The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher

by Hortense Calisher

  “Why is it do you suppose it’s happening?” said Johnny Ten, not the brightest of us, only there because if a Ten wasn’t eligible, who was?

  Nobody liked to say, even among us though there wasn’t a boy didn’t have an inkling.

  “But I can tell you why we’ve still got our different last names,” said the boy from Contoocook. “Otherwise, it would be too confusing to them—even though they don’t much use those. And too noticeable. This way, we can just fade quietly. And they can keep tally on us, like they like to do of the oldest stones in the graveyard.”

  Well, we didn’t do much but form the club, that year. Freshmen do that. Then we came home, and I suspect that ordinarily the same thing would have happened to the boys from those other towns as to me; clubs fade too, like winter seasons. But now it was summer again. And I was shocked to the gills when I saw my uncle and aunt. People not forty years old yet don’t just all of a sudden look like that, not when they’ve both always been lively as a barn dance—not unless they have a mortal disease. And it wasn’t as if they just suddenly looked older in any healthy way, or even downright old, the way some people’s hair turns gray overnight. He was still blond as could be; she was still brown. Morning early, and evening late, that is. In the strongest noon light, you couldn’t quite tell. What’s sucking them?—I thought, but we are a reserved family and I knew even if I could bring myself to ask, they wouldn’t say. They moved lightly these days, and vaguely—my uncle, with tattoos half the length of his burly forearm, and his machinist’s shoes and his heavy fingernails powerful as old yellow horn!—and their thoughts seemed to come from a long way back.

  “Look at him!” cried my aunt when she saw me, “Oh, Johnny One.” Her face puckered up, not much, just faintly, and then she stepped back, and put her hand to her hair in an absentminded way, and said in a thin voice, almost cold, and to my uncle, “Maybe he shouldn’t of come back at all!” She hadn’t the energy you see, to feel more.

  But I was just inside the door and I hadn’t tipped to any of it yet; I was waiting as usual for her to fall all over me and my growth like when I’d been to scout camp—in the winters, I’d used to hear her whispering at him in bed, “We’ve got to manage it for him another year, Andy, we’ve got to—we can’t let him stay here all summer long.” I was waiting for my uncle to thump me and kid around, and even for my aunt to say with a toss of her head that over at Willard Pond, they’d better look after their Barbaras, whereupon I would have to look both wise and innocent—for it was already too late to prevent that, too.

  Instead, my aunt came up to me and timidly touched me on the sleeve. And passed her finger like a dandelion-fluff over my cheek. “You’re so red,” she said. “And your eyes, so blue. Don’t tell me they feed you packaged stuff.” And I said, bewildered, “No, the college has got its own farm—part of the program is we have to work it.” And before I could say any more, she burst out, “Oh Johnny One, Johnny One, maybe you should go away for good now.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “This is our place.” And it is too, though it’s only free and clear because they won’t give us a mortgage on it, and there isn’t much to it except the windows and walls, still thick and healthy, and the bit of furniture we swapped to keep. We were lucky in some ways, some said. Some have waited until the place is so slatted to the roof, there’s nothing of it to sell at all.

  “You’re not going to sell,” I said. “Why, I could paint it up here in no time—if you could get the paint. And the roof too—I see where the water’s come through.”

  My aunt looked crafty—I’d never seen her look like that before. Even when she was cheating them a little, not with any outright lie; she’d look merry. “Not on your tintype,” she said—when you haven’t the energy, you sound hard and mean when you only intend to sound strong. “Catch me doing up what they’d only tear away. This place won’t tumble, not in our time. But I’ll make them pay the higher for every fence hole, inside and out. They like it better that way—don’t I know from the shop? They like to start from scratch.”

  Brrr. How that word sounded when she said it, half snake, half claw. I looked around me more carefully. The shop was gone of course—that went last year, no great decision, just weaseled away with the last load of goods. They could start up again, any time they had the gumption, and could fix the car. In the old farmland, it used to be when the cow died; now the cow is the car. But they still had their jobs surely.

