New Yorkers (31 page)

“Don’t suppose I’ll marry for years.”

“I thought not, somehow. Then you’ve no strings.” The Judge let a pause lengthen. “Well, then. Here’s my proposition. Will you come to New York?”

“Leave
school?
”

“Glad you said it that way. Implying interest. Not just Harvard. No, of course not. My idea would be—you could switch to Columbia. Not a university very great in forward spirit. But well abreast of the conventions. And in your own city. Which, believe me, Edwin, is what a man best answers to.”

“Why?”

“I’ll answer that presently.”

“No, I mean why should I change?”

“I was going to answer that too.” The Judge checked his watch again. He saw Edwin see it. “A habit of public life,” he said. “You know—until yesterday, I hadn’t worn a wristwatch in—years.” He reached for the black stick, held it for a minute above his head in the fencer’s alert, and tossed it behind the desk, where it rattled, rolled unseen, and lay still.

“I don’t fence,” he said. “Nor hunt, fish or ride. I can mirror-write, lipread, am ambidextrous, used to play a mean game of chess and a meaner game of points, can calculate compound interest at a pace would surprise you—and tup the ladies at one that wouldn’t, And once—I wrote a few tolerable reports. More recently I’ve learned to sail a boat—which some say can take the place of all the rest. When that becomes necessary. And—oh yes. I can guard a house. For the past ten years I seem to have done—nothing much else.”

He broke off sharply. “Edwin—has no one told you the first principle of social behavior is not to stand looming over a man seated talking to you!” Then he said, “Sorry.” When Edwin had seated himself, frozen into the quiet of one who knew what such insult meant to the insulter, the Judge said in a shamed voice that matched it, “Edwin. I’m going back into public life.”

Nothing further was added to this admission that all the Judge’s philatelies—from the charting of stamps to the cross-Atlantic saving of lives—had been private ones.

“How?” Edwin finally said.

“Hired a chauffeur,” said the Judge. “To drive more and quicker than I’m allowed—I don’t yet know where. Been offered a little back room, somewhere to the rear of the Low library up there at Columbia, and I’ve accepted it. To do I don’t know what. I assume—the work it’s assumed I’ve
been
doing. And now I suppose I want what can’t be hired—a man to help me with it.”

“You going to—run for office?”

He’d never seen so many changes pass across that ordinarily even face—whose almond planes and curled lip an Oriental yellow would have suited. “Edwin. What office could I possibly run for?”

“At school…I’ve heard them say—”

“Yes, yes,
—
what
is it—
they
say?” The Judge, finding his own hand on Edwin’s sleeve, pulled it away. It kneaded his empty glass into the palm of the other. “Well, well. I discover that—apparently—against my better knowledge it’s been my whole ambition—to hear
what they say.”
His voice had changed, to an uncommon tremor. “But—what do they—Edwin?”

If he wasn’t to insult, he must make the statement in a tone of possibility—where for all he knew it truly lay. “That you wanted to—run for President.”

The Judge’s mouth opened, not to laugh. Across it passed a caricature of trying. “No…” He bent his head. “Now I know how dead Chauncey Olney is. That friend I spoke of. Too dead to share a joke.” He seemed to commemorate. Then said in almost a whisper, “No, my paranoias were—rather…greater. So it’d be wise indeed for me, wouldn’t it, to have the ear of a young man like you—of more practical…scope. Although my present ambition is so…modest.” He raised his head. “Edwin. Know what I think I mean by—going back into public life?” He pointed out to the hall which led to the front of the house. “I think all I mean is—getting outside that door.”

He felt youngest in not being able to believe that this one of his elders—in spite of liquors and codeines, canes and memories—wasn’t still firmly holding on to his sharpest internal self. He drew a brave breath. “Don’t talk down—to either of us.”

There was a pause. “Histrionics aren’t for me, are they, Edwin? That’s perhaps—why I’ve liked women who—have them. But honor my proposal, boy, by thinking of it. Don’t answer now.” He was palming the glass. “Maybe I need a—confidential secretary. Who would see to it that I don’t confide. What used to be called an amanuensis.”

Edwin could scarcely see his face. But he heard the glass being filled again, set down.

