New Yorkers (85 page)

Near the lavabo, there was an oriel window—Ralston, what words you revive! The water tower, invisible, must be at the left, still shedding its light. Wheeling himself toward it, putting his glasses on, he could see across the two backyards, to his house. He saw how well it had maintained itself. His kind, the middle kind, bound tight the ends of life, always tending to resist those looser ends which weren’t the better part of existence nor the worse—but the parts that life insistently built itself of. One way and another, each member of his family had denied that heritage. His house was a triple amputee. Yet he wouldn’t admit himself or his house to be already history. Empty as it was tonight, a light still burned there, claret-colored as of old, tinged with blood as were all the houses of the earth.

He turned. A pair of shoes was coming toward him—no, they were boots—astrakhan boots, incredibly frogged and tittuping their wearer to a motion not for the tweed above them, more suited to a fan. “Your sisters are looking for you.”

“I worry them. They’re afraid I won’t say the right thing. But I thought I was good with the rabbi. He went.”

“You were. But he didn’t.” She sipped from the brandy she had with her. “He’s still
here.”

“What delayed him?”

“Important Christians.” She sipped again. “Frankly.”

He’d forgotten these old exchanges, brother to clever brother, above the crowd. She came to the window, to see the view. Together they looked at it. A wedding was such a perfect reprise.

“I can see myself over there,” he said. “Funny. Walking the top floor.”

“The top floor’s Anna’s.”

“So it is. I forget. But I do walk, nights. On the floor above mine.” It was totally dark over there. “Sometimes, I stop at David’s room. Last night—Ruth wasn’t with us, you know, I can tell
you
that—I went into hers. I hadn’t, since Mirriam died. But she keeps things. That old doll-house. Pauli was so hurt when she wanted to get rid of it. And that old engraving Mirriam must have given her. Gave it to
her,
for a joke once. ‘Behold Now Behemoth.’”

“‘That I have made with thee!’” The brandy shivered in its globe. “No, she took it. Afterwards…And you needn’t have worried, last night. She stayed—with me.”

“Did she.” He said it absently, to this younger brother from whom an elder had had to keep a few facts of life. “Middle age—” he said, peering as if he could see himself across there wandering the halls, that luminous night of his inheritance. “It’s a time for conspiracy. On one’s
own
behalf.”

He scarcely saw his cousin’s face, blunt, gray bulldog, beside his own neater one, faintly Buddha in the old glass. It was the speech in which he explained his retirement. In his mind, over the past months, he had made it to many—now that he had finished it. He stared at that claret light over there, rosying even his cousin’s glass. Music came now from behind them somewhere. The chair held him, a walking confessional. “I was destined to be a murderer, wasn’t I,” he said. “And was saved.”

In his mind, they had all asked who the victim was. Family didn’t have to ask. “I scare my sisters,” he said. “Though they’re proud of it. I’m the man under their beds. But I never worry you, do I. You always know what I’ll do, don’t you.”

A pigeon strutted their garden wall. Was she watching it?

Oh, he knew he shouldn’t ask the next question; it was the kind that couldn’t be answered except by a blinding flash from the throne of God. “Augusta,” he said weakly. “Stop holding that damn brandy glass. I mean, don’t take any more. Answer me. I’ve done the right thing for her
now
—haven’t I?”

The boots moved faintly, missing the Chummies, all that line of dogs male or female who knew he’d always been the man under her bed.
He
had always known, up to now. Cruel, to let her see he’d forgotten it.

“Augusta. What the fuck are you staring at!” He could have bitten his tongue off, of course.

She stared on. The dogs always knew what sex she was, as she knew theirs. And they knew that house; not a one had been fooled. No dog of hers could live there; how could she have thought of it? She always had to walk them stiff-leashed around what couldn’t be seen from over here. But was there well enough. They always sniffed and growled at its clawed wood as if another animal had been there before them.

She turned and answered him. “The newel-post.”

Too late, as she waddled away from him, he saw the high heels of her boots.

At the party, they’d missed him; even Margaret Fenno smiled. But no one spoke or listened to anyone carefully; the party now was everything. Music of a kind his house hadn’t been built on was yearning from an accordion, a harmonica, and from clackets and other baubles that with a jolt in the chest he recognized—they’d raided David’s childhood, that sonic, sealed room. It was the kind of conspiracy that came about at weddings. The troupe had joined with delighted Fenno jokesters, here and there even linking arms with an elder—he saw Moling—to hop a minuet. “Get Rupert to get his recorder!” came a cry.

