New Yorkers (2 page)

“Holding on by a feather,” said the old one, grinning. “A few deposit boxes, and St. Thomas’s Church.”

The other laughed with the professional ease of a diner-out, but looked uncomfortable. “Don’t romanticize us, Chauncey,” he said. The consonants would have a slight heaviness, if one weighed them. “I pick up the papers these days, I don’t know where I am. Don’t even single us out.” He spread his hands to signify he gave up the subject, folded them between his knees and pursed his lips, thick ones but mobile, a speaker’s mouth, like so many others here. “Specifically to him? Not to his own daughter? Well, what do you know.” Then he turned his back and the rest of the conversation was hidden.

The Judge leaned forward to light the lady’s cigarette. “I grew up in a different house, one my father built, on Riverside Drive. My father-in-
law
built the present house, as a young man. Had to fight his whole family to do it.”

He gave her the very deferential but firm nod which ended crosstable conversations and turned to his lefthand neighbor, who he already knew was hotly engaged with a man on his other side. This released the Judge to himself, since the chair on his right had for the moment been deserted, and also kept him turned away from the two whose colloquy he had been following. Then, to make sure he had removed himself from a talent which sometimes came over him inadvertently, he took off his glasses. He would have known what his friends had been saying underneath, anyway. They’d been saying—or, thinking—that he was here alone, and that he had his particular wife. But the explanation of how he’d heard their words at some distance was simpler. He had once, long ago, acquired this trick for a good reason—to help him understand a child. His own hearing was ordinary, but he could lipread. He had a deaf son.

Left to himself, as guests of honor sometimes were after these functions got rolling and the real drawing card—influence—magnificently emerged, he preferred to look at the room in the large, as he was fairly well able, his glasses being mostly for driving and the theatre. To go on using that old trick would be to feel as a paranoid must—for there was always a certain amount of filling in to be done. No sane man would choose to live in such an eavesdropper’s world. He had to live his mental life untinged, except for the timeworn exchanges men made face to face or in the saving reflections of print. No confident man would choose to live among the abysmal whispers from that underworld of what people inevitably said about each other. To him, face-to-face talk wasn’t the morass it was to some; it was a natural, Talmudic game—though the Talmud itself was all but unknown to him. To him, the reflections of men as embodied in print were also no burden, but the natural lipreading of men and nations. Otherwise, he meant to keep his mental life unhampered except by the
considered
judgment—odd as that might seem for a man with a wife, and children too. He had to be able to feel this way, for the sake of that private ambition which he well knew to be a paraphrase of a much meeker biblical one, not from his part of the Testament.
Judge not, that ye be not judged
—that was the Christian twist of it. The Semitic interpretation was simpler:
Judge,
that ye may be. He wanted to judge—yes, in the courts, and yes, in the highest one. And he wanted to do it so that in those far, ancestral courts or heavens which even Jews like him—third or fourth generation assimilated reform Jews—still listened to, he might be judged.

Otherwise, Simon Mannix didn’t count himself too self-conscious a man, and took a strong delight in such scenes as the one before him. Where else could one sit as onlooker, club member and actor too, before such relatively bloodless seats of power, and yet, unlike in the synagogue, the study or even the university, find oneself so much and heterogeneously in the world? Those presidents whom universities had directly or indirectly given the nation had either been nonentities or warped into excessive action by their own sudden immersion in the world of it. Business had plenty of color, dirt under its fingernails and—scratched from armaments contracts here and there—a little blood, in spite of which not even the rabbis mixed among his own merchant ancestors had denied that it was a necessary pursuit and could be an honorable one. But no one nowadays, even in America, or in the paid-for biographies anywhere, could give it any philosophy of the ultimate. Whereas in these city haunts of the law—from the district clubs of the police judges to these secondhand Vaticans of red velvet and marble where higher jurisprudence gave its dinners—one saw every jowl and paunch, nape and nose of male humanity, and of power too. Here was his boyhood collection all over again, not Daumier but Veronese, and with all the thronging, kneeling, bowing men in black tailored suits. One virtue of democracy was that potentate and retinue alike wore dinner jackets, which brought out the man inside. “In a monarchy,” his father used to say, “coats-of-arms make themselves known when you go in to dinner; here, it takes a little longer—until dessert.”

