False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  And what then was the general “shape” of these excursions? Essentially, all the elements of those in the long list to come were already present in the two episodes tangentially described above. I have a sentimental fondness for the Aiellos as my first, and as the simple sensitives they were. With them, I made all the predictable slips of a novice—telling at one time too little, at another too much. Being simple, their peasant clairvoyance at once apprehended a mystery (making of me more of a one than I had intended), and at once, with peasant practicality, set about making use of it. One of my slips had been to drop the name Serafina. This was the name of old Aiello’s wife, the mother, now dead, of the young Dominic I had seen die of scarlet fever. Why did I drop it, not quite unconsciously—partly for its charms (such syllables for a woman with gothicked eyes!), partly for its dangers and curiosities (was there a “snap” of her?) and perhaps partly for a godlike wish to give them, by wires scarcely vibrated, a message from their dead boy. The experience taught me never again to give in to such temptations unless better planned. The old man was certainly far from base, out on a promontory of yearning, the girl not dull but fresh from a land of omens and portents, sprites in the milk and saviors in goatherds, herself one of the swart creatures of which her race once made sibyls—together, what did they make of me to themselves? I dared not stop to see, poor, dear, wretched conspirators that they were, fond as I had grown of them—once I’d got wind of it. Was I Dominic reborn to them, blonde as a Milanese? My flight from that seraglio was an ungainly affair, an impostor just not caught in his closet, all flying pantaloons. I did them no harm, I think, and certainly meant none—this too is an essential part of the “form.” But the experience taught me to have well in mind beforehand who I “was” or pretended to be.

  The episode with Belden, not so laughable, taught me that complex people, hoist in their own ambiguities, are the more eager to be deceived. Although I rarely recall in color, I always see Belden so. (Normally, black, white, and gray are still the tones of that egocentric composition, tones of voice and posture—and words of course, every word.) But Belden, whom I had anticipated as all vellum veined with ink, a crabbed little counterplot of a man, emerges, as he did that first day from the back of his shop, like a 1910 illustration of Richard Coeur de Lion, a large man, heavy-maned, as rich in tints of gold and red as those apples from which were extracted his brandy and his passwords—a lion in a bookshop, attended always by that persistent anti-nibble of intellect, his mouse. For a person whose business dealt him men, one after the other, like shadows, I never saw anyone less like a shade. The shop was not only a “front,” but, by contortions too ridiculous to trace, a double front; above its base of rococo plots brewed for the acolytes who sneaked, opéra bouffe style, into that tiny back basilica every Thursday, there might be sensed, dotted in much thinner air, an austere circle of cardinals’ hats. It’s possible that, had I lingered long enough, I might even have been brought to meet those, for although Belden was cautious, Belden was brilliant, after forty years among his revolutionary shades, he hungered more than anything in life for a man with whom he might have a “personal” talk. I decamped for both reasons. I wanted no more organizations of any kind; the truth should not trump me up to serve it, in any such guise, ever again. And Belden’s monstrous, famished mouse was a warning. Even if Belden refused to see a possible resemblance between us, I did not.

  These, then, were two typical “devices” from the long chapter of them which was interrupted—in the midst of one not yet terminated—the night I came home to this desk, from Ruth Mannix’s side. Over the years, I had kept to my code. As time went on, my accumulating heap of the histories of others began to hump almost as heavy between my shoulder blades as my own—but I never used my knowledge for conscious harm. Whenever, in a place where I might be sojourning, affections were embroiled on either side, I eventually did us both the brief harm of leaving, but it never seemed to me that anything in us was more scotched by this than if left victim to the undirected processes of life. If change was the tragedy, then it was not one I had invented, any more than I had invented death—the only other unity we could all be sure of. As for love in its various forms—sexual, maternal, fraternal (more than one of which my century seemed to think it had invented)—I had experienced them in their transient beauties, but was not the man to forget that they were various, not excluding those vaguer religious diffusions that took in everybody. No one kind of love, it seemed to me, had enough unity to stand in triumvirate with those other two great ones.

