New Yorkers (30 page)

He was halfway down the hall before her own secret, as seen in that last trapped smile of the eyes, came to him. Anna was intelligent.

On the way to the Judge’s study, he passed the hall mirror again, and made himself look there, as was his custom at least once on each visit. His careless dress pleased him, now that he could carry it better than some aristocrats. He was no Austin. But he too had a lineage almost as formal. He too was the bloom of circumstances, in the directest line.

When his first suit, made by his mother’s sisters, had been fitted on him, he had discovered this about himself. The suit was unwearable—and couldn’t be rescued. One side of the jacket had been cut fatally too narrow for anyone, from the shoulder down. “No one could wear it,” he said to them proudly. “Not even a Chinee.” When he put on the trousers, he laughed aloud. The crotch was inches out of line with his navel. For a year after, the aunts wouldn’t speak to him because of what he’d said to them. “I can see for sure,” he said, with a snarl straight from the streets they had left him to, “neither one of you has ever been raped.”

He’d thrown away the suit himself, denying them even the solace of their remnant bag. The act had given him his first inkling of the sensation that could grow so imperial here—waste. He knew his hatred was lost on the aunts. One day, he found it had turned to pride. And so, he had found his lineage. Nothing of the emotions, early or late, ever really went to waste.

He walked into the study and was in his usual chair, laying out the black notebook, use of which the Judge if anything encouraged, eagerly drinking in the details of the beloved oracle-spot—from the stamp wall to all a great man’s life incunabula of paper, brass, marble and eraser crumbs, and on to the window through which he had first climbed in here at that man’s bidding—when another truth struck him. He’d had to go back to the district for it, to his reservoir. Whatever Anna had to hide, her fear of him was natural. He was unlike the innocents she was surrounded with. She was afraid of him because he could smell.

Then he forgot it all—the whole afternoon’s self-coaching, all his years of 5x8’s, the sipping of imported ale, the new sauvity of mirrors—and hauling himself up out of his chair, he was fifteen again on his eighteenth birthday—for the Judge, leaning on a cane, was here.

Doorways in this house were of a height to belittle almost anyone, but the Judge always paused for a moment in any, and never appeared to mind the heraldic majesty of some of his father-in-law’s Venetian chairs. Larger men went shaggy in the hide, but age had found little surface to work with in this neat, unviolent bantam, except to flick with white its black poll—and since the Judge’s weight and hair seemed likely to be permanent, he always appeared much the same. He’d been heard to say this could make a man seem unserious to contemporaries. He was smiling at Edwin as if he might have just said this, in the dry voice which invited one to disbelieve. His dress had never gone sloppy with retirement, remaining the same bluish or grayish of brownish, with white shirt and dim tie. But the cane, a black one with a thumbprint of silver on the top, was an embellishment. He and Edwin continued their steady mutual assessment of each other, an honored half-yearly ritual, before he crossed past the deck chair to an uncustomary one opposite Edwin’s and sat down, twirling the cane between his knees. He regarded it carefully, as if its revolutions had nothing to do with him, then folded his hands on it, clearing his throat. He always began—with what might or might not be the motif of their hour’s conversation. And he had several voices.

“I’m thinking of getting a mortal disease,” said the Judge. “Though it may be too late for it.” He tossed the cane aside, as if he could do this at will with sticks and diseases both. Then he said what he always said. “For God’s sake, Edwin, sit down. And for mine too.”

He’d meant to give Anna’s message now, but the Judge suddenly reached over, picked up the black leather notebook, from its place at Edwin’s side, and laid it on the low table between them. “So this is where you keep us.”

For answer, Edwin pushed the book toward him. The Judge reached into a cellarette for a bottle and two glasses and poured them each a small glass of white vermouth, to Edwin now a drink whose faint herbs tasted totally of reminiscence and the harmonics of intellect. In his room at school he kept a similar bottle, offering it in the same aristocratic way—without ice and without alternative.

“Dates.” The Judge sipped. The moment at which he enunciated his real topic was always hard to say, and the topic too, though Edwin was sure he was learning many things circuitously—the way one would if one could be led through childhood again, but with a fully developed brain. Indeed, because of David, he couldn’t help seeing that the Judge sometimes talked to him as if he were the superchild for whom blocked fathers longed.

