New Yorkers (65 page)

For the other half of the day, eat or not, he must fend for himself; she never inquired how. The dinners only were her obligation. What happened between the two of them afterwards took place without regard for illness or health. When she had to serve late at the Mannixes, she brought him his dinner at midnight, or extra the night before. She had missed only once. Once, ten years ago—no, eleven—at the mistress’s death, she’d had to telephone to Popich that she wouldn’t be there. Yesterday, and all the day before, she hadn’t phoned.

On the dresser, she saw now, as if out of a new corner of her eye, that there was nothing of hers. Bankbooks, burial insurance, wardrobe, everything was in her room in the other house; for seventeen years she’d come here in the clothes she stood in, never carrying even an umbrella between the two. She shivered now, remembering who the insurance was in benefit of, something she had known she must never tell the master.

As her husband ate, daintily as ever, his moustache lifted finicky over the beer, he seemed to her unchanged from that assistant headwaiter at Jaeger’s, whose coquettish toilette had come from his native Vienna, where he’d been a house servant too; who on trips with his master had been to a kavarna in Prague, and had quoted her the national dishes, national buildings, one by one. He’d been a thirty who looked forty to her then; he was a fifty who looked forty now; they were the same age, but maybe she had known from the first that of air his features, his hollows—in the cheek, in the conscience—were the most durable. “Where do you work?” he’d asked, and already two years at the Mannixes, she’d heard herself say, like an animal hiding its haven, “A brother and a sister, by the name Forbes.” All her reactions to him were animal; every time she went with him she had the impulse to scratch earth over this place, and walk away.

Over the years, she’d cannily enlarged for him her own gray memory of the Forbeses, telling him that they wouldn’t stand for a live-out maid or a hang-about husband, and that because of a claim adjuster who had long plagued her for a bill fraudulently put upon her in her greenhorn days, would say no one of her name worked for them, to any man who called. Each year she had someone check in the telephone book for her that they were still there. Somehow she didn’t despise him for not taking a stand; he was her obligation. A sick taints that she could never trust at the Mannixes—a man who would live like that in the bed linen, in the must of what she and he did there! But in some way he eluded her despising him. As for the money she spent—he considered that his due, he’d say, with a mocking lift of the waxed lip, though what she gave him would be repaid by the death benefit he had maintained against all odds, even before he knew her. He never had asked her about hers.

“You’re an
honest
criminal!” had once burst from her, one of the phrases, caught from the Mannix children, that she couldn’t always resist. He could understand these; he was a man of culture; unlike herself, he could read. “What fine talk!” he’d said. “You get that at the Forbeses?” After that, to the saga of the Forbeses’ kidneys and their pale menus, she’d added a niece and a nephew of just the ages of the Mannix children, plus a few other flourishes, airholes through which she could breathe here—of them.

He had finished. His hands—resting there on the tray with maybe the card dealer’s delicacy, but a servitor’s too—were the part of him she could look at. She recalled with a start that she’d brought him no mohnkuchen, the bakery cake he savored with a child’s regard for treats from the store. That leaden yellow wad in her purse had made her forget. In spite of his manners, today he’d eaten quicker than she’d ever seen him.

It crossed her motherliness—or would have in her other world, where she kept count of all the anxieties which ran between health and food—for once to ask him how he managed during the day. But for years now, because of the pure acid hopelessness of him here, she could be more truly domesticated to the Mannixes. And it wasn’t possible that he was starving.

“Only once before you do not come like that,” he said. “But that time, you phone.” He waited.

“Do I?” He never probed as to why she couldn’t bear mention of that time, of the mistress’s death—give him his due.

“Three days you were away then. No, four. Popich’s wife manage for me; it was just after the pleurisy. She was alive then.” In the last year, he was always onto her about dates, until it had reached her—in the dim painful way things did reach her from him—that he had so few of them.

“Nineteen forty-three,” he said. “Winter. When you came back, you took the suede shoes to Moroni’s for me—remember? He said it would be the last time he could do anything for them. It was. And for dinner you brought me—” He wasn’t looking at her but at the fire escape, through which the southern light declined on the one plant on the sill, a cactus, withered almost to cork between its gray spines. Sometimes she couldn’t resist, and tended it. In the faded light, he could still pass for the one description of him she had given the mistress. “Give me the folder,” he said. “The leather one.” He’d never let her touch it. She handed it to him. The calf was butter-soft, of the finest.

