In the Absence of Angels

by Hortense Calisher

  To his intimates at the Rainbow, where his invariable greeting is “You’re planning to go, aren’t you?” his invariable adieu “Be sure to be there, now,” Dicky passes for a joiner, a mixer, a man whose compulsion barely escapes buffoonery, but is invaluable to those whose gregariousness is more wistful, less competent. He is sensitive to the needs of the company, too — a Rotarian in Rotary, a father among fathers, a fornicator among fornicators — always so long as he can go on talking. Even his drinking is versatile and somehow controlled; he is good for an elegiac, gossipy chat in a corner or for an all-night spree with the boys, but even in the midst of the spree he never seems personally drunk. Only when you see him at home, a paterfamilias outdoing all others, or at a roadhouse, perhaps, this time with the wife, to whom he is playing the uxoriously gallant part of the husband on his girl’s night out, or in the morning smoker, where he persists in reading tidbits of news to men whose issues of the same paper are already slack and crumpled in their hands — only then may you realize that Dicky is more than a man who lives for the occasion — he is a man who cannot live without it, however small. Like those little mechanical toy men with the keys in their split, metal backs, he will scuttle around and around only as long as the original impetus lasts — one begins to imagine, behind the truckling rounds of his talk, a gasping prescience that, when he slackens, he will topple over on his side forever. He is a man who convinces himself into humanity only by the ululating sound of his own voice. And because one can imagine him en route to an experience, or possibly from it, but never actually in the middle of it, one can form conclusions as to Dicky’s reasons for stopping so often at a place like the Rainbow, which is essentially, after all, en route.

  As for Jack Burdette and Henry Lister, there is no need to take up separately two who are almost always together. They roomed together at college, went into business and married at about the same time, bought houses on adjoining streets in that fancy modern development in Northville before it was too evident that their wives would never get along, and refugees now, each from the disapproval of two wives, are ever more closely united in the deep beatitudes of the bottle. Jack is a great beef of a man with a fine nose only just beginning to vein, and an extraordinarily sweet smile which, with the cleft in the first of his chins, forms a solitary fleur-de-lys above the others. He is one of those large, deceptively solid men who melt in drink: as the evening advances, the smile grows fixed on a face which recedes behind it like a huge, fair egg, the bottom outline of which has been drawn several times over by a wavering artist.

  Seen over his shoulder, in that rich, Rembrandt-colored air of the Rainbow, which is half submerged smell, half expunged light, Henry Lister’s face, mouse-sharp and precise, does not change at all. There is no mystery about Henry unless it is the absence of one. He is a neutral, common denominator of a man, whose only departure from the ordinary is his drinking; even the latter seems an effort to fill up the uncomfortable reservoir of his averageness. He is never out of place in any company he keeps, and never quite of it; he is a man who is always seen over someone else’s shoulder — in this case Jack’s.

  Over the years, the association of these two has effected a likeness quite apart from looks — the kind of dual semblance which occurs in a long, uneventful marriage. Jack, who is an investment counselor, often surprises his business acquaintances with quite a bookish allusion, and Henry, who is in the trade department of a publishing house, is considered by his colleagues to be pretty sharp on the market. During the business day, Jack’s eye is remarkably clear and shrewd, notwithstanding the night before, and Henry’s manner may be a little on the vague side, but at closing time in the Rainbow, after the long, matched session of glass for glass, it is Henry who gently leads the faltering Jack away from the bar and drives him home.

  One might think that their wives — both childless, both graduates of the stern discipline of the evasive phone call, the mummified supper, the endless evening in the empty living room, of which there happens to be a counterpart not half a block away — one would think that they might pool their grievances in a sort of friendship too. Such is not the case, however. They hate each other — oddly enough each of the women saves her invective not for her rival, but for his wife. It is simpler that way perhaps. Or possibly it is easier to bear the onus of a rival than the presence of someone whose grievances are the same.

  Once or twice Henry and Jack have been known to josh each other over this quirk of Alice’s and Mary Lou’s, but only in the clichés with which men refer to women at the Rainbow, where it is generally conceded that the ladies, all of them sphinxes, are worth the solving at times, but blessedly not here and now. Mostly, however, the two men sit on in silence, accumulating on the abacus of their bar bill an ever huger total of hours they have spent thus together, two eunuchs sitting in a quietude from which trouble has been castrated, at a comfortable, derisive distance from the harem.

  This, then, was the way things stood with the four regulars, when Mrs. Henry Lister, on a pink May evening which contrasted, who knows how fiercely, with her sallow day, cut her wrists.