But Rupert, kneeling over the fountain in entente with Ralston, said to the approacher, “Bug off. You’ve got enough.”

Yards away, Mannix could read what was being said.

“Any prop man can fix this thing,” said Rupert. “Somebody’s made off with the gasket. Got a knife on you?”

Ralston, handing it over, fingered the cut greenery star, now flat on the floor. “Often wish
I
could be Jewish,” he said.

“Nonsense,” said Rupert. “Come and play the gutbucket with us afterwards, instead.” Or that was what he seemed to have said. “Meanwhile, hold your foot out.”

Straining for a line of vision, the Judge saw him cutting a circlet from the sole of the other’s shoe. “That’ll do it.”

Ralston took his blue lenses off. “Gutbucket?”

“Eh?” said Rupert. “Oh, it’s a washtub got up with foot pedal and arm, makes a fearful racket. Kids made it in the wee hours. Shan’t let them bring it in your pretty hall though. It’s no ‘Harp that once.’”

And Ralston said, “Calypso? Oh, any rhythms and all, dear boy. I sang countertenor once. What part do
you
sing?”

He could see almost everything being said if he wanted to, his distance glasses firm on his nose. Height hampered him less here than it would a giant like Moling; maybe all his life he’d been a coxswain in spite of himself. And maybe should have let himself lipread, on and on, to see how little was being said of the Mannixes even here, when all was said and done.

Taking up his duty as host, he began going from bower to bower, palm to palm, handshake to handshake, breaking into conversation which had nothing to do with the occasion—or everything. Lurid as the secret was, his house had ingested it, and lived by it, the knowledge of others as flowing a part of its being as the actual event—all of which not even he knew. So was the human thickness of a household attained.

Down at the far end of the room, little alcoves set with table and chairs and flickering lamp-candles were empty; people preferred to stand, and he saw how they kept their backs to the windows, only turning to look out of them in wallflower moments of meditation, or in a sense of their own singleness. Dark clots of time and cloud were out there, inscribed with cities. City. Inscribed on it, in living dust—the single family. The city reeled with lives. No wonder they turned their backs on it. For the moment, this was the household.

Suddenly, the music in the room was deafening; the dumbshow of mouths stopped. No one in this part of the room was even known to him. People without noticing it had formed a wall in front of his chair. Two little boys did ogle him, then pushed giggling in front of him—“They’re coming!”—and squirmed through the wall.

So they were coming—to no music
he
recognized! Under him was the new patch of floor, obelisk-shaped, like the cut-off explanations of kings. He could lipread anywhere what the households were saying to one another. If he should open his mouth it would be to say it to some coeval in a piping voice—like two survivors on a mid-ocean rock, watching the water come to rescue them.
“What shall we say to it when it reaches us?”
Did other men know? Was anybody ever old enough?

He was sure now of what a great man was—that he had the capacity to be lone through all the purlieus of life, yet walk its actual staircases every day—as he hadn’t done—walking it stair to stair, greeting those who tripped it with light breath or propped themselves up by its balustrade, grasping at those who came down it white-faced to their dead, or to their own charnel. A great man saw all of it with a generalized love—and kept his hates clean for progress, clean and young. Maybe the great
were
the young, for a time. Until we—they themselves—got to them. He reached out his cane and touched one of the two round little behinds with it. Generations were nothing; anyone alive got to them. Where was Borkan, Moling, Warren—someone of his own age? Speech was a dumbshow—but his way. “I meant to speak for the middle,” he said, to nobody in particular. “But life
moves.”
And inching his wheelchair humbly, he made himself known, the walls gave, and a place was made for him.

They had caught them both. Bride and groom were dressed for travel in the new way, that was to say—as they were. A thick circle had formed itself around the borders of the room, no opening anywhere. They had to dance their way out of it. It was a wedding. Anybody could see them perform. The music, kazooing a blues, fluting a Jericho, got itself together. The bridal couple took hands like skaters, put their heads together—was it a waltz? Round and round they went to it, slowly, breast to breast.