  “How’re the Blazers?” I said. The Blazers are our summer people.

  My uncle clicked a thumbnail. “Mr. Blazer is thinking of doing his own garden. He was telling me only the other day how healthy it makes him, not only to eat. ‘The old customs, Andy; we should all go back to them.’ He’s learning to do it all quicker than me. Got a lot of energy, that man. He showed me. Only thing he don’t do good yet is all that boxwood he just put in, front of the house. He’s no hand with the clipping shears yet. But he learns fast.”

  I looked over at my aunt. She hung her head, then looked at me sideways and through her hair, like those moron-children in our local family of the same. O my darling chubby, freckle-tan aunt, where had she got to?

  “Aunt Marietta!” I said. That was her full name, sunk away somehow. And do you know, she straightened a little, and the color came back to one cheek.

  “That’s it!” said my uncle. Usually he didn’t do the thinking for the family. He took a step forward, stamping as hard as if it was a resolution all in itself. But he was all excited. “We’ll go back to the old customs. I’ll be Andrew again.” Not Mr. Blazer’s Andy, is what he meant. “And he’ll be our John, or our Johnny. But not Johnny One. That way it won’t touch him, he’ll stay healthy. That way, he can stay.”

  “And I’ll make a garden!” I said. “I could do it out on the—” And then I looked outside, and remembered. What wasn’t all dock and burr, and those good New Hampshire boulders which take block-and-tackle to move where it doesn’t take eight generations of wall-building—was gone to wood. We’d let our old woods, sold to them, creep up on us. They hadn’t seemed to mind. But there was worse than that. The trouble really didn’t begin when they started wearing our jeans. When the old tools began to go, that was the beginning—from when we couldn’t tell, even ourselves, was a tool to stay in the barn or go to be sold in the shop?

  My aunt hung her head down again. But my uncle’s idea, poor Andy muscleman, had really bolstered him. “Marietta, our John is home,” he said, all dignity. “I’m going to shave.”

  I watched him while he did it. His great weightlifter’s arm, molded in biceps, always did look funny handling that delicate razor, but now it looked foreshortened too, like all the rest of him, as if something underneath the muscles was shrunk. He looked all shrunk and contorted, like those woodenheaded character dolls we used to find in a bunch of goods now and then, old shepherds and bent-over wives marked Nuremberg and Tyrol. That’s the way it took him, not like my aunt; it doesn’t take everybody the same. Funny thing too, I saw that though his beard and hair were still as blond as mine, the leavings in the bowl were different. I walked over to see for sure. He’d had a week’s beard on him. Yes, the scrapings in the bowl were gray. Or you could call it a dim green.

  All this time, my aunt, still peering at me now and then from under her hair, was fixing supper. And as the dusk came on, and before the lamps were lit, they began to look better to me. Maybe the green from outside, pressing in at the back window, rosied them a little; as we were told in art course, the complementary color to green is red. Oh I hadn’t gone without learning that year; as well as the grammar and the art and the regular animal husbandry, we’d had a course in plant ecology too.

  “What about that boxwood, what’s that for?” I said idly, only wanting to make conversation. Soon’s I got home, that’s all I seemed to want to do, and not too much of it. I just wanted to sit, really. I felt tired, down to the hair on my limbs.

  “Blazer wants to keep his priva
cy,” said my uncle Andrew. “Oh, not from us.” He gave a little snort—a weak one. “Not on the Pond and wood side. Round on the front side of the house. Seems the kids on their road are puttin’ up a neighborhood affair to keep them out of mischief, center of that common lawn they have, used to be the old green. Oh he approves of it, helped to do that. Just don’t want to see it, that’s all, from the house. Band stand, or suthin’.”

  “Bandstand? They don’t have any band,” I said. Neither do we, anymore. We younger ones used to, mellaphone and xylophone. But all that beating and blowing takes it out of you. And over there, why should they bother with that stuff, summers?

