The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (37 page)

“Now look here, Hattie …” said her father. He brought his cup to the table and sat down, sighing. Suave after-dinner raconteur, he was completely lacking in the vocabulary of dissension. Time after time, Hester had watched his superior verbal elegancies falter and dry up before the thrust of his wife’s homely tongue.

“They’ve never wanted for anything so far,” he said. “And neither have you.”

Mrs. Elkin’s lips tightened. Large-boned, calmly moving, she had few fussy mannerisms; it was only her voice that fiddled. “Time they realized their father isn’t getting any younger.”

In the silence, the percolator chortled on the stove. The cup shook in her father’s veined hand, and a drop fell on the waxy linen of his cuff, near the lion-headed cuff link. He set the cup carefully down.

Mrs. Elkin’s cheekbones and eyelids reddened. It was known that she lived among dreamers who could be educated for the worst only by her savage ability to get under the skins of those she loved and must awaken; this was why she was compelled first to tear down the self-deceptive veils with which they wreathed themselves and only afterwards could poultice up their wounds with love—with the tray of food brought to the banished boy, the party dress ironed to perfection for the girl who had given up going. All this was known, and now contemplated.

“Joe …” said Mrs. Elkin.

Raising his head, Mr. Elkin took off his noseglasses and rubbed at the inflamed prints on either side of his nose. The luxuriant up-twirl of his dated moustache looked suddenly too jaunty for his exposed face. He slid the glasses into their case, which popped shut with a snap, and looked at his wife. “For God’s sake, Hattie, take that damn
thing
off your head!”

Hester, chewing a soda cracker, heard the sound twice: the dry champing heard by their ears, at the same time magnified in her head. Wishing that she might melt from the room, carrying her dislocation with her, she started to tiptoe from the table.

“Come on back now, and finish your supper,” said her father, pleading, anxious as always to deny the ugly breach, to cover it over with the kindness that bled from him steadily, that he could never learn not to expect in return.

“I’m sleepy.” With the word, sleep fell on her like a blow. Seeing herself already in a mound of blankets, folded impervious in her own arms until tomorrow, she turned away, down the hall to the haven of her room.

She was halfway into the darkened room before she felt the alteration in it. Thinking that some of the furniture must be ranged along the walls, she moved confidently toward the island of the bed. Her body passed through its image with the ease of fingers passing through a locket. A moving reflection from the headlights of a car going by in the street below traveled up one wall, trembled watery on the ceiling, and swept down the other wall, leaving a scene fanned into an instant’s being, and gone. There was nothing in the room.

She turned and ran back down the hall, cracking a knee against chairs stacked one-over-one, as in restaurants in the early morning. Lumpily shrouded barriers extended all along the walls. She felt down them, hunting a cream-colored bed with insets of caning, the surely discoverable scallop-shape of a mirror, the bureau with bow-front swagged in wooden roses, in a pattern that was like a silly friend.

Holding onto the bruised knee, she limped back to the kitchen and confronted her mother. “Where’s all my room?” she said.

“What?” asked her father, puzzled.

“Oh, I meant to tell you,” answered her mother, composedly. “You’re to sleep in Grandma’s old room. Your nightgown’s there on the bed.”

“But where’s my furniture?”

“You’re to have Grandma’s old set. You know that. How many bedrooms do you think we’ll have, in the new place!”

“What have you done with the child’s things!” Mr. Elkin’s face was already shrunken with a warding-off of the answer.

Mrs. Elkin hesitated, but only to trim a note of triumph. “I—sold them.”

“I might know you’d start dramatizing,” he said. “There’s no need to act as if we were down to our last penny.”

“Are we?” Hester saw it, copper-bright and final, in the linted seam of his pocket.

For answer, he pulled her onto his lap. She perched there awkwardly, conscious of her gangling legs, but savoring the old position of comfort. “Almost forgot what I brought you from downtown,” he said, fumbling in the pocket and bringing out two objects. “New compass for Kinny,” he said, laying it on the table. “And this—for you.” In his palm, he held a tiny, round vanity-case of translucent, rosy enamel and painted flowers, its cover fitted with a golden latch.

“Fellow brought it in the office,” he mumbled.

