New Yorkers (34 page)

I once knew a German lady, Edwin, a countess from a provincial town near Koln, who claimed she’d run away from home and her Junker father all because at a musical which her noble finishing school attended, one of the other girls pointed to the soubrette and said, “See her? That’s your father’s latest mistress.” What a pity she didn’t get the news under some situation such as mine at that moment! How changed her life might have been—depending too of course on what her father replied!

Though technically I’d heard all of what was being said over my head, I hadn’t really taken it in—for, across from me, moving nearer to the baron and thus to me, even close enough so that I got a dose of that chypre she was soaked in—the little…darling…now tipped me a wink. It was a communication. She had a foreign way of smiling; the upper lip didn’t move, and the lower one curled down from the tiny teeth into a V, as if she were trying for my language. Corset or no, this was all I saw. In answer, my hand, unconsciously I swear, stole to my pocket—to the cap I kept stuffed there. It was the same luckless hand that had gotten me in trouble earlier, and what was it trying to do now, make tribute? Or reparations—and to whom? To my father—and that house of his?

What in God’s name did I mean by it? For, standing back a pace, and staring with all my might, I took the cap out, and placed it on my head.

I laugh about it yet—in memory of him, and of the service we did one another. For my father’s laugh broke overhead, enormous, the great ho-ho-ho’s of a shy man, infinitely relieved. It blew us out of there—but not before my father, toppling the room to nonsense with a final wheeze of it, had given me a push, making me extend the offending hand to the baron.

“Guess I didn’t introduce you two properly,” he said. “Simon—this is the Baron Godefroye de la Unnnh et de la St.-Blah”—or so it sounded to me. “And allow me to introduce Simon Mannix, Baron. Miniature—but a Mannix. This is my
son
.”

We left without waiting for the apologies. My father led us out of the neighborhood without once asking for directions, buoyed up by a vital energy arrived out of nowhere, which bounced from fingertips vibrating on my arm and flashed from his skittery eyes. “Miniat—” Chortling over his bon mot, he adoringly guarded me, the cause of it, across street after street, until we reached Duprès’s shop again, and turned from there onward to our usual street of restaurants.

“Let’s not go there,” he said, turning me away from the one we most usually frequented, and sat me down instead in another outdoor café around the corner, though not far. There was no reason for this—except that everything had changed. We sat for some time, saying nothing after the order was given. He’d changed that too; instead of a ragout and a sweet after, we were to have an omelet and cheese. Then, as if reminding himself, he called the waiter back, and consulted me on my choice. But it was quite all right with me, I said. Then we fell silent again.

With the apéritif, he remarked “Opera house! They always blame the theatre for these things, poor dears.” This emboldened me to ask if
cul
meant—what I thought, it did—also what he’d bent down and said to the girl just before we marched out. He told me both, repeating the last.
“La jeunesse a sa propre couleur,”
he said with a flourish. “And I’m glad that you asked. Youth
has
its own color, Simon.” There was his florid taste again, though it was the first time I marked it, plus the fact, though I didn’t say so, that
I
was modern—our sense of modernity arrives early, and never does change.

With the cheese, he discoursed a bit on the baron’s eccentricities—the Anglophilia which had made him act untypically, un-French. “It really was an act of friendship, you know. Ordinarily here, a man wouldn’t think of interfering. Tolerance covers all.” And with the café filtre, which I hadn’t been allowed before, he asked whether I understood what the baron had taken me for, and I said in a low voice that now I had. (My hated school had done that much for me.) Then I burst into wild laughter myself. There was a heady exhilaration about both of us in all of this, a recognition of something precious. Lack of pretense—that’s communication of itself. One doesn’t have to gabble anything in particular, or over any kind of instrument—that’s what this century doesn’t yet understand. But when he offered me a second coffee, I answered, from some imp that impelled me, in the voice of my mother—“No, it would stunt my growth.”

Across that impossibly hopeful, absurd statement, we grinned at each other. Then my father snapped his fingers for a cognac, got it, didn’t offer me any—he’d regained his fatherhood—and spoke. “I ordered light lunch on purpose. We’re going to tea with a lady.” In the lengthening sun rays of the slanting afternoon, and with his brown skin and striped suit so dark against the white napery, his handsomeness deepened, but as if about to edge away forever, into his gray hair. It must have been time for him to get the violet buttonhole he always came home with. At last he sighed, “I guess I want to show you. The other half of my house.”

