In the Slammer With Carol Smith

by Hortense Calisher

  Yet when the newspapers get me down, or a bad outside night has, I huddle in their company. I return to them, as to one of the ‘soap’ operas not seen since the ward, when we were all too spaced out to change the program, many of us swaying from left to right. That sway, between whatever poles, may be in my consciousness, if not my body, to the end. I’ll handle that. But are these women the ‘serial,’ not mine, that will travel forever at my side? Martyn’s mother has made me their spy.

  South Africa’s recipes are the last in the book, which is inscribed by her to her daughter-in-law. ‘Herein is the coffeebread that Martyn so much likes. You’ll find that the servants make it better. We don’t have the touch.’

  Now the book has landed back here. No servants in a caravan? Or to be fair, had Martyn and his wife likely never had them? But studying this text, as I do, she would learn Martyn’s geography: Cherry fritters à la Natal … Zambesia Compote … Pretoria Pudding…(‘always a delight with the children’)…(Which one is certain to have?) … Veldt Date Porridge … Kenya Pineapple Gateau … Bloemfontein and Daloaga Bay Steak.

  I riffle through for Durban. Ah, here:

  TENNIS Sundaes From Africa: ‘Out here in Africa, tennis and sundaes are synonymous. But our sundaes are such that any girl can make for herself, even if she be inexperienced.’ The flavor for Durban is peach.

  My heart opens and closes for these three people. For a man sweating out his sundaes. There is no tennis racquet here.

  I fell asleep. Waking from those deeps at what must be long past midnight, I sense that velvet lack of movement into which even a city of clarions may fall. I am in an acute state of perception. The dream is just around the corner, the present sharp in the nostrils.

  I see my legs stretched before me. That want to walk.

  I smell the odor of being.

  I taste the vim of the apple I ate before sleep, cracking the pips for their almond tang.

  I hear—my heart.

  I touch—hand to hand, clasping gratitude.

  I breathe me in, slowly. I may not embrace the bizarre. But I know it exists. I plash in a modest backwater of well-being, knowing well that I am nude until I reach the clothes on the shore.

  Don’t boast, Carol. Keep a little caution-powder handy. Just don’t salt the coffee with it. Or tell too many people, maybe not anybody, what you now know is at last wrong-right with you.

  Nothing much really. Only what smug millions expect of themselves daily. Or plod along sweetly unconscious that they are wearing its crown.

  Oh, Carol honey. Honey honey honey. Love it or leave it, you know damn well what’s the matter with you.

  You’re sane.

  ‘Nothing’s so pedestrian as sanity,’ a patron who was giving the hospital some millions in return for his cure was reported as saying, over drinks with the gratefully assembled board of directors. ‘But fellas, it leads to such … panoply.’ The trusty who was serving the drinks as part of his own cure broke into hysterical laughter, afterwards informing the ward that the old boy had spittled his p’s. That night the trusty required sedation, being unable to get the phrase out of his head. The ward was restive too. We thought we knew what that word meant. And what sanity was. So did he.

  My next session with Dr. Cee, I asked him: ‘What’s the word “panoply” mean?’ He’d had to look it up. ‘Let’s see—ah. It means, “a complete set of armor.”’

  ‘I thought so—’ I said.—

  Martyn’s letter, gummy with travel, is still up on that shelf. I know why I’m not opening it—or not yet. It may be offering me a job. Something more than this devotion to the manual of myself. Anyone may have such a manual, puzzled over, only to be tucked away, or now and then taken out for instruction, like the pamphlet that comes with the cordless iron, the VCR, the video screen that will turn the dining-room into a rainforest, the digital box that will answer all calls from outer life on the cheap. A real job comes from that outer life.

  I have a choice. Maybe that’s the job?

  Memory is Faith, my actress friend assured me. And went out on the road again, with a second company.

  I wish Heather were here. Not so we could celebrate.

  So we could hug.

  BAG IS PACKED. Plumped again with all the personals that had seeped from it. In my weeks here have I acted like some sloppy mistress whose man is away with the tidy wife?

