New Yorkers (16 page)

If clans like the Fennos, truly median (“Not so much the salt of the earth, Edwin, as the sterling silver”) were able to last, according to the Judge it was because of a steadily reappearing intelligence which one might never suspect from their stodgy to handsome exteriors, which never gave itself the racial airs of some, but rather persisted through generation after generation of all those navy-blue-clad children, like some stubbornly recessive but tenacious Mendelian pea. It was a special kind of intelligence, a Protestant one, not over-subtle but confident, on the sunny side of the street—and with this estimate of Austin, Edwin, and no doubt everyone else capable of it, agreed. Yet it was the Judge himself who had started the line, now a byword in the house, that Austin was “so handsome it’s hard to believe he’s that smart.” Perhaps that came out of an envy which Edwin, in looks himself a fair, average sort, didn’t share. Austin was good-looking of course, but what Edwin did envy was that assurance when it talked to the Judge, or sometimes even talked back.

“Austin,” the Judge had once said, during one of the topical dinner discussions he liked to foster among the young folk, this day on religion, “I’m afraid you’re our pet Gentile.”

Austin had replied at once, as graciously as if he were returning a compliment, “You must get over your prejudices, sir—after all, you’re not
our
pet Jew.”

For a moment, until the elder Fenno’s profession was remembered, the table fell silent, then rocked with laughter—the Judge included. If Austin had been the least flashy of smile, it might have been insolent, but he had said it very steadily. Often Austin did answer so readily, one might think he’d already heard the Judge’s remarks in private audiences of his own. But to do that and remain Diddy’s close friend wasn’t probable; more likely the Fennos had a clannish, collective memory of such remarks as the Judge’s—from which the answers came pat.

Edwin himself had a question he suspected Austin might have an answer to—“Austin, what breed of pet here am
I?”
Yet the house itself, by admitting him to its affections, had released him from such questions. When there, to be dressed and clean in his present manner was enough for his vanity, though he disagreed with the Judge on the question of good looks in general. David, with his noble length of irregular feature presided over by the remarkable, intent eyes, was far and away his choice over Austin—but if intellect was to count, then everyone knew of course what the Judge considered his son’s to be, or pretended he did. Perhaps this was why the Judge was always so careful to specify that particular requirement for total Adonis—intellect.

Back there, under the stairwell, the three young men had shortly gone on downstairs to the kitchen without seeing him, the new visitor, behind the corner of wall which kept him from their vision. But he still remembered every word of their paused confab before, how David’s black box turned from side to side in their center, and Walter, half David’s height, cocked his elongated spirit-face at a crow’s angle to his humped body, emitting the heartiest laugh and the deepest at Austin’s sallies, meanwhile clutching his own wishbone sternum with delight. Only past twenty, he was wearing the vest and cutaway jacket which best clothed his deformity; he had been a matter for the tailor since a child. College hadn’t been his hope until David, almost nineteen and still to qualify, had persuaded him; encouraging each other on, they had gone, entering Harvard together the next year. Austin, not quite eighteen, was at that time already a freshman. And he, Edwin, waiting in the hallway, was to go last of all—to meet some of them there.

“Ran into him on the Merchant’s,” Austin was saying. “Coming down last night, walking through the dining-car. It was a first-class old Dr. Brace encounter. I wished him howdy-do and. was about to go on down the aisle when he said, ‘Good evening, Yortchley’—in class he always confused me with Biff Yortchley—‘And how’s the girl?’”

“Yortchley’s going in the Navy, I hear,” said Walter. “Instead of college. Got engaged.”

“Engaged,” said David, collating black box and lipreading in his usual shadowy, echoing way—to the oddity of which no one except his father ever paid the slightest attention.

“So I decided it was time old Brace knew I was Fenno, now that I’d graduated. Or maybe it comes of being a freshman all over again. Anyway—I meant to say, ‘Dr. Brace, I’m Fenno, not Yortchley.’ But there he was, looking at me with that goggle stare, and so help me God, I said, ‘I’m not Fenno, Dr. Brace, I’m Yortchley.’”

The three collapsed in laughter on the bottom stair, David flat out on the floor—like many of the congenitally deaf, he let loose in gesture. Walter prodded him with a toe: “Save it for the rowing machine.” David mouthed that too, grinning to show he’d got it. He had almost no hearing, even with the box. “Come on, let’s go,” he said, getting to his feet. His voice wasn’t high or reedy, but his speech was careful with listening, as if he gave back accuracy to what he heard.

