Mrs. Fay folded her hands. Now someone would ask the other question. She gave a sigh. Next to her, her neighbor marveled. No, she was nothing like—no aureole. This one whisked herself in and out, like a conjuror’s pocket handkerchief. But the effect was the same. Small sensations, usually ignored, made themselves known, piped like a brigade of mice from their holes. There was a confused keenness in the ear … nose … air? One saw the draperies, peach-fleshed velour, and waited for their smell. The chandelier tinkled, an owl hooted, and a man could hear his own breath. The present, drawn from all its crevices, was here.
“But where did the beast come from?” said Miss Bissle.
Yes, it would be she, thought Arietta. The cousin, his glasses still off, was staring at her with eyes that were bright and vague. “A runaway,” she said in a cross voice. It always made her sulky to have to end the fun this way, with no punch line but fact. “There’s an animal importer up the mountain; we found out later. He buys them for zoos.” She turned pertly to the cousin. “Perhaps it was one of yours.”
“I can’t think when, Robert,” said Miss Bissle. “I’ve always known exactly where you were.”
Robert, before he replaced his glasses, had a vague impression that Mrs. Fay looked guilty, but she spoke so quickly that he must have been wrong.
“Parker,” she said, “did you and Helen ever hear about Great-grandfather Claude, and Mr. Henry Clay?”
They hadn’t. Nor had they heard about Louis’s patron’s glass eye. Robert, saved, sank deeper in his chair. He was his father’s son after all, trained to fear the sycophant, and he brooded now on whether Mrs. Fay wanted something of him. Look how she had got round the Lampeys. Was she honest? Victor’s tonic honesty, he remembered, had spared no one; he never flattered individually but merely opened to dullards the gross, fine flattery of life alone. And what did he, Robert, want of her? If he closed his eyes, prisms of laughter floated past him, flick-flack, down the long cloth of another table; he could feel, there and here, the lax blush of the present in his limbs. He slouched in it, while Arietta told how, when Carolingus spoke for her, her father had said, “You know she has no dot.” And how Carolingus, who was slightly deaf, had replied, “I’ve no dough either.” And how in after years, both always amiably purported to be unsure of who had said which.
And then Robert sat up in his chair. For Arietta was telling the story of the “beefies” and “les maigres.”
So that’s it, he thought. I knew it, I knew it all the time. And in the recesses of his mind he felt that same rare satisfaction which came to him whenever he was able to add to a small fund he had kept in a downtown savings bank almost since boyhood, money separate from inheritance, made by his own acumen, on his own. I recognized her, he thought, and the feeling grew on him, as it had been growing all evening, that in the right company he was not such a dullard after all. He leaned back now and watched her—quiet now after her sally, unobtrusive whenever she chose. It was not wit she pretended to; her materials were as simple as a child’s. What was the quality she shared with Victor, born to it as the Bissles were born to money, that the others here felt too, for there was Lampey, murmuring ingenuously into his brandy-cup “Wonderful stuff this, isn’t it?”—quite oblivious of the fact that it was his own—and there even was Emily, her broad feet lifted from the floor? Whatever Mrs. Fay did, its effect was as Victor’s had been, to peel some secondary skin from the ordinary, making wherever one was—if one was with her—loom like an object under a magnifying glass—large, majestic and there. She made one live in the now, as, time out of mind it seemed, he had once done for himself. But he did not know how she did it. Or whether she did. Watching her rise from her chair, begin to make her adieu, the thought came to him that he would not mind spending a lifetime finding out.
“Let me go with you,” he said, standing up. “Let me drive you home.”
But Emily had arisen too. “Mrs. Fay,” she said, her blinking fluttered, “have you had any experience with birds?”
Arietta smiled between them. How lucky she had recognized him, the real thing, poor dear, even if his sad little blague—out of African Game Trails of course, old Teddy Roosevelt, on half the bookshelves in Nigeria—was not.
