New Yorkers (61 page)

He had to go out in the backyard behind the tenement to burn it. Yards were his habitat; he scavenged well. Here are there at this hour, a solitary super was often to be seen over his small pyre, getting the world well ready, before six-o’clock Mass. The church next door had no bell, seldom a sacristan; he wasn’t even sure that it was consecrated any more.

The coat was hard burning. A sleeve protruded arm-length with a gust inside, the old shawl collar billowed up the gray of winters, one lapel trembled over the other to keep out the elements; the coat would not give up it shape. A terrible stench came from it, clearing his eyes.

Some men would hide from that other house now, or go on their knees to it. He would go back there this very evening, with a fresh batch of clothes. They were always explaining themselves there, and calling that civilization. Let them explain to him their yearning to make him one of themselves—when all the time they’d known they were no Lourdes for the curing of men’s souls. All they could tell him in the end was what he already knew and had long since paid for. That the ward was the beginning of everything.

He could imagine himself a politician now. The best mob was a mob of one. He saw himself in the Mannix house, writing the Judge’s essays, a power behind a throne he would gain his own power to desert. A man who didn’t know the difference between right and wrong had more moral suasion at his command than anyone—and had to watch out only for others like himself. He could do any thing now.

On the fire-pile, the cloth coat rose, full of red, hung for a tattered moment whole, and fell, giving up all its element. Poor rat, you had me. He began to tremble then, just when he had nothing more to fear.

There was nobody in the church next door, except the Heavenly Father. He ran there, to deal with his mortal one.

He got behind the confession box only to see if he was small enough. It was large enough. They could come from all the nations of the earth, to meet him here. Devise realty, bequeath personality. Now he was trembling, shrinking between the sheets of himself, which was what prayer must be. It was large enough in here for all the nations to present themselves and fall back again, one by one—leaving only one. After a while, that one separated from the others and came toward him, his father—a man like himself.
I appear in the record.
The box where he was kneeling couldn’t prevent it. In its old yellow panels he saw the pinholes where the wood louse made its entry, every pitiless detail.

His father touched him on the loins, leaving there his mother’s blood. Crouched over it, Edwin spat up the communion between them. One word, in night court—only one.
“Rapped.”

“T
HERE’S BEEN DAMAGE DONE
.”

It hung in the air of the stairwell, in the pure morning nimbus falling through the skylight above. A white dress was lying at the top of the stairs, crumpled enough for anything.

Naked from their own bed, they ran toward it, still with all their organs, the semen not yet dry. He stood over his daughter again, sex hanging, an old balls of a boy. Behind him, his bedmate, leaving herself bare, silently held out to him the garment she had seized on the way, and he took the frilled peacock and covered himself. But it was she who bent to examine, peering over the reddened skin, the bruised eyes—a pitying whore, executive. “The dirty—she wouldn’t let him do. So he’s pummeled her, good as any nark.”

Below them, the eyes opened. The woman’s hand, thrust under the girl’s skirt, was intent on other business. “Hah. I see. Some men are like that. She was that way, and he savaged her for it.”

But he saw the eyes. The flimsy dropped from his loins. He knelt over her. “Alive. She’s alive.”

“Alive enough, the more mess to it. Get off of her, Simon. Fetch hot towels, cold. Anything. And take your time.”

When he went, she leaned over the girl. “There, there, my duck. More things happen to one. You’ll be happy yet.” With a practiced lift, she raised the girl’s body, saw the muddled skirt behind, and laid her quickly down again. Her head bent, nostrils dilated, then she spoke. “The ponce. He did it anyway. Then beat you for it. Is that it?” Now she knelt, whispering, her naked haunches skinny up. “Get us to your room, girl. I’ll tell you what to do for it, if you don’t know. You poor silly little mark, it was the first, wasn’t it.”

Then the father was back, a eunuch bearing towels and a basin, babbling of the hot mound of them in one arm, the cold in the other—and saw the bloodied skirt. Robed as he was now, he got down to her again, the tassel of his sash dabbling. In the yawped face he turned up to Ninon’s, the lids were almost shut. “Her poor blood. I’ll kill him for it.” He bent over the girl again. “Was it—?” And thought better of it. “Who?”

