New Yorkers (42 page)

“We-ell, Austin.” His father gave no evidence of surprise. Indeed, he seemed to be spreading to the question—one that the committee knows the argument of beforehand, but is committed to go through. His thumbs came unlocked. “You know how we’ve brought you up. On your own.” And expectantly blameless? “And the world is coming closer to our point of view.” He spoke in the tone of foundation meetings—as if the world were present at the board of directors’ table, a new member delicately being referred to, shortly to be urged to join
in.
“What with the war after all, and what it was fought for. Why, some of the flower of that race is here—look at Einstein.” This was from an address.

Austin looked up, to stare at his father. But Warren was oblivious, or seemed so.

“Won’t say there mightn’t be problems.” Warren’s thumbs crept forward, to hook on his vest. “But you’re a Friend, and luckily your mother’s sect has always easily—”

How Warren had always enjoyed his wife’s Quakerism, on the grounds of which so many family avenues were left open, all the while his own mild Fenno churchship was excused from blame! “But it isn’t as if the girl were an unknown.”

Austin felt his hands drop to his sides, almost military. At the same time, though he was rooted motionless, he had the sensation of rising to his toes.

“After all, you two have known each other, what is it the British say—‘from the schoolroom.’” His father chuckled. “Why, your mother and I often said—the Mannixes fed you more often than we did.” His hands slipped into pockets. “And ’tisn’t as if we hadn’t—your mother saw her dance at a benefit, years ago. “The little Mannix girl is lovely,’ your mother said, way back then. And I met
him
once or twice of course in the war work, over there. Why, even your sister Alice—she and the girl went to the same dancing school.” His father coughed. “Alice not for as long, of course—I understand the little—your friend wants to be professional. But all the girls do these days, don’t they? And give it up just the same, when the family comes along. Your own mother.”

Alice was his middle sister. And until his own birth, his mother had indeed worked as a volunteer among the respectable poor of Philadelphia.

“Well, Austin? Hope that answers your question.” Warren fiddled a fingernail on the mantel, producing a dull, cricket-summoning sound. The rhythm became clearer. Tyumpity tump, tump tump. Tyumpity
tump,
tump tump. Warren had been with the Fighting 49th. And had returned with it, straight up Fifth Avenue, from Washington Square. And France, of course. “As I say—you know how you’ve been brought up.”

Now and then before the eyes of one or the other of one’s progeny, usually caught when alone, and on the brink of something which either family intelligences, or even progeny itself, eager and trustful of advice, had revealed—the whole Fenno fan of mutual funds and ideas
freely
expended was unfurled. All without obligation.

“It isn’t our war,” said his father, as if suddenly. “But it’s wartime. Not the worst time to marry. Not the worst time to marry—somebody we know.’”

So there it was. And there was always this informative little coda too. Which led up—and back—to why his father, after the phone call, had lingered on. He felt ten years old, fifteen—or eighteen, when he had come in dead drunk for the first time in his life—and twenty-four.

Suddenly, without meaning to, his father looked into his eyes, and Austin saw in his father’s, large and yet humiliated or humble, what always got to him at these moments i—his father’s terror of not being as good as he had set out to be, not as good as one said one was. A small terror, Austin suspected, compared to what those sufferers, the Mannixes, were capable of. But one he shared.

“Your mother and I would take it as a great compliment,” said Warren, “if you cared to bring the young lady to tea.”

There was no explanation he could give at this moment; it would take a recounting of all his other life in that household, of all that hadn’t been said yet even to himself. “Thank you, I—can’t. I never have before, you know. Brought her here.” He gave it up. “We haven’t ever spoken, you see. I haven’t. We haven’t even seen each other, for over a year.” That quick trip to London—for the job as well of course—before going overseas; he saw now that it was no wonder if his father had thought on other matters. “I couldn’t—unless it was
after
,” he said. So it was practically a promise, never to be exacted, of course, unless from himself.

“Dear me,” said his father, “Have
I
spoken too soon?” But it was mildly clear that he thought he hadn’t, at all.

