On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  Afterwards, she had a lovely, sleepy sanity they’d never glimpsed before. And was easily urged to bed. Usually nobody ever succeeded in urging Chess. “Yes, sleepy,” she said, closing her door on them. But she left on her light. From the library window below her bedroom, the three of them saw the light falling on the grass, a shaft from the baywindow. Was she sitting there again? Charles on other nights has sneaked out the back way and out to the front; but one couldn’t see from the lawn. Out on the road, any passerby, walking either north or south, must see her. And be seen. So they’d have to take her on trust. For the night.

  But when the three of them leaned in from the library window, it came Royal’s time. “I can tell you where Lucy lives.”

  Charles haggardly stared at him. “Don’t you be fancy. I’m walking on my eyelids. Where?”

  Royal led them there.

  The tower is bare. No drawing materials, even no chair. The deep-ledged window looks out into the treetops like a pulpit in the air, with no sense of the house below. By day one can see north to the Kellihys’ rolling lawn, to the east, the wavering river and its far shore. Between it and them across the road, and directly in front of them, and some yards south of the white cottage opposite Kellihys’ where the retarded boy is sat every morning—is the high, dipping-off bank they call the dock. The tower walls are newly white and clean, left so by the last workman. In the middle of the floor are the roll of masking-tape he asked for, the handled blade he chipped the panes clear with, a dried-up paint-bucket and a flyswatter—all of which belong to them. The bucket is upended. Why would she sit up there though? Chess hates heights.

  “Shhh, she’ll hear us. We’re right over her head.”

  They aren’t; they’re off side. But it gave him kind of a thrill to say so.

  “She said she’d sleep,” Charles says. “We have to trust her. Not just act as if we do. It’s the only way, with Chess.” He stares out the dark window. “With them.”

  So he’s admitting it. What Royal’s been telling him. Suddenly he stepped back from the window and turned off the light. The long chain hanging down from the oldfashioned ceiling-bulb swayed between them in the dark.

  “Somebody out there, Charlie? … Is it her?” Once, at the beginning of her trouble, her first night home from school she did that, raging out into the winter road and away from Dad. Standing out there, refusing to come in. Charles had finally persuaded her to.

  “No. Come on, let’s go down.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Some man. And some woman. Going down to the dock.”

  “Lemme see.” But the ledge is too high and deep. He can’t see over it. He lifts his hod-foot; he can’t get up there alone. And Charles, staring him down, won’t help.

  They tiptoed down the stairs, passing Chess’ door, which was still closed, and on down the hall to his own room.

  Charles is certainly white-looking. He collapses on the bottom of the bed. “Shut-eye. I’ve got to.” But it seems he can’t.

  “You going to snitch on Chess, then,” Royal says, warily, “or aren’t you?”

  “To who?” Charles grinds. “Who’s there to snitch to? To James?” And after a while, he does sleep.

  You can’t really depend on anybody except yourself. And your notebook. Which now advises Royal—in between some notes he took at James’s lecture and a dainty drawing of Dodo Kellihy’s privates—that yes, according to his mother’s dates, she is in a proper physical state to receive a man if she finds one. So it was Lexie out there. With some man from the party. He can always read Charles.

  And now, listen man. That couple. They’re coming into the house. The guy is, for sure. And he wouldn’t be here without Lex. His mother’s as lightfooted as Chess. Some mothers in a room are like mountains to climb over, but his mother lets them forget her presence. When other kids are in the house, she sinks back even; she is the mother-wraith. A light sorrow presses his chest. All his friends compliment him, on her good taste.

  He knows the quality of Charles’ sleep. His brother’s forehead is already lined like a thirty-year-old’s. How must it feel, to care like that; to have an aristocratic self which won’t lie? Which can’t?

  “Charlie. Wake up.”

  He’s sleeping against his fist. The eyes open, blank. He wipes the wet from his mouth, smiling. “The in … tense inane.”

  “What?”

  “I was walking up it. Up a pure stair.” He doesn’t move.

  “Listen.” He whispers it. “Somebody’s out on the porch. They’re coming in.”