At his side, the woman swabbing with towels, cold for the eyes, hot for between the thighs, stopped her work, caught even now in an attitude so predestined a man could hit her for it. “Don’t tell him, Ruth.”

He turned on her. “What have you to—Hold your tongue.”

“Don’t, Ruth,” said the woman, ignoring. “Don’t do.”

“Leave off, you bloody—” His mouth stuttered, working.

“Whore,” said the woman, and went on swabbing, her breasts swinging, small as they were.

In the cleansed face below, the swollen lips parted, speaking without sound. The father caught it; he was expert on such mime. Maybe the woman serving the girl did too. “My blood,” the lips were saying. “It’s only mine.”

“Oh, Disraeli!” said the woman. “Had a daughter.” Working with towel and basin, wiping soft, cozening the matted hair of the girl, her own nakedness looked motherly. “Better tell him then, Ruth. About us whores.” She dried the girl’s mouth. “Then nobody will be killed.”

The eyes closed again.

“She’s fainted,” he said, agonized. “I’ll
carry
her up.” The woman dropped her work, stood up. “I’ve got to have some
clothes.
That where her room is?” She stared down at the girl. “No, its just she doesn’t want me here. She’ll be all right. Let her be for a minute; it’s an exhausting—” Her own mouth worked—“experience.” She turned to go, turned back, foot one step up, hand on balustrade, nakedness forgotten, or proud. The lines of her face joined with those of her body. “Maybe I better do the telling, though—she’ll never. Because you have such an effect on us, Simon, on all of us, that we
can’t
always tell you—what we want to. For your sake. Not because we lie.” She came up to him stunned there, twisted her finger into his lapel as women did when charming a man, or loving him, laid her head for a minute inside his robe, on his chest, then stood back. “She let him,” she said, and left him.

As she went up the stairs, the sun rose upon the skylight and halted there. The virtue of these houses was that dark as they were at center, bound windowless to each other at the sides and not well cross-currented, once a day the sun sent its long shaft down their spiral, often to the very bottom, and all their gildings, any gold or crystal they had, were caught in this illumination. She walked steadily up and through it, a mote rising in the beam of a rose window, and lost herself in the shadows above. Below, the girl tried to rise, lay back. “I’ll help you upstairs,” he said. “I won’t carry you. I can’t.”

The girl struggled up on elbow slowly, towels falling from her. He stood beside her, not hindering. Her lips parted. “
I
am the missing person. I can’t pretend, any more.”

His face went down on his clenched fist. She stayed as she was, to watch him.

Now that she’d told him what he wanted to know—that she knew what she was—she was old enough to watch a man cry.

There was a heaving, no salt wet. He spoke. “Make it the night before. Oh Ruth, Ruth…make it the night before.”

Above, the woman watching them come up the stairs together to her wept as women did, scarcely knowing why. Scenes without intellect.

S
OME PEOPLE WERE ELATED
by the ancient-culture sections of Museums, striding the Egyptian wing, the Iranian, the Hittite, with their chins high, in the supreme command of being modernly alive. He often forgot the exhibits, in watching them. Others went down the aisles in a slight, persistent dusk of depression over so much beauty and inventiveness, all much the same under the superficial glazes, and all eventually congealed. Outside on the steps, ready to go down into the city again, most of any kind managed a romantic sigh, and could be done with it.

But to David Mannix, since the age of thirteen or so when he’d first begun coming here alone instead of with a school group or a chum, these friendly palaces of quiet, where the furnishment changed now and then but was always ultimately familiar, had become the haunt where he could best be at ease with an emotion he couldn’t have named then, and at twenty-eight had only begun to define. Somehow these spaciously dedicated halls supported it in him. Only they were comfortably big enough for his strong, constant, pressured pity for human beings busy at life, in the world.