“Father—” said Austin, trembling. He had imagined this—out there. “In Korea. Out there. I—”

His father’s eyes closed like shutters. “Austin. Do me a favor. Don’t talk to me about the
war.
Some time or other later. But not now. We had a pair of those little Hiroshima girls in the office yesterday—the ones brought here for rehabilitation. They kept bowing—in their bandages. They bowed themselves out the door.” He rested a hand on his son’s shoulder, that mock uniform. He would not have gone to war again himself; he always said so. “I know what you’ve been through. One of the reasons why we thought—But not today, Austin. Not today.”

Austin had been trained to recover his emotional manners very quickly. In a family of eight, who, jolly and unrepressed as they were on occasion, lived without “scenes,” it couldn’t be otherwise.

“Sure.” He was rather proud of a father more complicated than he had thought. There was so much of home—the overtones and inflections which even this household had—that he’d forgotten. Perhaps Fennos tended to oversimplify themselves. Or perhaps he was not the maverick he had begun to think.

He’d even been tactfully able to end their talk without awkwardness. “Too bad about that tweedy nursemaid down at the office. Male or female?”

His father winked, before going off to patronize the new bath. “That is still to be decided.”

Left behind, Austin kicked at the fan on the floor, now a ruin. He must remember to tell someone that Caesar, the one remaining dog, was not responsible. His kid sister would have to make a new one—the way she made jokes. Luckily, she was still young enough to know how.

As he was going out, encountering his mother, ready in her gray satin and handsomely blued hair to go out with his father to a theatre party, he told her. If she knew, by this or other means, that he and his father had had a little talk, she gave no sign of it. “Poor dear Caesar,” she said.

They had a drink together. He had already told her where he was due for dinner, but she made no mention of this either. As he went out the door, she told him—as she told any and all of her children when they set out for the toils and lures of society—that he looked wonderful.

And there, down the long block, almost at the corner of the avenue, was the Mannix house. He liked walking to the houses of friends who had houses like these in common with him, liked arriving, light and easy on his own good shoe leather—at least his home shoes still fitted him—to be let in, not by the flunky-of-the-week sent by the Elevator Operators Union, but by some ample Anna or Lutie, opening an old-fashioned, civilized door. Otherwise, the city itself, for itself, meant nothing much to him; it was the sum of the mechanics, sometimes efficient but getting dirtier and dirtier, in which by day the office and its good works are maintained, and by night “society” carried on by electric light those seasons which had so little to do with the weather. The city was his home of course, but he would never think of walking there for pleasure, even with a girl. The real homes for that use were the Wiscassets, even if these days they hung in the mind like the coal dealers’ Christmas calendars—hooked on the pantry wall last December 31st, and scarcely since ever turned. Up there, and in the “camp” his parents kept by the sea, he could still have counted out every railroad tie down the other and wrong side of its tracks; from boyhood he had known every inch of those rural slums. Here—though he hoped to dedicate his whole life to charitable workings commanded from this city—there were neighborhoods, blank to him, that he saw no need to enter and probably never would, even in the way of business. His business wouldn’t be that personal—and would command the better for it. Because of what the city was, and Fennos clear-sightedly knew always had been, even its wayside meditation ought not to be too trusted in.

Actually, he felt great. The very rhythms of his flesh felt biblical; he wondered whether this wasn’t the case with all “soldiers” who had been saved. Out of the bowel of the bloodletting—temporarily—suffer them to come unto me, to clean underwear and bathrooms without violation, for a home leave.

Just short of the house, he halted. For a moment, the house after a year was his again, alone.

It was where his nostalgias were kept. Before tonight, he hadn’t been sure of this. That lamp over the stoop hadn’t been stolen by Bedouins; the inner lamps were lit too. Anna’s window boxes were in full flair, their ceaseless ivy letting down like hair from the lattices of this summer night. On the curbside, then as a bugle, was the eternally young tree. They had a deal in common with him and his kind, this family. They had their houses in common. Why did he always feel so grateful coming here—was it that?

There was a schoolroom as his father had said—though being an atmosphere, not a room, it had wandered all over the house, in those long afternoons smelling of games and mustard sandwiches, during which friends’ sisters became sisters, and sisters became wives. And friendship took care of all the spaces in between.

