Extreme Magic

by Hortense Calisher

  “Jees, no, you know me. No posture at all. No, it has to be something real.”

  “Like what?” he said.

  “Claustrophobia, maybe.” Quent was feeling better. “Or what’s that thing on heights?”

  “Acrophobia.” It was hard to stay angry with them—if they had to make catastrophe of some small emphatic of life, in the end they always entertained you with their elaboration of it. “But the house is on the riverbank—I know that much. And she’s asking you for the weekend, not burying you.” A second cat was nosing at his door. “Why not ‘Ailurophobe’?” he said. “They must have half a dozen of them. Cats.”

  “Cats give William asthma,” Quentin said dreamily. “Gee, whad you do, swallow the manual? I wish I could read. I wish I had your sense of detachment.”

  Burn your house down then. Burn William. It was the one thing for which he couldn’t bear to be marveled at—why should they want his priceless capital of non-suffering? He didn’t answer.

  “Anyway, thanks, Guy, maybe I’ll do that. Thanks a million. It’s just—I don’t want it to sound phony. You know? And with certain people, outside your own close circle of friends, howya going to know you not giving offense?” Quent’s voice squeaked—a mouse transfixed in terror of its own moves.

  “You don’t give it, Quent,” he said. “You never do.”

  “Ah, Guy…Anyway. Good to talk to you. Marriage broker is nothing; you could open a whole accommodation agency. But not till you help us finish on the house, hah?”

  That house would never be finished—how could they afford to finish this construct that formally provided them with everyone else’s troubles—and pleasures of course—from maid trouble to gourmet shopping, to spats over the discipline of the curly-headed dog-child? He didn’t say this either.

  “Anyway, good-by now,” said Quent. “And William always asks for you. I’ll give your love to William.”

  “Yes, do that.”

  “And good to talk to you. I’ll be honest with you, that’s why I called.” Quent’s repetitions were more for his own ear than for others—it was the way he knew he meant something. “Thanks again,” he said. “You don’t know what it means to me, to be able to talk to another normal person.”

  He put down the phone. Phone calls often made him think of lantern slides, the kind even the high schools probably didn’t use anymore, and views of life, not Borneo. Any housewife might go through a box of them heavy enough to make her hand tremble, any morning. He took up the lamp again.

  In the past seven years, he had fulfilled all the fine dreams the hospital had had for him, meanwhile never hiding from himself that these might be limited dreams. It was only now and then that the old fire lit in his head—or the dream of a new one to which he would get there on time. Life, though so much more gently, had still come to him by accident. It had been on his first fishing trip alone, driving back on the Vermont side, that his attention had been caught by a farmhouse flying two flags, British and American, and idly inquiring down the road where he’d stopped to refuel at a gas pump in front of a china-stuffed façade and further sheds receding, had been given the whole of that rum-running story. He had knelt to look at, not buy, an old lamp of a kind he hadn’t seen since and now knew to be as rare as pemmican—and had been given the history of such lamps. History, he found, could be picked like daisies all along the roadside, if one were willing to take it a little squeegee—what had fascinated him from the first was the squeegee—the narrators themselves. And in the end, just like them, he’d acquired a business, and one just like theirs, “on the side.”

  For not a man jack of them (or a woman in that gallery of whittled women) who hadn’t been beached up on his wrack of metal and porcelain from somewhere other. Or if not, then whatever in them had settled early or late for this flotsam had done so in lieu of something else. It hadn’t been until much later, of course, that he saw this clearly, and much more: how even in winter or bad times the hunt had to go on, if need be, with each other; how in the end the rooker had to be rooked. How each, drily scanning “the trade,” saw this as well as anybody, but denied it for himself. And how each, like himself, had arrived at the specialty which made his game worthy and the others’ silly—and which he would not exchange. Sometimes, one came upon an antiquer whose wares, invading his house, had coiled into closet and bed and pushed out the humans entirely, leaving him wedged in its clockwork like a single, bright, movable eye. In his own case, the reverse having happened, he’d been helpfully pushed out of the house altogether, where he was kept tethered like a buoy in a tide, perhaps, but still in the world’s tide.

