New Yorkers (77 page)

“He took the roadster.” She said it like conversation. I knew these exchanges; younger girls get these duennaships early. Or apprenticeships. And I knew what a beat was. Places—one walked.

His shoes were a no-color—not sharpy. A gentleman’s.

Above me I heard him toss her what he had for her, his hand on the door. “Home? Or in? Say the word, Mirrie.”

She looked sideways at me. I’d never helped her before.

This was the moment it began.

I pointed at the gold lettering of the small sign on the plate glass. I’m not funny, really. Quick, rather, often from shame. Or an understanding my parents must take credit for. “Ladies invited,” I said.

Inside it was all elegant yet easy the way men can do it, mahogany and spittoons, and a long bonfire of a bar. The whisky breeze was familiar to me from my grandfathers, and the fine blue smoke from the Upmann’s she’d taught me to buy for their birthdays. She and I entered together behind him, two old-fashioned girls who knew cigars, she looking neither to the right nor left. She was the one who had been here before. The men sitting at the bar had behinds too big for the stools but moved within a peculiar narrowness, turning from the neck and tapering away from us again, like seals.

He bore us to the dark port of a table. “What’ll you have, girls?”

“Nothing.”

She said it for both of us. But sometimes a duenna wants to be a child. And speak as a child. “Mustard sandwiches,” I said.

Why should her eyes fill just then? I saw them. She turned away. “Yes, I know your beat,” she said to him. “Which one of them gave you the white feather?”

The stuff of the banquette we were sitting on was leather, the same color as the jodhpurs she wore when she rode. Girls rode sidesaddle once, for fear of breaking the hymen; she’d told me that. I squirmed, thinking of it. Or waiting for his answer.

“You,” he said.

Bear with her. She won’t be with us long.

She saw my squirm, thought it the ever-present riddle between my legs. Or it was convenient. I was convenient. She pointed. “Over there.”

I went. A yard away, a man’s urinal. Before I closed the door, I heard what he said after me. “Little Napoleon. Or his daughter.” Then I shut the door.

My pants were always damp those days, the black dance leotards smeared at the crotch with white. I sniffed like an animal at this inner saliva of myself, though I already knew its polypy, seaweed smell. But it came from outside too, something from outer space kissing me there.

When I went back, words had been said. My sandwiches were on the table. As I ate, a man from the bar called out my mother’s name. “—Mrs. Mannix!” She didn’t answer. Terror over what to do flooded me. Our companion had noticed that she didn’t, at once. It wasn’t new to him, either. I thanked him with my eyes for his gentle touch on her arm. “Jim Mandel, Mirrie. Used to be Judge Mandel. Better speak to him.”

I could tell she didn’t want to leave me with him. Duennas are all alike. But she went.

When she’d gone, he looked at me in that certain way elders did at times like these, even he. As if he were going to hire me. For a confidence. “I see you know. It’s come on your mother so gradually. Think she knows?”

“She knows everything.” I spoke from the heart. And another kind of knowledge. For this that was happening to her was only the smallest part of all of it. She would never have wanted out of the cosmos only because of it.

“They talk more,” he said, watching her. “Even when they don’t quite let themselves know yet. To cover up.”

“Not my brother.” I shouldn’t have said that, not to him; that was family. I sat tall. “My father can lipread. So that will take care of everything.”

“Got it screwed around, haven’t you, kid? Oh—you mean he’ll teach her how.” He folded his arms. The men in that place never folded their arms, not one of them. I had watched.

He didn’t raise his brows at me, or shake a sad head. He knew he had my confidence. But an expression changed his face—the only time—as she came back to us. “Congratulations on your commission,” she said. “I didn’t know…And now we’ll go. Come on, hon.” Suddenly she grinned at me. That “hon” had come out of the atmosphere here. We never used it. But I liked it. What a pair she and I could have made down here, if we’d been the same age!

“Yes…that will take care of everything,” he said—to me. But I couldn’t tell whether he was speaking to me as to a duenna, or as to a child.

“And now you’ll be making the rounds,” she said. “To say good-bye.” She was staring at his lapel. He didn’t nod. Would she laugh? No, it was like with the match. One could feel what they were to each other. My breath crept with it, maybe my blood too. “Call me a cab.” She said it as soft as I ever heard her speak. Never to us in the basement. Sometimes, to Si.

“No cabs here. Except on order. You know no cabs come here. I’ll drive you and her home. Then go on.”

