False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  “Thank you, thank you!” Pierre turned his head to each. “Mr. Jebb, isn’t it?” The woman would be the dead wife’s mother, that was it. “Mrs. … Bean?”

  “Jebb!” both chorused at him, one to an ear. Both sat back, not far, regarding him, their simpleton, between them.

  “Marcus Jebb,” the man said. “And this is Mother.” The woman blinked, accepting. Her son clasped his hands primly, sat up straighter. “Bean … he took off somewhere couple weeks ago, ain’t been heard of since. Leaving her all swole up and helpless, right there in that chair.” He swallowed again, eyes bulging with the accompanying emotion, whatever it was, virtue perhaps, and its own modest pleasure in same.

  Pierre, unsure of where to allot his sympathy, looked back and forth between them. “Oh, then you’ll still need it,” he murmured. “I mean, the chair.”

  Both exploded in laughter, Mr. Jebb slightly behind his mother, like two straight men over the sally of the comedian between them.

  “Not her,” said Mr. Jebb when he had recovered, nodding toward his mother. “Her,” he said with almost equal reverence, nodding vaguely at Pierre’s plate, as if it were there, hovering over this honor done her, that the departed might still be found. “Didn’t wait till she passed on. Bean and my old missus, I mean. He just took off.”

  “She took off first!” the woman said harshly. “And don’t you ever forget it!” With sudden violence, she gave the chair a shove, sending herself past Pierre’s knees to the table, where the wheels wedged, bringing her to rest just over the food. Slowly she hoisted herself up, a job for block and tackle, or for what already glutted her eyes, expanded her doll-shaped nostrils. Seeing her upright, it was already improbable to imagine this diva of the flesh as ever sitting, ever moved from where she was except by some fluxion of gas within or ground beneath, then as suddenly she kicked the chair behind her with a foot that came from beneath her skirt like a kitten and disappeared again. “Works right good,” she said, “but I ain’t yet ready for it.” She applied herself to the food, at first without benefit of plate, then turning back to them over a loaded one, her voice coming ventriloquially, as if thought were only a secondary chewing. “Marcus’ lawful wife she was. Always taking off with that Bean. Two years back, when Bean got the dam job, she took off for good. Then when he takes off, leaving her sick, she puts the health service on to us. Next of kin, they say, and you know who come running.” She paused, munching in the direction of her son.

  Mr. Jebb gave Pierre a gentle poke. “Eat hearty now,” he said. “You ain’t hardly had nothing.” Swallowing, he reclasped his hands.

  “Two weeks he waits on her, hand and foot, night and day. It ain’t decent, Marcus, I said, not after what she told the whole town last time. Bury her decent. But the rest ain’t.”

  “First-class burial,” said Mr. Jebb.

  “I’ll say. Last carriage empty, you know, for respect. That’s all right too, she was his children’s mamma. I won’t say otherwise, Bean or no Bean. But surely, I said, you ain’t going on with that second-day business!” Mrs. Jebb paused, this time in Pierre’s direction. “That cake come all the way from the Jew dellycadessen in Denoyeville,” she commented, lowering at his full plate. “Don’t nobody make better funeral cake than the Jews.” Under her frown, he broke into the cake.

  Fondant cheeks pursed, she watched him work backwards across the plate, free himself as best he could of the sin of nongluttony. Mr. Jebb sat poised alert, on the edge of his chair. Catching Pierre’s eye on him, he swallowed again, not, as now could be seen, from present sentiment only, but from a kind of permanent tic of it, as if Mr. Jebb’s heart constantly rode so near the surface that every now and then he was put to the trouble of gulping it back down.

  “Delicious …” said Pierre into the silence, once, twice, and again when he had finished. More than this was expected of him, he knew; he was their only hope of audience, of elegy; how else was Mr. Jebb to divest himself of his feelings, his mother divulge what she yearned to, unless he knew his role? Once more he repeated himself, this time, with a sudden hiccough of remembrance, in the town’s own idiom. “Very tasty.”

  “He would do it.” Hope gleamed again in her eel-jelly eye. “Who’d come after those pickings out there, I said. No more and you’d get from a hen in molt.” The hand resting on her bosom flicked toward the relic box and lay flat again. “Next of kin, that’s all he’d say. Next of kin is the children, I said—eight of them they had, four living and working—and when they come to choose wasn’t so much as a pinky-ring to go round. You’ll see, I said. Only thing in that place ain’t trash is the chair.”

