New Yorkers (3 page)

“Zo, little Simon. I come to see your triumph.” The Judge could have chortled aloud at this prime corroboration of his thoughts. He caught Borkan, the Grand Street boy, staring curiously at this encounter—let him. “Thank you, Mr. Manken, August. And how is Mutti?”

And Gusti junior, in his white linen Sunday knicks and sailor-ribboned hatful of nasty jokes to play on the girls—how is he? And Putzi, the
elder
junior and aptly so, in tennis blazer, cream-vanilla pompadour above its blue, in one hand his racquet, the other at the keyboard of a piano bevied with girls whose hourglass waists had seemingly sent the laced-away inches to their full cheeks—how were all they? Maitzie Manken, hot in a hall closet—
Simon, do this!
—had technically been his first woman, girl. How indelibly those afternoons on that Seventy-ninth Street block of about 1905 came back to him, the tall kitchens looking out on the laundried gardens, the younger children, clip-necked, smelling of cough syrup and powdered down to the navel, set out on the front stoops but forbidden to kneel, the brown living-rooms, their mantels marching with steins,
verboten
the rugs thick as cranberry sauce, coffee pouring like sap from every corner where an aunt knitted, the beds’ blue clouds of comfort forbidden in the daytime too, the cakes and the sips of kümmel, and the ripe indigestions of dusk. It all came back to him from the awful concaves of those Sunday afternoons.

“Oh, the Mutti has her bad legs—and how are the girls?”

The “girls” were the Judge’s maiden elder sisters, who lived now in a large apartment house built on that very site; August himself must live somewhere near it.

“Very well, thank you. Just the same.” And indeed they were—like the Mutti’s legs, which even back then had been varicosed with comfort and her own mutton fat. Friendship between the two families, mostly on the distaff side, had really been a matter of housekeeping sympathies. The Judge’s grandfather, as thick in his own way as his neighbor, had never seemed to see that beyond an occasional glass of Manken schnapps, the society of the editor of the
Staats-Zeitung
, the German consul-general, plus the Rupperts and Piels, the Heides and the Muschenheims, those brewers, candy millionaires and hotel operators, was—very politely—not for him. But young Simon had only had to be with the women and children, and the maids too, to hear another undercurrent already, perhaps in the same way that only yesterday his own twelve-year-old daughter had claimed to see a Hitler-face in the small, pugnacious scowl of a rose.

His grandfather had stood by the Mankens during the 1914 wartime, when whole blocks of “Kraut” windows had been smashed, the Mannixes’ own along with theirs, and everything German from Wagner to knitting from the left had been removed from the repertory of living. Whether or not August remembered this, tonight he had come to stand at attention, even to bow as he had been taught—at a “triumph.”

“And how are things in Yorkville, August?”

“Not so good. Business going down, riffraff coming in the Turnverein, the district club too. Why you don’t come down to the neighborhood, one day? We could use a smart man like your father was, like you. You were a smart boy, Simon. You had better luck than our Putzi.”

To compare the Judge’s “luck” with Putzi the forger’s could still be a father’s pathetic arrogance. To claim a share of that luck was no old man’s naïveté, but the bluntest statement of what was felt to be sentimentally owed. Taken together, these could well be the beginnings of just that German national character which now and then had to help the world militarily to an understanding of it. But Manken’s other sad, city-park phrase—the neighborhood—could still strike a chord. “The girls, my sisters, live in that house now, August, did you know? The one which was put up on the old block.”

The big head inclined deeply, its gray hair brush-cut in a mode which had long preceded the GI’s. Manken’s wing collar and black silk tie with gold-headed stickpin, a mask of comedy with a diamond in its stretched jaws, brought back other segments of that majestic household—fanged bearskin rugs, beetling cupboards and the snarling Orientalia which was thought to be imperial. “Mutti likes the elevators too. We share rooms not far from there, with Gusti. He has a fine wife.” He sighed, for whatever contradiction? “You do not bring yours?”

The Judge, eye level with the stickpin, raised his glance sharply. Nothing had been intended; it was just a question of thumbs.

