New Yorkers (83 page)

Across it, Augusta shook her head at him: To my cousin, if to anyone—she’s been the perpetration of all his controls.

But in the end it was simple. On the next round, the girl waved to Austin, but respectful as always, veered toward the old woman. Augusta, military in her tweed, fair-dealing as a duelist, stumped around to the entrance side—and there they three were.

In her whimsical way, she looked up at them, one to the other, while she sat and took off her skates. They had only to understand her. And tell her themselves what they wanted of her. When she was quite sure they wouldn’t, she stood up and flicked a small box Austin was carrying. “What’s that?”

“You’re entering a family that hallmarks its sentiments.” His own father had given his mother the
Nonesuch Weekend Book
of June 1924—another relished but tender joke.

“You think we don’t?” But she took the package, like a lure.

He had his daring, Augusta thought. Plays his allegiances well. A habit we share.

“Found it in the Charing Cross Road.”

It was a Florentine-printed volume of excerpts from the
Encyclopedia Spettacolo,
giving the classifications of the ballet Over Ruth’s shoulder, Augusta, who knew Italian from a coral-beaded year at a Miss Beard’s-style pensione in Perugia, read a passage aloud.
“A cominciare dé 1766 troviamo nei programmi le prime distinzioni: quella del generi (ballerini ‘seri’, ‘di mezzo-carattere’ e grotteschi’) e quella della gerachie: ‘primi ballerini seri assoluta’…
”

Augusta was to be a functionary here and knew it, already hearing it in her own voice. “There’s a glossary at the back. But that’s French.” She caught a glimpse of it
“Demi-plié; fouetté.”

“A vocabulary of life,” said the girl. “Particularly if you don’t know much life. Or much French.” But she was smiling. He could take it that she wasn’t going to go on with it.

“Come to a wedding.” He spoke to them equally.

For a moment, he and the old woman were a twosome, watching the long line of her neck as she leaned away from them in the projection that this kind could make of their bodies—toward the rink of people and past them to the high, fractured walls of the middle city, only the knot of hair, which she had let grow, holding her back. He had an impulse to grasp it. She turned to him before he had to.

Augusta, missing Chummie, looked down at her boots. Or come to me, at the Jackson—am I a fool, not to say it?

“Augusta—?” said the girl.

A violet steam rose from the snow. Out on the rink, the few skates left made a sound of thawing. Otherwise how could they have stood here so heedless, so warm?

“It’s natural,” Augusta said gruffly.

“Your boots,” said her young cousin in a choking voice, her eyes bright and sad. “Your beautiful boots.”

The lights sprang up as Austin led them out of the park. They all looked properly dressed.

The marriage took place on time—in what Judge Borkan called his “front” room, although all fourteen, through most of which they were conducted, banded “the most comprehensive view of the park you’re likely to find”—at this hour duly magical. “Front room” in Borkan’s heavy consonants was scarcely the term for this forty-foot expanse, whose stilted
bergères
and “Louie” mirrors aggrievedly faced east, to the side of the park they should have been on. Borkan led the couple to a positive altar of photographs, flanked with flowers. Farsighted as Augusta was, the large, vacuous script in which a vanished society had signed them was clear. “Your late wife was a DeKalb?”

Borkan assured her of it. “A street in the Bronx is named for them.”

“Brooklyn,” Austin said automatically. And suddenly he and Ruth burst out laughing. “Not bad for a Maine boy,” Austin said. Borkan, squinting critically at their group, like a photographer, pinned a flower on each of the women—a florist doing it for free. “I’m nervous,” he said, laughing. A line of warts along one cheek extended his smile. “Never married anyone before. After all, I was a lawyer to the theatre trade. Never dealt with real
criminals
before.”

The wedding party stood up straighter—all except Ruth, who was looking out the window, past the passionate flow of the drapes. Noting that, Borkan faced the three that way, his back to it. They all had a view of the park. Though the air was dusking, they all stared into it as if they were seeing it—while Borkan began to address the couple in a short, neatly phrased homily on life, life in common, and their participation in common life. The
bergères
attended it well. And
cum grano salis,
the photographs.

