The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher

by Hortense Calisher

  I get up too and go to the kitchen and we look at one another, each in our pajamas. And now a nice thing happens. He says nothing—no probing for the day’s beginning or for me, as I re-form myself out of dream—but merely reaches behind him, fumbling in a collection of brown paper bags he brought home last night, brings out a blood orange, of the kind he knows fascinates me, and hands it to me. Were my mother here she would say, “Say Good Morning to Your Father, say Thank You!”, not to me really, but to serve notice to the world that she is ready for her obligations, en garde for all the swordthrusts of the day.

  But she is much younger than we are. Two of a kind, we enter the dining room without saying a word. He is carrying the pot of coffee he has made, a low thing for a man in his position to do, as we both know, and akin to the smelly kippers he will toast for breakfast if not watched, and to that itinerant hobnobbing in delicatessens which produces the brown paper bags.

  Saturdays, when my mother returns in a flurry of delivery boys, her beaver toque askew over cheeks fretted rosy from her plundering of the shops, and exclaims, “Done for the week, for the entire week!” my father may reply mildly, “A cuisine should saunter, m’dear. From day to day.” He is thinking then perhaps of his old housekeeper in New Orleans, who used to cuddle his pears in tissue paper and reverse his wine bottles of an evening; but he will say nothing, because of the cheese he hid and forgot, that my mother found last week, that waved in a blossom of maggots when she lifted the sweating, china dome—and because she believes that wine makes you drunk. It is difficult, he knows, for a woman to have married an old man so full of comparisons. But it is difficult too—although this he never says—to have married out of one’s century.

  Now, however, in this hour while the morning freshens at the window, and some of the lamps that are always left burning to chart our household through the night are still on, Time moves for him as it should, like treacle, or even, as in my child’s world, not at all.

  Then, all at once as it seems, the morning paper thumps outside the hall door, the veteran clock in the hall gives its strangled cluck for the half hour, Josie lets fly the flush handle in her bathroom with a bang that can be heard all over the house, the weakening lamps give up the ghost, my brother roars. My father gives me an untranslatable look that I understand perfectly. The century, this one, has spoken; the contest has begun.

  Mrs. Huber, my brother’s nurse, who is as much on my mother’s side as Josie, if anywhere, can be said to be on ours, passes us, bottle in hand, on her way to the kitchen, giving us a starched, thermometric nod for the tacky pair we are.

  “Run, stop the paper boy,” my father says to me. “I want to pay him.” He ambles after me, and I leave them deep in confab at the hall door. I return to the table, at which I find my mother, in her morning chain-mail of ribbon and lace. She wears a boudoir cap to match, shaped like an upside-down ruffled spittoon, but beneath it, her voice is edged with modernity.

  “Whom can he have found to talk to already!” she says.

  When my father returns he has some paper greenery that he tries to stuff into the nonexistent pants pocket of his pajamas. Tickets for the Irish Sweepstakes, it develops, that McDonough, the paper boy, has sold him. My mother sits still for a moment, then says in a stifled voice that of all the fifty heads of families in this building, it is probable that only my father has the time to learn the name of every mendicant who plies its halls, and hadn’t he got a similar packet of tickets last week?—to which my father incautiously replies that the more coverage the better in any gamble. Gamble is one of the money words which produce a known response in my mother; when it does not come as usual I say it for her, since I have my own reasons for currying her favor this morning, and I know by heart all the public expressions of her private terrors.

  “Everything going out,” I say, “nothing coming in.”

  My father’s reaction to this is such as requires her telling him not to encourage me, and her commanding me to dress at once, or else I shall be late for school.

  “Nonsense!” he says, for secretly he resents the school for daring to impose temporal restrictions on any flesh of his flesh. “She has plenty of time.” And such is my faith in his faith that, although he has thus made me late morning after morning, and I am consistently punished in the school world for being also a resident of his, it will be years before I am willing to admit that it was he who was out of step with them.

