The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher

by Hortense Calisher

  “Prescription?” said Eleanor, smiling wryly back.

  “No prescription!” said her aunt. “In my office I see hundreds of girls like you. And there is no little pink pill to fit.” She shrugged, and then whirled on the others. “Come. Come on.” They were gone, in a last-minute flurry of ejaculations. As the train began to wheel past the platform, Eleanor caught a blurred glimpse of their faces, her parents and aunt in anxious trio, the two cousins neatly together.

  People were still passing by the door of the roomette, and a woman in one group paused to admire the baby, frilly in the delicately lined basket, “Ah, look!” she cooed. “Sweet! How old is she?”

  “Three months.”

  “It is a she?”

  Eleanor nodded.

  “Sweet!” the woman said again, shaking her head admiringly, and went on down the aisle. Now the picture was madonna-perfect, Eleanor knew—the harsh, tintype lighting centraled down on her and the child, glowing in the viscous paneling that was grained to look like wood, highlighted in the absurd plush-cum-metal fixtures of this sedulously planned manger. She shut the door.

  The baby began to whimper. She made it comfortable for the night, diapering it quickly, clipping the pins in the square folds, raising the joined ankles in a routine that was like a jigging ballet of the fingers. Only after she had made herself ready for the night, hanging the dress quickly behind a curtain, after she had slipped the last prewarmed bottle out of its case and was holding the baby close as it fed, watching the three-cornered pulse of the soft spot winking in and out on the downy head—only then did she let herself look closely at her two hands.

  The difference between them was not enough to attract casual notice, but enough, when once pointed out, for anyone to see. She remembered Stengel’s strictures on practicing with the less able left one. “Don’t think you can gloss over, Miss. It shows!” But that the scrubbing hand, the working hand, would really “show” was her first intimation that the daily makeshift could become cumulative, could leave its imprint on the flesh with a crude symbolism as dully real, as conventionally laughable, as the first wrinkle, the first gray hair.

  She turned out the light and stared into the rushing dark. The physical change was nothing, she told herself, was easily repaired; what she feared almost to phrase was the death by postponement, the slow uneventful death of impulse. “Hundreds of girls like you,” she thought, fearing for the first time the compromises that could arrive upon one unaware, not in the heroic renunciations, but erosive, gradual, in the slow chip-chipping of circumstance. Outside the window the hills of the Hudson Valley loomed and receded, rose up, piled, and slunk again into foothills. For a long time before she fell asleep she probed the dark for their withdrawing shapes, as if drama and purpose receded with them.

  In the morning the porter roused her at six, returning an iced bottle of formula, and one warmed and made ready. She rose with a granular sense of return to the real, which lightened as she attended to the baby and dressed. Energized, she saw herself conquering whatever niche Dan had found for them, revitalizing the unknown house as she had other houses, with all the artifices of her New York chic, squeezing ragouts from the tiny salary spent cagily at the A & P, enjoying the baby instead of seeing her in the groggy focus of a thousand tasks. She saw herself caught up at odd hours in the old exaltation of practice, even if they had to hire a mute piano, line a room with cork. Nothing was impossible to the young, bogey-dispersing morning.

  The station ran past the window, such a long one, sliding through the greasy lemon-colored lights, that she was almost afraid they were not going to stop, or that it was the wrong one, until she saw Dan’s instantly known contour, jointed, thin, and his face, raised anxiously to the train windows with the vulnerability of people who do not know they are observed. She saw him for a minute as other passengers, brushing their teeth hastily in the washrooms, might look out and see him, a young man, interesting because he was alone on the platform, a nice young man in a thick jacket and heavy work pants, with a face full of willingness and anticipation. Who would get off for him?