  So I had reached my forties, that halfway climacteric by which time a man is expected to have settled for a brand of reality at least as conclusively as on his cigars. I seemed not to have done so, still naming myself in private, far better than anyone else could, a vicarious man. But I had my rationale for this also. In the early years of my hobby it had shamed me, brought me periods of guilt during which I abstained. Like a drunkard, I always came back to it, knowing my own strength and in the end glorifying it. My talent was to remember, and in my fashion I had not wrapped it away. This at least was my own. In a world that regimented a public personality from me, meanwhile exhaustively researching the private and demanding that I scramble up enough conscience to serve both, I’d “adapted” as Darwin had predicted I would, thereby gaining an intermittent release from a certain soreness for the absolute with which I still strove—and from which I sometimes feared I would die. In a pluralistic world, as they now told me it was, under all heavens and philosophies exploding, the “real,” slipping a pinfeather, flew on. But by means of my devices I was managing very nicely thank you on the teeter-totter, able to be both up and down, in and out, with an endless supply of people and at the same time intractably alone. Voyeur indeed! As I sat at breakfast in convocation with the rest of the air-wave-washed world, all of us at our light repast of pic-post agony and joy, could I not quite reassure myself that the world had come round to the brand of reality that was mine? And if our mutual systems showed signs of managing us, I could shrug my shoulders in company. Company was the thing. A teeter-totter takes two.

  All lies, public lies. So I told myself them on the one hand, and the next minute told myself, this being my curse. I needed no diatonic silence to hear that other voice, chaste et pur: Each man is responsible for his own chronicle.

  So, you may see me, as for fifteen years I sit in my grove, emerging at intervals, my own ambassador to the uncertain real of other people, like those kings who sat in Venice, sending their Marco Polos in search of Chinas, fearsome but rich, that might or might not be there.

  But what we do not do persists, classic and perfect, beneath what we do. The final admixture is the judgment. So now, you may watch me there, naked and sore in my cell, on that day when, bearing their disturbing treasure, all the expeditions came back.

  Chapter II. The Last Device.

  I’VE CALLED HER. As soon as I had written the above, yesterday, I did so. When I finished, it was about six o’clock of a pre-summer Saturday evening, the side streets advancing tawny toward the avenues, on one of the longest days, which all the afternoon must have been gilding toward this perfect, light-blent fall. A day out of my gloss, but in my own way I had not missed it; the secret had been wrenched onto the page, the surgery almost done. From the open window the blue breeze invited itself forward, the sounds strung along its duskiness softened to bangles on a scarf. While I dialed it brushed me, solicitous. If she was there, she would be just going out.

  Anna answered. Yes, Miss Ruth and her father were home—from London, that is—but they’d gone down to the country for the weekend. Anna had opened the place for them the week before. Then that 4 A.M. call a few nights ago, which I had not answered, could have been she.

  “You want the number down dere?” Anna’s voice was cool, a reminder of how many weekends I had spent there last summer.

  “No thanks, Anna, I have it.” It felt strange to speak, healthful to be reproved. I wanted to prolong the sense of
her, firm and starched in her alcove, theirs, behind her the amalgam I knew so well, chairs flowering silent in their covers, German mantel clock swathed, in the library the audience of books stiffened primly for the winter concert—the whole old-fashioned sense of a house half closed for the summer, a coffer, mysterious with camphor, which its owners have left ajar. In the shaded library, above the couch, the Chinese horse burned blue-green in his niche, one heavy hoof raised. “Did you—give her my message?”

  “Yah. I give it.” There was a silence, no invitation to dinner. “Vwah-l,” she said, “I go do my packing. Tomorrow I go on holyday.” Her “holydays” were always notable providing sagas for the year, but tonight she would not chat about them. I wished her well. At the last moment she relented. “That Pauli Chavez—” she said. “He’s down dere with them along.” Then she suavely wished me good-by and rang off.

