False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  “Armistice Day!” he said, with a great widening of the voice. “The first one. Martin was three. You know—about our Martin? He would have been just a bit older than you are. It was the wine that reminded me. We drank to it. Armistice Day. You were born on it. Here.”

  Never as one dreams it. I barely heard him, never answered him, hearing instead Maureen’s “I’m to ask if you’ll have some, sir, before I take it up to her,” seeing instead, centered in the light of the fire, a phoenix glowing from its ashes, the slim Spanish bottle of Madeira, and beside it, an old image broken now into three, the thin, upstanding glass.

  Three. I knew on the instant who the third must be, and not Molly. Could it be?—that old Cybele of the upstairs, still fending off death then with her sabacthani, still proffering as hostage to the absolute her point lace and her goblets, für die Familie, für die Familie, with that grim Hebraic faith in the object which I had got here, from her. Not to Molly yet, the third glass. It was all too possible. Romance of a lesser sort would have had her die, but this was the world, where the sadder of the unities can sometimes be not death but change. Frau Goodman had been preserved then (that old historian whom even thirty years ago only one person had called “Franziska”) for the fate she had wanted—to see the rubric, the formal design of life, of theirs. And in so occurring, it had happened that she was still here to revise whatever fake history her young apprentice had given them in his—kept on for her confidant, her by-blow—me. “It can’t be,” I murmured, in the stupid way we protect ourselves from giving away how well we know it can.

  “What?” said Sir Joseph, with a trace of pride. “That I remember?”

  “That—that she is still alive.”

  “Who?” He said it with a sternness which melted into doubt. I saw with pity how unsure he would be of his own alternations—I had forgotten whom she meant first of all in this house.

  I looked at him, this old child whom I seemed never to have seen before, before I answered. “Tour mother.”

  He bent his head at that. “Oh, I’m a very old party, getting on for seventy-eight. But not my mother. She’s only ninety-five. You remember her, then?”

  Such inquiries usually faze me. What can someone like me reply? But here it seemed as natural as the honesty with which I answered; looking back, I see that I told no lies in that house. “We—used to have conversations,” I said. “I used to—” I gestured toward Maureen, who was still waiting, hung on our words, for the tray.

  “Did you indeed. She always has someone. Never one of us, I might add—none of my brood. Not that she fabricates. Just that we’d be too close to—see the glory of it all, I suppose.” He smiled at this last.

  “The general glory?” An odd question from one shade to another, or perhaps possible only between those who meet as such. I did not expect him to answer unguardedly, and it was as I thought. Struggle as we may, we do not like to admit to more than interest.

  “Oh,” he said carefully, “I’m afraid she manages to make it pretty much ours.” He arose, and I with him—time to leave. But what he said was, “Let me take you to her.”

  “She won’t remember.” I discovered that I did not want her to. All were dead now who could have had any real inkling of me early on—Dobbin, my uncle, my mother; even all those who had been supernumeraries in that life were either dead too or far strayed down their own lost paths. I did not want her to be alive, this old woman who had started me down mine. It was the last stand of my childhood. We do not like our monitors to survive.

  “On the contrary. Sometimes she’s a bit shaky on the present—she has so little of it. But very rarely on the past.” He had already pressed me forward, motioned to Maureen to follow behind with the tray.

  The two flights up are long ones and not directly above one another, but accessible through a small passage, with several landings on the way. We took them with a slowness which his stiff bearing made majestic—like the old dog, Chummie, he preferred to walk when he could. On the way, he told me that his mother, though she could still walk, no longer got about much; an old hip injury, from which she must have been recovering when I knew her, had been renewed during the blitz. He said nothing of his eye. I thought briefly of Mannix back there, of whatever it was that the Judge in his own way might be struggling to keep, but I put it aside, as only the traveler can. They were in abeyance back there, I thought, passing a fog-bleared window; that is what distance is. They are in abeyance, pending this. “Yes,” Sir Joseph answered as we climbed, his mother had gone with them to Japan, even taking up painting while she was there; later, after the second war, when his work had taken him to Paris, she had spent almost every day as a copyist in the Louvre. She had lost interest since, since coming back home really, but one could not say that she was failing, though she of course was frail. “But she shows no signs of failing,” he said, squaring his shoulders as we reached the last landing.

