New Yorkers (50 page)

Once, after a street fight, Felix had seen a man raise his head and speak like that, enlightened from within, “Dark people, you are.” His chuckle faded. What an empty place, really; among these millions, this sad forest—of twigs. “People…” He raised a hand, as if to decree them.

“You don’t like us?”

This Halecsy was a plug-ugly when in wine. Or when emerging from it. The brain, clearing, shadowboxed its own violence; Felix had seen it many a time; he was not afraid. “Cities…” he said falsely; leaving London had been a wrench. But no, he didn’t like this New York—producing its own phenomenon higher and higher, while the classics tumbled their warnings. A city so young should have more ambiguity, so that men might be heartened as to what they could still become. A city of any age should at least go veiled, under knowledge of its own sores. The snapping of souls was what this young man was hearing maybe.
Et mentem mortalia.
There was nothing like a bit of Vergil to light up the modern sky. “You are feeling better,” he said.

“Tell me what you think, though.”

“What a catechism! You study to be a priest?” He could see him, a papal secretary—to that judge.”

“The law.”

“Ah, to be a judge. Well—in that case—” Felix paused, turning to go. “Well then—does
everybody
here have the city on his back?”

They stayed on, silent for some minutes, then turned to go.

Edwin trotted after him. “You’ve such an excellent sense of direction, one would think you’d been here forever. Is it from—”

“Africa? No. London.”

“What’s that you were singing? On the way.”

“‘Now it was the custom,’” Felix began buoyantly, meanwhile continuing their pace, “‘of the
sultan
Harun-al-Ra
shid
to go sometimes during the night with his
vizier,
through the
city
in disguise, in order to discover whether everything was quiet’—you remember? From
The Arabian Nights.
” Felix’s chanting died away. It had been English after all.

They reached the park entrance. Ahead up the long blocks was the house they were bound for—veiled.

And Fifth Avenue had waited for them. Its traffic tranced by, and would forever, waiting for new observers to be born to it, against all the rural poets of the mind. “Look up there, man.” Felix pointed to a line of second-story windows. Diaphanous curtains fell with the closed radiance of water falls. Behind these, shadows moved sublimely, with the confidence that shadows always had. Felix scooped a handful of gravel from the path. “There, that window! Shall I? And when he opens up, I’ll halloo at him. ‘Ahoy, there! What paintings do you have?’”

“You would, wouldn’t you. You’d even knock at the front door.”

Eheu, how nasty! And how explain himself to this weird collegiate with his white canvas shoes, and those spectacles, and bung-all kind of drunk behind them? What Harvard words would there be, to tell him? That when one’s been made to travel fast enough cross-world, with the iron key of Latin around the neck, proud as any Jew, on the snowshoes of poets, over the camel humps of time—such an émigré isn’t to be dazzled by a little savagery that stops short at the skin. …We have racks and pyres still in our psyche—just behind my granddad’s hut, Mr. Halecsy—that could extricate you red as a mullet, dripping at all pulses, from your silvery skin.
Language is my juju!
The English, a colonial people, understand that, and gave it to me at once….

“Ah, Mr. Halecsy, remember Harun?” His tongue began of itself in the Arabic, then changed gait. “Remember? ‘They knock at the door of a
household,
he and his vi
zier,
and are admitted, by
Zobeide.
And
she
says to them—’”

“Does she.” Under a streetlamp, strange as a moon in its own cloud, Edwin’s glasses were still raised to those windows. Mist condensed on one lens and ran down it like a crack. The eye didn’t blink. Suddenly Felix’s companion relaxed, fell into a mock crouch, shuffled his feet and sparred at him, with a mock fist. “OK, Harun. I’m not drunk any more.”

“Good, Mr. Halecsy.” He felt the social pleasure he often had had, escorting home safe some companion whose rickety Norman frame couldn’t hold the Merrydown cider like his own. Look at him now, smooth as a clerk, wiping his glasses. “Maybe by now, Mr. Halecsy, the three will be home.”

A bus groaned by before he was answered. “Call me Edwin, chappie. Your vizier was a doorkey child.”

The traffic signal changed. They stepped off the curb. Felix often asked what a phrase meant, even if he knew. At times one ceded that to them, like a handicap. But not now. Under the signal light he saw the pink sow-glare of the face, for one second intent.

