New Yorkers by Hortense Calisher

his faculties, if performing variously, were keen enough. “How’s that handsome son of yours?”
    The Judge flushed, an often regretted reaction to mention of his son, not due to the boy’s affliction, or not directly. “He’s—thank you, he’s doing very well. Actually, one tends to forget how well he’s doing—it’s, almost no problem to him, any more. Except that he doesn’t hear from behind or a distance, you’d never know.”
    “Still an athlete?”
    “Yes. Track.”
    “Well, now. Your father’d have been mighty pleased at that.”
    “He was the one hauled him off to the Garden, Madison Square, by the time he was four.” Why must he grudge that so? Or that David had never had the usually despairing tantrums of the deaf child but had seemed to know at once, long before the special school, that everyone was trying to help him, even in babyhood taking it in with grave, alert eyes?
    “Favors old Mendes though, doesn’t he? Got his long bones.”
    “Keep forgetting you knew my father-in-law, as well as Dad.” As always, he was glad to get off that other subject.
    Chauncey chuckled. “Don’t know why I call him old; he was younger than me—except that he’s dead.” He turned to his pictures, alert on their easels or against vases or books he had stuffed behind them. Like a class of recalcitrant pupils they stared back at him, with all the inflections of willingness to learn except the one he could not teach them—how not to be what most of them already were. Behind him, the Judge once more wanted to reach up to that humble curve of back which was still marvelously, intricately alive. Then Olney, with a hand-sweep, sent the ranks down before him like ninepins. “Want my brandy. Let’s sit down.”
    They settled themselves in two armchairs near the bow windows on the avenue and park. The Judge always liked to know where he was angled in a house, a farmer’s habit but curiously the New Yorker’s also, in these squared streets easy to see why. Settled here, able to look west, and north-south with a bit of stretching, they were to his mind in the very center of the city. By now, far from the Piedmont as Olney was, it must be his city also.
    “Didn’t rightly know your father-in-law Mendes; only saw him once, as a young man. In the upstairs ballroom of one of the Ralston apartments, the one the owners kept for themselves.”
    “Must have been way back. Never knew Meyer saw them socially.”
    “He didn’t. He went there to buy the land for your house.”
    “Oh, I’ve heard his story of that night—many is the time! But he never said…whatever were you doing there?”
    “It was my father-in-law who represented the Ralstons. Didn’t you know that?”
    “By God—” The Judge sat up, slapping the arm of his chair. “No.” He leaned forward, the way he did when about to affix to his collection of stamps a rare one, lost and turned up again, that he hadn’t known existed any more. “Chauncey—” He felt as if Olney was himself a jar of rare memories that he must very gently tip. “ My father-in-law was in his thirties then, about to marry,” he said eagerly. “It was the year before he broke with the family firm in London, threatened to set up an American branch of his own. Got one of the rival music publishers, Rinaldi, I think it was, ready to subsidize him. Told his mother and uncles that, as the heir, if he was expected to run the business some day, he was going to do it then or not at all. So they gave in.” He prized all that history, as much as if he had inherited it along with the house.
    “Oh?” Olney said politely.
    “Excuse me, Chauncey. It’s just that—years later, to have another facet on what I always thought was cut and dried by now—” he poured himself another whisky. “Go on.”
    “Pour me one. The brandy. Thanks.” Chauncey drank, coughed.
    “Well, after the War, I was the poor widow’s mite you know, got through the university somehow, University of