The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (29 page)

But I still yearned sometimes, and wondered.
Did
she go back to Roanoke? I tried hard as I could to recollect whether there had ever been talk of grape arbors on Fox Road in Roanoke—in the tales that had come out of the peach jars. There had been damson, I knew, and elderberry. Damson too sour for you folks, and all the berries goes to the wine. Had she ever said there were grapes? I couldn’t remember, though every now and again for years I tried. Had she sent them from there, or from Harlem? I knew well enough what the box meant, though, same as my father had. It meant pure spontaneity, and love.

Later on, years later when I was teaching in college, there was a girl who looked so much like May-ry—her eyes and that brow—that I had all I could do not to go up and speak to her, ask her who was her mother. Of course I couldn’t. How could I be sure, these days, of terms that would be pleasing to her? Besides, I never knew May-ry’s last name—or Somus’s. That was the way it was, in those days. So I’ll never know for sure whether Somus did marry May-ry and she got emancipated, at least enough to work for Northerners, and send that girl on to college. Or whether, by now, she’s only been emancipated as far as heaven. If so, I hope she has the dress she wants, and maybe even a little snifter after dinner—and I’m purely sorry I ever was mean enough to insinuate that heaven might be anything else. People should be able to get freed without having to be perfect for it beforehand. Maybe even Somus knows that now. I’m even big-hearted enough to hope that he’s with her, either here or there, and has been all along. She’d never be happy without him, so he must be. For if anything had gone wrong, she’d always know whom to come to. And it’s been a long time. It’s been thirty years now, and she hasn’t come back yet.

O
N AN AFTERNOON LATE
in the Indian summer of 1918, on the lawn of the house from which the Elkin family was returning to the city the next day, a garden party was ending, and the talk there was all of the war, which was ending too. But inside the house—in a room called the “music” room because it held chairs in which no one could settle, a piano on which no one played, and a broken guitar slanted in a corner like a stricken figure—the Elkin child, Hester, lay on the floor, wishing that the war would never end and that a little old couple called the Katzes had never come to the party at all.

Outside, in the pink, operatic light, all the town guests, most of them Mr. Elkin’s elderly retainers, had just gone, looking almost rakish out of their city serge, in the foulards, pongees, and sere straws they had thought proper to the occasion. Her father, who was the head of the family and of the business which supported it, attracted retainers—as her mother often said—as if he were royalty. Even when they were no kin and useless to the point of impossibility, like old Mr. Katz, they swam knowingly toward him out of the sea of incompetents, and he kept them on, out of sympathy, some vanity, and an utter lack of the executive violence necessary to have off with their heads.

Today, all of them had eaten greedily of cakes whose scarce ingredients had been so happily procured, had partaken reverently of Mr. Elkin’s claret—meanwhile chattering thinly of what the end of the war boom might do to such claret-consuming incomes as the one which maintained them—and ancient relatives whom Hester had never before seen out of chairs had sat daringly on the grass. Toward the end of the party, Mr. Katz (thought of by Hester as her Mr. Katz), who had drunk no claret, had nevertheless been found sitting on the grass too, dazedly preoccupied in wrapping remnants of cake and ice cream, plates and all, in some napkins and a length of string, yards of which projected from a ball in his pants pocket and coiled recklessly in his lap. He and his wife had just gone, gathered up and reassembled by Miss Lil, Mr. Elkin’s forelady, a tall old woman with dead-black hair and a face like a white Jordan almond, who had shepherded them into a taxi, flapped her draperies officiously over their humbled, retreating backs, and climbed in after them with a great show of agility, as one whose competence age had not affected.

Outside the window now, Hester’s mother and Mr. Elkin’s sisters, Aunt Mamie and Aunt Flora, clinked and murmured over retrospective cups of coffee. The aunts, as per custom, had come out from the city the night before, to “help” in their peculiar way—Flora to check interminably on Mrs. Elkin: “What you have to pay for this chicken, your butter, these berries, Hattie?” and to cap each of her sister-in-law’s responses with some triumphantly cawed instance of her own shrewdness in such matters. Mamie would clog the air with vague recipes out of their Southern girlhood, recipes which she seemed to think had an extra and regional delicacy either because these scorned Yankee exactitude for “a pinch” of this and “a piece the size of a walnut” of that, or had some little trick she could never quite recall—“a wild geranium leaf, I think it was”—or had no pertinence whatever to the occasion at hand—like okra soup, when the question was afternoon tea. In addition, both had to squelch any assumption on the part of the maid that they might be poor relations, and this they did by handily assuming any of Mrs. Elkin’s duties which were merely verbal, and by their keenly critical acceptance of service at one magpie sit-down snack after another.

