Standard Dreaming

by Hortense Calisher

  “Niels, I can’t bear this.” Her face worked. She touched him.

  “You think I’m giving out. Well—that too.” A multitude of little failures at the end. “Nothing—clinical.”

  She touched his hand. He grasped for hers. “In another time. But I haven’t got it.”

  She nodded. “We’d get together over it even in bed. Our—obsessions.”

  “Have it artificially,” he said. “And I’ll father it. Synthetically.” Torture, torture. He looked at her close. She could never. He would bet on it. All her pillowiness was gone. That dewy, bee-jelly push that flesh had when it was bent on doubling itself. And able. Another beauty was refining it. “You look like a Breughel.”

  She was scrutinizing him too. Without sex. Victim-close.

  “You’ll soon tire,” he whispered. “Of all relationship.”

  “Hell is one, isn’t it.”

  Among the Berne fathers of his boyhood, such words had been alive. He could hear their skirt-rustle. Sounds of living had been simple, but another thing. The cratchet of cooks in the kitchen, munch-talk in the refectory, the cawing and sighs in the classes and the military drilling of the multiplication tables, outside all these the garden cooing of doves. Streets were at a distance; one phone in the headfather’s study absorbed all worldly messages. Bells were the framework, the clock, and even a kind of moral statement. In that air, concepts flowed freely, six inches above the head if not inside it; heaven and hell were fluid and real, and daily. Pain, and elation too, had had a more personal chance. The word “millennium,” said at supper, wouldn’t have caused the blink of an eye. The death of the world was not unexpected. It was understood that the inanimate was what had to be kept at bay. Infinitely strong as it was, in comparison infinitely lasting. The frailty of human flesh, outside all sin and past it, was what was known. The miracle of grace was that this strange unarmored organism, these soft beings dented in a minute by a stone, shattered at once by an ox cart or a needle, drownable by water, blown out in an instant by a gassy flavor, had so persisted in time. And in their dream that the universe was vulnerable. To them.

  In Baba’s fernery, the three of them sit, with this duration they can’t get rid of. Even while the universe is slowly stealing it back. Berners thinks to himself—what is the most alive to all of us here, in our dreaming?

  That Jake will call, with news like a needle, either way. That for Cohen a virus has been found; will this keep him from street-corner tambourines? That Smitters, who has asked us why we should be looking for one disease, is off to Burma, land of rubies, to hunt for one child. That Sylvia waits for us to get her not to Texas but to Washington. As Jake will bring some kind of Boston to me. And that Mimi, whose gaunt, chic twins had passed him on Eighth Avenue once, swinging their canes like a two-a-day act for the populace—is kept ever on the ledge of their double void, with suicide messages, last telegrams carefully delivered, that she can’t even read. Only Berners, interpreting once, knows she is illiterate. Near her, Baba’s princess telephone sleeps; if that impervious plastic were to be dropped in the sea like a Spanish ducat, how many decades would it take to dissolve? Meanwhile, honest beyond any truth, it purrs for us.

  Something has to be said aloud, it’s more than time, the silence is too much.

  “The telephone is breathing for us. Better than ourselves.”

  But it’s their hands he’s looking at. His own, blunted to antisepsis with years of repairing their like. Sylvia’s pair, tense but vague, losing sex to age. Mimi’s, red with labor, a country girl’s pluckers, going blindly down the winter-summer sheaves of circumstance; Baba had once tried to hire them. Is there any virtue at all any more in the Society of the Hand—which had once been to him the sign of human enduring? In the fold of a hand in a lap, have I seen anything?

  Berners asks us to note how at that moment he is wholly in the dream, has forgotten the report. Adding that he does not apologize.

  For any of them.

  “It’s going to ring, I can feel it.” Sylvia stood up. “But not for me. For you and Mimi maybe, with more of the same.” She slung the bag over her shoulder. “Remember, Mimi, you and Rebecca, that day at my house? How I said in the night I sometimes knelt down to it. Asking it to say Washington. And what you said?”

