New Yorkers (20 page)

He couldn’t move from under it. Slowly, waiting, he felt himself valeted by the unseen, clothed against her even to the cheek. Inside there, he breathed shallow, safe from all except the concealer’s glee, which sometimes he had seen in the armored face on a witness stand, yellowing the eye.

“Yes.”
He brought all the tonelessness he could muster to it. Then he walked away.

At the decanter’s side again, he felt drained but revivified. He would not have last night’s seizures again. “Another brandy?” But he checked his watch-cuff and let her see it. Born two years ahead of her, he could command some of the old inflections too.

“Time for the children to come home.” Her voice was toneless too.

“David’s gone off on a school field trip that was due. I thought it best. And he has Walter along.” Dear good Walter, bemused by Mirriam herself as if for this hour—who believed everything he was told in this house.

“But you—kept Ruth here.”

He drew breath shallow and easy; no, he would never be troubled again. “Doctor thought best. She still had the stomach upset.”

“And the delirium?” She had the spinster’s interest in symptoms, of course—or the whole clan’s placatory-to-God, Jewish one.

“She got her first period,” he said. His poor child—only Mirriam herself, always ready with a Marseillaise on any private right of womanhood, could have kept that in the dark, from the clan. But he saw Augusta flinch, as he had calculated. In a half-hour his daughter would be returning from the ballet practice she had gone back to straight from bed, as to a nunnery. She would be coming back as on every such afternoon recently, brown under the eyes with the sweat of these lyric hours, gabbling the Frenchy babble of those bacchae, and giving out nothing else,
nothing,
even in her silences, which were offered too bright-eyed to any observer. Speaking nothing else. He had to make his cousin leave.

He saw her prepare to go, then turn back. “Simon…the girls are letting out…that it was cancer—she did have that breast cyst two years ago. Was it?”

He shrugged.

“But—the autopsy?”

“There was no full autopsy. They got the bullet. It was her gun. They were kind.”

She was thoughtful. “Kind.” On that she prepared to leave.

But he had to give her something. He had better. “If
you
would say it—take it upon yourself to say—that it
was
—” And it would help, more than from the sisters.

He saw her turned-down smile—for all sham. But she was human. And he was Simon.

“Another brandy?” he said.

She answered finally, but to which question of his questions he wasn’t sure; she had drawn him too into these mincings.

“No,” she said, with deep, extended sadness. “No.”

At the street door, he said lightly, “Don’t forget to bring Chummie. Next time.” It was cruel, from him. One gawky, agonized glance, from the girl of the boarding-house, told him so. But he had done it. He’d kept at arm’s length that divination of him which reached from Augusta, from those antennae the ugliest beetles were often forced to carry like queens—which would brush and brush over the old, known part of him, to discover the new. He had prevented her from seeing Ruth.

For already then, not half a month away from the death, his certain duties had shut themselves in with him like lay figures, rising calmly from corners to shut the louvers in on him and bare their effigy teeth in a silent ukase. He’d passed successfully through the special wake left by a suicide; now he had to bear only that nameless shock which was to last him for life, from the moment he’d carried back upstairs the bloodied child.

For the child herself—whom he meant to bear to a womanhood as protected from the worldly consequence of her act as if she were still in the amniotic sac—was safe from
him
only. He had to perform all his duties in darkness, without help from instinct, or from her. For he still didn’t know what Ruth knew of her own actions that night. Therefore he was unable to ask her. He would never be able to. Ahead of him, a white cone at the other end of life’s tunnel—and really only that mythical access-to-radiance of which all people kept an image—was the chance that one day
she
would tell
him.
Yet he knew this to be as unlikelier each day as if they two could grow old together to mumble their secrets at exactly the same time. Yet he kept that picture too, gradually replaced by the most incontinent of all hopes. This was that in spite of all, she would somehow grow up maybe in the circumstances of a motherless child, an overfathered one, but otherwise in that state known to all but beggaring description, and therefore called normal. And would bring him therefore to a state of the same.

