False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  She was speaking of the circumstance that had brought us together, the encyclopedia soliciting her father for an article, the discovery that I had known David after the war, when he was serving with the American Friends in Germany, before the crash of the commercial transport in which he went down. I have of course never been in Germany. The war took me to the Far East, then home. It was Walter Stern who had been there with him, who used to speak to me endlessly of “Diddy” as he called him and of his friends the Mannixes, their house, their habits, meanwhile handing me, across our adjacent beds in the orthopaedic ward, the letters he was editing as a memorial, sitting up to read them to me—I with a leg in traction after a ski spill, he preoperatively spry, with his hump clinging between his shoulders, the night-light hollowing his eager face—that racked, Ancient Mariner face which all such people have. I had done him no wrong, merely appropriated him, what he knew, after his death, as people often must do with the dead, who, if they could, might prefer that to nothing at all.

  “You are not listening,” she whispered. I drew her hair over my face. I thought of all those whom we leave for dead, either in the grave or in the past, who grow again between our shoulder blades. I thought of the great hump of memory I had made for myself, of such a shape that I could never hope to lay it down. And then I made the accidental slip. I spoke unaware; I was listening, but not to her. And I found myself with the enemy lying beside me, in the flesh still quivering in communication with mine. I discovered why I had never looked behind me. The real danger walks toward.

  When I came back here that night I sat down here at my desk. All she knew was that there was something to be known, but I saw the thinness of the membrane I had always kept posed between myself and others. I wrote her a note full of evasions, another saying I was going away, tore them both up and sent none. “Tell me,” she had said, her mouth at my breastbone. My words until now. The words of the confidant. What I had to tell depended on a long chain of causation, from the beginning. I needed a place to lay it down. And the only safe confidant was myself.

  But often, afterwards, in the nights here since then, after I have written and am returned to the present, I think of her, and then I imagine her as still lying naked and vulnerable under the blanket I crept from—immobilized there, as I am here—and I wonder over the nature of my fear. I might have gone on as I was. There must be many who live on with effrontery under strange private burdens. The ordinary, advancing like lichen, protects us all. Yet I did not, because of whatever it is that spins its filament between us, as she lies there, as I sit here. Often, after being with a woman, the pattern of that connection lies like a tracery in the muscles for days; one carries the other person about with one, a silent companion, certain that one’s own impress is being carried also. This is like that—if fear can be like that. I sit here, remembering what I must no longer dare.

  I sat so last evening. It is a strange process, this alternation between the present and the past, in which I have deliberately made the present as null and stationary as I can, in order that the past may fill it to the brim. As I approach what I am after, I feel that it approaches me.

  Last night, I was thinking of the people called “accident-prone,” those who need to injure themselves. There could be others, I thought, who sought the good accident. And if so, they would fear it as well. Then the phone rang, so late, so unaccustomed in the dead room that I knew, unless it was a wrong number, it would be she. I looked at the clock, almost four, and I understood, as well as if I had lived it, the evening she had lived through, that had brought her naked along the filament, here.

  I picked up the phone and listened. If I answer, I thought, I may learn what my fear is.

  “Yes?” I said, and our voices collided.

  She spoke again.

  “Pierre?” she said, and I drew in my breath at the collision of the present with the past. For in the memoir I have not yet come to that name.

  Chapter VII. The Fourchette Office. The Shell. The Namesake.

  THAT WAS THE NAME I chose. At the time it did not seem to me I in the least odd that I, of English and Irish heritage, living in America, should suddenly choose to be known henceforward by the name of a half-French Viennese who had once shown me a brief, putative uncleship, letting me creep into the knee-high circle around him, long ago, on a few brilliant, lost afternoons. Nor that in doing so, in assuming my name, I meant contrarily somehow to preserve my identity, my singularity from the depredations of others. The young act from a pure, breathless logic still ignorant of the conventional barrier between dream and possibility. When a man begins to act logically according to others, to try to impose their kind of order on what the worm already whispers to him is an irrational world, then he has left his youth behind. As he begins to concede to the reality of the majority, the instinctual power of fantasy recedes. So, little by little, we bargain our youth away, and can no more quarrel with this inevitable than we can with the slow exchange of life for death. Some do, of course, pushing that earlier logic to the extremities of martyrdom or art, and history is made by them for a time. But I had neither their strength nor their luck. I am only unable to forget it, to let go of the Heimweh that remembers what it was once like to have.

  I still had it that evening. When I left Demuth, I already knew what I meant to do, with an intent as hot and cleansing as anger. I was going to the courthouse, to Fourchette, to take back—to seize if need be—the petition, and destroy it. Underlying that was another, a new satisfaction that for the moment I thrust aside. It was akin to the satisfaction that comes from leaving, from leaving anywhere when there are others left behind, but it was more complex. Later on I would recognize it often—the faintly corrupt serenity that comes when we have turned somebody down. It too was a sign that I was growing. A child’s hatred exudes, natural as honey, toward those who refuse him, who do unto him. As he is civilized, he learns in his turn to hate others for what he has done to them. Going down Demuth’s stairs was, I think, the moment when I changed sides.

