New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  And Angie says here in this letter—answering when I wrote them all to Tunis that Arne was alive, and all the rest of it:

  Dear Little Jewish Girl—how we howled! But really, what insight on the part of our Arne! I’d never think of such a thing myself; I’m absolutely sans race prejudice, even against my own. But Arne, come to think of it, was rather beautiful in that Siegfried way, wasn’t he—I never believed he was dead. And you do have rather an expectantly Sabine look about you in a roomful of us blonds. Has yer ever slept with a Jewboy, honey?

  The answer was no. I’d never slept with anybody but Arne before—and that went into my wife-personality too. You believed me. “You’re good with innocence, did you know?” I said. But I was more used to not being believed. That comes through best of all now, doesn’t it—at last. “I made wild remarks by imitation; after a while it came natural,” I said. Oh, I could correspond at first, with someone new, when it was still like dropping pennies down a well. “I can talk to you,” I said. Like a child to its daddy. But Daddy mustn’t save the pennies up, or dole them back. Otherwise, there’s his gangle-gawk of two weeks ago, a long-legged madonna hunching herself out on the dance floor flamenco with somebody else—the same as she did at fifteen.

  “Oh Daddy, why did you—” I wrote my father from Bad Kissingen, that terrible, itching summer of my girlhood when he sent my mother and me to circle safely round the spas, me to nauseate in the corners of my mind at all the human grotesques, yet never to forget them and their sad toiletries—what a bal masqué way to learn pity-in-the-round, from the turpentined wrecks of the mudbath and the high colonic, coughing their caviar-breath into their laces and suedes. No wonder I was a little nouveau riche with compassion, the rest of my life. …

  No, I couldn’t think of that by myself, Simon, that’s yours. …And neither could Meyer Mendes, to whom daughters were as of the old days, a special property, of the heart maybe, but of the blood and the purse certainly—like the wives. You’re a little like him in some of your old-fashioned moral hungers—I flashed that at you once!—but not too much like; never think that. Why, families like ours threw psychology away with their chicken bones; we’re older than any of it, Jewboy, you and I. You were modern enough for me, my smart thirty-four-year-old bachelor boy, with your sleek face like a carved ivory button at the top of the shabby clothes Meyer Mendes took for a sign of your Chasidic learning, not your vanity—but that would have been all right, with him too; you had us covered, both ways.

  That night, in our house, I took you to see yourself in one of the netsuke figures in the Nipponese corner of our bric-a-brac, but you scorned all that as pawnbroker’s junk which you said the best Israelite families still somehow got stuck with; “At home we had the French version,” you said, and we laughed, kneeling there in front of the cabinet—you had to take your under-five-foot advantage when you could; that’s when we kissed. I already knew about your monkey-ways with the women, from Angie, who called me before you did, and I challenged you with the names of your mistresses, some of whom I’d seen at the theatre—“Angie says you arrange it the French way, one by one”—which a father would have thought proper too, and maybe already knew from downtown. If I could have been your mistress!—or in the theatre, too!

  But we had mothers alike, didn’t we, my Sarah to your Martha; though mine was the prettier, to the end like a raisin-eyed, Raphael puddinghead; both of them brought us and our fathers their money—you and I stepped hand-in-hand out of the nineteenth century there. And good duennas, both of them. In Bad Kissingen, I’d found a fly Italian boy on his way to Cucciola with his papa, but she found us, behind the fountain in the public baths, at dusk only, but holding hands too in the amphitheatre of our loneliness, all of whose aged were still sleeping, except she.

  “Did he get to you?” she said to me. “Answer me, did that boy get to your funnybone?” Aren’t the names they had for it vile, I once said to you, telling it, and you recalled your little-boy shame at your mother’s “tassel,” and how your father saved you there from her shames, you keeping mum. We had children by the time we were telling each other this, in our own marital bed, in that second entente, after she was born. “After my father died,” you said, “my mother said to me, ‘He was a good man; he never bothered me more than once a week.’”

  Oh, the decade of the twenties wasn’t so free as some see, but floating still with luxuria, the genitalia of our parents—on our wedding trip you took me to see the Bosch panel, pointed to a kneeling nude figure looking backward between its legs at the sprig of flowers in its own behind, and said to me right there in the Prado, “Our mothers.” Oh, you and I understood each other—in our parents’ bed.

