In the Absence of Angels

by Hortense Calisher

  “Exactly,” said Miss Shotwell, bringing her head back to center, her face obviously readied for the fulsome courtesies of rejection.

  Behind the chic camouflage of her own smart appearance, that slick armor which she had learned to assume with the wiliness of the job-hunter, she had felt shaken with hatred for these people who had the power to let you in, who could annihilate, with a dainty, deprecatory finger, spheres of value which were not their own.

  “It does not seem to have impaired my ‘leadership,’ as you call it,” she had said at last, anger forcing the gassy word on to her tongue.

  The flickering interest had revived in the fish stare opposite. Miss Shotwell had smiled almost in approval. “Perhaps we can use you after all,” she had said. “We like them to be aggressive.”

  Them. In the past year she had indeed become one of “them,” learning the caitiff acquiescence, the shiny readiness which would cover the segregation of self, acquiring that whole vocabulary of pretense forced upon those who must make themselves commercially valuable, or die.

  She looked around now at the others herded together with her in the car. Perhaps her mistake had been to think that she was alone in this; perhaps each of her neighbors was sitting stiffened in the same intent misery before the deadening span of the day to come, each crouched protectively over the misfit hunch or sore of some disparity which had not fitted in. She looked again, but the set faces looked back at hers stonily, as if not all the prying tentacles of her pity could slip behind the mask which each had assumed for his journey through the ambuscade of the practical. Bending her head over the interlocked hands in her lap, she loosened them, cupped them softly over the unwanted extrusion of her compassion. Everybody, she said to herself in tentative kinship, each one of them, of us, locked up alone with the felony of his private difference.

  The car rocked to her station and she pressed out with the others, up the stairs into a brief interlude of sunshine and into the swinging door of the employee’s entrance, kept constantly ajar by the procession of batting hands. Inside the olive green locker room she found the number of her own compartment and set her hat and coat away, smelling with a dull sense of recognition the basement’s odor of wax and disinfectant, interfused with the vague patchouli of congregated women. One after the other, as they took off the bright spring hats and coats which had differentiated them up to now, they sank into conformity, leveled by the common denominator of their dark dresses as if by the command of some sullen alchemist.

  Nodding diffidently to the few she knew by sight, she joined them on the escalator to the main floor, her spirits sinking as she rose. Upstairs in the glove department where she had been assistant section manager for the past two months, the salesgirls lounged negligently behind the counters, waiting for the opening bell to ring and the first trickle of customers.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “ ’Morning, Miss Abel.” They were polite but reserved, with the resentment of old stagers who see a neophyte brought in to supervise.

  “Miss Baxter in yet?” She asked only to make conversation, but was warned by their suddenly innocent gazes. Baxter must have come in drunk again.

  “She’s behind — in the cubbyhole,” said one of the girls, and bent over, stifling a snicker.

  Behind the counter there was a door which led into the cavity under the escalator, a space big enough for two people if one sat in the single chair and the other stood with head bent under the declivity of the ceiling. The girls seldom used it, ducking in for an aspirin, or when a garter had broken and there was not time to go off the floor. Once or twice, when the hysteria of milling people around her had overwhelmed her with a feeling of nakedness, of exposure to too much and too many, she had crept in there herself for a moment of poise. She opened the door and went in, closing it behind her.

  Miss Baxter sat erect in the single chair, her angular shoulders squared tensely in one of the severely cut suits she wore daily. Miss Abel had never known her to wear a dress. Her cropped black hair was sleek from the brush, and her starched white shirt lay flat and crisp under one of the ties she affected, the cuffs projecting slightly from the jacket sleeves to show the only touch of vanity she allowed herself, onyx intaglio cuff links which clipped together like a man’s. With her firm, pallid profile and small, almost lipless mouth, she had the anomalous attractiveness of a well-groomed boy who is knowing and bitter beyond his years. Reputed to be the best section manager on the floor, she had been recruited temporarily from the enormous book department to cover the glove section during the spring rush. Once or twice Miss Abel, longing for congeniality, had tried to get her to talk about books, of which she was supposed to have considerable knowledge, but had been not so much rebuffed as forestalled by the controlled distance of manner, the look of careful mistrust in the deep-set eyes.

