The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher

by Hortense Calisher

  “Is the war really and truly over?” said Hester.

  “Indeed it is, indeed it is,” said her mother, still looking out the window. Several people had been pushed off the curb nearest the cab. One of them, an elderly man, rose painfully, scrabbling for his hat.

  Hester’s fingers tightened on the mauled rose. She put her hand on the fur band of her mother’s sleeve, then drew it back. There was no use asking her again about Mr. Katz. Just before they got out of the cab at their door, her hand crept out again and touched the sleeve. “Do you suppose … do you suppose it’s because I’m the best—that Mr. Duryea dances with me?”

  Her mother, fumbling for change, looked up as if she were looking over the rims of eyeglasses, although she wore none. “Might be,” she said, and gave her a pat to hurry her out of the cab. “But it’s more likely because you’re far and away the tallest.”

  In the weeks after the Armistice, the city faded slowly through an anticlimactic New Year into the liverish restlessness of off-season. It was now that almost weatherless time when even the sparrows seemed to idle in the trees, and through days the color of flat soda water one saw more clearly the chapped curbstones of the streets. At the Elkins’ there was quiet, too; even the number of family visitors had fallen off. A nurse had come to stay, whose only function seemed to be the arranging in the spare room of packages which arrived constantly, or to watch, squinting, while Mrs. Elkin, who spent most of her days in a wrapper, sat nibbling shamefacedly from little plates, or even from paper bags. Mornings Mr. Elkin could hardly be got out of the house, and he came home earlier and earlier, stopping to kiss Hester as she played, for the first time unsupervised, with the gangs of children in the streets.

  There, as in the papers read aloud at the Elkin dinner table, the talk was all of a great victory parade with which the city was to greet General O’Ryan and the victorious Twenty-seventh. At Madison Square, statues and pylons of plaster were to form a Court of the Honored Dead. The Washington Arch was to be transformed into an electrified version of the Arc de Triomphe. Fifth Avenue was to have arches hung with glass jewels, in front of the longest continuous grandstand in history. And here, in the matter of the grandstand, history reached out to the Elkins’ dinner table. For according to the outcry in the papers, in spite of all that welter of plaster and wood and glass, no seats in the grandstand had been provided for those wounded soldiers who had been returned to their country in a condition which prevented their being honored either as part of the line of march—or in Madison Square. A group of merchants whose places of business fronted on Fifth Avenue had arranged, angrily and proudly, to accommodate these. Oakley and Company had been allotted four.

  On the morning of the parade, Hester, waking before it was light, heard the milkman’s horse clopping in the street below. By the time she reached the window it had vanished, but she could still pick out the fading tramp of its hoofs and the lurch of the wagon as it stopped far down the block. The growing morning had a glinting change in it; there was a green trickiness in the March air, and paper scraps scuffled high above the streets. She dressed hurriedly, without calling for help in buttoning the backs of her camisole and sailor dress. Dragging a chair to the closet, she took from a high shelf a blue serge cape and a Milan straw hat with a broad band trailing from its rear. With luck, since her mother was not to be of the party watching the parade from the Oakley and Company premises, no one would notice that Hester was not wearing her winter coat and had substituted for woolen knee socks the short, pale silk ones which were always the true demarcation of spring.

  At the breakfast table, occupied only by her father and the nurse, no one spoke. The nurse looked at them with that slit-eyed remoteness with which she regarded their family life, as if she were telling herself and them, “My concern, after all, is for my patient.” Mr. Elkin ate abstractedly, fidgeting without his newspaper, which had not yet arrived. They were to go in the touring car, for which they had a special permit. The streets were to be closed to all downtown traffic by eight.

  Downstairs, the open car was waiting, the two aunts, here this time by invitation, already in the back seat. Hester got in between them, noting with disappointment that, except for the veils, they were dressed much as usual: Flora in the violent stripings and trembling arrays of jet on which hardly any extra would be noticeable, and Mamie in that lofty dowdiness which exempted her from style.

  “How’s Hattie?” said Flora.

  “Wish I didn’t have to go,” said Mr. Elkin, getting in with the driver, “but the nurse is with her.”

  “Any time?”

  “Any time.”

  “Isn’t this child dressed rather thin?” said Mamie.