  On this particular Monday night, when the phone rang in the booth at the Rainbow, the four men had the bar to themselves. This is often the case on Mondays, for at the Rainbow there is a discernible, taken-for-granted rhythm to the evenings of the week. Sunday is the big night; Denis is rarely able to close the place until four. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are slow; even Henry and Jack may not appear until after ten or perhaps not at all, presumably having gone home for a token dinner and been prevailed upon to stay. Thursdays are pretty normal, and Fridays the bar begins to expand again, with men who drink in a certain propriety, duty-bound, as it were, to honor the inception of the week end. Saturday is a poor night for the regulars, who are shunted out of their niche by celebrants who come (as the four indicate to each other with faint shrugs) apparently from nowhere, and Denis is kept busy shooing minors out of the place. But on Sunday nights the bar really hums, with an added group of familiars who arrive gratefully after the dearth of the day. Meeting on the station platform the morning after, the three regulars (for the judge, of course, does not commute) greet each other with reminiscent shakes of the head, eying each other’s gray gills and red, granular eyelids, and sit at an understanding distance from each other in the smoker, retiring glumly behind their papers. If a man just makes the train by the skin of his teeth, this is the one morning in which he is not chaffed. Even Dicky English has learned to shut his face on Monday mornings.

  During this particular first day of the business week, the city streets had been stroked with summer. When the evening train set down its passengers in Northville, it could be seen that the leaves, although still new against the sky, were no longer single and choice. The air had a beautiful, clear expectancy about it, like the inside of a glass bell that was about to be rung. The door of the Rainbow, though not yet screened, had been ajar.

  Now, with the bar to themselves, the four were settled restfully on their stools like convalescents from a mutual illness, just able to savor the malted dimness of the place in the safely muted company of their kind. Henry and Jack had been here since train time, the judge was in the middle of his second round, and Dicky had just breezed in.

  “Some night last night, eh Denis?” said Dicky.

  Denis nodded. He was a profound listener, with a repertoire of silent assent which ranged from the nod to a look of alert, pained sympathy which came, actually, from varicosed veins, but was a great help to his business.

  Dicky tipped his hat further back on his head. “Hear Patterson’s still on the town. They say he never did get home.”

  “In here about four o’clock for a minute,” said Denis, polishing a glass.

  “Better watch himself lately.” Dicky clapped his hands together, raised one to readjust his hat, looked about him minutely as if to search the possibilities of the hour, and let his arm sink around Jack’s neck. “Howja do at the office today pal?”
/>   Jack turned his head carefully within the crook of the encircling arm, and smiled his sweet, ponderous smile. “I died,” he said.

  “How about Henry, there? He looks able to sit up and take nourishment?”

  Henry screwed his eyes shut appreciatively, but made no answer. Down at the left end of the bar, the judge looked owlishly into an empty glass, Denis moved quickly to replace it with the third and last of his round. And the telephone rang.

  No one at the bar flinched in notice, although the telephone rings infrequently at the Rainbow. The phone knew better than to call for any of the men here.

  Denis shuffled through the archway into the alcove which held the phone booth and the pinball machine. After a minute he returned, gestured at Henry, and returned to his polishing. Henry pointed at himself with raised eyebrows, shrugged, and walked out to the booth. He was there for some time.

  “Da-te-da, da-te-da, da-te-da,” said Dicky, falsetto.

  Jack hunched himself over the bar, lit a cigarette, dropped the match on the floor before it was quite dead, and rubbed it out with his shoe.

  “Jesus Henry what’s wrong?” said Dicky.

  Henry stood in the archway, his face white, his arms dangling uncertainly at his sides. “The police. They took Alice to the hospital.”

  Jack lurched to his feet. “Something with the car, Hen?”

  “She tried to ...” Henry turned his head from side to side. “She acted all right this morning,” he said on a high note. “She acted perfectly O.K.”

  “Drive you down, fella?” said Dicky.

  Henry seemed not to have heard him. He reached out and touched the bar surface, moving his hand along as if he expected to find a tab there. “They want to type my blood they said.” He moved toward the door.

  “I’ll go with you, Hen.” Jack went toward him, weaving a little.

  “No,” said Henry. His eyes returned to focus. He shivered. “No. Don’t do that, Jack.” He went out the door.

  “Call me here. Call me if you need me.” There was no answer except the current of air from the swinging door. They heard the splutter of a motor, its outraged whine and diminuendo. Through the door, which remained ajar, came the dark, stealing scents of May. After a minute, Denis walked over and closed it.

  “She have a miss, you think?” whispered Dicky. No one answered him.

  The judge coughed, and spoke. “Sold them that house they have. Over on Summit. June ’42 it was, just before the rise. Nice little property.” He shook his head, as if he could not be responsible for the way people mishandled the lives to which he had helped them attach a property of value. Then, glancing at the clock, he saw that it was time. Pulling his hat brim lower, he nodded and left.

  “Well, guess I’m on my way too,” said Dicky. “Drop you, Jack? Well, see you in the morning then.” He eased himself halfway out the door, then poked his head back in. “Chilly,” he said, shaking his head solemnly, and shut the door behind him.