“Good coffee,” said Flora.

“The last of the Mocha Joe got from his importer friend,” said Hester’s mother. It was in the nature of things that Flora’s remark was tinctured with disapproval, and Mrs. Elkin’s with a hint of scarcities to come.

“I mustn’t eat another thing,” added her mother. “Kozak says I’m not to gain another ounce beforehand. Did you know—I ate a pound and a half of Seckel pears the night before Hester was born!”

“No wonder she’s so greenish,” said Mamie’s pecking voice.

“I know, I know,” said her mother. “The summer hasn’t done a thing for her. Autointoxication, Kozak says. He thinks I ought to put her on a farm, let her get built up. I thought maybe next spring, when the time comes. Or afterwards.”

Hester inched closer to the window. The family had made the transition from Manhattan to White Plains very late this summer, because of that ailing of Mrs. Elkin’s which Hester knew to be connected with the impending birth of a baby. She had guessed this, just as she had long ago concluded that what her parents really wanted, and what they must have wanted her to be, was a boy. To the aunts, and Mr. Elkin’s brothers, all girls had been born. At fifty, Mr. Elkin had produced Hester, last in a line of six girl first cousins, the other five of whom—Isabelle, Lucille, Jessamine, Gertrude, and Caroline—were sitting in their own group on the lawn now. All of these were flamboyantly handsome young women, to whom the nine-year-old Hester had never once been likened except, ruefully, in the matter of sex. If the women in her family (as, possibly, in the world) seemed to be of peculiarly dominant natures, it might be because they must never admit to a value somewhat lowered because there were so many of them.

“I’ve set my foot down with Joe,” said Mrs. Elkin. A cup rang decisively in a saucer. “We’re not going to take on this place another summer, with the war ending, and nobody knowing what business will do. Now he’s even talking about a trained nurse, instead of a practical. When we should be cutting down—all along the line.”

“My brother’s extravagances are never for himself,” said Flora.

“No,” said Mrs. Elkin. “No,
indeed.
”

“The way he lets people run on at the factory!” Mamie put in hastily. “A place that size, without a proper chemist! But he lets that Lil, who I remember when she was nothing but the head girl … and now she won’t even tell Joe himself the formulas!”

Oakley and Company, as Mr. Elkin’s business was known, were wholesale purveyors of finely milled hand soaps, individually wrapped in paper printed with testimonials so genteel, so familiar to the devoted users, and in such fine type, that these were rarely read. In addition they had several lines of talcums and toilet water—old-fashioned essences of lilac, rose, coreopsis, lily of the valley, and violet, favored mostly by that trade which had once been carriage: gentlemen whose tastes had retired with their incomes, and
grandes dames
living in rooms already overheated with the floral essence of the past. As for the company itself—much of its staff was as old as its clientele.

“And Katz!” said Flora. “My God, Hattie, isn’t Joe going to do something about Katz? It’s a wonder the firm isn’t a laughingstock to the trade!”

“I keep telling him,” said Mrs. Elkin. “I had it out with him that awful day we came down here.”

That day, the trip had been made, as usual, in a touring car hired with driver for the occasion, and as usual it had been a caravan of hampers, floating motor veils, and hindsight ejaculations. At the last minute, the two aunts had arrived uninvited, with a bland coincidence that had overreached itself in their already having donned veils. At that minute which inevitably followed the very last one, “old man Katz,” the messenger boy attached to Mr. Elkin’s office, had arrived with a folder of money, checks, and notes that he seemed unwilling to surrender, standing there with an amnesia to which he was subject at times so apparent on his bewildered, age-spotted face that they had been afraid to leave him there on the street, and had wedged him in, too. Hester, squeezed in next to him for the long ride, sneaking looks at his shaky, almost luminous hands with the blue veins and the brown cemetery spots, had felt that he and she were kin. He and she were the worthless people, whom the practical people could not forever afford.

