New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  He could see Ninon Fracca’s face when she got his letter—a moment’s bewilderment as she read, then the quick explosion—to herself—of experience. “What’s he saying to you, m’dear, with his any mores?—why, he’s saying…good-bye.”

  But that wasn’t the reason he wouldn’t mail it.

  On his wife’s desk, here all around him, the letters he had been reading for days, and had stacks of yet unread, spilled everywhere from spidery pigeonholes, and all over the desk’s watery inlay, once blond-green as an early apple, for some Marguerite. The desk had been bought at an auction gallery, by her—how cruelly some women knew their own taste! “Oh, what a lovely tart!” she’d said, when it was brought forward on the stand, its ormolu pale from two hundred years of such trials—and had bought it in ten minutes; if her correspondents had thereafter taken it upon themselves to fill it with her whole life, that was their business!

  Their letters piled it, in all scripts and voices. He’d begun going through them, not voyeur after lovers, only intending the dutiful consecration before the fire or the scrap heap; he had performed this service for the dead before. To him, at twenty-seven, his father’s leavings had been an ancestral experience—the business records willed to him as history, the memoir as heritage—and all of it enlarging the inheritor, even down to the long box, gold-leafed by donor with a calla lily one dared not laugh at, in which his father had kept for himself, by means of a few rent receipts and pictures, his Miss Lily Orpe of the Louvre, and kept unwittingly for his son (perhaps because the son had seen the woman herself as she aged, reminisced and died) the sharpest sense of those dusky Parisian hours: another man’s violets and passions—real. His mother’s effects were always pridefully tidy for just such a melancholy ritual as his, and once the neutral furs and jewels of status had been handed round, were only the corn plasters, rhinestoned combs and bridgework that any old stolid dray might leave behind her—plus the burial certificate, well forward in a drawer containing as in her lifetime no other papers, nothing made of words, whose force on him and his father she’d always been so suspicious of—as if at the last she was able still to say to them, accusatory to the final crumble of her dust. “Nobody wrote me; I had no crimes” and no bills.

  But finished, finished all—until now that had always been the sense of it. As the legal guardian of the family he’d become used to seeing the contents of a desk or bureau curdled into the pitiful merely by the death of the owner; this had been thought random?—this saved? Was a violent death any different, or an early one, leaving its victim unresolved except by death? Or did the unresolved last the longest, project the farthest, irritant as in life? For all these letters to her, not from her, crowded in toward the same purpose, and clearly left unstated, were, whether the sender was dead or alive, still palpitating water, lives streaked with her purple, changeable oil—like his own. So many people wrote her—he had never known. Clearly, as with him, as with everything, she’d never answered them at their own rate. But they’d gone on writing, and agonizedly fascinated, he’d gone on reading and arranging. Had his own letters to her, not found yet, held so much more of receiver than sender as these did? Over half these records of her were now ranged in the desk in packets, according to writer, and with a chronology for each. The test for life was after all—movement. And among this retinue of letters, she moved as in life.

  Her correspondents had always created her beyond herself, as they themselves sometimes seemed aware and one had said to her, outright. By never fishing for souls, never fastening on, she had caught them. And so, trailing the clouds they made for her, kicking at those gaudy chiffons like a bride who didn’t want a train—she would not be responsible for their silliness—she moved still. In all those tumbled voices, hers spoke clearest. Toward her movement, they cast their essence. They had never caught her.

  One packet of letters signed “Arne” he was still reading with painful care. Surely he had that right himself as a second husband, left by her in the first month of their marriage for a week’s return to the first one—on return, her explanation: “Yes, Denmark. I had to talk to Arne. Now it is over for good. And I’m here!” The rest of her correspondents, as in life, were of all ages and sexes, on onionskin, pad paper and rag, women called Billy, men called Buffy and Tinker, Carmens and Leslies who might be either, bluff Roberts and Millicents, an agile Raoul. Certain largest packets considered themselves special confidants—but hadn’t they all? They were the crowd. And where, for the dead, did the demimonde begin?