  Miss Baxter grasped her own chin in one hand and gravely swung her head to one side, then back. “I daren’t move it by itself,” she said in her husky whisky voice. Staring straight ahead, she uncurled the other hand in her lap to show a package of Life Savers. “Have one?” she said without moving further, and laughed.

  “Can I get you anything?” Miss Abel put out a hand, but somehow she did not dare touch her.

  In answer Miss Baxter, still sitting erect, closed her eyes. “What a night!” she said. “Lois’ job is folding, so we went on the town.” The words came oddly from the closed face, with a kind of bravado perhaps made possible by it. “Know Lois Gow, up in the doctor’s office?”

  “Oh. Yes, of course.” She remembered the girl mainly because of the pliant, hesitant manner which did not go with the nurse’s uniform, and the suffused pink of her face, which always looked as if she were about to sneeze or break into tears.

  “Think I can go on the floor, Abel?” Miss Baxter had opened her eyes, and was looking straight at her with her thin, slight smile. Except for the closed eyes, she had seemed up to now almost as she had on those other mornings when, rigidly controlled, exuding a powerful perfume of cinnamon, she had managed quite competently, handling both staff and customers with a dispatch which was, if anything, chillier than normal. But now, looking into the opened eyes, Miss Abel saw that the liquor had not glazed them but rather had melted from them some last cornea of reserve, so that, nude, and pained, they focused beyond her, askance at some unalterable incubus.

  “Look,” said Miss Abel, “you’ve signed in, haven’t you? Why don’t you go to the rest room? I can cover up for you here.”

  Miss Baxter shook herself slightly. With that shake, policy shuttered her face and she was again the equilibrist, the authority.

  “Quite a gal, aren’t you?” she said. “Able Abel.” She laughed. Then she put her head in her hands.

  Miss Abel went out and closed the door behind her. Hurrying to the high desk behind which she would stand all day, she began needlessly to set its sparse equipment in order. She couldn’t have gone on the floor, she said to herself. Not with those eyes.

  The rest of the morning she worked steadily to reduce the constantly forming queue of women in front of her. Just before noon, a cool voice said, “I’ll take over now. Thanks.” Miss Baxter stood beside her, resurrected and remote.

  Miss Abel got her purse from the desk, signed out and left the floor. Outside the locker-room windows the day had turned greenish and it had begun to drizzle. She had no heart for battling one of the crowded restaurants outside and turned into the employees’ cafeteria, where she ate her way through the flaccid “special plate,” flavored for the general and made more tepid by the humid smell from the steam tables. Gratefully she remembered that it was Saturday and, half-reluctantly, she visualized her usual date with Max.

  As on many other Saturday nights, she would prepare dinner for him, and they would sit over it in a coy, uncomfortable imitation of the domesticity they could not afford to make actual. If, during the past week, he had been called for part-time work in one of the biological-testing laboratories which all
owed him, as a former fellow in chemistry, to make tests of blood and sputum, they would go to one of the movies on Fourteenth Street. Otherwise, while he talked ardently of his ambitions, his hopes, warming his self-confidence with her attention, she would watch the light on the humbled nape of his neck, the abnormal cleanliness of his hands, seeing in them something already intimidated, subdued. Either way, she thought, it would end in the half-fearful, fending love-making of the uninitiate, in that tentative groping, not toward affirmation but only toward escape, in which each caressed and comforted the affrighted, sad replica of himself.

  She rose with a counterfeit briskness and went back upstairs. Signing in again, “Abel — 12:45,” she slipped into her station beside Miss Baxter.

  At five o’clock when the two of them, working steadily together, had disposed of the last of the queue, the crowd in the store had thinned. It was raining hard outside now, and most of the customers, wandering along desultory and vacant-faced, were of the brand the clerks called “just looking.” Miss Abel and Miss Baxter stood together behind the high pulpit of the desk, careful not to mar with more than fragmentary conversation their air of alert, executive readiness.

