New Yorkers (39 page)

Krupong’s eyes really widened. “I have heard what Gorgons your woman can be.
Self-defense.
Dear oh dear.”

And from then on they covered the intervening blocks without incident, on the stream of Krupong’s grapeshot interest: “Nice block of houses, like St. John’s Wood, would you say?…What is your opinion of the Korean conflict?…Is it your feeling that…? Am I correct in assuming…? How would you describe…?”—and so on.

Until, a few doors down from the house indicated—one with charming curtains and that air of self-sufficiency which time and the exertions of tradition supply—Blount drew up short.

“Mr. Krupong…Felix…er, I may say ‘Felix’?”

“You may.”

Blount put on an expression, thin and wise. “Really a newspaperman, aren’t you?”

Felix, examining the street at large, said absently, “Would you say Socrates was the first journalist?”

“Ah, come on—” Blount stopped himself, with an exaggerated gesture. “Say! The old steel trap is beginning to function. Aren’t you that Nigerian whiz-kid sent a Latin poem to the
Times
on the subject of the pound crisis—and they found out he was attending
two
universities, London School of Economics in his spare time—told the press it was no trouble at all. I saw a Reuters bit on it. Ah-ha, Felix. Come clean.”

“Clean?” Felix gradually swiveled from scrutiny of the street to the house just down there. According to which view of human nature one subscribed to—and Felix, with the advantage of divisible vitality and experience, had several—the house being approached either was the exact milieu for a
crime passionel
—or was exactly not. “I am
Christian,
oh yes.”

“Aw, come…You are?” Blount’s face was grateful. No crumb was too little for him—this was the secret of his success—and he would sweep until the end of time.

“Presbyterian—as a matter of fact.” Krupong, who had walked them on to the house, and was now standing on its lowest step, nodded down on him. From his years among those who had a fetish for
not
asking the personal, it was his own pleasure to offer at times a plethora of naïvely confusing fact. It was a more ancient style of journalism than any Blount knew. “Now my friend back at the Club, he’s still
Muslim.
But would you believe it, both we converts still suffer the same distress after meals, in the white countries! We discuss it the very moment you come up to us. Our poor stomachs are still used to only one meal a day. Biological persistence. Remarkable. Comes of our regretta
bly
cannibal grandfa
thers.
Yes.” He stared up at a window. “Mannix. I have never heard the name. Is it Christian? Like you and me?”

“Matter of fact, they’re Jews,” said Blount, blinking away his polite American aversion to saying what people were—they were so often, from terrain to terrain, something wrong. “I hope you’re not—prejudiced.”

Felix smiled his smile, every mahogany-bordered tooth a glistening echo. These fused. “No.”

“Well, I expect you’re hungry
now
at least,” Blount said, gathering himself a large grin. “I am. Let’s go in.” But he lingered on the second step, though it was now after eight. It had struck his conscience, as never before, that he knew almost nothing about this gent he was bringing into a trusted friend’s household. His own revelations on it had been already forgot. “I know lots of folks down at Cambridge,” he said. “Down there long?”

“Up.” When Krupong closed mouth and eyes, his very serious white linen took over. The effect was solemn. “Oh I stayed the course, yes.”

An even worse thought occurred to Blount, along with the memory that the Mannixes had now and then cashed a Sunday check for him. Could Krupong himself be the Tanganyikan’s bad debt? “Gamble much while you down there?” he said. “Excuse
me.
Up.”

Krupong stroked his black cheek. “Every one of us Englishmen likes his little bet,” he observed. Then he seemed to relent, and drew out his wallet, rather a large one—unless he was a bookie himself. The wallet, large enough indeed for a confidence man—or a renaissance one—did in fact contain, along with his passport and other quite legal documents, that increasing burden of credentials and memberships which learned societies pressed on a man who’d taken honors in both classics and economics—and all the more insistently if the man were black. But in one section of the wallet there were some prized cards he dispensed seldom. Printed up at an Oxford stationer’s (after a venerable joke common to both universities, and for the occasion only), they’d been given him in memory of his honorary induction—for one evening—into one of their drinking clubs. How well he recalled the bottle of port he’d had to drink down in toto! And the porter’s kind, unprejudiced hand as he administered the emetic—“Think nothink of it, sir—they all ’as to ’ave it. Port’s a fortified wine.” It was true that his stomach nowadays was no longer strong, though for more graceful reasons than his grandfather’s. But how he loved their humor, his English! Sometimes the whole net result of his double education seemed to him that now, instead of having only one humorous front to see the world under, he had two. And he wasn’t averse to acquiring an American third.

