The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (40 page)

Today the window held a few Flemish
genre
paintings in overpowering frames, and the interior was lifeless and dark. The plate glass gave him back a dusky astigmatic version of himself. He turned away. No one was coming down the long suave street; held there, gripped again by the drag of time draining away, he felt that no one would ever come. He waited, avoiding the knowledge of where he wanted to go. Time passes, he thought; perhaps one should go toward it. Far down the street, the thin line of the horizon was like a sealed eyelid waiting for him to lift it, to expose the huge wink of the future.

Turning on his heel, he walked slowly eastward down the long street, which grew more squalid with every step, with the inevitability of a declining curve on a graph. At Second Avenue he mounted the rickety stairs of the “El” and caught a train that was just winding its parabola into the station.

Jigging past the tenements in the settling dusk he watched the window scenes as they flicked by: a woman leaning over a sink, a man stretched out with his feet up, somnolent in a chair. Since childhood he had done this, hanging out from the tops of the buses on Fifth to catch a flash of a paneled drawing-room, a great brown wall of books, or people, muffled and vague behind a shimmering curtain; riding past in the veiled evening he had fondled these glimpses and enlarged upon them.

In this neighborhood he could now, because of his work, fill out the scenes to the last detail of mohair armchairs and cracked, calendared walls. He knew well the sameness of the life that went on behind those window lights that were so sterile and graceless from inside—the endless arias of family quarrels, and the blind grapplings of love. Even so, as he walked or rode along, each appearing lamp stood out like a lighthouse of warmth that drew him in his lonely role of beholder; each was an evocation of possibility.

At home now, their own lamps would be turned on soon for supper, and his father would rise, yawning, to go to the table, happy and complete in his belated role of paterfamilias if the family were all present, grumbling and swearing one of his strange oaths that were like no one else’s, if one of them were missing.
“Phantasmagoria!”
he would shout. “Where in God’s name does that boy find to go?” In the landscape of his mind he watched the image of his father collapse and dwindle with distance, heard the sonorous echo of his voice trickle and die; in his mind he pursued the image and the echo for a last minute, before he let them go.

At the last station, he got out. It was still a long way to Hester Street, and he walked the odd-angled asymmetric streets with a delaying step, remembering his first experience of them last year, when the heat of summer had been a great blunting hand pushing the people out of doors, the whole area had had the smell of a dying fruit, and his clothes had felt like a cage.

He stopped at last in front of the house. It must have rained recently down here. The carts and hagglers had deserted the block, leaving in the gutters pools that gave back the last light of the sky. A slate-colored breeze from the river blew brinily against the empty, peeling doorway.

He walked inside and put his hand on the doorknob. Over on the river the foghorns spoke, making over and over their slow mysterious statement. He had never been able to decipher it until now. It is the sound of waiting, he thought.
The sound of waiting.

Cupped in his hand, the oily doorknob spread under his palm as if he were touching a slowly widening smile. He knocked. He heard a light-chain being pulled on in the back room, and the high-heeled sound of footsteps coming toward the door. After the first compromise, he thought, all others follow.

Looking back through the open doorway, he saw the dome of the day melting downward irretrievably into the river. One by one, in the great pitted comb of the city, the evocative lights went on.

T
HE TRAIN CREAKED THROUGH
the soft, heat-promising morning like an elderly, ambulatory sofa. Nosing along, it pushed its corridor of paper-spattered floors and old plush seats through towns whose names—Crystal Run, Mamakating—were as soft as the morning, and whose dusty little central hearts—all livery stable, freight depot, and yard buildings with bricked-up windows and faded sides that said “Purina Chows”—were as down-at-the-heel as the train that strung them together.

Hester, feeling the rocking stir of the journey between her thighs, hanging her head out of the window with her face snubbed against the hot breeze, tried to seize and fix each picture as it passed. At fifteen, everything she watched and heard seemed like a footprint on the trail of some eventuality she rode to meet, which never resolved but filled her world with a verve of waiting.

