New Yorkers (84 page)

Austin, coming by, grabbed and spun her round, with the peculiar bonhomie of bridegrooms to mothers. Then he held her off. The huge pin on her bosom quivered. He knew it well, but grinned at his sister. “Who died!” Then, craning over the crowd from his height, he saw who the Judge had gone to. Edwin Halecsy was here.

He’d been invited of course; that is, he’d been sent the formal announcement with reception card enclosed. Though he’d struggled privately over whether or not
he
wanted to come, it never occurred to him that he was expected not to. He and Simon Mannix now believed the worst of each other. In this guarded business enmity, their column—written alternately, never jointly, but published as the Judge’s in entirety, with Edwin billed as assistant—seemed to go all the better for this. They now spoke only of the “law.” And Edwin was the charity the money was given to.

To Simon, every subtlety he’d taught this boy was now in service to Edwin’s natural depravity—which had come to the fore to show a Mannix how dangerous it was to be loosely libertarian. He’d brought his benefaction inside the home, and this was what had come of it. It never occurred to him that—except for a vicarious filial emotion, which now made Mannix wince for David’s sake (at the waste of it)—all those vaunted subtleties had belonged to the intelligence alone. Or that Edwin had been brought into the house as nowadays intellectual blacks were, to frequent only those influential homes which were culturally safe enough, there to feed on everything they wished except the normal emotions of human intercourse—which it was quietly assumed they practiced somewhere else. All this Edwin now saw. One article he had written with the lyric sob of betrayal in the throat. After that, he merely hated them.

Once so brave, he was afraid of experience now. Like his mother. He would never be stupid. But, in the style of the streets he was born to, he tended to believe the worst of people too quickly, and the better more sullenly slow. In such halls as tonight’s, ignorance of the social insincerities kept him awkward—and effectively concealed that he believed the best of nobody at all. He still wasn’t afraid to dare—if given the direction. He slept once a week with a secretary, but meant to marry well. His once prideful “reservoir” of instinct, he tried never to think of. The one night it had overflowed, it had made him “ill”—a newer word for murder, rape—or honesty.

He was talking at the moment to a girl. He could tell the story of his early life these days, and too often did. “Oh, he knows his age
now,”
said one of his former professors, after his recent visit there in attendance on the Judge. “Uses the catchwords of modernity like the oldest scholar here.” A second said, “And we thought he was log-cabin material, when he was here! Guy ought to know for himself, what
is
the best mob. Not ask.” The third, who’d never met Halecsy before, said “I wonder. Usually I can’t stand Mannix’s column. Too florid a view of life for me. But there was one beaut of politics, there was. Called ‘How Villains Are Made.’”

Austin went toward him in the spirit of the day, until he saw who he was talking with. “Didn’t know you knew my cousin Di. Hallo, Di.”

“Didn’t know she was your cousin Di.”

Why should so many gather to these two at once—the Judge, Moling behind him—like fish in an aquarium, behind two up ahead who have seen the same fleck of food? The girl faded back, as women did before duels they hadn’t provoked. Last came the bride herself, followed laggingly by Augusta, in whom the crocus-colored wine, on top of Brokan’s brandy and her own mossy nostalgias, had pro-listening bent headed to other people’s conceptions, which ready now, to live in his house.

“Brought this along,” said Edwin, handing over the folder which was his excuse to himself for coming.

“Anything important?” said the Judge. “For now?”

“That’s for you to say.”

Moling, the foundation man, enormously tall, always listening bent-headed to other people’s conceptions, which he then returned to them more securely knotted, said, “Ah well, your column, Judge, that’s always important.”

Inside the folder was a single copy of an Israeli newspaper Edwin often put there—though the column had never spoken of Israel. To the Judge’s eager glance, it held nothing new—current stories of Ben-Zwi and Ben-Gurion, pictures of desert military in their protective beards, Tel Aviv holy men in their consecrated ones, and the usual diplomats, clean-shaven for the chancelleries of the West. “All the gossips and accomplishments of a country with God behind and heavy business ahead,” said the Judge. “Edwin’s always wanting me to do a piece on Israel. Or go there.” He no longer cared how Edwin had found him out. To him it was appropriate. That this boy—even in his way—should be the only one to lend credence to the hope that David might be alive. A light torture was better than no belief at all. And a loose end opening out, out into living life.

“Chaim Weizmann,” Moling said softly. “How many people remember he created the acetone Britain needed for explosives in World War One?”

“It’s hard to be a lion of Judah,” Mannix said.

