New Yorkers (12 page)

In the post office, on a rainy off afternoon, he’d inquired for a city directory. “My God, take ya till doomsday, even if I could give ya, kid!” said the idler behind the grating. “Whyn’t ya try the phone?” The man had even held out to him, with a grand sweep of the arm, a last year’s phone book, or he might never have looked in such a place. For several nights, after his lessons, he scanned slowly through the Y’s, the J’s, and at last the H’s. When he found it, he had his first sensation of fear, mixed with awe. Somehow, he had never thought of anyone connected with him and his mother as having a phone.

Even if he had known for sure how to handle one, he wouldn’t have used it for his purpose, and not only because his mother was as ignorant as he; if one rang in a restaurant late at night when the chairs were up, she continued silently scrubbing, or if it persisted, picked it up and listened, shaking her head at how the thing chattered at her. No, the only way to use what he had found was the straight method of the miracle, which was what he viewed it as, and what he told his obedient mother—they were going uptown for a miracle. He had never been uptown, but he committed to memory the line of print in the phone book, and never even put it on a card. It was too big a fact for one.

On the Sunday then, cleaned and buttoned as if for church, he had set out with her from the cellar, on directions obtained. The finding of the house had that calm rhythm which he thought must precede all miracles; after a smooth subway ride, a short walk and a steep climb to the fifth-floor flat, he rang the bell. The sisters were home—and in a way, all he had believed was true. The door opened, and the sisters recognized each other—three faces nibbled by life. His mother had fainted on the doorstep, tired at last.

It developed that the two old maids had always been ashamed of this sin of their “youth”—it was understood that they meant their youth in this country, since even at the time of their desertion, these two had not been young. Now that their sister and her boy were here—and he, from quick, sharp glance was certified as no Chinee but under his glasses a plain-featured boy, tall as a middle-sized man but wearing pants still too long for him—well, yes, the two had been missed. Hot chocolate was given them in atonement, and in time he would have his legend too, not too much of a one, as sifted through these two, but with its central fact, for him enough.

But by that time, the Mannixes, ever acquisitively generous—had him. Under their aegis, more had happened to him externally than a collegium of schoolmen expert at miracles could have chartered. Between then, which had been 1944, and now, June 1951, he had gone (with the aid of summer school and outside reading, in which the Judge had always been happy to guide him) from the ninth grade through Harvard, and one year into law school. On the very day he had met them he had already, discovered—to be concealed from all but them until the oddity of those lost years faded—his real age. But the moment on the doorstep remained the miracle. It was the one in which he’d discovered what his true poverty was. Such a moment—in which emotion, only that instant discovered like a great valve, is at the same instant fulfilled—wasn’t easily counterfeited. It remained the exquisite moment of his life. Despite this, he still kept on with the cards. From sense of duty alone he would have gone to them, the way a man would tend with rake and spade his birthplace, where personality had begun.

He and his mother lived now in affluence, in fifty-dollar-a-month rooms which the Judge’s sisters had found for them near some of their own properties in the Czech-Slovak part of Yorkville, two rooms with an inside toilet, in a bathroom tiled with many remnant colors by a landlord who was also a housewrecker by trade, but still a tiled bath. By the accident of the city, the rooms, in a neat tenement between church property and the Mannix sisters’, were less than ten blocks from the Mannix house itself. And because the place was his, whether he came home to it from that other house or from the ivied stone and bear rugs of the Harvard dormitories, it was still the ultimate in luxury. He’d already known about inside toilets of course, from the restaurants. Sophistication can only come to a man once. After that—as after his own first visit to the Mannix house—he can only be surprised.

The sunlight came in now on the wooden filing case, used as a desk also, which had supplanted the old, heavy-paper accordion files he used to steal; once he had taken a particular after-school job because on a man’s desk in that office, he had caught sight of such a file. All change in him since his slow, natural reaction to circumstance. “If I had to choose an epitaph to put on your tombstone, Edwin, I know what it would be,” the Judge had once joshed him. “Edwin Halecsy, a learner.”

