The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (41 page)

“The same.” Mr. Smith kept his eyes on the road.

They turned in to the narrow dirt road that led off the highway down to the farm. Hester recognized a familiar curve in the sweep of surrounding hills, patch-quilted with crops. “There are hardly any white patches this year,” she said.

Mr. Smith flicked a look at her, almost as if she had said something sensible. “People don’t eat much buckwheat any more,” he said, and brought the truck to a bumpy stop in front of the covered well.

Hester and her mother ran the gauntlet of interested glances on the porch and went up to their room. The room had a mail-order austerity, with nothing in it that was not neutralized for the transient except the dim cross-stitch doily on the dresser. Hester was glad to see their clothing shut away in the tar-paper wardrobe, sorry to see their toilet articles, the beginning of clutter, ranged on the dresser. This was the most exciting moment of all, before the room settled down with your own coloration, before the people you would get to know were explored.

“I saw that Mrs. Garfunkel on the porch,” she said.

Her mother said “Yes” as if she had pins in her mouth, and went on putting things in drawers.

Mrs. Garfunkel was one of the ones who said “gorgeous”; it was perhaps her favorite word. A young matron with reddish hair, chunky, snub features, and skin tawnied over with freckles, she had the look of a Teddy bear fresh from the shop. Up here, she dressed very quietly, with an absence of heels and floppy sunwear that, with her pug features, might have satisfied certain requirements in Mrs. Elkin’s category of refinement. Neither did she talk with her hands, touch your clothing with them, or openly give the prices of things. But it was with her eyes that she estimated, with her tongue that she preened, and it was not long before you discovered that her admiring comment on some detail of your equipment was really only a springboard for the description of one or the other of her own incomparable possessions. Her satisfaction in these rested in their being not only the best but the best acquired for the least: the furs bought in August, the West Indian nursegirl who would work a year or so before realizing that the passage money Mrs. Garfunkel had advanced was more than underwritten by her inequitable salary, the compliant, self-effacing Mr. Garfunkel, who would probably go on working forever without realizing anything—even the languid, six-year-old Arline, who was so exactly suitable that she might have been acquired, after the canniest negotiation, from someone in that line to whom Mrs. Garfunkel had had a card of introduction. Perhaps, Hester thought now, her mother could better have borne Mrs. Garfunkel and her bargains if all of them had not been so successful.

When Hester and her mother, freshly washed and diffidently late, entered the dining room for dinner, which was in the middle of the day here, Mrs. Garfunkel hailed them, called them over to her table, pressed them to sit there, and introduced them to the others already seated. “Mrs. Elkin’s an old-timer, like Mel and me. Meet Mr. and Mrs. Brod, and Mr. Brod’s mother. And my brother Wally, Mrs. Elkin and daughter. What’s your name again, dear?” She paid no heed to Hester’s muttered response but dug her arm affectionately against the side of the rickety young man with slick hair who sat next to her, doggedly accumulating food on his plate. “Wally ran up here to get away from half the girls in Brooklyn.”

The young man gave her a look of brotherly distaste. “Couldn’t have come to a better place,” he said, and returned to his plate. Great platters of sliced beefsteak tomatoes and fricasseed chicken were passed, nubs of Country Gentleman corn were snatched and snatched again; the table was one flashing activity of reaching arms, although there was much more food upon it than the few of them could possibly eat. This amplitude was what one came for, after all, and this was its high point, after which there would be nothing much to look forward to through the afternoon daze of heat but supper, which was good, though not like this.

Eating busily, Hester, from under the wing of her mother’s monosyllabic chilliness, watched Mr. and Mrs. Brod. They were newly married, it developed, but this was not the honeymoon. The honeymoon, as almost every turn in the conversation indicated, had been in California; they were at the farm to visit old Mrs. Brod, a little leathery grandmother of a woman, dressed in a jaunty Roman-stripe jumper and wearing a ribbon tied around hair that had been bobbed and blued. The young Mrs. Brod had a sleepy melon face with a fat mouth, dark-red nails, and black hair cut Buster Brown. Mr. Brod, a bald young man in fawn-colored jacket and knickers, said almost nothing, but every so often he did an extraordinary thing. At intervals, his wife, talking busily, would extend her hand sidewise, palm upward, without even looking at him, and in one convulsive movement that seemed to start somewhere outside him and end at his extremities, as if he were the tip of a smartly cracked whip, a gold case would be miraculously there in his hand, and he would place a cigarette tenderly in her palm. A second but lesser convulsion produced a lighter for the negligently held cigarette. He did not smoke.

