False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  From where I was, am now, one can see only the back gardens of these brownstones. No one was in them at this hour. The superintendent had gone, and I regretted him. My own voice must be a croak; for weeks I had used it only when buying food. Behind me, the pages shifted under the breeze, and turning, I gathered them up and slid them into a drawer. One of the heavy spring-binders knocked against the telephone, loosing the steady dial tone. I let it whine on for a moment, then replaced the handset. That tone must be immediately annulled with a number; it is not bearable company. In the silence I had an urge to hear a voice, any voice. Urban children, I gather, have a game in which they dip like jackdaws into the wondrous rags-and-diamond bag of the directory and hold surrealist conversations with strangers—I knew who had told me that, her arms clasped around her knees as she rode that charming hobbyhorse of hers, the peculiar delights of a city childhood. We did it as much out of wonder as mischief, she had said—we could choose from a multitude and spell one of them into the hollow of our ear. As if we were all together, she had said, in a kind of synagogue of the air. In the city a child is never far away from his fellows, from the vastness of man, she had added with a musing tenderness, and I had not answered, thinking that, daughter of such a father, such a home, she would not have been—but of how many there must have been who were. And I had thought of my own game, and of how close it was to that other.

  “Tell me some different things you did as a child,” I had said, trying to forget in her presence what I did as a man. Now I looked down at the phone, in which hers and mine had been the last voices, and it seemed to me that it still held that residuum, sending up its bouquet of fear. I fear that I may trust I knew the look of the page on which I had written that, and I had an impulse to lock the drawer. Lifting the phone again, I let the dial tone whine on. There should be a listening service, I thought—a mechanical presence that would record nothing, merely registering its attention now and then in suitable syllables. Thousands would use it the first day. And after due survey, it would be found that the same syllables were appropriate to all. Then I reminded myself of a safe number, ME 7, and dialed it, with a grin for the animism still lurking for us savages in our most inorganic contraptions—for what Plato would deny soul to an instrument on which, in certain places, one might dial ME? For a few seconds I listened to the time signal, tiny ant-voice always climbing toward infinity. When you hear the signal the time will be … 12:59. And always falling back again. No, I will do first as Maartens does, I thought, and closing the door without a look behind me, I went down the stair.

  Outside on the doorstep I shivered in my jacket, blinking at the house opposite like an animal up from its hibernation, then started walking. The air was cooler than it had looked from above, a pre-spring mixture of capricious sun and cool already passing its zenith and on its long afternoon trend downward to the winter ultramarine that was the New York color above all others—a blue hour, I had read somewhere, of a purity to be found nowhere else in the world, in a city, except Lisbon. I did not know whether this was true, but I flattered myself that I knew all the prototypes of day bred by this city between its waters and its ether. If I had time, I thought, I could construct a semicelestial gloss, a new-sided kind of Diurnal or Hours in which those to whom a day was an entity still evasive behind the weather reports could find the “days of New York” numbered to the closest tolerance, weighed and named perhaps as the elements are in the international table, from actinium through curium, gadolinium, krypton, palladium, tantalum, wolfram, yttrium, and all the others that Demuth had made me learn, down to zirconium. It would be a listing like that one, susceptible to addition but rarely to change, and with no more poetic than is natural. Take the sidereal hour, I thought: angle unit of right ascension equaling 15° measured along the equinoctial circle. Let the standard atomic weight be oxygen at 16. (According to such measurements and others, herein this book is described, with addenda for industrial precipitations and all others short of cataclysm, a day for instance of such a blend of color, texture, mood, and other qualities as might be called the Interim or Jade: medium, nonseasonal, opaque rather than overcast, from the air dull over the cardboard Flushing flats and perhaps faintly Brontëesque over the Rocklands, but in the sea-level midtown streets of a caressing, mutton-fat dampness as perceptibly pleasant and undemanding as a held-back, happy tear. Colors without penumbra in that atmosphere. Green especially rises to viridian. Ladies should not wear bluish-reds. Day without edema, good for the purchasing of shoes. No sunset. Evening will impinge without drama, dishes with some condiment recommended, a little fugitive poetry among friends, or the milder forms of conjugal love. No stars.)