  When the front door is shut down below, however quietly, a shock of air travels up the stair, all the way to the back, to warn. The old house cooperates.

  Charles can’t wake. He turns his head from side to side, to show he can’t.

  “I can’t go,” Royal hisses, raising his foot. “I make too much noise. And we have to. We have to know everything.”

  “Chess?” his brother says drunkenly. “Oh Christ.”

  He put his mouth to his brother’s ear. “Lexie and a guy, I think. It was them outside before, wasn’t it. She’s bringing him in… Chess’ll go off her rocker… Go on out. We got to.”

  Charles is on his feet.

  “Here,” Roy breathes, holding out his brother’s glasses. But his brother’s already out there.

  Roy waits, his eyes bright. He has to know. Everything.

  At the back of the long hallway a minute later Charles stands, swaying a little. The long dark passage is like the universe he’s been climbing in sleep, the same faint parallels converging on the ever-receding illusion nipped between them—a logical space draining toward an end conceivable.

  Is that it—a man and a woman—or a girl—clasped, and musically grunting? The image at the top of the stair?

  Inconceivable. Don’t look at it. Turn back.

  In Royal’s room, he fell on the bed again.

  “Who was it?” Royal whispers in his ear. “Was it them?” At no reply he mouths inaudibly, “Lexie and a guy? I only heard a guy.” He is watching himself in his chrome lamp.

  “Gimme my glasses.” Charles put them on.

  That’s the way to look at it. Lexie, made young by midnight grace. And the anonymous man he saw from the tower, going down to the dock with her. Now brought into the house.

  Not his own father. With Chess.

  Parallel lines. Which way will he have it?

  He’s awake. He stands up, gripping the brass knob of the bed until fingers smart. He grips harder. It was Chess. And his father is home.

  Choose, Charlie. In the lamp surface, Roy’s warped face is waiting.

  “Must have been. Them.”

  Downstairs, the door hushed closed. A man, going down the porch steps. With familiar tread. A guy, his father. Gone.

  Royal hasn’t moved. A beetlewatcher, his arm slows wavily now in front of his mouth. His lower jaw drops, a mandible. At the same time, he grasps his left ankle with the other hand, laying himself along the bad leg in the exercise which both eases and stretches its shortened tendon. The angle of the foot is such that he can touch his chin to its arch. He rests there, goggling. “Well—now we know.”

  The doctor is sitting on his own steps. Behind him, at the head of the flagged path, a second flight of five broad wooden ones leads to the wide porch that encircles the house. At the path’s bottom where he is, four high, narrow stone steps, early ones, lead sharply up from the road to the rise of land where the house is. All the old houses here have them. He is sitting on the top one, between two stone pillars. Added by some pretentious turn-of-the-century owner, he’s never thought of them as his own, or as belonging to the real house. Tonight he leans against the nearer pillar, his head between his knees, his wrists crossed over his genitals, trying not to retch. Don’t keep touching where it hurts, a doctor has to say, day after day. Tongue away from that sore; stop picking that scab. Hands off your eyes; stop rubbing them. Don’t keep trying to press it, that lump you didn’t know you
had.

  The pain in his groin is ebbing; he misses it, wishing he’d retched. Where does it hurt, still hurt? Where’s his injury? In the fatherhood? In the familyhood. Where, oh where—goes the song his mother sang—has my little girl gone? His own mother never had a little girl, except herself. What is a father? What is a family? He grasps the round stone ball on the righthand pillar, pushing his head against it. And again. The other stone ball waits for him. Everything’s touching him. Everything wants an answer, at once.

  All he’d wanted was to give her the same kiss he always had, since her beginning. The kiss on the two-year-old top of her head where the single curl used to be. The hugged one for the mitten searching in what she herself had named his “candy-pocket.” The absent-minded evening kisses, the graduation one—where had they gone? When?

  “Brought you a present?” He knows he said that. But which present had he had in mind? The earrings? Or the portfolio?

  Or was it the fault of the damn nightgown?

  When did he know it was Chess? How long after did the kiss go on? When did his arms tighten, his mouth bruise down?

