In the Absence of Angels

by Hortense Calisher

  Therefore, on the list of the influential few who had rallied to the support of the Hall, none had rallied harder than Mrs. Whyte. And at the end of that summer six years before, the newspaper of the little Hudson River town where the Whytes had their bracketed gothic summer place, had reported: “Mr. and Mrs. Reese Reynolds Whyte and their daughter, Miss Letitia Reynolds Whyte, have left for an extended motor tour of the South, their destination Hyacinth Hall, the well-known finishing school, where Miss Whyte will enroll as an art student. Accompanying them is their house guest, Dame Alice Mellish, recently honored by His Majesty, the King of England, for her studies in Anglo-American semantics.”

  It had been a queer entourage which had descended upon the school in those last deciduous days of summer. The few teachers and students already there, waiting out the close, inert days before the beginning of the term, were energized and impressed by the visitors, whose confident eccentricity had as surely betokened superiority. Flanked by Mrs. Whyte, a type instantly recognizable and acceptable, and by Dame Alice, whose skirts were uneven to the point of vagary, but whose title had preceded her through the school like an odor, had come Letitia, not so instantly recognizable, but soon to be. And wheeled out, in dark finale, from the capacious back of the car, had come the chair bearing Mr. Whyte, a beautifully groomed old man in lawyer’s black and a stiff collar, his very clean hands nerveless on his knees, the fixed upward twist of one side of his mouth lending him a demeanor of unchangeable pleasure. He did not talk, and apparently could not, but his lack, appearing at the end of life rather than at the beginning, was an honorable one which needed not to be hidden, and he was wheeled in and out of every conversation. From time to time, the chauffeur who attended him leaned over and removed or replaced the silky black beaver hat on the silver head at the proper intervals, and this, seeming to be done according to some prescribed rhythm of etiquette, not only lent the old man a verisimilitude of activity, but created, also, an atmosphere of the most recherché good taste. And when Mrs. Whyte, pointing her arches carefully before her, trailing the confused and conquered Miss Rosanna behind her, had clacked down the marble steps of the main building, she had sailed right up to the wheel chair, which had not attempted the steps, as to a reviewing stand, and with nods and becks and the most wreathed of smiles, had apparently recounted the whole transaction to the unchangeable benevolence of Father.

  The Whytes did not stay the night at the school. They departed that same evening, leaving behind them a legend, that had faded, and Letitia, who had stayed the same.

  So it was that Letitia, entering her hot, still room on this particular day, entered the only permanent room in the dormitory, a room from which she yearned, each expectant June, to be delivered, and to which she was, each disappointed June, remanded. Most of the other rooms had a littered, bird-of-passage look which suggested that the girl in each was only sojourning on her way to wider fields which Letitia, while she craved them, could not have described. Letitia’s room, however, had the same supervised neatness as her person, and with its pictures of her family hanging on the wall in circular silver frames, its chiming clock near the bed, and its large calendar with the block numbers marked off crosswise, looked as if it had long ago made its concessions to forever. During one or two of the early years, the accident of a friendly girl neighbor next door had permitted the unlocking of the connecting door between the rooms, as was done everywhere else in the school, but with the coming of Willa Mae, all this had changed, and little by little, Letitia’s almost tolerated, almost earned place in the humming, cozy undercurrents of the dormitory, had slipped away.

  “Honestly, Mum,” Willa had reported at home, “it would give you the creeps! Really it would!” And at the very next Parents’ Day, Mrs. Fordyce, not having trusted herself among the delicacies of correspondence, had actually broached the subject, gaspingly, to Miss Rosanna, but had found her, under her cloud of faltering reassurances, unexpectedly immovable. For the special arrangement for Letitia was large.

  Nevertheless, the last four years had come to have a painful weight of their own, had come to be known, in her sharded thoughts, as “the locked-door years.” But now, as she closed the door behind her, excitement twitched at her mouth, gave almost a complexity to the clear glass of her eyes. For a minute she stood in the room like a stranger to it, as if waiting for someone to tell her what to do next. Then she went to the dresser and pulled out a drawer. Behind a pile of tailored slips, all alike, which she moved to one side with patient tidiness, she found what she wanted. With a crow of pleasure, she drew out the sequined cap and held it in her hand. Straightening up, she walked over to the window, hung the cap on the hooked ornament at the end of the window-shade cord, and stood there dazzled, watching it.

