New Yorkers (19 page)

He had learned soon enough. The sisters, after his last remarks, were easily routed; besides, their Daisy, though she was more of a churchgoer and teetotaler than her mistresses, had in all her twenty years of service never been given a key or allowed to leave the house without presenting herself, for check against the chance that she might “get into the jewelry drawers” or “take a nip from the sideboard”—the simple, republican reason for this being that Daisy was black. And that the sisters had to have some neatly controllable scare in their lives to make comfort all the cozier; his mother had made a similar use of servants too.

He closed the door on them, after a doorside duet of sighs and assurance from beneath mourning veils they must be the last non-Catholics to recall the uses of. In the past fortnight he’d learned to chew dread with his morning
Times,
gulp water with his midnight toothbrush despair, and trot obediently past the scarred newel-post all the day long. He’d dealt with police examinations—and with the clear and present evidence, even as he underwent them, that these were token, just as that proud owner of “a few concessions around town” had promised. He’d dealt with the morgue, whose “bullet in the left ventricle” had been matched to his wife’s gun. That same evening, he’d undergone visitation from the rabbi who had buried his mother five years ago, and had now come (with the peculiar arrogance of young rabbis to their elder laity) to extend to the bereaved “father” first a discourse (on death by suicide as doctrinally set forth in what he called “the literature”), then a personal lecture (on the felicity of being left with children to console and care for), and finally an invitation to return “before the high holidays” to the arms of the synagogue—which he called “the temple.” At the Judge’s own door, the young man had blessed him in Hebrew, which was gracious and acceptable, then addressed him as Simon, which from him was not.

“Remember now, Simon,” said young Dr. Hildesheimer, in a phrase he might have polished in the study and would repeat to the wife, “remember, hahr, that even a judge in his worst hour of loss must not judge the Almighty. Today you are only a man.” He held out his hand.

“Learned
that
at my b’mitzvah,” said the Judge, but remembered in time that any authority had better be courted just now, and took the hand. Watching the young twerp get back into his car, he caught himself thinking “German. And reformed. How tasteless they are. This would never have been the way of it in Dr. Pereira’s time”—in dry self-observance, of how apostates like himself, when in need of the religion of their forefathers, quite naturally demanded that it be as orthodox. Later, not knowing whether he meant it as bribe or blasphemy, he sent Hildesheimer a check.

In the next day’s mail, the Judge had received a letter from closer kindred—his companion at arms, competent concessionaire and closer of dead eyes. And now soldier of fortune. The letter, dated a week back and from Camp May, had read as follows: “So far, by the papers, all OK. Knew it would be. You’re the champ. Mirrie always said so. You won’t hear from me again. Even in the funny papers. So rest easy. Take care of the little girl.” The note was typed down to the yours truly, and signed with a scrawl. He thrust it away from him, into Mirriam’s desk with her other personal papers, marking only that the signature did begin with a P.

Otherwise, he’d had to learn, as one did every time, how few open gestures surrounded a death, even death like this and how little these had to do with the long effect. To him, the worst were the questions by telephone, from the army of Mirriam’s evening friends, in all voices and accents, bohemian slang and Harlem minstrel, musically grave or hysterically juvenile, or contralto with alcohol, or glottal with tears. On his instruction, he took them all. In two days of this, he refined the art of what to say to people about her—to an art. (Though, at the next call, he never could remember what he had said before.) Answers to the somber lawyers, or to condolences from friends whose characters were there to go on, he could often remember afterward. Neighbors were not the easiest, being for the most part met by accident. Beyond any degree of worst lay the parried silences, from people who came not to ask but to brood, or who fell short of the question, or were careful in their turn. He could lipread any such silence blindfold.

