New Yorkers (70 page)

His father was right. “And each
yell,”
he had replied. His father had whipped him the way a good poet used reason; he’d been listening to that pendulum. For this same talent, his colleagues had later murmured him upstairs to a judgeship. But the courtroom was a drama which expected answers, plus the arrogance to believe them; he would always be a cabinet-judge. And be disliked for it. As were all those who lived by the mixed breath.

The phone rang, at his side.

“Mannix here.” He admired the Anglicism, so economical.

Factotum had rung through to the restaurant, for his 8:30 reservation. “Will you have your own car, sir?”

“No, Charlie’s at Blackpool for the day.” He could see a downstairs screw of distaste for all this democracy, but couldn’t resist adding to it. “Visiting his old mother.” True enough; she was a character actress there.

But the class below still retained the privilege of putting one in one’s place. “Indeed, sir. Kindly order the cab in good time. I’m alone, sir. I’ll ask the cabman to come up.”

He was alone here now. Factotum knew that too. As well as that he never allowed his daughter to touch his wheelchair. Nor any family; family wasn’t for that. Rosa and Athalie never dreamed of “taking him for walks,” although for the last two Christmases knitted Afghans for his knees had supplanted the gray mocha gloves. The army blanket had been acquired when he thought he was going in, in 1917; there was continuity for you! Maybe his sisters, that formal stupidity of theirs, might all along have better instructed him how to be with his daughter—if he could ever have told them why. How had he used her? How did one mourn the young?

He hung up the phone as quickly as decent. “A vulgar instrument,” his father had said laughingly, after being on it to his mistress—“no gentleman wants to be any closer to an absent woman than the
pneumatique.
” There was continuity for you. And the gap as well. For where his father’s era had found the thing foreign to its manners, he resented it because of its empathy—and Mirriam had clapped it to her heart like an artificial—heart. And his children played tricks with it early, and more serious games later—dispensing emotion everywhere. Even David (though his box heard better than normal over it) in the days of his last home visit had refused call after call from a woman, saying to him once in passing, “Can’t stand the phone somehow, after the desert. It’s too close. Know what the phone is to some people? It’s fucking, by ear.”

Oh my son…in the privacies of life anything may burst through a door.

In half an hour or so, his daughter should be at the destination he was betting on, allowing for that peculiar ballerina gait which had to acknowledge the ground in the act of covering it. The other probable one, the theatre, might be a few squares nearer. If she’d had any intention of going as far as Ninon’s house in Clipstone Street, she would have taken a cab. “We had walks,” said his daughter after twelve years, and burst down the door. Dukes fell in ruins, his wife rose again from her grave, and his son lay down in his like a soldier—and Walter, so recently dead, was the liveliest. And I, what do I do?

I rise from the chair.

He couldn’t do it all at once of course. Nightly practice of the past two years had helped. Once a day the chair whizzed this way within a room’s limits, like a friendly amah, trundling its charge—who was preparing to get off. Now to the cupboard for the aspirin; he’d given up the codeine as too Oriental for him, and all the other Pantopons, Luminals, Nembutals, morphine derivatives of the soft, lethe-like names. Aspirin—like the pain of standing—was only cumulative. If taken at intervals, the two kept pace. Most spinal pain had some posture of remission. His was to sit; he and Charlie often joked of it. He himself had been the one to break down Charlie’s English stage-servant manners to a comfortable exchange of obscenity, most of it about the Judge’s ills, when they were alone. “Eh well, in a household of women ’tis needed,” Charlie said. “Eh well,” the Judge said to himself—for it couldn’t be said to Charlie—“In a way too it’s like having the wife in the house again, for this Jew.”

Shirts and suits were hung low enough for him to reach. He stripped his upper body, splashed it with cologne and powder in lieu of washing—Europe again—and began taking off his pants, an involved snail-inching in which every muscle reprinted its image on his brain. At a time when exercise had still been suggested (and before a spinal fusion had been tried and found wanting) a therapist trained to polio cases had taught him the names. “Merry Christmas,” Miss O’Neill had said last year, off on her holiday, “and remember to keep your hamstrings loose!” Mirriam, who was never even in this city with me, laugh anyway; that’s what she said.

