“Okay, Anna. I’ll ask to come, say Thursday.” This was Monday.
No, she said, that was her day off. “You ask for Friday.” She was insistent. “I make chicken paprikash.”
It was as easily arranged. If the Judge had assigned any cause to my recent neglect, he had not shown it on my visits, always proffering unaffectedly neutral news of Ruth. And if he had taken offense, I could hear my request repair it—to be asked for something always affords him a perhaps disproportionate glee. “Miss Augusta is coming too,” he added.
“Can I bring her? I know it’s Charlie’s day off.” That pleases him too—to have the routines there remembered. As I hung up I felt oddly young, a rebellious but good boy received back into grace, into a household whose intimate scents settled round me again like the stoppered air of an old amphora, powerful as Pompeii when released. What if the Mannixes, wheeling in a circle of obligations, contredansed by observances of the same on the part of their satellites, reminded me somewhat of a court—why should I pamphleteer against it? Theirs was only a highly refined version of the family stigmata to be found, once one entered that nest, anywhere—the sign of man budded domestic on a wild planet. And why not? Even if it was never as flawless, once one got inside it, this was the way, made Ishmael enough by the elements, men clung to their crag. So, in this mixed state of mind, limed but still struggling, I walked up that familiar stoop again behind old Miss Selig, carrying her ancient dog Chummie, who could no longer take the high steps and could not be left at home because he cried. It was an easy entrance, one that he and I had made before. Ruth was not there or expected, and any glances exchanged by Anna and me, under the eyes of the Judge and two strangers, were absorbed by the dog, who made one submissive tour of the guests and then settled to his corner like one of those nineteenth-century infants who were reputed to have been seen but not heard, Miss Selig having reared him exactly as she would a child. And he must serve for one here, I thought idly—I had never seen any other.
That night, one of the two other guests was a personage, a vivid young British M.P. named Stukely, whose reputation, somewhat fluidly unsound on his home side of the water, had gained the instant solidity we still extend such exports, once they touch ours. He was an old hand at their game of talking brilliantly wide, and his angular wife, whose painfully brave décolleté, at first blink, made her seem clad only in her excessively heavy earrings, was equally good at seconding him, either by one of those strangulations with which some upper-class British replace the animalities of converse, or, at his best sallies, a sympathetic reddening down to her shoulder blades. I should have found them, in their own word, “amusing,” but could not; after all these years they are still the people who make me remember my class, or that I once had one. If Mrs. Stukely, turning, were to ask if we had not met before, again inquiring my name, I was not sure that I would not nod and humbly give her the real one. In the presence of their high-nosed sense of place I was at once their parvenu, beneath what personal flourishes I had added to it, and at the same time, safe on this emigrant shore, more American than I ever felt anywhere else. I could tell myself that both they and I were wrong, that “place” for me was now some moral-emotional position, the echoes of which some repercussion from their “social” one had merely touched off. It made no matter; narrow as they were, there was something solid in them which made us award them more solidity than they had. In its presence, I could feel the terrible moral burden imposed on the single, wandering personality by the American scene. And resting my personal burden on that one, I could better understand my mother’s cry, “This would never have happened at home!”
After dinner the Judge, as if my silence had infected him with its cause, began speaking of Edgar Halecsy, who was collaborating with him on a book of essays after the manner of the article he had contributed to our office. All through dinner he had held his end up animatedly, but observing him now, I thought I saw why Anna had called. Diminutive people, offering less surface, often show physical change less than the vapidly large, and the Judge, still as unwrinkled as the Oriental he resembles, did not look ill, but one had a stronger sense now of how small he was, as one sees the constricted figure of a small boy who has just been punished. Who could have been punishing the Judge?
“A milliner’s son, mind you, Stukely. Harvard now, and all the rest of it—on his way to being one of the best legal scholars of his generation. Oh, I know that sort of thing happens with you all the time. But Edgar won’t have to suffer for it, as you still make yours do, for his rise. He’s done it individually; that’s our strength. But he was already as good as anybody, right from the beginning.”
“Ah yes,” said Stukely, tugging his beard. “Poor chap. Oh, right you are, of course. Matter of fact, we’re doing our best to imitate you.”
“Guy says—” Everyone looked with surprise at Mrs. Stukely, stirred by her husband’s modesty to her first clear statement of the evening.
