She gripped her hands in her hair. “She was making me into a woman, she always said. But whatever she told me, it was always about all of us. Never herself alone. Or just enough to make me wonder more.”
“Us…Make us…That was her charm.”
Reverie had entered the room so quickly, like the balm of a night plant, nicotiana, kept outside the window to feed sadness away.
“Strike you this place isn’t so comfortable any more?” he muttered. But she’d already said it. The deaths of two had been received here. It was home. “She used to call the boys your three musketeers. Remember?”
She came close again, but only not to spring at him. He saw the real face of this animal, young and itself. “No, I won’t have it. Memory. People are living now. And I could have held his hand.”
He took hers. “Who leaves letters for the family these days? But so much of her life was letters. All she wanted was to insure that we speak of her. That’s what she was like. And that’s memory! Now!”
“She always had to act. To her—it was an act.”
“In our day—letters still could be.”
“Then I’m old-fashioned,” she said. “You made me.”
“To hear you say it. That helps—close the gap.”
On that long neck, the head that had just been gnawing its red, pristine lip leaned back and laughed—the kind of laugh that stood on the air like a motif, ugly only because of this—perfectly on scale.
“The inter…penetrations of things,” he said, staring. His daughter shouldn’t dance, but sing. “One can’t talk about it. But I try. Hence—my language.”
“How you talk to me!” she said. “As if I were intelligent.”
Over her shoulder he saw her brother, her mother too. “I apologize. I apologize to you all.”
Again came the laugh—as if she were practicing. “What life’s like? Let me tell you. A day after his death, and yes I think of him—but of the message he might have left me too.” She put her hand to that long throat. “I feel…he would. That part’s all right. But then…I keep thinking, right here, how—maybe he’s left me the letter. Like people who wait for the will, for their money…You let us leave. Knowing. I’ll never forgive you for it. But the other, that’s part of it too. Right now. That’s how mercenary I am. Life is.”
Her cheeks were dry. If she’d buried them in her hands, it would be only a speech. Instead he saw her advancing, with measured laugh, with unsure step, to the fulcrum, to him.
“But it was destroyed,” he said hoarsely. “I asked him to.”
Her mouth opened, and closed.
“David wouldn’t take it,” he said. “How should I? If it had anything in it, wouldn’t it have been about Arne? Your mother’s first husband. You’ve heard about him—if you and she talked. She used to keep up with him. After he went back to Belgium, Switzerland, I don’t know where. By letter…And once in Paris. Once—she went to see him from there. And I used to think…All David’s lifetime I did think…Oh, never mind—he knew. But wouldn’t deign to read the letter from her. So I apologize to him now.”
“That’s why you hunt for him to—be alive! For yourself.”
He scored at the hard-rubber tire of his chair with his thumbnail, deepening a groove already there. “Leaving letters. How absurd. They’re finding more instant ways—of memory. Or my generation may be the last to value it at all.”
When he raised his head, he saw she had taken up her overnight bag, a kind of duffel that always hung about somewhere, and was looking around the room for anything of hers left in it, as one did when one left home.
“Ours,” she said with a shrug, sliding the strap over her shoulder. “They say ours will be the last. For anything.”
“Where are you going?”
She gazed back at him. “So it’s all to go unrecognized, then? Wasted. He’ll have left some—message. I know Walter. But not the letter. Not if you asked him to get rid of it.”
“I asked him to read it before.”
The bag slid to the floor, slowly. She covered her mouth.
“What is it, Ruth? For God’s sake.”
“You used him. As a…as a—” again she tried. “Mercenary. To do your own job.”
“Language,” he said.
“We learned from you.” At the mantel, she picked up the heavy bracelet her brother had sent her, and snapped it on her arm. “Oh, we mimic you. Because we admire you. Why do you think David went to war? The way you used Walter. The way you used—”
“David didn’t go to be a—mercenary. He went to be a soldier of—God.”
“Can one be that? I suppose. From a grave.” She hoisted the bag again. “But I didn’t mean him.”
On that brown velvet, the heavy sporting bag looked so—absurd. “Ruth. Where are you going?”
She shrugged. “Maybe you—came to London for that too.”
An incredulous twinge vibrated over him, from those depths where he was unable to forget how to play chess.
