Extreme Magic

by Hortense Calisher

  “I didn’t think so either.” But he felt as if he had been for a swim in laughter.

  “Or you don’t believe me.”

  “I believe you,” he said.

  “I guess it was me then, you were—People do.”

  “No, it was a coincidence,” he said. “I was laughing at the smallness of the world. Or the enormity. Anyway, please believe me. I can’t possibly explain.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” she said. “I certainly do. And I appreciate your language.”

  He stood up. “Cats need a place,” he said looking down at her. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to do the rounding up. Or else rename them.”

  “Oh!” she said. “Oh-h. I could come tomorrow morning and start feeding them here. I could come here every day, so that by Friday—I don’t have to go, you know, for four whole days.”

  She was going to be a bore, the kind that could be painful. He hadn’t come near one of her for years. He already wanted to get rid of her. She was the young. “Where are they sending you?”

  She made a face. “Friends of Parker’s. They have a girl my age, and they keep wanting us to be. We haven’t a thing in common really. Bianca O’Brian. She’s French.”

  “She doesn’t sound very French.”

  “Oh, she had an ancestor—some marshal. To have an Irish surname in France is the utter. And her live grandmother is a princess in Rome.”

  “Oh? And what color is she?”

  She giggled. Then she stood on one leg.

  He sighed. “And is Bianca at the—Country Day?”

  “Oh no,” she gasped, “she’s already been at Le Rosey. And at Brillaumont. They couldn’t do a thing with her.” The other leg twined. He watched, in fascinated recall of how it had once felt, to be literally beside oneself.

  She began to speak very rapidly. “She has this little face that pooches out, and she wears her hair scissored all around it, the way they do. Y’know? As if some sex-maniac had been chewing it. And all she has to do is scatter this talk of hers, like birdseed, and the boys come hop, hop. And wherever we others are wearing our belts, she isn’t.”

  “I hope it isn’t catching,” he said. “It’s certainly utter.”

  “Oh, it’s very poisemaking, to have a line,” she said. “If you haven’t yet got—the other.” And finally, the leg came down. Standing there, all of her implored him to see that she would give anything to rid them both of her company.

  He would have liked to pat her, in sympathy. Instead, he looked at his watch.

  “Oh, I must go!” she said at once. “Gran will be wi-ild.” Her hands crossed on her bathing suit. “I hope I haven’t given you a—a false impression of us. We’re really a very devoted family.” It gave him a glimpse of how she might be, once she had achieved what she aspired to—and a wish to give her something toward it. He hadn’t been able to give anyone else anything, all the long day.

  “I knew a girl once,” he said. “Only a very little older than you are.” It came as a shock that Ellen had been only three years older than this girl when he married her. “She wasn’t any prettier than you. And probably not as—smart.” His voice ground. To think blasphemy was different from speaking it. “But she had a way with her, if it’s any use to you—I suppose one could call it a line. Whenever anyone paid her a compliment, or she was at a loss, she used to look at him sideways—you’ll know how—and say, Oh, you’re just saying that!” Once, at Niagara Falls, Ellen and he had donned the oilskins they gave one, and had walked through a passageway under and back of the Falls. Strange images, octahedrons of glass were at the other side of them. Ellen stood with these now. “It was very fetching,” he said. “It made the boys come hop, hop.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Thank-you. I’ll study it up in a mirror sometime.” Then she bounded away from him. He gathered that he had somehow offended her, but at least it had made her free as a gazelle. Across the glen, he watched her bound backward over a hedge.

  His own youth had been awkward. “Pleased to meetcha!” he called from it. “Pleased to meetcha, Alden.”

  She paused, then she came running fleetly. Halfway across the clearing, her hands clasped at her breast exactly as before. She rediscovered the barn, the screen door, him standing there. A moon had risen since, and was coldly shining. Walking as if her bathing suit were a skirt, she included the moon. It was like watching a tic of the imagination—hers—acted out on his obviously dream-forested land. “You’re just the way I thought you would be,” she said softly. “Good night—Gwee.”

