New Yorkers (29 page)

“Romulus?” he said.

She didn’t answer. But she didn’t haunt off this time; she was looking straight at something—as one looked at a perfectly formed thought.

He tried to do the right thing, this time. His tongue had to be so delicate. To push her thought toward him.

“And where’s Remus?” he said.

Again she didn’t answer. But there was a vibration. He’d hit it somewhere. He waited.

“He’s like me—”

Like you, dear?—how could that boy be like you? He didn’t say it.

In tune, in perfect tune, he waited.

“His mother was raped, he said. That’s how he was born.”

“Like
you,”
he said in horror.

She contemplated it.

“What can you two—
possibly
—”

She nodded at him, but her head on one side, her mouth tremulous. For him. For him! He had seen judges give sentence like that, joining themselves to the accused, in the charge. And the prisoner, bowing his own head, saw it also. But which was he? Judge, that ye may be. Was it his turn?—but which was he? Prisoner or judge. He didn’t know. This was his final hallucination.

“Yes, like me,” she whispered, retreating to the door. “Everything’s already happened to him.” And then hung her head, like a bride.

E
DWIN BOUNDED UP THE
steps of the house, feeling well prepared. The front door was open; someone entering before him hadn’t pushed it closed. Anna would have a fit about it.

He let himself in, paused by the stair rail, avoiding the hall mirror, where there was an early vision of himself always embedded, and walked left into a long oblong known as the “big” room, to distinguish it from the righthand “library,” though the latter held less books.

“Great room,” their journalist friend Blount always said. “Great windows, that pier glass between ’em great, great curtains Belgium 1880, great.”

Edwin sat down in a chair near the door where Anna in passing would see him—so relieving his sense that he might be thought to have entered illegally, in order to catch the inmates of the house in the unofficial state in which they lay suspended when out of his presence. For though what the Mannixes were wasn’t simply said, he was always trying. In his black notebook, he sometimes put down their chronology as it came to him from their own mouths, as if he meant to be a Bulfinch annotator of their legend, or needed to keep it straight in his mind when he was among them. They were his gods then, if it were understood that he was highly critical of them, and that theirs was a group he never hoped to join. He wanted to know more precisely what their nature was, from the same wistfulness with which the poor read in their yellow journals about the rich.

He knew that through the Mannixes’ daily papers (which were whatever of the world’s they chose to read) they kept reasonably in touch with the mass movements of guns, hunger and thought—and even of peoples—and, even assisted practicably there, as the Judge had done with his refugees. Oh, they kept up their charities—even though nobody spoke so knowledgeably as they themselves of what an eyedropperful-in the sea of want these were. They
continued
—that was part of it—and he could see how it would be sometimes into mere smugness or self-love—but he didn’t think he much romanticized the best of them. For they themselves had the most powerful sense that
their
self-dramas, their lives, personal and as a class, were an ever-running commentary
on
the world. In this, he was somehow convinced, lay the true seriousness of their life. For they were released by money, yet immediately bound themselves into responsibility. No wonder their mode of life was ambiguous. For as the people in the house had seemed to him on that first visit, so they did still. They transacted life in beautiful visits, which never needed to get anywhere.

He glanced at his watch; he was now some minutes late for the Judge but stubbornly sat on, waiting to be discovered. As if this gave him leave, he stared squarely at the portrait over the mantel. In tawnies and greens, mud-pinks, and against a background of black—from which the sitter gazed into a beyond which must be somewhere painted as limply—it was a token portrait done in that accessible style which quickest flattened the subject into eternity, and might have been commissioned by a bank. For hints as to what the woman herself had been, he much preferred the yellow and black drawing of her in what seemed to be costume but might be some dress vagary of the 1920s—a tinted pen-and-ink, signed with a Parisian scrawl, in which the spirit of the eyes propelled a large head stomachered on a small body, tapered behind it like a wasp’s; somehow nevertheless, the subject appeared large. And the drawing was easier looked at, being hung in the room, once her bedroom, now a kind of sitting-room, used by all and sundry for anything. Considering its owner’s end, he admired the Mannixes for merely nullifying the room instead of preserving or ignoring it. Understandably, they’d more or less walled up the woman herself from their conversation at least with outsiders, though from their occasional necessary mention of her—as on his first walk with Ruth—he had an insistent impression that when alone they didn’t speak much of her either. Yet they had done their best; there were pictures of her everywhere in the house. Or almost everywhere. In the Judge’s sanctum, there was none.

