The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher

by Hortense Calisher

  “I—what did you say?” I said.

  She looked down tenderly at her clutch of mail. “I’ve joined the Party,” she said.

  Familiar as the phrase had become to us all, for the moment I swear I thought she meant the Republican Party. “What’s that got—” I said, and then I stopped, understanding.

  “Honey love,” she said. The moonstones rose, shining, on her breast. “I mean the Communist Party.”

  “Ginny Doll Leake! You haven’t!”

  “Cross my heart, I have!” she said, falling, as I had, into the overtones of our teens. “Cross my heart hope to die or kiss a pig!” And taking my silence for consent, she tossed her head gaily and led me up, past the Miller Bodice Lining, past the Apex Art Trays, to the top floor.

  Ida opened the door, still in her white uniform, and greeted me warmly, chortling “Miss Charlotte! Miss Charlotte!” over and over before she released me.

  I don’t know what I expected to find behind her—divans perhaps, and the interchangeable furniture of Utopia built by R. H. Macy—certainly not what confronted me. For what I saw, gazing from the foyer where the abalone-shell lamp and the card tray reposed on the credenza as they had always done, was the old sitting room on Madison Avenue. Royal Doulton nymph vases, Chinese lamps, loveseats, “ladies” chairs, and luster candelabras, it was all there, even to the Bruxelles curtains through which filtered the felt-tasting air of Fourteenth Street. Obviously the place had been a huge loft, reclaimed with much expense and the utmost fidelity, “Lenchburg” Ascendant, wherever it might be. Even the positions of the furniture had been retained, with no mantel, but with the same feeling of orientation toward a nonexistent one. In the bathroom the rod held the same weight of ancestral embroidery. The only change I could discern was in the bedroom, where Ginny Doll’s nursery chintz and painted rattan had been replaced by Mrs. Leake’s walnut wedding suite and her point d’esprit spread.

  I returned to the parlor and sat down on the loveseat, where I had always sat, watching, bemused, while Ida bore in the tray as if she had been waiting all that time in the wings. “The music box,” I asked. “Do you still have it?” Of course they did, and while it purled, I listened to Ginny Doll’s story.

  After Mrs. Leake’s death, Aunt Tot had intended to take Ginny Doll on a world cruise, but had herself unfortunately died. For a whole year Ginny Doll had sat on in the old place, all Aunt Tot’s money waiting in front of her like a Jack Horner pie whose strands she dared not pull. Above all she craved to belong to a “crowd”; she spent hours weakly dreaming of suddenly being asked to join some “set” less deliquescent than the First Families of Virginia, but the active world seemed closed against her, an impenetrable crystal ball. Finally the family doctor insisted on her getting away. She had grasped at the only place she could think of, an orderly mountain retreat run by a neo-spiritualistic group known as Unity, two of whose Town Hall lectures she had attended with an ardently converted Daughter. The old doctor, kindly insisting on taking charge of arrangements, had mistakenly booked her at a “Camp Unity” in the Poconos. It had turned out to be a vacation camp, run, with a transparent disguise to which no one paid any attention, by the Communist Party.

  “It was destiny,” said Ginny Doll, smiling absently at a wall on which hung, among other relics, a red-white-and-blue embroidered tribute to a distaff uncle who had been mayor of Memphis. “Destiny.”

  I had to agree with her. From her ingenuous account, and from my own knowledge of the social habits of certain “progressives” at my husband’s college, I could see her clearly, expanding like a Magnolia grandiflora in that bouncingly dedicated air. In a place where the really eminent were noncommittal and aliases were worn like medals, no one questioned her presence or affiliation; each group, absorbed in the general charivari, assumed her to be part of another. In the end she achieved the réclame that was to grow. She was a Southerner, and a moneyed woman. They had few of either, and she delighted them with her vigorous enmity toward the status quo. Meanwhile her heart recognized their romantic use of the bogus; she bloomed in this atmosphere so full of categories, and of men. In the end she had found, if briefly, a categorical man.

