New Yorkers (17 page)

Edwin looked at him with a dismay he hadn’t learned to conceal. This man
would
be Socrates to him, if only he wouldn’t let every one of their high dialogues finally crumble back into the personal. It had happened every time.

The Judge came up closer, still wandering negligently, in a professor’s track. “Tell me—in one word, Edwin.” Then he smiled. “Had French teachers made me do that. Unfair. But a good lesson in rhetoric—if anybody remembers rhetoric except the French—who are notably unfair. Tell me about that kitchen of mine, six years ago—in one word.” He shrugged. “Maybe a legal one. I still remember some of my law.”

Edwin felt the good pupil’s rush of elated blood. He could do better; he could use a political word, which would please the Judge even more. It seemed to him he’d had the word in his head always. That first Christmas, when Ruth and David had taken it upon themselves to walk him and his mother—as if they were their children—through the chiming Fifth Avenue stores, as his mother and he had finally had it caroled into their heads, she perhaps never quite, that all this charade was for sale, could be bought by someone—then the word had begun to form in his head like a three-pronged bird ready to fly. Later, his mother had a new coat, but not a new face, or head. The word persisted. When they’d sent him to Harvard, the word became once more merely a word—yet telling the Judge, he had to rest his face in his hands again before he could say it as politely as was required by this house. “It was—”

He saw the Judge shake his head, raising a finger like a croupier. “Only
one
,” said the Judge’s lips; often he didn’t seem to know that he talked like that, voiceless, watching lips opposite like a mute, or perhaps because his height prevented him from looking at most men eye to eye.

Edwin found his own voice, angrier than intended. “Anarchy!” he said.

By rights, the dialogue should have ended there. But the Judge chose to terminate it once again on the personal. “Why, Edwin,” he said, “You’re no longer calling me ‘sir.’” And on that same last visit—in the fall, just before he returned to Cambridge for his first semester of law—on their saying good-bye, the Judge had made him another presentation for his own minute library. That day he hadn’t been made to climb up and get it down from the Judge’s own shelves; it had already been waiting for him in the study desk at the beginning of their interview, one of the dark green packages of the British bookseller who was always pleased to hunt specialties for this prime American customer whose interests—philately, law, semantics, the history of the Jews from Zion to Israel and of religious thought in general, criminology, the psychiatry of women, and a touch of ordinary pornography—ranged so far. On Edwin’s request, the Judge had inscribed each book according to his own dictate—
Simon Mannix to Edwin Halecsy, September 19th, 1950.
This time only two of the books had been older ones, Victorian editions and both American: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s
The Common Law,
1881, Boston, Little, Brown, and an early form book, Potter’s
Every Man His Own Lawyer,
published in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1834. The other two had been modern: Thurman Arnold’s
Folklore of Capitalism
(which he’d already come across in college, along with Thorstein Veblen, Randolph Bourne and all that lot) and a current volume of essays, a number of these political, by a man named George Orwell, published in London that same year. “I’m bringing you up slowly, Edwin, eh, out of the dark ages where you were, into
our
anarchy.” Nothing revealed by Edwin was ever left unused.

Nine months later now, walking through the summery evening at that point of city year and air when there were always country catches of green in it which even the island’s lower tip, breath-fed on the rotten stews of the harbor, recognized and waited for. Edwin found himself following almost the same pattern of streets he and Ruth had done that first time. How much plainer it could have been if he’d had the nerve to say to the Judge’s request, “There’s
no
one word! Come down among us to the world of your children—that basement you say you never see, but which is full of you—and see me as I saw it for the first time.”…

“Wait—” he’d said to the smiling girl back there. “You went
up
these stairs. But you came back from
there.
” He pointed down the hallway, which conducted one toward the rear regions through brownish reflections of old furnishings, an aisle not quite shadowy, never brilliant, which he came to love. “There’s a back way, huh?”

She nodded. Probably nobody before him had entered that house in such guerrilla caution over ingress and egress. Only a housecat, if they’d had one, would have taken for granted, as he did, a street training which sniffed at every old cul-de-sac and in new places kept its back to walls in which there were exits. But she said, with another little nod, “You like to—know how to get out.”

