New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  That must have been what he had been watching them for all these years—the way some of his own cousins watched artists, not to be them but to have them, for how they worked—like those awesome Swiss timepieces, signed by the master himself, whose dials opened like lips, on all their innards exposed. Whether the Mannixes were as they were entirely on their own, or the quality he saw was really part of their Jewishness, he couldn’t say; they were not only the Jews he knew best, but aside from his own people, the family he knew best. And if he romanticized them, he was scarcely to be blamed for it. He hadn’t chosen to. As artists of the consciousness, they—or the Jews—had chosen themselves. And conscience—quite another thing, it seemed to him—was only part of it.

  Two girls in blue school uniforms opposite were clearly talking about him, almost but not quite vulgarly giggling. They looked like his sisters. No doubt they found his looks reassuring. He looked like them. Their mothers needn’t worry that they’d think too much. He’d never seen his looks so clearly as in the two days he’d been back in the family house—almost as if he himself could see the median outline of the mold he and they’d been made in, running from high forehead, between level eyes, down the straight nose, chiseled lips and squared chin.

  “I beg your pardon,” said the more forward of the girls—“your uniform—what is it?” Her well-bred speech said how all right this sort of thing was between them. She’d guessed right, of course—his accent was exactly like her own.

  “Mainly a kind of Quaker unit.” Small, recently organized, for medical services modestly called extra-hospital, limitedly open to other nationals who would do anything on a battlefield except fight on it—and as hard to stay alive in as a team of brigands. Though he didn’t say any of this, he thought she got it, already used to this sort of clue.

  “But not the Field Service, the Ambulance?” said the other girl.

  “No, not organized by the Americans, though we can belong.”

  “I thought it wasn’t,” said this shyer, second girl. “My brother…is…in the Field Service.” Her eyes filled with tears.

  “Taken prisoner,” said the first girl quickly. “We’re sure of it.”

  “They don’t—” she checked almost as quickly. “I’m sure of it too,” he said, and smiled. The pair of them, especially the one with the brother, were a lot like his first girl at that age, and both of them, when they got to college, would be like the girls he had then. His only girl they didn’t resemble at all was the Korean one—and he wouldn’t get into that again. Sex for him shouldn’t be that much connected with one’s other pities. Or with a hopelessly foreign, stick-like devotion—of such tenacity without hope that it had quietly taken itself off before he knew he wanted it to. He couldn’t say he hadn’t enjoyed what he would never in this world call “going native.” But it was why he had requested leave. It was possible to say that he’d been drawn into the affair all the easier because of wanting something else—Ruth and he had gone on exchanging letters of a sort all the twelve years of his friendship with her brother.

  “What’s your brother’s name?” he said.

  “John Carter Tolliver.”

  “Johnny Tolliver? From Atlanta? Why, I—”

  “I thought you were—” said the second girl.

  “We thought you were—” said the first.

  He finished third: “—was at school with him. We used to—”

  “I remembered you,” said his sister. “From his graduation.” She blushed.

  “What’s his outfit?”

  She told him. No prisoners would have been taken, where Tolliver was. Not now.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “He got married. To some town girl, up there at school?” And went into the navy, I thought. No, that was Yortchley.

  “Oh no, that blew over,” said Tolliver’s sister, in her soft Southern. “Papa said chickapenny-boo to that. And Jon-nuh went off to Princeton like a lamb. But then he did get engaged.”

  “To my older sister,” said the first girl.

  “To her sister.” Tolliver’s sister’s eyes filled again.

  It was some blocks from his stop, but he pulled the cord anyway. All too much of a capsule, Tolliver’s life. Whom he’d been mistaken for, now and then. Though there had been at least ten others who had looked just as like. “Good-bye—what’s your name? Jane.” And the sister, with her sweetly curved, sorrowful lips? “Susan. Goodbye. My best to you both. Best.” She’d known him once. All the way from his prep school graduation, when she couldn’t have been more than a kid. Maybe that was the answer—and the danger—to other possibilities he’d been thinking of. The clan—knew the clan.

  Eight o’clock, but since Anna had put dinner ahead, he wouldn’t be late: he still had time for a walk at a clip. Warren, his father, and many of his colleagues—the executives—walked to the office for health; it was the hoi polloi, heavy on starch—and on distances of course—who rode. Fenno Juniors walked because their fathers did, and if away at school, because the stauncher prep schools forbade cars or even bikes, except for day boys. The mothers took more taxis than the men, but often came in saying, “God, it was lovely—and I had so many errands—I must have walked forty blocks—in these heels!” The men took taxis when they were with the women, or with business outside the firm. And none of this had anything to do with having the fare.

  As he walked, Austin began to laugh; he had forgotten so much of this; his clan had its subtleties after all—or niceties. And he would bet that this girl, not the Southern girl (hers would be another style, which he knew equally well) but the New York girl, had a family that did just the same. Others in that same uniform, of course, might be anything from chauffeured Cadillac down, even—in other accents or these days in other colors, in a case or two—poor. But not that girl, he could tell; she came of that indefinable line, so exact to themselves, where comfort crossed wealth but didn’t quite reach it, seesawing sometimes up or even far down as in the 1930s, but almost never taking a complete fall. So did the Mannixes. But Jane Whatshername already had the recognizable “line” of her sort, in which, from bus stop to cotillion, she would be able to talk to all and any men of any age—who could talk it back.