“Far as I know, Edwin, we were all born in wedlock. Nothing incriminating there.”

“Or anywhere!” said Edwin. “Except maybe about Anna. And I don’t know what that is.”

“Anna?”

“You ever think—” He wasn’t sure of the ethics here—the ones to be exhibited, that is. An echo returned to him, without helping him—
Servants, Edwin? Whether their role in our lives gives us the creeps, or we accept it as farce
—
shows our own role in the social scale. Even now.
“You ever think that Anna might have another life? Separate from here?” Saying it, he felt almost an allegiance with her.

“You appall me. On my part. For no, I hadn’t.” The Judge shoved his glass away. “Why?”

“She acts afraid of me. As if—because of who I am—I might more easily find out.”

“Because of who you are,” the Judge said slowly. “Maybe we haven’t spent enough time on that. You always keep me so busy answering what
we
are.” He carefully reached out—as if from a prescribed radius—and rubbed the cane. “She was married once. My wife knew more about it than I.”

Since the Judge had never before mentioned either his wife or his retirement, Edwin found nothing to say.

“Ruth may know,” the Judge said indifferently. “What Anna does with her Thursdays and Sundays.”

Edwin did have his own ethics on this. Neither of the Judge’s children was to be discussed with him—and Ruth particularly not now.

“Or my sisters might.” Both he and Edwin burst into smiles.

“I saw them yesterday,” said Edwin. “At my aunts. They’re just the same.”

“If all civilization would only subject its nerve ends to as little of the new as my elder sisters!” The Judge looked at his fingertips. “I figured out once—since my attaining puberty, my sisters have given me almost a hundred pairs of gray suede gloves. At two a year—
there’s
chronology for you. The essence of family strength is in it—and because one can disregard my sisters themselves—in them.” He clapped his palms together, leaned back, and straight-ended again. “Enough. How’re you finding the law?”

He’d expected to be asked of course, and in just this way. “I’m
finding
it,” he said. It sometimes tickled the Judge to hear apt imitation of his own verbal artifice. Who wouldn’t want to please this man so viciously saddened, so horrifying alive in terms of what his own satisfactions appeared to be, this man who—yes, this must be the category—whom one loved. Whom, like a father, one loved.

But today this was received as a man in hospital receives flattery on his looks—with a disowning smile. Edwin sneaked another glance at the cane.

“Well, you’re only first-year. But there’re only two more. And I’ve an itch to see some of the young under my aegis work out.” He paused. “Go ahead and look at the cane, Edwin. It was my grandfather’s. Anna thinks I bought it—but she doesn’t know all the possessions of this house.”

“Very handsome.”

“Hmm.” He was poured another drink. “You haven’t it in your background as I did. The law, I mean.”

“Sometimes it helps. Not to have a category.”

“Oh, you don’t have the self-pity we’re educated to. Wear your bone outside, I’ve often thought, not inside, like the rest of us.” The Judge reached into the cellarette and took out a bottle of bourbon. “Don’t worry. It doesn’t show. Nice jacket, incidentally. Get it in Cambridge?”

He nodded. “On clothes, I just follow the mob.” With some surprise, he watched the Judge, a light drinker, down a shot of bourbon and pour himself another.

“That other stuff doesn’t—” The Judge looked up from his own mutter. “Join me? No? Don’t look so worried—Jews like us don’t make drunks. Doctor’s been giving me codeine for a slight ailment. But I find it intolerable. Turns the whole world an Oriental yellow.” He rose, walked to the window, without the cane, and leaned there. He turned. “How sentimental of me. I can still see you out there. Peeing. Edwin…d’you still feel—‘Politics is the best mob’?”

“So that’s the way I said it, that day! Always knew Ruth must have reported something to make you see me!”

When there was no reply—he never knew how far to go in personal talk with the Judge—he said, “
Can
one go after it honestly—politics?” Back there in the barbershop—that’s how they knew when a man wasn’t honest. When it went after
him.
In his excitement, he stood up. “I’ve thought about it a lot—we all do, at school up there. If they want to go into the business end of the law, they know how close a shave they’ll have, all the way along the line. Even if they plan to practice otherwise. It’s not like the judiciary—where a man has to wait to be found.” He had forgotten this would be personal. But even a retired man must expect references to his profession, if he still allows himself to be called Judge.

