Standard Dreaming

by Hortense Calisher

  A new weariness, darker than the pendulum his son has swung him on. Why should he feel at the nadir, because they have found?

  The girl, Adoree, clutching her brother’s hand, is standing over her mother. “You’re gonna phone Bobbie. You’re gonna send him money to come home. For to get his tests. That’s what you’re gonna be into.”

  “Tests? What does she mean? Rennie. Rennie—you didn’t.”

  His tremulous mouth is the same as hers. Neat ears, the curve of the head from parietal to frontal bones about the same; she stamps her children well. Five years ago just another blond prep-school boy? “I swear I didn’t give him anything. I haven’t brought it home. And I told them.” He drew himself up straight. “Bobbie didn’t get hooked around me.”

  “You’re going to have tests too, Ren, you are.” His sister’s broad lips tremble too, but are not the same as his.

  “Not me.” His head hangs. “Tried the methadone, I told you. They say I’m not enough motivated.”

  “This isn’t hash, honey. This is a real motivation. And I’m gonna make her pay for transfusions for you and Bobbie, just like she has to for me. She always gives me everything, leaves you the dawgfood.” She woos his jacket lapel, as if putting a flower there. “We got a ’reditary disease.”

  A moan from Baba.

  “A—you mean T.B.?” He shook her. “Dory hon, I told you to eat.”

  “You don’t, much.” She likes him to shake her, swings back and forth with it. “Uh-uh the lady didn’t say the name of it. But it is one. And we got to bring Bobbie home.”

  “What’s she got, for God’s sake?” He’s holding his belly; he can’t take much, Berners thinks; their span is short.

  “Niels, you tell him.”

  “She has sickle-cell anemia. Ever hear of it?”

  “Yeah? Yeah, I think. Yeah. You mean—the Neemy? like you hear on the street?”

  “That’s it. She’ll have to do as she says.”

  “But I thought—I thought only—” He shrinks inside his suit. Watching his mother. Who won’t look at him. “The only ones who get it—on the street they say it only hits—” He looks about to vomit. Sylvia too. Mimi, eloquent in her black, squats righteously; that font between her knees will receive what it can.

  “Don’t you believe ’em!” The girl takes her brother’s long, gray-nailed hand feverishly stroking it with her child paw. “They in cahoots. Because you dope, it don’t supposed to matter. And me and Bobbie both is too much. So she choose me, like everytime…. Rennie … Rennie, ain’t that it?”

  The boy has to get his hand away, his darting eyes too. He has to be elsewhere, he can’t wait. Shivering, he waits.

  Baba raises up from her huddle. But she always makes somebody else do her bad business, Berners thinks. She’s leaving it to him, to us.

  The girl sits tall now, clasping only herself—Adoree. The flesh is telling her, Berners thinks. The flesh always knows the pace of its mortality, all its life. At some moment, the full person tenses, as to a bell—and knows the end of it. At some moment, a species? He watches the flesh, which has taught him it will tell us everything.

  “Mumma. Mumma. Why it choose me?”

  Suddenly the boy bolts. Out the door, into the crowd-rot to which this place is ever accessible. Knocking over an old umbrella stand Baba keeps there, full of broken cameras, handbags, candy boxes, toys for thieves to snatch she says, better than locking.

  People are the last to leave a city, Berners thinks, not the rats. He used to love crowds too. In Europe their prim jostle, the rough, marine rocking of them here. But that was when crowds were made up of individuals; now the decaying forest smells of the shades that flit it; he fears their blind, seaward motion.

  “Baby, baby—” Baba whispers. Walks to her, arms out. Wails it. “Baby, baby—I made you black enough.”

  The girl unclasps herself. No more hugging. She stands, arms at her sides. Baba’s shining cheek is waiting, held out to her to be fondled or slapped.

  An old illusion. They have a new answer.

  A twig, a streak of leather goes past him. The girl is gone.

  Berners gets up to peer out the window, to see is the boy’s shadow still there, working at his arm. No, gone. Sylvia gets up too, even Mimi. Baba mistakes it.

  “No, I’ll go after her. I always have.” On the way out she halts at the umbrella-stand with abstract interest, as if it held something for her, then goes on past.

