Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  She'd never written of it before, and no one else had seen the one stanza. She read it out, in its first version:

  Miss Lacey’s is gone from Carnegie Hall.

  Times published her soul food on the Women’s Page;

  Pimps’ limousines brought her black girls at a crawl,

  Revving up again around the corner, turning on a dime.

  “Half-ass time,” the tires whisper, “—oh Miss Lacey,

  Gas cost something awful, girls blow your mind.”

  Across in the building built like a Florentine bank,

  An old white lady sits, eating Bath Olivers

  From the gourmet store; Taste like beaten biscuit

  If you squeeze your eyes and come from Georgia—

  And who doesn’t like watching whores?

  But Miss Lacey’s is gone now, from Carnegie Hall.

  She read well.

  A long pause. “Yes—” Lievering said then, “—it’s yours.” She felt as if he’d given it to her.

  As in a way he had. Raising her head, she gazed absently around the apartment the man who wasn’t Ventura had just left—into which she herself these days came perhaps once or twice a month. Mulenberg, he’d said. She’d remember it; she remembered all of them, always asking, if they didn’t give their names, always knowing when they gave them falsely. No matter; she treasured them. These were their names to her. The import with which they always told or concealed the one name that held them together always surprised. She herself would have enjoyed being named to the hundredfold, one for each hour, each dress and each outer garment she chose to cover it, each country her lucky job submitted her to, and each stopping place. And each man on whom she perpetrated adventure. To which man she always told her real name. A name was a word. Words were her honor; those she would never falsify. Why should she? Through them, she’d learned to move with the current, poetic or not—and that it was useless to falsify. Hopeless.

  Stretching her long arms high above her head, she exploded a great waw of breath. She was full of hope.

  She bent to her page again, seeing in the gap between first and second stanza what hadn’t been written there.

  That week following, Lievering had invited her and another student, an upper-class Bajan boy who’d once lived in Philadelphia, to come out to dinner with him and a pair of visiting professors from the States. Part of the learning process, he’d said: the university would pay. Lievering was poor—but he was also said to have the habit of it. Which she and Vivie did not. She and the boy knew they’d been hand-picked, and not only because they were bright students; the boy because he was a cripple, she because she was—she hadn’t yet known what. In class Lievering was firm. Each poet, he said, has one ikon the student must search for. Raising his arms crosswise, he added more haltingly, “Each person.” The crippled boy nodded, rapt. Maybe Lievering had already searched out his for him. She already felt she was to be given hers.

  That evening, Lievering and the boy picked her up at home. Vivie had approved of Lievering’s suit, worn daily in class and bought a lifetime ago in London, but ignored the boy, as she’d ignored all people of color since returning to the Islands. The boy owned the car which brought them; Lievering had never owned one. It was hard to imagine his tautness at any wheel. But though he exclaimed at the luck, he wouldn’t have elected the boy for that reason. Later she would understand better the workings of his innocence, which wasn’t childish but desert-dry, absolute. Fatality had picked him clean. Since then he’d lived in the great, nervy spaces between good and evil. To him, anything blown at him by either was gratuitous. No wonder hesitation was his disease.

  So, for instance, a friend and a friend, pressing their wits together, had blown him into the university, which like others, as soon as the discomfort he occasioned outweighed his gifts, would blow him out again. For although he was neither mad nor sick, he had a fault of memory which kept him remorselessly and inconveniently in the present. Where a normal personality’s sense of the past gave it footholds to live forward from, articulating these as it went, Lievering’s past, of which he couldn’t or wouldn’t speak, co-existed with him, only partially latching him on to a present he wished to live by entirely. Slowly as he spoke, ate, taught, he was lucky to do it at all. His silent central pain took the form of ever-heightening discriminations. He could just barely choose—his speech, his bread. In harness with other people’s easy onwardness, this could grow worse. That night they had a demonstration of it.