The night before that helpful, emollient visit from his good, dumb sisters, when just about to retire in his own familiar bedroom—the ell to his wife’s bedroom being closed, as often in her lifetime—he was for the first time in his life attacked by obsession. Often before in his fifty-two years he’d known despair, humiliation. Thanks to lively kidneys, he’d never been soddenly drunk, but had sometimes early in manhood been wildly so; he had several times smoked opium, in Paris, and had once spent three days there holed up in a convenience hotel with a tiger-haired
jolie laide
he had picked up in the Rue St. Honoré, emerging from that interlude blanched and smelly, trained to food and linen fed him through hatches, and to the most indelible images of a woman, nostril to armpit to labia to eye, which he thought he was ever to have—and in ten days had mislaid. But he had never before, in any situation, not been somewhere at the center of himself, in military control of his own nervous network.

Now, in his own leather and wood eyrie, with all the instruments of self-possession around him—drawers of shirts ready, ostrich collar-and-stud boxes of gear to clip them with, ranks of ties to thong him by the neck into reality, trousers in rows, eager to make a man of him—he had stood naked, or what a minute ago he had thought was naked. There indeed were the whitish tufts of the Moroccan rug between his toenails. Yet he had the sensation, accompanied by a bottomless melancholy, that he was dressed again, and this time with the forced aid of invisible valets. Over and over, just as he got himself down to the skin again, he found himself hopelessly clothed. Under wave after wave of this, he began to form an idea of who they were—a vision of octopal arms walking sturdily forward on pad-flat feet, able to insist a coat over his shoulders by mere touch to melt him into his underclothes with a whisper from horned mouths. Yet all the time he knew with some sanity that this was his own “vision,” that to an even saner man they were really there all right, but invisible. And all the time, like a third and further vision of reality, he saw the tufts of rug, his own toes
really
naked, each membraned nail. Then his valets would advance again, to relieve him, but only for a second, of the suffocating intimacy of the clothing which then once more formed on him. His pores felt the air but were never slaked; his thirst for nakedness was never to be allowed.

Then, as sudden as the waving of a wand, he understood his obsession, found the so obvious key, and was free. To dissolve an obsession one had only to understand it. It departed. And the second obsession came upon him, in its place, saying, “So you’ve had that? Now try this!” For he now
understood:
that if in his mind he now would search but every one of the persons to whose questions during his trial of days he had lied or prevaricated, and if to each he spoke a formula of the truth, this second compulsion—for he sagely understood that it was one—would itself be relieved. He was to say of each person—never directly to him—“What would so-and-so say, if I were to tell him—?” and then tell the truth as he could. He was not presented with any formula for telling it.

Lying on his bed, he had spent hours or seconds of non-time fussing lucidly over it, finding that although at first he had formulated the names as they appeared in the death notice:
Mirriam Sheba Mendes, wife of Simon, daughter of the late Meyer and Sarah de Sola Mendes, mother of Ruth Zipporah and David Daniel Mannix—
he was not required to do this, but could say simply: Mirriam, Ruth; my daughter, my wife. And he wasn’t required to say
kill,
for that implied intent of which he was ignorant. When he comprehended that he was to say only what he himself knew for sure, then the words were
given
him, as in the Bible.
My daughter Ruth has shot my wife, her mother Mirriam.
Next he was given to understand that he might drop the “has”—for time passes, and the “wife and mother” also—for the dead must rest. “Daughter” he must keep, as he would keep her. When all this—watched by him like a biblical measurement of sevens and sevens-was over, he began mentally compiling his lists, of every person, from phone calls to the slightest encounter—to whom he had replied, implied, lied. Then to each person, ticking them off by category, he spoke those words, understanding cannily that even in his mind he wasn’t addressing this person directly, not saying
you,
but only, “What would
he
think…if I told him? What would
she
…?” He had no fears of omitting any of all these to whom he had agreed, “Yes…suicide”; he knew every one. And so finally he was absolved and naked, and slept.

In the morning, that same Wednesday of his sisters’ and Augusta’s visit, he searched his quarters to see whether in his seizure he’d written down any of this, but there was no signature of it anywhere, even in his face. Yet there had been a purging—or an increase?—for he was not the man he—was. He’d been let have a plunge into the netherworld of Faustian bargains, where a man of his temperament would not ordinarily go.