“Wait, you haven’t heard what Brace said to
me,”
said Austin. “He looked at me in that way of his, you know? I think he thinks he’s twinkling. And he says to me, ‘Quite all right, Fenno. I always knew you were.’”

This time, the three fell howling into each other’s arms, which considering their various sizes was a feat that showed old habit.

In the hallway, the boy concealed from them by its angle and dark, felt his own chest as if it had a wishbone somewhere. The natural way these three were linked—there was plenty of this in the district, even if he’d never had time for it.

“Wait a minute, you guys, where we going?” said Austin. “You haven’t even said yet.”

“Didn’t we write you?” said Walter. “I bumped into my rich uncle—they’ve got a swimming pool right in the house. Not in the basement either, right in the living-room floor. He married an Olympics swimmer. So, every time the butler goes for the phone, he has to watch out. All the help know how to swim. There’s a rowing machine too, works
in
water. I told him about David wanting crew. So he lets us train. Anybody’s welcome.”

“Brawn or brain, for Harvard entrance,” said David. “I’m teaching Walter to swim.”

Walter stuck his thumbs under his armpits. His elderly clothes had dealt him the accompanying gestures. “
And
my uncle,” Walter said.

Did they laugh like this always? He listened to them rattle down the steps to the basement, and prepared to slip outside the front door and be off. She’d forgotten him; that had happened to him before on a delivery. And he’d almost forgotten her, meanwhile. All the painful sortings and separations began again in his mind, as his gaze, freed now to wing out and over these rooms, darted here, there, helpless before all this foliage of matter. In his mind, too, one syllable clinked against itself like a glass wind instrument—
rich.
What did anyone in this house mean—or anyone even remotely connected with it—when he spoke of someone
else
as “rich”? Meanwhile, he rubbed one blistered heel over the other, propriety suggesting he would less contaminate these shining surfaces—the floor was now a floor—if he shrank into himself within his bag of offensive clothing, and perhaps stood on one leg.

Yet when the girl came back, he was still there.

“Thought you were behind me halfway up the stairs,” she said, laughing. “Daddy’s door was open, so I told him about you. Maybe he’ll want to see you.” She resettled the headband which held her hair from her ears, a style whose youth, compared to the extravaganzas of girls her age in the district, confused him also. “Did you see the boys?”

So they did still call them boys here. Yet he’d seen at once that these young men with strains of childishness in their confab had an awareness to the world’s possibles which rarely came even to the elderly, in his. Not “maturity,” not even “sophistication.” By now, seven years later, he owned as large a vocabulary as any of them, yet he didn’t think the world had a word yet for this quality which entered under their skin very early, from never having to fight, even in a depression, for meat, drink and shelter, from having so many avenues open to them, except where blocked by personal circumstance (like loss or deformity, which then were really
personal
) or by cataclysm or war. He would call it mobility—scope. The very quality of the human condition changed with its presence, a change in the vital animal underneath. He thought that the Harvard scholars of the social welfare or of men’s economies hadn’t enough noted this, or where they did, hadn’t his opportunity to put the nature of it so precisely.

On his last visit, he’d tried to describe to the Judge himself the Mannix house and world as it had seemed to him that first afternoon. In order to remember his own former one with an émigré’s passion. And with a growing fear.

“It wasn’t only your possessions that I didn’t know the names or uses of, that confused me.” Not merely that he couldn’t have told direction because of the very draperies, or that sometimes even now, in this world of marble and the airiest references, he’d had doubts as to which of its surfaces were literally hard or soft. “It was you yourselves, sir, in your heads and souls. It was like I couldn’t even tell, secondary sex characteristics at first, or what was the age of who.”

“Well, Edwin, you were having a little age trouble yourself, back then.”

So he supposed he had failed in the end to explain how sometimes, in this wizard’s world, people in their silken approaches to each other appeared to him hermaphrodite, or one sex, or none—and even when he came to understand that they too had emotions—surely transvestite there too. “For a while, until I saw the sequence, you all scarcely
had
any actions. Just talk. Like magic powder—that explodes.”

“And you. Edwin, were bare-assed, as far as the emotions are concerned. You scarcely had one to your name.”