A waiter offered Edwin a tray. He took a glass. “Filled too full,” he said to Austin. Half-tones he did learn, he never forgot.

“Not today,” Austin said. Arm round his bride, he could afford to view Edwin objectively. If
he
married, Austin thought, it could be taken for granted—unless his mother’s heredity came proudly to the fore, creating once again some stolid, pleasantly dumb reminder of the basic human lot—that his children would go to Harvard, or at least try for Yale. As for a house—it was Austin’s surmise that Edwin knew of one without heirs live, or willing—and meant to inherit it.

Edwin drank, held out the glass. “Congratulations,” he said to the bride. Not telling whether he had innocently mixed up his wishes. “Fenno—” He made it sound like the clan rather than the man—“Good
luck.”

A moment later they saw him halfway down the room, moved there so dexterously that none had seen it done. As he stood there, in hornrims and a suit too Ivy League only for snobs, glass in hand, a hungry sparkle on his lip, over his head the two palm trees of any ad that now brought environments together, he looked appealing enough—in the modern way. One saw such legions of him everywhere.

“Who
is
that young man?” asked Moling.

“Edwin?” The wheelchair swung itself around. “He’s what the world’s going to be. And it won’t be like us.”

“Edwin?” It was the bride, just barely putting herself to the fore, in the softer accents Moling approved. Her hand lay on the back of the wheelchair—dutiful. “My father—was his protégé.”

A bowknot of the bride’s friends from the troupe hung near, too abashed to approach, in their center an accordionist. Taking sudden heart, they joined arms—surrounding the couple with their lovely, fluctuating barrier. At their edge was Ralston, in the crook of his arm an object of chrome.

“Modern life,” said Moling, unable to better the phrase, and stood on tiptoe, all seven feet of him, to go forward to it.

Borkan, coming up, heard him. “Rabbi is selling his story everywhere.”

“You still say ‘Rabbi’ direct,” said the Judge. “At home we already said ‘the rabbi.’ Or ‘Doctor.’ Therein lies a whole history of religious reform. Or social.”

“So? Simon—have dinner with me, after this?”

They looked at each other. Two widowers? It was like saying it.

One of the old politicos from the Judge’s list, seeing them in confab, came up to them, white-haired and wing-collared, a tottering charcoal of a man, with a little Irish glow left to him, at the long lip. “You look gay.”

“Married off my daughter today.”

“And you—not so gay.”

“I buried my wife, some months ago.”

“Ah yes, ah and yes. That takes a long time.” He doddered off, away from death, toward Austin’s young cousin, who was chatting with Augusta.

“My old cousin looks all the better for a little wear,” said the Judge. “Or I need my glasses. Dinner? If you can wait until I can leave. Where’ll we go?”

“How about my club?”

“The Harmonie?” Which his own father and Mendes had never joined.

“No. Not the Harmonie.”

Something in Borkan’s tone alerted the Judge. “Not—?”

Before he could let the august name drop, Borkan nodded, his face carefully grave.

“Why, yes. That would be appropriate.” Borkan must have had a willing brother-in-law somewhere. Or times had changed. “That was Chauncey Olney’s club.”

“Olney? I’d almost forgotten him.”

“I suppose it’s still the same.”

Borkan was proud.
“Just
the same…Is that music?”

Another young group ran by laughing, peering into each one of the palmy bowers dotted down the vast parquet. “They’re looking for the bride,” Borkan said with a smile.

“She went ice-skating this morning,” said her father. “You ever think, Borkan, that the present world might be the last to see life as a consecutive story? Or to try?”

“Nope. Who does.”

“The Duke of York,” said the Judge, feeling the cane which hung by his side. “Not the present one.”

“He never was in the courts,” Borkan said.

Left alone, Borkan gone to take a leak, the Judge, wanting the same, looked around for Charlie, hidden by people at the buffet. The reception was at its height. He didn’t want to see them catch the bride. Neither did anyone else, not yet. This was the city as audience, ninety feet of it, three hundred strong in top form, inside a house but not its own, and it was having a good time.

There was an agreeable freshness of new clothes, and the sugary odor of girls with good legs. Everybody was thinking about sex, in the most polite way. On the question of whether Austin and Ruth had already slept together, one could have ticked off the decades backwards in gradations, from foregone conclusion, through a nineteen-thirtyish “Of course, they’ll have had an affair,” to those few antediluvians among whom it couldn’t be discussed. These stood about the great room like old hands welcoming in new members who were the ghosts.