  I said nothing to you of fathers—daughters are shy. There by the spa fountain, I held out my elbow to my mother, only one step more innocent than she, saying, “Here?” Then wrote to my father—“Oh Daddy, why did you ever marry anybody so dumb.” But her letter and mine reached him together and he sent mine back to me, where it still is, clipped to his others in the iron-blooded file of them—spoil the child as a father may, with a whole Versailles of toys and even a sweetmeat entente or two secret between him and his bright darling, a law comes out in the letters—and the rod. Respect. Respect her whose money-blood I have mixed with mine.

  “I’ll see any kissprint you get on you,” she said at the fountain. “It comes out on the skin.” Though I couldn’t see any on hers, and said so, and got slapped for it, flat in the teeth. Ahhrr—daughters.

  By Arne’s time, she was too dead to see the brown bruises I’d maybe after all have kept from her—mothers are shy too.

  But Mendes guessed at those or feared it, and was glad enough that out of those dubious caves of art I’d at least drawn Arne, whose major-general of a mother owned a string of hotels. And maybe Meyer himself, deep in the cosmopolitan all around him, had a little hunger to see Siegfrieds in the family. How history goes back and back, but never fear, we’ll come to all the daughters.

  So Mendes married me to him quick, but with style. “What a doge your father is, I must do him,” said Arne, though the bust when it was done looked more like Shylock and still does; Arne got no money from mother as long as married to me, that’s true. And mother’s sons wander. Back. And get their insights later.

  So there Meyer and I were, father and daughter again, and I tried running around for kissprints, but on my skin they never showed. And you when you came along did your best for me, the best of anyone, I told the crowd over and over in one way, and you in another—now believe it. Who the father is doesn’t matter in the end, does it—whether old Meyer himself, whom when I slanged or cheered I called Mendes like a wife, or the winner husband, or even, if one lives long enough, the son. I never for one minute begrudge you what Mendes left you, Si. “He’ll be a judge, Mirrie. They say it downtown.” Why should I? We were a trinity at last. You slept with me, in my father’s house.

  And I could walk with you—the way you meant walk; none of the mistresses had ever done that; I asked and you said so; you had never let them in there.

  Nor would they have wanted to, with their cancan breasts and lace stocking lashes; I kept no part-time soul mates, no copyists at the Louvre.

  Ah, Simon, that’s you speaking, not me. Let me. Walk me back into that autumn when I’d stroll down from our house to your place, in brogues and pushing my hands into the pockets of some soft sweater, shaking out my black hair like a city dairy maid, and you took me to the Billings estate at one tip of the island, to the market squares at the other, and chop-chop to all the slum-fairs between, and brought me home at ten o’clock like a college virgin. Or I arrived in sequins and a coiffure like a pear, only to slip nude into your man-about-town bed (my phrase), like a snake into a bowl of milk (yours, and Theophile Gautier’s—and your father’s)—and then slid back into my glaze in order to walk midtown east as if we were between ballrooms, while you talked of the great social staircase of the city, and brought me home, skyscrapers
still chattering in our heads like icicles, brought the widow, the were-wife to be, to her childhood house not too far from balustrades you knew from your own nine-year-old betting days—back here, at dawn. Oh, we divided the city between us, like cubs their first kill. Can you walk with a son like that, with a daughter? Oh, why must there be these den-jealousies, in my father’s house? Give the children to Anna to deal with; they’re healthy. There are some roles I won’t play.

  Ah, now we come to talk of the roles. Did you once think you began that in me, with your teasing “You dress for your roles—even more than most women.”

  It was the eve of our wedding and we were at the perfect reprise for it, the first ice-skating night of the season, skimming the violet rink where you broke the ice of your boyhood confidences for me, once again. I was wearing a red tam-o’-shanter, red as a flannel-mouth—ah, Si, you think you can imitate my talk, bring me back like that, well, you almost do, not quite. Like the letters.

  “Do you dress me for a role too?” you said. “Each time? Or forever.” With the ice-light mauve in my brown eye, I didn’t answer, but somewhere in that iris universe did I hope you saw it—what the first husband saw too late—that I didn’t know?

