In the Slammer With Carol Smith

by Hortense Calisher

  ‘No. I never did say.’ I did tell the private hospital the trust could only half pay for what was owed. But their records are never revealed.

  ‘I know your father died in a war, Carol. I never told you, did I—that so did mine?’

  ‘Oh?’ The SW’s aren’t supposed to tell you, about themselves.

  ‘But about your mother, how she died … an army nurse, is all the record says. Let go, because of her relationship with a non-commissioned officer. When he was killed, his family’s long-time former employers took the child in.’

  So they did. The town thought the aunts were misguided, if charitable. Or perhaps that, with no money except what they earned, I too would be indentured to the big ruin of a house that must be saved. Perhaps Titus, staring at me like an owl each time he came to deliver the coal, thought that too. When asked how his wife did he always answered the same. ‘Poorly. Ever since Hezekiah was los’.’ Though from well before the son was lost she had been known to be odd, finally retiring early from the library. I remember her, a light-skinned lady, a little mumbly, who no longer worked at the front desk. In the town there were a great many I would remember, with whom I was never to connect.

  ‘I knew about my father, of course. I would have had to.’ I see Gold’s eyelids flicker; she agrees, staring down at my face. ‘About my mother, I was only half-told. And not until I was half-grown. They thought it best.’

  … That summer before I went off to college, Titus came for what was to be the last time before he died. By then I knew who he must be to me, but it was too late for either of us to remark upon it. ‘College?’ he said to my aunts ‘—that’s good. We none of us knew how much you had toward it, short of what’s needed for the house. But now she has the scholarship.’ The house was a monster, yet also half ancestor to him as well; he was in agreement that it had to be kept. Once the horse died I had grown indifferent to the old pile and its haze-filled barns, as the aunts knew. To my mind, I had no further stake in it. That was why I was told.

  Until then, my mother had been a cipher. I could sneak a look at the man whose by-blow I had been admitted to be, in the line of dead soldier’s faces at the American Legion Hall. On Independence Day I sometimes had. And once on Memorial Day, when the parade ganging up to go to the cemetery had again opened up a hall off limits to kids except at events. That time I had even asked if I could help sell the poppies always sold on that day. ‘In Flanders Field, where poppies grow’—the poem was in our reader. Though that was not the war the face on the Legion’s photograph had fallen in, it seemed the thing to do. But the marshal I asked said, ‘Only veterans can sell them poppies, young lady. Got to wear one of those khaki hats, so’s people know.’ But then he reached over to a table for a bunch of those red cotton flowers and gave me one, for free. Maybe, looking at me had made a connection.

  But of my mother—dead in childbirth, or vanished after?—no pictures, not even a name. ‘His family was willing for us to adopt you,’ was all the aunts ever said. And we sure wanted you. Now let’s rustle up the peanut butter sandwiches. ‘And have us a game.’

  In senior high, by which time, in order to qualify for the normal legalities I was required to present a birth certificate on my own, it was revealed that an ‘infant’ had been born in a small town just inside the U.S. at the Canadian border, delivered by midwife to one Carol Smith, American, not otherwise described, the infant being christened the same. ‘Father not identified.’ Signed illegibly, in the midwife’s hand.

  Color was not discussed in my aunts’ house, but mine was taken for granted by those who saw me there: a member of the town’s servant clan. When Noblesse oblige was murmured in my presence by a chance guest from one of the other turreted houses, and I asked later what that meant, Rosanna, the day aunt, rallied with, ‘To keep one’s obligations is noble,’ while Adelaide, who taught music to her evening classes, drummed on the table to the tune of La Roi d’Yvetot. As for me, no sooner did I show signs of knowing my lowly position in that household, than an extra blast of their love would knock me off my perch. I felt like the only surviving fish in the grand bowl in the sitting-room, swimming hither-thither to keep its place.

  By my eighteenth birthday the house plainly needed young shoulders: roof-tiles whirling away in a nor’easter, foundation sagging in the warm. Neither aunt was now well; one might not last my college years, although this I was not told. Once graduated though, if I could teach? ‘Any subject of your choice,’ Adelaide said—‘Though I would not suggest music,’ Rosanna said. ‘And I would suggest—by day.’