  As she waited in the jumble of baggage at the car’s end, she warned herself that emotion was forever contriving toward moments which, when achieved, were not single and high as they ought to have been, but often splintered slowly—just walked away on the little centrifugal feet of detail. She remembered how she had mulled before their wedding night, how she had been unable to see beyond the single devouring picture of their two figures turning, turning toward one another. It had all happened, it had all been there, but memory could not recall it so, retaining instead, with the pedantic fidelity of some poet whose interminable listings recorded obliquely the face of the beloved but never invoked it, a whole rosary of irrelevancies, in the telling of which the two figures merged and were lost. Again she had the sense of life pushing her on by minute, imperceptible steps whose trend would not be discerned until it was too late, as the tide might encroach upon the late swimmer, making a sea of the sand he left behind.

  “Dan!” she called. “Dan!”

  He ran toward her. She wanted to run too, to leap out of the hemming baggage and fall against him, rejoined. Instead, she and the bags and the basket were jockeyed off the platform by the obsequious porter, and she found herself on the gray boards of the station, her feet still rocking with the leftover rhythm of the train, holding the basket clumsily between her and Dan, while the train washed off hoarsely behind them. He took the basket from her, set it down, and they clung and kissed, but in all that ragged movement, the moment subdivided and dispersed.

  “Good Lord, how big she is!” he said, poking at the baby with a shy, awkward hand.

  “Mmm. Tremendous!” They laughed together, looking down.

  “Your shoes—what on earth?” she said. They were huge, laced to the ankle, the square tips inches high, like blocks of wood on the narrow clerkly feet she remembered.

  “Safety shoes. You have to wear them around a foundry. Pretty handy if a casting drops on your toe.”

  “Very swagger.” She smiled up at him, her throat full of all there was to tell—how, in the country, she had spoken to no one but the groceryman for so long that she had begun to monologue to the baby; how she had built up the first furnace fire piece by piece, crouching before it in awe and a sort of pride, hoping, as she shifted the damper chains, that she was pulling the right one; how the boy who was to mow the lawn had never come, and how at last she had taken a scythe to the knee-deep, insistent grass and then grimly, jaggedly, had mown. But now, seeing his face dented with fatigue, she saw too his grilling neophyte’s day at the foundry, the evenings when he must have dragged hopefully through ads and houses, subjecting his worn wallet and male ingenuousness to the soiled witcheries of how many landlords, of how many narrow-faced householders tipping back in their porch chairs, patting tenderly at their bellies, who would suck at their teeth and look him over. “You permanent here, mister?” Ashamed of her city-bred heroisms, she said nothing.

  “You look wonderful,” he said. “Wonderful.”

  “Oh.” She looked down. “A far cry from.”

  “I borrowed a car from one of the men, so we can go over in style.” He swung the basket gaily under one arm. “Let’s have breakfast first, though.”

  “Yes, let’s.” She was not eager to get to the house.

  They breakfasted in a quick-lunch place on the pallid, smudged street where the car was parked, and she waited, drinking a second cup of coffee from a grainy white mug while Dan went back to the station to get the trunk. The mug had an indistinct blue V on it in the middle of a faded blue line running around the rim; it had probably come secondhand from somewhere else. The fork she had used had a faint brassiness showing through its nickel-colored tines and was marked “Hotel Ten Eyck, Albany,” although this was not Albany. Even the restaurant, on whose white, baked look the people made gray transient blurs which slid and departed, had the familiar melancholy which pervaded such places beca
use they were composed everywhere, in a hundred towns, of the same elements, but were never lingered in or personally known. This town would be like that too; one would be able to stand in the whirling center of the five-and-dime and fancy oneself in a score of other places where the streets had angled perhaps a little differently and the bank had been not opposite the post office, but a block down. There would not even be a need for fancy because, irretrievably here, one was still in all the resembling towns, and going along these streets one would catch oneself nodding to faces known surely, plumbed at a glance, since these were overtones of faces in all the other towns that had been and were to be.

  They drove through the streets, which raised an expectation she knew to be doomed, but cherished until it should be dampened by knowledge. Small houses succeeded one another, gray, coffee-colored, a few white ones, many with two doors and two sets of steps.

  “Marlborough Road,” she said. “My God.”

  “Ours is Ravenswood Avenue.”

