New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  They were her aristocrats. At first, her young feeling for “the fine ones”—and for these four of them who were her portion expressed itself as promised, in a severe care of their personal effects, not for their adornment alone, also for a mutual honor’s sake; the thirty pairs of curtains inherited with the brownstone house were part of an escutcheon reassuring her of the quality of those she served. In time she came to scorn certain gifts, or even a family purchase, as not good enough for the house. The butcher knew her arrogance. In her middle age, she began to express her very sense of time passing, in the solid, impregnable cuisine with which she bound herself—to “them.” By then, the mutual psychology was fixed. Both sides knew.

  They “loved” her remotely enough so that she could be sure it would last, and would require of her that “best” which she had been taught she must give but might need help in holding to—obligation was the real emotion in her life. In turn, she expected “them” to be above certain things—and with the secret, deep Hola! of the stable and the keyhole, felt them capable of anything. For they were the only wildness she had. And like babies, must be protected from the consequences of it. Having had no mother, she became, in a stately way, the more motherly herself: “As peasants of good temper invariably do, Si; the hysteria of us women who from that same history are incapable of it, is reserved for the haute bourgeoise.”

  When the crime came, she was ready to be part of the concealing circle of family. As they knew. She felt confirmed by the deed, in a course that was familial—there was now a special sin in the household. As the children puzzledly made note, it was only afterwards that she became at times satirical. This was necessary, for balance. She knew. All. And in the smallness of the staff here, had no one to tell it to. From room to room, she grew used to her mistress’s pictured eyes saying to her, “Anna, you know all about it. My accident.” As those eyes followed her, in the housecleaning which was her meditation, she wondered hungrily if they knew that their accident had deprived her, Anna, of her only confidant. For any servant has to have a hutch of her own, according to her nature. And a day off, in which to do there what she will surely rue. To exert her own appetites and shames. And those Montenegrin eyes had been told of it.

  On a day some twenty years later, and two weeks after the first cable came to Judge Mannix about his son, Anna walked over—as in recent years she could do most afternoons—to her own habitat. In the way of neighborhoods in this city, it was only a few blocks in one direction, then another. No one, outside the Mannix household or in it, now knew of this place. If she died in it, under that other name, “they” would be safe; she thought of it that way still.

  Once, in the earliest years, on her way back to the Mannixes from her first place of her own, only a furnished hole, she’d passed their dressmaker and her sister, the Halecsys, and had had presence of mind enough to duck into a cheese store, midway between the neighborhoods, where she was known only in her capacity as servant. In the store, she had stood bemused. That night she had gone to the mistress.

  “Since when! Anna! Two years! Why—we would have given you a wedding!”

  She felt the heat pinken even her arms, and fixed her glance on them, clasping tight the afternoon’s swollen, aroused glands in her breasts, knitting close her thighs.

  After that the mistress said only, “You are…though? And since when did you know you want to keep it—dark?”

  But she had never been able to say since when, even to herself, and finally said, “Since the cheese store.”

  The mistress asked only once more, “But you’re not—there’s no child?” and receiving Anna’s mum headshake had intruded no further.

  But in time, she came to know everything, which wasn’t much, and didn’t change. On Thursdays, Mrs. Mannix often came and stood in the pantry, clasping her own breasts, said in a low voice, “Do you need anything?” and left again. Once the two of them, coming in late at night alone, met at the door (Anna just out of the taxi she took back on certain nights only), and the mistress said like a conspirator, “Are you all right?”, flashed a naked smile at her, and went on by. Bonus afternoons became regular, and sudden sums for nothing done extra—“For the flower arrangements,” the mistress said once. Nothing more was said. But she knew. Had known.

  Two corners from her own place, Anna stopped at a bistro named Auf dem Schwarzen Adler to pick up an order of sauerbraten, purple cabbage, and a pint of, beer. In all the years, she’d never cooked a morsel over here; there was a stove in the place but nausea locked it; she couldn’t mix food with what else was over here, nor make a kitchen of it.

  “Tomorrow’s order?” said the waitress, leaning on a zinc table.

  Anna grasped the table edge also, holding the tray in the other arm. Days at the Mannix household passed lovingly between the tasks, like between the hedges at Praha. In steady imitation, she had created here also a routine that squeezed, but let her by. At moments like this one, she came out into a wilderness, of no fences. And this time there was no one to tell, except the portraits. Over the wires of the past came the voice of the mistress at telephone, a practiced glide, refusing anything from a dinner to a person; God knows what posts she had squeezed through, until the last.

  “Nothing,” said Anna. “Nothing for tomorrow. I’ll let you know.”

  The builder of the house she entered, a tenement with “inside” water, had had the ghost of a brownstone in his memory, even to tin ceilings pressed in a fleur-de-lys that took the place of the Mannix plaster roses; it was natural, just as the fiber trunk Anna had brought across the water had been patterned after the family’s great leathern steamers, with a paper lining, to their cretonne. Going up the stoop, she felt herself note with stealth, that Popich’s Upholstery, whose owner lived in the first-floor back and went weekends to the brother on the shore, was already closed. From the neat hallway beyond the mailboxes, stairs led up five flights, each floor divided in half.

