“Hush, Walter.” As of old, he spoke as to a child. And listened for the wisdom not of this world. “Haven’t even seen her for more than a year.”
Walter, to his dismay, didn’t dispute him, or reassure. Often, by the way that heavily beautiful head hung toward its sage little vest, Walter’s friends kept track of the simple clouds which could pass over his sunniness. In their boyhoods, that head, dropping so tiredly under spectator pressure, had often seemed to yearn altogether for the body’s smaller scale. Now, bent as it was, quizzically regarding very much the same vested body—it belonged more to its hump. “We’ve grown up,” said Walter to his vest. “I’ve got gray in my hair.” He grinned up at Austin with the glee of one years ago warned that he, wouldn’t survive his youth. “So you have.”
“You’ll do what’s right, Austin. Whatever you do.”
“Ha. Aren’t you confusing me with David?”
“Oh—I can hero-worship you all. And with reason.” Walter’s very frankness laid his love lightly on them. “I should have known. You’re usually ahead of us, Harvard on in. But this time…Lean down closer.”
Austin did so.
“David’s not far behind you. He’s got a girl.”
“Who?”
“Alice Cooperman.”
“I—don’t know her.”
“No. Since you left. And—you wouldn’t. He’ll tell you. There’s a difficulty.”
“With the girl?”
“Not—exactly. Not yet. But she’s proud.”
“Is there always a difficulty? I’m beginning to feel…”
From Walter’s face, he, Austin, should not be asking that. “Not always.”
“What, then?”
“She’s lovely, brother. A glass fairy. Spun glass, delicate. Brave, too.”
“But doesn’t love Diddy.”
“But does.”
“Not—religion. Cooperman.”
“No. And neither too rich nor too poor. Nor from the dime store. Nothing in the world is wrong with her, except—” Walter couldn’t be fierce but he could be sad. “Except what Ruth says—that it was bound to happen. And some people can’t take that, she said.”
“I don’t get you.”
“She’s deaf. Alice. Talks beautifully, almost as well as Diddy. But far worse off, once. She was a mute.”
They saw the Judge re-enter and come toward them.
“Hush,” said Walter.
“Ah,” Austin said.
The Judge handed Walter a slip of paper. “Anna took the call, a while back…What’s the matter, boy?”
“My uncle. He—excuse me. I’ve got to phone.”
“On the landing.” Austin said it as if he had been here yesterday. “Remember.”
“His Uncle Samstag?” said the Judge. “I suppose.”
On the way out, Walter was halted at the stairs by Leni, who must have been sitting all this time in posed meditation. Now she half rose, arms outstretched with a peculiar cajoling, a stage beggar, asking alms. As the Judge and Austin watched, she reached out and tugged the hem of Walter’s jacket.
“What’s the matter with the woman?” the Judge said, sotto voce. Pauli, engaged with Diddy in the ingle, hadn’t seen. “She a little mad?”
“I’ve seen it happen to him before,” said Austin. “With—a certain class of people.”
As they watched, fascinated, Walter bowed his head, allowed her to rub his hump, then went up the stairs.
“Perfect Balkan logic, Simon,” said Madame at their elbows. “It’s done for luck.”
Leni was bearing toward them, carrying her fist holily. “What a house, eh, Ninon? Pauli was right. I should have let him bring me years ago.” She turned to their host. “You wait,” she said, in reciprocation. “I’ll remember everything yet. But first, I go upstairs.”
“If you want a—retiring-room, Madame Petersh,” said the Judge, “there’s one down here. Anna’s. Perfectly clean. Down the hall. Through there.”
“Not Madame.” Leni cast a sly look at Ninon. “Miss.” She went off, still carrying her luck.
“Didn’t want her up there after him,” said the Judge.
“Pity,” said Ninon. “All she wanted was another go at the bidet…And now hadn’t I better get on back to the hotel, Simon…”
“No.” He was kneading her hands between his. “This is an evening…This house used to stay up till dawn, many a time. And we’re all so bright; look at us!” He let go her hands. “Soon as Walter—I’m going to phone Augusta. Or the place where they took that confounded man…Austin? What’s the name of that hospital?”
