New Yorkers (73 page)

“Is—
Si?”
I said.

The look she. gave me! Like no other—except one. “That was a weird thing to say. Maybe I shouldn’t—am I making you weird?”

I’d scared myself, that was so private. “Maybe I’ve…got it,” I said, standing with my knees together all of a sudden. I was always “getting it”; all of us were; there’s almost as much moisture to becoming a woman as to being one. We girls were always going off to the bathroom “to see.”

“Go see,” she said, nodding me toward a store that sold health juices, where we often stopped. “Ask them to let you use it. I’ll wait.”

I remember that store, kept by a Turkish family, as if it were a Turkoman’s-land prepared just for me by women—the essence of the harem. They looked at me moist-eyed, letting me pass in as if they knew; behind the partition, I heard the two nearest my age giggling; when I came out there must have been all ages of female eyes on me and her—as I shook my head at her: “No.” Under their eyes we drank the tomato juice they pressed from the real fruit, not red as in cans but pale and straw-colored like serum, the real juice of the love apple, never quite tasted since, lost with them and their store.

She and I said nothing when we left it. But after that day, she sometimes looked at me as if I were her rival. It never occurred to her that like the rest of the people in her pocket, I was his. She spared me nothing from that day on, mixing it all up like a paste, a lure—her special agonies, reflections—and joys. “Oh, you won’t do him in,” she said to me now and then out of her fears, and almost a jealousy. “That’s why I can talk to you.” And from that time on—I would have done anything, for her. But I have fooled her in the end. In the end, what I remember most are the joys.

“I’m taking you in,” she’d say. “To my confidence. What I’ve got of it. As one does take—the child one bears. Against
all
husbands.” And drew the man Arne, for instance, like a letter Belgian and real, out of the deep brown cave of her bag. “It won’t be my fault,” she said, “if you don’t understand everything.”

Pale, alum-colored afternoons of fall those first walks were, along that upper part of Second Avenue where the verdigrised El stanchions made an almost pleasant Rialto of shops, hopefully near enough to supply people like us, whose pavements were scrubbed. Later on of course, she took me on the desperate lower avenue where the drabs hung from the railroad hotels, calling out the names of the cars below to each other over the ooga-ooga of the horns—later she took me everywhere. Yet even early, when the girls asked, “Where you keeping yourself?” I pleaded study or dancing school; I knew I had a secret twice precious because there was something piteously wrong with it—that my mother was taking me…
following
me…everywhere.

The dancing school, Ilonka’s, was the one place she wouldn’t wait for me, or ever enter. “No, it’s to be yours,” she’d said, when she made Pauli choose it. “I’m not to be trusted around any art.” And later, it was to be the place I could feel safest; it was all mine. But just then I wanted her; all the other mothers were there. Just as in Sunday school, where though I despised them in their fat fur and diamond knuckles, I’d felt all the more lone, I now wanted her to flash among these—long, subtle and opal. One day I asked her.

“These are only stage-mothers,” I said. “But the kind who’ll never make it.”

She stared at me. Ordinarily, she had too much style to recognize her own—but this was unmistakable. “Did—Pauli—say that?”

I could never lie to her. “No.”

We couldn’t look at each other. I’d mimicked her to perfection—why should that make us both feel miserable?

…Austin…if I say that I report the growth of an understanding between two people,
not
a relationship—will that clear it? Everything I make her say here—she said. My understanding should have tagged behind. When one person wants to
be
the other, then it’s dangerous…I couldn’t help it; already, without any Ilonka or Ninon to name it for me, I felt what I was watching.

“Onstage as a mother?” she said, raising those huge eyes. “No, I’ll never be that.” Ninon said it for us so many times later, but I already sensed the path of her I was watching. The progress of the assoluta is always alone. Everything strummed in me, a rising convergence of events beyond me, which we were only giving the name of my blood to. “I’ll understand,” I said. “Or it won’t be your fault.” I remember it because in our rounds again we were just passing that same store, or where it ought to have been.

“Look,” I said. “The Turkish store is gone.”

