“We had the classics in Virginia, Mirriam.” He sounded as if he had his chin in his hand. “Go on.”
“But when he writes to me, he changes back. ‘Darling. Take instruction. Do.’ And the tone carries me back. That was my decade. They were my crowd. Their wants…and sufferings…were the ones I knew. If somebody’s sick in the spirit, or brave in it—what does it matter if the only way he knows to say it is ‘I have such a yen’?…
They said ‘darling.’ All the time.”
I looked at the transom, so high, and the keyhole beneath it, so low, but had no real need for either. She’d be sitting straight now, looking straight out, and I knew that voice—the one which cut across the slang, or used it like a whip. Children at home don’t need keyholes; the voices and silences of those above ride the pipes with the bathwater, plugging ears, nose and throat against the morning cereal. The children of those who love are in the greatest peril too. Sitting at table with them, children hear the true voices, in the basement of their souls. The deaf hear that piano. She was talking the way she sometimes talked to Father. The one she was really talking to was Si.
“—But I couldn’t take religious instruction, Chauncey. We are it, Jews like us. It’s in the family inflection even if we don’t obey one of the laws. Know what my father used to say? ‘God could be converted maybe. But not one of us.’”
“St. Thomasy indeed!” said Chauncey. “But, go on.”
“So I went where you’d expect. Where so many like us do go, especially the women, in times like these—when the men still have their—busyness. ‘OK, Noel,’ I wrote, ‘I’ll try looking at life through a glass-bottomed boat. And when I see a shark smile, I’ll try not to let on I know it’s me.’” A silence. “I swore I’d never go, Chauncey. But I did. I guess you know where.”
“To Paris?” the old man said. “Hope you had the grace to go over there, for Simon’s sake. Though they still have them here, I suppose.”
“Dozens,” my mother said slowly. “Chauncey. Mind telling me just what you thought I meant?”
“Why—a brothel. Male brothels, as a matter of fact.” I heard his hands clap together. “Praise be. My century’s shocked yours.”
After a silence, my mother said, “I wish I’d had you at the doctor’s…Do you think that girl’s asleep?”
“Proctor’s eggnogs have a good deal of sherry in them…Ah—doctors…Well, each fifty years to its own. My father-in-law’s was the century of steam. You young people are more interested in your own self-combustion.”
“Young, Chauncey?…And what’s yours?”
“A man never really knows the watermark of his own age.”
Century, century—it was a word to put anyone to sleep. I thought I was.
“But that’s why I went to the doctor,” said my mother. “God forgive me, I don’t know why it should be me to see it…but I’m afraid I do. That’s what I told him when he asked what I was there for. ‘I’m a woman the wind blows through,’ I said. ‘Tell me if it speaks the truth.’”
I was asleep. For a minute, or a century, which has taken me all the years since to reconstruct. For when I woke, or seemed to. she was talking in the way I dreaded, that no one could stop, nor she. How terrible it is, Austin, when that wind blows through the one one loves. Chauncey wasn’t in love as I was. He loved my father. That was the difference.
“The doctor couldn’t help me,” said my mother. “‘The open secrets,’ I said to him—‘those are the ones I am doomed to keep.’ Oh, at first it was easy…‘I should warn you,’ I said. ‘I’m used to telling people everything; this is nothing new to me. I give you all little shocks—because the bigger ones you would never believe. Not from me, anyway. Especially not from me…Oh, when I see the shark smile, you see, I always know it’s me.’ ‘Shark?’ he said, and began to write. But after a while, he began to get used to me. And to dismiss my language; Which is all I’ve got. ‘Tell me who you think you are,’ he said, ‘in the plainest language you can.’ ‘My language is always plain,’ I said. ‘Some think it’s too sharp altogether. What you want, Doctor—is obscurity to me. But I’ll try.’…His office is on a Park Avenue corner. ‘I’m one of the women upstairs,’ I said. ‘I’m a woman upstairs.’ ‘Upstairs?’…‘Yes, Doctor, you must have dozens, in this apartment house.’ (They have, Chauncey. The sibyls of society whom nobody will believe. Who have the vote.) ‘Driving their husbands mad with closet-building, Doctor. Do you tell them how to live—or how to build closets more happily?’…I could tell from his smile that the charm had begun. ‘They tell me!’…So I told him. ‘So when you were young you wanted to paint, draw, dance, be an artist, Mrs. Mannix?’ ‘Never,’ I said. ‘I was never one of those.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because I was brought up a connoisseur!’ ‘So you collected artists,’ he said. ‘Why?’ Oh, he was sharp—those are the ones I charm best. And he helped me of course, like any audience. Those long-ago studio days, why had I hung about to reverence anyone with clay under his nails? ‘Because when the wind blows through them,’ I said, ‘it stops. For a short moment—it stops.’
