New Yorkers (63 page)

She was trembling, at his ash-burnt skin maybe, or the white nudity of his lower face. Just before coming he’d shaved off the flowing beard and moustache of a land where a man could newly choose to be one of the chosen, biblical
and
military, young and a patriarch too. But she wouldn’t have been able to read his mouth.

“‘There’s a one handed sys tem,’ you said.” He took her hands in his. “‘But most people use both. Like from the Dal gar no alpha bet. I could teach it to you. And all our signs.’” He took one of her hands, molding it into the
In hoc signo
sign—second and third fingers up, fourth and fifth bent under the thumb. “‘There. It’s the sign the saints make, but to us it is the letter U.’” She’d taught him all the little academic jokes and devices of the science. “‘And the sign for the word
and
is the quick est like a rabbit nibbling.’” He made four extended fingers vibrate muzzle-fashion, against a thumb. “‘There.’”

Quick as a flash, back there in that first museum, he’d made the U sign after her, then the
and,
then pointed to himself:
You and me.
“No,” she’d said, in her literal way, in the voice whose faint vibration his box had never been able to bring to him. “Those are the signs. But to spell it the M is like this and this is the E.’” He wondered now why he should be trying like mad to convince her that all was the same—when he had come home to confess the opposite. “Of course,” he said, casually aloud. “It’s my box. I forgot.” He always took it off when they met—to make things equal. He blushed now—to have said that to a woman: I have forgotten how you are.

“No.” She sat so tall. Had she voiced it? “Keep it on.” She touched the box, even with interest. “I’m teaching now, you know. In a hospital.”

“You wrote,” he said. “The larnygotomies.”

“How well you say it,” she said. “I never knew.”

He had barely understood her, she mimed so fast, or her lips moved so slightly. “I must go and watch. How you teach them.”

Again she didn’t reply. He felt like an amnesiac returning. Surely there was something that teased. What had he forgotten about this girl, or never known?

“I met your father,” she said suddenly. With her lips. “He was there just the other day to see a friend.”

“Repeat,” he said. “You speak so fast. Or the desert…has made me slow.” And when she had done so—“He knew you then?” How should his father not know her! How many deaf girls of that name, that description, would there be, other than the one with whom the son-of-the-name was rumored to be in love!

Again no answer—like a signal from a farther area of deafness at her very recesses, never discovered before.

“He’s terrifying,” she said then. “You never told me. He’s so small.”

“What did he say…to scare you?” he said aloud, starting up.

“Nothing. Relax, David, I thought you said the desert had changed you.”

“I have relapses. But what has changed you?”

Again no reply. Maybe to remind him that he had the explaining to do.

“He used to…terrify me,” he said with his lips. “Inaction does that—to people like me. We think such people have a secret. Of how to live…by thinking only. Because…we can’t. So I used to just—act happy instead…or helpful.” It was a long speech. She had listened to every word of it.

A guard looked in on them.

“We’re stealing nothing!” David said to him gaily, in flashing sign language, and turned to the girl. “See!” he said aloud. “My Dalgarno. I had no one to keep it up with. So I spoke to the heavens.”

The guard came forward.

“Nothing!” said David aloud. “Go away.”

“Go on,” she said. “About him.”

“Even you…say that,” he said. “After only one meeting. ‘Him.’” There was a pause. “But…don’t let’s talk like this. Let’s—” He took up both her hands, gently forcing them into the air.

“Not yet,” she said. “Not…yet.”

“Or—not here,” he said humbly, and turned his head quickly away to the window behind them, so as not to be sure of her answer. The city itself had no creeping moral poetry for him; he left that to his father. His own ears and box kept a single locale for him anywhere. He felt her hands seize his, and closed his eyes. The girl’s eyes calmly stared down the guard.

At her side, David opened his eyes. “I never feel childish with you.” Lifted like that, his long, handsome head with its broad forehead and chin, hair crimped like a Grecian bull’s, curled mouth and jutting nose, had a dignity he himself never saw. “He and I talked last night. Half an hour. Long…for us. ‘We’re not…a serious family,’ I said to him. ‘We don’t do enough in the world.’”