  The voices blend forever, over the tea napkins and special cakes—pink-icing’d squares I didn’t know were petits fours—that had meant decision-making ever since I could recall. ‘And if you could aim to teach in a college, for which we are told you have the capacity—what a tribute to your ancestors that would be.’

  To Titus, and the sad, lavender-cheeked librarian? And my dim handsome father, not pictured anywhere in the house except in drawings I had done and kept hidden, or in pre-dream I narrated to myself?

  The aunts knew my every expression, from the games always laid out for us in the bay. I have since been told, and I believe it, that this gaming was their own childlike expression of love.

  ‘Oh—the Oldfields?’ one said, the other adding ‘Of course. But not only them.’

  Then who? What game is this?

  The tea steams from the pot; we owned a Salton hot-tray given one year to steady savers at the bank.

  ‘My dearest.’

  ‘Dearest dear.’

  I no longer try to piece out which of the aunts said which.

  ‘To those ancestors—’ both say, pointing, napkins in hand. Their faces flush, like when either of them wins at chinese checkers maybe, or even dominoes—but how can two win a game at the same time? ‘To those, dear, up there, on the wall.’

  Their tribe crowds the sitting-room’s floss-flecked paper; I know every face, bearded or lace-capped, painted by an artist or photographed, and their legends as well. I know what a busk is and a peruke, and who brought home the ivories, all but two long since sold. The abolitionist minister, circled by four dead wives? The baggy Congressman who had deserted William Jennings Bryant and the free coinage of silver, just in time?—I know them all, the heritage of this house. Only, now they come down from the wall to me, gold frames, speckled ones, mourning banded ones, and the two silhouettes I cherish because no one knows who they are. One by one they are brought down and put in my hands, these ancestors. They are also mine.

  ‘Daisy—you still asleep?’

  No, she is awake. ‘The rain.’ Pit-a-pat, autumn coming. Top of the fridge, the radio-clock glows. It’s any time, past time, I don’t want to know the time; tomorrow I’ll be gone.

  ‘I’ll tell you who my mother was,’ I say. ‘One of the aunts. But they would never say which one.’

  The Shelter-Pak—its official name—is in the hall outside my half-open door. When you live with a backpack you are always looking for a clean place to set it down. The hall’s scrubbed linoleum is a palace rest-stop, compared to what that one will endure. For I’ll have a domestic life as much as any householder. Only of a different order. The search for running water being prime. After that the question of where you can lay your head. I have no grand theory on the adventures of the road. Except that in desert or oases, California or Niagara, the ground-rat knows early and best what the country’s coming to.

  It helps to leave with an errand. Outside, it’s not light yet. Too early for those here who will be going out for milk—and coming back in. I can’t see the note on the fridge, but it is there. On her pallet, once mine, Daisy lies face down, her hair gleaming in the dim ray cast from the hall bulb; we got the color just right. Accepted—when Carmen brought her a mirror—with a weak smile.

  My last night’s revelation sank into her like the dye. In former days she’d have cried out, like someone who’d found a lost key. In my own mind I continue speaking to her
all the night through. Or to the eternal someone: grateful, that neither of them replies.

  This is a new silence for me. In a head with a dialogue solely its own. The aunts have taken their enigma into the shadows behind me. My parents, whoever they were, have played out their variations. Gold has a hole in her where the children once were; it may never heal. I have no hole in me any more—its rim working like a mouth that wants a breast, its core of air sucking me toward the fatherless. My case is different; I was the child. Time will be my triumph. Whatever it brings.

  I stand in front of the mirror. Full-length, yes, a bargain. You have an instinct for those, Carol—Gold said to me once. So I do. Comes with having a bargain for a face, neither ghostly white as the lady librarian’s nor so Blue Coal dark as the sergeant’s in the Legion Hall. The short haircut is becoming; it was a bargain too, in a barbers’ training-school, where I paid nothing. Except for my dues, which were internal.

  The girl student who gravitated to me, like a young witch riding the shears she was pointing, had almost the same skin as me. All down the line of barber’s chairs people’s heads were turning into spiky cubes, or other propositions out of Euclid. The carrot-head next to me was being shaved to the crown, except for one sprout. I am like on a ward, but this time I am laughing.

