“Guryan?” The old man had shaken his head. Then he had drawn back, pressing his lips together. “That one? You mean she will get on the relief too?” Throwing up his hands, he had exploded in a torrent of Yiddish. Then he had drawn closer. “Listen!” he had whispered in English, patting the other rhythmically on the shoulder for emphasis. “Since she has been here that door has never been closed. All hours of the night, men going up there. It is a shame for the other people in the house. Listen …” But at the other’s guardedly professional lack of response he had broken off and gone on down the stoop, turning once to shake his head angrily with a glance that was like an accusation.
He had found the door easily enough, on the ground floor to the left, as one entered the dank focus of smells that was the hall. Most of these apartments led directly into the kitchen from the hall, and his first impression as he entered was that the kitchen was far cleaner than most, partly perhaps because the furniture was so sparse and there was no litter of food, or evidence of where it might be stored. He had been prepared for one of the volubly evasive women who were flocking to the protective disguise of the relief rolls, or who were occasionally referred to him by the probation officers on a promise to “go straight,” many of them fat and aging, distinguished from the neighborhood women only by their carefully hammered hair and the clear, aseptic finish of their make-up.
He had found her sitting at the table, a small, deceptively young woman, her figure thin and unexuberant under the dark blue dress. To his first surprised glance she had appeared dated somehow, possibly because of the way she wore her hair, close to her head in the casque effect of the flapper period, with its sharp black wings pointed flatly against the white-powdered oval of her face. As she answered his formal questions in the slurred, unclassified monotone of her speech, her poised hands folded in her lap, he had been reminded of that Egyptian cat in the Museum, which had come through the erosive sands of the centuries and the trembling hands of archaeologists, to sit finally on its chill pedestal in the echoing gallery, regarding the modern world still with its glance of impenetrable dislike. He had found himself avoiding her unreflecting onyx gaze, which slid over him as if she were making some secret assessment of himself. Ruffled, he made a show of scrawling her answers in his notebook, a technique he hated and almost never used, partly because he had always felt too keenly the humiliation of those who were being probed, and partly because he had found soon enough that the intonations of misery were not easily forgotten.
She had just been discharged from the hospital, she said, and had told them she had no means of support. They had told her to go to the relief. The janitor of the building was a friend of hers and had let her have the apartment free until the end of the month, since the rent collector had already made his rounds. The furniture? The janitor had lent her an old bed for the back room, and the kitchen set had been left by the previous occupant.
In this neighborhood, where everything was sold and exchanged down to the very nail-parings of existence, where old men sat in front of stalls formed by their knees and the sidewalk, haggling over used shoestrings, a few screws and bent nails, even a single boot, he had known this could not be true. Even so, the kitchen table stood between them, irrefutably new, its white baked-enamel surface shining like a statement.
Raising his head to confront her with this, he had found that he could not say the bald words, and across the table he had seen a thin film of triumph slide over the opaque slits of her eyes. With a gesture of finality she had risen for the first time and pulled the chain on the light bulb that hung over them. Behind her the two blotches of windows sprang forward onto his sight like two frames holding forth the dark. On one uncurtained sill there was a bottle. Reaching for it, she drew a shot-glass from the table drawer, and poured.
“Anise. You have some.”
He had refused, out of a conflict of reasons that were obscure to him, the least of which was that the rules of his job would have forbidden it. Gathering up his pencil and notebook, he retreated to the door, explaining hurriedly that he would let her know the decision of the office.
She had opened the door for him, clasping it close against her to let him by.
“All right. You come back and let me know. Any time.” A smile had widened her lips, spreading like oil, and just before the door closed, looking down, he had seen, like a revelation, an intimacy, the pink inner orifice of her mouth.
Hurrying into the half-tones of the evening, all the way home in the swaying push of the subway, even now, as he leaned against the pane, he had retained in his mind, like the central core of an undifferentiated whirl of feeling, the image of the glass of anise waiting on the table, light radiating from its icy viscous white as from a prism.
