New Yorkers (44 page)

“Oh, planes can be anything,” the girl said. “The one Daddy and I took back during the war was dark as a stable. Full of wounded soldiers, but going home, so they were gay. ‘Is this a bomber?’ I said. And the whole caboodle, must have been eighty of them, heard it and laughed. And took turns holding my hand every time we veered. To evade. Though they said there was nobody out there. Like being on a roller coaster. And we had spiked tea. I loved it.”

“You said that on purpose, I bet,” said Walter. “About the bomber. To make them feel better—I know you. Why, you’d already made all those model kits, baby. With us.”

She didn’t answer this. “Fly, fly,” she said to the air at large, fluttering her fingers. Her shoulders narrowed. “Why dance?”

On either side of her, the two guardians sat up. And spoke together, yet alternate—like the paired Dromios in the plays, or the gentlemen from Verona—or one Laertes, cut down the middle. “You
have
to talk about it sometime, Ruth! What are you going to tell him?”

The girl halted exactly as she was, one hand lifted at the wrist, in an artifice she seemed unconscious of. “He
wants
to let me go, really. Didn’t you know?” She bent both hands, making them relax and arch in what must be another exercise—or entreaty to private magic. “And I’m afraid I want to stay with him, really. That’s why I was glad you came over to get me.”

“So it’ll be the same as always,” said the hunchback, and the listener at his elbow could hear the yearning stuck like a bone in that chicken-bone chest. “You’ll stay.”

“No, Walter. I’m just coming to tell him. I’m going. With the troupe.”

The two made no comment. The brother’s eyes never left her.

“Oh, I know I’m not going to make a dancer, for long. Ninon knows I know that.”

“Then why would she—?” said her brother.

“Oh, I don’t know what
she’ll
say to
him
,” said the girl. Turning away brusquely, she looked straight into Casper’s eyes, denying it.

He was still drunk enough to look back. Do I know your telephone number? He was the first to look away. Outside the window, the flashes were still at it. Glow, little glowworm.

“But I know who
is
going to be bribed,” he heard the girl say.

“Who?” they said.

“Edwin.”

“Edwin?”

“Yes, Edwin. I don’t know exactly for what.”

“If anything,” said the deaf one, in his cleanest articulation, “it would be that young bimbo—”

“You don’t understand Edwin at all. Neither of you. You never have.”

“He’s remarkable. And Father helped to make him so.” Her brother slurred the words roughly. “What more is there to understand?”

“Bribe him for what?” said Walter.
“Who?”

Silence. O perfect caesura, O dangerous.

“Why, your father’s the most honorable man in the world!”

That might be. But the young hunchback’s will to innocence was as touching as his sternum, exposed forward and plain to all. “He took me in too…and he never…He could ask for anything…I could give. Why, that afternoon, day after my parents were killed…when David brought me home from school with him…I’ve never spoken about it, but—”

“Never mind, Walt,” said David.

“Sorry,” said his friend. “Trouble with air travel, takes your feet off the ground.”

“But you did speak!” The girl’s voice burred through the seat like electricity. “Don’t you remember? It was what my
mother
said to you that day that made you—stay. You told me, Walter. I’ve never forgotten it.”

Mothers were awarded silences too, in this crowd. But shorter.

“Oh, I did?” said the hunchback, with such unease that Casper turned to look at him. Neither young man was looking at the girl. And she? She sat with peculiar stiffness. As if she wasn’t looking at herself.

“Will we get there for dinner?” said Walter. What distress, from cheekbones that didn’t look as if he bothered with one dinner out of three!

And the deaf one said, “Oh look. Here comes God again.” Several seats around tittered, as the pilot began his royal way. The young passenger had miscalculated his own loudness, as the deaf do. Or had he?

Casper got up. “Sorry,” he said to the girl, as he worked his way past her. He knew what it was like out there, where she was. “I go to meet my captain.” Who doesn’t know that I have a second bottle.

“Wonder who’s he coming for now?” said the deaf one, oblivious. Casper, felt, rather than heard, the girl’s tense
Shhhh
behind him.

Casper reached down and tapped her brother’s black box. “Wash-rooms lead lives of quiet desperation,” he said. “Does it know?”

