New Yorkers (25 page)

For the only one who would have understood this, and laughed over it, was Mirriam. Two weeks later, he and Ruth had left. He thought that perhaps Mirriam would have approved of that too. Although one must be careful not to ascribe falsely to the dead—even more than with the living, since for the dead there was no recourse.

And now he and Ruth were home again. In the depths of his madness he’d become very good on other people’s deceptions; he had solved the world. Now the world was once more confused to him; he was living it. One sentence-long note had meanwhile come from Ninon Fracca.

“So now you’re on the wrong side of the Atlantic again!”—a twist from a music-hall ditty current there about Americans: “So now ’e’s over ’ere again, gettin’ ’is tea, dooty-free, but on the
right
side awv ther sea!” No doubt she’d never expressed herself outside of theatre parlance in her life, nor written a note any longer than needed to be left with the portress at a stage door. And in the nature of men and their Cythereas, it was probably as true that she was used to receiving incomprehensible letters like his, sent along with the rosebuds, maybe by a man who respected that plucked mound of hers for reminding him of his own deceptions, or because she might be the last woman he would ever touch.

His wasn’t too short a letter to have spent the afternoon on. Men had sent more peculiar tributes—and had sometimes kept certain women to receive them as the safest shrines. Where else—from scholars or prime ministers of the courts or retired champions—did such faded rosebuds belong?

“But am I on the right side of the century at last?” he wrote. “How can one ever tell? I’m ten years older than it, in age”—as she herself was, a blond he couldn’t mention—“and on the question of war and wars, I’m only catching up with my father and grandfathers—who didn’t catch up with me and mine. On certain questions, we never catch up with the young. Nobody gets to posterity in time. Now that my present job’s over, and the war will soon be—for it will, you know—I’ve been doing a little staring in other directions”—at wainscotings—“and maybe a little of the present age has caught on my knee-buckles at last. I’m getting the feel of what I wasn’t born to, myself. I’m lucky, you know. We’re still legion, our kind, and most of us never will.”

It had taken him a long time to go on from there, confused as he was—now that he was no longer in that mausoleum where all his thoughts had come to him at once. In the way of letters, the page showed no sign of this.

For without being a saint, these days can one ever forget that half the earth still lives as it were beneath the crust of the earth, in the left-over sun—or starves in the sight of everybody? All this now goes on in the sight of everybody. And this is the great revolution. There’s no tucking it away any more, on any end of the earth nowadays. And what perhaps hasn’t been quite seen yet in the world is that this, the greatest revolution, is in man’s mind—why, even the coarsest grabber feels an arrow of it in his backside somewhere, or when he puts out his paw will cut himself on it in the morning mail, or will see its root in his fine heir! And this is irreversible. One needn’t be a saint to see it, one deserves no credit for seeing or expressing it either—not any more. Of course, one still doesn’t refuse a mistress or not buy the house of one’s dreams because of it. And this used to be enough to put us in everyday Lethe. But it isn’t, any more.

He hadn’t gone on from there. Other men had done it better—if he wished, he could begin to read up on it, as was the way between generations. There must be a whole glossary of such letters as well, from men who needed to talk. To certain women.

But now he bent and wrote again.

The rich are always antiquarian; they want to save themselves. The middle class is luckily too cumbersome ever to be such an enclave. People are draining into it from both ends, fastest of course at the bottom. Is there a chance—

Staring at his old brown escutcheon with its thirty years of clothes ahead, he could see well enough its characteristic occupant, not really rich but always somehow inheriting a never quite collapsible opera hat. To see clearly, as he himself proposed to, was merely the sort of generalized love such gentlemen had time for. Although his own “refugees” couldn’t make him more Jewishly devoted, they’d helped thrust him back at his old pursuit of judging the world and himself in tandem—which was perhaps Jewish enough. But would anyone see that Simon Mannix belonged with the cranks now—that, too late for power, he too wanted to save the world?

He could see Ninon Fracca’s face when she got his letter—a moment’s bewilderment as she read, then the quick explosion—to herself—of experience. “What’s he saying to you, m’dear, with his any mores?—why, he’s saying…good-bye.”

But that wasn’t the reason he wouldn’t mail it.

