New Yorkers (86 page)

Borkan’s huge fur collar was already turned up, his homburg jammed on his head.

“Don’t think I’ll join you, Borkan.”

“Why not?” Borkan’s face fell. “I only see you at
public
dinners. And I—”

“My chair’ll be too difficult. Charlie’s taking Anna out to dinner.”

“Oh, if that’s all it is.” Borkan cheered. “I’m a Hercules on wheelchairs—the past five years, if you want to know.”

“Or we could eat here.”

They looked over at that funeral feast, here and there a beef still unbloodied, a turkey with the chef’s pimiento
legion d’honneur
still on its chest.

“Man’s martyrdoms are endless,” said Borkan dryly. “For the Jew—it takes a little longer. Good God, Simon, if this is the way a man goes on about a daughter—for once I’m glad even of my son.”

The other looked up quickly.

“Come on, Simon. The cuisine at the club is excellent A good hot meal.”

And some cold story, which he must bear with? Borkan’s face was quivering ready. If you’ll want to know, Mannix; if at the club, among the easy chairs of the widowers, the extortionists, the knotted bowel or the perfect lover extracurricular, all of them sucking the cigar,
fellatio
—if only you’ll want to know everything.

“Not sure I can stand the colors of clubland.”

“Eh? Oh.” Borkan stole a look at the bare rosy walls, in the muted light once more floating the Ca’ d’Oro toward them, four hundred years young again, now that the rented palmeries were gone. “Don’t worry, no decorators there. To change a napkin there, the board of governors takes a vote. Still the same.”

“I know.” Red cheeks, yellow skulls. And purple-heart lips. “What
are
the veterans talking about this year. Which war?”

Borkan laughed. “The Huns about have it. How long since you been there?”

Apparently Borkan didn’t remember that night especially. So why not see the cycle as it comes round again? Modern life, Mrs. Fenno!—that night all over again, the lamps lit, the city doges slumbering, in the colors of Childe Hassam too. “OK. Why not see the end of it.”

“Come on. Why the place is
flourishing!”

Borkan bundled him into the car. “Brr, can’t be more than ten above. And my God—listen to them!”

All the leftover young ones. They were in the garden of the Mannix house.

“Won’t your neighbors mind?”

“It’s an institution, on the other side. And on this—” Through a din of sprocket wheels and sour flutes, the mayhem beat of what must be the washtub came steady. “—I think that may be our host.”

Sitting inside the car, they were both loath to go. So much starlight, and energy! “What
is
that stuff!” Borkan said gruffly. “I like a little Strauss.”

The Judge looked at his watch. Quarter of eight. A few more minutes and they could hear the voices of Our Lady. The façade of his house, never quite dark, looked back at him. Music was its income, or had been once, in Mendes’s time. None of any kind ever really embarrassed it. Echoes of
Tiger Rag
climbed to its eaves again, and sat on its chimney pots like paper hats. His house was entrepreneur to anything, in the end. “They’re calling it Gut-bucket on the Outside. I think it’s classical.”

Borkan, once the car was in motion, had the grip of a man whose car was his shell, his fine star sapphire suave on the wheel. “Even think of joining a club?”

“No. My house is my shell.”

Borkan laughed, as if he didn’t believe this. He seemed all mission now, something more purposeful than dinner or a confidence after. Mannix wondered whether later it mightn’t be suggested they go to a house of another order. He wouldn’t agree—or only to see what Borkan, in the long trek from Grand Street, had settled on in these matters—what would now be his style.

At the broad steps of the club, he refused the chair. “No, Borkan. I miss my walk.” He felt a certain shame at his own style. The occupant of such a chair always had too many such easy little dramas at his command. He wasn’t surprised to see Borkan nod, admiring.

On the first of the three steps, he paused, head lifted. “Earmuff weather.” He said nothing more until they were inside, their coats taken, and Borkan, all bustle and hesitance, said half to himself. “Now—which room—” Mannix’s reply was brusque, almost proprietary. “In there.”

Memory was life, of course, plenty of times. From the door, the members’ library was quite the same in its long conventions of comfort and gazettes, spaced lamps and servitude, and more confident of enduring than many a cenotaph whose crumblings were of greater concern to the globe. “Not this door,” said Borkan. “Solid oak, nine feet high, the carving on it alone must be an inch in—yet see that device on it? Original’s in the Adam house the Chase Bank has, in London. No matter what angle that door’s left ajar, it’ll close.”

