New Yorkers (22 page)

No one had ever spoken to David of what he had done. In the two years since, that track too had long since been overgrown. What the two children might have said to one another when they awoke wasn’t known to the Judge either. He thought of this as part of the abnormality—his and the family’s but ultimately his, which he had to deal with. In the alternately submerged and surface way that life took, he thought and did not think of it. The boy himself now kept a silent distance which had once been the Judge’s only. Meanwhile, his own fathership, in no way more expressed, had secretly grown a little—as for a son adopted in youth, across old estrangements. Manhood might release them both. In the privacies of life, anything might burst through a door. But what those two children had said to each other remained inviolate. Upstairs, during these long afternoons growing toward winter, it sometimes seemed to him that if houses like his came to any value, it would be as among the last examples of a private life kept separate, untransfused either by its own public appearances or by what seeped more and more over the doorstep, or down from overhead—from the writings-in-the-sky.

Anna knocked now, but entered without waiting for the “
Come
in” he almost never gave anyway; he got so deep in here. Outside the study, where since his retirement he could never work himself deep enough in scholarship ever again to believe in it, she walked by hushed, fending everyone away with her own eccentric version of “in conference”—“De Judge is alone.” But this room was her own partially created domain—and here, as she perhaps knew, he was never alone.

She walked by him now without comment—they rarely spoke on these occasions—laid on the bed his dinner jacket and trousers, unpacked from the Atlantic trip, and went out, again closing the door, so effigy a servant that one would have been undisturbed to meet her doppelgänger simultaneously on each landing of the staircase; indeed, that was the effect she often gave. She had nothing in common with that other red woman of a past morning. They never spoke of it.

She never hung his dress clothes away in the big wardrobe, but always left them in his sight, a hint against frowsting at home, from that outdoor philosophy which all servants fostered in masters. He liked to think that in this she was his ally, helping him do battle against what he thought of as “the self-pity of the wardrobe.” A family inheritance of his side, huge enough to occupy the vision of anyone who sat at Mirriam’s desk, it had once held all the retired sack suits, cutaways, patent dress shoes, and collapsible opera hats of both father and grandfather. At the time of his wife’s death, it had held the thirty-odd suits of his own dandyism—and public ambitions. During those post-mortem weeks when his habit of sitting here began—with a never fulfilled intent to go through her correspondence—he often sat staring instead at this huge, hollow escutcheon, seeing himself in his true guise, a small man who only temporarily inhabited it. In his mind he had already retired himself. He’d never had to explain it to himself. Retirement, once effected, fell on him like the one suit of armor for which he had been born.

Now he got up, took up the jacket and trousers from the bed, hung them away, and sat down at Mirriam’s desk, in front of its many dim slots for open secrets and improvidently brassed “secret” drawers. At her death, he had found himself as impotent to touch her private matters as in life some men were before their wives’ flesh. But this had been his weeping for her, blood-sick and unnatural.

The old wardrobe held another kind of mourning—sweated, male. It mourned for fathers—and for all live burial. He knew that Jewish colleagues only less lapsed than he had said of his giving up his judgeship that he was
atoning.
In their high holidays away from Mammon (and in the limestone Episcopal synagogues with which they replaced the puce Moorish of their fathers, or their grandfather’s slum-yellow, public-bath brick) they still kept a Day for it. But he wasn’t too lapsed to know that privately a Jew atoned no better than anyone else—or just about the same. Now that the stench across the ocean was almost over, the world and maybe the Jews too both saw themselves moving in to a new age of public atonement as one might move into public affairs. Not yet seeing how this too went against that jealous old God Jahveh, of whom, true, he knew little more than a spelling, yet like every born Jew felt he carried live in his breast. Inwardly he still fought the new Israel, or even the emotion that the six million martyrs were for Zion, not for themselves. But as a man with an obligation which there wasn’t time to spell, he had helped. Maybe this was why he now could stare at the old escutcheon over there, at himself, the incumbent in it, and fight both. The man who would best have understood his retirement—long before he himself did—would have been Chauncey, one of the most Hebraic men he had ever known. How Olney would have relished being told so! But the second morning after their visit, Olney had been found peacefully in his chair at the window. Proctor, to whom the Judge had since spoken, had found him dead, early in the dawn hours, as Chauncey waited maybe for partying girls to peer in at his window, or wondered what had become of Anna’s promised soup. Meanwhile, as yet the Judge saw himself buying no more suits. For the life he was expecting to lead from now on, those thirty would be far too many—enough.

