New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  “He’s had no experience—here.” She said it professionally, giving the bed a smart rap.

  “None? I—guess. I’m not surprised. He’s from unique beginnings.”

  “Protégés always are,” said Madame. “I never have them.” She had coarsened her accent, always a hint he was to heed. “I should take care, I were you. Is he to help you at it too?”

  “Too?”

  “To be public again.” She rubbed his beard. “Poor Disraeli, I have hit it, eh? D’ya know, Simon—you must be a terribly good man, in some ways. Because in so many others, you’re not very sharp.”

  “Bless you.” He circled her in his arms. “May the night bloom.”

  “It’s day,” she said. “And afternoon in London, that elderly nation. Ours is to be a limited engagement, yours and mine.” Her tongue tripped quickly over this. “I don’t make any others, not any more.” She sat up. “Christ in the cornerhouse—what’s that!”

  From below they heard sounds unidentifiable except as rackety—thumps, shuffles, a scramble.

  “Your son?” said Ninon. “He moves large.”

  “David? No, he was to stay with Walter.” But downstairs, a sudden silence gave him time to remember his son’s one violence, that one night’s smashing rampage through which he had slept. Noises came again now, mysterious, methodical—would it have been like that? “I’m going down.”

  “No, don’t.” She was cocking her head like a telegrapher. “Listen. Two bodies, there are. Heels—a girl. And a man.” She turned to smile at him. “No, you mustn’t go.”

  He didn’t know what his overwhelming rage was most for. “Maybe you can also tell me who.”

  Through heavy oak double floors, fourteen-foot ceilings and the draperies due civilization, they couldn’t tell whether the sounds they heard, voices now, were muffled or strangulated, vicious or soft.

  “Not the breeder,” she said. “The other one.” He’d never felt such a vise as she held him with, not male or female—a snake’s steel. “She’s alive,” she said through her hold. “Be still. Let them be. She’s alive.”

  Or did he want to be held? He bent his chin into his neck—and broke free.

  As he was at the door, she said, from the bed, “Will you go naked to her?”

  “There’s damage down there. I feel it.”

  “There may be.” She lay where he had broken from her. “Shall I tell you about her daughter?”

  He came to her, as on a reel she was winding.

  “She’s got a father,” she said, “who brings her to bed with him.”

  As his hands went to her throat, she brought her lips to meet them. “When another woman’s there.”

  Fists in his eyes, he put his head on her breasts.

  “They’re not much,” she said. “I never had a child.”

  “You’d gnaw me free,” he said. “If you could.”

  “Hush.”

  “I’ll tell you about my daughter,” he said. “That’ll stop both our ears. What I know—and what I don’t.”

  “It’s quiet down there now. Listen.”

  It was. It seemed to him that for a moment there was no rhythm at all.

  “It’s natural.” She smoothed his face, whose indecent yawp he had turned away. “Their sex oughtn’t to be real to us. Or ours to them. It’s more comfortable.”

  He raised himself, remembering waitress in Brixton who’d said to him, We can’t have another war, it’s not comfortable. “It’s morning.”

  “Your beard, it’s black. Even if it was gray, your skin’s that olive—” For the first time, she sounded exhausted. “It’s when the gray shows through on a red skin that I can’t abide…Little drops of sweat, like. Color of a pearlie’s buttons.”

  “Calais?” he said.

  “You know better,” she said. “A rectory, in Islington.” She raised herself suddenly on elbow. “By God, I’ll tell them so. When they Dame me.” She beat her fists on his chest, in glee. “We’re a pair. Aren’t we.”

  Already, before she lowered herself beside him, she could see that they weren’t quite. “But it’s good to be where we are,” she whispered. “Not yet at the end. And in a minute—a bath.”

  He yearned to pay her a compliment nearest her life and comforts, and to what she called “Where we are.”

  Nothing fell so far short of that as talk of youth, or love.

  “No, you’re French,” he said. “You’re French.”

