The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (60 page)

Therefore, on the list of the influential few who had rallied to the support of the Hall, none had rallied harder than Mrs. Whyte. And at the end of that summer six years before, the newspaper of the little Hudson River town where the Whytes had their bracketed gothic summer place, had reported: “Mr. and Mrs. Reese Reynolds Whyte and their daughter, Miss Letitia Reynolds Whyte, have left for an extended motor tour of the South, their destination Hyacinth Hall, the well-known finishing school, where Miss Whyte will enroll as an art student. Accompanying them is their house guest, Dame Alice Mellish, formerly honored by His Majesty, the King of England, for her studies in Anglo-American semantics.”

It had been a queer entourage which had descended upon the school in those last deciduous days of summer. The few teachers and students already there, waiting out the close, inert days before the beginning of the term, were energized and impressed by the visitors, whose confident eccentricity had as surely betokened superiority. Flanked by Mrs. Whyte, a type instantly recognizable and acceptable, and by Dame Alice, whose skirts were uneven to the point of vagary, but whose title had preceded her through the school like an odor, had come Letitia, not so instantly recognizable, but soon to be. And wheeled out, in dark finale, from the capacious back of the car, had come the chair bearing Mr. Whyte, a beautifully groomed old man in lawyer’s black and a stiff collar, his very clean hands nerveless on his knees, the fixed upward twist of one side of his mouth lending him a demeanor of unchangeable pleasure. He did not talk, and apparently could not, but his lack, appearing at the end of life rather than at the beginning, was an honorable one which needed not to be hidden, and he was wheeled in and out of every conversation. From time to time, the chauffeur who attended him leaned over and removed or replaced the silky black beaver hat on the silver head at the proper intervals, and this, seeming to be done according to some prescribed rhythm of etiquette, not only lent the old man a verisimilitude of activity, but created, also, an atmosphere of the most recherché good taste. And when Mrs. Whyte, pointing her arches carefully before her, trailing the confused and conquered Miss Rosanna behind her, had clacked down the marble steps of the main building, she had sailed right up to the wheel chair, which had not attempted the steps, as to a reviewing stand, and with nods and becks and the most wreathed of smiles, had apparently recounted the whole transaction to the unchangeable benevolence of Father.

The Whytes did not stay the night at the school. They departed that same evening, leaving behind them a legend, that had faded, and Letitia, who had stayed the same.

So it was that Letitia, entering her hot, still room on this particular day, entered the only permanent room in the dormitory, a room from which she yearned, each expectant June, to be delivered, and to which she was, each disappointed June, remanded. Most of the other rooms had a littered, bird-of-passage look which suggested that the girl in each was only sojourning on her way to wider fields which Letitia, while she craved them, could not have described. Letitia’s room, however, had the same supervised neatness as her person, and with its pictures of her family hanging on the wall in circular silver frames, its chiming clock near the bed, and its large calendar with the block numbers marked off crosswise, looked as if it had long ago made its concessions to forever. During one or two of the early years, the accident of a friendly girl neighbor next door had permitted the unlocking of the connecting door between the rooms, as was done everywhere else in the school, but with the coming of Willa Mae, all this had changed, and little by little, Letitia’s almost tolerated, almost earned place in the humming, cozy undercurrents of the dormitory, had slipped away.

“Honestly, Mum,” Willa had reported at home, “it would give you the creeps! Really it would!” And at the very next Parents’ Day, Mrs. Fordyce, not having trusted herself among the delicacies of correspondence, had actually broached the subject, gaspingly, to Miss Rosanna, but had found her, under her cloud of faltering reassurances, unexpectedly immovable. For the special arrangement for Letitia was large.

Nevertheless, the last four years had come to have a painful weight of their own, had come to be known, in her sharded thoughts, as “the locked-door years.” But now, as she closed the door behind her, excitement twitched at her mouth, gave almost a complexity to the clear glass of her eyes. For a minute she stood in the room like a stranger to it, as if waiting for someone to tell her what to do next. Then she went to the dresser and pulled out a drawer. Behind a pile of tailored slips, all alike, which she moved to one side with patient tidiness, she found what she wanted. With a crow of pleasure, she drew out the sequinned cap and held it in her hand. Straightening up, she walked over to the window, hung the cap on the hooked ornament at the end of the window-shade cord, and stood there dazzled, watching it.

