The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (62 page)

It was a vertical place for people like them, in which the only way out was up. He watched the two of them, a couple named Sam and Bee, climbing from tower to tower, in a gilt-edged monkeydom of closeness, to the spheric music of the brandy glasses that would get thinner along the climb.

He drank, watching them. Opposite him, against a sky humbled to a perpetual nude, the towers waited, like slowly fizzing rockets that never went out—or soared away.

A
RIETTA MINOT FAY, AT
thirty-seven, still lived in the house in which she, her father and all their known male forebears but the first had been born, a white, Hudson River-bracketed house, much winged and gabled but with a Revolutionary cottage at its core, set in a tiny village, once only a road, on the west shore of the Hudson River, about twenty-five miles from New York. Arietta’s first forebear, Yves Minot, had come to the States in the entourage of Lafayette (some said as a body-servant, although this had never been proved) and had managed to stay near the general’s person throughout all the general’s campaigns except Valley Forge. In 1779, when the general had gone back briefly to France, Yves had stayed behind, first to marry one of the local Dutch girls (receiving the cottage and a large parcel of land as her dowry) and later to leave her at home while he ventured into battle or other forays, whenever he was so minded. In 1824, when Lafayette returned to America for a final visit, Yves was still there, flourishing in all but sons (because of land inheritance, the Minot line usually ran carefully to one) and had accompanied the general on his famous triumphal tour, again in some capacity typical of the Minots, something unidentifiable, profitable and without a doubt enjoyable.

Arietta, if asked to hazard a guess as to what this might have been, usually replied, with the family talent for presenting itself accurately, that Yves’s function probably had something to do with a cap and bells. For, all the Minots took for granted what they had been, were, and hoped to go on being. They were jesters,
fonctionnaires
attending the private person only, quartermasters supplying the ego, minor affections and spirits of those who were rich enough to keep living standards equal to their own
bon viveur
tastes, had the intelligence to relish the thrusts of which they were wisely capable, and above all were important enough to enable the Minots to admire them. This was the Minot vanity and their backbone through the years: that managing always to attach themselves to the most honorable patrons, they had meanwhile restricted their own knavish tricks to the surface diablerie required of their profession—that is, to entertainment only. Beneath the skin they were not knaves, beyond a certain French clarity as to the main chance, which in turn had instructed them that a supernormal honesty, shrewdly displayed, was invaluable to him who lived on perquisites.

For no Minot had ever had a salary, or had gone, as phrase is, “to work.” Every male Minot had attended a university as a matter of course, to be refined for his trade, and occasionally to pick up there some symbiotic relationship that had lasted him for life. Arietta’s father, of the first generation to have no sons, had done his best by sending her to Vassar, where three members of the Rensselaer (an old dining-club of which he was secretary) had sent their girls that same year—the three men representing respectively money with family, money with politics, and—since the Minots had had to lower their standards along with the rest of the world, though belatedly—money with money. For until her father’s time—and he, poor man, was in no way responsible for the monstrous change in the world—all had gone marvelously well with the Minots in both comfort and reputation. And deservedly, for all had worked hard. Although their perquisites had often been extraordinarily vague, ranging from small properties given them to manage and subsequently inherited either in part or in toto, from careers as retainers (they retained so gracefully) or as incumbents of benefices that never had to be explained to them or by them, all the way down to the latter-day vulgarities of stockmarket tips—no Minot had ever boondoggled at the earning of what he received. Until well past the First World War, one could imagine two important men murmuring of a third, as in another context they might mention that his chef was the great-nephew of Brillat-Savarin—“Lucky man, he has a Minot.”

Even in the non-Venetian world of post-’29, the world that had begun to be so hard on those useful types for which there never seemed to be any but foreign names: the
cavalière servante,
the
fidus Achates,
the
condottiere,
the … Minot—the family had still managed, amiably using its talents where there was still scope for them, but for the first time dangerously using its resources when there was not. Over a hundred years in this country had weakened their French pith, making them less antipathetic than they should have been to eating their capital and selling their land. Marrying by inclination had been an even earlier symptom to appear, but here perhaps they had been lucky, for like so many reared nobly, their inclinations had always been a little bit coarse—and this had kept the line remarkably healthy. This meant that Arietta, when she came on the market, did so from a long line of non-idiots, non-hemophiliacs with a minimum life-expectancy of eighty. It also meant that, with one thing and another, she hadn’t much expectancy of anything else except the uses to which she might put her share of Minot temperament—that merriment spiked with truth-telling, suppleness just short of servility, and love of ease combined with a wonderfully circuitous energy for pursuing it. Like so many of her ancestors, Arietta was willing to burn any number of ergs in the process, as long as neither dishonor nor the usual channels of attainment were involved.

