New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  Mothers were awarded silences too, in this crowd. But shorter.

  “Oh, I did?” said the hunchback, with such unease that Casper turned to look at him. Neither young man was looking at the girl. And she? She sat with peculiar stiffness. As if she wasn’t looking at herself.

  “Will we get there for dinner?” said Walter. What distress, from cheekbones that didn’t look as if he bothered with one dinner out of three!

  And the deaf one said, “Oh look. Here comes God again.” Several seats around tittered, as the pilot began his royal way. The young passenger had miscalculated his own loudness, as the deaf do. Or had he?

  Casper got up. “Sorry,” he said to the girl, as he worked his way past her. He knew what it was like out there, where she was. “I go to meet my captain.” Who doesn’t know that I have a second bottle.

  “Wonder who’s he coming for now?” said the deaf one, oblivious. Casper, felt, rather than heard, the girl’s tense Shhhh behind him.

  Casper reached down and tapped her brother’s black box. “Wash-rooms lead lives of quiet desperation,” he said. “Does it know?”

  He stayed there until somebody knocked. When he came out, the strophes were riding, riding, and the corridor too, in great humps of mul-ultitudinous…carpet. This was the way to get over the rim—if you had no swimming pool. He paused at the head of the aisle. Royally.

  Beautiful nihilists, those three down there, those plastic-lovers with their own cheeks still fleshly shining, hot and organic as peaches on the dead sideboard of the world. But young and kind before everything. They were disposed to be friendly. He could see that. Also their faces, if he gave them his card. My name is Friend—story of my life. No, too neat for the tear glands. Besides, the plane was too near New York now. Had he told them everything? But he had her telephone number, if he ever needed it. She would listen without guilt. Like me.

  He nodded from side to side, mandarin. Last trip out, he’d crossed in a double seat, next to a man reading from a book printed in some unknown Oriental script. The man had had a large nose inhabited by a tic. At intervals, nose and upper lip screwed toward the heavens in revulsion, but though all across the Pacific the man spoke steadily of his own life, Casper could never find the connection between tic and what was said. That time, Casper had shared the man’s bottle, a large one of Very Old Sun Tory Japanese whisky, brought out at once. He never learned the name of book or man. But he remembered the man’s life as if it were his own. The ocean, seen from above, must be scored with these trajectories, every wave peopled with character explaining itself, preparing for the silent vise of home.

  The important thing was—not to mumble. One doesn’t mumble Shakespeare. Had he been sure to speak loudly enough to those three in the seat—life companions forevermore? Had they got what he said to the black box? Or had he been mumbling all along?

  He stopped in the aisle, just ahead of their seats. They had changed things round. The girl was now in the windowseat, then her brother, then their friend. The aisled seat on the end was ready for him. Had they done it for the girl, or against him? “I’m sorry,” he made his gaze say to her. “If I leaned on your shoulder, I would do it from choice.”

  She smiled up at him, this observer whose handicap he recognized. She was an ordinary girl, plunged in the Shakespearean ocean of life like any other. What had taken from her the power not to understand?

  A passing stewardess, no older than this girl, frowned at him to sit down and fasten his seat belt, but he wasn’t going to have this moment taken from him—in which his trip united with his life. This was the real trip.

  He leaned across the seat and spoke, this time he knew for sure aloud. They and he would remember each other forever. The plane lifted, surging on his strophes, borne upward by garlands of glowworm into the ever-expanding dark—forward into port, into the time when he too would be young.

  But somehow, one didn’t speak to a person like her directly.

  “She does even better than me,” he said clearly, and held out his bleeding wrists to her. “She listens without guilt for any of us. Does she know?”

  11. The Honest Room

  June 1951

  ENTER THE DINING-PLACE of a house and the family story begins, pastorale or head-horror, but out of the dogshit of the streets. Home as sinecure didn’t end with the revolution—which revolution? Only a family at table can ask that; here gather all the secret conversatives of life. I, Simon, know this.