“Do,” she said to him, “but let’s walk.” She turned to Miss Bissle, and let the truth escape from her with gusto. After all it was her own. “No, not really. Of course—I’ve shot them.”
On the short way home, the river, lapping blandly, made conversation. Robert spoke once. “I don’t really think Emily would have suited you,” he said, and Mrs. Fay replied that it was nice of him to put it that way round.
At Arietta’s doorway, they paused. But it was imperative that she find out what was on his mind. Or put something there.
“I’d ask you in,” she said, “but I’ve nothing but dandelion wine.”
“I’ve never had any,” said Robert. “I’d like to try it.”
She led him through the hall, past the rack where Carolingus’s leather jacket hung, and her father’s, and the squirrel-skin weskit they had cured for Roger, then through the softly ruined downstairs rooms, up the stairs and into the little salon. It was an educative tour; it told him a great deal. And this was the family room; he sensed the intimate patchouli that always clung to the center of a house, even before he looked up and saw them all above the mantel, hanging on their velvet tree. While Arietta went for the wine, he moved forward to examine them. What a higgler’s collection they were, in their grim descent from ivory to pasteboard to Kodak, yet a firm insouciance went from face to face, as if each knew that its small idiom was an indispensable footnote to history, to the Sargents, Laverys, de Lászlós that people like him had at home. And there, in that small brown-tone. Yes, there.
“Take me round the portraits,” he said when she returned, and here too, since she also was on the wall, he learned. He saw that Carolingus must have been of an age near his own. “And who are they?” he said. “You missed that one.” They were sitting at a small escritoire on which she had placed the wine, and if he stretched a hand he could touch the faded brownstone.
“That’s my father as a boy, and his older brother, Victor.” What an absurd feeling happiness was. That must be its name. To feel as if such a sum, such a round sum had been deposited in that bank that he need never go there again. Not if he stayed here. As, in time, he thought, he could arrange.
Opposite him, Arietta fingered a drawer inside which the name of the desk’s first owner was inscribed—Marie-Claire, who had married for inclination but had got the rose-diamonds too. She stole a glance at her vis-à-vis. After all, she had recognized him, and in time, as she did remember, this and inclination could come to be almost the same. It was strange that he was no “beefy,” but she had already had one—and no doubt her tribe, along with the rest of the world, must move on. And he was very responsive. In time, she thought, the house would come to seem to him like his own.
“Wonderful stuff,” he was saying, holding up to the light one of the old green bottles into which Carolingus and her father had put the wine.
“Is it really?” said Arietta. “I was never any help to them on it.”
“What it wants,” he said, “is to be decanted, for the sediment. One does it against a candle flame. I was thinking—I might come by tomorrow. And show you.”
“Do—for company,” said Mrs. Fay. “Actually, one wine seems to me much like any other. I’ve got no palate for it. Women don’t, my father always used to say.”
“No, they don’t.” He was looking at her so deeply that she was startled. “Perfume kills it,” he said, and so intensely that, odd averral as it was, it hung over them both like an avowal of love.
Downstairs, she led him out the front door, and watched him to the end of the lane. Roger’s spaniel yipped, and over the hill another dog set up an answering cry. In the darkness, as she closed the door, she smiled, one of old Teddy’s sentences lumbering through her mind. “The hunter who wanders these l
ands sees the monstrous river-horse snorting, the snarling leopard and the coiled python, the zebras barking in the moonlight.” As she went back up the stairs, she wondered whether she would ever tell him. Some truths, as an honest companion, one spoke in jest; others, as a woman, one kept to oneself. At the moment it didn’t matter. Standing in the doorway of the little salon, she stretched her arms. “I’ve dined out!” she said to the pictures, to herself. “I’ve dined on zebra, and on hartebeest, and yes, I think, on … husband. I’ve dined well.”
