New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  Quick as a flash, back there in that first museum, he’d made the U sign after her, then the and, then pointed to himself: You and me. “No,” she’d said, in her literal way, in the voice whose faint vibration his box had never been able to bring to him. “Those are the signs. But to spell it the M is like this and this is the E.’” He wondered now why he should be trying like mad to convince her that all was the same—when he had come home to confess the opposite. “Of course,” he said, casually aloud. “It’s my box. I forgot.” He always took it off when they met—to make things equal. He blushed now—to have said that to a woman: I have forgotten how you are.

  “No.” She sat so tall. Had she voiced it? “Keep it on.” She touched the box, even with interest. “I’m teaching now, you know. In a hospital.”

  “You wrote,” he said. “The larnygotomies.”

  “How well you say it,” she said. “I never knew.”

  He had barely understood her, she mimed so fast, or her lips moved so slightly. “I must go and watch. How you teach them.”

  Again she didn’t reply. He felt like an amnesiac returning. Surely there was something that teased. What had he forgotten about this girl, or never known?

  “I met your father,” she said suddenly. With her lips. “He was there just the other day to see a friend.”

  “Repeat,” he said. “You speak so fast. Or the desert…has made me slow.” And when she had done so—“He knew you then?” How should his father not know her! How many deaf girls of that name, that description, would there be, other than the one with whom the son-of-the-name was rumored to be in love!

  Again no answer—like a signal from a farther area of deafness at her very recesses, never discovered before.

  “He’s terrifying,” she said then. “You never told me. He’s so small.”

  “What did he say…to scare you?” he said aloud, starting up.

  “Nothing. Relax, David, I thought you said the desert had changed you.”

  “I have relapses. But what has changed you?”

  Again no reply. Maybe to remind him that he had the explaining to do.

  “He used to…terrify me,” he said with his lips. “Inaction does that—to people like me. We think such people have a secret. Of how to live…by thinking only. Because…we can’t. So I used to just—act happy instead…or helpful.” It was a long speech. She had listened to every word of it.

  A guard looked in on them.

  “We’re stealing nothing!” David said to him gaily, in flashing sign language, and turned to the girl. “See!” he said aloud. “My Dalgarno. I had no one to keep it up with. So I spoke to the heavens.”

  The guard came forward.

  “Nothing!” said David aloud. “Go away.”

  “Go on,” she said. “About him.”

  “Even you…say that,” he said. “After only one meeting. ‘Him.’” There was a pause. “But…don’t let’s talk like this. Let’s—” He took up both her hands, gently forcing them into the air.

  “Not yet,” she said. “Not…yet.”

  “Or—not here,” he said humbly, and turned his head quickly away to the window behind them, so as not to be sure of her answer. The city itself had no creeping moral poetry for him; he left that to his father. His own ears and box kept a single locale for him anywhere. He felt her hands seize his, and closed his eyes. The girl’s eyes calmly stared down the guard.

  At her side, David opened his eyes. “I never feel childish with you.” Lifted like that, his long, handsome head with its broad forehead and chin, hair crimped like a Grecian bull’s, curled mouth and jutting nose, had a dignity he himself never saw. “He and I talked last night. Half an hour. Long…for us. ‘We’re not…a serious family,’ I said to him. ‘We don’t do enough in the world.’”

  “…I take it you don’t mean just me,” his father had said from his chair, with a forbearance which could have made those still on their two legs feel guilty for it, but comically scratching that way at his own crotch. He could charm the bees.

  “‘We’d as soon spend action outside our own circle—’” said David slowly to the girl—“‘as spend capital,’ I told him. ‘If that’s your middle class, I’m done with it.’”

  (And his father said to him, “There speaks your mother’s son.” Never forbearing there, his father. “Action never helped her, David.” And I said to him, “I’m your son, too.” I’d never shown him before that I knew he didn’t think so. He wheeled his chair up close to the mirror beside where I was standing—the big pier glass in the downstairs hall where we were waiting for Charlie, the new chauffeur I’d never met, to carry him up—and said nothing. Sometimes, my father looks to me like those men (you can see it in the hawk of the eye, the quiet of the hand) who in some way have succeeded, though in no great walks of life. At other times, often during the same evening, he reminds me profoundly of certain others encountered only in those prominent walks. Those famous men—distinguished at once by the breath of bitter almond in what they say, the gelid bird-flesh of the eye—who have failed.