“That your idea of the judiciary?” said the Judge, turning. “A man stands around in his honesty until he’s tapped for it?” He came and sat down again, looking up. In a man of his age, this was always winsome. “It was true of Cardozo. Oh, among the greats, there’s always a long list of the hyper-innocent. But Edwin, most times in the world you see a man with an appointment he very much wanted, you’ll very much more likely find he’s put himself in the way of it.” He reached for the cane again, using the ferrule to inscribe a minute circle on the floorboards, punctuating his remarks as with a pipe. “Same thing can be true if he removes himself from worldly appointment. Though that’s generally considered a less positive action. Some day I must tell you about an old friend of mine.” He looked up, smiling. “As my father used to say, ‘Some fine evening of my decline, when you come to see me in a fur hat.’” He held the cane still. “But right now, I’m too young for it. Though he used to say that too.”

The gentle silences which fell to such middle-aged evocations—the halls of learning were full of these. “Memory soup,” a cold-voiced student neighbor had once said to him of a professor presiding unasked in the dinner hall. “That’s all they live on.”

“I can use it,” Edwin had replied. But now he stared hostilely at whisky glass and cane, each as damning as false teeth or the jaw dropped aphasia of aging sleep. Each time he returned from school, he dreaded to find that the Judge might seem to him to know less and less of the law—and perhaps of experience.

Just then the cane smacked down. The Judge looked at it with surprise, as if a dog had barked. “I’m learning its gestures faster than I like,” he said. “Edwin, no more large talk. We’ll spend more time on who you are and are to be. You’ve a career to be—chosen by.” In deploring their loss of the grand manner, the Judge seemed almost to regain it. “You better haul out that black book again,” he said softer. “I’ve inhibited
you.
”

Outside the window it was that exact moment before dusk thickened to dark, baring those city crocuses, the first lights. The day furled round the house in draperies the color of disappointment, funeral to the obsessive, Byronic visits of young men. For the first time Edwin anticipated the terror-ennui of those who were cornered in houses, heard the refrain, “What are
you
doing
here?”
—and answered it manfully, “I will stay. But I will also go.”

The Judge put out his small hand, touching the notebook with a finger which to Edwin’s dilated eye and imagination grew until it pointed on the black leather like a cane. “When do you appear there?”

“Where?” He recognized the question as one he had been waiting for.

“In the record. With us.”

“I thought I was.” Really they had never invited him to be prince—only to prove that he wasn’t a frog.

“You know better than that. You’re more intelligent than anyone we let come to the house.”

“Austin is intelligent.”

In the eye-crinkles opposite, he saw how young he was.

“And has been coming to dinner longer than you.” The Judge glanced at his right wrist.

“I forgot to tell you—Anna said to say dinner will be half to three quarters of an hour later—”

“Good. Gives me even more time to incriminate
you.
Which is one way of being made to choose a vocation. I imagine they knew that at the barbershop.” The Judge took up a paper knife, absently using the haft to stir his drink. There was a physical simplicity about him which he didn’t appear to know he had. All the formality of his talk didn’t cover how he scratched his crotch in company, with a gusto so large for his person, and with a luxury the Edwins couldn’t spare. Such habits endeared him to his children, exciting their fantasies of that life of the privates, or of the animal, he too must once have had. According to Ruth, David had once come upon his father alone at breakfast, bending like a guilty boy to lick his plate. And their father had said to him—very carefully so he would hear all of it: “In my youth, David, I used to catch your great-grandmother—who wore her hair à la Madame Pompadour—blowing her nose through her fingers. Honesty has to come out somewhere—like snot.”

He found the Judge staring at him.

“Well, Edwin, since you won’t talk—yes, I want to make you a proposal.” The Judge poked into his drink, faintly smiling. “Used to be a picture at the head of the stairs, house I was brought up in. A young wench on a ladder, picking from a tree. And a grenadier clasping the rungs, looking up her skirt. My father got it in Toulouse once, and put it there. Outside his study, where all the young men visitors could see it. ‘A Shady Proposal,’ the title was. Or so he said. My mother never got the joke, though he shouted it at her often enough. ‘A proposition, Martha. For the love of God.’ Theirs was an arranged marriage. Which is why the sons of such couples often marry otherwise—for beauty, say. Or for intelligence.” He drank to the bottom. “Will you marry—for intelligence, Edwin?”