False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  “Joseph’s children come to see us very faithfully,” he said. “When they’re in town. The others have none; odd, isn’t it.” Under his long fingers, the letter scale wavered to perfect balance and was still.

  “Claire! You forget Claire is expecting!”

  “Oh yes, my youngest daughter. Who lives in France. And is always expecting. We’re all pretty much scattered, now.”

  They were talking to themselves through me, as she had done from the beginning, as all that early list, Miss Pridden, Demuth, had done. I listened with less rancor now.

  She drained her glass and set it down. “We were always scattered,” she said fiercely.

  He was silent. “My mother takes the Diaspora quite personally,” he said then. “As she does everything else.” His forefinger poised over the scale. “Oh, I grant you, nothing ever concludes,” he said, sweeping the brass weights from side to side so that we heard their miniature plunk, plunk, out of Haydn. “Except the power to go on.” He took things no less personally, I thought. As did I.

  At his last remark, there was a moment’s deference. For all the room’s protection, we heard the current.

  But when I rose to go, he was charming. “If the history is ever done, he’ll be in it, won’t he, Mother? After all, he was born in this house.”

  She appeared to be quite drunk now. “Wer kommt?” she muttered. “Wie heisst er?” Who comes. And what is his name.

  He mistook her meaning, not unreasonably, for she must never have played that trick with him. He had never been king of Beeberock. “Why, don’t you remember? I do, very distinctly. He was a posthumous child, named for his father. I was thinking of it only a moment ago.” He was triumphant. “Hold on. Hold on.” Then, before our eyes, he faded. “No—don’t tell me,” he said, turning to me. “I’ll get it directly. Hold on.”

  I held on. Let it come, the name of that dead innocent who meant so little to me now. Mine, which I had begun earning ever since my uncle had been the first to say it aloud, was Pierre Goodman. Not a name to be used here, but I had never really expected to, half hoping to get by here as anonymously as up to now I had. Let the other one come from him, then, fitting end to an expedition I was beginning to find as oversweet to me now as the Madeira, which, like my years of innocence, no longer tasted of justice but of sentiment.

  “I never knew it. His name.” Drunken or sibylline, she spoke in triumph over him, his hands clasped in painful search, lips moving in that soundless “Ah.” “To me he was always just Dora’s boy. Isn’t that so, Dora’s boy?”

  He came timidly close to me, even searching out my lapel. All his yellowed, grandee dignity gone again, his face was splotched with flushes that worked and faded like the visible dilation of the dying brain inside it. “Wait—was it not—” He bit his lips, and I waited, even prayed for that strong, growled “Ahr-r” which would mean that he had once more recovered himself. Instead, I saw him forced one notch farther back in his struggle. He took off his glasses, but the serenity of that sealed-off eye could not uplift the dreadful softening around it. “For your father—” he said “—surely?”—but the meaning of his own words was already lost on him. His face, nearing me in trust, found itself only inches from mine. Some kernel in it still presided over its own horror. “I—b-beg your pardon, sir.” The expletives forced through; he was using speech like a cane, to lead him back. And he was succeeding. “No. I don’t know your name.” Seeking the arm of the chair behind him, he wavered, almost fell.

  My hand and hers went out to him at the same instant—she was standing now—but he had already straightened. He was back. Then it was I who was cornered, between them, in as close a trinity as I had ever been in my life, on one side her redoubtable, sexless mask, still suffering with intelligence, on the other his broken, underwater face, one notch less human now. They had not receded. I had to answer to them.

  “Yes—” I had stopped, but only to put a hand on his arm, stretch the other toward hers. I’d meant to say it, buzz-buzz, the old name I’d begun with. But quietly, by whomever or however, the controls were taken from me. Or perhaps, in the answer to an old prayer, I was allowed for one unique moment to forget, made to, in the kind of forgetfulness that is a part of truth. Here in this room, where I had managed a crude physical jointure of the past and the present, I could speak the truth to those who were only shades, as I was, being only a little behind them—the truth which was all the tenses at once. “Yes,” I said. “I was named for my father. My name is George,” I said, in requiem. “George Higby.”