“Righto,” he said carefully, as they reached the other curb. He cast a look over his shoulder, whistled. Every man here carried the city on his back. But this man, how dangerous it was for him! How dangerous a man
is,
grandson, who lacks pride.

Going down the side street, he gave a humble, conciliating laugh. “Edwin.”

“Hmmm.” Grunted. Hands in pockets.

“I know too many languages now. Going home in August, I’ll be bloody scared. We always are.”

“Don’t give me that stuff. We’re always the same. As we started.”

They covered the next block in double time.

“You rowed, Krupong, Blount said.”

“Yes.”

“David Mannix—at college he rowed.”

“Ah, the son.”

“He’s deaf.” A pause. “But he can lipread up a storm.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Lipreading. He’s a whiz at it. And so is his father.”

“Ah.”
After a moment, Felix said, “A joke on
me
it was, then. How very friendly of you. To tell me.”…And a hyena to who else, comrade?…

At the last corner he said, “Interesting, those houses here. Rather British.”

“The old Ralston houses. Are they.”

“Well—here we are.”…And I’m not sorry….

“Here we are.” Edwin hesitated. “Wait here a minute, will you?” He gave Felix another buffet with his fist, coaxing, almost shy. …Why, how charming he was when elated, or sober! The face good-featured again, conventional as dozens here, the snub nose only merry, the eyes extra laughing because of their slant. When he was brash it nickered all over him, like his intelligence.

“Be my juju,” Edwin said, walking backward while smiling at him. “Don’t go till I come.” He waved, and disappeared around, the back of the house.

Mr. Krupong gazed up at the entrance, so warmly lit for welcome. A long window box, carefully crammed with green, had been set out on the stoop. This house must give many the feeling that only they were specially bound for it. Yet when its owner said, “Come again,” he’d felt trapped. Nothing happened there except in those granular scenes one was taught to call society—in which each and everybody merely grew the heavier in what he already was. Yet he felt drawn to it, as animals sometimes were drawn to cages. It was such a civilized house, fatally attractive to so recent a citizen of the open air.

Krupong gave a short laugh, and stepped farther back to regard it. A temple of the hidden? He could scarcely believe what Blount had told him. Like so many temples, it might have nothing within except what one saw—a tinkle of cymbals, or the brass prayers of the English. Yet he couldn’t help himself—who could, with temples? He would come again—back.

He looked to the right and left, down the street. Such an open city. And this house—veiled?
And Zobeide said, “You are welcome. But while you have eyes, have no tongues; you must not ask the reason of anything you may see, nor speak of anything that does not concern you, lest you hear and see what will by no means please you.”

Looking up at that façade, he declaimed the succeeding passages, as if the house were waiting for him to inscribe them there.

In the garden behind the house, Edwin checked the rear windows, dark all the way up from the study, then urinated. The water tower’s light had gone out at twelve. He was where he belonged. Now and then in his swift little pilgrimages here, some late pigeon walked the wall, and he always watched it, savoring the breeze naked on his cold boyhood; he would never be fifteen again.

He tiptoed round to the front. “Talking to yourself? What language d’ya use?”

Krupong wheeled, saw him. “Arguing…No, I really do not believe it. Not even on the best authority.”

“Believe what?” He saw Felix hesitate.

“Blount said it was common knowledge.”

“If
he
said it, then it is. About what?”

“Your patron.”

“My—” Well, it was what would be said. And true enough. And I’m sober now. … “You should hear what they say about him at Harvard.” He said it proudly. “He’s made himself a national character, just by retiring.”

“That is how it would be—yes.” Felix’s head bobbed and shone effervescently. No gesture could rob it of dignity.

The night was clearing after all, for a major visit, with everybody home. Pity he hadn’t seen earlier that a spade like this, of whom there were certainly none in
his
Cambridge, could be a natural friend. “One guy said—he’d become a virtuoso of the public honor.” Edwin underwrote this with a laugh.

“Ha. I know it well. That kind.”

“From England?”

“No.”

Edwin moved slightly nearer, hands in pockets, head bent. Felix remained in the same attitude. The same spot on the pavement engaged them both.

“Is your grandfather…really like him?”

“Profoundly.”

Both faces raised at the same time. On each was the same wistful expression.

“Why do you think we are scared
not
to go home!” Felix let roll his laugh. His long dark hand, gleaming at the cuff, advanced oratorically, but his voice lowered “That’s why I could never believe…there must be some other…” He looked up again at the façade of the house. “My grandfather would kill his wife too, yes. If it became necessary. Just as that foolish Blount said…Then he would retire and mourn her. Publicly. Yes… But he would never let
her
take the blame.”

