New Yorkers (51 page)

“Dinner parties. Through all that. Maybe we shouldn’t be having them.”

“Oh Simon, what soppiness.” Madame, stretching with a dancer’s extension, was no longer a small woman. Her tiny bodice, a moment ago lace and brilliants, now proffered real breasts. “Or is it this class thing, always worrying you because, you’re not supposed to have them—you’re all so self-conscious here. True, you’ve never been bombed.” Her arms paused on the air, like wings. “During
our
war—that was the only class thing going—were you there, with the bombs? Those were the aristocrats.” Surely they could all hear it in her laugh, as Simon did—that Cockney
eow.
She grinned. “Except for the children. We sent those away—so we could give dinner pa-owties. And what ones we gave. Remember, Simon? You were at one of them.”

“I remember. In that basement theatre near the Underground. We all brought gifts.”

“Of food.” A faint, wicked crinkle of her mouthlines, long droop of lids, reminded him of their first night together—and made sure the others saw. “You brought a lemon, remember. The only one in London.”

“Left over from our luggage. On the boat.” He was embarrassed, as then, at the eternal role of the American, scatheless, bearing gifts.

Madame Fracca got up from the chair into which moments ago she had melted so demonstratively, strode halfway to the dining-table they had left, turned her back to it, and confronted them. She was still a dinner guest somewhere, but by the thinnest line—an aura around her own attitude, perhaps only muscular—she had put distance between them and her. She was onstage. He’d seen her do this in the studio, explaining a movement to a group of girls. “After the performance. Couldn’t use the green room, there’d been a direct hit the week before. Some of the music hall people who owned the place trooped us down to a cellar it has, next door to Waterloo, deep down.” She drew the ingle down with her. “Basement light.” She said it like a command. “Brown. One always knows it. Twelve by fourteen room, and there were thirty of us. Stacked high with song sheets the place was, too. Somebody said it was against the fire laws, all that paper; he’d have to bring a complaint, he was a warden; that broke everybody up.” Over the stage she dispersed them, her ring finger imperious. “Rupert was doing an adagio, with a ham his mother’d sent him.” Walking steadily nearer them, she decreed it, and a laden table too. “And whoever had folk in the country. There was even Devonshire cream. Best food any of us had had since Dorset. And we were all from the theatre. No audience, except him.” She pointed to Simon. “He’d gone back to the hotel, when he saw what we had. On foot, because Jerry was at it again overhead. He had to take his chances, just like us.” She made a wreath of one arm and drew it inward. “Rupert’d put a tutu on the ham, and he was just holding it up in one hand, arabesque, finale.” Her tiara sparkled as her arm rose, bearing a weight. “And in walks Simon, like an Erl-king from abovestairs—with his lemon.”

“Had a bottle of bourbon, that’s why.”

She gave him the white glance for interruptions—in all his attendance at rehearsals he’d only seen it needed once, on a governmental visitor—meanwhile holding the illusion, choreographing it steadily in the core of her hand. “But it was the lemon we couldn’t take our eyes from. Everybody gathered round it—like that old ensemble in your
Cavalleria,
Pauli—and everybody had a touch of it.” Stepping softly, or seeming to, she circled it round them, and they saw it, doubtful only of whether they too ought to reach out and touch. “And remember what Rupert said? ‘Saw an onion not a month ago, down at me mother’s. But a
lemon.
It’s Spain, girls, Tangier. Shall we all ’ave a suck, since we can’t ’ave a pudding?” And one of the girls said—” the hush wasn’t in Madame’s voice but in her limbs—“‘If it were an onion,’ she said, ‘we could cut it up and all ’ave a good cry!’”

Smiling now, the ballerina’s correct smile, Madame again passed the lemon around for all to see, hot, gold and oval under the brown, ruined light of war. Using an intricately weaving combination he ought to know—pas seul?—she made each of them see it, and supremity of art, that it was an illusion. She deposited it in Pauli’s lap, where it lay for a moment. Then, with a flourish of the hand, all was over—Madame’s “demonstration.” Clasping her hands, she raised her eyes to a curtain she made sweep behind her, pressed her hands back against its billowing—and bowed.

Simon was the first to clap, then everybody at once, even Leni, who cried, heavily moving a foot, “That—from
Giselle!”

“
Wunderbar.
Fracca, you could dance even now. I am ready to believe it.”

“You were always ready, Pauli. To believe.”

