Age

by Hortense Calisher

  ‘I’m saving it for Christina. You know she’s pregnant?’

  ‘No! At her age? She must be past forty. And out there?’

  ‘The Saudis have one of the best hospitals in the Near East. And my mother had me at forty-eight.’ After a string of others, all stillborn, but why say? ‘Maybe we’re late bloomers.’

  She and Sherm never meant to have kids. If Sherm gives off the feel of a boy born to a large family, not one member had ever appeared East, or in his autobiographies. And in their crowd, in that heyday, having offspring wasn’t the arty thing to do, except by accident—say if the woman in the case died of a bad abortion, leaving some heartbreaking posthumous poems. Otherwise it was culturally tacky to add to the human race. But then they had Daphne—born, as Sherm would jovially tell you, when they were on homemade mead their first year in the New Hampshire house, and ‘when my good eye was shut.’

  Daphne took all her father’s farm-talk and population disdain seriously, also his freeloading style. As a consequence, she now grows Jerusalem artichokes, elephant garlic, and other rare fodder on the California estate of the patroness with whom she has adopted a baby. Of which baby Sherm, in one of those opportunistic flashes that according to Rupert have for fifty years kept him the only conservative to be printed in the liberal journals, and vice versa, immediately wrote: ‘our Lesbian grandchild.’

  Kit’s sharp eyes are roving our bedroom. It’s an active room, no doubt of it. Twin clumps of books and Kleenex at the bedsides, and a scatter of other intimate objects—nasal inhalator, neck pillow, body lotion—which we use as one. Maybe she can tell that. There’s also a jolly patchouli smell I want no housekeeper ever to get to the bottom of; it means us. The bed is made up but our nightclothes are tumbled on it. We don’t intend to be this graphic but I guess we are.

  ‘You don’t mean to say—’ Kit says, ‘Gemma, do you mean to say you and Rupert still—?’

  I don’t mean to say—and she knows it.

  We hold it there. Then, just as she and I used to do when she and Sherm—that rising young columnist, middle-of-the-road arbiter, and prospective elder statesman—still dropped in on us whenever Rupert rose a step or two—we went into the kitchen to join the boys.

  GEMMA PUT ON SUCH a spread that I’d have blushed for our conspicuous consumption if I hadn’t already been red in the face from laughing like the devil inside. She comes of a tradition that pushes hard on the larder for its guests.

  At first they had graciously said: ‘Don’t bother with refreshment,’ then Kit quavered, ‘perhaps a little white wine. If you have it.’ This was before the salmon and Parma ham and other goods were brought out; plainly she had thought we might not. Though normally we drink some mild aperitif, we always keep a bottle of Quincy or Sancerre on hand for Mr Quinn, the old pensioner who lives on the ground floor. Although wine is his delight, he rations his calls on us. I was glad to see the bottle was full; he’s about due. Then I eased out the Scotch from the store of bottles in the cupboard before Sherm could mutter, ‘If you have any—’ His mouth opened when he saw the brand. When Gemma brought out the cognac for me—brought to us from Paris by Christina—he would have switched, if I hadn’t just then said, ‘Oh, by the way, I recall you love marc.’

  It was the drink of his youth on those Paris barricades which were to sustain him for years later. When he came back home he brought the barricades with him—or thought he did. To be fair to Sherm, he never thought he would turn so American, and he has taken this with very good grace.

  He turns down the marc, though: ‘Good God no, not with my gut!’ and opts for the cognac, caressing the label with a leer. ‘Nothing too good for us ex-Communists.’

  He means himself, of course, not me. To him my career is sadly uncheckered by the kind of outer history every intellect should have—where some muddle is better than none. He used to joke that I must have heard the quote ‘To thine own self be true’ very early, maybe in the West or even Garden City, had said to myself, ‘That’s for me,’—and was stuck with it.

  Doesn’t matter. For a long while—my whole life—I have been. And I have said equally sharp things about him. That he too has only the subject on which he has written over and over—the one book. The main thing is that sitting around this table, we remember—all of it.

  Alas, including what Gemma does. Who now says: ‘Is that why when you were invited to the Nixon White House, you went?’

  ‘Were you invited?’ Kit said.

