New Yorkers (64 page)

H
ORSES WERE GELDED THERE
, for the trade.

Often the Mannix children heard Anna’s stories of her early life there. And of how she had come to work for
them.
Though she couldn’t tell them everything.

The gentleman advocate, retired to the farm estate outside Prague for which household Anna’s father had been majordomo, had had both a Montenegrin wife, on whom he had fathered two elegantly lineaged children, and a German mistress, very little younger than the wife, who lived on the estate as part of the family, along with her child by the advocate. This girl—a long, stringy, lime-colored child, dressed by the mother in the stripes and mauves of a court harlequin, with thin, fair hair allowed to dawdle below the waist like a beauty’s—had been just Anna’s age, and Anna’s imperious, spiteful friend. There were eighteen people on the estate, among whom the German, a foolish, gone Rubens of a woman, fadedly resembling the copy of a Venus by that artist which the master kept in the gun-room, was easily passed off as a cousin, for the gentry’s sake. The advocate’s domestics, from garden to chamber, had a prouder sense of drama, however, and among themselves never let drop the special sense of sin of their household.

No one kept them all in their places better than the parvenue’s sprig—or thought she did. Anna’s friend; the skinny bastard girl, got sugar-holes in her teeth from the extra tea-sweetening required to assure her that no wormwood had been placed in it, berated the laundress over any imperfection in the German’s laces—and was the one child of the family whom the advocate took on his knee. To Anna in her corner, a humble, plump girl whose only distinction was a father who could swallow hot peppers whole, this girl would then send a covert. smile—afterwards coming down to the kitchen to seek her out like an
agent provocateur
for the sexual, to whisper of her own mother’s arts, and on one rainy night after the other servants were in bed, to show her the advocate and the German through an industriously widened knothole. Anna, already informed of what she was to see, had seen it. Madeleine, as the master called her, or Big Tits, as the kitchen did, could tie bells on them, and twitch them to a rhythm, if not a tune. Through the hole, the daughter breathing down her neck in back, Anna saw the brown teat long as an udder, heard the bell. Neither had waited to see the whole performance, if there was any; the daughter had been so eager to get away and talk about it. In the kitchen, over the pan of yogurt to which the girl had access, and for which dainty, when sprinkled from a bag of chocolate shot always in the friend’s pocket, Anna had a sick weakness, she was asked to bear witness to having seen two bells. But Anna, whose father had that day gone off to the lung sanatorium, had replied in a rare outburst, “I saw only one.”

That had had little to do anyway with the spaniels which were always being kicked, for sucking themselves bright red, in the kitchen, or the master’s rage when a farmhand was caught with an animal—or the gardener’s wink that had convulsed the staff: “Bred stock; too!”—or with the cow’s lowing, clover breath, on her way to the bull. The kitchen was what mattered to Anna, the white air of its fall mornings nourished by the blood oranges on the dresser, all the safe, slow fruit of its seasons, the tickling pot of its afternoons. The whole while she was saving for America, she was scarcely frightened; she was on her way to some kitchen there.

Once in New York City, shut up alone as cook-general to a fourteenth-floor box kitchen in which after a week the refrigerator was a scorn, the four-burner never a friend, the one grocery cabinet a parched amazement—and the middle-aged, dollar-colored brother and sister who owned all this scarcely an afterthought—she began dreaming, night after night. And of all things (with all the rest of the estate to think about, animals, land, privies and women, all smelling high as its blessed cheeses, prickly to strangers as its own hedges, there on the opposite realm of the world), of one thing only, the Montenegrin. A tall, monkish woman, the order of
her
laces was never in question, nor her beauty challenged by the growth of down on lip and jaw. When she dined downstairs, rigidly fair to all at the tureens, the harlequin was for once quiet. When she had a migraine, her own children spent hours with her in the suite from which their peals of laughter were never censored; afterwards, during her angelic recoveries; the maids fought one another for the chance of a charmed remark from those pillows, for the privilege of taking it its tisane.

In New York, Anna, waiting for the grocery order which was telephoned for her, or walking the dog, the only time she was expected to go outdoors except Sunday, thought of her—the Montenegrin—as the gentry had always been heard to call her. The Montenegrin had never gone out, though she could have come and gone as she pleased, and had never had a dog, though in other ways she had been herself round the clock; the male servants’ other name for her had been “the angel without legs.” Anna remembered her, as through a knothole.

