New Yorkers (40 page)

Many a Fenno, if he was tempted to exceed his tissues (Austin had observed)—why, his own instinct held him back! When it didn’t, the clan did, even if this took till the member was ninety. As Austin regarded his grandfather, he could wonder whether this hadn’t happened to him even earlier—there had been other remarkable things in the pamphlet, none of them to do with sex or worms.

“James,” said Austin that Maine morning, “those last parts of
Dinner with God
—whyn’t you ever give them to the family before, until now?”

The old man’s neck cords were what held the gaze now, extraordinary flying buttresses which held up the chin and the great flapping ears, lobed slightly to windward, of the long-lived. One of the cords flickered now, at this young man who could address him, the nonagenarian, as a coeval, and without insult. Austin had always had that faculty with his elders; the best Fennos did; it came of manners all round.

“Warn’t old enough,” said James. If his small face, long gone impassive, gave a sense of oracle to anything he said,
he
couldn’t help it.

“You or us?” said Austin. He had a delightful casualness with other people’s enigmas—a better part of his averageness, too.

“Both.” James let this sink in, unexpressively. But his honesty wouldn’t let him take oracular advantage of it. “Go on,” he said. “Go on and ask me. What I can see
clarifiedly
enough you’ll’ve been wanting to ask.” His English trembled a little these days on the sublimer edge of wrong, or of antiquity. “You’re the only one I could see give it a thought. And I ought not be here, if you get back.” He gave a swallow, defiantly honest also.

On Austin’s almost naked head, already shaven for Korea, the old man’s “if” settled like a late fly. “OK, then. In those days when you wrote it. When you had the St. Margaret’s parish. You ever deliver it in full—to them?”

The answer had been no, of course not; James had had the sense never to deliver the thing in full anywhere. As for the clan’s suspecting this, Austin’s own father, Warren, had put the question in his mind. And when the late James’s long-gone action was reported to him—in a midnight father-and-son whisky-soda after the funeral—Warren had thoroughly approved, without any doubt in his mind that Austin did also. Toasting the departed, they’d not even needed to reassure themselves that James’s eight young children at the time, and lack of other competence than the property in Wiscasset, had had nothing to do with his caution; the family had never lacked the courage of its views. Austin, though as a pacifist Quaker exempt from direct military service, was on the eve of going straight into the carnage, not to kill, never, but in service to other people’s ill-got, unpacific wounds. If he died, the family wouldn’t see him as a martyr—not that they couldn’t see that martyrdom had had its point down the ages!—but out of a real humility which saw that it was inappropriate to them.

“Deliver the speech in full? It would not really have been useful,” Warren said.

So there’d been no harm, in the end, in James the maverick; at ninety it was even pridefully allowed—and surely at ninety-three and dead. “Quite a vogue for those pamphlets,” said Warren; “family’s had all kinds of requests. Not sure I approve of the spirit of the demand. Best we send the balance of them to the Historical Society up there. Let them take any profit in it.”

What the Fennos knew they weren’t, excellently preserved what they were. And certainly it was typically Fenno of Austin, that one’s thoughts approached him first through other Fennos—since his own were likely to do the same.

Now returned from Korea to the luxury of dinners, Austin, going north on a Madison Avenue bus, was thinking of the pamphlet and these other matters also. Private thought hadn’t been much allowed him this past year, even though he had been in Asia, once the hub of it. He was aware that others in the bus were obviously perplexed by his minimal uniform—the blue-black serge and silver insignia which gave such specialists as he just enough identity—above an enemy’s and below a padre’s—not to be killed by their friends for it. His “civilian” clothes were now sized too small for him. Even in this uniform, to the world and its buses he supposed he was in civvies still—which bothered him not at all.

As for James’s pamphlet, and James’s life also, by now it must be a harmless part of the family mortise, moldering up there on the Historical Society’s shelf. In his own two days at home, James had been mentioned only once, in entirely another connection. Gone to family mortise—there was so much of it! But now. once again on the way to a civilized dinner party—and to the Mannixes—he could hear James’s voice, taking clan privilege, the night Austin, en route to ski, had brought brother and sister both and Walter too to stay overnight at the grandfather’s house. “Like the girl, don’t you, boy? Oh, I know you’re just friends. But you like her. Now, that could be—ponderful.”

