New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  Another young group ran by laughing, peering into each one of the palmy bowers dotted down the vast parquet. “They’re looking for the bride,” Borkan said with a smile.

  “She went ice-skating this morning,” said her father. “You ever think, Borkan, that the present world might be the last to see life as a consecutive story? Or to try?”

  “Nope. Who does.”

  “The Duke of York,” said the Judge, feeling the cane which hung by his side. “Not the present one.”

  “He never was in the courts,” Borkan said.

  Left alone, Borkan gone to take a leak, the Judge, wanting the same, looked around for Charlie, hidden by people at the buffet. The reception was at its height. He didn’t want to see them catch the bride. Neither did anyone else, not yet. This was the city as audience, ninety feet of it, three hundred strong in top form, inside a house but not its own, and it was having a good time.

  There was an agreeable freshness of new clothes, and the sugary odor of girls with good legs. Everybody was thinking about sex, in the most polite way. On the question of whether Austin and Ruth had already slept together, one could have ticked off the decades backwards in gradations, from foregone conclusion, through a nineteen-thirtyish “Of course, they’ll have had an affair,” to those few antediluvians among whom it couldn’t be discussed. These stood about the great room like old hands welcoming in new members who were the ghosts.

  In the western windows, an extraordinary tumulus of blue winter light held at bay the Turk’s-head chandeliers. Hats of any insolence looked well in this peacock light, the dowagers’ best of all. Great bows of turquoise velvet and cut steel bent benevolently even to the male dancers sidling among them like pugs. Margaret Fenno’s severe coif was likened by a cousin to a common ancestor’s—“Annette van Rijn!”—and amended sotto voce by another: “More like the Indian.” This was the only open interracial remark of the afternoon. But in the palm bowers, people managed their owlish hints of it. From each bower, half hidden yet open, the talk fell gracefully, like sprays of a fountain that wasn’t there.

  Into one of these Augusta had led Ruth. From behind its private chapel of fretted green, swooped into that same high, fin-de-siècle arch through which the new age had been born into these houses, their talk came like dialogue to Rupert outside it.

  AUGUSTA: I’ve always known he had something to conceal. Simon. Will you protect him to the end? (Her voice weakened, as if to say, “will we?”)

  RUTH (in a voice strange even to any passing impresario):

  Yes, I will protect him to the end.

  AUGUSTA: What I can’t forgive—

  RUTH: My mother?

  AUGUSTA: Whatever there was to conceal later, she brought it into the house. I always felt that, it’s true. But that’s nothing. That’s just—jealousy. (It was said superbly, a throwing down of a life in all its maidenly significance, like an annuity spent in one throw.) No, what I can’t forgive is his—your father’s concealment. He should have risen above it. (It showed grandly, her craving to make him a man of action.)

  RUTH: He would have had to rise above me.

  AUGUSTA: I’ve always known you knew—what there was to hide.

  RUTH: So it showed?

  She must be smiling. If a certain observer very slightly shifted himself, meanwhile lifting another wineglass from the trays being passed under one’s nose with the locomotive verve of these Americans, he could glimpse the pair, like two behind the papery lattice of a flower shop.

  AUGUSTA: Will you tell me? I don’t ask for myself. (And the other figure was seen to bow, assenting this as true.) I mean—shouldn’t you?

  RUTH: For whose sake?

  (Whose could it be but his? AUGUSTA’S head said it.)

  RUTH: No, I can’t tell you. For your sake. And I’m used to it.

  AUGUSTA: Or you need it! For your power over him.

  …But there’s jealousy. That’s how Augusta must know. Whatever she knows. How we know, many things. And why wedding champagne so often tastes of insight…

  RUTH (hand over mouth): I need it…I never thought…One learns to live a certain way—if one has to…But not for power. Not for that.

  She came blindly out of the greenery, parting the broad leaves with the same dazed, seraglio gesture which came out of balcony windows in sets for operas by Leoncavallo. Or from the wartime flat gray doorways, like a row of broken teeth, in the bombarded stone of Rupert’s mother’s groveled street in the Midlands. And saw him, hunched there, not cheap enough to move, but like a whippet in the rain.