As she opened the door he said, “But why then—did you want the letter so much?”
She was kneading her breast with the heel of her hand. In spite of the breasts it was a child’s action. “I thought—she might tell me once again, from her own mouth. That I—would do her no injury. Did her—none.”
Then he remembered who he was talking to. With whom. It was like coming out of a madness—of murder, or a bed—of love, to realize the other person. Who had now made him drop every term of the silent entente under which the two of them had lived.
Don’t you know yet, Father? How you used me?
She rubbed her cheek. “I can’t cry. Again. Apologize to Walter for me. For that.”
After the door closed, the Judge, finding himself staring at the olive-yellow army blanket that covered his legs and now went with him everywhere, quickly wheeled himself to the window, in time to see his daughter emerge from the porte-cochère below, walk across the courtyard, the red bag bobbing in the dusk, and turn left up the hill. She wouldn’t have waited for the lift for just one floor down; she wouldn’t hail a cab. Mannixes walked, where it was possible; even in the century they lived in, they flaunted it. Of her two probable destinations, one—the theatres—must be about the same distance as the other. Both were possible. They escape. After she had gone he stayed as he was. The blind listened in order to see, the chairbound waited—but in the mind’s eye they were moving, walking the streets that came toward them. “No more memory!” What a young remark!
He caught himself glancing at his legs the way an addicted smoker took out a cigarette—to celebrate his helplessness. And to take heart. In what century now were the old “neurasthenias” of Goethe’s spa-Europe and of his own parents’—surely fizzing away like modestly bad sulphur water, somewhere still? Hypochondria, which once drowned its hyenas in holy waters, now took them on leash to some confessional: “What have I got?” A man still couldn’t quite choose his disease, but he could choose the century that named it—and sometimes compounded it. His own disorder was some mortar-and-pestle mythic of nerve, soma, and bone—a couple of vertebrae once cracked while sailing, a degenerative thinness of the discs between—and the cortisone which could cure at intervals, by killing him for good. Plus a will of his own which, like the masks of Janus, looked both ways. No wonder the orthopedists had no name to give him to pass on to his well-wisher’s; there was always the possibility that such conditions as his were the product of a life! He himself was holding back before he either gave his disease a name, or his life a century. A man of intellect, and some money, could to a degree determine both. And men of intellect, even without money, always had.
He was going to have to give up London. Now that his daughter had been empowered to leave him—and not just for the ballet, her mime-life. She’d even hinted that he himself might have provoked the loss of her for her own gain—and his own relief. Once, he’d heard an older colleague and his wife, good people with a great cornucopia of family in which surely no
thing was criminally hidden—sigh to themselves at the wedding of their youngest, in the champagne, wisdom that his abnormal parenthood had kept him from, “Well, there’s the last one off our hands!” Within the lordlier rise and fall of the civic generations, the personal seesaw of parent and child was so little; wasn’t it all a getting there in time, or a giving up? What Mirriam, no one, could accept in him was that he lived his life in these rhetorical questionings. Sometimes he hated the habit in himself, but he had to accept the questioning. He couldn’t see life as others did, as merely the color of events. A barrister to life was what he’d wanted to be, from even before his thrashing for that money lending episode. “I swear to God, Simon,” his father had said, much later. “I know I hurt you; you yelled. But you received each lash as if it were enlightenment.”
His father was right. “And each yell,” he had replied. His father had whipped him the way a good poet used reason; he’d been listening to that pendulum. For this same talent, his colleagues had later murmured him upstairs to a judgeship. But the courtroom was a drama which expected answers, plus the arrogance to believe them; he would always be a cabinet-judge. And be disliked for it. As were all those who lived by the mixed breath.
The phone rang, at his side.
“Mannix here.” He admired the Anglicism, so economical.
Factotum had rung through to the restaurant, for his 8:30 reservation. “Will you have your own car, sir?”
“No, Charlie’s at Blackpool for the day.” He could see a downstairs screw of distaste for all this democracy, but couldn’t resist adding to it. “Visiting his old mother.” True enough; she was a character actress there.
But the class below still retained the privilege of putting one in one’s place. “Indeed, sir. Kindly order the cab in good time. I’m alone, sir. I’ll ask the cabman to come up.”