“Regards home, Mr. Manken,” he said gently, and was about to thank him and move on when a disturbance at the gold-and-red-portiered end of the ballroom drew his attention. Down at that end, heads were turning from some rumor. A hollow-eyed servingman in green livery was coming toward him, carrying no salver but the very emissary of disaster; before the man came near the Judge had raked through most possibles in their likely order—first Mirriam, in a smashed mirror of alternatives, then David, hurt from behind by a car, then little Ruth, so poised but so vulnerable to people—but just then Borkan spoke from behind him: “It’s Chauncey. He’s had bad news, will you come?”

Beyond the curtains, across the club’s central hallway, the door of a library closed except to members was now open, revealing floor lamps equidistant along the moroccoed silence, each glowing down on its table and leather chair, forming an island for the financier’s solitude, the divorcé’s meditation, the octogenarian’s brandied sleep. The Judge had never seen it before, not being a member of this club or likely to be, though he knew its more public rooms well—since the depression, clubs like these had opened them to certain functions where some members were also involved.

He ran forward now with the short steps which from the rear made him seem like a boy in a dinner jacket, or like a quick-flying little prelate, if he had had a cape. A small group of men halfway down the room parted to let him through. Chauncey Olney was sitting in one of the chairs. He must once have been very tall, this man who would never see ninety again, his head still high and Venetian against the wing-back, his knees angled sharply, cloth-gaitered feet easily touching the floor. A silvery quiet surrounded him, an invisible weapon from which the other men had fallen back. The Judge had seen old people in his own family use their age like this. They lacked embarrassment. This was all they had. A house doctor, who had just come forward with his black bag, was motioned away.

“A body this age doesn’t shock, Doctor, don’t you know that? It just sits down.” Olney saw the Judge and gave him a rueful grimace, as if asking to be rescued from his own incontinence. “Simon.” He reached for a daily paper folded back on a pile of others and handed it over—a London
Times.
The Judge glanced automatically at the date: December 10, 1942—two months old.

“Read it aloud,” said Olney. “He might at least have that.”

The paper was creased to the obits page. The Judge read where Olney pointed, an ordinary family notice, not the casualty list.

Died in action, last October 23rd at Alamein, Geoffrey Edward Audley-Taylor, only sort of Lucretia Olney and Charles Audley-Taylor. Services private.

“They thought I mustn’t know,” said Olney. “My granddaughter Luce and her husband. Old people must be spared—that’s natural, isn’t it?” He stared at the circle of men. “They were hoping to smuggle it under. What’s unnatural about it? Even in war, the middle-aged have time for conspiracy. A natural disrespect for youth
and
age.” He seemed perfectly all right except for his little spate of talk. “I was too young to go, in ’61,” he said, conversationally. “Not yet twelve. But my mother, who was already a widow, bought my elder brother Julian a substitute; that was what was sometimes done. There’s that to be said for those of us who stayed at home in those days; we didn’t just pay for a walkie-talkie collections of wires and TNT, we bought us a full-grown, full-blooded man we could see. Oftentimes, it was somebody we knew.” His accent had Southerned; up to now, the Judge hadn’t recalled he was from there. “Wasn’t anything on the battlefield he couldn’t see by the dawn’s early light either, that substitute,” said Olney. “Or so they tell me. I was the wrong age for all the wars, all down the line. Like my father before me.”

There was a whispering among the men around the doctor. “He’ll wear himself out. Can’t somebody get him home?”

“There’s families that breed like that,” said Olney’s old voice, pursuing its thread. Whether he had heard them wasn’t clear, or was merely answering from the generalized determination of old men—to break in on events with what they thought
they
had. “Families that go on breeding behind the lines, or in the intervals. Or have men that for some reason or other get saved out. Or have daughters. Parlor breeds, you might say—but there’s no shame to it, when it’s accident. Somebody has to sit and talk. And breed.”

The Judge understood at once what he was getting at, if not why. His own father had been the wrong age for all the wars of his time and had often talked about it; he himself had been the right age in 1917, but the wrong size. His own son, too young now, in any event would be saved. And he had a daughter. He wouldn’t mind hearing what further the old man had to say—but pushed by the glances of the men around, he placed a hand on Olney’s shoulder.

“Mostly people say ‘at the front,’ don’t they still, Simon?” Olney looked up briefly, and—Simon, would have sworn it—shrewdly, then began counting on his fingers. “‘With the Blue’ or ‘with the Gray’ I b’lieve we said, or else the names of places, like you do in any war. Then, in the Spanish one, maybe we’d say of a man that he was with the Rough Riders, or yes, ‘with the Fleet.’ Wasn’t that it? And then—” He began chanting, nodding with it too. “Over there,
o
-ver
there
—”

“Chauncey,” said Borkan, coming up on his other side, “don’t you think you better—”

“But what’s it they say
now,
Simon?” said Chauncey, ignoring the other. “It escapes my mind.” He rat-tatted impatiently on the death notice. “What’s it they say now?”

