The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher

by Hortense Calisher

  “Notice I’m not the least interested in what you’ll remember. My way of talking’s a habit I can’t shake. Keep that in mind, won’t you, that I warned you? For I’ve reached an age, you see, where I notice people try to undazzle the young. …

  “Thank you, you’re very sweet, but I’m almost forty-one. There are women who falsify their age and women who ask you to guess; I’m too old to be the first sort and not old enough to be the other. And if you think that remark has been made before—well, it has! Oh well, thanks. The hair’s a tint of course, but at least I started out a real blonde. And we small-boned types wear better than average; I’ll live till ninety and die of a broken hip. And of course nobody who is anybody fattens anymore. A social comment, that—maybe you’ll use it someday when you use me.

  “Anyway, there are at least a half dozen of us who might be me. All of us have done enough to be looked up, the way you looked me up, all about forty, forty-five. All with at least two husbands too, although mine were better than most. A painter so handsome you wouldn’t believe his work could deserve such success—until you saw it—and a banker of such charm that nobody minded his money. Too good to have let go, both of them. And of course I didn’t, though they let me think so, right up to the end. Absolute opposites, those two men were, never even met; yet when they left, it was with the same parting words. …

  “Don’t flinch. You said you wanted to be one of us, didn’t you? From the pieces you showed me, maybe you will be. That’s why I’m telling you this. Get it straight, though—I loved them, and they me. My first used to say he’d never seen a woman as pretty and sexy as I was who was so tough to paint. Maybe you’re thinking that’s because one can’t paint a verbal shimmer. But I don’t talk very much with men actually, and I never talked at all in bed; I knew enough not to do that, even before I’d read about it. And I suppose it’s not surprising they both made the same remark when they left—after all, they were both expressing the same thought. Of course, it wasn’t my intelligence that bothered my husbands, though I’m grateful people think so. When asked, I take the line that the painter wouldn’t cope—engage—with it, and I couldn’t stand that. And that the banker wanted to promote it—and of course I couldn’t stand that either. That’s the line I take.”

  In the chair opposite, the one pale slipper, twisting, was joined in its movement by the other; then both were set flat, suggesting that the chair’s occupant was nervously in thrall.

  “So,” said the voice quickly, “at last, back to that spring. Couldn’t do without the preamble, though; you’ll see why, if you haven’t begun to already. In fact, because you’re so smart—so much smarter than I was at your age—I’ll even give you the key to it all, though I expect it’ll sound like kitchen-maid stuff to your collegiate ear. That spring was the last spring she really lived. Sorry, this is one of those. What I call ‘little did I know’ stories. Anyway—in case I made you uneasy back there—I still haven’t quite murdered Professor Tyng.

  “William Tenney Tyng. He was a tall, monk-skulled Anglophile, who opened his Daily Theme course every year by reciting “The policeman’s lot is not a happy one.’ In private life he was known to be writing an epic poem. He hated to see the student eye in a fine frenzy rolling, and his highest accolade—I never got it—was to put ‘Neat but not gaudy’ on modest little themes about cats. I suppose his real trouble was he wanted to be teaching young Oxonians, not second-generation American girls who were floundering in a tumescent passion for the language and spoke it mostly in the accents of the Midwest or the Bronx. And I suppose I should feel sorry for him, now that I know he directed his irony at us only because he didn’t dare direct it at the sublime. But I can’t. Oh, I’ve used him, now and then, as people like me will use, over and over, those who have humiliated them, and I once said he didn’t ‘teach the young idea how to shoot,’ as the quote says; he shot it, wherever, green and trembling, it arose. Let that stand.

  “For you see, I’d set myself to handing in poems as themes. Five a week we had to hand in—and almost always I was his target. And I was drunk on language, the way kids used to get on jazz at Birdland. I ran all over the pasture, wondering how I could ever eat all the books there were; I was out of my mind with delight at what some people had been able to do to the world with words. And the words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes, and hung them like bangles in my mind. To this day I’ve never seen a snaffle, but I remember sitting for hours once wondering what made it twinkle—twinkle—on the page; a lot of those double-consonant words do it. Lots of times I never even knew how the words sounded out loud, and I rarely looked up the meanings—the words simply hung up there, waiting. It wasn’t a bad way, really; you don’t have much of value to say at that age; what can anybody do but hang up the words and wait?

