The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher

by Hortense Calisher

  Over and above the flood of real “goods” that his father sold twinklingly, unfailingly, in the backslapping camaraderie of business, his father was a salesman, he thought—a salesman of the past. Rootless though the family had long been, in the shifting way of the apartment dweller, because of his father they had continued to live as if they still had attics and cellars, their closets and rooms crammed with the droppings of generations, the yellowed inanimates that had pitilessly survived the transient fingerprints of the flesh. When he, his son, had looked about him at the mass of young men at college with him, he had felt that, compared to his own, their backgrounds were as truncated, as flat, as their tidy one-step-above hire-purchase homes, where a family picture was an anachronism that must not mar the current scheme, where the old and worn must immediately be slip-covered with the new. And it had seemed to him then, that although he had never had the permanence of a homestead, of the landed people, he was rooted, he had been nourished, in the rich compost of his father’s reminiscence.

  But now, in the taut room, where the silence stretched like a wire vibrating with impulses that were never heard, he felt suddenly that his father had always been as remote to him as a figure in a pageant, or as a storyteller between whose knees he had been gripped, enthralled, but whose recitative backward glance had never bent itself to him. And torn, half by a jealousy for that panoramic experience, that sweep of life that he and his own contemporaries might never duplicate, he looked across at his father with regret, feeling that he, the son, had listened indeed, but had never himself been heard. From all the crooning corners of his childhood he could hear his father’s teasing, crowing voice: “Sure, boy. I’ve been everywhere! I’ve been to Europe, I-rup, O-rup, and Stir-rup!”

  As in the faded primary tints of a lithograph on a thumbed calendar, he could see, he could almost remember the dusty provincial streets and lanes of the post-Civil War Richmond of sixty-five years ago, and the little boy with black Fauntleroy curls being dragged along by the gaunt, arrogant Negro woman, past the jeers of the street urchins.

  “Plenty of professional Southerners talk about their colored mammies—but Awnt Nell—she was a real woman. Freed woman too, but she would never leave your grandmother. And proud of my curls—as if they were her own boy’s! Kept me getting in fights over ’em. Then she took to follering around behind me, ’til I went to Maw and cried to have ’em cut off. Stayed with us too; wouldn’t go away even after Paw’s business went bad with the rest.” … The remembered voice went on, like a record he could pluck out from the years at will.

  “Guess I should have been a lawyer. Always wanted to be.” Yes, his father would have liked that—the poised strut in front of the attentive jury, the poured-out display of the enormous, sometimes inaccurately pronounced vocabulary.

  “Left school too early. Heh! The Academy—that’s where we went in those days—all religions alike. Academy of St. Joseph. That old harridan there—Miss Atwell—she never did like me. One day she said to me ‘Joe! Come up here!’ And she had the ruler in her hand. Now your grandmother—she never raised her hand to the eight of us, and she kept us all in line. I wasn’t gawn to stand for any ruler rapped on my knuckles. So I walked up there … and I stood there … and I put out my hand. And when she raised the ruler I took it, and broke it over my knee, and threw it out the window. I left there and I never went back. Never. Only time I ever made my mother cry. Swore I would never make her cry again. I was a good son, and I didn’t. But I never went back there again.”

  Then the first job—the grocery store—almost like the stereotype beginnings of the self-made American, but with the imprint of the fastidious Joe, the bon vivant, the fin de siècle beau-to-be, already implicit in the tale.

  “That herring barrel! Seemed ’s if everybody who came into that store wanted herring. So I’d reach my hand down in that cold slithery mess of stuff and haul up one of those herring. Ugh! Quit that job as quick as I could … went into a lawyer’s office licking stamps. At the end of a week I went to Mr. Fitzmorris (your grandmother was married from his house) and I said ‘Mr. Fitzmorris, I want to leave.’

  “‘Why Joe,’ he says, ‘what’s the matter?’

  “‘Mr. Fitzmorris,’ I said, ‘my tongue is sore!’

