New Yorkers (36 page)

With these timid allusions to the wife who it was commonly agreed had half drawn him into retreat with her, was the Judge then really emerging again, into the society of couples as well? For of course he did literally go out the door from time to time—to committees, official dinners and the like—professional engagements, but must have made it known that he preferred not to dip into that other matrix. And no matter how importantly placed the people who came to dinner here were, they tended to be single, or even stamped with the classless aura of the stray. If family knowledge loomed for him, it must be always across the abstract vision of that absentee. And there was no picture of the wife here in the study—that was the omission—though sketches, portraits and photographs of her alone or among the Mendes clan were everywhere else; a large one stood on the desk in David’s room; Edwin had never been in Ruth’s. “I’ve met Mr. Chavez. Ruth characterizes well. From her own shadowy corner.”

“Does she
seem
—?”

“Shadowy? Not really. Or never when she’s here. Only when she’s away, and you think of it.” She had no power in the house—that was it. They so rarely spoke of her in her absence. There was almost a conspiracy among them—not to speak of Ruth.

“I’m going to let her stay away, study, over there, even go on tour, if she wants. Though she doesn’t know it yet. I’m no dictator.”

“She’s never shadowy when you’re here, sir. You two seem to complement one another.”

“Oh?”

“Perhaps that’s father-daughter—which I know nothing about.” Wasn’t he always maneuvered away from the younger ones here—if he had ever been near?

“I don’t have my children’s confidences any longer, Edwin. I merely keep theirs.” The Judge turned to go—there was a small lavatory off the study. Suddenly he turned round. “Glad you’ll come. Ought to have a conscience about asking you to. With you here, I may never get out after all. Or maybe you won’t like the weather in houses.”

“I’ll chance it.”

“We must take long walks if possible. Long, long walks.” He hung the cane on the knob of the lavatory door. “I’ll show you my city. Or what’s left of it.”

“And I you.”

The Judge’s tiredness came out in his smile. “City’s only a single story. Only nobody can agree on the same one.” He threw back his head in a characteristic, rejuvenating gesture, and saluted. “Ten minutes then. Here—don’t forget your notebook.”

“Won’t need it any more.” A wastebasket stood near. With a gesture of his own, he took up the small black leather book, weighed it under the Judge’s gaze, and tossed it in, wishing he had the5 X 8’s too. It was past time.

“Well! What style!”

“Don’t make me feel like two cents.”

Neither wished to leave; did parents and children sometimes meet that way in household pauses, encounter newly, and stand looking hopelessly after each other, down hallways?

“Dinner’ll taste good,” said Edwin, stretching. “I’m hungry. For company too. It’s a lovely evening, isn’t it. A lovely house.”

“I can’t wait either,” said the Judge. “For the open air.”

They turned to go. But the Judge, perhaps more experienced in these moments, once more delayed. If a fly buzzed now into the room, Edwin thought, even it would be important. Everything in the room was as always, yet hyper-revealed. Here is Simon Mannix, of whom I know nothing.

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll read it?” said Mannix, pointing to the basket.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because—you’re rich.”

“Rich?”

“Rich in—” His own glance was still powerfully enough his own to enumerate room, bookshelf, all a great man’s impedimenta down to invisibles in corners; his own being here hadn’t impoverished that. “In conscience.”

“You don’t know my guilts.”

He had been flipped the standard social answer. But he saw the man in front of him, always walking the coastline of the intellect, examining its sands. Behind him—what?

Somewhere within the interior beyond the door, a gong rang, in this house customarily a sign to gather for the one drink before dinner.

Now it was Edwin who delayed, like one of those strange scholars up from the rear of the class, who never could leave. “That story. Of you and your father.”

“Call it a bedtime story. Told before dinner.”

“I never had them.”

“Not from your mother?”

“My mother’s like the icons in church. You can talk to one. Or carry it with you. But it seldom talks back.”

“And
your
father?”

“What do you mean?”

“You must have some image of him. Of your own.”

“A mystery. In a doorway.”

“So was mine. In the end.”

“That’s a filial mystery. It’s not the same.” When he stepped too quickly back into those other times, he had the sensation of clambering again through childhood’s undifferentiated gel—and all to be defined over again, over and over defined.