  We do not know the truth, ever. We know merely how it feels to speak it. The feeling is clinically describable. I felt as if I pulled from my breast a thorn which, a moment after it was drawn, I yearned to replace. Looking at the two of them here—he was settling her in her chair again—looking back to those I could no longer break bread with, ahead to those with whom I still could, it seemed to me that though I said nothing more, I should never end speaking, and although they could not hear me, in my breast I spoke and spoke and spoke.

  I bent to say good-by, but when I turned to him, he was gone. She must have seen him go, perhaps knew too well where he was going. Eyes glinting, she beckoned me to bend down again. “What do you think!” she whispered. “What do you think! I have heard from them; I have had a letter. He doesn’t know it yet, but I have had Pinkerton’s on it for years.”

  “Oh what? From whom?” Had I been wrong then—in her own way was she as far gone as he? No—for once I had been right. She was more the same than any of us. She giggled, the light sound I remembered, ending in a laugh deep in her throat, almost a croon. “From whom do you think, Dümmling!” Counting on her fingers, she crooned it. “There are two of them, ein Bruder und eine Schwester.” Her eyes fixed on them, obsessive as history’s. In her mind she had already annexed them, named them. “From whom—what do you think! From the Brazilians!”

  Downstairs, I managed to let myself out without anyone seeing me. As I passed through the hallway, spiriting my hat and coat from the hook where they should be and were, I glimpsed him in the morning room, once more at the telephone. Her call had summoned him, perhaps. Or it was possible to imagine that nowadays he called her, in her madhouse, as much as she called him. But I was no longer that interested in their secondary mysteries. Age had refined the two of them, making of them that Biblical word “vessels,” through which one might see time and change at their work and the mystery beyond which is not ours, is ours. As I made my way to Hendon station, I thought of my luck, and this time was not afraid to name it. The necessary murder had come to me late, but it had come, and they had been preserved to help me, as I, who also had a place in their history, had been preserved for them. This was my luck, and if the crime was not a perfect one, as the extirpation of the innocents can never be, at least I could begin to believe in my own death, to live in the light of it—for it is a light—while there was still time. Intermittently, in those flashes when I could forget the particular, I might even know who I was and where, for I had seen the nature of the enclosure. I had seen what happens to a live house.

  And now home. London airport is being altered; this temporary wing where I have been waiting for a delayed plane is deserted except for an occasional guard, a bare sweep of counter, unmanned at this hour, and opposite me, one telephone stall. I could still call Austin Fenno. Since leaving New York it has been in the back of my mind to do so. He knows their secrets, surely. Alternatives for presenting myself occur to me, with the usual versatility. So far, I have managed not to. But shall I ever be able to look at that slim, body-width oratory and see it unsurrounded by the multitude of its echoes; temple of self-abuse, saving synagogue of the air? About an hour ago, just before midnight, I tried to reach New York, it being only dinnertime there, and was informed, through a scratchy chorale of operators, one saying “Double-oh, double-oh” in monody, the other answering a soothing “Dial nine-nine-nine,” that transatlantic calls were running far behind the hour I had
to spare. We are rescheduled to leave at 2 A.M., arriving in what will still be early morning there. I sent her a cablegram instead. Under the polite avoidance of the attendant, who for all his sense of the proper cannot keep his wistful eye from the only human thing that is moving here, I can put down the gist of it—it was not long. No, not better off on our own. I have news from London. That was the gist. I added the probable hour of my arrival, and that I would telephone her at once, as soon as I got home.

  No further plea. I’m taking a cruel advantage; I meant to. She’ll think I have spoken to Austin. But I want her to come. And—this to be said with the most tentative movements of the mouth—not for myself only. Or not entirely. No memoir is wide enough to examine that double-faced motive, no life that long. There will be other cruelties between us, hand over hand, over hand. But if she comes—and I think she will—let it rest on the grounds that we have each found a secondary mystery which interests us, which seems to us as recondite, perhaps even as worthy—as our own. For I meant what I said in the cable. That is the news from London.

