New Yorkers (35 page)

In the silence they stared at one another. A clock struck. Edwin counted—eight. There was a rustle outside the window; it could be a leaf scraping the bench. “Why must you always—spoil it with the personal?” It was out. He felt relief. Opposite, as the hand dropped, the glow on the Judge’s face surprised him.

“That’s the first real thing you’ve said this evening. Edwin—” He walked over and put his hand on Edwin’s shoulder; he had to raise his arm to do it. This brought the Judge’s face within the downward range of Edwin’s glasses, so that he could see the grain of the beard, how close-pored the skin was, even younger in close-up—though no one coming into the room would have doubted who was in command.

“Is personal emotion a filth to you, Edwin? Or only mine?”

He could hear the not quite vanished boy in the Judge saying: “There is a word for fathers. Thrash me, if I’m wrong.” Then the Judge, taking his hand from Edwin’s shoulder, thrust both in trouser pockets, shrugging. “Needn’t answer my question. Sbouldn’t’ve asked.”

“No, it’s not filth. Just that it’s—new.” In each corner of the room he seemed to see all the members of his hoped-for major visit, one to a corner, hung there like subordinate saints each in its own oratory, humbly suppliant before this man. David—Walter. Austin—Ruth. Austin wasn’t humble. But because of Ruth, he too was there. Ruth was the shadowiest.

The Judge had sat meanwhile on the sill, looking out. “Someone in the garden, I thought,” he said. “Went round toward the corner of the house—I couldn’t see who.” He turned away again, faintly smiling. “Maybe—some boy.”

“You said a man whispers the past to his children,” Edwin said harshly. “Why to me, then? Why don’t you whisper it to
yours?”

He saw the small figure wince at the breastbone as if struck, but rally. “Ah,” said the Judge in a stifled voice.
“You talk.
”

Horrified at himself, he said, “I apologize. I forgot.”

“No, no, go on. It helps. And I know I’m—not always fair to him.” He brought this out in the pinched agony of a man who hurried to name his disease before the doctor did.

“Ruth would listen.” It made him almost see her there in the corner, a watercolor of a girl whose lineaments came out strongest in her absence, the head cocked to the speaker, her whole body and eyes receiving—but giving back only in the dance? “She’s always listening. Though maybe nobody—” What judgment could come from her that those here were afraid of? Even Austin’s devotion had that in it. Her brother’s too, even with his stopped ears. Walter, with his saint’s straightforwardness, was the only one oblivious.

“Nobody—?” said the Judge. “Nobody
what?
”

Edwin looked up. Is it because we’ve tried so hard here for honesty, that I—oh God, I am going to be able to tell when he lies? I
can
tell. Yet he hasn’t said a word. “Nothing. Only that maybe fathers don’t listen to girls. Though you did. When she brought me here.”

“Yes.”

Maybe in private she was listened to. She knows why
I
am here—she knows. “What did she say?”

“She—characterized you.”

“How?”

“It was a confidence.”

“About me?”

“Not entirely.”

Then he and she did share something. And she had seen this too. “But it’s not—what Anna sees,” he said aloud, musing.

“What Anna sees?” the Judge said hurriedly. “What do you mean?”

“About me.”

“Oh no.” The Judge paid Anna the usual humorous smile. “No—we both know how Anna sees you.” He looked relieved.

The hint of strain in the Judge’s posture had gone. But Edwin could still remember Anna’s. “Why did you say—that I was the most intelligent person you let come to the house?”

“Because you are.”

“Why—
let.
”

“Did I say that?” There wasn’t the slightest pause, yet the Judge had assumed the courtside manner of a man who enjoyed all interrogations, unexpected though some were—and could answer truthfully. “One’s habit of mind—” He shrugged. “Edwin, believe me, I live alone.”

And will that be part of my job, to hear when he lies?

“What
you
are, Edwin,” said the Judge. “We’ll spend all our time on it.”

“Sounds like a bribe.”

“No, Edwin. Politics.”

They were both smiling. But he knew he was being maneuvered away, though not from what.

“I had a background. Just that there was no name for it.”

“Can you name it now? Now that we’ve educated you?”