  And if I answer more now in death than I ever would in life, isn’t that something? For deepest in the ice-eyes are to be seen the two children to come, perfect in their roles of a cold Christmas morning, in the twin red tams found in their stockings and put there by a father, who now skates them alone on the reservoir in the lurid looking glass of a winter morning; see their figure eight, how perfect on it, that trinity.

  Look to the letters for further advice on me. And to two visits. The one we made together, to Mr. Kitt, the memory of whose room, fluid with cats and her tongue, is a scene better even than letters. And the one to Arne—more a flight than a visit?—from the Prado to Denmark, from Paris to Belgium, from a wedding to a wedding is so far. Which journey, only a month out on our own twin voyage—do not all relationships mix?—I made alone. Look to your daughter also, Si, to when a man might come to her in her menses, as you used to come to me, or before that time, to when these come upon her now, twelve to the twelvemonth, in inexorable tattoo to remind her of the first one. During that year-long serenade, what does she dream of me? No, look away from that garden, that spa is not for fathers. It was mine—or would have been mine. “She means to be happy.” What childless woman said that?

  Look to my letter, the one you have just found, not stuffed away thoughtlessly, like the rest, in a pigeonhole. Was it really filed neatly away for you to find, a monkey-puzzle for you ever to wander in—would I do that? I was never evil enough, you see, for a final verdict to be made on me. Who is? Yes, I had that amorality against final verdicts; I preceded you into the twentieth century there. The letter was in the wall file between your old armoire and this desk, the happy no-man’s-land where I kept the “pics” of me and anyone else I could find, from ballet school before I got too tall for it and drama academy before too bored with it, from Brearleys before college and river-clubs after—and not specialising in family though including them, as if they were whatever I could find too. How I loved cameras—how they finalize a person, telling one afterward who oneself and anyone else were! You yourself were never in need of this sort of information before; were you surprised to find this file neat as my bureau drawers, and chronological as well? There were no letters to bother me here. As a last resort you scanned them anyway for the packet that must be somewhere—of your own. Few as you wrote me—since normally we were never more than a house or a crowd apart—they had existed. Now there appear to be none. Why didn’t I keep them? Was I pinned down there in too firm an old incarnation, or were you? Can you begin to believe in what you were to me, now?

  And the letter you’ve just found, would Mirriam ever have been devious enough to leave it behind with that intention—when did she ever bother to be devious…? How could I imagine, Si, that you would only choose to hunt me down now! Though there was a time—“You slang the word you belong to on all sides, your bunch, but you stay in it, you stay in it with me,” you said to me once. “What need then had I of your letters?”—didn’t I say that once to you? Persuade yourself of it.

  I thought you were never bewildered about me—I said as much to the others, and though unbelieving, they repeated it back to me, nagging from all sides, always the same refrain, “How can Simon…how can you… What is there between you, that it lasts…Who is he to know most about you, when we…What shadow does he cast, that we cannot?” And underneath all of it, the persistent sub-chorus—that they knew. Take that nutmeat of me—it is yours. Betimes I bewildered them, betimes I had a mixed relationship with myself. But always I thought you knew me. And betimes left you because of it.

  “Stop that hyena-laugh,” said my mother early. Oh, the dumbest women; there are things they know. There are roles I was not built for; perhaps instead I should have been an actress only, and superficially taken them all. No, I was not sick in my mind. But in the yellow upstairs room behind my high forehead, could you not hear the long hyena-muzzle of my compassion for all of us open its maw and howl? Couldn’t you see it, from behind my own bedroom eye, through that far telescope, peering at you all?

  To that letter I’ve left, then—half finished, crumpled down between pics of Arne alone and with me, of me alone and with you, with David, of the three of us, of David alone. Compare such resemblances as you will—the combinations aren’t infinite. But the chronology is endless. And the letter, like the one you’ve just written, is uninscribed—a letter written to the world maybe, or to one shadow:

  I know damn well what I am, one of those rich girls who marry sculptors—but not the second time. I was safely in society and yearned for the outsiders. On the rebound—what fascinates me about Si is that he is so in, not insensitive or anything like that and very smart—but he hasn’t a prayer of what it is to feel alienated, envious, cut off. Neither do I really except through the artists; the crowd feels this too. Maybe they don’t have all the charnel houses of the world on their consciences. But they want to know. I want to know. Though sometimes my only excuse is ennui. Never to be bored—is that pride?