Austin, seated to rest the wound which tired so quickly out of its brace, was watching them dreamily. “U.S. Military Base Hospital Number One, Area—”
“No, I mean where they took that man from the airport. Excuse me, Austin. Still think of all you young ones as together.” The Judge took this chance to rest a hand on Austin’s shoulder. “No, don’t get up.”
Walter came down the stairs and went at once to his friend. “Diddy…My uncle. I have to go.”
The box on David’s ear brred like a stammer. “Utah?”
“He never made it there. Happened here.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Thanks. Please.”
Without a word of death spoken, death’s timbre traveled the room, a soft noose slipknotting all of them closer around Walter.
“Your Uncle Samstag, Walter?” said the Judge. “I’m sorry.”
“Let me to get the cab,” said Pauli.
“Thank you…Uncle Pauli. They’re sending the car.”
“To be the uncle here in this house—” Pauli bowed deeply.
“He was—the last link,” said Walter, who looked about to cry.
“Anything we can do, Walter—anything.”
“You’ve already done it for me, you Mannixes, years ago.”
What more natural anywhere! Yet Austin couldn’t help feeling that over the Judge’s and Walter’s sudden, almost ritual exchange, the shadow of another emotion hovered—Hebraic, prayer-shawled.
“You’re not orphaned now, Walter,” said the Judge. “Always remember that.”
“I know, I know.”
The two men, by chance almost of a size, were even rhythmically swaying; hunchback to miniature, they were perilously near that chorally stunted misconception of their race to which even certain Fennos clung. Pauli, probably a non-Jew, stood with head bowed, come as far as even a willing adjunct could. David, like so many of the young today, was tall. Locked for the moment in the reticence of friendship, and for life in unrhythmic deafness, he could be taken for anything. But he was almost surely one of those of whom Austin’s unprejudiced father sometimes too fairly noted that “like the noses,” it seemed to come out in them with age. Like David’s own father maybe. In whose preoccupations the Mannix family, Jews—and maybe even the middle classes—sometimes were messianically one.
Alongside of which Austin stood Orientally fascinated, envious—and uncomfortable. Wishing that the car would come.
“It goes without saying, Walter, what you’ve done for us. David might never have…without such a…brother. In fact, I could wish…”
Except for David, Austin said to himself, this man can wish for anyone to be his son. Even me…Why, that’s not fair! Like evil, like ozone, a thought breathed to him—That’s what he’ll teach me—not to be fair.
“I’d never have finished school without him,” said Walter. “Or seen the Negev. Or learned to swim. Without any of you. You, Ruth, even Anna, even—”
“You’re family.” The Judge broke the rhythm, or righted it. “Let’s leave it at that.”
But Walter was on tiptoe, pink at the cheekbones with the enthusiasm which must be the reverse fever of saints, or their stamina. “Then I can say it. We mustn’t worry so, about Ruth. You and David. I myself.” At self-mention, he could stop short. “I don’t mean only tonight. Though if that poor guy wanted her to hold his hand, who
could blame him?…I don’t know anybody I’d rather…at such a time. Ruth doesn’t say much, but she’s—” His smile shied briefly up at Austin. “She’s…everything we all think,” he said. He alone could go up to the Judge as he did now, close enough to be personal, to put a hand on the other’s shoulder, eye to eye. The Judge’s were sardonic, as if he knew this too. “She or any of us,” said Walter. “Wherever we are, this house goes with us. We don’t really leave.”
“Ah Walter.” The Judge said it with infinite fondness. “That why you can speak to me—as one orphan to another?”