  She was there the next morning, and more of each day thereafter, sharing his lunches and once, in the company of a dealer-friend up from Pennsylvania, his supper, even offering him a muted assistance in the shop—and all with a manner so altered that he could find her unimportant presence lightly welcome. The dizzy reel of her confidences had altogether stopped, like a carnival ride shared by strangers. She made no more references to her family, and in his own mind they no longer struck the monster, papier-mâché attitudes she had so carefully pointed out to him along the ride. It was probable that they were quite ordinary, in their own way. Her subdued manner now almost called upon him to notice that so was she. Even the soapbubble chain of her giggling had vanished overnight, as if somewhere quieted at the fount. Overnight—it amused him to think—she might have consulted one of those Carmencitas who squatted over such matters behind windows crayoned with the zodiac, to which the words Readings, Advisor also adhered. Somewhere, in the depths of herself, she was being advised. In his own, he knew he was being worshiped, and felt himself too humble to question it. It was pleasant to find himself amiably concise with her in a way he was seldom able with his sharper-tongued New York friends—in the way perhaps, if things had been otherwise, that fatherhood sharpened the tongue. As a proprietor, he was used to lingerers, hangers-on, even apprentices such as, in the late, Urbino light of those August afternoons, pottering after him in her shirt and shorts, or shorn tan head seen bent across an intervening field of objects and tasks, she increasingly appeared to be.

  In that light, age was their duenna—and her hair wasn’t gold; she was merely in the absolute russet of health. He recalled better now how the flesh at that age was aureoled in its own fuzz. But, as she lounged, sun-struck in the doorway, he had no visual terror of her; she wasn’t Ellen, but what might have been Ellen’s child. A dealer had just left them. The shop’s business was always by appointment; few itinerants came here.

  “I admire you,” she said. “For the way you do nothing and people just come to you.” For the rest of the afternoon she was silent. It occurred to him, absent in mind as he’d been all week—or elsewhere in mind—that her prayer might be being answered; she was certainly more natural.

  Early Friday morning, before leaving, she came by for an uncalled-for visit to the cats, who were by now accustomed to his feeding them. He was mildly surprised at her appearance as she bent daintily over their dishes—travel suit, hat and bag, hair brushed to a burnish, from what he could see of it, and a new, sooty dimension to her unremarkable eyes. When he heard she was walking to the station, he of course drove her there, and waited with her for the dusty, division local that would take her on to Grand Central, where she would be met by a chauffeur, she said, and driven on. The station, merely a junction beneath the once Indian highland, was bare of persons on this national weekend away. Beyond the sheds and other ramshackles, deserted outbuildings of another century, that quietly rotted here and at other up-Hudson junctions, the flat valley of water took the sun. As always, the wide expanse made him uneasy; he turned his back to it. The girl beside him, taking the compliment to herself, smiled gratefully. Now that she was leaving, he was suddenly great with a four-day-repressed need to be by himself again. When he put her bag up for her in the train, he was already irritated with her for making herself out a waif to him, as she could apparently do without moving an eyelash. There were others on the train dressed exactly like her, most with friends or paren
ts it was true, but her own were returning in a few days. Still, her hat, though so regulation, reared back from her forehead like the pure feather of flight. He felt he ought to make it up to her, for not being able to keep his mind on her, somehow to explain to her that she was simply at that interim in her life when no one was around to do it. “Good-by,” he said. “And good luck on the weekend, don’t you worry now. You have no idea how different you look in shoes.”

  He hurried home to his house, to be alone with being alone there. It was good, infinitely good to mosey and loll, a man in no way bereft of the small things of life, one whose phone was contrarily atap with friends, waifs and petitioners—merely a man who preferred dogs, but had no dog. Toward dusk, he set his meal on a tray, and once more brought it out to the porch. No one, entowered somewhere in the tree-murmurs, was there to watch him. At last he was at peace enough, if it could be called peace, to dwell on what all week he’d been powerless to keep his mind from—to let it ring its changes inside him.

