New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  “Sit down,” she said. She forced him to. Doubtless she did this every day in the studio; her wrists were as strong as a handler’s. Then she stood off to regard him.

  “What Walter said—she’s what everybody thinks,” he said. “Never a clue from Ruth herself, is there?”

  “What would you expect there to be, in a young girl? I’ve had dozens of them under my care.”

  “And are they all like that? Your ballerinas.”

  “She is not a ballerina. Not the type. The company is…good for her. And she craves—the discipline.”

  He stared. “She can’t dance?”

  “Oh, well enough.”

  “And you let her stay, Madame? You?”

  She shrugged. The two older men were heard re-entering the hallway. “Maybe—for an old friendship, eh?” She preened, smoothing the pearls at a wrist.

  She saw that he got it. His face was burning. “Tours are helpful,” she said slyly. “And weddings. Maybe she will marry.”

  She measured him, columnar neck to flank, and maybe relented at what she found. “You’re right,” she whispered. “I do it for her. Because she is what I think.”

  “What?”

  In the face of the oncoming gentlemen, she murmured a foreign word in his ear—of which he caught only the ending -ta—but when he pressed her would mutter only, “Ask him”—meaning which of the men he wasn’t sure.

  And Ruth, in a white sweater and skirt, came out of the swinging door from the kitchen, eating grouse from a plate.

  “You look like a Backfisch, fourteen years old,” said Pauli. “Only if you had not cut the hair.” He sighed. “Now we go home. I call you tomorrow; there’s a concert.” He looked at his beautiful Gérard-Philippe. “Ach, der lieber Gott. I think Leni fell asleep upstairs—so much good wine.”

  “Leni is here?” said Ruth.

  He smiled at her, tremulous. Between the hairline stripes of his treasured suit, in the crease between sideburn and ear where massage didn’t reach, in the very crest of surviving hair, one saw the age of this hopeful bridegroom.

  “Ah, Pauli, how wonderful.” She smiled at her father and Austin. “Everybody’s here. Plus an African. Who’s he?”

  “Dan Blount brought him. But had to leave.” Father and daughter exchanged grins. “Maybe we’ll have to put the boy up. Or maybe Edwin has.”

  Ruth shook her head. Nibbling her bird, she did look to Austin as she had at fourteen. Or twelve. “They only have a room and a half.”

  “You’ve seen it?” said the Judge.

  “The Halecsys have. The sisters. His mother won’t let them in; they won’t say why. But they got in once, through the super.”

  Austin stirred uneasily; that she should know such dodges, such people, gave him a distaste. Until at least he knew. What he thought about her. “Maybe we could—put him up. Half the kids aren’t at home.”

  “Oh?” She resented his offer, he could see that. On Edwin’s part? “How’s Alice?”

  “Alice?” he said absently, watching her turn over the little skeleton on her plate, to the breastbone side.

  “Alice who?” said the Judge.

  At once she was at Austin’s side; how had she moved there so unnoticeably? It was their old basement connivance, silently taken up among the four of them, against the authority upstairs. Once, too, during a game he had hidden in a closet with her. There had been nothing, but he had never forgotten it.

  “Austin’s sister,” Ruth said.

  Pauli was calling to Leni.

  “The concubine, you’ll wake her,” said Ninon.

  “The con—Anna?” Ruth’s laugh was new, Anglicized or merely grown up, very slightly on scale. She sobered. “No, it’s Thursday, isn’t it? She’s gone off to her—She’s gone. I looked.”

  “Friday, it is now,” Pauli said. He called upstairs again. “Leni, for God’s sake. Come along. Ach, Simon, it’s been a beautiful evening, like old times. Or new—maybe. Wonderful.”

  “She must be making up her face, to go home in,” said Ninon. “Or thinking of that man’s name.”

  “Both,” said Pauli. “That’s when she thinks best. There, I think I hear her.” He left the room to go after her.

  Austin put his finger on the carcass of the bird, its flat little breastbone. “Grouse?”

  “Shh. In June? And here?” She put her finger to her lips. “Don’t let on. I guess it’s squab.”

  “Walter—” he said, leaning close over her—“he said he’d like you to hold his hand, if he were dying. …And no wonder.”

