Extreme Magic

by Hortense Calisher

  Thanksgiving Day was the worst. The day dawned oyster-pale and stayed that way. Grorley slept as late as he could, then went out for a walk. The streets were slack, without the twitch of crowds, and the houses had a tight look of inner concentration. He turned toward the streets which held only shops, and walked uptown as far as Rockefeller Center. The rink was open, with its usual cast of characters—ricocheting children, a satiny, professional twirler from the Ice Show, and several solemn old men who skated upright in some Euclidian absorption of their own. Except for a few couples strolling along in the twin featurelessness of love, the crowd around the rink was type-cast too. Here, it told itself, it participated in life; here in this flying spectacle of flag and stone it could not possibly be alone. With set, shy smiles, it glanced sideways at its neighbors, rounded its shoulders to the wind, turned up its collar, and leaned closer to the musical bonfire of the square. Grorley straightened up, turned on his heel, smoothed down his collar, and walked rapidly toward Sixth Avenue. He filled himself full of ham and eggs in one of the quick-order places that had no season, taxied home, downed a drink, swallowed two Seconal tablets, and went to bed.

  The next morning, seated at his desk, he took a relieved look at the street. People were hard at their normal grind again; for a while the vacuum was past. But Christmas was not going to catch him alone. He picked up the phone. At the end of the day he was quite heartened. Although he had not yet turned up an invitation for Christmas Day, he had netted himself a cocktail party (which might easily go on to dinner) for two days before, a bid to an eggnog party on New Year’s Day, and one weekend toward the middle of December. A lot of people did things impromptu. A phone call now and then would fix him up somehow.

  But by Christmas week he was haggard. He had visualized himself as bidden to share, in a pleasantly avuncular capacity, some close friend’s family gathering; he had seen himself as indolently and safely centered, but not anchored, in the bright poinsettia of their day. Apparently their vision of him was cast in a harsher mold; they returned his innuendoes with little more than a pointed sympathy. Only two propositions had turned up, one from a group of men, alone like himself for one reason or another, who were forming a party at an inn in the Poconos, and one from a waif-like spinster—“Last Christmas was my last one with dear Mother”—who offered to cook dinner for him in her apartment. Shuddering, he turned down both of these. The last thing he wanted to do on that day was to ally himself with waifs of any description; on that day he very definitely wanted to be safely inside some cozy family cocoon, looking out at them.

  Finally, the day before Christmas, he thought of the Meechers. Ted was that blue-ribbon bore, the successful account executive who believed his own slogans, and his wife, a former social worker, matched him in her own field. Out of Ted’s sense of what was due his position in the agency and Sybil’s sense of duty to the world, they had created a model home in Chappaqua, equipped with four children, two Bedlingtons, a games room, and a part-time pony. Despite this, they were often hard up for company, since most people could seldom be compelled twice to their table, where a guest was the focus of a constant stream of self-congratulation from either end. Moreover, Ted had wormed his way into more than one stag party at Grorley’s, and could hardly refuse a touch. And their Christmas, whatever its other drawbacks, would be a four-color job, on the best stock.

  But Ted’s voice, plum-smooth when he took the phone from his secretary, turned reedy and doubtful when he heard Grorley’s inquiry. “Uh-oh! ’Fraid that puts me on the spot, fella. Yeah. Kind of got it in the neck from Sybil, last time I came home from your place. Yeah. Had a real old-fashioned hassle. Guess I better not risk reminding her just yet. But, say! How about coming up here right now, for the office party?”

  Grorley declined, and hung up. Off-campus boy this time of year, that’s what I am, he thought. He looked at his mantelpiece crowded with its reminders—greetings from Grace and Bill, Jane and Tom, Peg and Jack, Etcetera and Mrs. Etcetera. On top of the pile was another airmail from Vida, received that morning, picture enclosed. Sans the red in the hair, without the thrush tones of the assenting voice, she looked a little long in the teeth. Her hands and feet, he remembered, were always cold. Somehow or other, looking at the picture, he didn’t think that central heating would improve them. “The living room is the curse,” she’d said. That’s it, he thought; that’s it. And this, Vida, is the season of the living room.