The two Mrs. Brods were discussing the dress worn by the younger, evidently a California purchase. “Right away, I said, ‘This one I take!’” said the bride. “Definitely a knockout!”

“Vunt vash,” said her mother-in-law, munching on an ear of corn.

The bride shrugged. “So I’ll give to cleaners.”

“Give to clean, give to ket.” The mother put down her ear of corn, rolling it over reflectively.

“Don’t have a cat, Ma.”

Mrs. Brod the elder turned away momentarily from her plate. “Sah yull
buy
ah ket!” she said, and one lean brown arm whipped out and took another ear of corn.

The bride looked miffed, then put out the cigarette-seeking hand. Flex, flash from the solicitous Mr. Brod and the cigarette, lit, was between her lips, smoke curling from her scornful nostrils.

“Sweet, isn’t it, the way he does that? And not a smoke for himself,” said Mrs. Garfunkel in an aside to Hester’s mother. “You better watch out, Syl,” she called across the table to the bride. “He forgets to do that, then the honeymoon is over.”

Mrs. Elkin smiled, a little rigid but perfectly cordial, unless you knew the signs, and stood up, reaching around for her big knitting bag, which was hung on the back of her chair. “Come, dear,” she said to Hester, in accents at which no purist could cavil. “Suppose you and I go out on the porch.”

On the empty porch, Mrs. Elkin selected a chair far down at the end. “Those people!” she said, and blew her breath sharply between set teeth. “I told your father this place was getting rundown.”

“Sah yull
buy
ah ket,” said Hester dreamily, and chuckled. It was the illogic of the remark that charmed.

“Must you
imitate
?” said her mother.

“But it’s funny, Mother.”

“Oh, you’re just like your father. Absolutely without discrimination.”

Hester found nothing to answer. “I think I’ll walk down to the creek,” she said.

“Take a towel.”

Hester ran upstairs. Suddenly it was urgent that she get down to the creek alone, before the others, digestion accomplished, went there to bathe. Upstairs, she shed her clothes swiftly and crammed herself into last year’s bathing suit—tight and faded, but it would not matter here. She ran downstairs, crossed the porch without looking at her mother, and ran across the lawn into the safety of the path, which had a wall of weeds on either side. Once there, she walked on, slow and happy. The wire tangle of weeds was alive with stalks and pods and beadlets of bright green whose shapes she knew well but could not, need not, name. Above all, it was the same.

She pushed through the bushes that fringed the creek. It, too, was the same. In the past year, it must have gone through all the calendar changes. She imagined each of them—the freeze, the thaw, the spring running, like conventionalized paper pictures torn off one by one—but they were as unreal as the imagined private dishabille of a friend. Even the bushes that ran for miles along its edge were at the same stage of their bloom, their small, cone-shaped orange flowers dotted along the leaves for as far as she could see. The people around the farm called them “scarlet runners,” although their flowers were as orange as a color could be.

She trod carefully across the slippery ledges out to the wide, flat slab that rose in the middle of the stream, and stretched out on her stomach on its broad, moss-slimed back. She lay there for a long time looking into the eye of the pool. One need not have an appointment with minnows, she thought. They are always the same, too.

At a crackling sound in the brush, she looked up. Mrs. Garfunkel’s head appeared above the greenery, which ended in a ruff at her neck, like the painted backdrops behind which people pose at amusement parks. “Your mother says to tell you she’s gone on down to Miss Onderdonk’s.” She waited while Hester picked her way back to shore. Until Hester gained the high weeds of the path, she felt the Teddy-bear eyes watching idly, calculating and squint.

In her room once more, Hester changed to a paper-dry cotton dress, then hurried out again, down the dirt road this time, and onto the state highway, slowing down only when she was in sight of Miss Onderdonk’s house, and saw her mother and Miss Onderdonk sitting facing one another, one on each of the two butterfly-winged wooden benches built on the top step at either side of the door, forming the only porch there was.

“Why that dress?” asked her mother, with fair reason, for it was Hester’s best. “You remember Hester, Miss Onderdonk?” she added.

Miss Onderdonk looked briefly at Hester with her watery, time-eclipsing stare. There was no indication that she knew Hester’s name, or ever had. One of the white cats lay resiliently on her lap, with the warning look of toleration common to cats when held. Miss Onderdonk, like the creek, might have lived suspended from last September to this, untouched by the flowing year, every crimp in her hair the same. And the parlor? It would have to be seen, for certain.

