Until the children came, gripping the present in their strong, death-defying fists, I used often to come up here. Leo’s inscription is next to the blank space on which will be Nessa’s. Towle had said to look, and I faithfully had, studying the two chiseled lines, never satisfied. The top line says, I live your life, the one below, Do you live mine. Perhaps it was a stonecutter’s mistake. An omission. Or an inversion. If it had declared I lived, or observed Now you live mine; if it had commanded, Do Ye … if it had said that. But it says what it says.
Today, on the flat ground below, there’s a small nosegay of twigs and grasses mostly, which don’t wither as quickly or as dolefully as blooms. Knobby used to do this at Nessa’s instruction. Now that she is past it, he keeps up the practice as he can. He has harbored that obligation all the way from Japan. Who would not approve of his having her house?
I must bring the children up here. I grow tired of the separate time sense of those who live too much by their secrets. More than that, I’ve been warned. Of those many who like me straddle the city and the town, the town and the nation, or like Knobby, two nations. I will strain with all I have—to keep the connection here. I would sin for it—and possibly already have. Would I love for it?
“Maybe I’ve toured too much.”
“And I’ve stayed here,” he says. “Which grave are you looking at?”
“Only an inscription. Not really a grave.”
“None of them is.”
“That one on the left.”
He doesn’t like to be read out what he himself can touch. He bends to smooth the carved stone, with those fingertips that can map skin. “Oh yes. I knew Leo.”
“You—you what? But how could you have?”
As we near the age of those whom we knew first as adults when we were adolescents, they begin to appear more equal to us, or we to them, as we approach. He is surely not that old—as I am now too old to play nineteen.
“I was seven. And losing my sight. A person named Leo often visited me. And ultimately found me the school where I was sent to be trained. Saved. And where I found—” He gestured back toward the grave with the marker on it, Mrs Evams’s now lost to sight. The blind gesture has more circumference.
“What was Leo like?” I am canny, not saying “he” or “she.” “Describe.”
“That’s curious.” His face lifts, as it often does for the past, nosing it into being, in pictures of what kind? “Towle asked the same. So I told him. That the year I was seven, I was living in a mist. Half-blind, or near-blind as I then was, is the worst. One doesn’t yet understand the growing keenness of one’s other perceptions. Yet I had noticed that people seemed not to characterize by sex the person who visited me, who said to me often, ‘You can hear. You can touch. You can walk. You can—love.’ They always just said: Leo. So one day I asked. ‘Are you a woman? Or a man?’ The person took my hand and said: ‘Half-blind is the hardest, isn’t it? When you are blind, I may tell you.’ No one had ever recognized that I was so fiercely waiting to be. But by the time I was, I was already away at the school. And Leo perhaps was dead. I wasn’t visited again.”
So Leo remains—Leo. No one now would ever know Leo better than Edward Evams. Except me. How quickly we lose the mysteries we solve; how beautiful the rest remain.
I bend to that inscription. We must touch as we can. If he can bring himself to put up a stone, he may in time be able to stop visiting—which is what stones are for.
When I straighten, I see how much taller I am than him. Still, we resemble. We are both waiting. We are both able to find that good.
“Would you like to read my face?”
“I don’t need to,” he says after a minute. “Your ears won’t have changed.”
It is beyond rudeness to ask to finger-learn a blind face. Very lightly, I touch his.
Down below are the porches. Descent is always easier, or so we are told. We stop in front of his house. The fanlight is not lit. No one is expected. I will go on to my own house. What a straddler I am. It was the hayloft I really bought, not the house. A hayloft can be a stage. That one was my first. Now I can sell.
Walsh’s is dark. They haven’t changed our yard; they are not concerned with gardens. Neither were we. In winter, the same stiff weeds will be knocked about and still come back to plumb. It’s not only the wind, no matter what Knobby says. It’s not always the wind.
“That porch tonight—” I say. “What an envoi.”
“Ah—” he says, “—was it that?”
Up these few steps is a house where the foot must step most surely, even if one enters there only for a cup of tea—which if I ask him for he will give. I am thinking that if I do, must I wait until winter? Perhaps I haven’t toured enough, haven’t yet run far enough toward the running world. He is teaching Nessa at her age only what he teaches us all. He cannot vary what he is or says, and those are the lessons which are dangerous.
I look up at this house, which has not yet been vandalized, and at a curtained window or two that I see Brenda still leaves carelessly wide. Across the way, the porch that once was ours is dark, though the birds return. I am standing at the double knot of my own legend, as we all are, in every part of every nation, and most of all in the nation of the dead. All lives are legendary. I haven’t yet gathered in all the threads of my own, nor will I ever. Others will do that for me. This is the cued house where I learned that the hours flow under the hand like holy braille. That we are all one flesh—and that the flesh has eyes until the end.
He says, “Will you read my face?”
About the Author
Hortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled In the Absence of Angels, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties. A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for The Bobby Soxer, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1986 by Hortense Calisher
Cover design by Kelly Parr
978-1-4804-3900-9
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Hortense Calisher, The Bobby-Soxer
The Bobby-Soxer Page 29