  He believes D. is not our son. I could make life simpler by telling him the truth. But this is the core. Because he believes but won’t ask—I will never say.

  Uninscribed and unsigned. But who appears best there, Si? I?

  Three months to the day, from the morning I slipped away from our hotel in Paris—and from a night of nights there—“What makes you so good in Paris, Si?”—leaving you the note: I just heard Arne is alive. From Billy, in the bar. I telephoned him. He’s in Belgium. But I want to tell him about us in person. Chick will fly me. Back Thursday. And it will be like yesterday always, then”—three months from that day (and four months to the day from our wedding—though to modern legitimacies this means nothing)—we appear together in New York again, you and I, downstairs in the Hotel Seville in Twenty-eighth Street, where in a room above Mrs. Kitt lies dying.

  “Of being ninetyish, of course,” I whisper, as we weave our way through the tawny columns of the lobby, in whose purblind dusk a mushroom-ring of ladies sits, sentinel, each with her toad-throat pulsing. “But even at ninety, of having an extra funnybone.” I am chuckling.

  “Thought it was an extra coccyx,” you murmured, but not smiling; since Paris you hadn’t smiled much—but I wasn’t seeing you.

  “Victorian for it, maybe,” I said. “Or maybe that’s where she thinks it is.”

  A little bonsai tree of an old lady—ah Si, you do remember how I said things!—Let us in, with a soft-moustached headshake, and there is our rumpled Shakespearean darling, her limbs sucked by the waters below blankets to the size of elephant feet that gurgle as she moves them, but dying, above sheets in her own chestnut-freckled skin—seventy years ago, what a marigold beauty—and her blue eye bonnie for the stalls and boxes still. The cats, two Siamese and two ginger, cross each other’s p
aths in continuous bas relief; their haunches stitch a pattern to the room that is eternal but of the period too, like the purring wheelwork of Hispano-Suiza cars.

  “No, we don’t go to hospital,” says Mrs. Kitt in answer to a bleat from the bonsai, and who the “we” is today, her guests may guess at, from all the repertory of Queens. The marmalade fish-stink in the room knocks us back, but once one’s inside—“Into the breach,” you murmur—isn’t deadly enough to stifle death’s odor, which rides stately in the room, like the patient’s pentameter breath. Old ribbons frame her, steeped in hair. And she heard you, her ear not yet too far buried to hear the prompter’s box. And chips us both with the blue eye. Of you, Simon, never met before, she says nothing at first, beyond the sudden gurgle of one leg. “Mirrie!” says Mrs. Kitt, in the accent like a glass prism with a light in it. “Mirrie, daughter of kings, who dressed you in that hat?”

  And who shall I say dressed me in it, that great pancake, Rembrandt’s beret in the harlequin of Michelangelo’s Swiss guards? Was it you and the other, marrying me, my father and mother bearing me, the sons and daughters to come and do what to me, all of you tailoring me—all the hysteric roles of my history rising in one gorge of calico? “And Mirrie—” says the tragédienne voice, with just enough fustian to make reality squeak with envy of it—“that outrageous dress! On you.”

  Mirriam, whom you never call Mirrie, Si, doesn’t answer her, but looks at you. I can see that you don’t think the dress at all outrageous. A darkish blue, wrapped surplice around me, it would remind you of some of your mother’s if my bones weren’t so elegantly long; my breasts fill it quietly; perhaps a dress like that thickens the cheekbones too much, nearing thirty; but surely all the rancor you know to be mine is in that great, flaunting salver which holds my head on it, upside down? I put my hands on my cheeks, to hold myself firmly upon it, saying to myself as well as you: I’m here. But you are remembering, as you have been for a month back, what I said when I returned from Belgium: “I intended great explanations of us, all round. But how the specters come out, Si, it wasn’t my triumph; it wasn’t that way at all. I can’t explain, can I? Even if you would let me. I can never explain.” Never in life, you can see I meant, now. But not then. “Well, it’s over,” I said, afterward, still in Paris. “And I’m here.”