New Yorkers (41 page)

Warren, his father, chancing to pick up Anna’s call when it came in, had handed it over to him; since the age of sixteen, Austin’s affairs had been considered private to him—and expectantly blameless of course. All the more surprising then, when he put down the phone, to see his father still hovering near.

“How is old Mannix these day?” said his father.

“Well—I hardly—” It was only his third night home. He hadn’t yet been anywhere else. “—I suppose he might be old, by this time.”

His father’s long, clean mouth moved at a corner. “When I came home, in ’19, it felt as if the century’d already changed again, before it even had a chance to get started. Expect it had.” Silent at the fireside, his father locked thumbs behind himself. “Moling said only the other day, the Law School’d given Mannix an office up there.” Moling was the figurehead at the foundation where his father was the working associate, and Moling was a trustee of that law school. “If Mannix would make
half
a move, Moling said. They still expect him to do something more.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, he was mentioned for the presidency one time, I think, but it was quashed. By himself, I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“Of the country?”

“Good God no. The university. And I wouldn’t blame him, if he did. They need a money-getter, not a—
senator.
” His father gave it the Latin pronunciation, and the Roman meaning. His father had had Dr. Brace too. “No, I don’t think—government—somehow. I don’t think they know what they expect of him. His only political or public life’s been in the courts.”

“‘The thing a politician must remember,’” said Austin, in the pontifical voice of quotation, though the Judge hadn’t used that tone, “‘is that every citizen is searching. Maybe venally. But for the fairer things in life.’”

“Eh?”

“‘To quote a judge.’”

“Him?”

“He always says ‘to quote’ et cetera. I think it’s him.”

“The foundation dinner! We had him for honorary speaker—and there were things he said…You’re right. I remember several of us said later, ‘Which judge do you suppose he was quoting there—Holmes?’ Nobody knew exactly, or wanted to ask. Certainly none of the legal men there.” His father coughed, his only form of criticism. An absurdly sweet-tempered man, almost as addicted to plain living—within the urban frame his lifework necessitated—as James, he had one helpful luxury, his “more in sorrow than in anger” attitude toward those who worked only for themselves. One couldn’t call it contempt, it was so benign.

“Well, maybe if he spread those quotes around long enough, they’ll think of him for the courts again.” He saw all the dinners-at-the-Mannixes in his life, as in that game where one sat in front of a small mirror with a larger mirror behind one—to catch destiny. One’s own, but why not somebody else’s? What things a year away did for one—even on battlefields not one’s own. “For
the
Court,” he said. “Yes, that would be in his mind, if anything.”

“Aussie!” His father’s mouth turned up at both ends. “Maybe
you
ought to go into politics.” But his father had no fears; they both knew that public service of another sort was in his blood—and in his reach. The foundation’s London office had been spoken of for him, when he came back for good. This wasn’t nepotism. At a very early age his father had begun talking to him like this—as if to a degree he must be taught the workings of power, but only to use it in the service of public pity. Other people hadn’t much wanted jobs like that until now—at least not in their world. The ones down under hadn’t known about them. Or if on the way up, would stay a mile away, as too recently charity’s recipient. He couldn’t see Edwin Halecsy wanting such a job, even now.

“Well, well,” said his father. “Wonder what Moling will think of that. Must make a mention of it.”

The fire on the hearth might have been burning, instead of dank with house-enclosed June air behind its pleated black paper fan; they were so silent in front of it.

“I suppose the London job—” said Austin. “These days, I may have to run for it.”

“Every Tom, Dick and Harry who’s had a course in ‘public administration.’ That’s what they’re calling it. Never thought I’d see the day where my humble efforts to lighten the misery in the world would come so in style. Got a tweedy young social worker in my office right now, put there to tell me what my principles ought to be on it.”

“Well, I suppose that’s what we’ve always wanted,” said Austin. “To have the whole world concerned. To have our work spread. Haven’t we?”

What he wanted as well was a London flat for a London marriage, flat hard by Covent Garden, or wherever that ballet outfit hung out. Jane Whatshername would have understood it perfectly, that although marriages were no longer for convenience, the ability to make them conveniently often had much to do with their being made at all.

