Across that impossibly hopeful, absurd statement, we grinned at each other. Then my father snapped his fingers for a cognac, got it, didn’t offer me any—he’d regained his fatherhood—and spoke. “I ordered light lunch on purpose. We’re going to tea with a lady.” In the lengthening sun rays of the slanting afternoon, and with his brown skin and striped suit so dark against the white napery, his handsomeness deepened, but as if about to edge away forever, into his gray hair. It must have been time for him to get the violet buttonhole he always came home with. At last he sighed, “I guess I want to show you. The other half of my house.”
She was thin, pale, with hair snailed in braids at her ears just as the baron had indicated, and not young—and this is not her story, except to say that aside from these intervals in her lone, half-expunged days, Paris was her only companion; she was a copyist at the Louvre. How perfectly suitable even the undersides of lives are seen to be, once the life has closed! After my father’s death and until her own, I visited her once or twice; it was also a great boon to him to be able to leave me private instructions for her pension. But I’d been too much of a success with her that afternoon ever to go there often; I might have become the son she had missed. When we left that afternoon, she wanted to give me a violet buttonhole also, but my father said she mustn’t—how romantic they were, compared to us! But it isn’t the war which has coarsened us but something else newer to the world—which if I let it will destroy the symmetry of reminiscence forever—let’s not talk about the world now…And on the way home, instead, he gave me the enameled case—should I have seen from his hesitance that he couldn’t quite bring himself to caution me to conceal it from my mother? Sons aren’t clairvoyant about the future until they become fathers looking back. Later that year, my mother found it in my laundry drawer and there was hell to pay, but only on my account; to manage this pleased my devotion to him, but my vanity even more. For I told her that the case had been given me, in the deepest friendship, by an aristocratic schoolmate—the Marquis Godefroye de la Unnnh—et de la St.-Blah.
My father was never sure he did right by telling me—how can one say for sure until all lives concerned are closed? And that means never; the underside of a family goes on and on, with the toughest genes of all. After his death when I was about twenty-eight, my mother let it be known that she had found out, though she never told me when. Her deepest outrage was for his having told me. She seemed to think that he had hurt her by telling me—her image in my heart—while all the time I was thinking of him in Paris that year—guiltily trying to give himself in so many ways, to her in her bed back there, to me in my cap.
“That dirty cigarette case with the girl on it,” she said suddenly, one day not long after. “He gave it to you, didn’t he. What things for a father to give his son.” She spoke with a stumpy satisfaction in her own legacy—all the way from our close resemblance to each other, in which his lean, drakish looks were shut out, to the thousand and one physical touches and admonitions which mothers can supply while fathers are away, or dreaming.
“He gave me his house.”
“House?” she said, staring. “Why, we sold that for the creditors, before he died. Oh, he was honest enough in the pocket, I grant you.”
He left no real creditors—only debts to him. She knew nothing of his business.
But I was going over all the other things, the thousand and one dreams which come while closer hands are touching: my habit of Daumiers, descendant in a way of his Conders, those knickerbocker evenings I still listened for, my whippings, the memory of a day with no moral to it.
“Still, I’ve got it,” I said. I was pretty romantic myself.
“Where! Tell me! In Paris? Who keeps it for you, now!”
I thought of a way of telling her, yet keeping it for myself always—as if we ever could, without passing it on. So—I pass it.
“The seals,” I said. “Who breed in the Pribilofs.”
The Judge snapped the ceiling lights on. Opposite Edwin, upright in the chair, the Judge looked spry, sparkling, his black hair electric, as if memory had invigorated him the way action would.
His own tongue clove dryly to his mouth in the mournfulness which came when one was waked away from erotic byways just then leading to perfection. “Feel as if I’d been in another century.”
“Maybe you have. Some of what my parents used to say came from their grandparents—who lived in the eighteenth—and so its goes. I’ll trust the spirit of it—let the historians scrabble for the details. Whenever my mother said ‘Steich mir am Buckel ’rauf!’ I heard that cattle dealer she denied we came from.”
“Paris,” said Edwin. “Suppose I’ll remember from now on I haven’t been there?” He felt unfairly played with, cheated, as if the wires of his emotions had been wrung, and not cheaply.
“Ought to get together and do it in clubs,” said the Judge. “Remembering clubs. Reminiscence ought to be a respectable pastime—an important one. What d’you think makes psychiatry so popular—our anxieties alone? Nonsense. If you squeeze the air of the past out of a man’s head, it’ll get out the back way from his guts—or in what he whispers to his children when the world’s not looking.”
“At least I know I haven’t been in the Pribilofs.”
“And what has such a violet-scented story to do with you, you’re thinking?” Mannix got up and went to the window, grasping the sill, which came just at his waist, with both hands. The arc light—which Mannixes paid for—gleamed from his watch and from the even pallor of his skin, picking out what was salient to this man, and maybe hereditary too. In the houses of all Mannixes the inanimate had its paid-for duties. Yet the man was trembling. “Or with me,” he said. “Why do you think I plucked you out of my garden—where you were ‘answering a call of nature’ as my father would have said? I didn’t wholly know why—but I’m learning. Along with you. The clock ticks between us; in some way we’re joined, tick to tock. Or could be. Which is it? Everything we say here I guide you in—did you think it was casual?—and yet I don’t know why or where.”
