The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (12 page)

Actually, the four dim rooms, curtainless except for the blinds which the landlord supplied—one yellow, one dark green to a window—had an almost incredible lack of traces of personal occupancy, even after one knew that the Hausers never thought of the place as anything but temporary. It was furnished with a bleak minimum of tables and chairs like those in hired halls. Mrs. Hauser had procured everything from a restaurant supply house, all except the beds, which were little more than cots, and wore hard white cotton spreads of the kind seen in hotels. Here, in the bedrooms, some of the second-hand surfaces were protected with doilies, on which a few European family photographs had been placed. Years later, when I was staying in the luxurious house of a family which had managed to keep on its servants in the old-fashioned way, stumbling inadvertently into the servants’ wing, one morning, I came upon a room that reminded me instantly of the Hausers’, although even its dresser had a homely clutter of tawdry jewelry, dime-store boxes, and letters.

Even so, when Werner and I hung around awhile in his room, we never sat on the drill-neat bed. Usually we sat on the floor and leaned back against the bed. Except for the times we did our homework together, we either just talked or exchanged the contents of our pockets, for it was the kind of house in which there was simply nothing to do. Once or twice we smoked cigarettes there, carefully airing the room and chewing soda-mints afterward. I supplied both the cigarettes and the soda-mints, since it was an understood thing that Werner never had any money of his own; the considerable work he did for his mother was “for the business.” The rows of cakes, frilled cookies, and tiny
quenelles
that we sometimes passed, going through the kitchen, were for the business too. I never got anything to eat there.

Usually, after we had been there a short while, Werner, wriggling his shoulders sheepishly, would say, “Let’s go up to your place,” or I would invite him up. I knew why Werner liked to be there, of course, why he could not keep from coming even after Mrs. Hauser had forbidden it. It may sound naïve to say so in this day and age, but we were an awfully happy family. We really were. And I never realized it more strongly than during the times I used to watch Werner Hauser up there.

I guess the best way I can explain the kind of family we were is to say that, although I was the only nonmusical one in a family that practically lived for music, I never felt criticized or left out. My father, although he tired quickly because of a shoulder broken when he was a boy and never properly healed, was the best musician, with faultless pitch and a concertmeister’s memory for repertoire. Nora played the cello with a beautiful tone, although she wouldn’t work for accuracy, and Carol could already play several wind instruments; it was a sight to watch that stringy kid of ten pursing her lips and worrying prissily about her “embouchure.” Both Luba and my mother had had excellent training in piano, and sang even better than they played, although Luba would never concede to my father that she occasionally flatted. My mother, contrarily, tended to sing sharp, which so fitted her mock-acid ways that my father made endless plays on words about it. “Someday,” he would add, striking his forehead with his fist, “I am going to find a woman who sings exactly in the middle; then I will steal the company’s payroll, and take her to live at The Breakers in Atlantic City!”

“Mir nix, dir nix,”
my mother would answer. “And what kind of music would be at The Breakers?”

“A string quartet,” Luba would shout, “with a visiting accordion for the weekends!” Then the three of them would pound each other in laughter over the latest “visiting accordion” who had been to our house. All kinds of people were attracted to our house, many of whom had no conception of the professional quality of the music they heard there, and were forever introducing a protégé whom they had touted beforehand. Whenever these turned out to be violinists who had never heard of the Beethoven Quartets, or pianists who had progressed as far as a bravura rendition of the
Revolutionary Etude,
our secret name for them was “a visiting accordion.” Not even Carol was ever rude to any of these though; the musical part of the evening simply ended rather earlier than usual, and dissolved into that welter of sociable eating and talking which we all loved.

When I say I wasn’t musical, I don’t mean I didn’t know music or love it—no one in that family could help it—I could reproduce it and identify it quite accurately in my head, but I just couldn’t make it with my hands or my voice. It had long ago been settled upon that I was the historian, the listener, the critic. “Ask Mr. Huneker here,” my father would say, pointing to me with a smile (or Mr. Gilman, or Mr. Downes, according to whatever commentator he had been reading). Sometimes, when in reading new music the group achieved a dissonance that harrowed him, he would turn on me: “We should all be like this one—Paganini today—Hoffman tomorrow—and all safe upstairs in the head.” But the teasing took me in; it never left me out. That’s what happened to Werner at our house. They took him in too.

