The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher

by Hortense Calisher

  “I picked it up and read the fine print on the label: Antidote: Drink teaspoon or more of magnesia, chalk, whiting or simple wall plaster—or small pieces of soap softened in water—in milk, or raw egg. Quite a rhythm the first phrases had, each with its feminine ending, then that nice little dactyl: or raw egg. Neat, but not gaudy. I went back for the envelope I’d addressed to myself, carefully used an old toothbrush to paint some of the stuff from the bottle onto the underside of the flap, carried the envelope back to my room, and set it on the blotter to dry. I never once thought of using the poison on myself. Indeed, I had never felt more surgingly alive, and for the first time in days I fell asleep like a lamb.

  “And the next morning I discovered I wasn’t going to have Banjo after all. The world immediately lost that intent, outlined look and went back to being its usual astigmatic blur; I’d never before felt how glorious the ordinary was. Ben had a nine-o’clock in philosophy; I raced over there to tell him.

  “The elevator in Philosophy Hall was one of those old-fashioned wire-cage ones that held only about six people. I’d squeezed in and faced the door before I saw that Professor Tyng was one of the six, his height looming over us all. I must have looked wild. My hair was tousled, and I’d just remembered the envelope on my blotter in my room.

  “‘Ah, good morning, Miss—er,’ he said. He had a very commanding voice. And you know that conscious stillness people have in elevators. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Have you quite deserted poetry?’

  “The elevator girl, an old university hand, closed the door softly and waited; she knew as well as I did that he hadn’t finished. I lowered my eyes, but I could feel the mass smile all around me.

  “‘Ah, well,’ said Tyng, ‘I always say that one’s poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one’s friends.’

  “That elevator must have been the slowest in the city; it rose in exact time with the blood in my ears. I didn’t answer Tyng and I didn’t look him in the face. I just stared at the cords in his neck. Someday I’ll murder you, I thought, but not with poison. No, I’ll remember what you taught me, that only irony is safe. Just you go on talking, and someday I’ll murder you—with words. Some day I’ll hang you by the neck with them, until you are alive.

  “Classes were already on, but I got Ben out of his; he was an awful color and kept saying, ‘What is it? What is it?’ out of the side of his mouth as we went down the hall. When we got outside on the steps, I told him. At that moment, all I felt was a horrible, female embarrassment at having to tell him.

  “‘It’s Banjo,’ I said. ‘He isn’t.’

  “The most peculiar expression crossed his face. There was relief there first, of course, but then something else took its place. Regret after catharsis is the only way I can describe it—the way people’s faces sometimes look when they come out of the theater after a wonderfully harrowing play.

  “I didn’t understand it until later that afternoon, when we were sitting quietly together over a Coke, in the rear of the soda parlor.

  “‘You know,’ Ben said, ‘when we were so worried, back there … Nevertheless that was living, though, wasn’t it? That was real.’

  “I knew what he meant, of course; I’d seen the world shift that morning too. But to say it, to put it into … maybe even while it was all going on … or even before! Poor footnoter, I thought, poor self-murderer. At the same time I shrank back from the table, from him—the way one leans away from someone with a bad cold.

  “‘I’m alive!’ I said. ‘I’m still alive.’ I stood up. ‘Afraid I’ve got to run,’ I said. And I ran.

  “The minute I got back to my room I sat down and wrote him a letter saying I didn’t want to see him again. I didn’t understand quite why yet myself, so I lied and said I was in love with another man.

  “Two weeks later, Ben came to see me; I suppose he thought it just another dodge to bring him to his knees. Anyway, that’s just what he did—went down on his knees again, without even saying hello first, and asked me to marry him. Later he told a friend of mine that from the way I’d refused him—I knew I hadn’t been sad enough—it was clear I’d never be a woman of the world. I haven’t seen him since, but now and then I hear he’s around somewhere, technically alive. I sure don’t want to see him. Little does he know the very particular way he could crow over me—fainting on my door-step or not, with or without his feet in those burlap bags. …”

  An intensity of silence reigned now, a contest of quiet in which the speaker herself must have been wondering if she was to be allowed to get away with it like that—or whether the girl across from her was going to let her know that she was not.