  Ruth Mannix’s line was—personal. In his pocket he had her London card, picked up from the mail tray when he left. Mailed three days ago, it was typical. “Come to dinner. We’ll all be home, it seems. The boys are here, and bringing me back. I’ve been offered a year’s tour, incidentally”—here cities were listed—“and hope to accept. We’ll see. Welcome home anyway. Love. Ruth.” Nothing indiscreet, ever. “The boys” more than anything made him feel far off; it had used to mean himself as well. He could still smell that crayony, nursery-tea atmosphere, hear that gym-sweat noise and lesson-cackling, outside of which, tactfully off center, surprisingly welcomed intermediary—to what?—Ruth had used to wait. Or preside. Possessor of a face quietly left vulnerable to memory, she was still a little hard to see. Was she as alive, quivering too, as over the many months and a few letters he had come to think? “Lovely little girl,” James had said when further queried. “Yes. I can see you and she are—friends.” Long before that it had come to seem to Austin that Ruth, like a prisoner whose form was defined by the bars, was limned in the loving forces which silently intersected and held her—fixed? They loved her. A friend saw the spaces between.

  Warren, his father, chancing to pick up Anna’s call when it came in, had handed it over to him; since the age of sixteen, Austin’s affairs had been considered private to him—and expectantly blameless of course. All the more surprising then, when he put down the phone, to see his father still hovering near.

  “How is old Mannix these day?” said his father.

  “Well—I hardly—” It was only his third night home. He hadn’t yet been anywhere else. “—I suppose he might be old, by this time.”

  His father’s long, clean mouth moved at a corner. “When I came home, in ’19, it felt as if the century’d already changed agai
n, before it even had a chance to get started. Expect it had.” Silent at the fireside, his father locked thumbs behind himself. “Moling said only the other day, the Law School’d given Mannix an office up there.” Moling was the figurehead at the foundation where his father was the working associate, and Moling was a trustee of that law school. “If Mannix would make half a move, Moling said. They still expect him to do something more.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, he was mentioned for the presidency one time, I think, but it was quashed. By himself, I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Of the country?”

  “Good God no. The university. And I wouldn’t blame him, if he did. They need a money-getter, not a—senator.” His father gave it the Latin pronunciation, and the Roman meaning. His father had had Dr. Brace too. “No, I don’t think—government—somehow. I don’t think they know what they expect of him. His only political or public life’s been in the courts.”

  “‘The thing a politician must remember,’” said Austin, in the pontifical voice of quotation, though the Judge hadn’t used that tone, “‘is that every citizen is searching. Maybe venally. But for the fairer things in life.’”

  “Eh?”

  “‘To quote a judge.’”

  “Him?”

  “He always says ‘to quote’ et cetera. I think it’s him.”

  “The foundation dinner! We had him for honorary speaker—and there were things he said…You’re right. I remember several of us said later, ‘Which judge do you suppose he was quoting there—Holmes?’ Nobody knew exactly, or wanted to ask. Certainly none of the legal men there.” His father coughed, his only form of criticism. An absurdly sweet-tempered man, almost as addicted to plain living—within the urban frame his lifework necessitated—as James, he had one helpful luxury, his “more in sorrow than in anger” attitude toward those who worked only for themselves. One couldn’t call it contempt, it was so benign.

  “Well, maybe if he spread those quotes around long enough, they’ll think of him for the courts again.” He saw all the dinners-at-the-Mannixes in his life, as in that game where one sat in front of a small mirror with a larger mirror behind one—to catch destiny. One’s own, but why not somebody else’s? What things a year away did for one—even on battlefields not one’s own. “For the Court,” he said. “Yes, that would be in his mind, if anything.”

  “Aussie!” His father’s mouth turned up at both ends. “Maybe you ought to go into politics.” But his father had no fears; they both knew that public service of another sort was in his blood—and in his reach. The foundation’s London office had been spoken of for him, when he came back for good. This wasn’t nepotism. At a very early age his father had begun talking to him like this—as if to a degree he must be taught the workings of power, but only to use it in the service of public pity. Other people hadn’t much wanted jobs like that until now—at least not in their world. The ones down under hadn’t known about them. Or if on the way up, would stay a mile away, as too recently charity’s recipient. He couldn’t see Edwin Halecsy wanting such a job, even now.

  “Well, well,” said his father. “Wonder what Moling will think of that. Must make a mention of it.”

  The fire on the hearth might have been burning, instead of dank with house-enclosed June air behind its pleated black paper fan; they were so silent in front of it.

  “I suppose the London job—” said Austin. “These days, I may have to run for it.”

  “Every Tom, Dick and Harry who’s had a course in ‘public administration.’ That’s what they’re calling it. Never thought I’d see the day where my humble efforts to lighten the misery in the world would come so in style. Got a tweedy young social worker in my office right now, put there to tell me what my principles ought to be on it.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s what we’ve always wanted,” said Austin. “To have the whole world concerned. To have our work spread. Haven’t we?”