  Until now, there had been no occasion important enough for it since the fiasco of its first wearing. Early in her first year at the school Letitia had been permitted to attend the initial one of the highly chaperoned dances which occurred there several times a year in co-operation with a nearby military academy. Halfway through the evening, an affrighted young man, flying incontinently from the coat room, and an incredulous wave of gossip, rippling through the dancers, had made it all too apparent that either Mrs. Whyte’s strictures to Miss Rosanna had been too reserved, or Miss Rosanna’s interpretation of them insufficiently literal. Ever since then, on such evenings, Letitia, accompanied by Delia, had been sent to the movies in Minetteville, where they stayed right through the double feature, and often even sat over a sundae at Whalen’s afterwards, although Delia, admitted there in her capacity as duenna, never ate anything, but sat stiffly, referring quietly from time to time to the watch the Whytes had sent her after the first year.

  Now, twisting and turning with a purposeful motion of its own, the cap dangled and reversed itself, glittering in the sun. A prism of light, deflected from it, kindled the silver frames of the pictures, where they hung on the wall, disregarded by Letitia’s glance, as their originals hung, neglected, in the dusty galleries of her remembrance. Twice a year she saw her family briefly, but so briefly, so remotely across the hedge to another world, that they had all but receded into symbols of that larger existence into which one was accepted, to which one acceded only after the mystical rite of graduation.

  All the signposts, all the clues, had brought Letitia around to this conclusion, and helped by circumstance, to her contrivance for escape. On the door of Papa Davis’ office, a yellowed card, pinned to the aged door frame, said in gothicked lettering: “Walter Wallace Davis. Professor, Emeritus,” and only yesterday, straying in there in answer to his eager, scooping glance, she had stopped to peer closer, almost professionally, at the lettering on the card, and with a delaying finger on the last queer word, had asked its meaning. Papa Davis had risen from his arm chair and bent closer to her over the card, as if he too had had to ponder its meaning. Then, tossing back his head so that she had seen the waggle-tuft of beard on his chin pointing straight out, he had laughed in his neighing voice.

  “Graduated!” he had said, smiling at her, nodding like a pendulum. “It means ‘graduated,’ ” he had added, frowning. “Leaving a place forever.” In the silence that fell between them he had kept on speculatively nodding. He had stretched an arm past her, then, to grasp the door, had leaned out to stare fretfully up and down the empty corridor, and stepping back into the room, had softly closed the door and locked it.

  Even when he had come closer, very close, she had been unalarmed. Each year the school put on a Roman Festival, and Papa Davis had been present at rehearsals to hear the Latin declamations, and pass on the authenticity of the home-draped togas. If she had seen the girls exploding into silent laughter in a corner, if she had heard one whispering to another “Papa Davis has to feel you to see if you’re Roman!” it had meant to her, perhaps, one more cryptic notion of authority, or perhaps nothing at all. And so, if at first she had watched his overtures with a docility heightened only with curiosity, then later she had received th
em with eager warmth, even though he was nothing like the young men to whom she had once put out a questing hand. For the force of his words, just said, hung around him like a clue, a means to an end. Then, too, she had heard him say so often in his peevish, solitary voice, that the school was his real, his only home, and this, interpreted as a complaint, had harped on a reality she understood, which made them kin. And finally, gazing up at him from the cracked leather davenport, she had seen that, with his avid lip drawn back over the long yellow teeth, he had looked unintimidating, familiar, like an old, begging horse.

  Now she lifted the cap away from the window, twirled it several times over in her fingers, and walked over to the mirror. With a single uncalculated movement she put the cap on her head and looked into the mirror with a pleased smile. Then she walked over to her desk. Strewn over its surface were a number of small white cards, discarded trial copies of that final, faultless one she had put in the school mail-box.