  We can be quiet too, the silence said now. People like us …

  “What?” Was the voice relieved at not being let off? “Don’t mumble so. … Ah, you want to know what it was—what both my husbands said when they left. Now, really! The listener ought to do some of the work. I’ve been telling you, actually, all the way along. OK, guess, then. Don’t be shy; go on, try.

  “Oh. You think it was more or less what I said to Ben—just before I ran? That’s very clever of you; you’re a very clever girl. That would be a twist, wouldn’t it? You’ve got talent, no doubt about it. Well, I shan’t say, but you listen now. You listen very carefully.

  “After I’d sealed that letter to Ben and put it into the mail slot in the hall, I came back to my room. The envelope for Tyng, stained brown and shriveled, was lying where I’d left it. I picked it up, rolled it in some tissue from an old stocking box, and threw it into the basket. Then I went to the window and leaned on the sill. It was the holy time, a beautiful evening. A dusky wind was blowing, and the west was the color of a peach. I could feel the cold touch of the pearls at my throat, the warm cuddle of the jersey I’d just thrust my arms into; I thought I could even feel the lovely tickle of the blood running in my veins. It was spring, and my whole future was opening up again, full of oysters, music, lovers. A few foghorns were sounding on the river, and I wondered idly whether I would ever be able to set down exactly the emotion that sound always called up in me—as I had tried and failed to do so many times before.

  “And after a while, as I leaned there, the words came, began to shimmer and hang in the air about me. There they were, armies of them, ready to be made into ropes for necks, ready for lovers to be put into, husbands, life. They danced in my mind like wild ponies that moved only to my command, with hooves sharp enough to kill, but forelocks meek enough to me.

  “It had been a day. All in one day I’d found out I wasn’t going to have Banjo, marry Ben, poison Tyng. It had been a day full enough for anyone. Except me—and perhaps you. …”

  Was she leaning forward? The voice was low now, farther back in its own mists than it had ever been, yet near enough for the quick of any ear.

  “So I sat down at the desk again—what I wrote was published the next year. The world stretched all before me that evening, in profuse strains of unpremeditated—life. But I left the window, and began to write about it. …”

  No, it was the girl, leaning back, away, now stealthily rising. For a moment the figure stayed, a series of soft, dark ellipses lapsing to that poised, no longer tentative shoe. Then it ran. On the edge of the promenade it halted; then the wind, or a gesture of its own, tossed back the free-swinging hair and it was gone.

  Did the voice know it was alone now? Had it planned it that way—to be left addressing that perfect, illimitable audience of one? For it was still speaking.

  “So I left the window,” it said, “and began to write about it. Beginning with the word ‘I.’”

  Night Riders of Northville

  ON SMOKY SPRING EVENINGS, from the windows of the commuter’s train which rides through the lowlands of Jersey, the little bars, which are seldom more than a block or so from the stations, look like hot coals burning in the thin dusk. Spotted over the countryside, they send up their signal flares, promising the fought-off moment of excitement before you open the door—when it s
eems as if someone may just this minute have said: “Here is the place—the place,” and the flat, sold feeling after the door is open, and you see that this is just about like any such place anywhere.

  If, having missed your usual train perhaps, you stop off at the particular hole-in-a-corner which clings to your station—Joe’s Place, or Morelli’s, or the Rainbow Tavern—and you sit there over your glass, after your phone call, waiting for the taxi or the wife with the car—then you may find, after the quick rash of one-shot commuters is over, that you are alone, or almost alone, with perhaps a solitary, leather-jacketed baggageman musing over his beer on his stool down at the other end. And you wonder what keeps a joint like this alive.

