In the Absence of Angels (21 page)

“Who do you suppose is in New York?” his father had chuckled from behind the
Times
one morning at breakfast, sitting there easy and fresh, wearing one of the dandified light silk ties and curious scarf-pins from the collection that crowded his dresser drawers, a mode that his wife could never persuade him to discard, that was as much a part of his style as the faint odor of cologne left clinging to the crumpled towels in the bathroom.

“Letty Danvers,” said his father. “Arrived on the
Queen Mary.
Stopping at the Great Northern. That’s where they all used to stop in the old days.”

“Who’s Letty Danvers?” he had asked, savoring the graceful English name on his tongue, sensing already, in his mother’s stiffness, the possibility of mischief. In the portfolio of family pictures there were several of unidentified women, mostly in profile, in the clear unshaded photographic style of another day, staring large-eyed and proud from under the curled fringe of their bangs. His mother would never confess to a knowledge of who they were. “Ask your father!” she would say, tossing back her head.

“Why she was what they’d call a ‘diseuse’ now, I guess,” said his father reflectively. “The greatest of her day. I knew her, my God — years ago. You know that silver dresser set of mine? She gave me that.”

“I always thought Mother gave it to you.” His mother shook her head, tightening her lips.

“Maybe I’ll go and see her,” said his father. “Talk over old times.”

“Kind of an elaborate present, wasn’t it?” he had said, watching his mother.

“Not for those days,” said his father musingly, from behind the paper. Then, looking up, he had met his son’s arch glance, his wife’s bridling look.

“Purely platonic!” he had growled. “Purely platonic, I assure you!”

“Hmmm,” said his mother.

His father had slammed the paper down on the table. “My God, Hattie, it was forty-five years ago. She was years older than I was. Why she must be damn near eighty years old!” He had stamped away from the table in a self-conscious huff, mock-angry, but pleased. For once, vanity had wrung from him the nearest allusion to his exact age that he would ever make. ...

Like a boy building over and over the same tower from blocks grooved with use, he could reconstruct the times of his father. He watched him living with his young French friend, Louis Housselle, in the Prince Albert Apartments, home of the fancy theatre set of the day and their ardent hangers-on. He saw him, a few tables behind Diamond Jim Brady, betting on that famous marathon of the appetite, or leaning intimately toward women over the small round tables, almost eclipsed by the velvet swoop of their hats. In yachting clothes he leaned back jauntily, legs crossed, the hand with the ring draped easily on the chair; posing for a portrait he held the aquiline medallion of his profile sideways, the black curls cropped almost to the bone, on his shapely upper lip a feather of mustache. ...

The rough bossing of the brush handle had left a pattern on his clenched hand. With a conscious, almost defiant gesture, he set the brush down askew in the long neat silver line. Stepping softly down the back hall, he let himself out of the apartment door. Avoiding the elevator, he hurried down the five flights of stairs and out into the street.

As always before, the milling streets gave him back the feeling of action; the air blowing against his face set up an unreasoning tingle of anticipation. Flower shops, pastry shops, and stationery stores were all open; people wove in and out of them on their beelike errands. Down the perspective of the side street he could see the olive-green buses, their open decks crammed with people in vivid spring hats, rocketing by like floats.

He ran down the intervening blocks. Wedging himself onto one of the buses he followed the line of people up the swaying stair. Upstairs the deck held the rows of people like a well-arranged tray, everyone coupled and spruce as a crowd just out of church, varied only by the restless dots of children.

They rolled by the Museum and stopped. Clutching the change in his pocket, he thought of getting off there, but while he wavered between indecision and habit, the bus heaved on. He knew the Museum too well, anyhow, particularly the American Wing, where he had wandered too many desultory afternoons, past the snub, diffused faces of the Cassatts, the small violent Homers, pausing longer at the moon-racked Ryders, held for minutes before the unfathomable Sargent “Madame X.” By now it was too well-defined a theme in his routine of hope and ennui.

At Fifty-seventh Street he got off and walked east. Stopping at the Kraushaar Galleries, he peered in at the blank dark doors. Several weeks ago they had been open one afternoon and he had wandered in. No one had intercepted him, and he had found himself in the midst of an “opening show” of French paintings, mostly Renoirs. Behind him the silky authoritative murmurs of approval or contempt went on almost unheard, for he had been held in front of the Renoirs by a shock of familiarity, of recognition. They sat there, the women of his father’s day, stiffly at their garden tables, under their enormous hats, in spade-shaped bodices, their faces and hair fretted by light and leaf shadow; in the dim blur of their boudoirs they curved over dressing tables their bodies of impermeable lavender and rose.