Behind him on the sofa his father still slept, punctuating with his breath the quiet that pressed on the eardrums like a weight. For one warm moment it seemed almost possible to him that, shaking the slumped shoulders, touching the brown crepe hand, he might awaken his father beyond the present minute, into an awareness of him at last; in some long shared conversation, that backward elegiac glance would for once be forced fully, openly, on him, and he might say, “Father … was it so for you? … For what is it I wait?” Instantly the fantasy shrank, and he winced at the picture of the clumsy byplay that would really occur, knowing that between them lay the benumbing sleep of the years, a drowse from which it was not possible to awake.
Outside the window there was sound, motion, involvement, even if only in one of his long aimless hegiras through the streets. He turned slowly and left the room. Down the long hall, the first door open on the right was that of his parents’ bedroom. Entering, he picked up the hairbrush from his father’s chifferobe and began brushing his hair.
Even here, the sense of his father’s youth was present to him, like a minimizing mirror in which he saw himself. On the high chifferobe, neatly arranged, as were all his father’s accouterments, lay the silver toilette set of which the hairbrush, with a handle, in the old style, like a woman’s, was a part. There was a broad clothes-brush, then a narrower hat-brush, and a small stud-box, all with heavy intricately wrought tops of silver repoussé, in the center of each the flat shield with the monogram JHE, and a soap-box, like a huge Easter egg of plain silver, on its top the embossed head of a nymph with twining silver hair. One saw odd pieces of similar sets now, unwanted and forlorn, in the dusty jackdaw windows of Third Avenue junk shops, crowded among the sad statuary and implements of a period that was done but had not quite yet slipped into the cherishable patina of the antique. Holding the brush, he remembered.
“Who do you suppose is in New York?” his father had chuckled from behind the Times one morning at breakfast, sitting there easy and fresh, wearing one of the dandified light silk ties and curious scarf-pins from the collection that crowded his dresser drawers, a mode that his wife could never persuade him to discard, that was as much a part of his style as the faint odor of cologne left clinging to the crumpled towels in the bathroom.
“Letty Danvers,” said his father. “Arrived on the Queen Mary. Stopping at the Great Northern. That’s where they all used to stop in the old days.”
“Who’s Letty Danvers?” he had asked, savoring the graceful English name on his tongue, sensing already, in his mother’s stiffness, the possibility of mischief. In the portfolio of family pictures there were several of unidentified women, mostly in profile, in the clear unshaded photographic style of another day, staring large-eyed and proud from under the curled fringe of their bangs. His mother would never confess to a knowledge of who they were. “Ask your father!” she would say, tossing back her head.
“Why she was what they’d call a ‘diseuse’ now, I guess,” his father said reflectively. “The greatest of her day. I knew her, my God—years ago. You know that silver dresser set of mine? She gave me that.”
“I always thought Mother gave it to you.”
His mother shook her head, tightening her lips.
“M
aybe I’ll go and see her,” said his father. “Talk over old times.”
“Kind of an elaborate present, wasn’t it?” he had said, watching his mother.
“Not for those days,” his father said musingly, from behind the paper. Then, looking up, he had met his son’s arch glance, his wife’s bridling look.
“Purely platonic!” he had growled. “Purely platonic, I assure you!”
“Hmm,” his mother said.
His father had slammed the paper down on the table. “My God, Hattie, it was forty-five years ago. She was years older than I was. Why she must be damn near eighty years old!” He had stamped away from the table in a self-conscious huff, mock-angry, but pleased. For once, vanity had wrung from him the nearest allusion to his exact age that he would ever make. …
Like a boy building over and over the same tower from blocks grooved with use, he could reconstruct the times of his father. He watched him living with his young French friend, Louis Housselle, in the Prince Albert Apartments, home of the fancy theatre set of the day and their ardent hangers-on. He saw him, a few tables behind Diamond Jim Brady, betting on that famous marathon of the appetite, or leaning intimately toward women over the small round tables, almost eclipsed by the velvet swoop of their hats. In yachting clothes he leaned back jauntily, legs crossed, the hand with the ring draped easily on the chair; posing for a portrait he held the aquiline medallion of his profile sideways, the black curls cropped almost to the bone, on his shapely upper lip a feather of mustache. …
The rough bossing of the brush handle had left a pattern on his own clenched hand. With a conscious, almost defiant gesture, he set the brush down askew in the long neat silver line. Stepping softly down the back hall, he let himself out of the apartment door. Avoiding the elevator, he hurried down the five flights of stairs and out into the street.