Behind him, a continent back, the war crept like feelers on his skin. Beneath the skin—that wasn’t ordinarily his way. But didn’t he have to have her, for her own good? He was so good with other people’s enigmas—having none of his own.

He knew what they were to him, these people, these sufferers cached here so quietly, ticking on in their own silence. They were not his tragedy. They were his charity.

Once a century or a war, or a young man’s lifetime or a summer evening—the maverick bloomed, intelligent beyond its sphere. The tenses of the evening gathered from their spherical sources, fatal to whom?

He knew what they were to him. He went up their steps, to their lamps, their daughters, saying it to himself—and felt the city gather him to itself like dirt does a man, like imagination.

I know what you are to me, you’re my charity, that I must have—to be me. I know you. I know what’s here, in this house.

“Oh, God help me,” he said, as he went up their steps and in. “I’ve always known there was something wrong.”

W
HENEVER ANY OF THE
three eerily attractive young people crammed into the airliner row of seats spoke into the quiet zoom of mid-Atlantic flight, an intimate secondary atmosphere, like a chrysalis the three shared, was apparent to the stranger in the row with them. He listened humbly, intent on whether to disturb their line of three one more time, by getting up from his window seat to go to the toilet for a nip from a second pint bottle still in his pocket, or whether he dared haul it out and offer it around. Every year he set out for his two-month leave in Europe or Asia, resolved not to drink away his fear of flight, on the way over, not to waste his trip in the lonely professionalism of the libraries, or in hotel after hotel, staring over an address book of introductions he could never bring himself to use. During the other ten months of the year, he never got even as mildly stumble-drunk as the whole plane knew he was now, coming back. Knew his name. Knew his story, boozed out from aisle to seatmate, until the captain had settled him here.

Almost from birth, he, Casper Friend, had understood that he was a peripheral person. His mother, after equipping him, sixth child of eight, with whatever the others had, might as well have slipped a blueprint of his orbit-to-be in his own crinkled red fist. The bland channels of Midwest town and school—maple-leafed all the way, like a dull, hesitant but safely continuous Sunday—had been perfect for his position in life. By now, at thirty-five a sort of city-clerk-of-the mind to the young—actually an assistant professor at an enormous city college, teaching Shakespeare (which there, like the Bible at home, was one of the ecstasies to which one could openly rock)—he knew that most of the young had the same exclusive, excluding way with them as these three. Something the young couldn’t help. Actually he felt more comfortable with them because of it, since all their other elders in the faculty of life were excluded too.

He’d been listening for some time, with the mulling, poetic intentness liquor gave him. On the sidelines, one could always listen without guilt.

“I’d have come back anyway,” said the girl of the three. “You had only to phone.
That
only costs twelve dollars. Four guineas.” But her small-featured face had a faint glimmer, at her age lovely as an almond on whose curve a Chinese artist had brushed downcast eye fringes and a tipped smile.

She was all in a fuzzy pale green, even to her beanie, a twig of wool in its center, as if she’d dropped into the plane straight from a tree. He’d bet she hadn’t yet dropped from the sexual tree, though under a daringly short skirt the leg she’d managed to cross bunched at the calf muscle every time she twisted the hidden foot, a mannerism persisted in like an exercise. He wouldn’t have been able to see her at all, centered like beauty between two young guardian beasts, if her righthand neighbor, the small hunchbacked young man with the curly, oversize Raphael head, hadn’t been in the next-but-one seat from the window, at Casper’s left. On her other side the tall boy with the black box on his ear had his very long legs in the aisle. As it was, Casper had an excellent view of them all. The one break life seemed always disposed to give him was—a good view.

“My fault,” said the hunchback, with a winning smile. “My uncle. He’s had another try at his obituary. Left us all the same careful little lumps of dough he did last time. ‘Bequest to nephew Walter Stern’—and various servants and cousins et cetera—‘fifteen hundred dollars.’ After all, you can’t gamble your whole estate, arranging your own fake death.” When the young man shrugged, his hump remained unmoved, like a basket hung on him, or a slipped hat. “And who can spend money like that on anything real? So I thought, well, neither Diddy or I’d flown before; we always boat. And Diddy thought it a good chance to see what it did to his box.”