At the employment agency, the harassed woman who spoke Czech said to Anna, “I can’t understand you girls, that’s Park Avenue, Mr. and Miss Forbes, and the pay as good as you’ll get, even from the Jews,” but Anna came every week now as to a clinic, walking the dog. She was watching. Once, twice, in the line of armchairs where sat waiting clients, she saw Mirriam Mannix, who required an “experienced.” The third time—she had been praying all week and had dared to come out without the dog—she had gone down on her knees to the dark young woman with the arched nose, sitting there in her riding boots, all in plain black except for the Horsewoman’s jabot of a lace any decent girl from Prague would recognize, above it the wild migraine, bold and remote, of those eyes. Anna, having no English as yet, had dared to touch the starched jabot, shaking her head over it; she could do better, she made that clear. Then she spoke the one word which surely she and this woman would have between them. “Madame.”

They were her aristocrats. At first, her young feeling for “the fine ones”—and for these four of them who were her portion expressed itself as promised, in a severe care of their personal effects, not for their adornment alone, also for a mutual honor’s sake; the thirty pairs of curtains inherited with the brownstone house were part of an escutcheon reassuring her of the quality of those she served. In time she came to scorn certain gifts, or even a family purchase, as not good enough for the house. The butcher knew her arrogance. In her middle age, she began to express her very sense of time passing, in the solid, impregnable cuisine with which she bound herself—to “them.” By then, the mutual psychology was fixed. Both sides knew.

They “loved” her remotely enough so that she could be sure it would last, and would require of her that “best” which she had been taught she must give but might need help in holding to—obligation was the real emotion in her life. In turn, she expected “them” to be above certain things—and with the secret, deep
Hola!
of the stable and the keyhole, felt them capable of anything. For they were the only wildness she had. And like babies, must be protected from the consequences of it. Having had no mother, she became, in a stately way, the more motherly herself: “As peasants of good temper invariably do, Si; the hysteria of us women who from that same history are incapable of it, is reserved for the
haute bourgeoise.”

When the crime came, she was ready to be part of the concealing circle of family. As they knew. She felt confirmed by the deed, in a course that was familial—there was now a special sin in the household. As the children puzzledly made note, it was only afterwards that she became at times satirical. This was necessary, for balance. She knew. All. And in the smallness of the staff here, had no one to tell it to. From room to room, she grew used to her mistress’s pictured eyes saying to her, “Anna, you know all about it. My accident.” As those eyes followed her, in the housecleaning which was her meditation, she wondered hungrily if they knew that their accident had deprived her, Anna, of her only confidant. For any servant has to have a hutch of her own, according to her nature. And a day off, in which to do there what she will surely rue. To exert her own appetites and shames. And those Montenegrin eyes had been told of it.

On a day some twenty years later, and two weeks after the first cable came to Judge Mannix about his son, Anna walked over—as in recent years she could do most afternoons—to her own habitat. In the way of neighborhoods in this city, it was only a few blocks in one direction, then another. No one, outside the Mannix household or in it, now knew of this place. If she died in it, under that other name, “they” would be safe; she thought of it that way still.

Once, in the earliest years, on her way back to the Mannixes from her first place of her own, only a furnished hole, she’d passed their dressmaker and her sister, the Halecsys, and had had presence of mind enough to duck into a cheese store, midway between the neighborhoods, where she was known only in her capacity as servant. In the store, she had stood bemused. That night she had gone to the mistress.

“Since when! Anna! Two years! Why—we would have given you a wedding!”

She felt the heat pinken even her arms, and fixed her glance on them, clasping tight the afternoon’s swollen, aroused glands in her breasts, knitting close her thighs.

After that the mistress said only, “You
are…
though? And since when did you know you want to keep it—dark?”

But she had never been able to say since when, even to herself, and finally said, “Since the cheese store.”

The mistress asked only once more, “But you’re not—there’s no child?” and receiving Anna’s mum headshake had intruded no further.

But in time, she came to know everything, which wasn’t much, and didn’t change. On Thursdays, Mrs. Mannix often came and stood in the pantry, clasping her own breasts, said in a low voice, “Do you need anything?” and left again. Once the two of them, coming in late at night alone, met at the door (Anna just out of the taxi she took back on certain nights only), and the mistress said like a conspirator, “Are
you
all right?”, flashed a naked smile at her, and went on by. Bonus afternoons became regular, and sudden sums for nothing done extra—“For the flower arrangements,” the mistress said once. Nothing more was said. But
she
knew. Had known.

