False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  And of course, such talents as I happened to own suited him mightily; one could have thought, from his pleasure, that all my history had portended my arrival here—as perhaps it had. After a short time, I was invited to leave my furnished room in nearby Mt. Vernon and join the small circle of resident staff. At end of summer, when other student aides left but I did not, he was surprised, then thoughtful. Clearly he was greedy for me to stay. When he heard that I would, he didn’t press for my reasons, only saying, “Stick with us, then. You shan’t lose by it.” Nor, in a way, have I.

  That first stint, I stayed for some eight months. My decision not to return to college seemed to me already fixed at the time when I had failed to mail a letter of explanation to Serlin, as absolute as a formal resignation, and one that it never occurred to me was not irreparable. Probably this was the one purely romantic gesture of my life—if one takes romanticism to be, as I do, those lies one tells not to others but to oneself. I told myself that the serene course of my college life to date, the approval which had been slowly accruing, was neither my fate nor my style; not that I felt myself unworthy, rather that real worth ought not to come along so gently, giving no trouble, into that enclosure where so many others already were. Probably that is true, in the large. Actually, I felt relieved to be away from the temptations of that enclosure. I gave up college exactly as I had once tried to discard Demuth’s chocolate. I could not bear to be helped.

  After a few months, I did communicate with Dobbin, to whom I had given power of attorney, after he had pointed out to me, during the course of that long ride, that my uncle had predeceased my mother, and that I was my mother’s heir. More months went by before I had a reply, under the heading of the Boston law firm of which Dobbin was a partner. They were very glad to hear of my whereabouts, since the house had been sold and the estate was shortly due to be settled. With the sale of the house added to my uncle’s savings and a small account of my mother’s, the total would amount to some fourteen thousand dollars, which, after the proper formalities, they would remit, along with a box of effects that had been held for me. Mr. Dobbin had been overseas since October last, moving from place to place, and was likely to continue so in view of conditions in Europe, but had left word before going that he was to be notified of my address as soon as found, since there were certain matters of which he preferred to write personally. This had been done. Meanwhile, also at his suggestion, they were to consider themselves at my disposal for any future legal services I might require.

  Dobbin was overseas. This was what the letter really brought home to me. I have had the luck always to be able to treat money pretty concretely, hanging no extra symbolism on what already had enough effluence as it stood. The sum impressed me, and had its deep, associative pangs, but I went through no “blood money” attitudes about it; almost at once it receded to a certain distance, as something beyond my expectations, that until I had a need for it or found one, would not be quite mine. But Dobbin was overseas, and had been since October.

  The sun, where I stood with the letter under one of the horse chestnuts, striped Lasch’s dead, yellow lawn with chipmunk black. While I stood there, it went in and out several times with a pale Cheshire smile and finally took itself off altogether behind the gray clouds muddled above the chimneys of the long sham-Tudor house, leaving a fresh cold through which the pure smell of leaf smoke twisted from a few hedgerows away. I had come to like this place mildly for its heavy 1900 virtues of wood, stone, and fumed-oak interior colors blazoned here and there on corners of arranged, fake dark that would not terrify a child. It was comfortable, at my bachelor age, to live among the drabs and absurdities of a bygone taste, released, as in a hotel or boardinghouse, from any exertions of my own. We lived then, Lasch and a few others of quiet persuasion, several physically handicapped, all single, behind mullioned windows, hard to open or repair, whose shared nuisance imparted a light sense of family, in winter lunchtimes (Lasch ran no commissary) appropriately knocking the snow from our boots against the tarnished greaves of several suits of armor which stood about the hall. It was one of those satisfactorily dim places of employment, rapidly vanishing from a world that seemed all “outer,” which gave one a sense of being able to stay on in it forever, and more than one drawn here by his own peculiarities had been soothed into that intention. Much the youngest here, I meant to linger in this backwater only until my own intentions declared themselves, not yet awhile perhaps—soon. The letter in my hand, whipped by the wind, flapped like a pinwheel, more active a paper than those dailies which entered the house each morning like tabbies, deposited communiqués already dead, and were gone again at nightfall. I looked up at the horse chestnut waving its branches above me, already dropping new husks on some of last year’s satiny brown fruit at my feet—a genus of tree first seen here, but long since mingled for me, in the fast-blotted reference map of my generation, with its forebears on the Bois (Odettes now behind the Maginot Line), with its collateral cousins steadily and impartially growing a fragrance of wunderschönen Monat Mai (I knew my Heine now also) as auf wieder to men goose-stepping away from Unter den Linden. Where was Dobbin, “moving from place to place,” now?