  Some, he remembered: Anglea Decies, of the feather hats and mortician dresses, the lady rotter who had once been in Holloway prison and written a book about it; preserved for him now in the white face powder of the twenties as in marble dust, and in the bad odor of her checks; the Noel Ammon who’d drawn that wasp-stomachered caricature of Mirriam over there on the wall; Olivia, Mrs. Kitt, a remarkable old actress from the days when those in her profession called themselves Mrs., who had retired to the old Hotel Seville, on Twenty-eighth Street, that tawny old hutch—and had attributed her longevity to an extra bone in the coccyx. There was no enumerating them all, their parties and jigtimes, arts and artistics, and hangover lures. And as with all human correspondents, there emanated from the letters half as the reason they wrote her—that they had all considered themselves remarkable. If she was, it was intimated—this was because they wrote her. And maybe that was the truth of it.

  Was there no one, no human soul she herself had angled for? Sometimes, going back over a letter, a phrase, putting his own essence to all of it, and suffocating for the lateness, hearing her voice, he thought he caught sight of him. From whom, though letters had been written between them, none so far had been found.

  Finally, he picked up and reread his own unfinished letter. Those others were more properly faded to the desk; though he might go back to them, they were yesterday. Late as his was, it was today’s. What it seemed to him to say best was good-bye. As yet, it lacked a signature—and had no salutation. In a scrawl that ruined the letter for any other than its true recipient, he wrote her name across it, and left it for her with the others. Mirriam.

  4. Mirriam Upstairs

  VOICES. LETTERS. VERDICTS?:—

  I am the daughter, rampant. Built for the sensual light. Seen in it, often by the unsensual. Some women document chapter-thick with home, from beginning to end. I, who began that way like any other, a child seated high at table, between bony father and grape-eyed mother, retreated as soon as my long legs would carry me, to the outside, and the oblique. Later, I told my two husbands all—or all I could. I was never willfully alone. The crowd was always with me. No one ever got from me—all. All my life, people sent what they knew of me back to me, in narrow letter-flights that fall back from me now like a boy’s paper darts. And all my correspondents write alike.

  Both my husbands fell in love with me alongside that granite friend, my father. The second didn’t know this of the first, until now. Even there, and before in my childhood, so much grasped for myself, I was always the daughter; if one were to pick a Greek epithet for me—as for the cow-eyed or the rosy-fingered—that would be mine. Oh this correspondence—why doesn’t one come into the world, and suffer it, unattended? Yet, in their cross-hatchings, my friends have caught me. And the shadow of a man ever stronger, like the white spaces in a black picture. If the letters could have spoken each to the other, would they have seen him, the shadow you glimpse, Si, as you read them all at once? I told them over and over about him, but they never believe what you tell them, especially when the man himself is there for all to observe. Not that crowd. Do you expect anyhow that a woman like me can speak, one to one? They could see that, why not you? I can not correspond.

  I thought you saw it. Or married you because you would be strong enough to stand it, when you did see. Arne couldn’t. You can tell by his letters he couldn’t. “You’ll daughter him, as you daughtered me,” he wrote out of the blue, when he heard about us. “Have you widowed him yet?
” And when I went back to him, that first month of our wedding trip, Si’s and mine, “You make the perfect widow,” he said. Or he said it after. Letters keep coming. Their letters kept coming after me always, to the end. Not yours though. You’re the champ.

  So Si, listen. Listen for your life, as people say. For your life, which I never had wholly—and thank God for it. Which was why you could have me. No, I never told you—I don’t tell things. Daughters—of fathers—don’t. Do fathers’ sons? Arne was a mother’s son—I mistook him. His letters say that too.