  From where we stood, briefly resting, I could see, down the hall, those other steep, narrower stairs, the back ones, down which I had cast the tray and myself after it, that last day. “One of the Eyetalian glasses!” Cook had been the first to cry when she and Molly got to me where I lay, in a welter of shards aromatic with wine and a small amount of blood, the cruelly jagged neck of the bottle pursed like a smashed mouth too close to mine. None of the others had reproached me, from Sir Joseph himself, straggling from the floor above this one to join the circle of children looking down at me as if I were down a well; not even my mother, joining us last of all from the muffled room where she had been closeted with Lady Goodman, had said anything. I had been picked up, washed, bound and tended, even coddled, without another word. In the general leavetaking, no one had appeared to notice whether I had suffered any other wound beyond a few scratches about forehead and shins, or that my mouth, though not smashed, was closed. But as I looked at those empty stairs now and repeopled them, it struck me for the first time that my mother, that strict connoisseur of relationships, might have gone to America not only for need of money or in retreat from my father’s humiliating history, but also, having watched her young bird in his paradise, for me—but we cannot really add to the secrets of the dead, only discover them. The old woman, still there on the other side of the door facing us, had been the most realistic of all. No. You cannot stay. I no longer looked back at that boy, her apprentice, with the same single-minded pity.

  We had stopped just short of the door. “Go in ahead of us, my dear, will you?” he said to the young girl who had trailed us with her load. “Tell my mother I’m bringing in a guest. Just in case Molly’s not with her.” As she awkwardly shifted the tray in order to knock, I reached out to take it from her, but casting me a cool look from those deep child’s eyes, as if to say “This is mine!” she managed it, and almost immediately the door opened; Molly was there. So I entered that room with my hands at my sides.

  “You’ve told her we have a guest?” he said softly.

  “Only that you were bringing someone to see her,” Molly said, stepping aside for us. The sliding doors which divided the suite had been pushed back, revealing the whole ugly, comfortable, grandiose room, still heavily curtained to appear windowless, boxed to the ceiling with the monstrous and the elegant, from Sèvres urns to Bohemian beer steins, spotted down its length by curio cabinets in which the bijouterie of a lifetime lurked and gleamed. Two grates burned the air to stuffiness; stewing on the hob of one of them the old benzoin inhaler sent up a thin, camphorous column of snuff-steam; everything which could keep the elements at bay here had been done. Frau Goodman was at the far end of the room. We approached her through its unmistakable attar, the smell of age. Chin on her breast, she regarded us.

  She was more nearly the same than any of us. Old to me when I left, now she was age’s very conception, sparrow where she had been eagle, all of her contracted to a minimum, occupying a space almost too small for an enumeration of its parts, and there was no need to, the years having done this for us; she was ninety
-five. Only the forehead had gained and was now of a breadth that would have made her sexless, had it not been for the atmospheric dainties with which she was still surrounded. Beneath it, sharpened by many skin-folds, unblinking, the eyes held us, drew us on and stopped us a few feet from her, while Maureen came round the side and knelt to set the tray down between. Sir Joseph let himself down into one of the chairs arranged on either side of her for audience.

  “Mother. Mother, here’s someone who knew us a long time ago. He’s going back to America tomorrow, but he came all the way down here on a day like this—just to see us.” His eyes watered with sentiment; it was true—next to her he was an old party. He was an old man; she was age.

  “Dora Cross, you remember her. You remember her, him. This is her son.” He had not raised his voice; she was not deaf, then. But she said nothing. He tried again. “Dora Cross’s son, Mother. The boy who used to come here with her, must be thirty years ago. This is he.” She was regarding me now, unmoving. For what seemed endless minutes, she looked at me. Finally he spoke again, in an even lower tone. “You can’t have forgotten. Rachel’s Dora.”