But Walter’s innocence couldn’t hear him, went on voicing it itself, baritone from that bird-body, and from some optimum heaven where all shoulders were straight. Often it was listened to not for its meaning but in reverence that it should exist at all. Which was why so many saints came to nothing, Austin said to himself. …Yes, I am home from the wars. …
“That day you took me in,” said Walter. “So long ago. She held my hand too…sick as we all know she must have been then. And talked to me, about—the family. Not about herself—though she must have had the cancer even then. Nor about Ruth, who was just a kid of eight or nine. About David. And about you. And the way she listened to me, for me! Though I hardly said anything at all; hardly even knew I was miserable…When you lose parents you scarcely’ve had a chance to love, sometimes you don’t know…But she heard.” Walter steadied his voice. “Tonight, when the poor guy on the plane said so much the same thing about Ruth—all I could think of was how much I wanted to tell her. Death or not, I’d always thought—some day I can tell them. That Ruth, just a kid then, not even spoken of—is now just like her. I see it more and more. How I wish I could tell her: ‘Ruth’s everything you and her father could wish. Mrs. Mannix,’ I’d like to say to her. ‘She’s just like you.’”
Even his innocence felt the silence. He looked at his friends. The father’s eyes were on the son. David’s were closed—as in the days of the lessons, when he could bear no more.
“Forgive me,” Walter said. “I just wanted to say—not to worry. There’s no need.” On these fading words his hands crept to clasp at the peak where vest covered sternum. The vest’s brave checks, the bright secular gold of the watch chain, gave him the semblance of a saint too thinly disguised by his tailor, praying despite himself, in that pietà from which his friends would never let him escape. His head now cached itself between the shoulder-blades—which occurred only when spirit finally tired as much as muscle. He was feeling the weight of his hump.
“Attendez!” said Madame. “Isn’t that a car?”
She’d say this, Austin thought, whether or not she knew anything about this family, out of to her the supreme propriety—that such a scene needed ending.
With the others he strained to listen, hearing only the nadir of the night exchanging into the marvel of how late it was, feeling round his neck, as they must, the single cat-bell of the human condition—how extraordinary, that we have come this far!…It so happened then that they had moved closer together.
A single, light tread was heard coming down into the areaway, passing the window whose curtains a film of wind had closed, pausing at the door. Impressions so often came from a person’s tread—reluctance, assurance—but this step might be any woman’s, except that it was light. Then the door was tried.
“Open the door for your sister, David.” The Judge leaned, clasping one thigh. “I must have locked up by mistake.”
David, still reading Walter’s face devotedly, didn’t hear. Before Austin could get forward, Walter ran briskly as a page, his deformity bobbing faithfully with him as he opened the door.
These downstairs doors, designed for tradesmen, were out of sight of anyone in the dining-room. But here Austin and the rest were standing to receive her at the dining-room door. If they hadn’t been impelled by tangential death into that close half-circle, would he have seen what must always have been here? If he hadn’t been to war of course, that too. Otherwise, he’d been away from this household many times before, always to find it on return only what all outsiders cherished it for—much the same.
Only the war could have made him, in his few days home, sensitive to so minor a tremor of human behavior—those shrinkings into oneself which one employed if one meant not to be a hero. Or a heroine.
That impression—of what otherwise might take months, or a marriage, to name or discover—was instantaneous.
“Oh…” She didn’t hold even the naturally delayed pose of greeting, as anyone might have done, much less take a pretty girl’s sweeping advantage of the page’s services. She slipped in quietly, the green beanie in her left hand swinging a little; though there were things she mightn’t do she wasn’t doleful, she was young. There they all were though, the circle of those who intensely loved or knew her, wasn’t that daunting? “Hi—everyone.”
She’d come maybe from a deathbed—and of a stranger who had insisted on his mysterious need of her—to a father she was planning to leave. She had the bright, over-stimulated gaze of the plane traveler who has watched time-space stream by. And a little of the scuffed weariness of city walkers who haven’t found cabs. She said this last neatly, at once. “No cabs.” Then gave Pauli the kind of kiss due him. Accepted from her father the affectionate grip of her face between his hands—she bent for it—that all had seen exchanged for years. “Madame—welcome,” she said. And gave the genuflection, one foot behind, which must be a ballet mistress’s due.