“Yes, my dear? What is it I say?”
“That our way is better. People popping up and down all the time, but inside the class structure. One gets just as much new blood that way.
And
keeps one’s standards!” Her blush of allegiance spread down to her sternum, if that was what this declivity of her person should be called.
True enough, I thought, loyal little bitch-rabbit, but the telltale sign was in her use of “one.”
“Hairdresser’s son, Judge,” I said, “the aunt was the milliner,” for even though I did not much like the absent Edgar, I wanted to flick them all. By control I had kept my voice dry, but dizzily wondered whether I was going to be ill, feeling the gorge of confession swelling in my throat. In another moment I should tell them who I was and how I had got there, for was I not their rounded pebble, the perfectly public, perfectly private individual man whom they did not really believe in, who had got where he was all on his own? “Let me tell you who
I
am,” I should say, only to be struck dumb when, turning, they said, “Who?”
The Judge’s stare, baffled, recalled me. It was the first time in my life I had ever felt this hysteria and I knew where to blame it. I should not have come here, to a house where I took things so personally. This was a dangerous house.
“And does he show no signs at all?” asked Stukely. “Of his rise? This Edgar?”
“Well,” said the Judge. “Perhaps he has to be a trifle more learned than anybody.” He spoke jauntily, like a man who had no need to keep up appearances, but my sense of my own unreality, suddenly after all these years so exacerbated, opened like a nostril, scenting his. Edgar. Edgar wrote that article.
“Nonsense!” said Miss Selig. “Simon, I’m surprised at you. We are what we are, from the cradle.” She spoke with the authority of one who had known him from his. “And whatever has made you think that being good enough for anybody is good enough!”
“Bravo!” Stukely, behind her, mouthed this silently, making a face like a horse at his wife.
“Up, down, up, down. It’s all nonsense,” Miss Selig grumbled. Her thick, gray hands, gripping her brandy glass, trembled from age, anger or greed. “I should know, shouldn’t I?” I’d never before heard her refer to her own circumstances, and it struck me now that our delicacy with the subject had been unnecessary. There wasn’t a crevice of doubt in her. In her squat, gray mass she reminded me of stone figures I had seen in the East during the war, palace garden ornament now, once ballast in the holds of ships from China. She was far less bruisable than I.
“You’ve known
me
forever, Augusta,” said the Judge, managing a number of avoidances at once.
“Yes.” Miss Selig tossed off her brandy and put out a hand to wake the sleeping Chummie. She stroked him. “Oh, yes.”
It was then that we heard Anna greeting someone in the hall.
The newcomer came forward, radiant from travel, dropped in on us from the air with eyes still changeling. She had not yet seen me. Behind her, Anna, shunning mine, slunk away.
“Ruth, Ruth, my dear. My dear Ruth!”
She knelt in front of his chair, laying her head down. So much taller than he, she looked improbably near me, like those penitents drawn in the early days of perspective, so much too large for the throne.
He put a small, papal hand upon her. “Why didn’t you let us expect you?”
“Anna knew—it was to be a surprise.” Her eyes were glistening. “It’s your birthday tomorrow. Did you think I would forget your birthday?” Then she saw me, following his glance to where I stood, in my corner. Can a person feel his own face whiten? In her blanched one, I thought I felt it, as I felt myself walk toward her without moving, exactly as she, immobile as I, approached me, and I was half prepared to hear a cry from one of the others, “They are twins!” Then the confusion of introductions, inquiries and answers, intervened.
“What kind of a dog does Austin keep now?” said Miss Selig, when they had all settled again, but on the arms of chairs, as a sign that the evening was breaking.
“Why, I don’t know, Aunt Augusta.” She had her hand on the back of his wheel chair now, in the familiar, antiquated posture, and the two of them no longer looked out of drawing. His head was down, gazing in his lap; one couldn’t tell whether it felt its punishment over. “He probably has one down in the country, but I only saw them in London. The house in Smith Street has no garden. And Ursula has enough on her hands with the children. Plus her own commissions.”
“Still, I can’t imagine Austin without one. Will you ever forget that Airedale?”
She shook her head, smiling, a finger creeping to the mark on her cheek. I touched it with her.
“Why, that’s Ursula Walker, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Stukely. “The architect? She and I were at Roedean together!”
Ruth nodded, leaving a smile here, a nod there, in every direction but mine.
