The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (59 page)

Perhaps, she thought, curvetting so lightly, so “modernly,” as we have been taught to do, over the sharp stick of emotion, never daring the banal, the stark word, it is our reticences that trap us after all. It happened everywhere: behind the tidy doors of marriage, in the dark bed of adventure, or in the social bumpings against one another in the crowded rooms where people massed together protectively in frenetic gaiety, hiding stubbornly—“I am alone”—using liquor, music, sex, to say—“You, too?” It happened, sometimes, in rooms at the end of the day, after the scratch of gossip, the long political sighs, were done, and there was a lull, with people staring reflectively into their glasses, twirling the stems, that the lull deepened, a sentence died on the air, and it was as if everyone had plunged his arm into a deep well, searching, seeking—but no hands met and clasped.

She walked into the kitchen and poured herself a drink. Toward her through the window over the sink the stunted city trees stretched in the soft, mottled weather, all along their weak, cramped boughs, the sure, recrudescent leaves. It would be better if it were autumn now, she thought drearily, when people huddling together at concerts, at parties, in front of fires, can persuade themselves that they are huddled there together against the cold.

Tonight there were people coming in to talk. She knew beforehand how she would sit there, in the anodyne of company, cradling the warmth of what had been, while every so often, half savored because it gave a meaning to the hour, half pushed down lest it rise to the surface and become real hurt, there would come, like water washing over a sunken buoy, the little knell of sadness for something that had been, that had never quite been, that now had almost certainly ceased to be.

H
OLDING THE SMALL WHITE
card so as not to bend it, Letitia Reynolds Whyte, aged twenty-four, looked cautiously up and down the main hallway of the school. Only the Senior girls were left in the school now, and most of them were in their rooms, lying on the beds in their underwear, talking dreamily of what they were going to do after graduation, the ones who were not getting married, who were only going to Europe with their parents, or just back to Locust Valley, or Silver Spring, or Charleston, listening enviously to the fluttery, conscious plans of those who were. Through the closed door of the Green Room down at the end of the hall she heard the laughter of the girls closeted there, rehearsing the skits for the Senior Banquet that evening. Tomorrow, hordes of parents would descend on the school for the graduation exercises, but today, the empty lawns outside—carefully shaven to a final unusual neatness that morning by Norval, the gardener—the echoing halls inside, all had had a hush over them, a left behind hush of desertions and departures, of feverish routines suspended, of another school year gone, and another deadened summer begun, in which only Miss Sopes—the Head—the colored cook, and Norval would be left to wait for fall. And, of course, Letitia.

She looked up and down the hall again. All the teachers’ cubbyhole private offices were closed and locked, even the larger one at the very end, a former parlor, which was rated by “Papa Davis,” Professor Walter Wallace Davis, because he was the oldest, the most distinguished looking, and the only one who was a real professor, having come to Hyacinth Hall after the close of a career in Latin and Greek at the State University. Usually, long after the others had locked up and gone he could be found lingering in the musty brown room with the shabby davenport and the bronze lamp with the purple frosted grapes. “This is my real home, girls. My real home,” he would say, leaning forward and smiling expansively, rubbing the grapes with a restless, worrying hand. But today even he had gone home to his palsied sister in their dark old house across the bridge in Minetteville, although he would return tomorrow to address the parents, as he did every year at graduation.

Satisfied that no one was around, Letitia crossed the hall to the large Student Mail box which hung on the wall in its very center. Ordinarily the box was a plain drab, lettered “Hyacinth Hall” in white, a smart, monogram-like inscription which the elder, dead Miss Sopes,
the
Miss Sopes, in some fierce spinsterish urge, thwarted possibly as to bedspreads and guest towels, had always had imprinted on every wastebasket, towel, door, and object that attached to the Hall. This tradition, like every one which stemmed from the mourned competence of her sister, the present tremulous Miss Rosanna had of course carried on.

