Edwin did have his own ethics on this. Neither of the Judge’s children was to be discussed with him—and Ruth particularly not now.
“Or my sisters might.” Both he and Edwin burst into smiles.
“I saw them yesterday,” said Edwin. “At my aunts. They’re just the same.”
“If all civilization would only subject its nerve ends to as little of the new as my elder sisters!” The Judge looked at his fingertips. “I figured out once—since my attaining puberty, my sisters have given me almost a hundred pairs of gray suede gloves. At two a year—there’s chronology for you. The essence of family strength is in it—and because one can disregard my sisters themselves—in them.” He clapped his palms together, leaned back, and straight-ended again. “Enough. How’re you finding the law?”
He’d expected to be asked of course, and in just this way. “I’m finding it,” he said. It sometimes tickled the Judge to hear apt imitation of his own verbal artifice. Who wouldn’t want to please this man so viciously saddened, so horrifying alive in terms of what his own satisfactions appeared to be, this man who—yes, this must be the category—whom one loved. Whom, like a father, one loved.
But today this was received as a man in hospital receives flattery on his looks—with a disowning smile. Edwin sneaked another glance at the cane.
“Well, you’re only first-year. But there’re only two more. And I’ve an itch to see some of the young under my aegis work out.” He paused. “Go ahead and look at the cane, Edwin. It was my grandfather’s. Anna thinks I bought it—but she doesn’t know all the possessions of this house.”
“Very handsome.”
“Hmm.” He was poured another drink. “You haven’t it in your background as I did. The law, I mean.”
“Sometimes it helps. Not to have a category.”
“Oh, you don’t have the self-pity we’re educated to. Wear your bone outside, I’ve often thought, not inside, like the rest of us.” The Judge reached into the cellarette and took out a bottle of bourbon. “Don’t worry. It doesn’t show. Nice jacket, incidentally. Get it in Cambridge?”
He nodded. “On clothes, I just follow the mob.” With some surprise, he watched the Judge, a light drinker, down a shot of bourbon and pour himself another.
“That other stuff doesn’t—” The Judge looked up from his own mutter. “Join me? No? Don’t look so worried—Jews like us don’t make drunks. Doctor’s been giving me codeine for a slight ailment. But I find it intolerable. Turns the whole world an Oriental yellow.” He rose, walked to the window, without the cane, and leaned there. He turned. “How sentimental of me. I can still see you out there. Peeing. Edwin…d’you still feel—‘Politics is the best mob’?”
“So that’s the way I said it, that day! Always knew Ruth must have reported something to make you see me!”
When there was no reply—he never knew how far to go in personal talk with the Judge—he said, “Can one go after it honestly—politics?” Back there in the barbershop—that’s how they knew when a man wasn’t honest. When it went after him. In his excitement, he stood up. “I’ve thought about it a lot—we all do, at school up there. If they want to go into the business end of the law, they know how close a shave they’ll have, all the way along the line. Even if they plan to practice otherwise. It’s not like the judiciary—where a man has to wait to be found.” He had forgotten this would be personal. But even a retired man must expect references to his profession, if he still allows himself to be called Judge.
“That your idea of the judiciary?” said the Judge, turning. “A man stands around in his honesty until he’s tapped for it?” He came and sat down again, looking up. In a man of his age, this was always winsome. “It was true of Cardozo. Oh, among the greats, there’s always a long list of the hyper-innocent. But Edwin, most times in the world you see a man with an appointment he very much wanted, you’ll very much more likely find he’s put himself in the way of it.” He reached for the cane again, using the ferrule to inscribe a minute circle on the floorboards, punctuating his remarks as with a pipe. “Same thing can be true if he removes himself from worldly appointment. Though that’s generally considered a less positive action. Some day I must tell you about an old friend of mine.” He looked up, smiling. “As my father used to say, ‘Some fine evening of my decline, when you come to see me in a fur hat.’” He held the cane still. “But right now, I’m too young for it. Though he used to say that too.”
