New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  “These are only stage-mothers,” I said. “But the kind who’ll never make it.”

  She stared at me. Ordinarily, she had too much style to recognize her own—but this was unmistakable. “Did—Pauli—say that?”

  I could never lie to her. “No.”

  We couldn’t look at each other. I’d mimicked her to perfection—why should that make us both feel miserable?

  …Austin…if I say that I report the growth of an understanding between two people, not a relationship—will that clear it? Everything I make her say here—she said. My understanding should have tagged behind. When one person wants to be the other, then it’s dangerous…I couldn’t help it; already, without any Ilonka or Ninon to name it for me, I felt what I was watching.

  “Onstage as a mother?” she said, raising those huge eyes. “No, I’ll never be that.” Ninon said it for us so many times later, but I already sensed the path of her I was watching. The progress of the assoluta is always alone. Everything strummed in me, a rising convergence of events beyond me, which we were only giving the name of my blood to. “I’ll understand,” I said. “Or it won’t be your fault.” I remember it because in our rounds again we were just passing that same store, or where it ought to have been.

  “Look,” I said. “The Turkish store is gone.”

  She was just leaning down to cup a match—one of the kitchen kind she’d taken to carrying, in a man’s leather pouch with an emery striker on it. The blue phosphor, before it went, kindled the crushed blue of her wide belt and of her hat; the rest of her was black. If I noted her dress narrowly enough, I caught her mood; one thing sure, she was always dressed too well to be walking a daughter. The smoking was new; I never saw her do it anywhere except on these tours.

  Following my pointing finger, she nodded at the blank glass there between a little fish store wet and gray as a bivalve, and the hot beads of the Italian fruitstand. “The little stores that sweat family,” she said, in her new, smoking-voice. “Oh, there’ll be another. Always some new family of innocents. It’s the city replenishment.” She threw the match in the gutter.

  “It went with your hat,” I said.

  “Too much,” she said somberly. “Or else my nails should be blue too.”

  I was right not to laugh. She had meant it. She saw through me anyway. “‘Oh, sweet patootie—’” she sang out suddenly—“‘with all yo’ beauty—You’ll nev-ah make it, nev-ah shake it, all the Co—Coq d’Or!’”

  “What’s that from?” I said, proud that I knew it was from something.

  “Tiger Woman Rag, I think it was called. Two performances, private, at the Mad Hatter. Noel and Angie had a hand in it. Never got put on.” Often her chatter with me now had these little rough edges of old song in it, and maybe always had had, but by then I had seen her files, once the family’s, that went back beyond her father’s company’s Aida days, everything from gold-colored menus to signed pictures—always by the same pen it seemed to me, whether Calvé or Tagliavini—to programs that rattled out those years like music boxes: Chu Chin Chow. The crowd had known the casts of everything that played, she said—and I had begun to know the crowd.

  Taking my elbow—she’d begun to appropriate me with touch too, as not before—she peered into the store that had been so full of women. One counter left, and a roll of paper on the floor. “Blue-hoo with cold,” she said.

  And I knew the rhymes of their old songs. We often made a rapid-fire game of parrying them; “blue” went with “true,” or “you.” “Maybe,” she’d say, in a voice gone barrelhouse. “Oh God yes: That was ‘baby.’” She might have been tuning me, like an instrument. What for?

  “What’ll I do-oo?” I sang. “When I’m old.”

  She didn’t smile. Then she did, like an older girl. “Darling, you break me up.” She straightened, turned from the window, and threw the cigarette far, with perfect aim, into the gutter. She stood for a moment, looking down the street as if we might be being followed, putting on her gloves. Actually her nails were high and buffed, with a deep collar of white, a kind one didn’t see around any more, even then. “Put on your gloves,” she said with a cool change, like a mother playing mother.

  We waited at the corner for the flower cart to go by with its nag; January was far too late for him but he had somewhere found a hundred aster pots. “I love those carts,” I said.