Today, in accordance with still another tradition, the box was covered, except for the slit for envelopes, with a large, fanned-out frill of stiff white paper, and stuck above it, a fancily inked sign said “Announcements.” All week long Senior girls had been surreptitiously seeking out the box and dropping in their white cards, or slips of pink or blue notepaper, when no one was looking. On Banquet night, the box, lifted from its hooks, would be set in the middle of the draped head table where the class officers sat, and after the jerkily rhymed class history had been read and the class prophecies for each girl had sent them all into gales of merriment, the class president, standing solemnly above the box, would dip her hand into it slowly, teasingly, and read off, one by one, the names and announcements of all the girls who were leaving Hyacinth Hall “engaged.” Each girl stood, was clapped for, walked forward smiling and reddened to the head table and was handed a long-stemmed rose, which she pinned to her shoulder and wore mincingly the rest of the evening. A girl could not just put any name, or even the name of her “steady” in the box. She had to be really, seriously engaged. Letitia knew, for Senior Banquet, since there were never any boys present, was one of the school functions she was allowed to attend. She had been to two of them already. Tonight’s would be the third.

After one more hesitant look around, she bent over the card in her hand, scrutinized it lovingly, tabbing each letter with a slow forefinger. Some of the girls even got themselves engaged just so they could announce it on Banquet night; just so they would not have to be one of the others barred from the flushed group of those who had been tapped, anointed, by love’s mysterious rose. Just a few nights ago, Letitia, leaning pressed against the locked connecting side door of her room, the door which led to Willa Mae Fordyce’s room on the other side, but was never opened, had heard Willa proclaiming to other murmurous visiting voices: “Why I’d count it a disgrace not to announce on Banquet night, really I would. I just wouldn’t feel
graduated,
honest!” And Willa had given a low, satisfied laugh. She had meant it too, for just this morning, Letitia, stealing breathlessly into Willa’s empty room through the unlocked regular door, had seen the slip readied on Willa’s desk. “Engaged. Wilhelmina Mary Fordyce and Homer Watson Ames.”

Letitia gave her own card a last admiring look. It was beautifully printed—the best she had ever done. In art class, Miss Tolliver would often pause, leaning over Letitia’s shoulder, and knitting together tenderly her gray, mock-fierce eyebrows, she would say, extra-loud: “’Titia, your copy-work is certainly real nice, dear. Truly lovely.” And shaking her head at some imaginary crony in the air, she would make a kind of soft sad sigh and pass on to the desk of the girl in front.

Almost reluctantly, Letitia raised the hand with the card in it, held it poised near the paper frill for a second, then quickly pushed the card through the slit in the box. She heard the slight sound it made, not the sharp tap of paper falling into empty metal, but a slithery rustle which meant that it had fallen on others like it. She gave her flat, tuneless giggle, which always sounded as if it needed finishing, and turning away in the dogged, laborious way she had, she walked down the marble steps, out onto the lawn, and across it to the pretty gabled dormitory on the other side.

From behind, with her pale blond hair swinging over the pink cashmere sweater and the dyed-to-match tweed skirt, with her loafers and pink socks, Letitia looked like any one of a dozen others. Even better groomed, even a little too carefully matched, perhaps—as she had been ever since that day, six years ago, when she had walked into her first class at the school, her mouth, which peaked way up in the center like a baby’s, widened in a grin, on her head, perched clumsily there, the glittering gold sequin and seedpearl cap which an inept uncle, knowing her fondness for shiny gauds, had given her for Christmas. Ever since then, Delia, the light-colored upstairs girl, who had seen service as a personal maid on some of the big estates near the school, had been detailed to go to Miss Letitia’s room each morning and set out the proper clothes for the weather and the day. Sometimes, if there was a special occasion, although there seldom was, Delia came in the evening, too. In the summer, when Delia worked elsewhere, Miss Rosanna came herself, and would stand there clucking a little to herself, her unassertive manner sharpened with impatience, although once in a while she spent a little extra time handling greedily the beautiful quality underwear and clothes Letitia’s family bought and sent down to her, with never any trouble about sizes or ideas, for the girl had stayed the same and looked the same as when she first came.