Outside the hedge at the end of the lane, Robert watched the door close. He knew just how it would begin tomorrow; he would begin by asking her, as he had never asked anyone, to call him “Bi.” There would always be a temptation to say more—who, for instance, would understand about that day on the Brandywine better than she? But he must remember; with all she was—she was also a woman. They liked to be chosen for themselves. He must always be as mindful of that as of his incredible luck. And what utter luck it was! He swelled with the urge to tell someone about it. But there were not many in the world today who could appreciate precisely its nature. It was even possible that he himself was the last one extant of all those who once had. Standing in the shadow of the hedge, he whispered it to himself, as once a man had whispered it to his grandfather, over the cigar. “Lucky man,” he said to himself, “you have a Minot!”
Saturday Night
THAT SATURDAY AFTERNOON, AFTER he had left the analyst’s office for what might be the last time, he stopped in at the elegant little Viennese bakery in the same block, and bought a mocha cake for his wife. Although, even five years ago, Dorothy had been one of those out-of-towners who slipped into the ways of the city with only a little more emphasis than was natural, she had never lost her glee over the complicated, alien tidbits which were such a contrast to the pies and hefty layer cakes of her native Utica. The huge new “housing development” in which they had been lucky enough to get an apartment quartered only several glittering chain shops, which she had long since learned to snub.
Waiting absently at the counter for his change, he found that actually he could not fully realign Dorothy’s face in his memory. Although he could summon a hundred images of their life together, before and now—the curve of her back as she offered the spoon to the child, the tilt of her head as she slumped, reading, in a chair—in full focus her face evaded him, remaining always in the rear, or to one side. A common enough occurrence, he knew. Nevertheless it left a curious hollow in his new-found assurance.
As he left the store, he turned a last look on the block to which he had been coming for almost three years now. Although, when away from it, he could not have told between which two of the line of houses the one he visited was precisely located, the whole of the block reared itself in his mind like a composition, an entity whose significance had become the foreground of his life. Up three steps, in at the gray entrance, into one of those self-service elevators within whose clicking, measured suspension one rode always with a sense of doom, no matter to what event. Then the anonymous room, whose stepped-down colors and noncommittal furniture offered only the neuter comfort of no stimulus to either approval or dislike. Then, finally, another installment in the long, delicate auscultation of himself, during which, sometimes clamped in resistance, sometimes irrigated with relief, he had been free to pursue the quality of his fear.
Turning away, he walked down to the corner and joined the vague group waiting for a bus. Wherever you went, at almost any time, on almost every corner, there would be such a group assembled. It was a deceptively impressive fact which, when elaborated on, he had long since learned, led nowhere. It was part of the provocative pulse of a city, of a world in which, if you did not learn to deflect the thousand casual contacts strewn at you, without attempting to seize upon them, to weld them into some philosophy of destination, you were lost indeed.
He wedged himself onto the bus, carefully protecting the cake. Looking down at the white box, he thought tiredly of what a funny symbol it was of that daily switch-off in which, laying aside the engrossing thread of himself, he bought a cake, he took a bus, and—rapped smartly back into the secondary—he deserted for another day the re-creation of himself as a working being. As a working being, he cautioned himself, he heard himself being cautioned by the dry voice from behind him in the anonymous room. For if the whole process had not helped him to hold himself untremulously at last in a world where others managed, what had it been but an infinitely seductive excursion into ego, after which, as cut off from others as he had been in the beginning, he would find himself twice alone, holding together the explored corners of himself?
Clutching the box in his cramped hand, he got off the bus at his stop. Less than a year ago, down here, there had been nothing but the great cylindrical gas tanks, nuzzled by tenements, slotted shops, and the exhausted outbuildings natural to the wharflike streets near an old river. Now the “housing development” loomed upward before him, an incredible collage pasted against the sky. Even remembering the excavations and the swarmed signs of contractors, even forcibly recalling the scores of families who were inside it going through their daily paces like tidy, trotting simulacra of each other, it was hard to believe that the whole organism had not been stroked from a lamp. Looking at it, the eye seemed always to be trying to wipe it away.