But since his return from England with his daughter, he had at last been able to go through this desk and watch Mirriam rise again from her own mementos. Now that he and Ruth were safe home from their summer of war, he could be properly grateful for a trip even farther out of logic to others than his “giving up.” He had elected to go to London and other points just at a time when all his work with the stream of refugees—from British children, to scholars and scientists trustfully waiting to be fitted into the world again, to the unswervingly romantic and handsome families of Polish airmen flying with the British—had been going the
other
way, as everyone said (meaning here). The trip was beyond duty, and to take a young girl impossible. Surely he and she had been a strange pair to be the first members of his family perhaps in a century to go to war, if only to attend it—and when a whole nation behind him was still freely choosing. Surely, he hadn’t done it from the terrible connoisseurship which always sent some to sink their personal disaster in the common one. His work had needed jobs done over there. And he’d had to take her because of the decision which antedated all others—that she was not ever to be left.

Queerly enough, on the question of taking Ruth with him, Anna had been his ally too. Anna hadn’t been present when, after the rabbi’s visit, he went upstairs to his daughter. Sitting at the bedside where she was being wooed back from sedation with all the sweetmeats the women could muster, he carefully spoke the absolving sentence he had labored over like an essay: “Mother killed herself, in her own way. It was an accident.” Gravely she nodded, giving back nothing, either of confession or assent. The school later reported their version of her, with rhyme as well: understandably his and their dear, bubbling girl had become
grave
—and “brave, dear Judge Mannix, so brave.” Anna had been in the room again, with a custard, when he got up, hands hanging, said quickly, “I’ll be with you always,
always
,” and went out

Once, as a young man still at home with his mother, he’d been involved in a dreadful weekend of harboring an old melancholic relative, while the red tape was being bound round the old man, for dispatch to a mental home. He and his mother, on instructions, had abstracted knives from drawers, drugs from cabinets, and kept the old man from windows, the hired nurse not having arrived and the registries being closed on a Thanksgiving weekend—he deserting his skis and a girl with a merry “Got to stand by some old loony in the bathroom and see that he doesn’t cut his throat.”

In the ensuing three days he’d felt closer to his mother than ever before or again, as they hovered in fealty, keeping the surface normality going like a fire which never warmed
them.
For while they kept the old boy immersed in their smiling stability, theirs became suspect to themselves. His mother, drawing on a long record of literal-minded domestic service which for the first time shamed him into admiration, had revealed a similar experience, with an elder sister, before. Men had to go to offices; women had this sort of job oftener. He’d never forgotten that terrible housekeeping around a mental illness, that keeper’s sense of himself, all day conscious of what the invalid was not, all day at his insane task of clearing up the leftovers of a sick mind more intensely at the task of life than his own.

He must take care now not to weave his own anxiety into such a situation. His own vigil over Ruth must somehow be relaxed.

“Does she ever…say anything to you…about
anything?
” he’d once asked Anna. The answer, “No.” She too had her vigil. And when the trip under question had been mentioned in her hearing by Augusta (who now never further jeopardized her status with him, and always brought the dog with her, but in a budding entente sometimes took Ruth home “to see Chummie”), Anna had spoken afterwards, serving his solitary dinner. “I am maybe too nosy. But take her
with
you, Misser Mannix.
Go.
” And in the damnedest way, had added a fatalism worthy of his mother—who if born to the servant class might have been happier. “De bombs,” said Anna. “Dey watch over you.”