“And it was that second I chose to want to burst out crying, Chauncey, isn’t that strange? I never cry, not since I was fifteen. ‘Why are you shivering?’ he said. ‘At the truth,’ I said. ‘A silver flash between the tongue and the ear. Even when they’re only mine.’…They don’t cry either—catch them weeping for the world!…‘So you’re hollow,’ he said keenly. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Like a harp.’ And because they love to talk about money, it obsesses them, I leaned my glove on the desk, with the dollar for the cab already in it. ‘My family made its money out of music, Doctor. So I suppose it’s natural.’”
I was asleep in the deep of the chair, of this house. I was safe here. Out of the wind.
“And the next time, for there were only three”—said my mother—“when he leaned forward—he always sat opposite, I’ll say that for him—I gave him his money’s worth. Not sex, Chauncey; that’s only their language…Tell me more about the women upstairs,’ he said. ‘Women?’ I said. ‘The hysterics of society. Whom nobody believes. And they’ve reason. We never stop. Your own mother was probably one, Doctor. Men like you always have them.’ ‘Not mine,’ he said. ‘We weren’t from your—echelon. She had to work.’…‘No exemption. We Cassandras are from all classes. My husband’s mother’s family nickname was Xantippe—a lower order. But sterner. She never wanted to get out of the cosmos, that one. She stayed and stayed.’ He burst out laughing. ‘That good old Jewish mother-tongue. Yes, I recognize it. And then he said, ‘Out’?”
In my dream of sleep, or of terror accompanied, I heard the old man get up from his chair. He had a walk like a pendulum. “Mirriam.” He must be standing by her chair. Virginians give a little flip to one diphthong. I hear it yet as he said it. “Out?” And then—“Mirriam. You’re not flirting—with that?”
You’ll have seen clocks that don’t have arc pendulums, Austin, but a little cage that turns this way, then that. My mother’s changes were like that, not an about-face or an arc—a turning, this way, that, of the cage itself. A role that doesn’t stop—won’t. Can’t. “Oh, I couldn’t have been an actress after all, Ruth,” she said once. “I won’t bow.”
“No, not with that,” said my mother. “I told him so. ‘I’ve got nerve enough to talk, even to act. But I can’t bow to the cosmos, Doctor. Not that far. You’d have done better, you men, by sending women like me to war. Not just giving us the vote.’ ‘You envy us men?’ It was the first satisfaction I’d given him. ‘Oh, not your physique,’ I said. Poor dry man, he believed in talk even more than I did. I couldn’t say cock to him. ‘No, Doctor. But men can pretend to die for the world when they’re really only dying for themselves. You’re Christers all.’ ‘When there’s a war on,’ he said, ‘a lot of private neuroses shoulder arms. And call themselves the world’s.’ ‘Or the whole world’s got mine,’ I said. ‘Have you thought of that?’ ‘You aren’t called upon to carry the world,’ he said. ‘
Aren’t I, though. You don’t know the women upstairs. But you don’t have to worry, Doctor, there’s no war on here.’…I can always shock them in the end. ‘Not for us,’ I added. ‘Not for anybody who’s not there.’ I saw that he’d certify me as sane after all. Though I hadn’t asked. ‘Isn’t there, Mrs. Mannix?’ he said. ‘Then where’s my son?’ I felt sorry for him then. He had the look of all the men who come to Delphi despite themselves. ‘He’s there,’ I said. ‘But not you.’ ‘I give what I can,’ he said. ‘We owe this country a lot. We’re not people like you. We were immigrants.’ ‘People like us?’ I said to him. ‘We’re the first to know. The first’. …Chauncey, I used to hear my father say it to every boy who came to the house: ‘Well, sir—on what argent fields have you played today? Or are you bound for?’ To me, a girl, of course he never said it. That’s how we come to see it. Nobody’s at a war, unless he’s there…‘Nobody, nobody, nobody,’ I screamed at him. And stamped my feet. That’s why we’re not listened to, but can’t help. ‘No, Doctor,’ I said. ‘You sent a substitute.’”
