New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  That was the place I came to have for most of them. Sometimes, Ninon may have been seeing my father in me, but I knew I puzzled her in myself. I would have told her the plain facts. “But what were they?” said my mother, striking a match. And in what words would I tell them, I wondered—like Rupert’s that day at the bar? But the body was Ninon’s direction. She would never answer me in any other terms. When we asked for direction, she never answered us otherwise. Demonstration was required—of our own secrets most of all. She would take up the chalk. I could see her mark the large X on the floor. For my mother. Maybe a circle round it. “Or does she move?” Madame would say over a shoulder, as she knelt. “Speak up, girl. In your dream, does she move?” I would know better than to answer, “She speaks!”—hearing the reply, “We have no recitative, here.” But I could come forward, to stand on the X. “If she moves, Ruth, you’re to make us see it. Or partner will, at your command.” Then Madame would hand me the gun, according to what she thought me capable of—a toy got from the prop-room, or a black soft shoe with its uppers gone. Or a four-inch block of air. “All right, now. You’re going to tell us. How it was.” Madame never said “show.” “Ready, Ruth?” Then a clap of the hands. “Dance!”

  And as I dance it out endlessly, I hear the sibyl-voices, hers and hers, my mother’s and Madame’s, both of them dancing on the practice floor of my mind. Men inherit the houses, and the wars. We inherit the sibyl-voices. Unidentified or known, they wash over us—which of them the mother-by-choice, which not? “The moment of conception!” says a voice—“There a magnificent ballet, for you! The motile sperm, more instant than thought. And the ovum, arrived slower than an infinite line of tortoises—already there!” Is that voice my mother, moving my hand over the stylus of sexual knowledge prescribed—or Madame loftily guiding our feet to some early notations of Laban? “The ballet is virtuoso calm, demoiselles, in the center of feats of strength. Action is ceaselessly resolved.” That’s Ninon for sure, quoting from some old master whose name she’ll never give us—who we believe to be herself. “We’re always trying to get out of the cosmos!” says that other sure one, ceaselessly resolved.

  The chronology is endless. I used to try. One day, I was dancing by myself in a corner, half watching myself in the great mirror which had migrated from Dorset to London, war to peace, effortlessly as a sky—when Madame came up behind me and stood. The technique is to go on dancing; I was good enough to do that now. Madame made a sign, and I continued backward from the glass, until our images stood beside each other. I was a head taller than she now, though I was not on pointe. She spoke to the mirror, not turning her head. Was she going to assign me a rank in the company? Often she let a girl know she was going to be kept on by a casual, “Take one of the blue lockers. From today on.” Her voice wasn’t like that; it gave me no rank. It was like the atelier-master’s downward sweep of the pen, correcting the apprentice’s drawing of himself. “You always dance backward, away from. Never toward.” She kept her eyes on mine in the mirror. And never asked me what it was I was still moving away from—in a revulsion so deep that it was calm,

  Sometimes there would come a day when Madame was deep in one of the grand invocations she made almost to herself, beginning low with the low: pas de chat, de Basque, sauté de; on from glissade to entrechat six de volée, sissonné tombé to failli—ever on to even wilder astrologies in her quest for the impossible. She would turn suddenly even on some prima who was slacking off. “When did they practice to the left in your school—in their bath?” Then I used to think that surely she would notice me also. To say, “Ruth, Ruth—walk toward.” Or that she would notice—toward the end of a session, when the body carves itself almost free of its own sweat—that I was doing it. But she never further instructed me. So, the years went on, and I came to have my place. I was the dancer without rank.

  Once a year, usually at end of term, when she was having to send the younger ones off before their characters were formed safe against the solider fantasies of Surbiton, or the seniors to grand performances they might fail to recognize, Madame had a speech she gave us. “Oh God, here it comes,” Rupert would breathe, perfectly audible. “’Virtuous calm, girls! Virtuous calm.’” While she gave it, that chant to the impossible she required of us—or hoped—I watched her feet, clothed now in plain pumps. No leather could hide that great squared-off metatarsal. “The arch that has soared never sits well again in the shoe!” said Rupert in my ear. Around us, heads hung embarrassed—hadn’t Madame herself always said it—a ballerina should not speak? The word “assoluta” is rarely heard among them. Nymph in the cave of all their thoughts, she moves with the most silent, unrosined footfall. Madame, in these moments, is only Ninon, pink-ringed and raucous-voiced, pimping for her own vision.