“…I take it you don’t mean just me,” his father had said from his chair, with a forbearance which could have made those still on their two legs feel guilty for it, but comically scratching that way at his own crotch. He could charm the bees.

“‘We’d as soon spend action outside our own circle—’” said David slowly to the girl—“‘as spend capital,’ I told him. ‘If that’s your middle class, I’m done with it.’”

(And his father said to him, “There speaks your mother’s son.” Never forbearing there, his father. “Action never helped her, David.” And I said to him, “I’m
your
son, too.” I’d never shown him before that I knew he didn’t think so. He wheeled his chair up close to the mirror beside where I was standing—the big pier glass in the downstairs hall where we were waiting for Charlie, the new chauffeur I’d never met, to carry him up—and said nothing. Sometimes, my father looks to me like those men (you can see it in the hawk of the eye, the quiet of the hand) who in some way have succeeded, though in no great walks of life. At other times, often during the same evening, he reminds me profoundly of certain others encountered only in those prominent walks. Those famous men—distinguished at once by the breath of bitter almond in what they say, the gelid bird-flesh of the eye—who have failed.

If I could disavow
him,
I thought—would I? “Walter had a letter from her once,” I said to him. “About you and me. He’s never opened it. She said it was to be for me.” I stared at him in the mirror. For me, in the event—of an event. But I refused it. I was afraid to lose you for a father—can you see? As afraid to lose you, as you are me? “And you wouldn’t ask to see it?” he said. “No, I won’t ever ask.” He gave me the queerest…no, the most direct look he’d given me since I was grown—like the looks he used never to know I saw, in our lessons. “So you wouldn’t ask her either,” he said. And when the chauffeur came in, my father refused him. “My son, Charlie,” he said—“my son will carry me upstairs.”)

The girl had been listening to him; she listened like the heavens, giving him all the time in the world for what he’d never been able to say
to
anyone, by any method known…

(To the heavens out there, I cried it all, with my fingers. It amused my father’s son, to do that. The tea out there smells of ram; the air smells of our gunpowder prayers. No house out there, no door, no stairs. The stars cram close, interested. I flash it to them, Dalgarno. A system made only a moment ago, in the sixteen-hundreds, and in Aberdeen, but the stars understand it, they are very intelligent. “He’s never really thought I was illegitimate,” I said to them. My mother had it all wrong; maybe he doesn’t know it himself. What he really can’t face is that I’m here. He can face that better in Ruth; he has so much worse there to bear that I would carry him on my back for it forever. And her…)

“And…what did you say then?” said the girl beside him.

“Oh, I said it all to the desert,” he said, head cast down in profile. “One day, if I’ve nerve enough, I’ll say it to you.”

(Hand to hand. In the black desert air, I practiced them for you, the sentences ingrained in me like those old conundrums in which “your father’s daughter” and “my father’s son” all turn out to be thee and me. My father’s wife—meant to shoot a lover. My mother’s husband—walked in on them. In the melee, who knows who shot her? My father’s daughter. Saw our mother die. Our father’s wife.)

“Say it to me,” said the girl, and he turned to her amazed, almost thinking he heard her voice.

“By night,” he said, aloud. “I’ll learn the
one-handed
alphabet, and say it to you. The one you said an abbé invented.” He thought he’d gone too fast, and repeated all this. “That’s all…the dactylology…it takes.”

“The Abbé de l’Épée,” she said. Softly. Or so it seemed to him.

(And at breakfast only this morning, after hearing of his intentions, his father had said to him, on their being alone, “Families
disappear
at the front, David. That’s how you and I come to be here—our fathers didn’t go. No excuse, either way. I wanted to go once, myself. To war.”

And when I denied nothing, not even that war would come out there, he said to me, “David, David. That’s not
Zion
out there…now.” As I stood there, risen from my chair, I found my answer. He, my own father, had given it me. “Then
I
shall disappear,” I said.)

