The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (6 page)

“Nothing of the sort!”

“Well then,” said his interrogator, turning his palms upward.

The doctor leaned forward, measuring his words with exasperation. “Do you mean you
want
me to tell you you’re crazy!”

“In my spot,” answered his visitor meekly, “which would you prefer?”

Badgered to the point of commitment, the doctor stared back at his inconvenient Diogenes. Swollen with irritation, he was only half conscious of an uneasy, vestigial twitching of his ear muscles, which contracted now as they sometimes did when he listened to atonal music.

“O.K., O.K. …!” he shouted suddenly, slapping his hand down on the desk and thrusting his chin forward. “Have it your way then! I don’t believe you!”

Rigid, the man looked back at him cataleptically, seeming, for a moment, all eye. Then, his mouth stretching in that medieval grimace, risorial and equivocal, whose mask appears sometimes on one side of the stage, sometimes on the other, he fell forward on the desk, with a long, mewing sigh.

Before the doctor could reach him, he had raised himself on his arms and their foreheads touched. They recoiled, staring downward. Between them on the desk, as if one of its mahogany shadows had become animate, something seemed to move—small, seal-colored, and ambiguous. For a moment it filmed back and forth, arching in a crude, primordial inquiry; then, homing straight for the doctor, whose jaw hung down in a rictus of shock, it disappeared from view.

Sputtering, the doctor beat the air and his own person wildly with his hands, and staggered upward from his chair. The breeze blew hypnotically, and the stranger gazed back at him with such perverse calm that already he felt an assailing doubt of the lightning, untoward event. He fumbled back over his sensations of the minute before, but already piecemeal and chimerical, they eluded him now, as they might forever.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said weakly.

His visitor put up a warding hand, shaking it fastidiously.
“Au contraire!”
he replied daintily, as though by the use of another language he would remove himself still further from commitment. Reaching forward, he gathered up his papers into a sheaf, and stood up, stretching himself straight with an all-over bodily yawn of physical ease that was like an affront. He looked down at the doctor, one hand fingering his wallet. “No,” he said reflectively, “guess not.” He tucked the papers away. “Shall we leave it on the basis of—er—professional courtesy?” he inquired delicately.

Choking on the sludge of his rage, the doctor looked back at him, inarticulate.

Moving toward the door, the visitor paused. “After all,” he said, “with your connections … try to think of it as a temporary inconvenience.” Regretfully, happily, he closed the door behind him.

The doctor sat at his desk, humped forward. His hands crept to his chest and crossed. He swallowed, experimentally. He hoped it was rage. He sat there, waiting. He was thinking of the luncheon table.

W
E FIRST SAW HER
, Mrs. Hawthorn, sitting alone, the first one down in the tender that waited to take us off the Bermuda boat. She was wearing a quilted taffeta suit, expensively flared at shoulder and hip, and a matching hat—one of those deep, real hats we were all wearing in the fall of 1935—and her arms were full, crammed full of tea roses. Under a city marquee, she would have had an enviable chic, but on the white deck of the tender, in the buttery Bermuda sun, she looked outlandishly urban for that travel-folder scene. As the rest of us climbed down into the tender, she made room for us with an apologetic shifting of the roses, but one could see, as she nestled her long, rouge-assisted face into the buds, that she was pleased with them.

Later on, in the week that followed, we saw her at our hotel, and Luke and I, drifting in the ambience of our honeymooners’ table, idly watched her dinner entrances. Each evening, appearing late but consciously unflurried, in a different gown—one always too dominantly colorful and sparkling for the off-season crowd—she crossed to the table reserved for her and her companion, a dark, pear-shaped man, shorter than she, who received her with an anxious, hesitant courtesy.

On the first evening, Luke, nudging me, had pointed to the single bird-of-paradise bud with which the hotel kept the tables adorned, each beaked bloom soaring from its coarse glass holder like an immoderately hued bird, and every evening thereafter, the analogy had kept us amused. One evening, however, as she passed us, her tall, haggard figure sheathed in green sequins that boomeranged the light, a child at a nearby table cried out: “Look, Mommy! Christmas tree!” As she stopped, and bent toward the child, the sequins not quite concealing the middle-aged line from breast to hip, we heard her say, in a mellow voice, as if she were indulgently amused at both the child and herself—“Yes, darling! Christmas tree!”—and we felt ashamed, and liked her.