  “I don’t suppose there exists a child of both a father and a mother,” he said, didn’t he. And then unfortunately added, being a foreigner, “In America.” Before that la, la—a perfect remark. Sculpture soured him into intelligence at times; I said that once. “It seeps out of the stone.” Or the stone and I, we did it together. As you see, he didn’t like my laugh any better than you. But you could always take it, darling. Why, yes, we always called each other “darling”—the crowd. A theatrical habit. When I wanted to call you, or anyone, something special, I said—nothing. I thought you knew. It can’t be helped. Or maybe it can, if you read my friends all very carefully; they’re eccentric, but they gabble well, don’t they. Listen to me very carefully now, Si, through them. Add your essence, that beautiful goddamn brain of yours—oh yes, I said that, but who didn’t, who doesn’t—add it to my voice. I don’t ordinarily tell things. But they caught me when I wasn’t looking—and sent me back to myself. Listen to me. Listen for your life: Daughters breed daughters.

  “Oh, I couldn’t know my own end, could I? What more could I tell you of myself, of us, if I had? I tell you now. That’s death for you, every time.

  And that joke, was Angela for you. Her life depended on the jokes she could see in it; so would yours if you’d had hers; yes, she’s the one said you had no humor, that you would never forge a check. “Don’t listen to Angie,” Noel wrote me once. “She’s a dirty dike who sleeps with men.” He should talk—whom she called her “best girl friend.” She died of getting funnier and funnier. The two of them went to the Bahamas with a female balloonist—they came down in the gondola and were picked up by the Queen of Bermuda on an off run—and Angie’s heart stopped “zizz”—from seeing a shark smile through a glass-bottomed boat. “Oh Father, forgive us—” wrote Noel then; they were both Catholic converts—“she died waving like a fevver on the breeze, she was the most romantic one of us all.” And cautioned me to heed what she told me, after all.

  I see her as a kind of St. Sebastian, truth sticking out like stilettos all over her skinny back. No wonder she was always on the move, she’d say, if she heard me. But I’ve drawn her that way, in her hat. Her life was better art than any of us. I’m taking her ashes straight to Paris—the return fare she had will do for both of us. And Mimi love—the final délice—she said she wanted you to have “all her hats.” The dear pook. When everyone knew she had only the one Man Ray photographed. But darling, I want it. I’m montage-ing it onto the picture. For her memorial. And a gallery there is very interested.

  But they weren’t of course, so I bought it—and gave it back to him—that’s the way it should be in art, shouldn’t it, a world of friends. Just before we married, Si, remember? Why, it was the night that summer I first took you to Daddy’s house; we hung the drawing of me that Noel sent to thank me. I hung it; I was taller. Under it, against the same wall, you hung me on you. Short man’s stand-up love, your head on my breasts, a perfect fit. I said so. Tall man would have had to hold heavy me high. You knew your powers. You said so. But you’ll have to remember for both of us. I never dwelt backwards like other women; I always remembered what I wanted next. May the night bloom. When we tottered back to bed, you turned the great, ugly silver ring Arne made, and read that engraved there. “What’s on the other one?” you said. On my other hand, a matching frog-buckle: In the company of friends. We both shouted with laughter. Then you shut up, remembering I was his widow. But later, when you knew the real circumstances (only presumed dead), you said, “Marry me and you can get rid of those damned epaulettes.”

  Sex was your only humor, I must have said to Angie, who answered: “Otherwise, you say, his principles get in his way?” To which Angie added, from whatever alcoholic balloon she was on at the moment, “Goody. How I wish mine got in the way of mine.” And when told that your artistic taste was better than ours (for it seems that sometime thereabouts, on the question of you, I did answer letters, and even entreated them) she commented, “Of course it is, dumb bunny. He’s a patron of the arts. Not of artists.”

  Bur Arne wrote, when he heard of us.

  Diamonds now, I suppose. Maybe you are just a good little Jewish girl, after all? When I asked you what you wanted of life, you said, “To go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, every night.” How was I to know this is just bourgeois tease-talk! I should have put that on a ring—and on the other “To be every night in cottage with the same man.” And both are true. This is worse you know than that I am not a faithful person—for this I know. Let me tell you, Mirriam, it is not enough to be brought up dutiful, if you do not know any longer what to be dutiful to. Or to be so honest you do not know the truth until it burn somebody else on your tongue. Your father bring you up with these big Jewish hungers like a son almost, he should not have let you marry a Christian.

