New Yorkers (69 page)

“David was my brother. If he wasn’t—dead—wouldn’t I know? But if it comforted you to…hunt. That’s why I came, I thought. Up to now.”

A flash of hope illumined his face. “Families disappear at the front. I said that to him. And he—”

“He disappeared from
you
long ago,” she said. She looked around the room—recognizing it?—and inhaled deeply. At the same time she took a step away from him. “With her.”

He recognized this place too now. Home. That’s why we came away, but it has followed us. After so long, never before in all those years—he heard his daughter mention her.

“Maybe I did too,” she said.

“Children always live downstairs. In the houses of their parents.” He gave her the smile for quotes. Old Meyer.

She nodded, looking around again almost wildly.

“Not that I—” If he weren’t in the chair, he would take a step toward her, to her side, as if by accident. “It’s all yours. The house,” he said. And gave a shamefaced smile. Givers do that, he thought.

“Father—”

Of a sudden, he wheeled himself close to her. “Ruth. Speak—of her.”

In his twelve-year image of just this—though she would speak, she always at first recoiled. Here was his daughter receiving it as if she spoke of her every day. Or staring past him, across the home-yards of London—to her.

“I spoke of her. To Edwin. Once.”

He wheeled himself at once—away.

“Not far enough,” she said bitterly after him—was this his daughter? “Yes, that’s why we came, how simple. To leave home.” She strode toward him and put a hand on the arm of his wheelchair; he couldn’t recoil. “Why Walter? Who did no one in the world any harm, even by loving us. Why him.” She put her young hand hard on the arm of his chair. “Oh yes, I see why. Why you could be jealous of him.
She
brought him in!” She gave the chair a push, sending him backward, against a wall. It wasn’t far. The wall held. The room contained it, what was happening here.

She raised her head, on a column of neck that was no Mannix’s. “So I speak of her!”

“How angry you are.” He could only whisper it. “I never realized.”

“Oh no,” she said. “Not angry. Not until
now.
None of you know what you want, what you are. But I have always had to know.”

It reverberated. But the walls held that too. He huddled there. In her blast. How familiar that was. “You’re like her. Walter was right.”

On the other side of the room she bent her head, backed against her wall in her brownish velvet, of the same cut, like a pageboy’s or a poet’s, which seemed to come out for the girls every year. “So he’s dead. That’s the way people speak of them, when they are.” She was coming back to him. She even smiled. “We always knew that. In the basement.”

“The way we take advantage of the dead, you mean. But I felt that too, at your age! I still do. So you see! You see!” He held out his hands to her, his arms.

She was unmoved. “Did you know what she was like? Did you?”

He clasped his hands, brought them up to his teeth—and in the instant knew who he was mimicking, bringing in here.

“No language?” his daughter said. “But I had to think about it—what she was like. Afterwards. For strength. She knew what
you
wanted. She knew—what we are.”

And then she glided toward him again. “Walter had a letter.”

“For David.”

“To him.”

“Your brother told you?”

“No.” She was gliding nearer.

“Walter, then.” He couldn’t move. But it was a dance.

“Walter? Never. He never did a soul harm. That was his triumph. That people thought so much of him in spite of it.”

And he had thought this girl without intellect.

“Then who?” It seemed to him that she had already said it.

“She told me. She did.” She leaned forward; she might have had him between her fingers like a bird on a plate, and now be dancing with it. He had seen her perform after all, his mind elsewhere. “We took walks,” she said. “She told me—everything she could. I was only twelve. How often I’ve heard you say that. ‘When Ruth was thirteen, or ten, or six, or two,’ you’d always say, harking back. But whenever you came to twelve, you said ‘only twelve.’ Marking it.” Her fists clenched over one another, like her tutor’s once. But there was no lemon in them. She smiled at him, the ballerina’s cool smile. “Like a shot.”

He sat heavy in his chair. No, he couldn’t carry her any more. But he felt her weight, as men of the audience, in their chairs, he thought, feel that adagio, flying weight on their shoulders, and the assoluta, turning one wrist from her pinnacle, carries them.

“Oh yes, we had walks,” she said. “We Mannixes walk and we talk, don’t we. How old did you think twelve was!”