  The house, on a rise of land at a squire’s distance from its own pillarbox, withdrew in its own Anglophile light, gathered back like a house in an engraving, although I knew that distance also to be slightly faked. Nevertheless, we were farther behind the lines there than even the rest of the country; as many newspapers as entered it did so more to be clipped than to be read, and I already felt a young man’s distaste for people who could be so quickly antiquarian with life. Even our one refugee, a Viennese librarian named Schott, was a queer exemplar of martyrdom—a handsome man in his forties who gave us no help in our heavy “sympathizer” discussions, breaking in on them, eyes rimmed with boulevardier red, to tickle the nape of our younger female resident (a lame girl named Delphine Smith) with a pointed nail that each time crept toward more meaningful areas. Schott was a professed opportunist, openly amused at our puritan need to see him morally all of a piece with his martyrdom, who meanwhile busily engaged himself in testing the stuff of his new American existence with a trader’s thumb. A man eager and didactic on the subject of rich acquaintance, already a weekender in the environs, he kept inviting me to tennis on the courts of his new cronies and had only yesterday proposed a whorehouse, not for information—he was already the patron of a good one—but for the fresher luster of my company, since, as he said, tossing his head with a strawberry-lipped laugh at the drama young men made of these visits here, surely the European custom of going regularly with one or more good companions was more civilized, and on these occasions he disliked the company, rich or not, of the old. I meant to go with him. But meanwhile, the British had declared war in September. The letter blew from my hand and I retrieved it. “Overseas,” it said, not the civilian “abroad.” The wind that blew it was a March wind. And meanwhile Dobbin, who for all his “theme” saw the law with a politician’s squint, who in August I could have sworn to be Ambition walking, must have put his judgeship aside and had been overseas since October.

  “Pi-erre! Teatime!” Delphine advanced across the cold lawn, shivering for me to see in her sweater, her dark, high-schoolish masses of hair ruffled back, rocking slowly toward me on the iron-braced leg. We were very English in our habits in that house, nudged both by the architecture and the times, and Delphine kept us to it most ardently of all, her sincerity amended by the knowledge that the silver curves of tea-pouring well became a femininity that she had had to express more quaintly than a normal woman, in pinned handkerchiefs, wide skirts, slim, archaic sandals on the wasted foot. A soft-featured, childish thirty above the incongruous spread of hip, reared on all the tender encirclement offered a bright cripple, she had proudly remained unspoiled, gently hoping not to differ. She was in love with me, as I well knew. Schott’s recent attentions, so marked and open, had only inclined her more bravely toward me, even to the point of a small, precious
confidence, offered tremulously as a bride, that she was not a virgin. Uncomfortably, I wished she would succumb to a man who would make more sophisticated use of her than I felt myself able. I found her attractions much more normal than she would allow, but saw no way of telling her this without coming closer to accepting them—and we lived in the same house. For, well as I knew Montaigne’s comment on the special heat in the loves of lame women, I was held back by what he had not mentioned—the heat of the attendant psyche. With Delphine, any “affair” she offered, its end already humbly germinated in the word itself, would have a note of hysteria from its beginning, gratitude twining with fidelity in a lovers’-knot not easily severed even by the experienced—and I meant to leave. Anyone could see what her emotions were, arrested and rarefied to a faëry intensity thin as membrane, and as tough. Only love could match it, or perversity, and I felt neither.

  “Any for me?” Embarrassed, knowing I saw her excuse, for I always brought the mail up for tea, she still came on; then, glimpsing the one letter in my hand, went on past me to the box. Surly, I let her, although I knew she hated to have her awkward movement observed from behind.

  Opening her own letters, she could not keep her eyes from mine. Everyone knew I got no mail, surely speculating on what ties lay behind me, receiving no help from me other than the name of the college, from which I let them think me a graduate of several years back, Lasch never discussing his staff, most people thinking me older than I was. Delphine, traveled, and a great word-fancier, had discerned, from occasional slips (such as “gum-boots” for the “galoshes” which had been rare in Alabama), my origins, and this too she treasured like an intimacy. I disliked her having it only because it was.

  “News?” As soon as said, she flushed at having said it, at my noncommittal silence. And a moment later, could not help herself from going on. “From home?”

  I was furious with her, for my having no right to be and no way to express it, for her being the gentle, tumultuous creature she was. And, I suppose, for having that barrier to fury, her leg.

  “No.”

  She would not pry, no not she, a person with feelings so much more bruisable than those who were whole. She wanted to get in, that was all; like anyone in love, she was bedeviled by the thought of it, its proximity, so near, so far. Only one hair of reserve to cross—then to drown together. “But you look so—I hope it’s nothing—?”

  “Nothing!” It burst from me, as if we had been snarling for hours. “It’s just that—one’s so far from anything here. From anything important!” I must have crested my head like a peacock.

  She bent hers, and started back up the hill, in front of me. As soon as I saw that pathetic gait, which she could not make ordinary if she would, I ran after her. “From the war, I meant, you know what I meant. Delphine.”

  “N’importe,” she said foolishly, her mouth bright. “N’importe!”