  She was hidden from him by his own embrace.

  “She’s very like you,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”

  They lay side by side, lightly almost not touching, in the valleyland of the hour and the season—of the minute before baths, the interval before age—in the musky bedclothes of what wasn’t birth any more, but wasn’t yet death.

  The steps that came up the stairs were heavier. Heel of a shoe, one foot unshodden; one foot unshodden, heel of a girl. That was the rhythm. Alas, so beautiful. The lone steps stopped at the landing, dragged at the door. Listening? Or fallen. Didn’t go on.

  “Open it,” said Ninon. “Oh Simon, open up to her. There’s been damage done.”

  13. Hunting a Judge

  June 1951

  The secret of cities is a simple one. Everyone believes himself to be the lone inhabitant. And is subjected to the sight of the others twenty-four hours a day. Between these two poles—of our natural meditation and its rebuttal—breed fantasies with which every police sergeant is familiar, every doctor. The law does only sharply remind us of this, our inalienable—fact. The question of civil law is not justice, but equilibrium.

  —JUDGE SIMON MANNIX

  Address to the Bar Association of New York

  “TO QUOTE A MURDERER,” the two personalities of Edwin Halecsy said to themselves, and took the Judge’s daughter by the hand. He had no idea as yet that he meant to make her pay for it.

  The twin lamps of the police stations were the same all over the city, in wealthy precinct or slum. Downtown in his old neighborhood—in those richly endowed blocks where the worn stone of the stoops was soft enough to sit on, on those hot nights when people boiled out of the burning anthills, or hung at the windows like a chorus of those too tired to be saved—there was always twenty feet or so of luxurious silence in front of the stationhouse, slunk past by moustached youths on their way to felony, given a wide berth by the baseball voices. Down there the twin globes gave a light that was known to all, testimony to the underhand machinery of life.

  Up here, in this poor environs that scarcely knew it was also a “precinct”—where the undernourished garbage cans held lobster husks, plus all the steak juice which could be brewed from stock certificates, but never the rich purple of a human fetus, rarely a rat—the two lamps were weaker, almost anonymous. Foot traffic ignored them, lonely lamps of some all-night post office, kept open for messages between the two worlds.

  “I came here once. To look at the list of missing persons.”

  “Here?”

  “Downtown.”

  “Who were you looking for?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Oh, of course—you told me once. How you went looking.” She slipped the hand he had let go into his again. “And here you are.” But he didn’t appear to hear.

  Inside, this place was the same as the stationhouse where he’d seen his first typewriter. The identical seamy-sallow air, half a locker-room’s but not so sweaty. More the color of the backs of stamps and the fronts of workmen’s compensation notices. With only a little more officialdom than hung anywhere there was a clock, a desk and a man. Still, a place where matters were glued together, stitched with the dark streak of the telephone, not quite jailed.

  He wished to tremble again. But he knew the names of all the objects in the room now.

  “Gwan,” said the man at the desk. “You college kids. Not since the thirties, that real all-night public show. Been cleaned up. What do you want that for?”

  “My idea,” said the
girl. “I was taken once. When I was little.”

  “For a lesson in responsibility,” the boy said.

  The man ignored him. “Little, hmm. And when was that?”

  “Before—I was twelve.”

  “And how old are you now, Grandma?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  On the desk there was a heavy-paper accordion file. The man fingered it. “Sorry, kiddies. Not in the 64th.” His eyes frisked, the boy. “Maybe in the Bowery. They still have the old line-up there.”

  “Sixty-fourth,” said the boy. “This is the 64th?”

  “Where else.”

  “Is Putzi still around?”

  “Who?”

  “Putzi the forger.”

  “Look,” said the man. “Whyn’t you two go have scrambled eggs at Child’s?”

  “That was the forties, officer,” said the girl. “Wasn’t it? People went there then, I’ve heard.”

  He took off his cap, ran his finger around the band, put the cap on again, smiled. “Right. That was me.”