  “Where we going?” The elder professor had been white, a psychologist with a desk body and gold-scrolled glasses, and genial in a hard way. The younger one, whom he’d introduced as Terence, hadn’t seemed like a professor at all. Robin, the cripple, who was yellower than most people of color here and not as pretty, was already irritated with him. “We could eat here at the hotel,” Terence said. “It’s very super.” He was a smooth copper color, with features so little raised in his round head that he looked to her like a melted penny.

  “We’re on tour to study race relations,” his elder said. “Why not go where race is? I mean—both, of course.” His laughter did nothing to age him.

  Lievering smiled.

  Terence whistled. “Anybody ever tell you you look like Raphael’s David? That one in front of that gallery in Florence?”

  “Michelangelo’s,” his elder said.

  His friend had mugged up at him. “We were both there.”

  Robin had jerked his bad foot.

  “Buonarroti?” Lievering said slowly. Informing always eased him. “Yes?”

  They waited again.

  “Well, then—what do you say?” The elder professor had written a well-known book and was a leader of men. “Where we eating?”

  “There is a restaurant.” Lievering had doffed his schooltime tie for an open collar with long lapels, neatly darned. Always interested in white bodies, she’d noted his well-modeled throat.

  “Bridgetown? Outside it, huh. West?” In the end, Robin, interpreting Lievering’s vague gestures, limped the way to the car, seating Lievering in front with him to direct. Or deflect.

  They drove for hours. At first, when eating places were passed by as too neoned-up or not the one, they assented, but soon they began to understand that nothing being good enough for them, nothing was what they might get. “Any, but any old tippy-oh joint,” Terence said fretfully from the back seat, where she sat between him and his friend. But Lievering was hunting the perfect place for them—one he’d heard about but had never had the money to dine at himself—and urged here, backtracked there, through woods, half-lit hills, and down the crashing coastline, they had found it. She heard Lievering give the relieved sigh of decision resting. Though the place was a burnt wreck. They all stared at the charred heaps smelling of sweet-potato ash, the spars sticking up like a ship in starlight. And the sign.

  “Take us back to the Sandy Lane,” the professor said.

  On the way back, he and his friend had a low-voiced exchange, half French, half English. “Incroyable,” Terence said. “But he is marvelous.” The professor answered in English. “Not for you, doll.” Adding in French, “So is the girl. Marvelous.” Terence replying with a French snigger; “And not for you.” Adding, even with a frank glance at her, “What’s she along for?” “Dunno,” the other had answered. “Dunno if she does. Where are we?”

  She’d breathed to herself, softly. It was like being a child, and not being one. “Does he know?” Terence said. “What is he?” Not one of us, the other had replied. “But yes, beautiful. If you can call it that. Spirituel.” And after a moment, “Now I remember. He’s supposed to have been in one of the death camps. You see that mark on his chest? Though I never saw the mark on a chest before.” “Where have you seen it, cheri?” the brown one said. And then, “Oh Lordy-lordy, where are we?”

  “At the Sandy Lane,” Robin had shrieked from over the front seat. “And she understands French.” One could never tell what Lievering had or
hadn’t heard, but he was already out of the car.

  “Good,” the old one said nimbly. “I invite you all.” His glasses beamed at her. She rather admired him.

  “No, no,” Lievering said. “It is my responsibility.” In the starlight his head, furled in its collar, hung in its own cloud. He went on in, up the steps.

  Terence groaned, clapping his hand to his forehead. From behind his fingers he peered at her.

  She leaned across him to the other one, who returned her glance more openly. There were no race relations yet, as far as she could see, between any of them, but you never knew. Should she speak English to him now, or French? English. French on her part now wouldn’t be polite.

  “It’s a mole,” she said low. And crossed her legs hard, over the sudden liquid pang between them. That was it then. Why she was here.

  Terence uncovered. “What is?”