He drew his shoulders square—to speak from it. He had no inherited cane, nothing but himself as he knew himself to be—in a suit that followed the mob. Yet it was as dignified a moment as the Judge’s own entrance—this was the end of the boy bidden to climb in the study window, of the young man guilty at slipping inside an open door. “We are—legion,” he said, as hushed as if he might be killed for it. “The kind you and yours never see.”

When he saw the Judge’s brows go up, he knew he wasn’t even going to get his face slapped for it. Even before that, the minute he heard himself aloud, he knew with sinking heart that the statement he’d harbored so long, so long; wasn’t even true, any longer
true.

“Think you’ll have time to humanize us—before you become one of us?”

“I told you I was losing it,” said Edwin. It was his one anguish—under all he always told himself on the way here. Sometimes he would look at his mother across the table in the lamplight, telling himself—
She
has it still, that old woman who never will know it. She has our old world.

“I listen to
you,
Edwin. And maybe you can save me from my own aphorisms—but not till you hear them all. Sure, you’re losing it—that’s the price of admission here, anywhere. Only youth keeps on seeing life in strict antitheses—black, white. When I found that out—all I did was give up chess. But for you boys…well…the youth of the world is over, too.”

“I did think of—going for labor law.” He brought it out half miserably. “But you’d say I was confusing poverty with integrity.”

“Never to you. You know who I said that to.”

To Walter and Diddy, when the two, following a step behind Austin’s Quakerdom, went into social work.

“Never to Austin?”

“Austin confuses nothing. When that type goes in for self-sacrifice, there’s no beating them. But they’re born to be merchant princes of whatever they choose—don’t go wasting your time in envy of it.”

“I’m not jealous of it.”

“No, your pride in what you are, regardless, is almost—Jewish. I’ve often admired it.” The Judge came forward, and bent to scrabble for the stick. Edwin leaped to get it for him; they met over it. “Labor?” said the Judge, taking the cane from him. “Why not?” he said slowly. “There’ll be labor judges on the Court before we can whistle. Listen, Edwin—what you need is a summer on the ward.” He brought this out with no emphasis. But Edwin had a sense that it would have been ready all along. Whether he himself had plumped for counting angels with the schoolmen of the law, or had declared himself ready for oratory and the fine sack suits of a gangster’s mouthpiece, the plan advanced would have been the same.

The night was now coming in the window, cool, dark and unhaunted as in the zesty days of the winter vacation times here when the Judge had worn no watch—and everything outside this sanctum had waited, for dinner and for them.

“The ward, David—that’s the beginning of everything. I could send you to old August Manken’s ward, the sixty-fourth—” The Judge’s voice was dreamy, altogether different from the one in which he had been used to release all that stream of talk which only a strange boy (and chosen for that too?) wouldn’t have recognized as already polished in solitary. He’d never called Edwin David before.

“August must be dead or retired,” continued the Judge. “The older son’s inherited the mantle. Putzi, the forger.”

“The what?”

“Oh, he turned respectable; got a job selling advertising space for one of the dailies—I helped him to that lead, matter of fact. I don’t boast the favor, understand—just want to enlighten you as to method. Anyway—he lives in Garden City now, keeps a voting residence in the ward here. And has modernized his father’s, er,
mana.
That’s anthropological lingo, David—for
pull.
”

“Edwin, sir.” He was filled with terror—was this what happened to one’s personality when a parent cracked up or died—and was found?

“Sorry, it’s the medicine. Took some after all—guess it doesn’t mix with drink. Yes, a forger—’ve you forgotten your barbershop, so quick? Thing a politician must remember—is that everyone in the world is searching—maybe venally—but for the fairer things in life. To quote a judge. Remember that—if you become one.”

“
Garden
cities?”

“Oh, Putzi is a fart—never wanted to see him again. That doesn’t mean you young ones mustn’t be sent to learn from those people.” The Judge held the cane like an artist’s pencil before him, measuring a horizon. “And you already have what’s invaluable; no
Auslander
is ever the same. Or ever more than a romantic doctrinaire on the subject. Listen to me, Edwin—David,
all
of you. It’s no good living in the city unless it’s transformed for you from
below
—and
that
you have to practice from a child. Where we lived, on the Drive, my father put in a revolving door to keep the wind out—the first anywhere, he said, in a private house. When he sent me out on a wild night for cigars, I used to think the rain-soaked park would never hold the river back. Eagles were still whizzing in my ears when I got to the stationery store.”

