On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  Royal quirks up at her, in exact imitation. Dreadful, how this is the one she doesn’t trust. “Uh-uh. I got that.”

  In spite of herself. “What?”

  He shrugs, evasive. But he can’t bear not to tell her. “Me.” He measures her. His mind’s like a small gold whistle, ever quick to his lips. “You and me.”

  Ah chilling, to know one’s own child. Once she’d heard a psychiatrist say thoughtfully, to the back of an insulter just then limping away, “Never trust a cripple.” Horrible. For a psychiatrist to say that. Yet she’d never forgotten. What the soft, muffling valves of motherhood should have shut out at once. She must be over-qualified.

  Holding onto Royal, she watches the trees over at Kellihy’s. Through the thick trunks thin arcs of water fall gracefully. The fire leaping from the garage looks joyous. They’re wetting down the roof of the Kellihy house. Nothing flames there yet, except what all the neighbors already know. Several from the nearest houses cluster on the road in front of it, at a safe distance from the engines, three now, parked up the driveway. It’s the great house of the district; it can accommodate three. And has garages to burn. She won’t join the group down there; she knows their scratchy, Methodist whispers: Rich, careless, youth, immoderate, booze, adultery, reckless, improvident—rich. All these things being bright and beautiful as fire to them. She has a whisper of her own. It was the Kellihys’ Roddy with the matches of course, redheaded gleeful pyromaniac, son of poor Bob, the wired frog. Their roof is gleaming: shall she ask the firemen to spray hers? How powerful neighbors are with each others’ lives—is that what she’s learning?

  “Where are the Kellihys?” Charles’ voice says. The three are back, Gabriel spitting and arching in Maureen’s arms.

  “Watch out, he’ll scratch,” she says. “Even you.” Has Maureen brought nothing else for herself? Yes, her metronome.

  Charles is carrying one of the machines he makes, on principles constantly changing, never explained. This is no doubt the latest one, bulbous at the core, but frailly pennanted. Under it, acting as its base, are the two green volumes of his book on parrots, in which the illustrative plates are made with actual feathers. He’s smug with choice.

  Fearfully almost, she turns to Chess. Tall, elongated to more than willowy five-foot-ten, she’s dressed now in the old velvet opera-cloak she bought at a fair for its amber highlights—and brown depths. She has topped it with the vintage crushy hat she wears constantly, flipped up now a la Watteau. She stands ready to be mocked. Courting it, daring it; all her aggression is there. She has sad hands, and enormous style. The long fingers turn up at the tips; they’re trembling.

  The children accept her. No adult ever knows what to say to her. She is mad with such fluency. And does so well at her books. From such brown depths.

  Safer not to speak. Lexie salutes, then stays her hand, puzzled. Her daughter, in that hat and cloak, is an intended charade. A linedrawing, meant to—“The Picasso!” she cries, “The Picasso.” Bought by her and Ray early on. After the house, their most important purchase—barring her tenth-anniversary pearls. And the most revered object in it. A figure anomalous, in a hat and cloak.

  Chess brings it out from under her arm. Unsmiling. But pleased. She’ll be an artist, or a martyr James had said of her. She enjoys redress, after being mocked.

  How can I leave them, Lexie thinks—these four personae so subtly risen up from the flesh given them, into tangles that only I know?

  Chess holds the print out to the three others. Their heads hang over it like an Adoration. Bearing gifts.

  In the grass, she stirs, clasps her knees, plucks a green spear, and lies down with it. The river is whitening, like her life. One can’t see a house on its mist anywhere. But yes, that was the moment, back there; that was it.

  Back there, the children turn on her. Sometimes, without warning, they act as one. “What about you? You haven’t brought anything.” Nothing from our house, to save. They’ve ferreted her out. Her tigerish “I’ve got it!”, hugging their four heads to her, doesn’t please them. They dislike parental sentiment. “No, no,” they say. “Go back in like us. And choose.”

  “Six minutes,” Charlie says, grinning.

  They were right, she thinks now, chewing her blade of grass. When I hugged them, I was telling the truth unadorned. But children know early that truth-adorned is more likely the parental one. I’ve had to lie down here to remember that.