  “I need it? I never knew,” she said.

  She touched one of his sideburns, as if they’d been talking together for hours. “Then I used them all! Even you.”

  “Never. Not you.”

  For answer she took his glass, drained it, and left it empty in his hand.

  From behind, he watched her poise on the brink of the crowd, facing the noisy young group coming at her. She was darker, taller, on this side of the Atlantic, or else the shadowy vibrato of her future made her seem so. There was more of her. He had a moment’s chance to see it. And then they caught her.

  The Judge hadn’t seen. Borkan had gone one flight below, to the temporary cloakroom set up there near the old-fashioned elevator. Coming up in that open iron cage, the Judge had seen into another world, piled with coats of the younger Fenno clan come strong and early, such odd shapes of sheepskin and helmets of bright leather, clothing for a race of Berbers to attack the Plaza in—and one flushed girl, hair in sunburst points like a kindergarten cutout, carmining her rosy lips and saying meanwhile with all her heart to another. “Thing is, you have to be sincere.” He couldn’t get his chair down there now, and didn’t want to. In the rear of this “étage,” as Ralston called it, there was an ancient lavabo, gone to mop closet, which their host’s sharp eye hadn’t yet renovated. The Judge had wheeled himself back, and standing up, was making use of the old terra-cotta shell, set in the wall at a height before vitamins had raised the mid-century pubis to the level of the 1870 navel—meanwhile hoping that the pipes still went somewhere. These secret peeings, and the places he found for them, had become the most meditative part of his days, reminding him that he was getting old to a pattern he’d first caught on to as an urchin at his father’s soirees—that old men tended to ruminate either with a hand spread pragmatic on their bellies, or horny with intellect, at their flies.

  Near the lavabo, there was an oriel window—Ralston, what words you revive! The water tower, invisible, must be at the left, still shedding its light. Wheeling himself toward it, putting his glasses on, he could see across the two backyards, to his house. He saw how well it had maintained itself. His kind, the middle kind, bound tight the ends of life, always tending to resist those looser ends which weren’t the better part of existence nor the worse—but the parts that life insistently built itself of. One way and another, each member of his family had denied that heritage. His house was a triple amputee. Yet he wouldn’t admit himself or his house to be already history. Empty as it was tonight, a light still burned there, claret-colored as of old, tinged with blood as were all the houses of the earth.

  He turned. A pair of shoes was coming toward him—no, they were boots—astrakhan boots, incredibly frogged and tittuping their wearer to a motion not for the tweed above them, more suited to a fan. “Your sisters are looking for you.”

  “I worry them. They’re afraid I won’t say the right thing. But I thought I was good with the rabbi. He went.”

  “You were. But he didn’t.” She sipped from the brandy she had with her. “He’s still here.”

  “What delayed him?”

  “Important Christians.” She sipped again. “Frankly.”

  He’d forgotten these old exchanges, brother to clever brother, above the crowd. She came to the window, to see the view. Together they looked at it. A wedding was such a perfect reprise.

  “I can see myself over there,” he said. “Funny. Walking the top
floor.”

  “The top floor’s Anna’s.”

  “So it is. I forget. But I do walk, nights. On the floor above mine.” It was totally dark over there. “Sometimes, I stop at David’s room. Last night—Ruth wasn’t with us, you know, I can tell you that—I went into hers. I hadn’t, since Mirriam died. But she keeps things. That old doll-house. Pauli was so hurt when she wanted to get rid of it. And that old engraving Mirriam must have given her. Gave it to her, for a joke once. ‘Behold Now Behemoth.’”

  “‘That I have made with thee!’” The brandy shivered in its globe. “No, she took it. Afterwards…And you needn’t have worried, last night. She stayed—with me.”

  “Did she.” He said it absently, to this younger brother from whom an elder had had to keep a few facts of life. “Middle age—” he said, peering as if he could see himself across there wandering the halls, that luminous night of his inheritance. “It’s a time for conspiracy. On one’s own behalf.”