“January,” he said, in the deep voice he kept for this. “Nineteen forty-three.” Inside its fine cover, the paper was bulged and dirty, with penciled droppings the same color as the bed linen. He shut it, but kept a finger on that page. “For dinner that time…
Spaetzle. Und Knockerl.
Not from the Adler. All the way from Alt Heidelberg.
Linzertorte,
too. And afterwards you tell me about the children. That the Forbeses have a nephew. I know already this. But that they have a niece too, I did not know. And how is she, the little Forbes niece?”

“You keep what I say—in there?” She chafed her head sideways, like a child who couldn’t help prattling of what obsessed her, wearing to the elders though she saw it to be.

“Only the dinners,” he said. “But they go back, all the way.” He seemed to bestir himself. “And how is that no-good no-relation, the Edwin? Does he still come there?”

“He comes. But not for her.”

“Twenty years, yes. They would be grown.” She wanted to take the tray from him, but sat on. He closed the book. “Other people’s business? Why should I keep their business here!” He flung open his pajama top, wide. “Behind my scars!” As he sat back, the pillow behind him fell from bed to floor. As she bent to pick it up, he could not meet her eyes. She slipped it quickly behind him, took up the tray, went into the hall where the sink was, and stood there, blindly running the water over the dishes, which she could never let herself return unwashed, as a true restaurant patron would. Noiselessly, she dried the Adler’s dishes, folding them in a plastic she kept here for that purpose and leaned forward, clasping her breasts, to the vista of him, profiled in bed, two dark steps down the hall. He had changed the pillowcase. Was he dying, to do this? Now she remembered, he had done the same that other time she had stayed away.

She took the two steps that brought her to the bedroom. He still would not look at her. They hadn’t done anything in the bed together for a year. She could go now—without a word. But there on the chair on the other side of the bed was her purse, with its lead weight. And at home—no one. To the house already half draped for summer, a knock at the door had come, a yellow paper, and master and young mistress had picked up and gone at once on their proud business, leaving her no way to ache for the boy she had once wrestled with, no one to tell it to except the dead. She went back in, to her purse, and sat in the chair.

“Only this time,” he said, “you don’t phone.” Yes, he was thinner, or shrunken; her father, before he went off, had looked like that. Not really sick, not even frightened, only humble, like the nags that were picked up once a season in the knacker’s cart.

She cradled the purse, waiting for the question that surely he would ask. Then she could tell him. He always asked her questions that would let her tell him whatever she had to tell. Then, like that other time, she would get down on the bed. He had never forced her, give him his due.

But he said, “My accounts. Why you don’t take a look at them?”

She took up the folder and studied its pages, recognizing the calendar divisions; numbers she knew, and the days of the week, the months. Only a step more to the words her tongue knew well enough; sometime, without thinking, she said to herself what later proved to be right. Poring over pages, she saw the menus, and like a map, the gaps of her absences. There was another pattern too, little stars now and then on some of the days she had come, but not always. “What are these stars?”

When he didn’t answer, the interval told her. Her face burned.
This
was reading.

“Only menus,” he said. “Ja. I had
them.
” He watched her put the book on the bureau. “And you,” he said to her back bent over it. “You know how to read chust for their grocery labels. And their envelopes. We’re two of a kind. A pair. Intelligent.” He gave the word the German pronunciation, but the word was a Mannix word too. A whip they kept for themselves, not for her. He should not be using it.

“Popich’s boy can read,” he said. “He’s gone to college. Gone.”

She shrugged—then at this last word, lifted her head to ask something, and bent it without asking.

The man on the bed spread his pajama top again—she saw it had been pressed, by God knows who. He might have taken it and the case to a laundry. “
Our
business, we should keep here.” Below his breastbone, crisscrossed at the sides, scar over scar had purpled with his thinness. He beat on that cage. “Ours.” The word caught in his throat, but he coughed, and swallowed it. He sat upright against his pillows, the breastbone swelling, and swelling. Underneath, the rib cage held by its seams, a bag reduced by the mending of it.