  “He’s a law student,” said the girl.

  Her companion bowed. “Her father is a judge.”

  “Is he. Could have saved you two a wild-goose chase then, couldn’t he. What court?”

  “Retired,” she said.

  “But he keeps busy,” said the boy.

  “Look at the time!” she said. “Is that right?”

  “Very right, sister.”

  “I just got off a plane. And is that…all the time it is? Three?”

  “Enough for most people, kid.”

  “Not—when you see somebody die.”

  “Around here?” said the officer.

  “You saw what?” the boy said.

  “You kids pick each other up?” said the officer. “You know this boy?”

  “She picked me up,” said the boy.

  “He knows me, better than anyone else,” said the girl.

  “Where was the accident?” the officer said. “Airport?”

  “On the plane. To a seatmate. I went along, in the ambulance.”

  “Better take her home.”

  “Oh, I’m all right. Just—not sleepy. Not…sleepy.”

  “Comes as a shock, kid. First time you see somebody go?”

  She hesitated for a minute, then put out a hand, almost socially. “We mustn’t—take you from your work.”

  “Phones do ring.” In the few moments they’d been there, none had. The officer sat there immobile, arms folded. He might have been cautioning them to listen for one. They could hear each other breathe. They moved to the door.

  “Had two years college myself,” said the man at the desk. “Nights. At Brooklyn Cee…”

  At the door, the boy turned back. “Knew you weren’t a Mick. Even though you put on the ‘gwan’ stuff. Why?”

  “In the force, you’re Irish. No, I’m Hunky. From the edge of old Yorkville itself. Born in the precinct.”

  The girl started to speak, but the boy got in ahead of her. “Which one do I come from, would you say?” Eyes narrowed, cheekbones high, he could have been asking this of the nations of the earth. Or telling them.

  “Why?”

  “Might want to join the force.”

  “Don’t have to be a Hunky to do that.” The officer squinted. “Not a Jew, I’ll say that for you.”

  The girl smiled.

  The phone rang.

  Over the ringing, the boy called, “Edge of Chinatown. The Third.”

  The phone was already being talked into. The man covered the mouthpiece; it couldn’t be said for sure that he had heard. “Better go scramble those eggs.”

  Outside, Edwin said, in his best imitation of his student self, “Well, that was informative.”

  The street had lightened, but it was still technically night.

  “That you aren’t a Jew?” She pointed a toe, swept it around and behind her.

  “Do I know you best?” he said. “Or is it only that the others don’t bother to hear.”

  When her profile didn’t move, he said, “Was it the first time?”

  It moved at once. “Oh I’m all right. I’m always all right.”

  The lamps confirmed her fresh dress, swinging purse, all of her so quietly ready to go on tour.

  “Shall I? Take you back home?”

  A finger touched his spectacles, ran itself lightly around one rim. She grasped his shoulder where it pressed hers, rubbing the cloth of his suit like a girl who knew cloth. “No. Keep me out”

  “I wondered. Whether you saw them.”

  “Madame and my father?” She was carrying a pair of white gloves, and now drew one on. “Years ago, Pauli and I—used to have hopes.”

  “Not any more.”

  “You must ask—Father’s secretary.” She had on both gloves now. “Where shall we go?”

  The secretary had his head averted. “I could show you—our place.” He said it without smirk. He would never be that collegiate. “I thought of it, earlier.”

  “Your—mother won’t mind?”

  “I meant the old place. The basement. I still check on it, sometimes.” He took up her gloved hand, examined the palm. “Like to go? Down to the Third?”

  “Corner of Pit and Gooverneer?”

  “That was the school. That was only the school.”

  “Yes, let’s go there,” she said. “Can we walk?”

  “Mother of God,” he said. “No.”

  “I know how far it is. I just meant—let’s walk.”

  He was already trotting her at a pace. “We’ll take the subway. Like anybody who doesn’t have to walk.” The kiosk was four blocks away. He felt a harsh, self-cleansing elation. “You and your family talk walking. Walking the city. Taking a walk. A walk is to get somewhere, when you have no other way. And a key hung around a child’s neck—is to let him in.”