Opposite her, her mother sat with the shuttered, conscious look she always assumed in public places. Today there was that added look Hester also knew well, that prim display of extra restraint her mother always wore in the presence of other Jews whose grosser features, voices, manners offended her sense of gentility all the more out of her resentful fear that she might be identified with them. Today the train rang with their mobile gestures, and at each station crowds of them got off—great-breasted, starched mothers trailing mincing children and shopping bags stuffed with food, gawky couples digging each other in the side with their elbows, girls in beach pajamas, already making the farthest use of their smiles and great, effulgent eyes. At each station, they were met by the battered Fords and wagons that serviced the farms which would accommodate them, where for a week or two they would litter the tight Catskill towns with their swooping gaiety and their weary, rapacious hope.

“Wild!” said Mrs. Elkin, sotto voce, pursing her mouth and tucking her chin in her neck. “Your hair and that getup! Always so wild.” Hester, injured, understood that the indictment was as much for the rest of the train as for herself. Each summer for the past three years, ever since Mr. Elkin’s business had been doing poorly and the family had been unable to afford the summer rental in Westchester, Mrs. Elkin had resisted the idea of Old Corner Farm, and each year she had given in, for they were still of a status which made it unthinkable that they would not leave New York for some part of the season. This year and last, they had not been able to manage it until September, with its lowered rates, but it would have been a confession of defeat for Mr. Elkin had he not been able to say during the week to casual business acquaintances, “Family’s up in the country. I go up weekends.” Once at the farm—although the guests there were of a somewhat different class from the people in this train, most of them arriving in their own cars and one or two with nursegirls for the children—Mrs. Elkin would hold herself aloof at first, bending over her embroidery hoop on the veranda, receiving the complimentary “What gorgeous work you do!” with a
moue
of distaste for the flamboyant word that was a hallmark of what she hated in her own race, politely refusing proffered rides to the village, finally settling the delicate choice of summer intimacy on some cowed spinster or recessive widow whom life had dampened to the necessary refinement. For Mrs. Elkin walked through the world swinging the twangy words “refined,” “refinement,” like a purifying censer before her.

Hester, roused momentarily from her dream of the towns, looked idly across at her mother’s neat navy-and-white version of the late-summer uniform of the unadventurous and the well bred. Under any hat, in any setting, her mother always looked enviably right, and her face, purged of those youthful exoticisms it once might well have had, had at last attained a welcomed anonymity, so that now it was like a medallion whose blurred handsomeness bore no denomination other than the patent, accessible one of “lady.” Recently, Hester had begun to doubt the very gentility of her mother’s exorcistic term itself, but she was still afraid to say so, to put a finger on this one of the many ambiguities that confronted her on every side. For nowadays it seemed to her that she was like someone forming a piece of crude statuary which had to be reshaped each day—that it was not her own character which was being formed but that she was putting together, from whatever clues people would let her have, the shifty, elusive character of the world.

“Summitville!” the conductor called, poking his head into the car.

Hester and her mother got off the train with a crowd of others. Their feet crunched in the cinders of the path. The shabby snake of the train moved forward through its rut in the checkerboard hills. Several men who had been leaning on battered Chevys ran forward, hawking persistently, but Mrs. Elkin shook her head. “There’s Mr. Smith!” She waved daintily at an old man standing beside a truck. They were repeat visitors. They were being met.

Mrs. Elkin climbed into the high seat and sat tight-elbowed between Mr. Smith and Hester, denying the dusty indignity of the truck. The Smiths, people with hard faces the color of snuff, made no concession to boarders other than clean lodging and massive food. Mr. Smith, whose conversation and clothing were equally gnarled, drove silently on. At the first sight of him, of old Mr. Smith, with his drooping scythe of mustache, Hester, in one jolt, had remembered everything from the summers before.

