The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (52 page)

Mrs. Wigham came round the corner of her house, neatly gray-haired, sweatered and skirted in dun, a sensible Englishwoman at home in her garden, in whatever country that garden might be. “Ah, Mrs. Bowman, so happy to meet you,” she said. “The Maywoods wrote me about you. On leave from your post, they tell me.” They shook hands. “Sociology, is it not?” said Mrs. Wigham. “Are you going to be studying us for a book?”

“No,” said the American, laughing. “I tell myself I’m seeing and being.”

“Oh, well. No one ever does much work in Rome.” Mrs. Wigham led the way, past potting sheds, up a brief staircase, into the house and out again. “Two of your compatriots are here this afternoon,” she said. “A lady from Hollywood, perhaps you know her? Her husband owns a film company, something like that.” She mentioned a name, one of the pioneer, supercolossal names.

“Oh, yes, of course. No—I don’t know her,” said Mrs. Bowman.

“She’s here with a friend of hers sent me by our film man in London. A lady who writes for the films, I believe.” Mrs. Wigham, correspondent for a London daily, had that pale, weathered glance which was perhaps
de rigueur
for middle-aged British lady journalists. It had never seen mascara perhaps but, in a quietly topographical way, it had seen almost everything else. It rested thoughtfully now on Jane Bowman. “You know of
her,
possibly? A Miss Francine Moon?”

“No,” said Jane Bowman. “I, er—I’ve never been to Hollywood.” There, she thought. Was that snobbery or modesty? Have I established myself as sufficiently Eastern seaboard and impecunious? When abroad alone, particularly on one’s first trip, one had constantly to stifle this terrible desire to establish oneself, knowing full well that, with the British, any overtness about that would establish one all too well. She stared at Mrs. Wigham’s back as it led the way to the terrace. The most map-conscious people in the world, they were, yet they still alluded to the States as once they might have to Kenya—as to one of those vast but cozy terrae incognitae where certainly everybody knew everybody else.

But when they came out on the terrace and she was presented to the three ladies seated there in the magnificent light that made paintable even the debris of afternoon tea, she was less certain that “the States” was not the intimate terrain that her hostess had presumed it. On their left, the pleasant-faced elderly woman who had answered to the name of Miss Hulme with a brisk “Dew!” was surely English—hatted and caned and wrapped in woollens whose lines one was not meant to pursue. But it was the nearer of the two hatless American women opposite who caught her eye, who was limned in the light with a precision that defeated any tenderizing chiaroscuro of Roman air.

But of course, I do in a way know her, thought Jane. If I were sleepwalking in Arabia deserta and I opened my eyes on her image, I would know her. Gray tailleur, a “Ford” as Seventh Avenue calls it, lapel pin so expensively junk that it does not have to be real. Enormous alligator bag—for this is one of the things that must not be counterfeited—and yes, there are the matching shoes. Gold of bangled wrist, flint of ageless figure, perhaps forty, hair irrefragably gold and coiffed not ten minutes before, butterfly glasses with this year’s line of twisted gold at the bridge. How should I not know her—this artifact of North America, authentic in its way as the pebble I picked up back there on the road?

“Francine Moon,” said this person, reinforcing their hostess’s hummed introduction. One felt her to be a person who established herself immediately.

“Mrs. Bowman has been living in London for the past six months,” said Mrs. Wigham. She looked from one American to the other with the bright teatime glance of those for whom conversation was still an accredited pursuit.

“London!” said Miss Moon, attaching the word to herself as she might hook another trinket to the polyglot baubles at her wrist. She was still leaning forward, partially screening the second Californian, a sullenly handsome woman of about the same age, who had acknowledged Jane with a single dead-pan, dark blink, returning to brood behind a lean brown hand afire with one astounding jewel. “Where did you live when you were in London? I had the loveliest flat—on Hay Hill.”

“Oh, Pimlico, Chelsea,” said Jane. “But most of the time with friends in the Middle Temple,” she added demurely. Miss Moon looked doubtfully, then shrewdly at the two British women, suspecting that her own Mayfair-tempered armor might have been pierced in some recondite way.

“In the Law Courts!” said Miss Hulme. “But how—how delightful!” But “How amazing” was what she had begun to say. She and Mrs. Wigham exchanged glances. The Americans; they are everywhere. One has grown used, in the last fifty years, to their heiresses unlocking our dukedoms. But now, even into our sanctuaries they fall, topside up on their incredibly neat, unlineaged legs. Even into the Middle Temple have they fallen, blunt and indiscriminate as the bombs.

