New Yorkers (7 page)

“Damn well ought to be, in that one. Far as I know, he didn’t pick me for his daughter’s husband, she did, and I was already after her, I guess, that night. But I was always very careful, later, not to go into his firm.” He sipped from his brandy and dried his lips. “Sometimes I wonder, though. He
was
rich enough after all to give his girls their own money, in the end. And I was a young carpetbagger. Didn’t
I
pick
him?”
The old man made a sly face at him.

“Oh, Chauncey.”

“Particularly fond of that story though, I must say,” Olney said, smiling to himself. “Considering—the tail-end of it.”

“You mean that wasn’t?”

“Uh-uh.” He let Simon wait, then cocked his chin at the ceiling. “Few weeks later—though I shore never got this from my father-in-law, and we never spoke of it later, b’lieve me—it came out that Ralston himself had already sold away, unbeknownst to anybody, the very room he was standing in that night; he’d sold the whole block of flats. For more money than a parcel like that had ever gone before. And he’d done it all by himself.”

In the smallish room, so markedly plain for the prospect it fronted on, Chauncey’s laughter rang loud and long, an elder’s laugh and of its era; Mannix’s laugh, though released specially for his friend, seemed of its own era, dimmer by habit, conserved in the chest. Looking around him, he could see yet another end to the story, a subtler one. The taxes on this place, in which one man lived with a servant, must be as high as any private one of its size in the city, for the land alone. The room’s clever shabbiness, resembling some of Boston’s, might be as characteristically Virginian, when there was money too. He smiled secretly, seeing his friend through the other end of the opera glass. Miles away from his money, miles away. And what of other sides of it, Chauncey’s wife, the girl? A name suddenly connected in him—Father Mendes mentioning it, saying it with the honest Jew’s high intellectual smile for Christian graft.

“Why, Chauncey, your father-in-law—wasn’t he one of the attorneys for the Boss Tweed crowd—why, I’ve got a Thomas Nast drawing I think shows him.”

“Have you?” said his friend, deep in the wings of his chair. “Yes, that was Mary’s father. Thought you knew, maybe. Your father did, of course.”

“He never said.”

“Mirriam knows, mentioned it to me once. Seems there’s lots of that crowd’s great-grandchildren, still stepping out around town.”

Mannix made no response. Forcibly, he kept his mind on the great double staircase of the city, up which went the thieves on the rise, the fancy girls, the peddlers Jew or Dutch, down which came the dowagers in their diamond dog collars, the race horse collectors and cart horse breeders—and the snake-hipped young men, the egreted women, who had danced at the Savoy.

“Pour yourself another drink, Simon.”

“No, I’ve had enough.” He got up and went to the piano, hunting among the pictures. There she was, Olney’s wife, in the pince-nez and stiff bun of that afternoon forty years ago, not ugly even under the glasses, laborer in civic works, faithful helpmate in Chauncey’s career, ever at his side. “She sang Tosti’s ‘Good-bye.’ Your wife. The day I was here with Dad.” He hesitated. “No. It was the other one.”

“The other one?” said Chauncey. He had sunk all the way back in the chair now, hands folded.

A sister or sister-in-law? She was nowhere among the pictures, at least the silhouette of her as he remembered it. “A blond woman, I think. Hair in curls on top, one down her neck. Very quiet otherwise. Dark dress.”

“You must mean my secretary, Mrs. Nevin, who lived with us. She had a daughter Lucy, about sixteen then maybe, who would have been away at school—or maybe not. Older than you. One of those two, it would have been.”

He’d been ten, both older to him—how would he know? “Good-bye forever,” the silhouette sang, in the dark of the generations.

“Luce, my granddaughter, is named for
that
Lucy—Lucretia Nevin. Her mother.”

“Her—”

“I adopted Mrs. Nevin’s daughter, since Mary and I had no children of our own.
We
did. My wife was a remarkable woman, Simon.” Was there a deep twinkle in Olney’s eye, a reminiscence at mouth, meant for Mannix to see? “No, there’s no picture here, matter of fact, but you’ll find a fine drawing of the two, mother and daughter, Mrs. Nevin and Lucy, on the upstairs landing, outside my room. Why don’t you go see?” It was a command—or a wistful, ninetyish request

Going up a stairwell heavily coddled in pictures far more luxe than down below, Mannix weighed his own father’s odd friendship with Olney, never before seen as so out of their spheres for both—had he been the one to help with such things as adoptions? On the landing, he saw an indifferent line drawing, two laughing women intertwined in the simper of the period, in twin clouds of Charles Dana Gibson hair. In the agelessness of dull drawing they were identical. He tiptoed downstairs again, why on tiptoe, except for all the merged silences here, he couldn’t say.

