The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride

by Hortense Calisher

  While Lottie went on sleeping, the other two conferred.

  “It can’t be—could it be—” said Jim, “that she just didn’t know about it—?” He said afterward that here, even as late as this, an edge of humor hovered—what a riot if it was merely that, then just give the pair time and all would be well, or as with the half the world not as lucky as some, at least smoothed over.

  “No, of course not!” said Emily. “We kept horses.”

  “Well, what the devil—then—?” he said, slow to anger as always. And why he should have been angry at Emily, he wondered after. “He’s a man, that’s all. I know the mate. A bit quick, maybe. And maybe one for the worn—never mind. But he’s no brute. I’d swear it.” He looked at her square. “And I can.”

  If she flinched at that, he said he couldn’t tell it. She spoke softly, “I can’t say what men are, the way you can, or what women are. But I daresay you’re right.” It was a long speech, for Emily. “And I know Lottie,” she said.

  “Then—if you knew what—why didn’t you—? Why didn’t you say something?” How absurd!—he could see that himself—and that they two should be quarreling about it. He never would again, he said after. For she stopped him cold, even if she didn’t mean to.

  “I’m only a girl,” she said.

  And she was too—not twenty yet. People like Emily—he said to the mate later—when they do speak, how they go to the heart of it!

  “And why wouldn’t she,” the mate answered, “for that’s how you are, Jim.”

  Anyway, when they saw him, that was maybe the worst shock of all. Lottie was gone by that time, taken by Jim down to Troy, to that woman friend she stayed with until Lottie found herself pregnant, some old maid friend. It couldn’t be said that Lottie had been deeply wounded that her sister wouldn’t keep her on and allow her to take up her old life there she had been a little hurt of course, but mostly—surprised. But they didn’t speak of her for a moment, now that they saw him.

  “The eye I did myself,” he said. “On the bedpost.” Then there was the blue dent on his temple, which you all know, which never did go away. The scratches were nothing, he said. But one or two had festered; the human nail will do that. Emily went at once to get a basin, though it was two weeks since that night, and more.

  “Thank you, Jim,” said the mate, while she was out of the room. “And let’s not speak of it again, of what or why, unless we have to.” He managed a smile. “Maybe someday, when we’re old.” He put the familiar hand on Jim’s shoulder. “There’s just something I want to ask Emily.”

  When she returned, he asked her it, in the middle of her sponging his face. She had put a towel round his neck and was treating his cuts as firmly as any trainer. The iodine made him squint his good eye. His voice wasn’t much, not for him.

  “When was it, Emily?” he said. “That you decided.”

  “Decided what?” she said, but they all knew, just as the mate must have known at once that it would have been Emily’s force which had refused her sister; Jim on his own could never have done it.

  “When I saw her walk into her room,” said Emily slowly. “When I saw her walk like that, back into her old room.”

  The mate nodded, holding his face up to the washcloth, his eyes closed against the water; then he opened them so that she might look into them; he and she were a pair, both of them quick to seize people and size them, not long bewildered. Then he jumped up and went to the mirror.

  “About my sister,” she said to his back. “There’s nothing to Lottie … except—what one sees.”

  “And if she were my sister,” he said without turning, “I’d have seen it.”

  His voice was bitter. For we’re so trained up to believe, Christian and infidel both, that all people are like icebergs, the greater part of them beneath. Why must we forget or deny that there are these others, too?

  “Why … Emily—” said Jim. “Why—Jim.” He rarely called the mate by their common name. “She’s right, do you see? And—if we could—remember it. Wouldn’t—could that make it easier?”

  The mate turned from the mirror, slowly, fingertips still to the stickingplaster he’d been dabbed with. “For whom?”

  Emily only looked at them both with her level glance. The mate came up to her, his head cocked the way one has to with an eye puffed closed. “Maybe I’m like that too,” he said. “Nothing to me, except what you see.”

  “Not if you can say it,” said Emily, and Jim with a nod agreed.

  All three were silent for some minutes. Then the two men both shook their heads, like dogs out of water, away from this kind of talk. “Well—I’m off,” said the mate. Instead, he rested the palms of his hands stiff-armed on the table and stared down into its center. “Got to admit it though, I’m dashed. I’m a bit—dashed.”