The Judge was a deadpan josher, with a great sense of humor, sour and raw, with flashes even of obscenity, all of which went with basics Edwin had learned too early ever to forget—and was part of why he could learn so well from the Judge. For there were certain kinds of fakery—the fake irony of many of his instructors was one—which sank to nothing the minute he remembered to test them against the badlands of his youth. Curiously, he didn’t hate his early years; these remained to him his integrity, persisting alongside his pleasanter path like an always accessible reservoir, plumbless with monsters but
known
, necessary as water to life, and with the same taste to it as water—plumbless too, but what every man knows. He knew a lot about himself he never bothered with. If asked whether a learned honesty, acquired so late and so clinically, was different from the usual, his answer, to himself at least, would have come at once from that reservoir: “Yes.”

The late sun was casting its beams through a window he valued, both for the colored reflections from the window of the yellow brick parish-house wing of the church next door, and because of its own light, interrupted by the strong, ugly steeple, had a look of the view at the northwest rear of the Mannix house, blocked by a water tower, of whose influence on their history the Judge had told him. That same visit—on Edwin’s declaring for the law—the Judge, silent but upright, behind the desk in that study known to be the hallowed scene of all his days, had then said, “Reach up there! No, up there!” When Edwin handed down the designated volume, he’d been presented with it—an old calf copy of John Bouvier’s law dictionary, dated 1839. “
Devise
realty;
bequeath
personality,” the Judge said with a glint. “First thing I learned, though not from there.”

In the room here, aside from a row of other presentation books kept separate from those he had acquired in Cambridge, there were small touches of gifts the Mannixes had given him unwittingly, bought at Woolworth’s with his “own money—a jar of cut flowers whose form Anna might have recognized, a green, tin-shaded lamp like the Judge’s own tole. For the rest, the room was cleaner than the usual student’s, kept so by his mother, but otherwise not elaborate, if one could forget—as neither of them ever quite did—that its light flowed never-failing from a meter, and its water ran.

His mother had changed little externally; internally much more than he. Cellar living had forced her intelligence, even as a caged animal could learn to walk a treadmill. Now, humanized by this unexpected warmth, giving herself over entirely to her sisters and to him, she had
stopped.
By day, she sometimes worked as a cleaning attendant in a nearby beauty salon—from which came the fiction given out by his aunts that their sister was a hairdresser. Often, there or at home, in the simple pleasure of being where she was she forgot what she was at, but since a very little push served to activate her again, she was never troublesome. In the evening, as she sat in the steam-heated apartment, her eyes, used to cellar cold, streamed continually. Sometimes, staring at her across the table, he wasn’t sure that these tears were only rheum. In the early years of their partnership, her person had been a heavy blank to him, dependable hindrance as well as help. Now, in the way a good Catholic, or a half-one, might begin to over-interpret the heavy image of the Madonna lugged with him through the years, she began to seem wise. She had a new black coat.

It was time to shave and dress. He resisted—anticipation at these times was always part of the pleasure, and the recall also—then went into the bathroom to turn on and wait for the hot water, which ran slow. Seven years had made him younger only in what he thought of as the surface of his mind. Physically, he seemed to himself to have grown younger also, though this was mostly because of his clothes. In the slums, children’s-size clothes were never as cheap secondhand as the tramp-trousers sold at stalls for under a dollar. For years he had lived in the anonymous crotch-smell of others, and had rarely seen, as other boys did daily, the gradual rising of his own knees. His hair, grown in a thick sprout from his crown, had been cut with scissors, one of their few tools, kept safe from the roaches with some bits of cutlery in a tin box, which the rats could knock over but never prise.