  If I could disavow him, I thought—would I? “Walter had a letter from her once,” I said to him. “About you and me. He’s never opened it. She said it was to be for me.” I stared at him in the mirror. For me, in the event—of an event. But I refused it. I was afraid to lose you for a father—can you see? As afraid to lose you, as you are me? “And you wouldn’t ask to see it?” he said. “No, I won’t ever ask.” He gave me the queerest…no, the most direct look he’d given me since I was grown—like the looks he used never to know I saw, in our lessons. “So you wouldn’t ask her either,” he said. And when the chauffeur came in, my father refused him. “My son, Charlie,” he said—“my son will carry me upstairs.”)

  The girl had been listening to him; she listened like the heavens, giving him all the time in the world for what he’d never been able to say to anyone, by any method known…

  (To the heavens out there, I cried it all, with my fingers. It amused my father’s son, to do that. The tea out there smells of ram; the air smells of our gunpowder prayers. No house out there, no door, no stairs. The stars cram close, interested. I flash it to them, Dalgarno. A system made only a moment ago, in the sixteen-hundreds, and in Aberdeen, but the stars understand it, they are very intelligent. “He’s never really thought I was illegitimate,” I said to them. My mother had it all wrong; maybe he doesn’t know it himself. What he really can’t face is that I’m here. He can face that better in Ruth; he has so much worse there to bear that I would carry him on my back for it forever. And her…)

  “And…what did you say then?” said the girl beside him.

  “Oh, I said it all to the desert,” he said, head cast down in profile. “One day, if I’ve nerve enough, I’ll say it to you.”

  (Hand to hand. In the black desert air, I practiced them for you, the sentences ingrained in me like those old conundrums in which “your father’s daughter” and “my father’s son” all turn out to be thee and me. My father’s wife—meant to shoot a lover. My mother’s husband—walked in on them. In the melee, who knows who shot her? My father’s daughter. Saw our mother die. Our father’s wife.)

  “Say it to me,” said the girl, and he turned to her amazed, almost thinking he heard her voice.

  “By night,” he said, aloud. “I’ll learn the one-handed alphabet, and say it to you. The one you said an abbé invented.” He thought he’d gone too fast, and repeated all this. “That’s all…the dactylology…it takes.”

  “The Abbé de l’Épée,” she said. Softly. Or so it seemed to him.

  (And at breakfast only this morning, after hearing of his intentions, his father had said to him, on their being alone, “Families disappear at the front, David. That’s how you and I come to be here—our fathers didn’t go. No excuse, either way. I wanted to go once, myself. To war.”

  And when I denied nothing, not even that war would come out there, he said to me, “David, David. That’s not Zion out th
ere…now.” As I stood there, risen from my chair, I found my answer. He, my own father, had given it me. “Then I shall disappear,” I said.)

  “That means sword—épée—doesn’t it?” he said. “What we aren’t supposed to perish by.” He mouthed it for her carefully. “Sword. A one-hand alphabet.”

  “You wrote…like that,” she said. “From Israel.”

  “So he met you. So he got to you ahead of me,” he said, slurring. She had always been even quicker at lipreading than he, smarter, from need, at all of it. “He’d charm the bees. He’s always ahead of us. But it doesn’t matter. What it really means is, you charmed him.”

  “He never knew it was me,” said the girl.

  “You mean…he never heard your name? That you were Alice Cooperman?”

  “Repeat,” she said. “Repeat.” He must have spoken so fast that he was unintelligible; often when the box was on he did that; but why should that make her look ready to cry?

  He repeated, watching her answer him in careful mime.

  “His friend—Mr. Somers—simply said…‘This is…my Miss Cooperman.’ I might have been…anyone.”

  “Might you,” he said. “Might you. How?”