The Judge made no move to try. “The death of the polite world—I never really did believe in it.”

He was ensconced in a chair from which his feet did indeed dangle, until Borkan kicked an ottoman under them. “Now I’ll go see the maître dee. What would you like? Steak? Lobster?”

“Shellfish? Why not? Later on, for our sins we can go upstairs and wind on our phylacteries.” He glanced up. He was tireder than he thought. “Nathan. I apologize.”

Borkan was red. But his eyes were shrewd. This was how he had become a judge, maybe. “You’re a fraud, Simon. My father had the
tefillin.
I’ll bet yours never did. Am I right?”

“Right.” When he glanced up again, Borkan was at the door, looking back at him paternally, his hands rubbing each other. No doubt about it, in these halls Borkan was proud of him. When he left the room, the door did close.

He was content to stay where he was. No urge to stand at the window for perorations, no need. From the club crest—
Ignoti nulla cupido
—stamped on every bit of morocco and in a stone chaplet over the fireside, the membership knew what was outside its windows as well as he.
No desire is felt for a thing unknown
—though their readings might vary to a degree. What he wanted just now must be ever in good supply here. He was looking for a dodderer. To whom he might address himself sentimentally. None came.

Shortly, a younger man, fifty say, did come in, crossed past the Judge with the slightest of nods, and stood at a window looking out. The law was heavy on the roster here. Though surely the cut of this well-steamed one was finance, of the newer sort grown in the suburban breadbasket; that blunt cheek itself would taste like Cornish hen. But he was a
customer.
That was his pose. The window in front of him was open. What was he looking at? It was only 1955, but he too should already be hearing the neo-silence of the new century, its neo-energies, cleansed waters, reined-in planets, and up among those air-brushed ozones, maybe even—strange and multiple—a kind of neo-peace. To which his own age would be a turbulent photograph, awful, but dead.

“Beautiful view,” the Judge said.

The man turned, surprised, gave a courteous murmur, and with a bow of the head, turned its back to him. One saw he was used to such quavers and knew best how to deal with them, as part of the responsibility of membership here. Even though, whatever else the club offered within the marble silences of its well-known atrium construction—its windows had no view.

Shortly after, he left. The air came through the window, peaceful with the dust of old wars. When Borkan returned, he was carrying the chair.

At dinner, Borkan said, “Might do worse than here, you know. It does have an upstairs. One of the last. Thinking of living here myself, instead of rattling around in fourteen rooms. Give it a thought, why don’t you. If you ever want to give up the house.”

So that was his mission. “Oh, they wouldn’t have me. We have no outside affiliation—such as the DeKalbs.”

Borkan turned red again. But again he looked pleased. Maybe this was the way to make a friend, in the sharp backtalk of the same breed.

Borkan was twisting the cellophane from a modest cigar. A metal-tubed one lay on the cloth for his guest. It was like old times, these gestures of negotiation, often enough between two who didn’t smoke. “You have—now.”

Mannix stared, then burst out laughing. Two men just leaving gave Borkan’s table a passing scrutiny, who again seemed pleased. “Oh
no,”
Mannix said. He took up his cigar, wondering how to give Borkan the tone of the Fennos. That he hadn’t got it, in spite of today, was the distance a Borkan still had to travel, to be a Mannix.
Cohn?
his mother’s voice said.
Abe Cohn?
—he hadn’t heard that voice in years…
Selig
to you, Mamma, after all. …

“My new relations? They’re a queer bunch.” May God forgive him, or safer still—might they! “They’re not society, you know, like your wife’s. Not nearly. Oh, a good enough family of course, in its way. But not that upper. And not that rich.” He watched a waiter address himself to the angle of a curtain, for activity’s sake. In this central room the windows, enormously portiered and with as many underpinnings as a well-made bed, must give out on nothing at all, not even a courtyard. “They’re just—” There was no other epithet. “Middle.”

Borkan did smoke. “It would be enough.”

“You wouldn’t propose me yourself?”

“Too new here.” Borkan, signing the check, smiled guiltily afterwards. “Can’t tip like I like. Have to be careful. Don’t want to single myself out.”

“Ah yes.” I remember.

They leaned back, the last in the dining-room except one old man in a corner sure to be his by right, and no move to dislodge them, none indeed. The dues were high here; one could be sure of that.