  You Edwin, of no family table, you Leni, naiad of the bathroom, know it. Blount, meet yourself coming and going, but you know of a kitchen table where all your safari began. Austin, this oval table here, eaten at so often, is only the reverse of a long medal, isn’t it, the Jewish side of the communion wafer, close as a lion to its victim—this, your other home. Mr. Krupong you are black, and first of your generation to be named Felix, but your grandfather is here, isn’t he, under those broad lapels the same cannibal flesh! Dear Ninon, Venus Callipygian of the small, steel buttocks, where was your table really, the one that was never on the Ile St. Louis?…The room knows this.

  Grace is always spoken by someone in these places, by an elder who may never say a live word:

  …In the eye of the whirlwind, eat home broth once a day. That was Meyer Mendes, builder of this house.

  …Use your first name at this table, Dan Blount, respect answers, not questions.

  …Go to England, grandson; one pod of cocoa was enough for Tettah Quashie; one pod and a blacksmith brought our farms to us, from Fernando Po.

  …The meal is the parable; no living member has ever heard it all.

  …Fathers wave the palm of opinion here, Simon, mother cutting with her manicure scissors at his broad leaf. Mine was Hungarian. He knew my mother, according to the oldest testament. She kept our tools safe from roaches, in a tin box. The rats are always outside—even with us.

  …Childhoods collect here, Edwin. In farina and short sentences, we teach you nothing wrong here; outside is the dogshit, don’t bring in any on your shoe. Oh my children of the airplane, fly home safe—and drop like Icarus, on this collection plate.

  “Everybody’s family here,” said the Judge. “Leni, at last you’re with us, you sit here on my right. Ninon, my dear Ninon, on my other side. How long since you two have seen each other? Next to Ninon, of course Pauli—you three have so much to catch up on. Next to Leni…why—Austin. How good to have you here again, Austin. Welcome home, boy. …Mr. Krupong, will you take the chair next to Austin…you’ll find his father has been in your country many times. And our mutual friend opposite you…Dan, on Pauli’s left please; Pauli, tell him about that palace in Vienna where the architect forgot the bathrooms—if he doesn’t already know. …And Edwin, I’ve been saving you for…Anna, since we’re not going to wait dinner for those three, perhaps remove their plates—yes, that’s better. …Here we are then. Ninon, Pauli, Blount. Leni, Austin, Krupong…And Edwin…at the other end. It’s not the foot. Opposite me.”

  And unbidden guests arrive without warning at any time between gong and coffee, drawn out of their graves to the plate that is never set for them, never lifted away.

  (I shan’t do over the dining-room, Simon. Black holland covers on the Jacobean, gravy-brown wood and vanilla white. It’s been that way from the beginning; they’d turn over in their graves. So I’ll leave it as is; I know when I’m beat. It’s an honest room; I’ll say that for it.)

  “We’ve never changed this room,” said the Judge, sitting down.

  (Seating and setting, Anna, said Mirriam, that’s all I’ll ever do about dinners here. Hire a flock of helpers, if you want. Or have caterers in. But the people and the flowers are all I’ll do. I’ll expect you to take care of the rest.)

  Mirriam, how you neutered people. The flowers were your allies, swarming in corners, offering flowers for the animal in us to lift a leg at, splitting the house safety with a liana of green, transfusing our minds to the yellow, jaundiced rain of autumn, outside. Yet you were
such an urban woman. Stay upstairs! Anna does the flowers now.

  “Why, it’s an English-basement house, Simon, isn’t it, with the dining-room below street. Like mine.”

  “You have a house, Ninon?” said Leni. …She has everything she wants, one can see. And she wants it; she’s no American fool; she’s like Pauli and me. “Ah, what happiness.” And maybe, visits from us.

  “Half belongs to the ballet, really. You know how it is, Leni. The choreographer always has a garret. To be sick in, and nursed. You don’t know Rupert—but they’re all the same. Then there’s always some stray girl down with something—usually love. Second floor’s for meetings, all projectors and files. We’ve very modern, now that we’re nationalized.”

  “No room—for husbands?”

  “Now girls, girls.” Pauli rubbed his elegant hands, delighted. “I’ll have to be stage manager again; I see it.”

