New Yorkers (60 page)

Two people passed; it must be close to four. He let another pair go by and dwindle before he answered. “Is that what we share?”

“You feel it too,” she said.

“How we keep them on!” he said. “Your mother in the house, my father—in the hallway.”

“Yes. Oh yes.” She said it passionately, into the distance. Then she buried her face in her lap.

“But you can’t pretend either,” he said. “Not like him. Do you and he ever—quarrel about it?”

She lifted her head, in one arched curve like an exercise. Her upper lip was white, or the morning had crept to it. “I used not to be able to. Pretend. But I have got control of it.” The market line had widened now beyond repair. “That unknown, in the hallway,” he said. “Sometimes, I almost—know him.”

The girl leaned her cheek against his. “She comforts me. She tells me the truth.”

“How you speak out. What you speak of her. Is that why they don’t listen to you, at home?”

“How can you say that?” she said. “They listen for me all day long.”

She was answering him plain, as he thought she always had, answered anyone—but from a frame of reference so far back or deep that all she said or did came from it; if he had the frame, he would have everything. “Because you know? About him?”

“I always knew about him. She never stopped talking about him. What I wanted was—to know about
her.”
The twin lamps behind them shone weaker. “Tell me. What she said about him.” She shrugged. He shook her. Her head bobbed in the light of the lamps. “It’s only that you already know.” He could feel her body feel his. “That he was too good,” she said. “With the innocent.”

In the refuse pile, there was a movement, a tinkle, of glass somewhere dislodged.

“She used to say that over and over…Now, of course, I see for myself. ‘It’s the Jew in us, Ruthie,’ she used to say. ‘We give an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, just as the Bible says. But not always only for vengeance. Nobody notices that we do it for pity too.
He
thinks he does it because he never went to war.’”

“But that’s
him
talking!”

“It was her too.”

He was watching the pile. “
Take
an eye,” he said. “She said ‘give.’”

She leaned forward, not to him. “‘Simon has a genius for private life; he’ll be a great man there,’ she said once. “Chauncey Olney told me so; he asked me to come and see him, Ruthie, and I went.” “So many of your race have that, Mirriam,” he said to me. “But public life, so many of your men fuddle there. Give him ten years, Mirriam.” And darling Ruthie, I said I’d try. But I’m so afraid one of us’ll be the one to do him in. It doesn’t matter if I tell
you…
It won’t be David. Your father doesn’t feel toward David—but that’s another story. And it can’t be you—not in that short time. So it’ll be me. I can’t convince your father, you see. That I’m bad enough.’”

She hadn’t mimicked, except in the pace of a woman walking, bearing down on the child, with a voice that maybe was to be the child’s. “And she couldn’t, you see, she couldn’t convince him. She couldn’t convince
me.
”

“She was mad, then?” he said in awe. “Or that would be his excuse.”

In the pile, there was a rustle. Always moving, moving; the test for life is movement. To quote a judge. He could see how it would be in a family. In some alliance in which all four Mannixes stole from and gave full pity to each other—the Judge had been quoting
her.
Did the dead still move?

“No, she wasn’t. That was her trouble…Excuse for what?”

“Her death,” he said—and listened for the echo of that.

She didn’t falter. “Often I can’t tell any more, whether she said everything to me. Or whether I—After.” Her voice changed. “She doesn’t really. …come to me. But she
comes
to me.” Her voice was happy. “I even know…a little something about her that no one else did. Or almost no one. I was never sure she knew it herself.”

“Would it concern—David?”

“In a way.”

“Well, sons are
made
,” he said. “I’ve no pity there.”

“You’re a Christian.” She rubbed her face on his shoulder.

“So everybody says.”

“But you see? How can one get to know—about both?”

“I’m not likely to hear voices.”

She turned his face to hers. “Phew, I’m tired, Edwin. I never knew I could be so tired. And you?”

“Not me. I was only fifteen yesterday.”

“That would help in the theatre, not to know one’s age. Know something? Your face hasn’t changed since. Not an iota. And I don’t think you have, either.”

“Don’t go to sleep.” His voice wasn’t gentle. It went with the face he could see as well as she. His own.

She leaned against him, her voice drowsy. “Helps though, she always said. To talk to someone. Even if you can’t tell them everything.”