On this particular summer Saturday evening at about seven o’clock, Arietta, dressed to go out in her one still respectable cocktail dress, sat in the dimming upstairs parlor of the house that had been hers since the death a year ago, within a few months of each other, of her father and her husband, and gazed out on the river, musing, moodily for her, on the narrow area of play offered that temperament by the modern world. Saturday was shopping day for the week, and this morning, hold back as she might on things like paper napkins—they would use the linen ones—she had not been able to avoid spending eighteen dollars on food. Her nine-year-old son Roger, away for the night at a friend’s house, would consume that almost unaided during the school week. One of the sweet-voiced robot-ladies from the telephone company had phoned twice during the past few days, and even the Light & Power, usually so kindly, had begun to press her about last winter’s heating bill. This week, to the bewilderment of her friends, she had taken to answering the phone in French, ready to aver that “Madame” was away. There had been no cleaning-woman for a year. Behind her, the rooms, receding wing on wing into the hillside with the depressed elegance of a miniature chateau, showed, besides the distinguished stainings of a hundred and fifty years, the thin, gradual grime of amateur care. The house, free and clear for a century until the thirties, was hers thanks to her father’s single quirk of hereditary thrift, hidden from them until the otherwise worthless will was read—mortgage insurance. It was worth about twenty thousand dollars, possibly a little more to one of that new race of antiquarians who had debouched upon these hills aching to “restore” some old place electrically, and able to—viz. the Lampeys, where she was going that evening. But its sale, if she could bring herself to sell, would be slow. Here she sat in it then, in the richest country in the world. In addition to the house, she had a few marketable “old pieces,” small ones to be culled from among the massive bedsteads and armoires, but nothing on which to rear a nine-year-old boy. She was sitting at Great-grandmother Marie-Claire’s tambour desk; Roger could eat it in two months. She had the pawn tickets for Marie-Claire’s rose-diamonds, and for Marie-Claire’s daughter-in-law’s epergne. And she had $126.35 in the bank.

And in addition she had, of course, herself. It had been her only dowry, and until some six months ago she had never seriously attempted to draw upon it. “What a pity,” her golden-haired Uncle Victor—elder brother of her father and the last successful one of his generation—had remarked of her when she was eight, what a pity that Arietta wasn’t male, for she seemed to have all the Minot talents, including a marked facial resemblance to the founder of the line. Victor had died, from an overdose of his patron’s pheasant and Lafitte, at the minimal age of eighty, spared from knowing that it was even more of a pity that she wasn’t a nineteenth-century male. But here she was, and she was neither. The room where she sat now was the
petit salon
that held the conglomeration of family pictures, and without turning to look at that descending gallery of honorable rogues, she could trace in them not only the decline of the private patron—of which all the world was aware—but of his factotum—small, tragic, subdominant theme that the world had ignored.

Above the mantel was Yves, done on ivory, full-length too, which was unusual for the medium. Legend had it that he had insisted on this because, knee-breeched to the end of his life, he had declared a man to be incomplete without a show of calf; certainly their japing angle went with the face above. It was a triangular face in which all the lines went up, a minstrel face whose nose, long for its tilt, must have moved, as hers did, with speech. The enamelist had even managed to indicate in
couleur-de-rose
those same crab-apple bumps of cheek she had when she smiled. Next to him was the Dutch wife, shown in conventional oval to the waist, of which there was much, a great blonde, serene in all but her stays. Beneath the two, depending on lengths of velvet ribbon in the tree of life, were their heirs direct and collateral, daguerreotype to Brownie, spilling from the mantel to the side walls. As a curious phenomenon, one could see one or the other of the two progenitors always recurring, often with such fidelity that there had long been family slang for the two types—“the beefies” for the Dutch ones, and
“les maigres”
for those
mince
creatures who were true Minots. Although there had been no intermarrying, one type had usually managed to marry the other, and his children tended to be his opposites as well.

