New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  I had no idea as yet, you see, that I was being shriveled. Nor had my father. Meanwhile, on the baron’s watch chain, a rabbit’s foot, large as a shaving brush, had caught my eye—always nearer to watch chains than most.

  “Thank you very much, but you see—it’s our last day together, he and I,” said my father. “Why don’t you join us?”

  Under the abstractions of politeness going on above my head—which exchange continued—I’m afraid I forgot myself. I was never bored, you see—that was always my trouble. And I must have been wondering whether the baron could use the foot to shave with. I’m afraid I reached out and touched it.

  The rabbit’s foot recoiled. The shopkeeper came running. The roar above my head was the baron’s.

  “Simon!” said my father.

  The baron’s shepherd’s-checks had swelled with him—I’ve thought ever since that this is why pompous men wear them. And some small ones.

  “Whatever has come over you?” My father, I could see, was struggling not to laugh, in spite of his exclamations. “Apologize to the baron.”

  My hand, harmlessly whacked by the kid crop on its way down, was at my own mouth. “I’m sorry, sir.” I felt my head for the cap now in my pocket, made my deep, schoolboy reparation without it. “I do beg your pardon, Monsieur le Baron,” I said in my execrable French, and to my father. “Criminy, I don’t know.”

  Above my hand, my glance met my father’s, severe as he could make it. He and I already shared a certain light agreement on people and character—originating no doubt in our joint amusement or annoyance over my mother’s estimates of the same—and only a tender shoot up to how. But now it seemed to me, pressing my hand against my mouth, that if I didn’t keep it firmly there, our warm complicity would flower from it in a great laugh.

  The baron saw us both, I’m sure, thought himself mocked by both, and plotted his revenge accordingly. But first he had the glare on his own face to deal with. He settled this on the shopkeeper. “Not today, Duprès. Another time.” To my father he said curtly, but this time looking at me, “Oh, I see. He’s not French,”

  “Not yet,” said my father, thinking this the baron’s joke.

  To the baron of course, it made a slight difference that I wasn’t—though not enough.

  “I’m thinking of palming him off as a Rumanian, until he does better.” My father’s manner was once more a parent’s. “Think that would help?”

  The baron showed his teeth again. “I yam not sure what is of help—to you or him. And I find I cannot lunch with you after all. But I yam thinking—” He used the crop again, sharply cudgeling a leg of one of Monsieur Duprès’s old chairs. “I yave to be on my way to make a purchase myself. Will you care to accompany me. I yam appreciating your advice on it. Both of you.”

  “Delighted.”

  It was the least we could do. My father paid Monsieur Duprès, and slipped the case in his own pocket—which the baron watched cannily. But if my father had said it would be mine, it would be. I breathed over this with some apprehension. Complicity is one thing. Out and out confrontation—with one’s manhood, paternal love, or anything else—is another. Isn’t it, Edwin? Meanwhile, we all set off, out of the shop and down the street.

  The baron led us through various crooked byways and half-blind streets which invariably turned out to have the one exit he knew, always meanwhile raising his chin to look about him at the broader avenues, then diving in again; it was easy to imagine him with his hounds, or in some mournful, corner of the Loire country, welcomed home from here by an ugly fox-wife kept captive either by lack of funds (for the baron had the same look of dedicated fatality as those at school whose families could support only one member in style; or maybe even more austerely—by her own lineage. We came out finally on a crumbly, ochre neighborhood obviously new to my father, who however had his antiquarian’s face on, ready for little shops the color of ambergris and dulled copper, out of which might come the brightly nacred picture or precious square of pen-and-ink which only he could mine—but all we passed were a few café holes, one Arab pastry shop.

  “Must confess I don’t know this area,” he said. “Near Duprès’s as it is.”

  In spite of our walk, the baron still looked touchy. “Not your hunting ground.”

  Now we passed a few murky shops, and bookstalls, too swiftly to examine them, but I, stopped by one window, lagged behind to stare. Its wares—women’s shoes—were extraordinary enough to compel even me, made for vampires willing to stalk on steel needlepoints, or on bursts of toe-feathers shaped like arachnids; some of the leg models wore knee pompons with mirrors in them and anklets to match; one stockinged leg had a flight of red velvet lips up the length from its pointed Turk slipper, and on a stool in the center of all was a plain black leather pump, with a heel about fourteen inches tall. The baron raised an eyebrow. “And not quite mine.”