  “Sorry to bother you about it.” Pierre stood up and took hold of the chair. “On such a sad day!” he heard himself add. Why, it was easy; the extra word, phrase, had popped out of him like a belch, half hypocrisy, half Coke. This then was what “condolences,” empty as the last carriage in a first-class burial, were for. We help each other round the bend, improvisers all. For Mr. Jebb, set off at last, as if by the turning of a proper key in his back, had begun a slight, steady rocking. What with his size and his cap, it gave him an unfortunate resemblance to a child needing to go to the bathroom, but under the circumstances was still recognizable as that formal palsy with which mourners, greeting each other, say nothing, say all.

  Somberly his mother regarded him. “More’n one way to make a man remember you, ain’t there?” she said to the air. “I say for shame.”

  “Give him something of Zella’s from the box, carry it on back to his folks,” said Mr. Jebb, aloof. “Her and them was neighbors.”

  “Oh, no no. Thanks, I’ll just take along this.”

  Mrs. Jebb held the screen door for him. The chair, too high for the jamb, had to be laid over on its side. It went out with a grudging noise, a catafalque dragging its chains. Mr. Jebb winced when it passed him.

  “Oh you there, hush!” said Mrs. Jebb, from the door. “Bean give you the laugh, he could see how you take on.”

  Her son closed his eyes to her.

  Mrs. Jebb gave the chair a push over the threshold. Hand knocking her bosom, still great with her story, she leaned over Pierre, her whisper hot in his ear, loud as the Trojan women. “Eight children they had, then she took off, saying he wasn’t big enough for her.”

  Legs adangle, the mourner once more gulped down what troubled him, bulging his eyes open, their indefensible smile.

  “I buried her,” said Mr. Jebb.

  They paid no attention when Pierre closed the door. Outside, he bent double over the laughter that had been mounting in him since he entered. Seeing the outhouse handy, and needing it, he went in. Its slatted window was almost up against the house. From the clinking of plates, the Jebbs must have returned to the feast.

  “Told you,” he heard her say. “Nobody come but him.”

  There was no answer except the hiss of a pop bottle.

  “Know your kidneys better’n your own mother? Take some milk. Know well as I do, that stuff gives you gas.”

  Whether Mr. Jebb did as bade could not be seen, was never heard. After a pause, his mother spoke again. “See how you take on when I go!” said Mrs. Jebb.

  On the way back the chair went hardily, broken in as any hired nag whose attendant was nodding, or laughing for all to see, like a fool. In the center of town, Rhine’s was just coming off shift; the chair walked him through these noisy ranks, oblique glances, affording him something of the quick, uneasy rapport extended a cripple; along quieter streets it freed him to listen, trotting him along behind with the high dignity of a Seeing Eye dog. After a while he bent over it with the trust one gave a talisman. It had its own silent repertoire, offering up such humoresques as Marcus Jebb, morsel, still alive and kicking between those two stern judges of anatomy, his She’s. Why should he always feel that laughter was somehow contraband in Tuscana? He had a proper errand, had met diversion by way of it, was returning. Once more humming, he followed the chair.

  On the edge of nigge
rtown it faltered, then went on. Quiet those streets seemed, in the low-keyed weather, but surely only in order to rise refreshed for the rich, brown evening, grackled with voices. He himself was sweating. If the demi-company here had folded its tents, in this fishbowl weather so had much of the town.

  But, nearing Pridden Street, the chair ambled, and he let it. Here were the horse troughs, never wetted in his time except with rainwater, each with its pilastered house behind it—a row of abdicated queens, Corinthian-curled. Natural ghosts, in the subaqueous light they looked more alive than the streets through which he had come, the habit of stillness on them not for an afternoon but for years. Three of the latter had not much changed their color, all of them the gloomy off-white of smudged conscience, except one. There at the end was Miss Pridden’s, still the ward of Montgomery, still white. Affection rose in him as he neared it, seeing it as neatly espaliered on reality here as it had remained in his mind. Here it was, pretty and pallid as a harmless reminiscence should be, bloodless that battlement, absurdly prinked against the sky. The glassed-in card on the door no doubt still gave the same hours, ten to twelve, two to five. He stood back on the path to look at the place. It made him happy, token of what memory could do when it was kind. A smile quirked his cheek. He must have been happy there in spite of himself; now, with graceful precision, it told him so. It had done as a proper memory should—it had kept itself up. And it had shrunk.