  “Don’t. He’s got to have an operation some day. That thing on him—presses in.”

  “Why did you say—you could cry now?”

  “Once I couldn’t. For a while.”

  He could feel her patience—with whoever pressed in.

  “You like us all. Don’t you.”

  She twiddled at the bird. “Yes. All.”

  Again he felt that distaste—as if she might have meant not only all of them—but the world. “Tell me. What are the classifications for ballerinas? How does it go—prima, secunda, something like that?”

  “Oh, not secunda!” Again she laughed.

  In the ingle with Madame, the Judge put on his glasses, to see his daughter. “Night owl. But take it easy with Austin. He’s—just got home.”

  “But you’re all right, Austin, aren’t you?” she said on her way to the sideboard. “You’re always all right.”

  His turn to laugh. “That my classification?”

  “The whole country’s,” said Madame.

  “Come now, Ninon,” said the Judge, “you haven’t crossed the water just to give us that old bromide? That we’ve never been touched.”

  Madame, walking toward the center of the room with the first abstraction the younger man had seen in her, was observing Ruth, who had just begun to dance, holding the bird on its plate in front of her. “To be touched, Simon, it had to come to us.” She spoke as if she had pins in her mouth, or had just said to a stagehand, “The light should be there!”

  An idea came to Austin that if he wanted to leave this house for good, Madame could release him from its mystery, by somehow telling him what she mightn’t know herself—the way men might go to whores, to be released from the domination of love.

  Ruth, balancing her plate like a salver, was executing steps minimal but defined; on the plate, the carcass, traveling axial to her, controlled her, delicate as a pet bird which itself never moved.

  “Entrechat, yes, yes, and then, and. then, yes, yes, and very nice,” said Madame, nodding as if counting beads. “That recovery—very good. What is it from, not Salome…From Rupert’s—that passage with the vase at the fountain? Or that old, old habanera, not from Carmen—?”

  From the hallway came a short, triumphant cry—Leni.

  “She’s remembered,” said Madame in aside, still fixed on her dancer. “Or the eyelashes are bung on again…But my memory’s gone blotto. What’s that from, girl? I’d swear I’d never seen it in me life.”

  “That man in the hospital, Austin,” said the ingle. “You never said what his injury was.”

  Austin refused to move over to where Mannix sat huddled up like a heart-sufferer judging himself. Back in the base hospital, the rugged head of the unknown man, pale with drugs, once again lifted visor-eyelids, electrically demanding, and closed them. “They haven’t told me yet, Fenno,” the mouth said. “What’s gone…I’m a judge of character, Fenno,” it said through its closed smile. “You’ll tell me, Fenno. Which part of the pain is real.”

  “He’s an amputee,” said Austin.

  They’ve flown him back? He’s here?”

  “That was six months ago. I dunno. You lose track.”

  “What kind of amputee?”

  Back there, that man had still been the electric center of himself. “Never let them dwell on what parts they’re missing,” said the therapists in the prosthetic room, calm as compasses among the metal claws and pulley wir
es, and the smell new rubber had in the sun. “Emphasize what they have. Or will get. We have no basket cases in this war.” All patients were put upright as soon as possible, for the circulation. “Blue sky,” the man said when they raised him. “Nice, but I’m sick of it.” Though this raising wasn’t done on the veranda, but indoors, where the mirrors were. It was done as soon as possible too. In the quiet, all the other men waited for what this newest recruit to their ranks would say when he saw himself. When it had been said, Austin, loser of nothing, present only because he was well enough to help as medic, was the only one who didn’t laugh. “Like a totem pole,” the man said. “But with balls.” He was new to the room of course. The patient who’d lost what there was no prosthesis for had laughed hardest, that was all.

  “Triple,” Austin said. “He’s a triple.”

  After a long minute the voice in the ingle—Austin had his back to it—came again. “Yes, one loses track. It can be managed. You never hear.”

  In a war, civilian, one is meant to lose track. “New York?” said the man that once, turning him off. “Ah, forget it, Fenno. I never hear from it. It’ll never hear from me.”