He was alone here now. Factotum knew that too. As well as that he never allowed his daughter to touch his wheelchair. Nor any family; family wasn’t for that. Rosa and Athalie never dreamed of “taking him for walks,” although for the last two Christmases knitted Afghans for his knees had supplanted the gray mocha gloves. The army blanket had been acquired when he thought he was going in, in 1917; there was continuity for you! Maybe his sisters, that formal stupidity of theirs, might all along have better instructed him how to be with his daughter—if he could ever have told them why. How had he used her? How did one mourn the young?
He hung up the phone as quickly as decent. “A vulgar instrument,” his father had said laughingly, after being on it to his mistress—“no gentleman wants to be any closer to an absent woman than the pneumatique.” There was continuity for you. And the gap as well. For where his father’s era had found the thing foreign to its manners, he resented it because of its empathy—and Mirriam had clapped it to her heart like an artificial—heart. And his children played tricks with it early, and more serious games later—dispensing emotion everywhere. Even David (though his box heard better than normal over it) in the days of his last home visit had refused call after call from a woman, saying to him once in passing, “Can’t stand the phone somehow, after the desert. It’s too close. Know what the phone is to some people? It’s fucking, by ear.”
Oh my son…in the privacies of life anything may burst through a door.
In half an hour or so, his daughter should be at the destination he was betting on, allowing for that peculiar ballerina gait which had to acknowledge the ground in the act of covering it. The other probable one, the theatre, might be a few squares nearer. If she’d had any intention of going as far as Ninon’s house in Clipstone Street, she would have taken a cab. “We had walks,” said his daughter after twelve years, and burst down the door. Dukes fell in ruins, his wife rose again from her grave, and his son lay down in his like a soldier—and Walter, so recently dead, was the liveliest. And I, what do I do?
I rise from the chair.
He couldn’t do it all at once of course. Nightly practice of the past two years had helped. Once a day the chair whizzed this way within a room’s limits, like a friendly amah, trundling its charge—who was preparing to get off. Now to the cupboard for the aspirin; he’d given up the codeine as too Oriental for him, and all the other Pantopons, Luminals, Nembutals, morphine derivatives of the soft, lethe-like names. Aspirin—like the pain of standing—was only cumulative. If taken at intervals, the two kept pace. Most spinal pain had some posture of remission. His was to sit; he and Charlie often joked of it. He himself had been the one to break down Charlie’s English stage-servant manners to a comfortable exchange of obscenity, most of it about the Judge’s ills, when they were alone. “Eh well, in a household of women ’tis needed,” Charlie said. “Eh well,” the Judge said to himself—for it couldn’t be said to Charlie—“In a way too it’s like having the wife in the house again, for this Jew.”
Shirts and suits were hung low enough for him to reach. He stripped his upper body, splashed it with cologne and powder in lieu of washing—Europe again—and began taking off his pants, an involved snail-inching in which every muscle reprinted its image on his brain. At a time when exercise had still been suggested (and before a spinal fusion had been tried and found wanting) a therapist trained to polio cases had taught him the names. “Merry Christmas,” Miss O’Neill had said last year, off on her holiday, “and remember to keep your hamstrings loose!” Mirriam, who was never even in this city with me, laugh anyway; that’s what she said.
Muscle by muscle, thong by thong of meditation, he dressed, missing Charlie’s Mersey-stream of backtalk. Jews in their own households often never swore even to other men, keeping to manners Chasidic or soft. Often, even in the middle classes, it was the woman who kept obscenity fresh, with a midwife’s coarse righteousness. Until Charlie came, he hadn’t realized how much he had missed Mirriam’s command of it. She’d had the affectations of her period. Where his own mother had dared only a domestic “Scheiss” or “futz”—like a peasant when a pot fell—Mirriam, like the artists she knew did when they cut their fingers, said “fuck.” At a dinner party, she could pass the psychological penises around gravely as anybody, a scholarly artifact. In bed, she said anything that came into her head, from wherever she found it. “Women don’t say ‘cunt’ though, do they?” he’d once said, and had in reply her high, señorita shrug: “Why should we!” Adding, “I got the rest from friends; Father would have died.”
