Age

by Hortense Calisher

  Rupert once rousted out a few pictures of Gertrude. The earliest showed a girl neither pretty nor plain, even anonymously median, but confident. Then came a woman much the same physically, whose sureness has become meditative, perhaps on what she already had had and could look forward to. She wears her hair pliably enough for any era and looks as if she can pass through an occasion without dressing specially for it. ‘Gertrude was a type,’ Rupert said. ‘Pliable, yes—and unchangeable. But the recognition of that was up to you. And the effect of this could be deep. As if she were telling you, “I won’t last.” Not warning you. Only presenting the fact, silently. But with no sadness one could see.’

  Her saga taught me something. Perhaps—to live too closely to love, and by it? Just as Arturo’s story helped Rupert to be a father, even of the lost son? We were what we were in part because of them. And wanted never to see them again.

  So, when that buzzer sounded I said to myself—She means to see us. Now. Why?

  And Rupert, who had just called her his wife, snapped back to being himself again, looking contrite. He doesn’t always know when he opts out like that, but he did this time. So once more she had affected both of us.

  ‘The MacNairs are in California,’ Rupert says to me, low. He has had my same thought.

  The MacNairs have the flat above. And poor Wallace’s, below ours, is vacant, waiting for the settling of the estate. The gallery on the first floor is closed for the weekend. That leaves us, who haven’t ordered anything, far as I know, nor expect anyone really. Not even Kit and Sherm, who sit there as people do when bells ring in other people’s houses—bright-eyed but unconcerned.

  ‘We—are not a hospice,’ Rupert says. How bright-eyed she has made him, too. A man in command, with not a thread yet lost to him. In front of those two, I’m proud.

  ‘No one is, nowadays. Isn’t that the trouble?’ Sherm grumbles. ‘For all of us.’

  This must be how Sherm talks when he gives an award, or gets one. Or at the White House.

  ‘She’s doing an extraordinary thing,’ he says.

  She is. Which of our two spare rooms will she expect? By now Mr Quinn has admitted her and sounded the buzzer. Our small elevator takes long. Perhaps a wheelchair is being fitted in—or won’t fit in. I will not ask those two whether there is a chair.

  ‘I’m not sure I go along with it. For myself, I mean. But Sherm—’ Kit is in a state. Pink-lidded, trembling. Maybe she’s thinking of their spare room in New Hampshire—and summer to come.

  How intolerant I am, I thought, about the dying; I should be ashamed. But was not.

  ‘The question is—just what does Gertrude think she’s doing? Aside from what she is doing,’ Rupert says, loudly for him. ‘With her the two were not always the same.’

  And now I was jealous. That he should speak this intimate knowledge as if it were yesterday’s.

  ‘Excuse me—’ Kit says. ‘But are you two, like Sherm, a little hard of hearing? Because I thought I heard a bell.’

  ‘You did,’ Rupert says. ‘Our downstairs neighbor does it. The one who let you in. But the elevator gets stuck now and then. People sometimes walk up.’

  ‘And no,’ I say, ‘we aren’t deaf. Either of us.’

  But that must be why Rupert raised his voice—for Sherm. And again I’m proud.

  ‘Though the house is a little moribund,’ he adds, smiling. And I think: How quick he is, after all.

  ‘Yes—’strordinary,’ Sherm says, ploughing on.

  So this is how he must hide the deafness. By repetition. I always thought it was pomp. And in those days perhaps it was. Poor man, the eyepatch gives him monumentality enough. But now the remoteness is really closing in. On him too.

  ‘What is she doing, Sherm?’ I mouth it. ‘Precisely what?’

  ‘She wants to start a hospice here. And she wants to start—with us.’

  ‘With—us?’ Rupert says.

  ‘She wants to gather in all the dying—any who are—from our crowd.’

  In the silence I stand up. I hear somebody walking up the stairs, very slowly.

  ‘Old school tie?’ The tip of Rupert’s nose has gone white. He too stands up. ‘I see. I think I see. And you’re her ambassador. You’ve come to nose out whether we are. Dying. I’ll save you the trouble, Sherm. You were always a lazy sonovabitch. We’re on notice, you might say. Gemma and I. But nothing more.’