  He looked down into the street. The Village was all right for the summer, he thought. But now the periphery of the season had changed. In summer, the year spins on a youth-charged axis, and a man’s muscles have a spurious oil. But this is the end toward which it spins. Only three hundred days to Christmas. Only a month—a week. And then, every year, the damned day itself, catching him with its holly claws, sounding its platitudes like carillons.

  Down at the corner, carols bugled steamily from a mission soup-kitchen. There’s no escape from it, he thought. Turn on the radio, and its alleluia licks you with tremolo tongue. In every store window flameth housegown, nuzzleth slipper. In all the streets the heavenly shops proclaim. The season has shifted inward, Grorley, and you’re on the outside, looking in.

  He moved toward the phone, grabbed it, and dialed the number before he remembered that you had to dial the code for Tarrytown. He replaced the receiver. Whatever he had to say, and he wasn’t quite sure what, or how, it wasn’t for the ears of the kids or the Lederer woman. He jammed on his hat. Better get there first, get inside the door.

  Going up to Grand Central in the cab, he pressed his face against the glass. Everything had been taken care of weeks ago—the kids had been sent their two-wheelers, and he had mailed Eunice an extra-large check—one he hadn’t sent through the lawyer. But at five o’clock, Fifth Avenue still shone like an enormous blue sugar-plum revolving in a tutti-frutti rain of light. Here was the season in all its questionable glory—the hallmarked joy of giving, the good will diamanté. But in the cosmetic air, people raised tinted faces, walked with levitated step.

  In the train, he avoided the smoker, and chose an uncrowded car up front. At his station, he waited until all the gleaming car muzzles pointed at the train had picked up their loads and gone, then walked through the main street which led to his part of town. All was lit up here too, with a more intimate, household shine. He passed the pink damp of a butcher’s, the bright fuzz of Woolworth’s. “Sold out!” said a woman, emerging. “’S try the A & P.” He walked on, invisible, his face pressed to the shop window of the world.

  At Schlumbohn’s Credit Jewelry Corner he paused, feeling for the wallet filled with cash yesterday for the still not impossible yes over the phone. This was the sort of store that he and Eunice, people like them, never thought of entering. It sold watches pinned to cards, zircons, musical powder-boxes, bracelets clasped with fat ten-carat hearts, Rajah pearl necklaces and Truelove blue-white diamonds. Something for Everybody, it said. He opened the door.

  Inside, a magnetic salesgirl nipped him toward her like a pin. He had barely stuttered his wants before he acquired an Add-a-Pearl necklace for Sally, two Genuine Pinseal handbags for his mother-in-law and Mrs. Lederer, and a Stag-horn knife with three blades, a nailfile, and a corkscrew, for young George. He had left Eunice until last, but with each purchase, a shabby, telephoning day had dropped from him. Dizzy with participation, he surveyed the mottoed store.

  “Something…something for the wife,” he said.

  “Our lovely Lifetime Watch, perhaps? Or Something in Silver, for the House?” The clerk tapped her teeth, gauging him.

  He leaned closer, understanding suddenly why housewives, encysted in lonely houses, burbled confidences to the grocer, made an audience of the milkman. “We’ve had a—Little Tiff.”

  “Aw-w,” said the clerk, adjusting her face. “Now…let me see…” She kindled suddenly, raised a sibylline finger, beckoned him further down the counter, and drew out a tray of gold charms. Rummaging among them with a long, opales
cent nail, she passed over minute cocktail shakers, bird cages, tennis rackets, a tiny scroll bearing the words, “If you can see this, you’re too darn close,” and seized a trinket she held up for view. A large gold shamrock, hung on a chain by a swivel through its middle, it bore the letter I. on its upper leaf, on its nether one the letter U. She reversed it. L.O.V.E. was engraved across the diameter of the other side. The clerk spun it with her accomplished nail. “See?” she said. “Spin it! Spin it and it says I. L.O.V.E. U!”

  “Hmmm…” said Grorley, clearing his throat. “Well…guess you can’t fob some women off with just a diamond bracelet.” She tittered dutifully. But, as she handed it to him with his other packages, and closed the glass door behind him, he saw her shrug something, laughing, to another clerk. She had seen that he was not Schlumbohn’s usual, after all. As he walked up his own street he felt that he was after all hardly anybody’s usual, tonight. It was a pretty street, of no particular architectural striving. Not a competitive street, except sometimes in summer, on the subject of gardens. And, of course, now. In every house the tree was up and lit, in the window nearest the passer-by. Here was his own, with the same blue lights that had lasted, with some tinkering on his part, year after year. Eunice must have had a man in to fix them.