  He parked the chair at the side, in the shrubs where, with one of its quick changes, it fitted in at once, born to rosebay, waiting for a dowager of the same high-backed incarnation as itself. Then he opened the jalousied door as if he had just done so yesterday, and stood inside. Was that the smell of benné seed cakes, the sound, just ceased, of a voice like Palmer script speaking? No, the air had a hollow, glassed-in quiet—museum air, best in the world for reverie, when one had the museum all to oneself. But there on the ceiling were the molded garlands, just as he recalled them. He had not yet opened his eyes.

  When he did so, they were there. His watch told him that it was past five, but visitors had always been precious here, the rules only for form. A latecomer would still be welcomed by whoever was curator now. Quiet as an epitaph he felt the presentiment that Miss Pridden was no longer alive, if only because he had not ever been urged to go and see her; in the daily anthology at home she had not once reappeared. For memory’s sake perhaps this too was as it should be; people kept up better when they did not. He smiled in passing at the thought of Miss P. intruding on her own image, she who had so timidly held it back from greater personages’ mirrors. But it was the library that had been his love, still must be, for at the thought of standing again under that clerestory light, fingering the books there, he was filled with the most foolish emotion. He listened to it a moment, for its quality, then, still wondering, opened the low door under the stairs, and entered.

  It was the same, three shafts of light shining faintly even on this gray day. Still smiling, he moved to let one of them center on his face, a bit of sun long preserved for his coming. It was so foolish to feel as he did, such a welling of comfort as if he were some prodigal returning, at an age when he was still to do much of anything, good or bad. There was the famous table, and it was not the same, piled now with papers, heavy books that even in the dimness he could see were not native here. The new curator perhaps was a scholar, or perhaps some other boy, silent catechumen, came here, as once he. He liked the thought of that, turning to the shelves, a collection shrunken indeed now that he saw it, fingering one or two of those quaint incunabula that at a touch once again were real. Gazing down at The Voyage of Commodore Perry, he felt himself once more a stylite on his pillar, knew his emotion for that delicate levitation of the heart when it looks down from the burden of new innocences, on the old. Sweet room in amber, may heaven and Montgomery preserve thee—to return to even when one plans never to come back. He put the Commodore in his place again.

  A light was snapped on behind him. “Oh, sorry!” said the man there. “Thought Miss Minnie’d shut up shop for the day and gone home.”

  Later, Pierre’s eye would never erase its early impression of him there in the orange nimbus of the first lamp, and there was no reason to—a head that kept its blunts and shadows firmly aligned in any light, like a good medal, whose outline, a breadth too small for the shoulders, at second glance had the same perfected, equivocal balance with the body beneath as the old plaster casts of classical statues that were kept in a long gallery to themselves, demoted but not quite shelved, in the basement of the Metropolitan. There was no other resemblance—this face had eyes that were anything but blind.

  “I expect she has. I’m afraid I took the liberty of letting myself in. I used to know this place quite well when—when I was a boy. Miss Pridden used to let me come in and read.”

  The man smiled slightly, from his height of the late thirties, early forties perhaps, at the word “boy.” “Oh, you knew my aunt, then. You knew—she died about six months ago?”

  “Yes, I knew.”

  “Well—do go on and have a look at whatever you want to. I shan’t be settling down for some hours yet.”

  “Thanks, I was just going.”

  “You’re sure now? Actually, I just came in for a wash.” He stretched his arms in a jacket, crushed but not slack, that like his speech, his manner, had not been tailored here, yet he had said “Miss Minnie” in the slurred way that had. “Been a rough day.”

  “Thanks, I should do.” He heard his own suddenly Anglicized inflection with embarrassment. It was one that rarely came over him even in answer to its like, but sometimes took him without warning, a secret obeisance, telling him that he was in the presence of his betters. “Nice place to work though, isn’t it.”

  The man nodded. “Matter of fact, I’m baching it here, while they build my place in Denoyeville. Right now, of course, it’s very handy.” He sauntered to the table, moved some papers, revealing a tantalus back of them, as if in dismissal, then turned, his head cocking, “You’re not—British? Yet—you’re not from these parts?”

  “I was born there. Brought up here.” Pierre hesitated. “Neither are you, are you? I mean—from here.”

  “Went to school over there. Born in Boston.” There was the slightest intonation, as if from more reserve than would want to add “of course”—yet had. “Spent a good many summers here. Before your time, though.” His smile was friendly, not assumed but economical, quick and purposive toward decent intimacy, no further—it too learned in a good school. His hand hovered over the tantalus. “Hold on a minute …” He came forward. “You wouldn’t by any chance be—you’re George Higby’s boy, aren’t you? Stepson, or nephew?” He leaned back. “Wait a minute now … you’re the one …” Don’t tell me yet, his gesture said, this is my forte, my business. These were eyes that indeed took no dismissal, sunk back on the trail of some evasive knowledge that when it came would seem to do so not from them, but from those they were looking into.