  Kit gives a high tee-hee. ‘Come along for the ride. Special rates.’ Then she bursts into tears.

  ‘Kit!’

  She gives me a look. Clasping her abdomen. Oh Jesus. So that’s what the belly is. She’s wearing a bag.

  There’s a knock at the door. Brushing past Rupert, I whisper: ‘It’s Kit he’s going along with it for.’ Then I take a deep breath, thirty-five years long, and open the door wide.

  Mr Quinn is standing there. In my relief, I want to go on standing there opposite him, on and on, enumerating Mr Quinn with neighborly delight.

  Even his everyday clothes have an air, the kind the young folks are looking for in the antique clothing shops. A short, faded French-blue overcoat with a pocket beret to match. The mechanic’s overalls—from early days as gofer to the racing drivers at Le Mans—in which he takes the garbage out. His little hawk-nosed wife wore a white tennis headband until the day she died. Like Suzanne Lenglen’s it was, the day Lenglen won the women’s singles. Mr Quinn played a match or two with Bill Tilden—‘before, of course, he turned professional.’ Rupert says they had the kind of sports-haunted youth on the Riviera that Sherm and the other midwestern literary émigrés never knew, but that both crowds were amateurs to the nth.

  Today Mr Quinn is wearing his Prince of Wales V-neck sweater, into which a canary silk ascot is tucked. If we ask him in, he will be dressed for it. No hard feelings if we do not. But just in case, he will be, carrying some bit of our mail that he has spotted as too serious to trust to our mailbox. Today’s, a long white envelope, is too big for it, and too square. In order to bring it he has walked up the stairs with his long, elegant stride. Above the ascot his slender cheeks are scarcely pink. I imagine that fed as he is on the well-chosen secondhand morsels I have seen him buying at the vegetable stalls and bread shop, even his breath is sweet. As sweet as the hope shining from his face.

  Oh how I envy him, this gofer from the past. He is having an amateur old age.

  ‘Come in, come in—’ I cry. ‘Oh, you must. We are having a drink with friends you must meet. And they you.’

  He’s not a man to make me work at overriding his demurs. And he can depend on me to cut them short.

  I introduce him with a flourish. ‘Our neighbor—who let you in. He is sometimes kind enough to save us steps. And Sherm—Mr Quinn was your contemporary—in France.’

  I can see that Sherm expects Mr Quinn might know his name. Such is not the case. Rupert, seeing this too, is calmed. We exchange what he calls happital glances. Happy marital. This little party will do well—at least for us. And will stave off the other one projected on us. Which is what a hospice too interrelated would be, wouldn’t it? A death party, with the friends we think we owe it to.

  I know who we owe. ‘We’re out of Quincy, Mr Quinn. You’ll have to make do with Sancerre.’

  After tennis, wine was once his interest. His wife had cousins with a vineyard in Beaune. He likes a thin glass. I bring him a rare one I have bought especially; he has taught me a lot, not all of it about wine. Rupert jokes that the day I buy Mr Quinn a bottle of Château Yquem he will sue the old boy for alienation of affection. Oh—I answer—to get to that brand will take us years and years, you’re safe. I doubt it, he says; I think the old boy is good for it, and we smile at each other, tentatively. Mr Quinn is ninety-two.

  I see that Sherm and Quinn are weighing his position here. Not a super, then? They don’t have pensioners.

  ‘Mr Quinn is our mentor,’ I say. ‘On quite a lot of things.’

  But Sherm is goggling at the white envelope that Rupert has qui
etly opened, instead of politely putting it aside. I feel his quiet behind me, held on to overlong. No one has to tell us two about body English. If either one of us tried to deceive the other with words, the body would tattle, like a child tugging its parent.

  ‘Is it from the city?’ I say. We are our own landlords, under a corporate name that Mr Quinn, when we acquired the house with him already a long-term tenant, did not discover was us. This allows us to give him certain benefices ‘by regulation’—a new stove, handgrips over the rebuilt bath—without imposing gratitude.

  Rupert only shakes his head mutely, but Sherm, waving his hands wildly, intercepts, crying: ‘I know that letterhead. I saw the original of the first one given—that who was it got?’ He points a finger at Mr Quinn. ‘In the Newberry.’