The gentle silences which fell to such middle-aged evocations—the halls of learning were full of these. “Memory soup,” a cold-voiced student neighbor had once said to him of a professor presiding unasked in the dinner hall. “That’s all they live on.”
“I can use it,” Edwin had replied. But now he stared hostilely at whisky glass and cane, each as damning as false teeth or the jaw dropped aphasia of aging sleep. Each time he returned from school, he dreaded to find that the Judge might seem to him to know less and less of the law—and perhaps of experience.
Just then the cane smacked down. The Judge looked at it with surprise, as if a dog had barked. “I’m learning its gestures faster than I like,” he said. “Edwin, no more large talk. We’ll spend more time on who you are and are to be. You’ve a career to be—chosen by.” In deploring their loss of the grand manner, the Judge seemed almost to regain it. “You better haul out that black book again,” he said softer. “I’ve inhibited you.”
Outside the window it was that exact moment before dusk thickened to dark, baring those city crocuses, the first lights. The day furled round the house in draperies the color of disappointment, funeral to the obsessive, Byronic visits of young men. For the first time Edwin anticipated the terror-ennui of those who were cornered in houses, heard the refrain, “What are you doing here?”—and answered it manfully, “I will stay. But I will also go.”
The Judge put out his small hand, touching the notebook with a finger which to Edwin’s dilated eye and imagination grew until it pointed on the black leather like a cane. “When do you appear there?”
“Where?” He recognized the question as one he had been waiting for.
“In the record. With us.”
“I thought I was.” Really they had never invited him to be prince—only to prove that he wasn’t a frog.
“You know better than that. You’re more intelligent than anyone we let come to the house.”
“Austin is intelligent.”
In the eye-crinkles opposite, he saw how young he was.
“And has been coming to dinner longer than you.” The Judge glanced at his right wrist.
“I forgot to tell you—Anna said to say dinner will be half to three quarters of an hour later—”
“Good. Gives me even more time to incriminate you. Which is one way of being made to choose a vocation. I imagine they knew that at the barbershop.” The Judge took up a paper knife, absently using the haft to stir his drink. There was a physical simplicity about him which he didn’t appear to know he had. All the formality of his talk didn’t cover how he scratched his crotch in company, with a gusto so large for his person, and with a luxury the Edwins couldn’t spare. Such habits endeared him to his children, exciting their fantasies of that life of the privates, or of the animal, he too must once have had. According to Ruth, David had once come upon his father alone at breakfast, bending like a guilty boy to lick his plate. And their father had said to him—very carefully so he would hear all of it: “In my youth, David, I used to catch your great-grandmother—who wore her hair à la Madame Pompadour—blowing her nose through her fingers. Honesty has to come out somewhere—like snot.”
He found the Judge staring at him.
“Well, Edwin, since you won’t talk—yes, I want to make you a proposal.” The Judge poked into his drink, faintly smiling. “Used to be a picture at the head of the stairs, house I was brought up in. A young wench on a ladder, picking from a tree. And a grenadier clasping the rungs, looking up her skirt. My father got it in Toulouse once,
and put it there. Outside his study, where all the young men visitors could see it. ‘A Shady Proposal,’ the title was. Or so he said. My mother never got the joke, though he shouted it at her often enough. ‘A proposition, Martha. For the love of God.’ Theirs was an arranged marriage. Which is why the sons of such couples often marry otherwise—for beauty, say. Or for intelligence.” He drank to the bottom. “Will you marry—for intelligence, Edwin?”
“Don’t suppose I’ll marry for years.”
“I thought not, somehow. Then you’ve no strings.” The Judge let a pause lengthen. “Well, then. Here’s my proposition. Will you come to New York?”
“Leave school?”
“Glad you said it that way. Implying interest. Not just Harvard. No, of course not. My idea would be—you could switch to Columbia. Not a university very great in forward spirit. But well abreast of the conventions. And in your own city. Which, believe me, Edwin, is what a man best answers to.”
“Why?”
“I’ll answer that presently.”
“No, I mean why should I change?”
