“Matter of fact, they’re all palmettos, aren’t they?” said Warren, toward one of the Irishmen though not actually addressing him—he never felt really comfortable with labor, except in Maine.
“Dunno, he never takes us Micks down there. We go to the Bay—Oyster, Bolton Landing—though that ain’t been open three years running, Tuxedo—before he sold it, and now here. Down on the Chesapeake, he uses colored. Fisher’s Island, he don’t have nobody at all.”
“Where does the man live?” said the Judge irritably. “When he’s working for you, Fenno. If he works.”
“Two rooms at the top of a house in Henderson Place,” Warren chuckled. “Oh he works. So hard, the office began to think he was put there to spy on us. Hardly a social worker type we’d ever seen before. But we never suspected any of this. Until the papers carried the engagement announcement. And your address.”
“Henderson Place. Do I know it?” The gulls surely had their lanes, otherwise. For the present Ralston heir to offer this place for the wedding! To him of course the Mannixes were merely the people who had always lived next door to a house of his—one house. Two years ago, he’d bought it back from the intervening owner. Restoration was a hobby with him. He’d pleaded with the Fennos most gracefully, to let him “warm the room” with their son’s wedding. He always warmed a new place at least once.
“Henderson? Oh, it’s a little corner,” said Warren. Ten blocks or so away. He didn’t like to think of it as restricted any more. Still, the Judge—who acted as if the gold keys of the city had been stuck in his mouth at birth, didn’t know it. “What was the Ralston money, originally?” said Warren. “That cereal?”
“No, always been property. Their sense of it hasn’t skipped even the collateral line. This is the grandnephew of course. Our Ralston never married.”
The two gentlemen laughed. “So many things skip,” said Fenno. Though the Fenno guest list was large enough to make these quarters convenient, he and Margaret hadn’t thought it quite the thing, not to marry off one’s daughters from home if one could—and next-door certainly could have managed it. What they liked least was the Judge’s morbid enthusiasm for property that wasn’t his own. And Mannix had told them the tale of Meyer’s own purchase of course, the punch-line distinction between Jews and god-damned Jews sitting rather peculiarly on his smile. “Well, I don’t find that too jolly,” said Margaret Fenno, afterwards. “Will he tell all the cousins it?” Warren had answered, “No, I don’t think so.” And surprised himself by adding. “We’re jolly. They’re not, somehow. They’ve got wit. I think it would be valuable if thee and I could both remember that.” She had laughed and said she would take the thought with her, to Meeting.
One of the Irishmen, working the border to the left of the Judge’s chair, spoke suddenly across it to the third workman, a silent Puerto Rican who was coming up on the other side. “Where you livin’, Manuel? You never say.” Whether or not all had taken in this property talk above their heads, the Judge couldn’t tell, from the faces. All workmen had faces now, as his children had heard him say. Blaming him, of course, for daring to be born before this was the case.
“One Hundred Forty Street,” Manuel said proudly. “West.”
“You don’t say! My aunt used to live there once. How long you live there?”
“Ten years, I move uptown.”
“You don’t say. That neighborhood used to be all white.”
Manuel, white as anybody who was white, nodded politely, scrubbing away. “Nineteen-thirty-two, I come from Ponce. To the Tee Ee Are AY.” He brought it forth like an ancestor.
“’N hell is that?”
Warren stepped forward eagerly. Onto the border, unfortunately. He stepped back. “Transient Emergency Relief Authority. For destitute nationals without state residence at the time.”
“Thatta right.” When Manuel beamed, he had more face than any of the four.
Twelve o’clock struck. “Lunch,” said one of the Irish. “Now what church would be that? Could that be St. Stephen’s of Hungary? I was married there.”
“Too far,” said the Judge. “Except on a wet day. No, that’s Ignatiurs Loyola.” Another bell struck. “And that’s St. Catherine of Siena.” He waited, grinning, for the third. “Our Lady of Perpetural Help.”
Warren burst out laughing. “How do you do it? And not even one for us.”