“Old enough—for her to tell you what she wrote? In the letter?” But he didn’t put his face in his hands. He could bear it, from her.

“No. No.” He saw her falter. A ballerina shouldn’t speak, he thought. “Father—you’ve read it?” she said—and she was only his daughter.

“Why should I? It was for him. David.”

She was silent.

“Would it have had—anything about me in it?” he said.

“About her.” She stood clumsily now. “It was only to be opened if she died. Or maybe—about all of us. Didn’t you know what she was like?”

They looked at each other like colleagues.

“We’re the experts,” he said. “On her.’ Oh Ruth. Language’s my way maybe. But you and she talked too.”

She gripped her hands in her hair. “She was making me into a woman, she always said. But whatever she told me, it was always about all of us. Never herself alone. Or just enough to make me wonder more.”

“Us…
Make
us…That was her charm.”

Reverie had entered the room so quickly, like the balm of a night plant, nicotiana, kept outside the window to feed sadness away.

“Strike you this place isn’t so comfortable any more?” he muttered. But she’d already said it. The deaths of two had been received here. It was home. “She used to call the boys your three musketeers. Remember?”

She came close again, but only not to spring at him. He saw the real face of this animal, young and itself. “No, I won’t have it. Memory. People are living now. And I could have held his hand.”

He took hers. “Who leaves letters for the family these days? But so much of her life was letters. All she wanted was to insure that we speak of her. That’s what she was like. And that’s memory! Now!”

“She always had to act. To her—it was an act.”

“In our day—letters still could be.”

“Then I’m old-fashioned,” she said. “You made me.”

“To hear you say it. That helps—close the gap.”

On that long neck, the head that had just been gnawing its red, pristine lip leaned back and laughed—the kind of laugh that stood on the air like a motif, ugly only because of this—perfectly on scale.

“The inter…penetrations of things,” he said, staring. His daughter shouldn’t dance, but sing. “One can’t talk about it. But I try. Hence—my language.”

“How you talk to me!” she said. “As if I were intelligent.”

Over her shoulder he saw her brother, her mother too. “I apologize. I apologize to you all.”

Again came the laugh—as if she were practicing. “What life’s like? Let me tell
you.
A day after his death, and yes I think of him—but of the message he might have left me too.” She put her hand to that long throat. “I feel…he would. That part’s all right. But then…I keep thinking, right here,
how
—maybe he’s left
me
the letter. Like people who wait for the will, for their money…You let us leave. Knowing. I’ll never forgive you for it. But the other, that’s part of it too.
Right now.
That’s how mercenary I am. Life is.”

Her cheeks were dry. If she’d buried them in her hands, it would be only a speech. Instead he saw her advancing, with measured laugh, with unsure step, to the fulcrum, to him.

“But it was destroyed,” he said hoarsely. “I asked him to.”

Her mouth opened, and closed.

“David wouldn’t take it,” he said. “How should I? If it had anything in it, wouldn’t it have been about Arne? Your mother’s first husband. You’ve heard about him—if you and she talked. She used to keep up with him. After he went back to Belgium, Switzerland, I don’t know where. By letter…And once in Paris. Once—she went to see him from there. And I used to think…All David’s lifetime I did think…Oh, never mind—he knew. But wouldn’t deign to read the letter from her. So I apologize to him now.”

“That’s why you hunt for him to—be alive! For yourself.”

He scored at the hard-rubber tire of his chair with his thumbnail, deepening a groove already there. “Leaving letters. How absurd. They’re finding more instant ways—of memory. Or my generation may be the last to value it at all.”

When he raised his head, he saw she had taken up her overnight bag, a kind of duffel that always hung about somewhere, and was looking around the room for anything of hers left in it, as one did when one left home.

“Ours,” she said with a shrug, sliding the strap over her shoulder. “They say ours will be the last. For anything.”

“Where are you going?”

She gazed back at him. “So it’s all to go unrecognized, then? Wasted. He’ll have left some—message. I know Walter. But not the letter. Not if you asked him to get rid of it.”

“I asked him to read it before.”

The bag slid to the floor, slowly. She covered her mouth.