  At the third-floor back, she stopped, wishing as always that the door didn’t open direct into the bedroom. But it was the bigger room, had the fire escape and window. Beyond it, joined by a hall sink, washtub and toilet, was a windowless. backroom of a sort other tenants in the line used for sleeping. An armchair was kept there and a radio, a bottle of schnapps for any faintness after the clinic, a real leather shaker for dice, never used, and usually some old raffle stubs from the Turnverein. She weighed the tray in an arm, feeling for her key in her purse, where the cablegram also lay. Two weeks ago the master had called her in to tell her that David’s plane had been lost. But the strangeness had only begun today, when she had picked up the yellow paper dropped in their travel haste in front of the wardrobe in the Master’s bedroom—and had stolen it. For herself—in imitation of what, she couldn’t say.

  The man on the bed was sitting up, propped on his many tobacco-yellowed pillows, stained at their centers with his hours of catarrhal sleep; if ever any blood came—from the nose only, she was sure of it—he left that too. Two minutes ago, he might have been at the radio. She had a cart horse’s foot, he always said—and she was sure he always heard it in time, on the stairs. How he kept himself—clean as a razor strop, the sideburns pincering evenly the hollow cheeks, the moustache trimmed and pomaded, even the back hair done with clippers—took up the shuffle of his day, all on display for her. Nostrils cleaned with a spill, ears oiled against wax, he had climbed into the malicious funk of the bed linen, pajama top buttoned for warmth over the sunken, scarred rib cage, but the pants half the time open on that sprouting animal pink, those urea-colored bags in the hair—and was sitting up for her. She almost never failed to come.

  “Popich’s boy brought it yesterday,” he said at once, watching her set his dinner for him. “I knocked with the stick.” It was feigned between them that the stick could be heard three flights down, just as it was kept up that he never went out, except to the clinic or the barber. On the bureau was the clinic visit book, prominently displayed—but she never asked any mo
re what the doctor said—along with the cards with which he played solitaire, and the buffer for his mooned, sharp nails. Sometimes she imagined that he even still waitered as an extra at the hofbrau where she had first met him; the union card and book were on the dresser scarf too. She could have reached for it, or for the thick leather folder he said was his “accounts.” What he really gambled with or on, she never knew or asked, only that it was hot with those soiled cards, those unused dice. She thought of the gambling as a sinkhole, swelling with the weather or his illness, toward days when he would say, “They’re going to collapse the lung again,” or “I must have extra, the doctor said”; then she would give him the money, to vanish into the sinkhole. Maybe he won, too. She still paid the rent and expenses here, but wouldn’t have a phone of their own. His operations had all been years ago, but the rest was long since routine. Sometimes he gave her leave—or command—not to come, saying he was well enough. When he said he wasn’t well—as for more than a year now—she came with the dinner, every night.

  For the other half of the day, eat or not, he must fend for himself; she never inquired how. The dinners only were her obligation. What happened between the two of them afterwards took place without regard for illness or health. When she had to serve late at the Mannixes, she brought him his dinner at midnight, or extra the night before. She had missed only once. Once, ten years ago—no, eleven—at the mistress’s death, she’d had to telephone to Popich that she wouldn’t be there. Yesterday, and all the day before, she hadn’t phoned.

  On the dresser, she saw now, as if out of a new corner of her eye, that there was nothing of hers. Bankbooks, burial insurance, wardrobe, everything was in her room in the other house; for seventeen years she’d come here in the clothes she stood in, never carrying even an umbrella between the two. She shivered now, remembering who the insurance was in benefit of, something she had known she must never tell the master.

  As her husband ate, daintily as ever, his moustache lifted finicky over the beer, he seemed to her unchanged from that assistant headwaiter at Jaeger’s, whose coquettish toilette had come from his native Vienna, where he’d been a house servant too; who on trips with his master had been to a kavarna in Prague, and had quoted her the national dishes, national buildings, one by one. He’d been a thirty who looked forty to her then; he was a fifty who looked forty now; they were the same age, but maybe she had known from the first that of air his features, his hollows—in the cheek, in the conscience—were the most durable. “Where do you work?” he’d asked, and already two years at the Mannixes, she’d heard herself say, like an animal hiding its haven, “A brother and a sister, by the name Forbes.” All her reactions to him were animal; every time she went with him she had the impulse to scratch earth over this place, and walk away.

  Over the years, she’d cannily enlarged for him her own gray memory of the Forbeses, telling him that they wouldn’t stand for a live-out maid or a hang-about husband, and that because of a claim adjuster who had long plagued her for a bill fraudulently put upon her in her greenhorn days, would say no one of her name worked for them, to any man who called. Each year she had someone check in the telephone book for her that they were still there. Somehow she didn’t despise him for not taking a stand; he was her obligation. A sick taints that she could never trust at the Mannixes—a man who would live like that in the bed linen, in the must of what she and he did there! But in some way he eluded her despising him. As for the money she spent—he considered that his due, he’d say, with a mocking lift of the waxed lip, though what she gave him would be repaid by the death benefit he had maintained against all odds, even before he knew her. He never had asked her about hers.