Until now, there had been no occasion important enough for it since the fiasco of its first wearing. Early in her first year at the school Letitia had been permitted to attend the initial one of the highly chaperoned dances which occurred there several times a year in co-operation with a nearby military academy. Halfway through the evening, an affrighted young man, flying incontinently from the coat room, and an incredulous wave of gossip, rippling through the dancers, had made it all too apparent that either Mrs. Whyte’s strictures to Miss Rosanna had been too reserved, or Miss Rosanna’s interpretation of them insufficiently literal. Ever since then, on such evenings, Letitia, accompanied by Delia, had been sent to the movies in Minetteville, where they stayed right through the double feature, and often even sat over a sundae at Whalen’s afterwards, although Delia, admitted there in her capacity as duenna, never ate anything, but sat stiffly, referring quietly from time to time to the watch the Whytes had sent her after the first year.

Now, twisting and turning with a purposeful motion of its own, the cap dangled and reversed itself, glittering in the sun. A prism of light, deflected from it, kindled the silver frames of the pictures, where they hung on the wall, disregarded by Letitia’s glance, as their originals hung, neglected, in the dusty galleries of her remembrance. Twice a year she saw her family briefly, but so briefly, so remotely across the hedge to another world, that they had all but receded into symbols of that larger existence into which one was accepted, to which one acceded only after the mystical rite of graduation.

All the signposts, all the clues, had brought Letitia around to this conclusion, and helped by circumstance, to her contrivance for escape. On the door of Papa Davis’ office, a yellowed card, pinned to the aged door frame, said in gothicked lettering: “Walter Wallace Davis. Professor, Emeritus,” and only yesterday, straying in there in answer to his eager, scooping glance, she had stopped to peer closer, almost professionally, at the lettering on the card, and with a delaying finger on the last queer word, had asked its meaning. Papa Davis had risen from his armchair and bent closer to her over the card, as if he too had had to ponder its meaning. Then, tossing back his head so that she had seen the waggle-tuft of beard on his chin pointing straight out, he had laughed in his neighing voice.

“Graduated!” he had said, smiling at her, nodding like a pendulum. “It means ‘graduated,’” he had added, frowning. “Leaving a place forever.” In the silence that fell between them he had kept on speculatively nodding. He had stretched an arm past her, then, to grasp the door, had leaned out to stare fretfully up and down the empty corridor, and stepping back into the room, had softly closed the door and locked it.

Even when he had come closer, very close, she had been unalarmed. Each year the school put on a Roman Festival, and Papa Davis had been present at rehearsals to hear the Latin declamations, and pass on the authenticity of the home-draped togas. If she had seen the girls exploding into silent laughter in a corner, if she had heard one whispering to another “Papa Davis has to feel you to see if you’re Roman!” it had meant to her, perhaps, one more cryptic notion of authority, or perhaps nothing at all. And so, if at first she had watched his overtures with a docility heightened only with curiosity, then later she had received them with eager warmth, even though he was nothing like the young men to whom she had once put out a questing hand. For the force of his words, just said, hung around him like a clue, a means to an end. Then, too, she had heard him say so often in his peevish, solitary voice, that the school was his real, his only home, and this, interpreted as a complaint, had harped on a reality she understood, which made them kin. And finally, gazing up at him from the cracked leather davenport, she had seen that, with his avid lip drawn back over the long yellow teeth, he had looked unintimidating, familiar, like an old, begging horse.

Now she lifted the cap away from the window, twirled it several times over in her fingers, and walked over to the mirror. With a single uncalculated movement she put the cap on her head and looked into the mirror with a pleased smile. Then she walked over to her desk. Strewn over its surface were a number of small white cards, discarded trial copies of that final, faultless one she had put in the school mail-box.

