New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  When he didn’t answer, the interval told her. Her face burned. This was reading.

  “Only menus,” he said. “Ja. I had them.” He watched her put the book on the bureau. “And you,” he said to her back bent over it. “You know how to read chust for their grocery labels. And their envelopes. We’re two of a kind. A pair. Intelligent.” He gave the word the German pronunciation, but the word was a Mannix word too. A whip they kept for themselves, not for her. He should not be using it.

  “Popich’s boy can read,” he said. “He’s gone to college. Gone.”

  She shrugged—then at this last word, lifted her head to ask something, and bent it without asking.

  The man on the bed spread his pajama top again—she saw it had been pressed, by God knows who. He might have taken it and the case to a laundry. “Our business, we should keep here.” Below his breastbone, crisscrossed at the sides, scar over scar had purpled with his thinness. He beat on that cage. “Ours.” The word caught in his throat, but he coughed, and swallowed it. He sat upright against his pillows, the breastbone swelling, and swelling. Underneath, the rib cage held by its seams, a bag reduced by the mending of it.

  He closed his mouth hard, as to a reminder, and began taking breaths of a size suitable. “Why do you hold your purse?” he said then in a whisper. His lips attempted a smile. “Is the mohnkuchen in there?”

  He had left himself open, naked. She held on to the purse.

  “All right,” he said at last. “What are you going to tell me this time?”

  She had been waiting for it; it was like the toilet once you were trained to it; until you got to it, you could hold the worst. She let go, in a scald of tears. As the tears roused, her head reared back on lengthened neck, the jaw elongated also. After that expulsion, her lips closed, on a sob. He watched. The mouth had barely come together, not yet to the line it held when she entered with his dinners. Her eyes reddened at him, from some inner, ennobling light.

  “What are you yammering over,” he said. “Popich’s boy?”

  He studied her face, as he sometimes studied the kings and the queens in solitaire, royal as anyone, trapped on the card.

  The light had dwindled, mournful anywhere to a room’s dark occupants, a day taking leave of a pillowcase.

  In her purse, the cablegram had tangled with their household keys. She smoothed it free. How these things were sent was still a mystery to her; beloved hands must have touched it somehow; they wouldn’t send by strangers such a message from the grave. Carefully, she laid it on the counterpane. There’s blood for you.

  The posture of people reading was what she could read. He never liked to read to her. “They would let you go to night school,” he used to say—“Ask.” In the dining-room, they said of her, “Dear Anna. We can’t get her to go.” They liked her better that way. She knew.

  “So?” he said. “Where did you get this?”

  “After they leave. It’s mine.”

  “You don’t know what’s in it?”

  “I know from two weeks ago—a plane crash.” She pointed at the yellow form, to letters she knew weren’t English. “In that country.”

  “Hebrew,” he said. “The country of the Bible.”

  “He would go there.” She nodded, tears beginning again. “Such a boy. He would go there.”

  “She told you? The mistress?”

  She sat up. He had a glimpse of the power she would be in that other household, white-bosomed, hair a tame crown. “The—little Ruth.” She drew breath through her teeth, as people did for the holiness of their own pain. “Her brother’s body. They do not find it yet, she said.”

  “The country of the Jews,” he said.

  “Read,” she said. “I know how long it take. To read. They find him? It says—they find him?”

  “They leave,” he said. “And they do not tell you?” His slender fingertip traced the words. “No, it is not yours. But I tell you.”

  “Do not tell me. Read.”

  He held it out to her. She knew what he wanted—that she come to him. She came and sat in the foul bedclothes, unable to keep her glance from the pillow. Side by side they sat. She stared at the cable, penetrating the design with her eyes. Four, five lines, and a name.

  MY DEAR ONES NOTHING FROM HERE BUT WHAT YOU KNOW STOP THEY SAY AIR PHOTOS OF WRECK SHOW NO LIFE BUT THEY WILL SEARCH ON STOP BETTER FOR US TO MEET IN LONDON STOP THEY VERY KIND BUT WILL NOT SHOW PHOTOS STOP PLANE WAS MILITARY STOP IF FOUND ALL HONOR WILL BE DONE

  LOVE

  WALTER

  She listened.