She was just leaning down to cup a match—one of the kitchen kind she’d taken to carrying, in a man’s leather pouch with an emery striker on it. The blue phosphor, before it went, kindled the crushed blue of her wide belt and of her hat; the rest of her was black. If I noted her dress narrowly enough, I caught her mood; one thing sure, she was always dressed too well to be walking a daughter. The smoking was new; I never saw her do it anywhere except on these tours.

Following my pointing finger, she nodded at the blank glass there between a little fish store wet and gray as a bivalve, and the hot beads of the Italian fruitstand. “The little stores that sweat family,” she said, in her new, smoking-voice. “Oh, there’ll be another. Always some new family of innocents. It’s the city replenishment.” She threw the match in the gutter.

“It went with your hat,” I said.

“Too much,” she said somberly. “Or else my
nails
should be blue too.”

I was right not to laugh. She had meant it. She saw through me anyway. “‘Oh, sweet patootie—’” she sang out suddenly—“‘with all yo’ beauty—You’ll nev-ah make it, nev-ah
shake
it, all the
Co
—Coq d’Or!’”

“What’s that from?” I said, proud that I knew it was
from
something.

“
Tiger Woman Rag,
I think it was called. Two performances, private, at the Mad Hatter. Noel and Angie had a hand in it. Never got put on.” Often her chatter with me now had these little rough edges of old song in it, and maybe always had had, but by then I had seen her files, once the family’s, that went back beyond her father’s company’s
Aida
days, everything from gold-colored menus to signed pictures—always by the same pen it seemed to me, whether Calvé or Tagliavini—to programs that rattled out those years like music boxes:
Chu Chin Chow.
The crowd had known the casts of everything that played, she said—and I had begun to know the crowd.

Taking my elbow—she’d begun to appropriate me with touch too, as not before—she peered into the store that had been so full of women. One counter left, and a roll of paper on the floor. “Blue-hoo with cold,” she said.

And I knew the rhymes of their old songs. We often made a rapid-fire game of parrying them; “blue” went with “true,” or “you.” “Maybe,” she’d say, in a voice gone barrelhouse. “Oh God yes: That was ‘baby.’” She might have been tuning me, like an instrument. What for?

“What’ll I do-oo?” I sang. “When I’m
old.”

She didn’t smile. Then she did, like an older girl. “Darling, you break me up.” She straightened, turned from the window, and threw the cigarette far, with perfect aim, into the gutter. She stood for a moment, looking down the street as if we might be being followed, putting on her gloves. Actually her nails were high and buffed, with a deep collar of white, a kind one didn’t see around any more, even then. “Put on your gloves,” she said with a cool change, like a mother playing mother.

We waited at the corner for the flower cart to go by with its nag; January was far too late for him but he had somewhere found a hundred aster pots. “I love those carts,” I said.

…One was outside your house, Austin, the day you took me to tea there. I liked your house for that. After a week at home, it was like still being on tour…

“You’re right to love,” she said. “I’d never tell you otherwise. Even my parents never did. But what to love—oughtn’t I be able to tell you that?”

Down the block ahead was a dirtyish café—dark inside and nothing like the awninged famous one she’d once taken me to—into which she always glanced when we passed. As we approached it, she looked back at the cart. “Bright with war, the flower-war. Did you ever see a street that looked less like a war?” The café seemed to rivet her attention. “They’d all go, like a shot.” Then she leaned down to me. “But we mustn’t stand and gape, must we. Have to stiffen our backs. Your father wants to be a judge.”

No wonder I was frightened. It was the first time she’d said anything irrational to me—why, at age six, I’d made a Sunday dinner-table howl, saying to him, “Aren’t you ever going to be a mister?” He’d been a judge all my conscious life.

…And so easily explained away later, wasn’t it? Years later, at tea. “The Court,” your father said to me, Austin. “At one time,
your
father was very much mentioned for it. Not so long ago, at that.”…And I didn’t ask when.