  He groans. That sound he made. Just before he knew it was Chessie? Or just after he knew it wasn’t Lex? He can still hear it. He’s never made a sound like that one before. Or has he? Who’s he asking, pleading with?

  Borden Wheeley would know. “Wey-ull… Lookit ole candy-pocket. Transplantin’ pussy, right in his own house.”

  And then she kneed him. A pure action, straight from the adrenalin. As taught.

  It was a kiss from Spain, polymorphous for all of them.

  Whatever. Whichever. Chess will know.

  As her doctor explained to him, that kind of straddle is what she does know, the very crux of her mental life. She sees the doubling alternative too clear—and everywhere. “It’s why she can never decide, never choose a path. We have to bring them together for her. If we can.”

  “What a god-damn statement,” he’d said to Lexie that night, reporting, their arms linked. The psychiatrist linked them, every time, in a glossy hatred they could share. “If you see anything clear, oughtn’t you hang onto it?” she’d answered. In what James called her on-the-barricades voice. “If you see anything.”

  It’s all coming back to him. Home. A place where it never stays as dark any more, or as light, as it once did, Lexie said not long ago. Much of what she says has either no meaning to him, or an inaccessible one, but still sheds an aura that clings. Any room where his wife is seems always messy with her shadow—along with those shadowy women she ranges always beside her, related or not. Energy streams from her, center-less—one day a bilgestench, the next a sporadic perfume. When she does chop logic—and she can, God knows—she’s as hardened as one of the swart old nurses who dogged his training with servile malice, handing him a roll of gauze or a specific, or even a diagnosis he should have been quicker with. “Yes, so it was trachoma,” Lexie said in the cool chippy-voice she quarreled in, striding the hotel-room after her slum-spree in Montevideo. “Women can’t travel light. We’re in charge of the basic facts.”

  The block of dark he’s staring into is whitening, lifting with a stirring freshness which should engage the heart. In another minute he’d be able to see the opposite riverline, two and a half miles out—the view people say they stay here for. And in its foreground, right across the road, the little promontory he owns. A bit of land that seemed always to be moving forward. Owning it soothes, like owning a wave. A private thought. Nothing that she dragged him to, in the way she does—caw-caw to every pebble on their common beach. In another minute (Dawn! she’d say) he’d have to hunker onto his feet and walk back into his history. The bag of presents is still upstairs, where he let it fall. A bag of farewells. Of noise, dropped inside his silent house. In a minute the cleansing sloth of invalidism will desert him. The power-web of his disease, that precious invigoration, will melt. He’ll be back in the crushing cell-drudgery of health. No, stay. Stay. I know where it hurts. I sight my injury. I want to be alone, with what I am.

  The hand he’s been clasping on the granite ball is raw, wet—bleeding? No, dimly white, birdlime or some insect jelly-mass, rank with living-smell. Something from nature, sticky as semen, seeping from the stone of his house. In the second he’s examining it, the light lifts; it’s day.

  Out there. On his wave.

  A speck, a sail. Unmoving. Flotsam, water-wrangled into human color, wood into limbs.

  No, he knows that odalisque. Yearly, daily, he’s paid for it.

  Dead or alive, it tells him what he knows already. For two people, there are two dawns.

  Wiping his hand on his pant-leg he runs toward it, in his new yellow shoes.

  And one more dawn, for the children. This is the morning the guerrillas will struggle down from the alps of childhood, onto the great divide.

  Royal’s asleep. It’s always a surprise to catch him at it. Charles watched. His younger brother sleeps like a man of affairs. Royal’s bad luck came early; now everything else can be arranged. And will be, handily. With all his excuses in the best order of any of us. He’ll leave this house the way he slides from Lexie’s lap.

  It’s the father and mother who make the enclosure, anyway. Charles is going to tell Lexie that in the morning. And write his father wherever he’s gone off to again. I feel nothing, when you’re not here. No obligation. No boundaries. The front door here opens too easy to the riverbank; the back wall has collapsed into Spain. I’ll tell her that in the morning. I’ll write Ray.