In the western windows, an extraordinary tumulus of blue winter light held at bay the Turk’s-head chandeliers. Hats of any insolence looked well in this peacock light, the dowagers’ best of all. Great bows of turquoise velvet and cut steel bent benevolently even to the male dancers sidling among them like pugs. Margaret Fenno’s severe coif was likened by a cousin to a common ancestor’s—“Annette van Rijn!”—and amended sotto voce by another: “More like the Indian.” This was the only open interracial remark of the afternoon. But in the palm bowers, people managed their owlish hints of it. From each bower, half hidden yet open, the talk fell gracefully, like sprays of a fountain that wasn’t there.

Into one of these Augusta had led Ruth. From behind its private chapel of fretted green, swooped into that same high, fin-de-siècle arch through which the new age had been born into these houses, their talk came like dialogue to Rupert outside it.

AUGUSTA:
I’ve always known he had something to conceal. Simon. Will you protect him to the end?
(Her voice
w
eakened, as if to say, “will we?”)

RUTH
(in a voice strange even to any passing impresario):

Yes, I will protect him to the end.

AUGUSTA:
What I can’t forgive—

RUTH:
My mother?

AUGUSTA:
Whatever there was to conceal later,
she
brought it into the house. I always felt that, it’s true. But that’s nothing. That’s just—jealousy.
(It was said superbly, a throwing down of a life in all its maidenly significance, like an annuity spent in one throw.)
No, what I can’t forgive is his—your father’s concealment. He should have risen above it.
(It showed grandly, her craving to make him a man of action.)

RUTH:
He would have had to rise above
me.

AUGUSTA:
I’ve always known you knew—what there was to hide.

RUTH:
So it showed?

She must be smiling. If a certain observer very slightly shifted himself, meanwhile lifting another wineglass from the trays being passed under one’s nose with the locomotive verve of these Americans, he could glimpse the pair, like two behind the papery lattice of a flower shop.

AUGUSTA:
Will you tell me? I don’t ask for myself. (And the other figure was seen to bow, assenting this as true.) I mean—shouldn’t you?

RUTH:
For whose sake?

(Whose could it be but his?
AUGUSTA’S
head said it.)

RUTH:
No, I can’t tell you. For
your
sake. And I’m used to it.

AUGUSTA:
Or you need it! For your power over
him.

…But there’s jealousy. That’s how Augusta must know. Whatever she knows. How we know, many things. And why wedding champagne so often tastes of insight…

RUTH
(hand over mouth):
I need it…I never thought…One learns to live a certain way—if one has to…But not for power. Not for
that.

She came blindly out of the greenery, parting the broad leaves with the same dazed, seraglio gesture which came out of balcony windows in sets for operas by Leoncavallo. Or from the wartime flat gray doorways, like a row of broken teeth, in the bombarded stone of Rupert’s mother’s groveled street in the Midlands. And saw him, hunched there, not cheap enough to move, but like a whippet in the rain.

“I need it? I never knew,” she said.

She touched one of his sideburns, as if they’d been talking together for hours. “Then I used them all! Even you.”

“Never. Not you.”

For answer she took his glass, drained it, and left it empty in his hand.

From behind, he watched her poise on the brink of the crowd, facing the noisy young group coming at her. She was darker, taller, on this side of the Atlantic, or else the shadowy vibrato of her future made her seem so. There was more of her. He had a moment’s chance to see it. And then they caught her.

The Judge hadn’t seen. Borkan had gone one flight below, to the temporary cloakroom set up there near the old-fashioned elevator. Coming up in that open iron cage, the Judge had seen into another world, piled with coats of the younger Fenno clan come strong and early, such odd shapes of sheepskin and helmets of bright leather, clothing for a race of Berbers to attack the Plaza in—and one flushed girl, hair in sunburst points like a kindergarten cutout, carmining her rosy lips and saying meanwhile with all her heart to another. “Thing is, you have to be sincere.” He couldn’t get his chair down there now, and didn’t want to. In the rear of this “étage,” as Ralston called it, there was an ancient lavabo, gone to mop closet, which their host’s sharp eye hadn’t yet renovated. The Judge had wheeled himself back, and standing up, was making use of the old terra-cotta shell, set in the wall at a height before vitamins had raised the mid-century pubis to the level of the 1870 navel—meanwhile hoping that the pipes still went somewhere. These secret peeings, and the places he found for them, had become the most meditative part of his days, reminding him that he was getting old to a pattern he’d first caught on to as an urchin at his father’s soirees—that old men tended to ruminate either with a hand spread pragmatic on their bellies, or horny with intellect, at their flies.