  I saw my father’s ears shift on his head; the countryman sniffs climate and the disorders of the universe, but a city man has only the general human evil and gossip to alert him. “Baron—”

  “Yes? We were paused in front of one of the inward, retreated houses of which Paris, Arab or not, is always half composed.

  “Just what is this place we’re going to?”

  The baron pointed to a sign at the door side—a neat rendering, in a few bold commercial strokes, of a woman’s dress from, in the hourglass shape of the era. “Une corsetière.”

  “Vraiment?”

  “Je vous en assure.”

  The fine sunlight purred at the door, and got nowhere. My father brooded, I now know, on how far a parent must be the agent or preventer of experience; our illusion that we can do either arrives with the slap and the birth cry. He bent on me a look peculiar to him at these times; I had seen it before. He never in his life showed any disappointment in my size; I suspect he actually enjoyed my cockiness the more. Yet saw how I must sometimes appear to myself, and weighed that. After a moment, the two of us followed the baron up the stairs.

  On the first landing, the wall held a dim, taped square at which my father peered, clearly still hoping that the baron was after treasure of the kind we were used to—but it was merely a map of the Metro. On the second landing, the door was opened to us by a female figure, shadowy against the hard shop lights behind her, under which there at first appeared to be an army of like figures; as we entered, we saw that these were mannequins, standing about like women, or lined up in front of screens.

  It was a shop all right, and it sold corsets. But even I could see—with no more to go on than my mother’s and the maid’s spaghetti-stringed cotton, garments seen drying in the basement at home—that, as with the shoe shop, other intentions were at work here, and in the same satanic reds and blacks, bold pinks and shrill satins, used here to exaggerate an ankle or an arch, there to tickle round a breast or a thigh. The language of lewdness is really very limited. In short, it was a sex-shop to which old men or young lechers might come in order to enjoy watching their “little friends” being fitted with creations tailored toward any impulse except straight nudity.

  As for me, nudity was what I was interested in; in any of my mute sniffings at bookstalls and art galleries all my own hot young imagery had centered on that. But a boy of not quite sixteen, staring at nipples sprigged with roses, fantails of coq feathers, silver net panties clasped by black lace hands at the navel—and down the room all sorts of other piebald suggestions—might well be excused for wondering whether he and art hadn’t lagged behind. All I’d wanted, you see, was a girl.

  Then my father’s hand came down hard on my shoulder. But his icy words were for the baron. “I could see this sort of thing in Soho when I was twelve, Baron. We’re not interested.”

  If he had—I couldn’t help thinking—then he and America had diddled me. He of course was thinking that the baron owned a piece of the shop—and maybe had further procurements in mind.

  “Ah, you interest yourself only in objets d’art these days? Then
maybe the one I show you will cure you. And the boy too.” The baron for once stared right at me.

  “Soho!” The proprietress intervened, maybe seeing trouble. She was dressed in black from neck to wrists, and to ankle—like a schoolmistress, or a backdrop—and not old, but her mouth, though she had teeth, seemed a black hole to me, perfumed with Sen-Sen. They all have a black, empty effect of space, within and about the mouth and sometimes the nostrils too—those who have exhausted sex to a business. “D’yer know me sister’s place off Greek Street?—she’s the one set me up ’ere.” She was English. “Me older sister.” She was even eager. My father was the sort couldn’t be properly rude to women. “No, I haven’t the honor.” It even sounded as if he meant it.

  And I suppose he couldn’t stomp out of there just over a few feathers and ribbons. I suppose he said to himself—“He’s sixteen almost, and it’s a man’s world, even if this one isn’t quite ours.” He even looked to me for guidance. It’s one of the more pitiful looks. Fathers do it often.

  “Stay and see, do,” said the proprietress. “Even if it ain’t quite your style.”

  “And since you like miniatures, Monsieur Mannix,” said the baron, with another stare at me.