He gripped the leonine arms of his chair, whose high seat didn’t allow his patent-leather toes to meet the floor. He was used to such suspension, often privately amused at its effect on others. The lady opposite, just ready to talk to him again, thought that he looked like a doll sitting there with that black pate, pale face, and the tiny hands so tight on the carved heads—or like a potentate.

His eyes crossed hers, unseeing. He was vain enough to hope that some day, hopefully under his tenure, the
New York Reports
would have a certain mastery—if not become a part of his country’s judicial heritage. What had seduced him to the bar went even farther back than to Paris—when, at his father’s elbow, he’d been permitted to share the latter’s deference to a man who had served their nation in the Bering Sea controversy. Even in those earliest evenings on Riverside Drive when, still in knickerbockers, he’d been shunted away from young men arriving for their colloquies there, he’d already begun to sniff out what he now knew for sure. The public thought that the law was logic. Blackstone had said that the common law was the perfection of sound reason. Many of the men here, when they didn’t think of it as influence and chicanery, might think it was wit and knowledge. But he—and most of those who had risen where he hoped to—knew better. The law was experience.

Opposite, the lady gathered her wrap and leaned forward, smiling. “Good night!” She paused. Since he had mentioned children but no wife, he might like herself be widowed. “And I’ll look for you!” she cried gaily. “Behind those curtains.”

The Judge, standing up, rescued the thumb of one opera glove which extended dangerously over her coffee cup, and gave it back to her. Women sometimes deplored his fussiness—which came from the same narrower range of vision which children had—or were excited by it. His wife had once been. Tonight he didn’t notice. He bowed. “Good night.”

Going down the long room took him some twenty-five minutes, stopped as he was at every hand. At this hour the ones who knew him best had gone—various associate judges of the courts of appeal who had perhaps helped make him one of them, still others from the Federal courts, from Albany, whom he knew from his own practice more than from the courts, which had never really been his sphere, and from dinners more exclusive than this one. These who delayed him now were men who came under that peculiar term “well-wisher,” politicals who clustered at every appointment or election and greeted with a squinted eye and a limp, neutral hand. The party of reform had them as well as any other. How like they were, whether Irish or Jewish—in the old entente of state politics once called “the Sacred Heart of Israel”—or some of the new Italians who since the depression had been coming up very fast, filling the lieutenant-governorships, the state assemblies and the lower courts with graduates of the Catholic law universities. The German influence had begun to wane even before the war’s outcry against the Bund in New Jersey and an ugly putsch or two in the hofbraus of the city, but here and there they still showed. The Judge, tapped for the bench almost straight from his own office into the relatively removed courts of appeal, still savored the unholy-holy mixture of sincere ward heelers, crafty law deans and faithful constituents which made up an everyman’s land between politics and law.

“Thank you,” he said, moving along hand over hand, “thank you very much.” No doubt some of the same influences would align themselves at the resurrection or the advent of the Messiah, whichever sphere then found itself in charge. No one denied that these pressures still obtained, even in the highest court of the land. True, Cardozo had been appointed to that court when there was already another Jew there. Sainthood, great mental elegance and a wisdom almost exquisite had done it for that candidate. Mannix’s own practice, of a barrister kind rare in America, had been in early emulation of this man, though he hadn’t flattered himself with any personal resemblance to him. For one thing, the other hadn’t married. “Oh yes indeed!” he said, to a surprised old jurist within whose hand his own had suddenly tightened. “And a very good night!”

Besides, his own admiration had long since passed on. For a while, like almost everyone else of his professional acquaintance on either side of the Atlantic, he’d wanted nothing better than “to be eighty again,” with Oliver Holmes. Still thirty years away from that, he now considered himself fit as any man to be his own mentor.

“Well,
Simon.”

