Standard Dreaming

by Hortense Calisher

  Cohen is staring at his own hands. “I used to be a fair man. Niels, come visit me in Ceylon.”

  Where he would find his leperdom, Berners was sure of it.

  “Europe?” Berners says. “I was brought up Evangelical. They deny we can be saved by good works. And my son found it out. That we cannot be saved.”

  “You do actually believe it then. That the millennia—are speeding up?”

  Sylvia leans forward. “I’d like to remind you two there’s a woman here who—”

  “Never mind, Sylvia. It’s great of them. I never had nobody with me before.” They see that tears have joined the blood on Mimi’s bitten lip. The cab passes the traffic thundering to the Lincoln Tunnel and wheels west, slowing down. As it draws up in front of the house, she says, “It’s raining. Alive or dead, they’re home. Raining, they don’t go out, it spoils their clothes.” And gets out to pay.

  Berners remembers he hasn’t fully answered Cohen. “There are still the parks, Sundays,” he says. “And this cab.”

  But she won’t let them all go up with her. “I’ll wave from the window; it’s only three flight up.” She looks up at her house; they can see this habit belongs to her and it. Watch us from the window, ma. And throw us down two dimes. When you get home, boys, be sure to push the bell and shout up.

  “I’ll go with you, I’m a nurse.” Sylvia gives him a last sharp look, and goes. He won’t see her again.

  “Nice woman,” Cohen says. “Yours?”

  “No. No.” He sees that Cohen, shifting feet, is in some kind of pain. “She has the chilliness of cities in her. But that’s what I liked.”

  “Yes, yes. This is the Village, isn’t it? I’m all turned round.”

  “Below it, and to the west.”

  “Thought I recognized it. These streets. Still so full of people.”

  This all-night street-flitting of people, Berners respected it. It took the place of a park.

  “Niels, I can’t stay,” Cohen says. “A corner near here, I last saw her. I’m going to run on. One last look. You never can tell.”

  He nodded.

  “Forgive me.” Cohen says. For more than this.

  “Street life.” Berners smiles a little. “It now seems to me entirely natural.” Mimi up there. Cohen here. And himself.

  “Remember now,” Cohen says. “Ceylon.”

  Berners has already forgotten him. Jake is coming down the wet street. Waving.

  “I only went to phone, Niels.”

  They embrace.

  Jake sobs for him. “My dear friend. My dear friend, come out of the rain.”

  “I can’t yet. She wants us to watch the window. Sylvia went up there with her.”

  “Sylvia? She was at the prison for me.”

  “She came back. To Baba’s.”

  “Where’s Baba?”

  “Her girl is sick. And ran out on us.”

  “It doesn’t get any better,” Jake says, watching the rivulets on his suede shoes. “Does it. But I had such news for my girl. She’s got a private phone up there; I paid graft for it! But she won’t answer. Even in prison, I can’t get to her.”

  “Sylvia says … Jake, Doris is on hunger strike.” Berners is surprised he has remembered it.

  Jake’s face slants sideways. To avoid the rain.

  After a while, Berners says, “They must be having trouble up there. Getting in. But she wouldn’t let us come along.”

  “Another attempt?”

  “We don’t know. This time, she left them the pills.”

  “That’s progress.” He turned up his collar.

  Berners thinks of his letter, in Jake’s natty Norfolk jacket, in a pocket somewhere, forgotten. Home, under the lamp, in a last terrified communion, he would open it. Constant Comment, with him forever. But anyway, a gift.

  “That Lexington package cost me two million of my own. Plus commitments I’ll never see the end of. She says I do it for myself. I knew she’d outsmart me.”

  The rain had stopped, or their patch of it had. “Jake—”

  “Yes?”

  “They do it for us.”

  “Bloody balls, they do.” Jake peers at him. “I always wonder about you, till today. What makes you stay out in the rain. You’ve got a saint, that’s why. I’ve got a murderess.”

  “We’re not the same as them.” That’s what’s got us where we are. And them, where they are? He watched the four windows Mimi had pointed out. Real embroidered curtains the boys had put up. Swiss. “You saw his room?” He turned. A scrap, a crumb? Whatever had last touched him.

  “It was like an empty chapel. Somebody had burned incense, once.”

