In the Absence of Angels

by Hortense Calisher

  We confer, Lotte and I, in nudges, and finally Lotte pushes in ahead of me, her smothered giggle sounding above the rasp of a bell on the door. For a moment, it seems warmer inside — then not. A light is turned on in the back of the store, and we see that the second room is actually only a space that has been curtained off. The curtains are open. A woman comes forward and shakes Hilda angrily by the shoulder, with a flood of foreign words, then turns to us, speaking in a cringing voice. Candy? Crackers? How much money we got? Her face has a strong look to it, with good teeth and a mouth limned in blackish hair. In the half room behind her, on one of two day beds, a boy sits up, huddling in a man’s thick sweater whose sleeves cover his hands. A smaller child clambers down from the other bed and runs to stand next to his mother. He is too young to have much hair, and the sight of his naked head, his meagre cotton shirt, and his wet diaper drooping between his legs makes me feel colder.

  It becomes evident that Hilda and we know each other. I remember Hilda’s cheekbones — sharp, and slowly red. The woman, all smiles now, moves toward us and lightly strokes Lotte’s collar. That year, Lotte and I have made a fetish of dressing alike; we have on navy serge dresses with white collars pinned and identical silver bars.

  “Little teachers!” the woman says. “Like little teachers!” She hovers over the counter a minute, then thrust a small box of crackers, the kind with marshmallow, into Lotte’s hand. The baby sets up a cry and is pushed behind the woman’s skirt. The boy on the bed stares at the box but says nothing. Confused, Lotte holds out her nickel. The woman hesitates, then shakes her head, refusing. Two fingers hover again over Lotte’s collar but do not touch it. “Hilda will be teacher,” the woman says. She makes a kind of genuflection of despair toward the place behind her, and we see that on a shelf there, in the midst of jumbled crockery and pans, is a man’s picture, dark-bordered, in front of which a flame flickers, burning deep in a thick glass. She makes another gesture, as if she were pulling a cowl over her head, lets her hand fall against her skirt, and edges after us as we sidle toward the door. She bends over us. “Your mamas have what for me to sew, maybe? Or to clean?”

  Hilda speaks, a short, guttural phrase in the language we do not understand. It is the only time she speaks. The woman steps back. Lotte still has the nickel in her open hand. Now Hilda is at the door. And now I see her mouth, the long lips pressed tight, turned down at the corners. She reaches out and takes Lotte’s nickel. Then we are outside the door.

  I do not remember anything about the rest of the walk home. But I remember that as I round the corner to my own street, alone, and am suddenly out of the wind, the air is like blue powder, and from the entrance to my house, as the doorman opens it and murmurs a greeting, the clean light scours the pavement. In the elevator, to my wind-smarting eyes the people look warmly blurry and gilded, and the elevator, rising perfectly, hums.

  Lotte and I do not ever go back, of course, and we quickly forget the whole thing, for as the school year advances, the gap widens permanently between girls like us and those other unilluminated ones who are grinding seriously toward becoming teachers, for many of whose families the possession of a teacher daughter will be one of the bootstraps by which they will lift themselves to a feeling of security — that trust in education which is the dominant security in a country that prides itself on offering no other.

  Then a bad time comes for me. My mother, after the birth of another child, late in life, is very ill and is sent away — to hunt for a warmer climate, it is said, although long afterward I know that it is a climate of the spirit for which she hunts. Once or twice during that time, she is brought home, able only to stand helplessly at the window, holding on to me, the tears running down her face. Then she is taken away again, for our windows are five flights up.

  Business is bad, too, everywhere, and my father makes longer and longer sales trips away from home. We have a housekeeper, Mrs. Gallagher, who is really the baby’s nurse, since we cannot afford a cook and a nurse, too. She does not wash my hair regularly or bother about my habits, and I grow dirty and unkempt. She is always whining after me to give up my favorite dresses to her own daughter, “a poor widow’s child in a convent,” after which, applying to my father for money, she buys me new dresses, probably with the daughter in mind, and my clothes become oddly tight and loud. Months later, after she is gone, it is found that she has drunk up a good part of my father’s hoarded wines, but now no one knows this, and she is a good nurse, crooning, starched and fierce, over the basket that holds the baby, whom she possessively loves. Standing behind her, looking at the basket, which she keeps cloudy with dotted swiss and wreathed in rosy ribbon, I think to myself that the baby nestled there looks like a pink heart. Perhaps I think secretly, too, that I am the displaced heart.