Out in the streets, the busyness never quite obscured that. It had been the same in the college dormitory, the embryo political clubs and even the first ballrooms of his youth—in wherever men congregated to buzz over what was being done in the world, or could be. Outside, one at once had to do something oneself about that vast “it” of human suffering. From grade-school days on—when he’d brought home anything from a wounded pup to a Walter—he had been practical about it. He now belonged to as many relief committees, in every cause, as if he were a Quaker, besides being a contributing foster-father to as many Indian children on reservations, war orphans of any side, as he could afford on the income from the trust fund Meyer Mendes had left him.

“It’ll come to you in 1948,” his grandfather had begun saying to him from his teens, maybe when they were watching a couple of comers in the prelims at the Garden, or two Greek imports massively wrestling over who should throw the next match, rehearsing it for the syndicate in some dead-end of the Bronx. Or once, after a regatta in which David himself had been a participant—an activity which his grandfather, a privileged in-bettor in rougher circles, may well have thought effete. “In 1948, when you’re twenty-two. Don’t rest on that money, David. It’ll only be your leather, and your jock.”

On receipt of it, Meyer long since dead, he’d quit Harvard midyear, plunging at once into the charitable works which were the only solution he knew of for his kind—or the kind he’d been brought up to be. But the mildly dispensing side of the science of human rescue—on which Austin had been very helpful—wasn’t what Meyer had meant or he himself could rest with, whether the money was his own or other peoples’. Against purely political solutions, his own father, with the Chinese water torture of his conversation, had made his children sophisticate. Another element in the family texture his son never phrased to himself, hating to think of his own pity as in any way personal—allied in any way to a guardianship—of a sister, of a mother before her, or of a father who never dreamed of it. Born in some way he couldn’t help, he had to guard them all, the human race included. And couldn’t act upon this from a distance—he had to anoint. Alongside that, his deafness was nothing; it even made him gay. Its real inconvenience was that it gave an arena all his own—scarcely communicable even in a crowd of two—to the suppliant cries of the world.

Here in the museum, everything had already been done, Sumerian to now. Even to his deaf ears the quiet was a special one, the ultimate after such noise. Here the buzzing demand could stop. Staring at the left-behind bowls and spoons, the sarcophagi, he found relief, even a kind of joy. It would go on, the suffering, but it could stop. What he should have been, of course, was a rabbi.

So, at least, they’d said to him in the kibbutz—where action was daily, and anointment even of their “own” barely rabbinical—and the ills of the world beyond frankly a Gentile matter, scarcely at the moment even the province of God. But those men back there were the businessmen of retribution. They saw “rabbi” in him because they unwittingly agreed with his own father’s low estimate of his brains (as he did himself)—and rabbis who were not too intelligent were the preference of businessmen everywhere.

But there was another kind of man out there again in the desert now, more modern even than the chemists. On his way home, he’d stopped off in London, to talk that over with Austin.

“But that’s the military, isn’t it,” said Austin, leaning back in the Spartan rocker he’d had set in his very formal office—of the sort, he had just remarked, with which the wiser foundations concealed the revolutionary nature of their benefices even from themselves.

“You’re not surprised?”

“At you—and that? Should I be?”

In two years abroad himself, Austin hadn’t changed a whit; all his attributes could merely now be seen foreshortened, in the way of any man who rightfully becomes what he had promised to be. Still, David chided himself as stupid for not having seen this before. “I am. Surprised at myself.”

Austin looked out across the square, at what he had pointed out as the only building more purely Adam than this one—the Chase Bank. “What’ll you be doing for them—if you go?”

“Radio communications. And allied—arts.”

“For how long?”

“As I please. But I must take on citizenship. And a kind of…contract. For some years.”

“Will you be home long?”

“Just to tell
him.
I never can write him. And to see how he is.”

“Hear he’s in a wheelchair. But going out more than he has in years. Warren wrote me.”

“He can still walk. But he conserves it, for the evenings. When he writes, Ruth says. Ruth’s home.”

“She came through here on her way,” said Austin. “To stay?”

“She did a ballet, down under.
On the Wallabies,
she called it. Says that’s Australian slang for an uncertain path.”

Both laughed.

“She’s the clearest of any of us,” Austin said. “I’m not sure why.”