New Yorkers (80 page)

The bathroom is as good a place as any, to get away. And I always need to go, at the important time. There are some girls the months follow. A fact giggled over at junior proms, and not unknown at some weddings. Poor Lavalette. Maybe it’s the months trying to warn us what are
not
the important times. We often wondered what call girls did about these calls from nature, and actresses—and shrugged ourselves the answer. The couture is always the same—and close the bathroom door. So here’s my satchel, full of months.

…And one I shan’t tell Austin of. Because he knows. Edwin’s a user. That’s the kind to use. A girl with my parents should know. But Ninon cleansed me of it. Later that night, when she came into my bedroom—and swabbed me clean. I was lying down when she came. She was no Anna. And I had different wounds now. Of which women easily speak.

“Get up!” she said. “This is no time to lie back.” She had a douche bag in her hand. Where she got it, I never thought; she was capable of dispatching my father to find an all-night drugstore. On one of those errands—for medicine, cigars, pastrami, medicine—that he often said were the hallmarks of a city—though he never sent David, or me. Or she’s capable of carrying one of those things in her bag until the end of her life; she has such a cat’s-claw sense of her own femininity—and ours. She put me in the bathtub now, and showed me how to use what I’d often seen hanging in the matter-of-fact English bathrooms, though the troupe itself didn’t have too much time for sex—and the dancing bleeds it out of you. Sweats, I should say.
This
is blood. Better than some kinds. My mother used to say that bathrooms were the surgeries of the soul—against all those bright razors, what chance has a wrist? Why haven’t I ever felt that? Here is where it most wells up in me, that I mean to live. How hard it is for women not to be normal—or casual—about blood….

“What a deal of junk women have to carry around with them,” she said, leaning over the tub. “Jockstraps are nothing to it. Or rubbers. I suppose he didn’t wear one. Your rapester boyfriend.”

We were through. I got up weakly; my outer bruises were worse than the other, though equally invisible. She helped me back into bed. How tenderly she could tuck a person in, this hellcat who at dress rehearsals I’d seen drag offstage a girl who’d forgotten to shave under her arms, with the cold whisper, ladylike enough for the back balcony to hear, “
Three
is too many, my dear.”

“It wasn’t rape,” I said.

She smoothed my hair. She’d never touched me like a person, before. “It rarely is.” She shrugged, straightened up, folded her hands. “Good. You understand that. You’ll live.” She’d half turned to go when she reversed, with that telltale poise of the neck. When young, she would have been a dainty dancer, never in a dream, reliable. “Why did you let him?”

I was too tired to say it fully. “Here.”

“Here?” Those huge eyes of hers paused in their scrutiny of the room. She knew my father. I went with Edwin. In my father’s house. Daughters do it all the time. Your sisters may, Austin, even though they haven’t my father. Or the same heavenly one—in which neither of us believes. “Ah. Simon.”

But that was all she ever said of him to me at any time. And not because he was he. Women reveal reluctantly what they learn of a man by sleeping with him; it’s a pact they don’t like to break. Whatever comes of us, Austin, I shan’t reveal you.

“What a queer picture!” she said, taking it up.

He gave it to my mother for a joke. During their engagement. But she always kept it.
Behold Now Behemoth.
And I stole it afterwards. “Just a Blake litho.”

“No picture of your mother?” said Ninon, putting down the litho. “So many, of course, everywhere else.”

Not in Father’s study. I gave mine to Anna. There aren’t enough pictures of her anywhere, to challenge mine.

“No, Madame,” I said from my bed. “But I always feel…you know her. Knew.”

“I? How should I—?” I saw it cross her face that my father had somehow lied to me of their affair. All of us knew Madame’s face as well as she knew our bodies. So, when in a few minutes or so, she gave me my rank—I knew it for that.

“Your end of season speech,” I said—“when you send us home.” I raised myself on elbow to meet the personage entering my room now to stand there with us, body-connected with us through my father—and through women, and life. “She was like that—in the way she was. The way she died. Everything.”

“The way she died?” Madame said softly. “By her own hand.”

I shivered. My hand lay on the coverlet. If I looked at it, Ninon saw it, who saw every muscle in flesh. “Not by his.”

“End of season.” Madame’s face was sunk in her hand. Not her habit. There was no figure at Chartres exactly like her—in that posture. “And what do I—did I say?”