  The older one nodded at her. He’d known why she was there before she had. In the years since, she’d often wished she knew his name, to tell him what had become of her, if she was ever to tell anyone. He knew his business, that one. “The mark,” he said.

  Lievering was back. It was after hours, he told them. The hotel restaurant was closed. The town was. There was a tremulous dignity about him. He’d done his best. The expected fatality had come upon him, resting him. Perhaps he lived for it? For he had the panting air of a dog after a chase, quarry or no. A weal of satisfaction came out on his face like a crack in sculpture, mortalizing. “There is nowhere else. Unless, Robin—” had a suggestion? He didn’t finish. It was now in their hands.

  It was always in somebody’s. Whoever, rent by his broken grace, would do something. That night it was her turn. She was filled with joy at the workings of things.

  “Vivie’ll feed us. My stepmother. She’s great with ham and eggs.” And with little else, since leaving off being a cook, but they needn’t know this. “And she always waits up.”

  “As late as this?” the professor said gently.

  “She still keeps theater hours. From where she worked.”

  “Miss Lacey’s?” Lievering nodded at her.

  Robin swung on his heel jealously.

  Ordinarily, Lievering’s reference to the poem would have been a betrayal. She’d been grateful. She too had a past, for which so far the island’s bland lightheartedness had done nothing.

  “Miss Lacey’s,” Terence said. “Lord God.” He hitched a hip. “And did you work there too?”

  He resented her being taller, and his sweetums being nice to her. Ollie’d had a few sidekicks like that who’d called her “the giraffe.” She spat lightly at him, a ghostly p-r-r-t. “And there’ll be plenty of race relations,” she’d assured the other one. “Some months here, Vivie just can’t stand the blacks.”

  At her desk now she chewed her pen, silently laughing. Outside in this side street it was now the deepest trough of night, just as it had been there—and equally set for a scene she cherished and couldn’t get rid of. Loving her own seventeen-ness for the first time it had strutted in command of anything. For the feel between her legs of those hot, plushy labia with their contracting Venus valve, moving toward the presence of Lievering, while by instinct she turned her back on him. In those days, too, her head was as open as a begging bowl; anyone with a mind to could drop a coin of idea in. She had some of those yet. But most of all the scene held Vivie on all cameras—paisan scourge, beloved half-mother and link about to break—handsome by then in the andante style of middle age about to fall. To die.

  Their small cottage, white enough on the outside, had been shadowy as a hut within; the rent from the New York house tenants had had to pay for all their keep plus her own tuition, plus the lawyer for Ollie’s latest scrape. She’d pointed the other four to its privy, meanwhile calling in to Vivie, then had led them in and seated them on the one room’s scattered cretonne pallets, doing all of this with a child’s offhand certainty that everyone else lived as it did, though she knew well enough that Robin’s parents lived in a large house high on a hill. Vivie, for her heart’s sake resting high on a frowzy pillow, in her lap their collection of tattered magazines from New York, wore a headkerchief which misrepresented her entirely; under it was hair oiled Spanish style and amber ear drops from Veronica’s father. The cardiac blue in her lips shone electric on her pear-tinted face. When she smiled, she never showed gum. When she was stormed up, as then, her cheeks paled like knuckles, reminding all that she could outwait anyone. As she had outwaited Veronica’s mother, loftily confessing it. “I did your daddy best. I’ll do you—as good as him.” Seeing their entourage, she settled the large Canadian coin-silver brooch in the grandee calico ruffles she’d worn over crushed kid-leather boots long before the era had caught up with her, and lifted her chin.

  The professor introduced himself with a polite little speech, somehow including Terence without naming him. Vivie nodded, joining the two of them with a glance before turning to Robin, who still had not sat—not because of his brace, but for the awkwardness of being in such a poor house. His parents, returned now from their Philadelphia teaching jobs, the father to Parliament, the mother to society, had snubbed Vivie at the freshman reception but had greeted Veronica for her father’s sake. Vivie nodded to him, elaborately. “Rest your leg.”