As always before, the milling streets gave him back the feeling of action; the air blowing against his face set up an unreasoning tingle of anticipation. Flower shops, pastry shops, and stationery stores were all open; people wove in and out of them on their beelike errands. Down the perspective of the side street he could see the olive-green buses, their open decks crammed with people in vivid spring hats, rocketing by like floats.
He ran down the intervening blocks. Wedging himself onto one of the buses he followed the line of people up the swaying stair. Upstairs the deck held the rows of people like a well-arranged tray, everyone coupled and spruced as a crowd just out of church, varied only by the restless dots of children.
They rolled by the Museum and stopped. Clutching the change in his pocket, he thought of getting off there, but while he wavered between indecision and habit, the bus heaved on. He knew the Museum too well, anyhow, particularly the American Wing, where he had wandered too many desultory afternoons, past the snub, diffused faces of the Cassatts, the small violent Homers, pausing longer at the moon-wracked Ryders, held for minutes before the unfathomable Sargent “Madame X.” By now it was too well-defined a theme in his routine of hope and ennui.
At Fifty-seventh Street he got off and walked east. Stopping at the Kraushaar Galleries, he peered in at the blank dark doors. Several weeks ago they had been open one afternoon and he had wandered in. No one had intercepted him, and he had found himself in the midst of an opening show of French paintings, mostly Renoirs. Behind him the silky authoritative murmurs of approval or contempt went on almost unheard, for he had been held in front of the Renoirs by a shock of familiarity, of recognition. They sat there, the women of his father’s day, stiffly at their garden tables, under their enormous hats, in spade-shaped bodices, their faces and hair fretted by light and leaf shadow; in the dim blur of their boudoirs they curved over dressing tables their bodies of impermeable lavender and rose.
Today the window held a few Flemish genre paintings in overpowering frames, and the interior was lifeless and dark. The plate glass gave him back a dusky astigmatic version of himself. He turned away. No one was coming down the long suave street; held there, gripped again by the drag of time draining away, he felt that no one would ever come. He waited, avoiding the knowledge of where he wanted to go. Time passes, he thought; perhaps one should go toward it. Far down the street, the thin line of the horizon was like a sealed eyelid waiting for him to lift it, to expose the huge wink of the future.
Turning on his heel, he walked slowly eastward down the long street, which grew more squalid with every step, with the inevitability of a declining curve on a graph. At Second Avenue he mounted the rickety stairs of the “El” and caught a train that was just winding its parabola into the station.
Jigging past the tenements in the settling dusk he watched the window scenes as they flicked by: a woman leaning over a sink, a man stretched out with his feet up, somnolent in a chair. Since childhood he had done this, hanging out from the tops of the buses on Fifth to catch a flash of a paneled drawing-room, a great brown wall of books, or people, muffled and vague behind a shimmering curtain; riding past in the veiled evening he had fondled these glimpses and enlarged upon them.
In this neighborhood he could now, because of his work, fill out the scenes to the last detail of mohair armchairs and cracked, calendared walls. He knew well the sameness of the life that went on behind those window lights that were so sterile and graceless from inside—the endless arias of family quarrels, and the blind grapplings of love. Even so, as he walked or rode along, each appearing lamp stood out like a lighthouse of warmth that drew him in his lonely role of beholder; each was an evocation of possibility.
At home now, their own lamps would be turned on soon for supper, and his father would rise, yawning, to go to the table, happy and complete in his belated role of paterfamilias if the family were all present, grumbling and swearing one of his strange oaths that were like no one else’s, if one of them were missing. “Phantasmagoria!” he would shout. “Where in God’s name does that boy find to go?” In the landscape of his mind he watched the image of his father collapse and dwindle with distance, heard the sonorous echo of his voice trickle and die; in his mind he pursued the image and the echo for a last minute, before he let them go.