  “He sat back and laughed and laughed. ‘Why Joe,’ he says, ‘we’ll give you a sponge!’”

  In the stereopticon of his mind he could see his father’s hand reaching down into the barrel, but somehow it was not the raw hand of the thirteen-year-old boy, but the elegant knotted hand with the raised blue veins and the brown diamond finger ring, in the graphically illustrative gesture he had seen again and again, the hand he saw now drooping over the sofa, lifted imperceptibly now and again in the current of slumber.

  Glancing back into the dimness of the foyer, he could see the huge triple-doored bookcase, its sagging shelves stuffed three-deep with the books that had been his father’s education. He thought of his own studies, the slow acquisition of the accepted opinions on the world’s literature, sedulously gathered from the squeezings of the compartmented minds of his professors, the easy access to the ponderous libraries with their mountains of ticketed references as available as his daily dinner. Yet it had been years before he could mention a book of which his father had not heard. “Baldassare Castiglione!” his father would say, taking the book from his hand, rolling the syllables on his tongue. “The Courtier! My God, it must be nearly fifty years since I saw that!” For a moment a formless eagerness has trembled on his own lips, as if he might say at last “What do you—?—This is what I—Let us exchange …” but the book would be handed back, the sighing revelation had not been made, the moment passed.

  All during the early years while his father had been selling soap for a Quaker merchant in Philadelphia he had also been studying Italian in the evenings so that he could read Dante in the original, or picking his way through Horace and Ovid with the aid of the “trots” that would have been forbidden to him had he gone to college. On one shelf of the bookcase, Mademoiselle de Maupin, the Mémoires de Ninon de Lenclos, and a row of Balzac stood as evidence of the years in New Orleans, where, only in his twenties, but already the dashing representative of “Oakley and Co., Manufacturers and Perfumers, Founded 1817,” he had, according to his own testimony, spent half his time at Antoine’s, and the rest on the pouting bosoms of Creole ladies of good family. On the other shelves Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, a red-edged set of Thackeray, and some funereally bound Waverley novels were jumbled together; copies of Burns, Mrs. Browning, and the Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre might be interlarded with the Victoriana of Quiller-Couch, Sir Edmund Gosse, and an old copy of Will Carleton’s Farm Legends. In the brown dusk of the foyer they all melted together, holding under their dusty gilt a repository of his own childhood, for on them he had fed also, and from them had been drawn the innumerable orotund tags of his father’s conversation.

  Stealthily he rose and went to the window. On one of the nearby tables lay the broken-backed copy of Pope from which his father often quoted, its cover scrolled and illuminated to look like a church window. Published by William P. Nimmo of Edinburgh. He had never realized until he was almost grown that his father’s vaunting chant was not literally true; that his father had never actually been out of America. Where had he picked this up? He opened it and read the inscription: “J. Henri Elkin, Mar. 26th, 1882,” and beneath that, underlined with flourishes, “sans puer et sans reproche.” With a smile for the insouciant motto and the error in spelling, both so typical of his father, he grimaced at his own forgotten inscription underneath, written in the brash pencil of his sophomore year:—“J. H. Elkin, Jr., Jan. 5th, 1929. De gustibus non est disputandum.”

  “Europe, I-rup, O-rup, and Stir-rup,” he thought bitterly. He had believed it of his father; in a way it was his trouble that he still believed, not only for his father, but for himself. The phrase had meant for him all the perilous seas beyond the casement, all the width of the future tha
t lay before the “compleat,” the “whole” man, all the roads to Rome. When he heard the foghorns lowing on the river, the phrase sometimes came to him still, with a quickening of inexplicable delight and unease.

  Now suddenly its echoes brought to him, with an association he did not understand, the image, sharp and disturbing, of the glass of anise on Anna Guryan’s table.