We met the two of them again, as we were all herded docilely into one of the glass-bottomed sightseeing boats, and she told us her name. The little man, tentative and deferential in the background, was one of those hovering people whose names one never catches, and we never did, although she told us it too. Again we saw her, alone on the beach in front of the hotel, in a maillot that was still somewhat scandalous for that time. We were a little embarrassed for her, not at the suit, but at its cruel, sagging revelation, and I remember that both of us, looking away with the instinctive distaste of the young for the fading, glanced down with satisfaction at our own bodies. One of her arms was covered almost from wrist to elbow with diamond and sapphire bracelets, and she must have seen me staring at them, or trying not to. She laughed, on the same mellow note.

“I’d feel naked without them.” She turned, and slid into the water. She swam well, better than either of us, her long, water-sallowed face, which once must have been very handsome, sinking deep into the fervid blue of the water, the one mailed arm flashing in the sun.

In those days, the thing to do was to go down on the
Monarch
and come back on the
Queen.
The little stenographers squandering their vacation on off-season rates, an “interchangeable” wardrobe, and one shattering evening dress, the honeymooners, intent on seeming otherwise, all said it airily: “We came down on the
Monarch
and will go back on the
Queen.
” On the return voyage, we met Mrs. Hawthorn and her vague companion again. The ship had run into bad weather, the usual October storms of the Caribbean, and at dinnertime, the little stenographers had been unable to appear in their evening dresses after all.

Luke had been affected too, although I was not. After dinner alone, I wandered into one of the ornate lounges that hollowed the ship. Seated in one of the gold chairs, her lamé gown blending so well that at first I did not see her, was Mrs. Hawthorn. She beckoned to me.

“I see you’re a good sailor, too,” she said. “I never get sick. Dave—the friend who is traveling with me—is down in his cabin.” There was the slightest emphasis on “his.” “Women are the stronger sex, I always say. You two are newlyweds. Aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Look,” she said. “Why don’t you and your husband come up to my stateroom and have champagne. It’s the best thing in the world for seasickness—and after all we really should celebrate for you two. Yes, do! We really must!”

I went down to our cabin, and roused Luke. “You think you’re inveigling me,” he said. “But it’s really Mrs. Hawthorn who intrigues me.”

We climbed the ladders from D deck to A. Up there, with no feel of more ship above us, the ocean, silhouetted against the looming slant of the stacks, seemed to shift its dark obliques more pervasively near us.

“The water seems more intimate up here with the rich, doesn’t it?” I said.

“Hmmm,” said Luke, “but it’s not an intimacy I care to develop at the moment.” I giggled, and lurching together, hip to hip, half with love, half with the movement of the deck, we entered Mrs. Hawthorn’s stateroom.

The room was banked with flowers. Mrs. Hawthorn and her companion were waiting for us, sitting stiffly in the center of the blooms like unintroduced visitors in the anteroom of a funeral chapel. Wedged behind a coffee table blocked with bottles, Mrs. Hawthorn did not rise, but we greeted each other with that air of confederate gaiety adopted by hostess and guest at parties of whose success neither is sure. Across from her, behind an imitation hearth, a gas log burned insolently, as if a fireplace burning in the middle of the sea might serve to keep the elements in their place.

“Life on the hypotenuse,” said Luke. He retrieved a bunch of gladioli, and set them back on the erring horizontal of a table.

Mrs. Hawthorn shifted her bracelets. “Dave is the florist in our home town—Hawthornton, Connecticut. I needed a rest, so Dave came down with me. Senator Hawthorn couldn’t get away. He’s the senator from there, you know.”

Luke and I nodded, eager to let her see that we took her explanation at its face value, unwilling to appear abashed at the malpractices of the rich and worn. I imagined her life—the idle, probably childless woman, burdened with an exuberance no longer matched by her exterior, drawing toward her, with the sequins of wealth and difference, the self-conscious little man who was doggedly trying to fill the gap between them with the only largesse at his command—his abracadabra of flowers. Luke and I exchanged looks across the flowers, secure in our cocoon of beginnings, seeing before us an itinerary that repudiated compromise, and made no concessions to the temporal.