  Summers here. Who? It almost came to him, in the thin Palmer script of those mild confidences. The nephew from Boston … you’re the one who. Who are you?

  “Paul … isn’t it? … Peter … Goodman! That’s it. And you’ve been away to college, up North.” He mentioned the name of it, in triumph.

  “That’s right.” Who? “You know my uncle?”

  “Well, rather!” He bent over the decanter, pouring. “Like it up there?” From his posture, one would not have thought that he could see Pierre’s nod, but he had already flexed his brows in answer. “Shouldn’t wonder,” he murmured. He turned. “Join me? Won’t you?”

  “Thanks, sir. Don’t mind if I do.”

  Both laughed. Whoever he was, there had already sprung between them the nimbleness between two intelligences who can speak to one another, the easier perhaps in a foreign land.

  “Here you are.” His manner toward a younger man was perfect, Pierre thought—nothing of the pater, no spurious youth. Few of his own professors
did as well. And yet there was about him what a few of the very best of these had—some superiority that shot its rays from several corners or one center, a nexus of talent not too forceful for manners, of some noblesse of ideas that did not disdain to clothe itself either in good jackets or poor ones, of men who roughed up both admiration and jealousy because born so clearly to the purple, no matter where. Well, the man himself had told him where. Now—who?

  “Drink up.”

  They were types to be wary of—just because he so admired them. They had the listener’s subtle frankness, and they were keen. And because, hungry as he was for his own level, this man’s smile, address, came to him like a breath from the North.

  “Funny old place, isn’t it?”

  Pierre nodded. “Yes it is. Or—you mean Tuscana?”

  “No.” A frown turned down the corners of the mouth, thinning it. “No. There’s nothing funny about Tuscana.”

  He was almost on the edge of it. Why could he not remember! “You know, I have to confess something,” he said. “I don’t know your name.”

  “Why … I am sorry!” A light of amusement broke on the man’s face, turned on himself. “It’s that job of mine … I get to thinking that everybody …” He thrust a hand forward. “I’m Neil Dobbin.”

  Chapter IV. The Proceedings. Jurors Are Seen.

  HE WALKED INTO THE courthouse like a naked emperor. Order had not yet been called in the main room; no one noticed him standing there in his peculiar clothing. For him, his nakedness lay in what he had told Dobbin; the jury would see it otherwise. His power lay in what he had not told. This no one would see at all. Yesterday’s lull was over; outside the window the court attendant fished for a high shutter with his pronged pole and closed them in from the dazzle. It was the afternoon of the next day.

  He and Dobbin had been up a good part of the night, talking. The color of Dobbin’s eyes by night was gray-green; he was forever after prepared to attest to that—to the special pattern that flecked them—in a court anywhere. And he still admired him—as one ranks those of one’s superiors who can be deceived. If Dobbin wanted a judgeship, then it was not that only he wanted, or rather, he could pursue it only along certain lines, deeper than principles, his “themes” perhaps, that flecked all his tissues in a pattern as specifically mapped as his irises, as similarly inborn. He was clearly incapable of wanting the judgeship above all, and this was admirable. Even as a listener, last night, he had had his subtleties, not to be deceived by the frank, transparent cornea, the sunny, reciprocal stare of youth alone. Confidences were his business too, and like the best of lawyers he knew the pace for them, sharing a dinner brought in downstairs by a manservant, risking the half-bottle of wine but not pressing it, shaking out a few metropolitan feathers for this hungry young man but never preening them, careful of this instrument that the gods had sent him, that of itself was so keen. At seven, the chair, glimpsed by accident through the dining-room window, was at once sent on its way with the servant, with Pierre’s message by hand, that he would dine late with a friend. By about eight, it would have been, Dobbin had heard of the Jebbs. No audience could have been more appreciative of them. It would have been about ten that he had heard all, had made his proposal. He too knew how to manipulate his brothers, listening with advocacy, like the best. It was not Dobbin’s fault if, lacking the ultimate imagination, he had assumed last night that he was joining truth to complete truth. His limitation was that of those born to the purple of never having felt alien in the world, born too rich to suspect the keenness that comes from poverty of spirit. Dobbin was blind to it. Unless, of course, his eyes changed color, saw better by day.