Today the window held a few Flemish
genre
paintings in overpowering frames, and the interior was lifeless and dark. The plate glass gave him back a dusky astigmatic version of himself. He turned away. No one was coming down the long suave street; held there, gripped again by the drag of time draining away, he felt that no one would ever come. He waited, avoiding the knowledge of where he wanted to go. Time passes, he thought; perhaps one should go toward it. Far down the street, the thin line of the horizon was like a sealed eyelid waiting for him to lift it, to expose the huge wink of the future.

Turning on his heel, he walked slowly eastward down the long street, which grew more squalid with every step, with the inevitability of a declining curve on a graph. At Second Avenue he mounted the rickety stairs of the “El” and caught a train that was just winding its parabola into the station.

Jigging past the tenements in the settling dusk he watched the window scenes as they flicked by: a woman leaning over a sink, a man stretched out with his feet up, somnolent in a chair. Since childhood he had done this, hanging out from the tops of the buses on Fifth to catch a flash of a paneled drawing-room, a great brown wall of books, or people, muffled and vague behind a shimmering curtain; riding past in the veiled evening he had fondled these glimpses and enlarged upon them.

In this neighborhood he could now, because of his work, fill out the scenes to the last detail of mohair armchairs and cracked, calendered walls. He knew well the sameness of the life that went on behind those window lights that were so sterile and graceless from inside — the endless arias of family quarrels, and the blind grapplings of love. Even so, as he walked or rode along, each appearing lamp stood out like a lighthouse of warmth that drew him in his lonely role of beholder; each was an evocation of possibility.

At home now, their own lamps would be turned on soon for supper, and his father would rise, yawning, to go to the table, happy and complete in his belated role of paterfamilias if the family were all present, grumbling and swearing one of his strange oaths that were like no one else’s, if one of them were missing.
“Phantasmagoria!”
he would shout. “Where in God’s name does that boy find to go?” In the landscape of his mind he watched the image of his father collapse and dwindle with distance, heard the sonorous echo of his voice trickle and die; in his mind he pursued the image and the echo for a last minute, before he let them go.

At the last station, he got out. It was still a long way to Hester Street, and he walked the odd-angled asymmetric streets with a delaying step, remembering his first experience of them last year, when the heat of summer had been a great blunting hand pushing the people out of doors, the whole area had had the smell of a dying fruit, and his clothes had felt like a cage.

He stopped at last in front of the house. It must have rained recently down here. The carts and hagglers had deserted the block, leaving in the gutters pools that gave back the last light of the sky. A slate-colored breeze from the river blew brinily against the empty, peeling doorway.

He walked inside and put his hand on the doorknob. Over on the river the foghorns spoke, making over and over their slow mysterious statement. He had never been able to decipher it until now. It is the sound of waiting, he thought.
The sound of waiting.

Cupped in his hand, the oily doorknob spread under his palm as if he were touching a slowly widening smile. He knocked. He heard a light-chain being pulled on in the back room, and the high-heeled sound of footsteps coming toward the door. After the first compromise, he thought, all others follow.

Looking back through the open doorway, he saw the dome of the day melting downward irretrievably into the river. One by one, in the great pitted comb of the city, the evocative lights went on.

W
HEN THE MUSCHENHEIM
limousine slid up to the curb, like a great, rolling onyx, it had hardly stopped before the chauffeur, in broadcloth cerements, leaped out and flourished open the door. Mrs. Muschenheim emerged slowly, her enormous bulk divided and encircled with ruchings, the elegiac balloon of velvet that compressed her black pompadour looking like the knob on the chess queen.

Hester, watching intently from a cramped stone niche in the courtyard entrance, where she had been sitting in Sunday-afternoon stiffness, knew that this arrival was the signal that the birthday party at the Reuters’ was about to begin. While Mrs. Muschenheim stared before her with majesty, the chauffeur reverently brought forth several cake-boxes of a whiteness and size that drew awed murmurs from the kids around the entrance, then bore them smartly behind his employer as she lumbered through the courtyard and into the apartment house on her way up to the Reuters’, on the ninth floor.

