Age

by Hortense Calisher

  ‘No matter the specialty,’ McClellan said.

  From the next room, someone knocked.

  ‘They’ll be ready with her now—’ one said, and the other: ‘We always see them out. Our people.’ There was a moment when I thought they might be going to ask Rupert and me to join them. Then they said, in their almost chorus: ‘Would you care to use the facilities?’

  As I said to Rupert later, for a minute I wasn’t sure which facility they meant, until they indicated that this second sitting room we were in also had a bathroom.

  Rupert used it first, then I. As I was peeing, I heard Gertrude being escorted out. I could think of myself as the surviving wife if I wanted to, and in a way I did, washing my hands carefully at the tap.

  ‘I suppose we must wait for them,’ Rupert said when I came out. ‘Only polite.’

  I wanted to walk to the window to see the view from up here. These days I seldom find myself on such a high floor, and the bird’s-eye relationship of buildings is worth study. But it somehow wasn’t part of today’s deal.

  Rupert, too, is immobilized. ‘Lucky they have a suite.’

  ‘Oh, we had to … Oh, we banked on it…’ we hear from behind us.

  How noiselessly they have come back, how unchanged. How reassuring it must be, to their patients, their ‘people,’ that those headdresses never slip. Their uniforms, too, stay so unmussed that day after day, watching from bed or chair, one might be forgiven for hoping that the starch they use is mixed with immortality. Which those soft gestures of theirs will one day confer.

  Too sweetly perhaps. Do I find that horrifying?

  Then why had I said what I had to Gertrude, at her end?

  ‘You banked on us—didn’t you, Sisters?’ I say.

  They aren’t shocked. They must get all sorts of reactions, when they draw outsiders in. As they must do with intent. Have to do, to perform their—job.

  ‘No one else would come …’

  ‘… would come.’

  It’s only our specialty, their stare, not plaintive, seems to say. As with the hotel and the mortician, they would have certain routines. Deferent enough, say, to address the patient formally almost to the day, then warming in at the death with the Christian name, as a family servant might. Speaking all the while in chorus so as not to infringe personally, yet coping close.

  ‘Well … she died as she lived,’ Rupert said.

  The Sisters stand quite still.

  I feel their disapproval. So must he.

  I want to say to them—Don’t you dare impugn those who are not in your sect, not of your persuasion. Those of us who, against all your charitableness know we will die a raging, lonely, irreligious death. A single one, whether or not a boon companion exists. Or existed. You two are nurses, not nuns.

  They put out their hands to us in the softest gesture, not touching us quite. As if we need this surely, but they will hold off until we are drawn in—perhaps not by them.

  ‘Dying is living,’ Sister McClellan said.

  I wait for Sister Bond to follow with the proper echo—will it be Living is Dying?—but she does not.

  Why—they’re quite ordinary women, I see, gathering their own strength. Wanting to be drawn in. Having a specialty doesn’t mean you don’t need to be warmed.

  Rupert saw that, as he always does. Did he also intend more? He says: ‘One day—we may drop in on you at Wandsworth. Never seen a real hospice in operation. I’m sure you do—yeoman work there.’

  The two of them turn to each other, then to the room, surveying the Plaza’s broad chintzes, tireless armchairs, plastic ice-bucket, and the desk’s array of cardboard advice.

  ‘This is a hospice,’ they said.

  WHEN WE COME OUT of that hotel, the world that people call real is quivering all around us. I test it as I do each day now, to see how much we are still part of it.

  ‘Let’s go to the duck pond,’ Rupert says. He still misses his farm. He sold it in exchange for family life and does not regret his bargain, he says, but the farm had places to accommodate feelings he can put nowhere else. Sometimes he enumerates them. Ledges the moss has budged, where other force cannot. Water eternalizing stone—if you could wait long enough. Manure fruity in the barn, and encouraging to the rose. Deer pellets on the garden crop may keep away that dark lout, the woodchuck. Birds in the trees chip chip away mind. ‘I have a bird goes psyche, psyche, psyche,’ he told me the first time we met. ‘Three hours of that while you feed the animals and there’s nothing in your head but cloud. Now all I need is a wolf at the door to keep me moving. Or a wife.’

