On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  The last day, when his own clothes were brought, the shoes were missing; the retarded woman who had charge of enough backstairs items and tasks to tax a genius was still searching when he left. Thievery was not to be suspected. But Hector Ibañez, the small hospital’s director, who spoke good English, felt responsible, as if Ray might think himself forced to pay with his shoes for the long, quasi-medical conversations they’d had of an evening, after Ibañez’ duties were done.

  “I can go home in these,” Ray’d said, pushing forward a foot in one of the soft foldover slippers he’d had in his bag. “Or maybe—what’s the Spanish word for sneakers?—happen to have an extra pair?” A josh, of the simple sort they’d been having. Hector had an ancient American tennis-racket brought him by an elder brother, the hospital’s owner and director before him, who’d served an internship at the Flower Hospital in New York, as he said: “Five hundred and fifty years ago.” Hector’d stuck out a foot. And on the last night, think of it, it was discovered they wore the same size.

  “Between friends—” Ibanez insisted, stern tears in his eyes. He’d been a monk, writing ecclesiastical reference-books, until that same doctor-brother died, and duty had called Hector to this lazier work; now the hair in his former tonsure flourished, purple-black and frayed as the unlit cigar he entered with each evening—a token of status maybe like an epaulet, or a housekey to the laic life—for after a time Ray suspected it to be always the same cigar. Like Ibañez’ flowery self-introduction and adieu every evening. Through the day, the formalities that even the least of people here clicked at like rosaries cast him a supportive perfume. It was the conversation of people who also danced communally; the words were like knee-dips and bows-from-the-waist, not of themselves to be saved. He couldn’t ever remember much of what Hector said, but the man’s attitudes, stiff yet flowery as the sheaves on a coin, would stay with him for life. He would like to bundle up just such a sheaf of them, he told Sister Isaac—who was also Hector’s sister—in Hector’s presence. “To send to my son Charles.” Hector’d wrinkled his nose over his moustachios. “Like the bundle of rods on the Fascist medals, you mean—? Pfui—he wouldn’t want those.” It was his only political remark. “Why to the son?” Sister said. “Why to him?” And then, with a covetous glance at the Hermes “Ahh—because he also writes?” They waited. Sister always spoke in threes. Her second thoughts were worth waiting for, Hector joked, but her thirds had been kept in a special family album ever since her girlhood. “Why—” she’d said “—do the Americans always want us?” He thought about that, in the long grave thoughts which were possible there, a stream always at his side. Every time she spoke, she took a little more of his skin away with her.

  Charles’ weekly letter was read to the ward in three parts: First, a portion to other patients in return for their own extracts. Then, certain passages which Hector would relish, having as he said “known your country through my brother.” And sometimes, only to Sister, the parts that troubled him. She never commented, as if she knew that he was merely trying to hang onto the family images that shift in an invalid’s absence—or doing it for extra surety that he wasn’t going to slip out and away from them. Into a future life that meant more to him even than they.

  The tiny hospital, which had no front or back door of its own, occupied the two middle floors of the building, once its own in entirety, which now also housed a government warehouse above, and some sort of agricultural department down below—all of them connected by the same elevator. A rickety outer staircase had been attached to the ward’s rear door, like a chute for all wastes. The warehouse floor, which had no personnel except rats, was given over to the storage of framed military portraits from the Franco side of the last war, all ranged with respect to rank, the towering gesso frames of the generals accompanied by those of their aides-de-camp, done in oil also, but the frames narrower. The walls, of what once had been the Ibañez’ apartment, were velvet-covered—which was perhaps what had inspired the government. One far wall was hung with tinted photographs, not quite so large, of official couples. “Colonels,” Hector said, pronouncing all the syllables. The women, all handsome enough except for the crimped space between the eyes, had an endearing, almost homebody look lurking soft behind their haughty corals and formidable hair—or perhaps it was the innocence which came to all the dead of only forty, fifty years back. Yet one could imagine them lowering their eyes. He’d touched the bodice of one of them—a young girl almost, with a high comb like a red canna-flower on her head, and seeing eyes. “Colonels and their wives,” Hector said. “I assure you, wives, all of them. But if you like that one, it can be arranged.” Hector had with him a black rosette of ribbon. Walking over to one of the aides-de-camps he attached it. “It pleases me to keep the necrology. Especially in my own house.” All the generals already had their death-ribbons. Some were a dust-covered red. “What are those?” Hector drew a long fingernail across his throat. “Shall we say—Sold.”