At the last station, he got out. It was still a long way to Hester Street, and he walked the odd-angled asymmetric streets with a delaying step, remembering his first experience of them last year, when the heat of summer had been a great blunting hand pushing the people out of doors, the whole area had had the smell of a dying fruit, and his clothes had felt like a cage.
He stopped at last in front of the house. It must have rained recently down here. The carts and hagglers had deserted the block, leaving in the gutters pools that gave back the last light of the sky. A slate-colored breeze from the river blew brinily against the empty, peeling doorway.
He walked inside and put his hand on the doorknob. Over on the river the foghorns spoke, making over and over their slow mysterious statement. He had never been able to decipher it until now. It is the sound of waiting, he thought. The sound of waiting.
Cupped in his hand, the oily doorknob spread under his palm as if he were touching a slowly widening smile. He knocked. He heard a light-chain being pulled on in the back room, and the high-heeled sound of footsteps coming toward the door. After the first compromise, he thought, all others follow.
Looking back through the open doorway, he saw the dome of the day melting downward irretrievably into the river. One by one, in the great pitted comb of the city, the evocative lights went on.
Old Stock
THE TRAIN CREAKED THROUGH the soft, heat-promising morning like an elderly, ambulatory sofa. Nosing along, it pushed its corridor of paper-spattered floors and old plush seats through towns whose names—Crystal Run, Mamakating—were as soft as the morning, and whose dusty little central hearts—all livery stable, freight depot, and yard buildings with bricked-up windows and faded sides that said “Purina Chows”—were as down-at-the-heel as the train that strung them together.
Hester, feeling the rocking stir of t
he journey between her thighs, hanging her head out of the window with her face snubbed against the hot breeze, tried to seize and fix each picture as it passed. At fifteen, everything she watched and heard seemed like a footprint on the trail of some eventuality she rode to meet, which never resolved but filled her world with a verve of waiting.
Opposite her, her mother sat with the shuttered, conscious look she always assumed in public places. Today there was that added look Hester also knew well, that prim display of extra restraint her mother always wore in the presence of other Jews whose grosser features, voices, manners offended her sense of gentility all the more out of her resentful fear that she might be identified with them. Today the train rang with their mobile gestures, and at each station crowds of them got off—great-breasted, starched mothers trailing mincing children and shopping bags stuffed with food, gawky couples digging each other in the side with their elbows, girls in beach pajamas, already making the farthest use of their smiles and great, effulgent eyes. At each station, they were met by the battered Fords and wagons that serviced the farms which would accommodate them, where for a week or two they would litter the tight Catskill towns with their swooping gaiety and their weary, rapacious hope.
“Wild!” said Mrs. Elkin, sotto voce, pursing her mouth and tucking her chin in her neck. “Your hair and that getup! Always so wild.” Hester, injured, understood that the indictment was as much for the rest of the train as for herself. Each summer for the past three years, ever since Mr. Elkin’s business had been doing poorly and the family had been unable to afford the summer rental in Westchester, Mrs. Elkin had resisted the idea of Old Corner Farm, and each year she had given in, for they were still of a status which made it unthinkable that they would not leave New York for some part of the season. This year and last, they had not been able to manage it until September, with its lowered rates, but it would have been a confession of defeat for Mr. Elkin had he not been able to say during the week to casual business acquaintances, “Family’s up in the country. I go up weekends.” Once at the farm—although the guests there were of a somewhat different class from the people in this train, most of them arriving in their own cars and one or two with nursegirls for the children—Mrs. Elkin would hold herself aloof at first, bending over her embroidery hoop on the veranda, receiving the complimentary “What gorgeous work you do!” with a moue of distaste for the flamboyant word that was a hallmark of what she hated in her own race, politely refusing proffered rides to the village, finally settling the delicate choice of summer intimacy on some cowed spinster or recessive widow whom life had dampened to the necessary refinement. For Mrs. Elkin walked through the world swinging the twangy words “refined,” “refinement,” like a purifying censer before her.
The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Page 31
