New Yorkers (72 page)

Down there’s the Ritz, Ruth, where my father stayed when he was flush; Quaglino’s, over on Bury, was where Meyer and your mother used to go. How we can talk now!—why? Mirriam, you were just back from here when we first met. Remember that party?—all your letters were there, larger than life; All the men, epicene or not, were stallions; the women had waists as narrow as the decade. (You have a waist like theirs, Ruth; daughters are a little smaller than life. Or we have kept you so.) Mirriam, as usual, you hid nothing. Nostrils dark as stencil edges, in the yellow fire of a half-photographic evening your laugh leans back on old batik divan covers, bringing the gruff-voiced parties back like an evening disc on the gramophone. Ruth, you hide everything. In the perfect reprise of such parties—your mother and I barely met—all three of us are there. Both of you laugh. How did we use you, Ruth, she and I? Mirriam, how did we use you—she and I? How we use.

And now
I
am here. At Piccadilly he realized he’d left the shooting stick in the turf back there. “I call you to witness,” he said to the porter at the hotel, “I have only
one
woman on my arm.”

In the phone booth, he took the pill. Now he knew his disease, any pill would do. In the midst of his pain, it began to help hold him upright, a separate backbone. For once, he felt no repugnance to the telephone. Had they closed bets so differently after all in the old days at Epsom? Meyer’s tout, and his own, had been from their own London offices—a crook-eyed little score-copier, with a sure thing in every musical sneeze. Important thing was, you yourself never had to appear.

Covent Garden. A decent flat there must have been hard to find.

“Hello?”

“Simon Mannix here.” He pushed the button, so that the other could hear.

“Hello.” A voice that found what it wanted. Could be bet upon. And in its downbeat, acknowledged this, after three years.

“Only want to ask you one thing—” Either way, I’ll be answered.

“She’s here. She’s going to stay. And you may ask
me
anything.”

Once I saw a horse walk into a house,
his own father said again.
One doesn’t believe the eyes.

“Has she—any message for me?”

“She’s not—saying anything, just now.” The voice was literal, and soothing, half turned away from the phone. “But she is going to tell me everything.”

And I won’t be there. But I could come. I could come on over. And listen in a corner, like Hadrian’s soul. “Could I—”

The voice cut across his. “I’ll give her your message.”

He paused; was this peace from the pill? I don’t have to appear. “Tell her—I know how she was used.”

“I think she knows.” The voice had no enmity toward him. It was on its own flight—toward her. “She knows everything.”

“Tell her that I—”

But the voice went on in its own highest emotion. Eleemosynary, would have been his father’s word for it, but the word meant charity. With a width one must hope wouldn’t prove too wide: “She’s always known what’s wrong,” said Austin Fenno. “She’s going to tell us. Me.”

How to tell him? How to warn him? Let her bear the brunt. As herself. For once. Bank on his intelligence. As I should have, on hers. Get to him in time.

“Can she cry?” said the Judge.

On the other side of the phone, he could almost hear the Fennos gathering.

“I mean to make her comfortable,” Austin said.

As he went down Swallow Street, his pace dragged, though the pill was a fine one, though he was a walker who won his bets. Once he sat down again, he’d be the Judge for good, a man at home everywhere, in a city where he could still disappear. Daughters die when they marry. He could already begin to feel the social ease of her being dead that way. The loose end is tied. Their bed—he must not imagine it. Austin’s would be—charitable. What would she tell there; what would she hide? After the wedding, the old parents, who are never old enough, join hands and whisper-wonder, “What is
her
‘everything?’ Don’t mourn
her.
Join hands. How did we get her
off
them? How did we do it. How dared we do it! Whisper it.” Mirriam, you can speak the truth; you threw psychology away with your chicken-bones. Oh no, Si, you’re the champion.

What a quiet street, where the true tavern flare awaits. I’ll be able to sit down again, and lose you. But first—once more. Mirriam, Mirriam. Retire not that talent of yours, which was death to hide.

In front of the restaurant, in all his armor, he waited, and it did seem to him that he felt his wife’s voice knock the truths into place one by one, each a vertebra. He trembled with the distance covered, and was proud with it, wishing for his pedometer. The fertility of the soul is in question at least once in every man’s life. That night was yours, Mirriam. Will this be mine? What can we do for her now, in hers? The poem of the soul waits for every man, and is implacable. Austin, whatever they’re calling the soul in
your
century, you’re the man to know it, and be charitable.

