New Yorkers (11 page)

F
ROM THE FILE CARDS
which recorded all his visits to the Mannix house, Edwin Halecsy, long since dubbed the Judge’s “law clerk,” in sardonic tribute to his own youth and the Judge’s lack of office, was noting before leaving for dinner there that this would be his seventh major visit, if other elements in it went right. He had no need to look at a card in order to know this or any other of the facts recorded on it either in the high-schoolish script of the earliest visits, dated 1944, or the typed ones beginning two years later, after the Judge’s gift to him, on his receipt of a full scholarship to Harvard, of a portable typewriter—a machine which, in Edwin’s whole life before between Mott Street and the high school and his “jobs,” he had never seen up close. To date, June of 1951, at the end of his first year in law school, the total visits numbered twenty-five.

His card files, however, dated from a period before the Mannixes had entered his life, from the day a bewildered eighth-grade substitute teacher had kept after school, to help her with all she didn’t know about classwork, this brightest boy, a spectacled young snub-face of no particular age, who did. She had paid him the first time with a wad of “five-by-eights” the very name of them, glib on her lips, was new to him—plus a nickel candy bar from her own worn purse, but after that, for the month she was there, at his own hint with the cards only; he was no gourmet. In that school, with its wooden, latrine-style toilets, its luxuriously crayoned decorations, so well matched to the waxy flesh tints of most of its students, she didn’t have to ask why the broken bridge of his glasses, tied with string, wasn’t better repaired, although she did put a finger up to the one cracked lens, with a “T-t-t-t,” but only shaking her head, like the poor, powerless, soon to be jobless creature he already knew her to be, when he replied, “It’s OK. I’m on the list at the clinic now. Here too.”

It
was
OK for him; as long as he could see the means up ahead; time as yet meant nothing much to him. Down where he was with his mother, there wasn’t much sense of time anyway and he had never much missed it, only later on getting the hang of what people scraped up and grieved over. He’d always known what it meant to be “on time” of course, this being required in his mother’s life and very soon of his; at whatever his walking age had been:—whereupon he had graduated from being left alone in the house to going along on the job with her, to help. But that other sense, of time past or lost, though it had got through to him like one of the luxuries he
didn’t
want, even now never much bedeviled him. Nevertheless, it was after the girl teacher had asked him a certain question that he had started his file system. “How old
are
you, Edwin?” she had asked, on her face a puzzlement he had seen on others before. Many in the grade were taller than he, more patchily bearded than his blond cheeks were; some were eighteen—but none of these were that smart. She could see he didn’t want to answer. “I don’t know,” he said, at last. This was true.

To her, a dumbhead as they both agreed, he’d seemed to know, in the line of lessons, about everything else, yet his school record went back, on and off, only about four years. She herself could have been only a few money grades above his, but in every other respect—little as she had in brain or hope or family situation—miles beyond. In her face, whose small range of expression helped him assess this new one, he began to glimpse, as she listened to his story of why he didn’t know his age, that there was something very special about his poverty, even to her. Few could have expressed to him what that was, certainly not she. But she had situations, in the world and with it, that he knew nothing of; this he could see in her listening face—and that there was another kind of dumbness which surrounded him. “But you can’t stay…like
in
a cellar…all your life—a boy with your…
Bubele,
you gotta come upstairs!”

The “cellar” was literal, a reference to where he and his mother did live, in itself nothing unusual in the streets the school drew from, or even on her own Bronx one. But out of that patriotism toward life which teacher-study had brought her, she had made a metaphor to be proud of. Both of them felt it. “I tell you what!” she said in triumph.
“Pick
one. How you could come even this far without it—!
Pick an age!”
From cracked lens to clear, a faded, flag-pink feeling was exchanged, the way teacher and class did at the daily “pledge of allegiance,” and with the same echo, as from an order behind. A day later he saw her go out of his life and felt neither gladness nor cost, not being much accustomed to either where people were concerned. These vanishings, shadowy replacements, were to him—except for his mother, who was in her own way a shadow—normal to all human constituents. A day or so later, he couldn’t have told the girl’s name. But the minute she had said “Pick!” he’d taken it as an order, from somewhere behind them both too. Until then, he hadn’t understood what the hoarded 5x8’s were for.