  “Ah, Leni, you were a prima before me.” Madame’s décolletage sparkled, but lacy as it was, her toilette had the solidity of their profession; that hair ornament would ride every tour-jété of the evening. “You do everything ahead of me.”

  “You were never a prima, my dear.”

  “But Leni, she is going to be a Dame.”

  Leni’s eyelashes cast themselves up, two sets of them. “What titles, the English.”

  Nearest Pauli, Ninon’s left glove had its fingers tucked back into its opera opening, for eating, but wisely covered elbow and upper arm where he knew she had those veins; she would still be no bigger than a mosquito in bed. Now she fluttered the hand at Leni. As of old, her double ring joined second and middle finger, but the fourth was beautifully bare.

  And would remain so. “What a glorious acid-green you’re wearing, Leni chérie.”…And how exquisitely I can still lie—I ought to do it more often, such fun. But she does have a good corset on. Anyway, I’ve made them all recall now—that I am French. …

  “You don’t have the little studio any more, Ninon, behind the Strand?”…Her perfume was the same, or to the same purpose, the only cloudiness about her. …Let those two hear him, he didn’t care.

  “Oh, that was just for the war. A tiny house now, Simon.” She made it sound like an assignation. “On Clipstone Street.”

  People’s houses so often sounded like them. When Edwin himself first came here, his confusion was all visual. Now the room, long since settled as to its objects, resounded with echoes; maybe a family never heard its own. They weren’t as musical here as he’d thought; they’d merely inherited musical interests, along with the money on which he supposed this house lived. …If I am offered a salary—must I take it? They’ll make me a sensitive hero, yet. But I always have my reservoir. …

  The foot of the table had no women to tuck in. Austin had gotten the old vampire-bag under the table with all her skirts as simply as if she came greased for it. Women would, with Austin, down to the slit. …In the bar, the spoiled priest speaks from painted nose, while Edwin and his mother scrub the taps. “Keeps the rats down and blessed, boy, does the alcohol; even priests use it. But if woman-slut is your trouble, I know naught else that will do.”…

  “Never thought of this room as a basement before,” said Edwin. His military stance had attracted the eyes of the others for a moment. He had been the last to sit down.

  “Nothing for the table like white damask, is there, Ninon,” said the old bag in green eye shadow.

  “Nothing,” said Madame. Leni’s dress, slashed here and there for the gold lining to show through like tarnished skin, made her laugh; it was so much an old-style Viennese dressmaker’s concept of sex—plenty of handwork, to draw the eye in. But she agreed on the damask. Damask was what would have been had in servants’ quarters on the Ile St. Louis, of a Sunday. Upstairs, seen from below-stairs in a certain rectory in Islington, it was what they had had.

  The two old girls down there at the host’s end were nodding like two peddler-wives on Grand Street. The lacy one looked down the table at him. Queen Mab on wires she was, even at sixty or so, pink all over as that nose, he’d bet—on every pointed end of her, a dancing sex.

  “Nothing like a white table,” Madame repeated, staring down the length of it. That young man with a suspicion of snout in the face, what possessed Simon to have him here? She could smell the slum ragout he’d been nourished on a mile away. Something non-aristocratic too in the hairline at the back of the neck, where it always told. Nobody could tell breeding better than she learning it at the start as she had, in the place where it bred.

  She smiled across-table at the other young man, in official blue, dowdy, but still a uniform. His extreme good looks were racially impersonal, with the same handed-down air which kept the right sort of clothes from ever looking new. She was surprised to find the type in America. In bed he would be adequate, even hot, but to topple over the last edge of excess was unlikely for these guardians of the seed; in bed he would be a heavy-flanked breeder, the slightest bit too considerate. …Thank God, at sixty-two, but with all organs intact, I can still think of bed. I never really was a dancer. Whores make the best executives. …

  “How very charming,” said the black man to his half-grapefruit. “Like a clown with a red nose.”

  At every place, a sawtoothed half-grapefruit, mounted with sugar and a maraschino cherry, sat on its concentric pedestal of plate and service plate, making a consciously festive ring around the table, outside an inner circle of huge, coned napkins, starched stiffly enough to stand.

  “These napkins!” said Pauli. “One gets them nowhere else.”