And he had never before in his life been so glad to see his poor dull sisters, and Augusta too, even if, in her having left the dog at home, he was warned. He’d glimpsed her at the cremation, and again in that surreal gathering afterward where, whether a body was earthed or burned, the peculiar demands of animal-human consciousness required all to tolerate that and afterwards eat over it. He thought he saw this sentiment too in Augusta’s expression, also always to him, in any room they were in, the other critic intelligence. She too had the same sense of life as vehicle and as its own self-conscious creation, to what joys and ends neither could imagine of the other, though now and then she let him see its blue pilot-spark in the spinster’s eye. Since the funeral, she had absented herself from the house, until this day.

Returning to the room then, where she still sat over the tea tray, he could imagine her in these past days, holed up in her hotel, sifting events through all her knowledge of him, then snapping her hands together like the Parcae their thread. He didn’t fear her literal imaginations—who could imagine
this?
—and she was even often clumsily thick with others from regions where her own life-limits did not extend. He feared only her awareness, delicate as an elephant’s lip of him.

“You haven’t brought Chummie,” he said, returning.

She was hawked over the tea tray as if she saw fortunes in the four cups there, and made no reply.

“Is he all right?” he had said.

Nearly two years later, he could now remember that the current Chummie, still the same one as on that day, was a female, but no one ever bothered to distinguish between the dogs.

“Anna,” his cousin had said, ignoring his question. “Whatever has come over Anna?”

“What do you mean?”

“She served the girls—tea.”

“The girls didn’t complain.”

“No, but they noticed. Before you came in. She looks terrible too, Anna.”

He wasn’t afraid of his sisters, those eternal girls. He went to a decanter and poured brandy into the two silver déposé glasses which Mirriam and he had taken with them on their honeymoon.

“Brandy? At this hour?” But she took it. Probably she had never had brandy anywhere except here—at nine in the evening. He had another sense of her limits forever barricaded into the domestic, this competent woman—and of the sharply honed focus this gave her.

“How they jumped! Rosa and Athalie.” The brandy had warmed her. “When you asked them to come live with you.” She said it cruelly, for their other offense to her. “Brandy,” she repeated, hovering her glass over the tray. “And tea.”

“Can you wonder at what’s come over any of us?” he said.

Such exclamations were the safest.

But she stood up, drained her glass, glanced down at her feet for the absent dog, and walked the length of the room away from him; he saw the high heels. At the mantel, she faced the large, florid picture, staring up at it. Reaching out, she touched the pair of gloves she was holding to the picture’s nameplate—
Portrait of Mirriam Mendes Mannix
—added by the artist, and once a family joke. “No. No, I don’t wonder.”

Was she hoping to tell him that whatever had happened, Mirriam was still to blame? If so, he could be moved now by the sadness of her method. Outside, the world at large buzzed revolution and bloodbath in telegraphic whistles, crime blotted the single streets at eight and was news-of-the-world at nine, across continent or parlor people cried to one another “No bamboozlement!”—the whole century wrote what it thought on the sky. And here in Augusta, in a body which if male would have been more powerful for sports and war than his own, a minced emotion, hedged inflection, gesture with glove, were still preserved. She could always make him feel by contrast with her that he was still in the world. Even now, in wartime, she stood like some brass portcullis image refused to the metal collections, upholding the single story of his house.

“Simon.” She was back at his side. “Don’t—put too much on Anna.”

He assented with a nod, not trusting speech.

“Simon—” Again she glanced at her ankles, for the dog. “Put it—on me.”

He raised his head.

“I won’t come here to live. Of course not. But otherwise.”

If he could. He thought of last night. But he’d managed alone. Augusta hadn’t been on his list of names to satisfy. As yet
she
had asked him nothing.

“Simon—?”

“Yes—?” he said, in great fear.

She had drawn on one gray glove, the pair a present from his sisters also; and another family joke. Now she touched his cheek with it. The house was full of jokes; “Simon,” she said, in a voice so loud she must have rehearsed for hours. “Was it suicide?” At the far end of the room, the voice rebounded, a gauntlet thrown down. His nearer cheek she touched, with the real glove.