New Yorkers (75 page)

“No, not with that,” said my mother. “I told him so. ‘I’ve got nerve enough to talk, even to act. But I can’t bow to the cosmos, Doctor. Not that far. You’d have done better, you men, by sending women like me to war. Not just giving us the vote.’ ‘You envy us men?’ It was the first satisfaction I’d given him. ‘Oh, not your physique,’ I said. Poor dry man, he believed in talk even more than I did. I couldn’t say cock to him. ‘No, Doctor. But men can pretend to die for the world when they’re really only dying for themselves. You’re Christers all.’ ‘When there’s a war on,’ he said, ‘a lot of private neuroses shoulder arms. And call themselves the world’s.’ ‘Or the whole world’s got mine,’ I said. ‘Have you thought of that?’ ‘You aren’t called upon to carry the world,’ he said. ‘Aren’t I, though. You don’t know the women upstairs. But you don’t have to worry, Doctor, there’s no war on here.’…I can always shock them in the end. ‘Not for us,’ I added. ‘Not for anybody who’s not
there.’
I saw that he’d certify me as sane after all. Though I hadn’t asked. ‘Isn’t there, Mrs. Mannix?’ he said. ‘Then where’s my son?’ I felt sorry for him then. He had the look of all the men who come to Delphi despite themselves.
‘He’s
there,’ I said. ‘But not you.’ ‘I give what I can,’ he said. ‘We owe this country a lot. We’re not people like you. We were immigrants.’ ‘People like us?’ I said to him. ‘We’re the first to know. The first’. …Chauncey, I used to hear my father say it to every boy who came to the house: ‘Well, sir—on what argent fields have you played today? Or are you bound for?’ To me, a girl, of course he never said it. That’s how we come to see it. Nobody’s at a war, unless he’s there…‘Nobody, nobody,
nobody,’
I screamed at him. And stamped my feet. That’s why we’re not listened to, but can’t help. ‘No, Doctor,’ I said. ‘You sent a substitute.’”

In the silence, the old man made a sound, just a memory sound.

“I told you, Chauncey,” said my mother. “I keep everything…All the doctor said to me was, ‘You’re not a harp. You may be a weathervane.’ Poor man, he was trying to talk
my
language. ‘May it be of use to you,’ I said. ‘I fancy you’ve got a wife something like me, at home.’ It was the only remark of mine he didn’t answer. So when I got up to leave for good, I said, ‘Don’t bother to pay me now, Doctor. I’ll send you a bill.’”

Now my mother’s voice was gentler, like to me or David at bedtime, years back. “He was such a thin, nervous little man. Like a Jew butchering pork.”

“You people. Why are you Jews so hard on one another.”

Her voice was almost inaudible. “Love.” If it hadn’t been for that word I wouldn’t have heard her. This must be the way she put herself to sleep. Instead of with tears for all she
couldn’t
say—like me. “That’s why we only go to ourselves…for instruction. Otherwise. …it might take.”

“Do you talk to Simon like this?” The old man’s voice was sharp.

“Never aloud,” said my mother. “He hears every word.”

“That why you married him?”

“Part of it…And because he resists…
resists.
”

“Change,” said the old man, not as if he were asking.

“Me.”

Her high heels, in which she could walk me for a whole afternoon, clicked across the floor. “He tells me not to let people use me as they do. But that’s
his
mother in him, her stinginess. He’s generous. I found that out by trying it, endlessly. What he really means is—I’m a waste. And arrogant about it. But life
is
movement, Chauncey, isn’t it? And that’s what he doesn’t see. He looks at our world as if—it still was.”

“Ah? And isn’t it?”

I heard another sound I knew well, from home—the spit-spit of the nails which were blue, against a window-pane. “Your view. Your beautiful view. It’s two-way. In full view of the city. Like Grant’s tomb. Like us. People like us.”

“Like us?”

“Ahrr, the life in this house is over, Chauncey. But
you
know. I wouldn’t put it past you to know.”

But
our
house was alive. Dark sometimes, and—even I knew it—desperate. But alive. With the imperial right to be unhappy if it chose. Like her.

“Personally,
I
may’ve been dead for some forty years,” said Mr. Olney. “But I never confuse the class structure with myself. Or the class
struggle
as they’re calling it nowadays. Same thing of course. Though it’s not polite to say…There’ll always be a middle and an upper, Mirrie. Though it mayn’t be
us.”

“You talk to me as if I were intelligent.” That’s when she was tenderest with David. When she felt like that—against
him.