  “Why does she always look at you?” says Rupert, and his tone, kind but puzzled, carries all my rank. Yes, she is looking at me as the speech ends, always on the same syllables, “—impossible.” She too must have received her answers early. How else could she describe such Snow Queens, such nymphs that the wind blows through—so well? How better describe that silent partner of mine, my mother, than by staring at the ones without rank, like me? I turn to answer Rupert, grizzled boy, lamed in a service too. “She knows what she can’t be,” I said. Like you, Rupert. Like me.

  …There’s your telephone, Austin. Yes, go answer it. No smell of girls here, is there? I know you. You’d hunt the red Indian in Soho—but never bring her home, unless she was from home. But point of honor—if all the women you’ve ever had chose to call just now—you wouldn’t lower your voice. Why must I know us all down to the root? Will it be good for you and me, that I know you so well? As I know who you’re speaking to. Voices that speak to him are always the same. Mine was, until today. When we talk to him we deceive ourselves, but find out, later. What’s a judge for, if not that? It’s me he was mourning all that time, wasn’t it. As a man does mourn, against all bloodstains, all wives—the child born to him. Poor man, he never knows in time what’s vital to him. I can love him now. If I don’t have to talk to him…

  The bathroom is as good a place as any, to get away. And I always need to go, at the important time. There are some girls the months follow. A fact giggled over at junior proms, and not unknown at some weddings. Poor Lavalette. Maybe it’s the months trying to warn us what are not the important times. We often wondered what call girls did about these calls from nature, and actresses—and shrugged ourselves the answer. The couture is always the same—and close the bathroom door. So here’s my satchel, full of months.

  …And one I shan’t tell Austin of. Because he knows. Edwin’s a user. That’s the kind to use. A girl with my parents should know. But Ninon cleansed me of it. Later that night, when she came into my bedroom—and swabbed me clean. I was lying down when she came. She was no Anna. And I had different wounds now. Of which women easily speak.

  “Get up!” she said. “This is no time to lie back.” She had a douche bag in her hand. Where she got it, I never thought; she was capable of dispatching my father to find an all-night drugstore. On one of those errands—for medicine, cigars, pastrami, medicine—that he often said were the hallmarks of a city—though he never sent David, or me. Or she’s capable of carrying one of those things in her bag until the end of her life; she has such a cat’s-claw sense of her own femininity—and ours. She put me in the bathtub now, and showed me how to use what I’d often seen hanging in the matter-of-fact English bathrooms, though the troupe itself didn’t have too much time for sex—and the dancing bleeds it out of you. Sweats, I should say. This is blood. Better than some kinds. My mother used to say that bathrooms were the surgeries of the soul—against all those bright razors, what chance has a wrist? Why haven’t I ever felt that? Here is where it most wells up in me, that I mean to live. How hard it is for women not to be normal—or casual—about blood….

  “What a deal of junk women have to carry around with them,” she said, leaning over the tub. “Jockstraps a
re nothing to it. Or rubbers. I suppose he didn’t wear one. Your rapester boyfriend.”

  We were through. I got up weakly; my outer bruises were worse than the other, though equally invisible. She helped me back into bed. How tenderly she could tuck a person in, this hellcat who at dress rehearsals I’d seen drag offstage a girl who’d forgotten to shave under her arms, with the cold whisper, ladylike enough for the back balcony to hear, “Three is too many, my dear.”

  “It wasn’t rape,” I said.

  She smoothed my hair. She’d never touched me like a person, before. “It rarely is.” She shrugged, straightened up, folded her hands. “Good. You understand that. You’ll live.” She’d half turned to go when she reversed, with that telltale poise of the neck. When young, she would have been a dainty dancer, never in a dream, reliable. “Why did you let him?”

  I was too tired to say it fully. “Here.”

