New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  He handed Blount the card, on which Blount read that Mohammed ben Ali Krupong, Panjandrum, latterly of King’s College, Camb., Hon. Member of The Oakers and Philolexion, Oxon., was hereby recommended as a first-class courier, signed Edward, H.R.H. A sentence in Greek followed.

  “What does that say?” said Blount.

  “It says Honorable Candidate for a First in Greats. Failed.” And Krupong’s laugh, an inch longer than usual, rolled down the stoop. After which he handed over to Blount a quite ordinary card of his own, listing his London and Accra University addresses.

  In great amity, they went up the stoop.

  At the door, while they waited, Felix said, “Human nature, sir”—he knew how the whites loved to talk about it—“you find it much the same in your travels?”

  “Why, of course I do,” said Blount, back on easy ground. As always when Missouri came upon him hard, his “I” had the sound of the “a” in “cat.” “A do, A do, and thank God for it. How else could A tell the countries apart?”

  Then, as the door opened, he held back a trifle, perplexedly aware that this had the sound of one of the profundities by which others were so often entertained.

  The young man who opened it to them, Felix saw, wore a kind of uniform, not a domestic’s, but not any military one he knew either.

  “Why har you, Austin boy, har you!” said Blount. “Uncle Sam sent you back?” He turned to his companion. “L’me introduce Mohammed Ali”—and he quoted the card letter-perfect—“alias Mr. Felix Krupong, KCB, and future OBE! And this here scoundrel’s Austin Fenno, one of our finest, Quaker Plenipotentiary!” His introductions always resounded, beguiling the listener to possible half-truths, and committing Blount to nothing. He liked to enter a room as an old-fashioned foreign correspondent should, talking fatter than he was; it inspired confidence. Afterwards people could forget him better. Men of the press didn’t have to be these thin, modern-style sneaks with no style at all. Sometimes he dreamed he was the celebrity he was—and woke up perplexedly too.

  “Why, Simon—here you are!” said Blount. As he circled the world—yesterday Alaska, tomorrow the Aleutians, Tokyo, Melbourne, Tierra del Fuego, with intermittent stops between Statlers, the Algonquin and the Hotel Inghelterra—it did seem clever of people to be right there in their homes to receive him. “May I introduce—?”

  This time, he gave each man his proper names very quietly. Under the Judge’s eye, he knew just who he was—Dan Blount. As for the companion he’d brought here, one last look and he left him to be on his own, he’d been eviscerated and had given up all the answers D. V. Blount had time for, barring one reference, like a souvenir bought at one railway terminal and discarded at the next. “Why, Judge,” said Blount, pausing like a chamberlain at the long room’s entry, “what a fine lot of human nature you have here today.”

  Felix, looking down it to the large picture of the mantel end, saw only a pair of women, one rather splayed and thickish, one very tiny and pointed, who looked up at them. The young Mr. Fenno who had opened the door stood near a snub-faced bespectacled young man of about the same age, but they weren’t talking; Felix had one of those early, to be trusted impressions that they were not at ease with one another.

  But the Judge was the shock. In size, features, eyes as young in that head as if only lent to it, the Judge—barring skin color, and a few ninetyish wrinkles he would surely live to acquire—might be Felix’s own grandfather. Above all, it was in the head and the posture, and the size—though this man was by birth what his grandfather had shrunk to. On state occasions, his grandfather had worn an out-of-style jacket, with much the same, comfortable breadth at the lapels. This man’s hand, small but not shrunken, pouted on the head of his cane, in the same way rejecting it. But he Felix Krupong, couldn’t believe Blount’s gossip about him. Not after knowing his own grandfather. For the very same reason, he would believe almost anything else.

  At his elbow, he heard Blount say, “Don’t see the children, Simon. But I suppose these days, they’re anywhere. All the same these days, isn’t it all the same under the tsetse fly!”

  9. Dinners with God and Man

  June 1951

  AUSTIN FENNO’S PATERNAL GRANDFATHER, until recently still surviving on in a house in Wiscasset, Maine, where he broke the ice on the pitcher half the mornings of the year, had been a minister-reformer and formidable diner-out for his own causes, to the end of his life still fond of haranguing any family gathering which had steeled itself to “having Father Fenno,” on the text. “The meal is the parable of society.” This most famous of his many sermons had exhaustively probed all the variations of breaking bread, from the more intimate breakfast trays and peasant gobblings to the banquets of kings and episcopals—and all with the usual wealth of classical allusion, interspersed as the years and dinners went by, with really rather sharp homily from what increasingly appeared to be a worrisomely modern mind. Since Father Fenno’s own father, the great-grandfather, had been missionary to China and other places then far, the discourse was chock-full too of those foreign details which had been the romance of pre-airplane generations; indeed, Austin’s father had told him that the sermon’s sub rosa name among the minister’s own children had been “Food in Many Lands.” Delivered in full, like an extended carminative grace, of a Sunday morning in the old days, Dinners with God and Man must have sent home the old man’s parishioners roaring hungry for a roast without any moral significance whatsoever. Over the years, as the number of courses in a family meal had declined from the Victorian to the dietetic, the most senior Fenno had become resigned to spooning out the sermon to his progeny in as many small sections of it as he could get down them—like a nurse feeding children whose mouths were otherwise open—before their attention got back to what he was doing and the meal in any case ended. On his more recent visits to Fennos in Manhattan, Glen Cove, Guilford, Williamstown, or any of the other places where Fennos typically scattered, the old campaigner had even been caught adding so-called anthropological details to titillate them; certainly the sexual significance of suckling, or the premastication of love offerings between Hindu newlyweds, could never have been in the original version. For by then, no living Fenno had ever heard it all.