“Maybe we two could write the work I’m supposed to. Law clerks have lots of leeway. The Encyclopedia wants an article or two from me. If it’s any good, you can publish it as yours. In the old days, men used to go to war by proxy, did you know that?”

“Yes, the Civil.” He got to his feet again and went to the window, fighting the room’s lack of light and its owner’s replacement of logic with dream. No man
returns
to life, he thought; how did I know? Or not this man somehow, to whom honesty is a pearl.

Outside the low, open window, at the far end of the narrow garden, a figure had entered the garden, from around the front of the house, moving unhurriedly, but not as if it knew the place. He leaned forward, half reluctant to call it to the Judge’s attention. Another intruder?—from the openly shared dream-life of cities.

“Shall I turn on a lamp?” he said.

“There’ll be light,” said the Judge.

For a moment, the words behind Edwin sounded rabbinical, or mad. Then, yards away and up, the water tower was under-illumined by a slender beacon which cast a modest gleam on the garden below, reminding one that anciently this had been sufficient.

“Nightly, since 1876,” said the Judge. “Except for the brownout. We help pay for it.” Through the open chairback, the light touched a profiled head as bullet-shaped and frail-necked as a boy’s.

Across the garden, always kept to grass, a few stone seats and its bending tree, the woman’s slow, angled progress recalled the pigeon that had paced the wall. Her back was to Edwin; she was facing the city beyond. Not Ruth. Except for her almost miniature size, and the hair slouched in a knot on her back, she might have been—it was in the way she walked. As she moved again and stood chin in hand, the patching light revealed an arm and elbow, white-gloved.

“Shall I close the curtain?” He said it like a child, hoping not.

“No, I don’t ever. It’s my audience—I’d miss it. Or I’m its.”

Behind and above her, the water tower’s outline squatted on the sky like a kindly ogre. The air between her and it and the window was edged with what he supposed was imagination. Almost musical, but on the safe side of silence. He was beginning to think like them. Watching her leading his eye into another plane of perspective from
his
window, he saw the reasons for statues in gardens. To show the limitations of houses—while nymphs raged and men traveled.

In the room, the Judge spoke. Always so many—ruminations,” the voice said. “What a father never says to a son.”

He kept silent.

Earliest here he had learned that none of the young people around David—Austin, Walter, or Ruth his own sister, would ever collaborate with the Judge in any of his allusions to David. A calm rudeness deadened their hearing, a blankness their eye, though they did it tenderly, in a pact to keep the Judge from his worser self—a silent pact which Edwin, unasked, had joined.

“One needs to…talk,” said the voice behind him. “Anna swears I don’t talk to myself. Or that she never hears a word. Sometimes I wish she would.” To Edwin the voice was the Judge’s best—not a wooing voice. A plain one, speaking from a pain in the breast that could be honesty, ash-dry as it could have been in court.

Outside, he saw that in that interval, the woman had gone. No dinner bell had rung. He half listened to the multiple interior of the house, a delicate ear that rang.

He turned from the window. Anna’s other message, which for a second he’d meant to give, skimmed away.

“I accept your proposal,” he said. He felt a pain in his own chest.

The man in the chair, so short under its latticed back that the beacon barely touched his poll with its manufactured moonlight, was rubbing and rubbing his face in his hands, and might never have heard. When the face was raised, a dreadful smile had been rubbed on it—the kind the owner of a face didn’t know was there. He spoke in a hoarse voice his audience had never heard before.

“I—
need
,” he said.

Edwin, grasping the sill behind him, held on tight. I shall live here.

A pause between members of the same household had a different silence.

“Thank you,” the Judge said at last. “Later, put my words down or not, as you like. I’ve put some down here; in a little memoir. But don’t canonize them. Your job in this house will be simple. When I talk to myself, you will hear.”

Fathers, Edwin. We’ve never talked about them. Only cousins, sisters, aunts, all the side bubbles of the family vortex, as if we were making an assemblage for a new ark. Or we sit and murmur sociologies at each other, like idle flybaiters in a zoo. While outside the grape is drunk, and the women are laid. That was the province of fathers and sons in my generation, and what men talked about in private. Politics and justice were for the dinner table. Reverse it, as nowadays, and both conversations are ruined.