  “You’re an honest criminal!” had once burst from her, one of the phrases, caught from the Mannix children, that she couldn’t always resist. He could understand these; he was a man of culture; unlike herself, he could read. “What fine talk!” he’d said. “You get that at the Forbeses?” After that, to the saga of the Forbeses’ kidneys and their pale menus, she’d added a niece and a nephew of just the ages of the Mannix children, plus a few other flourishes, airholes through which she could breathe here—of them.

  He had finished. His hands—resting there on the tray with maybe the card dealer’s delicacy, but a servitor’s too—were the part of him she could look at. She recalled with a start that she’d brought him no mohnkuchen, the bakery cake he savored with a child’s regard for treats from the store. That leaden yellow wad in her purse had made her forget. In spite of his manners, today he’d eaten quicker than she’d ever seen him.

  It crossed her motherliness—or would have in her other world, where she kept count of all the anxieties which ran between health and food—for once to ask him how he managed during the day. But for years now, because of the pure acid hopelessness of him here, she could be more truly domesticated to the Mannixes. And it wasn’t possible that he was starving.

  “Only once before you do not come like that,” he said. “But that time, you phone.” He waited.

  “Do I?” He never probed as to why she couldn’t bear mention of that time, of the mistress’s death—give him his due.

  “Three days you were away then. No, four. Popich’s wife manage for me; it was just after the pleurisy. She was alive then.” In the last year, he was always onto her about dates, until it had reached her—in the dim painful way things did reach her from him—that he had so few of them.

  “Nineteen forty-three,” he said. “Winter. When you came back, you took the suede shoes to Moroni’s for me—remember? He said it would be the last time he could do anything for them. It was. And for dinner you brought me—” He wasn’t looking at her but at the fire escape, through which the southern light declined on the one plant on the sill, a cactus, withered almost to cork between its gray spines. Sometimes she couldn’t resist, and tended it. In the faded light, he could still pass for the one description of him she had given the mistress. “Give me the folder,” he said. “The leather one.” He’d never let her touch it. She handed it to him. The calf was butter-soft, of the finest.

  “January,” he said, in the deep voice he kept for this. “Nineteen forty-three.” Inside its fine cover, the paper was bulged and dirty, with penciled droppings the same color as the bed linen. He shut it, but kept a finger on that page. “For dinner that time…Spaetzle. Und Knockerl. Not from the Adler. All the way from Alt Heidelberg. Linzertorte, too. And afterwards you tell me about the children. That the Forbeses have a nephew. I know already this. But that they have a niece too, I did not know. And how is she, the little Forbes niece?”

  “You keep what I say—in there?” She chafed her head sideways, like a child who couldn’t help prattling of what obsessed her, wearing to the elders though she saw it to be.

  “Only the dinners,” he said. “But they go back, all the way.” He seemed to bestir himself. “And how is that no-good no-relation, the Edwin? Does he still come there?”

  “He comes. But not for her.”

  “Twenty years, yes. They would be grown.” She wanted to take the tray from him, but sat on. He closed the book. “Other people’s business? Why should I keep their business here!” He flung open his pajama top, wide. “Behind my scars!” As he sat back, the pillow behind him fell from bed to floor. As she bent to pick it up, he could not meet her eyes. She slipped it quickly behind him, took up the tray, went into the hall where the sink was, and stood there, blindly running the water over the dishes, which she could never let herself return unwashed, as a true restaurant patron would. Noiselessly, she dried the Adler’s dishes, folding them in a plastic she kept here for that purpose and leaned forward, clasping her breasts, to the vista of him, profiled in bed, two dark steps down the hall. He had changed the pillowcase. Was he dying, to do this? Now she remembered, he had done the same that other time she had stayed away.

  She took the two steps that brought her to the bedroom. He still would not look at her. They hadn’t done anything in the bed tog
ether for a year. She could go now—without a word. But there on the chair on the other side of the bed was her purse, with its lead weight. And at home—no one. To the house already half draped for summer, a knock at the door had come, a yellow paper, and master and young mistress had picked up and gone at once on their proud business, leaving her no way to ache for the boy she had once wrestled with, no one to tell it to except the dead. She went back in, to her purse, and sat in the chair.

  “Only this time,” he said, “you don’t phone.” Yes, he was thinner, or shrunken; her father, before he went off, had looked like that. Not really sick, not even frightened, only humble, like the nags that were picked up once a season in the knacker’s cart.

  She cradled the purse, waiting for the question that surely he would ask. Then she could tell him. He always asked her questions that would let her tell him whatever she had to tell. Then, like that other time, she would get down on the bed. He had never forced her, give him his due.

  But he said, “My accounts. Why you don’t take a look at them?”

  She took up the folder and studied its pages, recognizing the calendar divisions; numbers she knew, and the days of the week, the months. Only a step more to the words her tongue knew well enough; sometime, without thinking, she said to herself what later proved to be right. Poring over pages, she saw the menus, and like a map, the gaps of her absences. There was another pattern too, little stars now and then on some of the days she had come, but not always. “What are these stars?”