  Once outside again, I know how it will be. Unable to scatter, I’ll begin to cherish every neatness I can scrape up. The soft, glycerined air of restrooms one cannot even enter unless respectably pre-cleansed—and where one cannot rest. Or, dropping lower in the social scale, and if you have found a store that still stocks Sterno, the campsite fuel—the bunged pot on the improvised hob under some bridge. There’s no glow, but the pot steams.… The bit of company—just enough, when a passing stumble-bum brays: ‘I was a Boy Scout once.’ And stumbles on past, almost politely, far enough on from me so he can pee. Then moves on.…

  Where are they moving? Good question. Where did I, during those years when I deemed myself to be on the barricades—because I was nowhere else? Even so, in any planned life I adopt, will my bones ever forget that movement? Where the violences to be met were not legendary, as in a war, but pitiful. And the politenesses too. The street is a low-class war. But should anybody ask—a woman there has full privileges.

  Nobody much does ask, or not much, about what goes on in the minds of the walking population. Or people do ask and then forget those who are not sufficiently in-a-slot. But now and then, in one of the scheduled parades that this city adores, a man will join it, dragging a banner without motto, of a meaning known only to him. But he marches; he too is on view.

  I have packed the checker board. Red-and-black, black-and-red, will it remind me not only of the fates but of the possibilities? Or will it be just one of those games that help you turn your back on the newspapers? Or is it both?

  There are games that tell you where to ‘Go,’ but merely on the game-board. There are battles to be fought on a screen, where one can murder, conquer and travel the universe; there’s one at the stationer’s, though I have never seen any of the luck-seekers stop to play. No matter how wide or thick or far its trick dimensions seem to be, it cannot empower them to win the lottery; you have to leave a video in order to live. No wonder, if at times you want to creep into it and stay.

  Not far from the halfway house there was a hall offering those anodynes. It was after a sneaked visit there that the boy and I first crept into bed together. ‘I could murder you for real,’ he shuddered, which only made us creep the closer—until one night, he did half-try. I was the one to be banished, for safety’s sake, they said.

  Stop, memory. You too can be delay.

  Outside, the weather is getting colder. The autumn sky is that icy blue which triumphs even over city dust. Downstairs, the street is empty. Commerce has gone for the night; cars are few. Today I walked along the Hudson, from the George Washington Bridge, to which I had subwayed, down to Seventy-Second Street, staying always as near the river as the city will let you go. A ‘walk’ is not the same as finding yourself where-ever and slogging on, but for keeping in training it will do.

  When I came to the low stone barricade where Alphonse and I had met, I lingered, becalmed. It felt like an anniversary, at least for me. When that play was reviewed, with the cast list printed, I read that Alphonse had taken Martyn’s place as Wall. He’ll be a slender substitute, but as valiant as able. I’ll be forever grateful to him. Though I’ve no plans to keep in touch. When it comes to people, there is a one-to-one continuity I must still lack. Though they may burn like candles in my mind.

  As I left Riverside Drive, the west was banked with sunset clouds, those autumnal ones, so piled that one might walk on them, toward winter. At night now, Martyn’s building is barely heated, but since it is classed as non-residential, those tenants who secretly household must not complain. I may have met one or two at dusk, nondescript except for their att
aché cases; ostensibly they are merely working late. To them I’m perhaps a secretary doing the same. They are the moles of the city, not its rats. ‘Quality rats prefer the waterfront. Even to the garbage. Best of all they want to be where children are.’ That was Alphonse’s lore. He treated the city as if he was courtier to a mad queen. When I get home, I thought, I’ll send him a card.

  Before I leave, I’ll send them all cards, those persons who have their niches in my life. That way, I’ll practice the continuity. Some would call it love.

  Home?

  Dangerous as any four-letter word in English.

  In German, Heimat, said with a holy whine. The French are smarter; they cut it in two, and apportion a mite of its power to everybody: chez moi, chez soi. Meanwhile, keeping the ‘house’—à la maison—an official pace away.

  Inhabit home or leave it—I’m thinking as I came in here—it’s whereby you have to explain your life.

