False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  “Court in session this afternoon,” says your new companion. “Judge just back from Montgomery. Every time he’s fresh from there, it’s a rip-snorter. Say he goes down there to get himself an injection of the law.”

  By instinct the two of you, hands at ease with cigars now, turn slowly and regard the courthouse. The street is as motionless as a strip of desert sand. Heat oscillating above it makes a pattern, light running up watered silk, that you have known since a child. It will be different inside there; the climate of law is always opposite. In the winter cold snaps it will be musty with steam and hard as snuff to breathe. It will be dark as an old bruise inside there now, if not cool. On the way your informant, known to you now by name as you are to him, tells you that no one minds if the judge hogs both sides of the law here, people are kind of proud of it; besides, he always gives you your money’s worth, always puts on a good show. Gossip was, when he first came here, before the speaker’s time, long before, that he never finished his law study in Louisiana, never finished it anywhere at all. But nobody bothers about that nor ever did, figuring a thing done often enough and common enough is surely legal. By now, if it wasn’t, half the leases and liens in the county wouldn’t hold, say nothing of the jails. You nod agreeably; down here people are comfortable about such things; to you nothing of this sort has to be explained.

  As you enter you are both quiet before today’s matter of interest, the natural spectacle always provided a man who keeps himself healthy in mind. Up North they may believe what they like, but this is a country of humanists, where the deepest theater is what happens to people. You have been bred to it, as you have been bred—not as they have—to know that life cannot be passed without violence, without resignation, and that a man who has no time to watch has no time at all. Forward, in the mauve shadow of the rostrum, are the judge, the mother and the son. The day has provided. Slouch and take your ease.

  There were two such men at the back of the courtroom that day.

  And the gist of that day is that I let my mother come to it, to its rostrum, unaware that anything had changed. As I look back there, I know that I have never done any one thing more irreparable than what I did by doing that, nor any more natural. If by “natural” one means not merely that red sequence of tooth and claw which drops hunter on hawk, hawk on mole, but the feral, inner sequence of a man. That red sequence in which we are sent first against ourselves, then, as we grow cleverer at eluding, against others we can use in place of ourselves. And in the order of things, those we use are the nearest to hand.

  As I walked home that night from Fourchette’s, what had happened there seemed to me already almost a fantasy, the enactment of a daydream I had never before so fully admitted I had. The next morning I tried to forget it, almost to persuade myself that it had never been. I could do neither. I was never able to deceive myself as openly as some. And memory, that was to keep me so faithful, was already beginning to take from me the strength that knows how to put what is done with aside. I was already of the persuasion, as I remain, that what we do is never really done with. I had yet to learn that with what I failed to do it would be the same.

  And so the days, not many of them, in which I could have willed things otherwise went by—days of grace we like to fancy them, contra the facts that tell us that if the precious interim of our inaction could come again, it would come again in the same terms of ourselves—again the constricted lover would not will himself to kiss, again the man on the beach would move just too late to lift the lost face from the wave. Days during which, if I could have brought myself to tell my mother what I had done, much might have been different—and during which I vengefully did nothing.

  I told myself that I was afraid to reveal what I had done to her hopes, to see her rage, that I had never yet seen. And this was true, and foresighted. I was afraid, and her rage, when it came, though not as I had envisioned it, was dreadful. I reasoned also that in the “due process” peculiar to the Fourchette office—even I could see that this was like a coil of rope payed out as needed, sometimes hawser-thick with ceremony, at others thin and neglected as old tatting thread—there was a good chance that the petition might not come to light again for months, by which time I would be far away. And this was reasonably true. But beneath all that I told myself was the deeper truth—that I longed to see the rage, to strike the blow. So I let myself swing in the lap of things-as-they-were, and “did”—as I persuaded myself—“nothing.” And I was not disappointed. No wonder we ultimately adore the status quo, hating the sense of it only in our tragic moments, or as good boys to the preceptors who tell us that it is too low a form of mental life for creatures risen to the distinction of a future and a past. For meanwhile it creeps for us, doing our good work and our dirty, giving us a pale respite in that Eden of the animals from which we are barred.

  Once during those days a particular chance came; it had no number on it; it was not that illusory “second” one to which we limit ourselves; it was merely a particular one of the infinite train, offered us with the precision of minutes on a dial, whose progression, in order to live sanely, one ignores. On the Friday after the Monday on which Mr. Fourchette Senior had been due to return home, newly swollen with law and order, from Montgomery, I came home late in the evening after my weekly job of loading and unloading trucks at the market. Summer market days were thronged now, even in Tuscana, and went on until midnight. Our house had no hall, no hall table, but on my way through the kitchen I passed the shelf on which our scanty mail was always laid. A long envelope lay there, Fourchette stationery, addressed to my mother. It had been opened, I saw, and for a moment my breath bounded with relief—the secret was out; my need to decide, that I had pretended did not exist, was over. All sorts of hazards crossed my mind—that the petition, bearing one new name or the other, had somehow been granted in absentia, or else that Mr. Fourchette Senior was communicating with my mother, having discovered his son’s fraud. I unfolded the enclosure. It was not the petition but its forerunner, gazing up at me with the same neuter, conscious lack of blame with which the messenger gives the tidings that open the Greek play. It asked all please to take notice that such and such a petition would be presented on such and such a date—a week hence—at the opening of court on that day or as soon thereafter as counsel could be heard, that an application would then and there be made for an order of the court directing a change of name of said infant, pursuant to the civil rights law of the State of Alabama, and that said petitioner would then and there “apply for such other incidental relief as the court may deem just and proper.” Signed Hannibal Fourchette, Attorney for the petitioner, and dated the previous day. Although a projected name should probably have been incorporated in the notice, none appeared there; the form of Mr. Fourchette’s legal notices, like so much of his law, was his own.