  Mr Quinn draws back, blinking, as if he may have brought the wrong mail. ‘Newberry? A vegetable?’

  ‘—Library,’ Sherm says in his deepest platform voice, and bends that ruffed white head of his, so ready and right for honors, to read that stiff testimonial.

  Then he tries to get down on his knees, or on one of them. I swear it. Oh Rupert, when you come to read this, remember Sherm for me. That gouty knee-joint, which always thought it knew when and where to bend and to whom, got down on the floor to you—or tried. Didn’t make it. Not to where you were—and are, dead or alive. Never will.

  I still didn’t know what was up. But I can savor it now.

  How you then are whispering to me, naming one by one your faithful correspondents during the years of your supposed decline, each of whose letterheads I in turn know well enough. That thick paper, smelling of flax, from Italy. The one in crabby French handwriting but postmarked from Maine, a combo that always makes you laugh. The envelope from Paris, always thick with translations, which makes you mutter—They haven’t as many words as English, they have to go the long way round—but how he makes it seem short! And from Norway, the most cherished of all—ordinary pad-paper, lined in blue.

  ‘They sought me out—’ you’re saying, in the weakest voice I have ever heard from you, ‘they must have testified’—and again: ‘They sought me out.’

  Kit is saying to Sherm: ‘You always know about prizes. How come you didn’t know about this?’

  ‘It’s not his territory.’

  I shouldn’t have said it. The page you transferred from his fist to mine said it better.

  Then Kit says in a stifled voice, ‘Excuse me,’ and totters toward the bathroom on her high heels. I follow, to ask if she needs help, though I can’t be sure one could, at what she might have to do. She says dully, ‘No. But I’ll use your perfume after, if you don’t mind. I forgot mine.’ Then she turns a terrible face on me. ‘He wants to put me away early. He thinks he’ll outlive me. But he won’t.’ Once inside the bathroom with the door shut, she opens it again. What a crooked smile she had then. ‘And for God’s sake, Gemma, pull your stockings up.’

  When I get back, Sherm is interviewing himself, going over all the possibles that produced this event, weighing each country, each constituency—as you said later—in a hallowed voice that nobody’s listening to, and every now and then touching his eyepatch, as if it has somehow betrayed him.

  You are bringing out the Sancerre, and the glasses.

  Kit returns, smelling of my Vol de Nuit.

  ‘It’s good on you,’ I whisper, and dare to touch her cheek. ‘I can never smell it on myself.’ And show her my ankles, now as trim as hers.

  I changed to nylons in the bedroom, Rupert. I’m not at all sure I believe in God. But it was as good a way as any of thanking him.

  As for you—you look older. I see that any event, even the best, ages one. Minute by minute the body gives up a portion of its substance, no matter what. Exchanging its energy for time.

  We lift our glasses. Sherm is about to offer a toast, to you, no doubt, but you fiercely hush him. The words die in his mouth with a sound of tissue paper, which is probably what they were. ‘But he doesn’t know that,’ you say later. ‘Gemma, we’re too hard on him.’ And then you chuckle. ‘Recognition makes one more benevolent.’

  But that was all to come.

  In silence we sip. Sherm does lean toward the bottle to note the year, but corrects himself in time. He understands ceremony, this he does.

  Mr Quinn is the cupbearer here. As his posture now makes all aware. He bows to me. Then to Rupert. ‘Where else can one meet again a heaven once known—except in wine?’

  He says this each time, telling us who taught it to him. Each time I forget who. Halfway down the glass he will ask our permission to toast his wife—which we will join. On the second glass, we in turn will propose a toast to the greatest tennis player America has ever had, amateur or professional: William T. Tilden, 189- to 19—. He will correct us if we get the dates wrong. We always do. Then he will leave, refusing a third.

  But today he is mum. He has his decade’s manners. We have visitors.

  So it is Rupert who proposes the toasts. ‘To the champion Roxanne Marie-Celeste Quinn—who once played a match with Suzanne Lenglen herself.’

  Mr Quinn, holding his glass a trifle higher than the rest, says: ‘Not in competition, of course.’

  ‘And now—’ Rupert says, ‘to William T. Tilden, the greatest in tennis ever, 189- to 19—.’

  ‘Nineteen—’ Mr Quinn says. Then with a shy smile he rises to go.

