In the Absence of Angels

by Hortense Calisher

  Regretfully, as if taking leave of a landscape that had pleased, he broke his glance from the eyes opposite him, looked down at the hand that lay perhaps intentionally near his on the mantel, curved upward, open. Warned, he had felt all afternoon the too recognizable air of intensity, of special pleading, that had surrounded her; in a woman of less taste it would have taken the form of a dress too tight, or a flock of bows in the hair. Intelligent women stimulated rather than repelled him, if they had the other attraction too; their withdrawals and defenses were heightened by subtleties that it was a challenge to explore and subdue. But in the end it was all the same — gazing up at you afterward with their liquid pained stare, detecting the coil of softness in you that half appreciated, half understood, they all pleaded for an avowal — of what?

  The hand on the mantel brushed his, and was withdrawn.

  “It’s pathetic, isn’t it,” she whispered, “the spectacle of people trying to reach one another? By any means. Everywhere.” There was a rush, a grating of honesty, in her tone that she deprecated immediately with a quick covering smile.

  The remark hung too nakedly on the air. He nodded ruefully, and allowing his hand to touch hers for a moment, he stared into their palms, and they stood together for a moment, joined over the body of their failure.

  Patting her shoulder in a light rhythm, one, two, three, he grasped her chin tight in his hand and looked down at her for quite a time.

  “See you,” he said. “Better run for my train.” As he took up his hat and brief case half embarrassedly, leaning against the mantel she was watching him silently, and it was so that he caught the last image of her as he let himself out the door, easing the knob to.

  Blinking in the light of the outdoors, which was a lot stronger than one would suspect after that dim apartment of hers, he brought that image with him, but, shielding him, his mind shifted, rioting pleasurably among the warmer images of the early afternoon. All the way down the avenue from the park he carried these with him, until at Forty-second Street, sauntering toward Grand Central, he joined the streams of women carrying their light pastel packages of hose, ribbons, blouses — all the paraphernalia of women at the turn of a season. He was used to seeing them in the train, haggard after the day-long scavenger hunt for the hat to go with the shoes that went with the dress — riding home for the long ritual of unguents that would arm them once more. From his wife, and his sisters before her, he knew it well — the ritual that would transform the kimonoed, the oiled, the bepinned one into the handsome, curled, confident woman waiting at the door, Venus risen triumphant on a shell of empty boxes.

  For a while now, out of a sense of the just, the cautious moment, he would be free, but inevitably he would be alert again to the puff of organdie at a throat, a mouth so richly, redly drawn over the scanter curve of lip beneath, a look, plaintive or ripe — the whole froth of femininity that they all put out like entangling scarves. They would be drawn to him too, often out of an awareness of his sensitivity to them, only to be confused by the proffered warmth for warmth of a relationship that ended, not in the conventional brutalities of a rejection they might have understood, but in the firm, knowing refusal to be involved in the abject spiritual surrender which they always ended up by demanding, for which they all longed.

  Either they caught you young and eager, as he had been, and — nailed down by their allies, time and habit — incredibly, swiftly, you were a member of the country club, with a mortgage, while across the room, herded together with the others, in their unblushing, blatant discussions of the idiosyncrasies of husbands, they proclaimed your indenture to them — or else, in the byways of sub rosa relationships, there too, sooner or later, they strangled calm with their demoniacal need for finality, possession, grown all the stronger because it could not be socially displayed. Perhaps, he thought, it is the riddled period in which we live, in which people are driven endlessly upon one another, hoping to find, in the person of another one of the bewildered, the a priori love, the certainty, the touchstone.

  He had reached Grand Central and the long sloping entrance to the suburban trains. Across the way his usual stop-in place beckoned with its promise of a muted jumble of light, noise, and clinking glassware in which feeling could be drowned. Perhaps it is worse for the women, he thought, but they are the worst — all of them Penelopes, trying to weave you into the fabric of their lives, building on you in one way or the other until you have to get out from under. Squaring his shoulders, he shifted his brief case, and walked on toward the sure nepenthe, the comfortable glaze of the bar.

