New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  He chuckled. “‘Except for Ninon, you don’t go.’”

  She snapped her hands smartly together and bent over herself. Silk hose, panties—barring shoes, dress and jewels, which were always added in the other room, she was through here. “Oh, here, hook me. I forgot.”

  Tender for her brilliant interpretations, he fastened the new satin, at the top back.

  “I wear the velvet,” she murmured. “Then I don’t have to put over the head. And the Rhadames earrings.” It was in these murmurings, never expectant of reply, that he felt her nearest to marrying him. “Oh, I forgot also,” she said. “Madame has solved also a problem. What to do with his little Ruth.”

  He was about to go for his jacket, which with hat, stick and scarf, was all he needed. “Ah. She told you.”

  “So you know too, you foxy.” But she liked this in him; she expected it.

  “Ruth wrote me from London. But he will never allow it. Those tours that start in Canada, and end up in Australia. She could be away two years, out of his hands entirely. And he made her come home twice during this year already. He will never.”

  “And you say ‘ordinary,’ ‘normal,’ Pauli! You are more her father than he; who does she write to, about it? A girl not allowed even to go away to college.”

  “It came out that way, that’s all. There was never a real—brou-haha.”

  “Tcha, with them is there ever?” She gave the theatre’s shrug of contempt for its audience, then turned on heel. No, there was nothing more to be done here. At least—oh yes. She clattered over in her mules and sat down again, charily raising her café-au-lait, lace-encrusted slip from behind, modestly spreading a bath towel over her froufrou-gartered knees. Sound was permitted, but sight never. So ensconced, she put elbows on knees, staring ahead as if the future, like the sound in the toilet bowl, was only waiting for her, to form itself.

  “Ha, that Ninon,” she said. “I wouldn’t like to be in the dock to her either. The two of them, they’re a pair.”

  And from the pot, she gave him a smile at last, tender enough, but with the stinginess of a woman whose makeup was complete.

  So, in some three-quarters of an hour—after two glasses had been sipped in toast to one another’s appearance, they emerged from a door almost hidden by the double glass-and-chrome entry of the delicatessen which held up the old house from below.

  Just inside the door, Leni paused, wondering aloud whether her pagoda earrings weren’t “too much” for the imperceptible, pre-eight o’clock, dusking wind. Pauli waited sleepily, aware that the earrings would be removed and replaced several times before their arrival, and that this uncertainty had nothing to do with the wind. He was always willing to pause here in the shabby hallway of a residence only a shade too expensive for his purse, happy in the thought of that room above, where all the necessary opalines of existence had somehow been preserved.

  “I am glad we had the Chambéry on our own,” said Leni. “I do not like to take hard liquor before wine, so now I can refuse. I suppose they will have wine?”

  He nodded, not saying they would have been able to supply her with the Chambéry also, or that the wine would be beyond any criticism of hers. All of the household would be—a discovery unlikely to help either her feelings or her conversation. But they’d reached the curb now, at that corner where the bus could take them easily across the park and up with only a few blocks to walk after, not too much for her high bronze heels. She still had the earrings on.

  “Taxi?” he said. After all, their toilette had taken two hours, and almost twenty years.

  “I don’t see why. The bus always does for us. Just because they…” Because they—what? She didn’t say.

  Though he and she weren’t late, the bus was a long time coming.

  And he let it go by.

  “It was ours!” she said, but she was already smiling.

  “Your bronze shoes. They are so pretty.” Cased in a hatbox the year round, their shine was as fresh as a pheasant’s, the buckles like caramel. With a loving glance at them—and her—he snapped his fingers.

  The cab drew near. She touched an earring. After twenty years, the cab will get them there so quick! But after all, what has that house done to her except share Pauli, for whose attractions they cannot be blamed? Never have they said anything against her; the invitations have always continued. She knows all about finger bowls. If the journalist has brought a fashionable woman, let the woman gaze at her shoes—and know them for what they are. She will leave the earrings on also. Zut! She has decided.

  “It will be amusing to see,” she said. “Him and her.”

  “And Anna,” he said. “You will like Anna.”

  “Will I?”

  He can hear she isn’t certain. May all have been lost again?

  “And maybe I shall find out as well—what makes Ruth so interessant.”

  He worried. “I hope—” That you…that they…What could he say to it all?

