“Misser Owstin! Oh, Misser Owstin.”
“Mr. Austin’s been in hospital, Anna,” said the Judge. “But he says he’s all right now.”
“Yah, I know.”
“You know?” said the Judge. “How?”
“Your Lutie,” she said shyly to Austin. “We go same meat market.”
Her face assumed the same holiness Lutie gave to her shibboleths of health. “Drink lots water. So near the kidney, you got to take care.”
Mannix gave a choked guffaw. “The gulls have their lanes.” He couldn’t seem to stop laughing until he blanked his face with a handkerchief. Above the white folds, his eyes were merry, or derisive, or only very sane. “See, Austin? We even eat the very same meat.”
“I guess.” Another bond, that he might sometime tell his father. Lutie must have come upon the leather brace he’d been told he might begin to discard. He could still keep to himself the pin in his hip. “If we’d had you and Lutie out there, Anna, things would have gone faster.”
Nobody believed this, least of all Anna. “Yah? And what would your mother do without her?”
Everybody smiled speciously at this terrible clarity—especially the two women, long accustomed to hear men patronize their own feminisms in the same way. Anna picked up a vase from its pedestal and turned to go.
“Indeed!” her master called after her as she departed. “And what about me.”
“Graz!” Leni got up from her chair to walk about. She halted, center stage. Forty years late, her figure, nullified to grace, held all the middle-aged negatives which made for power. The neck strengthened by a rear hump, could move forward only. The skeleton, once tortured to suppleness, now had the strong put of permanence. Under that authoritatively ugly dress her body suggested a new, heavier nymph in stone, monument to all the more important reveries of flesh. Beside her, Fracca, reclining with pointed chin on palm, lissom arm still gloved, was an annihilated girl, grace too sharply preserved. “We know about military hospitals, la, la, Pauli and I. Didn’t we meet in one?” She inserted herself between Pauli and Austin. “Our troupe came to entertain the officers, in the hospital at Graz. We were—what you might say—quarantined there.”
“I was not wounded.” Pauli might have been snapping to attention. “Only by her.”
Blount, with a large stretch, began picking all his own pockets—ready to make off. Leni, with a night-owl shrug, grasped Pauli’s arm, then Austin’s. “La, la, what we didn’t do with you, the nurses did!” Dividing her smile between the two of them, she slid her hand down Austin’s niggardly uniform, over the bare, unmedaled pocket flap, to his waist. “A man can do all right, eh, when only wounded in back.” She squeezed him too. Memory exuded from her like sweat, like sex. “No ballerinas, a nurse will do very well, eh. Legs like sticks, those Chinese girls. Pauli has pictures of the opera one…he wanted to bring her back with him but she turn him down…”
“Leni! I better take her—” Pauli was ready to give up even his worry, his Ruth.
Austin had been congratulating himself on the discovery that life at the root was never vulgar. Now Leni’s heavy arm pinioned him under another: No one was really vulgar who knew that this was so.
“In the echelons of our race, Austin—” I met my father-in-law, Meyer Mendes; is that what I really want to say?…“I’ve sometimes met your father. At a dinner only recently. We talked. He understands a good deal.” About us, the Judge was about to say, meaning to set forth how hopefully well Warren Fenno understood the conventional usages of the Jews. The quizzical smile on his face was for what Fenno wouldn’t understand (which perhaps Warren’s bright son one day would tell him). How a Jew could become competitive even about failure. And could blame his race in the bargain, just like any Quaker or communicant of St. Thomas’s, for whatever he himself was.
“About me?” said Austin.
“We always speak of you.”
“Oh?” About Korea, then. He could imagine his father worriedly seeking a Jew’s opinion about race. Austin rallied against that knowing smile—among Dr. Brace’s boys he’d been the best broken runner of his year. “In the hospital, I met someone who knew you, Judge Mannix. Said he’d met me here as a boy. I didn’t remember, myself. Afterwards he didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Oh?” The Judge’s mind was still on the elder Fenno, one of those fascinatingly dull do-gooders whose perceptions had been enlarged not through thought but by their own acts. “Your father understands about other races in the oddest way. Out of politeness, I think. For which he would die, of course. Not for the other—combatant.”