His father had given him a typically careful Fenno answer. “Oh, you needn’t worry, Aussie. It’ll come out all right.”

Then he’d teetered on his toes, giving the old library—with its porridge paper, greenish bookshelves, bleary vases, and rugs that still smelled of 1870 wedding-trip camel and had never been Bokhara—a smile of inherited love. “Notice any change about the old place?”

At first he hadn’t. The bookshelves, like the rest of the house, looked faintly dirty, but on testing with a finger would be found to be quite clean—which came of having one inherited domestic and half another. The books were good, in a narrow range which did not favor the present. Nothing in the room was at all valuable; anything precious in it had been made so by dead tastes. The fan in the fireplace, made by the imp, his youngest sister, was new. Upstairs there were two more floors much the same, and one below. It was a hard-worn place, but in spite of its lost colors, almost always one of good cheer, made up of innocent toastings in corners, bedrooms always being redecorated in cheap chintz by a sister with Christmas money, or being formed into cells of baseball lore by a grade-school boy. It had never had much time for nostalgia; his five younger brothers and sisters had seen to that.

“Not much,” he said. “No—wait.” Faucets. “You’ve fixed over the hall bath!”

“Well—” said his father, looking ashamed, as was proper, but squirely too. “It was a violation of the building laws, you know. Those lavatories without air shafts.”

So it was. And had been, ever since before he was born.

“And there’s a new icebox, I’m afraid. Lutie insisted. And Lutie’s got her granddaughter to help her—your mother insisted on that.”

There were doubtless further mild innovations which would be broken to him little by little by the others, who were always harboring ideas for just such waves of affluence; he had done it himself. Whatever it had been, he had never got it—almost no one ever did. And a good thing too. They’d benefited from all the thriftier instructions of the imagination, yet when they grew up, had this house to come back to. In which the top floor had not been made into either a puppet theatre or a basketball court.

“I saw her.” There’d been a Fenno family dinner. “But I thought she was just for the night.”

His father was peering sidewise at him; in the guilty style of such times.

“Papa,” said Austin. Who died?”

His father shook his head at him. Nobody new had died then, in the family, while he’d been away; at the dinner he’d have heard of it anyway. Then his father burst out laughing, delighted at Austin’s recall of an old family joke.

“Incredible,” said Warren Fenno, more suitably solemn. “
In
credible.”

So it had been James, then. As everyone had expected. And from James’s style of living—which could never otherwise have been quite so Spartan yet hospitable—had had every right to expect.

“Absolutely incredible. We had no idea.”

They never did. Weren’t supposed to, when an inheritance was so obviously near. When it was a good way off, properties might be talked about—in terms of interests and mortgages—because of the need for the young to be trained in the responsibilities of how real property had to be gone about if they ever had any. And sometimes, though more rarely and vaguely, money to come might be spoken of, for a crasser knowledge of this was needed these days too. But, like mourning crepe prematurely worn, they all assumed a black ignorance of anything on its way to them, the nearer it fell due.

“Fifty thousand,” said his father. “After the fund to take care of the museum and so forth.”

“In toto?” Somehow, he would have thought it would be more. James had been so canny.

“Good God, no,” said Warren, truly shocked. “To you.”

“To—me? But what about the others?” He thought of them before himself; this was one of the things of which he hadn’t needed to be aware.

His father was smiling. “Your share of the residue. As the oldest. The others each get a little less. In time.”

“And you and mother?”

His father hung his head. “I’m
afraid
—it’s going to mean pret’ near three-quarters of a million.” And he meant exactly what he said.

Austin stood still. Money made one smile. He was no hypocrite.

“Poor Mother,” he said after a moment. “She’s going to have to stop her Woman’s Exchange way she says, ‘Well, of course
they’re
rich.’”

His father grinned. “Oh no, she won’t. She’ll say what three-quarters of a million says of one million or more, ‘Well, of course they’re
rich.
’”

“Will it make a hash at your job?”