“Mother, father, son,” Mannix said, raising his head. “Screw that trinity, outside the church. It’s too cheap a religion for—families. Freud was a Jew—he should have known better. There’s more to it than that.”

“Houses?”

“If you will.”

“You said there was a word.”

“For what?”

“Fathers.”

“Fathers…” At the moment when word and pause became unbearable, like the silence between chess plays, the Judge moved. “A father—is an accomplice,” he said.

“And a son?”

“A son?” It came too curt for thought. “A son is—made.”

At the door, Edwin said “Thank you, sir,” as he always did. A definition burst from him. “You’re the richest man in conscience that I know.”

Mannix made the queerest bow, stretching his neck as if toward a noose, then retracting it. “You must call me Simon,” the Judge said.

Outside the study door, Edwin said it aloud, testing.
Simon.
No one heard it but himself. The hall as he crossed was empty, but he could hear murmurs in the big room. So, as always, as with kings and their audiences, he and the Judge hadn’t been disturbed. In the same old washroom, he slicked back his hair, but with his own comb, though on the washstand that old couple, the comb and brush still clasped there, Abelard and Heloise. I could tell that to Ruth; she’d get it. But in the mirror, he shivered. I won’t marry for ages. Mannix had told his story as a son, maybe. But when defining fathers, had spoken as one. Those double realms of the personal were ones to avoid.

He was vexed with this frippery of garden visions, conversations invested always with these double realms, yet always at stasis. Staring at his own eyes, he resolved to live the plainer life of the visual, saw fat pleb dinners, dockside cigars. Yet the shadows of this house beguiled him. By such slow-blooming family courtyards, interior from war shrieks and cavalry falling, a certain part of life went on being transacted, not divided from the rest, maybe, or even apart—harbored rather, like a bitterly fed, persistent glow. He felt the bones of his coccyx move to it, to the slow bloom of life here, as apes were moved to music, and men were led by snuff and spells up the ages, to the smell of ideas,

Coming out of the washroom, at the back of the hallway, he had a long view of the Judge, just pausing at the broad door of the big room on the right. He must have seen that the front door was open a crack again, though this time the fault couldn’t have been his. Using the cane, he was tiptoeing to close it. That done, turning back to the room, he stopped again, looked down at the cane, half moved to discard it in the umbrella stand, then gripped it and stepped forward. Edwin, on the way down the hall toward him, heard the Judge, entering the room, say pleasantly, “Pauli. And Leni. How glad I am that you could come. Let me see, it’s been years.”

Over the Judge’s shoulder, he saw Pauli Chavez, slender, silver-haired, and in his usual gray perfection of clothing European style—a man whose sweetness of nature and handsomeness were both instantly apparent even to men—along with the appraisal that Pauli had never taken or got full advantage of either. He was bearing on his arm a short, thickish woman, plaintively made up, whose greenish velvet only emphasized an all-over froggishness, in the pushed Slav face, and in the limbs too—a certain outward turn of the joints. Her hair was badly disposed. She looked triumphant, ready to be hostile.

“I bring
two
guests,” said Pauli’s voice, polished, accentless, yet European in its care. “We phoned Anna.”

Then from the far end of the room, just below the picture of Mirriam Mannix, a laugh came from an unseen person sitting in the depths of an armchair beneath it—a pizzicato laugh, French as an arched glove.

“In this
fauteuil
you cannot see me, Simon, eh?”

The cane dropped, clattering.

“Ninon!” said its owner. “My God.
Ninon.
”

Behind him, Edwin picked up the cane, made a retainer’s effort to hand it back to the Judge, and desisted. He would have had to follow a man who was traveling the thirty feet or so of rug with his arms stretched for balance, or in welcome. Whose gait had a faint halt in it, but whose face as he bent it to the chair hadn’t the look of a lame man, but of one blind.

Halfway down the room, Austin Fenno, in uniform, also stood up from a chair to greet him, but the Judge’s voice had already gone by him. Under the picture at the far end, a passage of sorts had already taken place, between the Judge and whoever was in the armchair. Only a sentence. But already an absent bird had been flushed from its shadowy brake to its corner, where it hovered over all, not asking to but accepting, on quiet wing.

