The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (23 page)

The bell rang curtly, bringing an image of Jamie downstairs, grizzled hair, sandy face lively with impatience, feet shuffling in the way he had of always seeming to be treading water. His was a cathartic presence that comforted, not with calm but with the energy of an annoyance that barked peremptorily at the forces of ill: I won’t have this. I simply won’t have it. She walked the length of the room and leaned against the buzzer with a sigh of relief.

On her way back Paul caught at her hand. A blue smear of beard on his upper lip and on the round of flesh under his chin gave him the culprit look of a boy long since too old to be told to wash.

“Call her,” he said. “Promise.”

She detached her hand, even flexed her white, wrinkled palm to show that it was still empty, still free. “Yes,” she said, “I promise,” and went to open the door.

Jamie stumped past her, dropped his bag on the floor near Paul and stood looking down at him. He bent, flipped back Paul’s blankets and straightened up, still looking at him. Neither spoke.

She took up her post at the window again. Behind her the small, diagnostic clinkings went on, and she could hear the separate breathings that haunted a room at such times—the heavy intake of the patient, the quiet, judging respiration of the doctor, and her own breath, held. Then Jamie’s voice, brusque at the phone, ordered an ambulance. He joined her at the window, lit a cigarette and puffed at it angrily. Behind them Paul seemed to doze. A Good Humor wagon went slowly down the street, pricking at the heat with its feeble icicle of sound, but no children came from the elderly doorways and it puttered on out of sight.

“There it is,” said Jamie. He opened the window and motioned to the orderlies, who were drawing the stretcher from the ambulance.

“Pleurisy,” said Paul’s voice behind them. “Isn’t it?” The doctor, shutting his bag, did not answer. “Where you taking me?”

“Lenox Hill. You’ll need a tent.”

“Is that routine?”

The doctor reddened. “I told you yesterday. Your condition’s routine. But you seem to want to distinguish yourself by dying of it.”

Paul’s eyelids flickered. “I’m just like everyone else. I don’t want to die.” His voice tremored defiantly, like that of a man presenting doubtful credentials at a bank.

She put her hand on Jamie’s arm. He was glowering at Paul as if they were enemies. “Maybe not,” he said. “But if you don’t want to live I can’t help you.”

There was a knock and a shuffling at the door. She opened it. “This it?” said one of the men, and with a joint, hard glance at Paul they pointed the litter inside. They moved quickly, two vacant-faced nullities, one that chewed, one that did not, and when they had finished, Paul, neatly cocooned in gray, was a nullity too. But as they swung him toward the door his hand came imperiously out of the gray cowl, and they paused, holding him slung between them, two indifferent caryatids, smelling faintly of dishwater and iodoform.

“Mary!”

“Yes, Paul. Yes, I will. Yes!”

His hand touched his smile, saluted, and let them bear him off. It was the gesture of a hero borne wounded from the field—but on the winning side.

She turned to find Jamie watching her as if he saw something telltale, symptomatic, in her. “Going uptown?” he said. “I’ll drop you.”

“I better find the key.” She found it, in the pocket of the trousers collapsed on a chair. Holding it in her hand, she looked around the room, feeling that she must tidy it, but already its disorder had the subtle, irreparable flavor of desertion.
No one here by that name now. The policy has changed.
“How quick trouble is!” she murmured, and for a moment felt the thirty-year-old shock turn and reverberate in her heart. They left, locking the door behind them.

In the car he offered her a cigarette like a truce. “Will he be all right?” she asked.

He was silent until they had pulled away from the curb and were part of the traffic. “They’re hard to kill.”

“People with TB?”

He shook his head. “Sometimes I think I could go down the file in my office and tick them off. The ones who want to, and the ones who don’t.”

“Die, you mean?”

“No. Live.”

She ground out her cigarette. “Pretty subtle distinction.”

“No!” He kept his eyes on the traffic. “We’re all subject to the normal human damnations. We’re all ‘afraid to die.’” His voice was a faint, savage mimicry of Paul’s. “But these people make their whole lives a deathbed—and expect the rest of us to gather round.” He flicked her a glance. “And we do. We do.”

“I can think of a lot of books, a lot of art, came out of some of them.”

“No. Those were the ones who wanted to live most of all. Wasn’t Keats a lunger? And still able to make such an expression of interest in the world?” His voice softened. “No—that’s the crux of it—when you see that.”