“I was going to answer that too.” The Judge checked his watch again. He saw Edwin see it. “A habit of public life,” he said. “You know—until yesterday, I hadn’t worn a wristwatch in—years.” He reached for the black stick, held it for a minute above his head in the fencer’s alert, and tossed it behind the desk, where it rattled, rolled unseen, and lay still.
“I don’t fence,” he said. “Nor hunt, fish or ride. I can mirror-write, lipread, am ambidextrous, used to play a mean game of chess and a meaner game of points, can calculate compound interest at a pace would surprise you—and tup the ladies at one that wouldn’t, And once—I wrote a few tolerable reports. More recently I’ve learned to sail a boat—which some say can take the place of all the rest. When that becomes necessary. And—oh yes. I can guard a house. For the past ten years I seem to have done—nothing much else.”
He broke off sharply. “Edwin—has no one told you the first principle of social behavior is not to stand looming over a man seated talking to you!” Then he said, “Sorry.” When Edwin had seated himself, frozen into the quiet of one who knew what such insult meant to the insulter, the Judge said in a shamed voice that matched it, “Edwin. I’m going back into public life.”
Nothing further was added to this admission that all the Judge’s philatelies—from the charting of stamps to the cross-Atlantic saving of lives—had been private ones.
“How?” Edwin finally said.
“Hired a chauffeur,” said the Judge. “To drive more and quicker than I’m allowed—I don’t yet know where. Been offered a little back room, somewhere to the rear of the Low library up there at Columbia, and I’ve accepted it. To do I don’t know what. I assume—the work it’s assumed I’ve been doing. And now I suppose I want what can’t be hired—a man to help me with it.”
“You going to—run for office?”
He’d never seen so many changes pass across that ordinarily even face—whose almond planes and curled lip an Oriental yellow would have suited. “Edwin. What office could I possibly run for?”
“At school…I’ve heard them say—”
“Yes, yes,—what is it—they say?” The Judge, finding his own hand on Edwin’s sleeve, pulled it away. It kneaded his empty glass into the palm of the other. “Well, well. I discover that—apparently—against my better knowledge it’s been my whole ambition—to hear what they say.” His voice had changed, to an uncommon tremor. “But—what do they—Edwin?”
If he wasn’t to insult, he must make the statement in a tone of possibility—where for all he knew it truly lay. “That you wanted to—run for President.”
The Judge’s mouth opened, not to laugh. Across it passed a caricature of trying. “No…” He bent his head. “Now I know how dead Chauncey Olney is. That friend I spoke of. Too dead to share a joke.” He seemed to commemorate. Then said in almost a whisper, “No, my paranoias were—rather…greater. So it’d be wise indeed for me, wouldn’t it, to have the ear of a young man like you—of more practical…scope. Although my present ambition is so…modest.” He raised his head. “Edwin. Know what I think I mean by—going back into public life?” He pointed out to the hall which led to the front of the house. “I think all I mean is—getting outside that door.”
He felt youngest in not being able to believe that this one of his elders—in spite of liquors and codeines, canes and memories—wasn’t still firmly holding on to his sharpest internal self. He drew a brave breath. “Don’t talk down—to either of us.”
There was a pause. “Histrionics aren’t for me, are they, Edwin? That’s perhaps—why I’ve liked women who—have them. But honor my proposal, boy, by thinking of it. Don’t answer now.” He was palming the glass. “Maybe I need a—confidential secretary. Who would see to it that I don’t confide. What used to be called an amanuensis.”
Edwin could scarcely see his face. But he heard the glass being filled again, set down.
“Maybe we two could write the work I’m supposed to. Law clerks have lots of leeway. The Encyclopedia wants an article or two from me. If it’s any good, you can publish it as yours. In the old days, men used to go to war by proxy, did you know that?”
“Yes, the Civil.” He got to his feet again and went to the window, fighting the room’s lack of light and its owner’s replacement of logic with dream. No man returns to life, he thought; how did I know? Or not this man somehow, to whom honesty is a pearl.
Outside the low, open window, at the far end of the narrow garden, a figure had entered the garden, from around the front of the house, moving unhurriedly, but not as if it knew the place. He leaned forward, half reluctant to call it to the Judge’s attention. Another intruder?—from the openly shared dream-life of cities.