“Other? Father’s never been much in Asia.” Austin, finally released from under Leni’s arm, wanted to make amends for her, to Pauli’s silver discomfort. And through her, old unstoppered vial that she was, to Kim Yong Mai. “Come to think of it, most of my mother’s friends have legs like sticks.” Then he blushed. …I sound vulgar, when I only meant to be fair….
“What race is a Jew usually talking about? Especially when he’s talking to a Christian. But your father brought up a very subtle fact about us—that we’re not really an urban people but a desert one. Even warlike, only that circumstances. … Excuse me, did you say military hospital? Where you met this boy?”
“While I was an aide,” Austin said. “Not a patient. I was the medical aide at his—operation. Somebody addressed me by name, when he was just coming to. He said it over and over, the way they sometimes do. Later, over the dressings, he asked about you.”
“Dressings,” said Pauli. “Ah, God, I remember the smell.” He glanced all down his own perfumed tailoring, as if he understood it better. “I used to know all the boys who came to this house. What was his name?”
“No smell,” said Austin. “Aren’t given time. The antibiotics.” He scanned the dimple from the saber-cut in Pauli’s left cheek. “Did you see his name on the register—he never gave it to me.” He rubbed his temple. “But he wasn’t a boy, Mr. Chavez. He was a middle-aged man. An officer. Regular army, I’m pretty sure.”
“Tom Somers?” said the Judge. “He was at the Point when he was young. But no, I got stamps from Manila from him yesterday.”
“Don’t think this guy was ever at the Point.”
“Some old politico on the lam, maybe. War’s often providential, for some of them. He didn’t want to be known?”
“Got the impression from something he said, that he knew—Anna.”
“Anna?” When the foot trod thin ice, the foot knew first. In the same way the sensation of drowning was known to the lifelong inhabitants of dry land. “Why Anna?” And why should Austin duck his head in the prep school nod of years ago, of all David’s friends met on the stairs—that half-flinch, half-ogle which said with green-blazer irony, “Is this the great man?”
“He’d had a bad time. Almost the worst a man can have. I attended him for a week, when he was coming out of it. Every morning, until he did, he’d say it. ‘Is Mannix the champ she always said?’”
…So for that man too, far out there on his raft of war, her eyes had never really closed. …
He didn’t feel tired any more, that was the sensation of it. …I should have had them here all together before, but how was I to know?…“Not—Anna,” said the Judge.
He couldn’t say more, going from face to face. Ninon, if she guessed, wouldn’t say. Blount had clicked his tongue, but by principle could not declare.
“Who could it be?” said Pauli. “She had so many friends. Mirriam.”
“But her letters—” said the Judge—“they were all to me.”
Austin had already turned to Leni. “I thought he was Czech. Anna’s Czech, isn’t she? Now I remember. It was a name more like yours.”
“Like mine?” Leni, warmly forward, drank this like compliment “Like Petersh?”
“Something like. With a P. Not a month ago. How could I have forgotten it?” Austin rapped his chin with a clenched fist.
“He didn’t want you to remember i
t,” said the Judge.
“He was a big, blondish-gray man with good features, blue eyes, a good nose. At least he gave the impression he’d been a big man…before. The face wasn’t touched…Surely you must remember him. Someone must. He used to come here.”
“Yes,” the Judge said. “I remember him.”
“Like mine?” said Leni. “Pauli…”
“I knew you would.” Austin gave him that junior nod again.
“Did you. And what did you tell him?”
“He had asked me that question about you.” His own severity surprised him, the same irritable paternity with which Warren had sometimes spoken to his father-James. “And naturally, I—”
“You said I still was.” The compression of the Judge’s lips was both mean and proud—the sort a man adopted to say he could be modest, but wouldn’t. “The champ.”
He was rewarded. In Austin’s eyes a flicker he’d never before been able to make rise there. But there it was and for the future they both knew it. You Jew.