He handed Blount the card, on which Blount read that Mohammed ben Ali Krupong, Panjandrum, latterly of King’s College, Camb., Hon. Member of The Oakers and Philolexion, Oxon., was hereby recommended as a first-class courier, signed Edward, H.R.H. A sentence in Greek followed.

“What does that say?” said Blount.

“It says Honorable Candidate for a First in Greats.
Failed.
” And Krupong’s laugh, an inch longer than usual, rolled down the stoop. After which he handed over to Blount a quite ordinary card of his own, listing his London and Accra University addresses.

In great amity, they went up the stoop.

At the door, while they waited, Felix said, “Human nature, sir”—he knew how the whites loved to talk about it—“you find it much the same in your travels?”

“Why, of course I do,” said Blount, back on easy ground. As always when Missouri came upon him hard, his “I” had the sound of the “a” in “cat.” “A do, A do, and thank God for it. How else could A tell the countries apart?”

Then, as the door opened, he held back a trifle, perplexedly aware that this had the sound of one of the profundities by which others were so often entertained.

The young man who opened it to them, Felix saw, wore a kind of uniform, not a domestic’s, but not any military one he knew either.

“Why har you, Austin boy, har you!” said Blount. “Uncle Sam sent you back?” He turned to his companion. “L’me introduce Mohammed Ali”—and he quoted the card letter-perfect—“alias Mr. Felix Krupong, KCB, and future
OBE!
And this here scoundrel’s Austin Fenno, one of our finest, Quaker Plenipotentiary!” His introductions always resounded, beguiling the listener to possible half-truths, and committing Blount to nothing. He liked to enter a room as an old-fashioned foreign correspondent should, talking fatter than he was; it inspired confidence. Afterwards people could forget him better. Men of the press didn’t have to be these thin, modern-style sneaks with no style at all. Sometimes he
dreamed
he was the celebrity he
was
—and woke up perplexedly too.

“Why,
Simon
—here you
are!”
said Blount. As he circled the world—yesterday Alaska, tomorrow the Aleutians, Tokyo, Melbourne, Tierra del Fuego, with intermittent stops between Statlers, the Algonquin and the Hotel Inghelterra—it did seem clever of people to be right there in their homes to receive him. “May I introduce—?”

This time, he gave each man his proper names very quietly. Under the Judge’s eye, he knew just who he was—Dan Blount. As for the companion he’d brought here, one last look and he left him to be on his own, he’d been eviscerated and had given up all the answers D. V. Blount had time for, barring one reference, like a souvenir bought at one railway terminal and discarded at the next. “Why, Judge,” said Blount, pausing like a chamberlain at the long room’s entry, “what a fine lot of human nature you have here today.”

Felix, looking down it to the large picture of the mantel end, saw only a pair of women, one rather splayed and thickish, one very tiny and pointed, who looked up at them. The young Mr. Fenno who had opened the door stood near a snub-faced bespectacled young man of about the same age, but they weren’t talking; Felix had one of those early, to be trusted impressions that they were not at ease with one another.

But the Judge was the shock. In size, features, eyes as young in that head as if only lent to it, the Judge—barring skin color, and a few ninetyish wrinkles he would surely live to acquire—might be Felix’s own grandfather. Above all, it was in the head and the posture, and the size—though this man was by birth what his grandfather had shrunk to. On state occasions, his grandfather had worn an out-of-style jacket, with much the same, comfortable breadth at the lapels. This man’s hand, small but not shrunken, pouted on the head of his cane, in the same way rejecting it. But he Felix Krupong, couldn’t believe Blount’s gossip about him. Not after knowing his own grandfather. For the very same reason, he would believe almost anything else.

At his elbow, he heard Blount say, “Don’t see the children, Simon. But I suppose these days, they’re anywhere. All the same these days, isn’t it all the same under the tsetse fly!”