  So she ran back to the house. From Chessie’s window, which faces north upriver, she can see the whole plan of the Kellihy fire, a siege already receding and on its way to be filed in village recollection. With certain embellishments.

  Is that Betsy, emerging on the front balcony? The garage and its turrets are a dead loss, down to the ugly stone foundation, which remains. Two of the engines are backing down the driveway. The crowd of neighbors out in the roadway moves calm and sated in the dawn. Bob, without his telephones but gesticulating, is among them.

  In the back garden, Arthur the butler comes out with a flashlight which he plays over the ruins and shuts off again, musing like the real householder here. And out front, on the balcony, yes, that’s Betsy. She’s making gestures of thanks, large ones, from the Pasadena Playhouse. Wide-in-the-sleeve, and appropriating to herself the still-smoky heavens, she’s like that girl in the old high school joke—who every time the thunder claps, goes to the window and bows. She knows who she is, better than some people do. She is the embellishment. She’s wearing the nightgown from Saks’.

  In Lexie’s own house, safe under its dry roof among its hundred corners, she runs to Ray’s and her common bedroom. There’s a dressingroom off it, and another smaller room, where she sleeps these days, but no matter; from here, turning on a heel, she can survey it all, the whole arrangement—in a thunderclap. She has no time for her ledge. When she comes out of the house again, her absurd, precise Charlie says “Four minutes.” She is carrying her thesis on Roger Bacon.

  She’ll never know what they thought of that, whether they approved. Only Maureen spoke up, with her devotional gaze. “I thought—maybe the peppers. But you can buy those.”

  Yes, that was the moment. With the house rescued, the children gathered, and the wind blowing away from them. When she knew she would eventually leave.

  Afterwards, they’d gone inside and make pancakes, hilarious as a houseful of allnight drunks.

  After which, like a nun’s veil floated invisibly down on her, what may be the reigning meditation of her life begins. Or its suspension? Every seventh day, Ray’s weekly bulletin gives her one more week to muse. Since marriage she hasn’t been so alone with her ego, or so taken aback at its narrow, grim persistence. Yet instinct tells her she must be serious; if she lets in humor now—she had it once—she’ll fail. At what?

  She doesn’t allow herself to brood on concrete matters. Ray’s weekly letter, three sheets of thin European paper that would melt in a teacup, is full of those. “Pay the insurance; remember the tires on the Volvo. Have them cut the bamboo between Kellihy’s and us before it gains headway.” As it does every year, despite. “This is the year we were going to train the wisteria into a tree, and clear away the rotting pilings that were once a dock. What of Charles’ college applications?” Ray’s wooing her from afar, she thinks. He is rebuilding their house—from cloud.

  She constructs her days like yoga exercises which come upon her one by one. For a morning, she’ll sit at the kitchen table examining like an actress what it will be to be old, rehearsing it. By noon she has it down pat—the mumbling lip, rocking jaw, blinking eye, and shake of head. And tentative hands. Is this depression? Probably. But shouldn’t one practice age? When one has so much time for it?

  On another morning she’ll go into the city, wandering there the whole day to test what the city is to her without lovers.

  From a window in the Cloisters, where faith is museumed in fake rock, she saw through its arch the dead-real Palisades. On South Street she boarded the sailing-ships,
which were standing still. She felt the tourist panic—who in the world hereabouts knows who and where I am? A sandwich place unlocked her tongue. Outside it again, a man in a green wool tam, knocked sideways for Ireland’s sake, hobbled by her at a clip, not drunk, not crazy, merely stating to the air and whomever he’s on the way to “—and oy am the best dommed dogtrainer in this town.” Right. That’s better; this is a street she knows. Her foot treads a small newssheet, still clean, on which, bending without picking it up, she reads: Boston Auto Torpedoes Racist Banner. A broadside for some faction? She visualizes a parade-size banner, upheld by two people, and the small, pointed car; a Volks wouldn’t be sharp enough. But she walks on without picking the newssheet up. The essence of her city is in that nonchalance.