“What is it, Ruth? For God’s sake.”

“You used him. As a…as a—” again she tried. “Mercenary. To do your own job.”

“Language,” he said.

“We learned from you.” At the mantel, she picked up the heavy bracelet her brother had sent her, and snapped it on her arm. “Oh, we mimic you. Because we admire you. Why do you think David went to war? The way you used Walter. The way you used—”

“David didn’t go to be a—mercenary. He went to be a soldier of—God.”

“Can one be that? I suppose. From a grave.” She hoisted the bag again. “But I didn’t mean him.”

On that brown velvet, the heavy sporting bag looked so—absurd. “Ruth. Where are you going?”

She shrugged. “Maybe you—came to London for that too.”

An incredulous twinge vibrated over him, from those depths where he was unable to forget how to play chess.

As she opened the door he said, “But why then—did you want the letter so much?”

She was kneading her breast with the heel of her hand. In spite of the breasts it was a child’s action. “I thought—she might tell me once again, from her own mouth. That I—would do her no injury. Did her—none.”

Then he remembered who he was talking to. With w
hom.
It was like coming out of a madness—of murder, or a bed—of love, to realize the other person. Who had now made him drop every term of the silent entente under which the two of them had lived.

Don’t you know yet, Father? How you used me?

She rubbed her cheek. “I can’t cry. Again. Apologize to Walter for me. For that.”

After the door closed, the Judge, finding himself staring at the olive-yellow army blanket that covered his legs and now went with him everywhere, quickly wheeled himself to the window, in time to see his daughter emerge from the porte-cochère below, walk across the courtyard, the red bag bobbing in the dusk, and turn left up the hill. She wouldn’t have waited for the lift for just one floor down; she wouldn’t hail a cab. Mannixes walked, where it was possible; even in the century they lived in, they flaunted it. Of her two probable destinations, one—the theatres—must be about the same distance as the other. Both were possible. They escape. After she had gone he stayed as he was. The blind listened in order to see, the chairbound waited—but in the mind’s eye they were moving, walking the streets that came toward them. “No more memory!” What a young remark!

He caught himself glancing at his legs the way an addicted smoker took out a cigarette—to celebrate his helplessness. And to take heart. In what century now were the old “neurasthenias” of Goethe’s spa-Europe and of his own parents’—surely fizzing away like modestly bad sulphur water, somewhere still? Hypochondria, which once drowned its hyenas in holy waters, now took them on leash to some confessional: “What have I
got?”
A man still couldn’t quite choose his disease, but he could choose the century that named it—and sometimes compounded it. His own disorder was some mortar-and-pestle mythic of nerve, soma, and bone—a couple of vertebrae once cracked while sailing, a degenerative thinness of the discs between—and the cortisone which could cure at intervals, by killing him for good. Plus a will of his own which, like the masks of Janus, looked both ways. No wonder the orthopedists had no name to give him to pass on to his well-wisher’s; there was always the possibility that such conditions as his were the product of a life! He himself was holding back before he either gave his disease a name, or his life a century. A man of intellect, and some money, could to a degree determine both. And men of intellect, even without money, always had.

He was going to have to give up London. Now that his daughter had been empowered to leave him—and not just for the ballet, her mime-life. She’d even hinted that he himself might have provoked the loss of her for her own gain—and his own relief. Once, he’d heard an older colleague and his wife, good people with a great cornucopia of family in which surely nothing was criminally hidden—sigh to themselves at the wedding of their youngest, in the champagne, wisdom that his abnormal parenthood had kept him from, “Well, there’s the last one off our hands!” Within the lordlier rise and fall of the civic generations, the personal seesaw of parent and child was so little; wasn’t it
all
a getting there in time, or a giving up? What Mirriam, no one, could accept in him was that he lived his life in these rhetorical questionings. Sometimes he hated the habit in himself, but he had to accept the questioning. He couldn’t see life as others did, as merely the color of events. A barrister to
life
was what he’d wanted to be, from even before his thrashing for that money lending episode. “I swear to God, Simon,” his father had said, much later. “I know I hurt you; you yelled. But you received each lash as if it were enlightenment.”