Was this the talk Anna denied hearing?

The Judge fitted the cane’s ferrule into a knothole in the old floorboards, fiddling the cane’s silver cap intently as a crystal ball. “As for you, you had your grating you told me the bums walked on—a native son too. We do what we can with our nativity and get power from it—that’s why I say—come home.” The night wind blew in stronger, rustling papers on the desk. “Smell that,” said the Judge. “I actually used to think the Jersey side of the river was Paradise Lost—some child’s Milton I’d read. When the factories sent up their night odors I thought I could smell it, the burning, chocolate souls of the damned. In full view of the city, there’s a pantheon for people like us, isn’t there? We
must
understand it—to be able to live there. Or it isn’t bearable. Why—when you think of what we must look like to a farmer still getting up in the old christly kine-dark of a farm morning!—thousands of souls in high buildings clenched away—and only their electric ease to comfort them. But even that horror is part of it—if you’re born here. And part of what a father here gives his son—part of his house—if the son has ears to hear.” He twirled the cane, scowling at it. “Walking. Walking. That’s what I’d miss.”

“Maybe he
was
Jewish,” said Edwin, as dreamily as if he too had been taking potions, and thinking of his old fantasy of querying the nations of the earth one by one for his paternity.

“Who?”

“
My
father.”

“Your—Ah yes. Well, why not.” When the Judge thought he’d embarrassed someone, he flushed, a curious revelation on that opaque skin. “Or shall I deed you mine, à la that story? I scrabble on at that little memoir of him now and then—to go with the rest of the collection. ‘How War Never Comes’ is the title of it. From something a friend once said to me. But that’s for another day.” His voice trailed off.

“Oh, I’m used to him,” said Edwin. “That raping stranger. Ruth told you that, didn’t she? That first day, when she came in here to tell you about who she’d brought home.”

“What you forget,” said the Judge, almost irritably, “is that it was also my day. Which is why I remember it—and incidentally, you. I was upstairs, writing an important letter. And reading some equally important ones. That I’d never read before.”

“When Ruth came down, all she said was, your door was open.” He remembered how the word hit him—“Daddy’s”—the idea that people had rooms just for themselves.

“No, this room is for—” The Judge glanced at his shelves. “Not for that. I always go up there—to the big sitting-room. If you really must know—I was writing to a woman. I still have the letter. When I saw it wasn’t—really addressed to her—I never mailed it. Though it was to say good-bye.” He made one of his half-boyish gestures. “And she never answered.”

“Maybe Ruth didn’t want to say. She never did like that upstairs room.”

“Doesn’t she? Nobody ever said.” It was said so quietly, with almost a ventriloquist’s removal. “We did the best we could.”

No, it was a totally different voice, a natural one, a man’s. If Edwin had dared, he would have put a hand on a shoulder. Ah,
you
talk. But the Judge immediately gave a practiced eye-slide at the watch he wore projecting just a minim from his right cuff. All that he had once been came back into the room with it. “We must wash, Anna’ll be at us any moment with the gong.”

“Jesus, I forgot to tell you. The reason dinner was delayed—Anna said to say someone else was coming. A lady. Just tell him ‘the ballet lady,’ she said.” He couldn’t help watching with interest, and felt a pang—would he do that from now on?

“The bal—oh.” The Judge only laughed. “Pauli Chavez, you’ve met him, old friend of the family, of the Mendeses, before my time.” He always referred to the Mendeses as if all knew who they were, an aristocratic unselfconsciousness he shared with the Fennos, who spoke of their distaff connections, indeed all others, in the same way. “Must’ve been the woman he lives with. Well, well—he’s had a standard invitation to bring her, for years. Ought to be his wife. But she won’t marry him. Blames us, somehow. Doesn’t think she’s good enough for him. Well, well—so he finally got her to come.”

“Oh yes. Uncle Pauli. I met Ruth and him in the street once.”

“Ruth’s uncle entirely. As a kid once, she referred to him as her
female
uncle, to the embarrassment of no one. Pauli’s a certain kind of European, that’s all—he’s simply been a special friend to women all his life.” The Judge always spoke livelier when citing Ruth’s bright sayings. “Leni, the mistress, is a ballerina of the old days.” He hesitated. “Pauli knew my wife.”