It was the first small ripple of their peculiar sympathy. On her part it might be merely womanly—not like his market beldames and clam-lipped teachers, or even the warm dopiness of the junior substitute—but the way women were in the library books, and up here. Until he went to Harvard and met others of her kind who didn’t have it, he wasn’t sure it was unique to her. Quiet and cool as her face was, it was never sad, though its features—replica of the Judge but with hints of a larger-faced heredity;—could have stretched to that, he grew to think, if there had been reason for it.

“Yes, I saw them,” he’d said. “The—boys.” If one has started the day aged fifteen and is ending it at eighteen, one can’t be blamed for uncertainties of all sorts.

“Well, then, come on. Aren’t you starving?”

Sometimes the locutions of this world still amused him.

“Who are they? The—the little one—is that your older brother?”

“Oh no, that’s Walter Stern, our dear friend. He’s the absolute dear of all time—and it doesn’t even matter if I say so, it won’t put you off, you’ll like him just the same. You’ll see. No, Diddy’s the tall one.”

“The one with the—” He touched his ear.

She nodded, courtly. “Just be sure to face him when you talk to him.”

“And the third one? What’s wrong with him?” He was used to seeing the lame, the halt and the blind hang about together for natural protection.

“Austin?”
She burst out laughing, clapping her hands—she always took full advantage of merriment, as if one should. “Yes, that’s Austin to a T—there’s nothing
wrong
with him.”

“They all live here?”

“Walter used to, in the holidays sometimes; he’s an orphan. Now he’s got a place of his own, a whole apartment. They all went to school together, until Austin went away. Anna’s putting on a feast, because he’s back.”

As she led him downstairs, he thought first, that it mightn’t be smart to let himself in for three against one, second, that if Austin had been “away”—which in the district was a politer way of saying he’d been in jail, in jug, in stir—then there was already plenty enough wrong with him. It occurred to him that the house here might be a kind of placement home, on the settlement order but live-in style, for rich boys when they came home from their reform schools. With her stay-at-home father at the head of it.

The Judge and he had long since laughed together at this unilateral assumption—that the upper classes would have their own facilities all along the line. David and Austin had never been told it. both being uneasy laughers at any but their own kind—David because he couldn’t bear to hurt, Austin from the depths of his own reserve. Walter, who could have been told anything, was always with them. Though the three, polite enough with Edwin, would have said of themselves that they did their best to be friendly, he knew they didn’t trust his entente with the Judge. He himself had an upstart’s jealous, awareness that his standards of honesty mightn’t satisfy theirs. Oh, he knew enough about the underskin forces between him and them to prove the Judge utterly wrong on who knew best about who! Back there, the succeeding ten minutes had been the most hated learning period of his life. Entering, he’d known at once that he belonged
here,
in
this
world—just as a natural designate of either heaven or hell, on entering either, would sense at once that this was where
he
belonged. They’d treated him tenderly, neither laughing at him nor with him. He was as bound to them, by then, brothers though they never would be, as if they’d scarred his cheeks like a committee of Abyssinian elders. And to the house also, beyond all its other enticements, because he had received his scarring there.

The kitchen as he knew it now was brown wood and stove-polished iron, with many seams of honorable use. The white dazzle of fixtures and floor had been mainly in his own mind. Anna had looked up at his approach, plump and in housewifely command, but in her eyes that dog’s devotion to these others—which always betrayed her. That first time, she breathed him in and then out again, like an odor she recognized. As for him, he was grateful to her forever. Whenever he looked into her domesticated eyes he knew afresh that whatever else he might be, he was not a servant, here or anywhere.

The three young men stared bright-eyed at what the sister was bringing in. He entered chin lifted, like any male introduced by the female. Of his other braveries, in cul-de-sac and out of burrow, they couldn’t know. The table already had a fruity whiteness of the sandwiches, milk and cookies Anna had provided: at their pleading she was just freshly studding it with delicatessen with whose window prices, black as iron bars, he was familiar; the three were nagging for beer as well.

“Yah, I know,” said Anna to Austin. “I don’t care where you been, you ain’t any older than I know you are. Seventeen. And Diddy and Walter, they ain’t even been away yet. It’s milk. Or chincherale. No beer.”