  I sent no smile after her, though I might have. Anna knew as well as I that Paul Chavez was no rival. One of Ruth’s cronies from her dance-world days, he was linked also, through her mother’s family, who had been music publishers, with their collection of friends from the music world of Fifty-seventh Street. A long, lean exquisite of a man, silver-haired and mustached at only a little past forty, he often put me in mind of his namesake in Fathers and Sons, Arcadi’s uncle, Pavel, “any of whose nails could have been sent to the Exhibition.” Somewhere Chavez kept a small, gouty-voiced Frenchwoman, frog-shaped as retired ballerinas often are, who either would not or could not marry him, and this fact, together with sympathies as delicately articulated as his ankles, gave him the almond-eyed quiet, the sad, silvered aspect of the perfect friend. His was a company ideal for the times in a woman’s life when there were no rivals, or he would be the comfort, special but still male, to which she might bring her troubles with another man. As for letters abroad, I thought, some never reached their destinations—I knew of one. Others might reach too many. Is he there with her, hanging over mine, now? I think not. Nor is it Pauli Chavez I fear.

  Is. These last days, I seem to be rushing toward the present, headlong.

  Late last night, I came up here to Lasch’s. No one calls it that any more except old hands like me; it is a foundation now, in memoriam Albert Bernhard Chester Lasch—the initials were real. It is also the office of which I am head. He’d been right, in a way; I didn’t know that I had lost by coming in. After the war I had tried several things which, by dint of some stretching on my part, I had suited quite well, but had not suited me. Lasch had been after me to return ever since the day I had gone up there, still in uniform, for my trunk. “You belong here,” he said solemnly, over the drink we had that day in his office, in front of a coal fire like an English grate, in the smell of cut leather, book paste, the tonic rustle of paper everywhere. “You’re not built to serve just anything. I suppose you have to bat around some first; that’s it.” In the moldy December light, his cheek not as round as once, his upper lip long, he might have been my grandfather taking the liberty of lecturing one of his subalterns, and indeed I felt the deference toward him that one never loses for those with their fanum, their standard to serve. This was the very reason why I could not explain my refusal—because his temple seemed to me the epitome of those “side lines” I must stay away from, the very haunt and realm of the embusqué.

  “You have the talent for it,” he said again on the day several years later when, no longer so youthfully sure of where the front lines were, or even enamored of them, I returned. “You suit.”

  “How’s that, sir?” I really wanted to know, and I knew he did not mean mere pliancy with paper and pen.

  He put the tips of his fingers, slightly wasted and tremoring now together. “You see the cycle,” he said, looking at them, but would not go further, dryly turning to talk of salary, of the place’s vast expansion, for which the estate had grown too small. I had attributed the tremor of his hands to age. Not much later I knew better. He had been looking for an heir. During his year and a half in the sanitarium where he retreated with the disease that at the last allowed him to move only the eyes, I saw him almost daily. I do not think of doctors as heroes, as this age does, but rather of those of their unsung charges who round the clock make the least of their dying, and the most. Lasch made the happy end that we are taught all heroes make. He had been a boy from an outlying farm; for him, all his aromatic distances had been achieved. He bequeathed his “place” to me. It was not his fault that this is not a thing which one man can leave to another.

  In my own way, though never with his single-mindedness, I filled the job. The war had given enormous impetus to all printed matter, and ours was the kind of matter which held, even for the peace. In supplement to conventional volumes of reference, we now engaged with the future and even compounded it, amassing compendia for sciences still in process, for languages whose full mode waited to be used by those still unborn. Although I was still in my early thirties when I took over, trained men were still scarce, and my appointment was readily ratified by a board of directors, of whom, I found to my surprise, Delphine, also come into her inheritance, made one. Apparently she had voted for me, whether a beneficent “pro” or merely an averted one, I never knew for sure, taking it as more likely to be some deep, ultrafeminine concoction of both. She and Schott live mostly in Europe now, or when in America on the high Alps of the very rich, where, except for that one dinner party, I have never again met them. Meanwhile, like any member of those spheres which revolve vaguely around print, I go to a great many parties myself, my name, in its professional capacity, often appearing modishly engraved on more serious rosters as well. On the surface, then, I wear as much chain mail as anybody. For, far from being on the side lines, our excellent organization, in the glory-jargon of the era, deals with the “frontiers” as their very aide-de-camp, and to the tune of a profit (in wordage and money) plural beyond Lasch’s dreams. It was not his fault if, with all this variorum at my back, I still favored the deep mystery of the one over the many, and by my poor devices kept lookout on my own. This has been my life, then, almost up to the present.