  When Mimi doesn’t answer, she crosses to her. “Never mind, Mimi, don’t bother. Cheers. And I hope you get on a cruise.” It is a warmer voice Berners has never heard from her. She turns to him. “She said to us, ‘I won’t never kneel.’” She slung the bag to the other shoulder. “She breaks me up. Do you know those boys run up bills for their fancy death-trips? Pills, ambulances, bloodied clothes. And she pays for it…. You break me up. Wanting the whole world to be—who knows what. For you and your son…. Baba, she’ll end by doing it to me too. Like Rebecca did…. I break me up, don’t worry…. And Jake? You didn’t ask me the message I had to take to her. To Doris Whatshername. Just before he went up there for you, he calls me. ‘Tell her—tell her the Lexington package is almost ready. Tell her I’m working for her day and night.’”

  She put her hat on. Didn’t push it back. All tidings brought. “We never did anything.” On her way past Baba’s umbrella stand, the phone rang.

  Three grown people on the floor struggling over it, nightmare’s babies of what they are. For Mimi, lunging, had begun to beat the handset against a wall. Sylvia has slid after it, her head dangerously near the blows. Berners, butting between them, is netted at the ankle by the cord, in his ear the sound of the broken connection, above him like an animal champing—Mimi, her eyes rolled up. They are all kneeling. The phone is unharmed.

  They rise together, holding each other, monstrous underwater game. Of children.

  “She’s in sycope, Niels. Like Andrew.” When they press her in a chair, they hear her powerful sucking breath, bringing up some word over and over, like a pebble they can’t catch. “What, Mimi, what?”

  The eyes return. The sibyl lap is gone, its knees knocked crosswise. Encircling, they arm her with themselves. The word rolls out. “Help.” Her teeth close.

  She’s seeing something her brain won’t read, Berners thinks. “Give her whiskey. Over there.”

  “No, I’m Jehovah’s Witness. We don’t drink.”

  They had forgotten the simple social key to her. Speech isn’t for agony. But she is ashamed before him, the doctor. He knows that from the ward. Tell the nurse, the orderly who sweeps, or even downstairs at the desk, or the elevator attendant, all the way up the path to the doctor, tell anybody—but not him. They think telling him helps create the disease.

  In a corner, she and Sylvia consult, then Sylvia leads her to him.

  “Are you a medical doctor? … I did something.”

  “You’ve taken something?”

  “I give it.”

  He is thick, tired. “Gave?” Then it hits him. In the ward too, there are those like her who push their maimed children forward a certain way. Silently. Mothers of another sort, like Mei-ling’s, will flame at the slightest wrong mention, off-hint of their child’s handicap—reality is disparagement. Was there any lower species which so hewed to the weak offspring, the crazed or the half-mad, as we do? Yet even with us—there are these other parents whom civilization has made unnatural. Unable to say it, except with that push forward. Bad flesh.

  “You all talked do something. She did.” Mimi pointed at Sylvia, and behind her to all Mimi’s upper-class ladies. You said not to dust the jardiniere. You said—put a tablespoon fertilizer in the plant. But her sons have helped too. They have nagged her with a word and finally taught her it. “Euthanasia.” She says it like a prescription. “They were always at me for it. It means if you want to, the family owes you an assist.”

  Sylvia helps her tell him how. She has put a horde of pills on the kitchen table, neatly divided. “Street seconals I had to buy, extra. It’s hard when you have to have for two.” For in their mock deaths, her two boy-men are never divided. She has used a scribe to wr
ite her note to them. “The gypsy woman in the storefront, I paid her.” She takes pride in having paid for everything.

  Is this hate in disguise, Berners wonders—for many a time he and the others have declared this pride too. Her small sociomechanical voice gives him what answer it can. “I told the gypsy, ‘Say I’m sick of it. Say I’m sick of loving. Say “Go ahead.”’”

  She has stayed away from the house for last night and today. “In the Grand Central ladies’ room. A girl I know is the attendant there.” Marching there firmly, almost willing them to do it. “Call my bluff if they want to.” Then, as the hours grow, she is swayed, filled with all the wrong ways they can hurt themselves, revenging themselves on her. “Razor blades again, and leave it too long. Or the rat stuff—that way is horrible.” Or set fire to a spray can and ignite themselves. She’s not a woman of natural imagination. Her sons have educated her. “Once, I have my friend call. That way, if they answer, it’s not me.” But they don’t. By the time she’s due at Baba’s, she’s crazed for fear they’ve done it—but she won’t go home to it. “Two jobs they did on me this summer already. Once to the hospital. Once only the police. To break down the door.” They always come home to her for it. “But if I wait out here too long, maybe they won’t wait.” She knows they always half mean to. “They’re just scared,” she says in her teaparty tone. “Poor things, they’re just scared.”