  He stopped on the path. A man in. She was pretty, scorned, and—he had cavalierly assumed—miserable. He had taken for granted that his family, in his absence, would have remained reasonably static. They always had. He’d been thinking of himself. Silently, he peeled off another layer of self-knowledge. He still was.

  He walked up the steps wondering what kind of man might rise to be introduced, perhaps from his own armchair. One of her faded, footballish resurrections from Ohio State U., perhaps: Gordon, this is Jim Jerk, from home. Or would she hand it to him at once? Would it be: Dear, this is Gordon.

  The door was unlocked. He closed it softly behind him, and stood listening. This was the unmistakable quiet of an empty house—as if the secret respiration of all objects in it had just stopped at his entrance. The only light downstairs was the glowing tree. He went up the stairs.

  In the bedroom, the curtains were drawn, the night light on. The bed was piled with an abandoned muddle of silver wrappings, tissue paper, ribbons. He dropped the presents on the bed, tossed his hat after them, let his coat slip down on the familiar chair, and parted the curtains. It had a good view of the river, his house. He stood there, savoring it. He was still there when a car door slammed and the family came up the path. The Christmas Eve pantomime, of course, held every year at the village hall. Georgie had on one of those white burnooses they always draped the boys in, and Sally, in long dress and coned hat, seemed to be a medieval lady. He saw that this year she had the waist for it. Eunice and Mrs. Lederer walked behind them. He tapped on the glass.

  They raised their faces in tableau. The children waved, catcalled, and disappeared through the downstairs door. Mrs. Lederer followed them. Below, Eunice stared upward, in the shine from the tree-window. Behind him, he heard that sound made only by children—the noise of bodies falling up a staircase. As they swarmed in on him, she disappeared.

  “You shoulda been to the hall,” said Georgie, seizing him. “Christmas at King Arthur’s court. I was a knight.”

  “Was it corny!” said Sally, from a distance. She caught sight of herself in a pier glass. “I was Guinevere.”

  “Had to do some last-minute shopping,” said Grorley.

  “I saw my bike!” said Georgie. “It’s in the cellar.”

  “Oh…Georgie!” said Sally.

  “Well, I couldn’t help seeing it.”

  “Over there are some Christmas Eve presents,” said Grorley.

  “Open now?” they said. He nodded. They fell upon them.

  “Gee,” said Georgie, looking down at the knife. “Is that neat!” From his tone it was clear that he, at least, was Schlumbohn’s usual.

  “Oh, Dad!” Sally had the necklace around her neck. She raised her arms artistically above her head, in the fifth position, minced forward, and placed their slender wreath around Grorley’s neck. As she hung on him, sacklike, he felt that she saw them both, a tender picture, in some lurking pier glass of her mind.

  The door opened, and Eunice came in. She shut it behind her with a “not before the servants” air, and stood looking at him. Her face was blurred at the edges; she hadn’t decked herself out for anybody. She looked the way a tired, pretty woman, of a certain age and responsibilities, might look at the hour before dinner, at the moment when age and prettiness tussle for her face, and age momentarily has won.

  “Look what I got!” Georgie brandished the knife.

  “And mine!” Sally undulated herself. “Mums! Doesn’t it just go!” She stopped, looking from father to mother, her face hesitant, but shrewd.

  “Open yours, Mums. Go on.”

  “Later,” said Eunice. “Right now I think Mrs. Lederer wants you both to help with the chestnuts.”

  “No fair, no fair,” said Georgie. “You saw ours.”

  “Do what your mother says,” said Grorley. The paternal phrase, how it steadied him, was almost a hearthstone under his feet.

  “Oh, well,” said Eunice, wilting toward the children, as she invariably did when he was stern with them. Opening the package he indicated, she drew out the bauble. Georgie rushed to look at it, awarded it a quick, classifying disinterest, and returned to his knife.