  He’d never said anything so cruel, to anyone. Here was the heavy underbottom of that pale ice floe, his pity. He felt it rise in him as it had in the desert—the black basalt cliff of his rage. In the Sinai, in the Arabian black Harra, one understood God better, that two-faced Adonai. Eagles pick the stars clean, and that is pity. Ice melted astrally—and disappeared. Elohenu. Blessing is double-faced too.

  “My father.” The box squawked, he spoke so large. “The smartest man on earth. The champ. And he didn’t recognize you? A deaf Miss Cooperman, who teaches mutes to whistle, like herself?” He raised his head, the high, hewn profile given to prophets, as the possessors of such heads should—in full knowledge of it. Under his hands, at her wrist, he felt the bracelet made of the triangular forehead-piece of a fourteenth-century bride, identical with the one he had sent his sister, from Jerusalem. He peered closer at the face above it. “You—don’t remind me of her, any more.”

  The face was answering his whisper, with tears. It had never stooped to tears before—that last resort, beyond even hands. Under the running wet, the face looked almost—ordinary. Cameo out of the matrix, it came forward, discovered of its own pity and rage. It bent forward, hiding in its own lap how cruel it felt, to be real.

  What should he say to it, out of the fear in him now? He could test her, in the way he tested his own box. “Laryngotomy,” he said aloud. He wasn’t touching her. She couldn’t see him. But in the electronic center of her, unreachable by alphabets, he saw her quiver—who couldn’t see him.

  He felt his mouth’s lassitude. It wanted its beard. Oh beard of change, cover me! “Marry me,” his mouth said, to that hidden face. “Then I won’t—disappear.”

  The head rose from its lap. Yes. It had heard, it had heard. “Won’t you?” Her lips said it, full voice. Her voice, heavy enough to carry, entered his box, and was carried to him. In the ordinary way—for him—he heard her voice.

  Then her two hands, clasped against that but powerless, broke into their true language, telling him, telling him, scattering their frail ideograph everywhere, so that it seemed to him the gallery walls must be stamped floor to ceiling with the pale track of these waste butterflies. She raised the hair from one ear, to show him the shaved place where new bandages must have been, and in a coronal of fresh little head-scars, the perfect ear. She spoke to him in mime, then, touching his box, in voice, and when she saw he couldn’t or wouldn’t understand, at last once again with her hands in the true communication. She said the same thing over and over again. She was showing him how she could waste words. He sat dumb.

  In the window, the city was real, but one could turn from that. He lifted his own hands to answer from their lost inner circle. He tried to answer her, from his desert of one. He couldn’t shape it, one-hand method or two, or say it. Maybe in time he could breathe it to himself, to be lost in his box. You disappeared first. But I shall manage it.

  The guard checked in and out again. How was it the guard himself didn’t see her last true communication, not in sign language but painfully spelled out in their alphabet, black-tracked on the walls, engraved on the dusk coming of age here down the ages—her ideograph fluttering everywhere—in the raised fifth finger and clenched four of the sign for I, in the open tiger-cry of the C (four above and the thumb-jaw below), and the long, pointing, parallel forefinger and second, of the H.

  16. The Servants

  Spring 1954

  HORSES WERE GELDED THERE, for the trade.

  Often the Mannix children heard Anna’s stories of her early life there. And of how she had come to work for them. Though she couldn’t tell them everything.

  The gentleman advocate, retired to the farm estate outside Prague for which household Anna’s father had been majordomo, had had both a Montenegrin wife, on whom he had fathered two elegantly lineaged children, and a German mistress, very little younger than the wife, who lived on the estate as part of the family, along with her child by the advocate. This girl—a long, stringy, lime-colored child, dressed by the mother in the stripes and mauves of a court harlequin, with thin, fair hair allowed to dawdle below the waist like a beauty’s—had been just Anna’s age, and Anna’s imperious, spiteful friend. There were eighteen people on the estate, among whom the German, a foolish, gone Rubens of a woman, fadedly resembling the copy of a Venus by that artist which the master kept in the gun-room, was easily passed off as a cousin, for the gentry’s sake. The advocate’s domestics, from garden to chamber, had a prouder sense of drama, however, and among themselves never let drop the special sense of sin of their household.