  His own specialty was necessarily invisible. But if he could have stood people up in rows—like Romanies with their hands out, who were in turn his soothsayers—the shop would have been filled with them, and his best customer was always himself. He supposed they were his substitute for history—whose?—as history itself had always seemed to him in a way a substitute. In the hospital, in his last phase but one, which he had taken to be religious, he had done a great deal of such reading, only to find out that, like so many of his era, he had merely been lonely to hear about other eras, especially of that pure time when people made their own constructs of God. And in the final months of his cure, he came to understand what the dead were—at least, his dead. The dead did not own history, as he had once supposed; they only could not move forward into it, being fixed in what they had. In the worst of his sickness, he had wilfully refused to move on without them—he would stand with them. He was mad with jealousy for them and against himself—for all they would never know. He hated himself for having to grow forward into it. In the end he had been able to, to leave the hospital—and them. Sheer luck had then nudged him into a modus vivendi whose limits were so exactly modulated to his own—one exactly useful to a man able to move on, unable to forgive himself for it.

  He had come to this place not long after, on a day’s trip to the impeccably kind lawyer who had all that time held in trust for him his now more modest good fortune. Even the barn, a mile or so uproad, had been so forbearing with him, so high and mild, with autumn riverwind coming in at its windows just a cast too weedy—so willing to wait. Even the real estate agent might have known of his mishap, unless he spoke to all clients as if only his properties could heal. In geography, of manners as well as hills, this was still that formal countryside of the hospital he had just come from, where wealth, and perhaps goodness, too, were sometimes still ecclesiast. To the north of him, one great estate had humbled itself to Capuchin, hard by another, to be sure, that had gone more militantly, to golf course. Down below him, rectors in board-and-batten snuggeries presided over the lesser manses, alongside here and there the heart-piercing needle of a still New England church. Sports cars knitted amicably as petunias between all of them. A safe visual goodness still ringed him. Everything was in repair. And—as he had the perspective to say laughingly—the opportunities for picking up church candlesticks were endless.

  He had good perspective. Down still lower in the town, in certain side streets that had once been “native,” or more often now in the supermarket for new cottagers of the class just below commuter, he sometimes saw a Saturday family he recognized. They had come from the north. The young man, one infant on shoulder, was beset by two other jumpers demanding to be taken to the Mi-Dream Ice-cream. The woman, the Ellen, was still pretty in her postpartum fat and had been to Mamie’s Beauty Den; she would not comb the curls out until morning. She was a girl who would name her eldest “Chester,” against all lost eighteenth-century New England, because it “went with”—who would name her infant daughter Coral. She was a stranger, an utter stranger. The young man, given the privilege of naming his second child, had called it Constance, but only out of a simpler maleness, or perhaps, though he was unaware of it, because fidelity was going to be so important to him. They both were blind to him, Guy Callendar, as he was now. She was ensconced in her family, never to look at another man, never at one
like him. Perhaps the young man, not necessarily smarter than she, only properly keener by way of army, business college, and business, had paid him a look, as to an example of what he himself might someday aspire to: this lean, older man who so resembled him, who still had his hair, his own long, pleasant enough Connecticut face, inside a style of dress and haircut already noted down at conventions—this older man who, in ten years and with a little of the right kind of luck, might be him. Both the couple were oblivious to his own—snobbery. The children were smartest of all; children always sense fear. For though in the book of phobia he had a clean slate, even to fire, he could not sit through any movie or story in which a child was mistreated or in peril—and this was not in the book. The children knew he preferred not to look at them at all but could not help looking. Like animals they sensed their mastery over him and often acknowledged it in some gawky mince or persistent turning back that bewildered their parents. It was in his face perhaps, what he feared for them—even the infant often gave him a patient, peach-cheeked smile.

