Extreme Magic

by Hortense Calisher

  “Where’s the sherry, Hattie?” he called.

  “Sherry!” Her mother reappeared at the door to the kitchen. Behind her Kinny lounged, already munching a roll. “Table’s set in the kitchen!”

  They had never before eaten in the kitchen, too small except for scratch lunches or the solitary, clinking meals of the maid.

  “Look, Hattie,” said her father, frowning, “why don’t I take you all out to dinner?”

  “Hmmph!” said her mother. “Delmonico’s, perhaps?”

  “No need to grind it in,” said her father, flushing. His teasing account of their engagement dinner—when he, the so much older man of the world, had found himself at Delmonico’s with a girl made tipsy by one glass of champagne—was known to all.

  Mrs. Elkin sat down at the kitchen table and began to eat. Set out were cheeses still in their cartons, cold sliced meat in butcher’s paper, everything haphazard and at odds, as if she, normally a heckler of maidservants on table detail, would forcibly show her family the ugly pattern of tomorrow.

  “Get your father some coffee,” she said to Hester, pointing to the pot on the stove.

  Hester waited, warily. Her mother had a habit of urging her to activity, then stopping Hester’s clumsy efforts midway.

  “Let the child alone. I’ll get my own coffee,” said Mr. Elkin, his face red and miserable above a dandified tie and jeweled stickpin which contrasted queerly with the stove, as he bent over it.

  “Time they realized their father isn’t a millionaire,” said Mrs. Elkin. Kinny had already tiptoed away.

  “Now look here, Hattie…” said her father. He brought his cup to the table and sat down, sighing. Suave after-dinner raconteur, he was completely lacking in the vocabulary of dissension. Time after time, Hester had watched his superior verbal elegancies falter and dry up before the thrust of his wife’s homely tongue.

  “They’ve never wanted for anything so far,” he said. “And neither have you.”

  Mrs. Elkin’s lips tightened. Large-boned, calmly moving, she had few fussy mannerisms; it was only her voice that fiddled. “Time they realized their father isn’t getting any younger.”

  In the silence, the percolator chortled on the stove. The cup shook in her father’s veined hand, and a drop fell on the waxy linen of his cuff, near the lion-headed cuff link. He set the cup carefully down.

  Mrs. Elkin’s cheekbones and eyelids reddened. It was known that she lived among dreamers who could be educated for the worst only by her savage ability to get under the skins of those she loved and must awaken; this was why she was compelled first to tear down the self-deceptive veils with which they wreathed themselves and only afterwards could poultice up their wounds with love—with the tray of food brought to the banished boy, the party dress ironed to perfection for the girl who had given up going. All this was known, and now contemplated.

  “Joe…” said Mrs. Elkin.

  Raising his head, Mr. Elkin took off his noseglasses and rubbed at the inflamed prints on either side of his nose. The luxuriant up-twirl of his dated moustache looked suddenly too jaunty for his exposed face. He slid the glasses into their case, which popped shut with a snap, and looked at his wife. “For God’s sake, Hattie, take that damn thing off your head!”

  Hester, chewing a soda cracker, heard the sound twice: the dry champing heard by their ears, at the same time magnified in her head. Wishing that she might melt from the room, carrying her dislocation with her, she started to tiptoe from the table.

  “Come on back now, and finish your supper,” said her father, pleading, anxious as always to deny the ugly breach, to cover it over with the kindness that bled from him steadily, that he could never learn not to expect in return.

  “I’m sleepy.” With the word, sleep fell on her like a blow. Seeing herself already in a mound of blankets, folded impervious in her own arms until tomorrow, she turned away, down the hall to the haven of her room.

  She was halfway into the darkened room before she felt the alteration in it. Thinking that some of the furniture must be ranged along the walls, she moved confidently toward the island of the bed. Her body passed through its image with the ease of fingers passing through a locket. A moving reflection from the headlights of a car going by in the street below traveled up one wall, trembled watery on the ceiling, and swept down the other wall, leaving a scene fanned into an instant’s being, and gone. There was nothing in the room.