The picture told him nothing. He saw now that the frame had a small inscribed gold tag attached to its nether side as in museums; if he went up to it he would learn her name, which he didn’t know. In his notebook, she was merely Mrs. M. He sat where he was; she concerned him only in what her end had done to the Judge. For it was absurd to think that a man’s bad luck didn’t attach to his character. Just as her suicide had crystallized hers, it had at once made of the Judge a man who could choose a woman capable of committing it. Cancer had been rumored the cause of it—at Harvard where Edwin had heard all this, meanwhile watching gossip’s interplay, taking a ground lesson, in the politics of men before they flew off into outright politics. For, just as the ill luck of cancer had forever attached itself to the body of her character, whatever the Judge had done after her death was at once attached to his. Ill luck had made his personal character common property. Now men could say thus and so of him. After her death, he had for years retired from public life. He was
that
kind of man.

Yet because of what the Judge was otherwise, it hadn’t been the end of him.

“Look—it stands to reason,” had said one professional voice, host in his rooms to the group of frosh law students who were pleasantly conscious of being as “in” as the imported ale they were drinking. “Some men’s reputations
swell
in retirement. That’s our country for you. We confuse it with purity. Anything he writes—be it ever so—”

“Humble?” said another. There was a general snigger.

“Not
that,”
said the first. “But he was always a contradictory figure. Look at his early practice, a lawyer’s lawyer, almost a yearner after the poetry of the law you might say—not at all in the style of the man you meet. Yes, I’ve been to meet him. And I’d have been tempted to put him down as a top trial lawyer, if we’d met
outside.
Nothing radical—if there was a touch of that too in the early days, I’d bet he cultivated it, to conceal a conservatism not in the popular style. Anyway, a tricky little Napoleon, to look at him. And on second handshake, an old-fashioned niceness that cuts a clever modern fellow—like me—to the heart. Juries would have gone under to it. And the very size of the man! Where little Mannix sits is always the head of the table—you have to listen to him. It’s like sex.”

When he had finished, a student voice said “Outside?” And got a student’s answer, from a generation suddenly reminded that it was gossiping about its own.

“Yes, people mostly go there to meet
him,
I guess. But you’ll find that’s true, Benjamin, of a lot of us old gents. Though Mannix is only sixty or so.” The speaker was perhaps fifty.

And then Edwin, in spite of himself, had interposed. “That’s right, sir. He’s sixty-one. He was born in 1890.”

They’d all turned to look at him except the first man, who went on riding his hobbyhorse. “See, then? And already a sage. Retirement’s only made him a virtuoso.”

“On what, sir?” said the persistent Benjamin. The masters looked at each other, shrugging.

A new voice spoke, an eminent visiting historian. “On honor, I guess. The public honor. Those discriminations which can only be made by men who live in private. Not that
he
makes them. He’s never done a damn thing since as far as I can see—except his refugees, and that one little early paper he revised. Just lets his reputation grow in interview—or in talk like this. Naturally anybody’s incorruptible who doesn’t do anything.”

One of the home crowd agreed with him. “Though there was rumor that even before his wife—died—he was planning to desert judicial life for another sort entirely. I’m not inclined to believe it. Has to be some better explanation of why he dropped out, gave up what he had. The talk has always been that maybe, during the interlude after her death, an improbable ambition he had became an impossible one. And he’s never been able to scramble up the energy for anything
less.
” The speaker’s drawl was scornful. On the subject of inaction, these university shut-ins often were.

“What ambition?”

“Oh, it was absurd—the way truth can be. It was rumored he wanted to—” Someone must just then have realized that they were talking in front of Mannix’s protégé. In the silence that fell he had heard the speaker’s finishing whisper and laugh anyway: “—to run for
President
.”