  Yet when two men from a truckload of Hasidic Jews offer her a flyer she takes it and carefully reads the proper procedure for kindling the Shabat candles. “First light the candles, then cover your eyes with your hands to hide the flame.” Yes, the city is still hers. And she needn’t call James. Whose role in her life so teases her. Yet I have a life in which people have roles. She goes home.

  On still another day, she asks herself “Why do women like me think that being in the world is being outside the house?” And goes to the nearby State Hospital, to volunteer. For two weeks she teaches typing as therapy. A schizophrenic boy of seventeen—yes, seventeen is the age—falls in a kind of love of her. Though he’s physically sound, his fears and angers are going through the senses one by one, negating them. In music-hall he’s gone deaf; in painting-workshop his fingers can’t feel though he hears perfectly. In her class, he professes to be blind. She guides his fingers on the keyboard, meanwhile passing a hand between his eyes and hers. He is blind.

  “I can smell,” he says. “You have perfume on. May we kiss?”

  When she does so, he vomits on her hand.

  The rest of the week there was uneventful. She had other patients who had cycles too, but less overt ones. She noted how they went from talk-talk to silence, from sleep to hard wake. A doctor said “It drears the pain.”

  At the end of the second week, she quits. “No, I’m not a volunteer,” she says, when pleaded with. “No, I’m not your material. I’m looking for a job.” So she’s found that out. But it’s also true that witnessing these cyclic patterns has scared her. Do they resemble hers?—she thinks, walking away from the gray hospital yard whose grass pleads with her for help. What is her central pain? Why’s she asking that?

  Home, when she pulls up in its driveway, greets her with the sanity of tasks waiting. She tries to visualize the house, dappled now in the noon sunlight, without the penumbra of tasks that shadow it in her consciousness, in the worst early days a snail’s smear, dragging her from behind. Yet she’s always concealed from others that she enjoys household craft itself. Concealing it from other women especially. But the children know, and tease her; when she polishes furniture they condescend, like shimmers in a land they’ll never live in, not them. “Ma’s polishing furniture again.” How bewildered Charles was, when, leaning in humiliation on her oily rag, still half-circling it on the table’s oval, she spat out “It’s my meditation!” and stalked up the stairs.

  Did he know how she lay on her bed, a creature circling in her meditation, trying to weep like a girl? Why has she been given all this time for philosophy, if it shall not bear fruit, or even be credited? Yet the children love to come home and find her tethered to the house, like an animal of which they’re fond. Which feels guilty when it slips their leash and runs. What does her chastity or unchastity mean to them? That she’s slipped the lines of family, contaminated their mother’s-milk? Or only that at three o’clock homecoming time, she’s deserted them?

  Upstairs, she hauls out Ray’s letters and reads between the lines. Yes, he’s homesick in a way—but can it be for this? No, we’re both homesick, but not for each other. What would a man like Ray be homesick for? Almost she knows, but won’t admit.

  For a life, knitted with hers, in which he will be spared homesickness for anything else.

  Not like her for a land of condors—if only to see whether the condor flies as pitiless as said. Not for a flotilla of ships, receptive off a shore one strides down to naturally. She sees that armada, that odyssey toward which—whenever it creaks at anchor—the woman may only go filleted, bearing gifts. As in the poem her class is studying. While on board, on the high seas, the sure, sandaled feet raft the rocking waves, tread the great poem, traveling.

  “Ah,” she said, running up the stairs to her ledge and standing there, as of old. “So that’s it.” So that’s what I’m homesick for.

  Standing there, she saw herself in the vague pane—arms winged out for victory, but the head not damaged enough yet to be classical. So these are my images. So it’s not you after all, house-of-cloud. No matter how many fiery windows burn through your gray. So my images don’t include a house—did they ever?

  Next morning, sitting on at the breakfast-table after the kids leave, in her mind she writes a letter to Ray, maybe on that old yellow scratch-pad paper which used to have bits of wood in it. “Dear Ray: I would not use travel to hide.”

  For an hour, going about her duties in silence, she wore that sentence like a plume on her head. But once out on the parkway, driving citywards, at the first sight in the distance of those silver harbor-needles which rim its coast, her plume collapses. Will all her language-search end in letters to Ray?