When she tells you, tell her this:

Your mother courted death everywhere. Your father couldn’t strangle her.

Mirriam, you courted death everywhere. I could not strangle you.

Suicide!—how I murdered you!…We were hot opposites.

How we used her.

How I mourned her. The substitute.

Inside the restaurant he was met, had his father’s stick taken from him, and was led up to where Ninon sat waiting. She was always prompt. He was only a few minutes late, by his shorter cuff. He watched her face light in amaze, wanting to tell her how he’d left her gift, rooted under the starlight like a small monument, but could say nothing.

“Simon. Haven’t I told you? The muscles can do everything!”

He nodded and sat down, himself again, lost in his own estimate of her after, so long. Very little shrunken with the years, still so much herself. Not monster, not narrow—merely like those pretty seahorses which resembled our smaller, baroque dreams. She was all the gallantly frivolous part of woman without family—made to perform. She could have all his evenings—or this might be the last. “Yes—I’m out in public,” he said.

O
H PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE
…I understand everything.

Once I had done it, I had to become the most intelligent person in the house.

Make it the night before. But first, make it all the days of that year. I was twelve, not an odd age. Breasts like twin almonds, ears silky with wax, bicycle-knees running purple as the pictures of the Sacred Heart, and a stomach like a slum. Figures of laughter, a club of our own giggles, we stood on our hands like thralled fays, peering at the upside-down nerve ends of the world, our hair falling toward gravity, perpendicular. When we vaulted to our feet, harpsichords shaking like throstles in the old gym piano, our heels felt the kettledrum in the thighs. Going to the bathroom at night, looking for the blood, my toes tested the floor gently, parts of a vine nuzzling out its earth. My teeth ached with music in every wind—nothing I could tell the dentist, who knocked them severely for collecting the world’s tartar, tapping with a little hammer—the world’s, I supposed—which I bit and broke.

“Wish it had been his finger,” I said to her, snapping my teeth again; all the club nervously home-studied its own gestures, to get used to them. “He leans too hard on my chest. And too long.”

She walked me away from the waiting-room, with the laugh that always made me proud and warmed me, velvet-safe against the cold. A little of the harpsichord in it, much more of the drum. Some day it would be mine. Meanwhile—I was hers. She was walking me almost every day now, seizing every chance in the afternoon schedule that the winters of girls like me were provided with. Older girls, wanting to talk of lovers, sometimes walked us like that; I thought of it. She surely knew everything about me already, I thought. What she didn’t, I told her. Being in love too.

“Say
breasts,”
she said now. “That’s what they are.” She was wearing the coat we called “the Windermere,” tweed from those hills, and the band of beaver at the bottom swung delicious against my knees. I looked down at their bare chap. “My knees are
plaid,”
I said.

She stared, then hugged me. “Oh, women!” she said, and tucked her arm in mine. “But you’re not cold?”

“No, I’m never cold.”

“I remember.” Sighed, then lifted her chin; she was forty-six; I shan’t be able to queen it like her, at that or any age, but I’ll remember. She had her right arm in my left, and both our hands were in her muff. “I’m walking you the way they walk pregnant women, just before the birth. That’s all that’s wrong with you, you know. You’re waiting for the blood.”

I nodded. I had the pins and the belt and the pads in my drawer, but I was to come to her: at once anyway; at any time of night, I was to come. “We all are. Except Lavalette, who’s already got it. She got it early.”

“Catholics!”

“But her mother never told her.”

“Heaven is their destination,” my mother said. “I mean to tell you everything.”

And in the days to come, she tried. Those fall-to-winter days with her, they blend altogether. Afterwards, in my night thoughts, I tried for years to separate them—my hand in hers. Heredity is a haunting. They blend in me. With her real lover. She talked to me of
him
as if I had never met him, never would. Nor have I. When she said merely “Your father” to me, he stood aside. But now and then when she said his name—with the blue spurt of a match as she lit up, in front of a certain bookshop once their meeting place, of drawing me into a café she said had been there forever—I heard him as clearly as any of the letter-people she sometimes made live for me, a razzle-dazzle chorus of them, one after the other, out of her handbag. Was he known to her, for what he was? Is the sibyl conscious of her cries? His name was Si.