  On Tuesday, he had called the Canal Zone. During the day, there’d been no reason to fear she might be bereft; Tuesday, when the place reopened at four, was always a big day domestically, with cleaning to be done, suppliers’ salesmen to be dealt with, and the full staff in attendance, two waitresses, Carlos the cook, and sometimes Roy, the assistant barman. He had restrained himself from calling until six, the busy hour at the bar, when Sligo was always in attendance there. Roy had answered the phone. He had asked to speak to Marion.

  “The missus, she’s in the kitchen,” said Roy. “Talkin’ to Carlos.”

  Everyone knew of course that Carlos did drink; his temperament, often to be heard from the kitchen, was cherished as much as his cooking by those patrons who liked to think that they haunted a bar for its colorfulness. No one would have known of it otherwise. The staff, loyal to each other and apparently to the owners, never gossiped.

  “You want to talk to the mister?” said Roy. “He’s awful busy, Mr. Callendar, we got a rush on that IBM Country Club crowd.”

  “No thanks. Just ask her—” He hesitated. “I just called to find out if the lamp I left was okay. Just ask her if everything’s all right. About the lamp.”

  “Okay, sir.”

  “Maybe I’ll stop by myself to check on it tomorrow,” he added half to himself, as Roy hung up.

  He did that. During the period when he had helped furnish the upstairs, the staff had grown used to his checking. Wednesday afternoons, as he knew well enough, Sligo and Marion were usually in town with the station wagon, doing all the weekly errands from meat inspection to talking improvement loans with the bank manager. He pretended to have forgotten this.

  “Wednesday their town day,” said Roy. It was the usual midweek afternoon, trade dull. Everything appeared normal. Of course, everything always had. Why was he here?

  “One day gets to be like another, out where I am,” he said. He knew how to talk to Roy, not that it took anything special; anyone did.

  “Out where anybody is, around here!” Roy said at once. “I tell you, Mr. Callendar, we can’t wait for winter.” Winters, Roy did the Miami run. “We” meant his wife and mother, as devoted as he to the crowd, the tables, the money, the sun and the sea, in that order—to all the big-time externals of life. It was hard to imagine any of the three ever suffering from one of the inner varieties of love-death, certainly not from love of death, or even perhaps from the death of love. They were happy. But knowing how to talk to Roy meant knowing that even he, they, were in their own way extreme.

  “When you going?” Guy said.

  “December twenty-sixth, leave here six-thirty A.M.,” Roy said promptly. “I drive the buggy down, U.S. 1 all the way. Ma and Vee fly National. Next night we’ll all three be in our suits at the beach, dinner at the Alcazar. And three nights after. I don’t start work till the first.”

  “Sounds wonderful.” He was having trouble keeping his mind on Roy. He stared at the diamond ring in its glass case. Roy’s blunt, shaven head didn’t shadow it.

  “I tell you. Whyn’t you pick up and go down. Even for good, you could make a living. They got antique shops galore.” Roy was capable of assuring a banker that Miami had banks.

  “Maybe I will.”

  “I tell you.” Roy leaned forward. Now came the climax of this refrain. “If we could stay down there—” The preamble was always the same, the conclusion too. Only the metaphor varied. “If we could stay down there—!” Each of Roy’s eyes shone as if it were the only one he had. “Nee one of us ever ask nothing more in this life. Nee one of us ask for two more tail feathers from a duck.”

  He almost forgot to make the drink-offer which was the ritual end of this conversation.

  It was answered with the ritual headshake. “Thanks, Mr. Callendar. But I’ll have a cigar.”

  He put his elbows on the bar, trying to recall how it felt to lean outward into life from some heavy focus, glowing or dark—instead of cordially, temperately, holding the phone. “Roy?” he’d said, as if Roy could tell him. “Roy—what’s your last name?”

  Roy, just nipping the cigar, looked up. He spat the tip. “Grotz. Roy Valerian Grotz. Must be why I became a bartender, huh, whoever asks a barkeep his full name?” He doffed the cigar. “You ever ready for info ree down there, you just write me. Care of the Alcazar.”

  “Thanks,” he said, “I just came to wonder. Don’t know why in particular.” Looking round the calm, empty bar, with its faint smell of bitter from old limbos, he’d shivered his shoulders. “Certainly not waiting for winter.”

  “You’re telling me!” said Roy.