  Maybe that’s why he’s had to be the opposite, ever since.

  “I’m making her an allowance, of course,” he said. “But I don’t plan to go down there after her.”

  “But otherwise—” said Jim.

  “Otherwise … I’ll have to sell Oriskany. It’s her money bought it.” He looked at them as squarely as his eye allowed him. “Maybe I’ll sell it to you.”

  He did always have a business head, even at odd times. Of course they both smiled at the idea, Emily the more.

  “But if she’ll come back—” said Jim, poor Jim, always seeking to make his kind of peace, or to find out what that was.

  “Something may come of it.” The mate spoke lightly. Then he screwed his face the way a person does when he intends to look mean. “Something … may … come of it all. We’ll wait and see.”

  Something did of course, the child. And though in these days, a woman mightn’t have come back to have it, Lottie did—maybe a Lottie always would. Later he said that he would have divorced her otherwise, but that’s blarney; the mate would never divorce the mother of his child, and that’s how it’s worked out, hasn’t it?—in the mate’s own way. For, during the months before the child came, it was a sight to see, how he cossetted her, bringing her up breakfast before he went off to the job he’d decided to hold on to, going against the doctor, to push her to eat. And to look at Lottie, though she didn’t appear to give much thought to the baby itself that was coming, or even to her having it, everything was smooth as cream. It was repellent, maybe, to see a man use what he knew of his wife to get what he wanted out of her—which was dynasty—and maybe the mate himself knew it was, beneath that blind, horn-forward stare which always came on him when he was after something. And he got him, by God—the lone boy who was dynasty and is dead now, but not before he in turn fathered four of his own; can it be fifteen years now, and the war after the second world one in its turn an old one? And the mate has him still—however way many of us are conceived; here we are—or were. And here you are, the fruit of us, burdened with the tale.

  Once the baby was born and coddled out of its two-month frailty, everyone knew that things were going badly out at Oriskany. It dragged on so for a few months more, then ended, though there was no more violence, at least as far as was let be seen. Then Lottie left again, this time very quietly, by what private arrangements were never publicly known. That she had made some agreement was taken for granted since, though she made no more forays on her sister, indeed not even a letter so far as was known, she wasn’t the sort to manage alone. Then indeed the town could reflect back on how the mate had always been the doting parent and the mother the negligent or perhaps confounded one—and could take the mate to its bosom. For Lottie had left behind the child.

  So—the mate never got his garage, or Jim either—though that too remains to be explained. Oriskany was sold—it’s funny now to think of the mate having to sell a place to get money—and the money presumably reverted, from a distance, to “the mother,” as the town has since persistently referred to her, always in hushed tone. The mate moved nearer Jim, so that Emily could tend his child, which was subsequently brought up during the day with her
others, joining its father at night. And that’s why such a rich grandfather lives in such a small house; half of reality has these kindergarten reasons for it—this being part of the general undertow and sneakwork of the world. Surely it’s also why, when we can see a trolley ride clear, we cling to it.

  If Lottie got the best or the worst of things, the town never precisely knew, nor could they tell whether Jim and Emily knew either. At first she was heard of quite simply and normally, as working in a bakery down in Troy. The bakery was in character, and not only in hers—you watch. Later they heard she was working in a similar capacity in the town of North Adams, Massachusetts—and the migration of people, by foot or wheel or hunger, is always interesting—for there is no other town in the state of Massachusetts which more resembles a New York State town called Troy. Why a woman whom surely the mate supported, and who had had ten thousand dollars of her own in the bargain, should need to work in such places, only those who saw her could say. Bulletins got vaguer as times got leaner, and if it was heard that she had invested her money in oil stock and lost it, others had done the same. There was shock when some vacationer reported seeing her in a place called Squaw Village, not what it might sound but one of those tourist places on the Molly Stark trail, with a big country store and Indian tepee setups; the shock was that she had let her hair grow down in a braid, dyed black surely, to add to her squaw-weight, and was on charade in the gifts-and-goodies shop, billed as the mother of an Indian family, in a troup of hired braves and papooses selling everything from carnival glass to saltwater taffy. “Surrounded by children!” the shocked vacationer said. By which it could be seen that our town, like many in the region, had in some ways maintained its own character.

