New Yorkers (78 page)

Now comes the shortest part of the story. So short. What is shorter than a gun? Hold my hand. It has to remember everything. So we plight our troth, over the gun. It will speak, soon.

It’s the night. I’m in bed, after throwing up the mustard sandwiches—and all the woe I could. My breath is sweet again, my bowel clean. Anna has been serviceable but no longer nanny-close, not since the walks, which she won’t speak about. What have I outgrown? I fall asleep in the sense of it. My bed is no longer an extension of the elders’, a half-cradle still only a trundled yard or so from their night care. It is about to be my own.

At a time of night I have never met before, I awake. Twenty times a day I’ve sneaked a look between my legs and found nothing; now I don’t need to look. But I do. Yes. How small a spot of blood, at first! Yet all the perfumes of Arabia cannot contend with it. The strings between the stars, slightly loosened, absurdly weakened, reknot themselves in the curled small of a female back. Grandiose, unimportant, she is tied to the tide—and takes care of the universe with a cotton pad. One weeps beforehand, about nothing. I had wept about something; maybe that was the difference. And I was to go to her when it came on me, at any time. I brushed my hair and put a new ribbon on it before going down the stairs. Who does that in the middle of the night, except a woman? I hadn’t seen David since morning, and never thought of him. My father was out in public. Tonight this was a woman’s house.

So I entered her room without knocking—as never before. Her bed, in the alcove that faced the door, was empty, but I already had it fixed in my mind that she would be as I had so often found her—prowling, or at her desk in one of the greenish wrappers that matched it. She always dressed for the room, maybe to remind us all that she had been born in it.

They were on that chaise, grappled in the hump and muddle that coupling is. When you’re outside it. Her head hung over the edge, upside-down under that double-rocking, the mouth turned the wrong way, the eye-discs closed. His backside reared over his head. Which raised like a turtle’s, and saw me. And his face never changed. Battered, half-strong against us, it would not change. For a premature minute I saw through the charged clouds behind the hymen to what men were—only the other hagridden part of life. “That’s a universal tenderness”—she’d say—“which shouldn’t be felt until life’s end.” If my father had been the one there at her, maybe a simpler jealousy would have kept me from feeling it. It didn’t last long. I was already out the door again, even careful to not quite close it, when the pain seized.

It’s only the body pushing against civilization. She’d told me that too, while she prowled. “Men when they have that cramp want the wilds, or war. We have to creep about on the subway once a month, daft with it, wanting the real pangs. When you have a baby, for once they’ll let you walk it as it should be, letting the watery animal drip down.” Oh, she’d told me everything—except how to walk that pain up the one flight to my room and into it, when at my back she’d begun to whimper with that other real wild which she hadn’t told me of. And when, two nights above us, Anna had come out to the stairwell and was listening.

Houses like yours and ours, Austin, are built for listening. There’s a quiet to them in which the family can work upon a person, no privacy closed to that inner ear. It’s a comfort, that you know. You and I are closer in that heritage than many a Jew with Jew. And in knowing how people in such houses breed a reserve as thick as the palate of a mute. David could never hear any of that listening. Into it,
against
it, my father constantly spoke. And my mother—slapped its family face. I could hear Anna’s listening now and the quality of it, like a creak upon the stair.

There’s a closet under the stairwell where I crouched. …You and I hid in it once, later; I could feel you feel me there, and not touch. …I hid in it now. Against the shame of Anna’s coming down, against my pains—and against the listening. I belong in my mother’s line.

I heard Anna come halfway down the stairs and stand there. For a moment, with her there, my mother giving tongue in her bed, and me clutched over my new swollen belly with its moil of eels, the house was all women. Then my mother stopped. Then the man uttered. Then Anna crept back. And I was left to give birth, under the stairs.