  The cab was here.

  He handed her in gallantly, got in after her rustle of perfume, and settled back, jingling, the bus fare in his pocket.

  “Joy—” said Pauli—“joy is in what is breathed away!”

  8. Two on Their Way to the Host

  June 1951

  MEANWHILE, STILL SOME EIGHT blocks south and east of the Mannix house, Blount and an observant companion were walking toward it. “Blount, the journalist,” as he had been introduced, kept two unmemorable initials to his byline, but was known everywhere by that useful surname, which he had made wag in the mouth as easily as the name of a species. Accustomed to observation, he had the unremarkable flesh of many meals in Statler Hiltons, and the stilted walk of a man under whose feet the terrain might change at any moment, from delta to Himalaya, but via only the wheel, or air. A walk was his safari, as now. He never carried an umbrella, or wore hat, cap, topee or boots, or any shoes other than his present thin town ones, and was said not to own an overcoat. He could toy with all manner of banquet food but appear to be eating it, and however near he might be, glass in hand, to a host’s shrubbery or plumbing, knew it had always been assumed that he drank what he drank—some colorless liquid. He was from Missouri. Had he a digestion? A religion? A weekly lay wherever he was? Nobody thought to ask any longer; Blount carried the questions, in tête-à-tête or crowd. He acquired people like answers, for an hour or an evening, jammed guest and host together at will, and never had to wait, any more than for saliva, for the pale newsprint to flow. By intent, Blount’s company never compromised anybody—man, woman, hermaphrodite, two-bit Polynesian whore on his arm at the Eskimo Embassy, or communist child. Nor much personified them. And nobody’s reflection ever had enough time to settle on him.

  At present walking, he had a companion just acquired at the Overseas Press Club, one Felix Krupong—six feet of twenty-eight-year-old African and a classical education, ebon as his suit, and by his six-inch laugh, happy to dine with unknown judges and stroll thirty blocks to do so. He and Krupong were going to be late. But they would get there on time. Blount was always late and always made it. He had made this one of his characteristics too.

  “Fella in checked suit, met you with, Felix,” said Blount. “He from your part of the dark continent?” He like the clichés that made communication easy.

  “Oh no, man, he’s from East Africa.”

  “Where?”

  “Tanganyika.”

  “Where?”

  Mr. Krupong made a stand. He liked the interrogative himself—not that Blount had given him a chance at any—but was even fonder of the declarative, a mode of expression Blount seemed not to use at all. “Very depressed, that poor scrubby, to find that people in this country know only Kilimanjaro about his country, and nothing else of consequence; yes, that is indeed a very depressed man.” He sighed, with the pleasures of evacuation. And Blount, the person who had so offended, had already inquired the man’s origin as well, from the man himself.

  “Kilimanjaro?” said Blount, absen
t as a doctor with a stethoscope.

  Was he aware of his reflex? Did he do it to give people the reflex habit of answering—and then slip in a ringer? Was he well aware that such a style could conceal the possession of knowledge as well as the lack of it?

  Mr. Krupong blinked. “A mountain.”

  “Oh?” Blount swung his head from side to side as he walked, it was supposed in order not to miss anything, actually from a laudable effort to recall which system of traffic signals—left or right hand drive, zebra stripe, camel-train or laissez-faire—he was momentarily in. “He going to teach with you at Princeton?”

  “Oh I shan’t be teaching, just visiting, an American friend, a Rhodes scholar who visited at King’s in my time, yes.”

  “Did you have a Rhodes?”

  “That is South Africa, yes?” Mr. Krupong was learning. He waited.

  “South Africa?” said Blount—and then—“Watch out! That car!”

  Lucky that last hadn’t been a question. It had been a near thing. “If I die here,” Felix Krupong said to himself, “I should like to think that beforehand—” and then he leaped into the gap in the quizzing, as neatly as he had jumped back on the curb. Five years as a Latin and Greek scholar in Cambridge hadn’t lost him his Accra agility. “No, that Tanganyikan now—he is living in Birmingham as a turf accountant. Poor scubby, there is a rumor”—a phrase seized from Blount—“he is in the Overseas Club to collect a bad debt.”

  “Bookie?”

  “Oh, is that some of your American slang?”

  “What does ‘scubby’ mean?” said Blount.