  Shutting the image out, he turned his back to the sleeping figure and stared out the window, past the blurred palette of the park with its motley strollers, to the strong blue of the river, which struck through the tentative spring air like a flail. It was not too late to fill the day that was draining away from him with one of those commonplace devices for seeking human warmth, a dinner, a date, a movie—the little second-rate enterprises where there was always the chance, after all, that reality might explode upon one in the exchange of a word, a recognition, an embrace.

  He turned over a roster of people in his mind: the earnest young men of his own age, whose conversation would turn inevitably from books and jobs to girls, with the fascinated allusiveness of inexperience, or the gauche young girls tricked out in the bright dresses, shrill patter, and the finger-snapping gestures of allurement that would lead them not too improperly to their goal of a doctor or a dentist.

  There was no one, nothing that he could scrape up that would serve as a palliative for the driving sense of alienation, of constriction, that sent him out more and more on his free Saturday afternoons and Sundays, prowling the dim drowsy art galleries, standing before each picture as if it were a window to a world, yet always subtly conscious of the current of people moving behind him, their dress and their speech, and of how he, in his stance before the picture, looked to them. Or he would walk the brilliant mid-town streets briskly, as if he had a destination, savoring the expensive color and movement, glancing at the great carved upheaval of buildings with a pride almost of ownership, until a dusk the color of melancholy blended all the outlines of faces and buildings in a brooding preamble to the great play of light that was to come.

  Then he would flee into the haven of some small restaurant, always somehow, the wrong one, where, under the slack gaze of the waiter, he would choose from the menu with an exaggerated sense of the importance of his choice, and eat his dinner slowly, head bent, whetting himself against the knife of his solitude, until home seemed at last the only destination there was, and he would rise and go. Home, exhausted, ready at last for its commonplaces, he would let himself into the dim clogged air of the hall. Nodding over a book, his father would look up to mutter his half-irritated “Where’ve you been?” and to all the sounds and stimuli singing in his head the remark would be like a shutter, closing down between the halves of himself, and he would reply guiltily, almost as if he had been lying, “Just around” … or “Nowhere.”

  Tomorrow, delivered once more from the disturbed, uninhabited spaces of the week end, he would sink almost gratefully into the round of his job, that job which was so far from the context of his home that he could never have expected it to be understood at home, had he ever been asked. Along with the hundreds of others spewed out by the colleges the previous summer, into professions that had no room for them, he had found a place in the only employment where there was room, in the vast framework of the city’s welfare department. He had been at it almost a year now, toiling up the steps of tenements in neighborhoods he had never before seen, delivering his blue and yellow tickets to existence to his one hundred and forty families.

  In the beginning it had been exciting, almost romantic, to penetrate deeper into the unknown capillaries of the city that he loved, finding, in the midst of the decaying East Side tenements, the rococo hoardings on an old theatre that had been the glory of his father’s day, seeing a date on the crumbling pink façade of the stables on Cherry Street where the peddlers kept their nags, reading the layered history of the city like a palimpsest. But lately it had seemed more and more as if he were immured in the catacombs of a daily round, from which he would never work himself up into the clear.

  He thought of the families he would be visiting tomorrow, each of them like a little aperture into the world that really was. There would be the whine of Mrs. Barnes, born, raised, and married, on some form of aid, but with the steamy smell of comfort somehow always in her kitchen.

  “Now there’s William,” she would whisper, with her sidelong glance. “Poor boy, he’s a diabetic, you know. He needs special food.” And the boy William would stand there with his over-sharp, delicate Irish face averted, his hunched shoulders straining away from notice. In the next house, Mr. McCue, “brassworker for thirty years,” would once more exhume the badge to which he clung, the bank book showing the $4000 savings which had lasted three and a half years until now, and on his broad brick face there would be the usual look of puzzlement at what could happen to a man who had worked and done what was right and proper.

