New Yorkers by Hortense Calisher

Christians with other people’s testaments, and their agonies too. Though if he could have said this to Borkan and Olney, interrupting that lipread exchange, it would have been Olney who smiled.
    “Don’t single us out,” pleaded Borkan, because he was Borkan, and in that was all one ever needed to know about the hierarchies of the Jews. “If we are not singled out,” preached the rabbis, “we are nothing; all our history is nil.” And that went for a man personally too if he had the brains and the bootstraps. Though of this the rabbis preferred to say nothing. “Otherwise, we in our turn”—so went a man’s own secret addendum—“are nothing but the coral reef, the aggregate, the sediment of cities.” This is the power of my house.
    Tonight, what he walked toward in it was Mirriam. Even now, through all this, they weren’t a divided couple, merely one not joined. Often, after their separate stimulations of the night, they met in bed, coupling with the excitement of strangers met in a dream house, in one of those exotically prepared way stations of sexual daydream which had somehow been legalized for them—and in the morning was seen to be their own. His six months of worry must stand, would be corroborated, if he spoke. But tonight’s was an error, an over-subtlety of the nerves. Not to speak was merely the subtlety he and his wife had resorted to in these matters; why should she break it now that there was no need?
    For all this time he had been going over their dialogue as in an examination; beneath the righthand flow of thought on which he walked, the left hand mirror-wrote also, to convince him that he understood her words on the phone as he understood her character—dark of motive until she chose to reveal it, jangled as a bacchante’s when in action, but in utterance flashing pure. The fellow was leaving for the war, or war was his excuse—and in the brittle way she had when piqued, she’d been talking to the fellow ail along. Dropping people, the privilege of it, was in her foolish, still debutante rationale, all hers. He’d so often before seen it exercised in her vague, demi-primrose wanderings from his house—which she would never leave. She’d used him, her own husband, but of pique. And now it was over or soon would be, and there was no blood on anyone’s hands. But in the core of the bedroom, between the sheets when he had got her there—if he did not strangle her, he would speak.
    A strange image, which he’d never had before, of not admitted to—and wasn’t frightened of. A judge could also comprehend the motives germane to the strangler, and why a man might reach for the voice-box instead of the knife. Lawyers like Borkan made a virtue of this kind of criminal understanding—and a large practice. Only Mirriam’s laugh wanted killing, and all it signified in her—her elegantly neurotic mockery of the edifices other people made. Even the children were sometimes seen to flinch from it with him, or for themselves—even David, who could after all see. But all the life-thrashing rest of her, her purebred compassions inherited the way royalty had its horses, they—and he—loved, in strands dark or light. Just so Chauncey, in his own way, hot under the façade of hypocrisy his wife had helped him with, might at times have wished—surely when he was offered the Court—to reach out and tear off that pince-nez which had allowed her to see so tolerantly double.
    There was the house, across one avenue and down one house. Bulwark beneath all other feelings, he felt the paterfamilias gratitude that all his family was safe abed there, from Anna at the top, in the quarters she preferred even though four flights above the basement kitchen, to the children’s floor below her, where slept the one child with his large affliction and the other with her small, winning frailties, and down again one floor—to his wife. There were bright lights on that floor. He glanced at his watch; not quite