New Yorkers (28 page)

And how has Carrie come so ancient-quick, the bottle pushed at her from the wings by the prop man surely?—while you and I are still silent in the theatre of one another.

“Lean closer, children,” says the voice of Mrs. Kitt. “For the blessing. Ah, champagne. My bed is roses.” Hear her leg gurgle. “But soft—which one of my ribbons falls there? Blue? Blue it is! For a boy.”

So, let me walk, Simon; let me walk my upstairs one last time, stalking the chambers of our house too, in the slippers of all the murdering houris who engage others to help them do away with themselves. That man. He was to take
your
place there. You would never have helped me at it. Your principles were too strong. He was there, where you should have been. I never meant it to be her.

See me. I was hopelessly polylingual, with emotions I could never speak, except in crowds—and to your shadow. A rich man’s daughter, only one prince could come for me, to be flouted and turned away with his casket of guesses, and sought forever after, in crowds. What did you have there? What does the prince treasure there anyway, just as the bourgeoisie fondles her artists? Is it the lovely black villainies of those other desperate—of the poor?

Oh, I was never one to be remembered like some—in their commonplaces, in their chits and meals. Shall you be, Simon? Do you want that safety, now that you see what comes of the other? Or is my destiny only for women, who want to throw down their royalty and have it too? Are you a judge now, Simon?

Oh, what a pastiche we make of ourselves! And Simon, is it I who speaks now, or you? Drop us in aconite pure, so that we may rise to our Elizabethan roles, one riding the hill plains of women, one stalking the clanking seas.

You were my rhetoric, Mirriam.

And you were—do you see his shadow now? Where are
his
letters, Simon?

Where are they; who was that other letter for?

There is no allegory, Simon, no allegory, except what we make for ourselves.

Who said that? Which of us?

I
said it to you, hissing it through the teeth which gnawed the chains of motherhood: Stay away from me, Simon, with that brain-gun of yours. Or shoot me with it—close.

I say it. I say it with you, Mirriam.

So, together, the dual voices. There is no allegory, except as we make it ourselves.

So—I must rove. Give me my character, Simon. As I give you my letters—and my daughter. See how she stalks our history, our chamber—her upstairs. Ware the character you give her. Will you give her mine?

Oh Simon, my voice
was
velvet—will you kill me now?

So. This is death.

A
T FOUR O’CLOCK, A
church bell distantly sounded the hour, a bell buoy deep in regions of city dirt and air, and he raised his head in gratitude; he was finished with his service for the dead. Toward winter, the farther bells did this, on a clearest day striking their whims from across the park. Once in a while in summer, the house heard from the south somewhere a ruffled, dropped plume. No church was near enough to regulate its hours. But into many pockets of the city, these continental sounds often wandered, a reminder that the whole island, spired to the sea by bridges everywhere, was still built on country topography, hilltop to sea level, valley and dale.

The final packet of letters had been a cleansing one of the children’s earliest, bird bells from kindergarten or from the weekend house where they still went sailing, notes and rhymes long since read together with old Mendes, handed round in the way of families who had few or no other collateral children. At the outposts of this one, flocks of cousins, three or four times removed, were never much more than recorded now. Every twenty years or so, with a war or a martyrdom, a few more dropped in from abroad. But in the direct lines of Mannix and Mendes—as often after a generation or so of only children or late marriages—his two chicks were the last of what had once been, in his own boyhood and at the building of this house, two noisy, vigorous clans.

As usual, any slightest family thought swung his compass needle towards its north. Past time for Ruth to come home, an hour past. He stanched that worry—that was the way it always felt, a far trickle, bleeding in the mind—and went to the window anyway. The three boys, intent on Austin’s homecoming, he’d already heard some time back, clobbering the stairs to David’s room, and then down.

It was a sweet, sad November afternoon of a street, outside. The car at the curb was his own. Very soon he might get rid of it, or give it to David; he wasn’t going anywhere. Between him and it, the present incumbent curb-side tree had spindled and must be replaced. He enjoyed the faintest percussion of the seasons on this street, and knew his privilege; if he had his way every man, woman and child in the city would own this home-sense of a life scene stretching ahead of them like a line of merging Utrillos, except for a shutter painted or a door wreath, unchallengedly the same.