In the slums, girls do it that way. And if it’s a lucky miss, throw it in the can. Sometimes even if not. I had heard of it. I had nothing like that to give birth to, yet I was filled. Crouched there, hearing her rail at her lover, not at me—did he know it was for the world?—all my body-images mixed—with hers. Eyes oozing upside-down color, ears expletive in the dark, my brain was damp on my forehead with the sweat of it. In bicuspid darts of pain, my tongue tore at my hymen, which would not break. Then an animal spoke, piteous—she—and her throat swallowed my heart. I broke from the closet, carrying my belly, and ran to her. I thought she was crying. I had to see,

She was trying to get him to murder her. But he wouldn’t. His gun was out of
his
reach, not hers. “Get the gun!” She said that to
him.
Her wish was so clear to me. At the end, she saw that. She saw me. What she had done to me. And what I would do—for her. She tried to say it all, so quickly. The words came out in that utter truth of hers—double. Somebody had to ruin us. But she never meant, always meant it to be me. “Help me!” she said—“escape.” Other nights I might not have been her daughter so dutifully, but that one night I was. Life is movement. The little gun, clean and gray, was on her dressing-table, beauty’s toy, often in her handbag. We’re all of a piece here, nothing comes out of the wings. Hysteric with life’s messages, I picked up the toy and saw her approve. In monstrous love and tenderness, I gave her the hate she could get from no one else.

“It’s come, Mirrie,” I said. “The blood.” I could call her Mirrie now. She was only an older girl who had given birth to me. Or I had. To her. I remember the moment of death is guiltless. I saw.

As my father ran in and to her, she met him with her answer. She had stopped. As he turned to me, to pick me up, the real thrust of my blood gave me mine. I could have walked my pains, but it was too early for it. The gun dropped from my hand.
Vol de nuit.

Austin, Austin,
do
I understand everything? You hold the catatonic’s hand as if she does, and is about to tell you it. I try to imagine that I already have. From Dukes to Covent Garden is a fair way by foot, but the mind’s path is quickest, getting even behind death. Its light-years steadily reach their star. All the way over here, it shone its story into your waiting face. You sat just as you sit now. Your face, now that I’ve reached it, is the same. Grave, a man’s face which has kept the promise of the boy’s—eager to be haunted by me. Yet I am still mute. All I could say when you opened the door to me was
Walter.
Even his death seemed to me still so far in the future that it had scarcely a voice. It takes time. To come forward to you. Yes, Austin, I know you’ll wait.

Bear with me. I have just shot the gun again. I have been mute like this before…

When my father came to my bedside with the doctor, I’d already heard that great clear cry of his stumble through the house. I hear it yet.
There’s nobody young enough to mourn her.
Why? I was young enough. If I’d opened my mouth, I’d have said that to him. Of my father the Judge I had never been afraid. But I had robbed him forever of being Si to her. I felt that Si in him already reach out to me. And was afraid. So I said nothing. Once I answered a question from the doctor, but that was nothing.

When I woke from the drug, David was lying across the bottom of my bed. I woke straight into his eyes.
We are left,
his eyes said to me—
we two are left,
to deal with it ourselves. They had left us together, or bowed to it. And after a while he could speak. He had had to learn how to, once before. He expected little more of speech than that. Or not as much as we. “You saw?” What should I answer? “
Did
she—do it?” Yes, no; yes, no. The double message. Now I harbored it. So I said nothing. Even when my brother said, “We will protect him.” Straight into my eyes.

When Anna came into my room again, at the sound of my brother smashing his way through the rooms below—we clung. What control it took from her, against her lifetime care of our objects, not to go down and stop him! I felt it shiver her, like a prayer. And guessed it wasn’t me she asked and got her guidance from.
Let him, Anna,
the voice said.
It’s me, in him!
So we listened together this time, and clung. I had no fear of her from then on—it is good to have one like that. But I had already spoken to her that once—too much. “Sleep!” she said, straight into the face of the morning. She cradled me. “
Here
it is night.” So I had to shrink a distance from her too. In her huge, faithful dreams she’d have made a daughter of me. Or a mother. That “night before” when nothing had happened yet, how could I make it come again, except as I did, from then on? Except in a lifetime, who could remember it?

So I became intelligent. And mute. The brightest animal in the wild is the one who manages to live on. Every breath against his skin changes the direction of his cells. Sensation—a brilliant tic-tac-toe always at work in the vitals—is his
thought.
I was that creature now. At school, they were always setting us projects, teaching us to live ourselves into living. Cowering in the cloakroom of their sympathies, the day I returned there, I conceived my own—and was grateful. I was to pretend I had words, and knew how to sup with human spoons. I had to pretend I was not in the wilderness. Oh, that’s already human—yes I know that now. Everything is human that we do against the wild.