  “We let him in,” she said. “Shouldn’t we have?”

  “What I don’t know,” he said slowly…“is how much you know.”

  They’d reached the kiosk.

  “I know nothing,” she said. “About the Third.”

  Downstairs, they had the luck to catch a train for which a group had already collected on the platform, old women made baby-faced by babushkas, all wearing strong black coats.

  “The cleaner’s train. Some of them get on here. My mother and I once used to catch it from a job further down. We’re lucky. Last one down until six.”

  In the train, he sat her across the aisle from them. The same crowd, it could have been, rocking with the car like the pros they were, full of the same sturdy, unionized talk.

  “What did you and she clean?”

  “Bars.”

  She looked across the aisle, at the line of black oilcloth bags. “Didn’t know there were that many bars to clean.”

  “There aren’t. This is the aristocracy you’re looking at. But we had a bag like theirs. Maybe we still do. She doesn’t like to throw away.”

  “What do they clean?”

  “Offices.”

  Across the aisle, one of the women sat apart, intent, in her hands the power of the rosary.

  “Clean is my mother’s God.”

  “I only met her that once.”

  “She’s all there,” he said. “The aunts’ll tell you no. People as stupid as my aunts never can believe there’s anybody stupider.”

  “I could never stand the Halecsys.”

  “Because she didn’t tell them, you know. When it happened to her.”

  “When what?”

  He turned. She had remembered Pitt and Gouverneur. “Me.”

  “Oh yes,” she said at once. “‘Dead, divorced’—what was the other?”

  “‘Disappeared.’”

  The train rocked.

  “Used to be tribes,” he said. “That didn’t understand the connection.”

  “The—?”

  “Between having kids and—you-know.” It had slipped from him without thought, that earliest euphemism of the
schoolhouse stairs, dropping like a penny into the well of his older intelligence, starting up bright, concentric ripples between that world and this. She’d taken off the gloves again, in one of the fake subtleties they swallowed in place of living; her hands were bare. He didn’t touch them. “Fornication,” he said.

  Her face didn’t change. “Where were they, those tribes?”

  “Some archipelago.”

  He watched the sisterhood across the aisle get up and file out as the train stopped, in the rear the one who had prayed. “My mother’s all there. It’s just that what you see—that’s all there is.”

  “Just like—” The train was roaring on again. He’d never seen her face like that. Surely she’d said it. “—like mine!”

  They were drawing through one of the longest station approaches, a no-man’s-land in which pole after pole crept by.

  “We wait here. It always waits here, doesn’t it?” she said.

  “You’ve been before.” He had meant to show it to her first—the monstrous death’s head of his city. But the city was open to all. “With Austin? That settlement house? You don’t have to tell me.”

  She didn’t. Her expression was the one they all knew. She hid behind it. None had ever realized that except himself.

  The train drew into the halt, fans whirring. As minutes went by, the few passengers exchanged rigid stares in the non-language which was the proper code for the bowels of the earth. Nobody got up and beat at panes or broke tongue; this was the city too.

  “Lots of intelligent people too”—her eyes were half closed—“never can believe how many others are stupider than them.”

  “Not Austin.” He gave his rival careful justice, half wishing Austin could hear. “Austin knows the scale. He was born to it. That’s half his intelligence. Or—did you mean me?”

  She bent her head, a sudden noncommittal curve of the body professional. “No.”

  Who then? The train began moving. “Anna is intelligent,” he said. “Why is she afraid?”

  The train shadows took up her profile, enlarging it.

  “Oh, not just of me,” he said. “I know why that.”

  “Servants are always afraid.”

  “Not of you. For you. Like a—bodyguard.”

  The flickering light passed over her face and over.

  As they stepped from the train, he found his hand under her elbow, and felt a spasm of pride. Manners were instinctive with him now.