These mixed marriages were always awkward affairs, Austin was thinking, secretly relieved his parents weren’t here. In recent years as guest or even attendant he had seen quite a few. The place was rarely right, nor the minister; a spiritual uncertainty hovered, always coming out somewhere, in the wrong hues between flowers and. bridesmaids, or between the two sides of anecdote. He shifted his eyes to Borkan. His grandfather had had a line of warts like those. “Like the girl, don’t you, boy. Oh, I know you’re just friends.” An old gaffer at the rink had skated like James, too. Austin glanced toward where the rink should be in the twilight window. But James would never have let us go on seeing him dead; he was a practical man. This was an idea so much in his bride’s style that he looked down at her—had they already begun to exchange?

Augusta saw how the girl’s eyes went from one to the other, not wandering, just as if in some ballet of entrances all on the right, she’d come in on the left, and was watching her turn. She still held the book, like a clutch of prayer. She’s human. She’s not to be fooled as we are, any more, but in some other way. She has no self-center yet, or not enough. But she’ll—educate herself. Who would come for her, to meet her then—with his own tragedy spread like a bird across his shoulders? “And now,” said Borkan, “by the authority vested in me by the State of New York—”

They were pronounced man and wife.

As they kissed, she saw in his eyes what had made her come here and drew her still—his terror of not being as good as he had set out to be.

“What are you looking at?” he said to her afterwards, at the window. She pointed across the park, to an approximate spot. “Our house.”

“Common life,” said Augusta, grasping the brandy Borkan had brought her. “There’s too much of it.”

By the time Judge Borkan’s Cadillac, cutting around the park via the Plaza, brought them to the Ralston house, it was glowing abovestairs, the reception in full swing. Judge Mannix’s chair (as he’d been explaining to several) was set in the only new patch of floor, where the central staircase had been—now closed over because of the fire laws for a multiple dwelling. What a weight of scorn he put on the word “multiple.” Warren and Margaret Fenno, though near him, had formed no reception line, her Quaker simplicity rising oddly to the fore even to her husband—until he saw that by this device each family was able to greet its own. Fennos were overwhelmingly—Fenno, and had brought the young of Guilford to meet the young of Williamstown. Broughams stood about with luminous looks (as if inwardly painting their own portraits in the manner of Eakins) and were greetable.

Judge Mannix’s list, culled in part from public dinners, was impressive in that style. Judges were present of a rank which thought little of Borkan, and several deans of law who could nod across at Moling, the head of Warren’s foundation, with the “Ah-ha, so you’re here” of men accustomed to meet in narrower categories than were here today. He had wanted a few criminals too—as he had said to Edwin, to whom on certain bases he was talking again—“Respectable, of course.” A few of the more politically responsible had responded. Mulling the choice of a judge to marry the couple, he’d thought of Borkan, as veteran of a mixed marriage, but from his own sentiment too. For, now that by virtue of his column he was out in public—“Print in a London monthly, Moling for dignity; syndicate in the States for money, and give the money to charity”—he’d at last made the great middle-aged jump from feeling to sentiment. It was the house he was really giving this gala for.

Not all the old faithfuls were here, though Blount, stopping at Port Harcourt en route from the vast holdings Krupong had acceded to, had sent one of those garbled, globe-circling telegrams without which no present-day ceremony was complete. Charlie was behind the buffet with Anna, who was watching Ralston’s caterer with a home cook’s eye. Austin’s Harvard roommates were here, and some of Ruth’s troupe; otherwise this was scarcely a young wedding, at least on the Mannix-Mendes side. Most surprising of their arrivals was Leni. A last admitting herself to be at that age when women open shops, and finding herself to be one of the happy ones who lost all ill-ease when they could meet the public on a cost-plus basis, she now called herself Gaby, after her line of corsets, and wore black. Ninon, unable to leave the theatre, sending both Ruth and him notes, had as usual gone to the heart of things. His said, “Thanks, my dear, I don’t approve of first marriages.” To Ruth she had been equally brief. “I’m willing you the house in Clipstone Street.”

All others were accountably absent.

“Nothing happens on these occasions,” the Judge said to Borkan at his elbow. “Certainly not the marriage.”

“Oh, they all hop into bed now right away,” said Borkan.

“Didn’t we.”

“And
say
they did,” said Borkan. “My God—who owns this place?”

“My sisters found all these spidery chairs,” the Judge said to Margaret Fenno. “Didn’t they do well? Ralston’s enchanted.” And so had he been. “Originally, the place was furnished by Cottier, dealer my father knew well. Rosa and Athalie did quite a research job. It’s given them a terrible mistrust of their own mahogany.”