  ‘Ah—ten-nis-ah—’ Sherm says, pointing his good eye at Rupert. ‘A new poem?’

  I stand up again. I don’t do much of that, not that I’m such a gentle personality, but because it hurts the shoulders to lift even a thin glass. But I want to make a toast of my own. To all husbands. To all wives. To all of us still extant, harmonious or not, and to all those gone on into the pattern ahead. To the libraries that sustain us, and the vegetables. To this kitchen, a hearth that will vanish. To the Prendergast, whose darkening cannot be stayed. To death even—that provenance which none will prove false.

  And to you who will read.

  ‘To—this hospice,’ I said.

  ‘WE SEEM TO BE drowning in sentiment,’ I told Gemma. ‘Maybe that’s the way to go.’

  Getting the prize has been like winning the race I’ve never before admitted I was in. Yet does it come too late for encouragement? For I also hear its verdict: Your work is done.

  Still, the announcement won’t come out for some months. And Sherm, who had sworn not to tell but couldn’t be trusted there, had on the way home from our house suffered a slight—what do they call a stroke nowadays?—‘neural accident.’ ‘He can speak clearly enough,’ Kit said on the phone. ‘But somehow, you don’t believe what he says.’

  I saw that happen to my father. Physical loss saps one’s authority. Especially with others who are still whole. According to Gemma, Kit is certainly not that. But her loss has been in another direction. That lemony disposition of hers has turned her mind sharp—even improved by the other loss?

  ‘Poor Sherm,’ I said to Kit. Late in life one begins to love even one’s enemies. Though he was never quite that.

  Gemma was putting a large yellow tuber into the oven to bake. She’s looking sharper but talking less. I think the years make women feel less unique to themselves. She’s said as much. Once she was a woman she could recognize in any mirror. ‘I had a certain flashy reticence. Now I only see my type.’ And what was that? ‘A brown-dyed old lady, proud of wearing a blouse too young for her.’

  What men suffer is a loss of arena. Even if we’ve never had much of a one. Or even if it’s not outwardly true. When the announcement does come I’ll have telephone calls, invitations to speak, travel if I want it, and more media exposure than I have ever had in my life—for a short while. But my real arena is my work. And the body crucial to it.

  ‘What’s that you’re baking?’

  ‘Mr Quinn put me on to it. Not exactly expressing a desire, but almost. Scrape the center with a fork when it’s done, and presto—pasta. Miracles of the loaves and fishes can
’t compare with a spaghetti squash.’

  ‘How is he today?’

  ‘Better. Was nothing but flu, he says.’

  He had never been sick before, he told us. A next pleurisy could carry him off. But to our relief—for where would this end for us otherwise, there in the same house with him?—a nephew had turned up.

  The squash went in. Now she must find another work pretext. Dozens of them in the last few days. Curtains. Duties in the small garden behind the house. My not too dusty books. And oddest of these addenda: plotting our concert and play subscriptions for the coming year. Mr Quinn’s illness, an honest scare, had ended up a godsend. I’d seen it all before. Anxious women pull domesticity over their heads. Or women like Gemma.

  ‘Those big black ants that are coming in from the cellar,’ I said, ‘I just now drowned one in the toilet.’ I always feel guilty—and always tell her. I always wish I were a Hindu who out of religious consideration would not have done such a thing. Yet my hand always flashes out. By what is called instinct.

  ‘Oh, did you.’ She knows all that. She shut the oven door.

  ‘The ant—reminded me of you. Going down—in such a swirl. And of me. One day the hand above us will flash. Casually.’

  ‘You’re low, aren’t you.’

  I nod. ‘And you?’

  She nods.

  ‘So it better be sentiment, hmm?’ she says. ‘So let’s go that-way. To the Plaza.’

  Before we left, she wound her hair up with a big comb. Did it make her older, not to have hair long at the cheek? Or younger—to have dared that high sweep? I couldn’t decide.

  She said, ‘It’s time. And it should be white.’

  ALL THIS WEEK WE have been immobilized. By a woman Rupert has not seen for over thirty years and I have never met. Gertrude herself never phoned. Apparently that is not her way. If she has a way that she herself is aware of. Rupert says she used not to. We do not speak of her easily now. Who could?