  “So, of course, I was a setup for Tyng. If he hated, as he did, the exotic in Sir Thomas Browne, De Quincey, Coleridge, what couldn’t he do with me! ‘Now, let us see what our young wallower in the beauties of English literature has for us today! Hmm, a sonnet: “Let me touch the terrace of the dream, /Soft set foot upon the fragile stair …” Hmm. I’m rather a stupid man. Perhaps the author will explain this to me. Most of the terraces I’m familiar with happen to be in Scarsdale.’

  “I might have cut his classes—we had free cuts—but I found I couldn’t; I had to sit there, in defense of I didn’t quite know what. He wasn’t just preaching against excess; I knew that. He was saying that all ardor, aspiration, was a disgrace.

  “When I was most sunk, I started reading detective stories. Dostoevski and Baudelaire were too much for me; in their company I didn’t need Tyng to tell me I was a serf. I don’t know how the idea of writing a theme in which a professor was safely murdered merged with the idea of murdering a professor—maybe because the plot was so close to hand. During vacations Tyng had us mail themes to him with a self-addressed envelope enclosed for their return. He was a bachelor with no secretary, and the themes always came back marked in his own crabbed script. If one could find a strong poison to put under the flap of the return envelope—a delaying poison, of course, which wouldn’t be fatal until the envelope was safely away in the mail—then ’twere done. Of course, one would have to gamble that Tyng didn’t use a sponge.

  “You laugh; I don’t blame you. I would too, if I didn’t know how close I came to the deed. I scared myself, because I knew the intense way I brooded on it wasn’t normal. And I had a girl friend whose father ran an untidy, neglected drugstore; we often stopped by of an afternoon and made sodas for ourselves. I found myself one day looking up poisons in the pharmacopoeia, and I tried to reassure myself by recalling that, no matter how many times I’d read Crime and Punishment, I’d always hoped that Raskolnikov wouldn’t. Still, why had I avoided the school library and gone to the city one downtown?

  “Then, one day when Tyng stood up to dismiss me after having been particularly vicious to me in the conference hour, he said: ‘Easter vacation coming up. Such a strain on poets. Perhaps you might curb your élan a little, during the Lenten season. Try not to drink quite so deep of the Pierian spring. Otherwise—’ Then he shook his head, licked the flap of an envelope he’d been fiddling with, and set it on the desk, as if for me to see. REPORTS, it said. RETURN TO REGISTRAR.

  “I walked out of there holding my breath, but not because I was worried about the mark. I’d done the work, and for all its spotty precocity it wasn’t the kind he could openly give an F or D; what he’d do would be to purge me with mediocrity as he’d done last term, cupping my overheated blood with a C.

  “No, what made me shiver, even as I passed girls in light jerseys on the tennis courts, was that licked envelope, falling to my lot as the knowledge that the old woman would be alone fell to Raskolnikov’s. Dozens of times I’d heard someone say, as we left Tyng’s course in Room 242: ‘Couldn’t you kill him?’ Now I realized that what I’d been saying to myself was ‘I could kill him.’ I don’t know what I’d have gone on to do if Ben Bijur
hadn’t been waiting for me at the dorm—as he usually was, in spite of his best resolutions, almost every other day. He was waiting, though, in one of those chintzy cubicles they made boys wait in. In a way it was like being saved from jumping out the bedroom window by happening to be in the center of the room, thinking about it, when the plaster falls.

  “I suppose I was in love with Ben Bijur because he was the first man who’d ever touched me. In later years I’ve seen words swarm about an idea just the way my spongy dreams clustered about Ben Bijur’s head the minute he put a hand on me and I let it stay. At home, in Ontario, I’d been a day student at a convent in a small town; the few local boys I’d known had been as fair and corn-fed as myself. This boy was enticingly swart and world-weary; he had splendid teeth and a fine baritone, but at twenty-two he was already losing his hair—a fact that he and I both looked upon, at the time, as an effect of character—and he was fond of saying quietly that he had been born old.