  “I think,” said Mr. Krupong, declarative with intent, and feeding it slow—“it must be what you are when you are a Tanganyikan turf accountant living in Birmingham and you are at the Overseas Press Club in America to collect a bad debt.”

  But “up against an educated native,” as Blount sometimes phrased it, one had one’s routines. “Tell me, Felix, what’s the position of emancipated women in your country? At present date?”

  “I hear a rumor,” said Krupong, “that there are none from there as yet in Cambridge.”

  “You married?”

  “At present date then, man, if I am not, should I not make haste?” said Krupong pleasantly, and rolled out his disarming laugh, and said quickly, “Are you?”

  There were questions, of course, which even with a Blount were yes or no. Rare were those who got to them. “No,” said Blount.

  “You have children?”

  The first thing people over here noticed about Krupong was that, even metaphysically, he didn’t know what it was to touch his forelock. Claret in the common room had merely polished down a dignity which otherwise might have been too supernal, even there. The second was his gaiety, which Americans thought must have reasons beyond their ken.

  Blount noticed, a rare sensation too, but rallied. “Have you?”

  “Children need fathers everywhere,” said Felix, smiling—“isn’t it so?” He felt he had made an African cliché. But he liked to give good measure. “As we say, isn’t it all the same, under the tsetse fly?”

  Blount chortled. Once they started to kid, you were in. They loved a tease, and he knew how—why else were his return visits so acceptable round the world? “Like under—?” But whatever he’d been going to ask was lost, for just then they reached a curb again, and the other grabbed his arm and said, “Watch out! That car!”

  On the opposite side of the road, and walking on, the other kept the firmest grasp of Blount’s forearm, and Blount suddenly recalled a rumor, or rather a sports page—hadn’t there been a West African, a few seasons back, top student in something or other, who’d also been a Cambridge Blue? And who had also—?

  “You will answer the following questions, please, Mr. Blount—our host’s name?”

  Blount, still suffering the urge to ask, like an urge in the bladder, moved his arm, which was not released.

  “In a moment, Mr. Blount.”

  “Judge Mannix,” said Blount. In answer to a look, he spelled it.

  “Judge what Mannix?”

  “Simon.”

  “Of what court?”

  “Retired.”

  “From what court, Mr. Blount?”

  He might as well have been holding Blount by the ear, and they hadn’t stopped walking.

  “I—I believe it was the appellate.”

  “And that corresponds how—in British jurisprudence?—no, never mind. If you please—the names of his family?”

  Blount gave them.

  “Has he a party?”

  “?” But Blount didn’t voice it.

  “Political party, Mr. Blount.”

  “No.”

  “Rich?”

  “C-comfortable.”

  “Distinguished, eh?”

  “V-very.”

  “Old friend of yours, man?”

  The word “man” somewhat relaxed him. “Yes.”

  “And you are privileged to bring a casual guest? It is o-kay?”

  “Right.”

  Mr. Krupong, nodding like the tutor he may have been, gave him back his arm, plus a phrase of his own, appropriated. “I like to have a little background. And, oh yes, man—is there no wife?”

  “Deceased.” Blount felt like a beetle down off its pin. These affirmatives could be hypnotically relieving. He emitted—like a hiccup—a final one. “Shot.”

  Mr. Krupong did give him a glance. “Oh dear.” For the first time, his accent lost its native lilt, in favor of its years on the Cam. “What a violent country! Was it an old lag he’d sentenced, did it? And did the Judge put the person properly in jail?”

  What with all this trotting time, they had reached a curb again. Blount glanced right-left apprehensively, and kept at arm’s length. “Well…as a matter of fact—” this was a phrase he hadn’t used in years—“no.” He coughed. “There was a ru—” The other moved nearer. “I have it on good authority…” But it was no use. “Hushed up as suicide,” said Blount. “But everyone knew…she’d given him reason enough.” He gave the squawk that plain statements induced in him. “No—a judge couldn’t very well put himself…and everyone knew it must have been an accident.”

  Krupong’s eyes really widened. “I have heard what Gorgons your woman can be. Self-defense. Dear oh dear.”

  And from then on they covered the intervening blocks without incident, on the stream of Krupong’s grapeshot interest: “Nice block of houses, like St. John’s Wood, would you say?…What is your opinion of the Korean conflict?…Is it your feeling that…? Am I correct in assuming…? How would you describe…?”—and so on.

