New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  Under the steadier lamps of the deserted station, he held her still, and studied her.

  “I’m intelligent,” he said. “He’s always telling me. I kept a little notebook, telling myself. I only threw it way today. That picture. The big one, in the big room—Anna caught me studying it. There’s one of her in almost every room, isn’t there. Kept there. Because none of them really look too much like her, do they.”

  “Almost every. She was a difficult subject. Everybody said.” She didn’t whisper.

  He passed a hand over her face. They stood there on the platform’s edge, oblivious, courting danger, or each other.

  “You do. You look like her,” he said. “That’s why Anna’s afraid, isn’t it.”

  She moved her head from side to side. Into a yoke, out of it. As long as she kept moving—the motion itself seemed to say—she looked like no one in her family, only herself. Her mouth closed, opened again. “I mean to live. I mean to live.”

  A rush of the unknown welled up in him. He felt it—the unknown. Or it was hot in here—and he had his mother’s eyes. “Let me show you my place.” The personal wasn’t filth, down here. He eased himself into it; down here nothing was personal. Tenderly, wielding her like a trophy, he went up the familiar stairs.

  Nothing had changed in these slumped barrows along which he had toiled with his ikon, the hours growing on their joined backs like a spine always testing upward for the scope of that day’s food. Orchards of night-bruised fruit; he could smell its dark mauve. Nothing had changed in these grand banks of his beginnings. He could always depend on it.

  He wasn’t surprised that it was all still here. In the nameless merge of its seasons, nothing much was separate except the light from the dark, the empty bowl from the not quite filled, chill cellarholes of time when the bugs were silent, bustles of heat when the rats were brave. How beautiful it had been. There were no visits here. In the small center of their round, he had carried his ikon, she had carried him.

  “Nothing,” he said aloud. “Here’s the school.” They passed it, in a golden shower of 5x8’s.

  “But it’s not there,” she said.

  Only a scoop in the earth, with a crane hung on the sky behind it like a huge, idle spoon. “No, it isn’t. But nothing’s lost.”

  The church was still here. And the spoiled priest who wouldn’t leave the all-night bar until the first bell for Mass had rung. “‘Puts a little religion into the morning,’ he used to say…There’s the door where they used to give out the shoes.” He didn’t turn his head as they passed it.

  “‘Keeps the rats down and blessed,’” she said. “I never forgot.”

  When the twin lamps came in sight again, solemn here and dangerous, she put her hand in his and made him keep it. The cellar door, familiar to him as their holly-wreathed knockers to them, was just around the corner. He stopped her before it. “Here’s our stoop.”

  “So near? To the police?”

  “The less wanted.”

  “Edwin.” She dared a laugh. “Even then, you were political.”

  They always dared to laugh. That was their style. He could have it in time. In exchange for a rat.

  He lifted the cellar door; it was always open. “I was here last year. Checking my property.” He dared to laugh. “Nothing surprises you, does it—not even down here. Is that you yourself?—or in all of you? You’ve never surprised.”

  “We used to walk near here. I tried to tell you.”

  He held the door for her, leaving it propped open behind them. But he already knew, as they went down the steps of the correct number, into the pissy, wood-and-rag quiet and the crockery murmur of the pipes, all correct—now in subtraction we add back and verify—that no one should have been brought here.

  “Some old bum’s been sleeping here. Always are. Smell.” In the corner, there was still a table. Scarcely more than boards, it could be anything. “Could be ours.” There was no tin box. Opposite was the newspaper pile. While they sat on them, he refurnished the place for her. “He burns candles too,” he said. “See there.”

  “What was in the box?”

  “Scissors. Couple of spoons. Knife I bought.” Plus some scavenged items, including the tube he’d been sure was a thermometer until he’d learned it came with contraceptive cream—and an eggbeater they never got to use.

  “Hall toilet’s that way…Listen.” Intent, he held her close. “You hear a rat?”

  “Maybe there is.” She got to her feet. “But I have to go.”

