judge next door, lulled, hadn’t heard. Anna, upstairs in her fastness, hadn’t heard it either, the steady frustrate rage of that descent through all the family rooms to the bowels of the house, grinding lamps to bits, stamping over chairs in a clean, methodical wake. The worst had been in the family rooms and at the front door, which still bore its grazings, irreparable in the oak. Neither Anna’s kitchen nor his own study had suffered anything, nor any windows. In effect that almost silent raging had all taken place, where it had always been—inside.

  It must have been in the kitchen that the boy returned to his senses, for Anna had found food there on the table, gone after in the hunger reflex of that long bone structure, his own body, but scattered uneaten, the dish smashed. Then he had gone up to his sister’s room, to find her sleeping beyond rousing, and across the bottom of her bed had sobbed himself to sleep. For the hour or so before the world advanced again, the house might have been Beauty’s castle. When the two children woke, they were still alone. Together they must have heard Anna’s first “My hosh, my hosh!”, the trail of them as she went through the damaged house, and the Judge as he picked up and answered the first phone. Anna had found the two together, Ruth wan but the calmer of the two, David swollen to the eyes.

  No one had ever spoken to David of what he had done. In the two years since, that track too had long since been overgrown. What the two children might have said to one another when they awoke wasn’t known to the Judge either. He thought of this as part of the abnormality—his and the family’s but ultimately his, which he had to deal with. In the alternately submerged and surface way that life took, he thought and did not think of it. The boy himself now kept a silent distance which had once been the Judge’s only. Meanwhile, his own fathership, in no way more expressed, had secretly grown a little—as for a son adopted in youth, across old estrangements. Manhood might release them both. In the privacies of life, anything might burst through a door. But what those two children had said to each other remained inviolate. Upstairs, during these long afternoons growing toward winter, it sometimes seemed to him that if
houses like his came to any value, it would be as among the last examples of a private life kept separate, untransfused either by its own public appearances or by what seeped more and more over the doorstep, or down from overhead—from the writings-in-the-sky.

  Anna knocked now, but entered without waiting for the “Come in” he almost never gave anyway; he got so deep in here. Outside the study, where since his retirement he could never work himself deep enough in scholarship ever again to believe in it, she walked by hushed, fending everyone away with her own eccentric version of “in conference”—“De Judge is alone.” But this room was her own partially created domain—and here, as she perhaps knew, he was never alone.

  She walked by him now without comment—they rarely spoke on these occasions—laid on the bed his dinner jacket and trousers, unpacked from the Atlantic trip, and went out, again closing the door, so effigy a servant that one would have been undisturbed to meet her doppelgänger simultaneously on each landing of the staircase; indeed, that was the effect she often gave. She had nothing in common with that other red woman of a past morning. They never spoke of it.

  She never hung his dress clothes away in the big wardrobe, but always left them in his sight, a hint against frowsting at home, from that outdoor philosophy which all servants fostered in masters. He liked to think that in this she was his ally, helping him do battle against what he thought of as “the self-pity of the wardrobe.” A family inheritance of his side, huge enough to occupy the vision of anyone who sat at Mirriam’s desk, it had once held all the retired sack suits, cutaways, patent dress shoes, and collapsible opera hats of both father and grandfather. At the time of his wife’s death, it had held the thirty-odd suits of his own dandyism—and public ambitions. During those post-mortem weeks when his habit of sitting here began—with a never fulfilled intent to go through her correspondence—he often sat staring instead at this huge, hollow escutcheon, seeing himself in his true guise, a small man who only temporarily inhabited it. In his mind he had already retired himself. He’d never had to explain it to himself. Retirement, once effected, fell on him like the one suit of armor for which he had been born.

  Now he got up, took up the jacket and trousers from the bed, hung them away, and sat down at Mirriam’s desk, in front of its many dim slots for open secrets and improvidently brassed “secret” drawers. At her death, he had found himself as impotent to touch her private matters as in life some men were before their wives’ flesh. But this had been his weeping for her, blood-sick and unnatural.

  The old wardrobe held another kind of mourning—sweated, male. It mourned for fathers—and for all live burial. He knew that Jewish colleagues only less lapsed than he had said of his giving up his judgeship that he was atoning. In their high holidays away from Mammon (and in the limestone Episcopal synagogues with which they replaced the puce Moorish of their fathers, or their grandfather’s slum-yellow, public-bath brick) they still kept a Day for it. But he wasn’t too lapsed to know that privately a Jew atoned no better than anyone else—or just about the same. Now that the stench across the ocean was almost over, the world and maybe the Jews too both saw themselves moving in to a new age of public atonement as one might move into public affairs. Not yet seeing how this too went against that jealous old God Jahveh, of whom, true, he knew little more than a spelling, yet like every born Jew felt he carried live in his breast. Inwardly he still fought the new Israel, or even the emotion that the six million martyrs were for Zion, not for themselves. But as a man with an obligation which there wasn’t time to spell, he had helped. Maybe this was why he now could stare at the old escutcheon over there, at himself, the incumbent in it, and fight both. The man who would best have understood his retirement—long before he himself did—would have been Chauncey, one of the most Hebraic men he had ever known. How Olney would have relished being told so! But the second morning after their visit, Olney had been found peacefully in his chair at the window. Proctor, to whom the Judge had since spoken, had found him dead, early in the dawn hours, as Chauncey waited maybe for partying girls to peer in at his window, or wondered what had become of Anna’s promised soup. Meanwhile, as yet the Judge saw himself buying no more suits. For the life he was expecting to lead from now on, those thirty would be far too many—enough.