  They waited because they waited. Or had learned each other’s rhythms. It was like a dance.

  “Think she’ll find her,” Sylvia whispers at the window. “The streets are all the same.”

  “You feel that too?” Berners said. “Synonyms.”

  “They used to be different. Maybe it’s our time of life.”

  “It’s because we’re waiting. If we weren’t we’d never notice it. Lots of people our age don’t.”

  “My sister. A healthy family.” She sat down again and dallied with her travel-bag. “Think I’ll get to Dallas? I was hoping you all’d help.”

  “You have a reservation, dear?” Mimi had won a trip to Bermuda once; now tours hung in her head like trophies to be won; if she had the money to do it, Sylvia said, she would have been that woman you met on every cruise, who had only one dress. And glad to be.

  “In summer I can always get a standby. To Dallas.”

  Sylvia kicks aside the bag, leans her elbows on the coffee table, and cups her face in her hands. They lean with her, knowing her fancy like their own. Even Mimi strains to it. Moments when they wait like this with another member are the group’s best, Berners thinks. We’re like caryatids holding up the same stone. What does it really matter if his four other friends have found it a name?

  “Easter,” Sylvia says. “When I gave you the key, Niels. I didn’t go. To Texas. All the way to the airport, I knew I was going to catch the shuttle to Washington, and then hire a car. I was like a drunk had to have that drink. When for two years you don’t see your own daughter you spent a lifetime with. I’ll knock down the door, I thought. I’ll give them an opera, why not…. That’s what she does now she’s not riding, he’d been telling me, listens to the hard-luck stories on the T.V. And at the same time I’m dreaming—I’ve got a dress for her. From Paris. Like a butterfly pressed flat. I stepped it down a size, but even if it doesn’t fit, she’ll say like she used to Gee Sylvia, gee. So I get there, one hour and three-quarters to the door, I could do it every weekend. And there she is, sitting in the garden. Six months along she must be. By now it’s due…. Well, I’ve got my answer, I thought. That she should be like that, and never tell me. I slammed the car door, so she’d see me. And—I turned around and went back. All the way back.”

  “Easter Sunday. What hell holidays can be.”

  “I saw you in the park Sunday,” Mimi said suddenly. “You were reading, so I didn’t come close.”

  About us, I was reading about us. Suppose he said that? There was a great blank that protected man from his own experience. Even his friends preferred not to see Nature plain. Else how could they live? Yet if you saw a piece of it, as the great ones sometimes had, it would be something seen daily, maybe in the fold of a hand in a lap. In what men and women—and their children—saw every day. He felt himself lost, swimming between flesh and idea, the connection slipped, yet like any tadpole, he swam because he could. “I was reading about a man who went on a cruise. A long, long cruise.” And came back with the history of the world. “My son gave me the book. A whole pile of them. A year ago. Before he began killing the world.”

  Suddenly it seemed to him he was tired of all relationship.

  “Niels—hang on.” Sylvia, who never touched people, put her hand on him. “Jake’ll come soon.” She thought he was breaking down.

  “His reasons are getting to me,” Berners said. “Raoul’s.” For a minute he could no longer remember in which of his groups he was. “I go to the park to see the young ones who—who don’t yet know they
’re in the process. To remember that they are still in the majority.” But in every generation—if there is a process—there would be more of the young who do know. Like ours.

  “The process. What process?”

  He took her hands. “You didn’t have zoology. But you had analysis, you once said.”

  “Both Andrew and I.” Proudly. “Four years.”

  He could see that Freudian nest. And how death had broken it down. “You settled for the short span.”

  “What do you mean! We covered the whole range of our lives!”

  “I settled for it too. Raoul didn’t care what I was doing, or about the money I got for it. He just thought I was blind crazy, to repair flesh.” Let the crockery break, Raoul meant. Let the shards be found.

  “Your boy was spoiled by having to sit out the war. And my girl—she’s no chicken, she’s twenty-six—from having to wait for them. Or not wait.”

  “Yes, he sat. And I was proud of him.” But while he sat, he had time to see.