  This is the intensity of the convert, I told myself, as I waited for the long light at Park, teetering on my heels with a certain bland assurance at knowing how much longer that particular light was. Always a tendency to press on the natives those evidentials to which the latter were so informally born. That summer I had arrived here, a month before school began, I had tossed my clothes in the dormitory room and never been in it from dawn to dusk and sometimes not from dusk to dawn, roving the streets with the same magpie acquisitiveness I had hitherto given to books, learning the city strata with a voyeur scholarship that had soon outstripped the obvious, until remarkably soon, thanks to youth, shanks’ mare and subway, I could botanize any neighborhood—until in time I could dispense his own heritage to the native, telling, for instance, a third-generation New York Jew, genus German, habitat East Eighties, of the Ankarese Sephardim in New Lots, of a street, not far from Hester, not quite Mott, where pariah Galitzianer had mingled with Eurasian Chinese. Even now, that punditry, though relaxed, is the only one I am not averse to displaying—for though an encyclopedist, like members of some other professions, is, after the American habit, much buttonholed for free in the parlor, I prefer not to draw too much attention to a mnemonic talent outside the routine.

  The light changed and I crossed, thinking meanwhile what a dull street Park was, a hallmark; even at Christmas, with its evenly illuminated trees equidistant along the stream of cabs, it had only a barely standardized faërie, like a hotel salon trimmed once a year for the chambermaids’ ball. One might felicitate oneself, of course; it was not every provincial who had learned to despise Park. Still, I thought, I was forever convincing myself into the city, mentally possessing and repossessing it; for all the years I had been here I could never see its towers without a disquieting sense that I must regrow them for myself each day. This was not man’s universal reaction to cities, I told myself; this was the parvenu’s trouble—always trying to forget what he must not remember. Or always refusing to remember what he must not forget? How agile of you, dear harpsichordist, I thought, and how unworthy of both you and the old professor in the course you were so proud of taking in your first year here—“Metaphysics of Vitalism and Pragmatism,” and his name was Phillips—who was forever pressing his young gentlemen to note how little grist was ground by paradox.

  I turned a corner down a street of embassies, one of them painted the same buff, yellowish cream, slightly grimed, as the house opposite mine. I stopped in front of it. Answer me this, then, I thought, still apostrophizing my bright morning musician, there aren’t many such houses in New York, and I don’t find any connection—why do I find the sight of this one so pleasant?—answer me, you who know so well that free association is never free. Ah, it answered, if one could travel the whole world, know every recondite cave and the tops of all the topless towers—as should soon become possible, even laughable, as men find their own planet only a miserable insectarium in the garden of the sky—then to such a traveler all places will be analogues of one another. From the boundless store of his impressions he will turn up a bit of yellow Mississippi mud on the Irrawaddy, on Second Avenue a dusk that was Portugal’s, in the Himalayas, cornered perfect in its monastery, a day out of your gloss. With that terrible weight on his shoulders, any Canaan of place will be lost to him forever. To the man without furt
her hills, who can see on both sides of the horizon, all places will become less dear, none final. No, I will not admit that, I answered, and staring again at the house front, I thought—perhaps it reminds me of hers. But that was absurd; hers was the old brownstone like mine, which, when sanded back to its quarry color, as the Mannix house had been, has a henna-violet tint in the evening and in the last flash from the west almost a carnelian—one can imagine a row of them then in their heyday, inflamed by the late-century sun. For a moment I stood there and imagined them. I have always preferred their era to the skinny-shanked nineteen-twenties so favored by this one; it was an era of embonpoint in women, in sofas, in time. They too had been all but eaten by the time signal, I thought; then, how absurd to take flight, as I had done each day, from this neighborhood of their ghosts. Under that aspect, what could it matter, the conjunction of a soon-to-be-ghost woman with a similar man? No, I answered myself, one does not go down to that subcellar and pull the centuries over one’s head. Between one’s appetites and one’s dangers, one moves on.