The word is so rarely said among us. I couldn’t say it, to Madame who was never it, who was never more than the Queen Bee in miniature, steady on her own flight. Ninon has no wildness; she’s like me.

“You know. How everything is arranged around her. Like when you explain to the boys how it should be in the adagio, if ever they find themselves dancing with the real article—and meanwhile with us. How she is the visitor from the impossible.” But when Madame used to explain how she must be touched—impersonal, there I was sad and did not wish to follow her.

“‘She does not communicate,’” I said. Why was it this next part always made the tears come? I was only quoting Madame. “‘Though she tries, she carries too much.’” Tears were all right among women. I let them fall, like that time in Nick’s car. “‘The impossible,’” I said. Madame, watching from the wings, must once have been such a one, to make her speak like that—maybe early, when she herself was still a tidy butterfly with the glassy wings of the divertissement stuck to her shoulders, crowding with the others to watch that marvel, maybe in Prague. That was why she always looked at me when she said it—another watcher from the wings. “‘She carries the impossible,’” I said. “‘That is her freight.’”

Madame stood up. She does this, after performances. Saying nothing until ready. “So. No wonder no one can compete with you.”

“Compete?”
I
?

“In his eyes.”

She looked at me for so long that I shivered again. There was a figure at Chartres exactly like hers—in that posture. Then she reached forward, flicked a finger under my eye, and looked down at the pearl of wet on its tip. “At a time like this—cry for
yourself!”

But that pearl of wet on her fingertip! It was mine. “I have to walk backward,” I said, looking at it. “From that.”

“When you can cry for yourself,” she said, “you’ll understand everything.”

Did you?
I didn’t say it aloud. She heard. She looked down at herself, still in the towel she had knotted around herself, from my father’s bed. “Got something for me to put on?”

“Of course.” I went and got a sweater and skirt from a drawer. Over the exchange, between our two man-tired nakednesses, a tenderness, all motherhoods mixed, brought our heads close. “Get back to bed,” she said. Her hands hung veined in my sweater, like girls whom the weather has wizened. I lay back on the bed, all my pangs out-walked. She gathered up the towel.

“Leave it.”

“And the douche. I’ll leave that.” She smiled slightly. “Take it on tour.”

“So I’m to go?”

“You can have Rupert’s place.”

Not to dance. Not ever to dance. To watch everything from the wings. I turned my head on the pillow. Self-pity. I felt it. At last.

She came toward the bed. When Madame is herself again, and most serious, she has the lightest hand. It grazed my forehead. “You’ll carry your weight. Your own weight and more.”

I turned my eyes toward her. She stood fast, hands clasped, not recoiling from me. There’s one like her at Chartres.

“That’s it, that’s it, my girl,” she whispered. “I could never quite see what it was, before.” Her head shook it out at me—custodian. “You’re—to understand. You’re to be
that
one.” Then she shrugged, just as she had over the girl assigned the blue locker, and left me to take it from there. On her way out, she gave the Blake a scrape of the nail that’s still on it. “What an old balls of a boy!”…

…We give birth to ourselves, but slowly. As our parents came to give birth to us, they died a little. We die a little, giving birth to them. I lay there thinking of them both. Equally. Tonight—we three are equals. Neither of them with the power to come to me, to guard me, to use me any more.

My crime was my pearl. It was given me. But something in me had given me it as well.

I chose her.

I took sides. I chose
her.

I had all my slow life to forgive them for it. Mine own slow life. To understand from the beginning. To have had to understand then, instead of at the end—that’s the pearl I carry. Walking backwards, until now. To love someone, will that be to turn round and walk toward? Toward them? Mother! Bathsheba for whom I wasn’t named!—I mean to live. And suffer, Father—if I choose. Father! Judge me. I mean to suffer if I choose.

My pearl of wet. I am young enough to mourn you. You are mine.

We give birth to ourselves. And close the bathroom door behind us…Austin, you have the look of all the men who come to Delphi in spite of themselves. Hold me—I’m beginning to speak. I won’t be the mystery any more. Take the mystery from me. You’re to be my past, from now on! You’re to understand everything now.

Father, I’m going to speak now. David, Walter, strain from your graves; help me to speak well. Austin, you’ll help me to speak. How am I to begin it all? Oh Austin, everything is in question.
I
always knew.

“Oh please, please,
please
—”

I speak. I
speak.

Oh fix my fancy. I am possible.