With her father, she and Katz were safe. Mr. Elkin, when pressed for an indulgence, might counter, “Money doesn’t grow on trees, daughter!” but this was a joke promptly nullified by the indulgence itself, provoking only a delightful image of a tree from which, in ropes and ribbons and spangles, money did somehow hang. But from her mother’s arpeggios of background complaint came another portent, tied to the lurking references to the baby, and focused not so much on living expenses as on the particular objects of Mr. Elkin’s headstrong altruism—of which Hester felt herself to be one. For with her father, one had only to be. But with Mrs. Elkin, some businesslike reason for being was expected. With her there was a status to be earned, either by a displayable beauty, like that of those cousins to whom Hester was never compared, or by some competence, of which, in company with Katz, Hester had only the lack. Lately, the predicted end of the war and the arrival of the baby had joined in Hester’s mind as the probable end of a halcyon time, after which expenses like herself and Katz, unless they could justify themselves in the meantime, might not be rescuable, even by her father, from her mother’s measurement of worth. All that uneasy summer she had listened with concern to the fluctuating dinner-table destiny of Katz, appraising it silently, feeling that it involved her own.

Today though, at the party’s beginning, Mrs. Elkin had sat in its midst in a peaceful mood that had thickened upon her of late, letting others do the bothering, with a
laissez faire
that was for her, and for them all, the ultimate extravagance. With the most lavish, reassuring touch of all—she had invited Mr. and Mrs. Katz.

Therefore, when Mr. and Mrs. Katz had trotted up the path this afternoon, it had at first seemed an augury of the best for them and Hester also, for expendables everywhere. For, judged by the least worldly of standards, the market value of the Katzes must be doubtful indeed. With matching white wool hair, stunted twin statures of something under five feet each, and flat, cartilaginous faces nodding, blanched and puzzled, over their hard Sunday black, they looked like two elderly lambs, somewhere between full size and mantelpiece. Lambs, moreover, between whom there must be a preliminary agreement that Mr. Katz was to do the gamboling for the family, and Mrs. Katz the baaing. While Mr. Katz, whisking back and forth between the guests, his hands tremulous with cake plates and cups, seemed determined to prove that his rickety legs and understanding were still capable of infinite errands, Mrs. Katz plodded from the edge of one group to another, looking up at the faces of the conversationalists until she caught a declarative sentence, which she would thereupon confirm with a loud, assenting “Annnnh!” Watching them, Hester thought it cheering that two of such small wit had not only found each other, but managed to grow old. Later, watching her mother, as Mr. Katz was uncoiled from his string, wiped, and sped on his way, she had seen that her mother had not been cheered.

Now she stretched out an arm and scuffed the strings of the guitar, which let out a plangent sigh.

“Hester! Come out in the open air!”

Outside, clouds of motes gyrated in the lustrous, Indian heat. Her mother bent again over her embroidery hoop. Aunt Mamie was crocheting in nervous jerks, and Aunt Flora was stringing the bronze beads and jet passementerie with which she would later adorn her front. Near them, in a circlet of their own, the five cousins were doing no fancywork, but such was the twiddling of curls by ringed fingers, the fluttering of chiffon kerchiefs drooped from airy wrists, that one had almost an impression that they were.

Behind the casement Hester stuck out a wrist and shook it, but the effect was not the same. She picked up the guitar, hugging it to her like a doll, and walked outside. Standing near the older women, she listened to the ripple of the cousins, the stirred flounces, the round-robin lilt of “the Casino,” “the Island,” “the Turkey Trot,” that went from velvety head to head of those five who so resembled one another in their dark-fanned eyes, fair necks, and cheeks that curved with rose.

“Will you look at that hem line,” said her mother. “Half up from her knees again!” Hester sat down, looking at herself. One was to be built up, yet one’s hem lines were to stay the same. There was no pleasing them—the practical ones. Yet they had to be pleased.

She looked over at the cousins. They are a wreath, she thought. They are like a rosy wreath. They were as closed to her as if they had locked hands against her, meanwhile interchanging the soft passwords of their pet names—Belle, Cile, Jessy, Trudy, Lina.