  When I came in from that walk, the cards on the table confronted me still, and the letter on its shelf. It’s possible not to open a letter at all, or to stash it until one is safely away. But that wouldn’t be fair, to a person so fair to me that I waver under the burden. No, I’ll read the letter before I go. Surely it will contain love. That I’ll carry with me. Also those cards, written while I too was traveling—in the byways of the mind.

  But never sent. Some might be recent, others not; it was a dateless time. Some would be only a sentence or two, scatty and quick. Those were the hardest to write, and leave be. Some brood longer, on the life I was living. But not merely on the mode of the streets, which is public knowledge, whose warps any passerby can see. What if that same life is assumed as conscious experience? An indulgence, say, that no priest can give?

  I set out the cards at random. A ghostly solitaire. Laid out by someone who doesn’t quite know how to play.

  To Carmen Rodriguez, that madonna of the inside, before whom even the roaches bow. Who seems to me in recall like a saint’s picture in one of those nooks off a nave. But who hangs her headbands on a plaster Virgin rescued from an ashcan.

  ‘—Remember me to the roaches. I drink tea from your cup.’

  To Daisy Gold, whose carry-all held all the sorrows of Job, though more freely distributed.

  ‘—A welfare worker is not supposed to “identify” with the client. You did. Thanks.—’

  To Mungo, whose contradictions were like a sea with all its waves in reverse:

  ‘—You helped me walk on glass. Thanks—’

  To Angel, who was the first to offer me newspapers. Touched by God, that boy, in the best way: smarter than his parents, but still nice to them.

  ‘—I’m reading the news now. Enjoy the bike. And don’t ever change your name. Thanks—’

  Tact—I think, reading those. I must be making the break to it. But for honesty’s sake, I hope it doesn’t go too far.

  Turning up an angry card to Ms. Mickens, I can chuckle off that concern:

  ‘—To Bryna Mickens, Substitute:

  —Call me anytime. I’m in social work—’

  When I open Martyn’s letter I see it is postmarked eight days ago.

  My mother has received her memorial. My elder brother, the head-of-police, attended with men of his unit. Readers of my mother’s books attended also, mostly Anglo couples with their children and children’s children, for whom my mother’s fierce blend of South African flora-fauna and Brit principle was thought to be ideal.

  At the graveside my brother and I stood together. Sharpshooters managed to wing us both. The crowd stood fast. So did the unit. I was proud of both sides.

  My brother is in hospital, but will survive, to live on my mother’s land, which rightly goes to him; it was his father’s. The monies from the books, which apparently lie unspent, and any future earnings therefrom, come to me. Some I will take out of the country if I can. Any theater I have in me I get from her, and she wouldn’t care where it’s used. The balance will go to the troupe.

  My dear Carol: If you will live with me half the year, I will walk outside with you the other half—either six months to begin as you choose.

  I should be able to return within the next week.

  Love,

  Martyn

  The scene at the graveside is so vivid to me that what he proposes at first scarcely pushes in. The brother and his men are in uniform, a khaki the color of dark honey, that doesn’t show sweat; their caps are absolutely level, their foreheads red with righteousness. The crowd, mostly women and children, pressed together thin as books read at bedtime, are on a shelf of tableland, to one side. Some who might be women from the cookbook are among them. The coffin, on a mechanized platform, sinks slowly out of sight. The corpse, who surely would have preferred to be lowered by human effort, does not protest. The sharpshooters, a duo at a distance only the dead can see without binoculars, make the sign of the cross before they fire. Ping. A sound like a witty remark. I cannot see what Martyn is wearing. But two men fall.

  What’s his wound? Wou-ound. The sound reverberates in those foothills I cannot see.

  Not so serious that the hospital won’t soon release him. And he can walk. I take heart at the word ‘winged.’

  I step out of the shell of myself. I take heart.

  October 29th

  The six o’clock light comes on. Two days have passed. My month is long since up, yet I am still here. No need to bring out the checkers to tell me why. I’m not foolish enough to think that one ever stops playing games with oneself. So I sit here, in wonder at how I have been weaned.