  ‘Come, come,’ Sherm said. ‘Over the dam. Let it be.’

  I have to laugh. He’s a natural pacifier—even when the offense is his own.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Gemma says, ‘We were asked—to this one.’

  The room grows quiet the way a city room does—just enough to hear the caterwauling outside. Since ours is in a four-story in a cul-de-sac, we may also hear anybody traipsing down the front steps into the areaway to ring Mr Quinn’s bell.

  ‘And you didn’t go?’ Kit’s face is so naively aghast that I like her again. She would go if Judas sat in the Oval Office. And would wear that pendant of hers.

  ‘Gemma had nothing to wear,’ I say. She does, of course, including some beauties brought by Christina, now all laid by. Only Francesca could persuade Gemma to wear them, taking her mother out to some fancy place to show both of them off.

  ‘Come on,’ Kit said. ‘I know that fawn Italian suit, for one. And others. You could have asked me to help pick.’

  ‘It wasn’t Gemma, Ki-it,’ Sherm says between his teeth, the tone so venomous that I and Gemma have to stare into our laps. It’s a revelation, after so long. She’s not naive, our scatty Kit. She’s a mite stupid—and Sherm hates her for it.

  ‘Your hide’s always been too thin,’ he said to me. ‘Too thin for your own good.’

  Too late now, he means.

  And it is. For both of us.

  I see Gemma’s chin jut forward. As her flesh withers, one can see Francesca’s bones emerge. ‘It’s not modesty. He had one subject. And he stuck to it.’

  So did Sherm. Back and forth, under and over those barricades. But I won’t twit him for it now. For Gemma, using the past tense, as we all can hear, is using it for all of us.

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t of come,’ Kit says. Maybe she’s not that stupid.

  ‘Oh I dunno—’ Gemma says, ‘if one has to hear the worst, nice to be able to depend on one’s friends.’

  She sees my astonishment. She’s never been catty.

  ‘Wish to Gaw-ud it could be the best, Rupert.’ Sherm almost groans it. ‘But they don’t ask me down here much lately.’

  Then what’s he and Kit here for? Spring used to be his season. Any prize committee going, Sherm would be on it, handing out the medals and the money as if these came from him personally, he and Kit meanwhile staying at the Algonquin for free. And arranging for next winter. By which time somebody in the cultural world who has heard that their old bones won’t take country Spartan anymore, will have lent them a city flat. Sherm keeps track of those going on sabbatical, and prefers Boston. Kit does well with the millionaires who are going south, or leaving it.

  He used to tell me whenever he’d lobbied for a prize for me. But I never did well for him.

  ‘Where were you, this winter?’ Gemma said.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Daphne took us,’ Kit said.

  It wrung me. The way she said that.

  Gemma too. ‘Must have been beautiful out there,’ she said. ‘California.’ But her glance around the room, at the sun now an ember in the west outside our fire-escape terrace, told me she too was numbering our blessings. Including the Prendergast.

  ‘We rescued the child, anyway,’ Sherm said grimly. ‘At least—for the time we were there.’ He shook his head, that oversized benignity which looks so well on rostrums. ‘At least we did that.’

  Kit is almost in tears. Adversity never brought us together before. But then—it was never before theirs.

  �
��We did get to London,’ she said. ‘Daphne and her friend Erda gave us that.’ She bit her thumb. ‘Erda and Daphne.’

  We could see that scene—and hear her correction.

  Sherm reached for his glass. ‘Mind if I have another?’

  ‘Serve yourself,’ I said.

  He surveys the bottles. ‘What an array. And more in the sideboard, eh?’

  I watch him switch to the marc. Gemma moves to give him a fresh glass but he waves her away. ‘All goes the same route.’

  He drinks with the same air of restrained gusto that he has trained on all the satisfactions of life—and this justly gives him a kind of rude distinction. His attitude toward nature supplements that, even if with the engaging pomp of ‘Woodman, spare that tree.’ But smart as he is, one can’t see him in any of the deeper convolutions of thought. His is a clubman’s response to the universe, socially and physically. Sherm became a link in the old boy chain of American letters quite early, and will wear that old-school tie all the way to Olympus; indeed there is where he will expect it to count most. Odd, then, that it’s only in words that his shrewdness shows through as coarse.