  “How does she ever starch them?” said Blount. “Would that she could give the secret to the laundresses of the world!”…Starched to stand, yet silky to the lips; my mother used to do it. …

  “She?” said Leni. “Your servant?”

  The Judge made a face at his spoon. “Maraschino. My wife used to say, ‘Sherry, not cherry, Anna.’ But now she puts both. The menu is hers, I might say. And we’re not to notice her, until dessert. Till then, she thinks of herself as invisible. And won’t have help. After that point, when her crise is over, it’s permitted. She may even notice us.” As she does all along of course. Anna knows her place. …But why don’t you, why won’t you stay upstairs, why must I mention you? Because of Ninon. I’m so seldom taken by surprise. It would be good—to take…” Anna’s our housekeeper. In the family since the children were young.” The Judge noticed that his spoon was ahead of his napkin, and shook out the cone’s folds. “My father-in-law required them big. To tie round the neck. These came with the house. And that way of folding them. The children used to call them Everest.”

  “And I used to make a napkin mice for them—see,” said Pauli, whipping one out in front of Leni. Worriedly, he could see she hadn’t yet chosen her style.

  “She sounds more like a concubine, Simon,” said Madame Whatshername, Fracca, with a laugh, her smile lingering on Austin’s uniform. Taffy-haired, amazing of skin, she didn’t fascinate Austin for herself, though he’d been to dinners abroad where there were women like her, the least malicious of what was said about them being that they “kept themselves up.” He preferred women her age to be like his mother, behind her armorial satin a body fashioned only for his father in long-ago moments one didn’t think of—a woman now modern enough to dye her hair to a shade just blue enough to advise all men it was really gray. But this Madame the Mistress Royal might know how it was, how it really was—with her charge. He wouldn’t say his “beloved,” even to himself. The word smacked of Bibles given to dutiful sons by fathers; this Fenno might maverick yet. And would be the first Fenno to choose the dark city. He looked at his neighbors—in this room consecrated to middleness, bland with it as the chicken which was by the smell on the way—and wondered why he thought that.

  …Used to, used to. The air here was anaesthetized with its own legend, beautiful visits that don’t go anywhere any more, having got all that was wanted, long ago. Or what was not wanted? Surprised at itself,
the foot of the table stared at the host. But the whole world already knew merely that about him. Yet I am more intelligent than anyone he lets come to the house. …

  “A concubine?” said the Judge. “Mine?” Glancing up, he saw in the younger men’s face the barometric halt that came when any older person, hoping to be contradicted, referred to his age. … Edwin’s embarrassed, as one’s children are, by one’s sex. Is personal emotion a filth of you, Edwin? Against all Harvards, is that where you’ll always be—second-class? Or I’m a father to you, is that it? Are you dear to me—as a son?…“No, not mine,” he said aloud. “Maybe someone else’s. Edwin thinks she has a secret life.”

  Austin’s embarrassment at that, the Judge saw, was different—social. …Yes, I know one doesn’t discuss the servants. Women make us vulgar, Austin—haven’t you yet found that out?…

  The Judge’s smile at Austin made no effort to win him, and never would. … You’re not a son to me. …At the boy’s glassy coolness, he himself felt a certain withdrawal, recognizing the slight chill that came upon meeting an equal. …Is it because you’ve been to the wars and this house has never been, even in your uniform? No, we were equal even before, you and I. Don’t worry me, boy, don’t let me guess it. …Austin, Austin, what do we share?…

  Edwin turned from watching Krupong, up the table at his left, who was penciling on a memo pad some kind of diagram too sidewise for him to see it clearly. “Oh, Anna has secrets, all right,” he said, in imitation of the careless style here. “Don’t know whose.” Had he done it badly? No, the Judge’s cold stare seemed to be for Austin. Who had done nothing, in a casualness not to be imitated. …Simon—a god shouldn’t be frightened. Simon—don’t be Simon, to me. What have you let into the house, Judge Mannix? Who?…

  “Oh, this house has depths,” said Blount. “I never ask too many questions here.” He looked up, startled. “Why—it’s true. That’s why I come here. Isn’t it?”