B
ETWEEN POTTED PALMS SET
at diamond-shaped intervals along all ninety feet of the ballroom at the top of the Ralston houses, three men were running power-waxers along the intricate parquet. At times they got down on their knees to do the borders by hand, talking meanwhile of the weather—a brilliant February snap whose snow had mounded like gravestones all the air-conditioners in the new apartment house across the way—and of the owner here, in whose other houses they had also worked.

“Give them knee breeches, they could be footmen!” said the Judge, from the central grove of green where his wheelchair had been placed. “My God, did you ever see such a room? In this sun!”

Warren Fenno, sitting perched on a small ladder, only because he didn’t want to emphasize his own physical well-being by standing, nodded absently, leaning forward to listen to the men. Ever since the foundation had put some money in a survey of city migrations—and in property, though that was an accident—ethnic groups here had begun to interest him. He heard that the two Irishmen had each come through the snow by car, from “double frames” in Queens. “My grandfather, he lived in a tenement in Hell’s Kitchen owned by Ralstons, once.” The fourth man, the German foreman, was engaged in a last touch of the brush to the exquisitely pseudo marble-painting on the walls. “I live now by York Avenue. First when I come—Washington Heights, they tell me to go.” He shrugged. By which Warren deduced that though by his age he might have been fleeing Hitler, he wasn’t a Jew.

“Looks like the Frick,” Warren said.

“The Frick?” How anyone could compare that heavy tycoonery with this delicate, Byzantine-etched room!—unless Fenno meant that both were fakes. There wasn’t an ounce of plush, gilt or carpet here; even the swags at the windows had been penciled in, and the two chaste fireplaces had no mantels other than faint pickings of blue and bronze, aged to a Renaissance tint just yesterday, by two Italians who had then left to clean the acreage of Ralston terrazzo in Palm Beach. To think all this restoration here had been going on next door to him, for two years! “I suppose you mean the palms in Frick’s garden, around the fountains.”

“Matter of fact, they’re all palmettos, aren’t they?” said Warren, toward one of the Irishmen though not actually addressing him—he never felt really comfortable with labor, except in Maine.

“Dunno, he never takes us Micks down there. We go to the Bay—Oyster, Bolton Landing—though that ain’t been open three years running, Tuxedo—before he sold it, and now here. Down on the Chesapeake, he uses colored. Fisher’s Island, he don’t have nobody at all.”

“Where does the man
live?”
said the Judge irritably. “When he’s working for you, Fenno. If he works.”

“Two rooms at the top of a house in Henderson Place,” Warren chuckled. “Oh he works. So hard, the office began to think he was put there to spy on us. Hardly a social worker type we’d
ever seen before. But we never suspected any of this. Until the papers carried the engagement announcement. And your address.”

“Henderson Place. Do I know it?” The gulls surely had their lanes, otherwise. For the present Ralston heir to offer this place for the wedding! To him of course the Mannixes were merely the people who had always lived next door to a house of his—one house. Two years ago, he’d bought it back from the intervening owner. Restoration was a hobby with him. He’d pleaded with the Fennos most gracefully, to let him “warm the room” with their son’s wedding. He always warmed a new place at least once.

“Henderson? Oh, it’s a little corner,” said Warren. Ten blocks or so away. He didn’t like to think of it as restricted any more. Still, the Judge—who acted as if the gold keys of the city had been stuck in his mouth at birth, didn’t know it. “What was the Ralston money, originally?” said Warren. “That cereal?”

“No, always been property. Their sense of it hasn’t skipped even the collateral line. This is the grandnephew of course. Our Ralston never married.”

The two gentlemen laughed. “So many things skip,” said Fenno. Though the Fenno guest list was large enough to make these quarters convenient, he and Margaret hadn’t thought it quite the thing, not to marry off one’s daughters from home if one could—and next-door certainly could have managed it. What they liked least was the Judge’s morbid enthusiasm for property that wasn’t his own. And Mannix had told them the tale of Meyer’s own purchase of course, the punch-line distinction between Jews and god-damned Jews sitting rather peculiarly on his smile. “Well, I don’t find that too jolly,” said Margaret Fenno, afterwards. “Will he tell all the cousins it?” Warren had answered, “No, I don’t think so.” And surprised himself by adding. “
We’re
jolly. They’re
not,
somehow. They’ve got
wit.
I think it would be valuable if thee and I could both remember that.” She had laughed and said she would take the thought with her, to Meeting.