  “Yes, he used to do that. Or a girl he had did. But not for a long time.” No girl is for a long time; no fathers. No relationship. “Was there … any sign of food?”

  “Boys downstairs said he went out once in a while. To the store. He’s left the key with them. That crowd. They didn’t touch the place. A wonder.”

  “No, he was always giving them stuff.” Camera, clothes, boots, skis and his grandfather’s alpenstock, most of the pictures on the walls and many books though not all. And once, piled together in the hall like the ghost of an average boy going Egyptian-style into the afterlife—a sleeping bag, an antique raccoon coat, and a Goya guitar. “All the encumbrances of life, he said. As he dispensed with them.”

  “Couple of books still there,” Jake said gruffly. “Got ’em in my bag for you.”

  “What were they? Happen to look at them?”

  “Niels, I looked at everything.” Jake put his hands on Berners’ shoulders, holding close his own face. Remember me, his phiz said—I’ve got prisons. “One of them is that book, you know—the monkey-man. Same copy as on your desk in the office.”

  “He gave it to me for Christmas, the year he left school. And the other?”

  “Some paperback.”

  During that year, his son had given him half a dozen such at first, then one or two, then nothing more. The Darwin had been a proper edition, endpapers and all, two volumes picked up in some bookshop off the Charles.

  “I know—it had like my name on it, Jacob. I’ll bring them both over.”

  “Boehme, thanks, I have it too.” Raoul had underlined some words in the Berdyaev preface. “‘What is at stake is not the tears of a child in time’—”

  “What, Niels?”

  But a window three flights up is opening. Sylvia appears at it, is calling down to them. “They’re all right. They did it, but not till a couple of hours ago—and not much. We can take care of it.” She and Mimi know what to do, and are doing it. No, they don’t need an ambulance, both boys had already thrown up. Mimi had made coffee; Mimi and she had been walking them up and down. Her voice came to them temperately. “In between, she’s walking in between them,” she said, looking down at Jake and Niels as if they were a populace. “One on each arm.”

  “Not the tears of a child—in time and on earth, but the suffering, temporal and eternal of a vast number of living creatures. Who have received from God the fatal gift of freedom. God knowing the meaning and consequences of this gift.” Berners gabbled it like a catechism. Long ago he had memorized the words without intending to, walking back and forth with the memory of his son. Trying to take in what they might mean to a member of that freehold generation which had never been catechised. And what might be intended in them—not by Boehme alone—for him.

  “Sylvia—” Jake was saying. “You went up there?”

  She nodded down to him. “Come on up if you want.” The rain, starting up again, carried her words soft and clear, like beads on the mist. “I’ll tell you about her. While we walk.”

  Jake made a move, Berners with him. She stopped them. “Not Niels. Forgive her, but she’s afraid because you’re a doctor. They don’t want to go back to a hospital.” Berners shrugged, palms up, to show he understood how he would be the last one Mimi could tell it to. Sylvia left the window. Jake was already entering the house.
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  “Jake!”

  Jake turned a haggard face Berners had never seen. Not a phiz. “Jake, my envelope.”

  “Oh God, sorry.” He drew it from an inner pocket from that jacket, so jaunty on a suffering man, and palmed it through the rain. “Sorry. Want me to stay while you—?”

  “No, No thanks.”

  “That’s all right.” His forearm was gripped. “See you later.”

  “Right.”

  Now he had it, it was like a phone call he knew would be answered. He could wait. For home. Or a cab. If he had to know—what he had to know. Down at the bottom, he was warding off a blow. Like a patient ready for an answer he knows. He could wait. The rain began to drum.

  Cabs would be at the far end of the street, in the lighted slice of avenue. This was a cul-de-sac. He started walking, heard a window flung up, his name called. He turned round. Mimi was waving from her window a half-block away. Backed up against the river, her house, a five-story out of a time past and dirt incalculable, held up its old gray slates and slats to what must be dawn, or a fire on the docks. Tiny on its façade, she kept waving to him. How could dawn redden like that, behind such rain? But it was summer, the beginning of a time when people went away. Thousands were already missing.