  The park pond has been restored since we were last here. Scrubbed enough to see rainbows in, if the city stocked them. Across that great frond of trees yellow-green with sun, I could see another hotel, that thin, nursery-tale tower from which Christina was married again. After Francesca went off from the wedding to sleep with her beau, we came and sat on what looks to be that same bench. I have no place to accommodate my feelings about Francesca, so I do without them.

  Who could not manage to, with a man like this at one’s side?

  ‘She duped those—those nuns,’ he says. ‘She never meant to go back.’

  ‘They knew they were being duped.’ They had had that glassy air one has when carrying too full a jug. ‘They must get it all the time.’

  ‘One has to admire them,’ Rupert said. ‘But I wanted to be yards away from them. As if they carried a known germ.’

  ‘They treated us as if we were dying!’ The Anger that had belabored me at the Plaza now burst on the gentle park wind. A passing young couple, tall, slender, carrying bookbags, turned, then hurried by. How had we two looked to them?

  ‘Would you ever—want to see Wandsworth?’ Rupert said low, as if those two might hear, although they were already far, though I could still see how their bookbags swung, like pendulums.

  ‘In my dreams,’ I said. ‘My bad dreams. Only in those.’

  ‘Even if—we needed it?’

  No couple passing could possibly hear him.

  ‘We?’ I said—and I didn’t care how loud. ‘We? If we’re so sure we’d be seeing it together—then why are we keeping that almanac?’

  There were a lot of people passing, just then a buoyant Puerto Rican crowd of all ages, borne along on their balloons and salsa chatter. I can ask it quite conversationally. ‘You are—keeping it?’

  He nods. ‘Though this past week, you know—maybe since the prize—I’ve had this terrible urge. To write on my own again.’

  ‘Oh?’ He wouldn’t want me to praise.

  ‘And you know, Gemma—I have.’

  This is a sacrifice. He would rather not have told anyone.

  ‘One—last try,’ he says. Then he laughs. Tosses his head. ‘Maybe not the last.’

  So—is he in the world again? His world. I recognize a distance in him. Sitting at its edge, I have never had trouble honoring it. At times slipping him the only pencil I had on me, the drawing pencil I used to carry. In the city one never knows when a cornice or an abandoned doorway may cry out to be rescued, described. He’s not come far enough for the pencil maybe. Or maybe is already out there, a man on a raft, on a far wave of thought.

  Great events stir. Gertrude did that for him. Yes, I can see he hasn’t come to the duck pond for nothing.

  Rupert had doffed his raincoat and laid it on the bench between us; people our age tend to lag well behind the warm season in our clothes. The morning newspaper, bought on the way here, juts from a pocket, still unread. It holds all the wars we’re no longer going to, all the new topics we aren’t expected to engage in: feminism, lost or abused children, drugging, outer space. I remember Sundays bannered with marching hope, and our round dinner-table afterward, every cheek in the circle scarlet from hating a president. Rupert laughs when I tell him this; he says all the topical only mutates, as the crowds behind the topics rise and fall. ‘And have we fallen?’ I said.

  Or he’ll tease that women dramatize their live
s before they get to them, or in the very act. ‘A man is more businesslike about his myth.’ And to him people are never wholly in the world. ‘We are always one foot out, one foot in.’

  He never used to lecture. I never used to insist. But today I have to know. Can we go on, in this state of going on?

  Parks are dangerous for old people, yes. But not just because we are such easy targets. Twenty policemen could close ranks around this bench, and that other mugger still approach me. I have just enough time to see the time on my hands, heavy or light. To test my position in the world and get my answer. Then it’s upon me. A shadowy couple passes us. They snatch my purse, Rupert’s wallet, but only to return those to us, with their youth in them. This bench can’t hear the carousel. But over there, on the edge of all that green lapping us, we can see that lost Barbizon to which the only ticket of entry is a child. Almost summer now, but my jealous, shriveling body hears the skating rink. Then it is over, that secret assault. And Rupert hasn’t heard a thing.

  Or had he? He does heave a sigh.

  ‘What did you say to Gertrude, by the way?’