  “Take a candle.”

  She had to climb a flight, but she’d find it. She was gone quite a time, but he didn’t worry about her, sitting here, seeing this place first through her eyes then through his own, with the shutter effect of those card movies in the oldest penny machines. The dark was moving, arranging itself as it had used to do—but nothing any more was nameless. He had his legend now, if he wanted it. It had been here all the time.

  “You all right?” he said.

  “I had something in my bag. Kleenex.” She crept back close to him. She hadn’t got up, then, in order to get away.

  “Guess I’m the cleanest here,” he said. “At that.”

  “How do you know the—the person who lives here—is a man?”

  He marveled. They were formal with people to the end; not even a bum huddling in a corner to scratch and push at himself was one of a legion to them; they personified to the end. As they had done with himself.

  “Because of the smell,” he said harshly. “That fishy smell.” Let her figure it out for herself.

  On their two pallets, he and his mother had turned their backs to each other, in dumb continence. Since babyhood, he had tended himself in all fleshly things; she liked the touch only of the soap, the water and pail. From their memory rose a manger smell, ammoniac and straw. He could smell it now, the hard metal scent that sweat became after days of cold. But like all innocents, those two had never smelled themselves. In the dark, without fathers, a son was made.

  “I never met any woman bums. Mostly they have a doss somewhere.” Old hags, with a den to scream at the kids from. Or—you-knows. “You all have a doss-down somewhere,” said the spoiled priest to his mother. “Even you.”

  He got to his feet. “Come on, let’s get out. How do you stand it here.”

  “We can’t go back yet,” she said. “You have to keep me out.”

  “We can sit upstairs! We used to do that.”

  On the middle step he turned, waiting as he had so often done, bracing the metal trapdoor on his bent neck.

  “Aren’t we going to blow it out?” she said. “His candle?”

  “Let it burn.”

  She went back and did it anyway. “The old john will never know we’ve been here,” he said. “We have no scent.”

  “Haven’t we?” She stopped beside him. “How can you do that. On your neck.”

  Holding it, a proud Atlas-weight grinding his shoulders, he let himself be kissed. Then she went up, before him. Outside, just above pavement level there was a ledge broad enough to sit on. He let the trapdoor fall, looking down on the clang. “We did nothing wrong,” he said.

  In the sky, roughly northwest from where they sat, a line evidenced itself, scarcely light, more a wearing through of the dark. “The market line, we always called it. That’s how we told time.” When working at the stalls, it had been the time he rose. An ozone always came with it—chlorophyll. His mother still got up to it, in the electric-veined dark.

  “So your father toured the city with you,” he said. “I can imagine, those ‘Here’s Fraunce’s Tavern, and here I was born’ walks. Now you’re going on tour by yourself, he intends to take me.” But his voice was almost tolerant. She had already paid for that.

  Going to be a lot of traffic before long—the cursing trucks that would take the wrong turn into these narrows, against foot traffic of the earliest trade-hours, the chicken-slaughterers on their way to the synagogue first, and others en route to the more C
hristian rituals of the river—chandlers with shaved heads and leather jerkins, bums who still thought they were longshoremen, helpers with the wide, cutpurse mouth that often signified the handlers of fish. But for a half-hour yet, it was still all roach-shadows, scuttlers passing anonymous.

  “Not him,” she said. “Her. She walked me everywhere. Talking, always talking. From the time I was little. He never knew.”

  “Speak up,” he said.

  “You think we’re all talk.”

  “Not when you speak of her.” He was watching her face. “Don’t hide. When you don’t speak of her…how you hide.”

  She opened her purse. The gloves, crumpled, were in it. “He sometimes took us to the park when we were little. For the park. She never bothered with that.”

  A rusted garbage can lay on its side near him. Using the toe of a sneaker, he began dislodging it from the refuse pile behind. “Where did you and she go?”