  So I begged off tea, and went back to my room—to write Dobbin. In the months since, I had seen nothing in the papers about the events in Alabama, the workings of obscure juries there not being as newsworthy as now. If any notice of my uncle’s murder had appeared nationally, it must have done so during the two weeks I had been in my hotel room. I had no wish to exhume it—years later, happening on some AP and UP dispatches for that period, I checked and found nothing. Dobbin’s letter, the one he was waiting to write me, would tell me whatever there was to know. Then why did I write him in advance of it? Up to now, my life, school-grooved like most, had cushioned me against the real multiplicity of the world outside, leading me to assume that there as well complexities would present themselves in a lean, single line of progression, to be dealt with one by one. Lasch’s had proffered a similar groove, those who stayed on burrowing safely there for that reason. But I had a double citizenship in more ways than one, never knowing when the inner globe of the monologue would pall and I must plunge for the outer. Ducking from school to Lasch’s as I had, confusion had still reached me, pulling me with wars, Delphines, my own pendulum, toward the inevitable graduation into it, somewhere along the line.

  The letter I wrote Dobbin was as confused, although formal on the surface. Reminding him that I was a national of a country to which I did not wish to return, one engaged however in a war in which I wished to serve, I asked his opinion on how soon “we” would get into it. Unless we would, I did not feel it proper to take out papers here as planned, not wishing to avoid military service, but preferring to cast my lot here, as was natural. Actually it was not at all natural, except in certain small pockets of America, to have feelings ready-made for this sort of thing; thousands of my contemporaries must have been writing just such pretenses to those elders who, neglecting to warn them what heavy thunderclouds of the arbitrary could suddenly loom on a horizon, had taught them to think for themselves. No man really wants to be anonymous. So, in this war, we were to find ourselves running constantly toward the illusion that we had choices, as if this in itself were the white plume. I had rather more anonymity to run from than the average—and this was the real reason I wrote Dobbin, who knew more about me than anyone else now alive. To have someone continue to know. From that deep human itch for which there is no other balm, to be “known.” I’ve no idea whether he ever got the letter.

  During the weeks while I waited for his reply, I imagined myself into all sorts of courses. Going to Canada and enlisting there was one—but not being American, would I need a passport? I had none except the old one of my mother’s on which I was down at the age of ten. One day, I dropped by the recruiting office in the postal building in White Plains, and casual as anyone, holding my breath as if the bored sergeant there might read “alien” striped on me somewhere, I found out what was needed for enlistment. “Easy as pie,” he said. “Getting in, that is. Few little John Hancocks here and there, on the dotted.” He handed me some sheets to look over. “You look healthy enough. ’Less you got flat feet.” A second man, at a nearby desk, raised his head from a crossword puzzle. There was no one else in the office. “Join the navy then,” he said. “See the world.” Outside the window, leaf rustled against brick, sun dazed a fruiterer’s stall; in the lobby, feet swished on marble. A little boy went out carrying stamps as if they were holy. If ever there was peacetime, it was there. On the way home, my mind went round and round again (if my uncle, being naturalized, had adopted me—but he had not—whether my mother had included me, still under age, in her first papers), winding me in a self-spun court of chancery. There had been too much law in my life already. And like a fish desiring suddenly to live in air, hearing that there were lungs to be acquired for that element, I wished not to lie. Notice came from Boston that the money had been deposited to my name, followed by a large package—the previously mentioned “effects.” But Dobbin was still silent.

  I carried the box down to Lasch’s basement, intending to stow it in my trunk alongside a much smaller one, taken from my mother’s side at the hospital, which when opened the next night in my hotel room had disclosed the packets from the sewing machine—old letters, marriage certificates, the passport, a citation from her school in Lyons, a picture of her first wedding—none of which I had scrutinized except the last, finding, at long length, that I did indeed resemble my father. Well I’d never thought myself a bastard; this opera touch at least hadn’t been included in my longing, in that peculiar “ambition” which had so worried her. Should I use some of the money to go to London, then, conscript myself there?

  The second box was much heavier, still in its Tuscana wrappings. A penciled note fell from them. Your mama pack away some these things long time back. I done put in what else reckon she want you to keep. Enthing I ken ever do, you write me, care Miss Minnie, the Museum. That the best place. Enthing atall. And God bless you in your troubles. Lucine. I lifted the cover. Lucine had packed us in by layers, on top all the mementos of my grandfather, taken down from their hallowed places on the wall. Next came a layer devoted to my uncle. I passed over it. Beneath were the boo
ks from my shelf, under these, dozens of things, from catcher’s mitt to stone collection, that I had forgotten. Objects pursue us, I thought, a detritus we can’t shake, and survival makes sneaks of us all. At the bottom, something both hard and soft was wrapped in tissue. The Japanese slippers fell from it, first signal of my arrival in the new world, and a large conch shell. So my mother had brought it there for me after all, but on second thought kept it hidden—I knew why—exactly as she would have burned that copy of the London Times in our nonexistent grate, if she could. I did not lift the shell to my ear. Something caught my eye among my uncle’s things as I replaced them—the page of legal notices which appeared Seasonally in the Denoyeville Dealer. I saw almost immediately why he had kept it, my name leaping at me from the required notice of the granting of petition for change. So he’d done that for me too. I wasted no time in gratitude. What a fool I’d been! I came from a town the bulk of whose records for a century back had been lost in the flood. Birth certificates, property attestations—I’d seen their recapitulations paraded on these pages for years. Who was to know that a like loss hadn’t occurred with mine?