  She turned and ran back down the hall, cracking a knee against chairs stacked one-over-one, as in restaurants in the early morning. Lumpily shrouded barriers extended all along the walls. She felt down them, hunting a cream-colored bed with insets of caning, the surely discoverable scallop-shape of a mirror, the bureau with bow-front swagged in wooden roses, in a pattern that was like a silly friend.

  Holding onto the bruised knee, she limped back to the kitchen and confronted her mother. “Where’s all my room?” she said.

  “What?” asked her father, puzzled.

  “Oh, I meant to tell you,” answered her mother, composedly. “You’re to sleep in Grandma’s old room. Your nightgown’s there on the bed.”

  “But where’s my furniture?”

  “You’re to have Grandma’s old set. You know that. How many bedrooms do you think we’ll have, in the new place!”

  “What have you done with the child’s things!” Mr. Elkin’s face was already shrunken with a warding-off of the answer.

  Mrs. Elkin hesitated, but only to trim a note of triumph. “I—sold them.”

  “I might know you’d start dramatizing,” he said. “There’s no need to act as if we were down to our last penny.”

  “Are we?” Hester saw it, copper-bright and final, in the linted seam of his pocket.

  For answer, he pulled her onto his lap. She perched there awkwardly, conscious of her gangling legs, but savoring the old position of comfort. “Almost forgot what I brought you from downtown,” he said, fumbling in the pocket and bringing out two objects. “New compass for Kinny,” he said, laying it on the table. “And this—for you.” In his palm, he held a tiny, round vanity-case of translucent, rosy enamel and painted flowers, its cover fitted with a golden latch.

  “Fellow brought it in the office,” he mumbled.

  Mrs. Elkin, for whom the extras of life had a touch of the dissolute, turned her head aside.

  Hester, warming the pink gift in her hand, stood up between them, in the gap between her mother, immovable on her plateau of the practical, and her father, wavering curator of intangibles he could assert but not protect. All this was known, yet there was never a way to say it. She aligned her free hand on his shoulder. “I wonder what I would have looked like,” she said in a hard voice, “if you had not married her.” Without waiting for an answer to what was not after all a question, she left the kitchen again.

  In the doorway of her room, she stopped, waiting until she could half-see in the darkness. The nude walls poured from ceiling to floor, regarding her. Refracted in her mind, she saw the room as it had been, its objects spaced with the exact ruler of remembrance but already blurred with the double-edge of the past. Wading carefully into its center, she set the gift down on the bare floor. She knelt over it a moment. Then she walked out and closed the door.

  In her grandmother’s room, she flipped the light switch on and off just long enough to see the odd note of her own sprigged flannel gown on the huge bed. The room, shrouded in dust-covers since its owner’s death, had the reserve of disuse. Ordinarily Hester would have tried the locks of the trunks which held the vestees of broderie anglaise and the threadlace shawls, and run a scuttling finger through bureau drawers still full of passementerie rejected by the raiding relatives six months ago. Tonight, she had begun to understand the mechanics of desecration. She stepped out of her clothes and into the nightdress, feeling as strange here as on the one night she had spent in the hospital. Crouched down under the comforter, she gripped her ankles with her hands. Burrowing her head into the blackness be
tween her knees, listening to the purling of her own breath, she slept.

  Sometime during the night she woke, her heart hammering up from a dream in which two hands, smooth, anonymous and huge, emerging wrist upward from mist, wrestled with one another, the great fingers twining in silent, marble struggle. From beneath a coverlet of stone, she waited for the mushrooming spaces of the dream to settle and ebb. Through the open door of the bathroom connecting with her parents’ bedroom, she heard their voices, locked and vying.

  “No!” said her mother, in a whisper as long-drawn as a scream. “I won’t let you have it. What should be kept for your own children. To let it go down the family drain, like all the rest.”

  “By God,” said her father’s voice, “how would you have it, except for me? How many women are there who can buy ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock out of their household allowance?”

  “Sixteen years,” said her mother, still in that shuddering whisper. “Licking their backsides. Being the Ausländer. Being the responsible one. Carrying the bedpans to your mother, so your sisters could visit, and drink cream…And the miles and miles of fine words, of fine feelings that the Elkins have such a talent for—as long as someone else underwrites them…Someone crass—like me.”

