New Yorkers (54 page)

“Grouse,” said Pauli, doting, as she kissed him. “I brought you some.”

“Oh. I’m starved. Nothing since the plane. I must just go up and change my…Grouse!”

“Everything will be all right,” said her father. “Ninon and I’ll…talk…on our way home. Are you all right?”

“All right,” she said. But did not look at Ninon.

“What an extraordinary stole,” said Madame. “Or is it a bedspread?”

Austin saw that draped as she held it, covered her, a thick, tan mantle, wildly embroidered.

“Augusta’s. It always hangs in the lobby. She wasn’t there.”

“How is he…you stayed on?” said David. “That guy.”

“He…made it dead,” she said.

There was a flash of feeling here whose terms were unclear; it belonged to those three. Walter took her hands in his, through the stole.

“His
uncle
too,” said her brother. “Walter’s.”

“Not to Utah,” Walter said.

“I’ll—?” She could start a statement like a question.

“No, Diddy’s going with me.”

“—stay here.” And finish the other way round.

And finally, to Austin at the end of the line, she said, “Austin, Austin, I saw you the minute I came in.” She put her arms up and around him. “Welcome home. Oh Austin, I’m so glad. You’re home.”

Because it was the same hug she’d given him on graduation—and because he couldn’t bear to be public—he made no more of it. But when he didn’t move to kiss her cheek, she kissed his. The long enveloping stole fell back slightly. Even before that, he felt the unnatural stiffness of the dress underneath. Or smelled it. War had done that for him too.

On the pale ground of her dress, almost the same green as much-washed army fatigues, the soaked-in stains had dried to the color, not black, not red, found on the chests of the ambushed—men he’d brought in six or seven hours after, too late.

“You’re…covered with…!” Even if he hadn’t heard the circumstances, he thought he would have recognized the spots, the great artery-drops cast on live men or dead. She was covered with it, covered with it. But it wasn’t her own.

She nodded swiftly. He’d never seen her secretive before. Following her glance, he saw that the others had made an effort to ignore these two exchanging endearments.

“Only on the front,” she whispered oddly. “Nothing on the back.”

Time out of mind he’d seen his own sisters cry; he’d never before seen tears in this girl’s, his friend’s sister’s eyes. The dark blood-smell sickened him, yet joined together the two parts of his recent life, war and home. This girl just turning away, still half against his chest, was the first civilian here who hadn’t that distance in her, between the two.

“Well…I can
cry
,” she said.

She was looking past him. “Where’s Edwin?”

In the slowness of the others, Madame obliged. “The secretary? He’s with the African. Walking off the wine.”

“Secretary?” To her father.

“Edwin’s—coming to live in the house. Since you won’t.”

She smiled back at him, gently; she wouldn’t have a scene. “Since I won’t be.” Perhaps she did look at her brother, to see if he’d read this. Then, decently caped for death or dinner parties, not for one moment a heroine in the face of any of this, she went quietly out and up the stairs.

“There they are!” said Madame at the window. The wind, deeper into night, blew the curtains straight in against her ruffled bodice. One arm raised, she looked prepared to evoke any spells needed here.

The car at the curb, flanking the ingle window, looked to Austin large enough to carry the uncle in state to his nephew. Maybe it had. A chauffeur entered without ringing, and with a touch of his cap drew Walter outside; the other men followed, in a rallying which could spare him. It seemed to him that the whole evening bore toward what had been instantaneous, yet now had to be named.

“She was covered with it,” he said, in his horror. “Did you see? Blood.”

“Oh yes,” said Madame, in the voice women could put on anything. “Everybody saw.”

But not like him. He leaned forward. “We none of us know one word about her. Not one word of her own. I’ve just realized it…I’ve just come back.”

“Sit
down
,” she said. She forced him to. Doubtless she did this every day in the studio; her wrists were as strong as a handler’s. Then she stood off to regard him.

“What Walter said—she’s what
everybody
thinks,” he said. “Never a clue from Ruth herself, is there?”

“What would you expect there to be, in a young girl? I’ve had dozens of them under my care.”

“And are they all like that? Your ballerinas.”

“She is not a ballerina. Not the type. The company is…good for her. And she craves—the discipline.”

He stared. “She can’t dance?”

“Oh, well enough.”

“And you let her stay, Madame?
You?”

She shrugged. The two older men were heard re-entering the hallway. “Maybe—for an old friendship, eh?” She preened, smoothing the pearls at a wrist.

She saw that he got it. His face was burning. “Tours are helpful,” she said slyly. “And weddings. Maybe she will marry.”