  The car started, drowning out Mamie’s remark. Hester squeezed down as far as possible between the aunts. Near her left ear, the tiny percussions of Flora’s jet went on and on in a rhythm that aped the car’s, then paused.

  “What are we stopping for?” said Flora.

  Hester, sitting up, saw that they had pulled up in front of one of the tenements on Amsterdam Avenue.

  “I thought I better get the Katzes there with us,” said Mr. Elkin.

  “Oh good God, Joe,” said Flora.

  “I know, I know,” he answered. “Pull down those two extra seats, will you. Hester, you go on in and tell them we’re here. It’s the ground floor right.” He pointed up at a window. “Just knock and tell them. I don’t think there’s a bell.”

  Hester went up the stoop and into a vestibule floored with linoleum, in it a great worn hole. The door groaned closed and she was left almost in the dark. Stairs rose sharply in front of her, their risers just visible. Far above, at least four flights higher, a skylight glimmered. There was no definite sound, but the building murmured, nevertheless, with the unseen nearness of people. The riband hanging down her back rustled in a steady, poking draught, and she flipped it quickly forward over her shoulder. A door at the right had a glass pane at the top, over which lozenge-patterned paper had been pasted. She knocked. She heard the tinkle of a plate or a spoon being pushed back, a creak, a tread—all the noises, begging for mystery, which sounded so exciting from behind closed doors.

  The door opened and Mrs. Katz stuck her head out on a level with Hester’s. Her woolly fringe caught on the brim of the straw hat, and Hester looked for a moment straight through Mrs. Katz’s spectacles at eyes which rolled like large blue immies behind them.

  “Annnnh!” said Mrs. Katz, clapping her hands. She patted Hester into the room and shut the door. “Katz! Katz, they are here. The child is here. Come, Katz!”

  In the room, there was so much, so fantastically much, that at first Hester could not untangle Mr. Katz from the rest. This was not merely the furniture, which seemed to consist of innumerable small mounds, so swagged with throws and coverlets and scarves that tables could not be told from chairs. The walls, the surfaces of the mounds, the ceiling, from which objects hung on strings, the very air was crammed with such a miscellany that Hester’s eyes could not take it in, but had to stop, blinking, on one thing, until recognition set in. This thing resolved itself into Mr. Katz, who lay on one of the larger mounds, looking vaguely in front of him. He was dressed as he had been at the garden party, except for a wide collar of flannel which was tied around his neck with two long ears sticking up behind.

  “Annnnh,” said Mrs. Katz, nodding and smiling at Hester. “He has with the throat.” Still nodding, she scuttled to Mr. Katz’s side and began pecking at him with little croons and pats. “Up, Katz. Come. Up!”

  Hester stared at one of the walls of the corner in which Mr. Katz lay. It was tacked from top to bottom with scraps of lace, colored and plain, pleated and flat, fanned out straight or puffed in bows that quivered with dust. On a shelf above his head, several yards of it were festooned over drapery cards. Between these there was a signed picture of the banquet variety, and a placard which said Henkel Brothers. Fine Laces and Veilings. Beneath the shelf, almost touched by one of Mr. Katz’s fla
nnel ears, there was a collar and cuff set, tacked in dainty alignment, as if waiting for a neck and two wrists to sprout neatly into place out of the wall.

  Hester looked at the other side of the corner. This wall was cross-hatched with narrow shelves, dozens of them, on which there were ranged, almost there tinkled, an army of china trifles: Dutch boys, pagodas, slippers filled with pincushions, tankards and bud vases gilded with the names of towns or painted with simpering girls whose ringlets ended in a curl flowing artlessly over a shoulder. Among these, too, there were pictures, and one large placard—Weinstein and Gaby. Jobbers to the trade.

  Hester turned on her heel. Here was a far corner devoted to buttons, there, beyond it, objects she could not identify. Each section had its photographs and placards. Even among the things which swung from the ceiling—an assortment of feathers—there was a sizable plume to which a placard had been pinned. On the mantelpiece, arranged as in a showcase, there was something—familiar.

  “Katz!” said the crooning voice behind her. “Mr. Elkin is waiting. On you he depends, Katz.”

