The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride

by Hortense Calisher

  When I shouldered my bag again, and put down the money for the tea, the two Chinese who had been cluttering in the back came forward. Though the old Chinatown tongs that brought them here were said to be dying, recruits like these still arrived regularly in the poorer eating-houses. Two pale boys with coarsely shining hair, lips swollen with youthful serenity, and inquiring nostrils, they had waited upon me together, teaching each other how to learn by serving a single pot of tea in unison. Three weeks ago, perhaps, they had been in Taiwan, and their landscape still walked with them; I could see their bent backs sculptured in the field. There is a kind of innocence that hangs for a long time about people who leave their homeland early. They don’t know precisely what events, which people in the new land, must be called strange.

  And now once more, as these two ovaled up to me, bowing and curving, I was reminded of how, in Bangkok, Oriental gesture had always seemed to me to be fluently addressed to a point beyond me, its immediate object—as if all but me were chorus to a play whose main roles were being played elsewhere.

  Surely my tip, modestly suited to my new status, couldn’t have caused all this twittering. “English?” I said into it. “Do you happen to speak any—”

  In their seashell language, they deprecated themselves, humbly powerful. Grow grass they could, or set a table of teakwood thoughts in this wilderness, or mend the sky—with a gesture—when it was in danger of falling—but no, they spoke no English.

  When I finally understood them, I couldn’t speak either. For, finally, one brought me a small wooden salad bowl, cupped my hands round it gently, as if valet to a personage, and even more humbly set my money—the quarter for the tea also—inside it. So, once again, I saw myself in somebody’s mirror, and this time I smiled.

  As I left, tucking the bowl under an armpit, I pressed my palms together and bowed over them, glad that my travels had educated me enough to say thank you in monk language. In their final flurry of bows, they seemed even to be pointing me on my way—to the viaduct.

  When I looked back, they had stopped bowing. One leaned in the doorway, staring out into the neon-thumbed night. The other, head bent, studied the carnation reek of our gutters. And I?—I’m a silly woman—I tripped along mystically, thinking of all the new roles my new head might have in store for me. I thought I saw the pattern of the life it held out to me and all wanderers, a life that was all episodes, through which I was the connecting string. Though these were to fall tangential as snow, it was my fate to unite them. Is this ordinary?

  And is it customary to stand still on the pathway and give thanks to the general scene that you are in it, uncomfortable as you are? I did that! When the wild jackass coughs by night in the desert, bringing up all the poetry he has chewed by day, that’s what it must sound like. For, think of it, I had never before felt the absolute hilarity which comes of knowing that one’s equipment is equal to one’s intentions! Face to face with the diorama of where I could go—(and would) up to and including captain death’s table—my head fairly dizzied itself. I turned it yet once again—this large, superbly bare fact on my shoulders. I wanted to thank the boys back there for being my signal. Then it came to me—that I had been theirs. And that this was the inexhaustible doubleness of the world.

  When I got to the viaduct, I found out why they had urged me here. One of the niches was occupied, by I-don’t-know-who, rolled up in my raincoat. I sat down next to him, pushed my pouch against the wall for a pillow, and considered him, snug in my coat there, if it rained.

  Would he lend his half, in that case?

  Does the future of the world depend upon it?

  And would I steal it back for my own, when I woke?

  Does the future of the world depend upon it?

  Along toward dawn, he roused himself, stumbled toward the public convenience, didn’t get that far, but in a gentlemanly, sleepwalking way, managed to put a fair distance between us. Behind him, the night went up one lucent step. Head bent, he looked from the rear as if he were praying. I appreciated his courtesy.

  So, when he came back, I said in a cheery voice, “I’ll lend you back the half you stole, eh?” Bleary-eyed, he nodded, without another look at me, and so we lay down to sleep, back to back, in mutual trust, or a draw. He and I were harmless.

  I lay for a while on my elbow. Before me, the ordinary phoenix-fire of day was rising. We are born, we live and we die; crouch and adore. I watched the waterbugs streak like lizards from the Chinese restaurant, the men stride like catamounts, from plain doors. In the inexhaustible doubleness of the world, are there signals everywhere, wild as grass, that unite us? Or must we unite them?

  What is imagination? I used to think it was to struggle against the facts like a fly trying to get out of the cosmos.

  Come, you narks, cops, feds, dicks, railway police, members of the force everywhere! Run with us! If the world is round, who’s running after who?

  In the cold of morning, I wrapped a scarf about my ears, but loosely, no deception, and lay down to rest with plenty of leeway until well after sunup, when the first rounds are once again made. Children can learn to be bald. And so to bed. What is imagination? And so to dream the answer, which I knew of course, but could never say. And so—I was born.

