New Yorkers (4 page)

But when he shivered and seemed to falter, they moved, sympathetic to a man. Again he anticipated them. “Simon’ll see me out, won’t you, Simon. My man’s outside with the car.” He nodded gently to all round, as once he might have done to the court, and left, head bowed, thumbs linked behind him. The Judge followed, making his excuses silently here and there with a nod, a shrug, a salute. As the two left the room, someone thrust the newspaper into the younger justice’s hand.

Outside in the hall, the younger man watched while the porter helped the old man with his coat. Olney took out a pair of earmuffs and a muffler. In the doge’s-palace illuminations of the dub, the face between the brown muffs could have been taken for old Maine, Rome or Virginia; odd how the prototypes which men made of
virtu
sooner or later merged. Olney’s grin broke up that mask of it. “Had TB as a—younger man. It’s served me well.”

The Judge smiled and they waited in an easy silence for the car to be brought round. From the many old people in his own family in his youth, he’d got used to the worst of them and formed a taste for the best. When the old weren’t idle chatterers it could be infinitely comfortable to meditate at their side. He knew he ought to go home with Olney, for that wake. But he also knew he ought to go
home.

No, what was the need or good? The habits and defenses which two people made of the years could become an emotion of itself, serviceable, and always added to, added to. When and where had it been that her personality and his could have stood aside to point fingers or wring them, to say, “
This
makes it. We are separate now”—in lieu of saying, “We were never joined”? Her friends traveled in crowds, the women by day for causes or for company; they were social—and who was it after all who had met her in these circles, he as worldly as any in his own way, or more? They, her friends, went “everywhere” together, and what of it if the everything was anywhere, by night? Which of those complaisant, not so young young men—the good dancers, the escorts, the
cavalieri servanti—
would have the singularity, the energy to stand out—and be a lover?—the crowd asked the world. On his own side of the matter, when was it that he’d begun to be unlikely to be home of an evening, because he was never very fervently expected to be? And in time—so is a nest feathered against the cold—had more and more planned it so? None of this had ever been said. How powerful that was! He looked up from that morass to the face hatted like a sentinel’s beside him, the woolen mittens crossed, the cane for a sword. It was a mistake to think that the unneurotic, like Olney here, lacked sensibility.

“Judge…” said Mannix. He liked to hear the title on someone else, it was a natural uplift. “Judge…for the worldly these days…where does the demimonde begin?”

Olney stared. “Why—Simon.” He half laughed. “Expect me to answer that question from—from the heart? Why, I believe you do. For people like us, you mean?”

“Like—” If he said
us,
it would mean Mirriam as well, which was what he had meant but shouldn’t ask, having forgotten until now that lipread conversation, and what it had held back. Like her—where does it begin for
those?”

“Like—me.”

“You’ve answered it. Isn’t it a question of—for whom? And how far in.” The older judge looked vague. “And for women or for men? For a man, you mean.”

“Yes,” said Mannix, lying promptly but almost inaudibly. “Men…and judges,” he said, as the old car drew up to the steps. He put a foot on the running board. “I’d like to go with you, please. To sit up…a little while.”

As they took off at about fifteen miles an hour, Chauncey slid half the lap robe over the Judge’s knees, then lifted his profile attentively straight on, in an old motoring stance Mannix hadn’t seen for years; his father had had it too. The car itself, a black Packard high as a jitney, padded with amber leather as soft and creased as an old wallet, might have been one of the hansom cabs in the park now or in his youth, the visored chauffeur up ahead a coachman, the hood of the car the back of a horse hoof-slipping on the yellow-spattered cobblestones of the avenues the Judge had crossed on his way to grade school—Columbus, Amsterdam, obscure out of the city rhythms to him now—the West Side. “Lower” East Side, “upper”—all cities had these directional signals which rang like tocsins in the mind of the dweller, conjuring up whole sociologies that even the stupid knew. Tonight, for instance, at his own dinner, he hadn’t had any sensation of triumph, but in any year after—or now—he would recall how a triumphal evening moved through the streets, swam like a fish past its clubhouse of friends, colleagues and onlookers—and rode home.