“Lovely pair; they must have been very alike.” The Judge peered at his watch. “Isn’t it time for me to go home?” He had spoken to an empty chair, Olney was at the piano, hunting fretfully. “Can’t find him,” he said “Can’t find him anywhere.”

“Isn’t that—” said Mannix, pointing again to the young Britisher’s picture, but Olney, ignoring, walked past him to the window, recalling to Mannix how at their last dinner he had gained vigor with the late hour, only to fade, almost neatly, into doze—and a healthy rousing—and so off jauntily in the small hours with his man, who seemed used to it, in the car.

The Judge came and stood beside him. Nobody on the avenue now, not even a bus, and the planes of it, the lovely bones of light that were its trees, seemed to stand at attention, pressed forward by visions of it in other lights and at other hours.

“I like sometimes to see the young couples coming back from parties,” said Olney. “Summers are better for it. I don’t go away any more. Don’t mind the heat now. Got everything here.” He drew the curtains halfway, with a shy smile of guilt. “Once a girl saw me watching, ran up and knocked at the window, but nobody’s thrown any stones yet.” He chuckled. “Maybe they’re waiting to see what happens to the Court.” Very slowly he bent over the tray, pouring out another brandy. “Yes, they were often taken for sisters, that mother and daughter.” He was humming. “And Mary was a ve-ry remarkable woman.” He’d poured the brandy, the Judge saw with a certain chill, into a third glass. It wasn’t possible to tell whether he was wandering, or with the insouciance of his years was merely plucking down—as one might attempt the crystal plums carried by the wrought-iron maiden in the piano bay—all the themes, still fruiting, which inhabited this house.

“One for the road, Simon,” said Olney. “And brandy’s best, at evening’s end.”

“Is it?”

“’Tis. And you’ve sat up with me long enough.”

“Sure now?”

“Often sit up reading. Proctor’s got a buzzer downstairs if I want a snack—he sleeps days, if I do. And there’s always the window, even without girls. Five o’clock in the morning, it’s a marvel.”

Mannix took the glass.

“Your own little girl must be growing on, Simon. What’s her name? Saw her with Mirriam once. Looks like you.”

“Ruth. She’s twelve.” He could feel his face break into the sweet gape of fatherhood—and not only because she was an even smaller, femininely decent replica of him. “Off her feed tonight, Anna said. What girls of that age eat!—great big eyes and a bellyache, all of them. Used to get high fevers with any little thing, seems she’s growing out of it.” He heard his own babble, in this house of mourning.

“Luce used to ride. She made the three of us do it. Every Sunday morning.” He pointed a long forefinger at the window. “Right out there, we used to come out of the park.” The force of his glance and the gallery of pictures behind him all but drew that vision of riders through the French window, the three women on their mounts, girl, mother, and Mrs. Olney behind them, stepping through with the ease of apparitions, one by one, lightly equestrian. And Olney, behind them all, was still here.

“They grow out of it,” said Olney, “all of it. And what about your boy—will he be for the law?”

“No,” said Mannix. “Got some idea he wants to save the world.”

“Heh. Won’t ask how. Gather he don’t think that process is synonymous with the courts…Simon—kin I ask you a question?”

“I know what you’ll ask,” said Mannix with a laugh. “Do I really think orderly process
will
save?’ Yes I do, you old revolutionary. And you helped on my appointment, nevertheless.”

“
Because
,” said Olney. “And because I—never mind. But you find me going along with what’s being done to the Court these days, I’m no radical. I b’lieve in a government of
laws,
not men, just like the founding fathers did—who got that idea from Harington’s
Oceana,
by the way. And in the end, I plump for the men. Just like
them.
But what the hell are we talking about that for—after midnight?” He suddenly bowed his head. “I hope that boy—” he said, gesturing at the pictures on the piano—“I hope that boy had some women, in his time.” Olney lifted his head, not lecherous, but as if poking toward some shrewdness he hoped was in his younger friend. Was he asking Mannix to note how all this evening’s talk might now be seen as circling round that martial mourning they had joined forces for—that this was the way men properly sat up with the spirits of men? Or had Mannix’s own evening, that nervous quick of private reflections, drawn everything from the other’s to itself?