Deepest in his chest, he felt the inertia of family life. In the unconscious life of men in cities, it flourished, an underground spring neither diseased nor healthy, merely silent water, coiling at the family root. Armies of men and women stood at windows, watched fires, swallowed their bread and felt its power, narcotic in mouth and limb. To escape its terrible, impalpable sinew, some got out and stumbled into bohemias, or lay down amnesiac in Boweries. To this order too belonged the silent disappeared, those strange, often eminent men who left behind them nests in no apparent way fouled—and were heard of years later or lost forever, in clerk jobs which kept them at the nadir of personal life. The mass of men stayed on, clenched in their days, almost but not quite aware of it, to die unprotesting and loudly shriven. Family inertia! Most who felt it wouldn’t recognize his word for it. But any man at a window now and then shivered at its argument, assassin deep in the breast. I must move. I must murder. Where is Joy?

He ran back to the desk, hunted and found a letter, seized and crumpled it, painstakingly reopened it to check—“…I will never say,” and took it to the toilet, where he tore it into small pieces with an animal’s concentration—as if he expected the secret of what it was to appear as he dismembered it—and furtively watched it go down. To dispose of any record was hard for him, both by profession and temperament. The rest of the correspondence could be left to accrete, as family history was left everywhere in this house; no one reading it in years to come—either to see how things had been in the twenties, the thirties, the forties, or even for the secrets of his progenitors—would be able to add his own particular essence to it. But that one letter had had to be destroyed. This household no longer belonged among those whose lack of drama could be trusted in. That letter had been the very kind which inertia itself, half not vengeful toward lives that escape from it, might be tempted to let lie, in wait. And did not children always seem poised for successful escape?

He posted himself at the window again. And after a while, down the block, he saw her coming back to him, his choice, his enigma, his dear loose end.

She was walking very like those nymphs of Dorset, his land girl of the city, toeing out as sturdily as they, the key to this house flopping innocently on her breast. A tailor’s boy, it looked to be, walked beside her, carrying what father and brother, for once united, hadn’t teased her out of, those uniforms which her mother, for once stirred to daytime allegiance, had arranged for, autumns back. She was clattering, and the boy—as he neared the step, what a scarecrow!—was rapt, chin dug in the pile of garments he was trundling. Maybe she oughtn’t to wear that key in such nursery-school trust. He restrained an urge to wave. Now the two were on the stoop, just below him. The boy made as if to hand over the bundle. She didn’t immediately take it—was she going to invite him in? Stray kittens—she was that kind of little girl, or had been, before her trouble. She still acted as if there were no trouble, like a skater who never went near a known hole in the ice, yet never gave evidence of seeing it. He must not think of the trouble as hers. She was asking in the boy, who was staring up at the house entrance, his estimate of it hidden under a Fiji-mop of hair, blond though, and behind a comic pince-nez of string. Below, the door then closed.

He opened the door of the upstairs room, where, if they came up the front stairs, she must pass. What more natural—he wasn’t waylaying her. Yet in the continual eddy of conscience, as she did come up the stairs, alone, and stopped just below the top, seeing him there over her pile of garments, he said, “I saw you from here.”

She nodded, taking the last step up with her burden.

“Want me to take those in here?” He gestured behind him.

“Uh-uh. I’ll take them to my room.”

“How’s—every little thing?”

“Copacetic.”

The old prep school word he’d taught her touched him, along with a memory of her seven-year-old glee in finding that he didn’t know what it meant.

“So many of them. Still.” He touched the dresses.

She looked down at them. “Oh—I’ve outgrown them.”

“I should think.”

“Oh, not the dresses. We all have. No, I meant—the girls.” And suddenly she gave him a wicked, radiant smile that floored him—a high smile so like her mother’s, but from his own replica face—and went on up the stairs.

He called after her. He must not. “Who’s—the boy?”

He heard her dump the dresses and come down again.

“The Halecsys’ nephew.” In the dimness at the far end, he could tell only by her voice.