  So I begin to steal. Not at home, but at school. There I am now one of the lowest scholars. I have altogether lost track in Latin, and when I am sent to the board in geometry, I stand there desperately in front of the mazy diagram, the chalk in my slack hand, watching the teacher’s long neck, in which the red impatience rises until it looks like a crane’s leg. “Next!” she says, finally, and I walk back to my seat. At test time, I try frantically to copy, but the smart, safe ones ignore my pleading signal. And once the visiting nurse sends me home because there are nits in my bushy, tangled hair. Thereafter, when I follow on the heels of the crowd to the soda parlor — my hand guarding several days’ saved-up carfare, in the hope of finding someone to treat — the sorority is closed.

  So, day after day, I treat myself. For by now, although there is plenty of food at home and Mrs. Gallagher packs me thick sandwiches (mostly of cheese, which she buys conveniently in a big slab to last the week) — by now I am really hungry only and constantly for sweets. I live on the thought of them, for the suspended moment when the nugget is warm in my mouth or crammed, waiting, in my hidden hand. And the sweets that comfort me most are those bought secretly and eaten alone. It never occurs to me to ask Mrs. Gallagher for spending money. At noontime, habitually now, I slip into the dark coatroom, where the girls’ coats are hung, one on top of another, and, sliding a hand from pocket to pocket, one can pretend to be looking for one’s own. And there, once again, I meet Hilda.

  We meet face to face in the lumpy shadows of the coat-room, each of us with a hand in the pocket of a coat that is not her own. We know this on the instant, recognition clamoring between us, two animals who touch each other’s scent in the prowling dark. I inch my hand out of the gritty pocket and let it fall at my side. I do not see what Hilda does with her hand. But in that moment before we move, in the furry dusk of that windowless room, I see what is in her eyes. I do not give it a name. But I am the first to leave.

  Even now, I cannot give it a name. It eludes me, as do the names of those whom, for layered reason upon reason, we cannot bear to remember. I have remembered as best I can.

  The rest belongs to that amalgam called growing up, during which, like everyone else, I learn to stumble along somehow between truth and compromise. Shortly after that day, I fall ill of jaundice, and I am ill for a long while. During that time, my mother returns home, restored — or perhaps my illness is in part her restorative. Her housewifely shock at what she finds blows through our home like a cleansing wind, and her tonic scolding, severe and rational as of old, is like the bromide that disperses horror. When I go back to school, after months of absence, I have the transient prestige of one who has been seriously ill, and with my rehabilitated appearance this is almost enough to reinstate me. Then an English teacher discovers my poems, and although I am never again a sound student in any other class, I attain a certain eminence in hers, and I rise, with each display coaxed out of me, rung by rung, until I am safe. Meanwhile, Hilda has dropped out of school. I never ask, but she is gone, and I do not see her there again.

  Once, some ten years later, I think I see her. During the year after I am married, but not yet a mother, or yet a widow, a friend takes me to a meeting for the Spanis
h resistance, at which a well-known woman poet speaks. On the fringes of the departing crowd outside the shabby hall, young men and women are distributing pamphlets, shaking canisters for contributions. I catch sight of one of them, a girl in a brown leather jacket, with cropped blond hair, a smudge of lipstick that conceals the shape of the mouth, but a smudge of excitement on cheekbones that are the same. I strain to look at her, to decide, but the crowd is pressing, the night is rainy, and I lose sight of her before I am sure. But now I have reason to be sure. Yes, it was she.