How dared she whisper that, forward from the waist, arrogant as a diva, with Leni looking on? If Madame didn’t take lovers from the theatre, Pauli must have been an exception. Or to her mind, an amateur. “Ninon’s a directress,” said the Judge to Leni. “She can make us believe anything.”

“Oh yes, Simon? Even that I am
not
Madame?”

“
I’m
audience.”

Leni made a sepulchral sound. “We are all audience now—at our age.” Didn’t she know best of any of them what theatre was? “Now it’s time to go home.”

Pauli whispered to her, looking at his watch.

“Oh, you were never just audience to us, Simon.” Ninon stood in front of him. “You brought your daughter to our war, which made all the difference. We never asked why. But once—she told us.”

“Told you. What could she have told you.” Stiff-lipped, he couldn’t make it a question. Women were the daring ones. While their men went to work or to war, they rose, like slaves freed of all except themselves, and lit the revolutionary fuse in the drawing-room. Waiting for Ninon’s answer, he heard another, long ago. (
It’s the honorarium you men let us have, Si. For being what we are.
)

“She said…‘My father couldn’t come without me.’” Ninon shrugged. “She didn’t say why. But our Ruth always speaks the truth, have you noticed?” She sat herself down between Austin and the half-dozing Blount, and cupped the younger man’s chin in her palm. “
Here’s
an audience. What year were
you
born in?”

He couldn’t laugh. Her touch penetrated, agelessly a woman’s. “Nineteen twenty-seven…Tell us more. About Ruth.”

She turned away from him to Simon. “Later.”

He might be going to hear, maybe years too late, the inner tale of his daughter; would Ninon be bearing it to him? But he should never have brought them
all
here together. People carried revelation with them for years, like germs; it only needed a presence, and a cough.

“Of
course
she speaks truly, our Ruth,” said Pauli. “Look who her father is!”

Blount, the observer, was now asleep. The rest gave each other little smiles at the sight, drawn closer by it as people are.

“No,” said the Judge, “that was her mother’s bent. Mine cannot—compare.” His eyes watered—like some murderer’s, returning after years of useless safety to place a late rose, so that all might know.

“So often you speak of her tonight, your dear wife. Is it a special occasion?” said Madame.

The Judge’s hand gave a small jerk; it wanted its stick. There, at the table’s edge, so far—who had placed it there? “One of a sort. Pauli…I’m going to let Ruth go. On tour.”

“There,” said Pauli. He took Leni’s hand like a pledge. “Did I not
tell
you how things are managed in this house?”

Leni gave him an enigmatic shrug—she was not to be managed—and leaned over Blount as if he were the last recoverable man. “Shall I wake him?”

“No.” From Pauli’s gleam of teeth, he’d understood more of Blount’s yearning for Pyongyant than thought. “As my mother used to say at the end of a season, ‘He has been too many places at once.’”

“On tour with you, Madame?” Austin, as always even under the influence of emotion, was determined to bring something concrete from it

“I don’t go on tour, Mr. Austin. Only the young ones.” She took up the boa lying on a chair and drew it across his knees, to her own. “The
second
company.”

“Yes, that’s what we are, of course,” he said.

“On the way to being the first, Austin, I assure you,” said Simon. “As for the tour, I haven’t told Ruth yet, Ninon, so let’s not—”

“I never talk about the young behind their backs.”

“Hoping we won’t talk about you?” said Austin.

“My God.” Madame gave a stare for the manner which could carry this off so politely. “He gives us lessons, eh.”

“In vino veritas.”
Austin nodded at Pauli. “That’s the other Latin I know.”

“What does that mean, Pauli?”

“In wine, truth—Leni. Best at weddings.”

She snorted. “
That
language.”

Austin got up and stood by the window, in which the curtains were moving slowly back and forth over the window boxes.

The Judge’s eyes followed him. “Yes, Austin?”

“Diddy speaks the truth also. David.”

After a minute, the Judge said, “I’m glad you’re my son’s friend. So you still call him by his childhood name for himself—come out of his deafness, you know. Does he speak of me?”

Austin turned round, confronting him. He drew a long breath, “No.” Just then he thought he heard the shuffle of feet in the areaway and made a quick move to look out over Anna’s window boxes, but instead stumbled from the countering pain in his hip, of which not even his family had been allowed to make mention. He forced his hand back from it, to hang at his side.

“Austin.
Austin.
No wonder you knew so much about—
You’ve been wounded.
”

Even Blount woke at the Judge’s cry. It was almost a cry of joy, of annexing joy.