Even when people saw her from the front, saw the domed childish forehead, the eyes, large with a painful attention, the peaked fledgling mouth always open as if waiting for someone to push into it the blessed worm of enlightenment—even then they were not sure. Feature by feature the face was a pretty one. It was only as people waited covertly for reflection to shadow the eyes, for a self to assemble and animate the face, that the doubt stole over them. The creeping realization began to form only as, shrinking, they became aware of the presence of that same straining of a blocked sense which they felt in the presence of the deaf who leaned to listen, the blind who stretched to feel. But when they heard the light, singsong rote of the voice, the sentence that petered into a laugh, the laugh that was like a pitch-pipe whose single note was query—then they were sure.

Then it was that, at a tea where Mrs. Reese Reynolds Whyte poured, or at a meeting of which she was inevitably chairman, one or the other of the women would purr in the ear of her neighbor: “You’ve seen that youngest daughter of Gratia Whyte’s … is she quite …?” and the other would answer: “All right … you mean? …” covering the words with a disclaiming shrug.

“Borderline?” This, avidly, from the inquirer.

“Well … you know Gratia …” might come the discreet answer. “She can face up to anything. … Look at how they drag the father with them … lectures, everywhere!”

It was through the means of Hyacinth Hall that Mrs. Whyte had faced up to Letitia. The Whytes belonged to those quiet rich who managed to imply, by their abstention from show, their endorsement of the proper, noncontroversial causes, such as Poetry and Peace, that wealth could be noble and remain fruitfully in the hands of its rightful inheritors. Summer and winter, their homes had a serene dowdiness possible only to those who could afford to be contemptuous of fashion. Their limousines were the heaviest, but dark, their servants and appurtenances of the most durable best, and none of these was changed too often. Mrs. Whyte had not only “attended” but graduated from one of the severer colleges long before it became commonplace for debutantes to do so, and from the list of benefactions which offered opportunities for conspicuous waste in an altruistic form, she had long since dropped the sponsorship of day nurseries and fallen women, leaving this to the less intellectual members of Society. It was in the poetry leagues and the English-speaking unions that she could be found, and in those spontaneous, pacifist groups of women which were most fervid and vocal just before a war, were as swiftly transmuted into “Bundles for Something” during the war’s course, and were once again transformed by victory into Leagues for a Proper Peace. It was related of her, and justly, that she had downed in debate (at a benefit) a Justice of the Supreme Court (retired). Her three daughters before Letitia, had been sent, not to Miss Hewitt’s Classes, or various “Halls” in America or Lausanne, but to Radcliffe, Bryn Mawr, and in one case, Oxford, after which, their doughy faces veiled by Venus-nets of trust funds, they had achieved marriage, and settled down to inheriting their mother’s committeeships.

Therefore, when Hyacinth Hall, in straits after the death of its founder, had circulated an appeal to “its friends” to rally and save it, it had not been likely that Mrs. Whyte would appear in that category, since the school was superannuated, of a type she deplored, and located beyond the Eastern seaboard, in a part of America in whose pretenses she did not acquiesce. As for Letitia, she had long since been taught at home by elderly women whose need made them tactful, whose chief function was to maintain the tacit assumption that she was being taught at all.

On the very day, however, that Mrs. Whyte received the letter from the Hall in her morning mail, the housekeeper had appeared in her sitting-room, red-faced, almost in tears, with the tale that Miss Letitia was bothering the houseman again.

After the housekeeper had been reassured, halted just short of a bosomy, sisterly commiseration Mrs. Whyte could not have tolerated either as a woman or as an employer, Letitia’s mother sat over her dilemma for a long time, contemplating the pitiful mauraudings of her innocent. Then, with one of those masterly inspirations which had made her such a jewel among committeewomen, she had riffled hastily through her correspondence for the letter from the Hall. The school, she recalled, was situated in fox-hunting country; its girls spent a good part of their time in riding clothes. And Letitia could ride, had even appeared unobtrusively, years ago, at one or two shows, in the children’s class. She had proved unequal to jumping, or anything fancy; she required a gentle mount, but she loved horses, and she could ride. Her sole other talent, that for “art work,” would certainly find a place in the rudimentary classes of such a school, or else one of those special arrangements, of which she had already had so many in her life, could always be made. And what better place for protection, for segregation without emphasis, than a girls’ school, especially one where, its highest aim being to equip its young ladies with all the attractions and accoutrements of the belle, the value of protection was understood better than any other?