  It was she — and I have remembered as best I can. While I have sat here, the moonlight, falling white on the cast-down figure of the other waker, slumped now in sleep, showing up each brilliant, signal detail of the room in a last, proffered perspective, has flooded in and waned. I hear the first crepitations of morning. I am alone with my life, and with the long view.

  They will tell us this morning that we must come down off our pin point into the arena. But a pin point can become an arena.

  They will tell us that while we, in our easy compassion, have carried the hunger of others in our minds, they have carried it on their backs. And this is true. For this, even when they say it corruptly, is their strength — and our indefensible shame.

  They will tell us that we have been able to cherish values beyond hunger only because we have never known basic hunger ourselves — and this will be true also. But this is our paradox — and this is our stronghold, too.

  They will tell us, finally, that there is no place for people like us, that the middle ground is for angels, not for men. But there is a place. For in the absence of angels and arbiters from a world of light, men and women must take their place.

  Therefore, I am here, sitting opposite the white bulletin on the wall. For the last justification for people like us is to remember people like Hilda with justice. Therefore, in this room where there is no cockcrow except of conscience, I have remembered everything I can about Hilda Kantrowitz, who, this morning, is to be our prosecutor.

  I will need to close my eyes when I have to enter the little latrine.

  A Box of Ginger

  FIVE STORIES BELOW, the hot white pavements sent the air shimmering upward. From the false dusk of the awning, Kinny, leaning out to watch the iridescent black top of the funeral car, smelled the indeterminate summer smell of freshly ironed linen and dust. Below, he could see his father help the aunts into the car and stumble in after them, and the car roll away to join the others at the cemetery. The winter before, at the funeral of his father’s other brother, everything had left from here, hearse and all. The house had been crowded with people who had entered without ringing and had seated themselves soundlessly in the parlor, greeting each other with a nod or a sidewise shake of the head, and for days there had been a straggling procession of long-faced callers, who had clasped hands with his father and mother and had been conducted, after a decent interval, to his grandmother’s rooms, where she lived somewhat apart from the rest of the family. They had all come out clucking, “She’s a wonderful woman, a won-der-ful old woman!,” had been given coffee, and had gone away. Today, there was no one, and the wide glaring street was blank with light.

  “Kinny, where are you?”

  “I’m in the parlor.”

  “How many times have I told you to say ‘living room’? Parlor!” His mother clicked her tongue as she came into the room. “Why didn’t you go to the Park?” She walked toward him and looked at him squarely, something he had noticed grown people almost never seemed to have time to do.

  “Listen, Kinny!” Her voice had the conspiratorial tone that made him uncomfortable. “You’re not to let on to Grandma anything — anything about the funeral. It’s a terrible thing to grow to a great age and see your children go before you.” Her gaze had already shifted back to normal, slightly to the right of him and just above his head. “Don’t lean so far out that window!” She turned and went into the kitchen to help Josie, the maid. His family never sat down to a dinner for just themselves; there were always the aunts, or the innumerable cousins, who came to pay their short devoirs to Grandma and stayed interminably at her daughter-in-law’s table.

  He wandered back into the room, dawdling. It was a parlor, very unlike the Frenchy living rooms of his friends. Opposite him, the wall was half covered by a tremendous needle-point picture, framed in thick, curdled gilt, of Moses striking the rock and bringing forth water at Meribah. “And Moses lifted up his hand,” it said in the big Doré Bible, “and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also.” The faces of Moses and the Israelites were done in such tiny stitches that they looked painted, and there was a little dog lapping at the gush of water, which had minute, glistening beads worked into it. Diagonally across the room from the picture, the wreathed cherubim of a Vernis-Martin cabinet were flanked by a green marble column, on which poised an anonymous metal girl, arms outflung against a verdigrised apple tree, which sprouted electric-light bulbs.

  He went over and fingered the Victrola, the only relatively new thing in the room. Slanting back on its lemon-oiled shelves lay all the newly acquired Red Seal records: Galli-Curci in the sextet from “Lucia”; the Flonzaley Quartet, whose sprigged mustachios he knew well from the Victor catalogue; and Alma Gluck, singing “From the la-and of the sky-ee blue” and then “wawtah” very quick. He would have liked to play that one, or “Cohen on the Telephone,” but he was sure that he would not be allowed to today.