  In the ward proper, the atmosphere was that of some homely pension—with its own stewpots, waiting lists and profits and losses—which happened to serve medical guests. Two doctors consulted and operated, neither of them residents. Under Sister Isaac, four other sisters nursed, assisted the one male cook, and waited “on table.” The retarded slavey’s husband was both orderly and marketer, washing his hands, it was to be hoped, in between. The operating-room, which Hector showed proudly, was reasonably modern and included a dentist’s-chair from which came the loudest howls in the hospital. Twice a year medical students arrived, allotted—as happened during Ray’s third week—from some civic bureau above. The excitement over what provinces these neophytes would be from was far larger than he’d seen during any emergency. One of the half-dozen chronic patients, a man who’d worked in London, said to him seriously “Señor, a fellow from Saragossa slips in that thing there”—a catheter—“bitching different than a fellow from Almeria.”

  Clearly there were also hierarchies in how one got to be a patient at all in this tiny facility, where a man’s town-entity loomed larger than money, or even suffering. What happened in the unseen female ward he assumed went the same way. The hospital itself, founded by the Ibañez pair’s father, now submitted to the government publicly, and adjusted in private, gleefully. The cook, stalking into the ward from the kitchen—which Ray, when ambulatory, learned was next to the operating room itself because of a matter of pipes and electrical lines—was now and then pacified from Hector’s own pocket, though not before signing a receipt. “Wine custard can’t be made without good wine,” Hector said. “In summer, we abstract many little gaieties from the fund for bedsocks.” At first he and his sister seemed to be in the ward neglectfully often for a director and his nursing supervisor; whenever they were, the hospital’s innards were unrolled to Ray. “You make too much of me,” he’d even said, hoping to relieve them of professional courtesy. Then, after one peculiarly circuitous chat with both brother and sister, the English-speaking chronic looked up from his equally chronic game of piquet and said offhand to his other neighbor, first in English and then Spanish “The Director and Sister are studying for their alternitiva with the Doctor here.” On inquiry, he was told this was the license issued by the Royal School of Bullfighting—and laughed uncertainly, at what must be a dig at all medicos. But at last, routing himself through their protocol of innuendo combined with franknesses quite opposite to his own (a local process which he was learning faster than the language) he understood that the pair were hoping to learn everything they could scrape from him. If he went back over their chats of the last few days, he could even hazard that their new cases had numbered a pneumonia, a diabetic amputation, and a Hodgkinson’s. But for dignity’s sake, neither would ever ask him a question direct.

  Let Sister Isaac walk on one side of him now—she’d want the river side—and Hector on the other, the two gray radishes of his moustache pointed at the houses of his friend’s medical domain. Both of them ready for consultation on a case. A
nd all three of us watching the progress of the yellow shoes.

  Let us consult. We all three know who the case is.

  The case of a man who isn’t in touch? This would never occur to either of those two. Never does, to people who are.

  How can it occur to the case itself? Think of Borden Wheeley, who barrels through the world and its widows on the cheap phrases he thinks will unlock him and them—only succeeding in making himself untouchable.

  “Yet you say his practice is the largest in the Miami area, Doctor Ray?” Hector says. “Surely you make mistake about him. And yourself.” They walk on. “You have big practice here, Doctor Ray? How many souls?”

  Souls? I think of them as houses.

  Sister’s more practical. “It’s not the same as just touching people, Hector. On the nose or the neck. Or anywhere.” She doesn’t blush. “Doctor here, he’s done plenty of that. Just like me. Look at his buttons.”