Hester could never decide which attracted her more — the elaborate sweets or the solemn pageantry of the Reuter family life. Sometimes she was given tastes from the boxes of mocha torte or glazed cherries when Clara, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of the Reuters, descending to Hester’s twelve-year level on bored, boyless afternoons, asked her upstairs, and the two of them hovered hopefully on the periphery of the stately orgies of pastry, coffee, and talk.

The Reuters belonged to the solid phalanx of upper-middle-class German burgher families that moved in its own orbit in New York. During the first World War, just past, the women had learned to knit by the jerky American method and had bought Liberty Bonds stolidly, but through this period, as always, they lingered over the coffeepot on smoky winter afternoons, did their hair leaning over rivulets of scalloped dresser scarves made by the daughters of the house, and married off their sons and daughters to one another — not by compulsion but through the graceful pressure of cocoa parties together at the age of ten and dinner parties at the age of twenty.

Hester detached herself painfully from her cold seat, permitted herself one superb glance around at the other kids, who did not share her entrée, and followed Mrs. Muschenheim in, just slowly enough not to catch the same elevator. She went up to her own family’s apartment, four floors below the Reuters’, and scurried back to her room, sliding off her coat. Because of the inactivity of Sunday afternoon, her new dress was still fresh. Ramming her barrette to a firmer hold on her hair, she burrowed in her bureau drawer for the tissue-wrapped handkerchief that would serve as her ticket of admittance to the birthday party. Holding it by its rosette of ribbon, she slipped out of the apartment, climbed the four flights to the Reuters’ floor, and rang the bell. Clara opened the door.

“Oh, h’lo, Hester,” said Clara, her eyes on the little package.

“ ’S for your mother’s birthday,” Hester muttered, and thrust the package at her.

“Oh,
thank
you, Hester! She’ll be pleased,” said Clara with sweet artificiality. Both were aware that a handkerchief was not to be considered a real present but, rather, a kind of party currency. Then Clara dropped her adult tone. “Listen! Guess what!” she said, and hurried Hester along the hall toward her mother’s bedroom. Going past the piles of tissue paper and ribbon on the waxed foyer table, turning her head to peer back through the living-room doorway at the people gathered inside, Hester thought there was no place for a party like the Reuters’, where all the material panoply of life was treated with such devotion.

Both Mrs. Reuter, the grandmother, and her sister, Mrs. Enke, rivaled Mrs. Muschenheim in size. Their mammoth hips swelled like hoop skirts under their made-to-order dresses. Behind her nose glasses, Mrs. Reuter’s enlarged blue eyes melted innocently in the genial arrangement of red pincushions that was her face. From Mrs. Enke’s more elegant profile, wan folds draped away sculpturally, as befitted her long-standing widowhood. In this citadel of women, which included Clara and her mother, Mrs. Braggiotti, Mr. Reuter might have felt oppressed had he not been equally large, and likely to find, on his four-o’clock return from the lace business, various Adolphs and Karls, of severe clothes and superb, gold-linked linen, who had already deserted the garlanded cake plates for a bottle of schnapps, over which they would discuss the market. Once, Hester had even seen the German consul there, his domed head rolling and stretching out on his creased neck like a sea lion accepting the deference of the crowd. When, on such occasions, Mrs. Reuter’s eyes turned too explicitly to Hester’s grubby play dress and battered knees, the two girls played in Clara’s room with the frilled doll that had belonged to Clara’s mother, or made exploratory tours of the other bedrooms.

All the bedrooms were of such complete neatness that Hester had never been able to imagine the Reuter women as really going to bed at all, but saw them moving serenely through the night ready to meet the first caller of the day, their hair unawry, their watches pinned to their waists. To her, these rooms full of starched bolsters, where every plane was animated with linen and crisped with laces, seemed the ideal toward which any girl would aim her hope chest, but sanctuaries, nevertheless, in which it was improbable that any of the natural functions went on. The closet floors were not cluttered with stray shoes or saved boxes, and in the dresser drawers there were no broken earrings tumbled among cards from the upholsterer, bits of cornice off the mirror, and odd ends of elastic. Each object, useful and needed, reposed in a wash of space and calm. Mrs. Braggiotti’s room had, in addition, the aura of the romantically pretty woman.