  Walking into the hot, brassy clutter of the kitchen, he stopped at the icebox and drew himself a glass of water from a pipe than ran back into the ice chamber — a fixture in which his mother took pride but which he thought overrated.

  “Can I have some of Dad’s French Vichy?” He wasn’t even sure that he liked its flat, mineral taste, but it was something of a feat to get it.

  “No, you can’t,” said his mother, gingerly taking a tray of prune pockets out of the oven. “I can’t be sending to the drugstore all the time. Catering to the fads and fancies of a lot of — A boarding house, that’s what I’m running! You’d think they all lived here!”

  “Mother, what did Uncle Aaron die of?” he said idly.

  He already knew the answer. He rarely needed to ask an explicit question about family affairs. By picking up crumbs and overtones at the endless family gatherings, he had amassed his information. His Uncle Aaron had had pneumonia and had been convalescing on an upstate farm all spring. But his mother said, “Of old age, I guess,” and gazed past him. Kinny’s father, years older than she, was only a decade younger than the dead uncle. The family was getting down. His father had only sisters now. Kinny began to eat a prune pocket.

  “You wait till you get to the table. One of these days, you’ll burst!”

  “Hattie!” a sharp, high voice called. “Hattie!” Then a small bell tinkled insistently.

  “Go in and see what Grandma wants,” his mother said. “Tell her the optician’s man will be in this afternoon. And if she asks about a letter from Aaron, for goodness’ sakes don’t say anything!” She sighed. “I’m sure I don’t know what they’re going to tell her this time.”

  He idled slowly down the hall to his grandmother’s bedroom, although he knew she had already been helped to her sitting room, where she spent most of the day. Light filtered through the half-drawn shades over the huge bed, with its wide panel of burled Circassian walnut, topped by a two-foot pediment of acanthus leaves. He swung himself onto the broad footboard, high as his shoulder. Up to it swelled the feather bed for which his mother was always wanting to substitute a hair mattress. Everything was big here — the looming wardrobe, where he had sometimes hidden, choking, among the tight-packed camphored clothes; the long chests, with their stretches of cold, fatty-looking brown marble; the towering, grim-latched trunks.

  On his confirmation day, just past, when one of the trunks had been opened for the presentation of a gold watch with a remote, scrolled face, h
e had been allowed to finger a drawerful of Virginia Treasury notes with the serial numbers marked by hand in brown ink, and a miniature envelope, addressed in long-essed script — his grandmother’s wedding invitation, dated 1852. Still in her twenties, his grandmother had married a man well past fifty, and her youngest son, Kinny’s father, had waited for marriage until he, too, was almost fifty, so if you figured back, here was he, Kinny Elkin, in 1924, with a grandfather, sunken in the ciphers of time, who had been born in the eighteenth century. In his mind, he saw the generations as single people walking a catwalk, each with a hand clutching a long supporting rope that passed from one to another but disappeared into mist at either end.

  “Kinny! Grandma wants you!” From the sitting room down the hall he heard the familiar clank-clank of the gadrooned brass handles on the sideboard. Grandma would be standing stiffly with the yellow box of preserved ginger, uglily lettered in black, clutched in one knuckled hand, waiting for the small afternoon ceremony that had been her only apparent notice of him for as long as he could remember. Reluctantly, he opened the door and went down the hall.

  She stood there just as he had known she would, a dainty death’s head no taller than he, in the black silk uniform of age, one hand wavering on her cane, the other tight on the yellow box. The sparse hair, dressed so closely on the skull, enlarged the effect of the ears and the high nose with its long nostrils; the mouth, a mere boundary line for tributary wrinkles, firmed itself now and again. She was neat as old vellum, and though time had shrunk her to waxwork, it had left her free of the warts and hairs and pendulous dewlaps he saw on other old people. Her admitted age was ninety-three, but the family was of the opinion that she had concealed a few years, out of vanity.