  When he had finished, he said, “Who is Walter?”

  “A friend. His friend.” She touched his hand, and in answer he read it again.

  “My boy,” she said. “My boy.”

  “Anna,” he said. “He is not your boy.”

  She snatched at the paper in his hand. It tore slowly in half.

  “Nothing is yours,” he said. “Nothing. Will you never see it?”

  “You don’t want them to be mine.” She shrank from him. “You do not know them. And you will never.”

  “Your Forbeses? With a Ruth and a David? And the chicken soup. And—” He broke off. “No, I do not know such—Forbeses.” He fluttered the half of the paper in his hand. “But I know them.”

  She grabbed for the paper. It came away in her hand, on his loins.

  “From there, I know them,” he said. “Not from the paper. From there.” He stood up to face her, fallen back on the bed, her hand on her mouth. “No, it’s not on that paper, the name and address; you don’t think I see where you cut it away? You want me to tell you—the names. The house?” He began telling her, the name she never thought to hear from him, the street number, other identifications. His voice went on, opening up the walls here to them where they could see in on her, dozens of knotholes on her and him.

  “You follow me,” she whispered. “All that time.”

  “No, I don’t follow you. Not like you think.”

  His pants had dropped from him. He stood reflective, in his skeleton. He wasn’t showing it off to her. Even she could see that. “Poor Anna. How you think you can keep such a thing. For such years.” His voice fell sad on her there on the bed. “Poor Anna. I follow you in the head. And here. And here.” One hand on his chest, one at his loins, he wavered at her. “Poor Anna. I can read.”

  How could she never see his skeleton before, how could she come down all those years side by side with it, star by penciled star, and not see! He was hers, in imitation of nothing she could say.

  “Get out!” she said from the bedclothes. “Go.”

  He grasped the dresser edge. It was clear he couldn’t stand for long, without. By chance, maybe, he had touched the folder. He inched it into his palm and leaned there, not frightened, already looking back at her. He knew what was going to happen to him. For such occasions, one finds a clean pillowcase.

  She took up her purse. She could leave in the clothes she stood in. For such occasions one prepared, not knowing it until the day comes. She got up, from that dirty linen. The door to the outside was handy, right here.

  No sense of millennium came to them. They had the pure triumph of utter involvement only in themselves.

  “Take the tray,” he said.

  Downstairs on the stoop, she peered closer into Popich’s. The store wasn’t closed as she had thought, but emptied altogether. Wife and son gone, Popich must have moved away. For a moment she faltered, then bent her head and plodded on. She was carrying the tray,

  Outside the Adler, empty-armed again, she half hailed a taxi, her habit always after the bed, and brought her arm down again; now there was no longer any need. She walked farther and farther from that other hole, not to return. That would be the safest—for them. A skeleton must take care of itself.

  She had dates of her own, confided to no one, following her down all the rooms of her years like a mistress’s eyes. There was the time the mistress asked what he looked like, and she answered,
“Like the king on the stamps on the letter you get from over there. Paris?” For she wanted to know. For both their sakes. “Ah,” said the mistress. “Ah, Anna.” The mistress had a laugh at these times that Anna waited for. “There’s no king in Paris, Anna.” Anna had shown her the envelope saved from the wastebasket; like a pair of girls almost they were, over it; maybe the master knew the mistress still got those letters, maybe no. “Belgium, Anna. That’s Alfred of the Belgians!” the mistress said. And there was the night years after, when Anna came in the taxi, home, and the mistress, going out, not alone, leaned close to her and had said it to her, with the laugh that was like the shiver of a single bell. “Ah, Anna. The stamp king.”

