New Yorkers (68 page)

“No, it’s David’s letter,” the Judge had said harshly, after the plane crash, when Walter first offered it. “It belongs to my son. Keep it for him.”

A month ago, Walter had tried again, on hearing that the Judge and Ruth were once again going to London. In spite of illness, the Judge took every chance to go there.

“I’m going in for that op,” said Walter. “I could have mailed it to you.” Somehow, remembering Mrs. Mannix, he hadn’t. It would have been—like a burning. “It oughtn’t to be found in my papers perhaps. Just in case.”

This time the Judge had said, “Come here, Walter. Closer to my chair. Walter—why do you think I go to London?”

He’d reflected, then said what honestly came to him, considering it all. “For Austin.”

The Judge’s eyes widened; since being chairbound, he was less impenetrable of face. “Walter, you’re a prize. Most people still help me to think I go there for a woman.” The Judge put out a small compact hand, and for a second Walter put in it his own long fingers. “The agencies are there. For lost people. I worked with them before.” The hand was the iron kind, musclebound with weight-lifting, which the chairbound often had. “Don’t think I accuse you, Walter. Not after my first—grief. We each believe as we have to believe. If he’s dead, then he has you to believe in him, of those who loved him. And Ruth, I think—too. But if he’s alive somewhere—he has only me.”

What the Judge had said was so like
her!
Walter almost spoke of it. But he was older now to the wonders here, and could let the house rest on this—that it was a house of both sides. So when he turned the study doorknob, to leave, he still had her letter.

“Wait.” The Judge stood up. Terrifying to watch him. It was done without visible struggle—that was why. “When you going in, Walter? The fifteenth…I’ll tell Ruth?”

“No, don’t,” he found himself saying. “Promise me you won’t. She’s had enough.” (Of what, he didn’t know, except from the silences of his friend’s box, the loudness of his protectiveness! Too much had been put upon her once.) “Enough!” This was merely the expression of all he felt about her, coming out, as things did when one was tidying one’s affairs. In so far as he’d ever thought of what could have happened to her, he’d place it as among the horrors that in alleyways did assail young girls, had hoped, it was more imagined than real—and hadn’t dwelt upon it. He’d forgotten that a father would.

Worse than seeing the Judge rise—to see him draw back, and sit again in the chair. “So you know,” he said. “Well, I’m glad. That it’s you. It’s just that I always thought you were—the most innocent.”

“I don’t know what happened to her, sir, I only know that you all have always…David too—”

The cry came sharp.
“Did her brother know?”
And quick on its heels, “Don’t answer! That’s his!”

This Walter could answer—“I wouldn’t know”—dully hoping that in all this tidying, the house which even into his manhood had remained the same, wouldn’t disappear.

“I see well why Mirriam gave you the letter,” said the Judge. “As well as something else, about myself. For if you
had
known about Ruth—I see I’d have welcomed it. Not just because it would be safe with you. Because I’d have—welcomed it. And I can’t afford to feel that.” He looked wank, failed—if a man assessing himself so grimly could be said to. Or it was the mystery of fathers. “Walter. There
are
some things I’d rather not know. So oblige me. We ask those we love to oblige us. Read that letter and destroy.”

“I can’t promise,” he’d answered. “Not yet.” Though why that he couldn’t quite say. The dead do not consult. On the night table, beside the phone for which he had all privileges any hour, the smaller pill gave him its candy smile, full of possible companionship. For the phone wasn’t going to ring. He hadn’t made a promise. But the Judge had kept his.

He sat like a man at a desk, meditating business to be done. …What must I feel
next?…
Suddenly he got up, inserted his feet carefully in the warm slippers given him by Anna last Christmas, scooped up the pill, trotted to the toilet and cast it in. About to draw water in a glass, he recalled just in time that he wasn’t to drink any more liquid before the anaesthesia. But he still had water in him. “Futz,” he said, and urinated upon the pill. Then he climbed into bed and read the letter. Though in memory now Mrs. Mannix seemed a woman who was always speaking, he could recall quite clearly that she had never said much at one time. Inside the blank envelope, whose freshness made him shiver, even the page had no salutation.

