New Yorkers (46 page)

Pauli clasped his long, silvery hands and shook them nervously. Madame stretched her long neck and lowered her eyes.

“I am sure, Madame Leni, that you never had to use juju to make any man fall in love with you,” said the Judge.

“Juju,” said the black man gaily. “Who is talking juju?” And Dan Blount said, “Are you an expert at it?” and Leni, shaking her head, smiling into the creak of her corset, said, “When they are black like that, they are of the blood of kings.”

Down at the foot, Edwin, fiddling with one of the small table ornaments that stood at each place—a minute porcelain rose-in-basket, found it come apart in his fist. “Oh hell. I’m sorry.”

“Oh,
those
,” said the Judge, lifting his chin to see. “Whatever possessed Anna; I haven’t seen them in years.” He took up the one at his place. “They’re made to come apart—the children used to know how.” Very carefully he probed, and drew the rose out of the basket on its green china stem. “There. Horrible Nuremberg-style gaiety. They were
my
mother’s. She used to bring them out at family weddings. Well.” He lifted his glass. “Austin. You haven’t said a word. Not a word. But that’s understandable. Austin’s just returned from the wars. To—” He stood up, pushing back his chair, and took up his glass again. “To…this.” He twiddled the rose. “We drink to you, my dear boy.”

“How lovely old-fashioned it all is,” whispered Leni to Ninon. “Like
home.
”…Like the Rue de Bellechasse, the Via Angela Masina. Home is always
was.
Yes, Pauli, why didn’t I come here before?…

They drank.

Austin, bowing gravely to the Judge, picked up his rose and raised it in acknowledgment. “To family weddings,” he said, and inserted the rose in his buttonhole.

“Charming!” said Ninon.

Pauli stared at Leni, who returned the stare.

“What hour do the children get home?” asked Blount

“Any moment.” The Judge sat down.

The Nigerian turned to the young man at the foot. “Ah,” he said low. “But you have really broken yours now though, haven’t you.” He regarded the ornament under Edwin’s fist. “Look. I will show you my juju.” He showed Edwin his note pad. On it was a diagram of eight crude circles in an oval roughly corresponding to the positions of those at table, some inscribed within. “I used to do it in England. Here, they said the society would be simpler.” Edwin naturally looked first at his own circle—which said
RED,
just as Austin’s said
WHITE.
“I think you show everybody his own juju,” said Edwin. “Isn’t that it?”

“How quick you are, yes. But no, not everybody.” Over Edwin’s shoulder, Felix pointed, left of the Judge’s circle to Madame Fracca’s, above which was inscribed: “She is only as French as her kiss.” To Edwin, he added in a whisper, “And would kiss me.”

When Edwin laughed, showing strong square teeth, his somewhat morose face brightened, more in line with its fair complexion, but above the pug nose, the Slavic crease of his eyes lengthened.

“You have better teeth here than the English,” said Krupong.

“Not as good as yours.”

“Oh, we have lion’s teeth, yes.”

“From diet?”

“Of
Christians?”
Felix extended the old joke out of courtesy. “No, no, those are the Yoraghum, the
real
cannibals. My tribe is Efik.” Privately he felt that most Westerners had teeth like baby crocodiles. From eating
us.
“And you, sir—are you perhaps Mongolian?”

“Hungarian.”

Almost frightened, Felix snapped shut the memo pad. He was careful not to see the thin red trickle beginning to come from Edwin’s fist, bearing down on the china bits on the cloth. Had the Judge been confused—surely this must be the young man who had been to the wars?

The young man spoke. “I’m interested in what you have on the graph, about the Judge.”

“Ah, yes, Mr.—excuse me?”

“Halecsy. Just what is—‘A member of the Egbo’?”

“The Egbo are a great secret society,” said Felix in an undertone. “Were. In my grandfather’s time.” Yes, this young man’s dissociation from himself, from his own flesh, was fearsome. Primitive. He could not bear it. “Mr. Halecsy, excuse me, sir. But you have cut your hand.”

Luckily the cloth wasn’t too badly stained. And the young man was full of manners about it, very Harvard after all. Anna would have his head off, he said.

Austin, disengaging himself from the bathrooms of Vienna on his left, was amused to hear the tail-end of Edwin’s remark—“unless you’re a
witch
doctor, too?” and the Nigerian’s response. “Oh no, sir, I could not help put a head back on. I am only an
economist.
”

And Anna came, bearing the soup on a second tea-wagon which she set at the Judge’s side, the dishes on the shelf beneath, and on top a huge casserole and ladle. All heads turned toward her and obediently away again. She wore a dark brown but silky dress with a deep lace collar, above a token apron which any housewife might wear on maid’s-night-out, but her hair was netted, as a good servant’s should be. She removed the first and second-course dishes to the original tea-wagon and wheeled that away, without a glance at anything above table level.

