The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (54 page)

“She’s a fool.” Miss Moon breathed this to herself. Behind her glasses her eyes were bright and fixed. “It’ll be all over the Coast in twenty-four hours.”

Now the couple neared them again, in their return passage down the room. The young man’s face was warm. Mira was still faintly smiling, and although this time the smile, fixed on the door, was for neither of the two women, to Jane, trembling suddenly in her tailored suit with a shock that was bitter and sororal, it came as if it was. Almost a grimace, it showed its teeth to an invisible mirror, denying with the lips the secret lines that a body must gather—the crow’s feet of the armpit, the dented apple of the belly, the mapped crease, fine leather too long folded, that forms between the breasts. As Mira passed her on the arm of the young man, her scent remained for a moment behind. It rested on Jane as if it were her own.

At the door, Mira and the young man paused. A rush of lilac came to them from the outside, and Mira’s fur slid from shoulder to waist, a dropped calyx. The young man replaced it carefully. Her lips parted, watching him. It was a beautiful fur, manipulable as smoke. Before the arts of the furrier had dappled it, it might have been just the color of wolf.

Left together by the flicking of the door, the two women stared at one another.

“Traveling alone?” said Miss Moon.

Jane nodded.

“Divorced too?”

“No,” said Jane. “I’m a widow.” Her head lifted. “I have two boys.”

Miss Moon seemed not to have heard this last. “Care to—join forces for dinner?”

No, thought Jane. Don’t settle for anybody’s company. As she does. As she has. Not yet. She gazed past Miss Moon, saw herself in the mirror, and looked quickly away. “Thanks,” she said, and her voice was kind. “I’m afraid … I have work to do too.”

“Oh, you work,” said Miss Moon eagerly. “What do
you
do?”

“I teach,” said Jane. “In a university.” I teach, an echo said inside her, and of course at home I have the two boys. And suddenly the echo, her breath, something, rammed itself hard against her chest, inside. Not enough, it said, beating behind the mapped crease between her breasts. Not enough. What a thing, it said, crying. What a thing!

“Well, back to the salt mines for us, eh?” said Miss Moon. Her voice was matey, unbearable. Just as if she too had smelled the scent, had heard the thing crying. As if she knew too that Jane, staring into the big, winged glasses, could see the two poor eyes beating against the glass.

And now they stood up quickly, gathered their purses and signaled for the waiter. When he came, they paid him with a dispatch unusual to women, and the lire notes left lying in his saucer were large enough for anybody here. For now they could not part quickly enough. For now, each said to herself, the other’s company was no longer to be borne. No, it was not to be borne. Not now. Now that they both knew what it was they had in common.

S
OME TEN YEARS AGO
when I was for the first time in London—when, as a rather elderly innocent abroad, I was for the first time anywhere outside New York City except Rochester, Elmira, Binghamton, the Eastern Shore, a few summer resorts in New England and, at the age of twelve, Asbury Park, New Jersey—I attended a semi-diplomatic dinner party at which, after we had all drunk considerable amounts of several delightful wines, one of the ladies present suddenly peeled off her blouse.

Since the other guests, though moist and perfervid, were still upright in their chairs and conversation, the incident caused, even in that imperturbable company, a certain silence. Chitchat, suddenly quenched, faded off into one of those pauses where isolated sentences stand out sharply. The man on my left, whom I had placed tentatively as either a connoisseur of heraldry or a baiter of Americans, had been lecturing me on the purity of lineage maintained by German nobility up to the last war. “Where else,” he had just inquired, “can one find, even now, a person whose line shows sixteen quarterings?” Then he stopped short, as if contradicted by circumstance. Headily I reassured myself that quite without knowing it—and in the first week too—I must have scaled one of those dizzily international heights of society so often promised the provincial: a set so patrician that queens had no legs, emperors might be clothed exactly as they said they were, and ladies appeared in their quarterings without shame.

She was an exceedingly pretty young woman of about twenty-five with masses of blond hair arranged ingénue, and a pair of truly enormous blue eyes swimming in some Venus-lymph, clear natural nacre in which a man, or indeed any onlooker, might well sink. Words like “truly” came inevitably to mind as one regarded them. As I did so, they spilled over pellucidly. Casting a reproachful look at her partner (later it was understood that he had dared her), turning down the corners of a lovely mouth rosied with wine and—though one hated to think it—stupidity, she gazed at us, clutching the discarded portion of her costume, then hung her head and let fall on her lavishly ruffled
broderie anglaise
corselet two neatly schooled tears.