  He scarcely saw his cousin’s face, blunt, gray bulldog, beside his own neater one, faintly Buddha in the old glass. It was the speech in which he explained his retirement. In his mind, over the past months, he had made it to many—now that he had finished it. He stared at that claret light over there, rosying even his cousin’s glass. Music came now from behind them somewhere. The chair held him, a walking confessional. “I was destined to be a murderer, wasn’t I,” he said. “And was saved.”

  In his mind, they had all asked who the victim was. Family didn’t have to ask. “I scare my sisters,” he said. “Though they’re proud of it. I’m the man under their beds. But I never worry you, do I. You always know what I’ll do, don’t you.”

  A pigeon strutted their garden wall. Was she watching it?

  Oh, he knew he shouldn’t ask the next question; it was the kind that couldn’t be answered except by a blinding flash from the throne of God. “Augusta,” he said weakly. “Stop holding that damn brandy glass. I mean, don’t take any more. Answer me. I’ve done the right thing for her now—haven’t I?”

  The boots moved faintly, missing the Chummies, all that line of dogs male or female who knew he’d always been the man under her bed. He had always known, up to now. Cruel, to let her see he’d forgotten it.

  “Augusta. What the fuck are you staring at!” He could have bitten his tongue off, of course.

  She stared on. The dogs always knew what sex she was, as she knew theirs. And they knew that house; not a one had been fooled. No dog of hers could live there; how could she have thought of it? She always had to walk them stiff-leashed around what couldn’t be seen from over here. But was there well enough. They always sniffed and growled at its clawed wood as if another animal had been there before them.

  She turned and answered him. “The newel-post.”

  Too late, as she waddled away from him, he saw the high heels of her boots.

  At the party, they’d missed him; even Margaret Fenno smiled. But no one spoke or listened to anyone carefully; the party now was everything. Music of a kind his house hadn’t been built on was yearning from an accordion, a harmonica, and from clackets and other baubles that with a jolt in the chest he recognized—they’d raided David’s childhood, that sonic, sealed room. It was the kind of conspiracy that came about at weddings. The troupe had joined with delighted Fenno jokesters, here and there even linking arms with an elder—he saw Moling—to hop a minuet. “Get Rupert to get his recorder!” came a cry.

  But Rupert, kneeling over the fountain in entente with Ralston, said to the approacher, “Bug off. You’ve got enough.”

  Yards away, Mannix could read what was being said.

  “Any prop man can fix this thing,” said Rupert. “Somebody’s made off with the gasket. Got a knife on you?”

  Ralston, handing it over, fingered the cut greenery star, now flat on the floor. “Often wish I could be Jewish,” he said.

  “Nonsense,” said Rupert. “Come and play the gutbucket with us afterwards, instead.” Or that was what he seemed to have said. “Meanwhile, hold your foot out.”

  Straining for a line of vision, the Judge saw him cutting a circlet from the sole of the other’s shoe. “That’ll do it.”

  Ralston took his blue lenses off. “Gutbucket?”

  “Eh?” said Rupert. “Oh, it’s a washtub got up with foot pedal and arm, makes a fearful racket. Kids made it in the wee hours. Shan’t let them bring it in your pretty hall though. It’s no ‘Harp that once.’”

  And Ralston said, “Calypso? Oh, any rhythms and all, dear boy. I sang countertenor once. What part do you sing?”

  He could see almost everything being said if he wanted to, his distance glasses firm on his nose. Height hampered him less here than it would a giant like Moling; maybe all his life he’d been a coxswain in spite of himself. And maybe should have let himself lipread, on and on, to see how little was being said of the Mannixes even here, when all was said and done.

  Taking up his duty as host, he began going from bower to bower, palm to palm, handshake to handshake, breaking into conversation which had nothing to do with the occasion—or everything. Lurid as the secret was, his house had ingested it, and lived by it, the knowledge of others as flowing a part of its being as the actual event—all of which not even he knew. So was the human thickness of a household attained.

