Eagle Eye by Hortense Calisher Page A

blind warehouses, black with the dirt of years, full of mysterious industrial guilts heaped in wood and slag and zinc. Then came the flat-topped houses of people who worked there, and lived in streets out of a policeman’s gazette. Then the newer factories, in whose clean halls the plastics refined themselves out of the living air, leaving behind a smell of Faust. A knot of viaducts, then old kiosks placarded with damp, then a spray of rumbling bridge over a slime of water. There, over there, the bristle of leafage and stone that had always been the Manhattan side. Scarabs of slum; then gradually that burden lessened. They were approaching the East Sixties; a mile north were the blocks where he had once been an Ambassador. Though they weren’t going that far, even here the family sense was already strong. Maeve scrubbing city out of her neck with a nailbrush every evening. Buddy’s collar wilting with it the big morning he went to borrow a stake from the bank. The city was against your finding it irresistible. And it was anti-memory too. Like some sporting, sparring uncle who slapped you on the mended collarbone saying “ That where I hit you, boy?”
    “There’s the Manhattan Eye and Ear.”
    “Yeah, you had your tonsils out there. Maeve took you without telling you first.” Buddy’d always resented this for him.
    Calm and self-knowing, a nurse whose hidden white smell was still with him now, had sat down gripping him between her knees, and held out under his chin the paper cup of the terrible, thick stuff. Milk of magnesia, nothing. He knew it came from her. But he got it down, the white potion that made you mad or loved, lame or invulnerable. It was the dram you had to drink.
    “From Central Park West. All the places we moved, Buddy. Do you ever mind?” Travel had made him blunter. Or his whole situation.
    His father folded his arms, like a man who recalls he has soft parts to protect. He glanced at the chauffeur’s barrier, as if the man out there could hear. “Hardest part is the philanthropy. You have to give to the opera, so you go to the opera.”
    Even with this, when they drew up on Fifth Avenue he still hadn’t understood what his father was trying to say. Though the new building, new not just to them, had black marble bays bucking out of its white—as if the builder had dreamed of Byzantine while at the dentist, and the canopy was a gold-braided and draped palanquin you could scarcely emerge from with propriety unless you were on a horse—to him it was still only an apartment house. He did note that inside their state uniforms, the doormen were worse types every year.
    In the elevator, Buddy said “Maeve’s parties are still the same, Bunt. But I should warn you. She thinks this one’s for you.”
    He nodded. They were at their floor. “Wow. One apartment to a floor. The Bronstein floor?”
    Buddy nodded. There was a careworn look that some businessmen put on whenever their expenditure pointed to their own successes; he had never done that: his sadnesses would be his own. He brightened. “Jesus, I forgot.” He took out two yarmulkas. “Found these in my chifforobe.” Solemnly, they donned them, then broke up. “Congratulations, kid. Glad you’re home.” They shook hands.
    “How’s Maeve?” His chin dropped to his chest. What a sod he was, to wait until now to ask.
    A shrug. The same complicitous one his grandfather used to exchange with the other men before they went into Sunday dinner, after conversations which were over a child’s head. He could smell the yellow fricassee, and hear the uncles. The shrug that Jewish men made before they went in to join the women.
    “I don’t rock the boat.” Buddy took out a bunch of keys, then thought better of it and rang, his head held high. Family life was a magnetic tape on which you were pulled along, hearing through walls maybe, but never speaking the ultimate—the process should not be disturbed.
    Two locks were needed here, and a buzzer