“Oh, I married into the music business. Had to do something.” Not that the Mendeses had ever been performers, or even listeners. “Pity for Ralston’s sake, Ruth won’t have his string trio.” But she hadn’t wanted any of this elaboration. Only Austin had persuaded her, for the clan’s sake. And because it was not to be in her own house.
“Well, must go and dress,” said Warren. He hadn’t been needed here. Margaret, like all women, thought widowers needed help. Or wanted news she wouldn’t come for herself. “Thanks to the arrangements, there’s plenty of time.” He couldn’t help his expression. Married by a judge in chambers—it was known to happen. Even if the chambers were a flat over on Central Park West—and said jurist had got his start in a dubious kind of law. But for none of them to be there! Nobody except Judge Borkan would see the young couple until the reception. Austin, saying only, “We want it private”—but maybe silently imploring?—had persuaded the Fennos to that. Oh, it was going to be a peculiar affair all round—though he was sure that the Fennos would carry it off by sheer numbers. Plus the powerful presence of the Broughams, Margaret’s people, who were too plain to speak of their family, but on the frivolous occasions of others seemed often innerly guided to stand silently, thinking about it. “Better—than no wedding,” Margaret had said. “Warren—you don’t think that girl has a look—of a girl who mightn’t go through with it?” The assurance he’d given himself, he couldn’t give her. They’ve already had an affair. And this time, Austin will go through with it.
The Judge looked down at himself, once again in the ancient morning coat which would do him until he died. He wore a smaller brace now. And could dress himself, once a day. “You know where they are now, I’m told? Together. At the park, I believe. That’s the way it’s done, these days.”
“Well, I’m off.”
The foreman stepped forward. “But now the fountain,” he said. They’d forgotten it, the fountain which both sides in agreement had hoped to keep hidden away. Ralston at their sole joint meeting with him had promised it. In a last access of restoration—and in a hysteria of delight at his own. “So good to be out in the open!” said Ralston, clad in a suit made for him in Hong Kong, thick as a secondary pelt. The Judge hadn’t dared meet his daughter’s eye. “So glad,” Ralston was singing, pumping Warren’s shy, dry hand. “It’s been such tough titty, being underground!” But when Warren turned round, Ruth—whose tact went all to that side these days—was gone.
They watched the German unwrap the fountainhead, oddly small, disappointingly chrome. “From Hammacher’s,” said the Judge. “Well, maybe the water improves it.”
“Nein,” the foreman said. “It works only the champagne.”
Upon which both gentlemen shouted a “No!” It was really their best moment together, to date.
“Maybe Ralston won’t come,” said Fenno.
“He comes today, ja,” said the foreman. “From the house in Lago di Lago.” Still protesting, he went to lunch.
“It uses the same wine over and over,” said the Judge, reading the directions. “That’s how the rich get rich.”
“Disgusting, either way.”
“And I’ll get blamed for my ostentation,” said the Judge. “By three hundred Fennos.”
“We did rather pad that list.”
“You did, rather.”
They were both smiling.
“For a boy like that—” said the Judge.
“Austin’s head over heels,” said Warren. “Naturally. But I think you might like to hear what Margaret said, years ago. When she saw Ruth at dancing school. And again when he brought her to tea wi
th us, last fall. “‘The little Mannix girl is lovely,’ Margaret said.”
“Last fall?”
“September, I think.”
Before Walter died. “My daughter’s a mystery to me.” He spun the pamphlet with the vicious aim of the legbound, straight into the box. “As for that thing—I’m beginning to think old Ralston himself was part Jew.”
“You people,” said Warren. “Always that chip on your shoulder.”
“Sorry, does it show?”
“Yes. But I admire it. Came across the figures for the people you yourself brought over, the other day. During the war.” He’d gone out of his way to get them.
“Oh, that.” He’d kept them out of his consciousness, ever since. To do otherwise would have seemed like buying himself from God—with souls.
“Weren’t all Jews you saved, Simon, were they. Didn’t I hear, you had trouble with some of your co-religionists, because of that?”
“A little.” The judge felt the light, almost palpable breath of air when one seemed about to make a friend. “That was my war.”
“Quite a war. Four hundred and some people.”