“Shall I turn on a lamp?” he said.
“There’ll be light,” said the Judge.
For a moment, the words behind Edwin sounded rabbinical, or mad. Then, yards away and up, the water tower was under-illumined by a slender beacon which cast a modest gleam on the garden below, reminding one that anciently this had been sufficient.
“Nightly, since 1876,” said the Judge. “Except for the brownout. We help pay for it.” Through the open chairback, the light touched a profiled head as bullet-shaped and frail-necked as a boy’s.
Across the garden, always kept to grass, a few stone seats and its bending tree, the woman’s slow, angled progress recalled the pigeon that had paced the wall. Her back was to Edwin; she was facing the city beyond. Not Ruth. Except for her almost miniature size, and the hair slouched in a knot on her back, she might have been—it was in the way she walked. As she moved again and stood chin in hand, the patching light revealed an arm and elbow, white-gloved.
“Shall I close the curtain?” He said it like a child, hoping not.
“No, I don’t ever. It’s my audience—I’d miss it. Or I’m its.”
Behind and above her, the water tower’s outline squatted on the sky like a kindly ogre. The air between her and it and the window was edged with what he supposed was imagination. Almost musical, but on the safe side of silence. He was beginning to think like them. Watching her leading his eye into another plane of perspective from his window, he saw the reasons for statues in gardens. To show the limitations of houses—while nymphs raged and men traveled.
In the room, the Judge spoke. Always so many—ruminations,” the voice said. “What a father never says to a son.”
He kept silent.
Earliest here he had learned that none of the young people around David—Austin, Walter, or Ruth his own sister, would ever collaborate with the Judge in any of his allusions to David. A calm rudeness deadened their hearing, a blankness their eye, though they did it tenderly, in a pact to keep the Judge from his worser self—a silent pact which Edwin, unasked, had joined.
“One needs to…talk,” said the voice behind him. “Anna swears I don’t talk to myself. Or that she never hears a word. Some
times I wish she would.” To Edwin the voice was the Judge’s best—not a wooing voice. A plain one, speaking from a pain in the breast that could be honesty, ash-dry as it could have been in court.
Outside, he saw that in that interval, the woman had gone. No dinner bell had rung. He half listened to the multiple interior of the house, a delicate ear that rang.
He turned from the window. Anna’s other message, which for a second he’d meant to give, skimmed away.
“I accept your proposal,” he said. He felt a pain in his own chest.
The man in the chair, so short under its latticed back that the beacon barely touched his poll with its manufactured moonlight, was rubbing and rubbing his face in his hands, and might never have heard. When the face was raised, a dreadful smile had been rubbed on it—the kind the owner of a face didn’t know was there. He spoke in a hoarse voice his audience had never heard before.
“I—need,” he said.
Edwin, grasping the sill behind him, held on tight. I shall live here.
A pause between members of the same household had a different silence.
“Thank you,” the Judge said at last. “Later, put my words down or not, as you like. I’ve put some down here; in a little memoir. But don’t canonize them. Your job in this house will be simple. When I talk to myself, you will hear.”
Fathers, Edwin. We’ve never talked about them. Only cousins, sisters, aunts, all the side bubbles of the family vortex, as if we were making an assemblage for a new ark. Or we sit and murmur sociologies at each other, like idle flybaiters in a zoo. While outside the grape is drunk, and the women are laid. That was the province of fathers and sons in my generation, and what men talked about in private. Politics and justice were for the dinner table. Reverse it, as nowadays, and both conversations are ruined.
But we know about mothers, you and I, even if society hadn’t already told us and told us. Mothers are the tigress, the defender, force-feeding us by day, tender with night’s poultices. I’m not so sure about Oedipus, all that. My mother was an enjoyably useful nuisance—and we could be tender with that too; our feeling for her was something like what one has for the fools in Shakespeare, though she was nowhere near so entertaining. But it is doubtful that I ever wanted to sleep with her—any more than my father did.
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