She measured him, columnar neck to flank, and maybe relented at what she found. “You’re right,” she whispered. “I do it for her. Because she is what
I
think.”

“What?”

In the face of the oncoming gentlemen, she murmured a foreign word in his ear—of which he caught only the ending -ta—but when he pressed her would mutter only, “Ask him”—meaning which of the men he wasn’t sure.

And Ruth, in a white sweater and skirt, came out of the swinging door from the kitchen, eating grouse from a plate.

“You look like a Backfisch, fourteen years old,” said Pauli. “Only if you had not cut the hair.” He sighed. “Now we go home. I call you tomorrow; there’s a concert.” He looked at his beautiful Gérard-Philippe.
“Ach, der lieber Gott.
I think Leni fell asleep upstairs—so much good wine.”

“Leni is
here?
” said Ruth.

He smiled at her, tremulous. Between the hairline stripes of his treasured suit, in the crease between sideburn and ear where massage didn’t reach, in the very crest of surviving hair, one saw the age of this hopeful bridegroom.

“Ah, Pauli, how wonderful.” She smiled at her father and Austin. “Everybody’s here. Plus an African. Who’s he?”

“Dan Blount brought him. But had to leave.” Father and daughter exchanged grins. “Maybe we’ll have to put the boy up. Or maybe Edwin has.”

Ruth shook her head. Nibbling her bird, she did look to Austin as she had at fourteen. Or twelve. “They only have a room and a half.”

“You’ve seen it?” said the Judge.

“The Halecsys have. The sisters. His mother won’t let them in; they won’t say why. But they got in once, through the super.”

Austin stirred uneasily; that she should know such dodges, such people, gave him a distaste. Until at least he knew. What he thought about her. “Maybe we could—put him up. Half the kids aren’t at home.”

“Oh?” She resented his offer, he could see that. On Edwin’s part? “How’s Alice?”

“Alice?” he said absently, watching her turn over the little skeleton on her plate, to the breastbone side.

“Alice
who
?” said the Judge.

At once she was at Austin’s side; how had she moved there so unnoticeably? It was their old basement connivance, silently taken up among the four of them, against the authority upstairs. Once, too, during a game he had hidden in a closet with her. There had been nothing, but he had never forgotten it.

“Austin’s sister,” Ruth said.

Pauli was calling to Leni.

“The concubine, you’ll wake her,” said Ninon.

“The con—
Anna
?” Ruth’s laugh was new, Anglicized or merely grown up, very slightly on scale. She sobered. “No, it’s Thursday, isn’t it? She’s gone off to her—She’s gone. I looked.”

“Friday, it is now,” Pauli said. He called upstairs again. “Leni, for God’s sake. Come along.
Ach,
Simon, it’s been a beautiful evening, like old times. Or new—maybe. Wonderful.”

“She must be making up her face, to go home in,” said Ninon. “Or thinking of that man’s name.”

“Both,” said Pauli. “That’s when she thinks best. There, I think I hear her.” He left the room to go after her.

Austin put his finger on the carcass of the bird, its flat little breastbone. “Grouse?”

“Shh. In June? And here?” She put her finger to her lips. “Don’t let on. I guess it’s squab.”

“Walter—” he said, leaning close over her—“he said he’d like you to hold
his
hand, if he were dying. …And no wonder.”

“Don’t. He’s got to have an operation some day. That thing on him—presses in.”

“Why did you say—you
could
cry now?”

“Once I couldn’t. For a while.”

He could feel her patience—with whoever pressed in.

“You like us
all.
Don’t you.”

She twiddled at the bird. “Yes. All.”

Again he felt that distaste—as if she might have meant not only all of them—but the world. “Tell me. What are the classifications for ballerinas? How does it go—prima, secunda, something like that?”

“Oh, not secunda!” Again she laughed.

In the ingle with Madame, the Judge put on his glasses, to see his daughter. “Night owl. But take it easy with Austin. He’s—just got home.”

“But you’re all right, Austin, aren’t you?” she said on her way to the sideboard. “You’re
always
all right.”

His turn to laugh. “That my classification?”

“The whole country’s,” said Madame.

“Come now, Ninon,” said the Judge, “you haven’t crossed the water just to give us that old bromide? That we’ve never been touched.”

Madame, walking toward the center of the room with the first abstraction the younger man had seen in her, was observing Ruth, who had just begun to dance, holding the bird on its plate in front of her. “To
be
touched, Simon, it had to come to us.” She spoke as if she had pins in her mouth, or had just said to a stagehand, “The light should be there!”