“So you
are
alike then. You and she.”

She sat up. “I was once. But I got control of it. You can be like
both.
You can. I finally remembered that.” She followed his glance. “What’s that?”

“It’s a rat.” Sometimes in the lone bed-dark when he couldn’t be continent, he felt this same satisfaction—halfway between gain and loss. “Two of them.”

In the refuse pile, first one head poked out, then the other whole animal—the peculiarly glistening haunches which slimmed to a cord, had without warning a head. Some said the human hand was what confounded artists—but if you could draw a rat, you had drawn everything. “I been bit by a Mexican chicken,” the children sent to the school nurse said with aloof smiles. Men coming into the barbershop after a bought night, to have a scratch dressed, an eye leeched, said the same, with the same smile. The two animals prowling here, tough between the discs of tin marked Coca, Kraft, brave with summer, might have been nibbling a pile of goods as high as the resurrection. The girl beside him hadn’t moved; she was cool. With what she must once have been witness to, why wouldn’t she be? He stood up. “They don’t eat for nothing. Somebody pays for it.”

“Where did they
go?”
she said.

It was never possible to tell the exact rat-tip when they had gone. Once they had, you always knew. The cellar door didn’t have to be open for them; she could see that. The lore of his city was simple. “Where do you think?”

She stood up and kissed him—not for himself but for what they all treasured him for, for his
life,
before he had met them.

“Want those eggs?”

“No. Take me
home.
”

“I’m not sleepy either,” he said.

At the end of the alley, they both turned to look back.

“Know what it looks like to me now?” he said…“Just a habitat, that’s all. Like it says in the nature books: ‘Mexican chicken, habitat all hemispheres, low ground.’” He smiled at her, the way he had at Krupong. “I won’t go back.”

She took his hand and swung it. “Yes, we’re alike. The way I’ve always thought of it.”

“How?”

“Everything’s already happened to us.”

He had the wit to walk on, not to ask details. He was at the beginning of everything now. He had the clearest sense now of how young he was. Of the blatant power given him by circumstance. Of how protean it was in his will to become. Could Putzi the forger walk both sides of the street any better? Any lipreader have a finer sense of what others missed? Or any dinner guest make a more knowledgeable payment—for what he was about to receive. In return for having been the most intelligent who had ever been let in. the house.

“Don’t know that we can get a cab here.” He had a concern—like a dater’s—that this tender means to an end should not be jarred.

“I use the subway a lot.”

“No,” he said, “we’re not so different.”

In the city habit, they waited in total silence for the train back. In the train they said nothing, saw what they saw with the train’s rhythm, side by side.

Outside it was morning.

At the head of the Mannix street, she took the key out of her purse.

“Not around your neck any more.”

She walked on without reply.

“Still have your club?”

Fair enough if she wouldn’t answer; with these little hostilities he was warning her of what was to come, and she was taking it in. “Used to be a stone bust in the window of that house across the way, and a silver pitcher. Real thief-bait.”

“They’re gone. It’s apartments now.”

“Seven years.”

“And seven maids, and seven mops,” she said.

And seven visits. He lingered at the bottom of the steps. No one sat on a stoop here; it merely provided a natural pause for reflection for all classes, as to whether the caller was going down in the world or up. No apartment house ever did this as well.

She was looking up and down her street. Its pale, private trees were new ones. She was looking at her habitat the way all her class did—as if they had made it themselves, and knew the price to be paid for it. They were not to be surprised.

“What’s the matter, don’t you want to go in?” he said. “It’s still a very quiet street. No revolutions here. No murders.”

Twin lamps over her head shed safety only, from her own house. He climbed two steps above her and looked down at her, laughing. A red commune, rolling heads down society’s staircase—as her father was so fond of calling it—was the last thing he wanted. What he wanted was to get to society in time, before it exploded into new proletariats—to get
his
fill of it.

“We’re the revolution,” he said. “We’re what the world’s going to be.”

For his answer, she handed him the key.

They went up the steps, stood in front of that door—there were doors that didn’t need to be braced with the neck, or didn’t let on. “Maybe it’s open,” he whispered. But on this night the Judge had closed it well. And she wouldn’t help him with the unfamiliar key. Fair enough. He’d warned her.