  Down at the far end of the room, little alcoves set with table and chairs and flickering lamp-candles were empty; people preferred to stand, and he saw how they kept their backs to the windows, only turning to look out of them in wallflower moments of meditation, or in a sense of their own singleness. Dark clots of time and cloud were out there, inscribed with cities. City. Inscribed on it, in living dust—the single family. The city reeled with lives. No wonder they turned their backs on it. For the moment, this was the household.

  Suddenly, the music in the room was deafening; the dumbshow of mouths stopped. No one in this part of the room was even known to him. People without noticing it had formed a wall in front of his chair. Two little boys did ogle him, then pushed giggling in front of him—“They’re coming!”—and squirmed through the wall.

  So they were coming—to no music he recognized! Under him was the new patch of floor, obelisk-shaped, like the cut-off explanations of kings. He could lipread anywhere what the households were saying to one another. If he should open his mouth it would be to say it to some coeval in a piping voice—like two survivors on a mid-ocean rock, watching the water come to rescue them. “What shall we say to it when it reaches us?” Did other men know? Was anybody ever old enough?

  He was sure now of what a great man was—that he had the capacity to be lone through all the purlieus of life, yet walk its actual staircases every day—as he hadn’t done—walking it stair to stair, greeting those who tripped it with light breath or propped themselves up by its balustrade, grasping at those who came down it white-faced to their dead, or to their own charnel. A great man saw all of it with a generalized love—and kept his hates clean for progress, clean and young. Maybe the great were the young, for a time. Until we—they themselves—got to them. He reached out his cane and touched one of the two round little behinds with it. Generations were nothing; anyone alive got to them. Where was Borkan, Moling, Warren—someone of his own age? Speech was a dumbshow—but his way. “I meant to speak for the middle,” he said, to nobody in particular. “But life moves.” And inching his wheelchair humbly, he made himself known, the walls gave, and a place was made for him.

  They had caught them both. Bride and groom were dressed for travel in the new way, that was to say—as they were. A thick circle had formed itself around the borders of the room, no opening anywhere. They had to dance their way out of it. It was a wedding. Anybody could see them perform. The music, kazooing a blues, fluting a Jericho, got itself together. The bridal couple took hands like skaters, put their heads together—was it a waltz? Round and round they went to it, slowly, breast to breast.

  “Austin was always a fine ballroom dance
r,” Margaret Fenno said.

  One of the harmonicas snuck into ragtime, was hushed, spread itself again when the couple never faltered—today they would jig to whatever was required of them. “Oh but that other was Swan Lake!” Leni wailed, touching a handkerchief to one eye.

  The couple paused before her and Pauli, for their blessing. “Joy!” said Pauli, boosting them on, and gazed after them, considering his luck.

  “That’s the housekeeper she’s going to now,” someone whispered. “Been with them all her life.” Anna, bending over the buffet to embrace her, muttered low her benediction. “No, you don’t have to bodder any more.”

  Edwin, who hadn’t stayed to see the rest of it, was told of it later. “When Austin and she got to the far end of the room where his chair was—why, it was like Lourdes or something!” said the girl he was snuggling with. “He got up and walked.”

  “He walks at night,” Edwin said.

  “Like a zombie?” she giggled.

  “No. Like a ghost.”

  She snuggled closer. What a lark, to be in the Mannix house, next door! “Honor bright, it was like the Pope getting up,” she said. His hand went up her skirt, “They danced!” said Austin’s cousin Di.

  But that was a Fenno description.

  “I see you dance!” the Judge said when she came toward him, breaking from her husband at the sight of him standing without cane, alone. The muscles could do everything.

  Too late, he saw that she was frightened of his embrace. Her arm came up. As in a minuet, he grasped high the wrist that might strike him, and brought it down near the floor, his upper arm shivering like a samurai’s.

  “It should have been me,” he said, pride and anguish locking their hands. “You should have chosen me.” And she, masking their struggle in the dancer’s deep curtsy, unlocked them. “Oh, please, please—please—”

  Austin came and bore her away from him, like a rival. The dowagers snuffled at his handsomeness.

  On that young man’s arm, a girl should never again have to wonder whether the smaller life wasn’t worthy enough to set beside the larger agonies. Yet her father could see that she was still not sure.