  Still holding the sparkling cap awkwardly to her head with one hand, she bent over the desk and picked up one of the cards. Beautifully printed and shaded in India ink, it seemed unmarred, and in truth, working delightedly all that morning over her inscriptions, she had been almost reluctant to settle on one as perfect enough for her vivid purpose. She had copied the first word secretly from the slip on Willa Mae’s desk. Her own name she knew how to do. The last of the legend she had transcribed lovingly from the yellowed card rifled from Professor Davis’ office door. Only, here, with this last, making a single change which for her amounted to an act of creation, almost of intelligence, she had inverted the sequence, so that the little card she held in her hand now, copy of that still more perfect one she had slipped into the box, read:

  “Engaged. Professor Walter Wallace Davis. And Letitia Reynolds Whyte, Emeritus.”

  Night Riders of Northville

  ON SMOKY SPRING evenings, from the windows of the commuter’s train which rides through the lowlands of Jersey, the little bars, which are seldom more than a block or so from the stations, look like hot coals burning in the thin dusk. Spotted over the countryside, they send up their signal flares, promising the fought-off moment of excitement before you open the door — when it seems as if someone may just this minute have said: “Here is the place — the place,” and the flat, sold feeling after the door is open, and you see that this is just about like any such place anywhere.

  If, having missed your usual train perhaps, you stop off at the particular hole-in-a-corner which clings to your station — Joe’s Place, or Morelli’s, or the Rainbow Tavern — and you sit there over your glass, after your phone call, waiting for the taxi or the wife with the car — then you may find, after the quick rash of one-shot commuters is over, that you are alone, or almost alone, with perhaps a solitary, leather-jacketed baggageman musing over his beer on his stool down at the other end. And you wonder what keeps a joint like this alive.

  Down in the thriving center of town, or settled here and there on its skirting streets, are places, certainly, which cater more specially to a man’s sudden convivial needs, or to his malaises. Out on the highway which is never far from such a town, the roadhouses, each evening, corral the people who want steak, pizza, chicken-in-the-basket. There is a “good place to take the family and still get a drink,” a haunt for the juke-box babies, a daytime spot which draws the lawyers from the courthouse over at the county seat, even a swank little box of a place where certain rich women of the town gather to sip away time from the huge carafe of it that confronts them each day between breakfast and the arrival of the evening train. And because no man or woman lives his life in just one context, sooner or later you may see a person who more properly belongs in a particular one of these places, seated, explicably or not, in another.

  But the nondescript place where you are sitting now — could it be said to have a category? To whom or what could it cater, other than to the casual, modestly sated thirsts of its portion of two trainfuls a day of men homeward bound toward the snow shovel or the garden, or toward the less seasonal dictates of the television, the wife, and the children with egg on their chins? And as you rise, relievedly, to the toot of a horn outside, and exchange diffident nods with the owner, you decide that his reserve with you on this and other occasions is the case, not because you are not a regular, but because there are no regulars here. As you go out the door, you wonder idly how he hangs on here at all, and you imagine him of a Sunday, when the trains are all but stilled, totting up his supplier’s bills and his receipts, and worrying about a better spot for trade.

  Should you sit on there for a sufficient number of evenings, however, you might learn how wrong you were. For that place is one of a circuit of such places which certain men of the town ride ceaselessly, for reasons which neither appear to be simple nor are.

  Take, for instance, the Rainbow Tavern at Northville, and four of its regulars — James De Vries, Dicky English, Jack Burdette, and Henry Lister. If you get to know the habits of these four, who are sure to appear there singly or in varying combinations almost every night of the week — and if you also happen to learn of a minor tragedy which befell one of them — then in the course of time you may also sense, although you may never quite be able to put your finger on it, the nature of that spécialité de la maison which is served by the Rainbow Tavern.