  “What time is it?” says my mother, and in the same instant closes her eyes and puts the back of her hand against her capped brow. For there are at least eight running clocks in our house in addition to broken ones in drawers and antique ones with stopped faces—almost one for every room—and not one agrees with any other. And this is so not only in our house, but in the houses of all the uncles and aunts on my paternal side. They all have something in their blood that slows clocks, my mother claims, but this is not true, for one clock we have breaks into rowdy tarantellas in the night and must be forcibly calmed—it is more probable that they confuse them. I do not mind our eight—it gives one such a choice.

  “Oh, do you have a headache too,” I say quickly. At once my father’s hand, dry with years, is at my forehead, as I knew it would be, feeling for temperature. I droop cooperatively and let him see that I, nicknamed “hungry Henrietta,” have pushed aside my plate. Death is a word never spoken in our family, since there are so many of an age to expect it, but my father, who will thus deny his own mortality, is always hearing its dragon breath snuffing near the heads of his children, as if he fears that Providence will surely snatch from him early what he neglected to take from it until so late.

  “Now, Joe,” says my mother, “you know as well as I do that she will recover like magic as soon as it’s safely ten o’clock!”

  “Ah, now, now,” he replies, his hand holding safe my cheek, “you know you’d never forgive yourself, if …”

  My mother throws up her hands, and I see that this will not be one of the mornings when, enraged, she will threaten castor oil or the enema, or when, half convinced, she will suggest citrate of magnesia or Feenamint, or any other of those mild unspecifics she claps down us to warn the dark powers that she is aware. She gives me up, the better to concentrate on him. “Tailor came last night,” she says. “He brought back your pearl-gray.”

  My father accepts the prod with grace, having won the first round, and goes off with a tuneless whistle, although he is not a whistling man. This means that even he does not believe me this morning. It is an expression also of his refusal to truckle to schools on principle, on the grounds that they are coarse instruments for the shaping of such quality material as he sends them. Above all, it means that his day has begun as a proper day should, easing itself so gently into the whorls of circumstance that it can scarcely be said to have moved, and with the first prerequisite of a Victorian household—with everybody home.

  My mother has barely time enough to dress and to make one rapid round-trip through the apartment, setting higher the fires under everybody’s caldron, and there he is back at the table—shaved, spatted, cologne on handkerchief, stickpin in lilac tie. And this provokes her most of all, that while his long view of life is so deliberate, he is not at all dilatory about its detail; it is hardly to be borne that of the thousands of trains he has had to make in his life he has, by not only the neatest but the calmest of margins, never missed one. Time is her enemy, and, she knows, the natural enemy of us all; it is not fair that my father’s naïve trust in it works for him as pragmatically as some people’s trust in God. She sits at table, thinking of the enviable tohu-bohu of shaving cuts and indigestion in which the other fifty fathers have long since whirled away, and wonders if this morning, just this morning, after the incontestable interval of the Tribune and the grapefruit, she might not be able to get him off with a couple of three-minute eggs.

  “Fix you some calfs-brains, Misser Joe?” This is Josie, bearing the first cup of coffee, and one of the clocks has just struck
ten. My mother flinches—calves’ brains have to be poached, and after the poaching, breaded, and after the breading, fried.

  “Mmmm,” he says, “and with black butter, eh Josie? Black butter, not brown.”

  Another clock—sometimes they do their best to be helpful—strikes the hour, and my mother murmurs rapidly and bitterly of all the duties before her, including the fact that she must be off to the bank, to which my father says nothing, for he knows that she will not leave the house before him, although he does not know why. It is because she must protect his reputation, since he will not, and she considers it infinitely low-class for a woman to be seen up and abroad when her man is still lounging at home. Forgotten by them, I listen, incognito unless I turn healthy before noon. Nested in the shawls that have been mustered against disease, I mull over which of them is the aristocrat, which the low, over why it is so hard to love the worthy, so warming to be in the presence of one who will allow himself to be deceived. Above all, I wonder which of them is right about Time, not knowing that it is more than my mother and father who do battle here. Contra, contra I hear their dividing voices, as, with an Eurasian aching, I hear them yet.