  I had dropped another simplicity by the wayside. It glitters back there like a bit of mirror in a hedge. But I had more.

  Outside, it was not much more than six o’clock; the night had not really come. It was the long, stationary dusk that at this season held the land for hours in a spider-colored void. Half a mile down the road to Tuscana, I caught a ride on a truck whose driver had picked me up once in a while before. We rode on through the pall as if it were a thicket, seeming to get nowhere except where we were, unless we glanced back at the huge, glazed waves of the dams.

  “Sure is some combine,” said the driver. “Sure is some combine.” Ahead of us, on the state road, the wet streaks of the mirages skimmed one after the other under the wheels. Now and then we passed through a pocket of gnats frizzling in the air. Same specks came in the eyes just before the sun hit you, said the driver; one time he had to park by the side of the road for an hour before he was sure which.

  “Dead town for sure, ain’t it?” he said, as we drove into Tuscana. In front of the courthouse he set me down. “Hitch along sometime, kid—I’ll carry you to Memphis.”

  I told him I was going north. “Uh-uh!” he said. “Get there, send me down a satchelful that ice.” He tipped two fingers at me when I thanked him. “Hurry back!” he said, and drove off.

  The courthouse square was deserted. This was the hour when people lay about wherever they could, letting the day press from their pores. If the office was closed, I thought, I would even go to the Fourchette house, but the door was open, and on it a note: Ticely—you want that writ Pa promised, look in around nine. Ticely was the name of the sheriff—a sharp reminder that the office, for all its slackness, was the precinct of county business, of adult affairs. But the note was signed Junior, by the fumbling, heavy-breathing hulk of a man who was the son. Thus my luck followed me. I should not have got away with what I did, under the rubbed-stone eyes, denatured yet sober, of the elder Fourchette.

  Inside the offi
ce the fan was blowing, going on just as I had left it, under the wheeling generations of flies. That other day I had been here was “there”; this was “here,” with the fan between them, a weaving “now.” Only I, a patchwork of all three, a being continuously repaired and accreting, had changed. I could still hear, as I did just then, the to-from Memphis train spreading its cloudy horn along the land, but now I had the beginning, the necessary deafness. I could still listen to the voice of memory, but from now on, even to this voice, with calculation. I was almost ready to begin the exchange of unpremeditated feeling for the privilege of knowing at all times who and where I was, for that absence of pain which I would learn to confuse with joy. And I knew the name of the next town north.

  I smiled to myself, remembering how once, to know that had seemed the sesame to everything. How enormously more I knew now, and how much less likely I was to be diddled—the proof being that I sat here, ready to defend my name, my selfhood, like any knight-at-arms. I felt the presence of all my appetites, huge to know more, and the possession of them gave me, even as now, the conviction of health. In my knapsack there were still two sandwiches and I hunted them out with sharp pleasure and ate them in great bites. On a stand near the desk there was a dish of pears under a netting, and with a brigand’s look over my shoulder, I lifted the netting and stole one. I felt all the excellence of growing up, the bravery that opened like a door in oneself, the privilege that arrived in mysterious, due course, and no one at the moment could have persuaded me but that growing older was a quantitative affair. In my pocket there was still one brown-papered bar of Demuth’s chocolate, and putting aside childish things, I ate it with a knowing cannibal twinge. My “themes” had not left me; if intent upon it, I could still summon them at will from the uncontaminated country that was still most truly I. That inward country was only more richly textured than I had dreamed, more deeply situated than a child’s. But I could still draw from it a deep surge of innocence—though it came now only at will, preceded by the faintest tinge of injury, and from slightly farther off.

  At the window, in the hallucinated lavender that hung just before dark, even Tuscana’s stingy shapes took on the weak lyrism of a town that, though hated, was shortly to be left. It was my duty to cherish that hatred for all that it had meant to me, to hold to the real substance beneath those dim porches, so ingénue and soft now in their evening summer. It would never, I swore, become my province—that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land of youth which other people, sometimes even my mother, saw in the teacup, the time-cup, brooding over it with a bemused smile. But now that I was leaving Tuscana, I could afford at last to admit that I was in it, that this was America and I was in it, here.

  Back there, during the years when my mother used to mention, halfheartedly, the ridiculous idea of coming here, “America” had had the comfortable shape of some leviathan humping so far behind the horizon that one could talk of it without ever fearing to see it. For a long time I had not even understood that it and “the States,” as it was called in Fulham, were for the most part the same. “America” was what my mother had always called it, and from her silent head-shakings over the letters from her sister, I had come to regard it as another part of the ill chance that dogged my aunt, that had dogged her also with a mortal disease. So too it had dropped occasionally from the old grandmother’s accented tongue—Amerika—sounding down the endless, travertine corridors of her family whenever she spoke of Pierre, her favorite brother who, though a great traveler, had settled permanently there. And on her lips too it had the rap of some uncomfortable destiny that a man less feckless or obstinate than he would have had the sense to avoid. For all her spa acquaintance with Europe, she was a provincial, reconciled to England only because die Familie, all the core of it except Pierre and a ragbag of auxiliary cousins, was gathered there. She had, too, all the European woman’s deification (in her case Germanic and Hebraic as well) of the males of the family. And for this brother, the Goodman children’s distaff great-uncle, she had the special matriarchal passion that often extends itself to the adventurer.

