New Yorkers (24 page)

They’d been standing in the hallway of a brownstone given over to an eating-club his father belonged to, the Felicity, one of the rough-and-ready, oatmeal-papered retreats men of the era frequented as counter-tonic to the champagne hours farther uptown. This place was older and more furnished than most of its kind; the hat rack facing them, humped pell-mell with a score of overcoats, might have been the one at home. Hats still scattered it too, bowler and soft, and billycock—no caps. A few canes hung, or crossed. The time must have been late 1916, just before their country’s entry into the war, and the next to last year of his father’s life; he himself had not yet volunteered, or been turned down.

They’d already hung up their own coats, and his father the grandfather’s silver-topped stick. “The stallion in the hallway,” said his father. “That’s how I always think of it. War. The stallion in the hallway, nickering at the male coats on the hat rack. And nuzzling them. I saw a horse walk into a house once, you see, I could scarcely believe my eyes. One never does.” His father had murmured this, wine-loosed; then they’d passed on in to the tables, down every length of which young head chatted with old head tonight, blond with white, dark with bare, and all on the same subject—all their coats hung carelessly together, outside.

He sat now, and thought about the failed life. Flotsam and jetsam of unfailed lives, civilizations one after the other were groined in sand. Scratch under any Pompeii, find the same archaeological cry. “How did we fail?” He and his father and their like, Chauncey Olney too, could they maybe make their own kind of answering? And also the billycock in the hall?

The anatomy of failure, what was it in a
man,
and was its language—if he had language—always grandiose? Was a life like Chauncey’s, which pulled up short of its own endowment, always an abdication? In the beginning of his own trials, no one had seen them more conventionally than he. He didn’t have the courage, or wonderment at the universe, to be Job. Duty to Ruth kept him in life if not health, he would have said. As to his duty to David, so early tied up with deformity and disappointment, grudgingly he could even see that helpless parental answer ahead of him—was a son ever
meant
to be a father’s health? Thoughts on the generations never led anywhere, except to lyric poetry, and back. The ages stood—for men and man.

But at first hadn’t Chauncey too found it cynically interesting that the big act of retiring could give such an indolent keenness to the minor sensations of life, and he’d then had not just time, but honest time—in which to test and stare? The class of men who accepted society at once, and always had, weren’t necessarily confident men, not even those who most appeared zestful and thick-skinned. Sometimes at school—prep school years were the prime for seeing it—the very earliest accepters had been the bullied and the effeminate, or at least the humiliated. Afterwards if they went on from there with wits sharpened to the power of society, it was said of them that their failures had worked.

But were there others more confident, who out of their own ardency and daring became the open failures or the secret separatists? If, like Chauncey, these finally gave their confidence and daring to the position of onlooker, what came of it? Had Chauncey too seen that as the biggest act of his life? And seen (far sooner than himself) that whatever excuse he’d taken for retiring—duty to the unloved or to the personal safety of the beloved—he’d been given time, borrowed from his own old age, to question the act of judgeship itself?

For after a while, the sensation began to be just that, as if one were just back from the dead, or more accurately had become one of the old people of this: society—who, honored or not, were its zombies no magic was needed for. One had the insights, good or bad—of the finished life. As for his own father, totally a weaker and gentler man than Olney, one who could never have seen his own promise as anything to give up, but had had a piece of the onlooker’s temperament; hadn’t even he felt in his heart of hearts at the end that the dogma of every life ought to count somewhere to the world, as well as to the rosary of faces round a bedside—and hadn’t done? To finish a father’s memoir, was it more than an act of piety? Was it only poetry, to wish the old men back?

He told himself that it was. He could take the long view only because as a “failure” he had no shorter one. Downstairs in the study, he sometimes had the arrogance to feel himself the middle class dying, even against his own witness, and the wardrobe’s, that a middle class was born every minute (like the class of suckers, but in no other way connected with them) and was therefore immortal, since its death rate, though high, ran by the year.