  Until, a few doors down from the house indicated—one with charming curtains and that air of self-sufficiency which time and the exertions of tradition supply—Blount drew up short.

  “Mr. Krupong…Felix…er, I may say ‘Felix’?”

  “You may.”

  Blount put on an expression, thin and wise. “Really a newspaperman, aren’t you?”

  Felix, examining the street at large, said absently, “Would you say Socrates was the first journalist?”

  “Ah, come on—” Blount stopped himself, with an exaggerated gesture. “Say! The old steel trap is beginning to function. Aren’t you that Nigerian whiz-kid sent a Latin poem to the Times on the subject of the pound crisis—and they found out he was attending two universities, London School of Economics in his spare time—told the press it was no trouble at all. I saw a Reuters bit on it. Ah-ha, Felix. Come clean.”

  “Clean?” Felix gradually swiveled from scrutiny of the street to the house just down there. According to which view of human nature one subscribed to—and Felix, with the advantage of divisible vitality and experience, had several—the house being approached either was the exact milieu for a crime passionel—or was exactly not. “I am Christian, oh yes.”

  “Aw, come…You are?” Blount’s face was grateful. No crumb was too little for him—this was the secret of his success—and he would sweep unti
l the end of time.

  “Presbyterian—as a matter of fact.” Krupong, who had walked them on to the house, and was now standing on its lowest step, nodded down on him. From his years among those who had a fetish for not asking the personal, it was his own pleasure to offer at times a plethora of naïvely confusing fact. It was a more ancient style of journalism than any Blount knew. “Now my friend back at the Club, he’s still Muslim. But would you believe it, both we converts still suffer the same distress after meals, in the white countries! We discuss it the very moment you come up to us. Our poor stomachs are still used to only one meal a day. Biological persistence. Remarkable. Comes of our regrettably cannibal grandfathers. Yes.” He stared up at a window. “Mannix. I have never heard the name. Is it Christian? Like you and me?”

  “Matter of fact, they’re Jews,” said Blount, blinking away his polite American aversion to saying what people were—they were so often, from terrain to terrain, something wrong. “I hope you’re not—prejudiced.”

  Felix smiled his smile, every mahogany-bordered tooth a glistening echo. These fused. “No.”

  “Well, I expect you’re hungry now at least,” Blount said, gathering himself a large grin. “I am. Let’s go in.” But he lingered on the second step, though it was now after eight. It had struck his conscience, as never before, that he knew almost nothing about this gent he was bringing into a trusted friend’s household. His own revelations on it had been already forgot. “I know lots of folks down at Cambridge,” he said. “Down there long?”

  “Up.” When Krupong closed mouth and eyes, his very serious white linen took over. The effect was solemn. “Oh I stayed the course, yes.”

  An even worse thought occurred to Blount, along with the memory that the Mannixes had now and then cashed a Sunday check for him. Could Krupong himself be the Tanganyikan’s bad debt? “Gamble much while you down there?” he said. “Excuse me. Up.”

  Krupong stroked his black cheek. “Every one of us Englishmen likes his little bet,” he observed. Then he seemed to relent, and drew out his wallet, rather a large one—unless he was a bookie himself. The wallet, large enough indeed for a confidence man—or a renaissance one—did in fact contain, along with his passport and other quite legal documents, that increasing burden of credentials and memberships which learned societies pressed on a man who’d taken honors in both classics and economics—and all the more insistently if the man were black. But in one section of the wallet there were some prized cards he dispensed seldom. Printed up at an Oxford stationer’s (after a venerable joke common to both universities, and for the occasion only), they’d been given him in memory of his honorary induction—for one evening—into one of their drinking clubs. How well he recalled the bottle of port he’d had to drink down in toto! And the porter’s kind, unprejudiced hand as he administered the emetic—“Think nothink of it, sir—they all ’as to ’ave it. Port’s a fortified wine.” It was true that his stomach nowadays was no longer strong, though for more graceful reasons than his grandfather’s. But how he loved their humor, his English! Sometimes the whole net result of his double education seemed to him that now, instead of having only one humorous front to see the world under, he had two. And he wasn’t averse to acquiring an American third.