He closed his mouth hard, as to a reminder, and began taking breaths of a size suitable. “Why do you hold your purse?” he said then in a whisper. His lips attempted a smile. “Is the mohnkuchen in there?”

He had left himself open, naked. She held on to the purse.

“All right,” he said at last. “What are you going to tell me this time?”

She had been waiting for it; it was like the toilet once you were trained to it; until you got to it, you could hold the worst. She let go, in a scald of tears. As the tears roused, her head reared back on lengthened neck, the jaw elongated also. After that expulsion, her lips closed, on a sob. He watched. The mouth had barely come together, not yet to the line it held when she entered with his dinners. Her eyes reddened at him, from some inner, ennobling light.

“What are you yammering over,” he said. “Popich’s boy?”

He studied her face, as he sometimes studied the kings and the queens in solitaire, royal as anyone, trapped on the card.

The light had dwindled, mournful anywhere to a room’s dark occupants, a day taking leave of a pillowcase.

In her purse, the cablegram had tangled with their household keys. She smoothed it free. How these things were sent was still a mystery to her; beloved hands must have touched it somehow; they wouldn’t send by strangers such a message from the grave. Carefully, she laid it on the counterpane. There’s blood for you.

The posture of people reading was what she could read. He never liked to read to her. “They would let you go to night school,” he used to say—“Ask.” In the dining-room, they said of her, “Dear Anna. We can’t get her to
go.
” They liked her better that way. She knew.

“So?” he said. “Where did you get this?”

“After they leave. It’s mine.”

“You don’t know what’s in it?”

“I know from two weeks ago—a plane crash.” She pointed at the yellow form, to letters she knew weren’t English. “In that country.”

“Hebrew,” he said. “The country of the Bible.”

“He would go there.” She nodded, tears beginning again. “Such a boy. He would go there.”

“She told you? The mistress?”

She sat up. He had a glimpse of the power she would be in that other household, white-bosomed, hair a tame crown. “The—little Ruth.” She drew breath through her teeth, as people did for the holiness of their own pain. “Her brother’s body. They do not find it yet, she said.”

“The country of the Jews,” he said.

“Read,” she said. “I know how long it
take.
To read. They find him? It says—they find him?”

“They leave,” he said. “And they do not tell you?” His slender fingertip traced the words. “No, it is not yours. But I tell you.”

“Do not tell me. Read.”

He held it out to her. She knew what he wanted—that she come to him. She came and sat in the foul bedclothes, unable to keep her glance from the pillow. Side by side they sat. She stared at the cable, penetrating the design with her eyes. Four, five lines, and a name.

MY DEAR ONES NOTHING FROM HERE BUT WHAT YOU KNOW STOP THEY SAY AIR PHOTOS OF WRECK SHOW NO LIFE BUT THEY WILL SEARCH ON STOP BETTER FOR US TO MEET IN LONDON STOP THEY VERY KIND BUT WILL NOT SHOW PHOTOS STOP PLANE WAS MILITARY STOP IF FOUND ALL HONOR WILL BE DONE

LOVE

WALTER

She listened.

When he had finished, he said, “Who is Walter?”

“A friend. His friend.” She touched his hand, and in answer he read it again.

“My boy,” she said. “My boy.”

“Anna,” he said.
“He is not your boy.”

She snatched at the paper in his hand. It tore slowly in half.

“
Nothing
is yours,” he said. “Nothing. Will you never see it?”

“You don’t want them to be mine.” She shrank from him. “You do not know them. And you will never.”

“Your Forbeses? With a Ruth and a David? And the chicken soup. And—” He broke off. “No, I do not know such—Forbeses.” He fluttered the half of the paper in his hand. “But I know
them.
”

She grabbed for the paper. It came away in her hand, on his loins.

“From
there,
I know them,” he said. “Not from the paper. From there.” He stood up to face her, fallen back on the bed, her hand on her mouth. “No, it’s not on that paper, the name and address; you don’t think I see where you cut it away? You want me to tell you—the names. The house?” He began telling her, the name she never thought to hear from him, the street number, other identifications. His voice went on, opening up the walls here to them where they could see in on her, dozens of knotholes on her and him.