He turned to Ninon. “She always said that…Yes, I knew the man. Though I never really knew his name.” Now surely—barring what Ninon might tell him of Ruth—he had told everything.
Just then, there was a noise from outside in the area-way. Over the window boxes, the filmy curtains were flung aside. Two heads appeared there, golliwog, over the ruff of foliage. David, his lean body jackknifed, shoulder to shoulder with Walter, whose hump wasn’t visible. Without it, under a Raphael-thatch even touched with gray, his face was still a boy’s, too heavily lined with kindness. David had his ear-box off and was smiling, as in those snapshots which showed him between oars at the boathouse on the Charles—an irregular-faced tall Apollo, surely from a long line of the same.
“My God, what an entrance,” said Ninon. “Only the young!”
Now that she’d pointed it out, yes, this was youth’s way of dealing with the borders between the gypsy and the tented. This way of looking in a window, like a young old-clothes-crier, new to the trade, not really wanting what would be sold inside.
David Meyer Mendes Mannix smiled straight in at his little father. Electric-green in the blend of streetlamp and house, the plants in the window box between them bobbed artificial, rubberized by the light.
The Judge stood up, bringing himself eye level with his son. …Over the balustrade of night, who looks at me from the bush of long ago—a rose of Sharon bush, and a home-walking boy betting with the dime in his pocket? Is this one from the boy-bush of myself. Is he? He is so near. …
“Give up!” David said, in the voice that was “placed,” but never deafly loud. “I heard every single word you all said.”
This was from the family humor-book, one of the first jokes in it, derived from their earliest morning lessons, where sometimes the happy, deaf child had repeated conversations (sight-read from a father unaware of it) of the night before.
“We did.” Walter’s voice always astounded, rich marvel from that cave of papier-mâché, his chest. David lending him a hand, they stepped up on the outer sill, legged it over the window boxes, and stood there smiling, inside. If compensations like this—length of leg against hump, voices for ears—had crossed their friendship as boys, now as men, even the emotions roused in the spectator by the incongruous pair were by habit forgotten by the two themselves. Only, like any such devoted pre-manhood relationship between men now grown, unsuspect as it was otherwise, it had kept them boys.
“Hallo, Diddy, Walter,” said Blount, whom youth always awakened. “You’re late.”
“Came in one of your grand pianos, Dan,” said David. “That’s why. How can you stand them? Too much opera for me.” But his face was serious. “Hallo, Dad.” He nodded at his father. They hadn’t shaken hands since David—aged ten and already taller—had dropped the custom. Traveling the circle of known people, his eyes blinked shyly by Ninon, paused at Leni—“I don’t think we’ve met—” and stopped. “Austin. Dear God. Austin.”
“David.” The Judge’s accusing voice was the same he always mustered for his son. “Where is—” He couldn’t finish.
Pauli could, darting forward, the buffer. “Ruth, where is she—my God, they said an accident but that everything—”
“Yes.” David couldn’t know that his stiff, ever-patient speech, giving every word the same weight, made the anxiety intolerable. “She left separately. Why? Isn’t she here?”
“Separately?” In Pauli’s clasped hands foreboding was already being hoarded. “In another plane? From London?”
“She’s left then.” The Judge had turned to Ninon. Another woman, this was all it took. “For good. I always knew she would.”
Walter stepped forward, between David and his father—and took the Judge’s hand. He could do that; he was of a properly hunched size. “No, everything’s all right. She just left the airport there, separately.” His great eyes were happy, in that sight of love demonstrated which he always found here. “There was an accident, just before we landed. To a guy who’d been sitting with us. She went to the hospital in the ambulance with him. Diddy and I followed, but our cab got tangled in traffic. And when we got there, the hospital wouldn’t let us all see him. Poor guy, he’d seemed to—take to her.” He smiled, for how reasonable this was. “But any moment, she should be here.”
“Take to her?” Her father’s voice was coarse. “What was his trouble?”