  When she got to the house, she went up the stoop with a heavy varicose love. “Good masters find good servants,” the advocate said. For her it had been the other way round. To come here, she had knelt. But the mistress had never told anyone. “Ah, Anna. Hate us a little!” the mistress said once. But that she could not do, not for herself alone. “To squeeze sexual sin from the household of the world takes both servants and masters!” said the Montenegrin, taking her tisane.

  Inside, in room after room, were eyes which had paid for their own days off, very dearly. Now that hers were over, she couldn’t wait to get them. They were her royalty; ah yes, all here in this house were that, dead and alive. After her own death, when she was beyond protest, her money would go back to the house. Not to the master. To his child—whom all one winter Anna had watched the mistress steal back from him. To the daughter of a mother who could make anybody do anything for her—and knew that Anna would never tell. To the girl herself—who’d known for years where Anna went, and never told. To Ruth, who had her mother’s eyes.

  She closed the door of the Mannix house fast behind her. In front of the large picture in the salon, she stood for a while, hands clasped, before going downstairs for her own supper. Tonight the house was all hers. Or she had no other. Now she was all theirs.

  The eyes—large, bold and dead—stared back at her with their old, kitchen answer. Horses are gelded for the trade, Anna—and in their own way, the mares.

  17. The Great Blues

  October 1954

  WALTER STERN WAS IN hospital, to have a modern experience. His congenital hump was pressing in on him in a number of medically disapproved ways, all degenerative. If left to its clutching company, probability was that his body would die—of that long association. Some fervor of spirit in that body had kept the two companions going for much longer than any childhood prognosis had been willing to stretch. Clinically speaking, the doctors couldn’t really say how that delicate body had done it. Thirty years before, when religious phrases were still possible, or evolutionary ones, they’d spoken of the “will to live.” Now that cost-methods engineering had given them so many phrases better geared to the labor movements of modern lives in general, they spoke to him of “incentive.” Walter’s was little different from anybody else’s; he wanted to see what would happen, for the longest possible time. What he’d come up against was the doctors’ own incentive; they too wanted to see what would happen, indeed felt obliged to—and by one of those strange involutions in which the Hippocratic oath was reconciled with impersonal inquiry, had no objections to finding out on somebody else’s time.

  Even doctors who met Walter for the first time often had an impulse to stroke his hump for luck. For an ordinarily good-looking face to be crouched under that hump and still remain pleasant must have been achieved at the cost of some equally severe recognition down below—but this too appeared to be only the most general avowal, like that of any man who knew himself to be of a certain height, weight and hair color, whose more arguable personality then began from there.

  As a child, his closeness to his parents had early been muted by the swathed emotions of a friendly divorce, and much passing back and forth in an interrupted circle of relatives who were nice enough, concerned enough and rich enough, but whose main constant to him was this interruption. So it was that the car crash which had killed his parents had caught them coming to see him in the most civilized way, in the same car—and the relative most accessible and able to make the special trip to Walter’s boarding school to inform him had been one of so many who had been at intervals almost anonymously kind to him. It was possible of course that he was a psychological marvel; with so much to weigh him, he had by chance never been given the emotional space in which to break down—and so had achieved control. His emotions gravitated, rather than swelled or snapped—not to say that they weren’t deep. He saw the great blues, the great greens, and admired them for what they were—trees and sky. But by the time he came to know the Mannixes, he was like a boy who walked a wood that was lonely but known, only to meet one day upon the path one of those mythical palaces of blandishment, the air floating with colored birds, its tables set with the finest viands, the whole of it built out of the loveliest filigree of affection—and all real.

  “Walter? One of the blessed,” the Judge said of him. “It hasn’t been given to him to question the significance of his life.”