  “Of course you haven’t, Madame!” Farther in the room, threading between table and sideboard, Ruth was dancing; her voice was breathy but triumphant. “It’s not a passage that’s been anywhere before. It’s mine.” In a twinkling series of turns done as if she were on pointe, she circled the table, executed a run which brought her past her father, to end before Austin and Madame. “I’m doing Rupert’s part. It’ll be adagio. He’ll be holding the girl. Dressed like a bird.” Slowly she lowered the plate, cocking one toe behind her. “What shall I call it? The Ballet of the Grouse?” At a noise behind she turned, the toe still at tripod angle, still on stage.

  In the doorway, Leni as triumphant too. Her maquillage renewed shone white on the cheeks, black at brows and eyes. There had never been such a stage-green as her dress. Pauli, behind her, was almost effaced. Her head lifted. Beauty was behind her; the past was her topic, sweating memory like sex. She had remembered.

  “His name was Posliuty. Stanislaus?—was it Stan she called him?…No. Nick. Nick Posliuty.” Others might be dancing, but now she, Len, was entering, the prima. Nearing Austin, she flicked his lapel, her hand pausing there, fan-shaped. “Posliuty. Like Petersh. You were right.” Stub-a-stub, her bronze feet stammered toward the Judge in his ingle. She was dancing now, the ballet of how beauty, settling for the past, became harridan. “Sehr elegant, your wife was, hmmm? How she sat there, so dark in that restaurant, all the other woman décolleté.” She turned sideways to Ninon a shoulder heavy as a bolster, but the arm floated, correct. “The ensemble black, with silver at the sleeves, marvelous raglan sleeves. I remember it like it was yesterday. Two nights before she was killed. Burning inside, she was. And not even a cigarette.”

  Behind her, Pauli made an abortive, trailing sound, but he was merely the conductor, he could do nothing.

  “Yes, I remember.” Leni’s reddish hair dropped backward over the neck which no longer could bend back of itself. On the hand spread across her puce mouth, one nail had chipped. “‘Is he a policeman, your friend?’ I said to her. When he went to the men’s room. So big he was, when he got up the table almost went over. She didn’t answer me. Not a word, remember, Pauli? Not a word. Until he came back.” The palm pressed for a moment on the Judge’s shoulder left a powder mark. “You’d gone by then; you had to leave. “Soldier of fortune,’ your wife said then, ‘that’s what Nick Posliuty is. Who doesn’t go to war.’ And I said, ‘Posliuty?’ And he looked up quick and said, ‘Polski?’ And I said in our language, ‘Glos—” The palm rose in smart salute. “‘Glos wolny wolnosc ubezpieczajacy!’ An old proverb. And she laughed. How did she know what I said to him? ‘A free voice guaranteeing freedom.’ Remember, Pauli, later when you ask what it mean, what I say to you? ‘Ask her.’”

  The Judge sat as people did when old times were recalled to them, looking past the narrator at the still, small voice of the scene itself.

  Pauli advanced, putting his arms around Leni from behind. With an almost lithe pull she took advantage of it, spreading skater-like back against him, his hands gripped in hers. She had involved him now, he must stand and support her—the prima, gone from the rib cage down, but the face possible to imagine swooping forward, suspended at the breastbone, riding aloft a man’s hand, with swanlengthened eyes. “He saluted me back,” it said. “‘Not me, I’m the champ’,” he said to her. “Your wife’s friend, Judge. The Pole.”

  Ruth was moving, taking the minimal steps to carry the plate, which she was still holding, arrested there in her little spotlight of her own making, over to the sideboard. She wasn’t the prima, this slightest passage of the limbs demonstrated, merely a member of the chorus entrusted with the safety of a prop. She put the plate down carefully, a tranced but good child moving to an invisible beat. For a moment her hands, freed now, hung at her sides. Austin had never seen hands look emptier. Was she still dancing?—then she was a marvel at pantomime. But one of her hands crept behind them, to touch her dress at the seat, to wipe off blood which wasn’t there, then recalled in time that there was no blood on it, that she had changed.