The story he’d told her was simple in its extremity. His mother, Marda or Marta Jalecsy or Halecsy—he didn’t know the correct spelling—had come to the U.S. as the youngest of a trio of sisters, the two elder of whom had come first, later sending her the fare. A job had been lined up for her, and he thought perhaps a husband—at least a man had appeared at the immigration dock to claim her but had disappeared after; perhaps the man had been paid. She hadn’t been very good at jobs. Neither Edwin nor she had much idea of how long ago this was. Here he’d hesitated, not out of shame, but incapacity; it was always hard to explain to people about his mother, how she wasn’t a moron or mixed up, and in some plodding ways very strong—merely how very simple she was. Perhaps this came over anyway, as he told how, after an indefinite time here, she had one night been attacked in a dark hallway, but never told her sisters of this or of her pregnancy—“She just let it grow,” he said. When she came out of the hospital ward, the two sisters had already picked up and gone; among other things, because of the neighborhood, they had been afraid the baby might be Chinee. She had lost her papers, was illiterate, and actually couldn’t say what country she was from, knowing only the name of the “small” town, the big town nearby, and the province. She had almost no stories of either. The modern names of the Slovak countries were unknown to her. He had no real knowledge of whether his own name was Edgar or Edwin. Only recently he’d discovered that the thick dialect they spoke together—he very haltingly, for she said little—must be Hungarian. He had found that out one night in a restaurant where she scrubbed—from a stray customer. The restaurant jobs were always the luckiest for them, since she could scarcely cook. He learned to. Earliest, she had worked “for the Jews,” for a Jewish chicken butcher, until it was found she wasn’t Jewish as assumed—this she did know and would have told them—and she’d been dismissed. Either because she couldn’t learn the ritual for slaughter or because her presence was against it; she had never known which. But she was strong and knew a few good things—how to clean and to be clean was one of them—and she had found the cellar, passing meanwhile from one scrub job to another, mostly in stores, for she wasn’t smart or “good” enough for the domestic trade.

It came out, in his brief summary, even to the girl listening, how very “good” his mother had been, at being silently poor. They had remained in the cellar, escaping censuses, elections, somehow all the numbers which bound most people to outside life. The relief bureau?—no, even if they had known about it, that depended on numbers too. Even if the two of them could have proved their existence, they had no way of proving, in the illegal hole where they lived for a small cash rental without receipts, how long they had been anywhere. No, he had never had anyone to stay with him in babyhood, as far as he knew. He must have picked up his first English when he had begun to accompany his mother; later he did it by imitation consciously, for a while from the priests. For, when he was quite tall, and had already had a few “jobs” on his own, he had remembered for her that she was Catholic, and they had gone to church—and under that influence he had been put in school at last, not the parochial but the public school. He had attended or hadn’t, according to how he and she could manage. After it began to be understood—by him—how “good” he could be at school, he’d taught her that they must manage it and recently had.

The school—this grayish, battered trough for disinfectant, for a hard-mouthed staff climbed up from others like it, and always for the fleshy noise, weak or wild, of children—was to him, though he didn’t say it, a dreamland. But it came out perhaps, to the teacher listening, how he’d acquired his dexterity with the stupid, with herself. For the rest—the neighborhood, mostly Chinese until one got to the pushcarts, had kept this couple to themselves, and him from the street life of his age, until he’d learned this too, at his “jobs.” As far as could be seen, from his lightish hair and chub face, he was not a Chinee. “No—” The substitute teacher had sighed at the end of it all—“no, you really look
Hungarian
to me.” This he had taken home with him too.

For he had no legend; obsessively this seemed to him the only difference between him and others, in the world that he knew. To him—and this would be as much the measure of him as the intelligence many found fresh and uncorrupted as an animal’s—he was in every other way in the prime and natural state of health, as much as any other boy. The existence of riches, or even the modest lift of privilege which would have raised him from the lowest, he bore with indifference, like a moviegoer who had seen only two or three films (as was about his score between school and parish house) to whom all Eldorado was therefore the same. As yet he bore no grudge, for lack of a past for it to spring from. But even in the bars where the Bowery bums got the 25-cent shots and he and his mother sometimes scrubbed, he had heard legend-scraps of family and nativity. In the rat-colored humidity of these lowest depths, often such a brilliant rain of reminiscence came over one of the clouded minds there, so much like a movie-flicker that it was hard not to give it credit for being as real.