  “Here?” Those huge eyes of hers paused in their scrutiny of the room. She knew my father. I went with Edwin. In my father’s house. Daughters do it all the time. Your sisters may, Austin, even though they haven’t my father. Or the same heavenly one—in which neither of us believes. “Ah. Simon.”

  But that was all she ever said of him to me at any time. And not because he was he. Women reveal reluctantly what they learn of a man by sleeping with him; it’s a pact they don’t like to break. Whatever comes of us, Austin, I shan’t reveal you.

  “What a queer picture!” she said, taking it up.

  He gave it to my mother for a joke. During their engagement. But she always kept it. Behold Now Behemoth. And I stole it afterwards. “Just a Blake litho.”

  “No picture of your mother?” said Ninon, putting down the litho. “So many, of course, everywhere else.”

  Not in Father’s study. I gave mine to Anna. There aren’t enough pictures of her anywhere, to challenge mine.

  “No, Madame,” I said from my bed. “But I always feel…you know her. Knew.”

  “I? How should I—?” I saw it cross her face that my father had somehow lied to me of their affair. All of us knew Madame’s face as well as she knew our bodies. So, when in a few minutes or so, she gave me my rank—I knew it for that.

  “Your end of season speech,” I said—“when you send us home.” I raised myself on elbow to meet the personage entering my room now to stand there with us, body-connected with us through my father—and through women, and life. “She was like that—in the way she was. The way she died. Everything.”

  “The way she died?” Madame said softly. “By her own hand.”

  I shivered. My hand lay on the coverlet. If I looked at it, Ninon saw it, who saw every muscle in flesh. “Not by his.”

  “End of season.” Madame’s face was sunk in her hand. Not her habit. There was no figure at Chartres exactly like her—in that posture. “And what do I—did I say?”

  The word is so rarely said among us. I couldn’t say it, to Madame who was never it, who was never more than the Queen Bee in miniature, steady on her own flight. Ninon has no wildness; she’s like me.

  “You know. How everything is arranged around her. Like when you explain to the boys how it should be in the adagio, if ever they find themselves dancing with the real article—and meanwhile with us. How she is the visitor from the impossible.” But when Madame used to explain how she must be touched—impersonal, there I was sad and did not wish to follow her.

  “‘She does not communicate,’” I said. Why was it this next part always made the tears come? I was only quoting Madame. “‘Though she tries, she carries too much.’” Tears were all right among women. I let them fall, like that time in Nick’s car. “‘The impossible,’” I said. Madame, watching from the wings, must once have been such a one, to make her speak like that—maybe early, when she herself was still a tidy butterfly with the glassy wings of the divertissement stuck to her shoulders, crowding with the others to watch that marvel, maybe in Prague. That was why she always looked at me when she said it—another watcher from the wings. “‘She carries the impossible,’” I said. “‘That is her freight.’”

  Madame stood up. She does this, after performances. Saying nothing until ready. “So. No wonder no one can compete with you.”

  “Compete?” I?

  “In his eyes.”

  She looked at me for so long that I shivered again. There was a figure at Chartres exactly like hers—in that posture. Then she reached forward, flicked a finger under my eye, and looked down at the pearl of wet on its tip. “At a time like this—cry for yourself!”

  But that pearl of wet on her fingertip! It was mine. “I have to walk backward,” I said, looking at it. “From that.”

  “When you can cry for yourself,” she said, “you’ll understand everything.”

  Did you? I didn’t say it aloud. She heard. She looked down at herself, still in the towel she had knotted around herself, from my father’s bed. “Got something for me to put on?”

  “Of course.” I went and got a sweater and skirt from a drawer. Over the exchange, between our two man-tired nakednesses, a tenderness, all motherhoods mixed, brought our heads close. “Get back to bed,” she said. Her hands hung veined in my sweater, like girls whom the weather has wizened. I lay back on the bed, all my pangs out-walked. She gathered up the towel.

  “Leave it.”

  “And the douche. I’ll leave that.” She smiled slightly. “Take it on tour.”

  “So I’m to go?”

  “You can have Rupert’s place.”

