False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  On Friday evenings, or sometimes on Sundays, those long-drawn days of the spirit that often end so excusably (as I could not know then) in wine and flesh, when my mother sometimes came back from the pub looking a trifle overmoist and red, a little too publicly fond of my uncle’s arm, then it was my uncle, that neutral man saved from coarseness only by phlegm, who emerged from his sandy silences, awkward as a myna bird talking, to protect her and me from her lack of reserve. At such moments I was grateful to him, with the only kinship I ever felt for him, but I was not deceived. Later on I was able to see her lapses, his fumbling reparation, for the poor, strangulated human thing it was—to see how the vise of their class had all too well kept their loyalties for them. But on those evenings when their door finally closed, as it always did, I used to steal outside to sit on the ground with my back against the wall of the house farthest from them, sitting out the hour that, as I was learning, always passed.

  The next morning my mother, half an hour late for breakfast, but more than ordinarily generous with the bacon, often said to me, “why do you squint so? Never mind the test says you’ve no need to wear specs. You should do.” But I was squinting because the great characters of my fantasies—men like bell-towers leaning over leonine women—had stretched my eyes too wide accept these small people. And when I left Tuscana it was those two I went from—that pair, shrunk to the size of their compromises, their door.

  Outwardly, I had become one of those organized young creatures who are briefly the despair of their contemporaries, of those others of equal or greater talents still softened with mischief, inertia or humility, who later go on to do more in the world than ever I have done. At the school, I had come under the notice of the new assistant principal, Mr. Demuth, a German from Wisconsin, who had fought against his ancestors in the late war, had got an honorable head wound from them—a bald cranial ridge that he sometimes tapped meaningfully, saying, “German silver, boys!”—without ever being able to tap away the mark he had got from them at birth—his Teutonic faith that Kultur came in catalogue, his pundit passion for drill. My ability to memorize, so quickly exposed in class, excited him deeply, and the odd miscellany of my secret reading, that I had hitherto managed to keep hidden from his less Socratic colleagues, tempted him with its disorder. At first I resisted him—although I was not yet aware of how my zealot habit of memory differed from the ordinary catechumen’s, I knew instinctively that like my privates it had to be concealed. One day, however, Mr. Demuth, abroad for the afternoon on a Wanderfahrten of the district, which he toured as earnestly as if it had been Granada or Kuala Lumpur, walked in on me as I sat, safe as I had thought, in my egg—in the library of the Pridden house.

  I remember how I watched those pedagogue hands as, sacrilegiously eager, they seized upon the books of outmoded shape—thin fifteen-inch folios of anniversary poems, sea-green atlases giving the trade routes in the time of Commodore Perry, birthday books fat and chunky as a child’s Bible—that for all their cranky worthlessness were a part of me, and how, as each was set down tainted with another’s touch, I had already given it up forever. More fearfully, I watched his instantaneous rapport with Miss Pridden, apprehending how the formality of each would approve and complement the other’s, sensing that I seemed fated to attract the embusqués of this world, and that the alliance of these two would inevitably settle, as it did, on me. I discovered that I did not like people who knew me separately to meet each other, that the chameleon concessions one makes to one personality require a dangerous virtuosity in the presence of two, inviting comparisons that one cannot allow others to make without risk, oneself without pain. Above all, I knew, with that anticipation of good or bad which has rarely failed me, which the credulous call prophecy but which others like me will know for the uncontrollable coup de main of objectivity, that my acquaintance with Miss Pridden would be made known to my mother, and again what I wanted to keep disparate would blend.

  And so it all happened. Miss Pridden, inordinately fluttered by the presence of a visitor who not only knew her aunt’s name in its proper order and had read one of her pamphlets on education, but was also, as he said, “brought to his toes” by the presence of her very relict, served tea, not in the kitchen, not even in the parlor or the conservatory, but on the library table, her aunt’s work table itself. I attended it all—the tray set square on the chipped leather, on that blemished map where I had so long dreamed, the light gilding down from the high windows impartially on the three of us, as once it had only on me—and I assisted as at the end of an era. I thought of running away from them before it began, but I stood fast; I parted my lips to cry, “Don’t speak to each other! Don’t talk of me!”—all the time helping passively with the tea things, while Mr. Demuth sotto voce admired my manners, my dexterity. I knew that for these two, headed for devotion to my ends as toward a missionary supper, I could do no wrong at the moment; my silence would be taken for elegance, any awkwardness—if, for instance, I dashed the tray to the floor—as the dear defect of intelligence.

  “To think of finding her house, this, you, Miss Pridden, here!” said Mr. Demuth. “It makes one realize the resources of this country!” He rocked back and forth in his seat; he was always carefully weighing his position in space, that man—teetering on his heels, making a rocker of every chair.