Yes, it is all very interesting, thought Arietta—we are a fascinating lot, rather like the green and yellow peas in Mendel—and her father had often dined out on that story. In time, if there was time, she might dine out on it too. Meanwhile, brooding on the three pictures between Yves and the wedding portrait of herself and Carolingus Fay, deceased, she traced a history much more in Gibbon’s line.

Beneath Yves came his Claude, a “beefy,” of whom it might have been said (as Henry Adams had said of himself) that “as far as he had a function in life, it was as a stable-companion to statesmen, whether they liked it or not.” In Claude’s case they had. Next came Louis, her grandfather, who had switched to railroad barons—a light sprig of a man who had passed on, full in years and benefices, while accompanying home the equally aged body of his baron, on the Union Pacific somewhere between Ogden and Omaha, in a private car. Under him, in the sepia gloss of the eighties, were his sons, beefies again: her father in his teens, in the deerstalker’s cap so prophetic of his later years, and Victor, already a man with a beautiful Flemish jowl. Victor had already been with “munitions” at the time. At the minimal age of eighty he had died (her father used to joke) not of pheasant but of pique, because his patron’s son, seduced by the increasingly corporate air of Delaware, had entered Victor’s exquisitely intangible services on a tax sheet, had actually tried to incorporate
him.
If so, it had still been death in the high style, and of it. But with her father, the long descent, gradual as the grime on her bric-a-brac, was clear. He had still had the hereditary talent, but he had been fifteen years younger than Victor. Patrons herded in groups now instead of carrying on singly, and preferred the distressingly plebeian admiration of the many to the fine, patrician allegiance of the one. And gaiety, the mark of the personal, was suspect in a sociological world. Ergo her father. When a Minot was stripped of his devotion and of the truth-telling that was its honorable underside, when he was reduced to picking up crumbs of “contact” wherever he could, to making public show of his charms like anyone else, then he did so in the only way he knew. Her father had become a diner-out. It was some consolation that, under many lambent chandeliers and between many long-stemmed rows of pink and tawny glasses, he had dined so well.

She glanced at her wrist, remembered that she no longer had a watch, and looked at the river, estimating the seasonal angle of light on the opposite shore. Still too early to walk the short distance to the Lampeys, who, much as they adored her company, touted it, still preferred their guests to arrive, sharply gala, at eight. And these days Arietta aimed to please, had in fact aimed so steadily these past months and so far from her usual haunts, the shabby Saturday night parties of the real denizens of these hills, that it was no wonder if these were already remarking how unexpected it was of Arietta—slated one would have said for years yet to the memory of Carolingus—to be openly hunting a husband, and in such circles as the Lampeys, too. How surprised they would be if they knew that all she was hunting was a job. A job, to be sure, for a Minot—a sinecure not for sloth, but for the spirit. With, of course, perks enough to feed a healthy nine-year-old boy.

She rose and went to the mantel, staring up at Yves—one
“maigre”
looking at another. She was four velvet ribbons removed from him, and—except for Roger, who would be nothing for years yet—the last hope of his line. If from his vantage point he could have approved the resemblance, would he have expected her, a female, nevertheless to do something in his line? Being female, what she had done was, twelve years ago, to marry Carolingus Fay. After Vassar had come a year in Italy with one of the daughters of her father’s three friends; the girl had married there, and Arietta, after attending her in a horsehair hat, had returned home. Next, the second girl, married to an Englishman who farmed in Nigeria, had invited her there. Against her father’s wishes—it was not cautious for a woman to become too
déracinée—
she had gone, and in her lightsome way had enjoyed it, but marooned there, she had missed much of the war and most of the eligible men. In any case, esprit, or whatever it was she had, was difficult in a woman if it wasn’t so much accompanied by looks as contributed to by them. Returning home, with her laugh-lines baked deeper than they should have been for her age, and with some knowledge of cacao and palm oil added to the magpie lore of her clan, she had vegetated in the Hudson Valley for a few restless months—her father’s profession so seldom left him home to be cooked for—and then had gone to Baltimore to visit an old cousin.