Take care of your father. He is your father, you know. And give him my love. I hope—if you get to read this—that I have done him and you no injury.

MIRRIAM

He’d never known his friend to call his mother Mirriam. The scrap of paper warmed his hand, amber from a breast. To the father, through the son. His friend, refusing it, had said simply, “No, you keep it”—being the man his friend had been. But the father, a judge, was used to harsher solutions. “Read it”—for it ought to be read by someone—“then destroy.” Safest that way. For the dead do not consult, Water. And you are going to die.

Until now, he hadn’t been so sure. He’d left himself the human margin. And day after day, in his talk of them, what had he been doing but imagining them here? But where his daughter was concerned, the Judge was like rock. So would any man be who was her father. That was her quality; who could say why? “We obligate those we love,” said the Judge. “So I do
you
injury, as to any humpless man.”

Six feet from him, the man Goodman rolled over in his sleep—not a bad man to die near. He could send some message by Goodman, maybe that he, Walter, had done as asked. No, what a burden to leave them, his own weakness reaching out for a last touch. No message was best. He had talked enough.

The letter, torn into a heap of the minutest pieces, lay before him now, like the rainy-day work of a daydreaming child.

Behind him, his true companion pressed harder into the pillow, and into him. Life, private life, is never that artificial—cheery as they are, here. It will provide you the last feelings. You needn’t choose. I am your dear hump. With me on your shoulders, they could love you purely. For who could bear to do you more injury than you already had? I am your dear hump—and that is our luck.

Toward morning, he began to feel immortal. The emergency down the hall sifted unmistakably into death; the sure nun-feet of the nurses wavered at these times, and their voices also; more than once he’d seen the cart that came. Whereas he, Walter Stern, could feel with magnificent certainty—in the center of a hospital that would strive with all its might for him if he had a syncope—that he would be alive until eight o’clock.

He could use the pan; they wouldn’t mind now, if he rang for it. He refused to get up for it, any more. In his mind’s eye, he did get up, strode to the wardrobe, called for his checked vest and his watch chain, shrieked to them all, “I will not have your comforts!” and strode down the stairs. He sat on, hard against the pillow. Far away, across the stretches of vanished swimming pool, across Utahs, his foolish uncle beckoned to him, waving him a last bequest—and he saw what he had done. Where his uncle had failed, he was succeeding. An amazed whimper broke from him. Had his roommate heard it? No, Goodman was dead asleep. He could let escape his message to them all.

“I still feel—so
good
.”

In the bed, his head sank further on his chest; his hands crept up either side of his neck to grasp his shoulders, the long fingers pointing backward, in the attitude that best gave him rest. Trembling in his diminishment, he fell asleep.

When he woke, to the hypodermic, the man in the other bed woke too, and began talking to him, Walter answering for as long as the drug allowed. Both of them knew the obligations here. But Goodman was more delicate than most. For he was talking of the Mannixes. A good listener, he now offered the fruits of it, and kept Walter in their company, bringing them as best he could to the other’s bedside.

Orderlies displaced them, transferring Walter to a wheeled stretcher. Light as a feather, Walter gave them all his help. His stealing hands pulled the long sheet to cover him, as far as the chin. From the door, he saw his bed receding. He felt a terrible concern over its being empty; this was the moment when he knew to the full that he would die. He had succeeded—in arranging his own fake death. But he was already in the ritual—where no one could do the subject any injury that he could feel, or could hold his hand.

He saw the bed as it would be tomorrow or even tonight, stripped down to the harsh, striped ticking, the curtains being drawn around it, while tossed from inside there accumulated at the foot the stained sheets, draw-sheets and pillowcase, in a small pile. Two nurses always did this together. In the most modern hospitals, the bed itself, already the “table” as well, could be wheeled straight up—and sometimes down again. His would have to wait.

“Graciously, my spittle,” he said to it, and saintly or not, these were the last words he spoke.

Upstairs, the actions of others, gathering around him, made a chancel which hid him from life, from the Host which was no more his own. They took his hump, leaving him two scapulae clapping in the soundlessness of the world. Consciousness is the experiment which always fails. And begins again, in another bed. The whole hospital hushed it to him, semi-privately. The great blues moved toward him, and those great greens the nature of whose paint he would never understand. Hosannas of flies bore him upward and into them, ever upward, never down.