  “Close the window,” said my aunt. “Don’t look out.” She went and closed the shutters, moving slow, like her own shawl. I’d never known her to wear a shawl before. And there was a line of dark on her upper lip. I never did like dark on the upper lips of ladies. Then she came and sat down again.

  But I’d already seen the outside green, pressing in on us. Funny thing. Our own woods never seemed to close us in before—or out. But that was when they were our own.

  “Think I’ll go up the hill after supper,” I said. “See what’s doing at the soda parlor.” It didn’t have a name anymore, but they knew where I meant, the place next to the supermarket—where we young ones all make tracks for first. The number one Soda Parlor. Not such a bad dump that the Barbaras from over Willard Pond can’t come looking for us.

  “But it’s gone,” said my aunt.

  I’d come in at night, hitching with a couple of salesmen kept me yapping and dropped me over the hill. But I’m quick to rally, at least in winter weather, or fresh from the Agricultural.

  “Well, then, guess I’ll have to go to the greasy spoon.” The coffee-and-sandwich tourist place. No ice cream, but soda parlor number two, in a pinch. That’s where they’d all be, if they couldn’t the other.

  “Closes at six, when it’s open. Not open during the week.”

  Something in her tone put me wise. I hadn’t been back all year.

  “And Schlock’s malted?”

  “He’s been junking since spring.” My aunt began a kind of singsong. “Kelley One, Kelley Two, up the Niansit Road, they’re junking, doing the best of any, they’ve got Irish blood keeps them going, and they never even knew what was in that barn of theirs from thirty years ago when they bought the place, many’s the time I tried to tell them. And Anderson, the real estate, of course they’ve been at it always, near far back as me, and they only do to dealers, but now the mother-in-law too. And Cargill at the Souhegan crossroads, and back of the Monadnock Road, and Pack Monadnock—” That’s a mountain. “When they’re not at the tables, they’re digging for bottles. Bottles are very good this year. There’s tables out everywhere. Up and down the Pack.”

  “Bottles” means old “hand-blown” medicine bottles, from bitters to what can be only bromo-seltzers, or old commemoration bottles and so forth—I’ve dug those often, at the town dump, to sell back to them.

  “But where do we hang out now?” I said.

  My uncle meanwhile was rocking. Takes practice in our old Boston—he was going at it like a master. “I know what those kids—must be a grange. Saw all these colored lampshades going in, like we once had, the dining-room table. Kelleys sold them two. That’s what it is. A grange.”

  Wasn’t any reason my aunt should snap at him, more than at me. But she went for him, almost with her old spunk. “No it isn’t,” she said. “You know right well what it is and must be. It’ll be like the woods, not to hunt in—for you. And not to swim in—for him. Like the Pond.” Then she turned to me.” It’s to be what they call a teenage hangout,” she said.

  So then I was so tired. I didn’t say anything, didn’t say nothing. Either way—I didn’t. Supper was fixed; you’d never believe what. I ate it, but I won’t talk about it, even now.

  And the next morning, I was up early to go up over the hill and see for myself, about the town. At least I meant to, but somehow I slept until noon. When I got there, it looked lively enough, cram-jam with tourists. They didn’t stay on the hilltop long; just parked their cars in the white lines—and everywhere else—and spread out by foot. They have some idea that coming up to a table, if you don’t see their license, you won’t know they’re not local and soak ’em for it. But they look so healthy, you can always tell. They’re not a mirage, summer or winter. They’re just passing through, so you can say it. They’re real.

  And I thought, not seeing anybody who was anybody—my age that is—that maybe the Agricultural gets out earlier than their schools would, from the old days when the farm boys had to get home. But there was none of our town kids around either; few as there are left, there wasn’t a Johnny or Mary of any denomination, in sight. Later on, I knew where they were; if they weren’t digging bottles, they were rocking in their junior-size rockers, to guard the tables, or just hanging on the front steps, looking sideways through their hair. But just then I had to walk up and down the whole street a dozen times, to convince myself. There wasn’t a one of us kids, either from Willard Pond or our side, in town.