  He ran back the half-block. Until he could see her clearly, from her third story. More tears, or the rain, must have wet the dried blood on her lip, the whole lower face was a strawberry stain. She spread her arms wide, called down nothing, didn’t need to. They’re all right. He waved back.

  After she closed the window and disappeared, he continued to stand there, still seeing her, with her arms spread. A gesture radiant against the glowering heavens, half-lit without thunder, that now began to rain in cloudburst all the way from Jake’s Jersey Towers, sweeping in silky sheets past Berners, to Sylvia’s side of town and back to him drenching his suit, running off his bared head, making him momentarily a child. In North Boston maybe raining too, and in Cambridge—haunt of his special dreaming—rainbow tears for the harlequin young. Flame, soot and ashes on this parent city. On the parent city of Boston, when its dreamer is here. Starvation of the old sort stole down his gut. Until he phones, I starve. I’ll starve, until he breaks down and phones. I’ll starve like him. In the retributory dream that we have of them. He bent his head and ran for a cab.

  Inside it, he felt too wet to take out the envelope, imagining a message written in pencil, or even some hieroglyph that intentionally ran when water touched it, and escaped. To be forever what he would never know—of what he would never know. But what the stain on Mimi’s lip was now came to him, not blood but lipstick. She never wore it, but her boys had. The three of them must have kissed and cried, and kissed. And now she was walking them, just as down the years, with razor blade at her throat, pill and stomach pump at her back, they had walked her. Like a dance. As the cab bumped and rode smooth, cobbles to macadam, making half the Rhine journey of this city, his letter rose and fell with him. When he had first been here, sent to live with yet another aunt and attend school “for the English,” the avid, delighted schoolboy of those heady morning skylines had learned quickly to save the letters beside his breakfast plate for the evenings, when he would be felled like a poisoned animal, by the mysterious shaman-sickness for home. Now the letter in his breast, from his son and maybe containing only a shaman pebble or drawing, seemed to him that—a letter from home.

  When he got to his own car, a small shape was dozing on the hood. The air here smelled like a bowl of bad fruit, dawning with flies. The boy’s clothes have drab death on them. Berners knows he is lightheaded, sniffing autopsies everywhere, before their time. When he goes round to the front, that filbert cheek is merely asleep, curved under its high crown of stubble in the delicate anonymity of childhood. When Berners bends over, the eyes open—the expected ones. What faith they have in their own doom! As Berners, swaying, manages to pet him, thank him, meanwhile counting out a wad of small bills that won’t threaten him or get him cheated, the boy points a finger, stalwart out of sleep, at the car’s license. Berners has to kneel down to the frog-talk, to catch what is wanted. A doctor. For the mumma.

  Ward language comes to his rescue. “Special sick? or always?”

  “Mose of dee time.”

  The answer comes as a relief, for Berners, his insides rubbing together for lack of blood sugar, fears he physically can’t go. Knows he won’t.

  “Can you write? Here, write down your name and address.”

  The child writes. Leaning on the hood. His other fist full of dollars.

  “You believe I’ll come, don’t you? Tomorrow night.”

  The child lowers his lids, sophisticate. That smile creeps out on him.

  “Here, here, I’ll drive you home!”

  Gone.

  In Berners’ hand is only an address.

  His only faiths are secular, Berners thought. Like mine.

  Inside the car, too done in to do more than dry off, Berners, head dropping, argues with Raoul. Who if he had become the doctor his father had hoped for—and he himself had, for a time—would have gone with that boy tonight. Who, if he still is anywhere, is saying “Go now.” Not with scorn, never even accusing. But with a spatial smile for this other man, this median one. Who is sitting, played out, in his car. Have pity, Raoul, the years have made me almost another species. From you. Nothing to do even with relationship. The physical years. This is what we both forgot…. Played out, father? But father—it was never at my game.

  The car was filling with the aerial phoning of years. Too much money—too much care? Not enough…. You used me. And taught me to use you so I can’t get out of it. Leave me!—I am alone because of you. The wanting me to be with. The world is too much that … and it’s your world…. I never made it … won’t make another … just for you…. Love me and leave me … alone.

  It was a song Berners had known for a long time, a son’s song, a child’s. In the machine-colored shadows of the car, he heard it over, reheard it as his own—and pitied himself. Healing, good as blood sugar, this feeling he had never allowed himself. Blame.