A
USTIN FENNO’S PATERNAL GRANDFATHER
, until recently still surviving on in a house in Wiscasset, Maine, where he broke the ice on the pitcher half the mornings of the year, had been a minister-reformer and formidable diner-out for his own causes, to the end of his life still fond of haranguing any family gathering which had steeled itself to “having Father Fenno,” on the text. “The meal is the parable of society.” This most famous of his many sermons had exhaustively probed all the variations of breaking bread, from the more intimate breakfast trays and peasant gobblings to the banquets of kings and episcopals—and all with the usual wealth of classical allusion, interspersed as the years and dinners went by, with really rather sharp homily from what increasingly appeared to be a worrisomely modern mind. Since Father Fenno’s own father, the great-grandfather, had been missionary to China and other places then far, the discourse was chock-full too of those foreign details which had been the romance of pre-airplane generations; indeed, Austin’s father had told him that the sermon’s sub rosa name among the minister’s own children had been “Food in Many Lands.” Delivered in full, like an extended carminative grace, of a Sunday morning in the old days,
Dinners with God and Man
must have sent home the old man’s parishioners roaring hungry for a roast without any moral significance whatsoever. Over the years, as the number of courses in a family meal had declined from the Victorian to the dietetic, the most senior Fenno had become resigned to spooning out the sermon to his progeny in as many small sections of it as he could get down them—like a nurse feeding children whose mouths were otherwise open—before their attention got back to what he was doing and the meal in any case ended. On his more recent visits to Fennos in Manhattan, Glen Cove, Guilford, Williamstown, or any of the other places where Fennos typically scattered, the old campaigner had even been caught adding so-called anthropological details to titillate them; certainly the sexual significance of suckling, or the premastication of love offerings between Hindu newlyweds, could never have been in the original version. For by then, no living Fenno had ever heard it all.

But to the clan’s surprise,
Dinners with God and Man; or, Meals As Parable
, when its author’s one precious steel-penned manuscript of some forty-nine pages was borrowed for an honorary publication on his ninetieth birthday, had been found to contain all these allusions too and more; its author, in addition to other causes espoused, had been a just barely not too scandalously early follower of Darwin—and more. Privately printed, the pamphlet might yet become an item for cognoscenti, in the same way that Austin’s music-buff friends collected a concert recording by a rich amateur soprano of parts—some missing. As with Mrs. Jenkins’s colossal swoopings (where one heard the sublime in the very notes avoided), there was something remarkable in hearing in the language of Emerson, Macaulay and two lady poets named Hemans and Ingelow—but always under the aegis of God himself and his disciple Fenno—an entirely verifiable account of tapeworm travel.

Otherwise, disclosure had been a miscalculated blow to the balance of the old man’s dinners, throughout which, until he died—and against all daughter-in-law effort to exploit him for visitors: “Do, Father Fenno, give us the part on Table Talk, Tête-à-Tête and the Divine Monologue—the old man had remained glum. He was too intelligent to allow his share of the clan’s power to be made into mere vaudeville. No Fenno of the blood—the pamphlet had been a project of wives—would ever have asked.

“It all ought to have been kept private,” the old man said pitifully, but ministerially strong on his future past imperfects or whatever they were, even now. “In January, it’ll have been a year that I sh’ll’ve wished I mought never’ve let it out,” he said to Austin, whose favorite elder he was, on one of their last icy mornings. “Should have been kept to the family. There was nothing to it any more, without me.”

For a true Fenno intelligence prided itself, most on its self-awareness—more of a clan instinct than a personal insight—of what it
wasn’t.
Austin himself, the old man’s direct descendant, knew for instance that by and large Fennos hadn’t the nervous tissue to be artists, or the emotional intensity of their Jewish friends; when a Fenno had money, he tended to become an enlightened patron of both; when he hadn’t, he and his sons went to be ministers, doctors or other servants of the populace. Often, like Austin’s own father, Warren, they were in the highest sense mercantiles of the moral good. And of the median. In the performance of this, they often married sidewise into sterner dedications or odder clans; Austin’s own Quakerism came to him via his mother. Back in the eighteenth century there’d been an authenticated Indian—and an unproven Jewess, of whom they should’ve like to’ve been proud. Physically, in the matter of ships and seas and good Hudson Bay furs, they had been pioneering enough. The family fortunes had often been high, and never fell to creature-comfort poor—in this they honestly preferred temperance too. Otherwise, they were downright ascetic, stuffy or sensible, as you cared to look at it—but they were almost never too intelligent for their own good. And as with Austin, “by and large,” for Fennos usually included the Fenno who observed it.