We had our bad times of course. Often my father’s suppertime accounts of his day on Seventh Avenue, usually reported with a deft, comedian’s touch, turned to bitter invective, or were not forthcoming at all. Then we knew that the mood in which he regretted a life spent among values he despised had stolen over him, or else the money question was coming up again, and we ate in silence. Luba and my mother quarreled with the violence of people who differ and cannot live without one another; their cleavages and reunions followed a regular pattern, each stage of which pervaded the house as recognizably as what was simmering on the stove. My sister Nora, eighteen and beautiful, was having trouble with both these contingencies; each month, just before her monthly, she filled the house with a richly alternating brooding and hysteria that set us all to slamming doors and leaving the house. A saint couldn’t have lived with it. And Carol and I bickered, and had our pint-size troubles too.

I can see how we must have seemed to Werner though. No matter what was going on, our house had a kind of ruddiness and satisfaction about it. Partly its attraction was because there
was
always something going on. If anyone had asked me about the state of my innards in regard to my family, I guess I would have said that I felt full. Not full of life, or happiness, or riches, or any of those tiddly phrases. Just chock full. I would have said this, most likely, because, as I watched Werner hanging, reticent but dogged, to the edge of our family, watched him being stuffed by my mother, twitted by my father, saw him almost court being ignored by Nora and annoyed by Carol, I had the awful but persistent fancy that he must be absolutely hollow inside. Literally hollow, I mean. I could see them, his insides—as bleak as the apartment where his parents were either oppressively absent or oppressively around, and scattered with a few rag-tag doilies of feeling that had almost no reason to be there. There would be nothing inside him to make a feeling out of, unless it were the strong, tidal perfume of the goodies that were meant for the business.

One evening at the beginning of that summer, Werner was with us when my father scooped us all up and took us to the concert at the Stadium, only a few minutes’ walk from home. We went often to those concerts, although, as everyone knows, open-air music can rarely have the finish of the concert hall. But there is something infinitely arresting, almost pathetic, in music heard in the open air. It is not only the sight of thousands of ordinary faces, tranced and quiet in a celebration of the unreal. It is because the music, even while it is clogged and drowned now and then by the rusty noises of the world outside the wall, is not contaminated by them; even while it states that beauty and the world are irreconcilable, it persists in a frail suggestion that the beauty abides.

Werner, at his first concert, sat straight-backed on one of the straw mats my father had rented for us, taking in the fragments of talk milling around us, with the alertness of a person at a dinner who watches how his neighbor selects his silver. During the first half, when an ambulance siren, combined with the grinding of the trolleys on Amsterdam Avenue, clouded over a pianissimo, he winced carefully, like some of those around him. But during the second half, which ended with the Beethoven Fifth, when a dirigible stealing overhead drew a thousand faces cupped upward, Werner, staring straight ahead with a sleepy, drained look, did not join them.

As we all walked down the hill afterward, Carol began whistling the Andante. As she came to that wonderful breakthrough in the sixteenth measure, Werner took it up in a low, hesitant, but pure whistle, and completed it. Carol stopped whistling, her mouth open, and my father turned his head. No one said anything though, and we kept on walking down the hill. Suddenly Werner whistled again, the repetition of that theme, twenty-three bars from the end, when, instead of descending to the A flat, it rises at last to the G.

My father stopped in his tracks. “You play, Werner?”

Werner shook his head.

“Somebody plays at your house?”

“Nein,”
said Werner. I don’t think he realized that he had said it in German.

“How is it you know music?”

Werner rubbed his hand across his eyes. When he spoke, he sounded as if he were translating. “I did not know that I know it,” he said.