  The Last Trolley Ride

  I

  THERE WERE ONCE, SAID my grandfathers Jim—this was years ago—two sisters named Emily and Lottie Pardee, nice girls with pleasant enough small faces and ankles too, but they lived at the end of the town, and nobody could keep them in mind. Ever so often, people would suddenly remember this fact, that nobody could keep the Pardee girls in mind, and this would last for a while, but then that would pass out of mind too. Their parents had been the same way; they would be at church and at church suppers like anybody else, and they were invited to weddings too, like everybody else—and afterwards, when people were going over the affair in their minds, they could recall very well that the Pardees had been there. But scarcely anybody ever recalled afterward that they ever got to any of the really important places where things were transacted, like last minute phone calls to come to supper, or small meetings in the vestry or grange, which hadn’t been arranged for, or even picnics and pajama-parties, when they were young. And when the parents died, leaving the girls with the neat little house out of town to keep, and, it was said, a tidy little sum to do it with, alas, it was soon clear that they had been left this other inheritance too. For one might have thought that lots of young sparks would be drawn to that cozy fireside—even two at a time, since there were two Pardees—and that with the automobile coming in as strong as it was, there would be a double wedding out there in jigtime. But it just didn’t seem as if this would ever happen. There are some people born to live at the end of a town.

  So what the sisters did, for they had a sort of quiet spunkiness between them, was to have a bay window cut into the front of the house, and they set up to boiling fritters in it and selling them to eat. The fritters were wonderful; sometimes they came out of the hot fat like a butterfly and sometimes like a blossom, but always they were miles lighter than a doughnut, and gone quicker. It was a queer kind of eating experience and a delightful one, but the kind more or less remembered afterward as a one-time affair, without needing to hunt for it again. People tried to be faithful, sometimes sent their children for a treat or came by themselves for takeouts, but a taste for fritters never seemed to settle itself to a time of day, enough for regularity, and there’s no doubt that the best business is regulation business. There was one young man named Jim, he used to come, it began to be said, some said always when Emily had her turn in the window; some said no, it was Lottie—but the truth was he couldn’t stand sitting in that lighted window, at the one little zinc table and wire chair. If they’d had two chairs and tables put in, it would have helped, but they hadn’t. He never thought to bring a mate with him at first, which would have helped matters too. For although he was a man, and even in those days, even without many automobiles, men could g
et about easier in love than women, Jim had a trouble not unlike the sisters. He had been born at the other end of the town.

  I don’t know that this needs much explaining, even now. Though in his case, it wasn’t a question of railroad tracks but of barges. On the Erie Canal, there was always a part of barge life that was family and respectable; the wives and men too could go to Sunday church and did, though it couldn’t always be the same one, except now and then through the year. That was the difference. For the people of the upstate region—whether they live forty miles from a great lakeside or ten from one of the fingerling small ones—are a landlocked people. And they want it that way, though in those days, without so many cars and planes, you could see this clearer. It troubled them too, maybe, that their state was so various. The people in the towns and farms of that nor’nor’west part of New York State had given their hearts to the chasms and ravines mostly, and there wasn’t much left over for water. Winters, on the short, overcast afternoon when the dairy farm ponds were frozen, of course they skated them, and summers, many a canoe was flipped onto the smaller waters, of Honeoye maybe or Canadice or Hemlock. Otherwise, they sat in their tight dark winters, which the women hotted up with calico, and stared out at the numb farmland through air the color of an oyster; nine months of the year there is never much sun in those towns. Or they drove out to look at that hill near Palmyra where Joseph Smith the Mormon had his vision, or past Oneida, where a community had once hammered silver into free love. And when the barge people came to town—even though a family of these might get to their church several times a year, and come around steady as a season year after year, married as close as anybody and maybe as schooled too—the others looked at them with eyes that were the color of oysters, even though maybe they themselves had never seen one.

  At least that was the way it must always have seemed to Jim, as a barge child. At times, he even went to school on land with the others, but although he had a last name like some of theirs, and once in a while even kin here and there, it was the once-in-a-while and the general scatter that did it; he might as well have been a gypsy, or one of the Italians from the wineries which had made a little Italy out of the hills around Naples and Hammondsport, who went to the Pope’s church. Or else it was the water itself that was an invasion to the others, the farm and townspeople, even though it was the found money that worked their truckland and wetted their apple orchards and humbled itself to carry down from the flour mills at Rochester and the knitting mills at Cohoes, and everywhere else. Summers of course, there was more roister on the canals, and the farm-boys meanwhile had their noses hard to the grind; if a runaway farmboy was lost to the barges, he might as well have been lost to the Indians in the days before these were all on reservations—for the amount of hullaballoo that was made. And even when Jim’s parents retired to the little wayside house by a bit of water, which was all that was left for him to return to after the war—and where else should he come?—still, for all the changes that had been made in towns and roads and people, there was still a lingering difference between him and them. A town that size always has people who remember its gypsies. And even if not, as Jim would often tell the mate he’d brought back to share the house—war-buddies, the town called them, quite fondly—even polite as the town was to him now, and even if he could see for himself that what with the house-and-lot developments going on everywhere (this was nineteen-twenty) that if he stuck around long enough he’d be an old-timer himself, still he’d be the one to remember, even then. Barge people had their own way of remembering, half land, half water.