“I
heard
that she married an American,” said Mrs. Stukely.
“Prue—I think we ought to—” said her husband. I guessed that he knew Fenno’s relationship here, or former one.
“You’ll have to imagine him with children now, Aunt. Four. The new baby’s a darling.”
As if in answer, Chummie made his only sound of the evening, a disparaging one. Facing the general laughter, he rose unsteadily, his eyes as obtuse as Anna’s when she knows some remark of hers has made her socially useful. Anna herself was nowhere to be seen.
“Chummie,” said Miss Selig, “we must go home.”
“I’ll ride along with you. I bear all kinds of messages.” She turned to her father, whose head was still bowed. “Charlie’ll bring me right back. I won’t be long.”
“It’s
Friday.
” He spoke in sour triumph, as if her lapse on this canon measured her neglect, past any efforts on birthdays.
“There’s plenty of room,” said Miss Selig. “I’m sure Mr. Goodman won’t mind.”
So she was caught, if she had meant to escape. She took up Chummie without a word.
“Oh, he can walk
down
,” said his owner. “Chummie likes to walk when he can. Good night, Simon.”
Good night, we all said, in a catching of cabs, closing of doors that put us out again into the fresh, illimitable dark. Good night, we said in a round, snatching at the phrase, wistful even between enemies or bores, which must last us until we were somewhere inside again, good night, good night.
In the silent car, there were no messages forthcoming, and the old woman did not press for them. So many emphases that I had never noticed before had seemed to come from her lips tonight. Like that marble in which one saw the infinitely flattened snails of pre-time, she must be—tough old stone in which the Mannix confidences were embedded. “I’ll get a cab back,” her companion said when we reached Miss Selig’s street. “Don’t wait. Good night.”
The street, not yet sinister but a mean one, was a dead realm to cabs. When she came down, after an interval fair enough for confidences, she hesitated in the doorway, seeing me still there. Slowly she came toward me, a statue warmed down from its niche against its own will, and got into the car. We found nothing idle enough to say to each other. The long rest, borrowable from time, from dissimulation, gathered between us, and at last we touched.
For a short time thereafter we gave ourselves up to a metaphysical delaying—the harmless thumbscrew delights with which a man and woman postpone their arrival at an end of which neither despairs. We were like two people watching, hand in hand, through separate binoculars, the inland tending of the same white sail. And we were like two who, chatting noncommittally the while, hid our locked hands behind us, against the spies in our own breasts. I left off going to her house, and my flat was not mentioned. Instead, powerfully urged into each other’s company at least once a day, we met in all the public places, luxury and on the cheap, that a city suddenly seems to offer such preambles, with the air of a great mine opening on treasures that exist for nothing else. We were the engrossed couple on the ferry boat, the two in day clothes (as if this made them incognito) in the opera box, the two met as if by chance in one of the currents of musk or pine sent out by the stores at this season, and fallen at once into an urgent silence which had only the one errand. It was during this period that, when apart, we had those conventionally absurd exchanges on the telephone, and when together, she dropped those bauble confidences which I was as careful to mistake for her simplicity—in which, like any woman shaking out her best attractions, she set up for me the clear sugar-castles of her girlhood, as if she saw that these were what I was best drawn by, and that only they could reassure. I learned why—or several good reasons why—self-apprenticed to the ballet at the age of six, and arduous enough to gain entrance, during a summer tryout years later, to one of the best ballet companies in Europe, she had toured with them for a year, and had as suddenly given it all up, only a week before the troupe reached New York. Oh, she’d been good enough, but if she wasn’t to be superb, then, to one of her background, there was no need. Her family, with a musical past of its own, had never opposed her; perhaps she’d have been better spurred that way, like some of her friends shot out into the arts by the bourgeois outcry behind them; but perhaps she’d been a little too subject, at home, to the idea that excellence was all. “And you know how verbal we are there,” she said. “For a while I did choreography—there was even a ballet of mine. But the best dancers are stupid, you know, to verbal people. Even the great ones. It’s like living in a society of cats busy at watching their own ripplings. It just wasn’t my milieu—even if I hadn’t another on my own.” The family somehow appeared, if benevolently, in all her reasons, as one of those milieus perhaps so binding in its early satisfactions that later on its members needed no other. As such, I admired it—who now, of the two of us, had the guile?