In the silence, the old man made a sound, just a memory sound.
“I told you, Chauncey,” said my mother. “I keep everything…All the doctor said to me was, ‘You’re not a harp. You may be a weathervane.’ Poor man, he was trying to talk my language. ‘May it be of use to you,’ I said. ‘I fancy you’ve got a wife something like me, at home.’ It was the only remark of mine he didn’t answer. So when I got up to leave for good, I said, ‘Don’t bother to pay me now, Doctor. I’ll send you a bill.’”
Now my mother’s voice was gentler, like to me or David at bedtime, years back. “He was such a thin, nervous little man. Like a Jew butchering pork.”
“You people. Why are you Jews so hard on one another.”
Her voice was almost inaudible. “Love.” If it hadn’t been for that word I wouldn’t have heard her. This must be the way she put herself to sleep. Instead of with tears for all she couldn’t say—like me. “That’s why we only go to ourselves…for instruction. Otherwise. …it might take.”
“Do you talk to Simon like this?” The old man’s voice was sharp.
“Never aloud,” said my mother. “He hears every word.”
“That why you married him?”
“Part of it…And because he resists…resists.”
“Change,” said the old man, not as if he were asking.
“Me.”
Her high heels, in which she could walk me for a whole afternoon, clicked across the floor. “He tells me not to let people use me as they do. But that’s his mother in him, her stinginess. He’s generous. I found that out by trying it, endlessly. What he really means is—I’m a waste. And arrogant about it. But life is movement, Chauncey, isn’t it? And that’s what he doesn’t see. He looks at our world as if—it still was.”
“Ah? And isn’t it?”
I heard another sound I knew well, from home—the spit-spit of the nails which were blue, against a window-pane. “Your view. Your beautiful view. It’s two-way. In full view of the city. Like Grant’s tomb. Like us. People like us.”
“Like us?”
“Ahrr, the life in this house is over, Chauncey. But you know. I wouldn’t put it past you to know.”
But our house was alive. Dark sometimes, and—even I knew it—desperate. But alive. With the imperial right to be unhappy if it chose. Like her.
“Personally, I may’ve been dead for some forty years,” said Mr. Olney. “But I never confuse the class structure with myself. Or the class struggle as they’re calling it nowadays. Same thing of course. Though it’s not polite to say…There’ll always be a middle and an upper, Mirrie. Though it mayn’t be us.”
“You talk to me as if I were intelligent.” That’s when she was tenderest with David. When she felt like that—against him.
“Women sense certain changes quicker. But that’s fashion. Don’t elevate it to prophecy.”
“Ahh-hr, I can’t blame you,” she said. “Why should it be someone like me? Why should I be the one to harbor it? Sometimes I feel the world-to-come, the world right outside our door, like an egg inside me—that I must bring to him…Me, who never could stand a mother’s role. Maybe women like me are a new, non-sex to come, nothing so simple as fags or dikes. Hummph. Nothing so mystic, either…But I tell you, our world is over.” I heard her walk back to him. “Chauncey…Oh, it’s not just a question of bongo-bongo, or whatever twelve-tone city lights they split this year in Jimmy Ryan’s, to some hot-pash dance tune. The polite world is over…Funny, some of the very rich are getting cozy bedded down with the new one—but not us. Never us. I don’t mind—for me. I just want him to see it. He’s the one wants to be a judge.” She came so close to the panel between us that I could hear the stuff of her dress against it. “So I have to slap him back for it, every time.”
“Is this other man—political?”
She moved off. It was her slip made the noise, really. Taffeta. “Criminal…You’re not surprised.”
Now the old man got up from his chair. I heard his cane, like a shrug. “My father-in-law was that…Oh, it dies every ten years, the polite world. …Maybe your twenties was a weathervane of the century. But that was twenty years ago. Shall I tell you why you see—what you see? You’ve slept with a member of the lower classes. And that’s your enlightenment.”