She was thin, pale, with hair snailed in braids at her ears just as the baron had indicated, and not young—and this is not her story, except to say that aside from these intervals in her lone, half-expunged days, Paris was her only companion; she was a copyist at the Louvre. How perfectly suitable even the undersides of lives are seen to be, once the life has closed! After my father’s death and until her own, I visited her once or twice; it was also a great boon to him to be able to leave me private instructions for her pension. But I’d been too much of a success with her that afternoon ever to go there often; I might have become the son she had missed. When we left that afternoon, she wanted to give me a violet buttonhole also, but my father said she mustn’t—how romantic they were, compared to us! But it isn’t the war which has coarsened us but something else newer to the world—which if I let it will destroy the symmetry of reminiscence forever—let’s not talk about the world now…And on the way home, instead, he gave me the enameled case—should I have seen from his hesitance that he couldn’t quite bring himself to caution me to conceal it from my mother? Sons aren’t clairvoyant about the future until they become fathers looking back. Later that year, my mother found it in my laundry drawer and there was hell to pay, but only on my account; to manage this pleased my devotion to him, but my vanity even more. For I told her that the case had been given me, in the deepest friendship, by an aristocratic schoolmate—the Marquis Godefroye de la Unnnh—et de la St.-Blah.

My father was never sure he did right by telling me—how can one say for sure until all lives concerned are closed? And that means never; the underside of a family goes on and on, with the toughest genes of all. After his death when I was about twenty-eight, my mother let it be known that she had found out, though she never told me when. Her deepest outrage was for his having told
me.
She seemed to think that he had hurt
her
by telling me—
her
image in my heart—while all the time I was thinking of him in Paris that year—guiltily trying to give himself in so many ways, to her in her bed back there, to me in my cap.

“That dirty cigarette case with the girl on it,” she said suddenly, one day not long after. “
He
gave it to you, didn’t he. What things for a father to give his son.” She spoke with a stumpy satisfaction in her own legacy—all the way from our close resemblance to each other, in which his lean, drakish looks were shut out, to the thousand and one physical touches and admonitions which mothers can supply while fathers are away, or dreaming.

“He gave me his house.”

“House?” she said, staring. “Why, we sold that for the creditors, before he died. Oh, he was honest enough in the pocket, I grant you.”

He left no real creditors—only debts to him. She knew nothing of his business.

But I was going over all the other things, the thousand and one dreams which come while closer hands are touching: my habit of Daumiers, descendant in a way of his Conders, those knickerbocker evenings I still listened for, my whippings, the memory of a day with no moral to it.

“Still, I’ve got it,” I said. I was pretty romantic myself.

“Where! Tell me! In Paris? Who keeps it for you, now!”

I thought of a way of telling her, yet keeping it for myself always—as if we ever could, without passing it on. So—I pass it.

“The seals,” I said. “Who breed in the Pribilofs.”

The Judge snapped the ceiling lights on. Opposite Edwin, upright in the chair, the Judge looked spry, sparkling, his black hair electric, as if memory had invigorated him the way action would.

His own tongue clove dryly to his mouth in the mournfulness which came when one was waked away from erotic byways just then leading to perfection. “Feel as if I’d been in another century.”

“Maybe you have. Some of what my parents used to say came from their grandparents—who lived in the eighteenth—and so its goes. I’ll trust the spirit of it—let the historians scrabble for the details. Whenever my mother said
‘Steich mir am Buckel ’rauf!’
I heard that cattle dealer she denied we came from.”

“Paris,” said Edwin. “Suppose I’ll remember from now on I haven’t been there?” He felt unfairly played with, cheated, as if the wires of his emotions had been wrung, and not cheaply.

“Ought to get together and do it in clubs,” said the Judge. “Remembering clubs. Reminiscence ought to be a respectable pastime—an important one. What d’you think makes psychiatry so popular—our anxieties alone? Nonsense. If you squeeze the air of the past out of a man’s head, it’ll get out the back way from his guts—or in what he whispers to his children when the world’s not looking.”