“Simon. You know that with her, everybody—” In relief, Pauli spread his nervous hands, took out a cigarette. David lit it for him with a lighter, though David himself didn’t smoke.
Austin, stepping back to allow the members of the family all precedence, recalled how David, as a boy ever being taught to tame his excessive gesturing down to the normal, had as a man become a picker-up of hats and coats left behind, a caretaker of packages, an offerer of pencils, an opener of doors. Whereas Ruth, without any effort to be the explicitly quiet one—He drew in his breath. No reason to think of her as having had to make effort to appear other than she was. She had no flaw.
“Guy’d been sitting next to her. Drunk, was all we thought. Meek little drunk. Anyway, when he went to the men’s room, Walter and I made her shift to the window. When he came back—”
“It was a mess,” said Walter. “We thought he was just going to vomit. He was holding himself.” He reddened.
“At the crotch,” said David. “In a muffler. I was ready to hit him. I got up to.”
“Pushing me out of the way, as usual,” said Walter.
“Then he simply—said something to her. And fell forward.”
“Putting out his wrists.” Walter stared at his own, hairy and large as a true-grown man’s. His hump sat on him. “Which he had cut.”
“Ah, God, the poor darling.” Pauli couldn’t avoid a downward look along his pure tailoring.
“Poor man,” said the Judge.
“Yes, of course, Simon of course,” said Pauli.
“He bled all over my sister,” David said. Queer to say it that way, to her father, but the deaf’s choice of words sometimes was. “She didn’t turn a hair.”
Austin stepped forward. Coming home was a continuous stepping forward and back a dozen times a day, across the enormous ditch—of difference. Though he wouldn’t mention hospitals again. “Women. Often they don’t.”
At his voice, wistful with that distance, the two young men were upon him, in flurry of shoulders pounded, hands clasped, which the two old men smiled on uncertainly.
“Watch out for him, boys, he has a wound of honor,” said Pauli.
“Nothing,” said Austin, on a cold note which his friends seemed to recognize. And at once fell in with. “Nothing, Austin,” said their faces. “If you say.”
Pauli coughed uneasily. “Maybe she stopped by at Augusta’s. In the old days at Ilonka’s—you know that school, Ninon?—she kept a change of clothes there. Because it was so near.”
“Augusta’s?” said the Judge. “At going on one in the morning? Why would she ev
er want to go there?”
David, watching everyone with a ceaseless annotation of the head, spoke up gently. At times the box on his ear communicated voice before meaning. Always it had a special voice for Simon, its first teacher, tonight even gentler than before. “For Augusta,” his son said.
“What children you have,” said Madame, engaging Diddy to come talk to her.
Walter was meanwhile smiling up at Austin with the surety of a seraph whose values, useless in this world, might be all-powerful in the next. “You’ve changed. But you’re still the same.”
“Meaning?”
“The war.”
“I’ve come back.”
“But you’ve—been.”
“In the end—” Austin watched Blount draw the Judge aside, make a swift adieu with a sign not to disturb the others, and slip out into the hallway with him. “—I think of my father. Who went. In the end does it make any difference?”
“You’re the same, or will be,” said Walter. “But maybe, not for a while. Not just now.”
“I’ve been feeling—maybe I’m going to be the maverick Fenno.”
They both laughed.
“Or do you mean…I’m not one of you any longer?”
“Yes and no.”
“Oracle.”
They were both watching the door.
“Where can she be, can she be?” The whisper—blind, fierce, Austin’s—surprised them both.
Walter sighed. “You’re getting to be as bad as David. Always worrying about her, never any reason why. ‘Sisters,’ is all he’ll say. And of course I have no sisters, so how I am to—” He glanced up sharply. “But you—”
“Three. As light broke on Walter’s face, Austin couldn’t help letting it creep sheepishly over his. His father no longer seemed to him precipitate.
“Austin. Austin. Of course. Of course. You and she. Forgive me—if I never thought of it before. You know me, I’m not geared—” Walter’s grasp of his limits was firm. “One of us, indeed.” His tone was holy. “Of them you mean. You’ll be one of them.”
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