“Ah-ha,” she said. “If that isn’t like you all. Or to the nunneries with us. When Simon and I were on our honeymoon…no, we were still on it, but it was over…I’d come back to Paris and we’d left it, but we were still in France, in the Loire. We motored past a convent wall, of the Carmelites.
‘Custodians of the Unregarded,’ the stone gate said—I’ve never forgotten it. ‘How wonderful!’ I said. ‘To be that.’ How beautiful. You see—I thought it meant the nuns themselves—that they did that for the world. But Simon only laughed, and said it meant the order itself—that kept them. The extra women. ‘Some of the best names in France,’ he said. ‘My father knew a baron once, who it turned out kept his wife there.’”
“Unregarded!” I heard the cane again, and in my half-doze protested it, for Anna’s floor. “Meyer spoiled you.”
“He gave me everything,” said my mother. “But never told me what to want. That’s for the sons.”
“Nor what not to want, apparently.”
“My mother told me that,” she said. “So, sometimes, when he was impatient with her, he called me his ‘little mother.’ That’s all she got for it. Oh, it’s a simple, Biblical family line.”
“And Simon?”
“Simon slept with me, in my father’s house…Sleeps.”
“Ah-ha,” said the old man, “Ah-ha.”
“Ah-ha what?”
“It’s very simple, what you’re suffering from.”
“Is it now,” said my mother. I could have warned him, hadn’t I been fast in the chair, my drowsy arms pinned.
“Two men at once,” said the old man. “Somehow, women over here aren’t—brought up to be fit for it.”
“I ought to laugh,” said my mother. “I ought to laugh. Or ask—what about the men.”
He chuckled. “Y’all can say that all your lovely lives. But it ain’t synonymous. Simon have a mistress?”
“Not that I know of. And I’d know.”
“Too bad. What would you do—if he had?”
“Not bring her to live with us.”
His laugh had a cackle, the first old age I’d heard from him. “So you see, how times’ve changed. But women—let me tell you…When my father-in-law heard about our ménage, he had me in and roared at me…The criminal classes’re often sexually stricter than us, Mirriam—have you noticed?”
She got up from a chair she must have sat in, and prowled, but didn’t answer.
“When he found out it was my wife who’d insisted, he was knocked off his pins. ‘That do-gooder, my daughter’—my wife was an active suffragette. ‘She must be insane.’ I knew how to talk to him by then. ‘
Oh no, sir, she’s suffering from a female disease.’…‘Is she now,’ he whispered—after roaring at me again for not taking her to better doctors. ‘What is it?’ But when I told him, after reminding him of a business deal or two of his own—he began to smile. …It’s what you’re suffering from, Mirriam. And not only over your—Nick.”
Or her Si, I said to myself. Or her Si.
“Well?”
He cleared his throat. “Woman can’t bear the difference between legal and ethical experience.”
My mother began to laugh. “Vive la différence. We can understand it though!—And did she ruin you for it. Because you could!”
“Public life is harder for men than you think.”
Oh stop her laughing stop her.
With a great effort that I could almost see, my mother stopped herself, and I awoke.
“Simon won’t meet him,” she said, low. “I tried. Will you do me a favor, Chauncey?…Have him here.”
“Who?” A pause. “Who?”
“Both.”
A long, long pause. “You’d shoot a man, wouldn’t you. Only to get him to look at you hard enough.”
“Not Simon.” My mother said it so softly. “Not him.” It was my mother, only my mother; why should I be terrified? “Maybe the other. He’s going off anyway. But not him…No…to get Simon’s full attention—” She broke off with a short laugh. I could imagine her shrug. “—I’d have to get him…to shoot me.”
After which Chauncey Olney said. “Get out of here, Mirriam.”
I heard my mother pick up her bag, click across the floor. I shut my eyes fast; kettledrum, harps, I heard them all—and my own blood.
“All your talk about two worlds,” said the old man. “You want to ruin him, don’t you. God knows why. Or just to see the two of them in the same room.”
“Didn’t you. Want to.”
“No! And vive la différence.”
“And David too,” she said bitterly. “We might have him.”
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