He beat the sill with his fist, but regally; the fist didn’t forget that the sill was his. “You were a lone boy, peculiarly without family. ‘Politics?’—what you said about it drew my attention to you, that’s all—to your story—from where I was wool-gathering all those two years. ‘He’s like Romulus then,’ I said to her when she came in and told me, but maybe she knew better, she wouldn’t say. If you were really the savage at our gates that didn’t interest her, as it might me. Wise girl. ‘And where’s Remus?’ I asked her. What she answered—has nothing to do with you. But she saw too that you weren’t simply lonely or underprivileged—merely a boy in one of those groves—you were lone. Family knowledge is the most important of all. I was brought up to believe that in one way—and forced to believe it later. And you had—not quite none. Such a strange, lone slice of it.”
“So I was a specimen.”
“Be fair. So was I to you. My own middle-classness never fails to interest me, does it. Nothing interests you as much about us—you think. And I thought all I wanted was to tell you about it. At our leisure.” He shrugged, looking up past the light. Maybe we’re both learning otherwise. I am. Living so much alone as I do. The city is all very well. But an audience is needed—in the house.”
He raps the sill as if he could summon one, Edwin thought. “That why you told me about you and him? A sort of middle-class legend?”
“Anything about us’ll have some of that in it. But—no.”
“What other kind of audience then—than we’ve been!” He was furious, rent, shaking also. Their dialogue was falling to bits.
“You think maybe I want you to tell me about your sex life? Hmmm—no. Though those books over there, the risky little bits that book-seller sends—they’re kind of a memorial to him, too, a gentle little collection of nineteen-century erotica that some day I’ll present to a university. The Simon Mannix Collection—Simon Senior. You didn’t know I was a J
unior, did you. Start thinking of me that way, Edwin—it. may help us both. Tick…tock.”
“I don’t want to. Think of you that way. No younger man can.”
“I know. And did I really say that about the seals, to my mother? I only remember that I wanted to. Family knowledge—you have to know us not only as we are, but as we think we are—” He was smoothing the sill now, over and over. “And were. Ruth was born in this house, did you know that? Not David. We weren’t yet here then, but in an apartment; he was born in hospital. But even he and she were really too late for the other. Home birth stopped—for people like us—around 1912. And after the war, gradually for everyone. Even the rich couldn’t afford it any more—only the deepest poor. And now even they can’t.”
He turned around and leaned his back against the sill, stretching either arm on it. “Know that a house with a child coming in it begins to smell of milk weeks before? Not just the body of the mother. And while the birth goes on, you find out what the air of a house like this is really made of. You lived in a slum—maybe you already know. But we don’t—ordinarily we have to be told, or manufacture it in some other, abnormal, way. On the day of birth, the air itself tells you that the house is made of blood and earth and amniotic fluid—water. And maybe a little claret—that the father, out in the hall at the bottom of the steps, is drinking. Or tea, or whisky—claret is what I had. After the birth, then it’s all normal again; you can hear the death-beetle again in a room or two, of an evening—not because somebody died there, but because they lived. And you can see the scars on the newel-post. But not just then. Later.” His voice trailed, began again. “Later you have all the time in the world to put the two halves together.” He pressed a hand over his mouth. “As my father did.”
In the silence they stared at one another. A clock struck. Edwin counted—eight. There was a rustle outside the window; it could be a leaf scraping the bench. “Why must you always—spoil it with the personal?” It was out. He felt relief. Opposite, as the hand dropped, the glow on the Judge’s face surprised him.
“That’s the first real thing you’ve said this evening. Edwin—” He walked over and put his hand on Edwin’s shoulder; he had to raise his arm to do it. This brought the Judge’s face within the downward range of Edwin’s glasses, so that he could see the grain of the beard, how close-pored the skin was, even younger in close-up—though no one coming into the room would have doubted who was in command.
“Is personal emotion a filth to you, Edwin? Or only mine?”
He could hear the not quite vanished boy in the Judge saying: “There is a word for fathers. Thrash me, if I’m wrong.” Then the Judge, taking his hand from Edwin’s shoulder, thrust both in trouser pockets, shrugging. “Needn’t answer my question. Sbouldn’t’ve asked.”
“No, it’s not filth. Just that it’s—new.” In each corner of the room he seemed to see all the members of his hoped-for major visit, one to a corner, hung there like subordinate saints each in its own oratory, humbly suppliant before this man. David—Walter. Austin—Ruth. Austin wasn’t humble. But because of Ruth, he too was there. Ruth was the shadowiest.
The Judge had sat meanwhile on the sill, looking out. “Someone in the garden, I thought,” he said. “Went round toward the corner of the house—I couldn’t see who.” He turned away again, faintly smiling. “Maybe—some boy.”