“Ninon—how glad—” said the Judge. And then, “But why? Is Ruth all right?”

P
AULI CHAVEZ HAD A
loving submission to what clothes did to him, and often put on a tattersall vest and walked in Central Park. There, in the beautiful, spring morning haze, if people mistook his air of the theatre, they went wrong only in putting him down for an actor, oftener than not a star, of the European kind to whom middle age was no handicap—none of which verdicts he had the vanity to see. As the son (rather a long time ago now, for he was the same age as the century) of a young maestro of the provincial European opera houses of the eighties, and of an older ballerina whose dead, wreathed name was still known to the devoted, Pauli was content to be one of the theatre’s countless circus children, those who never got to the real trapezes, but to whom the tent and the snuffle from the cages was home. From his father, earlier deceased, he had inherited a small conducting talent, which he applied strictly to life. From his mother, forty when she bore him between seasons, he had as her gift, rather than by discipline, the golden-shallow Viennese temperament which, to the delight of her audiences, had been forever peeping from behind her triste Russian nom-de-plume. He himself was born pleasedly into adulthood every morning, often with a phrase of his mother’s trembling on his lips or sure to be cited over what some hour had either brought him or must be spent toward: “Joy is in what is breathed away!” No wonder, then, that he walked the park as if he came to it from the Plaza, and could never be made to see any misfortune in having a mistress who made any apartment they inhabited into a furnished room.

Their present rooms, like former ones off the Boulevard Raspail, the Via Angela Masina and sundry other Avenidas and Tiergartens, were a bargain got through the friendly network, and located also in a not quite seedy once-residence, gone altogether to commerce on its lowest floor. As with the French flats, a winding stair led into a good-sized front room with ample fireplace, whose hearth, closed to all but curl-papers, gave a lonely passage to the eye. As in the Italian flats, at certain hours the light over chimney pots gilded a dressing table strewn with stage-size tins of powder and rouge, candied violets, tweezers, court plasters, English pastilles for the throat, amber barettes for the hair, and among these, brought by a crony, one rainbow-catching flask of millionairess perfume. On the mantel here, a tree of red-paper bougainvillea vine from some
Cavalleria Rusticana
Pauli had stage-managered, grew dustier, like the huge gold fruit out of the Paris Production of Offenbach’s
La Belle Héléne,
or the bow and arrow affixed to the clotted Berlin wallpaper, after
Wilhelm Tell.
Ranged on whatever shelf had been designated the pantry, there were the usual bottles of Orgeat, Byrrh and Cassis which displaced each other with regularity, plus the one bottle of Scotch whisky, whose level was never disturbed except by a friend. In any of those flats, there might or might not be a hot plate. Here there was, not interfering with the orange odors of smoked salmon or rollmops in oiled paper, cardboard essences of pastry, or ripe marzipan, or the vanished chicken-scent of good dumpling soup sent up at any hour from the delicatessen below. The two closets were the same as always: one from whose storage of musty bronze stuffs, raging chiffons and melancholy furs no sensible woman could make costume, and one calm temple in which Pauli’s few, exquisite needs hung clean as jewels, in a civet-leather atmosphere no moth would dare. Any programs or photos scattered about were either current ones or anciently permanent, never a matter of décor. The air suffered from a constriction of pillows. No wonder that more than one old friend come to a new country or in out of this one’s sad barnstormings, sank down with a “
Vive-le, vive-le
!” or pulled out a handkerchief monogrammed with too many cities, and burst into tears.

If one happened on Pauli there at aperitif time, well before he had to be off to whatever small orchestra sinecure was supporting them, one found him major-domo among the afternoon papers, in his dressing gown. At these times Leni, in a coverall, her bulging curlpapers shrouded in linen, might be rousting out her closet. Or, with the hair wildly on view, and always to the same pattern of one spit-curl on forehead, one in reverse on a wide cheekbone, she might be on the other sofa—though they had clearly been expecting no one—in one of her chiffons. She had the snub cast of feature which in age went to frog or bulldog, but in youth had a thick sexiness of lip and round, glistening eye especially attractive to shy men; in the ballet her nickname had been The Pug. If out, she would be with others of her sort, to enter later with packages or to ring him from L’Éclair or another tearoom haunt; she and the home she made for him were always in character.