Mrs. Elkin, for whom the extras of life had a touch of the dissolute, turned her head aside.

Hester, warming the pink gift in her hand, stood up between them, in the gap between her mother, immovable on her plateau of the practical, and her father, wavering curator of intangibles he could assert but not protect. All this was known, yet there was never a way to say it. She aligned her free hand on his shoulder. “I wonder what I would have looked like,” she said in a hard voice, “if you had not married her.” Without waiting for an answer to what was not after all a question, she left the kitchen again.

In the doorway of her room, she stopped, waiting until she could half-see in the darkness. The nude walls poured from ceiling to floor, regarding her. Refracted in her mind, she saw the room as it had been, its objects spaced with the exact ruler of remembrance but already blurred with the double-edge of the past. Wading carefully into its center, she set the gift down on the bare floor. She knelt over it a moment. Then she walked out and closed the door.

In her grandmother’s room, she flipped the light switch on and off just long enough to see the odd note of her own sprigged flannel gown on the huge bed. The room, shrouded in dust-covers since its owner’s death, had the reserve of disuse. Ordinarily Hester would have tried the locks of the trunks which held the vestees of
broderie anglaise
and the threadlace shawls, and run a scuttling finger through bureau drawers still full of passementerie rejected by the raiding relatives six months ago. Tonight, she had begun to understand the mechanics of desecration. She stepped out of her clothes and into the nightdress, feeling as strange here as on the one night she had spent in the hospital. Crouched down under the comforter, she gripped her ankles with her hands. Burrowing her head into the blackness between her knees, listening to the purling of her own breath, she slept.

Sometime during the night she woke, her heart hammering up from a dream in which two hands, smooth, anonymous and huge, emerging wrist upward from mist, wrestled with one another, the great fingers twining in silent, marble struggle. From beneath a coverlet of stone, she waited for the mushrooming spaces of the dream to settle and ebb. Through the open door of the bathroom connecting with her parents’ bedroom, she heard their voices, locked and vying.

“No!” said her mother, in a whisper as long-drawn as a scream. “I won’t let you have it. What should be kept for your own children. To let it go down the family drain, like all the rest.”

“By God,” said her father’s voice, “how would you have it, except for me? How many women are there who can buy ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock out of their household allowance?”

“Sixteen years,” said her mother, still in that shuddering whisper. “Licking their backsides. Being the
Ausländer.
Being the responsible one. Carrying the bedpans to your mother, so your sisters could visit, and drink cream. … And the miles and miles of fine words, of fine
feelings
that the Elkins have such a talent for—as long as someone else underwrites them … Someone crass—like me.”

“No one asked you to martyr yourself. Who do you think I work for, if not for you and the children?”

“For anyone who gets to you first with a few cheap words to make you feel big Ike. For anyone who will say ‘dear Joe.’”

“Now listen, Hattie—”

“You corrupt people,” said her mother, her voice rising. “Because you are too weak to refuse them.”

“For the last time …”

“No!” said her mother. “Not this time,” the words pulling from her as if she spun them one by one from a pit of resolve. “Not if you go down on your knees.”

“God, what kind of woman are you, to make a man abase himself so? Over
money
,” said her father, his voice ratchety and breathy.

“Family of leeches, leeches,” intoned her mother. “Sister Flora’s husband can’t get a job in anyone else’s business, but dear Joe will give him one. Sister Mamie can’t live with her rotter of a husband, but she can talk about his aristocratic Leesburg connections, as long as dear Joe will help her out. And the bookkeeper you won’t accuse of stealing from you, because he is your sister-in-law’s brother. Even your brother’s widow, that low Irish, complaining about the settlement you gave her. What was he but a shoe salesman until he brought her from Chicago, and dear Joe gave him the factory to manage. Fine manager.”

“Leave the dead alone!” Her father’s voice had an empty sound. There was a pause, in which the edges of silence rubbed together.

“Ask the dead for your collateral.”

From beneath the stone coverlet, Hester heard that last, faceless word sink into the quiet. After a time, someone shut the connecting door.