On his wife’s desk, here all around him, the letters he had been reading for days, and had stacks of yet unread, spilled everywhere from spidery pigeonholes, and all over the desk’s watery inlay, once blond-green as an early apple, for some Marguerite. The desk had been bought at an auction gallery, by
her
—how cruelly some women knew their own taste! “Oh, what a lovely tart!” she’d said, when it was brought forward on the stand, its ormolu pale from two hundred years of such trials—and had bought it in ten minutes; if her correspondents had thereafter taken it upon themselves to fill it with her whole life, that was
their
business!

Their letters piled it, in all scripts and voices. He’d begun going through them, not voyeur after lovers, only intending the dutiful consecration before the fire or the scrap heap; he had performed this service for the dead before. To him, at twenty-seven, his father’s leavings had been an ancestral experience—the business records willed to him as history, the memoir as heritage—and all of it enlarging the inheritor, even down to the long box, gold-leafed by donor with a calla lily one dared not laugh at, in which his father had kept for himself, by means of a few rent receipts and pictures, his Miss Lily Orpe of the Louvre, and kept unwittingly for his son (perhaps because the son had seen the woman herself as she aged, reminisced and died) the sharpest sense of those dusky Parisian hours: another man’s violets and passions—real. His mother’s effects were always pridefully tidy for just such a melancholy ritual as his, and once the neutral furs and jewels of status had been handed round, were only the corn plasters, rhinestoned combs and bridgework that any old stolid dray might leave behind her—plus the burial certificate, well forward in a drawer containing as in her lifetime no other papers, nothing made of words, whose force on him and his father she’d always been so suspicious of—as if at the last she was able still to say to them, accusatory to the final crumble of her dust. “Nobody wrote me; I had no crimes” and no bills.

But finished, finished all—until now that had always been the sense of it. As the legal guardian of the family he’d become used to seeing the contents of a desk or bureau curdled into the pitiful merely by the death of the owner;
this
had been thought random?—
this
saved? Was a violent death any different, or an early one, leaving its victim unresolved
except
by death? Or did the unresolved last the longest, project the farthest, irritant as in life? For all these letters to her, not from her, crowded in toward the same purpose, and clearly left unstated, were, whether the sender was dead or alive, still palpitating water, lives streaked with her purple, changeable oil—like his own. So many people wrote her—he had never known. Clearly, as with him, as with everything, she’d never answered them at their own rate. But they’d gone on writing, and agonizedly fascinated, he’d gone on reading and arranging. Had his own letters to her, not found yet, held so much more of receiver than sender as these did? Over half these records of her were now ranged in the desk in packets, according to writer, and with a chronology for each. The test for life was after all—movement. And among this retinue of letters, she moved as in life.

Her correspondents had
always
created her beyond herself, as they themselves sometimes seemed aware and one had said to her, outright. By never fishing for souls, never fastening on, she had caught them. And so, trailing the clouds they made for her, kicking at those gaudy chiffons like a bride who didn’t want a train—she would not be responsible for their silliness—she moved still. In all those tumbled voices, hers spoke clearest. Toward her movement, they cast their essence. They had never caught her.

One packet of letters signed “Arne” he was still reading with painful care. Surely he had that right himself as a second husband, left by her in the first month of their marriage for a week’s return to the first one—on return, her explanation: “Yes, Denmark. I had to talk to Arne. Now it is over for good. And I’m
here!
” The rest of her correspondents, as in life, were of all ages and sexes, on onionskin, pad paper and rag, women called Billy, men called Buffy and Tinker, Carmens and Leslies who might be either, bluff Roberts and Millicents, an agile Raoul. Certain largest packets considered themselves special confidants—but hadn’t they all? They were the crowd. And where, for the dead, did the demimonde begin?