At his side, the old man’s nodding silence soothed him. As the car crept north, the dark-and-light of Central Park on their left wheeled slowly by exactly as in his childhood. On their right, the reaches of “upper” Fifth Avenue advanced on them just as fixed and stationary as then. Of course this wasn’t so; a host of associations did this for him, or perhaps only a lamp, a passerby and a balustrade. In the same way, even when he went casually to a store, the lower and mid-avenue had somewhere in his mind another and fixed topography, in his case seen on red-and-blue parade through the flag-draped, smoky regimental haze of the 1914 war (though the armies were elsewhere)—a bond drive perhaps, with steeples and façades, pressing closer through a heraldry that stained the sunlight with hurrahs. In the museum there was a Childe Hassam like that which he always wished he owned.

Not that owning it or anything else in this city—even a house—would ever change the city dweller’s conundrum: was there any meaning to these assaults of memory that he carried willy-nilly in his breast, and if so, to whom could he charge them? Even if this whole mass of sea-scurfed islands, bridge-interlocked, heavied with people, were to be enumerated street by street, family by family, person by person down to the last stoplight and beyond, ninety miles out to the last beacon-buoy off Montauk—who would audit the single story of each? Again, again, to whom could it be charged—did a man even live out a single life story, so far from his own graveyard? Was this why, when old August Manken said “neighborhood” to him, the something in him that begged an entity from these streets, an audience to his life, cried out in response, “Hold. Hold”? Was a city, especially this one, ever an entity? Was it ever really audience? And why should the riddle never depress him but always exhilarate his tissues, his sense of living? What was attached to the key ring, chill as a piece of outer cold in the hand, when one said to the cab driver outside the Empire State Building, as one left it, to the red western sun behind it, “I believe the Waldorf once stood here”?

He still had the London newspaper in his hand, as they drew up to a house not twenty blocks from his own, nor from Manken’s, nor from any kind, if one pushed the radius only as far from this side of the park as the rat-nested piers of its own river, the East. As the chauffeur went to open the door for them, Mannix suddenly recognized the house, one very narrow for a vintage residence on this avenue, with bowed iron window grates and an iron-scrolled glass door. It was in fact like many on the West Side, like the one he’d grown up in; even on this gilded frontage it was a part of all that other printless undercurrent of city life. “So this is
your
house, Chauncey.”

“You were here once. With your father. You wore a school cap, I believe. Yes. And Mrs. Olney, my wife, was outraged because we gave you a sip of beer.”

He should remember it, but didn’t. Later, he must scratch up some tribute memory to Mrs. Olney; they had been a famously devoted couple. He laid the newspaper softly on a small half-moon table, for calling cards once, and let his hat and coat be taken, glad to let that other nihilist city stand back and wait, until once again in an off moment its vision would grow again, a timbre of death-excitement in his bones.

Olney lived alone now except for his servant and a daily; The man brought a tray with whisky and brandy, then left them in the library that fronted the house; his steps could be heard going to the rear, comforting as those of servants always were, then perhaps making his way downstairs to a room off the kitchen—not at the top, above but near children, like the Mannixes’ own faithful Anna. In this house the fourth floor was more likely to have been the ballroom.

At the window, nursing a whiskey he had given himself while Chauncey went off to change, he stared out at a park not plangent-voiced as in summer but stern in the black cold which to his mind became it better. It was never so New York a park as in the five-o’clock winter’s tale of the electric lights on the sky and the sky on the snow, mauve as the chapped lips of the children one had brought there and must now take home to soup and cuddling, home against that unearthly light. Or as it was now—a great strip of the city-fear, but warmed by a window, made Roman.

He drew a great breath; his chest expansion, like his sex, was large for the rest of him. Tonight, everything he saw was variegated, expanded, refined. Ambition made it so, rising past what would have satisfied another man, had satisfied Chauncey—a man whose admiration he returned severalfold. Behind him, the house, was so shabby-nice—how good of it to be so frugal of the worst of wealth, so lavish with the best, so excellent and just a house, and here, on this avenue, halfway between the mansions of Carnegie and Frick, such a small one—and how good that he was here this night to talk with a man like Chauncey, even of what they had come to talk. What secret, beautiful houses and stories lay in this city! He drained his drink, its other ingredient rising from ankles to crown—ambition, ready for him as whisky in a glass.