The Judge thought a moment. “‘Overseas,’ do you mean? But they’ll still say ‘at Alamein’ about your grandson, or ‘in North Africa,’ Chauncey. Things don’t change that much.” It was always best to bring the old back to the concrete. In spite of all, they appreciated it.

“‘Overseas.’ That’s it. Thank you.” He patted the newspaper gently. “Not my grandson. My
great-grandson.
But thank you for understanding what I was after.” Even seated, the old man was almost eye to eye with him. “In my time, we always sat up with a man, as we called it. Something like a wake—but at any time the news came to us. Two months or two years later, we always sat up with a man’s spirit. Or tried to. And I thought—what better place than with all these men here?”

The doctor came forward with a glass someone had passed, and held it out. “Have some brandy.”

Olney took it with a nod. “A toast to him? Or for me?” Glass in hand, he looked from face to face slowly. He was grinning, eyes, brows and that flexible mouth, as when first he had spoken to Borkan. He’d probably never looked less confused in his life. He seemed now to note the turkey wattles of one man, the lemon-shine of another’s nude head, the red and mauve cheeks of sport, or of alcohol. “Just for me, I think. No toast. There’s nobody young enough here in this room, have you noticed that?” He tossed off the brandy, and set the glass down so hard that the paper fell to the rug. “Nobody! There’s nobody here young enough to mourn a young man—as he should be mourned.” He stood up.

Borkan was just in front of him, not disheveled with the evening, consciously the darer, the carefully irreverent, as his section of the profession affected to be. “Some of us were counted on in the last war, Justice Olney. I don’t know what you’re driving at. And some of us will send our sons to this one.” How rhythmically the men talked here, when they chose!

Olney looked delighted. He had broken in. “Just so, Nathan. I’m sure you will. I wasn’t trying to asperse. And the middle-aged will always do their duty, Simon said it—things don’t change that much. But that’s what I—Guess I was trying to say that too. Something about the way it always is.” He looked very old now. “You see, I wasn’t ashamed of not going, when I couldn’t. Young men don’t really want to go, no matter what
you
say. Not in their heart of hearts. And I’ve enjoyed my life, all the ages I ever was.” He paused, bewildered. “The middle-aged are nowhere though, are they, if they’re not in power? And now I’m—this age.” These words were a thread. His voice strengthened. “But I still wonder and think about it, how it is to be that particular breed. How it is, that…all that to-kingdom-come and awfulness is always—
over there
—to some people. Why, I could talk to my granddaughter in London during an air raid not long ago. And
we
were in the parlor. Here.” His voice softened again, and he looked truly faraway and bewildered now: he was back not to youth but to childhood. “My brother Julian. That’s it, that’s it. Go back to that. He’d come in my room sometimes those leafy Virginia nights it was so aching hard to sleep, for all the things that must be happening somewhere, and I’d clutch my knees up in bed and listen hard for he was my elder brother that was speaking. He was eighteen. Always had the map and pins with him, that he’d carried along to the back farm in the Piedmont where my mother’d brought the eight of us. We knew where the regiment was of course, and in which campaigns that particular division had figured. Even had an old head-by-head list. Hopeless acourse; we’d no news but what came from the old men at the courthouse, that they had from an occasional runner. But every night we put the pins in and made out our pitiful little gazette, that hadn’t any more…any more connection with the central howl of it—than
that.”
He looked down at the newspaper on the rug. “But by the light of the moon that must be shining on him and his bivouac somewhere, we put the pins in and followed him. The substitute.”

In the respectful silence, the men around him glanced uneasily at each other. In their lowered eyes, the Judge saw they’d already written Olney off, not just for his age or for that fishing in the past which was to be expected of it—but because he was now too good to be true. There was light for all men in the truly finished life; the saint burning round his own agony was daily knelt to by some here. For others, like Borkan, the criminal great coiled round their instructive crimes. But a life which was formed, finished, and still vocal—and only on the ordinary level—was not bearable. Olney drew a perspective tolerable only in the dead.