“Oh? Didn’t know they had one.”

“Neither did they.”

He put his distance glasses on. “They didn’t?”

She saw him. “It was his birthday. So I…”

“He doesn’t look like the Halecsys.”

“He isn’t. He…”

He waited. She cocked her head, not to him.

“Queer duck,” he said.

“No. Not really. Just the way he’s—been brought up.”

“Oh?”

But dawdling at the head of the back stairs, she said, “I’ve got to go down. Austin’s having a fest.”

And he was after all used to this routine avoidance of parents, to the hide-and-seek, the lavatory passions, the confab giggles behind stairs.

“Have fun.”

And she was gone. He never thought of joining them, nor never had until now. And now he couldn’t, to slide awkward in on their fest, on that foursquare, strangely solid team. Austin, for one, would know what he was after, appraising both him and the newcomer with cool, libertarian eyes. David would be at once on the defensive too. Oh Diddy’s score—that painful nickname first coaxed from the boy’s own lips—he knew well enough whose side they were always on. No criticism would ever come from Walter, that gay, humble soul who merely loved them all. But if ever a girl had some day to meet the seamy side of the picture—as today even the Ruths did—then he couldn’t ask for a better guard than those three would instinctively form. He’d never thought of this as strange, before.

Some minutes later, downstairs in the study, he was glad when she tapped on his door.

“Come in.”

“It’s the boys. They want beer. Anna won’t. Unless you—”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Tell her it’s OK.” And had better be for good, with Austin at college, and the other two on their way. Her, and in other items like lipstick or the girl’s dress, wherever a sure social sense was needed, of his own class but above all sure, Anna’s terrified lower-class strictures couldn’t help, even hindered.

“But—” His girl hesitated.

“Yes?”

“She’s made a cake. And ice cream. In a mold.”

“Ah. I see.” He yearned with pleasure. His girl had it for herself, her own sense of right. And that would—must suffice. He’d have no genteel lady-companions here, dragged forth by Rosa-Athalie.

“Tell her to give them whisky, if they want it. Long as they eat her cake.”

She grinned at him.

“And that boy—is he still here?”

“Oh, Daddy—” She came close to him. “He’d eat the whole table. I’m sure of it. He’s starved. Like an animal.”

“But—‘sweet,’ eh?” He smiled at her. This was what had always been said, time out of mind, about the kittens and other strays. Of Walter, God only knows, it had been true. Where had they got their pity, his children?

But she was older now. Her mouth, on which there was now an approved orangey-pink coating, like wax on a raspberry, opened, then closed. “Smart.”

“Odd-looking boy.” Or slum man. That was it, that early look.

“It’s only his clothes. They’re going to make him a suit.”

“I’d no idea the Halecsys were that poor. We must do something.”

“Oh—
would
you. He wants to go into politics.”

“Pol—?”

She nodded, heedless. “They’re not like the Halecsys. They come from—somewhere—worse. Where there’s rats. His mother. She doesn’t talk hardy at all. Like somebody you—tell what to do. The Halecsys are going to make her a coat. He works at some restaurant job. He always has. Worked.” As each halted phrase came out of her, a change, a stare, an intentness came over her too, haunting her gaze past his own. “And he loves school,” she said, in a rush. “Like I—” She stopped.

“Yes?”

“Love Ilonka’s.” This was the ballet school.

He was silent, confronted by what children knew of themselves. “And—how do you know—what he wants to do?”

“Because he told me.” She hesitated, like all the young over their joint secrets. “He says, ‘Politics is the best mob.’”

A coarse hoot of laughter burst from him. He couldn’t help it, almost in allegiance with what that tough had said. And at the word “mob” on her milk-fed, fastidious tongue. “Maybe he should join your club.”

Too late, he saw his mistake. How did they do it?—she hadn’t changed expression in the slightest. Yet behind it, she had closed. “I beg your pardon,” he said. He reached out and patted her. She allowed it. “Really I laughed—because he’s so damn right.” In fealty, he offered her the “damn.”

“He’s alone,” she said. “He didn’t even know how old he was. Until today.” But her tone was cold, without sentiment. Were there no kittens, any more?