  “No one asked you to martyr yourself. Who do you think I work for, if not for you and the children?”

  “For anyone who gets to you first with a few cheap words to make you feel big Ike. For anyone who will say ‘dear Joe.’”

  “Now listen, Hattie—”

  “You corrupt people,” said her mother, her voice rising. “Because you are too weak to refuse them.”

  “For the last time…”

  “No!” said her mother. “Not this time,” the words pulling from her as if she spun them one by one from a pit of resolve. “Not if you go down on your knees.”

  “God, what kind of woman are you, to make a man abase himself so? Over money,” said her father, his voice ratchety and breathy.

  “Family of leeches, leeches,” intoned her mother. “Sister Flora’s husband can’t get a job in anyone else’s business, but dear Joe will give him one. Sister Amy can’t live with her rotter of a husband, but she can talk about his aristocratic Leesburg connections, as long as dear Joe will help her out. And the bookkeeper you won’t accuse of stealing from you, because he is your sister-in-law’s brother. Even your brother’s widow, that low Irish, complaining about the settlement you gave her. What was he but a shoe salesman until he brought her from Chicago, and dear Joe gave him the factory to manage. Fine manager.”

  “Leave the dead alone!” Her father’s voice had an empty sound. There was a pause, in which the edges of silence rubbed together.

  “Ask the dead for your collateral,” said her mother.

  From beneath the stone coverlet, Hester heard that last, faceless word sink into the quiet. After a time, someone shut the connecting door.

  In the hollow of the bed, the dream waited to grow again. With an effort, she pushed up the rim of stone, and slipped out of bed. Dragging after her the comforter, suddenly light and threatless in her hand, she felt her way down the corridor to Kinny’s room. Always in a state of embattled flux, even packing day had scarcely dislodged it from the norm, and its shadows had the clutter of homeliness.

  She sat on the edge of his bed and drew the comforter around her, nestling toward him, feeling him warm and insensate beside her, smelling of boy-sweat and grubbiness, and infinitely removed. From behind them, the moiling quarrel between her parents pierced through her, past her, into the world beyond. All of it had been known, but she could now see, as never before, the exact angle of its interception. On the one side stood her mother, the denying one, the unraveler of other people’s façades, but resolute and forceful by her very lack of some dimension; on the other side stood her father, made weak by his awareness of others, carrying like a phylactery the burden of his kindliness. And flawed with their difference, she felt herself falling endlessly, soundlessly, in the gulf between.

  On Kinny’s shoulder, rounded in sleep, a lozenge of light wavered. She put out her hand hopefully, but she had lost the trick of playing with such semblances. She tried to cry, but could not summon that childish scald. Though she could not name the bird now hovering, she knew its nature. Slowly the bird descended, and chose. She began to weep the sparse, grudging tears of the grown.

  Songs My Mother Taught Me

  SOME TEN YEARS AGO when I was for the first time in London—when, as a rather elderly innocent abroad, I was for the first time anywhere outside New York City except Rochester, Elmira, Binghamton, the Eastern Shore, a few summer resorts in New England and, at the age of twelve, Asbury Park, New Jersey—I attended a semi-diplomatic dinner party at which, after we had all drunk considerable amounts of several delightful wines, one of the ladies present suddenly peeled off her blouse.

  Since the other guests, though moist and perfervid, were still upright in their chairs and conversation, the incident caused, even in that imperturbable company, a certain silence. Chitchat, suddenly quenched, faded off into one of those pauses where isolated sentences stand out sharply. The man on my left, whom I had placed tentatively as either a connoisseur of heraldry or a baiter of Americans, had been lecturing me on the purity of lineage maintained by German nobility up to the last war. “Where else,” he had just inquired, “can one find, even now, a person whose line shows sixteen quarterings?” Then he stopped short, as if contradicted by circumstance. Headily I reassured myself that quite without knowing it—and in the first week too—I must have scaled one of those dizzily international heights of society so often promised the provincial: a set so patrician that queens had no legs, emperors might be clothed exactly as they said they were, and ladies appeared in their quarterings without shame.