Pauli Chavez had helped too, drawing from his ragbag of European friends-of-his-youth—all of whom seemed to have become famous in the years since without ever incurring Pauli’s rancor—the name Ninon Fracca. At Mirriam’s behest, Pauli, in youth an assistant conductor in European opera houses, had always supervised the selection of Ruth’s ballet teachers, often happy to tag along with her to haunts of his own friendships and courtship, to any faintest detail of which Pauli remained fond; in the mind of such a man, when did “youth” formally stop? Pauli at the ballet school—as Ruth, who knew his mistress Leni, reported—was tolerably uncle-ish to the fauns there. “From having—you know, Daddy—an
old
sort of one at home.”

These swift young verdicts were the only way Ruth’s own character, if one could call it that as yet, still peeped out as it used to. How the Judge watched for it now, in joy and fear, recalling how once, for instance, they’d heard her say of the school’s fat boy, whose elder brother had been drowned, “That’s why his mother feeds up Billy.” Back then, he’d merely smiled over it—with Mirriam.

“Ruth is on the way to be a dancer,” Pauli’d said, last spring. “Good, Simon? Who knows. Not a dancer just in the legs, anyway. She had a whole feeling for it, for that whole world. Leni says so too.” And was that why, in the end, her father felt he must stop her? For he knew the fate of those who had only a feeling for art; Mirriam’s crowd had been composed of them. And of
their
hangers-on, of whom hadn’t Mirriam herself been one?

“And just
now
—” Pauli had said, with the silvery, pervasive innocence of advisers who are childless.

Agreed, though—just now. “Fracca,” said Simon. “I seem to have heard that name somewhere.” Until he’d reached England and the Dorset manor house, run like a close, where Madame and her troupe of twenty of the King’s best dancers guarded the votive fires of British ballet—and now and then dared the blitz over London theatres to douse them—he hadn’t understood Pauli’s smile.

“Yes, this is ‘Thomas Hardy country,’” said Ninon Fracca, an implicit “as you Americans, would say” in her voice, though he and Ruth had only exchanged light-struck stares at the house behind them in the sun, and at the tiny royal figure, shorter than his own, advancing toward them, in its brown wartime “utility” dress and silver-blond curls, over the stage-green sward. Wessex wasn’t in their minds, though they were indeed not far from Dorchester. Ruth, who had photographs of this lady in old
Dance
magazines at home, might have knelt, if the seigniorial brown façade at her own back hadn’t reminded her of who she and father were, colonially.

Probably Madame had things she said to visitors. “Ours is a wartime tenancy. The family is originally a Devon one—Stuccleugh.” She spelled it for them, her glance straying, but never abstract, toward two of her nymph-troupe in slacks and work boots, who had just pigeon-toed their hoes around a garden frame. “Land girls, in their spare time,” she said briefly.

Ruth watched them hungrily. Since the trip across under the closed hatches of other people’s losses, she had begun to be almost herself. Or rather, at what cost he couldn’t believe in, had remained so. Always as long as her central mystery was not touched by transient remarks, never his of course. She bent now to the turf, her hair falling over her headband, and smoothed that electric green. She had never before seen turf, or England. “But you have no crabgrass!” she said. Afterwards, on the train back, explaining, “I thought an
agricultural
remark might help!”—and for that old glint alone, he would have let her stay there.

But coincidence had already interceded, like one of the long shadows on the lawn. “Any relation to the Stukelys?” he asked, spelling for Madame the name of one of his close associates in the refugee committee here. And of course it was the owner.

“Crebgrahss,” Fracca said. “Whet is thet?” By habit perhaps tutorial, she never answered young people without a pause; older people were replied to on the double and often fliply—and might take the distinction to be Ninon Fracca’s attitude toward life, youth and age, if they chose. Her voice was pizzicato, like her laugh and whole presence, down to the feet, now in stumpy court pumps, which might once have been that also. He supposed her to be perhaps forty-five. Though listed as French in the printed biographies, she spoke the best British. He never took her to be anything but Cockney, and did still, understanding also that, to the number of personalities she legally carried—
Madame, la Fracca,
and most divinely,
Fracca
—early perfidy meant nothing now. “And how is Pauli?” she said.

“You know
our
Pauli?” cried Ruth, who clearly found this mystically impossible in spite of knowing it from Pauli himself.