He and Dorothy had already been drawn into the imitatively suburban life of the young couples who lived there. Dorothy, of course, he thought, much more than he—since whatever time he had away from his university job was already so prescribed. Again he strove for a better picture of her, brushing aside the recurrent blankness. In the mornings, waving to her as he passed the playground on the way to his classes, he had seen her sitting talking or reading or sewing with the other mothers, watching Libby as she played with the other beplaided and corduroyed toddlers in the austerely planned sandpit, already cluttered with buried rakes and spoons and lost tin fish. All of the mothers, still slender and attractive, looked like thirty-year-old versions of the college girls they once had been. Many of them had had careers or talents that marriage and children had interrupted or aborted, and to the memory of these they paid insistent and bitter homage, constantly totting up the frustrations of housewifery in remarks which were like a kind of bleak, allusive shorthand understood by them all. For now that they were women of the home, they felt an inferiority to their former selves, and so, too, they had constructed a technical patter full of words like “preschool” and “security” and references to “Gesell-and-Ilg,” as if by this subaqueous jargon they would return motherhood, with all its inconvenient secretions and scullion duties, to the status of a profession.
With Dorothy, however, he thought thankfully, this defeated prattling never had been more than part of her half naïve acceptance of the New York “line.” She had been reared in a town where people, particularly the women, expected that life would deal with them according to those archaic truisms which, if no longer so hallowed as once, came to them, at least, without the friction of disappointment. It had been this certainty in her which had drawn him as much as her mild blond good looks, whose exact lineaments so curiously evaded him now; it had been to this sureness that he, already deeply flawed with irresolution, had clung and married himself, in the sick hope of transference.
How was he to have foreseen, he thought now, that this very ability of hers to cope, this health, would become formidable between them, sending him further into his cowl of preoccupation, leaving her beached on normality, so that, strangers now, too far apart even for conflict, they had gone on sharing the terrible binding familiarities of the joint board, the joint child, and, less and less often, the graceless despair of the common bed?
For in the world of the normal, he knew now—he heard the dry voice say—to those whose qualms were always based on the tangible, the active, the real, how could he have seemed otherwise than intransigent, when he had insisted that in his world there was a basic, roiling chaos, over which the footage
was never more than a series of staircases that dissolved as one trod them, in the midst of which alternatives faced one like knives—and people were the only alternatives?
He walked on through the circuitous approaches to his own building. Light skittered, noise faceted from the hived buildings about him, lazily compounding a day, redolent of livelier Saturdays and more expectant springs, which was like a percussive recall to health. Fear was all right, it said to him, as long as one could bring it out into the light and give it a name. He was almost up out of the ditch now, almost up on the other, the safe side, with Dorothy and all the people who knew where they were going, and could manage.
He turned in at Number 6 Village Drive, noting, as always, the cozy term applied to the massive clinical building whose entrance halls, all of nude beige marble enlivened only by buttons, held the etherized silence of a museum. It was difficult to believe that on its upper floors hundreds of doors opened on interiors rumpled with living and the intimate sediment of people, on kitchens checkered with the aftermath of meals, bathrooms clotted with diapers and cream pots, at whose windows stockings hung swinging in the dust motes and the sun.
The door opened to his key and he stepped into the apartment, receiving the familiar impingement of the pictures, the chairs, the books serried just as he had left them. Everything waited for him like a box full of stale attitudes, old grooves in which he both fitted and chafed. As always on Saturdays, the room had a cleanliness almost pitiable in view of the way Sunday’s lax living jarred and crumbled it—almost as if Dorothy expected someone—or something. He hoped she was not going to expect too much of him at first. He hadn’t really thought, he hadn’t had time to think of it during these years, visualizing her, when at all, as a man in a ward visualizes the ordinary ones, cumbered with health, who wait patiently in the anterooms of hospitals.
The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Page 51