  To Austin, from a family of sisters and girl cousins, this was a known gesture from the decently guarded monthly trials of women, which a brother wasn’t to notice, sitting rigid at fourteen for instance, eyes straight ahead, while his mother whispered to Alice, “Take little Di upstairs, tell her she’s come through.” He sat like a brother again, uneasy, marveling, eyes straight ahead, once again bereft forever of that straight-legged sprout in jeans, his cousin Di. But this girl has never been seen before for what she is; isn’t that what lovers always say? What she is, what she feels—never by anyone, except me. Bright chains of love-friendship interchanged themselves in his breast—reaching out for all their family pain, hers, so needlessly dabbled with blood. And it appeared to him that all this pain in him was instantaneous.

  Pauli had already spoken, a stifled blurt of outrage at Leni, who leaned against him now like a statue which had begun to fall. At Austin’s side, Madame placed a hand on his shoulder, pressing like a signal. She was watching the Judge. How could a man who limped like that get so quickly to his daughter’s side?

  “That business on the plane…why should you…why should it have to be you?” Who was Mannix angry with, his face so white? “You want to go upstairs, my darling. Tuck yourself under, hmmm. Go and do that.”

  “I’m not tired. I’m never tired.”

  It was such a standardly bold young disclaimer. Austin himself had made it often, before the war. But surely there was a bit of the girl herself in the way she leaned to pat her father’s cheek, being taller.

  “Who’s to carry me,” she said, “now?” Then she flushed, dark and deep. “No, I’m all right.”

  A knock came at the door.

  “Edwin, it must be Edwin!” She cried it as if rescued. “I’ll go. Let me.” But first she ran to Ninon. “You’ll want to talk to Father.” Then to her father, “You’ll want to—talk to her.”

  A second knock came.

  As she passed Austin she whispered to him, “Edwin. You still don’t like him, do you?”

  “Should I?”

  She sighed, went on past him to the outer door. That sigh chilled him, so near, so far. Why do I think of her as “the girl”? Her name is Ruth.

  They heard her step outside the door, leaving it ajar. The city drifted in to them. They raised their heads to it, all but Madame, who was a foreigner—did they own it, or were they owned? Intently listening, all of them, after a murmuring out there they heard the door close.

  Krupong came in uncertainly, clearly surprised to see them all still there, quickly debonair. “Your stars are out.” A whiff of these came in with him. He saw that his quiet, poetic tone was welcome—young Fenno for one looked as if he could have used a more elegiac end to the evening than seemed likely. But it was not in
himself to maintain it. “But Blount is gone,” Felix said. As usual, everybody had to laugh; the sequence of his thought was so fresh—or different from theirs.

  Austin stepped forward. “Have you a place to stay? If not—we can put you up. At my house.”

  “Thank you, I am stopping at a club. But what I would like—there is an all-night bar I have been told of. Will you come?”

  “Did Edwin come back with you?” said the Judge. “Are those two going along with you?”

  “Alas, they did not say. She said not to wait up.”

  Everybody suddenly said it had been a wonderful evening.

  “I should have had you all together long since,” replied the Judge.

  “Can we give you a lift, Ninon?” said Leni. “We always take a cab.”

  “Thank you, I shall stay on a bit.”

  “Remember now, Felix,” said the host, “come again.”

  “Thank you. May I just—?” He was directed to the hall. Madame, following after, turned and went up the stairs.

  “Good night, Uncle Pauli. Gaudeamus.”

  “Good night, Owstin.” Pauli leaned closer. The dinner party as over; already a part of the calendar to be pieced over at will. It belonged to the ages, maybe some day even to Rameau. Outside was life, fanged and waiting. Important things must be said hurriedly between the two states of being, at the door. “Such a darling,” murmured Pauli distractedly. “Will she be all right with him, Austin, that Edwin? She has such bad luck!”

  “Sehr interessant!” Leni was still at such a height—or now felt the Judge and his house to be—that only another language could convey her compliments. “Sehr interessant,” she repeated, until dragged away.

  “What a handshake that woman has,” said the Judge, after her. “Once a European gets the idea of them—” He saw that he and Austin were momentarily alone. “Austin—” Was Mannix going to ask him to go after those two? If so, he was prepared to counter—“When is he coming to live here, in the house?”

  “Triple amputee,” said the Judge. “God, that…conjures up—The man was all physical. Anyone could see that.”

  Austin supposed a man would prefer to think that about his wife’s lover. Until now he’d assumed a man wouldn’t talk about it.