But then—I was grateful for anything the concrete could give me. Consciousness, when first frightened into being, wants all the more to live by the fence post and the stone. The human part is in speaking of it at all. Where I might have to lie. But I could have told anyone at once, like a shot, what I was afraid of. Anything in the bestiary describes its fears—
as it moves.

Remember that rainy day we were all down in the basement telling our worst dreams—or elaborating them? My brother said, “I dream I’ve lost another sense—like touch. Awful.” Walter, ever agreeable, answered. “Then I dream that the rest of you are crooked. And poor Suzy Stern is out of step again—he’s
straight.”
“Oh Walter, you’ll
die
agreeable,” you said. Austin, how did you know—so early? Isn’t that why I’ve come to you? Like I almost told Augusta, once. We tell the ones who almost know. Because I feared these explorations of the quick, I said, “Suzy, Walter? Do you dream you’re a woman?” “Oh, no, half-chick,” he said. “That must be
you.”
How I loved you all, always, for laughing at me. At
me.
“Your turn, Austin,” I said. You were always bad at these metaphorical games we injured ones loved. “Oh, I don’t know,” you said. “Dreaming old Latin tests maybe.” We didn’t laugh at your normality; we were too much in awe of it. You are romantic to us.

Then it was my turn. How grateful I was to the ballet—for providing me with stage fright. “I’m on—in a solo I never heard of, which the audience knows by heart. I can see them, a thousand dolls, all alike—” But I was never good at it, either lying too little, or too much. “And two, first row front, whose faces aren’t blank,” I said. “Those are the worst of all.” The rest of you were silent. Then you said, “What’s that in your hand?” Nothing. Thumb over three fingers clenched, the trigger one pointing—but nothing. Only my fear that the fire of thinking might explode like smoke—in my hand.

The ballet was my place to hide. No real dancer does that. It’s their speaking. The wind blows through them—she was right. They quiver with it. I can’t do that—not in the dance. Maybe there’s still some other way, I used to think, that would be mine. But I always know when they are speaking that way—without vanity, not for themselves. That’s why, later, Madame let me stay.

That first month after, Ilonka’s was where my muteness went unnoticed, and I could heal. She allowed mere babies on pointe too early and too much, but I had just come to it, late. To pack the box of my shoe with lamb’s wool was a poultice, to dip it in the rosin, a ritual. Sewing at our ankle elastics, poring over old prints of Camargo in
la cachuca,
Fanny Elssler, Karsavina, Pavlova, we were novices imitating our saints, some of whom were still alive. Old custodians of the order came to sit on the gold-chaired sidelines, nodding their coifs from ruffles that smelled of maraschino and chocolate, pinching our unformed muscles with their eyes. When for three days running the assistant mistress, whose much-argued custom was to put a spot of glue between the heel of her tights and her shoe, had a broad raveling rise up her rear while she was at the bar—was when I found I could smile. I carried the smile like a bonbon, home to my father. Who was saying good-bye to Augusta in the hall.

She cupped my face. “You still look seedy,” she said, and traced the purple under my eyes.

“We’re learning the single pirouette from the fourth position,” I said, measuring the distance to go past them.
Un petit changement de pieds
—and I could make it. “It’s hard.” For in the dry marionette words of the ballet, those light, eighteenth-century improvisations for the clockwork of the limbs, I had found my way back to speech again. What better way to learn the terrain of one’s tongue, and how to walk backward, forward, from an event? They were both watching me.

“I saw Nijinsky once,” said Augusta. Great poor dear, with those shoes of hers from some improbable
bottier
of the past, she belongs to that long line of spinsters who have had tickets to many halls—once. I stared at her feet; ballerinas do. If anything could make me cry, it would be those Watteau boots—on her.

“Your—” My father, moving suddenly in the shadows by the newel-post, squaring his shoulders, only making himself smaller. He’s never realized how many times he mentions her—by default. Under Augusta’s inexorable family eyes, he went on; we all knew the story. My mother had met Nijinsky at fifteen, when she and
her
mother were going round the spas, “—your mother met him once.”