New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  He knew that through the Mannixes’ daily papers (which were whatever of the world’s they chose to read) they kept reasonably in touch with the mass movements of guns, hunger and thought—and even of peoples—and, even assisted practicably there, as the Judge had done with his refugees. Oh, they kept up their charities—even though nobody spoke so knowledgeably as they themselves of what an eyedropperful-in the sea of want these were. They continued—that was part of it—and he could see how it would be sometimes into mere smugness or self-love—but he didn’t think he much romanticized the best of them. For they themselves had the most powerful sense that their self-dramas, their lives, personal and as a class, were an ever-running commentary on the world. In this, he was somehow convinced, lay the true seriousness of their life. For they were released by money, yet immediately bound themselves into responsibility. No wonder their mode of life was ambiguous. For as the people in the house had seemed to him on that first visit, so they did still. They transacted life in beautiful visits, which never needed to get anywhere.

  He glanced at his watch; he was now some minutes late for the Judge but stubbornly sat on, waiting to be discovered. As if this gave him leave, he stared squarely at the portrait over the mantel. In tawnies and greens, mud-pinks, and against a background of black—from which the sitter gazed into a beyond which must be somewhere painted as limply—it was a token portrait done in that accessible style which quickest flattened the subject into eternity, and might have been commissioned by a bank. For hints as to what the woman herself had been, he much preferred the yellow and black drawing of her in what seemed to be costume but might be some dress vagary of the 1920s—a tinted pen-and-ink, signed with a Parisian scrawl, in which the spirit of the eyes propelled a large head stomachered on a small body, tapered behind it like a wasp’s; somehow nevertheless, the subject appeared large. And the drawing was easier looked at, being hung in the room, once her bedroom, now a kind of sitting-room, used by all and sundry for anything. Considering its owner’s end, he admired the Mannixes for merely nullifying the room instead of preserving or ignoring it. Understandably, they’d more or less walled up the woman herself from their conversation at least with outsiders, though from their occasional necessary mention of her—as on his first walk with Ruth—he had an insistent impression that when alone they didn’t speak much of her either. Yet they had done their best; there were pictures of her everywhere in the house. Or almost everywhere. In the Judge’s sanctum, there was none.

  The picture told him nothing. He saw now that the frame had a small inscribed gold tag attached to its nether side as in museums; if he went up to it he would learn her name, which he didn’t know. In his notebook, she was merely Mrs. M. He sat where he was; she concerned him only in what her end had done to the Judge. For it was absurd to think that a man’s bad luck didn’t attach to his character. Just as her suicide had crystallized hers, it had at once made of the Judge a man who could choose a woman capable of committing it. Cancer had been rumored the cause of it—at Harvard where Edwin had heard all this, meanwhile watching gossip’s interplay, taking a ground lesson, in the politics of men before they flew off into outright politics. For, just as the ill luck of cancer had forever attached itself to the body of her character, whatever the Judge had done after her death was at once attached to his. Ill luck had made his personal character common property. Now men could say thus and so of him. After her death, he had for years retired from public life. He was that kind of man.

  Yet because of what the Judge was otherwise, it hadn’t been the end of him.

  “Look—it stands to reason,” had said one professional voice, host in his rooms to the group of frosh law students who were pleasantly conscious of being as “in” as the imported ale they were drinking. “Some men’s reputations swell in retirement. That’s our country for you. We confuse it with purity. Anything he writes—be it ever so—”

  “Humble?” said another. There was a general snigger.

  “Not that,” said the first. “But he was always a contradictory figure. Look at his early practice, a lawyer’s lawyer, almost a yearner after the poetry of the law you might say—not at all in the style of the man you meet. Yes, I’ve been to meet him. And I’d have been tempted to put him down as a top trial lawyer, if we’d met outside. Nothing radical—if there was a touch of that too in the early days, I’d bet he cultivated it, to conceal a conservatism not in the popular style. Anyway, a tricky little Napoleon, to look at him. And on second handshake, an old-fashioned niceness that cuts a clever modern fellow—like me—to the heart. Juries would have gone under to it. And the very size of the man! Where little Mannix sits is always the head of the table—you have to listen to him. It’s like sex.”

