New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  On the night of her death, in that second after the shot when he saw the deathblood running slow, he had felt the loss first in his genitals, where there was a place to feel. Cubs, after the mother-kill, must wander analogous, thinking teat. Men when hung, erect—how that must have looked, in the short skirts of 1928. Mirriam! Laugh! There was no time to mourn you, until now; I had to mourn her. That’s how I used her, surely? She herself said. Or didn’t say. Now she’s gone—and I think, provided for—I can mourn you. The laugh I hated, the “lady’s” laugh! Now that all the letters are dead, send me it. Let my mind not letch.

  Along his spine he felt the gradual lapse of pain. Or that tired truce which was still sensation. But like the flush of a late climacteric, must suffice. He remembered that first social ease of her being dead. Age wasn’t merely in the muscle, but in the closing of the ranks when it was too late for it, Meyer coming into this room, Mirriam into his mourning, and who next, all bearing the same message? He found he could lift his legs now to put on his pants, knowing that all the ridiculousness would have to be borne alone.

  In the wardrobe, a hotel try at what the county and he had at home, there were two new suits; he’d had to give up his thirty after all, to accommodate a brace ridged with whalebone. Hung within his jacket, he found the pedometer and put it aside as one did a toy soldier. Tonight its tidy spring, set to hall distances, might get a shock. Shoes next, the sweat stealing down his arm. Propped in a corner was his third leg, near it another cane almost its silver-ebony twin, sent him by Ninon for Christmas, to the hospital. “Oooh, whoo sent you that?” said the nurses, Floradora round his bed that morning. Yoo-whoo did not die in hospital. The witness sat up with his harness on. Nothing was effete in hospital. Sex was angry elsewhere. “My mistress,” the foolish witness said, sitting up on his rubber ass and fondling his urinal. Let me not letch in the mind alone.

  Ninon knew of his chair, but had never seen him in it. She never wrote, had never missed letters begun to her and never sent. Sometimes, when Ruth was in London, he rang up Clipstone Street from New York and he and never rang him. He wasn’t to feel—that he had to feel. This was how she released her lovers, from limited engagements often redeemable. Since becoming a Dame, Ninon chatted of her, like good foster-parents. Ninon she’d acquired certain dying British elegances which in her hands became Gallic again, like some French convert to citizenship. He doubted she’d told about the rectory. She was dancing again. After middle age—just as after a pulled tendon or a love affair—the body “got better again.” She had this same answer (or no other) to any of it. Or to him. And none of this was ever discussed.

  Thursdays, though not at the theatre, she couldn’t see him, being in the habit of attending the directors’ meetings of Hoare’s Bank. “Very mind-sharpening, Simon.” He assumed that one of the directors—some red-faced securities-drinker thatched with gray finance—was being shaped up too. When her gift stick made holes in the hall floor which Anna nagged over—for in his night walks up there he used both canes—examining it together, they’d discovered it to be a shooting stick, opening under her knowing pressure—“I know these from the farm!”—into a seat no bigger than her palm. How they had laughed together! In the absence of “the mistress”—and the mistress—he and the concubine were left to laugh.

  Three months after his operation, he’d said to Charlie, handing him an address, “Drive by and case this joint. See if it has an elevator. Understand there’s no question about the quality of the girls. But you can’t carry me in.” The place had been listed for years as Cheval Merde, thanks to the innocence of the telephone company, and was found to have an elevator. There was also no question about the quality of the girls.

  Three months after that, he was being wheeled along in front of the Plaza on the first summer evening of spring, as his father used to say of New York’s weather. “It’s called Grand Army Plaza here, Charlie, but that’s pedestrian.” As they moved in and out of the pattern of a throng circling where the moist flower patch raised its mystery to the horse cabs, crossing the avenue in wild ownership, streaming past the portico of the hotel under its high lamps, none daring the gloom of the great bordering park—he and Charlie stopped to watch the pattern of the sauntering girl, perfect under the lamps in her white cartwheel hat with its band of black, white suit severe as a debutante’s, black stockings his own daughter wore, black gloves, and a little cool smile perfect on her pearly face. Only the pattern questionable, back and forth and across and around—like a model for whom there was no photographer. Just past the lamps, she took or gave the telephone number (more than once to men of his age) with a social pause suited to a dance card signed—and moved on again. By himself, he’d have watched, for the pleasure of the evening, of how Parisian New York could be in this one embattled place. But would never have approached her, not on two legs.