  He’s still wearing the tie-pin and cufflinks engraved “Dr.”, which Lexie gave him when he began. When they began. When he put them on at leaving, Sister Isaac had thought them official insignia. “Ahh—the Señora,” she’d said, nodding when he explained. He’d formed the habit of reading her Lexie’s curt letters, watching her. She in turn tested them, glancing as curiously at the English, the typing, as if, in spite of all her languages, she couldn’t quite have read it herself. She had her own names for the pictures of his children: Tall Son, Tall Daughter, Middle Daughter and Little Lame. Was he wrong, or had she pressed him to talk of them—therapeutically? She’d never call it that.

  “It comes from his job then, Isabela?” Hector says. “You do not suffer.”

  “Fool, I am a nun,” she says, sotto voce. Have the kindness to remember it, she always sighed, when Hector chose to forget. She takes Ray’s hand now. “Doctor. We are not what you think. You are not what you think. It is the disease.”

  Is it? Then name it, Ray. Spanish hepatitis? Liver perspective? Distance dialysis? One should always listen carefully to the patient’s description of his disease. Hospital depression—or its opposite? Am I merely suffering from mountain viewing, or a balcony complex? “Are ward conversations always so frugal?” he’d written James. “We doctors should remember that. I’m coming back with a headful.” A doctor should never be sick, James had replied—it broke down the immunities. As for a job in the public health, my dear Ray, it’s clear you’re one who should never travel. Know what’s wrong with you? Middle age. The disease of the first inner monologue.

  “Where does it hurt him?” Hector’s not a man whose attitudes keep him from walking, but now he stops, to look south through the downriver mist.

  “Where does it hurt you, Doctor?” Sister Isaac pummels him in the liver region, competently delicate. “In the wife? In the children?” She exhales sympathy through her teeth. “Ahh-ssssiuuu. Here. In the li-ife… Ha! I have made a poem … The wife makes poems, Hector, but does not send him them.”

  “In the father, maybe” Hector says gloomily. He sleeps with women now as part of his new status, but fearing monkhood may have made him infertile, can’t bring himself to marry one until she conceives. “And in the Holy Ghost—does he suffer there?”

  “Silencio… Look at this river, how it prays.”

  It was Lexie who said that. When he met her walking on the road here once, and caught a shocked glimpse of her as she must be when alone. More accurately, she’d said “Ray, the river prays for us.”

  But against that one-time revelation, cutting across the family day like a squall of light from the river itself, is that other caution she’s always cornering him with. “Why do you impute your mother’s thoughts to me—I’m not her. Nor any other woman, necessarily. I am not any of them.” And now I’m a nun to him, she’d say harum-scarum to the air, her silent witness. So much a part of their lives, invoked so often, that auditor in the air, that in the event of divorce it ought to be named as correspondent. And now a nun he links me to, she said to it. Tell me somebody, why? Why he’ll never look me in the face and say merely: This is she.

  He’d been brought up to think of family women as the bitter herbal essence in a man’s life, that was why. As the seat of judgments which could change the taste of food on your tongue—unless ignored. And even then.

  “Which way issa the-e Flower Horspital?” Hector was fading but still upright, a column of emphatic accent in the mist. “Effa I could introduce you my brother, khee would help you. But khee is dead.”

  “And so are we,” Sister Isaac said, washing her hands at the ward tap, shaking them high over her coif while she looked out the window at the mountains, as if those too were patients in her charge. “Dead to him. And he to us.” They wouldn’t forget him. But he was only a patient. As a doctor himself, he knew that the patient was always less to them than they to him. But he and they were also officially and mutually dead to each other the minute he’d handed them the envelope. Even though they were happy for it, had expected it, and had beamed at their apt pupil for learning their ways—while he, feeling like a graduate, had beamed back. All along of course he’d paid his weekly pittance via a ticketed bill of particulars from the municipality, but this was from him. For having changed him. For having looked him in the face. On the envelope which held his check for a thousand, he’d written in a Spanish carefully checked beforehand with the chronic cardsman: “For the bed-socks.” At the last minute, he’d left them the old Hermes too.

  Over there, Sister Isaac, waking now in that leaky old room, papered with newsprint, which was everybody’s office and only nocturnally her cell—is still admiring it. It was trained in France.

  “So he is in America by now,” Hector is saying over their coffee-cups. Adding his witticism of yesterday. “Now he has only to suffer from my shoes.”