  Miss Pridden, taking a responsive sip of tea, was however immediately reminded, as Americans, once tribute is paid, so often are, of her Grand Tour. They exchanged notes—with me, already their most precious trove, sitting silent between them—like two travelers who find on returning that they have purchased the same locket on the Ponte Vecchio, the very same.

  “And to find the boy here,” said Mr. Demuth, as if lockets had no ears. “The remarkable student: that is what one looks for in teaching. And you have done well by him. Well!” He cocked his head judiciously with a moment’s pause, then went on nodding.

  It was modestly revealed that I had been born in England, but this too was appropriated as one of the country’s resources. “T-t-t, what one finds here! What one can find!”

  When the prospect of the scholarship was mentioned, he lit to it like a candle. “We shall do it!” he said. “We shall accomplish!” And leaning back precariously, giving vent to his satisfaction in the gesture I came to know so well, that terminated every drill well done, he rubbed both palms vigorously on his “silver.”

  Without his help I never would have got the scholarship. Miss Pridden’s humble little notes to the remnants of her aunt’s circle up North—aging deans of seminaries long submerged, suffragettes huddling at eighty in some corner reserved for the espousers of causes no longer lost—must have come, even to them, more like sachets than letters. Here Mr. Demuth took over, glorying in a welter of prospectuses, recommendations and forms. And my coaching began.

  Even now, in my daily round with the encyclopedias at the office, where the particular can be lost in the general like a case in chancery, where only the unsophisticated evince surprise at either the compendium of what is known or the habit of each droplet to deem itself a pond, I sometimes come across a familiar fragment of what he put me though—bits of Juvenal, Ricardo, Hobbes, Burke; lists of U.S. census figures side by side with the doctrines of Valentinus, the genealogical tree of the House of Savoy, the terms of the Pacification of Ghent and the solitary name of Eudoxus of Cnidus; fourteen pages, learned by rote, from the history of the Wars of the Roses, ten from the sixth book of the Aeneid and a chapter of Chateaubriand; a plate of von Helmholtz’s experiments and one of the Elgin marbles—and I am once more awed at the bravado of his attempt. No learned man himself, he solicited advice on my education from a dozen authorities, and used it all. He was like a neophyte photographer unable to resist the temptation of film. His trouble was that craze for the absolute which has drawn us all, at one time or another, along its exquisite variable string; in him it took the form of a hope that knowledge might be an enclosure, that one could somewhere write finis.

  A
nd I resisted at first, blindly, his efforts to write it through me. I wanted my convictions—no, that is not the word—themes perhaps, to rise pure, of themselves. In the uncontaminated country that I could sometimes glimpse in the depth of myself, there was another kind of knowledge that sometimes turned its dark fin and disappeared again, that I must fight to keep. I did not want any help from him, or from anyone else outside. Once, only once, on an afternoon when he had persuaded me to stay for coaching after school, when I could feel him probing my mind with eager connoisseur fingers, and I, unable as yet to parry as deftly as I could now, gave him back an ox-front of stupidity, he lost control and hit my wrist hard with a book he happened to be holding. Immediately he was babbling with apology and tears came to his eyes—one rolled down his cheek on the shaved fawn stubble like a drop of beer. He was not an unkind man, but this went below kindness. He was afraid that he had damaged his machine.

  Loss of control in a grown man shocked me, where now it might only intrigue, but I was not moved. It was my mother’s prescience that did so. There was danger in it, from one who had my paring—even though she did not know the nature of it, nor did I. I felt that same danger the day of her death. How I should like to be able to ask her, one of these nights here, to say what she knew about me—it makes one impatient with death, with the waste of it! Although I know well that even if she could, if made to sit up in her grave with the mother-fear still stiff in her sockets, she would not. No doubt that is her immortality and ours—to live again, by slow sardonic inches, in the irreverent needs of one we have loved.

  In her own country, my mother had been accustomed to steer herself by her betters, who were so both by conclusions long foregone and by some instinctive choice she would have regarded as hers. They were no star to her—often in private she had used to be sharp on them—but, rather, a handrail by means of which she had known what her rights were, who she was, and where. Her pride in them, in helping to keep them where they were, had thereby redounded to herself, in that fastidious balance which Americans would never understand, or countenance if they could.

  Over here, all must have seemed to her a confusion—of each man steering blindfold under the onus of not yet knowing what would have been his dower at home, of people talking about their rights in the way nouveaux riches talk about money—and if ever she could have phrased it, her rejoinder would have been that in a country where none could be elite, all would remain parvenus. Often, during my early schooling in Tuscana, when she chanced to hear me gabbling the “all men are born equal” of my first history lessons—or any of those proud statements which sound so chauvinistic to one nation in the mouth of another—there had been a moue of disbelief on her face, as if she could have told me that the inequality would creep in somewhere, and had best be taken into account at the start.