  The doorbell rings and now my father rises, eager, nostrils sniffing the true pursuit of the morning. For the second prerequisite for a Victorian household is that all morning long its doors, front and back, be applied to by processions of those who either bring special services or require them. Before noon we will have had, besides our regular shipment of eggs from coquettishly pastoral places with names like Robin Roost, of French Vichy from the drugstore, and panatela cigars from the little Spaniard in Harlem, also various but unvarying visits from upholsterers, dressmakers, opticians, even a bootlegger whose ton, like all the others, so remarkably suits us—a rococo little man, trapped like us, between two eras, who carries a cardcase and deals only in wine. In between come the variables, perhaps a former servant girl with her new baby, or a long-lost cousin with her old debts (both of them aware that petitions will not do as well in the afternoon, which is my mother’s dominion), or perhaps an old-clothes man who does not yet know that we never ever sell anything off, we only buy. Even he is detained long enough to learn that he has one commodity for which my father will find some way to reward him—conversation.

  “It’s the Walker-Gordon man,” my mother says, in triumph, and my father sits down. This is the man who delivers the special acidophilus milk for my brother, a routine meant to cease in the first month after birth but prolonged by my father so that the heir may have his traditions too. In other respects it has been a failure—the Walker-Gordon man will not stop to talk.

  Providentially, Mrs. Huber enters to say that if my father wishes to pay his usual visit to the nursery, will he kindly do so at once, so that she may get her charge out in the sun “while it is high.” As soon as he is gone, my mother puts on her hat, not that he will take the hint, but it makes her feel better, and besides, since there is no routine left to him now except his half hour’s reading to my grandmother, and since this has been an exceptionally reasonable morning so far, it is just possible that, if no bells ring, she may get him off by eleven, which is at least a half hour better than par.

  I am quite used to seeing her go about her housewifery for hours on end thus hatted; she was wearing one on that extraordinary day when, in a similar period of waiting, she suddenly lifted her petticoats, revealing to my pleased eye that although she had laughed at my yellow satin Christmas garters she sometimes wore them, took three steps back, and kicked the dining-room clock. There is red in her eye now as she looks in on me in passing, but she will kick no more clocks. The subsequent sal volatile and sweeping-up provided my father with an hour’s valid delay, and the clock returned from repair “same like ever” just as the old watchmaker had promised, that is, running ten minutes later than the one in the hall.

  But joy of joys, here he is and it is only eleven, and he has actually already completed his devoirs to his mother, his matins to his son—it must be the spring, ding-a-ding, for matters ’gin arise, time’s on the run, and father makes for the hatrack, on which his bowler lies. … And two bells ring.

  At the front door. At the back. And now there is no device of wit, verb or cachinnation by which I can follow the final counterpoint of my father, the a cappella exits and returns by which he halts, circles, hedges, rises to the high C of delay, and ultimately, coda, goes.

  Let me try. The ring at the front door belongs to Mr. Krauss the cabinetmaker, who comes to us once a month, to feed the furniture. There is nothing outré about this; we have masses of elderly wood and veneer that apartment-house heat withers, and Mr. Krauss spends an earnest day feeding linseed oil and casauba to our parched gargoyles, griffons and lion-footed tables, never troubled by any fantasy that he might do as well by placing his supplies in the center of the arena and quickly taking his leave. He is a tall, cavernous German, full of Hegelian pauses through which occasionally climbs one memorable phrase—the kind of old-fashioned workingman whose society is always courted by urban men like my father. The ring at the back door belongs to Cyril, one of the West Indian elevator boys, who can also talk Creole. He has come to borrow my father’s roulette wheel, and this I shall not bother to explain; if by now it does not seem perfectly natural, there is no more to be done. No, better to leave them at once, the three of them bogged there forever, Cyril’s winsome causerie on one side, Krauss’s silence on the other, and my father somewhere in between them, with his foot on the stile.