  “Do, and it’s ’armless, there’s nothing naughty goes on ’ere, sir.” The proprietress squirmed her own shock at such possibility. “Might give you other ideas to be sure, who knows?” She tittered, gave me a side-wise look, and decided for us, by clapping her hands. “Coo-ee, the marquis’s little elf is read-ee,” she sang, letting it hang on the air unresolved, like a barnyard cry. She bowed herself backwards, against a screen.

  A very tiny young girl, her black hair cropped in an explosion of curls, came from behind the screen, wearing only one short garment and high-heeled shoes, and stood obediently. Her kohled eyelids dropped before the baron like a curtsy, but one subtle corner of her mouth acknowledged us; hands at her sides, she might have been wearing her communion dress. The brief corset she wore was as yellow as lemon curd, pleated like party firecrackers, and altogether ingénue—except that both tiny muzzle-breasts, outlined only with ribbons crossed as in a Greek chiton, were totally exposed.

  “Yellow!” said the proprietress in an announcing voice, her eyes squeezed closed and neck swanned, as if she were drowsing in the finest soup bowl of it. “The color of youth!”

  It was also the color of the baron-marquis’s teeth, and of the rabbit’s foot he was unconsciously smoothing. At a sign from him, the girl pivoted.

  “She doesn’t speak a word of French or English, ’is little friend, she’s a Cypriot,” whispered the woman. “’E’s going to ’elp ’er get into the hopera.”

  “To sing, no doubt,” said my father.

  “Coo, no—for the bally,” said the woman, seriously, and behind her eyes too I saw an empty black space, in which hung two seraphim, trussed like chickens for the larder—one for her faith in the ballet, one for the poetry of elves.

  I fastened on the woman, not daring, under my father’s eyes, to watch the girl. Maybe for the same reason, he was watching me. We both looked away. Looks between parent and child always travel like contraband chemicals anyway—while both listen, as if blind, for the word.

  The girl meanwhile was slowly revolving, managing those heels very adroitly for a ballerina I should say now, and came to a stop with her little rear in profile to us, on it a horse’s-tail train of floating net scattered with brilliants, through which we could see the bare cheeks, flat as a child’s.

  What I was seeing, of course, beyond lechery or innocence either, was that even in her high slippers and with the help of all that frizzled hair, the girl just barely reached the same height as me. With the aid of these, in height she was my twin.

  “Alors, Mannix. Here is my miniature.” The baron spoke in French, which words I understood as if I were born to it.

  My father bowed. I saw the uses of formality. “By rights, Simon and I should give the young lady the one we’ve just bought—but we’ll keep it as a souvenir.” He bowed to the proprietress too.

  Any human address makes these women spurt talk. They’re not used to it. “Proper minitaur it was to make sir, too; yer needle meets itself coming and going,” she said, with a sally to the baron, and then, in a hoarse aside to my father, “Do the same for yer little friend if yer like, though it ain’t often we job for the gentlemen. But ’e’s a proper little fay, yer fancy boy.”

  My father was a swarthy man. He went white. I understood none of it.

  And the baron-marquis said in English, “M’sieur Mannix—we are old friends, no?” Sportsmen are great sentimentalists, and above all on friendship; nobody knows more fondly than a fox killer, or a rabbit cracksman, of the romantic duties between men. The baron spoke both tenderly and rough. “This is what kind of rot for you, mon ami? For the English when they are in the boarding school maybe—that kind of pony. But sport for a man of your age? And to show yourself everywhere with him, anywhere—the Cluny, the Palais de Justice! Chuck it, I beg you. Give to that little cul his money—he will like that better than the Falize—and let him go.”

  “Why…you—!” My father’s grimace, only for an instant bewildered, went past the baron, round and round the room, from headless figure to figure, unable to deliver its horrified burden on any of these frilled nipples and pussies, or velvet-beauty-spotted tails. Total license, as everybody knows, stops the senses from performing in the end—and begins with the tongue. His sweet, light-opera style of riskiness had nothing to do with the insinuations he found here. “—You stinking Christian,” he said.

  That’s it, you know, still there as strong as ever, down at our bottoms. For a man with a house like my father’s, it’s still the worst we can say.