“Well, McAfee!” He smiled up at the flat-tongued Boston Federal judge who not two months ago, talking of the war in Europe, had asked him what none of Mannix’s own kind had ever bothered or dared to: “Simon, why aren’t you a Zionist?” They smiled at each other now, both remembering his answer. He’d considered quite coolly before he made it. McAfee’s forebears had probably come to Massachusetts during the Irish potato famines of the 1840s—which about coincided with the half of his own which had fled the European revolutions of 1848.

“Why is it, Francis,” he had said, “that you aren’t Sinn Fein?”

But later comers of his own kind would never honor any such answer. Now that Jews were dead or dying in thousands which left the head numb, he was no longer as sure as once that he could. Before the war, though one couldn’t hope to explain even to a man like McAfee all the hierarchies, envies and fears which beset the Jews themselves, among themselves they could be funny enough about it. He could have recounted to almost any of them how when he had brought home his schoolboy crony Abe Cohn, his mother had whispered,
“Russian?”
—even as, thirty years later, he had revealed it to Professor Abraham Cohn. Capping it with the story of how his mother with her eighteen carat German-descended conviction of superiority, had had at last to sit in one of the vestry rooms on a Sunday afternoon in the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue, to hear one of her own daughter-in-law’s relatives warn his congregation against their snobbish condescension to the Ashkenazim—the German Jews.

But now, all his legal rescue work for these many scholarly or humble refugee Jews for whom he had often made himself responsible in purse as well, couldn’t convince certain of his “co-religionists” that—unless he was also for Zion, a Zion he was sure would end in the political—he was not a renegade. What strange tightropes a Jew like himself—a lace-curtain Jew and a lapsed one—had to walk! Now that a suffering not yet his had made his honesty suspect, and the whole history of his family’s “assimilation” (which latecomers had perhaps coveted) traitorous! No wonder he yearned to escape into that larger court of justice for humanity at large, which they would see only as an escape. To them, if he was to be a lion, then he must be a lion of Judah still.

Strange path to walk for a man brought up to be as stiffishly proud of his race as he! To have to wonder now whether it was only pride—and to be damnably sure meanwhile that probably fifty percent of the “Americans” who might be fighting over there for his kind would still have reservations about them, over here. But perhaps this too was the strange, yeasty working of what one day might be humanity in the large. His own wife, one of whose family was in history books on the American Revolution, and another in Queen Victoria’s government (and whose first husband and what other prior lovers he preferred not to know, had been Christians) had once whispered to him in one of “their” drawing-rooms, “Do you really ever feel comfortable with them? No me.
Not me.
”

“Why—hello, August, Mr. Manken,” he said to a man looming beyond the several around McAfee.

“
Gut
evening, Simon. You see, I come to your dinner.”

Here was one feeling he could be sure of—his anti-Germanism—even if he secretly knew its roots to be deep in familiar dislike of those maternal cousins and uncles of his youth who had been as assimilatedly Teutonic as if ghettos had never been heard of, down to the dumpling creases in the neck, the Bavarian blue-green of the eye. A subtler tragedy of the later wave of well-to-do cousins who were coming over now—he himself had sponsored over twenty-five of them—was that they had
not
been alien to the German spirit but embedded in it, and hadn’t ever conceived of themselves otherwise. August Manken here, this huge walrus of a man with his Hindenburg whiskers, was no relative. As the Judge’s maternal grandfather’s next-door neighbor, Catholic of course, in the brownstone to brownstone “German” enclave of Yorkville, he had been the grandfather’s lifelong friend, in a way; certainly their wives and daughters had been almost as deep in the kaffeeklatsches as if all went to the same church—almost, if not quite. As a boy, Simon had been much in this maternal grandfather’s home, whose circle had even then been referred to as “the Germans,” his mother taking on the habit of his father’s pro-English side. He and his father had seen eye to eye on them. “Even when a German takes a
friendly
pinch of you, Simon, he has no real feeling under the thumb.” It was this lack, a kind of gross stupidity of the emotions, which would have kept old Manken ignorant of how the German-American stance on the war had ruined Yorkville as a political force forever, or of why its street of bierstubes was now all but deserted. And it was their Christmas-annual sentimentality—a sweet always saved in the end for themselves—which would have brought Manken here.