“I hear that blasted foreman on his way up. Maybe he was one of ’em.”
Warren knelt to examine the contraption. “Wonder if this thing couldn’t stand a little adjustment,” he said suddenly. “My boys’ve taught me to be pretty mechanical.”
“Sailing used to be my speed.” He wheeled himself closer, watching as Warren disassembled the pieces very handily. “You and Austin’ve both been at the front. My son David when he met his death was on his way to war.” Saying his death aloud didn’t make him believe it, even yet. “‘Nobody’s really at war,’ he said to me. ‘Unless he’s there.’”
“There!” Warren said, standing up. “Let them try make that gadget go without this.”
“What is it?”
“A sort of gasket. Water or Veuve Cliquot—no runnee without it.”
“You like wine?”
“No, ’s matter of fact. Margaret’s people do, Quaker though they be. Though I make her the excuse lots of ways, I guess, for not being luxurious. Wives’re convenient.” He said it deliberately, pocketing the piece of rubber meanwhile. Naturally, marrying into a family, they were curious about the mother. In the name of their future grandchildren even had a right to know. But Austin, on their mentioning it, had been furious—a new thing for Austin.
“Yes indeed.” The Judge looked so small and forlorn, sitting there under his army blanket, that Warren put a hand on his shoulder. “Women are funny at these times,” he said. “Girl ought to have her wedding the way she wants it.”
“Wives are convenient,” said the Judge dryly. “Particularly at weddings. I’d even thought of acquiring one myself.” Yes, he’d even done that, when he got back. By a letter. Which, this time, he had mailed. “Didn’t work out.”
Warren removed the hand. They did go too far. One could depend upon it. “Austin told us, by the way. That she’d told him everything. Family history, all that. Nothing mental, I gather. He didn’t tell us, of course. Got our own skeletons. Told him so. ‘Austin,’ I said, ‘tell them about Aunt Elsie.’” Warren gave a short laugh. “‘How she left her money—away.’ So it all ended in laughing. Our family—usually does.” He got off that—not to sound superior. “But how Austin does love that girl, Mannix! All he’s thinking of is how to take care of her. Protect her. All day long. Says he’s going to spend his life at it.” His son had struck him as rather intense, and he’d told him so. Maybe too sharply. “Company one keeps,” he said.
“Oh?” That scary quality which was somehow in the Judge’s very size—Molly, the youngest girl, had said so—had now returned to him. “He’d better do more than that.”
So they parted. Maybe it was Mannix’s joke—a rather nasty wedding one. He couldn’t tell. Or whether it was only him he felt uncomfortable with, or all of them. The family all meant to do their best with the girl. As Warren went off, he felt the piece of gadget in his pocket, and revived. “A tisket a tasket, a green and yaller gasket”—It was the kind of joke the family loved.
“Until four.” Mannix nodded good-bye. He could feel it himself. The delicate breath of friendship hadn’t lasted too long.
When Charlie brought him over home, they found Anna in a state because the bride hadn’t yet returned from the park—and hadn’t promised to. Anna’s anxiety was clear to him, if not to herself. Somehow, it was harder to imagine childhood friends married to one another than it would be to accept a stranger. Or maybe neither Anna nor he could believe that their guardianship was over, all, all ended now. “Well, she can’t run away, Anna. She’ll turn up. After all—she’s with him.”
Meanwhile Austin, on his way to his own wedding, strode through the park without seeing it. He’d meant what he had said to his father, in the nearest to release he had permitted himself to come. Though he’d keep the London job, it would never be his main job again. In one stroke he had become one of those men with lives divided by women. One saw or smelled them out everywhere, men who were openly hobbled or resigned—bled away by invalid wives or extravagant mistresses, or those others, grayly present at a board meeting or a. family council, all the time secret abstraction suckled them. Fenno men weren’t exempt. Indeed, were more vulnerable, as men who coped, and weren’t destroyed by their demons (or angels) but merely—divided. He’d no more dreamed he might become one of these than he’d aspired to be one of their opposites, those men of total vocation—to art, religion or ideas—through whose grating he’d always peered with respect, tinged with the slight distaste of the moderate. Knighthood to anything, much less a woman, made his whole generation squirm; for him at best manners were enough, and not to be a pig at any trough.