  Through the kitchen door I could see almost all the rest of the house: the nearer end of the sitting room, then my door, closed although I kept no concrete secrets behind it, and theirs, closed with the same habit of reserve. They might be here, already behind it, or since it was Friday, not yet returned home from the café. I could knock at the door or wait up for them.

  In the sitting room, dimmed with shades both night and day, my aunt’s old parlor suite stood at attention on cabriole legs, its fabric, never renewed, holding the remote look of winter cloth in a warm season, each claw-footed leg clutching its ball. I felt as clenched around the immovable as these. I could not let go of what I meant to let happen. Beneath the periphery of my glance I could see the envelope lying where I had dropped it, on the table next to the canister of tea. Long ago, on the night they left for Memphis, another envelope had lain there. The old canister, years since emptied of its original hoard, had been purged too of that mute twinge of remembrance which it had once held for my mother as well as for me. But I would keep all the fidelities that others seemed almost intent to lose. If I recalled how once she had set out the bit of money, of Twining’s tea for me, I would also
counterbalance it; I would tally too how I had wept for her in the privy, with the wry gape of the child who first learns, left behind, that someday he too will want to leave. Over the years I had almost been persuaded to forget this, until that night in Fourchette’s office when, as I sat glass to glass with his son, that poor squeezing-vessel who drank liquor and sweated truth, some inner guardian had risen to remind me that leaving, unless it had its own argument, changed nothing. And straightaway, up like a djinn from a dust heap, an argument, strangely my own, had been provided. I could well marvel now with Demuth over “the mind,” seeing without mysticism its literal power over matter, wreaked daily, ignored and repeated in the perpetual associative hum that tossed up people like analogies, names like truths, truths like shells. To live daily with that marvel, its surprises, even its hurts and horrors, to be logged with a history of my own to interpret, perhaps at the end of life, luckily so far away, to understand—seemed to me all the meaning that one would ever crave. Voicelessly I repeated to myself the new name, signal from that part of myself I meant to preserve.

  And still I stood there in the silent house, wondering whether she, they, were behind the door there, at its core. From old habit my muscles motioned me toward the outside, to seek out that accustomed seat with my back against the farthest wall. In another part of my brain a fantasy that I knew to be such slunk back and forth like a ghost hoping to be relieved of its round—the image of myself tearing the envelope across, waiting up to tell them my secret, or bearing it forward through that door, inside.

  By an effort of will I kept myself where I was, staring out through the window at the landscape I had lived with for so long. It was moonlit now to a pure absence of color—but in those days, in any case, I rarely saw the colors of the world. The world was black, white or gray in those days, in such tones, one is told, as might be recorded if one could use the eye of an animal as a camera. But one need not go to the animals for such; one need go only to the inner eye of the utterly self-contained. There the world rose for me as always, a backdrop, in its center tonight the dam, clear as a Nuremberg mountain around which my wishes, my judgments flew like angels out of Dürer, in moral striation, untouched by the error of pity, in a wooden perfectibility of wing.

  If I had had some mentor to whom I could have said, “Save me from what I shall do!” I might have wavered, but she was the only such mentor I had ever had. I told myself the filial truth that one comes to, that a parent forgets what one is like or has never known it, that whether or not she had a history of her own she was only an actor in mine. I turned from the window and looked at her door. Even if she was behind it, it was closed. So I moved away from her and gave to memory the blame which should have been given to the ancient grudge that antecedes it, to the bias that comes through the archway of birth with us as we are born. So I left the envelope on the table and “did,” as I persuaded myself, “nothing.”

  The day came, as none fails to. In answer to a telephone call that my mother, all agog, had made on the eve of it, we had learned that the judge would be busy at other affairs in the morning; we need not present ourselves until the afternoon session. Later I heard her awkwardly trying to coax my uncle; it was never her habit to coax, and the sound of her voice, alternately its stolid self and the tiny voice that some women make when they wheedle, made me blush for her, and against her. She wanted him to take the day off from work and accompany us.

  “No, Dora,” I heard him say. “Let it be.” He would by nature of course stiffen away from any public parade of his feelings, but he would be constricted too, I assumed, by that vulgarity of class which held it vulgar to feel. My mother, on the contrary, was in an access of the same delight that moves the grave Jew to get tiddly at his son’s circumcision, that sends the whore to strut austerely a step behind the little daughter who goes before her through the cheap streets, crimped head under cotton Communion veil, on her way to partake for the first time of her Lord.