“Oh, if Paul had found his talent …”

He grunted. “I oughtn’t have blown up at Paul yesterday—but the man in before him was an old patient, a graduate of Dachau—and gangrene. Long since turned him over to an orthopedist. Fitted with a hand four years ago. He sells soap—but he wants to go back to being a printer. Barged in full of excitement to show me his new hand. Untied my tie—and tied it again.”

He dug down on the gas pedal and they spurted ahead of the parallel traffic. “No, this is pre-Freud, something in the egg. Maybe we’ll get so we can calibrate it in the kindergarten. The ones who are willing, and the ones who will have to be dragged. Try it on your friends sometime.”

She looked out the window. The day was in full blare now, the air like an agar through which the outlines of people vibrated and doubled. “You’re pretty arbitrary.”

“No,” he said. “The egg is arbitrary.”

She was silent until they reached the university. “Anywhere along here.”

He let her out at a corner. She thanked him, leaning for a moment on the car door. “And the others, Jamie? What do we do about them?”

He patted her hand and gave it back to her. “What do you do? What do I do?” he shrugged. “Visit as usual,” he said, and tipped his hat and drove off.

She walked into a drugstore opposite the main building and ordered a sandwich and coffee. This place was a student haunt well known to her: three years ago she had been a visiting professor at the university. Even this late in the year it was packed with glossy boys and girls, talking and lolling with that combination of urgency and unpremeditated time for which they would be nostalgic the rest of their lives. She ate hurriedly, sitting among them with the sad anonymity of the outsider—a feeling as familiar to her home ground as here. With them, any age past their own was the outsider; any skin that had made its concessions or eye that had veined with memory was both beneath their notice and beyond it. One sat with them, skeletal at their feast, knowing something about them that they would be incapable of believing, that the skeleton, if challenged, would be unable to describe.

An hour later, however, seated on the platform in the immense white daze of the stadium, she felt closer to them than to her colleagues sitting on the dais with her in their annual empurplement of heat and dignity. So many of these were such dry sticks as collected wherever intellectual pursuits went on, kindling to occasions like this one with an inescapable air of having been rejected at better fires. Now the chancellor was making his address, and out into the air floated all the baccalaureate cognates—“war … goal … peace … aspiration … from our failing hands”—in a style that just skirted iambic pentameter, leaving one doubtful as to whether it ran from it or toward it. On his head he wore a little pillow of scarlet plush of whose heraldry she was ignorant, unless it signified an eminence that no longer bent the knee but rather must be protected from the jagged points of the stars. Now he spoke directly to the graduates, telling them, with the easy teleology of the safe, that certain wars were sacred, certain generations—perhaps theirs—divinely lost, and they lifted their faces toward him in a thousandfold ovoid innocence. If some among them saw privately that the emperor had no head but a pillow, ten years from now they would be less sure.

Hearing her own name, she raised her head, but bent it quickly, for her own citation had begun. “For achievement in the world of letters … for yeoman service to young candidates for that world …” The university had already approached her with a plan for its administering, as scholarships, the money she used for her own scattered benefices, but the citation, laying no indelicate emphasis on these, circled lavishly around her own work.
Timeo Danaos,
she thought, but the praise lapped her with shameful warmth.

At a benedictory signal from the chancellor she went forward, bending to receive the brilliant capelet on her shoulders. He shook her hand, turning it with practiced dismissal, so that for a moment she faced her audience, a speaker who was not to be allowed to speak.

As she returned to her seat, Sweet, the head of the department, shot out a hand as if it had been tapped with a mallet and beamed violently, making a noise like a bubbling kettle, but already his face was angled toward the next to be honored, as were all the young faces before her. Tipped and oval, a thousand eggs of unknown impulse, they waited, dressed in their rented black, as if the old could not quickly enough take the young into the dark seminary of responsibility. If she had been allowed to speak, she thought, what would she have told them? That life gave no baccalaureates? That there was always the visit to be paid as usual, always the telephone call to be made?

At last the ceremony was over. With one final fanfare it smashed and dispersed, scattering its components over the grounds like bright and drab bits of glass from which no further pattern could be expected that day. She walked slowly, through family groupings, toward the Faculty Club, where her presence had been requested at tea and where there was a phone.