The farm they travelled toward lay in a valley off the road from Kerhonkson to Accord. The house, of weatherbeaten stone, was low and thick, like a blockhouse still retreating suspiciously behind a stockade long since gone; upstairs, beaverboard had partitioned it into many molasses-tinted rooms. In front of it would be the covered well, where the summer people made a ceremony of their dilettante thirst, the children forever sawing on the pulley, the grown-ups smacking their lips over the tonic water not drawn from pipes. Mornings, after breakfast, the city children gravitated to the barn with the indecipherable date over its lintel and stood silent watching the cows, hearing their soft droppings, smelling the fecund smell that was like the perspiration the earth made in moving. Afterward, Hester, usually alone, followed the path down to the point where the brown waters of Schoharie Creek, which featherstitched the countryside for miles, ran, darkly overhung, across a great fan of ledges holding in their center one deep, minnow-flecked pool, like a large hazel eye.

“There’s Miss Onderdonk’s!” Hester said suddenly. They were passing a small, square house that still preserved the printlike, economical look of order of old red brick houses, although its once-white window frames were weathered and shutterless, and berry bushes, advancing from the great thorny bower of them at the back, scraggled at the first-floor windows and scratched at the three stone steps that brinked the rough-cut patch of lawn. A collie, red-gold and white, lay on the top step. “There’s Margaret!” she added. “Oh, let’s go see them after lunch!”

A minute before, if asked, Hester could not have told the name of the dog, but now she remembered everything: Miss Onderdonk, deaf as her two white cats, which she seemed to prize for their affliction (saying often how it was related in some way to their blue eyes and stainless fur), and Miss Onderdonk’s parlor, with a peculiar, sooty darkness in its air that Hester had never seen anywhere else, as if shoe blacking had been mixed with it, or as if the only sources of light in it were the luminous reflections from the horsehair chairs. Two portraits faced you as you entered from the bare, poor wood of the kitchen; in fact, you had only to turn on your heel from the splintered drainboard or the match-cluttered oilstove to see them—Miss Onderdonk’s “great-greats”—staring nastily from their unlashed eyes, their pale faces and hands emerging from their needle-fine ruffles. The left one, the man, with a face so wide and full it must surely have been redder in life, kept his sneer directly on you, but the woman, her long chin resting in the ruffle, one forefinger and thumb pinching at the lush green velvet of her dress as if to draw it away, stared past you into the kitchen, at the bare drainboard and the broken-paned window above it.

Last year, Hester had spent much of her time “helping Miss Onderdonk,” partly because there was no one her own age at the farm with whom to while away the long afternoons, partly because Miss Onderdonk’s tasks were so different from anyone else’s, since she lived, as she said, “offen the land.” Miss Onderdonk was one of those deaf persons who do not chatter; her remarks hung singly, like aphorisms, in Hester’s mind. “All white cats are deaf.” “Sugar, salt, lard—bacon, flour, tea. The rest is offen the land.” The articles thus enumerated lodged firmly in Hester’s memory, shaped like the canisters so marked that contained the only groceries Miss Onderdonk seemed to have. Most of the time, when Hester appeared, Miss Onderdonk did not spare a greeting but drew her by an ignoring silence into the task at hand—setting out pans of berries to ferment in the hot sun, culling the warty carrots and spotted tomatoes from her dry garden. Once, when she and Hester were picking blackberries from bushes so laden that, turning slowly, they could pick a quart in one spot, Hester, plucking a fat berry, had also plucked a bee on its other side.

“Best go home. Best go home and mud it,” Miss Onderdonk had said, and had turned back to the tinny plop of berries in her greedy pail. She had not offered mud. Hester, returning the next day, had not even felt resentment, for there was something about Miss Onderdonk, even if one did not quite like her, that compelled. As she worked at her endless ministrations to herself in her faded kitchen and garden, she was just like any other old maid, city or country, whose cottony hair was prigged tight from nightly crimpings never brushed free, whose figure, boarded up in an arid dress, made Hester gratefully, uneasily aware of her own body, fresh and moist. But when Miss Onderdonk stepped into her parlor, when she sat with her hands at rest on the carved knurls of the rocker or, standing near the open calf-bound book that chronicled the Onderdonk descent from De Witt Clinton, clasped her hands before her on some invisible pommel—then her role changed. When she stepped into her parlor, Miss Onderdonk swelled.

“How
is
Miss Onderdonk, Mr. Smith?” Mrs. Elkin asked lightly.