New Yorkers (6 page)

The phone would bring them. Mirriam, like the Judge, had been taught to honor age. She would come, this wife who in girlhood had been taught all the old-fashioned compassions, and still held to them as to an etiquette. She would stand here in the hallway of this house antecedent to her own, with the assured, half rebellious manner she always had in such houses, even in her own. The man with her would stand at her side as he had in the Judge’s hallway, his eyes shrewd yet offhand; he’d been in places like this before, let nobody think otherwise; and his attitude, yes, would be just that: he
was with her.
Everything in their connection would be brought a step further, by one of those improbably social impulses a telephone made possible. What then? Would she and the man, looking about them here, see how impossible a couple they were, or would Mirriam alone see it, as earlier she must have seen it for herself and Simon—meanwhile aware even that this mutual impossibility of them for her, her for them, was what had brought the three of them together here?

He saw that vision and certified it as wild. For a minute only, he’d entered that mad, modern telephonic world of hers where everything was viable.

At the library door, he said, “Sorry I took so long—” and then paused. His host, bent over the piano, on the closed lid of which there were now ranged dozens of photographs taken apparently from the open bench and the wide drawers of an old breakfront, had his back turned to him, poring over them.

“Everything all right at home?” said Chauncey.

The Judge took a shallow breath. It was with these, not the expansive kind, that one lied. “Everything.”

He went and stood by the old man’s shoulder.

“Can’t find him,” said Chauncey. “Damnedest thing. Can’t find him anywhere.”

The Judge put a hand on that shoulder, reaching up to do so, and not only to console, to give him one of the few real gifts the old could use, to say—it’s not only you need me; I need to be here, with you. Family had taught him this, his mother tucking his grandmother’s specs into his five-year-old fist, saying, “Ask her to read to you”; his father taking him along on a visit to
his
father in the nursing home, to see the old man blush with pleasure at his son’s laying the firm’s books on the bedspread, his “Papa, I hate to bother you, but could you give me a word or two on this?” His father had needed the help; those needs, not the pretended ones, were the best. And he did, now. He would stay here all night, and welcome.

“Damnedest thing!”

On the piano, at least three generations stared in the wistfulness of all dead sitters—hoopskirted and mutton-chopped, bustled and nautical-jacketed, after these the platter hats and bowlers, a little sprightlier from being still perhaps in the land of the living, then a scattering from the latter-day twenties and thirties, alive and crude. To see Chauncey’s own visage, recognizable all down his long span, was the familiar shock one always had.

“There—” Mannix indicated a young man among the moderns, not in uniform but with a British haircut. “Isn’t that your great-grandson?”

There was no reply. Chauncey, turning around, mightn’t have heard, though his faculties, if performing variously, were keen enough. “How’s that handsome son of yours?”

The Judge flushed, an often regretted reaction to mention of his son, not due to the boy’s affliction, or not directly. “He’s—thank you, he’s doing very well. Actually, one tends to forget how well he’s doing—it’s, almost no problem to him, any more. Except that he doesn’t hear from behind or a distance, you’d never know.”

“Still an athlete?”

“Yes. Track.”

“Well, now. Your father’d have been mighty pleased at that.”

“He was the one hauled him off to the Garden, Madison Square, by the time he was four.” Why must he grudge that so? Or that David had never had the usually despairing tantrums of the deaf child but had seemed to know at once, long before the special school, that everyone was trying to help him, even in babyhood taking it in with grave, alert eyes?

“Favors old Mendes though, doesn’t he? Got his long bones.”

“Keep forgetting you knew my father-in-law, as well as Dad.” As always, he was glad to get off that other subject.

Chauncey chuckled. “Don’t know why I call him old; he was younger than me—except that he’s dead.” He turned to his pictures, alert on their easels or against vases or books he had stuffed behind them. Like a class of recalcitrant pupils they stared back at him, with all the inflections of willingness to learn except the one he could not teach them—how not to be what most of them already were. Behind him, the Judge once more wanted to reach up to that humble curve of back which was still marvelously, intricately alive. Then Olney, with a hand-sweep, sent the ranks down before him like ninepins. “Want my brandy. Let’s sit down.”