  But to the clan’s surprise, Dinners with God and Man; or, Meals As Parable, when its author’s one precious steel-penned manuscript of some forty-nine pages was borrowed for an honorary publication on his ninetieth birthday, had been found to contain all these allusions too and more; its author, in addition to other causes espoused, had been a just barely not too scandalously early follower of Darwin—and more. Privately printed, the pamphlet might yet become an item for cognoscenti, in the same way that Austin’s music-buff friends collected a concert recording by a rich amateur soprano of parts—some missing. As with Mrs. Jenkins’s colossal swoopings (where one heard the sublime in the very notes avoided), there was something remarkable in hearing in the language of Emerson, Macaulay and two lady poets named Hemans and Ingelow—but always under the aegis of God himself and his disciple Fenno—an entirely verifiable account of tapeworm travel.

  Otherwise, disclosure had been a miscalculated blow to the balance of the old man’s dinners, throughout which, until he died—and against all daughter-in-law effort to exploit him for visitors: “Do, Father Fenno, give us the part on Table Talk, Tête-à-Tête and the Divine Monologue—the old man had remained glum. He was too intelligent to allow his share of the clan’s power to be made into mere vaudeville. No Fenno of the blood—the pamphlet had been a project of wives—would ever have asked.

  “It all ought to have been kept private,” the old man said pitifully, but ministerially strong on his future past imperfects or whatever they were, even now. “In January, it’ll have been a year that I sh’ll’ve wished I mought never’ve let it out,” he said to Austin, whose favorite elder he was, on one of their last icy mornings. “Should have been kept to the family. There was nothing to it any more, without me.”

  For a
true Fenno intelligence prided itself, most on its self-awareness—more of a clan instinct than a personal insight—of what it wasn’t. Austin himself, the old man’s direct descendant, knew for instance that by and large Fennos hadn’t the nervous tissue to be artists, or the emotional intensity of their Jewish friends; when a Fenno had money, he tended to become an enlightened patron of both; when he hadn’t, he and his sons went to be ministers, doctors or other servants of the populace. Often, like Austin’s own father, Warren, they were in the highest sense mercantiles of the moral good. And of the median. In the performance of this, they often married sidewise into sterner dedications or odder clans; Austin’s own Quakerism came to him via his mother. Back in the eighteenth century there’d been an authenticated Indian—and an unproven Jewess, of whom they should’ve like to’ve been proud. Physically, in the matter of ships and seas and good Hudson Bay furs, they had been pioneering enough. The family fortunes had often been high, and never fell to creature-comfort poor—in this they honestly preferred temperance too. Otherwise, they were downright ascetic, stuffy or sensible, as you cared to look at it—but they were almost never too intelligent for their own good. And as with Austin, “by and large,” for Fennos usually included the Fenno who observed it.

  Many a Fenno, if he was tempted to exceed his tissues (Austin had observed)—why, his own instinct held him back! When it didn’t, the clan did, even if this took till the member was ninety. As Austin regarded his grandfather, he could wonder whether this hadn’t happened to him even earlier—there had been other remarkable things in the pamphlet, none of them to do with sex or worms.

  “James,” said Austin that Maine morning, “those last parts of Dinner with God—whyn’t you ever give them to the family before, until now?”

  The old man’s neck cords were what held the gaze now, extraordinary flying buttresses which held up the chin and the great flapping ears, lobed slightly to windward, of the long-lived. One of the cords flickered now, at this young man who could address him, the nonagenarian, as a coeval, and without insult. Austin had always had that faculty with his elders; the best Fennos did; it came of manners all round.

  “Warn’t old enough,” said James. If his small face, long gone impassive, gave a sense of oracle to anything he said, he couldn’t help it.

  “You or us?” said Austin. He had a delightful casualness with other people’s enigmas—a better part of his averageness, too.

  “Both.” James let this sink in, unexpressively. But his honesty wouldn’t let him take oracular advantage of it. “Go on,” he said. “Go on and ask me. What I can see clarifiedly enough you’ll’ve been wanting to ask.” His English trembled a little these days on the sublimer edge of wrong, or of antiquity. “You’re the only one I could see give it a thought. And I ought not be here, if you get back.” He gave a swallow, defiantly honest also.

  On Austin’s almost naked head, already shaven for Korea, the old man’s “if” settled like a late fly. “OK, then. In those days when you wrote it. When you had the St. Margaret’s parish. You ever deliver it in full—to them?”