“After women give birth, they sometimes go loony for a bit with it—it’s so weird. Let no one tell you it isn’t, why should you?—you’ll want it for that, the way you’ll want everything they call weird—if you’re like me.” She had that smile which sat on her lips like a circumflex. Her face was like a sculpture of a girl in a corner, resisting the lines that shadow and skin put on it. “I was for a few hours myself, the first time; I woke up dreaming love-dreams of the gynecologist. Imagine—that Irishman with a eunuch’s prolapsed stomach and a bottom-of-the-sea fish-eye from looking too much into women’s insides!” She squeezed my hand. “But the second time—that was
you
—I knew who I was in love with. And when you came out, I loved what I saw, too.”

“Didn’t you—the first time?”

“Yes, of course. But it was different. Because of something else.” She was always casual over what I shouldn’t know, intense on what I should; any child knows from that where the real secrets are. “After I gave birth to you, I flew away from the bed for a while and sat like a raven on the housetop, chattering of it. But then they brought you in—and I flew back.” The smile bent to me. “What?”

“Did you stay?” I wanted to ask her, “Don’t you still fly away?” But I knew better. I always knew how wild to let her be. He didn’t. Or something in me stopped her.

“You’re a pre-partem bacchante just now, that’s all.”

“I sure hope it comes,” I said.

“It’ll come. That’s why I want you to know everything. Because my mother didn’t tell me.”

“Nothing?”

“She slapped my face for it,” she said.

We walked on; we were approaching Second or Third Avenue, one of the streets with the old elevated trains; she always liked those. “Your father never walks these streets,” she often said.

We walked in triumph, for the street, and for the slap. “Oh, it’s one way,” she said. “I’ll never do it to you.” How she wooed me: “Oh—we forgive them. Your grandmother was just a puddinghead, married for her money—which you’ll get—and for her puddinghead. That’s the kind of ancestry the old Jews loved—where the father is to be the intelligence in the family. Si had the same background, that’s something. We used to laugh about our mothers, in bed. In her old age, his mother took to saying, ‘I’m essentially a simple person.’ And he said behind her back once, ‘When you hear somebody say that, run! They
are.
’”

“I won’t laugh at you,” I said.

“I hope you laugh with me,” she said. “Know any jokes?” And we stood right there in the street, like two members of the club, and laughed until we cried.

“Oh Ruth, Ruth, Ruth,” she said. “It’ll all come.”

But that must have been early, when I was only eleven, which was when she’d first taken it into her head to talk to herself, through me. “Up to now you’ve been your father’s girl.” Oh, I knew I could never hope to be Si’s. “Now you’re to be a woman, we can talk.” But after a while, she strode and I listened, hopping alongside to catch up.

…People who aren’t a mystery to themselves, Austin, aren’t that to others really, have you noticed? Father knew all about himself from the beginning; all he does is go over it: My mother knew almost nothing—she was still finding—and she knew it was hopeless. She was the most wonderful companion in the world. He knew that too. They were married for life. She looked at me once, that last night, and said, “Help me escape.” Sometimes she talked about the cosmos. “Imagine
me,”
she said. “Talking about that.” But she always knew that those were the people who really could.

…Remember. Aussie, how we laughed down in the basement, over his aphorisms? “That’s a Simon!” we used to say—and then we’d reverse them as he sometimes does himself—only we’d do the ones he hadn’t got to yet.
The law
—remember that one?
The law is experience.
That was the first time you joined in, Austin—you were shy. But it was then I realized about you—that you had his kind of intelligence. “Why—” you said, with a look of pleased surprise that you were down there with us at all—“Why,
experience
—is the law of the world.” I could tell you didn’t believe it, though. Because I’m like her. I did.

…Austin, are you a mystery to yourself?…

“Essentially, your father’s a very complicated person,” she said to me with her smile, as we turned down that street another day—which? I didn’t ask her whether one ought to run from those. She never ran; she fed us all just enough of her mystery. It didn’t occur to me that she might be hopping alongside of him, to catch up—I thought he was there in her handbag with the others, like me. For by then, I would have written her a letter at any time. I did, in a way. What I said to her then. That was the turning point.