  When he had finished, a student voice said “Outside?” And got a student’s answer, from a generation suddenly reminded that it was gossiping about its own.

  “Yes, people mostly go there to meet him, I guess. But you’ll find that’s true, Benjamin, of a lot of us old gents. Though Mannix is only sixty or so.” The speaker was perhaps fifty.

  And then Edwin, in spite of himself, had interposed. “That’s right, sir. He’s sixty-one. He was born in 1890.”

  They’d all turned to look at him except the first man, who went on riding his hobbyhorse. “See, then? And already a sage. Retirement’s only made him a virtuoso.”

  “On what, sir?” said the persistent Benjamin. The masters looked at each other, shrugging.

  A new voice spoke, an eminent visiting historian. “On honor, I guess. The public honor. Those discriminations which can only be made by men who live in private. Not that he makes them. He’s never done a damn thing since as far as I can see—except his refugees, and that one little early paper he revised. Just lets his reputation grow in interview—or in talk like this. Naturally anybody’s incorruptible who doesn’t do anything.”

  One of the home crowd agreed with him. “Though there was rumor that even before his wife—died—he was planning to desert judicial life for another sort entirely. I’m not inclined to believe it. Has to be some better explanation of why he dropped out, gave up what he had. The talk has always been that maybe, during the interlude after her death, an improbable ambition he had became an impossible one. And he’s never been able to scramble up the energy for anything less.” The speaker’s drawl was scornful. On the subject of inaction, these university shut-ins often were.

  “What ambition?”

  “Oh, it was absurd—the way truth can be. It was rumored he wanted to—” Someone must just then have realized that they were talking in front of Mannix’s protégé. In the silence that fell he had heard the speaker’s finishing whisper and laugh anyway: “—to run for President.”

  He went up to the portrait now, and looked at its nameplate. Her name was Mirriam.

  Anna was heard coming upstairs from her lower regions, not ponderous, but moving always with the responsibility of creatures who must announce themselves. No reason why he should feel as if he’d filched a part of the house’s silence. Yet when she saw him, he said, “The door was open again.”

  Under her regard, flat as at their first entente over hall toilets, his neat chinos flopped again into tramp-folds. He couldn’t have cared less. Maybe this puzzled her.

  “Walter and David here?” he said.

  “Dey left again day before yesterday.”

  There went his “major” visit. Perhaps they were all too grown now for it ever to occur again. “Abroad?”

  “Yah.” She always grudged informing him of any of them, preferring to hold him on the side of those strangers it was her job to keep away from such information. Was it also because she thought him the Judge’s favorite? He’d never thought of the word, until seeing himself again in her eyes.

  “Mr. Austin, he’s home from Korea.”

  Edwin knew who her favorite was—and why. “Yes, I know. Ruth wrote me from London.” Only a card, but no reason to say that. “She back yet?”

&
nbsp; “The two boys dey gone to meet her.” Then she said quickly, “I knew you be late again—you better sneak in, wait for him.”

  If they’d gone to get Ruth, what could it mean except that, unpersuaded, she, who had never been away alone before, wouldn’t come back? He stared at Anna, from hairnet to apron, understanding her function better. Anna smoothed away the family thunder by giving to all family information the appearance of its being nothing at all.

  “Not down yet?” he said.

  “He don’t look good. He been to doctor. Him.” On the subject of the Judge’s health she would inform or consult anybody—and no one she loved ever looked too good to her. “What you tink—?” she said. Since they were all away she would ask anyone, even him. “He bought a cane.”

  “Ah, Anna—” He flattered himself he was all Harvard now, make what she could of it. “That’s to beat me with.”