  In the apartment, she still stood at the mantel, reluctant to acknowledge the gap in the room, to close it over finally with movement, change. At last she walked over to the sofa and sat down, shrinking into the cushion for its warmth. The room was always like this afterward, like a deserted theatre, and, half actress, half spectator, she sat and mulled over what had gone before, forming, as if into a stylized ballet, the whole interchange of responses that had been their meeting, forestalling, by this means, the sure humming rise of depression.

  Her last exclamation, which had been as alienating to him, she knew, as the shock of a cry for help thrust suddenly into the most casual of conversations, had come from the heart, the heart that she knew, by unspoken agreement with him, with all of them perhaps, must always be held behind one. Only among the very young might it be otherwise, possibly …before they had acquired the destroying talent for compromise that eased — as it more and more deflated — the drama of experience.

  Perhaps, she thought, curvetting so lightly, so “modernly,” as we have been taught to do, over the sharp stick of emotion, never daring the banal, the stark word, it is our reticences that trap us after all. It happened everywhere: behind the tidy doors of marriage, in the dark bed of adventure, or in the social bumpings against one another in the crowded rooms where people massed together protectively in frenetic gaiety, hiding stubbornly — “I am alone” — using liquor, music, sex, to say — “You, too?” It happened, sometimes, in rooms at the end of the day, after the scratch of gossip, the long political sighs, were done, and there was a lull, with people staring reflectively into their glasses, twirling the stems, that the lull deepened, a sentence died on the air, and it was as if everyone had plunged his arm into a deep well, searching, seeking — but no hands met and clasped.

  She walked into the kitchen and poured herself a drink. Toward her through the window over the sink the stunted city trees stretched in the soft, mottled weather, all along their weak, cramped boughs, the sure, recrudescent leaves. It would be better if it were autumn now, she thought drearily, when people huddling together at concerts, at parties, in front of fires, can persuade themselves that they are huddled there together against the cold.

  Tonight there were people coming in to talk. She knew beforehand how she would sit there, in the anodyne of company, cradling the warmth of what had been, while every so often, half savored because it gave a meaning to the hour, half pushed down lest it rise to the surface and become real hurt, there would come, like water washing over a sunken buoy, the little knell of sadness for something that had been, that had never quite been, that now had almost certainly ceased to be.

  One of the Chosen

  THE NIGHT BEFORE the fall reunion of his college class, Spanner had come home a little ashamed of his easy acceptance of the prodding special invitation over the phone that day from Banks, a man whose face he could not even remember. For years he had ignored the printed notices that came to him now and then, even though he lived in the city where the college was, but this time, Banks had said, there was to be a private conclave of all the members of the crew who had won the regatta for the college over twenty years before. Half reluctant to include himself in the picture of the old grads redundantly deploying the terrain of dead triumphs, he had found himself saying that he would come. He had been coxswain of that crew.

  Thinking it over idly in bed later on, in those random images just before s
leep, which carried with them unexpected prickings of realization that lay just below the surface of expressed thought, he had found himself dwelling, not on the members of the crew, but on all those odd ones, the campus characters who had existed, hardly acknowledged, on the penumbra of his own sunlit, multiform activities of those days. Why should he now think suddenly of De Jong, the spastic, who, jerking and shambling his way one day into the office of the college literary magazine of which he, Spanner, had been a staff member, had thrust upon the group there a sheaf of manuscript, and gargling incomprehensibly, had left before their gauche heartiness could detain him? The sheaf had contained a group of poems clearly derivative from the unfashionable Housman, and therefore unusable, but marked by a discipline of language, a limpidity, almost a purity of organization — as if in them De Jong had tried to repudiate his disjointed idiot face, the coarse clayey skin, the wide slobbering mouth, thickened with effort. They had avoided discussing him, until Black, the psychology student, had remarked, with his clinician’s air, “I saw him once in Phipps’ lecture class, way at the top, you know, in one of those high gallery seats. My God — there he was — twitching away at some lecture of his own — oblivious!” One of the others had sniggered nervously. The talk had passed on, and later that year, because of a lack of copy, one of the poems had been printed after all.