But at the moment, I give only her portrait, by her own hand. Like her death, later. “Even when the coryphées are ablaze,” Ninon is always telling us, “the assoluta remains sane. She is not the Queen Bee—no, no, my dears, leave that to the premiers danseurs.” No laughter, in the rehearsal room; no one dares. And Ninon goes on. “She is not of herself only—and fights being that. But gives in only to that. Those poor mad Lucias—leave those to the coloraturas, my dears. We do not sing, here. The role of the assoluta is to keep the balance—to which all eyes must now and then return. It’s the wildness, with the truth in it. … But none of you is one. Else you would know.”…

At the next corner, I knew by my mother’s pace that we had a destination. “Not to the dancing school, no. You’re going with
me,
somewhere. How’s your French?” “Bad,” I said. My tone carried its conviction. “Like
his
,” she said with a grin. “And how like him! You. Come on.” She led me block after block away from the East River, past our own avenue, on to Fifth, then for blocks down. I forgot my fright. One accepts things, walking; it’s a parade of acceptance, in oneself, or between two…You and I haven’t walked that way yet, Austin; I suppose we will. …

In front of a house on Fifth Avenue, second from the corner, she stopped. “One on the corner’s already an institution. That huge one. This one’s just barely escaped.” “Our house has an institution. On the other side.”

“Quick, aren’t you,” she said.

But I wasn’t sure why. “What is this place?” I’d come to ask this often, as we walked the battered streets or the luxurious. She always told me.

“This place?” She spread her lips in the way that meant she wasn’t talking
to me,
and said it too quickly for me to get. Her French was always perfect. She said it again, through her nose, as she pressed the bell. “I often visit it.”

The manservant who opened the door was so perfect in manner, woodcut spectacles and a string tie, that though I’d never seen one like him, I recognized him at once. Behind me, I heard her ask in an offhand voice to use the phone, then the total change in it as, leading me into a long room on the right, she called out to a person there whom I couldn’t yet see. “Enter!” she said, not to me. The voice was the one in which the crowd must have spoken to one another; any record buff knows it, from some rough old disc cut by black singers in the Paris of 1925. It pushed me forward like a ticket stub and left me. “Entah—the
demimonde!”

He was in a chair by the window. Yes, he was handsome, even though old, with that Jack Hero face from which women will tolerate even virtue—anything. … And I was wrong in what I said, back there in the room at Dukes, to Father. What is so live as memory? There must be many who are as glad as I when this old man steps forward for them as he does into mine. …But I looked over my shoulder to be sure she had left us, before I fell in love with him. He stood up from his chair at once, old as he was, to meet me. It’s not very common, to women aged twelve.

We made friends there on the spot, in a number of musical proposals; he had the kind of whimsy children could bear, and the room too had the expectedness of bygone illustrations—the cut of its ogives and its teapot had been under my pillow many a time. He caught me watching Proctor, and drew from me, “He’s so much the way he’s
supposed!”

“Ah well, after all, we’ve been supposing him for so long!” Chauncey Olney said—and caught me catching it.

Children like to see the centuries before, but unguided—remember, Aussie—like sage young sprouts of the time machine, by themselves. I had just time to begin, when she came back, and I was banished to a sitting-room next door, given an album of views, and as an afterthought of Proctor’s, a queer stylus game whose antique lever when pressed made marvelous geometrical patterns, the only part of this I sometimes think of as dreamed. Proctor was agog with me—or with her. “I’ll bring something delicious, miss. It’s called a milkshake, I believe.”

“Thank you,” I said. “And close the door after you, please.”

He gave me an admiring look, and did so. My mother’s genie-laugh came through the painted transom. He must have known that perfectly well. What a servant he was. In my mind sometimes, I marry him to Anna.

“Posterity can hear us,” said my mother. “I can hear her.”

“From next door. As is proper. We always kept the amenities here.”

Proctor was giving them tea first. Then he left them, I hoped—to get mine. Closing the door.

“So I heard,” said my mother. “So I once heard.”

I heard the old man’s chuckle. “Nothing before the servants. Whatever else you do, Mirriam, I see you still keep to that.”

“Some things you’re given, you can’t throw down. No matter how hard you try. Oh—I keep everything.”

“Don’t much care which side of the world you put
us
on,” said old Mr. Olney. “Demi or not. Long as you give us
some.
Though I like my window.”

“Oh, it’s the side Simon says I’m on,” said my mother. “Without any real reason to be. If I stole, I suppose he thinks, or painted. Or lied. He may be right—what’s dancing at a supper club? This way, I’m not much of anywhere. And not with him.”