  Just then the phone rang. She let it ring, counting—the Judge and she had an arrangement—then answered it. Her bulk filled the little niche in the hallway, through which he must pass to the Judge’s study in the rear. He turned once again to study the picture, proudly not listening.

  But she—when she hung up he had never seen her in such a state—nor in any, of course. Her face had mottled; she wrung her hands. Yes, he thought—how visible our kind are.

  “That woman, she’s over here; she’s coming to dinner,” she finally said, smoothing her hair as if inner feelings had worked on it. “I didn’t invite her. Pauli say to tell him she’s coming. You tell him.”

  “Who shall I say?”

  Too late she saw how close she had invited him to come. “You just say—” she hesitated—‘the ballet lady!’ You just say it like that.”

  “Well, you always have enough to feed a battalion, Anna. I’ve heard the Judge say it time and again.”

  Right there, he saw her smooth over her own character, tug it, like a skirt or a blouse ruff, back into line. “Yah!” she said in broad relief. “Tank God, I got the fricassee.”

  They were still standing together near the entrance of the long room. An impulse made him touch her arm, perhaps because he’d guessed the identity of the newcomer. But the best thing was Daddy and Madame—somebody or other. When the war’s over, maybe the Royal will take me. But Ruth had never dared go back, until now. “I’ve been looking at that picture up there. Mrs. Mannix. She must have been very handsome.”

  “Yah.” Though she must know he knew the circumstances, she said it so calmly, prepared for all visitors.

  “More like David.” He didn’t know what he was digging for, scarcely that he was.

  Again she nodded. She hadn’t really opened her mouth at all.

  “Not like Ruth.”

  She shook her head minimally. She must be in a rage to get away to her dinner preparations, the only hours she showed temperament; her refusal to have other help was known to all. Yet she stood there, lip twitched to a smile, in a stance that half horrified he smelled out at once—her cul-de-sac.

  “You tell Judge I put dinner later haff, tree-quarter hour,” she said—and left him.

  He found himself near the telephone, and shook a musing no at it. Wherever her fear of him circled, it wasn’t in connection with the Judge—though it now seemed to him that he knew the judge better than anyone alive, even anyone here. He’d never thought along of their mother before. Now it struck him that perhaps Anna was afraid that suicide was hereditary. But then why should her fear be connected in any way with him?

  He was halfway down the hall before her own secret, as seen in that last trapped smile of the eyes, came to him. Anna was intelligent.

  On the way to the Judge’s study, he passed the hall mirror again, and made himself look there, as was his custom at least once on each visit. His careless dress pleased him, now that he could carry it better than some aristocrats. He was no Austin. But he too had a lineage almost as formal. He too was the bloom of circumstances, in the directest line.

  When his first suit, made by his mother’s sisters, had been fitted on him, he had discovered this about himself. The suit was unwearable—and couldn’t be rescued. One side of the jacket had been cut fatally too narrow for anyone, from the shoulder down. “No one could wear it,” he said to them proudly. “Not even a Chinee.” When he put on the trousers, he laughed aloud. The crotch was inches out of line with his navel. For a year after, the aunts wouldn’t speak to him because of what he’d said to them. “I can see for sure,” he said, with a snarl straight from the streets they had left him to, “neither one of you has ever been raped.”

  He’d thrown away the suit himself, denying them even the solace of their remnant bag. The act had given him his first inkling of the sensation that could grow so imperial here—waste. He knew his hatred was lost on the aunts. One day, he found it had turned to pride. And so, he had found his lineage. Nothing of the emotions, early or late, ever really went to waste.

  He walked into the study and was in his usual chair, laying out the black notebook, use of which the Judge if anything encouraged, eagerly drinking in the details of the beloved oracle-spot—from the stamp wall to all a great man’s life incunabula of paper, brass, marble and eraser crumbs, and on to the window through which he had first climbed in here at that man’s bidding—when another truth struck him. He’d had to go back to the district for it, to his reservoir. Whatever Anna had to hide, her fear of him was natural. He was unlike the innocents she was surrounded with. She was afraid of him because he could smell.