He took a look at his companion. The “Yes?” ever on his lips froze there. That yellow color the Westerns lapsed to when the bile hit them, how could it be preferred to decent ash-gray? “It is the air,” he said hopefully. “When it hits you, warm like this. And the bile. Makes one drunk all over again.”

Often it had been the same in England too. Drag one of this kind home to vomit, get him past landlady or porter, show him what black respect to wine and wine-friendship could be—and maybe even as you held his head you would see it in the sudden tension in the catbones, the ice pit in the eye—that down in the marrow of him he was still master of it, if not of you, that he couldn’t get drunk at all.

He wasn’t sure of this one, though, until the curses came, in a dialect which though it must be English, Felix could scarcely follow, the words steady on, in matched pairs as in Beowulf, repeated and reversed, as if the man was filing his teeth on them.

Then he was inordinately pleased—at the hand extended.

“Oh, Felix Shake. Grandfathers or not—you’re my friend.”

“And you are
not
drunk?”

His strange secretary-friend walked ahead of him, stiff-legged, down the steps to the basement door. At the door, Edwin spread his fist on it like a man who was going to live there. “No, I’ve swum through the wine. To the top.”

The door was opened from within. The girl who stood there had the light behind her, giving her the vague, graceful outline of any young figure in the soft white stuff of a summer night, and an aureole of hair in which the face remained dark.

“Ruth.”

In the light cast from the lamp on the stoop above, their faces must be clear to her.

“Excuse me.” How polite Halecsy’s voice was. “This is my friend Felix—er—”

“Krupong,” said Felix, disliking is own clarified voice. Play with his name was so often a put-down, whether or not the Westerns understood so.

“Alias Harun. He and I’ve been out taking a look.”

No, this was only a young man trying it on with a girl, in that light, undergraduate way in which this kind could snap back.

“Welcome.” Her voice was matter-of-fact. She stepped forward politely to let him inspect her, rather than the reverse. Gravely, she allowed it. He got the shock he always did, meeting what so few were capable of here. Sensitivized in spite of himself, he could tell it before these rare ones opened their mouths. Not always good people, or gentle. A navvy could have it; it came of how people saw themselves. She didn’t see him as black. What she saw him as, he couldn’t say.

“Welcome to the Mannix house,” the girl said.

Letting him precede her in, she wavered back against Edwin. “Wait…” She turned back to Krupong. “Tell my father…” She hesitated, her head hung like a culprit’s; she offered herself for inspection. “Tell him—not to wait up.”

She and Edwin were off, before he had time to answer. Either an assignation, or she’d maneuvered them both. Krupong hesitated a moment to look up at the sky, which was clearing, drawing back toward the zenith cool. In it the stars shivered at him, the last friends here as everywhere. He waited, until they’d murmured their Latin to him. Then he went into the house, carefully closing the door.

Austin, by no fault of his own, had been telling the others what they wanted to hear. Short as home leave had been, he’d learned that the civilian had far truer instinct for war’s horrors than the men who were engaged in them—his own conclusions had only come to him once he was home. “War is hell” was a soldier’s generalization. The home front required more specific for the bad dreams it already had. When it wasn’t forgetting altogether, its conscience was far busier, more objective than anyone under fire had time for, asking after the worst details like any sheltered wife at eventide—for connection’s sake. Home could take horror, if adventure came with it. What it had no time for was the dullness of life under siege.

“…but I shouldn’t. Dinner party, after all.” He’d been brought up to a reserve which declined to speak of these realities at dinner. He could have bawled now, at all the passion and wretchedness a man could experience, only to find himself stuck again like a sprig of ego, in the old society, back here. Had his father gone through that, a maverick too? Outside, at intervals, a car motor inhaled, exhaled, then sped off with an expiatory sigh. “Hospitals. They’re the happiest. Even the wounded children’s. Those above all. Everybody’s trying of course—that’s why. Every hospital out there—beautiful. In spirit. In spite of all the ghastly…leftovers. Or because.” He smiled at them. “Every damn hospital’s a pantheon of peace, of the ideal of it. Maybe because it’s the only place
where.
” His voice cut, but he could still hear that fatherly one. … Aussie, you were born to it, to be with us. If only the London branch could see you now. You were born to tell others what they want to hear. …