In the booth she dialed the number of Helen’s office. It was not quite five o’clock.

“Manning and Coe, good afternoon.”

“May I speak to Miss Bonner, please?”

She gave her own name, spelling it out. After an interval a second voice spoke. “What is it, please?”

“Helen? Is this Miss Bonner?”

There was a pause, then the voice spoke again. “Miss Bonner is no longer connected with this office.”

It was close in the booth but she suddenly found herself shivering. “Can you tell me where I can reach her?”

Again the voice waited. “No,” it said finally. “I’m sorry—but I cannot.”

She drew a long breath. “If she—gets in touch with you, perhaps you’d give her a message?”

“What is the message.” It was less a question than a statement.

“I’m calling for my nephew, Paul Ponthus. He is seriously ill in Lenox Hill Hospital. He would like to get in touch with her.”

Over the wire she could hear the breathing of the other woman. She waited. “Yes,” the voice said, and its weary inflection made her certain. “I’ll see that she gets the message. If she calls. But I doubt if she will call.”

When she left the booth she was still shivering. She hadn’t seen Helen in over a year. But she was good at voices, good at inflections. The second voice had been Helen’s.

In the Faculty Parlor she held herself apart from the chattering groups, drank two cups of hot tea and took a third to a seat in a corner. I caught a chill, she told herself, and knew that she had not. Most of us are such drifters, she thought, leaving our fates to erosion, our amputations to death and accident. When we see someone his own surgeon, we are filled with awe.

Through an open window at her side she heard children playing outside the chapel gates, exchanging the familiar twilight calls: “Where are You?” … “I’m anyplace, where are You?” The cries rose gawkily, the sound of viols played by amateurs for whom the opulent instrument was yet too much. For an insistent moment she wished herself back there with them, with the sun going down in a clash of skates. Not to be here in his tea-colored room where the old condescendingly relaxed with the young, and the young were so ruddy and unaware of how powerfully they could condescend to the old. Not to be sitting here, an elderly voyeur, holding in my lap, like knitting, the severed nerve ends of two lives. But not quite yet the voyeur. There is still the visit to be made.

Someone turned on the lights, the dusk at the window snapped to a sharper blue, and people, blinking in the orange brightness, plunged again into the rubble of talk. She looked down the room as one did at funerals, reunions, all the roll calls at which one took stock of the assessments of time. Brewster, that sorry sufferer from the worst of academic diseases, had retired into some cranky shade, taking with him his disappointment in himself. But Baldwin was gone too, the tall, bearded medievalist whose mind had been of such an opaline goodness that, staring into it, one almost saw striations of goodness that were one’s own.

“Felicitations! Felicitations!” Sweet teetered on his heels before her, his clasped hands cherishing his tweed belly. “How does it feel, eh? How does it feel?” Having founded a career on repetition, he was not one to desert it for lesser purposes. “But they’ll be wanting to meet you,” he added. “Come take your turn at the urn. Ha! Turn at the urn.”

He led her to the long table and installed her in front of the tea service. “Young chap you must meet,” he whispered. “Just back to the graduate school from the Army. Did some brilliant emendations on
The Pearl
before he left. ’S matter of fact—if you should see your way clear—hm—he’d be one of our first candidates. Used to be a protégé of poor Baldwin.” She watched him shamble over to a group and detach a young man from it. She had always piqued him with her preference for Baldwin, a man of no great departmental or secular distinction. But the patronage of the dead, if useful, would not offend.

She looked at the boy Sweet was bringing toward her, a nice enough young man with his hair cut in that neat furze they all affected, his face still that printless mask which nature affected for them. For the first time she could not summon the friable tenderness, that perverse sense of her own youth whereby she seemed to herself really only a prisoner, caught in some gargantuan trap of flesh and years. For the first time she felt the great disinterest that was age. They keep coming, she thought, another and another. It’s time I stopped running toward them, poking at them for whatever it was I was seeking. Perhaps it’s time to admit what that was too—nothing much more than the bawling of an old cow with caked udders, lowing for a calf thirty years gone. I’ll let the college have the money, let them handle it any way they wish. I’ll take on Paul, for whom nothing can be done, and it will at least be better that the nothing be done by me than by Helen. People like Paul can be looked after quite easily out of duty; the agony comes only when they are looked after with hope.