  …One was outside your house, Austin, the day you took me to tea there. I liked your house for that. After a week at home, it was like still being on tour…

  “You’re right to love,” she said. “I’d never tell you otherwise. Even my parents never did. But what to love—oughtn’t I be able to tell you that?”

  Down the block ahead was a dirtyish café—dark inside and nothing like the awninged famous one she’d once taken me to—into which she always glanced when we passed. As we approached it, she looked back at the cart. “Bright with war, the flower-war. Did you ever see a street that looked less like a war?” The café seemed to rivet her attention. “They’d all go, like a shot.” Then she leaned down to me. “But we mustn’t stand and gape, must we. Have to stiffen our backs. Your father wants to be a judge.”

  No wonder I was frightened. It was the first time she’d said anything irrational to me—why, at age six, I’d made a Sunday dinner-table howl, saying to him, “Aren’t you ever going to be a mister?” He’d been a judge all my conscious life.

  …And so easily explained away later, wasn’t it? Years later, at tea. “The Court,” your father said to me, Austin. “At one time, your father was very much mentioned for it. Not so long ago, at that.”…And I didn’t ask when.

  But at the moment, I give only her portrait, by her own hand. Like her death, later. “Even when the coryphées are ablaze,” Ninon is always telling us, “the assoluta remains sane. She is not the Queen Bee—no, no, my dears, leave that to the premiers danseurs.” No laughter, in the rehearsal room; no one dares. And Ninon goes on. “She is not of herself only—and fights being that. But gives in only to that. Those poor mad Lucias—leave those to the coloraturas, my dears. We do not sing, here. The role of the assoluta is to keep the balance—to which all eyes must now and then return. It’s the wildness, with the truth in it. … But none of you is one. Else you would know.”…

  At the next corner, I knew by my mother’s pace that we had a destination. “Not to the dancing school, no. You’re going with me, somewhere. How’s your French?” “Bad,” I said. My tone carried its conviction. “Like his,” she said with a grin. “And how like him! You. Come on.” She led me block after block away from the East River, past our own avenue, on to Fifth, then for blocks down. I forgot my fright. One accepts things, walking; it’s a parade of acceptance, in oneself, or between two…You and I haven’t walked that way yet, Austin; I suppose we will. …

  In front of a house on Fifth Avenue, second from the corner, she stopped. “One on the corner’s already an institution. That huge one. This one’s just barely escaped.” “Our house has an institution. On the other side.”

  “Quick, aren’t you,” she said.

  But I wasn’t sure why. “What is this place?” I’d come to ask this often, as we walked the battered streets or the luxurious. She always told me.

  “This place?” She spread her lips in the way that meant she wasn’t talking to me, and said it too quickly for me to get. Her French was always perfect. She said it again, through her nose, as she pressed the bell. “I often visit it.”

  The manservant who opened the door was so perfect in manner, woodcut spectacles and a string tie, that though I’d never seen one like him, I recognized him at once. Behind me, I heard her ask in an offhand voice to use the phone, then the total change in it as, leading me into a long room on the right, she called out to a person there whom I couldn’t yet see. “Enter!” she said, not to me. The voice was the one in which the crowd must have spoken to one another; any record buff knows it, from some rough old disc cut by black singers in the Paris of 1925.
It pushed me forward like a ticket stub and left me. “Entah—the demimonde!”

  He was in a chair by the window. Yes, he was handsome, even though old, with that Jack Hero face from which women will tolerate even virtue—anything. … And I was wrong in what I said, back there in the room at Dukes, to Father. What is so live as memory? There must be many who are as glad as I when this old man steps forward for them as he does into mine. …But I looked over my shoulder to be sure she had left us, before I fell in love with him. He stood up from his chair at once, old as he was, to meet me. It’s not very common, to women aged twelve.

  We made friends there on the spot, in a number of musical proposals; he had the kind of whimsy children could bear, and the room too had the expectedness of bygone illustrations—the cut of its ogives and its teapot had been under my pillow many a time. He caught me watching Proctor, and drew from me, “He’s so much the way he’s supposed!”

  “Ah well, after all, we’ve been supposing him for so long!” Chauncey Olney said—and caught me catching it.