  Then he forgot it all—the whole afternoon’s self-coaching, all his years of 5x8’s, the sipping of imported ale, the new sauvity of mirrors—and hauling himself up out of his chair, he was fifteen again on his eighteenth birthday—for the Judge, leaning on a cane, was here.

  Doorways in this house were of a height to belittle almost anyone, but the Judge always paused for a moment in any, and never appeared to mind the heraldic majesty of some of his father-in-law’s Venetian chairs. Larger men went shaggy in the hide, but age had found little surface to work with in this neat, unviolent bantam, except to flick with white its black poll—and since the Judge’s weight and hair seemed likely to be permanent, he always appeared much the same. He’d been heard to say this could make a man seem unserious to contemporaries. He was smiling at Edwin as if he might have just said this, in the dry voice which invited one to disbelieve. His dress had never gone sloppy with retirement, remaining the same bluish or grayish of brownish, with white shirt and dim tie. But the cane, a black one with a thumbprint of silver on the top, was an embellishment. He and Edwin continued their steady mutual assessment of each other, an honored half-yearly ritual, before he crossed past the deck chair to an uncustomary one opposite Edwin’s and sat down, twirling the cane between his knees. He regarded it carefully, as if its revolutions had nothing to do with him, then folded his hands on it, clearing his throat. He always began—with what might or might not be the motif of their hour’s conversation. And he had several voices.

  “I’m thinking of getting a mortal disease,” said the Judge. “Though it may be too late for it.” He tossed the cane aside, as if he could do this at will with sticks and diseases both. Then he said what he always said. “For God’s sake, Edwin, sit down. And for mine too.”

  He’d meant to give Anna’s message now, but the Judge suddenly reached over, picked up the black leather notebook, from its place at Edwin’s side, and laid it on the low table between them. “So this is where you keep us.”

  For answer, Edwin pushed the book toward him. The Judge reached into a cellarette for a bottle and two glasses and poured them each a small glass of white vermouth, to Edwin now a drink whose faint herbs tasted totally of reminiscence and the harmonics of intellect. In his room at school he kept a similar bottle, offering it in the same aristocratic way—without ice and without alternative.

  “Dates.” The Judge sipped. The moment at which he enunciated his real topic was always hard to say, and the topic too, tho
ugh Edwin was sure he was learning many things circuitously—the way one would if one could be led through childhood again, but with a fully developed brain. Indeed, because of David, he couldn’t help seeing that the Judge sometimes talked to him as if he were the superchild for whom blocked fathers longed.

  “Far as I know, Edwin, we were all born in wedlock. Nothing incriminating there.”

  “Or anywhere!” said Edwin. “Except maybe about Anna. And I don’t know what that is.”

  “Anna?”

  “You ever think—” He wasn’t sure of the ethics here—the ones to be exhibited, that is. An echo returned to him, without helping him—Servants, Edwin? Whether their role in our lives gives us the creeps, or we accept it as farce—shows our own role in the social scale. Even now. “You ever think that Anna might have another life? Separate from here?” Saying it, he felt almost an allegiance with her.

  “You appall me. On my part. For no, I hadn’t.” The Judge shoved his glass away. “Why?”

  “She acts afraid of me. As if—because of who I am—I might more easily find out.”

  “Because of who you are,” the Judge said slowly. “Maybe we haven’t spent enough time on that. You always keep me so busy answering what we are.” He carefully reached out—as if from a prescribed radius—and rubbed the cane. “She was married once. My wife knew more about it than I.”

  Since the Judge had never before mentioned either his wife or his retirement, Edwin found nothing to say.

  “Ruth may know,” the Judge said indifferently. “What Anna does with her Thursdays and Sundays.”