“Women sense certain changes quicker. But that’s fashion. Don’t elevate it to prophecy.”

“Ahh-hr, I can’t blame you,” she said. “Why should it be someone like me? Why should
I
be the one to harbor it? Sometimes I feel the world-to-come, the world right outside our door, like an egg inside me—that I must bring to him…
Me,
who never could stand a mother’s role. Maybe women like me are a new, non-sex to come, nothing so simple as fags or dikes. Hummph. Nothing so mystic, either…But I tell you, our world is
over.
” I heard her walk back to him. “Chauncey…Oh, it’s not just a question of bongo-bongo, or whatever twelve-tone city lights they split this year in Jimmy Ryan’s, to some hot-pash dance tune. The
polite
world is over…Funny, some of the very rich are getting cozy bedded down with the new one—but not us. Never us. I don’t mind—for me. I just want him to see it. He’s the one wants to be a judge.” She came so close to the panel between us that I could hear the stuff of her dress against it. “So I have to slap him back for it, every time.”

“Is this other man—political?”

She moved off. It was her slip made the noise, really. Taffeta. “Criminal…You’re not surprised.”

Now the old man got up from his chair. I heard his cane, like a shrug. “My father-in-law was that…Oh, it dies every ten years, the polite world. …Maybe your twenties was a weathervane of the century. But that was
twenty years ago.
Shall I tell you why you see—what you see? You’ve slept with a member of the lower classes. And that’s your enlightenment.”

“Ah-ha,” she said. “If that isn’t like you all. Or to the nunneries with us. When Simon and I were on our honeymoon…no, we were still on it, but it was over…I’d come back to Paris and we’d left it, but we were still in France, in the Loire. We motored past a convent wall, of the Carmelites.

‘Custodians of the Unregarded,’ the stone gate said—I’ve never forgotten it. ‘How wonderful!’ I said. ‘To be that.’ How beautiful. You see—I thought it meant the nuns themselves—that they did that for the world. But Simon only laughed, and said it meant the order itself—that kept
them.
The extra women. ‘Some of the best names in France,’ he said. ‘My father knew a baron once, who it turned out kept his wife there.’”

“Unregarded!” I heard the cane again, and in my half-doze protested it, for Anna’s floor. “Meyer spoiled you.”

“He gave me everything,” said my mother. “But never told me what to
want.
That’s for the sons.”

“Nor what not to want, apparently.”

“My mother told me that,” she said. “So, sometimes, when he was impatient with her, he called me his ‘little mother.’ That’s all she got for it. Oh, it’s a simple, Biblical family line.”

“And Simon?”

“Simon slept with me, in my father’s house…Sleeps.”

“Ah-ha,” said the old man, “Ah-ha.”

“Ah-ha what?”

“It’s very simple, what you’re suffering from.”

“Is it now,” said my mother. I could have warned him, hadn’t I been fast in the chair, my drowsy arms pinned.

“Two men at once,” said the old man. “Somehow, women over here aren’t—brought up to be fit for it.”

“I ought to laugh,” said my mother. “I ought to laugh. Or ask—what about the men.”

He chuckled. “Y’all can say that all your lovely lives. But it ain’t synonymous. Simon have a mistress?”

“Not that I know of. And I’d know.”

“Too bad. What would you do—if he had?”

“Not bring her to live with us.”

His laugh had a cackle, the first old age I’d heard from him. “So you see, how times’ve changed. But women—let me tell you…When my father-in-law heard about our ménage, he had me in and roared at me…The criminal classes’re often sexually stricter than us, Mirriam—have you noticed?”

She got up from a chair she must have sat in, and prowled, but didn’t answer.

“When he found out it was my wife who’d insisted, he was knocked off his pins. ‘That do-gooder, my daughter’—my wife was an active suffragette. ‘She must be insane.’ I knew how to talk to him by then. ‘Oh no, sir, she’s suffering from a female disease.’…
‘Is
she now,’ he whispered—after roaring at me again for not taking her to better doctors.
‘What is it?’
But when I told him, after reminding him of a business deal or two of his own—he began to smile. …It’s what you’re suffering from, Mirriam. And not only over your—Nick.”

Or her Si, I said to myself. Or her Si.

“Well?”

He cleared his throat. “Woman can’t bear the difference between legal and ethical experience.”

My mother began to laugh.
“Vive la différence.
We can understand it though!—And did she ruin you for it. Because you
could!”

“Public life is harder for men than you think.”