  Warned in time, she walked into class still hopeful. The group, now well into its second semester, has been through cycles too. At first, they are each other’s dear familiars, met passionately, In skittish lunches after class, they laugh immoderately, playing hookey from home. While the confidences flow—stall to stall in the ladiesroom—of women who have held their water too long. Couples or threesomes spin off into friendships where they suddenly want to show each other their homes, and the people there. Ending up embarrassed afterward (too much has been said beforehand) when they see their home-treasures in the fierce, cold neon of the class. A schism develops between those who still lunch—watched by the local hotshots—in the plushy bar-restaurant in town, and those purist younger ones, still with the grub-smell and crayony clothes of baby-minders, who have settled for the school cafeteria, where they huddle like a vanguard, away from the older women, whom they see as having settled for good.

  In the class outright a few personalities have emerged at once.

  Elaine, who slams down from the Bronx once a week in her round black curé’s hat, writes food-news for a Bronx weekly, brings them Hamentasch cakes for Easter, has had two husbands “Both of them gingerbread gentlemen; one hard, one soft,” and once brings her current lover to class with an air of having baked him for the occasion—“I wanted to show him you girls.” She’s aiming for pre-law, and is obviously a woman who’s had her own language from the beginning.

  Jean Fackenthal, who lives in the town where the college is, had early on invited them for “tea in my home.” Which they tour in silence down to the very dresser-drawers, proudly opened “for a peep,” in whose quilted care a disaster-supply of silk bras, panties and nightgowns lie separate. Jean’s husband has Parkinson’s disease. The children, now in far places, have done well. She’s the class renegade; they can only wish she were also the class dope.

  “You blame everything on being women,” she says, rising turkey-red from their first general lunch together. “Half the things you gripe about happen to people from life.” She sits in class now and then turning that same color as if it’s her obligation to, spitting into their discussions an “Age, you fools!” or “What’s your sexual liberty going to do about sickness, my hearties?”, or “Get yourselves the jobs, the medals; can’t you see that’s all that’s needed?” Or once, approvingly, when a portion of Lexie’s thesis is read out: “Time, girlie, that’s it; don’t you worry, ladies; death will respect us sexually”—while throughout she worked the needlepoint square on which was appearing the herald
ic seal of Barnard College (attended for two years only), her shaky hands tremoring intelligences into the wool.

  Outside her house after the tour, Elaine said, “Gee, I always wanted to do my drawers like that,” and then “Maybe she catches that palsy from him.” One of the crayony girls burst into tears. “Tears,” the horsey girl said—“Shit.” She still never spoke except in monosyllables, but always tagged along, bringing with her like an accusation the ozone of early-morning rides.

  By now they are all each others’ enemies as well as friends. From too much similarity and too much shredding of the situation, they depress each other, both because some of them will not make out well—and some will. When she herself is with the group, a fish flowing with her kind, she so loves the sensation, the comfort, that a blessed myopia of acquiescence comes over her; she never knows what they think of her.

  This morning, there are grumbles because Tom Plaut, the instructor, is late again.

  “He takes advantage of us because this happens to be a three-hour class.” This is Cee-Cee, the youngest of the vanguarders. “I was told this is a crash course, so I could start my major; we’re not even getting through the syllabus.”

  At the outset, when Cee-Cee brought her two buttery-beautiful children to class, and Plaut told her “This is a college. You’ll have to solve your problems outside the class,” she’d replied “I want to solve them here.”

  She’s a troublesome girl, always trying to solve things practically. The two children, aged three and four, disrupt the class just by being there. “Why should I pay a sitter—what do I care if they hear about D. H. Lawrence’s dirt?” their mother says, but the rest reluctantly side against her, although the word “sitter” is attached to their own hearts like an extra valve. The line of liberty is hard to take. For Cee-Cee is also their proletarian. Her husband’s a policeman; both have two years’ college, but she’s studying on, in order to write a book about his experiences. Which he is all for. And better be, she makes clear. As if this isn’t all, she’s also Chinese, and therefore one-half the class’s ethnic triumph.