  He never saw them, that family, as any older; they stayed where they were. He was the one who had moved on. To the degree that he had, he could bear it now. Perspective was what any man carried on his back, not a cross, but an easel to which pictures were supplied slowly, always from an unknown hand. He merely knew better than most what had happened to him. The hospital had taught him not to expect that the world would continue to recall his extremity and pity it, had warned him that he must not either, and they had been right. What more had come, they couldn’t have anticipated. The heart educates, and unlike the State, is no leveler. Some men tragedy flattens farther back in their grooves. Others it pushes altogether out of their sphere.

  The lamp was finished. His hand went to the phone, then withdrew. Instead, he chose a shade of plain old white glass from his stock of them, set it upside down in a carton, placed it and the brass lamp, electrified and polished now, on the floor of his station wagon, and drove off. On Mondays, the inn’s bar and restaurant, like his shop, was closed, the chef and assistant barman off; the rare guest in one of the rooms upstairs must take his chances elsewhere. Sligo and Marion always spent the day at home in retirement; any business that took them away was performed midweek. No doubt they could only feel private on the one day the place wasn’t convivial. Publicans had little time or will for private friends. If they welcomed him there, as they did now and then on that day, it was more or less because it was his Monday also, and he understood the special coziness taken and given when the shopkeeper entertains others, particularly others of the same, on the day the door is closed. He went there, he supposed, because they were in the same pocket as himself. If he never thought of those two as enjoying their place in nerve and spirit, as he did his, of ever really doing more than accepting it, it was perhaps because to think of them, or of knowing them, in terms of nerve and spirit, was in itself an oddity; they were not that sort.

  Good barkeeps, or “your host” as the menus said nowadays, generally kept themselves unknowable. Sligo was a good one. A big, very pale man, both tall and wide, shown ambiguously only to the waist as he stood between the dark mirrors and mahogany of a bar dating from the Spanish-American War, he might have been a mercenary seen through the spyglass of a much earlier war, or perhaps a footman of the size and impassivity then so prized. He had a blacksmith’s arm girth, ending in the bartender’s pouchily delicate hands. In his silence, he might have been the smith’s spreading tree. From his wide gaze, customers assumed that he listened. Rumor said that he drank, or (because he accepted no offers to) once had—but this was always said of men in his profession. Some said that the horse brasses on the wall behind him came from Sligos, who for centuries had been innkeepers in Britain. Others pooh-poohed this because of the name and favored the Abbey Theatre, the wives particularly. His black hair curled low and caddish—or Roman—at the neck; both were thick. Such a figure, so aristocratically pale, must have come from somewhere; the odds were that it had come down.

  When the restaurant itself was full, it was Sligo’s habit to leave the bar and make a circuit of the tables, inclining his head to each with a query so regally inaudible that only weeks of custom confirmed what he had said to be no more than “’S everything all right?” Seen at a distance, above the tables, Sligo’s profile was suddenly neat, set in his jowled head like one of those cameos purposely carved only half emerged from the matrix, not cut free of it. Weight was the one sign that this great trunk might indeed be hollow enough to have a once much smaller man inside it. At the moment he stepped down from the bar, wholly in the clear, one saw with surprise, beneath the white coat which hid width but no belly, that his legs, long as they were, were bowed. As for Marion, who sometimes tended bar in these interims, at first glance she was merely the good host’s wife.

  At a break in the hedgerow to the left of the highway, Callendar turned in—there was no sign—drove riverwards for perhaps a quarter of a mile, parked in the big courtyard behind the house, empty now except for the owners’ car, and waited tactfully for one or the other to come out, as per custom, at the sound of his tires on the gravel. On Mondays, to get their quiet, they disconnected the phone. He wasn’t one to drop in on a couple on their equivalent of Sunday—he remembered how it could be. Once in a great while, Marion called him the same day to ask him over; more usually the invitation was an offhand “Drop in” or “We’ll expect you” that same week. Today he was expected, with the lamp. Sometimes it took her quite a while to come from some upstairs region from which Sligo would come down later—it was almost always she. And once or twice, when expected, no one had come out to greet him. He’d the sense not to knock or go in, and he’d been right. Neither of them had ever referred to it after.