  He goes at last, of course, although I never seem to see him do it, only hearing his parting, customary cry. It is his one mock-fierce threat, one so gay, so mild, so aptly like him, yet its frisson always travels up my spine as no threat of the cat-o’-nine-tails could. “Be a good girl!” he always cries. “Else I’ll throw you into the middle of next week!”

  Now my mother is left in her bevy of women, free to chivy us back into her century. As dusk advances, her siege of him will be renewed by telephone, and pointed the other way, toward us, as she begins to doubt that he will ever again come in the door she was at such pains to get him out of; for an office where there is plenty of time is just as hard to leave, and all the way up the avenue from the subway station there are cracker-barrels which know Mr. Joe. Now, however, she rests. One more morning has passed without realizing her worst fear—that the dreadful, shiftless day will come when he will still be there for lunch.

  But he comes, and evening with him, and all his clan gathered to him from block and cranny, and then his star rises to its full. For in the end he draws us all back with him into his calm antipodes. Supper-talk is slowed, appetites dreamy, now may our griffons protect us, our curtains swaddle. Even my mother has stopped her White Queen running and sinks in her chair, a little muzzy with life, as at those times when she can be persuaded to a single glass of ruby claret. I fall asleep on the davenport, smelling its ageless, mummy leather, hearing the murmur of the elders. The last thing I see is my father, his eyes sweet with triumph. The vital threads of existence are blending, yet endless, the furniture is fed. We are all together with him in the now, rocking in the upholstered moment, in the fur-lined teacup of Time. The lamps are lit for the night, against that death which is change. And tomorrow, da capo, it is all to do over again.

  And now I am awake on another night, tonight. Thirty years have gone by, and I no longer hear the murmuring of the elders. All around me, as I slept back there, my own century was coming to the fore. Flappers, streaking by me in Stutzes and Auburns, were already disappearing over the edge of their era; each day the stock market climbed like the horses of Apollo, yet at nightfall had not come down. Later would come the false stillness of the thirties when hands hung heavy; then, with a proletarian clanking of machinery we would be off again, into a war, into the self-induced palpitations of the forties, as, pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, we changed matter into light, outdistanced sound, and came roaring out upon the strait turnpike of the fifties in our new pink cars.

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nbsp; And now there is nothing left to outdistance, except Time. I am awake wherever I am; is it on the rim of the world, the lip of the Time-machine? All around me there is a cold, sublunary glare, the sourceless light of science fiction, that greens the skin, divorces cell from cell.

  I know where I am now. If there are any gods in this place I must pray to them, as once one could to the comfortable old evils of Ra or Baal. I must pray to s-s-s, or b-oom. For this place is the middle of next week.

  Then, from over the rim of the world, I hear voices, the dividing voices.

  “Run! Run!” says my mother. “Can’t you run a little faster!”

  And then I hear my father’s voice, Rhadamanthine, serene.

  “You have time,” says my father. “All the time in the world.” And from the pinpoint where I stand, I can see it, the old place, lit up bravely as a fish bowl against the dark shadows of eternity, moving slowly while it persuades itself that it stands still—the whole improbable shebang, falling through the clear ether silently, with all its house lights on.

  May-ry

  MY FATHER, BORN IN Richmond about the time Grant took it, was a Southerner therefore, but a very kind man. All of us—children of his sixties, with abolitionist consciences—knew that. The limits of his malice extended to flies, and to people who hit children or mistreated the helpless anywhere. His pocket was always to be picked by any applicant, and no matter how many times my mother, much more of a grenadier, pointed out where they did him in, he remained the softest touch in the world.

  His manners were persistently tender to everyone, and perhaps because he looked and dressed somewhat like Mark Twain and shared a small, redeeming slice of Twain’s humor, nobody ever seemed to find this saccharine. He was, for instance, the only person I ever knew who could chuck a carriage baby under its chin and goo at it—“Coo-chee-coo!”—without making anybody gag at the sight, or doubt for one minute that it was done out of pure spontaneity and love. Yes, he was the kindest man in the world. Yet, when the time came, it was my father who was purely unkind to our colored maid Mary—May-ry.