He went up to the portrait now, and looked at its nameplate. Her name was Mirriam.

Anna was heard coming upstairs from her lower regions, not ponderous, but moving always with the responsibility of creatures who must announce themselves. No reason why he should feel as if he’d filched a part of the house’s silence. Yet when she saw him, he said, “The door was open again.”

Under her regard, flat as at their first entente over hall toilets, his neat chinos flopped again into tramp-folds. He couldn’t have cared less. Maybe this puzzled her.

“Walter and David here?” he said.

“Dey left again day before yesterday.”

There went his “major” visit. Perhaps they were all too grown now for it ever to occur again. “Abroad?”

“Yah.” She always grudged informing him of any of them, preferring to hold him on the side of those strangers it was her job to keep away from such information. Was it also because she thought him the Judge’s favorite? He’d never thought of the word, until seeing himself again in her eyes.

“Mr. Austin, he’s home from Korea.”

Edwin knew who her favorite was—and why. “Yes, I know. Ruth wrote me from London.” Only a card, but no reason to say that. “She back yet?”

“The two boys dey gone to meet her.” Then she said quickly, “I knew you be late again—you better sneak in, wait for him.”

If they’d gone to get Ruth, what could it mean except that, unpersuaded, she, who had never been away alone before, wouldn’t come back? He stared at Anna, from hairnet to apron, understanding her function better. Anna smoothed away the family thunder by giving to all family information the appearance of its being nothing at all.

“Not down yet?” he said.

“He don’t look good. He been to doctor.
Him.
” On the subject of the Judge’s health she would inform or consult anybody—and no one she loved ever looked too good to her. “What you tink—?” she said. Since they were all away she would ask anyone, even him. “He bought a cane.”

“Ah, Anna—” He flattered himself he was all Harvard now, make what she could of it. “That’s to beat me with.”

Just then the phone rang. She let it ring, counting—the Judge and she had an arrangement—then answered it. Her bulk filled the little niche in the hallway, through which he must pass to the Judge’s study in the rear. He turned once again to study the picture, proudly not listening.

But she—when she hung up he had never seen her in such a state—nor in any, of course. Her face had mottled; she wrung her hands. Yes, he thought—how visible our kind are.

“That woman, she’s over here; she’s coming to dinner,” she finally said, smoothing her hair as if inner feelings had worked on it. “
I
didn’t invite her. Pauli say to tell
him
she’s coming. You tell him.”

“Who shall I say?”

Too late she saw how close she had invited him to come. “You just say—” she hesitated—‘the ballet lady!’ You just say it like that.”

“Well, you always have enough to feed a battalion, Anna. I’ve heard the Judge say it time and again.”

Right there, he saw her smooth over her own character, tug it, like a skirt or a blouse ruff, back into line. “Yah!” she said in broad relief. “Tank God, I got the fricassee.”

They were still standing together near the entrance of the long room. An impulse made him touch her arm, perhaps because he’d guessed the identity of the newcomer.
But the best thing was Daddy and Madame
—somebody or other.
When the war’s over, maybe the Royal will take me.
But Ruth had never dared go back, until now. “I’ve been looking at that picture up there. Mrs. Mannix. She must have been very handsome.”

“Yah.” Though she must know he knew the circumstances, she said it so calmly, prepared for all visitors.

“More like David.” He didn’t know what he was digging for, scarcely that he was.

Again she nodded. She hadn’t really opened her mouth at all.

“Not like Ruth.”

She shook her head minimally. She must be in a rage to get away to her dinner preparations, the only hours she showed temperament; her refusal to have other help was known to all. Yet she stood there, lip twitched to a smile, in a stance that half horrified he smelled out at once—her cul-de-sac.

“You tell Judge I put dinner later haff, tree-quarter hour,” she said—and left him.

He found himself near the telephone, and shook a musing no at it. Wherever her fear of him circled, it wasn’t in connection with the Judge—though it now seemed to him that he knew the judge better than anyone alive, even anyone here. He’d never thought along of their mother before. Now it struck him that perhaps Anna was afraid that suicide was hereditary. But then why should her fear be connected in any way with him?