  In his breast, the letter went on beating, beating him, like a heart.

  In the stalled car, Berners drowsed, exhausted. His mind has never been clearer for his report; he is in Switzerland. That high patch of snow and small flowers, clearinghouse for the neuroticisms of Europe, spa for the dry cleaning of ideas, where the assorted morbidities which gather like age spots, could for a while be shaken—his land of clock towers and customs classifications, from which neutral medium the higher grotesques of the spirit could rise again like Alps. Eagle, he flies over it, a voyage, warning us. We, the faces of his amphitheater are still blurred. It’s not science which will kill the dream—he calls out to us—but the dreams of men which are killing the science—two asymmetric spurs between which the race is rowelled, and runs on. When the two meet—that will be apocalypse.

  Berners woke. Hot, sick, empty. The letter was still beating. He tore it open, laid flat the slip of paper inside, and drank the few words like a dram. They had been laid on Japanese paper, with a brush. His son had taken care over them. Let us be the uncollected place. Neat or precious, kind or insane, they were beautiful; he wept for them. His son had taken such care to tell him. What a man in his decline forgets. Or a species. That the truth is in the wandering.

  He was grateful for the “us.”

  On a Friday, his “teaching” day, Dr. Berners returned to the hospital on schedule, after a trip to the old town in which he had been born, from which some obscure ancestor on the wander from it—a Berners—might have been named. He had been to see his mother’s sister, at eighty-five still powerfully extant in her notorious ill health. Even as a boy he had never been bored by old people; they had seemed to him like parts of the town, old arcades in which history lay ready, not as in the bound books he was catechized on, but slippery and untrustworthy with life. Old grottoes where he might catch the true accent of what had been, down wh
ose grates he dangled himself like magnet. Just such a place he had expected in time to become—an old niche where his own progeny would wander of a dark, bored Sunday, yawning maybe, but knocking and testing too. Surely this was part of what was meant by being “human”—which in its turn had its hint of something just past physical law.

  Pain to think any of this now, with one’s own child dead or wandering. Pain to Darwin at the end, a human pain?—when gazing at that great arrangement of physical life in respect to which, even under God, he could not place us beyond. Berners had Raoul’s copy now, a paperback—and still found it touching that his son had given him the old, elaborate one. In both editions, some of the passages had been marked. By each of them.

  Berners’ old aunt had had her resonances. For him her principal one had been that she spoke of Raoul as alive, and in the framework she and Berners shared. Letting her do so, he learned through her that this too was now the past.

  No other vibrations had come to him. He was in limbo on that question. Other people were exercised. To certain rites. Each morning now, Erna presented herself, red-eyed. He’d been unable to lie to her, who saw him daily. “You could go to the F.B.I.”—Mrs. Krants’ suggestion. Both she and Erna saw this as fitting; if either had been lost, this is what the other would have done.

  “No, I can’t do him that indignity. Suppose he should be alive?”

  By that, did he mean he felt his son was not? He couldn’t say. What he did feel—never before admitted over that long-time telephone-umbilical—was that whatever Raoul had had in his knapsack, it was now his own. Berners said it to himself daily: I will not collect. I will let us be that to each other. At last.

  Later, he began to think: This way, we have a place together. Others will think it a terrible one. Yea, a dreadful, fruitful place.

  In Europe, remembering Cohen’s remark, he had meant to look back on himself here, though not on his fitness for it. He no longer felt it necessary to belong anywhere. But though, over there, he thought now and then of those Chinese bodies, of those other parents he had spent a winter with and their almost mythic children, of all the bodies and all the viruses, beyond which there must be a breaking-down process he was certain of—he was reluctant any longer to name it. Personal loss had made him unable. Wary that he might only be transcribing his circumstance—into a general loosening of the hold on life. Hadn’t men before this, in their deaths and tragedies, dreamed that the race was following them? One day over there, he had been gripped by a desire to discuss this with old Niehans, dispenser of a reasonable longevity to those who could pay for it, and searching him out, already hearing in his own head conversations in which there might be a grotto-echo of his own father as well, had discovered that the old man, in his eighties but not attaining the age of some of his patients, had died shortly before. So much for vibrations!