Muscle by muscle, thong by thong of meditation, he dressed, missing Charlie’s Mersey-stream of backtalk. Jews in their own households often never swore even to other men, keeping to manners Chasidic or soft. Often, even in the middle classes, it was the woman who kept obscenity fresh, with a midwife’s coarse righteousness. Until Charlie came, he hadn’t realized how much he had missed Mirriam’s command of it. She’d had the affectations of her period. Where his own mother had dared only a domestic
“Scheiss” or “futz”—
like a peasant when a pot fell—Mirriam, like the artists she knew did when they cut their fingers, said “fuck.” At a dinner party, she could pass the psychological penises around gravely as anybody, a scholarly artifact. In bed, she said anything that came into her head, from wherever she found it. “Women don’t say ‘cunt’ though, do they?” he’d once said, and had in reply her high, señorita shrug: “Why should
we!”
Adding, “I got the rest from friends; Father would have died.”

But Meyer, to him, had said with a twinkle, “Oh, the Old Testament keeps us Jews healthy and sex open, not separated from life. Milk and meat is what shouldn’t be joined—when we go to the whorehouse what we should be careful of is not to eat shrimp. Diet is what is sin! So instead of repression, we older Jews have flatulence. The Jew doesn’t use orgasm to bow to the life force with; he farts.” And had added, “Thank God for it, Simon. I see some of our younger men drinking up the Christian sense of sin like alcohol. You mayn’t have stomach trouble yet, but you’re one of the old sort, like your father. You’re still
ours.”

Naked in the chair, he felt the aspirin give him a hitch toward blandness and took two more; in ten minutes, pain retreated to cortex, he would be able to stand for forty, without more than he could bear. At the age of seventy-six, old Meyer, after living with them in his own house for four years, had left for the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where until he died he’d kept the management on the qui vive with his late poker and visiting cauliflower ears. “I’ve begun to fart, Simon. And my tongue’s begun to like to letch. It’s time.” Up to then, he’d still had women. “Sex in the afternoon, Simon; reminds you of younger love affairs, but you send them an orchid in the evening, and get your sleep. Very practical. Leaves the young woman
her
evenings.” In London here, Meyer’s birthplace, he came alive again, in his sporty suits and Limey speech. In a moment he’d enter the door his granddaughter had gone out of, up from the glassy dusk of Dukes courtyard, in his spotted tie and Yankee snap-brim, bringing with him a farther London’s itching cries. To him, his son-in-law’s neat nakedness, the chest hair barely grizzled, would show up plenty live. “Get up, man, legs like a five-day biker’s; and look at those arms. Old Testament kept you young in the proper places, but don’t pick the wrong book. Judges
sit,
and you’ve sat, that it? Get up, I know a young singer at the Palladium. With those Japanesy looks of yours…I never was much for spas.”

The phone rang. From his daughter? Or her destination, calling to say—how would it be said?—
Just to let you know she’s here.

Ninon’s secretary. “Madame will be kept at the theatre and will come straight on to meet you.”

“At eight,” he said. “Bentley’s in Swallow Street. I may be a few minutes late.” She much preferred Boulestin or Rule’s, but they were too far for what he had in mind; the other place was all he could dare. He’d no idea how much time he would need. But the ten minutes was up. Now came the part he always hated, even in the lone sessions he forced himself to at night at home—when all he did was to pace the floor of the room to whatever he had set himself on the pedometer, or ghosted it down the long hall to the open door of his son’s room. To stand there breathing, and pace back.

The dry corset was hanging on a rod over the wash-stand—he had three, and he supposed the chambermaids understood what for because of the chair. At the Lenox Hill brace shop it was called a brace, but to any man brought up in a basement of just such strings and eyelets, it was a corset, unsavory on him now as in his boyhood the rumored secret appliance of a bladdery-lipped old aunt who’d wetted each newspaper page with a large flat thumb he’d somehow connected with her truss. He pulled the strings tight now and knotted them; he was a man who couldn’t tie a bow. Some, luckier than he, got by with a sacroiliac bellyband, with hooks. This thing gave him a waistline he couldn’t bear; he now realized that Pauli must wear stays. With it on, he wheeled the chair to the mirror. “Your—undergarment, sir,” said Charlie the first time he saw it, never a valet before and wanting to be sure of his terms. “My phylactery,” said the Judge grimly. “I’m thinking of having it done up in black lace.” And Charlie, serving him from the tender distance of a brother widower—“Wife killed in the blitz, sir, and a daughter in the convent when she isn’t running off to the old girl in Blackpool”—always thereafter called it his “prophylactery.” Funny, but no one to hear. Every time he put the thing on, he thought of a man he and Mirriam’d known, whose wife had found…him hanging—dressed in
her
clothes, down to the high-heeled shoes. In the months he had been wearing it, he’d begun to surmise what the really old looked for and missed in the dead. “Look, Mirriam!” he’d say. “Travis McCardell!” Just as she began to laugh—for she would laugh; she’d had a thousand letters, he saw now, which had sought that laugh or answered it—he would top it. “‘
Gott sei dank!’”
he would say, in the very voice of his mother and hers: “‘—that
such a
man was no Jew!’”