  “Yes, it must have been destiny,” I said. Only kismet could have seen to it that Ginny Doll should meet, in the last, dialectic-dusted rays of a Pocono sunset, a man named Lee. “Lighthorse Harry” or “Robert E.,” I wondered, but she never told me whether it was his first name or last, or gave any of the usual details, although in the years to come she often alluded to what he had said, with the tenacious memory of the woman who had once, perhaps only once, been preferred. It was not fantasy; I believed her. It had been one of those summer affairs of tents and flashlights, ending when “Party work” reclaimed him, this kind of work apparently being as useful for such purpose as any other. But it had made her a woman of experience, misunderstood at last, able to participate in female talk with the rueful ease of the star-crossed—and to wear those hats.

  “I’m not bitter,” she said. He had left her for the Party, and also to it. Her days had become as happily prescribed as a belle’s, her mail as full. She had found her “set.”

  “And then—you know I went through analysis?” she said. She had chanced upon the Party during its great psychiatric era, when everybody was having his property-warped libido rearranged. Hers had resulted in the rearrangement of her teeth.

  “The phases I went through!” She had gone through a period of wearing her hair in coronet braids; under her analyst’s guidance she cut it. With his approval—he was a Party member—she had changed her name to Ginevra. He would have preferred her to keep the teeth as they were, as a symbol that she no longer hankered after the frivolities of class. But they were the one piece of inherited property for which she had no sentiment. Too impatient for orthodontia, she had had them extracted, and a bridge inserted. “And do you know what I did with them?” she said. “He said I could, if I had to, and I did.”

  “With the teeth?”

  She giggled. “Honey, I put them in a bitty box, and I had the florist put a wreath around it. And I flew down to Lenchburg and put them on Mamma’s grave.”

  Something moved under my feet, and I gave a slight scream. It wasn’t because of what she had just said. Down home, many a good family has its Poe touch of the weirdie, my own as well, and I quite understood. But something was looking out at me from under the sofa, with old, rheumy eyes. It was the pug.

  “It’s Junius! But it can’t be!” I said.

  “Basket, Junius! Go back to your basket!” she said. “It’s not the one you knew, of course. It’s that one’s child. Let’s see, she married her own brother, so I guess this one’s her cousin as well.” Her tone was rambling and genealogical, the same in which my old aunt still defined a cousinship as once, twice or thrice removed. And I saw that the tip of her nose could still blush. “Old Junius was really a lady, you know,” she said.

  When I rose to leave, Ida followed us to the hallway. “You come back, Miss Charlotte,” she said. “You come back, hear? And bring your family with you. I’ll cook ’em a dinner. Be right nice to have you, ’stead all these tacky people Miss Ginny so took up with.”

  “Now Ida,” said Ginny Doll. “Charlotte,” she said, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned—” Her moonstones glittered again, in the mirror over the credenza. It was the single time she ever expounded theory. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned—it’s that real people are tacky.”

  I did go back of course, and now it was she who gave the social confidences, I who listened with fascination. Once or twice she had me to dinner with some of her “set,” not at all to convert me, but rather as a reigning hostess invites the quiet friend of other days to a brief glimpse of her larger orbit, the better to be able to talk about it later. For, as everyone now knows, she had become a great Party hostess. She gave little dinners, huge receptions, the ton of which was just as she would have kept it anywhere—excellent food, notable liqueurs and the Edwardi
an solicitude to which she had been born. As a Daughter and a D.A.R., she had a special exhibit value as well. Visiting dignitaries were brought to her as a matter of course; rising functionaries, when bidden there, knew how far they had risen. Her parlor was the scene of innumerable Young Communist weddings, and dozens of Marxian babies embarked on life with one of her silver spoons. The Party had had its Mother Bloor. Ginny Doll became its Aunt.

  Meanwhile we kept each other on as extramural relaxation, the way people do keep the friend who knew them “when.” Just because it was so unlikely for either of us (I was teaching again), we sometimes sewed together, took in a matinee. But I had enough glimpses of her other world to know what she ignored in it. No doubt she enjoyed the sense of conspiracy—her hats grew a trifle larger each year. And she did her share of other activities—if always on the entertainment committee. But her heart held no ruse other than the pretty guile of the Virginian, and I never heard her utter a dialectical word. Had she had the luck to achieve a similar success in “Lenchburg” her response would have been the same—here, within a circle somewhat larger but still closed, the julep was minted for all. She lived for her friends, who happened to be carrying cards instead of leaving them.