  At the sound of her father’s name, the array on the mantelpiece merged and made sense. Set there, exactly as in the anteroom of Oakley and Company, were samples of all its products. Here were the bottles with their intricate labels: Lilac, Parma Violet, Coreopsis of Japan, and Triple Essence of California Rose. On tripods between them were the “compacts,” small rounds of satin centered with moiré rosebuds, each box containing a hard cake of powder, or a flaming oval of orange or purplish rouge. There was even a display of one of Mr. Elkin’s transient ventures—tiny vials of rosy or greenish liquid (each with a brass clip at its back), which had been designed to hook onto a lady’s corselette or inside the lacy masses of her décolletage, there to dispel a mysterious fragrance as she breathed—but which, Hester knew, had somehow or other “not caught on.” Set in the center of all this, flanked by many gilded cardboard trademarks, were two pictures.

  She moved nearer. One was a picture of the Oakley office. The other was a picture of herself. It was a replica of one on her father’s desk downtown—of herself at the age of three, in white corduroy bonnet with lining frilling her solemn face, coat with belt absurdly far below the waist, the hem just touching the kid uppers of her patent boots. Scrawled in her father’s fancy hand, on this copy, however, an inscription ran right across the boots: To Mr. and Mrs. Katz. Regards. From the Coreopsis Kid.

  “Annnnh. Now!” said Mrs. Katz in a failing voice. Hester turned. Mr. Katz was on his feet. He still had a vague look of waiting for instruction, but he was vertical.

  “Come,” said Mrs. Katz. She stepped nimbly in front of Mr. Katz, as if she were used to shielding him from notice. “You looking samples?” She pointed a knotty paw. “When Katz was in Lace.” She pointed again. “When he was Souvenirs.”

  “What are those?” Hester indicated the far corner.

  “Findings,” said Mrs. Katz. “Ledder Findings. Was before Buttons.” She followed Hester’s gaze to the mantel. “Annnnh,” said Mrs. Katz, folding her hands. “The Company.”

  Behind her, Mr. Katz jackknifed so suddenly that Hester thought he had fallen over, until she saw that he was tugging at several packages which were piled on the floor under the mantel.

  “Nah, nah, Katz.” said Mrs. Katz, with a fretful sob. She tweaked at the flannel. “Today is holiday, remember, Katz?”

  There was a sharp rat-a-tat at the door.

  “Annnnh, Gott,” Mrs. Katz sighed, and pulled Mr. Katz upright. She pressed her face close to Hester’s “Sometimes Katz cannot think how to come any place but home. Versteh?” she whispered. “So he brings them here, the bundles, and we go out togedder. Him to carry. Me to show where.”

  There was another, louder knock at the door. “Like podnership, see?” whispered Mrs. Katz. She put a blunt forefinger against her pleading, wrinkled muzzle. “Sh-h-h. You are good girl, nu?” Then she scurried to the door. “Yes, yes! We are ready!” she cried, and flung the door open, bobbing low behind it, almost in a curtsy.

  “Well, please come on then,” said Mr. Elkin, in a voice more indulgent than his expression. “Or we’ll never get there.” He looked at Mr. Katz, shook his head, then took Katz by the arm and led him out the door.

  Hester and Mrs. Katz waited on the stoop while Mr. Katz was inserted in the front seat of the car, next to the driver. Mrs. Katz put a hand on Hester’s upper arm and squeezed it. “Big strong girl,” she muttered. She nodded closer, so that Hester again looked through the spectacles at the round, swimming eyes. “Sometimes I carry, too,” whispered Mrs. Katz.

  Mrs. Katz was to have shared the back seat with the aunts, but with the mulishness of the timid, she pleaded the anxiety of her “podnership” and was finally allowed to get up front. From the back seat only her nodding bonnet was visible, next to the tartan shawl she had wrapped carefully around Katz.

  Mr. Elkin got in one of the small seats facing the back, turning around to hand the driver a large engraved card. “Drive down to Washington Square and back up, whichever way they’ll let you go,” he said. “I think this will get you through.” He sat Hester on the little seat next to him and cradled her hand in his lap. “I want Hester to see the Arch.”

  It was still very early. The car made good headway, creeping along the battered streets near the East River.

  “How many boys will you have, Joe?” said Flora.

  “Four, they said.”