  “Anywhere—she didn’t care where. She only lived when she was moving, acting—she said it herself. Action, she meant. She couldn’t pretend, not at all. She always had to speak out. Diddy and I overheard them once, quarreling about it.”

  “Can you?” he said. “Pretend?”

  “I dance.” She gave a sudden, tender laugh. “So did she a little, once, whatever they did in those days—flamenco, Isadora Duncan Greek. She taught in a settlement house once, the old Meinhard, uptown—Grandfather Mendes knew old man Meinhard. First time she went—she was sixteen—she gave the kids a talk first, about ancient Greece. When she got through, one of them said, ‘Ain’t any Greeks around here, miss. Can yer do the split?’ So she stood up and did it. After that, she had them in the palm of her hand.”

  “Palm of her hand.” He kicked the garbage pail upright. “My mother told me about a pig-sticking once.”

  “I was just—telling.”

  “So she told you all about life,” he said. “What else?”

  She looked at him steadily. “Life.” Even in this light, on this ledge, her face was no different from the way he and they always saw it. “Fornication.”

  The market line was widening. He could smell it now.

  “She told me everything,” said the girl beside him. “Her side of it. But it’s never enough.”

  Two people passed; it must be close to four. He let another pair go by and dwindle before he answered. “Is that what we share?”

  “You feel it too,” she said.

  “How we keep them on!” he said. “Your mother in the house, my father—in the hallway.”

  “Yes. Oh yes.” She said it passionately, into the distance. Then she buried her face in her lap.

  “But you can’t pretend either,” he said. “Not like him. Do you and he ever—quarrel about it?”

  She lifted her head, in one arched curve like an exercise. Her upper lip was white, or the morning had crept to it. “I used not to be able to. Pretend. But I have got control of it.” The market line had widened now beyond repair. “That unknown, in the hallway,” he said. “Sometimes, I almost—know him.”

  The girl leaned her cheek against his. “She comforts me. She tells me the truth.”

  “How you speak out. What you speak of her. Is that why they don’t listen to you, at home?”

  “How can you say that?” she said. “They listen for me all day long.”

  She was answering him plain, as he thought she always had, answered anyone—but from a frame of reference so far back or deep that all she said or did came from it; if he had the frame, he would have everything. “Because you know? About him?”

  “I always knew about him. She never stopped talking about him. What I wanted was—to know about her.” The twin lamps behind them shone weaker. “Tell me. What she said about him.” She shrugged. He shook her. Her head bobbed in the light of the lamps. “It’s only that you already know.” He could feel her body feel his. “That he was too good,” she said. “With the innocent.”

  In the refuse pile, there was a movement, a tinkle, of glass somewhere dislodged.

  “She used to say that over and over…Now, of course, I see for myself. ‘It’s the Jew in us, Ruthie,’ she used to say. ‘We give an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, just as the Bible says. But not always only for vengeance. Nobody notices that we do it for pity too. He thinks he does it because he never went to war.’”

  “But that’s him talking!”

  “It was her too.”

  He was watching the pile. “Take an eye,” he said. “She said ‘give.’”

  She leaned forward, not to him. “‘Simon has a genius for private life; he’ll be a great man there,’ she said once. “Chauncey Olney told me so; he asked me to come and see him, Ruthie, and I went.” “So many of your race have that, Mirriam,” he said to me. “But public life, so many of your men fuddle there. Give him ten years, Mirriam.” And darling Ruthie, I said I’d try. But I’m so afraid one of us’ll be the one to do him in. It doesn’t matter if I tell you…It won’t be David. Your father doesn’t feel toward David—but that’s another story. And it can’t be you—not in that short time. So it’ll be me. I can’t convince your father, you see. That I’m bad enough.’”

  She hadn’t mimicked, except in the pace of a woman walking, bearing down on the child, with a voice that maybe was to be the child’s. “And she couldn’t, you see, she couldn’t convince him. She couldn’t convince me.”

  “She was mad, then?” he said in awe. “Or that would be his excuse.”