  “No!”

  “Slicker!” he said. “Ah, darling, I can’t believe you’re here.” His free arm tightened and she slid down on his shoulder. The car made a few more turns, stopped in the middle of a block, and was still.

  The house, one of the white ones, had two close-set doors, but the two flights of steps were set at opposite ends of the ledge of porch, as if some craving for a privacy but doubtfully maintained within had leaked outside. Hereabouts, in houses with the cramped deadness of diagrams, was the special ugliness created by people who would keep themselves a toehold above the slums by the exercise of a terrible, ardent neatness which had erupted into the foolish or the grotesque—the two niggling paths in the common driveway, the large trellis arching pompously over nothing. On Sundays they would emerge, the fathers and mothers, dressed soberly, even threadbare, but dragging children outfitted like angelic visitants from the country of the rich, in poke bonnets and suitees of pink and mauve, larded triumphantly with fur.

  As Dan bent over the lock of one of the doors, he seemed to her like a man warding off a blow.

  “Is the gas on?” she said hurriedly. “I’ve got one more bottle.”

  He nodded. “It heats with gas, you know. That’s why I took it. They have cheap natural gas up here.” He pushed the door open, and the alien, anti-people smell of an empty house came out toward them.

  “I know. You said. Wait till I tell you about me and the furnace in the other place.” Her voice died away as, finally, they were inside.

  He put the basket on the floor beside him. “Well,” he said, “this am it.”

  “Why, there’s the sofa!” she said. “It’s so funny to see everything—just two days ago in Erie, and now here.” Her hand delayed on the familiar pillows, as if on the shoulder of a friend. Then, although a glance had told her that no festoonings of the imagination were going to change this place, there was nothing to do but look.

  The door-cluttered box in which they stood predicated a three-piece “suite” and no more. In the center of its mustard woodwork and a wallpaper like cold cereal, two contorted pedestals supported less the ceiling than the status of the room. Wedged in without hope of rearrangement, her own furniture had an air of outrage, like social workers who had come to rescue a hovel and had been confronted, instead, with the proud glare of mediocrity.

  She returned the room’s stare with an enmity of her own. Soon I will get to know you the way a woman gets to know a house—where the baseboards are roughest, and in which corners the dust drifts—the way a person knows the blemishes of his own skin. But just now I am still free of you—still a visitor.

  “Best I could do.” The heavy shoes clumped, shifting.

  “It’ll be all right,” she said. “You wait and see.” She put her palms on his shoulders. “It just looked queer for a minute, with windows only on one side.” She heard her own failing voice with dislike, quirked it up for him. “Half chick. That’s what it is. Half-chick house!”

  “Crazy!” But some of the strain left his face.

  “Uh-huh, Das Ewig Weibliche, that’s me!” She half pirouetted. “Dan!” she said. “Dan, where’s the piano?”

  “Back of you. We had to put it in the dinette. I thought we could eat in the living room anyway.”

  She opened the door. There it was, filling the box room, one corner jutting into the entry to the kitchenette. Tinny light, whitening down from a meager casement, was recorded feebly on its lustrous flanks. Morning and evening she would edge past it, with the gummy dishes and the clean. Immobile, in its cage, it faced her, a great dark harp lying on its side.

  “Play something, for luck.” Dan came up behind her, the baby bobbing on his shoulder.

  She shook her head.

  “Ah, come on.” His free arm cinched the three of them in a circle, so that the baby participated in their kiss. The baby began to cry.

  “See,” she said. “We better feed her.”

  “I’ll warm the bottle. Have to brush up on being a father.” He nudged his way through the opening. She heard him rummaging in a carton, then the clinking of a pot.

  She opened the lid of the piano and struck the A, waiting until the tone had died away inside her, then struck a few more notes. The middle register had flattened first, as it always did. Sitting down on the stool, she looked into her lap as if it belonged to someone else. What was the piano doing here, this opulent shape of sound, five hundred miles from where it was the day before yesterday; what was she doing here, sitting in the lopped-off house, in the dress that had been her wedding dress, listening to the tinkle of a bottle against a pan? What was the mystery of distance—that it was not only geographical but clove through the map, into the heart?