  Along the aisle a small, nondescript woman teetered aimlessly toward them. She was no different from the scores of women who had today — and would tomorrow — filtered colorlessly through the store from the cardboard suburbs or the moderately respectable crannies of the city. A coat of some nameless but adequate fur flapped back from a dress which was indistinctly neither fussy nor smart. On her precise, mat hair a small flyaway hat with a veil halfway between coquetry and conservatism perched sharply to one side — denotation that its wearer might have lost touch with her sense of the ridiculous but not with her instinct for what was correct for her station in life. Beloved of some man, she would amble through the stores, coming home with a darling blouse or another pair of stubby, frilled shoes, or perhaps only with a sense of virtue at having viewed and resisted all the temptations of the bon marché except the paper bag of caramels from which she was now munching.

  She stopped in front of them, just to one side, and stared frankly, curiously at Miss Baxter. Then, with her face screwed up in kittenish perplexity, she backed up, sidestepped, craned over to get a glimpse of Miss Baxter’s legs.

  “Is there something I can do for you?” There was an edge of insolence in Miss Baxter’s tone which made Miss Abel catch her breath with apprehension. Sidling a glance from under the dropped lids of embarrassment, she saw what she had never before seen in Miss Baxter’s face — the creeping red of color.

  “Well, uh, no.” The woman tittered ingratiatingly. “I mean — I just couldn’t tell whether — I mean I just wanted to see …whether you had trousers on,” she finished, the words coming out on a cozy gust of confidence. She smiled, and tittered again.

  “Want to step around and take a really good look?” Miss Baxter’s face was white again.

  “Why, you — why, this is outrageous!” Rage did not dignify the woman’s inadequate features. “Why, I could report you!”

  “Get out.” Miss Baxter’s immobility was more offensive than her words.

  “I’ll report you for this!” Looking around for adherents, the woman met the bright, hushed stare of the clerks. Drawing her coat around her, she stalked off, her face working and mottled, the paper bag crackling convulsively in her hand.

  She will, too, thought Miss Abel. She kept her glance carefully apart from Miss Baxter. The clerks, heads bent ostentatiously over their books, returned to their tallying of the day’s receipts.

  With a thin, releasing sound, the five-thirty bell rang through the store. If I tell Baxter to get out quickly, she won’t, thought Miss Abel. She said nothing. After a face-saving moment, Miss Baxter opened the desk drawer slowly and took out her purse.

  “My turn to close up,” said Miss Abel. “Good night.”

  “ ’Night,” said Miss Baxter. She hesitated for a moment as if there were something she wanted to say, then gave a half-smile, as if the concession shamed her, and left.

  Methodically Miss Abel set the desk to rights for Monday morning. Baxter had left without signing out. As she signed the chart for both of them with a grim feeling of conspiracy, she saw Mr. Eardley, the floor superintendent, a sandy-haired, middle-aged man with tiredly pleasant manners, being pulled toward her down the aisle by the gesticulating woman. They stopped in front of her.

  “She isn’t here,” said the woman. “This girl will tell you, though. The idea!”

  “Yes, Madam.” Mr. Eardley looked at Miss Abel, his brows raised over his glasses in weary inquiry.

  Miss Abel looked at the woman. She was still babbling angrily to Mr. Eardley and her silly hat, held on by elastic, was cocked awry on her head, far beyond the angle of fashion. Even the exertions of her annoyance had not been able to endow her with individuality, but under stress the details of her person, so dependent on the commonplace, appeared disorderly, even daft.

  Miss Abel looked past her at Mr. Eardley. Imperceptibly she shook her head and, raising her hand to her temple, she moved her index finger discreetly in the small circle, the immemorial gesture of derision.

  As if he had caught a ball deftly thrown, Mr. Eardley nodded imperceptibly back. Turning quickly toward the woman, he burbled the smooth reassurances of his trade. He took note of her name and address in a voice which was soothing and deferential, and on a wave of practiced apologies he urged the woman inexorably toward the door.

