Free New Yorkers by Hortense Calisher Page B

dusk when he and the chum had walked the floes on a lake drowning in its violet solitudes and snowy wastes, far across the steppes from the skyscrapers’ lights—and, item for the biographies, two park attendants had rescued from its seal-cold waters a future appellate justice, and Professor Abe Cohn. “Russian?,” his mother, who’d never before seen his chum, had managed to whisper, even into the steaming twin blankets, in which she had wrapped them both—a kind woman, not vile, only wanting her son to stay in his society. And her son, if he had enlarged the society, had certainly kept the principle.
    He was middle-class, of his particular proud race (and no one would ever make him ashamed of either), never servile to any of any race presumed to be above: him—never consciously unkind to those whom, race apart, he presumed to be below him—even dedicated professionally to be of service to them, but not from any sloppy liberalism of the heart. His mother had also bequeathed him her shortness; there was a strain of dwarfism in her family—kept concealed and when found out unmentionable—from which he supposed his six-foot father had saved him, stretching him by a counter effort of the genes to a half-inch or so under five. Her Simon was supposed to have inherited her quickness also. Even now he could not quite bear to be slow. He had had an only son’s obligation not to be. “You’re the champ.” But she hadn’t been an honest person, his mother; like many women of her sort, behind a soft, Israelite amplitude of breast she was a person of many fiddling pretenses and not quite majestic fears. If he himself had the absolute honesty required of a judge, he’d got it from his father, that sportsman-innocent of the business world whom only the florid finances of the era had kept better than solvent, who had bequeathed him honesty general and uncontested, like the fact of always having a dollar in pocket.
    There were only three more avenue-blocks now. The Judge took off the earmuffs. Kept the head warm maybe, but induced a simple herbalist style of thought which would never do by day.
    He stood quiet in numbing air already damp with a promise that came not to the eye but to the whole animal. He was well aware of that other guerrilla-haunted world of emotions, dissidences, opinions and temperaments which kept some men further apart from society than circumstances or money ever did. In that world too, he felt himself if not full-square at least somewhere near center, well within the balustrade.
    His glance swiveled past the high clouds and down again to buildings west and south, in the radius of those beacons the city allowed to be played on it from dreadnoughts in the river. All his early life, lucky in his place and temperament, beneath both he’d felt that such a city had to be stormed by every man. By day, he’d credited himself with no longer believing it. Curious how at an hour dampened to most sound, freed most of men’s atmosphere, the city rose again, in the dragons’ teeth sown in its dwellers forever, once more, even to the solitary, conquering rider, an audience.
    Three blocks on, he turned east, down his own cross street. Many times he’d walked toward many things down this street. Toward old Mendes’s death and the vast clearings-out and movings-in which had left the house tribally fair to both generations. Toward Ruth’s birth and the honeymoon closeness of those few after-months when all four of them had seemed to be fed on mother’s milk. Toward that sub-life of his children in some mythical belowstairs he became aware of only when it erupted into real accident. To the rackety phonograph evenings which sat on the old rooftop like paper hats—and to his own study, below all activity and behind it, calm and free as such cells were. Always, he walked toward the power of-his house. If the nature of this was biblical, it had taken a Christian to point that out to him—as was the habit of