  The flight call has finally come, after two postponements. We’re leaving, a small crowd of us, on all our Jack-be-nimble daytime errands. Inside each is that other night-blooming one, slow as the self. But this time—no more talk of distance, in cities, in people, in time. We shall never know what it is, only feel it in transit, a void that except as we assuage it in others can never be appeased in ourselves.

  And now home—which is anywhere.

  I am in abeyance. The room and I wait for her together. The phone was ringing as I unlocked the door. I went to it and answered direct, as if to the god in the machine, “Yes, it’s I.”

  She and I have a strange intimacy over the phone, always instant; one would think, if one did not know better, that we were people who did not like to touch otherwise. At these times I never visualize her. The conversation resumes, stripped to the essential, half of it unvoiced but heard. I knew that she was unable to speak as yet, but there. Then, softly—my name. Then, as if the voice gathered itself to admit, set the tone, not admit: “So?”—the keep-things-light New York “so”—“I’m here.”

  I drew a deep breath. That fierce angina, absence, is over. Here. “But not here. Will you come?” Unless I was direct, she would get away with it. Unless I held fast now, we would both get away with it, back to nowhere.

  A long pause. “But—you did go—To see Austin, I take it.”

  “Oh.” My turn to be silent. “No, I didn’t. I went—for other reasons. It’s true, I thought of seeing him. For he knows, doesn’t he, what you have to tell me.”

  No answer.

  “I was badly tempted to call him,” I said. “But I didn’t. For me it was—a special triumph, that I didn’t. You won’t understand why until I—until you come. I could have found out that way. But I—managed not to.” An echo came to me, of almost the same words she had once said to me. And she had called me honest then. “For once I was honest,” I said. There was a small sound, so faint that I wasn’t sure that it was not in the wire. I waited. “You can tell me or not, as you choose,” I said.

  Another sound—of breath. Not the wire. A loop of meaning, yearning that I had almost failed to catch. How could I have failed to, shut up with such a burden as I have been these weeks—these years! But the role of the confidant is never fully learned.

  “Then—” That one note was high. The rest came in monotone. “Then—we are—as we were. You did let it be.”

  “No—” But I had let it be—for her. Below me on the desk lay all the pages of the chronicler, bits of paper dropped in the woods, useful only to him. In the telephone at my ear, dark as a crater, a void not mine. She was not able.

  I understood then. She was not able, but she had hoped. She had hoped that I would go to Austin—and that he would tell me. You poor, poor—I thought, looking down into the crater, and at last I reached out. “Listen—” I said, “only listen.” Then I told her—about this memoir.

  It happened then, as I spoke, that I began to see her. She looked: not quite as I had first seen her, never to be that again—although she had something of the stillness with which she had overheard her father speaking to me, when only an earring had quivered and shone. She was what a person is in memory, a composite of the facets and obliques of all the moments which could not be recovered until I was once more in her presence. If she resembled any one of them more than another, it was that moment when we had met unexpectedly in the hallway, when, mulling it afterwards, I had seen how she would look when she was old. In that image, her eyes had been cast down, but now they were wide, dry with the hiatus that is not clinically describable—hope. I could see in them the lineaments of the person she was staring at, as I was at her—at the Messiah who was not ourselves.

  “Hello. Hello,” I said. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here.” For a minute the voice was richer. You poor, did it say, you poor? Then it was hers again, and it failed her. “I can tell you, someday. Just—give me time.”

  “No,” I said. Not in the light of our death. Had I said that aloud? I glanced down at the phone, as if it could tell me, and in the staining blue I saw it for what it was, still bridled if I willed it, still the subject machine. “Are you phoning from your room?” I said.

  “I—have none there. Father’s is the only—upstairs.” A prescience swept me, of all I did not yet know about her. “I’m in the downstairs hall.” She was in Anna’s niche then. “It was four when I began calling you. I didn’t want the phone to ring here.” She spoke in a whisper. “I don’t want anyone to—”

  “No one will hear you then. It’s barely light.” Suddenly I remembered our early interchanges on this island, when all we had listened for was the glowing mournfulness of the boats, and I felt the shiver that comes as we descend knowingly into a relationship, even into one we crave.