On the night of her death, in that second after the shot when he saw the deathblood running slow, he had felt the loss first in his genitals, where there was a place to feel. Cubs, after the mother-kill, must wander analogous, thinking teat. Men when hung, erect—how that must have looked, in the short skirts of 1928. Mirriam! Laugh! There was no time to mourn you, until now; I had to mourn her. That’s how I used her, surely? She herself said. Or didn’t say. Now she’s gone—and I think, provided for—I can mourn you. The laugh I hated, the “lady’s” laugh! Now that all the letters are dead, send me it. Let my mind not letch.

Along his spine he felt the gradual lapse of pain. Or that tired truce which was still sensation. But like the flush of a late climacteric, must suffice. He remembered that first social ease of her being dead. Age wasn’t merely in the muscle, but in the closing of the ranks when it was too late for it, Meyer coming into this room, Mirriam into his mourning, and who next, all bearing the same message? He found he could lift his legs now to put on his pants, knowing that all the ridiculousness would have to be borne alone.

In the wardrobe, a hotel try at what the county and he had at home, there were two new suits; he’d had to give up his thirty after all, to accommodate a brace ridged with whalebone. Hung within his jacket, he found the pedometer and put it aside as one did a toy soldier. Tonight its tidy spring, set to hall distances, might get a shock. Shoes next, the sweat stealing down his arm. Propped in a corner was his third leg, near it another cane almost its silver-ebony twin, sent him by Ninon for Christmas, to the hospital. “Oooh, whoo sent you that?” said the nurses, Floradora round his bed that morning. Yoo-whoo did not die in hospital. The witness sat up with his harness on. Nothing was effete in hospital. Sex was angry elsewhere. “My mistress,” the foolish witness said, sitting up on his rubber ass and fondling his urinal. Let me not letch in the mind alone.

Ninon knew of his chair, but had never seen him in it. She never wrote, had never missed letters begun to her and never sent. Sometimes, when Ruth was in London, he rang up Clipstone Street from New York and he and never rang him. He wasn’t to feel—that he had to feel. This was how she released her lovers, from limited engagements often redeemable. Since becoming a Dame, Ninon chatted of her, like good foster-parents. Ninon she’d acquired certain dying British elegances which in her hands became Gallic again, like some French convert to citizenship. He doubted she’d told about the rectory. She was dancing again. After middle age—just as after a pulled tendon or a love affair—the body “got better again.” She had this same answer (or no other) to any of it. Or to him. And none of this was ever discussed.

Thursdays, though not at the theatre, she couldn’t see him, being in the habit of attending the directors’ meetings of Hoare’s Bank. “Very mind-sharpening, Simon.” He assumed that one of the directors—some red-faced securities-drinker thatched with gray finance—was being shaped up too. When her gift stick made holes in the hall floor which Anna nagged over—for in his night walks up there he used both canes—examining it together, they’d discovered it to be a shooting stick, opening under her knowing pressure—“I know these from the farm!”—into a seat no bigger than her palm. How they had laughed together! In the absence of “the mistress”—and the mistress—he and the concubine were left to laugh.

Three months after his operation, he’d said to Charlie, handing him an address, “Drive by and case this joint. See if it has an elevator. Understand there’s no question about the quality of the girls. But you can’t
carry
me in.” The place had been listed for years as Cheval Merde, thanks to the innocence of the telephone company, and was found to have an elevator. There was also no question about the quality of the girls.