New Yorkers by Hortense Calisher Page A

twenty after three. She was waiting up for him, as promised. Except for a dim permanence of hall light, the rest of the house was dark.
    He crossed the avenue, passed the gnarled side wall of the Ralston houses, whose doors were all on the avenue side, and stopped in front of his own. Behind it, to the rear and above, the water tower still loomed. His house still had its high stoop which led into the parlor-floor level in the old-fashioned way. There were the curtains—taken from an attic stock of them bought with the house, which Anna washed and laid away again yearly—and still veiling the windows of one and a half times the usual frontage, which Mendes had supplied for all these thrifty, château habits. Through their ancient netting, which by day caught the south sun and drew it inward a little more yellowed than it came, he could see that elusive underlay which strangers saw. A vague claret-and-water light came from lamps invisible. Chairs and tables were blotted, in a furnishment which needed forms moving between to identify them further, but nobody was downstairs now. Because he knew where the stairwell was, he could see the twinkle, far above, of a small, prism-hung light. The young Mendeses had had no extra money for chandeliers, or for the cushioned grossities of their era. But could the lady of the earrings, or any stranger, see the fine French touches with which the present mistress had reset old rooms already proportioned for music? On the fringe of his vision, something made him turn aside. A lone car sat at the curb, in front of his stoop. Exhausted at last, he averted his eyes from it, climbed his steps and let himself in. If she could only lie. If she could only lie.
    At once, with an animal motion, he closed the street door behind him, to shut out—though the block was deep in its reserved slumbers—all that other audience. From the long ell of his wife’s bedroom just off the first landing at the top of the stairs, a single, singular voice was haranguing, behind a closed door even now. The doors in his house were heavy ones, to normal sound. But this sound went on in arcs, at an even height of passion or altercation which he had never before heard that voice describe. His wife’s voice discharged steadily, at gasped intervals, like the nasal anguish of a dog injured or pursuing at the height.
    In a flight which had no memory of itself, he found himself on the landing. He was held there by the sound of a man’s laboring answer, shameless and deep, no words in it at all. He put his hand on the doorknob, must have crossed to it, then dropped the hand. At that moment he heard a slight, sharp crack, like the spit of a palm on a cheekbone. Gunshot. Gunshot. From a gun he knew well. Then, from the room’s shorter ell, which led to his own room, a soft shrilling came, and stopped, as if his wife had made an end of lament—or of sex.
    How slowly, quickly, he burst through the door.
    At first he thought it was only passion which confronted him—that this was all. His wife was clasped by the man, from behind. He must have just caught her. The big man held her arched, falling weight as he himself could never have done, the man’s great fists clenched and guiltless under her breast. He knew that already. All of her, wide-open eyes, stretched mouth, black-red bubbling over that throat and breast, was turned toward her husband—faced him.
    “Mirriam. Ah-rr God.” He felt the worst, the bottomless, a sexual deprivation which must last forever, the truth which couldn’t lie.
    Above her, the man’s big blurred head shook itself sideways, lips smirched back from the teeth as if to a god they must both understand.
    They got her to the chaise, the Judge’s empty hands crooked under her, only guiding, at her hair, at the throat still intact, at her wrist. How quickly she had gone, leaving this behind her. The wound was—impersonal.
    “A doctor!” he said nevertheless, his hand on the phone near the