  She did not, however, die for her friends. Every newspaper reader, of course, knows how she died. She was blown up in that explosion in a union hall on Nineteenth Street, the one that also wrecked a delicatessen, a launderette and Mr. Kravetz’s tailoring shop next door. The union had had fierce anti-pro-Communist troubles for years, with beatings and disappearances for years, and when Ginny Doll’s remains, not much but enough, were found, it was taken for granted that she had died in the Party. The Communist press did nothing to deny this. Some maintained that she had been wiped out by the other side; others awarded her a higher martyrdom, claiming that she had gone there equipped like a matronly Kamikaze, having made of herself a living bomb. Memorial services were held, the Ginevra Leake Camp Fund was set going, and she was awarded an Order of Stalin, second class. She is a part of their hagiolatry forever.

  But I happen to know otherwise. I happen to know that she was on Nineteenth Street because it was her shopping neighborhood, and because I had spoken to her on the telephone not an hour before. She was just going to drop a blouse by at Mr. Kravetz’s, she said, then she’d meet me at 2:30 at McCutcheon’s, where we were going to pick out some gros-point she wanted to make for her Flint & Horner chairs.

  I remember waiting for her for over an hour, thinking that she must be sweet-talking Mr. Kravetz, who was an indifferent tailor but a real person. Then I phoned Ida, who knew nothing, and finally caught my train. We left on vacation the next day, saw no papers, and I didn’t hear of Ginny Doll’s death until my return.

  When I went down to see Ida, she was already packing for Lynchburg. She had been left all Ginny Doll’s worldly goods and an annuity; the rest of Aunt Tot’s money must have gone you-know-where.

  “Miss Charlotte, you pick yourself a momento,” said Ida. We were standing in the bedroom, and I saw Ida’s glance stray to the bureau, where two objects reposed in nature morte. “I just could’n leave ’em at the morgue, Miss Charlotte,” she said. “An’ now I can’t take ’em, I can’t throw ’em out.” It was Ginny Doll’s hat, floated clear of the blast, and her false teeth.

  I knew Ida wanted me to take them. But I’m human. I chose the music box. As I wrapped it, I felt Ida’s eye on me. She knew what noblesse oblige meant, better than her betters. So I compromised, and popped the teeth in too.

  When I got home, I hid them. I knew that the children, scavengers all, would sooner or later come upon them, but it seemed too dreadful to chuck them out. Finally, it came to me. I taped them in a bitty box, masqued with a black chiffon rose, and took them to our local florist, who sent them to a florist in Lynchburg, to be wreathed and set on Mrs. Leake’s grave.

  Nevertheless, whenever I heard the children playing the music box, I felt guilty. I had somehow failed Ginny Doll, and the children too. Then, when Mr. Khrushchev’s speech came along, I knew why. I saw that no one but me could clear Ginny Doll’s name, and give her the manifesto she deserves.

  Comrades! Fellow members of Bourgeois Society! Let there be indignation in the hall! It is my duty to tell you that Ginevra Leake, alias Virginia Darley, alias Ginny Doll, was never an enemy of Our People at all. She never deserted us, but died properly in the gracious world she was born to, inside whose charmed circle everyone, even the Juniuses, are cousins of one another! She was an arch-individualist, just as much as Stalin. She was a Southern Lady.

  And now I can look my children in the eye again. The Russians needn’t think themselves the only ones to rehabilitate people posthumously. We Southrons can take care of our own.