They settled themselves in two armchairs near the bow windows on the avenue and park. The Judge always liked to know where he was angled in a house, a farmer’s habit but curiously the New Yorker’s also, in these squared streets easy to see why. Settled here, able to look west, and north-south with a bit of stretching, they were to his mind in the very center of the city. By now, far from the Piedmont as Olney was, it must be his city also.

“Didn’t rightly know your father-in-law Mendes; only saw him once, as a young man. In the upstairs ballroom of one of the Ralston apartments, the one the owners kept for themselves.”

“Must have been way back. Never knew Meyer saw them socially.”

“He didn’t. He went there to buy the land for your house.”

“Oh, I’ve heard his story of that night—many is the time! But he never said…whatever were you doing there?”

“It was
my
father-in-law who represented the Ralstons. Didn’t you know that?”

“By God—” The Judge sat up, slapping the arm of his chair. “No.” He leaned forward, the way he did when about to affix to his collection of stamps a rare one, lost and turned up again, that he hadn’t known existed any more. “Chauncey—” He felt as if Olney was himself a jar of rare memories that he must very gently tip. “
My
father-in-law was in his thirties then, about to marry,” he said eagerly. “It was the year before he broke with the family firm in London, threatened to set up an American branch of his own. Got one of the rival music publishers, Rinaldi, I think it was, ready to subsidize him. Told his mother and uncles that, as the heir, if he was expected to run the business some day, he was going to do it then or not at all. So they gave in.” He prized all that history, as much as if he had inherited it along with the house.

“Oh?” Olney said politely.

“Excuse me, Chauncey. It’s just that—years later, to have another facet on what I always thought was cut and dried by now—” he poured himself another whisky. “Go on.”

“Pour me one. The brandy. Thanks.” Chauncey drank, coughed.

“Well, after the War, I was the poor widow’s mite you know, got through the university somehow, University of Virginia of co’se, came up here just like any carpetbagger, only in the other direction, to see what I could squeeze out of the North. My folks had connections here and I renewed them for all they were worth. I was a sweet-talking young sinner, back then. The time we speak of I wasn’t but twenty-three or so, clerking with another firm entirely. If my father-in-law knew he was going to be that to me, he hadn’t said so, and I sure hadn’t asked him. I was simply at an evening party there at his home. When we left the ladies for the cigars he said, ‘Come along with me later, young fellow, to an appointment I have. Show you something interesting, you might never get to see.’ So, I went.”

“That ballroom,” said the Judge. “It was like Venice, my father-in-law said, it
was
Venice—copied as a matter of fact from a room in the Ca’ d’Oro, walls painted to look like marble, and the floors like terrazzo, but done in wood. Unfortunately the pictures, hundreds of them, were copies. But the fountains were real.”

“That so?” said Olney.

“Didn’t you—notice?” The year he inherited his present house he’d gone next door to the Ralston houses to ask the tenant of that flat, to let him see if he could find a scrap or two of all that trompe-l’oeil, but the room had been cut up, the walls painted over, the legendary fountains sunk beneath the floor.

“No, I didn’t,” said Olney, sharply for him. “Studied what I thought I’d been brought there to. I studied Ralston, the balky seller, and how his own lawyer and the buyer helped each other, how they checkmated him from opposite sides of the table, each for his own reasons, two men who’d never met before, our respective fathers-in-law. I studied young Ralston particularly. And I studied—the law.”

“Ralston was one of the young aesthetes,” said the Judge. “My father-in-law Mendes had seen his kind back home in London. Dressed plain, he said, all black and white, but everything as if it’d been knitted on him. An aesthete, but a young blood also. Lisped by intention. Boxed at the Athletic Club. And had his hair dyed gray.”

“He was a builder’s son, Simon,” Olney said gently. “American. Lemme tell his principal characteristic as I saw it, that evening.” He leaned forward and pointed a thumb, giving each word its burden. “He didn’t…want…to—sell.”

“Ah, well.” The Judge backed away from that thumb, laughing, throwing up his hands before it. “Ah, well. The minute he saw the man, Mendes said—Mendes began to talk opera. You agree to that?”

“Opera it was,” said Olney. “And how my future father-in-law abetted him, just by knowing nothing about it! I can see the rapscallion’s head shine yet, turning from one to the other—he was one of those men with a bald head all one big freckle, nasturtium color. Puh. And I had to sit there, mum too—felt as if I was in knickerbockers. Which I was.”

