New Yorkers (26 page)

“Oh, I couldn’t know my own end, could I? What more could I tell you of myself, of us, if I had? I tell you
now.
That’s
death
for you, every time.

And that joke, was Angela for you. Her life depended on the jokes she could see in it; so would yours if you’d had hers; yes, she’s the one said you had no humor, that you would never forge a check. “Don’t listen to Angie,” Noel wrote me once. “She’s a dirty dike who sleeps with men.” He should talk—whom she called her “best girl friend.” She died of getting funnier and funnier. The two of them went to the Bahamas with a female balloonist—they came down in the gondola and were picked up by the
Queen of Bermuda
on an off run—and Angie’s heart stopped “zizz”—from seeing a shark smile through a glass-bottomed boat. “Oh Father, forgive us—” wrote Noel then; they were both Catholic converts—“she died waving like a fevver on the breeze, she was the most romantic one of us all.” And cautioned me to heed what she told me, after all.

I see her as a kind of St. Sebastian, truth sticking out like stilettos all over her skinny back. No wonder she was always on the move,
she’d
say, if she heard me. But I’ve drawn her that way, in her hat. Her life was better art than any of us. I’m taking her ashes
straight
to Paris—the return fare she had will do for both of us. And Mimi love—the final
délice
—she said she wanted you to have “all her hats.” The dear pook. When everyone knew she had only the one Man Ray photographed. But darling, I want it. I’m montage-ing it onto the picture. For her memorial. And a gallery there is very interested.

But they weren’t of course, so I bought it—and gave it back to him—that’s the way it should be in art, shouldn’t it, a world of friends. Just before we married, Si, remember? Why, it was the night that summer I first took you to Daddy’s house; we hung the drawing of me that Noel sent to thank me. I hung it; I was taller. Under it, against the same wall, you hung me on you. Short man’s stand-up love, your head on my breasts, a perfect fit. I said so. Tall man would have had to hold heavy me high. You knew your powers. You said so. But you’ll have to remember for both of us. I never dwelt backwards like other women; I always remembered what I wanted next.
May the night bloom.
When we tottered back to bed, you turned the great, ugly silver ring Arne made, and read that engraved there. “What’s on the other one?” you said. On my other hand, a matching frog-buckle:
In the company of friends.
We both shouted with laughter. Then you shut up, remembering I was his widow. But later, when you knew the real circumstances (only presumed dead), you said, “Marry me and you can get rid of those damned epaulettes.”

Sex was your only humor, I must have said to Angie, who answered: “Otherwise, you say, his principles get in his way?” To which Angie added, from whatever alcoholic balloon she was on at the moment, “Goody. How I wish mine got in the way of mine.” And when told that your artistic taste was better than ours (for it seems that sometime thereabouts, on the question of you, I did answer letters, and even entreated them) she commented, “Of course it is, dumb bunny. He’s a patron of the arts. Not of artists.”

Bur Arne wrote, when he heard of us.

Diamonds now, I suppose. Maybe you are just a good little Jewish girl, after all? When I asked you what you wanted of life, you said, “To go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, every night.” How was I to know this is just bourgeois tease-talk! I should have put that on a ring—and on the other “To be every night in cottage with the same man.” And both are true. This is worse you know than that I am not a faithful person—for this I
know.
Let me tell you, Mirriam, it is not enough to be brought up dutiful, if you do not know any longer what to be dutiful to. Or to be so honest you do not know the truth until it burn somebody else on your tongue. Your father bring you up with these big Jewish hungers like a son almost, he should not have let you marry a Christian.

And postscript:

I never thought he believe me dead. I am always sure he know it for only a courtesy. How is the old Meyer? I hope well.