She gave them all their due; only Austin was back from the wars to see how it was done, that it was done without art or craft but like a walking on wires which had become normal. And that on this night, intersection of so many crises implied or accidental, there should have been more of—herself. That was it!
“Grouse,” said Pauli, doting, as she kissed him. “I brought you some.”
“Oh. I’m starved. Nothing since the plane. I must just go up and change my…Grouse!”
“Everything will be all right,” said her father. “Ninon and I’ll…talk…on our way home. Are you all right?”
“All right,” she said. But did not look at Ninon.
“What an extraordinary stole,” said Madame. “Or is it a bedspread?”
Austin saw that draped as she held it, covered her, a thick, tan mantle, wildly embroidered.
“Augusta’s. It always hangs in the lobby. She wasn’t there.”
“How is he…you stayed on?” said David. “That guy.”
“He…made it dead,” she said.
There was a flash of feeling here whose terms were unclear; it belonged to those three. Walter took her hands in his, through the stole.
“His uncle too,” said her brother. “Walter’s.”
“Not to Utah,” Walter said.
“I’ll—?” She could start a statement like a question.
“No, Diddy’s going with me.”
“—stay here.” And finish the other way round.
And finally, to Austin at the end of the line, she said, “Austin, Austin, I saw you the minute I came in.” She put her arms up and around him. “Welcome home. Oh Austin, I’m so glad. You’re home.”
Because it was the same hug she’d given him on graduation—and because he couldn’t bear to be public—he made no more of it. But when he didn’t move to kiss her cheek, she kissed his. The long enveloping stole fell back slightly. Even before that, he felt the unnatural stiffness of the dress underneath. Or smelled it. War had done that for him too.
On the pale ground of her dress, almost the same green as much-washed army fatigues, the soaked-in stains had dried to the color, not black, not red, found on the chests of the ambushed—men he’d brought in six or seven hours after, too late.
“You’re…covered with…!” Even if he hadn’t heard the circumstances, he thought he would have recognized the spots, the great artery-drops cast on live men or dead. She was covered with it, covered with it. But it wasn’t her own.
She nodded s
wiftly. He’d never seen her secretive before. Following her glance, he saw that the others had made an effort to ignore these two exchanging endearments.
“Only on the front,” she whispered oddly. “Nothing on the back.”
Time out of mind he’d seen his own sisters cry; he’d never before seen tears in this girl’s, his friend’s sister’s eyes. The dark blood-smell sickened him, yet joined together the two parts of his recent life, war and home. This girl just turning away, still half against his chest, was the first civilian here who hadn’t that distance in her, between the two.
“Well…I can cry,” she said.
She was looking past him. “Where’s Edwin?”
In the slowness of the others, Madame obliged. “The secretary? He’s with the African. Walking off the wine.”
“Secretary?” To her father.
“Edwin’s—coming to live in the house. Since you won’t.”
She smiled back at him, gently; she wouldn’t have a scene. “Since I won’t be.” Perhaps she did look at her brother, to see if he’d read this. Then, decently caped for death or dinner parties, not for one moment a heroine in the face of any of this, she went quietly out and up the stairs.
“There they are!” said Madame at the window. The wind, deeper into night, blew the curtains straight in against her ruffled bodice. One arm raised, she looked prepared to evoke any spells needed here.
The car at the curb, flanking the ingle window, looked to Austin large enough to carry the uncle in state to his nephew. Maybe it had. A chauffeur entered without ringing, and with a touch of his cap drew Walter outside; the other men followed, in a rallying which could spare him. It seemed to him that the whole evening bore toward what had been instantaneous, yet now had to be named.
“She was covered with it,” he said, in his horror. “Did you see? Blood.”
“Oh yes,” said Madame, in the voice women could put on anything. “Everybody saw.”
But not like him. He leaned forward. “We none of us know one word about her. Not one word of her own. I’ve just realized it…I’ve just come back.”
New Yorkers Page 42