And so Walter Stern at the last did question the significance of his life.

“W
HY WAS I
NOT
to be told?
Why?”

Minutes passed. His daughter kept her back to him, staring down into the hotel yard.

The view from Dukes was deceptive, as was this small establishment itself. Up the hill of St. James’s, giant traffic streamed almost into the heart of Piccadilly, yet these side passages were remarkably sedate, here a stationer’s, there a turf accountant or other modest commercial flashes, along rows of those blind buildings of which so much of trading London was still composed. At night even the hill was quiet, almost deserted of foot traffic. Dukes’s cul-de-sac had almost no light at all. Cabmen knew it of course—a small hotel with one elderly factotum at the telephone who doubled at night as porter, and a lift which stretched to three, put in for women and Americans. Or you might healthily walk the wide, red-carpeted stair, meeting there the walrus-moustached half of the couple who shared your bath. Rest assured, he wouldn’t greet you, not a blink; the county had a talent for not encountering those it shared a bath with at such places; if you couldn’t manage it, your fault, for being American.

Dukes since the Judge’s father’s day had been much the same. The housemaids were British sub-Annas; he heard a pair in the hall now, at whose end he had engaged a room for his chauffeur, Charlie. No meals here, past the “Continental” roll in the morning, but just a walk away, to Bentley’s discreet door, and the truth about this city overtook one—that all its true tavern flare, and the chandelier lunettes of its greater conversations—were on the inside. He and Ruth had eaten there ever since the old days, at the buffet where one had Colchesters and Stilton in the company of those from the Temple or the City or Whitehall whose long legs were equal to the high barstools, not a head turning as the Judge climbed to his—more unblinkingness of the kind he loved this city for. Nowadays, his wheelchair was allotted one of the coveted tables at the entry; he and she should be meeting Ninon there a couple of hours from now.

And he hadn’t yet answered his daughter, hunched there with her back to him and the room, in a rejection so powerful that he too was mute. The room, smaller of their two, was the dullest, cleanest hotel-Victorian; up to now soothingly just that. Wasn’t the room to which Walter had come, fresh from his hunt for David in the Negev; that one had had a view only of chimneypots. The ones during the blitz had been lower down. “Will you require the same rooms?” the hotel always asked. He always said no. But the porter, faithfully of the same quality through a number of factotum faces, was sure of finding him anyhow—with the hospital’s cable in answer to his own. Allowing for the five-hour difference, it had been morning there when it happened—for the Judge a brilliant afternoon among the booksellers on Hayhill, in an October beautiful across oceans. But by any reckoning, when the cable came Walter Stern had been dead a day.

He’d just told her, not five minutes ago. He was always stumbling nowadays, with his daughter. In the days of his mystification, he’d had a blind love-surety with her—in those tender “copacetic” years after her crime. But once persons identified themselves as “the missing,” they truly were. They escaped.

“Why?” he repeated after her. If he could tell her why, wouldn’t he have explained what people thought of (in agony or the silveriest retrospect) as “everything”? “If—”

“Oh please—no
language
.”

It hit him that she was humped in a dancer’s mime of the man who had died—striving to bring him into the room, in her way out, from language.

“You knew he was going in? And let us leave anyway?”

He’d never understood her dancing. He should have gone to see her perform. But had left her this one sure way out. A pain shrouded him, from the leg that kept him in the chair.

“He made me promise,” he said.

She wheeled to face him. “Are you sure you didn’t make him?”

“No, I’m not sure,” he said.

She gave him the queerest look; over her ruff he saw their resemblance. She was judging
him.
She was striving to bring him into the room: aspects of you, are they aspects of me? In all the one-way violence of his protection, he’d never really thought of that.

She came closer to him. She was scrutinizing. Or recognizing. “Why did we really come here? Father?”

He spread his hands. In a wheelchair, gestures are few. Hard not to acquire the papal air of a man who knows, and blesses. Helpless to assure her he wasn’t cultivating it.