  Then, in the forties somewhere, it heard for sure—or at least from her—that she was rich again or very comfortable; the oil stock—think of it, oil stock bought by a Lottie!—had panned out after all. It was in Florida that some folks met her; by this time we upstate farmers, and business people too, were wintering in Florida ourselves, and not busing it down there either, flying there, just like the birds. She was very dressy now—the women of the party said—in a way that hid her bulk, and like a well-heeled widow with her bracelets and gold charms. She lived in one of the warm coastal towns where the older boat-crowd sat a lot on deck or by the water, her distinction being, and maybe her respectability too, that she didn’t drink—diabetes had lost her a toe. “Didn’t drink,” the women said. “Dressed like Rochester, sure, but there’s that bazoom to make you think of Miami,” some of the men said. Others said, “Oil stock, nuts, anybody knows what he’s worth now, and he’s never divorced her, that’s all.” The wildest tale of all, which should encourage us all as to the civic imagination, was that the mate himself had been seen down there, in that hotel like a French chateau, coming out of a suite behind her or her image, in the wee hours of the morn. A lovely conclusion, only not possible. True enough, that he’s often seen down there at that place or others, and that he goes to some trouble to see that the middle-aged tarts he chooses will look to strangers as if they could be his wives. Seeing him at a table, bending his fine head of white hair very courtly over some nice, fullblown woman with not much makeup and good manners, who’d think otherwise—unless the real wife was known to the observer from before? It may be that he was showing the lady out of his suite all right, and treating her like one—whoever she was. But it wasn’t Lottie. To dream of Lottie as her husband’s whore or anyone else’s is to—well no, it’s neither to laugh nor to cry. It’s to wonder how a woman who hadn’t it much in her to stir the emotions, could hold a man down, and for a lifetime too, and by emotions he never had it in him to have. If to be that is to be a whore, then, poor thing, she was one. But there are those who say she never could have been one conventionally, not even with him. How do they know? Because, though it’s said she used to see the boy now and then—for his own good, as maybe Emily insisted—she never came back to Sand Spring, not once. If she’d been a whore somewhere, rich or not, she could have come back to town—and been respectable.

  Now Emily, though for her there is no key. For, all her life, unlike the other three, each of whom wanted something in a way which overpowered or colored them—Emily was concerned with the workings of daily living only, and so her mystery, like its, is only hinted at here and there in the shadows and gildings of that ordinary living, and is as hard to see. When the mate, one solemn day, carried his baby into her house to be cared for forever, although she had none of her own even begun yet, she received the infant handily, yet not greedily, in no doubt that her own babies would come along, when called. Though it was a sad day, to the two men watching she left no doubt either that in any day where such a child was, there were still tweaks of joy. The three things she said might have come one by one out of a casket of the sort women keep by them. To the mate, whose face, except for the blue dent, was now healed to an even hardness, she said lightly, “Don’t fret, don’t fret”—whereas to the baby cradled in her arms she said almost formally, “It can’t be helped.” Shouldn’t it have been the other way round? Or did she hope to make the little man see as early as possible a view of the world—her sex’s—in which, if he grew up like the rest of his, he would never believe? Or was it simply that she was one of those who from birth know the position of the generations and can act by it, needing no other compass or calendar.

  But in the third thing (which was Lottie’s epitaph no matter how much might be said of her later) surely there was also a hesitance in the way Emily spoke, as if some of the verdict—in the way character is apportioned among families, or among women—must surely cling to herself.