  Down the block a few stragglers waited for the bus. When it came I pressed forward with them and sat down on one of the long front seats that faced in. I knew the strata of the buses also, on these crosstown routes always more mixed and original, with people less sluggishly in context than they were on the avenues, men whose self-priming touches to hat or collar suggested that their confidence was out of its district, women who worried at each signpost and clutched their purses like women abroad in a foreign land. I stared absently at my vis-à-vis and they vacantly back, no doubt registering the facts of me according to their own lights and preoccupation. Surely the nature of a crowd is that everyone in it thinks himself the godly observer—the others are always the crowd. But in the subway and elsewhere when men are disposed en face, it has always seemed to me as if, for the purposes of travel, each man subsides, in truce, to the homunculus. Here, in a subserving silence so remarkably without overseer, a man may examine his opposite as if the latter were a bit of jeweled dirt, and for this no gauntlet is ever thrown down. And suddenly I was reminded of what my years here had made me forget, of how in those first weeks of wandering the city, what had surprised me, awed me most of all, was this great conspiracy of silence. In towns such as I had come from the streets are a constant ripple of nods and tipped greetings, a bath of human acknowledgment And before that, in London, I had been a child, to whom all elders are a single, high sentry mouth from which one takes as scripture the handed-down distinction between the seen and the heard.

  But as I had first walked the streets of New York I had been filled with amazement. Here and there on the tenement stoops there were clusters, and the bicker of children. Yet even these people put their necks in the yoke when they went on the main streets, abroad; a chance encounter with a known had a tinge of embarrassment at its edges, as if one had been surprised incognito; even lovers and families fell proudly silent in a kind of disownment, and only the inanimate, unleashed and braying its triumph, gave tongue. It’s this, I thought—as the bus came to the end of the line, the driver said nothing, and we all disembarked—that makes the countryman say he cannot bear the noise of the city. What he finds unbearable is the non-noise of the human.

  A clump of schoolgirls came toward us, all shoots of arm, gawk and hair. They were speaking to each other but really to “the gallery” hung in each heart like a collective valentine just opened that morning. They rolled past us like a huge sweetmeat ball sugared with giggles, leaving an eddy of smiles or annoyance behind. We dispersed around them, each of us taking his way alone, and as I stood looking down the long street with its busy rodent-fringe of shops, I could see perhaps fifty or more like us, a congress of fifty human beings passing each other as silently as if under edict, like people who walk about under some mutual concept that all assent to and none has authored, under a ban of tyranny or war.

  I turned westward with some of the others, toward the Hudson. How sunshine muddies the thinking I thought; the absurdity is mine. The city merely makes demonstrable, in broad daylight and in numbers, the final distance between psyche and psyche, between C sharp and D flat, between one and one. A distance to be yearned over occasionally in private, but sensibly welcomed—as the naked bum blesses its trousers—when abroad. The city is nothing more than anonym on the avenue, in place of anonym at home in double bed or at family table, at his analytical desk or on his painfully self-examining knees. This is the feverish sensibility of the truant still tied to his memoir, I thought—now it’s time to go home. Nevertheless, I continued walking.

  Ahead of me on the broad thoroughfare, two or three of my compatriots on the bus were still with me going my way—and perhaps one or two behind. Did I really wish to know them, and why? Ego, no doubt, in part—the concatenation of thirty-five persons and Mr. P. Goodman on an east-west bus on a particular afternoon in the year of our Lord, April, either has a significance toward which all their past lives have tended them, or none—in which case neither has he. In which case neither is he. Or who? But the whole of it was that I was still in fact greedy to know them all, not themselves but their single story in all its variable, in each of which perhaps there was a chip of mine. And if I could, I should have wished to know not only theirs but all the street’s and the city’s, like some emperor, sadder and less satiable than Alexander, who knew that the world to be conquered never ends, being round.