Things changed. Here—where he sat now in the dun dusk of an afternoon well suited to reading old correspondence and writing farewell letters—was a sitting-room once a woman’s bedroom. Its flowered silks remained as always; her desk, at which he was sitting, still lodged its many pigeonholed archives between the same prettily niched confusions of pinks and greens. Yet the room now smelled harmlessly of chalk, crayons and cleaning fluid and the dozen other domestic tasks and interviews set to dry in the “extra” room. There in that chair the plumber had waited to sign his contracts; on that tall screen the dressmaker hung her cutouts; under their many fingerprints the room was now extra, rainy-day, characterless. Lack of drama was its job. How else could he have sat here, as had begun to be his afternoon habit even before he and Ruth had left the country?

Now on a week’s return, the long summer just past already seemed a planet away, almost as out of logic for him and his daughter as those who had protested the trip, yet helped them to get there, had said. Actions which were altogether out of logic were different from the merely illogical. If only one could say for sure in all daily life—as easily as one could say it of taking a fourteen-year-old to wartime England—which actions these were.

Since their return, his afternoon habit here—as distinguished from the morning’s professional hours in the study downstairs—had become fixed. Anna had made the changes in this room, whether in lucky fumbles that became tact, or in some exquisite knowledge which came of servitude, wasn’t his to say. The chaise had vanished, replaced with a sofa come from somewhere in the house, since it looked worn and he had never paid any bill for it. The room’s new name had evolved the best way, as perhaps the protective emotions and habits should also—through use. Opposite him, an ancient wardrobe, where he’d always stored any overflow clothing, from sailing gear to dress suits, still housed these, insuring his natural entry here from his own bedroom from time to time.

Since the death, his own illogic consisted in coming to this room for all decisions. These had been, in reverse order from the present: to write a parting letter to a woman (which he had just now done), to read and dispose of his wife’s lifetime correspondence (which he had been doing all week), to go abroad with Ruth (accomplished), to write a memoir of his father (still unfinished), to give up his judgeship in order to work full-time at the rescue of legal scholars and others from the fascist countries (decisions not clearly connected but both undertaken that first six months), and—undertaken in that first hour after the death—to do what he had done, about Ruth.

Going upstairs to her third-floor room, he and the doctor had left the examiner in the bedroom—
here.
“No need for you to come in here again, Judge,” the examiner had said. Standing in the doorway here, he’d spread his arms across it, barring it to the pair of them on the landing, but also meaning to be kind—and conspiratorial? He’d been a smallish man (though medium-size to the Judge), with a chin of incongruous length and a sidelong, putty nose. It was a confessor’s face. The Judge had an impulse to lean on those arms, so spread for it, to cry Murder to that conniving, tweaked face. But the man turned his back on them. “I’m Ford,” he’d said at the downstairs door, going past them and up to the death-room as if he had the ground plan of all murders in his brain. “I’ll take care of everything.”

And he had, even to the undertaker, who must have had a tie-in with that kind of trade. “Just leave the door on the latch for my men, please,” he said, striding past the Judge, leaving Joel, the family doctor, on the steps, and except for that passage on the landing they hadn’t seen him again. He had eloped with Mirriam, into the night.

“Wait a minute. You say she walked in on it?” said Joel, his hand on the knob of Ruth’s door. His father had delivered her. He had inherited the same heavy, internist silences. All his patients were convinced they understood his simple personality better than he possibly could their complicated ones, and this arrangement was satisfactory all around; the magic could go into the medicine.

“She got her first period. She came to tell.” The faintest sense came to him of how it must be to be female—an appointed day, a certain musk.

“She know about such things?”

“Of course.”

“You’d be surprised,” said Joel. “Even this day and age. I get commissioned to do it all the time. To tell them. Boys too.”

“Mirriam was good about all that. Open. And I think they have a course at school.” He’d never once made the mistake of the tenses, never again said, “Mirriam
is.
” He could observe that now.

“Give her something to rest, Joel,” he said. “For God’s sake, give her something.” He’d inherited a family manner with doctors, or a Jewish one—abject, and imperial.

“Hold it, Si. Anna may have given her something.” Joel’s relationship here was mostly with Anna, over the children. Once it had been with Mirriam. The Mendes manner with doctors was more regal than the Mannixes’. They lived almost to their deathbeds without them—and lived long.