  The three were sitting in the bay window, out at Pardees’ Coffee was on the table, tea for the mate. In the nearer depths of the house, the baby had been put down; its next bottle was ready on the stove. The stove was Bismarck. On the lake in front of the house it was late August again, one of its lizard-gray days, scaly with mist, from which autumn bursts like a pumpkin, a fruit. All three couldn’t help but be thinking how far, from Bismarck to baby, they had come. Outside, on the railless water, the fogline now and then parted a few feet above it in porcelain flushes of vision to which each pair of eyes would put a personal shape. Over her own, Emily’s brows almost met, but it was she who first broke the long pause, though silently, flinging her baby-tired arms wide. She could do that—it was one of the things that made her seem tall, yet contrarily could bring her fingertips in again to hold an eyelash; she had stretched her legs wide and closed them again, and in the nutcracker between them brought herself a man. She looked at him now, at Jim watching the water, loving his vagueness, never scolding, perhaps tending it—for both their ends. But today was the mate’s day; anything about Lottie belonged to him.

  “Jim—” she said. The two men always knew which Jim she meant. She spread her hands—like a sister’s—then clasped them. “The sugar-people. That’s the way they are.”

  Each nodded at her, needing no further explanation. Jim, her husband, smiled. It wasn’t his day, life hadn’t marked him outwardly yet, as it had the mate, but until his inner arguments settled themselves, until he could point to the mark on himself perhaps, his clever girl would always have a word for what the risks were, and the responsibilities. He, meanwhile, was waiting. And there was no shame in it.

  It could have been only a few minutes later when she got up, walked over to the great stove, cold as armor these many months in favor of the smaller summer one, and put her hand on it. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. Her clear eyes shone with a forward-backward light. “There’s not a decent baking company in town.”

  The genius of it was that from the first she had said “company.” A mere bakery, even if its owners keep in the basement a staff of two floured German madmen—do you know bakers?—is still only a shop. Nevertheless, that’s the way they began of course, but with that other word always leavening the conversation and at last rising from it, written neater than Nebuchadnezz
ar’s—on the wall. The name “Aswami” came from a secondhand truck which glimmered at them from a car-lot when they were on holiday up near the Canadian border—“The Aswami Baking Company”—the name of its past owner and locale conveniently obliterated, but an Indian version after all. In the early years, toward her thirties, Emily, selling at the shop’s counter—did she ever think of her sister?—or downstairs, scarf-headed, checking over the staff in the large basement of the second establishment, or at Jim’s side at an evening party, looked ever younger, almost a child-wife—you’ll remember there was almost a decade between them. As for the parties, the two of them, if by choice not in the forefront, were always on the list now, having long since moved to the middle of town and got over their trouble.

  In later years, in the business office of the factory they built on a razed property—yes, in Oriskany—as Jim grew more portly, Emily, though no plumper herself, kept matronly pace with him somehow. The children, when they came, were never vulgarly underfoot in the shop, a distaste for this being part of what her livery-stable heritage had taught her, so that by the time the company had been achieved, the children, now parents themselves, could laughingly tell their own, home from prep and boarding schools with perhaps a schoolmate, that they had never even had as many cakes and cookies as children normally did, when young. All of them called their parents Jim and Emily, oddly modern for them, unless one suspected that in this way the mate’s child wouldn’t have been shunted away from “Mother” to “Aunt Emily.” For which reason—far back in those browndark days of childhood which precede the light-blazed ones on which young men’s planes go down (their last letters to dear Emily arriving later)—it had been done. As for the baking products on which this small, decent empire has been built, these have kept pace with modernity too; the company has one of the best bread to doughnut lines in the upstate area, all properly packed with no more than 10 per cent preservatives—and there isn’t a fritter in the lot. But what with automobiles and trucking, and the trackless wastes between towns and appetites, always needing to be covered, it has done very well. Dear Emily—as much more than old letters still say. If we don’t count that young man, the father of some of you (and how does one count death out of one’s generation, when it is not among the natural and daily?), then Emily was the first of us to die. She is the first to fall, of that young constellation, and never will there be a better reason for you all to gather here. As might be expected of such a woman, she went from one of the commoner diseases, which was gotten to, as the doctors like to say, in time. When Jim took the mate with him to help order the stone, and they stood in the stonecutter’s office, studying that grim manual of texts and design cuts, looking out the window at his samples, it was the mate who suddenly slammed the book closed and said “What do I do in my business, when I buy anything! Let’s go to an expert!” So they hopped in that other car of his, the Bentley he’d got from England—the two men when they go out together always use his cars—and drove to the church.