Now his head was clipped almost as smooth as a knuckle, and he wore army pants and the scuffed white sneakers which were beginning to be the other sign of his generation’s youth. In the mirror, he could see behind him his jacket hung ready, to one side of a laden set of shelves. Sometimes in his dreams, dressed as of old, he found himself seated at an examination desk, on whose blank white paper he was being required to write down the names and uses of all the objects piled before him in a huge mound of human goods as high as the Resurrection—from shoe polish to tinned soup, to lampshades and coat hangers, even drawers with keys, closets with doors, step-on garbage cans and silver napkin rings—all the paraphernalia of the civilized, and all yet blank to him. Then he always woke with heart-knocking relief, and moving only his eyes, head still thralled to the stone pillow of this almost conservative nightmare, numbered each of these very objects in his shelter now.

It wasn’t so much as comforts he saw them but as signposts, and faintly ridiculous, the product of elves. No wonder seven years among them had made him younger. Once again he rose from his cot in the cat-piss of the cellar, stuck his feet into his St. Vincent de Paul Society shoes, washed with a sliver of Fels-Naptha, lifted the trapdoor and angled his neck out above the pavement seams, into a morning gray as yer grandmother’s cunt said a bum just passing, or into a Saturday job’s bright burden of sunshine on the noon soot of the gutters, or into a scrubwoman’s midnight, luridly striped as his fondest fancy, a slab of Neapolitan brick ice cream. He sometimes thought that while others in his new world aged properly enough, he might spend his whole life growing ever more greenly superficially innocent, up from the maturity of those streets.

In this new world, crowded with ideas and objects of which he was daily still discovering the habits and names, people seemed to float calmly atop a wrack of these they had made peace with since the cradle. Fish-naked in his dreams, in his dreams he still walked toward these other denizens of the upper air, a man-fish flapping up the watersteps to
their
morning, in their own secondhand shoes. In his dreams they waited to receive him, and turn him back. But by day, they none of them seemed to notice what they had with them—the ancient young of the eel, colored with their own depths. By day, crossing Harvard Yard or ascending the Mannix stoop at a Christmas, he never mixed up their streets with his. Or better still for them, seemed not to grudge the difference. He could smile at that now, with an intelligence drawn from both sides: the differences
they
saw in him were so mild. But by night, by dream, a phone rang in the cellar—and his mother answered it.

He was knotting his tie when the real phone rang on the sunny desk.

“Hello—” he said. And as always as if his fists were up. Because he couldn’t help that, but knew who was on the other end and why she mightn’t like or trust him, he added blithely, just for the hell of it, “This is the Halecsy residence.”

“Hallo,” said Anna. “You don’t say.”

They were too near each other socially. She must hate to serve him on a par with her darlings (even though they might be his also)—the way nigger messboys in university commons disliked serving their own color when it ate on a fellowship.

“And how are you, madame, are you feeling the summer?” But he could never strike the right note of chaff with her, the way other young visitors could at once, Austin or Walter, on whom it was as easy as the leather of their shoes.

“I feel your backside for you, you come again late.” He was the only one she sounded coarse with. If he hadn’t known her secure position in that household, he’d have thought the footing he had there somehow frightened her.

“What are we having?” he asked, meaning “Who’s coming?” or “Who’ll be home?” by their favorite dishes, he could know. Not ham if David were already home; steak for Austin, a squash player as anyone would know, which Austin would laugh at himself. It might even be veal with olive—the dish of
her
choice; she had never had a homecoming until now. …Though he would settle for any of the “big” dishes which would mean the presence of them all.

“What
we?”
Anna said gruffly.

It was only what the others always said. But he wouldn’t repeat it. In recesses he’d never known he had until he went to that house, he could now be hurt.

“Judge say you be here six.” She knew well enough, when she bothered to consider, that the Judge was his law. And even she did bother to; they all did, without hierarchy, extending the gift of their solicitude to him who was as yet only a frequenter, just as equally as to Pauli Chavez, their old family friend, and to the Judge’s first cousin Miss Augusta, who were among the solid habitués. His own knowledge of these gradations was even a sign of how they were training him to it. This was how it was when people lived not behind trapdoors but in houses. They all were concerned with what each other felt and did, down to the last and smallest thing. Happy families always were.

“But dinner’s still at eight?” he said.

“Yah. Like always.” But she knew his privilege, an hour and a half with the Judge. Tonight, it would be more.