  My operator touches my cheekbone, then her own. She has almost the same hair too, curly but smooth, straight but not dead straight. ‘Man, are we going to make us kicky,’ she says, sleeking a hand on her own coif, that sits like a bell halfway up her nape. ‘Will you have the same? Look great on you. And easy care. Grows into a pigtail, if you can’t come in here regular. Or a bun.’

  After she was done, an attendant moved to scoop up behind my chair. The whorl of hair that went into the carpet sweeper looked like the long-outmoded head of a college girl. ‘What made you finally do it?’ the operator said. ‘I kind of like to know.’ We smile at each other, sisterly. ‘I had this great barette,’ I said. ‘I wanted to give it away. I cut my hair so I could.’

  Goodbye Daisy Gold. Though in a way we’re still linked. Both of us on the receiving end now, you on the severance pay and whatever welfare you can luck into later, me still on the stipend the street calls ‘the disability.’ Both of us bound to whatever offices that so dispense. You to the courts, for judgment—I to the clinics, and the streets. The mails may make things simpler in your case. So I give you this house. Easy-chair.

  This woman, in this mirror—who knows what she might yet be? Or how bright are her errands?

  The gorilla-cage is bare now except for what’s hung there, still neat under its plastic. Alphonse’s shirt.

  THE STREET AHEAD should look more crooked. Seen from behind, it somehow looks straighter, even before she’s there. Has the long bus ride put her off balance, as it used to? She knows it has not. The spacey side-to-side she once spent her days in is a trance she can scarcely recall. Shoulder to waist, ankle to knee, she is now aligned as most people are. Though in the street itself an outline is missing. Some indication always expected, even at dusk—chimney-stacks? Somewhere along.

  As she rounds the corner she almost bumps into a barrow stacked with pots of yellow flowers. Mungo is standing on the sidewalk in front of it. Hand to forehead under his visor cap, he stares like those Indian scouts who used to be painted looking down into a canyon from their mountain top. What Mungo is looking at is only a vacant lot. A long, narrow expanse of ground, rubbled with crushed stone. Almost neatly. Some giant machine has patterned it.

  Her sight is as clear as a falcons must be. Or like after eye-drops. She may have perfect confidence in it. Those slates there, ranged up from the walk’s edge like a stile to nowhere; those were the front steps. In front of her is a huge parallelogram of air.

  The Cat Club is gone.

  ‘They came in the night—’ Mungo said, as if continuing a conversation. ‘Cop on duty says. Did the same last year, to a building same block as our church. Where I’m sexton. Complete wrecker’s crew. Gone like the wind.’ An embossed tin box is in his palm. Opening it, and lifting his mustache, he inserts a pinch up each nostril. ‘Tax relief. Or they sell the site.’ He sneezes; his eyes tearing. ‘Only the snuff,’ he says.

  She recalls how he used to say that, at intervals. All those habits that houses have—where now is the cat? Where’s everybody, anybody? She knows the whereabouts of one. ‘There was a notice on the door. After an accident.’

  ‘Don’t fancy that crew came in by any door. Or left by one.’ He sends her a sidelong glance, almost proud. ‘And I have a heap of business with doors.’

  ‘Doors?’

  ‘Aye. From the Seamen’s Institute. Lived there. Until they got rid of the building, and us. Same bloody wind.’

  She’s inching into the shock, slowly. His big red face is a help. ‘You sell flowers too?’

  ‘Distribute them. After the church weddings. Young couple, this time. So it was plants. Three dozen of ’em. Hospital couldn’t handle. Other outlets closed for weekend. So come here.’ Suddenly he poked a finger at her. ‘Three dozen of ’em. Count!’

  She sees too close his gelid, distracted eye. Nothing dangerous. But does as she is bid. Yellow rosettes on stiff stems, not dead yet.

  ‘Count.’

  They have no smell. ‘Thirty-six.’ When she raised her head she saw what was at the far corner of the lot.