  “The sad truth was that he had; his was one of those temperaments that never, even in senility, take the form of youth. At twenty-two, he was already a disappointed man, sulking at authority instead of flying at its eyes, carrying his hypersensitivity around with him the way a would-be suicide carries a knife—hoping to hurt himself. Even his frustrations seemed secondhand, as if he’d got them only through reading of Prufrock and Leopold Bloom. But at the time I was much impressed by the experiences at which Ben hinted—though he was, no doubt, as virginal as I—and when he repeated his fantasies of affairs with older women, I smoothed his poor, shedding scalp in awe. He was a word collector too, and used to tell me mournfully that he was afraid he was already putting life into footnotes without ever having enjoyed the text. Whereas, he used to say, there was something about me, young as I was, which marked me for the success that would pass him by. Sometimes he drew little word pictures of how, when ten years had passed, I would open the door of my penthouse and find him fainting on the doorstep, his feet wrapped up in burlap bags.

  “Ben called me four or five times a week and dropped by during the day, but he would never make a date ahead, and he had a way of not phoning on Saturday night—this was to preserve his freedom and keep me from knowing where I stood. Marriage was never mentioned, of course—he was getting his Ph.D. on an allowance from his father—but neither of us saw anybody else. Nights when he hadn’t called, I hung near the phone in agony; when he did call and we went somewhere to neck, it often ended with me crying like mad on his shoulder—I didn’t know why. Sadness interested him, and he treated mine with great deference, kissing me with a kind of scientific respect and muttering words like Sehnsucht into my ear. The farthest he’d ever gone was to lean against my blouse and quote into it, but this seemed to me very far.

  “I’d never told Ben about Tyng, and I didn’t this time; I was in such a high state of dejection I hardly noticed him. He’d got me out of the cubicle, bought us both hot dogs, and walked me to our favorite stretch along the river, before I realized that he was hanging on to my arm and looking at me with a humility I’d seen on the faces of young husbands walking their pregnant wives.

  “I wasn’t noticing him, you see; it must have been clear to him that I was swept up in some powerful emotion that was bigger than I. And for people like—well, like Ben—the sight of another person in the throes, divorced from reason, offering a breast for the eagles to pick at and so on, has an attraction just as strong as sex. That’s why lots of times you’ll see a weak man or an ugly woman with an entourage otherwise hard to explain; it’s because they have this talent for letting life blow through them, for seeming to be swept away. And the people who hang around them don’t even hope to get into the act; all they ask is to get close enough to be shaken a little themselves—something like kissing the Pope’s ring, or being touched by the king for pox.

  “Of course, there’s another, simpler explanation for the way Ben acted—that he thought I was thinking of some other boy. Whichever it was, between it and the evening, he was done for.

  “It was a gorgeous evening, one of those butterfly-blue ones. Every once in a while the river gave a little shantung wrinkle and then lay still; there was one sailboat low in the foreground, like Whistler’s signature. Behind us, the windows of the Alpha Delt house were open, but there was nobody in them; everybody was off for the Easter holidays. Ben knew the grad student who acted as janitor in exchange for an apartment in the basement, an older man who was doing some kind of endless project on the Risorgimento and went off now and then with the merchant marine, until he had enough funds for another go at research. His door was always unlocked, and we’d been there once or twice alone. That evening there was a note tacked to the door: ‘Back next Wednesday at eighteen hours.’

  “Ben led me inside, murmuring, ‘Say something, darling; you look so sad. I’ve never seen you look so sad!’ By this time I wasn’t, of course—he’d never called me darling before, and I knew that for him words spoke much louder than action—but I had the sense to hold my tongue and keep my sad expression, and on a young skin I suppose the wish to murder and the wish to love look much the same.