  “They say some of them …” Mamie said nervously. “Basket cases.”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that, Mamie.” Mr. Elkin gnawed his mustache. “They wouldn’t.”

  Hester saw the soldiers in her mind, baskets over their poor, mad heads, with holes woven for the strange, lucent eyes.

  “Joe,” Flora’s voice cracked, parrotlike, above the motor hum. She motioned with her chin toward the front seat. “Is he always like that?” she said, lowering her voice. “Really, you ought to realize.”

  “On and off,” said her father. “He’s not much use around the office any more. Still pretty fair on deliveries, though.”

  Hester lowered her eyes to the hand held in her father’s and counted her breaths. In, out. In, out.

  “Couldn’t you mail?” said Mamie.

  “Oh …” said her father, looking vaguely out the window. “There’s always something.”

  “You mean you see to it there’s something,” said Flora. “That business will collapse of its own dead weight one of these days.”

  Mr. Elkin looked patiently back at the two who had been part of the dead weight for years. “They haven’t a soul. I’m trying to get them into a home.”

  “Daddy,” said Hester, “what is the Corylopsis Kid?”

  “The Coreopsis Kid?” Mr. Elkin squeezed her hand with an absent smile. “That’s you, m’dear.”

  “Me?”

  Mr. Elkin nodded over her head at the aunts. “Louis Orenstein, wasn’t it, who started it with that telegram the day she was born. ‘Three cheers for the Coreopsis Kid.’”

  “What a fool you were that day, Joe,” said Flora, her jet beads quivering with chuckles. “What an old fool.”

  “Why not?” said Mr. Elkin. “I’d waited a long time for that day.”

  “And the telegrams you sent out later,” said Mamie with a pursed smile. “Eight hundred of them. ‘Greetings, from Oakley and Company and the Coreopsis Kid.’”

  “Well, the line’s known from coast to coast,” said Mr. Elkin. “And so am I.” He looked down at Hester. “And so is Hester. When I’m on the road I get it all the time. ‘How’s the Coreopsis Kid, Joe?’”

  Suddenly, turning a corner, they were at the Arch. It gleamed in front of them like an enormous croquet wicket massed with jewels. Then it was hidden by the blue bulk of a policeman. When he saw the card, his face cleared. “I’ll get you over to the curb, sir. You’ll have to wait there a bit, but we’ll get you through.”

  At the curb, the people packed swelling behind the barrier lo
oked enviously into the long car. The two aunts held up their bosoms, looking stiffly ahead with the hauteur of influence. The car edged into a line of others and stopped, pointing straight at the Arch. To the north, south, and west, phalanx after phalanx of waiting uniforms quivered in the early morning sun. Here and there commands sparked suddenly above a continuous surf of sound. To the left of the car, a horse curvetted and was reined in, his nostrils distended but still.

  Hester looked at the Arch. Hung with a dazzle of light, it swayed with the sound of thousands of colors chiming softly together. It kept time with the dazzle in her chest, inside of which a music box tintinnabulated over and over, “Coreopsis … Coreopsis … Coreopsis Kid.”

  She stood up, and stepped on Mamie’s foot. At Mamie’s sharp yelp, she sat down again.

  “When that baby comes,” said Mamie, nursing her foot, “I know someone whose nose is going to be out of joint.”

  “Mamie,” said Mr. Elkin, “sometimes you haven’t the sense of a mule.”

  Hester stared at Mamie. Idly, she noted how well her aunt’s triangular mouth suited her sly bird-speech, was perhaps too small for anything more, but her own answer came from far below the stare. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess Daddy can afford us all.”

  A murmur from the crowd drowned out her father’s guffaw. The lines of soldiers tautened, each to a single glitter. Waves of brass washed over them, and the glitter moved with the drums. Now everyone in the crowd was throwing something—packs of cigarettes, oranges, paper rosettes, and streamers of tricolore. The aunts dug down in a hamper and brought out things to throw, too. From the windows around the Square, confetti flaked and fell through the air. Some of the brilliant bits spiraled onto the car, and Hester, leaning against her father, raised her face to receive them, as she did in winter with the first, slow feathers of snow. Her father held her, as he would uphold them all. And there was no other quite so dashing name in the whole Oakley and Company line.