  As when he screwed his good eye at the bottles, and then at us. ‘So you two’re well fixed, eh?’ His massive head moves up down, up down in approval, even respect. ‘Well fixed.’

  I hadn’t heard that phrase since my mother, the calculator of the family, had employed it. It was always said of older people. Those who had money to begin with, or who had retired well.

  It’s a shock to hear Gemma and me so described. We have had two trades, after all, and Gemma is good with property.

  ‘I suppose we’re provided for. Barring the worst.’

  That word keeps cropping up. I have trouble these days with finding synonyms, or euphuisms. Only basic language will do.

  Gemma is crouching over the table, in profile too old for a bacchante, too young for a sphinx. ‘Where did you two stay? In London?’

  Kit says: ‘Get me my jacket, Sherm, will you? It’s in the bedroom.’ She’s shivering.

  Gemma’s arms move slower these days. She thinks I don’t see. But this time she’s quick. ‘Here, take this shawl.’ Lately she keeps them handy.

  ‘Thanks, duck.’ The shawl, a black, white, and orange wool one given Gemma by Czechoslovakia’s greatest poet when I was there years ago on a State Department tour, looks garish on Kit’s tailor-made.

  ‘You were always full of cures, Gemma,’ she says. ‘Nice Jewish ones, that worked. Remember that mustard plaster you made for me? That time I caught cold in that dreadful shack we four rented together in the Poconos?’

  I don’t remember that—or the Poconos. Were Sherm and Kit and we ever that close? I am remembering the poet, his ugly, generous sister, and every detail of that Prague flat, musty with a brother-sister relationship meticulously observed. I helped him get to a university here shortly after. That shawl is over twenty years old, like our friendship. The poems arrive in the mail, woven as tight as that wool. I send him mine in exchange. The world has recently crowned him, but it makes no difference. He and I—and a few others round the world—have a confraternity the Sherms wouldn’t understand. In fact we cure each other, against the Sherms.

  What’s Gemma looking so strange for?

  I’d lost track.

  ‘We always kept up with her,’ Kit’s saying. ‘Like we have with you. Though we never stayed with her. She’s always had some cuckoo arrangement—you know—with a man. But this time—she wrote to invite us. And it came—just as we needed it.’

  One never thinks of those two as needy. Either of money, or invitations. Certainly the patronage still flows from somewhere, though perhaps even to the grand old men not as once.

  ‘Get to the point, Kit,’ Sherm said. ‘So we went there. Down in Wandsworth—not very savory. But on a good underground line. That’s all right; we always travel light. And when you get there, a very handsome, big Victorian house. We thought it was a convent at first. You know, the kind that take in guests. We stayed in those in France. Plain and clean—and cheap. And this place was a lot like them. Only British instead of French. The sisters wearing headdresses but no habits. The refectory very cheery that first night, but not many at table. We asked if Kit and I would have to separate for the night—in France the man of a couple has to go to a nearby monastery—but the sister who served us laughed and said no. So we didn’t understand until the next morning. When we saw—more of the residents.’

  ‘Understand what?’ I said.

  ‘Nurses are called Sister in Britain, Gemma,’ Kit said. ‘You’d love them.’

  ‘That the place is a hospice.’ Sherm said. ‘For the dying.’

  There was a strange light around Gemma. I hoped to God I wasn’t about to see one of those parachutes. Retinal images, I suppose. One of my fritillary umbrellas, as I know think of them. But maybe it was only Gemma’s intensity.

  ‘Is she dying?’ she says. There’s a wry smile on her face.

  Sherm shrugged. ‘They let her in.’

  ‘Who is this “she” you’re talking about?’

  I could hear my own irritation. When I’m fending off one of my episodes I always can. Fear sounds fretful.

  One can tell also when people look at one too tenderly. Gemma doesn’t. She braces me instead.

  ‘Gertrude—’ she says.

  ‘She’s here,’ Sherm says. ‘She came over partly because she wants to see you. They encourage them to see the family if they can.’ He coughed. ‘She seems to regard you two as family now. Her only one.’