Oh stop her laughing stop her.

With a great effort that I could almost see, my mother stopped herself, and I awoke.

“Simon won’t meet him,” she said, low. “I tried. Will you do me a favor, Chauncey?…Have him here.”

“Who?” A pause.
“Who?”

“Both.”

A long, long pause. “You’d shoot a man, wouldn’t you. Only to get him to look at you hard enough.”

“Not Simon.” My mother said it so softly. “Not him.” It was my mother, only my mother; why should I be terrified? “Maybe the other. He’s going off anyway. But not him…No…to get Simon’s full attention—” She broke off with a short laugh. I could imagine her shrug. “—I’d have to get him…to shoot me.”

After which Chauncey Olney said. “Get out of here, Mirriam.”

I heard my mother pick up her bag, click across the floor. I shut my eyes fast; kettledrum, harps, I heard them all—and my own blood.

“All your talk about two worlds,” said the old man. “You want to ruin him, don’t you. God knows why. Or just to see the two of them in the same room.”

“Didn’t you. Want to.”

“No! And
vive la différence.”

“And David too,” she said bitterly. “We might have him.”

“I apologize,” said the old man. “I forgot how he is, about the boy.”

“Oh—if someone’s going to be ruined, it had better be me,” said my mother. “I’m glad you think I’m bad enough.”

“I forgot,” he said. “But I’ll give you a bit of truth to put between your teeth if you want it. Mirriam…
is
it out you want? Or in.”

I could tell how it would be when she was shivering. She must have put out her hand. “Well, thank you, Chauncey. For your instruction.”

He must have taken it. “Mirriam…you will take care?”

“You’re on his side, aren’t you. That’s why you let me come here.”

“A man would be,” he said. “I thought you knew.”

Her voice was farther away when it came next; was she going to leave without me? I couldn’t wake.

“She did ruin you, didn’t she,” she said.

She was hysteric of course, from seeing the truth, unable to act on it. That’s what the truth
is.
If you want to know, Austin, how I know—she told me so herself. How else would I remember all this, if she hadn’t said it in one way or the other over and over all our lives, to Simon-Si, to me then, in bits and pieces to everyone. Later, what Chauncey said was the only part I had trouble with. Finally, that too came back—like those cued parts they give actors, I had only to remember her.

But now as he came toward me in my chair, I kept myself in dreams of sleep. Century. I was a child in another century, any that would be secretly gardened, tunneled with love—any cave out of time. I meant to be happy—or for a moment, floated free.

I felt him lean over me, slip the stylus from my hand, and look down on me. “On what argent fields…” I heard him murmur it. I let him pat my shoulder. “All right, posterity,” he said. “You can come out now.”

I opened my eyes, letting him see they were clear and bright.

“What lovely designs you made,” he said courteously.

I nodded. “I mean her to be happy,” I said.

But outside, where she hailed a cab with a boy’s whistle—two fingers hooked between the teeth, right there on Fifth Avenue, and a girl’s tremulous smile down at me afterward, from under her matron’s hat with its Diana-wing of blue—I wasn’t sure whether it was her I meant to be happy, or me. Nothing was separate.

“What did you whisper to Chauncey?” she said. “At the door?” She leaned over me. The cape she wore, lined with monkey fur, dated from her wedding trip and had charmed her by coming in again; I hated its dead-black gypsy forelocks—for suiting her too well. But she’d made it smell of my favorite scent on her dressing-table, Guerlain’s
Vol de Nuit,
whose label she’d once translated for me with a smile—adding with a scratch of her nail on the zebra-striped box: “A
lady’s
bestiary. A
lady’s
night out.”

The cab hadn’t started yet. They always waited for her. I whispered it to her. “I said to him…that maybe
I
could come back.”

“You heard,” she said low. “Everything.”

“I was dreaming,” I said. “P-part of the time.”

She raised a brow.

“And—I won’t understand the parts that are bad for me.” It was what I had said to
him,
when he caught me with his edition of the Decameron. Maybe she knew… “Won’t?” she said absently, glanced at her watch, drew a bill from her bag, slid open the glass panel between us and the cabby, said, “Drive round the park; I’ll tell you where later”—they would do that then—and had us off, settled and yet afloat. She was always so quick at that. She left the panel open. “I’ll feed you your instructions as we go, driver.” She nestled back with me. “That’s what a mother’s for.” She nestled down. “Oh, I can see how late it is by your face, you truant. Let Anna wait, for once.”