Upstairs, he knew only that
he
was dying, at his own sequestered rate. He was outside the currency of his time, in talk and ideas; instead of living a life, he was living an idea of life. Everyone active in the world and the war would say so. Downstairs, the splotched news-world exploded slowly, day by day. Upstairs, in the heart of family life, a man saw, like a frieze in his wainscoting, that violence couldn’t detonate forever without reaching along the arteries of a civilization, to all its hearts. The education of most men was a gradual giving-in to the ideas of others. For a while he dragged each idea up the stairs like a heavy body. Up from that study so impervious with other men’s books, to this room which was only for sitting, and murderous with reflected life. In the end, when he had ranged them all here, he sat like a man peering into a mausoleum to which he might or mightn’t be related, seeing the immortal spidership of its corners, cataracted with failing light. In the end, all the bodies here were his own.

“How wonderful your refugee work has been for you, Simon!” Rosa and Athalie had said to him in the spring. His dear sisters had no trouble seeing the sun as merely a captious blood-orange hung in their Floridas, or—in the black cold that now gripped Europe—a poultice to get their brother’s circulation going. “Better than sailing,” they said. And not so dangerous.

“And a man like you is too valuable not to be active. In temple, Dr. Hildesheimer was saying it only the other day,” they nodded, ever mindful of their membership in an even larger sisterhood. Strange, then, that like a sophomore trying his orations on groundskeepers, he spoke his inmost thoughts these days to them.

“Talk
is
action, nowadays, isn’t it?” he said idly to his sisters. At once it rang true to him. For where his own father would have gone into “rescue work” as what one did naturally for history and posterity, he himself had done so almost as selfishly as his sisters saw it, as his only chance, crannied between wars to share right
in
action. Only to find that the old-fashioned blood-and-thunder vision of action as supreme over thought, those vast galloping into the sunset, had changed for him and others. Or except in the dress rehearsals of historians, had never been there.

“The thundering of events has never been worse, has it?” he said to bewildered Athalie-Rosa. “Yet talk
is
the action, now.” In the peculiar transparencies of that newer generation just beyond his own, where everybody’s language was almost everybody’s, ideas
were
life. The natural mist between private and public action was going, one day to be gone. Or was this only what all men saw when they’d aged beyond hope of action?—which only his retirement had made him see in time?

Dear heart, their wrinkles now signaled one another—what a brother we two have! Oh, he never underestimated their value, lumbering alongside him like a pair of family cart horses, reminding him protectively every other day that the admiration of the stupid was an element of all power, radical or conservative. But now and then he took a feint at it, like a boy with a chocolate knife.

“Like the story of Mirriam’s cancer,” he said. There was a pleasure in talking of her to them. To them only, he mentioned her without effort, for their whole concept of her was so far from the real. “I heard it repeated only the other day, from Walter Young Walter Stern, David’s sidekick. And I thought—well, why not, why not. He was fonder of Mirriam than of any of us. And he has enough hump to carry of his own.”

“But—Simon—”

It wasn’t possible. Yes, it was. They believed it, now in perfect duet. They were invaluable.

“My God,” he said. “The
two
of you? Why—you’re like
Hitler
.”

And to Dr. Hildesheimer whom they afterwards, in tears, sent to check on him, he found himself saying, “Doctor, forget my sisters for a minute. Doctor—it ever strike you that what holds wisdom back is only that everything of value about the conduct of the world has to be relearned every twenty-five years? Isn’t it all as simple as that? So that if we’re to survive, it’s not the
matter
of achievement we ought to focus on, but the
interval?”

“We really must have you to talk to the men in the vestry, Simon,” Dr. Hildesheimer said. “They would really appreciate it.”

He supposed this was part of what had made him a judge—that he could never wholly dismiss the stupid, either from his house or his mind. That was what real competitiveness was. You’re the champ.

“I really came to talk to you about Ruth,” said the rabbi.

“Yes.”

“Rosa and Athalie are really very worried.”

“Yes. What?”

“Even if you could get clearance—you’re not really thinking of taking her with you?”

He expelled the shallow breath. There was always the chance that his special care of her would be noted, and wondered at. “I’ll get clearance.”

“But why?”