  He was used to doctors being both tender and irritable with him. What they couldn’t bear to sustain was their own reasonably accurate knowledge of how long he had to live as was, against the chance that they could “do something for the boy.” It was at this point that syllogism took over. Ten years before, or even five, when “the end” hadn’t been so visible, they’d never have suggested anything so radical as separating the two companions. In the interval, nothing in medical science had occurred which strictly said it could be successfully done. But there was still no certainty, they told him, that it couldn’t. If it was tried, there was an outsize probability that the “body,” which as much as anything was Walter, wouldn’t take it, in other words would die much sooner than by natural processes, more than likely “on the table.” But that was chance. The other, though two or three years in the future, was certain. “Well, I got into bad company at the beginning,” said Walter ruefully. “Couldn’t I stay?” But in the end, of course, the matter had been put to that old incentive of his—which the doctors had somehow managed to turn into a version of theirs.

  So here was Walter, ten days before the date in question, entering the hospital bright as a dollar, to be “built up” for it, giving up his outdoor clothes to a nurse who made him enumerate them on a form for that purpose, but in consideration of the ten days, allowed him “for the time being” to keep his watch. During that period of course he would still be ambulatory and have the run of Lenox Hill Hospital (particularly the brace shop, whose handicapped aide was a friend, and the children’s orthopedic, where he himself had once been a patron); he was pressed to have all the extra wine and food he cared to pay for, and allowed visitors and phone calls at almost any hour, since the man in the other bed of the “semi-private” room was only in traction for a ski-twisted leg—who knew but that the kind hospital had arranged this too? Every one of the many on staff who knew Walter was bright and cheery with him; he was accustomed to bringing that out in people, but now this was especially so. He himself was by all odds the cheeriest. Though at certain times it did cross his mind that in spite of the warning asthmas, syncopes, and outright harsh pain he still suffered (no slighter than before but scarcely worse yet either), he was still marvelously well for a man who could sensibly apprehend that he was going to die of his “illness” next Tuesday.

  At other times, particularly when he opened or closed the door of the tin locker where his changes of invalid wear were kept, and he saw on a rear peg the necktie he’d neglected to give up on admission or to list against possible loss to himself or his heirs, he stood for a moment under the most surreal feeling of self-imprisonment. It was now October, to him the most beautiful month of the year. If he demanded his outer clothes and left, he would almost certainly see Christmas in his own flat, Whitsun, Easter and a number of other holidays round the world by easy stages, if he still chose—and even another October. No o
ne could stop him; he could imagine himself ten minutes from now, bulling past all their red tape, the religious disappointment in him, walking down the hospital steps, shutting its door forever on all that cheer, and standing in the broad autumn velvet of Park-Lexington, a gold lake of air, streaked with the early charcoals of winter, in which he could still swim, his excited pulse fibrillating too fast to die. His own necktie had played hooky. Why not he?

  In the end of course, he hadn’t. Mornings, when this willfulness was strongest, he was sure to be interrupted by one of the details of the building-up process—a pathologist to test whether his blood was worthy yet, an orderly with his euphoric milkshake. The one was too stupid to understand Walter’s feelings if told, the other too enlightened. At night, the hospital, as if it understood the psychology of this all too well, gave him a sleeping pill—and trusted him to take it. Some grim synonyms for this clever little Totentanz the community and he were now sharing did in fact occur to him. But after eight days of the soothing ritual (and in spite of a fair education as a citizen of the very century of analogy) he could still have laughed if anyone had suggested any parallel in the hara-kiris, euthanasias or even death battalions by which men anciently—and to the public honor—had cut themselves out of experience. He was doing only what men had done immemorially—dealing with life in the modern way. And it was now the ninth day.

  Life meanwhile continued as was, relentlessly experiential. He could have afforded a single room, or a suite if one existed, but knew his own stubborn conviviality too well.

  “If I’m not to have my hump, I must have someone,” he said to the doctor. “For company, afterwards.” To himself he said, “For before.” Nurses wouldn’t do for it. They had a nanny sympathy, or a sister of mercy’s, but kept their little locked store of the secrets of your condition always in reserve, and like the most devoted visitors, got free of you into that other culture, at least once a day. Their own lives, all long since written up by Abou Ben Adhem, were useless for exchange. What was needed, he remembered (now that once again he had it), was a sharer of one’s own situation. And this, to all except the sequestered rich, a hospital lavishly provides.