  “Except Anna,” I said. “And Anna won’t mind.”

  “No, Anna won’t mind.” The dry tone surprised me, the next words even more. “You treat me as if I were a child.” Of course, of course, I thought. I shudder now to think of it, of how my tender patronage must have fallen on that ear.

  “Tell me now,” I said. “On the phone. It’s easier. When it’s not face to face. Then when we meet—you’ll have told me. Get it over with. Try.” I couldn’t see her any longer. There was no answer. “Hang on,” I said. “Take your time—but now. I’ll stay, it doesn’t matter how long. I’ll stay.” I’ll stay. I heard its echo, while I waited. Time to stay, I heard, and it came to me in a treble of voices—we change. The voices we hear in this place are the voices of paradise lost, regained and lost again. Death is only the other unity. For we change. And after an interval I heard that actual voice, whispered. “O.K.”

  It came in pauses, but with dignity, that simple story, and the voice that told it was not a child’s. She was so far ahead of me there, and had been for years—as her quiet burden came to my ear I thought it the least innocent voice I had ever heard. From time to time it halted, then went on. To trust the listener is an act of the greatest daring; she had reason to know that even better than I. Perhaps it took less time than it seemed. Neither of us wept. I had not wept since that day in the privy, but from what I remembered of weeping it wasn’t enough for this. I listened, and I did the best I could for her. I listened—and I was the friend. She did the best she could for me. I listened, and I was the friend.

  When it was over, we were each of us as rough and quick as we knew how, for we must meet soon now, bound as we were, and each of us knows how little of what is said face to face avails. “Come here now,” I said. “To stay. Pack a bag and get out of that house. And don’t look back.” She promised, though there was no need. “And if there’s anything you’d miss later—” I was looking at the array on my mantel. “You won’t be going back there. Bring it now.”

  It would take her a couple of hours, she said. Not for the bag. It would take her that long to leave very carefully,
to leave as if she were not going—she who had always stayed. “But Anna will help?” I said.

  “Oh yes,” her last words were. “I’ve not been that alone,” she said, and again I shivered. “Anna will help.”

  So I am here, making my own farewells. I leave, I leave myself. I leave this account, as nearly myself as I was able to bring it to be against the consciousness that nothing which is written down is ever equal to the weight, in life, of the simplest man. If she reads it, when she reads, she will see what I have always really known, the identity of the follower—who pretended himself the quarry—and what he followed after people for, along that gravest journey where, as part of its condition, we must both leave and stay.

  As the morning advances, now and then I hear the slam of a car door from below, and I go to the open window, thinking to allow myself one last spell of the voyeur. I should like to see her once again unaware, before we begin to change. And I should like to see the look on the face of one who is making his formal entry into the enclosure, taking up his bag along that journey into what depths, to what altitudes of non-air, alongside him all those others with that bit of misplaced red in the brain which makes them human—knights errant, Knights of the Midnight Mystery, Knights of Malta—all bleeding mortality from the nose. Meanwhile, along our own minor journey, we shall give each other such absolution as we can. Happiness is for younger worlds than she and I were born to, for those green places where we can no longer lay ourselves down; the consciousness that destroyed them is our substitute glory. She knew, so much sooner than I, why we are still born to ours with more innocence than we can ever hold. It is so that we may have enough left over for absolution. Absolution, for people like us, is no longer a heavenly forgiveness of sins. It is to be loved here, for our innocence, by those who know we are guilty. The look on her face should be identical with mine.

  More than two hours now, almost three. More than time.

  Here we are. A car door has just slammed. Is it she? I thought I heard someone’s voice saying over and over Good-by, good-by, God pity you and bless you, my darling. Anna’s. No, I shan’t go to the window. Hang on, by the pen if need be. This is the silence; this is the theme. Stay here.