How quietly we divorced Arne again, together, for good, Si, you and I, and how close it brought us! To document your wife into being a girl again, into your being, before the marriage service, to drive her downtown to those quiet legal streets at the bottom of the island, to bring her, shining and shy, great eyes forward, long cool summer legs flashing past the secretaries, into the grave office of your good friend—who needs to ask me a few questions. I answered them all, in my voice to match the legs: Aged twenty-nine (this was in 1925), not living with first husband six years, one year under the desertion limit in some states, separated mutually as far as I could define. But how tell your monk friend, with his Lobb shoes and speckled cravat, about the flotsam of the studios?—how one could lose a husband as easily as a locket in those high-arched places so drunken cozy in the evenings, so cavernous in the morning, how, if it was one’s temperate family habit to drink only eager gulps of the sodden, seductive air of art, to gorge only on its heavy conversations (always loaded with bitter plums for stuffing the wombs of girls like me, and serving us up like squabs on the altars we yearned for), that a girl like me could drop virginity, religion, a four-story house and my grandmother’s dowry string of Burmese pearls, lose them like a pair of panties, all in one evening, and meet on the way out another girl like me, maybe one with high-church giraffe neck and nostrils, slouching in to meet her Jew.

I answered his questions queenly, your member-of-the-firm with his flavorful name stuck like a bud of garlic among the
goy
ones, stuck there for us and our world, and I crossed my legs princessy, in the way of women accustomed from childhood to visit the offices which supported and protected them. For though the silences here were more calfbound and quiet than in my father’s music-broker’s office, with its tea-break snatches of Mary Garden gossip, and Caruso himself once, swelling his throat like a thrush, over a matter of copyright—I knew my place and privileges as I always did, and could get Grandma’s pearls back any day, in a secretary’s eyes.

And maybe your friend did understand that part of me better than you did, then. Maybe he already had a monk’s sister, or daughter, at home—some pre-Penelope, knuckle-trained to sail Larchmont’s blue money-waters and lie in wait for Newport’s, but already slouching off with her sweet little bat-boned, Galician face set on finding a husband easy as a locket, in the land of Minnetonka-no-money, Minnehaha-no-morals—some worrisome little girl already weaving her mythical two-man raft, man-and-woman one, made of all the thin excuses we girls assigned to art.

“Was he a
good
sculptor?” said your friend, his great hungry eyes thoughtful. And I spoke the truth to him, to eyes hooded as mine but grayer-skinned, as mine might have been if given time.

“Oh, that wasn’t to have been the point of it,” I said, as carelessly as I must have said it to Arne. “Second-raters are so comfortable to be with, in company. How was I to know that as husbands they gave themselves such hell over being it?” And we all laughed, and I looked at you, Si, with such pride—you’re the champ, and if some day we’re to find that those can give themselves hell too, over me and my menses dark changes, they can bear it. And afterwards, I quoted Angie, saying to me, “Arne always minded that
you
didn’t, you cluck.” So, here we’re round to Angie again, and why not; she introduced us.

Noel was there too; don’t you know him now, he was the one you called “the parlor snake.” How that dates us. You wouldn’t go on to the river-club with us; you called Angie later and got my number. You knew her father, and once, to get her out of a scrape, you pulled strings for her, telling her very kindly that it was likely the last anyone could pull.

“You rat,” I said, laughing to you, not much later, “do you always know fathers?”, for you’d met mine in the echelons of our race somewhere, and you said into my breasts, “That’s how I’ve remained a bachelor. Until now.” Then we opened our noses warily to the odor of orange blossoms closing in on us like the pelmets of the family bed down the hall from us, and I whispered, “How safe,” but in the same minute you put your mouth where it ought to be and I split my long legs for you—“Propose to me again.”

And Angie says here in this letter—answering when I wrote them all to Tunis that Arne was alive, and all the rest of it:

Dear Little Jewish Girl—how we howled! But really, what insight on the part of our Arne! I’d never think of such a thing myself; I’m absolutely sans race prejudice, even against my own. But Arne, come to think of it, was rather beautiful in that Siegfried way, wasn’t he—I never believed he was dead. And you do have rather an expectantly Sabine look about you in a roomful of us blonds. Has yer ever slept with a Jewboy, honey?

The answer was no. I’d never slept with anybody but Arne before—and that went into my wife-personality too. You believed me. “You’re good with innocence, did you know?” I said. But I was more used to not being believed. That comes through best of all now, doesn’t it—at last. “I made wild remarks by imitation; after a while it came natural,” I said. Oh, I could correspond at first, with someone new, when it was still like dropping pennies down a well. “I can talk to
you,”
I said. Like a child to its daddy. But Daddy mustn’t save the pennies up, or dole them back. Otherwise, there’s his gangle-gawk of two weeks ago, a long-legged madonna hunching herself out on the dance floor flamenco with somebody else—the same as she did at fifteen.