As we drank, the fraudulent solidity of the room was displaced now and again by a deep, visceral sway that drained the chair arms from beneath our digging fingers, and the wine seemed only to accentuate the irrationality of the four of us so transiently, so unsuitably met. At one point, Mrs. Hawthorn told the blond, mild-featured Luke that he had a “sulphurous” look, which roused us all to unsteady laughter, and again I remember her asking, with the gaucherie so denied by her appearance, if he were a “college man.”

Then, suddenly, with an incredulous look on his face, Dave, the little man, stood up. Edging backwards, he felt for the doorknob, caught it, and disappeared around it. Ignoring his defection, the three of us sat on; then Luke, with a wild look at me, lurched through the flapping door and was gone.

Mrs. Hawthorn and I sat on for a moment, united in that smug matriarchy which joins women whose men have acted similarly and disgracefully. The heat from the burning log brought out the reek of the flowers, until it seemed to me that I had drunk perfume instead of champagne. Slowly the log up-ended and pointed toward the ceiling, but this too had slid far to the right, so that the room hung in a momentary armistice with the storm, the implacable hearth still glowing in its center. I stood up, and moved toward the door. It sidled toward me, and I achieved the corridor, but not before I had caught a last glimpse of Mrs. Hawthorn. She was sitting there like one of those children one often sees at dusk in the playground or the corner lot, still concentrated in fierce, solitary energy on the spinning top or the chalked squares of the deserted game, unwilling to admit the default of the others who have wilted, conceded in the afternoon’s end, and acquiescently gone home.

By the time Luke and I had made our separate ways to the cabin, the ship had ridden out the storm area and was running smoothly. We would dock next morning in New York Harbor. We greeted each other, and slid limply into bed. Luke put his arms around me with a protectiveness tinged, I could not help thinking, with a relief that I had not proved so indomitable after all. For a second, I held him at arm’s length. “Tell me first,” I said. “Are you a college man?” Then we nestled together, in the excluding, sure laughter of the young.

At the docking the next day, we got through the lines early, without seeing anyone we knew. We had exchanged addresses with Mrs. Hawthorn, never really expecting to see her again, and in the busy weeks after, during which we returned to our jobs and our life together, we forgot her completely.

About a month later, sometime in November, we got a note from her, written in a large, wasteful hand on highly colored, expensive notepaper, and followed, when we did not immediately answer, by a phone call, during which her voice came over the wire as gaily insistent as before. Would we come up for dinner and stay the night? We accepted without particular consideration, partly out of a reawakened interest in her and what she would be like at home with the Senator, and partly because it was a place to go with the Chevy—and no sense of the stringency of time had led us as yet to a carping evaluation of the people with whom we spent it.

On the way up that Saturday, a run of about seventy miles, we drove steadily through a long, umber autumn afternoon. At our left the sun dropped slowly, a red disc without penumbra. Along the country roads, the escarpments of pines and firs were black-green, with the somber deadness of a tyro’s painting of Italy. Lights popped up in the soiled gray backs of towns, and a presage of winter tingled in our minds, its remembered icicle sliding down our spines. I was twenty-two, free, still catching up with a childhood where hot dogs had been forbidden. I made Luke stop for them twice. After that we drove silently, my head on Luke’s shoulder. Inside the chugging little car, the heater warmed us; we were each with the one necessary person; we had made love the night before.

At seven, when we were expected, we were still twenty miles away. Luke stopped to phone. He came back to the car. “She says dinner will wait for us, not to rush. We’re to go on to a night club afterwards.”

In a second my mind had raked over everything in my suitcase, had placed me at the dinner table—perhaps not quite at the Senator’s right—had moved me on to the little round table on the dance floor.

“I just remembered,” I said. “I didn’t put in my evening shoes.”

“
I
just remembered,” said Luke. “I didn’t bring a proper tie.”

We burst into laughter, “We’ll swing round by way of New London,” said Luke. “We can get things there.”