  Vivie could be cruel, the girl thought now, in the way of all people who knew the schemata of the world, who had swum out beyond the breakwaters of sentiment. Like Shakespeare, like all good dramatists, if she’d written plays she would have lopped off heads.

  Lievering had come up behind her to kiss Vivie’s hand, but she’d already seen him, in Vivie’s face. She herself had lost his name and couldn’t say who he was, already focusing on an image of him separate from the man before her and reduced minute enough to swim her bloodstream without the man himself ever having touched her—a merman of the blood, inside his own icy capsule, in a forty-year-old graveyard suit made before he was born. Lievering kissed the hand, in slow motion. Then the six of them—Robin, the pink professor, the angelically fair and dark-haired Lievering, copper Terence, her black self and Vivie already blued with death—sat looking at each other, in all their colors of skin. It would be the last time she thought of it that way—skin.

  “Who hurt you?” Vivie was saying to Lievering. “I’ll cook you a meal.”

  Whatever Vivie’s circumstances, she kept the makings of one special meal always with her as insurance that sooner or later somebody worthy of it would crop up. Only Ollie, when he flew down for one of his hideouts, could make her break into her hoard, since he always replaced it. Two weeks before, he’d done so from the gourmet store on Fifty-seventh Street, the same one that had appeared in the Miss Lacey poem. The packages always caused Veronica a certain eerie misery, hoarded too. Having only one street to be homesick for must be shameful to those who had whole villages at their backs, home towns doubly luminous because they’d never been out of them. Yet it was the street which had pushed her to poetry.

  Just so, when she’d first been entered in a Stateside school as a transfer from Canada and from Bridgetown, the weight of other languages at her back, other worlds, had made her a solitary. Though the teachers tried to make kindly class-use of her foreignness, they couldn’t really treasure it. Nowadays the good schools were packed with children who from choice could have ranges of cities, different families, behind them, and these children were no longer tentative. The world now belonged to their kind. Rich suburban kids holidayed in the same Puerto Rico the city poor had emigrated from. A few of the forward-looking rich now even sent their young to her former school for the ethnic polish money could not buy. The world now belonged to the smartly drifting children of successive worlds. If you came from what had once been sought after as an “integrated” background, you had to catch up.

  Meanwhile, Vivie had served them up Ollie’s apology for the amount of his bail money—tinned grouse and asparagus, augmented with a sauce made of the eggs she and Veronica would have had fo
r supper if alone, a pudding of the local breadfruit with which the subdued Terence comforted himself largely, and a mess of dried fruit soaked in rum. It was a talented meal, no doubt about it, and nobody else could have done it even with that provender; the girl was pleased to see Vivie resurrect herself. Lievering ate in the non-grabby way of Europeans, the fork confiding close to the knife, but his aura of poverty left him for a space, and when Vivie brought out the goose-quill toothpicks she used to pinch from the cashier’s desk, he exclaimed. The quill lolled between his lips. Because he was strange was no reason to think him unsophisticated; he might even be the victim of his facial architecture. By that time Robin had excused himself to take his father’s car home. Terence, who was wishing loudly for his own record player, brought out a brandy flask. There was a sense of family the girl would often see later between people temporarily brought together from the ends of the earth. The professor was regarding her thoughtfully.

  “You going to write a book about us?” If he was, she meant to read it.

  “Not yet. And not about us.” He smiled back at her.

  “I only meant—I’d want to read it.”

  “Always reading.” Vivie leaned back against the pillows she carried everywhere to warm her, even here. The kerchief had come off.

  “His partner at home really writes them. We just collect info.” The oil Terence had eaten glistened on his forehead.

  “Why are you so tetchy-mean?” Veronica said to him.

  “Why aren’t you?” Terence retorted.

  She didn’t get it. She saw Vivie was frowning at him.