He knew now what the Mannixes were to him. During his year out of their world and his, the whole public artillery of the world’s misery had been turned on for his benefit. So that he’d remember, when he got home to Murray Hill and turned on a light bulb or a faucet, that somewhere on other sides of the world children’s flesh still exploded in fireworks, water puddles were lakes of brain—and around him and them were still the incommunicable nets of star. He’d remember. Some sermons last. More especially, when one has been taught them beforehand. But what he’d brought home for himself—like a vial of teardrops held aloft in the sea of charitableness—was a sense of what
personal
suffering might be, to those whose nerves were more naturally kin and heir to it. Such a sense went against his grain—and was the more precious to it. For he knew that he was constructed to an emotional largeness which trained with difficulty on problems beneath the skin.

Why, even on that august field of international relief where his father served so well, there was always some little tribal pebble which resisted the good plow—grind me down ye shall not! He remembered evenings when his father, thumbs locked behind him, gloomed moodily in front of the fireplace, unable to see why such a pebble, after one so dutifully washed and tended it, should still bleed. He himself didn’t yet understand that other world of feeling, unsure whether he ever would. But he was able to imagine it now. Long ago, a quality in the Mannixes had drawn him to them; now, home from the wars, he could begin to identify it.

Practically, he was still hardheaded enough to suspect that this came of his being among those Protestants who very probably romanticized Jews, particularly the ones they knew. In his own family there was already a tradition of it. His mother liked to recount—often to the friends in question—how his little imp of a sister, home from a party where all were large-eyed and red-lipped and boisterously changeable, none like herself flatly blond, open and serviceable—and where family life was played more fife-and-drum than harmonium, and more solo—had wailed, “Why can’t I be Jewish too!” He didn’t want that. Certainly their complication attracted him, all the more because it too, like his own so different character, took its place within a clan. Watching David Mannix, he saw that David wanted to save the world not merely because deafness might have taught him that others suffer, not like Austin because first and foremost it was right, but because otherwise, it wasn’t bearable—to bleed too. In this, David was more selfish than himself. And watching the Judge (as much as any young boy-to-man flying in and out of that house had had chance to), any Fenno could see, the way a practiced banker saw the man at his desk in some recognizable shape of credit, that the Judge, for all his language, stuttered over action. Fennos bounced on, never straining at gnats. Yet the Judge, a boy could see, could go beyond them. Never stirring from his seat, he would swallow a camel, and manage it. By being—Austin now suspected—more personal about it than any Fenno would ever dare.

That must have been what he had been watching them for all these years—the way some of his own cousins watched artists, not to be them but to
have
them, for how they worked—like those awesome Swiss timepieces, signed by the master himself, whose dials opened like lips, on all their innards exposed. Whether the Mannixes were as they were entirely on their own, or the quality he saw was really part of their Jewishness, he couldn’t say; they were not only the Jews he knew best, but aside from his own people, the family he knew best. And if he romanticized them, he was scarcely to be blamed for it. He hadn’t chosen to. As artists of the consciousness, they—or the Jews—had chosen themselves. And conscience—quite another thing, it seemed to him—was only part of it.

Two girls in blue school uniforms opposite were clearly talking about him, almost but not quite vulgarly giggling. They looked like his sisters. No doubt they found his looks reassuring. He looked like them. Their mothers needn’t worry that they’d think too much. He’d never seen his looks so clearly as in the two days he’d been back in the family house—almost as if he himself could see the median outline of the mold he and they’d been made in, running from high forehead, between level eyes, down the straight nose, chiseled lips and squared chin.

“I beg your pardon,” said the more forward of the girls—“your uniform—what is it?” Her well-bred speech said how all right this sort of thing was between them. She’d guessed right, of course—his accent was exactly like her own.

“Mainly a kind of Quaker unit.” Small, recently organized, for medical services modestly called extra-hospital, limitedly open to other nationals who would do anything on a battlefield except fight on it—and as hard to stay alive in as a team of brigands. Though he didn’t say any of this, he thought she got it, already used to this sort of clue.

“But not the Field Service, the Ambulance?” said the other girl.

“No, not organized by the Americans, though we can belong.”

“I thought it wasn’t,” said this shyer, second girl. “My brother…is…in the Field Service.” Her eyes filled with tears.

“Taken prisoner,” said the first girl quickly. “We’re sure of it.”