Still holding the sparkling cap awkwardly to her head with one hand, she bent over the desk and picked up one of the cards. Beautifully printed and shaded in India ink, it seemed unmarred, and in truth, working delightedly all that morning over her inscriptions, she had been almost reluctant to settle on one as perfect enough for her vivid purpose. She had copied the first word secretly from the slip on Willa Mae’s desk. Her own name she knew how to do. The last of the legend she had transcribed lovingly from the yellowed card rifled from Professor Davis’ office door. Only, here, with this last, making a single change which for her amounted to an act of creation, almost of intelligence, she had inverted the sequence, so that the little card she held in her hand now, copy of that still more perfect one she had slipped into the box, read:

“Engaged. Professor Walter Wallace Davis. And Letitia Reynolds Whyte, Emeritus.”

T
HROUGH THE CARNIVAL LOOPS
of the beginning of the bridge the cars, shining suddenly, crept slowly on their way to Manhattan. Back of their packed lines, the dark smear of Jersey, pricked with itinerant sparkles, gained mystery as it was left behind, but never enough to challenge the great swag of coastline that hung on the blackness opposite.

In front of Sam Boardman’s car the lines inched forward and stopped.

“Look at that!” he said. He leaned on his motionless wheel and stared south. “Will you look at that!”

Bee’s nearer earring, tiny, hard and excellent, flexed with light.

“There she is,” he said. “Just past your earring. One of the wonders of the world. If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never get tired of it.”

Or of knowing I have a piece of it, he thought. The city was his hero, the only one he had ever had or would have. Born into it, funneled through its schools and its cynical, enchanting streets, he was still as tranced by it as all the boys and girls from out of town who ate it up with their eyes and hearts and were themselves eaten in the hunt for a piece of it. There it was, he thought, the seacoast of Bohemia, moving always a little forward as you went toward it, so that even now, when he saw his listing in the telephone directory,
Samuel Boardman atty 351 5 Av, Residence
75
Cent Pk W
, he could hardly believe that he was an accredited citizen of the mirage.

“Give thanks you don’t have to look at it from Englewood,” she said. She lit a cigarette and blew vigorously on her furs. “How Irv and Dolly—of all people. …”

Because of the kids, he thought, as they moved forward a few feet. We know damn well it was because of the kids. All the New Yorkers who grew up there as tough as weeds were convincing themselves that their children couldn’t have sound teeth or sound psyches unless they moved them to the country. Perhaps it was the last gesture, the final axing of the cocktail hour and the theater-ticket agency, by those who didn’t want to stay in town unless they could go on being on the town. Or perhaps it
was
decentralization—not of cities, but the last, the final decentralization—of the ego. At least they said it was because of the kids, and you didn’t say this aloud to a woman who had been trying to have one for ten years. You took pleasure, instead, in the quietly serviced apartment with the expansible dining nook and the contractible servant; and you were careful to voice this on occasion, perhaps at the little evening ritual when you were proffered the faultless drink from the crumbless table, and you reached around to pat the behind, flat as a ghost’s, of the woman who had not let herself go.

Ahead of him, the lines melted slightly; he eased into a better lane and picked up some speed as they neared the city side. Through the surge of Irv’s after-dinner highballs, he shied away from the image of Bee, her platformed shoes tucked stiffly to one side on the toy-strewn rug, her blond wool lap held politely defenseless against the sticky advances of Irv’s twins. After all, there was a certain phoniness in the people who tweeded up and donned couturier brogues just because they were visiting the country; Bee’s bravura Saturday night chic was more honest. And she had patted the twins’ round fists and held on to them, if a little away from the lap, and had referred to herself as Aunt Bee.

“Talk about wonders,” she said. “To see Irv and Dolly Miller knee-deep in paint and dirt is one of them. Two months out of Sutton Place. And that gem of an apartment.”

“You realize they’re the fourth in a year?” he said. “The Kaufmans, in Stamford. Bill and Chick, in Roslyn. And the Baileys, in Pound Ridge.”

“Oh, it’s the same difference,” she said. “A perpetual stew of wallpapering.”

He slowed up for the traffic on the New York side. It was true, he thought; it was about the same difference. Country coy, all of them, as soon as they hit a mortgage—they made a morality of acreage and a virtue of inconvenience. In Stamford and Roslyn the “doing it over” might be less obsessively home-grown, perhaps, and at the Baileys’ there would be brandy instead of highballs after dinner—the glasses thinning appropriately with the neighborhoods, all along the way.