  It was almost dawn when I drove in here. I watched that neglected spectacle, the gradual creation of the universe, then fell asleep here on the couch in front of the dead grate. No one lives here now and it is Sunday-quiet. We keep this building mainly for library purposes now; the main offices are in New York. Ten years ago we bought for “protection” an adjoining tract eighty years ago planted over with pines by a merchant overlord and entailed to his heirs forever as the ultimate luxury to come—uninhabited land. We are his heirs now, and those trees of his are “organizational” trees—almost again, as in the infancy of the earth, belonging to no particular man. I came up here partly to see them, for my bit of “the country” too. Here on this side the grounds show the fresh black humus, clever absence of gardeners, of the impersonal public preserve, but beyond it, at its civilized edge, those trees, rising vast and unpruned, the harsh blue behind them not Cézanne’s or any mortal’s, have a look of the old terrestrial realm, of that childhood of the earth to which we can no more return than we can to our own. Each of us, unable to shake the flame of consciousness from his head, maintains a green guilt for that green world. We can no more be natural there now than a man can stretch out in a cradle. Perhaps we must no longer try.

  On a clear day like this, one can see New York from here, a long gray skyline, bubbled and squared. It seems to me that I can almost see myself there somewhere in its flat center, my old Doppelgänger, still working away as he has been these past weeks. I came up here partly too to get away from him. Up here, the present burning quietly in my nostrils, I have never felt more alive. About an hour ago, I reached Ruth, down there with her piece of nature, the sea. They’d been out sailing; she’d just come in. There were people in the room from which she was speaking—perhaps better so, because of all the time that had lapsed between us. Yet even in our few words there was a pressure between us, like that of kind hands gently dooming us towa
rd each other. She will meet me at the flat the day after tomorrow. Will I give her this? She has never been there. It seems to me that when I see her there, then I shall know. Before then, I must affix her in the narrative, in her proper place:—

  It has not escaped me that, intending all these years, perhaps hoping all along, to give my story to someone, at the breaking point I reached out for her only as the nearest to hand—and in the last defeat of subtlety made her the bogey that required it. One is taught—by its enemies, the hearty boys who never look behind—always to suspect the memoir. Or do I believe, by the Athanasian creed of memory, that however the choice is made one does choose? Out of the tangled scents of my beginnings, haply I think on thee?

  Beginnings are not endings. If standing there with her, holding this account in my hand—to be withheld or given—I could arrive at that moment sure for once that I knew everything—?

  Herewith, the account of my last device:

  With my “entry” into the Mannix household, there came a difference in the scheme, a change in quality of which, like a man alerted to a new thrumming in a motor, I was partially aware. For some time my excursions had been of the mildest, even approaching the shallow level of those social lies, pretenses, charms and cabals aimed at one another now and then by all but the most ingenuous—for a lark, for a “lift” or a climb—for a change. One might have thought my habit almost ready to disappear, or at least merge with the general. I knew otherwise, by the degree of premeditation I still bent on the milieu to be studied, and by the familiar intensity of feeling when I rose there from some spot in its center, like a genie who, pretending to be ordinary, gave nothing—and gave nothing away. Mostly the people I chose to enter upon were still ordinary enough, though less and less often those known to me in my private Morse as “the people down there.” It was complication that I craved now, and the warmth once so admired from the window frame, seen now from the intellectual distance, no longer satisfied. I still did no tangible harm to anyone. The alien’s drum sounds from farther below. My connection with them—I see it now—was rather the harm I withheld. But I never thought now of Tuscana. I had reached that point of safety where my only emotions were my tastes. So it was. With the Mannixes, I approached my own kind.