Free New Yorkers by Hortense Calisher Page A

great-grandson?”
    “Yes,” said Olney’s voice behind him. “That was Geoffrey. I scarcely knew him. Hard to b’lieve that like Christ, he died for me.” He turned. “But that’s not the picture I was hunting—Proctor!” But Proctor had discreetly gone downstairs again. “Well, never mind.”
    But Mannix, at the door now, had to know it—which end to what story, which lost silhouette?
    “Who? Whose were you hunting?”
    “They had it taken at the railroad station, just the two of them,” Olney said, as if the Judge must know. “A barbarous custom. But it was often done.”
    The Judge saw them all falling through the water-curtain of the years—Luce, still a girl on her mount, and her grandson at Alamein, Mrs. Olney the wife, and the secretary singer leaving together perhaps for the country in their wide platter hats—even the whole ménage of this house in a dogcart à la Harper’s Weekly, with the father-in-law-progenitor in the center at the reins, his neck ruffed like a sunflower’s as in the Nast cartoon. Then the door shut and he was standing outside on the steps in a steel-blue cold, the touch of his friend’s dry fingers still in his gloveless palm, in his ears Olney’s whisper, their last salute as he fled the drafts of the vestibule. “A picture of Julian. My brother Julian. And the substitute.”
    It was a quarter of three. He put on the gloves and started walking. As he turned north, he caught a glimpse, through a curtain still awry, of the wicker chair in the window, its sidepockets stuffed with reading matter, perhaps some of the New York Reports.
    His steps rang exhilarated on the pavement; the city, solitary under its brindled welkin, was most his now, the breathless cold of its best season his element. Those curtains the lady had so admired were still eighteen blocks away, and the cold needled at the thin soles of his dress shoes, but if a lost taxi had passed him, out of The Flying Dutchman at this hour and on its way to Brooklyn, he wouldn’t have hailed it. As a boy he had often contrarily slogged his way home on foot in the worst weather, the bus fare burning meanwhile in his pocket, a bet he was sure to win.
    He passed a house on a northeast corner, a white marble balustrade; in those days it had been as high as his head. All one winter, his ninth, he’d rounded it on his way to old Basch the ear doctor, to have his bad right one lanced, the first year he’d been allowed to cross the city alone without nurse or mother. Even now, when he flashed by here in a cab, it was still old Basch’s corner, the white mansion on it anonymous still, it being the balustrade that counted, memory floating a Piranesi still only that high. Though he himself now resided here on the “upper East Side,” the phrase and the environs sometimes still had their early dream quality, half villainous too. So it had appeared in his father’s conversations with the other elders—a mysterious stronghold, more than of Gentiles, of other morals and manners too and of course money, to which the old West Side families and their imitative mansions, the Ochses, the Meinhardts, the Littauers, the Mendeses—had themselves at last deserted. These currents were as strong as any that washed the city’s extension, on far Montauk.
    Here was Seventy-ninth Street, one of the old Astor places, wasn’t it, or some other old fur peddler of the seventh-grade civics books, and here behind its balustrade a solitary rose of Sharon bush, left over from what new-century-green landscaping? Gaunt now, but bridging all the summers of his youth, the bush bloomed of a summer still. Such lore was what made a bred New Yorker, slum or upper, refuse even to sneer at those ten-twent’-thirt’-year migrants who presumed to know his city in a parade of restaurants, and who lived here, as they said—now.
    His ears were as cozy as a child’s in Olney’s earmuffs. Above the park the heavens were as widening a scroll as on that wintry