Two corners from her own place, Anna stopped at a bistro named Auf dem Schwarzen Adler to pick up an order of sauerbraten, purple cabbage, and a pint of, beer. In all the years, she’d never cooked a morsel over here; there was a stove in the place but nausea locked it; she couldn’t mix food with what else was over here, nor make a kitchen of it.

“Tomorrow’s order?” said the waitress, leaning on a zinc table.

Anna grasped the table edge also, holding the tray in the other arm. Days at the Mannix household passed lovingly between the tasks, like between the hedges at Praha. In steady imitation, she had created here also a routine that squeezed, but let her by. At moments like this one, she came out into a wilderness, of no fences. And this time there was no one to tell, except the portraits. Over the wires of the past came the voice of the mistress at telephone, a practiced glide, refusing anything from a dinner to a person; God knows what posts
she
had squeezed through, until the last.

“Nothing,” said Anna. “Nothing for tomorrow. I’ll let you know.”

The builder of the house she entered, a tenement with “inside” water, had had the ghost of a brownstone in his memory, even to tin ceilings pressed in a fleur-de-lys that took the place of the Mannix plaster roses; it was natural, just as the fiber trunk Anna had brought across the water had been patterned after the family’s great leathern steamers, with a paper lining, to their cretonne. Going up the stoop, she felt herself note with stealth, that Popich’s Upholstery, whose owner lived in the first-floor back and went weekends to the brother on the shore, was already closed. From the neat hallway beyond the mailboxes, stairs led up five flights, each floor divided in half.

At the third-floor back, she stopped, wishing as always that the door didn’t open direct into the bedroom. But it was the bigger room, had the fire escape and window. Beyond it, joined by a hall sink, washtub and toilet, was a windowless. backroom of a sort other tenants in the line used for sleeping. An armchair was kept there and a radio, a bottle of schnapps for any faintness after the clinic, a real leather shaker for dice, never used, and usually some old raffle stubs from the Turnverein. She weighed the tray in an arm, feeling for her key in her purse, where the cablegram also lay. Two weeks ago the master had called her in to tell her that David’s plane had been lost. But the strangeness had only begun today, when she had picked up the yellow paper dropped in their travel haste in front of the wardrobe in the Master’s bedroom—and had stolen it. For herself—in imitation of what, she couldn’t say.

The man on the bed was sitting up, propped on his many tobacco-yellowed pillows, stained at their centers with his hours of catarrhal sleep; if ever any blood came—from the nose only, she was sure of it—he left that too. Two minutes ago, he might have been at the radio. She had a cart horse’s foot, he always said—and she was sure he always heard it in time, on the stairs. How he kept himself—clean as a razor strop, the sideburns pincering evenly the hollow cheeks, the moustache trimmed and pomaded, even the back hair done with clippers—took up the shuffle of his day, all on display for her. Nostrils cleaned with a spill, ears oiled against wax, he had climbed into the malicious funk of the bed linen, pajama top buttoned for warmth over the sunken, scarred rib cage, but the pants half the time open on that sprouting animal pink, those urea-colored bags in the hair—and was sitting up for her. She almost never failed to come.

“Popich’s boy brought it yesterday,” he said at once, watching her set his dinner for him. “I knocked with the stick.” It was feigned between them that the stick could be heard three flights down, just as it was kept up that he never went out, except to the clinic or the barber. On the bureau was the clinic visit book, prominently displayed—but she never asked any more what the doctor said—along with the cards with which he played solitaire, and the buffer for his mooned, sharp nails. Sometimes she imagined that he even still waitered as an extra at the hofbrau where she had first met him; the union card and book were on the dresser scarf too. She could have reached for it, or for the thick leather folder he said was his “accounts.” What he really gambled with or on, she never knew or asked, only that it was hot with those soiled cards, those unused dice. She thought of the gambling as a sinkhole, swelling with the weather or his illness, toward days when he would say, “They’re going to collapse the lung again,” or “I must have extra, the doctor said”; then she would give him the money, to vanish into the sinkhole. Maybe he won, too. She still paid the rent and expenses here, but wouldn’t have a phone of their own. His operations had all been years ago, but the rest was long since routine. Sometimes he gave her leave—or command—not to come, saying he was well enough. When he said he wasn’t well—as for more than a year now—she came with the dinner, every night.