  No one kept them all in their places better than the parvenue’s sprig—or thought she did. Anna’s friend; the skinny bastard girl, got sugar-holes in her teeth from the extra tea-sweetening required to assure her that no wormwood had been placed in it, berated the laundress over any imperfection in the German’s laces—and was the one child of the family whom the advocate took on his knee. To Anna in her corner, a humble, plump girl whose only distinction was a father who could swallow hot peppers whole, this girl would then send a covert. smile—afterwards coming down to the kitchen to seek her out like an agent provocateur for the sexual, to whisper of her own mother’s arts, and on one rainy night after the other servants were in bed, to show her the advocate and the German through an industriously widened knothole. Anna, already informed of what she was to see, had seen it. Madeleine, as the master called her, or Big Tits, as the kitchen did, could tie bells on them, and twitch them to a rhythm, if not a tune. Through the hole, the daughter breathing down her neck in back, Anna saw the brown teat long as an udder, heard the bell. Neither had waited to see the whole performance, if there was any; the daughter had been so eager to get away and talk about it. In the kitchen, over the pan of yogurt to which the girl had access, and for which dainty, when sprinkled from a bag of chocolate shot always in the friend’s pocket, Anna had a sick weakness, she was asked to bear witness to having seen two bells. But Anna, whose father had that day gone off to the lung sanatorium, had replied in a rare outburst, “I saw only one.”

  That had had little to do anyway with the spaniels which were always being kicked, for sucking themselves bright red, in the kitchen, or the master’s rage when a farmhand was caught with an animal—or the gardener’s wink that had convulsed the staff: “Bred stock; too!”—or with the cow’s lowing, clover breath, on her way to the bull. The kitchen was what mattered to Anna, the white air of its fall mornings nourished by the blood oranges on the dresser, all the safe, slow fruit of its seasons, the tickling pot of its afternoons. The whole while she was saving for America, she was scarcely frightened; she was on her way to some kitchen there.

  Once in New York City, shut up alone as cook-general to a fourteenth-floor box kitchen in which after a week the refrigerat
or was a scorn, the four-burner never a friend, the one grocery cabinet a parched amazement—and the middle-aged, dollar-colored brother and sister who owned all this scarcely an afterthought—she began dreaming, night after night. And of all things (with all the rest of the estate to think about, animals, land, privies and women, all smelling high as its blessed cheeses, prickly to strangers as its own hedges, there on the opposite realm of the world), of one thing only, the Montenegrin. A tall, monkish woman, the order of her laces was never in question, nor her beauty challenged by the growth of down on lip and jaw. When she dined downstairs, rigidly fair to all at the tureens, the harlequin was for once quiet. When she had a migraine, her own children spent hours with her in the suite from which their peals of laughter were never censored; afterwards, during her angelic recoveries; the maids fought one another for the chance of a charmed remark from those pillows, for the privilege of taking it its tisane.

  In New York, Anna, waiting for the grocery order which was telephoned for her, or walking the dog, the only time she was expected to go outdoors except Sunday, thought of her—the Montenegrin—as the gentry had always been heard to call her. The Montenegrin had never gone out, though she could have come and gone as she pleased, and had never had a dog, though in other ways she had been herself round the clock; the male servants’ other name for her had been “the angel without legs.” Anna remembered her, as through a knothole.

  At the employment agency, the harassed woman who spoke Czech said to Anna, “I can’t understand you girls, that’s Park Avenue, Mr. and Miss Forbes, and the pay as good as you’ll get, even from the Jews,” but Anna came every week now as to a clinic, walking the dog. She was watching. Once, twice, in the line of armchairs where sat waiting clients, she saw Mirriam Mannix, who required an “experienced.” The third time—she had been praying all week and had dared to come out without the dog—she had gone down on her knees to the dark young woman with the arched nose, sitting there in her riding boots, all in plain black except for the Horsewoman’s jabot of a lace any decent girl from Prague would recognize, above it the wild migraine, bold and remote, of those eyes. Anna, having no English as yet, had dared to touch the starched jabot, shaking her head over it; she could do better, she made that clear. Then she spoke the one word which surely she and this woman would have between them. “Madame.”