  I hung around until after suppertime, not being over anxious for it, and at the grocery steps—ours of course. After supper would be the time, if any. Not much custom came by—two. One was a great, strapping beauty of a girl we older boys had been warned away from ever since she went to live by herself, even before the school shut down for good. Other was her sister. Beautiful as sin they still were, even yet. Fading had even helped them; their hair was a cooler color, and it rippled, rippled down their backs. Going in and coming out, they made a sign of interest in me, but they couldn’t maintain it. I could see they didn’t know who I was anymore, but I wasn’t only glad, as I watched them away, I was scared, past any connection with them alone. We always had some moustached old ladies in the town, and some of the Geracis have like a pencil smear, but this, on these girls’ upper lips, above the pretty pucker, was different—a green mold. And I knew it didn’t have anything to do with their sinfulness—on account of my aunt.

  When they were gone, I got up and went inside the shop. The owner was sitting there, just like an album leftover of last year. Only thing shining was his china teeth; I never knew why the old hunting men around there always either had them, or else none. Maybe because only the old ones still knew how to hunt. I could see he didn’t know me either, or try, though he was once the one first let me have a shot at the target. But they always have a big calendar, and there it was, hung right under the big long-barreled gun they never used but said was for deer.

  “I just want to see the date,” I said. “The day of the month. I just want to see for sure what day it is in June.” For though I was sure I’d been home long enough for any school to be out by now, I couldn’t remember.

  He didn’t move any more than a wooden Indian. He let me lean right over him. I saw that the calendar page was still at October. Had an Audubon picture above the empty days, a mother woodcock with her brood nice and quiet and ready, in a field. I started to lift the page.

  “Leave that be.” He didn’t move. His eyes were pink, from staring ahead.

  “I just wanted to—”

  He raised his hand to the gun. The hand was shaking, but kind of an old brown-pink too, almost healthy. And by God, the gun barrel was shining too, more than anything else in sight in Hillsborough. I had to admire his energy.

  “It’s always October here,” he said, as I left the shop.

  But being the age I am, the soda parlors seemed to me the most sinister. “Sinister” is a word our plant-and-forestry instructor begins the hour with almost every morning; it’s his first year too, and he comes from one of the fancy places, Cornell. He’s only teacher-in-training to us, before he goes off to the job he’s going to get after the summer, in research. “Be seated, gentlemen,” he always says, “and let me impart to you another sinister fact about the ecology of our world.” Then he flashes a grin at us, to show us we can be at our ease, but
if he gave the command, he could keep some of us straight in our chairs for double the time. Talk about D.D.T., that’s only the beginning; he can tell you a hundred different ways, from detergents to depth-bombs, how the natural balance of the world is being upset. And another hundred brave ways of how nature plans to keep it. About the rise and fall of all plants, and how certain plants, even trees, have to have other trees near by them, little numbly ones you would never look at for themselves, in order to survive. “Survive” is another word he’s always at, when he isn’t at the other. Boy, has he ever given it to us. Even Johnny Ten knows what Ecology is. It’s our favorite course. “Even about the Dutch elm, boys, don’t be so quick to blame it all on that beetle, or even that aphid they’re blaming now. Look for some tree, maybe the commonest genus in the world, that isn’t standing by any more, and once used to be.”

  It was about eight o’clock or less when I left the grocery, still to be light for an hour or so, and I decided to go to the woods and think about making out. How else was I going to meet her, otherwise? I could go through our old wood and up to the rim of Willard Pond, just one open place on it, but I couldn’t go round the rim to their side, that’s all theirs, and we younger ones never do—did. They always used to come here. And that’s how it happened between her and me last year. I just went and sat at the edge of our woods, in the high, flat, mossy place I’d known forever, where you could lie and be seen or not seen, as you chose. I used to sit there regularly, day and evening, always at the same times, so that anybody saw me from over there, they’d begin to know. I used to just sit there, and think about making out with girls. And one day, parting the birches, from where she’d come around the rim, there she was. Of course we’d seen each other at the soda parlor, before.