  Not to dance. Not ever to dance. To watch everything from the wings. I turned my head on the pillow. Self-pity. I felt it. At last.

  She came toward the bed. When Madame is herself again, and most serious, she has the lightest hand. It grazed my forehead. “You’ll carry your weight. Your own weight and more.”

  I turned my eyes toward her. She stood fast, hands clasped, not recoiling from me. There’s one like her at Chartres.

  “That’s it, that’s it, my girl,” she whispered. “I could never quite see what it was, before.” Her head shook it out at me—custodian. “You’re—to understand. You’re to be that one.” Then she shrugged, just as she had over the girl assigned the blue locker, and left me to take it from there. On her way out, she gave the Blake a scrape of the nail that’s still on it. “What an old balls of a boy!”…

  …We give birth to ourselves, but slowly. As our parents came to give birth to us, they died a little. We die a little, giving birth to them. I lay there thinking of them both. Equally. Tonight—we three are equals. Neither of them with the power to come to me, to guard me, to use me any more.

  My crime was my pearl. It was given me. But something in me had given me it as well.

  I chose her.

  I took sides. I chose her.

  I had all my slow life to forgive them for it. Mine own slow life. To understand from the beginning. To have had to understand then, instead of at the end—that’s the pearl I carry. Walking backwards, until now. To love someone, will that be to turn round and walk toward? Toward them? Mother! Bathsheba for whom I wasn’t named!—I mean to live. And suffer, Father—if I choose. Father! Judge me. I mean to suffer if I choose.

  My pearl of wet. I am young enough to mourn you. You are mine.

  We give birth to ourselves. And close the bathroom door behind us…Austin, you have the look of all the men who come to Delphi in spite of themselves. Hold me—I’m beginning to speak. I won’t be the mystery any more. Take the mystery from me. You’re to be my past, from now on! You’re to understand everything now.

  Father, I’m going to speak now. David, Walter, strain from your graves; help me to speak well. Austin, you’ll help me to speak. How am I to begin it all? Oh Austin, everything is in question. I always knew.

  “Oh please, please, please—”

  I speak. I speak.

  Oh fix my fancy. I am possible.

  20. In Full View of the City

  Winter 1955

  BETWEEN P
OTTED PALMS SET at diamond-shaped intervals along all ninety feet of the ballroom at the top of the Ralston houses, three men were running power-waxers along the intricate parquet. At times they got down on their knees to do the borders by hand, talking meanwhile of the weather—a brilliant February snap whose snow had mounded like gravestones all the air-conditioners in the new apartment house across the way—and of the owner here, in whose other houses they had also worked.

  “Give them knee breeches, they could be footmen!” said the Judge, from the central grove of green where his wheelchair had been placed. “My God, did you ever see such a room? In this sun!”

  Warren Fenno, sitting perched on a small ladder, only because he didn’t want to emphasize his own physical well-being by standing, nodded absently, leaning forward to listen to the men. Ever since the foundation had put some money in a survey of city migrations—and in property, though that was an accident—ethnic groups here had begun to interest him. He heard that the two Irishmen had each come through the snow by car, from “double frames” in Queens. “My grandfather, he lived in a tenement in Hell’s Kitchen owned by Ralstons, once.” The fourth man, the German foreman, was engaged in a last touch of the brush to the exquisitely pseudo marble-painting on the walls. “I live now by York Avenue. First when I come—Washington Heights, they tell me to go.” He shrugged. By which Warren deduced that though by his age he might have been fleeing Hitler, he wasn’t a Jew.

  “Looks like the Frick,” Warren said.

  “The Frick?” How anyone could compare that heavy tycoonery with this delicate, Byzantine-etched room!—unless Fenno meant that both were fakes. There wasn’t an ounce of plush, gilt or carpet here; even the swags at the windows had been penciled in, and the two chaste fireplaces had no mantels other than faint pickings of blue and bronze, aged to a Renaissance tint just yesterday, by two Italians who had then left to clean the acreage of Ralston terrazzo in Palm Beach. To think all this restoration here had been going on next door to him, for two years! “I suppose you mean the palms in Frick’s garden, around the fountains.”