“What keeps us Jews, Simon?” Borkan said it softly, a shade too low for Mannix’s comfort. “Why don’t we take it all on
trust?”
Then he laughed. “Mine own answer!” He was smart enough in his way. And somewhere—maybe in that finger ring, this club, Borkan’s marriage to the top without going through the middle—was the story Borkan was ready to tell.

“Haven’t thanked you yet for what you did for us today, Nathan. Nathan—tell me about your son.”

“Today? A pleasure, Simon.” Borkan was flushed with his hot meal, maybe uneasy with it too. “I confess it, Simon, I can tell you know I didn’t bring you here for nothing. And it’s not the club—though I would like that too. My son?” He shrugged. “Married. Lived in Scarsdale, once. The rest I won’t bother you with.”

“In the Korean War?”

“Three kids.” Borkan himself had been a judge advocate of sorts, in a redistribution office, not of people but of property. “And—well—three kids.” He sighed. “Oh he’s alive.”

“Families behind the lines,” said the Judge. “But the kids—maybe
they’ll
go. …Don’t look at me as if I were perverted, Nathan.”

“Sorry to hear about your son,” said Borkan, not sparing the patronage. “Oh, you’ll have grandchildren yet.”

“Your son a lawyer?”

“He was. A talented boy.”

These particular stories were hard on lawyers. Even to those who had been in the courts. He was silenced.

“Nothing criminal, Simon. Not even a Communist—you hear about Moling’s son? Not even women. Or men.” Borkan’s voice was bitter. “You heard the old saw, ‘He’s got a great future
behind
him.’ That’s my son.”

“My father used to say that. I always thought it was his.” But my mother knew an old saw to answer with. “What did the poor man
do,”
she would say—“steal a—”

“For God’s sake, Nate, what did the poor boy do—steal a hot buttered roll?”

Borkan acknowledged the phrase with a shrug, a shamefaced smile. Maybe that was why Jews acted as Trojan horses for their brethren, like Borkan wanted to—in order to swap the old saws they’d left behind. “He refuses to be outstanding,” said Borkan virtuously. “In any way. A boy of such talents—only I know what a crime.”

And this man could ask the question he just had!

“Maybe he doesn’t want to be a Jew any more, Nate.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re hooked on future deeds from the moment we’re born.”

“My wife, a Gentile, felt exactly the same.”

“Ah?” That’s
your
story, then. Of you and a DeKalb. “Still—
we
—” said the Judge. Still, there’s a difference. “What does keep us—?”

Softly the waiter poured another brandy; he might have been wearing special shoes to tread the borders of these stories with, or had taken lessons in the art of their intervals. Still, gentlemen, still? What keeps you as you are?

Borkan, in time to it, rubbed his upper lip.

“We mean to be
judged,”
said Simon Mannix, in a harsher voice than he’d ever used on the bench. “And that is enough.”

In the same instant, he guessed what Borkan wanted of him. It was in Borkan’s sudden stance forward over the table, careless of the ash under his arms, in those full, speaker’s lips, ready to tremble and swell a little more, across the good hot meat of another’s eminence. It was in the blood whirring in his own ears. His eyes closed now like a prisoner’s in the dock, at the sound of the sentence deserved.

“They said you’d never be willing,” he heard Borkan say hoarsely. “That you’d
been
asked, once before. I said you might be interested—now. That I’d ask you. Whether you’d be open to it. That’s all I’m empowered to do.”

He opened his eyes. The jowled, bland face was mottled, nervous. If ever a prisoner needed corroboration on his effect on others, it was there.

“So—by the authority vested in me, Simon—that’s twice today. You’re to think it over; you’re not to say a thing, not tonight. I’ll leave; sit here, be my guest, and God bless you. Or you can say—‘Nate, take me home.’ I won’t say another fucking word. Either way. All I have to do is tell you you’re being thought of. And now I do.” How it got to them all! Borkan was as moved as if the honor had come to himself. He was nod-nodding the many imperceptible times appropriate to holiness. “Your name is in that high place, Simon. You’re being mentioned for it. Not in vain—I’m not even allowed to hope. That’s all I have to say.”

For the Court.

The table silver was crested too. In his mind, before he made himself look away, he was already shifting spoon, salver, saltcellar, in the way men scribbled their fortunes on table linen—men who could never forget how to play chess.