“It’s
our
wartime.” But people like us never seem to grasp the fact of it, hard enough for the spikes to enter our palms. Or is that our talent?

“Surely not that child’s wartime! Not really. Not yet.”

“No.” But would history ever get to the men in the vestry in time? He and the rabbi were sitting in the long downstairs salon. He saw Hildesheimer glance around the room to reassure himself on Mannix with a sight of Mannix’s own possessions. Maybe he was right; one didn’t change one’s breeding like one’s brand of tea.

“Friend Simon. You really mustn’t let personal tragedy—”

“Become confused with the public one? I wish it would. I wish it had.” And there it was—out at last.

“We can’t all be as holy as those martyrs across the water,” said the rabbi. And bowed his head.

Foolishly or cleverly, his own conscience had gone on talking, confessing this easy, secular madness which even the good rabbi could understand well enough to be horrified over, while all the time that other private confession he must never make was pressed swollen under the tongue—and was, grant it, a little relieved. Talk
was
action. Or only all
he
had?

“Dr. Hildesheimer—every martyr’s always half self-made, don’t you think. Even those.” For he’d been terrified to find himself thinking this even while at the work of helping. Daring to apply it, even during the nightmare, to the victim. Until he reminded himself that ever since Eden, it had applied to men in general.

“Judge Mannix!” Hildesheimer stood up. “In these times—you can contribute to that
rishus
against us, against the Jews! You, of all people? That we…they…are to blame?”

“No, no. We all half choose to be victim—to be the chosen. The whole world.”

But the rabbi had his craftiness. He pulled an ear lobe, in lieu of a side lock. “Ah-ha. Now I see. You want just to be a man. Whenever I hear a Jew say that, that he just wants to be a part of mankind—I know it’s that he just doesn’t want to be a Jew any more.” He took up his hat, an only very slightly broad-brimmed one. “Friend—why don’t you give up that grievous work for a while? Why go to Europe at all, just now?”

“Think I’ll lose my faith?” A pertness straight from his youth, from that period of it when his newly discovered brain, still shaky with its own smartness, had found a nervous balance in the company of the stupid, among whom his mother had been the one he knew best.

“We leave that to the Catholics.” From Hildesheimer’s smirk, he’d made this joke before. “No, but I often speak of you with Guedalia the sexton; his brother had you in Hebrew class. A regular Isaiah they remember you.” He settled the hat on his close-shaven head; to do that while yet in the house was still a religious privilege of those who no longer wore yarmulkes or side locks. One could only hope they did have the best of both worlds.

“And I personally
know
,” said the rabbi, “that sorrow is extra hard on a good brain.”

“You sound like my mother.” He hesitated, but couldn’t resist. “Though
she
never claimed personal knowledge of it.”

But the rabbi only bowed at this other holy mention. “
My
mother,
selig,
would say of you, ‘He is busy with the wisdom of sorrow. But it will leave soon.’” (And later, by the calendar of events left with him, the Judge saw that, the next Saturday of May being the one before Mother’s Day, Hildesheimer was billed for “A Mother’s Day Sermonette.”)

But seeing the young rabbi out, he had delayed at the door. “Yes, I was always ‘precocious.’ At least that was the legend—partly my size. But I never thought I’d get my old age so young.” He put a hand on the rabbi’s shoulder two steps below. “Tell me, though. Didn’t the Jews, all ancient peoples, used to listen to the elders? They were aware of—that dangerous interval?”

“‘When Job’s wisdom was ended’—one of the books says—‘then he was ready for God’s.’”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Ah, I thought you were never going to mention him.”

“Job?”

“No.” It had been vicious of him—but hypocrite to hypocrite? “God.”

But the young man had given him his hand anyway, even enthusiastic over his spirit. Hildesheimer wasn’t being false; he might even believe in God; it was just that the priests were all social workers now. “I’m going to tell Miss Rosa and Miss Athalie that you’re really all right!”

And he’d half run up the stairs, to tell someone: “Remember that young rabbi who buried Mamma, the one who says “really” all the time? I know why. He’s not
really
sure he’s a Jew any more, or what Jews are. The Germans came just in time.”