He had begun the filing system with his mother. Patiently as with a cart horse, he had made her go over everything she knew, though at first, seeing the “paper” ready in the shoe box, she was afraid, thinking he’d somehow become involved with the police for whatever she and he must have done wrong without knowing it. Slowly, she’d begun to enjoy his questioning; he even fancied it had left her a little brighter than she came to it. He made her describe over and over, for instance, the man who had come with her sisters to be a pretend husband since this might after all have been a sort of father. He was pleased at the slightest trace she could recall of the old country; once it was a pigsticking, which however stopped short of human detail; at the pig. He began to hope, like the father of an idiot, that she would remember more if she could only express it in her own language, of which, perhaps laid away somewhere, she might have more too. For a while it was his highest ambition to meet another Hungarian, and bring him home. (Instead he was to find two—his aunts, known among the Mannix retinue of suppliers, pensioners and hangers-on, all those below the rank of guest but often fed and tended like these, as “the Halecsy sisters,” the Judge’s sisters’ dressmaker and milliner.) But all that was to be later—and of course his aunts never came to the cellar. Meanwhile, he had investigated everything he could think of, because there was so little, and had stopped at nothing, even helped here by what was special to him and his mother—that she had given him no prior knowledge of what topics, in conversation with her or others, should be stopped at. But she remembered nothing about his father, her attacker. Nor was he able to make any more sequence of the years of their life than he knew for himself.

Then one night, he had a triumph. For as long as he could remember, his mother had worn the same coat, once black, once of a length and a shape, but now a kind of tireless no-garment suited to her looks and her losses; there was no telling her age from her looks now, but she was tireless too. When he understood that the coat belonged to her “upstairs life,” in the days before the basement, he had to take deep breaths not to leap upon her to squeeze out the knowledge she must hold somewhere within, not to scare it away. The coat had been made for her, she finally said, by a sister—one of the two. It took him all evening to get the names of the sisters from her—her refusal ever to name them to him had been the only departure into emotion (other than her care of him, never expressed as emotion) that he had ever seen in her. He had never even been sure that it was a refusal, not merely that she was unable. But he understood at once that here was where he must probe. Something about the coat, now that she herself studied it, had affected her, perhaps only that like herself, after all the hours since that hallway—under all the morning haulings of water and the chapped candles of evening—it was still here. Before they slept, he had transcribed the two names from her guttural as best he could.

Another month or so lapsed before he did anything about it; he was possessed now by a strange inertia, the reluctance a fish might have before it made itself rise from the brown of the sea bottom, so soft with refuse it had paths through, into the blinding, rainbow air. He told no one about his inquiries once he did begin them, or rather no one of import, like the school registrar, who might help him too rapidly, with one grand push. Now and then, however, he begged hints on how to go about such research from people almost as low in the scale as he and his mother, who would be safe. For, he had the wariest sense that he was meddling with life processes which had brought him forth into conditions which were meant to keep him where he was. And he had to do it on his own.

“Missink poyson, bureau vom missink poyson, dot’s vat ya van,” said a peddler for whom he sometimes “worked”—at sorting the rotten fruit down into the underlayers of the baskets to be sold, for which he was paid in kind. In an unguarded moment he had answered this with a statement of his own—then quickly taken up his pulpy earnings and gone on. Behind him, he had seen the peddler make a sign to his wife.
Meshuggenah,
that little
goy.”
He wasn’t used to being called crazy, but well used to the other—apparently the unknown half of him was neither Chinee nor Jew. For often he was called
goy
even by peddlers who didn’t know his mother, and he thought of this as one more step along the path of elimination by which he might possibly present himself to all nations of the earth one by one, so that he might get the answer “No—not us.” Definition of what he
was
might even after that come hard, but he had one, of a sort. “No,
we
are the missing persons,” he’d said to the peddler. And this he truly believed.