“That stuff you give her for her stomach—does it have a narcotic in it?” Or had she been delirious? He’d clutched at a last-minute faith in keywords, specifics which might explain everything.

“Trace of paregoric, peppermint.” The doctor, listening past him, had had the same bovine stare as when he was auscultating. “But she wouldn’t have heard that popgun anyway, would she, way up here.” He knew all about the family target practice, having sent David to the ear man who’d prescribed it. Now he poked Simon in the chest. “You were still out?”

He looked down at his dress shirt. “A dinner for me. I stayed late with a friend afterwards.”

“Oh?” The doctor had the conservative ethic of a man too busy for any but the good life; patients consigned their children to him but took their own sins elsewhere. Any cynicism he had was reserved for the bodies they brought back.

“He’d had bad news from overseas. He’s ninetyish.”

“Ah.” In retrospect, Joel’s I-wouldn’t-think-of her wise smile reminded him of Hildesheimer’s—the same unction without imagination. A mixture widespread, for which he supposed he must give thanks;

For he’d made a slip then. “Mirriam was waiting up for me.”

“And it was
then
she did it?”

The mind could be emptied. His had. His skull ached around it.

“I’m not surprised, Si.” The doctor’s words had been like a wand drawing him to his feet again, from where he had sunk back. “I have to tell you—that I’m not surprised at all.” He spoke stiffly. “Ordinarily I—Mirriam was not my patient, Simon.” It was almost the worst he could say. “She was unstable. I have to tell you it. Any medical man could see it.” Especially if he saw only children. “You better let me handle Ruth.”

“You mean you think
she…
takes after Mirriam that way?”

“No, Si. Not at all. I’ve been sticking needles into her long enough to know what a great little kid you’ve got there, straight as a die. But maybe she ought to spill a little before I give her anything. Especially with the other business, or if she’s in shock. You still are. Better let me.”

“David’s still sleeping.” And my son, what of him?

The doctor shrugged. “Let him, as long as he can, poor boy. David’s his own man, I could never break him down.” So his own father might have him. “Far’s I know. David doesn’t take after either of you, much. But Ruth, you don’t have to worry—she’s all you.”

So he’d given up, unknowing, his great opportunity. All his life might have equipped him to be the seismograph here, and love as well, but to the doctor, both his love and his shock disqualified him. Now he could see where these might have been the talismans. The next night he’d gone alone to her, prepared for honesty from her if that came, or bewilderment. And ready for either with words agonizedly chosen neither to lead her on nor put in her mind things which—might not be there. Could there have been such words? What he’d really done was to leave it to her.

“I’ll take care of her,” said Joel. “As a patient.” And so he had, pushing in the door, that lightest of barricades.

A blue lamp was burning, though it was already day. Though the Judge knew all the moods of the house, how it blended inner cloud and outer, he scarcely recognized this milky rain of light washing the window, above a horse race of clouds. The bulb of the lamp had been wrapped with the paper from a box of absorbent cotton, an old sickroom trick even of his time, of the women who made childhoods. Since the days of bedtime stories he had scarcely been in this room. Now he quivered for all fathers who meant to get to know their children in time. In an alcove, the enormous dollhouse still squatted in its dusty fairyland shrubbery, not to be got rid of except to younger children or one day to a charity; it had lights and linens on the beds and a doghouse, he remembered from the day of its arrival, and was the kind only a poor man like Pauli Chavez would give. On a rack to one side of it, a half-dozen school dresses hung in strict attendance. Ruth wasn’t in the tumbled bed. Anna was sitting on the side of it, head bent.

“Dr. Choel.” She seized on the doctor, yet was hopeless. “She has cramps yet. I give her Midol.”

His own father used to give his sisters a little Holland gin for the same reason—had his father felt as clumsy, hangdog, as this? He wished he had only his father’s reasons. Then Ruth came out of the adjoining bathroom in a nightgown, saw them, slid into bed like a truant, and closed her eyes. It wasn’t a child’s way of doing it.