“
Sehr elegant
,” said Leni airily, adding some even more foreign syllables in an aside to Pauli.

“Now, what language was the end of
that
?” said Blount.

“Polish,” said Pauli meekly. “Leni has never taught me it.”

“Two tea-wagons, is what I said. What a useful system, I have never seen. Did she think of it?” Like women immemorially, Leni, who had never had a servant of her own in her life, when nodding toward the kitchen lowered her voice.

“No, my wife did, as a matter of fact. She had quite a hand for such things, people used to say. The tables were already here.”

“Very like what Ruth would do,” said Madame. “Do you know, Simon, she is beginning to be a very good little ensemble choreographer, in a small way.”

The Judge was ladling out the soup, a steaming yellow in which dumplings bobbed. “Very like Ruth?” He steadied with his left hand and poured slowly. “It is?” he added, and gave Madame the first soup.

“Ah-ha, you two know each other well,” said Leni.

“Of course they do, have you forgotten—over Ruth.” Pauli was consulting his exquisite watch. “They should be calling us from the airport. She said they would.”

“
You
don’t forget her.” Leni turned to the table at large. “They write each other like—father and child.”

Simon handed her plate. “Yes, we know each other, Ninon and I. Very well.”

He’d given Leni three dumplings, a reward over which she exclaimed, and saw Pauli put a restraining hand on her tendoned arm, which could have used a glove. …It’s all right, Pauli. I don’t mind who knows, even the children. You be their father, tonight.
Stay upstairs,
Mirriam. I don’t mind, even if
you
know. …

Madame was looking at the ladle, as it slowly served, Edwin stretched forward, carelessly. He’d put a butter plate over the stain on the cloth, and the scratches on his hand had dried immediately, as all cuts did with him; whatever chemical in the blood did that, his was in good supply. The wine had elated him also, giving him sway over both his reservoirs, the one above the salt, and the one below. “Was it you in the garden, Madame, before dinner?”

“Ah-ha, you caught me there, young man. Simon was talking;
you
didn’t see me, Simon.”…I heard him. When he talks, a Disraeli. No man like that stays here, like a widowed banker, he and his Anna, unless he’s in hiding. …

She watched the Judge rise and this time go round with the wine himself. No one would mistake him for a
sommelier.

“No, I didn’t see you. But I’d have taken you for a vision anyway.” He refilled Edwin’s glass. “Who let you in, Ninon?

“The door was open.”

Both Blount and Pauli laughed. “That door.”

“Wasn’t me,” said the Judge, filling Krupong’s dry glass. “I haven’t been out since—” The doctor that morning. “Must have been Edwin.”

“Anna will have
your
head, yes?” Felix whispered to the Judge, smiling at his surprise. …No grandfather, only a deduction. I have not your juju. Who does?…

“Or a ghost maybe,” said Leni. “In the garden, eh? What solos we dream of there. Eh, Ninon?”

“We have lots of ghosts,” said the Judge, smiling at Ninon over Austin’s glass. … Let them
all
watch. …At a sign from Pauli he passed over Leni’s glass, then found Blount’s still almost full, and sat down again.

“Why is good Jewish soup always so wonderfully the same?” said Blount. “All over the world.”

“
Is
it the same, Dan? Heard you say you were just in Germany.” For the moment, only the busy soup spoons answered the Judge, clinking from bowl to mouth, like petitioners satisfied. “No, don’t answer, Dan. Let’s not get into that. Though I live to hear you make a statement. And I suppose these
are
matzoh balls. Hasn’t been kosher cooking on either side of the family for a hundred years, but I still know that, somehow. Curious, isn’t it. And though Anna herself is Christian.”

“
They
are all the same to me, yes?” said the Nigerian. Everybody laughed, except Leni, who was busy stealing Pauli’s fresh glass across the table, and now sipped from it defiantly.

“Are Jews all alike basically, Judge Mannix?” said Austin, almost harshly. In an allegiance which even his Jewish friends didn’t always sustain, he hated to hear them say so.

“Maybe Krupong can tell you more. He’s our sociologist.”

“Oh no, sir, classicist.”

“Really? Better still. Much better.”

“Thought you were an economist,” said Edwin.

“That is for America, yes,” said Felix, again to laughter. “The other was for England.”

“So you
are
that guy,” Blount said, softly for him.