“You’ve just come down from Florence, have you not?” said Mrs. Wigham.

“Ah … Florence. I shall not manage it this time,” said Miss Hulme. Over her simple, elderly-sweet profile there passed that basking glaze which, at the mention of Florence, crept over the faces of all Londoners old enough to remember the days before the pound-sterling travel restrictions—a moment’s Zoroastrian magic, sluicing through fog.

“Florence!” said Miss Moon. “I’ve been up there for two weeks. Doing some research. Historical stuff. They’re all mad for Italy on the Coast, you know.”

“The Coast?” said Miss Hulme.

“The West Coast of America, Enid,” said Mrs. Wigham.

“Well,” said Miss Moon. “I was getting some simply marvelous stuff for my people when Mira here wired me from Garmisch, insisting that I come and stand by her in Rome. She gets so bored, you know—where there’s no skiing.”

Mira, impassive, blinked once, an animal pricking slightly to the mention of its name. It was enough of a movement to refract the stone that studded her hand like a king’s seal. This then was the wife of that California magnate who perhaps had caught an imported starlet as she rose, or had been caught by her as she faded. Under its wiry, black karakul hair, this was a face that had never been personal enough for real beauty perhaps and was now a little too worn for lushness. But, short-nosed and impenetrably planed, it had been that central European cat-face which did well with pictures and with men, which one saw now and then framed in marabou on little girls sitting like spoiled goddesses next to their mothers on the East Bronx train. She wore a coat clipped by couturier scissors but dusty, even dirty, and her scuffed sandals showed a split in one sole. Visiting people of no importance to her, she had abjured even conventional grooming, but the seedlets that hung from her ears had an ineffable grape-bloom and were, Jane saw suddenly, black pearls. It was a pity that Mrs. Wigham, obviously not one for the nuances of dress, might not know how subtly she was being insulted. For this woman was dressed, in a way that the Miss Moons would never dare, with the down-at-the-heel effrontery of the woman who, even in her bath, wears a diamond as big as the Ritz.

“Rome has its attractions,” said Mrs. Wigham. “But I fear skiing is not one of them.”

“Rome!” said Miss Moon. “I have to keep telling Mira now it’s got it all over poor Paris. Sixteen times she’s crossed, and this is the first time anybody’s been able to drag her here.”

“More tea?” said Mrs. Wigham to Mira.

“She hates tea,” said Miss Moon. Again Mira blinked, and this time it was as if she had twitched a ridge of skin to remove a fly. “When she’s skiing she won’t even smoke. She’s marvelous at it. Dedicated.” She turned to shake her head at Mira, to look enviously at the body, still good, still lithe, that moved now, with the humility of the admired, in its rattan chair. Suddenly Mira took out a mirror and stared at it intensely, moving one hand around her eye sockets. Her face pursed in a spasm of regret. She put the mirror away.

“Tarrible for the skin,” she said.

“What … tea?” said Miss Hulme.

“The wind and the sun on the slopes, you know,” said Miss Moon. “But she will do it.” And leaning forward, they could all see the white mask left by the goggles and, radiating through it, the lines of strain, flash burns from the agony of sport.

“But faces are more interesting as they gather life-lines, don’t you think?” said Miss Hulme.

Mira stared, unflickering, into space. Then she stood up, flinging out a hip, in a voiceless sex-contempt for women whom nature had not permitted to know what else a face may gather. She spoke, apparently to Miss Moon. “They have ordered that cab yet? You know I have a date at six-thirty.”

From Mrs. Wigham’s flush it was clear that “they” had been “she,” but her face retained its smile with only a slight shift, as if she had quickly substituted a spare. “Giuseppe is ringing about now, I should imagine. One doesn’t order anything ahead here, don’t you see. Italians don’t have our sense of promptness. Miss Moon will have found all this out, I fancy.” The rapid flutter of her tongue was meant to imply that she had perceived rudeness and risen above it, but now it was she, Jane thought, who wasted a nuance.

“I alwess like to rest before a date,” said Mira. The word “date” seemed to stir her to an anticipatory sleekness. She stretched a long leg in front of her, reared her chin and bosom. Then, uneasily, her fingers returned to explore her eye sockets, as if she were learning an unwelcome Braille. Not once had she looked at anyone directly. Jane had never seen a woman whom it was possible to observe so indiscreetly, without danger of the counterglance, the sudden swerve of rapport.