He stayed there until somebody knocked. When he came out, the strophes were riding, riding, and the corridor too, in great humps of mul-ultitudinous…carpet. This was the way to get over the rim—if you had no swimming pool. He paused at the head of the aisle. Royally.

Beautiful nihilists, those three down there, those plastic-lovers with their own cheeks still fleshly shining, hot and organic as peaches on the dead sideboard of the world. But young and kind before everything. They were disposed to be friendly. He could see that. Also their faces, if he gave them his card. My name is Friend—story of my life. No, too neat for the tear glands. Besides, the plane was too near New York now.
Had he told them everything?
But he had her telephone number, if he ever needed it. She would listen without guilt. Like me.

He nodded from side to side, mandarin. Last trip out, he’d crossed in a double seat, next to a man reading from a book printed in some unknown Oriental script. The man had had a large nose inhabited by a tic. At intervals, nose and upper lip screwed toward the heavens in revulsion, but though all across the Pacific the man spoke steadily of his own life, Casper could never find the connection between tic and what was said. That time, Casper had shared the man’s bottle, a large one of Very Old Sun Tory Japanese whisky, brought out at once. He never learned the name of book or man. But he remembered the man’s life as if it were his own. The ocean, seen from above, must be scored with these trajectories, every wave peopled with character explaining itself, preparing for the silent vise of home.

The important thing was—not to mumble. One doesn’t mumble Shakespeare. Had he been sure to speak loudly enough to those three in the seat—life companions forevermore? Had they got what he said to the black box? Or had he been mumbling all along?

He stopped in the aisle, just ahead of their seats. They had changed things round. The girl was now in the windowseat, then her brother, then their friend. The aisled seat on the end was ready for him. Had they done it for the girl, or against him? “I’m sorry,” he made his gaze say to her. “If I leaned on
your
shoulder, I would do it from choice.”

She smiled up at him, this observer whose handicap he recognized. She was an ordinary girl, plunged in the Shakespearean ocean of life like any other. What had taken from her the power
not
to understand?

A passing stewardess, no older than this girl, frowned at him to sit down and fasten his seat belt, but he wasn’t going to have this moment taken from him—in which his trip united with his life. This was the real trip.

He leaned across the seat and spoke, this time he knew for sure aloud. They and he would remember each other forever. The plane lifted, surging on his strophes, borne upward by garlands of glowworm into the ever-expanding dark—forward into port, into the time when he too would be young.

But somehow, one didn’t speak to a person like her directly.

“She does even better than me,” he said clearly, and held out his bleeding wrists to her. “She listens without guilt for
any
of us. Does she know?”

E
NTER THE DINING-PLACE
of a house and the family story begins, pastorale or head-horror, but out of the dogshit of the streets. Home as sinecure didn’t end with the revolution—which revolution? Only a family at table can ask that; here gather all the secret conversatives of life. I, Simon, know this.

You Edwin, of no family table, you Leni, naiad of the bathroom, know it. Blount, meet yourself coming and going, but you know of a kitchen table where all your safari began. Austin, this oval table here, eaten at so often, is only the reverse of a long medal, isn’t it, the Jewish side of the communion wafer, close as a lion to its victim—this, your other home. Mr. Krupong you are black, and first of your generation to be named Felix, but your grandfather is here, isn’t he, under those broad lapels the same cannibal flesh! Dear Ninon, Venus Callipygian of the small, steel buttocks, where was your table really, the one that was never on the Ile St. Louis?…The room knows this.

Grace is always spoken by someone in these places, by an elder who may never say a live word:

…
In the eye of the whirlwind, eat home broth once a day.
That was Meyer Mendes, builder of this house.

…
Use your first name at this table, Dan Blount, respect answers, not questions.

…
Go to England, grandson; one pod of cocoa was enough for Tettah Quashie; one pod and a blacksmith brought our farms to us, from Fernando Po.

…The meal is the parable; no living member has ever heard it all.

…
Fathers wave the palm of opinion here, Simon, mother cutting with her manicure scissors at his broad leaf. Mine was Hungarian. He knew my mother, according to the oldest testament. She kept our tools safe from roaches, in a tin box. The rats are always outside
—
even with us.

…
Childhoods collect here, Edwin. In farina and short sentences, we teach you nothing wrong here; outside is the dogshit, don’t bring in any on your shoe. Oh my children of the airplane, fly home safe
—
and drop like Icarus, on this collection plate.