  But since his return from England with his daughter, he had at last been able to go through this desk and watch Mirriam rise again from her own mementos. Now that he and Ruth were safe home from their summer of war, he could be properly grateful for a trip even farther out of logic to others than his “giving up.” He had elected to go to London and other points just at a time when all his work with the stream of refugees—from British children, to scholars and scientists trustfully waiting to be fitted into the world again, to the unswervingly romantic and handsome families of Polish airmen flying with the British—had been going the other way, as everyone said (meaning here). The trip was beyond duty, and to take a young girl impossible. Surely he and she had been a strange pair to be the first members of his family perhaps in a century to go to war, if only to attend it—and when a whole nation behind him was still freely choosing. Surely, he hadn’t done it from the terrible connoisseurship which always sent some to sink their personal disaster in the common one. His work had needed jobs done over there. And he’d had to take her because of the decision which antedated all others—that she was not ever to be left.

  Queerly enough, on the question of taking Ruth with him, Anna had been his ally too. Anna hadn’t been present when, after the rabbi’s visit, he went upstairs to his daughter. Sitting at the bedside where she was being wooed back from sedation with all the sweetmeats the women could muster, he carefully spoke the absolving sentence he had labored over like an essay: “Mother killed herself, in her own way. It was an accident.” Gravely she nodded, giving back nothing, either of confession or assent. The school later reported their version of her, with rhyme as well: understandably his and their dear, bubbling girl had become grave—and “brave, dear Judge Mannix, so brave.” Anna had been in the room again, with a custard, when he got up, hands hanging, said quickly, “I’ll be with you always, always,” and went out

  Once, as a young man still at home with his mother, he’d been involved in a dreadful weekend of harboring an old melancholic relative, while the red tape was being bound round the old man, for dispatch to a mental home. He and his mother, on instructions, had abstracted knives from drawers, drugs from cabinets, and kept the old man from windows, the hired nurse not having arrived and the registries being closed on a Thanksgiving weekend—he deserting his skis and a girl with a merry “Got to stand by some old loony in the bathroom and see that he doesn’t cut his throat.”

  In the ensuing three days he’d felt closer to his mother than ever before or again, as they hovered in fealty, keeping the surface normality going like a fire which never warmed them. For while they kept the old boy immersed in their smiling stability, theirs became suspect to themselves. His mother, drawing on a long record of literal-minded domestic service which for the first time shamed him into admiration, had revealed a similar experience, with an elder sister, before. Men had to go to offices; women had this sort of job oftener. He’d never forgotten that terrible housekeeping around a mental illness, that keeper’s sense of himself, all day conscious of what the invalid was not, all day at his insane task of clearing up the leftovers of a sick mind more intensely at the task of life than his own.

  He must take care now not to weave his own anxiety into such a situation. His own vigil over Ruth must somehow be relaxed.

  “Does she ever…say anything to you…about anything?” he’d once asked Anna. The answer, “No.” She too had her vigil. And when the trip under question had been mentioned in her hearing by Augusta (who now never further jeopardized her status with him, and always brought the dog with her, but in a budding entente sometimes took Ruth home “to see Chummie”), Anna had spoken afterwards, serving his solitary dinner. “I am maybe too nosy. But take
her with you, Misser Mannix. Go.” And in the damnedest way, had added a fatalism worthy of his mother—who if born to the servant class might have been happier. “De bombs,” said Anna. “Dey watch over you.”

  Pauli Chavez had helped too, drawing from his ragbag of European friends-of-his-youth—all of whom seemed to have become famous in the years since without ever incurring Pauli’s rancor—the name Ninon Fracca. At Mirriam’s behest, Pauli, in youth an assistant conductor in European opera houses, had always supervised the selection of Ruth’s ballet teachers, often happy to tag along with her to haunts of his own friendships and courtship, to any faintest detail of which Pauli remained fond; in the mind of such a man, when did “youth” formally stop? Pauli at the ballet school—as Ruth, who knew his mistress Leni, reported—was tolerably uncle-ish to the fauns there. “From having—you know, Daddy—an old sort of one at home.”

  These swift young verdicts were the only way Ruth’s own character, if one could call it that as yet, still peeped out as it used to. How the Judge watched for it now, in joy and fear, recalling how once, for instance, they’d heard her say of the school’s fat boy, whose elder brother had been drowned, “That’s why his mother feeds up Billy.” Back then, he’d merely smiled over it—with Mirriam.

  “Ruth is on the way to be a dancer,” Pauli’d said, last spring. “Good, Simon? Who knows. Not a dancer just in the legs, anyway. She had a whole feeling for it, for that whole world. Leni says so too.” And was that why, in the end, her father felt he must stop her? For he knew the fate of those who had only a feeling for art; Mirriam’s crowd had been composed of them. And of their hangers-on, of whom hadn’t Mirriam herself been one?