  A beardlike puff of lace between breast and chin played in her breath. She was breathing heavily. There was a slight, all-over wince of the body as her lips opened. “Amayrika,” she said.

  He stared at her, petulant. “No, no. He used to come upstairs in the afternoons—you used to have conversations, he says.” Already he had adopted me. He pointed a shaky forefinger. “He used to bring up your tray.”

  “Hald dein Mund.” It should have brought me down to earth, that swift, guttural phrase, the raised, perfectly steady hand, but I was still acting from sentiment. I reached for the tray. It was my last impersonation, as it had been my first, but I could not know this; we do not lightly assist at the death of the child we were. Even if I had been listening with all my talent I would not have heard his exit preparing, or at what point during that afternoon the sound came, no more than the squeak of a windpipe garroted with its own undersized collar, his final sound. One expects so much more of murder. I even smiled condescendingly down on the two of them, as I lifted the tray in that sudden flamboyance with which the middle-aged act young to the old. “Guten Tag, gnädige Frau,” I said.

  She did not smile back at me, but when she took up the cue it came in a whisper as light as a girl’s. “Da bist du.” Still, she scrutinized me, the corners of her seamed lips turned down. “Ach, such ton he had, nicht?” she nodded. “Das kleine Herrgöttle von Bieberach.” Lips working, until the cry came she appeared to be smiling, until the cry came. “Pierre!” Eyes closed, she rocked with it, in the dying fall for the departed. “Ai, ai, Pierre!” Her eyes open, she whispered it, “Pierre, selig. Pierre.”

  Only my grasp on the tray upheld me. The exorcised must stand that way, rigid before the worn syllable that is the curse, that is the blessing, while the inner bulwarks slide. Then his muttered aside—“Why should she take you for him, of all people?”—released me, and bending carefully, knees, back, arms, as if I were of an age with them, I handed the tray to Maureen and sat down. For they had forgotten me. Gabbling, they were exchanging the ritual insults with which members of a real family relieve one another in their imprisonment. “She!” I heard her say. “I am not ‘she’; I am your mother, and I still know what I am doing. Who anyway makes here the mistakes nowadays, does not know himself from one day to the next one?”—his low, answering “I did not mean—” and her overriding “Gott sei dank, the women in our family hold on to their minds!”—his rising “Can’t you ever forgive me for her, you devil, leave that poor thing out there alone after all these years! Or me!”—and in the sudden, shocked silence, his “Forgive me, it’s true—I don’t always know, these days,” and her quick, agonized “My son, my son, I did not mean—” They had forgotten themselves. With less than twenty years between them, both cornered now in the far end of the enclosure, they might have been not son and mother but in turn a variation of couples—spouse to spouse, sister to unfavorite brother, father to intemperate child—hand over hand, over hand. Age, the far corner, was the relationship that now made them most near to one another, most dear. As I watched, waiting for them to remember themselves and me again, they receded to it, not as far as their obscure legend, but to the more intimate distance of two old ones of indeterminate years, even sex, of certain human smells and lapses, a little ahead of me in the human stockade. The sound of a door closing, Maureen going out, reminded them of me.

  “He was here,” she told him, pointing at me. “On Pierre’s last visit. That’s why I said it, du alte Dümmling, you old fool. What else do you think!” She turned to me. “He will remember. Der Onkel Pierre, my little brother. Every child he ever met fell in love with him.”

  Sir Joseph lowered his eyes, in truce for the time being. Not every mistake need be corrected.

  “The pig said Oui,” I said to him. “You were the one to interpret that for me.” Whether or not he got the reference, my absurd post-mortem gratitude, but was being careful because of his alternations, I could not tell.

  “He died four years later, in Brazil,” he answered. “Got married there, leaving us a parcel of cousins we’ve lost track of. Never got back.” Then his lip twitched, and together, in our separate ways, we stifled the smile one reserves for those who have after all not escaped.