  When he came home, he found a note from Marion in his mailbox; she must have driven by to put it there. “Please don’t call. And don’t come. My thanks.” With the proper chance, he might have met them there at the end of his driveway, she bending to thrust the note far back in the box, Sligo sitting immobile in the car as one sometimes saw him, hunched forward in the posture of men in World War I statuary groups—a member of the Battle of the Marne temporarily hacked from his stone brothers. Marion always drove.

  Thursday—last night—his dealer friend, Sprague, had stayed for supper, and the girl. Though he addressed her by name, in his mind she was “the girl.” He’d been grateful for both their presences. In the summer dimness after the hot glade of the day, as they sipped the wine Sprague had brought, the rise and fall of their own voices had had a pre-fall, alfresco charm. The girl had sipped too, with an over-distinguished air.

  “Nice kid,” Sprague had commented, in a moment when the girl had gone in for a bit.

  “Lonely summer,” said Guy.

  Sprague nodded. “I get ’em from the summer theaters. Apprentices. Sent round to borrow.” A former painter, he now dealt mostly in authentic American primitives, had a shop in the Poconos, and knew Joe and Milly Pink. “Terrible stuff they have,” he said.

  “Terrible.” He listened to the echo. “Their boy is getting married.”

  “Oh, I know that boy. Different from them.” Sprague, pouring himself another, had gestured with the bottle in the direction where Alden had gone. “Like her, they’re luckier. Kids like her, you can see their whole background behind them, ahead of them, too. Meet a boy of the same, and with a little luck they’ll live their whole lives that way. Lost in the background. The best way.”

  Sprague’s history was unknown to him, or whether Sprague knew his—but that each had an unlikely one was one of the comforting assumptions of their trade.

  “She looks a little like that print you have inside there,” said Sprague. “The girl in profile—who’s it by, Polliaiulo? Just a pretty girl of the day, but you can see the whole Renaissance behind her. I’ve got a little Federalist one at home now. A stiff little girl of the period, all her life, probably. Only the painter happened to single her out She isn’t the subject anymore. The subject is 1810.” He gestured again at Alden, who had just reappeared, and was now circling the porch, fiddling with the cats’ dishes. She ben
t there with the bursting shyness of one who knew herself the question. “Girls like that are like stencils,” he said. “For what’s around them. Boys too, of course. Hmm. Used to wish I could paint that way. You know? I wanted to do it for now.”

  Alden came in and sat again at the table.

  “What’s the name of this county?” Sprague asked her.

  “Dutchess.”

  “There you are!” said Sprague. “Girl of Dutchess County, with the light behind her. American primitive, circa 1970, artist unknown. All I need is a hundred years.”

  “A hundred years and I’ll be dead!” said Alden gaily. She flung it out like a garland.

  “They’ll be nice ones, honey,” said Sprague. “Just marry some neighborhood boy.”

  “This neighborhood?” she said.

  Both he and Sprague had roared, of course. “Alden’s family is musical,” he had said, in reparation.

  “How about that!” Sprague had answered, with the trade’s tone-deafness. “I took in a harpsichord once. Inlaid with Wedgwood medallions. Not the blue jasperware either. The gray.”

  He thought now of the girl riding to her destination, for today, somewhere on Long Island—of whether she would ride all her life jogging in the “background” expected of her, through the minor hazards to the final, profound ones—all of her happily submerged life. Right now, as Sprague had said, she was only a mild darkness at whose edges one could see the whole bright pattern of her segment of life, from costume plates of the period to chapbooks of the road-and-home-life of the times. It was in her very voice and no doubt in the fillings of her excellent teeth—all the successive decades of the woman she would almost certainly be, already counterparted by the versions of such women to be seen, in their own decades from blond hair to mauve, in the streets and shops of towns near places like Garrison. And it didn’t have to be that stratum, of course. A same unconscious innocence of itself could work in any—he remembered Hartford. As Sprague had said, innocence of its own import was what was required, of the life that was the subject, as well as of the painter’s hand. And even for those who knew themselves to be the extreme, there might be degrees of innocence. All that was needed was a hundred years.