  Miss Abel walked down to the basement once more on one of the escalators which had stopped for the day, got her hat and coat and a spare umbrella from her locker and left the store. Under the jaundiced cast of the rain the faces of the people on the street looked froglike and repellent. In the subway she sat numbly in a catalepsy of fatigue, her feet squirming in her soggy, drenched shoes. She walked the long blocks from the station at a blind pace, the umbrella slanted viciously in front of her, her mind fixed on the chair at home.

  At last she was there, and the dead, still air of the apartment welcomed her, inspiring a relief close to tears. Dropping off her damp clothes and soaked shoes, she put on a wrapper and mules and set a pot of water to boil. Usually when she came home she had cup after cup of dark coffee, but now the thought of its flavor, hearty and congenial, sickened her. Tea, meliorative and astringent, recalled those childhood convalescences when it had been the first sign of recovery, and half-medicine, half-food, it had settled the stomach and warmed the hands. She set a pot of tea to steep, brought the tray around in front of the chair and sat down. After a moment she kicked off the slippers with a dual thud which was like a signal to thought.

  Looking back on the day, she curled her lip at the mawkish sentiments of that morning in the train, at the nascent fellowship which had seemed so plausible. The day seemed now like a labyrinth through which she had followed an infallible, an educative thread — to a monster’s door.

  Everybody, she thought, shivering. The woman in the store was “everybody.” Multiplied endlessly, she and her counterparts, varied slightly by the secondary markings of sex, education, money, flowed in and out of the stores, in and out of all the proper stations in life, not touched by the miseries of difference but indomitably chewing the caramel cud of their own self-satisfaction. Escape into the long dream of books, behind the ramparts of your special talent or into some warm coterie of your own ilk, and they could still find you out with a judgment in proportion to the degree of your difference. The Misses Baxter they would pillory at once, with the nerveless teamwork of the dull; the Misses Abel might escape their gray encroaching smutch of averageness for a while, behind some maquillage of compromise, only to find one day perhaps that the maquillage had become the spirit — that they had conquered after all.

  They were even there, latent, in the rumpled letter, simple with love, still lying on her table. In the end they could push everything before them with the nod of their terrible consanguinity.

  She moved dee
per in the chair. Soon the boy, Max, would come, and in the desperate wrenches, the muffled clingings of love-making they would try again to build up some dark mutual core of inalienable wholeness. For there was no closeness, she thought, no camaraderie so intense, so tempting as that of the rejected for the rejected. But in the end those others would still be there to be faced; in the end they were to be faced alone. Meanwhile she sat on, shivering a little, over the steaming tea, and making a circle of her body around the hardening nugget of herself, she clasped her chill, blanched feet in her slowly warming hands.

  Heartburn

  THE LIGHT, GRITTY wind of a spring morning blew in on the doctor’s shining, cleared desk, and on the tall buttonhook of a man who leaned agitatedly toward him.

  “I have some kind of small animal lodged in my chest,” said the man. He coughed, a slight, hollow apologia to his ailment, and sank back in his chair.

  “Animal?” said the doctor, after a pause which had the unfortunate quality of comment. His voice, however, was practiced, deft, colored only with the careful suspension of judgment.

  “Probably a form of newt or toad,” answered the man, speaking with clipped distaste, as if he would disassociate himself from the idea as far as possible. His face quirked with sad foreknowledge. “Of course, you don’t believe me.”

  The doctor looked at him noncommittally. Paraphrased, an old refrain of the poker table leapt erratically in his mind. “Nits” — no — “newts and gnats and one-eyed jacks,” he thought. But already the anecdote was shaping itself, trim and perfect, for display at the clinic luncheon table. “Go on,” he said.

  “Why won’t any of you come right out and say what you think!” the man said angrily. Then he flushed, not hectically, the doctor noted, but with the well-bred embarrassment of the normally reserved. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  “You’ve already had an examination?” The doctor was a neurologist, and most of his patients were referrals.