An idea came to Austin that if he wanted to leave this house for good, Madame could release him from its mystery, by somehow telling him what she mightn’t know herself—the way men might go to whores, to be released from the domination of love.

Ruth, balancing her plate like a salver, was executing steps minimal but defined; on the plate, the carcass, traveling axial to her, controlled her, delicate as a pet bird which itself never moved.

“Entre
chat,
yes, yes, and
then,
and.
then,
yes, yes, and very
nice
,” said Madame, nodding as if counting beads. “That recovery—very good. What is it from, not
Salome…
From Rupert’s—that passage with the vase at the fountain? Or that old, old
habanera, not
from
Carmen
—?”

From the hallway came a short, triumphant cry—Leni.

“She’s remembered,” said Madame in aside, still fixed on her dancer. “Or the eyelashes are bung on again…But
my
memory’s gone blotto. What’s that from, girl? I’d swear I’d never seen it in me life.”

“That man in the hospital, Austin,” said the ingle. “You never said what his injury was.”

Austin refused to move over to where Mannix sat huddled up like a heart-sufferer judging himself. Back in the base hospital, the rugged head of the unknown man, pale with drugs, once again lifted visor-eyelids, electrically demanding, and closed them. “They haven’t told me yet, Fenno,” the mouth said. “What’s gone…I’m a judge of character, Fenno,” it said through its closed smile. “You’ll tell me, Fenno. Which part of the pain is real.”

“He’s an amputee,” said Austin.

They’ve flown him back? He’s here?”

“That was six months ago. I dunno. You lose track.”

“What kind of amputee?”

Back there, that man had still been the electric center of himself. “Never let them dwell on what parts they’re missing,” said the therapists in the prosthetic room, calm as compasses among the metal claws and pulley wires, and the smell new rubber had in the sun. “Emphasize what they
have.
Or will get. We have no basket cases in this war.” All patients were put upright as soon as possible, for the circulation. “Blue sky,” the man said when they raised him. “Nice, but I’m sick of it.” Though this raising wasn’t done on the veranda, but indoors, where the mirrors were. It was done as soon as possible too. In the quiet, all the other men waited for what this newest recruit to their ranks would say when he saw himself. When it had been said, Austin, loser of nothing, present only because he was well enough to help as medic, was the only one who didn’t laugh. “Like a totem pole,” the man said. “But with balls.” He was new to the room of course. The patient who’d lost what there was no prosthesis for had laughed hardest, that was all.

“Triple,” Austin said. “He’s a triple.”

After a long minute the voice in the ingle—Austin had his back to it—came again. “Yes, one loses track. It can be managed. You never hear.”

In a war, civilian, one is meant to lose track. “New York?” said the man that once, turning him off. “Ah, forget it, Fenno. I never hear from it. It’ll never hear from me.”

“Of course you haven’t, Madame!” Farther in the room, threading between table and sideboard, Ruth was dancing; her voice was breathy but triumphant. “It’s not a passage that’s been anywhere before. It’s
mine.
” In a twinkling series of turns done as if she were on pointe, she circled the table, executed a run which brought her past her father, to end before Austin and Madame. “I’m doing Rupert’s part. It’ll be adagio. He’ll be holding the girl. Dressed like a bird.” Slowly she lowered the plate, cocking one toe behind her. “What shall I call it? The Ballet of the Grouse?” At a noise behind she turned, the toe still at tripod angle, still on stage.

In the doorway, Leni as triumphant too. Her maquillage renewed shone white on the cheeks, black at brows and eyes. There had never been such a stage-green as her dress. Pauli, behind her, was almost effaced. Her head lifted. Beauty was behind her; the past was her topic, sweating memory like sex. She had remembered.

“His name was Posliuty. Stanislaus?—was it Stan
she
called him?…No.
Nick.
Nick Posliuty.” Others might be dancing, but now she, Len, was entering, the prima. Nearing Austin, she flicked his lapel, her hand pausing there, fan-shaped. “Posliuty. Like Petersh. You were right.” Stub-a-stub, her bronze feet stammered toward the Judge in his ingle. She was dancing now, the ballet of how beauty, settling for the past, became harridan. “
Sehr elegant,
your wife was, hmmm? How she sat there, so dark in that restaurant, all the other woman décolleté.” She turned sideways to Ninon a shoulder heavy as a bolster, but the arm floated, correct. “The ensemble black, with silver at the sleeves, marvelous raglan sleeves. I remember it like it was yesterday. Two nights before she was killed. Burning inside, she was. And not even a cigarette.”