  This was Yorkville, but over on 95th, near the river, the stunted inhabitants had seemed to him at first like a race of anthropophagi whose faces he never would be able to distinguish one from the other. Stumbling once through one of these buildings, in search of a family that was about to be evicted, he had passed through room after room in which the varicolored women, sprawling on daybeds, or huddled around tables in shrieking atonal conversation, had paid no more attention to him than if he had been invisible. Passing on into the dark center of the building, he had found himself in a black windowless room where there was no light but the red sparks flying out from under the frying pan in which a girl with wild Hottentot hair was cooking fish. She had looked at him indifferently, as though she would not have been surprised if he had grown from the floor, and had replied hoarsely to his question: “Family? There ain’ no families here.” He had stood there for a moment in the disoriented blackness, feeling himself shrunk to a pinpoint, a clot in time, and it had seemed to him that he had penetrated to the nadir of the world, where personality was at an end.

  In the quiet planes of the room behind him, his father’s breathing went on, like a gentle, insistent susurrus from a world that had been. Only that morning, the radio, playing Grofé’s “Grand Canyon Suite,” with its swaying theme of the donkeys, had reminded him, as always, of one of his father’s favorite anecdotes, one that, as a boy, he had never heard without an ache of emulation, of desire for the avenues of action that would one day be his.

  “That summer I was eighteen, Mr. Oakley sent me out all the way to San Francisco. Some responsibility for a boy, but I’d been working there in New York for him for two years, and he trusted me. Travelling on the Union Pacific, met a man in the dining-car, Colonel Yates, big mine-owner out there. Took a liking to me and invited me to stop off the next day and go down to one of his mines. I thought I shouldn’t stop off to do it, but he said ‘Listen, boy! You want to see the world, or not?’ So the next morning I got off with him, but when he saw me he said, ‘God, boy! You can’t go down a mine in those clothes!’ You see, those days, every salesman of any account dressed to look the part, and I had on a three-button cutaway and a top hat.

  “‘Colonel,’ I said, ‘these are the only clothes I have.’ And it was true, too. He shook his head, but we went on anyhow, and when I saw that canyon we were going down into I wished I’d stayed home in New York. A drop down into nothing for miles, and the only way to go down it was a narrow little trail not wide enough for a man. What they did, they used these little Kentucky single-footers, mincing from side to side, one foot in front of the other. Well, I looked at that donkey, and he looked at me, and I flipped up my coat-tails and got on. Went all the way down that canyon with my top hat on my head, and my coat-tails hanging down behind!”

  The picture of his father, middle-sized, dapper, in the raw West of the eighteen-eighties, brought back momentarily the pride and tenderness which had always been a part of the feeling that he supposed was meant by the term “filial.” As a boy he had never minded that his aging father had never joined in the baseball games like
other fathers, or taken him swimming, for in his tales of the trotting-races at Saratoga, the fights in which John L. Sullivan had battered round after round bare-knuckled, the cockfights held secretly in a grimy cul-de-sac in New Orleans, had been the heady sense of an apprenticeship to the masculine world. And blending always with that gamy recall of the sporting world of the nineties had been the undercurrent that was implicit in his father’s knowing allusion, in the slow spreading smile of reminiscence, in the anecdote lopped off at an unsuitable part—an undercurrent that spread beneath his talk, moving provocatively under the lace of words like a musky perfume—the sense of beautiful women.

  Outside he could almost feel the subtle pressing of the sooty spring air, snubbing against the pane like an invitation. In his mind he traversed again the grim woodcut streets of his “district” wondering whether Sunday brought easement there, or whether there too, it was like a vacuum sucking the inhabitants into a realization of despair. He thought again of Anna Guryan, whom he had first visited two days before.

  The address had been that of an old tenement off Hester Street, most of the occupants of which were already on his list. On the paper-strewn gritty stoop he had met old Mr. Askenasi, evidently on his way to the barber-shop for the pre-Sabbath “shave with hot towels” to which the Jewish men, young and old, clung, throughout the humiliation of being on relief, as to a last shred of independence and manhood, though there might be no cholla for the table, or little tea for the glass.