Austin gave the classic answer, smiling it up at Pauli, the military expert, by the light of whose toe-caps troops could have been deployed. “It was nothing.”

“Wounded? Where?” said Blount.

“On the map? Or on me?”

This time no one could laugh. The women’s nostrils opened to the scent. The poppy of war was nearer—near.

“Nothing serious.” Exactly what he’d told his family, in the reverent hush round his return. They’d finally sicked his little sister on him, to use her direct angel-honesty to find out. She hadn’t. He would
not
have his body made public; that was what it amounted to. He’d seen men do that, letting it be dragged out of them by the nearest civilian. Oh, he’d learned so much that might forever devil him—about men and feeling.

“Ah, here’s Anna. Wonderful dinner, Anna.”

Everybody made an assenting murmur. Anna, apron removed, now to show the long string of huge amber ovals given her by the Judge’s sisters in their disposition of his wife’s effects, took the plaudits gravely, standing in front of the swing-door to the pantry. “Leni, Ninon, this is our Anna. Anna, this is Miss Petersh and Madame Fracca.” Anna’s netted head, nodding to Ninon’s coronet and Leni’s earrings, had a queen’s dowdiness. She handed the Judge a slip of paper. “For Misser Stern, a call to this number. I go off now, so I give you.”

“Oh, Walter. We’ll give it to him. And good night Anna, don’t you stay up now. Sleep well.”

A strange adjunct to a housekeeper’s good night, as the two women were perhaps thinking. The male habitués of the house were used to it, Austin taking it as part of the Mannix warmth, along with the way Anna was looking at him—like any friend of his mother’s, who had watched him grow and had always favored him. He gave her his hand. “Anna. Good to be home.”

“Misser Owstin! Oh, Misser Owstin.”

“Mr. Austin’s been in hospital, Anna,” said the Judge. “But he says he’s all right now.”

“Yah, I know.”

“You know?” said the Judge. “How?”

“Your Lutie,” she said shyly to Austin. “We go same meat market.”

Her face assumed the same holiness Lutie gave to her shibboleths of health. “Drink lots water. So near the kidney, you got to take care.”

Mannix gave a choked guffaw. “The gulls have their lanes.” He couldn’t seem to stop laughing until he blanked his face with a handkerchief. Above the white folds, his eyes were merry, or derisive, or only very sane. “See, Austin? We even eat the very same meat.”

“I guess.” Another bond, that he might sometime tell his father. Lutie must have come upon the leather brace he’d been told he might begin to discard. He could still keep to himself the pin in his hip. “If we’d had you and Lutie out there, Anna, things would have gone faster.”

Nobody believed this, least of all Anna. “Yah? And what would your mother do without her?”

Everybody smiled speciously at this terrible clarity—especially the two women, long accustomed to hear men patronize their own feminisms in the same way. Anna picked up a vase from its pedestal and turned to go.

“Indeed!” her master called after her as she departed. “And what about
me.
”

“Graz!” Leni got up from her chair to walk about. She halted, center stage. Forty years late, her figure, nullified to grace, held all the middle-aged negatives which made for power. The neck strengthened by a rear hump, could move forward only. The skeleton, once tortured to suppleness, now had the strong put of permanence. Under that authoritatively ugly dress her body suggested a new, heavier nymph in stone, monument to all the more important reveries of flesh. Beside her, Fracca, reclining with pointed chin on palm, lissom arm still gloved, was an annihilated girl, grace too sharply preserved. “We know about military hospitals, la, la, Pauli and I. Didn’t we meet in one?” She inserted herself between Pauli and Austin. “Our troupe came to entertain the officers, in the hospital at Graz. We were—what you might say—quarantined there.”

“I was not wounded.” Pauli might have been snapping to attention. “Only by her.”

Blount, with a large stretch, began picking all his own pockets—ready to make off. Leni, with a night-owl shrug, grasped Pauli’s arm, then Austin’s. “La, la, what we didn’t do with you, the nurses did!” Dividing her smile between the two of them, she slid her hand down Austin’s niggardly uniform, over the bare, unmedaled pocket flap, to his waist. “A man can do all right, eh, when only wounded in back.” She squeezed him too. Memory exuded from her like sweat, like sex. “No ballerinas, a nurse will do very well, eh. Legs like sticks, those Chinese girls. Pauli has pictures of the opera one…he wanted to bring her back with him but she turn him down…”