  He thought now, with a belated guilt, of the grim separation that must have been De Jong’s, and whether there would have been anything that the rest of them, if less swaddled with their own crude successes, could have done. He’d never heard the man mentioned again, or seen a reference to him in the alumni magazine.

  Why now, in this context, should he remember George Shipley, the Negro basketball star of their era, certainly handsome enough, with straight, clipped features so completely lacking the prognathous bulges commonly associated with his race that this, no doubt, had had some effect on his acceptance on certain levels by the student body. Smiling, quiet, he had often sat near Spanner in the rotunda of the law library; Spanner had heard that he was a professor of law now in one of the good Southern colleges for Negroes. Why, burning now with something like shame, should he remember him at the dances to which he brought always the same prim-faced mulatto girl; why should he see him, wide shoulders bent in the dégagé dance fashion of that day, black features impassive, slowly circling with the girl, always in a small radius of their own?

  Spanner was fully awake now and, raised up on his elbow, his eyes gradually following the familiar outlines of the furniture as they grew more perceptible in the darkness, he forced himself to probe in the archives of recall for others who, like Shipley, like De Jong, seemed bound together in his memory only by the mark of that rejection by the group, which now, in pitying retrospect, it seemed to him, had he then been less grossly unaware, less young, he, by some friendly overture, might have partially repaired.

  There was the Burmese princeling who had lived at International House, who had treated a group of them to several awkwardly accepted dinners at Oriental restaurants of his choosing, whose foreignness and wealth had at first had a certain cachet, but from whom they had shortly retreated in ridicule, in gruff embarrassment at the hand, sliding as silk, the emotional waver of the voice. At that, they had never been sure that he was really …that it had not been just a form of Eastern cajolery, or a misbegotten sense of acceptance which had elicited the moist look, the overheated hand. Afterward, when they had met him on campus in a few curt scenes of misshapen talk in which it was evident that camaraderie had flown, his gestures had been restrained enough, Lord knows, his eyes sufficiently flat and dull, with reserve enough to satisfy the most conventional of them.

  Of course, there had been that group of those others, pariahs without question, who convened always in that little Greek restaurant, the Cosmos, through the door of which they sometimes glanced out at you with the hauteur of tropical birds in a zoo, jangling consciously into conversation as you passed, with their tense, dulcet exuberance. Toleration of these had been more than one could expect of boys suffused with their own raw reactions to adulthood, which they covered up with a passionate adherence to the norm, with apprehensive jeerings at the un-average in its lightest forms, so that even displaying too good, too undulate a French accent, in class, was likely to incur for one the horse-laugh from behind. But could they have helped, with some small glow of receptivity, young Schwiller, that model young German from the cleanly swabbed villa in North Jersey, with too little money, background, or ability — too little of everything except a straining, unhumorous will to belong — who, after some covert, abortive incident on a group camping trip, had hanged himself to a tree?

  Ah well, Spanner thought, fumbling in the dark for a cigarette, and lighting it in a thankful momentary absorption with the ordinary — these had been the extreme cases. But what of the others, less vividly obvious to memory because they had been more usual, or because they had perhaps already achieved their secret dikes of resignation? He remembered, for instance, all the little Jewish boys, with their overexpressive eyes, their thickets of hair whose Egyptian luxuriousness no barber could tame, and most revelatory of all, the forced vying, the self-conscious crackle of their conversation.

  As a Jew himself, he had been helped, he knew, by his fair-skinned, freckled, almost “mick” exterior, by the generations of serene cosmopolitan living that were evident, implicit in the atmosphere of his family’s sprawling apartment on the park, and frankly, he supposed, by the unrevealing name of Spanner, which his great-grandfather had brought over from England, and had come by honestly, as far as the family knew. His family had belonged among those lucky Jews, less rare than was commonly realized, who had scarcely felt the flick of injustice expressed socially, much less in any of its harsher forms. Still, despite this, it had been unusual, he knew, to remain so untouched, so free from apprehension of the lurking innuendo, the consciousness of schism — for in addition to his race, he had carried, too, that dark bruise of intellectuality, the bearers of which the group flings ever into the periphery, if it can.