  “That age, you ought to go with the tide. Or it shapes you anyway. I watched their parties, Niels. Walked out on them, sneaked home again. When she gave up on life, our kind of life, she had to give up on me. She married him so she could get back, that’s what. And never forgave me for it.”

  “Wish I had a girl.” Mimi’s voice was as usual. Speech for her wasn’t the vehicle of agony; she could never express agony socially.

  “Obsession.” Sylvia nods over at her like a soprano, at an alto who has done her best. “But we can only see our own. Now we’ve learned that, we all ought to get out.”

  “Yes, yes.” Berners saw himself swimming, grasping at anything. “But what if all our obsessions are the same?”

  “The same,” she said, staring off. “I’m sorry, I just want to be alone with mine.”

  “I see them in a lineup,” he said. “All so different, but the same. Think of them together, that skinny lineup. We each only thought of our own. But if you think of them together—that’s what people never do.”

  They sat with him—tallying. When he speaks, it is for them.

  “Rebecca’s boy, on his milk-and-custard. Baba’s two, tonight. One from drugs, one from genes.” All variations, nature accepts them all. “Jake’s girl, on her hunger strike. And your girl for a while, Sylvia, on hers.” For beauty, it could even take place in the name of that. “My friend Dr. Cohen has a girl—the man who just called. I saw her on the street once. And your two, Mimi—I saw them.” Even those theater harlequins with their hoofer’s ankle-knobs and calves. “And—mine.” Raoul, sitting in the concentric alembic of his own mind. Making his father see. “Oh, for a long time, there would be the all right ones too.” Will be. “Like your sister’s children, Sylvia.” And the halfway ones like your own girl maybe, who will be remitted. Whom the prime process—life—would rear back and save.

  He raised his head as if he had heard something. “We may look forward to that.” But ours would be the others, the new. “Like a starving species,” he says. “The young of it.” And behind them, in strict emaciation too, a line of older bodies, in a morgue.

  Mimi stirs. “That Lasky one, wasn’t he fat.”

  “You remember!” he says.

  “I saw him; he came back. They lived in my neighborhood, the good part. I used to see the three of them, carrying the stuff from the supermarket. Why wouldn’t he at least let them deliver? He dragged them there twice a day sometimes, the checker said. Together the three of them musta weighed a ton.”

  So they let him drag them his way. That’s how they got rid of the telephone.

  Sometimes in Berners’ student days, working round the clock, coming home in the holidays to help his father, migrating from the labs to the books to the wards, and finally to the bright, operative glare of the performing rooms—and always in the end, coming up hard, hard against the knot of substance that was a patient—the very snow in the villages had turned to a mound of flesh he walked with his alpenstock, pondering its pores. Going home and back, the neat train zippered it, the surgical rails stitched, but though he rode between steeples his reveries seemed to him natural; the mystery of the flesh was what the church itself was based on—as were all his own resurrecting hopes. It had been in the time just after the heyday of the Niehans clinics, where khans and Yankees, and the rich French and British, from their members of Cabinet to their sun-dried old writers, had gone to be regenerated by injections of the unborn fetuses of lambs and other small kill, and the high possibilities of lengthened human life had gleamed through the pink twilit air like the Matterhorn on a fine tourist evening; his own father, a revered local doctor, had been to the clinic at Aigle to see the work, and had never questioned it. Why should Berners be the one fated to live out, and even hear, only the darker messages? And Berners’ son.

  “What happened to them?” he said.

  “Dint you see in the News? They gassed.”

  “Oh God,” Sylvia said beside him. “That little sad pair.”

  In front of his eyes, Mimi’s hand turns over on her lap. “And the boy.”

  In enormous, freakishly fat persons, the upper thighs took on the lines of a bear’s, the padding feet also, and the eyes went lidded and glandular; as the image of the person sank, the flesh became its own sphinx. He sees the three of them, nude and paleolithic again, lumbering to seal up window after window, maybe with old, civilized cloth that no longer fitted them—rubbers, bow ties—or just some clever tape sold in reels at the supermarket. Then one huge paw, dimpled as a child’s, turning on all cocks, and all three peacefully lying down. Or the father and son. Or the son, murdering their closeness. Or the mother, passing a mirror—and stirring up a last, tenderly drugged meal. And faithfully waking, alone and fasting, to her inner clock. And to her lone, domestic chore at the stove.