  ‘Here?’ Gemma says. ‘With you?’

  ‘At the Plaza,’ Sherm says. ‘Naturally, she needs a—an aegis.’

  ‘Aegis?’ Gemma says, as if it’s some form of medication. Even now I’m often not sure whether or not she knows the meaning of some fancy words.

  Kit is biting her thumb and looking at Sherm with venom. ‘We are staying with her. That last man of hers did her rather well. Still does. Though he won’t see her.’

  Then of course I know who they are talking about. There’s nothing like old rage to clear the head. I had had to do the same with her as that man. Refuse.

  What a gaffe though—the way I said it.

  ‘Oh—Gertrude. My wife.’

  WHEN OUR DOWNSTAIRS BUZZER rang, I had the wild thought that she might be already down there in the hall. She must be ambulatory. Sherm and Kit were not the sort to encumber themselves with a complete invalid, even in order to stay at the Plaza for free. Or she would have a nurse, maybe one of the Sisters from the hospice whom she would have enticed away—perhaps to let them see how we handle death in the States. According to what Rupert told me long ago, Gertrude had always been able to find what Sherm calls an ‘aegis.’ Often she ran several at once, all of them vying for her attention. ‘As if she was saddled with us,’ Rupert had said, ‘and she was only seeing how we would do. The candidates will always change. But she will never lack for them. And the attention she gives them is—well—professional. For a long while I didn’t see that I was serving Gertrude. I thought I was learning how to live my life.’

  And in a way, he had. Once, when I referred to her as a femme fatale, he said, no, that soiled old phrase, which reminded one of flashy art-nouveau women in monkey fur or grand courtesans riding the Bois in Klimt poses, would not describe what she was or did. ‘She knew how to attract men with the fatality already in them. Men about to brim over with success. Or just losing a religion. Or just finding one. Like me.’

  Her pretexts were always reasonable and solidly grounded. So, any nurse would no doubt learn what Gertrude had promised she would. Would some one of Gertrude’s many former contacts provide—as payment for not having to meet again with Gertrude herself?

  I of course have never met her. But among Rupert’s friends, the crowd into which I married, Sherm and Kit among them, she was a constant topic, often at parties to which she had not been invited, where there was the fear or expectation—that she might a
fter all turn up. A rumor that she might, could make certain people—women too—uneasy enough to want to leave, yet too fascinated at the prospect of Gertrude to depart. Still, she must have, known where she wasn’t wanted, for she never came. But kept them guessing? ‘Yes, that was her quality,’ Rupert said. ‘No—I’m being unfair. Or rather, inaccurate. That was her—nature. You could never put a finger on her. On what she was or where at the moment she might be. Meanwhile, over some months—or years in my case—she might be in your flat, your bed, and of course your purse, though always openly—and possibly even at your place of work.’ Many people found Gertrude jobs, he said usually interesting ones, always performed faithfully if briefly. ‘The one place she could not care to be was in your heart.’ There had apparently never been any question of being in hers.

  Yet though he lived with her for only a few years, it took double that number of years of living with me before he left off inadvertently referring to her as his wife. I understood. I wasn’t as wounded by that as he perhaps thought at the time, or even after so long, in front of Kit and Sherm. After all, I had had to excise Arturo, the long, long habit of him, if not the love.

  When you marry early, romantically and wrongly, you may still keep the image of the affair, and of the girl that was you still centered there, but lose the image of the man to the life you live with him. I have seen this even more clearly in the women who stay married to those men. The old Italian women who were my mother’s friends in Bridgeport, for instance—who could cite every slightest stage of their one and only affair. And then, on the following Sunday, there he was, they said, their old eyes alight, and scarcely connecting that he with the broken-toothed husband playing bocce with my father on the lawn.

  I called Rupert by Arturo’s name now and then, but as he became the girls’ father, only when it had something to do with them. And when the girls brought over snapshots of themselves with Arturo included I never learned to see him as that pudgy gentleman in striped trousers, whose fat, seraph smile was fended off with bank checks. What I saw, and still see, is the Arturo who the morning after I lost our baby said to me, aggrieved and balked of what I owed him: ‘Couldn’t you have held on to our little commendatore for just a little longer?’