  “Car’s just yonder,” he said to Charlie. But servitors as formally devoted as Charlie—or because of it—expected the pleasures of their masters. “We’re pedestrians,” Charlie said, and wheeled him into the light. “Guess you can come right along, Daddy,” said the girl lightly, in the accent with the cheap sweetness of street cries, and slipping him the room number in a hotel around the square. “Be my guest. Chair’ll get you past the badge.” But on that evening, he had risen from the chair first, to take his short regime of paces on the sidewalk, outside. Afterwards, he was in his chair again, and had hoisted himself into the rear seat of the car, Charlie up front giving him the back of the head like a good robot, while his master waited for the “Where to?” that Charlie hadn’t yet said. The plaza, empty now at two in the morning, was like the stable yard of a château in some inaccurate, fifty-year-old memory; the General’s statue smelled of horse. His own hat lay on the seat in back of the folding chair—a fedora he never wore. The hat was for check girls and the cloakrooms of formal dinners, where excuses to linger were almost political; since the thirties, as coxswain of the younger style to his coevals, he hadn’t worn a hat. He put it on his head; now anyone who wanted to could see him for what he was. Dr. Hildesheimer would approve. “Charlie?” he said. “Yes sir?” But still Charlie hadn’t asked where to; he had his lapses. Even knew when he ought to have them. “She was nice, she wasn’t even too young—” said the Judge, and at his voice, Charlie’s “Where to?” came quick, not quick enough. “—but I like it standing up. Let’s go eat, Charlie. Let’s go have some shrimp.”

  Thinking nodded in a chair, grew diffuse, wheeling itself over and across the same territory, with a hand that wore a glove against dirt and calluses, an old mocha suede one, of which it had a lifetime supply. At the sink in the corner, he now removed it, washed his hands. Leaned them hard on the marble. Then he stood up. Whalebone upheld him, angling him forward. Men in mail must have been cuirassed into more than just courage, gently pitched forward into the fray as well, by this duenna from behind. Grasping the sink, his shoulders crabbed from hoisting himself, biceps as bulging as a samurai’s, he could have gone with his peers to any of their wars; his size had their majesty now. Wasn’t done to pee in the sink here, but he couldn’t waste steps to the bath. Then, breathing deeply, he stood alone, and the spire of pain—in a marvelous column of identity up from the heel to the sartorius muscle of the leg, to the gluteus of the buttock and the trapezius of the back—upheld him too.

  He checked breast pocket for aspirin and an arsenal never used: capsule of codeine, one of Demerol, and for emergency one final capsule, slipped to him by his doctor as something new, sworn to give anybody any time some hours of peace. Then he took up both sticks, Ninon’s for the right hand, his grandfather’s for the left, and plotted his simple itinerary: out of the courtyard, up St. James’s Street, past three short streets (and all uphill which might be harder, he wouldn’t know yet), then Piccadilly, which he had only to cross. Or he might turn right at Jermyn, and come out at Duke Street a little farther on past Old Bond. Turning right on Piccadilly in any case, he’d pass Burlingto
n House, then Sackville, then Swallow—down whose crook he would enter, and be there. He always rehearsed this way for London, as a walk this one was unusual only in its limits. He was only doing now what other men did earlier or as a prodigy he had done too early. He was trying to see how far he could go. And being goddam pompous about it—as men in armor were. As he went out the door, very softly for such a man, the aspirin really took over, and he began to laugh.