  I am ashamed. I should have done better. At a deathbed, after all. ‘I forget.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Yes, I have.’ Haven’t I almost, as I say so?

  ‘You never lie, Gemma,’ he says. ‘But you sure prevaricate.’

  I know. That’s what I did to myself over Frankie.

  ‘That’s because you were a middle child,’ he says, teasing. He knows how I love that old story, so often told, so pointless to anyone but me. How it feels to be merely the fourth of eight. Even though all the others were only cousins brought over to be adopted.

  ‘Always in the middle of the palaver,’ I say, joyful to have that child in Bridgeport again recognized. At seventy-eight! And in front of the Plaza Hotel.

  ‘You never forget,’ he says. ‘You have your black-outs. But you don’t forget. Neither do I.’

  A child passed, bouncing a ball. I wish it would bounce in my lap. ‘Do I? Have those?’

  He grips my hand. ‘So do I—you said.’

  ‘Did I. I—Rupert, I can’t remember. Really. That I told you I did.’ I can check later, I think. ‘Maybe I wrote it down.’

  ‘Maybe you didn’t,’ he says quick, reassuring. ‘Maybe I only thought you told me. When I blanked out—on what the CAT scan was for.’

  We must have been a pretty sight, holding on to each other’s hands, dithering.

  A young man stopped. A nice one. ‘Can I—are you all right?’

  At every fringe the body is assailed.

  I’m out of breath. Never had that before. ‘Quite all right—’ I manage. ‘Th—thank you. We were just flirting.’

  When he’d gone on, Rupert has a laughing fit, a little too long a one. We have a pill with us but no water, so he takes it dry.

  When I am sure it has taken effect I say: ‘I wanted to tell her a lot of things.’

  I wanted to tell Gertrude her whole story—according to me. I’m the domestic one, I’d say. I’ve always known it. I don’t mind. He didn’t love you any more than he did me—does. Maybe he didn’t love you at all. But you made a poet out of him. He left you so that he might forget that. But you didn’t, did you. You came to make him pay up. And to find out why he married another woman whose name begins with G.

  But I didn’t say any of it.

  Rupert: All I could think of when I saw her was that she was there. Acting like herself, as all of you used to say. I saw that from the minute I walked in. That’s why she wouldn’t acknowledge me at first. Women understand too well each other’s affairs.

  She’s come to make him pay up. I said that to myself the minute I saw her in the wheelchair. A skeleton in a Paris dress and wearing high heels. People in wheelchairs don’t usually cross their ankles that coquettishly.

  And I thought: Death is like a man she’s living with. Under some cuckoo arrangement. Like: Let me live—until I’m paid.

  ‘So what did you say?’ you said, Rupert, your voice dry, maybe from the pill.

  You’re right, Rupert, I do prevaricate. And I just whispered it. She might not have heard.

  ‘I said: “He’s here.”’

  Nobody was passing just then.

  ‘You’ll flirt even with death,’ you said.

  I couldn’t tell whether or not you approved.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘That was her.’

  ‘And you—are you,’ you said. You tell me that twenty times a day. I never have to wait. Or plot.

  Then you say: ‘I sometimes have a dreadful wish. I want to be there with you. To see.’

  One can’t see any dells from the duck pond. I wanted to see a dell where we might both lie down. And stay to nourish it. ‘So do I.’

  Then there were people again and we straightened and smiled too self-consciously and agreed it was time to go home.

  ‘I’ll just read the paper a bit,’ you said. ‘It’s such good air today.’ You love to read and eat in the open air.

  ‘Wish I’d brought a picnic,’ I said—and then: ‘Oh dear.’ What a thing to say just now. I may even have muttered that at home I had a roast. But you know these mumbles of mine and have already handed me my half of the paper.

  The second half. You know I never particularly crave the first. In a minute I’ll scan it, to see what lesser topics are for today. Meanwhile the air is good. The sun is slipping through the trees. And we haven’t even looked at the ducks.

  Mallards, I think. In a sec I’ll ask for sure, but just now not interrupt; he gets so deep in.

  How they sail, that brown and green pair, so sure of. themselves. I sail with them.

  Then I hear your silence alongside me. So deep, that before I turn I’m afraid it might be the silence I will not be able to interrupt.