But Meyer, to him, had said with a twinkle, “Oh, the Old Testament keeps us Jews healthy and sex open, not separated from life. Milk and meat is what shouldn’t be joined—when we go to the whorehouse what we should be careful of is not to eat shrimp. Diet is what is sin! So instead of repression, we older Jews have flatulence. The Jew doesn’t use orgasm to bow to the life force with; he farts.” And had added, “Thank God for it, Simon. I see some of our younger men drinking up the Christian sense of sin like alcohol. You mayn’t have stomach trouble yet, but you’re one of the old sort, like your father. You’re still ours.”
Naked in the chair, he felt the aspirin give him a hitch toward blandness and took two more; in ten minutes, pain retreated to cortex, he would be able to stand for forty, without more than he could bear. At the age of seventy-six, old Meyer, after living with them in his own house for four years, had left for the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where until he died he’d kept the management on the qui vive with his late poker and visiting cauliflower ears. “I’ve begun to fart, Simon. And my tongue’s begun to like to letch. It’s time.” Up to then, he’d still had women. “Sex in the afternoon, Simon; reminds you of younger love affairs, but you send them an orchid in the evening, and get your sleep. Very practical. Leaves the young woman her evenings.” In London here, Meyer’s birthplace, he came alive again, in his sporty suits and Limey speech. In a moment he’d enter the door his granddaughter had gone out of, up from the glassy dusk of Dukes courtyard, in his spotted tie and Yankee snap-brim, bringing with him a farther London’s itching cries. To him, his son-in-law’s neat nakednes
s, the chest hair barely grizzled, would show up plenty live. “Get up, man, legs like a five-day biker’s; and look at those arms. Old Testament kept you young in the proper places, but don’t pick the wrong book. Judges sit, and you’ve sat, that it? Get up, I know a young singer at the Palladium. With those Japanesy looks of yours…I never was much for spas.”
The phone rang. From his daughter? Or her destination, calling to say—how would it be said?—Just to let you know she’s here.
Ninon’s secretary. “Madame will be kept at the theatre and will come straight on to meet you.”
“At eight,” he said. “Bentley’s in Swallow Street. I may be a few minutes late.” She much preferred Boulestin or Rule’s, but they were too far for what he had in mind; the other place was all he could dare. He’d no idea how much time he would need. But the ten minutes was up. Now came the part he always hated, even in the lone sessions he forced himself to at night at home—when all he did was to pace the floor of the room to whatever he had set himself on the pedometer, or ghosted it down the long hall to the open door of his son’s room. To stand there breathing, and pace back.
The dry corset was hanging on a rod over the wash-stand—he had three, and he supposed the chambermaids understood what for because of the chair. At the Lenox Hill brace shop it was called a brace, but to any man brought up in a basement of just such strings and eyelets, it was a corset, unsavory on him now as in his boyhood the rumored secret appliance of a bladdery-lipped old aunt who’d wetted each newspaper page with a large flat thumb he’d somehow connected with her truss. He pulled the strings tight now and knotted them; he was a man who couldn’t tie a bow. Some, luckier than he, got by with a sacroiliac bellyband, with hooks. This thing gave him a waistline he couldn’t bear; he now realized that Pauli must wear stays. With it on, he wheeled the chair to the mirror. “Your—undergarment, sir,” said Charlie the first time he saw it, never a valet before and wanting to be sure of his terms. “My phylactery,” said the Judge grimly. “I’m thinking of having it done up in black lace.” And Charlie, serving him from the tender distance of a brother widower—“Wife killed in the blitz, sir, and a daughter in the convent when she isn’t running off to the old girl in Blackpool”—always thereafter called it his “prophylactery.” Funny, but no one to hear. Every time he put the thing on, he thought of a man he and Mirriam’d known, whose wife had found…him hanging—dressed in her clothes, down to the high-heeled shoes. In the months he had been wearing it, he’d begun to surmise what the really old looked for and missed in the dead. “Look, Mirriam!” he’d say. “Travis McCardell!” Just as she began to laugh—for she would laugh; she’d had a thousand letters, he saw now, which had sought that laugh or answered it—he would top it. “‘Gott sei dank!’” he would say, in the very voice of his mother and hers: “‘—that such a man was no Jew!’”
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