“Everybody’s family here,” said the Judge. “Leni, at last you’re with us, you sit here on my right. Ninon, my dear Ninon, on my other side. How long since you two have seen each other? Next to Ninon, of course Pauli—you three have so much to catch up on. Next to Leni…why—Austin. How good to have you here again, Austin. Welcome home, boy. …Mr. Krupong, will you take the chair next to Austin…you’ll find his father has been in your country many times. And our mutual friend opposite you…Dan, on Pauli’s left please; Pauli, tell him about that palace in Vienna where the architect forgot the bathrooms—if he doesn’t already know. …And Edwin, I’ve been saving you for…Anna, since we’re not going to wait dinner for those three, perhaps remove their plates—yes, that’s better. …Here we are then. Ninon, Pauli, Blount. Leni, Austin, Krupong…And Edwin…at the other end. It’s not the foot. Opposite me.”

And unbidden guests arrive without warning at any time between gong and coffee, drawn out of their graves to the plate that is never set for them, never lifted away.

(
I shan’t do over the dining-room, Simon. Black holland covers on the Jacobean, gravy-brown wood and vanilla white. It’s been that way from the beginning; they’d turn over in their graves. So I’ll leave it as is; I know when I’m beat. It’s an honest room; I’ll say that for it.)

“We’ve never changed this room,” said the Judge, sitting down.

(Seating and setting, Anna,
said Mirriam,
that’s all I’ll ever do about dinners here. Hire a flock of helpers, if you want. Or have caterers in. But the people and the flowers are all I’ll do. I’ll expect you to take care of the rest.
)

Mirriam, how you neutered people. The flowers were your allies, swarming in corners, offering flowers for the animal in us to lift a leg at, splitting the house safety with a liana of green, transfusing our minds to the yellow, jaundiced rain of autumn, outside. Yet you were such an urban woman.
Stay upstairs!
Anna does the flowers now.

“Why, it’s an English-basement house, Simon, isn’t it, with the dining-room below street. Like mine.”

“You have a house, Ninon?” said Leni. …She has everything she wants, one can see. And she
wants
it; she’s no American fool; she’s like Pauli and me. “Ah, what happiness.” And maybe, visits from us.

“Half belongs to the ballet, really. You know how it is, Leni. The choreographer always has a garret. To be sick in, and nursed. You don’t know Rupert—but they’re all the same. Then there’s always some stray girl down with something—usually love. Second floor’s for meetings, all projectors and files. We’ve very modern, now that we’re nationalized.”

“No room—for husbands?”

“Now girls, girls.” Pauli rubbed his elegant hands, delighted. “I’ll have to be stage manager again; I see it.”

“Ah, Leni, you were a prima before me.” Madame’s décolletage sparkled, but lacy as it was, her toilette had the solidity of their profession; that hair ornament would ride every tour-jété of the evening. “You do everything ahead of me.”

“You were never a prima, my dear.”

“But Leni, she is going to be a Dame.”

Leni’s eyelashes cast themselves up, two sets of them. “What titles, the English.”

Nearest Pauli, Ninon’s left glove had its fingers tucked back into its opera opening, for eating, but wisely covered elbow and upper arm where he knew she had those veins; she would still be no bigger than a mosquito in bed. Now she fluttered the hand at Leni. As of old, her double ring joined second and middle finger, but the fourth was beautifully bare.

And would remain so. “What a glorious acid-green you’re wearing, Leni
chérie.
”…And how exquisitely I can still lie—I ought to do it more often, such fun. But she does have a good corset on. Anyway, I’ve made them all recall now—that I am French. …

“You don’t have the little studio any more, Ninon, behind the Strand?”…Her perfume was the same, or to the same purpose, the only cloudiness about her. …Let those two hear him, he didn’t care.

“Oh, that was just for the war. A tiny house now, Simon.” She made it sound like an assignation. “On Clipstone Street.”

People’s houses so often sounded like them. When Edwin himself first came here, his confusion was all visual. Now the room, long since settled as to its objects, resounded with echoes; maybe a family never heard its own. They weren’t as musical here as he’d thought; they’d merely inherited musical interests, along with the money on which he supposed this house lived. …If I am offered a salary—must I take it? They’ll make me a sensitive hero, yet. But I always have my reservoir. …