“Mendes happened to have the score of
Aida
with him. Had just been produced the first time, in Cairo, year or so before, 1871. By this time he was already an entrepreneur. He promised to introduce Ralston in opera circles—seems Ralston had a protégé.” It had taken innumerable renditions of the story before Mendes had happened to mention the protégé had been a castrato, a boy. Mendes was no prude; he’d simply had his mind on another point which had seemed to him the final one.

Olney nodded. “Maybe so.” He smoothed his chin, staring forth. “My prospective father-in-law didn’t give a damn about the lot itself, or who his client Ralston sold it to, if persuaded to sell at all. It was Ralston’s business agent he was after—fellow’d been asking too much baksheesh on the side. My father-in-law wanted him out of estate matters. This was one of the ways to get at him—and still keep Ralston under his own thumb.”

He decided not to interrupt again. After all, was there anyone who knew
all
of it? “So that was it,” he said. “And the end of it, do you remember that? What Ralston said to Mendes, after they’d agreed?” It had been Mendes’s climax, half the reason for his telling the story at all, even to Simon, and when he was telling it out of the family, all of it.

“Not so’s I could say.”

“Why, Ralston said, ‘Well, at least this time I’m not letting in one of those god-damned Jews.’ And then Father Mendes had to tell him. Never occurred to him that people sometimes didn’t know what a Mendes was; he was so proud of it. ‘I think I should tell you, Mr. Ralston,’ he said, ‘that I am a Jew.’” The Judge paused—here was the part that had always tickled him. “Mendes always said he also offered at once to let the deal go. I’d like to be sure of that. But I’m not.”

“Heh,” said Chauncey appreciatively. “Well—and so—”

The Judge lifted a finger, forgetting about interruptions—Olney’s recall seemed sturdy enough, almost impenetrable. “So young Ralston stared. Then, Mendes said, he looked around the room as if he were tallying it. Then back to Mendes again, with a kind of funny smile on his face all that time. Then he shook his head. ‘That may be, Mr. Mendes,’ he said. ‘But at least you’re not one of these
god-damned
ones.’”

“Heh-heh.” Chauncey gave a heel-stamp. “Must say I’ve heard that same little twist from others of your co-religionists. So I’d say you were right about Mendes, maybe.” He coughed. “Well now—want to hear the end of the story?”

The Judge stared. Then he said gently, “Yes, Chauncey. Tell me the end of it.”

“Well.” Olney sat with his hands on the curled paws of his chair, his thin legs uncrossed, the lamplight in the hollows under his cheekbones, the rest of him in shadow; he might have been gowned and in court. He was sitting in judgment, Mannix realized—in judgment on two quite other men that had appeared in Mendes’s version. Seventy years later there was still satisfaction in it. “My father-in-law was rascal-rich, you know, I guess you do. And not used to all his own red velvet yet, slathers of it all over his drawing-room, gold fittings that I didn’t know weren’t brass till I touched them. So you understand why he said what he did. I’ve never forgotten it. ‘So, Olney,’ he said to me when we got out of there. ‘Did you see?’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir, I think I learned something about the law tonight.’ He gaped at me. ‘You smart-allicking me, Mr. Olney?’ But he saw I wasn’t, that I was serious. ‘Why you young poop,’ he said. The law? Didn’t you watch
him
at all,
Ralston?
Didn’t you see it?’ When I said I hadn’t seen anything special, that freckle of his turned bright red. ‘Oh, so?’ he said. ‘Oh, so. Not so smart as I thought. Let me tell you something, mister. The way to be rich is the way that young man is rich, the way my own boy is going to be, if I can make him. My girls have got to take their chances; I can only do it once, and I’ll do it for my boy. Only got one.’ He almost choked on it, telling me. ‘Can’t do it for yourself. Has to be done
for
you. That boy Ralston is
miles away from his own money.
Don’t know where it’s from, scarcely knows that it comes. Has to be done for you—that.’ He even shook me by the arm, as if to wake
me
up. ‘Miles away,’ he said, ‘did you see it?
Miles and miles away.’”

Into the dying fall of that other-century voice and Olney’s silence, the Judge said, “Wonderful story, Chauncey. Wonderful telling, too. You’re a past master.”