“You said a man whispers the past to his children,” Edwin said harshly. “Why to me, then? Why don’t you whisper it to yours?”
He saw the small figure wince at the breastbone as if struck, but rally. “Ah,” said the Judge in a stifled voice. “You talk.”
Horrified at himself, he said, “I apologize. I forgot.”
“No, no, go on. It helps. And I know I’m—not always fair to him.” He brought this out in the pinched agony of a man who hurried to name his disease before the doctor did.
“Ruth would listen.” It made him almost see her there in the corner, a watercolor of a girl whose lineaments came out strongest in her absence, the head cocked to the speaker, her whole body and eyes receiving—but giving back only in the dance? “She’s always listening. Though maybe nobody—” What judgment could come from her that those here were afraid of? Even Austin’s devotion had that in it. Her brother’s too, even with his stopped ears. Walter, with his saint’s straightforwardness, was the only one oblivious.
“Nobody—?” said the Judge. “Nobody what?”
Edwin looked up. Is it because we’ve tried so hard here for honesty, that I—oh God, I am going to be able to tell when he lies? I can tell. Yet he hasn’t said a word. “Nothing. Only that maybe fathers don’t listen to girls. Though you did. When she brought me here.”
“Yes.”
Maybe in private she was listened to. She knows why I am here—she knows. “What did she say?”
“She—characterized you.”
“How?”
“It was a confidence.”
“About me?”
“Not entirely.”
Then he and she did share something. And she had seen this too. “But it’s not—what Anna sees,” he said aloud, musing.
“What Anna sees?” the Judge said hurriedly. “What do you mean?”
“About me.”
“Oh no.” The Judge paid Anna the usual humorous smile. “No—we both know how Anna sees you.” He looked relieved.
The hint of strain in the Judge’s posture had gone. But Edwin could still remember Anna’s. “Why did you say—that I was the most intelligent person you let come to the house?”
“Because you are.”
“Why—let.”
“Did I say that?” There wasn’t the slightest pause, yet the Judge had assumed the courtside manner of a man who enjoyed all interrogations, unexpected though some were—and could answer truthfully. “One’s habit of mind—” He shrugged. “Edwin, believe me, I live alone.”
And will that be part of my job, to hear when he lies?
“What you are, Edwin,” said the Judge. “We’ll spend all our time on it.”
“Sounds like a bribe.”
“No, Edwin. Politics.”
They were both smiling. But he knew he was being maneuvered away, though not from what.
“I had a background. Just that there was no name for it.”
“Can you name it now? Now that we’ve educated you?”
He drew his shoulders square—to speak from it. He had no inherited cane, nothing but himself as he knew himself to be—in a suit that followed the mob. Yet it was as dignified a moment as the Judge’s own entrance—this was the end of the boy bidden to climb in the study window, of the young man guilty at slipping inside an open door. “We are—legion,” he said, as hushed as if he might be killed for it. “The kind you and yours never see.”
When he saw the Judge’s brows go up, he knew he wasn’t even going to get his face slapped for it. Even before that, the minute he heard himself aloud, he knew with sinking heart that the statement he’d harbored so long, so long; wasn’t even true, any longer true.
“Think you’ll have time to humanize us—before you become one of us?”
“I told you I was losing it,” said Edwin. It was his one anguish—under all he always told himself on the way here. Sometimes he would look at his mother across the table in the lamplight, telling himself—She has it still, that old woman who never will know it. She has our old world.
“I listen to you, Edwin. And maybe you can save me from my own aphorisms—but not till you hear them all. Sure, you’re losing it—that’s the price of admission here, anywhere. Only youth keeps on seeing life in strict antitheses—black, white. When I found that out—all I did was give up chess. But for you boys…well…the youth of the world is over, too.”
“I did think of—going for labor law.” He brought it out half miserably. “But you’d say I was confusing poverty with integrity.”
“Never to you. You know who I said that to.”
To Walter and Did
dy, when the two, following a step behind Austin’s Quakerdom, went into social work.
“Never to Austin?”
“Austin confuses nothing. When that type goes in for self-sacrifice, there’s no beating them. But they’re born to be merchant princes of whatever they choose—don’t go wasting your time in envy of it.”
“I’m not jealous of it.”
“No, your pride in what you are, regardless, is almost—Jewish. I’ve often admired it.” The Judge came forward, and bent to scrabble for the stick. Edwin leaped to get it for him; they met over it. “Labor?” said the Judge, taking the cane from him. “Why not?” he said slowly. “There’ll be labor judges on the Court before we can whistle. Listen, Edwin—what you need is a summer on the ward.” He brought this out with no emphasis. But Edwin had a sense that it would have been ready all along. Whether he himself had plumped for counting angels with the schoolmen of the law, or had declared himself ready for oratory and the fine sack suits of a gangster’s mouthpiece, the plan advanced would have been the same.
The night was now coming in the window, cool, dark and unhaunted as in the zesty days of the winter vacation times here when the Judge had worn no watch—and everything outside this sanctum had waited, for dinner and for them.
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