“They don’t—” she checked almost as quickly. “I’m sure of it too,” he said, and smiled. The pair of them, especially the one with the brother, were a lot like his first girl at that age, and both of them, when they got to college, would be like the girls he had then. His only girl they didn’t resemble at all was the Korean one—and he wouldn’t get into that again. Sex for him shouldn’t be that much connected with one’s other pities. Or with a hopelessly foreign, stick-like devotion—of such tenacity without hope that it had quietly taken itself off before he knew he wanted it to. He couldn’t say he hadn’t enjoyed what he would never in this world call “going native.” But it was why he had requested leave. It was possible to say that he’d been drawn into the affair all the easier because of wanting something else—Ruth and he had gone on exchanging letters of a sort all the twelve years of his friendship with her brother.

“What’s your brother’s name?” he said.

“John Carter Tolliver.”

“Johnny Tolliver? From Atlanta? Why, I—”

“I thought you were—” said the second girl.

“We
thought
you were—” said the first.

He finished third: “—was at school with him. We used to—”

“I remembered you,” said his sister. “From his graduation.” She blushed.

“What’s his outfit?”

She told him. No prisoners would have been taken, where Tolliver was. Not now.

“Let’s see,” he said. “He got married. To some town girl, up there at school?” And went into the navy, I thought. No, that was Yortchley.

“Oh no, that blew over,” said Tolliver’s sister, in her soft Southern. “Papa said chickapenny-boo to
that.
And Jon-nuh went off to Princeton like a lamb. But then he did get engaged.”

“To my older sister,” said the first girl.

“To her sister.” Tolliver’s sister’s eyes filled again.

It was some blocks from his stop, but he pulled the cord anyway. All too much of a capsule, Tolliver’s life. Whom he’d been mistaken for, now and then. Though there had been at least ten others who had looked just as like. “Good-bye—what’s your name? Jane.” And the sister, with her sweetly curved, sorrowful lips? “Susan. Goodbye. My best to you both.
Best.
” She’d known him once. All the way from his prep school graduation, when she couldn’t have been more than a kid. Maybe that was the answer—and the danger—to other possibilities he’d been thinking of. The clan—knew the clan.

Eight o’clock, but since Anna had put dinner ahead, he wouldn’t be late: he still had time for a walk at a clip. Warren, his father, and many of
his
colleagues—the executives—walked to the office for health; it was the hoi polloi, heavy on starch—and on distances of course—who rode. Fenno Juniors walked because their fathers did, and if away at school, because the stauncher prep schools forbade cars or even bikes, except for day boys. The mothers took more taxis than the men, but often came in saying, “God, it was lovely—and I had so many errands—I must have walked forty blocks—in these heels!” The men took taxis when they were with the women, or with business outside the firm. And none of this had anything to do with having the fare.

As he walked, Austin began to laugh; he had forgotten so much of this; his clan had its subtleties after all—or niceties. And he would bet that this girl, not the Southern girl (hers would be another style, which he knew equally well) but the New York girl, had a family that did just the same. Others in that same uniform, of course, might be anything from chauffeured Cadillac down, even—in other accents or these days in other colors, in a case or two—poor. But not that girl, he could tell; she came of that indefinable line, so exact to themselves, where comfort crossed wealth but didn’t quite reach it, seesawing sometimes up or even far down as in the 1930s, but almost never taking a complete fall. So did the Mannixes. But Jane Whatshername already had the recognizable “line” of her sort, in which, from bus stop to cotillion, she would be able to talk to all and any men of any age—who could talk it back.

Ruth Mannix’s line was—personal. In his pocket he had her London card, picked up from the mail tray when he left. Mailed three days ago, it was typical. “Come to dinner. We’ll all be home, it seems. The boys are here, and bringing me back. I’ve been offered a year’s tour, incidentally”—here cities were listed—“and hope to accept. We’ll see. Welcome home anyway. Love. Ruth.” Nothing indiscreet, ever. “The boys” more than anything made him feel far off; it had used to mean himself as well. He could still smell that crayony, nursery-tea atmosphere, hear that gym-sweat noise and lesson-cackling, outside of which, tactfully off center, surprisingly welcomed intermediary—to what?—Ruth had used to wait. Or preside. Possessor of a face quietly left vulnerable to memory, she was still a little hard to see. Was she as alive, quivering too, as over the many months and a few letters he had come to think? “Lovely little girl,” James had said when further queried. “Yes. I can see you and she are—friends.” Long before that it had come to seem to Austin that Ruth, like a prisoner whose form was defined by the bars, was limned in the loving forces which silently intersected and held her—fixed? They loved her. A friend saw the spaces between.