“That means sword—épée—doesn’t it?” he said. “What we aren’t supposed to perish by.” He mouthed it for her carefully. “Sword. A one-hand alphabet.”

“You wrote…like that,” she said. “From Israel.”

“So he met you. So he got to you ahead of me,” he said, slurring. She had always been even quicker at lipreading than he, smarter, from need, at all of it. “He’d charm the bees. He’s always ahead of us. But it doesn’t matter. What it really means is, you charmed him.”

“He never knew it was me,” said the girl.

“You mean…he never heard your name? That you were Alice Cooperman?”

“Repeat,” she said. “Repeat.” He must have spoken so fast that he was unintelligible; often when the box was on he did that; but why should that make
her
look ready to cry?

He repeated, watching her answer him in careful mime.

“His friend—Mr. Somers—simply said…‘This is…my Miss Cooperman.’ I might have been…anyone.”

“Might you,” he said. “Might you.
How?”

He’d never said anything so cruel, to anyone. Here was the heavy underbottom of that pale ice floe, his pity. He felt it rise in him as it had in the desert—the black basalt cliff of his rage. In the Sinai, in the Arabian black Harra, one understood God better, that two-faced Adonai. Eagles pick the stars clean, and
that
is pity. Ice melted astrally—and disappeared. Elohenu. Blessing is double-faced too.

“My father.” The box squawked, he spoke so large. “The smartest man on earth. The champ. And he didn’t recognize you? A
deaf
Miss Cooperman, who teaches mutes to whistle, like herself?” He raised his head, the high, hewn profile given to prophets, as the possessors of such heads should—in full knowledge of it. Under his hands, at her wrist, he felt the bracelet made of the triangular forehead-piece of a fourteenth-century bride, identical with the one he had sent his sister, from Jerusalem. He peered closer at the face above it. “You—don’t remind me of her, any more.”

The face was answering his whisper, with tears. It had never stooped to tears before—that last resort, beyond even hands. Under the running wet, the face looked almost—ordinary. Cameo out of the matrix, it came forward, discovered of its own pity and rage. It bent forward, hiding in its own lap how cruel it felt, to be real.

What should he say to it, out of the fear in him now? He could test her, in the way he tested his own box. “Laryngotomy,” he said aloud. He wasn’t touching her. She couldn’t see him. But in the electronic center of her, unreachable by alphabets, he saw her quiver—who couldn’t see him.

He felt his mouth’s lassitude. It wanted its beard. Oh beard of change, cover me! “Marry me,” his mouth said, to that hidden face. “Then I won’t—disappear.”

The head rose from its lap. Yes. It had heard, it had heard. “Won’t you?” Her lips said it, full voice. Her voice, heavy enough to carry, entered his box, and was carried to him. In the ordinary way—for him—he heard her voice.

Then her two hands, clasped against that but powerless, broke into their true language, telling him, telling him, scattering their frail ideograph everywhere, so that it seemed to him the gallery walls must be stamped floor to ceiling with the pale track of these waste butterflies. She raised the hair from one ear, to show him the shaved place where new bandages must have been, and in a coronal of fresh little head-scars, the perfect ear. She spoke to him in mime, then, touching his box, in voice, and when she saw he couldn’t or wouldn’t understand, at last once again with her hands in the true communication. She said the same thing over and over again. She was showing him how she could waste words. He sat dumb.

In the window, the city was real, but one could turn from that. He lifted his own hands to answer from their lost inner circle. He tried to answer her, from his desert of one. He couldn’t shape it, one-hand method or two, or say it. Maybe in time he could breathe it to himself, to be lost in his box.
You disappeared first. But I shall manage it.

The guard checked in and out again. How was it the guard himself didn’t see her last true communication, not in sign language but painfully spelled out in their alphabet, black-tracked on the walls, engraved on the dusk coming of age here down the ages—her ideograph fluttering everywhere—in the raised fifth finger and clenched four of the sign for I, in the open tiger-cry of the C (four above and the thumb-jaw below), and the long, pointing, parallel forefinger and second, of the H.