  Berners has his head in his hands. To him, the worst of suicide is that all who commit it must be scared. To their misery, they must add this.

  “What they would like—” She clears her throat, sits up in her chair. “They want to pull me down.”

  Sylvia’s dry voice says, “What they would like, she thinks, is for her to do it along with them. Alongside.”

  Berners, lightheaded, remembers food, remembers Darwin—the nineteenth century in a beard unmystical. Do the mothering-fathering cells keep time with those of the child? His own are full of doubt. Or the floating empathy that is—fatherhood.

  A man appears in the doorway—Cohen. In his face they see the shambles they are. Wild hair, traveling bags, sibyls, Berners in this fernery of women, and on the floor, off the hook all this time, the beeping phone. “Excuse me.” Berners rushes to attend to it, his face telegraphing Cohen: our joint obsession; getting Cohen’s shrugged reply: I have no number for her anymore.

  “This is Dr. Cohen.”

  A brief, inquiring flash from Sylvia. No, no one she knows.

  “Please, can I call?” Despair gives some on the ward airs, but Mimi is too accustomed to it. Huddled over the phone like a dram-drinker, she dials. Slowly her face diffuses hope. “A D.A., oh thank God, a Don’t Answer. When they gone and done it, they always pick up and tell me…. Unless maybe I left it too long.” She lays the phone down, gently listening. It lies there, weeping.

  “Why don’t we go back with her?” Sylvia whispers.

  “Come on everybody!”

  They are ready to follow her. Passing the phone, Sylvia dips a knee, attends to it. Like someone who lights a candle in church.

  It rings under her hand.

  She picks it up, answers. Looks at him, Berners. At once they all do. Caryatids. Who have not forgot.

  On the way, his cells tell him nothing.

  “Jake!” As Jake talks, Berners relays it to his circle of responsibles. This is his rotunda. “Nobody—there.” They choke with him. “The place neat … swept to a fare-thee-well.” Fare-thee-well. Bare. “Still one picture—that would be of the snake?” And Jake, who has no qualms on loiterers, who hasn’t passed under their stare weekly for months, has spoken to them. “He left a week ago.” “How was he, how was he, Jake, did they say?” He sees their lurking, underwater looks, pimpled faintly with an interest that shakes the ash from their idleness. “Thin—” But with a—“Oh my God, Jake. Oh my—thank God.” But with a knapsack.

  Who dares hope here? In this rotunda that may be the world?

  Mimi gives the cry.

  “We’re going to Mimi’s, Jake. An emergency…. He’s at the East Side Terminal, he’ll follow us…. He knows where.”

  Outside, Berners says, “My car’s blocks from here.” And Cohen has a car, in a nearby garage. But Mimi wants a cab. To pay for it.

  In it, stalled in the flickering 125th Street crosstown traffic, the long ghosts of their faces opposite him and near, these his friends and co-mourners begin to look to him like good stone statues, crowded close. He knows where this comes from—the crypts of home, where often, already without religion, he would stop in a stone church-corner anonymous with saints, or in one of the plazas alive with stone people, and feel the good, warm life of the centuries. Then the cab wobbles on, and he is alive with them in this other life. What if one becomes confused, between the millennia and this present life?

  “People have tried to live in both,” he says aloud. “People have tried.”

  Nobody asks Both what? The cab jogs on, carrying this miracle. After a while, Cohen says, “What was the snake?”

  “A mandala, they call it.” He hears Raoul pronounce it for him. A friend of Raoul’s had drawn it, in that metaphysical, religious, health-science, interior decoration of the soul—which they culled from art books, swami grocery stores, or all the stores of literature, anywhere. “Underneath is printed The Struck Snake Does Not Die Until Sundown.” Raoul had paid the rent for one more neat month, Jake said.