  And postscript:

  I never thought he believe me dead. I am always sure he know it for only a courtesy. How is the old Meyer? I hope well.

  How quietly we divorced Arne again, together, for good, Si, you and I, and how close it brought us! To document your wife into being a girl again, into your being, before the marriage service, to drive her downtown to those quiet legal streets at the bottom of the island, to bring her, shining and shy, great eyes forward, long cool summer legs flashing past the secretaries, into the grave office of your good friend—who needs to ask me a few questions. I answered them all, in my voice to match the legs: Aged twenty-nine (this was in 1925), not living with first husband six years, one year under the desertion limit in some states, separated mutually as far as I could define. But how tell your monk friend, with his Lobb shoes and speckled cravat, about the flotsam of the studios?—how one could lose a husband as easily as a locket in those high-arched places so drunken cozy in the evenings, so cavernous in the morning, how, if it was one’s temperate family habit to drink only eager gulps of the sodden, seductive air of art, to gorge only on its heavy conversations (always loaded with bitter plums for stuffing the wombs of girls like me, and serving us up like squabs on the altars we yearned for), that a girl like me could drop virginity, religion, a four-story house and my grandmother’s dowry string of Burmese pearls, lose them like a pair of panties, all in one evening, and meet on the way out another girl like me, maybe one with high-church giraffe neck and nostrils, slouching in to meet her Jew.

  I answered his questions queenly, your member-of-the-firm with his flavorful name stuck like a bud of garlic among the goy ones, stuck there for us and our world, and I crossed my legs princessy, in the way of women accustomed from childhood to visit the offices which supported and protected them. For though the silences here were more calfbound and quiet than in my father’s music-broker’s office, with its tea-break snatches of Mary Garden gossip, and Caruso himself once, swelling his throat like a thrush, over a matter of copyright—I knew my place and privileges as I always did, and could get Grandma’s pearls back any day, in a secretary’s eyes.

  And maybe your friend did understand that part of me better than you did, then. Maybe he already had a monk’s sister, or daughter, at home—some pre-Penelope, knuckle-trained to sail Larchmont’s blue money-waters and lie in wait for Newport’s, but already slouching off with her sweet little bat-boned, Galician face set on finding a husband easy as a locket, in the land of Minnetonka-no-money, Minnehaha-no-morals—some worrisome little girl already weaving her mythical two-man raft, man-and-woman one, made of all the thin excuses we girls assigned
to art.

  “Was he a good sculptor?” said your friend, his great hungry eyes thoughtful. And I spoke the truth to him, to eyes hooded as mine but grayer-skinned, as mine might have been if given time.

  “Oh, that wasn’t to have been the point of it,” I said, as carelessly as I must have said it to Arne. “Second-raters are so comfortable to be with, in company. How was I to know that as husbands they gave themselves such hell over being it?” And we all laughed, and I looked at you, Si, with such pride—you’re the champ, and if some day we’re to find that those can give themselves hell too, over me and my menses dark changes, they can bear it. And afterwards, I quoted Angie, saying to me, “Arne always minded that you didn’t, you cluck.” So, here we’re round to Angie again, and why not; she introduced us.

  Noel was there too; don’t you know him now, he was the one you called “the parlor snake.” How that dates us. You wouldn’t go on to the river-club with us; you called Angie later and got my number. You knew her father, and once, to get her out of a scrape, you pulled strings for her, telling her very kindly that it was likely the last anyone could pull.

  “You rat,” I said, laughing to you, not much later, “do you always know fathers?”, for you’d met mine in the echelons of our race somewhere, and you said into my breasts, “That’s how I’ve remained a bachelor. Until now.” Then we opened our noses warily to the odor of orange blossoms closing in on us like the pelmets of the family bed down the hall from us, and I whispered, “How safe,” but in the same minute you put your mouth where it ought to be and I split my long legs for you—“Propose to me again.”