  Children like to see the centuries before, but unguided—remember, Aussie—like sage young sprouts of the time machine, by themselves. I had just time to begin, when she came back, and I was banished to a sitting-room next door, given an album of views, and as an afterthought of Proctor’s, a queer stylus game whose antique lever when pressed made marvelous geometrical patterns, the only part of this I sometimes think of as dreamed. Proctor was agog with me—or with her. “I’ll bring something delicious, miss. It’s called a milkshake, I believe.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “And close the door after you, please.”

  He gave me an admiring look, and did so. My mother’s genie-laugh came through the painted transom. He must have known that perfectly well. What a servant he was. In my mind sometimes, I marry him to Anna.

  “Posterity can hear us,” said my mother. “I can hear her.”

  “From next door. As is proper. We always kept the amenities here.”

  Proctor was giving them tea first. Then he left them, I hoped—to get mine. Closing the door.

  “So I heard,” said my mother. “So I once heard.”

  I heard the old man’s chuckle. “Nothing before the servants. Whatever else you do, Mirriam, I see you still keep to that.”

  “Some things you’re given, you can’t throw down. No matter how hard you try. Oh—I keep everything.”

  “Don’t much care which side of the world you put us on,” said old Mr. Olney. “Demi or not. Long as you give us some. Though I like my window.”

  “Oh, it’s the side Simon says I’m on,” said my mother. “Without any real reason to be. If I stole, I suppose he thinks, or painted. Or lied. He may be right—what’s dancing at a supper club? This way, I’m not much of anywhere. And not with him.”

  “Oh the demimonde is not what it was,” said Mr. Olney. “Like the Social Register, these days. Simply anybody can get in.”

  She burst out laughing. “Oh, Chauncey. I like your window too. That’s why I come.”

  “Same view as his. Only you’re not married to it.”

  “Same? Not by half.” She sounded like my grandfather Meyer, his London twang. Out of the room, I heard things I’d never heard before. “You’ve got a fuller view of the city. I don’t know how you do it. Miles away from your money though you are.”

  He chuckled again. “Who told you that story, Meyer? Or…did I?”

  A hesitation. I knew it well. Whenever my mother did stop to pause, she was sad. “You did, Chauncey.” She couldn’t help it. She always spoke the truth.

  “Thought I must’ve. You’re a tonic, Mirriam.”

  “Don’t flirt with me, Chauncey. I don’t come for that.”

  “You flirt with life. Who can resist that?”

  They must have heard Proctor coming up the stairs. I did.

  “No one,” said our host, in the familiar, wrapped voice which elders suddenly assumed. “Man, woman nor child.”

  “I’ve been taking her everywhere,” my mother said nervously. “Maybe I shouldn’t. As one does take in—the child one bears—I find.” She sounded surprised. “Or maybe to show her how miles away we all are. From everything.”

  “She’ll be safe here,” Mr. Olney said. “Thank you, Proctor, we’ve enough hot water. Been having trouble finding wicks for that old urn, Mirriam, but Proctor has found just the thing. What did you say it was, Proctor?”

  “In Woolworth’s, sir. Wicks is gone out altogether; I’ve done with pipecleaners for years. Can’t get them because of the wire in them—the war. But there’s these toy animals still made of them. I believe they’re called a shmo.”

  Proctor came in to my side, carrying a tray with a long yellow drink capped with cream and a dish of biscuits with lemon curd and mauve fillings. Downstairs taste, and children’s. I crooked my finger at him. He bent to my whisper.

  “It’s called a shmoo. I have one. But mine is shells.”

  He nodded. Gave a flip to the transom—I would swear he slanted it more—and went out. Servants like the double life.

  Against the teacup clink, the old man said, “Simon can’t resist. Do you have to flirt with him, just now?”

  “So you’ve heard,” my mother said. “About—Nick.”

  “Not by name,” he said. “I’ve no interest in that. So—it’s true.”

  “This time—it’s true.”

  I had drunk all the tall glass and begun on the biscuits. Very slowly, I began to draw with the stylus, which made a scratching noise.