  “And of course I know who you are, then,” she said to me, “what do you think! So-o. So.” She marveled at me. “So, Dora’s boy. You got back.” She leaned back, shrugging off marvels as easily as she had once dispensed them; in her firm grasp they were natural, even when she added, “Well, handsome waiter, pour the wine.” As we drank, she turned to him again. “Deine Grosmutter, my mother, used to play that game with him—my brother. You never met her. But last time he was here, I recalled it to him. ‘What a memory you have, Franziska!’ he said, that last time.”

  “My mother,” she was still saying at ninety-five. “Your grandmother,” she was saying to this rheumy-eyed man. We were all being equally absurd, equally sentimental. Eternity makes us so, leaving us to make what we can of it. What Lasch had once said of me, in his old age and too soon for me, was now becoming true. I saw the cycle, or began to, even imagining that outside the door Maureen, whom Molly would never think of letting listen at doors, had her ear pressed against this one, yearning toward the epic company of this house.

  “Look there,” said Frau Goodman, pointing to some shelves I knew well. “Everything he ever gave me is there. Maureen has just been dusting them.” What mind-readers, she and I, I might have thought formerly, but saw it now for merely the heavy repetition of the way things are. “And you know what?” she continued. “I would give them all up for just one little thing.” She stopped, to wipe a drop from the corner of her eye, nose, mouth—not tears, but that general ichor toward which we all slowly refine. I thought she was going to name the “one” thing for me, give me the nonagenarian’s secret, impart to me, just before leaving, a hint of what it is our end to know. “What I would not give for it!” she said. “That little stickpin he wore always in his tie. His horse.”

  Because she was pleading with me to remember, I nodded back to her. And since hearing another person describe it would bring it nearer for her, I did so, but with no other reverence—recoiling now from any such storehouse of the dead for myself. At the point where she was, had already been when I first knew her, at the point where this brave man opposite would refuse until death to admit that he was, there might be an almost permanent place from which one might look backward only—to the vast, frozen rearguard of the happened—with honor. But I was still in the middle of life, where one needed only enough remembrance to walk toward.

  “I’m looking at your pictures,” I said, hoping to coax her a little nearer me, closer in limbo. “The ones you painted.” Lined up on a wall devoted solely to them, they were a queer lot such as would never be shown in any gallery but might be seen any day, though seldom in such number, in a
house. Copies all of them, of modest Dutch interiors, mild Holy Families, they were in themselves too mild to be bad, but taken together possessed an elusive congruity, of domestic subject perhaps, or of that vague diffusion of comfort to be derived from the second-rate—for there did not seem to be a known original among them. Surely, however, the originals could not all have been—that was it. She had made them all exactly the same size. What unity she had tried to bring them all down to, I could only surmise. Around us were those other objects she had massed against change all through her life, just as my mother—each of them in her way the domestic repository—had tried to do so much later, at the very end of hers. Looking at their dim serial, I might even begin to understand the nature of the enclosure which my mother had tried to push me toward too soon.

  “Those?” she said. “Ach—embroideries. I had never the patience to sew. Any more, I don’t do them. I have on my hands too much else.”

  Sir Joseph moved impatiently. In his opinion, I was reminded, she had no present. In hers, I suspected, she had him, and more. But his manners prevailed. “She ought to write down the family history, I tell her. But she won’t.”

  “A box to talk into, once he brought me from the Museum. When I tried it—such a schmier!” A flush had come over her, from several glasses of the wine. “No. Not for me, boxes!” I agreed with her. A box doesn’t listen, from deep, receiving eyes. “‘Then let Harley do it, be your secretary. He knows anyway all your stories,’ he says. ‘Harley knows the end of them?’ I said.” She held out her glass and I refilled it. Sir Joseph, not drinking, was occupying himself by moving and removing the brass weights, no bigger than dice, from the platforms of a miniature letter scale on an end table near his chair. She drained the glass halfway. “What isn’t yet finished, I tell him, how can you write down?” She muttered into her glass. “It ends not so quick, such a family.”