“We’re not rich enough for antiques,” said Mrs. Fenno.

Did Quakers still tremble with emotion, in Meeting? In society, his new in-laws gave no sign of it. How neatly they walked between the two bazaars of ethic, Christian and Oriental, settling for no consciences but the best! “Do sit on one anyway!” he said.

“What a fascinating crowd,” said Mrs. Fenno. “So various.”

“The small size of the soul, when it goes out in society! One of the most frightening things in life, isn’t it?” Turning, he saw she didn’t know how to answer him; she must always have thought her own decently large. “And the recurrence of types! I mean—surely you and I’ve seen all these characters before.” He waved at their line of vision—hands with champagne glasses, declined waists, expanded bellies, striped serge crotches with a shrunk hint of “prostate” in them. And one towheaded Fenno chick, and two pliant boys shifting past, sweater dress and corduroy, faultlessly young. “Spoke at Harvard not long ago. Going across the Yard, caught myself saying, ‘Why, there’s young Hayes, and there’s Steinmets!’—till I remembered they’d been upper-classmen even in my day. And at Columbia.”

“Young for your class, weren’t you?” said Warren.

“I’ve never seen
him
before,” Mrs. Fenno said.

It was Ralston. He was wearing a suit of black horsehair apparently, with pipestem legs. Like so many rich who could indulge themselves, physically he was almost entirely the creature of his own imagination; even his sideburns didn’t cling as convincingly to his cheeks as did Rupert’s, who was near. He wore blue glasses, which he now removed to show bright eyes distraught with intelligences of all the other worlds he wouldn’t have time to join. Plainly his social-worker seriousness had saved him from something sexual, though precisely from what would probably never be clear to anyone, including him. He had each of the bridal couple by a hand. “How you’ve warmed me!” he said.

He professed himself delighted with the ferny bower the foreman had made of the fountain—“A six-sided star!” but went off to see if it couldn’t be made to work. At Warren’s side, his youngest girl exploded into giggles. “A tisket a tasket!” she said.

“He’s hooked on arenas now,” Warren said to Mannix. “Says this is his last house. Says a hundred years from now, everything’s going to be in public performance areas; real estate might as well get ready for it. Hordes of us, just milling around outside. Private homes will be a thing of the past.”

“Everything?” said Mrs. Fenno, faintly.

“With fountains of course,” said the Judge. “One could hide behind them. Well, the rich are always on the side of anarchy, in the end.”

Dr. Hildesheimer came up, in Rosa’s tow.

“Very good of you to come, Doctor,” said the Judge, introducing him.

“Especially since he couldn’t officiate.” From behind Rosa, Athalie waggled a finger at the Fennos. The sisters had agreed to take the jocular approach. And not get
too
close.

“Modern life!” said the rabbi, spreading hands of amity wide. “Modern times.” It was his newest blessing. He bent confidentially to Mannix’s ear. “Frankly—I was glad to be of use about the picture. Mirriam will be with us in dear memory, just the same.”

Moling, coming up, took away the Judge’s attention.

“Picture?” said Mrs. Fenno, low. “How?”

“Frankly—” The rabbi was a leaner, and a whisperer too. “Salt of the earth, those two women. But a cancer of that type, why should a girl on her wedding day be reminded!” Then he stood back. Clearly he didn’t want to bless this gathering too firmly. “Frankly, I must be going.” He leaned over Mannix. “Come to the vestry, hmm?”

“He used to say ‘really,’” the Judge said after him. “I’m coming to love Dr. Aitch—for his uncertainty.”

And Warren asked himself whether he couldn’t come to love this man, for his.

“About what, Judge Mannix?” said Mrs. Fenno. She would
not
say Simon.

“Eternity, Margaret.” He said it deliberately. “As my father used to say: ‘A true Jew is never guilty of the phrase
“modern”
life’…And now, if you’ll excuse me—” He wheeled himself off.

“Does he always talk like that?” said Mrs. Fenno to her husband.

“He was a prodigy.”

“Cancer,” she said. “The wife. Well, if that’s all it was—”

“Was it. Tried this morning. He wouldn’t give.”

“They always talk about money in the end,” she said.