  Actually, he may have seemed an adventurer only to her. To others he must have seemed merely that natural dilettante which all such mercantile families inevitably acquire on their way from money to taste. He had his business interests along with the artistic. Although she never said precisely what he did or was, showing at times an irritation with him because she could not, it appeared that he dabbled in export-import, always in some charming currency—Carrara marble, sometimes the finished statuary, terrazzo, wine. Apparently he hovered between his taste and his money, casually augmenting one with the other, and this, although it was not solid enough for her to approve, she could understand. What troubled her was that he did it “over there.” She was the family’s recorder, its central repository, tending, in the continuous brew of her incantations, what she clearly regarded as the family soul. But like the true duennas, the best witches, she had little imagination. Pottering over her memorial fires, she could evoke that concentric family, its panoply of death, birth, banns, houses, taxes and long uneventfulness, in all her known sulphurs and blues, making for herself and them—and for me—such a family as was never anywhere else. But Pierre’s life was lost to her, a blank patch somewhere in the North Atlantic mists across the world. She could not weave him in. It was not his change of country she objected to, or his far journeys. The family, since Egypt perhaps, had had many such—but always together. If Sir Joseph had taken the family to Amerika on the morrow she would have gone with him, as later she surely went along to Japan, no doubt settling down devotedly at once to weave that in too. But Pierre was alone. It was not that she thought of him—although she may have—as wandering over savannahs she would have been at a loss to describe. Nor that he never corresponded, except by presents sending a constant stream of curiosa from everywhere, America as well—and came to see her only every four or five years. Without the family she could not imagine him at all. He was therefore the sole denizen of her lamentations; to death and other scourges she gave only a token sabacthani, revering these as the natural enemies against which a family circle was formed. Meanwhile she saw him—and made me see him (soon, she said, to be seen on one of his visits, in the flesh)—as a Merlin of talents that could conquer anything except his own waste of them. On her elegiac days as I listened to her, I saw him in “Amayrika,” held fast in the laocoön coils of its central dark. At other times—on the days when, chatteringly gay, she talked at me as to some elegant crony of the Ringstrasse—America appeared merely as something he had somehow contracted and would one day abjure like an absurd mésalliance.

  He was of course also the “uncle from Gibraltar.” I had not yet reasoned that out on the day I went to the old lady’s apartments as usual and found him there, having just discovered his presence in the house from Molly, who had called me back as I was bearing off the tray at the usual hour, saying, “Hoi there, hold it a tick, the uncle is with her!”—and carefully replacing its glass with two others, pale red with dots of white on them, that I had never before seen. “Can the boy manage?” I heard the cook say, low. “The Eye-talian ones those are, sent her Easter last,” and Molly’s answering whisper: “Fair treat to watch him. Can he not!”

  “Ach, so it is your day is it?” said the old lady as I entered. “Here comes the handsome waiter. And here he is,” she said proudly, clapping her knuckles together and nodding toward the dapper, mustached gentleman who sat next her on the sofa, “the naughty wanderer we speak of so often, at last. Here is my brother Pierre.” She turned to him with glee. “And you, Brüderlein, wait.”

  Then she put me through our little routine, and he tossed back his head and laughed, smoothing his short gray curls and the mustache that matched them, slapping his sharp, silken knee.

  “‘Here comes the handsome waiter,’ eh? My God, Franziska, how you remember! I can hear our dear mother saying that to me now.” I knew that he was really the old lady’s stepbrother, younger and of a different
father. It was strange to hear him name the old grandmother, for although she often referred to herself thus in her recitals, I had never heard anyone in the house say it aloud.

  “And who is this?” he said, turning to me. “Not another nephew-once-removed I have lost track of?”

  “Ach!” she said. “Although you—you are capable of it. Of course not. It is Dora’s boy. You remember Rachel’s Dora.” I made as if to go then, reminded of who I was, but she motioned me to stay. “The others are always off somewhere. We have long conversations together, he and I.” I was too young then to remark, even to myself, that in reality I never said a word, but I remember thinking: Those are “conversations,” then—we have “conversations.”

  He fixed his eyes on me, brown plush instead of his sister’s black but with the same mottled keenness. The lids were paper-thin, under brows that bristled and curled at the tips like secondary mustaches. “‘Handsome waiter,’ eh? Would you believe it, that’s what they used to call me. Hmmm? Can you believe it? What do you say?”

  It was a warm June, and he was wearing a vanilla-colored suit of the silk my mother called “pongee.” His hat lay beside him, a rolled-brim panama of the same tinge, and next it a smooth, yellow cane. In his tie, pale as the rest of him, something twinkled—a horse with its pinhead hooves stretched to an extension no bigger than the nail of a man’s thumb. “Eh?” he said.