Some, he remembered: Anglea Decies, of the feather hats and mortician dresses, the lady rotter who had once been in Holloway prison and written a book about it; preserved for him now in the white face powder of the twenties as in marble dust, and in the bad odor of her checks; the Noel Ammon who’d drawn that wasp-stomachered caricature of Mirriam over there on the wall; Olivia, Mrs. Kitt, a remarkable old actress from the days when those in her profession called themselves Mrs., who had retired to the old Hotel Seville, on Twenty-eighth Street, that tawny old hutch—and had attributed her longevity to an extra bone in the coccyx. There was no enumerating them all, their parties and jigtimes, arts and artistics, and hangover lures. And as with all human correspondents, there emanated from the letters half as the reason they wrote her—that they had all considered themselves remarkable. If
she
was, it was intimated—this was because they wrote her. And maybe that was the truth of it.

Was there no one, no human soul she herself had angled for? Sometimes, going back over a letter, a phrase, putting his own essence to all of it, and suffocating for the lateness, hearing her voice, he thought he caught sight of him. From whom, though letters had been written between them, none so far had been found.

Finally, he picked up and reread his own unfinished letter. Those others were more properly faded to the desk; though he might go back to them, they were yesterday. Late as his was, it was today’s. What it seemed to him to say best was good-bye. As yet, it lacked a signature—and had no salutation. In a scrawl that ruined the letter for any other than its true recipient, he wrote her name across it, and left it for her with the others.
Mirriam.

V
OICES. LETTERS. VERDICTS?:—

I am the daughter, rampant. Built for the sensual light. Seen in it, often by the unsensual. Some women document chapter-thick with home, from beginning to end. I, who began that way like any other, a child seated high at table, between bony father and grape-eyed mother, retreated as soon as my long legs would carry me, to the outside, and the oblique. Later, I told my two husbands all—or all I could. I was never willfully alone. The crowd was always with me. No one ever got from me—all. All my life, people sent what they knew of me back to me, in narrow letter-flights that fall back from me now like a boy’s paper darts. And all my correspondents write alike.

Both my husbands fell in love with me alongside that granite friend, my father. The second didn’t know this of the first, until now. Even there, and before in my childhood, so much grasped for myself, I was always the daughter; if one were to pick a Greek epithet for me—as for the cow-eyed or the rosy-fingered—that would be mine. Oh this correspondence—why doesn’t one come into the world, and suffer it, unattended? Yet, in their cross-hatchings, my friends have caught me. And the shadow of a man ever stronger, like the white spaces in a black picture. If the letters could have spoken each to the other, would they have seen him, the shadow you glimpse, Si, as you read them all at once? I told them over and over about him, but they never believe what you tell them, especially when the man himself is there for all to observe. Not that crowd. Do you expect anyhow that a woman like me
can
speak, one to one? They could see that, why not you? I can
not
correspond.

I thought you saw it. Or married you because you would be strong enough to stand it, when you did see. Arne couldn’t. You can tell by his letters he couldn’t. “You’ll daughter him, as you daughtered me,” he wrote out of the blue, when he heard about us. “Have you widowed him yet?” And when I went back to him, that first month of our wedding trip, Si’s and mine, “You make the perfect widow,” he said. Or he said it after. Letters keep coming. Their letters kept coming after me always, to the end. Not yours though. You’re the champ.

So Si, listen. Listen
for your life,
as people say. For your life, which I never had wholly—and thank God for it. Which was why you could have me. No, I never told you—I don’t tell things. Daughters—of fathers—don’t. Do fathers’ sons? Arne was a mother’s son—I mistook him. His letters say that too.

“I don’t suppose there exists a child of both a father and a mother,” he said, didn’t he. And then unfortunately added, being a foreigner, “In America.” Before that la, la—a perfect remark. Sculpture soured him into intelligence at times; I said that once. “It seeps out of the stone.” Or the stone and I, we did it together. As you see, he didn’t like my laugh any better than you. But you could always take it, darling. Why, yes, we always called each other “darling”—the crowd. A theatrical habit. When I wanted to call you, or anyone, something special, I said—nothing. I thought you knew. It can’t be helped. Or maybe it can, if you read my friends all very carefully; they’re eccentric, but they gabble well, don’t they. Listen to me very carefully now, Si, through them. Add your essence, that beautiful goddamn brain of yours—oh yes, I said that, but who didn’t, who doesn’t—add it to my voice. I don’t ordinarily tell things. But they caught me when I wasn’t looking—and sent me back to myself. Listen to me. Listen for your life: Daughters breed daughters.