  “God, look at it,” Cohen said, peering out. “I haven’t passed here since I got back. I don’t think I ever was here. Worse than where we are.” He meant the hospital. “This is the worst.”

  The driver, who knew his own black streets, was taking a shortcut. A known street jogs; this one flew past them, never to be recovered, on its hot stoops were people with eyes like antimony, in flesh from the pyramids.

  “Yes, a national disgrace.” When Berners is only paying lip-service, his Swiss accent comes back on him, as Erna often notes. Erna is in Cape May now—would Raoul go there? Never. It doesn’t matter. A knapsack means life.

  “The whole country is a national disgrace. I’m going back.”

  “To where?” Sylvia has Mimi’s hand. Which has hers.

  “Ceylon. My leprosarium is cleaner, more decent than anything here.”

  “That’s not true,” Berners says. “There are the parks.”

  Sylvia laughs. “And Texas.”

  “I promise me the wide world,” Mimi says, rolling with the wheels. “If they’re only alive. Just once more.”

  He understands how her flesh is—not knowing yet whether to droop or revive. And how his flesh may never know. But Jake said an envelope had been left for him, in the center of that alembic so carefully—childishly—drawn on the floor.

  The springless cab shakes Berners unheeded; he has a white gift lodged in his breast.

  “You ought to go back, Niels.” Cohen says.

  “Back where?”

  “Europe maybe. You don’t belong here. It’s getting you.”

  Suddenly Berners knows why Cohen is here.

  “Asia’s still tooth and claw. But not fake.”

  Berners leans from the cab, feeling the whiz of air. His mother used to wet a finger to the wind, telling them how in her house as a girl they had charted and predicted their daily course by the nearby bells, swinging like buoys anchored between weather and faith. Even here, where the wild sky conspired with the buildings and was lost, this should be possible. He pulled in his head. “It’s not fake here anymore. Only convulsed.” If you went to the heart of the country and sat down under a maple, an apple tree, with your knapsack, wouldn’t it still be so—if it was a heart? Or if you had brought one there?

  “John—I don’t feel any more national relationship,” Berners says. Neither had Cohen nor Smitters, nor Minna, that high night in Berners office, when they had been seeing their own palaeontological death as if it went before them on a palfrey, easily. Berners had never been sure of Dr. Li-Lee. But now that a virus had been found, the
y all were localized again, and ashamed. Cohen had come to tell him so.

  “Do you take your family, Dr. Cohen?” Sylvia.

  “Not anymore. Three of the kids are in college. And—I’m separated.”

  “He’s fleeing street corners,” Berners said cruelly. More like Raoul than himself. That resemblance was progressing too.

  He turns to look at Cohen, who does look ashamed. Cohen doesn’t know it yet, that he too is tired of relationship. “John—that night in my office, we’ll keep it between all of us, hmmm? … Private.” And the weeks after. Beginning with the morning at the morgue, they had all kept their own counsel, anyway.

  “A wild evening—” Cohen said carefully. “But when you get together men with minds like that—”

  You find a virus.

  Berners sighed. “One of the best in my life. But on such things one cannot report. Certainly I am not qualified.”

  “Lee was afraid—” Cohen coughed. “He thinks the hospital is not the place to—Or to students, publicly.”

  Who are upset enough. “Such things are not really reportable.”

  “Smitters and I—we’d like to come to your office someday, and kick the ball around. But Minna and Lee—”

  “They have found a virus,” Berners said quickly. “The virus.”

  “You know his boy died? Of the bone cancer.”

  “Ah.” At such times, who wants a report like mine? And Minna is afraid. “What of Minna’s child?”

  “Very young, that’s all I know.” Cohen smiled. “She says it was an aberration. She doesn’t like men sexually.”

  Sylvia coughs, to remind them. Mimi, swinging her head, is watching the lights; they are drawing nearer the West River.

  “Well, tell them I keep to my specialty.” Next Tuesday as usual. Mei-ling. “They don’t have to be there.”

  “The whole hospital admires what you are doing there, Niels. The rehabilitation unit will never be the same.”

  He didn’t answer. He had a white envelope, which Jake would bring.