  If the baron was an aristocrat, he knew that—and answered in kind. “Catholic, m’sieur. And my wife’s prayers, thank our Lord, intercede for me as well. Maybe your wife do that also. But I don’t ask what it is you tell her, or to le bon Dieu either. I interest myself more in what it is you tell your mistress, that blond English miss”—he hissed it: “mees”—“with the hair like this, so raffinée—How is she been, that charming lady, since we all dine together, last year?”

  I once knew a German lady, Edwin, a countess from a provincial town near Koln, who claimed she’d run away from home and her Junker father all because at a musical which her noble finishing school attended, one of the other girls pointed to the soubrette and said, “See her? That’s your father’s latest mistress.” What a pity she didn’t get the news under some situation such as mine at that moment! How changed her life might have been—depending too of course on what her father replied!

  Though technically I’d heard all of what was being said over my head, I hadn’t really taken it in—for, across from me, moving nearer to the baron and thus to me, even close enough so that I got a dose of that chypre she was soaked in—the little…darling…now tipped me a wink. It was a communication. She had a foreign way of smiling; the upper lip didn’t move, and the lower one curled down from the tiny teeth into a V, as if she were trying for my language. Corset or no, this was all I saw. In answer, my hand, unconsciously I swear, stole to my pocket—to the cap I kept stuffed there. It was the same luckless hand that had gotten me in trouble earlier, and what was it trying to do now, make tribute? Or reparations—and to whom? To my father—and that house of his?

  What in God’s name did I mean by it? For, standing back a pace, and staring with all my might, I took the cap out, and placed it on my head.

  I laugh about it yet—in memory of him, and of the service we did one another. For my father’s laugh broke overhead, enormous, the great ho-ho-ho’s of a shy man, infinitely relieved. It blew us out of there—but not before my father, toppling the room to nonsense with a final wheeze of it, had given me a push, making me extend the offending hand to the baron.

  “Guess I didn’t introduce you two properly,” he said. “Simon—this is the Baron Godefroye de la Unnnh et de la St.-Blah
”—or so it sounded to me. “And allow me to introduce Simon Mannix, Baron. Miniature—but a Mannix. This is my son.”

  We left without waiting for the apologies. My father led us out of the neighborhood without once asking for directions, buoyed up by a vital energy arrived out of nowhere, which bounced from fingertips vibrating on my arm and flashed from his skittery eyes. “Miniat—” Chortling over his bon mot, he adoringly guarded me, the cause of it, across street after street, until we reached Duprès’s shop again, and turned from there onward to our usual street of restaurants.

  “Let’s not go there,” he said, turning me away from the one we most usually frequented, and sat me down instead in another outdoor café around the corner, though not far. There was no reason for this—except that everything had changed. We sat for some time, saying nothing after the order was given. He’d changed that too; instead of a ragout and a sweet after, we were to have an omelet and cheese. Then, as if reminding himself, he called the waiter back, and consulted me on my choice. But it was quite all right with me, I said. Then we fell silent again.

  With the apéritif, he remarked “Opera house! They always blame the theatre for these things, poor dears.” This emboldened me to ask if cul meant—what I thought, it did—also what he’d bent down and said to the girl just before we marched out. He told me both, repeating the last. “La jeunesse a sa propre couleur,” he said with a flourish. “And I’m glad that you asked. Youth has its own color, Simon.” There was his florid taste again, though it was the first time I marked it, plus the fact, though I didn’t say so, that I was modern—our sense of modernity arrives early, and never does change.

  With the cheese, he discoursed a bit on the baron’s eccentricities—the Anglophilia which had made him act untypically, un-French. “It really was an act of friendship, you know. Ordinarily here, a man wouldn’t think of interfering. Tolerance covers all.” And with the café filtre, which I hadn’t been allowed before, he asked whether I understood what the baron had taken me for, and I said in a low voice that now I had. (My hated school had done that much for me.) Then I burst into wild laughter myself. There was a heady exhilaration about both of us in all of this, a recognition of something precious. Lack of pretense—that’s communication of itself. One doesn’t have to gabble anything in particular, or over any kind of instrument—that’s what this century doesn’t yet understand. But when he offered me a second coffee, I answered, from some imp that impelled me, in the voice of my mother—“No, it would stunt my growth.”