“Oh Daddy, why did you—” I wrote my father from Bad Kissingen, that terrible, itching summer of my girlhood when he sent my mother and me to circle safely round the spas, me to nauseate in the corners of my mind at all the human grotesques, yet never to forget them and their sad toiletries—what a bal masqué way to learn pity-in-the-round, from the turpentined wrecks of the mudbath and the high colonic, coughing their caviar-breath into their laces and suedes. No wonder I was a little nouveau riche with compassion, the rest of my life. …

No, I couldn’t think of that by myself, Simon, that’s yours. …And neither could Meyer Mendes, to whom daughters were as of the old days, a special property, of the heart maybe, but of the blood and the purse certainly—like the wives. You’re a little like him in some of your old-fashioned moral hungers—I flashed that at you once!—but not too much like; never think that. Why, families like ours threw psychology away with their chicken bones; we’re older than any of it, Jewboy, you and I. You were modern enough for me, my smart thirty-four-year-old bachelor boy, with your sleek face like a carved ivory button at the top of the shabby clothes Meyer Mendes took for a sign of your Chasidic learning, not your vanity—but that would have been all right, with him too; you had us covered, both ways.

That night, in our house, I took you to see yourself in one of the
netsuke
figures in the Nipponese corner of our bric-a-brac, but you scorned all that as pawnbroker’s junk which you said the best Israelite families still somehow got stuck with; “At home we had the French version,” you said, and we laughed, kneeling there in front of the cabinet—you had to take your under-five-foot advantage when you could; that’s when we kissed. I already knew about your monkey-ways with the women, from Angie, who called me before you did, and I challenged you with the names of your mistresses, some of whom I’d seen at the theatre—“Angie says you arrange it the French way, one by one”—which a father would have thought proper too, and maybe already knew from downtown. If I could have been your mistress!—or in the theatre, too!

But we had mothers alike, didn’t we, my Sarah to your Martha; though mine was the prettier, to the end like a raisin-eyed, Raphael puddinghead; both of them brought us and our fathers their money—you and I stepped hand-in-hand out of the nineteenth century there. And good duennas, both of them. In Bad Kissingen, I’d found a fly Italian boy on his way to Cucciola with his papa, but she found us, behind the fountain in the public baths, at dusk only, but holding hands too in the amphitheatre of our loneliness, all of whose aged were still sleeping, except she.

“Did he get to you?” she said to me. “Answer me, did that boy get to your funnybone?” Aren’t the names they had for it vile, I once said to you, telling it, and you recalled your little-boy shame at your mother’s “tassel,” and how your father saved you there from her shames, you keeping mum. We had children by the time we were telling each other this, in our own marital bed, in that second entente, after
she
was born. “After my father died,” you said, “my mother said to me, ‘He was a good man; he never bothered me more than once a week.’”

Oh, the decade of the twenties wasn’t so free as some see, but floating still with
luxuria,
the genitalia of our parents—on our wedding trip you took me to see the Bosch panel, pointed to a kneeling nude figure looking backward between its legs at the sprig of flowers in its own behind, and said to me right there in the Prado, “Our mothers.” Oh, you and I understood each other—in our parents’ bed.

I said nothing to you of fathers—daughters are shy. There by the spa fountain, I held out my elbow to my mother, only one step more innocent than she, saying, “Here?” Then wrote to my father—“Oh Daddy, why did you ever marry anybody so
dumb.
” But her letter and mine reached him together and he sent mine back to me, where it still is, clipped to his others in the iron-blooded file of them—spoil the child as a father may, with a whole Versailles of toys and even a sweetmeat entente or two secret between him and his bright darling, a law comes out in the letters—and the rod.
Respect.
Respect her whose money-blood I have mixed with mine.

“I’ll see any kissprint you get on you,” she said at the fountain. “It comes out on the skin.” Though I couldn’t see any on hers, and said so, and got slapped for it, flat in the teeth. Ahhrr—daughters.