  ‘Three dozen,’ Mungo said with satisfaction. ‘No mismanagement. Hey, hold back—don’t walk in there. There’s glass everywhere.’

  She’d forgotten how cogent in some matters the Cat Club’s non-members could be. Or when abroad, in their pursuits. The walkers knowing down-to-the-ground it were, what is possible, ignorable or threatening, underfoot. The can-collectors, who know all the classifications of tins as well as the stores that by law have to accept deposits and for how much.

  ‘I’ve got new shoes’ she says. ‘Stabilizers.’

  ‘You’ll ruin them.’

  ‘I got to have one last look at it. The shed.’

  ‘Ah, in that case. Well, I have on me workaday boots.’

  The rubble ahead of them, tinted by the rising sun and glimmering with points of glass and wave-crests of metal, looks more of an expanse than a city lot.

  ‘That’s what keeps a chap at sea,’ Mungo says. ‘Your last view is no change from your first.’

  They pick their way slowly, his hand on her elbow. His two pairs of boots classify him, just as Alphonse’s ‘other’ shirt, now in the outer slot of her pack, classified him. As being a step above those who have only what is on their backs. And only the one source of cash.

  ‘Minding a church—,’ she says ‘—what a nice job.’

  ‘A dispensation.’ He lifts a small, evil sliver of metal from their path. ‘Nights only. I watch until it’s light. Days, I’m on the docks—if there’s nothing for the barrow. Or on the ferry—if luck presents.’

  Does he mean—if he can pay?

  ‘Is it an open church, or a closed?’

  A splinter of glass has lodged in the heel of Mungo’s left boot. Bending, he pries it out. ‘Open for services only. And Sunday soup. Otherwise closed, with only me there. All the riffraff that’s around—that would doss down in the sanctuary? Can’t do else.’

  She wonders whether he stays for the soup.

  The long shard he tosses out of their path is amber. From the storefront window’s border. She decides not to mention this. They are almost at the shed.

  ‘Wonder how come they left it,’ Mungo says.

  A voice answers from around the shed’s side. ‘Daylight. They had to scramble.’

  It’s Jerry Guido, the cop on the beat. Who as all of them know, volunteered to walk his territory instead of riding in a police car. Who even the teenage hoods go to, in a jam. ‘That fuckin’ moneybags. She must of figured the courts won’t bother her for the demolishing, just because she’s in Florida.’ He comes round the side of the shed. ‘And how are you, my Aussie friend?’

  �
��No she wasn’t. She was here, in her mink. The morning of the accident.’

  When a cop alerts, even in chat, his hand always goes to where his gun is stashed. ‘And who are you? And what do you know about the accident?’

  Whatever is wrong with her chemistry—for of course she’s been warned there may be something—it’s also common knowledge that people like her share one of the stigmata of childhood for which they are neither cherished or thanked. Their tongues will not lie. Even if they take a daily pill.

  Fortunately, Jerry now recognizes her. ‘Why it’s you, is it? Alphonse’s Miss Boston Special. Hey there. Looka you.’ He whistles. ‘Got yourself a job, maybe? At the Rainbow Room?’

  It’s the haircut. And starting out. With the men at the bar maybe watching. She has on all her ‘other’ wardrobe. The shirt, the belt, the dungies. And Angel’s earrings.

  But when he sees the tell-tale backpack there’s that shift in his face. When it recognizes the outside. ‘Don’t get me wrong—’ he says. What he means is—he had her wrong. ‘But where are you two heading?’

  ‘She has to see the shed.’ Mungo speaks as if this is some faith he won’t question.

  ‘Does she now. And why?’

  Mungo turns to her. ‘Why?’

  When both the outside people and the inside ones want to know your reasons, their own whys become starkly clearer. Mungo’s asking only because wherever he is, he travels in circles. Answering docilely to those who hand out dispensations. And always a little at sea.

  Jerry asks because he has the eye-crinkles that come from kindliness, but also a holster somewhere.

  She says, ‘I want to keep a memory.’

  Mungo swings his head uncomfortably. He’s wearing a round collar back-to-front—his minister’s discard?—which he has fastened with paper-clips. The cop purses his mouth. If she mystifies both parties, that’s nothing new.