  When I went to the stationer’s again, resuming that routine, the daughter and her cousin were not there, but as I accepted the newspaper the father handed me, he unbent. ‘She’s at school,’ he said. ‘On her motorbike.’ He would have said more, but just then the woman lurking in the rear stepped forward to reveal herself, the mother, all sinuous garment and coiled hair. ‘Thank you,’ I say to the father, and as I pass, the mother echoes it. She does not say for what. But she knows the English for it. It’s well past dinner-time, the lottery customers are gone—but I’m in luck. I am now part of their story. The city has begun to let me in.

  I am no longer angry at Martyn’s offer. At first I thought he mocked the way I had lived, and assumably planned to go on living. The trouble is—I see how he might. What’s a Jeanne d’Arc, if no one sees her burning?

  My childhood did not allow anger. If there was reason for rage, whether on someone else’s part or mine, I was programmed to remain oblivious. Of how our breasts swelled, the voice muttered, the fist sounded in the palm—a stand-in for the enemy we could not afford to have.

  This time, I catch my own posture, swollen and inarticulate. The solitary glass bangle at my wrist, silent for want of a companion, reminds me. Anger without just cause is the psyche’s noise. I think how Martyn would burst out laughing at the sight of me, and am ashamed.

  I glance over at the line of drums. They and I have a small secret that I will not confide even to a machine.

  October 31st

  One recognition of a day’s date even the confirmedly dateless are allowed. Maybe a street seller thrusts a flyer in your hand and you hold onto it, so as to keep track of when your next welfare check is due? Or the collector of aluminum cans for turn-in money, loading his barrow, turns up a half-empty, that if left unopened would have been good for two years yet—and shakes his head at that beery improvidence.

  But date two entries, as I now have, and you join the calendared planet, all the way back to Copernicus. With maybe a clutch of Aztecs and Chaldeans at your elbow. To say nothing of Stonehenge.

  Dusk comes earlier now. The year turns, and I don’t need a weatherman to tell me so. Venture out, and I see all the astrology of the street. Jealousy nips me. Do I want to join the charts?

  Saunter anywhere in a city’s dust and you are forced to mark the two divided streams of the populace. First, always first, the mainstream of those who have appointments with t
unnels, subways, buses or limos, no matter what their position is in society, and whether or not they are going home. Sooner or later they will—and home implies the calendared life. Everybody there takes for granted that days have labels. Life is conducted behind a curtain of numerals: bank statements, salaries, taxes, that sound their warning bells morning to evening, a background music that some repress, many enjoy.

  Side by side with that flowing current, are those who live in the dateless country, their hobbled transportation likely to be themselves. In prison, the only date is your sentence, in hospital it’s your feared or craved for ‘release.’ Once outside, we special ones meld with the commoners—those so low or dumb or hapless that they have been ousted even from the ranks of the resident poor.

  But we are not that. We are the freed.

  That’s what the SW’s don’t understand.

  Before Daisy Gold I had a man worker, given me by design. A cozy hipster with a ring in his ear and an extra in his nose for weekends; for our confabs he wore both. ‘You can have a job, Carol, and still hang loose. Look at me. You don’t have to be passive, dear, to be cool. And I myself spend the wee hours in a shelter, once a month.’ All the lingo he had learned from his shrink he shook out on me.

  ‘You’re trying to rape me with theory, Manny,’ I told him. ‘I could complain.’ But to be smart only spurs their interest.

  He and a photographer friend wanted to do a documentary on me, for some nights following me on camera to wherever I crashed. Finally I say to them: ‘If I had a pad, I’d call the cops on you. As it is, well—scram. I’m not a documentary. I’m a case record.’ I see how he and the friend exchange glances. ‘Carol—’ Manny says. ‘How’d you get so clean?’

  They had found me in that spot near the George Washington Bridge, where I’d set up the Sterno. The night before, a girl sharing the archway with some of us, had had a miss and bled all over me before we got her into a cab and to Columbia Presbyterian, where she O.D.’d. ‘The nurses let me wash up,’ I tell him. The guy with the camera raises his flash but Manny stops him. ‘Why—’ he says to me, ‘why do you so love the abyss?’