But we know about mothers, you and I, even if society hadn’t already told us and told us. Mothers are the tigress, the defender, force-feeding us by day, tender with night’s poultices. I’m not so sure about Oedipus, all that. My mother was an enjoyably useful nuisance—and we could be tender with that too; our feeling for her was something like what one has for the fools in Shakespeare, though she was nowhere near so entertaining. But it is doubtful that I ever wanted to sleep with her—any more than my father did.

What is a father? You never ask. There’s a word for it…if you ever ask. From his first breeze over my cradle, my father’s success was that almost to the end of his life I never saw him except emotionally. He had a great, dripping bundle of experience in his hands, and as we talked or walked together, he never failed to break off a piece and give it to me, sometimes a berry, sometimes a thorn. Either way, I had to grasp it. And behind him, he had a house invisible, but not made of cards or of glass or any of the other corruptibles, not even of biblical rust—see Ecclesiastes. We walked through its rooms without ever speaking of it; its contract was never mentioned, yet every day we paced its boundaries and defined. By the time he was an old man and I saw him with my intellect—the bundle bare and the house gone—it was too late; he had already given me them. Fathers are where the dreams are.

And the art of failure, what is it? For in terms of the men my father shared a courtroom morning with, or a brownish winter afternoon on “the street,” or even, as he used to say, “a flossy dinner at Mouquin’s”—to all those Carters and Choates he never chummed with or took by the coattails either but had to see almost daily in the way of business—he must have been merely one of those non-bankrupts who never made either a legal or financial success. In their eyes, surely that was failure. But I never could tell, with him. Perhaps that attitude’s a hereditary strain in us somewhere—though my father went on working till he died.

But inaction helps make a man a poet if he’s able; he has to gather together the loose ends of his sensibility—or the kernels—and dare to say to the world, “Here! Value
this!
”

Yet even in men of action there were great storytellers in those days—mainly because there were great listeners, used to hearing the world made habitable by talk. My father was always in this second group—in spite of all the young men who used our house as a hall. And emulating him—though it wasn’t my nature but only my age—so was I. Now, being a father, I can tell you the story, and you may brood on the word for us. Or words.

Before I was born, my father had already built up a part-time practice in Paris, at first as one of the many in attendance on the Bering Sea arbitrations between Great Britain and us. Look it up, that late-century tea party—almost the last of the great Anglo-American disputes. Did Great Britain have the right to kill seals in water adjacent to their breeding ground—islands held to be our domain under the Alaska Purchase? We lost—but for international law it meant a new turn. For my father—it brought him into the world, if not the society, of James Carter, counsel for our government, of Lucius Choate, the “great cross-examiner,” who later wrote Carter’s memoirs, and eventually much more of the same company, where—quite possibly for lack of talent alone—he didn’t belong. It’s not a familiar role, the Jew who isn’t smart enough for a particular milieu or group of Christians, and it’s certainly not a favorite one with our people, but it exists. Maybe it broadened and gentled him, but somewhere it must have dampened and muted him too—my father-in-law Mendes, that old Spanish hawk among hawks, would never have understood him.

To me, my father was always smart enough. If the young clerks, junior partners, and now and then even students who sought the house did so mostly for their own inter-jangling charms, I wasn’t too young myself to observe that a word from him, however modest and hostly, nevertheless fell hypnotic on their abstract struggles—and in silence I measured this. Under pact of said silence, I had been allowed up—from the time I was nine—to learn what I could, plus the habit of oral memory as well. By then the Bering Sea business was long over—settled in 1893, when I was three. But it was always recurring, of course; one of the great aspects of the law is that its conversations go down the ages at will—and of course I was learning that too. For to me, the very words
Bering Sea
and
the seals’ breeding ground
—or that curt, sea captain’s phrase
off the Pribilofs
—were also an entirely other kind of island music. Even later, when I was studying for the bar exams—which if done alone, as we often used to, is like learning the separate names of ten thousand matchsticks—even then I could still hear it, and for its sake go on. It taught me that no matter how far the law recedes into infinite holding companies of itself, at sea bottom, it takes in the natural world. From there I wasn’t far to seeing, if I hadn’t seen already, how from the meadow to its owner, from a man’s riparian rights to the water-music he listens to—the law takes in the invisibles of men.