  The answer had been no, of course not; James had had the sense never to deliver the thing in full anywhere. As for the clan’s suspecting this, Austin’s own father, Warren, had put the question in his mind. And when the late James’s long-gone action was reported to him—in a midnight father-and-son whisky-soda after the funeral—Warren had thoroughly approved, without any doubt in his mind that Austin did also. Toasting the departed, they’d not even needed to reassure themselves that James’s eight young children at the time, and lack of other competence than the property in Wiscasset, had had nothing to do with his caution; the family had never lacked the courage of its views. Austin, though as a pacifist Quaker exempt from direct military service, was on the eve of going straight into the carnage, not to kill, never, but in service to other people’s ill-got, unpacific wounds. If he died, the family wouldn’t see him as a martyr—not that they couldn’t see that martyrdom had had its point down the ages!—but out of a real humility which saw that it was inappropriate to them.

  “Deliver the speech in full? It would not really have been useful,” Warren said.

  So there’d been no harm, in the end, in James the maverick; at ninety it was even pridefully allowed—and surely at ninety-three and dead. “Quite a vogue for those pamphlets,” said Warren; “family’s had all kinds of requests. Not sure I approve of the spirit of the demand. Best we send the balance of them to the Historical Society up there. Let them take any profit in it.”

  What the Fennos knew they weren’t, excellently preserved what they were. And certainly it was typically Fenno of Austin, that one’s thoughts approached him first through other Fennos—since his own were likely to do the same.

  Now returned from Korea to the luxury of dinners, Austin, going north on a Madison Avenue bus, was thinking of the pamphlet and these other matters also. Private thought hadn’t been much allowed him this past year, even though he had been in Asia, once the hub of it. He was aware that others in the bus were obviously perplexed by his minimal uniform—the blue-black serge and silver insignia which gave such specialists as he just enough identity—above an enemy’s and below a padre’s—not to be killed by their friends for it. His “civilian” clothes were now sized too small for him. Even in this uniform, to the world and its buses he supposed he was in civvies still—which bothered him not at all.

  As for James’s pamphlet, and James’s life also, by now it must be a harmless part of the family mortise, moldering up there on the Historical Society’s shelf. In his own two days at home, James had been mentioned only once, in entirely another connection. Gone to family mortise—there was so much of it! But now. once again on the way to a civilized dinner party—and to the Mannixes—he could hear James’s voice, taking clan privilege, the night Austin, en route to ski, had brought brother and sister both and Walter too to stay overnight at the grandfather’s house. “Like the girl, don’t you, boy? Oh, I know you’re just friends. But you like her. Now, that could be—ponderful.”

  He knew now what the Mannixes were to him. During his year out of their world and his, the whole public artillery of the world’s misery had been turned on for his benefit. So that he’d remember, when he got home to Murray Hill and turned on a light bulb or a faucet, that somewhere on other sides of the world children’s flesh still exploded in fireworks, water puddles were lakes of brain—and around him and them were still the incommunicable nets of star. He’d remember. Some sermons last. More especially, when one has been taught them beforehand. But what he’d brought home for himself—like a vial of teardrops held aloft in the sea of charitableness—was a sense of what personal suffering might be, to those whose nerves were more naturally kin and heir to it. Such a sense went against his grain—and was the more precious to it. For he knew that he was constructed to an emotional largeness which trained with difficulty on problems beneath the skin.

  Why, even on that august field of international relief where his father served so well, there was always some little tribal pebble which resisted the good plow—grind me down ye shall not! He remembered evenings when his father, thumbs locked behind him, gloomed moodily in front of the fireplace, unable to see why such a pebble, after one so dutifully washed and tended it, should still bleed. He himself didn’t yet understand that other world of feeling, unsure whether he ever would. But he was able to imagine it now. Long ago, a quality in the Mannixes had drawn him to them; now, home from the wars, he could begin to identify it.

  Practically, he was still hardheaded enough to suspect that this came of his being among those Protestants who very probably romanticized Jews, particularly the ones they knew. In his own family there was already a tradition of it. His mother liked to recount—often to the friends in question—how his little imp of a sister, home from a party where all were large-eyed and red-lipped and boisterously changeable, none like herself flatly blond, open and serviceable—and where family life was pl
ayed more fife-and-drum than harmonium, and more solo—had wailed, “Why can’t I be Jewish too!” He didn’t want that. Certainly their complication attracted him, all the more because it too, like his own so different character, took its place within a clan. Watching David Mannix, he saw that David wanted to save the world not merely because deafness might have taught him that others suffer, not like Austin because first and foremost it was right, but because otherwise, it wasn’t bearable—to bleed too. In this, David was more selfish than himself. And watching the Judge (as much as any young boy-to-man flying in and out of that house had had chance to), any Fenno could see, the way a practiced banker saw the man at his desk in some recognizable shape of credit, that the Judge, for all his language, stuttered over action. Fennos bounced on, never straining at gnats. Yet the Judge, a boy could see, could go beyond them. Never stirring from his seat, he would swallow a camel, and manage it. By being—Austin now suspected—more personal about it than any Fenno would ever dare.