  Behind me the footsteps dropped off. Up ahead, only one of the crowd on the bus still led me, a small, elderly woman hobbling along with jerky neatness, as if her long skirts concealed an endless wheel of paper-doll feet that one after the other came down. I trailed her, if only because I have always had a hard time making myself let go of the casual, knowing how subtly afterwards it may be seen to have woven itself into the choice. Then too, we were approaching the university neighborhood and this gave me a practical reason—I have always been adroit at finding them. For I still meant to keep my evening appointment with myself. If I cannot approach through the depth, I thought, then I shall probe downward through the surface—even if it means doing as the encyclopedist does in the office, even if I should have to record the “I” as if it were another’s, as if it were “he.” And these blocks, though not for long, were the next environ in the memoir.

  The woman ahead, eyes bent, was covering the ground with the tortoise intentness of the elderly. She turned into the doorway of one of the large apartment houses that front the river there, her slow pace allowing me time to make my direction nonchalantly hers. This too was the impersonal advantage of the city. We stood together inside, in front of an elevator that descended somewhere above us with a servile sighing, like an omen that had to please everybody. I knew these old lobbies well, their ochered Ionic plaster and dirty marble from which the corporation had long since removed the Oriental rugs and Queen Anne thrones of their prime, leaving behind only what could not be removed and was valueless—their echoing, anachronistic space. Above, the middle middle class lived with its pretensions and its roomers, the professor housing the student, the salesman hanging on to his debts by his expense account, while their wives, hunching their collars through the Puerto Rican side streets, protested “the river, the park for the children,” meanwhile keeping up an elegy in tune with the elevator—“running down, everything running down.”

  The old lady, about seventy, had the classless neatness peculiar to some elderly women, flesh faded serviceably toward soap, past crème, long since pensioned off into its black. I had a fancy that she lived here; this neighborhood, as I knew from my college days, was among other things the habitat of the in-between relict of indeterminate age, ancestry, and bundles. One passed them so constantly, each under her artifact, a black hat, shaped like a pot or a dusty meringue which changed its shelf perhaps but never its season, that after a while they became the same one, recurring like a figure on a willow plate of blurred, indefinable pattern, or on some humble karma wheel.

  The elevator was a long time in
coming. I studied my lady as one might a shell plucked from a beachful; her eyes were cast down. Faint iodine stains on the white hair told of blondeness fifty years before. A long nose, patient with its own length, a Hapsburg lip, slightly trembling, one Manila paper bag—was she dispensing or receiving?—on which thick leather gloves with a gift shine to them firmed themselves now and again to a crackling in time with the lip. Her cheap scarf caught my eye; there was always something. Printed with clowns and balloons in the crudely coy dime-store art intended for children—chosen by a child perhaps, or borrowed from one. She might be academe’s widow or salesman’s mother-in-law. She might be anybody. This was her mystery.

  To the left of the elevator there was a tenant directory; from it I picked an imaginary destination—Gerber, 10A, on the top floor, from which I might then walk down, taking a survey perhaps, hunting a room—I had no plan. It seemed odd to have none, after so many years of meeting, as strangers, those with whose dossiers I actually was so often secretly armed. But here, of course, I had no intent to enter her life past her door. Madam, I am investigating accident. Specifically, the accident toward which all our lives may have tended us, and, except for my action, veered us away. I intrude no personal acquaintance; I crave merely a bit of cosmic gossip—what history it was sat so silently next to mine. Doubtless there is no connection other than the slight fortuity of existence. Pardon this amateur philosophizing—I attended school in this neighborhood, at the innocent age when such problems had force.