  In the pile, there was a rustle. Always moving, moving; the test for life is movement. To quote a judge. He could see how it would be in a family. In some alliance in which all four Mannixes stole from and gave full pity to each other—the Judge had been quoting her. Did the dead still move?

  “No, she wasn’t. That was her trouble…Excuse for what?”

  “Her death,” he said—and listened for the echo of that.

  She didn’t falter. “Often I can’t tell any more, whether she said everything to me. Or whether I—After.” Her voice changed. “She doesn’t really. …come to me. But she comes to me.” Her voice was happy. “I even know…a little something about her that no one else did. Or almost no one. I was never sure she knew it herself.”

  “Would it concern—David?”

  “In a way.”

  “Well, sons are made,” he said. “I’ve no pity there.”

  “You’re a Christian.” She rubbed her face on his shoulder.

  “So everybody says.”

  “But you see? How can one get to know—about both?”

  “I’m not likely to hear voices.”

  She turned his face to hers. “Phew, I’m tired, Edwin. I never knew I could be so tired. And you?”

  “Not me. I was only fifteen yesterday.”

  “That would help in the theatre, not to know one’s age. Know something? Your face hasn’t changed since. Not an iota. And I don’t think you have, either.”

  “Don’t go to sleep.” His voice wasn’t gentle. It went with the face he could see as well as she. His own.

  She leaned against him, her voice drowsy. “Helps though, she always said. To talk to someone. Even if you can’t tell them everything.”

  “So you are alike then. You and she.”

  She sat up. “I was once. But I got control of it. You can be like both. You can. I finally remembered that.” She followed his glance. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a rat.” Sometimes in the lone bed-dark when he couldn’t be continent, he felt this same satisfaction—halfway between gain and loss. “Two of them.”

  In the refuse pile, first one head poked out, then the other whole animal—the peculiarly glistening haunches which slimmed to a cord, had without warning a head. Some said the human hand was what confounded artists—but if you could draw a rat, you had drawn everything. “I been bit by a Mexican chicken,” the children sent to the school nurse said with aloof smiles. Men coming into the barbershop after a bought night, to have a scrat
ch dressed, an eye leeched, said the same, with the same smile. The two animals prowling here, tough between the discs of tin marked Coca, Kraft, brave with summer, might have been nibbling a pile of goods as high as the resurrection. The girl beside him hadn’t moved; she was cool. With what she must once have been witness to, why wouldn’t she be? He stood up. “They don’t eat for nothing. Somebody pays for it.”

  “Where did they go?” she said.

  It was never possible to tell the exact rat-tip when they had gone. Once they had, you always knew. The cellar door didn’t have to be open for them; she could see that. The lore of his city was simple. “Where do you think?”

  She stood up and kissed him—not for himself but for what they all treasured him for, for his life, before he had met them.

  “Want those eggs?”

  “No. Take me home.”

  “I’m not sleepy either,” he said.

  At the end of the alley, they both turned to look back.

  “Know what it looks like to me now?” he said…“Just a habitat, that’s all. Like it says in the nature books: ‘Mexican chicken, habitat all hemispheres, low ground.’” He smiled at her, the way he had at Krupong. “I won’t go back.”

  She took his hand and swung it. “Yes, we’re alike. The way I’ve always thought of it.”

  “How?”

  “Everything’s already happened to us.”

  He had the wit to walk on, not to ask details. He was at the beginning of everything now. He had the clearest sense now of how young he was. Of the blatant power given him by circumstance. Of how protean it was in his will to become. Could Putzi the forger walk both sides of the street any better? Any lipreader have a finer sense of what others missed? Or any dinner guest make a more knowledgeable payment—for what he was about to receive. In return for having been the most intelligent who had ever been let in. the house.

  “Don’t know that we can get a cab here.” He had a concern—like a dater’s—that this tender means to an end should not be jarred.

  “I use the subway a lot.”

  “No,” he said, “we’re not so different.”