  That was where the luck he had had in being coxswain had come in. Because of it, although he had done well, almost brilliantly in his law classes, all his possibly troublesome differences had remained hidden, inconspicuous under the brash intimacy of the training session, under the hearty accolade of his name on the sporting page — because of it he had been hail fellow in the boat house and on the campus — he had been their gallant ‘little guy.” So, he thought, he had ridden through it all in a trance of security which, he realized now, had been given only to the favored few, while all around them, if he and the others had not been so insensible of it, had been the hurts, the twistings, that might have been allayed. The image of the spastic crossed before him again, a distortion to the extreme of that singularity from which many others must have suffered less visibly, from which he himself had been accountably, blessedly safe. He lay back again, and turning, blotted his face against the dispassionate pillow and slept.

  The next morning he awoke late. It was Saturday. Taking his coffee at the dining-room table deserted by his wife and children some hours before, he was half-annoyed at the emotionalism of the previous night. “Who the hell do I think I am — Tolstoy?” he thought, wincing. Rejecting the unwonted self-analysis that had preceded sleep, he finished his coffee offhandedly, master of himself once more. He got the car out of the garage and swung slowly down the parkway, thinking that if he delayed his arrival until well after twelve he would miss the worst of the speechifying.

  As he approached the college-dominated midtown neighborhood, idling the car slowly along, he passed some of the brownstone houses, shoddier now with the indefinable sag of the rooming house, which had been the glossier fraternity houses of his day. He had heard that many of them, even the wealthier ones which had survived depression times, subsidized to plush draperies and pine paneling by some well-heeled brother, had gone down finally during the war years just past, when the college had be
come a training center for the Navy. Then, he supposed, those accelerated waves of young men passing through had not only not had time for such amenities, but, trapped together in a more urgent unity, had had no need for the more superficial paradings of Brotherhood.

  Although he had had his fair share of indiscriminate rushing during his freshman year, he himself had had no particular desire to join a house, comfortably ensconced, as he had been, in his family’s nearby home, already sated with the herded confinement of prep school. In his sophomore year, he remembered, after he had joined the magazine, and it was evident that he would have a place on the varsity crew, the best Jewish fraternity had been very pressing, then annoyed at his tepid refusal, and there had been overtures from one or two of the Christian fraternities whose social position was so solid that they could afford, now and then, to ignore the dividing lines in favor of a man whose campus prominence or money would add lustre to the house, but by this time he had already been focusing on his law career. Still, he thought now, he had always had the comfortable sense of acceptance; he had, for instance, never felt that deep racial unease with the Gentile to which his most apparently assimilated Jewish friends sometimes confessed. To be free from the tortuous doubt, the thin-skinned expectancy of slight — it had helped. He had been lucky.

  In front of one of the brownstones not too far from Jefferson Hall, the old residence hall in one of whose rooms the luncheon was to be held, he found a place to park the car, and got out. He hadn’t been near here in years; his life was a well-conducted bee-line from suburb to downtown office, and most of his associations were on the East Side anyway. He walked past the familiar architectural hodgepodge of the buildings, noting with pleasure that the rough red cobbles of the walks had been preserved, glancing with disapproval at the new library which had been begun in his time, on the field where they used to play tennis. Half utilitarian, but with reticent touches of bastard Greek on its lean, flat façade, it stretched out, two-dimensional and unassimilable, a compromise of tastes which had led to none. The vulgarization of taste in a place which should have been a repository of the best still had power to shock him; he was pleased at having retained this naïveté, this latent souvenir of youth. Around him and past him, male and female, hurrying or sauntering, or enthusiastically standing still, was that year’s crop of imperishable young, on their faces that which the college had not yet vulgarized — the look of horizons that were sure, boundaries that were limitless — the look of the unreconciled.