In the next few weeks Werner came with us almost every time we went. I didn’t know where he got the money, but he paid his own way. Once, when he hadn’t come to go with us, we met him afterward, loitering at the exit we usually took, and he joined us on the walk home. I think he must have been listening from outside the Stadium wall.

He always listened with a ravenous lack of preference. Once he turned to me at the intermission and said with awe, “I could hear them both together. The themes. At the
same
time.” When I spoke sophomorically of what I didn’t like, he used to look at me with pity, although at the end of a concert which closed with the “Venusberg,” he turned to me, bewildered, and said. “It
is
possible not to like it.” I laughed, but I did feel pretty comfortable with him just then. I always hated those triangles in the “Venusberg.”

Then, one time, he did not come around for over a week, and when I saw him in the street he was definitely avoiding me. I thought of asking why he was sore at me, but then I thought: The hell with it. Anyway, that Sunday morning, as my father and I started out for a walk on Riverside Drive, we met Werner and his mother in the elevator. Mrs. Hauser carried some packages and Werner had two large cartons which he had rested on the floor. It was a tight squeeze, but the two of us got in, and after the door closed my father succeeded in raising his hat to Mrs. Hauser, but got no acknowledgment. My father replaced his hat on his fan-shaped wedge of salt-and-pepper hair. He chewed his lips back and forth thoughtfully under his large, mournful nose, but said nothing. When the door opened, we had to get out first. They passed ahead of us quickly, but not before we heard what Mrs. Hauser muttered to Werner.
“Was hab’ ich gesagt?”
she said.
“Sie sind Juden!”

Anybody who knows Yiddish can understand quite a lot of German too. My father and I walked a long way that day, not on the upper Drive, where the Sunday strollers were, but on those little paths, punctuated with iron street lamps but with a weak hint of country lane about them, where the city petered out into the river. We walked along, not saying much of anything, all the way up to the lighthouse at Inspiration Point. Then we climbed the hill to Broadway, where my father stopped to buy some cold cuts and a cheese cake, and took the subway home. Once, when my father was paying my fare, he let his hand rest on my shoulder before he waved me ahead of him through the turnstile, and once he caught himself whistling something, looked at me quickly, and closed his mouth. I didn’t have a chance to recognize what he whistled.

We were at the table eating when the doorbell rang. Carol ran to answer it; she was the kind of kid who was always darting to answer the phone or the door, although it was almost never for her. She came back to the table and flounced into her seat.

“It’s Werner. He wants to see you. He won’t come in.”

I went to the door. He wasn’t lounging against the door frame, the way he usually did. He was standing a couple of paces away from it.

“Please come for a walk,” he said. He was looking at his shoes.

“Gee, whyn’t you come in?” I said. “I’m dead.”

“Please,” he said, “I want you please to come for a walk.”

I was practically finished eating anyway. I went back to the table, grabbed up a hard roll and some pastrami, and followed him downstairs.

Summer in the city affects me the same way as open air music. I guess it’s because both of them have such a hard time. Even when the evening breeze smells of nothing but hot brick, you get the feeling that people are carrying around leaves in their hearts. Werner and I walked down to our usual spot on the river, to a low stone wall, which we jumped, over to a little collection of bushes and some grass, on the other side. It was an open enough spot, but it reacted on us more or less like a private cave; we never said much of anything till we got there. This time it was up to Werner to speak. I had the sandwich, so I finished that.

The electric signs across the river on the Jersey side were already busy. Werner’s face was turned parallel with the river, so that it looked as if the sign that gave the time signal were paying out its letters right out of his mouth.
THE TIME IS NOW
… 8:01 … Ordinarily I would have called his attention to this effect and changed seats with him so he could see it happen to me, but I didn’t. The sign jazzed out something about salad oil, and then paid out another minute.

Werner turned his head. “You heard … this morning in the elevator?”

I nodded.

“Your father heard too?”

I nodded again.

He pressed his knuckles against his teeth. His words came through them with a chewed sound. “It is because they are servants,” he said.