  “And let the boy be,” I heard him add.

  I came in just then and joined them at table, wondering if he had any doubts of me, of my conduct tomorrow. I had nothing against him; I was glad that he was not coming.

  Although we seldom said grace, I bowed my head as if ready for it to be spoken. Extraordinary, in what detail that last scene, last supper, comes back to me. I see the cloth with its pattern of dulled blue-and-white daisies, a frayed thread hanging from the collar point of the shirt my uncle had just changed to, my mother’s pricked hands and my own, poreless and young—all the stray facts of that room convened now in space as if they had been rubies. Powerless, a god outside the machine, I look down on our three bowed heads from above.

  “Just think,” said my mother, glancing from one to the other of us in her fool’s joy, “by this time tomorrow there’ll be two George Higbys!”

  She could have said nothing better to show me how gladly she hurried to annul forever my father and all the heritage of that other life, hers too, that went with him; how eager she was to clip the foreskin, veil the eyes, to gain for me—for her own salvation—the great enclosure of the norm.

  My uncle gave his cough and did not look at me. Was he less self-deceiving than she? He bent his head over his plate. “Let him be.”

  The next morning I woke early, a pulse thudding in my throat, my eyes wide. In that tinder-paper house one could hear every domestic sound, but this was not always an irritant; often I listened gratefully to the chirruped signs of the family unit encamped with me, in whatever bondage, against our mutual wilderness, the world. My uncle, on his way to shave, cleared his throat on the same modest, middling note he made every morning—impossible to say whether he greeted the day or deplored it. My mother could be heard up and about but did not knock as usual to awaken me; did she think, in the generous overflow of last night’s glee, to allow me, as myself, a largesse of dream? Or was she thinking to keep me as safe as possible until that great moment when I should be hatched anew? I could not convince myself that she suspected anything.

  Through the window as I dressed, I saw my uncle departing. Seeing him from behind, I noticed for the first time the long, good shape of his head, his fine square posture. I knew well that the latter had nothing to do with this special morning, with me. It was merely that I was seeing him as a passer-by might, instead of at the looming range which makes the intimate invisible. So slight was the silhouette that he made on any nearer awareness, so lacking in the antitheses with which others roughened the vision, that I was surprised to discover, as I watched him recede, how much I respected him. He must have earned it at the rate he did everything, imperceptibly. It came to me too late that through him I could have approached my mother. He would have acceded, and I could have asked him, I did not know why, any more than I knew what had moved him to attach his name to me. As I thought of last night it occurred to me, with the first shiver of interest I had ever felt for him, that of the three of us he might be the least self-deceiving. Perhaps that was all the mystery there was behind a man who seemed to live from modulation to modulation, undisrupted by central song. “Let it be; let him be,” he had said to my mother. And he had bowed his head to hide from her, not from himself, his foreknowledge that there would never be in any real sense two George Higbys.

  With that thought I forgot him, turning to regard the cramped room that I was leaving. I should never quite hate it as I meant to hate the rest of Tuscana; it had been mine. As this last morning was mine. My wallet was on the dresser behind me, holding the small remainder of my last week’s earnings. I took it up and was halfway out the window—only three feet from the ground and in an angle concealed from the rest of the house—when by a sudden stricture of the eye I saw the room as it would look, without me, to my mother. This would happen to me often later on, this inner flick that put me without warning in another’s place, and I learned to accept its advent as I might that of an old crony who audited but never advised. I took a bit of paper from the wallet, a pencil from the cleared desk, w
rote a line and tossed the note on the pillow: Back in time.

  I could have left her to fears that I would be late or even had decamped, to any number of facets of that anxious doubt she always had of me, that I presumed all mothers had of their children—the formless worry in which she kept disaster warm for me, seeming to hold me already foredoomed. But I was no longer a child, with the simple brutality of a child. She was the first woman I left, as she is for most men, and she herself had taught me that a few ritual comforts left behind could ease the mind of the leaver, that there was a certain neat kindness in which the collapse of trust might be enclosed.

  And all that morning I walked about Tuscana, my eyes prying out its ugliness and weaknesses, storing them up to remember. Most of the middle-aged will no longer understand what I intended by this, but some—quite ordinary people, but still joined to their youth by an umbilicus of sensibility, meditation or suffering—will know. Years later, a man told me the story of how he and two friends, on the eve of their graduation from a harsh school that each had mastered but loathed, swore a joint pact that no one of them in times to come would ever refer to his youth as “golden.” In the same way, bathetic and alone on that valedictory morning in Tuscana, I meant never to gloss mine.

  Gray to the eye as the town was, calloused with its own desuetude, it was not these physical attributes only whose print I meant to keep. There was another attrition always felt, never phrased, a deep circulatory lack, more of the brain than the heart, that pervaded the land as invisibly as did the shabby-sweet aura of some cheap, anonymous vegetation that I had never learned to identify. If there had once been a land-language here, green or otherwise, it had now been translated into terms of the dams, and Tuscana had been shunted away from these. The vegetation I knew was its people, their faces and voices, the cat’s-cradle patterns of their mornings and evenings, the tenor of their ways projected on their streets.