But that night, as she spoke and spoke, and as the great ravine of pity and horror had opened up in him—to be sealed and never spoken of after—he’d already resolved. In a yawn almost of relaxation from jaw to loin, he knew what men felt who had a vow, or had a job for life. Or had had an abbé with a Rupert-nose say to them, “This is your role.”
At the beginning of her recital, she was like a child leading him through the forest of her life, in which only he was lost. She already knowing that when they got to witch territory he would find two of them, the old and the young. “To see the shark smile, and know it for oneself?” He had to remember—all the while his hatred for the mother grew—who had taught this girl that! Later, as the girl grew out of her own childish womb in that midnight closet under the stairs, he wept at her accouchement like a father—of the child. Still later, when in her grown self she at last faced him and wept, she was like a medium, piteously strong, whose ghosts, when the lights went up, couldn’t fade. Men married women for their intensity, kept them or left them for their tragedy. She brought him certainty like a pearl saying, “Take this treasure, now. Be keeper of it.” “Men are only the other hagridden part of life”—she could say that to him! Oh, he knew now what she meant to him! If he could have said all this to his father, presenting it to him like the patents, land grants for a new country, it would have been said easiest: “So one becomes a maverick.”
Last—when she had finished—she scanned his face, for his forgiveness. Didn’t find it. And was satisfied he knew it wasn’t his or any man’s to give.
“I hope to understand,” he said. “As well as you.” She’d given him her everything. And this was his.
Like any woman she became his, came to live with him in the flat, cooked her first awkward meals for him, lay for him—not so greenly, he thought—and never became to him like every woman. Her jokes wrenched him, when he thought where they came from. Sometimes he thought of the children of such jokes. “You are funny,” he said to her, in his arms.
“Oh, you like black women,” she said, rolling over on him—did any difference she could find in him excite her? “Or—your mother’s Indian. I’m that. Maybe not quite red enough.” From which he gathered his mother had taken her
through their collection of rewarding ancestors just missed. Ruth the Red. But his intelligence refused to play at what was dangerous—and so much was.
“You’re the most honest man,” she said. “We’re not marrying, are we, because you know?”
But stupid he was not. Had she given him all her mystery? Could a person? “Because of what I don’t know,” he said.
Their days before coming back to New York were a continuing conversation. Their elders might have thought they drifted. On one wild wet night, their last before coming over, he went to the theatre for her. Though he’d never said he’d disliked coming, when she saw him hanging about in the stage line among the other Johnnies, the only American among those romance-filled bowlers and baby cynics from Harrow, she gave a little laugh. “Next time we’ll meet out front.”
Home in his flat, peeling off her clothes, she’d said what still chilled him. He could see the bunched calf come gleaming out of the tights so thick in the hand, so gauzy onstage. Would there be a next time? How often he’d seen her hands grasp the square toes to exercise them, not to hide—and hadn’t asked whether she meant to go on with it. Were her words—out of the blue—an answer to that? “I must have mystery,” she’d said, and for a while couldn’t look at him. He hadn’t asked her to explain.
Next night on the boat—for they were lovers, they had time—riding the black jointure of sea and sky in a single deck chair, they’d exchanged their views on the possibility of God. Their elders might have heard it as the proper prelude to a mixed marriage. “Universe is such a well-run clock, must be a clockmaker, the age of Newton used to say—but I’m not so sure,” he said. While in another sky, fragments of mortars and children glinted, like fireballs of slow magnitude, and fell. Those who had seen that—it was his one small claim to be with her, in her universe. “Oh no,” she said into the clouds, like a child, “it’s much simpler. If there’s a God, it’s because there’s nobody else old enough. To mourn.” Though there was no one on deck, they went below. Before love, he buried his face in her, so as not to ask, and asked it. His first question in all those weeks. “Am I mysterious enough?” In love, gripping him, she answered him. “You’re to be my past. From now on.”
New Yorkers Page 64