  It can be awkward, drinking alone at a bar. Is the man behind it wholly a servitor at such times, or must recognition be made of the fact that two human beings are together in an otherwise empty room? At such times it is good to be where one is known. Denis sat reading his newspaper, his shell-rims far down on his nose, his presence as sane and reassuring as a night nurse. It was a racing final he read; occasionally he made a mark on it with a pencil, or rose to freshen Jack’s glass. There were no other demands on his attention either from his customer or from the phone. Gradually the room, although it had no fireplace, took on the guttered look of a room in which a fire has died down. When the late freight chuffed by on her way to Newburgh, Denis went to the booth, called a cabby with whom he had an arrangement, shook Jack by the shoulder, and sent him home.

  The next day, Dicky English, purveying the news to the smoker, had the field to himself. Henry, of course, was absent, and Jack did not appear for several days. On the second of these, the smoker heard, as the town had already heard, that Mrs. Henry Lister had muffed it. She would survive. This was received as such news is. The suicide attempt which is successful has an awesome achievement about it, before which we quail, but bow. It is a terrible epitaph, but it is one, and its headstone will sooner or later be obscured like any other. But the incompetent who has botched, who has been retrieved against his will, has committed an indecency. He has brought his nakedness not to the tomb, but to the tea table. Later, his existence will fret us like that of the invalid whose ailment death refuses to dignify.

  On the morning when Jack returned to the train, it was observed that he had the drained, pearly look of dedication of the man who is on the wagon. No comments were made, since it was known how close Jack had been to Henry — too close, it was assumed, for comfort. Not a few of the other men who had been riding the circuit a little too steadily were, over that week end, unwontedly solicitous of their wives and gardens. But, the following week, when Henry, too, returned to the train, it was plain that the shaft which Mrs. Lister had aimed at her husband, had not only struck glancingly at his friend but had also sheared between the two. Their steps no longer joined naturally with each other’s, when they greeted, it was with the creaking tact of constraint, and although they both were avoiding the Rainbow, they did not do so together.

  When Henry, taking his month off early, took his wife down to Atlantic City, both the town and the smoker were relieved. It was felt that he had done the proper thing not only for his wife, but for the community. At present, for instance, it was neither natural to inquire after her, or to neglect to. But for a long time, even after things blew over, Henry would be a constriction on any company he kept — precisely because he had suffered no conventional loss.

  Had he done so, however unusually, one could still have offered him the normal currency of condolence. One could have demonstrated one’s fealty at the funeral parlor, or, meeting him at a later date, extended to him, according to the degrees of delicacy and acquaintance, either the mute clasp of the hand, or one of those basso-timbred remarks with which we acknowledge to one another that we are all as dust. Still later, after his sorrow was a little out of its black, one could have propelled him tenderly toward drink, as one propels a widow toward tears. As things were, however, Mrs. Lister, and death, in their brief affair together, had cuckolded Henry, had made of him, moreover, a man whose cuckoldry is known.

  During the weeks of Henry’s absence, Jack returned, little by little, to the Rainbow. Each evening he walked in earlier and stayed on later, until, rosy once more, he was back at the old routine. On those evenings when Denis judged him unfit to drive himself home the cabman was called. Or sometimes the cabby checked for himself, in a friendly sort of way.

  On one of these evenings, just after Denis had made the call, Jack brought his glass down on the bar with a rap that raised Denis’ startled glance from his paper, and leaned intently over the bar.

  “Not the same around here, is it Denis?” he muttered. “Not the same.” He looked into his glass, which he was swiveling in his hand. After a moment he looked up again. “It never will be the same,” he said, in a voice suddenly free of rheum.

  Denis, who, in his trade, witnessed few of the soaring denouements of drama, but often administered to its tag-ends and dispersals, kept his own counsel.

  On another Monday night, this time late in June, Dicky, the judge, and Jack once more had the bar to themselves. It was again the time of the judge’s second round, and Dicky, again, had just breezed in. There was nothing oddly Aristotelian about this unity of time, space, and character; as must be clear by now, the very predictability of the Rainbow, the very reassurance of the way in which evenings spent there tend to blur into one long, continuous evening, is a part of its stock in trade. This night, however was the one on which Henry Lister chose to return.

  When he walked through the door, which was screened now, and had been closed against the humming insect tide of summer, his manner in no way admitted that this was a return, or that there had bee
n, at any time, a choice to be made. Denis, alone of the men there, was not surprised. On the faces of the other friends there was a momentary flash, like that on a mirror turned once against the light and laid flat.

  To the right of Jack, who was farthest down the bar, there were three empty stools. Henry sat down on the middle one of these.

  “Evening,” said Henry. “Judge …Jack …Dicky …evening.”

  From the quiet chorus of greetings, Dicky’s rose with verve. “Well look who’s here! If he isn’t a sight for sore eyes!” He walked over and pumped Henry’s hand with unction. “Looking fit, boy,” he added, in the low, secret tones of allegiance. “Real fit.”

  Behind him, the others stared into their drinks, but on Henry’s face there was a singular look of gratitude. It was as if Dicky, in doing what might be expected of Dicky, had shown him that whatever else he had returned for was likely to be here too.