“They weren’t freed.” Sometimes he yearned to have their unfairness, the way they had their table manners. To have it—but not to know. They were in the Judge’s study, where these interviews always took place. “I remember the day I first came here, when you made me step through this window. It was like a wizard’s house.”

The Judge bowed. “Public schools feed far too much on the fairy-tale literature.”

“Well, of course!” cried Edwin, “And don’t you see why?” How he had been led on!

“Tut, tut, Edwin. We are your romance. Just as we are. And I submit you understood it at once, from the moment I caught you buttoning your fly.” He grinned. “But the poor understand us an edge or two less well than we understand them.”

Back there, on that most recent visit, in one of the silences which were common with them, he’d thought long, while the Judge fiddled with the day’s mail on stamps; with all his hobbies, welfares and philosophies set in action from this room, his hours were fuller, for a man without a job, than many a gasping executive’s.

After a while, Edwin raised his head. To bend his face between his hands was a gesture he never used except here. A breeze was now blowing in the same window onto the garden through which, under the owner’s gaze, sharp as a ruler on his knuckle, he had climbed. “Shall I tell you how the basement looked to me though, that first day?”

“Yes do. Always happy to hear anything which might help me understand what goes on in my son’s world, not to speak of his mind. Even Ruth, who used to be like an open book, is beginning not to confide in me.”

Edwin stared at him thoughtfully. One of his main reasons for not thinking Ruth an open book was that the Judge so often told people she was. The Judge’s attention had wandered—though one could never tell for sure. On the stamp-wall side of the room, the beauties of his collection were affixed to a great relief map, made for him by an indigent refugee artist, of all the map pink, tan and green places on the dilute blue waters of a cartographer’s planet.

“Well,” said Edwin. “First off, it was clean. A whiteness which would’ve made my mother kneel. Clean is my mother’s God, you know, all the one she has—maybe that’s why I’ve never been able to get away from the idea that cleanliness must be stupid some way. I think the only thing upheld me in that kitchen was a pride in my own—dirt. Which I’d certainly never had before. And didn’t want. For I saw at once that our basement was a burrow. Our floor had earth in it, where the cellar stone had worn away. There was no dark here, for my shoulder to rub against. There was no animal life here. They say that roaches appear even in the Egyptian hieroglyphs—man’s company. I never thought I would think of a rat’s rustle as something—
lost
.”

“I see you’re not ashamed of your origins, that’s what I see. You can go far.” He was no longer looking at his collection on the wall.

“No, it’s physical,” said Edwin. “The difference between us and you, between us as we were then, and even my aunts. Not just the condition of being warm or cold, starved or fed. Physical in the bloodstream of the mind. Like low blood pressure in the Arctic maybe, from many nights of cold. Or in what the soul expects.”

The Judge said nothing, here.

“Anna had just shopped for the week,” said Edwin. “For the
week.
That notion itself—My first thought was of how dangerous. Your house invited robbery everywhere.” He swallowed. “Or trust.”

The Judge had put his fingertips together. “And you were the marauder, perhaps? Now, Edwin. The poetry of one’s early self is very affecting, isn’t it. I gather that like every other student in the world, you’ve been reading Freud. My generation was the last, I often think, to read the poetry of the ages instead.” He picked up a paper knife and held it, with a duelist’s pause.

“I despair of ever saying it,” said Edwin. “To you or myself. And that’s because I’m losing it.” Gnawing a knuckle, he was silent. Then it burst from him. “We were disorderly. But bare.”

The Judge sighed. “I’m not built to be Socrates. Are you saying our middle-class clutter is the
real
disorder? Do you go on from there to consider your lost—simplicity—as art?”

“Not art, not down there!” said Edwin. “No, that’s fakery. To say that.”

The Judge quickly slid forward so that he could put his feet on the floor—he had the clearest, almost rhythmic sense of his physical self—Ruth had it too. “Hm-m, so you’re from that burrow.” He got up and walked about, looking out on the water tower, of which his study had the closest view in the house, across a patch of garden gone to yard. “So you don’t go along with my two. You mean to say, you don’t believe that art or social service is the answer—to all our guilts?” He swiveled quickly. “Middle-class guilts, I mean, of course. You surprise me, Edwin. Should’ve thought you’d acquired that up there, by now. Sincerity is every brewer’s daughter doing rhythmics in a leotard, isn’t it? And a billet in the American Friends Service for every banker’s son.”