  The Woman Who Was Everybody

  AT A QUARTER OF eight, young Miss Abel was prodded out of sleep as usual by the harsh clanging of the bell in the church around the corner. It went on for as much as forty or fifty times, each clank plummeting instantly into silence, as if someone were beating iron against a stone. She did not get up at once, but lay there, seeing herself rise with the precision of a somnambulist, go from bathroom to kitchenette in the blind actions which would dissolve the sediment of sleep still in her eyes, in her bones. In her throat, a sick resistance to the day had already begun its familiar mounting, the pulse of a constant ache on which sleep had put only a delusory quietus. Lying there, she wondered which unwitting day of the past had been the one on which she must have exchanged the bright morning dower of childhood, that indolent assurance that the day was a nimbus of possibilities, for this heavy ache that collected in the throat like a catarrhal reminder that as yesterday was dusty, so would be today.

  There had been nothing in her childhood, certainly, to warrant that early dowered expectancy, nothing in the girlhood spent in her mother’s rooming house near that part of the Delaware River consecrated to the Marcus Hook refineries, where the great fungoid tanks bloomed oppressively over all, draining the frontal streets like theirs, which were neither country lanes nor town blocks, but only in-between passageways where the privet died hardily, without either pavement or neon to console one for its death. In that bland, unimpassioned climate the days had been blurred exhalations of the factories, the river and the people, dragging on into a darkness that was like the fainter, sooted, interchangeable breath of all of these. Perhaps the days had rung with expectancy for her, nevertheless, because from the first, for as long as she could remember, she had been so sure of getting out, away. As, of course, she had.

  She swung sideways out of bed and clamped her feet on the floor, rose and trundled to the bathroom, the kitchenette. Boiled coffee was the quickest and most economical; watching the grounds spray and settle on the bubbling water, she took comfort from the small action. Everywhere in New York now toasters clicked, clocks rang, and people rising under the weight of the new day took heart from each little milestone of routine, like children, walking past a strange paling, who touch placatingly every third picket, hoping this will bring them through safe.

  Fumbling without choice for one of the two dresses of the daily requisite black, she peered out the window into the alley beyond. The slick gray arms of the dwarfed tree, which grew, anonymous and mineral, from its humus of dust and concrete, were charitably fuzzed with light, and above them the water tanks and girders of the roofs beyond stood out against the fine yellow morning, clarified and glistening. Night could still down the city, absorbing it for all its rhinestone effrontery, but the mornings crept in like applicants for jobs, nuzzling humbly against the masked granite, saying hopefully, “Do you suppose … is there anything to be made of me?”

  Behind her, except for the unmade bed, the room had the fierce, wooden neatness of the solitary, beginning householder. She turned from the window and made up the bed swiftly so that the immobile room might greet her so, with all its rigid charm of permanence, at nightfall. Now there was nothing out of place except the letter from her mother, read and le
ft crumpled on the table the night before.

  None of the rooms in the house at Marcus Hook had ever really belonged to her mother, her sister Pauline or herself. The changing needs of the roomers came first—the workmen who had a wife coming or a wife leaving, the spinsters who made a religion of drafts and the devotional bath, the elderly male and female waifs who had to “retrench” farther and farther back into the cheapest recesses of the house, until the final retrenchment, to the home of a relative, could be delayed no longer.

  The family, forever shifting, took what was left over. The best times would have been when the three of them slept in the big front sitting-room together, had not these also been the bad periods when the larger rooms went begging, and they and the most unimportant, delinquent roomer were almost on the same footing. But at all times, mornings the kitchen was never clear of “privilegers,” evenings the parlor creaked and sighed with those for whom solitude was the worst of privileges. And late at night when, in no matter what bed or room one might be, there was still the padding in the corridors, the leakage of faucets, then the house rumored its livelihood most plainly of all, having no being other than in the sneaked murmurs, the soft crepitations of strangers.

  She sipped the coffee, ate a roll, smoothing out her mother’s letter. “Mrs. Tregarthen, she lived in New York once, says you are down in a terrible neighborhood and for the same money you could get into a business girls club. The Tregarthens still have the sitting-room thank God. I am so glad you are fixed in the Section Manager job, all that time you studied was not wasted after all. They say even the elevator girls have to be college now. You must be on your feet a lot too, be sure you have the proper shoes. Will you use the store discount and buy Pauline a white dress for graduation, size 14, something not fancy I can dye later. Let me know how much. I am so glad of the discount.”