  Your profile is rigid—yes. Struck—as is said of medals. The paper crackles from your hand.

  You do move. You do move. You move.

  ‘what?’ I say.

  ‘Kit and Sherm.’

  THAT SMALL DOUBLE-COLUMNED space, bottom center, front page, which the Times keeps for the deaths of those too well-known for the obits page but not international enough for the top—there they were. Twice, other friends of ours have been there, a poet, a novelist. Sherm would have made it on his own, a benign Grand Old Man going to his fathers. As it was, the story ran over to page two and a second headline: ‘Biographer and Wife Found.’

  Gemma and I are to hash it over endlessly.

  We have the smug preknowledge of friends.

  ‘They did know the Arthur Koestlers, of course. But only as acquaintances.’

  ‘One wouldn’t have to know them well,’ she says. ‘To be influenced.’

  We have walked from the park along Central Park South, trying to get a cab. ‘Gertrude knew them best. But she would never have considered doing such a thing.’

  No, she was queer for crowds, Gemma said. ‘And had nobody to double up with.’ Guilt coarsens the tongue, and this was still the first shock. Even if our only guilt was that we hadn’t liked them enough.

  ‘Never any cabs in this town in an emergency,’ she said when we reached Seventh Avenue, running on past me to hail and hail, and fall back.

  If there was ever a day in our lives that was not an emergency, it was this one—with Gertrude’s opera just behind us and Sherm and Kit gone since yesterday. But I did feel unaccountably frail. As if all my barriers were being put to trial. Gemma has since said that with her, when she feels rickety, it’s as if all her boundaries are being nibbled, or sucked toward her core.

  But this interchange was when we had finally caught a bus, plumping ourselves down on the seats marked for seniors and the handicapped, although Gemma ordinarily won’t sit there. The tears are running down her face.

  ‘Koestler was dying of one of those diseases,’ I said. ‘I forget which one.’ And did not plan to look it up. ‘Far as I know, Sherm wasn’t really that sick.’

  ‘No�
��it was Kit.’

  ‘Did she say?’

  ‘Only that Sherm was—hoping to put her away. She meant the hospice.’

  ‘And was he—going with her?’ Though I don’t know that one can.

  ‘Not—just that way. She said she planned to outlive him.’

  ‘Macy’s,’ the driver said. ‘Herald Square.’

  ‘I can’t see Sherm leaving the motor going. He was so careful with everything, outdoors and in.’ A man with an eyepatch, who could still wield an axe. At times it seemed as if the patch itself corrected him. ‘Remember what a hard time he gave me once, when I was on the cross-saw with him? “I have three eyes, Rupert,” he said. “You have only two.”’

  ‘Kit always drove the car,’ Gemma said.

  ‘He built that carport shed himself.’ With the aid of a local craftsman they called ‘The Lout’—and paid accordingly. They called the carport ‘The Ell,’ as they said the 1790 builder of the house would have, proud they hadn’t contaminated its design. Not so, Gemma told me on the train home. Ells were for wintering the livestock, in the larger farmhouses. You can’t tamper with a saltbox house; it sits too high.

  ‘All himself,’ I repeated. How quick are our tones of requiem. And he would have built it tight.

  ‘Plus the storm windows—finally. All over the house.’ Which Kit, after disdaining them for years, had after all campaigned for. What our austere youth refuses, I thought, our old age achieves.

  ‘But wouldn’t they have smelled anything?’ No, not that night-blooming plant of our era, carbon monoxide.

  ‘I should have listened to her harder,’ Gemma says. ‘I think she had an op. I think she wore a bag.’ The bus was slow and hot. Her tears had almost dried. Her mouth almost quirked. ‘That’s what they went to England for. She must have had the op over there, on the cheap. Didn’t they do that once before?’

  ‘Not quite. Not on purpose. But when they were there once, Sherm had a kidney stone.’ I shut my teeth. The worst of age is its creeping bad manners. That habit of calmly and publicly listing its organs, numbering them. And the bus was listening hard enough.

  Yet I can hear Sherm’s jovial ‘I tell you, Rupe, what high-class care. If ever one really needed—And all we paid was two-pound ten for some pills.’