  She was an exceedingly pretty young woman of about twenty-five with masses of blond hair arranged ingénue, and a pair of truly enormous blue eyes swimming in some Venus-lymph, clear natural nacre in which a man, or indeed any onlooker, might well sink. Words like “truly” came inevitably to mind as one regarded them. As I did so, they spilled over pellucidly. Casting a reproachful look at her partner (later it was understood that he had dared her), turning down the corners of a lovely mouth rosied with wine and—though one hated to think it—stupidity, she gazed at us, clutching the discarded portion of her costume, then hung her head and let fall on her lavishly ruffled broderie anglaise corselet two neatly schooled tears.

  “Why, Lady Catherine!” our host said at once, and rising, he went round the table to her and poured her more wine, murmuring what I thought to be “How very sporting!” and capping it with—as he raised his own glass—“Bravo!”

  Other gentlemen took up the plaudit. Lady Catherine, shyly consoled, raised her head, and I remembered her patronymic, ducally familiar even to me: one of her ancestresses, whom she was said to resemble, had been a wife of Henry the Eighth. From her round eyes two more pearls dropped, but this time surely with retrospective art—I wondered whether Henry, watching her ancestress’ head fall, might not have thought to himself, “None of my other wives looked that good upside down.”

  What happened next I can only recount, not explain. It is true that, while we were only fourteen at table, the number of empty bottles ranged testimonially behind us must have totaled more than twice that. I have a vague impression that the male applause may have attained an ethnic intensity. Also that our host, bending over Lady Catherine, was assuring her that she looked smashing, and rather more respectable than the portrait of his grandmother as lady in waiting to Queen Alexandra. And that she, though retaining a disconsolate posture, was looking smug. What I know for sure is that when I next glanced at our hostess—a bishop’s daughter—she too had peeled.

  “She’s upset the gravy boat, Mother!” I murmured delightedly, but of course no one paid any attention to me, or would have understood the reference if they had. No one there was likely to have heard of Mrs. Potter Palmer, much less
of my mother. I shall shortly explain—for the benefit of readers who, although they may have caught the allusion to American social history, cannot possibly know anything of mine. But first let me complete the mise en scène of a moment in which were to be brought home to me all the old saws of my girlhood—a moment of truth in which, across so much water and over the ten years of my mother’s sojourn in Mrs. Grundy’s heaven, I could at last exclaim to her, “Mother, you were right!”

  Of the seven women at table, six, including myself, were wearing the version of the currently fashionable (and easily doffable) “separates” known as “evening sweaters.” There was nothing coincidental about this; the best houses were cold, even for London; rationing was still on and the English were burning an ineffectual sludge called, with their usual talent, “nutty slack.” The one exception to the sweaters was also the only one of the others who was neither chic nor pretty, a vast, untidy woman opposite me—Frau Ewig, a noted anthropologist, recently returned from Sierra Leone—whose dress, showing so many possible means of separation that the eye was unable to choose the probable, looked somewhat as if, in order to appear in it at the party, she had first chopped several natives up. She, like the rest of us, had forgotten Lady Catherine in the sight of our hostess, who sat revealed, with the air of a prioress who had removed her wimple, in a rock-pink, ten-guinea model by Berlé.

  In the silence that followed I heard the clink of crystal—the gentlemen, according to their needs and natures, were either taking another drink or putting down the one they had. A muted cry of protest was heard—from Lady Catherine. I could have seconded it—for another reason. For glancing round at the other ladies, I sensed something infinitely feminine glissade from eye to eye. In prescience I closed mine. When I opened them, what I saw confirmed it. Every remaining lady—except the anthropologist and the American—had the upper part of her costume in her hand.

  Now there was nothing essentially risky in the tableau before us: a number of ladies sitting, modestly swan-necked, in their foundations, is a sight familiar to every window-shopper. Besides, the temperature being what it was, I thought I could discern, between various lacy interstices, the fuzzier-than-flesh-tone of what Debenham & Freebody’s (where I bought one the next morning) called a vest. No, the riskiness is often in the eye of the beholder. And this composite eye, twelve times magnified and stern as that of a nudist group eyeing the indecency of a visitor’s clothing, was now fixed on my pied vis-à-vis and on me. Leave me there now, while we make our way back—by gravy boat and a sneaky trail of safety pins—to my mother. We shall return.