Hester sat down quietly next to her mother, whose sewing went on and on, a mild substitute for conversation. For a while, Hester watched the long, important-looking shadows that encroached upon the hills, like enigmas stated every afternoon but never fully solved. Then she leaned carefully toward Miss Onderdonk. “May I go see your parlor?” she asked.

Miss Onderdonk gave no sign that she had heard. It might have been merely the uncanny luck of the partly deaf that prompted her remark. “People come by here this morning,” she said. “From down to your place. Walk right into the parlor, no by-your-leave. Want to buy my antiques!”

Mrs. Elkin, needle uplifted, shook her head, commiserating, gave a quick, consolatory mew of understanding, and plunged the needle into the next stitch.

“Two women—and a man all ninnied out for town,” said Miss Onderdonk. “Old woman had doctored hair. Grape-colored! Hollers at me as if I’m the foreign one. Picks up my Leather-Bound Onderdonk History!” Her explosive breath capitalized the words. The cat, squirting suddenly from her twitching hand, settled itself, an aggrieved white tippet, at a safe distance on the lawn. “‘Put that down,’ I said,” said Miss Onderdonk, her eyes as narrow as the cat’s. “‘I don’t have no antiques,’ I said. These here are my belongings.’”

Mrs. Elkin put down her sewing. Her broad hands, with the silver-and-gold thimble on one middle finger, moved uncertainly, unlike Miss Onderdonk’s hands, which were pressed flat, in triumph, on her faded, flour-sack lap.

“I told Elizabeth Smith,” Miss Onderdonk said. “I told her she’d rue the day she ever started taking in Jews.”

The short word soared in an arc across Hester’s vision and hit the remembered, stereopticon picture of the parlor. The parlor sank and disappeared, a view in an album snapped shut. Now her stare was for her mother’s face, which was pink but inconclusive.

Mrs. Elkin, raising her brows, made a helpless face at Hester, as if to say, “After all, the vagaries of the deaf …” She permitted herself a minimal shrug, even a slight spreading of palms. Under Hester’s stare, she lowered her eyes and turned toward Miss Onderdonk again.

“I thought you knew, Miss Onderdonk,” said her mother. “I thought you knew that we were—Hebrews.” The word, the ultimate refinement, slid out of her mother’s soft voice as if it were on runners.

“Eh?” said Miss Onderdonk.

Say it, Hester prayed. She had never before felt the sensation of prayer. Please say it, Mother.
Say “Jew.”
She heard the word in her own mind, double-voiced, like the ram’s horn at Yom Kippur, with an ugly present bray but with a long, urgent echo as time-spanning as Roland’s horn.

Her mother leaned forward. Perhaps she had heard it, too—the echo. “But we are Jewish,” she said in a stronger voice. “Mr. Elkin and I are Jewish.”

Miss Onderdonk shook her head, with the smirk of one who knew better. “Never seen the Mister. The girl here has the look, maybe. But not you.”

“But—” Mrs. Elkin, her lower lip caught by her teeth, made a sound like a stifled, chiding sigh. “Oh, yes,” she said, and nodded, smiling, as if she had been caught out in a fault.

“Does you credit,” said Miss Onderdonk. “Don’t say it don’t. Make your bed, lie on it. Don’t have to pretend with me, though.”

With another baffled sigh, Mrs. Elkin gave up, flumping her hands down on her sewing. She was pinker, not with anger but, somehow, as if she had been cajoled.

“Had your reasons, maybe.” Miss Onderdonk tittered, high and henlike. “Ain’t no Jew, though. Good blood shows, any day.”

Hester stood up. “We’re in a book at home, too,” she said loudly. “‘The History of the Jews of Richmond, 1760–1917.’” Then she turned her back on Miss Onderdonk, who might or might not have heard, on her mother, who had, and stomped down the steps.

At the foot of the lawn, she stopped behind a bush that hid her from the steps, feeling sick and let-down. She had somehow used Miss Onderdonk’s language. She hadn’t said what she meant at all. She heard her father’s words, amused and sad, as she had heard them once, over her shoulder, when he had come upon her poring over the red-bound book, counting up the references to her grandfather. “That Herbert Ezekiel’s book?” He had looked over her shoulder, twirling the gold cigar-clipper on his watch chain. “Well, guess it won’t hurt the sons of Moses any if they want to tally up some newer ancestors now and then.”