  Down in the thriving center of town, or settled here and there on its skirting streets, are places, certainly, which cater more specially to a man’s sudden convivial needs, or to his malaises. Out on the highway which is never far from such a town, the roadhouses, each evening, corral the people who want steak, pizza, chicken-in-the-basket. There is a “good place to take the family and still get a drink,” a haunt for the juke-box babies, a daytime spot which draws the lawyers from the courthouse over at the county seat, even a swank little box of a place where certain rich women of the town gather to sip away time from the huge carafe of it that confronts them each day between breakfast and the arrival of the evening train. And because no man or woman lives his life in just one context, sooner or later you may see a person who more properly belongs in a particular one of these places, seated, explicably or not, in another.

  But the nondescript place where you are sitting now—could it be said to have a category? To whom or what could it cater, other than to the casual, modestly sated thirsts of its portion of two trainfuls a day of men homeward bound toward the snow shovel or the garden, or toward the less seasonal dictates of the television, the wife, and the children with egg on their chins? And as you rise, relievedly, to the toot of a horn outside, and exchange diffident nods with the owner, you decide that his reserve with you on this and other occasions is the case, not because you are not a regular, but because there are no regulars here. As you go out the door, you wonder idly how he hangs on here at all, and you imagine him of a Sunday, when the trains are all but stilled, totting up his supplier’s bills and his receipts, and worrying about a better spot for trade.

  Should you sit on there for a sufficient number of evenings, however, you might learn how wrong you were. For that place is one of a circuit of such places which certain men of the town ride ceaselessly, for reasons which neither appear to be simple nor are.

  Take, for instance, the Rainbow Tavern at Northville, and four of its regulars—James De Vries, Dicky English, Jack Burdette, and Henry Lister. If you get to know the habits of these four, who are sure to appear there singly or in varying combinations almost every night of the week—and if you also happen to learn of a minor tragedy which befell one of them—then in the course of time you may also sense, although you may never quite be able to put your finger on it, the nature of that spécialité de la maison which is served by the Rainbow Tavern.

  James De Vries, who is always called “the judge,” out of deference to the fact that he was once, for several years, a justice of the peace, is the only one of the four who was born in Northville—and perhaps some of the deference is to this fact too. In a town where most of the men make their living elsewhere, he is one of those vanishing few who subsist on their inherited knowledge of the place and the “connections” in it—a little banking, some law, a few real estate transactions, and a little politicking. He can tell you the real legend of the old Viner place, and what went on there in the old days, can search a title in his mind before he has to refer to county records, and lives in the ground-floor apartment of the cupolaed house in which he was born—the house bought by his grandfather, who was a minor henchman of Boss Tweed. Although there has never been any suggestion of financial hanky-panky about his own reputation, there still clings to him, somehow, the equivocal aura of the man who turns a dollar because he is in the know. As he stands at the bar, with his hat brim turned low over his long, swart face, so that if you are near him and fairly tall you cannot glimpse anything but his mouth (for the judge is quite short, and in the manner of many short men, affects hats a little too high in the crown and wide of brim), he keeps a silence weighted faintly with an indication that silence is what he has come here for. If he is addressed, however, on a question of local affairs, he likes to pronounce the answers in a measured, monotonous voice, although he will never keep the conversational ball rolling with the added fillip of a question or an opinion. He is at the bar briefly at five, at seven-thirty, and at ten, so precisely that Denis, the owner, often may answer a time query from one of the regulars: “Almost time for the judge’s last round.” He has two drinks at five, three at seven-thirty, and three at ten, always of straight bourbon with a dash of bitters, and always set before him by Denis as soon as he appears. He has probably not ordered out loud for years, never buys or is bought a drink, and has long since managed to convey, by this routine, that for him, liquor—something to be accomplished, as it were, as is a meal by a man not interested in the table—is never in any case a specific for some disreputable need. It is ironic, therefore, that in a place where casualness and haphazard spontaneity are part of the mores, the very carefulness of the judge’s behavior has made him the oddity he imagines he is not.