“Well now, Simon,” said Chauncey behind him, “don’t you want to phone home?”

Without the earmuffs, the old man’s temples were cockleshell frail; he wore a smoking jacket of a cut the Judge had last seen in his schoolboy’s Paris of his father’s day. Suddenly, without effort, he recalled his long ago afternoon here. It was to his father, and to Mrs. Olney, whom he now remembered wore pince-nez perched on a face too pretty for it, to this whole expectant house that he supposed he must answer, like a boy remembering his manners, or told to. There was no need to report in to a waiting wife. All his family knew that the Judge never spoke idly on the phone.

“Through that door and off the landing. You’ll find one in the study.” The old man had already turned away, rummaging in the bench in front of the concert grand at the far end of the room, its surface not littered with photographs like the rest of this grave, nineteenth-century chamber, but opened at keyboard and lid—did the old man play, at his age? Mrs. Olney had sung; Mannix recalled this to the pattern of some boyhood knickers he had loathed and must have stared at throughout. She hadn’t sung badly, but the song had been that awful Victorian drawing-room effort—what was its name?—which went on forever with its one note. There’d been someone else beside her—only a draped portrait-shadow against Mrs. Olney’s clear form with its neck jabot and glassy twinkle—who had also sung. He hesitated, about to volunteer all this, but the old man clearly expected him to go—if gossip about the Judge’s wife was known to him, then perhaps all the more.

“Thank you,” said the Judge, with nineteenth-century obedience, and went to do as he was told. He hadn’t been born until 1890, the century’s end, but its trust in manners at all costs, or at least at some, had persisted in him. To the latent ridicule—never expressed in words of course, only in actions—of his wife, born in 1896.

In the study, he rested chin on hand. Where would she be now—at that Club Savoy in that Harlem ballroom where her crowd had once taken him, the crowd itself as strange as anything there, with its pale, chicly drooping men out of Covarrubias and its parakeet women, one of them in a black satin Pierrot cap and egret feathering the air? Or would she be at the Roseland ballroom, which, as a nimble dancer himself—although, as with clothes, he would not extend himself to the dandified in the cheek-to-cheek tangos—he could have understood as a kind of good dancer’s slumming? But the Savoy, and the taxi-dance places, that was years back, fifteen years ago and more—before his marriage—and the crowd was no longer dancing but sitting, not from age but preference—meeting in what they now called bistros, or “Dixielands” or “Bird-lands,” listening to what he was sure was the same rhomboidal music—to which it was now gauche to dance. Or was that too now passé? The crowd, now that he thought of it, wasn’t much of a crowd any longer, or else unknown to him except for a few tea-drinking strays met after one of his office days when court wasn’t in session, or one or two of Mirriam’s late-night escorts. That too, for almost a year, had been passé. Only one of those escorts was still known to him. One.

As he made the call, the thought of Anna, who would answer, came stable and comforting through the night air; good servants did this for their masters. Usually he took her for granted, faithful to them as she had been for so long past even her own dim marriage, which Mirriam knew more about than he. Tonight he saw her plump, hair-netted image leave the two-room, top-floor suite given her on her return just as if she were a governess and not just a cook, and go straight to the phone on the landing. The phone had already rung several times, but he was unworried; she would come slowly, careful to tie the padded dressing gown he’d sometimes seen her tend a sick child in, though the house was all hers tonight. She knew all their prescriptions and needs, and no doubt tallied their satisfactions also; she would know more of Mirriam than he, though not through confidence; she was their Greek chorus, Czech version, who never spoke—beyond that calm “My hosh!” the children teased her for, and had adopted. David wouldn’t hear anything, unless the electric mechanism, which had been rigged to a bedside light and a percussion block, was set going. Ruth, aged twelve, wasn’t yet expected to hear. In the daytime, Mirriam, if home, might or mightn’t answer; daytime calls she was languid about, as with most things—she herself said it—in the daytime. At night, when such a call might be from her rackety friends, she might answer from anywhere in the house, even, if she were passing, from his study, taking the phone with an indolence not quite insult either to him or the caller. Insult was never intended—she wouldn’t bother.