  What he wanted as well was a London flat for a London marriage, flat hard by Covent Garden, or wherever that ballet outfit hung out. Jane Whatshername would have understood it perfectly, that although marriages were no longer for convenience, the ability to make them conveniently often had much to do with their being made at all.

  His father had given him a typically careful Fenno answer. “Oh, you needn’t worry, Aussie. It’ll come out all right.”

  Then he’d teetered on his toes, giving the old library—with its porridge paper, greenish bookshelves, bleary vases, and rugs that still smelled of 1870 wedding-trip camel and had never been Bokhara—a smile of inherited love. “Notice any change about the old place?”

  At first he hadn’t. The bookshelves, like the rest of the house, looked faintly dirty, but on testing with a finger would be found to be quite clean—which came of having one inherited domestic and half another. The books were good, in a narrow range which did not favor the present. Nothing in the room was at all valuable; anything precious in it had been made so by dead tastes. The fan in the fireplace, made by the imp, his youngest sister, was new. Upstairs there were two more floors much the same, and one below. It was a hard-worn place, but in spite of its lost colors, almost always one of good cheer, made up of innocent toastings in corners, bedrooms always being redecorated in cheap chintz by a sister with Christmas money, or being formed into cells of baseball lore by a grade-school boy. It had never had much time for nostalgia; his five younger brothers and sisters had seen to that.

  “Not much,” he said. “No—wait.” Faucets. “You’ve fixed over the hall bath!”

  “Well—” said his father, looking ashamed, as was proper, but squirely too. “It was a violation of the building laws, you know. Those lavatories without air shafts.”

  So it was. And had been, ever since before he was born.

  “And there’s a new icebox, I’m afraid. Lutie insisted. And Lutie’s got her granddaughter to help her—your mother insisted on that.”

  There were doubtless further mild innovations which would be broken to him little by little by the others, who were always harboring ideas for just such waves of affluence; he had done it himself. Whatever it had been, he had never got it—almost no one ever did. And a good thing too. They’d benefited from all the thriftier instructions of the imagination, yet when they grew up, had this house to come back to. In which the top floor had not been made into either a puppet theatre or a basketball court.

  “I saw her.” There’d been a Fenno family dinner. “But I thought she was just for the night.”

  His father was peering sidewise at him; in the guilty style of such times.

  “Papa,” said Austin. Who died?”

  His father shook his head at him. Nobody new had died then, in the family, while he’d been away; at the dinner he’d have heard of it anyway. Then his father burst out laughing, delighted at Austin’s recall of an old family joke.

  “Incredible,” said Warren Fenno, more suitably solemn. “Incredible.”

  So it had been James, then. As everyone had expected. And from James’s style of living—which could never otherwise have been quite so Spartan yet hospitable—had had every right to expect.

  “Absolutely incredible. We had no idea.”

  They never did. Weren’t supposed to, when an inheritance was so obviously near. When it was a good way off, properties might be talked about—in terms of interests and mortgages—because of the need for the young to be trained in the responsibilities of how real property had to be gone about if they ever had any. And sometimes, though more rarely and vaguely, money to come might be spoken of, for a crasser knowledge of this was needed these days too. But, like mourning crepe prematurely worn, they all assumed a black ignorance of anything on its way to them, the nearer it fell due.

  “Fifty thousand,” said his father. “After the fund to take care of the museum and so forth.”

  “In toto?” Somehow, he would have thought it would be more. James had been so canny.

  “Good Go
d, no,” said Warren, truly shocked. “To you.”

  “To—me? But what about the others?” He thought of them before himself; this was one of the things of which he hadn’t needed to be aware.

  His father was smiling. “Your share of the residue. As the oldest. The others each get a little less. In time.”

  “And you and mother?”

  His father hung his head. “I’m afraid—it’s going to mean pret’ near three-quarters of a million.” And he meant exactly what he said.

  Austin stood still. Money made one smile. He was no hypocrite.

  “Poor Mother,” he said after a moment. “She’s going to have to stop her Woman’s Exchange way she says, ‘Well, of course they’re rich.’”

  His father grinned. “Oh no, she won’t. She’ll say what three-quarters of a million says of one million or more, ‘Well, of course they’re rich.’”

  “Will it make a hash at your job?”

  “Not any more. When you were a boy, it might’ve—they used to think a man with a competence wouldn’t work hard enough. Or ought to work for nothing. Now they like it if you can afford to be what they call ‘disinterested.’”

  “Mmm.”

  “Mmm. You know, Austin—might make just the difference for you on London too. Though we’d have to make thoroughly clear to them here that you’d want to know they felt you were the best man anyway—as you are. They’d have to reassure us of that.”

  It was conversation any member of the family could interpret. No inheritance Austin knew of had ever been of this size, but they would face it like any. They had their standards.

  “Means your mother and I won’t have to alter the house,” said his father. “Muss confess we were thinking of it. Top-floor apartments. Even had a builder in.”