  He came face to face with his sharer of the bath. Unblinkingness held, or would have for those of normal height. But a man of five feet at a stretch saw the mouth, and if much given to sitting, the irresolute stop of the leg—being interested in legs. Bathmate had been observing him all along—and knew he ought to have been in his chair.

  “Howja do,” said the Judge, standing aside to let the man take the stairs if he preferred. With a shy, walrus snuffle, the man did so. Quick military thinker. But no general, for at the third step he couldn’t resist a look back.

  “We’re all more American—” said the Judge grinning inside—“when we’re away from home.” Paralyzed, the man nodded back, turned and went down; one could hear him saying to his country wife later, “Fellow spoke to me. Didn’t hear what he said.”

  Standing! In a dream of envy, he reminded himself, as the lift came, that this was he. The imp who’d spoken was himself too. How smart I was, at twelve. Daring. I’d have done anything. Dangerous at any time, this elation without the means then, without the muscle now. Did I know then, what I was like? I didn’t have to know. Or people told me. But we never told her.

  Downstairs, the slow lift deposited him at the desk. Factotum blinked, even came forward and stopped at the sight. Out of sheer pleasure at the sight of him the Judge slipped him a two-shilling piece. For the silvery retrospect, for what people thought of as “everything.” “Walking’s what I miss,” said the Judge.

  Now. I stand in the doorway. The Judge stands in the doorway? No. This is the secret self, deep under the category, never inadmissible. Here I am. The Judge is upstairs, or even farther. To this walker, the Judge is in that house in full view of his city, a man sitting in a chair, at home. He thinks that the I part of us is a snuggery. Walkers know better. Action is the best rhetoric of all. How long is it since I’ve been this daring trapeze artist outside the walls, this schoolboy without a hat, smart young fifty-year-old going home from his Chauncey, all of us effortlessly swinging the distance from I to thou, and with nine lives a minute to do it in—how long is it since I the Judge have also been I?

  He looked down at his legs. Now I have four, almost a machine. My son had a box—David, are you anywhere? Came here for you, didn’t I—for a hint of you behind some beard in the front line’s desert light? No, she was right. On my two legs, between a shooting stick and a hereditary walking stick, I know better. We came here for her. Tonight’s for her sake. And for hers. Neither is the woman I go to meet. And Chauncey is nearer than he ever was; what era is ever only itself?

  The Judge back there had always considered himself an analytic traveler, for whom London; for instance, was a refreshing bath in what remained of the class system, among a people who studied the body politic harder than others and so seemed to have more of it—all conversing in a language like a cathedral in which only tailors were talking. Or, unofficially, it was Ninon’s studio of sex.

  The man standing here at the corner of Little St. James’s Street and St. James’s was different. Travel for him was still a sexual excitement in which the love object was unknown. Often, in youth especially—before either physical or spiritual home was formed, any new Illyria, where ever it was, honed a man to a focal point of aloneness in which he knew himself biblically, and saw everything in its unique character. The man here could remember French loneliness—a clarity in which one sinned. The English version was grander and more diffused—a royalty ruined, more to the middle-class taste. Though the I has no audience, it’s audience to the world. But London is still the place where a judge can disappear.

  He began. At the head of the street, after about as many paces as it took to walk down a hall, he changed his itinerary. He decided to turn right, down Marlborough Road to the Mall, making the grander circle a man should if he had women on his arm, dead or alive. The soldiers of God lie in the grave, but women, foot soldiers of memory, are stalking everywhere. The I outwardly accepts the calendars men give it, but remains implacable. “Ours is the last, they tell us,” she said. And could still smile. So, Mirriam, I must rove.