  Unlike his own place, this one had a straight view. The Canal Zone Inn, as it still was known, was set in the crotch of a promontory that fingered the river, really only a slice of made land just strong enough to hold a concrete pier, no trees. Behind the sandstone house, of the squat Dutch sort that never looks its size, there was backdrop enough of them. The courtyard was good for fifty cars. Nobody except the occasional tourist who bumbled here ever walked out on the little plage of false land, either to sit at its umbrellaed tables, or bathe from its fringe of beach. From it, it was said, one could see clear down to the Point—West Point. The inn’s late owner, not from the Academy, though military enough to have seen war service in “ninety-eight,” had probably acquired most of his rank and all of his legend when well out of the war, and in his last years also, a character. The legend (of cadets sneaking across river and so forth) the Sligos had kept or let stay, even to the large, gold-pronged diamond solitaire in its glass showcase on the bar-top, according to its shaky Spenserian label: “Ring worn by Colonel George when he helped carry the message to Garcia.” Customers who had known the old “Colonel” reported that even in his nonage he had been nimble enough in mind to have carried the news from Ghent to Aix, had he ever heard of that circumstance. Nowadays, and not merely because of time passing, there were almost no such customers. In place of the former character of the inn—speakeasy in the Twenties, dirty ladies upstairs in the Thirties, dirty old men downstairs in the Forties—the Sligos had painstakingly substituted their own. This was no longer new enough to be shadowy, or shouldn’t have been—like Callendar, they too had been here seven years. Or perhaps the inn’s intended character was to make them seem shadows of it.

  He himself wouldn’t have painted the mellow old stone with white, cleanly as it now looked, pleasingly cleft at precise intervals, even on the overhanging second story, with boxes of geranium, all of the same superior pink. The place now looked reassuringly as much as possible like others of its kind, with their same suggestion that setting was only for status, that the real shelter one got here provided the customary satisfactions—and above all, was inside. But the Sligos must know their business, for they had got plenty of it—still uncompromisingly local, if not the same. “Before we ca
me,” he’d heard Marion say, “the bar had one television, one spider hanging down in front of it—and often only one customer.” If she knew that this might well have been one or another of the older residents, people like the Benjamins or their attendant cronies, who now never came here, she made no mention of it. Now, with no television or spiders, the trade came from the former trade’s expensively subdivided land, from people well above cottager, often new country club, who needed to love the local tradition, and were prepared to do so in a hurry. Inside, in the games room on the lower level, darts could be played, or—as a visiting Englishman had once exclaimed at—shove ha’penny, played with half-dollars. (Drinks brought from above were likely to cost twice that, and to be martinis.) Nobody except that visitor—and Guy—was likely to wonder from which of the Sligos’ backgrounds this idea had come, or whether it went with anybody else’s here. Like the decor, some of it from Guy’s shop, the idea was “Colonial.” A specialty, like seventy kinds of ice cream, or pizza, had been provided. The rooms above were purposely empty, overnight trade discouraged. Patronage came mostly in pairs here, but not that kind. Even the hosts, shadowy as they kept themselves, were seen to be a pair.

  Inside, since Marion was the talker of the two, it took time to notice how noncommittal she remained. Tending bar, when not busy she usually sat on a stool behind the glass case with the Colonel’s ring in it, down at one end. The case was small and low enough for her to lean chin on hand and look down into it, if she chose. Guy, in his mild bouts of company, often sat on the last stool at that end; company at one elbow was enough. From the first, he’d seen how useful the case and its contents were. New customers always asked about it; old ones invariably made some reference to it of an evening. The big diamond, high on its gold prongs, couldn’t be touched, but its gleam could always be rubbed up into a conversation. “My God, that’s a convincing fake!” a man would say. “Have to look at it twice to know it isn’t real.” Marion would nod, not looking down on it. “Real, they couldn’t leave it here,” said another. This time she might look down on it, or smile, or raise an eyebrow—oh, there were all sorts of variants, on both sides.