“Why, Lady Catherine!” our host said at once, and rising, he went round the table to her and poured her more wine, murmuring what I thought to be “How very sporting!” and capping it with—as he raised his own glass—“Bravo!”

Other gentlemen took up the plaudit. Lady Catherine, shyly consoled, raised her head, and I remembered her patronymic, ducally familiar even to me: one of her ancestresses, whom she was said to resemble, had been a wife of Henry the Eighth. From her round eyes two more pearls dropped, but this time surely with retrospective art—I wondered whether Henry, watching her ancestress’ head fall, might not have thought to himself, “None of my other wives looked that good upside down.”

What happened next I can only recount, not explain. It is true that, while we were only fourteen at table, the number of empty bottles ranged testimonially behind us must have totaled more than twice that. I have a vague impression that the male applause may have attained an ethnic intensity. Also that our host, bending over Lady Catherine, was assuring her that she looked smashing, and rather more respectable than the portrait of his grandmother as lady in waiting to Queen Alexandra. And that she, though retaining a disconsolate posture, was looking smug. What I know for sure is that when I next glanced at our hostess—a bishop’s daughter—she too had peeled.

“She’s upset the gravy boat, Mother!” I murmured delightedly, but of course no one paid any attention to me, or would have understood the reference if they had. No one there was likely to have heard of Mrs. Potter Palmer, much less of my mother. I shall shortly explain—for the benefit of readers who, although they may have caught the allusion to American social history, cannot possibly know anything of mine. But first let me complete the
mise en scène
of a moment in which were to be brought home to me all the old saws of my girlhood—a moment of truth in which, across so much water and over the ten years of my mother’s sojourn in Mrs. Grundy’s heaven, I could at last exclaim to her, “Mother, you were right!”

Of the seven women at table, six, including myself, were wearing the version of the currently fashionable (and easily doffable) “separates” known as “evening sweaters.” There was nothing coincidental about this; the best houses were cold, even for London; rationing was still on and the English were burning an ineffectual sludge called, with their usual talent, “nutty slack.” The one exception to the sweaters was also the only one of the others who was neither chic nor pretty, a vast, untidy woman opposite me—Frau Ewig, a noted anthropologist, recently returned from Sierra Leone—whose dress, showing so many possible means of separation that the eye was unable to choose the probable, looked somewhat as if, in order to appear in it at the party, she had first chopped several natives up. She, like the rest of us, had forgotten Lady Catherine in the sight of our hostess, who sat revealed, with the air of a prioress who had removed her wimple, in a rock-pink, ten-guinea model by Berlé.

In the silence that followed I heard the clink of crystal—the gentlemen, according to their needs and natures, were either taking another drink or putting down the one they had. A muted cry of protest was heard—from Lady Catherine. I could have seconded it—for another reason. For glancing round at the other ladies, I sensed something infinitely feminine glissade from eye to eye. In prescience I closed mine. When I opened them, what I saw confirmed it. Every remaining lady—except the anthropologist and the American—had the upper part of her costume in her hand.

Now there was nothing essentially risky in the tableau before us: a number of ladies sitting, modestly swan-necked, in their foundations, is a sight familiar to every window-shopper. Besides, the temperature being what it was, I thought I could discern, between various lacy interstices, the fuzzier-than-flesh-tone of what Debenham & Freebody’s (where I bought one the next morning) called a vest. No, the riskiness is often in the eye of the beholder. And this composite eye, twelve times magnified and stern as that of a nudist group eyeing the indecency of a visitor’s clothing, was now fixed on my pied vis-à-vis and on me. Leave me there now, while we make our way back—by gravy boat and a sneaky trail of safety pins—to my mother. We shall return.

Moral instruction by moral illustration has long since disappeared from the training of the young. Metaphor itself is considered untrustworthy—likely to weaken the facts of what already is a pretty slippery reality—and every good parent knows that the parable is too “punitive” by far. My childhood was full of them, from boogieman to Bunyan, my parents belonging to a generation still very sure of its facts. And my mother’s specialty was what might be called the “social” allegory. Obvious in design, single in target, it was part of the process by which she hoped to transform the unpromising grub at that very moment scratching its knee-scabs in front of her into something pretty and marriageable, designed to preside, with some of her own graces and others she aspired to, at a table even more elaborate than her own.