“Not any more. When you were a boy, it might’ve—they used to think a man with a competence wouldn’t work hard enough. Or ought to work for nothing. Now they like it if you can afford to be what they call ‘disinterested.’”

“Mmm.”

“Mmm. You know, Austin—might make just the difference for you on London too. Though we’d have to make thoroughly clear to them here that you’d want to know they felt you were the best man anyway—as you are. They’d have to reassure us of that.”

It was conversation any member of the family could interpret. No inheritance Austin knew of had ever been of this size, but they would face it like any. They had their standards.

“Means your mother and I won’t have to alter the house,” said his father. “Muss confess we were thinking of it. Top-floor apartments. Even had a builder in.”

“Oh
no
,” said Austin. It had never come as far as that.

“Being done, you know. As the children scatter. Even where there’s money. It’s chic.” Warren squared his shoulders, relieved from that. “Now we won’t, of course. So we felt the bathroom—wasn’t out of line.”

Austin reached forward on the hearth and took up his sister’s paper fan—she’d done a good job of it. It was she who had naïvely asked—when his mother wore a state jewel they’d none of them known existed—who had died. Now that the children had dispersed to schools, many such jokes, once as numerous as the family pets, were on the wane. They were a humorous family—or a large one, preservative of its own saying. Now that he was older, he could see that perhaps they’d never made the distinction clear.

“Oh well. It’s all
relatives
—whom’ve I heard say?” he said, absently pleating the fan.

His father smiled benevolently, but minimally. They had loved old James. Not that James himself would have been anything but happy to chime in on this conversation.

“Thought there was no point in telling you out there,” said his father, rather heavily for him. “Thought it could keep.”

Had his father heard about the Korean nurse? In the network of friends’ sons out there, it was perfectly possible. And if, from a continent away, his son had made noises about marrying this girl? Though there’d been no child, and Austin would have done it only out of the strangest remorse for being so authentically loved and still chill to it. He’d been aware that none of the others in his own outfit, good fellows all, would even have considered doing it. But if he had, would Warren have accepted it? And at once silently begun her induction into their midst here—not just Kim Yong Mai, Tokyo-trained daughter of village schoolmaster, bird-boned but not beautiful, three teeth missing in token of Japanese bullies, and a liking for rice wine in their stead—but also the Fenno’s latter-day Pocahontas? It was perfectly possible. But Austin hadn’t made noises. And Warren, knowing what strange independences sudden money can cast on the young, even on the wary sons of the wary, had held off—this was the most probable of all.

“Well, Father. Guess I better go shave.”

“Late dinners, they have.”

“Somebody coming last-minute from abroad. And they only have Anna.”

“Ah?” said his father. The implication was clear. Like our Lutie. Like
us.
“I didn’t know.” It was assumed that Jews made more show of their money. From the looks of the two houses, Austin would have had to agree. Though the Mannixes might spend no more money than here, even on art objects, their racial warmths and comforts betrayed them—they knew how.

“And Ruth and David may get there too,” he said. “They’re coming in from London with her. David and Walter, the boys.” He liked saying it, still.

“Young Stern, isn’t it. The hunchback boy, whose parents were killed. Years ago. Father had a brokerage house.”

His father had many linking acquaintances; though the Mannixes didn’t come here they well might have, if his parents, who stuck year in, year out to the same round of intimates, had ever done what they called “entertain.”

“Yes.”

And still his father delayed. “They have an interesting crowd there?”

“Oh, more a collection of the faithful,” said Austin absently.

“Jewish, you mean,” said his father, absent too. “Those good old families stick to it.”

“Oh, not necessarily. No, it’s cosmopolitan enough. Just that one gets to know the regulars. Mostly, that’s what there are.”

“Guess he likes it that way. Those independent characters often do.” Warren’s profession, dealing so often with rich eccentrics, or international ones, gave him a special psychology of which he was rather proud.

“I guess.” He’d bent the fan’s folds out of line, and was trying to restore them. “Father…What would you have had to say if I married out of—well, what we shouldn’t say, but do.” He looked up. “Out of the—race.”