  But at the bottom of the street he remembered the steps to climb up from the Mall to Carlton House Terrace, and turned into Pall Mall instead, a man’s street too. He walked slowly; his Judgeship might be at home, but the witness walked to tell the tale. And who, with a cane in each hand and a memory on either arm, is champion? As he walked, to help ease that cloudless ache in him where for the space of about four inches there seemed to be no vertebrae at all, he began naming to himself certain sights not on his way, one to a vertebra: that’s for the cream colonnades of the Haymarket!—one to a step: that’s for the National Gallery, dung-whitened like some penguined coppice of the sea. As I was walking—step—down St. James’s, not the Infirmaree of my homeland, but past the Army-Navy to Boodles and through the back door of Mr. Trollope—with my American club foot. And I wear corsets—oh pornography not of Paris, but of the little bookseller in Cecil Court, what century is this, am I? Ladies on my arms, what are you dancing to—the Esmeralda Waltz? Not the right period for either of you. Take your ease in any case. We have made it—to St. James’s Square.

  He rested on his two canes. Now he had only to go half around the square, past Apple Tree Yard to Jermyn Street and the cut to Piccadilly, crossing which he would be right at Swallow. And in back of the phones in the Piccadilly Hotel. He had a bet on, burning like bus fare in a boy’s pocket. No fixed character in the world any more, Edwin? That’s the remark of a man without one. That’s the character of the age. But I’ve forgotten I don’t speak this way to Edwin any more.

  Suddenly he opened the shooting stick that the past few minutes he’d been yearning for, stuck it in a bit of lawn and carefully sat on it, a trick he’d practiced too. From this post, under a night sky opening like a Turner, he could see across the gardens, or thought he could. Down there in the mist was the Duke of York’s monument. He had a century without a doubt, and one with character, too. Duke, may I ask you something?—since I don’t speak to Edwin except in the way of business, which he considers his bit of blackmail, but traps him, poor barbarian, far more than I. And since the young man I hope shortly to speak to on the phone may be otherwise occupied. Duke—will my age be the last to see life as a consecutive story?…Ladies, listen to the Duke’s answer—aspirin can have as many visions as alcohol. Listen…Dear fellow. Dear Mr. Justice. That was mine.

  So the Judge is here after all. Sitting, I disappear. We must both of us remember it. Duke—I was taken early to see the monuments. Cities of the plain, that is what the generations are, each mall magnificent with its dead. Now we’re told not to honor the I of any one man alone on a cenotaph. The young say—honor only the people thronging the stair. But I was taught to take even the mob one by one. So, in the end, will they?

  He stood up. Now I am I again. And not thinking clearly, or thinking of everything at once. Only the dead are so privileged. Dukes are privileged not to answer, as well. Ave, Ave, Walter, David. One always communes with the nearest dead. And the certainty is that every dead man is a duke. Women are different; they never cease to commune.

  He turned to go, his itinerary running in his head. The streets of one’s native city one doesn’t need to name. I see it even clearer from here. Traveling, I see everything. Back there, over that city, the slow ogives of the century are closing, more than halfway. A city names itself constantly into the century it thinks it is, its bridges zooming bizarre into the night of never-really-ending, an endless sunshine of machines stopping the psychic rain of the minutes, enormously roaring st
raight into the tender cockles of the heart. Under it, in it, in the house that confounds him—what date is a man who lives in a house not built that morning?—the Judge is choosing a century, shuffling up and down his hall. Chaired by day, he chooses his story too, that single story in which he believes. Somewhere nearby him, the soul wheels itself out of a corner and watches, small as Hadrian’s. It has another name now, is not the soul, and is not Hadrian’s ever again, but no matter. It watches as I watch now. For the enormous hush of the century when it shall be over, for the enormous answer: O my native city, the universe.

  Pain returned, prompt as his watch. He fingered the pills in his pocket, by shape. The sale of aspirin in the dark continents runs into the millions, though neither they nor we know how it works; good as religion you are, but I shall have to desert you now. Codeine brings that Jungian feeling I can’t bear, and with Demerol one can’t have a drink. I’ll have the pax vobiscum.

  But he hated to give up his autonomy before the pain took it from him, and when he crossed Jermyn Street still had the unknown pill in his hand. “You’ve a high threshold of pain, Mr. Mannix,” said the orthopedist. “You can take a good deal. Too bad. You should have come to us before.”