  He’s nearing the house now. In his bag, besides the unmailed letters, are the presents he chose, refusing all escort, in the town’s stripped bazaar. Where he did well. He happens to be one of those buyers who always astound others with his silent knowledge of them. This comes from being a solitary among them. If other fathers are not so adept it must mean they aren’t solitary. Only with Lexie do his choices falter. “I’m wearing them—” he heard her say to Chess once, hearing the glint between them even through the bathroom door “Everywoman’s pearls.” For Chess he has a pair of ear-dangles; he can already hear her “Oh wild. Absolutely wild.” Then it’ll be a contest of wills—between her two—as to whether she’ll wear them. Or fling them to her mother, saying, “They really belong to you.” For Maureen a trusty leather purse, large enough for all her tasks. For Royal, after some doubts, an intricately dovetailed diary-wallet which can only increase his hoarding—in money, surgical appointments and secret jottings—of the statistical world he believes to be the only one. For Charles—for whom, in spite of himself, he always finds the best—a fine old astrolabe, which he yearns to have Charles instruct him on.

  Charles is the only one he’s not had to be in competition for. This is an old secret, rusty as a garden-lock on a gate swinging into the few assignments with himself that his chosen livelihood allows. Chosen for that reason, his wife, that interpreter-after-the-fact, would say; has said … “James chose a profession which would keep him approvedly from people; you, Ray, use it to keep you from yourself. Abetted by your mother, who saw having a doctor in the family as the one social vaccine which would cure a vet’s family—of the odor of manure” … When Lex got excited she fell into rhyme, which disconcerted her brother, who saw it as merely one more aberration. Ray, brought home to meet Lexie the sweet kid sister, had fallen in love with what they thought they’d hid from him: Lexie the rhymer, the dark repository, the symbolist. Yes. he did identify her with his mother—but not carnally, never. Rather, because his mother, otherwise totally unlike Lexie, occupied the same dark tribal niche in the family, there did cling to Lexie a votive tinge—of that tabu. What it killed Lex to acknowledge was the other resemblance—the circumstantial one. (Or
whisper it—the artistic one.) Between her and this older woman of limited mind and even mean character. Whose orderly New England basement made her “feel dirt.” Whose painted milk-cans she hated with a Picasso’s loathing, or a radical’s: “Eagles! Why does she aspire so low!”

  Why were women so hard on women? “Weakness rejoices in the sight of weakness,” she’d said—though over the years he was less and less sure of the tones in her voice. “Men rush to the defense of other men when the chips are down,” he said. “And are larger beings for it you mean?” she countered. “Yes, that happens. Or they have more chips.” From the back of the porch, that day, James, who was playing chess with Royal, said “Our little sister suffering from nervous injustice? A venereal complaint.” And she laughed. James could be as unkind as he pleased, if she liked the phrasing of it. She and her brother shared a language; also they knew how language itself shut Ray out. It was what he was shy with, now. On the porch a minute later, James had lost to Royal. Who’d said with the smugness he couldn’t be smacked for “James likes losing to me. I’m his favorite.”

  “In a family,” James says “the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts. Don’t tell me Ray that you still thrive on it.”

  Yet over the years, even James has grudgingly reversed his position—on her position. No, she’s not off her head or out of it—my sister-your-wife. She’s incontinently, stubbornly on edge—on the swerving edge that’s inside all of us. But this James will only privately admit. And never to her.

  “Most family women are like her,” he’ll say, porch-lolling. “You call us ‘family women’—” she interrupts through the window “—the way cows are called ‘ruminants.’” He ignores her. “Mentally, they’re much more obviously creatures of their environment, than their men.” For them, he said, life was—whatever happened. And in any argument of mind—even if they had mind—most shared one great position. They were all wavering on top—“Streamers to any wind”—and immutably fixed, down below. Like birds who followed the migration patterns, shrilly criticizing all the way. “Lexie makes emotional argument of it. And longs for an intellectual one.” She philosophized as she flew, almost as if she knew where. “Driving us mad, though, in the process. Because everything they do is outsize.” James’s cheeks have taken to reddening when he talks so. She came out on the porch that day, and linked arms with him. “Yes, James. Inside us, all inmates are.”