“Mira’s husband phones her every night,” said Miss Moon. “Think of it!” Behind the great, clear wings of her glasses she appraised the other women, their dowdy innocence, with marmoset eyes. “Every single night she’s been away! All the way from Beverly Hills!”

“Indeed!” said Mrs. Wigham, who was the friend of more than one dexterous marchesa and had looked on Mussolini’s paramour hanging wry-mouthed in the public square. She rose. “Let us take a look at the garden until the cab arrives,” she said firmly. “I must show you our irrigation system. It’s quite unique.”

“Ah yes, how lovely,” said Miss Hulme, rising also. “I hope to persuade your Giuseppe to sell me an oleander. I must have a present for my little Signorina Necci before I leave for home.”

“No!” said Mira. She kicked one shoe against a chair leg, dislodging some gravel from the sole. “I must be back at the hotel at six!”

But Mrs. Wigham had already handed Miss Hulme her cane. “Oh, yes,” she murmured. “Giuseppe has developed a very good nursery business on his own.” And somehow, between the vague smoke of her chitchat and a guerrilla flanking of Miss Hulme’s cane, the three Americans found themselves maneuvered off the terrace, onto a path that meandered far and bournless into the flat surrounding field.

It was a narrow path, hardly more than a rut in the yellow earth, hedged by currant bushes hair-do high and by low clouds of European daisies, their delicate nets set at nylon level, their perfect, flock-pattern faces, scratchier than in Botticelli, tipped ingenuously toward the sun. Miss Hulme headed the line, and her progress was slow. Her cane probed; her enthusiasm, inflected with the remorseless lilt of
solfège,
paused at each planting. Behind her, Mira stumped, taking a step from the hip, when she was able. Miss Moon followed, placing each spike heel with safari decision, turning to flash encouragement to Mrs. Wigham and Jane.

Moving thus crabwise, she was still able to give them a precis of herself. Hearing Jane tell Mrs. Wigham that she had two boys in school, Miss Moon remarked that she had once been a housewife herself. “Married to a script-writer,” she said. “Years and years of never using my mind!” Then she had chanced to make some suggestions on a script and it had turned out that she was a born natural. “Ah, then you are one of those writer-teams,” said Mrs. Wigham. But it seemed that Miss Moon had ditched the husband—who had not been a natural. She had been in pictures ever since. The work she was doing now was really a luxury of the intellect that she had had to allow herself at last. For, said Miss Moon, whacking viciously at an artichoke plant that had caught her skirt on a spire, her mind was having its revenge for all those fallow years. It had become an instrument that gave her no rest.

“Take Mira,” she said. Ahead Mira, face lowered as if to butt, breathed mutinously near Miss Hulme. “There’s a girl who knows four languages. And one of those real low singing voices. But all she wants to do is ski like mad and dance all night. Never reads a book or uses her mind.”

Mrs. Wigham peered watchfully at Mira, so very near, so extremely close to Miss Hulme. “Sounds frightfully nice,” she said. “Don’t you think so, Mrs. Bowman?”

“Yes, indeed I do,” said Jane.

“Well, of course, she goes in for domesticity like mad at home.” Miss Moon’s tone was huffy. “Her husband’s a great stickler for maturity. Everybody is, with us.”

Suddenly the path ended abruptly and they found themselves in front of a large, dirty green pool, the path having led them to the front of the house.

“Dear me,” said Mrs. Wigham. “You have left
us
so far behind.” She hurried toward the two women ahead at the brink of the pool, and it was thus impossible to say to whom she had addressed this last. Slipping neatly between Mira and Miss Hulme, she embarked on an explanation of the pool as a vestige of the great hydraulic systems of antiquity; waving a brisk hand, she displayed the horizon, on whose line one might just see, or imagine, the worn arches of the aqueducts, marching with ruined step toward classical Rome.

Mira gazed morosely at a stone faun that reared from the center of the pool and made a modest return of water to it on a basic principle. She inhaled ominously in her throat, so that one saw the fine, black ciliar fur of her nostrils. “Francine. Here is not yet that cab.”

A white-jacketed servingman came from the house, a Maltese cat nosing between his legs. Mrs. Wigham questioned him in Italian. He spread his hands. Mrs. Wigham sighed and took out a handkerchief. Dabbing her lips with it, as if to blot them free of the hopelessly sweet jelly of Italian, she turned to Mira. “It will take a little time. Meanwhile … perhaps you’d like to see the house.”