  Once, when someone sent her a copy of the London Times with an inked arrow pointing to a notice of the death by accident of a distant cousin, I found her sitting with it on her lap, folded to another page, and staring out over it, shaking her head in small, denying nods. At the time I thought she was ruminating on the death, as older persons did, but now I do not think so. When I came in she made as if to toss the paper into the grate, with an unconscious gesture I had not seen her use in years, that we had both rid ourselves of long ago—we had no grate in Tuscana. She let me see the notice, but that evening the paper disappeared. “Went out with the dustbin,” she said, when I asked her for it. Perhaps she thought it might not be good for me to see it, might set me hankering—with that intractable craving which Americans called “ambition,” which “spoiled” their children and which they thought so fine—after certain things at home that I would not have dared to hanker after there.

  “I could have used the paper,” I said. “I’d have brought it to school.”

  “Best turn your mind on what you bring from there,” she said, not with disdain for me, for she knew I worked hard.

  “I bring nothing wrong,” I said.

  She made no reply, bending again over her sewing, one thumb rubbing against its selvage. For she had begun to distrust my ambition. At home, safe on her own terms, she might have been braver for me, but here among these sourceless people, whom could she find to tell her what was reasonable, what was safe? And when the whole of my secrecy was revealed to her, then, sensing that my ambition, whatever it was, unknown to me as it was, might be no ordinary one even for this place, she must have begun to mistrust me.

  As I had foreseen, Mr. Demuth, after our meeting at Miss Pridden’s, had come almost immediately to see my mother, to tell her what a duckling she owned. I was not present when he came; he may have planned it so, but I could well imagine that interview—his surprise when he learned that my mother knew nothing of Miss Pridden (either of what the town so indifferently knew of that eminent house or of my intimacy there), and his gleeful assurance—to what portentous tilting of chairs!—that this secrecy of mine signified all the more what a prize bird, what a downy bird the two of them had. Even more clearly, I could picture my mother, her deference to the schoolmaster while judgment waited on the rest of him, and then—posed with the keenness of my grandfather, of one herself reared to be the canniest critic of who her betters were—the judgment, sharp as one of her own needles, that this man, born here, was no surer of his place in this country than she was.

  He was no guide for her, she must have thought, this man who teetered so uncertainly on his own nativity that he could keep himself comfortable only by patronizing her for the lack of it, whose hearty miracle tale, like a drummer extolling a cure-all, of how children here always improved on the status of their fathers, must have reminded her the more forcibly of the surer tone of that long-gone patronage which had stood upon what it was. And when he began to prate of my abilities, of my marvelously retentive memory, then she rose suddenly and dismissed him—“Your mother does not like to hear you praised,” he told me later—saying that she had to get tea ready for my uncle.

  But when I came in, shortly after, nothing was readied. She stood at the window with her back to me and with the curtains wide, which was not her habit. The intrusion of the outdoors upon the in—a complexity that I loved even then—always made her uneasy; she would go out biddably enough to look at the moon when it rode beautiful and high, but always drew the curtains carefully upon it when she returned to the house.

  “I did not ask him to stay for tea,” she said, still with her back to me. “He didn’t expect to find manners here. So I showed him none.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Your schoolmaster.”

  When she turned, her lips had the same set to them that she had awarded the history lessons. “You’ve no cause to worry. He didn’t see the snub.”

  “They don’t have ‘tea’ here, but supper,” I said, aware she knew that as well as I.

  “Ah, do they not!” One of her brown hair brooches fell to the floor. She bent to pick it up. “They drink tea on Pridden Street, I hear. He told me—how you play the gentleman there.”

  “Eh?” she said, after a moment.

  I said nothing.

  “Why did you let me think the scholarship was all on your own?” she said, low. “What else do you keep to your … what do you talk of with the old woman there?”

  “We don’t talk much. I go there for the books.”

  “Ah no,” she said. “No. Else you would not have minded telling me.”

  “What else could there be?” I muttered it. Mothers were sibyls. I feared a real answer. And craved it.

  “I cannot say,” she said humbly. “I do not know.”

  She came forward to me eagerly. “You don’t want the scholarship after all, eh? He begged me to make you let him help you; he said you would not. You were sharp there. He’s no sort for that.”

  “I want the scholarship,” I said.

  “And what will you do with it?”

  I bent my head in silence, dropping down into myself, as others could sometimes all
too keenly make me do. Down there were my hopes. I saw them—all retreats from what I did not want, not fine parades toward what I did.

  She put her hands on my shoulders, looking up, now that I was taller than she. “Then why do you not stay here? The mill is losing men to the dam every day—all to the good for your uncle. They think well of him there. He will be head foreman next year … or the year after. You could rise there too.”

  “It’s not rising I want!”

  She shook me. “What, then?”

  I closed my eyes. I wanted to get away from what I knew too well, to a place where no one knew me. Beyond that … I could not see.

  “Open your eyes, do not do that—open them!”