  James De Vries, who is always called “the judge,” out of deference to the fact that he was once, for several years, a justice of the peace, is the only one of the four who was born in Northville — and perhaps some of the deference is to this fact too. In a town where most of the men make their living elsewhere, he is one of those vanishing few who subsist on their inherited knowledge of the place and the “connections” in it — a little banking, some law, a few real estate transactions, and a little politicking. He can tell you the real legend of the old Viner place, and what went on there in the old days, can search a title in his mind before he has to refer to county records, and lives in the ground-floor apartment of the cupolaed house in which he was born — the house bought by his grandfather, who was a minor henchman of Boss Tweed. Although there has never been any suggestion of financial hanky-panky about his own reputation, there still clings to him, somehow, the equivocal aura of the man who turns a dollar because he is in the know. As he stands at the bar, with his hat brim turned low over his long, swart face, so that if you are near him and fairly tall you cannot glimpse anything but his mouth (for the judge is quite short, and in the manner of many short men, affects hats a little too high in the crown and wide of brim), he keeps a silence weighted faintly with an indication that silence is what he has come here for. If he is addressed, however, on a question of local affairs, he likes to pronounce the answers in a measured, monotonous voice, although he will never keep the conversational ball rolling with the added fillip of a question or an opinion. He is at the bar briefly at five, at seven-thirty, and at ten, so precisely that Denis, the owner, often may answer a time query from one of the regulars: “Almost time for the judge’s last round.” He has two drinks at five, three at seven-thirty, and three at ten, always of straight bourbon with a dash of bitters, and always set before him by Denis as soon as he appears. He has probably not ordered out loud for years, never buys or is bought a drink, and has long since managed to convey, by this routine, that for him, liquor — something to be accomplished, as it were, as is a meal by a man not interested in the table — is never in any case a specific for some disreputable need. It is ironic, therefore, that in a place where casualness and haphazard spontaneity are part of the mores, the very carefulness of the judge’s behavior has made him the oddity he imagines he is not.

  For, often, when a man is to be found night after night in the same place, swaying deep in drink, progressing through the stereotype stages of the drunk — from the painful interest in each newcomer, the mumbled revelation to the bartender, down to the final, locked communion with the glass — often a common thing to be heard in the pitying undertones behind him is:
“Nice guy though. They say his wife is a bitch.” But in the Rainbow Tavern this is most commonly said of the judge. Not by any of the other three regulars, incidentally, for all the regulars share a solidarity of reticence about their affairs outside, one even stronger than is usual among men, perhaps, and peculiarly noticeable, since it suggests that, with them, home may be really the outside, and “inside” is here. No one knows the origin of this rumor about the judge, or any verification for it, for although the other three know each other in another context, the social life of the town — have visited each other in their homes, and even, by prearrangement, have brought their wives here, after the manner of men who twice a year tolerate ladies’ night at the club — the judge does not know any of these people socially, and never brings his “outside” here. The rumor arises, possibly, because there is no worse place to hide than among the heightened awareness of others who are hiding too.

  When a man walks into the Rainbow Tavern, it is often possible to tell his mood, at what stage in the circuit he is, or how full he is or intends to be, from the angle at which he wears his hat. Dicky English’s hat is always tipped toward the back of his head. This is true of him wherever he is making an entrance, whether to the Rainbow or others of its ilk, to a party, to a meeting of one of the dozens of committees on which he is a prime mover, or to the smoker of the morning train. A buzzing, bustling, smart dresser of a man, in whose freshly barbered face, above his bow-tie, the slightly juvenile features are only healthfully obscured by a faintly moony, fortyish fat, Dicky, if not exactly a dream of fair women, is conceivably that of a number of fair typists in the office of which he is manager. Only longer acquaintance with him suggests that in his very trueness to form there is something much too credible. Watching Dicky at first, one is bored or amused by the larger-than-life verisimilitude of the man; later one wonders how, under such a bewildering collection of verisimilitudes, there can be a man at all. Here, one says, as he struts chestily into a conversation, or, his backside waggling in jaunty efficiency, is seen disappearing round the bend in the center of two or three cronies he has marshaled on an errand of pleasure — here is the eternal seller of tickets to raffles, the organizer of poker games and pig roasts; here is the life-of-the-party, in whom, as with so many such, there is just enough of the clown, the simpleton, the butt — so that by his very bêtises he breaks down the united ice of others, warming them, even at the cost of ridicule, to that sense of occasion he craves.