  “There’re always some who won’t eat for the future. Or are meant not to. But when it’s the young—” His voice trembled. “That bag over there, Sylvia. I suppose you have her dress in it?”

  She hooted out a laugh. “Easter, when she ran back in the house—did I tell you she did that? Yes, she’s having a baby. She never filled out, but you can see she’s having it. Now it’s due. And last night Herbert phones me—to plead. They know I’m free, August. He says if I come near I’ll kill her. And it.” She stares straight ahead, the eyes with their double lens of tears. “He’s afraid she means she’ll kill herself. ‘Maybe she wants to,’ I told him, ‘and blame me.’ Blame. She’s crazy of course. They all are, we’ve just never admitted it. All their reasons mean the same thing. Your Raoul, and Jake’s child-killer and—and your pair too, Mimi, with their weekly fake suicides.” Her voice softened, toward this other-class person who is in the same social class of despair. “Rejection, sure—what kid doesn’t feel it? Didn’t? Or wanted out? My own brother stowed away on an Army plane, for godsakes, to join the Navy in the States. I had an affair with a beachboy at sixteen, and was shipped up there to Boston, to school. There was even hate. All the conventions, between our parents and us. But this—this is another country, Niels.”

  In another country, his sister and his sister-in-laws, the Schwester and the Schwesterin, bring his father golden plums from the Valais, bored to yawns over the old man at dinner, clucking with his mother and chafing at her, devoted and irritable, human, going through the forms. Respect your mother! his father had once thundered at him, and he the green atheist who had called his churchgoing mother a name—that Jesus-lover—had shouted down from his attic Has she a mind that we can? But it was different. And we remember it. “For people like us, yes, it is really another country. We were brought up—another way. We’d be the ones to feel it most. Or first.”

  “Uh-uh, Niels. It’s pure X-ray they’re pointing at us. Like it dropped from the stars. And we stand there and take it. We even want it. We’re crazy too, why else did we come here? We cooperate.”

  “I wish Doctor Cohen could hear you.” Or Smitters. Or Darwin. A process. Had she any
idea what she was telling him?

  “He’s not coming?”

  He hesitated. “Not—for himself. He wants me to—he wants to talk to me. The hospital has found a virus that interests them.”

  “Virus.” She picked up the bag. “Let them find mine.”

  He saw the eons, populated like hills, behind her. And ahead. A silvered page, that a little boy jarred. “Sylvia. The child. Your girl is having it.”

  Two women sit, miles apart from each other, blood close. Looking at a man. He feels their pressure, toward what? Mimi, redfaced, seems to be holding her breath; he has never seen her like this; she has nerves. Sylvia’s lip corners flicker, one, then the other, like an aper of craziness. Her face slys; she has secrets. “Know what crossed my mind? Like a shot when I saw her. That I’m only forty-six. And no menopause yet. Then I buried it. Until last night. I was up all night, dreaming it. I could get inseminated. A doctor’s wife, I could manage it. I could start all over again.” She has dropped the bag, staring outside Baba’s fernery, at the open door. “We two could be alone then—I even dreamed it was another girl. The way we always wanted to be.” Her voice went to the bottom. “Without him.”

  Mimi let out her breath.

  “I scared myself so, I called my psychiatrist. I disgusted myself. Do I want to be her?”

  Side by side. “What did he say?”

  “I forgot it’s August. He isn’t there.”

  Not there. Up in Boston, Jake would have knocked and knocked. Spoken to the loiterers. Or broken in. And finding, gone for the police.

  “We want to be them. We’ll all huddle together in the end maybe.” Eons ahead or not, he could see it, and wave to it a hand that would not even be dust. “But I can’t believe in our craziness. I don’t believe in my son’s. Oh we parents, yes, we’re coarsened by life. They’re still pure with it. When they run from us, it’s because life tells them that too. It’s the flesh, not the mind, not our everlasting mind.” Which I respect because it can conceive this. “It’s the flesh. Giving out.”