  The time-wheel he’d constructed to show his father’s travel-zones is still hung down in the kitchen. He’s ashamed to have it there, a signal plain, showing the scientific gap between his one-sided romance with his father, and the latitude to which a father can desert. For whether his father is still here or not—or even, impossibly, was not the man in the hall—can make no difference now. He’s seen the possible visionary side of his father. Of them both. Thing to do is to desert them first, both of them.

  He steals off Royal’s bed, and down the curved back stairs. The kitchen door opens on a paved alley directly under the mossy hillside, roofed by the second-story porch. Facing him, built into the hill itself, is an earth-cellar with a blackened, vaulted door, behind which ancient cables, once good for something, subside into the years. He takes from the wall the cardboard contraption, whose precision and calligraphy cost him a week, and slips it into the trashcan. Up above, it’s getting faintly light now, but there are stains of diurnal dark here which keep their own earth-clock. Where the old pavestones end is a millwheel which no one can move, has ever moved. Never was a mill here within record, not for miles around. It’s a man’s whim, or a team’s—sunk here. The alley’s an unresurrected place, in a house which has had room for many; he loves this one best. Mill-smell itches his nostril like catnip. He stands on the edge, pooling his reflections, unresurrected too.

  Absently, he ghost-walked back inside, movie-stalking through the front of the house—Monsieur Hulot on holiday, smartly heel-toe—and bounded up the front stairs. The girls’ bath was open, dimly. Early morning, in the half-dark, all the bathrooms here smell like cathedrals, cool with damp thoughts, and time. Is time a thought? Before it intersects with space? Is space infinite duration? Or is it the presence of matter eternally referential to itself—like Dutch Cleanser clinging to the tub where the enamel’s chipped? Always been that black tin-spot there. Since his own eyes began. A span which is holy to him in spite of all his efforts. Careful of noise, he lifted up the closed toilet-seat. Suspended in the interior moment of animal muscle communing with its own consciousness, he peed.

  Oh Christ. I was happy. On the floor near the toilet, a pad stiff with what must be blood. Damn the girls. He won’t pick it up. Quietly he put down the seat again without flushing, closed the lid.

  A long whisper, his name, from the back of the hall. In the mirror, shadowy over the sink, he summons his captaincy.

  “Charlie.”

  It’s
only Maureen. He steals close enough to confab.

  “Our toilet’s stopped up.”

  “Jesus. Can’t it wait until morning?”

  She doesn’t know whether. A retriever only, these days she brings him and Royal all facts with the same tentative woe. He understands why the Greeks killed messengers.

  “I’ll get the plunger.”

  “Thanks, Charlie. It’s only that I get—you know.”

  “Sure.”

  “Scared. When anything.”

  A roundcheeked comic girl in her long nightie, too comfy to be in the middle of this. But a blessing to him because of that. His mother, always casting Reeny as the spinster-to-be, is dead wrong. Lexie’s always casting all of them, in her mind. In the good times, before things went bad, where she put Maureen used to anger him. And Chess. “Don’t worry, Reeny,” Chess herself used to say, tickling her sister’s woe away. “Know what? You’re going to marry hard and fast, red and early. The missionary boy is already stuck on you.”

  “I’ll get the plunger,” he said.

  “Uh-huh. Gee thanks. You try. I already used it.”

  And she put it back, of course.

  They retrieve it from the utility closet over the back stairs. He cuffs her, patting her back down the hall. Her habits are as circular as her outlines. Some guy will love her for it.

  In the girls’ bath the horse-chestnut trees were clumbering inward a greengold light.

  “Gee, you’re not kidding.” The toilet’s chugging up pink-stained pads. “What the hell—”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I know.” And the same guy will fall out of love with her. But maybe not in time. “I’ll have to get a wrench.” The toolbox is downstairs. On such an errand, there and back, the house seemed endless.

  Why does she do it?—he thinks, working at the old trap, working back to Chess. In the commune, they’d had to group-censure a girl for doing the same—or nearly. Using their john he himself had seen the withered purplish rag tossed near the can it had purposefully missed. The other girls had complained, Rocky told him, grinning. “When they themselves leave a line of pill-bottles on the shelf stretches from here to Christmas, just to keep in our minds what they go through.”