“Yes I am that poor scubby, yes.”…And home, Grandfather—what will I be for home?…

“Edwin. You’ve known other Jews. What do you say?”

“They were pushcart Jews. But they all have the same pride in what they are. Even those who paid me in rotten fruit.”

Austin turned to look at him. “Sounds pretty sociological to me.”

“What’s wrong with sociology?” said Blount.

“Sociology has no principles, that’s why.” The Judge held out his hand for the empty soup plates, which were passed to him to be slipped on the lower tray of the tea-wagon, Leni watching admiringly. “It merely records. That’s why it’s always so easily and dangerously for hire.”

“Jesus,” said Blount. “And I been doing it all the time!”

“Hurray!” said Mannix, chuckling. “A statement, boys, at last.” He touched a little bell he used instead of the electric buzzer Mirriam had had installed under the carpet, too far for his foot to reach. At the same time, he checked his watch, then softly lifted Madame’s wrist, pushed back the glove with a proprietary finger, and checked hers. The whole table saw, as well as the way the pink-pearled wrist was held for a moment before released.

Madame looked down at it herself. Then she touched her pointed fingernail to his wrist. Everyone heard the intimacy, though not all understood. “Your short cuff.” Everybody took a sip of wine, or water.

Krupong touched Austin’s arm, speaking softly too, as was becoming the mode. “But it’s very simple about Jews. Every Jew is a
Jesus,
yes? Why does everybody forget?”

But Leni, leaning into her wine-dream, spoke up loud, in her Seventy-second Street patois of salt fish, liqueurs and transatlantic perfume. “No, we Poles kill for love only, Judge. We are not for hire, are we—
we Poles.
”

Anna, by now invisible, because the inner clockwork of his house was perfectly absorbing her in her role, brought in the meat,

“Fricassee,” said the Judge, giving it a heavy German accent. “Till I was grown I didn’t realize the word was French. To me the dish is always and above all—Sunday. If it appeared in Hades, I would know the day.”…And the mixed parental voices of a made marriage, in all the terminal attractions of need. Those jointed chickens of hell, which we somehow manage to enjoy. A family is
made. …
Is this why I married a woman who had no Sundays?—and am drawn always to those?…

As a host without hostess, even he could feel what a woman of the other sort must feel at a time like this—the perfect synchronization of her house with its own meaning. Every dinner party was an impressionistic performance, an obligatory dream entered into by both host and guest, to help keep themselves in the practicable world. Menus, from offal to ambrosia, only set the tone; he could imagine that young Nigerian, at home in Lagos or Ibadan or on the shores of a diamond-fire Lake Chad night, gathered with his own relatives and friends around a roast gazelle of meanings just as significant to them, and as hereditarily prepared. …One entered a dinner party as one did a chartered bus; destination: the world—that’s why I never go. …“We must eat,” he said grumpily. “So we embroider upon it. And that’s society.” Sending down the last plate, he smiled in apology, unnecessary, seeing no one at this point believed him except maybe Edwin, the foundling—who wouldn’t know.

He didn’t know whether he believed it himself, and in an extraordinary, uncalled-for happiness jolted by the wine, got up from his chair to pour more wine on this vision of gardens, of burdens lifting, after ten years’ labor, from his house.

“May I—?” said Austin. Bowing, the Judge let him have the decanter of red. Standing at his place, he watched Austin go round the oval of the table. A perfect son-in-law. At once he could see it, amazed he’d never seen before what every man craved for his daisy girl—no stallion, no faun, no satyr, but a good sound horseman, both in the head and in the hands. No yes-man either—not in that stubbornly dowdy uniform. In the flesh—fine for any girl. …I swear don’t think of the bank side of it—any more than fathers must. Bed—can I see them there? I can prefer not to—which is all a father can do. And can admit I don’t think of
Austin
at all. This room
is
honest. Mirriam, you were right. …

“A toast—” said the Judge, then remembered he’d already toasted Austin. …We’re always toasting the stallion in the hallway, we who have never been to the wars. …In his mind’s eye, Austin’s white-blond head, scarcely muddied with experience, blended with those young heads mixed among dark ones or old, at that long table in the eating-club of 1916, on the eve of war. Austin had returned. Yet one saw them now everywhere on the streets in wartime, these young heads with the astral look of the already fallen. In the candleglow of aged wine-tears, the young and brave of forty years ago kept their precarious health. “No, Austin, you’ll have a chance later. To make a toast. It’s Pauli’s turn, as the next senior member.” As father-confidant pro tem—what would
he
fancy for the daisy girl? An uncle who knows the past, but never played an important role there; that’s what Ruth loves him for. “Pauli—a toast!”