  “He took off my dress, and the sight of me in my long cotton slip sent him down on one knee, his arms flung wide; it was a pose like the gallants in those slightly shady, illustrated editions of Mademoiselle de Maupin or the Heptameron—both of which Ben had. I was in an odd rig for seduction; there was a fashion on then for Oxford glasses, silver-rimmed ones that snapped open like lorgnettes, and mine hung down over my chest on a chain. My shoes were much too sedate for me too—terribly long, pointed ones, like dachshunds’ muzzles—and my stockings, heavy gun-metal silk, were rolled. Despite all this, we were able to lose our heads. Or at least we thought we had—this generation can have no idea of the innocence of mine. When, we left the apartment, I was under the confused impression that I had been seduced—an assumption that wasn’t corrected until two years later, when I was. Ben must have been under the same misapprehension, because he insisted on taking me back to the dorm, ten blocks away, in a cab. And on the way he asked me for a date—for Saturday night.

  “And when Saturday night came, he surprised me by taking me to the Baxter. Unlike the campus joints where we’d always gone for Coke or coffee, the Hotel Baxter was downtown, dull and semiofficial; couples went there dutifully the minute they got engaged, for a splurge à la carte. Poor Ben! It was his only way of saying that if necessary he’d do right by me, but I was as insulted as if he’d bought the ring without asking me. It seemed humiliating that only sin had got me to the Baxter—and besides, I wasn’t dressed for it.

  “To this day those starlight-roof places always make me think of babies born out of wedlock, for of course that’s what was on Ben’s mind. He ordered Alexanders—in those days that’s what you started girls drinking on—and when I said mine made me feel positively sick he turned white, not knowing I’d said it only because at home in Ontario my grandfather had taught us early to disdain anything but Scotch. ‘What—what about Banjo?’ he said.

  “Banjo was one of those terrible whimsies that lovers have, like those letters beginning ‘Dear Poodles …’ that stockbrokers always seem to get held up for; you and your Stamford boy probably shared something of the same. Ben was always plying me with anecdotes I didn’t yet know were clichés, and once—after he’d told me how Isadora Duncan wrote Bernard Shaw suggesting what a paragon any child of theirs would be—we’d spent an afternoon concocting a paragon of our own. It was to have Ben’s teeth, my hair, and—since this was also a very feminist era—both our brains. We’d dubbed it Ben-Jo, corrupted in time to Banjo.

  “And for some reason that wasn’t clear to me at the Baxter, his choosing that way to ask me infuriated me. Why did he always have to remove himself from everything, from the most important things, by putting them into quotes!

  “‘Oh you!’ I said. ‘You’re so literary you make me spit!’ Then I stood up, burst into tears, and we went home.

  “Extr
aordinary, isn’t it? There it was, a warning out of my own mouth, and I passed it by, the way you can speed to your death right past a warning from Burma-Shave.

  “During the next few weeks Ben scarcely left my side. Vacation was well under way, but by this time I was glad I hadn’t had the money to go home; I couldn’t have borne being at home feeling like Hardy’s Tess. Day after day went by and—it must have been nervous strain or self-hypnosis—I still couldn’t assure Ben we weren’t going to have a baby. Luckily I had term papers to do, and Ben had his thesis; we spent most of our time in the library or walking by the river, holding hands numbly but not kissing. I was finding out how the world both heightens and darkens under a single, consuming anxiety; normality goes on rattling around you, and your trouble is like a goiter in your gullet that no one else can see. Ben and I couldn’t bear to be out of each other’s sight; it was such a relief to be with someone who knew. At the same time, I couldn’t help feeling a certain excitement at being one with several heroines of history. Once, when we were down by the river, I referred darkly to An American Tragedy and, to my surprise, Ben gave me a dreadful look and dropped my hand. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that he might be having heroic feelings of his own. I wasn’t afraid of them, but I was rather miffed at the idea of his enjoying them, and for the first time I wondered whether it would be a bore to marry someone whose reference books were the same as mine.

  “Meanwhile, I’d forgotten all about Professor Tyng. Then, the last night before school began again, I remembered I hadn’t sent him my ration of themes. I’d enough back poems to choose from, and after Ben and I had parted, I sat up until three retyping them. As I slugged them out I kept thinking of how I might never have been in the situation I was in, if it hadn’t been for Tyng. When I’d finished, I went down the hall to wash out some underwear, and in the bathroom I saw the bottle of stuff the maids used for the drains. It was marked POISON in large, navy-blue letters.