  “Oo—I know how to work those! Margie’s sister has one,” said Sally. She worked it. “If that isn’t corny!” she gurgled. Eunice’s head was bent over the gift. Sally straightened up, gave her and Grorley a swift, amending glance. “But cute!” she said. She flushed. Then, with one of the lightning changes that were the bane of her thirteen years, she began to cry. “Honestly, it’s sweet!” she said.

  Grorley looped an arm around her, gave her a squeeze and a kiss. “Now, shoo,” he said. “Both of you.”

  When he turned back to the room, Eunice was looking out the window, chin up, her face not quite averted. Recognizing the posture, he quailed. It was the stance of the possessor of the stellar role—of the nightingale with her heart against the thorn. It was the stance of the woman who demands her scene.

  He sighed, rat-tatted his fingers on a table top. “Well,” he said. “Guess this is the season the corn grows tall.”

  A small movement of her shoulder. The back of her head to him. Now protocol demanded that he talk, into her silence, dredging his self-abasement until he hit upon some remark which made it possible for her to turn, to rend it, to show it up for the heartless, illogical, tawdry remark that it was. He could repeat a list of the game birds of North America, or a passage from the Congressional Record. The effect would be the same.

  “Go on,” he said, “get it over with. I deserve it. I just want you to know…mentally, I’m out of the Village.”

  She turned, head up, nostrils dilated. Her mouth opened. “Get it ov—!” Breath failed her. But not for long.

  Much later, they linked arms in front of the same window. Supper had been eaten, the turkey had been trussed, the children at last persuaded into their beds. That was the consolatory side of family life, Grorley thought—the long, Olympian codas of the emotions were cut short by the niggling detail. Women thought otherwise, of course. In the past, he had himself.

  Eunice began clearing off the bed. “What’s in those two? Father’s and Mother’s?”

  “Oh Lord. I forgot Father.”

  “Never mind. I’ll look in the white-elephant box.” The household phrase—how comfortably it rang. She looked up. “What’s in these then?”

  “For Mother and Mrs. Lederer. Those leather satchel-things. Pinseal.”

  “Both the same, I’ll bet.”

  He nodded.

  Eunice began to laugh. “Oh, Lord. How they’ll hate it.” She continued to laugh, fondly, until Grorley smirked response. This, too, was familiar. Masculine gifts: the inappropriateness thereof.

  But Eu
nice continued to laugh, steadily, hysterically, clutching her stomach, collapsing into a chair. “It’s that hat,” she said. “It’s that s-specimen of a hat!”

  Grorley’s hat lay on the bed, where he had flung it. Brazenly dirty, limp denizen of bars, it reared sideways on a crest of tissue paper, one curling red whorl of ribbon around its crown. “L-like something out of Hogarth,” she said. “The R-rounder’s Return.”

  Grorley forced a smile. “You can buy me another.”

  “Mmmm…for Christmas.” She stopped laughing. “You know…I think that’s what convinced me—your coming back tonight. Knowing you—that complex of yours. Suppose I felt if you meant to stand us through the holidays, you meant to stand us for good.”

  Grorley coughed, bent to stuff some paper into the wastebasket. In fancy, he was stuffing in a picture too, portrait of Vida, woman of imagination, outdistanced forever by the value of a woman who had none.

  Eunice yawned. “Oh…I forgot to turn out the tree.”

  “I’ll go down.”

  “Here, take this along.” She piled his arms with crushed paper. In grinning afterthought, she clapped the hat on his head.

  He went to the kitchen and emptied his arms in the bin. The kitchen was in chaos, the cookery methods of alt Wien demanding that each meal rise like a phoenix, from a flaming muddle belowstairs. Tomorrow, as Mrs. Lederer mellowed with wine, they would hear once again of her grandfather’s house, where the coffee was not even roasted until the guests’ carriages appeared in the driveway.

  In the dining room, the table was set in state, from damask to silver nut dishes. Father would sit there. He was teetotal, but anecdotalism signs no pledge. His jousts as purchasing agent for the city of his birth now left both narrator and listener with the impression that he had built it as well. They would hear from Mother too. It was unfortunate that her bit of glory—her father had once attended Grover Cleveland—should have crystallized itself in that one sentence so shifty for false teeth—“Yes, my father was a physician, you know.”