  She began to play, barely flexing her fingers, hearing the nails she had let grow slip and click on the keys. Then, thinking of the entities on the other side of the wall, she began to play softly, placating, as if she would woo them, the town, providence. She played a Beethoven andante with variations, then an adagio, seeing the Von Bülow footnotes before her: “… the ascending diminished fifth may be phrased, as it were, like a question, to which the succeeding bass figure may be regarded as the answer.”

  The movement finished but she did not go on to the scherzo. Closing the lid, she put her head down on her crossed arms. Often, on the fringes of concerts, there were little haunting crones of women who ran up afterward to horn in on the congratulatory shoptalk of the players. She could see one of them now, batting her stiff claws together among her fluttering draperies, nodding eagerly for notice: “I studied … I played too, you know … years ago … with De Pachmann!”

  So many variants of the same theme, she thought, so many of them—the shriveled, talented women. Distance has nothing to do with it; be honest—they are everywhere. Fifty-seventh Street is full of them. The women who were once “at the League,” who cannot keep themselves from hanging the paintings, the promising juvenilia, on their walls, but who flinch, deprecating, when one notices. The quondam writers, chary of ridicule, who sometimes, over wine, let themselves be persuaded into bringing out a faded typescript, and to whom there is never anything to say, because it is so surprisingly good, so fragmentary, and was written—how long ago? She could still hear the light insistent note of the A, thrumming unresolved, for herself, and for all the other girls. A man, she thought jealously, can be reasonably certain it was his talent which failed him, but the women, for whom there are still so many excuses, can never be so sure.

  “You’re tired.” Dan returned, stood behind her.

  She shook her head, staring into the shining case of the piano, wishing that she could retreat into it somehow and stay there huddled over its strings, like those recalcitrant nymphs whom legend immured in their native wood or water, but saved.

  “I have to be back at the plant at eleven.” He was smiling uncertainly, balancing the baby and the bottle.

  She put a finger against his cheek, traced the hollows under his eyes. “I’ll soon fatten you up,
” she murmured, and held out her arms to receive the baby and the long, coping day.

  “Won’t you crush your dress? I can wait till you change.”

  “No.” She heard her own voice, sugared viciously with wistfulness. “Once I change I’ll be settled. As long as I keep it on … I’m still a visitor.”

  Silenced, he passed her the baby and the bottle.

  This will have to stop, she thought. Or will the denied half of me persist, venomously arranging for the ruin of the other? She wanted to warn him standing there, trusting, in the devious shadow of her resentment.

  The baby began to pedal its feet and cry, a long nagging ululation. She sprinkled a few warm drops of milk from the bottle on the back of her own hand. It was just right, the milk, but she sat on, holding the baby in her lap, while the drops cooled. Flexing the hand, she suddenly held it out gracefully, airily, regarding it.

  “This one is still ‘the rabbi’s daughter,’” she said. Dan looked down at her, puzzled. She shook her head, smiling back at him, quizzical and false, and bending, pushed the nipple in the baby’s mouth. At once it began to suck greedily, gazing back at her with the intent, agate eyes of satisfaction.

  The Middle Drawer

  THE DRAWER WAS ALWAYS kept locked. In a household where the tangled rubbish of existence had collected on surfaces like a scurf, which was forever being cleared away by her mother and the maid, then by her mother, and, finally, hardly at all, it had been a permanent cell—rather like, Hester thought wryly, the gene that is carried over from one generation to the other. Now, holding the small, square, indelibly known key in her hand, she shrank before it, reluctant to perform the blasphemy that the living must inevitably perpetrate on the possessions of the dead. There were no revelations to be expected when she opened the drawer, only the painful reiteration of her mother’s personality and the power it had held over her own, which would rise—an emanation, a mist, that she herself had long since shredded away, parted, and escaped.