“Austin was always a fine ballroom dancer,” Margaret Fenno said.

One of the harmonicas snuck into ragtime, was hushed, spread itself again when the couple never faltered—today they would jig to whatever was required of them. “Oh but that other was
Swan Lake!”
Leni wailed, touching a handkerchief to one eye.

The couple paused before her and Pauli, for their blessing. “Joy!” said Pauli, boosting them on, and gazed after them, considering his luck.

“That’s the housekeeper she’s going to now,” someone whispered. “Been with them all her life.” Anna, bending over the buffet to embrace her, muttered low her benediction. “No, you don’t have to bodder any more.”

Edwin, who hadn’t stayed to see the rest of it, was told of it later. “When Austin and she got to the far end of the room where his chair was—why, it was like Lourdes or something!” said the girl he was snuggling with. “He got up and
walked.
”

“He walks at night,” Edwin said.

“Like a zombie?” she giggled.

“No. Like a ghost.”

She snuggled closer. What a lark, to be in the Mannix house, next door! “Honor bright, it was like the Pope getting up,” she said. His hand went up her skirt, “They danced!” said Austin’s cousin Di.

But that was a Fenno description.

“I see you dance!” the Judge said when she came toward him, breaking from her husband at the sight of him standing without cane, alone. The muscles could do everything.

Too late, he saw that she was frightened of his embrace. Her arm came up. As in a minuet, he grasped high the wrist that might strike him, and brought it down near the floor, his upper arm shivering like a samurai’s.

“It should have been me,” he said, pride and anguish locking their hands. “You should have chosen me.” And she, masking their struggle in the dancer’s deep curtsy, unlocked them. “Oh, please, please—
please
—”

Austin came and bore her away from him, like a rival. The dowagers snuffled at his handsomeness.

On that young man’s arm, a girl should never again have to wonder whether the smaller life wasn’t worthy enough to set beside the larger agonies. Yet her father could see that she was still not sure.

“Oh Warren,” said Margaret, “I hope she’ll be good enough.” Her son was carrying off the girl as if he knew better than she what an heiress he had.

Austin, shielding his wife close against the resemblance he saw in her, tucked her head on his breast. Shielded there, she felt its rhythmic message, that the experimentation of life was over, for her and him. For a truant moment, they stood still again. Each looked sideways, not at anyone. Fluttering out kisses through the aisle that parted for them, they ran down the new staircase and were gone. Nobody knew where they were going. The dowagers approved of that.

“Youth,” said Rupert, beautifully drunk, standing up to watch. “Youth is the assoluta.” (It was what Ninon often said, to him alone. Because, like so many of her other confidences, he knew it already. Only good reason for giving confidences, she said. “Which is why I can tell you, Rupert, about her.”) Youth is the assoluta. “Then it merges.” (Like you, Ninon.) “Or stops.” (Like me.) “And the next ones wobble out of the chrysalis even of crime—on trembling pointe.”

His companion was crouched over the fountain. Rupert knelt next him, to finish the job. “Hear
that
exchange, dear boy?” whispered Ralston. “Between father and daughter. One does hear the
most.
Was he her lover?”

“No,” said Rupert. “She was his work of art…oh
blast!”
And the fountain sprang up before he was ready for it, in the true spray.

A hand was placed on the Judge’s shoulder. “You married her to a friend,” said Miss Augusta. “Now she’ll be ready for a stranger.” The voice was hard, the gloved hand like a man’s. “You can sit down now.”

“Come and warm the house, everyone!” Mr. Ralston cried.

Judge Mannix, when Judge Borkan came upstairs to get him, in the room emptied of all but the caterer’s men, was still sitting in his chair. He was thinking of the column he and Edwin rode in tandem, each so kept from knowing for sure the verdict on his strength alone. One day, the Judge meant to tell the world of that authorship. Though already such a system was not a hoax, but “honorable.” For honor was changing, unless this was the way decade and decade had always had to ride together. His wife’s conscience was no longer here to tell him how badly he’d done in years since her death. Grown almost to be his conscience, tonight it no longer waited up for him. Soon he’d be wearing gaiters, or some later token of time past—and his feet would be dangling from the chair. While those around him waited for him to be dead, so that they could really
listen
to him.