Where had she learned to twist into him now like a finger into a buttonhole, holding him there, under the lintel of her own house? “What’s he bribing you for? Why?”

In any court of night or morning, such a question was its own answer. At last, with trembling lip, she herself gave it. “For me?”

Again he had that same sensation of gain-loss as after his nightly trials in the dormitory bed linen. Now it was over, in the lonely court of himself. And he had done nothing yet. Nothing personal.

Entering the house ahead of her, he turned around to face her. “Welcome to the Mannix house,” he said, then drew her in and closed the door.

As in all his visits, the hall mirror waited, holding in its gaunt pool all the elusive dynasties that had gone before. He could see himself perfectly there. Edwin the learner—who dealt with it as it came. The power of a person shouldn’t be diminished just when he understood everything. But it was. Hunt down a judge and this is still all he can tell you, from the moment he catches you buttoning your fly.

He took off his jacket and hung it on the newel-post. She was still standing just inside. “Can’t
you
get past that mirror? I could break it for you.”

She shivered in his arms. “I’d still be there.”

“Funny, I can see myself there perfectly. But not you.” He touched the glass. “Edwin Halecsy—and who?”

“Friend.
Friend.”

“I take all bribes,” he said.

He began mothkissing his questions over her cheeks, scarcely caring whether she heard. “You saw somebody die tonight.
Was
it the first time?” His lips murmured over her eyelids. “Is there a picture of her, in
your
room?” In her mouth, his tongue prodded, and withdrawing itself, said, “You’re the perfect witness. The daughter of the house.” His stretched mouth breathed heat into her ear, the tongue circling it. The tongue inserted itself and said, “He killed her. You saw.”

All this time, against him from breast to knee, she didn’t move, even to the swelling of the rod against her own mound. She wasn’t going to resist. He hung on her in a sawtoothed pit of regret for that, motionless.

She spoke, hard-voiced, from a cold distance he hadn’t touched. “I’m not bad either. No one will ever convince me of it.”

He held her, a fist in her shortened hair. “You want my dirt. When you have so much of your own—why do you want mine?”

When he began to take her, pushing aside the bloody-wet contraption between her legs, which couldn’t save her, she hung on him, arms and head drooping at a thieves’ angle—as if he was the cross. For that he would beat her, but afterwards. He held her wrists behind her—limp, but in the attitude that was correct. Over her shoulder, through her hair, in all the cups for light that a personal outline could make, he saw the hallway. His jacket on the post, immobile. In the niche behind it, a woman’s boa, on a chair. Pitiless, the pointed light hung above, through all the convulsions of his loins. If he could only let go of her wrists, he had a strange emotion toward what she could do for him; she would reach up gently and take his glasses off; then she would sink her teeth in him. If she hadn’t refused to be saved—he could have let her go.

He had to take his glasses off to beat her, which his own fists did for him efficiently, as if he had never left the district, quietly reddening the skin, not breaking a bone. At last she resisted him, and he could stop. He had a little of her blood on him, but that was natural.

They couldn’t immediately release one another. Sprawled at the bottom of the stairs, they might have been hanging there in a colloquy of love. Then, slowly, each began to move. A blind hand groped along the floor. The eyeglasses, flung against the mirror like a marriage-cup, were within its reach, but it could not seem to find them. A hand not its mate found them for it, gave these into it. Miracles happen, gently, but too late. The hand that owned the glasses felt over them. One lens should have been cracked, but was whole.

The unknown form that was himself stood up with him. His arms hung heavy, Neanderthal, but tiny fingers at their far ends buttoned him intelligently. Below him, she was moving, repairing herself, in the attitude that was correct. Surely he had convinced her now.

“Poor rat,” he said. “You found me.”

Closing the outer door behind him, he had a moment’s confusion as to why, for he lived here now. Then he walked rapidly to his other house. Entering, he mounted the stairs as noiselessly as he could, for the hugeness of his outline was still with him, and people in fifty-dollar-a-month houses often slept until eight. When he came downstairs again, he was carrying a coat. Napless now, scarcely black any more, it was one coat of a legion made to last. The only wonder of it was how it had been kept so clean.