“What is it, Simon,” said Chauncey, “that you hold against your own boy?”

He could feel himself shrink into the smallest corner—of not knowing. “I don’t know,” he said, from it, his voice a strangle of relief. Led like any witness into admission never yet made to the witness self, he stared at his clasped hands, seeing what advocacy could be.

“Not—because he’s deaf?”

The Judge looked up, with a stiff smile. “I can lipread, Chauncey. I learned it with him, did you know that?”

Olney shook his head, as against a gnat. “He’s
Mirriam’s
son, and I can understand how that could—but he’s also yours.”

He drew a shallow breath—and said nothing.

“Troubles you, I see it. I had no son.” The old voice hadn’t a quaver, strong with the evening’s supply of life. “I’d have made do with a bastard, if I could’ve got one. But I can see how it would be between you, just now. Simon—we didn’t fight in the wars of our time either, you and I. Are you agin that boy because he can’t?”

“Judge,”
said the Judge. “Let us talk about
Geoffrey Audley-Taylor.”

Then he was ashamed.

But the other held up a hand. “Haven’t got the time to take offense—or to be polite.” He grinned. “Nor, ’s matter of fact,” he drawled, “to wait out a bet I made with Borkan, about you. On reconsideration, I’d say he was right.”

“What was that?”

“He gave you six years—to get there. I gave you ten.”

He received this in absolute silence. There was no need to ask “Get
where?
”—any more than there had been to ask Chauncey what he had meant when he had said “the Court.”

“I didn’t know I was being mentioned for it,” he said then.

Chauncey squinted. “Don’t know’s you have been, except by us. But
you’ve
thought of it. You just didn’t know it showed on you. It always shows. Showed on me.”

“I didn’t know you ever—” The usual verdict on Chauncey Olney was that he had never cared to exert his endowment to the full—though there were those who contended that he was an unremarkable man, exalted into an air of endowment by sheer lifespan.

“You’d have known, if you’d been around. But I’ll tell you something known to few, now all dead. I was offered it.”

“You were…offered—” He counted back how many administrations that must have been, which President—never doubting that Olney spoke the truth. Vanity wasn’t in that hooded eye. Perspective was. Even perhaps a surely inapposite—paternity.

“I turned it down.”

“You…but in God’s name, why?”

“I thought my…private arrangements—might not bear scrutiny.”

“But—surely they already had borne—”

“I did not wish to bring them into full view.”

He was stunned most of all, he thought, by the conversational difference between the two centuries—and by what the preceding one’s mannerism could conceal, even from its successor’s eye. Few in public life now would openly have dared such a ménage as must have been here, or made such a serene go of its “arrangement”—and this despite all the rapines of passion, and perversion too, nowadays so common on the cocktail tongue.

“That doesn’t sound like you, Chauncey,” he said, stern as a son who had expected better of his father.

“It wasn’t,” he answered. “You see…Mary convinced me. Yes, she was the one who persuaded me—that it couldn’t be done. But not even the President knew that.” Olney held out his hand. “Good night, Simon, and thank you. Confidences are tiring—you may find that out one of these days. And I have to take care of myself.” He did look tired now, with dangerous hollows in his face that might not refill. But surely there was a glint in his expression still. “You see—that sudden bout of TB I had? Came on me as a middle-aged man. At just about that time.”

While the Judge was taking this in, Chauncey pressed the buzzer on the wall. The man Proctor shortly appeared, wearing spectacles which gave him a clerkly look well suited to the house.

“Proctor’ll drive you.”

“Oh no, please. I’m looking forward to the walk. No, I really am, Chauncey.”

“Grown bitter out.” Olney went to the window, peering at an outside thermometer. “What do you know, down to twenty above. But no wind.”

“I’ll be warm enough. I need the walk.”

Proctor helped him into his fur-lined coat and handed him the thick French-gray suede gloves which were his sisters’ half-yearly gift, doing it with a measured approval as silent-footed as his service, and as much in evidence. Proctor and his kind held this world up, or what was left of it—which was a lot. He gave Proctor a nod of approval fully exchangeable.