  “What’s that?” said my mother.

  “An old game. It fascinates them. My—adopted daughter had it.”

  The stylus made pushpulls and penmanship circles almost without help from me. I delved deeper into its geometric heart, full of so many tangents and talents I didn’t have.

  “I won’t ruin him,” I heard my mother say. “Not that one. Anything of value I have to say—he already knows. He belongs to the world a-comin’. Besides, he’s getting out. To the war.”

  “There’s always a world a-comin’. Though mebbe that doesn’t sound too well from a nonagenarian,” said Olney. “And you can’t keep everything.”

  “Double or nothing!” said my mother. It had the loud, defiant sound that always came when she tried to lie to herself. She never got control of it.

  “D’you know—?” said Chauncey. “My wife once felt the same. Whereas I’d have settled for one woman or tother. Meyer ever tell you that?”

  “Not he. You men stick together. But I heard. Of a—ménage.”

  “My secretary—a Mrs. Nevin. Proctor reminds me of her. She was so much—as we supposed. Quite willing to retire. To her native heath—France. And bring up the baby girl there. It was my wife who explained to her—that she couldn’t have everything. And to me.”

  There was a stifled sound from my mother, but no words. The stylus made a small blot in the red ink it was using, then continued its rich tangle.

  “Oh, my wife suffered too. Good hard businessmen often breed daughters like that—with robber-baron consciences.”

  “No one ever accused me of that before.” My mother sounded soft, almost childish. How good he was for her! The biscuit I took melted slowly in my mouth.

  “Maybe only a Christian would see it.”

  “I never usually can talk—to one of them. But to sleep with them—that’s…now I’ve shocked you.”

  “You hope,” said Chauncey Olney. “And it’s really quite pleasurable for a man of my years.”

  “But you are a Christian. We’re brought up to think they don’t really shock.”

  “That so, Mirrie?” he said politely. It was hard to hear that the old man had any voice but the polite one, but I heard. “You shock Simon. Not sexually. You get to him somewhere. I don’t know how. But isn’t that enough for you?”

  The drink had made me sleepy. I put the stylus down. In the silence next door, I trifled with the ink bottles ranged in slots at its side; it had
viridian and prussian blue. And a number of designs I could learn to copy too.

  “He’s like a son to you, isn’t he,” said my mother.

  “Yes,” said the old man. “A bastard son.” How queer that he should sound as if he were smiling. I’d known what “bastard” meant for years. She told me everything.

  “Simon’s father was a romantic failure, they say. I never knew at what.”

  “Give him time,” said the old man. “That’s what I—didn’t have.”

  “They say he’s going to be a judge, Mirrie. I remember my father saying it. And later on too, when he told me he was going to leave him the house. I didn’t mind that. That’s the way it should be.” Was she smiling too? “But do you know how I had to learn of Simon’s larger ambitions?”

  “I can guess.”

  “Yes. Nick has his connections too.”

  “Simon would never mention the Court. Even to himself.”

  “Then it’s true.”

  “I have a bet on it I may not live to see,” Chauncey said. “Give me time too, Mirriam.”

  But he had so much already!—I thought—and listened for my mother; the silence was so long. How sad she must be, almost sad enough to cry. I had never seen her. Maybe here is where she came to do it, I thought.

  Then I heard her speak, very low. “I’ve been taking instruction—that’s why I haven’t been here. …Oh no, Chauncey, don’t look so St. Thomasy. Not Catholic…but I’ve a dear, silly friend in Paris, Noel Ammon, he’s a convert, and every time I get a letter, he presses that. Chauncey…it might sound funny that what he says weighs with me.” My mother still sounded sad, but she was talking. “He’s a convert all right. Changed his sex, and married his gallery owner. Or maybe she changed hers.” When she waited for others to shock, my mother’s long eyes elongated even more, her mouth corners subtled, and one shoulder held still—that’s how I always knew she meant them to be. Never me. There were other times, terrible ones, when I was shocked, and she was past knowing it.