“Anna darling, Anna my hosh,” said Diddy, his arms around her from behind, “we know you have it. You wouldn’t want us to steal.”

“Mr. Mannix didn’t say for it.” To Ruth only, Anna always said “your father.”

“I’ll go ask,” said Ruth. She sat Edwin down at table next to Walter and left him. They all saw his wild look at her desertion.

It was at this point that David, as the host, came forward to greet him. Edwin, like the Judge, never thought of David under his nickname.

“Oh, the Halecsys.” David repeated, but only because of his deafness. Still, there was a touch of the settlement house grandee about him—those boys so full of libertarian willingness, who came to the slums because it was good for
them.

Austin, whose haughty looks would make him a dead duck to the hoi polloi before he even opened his mouth, didn’t smile, from a reserve he extended to all. But he was the first to see that Edwin by intellect belonged among them. In the end it was he, whose extra intelligence was joined to a sensitivity of average thickness only, whom the protégé, the refugee, might best trust. Though at the moment Edwin took this as merely the result of Austin’s having been in jail.

Walter was just as she said; he might have got his very hump from years of delicate scholarship on the subject of other people’s feelings. In the long silences, he was filling everybody’s plate. “We’ll drown like logs,” he said happily, passing the food with the lavishness of one of small, frailly dictated appetites. “They’re going to teach me to swim,” he said to Edwin. “I suppose you know all about that.”

He saw Austin watching him, and gave the district’s shrugging offhand answer, based on how it mostly did learn to swim, in a Y pool. “Oh, I dive for pennies,” he said. There was another lengthy silence.

“Did the Halecsys stuff you with cocoa?” asked David. “I must say, your aunts make better cocoa than mine.”

“We had kümmel,” he said, daring pride—and meanwhile learning what courteous chitchat was, even from the mouth of the deaf—and how to be cavalier about food. For some moments the others ate busily.

“Kümmel?” said Austin at length. “For the bellyache?”

“No,” said Ruth, returning, “it was his birthday.” He hadn’t dared begin to eat yet, and looked up at her, waiting. She saw him—and didn’t go on with her story. He saw that she had never had any intention of doing so. And from this he learned.

“Father
says
—” said Ruth.
“Father
says—” All heads arrested, including Anna’s. “He says—Anna, give the boys
whisky
if that’s what they want. But they’re to eat your cake.”

He’d already grasped the idea that they weren’t hungry on demand, or at the sight of any dish, like him.

“A
cake,”
David said at once. Anna was made to bring it; there were celebratory remarks. “Let
me
cut it, it’s
mine!”
Austin said quickly, as if he, not Anna, were the child. In silence, like a mother who had misunderstood her children but not underestimated them, she brought out from the icebox an enormous bowl as well. “It won’t keep,” she said.

So, though they didn’t eat much of the cake, he learned the delicacy—to a point—of master to servant. But that was minor. For, as he watched the four docile faces which appeared to be “against” no one, he had an extraordinary feeling—in the way even the young with nothing in common snatched these facts from one another—that if they lived somewhere a darker, deeper life than one saw, they kept their innocence not only for this kitchen, but for the whole house. He himself was already tethered to the house by its innocence, a mayfly vision seen from his own wintry basement lair, in the house above which every floor and wall was stained with the afterbirth, the death rattle, and the red hilarity of gangsters, and in whose garbage can only yesterday a withered, purple baby had been found, still in its slime. He had an idea that if they kept him here, it would be on both sides because of that innocence. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the bowl Anna had brought out, in which there was a stiff Neapolitan hill of green, brown and pink ice cream.

“Want more,” said Anna, watching him. He refused it, from her. The bowl was then placed in front of him by Ruth—because of his birthday. By the greatest effort, he didn’t grab. In his ten minutes of darting glances he had learned where elbows should be, and the swan grace of spoons not clutched. In equal effort, he didn’t finish the entire bowl, but uncorrected by any of them, he ate from it. Then he leaned back, replete, and, in token of their mutual interest, offered Austin a remark, like a cigar. After all, they were the hosts, and couldn’t ask him anything. Where he had learned this, he never knew. He leaned forward. “Warwick, Otis—or Highland,” he said. “Which one you were in?”