Under a codex possibly marked “Accidents, Dinner”—for, as will be seen, a good proportion of my mother’s tales revolved on accident—reposed Mrs. Potter Palmer. Famous arbiter of bygone Chicago society, she may be the model for performances slightly more rarefied than the one I know her for—as for me, I see her only in the attitude of one. Eternally she presides at her exalted dinner table, from whose foot, in the worm’s-eye view of my mother’s imagination, she is all but obscured by the gravy boat suited to her station—to my mind about twice the size of our largest tureen. In her historic moment she knows nothing of us, but all is open to posterity—hovering above her now like helicopters, like damsel flies, we see all. Then it happens. Far down the length of the gilt-encrusted table—exactly center I make it for drama—a guest jars a servingman’s wrist. A great gout of gravy erupts on the cloth.

My mother pauses; I return her look of high seriousness. Extrasensory perception or what you will, with not a word said between us, our images of that cloth are the same. As a superb embroiderer, my mother’s chef d’oeuvre is her banquet cloth. Loaded with eyelet, scallop, punchwork, Valenciennes, fringe and insertion, lying even now on its cardboard cylinder between sheets of preservative blue paper, five years in the making, never used and none like it in the world—yet there on that august table, with a terrible brown blot on its middle, lies its twin.

The guest hangs his head, and no wonder. In unavoidable
frisson
the other guests, well-bred as they are, avert theirs. We gloat over the dreadful moment, knowing rescue is nigh. Mrs. Palmer, whose eagle eye—exactly like my mother’s at her half-yearly dinner parties—sees everything while appearing to register nothing, pauses for a fraction in her elegant conversation. Then she makes her gesture—irreparable and immortal. I see her elbow, plump, white and shapely, a noble
fin-de-siècle
elbow suited to its duty, not covered with chicken-skin like mine. Carefully careless as Réjane, no doubt chatting gaily the while, she has swept it outward. Hail Mrs. Palmer, heroic hostess, who, in the imitation that is the ultimate of good manners, is seen now to have overturned, on that cloth, the tureen!

With years of reflection, this tale of my mother’s, like another even more pertinent, came to have as many holes in it as the cloth had eyelets. Was it quite the thing to be so exemplary so publicly? Wouldn’t the real acme of taste have been not to notice—had the guest felt better, or worse? It came to me that Mrs. Palmer’s manner might someday merit the same comment as her money: too much of it. As a matter of fact, if they were being served by footmen, what was the tureen doing in front of her at all?

But at eleven or so, yes, moral illustration, when taken literally, can be dangerous. We were a family of many guests and many, though infrequently regal, dinners at which, since our household was small, I was often allowed up. Time went by while I waited for someone to have his accident, so that I might pridefully watch my mother’s aristocratic amends. For months we seemed to feed no one but aunts and uncles; I knew my mother too well to think she would waste that sort of high style on them. But at last one of our guests obliged. He was a Dr. Nettel, fresh from a twenty-year stint in Egypt, who had once been one of my mother’s suitors—perhaps it was my father’s still sardonic eye on him that caused him to drop a fork into a vegetable dish that splattered wide.

To me, seated at my mother’s left, all augured well; the cloth was damask only, but the vegetable was beet. I looked at my mother expectantly; when she did nothing I nudged her, pointing to the service dish of beets which, since it was maid’s night out and we were short of footmen, reposed, family-style, in front of her. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she whispered, her lips sealed, her gaze on the horizon.

I had just been through my eighth-grade graduation—“Into thy hands we give the torch”—the noblesse of our house it would seem, rested with me. I crooked my sharp elbow, bending my hand backward from the wrist as if it held a little pinch of something, meanwhile elegantly averting my head, as if to chitchat, toward Dr. Nettel, but since I could think of nothing to say I remained thus, bas-relief—perhaps he thought I was assuming an Egyptian pose just for him. “Stiff neck?” said my father. My mother, knowing better, grabbed for the elbow; absorbed in the mental picture, profile, of myself, I jumped at the touch; between us we upset the ice pitcher. Diversion was thus created, though not as symmetrically as it would have been via beet. Later, before I went to bed, I was whacked. “Because you are so smart,” said my mother between whacks, “and because you are absolutely unteachable.” She was wrong. I had just learned for sure what I had always suspected—that we were irretrievably middle-class.