“At least I know I haven’t been in the Pribilofs.”

“And what has such a violet-scented story to do with you, you’re thinking?” Mannix got up and went to the window, grasping the sill, which came just at his waist, with both hands. The arc light—which Mannixes paid for—gleamed from his watch and from the even pallor of his skin, picking out what was salient to this man, and maybe hereditary too. In the houses of all Mannixes the inanimate had its paid-for duties. Yet the man was trembling. “Or with me,” he said. “Why do you think I plucked you out of my garden—where you were ‘answering a call of nature’ as my father would have said? I didn’t wholly
know
why—but I’m learning. Along with you. The clock ticks between us; in some way we’re joined, tick to tock. Or could be. Which is it? Everything we say here I guide you in—did you think it was casual?—and yet I don’t know why or where.”

He beat the sill with his fist, but regally; the fist didn’t forget that the sill was his. “You were a lone boy, peculiarly without family. ‘Politics?’—what you said about it drew my attention to you, that’s all—to your story—from where I was wool-gathering all those two years. ‘He’s like Romulus then,’ I said to her when she came in and told me, but maybe she knew better, she wouldn’t say. If you were really the savage at our gates that didn’t interest her, as it might me. Wise girl. ‘And where’s Remus?’ I asked her. What she answered—has nothing to do with you. But she saw too that you weren’t simply lonely or underprivileged—merely a boy in one of those groves—you were
lone.
Family knowledge is the most important of all. I was brought up to believe that in one way—and
forced
to believe it later. And you had—not quite none. Such a strange, lone slice of it.”

“So I was a specimen.”

“Be fair. So was I to you. My own middle-classness never fails to interest me, does it. Nothing interests you as much about us—you think. And I thought all I wanted was to tell you about it. At our leisure.” He shrugged, looking up past the light. Maybe we’re both learning otherwise.
I
am. Living so much alone as I do. The city is all very well. But an audience is needed—in the house.”

He raps the sill as if he could summon one, Edwin thought. “That why you told me about you and him? A sort of middle-class legend?”

“Anything about us’ll have some of that in it. But—no.”

“What other kind of audience then—than we’ve been!” He was furious, rent, shaking also. Their dialogue was falling to bits.

“You think maybe I want you to tell me about your sex life? Hmmm—no. Though those books over there, the risky little bits that book-seller sends—they’re kind of a memorial to him, too, a gentle little collection of nineteen-century erotica that some day I’ll present to a university. The Simon Mannix Collection—Simon Senior. You didn’t know I was a Junior, did you. Start thinking of me that way, Edwin—it. may help us both. Tick…tock.”

“I don’t want to. Think of you that way. No younger man can.”

“I know. And did I really say that about the seals, to my mother? I only remember that I wanted to. Family knowledge—you have to know us not only as we are, but as we think we are—” He was smoothing the sill now, over and over. “And were. Ruth was born in this house, did you know that? Not David. We weren’t yet here then, but in an apartment; he was born in hospital. But even he and she were really too late for the other. Home birth stopped—for people like us—around 1912. And after the war, gradually for everyone. Even the rich couldn’t afford it any more—only the deepest poor. And now even they can’t.”

He turned around and leaned his back against the sill, stretching either arm on it. “Know that a house with a child coming in it begins to smell of milk weeks before? Not just the body of the mother. And while the birth goes on, you find out what the air of a house like this is really made of. You lived in a slum—maybe you already know. But we don’t—ordinarily we have to be told, or manufacture it in some other, abnormal, way. On the day of birth, the air itself tells you that the house is made of blood and earth and amniotic fluid—water. And maybe a little claret—that the father, out in the hall at the bottom of the steps, is drinking. Or tea, or whisky—claret is what I had. After the birth, then it’s all normal again; you can hear the death-beetle again in a room or two, of an evening—not because somebody died there, but because they lived. And you can see the scars on the newel-post. But not just then. Later.” His voice trailed, began again. “Later you have all the time in the world to put the two halves together.” He pressed a hand over his mouth. “As my father did.”