  For, often, when a man is to be found night after night in the same place, swaying deep in drink, progressing through the stereotype stages of the drunk—from the painful interest in each newcomer, the mumbled revelation to the bartender, down to the final, locked communion with the glass—often a common thing to be heard in the pitying undertones behind him is: “Nice guy though. They say his wife is a bitch.” But in the Rainbow Tavern this is most commonly said of the judge. Not by any of the other three regulars, incidentally, for all the regulars share a solidarity of reticence about their affairs outside, one even stronger than is usual among men, perhaps, and peculiarly noticeable, since it suggests that, with them, home may be really the outside, and “inside” is here. No one knows the origin of this rumor about the judge, or any verification for it, for although the other three know each other in another context, the social life of the town—have visited each other in their homes, and even, by prearrangement, have brought their wives here, after the manner of men who twice a year tolerate ladies’ night at the club—the judge does not know any of these people socially, and never brings his “outside” here. The rumor arises, possibly, because there is no worse place to hide than among the heightened awarenesses of others who are hiding too.

  When a man walks into the Rainbow Tavern, it is often possible to tell his mood, at what stage in the circuit he is, or how full he is or intends to be, from the angle at which he wears his hat. Dicky English’s hat is always tipped toward the back of his head. This is true of him wherever he is making an entrance, whether to the Rainbow or others of its ilk, to a party, to a meeting of one of the dozens of committees on which he is a prime mover, or to the smoker of the morning train. A buzzing, bustling, smart dresser of a man, in whose freshly barbered face, above his bow-tie, the slightly juvenile features are only healthfully obscured by a faintly moony, fortyish fat, Dicky, if not exactly a dream of fair women, is conceivably that of a number of fair typists in the office of which he is manager. Only longer acquaintance with him suggests that in his very trueness to form there is something much too credible. Watching Dicky at first, one is bored or amused by the larger-than-life verisimilitude of the man; later one wonders how, under such a bewildering collection of verisimilitudes, there can be a man at all. Here, one says, as he struts chestily into a conversation, or, his backside waggling in jaunty efficiency, is seen disappearing round the bend in the center of two or three cronies he has marshaled on an errand of pleasure—here is the eternal seller of tickets to raffles, the organizer of poker games and pig roasts; here is the life-of-the-party,
in whom, as with so many such, there is just enough of the clown, the simpleton, the butt—so that by his very bêtises he breaks down the united ice of others, warming them, even at the cost of ridicule, to that sense of occasion he craves.

  To his intimates at the Rainbow, where his invariable greeting is “You’re planning to go, aren’t you?” his invariable adieu “Be sure to be there, now,” Dicky passes for a joiner, a mixer, a man whose compulsion barely escapes buffoonery, but is invaluable to those whose gregariousness is more wistful, less competent. He is sensitive to the needs of the company, too—a Rotarian in Rotary, a father among fathers, a fornicator among fornicators—always so long as he can go on talking. Even his drinking is versatile and somehow controlled; he is good for an elegiac, gossipy chat in a corner or for an all-night spree with the boys, but even in the midst of the spree he never seems personally drunk. Only when you see him at home, a paterfamilias outdoing all others, or at a roadhouse, perhaps, this time with the wife, to whom he is playing the uxoriously gallant part of the husband on his girl’s night out, or in the morning smoker, where he persists in reading tidbits of news to men whose issues of the same paper are already slack and crumpled in their hands—only then may you realize that Dicky is more than a man who lives for the occasion—he is a man who cannot live without it, however small. Like those little mechanical toy men with the keys in their split, metal backs, he will scuttle around and around only as long as the original impetus lasts—one begins to imagine, behind the truckling rounds of his talk, a gasping prescience that, when he slackens, he will topple over on his side forever. He is a man who convinces himself into humanity only by the ululating sound of his own voice. And because one can imagine him en route to an experience, or possibly from it, but never actually in the middle of it, one can form conclusions as to Dicky’s reasons for stopping so often at a place like the Rainbow, which is essentially, after all, en route.