  It was all in the names of places, the difference between them and the town, he’d now and then say to the mate, across the deal table in the kitchen of the little house, after the dinner they’d cooked quite neatly, and just before they got down to talking, night after night, of what kind of business they’d go into after they’d saved enough from the fat, steady but no-account jobs they’d got into but wouldn’t stay at—no, not they. Jim’s mate had come from the coal mines of Pennsylvania out of Lancashire, England, when he was thirteen, and farmland was to him what the canals were to Jim—though to him, by an even more cut-off memory, it was of what he’d never yet had. He didn’t talk much, either of what he had had or he hadn’t, but he could sing of it now and then—and he could listen.

  “It’s all in the names of the places,” Jim would say. “There isn’t a square foot of New York State that isn’t within spitting range of some kind of water—falls, rapids, lake or creek—and within day or two range of the great waters. You wouldn’t think that this inland fever would hit some people this way.” But it did. It was his contention that, let a New York town stand back only ten miles from a river and it called itself something like Middlesex or Woodsville, or Horseheads or Roseboom, or Painted Post. Nice enough names, but landhungry, in a town way; The canal names were another breed, wider and lazier, lots of them Indian or classical, or marined from elsewhere, or simply practical, like Lockport. “Three canals of the inland waterway, there were at the beginning,” Jim would say, in the special, swinging voice he kept for this use, though the voice itself knew that this was nearly nineteen-twenty-one, and the canals were done for. “The Erie, the Champlain and the Oswego. Then, only as far back as nineteen-oh-three—I was already eleven—they even voted to make way for the new big ones, to hold barges up to one-thousand-ton burden. Troy to Waterford, along the Hudson. Kept the old part of the canal, up the Mohawk, to Rome. Rome to Clyde, the canal takes in the Oneida and the Seneca. Rivers, mate. Westward from Clyde, it goes up to the Niagara, at Tonawanda. I was born Mohawk to Rome, just outside of Oriskany.”

  “Aye,” would say his mate, who had never seen big water, not even from the troopship. By the map though, pulled out on the table for his education, he could see well enough that Jim had barely escaped being born outside of a town called Whitesboro one way and a Middleville the other, but he never pointed this out, nor the plain fact that many of the waterway towns had a landlubberly enough sound, and many of the mountain ones a wail of water. To him, the hills around here looked enough like Scotland to be Yorkshire, and he knew well enough what it was those hills—and what they had or hadn’t in among them—could do to people. If people here aimed to keep their feet out of water, no matter how much they had of it, it could be these powerful hills alongside, and so wild in the beginning, which had been to blame. Bears and bobcats, even now. But this he never said, either.

  And all this was only after-dinner talk, transportation talk really, of the kind men always get involved in, even if it’s only how long by bicycle to Maple Avenue. Though, in their case, it was preparatory to whether the joint business would or would not be what had begun to be called a “garage.” Nor did the town’s semi-distant way with newcomers, or even with its own, much bother them; if the two of them spoke between themselves of such things, it was only a joshing way of admitting to each other that in certain ways they were shy. The town was a nice, pert one, with most of its clapboard in good condition, plus half a dozen mansions made of the small cobblestone that used to roll up on the shores of Ontario, and a lot of silent money in the sock—also not too many grannies with hair on their chins, or other characters left over from before the world got smart. Indeed, Jim and his mate often spoke of it, how it was in the air here that the young people were in control—or soon would be. It was just the town to make your way in, once you knew your way. And its name, if not the most dashing, still had bits of nature in it—Sand Spring.

  Shy they both were, though they went everywhere with the returned soldier’s bold air of still seeing the world, and Jim’s mate blamed his own hanging back on his not being American enough yet. He was away on one of his surveying jobs, the two three times, three it was, Jim walked over to Pardees—which meant two miles to town, one and a half through it and four on the other side round by the lake shore. Oh yes, there was a lake in Sand Spring, but back of it there was a rack of hills, making the town a sort of valley—though like all
the valleys in this double country it was only a temporary valley, between the hills holding their breath and the waters holding back. Anyway, it was a lot of walking just to appear casual, but to bicycle all the way just for fritters went against the grain, though it was the ideas of the fritters that got him—set up in a bay window for all to see, four miles out of town!—plus a little bit the idea of the Pardees.

  For if those girls had been left none of that family business to go on with, it was no fault of their being women; women had run that sort of business before, just as women had now and then done the same on the canals. Whose fault was it, certainly not those two girls’, that there were getting to be no livery stables any more? It was something along this idea he had in mind, as he walked. He’d had women before; he wasn’t that sort, and except for just now he wasn’t even particularly backward with those you could marry. But at the moment, as he told his mate later, he was thinking of how the barges were going down, dropping down, derry-down, into a lock they’d never get out of—and how the livery stables were already almost gone. Those who lived by the wheel, or the clop-clop of a horse, or even water, were always being flung offside, and in the moment that whelmed them there was maybe a kinship between them, or maybe a warning, like those failed families that sometimes get together on a back street. Even for a bargeman, who always has some allowable thinking time, Jim had been a dreamy one—not that the mate was far behind. But these thoughts were not unlikely ones for any man who was thinking of setting up the first auto agency in a town, and nearly the first garage. In any case, this was how it came about that his idea of the Pardees wasn’t pushing at the fact that they were young women.