“Home. And then go on.” Close in, she heard everything.

The two of us walked behind her, to the curb. She bent, peering into the enormous car, an English one with a righthand drive. There was no chauffeur. “He took the roadster.” She said it exactly as before. Then she whirled on us—I was at his side. “Which wouldn’t have done for three. You planned it all from the window, didn’t you. The minute we were seen. To get me back home without a fuss—and in the safest company. Hers. The way you plan everything. Quickly. I’ve always admired that. And how you’re due at—where is it next?—Donofrio’s, and so on and so on, but not for business tonight. To say goodbye.” She caught her breath, or speaking at such a rate, it caught up with her—and she stopped. When my mother did stop, her gestures were strange for common life, but beautiful, calculated from far within, to an audience beyond us. Anyone in the ballet would recognize them.

“To say good-bye,” she said softly, bemused with it, drawing off her winged hat, and all her hair, tumbling from the tortoise pins that held it, fell behind her, neck to waist, and hung there in the windless cold. There’s a picture of her like that at fifteen, before her features were formed—at Montecatini, with her mother. The daughter. I used to think that if she’d only worn a ribbon behind her ears, it could have been mine. She bent at me now as if I were new to her—even a child of hers never felt itself stale to her, totally known. “Grave novice,” she said. And before he or I could think, opened the rear door of the car, clapped me into it and was in front behind the wheel, her hand at the dangling keys, the motor purring like a tom. People admire themselves in others. She could think quickly too. She rolled down her window an inch or two. He could have stuck a gun in it, if he’d wanted to. “Your car will be at the door. Mine. And the keys—upstairs. I’ll be—the last on your beat.”

He folded his arms. …Austin, I’m not enough like her—for you to remind me so, of him. He was so much better than he ought to have been. I rolled my window down all the way. “Thank you for the sandwiches,” I said, and extended my hand. He’d noticed me, at least enough to call me what he had. I wanted him to see I’d noticed him. To see his expression change. I whispered what I thought would do it. Instead, he tipped my chin, and kissed. “The kiss is for you,” he said. But I never saw him smile.

If I’d been in the front seat, would she have slapped me for it? There was nothing wrong with her eyes. The car roared, bucked like a boat, and left him behind with the lamppost. That was our getaway. I looked back.

She drove like fury, through traffic signals when she could. No sirens charged us. People like her get caught when they’re ready. At the first impasse, she put up her hair. “What did he say to you?” She spoke without turning.

My intelligence began then, silent as an antler growing upward in the hair. “He said—the kiss was for you.”

And in the paneled backseat of that car, lonely as a drawing-room, I folded my lips in my teeth, locked my thumbs at my nape and tightened my diaphragm against the sob, but the tears ran anyway, for the wretchedness of my joy. Everything was converging; nothing was separate. We’d given it the name of my blood, but it was for both of us. The car lurched to a stop, and we were home. We had come to the end of our beat.

The two of us sat on for a minute—she in the front seat, I in the back—and looked out at our house. Down below sidewalk level, the dining-room was dark, but Anna’s kitchen-glow shone from the rear, and above it, glossy behind the curtains of the parlor floor, spectral from the hall, all the various pulse-lights that were never turned off. My father’s study, over the garden at the back and behind the water tower, couldn’t be seen. Bedroom floors were dimmer, personal. For her, it was the house she had inherited—for him. For me, it was the house I always knew I was meant to leave. We women “keep house,” as the saying goes. Austin, but what you don’t know about us is that we will keep
any
house, most of us—and make it ours. It’s the men who want—theirs. While I looked at it, my face dried.

She spoke suddenly, still without turning her head. “So the kiss was for me, eh. And what had you said to him, to make him do that?”

This was the hidden side of her—and still is—the part that she could always manage to keep opaque. Maybe that’s what this man was to her. When she was with my father, I knew her down to the ground. I even knew her with Si. I hesitated. I couldn’t hold back yet; later I got control of it. “I said—” Again the big man looked down at me, the fair barbarian, the lamplight glistening on a bit of blond stubble in the deep-shaven cleft of his upper lip. Again I held out a cool, social hand. How had I known the words to make him bend? “I said—‘You must be Nick.’”

“So you were dreaming,” she said, in the hard voice I knew quite as well as the velvet. “Back there at Chauncey’s. And you ‘won’t understand what’s bad for you.’” Her mimic was cruel. “Don’t you think I was a daughter, once?” She turned slowly. Was she going to slap me for it, now?