In the hollow of the bed, the dream waited to grow again. With an effort, she pushed up the rim of stone, and slipped out of bed. Dragging after her the comforter, suddenly light and threatless in her hand, she felt her way down the corridor to Kinny’s room. Always in a state of embattled flux, even packing day had scarcely dislodged it from the norm, and its shadows had the clutter of homeliness.

She sat on the edge of his bed and drew the comforter around her, nestling toward him, feeling him warm and insensate beside her, smelling of boy-sweat and grubbiness, and infinitely removed. From behind them, the moiling quarrel between her parents pierced through her, past her, into the world beyond. All of it had been known, but she could now see, as never before, the exact angle of its interception. On the one side stood her mother, the denying one, the unraveler of other people’s façades, but resolute and forceful by her very lack of some dimension; on the other side stood her father, made weak by his awareness of others, carrying like a phylactery the burden of his kindliness. And flawed with their difference, she felt herself falling endlessly, soundlessly, in the gulf between.

On Kinny’s shoulder, rounded in sleep, a lozenge of light wavered. She put out her hand hopefully, but she had lost the trick of playing with such semblances. She tried to cry, but could not summon that childish scald. Though she could not name the bird now hovering, she knew its nature. Slowly the bird descended, and chose. She began to weep the sparse, grudging tears of the grown.

S
UNDAY WAS THE DAY
you hung around listening to the echoes of yourself. In the fat silences after dinner, everyone hovered, holding on to the dwindling thread of yesterday’s routine, wretchedly waiting to join it to that of tomorrow. Outside, the soft tearing sound of the traffic rushed people to innumerable delights and conclusions; inside the ticking room anticipation swelled like a bell that was never sounded. Laved, in fresh clothes, the body thudded, poised for its adventure, until the sharp definitive click of the lamps slid the day down from the hope of change into the pigeonhole of reality.

For all, for everyone except his father. For him, Sunday was a kind of justification, whose rest he took in the biblical sense, a patriarch relaxing superbly from converse into the sleep where he lay now, the mock-fierce mustache stirred by the breath from the hidden kindly mouth, the delicately made spatted ankles, out of another era, crossed sideways on the sofa.

If he moved now, his father would stir irritably, muttering “Eh? Where’re you going now? Can’t you spend a day with your family?” for, to his almost tribal sense of family, outside interests were always to be secondary, and—with the dwindling of his own family contemporaries by death—the attainment of adulthood in his children and their increasing focus outside the home seemed to induce in him a pathetic rage, almost as if over a breach of allegiance.

If wholly awakened now, he would rise to potter testily with his cigar, roughing the newspapers back into coherence with mutterings against the disorderliness of the rest of the family, or, if fate provided an attentive Sunday visitor, settling benignly again into the anecdotes that eructated like bubbles from the ferment of his memory. “Salesman’s talk,” his mother called it, for to her his father’s expansiveness, always a continual social embarrassment to her aloofness, had become even more of a reminder that his father was really an old man now, that the long gap of age between them would never again be bridged. His father was old enough to be his grandfather—had the gap between his father and himself never really been bridged at all because of this alone, he wondered? Or was it because his father belonged to the last outpost of a generation which regarded its children as the final insignia of a full life, perhaps, but always as extensions of its own identity, interposing between them and it a wall of glass, through which the pattern of daily intimacies might be filtered, but through which the self-contained globe of a child’s private world was forever inadmissible?

Over and above the flood of real “goods” that his father sold twinklingly, unfailingly, in the backslapping camaraderie of business, his father
was
a salesman, he thought—a salesman of the past. Rootless though the family had long been, in the shifting way of the apartment dweller, because of his father they had continued to live as if they still had attics and cellars, their closets and rooms crammed with the droppings of generations, the yellowed inanimates that had pitilessly survived the transient fingerprints of the flesh. When he, his son, had looked about him at the mass of young men at college with him, he had felt that, compared to his own, their backgrounds were as truncated, as flat, as their tidy one-step-above hire-purchase homes, where a family picture was an anachronism that must not mar the current scheme, where the old and worn must immediately be slip-covered with the new. And it had seemed to him then, that although he had never had the permanence of a homestead, of the landed people, he was rooted, he had been nourished, in the rich compost of his father’s reminiscence.