And saw my face. Her own mouth stretched in pity, unhinged, awry. She put out her fingers, touched my face, left them against it, so soft that I scarcely knew when they drew away. “Ah, Ruth.” In that darkness of many nights afterward, she said it. “Ah, Ruth. They
wait
for us to cry.”

There’s a lamppost near our door also, sometimes deplored. You know it, Austin. It shone into the car, onto her hair. I could see the high arch of her eyeball, the long line from nose to mouth, behind which the face was cornered. She hadn’t put her hat on. Her voice had retreated, the farthest back I was ever to hear it. “I dream too. That doctor asked me to bring him my dream, but I never brought it.” She turned to me, full face. “I dream the same voice every night. The same words it says to me. And every morning I wake up and recognize it. My own voice.”

When did I begin to feel what she wanted of me? Of us. Not of me in particular, Austin, you see; I now see that. I think it was just then, outside our house. Poor thing, she’d got it all twisted. It wasn’t my father she wanted ruined, or even that man. But at what she wanted, how could I help!

How could I help ask her? She’d half turned away again. “Mother?…Mother!…What does the voice say?”

That voice, round, rich and strong, almost sexless, has never faded. It’s a cadence, not a dream. “Oh fix my fancy!” it said; it says—“am I possible?”

Then we looked vaguely about us, and got out, remembering the car wasn’t ours. Neither was the house in a way, but we went up its steps.

She hadn’t brought the hat: she must have left it in the car. I sometimes think of what his thoughts were, later that night, after he left our house, when he saw it there, on the front seat. But she did take the car keys. After all, she took the keys.

At the top of our steps, the door was closed. Open, it might have meant that my father, always careless with it, was still in. “So he’s gone,” she said. “Not to be ruined.” She delved vaguely in her bag for the house key…Always we delve vaguely in our bags, Austin, that’s our gesture, and no matter what trivia we find—a puff, a lipstick—we bring it out as if we left behind something else of importance, there in the bag, that walks with us, as I walk to you across London, with mine…

She put the hand with the two sets of keys in it hard on my shoulder—this same shoulder here, where the bag strap crosses it. It was lower then, by a little, but bore the weight. “What shall I say to myself at the end of my life?” said my mother, low, “I can’t think of a thing.” Then we went in.

But our walk wasn’t finished yet, or I didn’t want it to be. Once inside the house, I felt myself losing this woman who walked me, wooed me. Into being a woman. And over onto her side. The two go together, Austin, always. Between a mother and a daughter. Inside our house, I felt only her wretchedness and forgot her joy. I spoke my fear, almost as Chauncey had. It’s a standard voice even at twelve—in which people speak that fear. “The—end?” I said.

She bent her head to me. It was the next year I grew, though never to her height. Her eyes curvetted from side to side. From those eyes, to the draped purse with its weight of letters, to her finger rings, all of her couldn’t help glittering at me with the decade she loved. Or forward and past me, past him. With all her messages. For the eyes did fix on me at last, her mouth shaped its endearment. She never mumbled, but the words came out soft. “Grave novice.” Her finger touched the tip of my nose, and retracted. “Maybe I should have told you nothing. Like Lavalette.”

I shook my head. No, no. No. No.

She dropped to her knees. Crouched there, she put her arms round my waist, reached up and drew my arms onto her shoulder. Clutched so, we breathed. “Little mother,” she said.

So I’m here, Austin, I’m here. Sit me down, I can’t speak yet. My flesh still has another direction. You take the bag from my shoulder as if it were a wreath; maybe it is. Heavy enough, yes, though it has no letters in it.
Walter.
There: I’ve spoken. So I’m not mute. I thought maybe I was. Soon I’ll tell you all of it. But I have to remember everything, before I can speak. So sit me down…How like you your flat is. As like you as that Hitchcock rocker in your office, as your parents’ house. I’m less like my house than you are. Or such is my—fancy. You look so grave—like a man about to hear
his
destiny. Should you have married the Korean girl? We heard about her. I can see her in your house almost better than I see myself. Don’t inherit, Austin. My mother was right; it’s no longer the world for it. Not for houses. Don’t inherit only your house. Though maybe the men can’t help it. My mother’s second given name was Sheba; she inherited everything else. Though my father try to hold me back from it with all his might, so will I. I will inherit her, Austin. I will inherit my mother if I choose.