In the Absence of Angels

by Hortense Calisher

Next to Martha, Rose, her younger sister, whom she intermittently supported, made the muted small sounds that were meant to indicate delicately that her digestion, as usual, was not acting well. Rose was the only one of her father’s cousins whom Hester disliked. With the slack shoulders and drooping neck of the invalid, she sloped inward upon herself, as if it were only by an intense concentration on her viscera that their processes might be maintained, as if the fractional huff-huff of her heart would go on only so long as she was there to listen and bid it. About her there was always the cottony, medicinal smell of indefinite ailments which would never be confirmed, Hester felt unsympathetically, except by that astringent confirmer, death.

  “Want some soda, Rose?” asked her mother, “We could run across to the drugstore.”

  “No. I’ll be all right,” said Rose, satisfied that her distress had been noted. She turned toward Hester, whose stolidity she was always trying to court. “Getting such a big girl!” she said. “Why isn’t she at camp, with Kinny?”

  “She has to make up her algebra at summer school,” said her mother. “Besides, she says fourteen and a half is too old for camp.”

  “Fourteen years. Imagine!” said Martha, the involuntary spasm flicking over her face, like an oblique comment. “Why I can remember her in her bassinet!”

  “Yes,” said Hester, in a dreamy urgency to say it before anyone else could. “How time flies!”

  “Hester!” said her mother.

  From Selena, sitting rigid, unyielding, in the supple currents of the dark, came a stifled snort, whether of amusement or disapproval Hester could not quite tell. Of all the adjuncts to their household, Selena was the most constant and the most silent. Spare and dark-haired, the color of a dried fig, she wore odd off colors, like puce and mustard and reseda green. Although they did not become her, she carried them like an invidious commentary on the drab patterns around her, and her concave chest was heavily looped with the coral residue of some years’ stay in Capri as an art student, in her youth. She was the secretive spinster remnant of a branch of the family that had once been rich, so her concealment of her circumstances and her frequent presence at meals provoked occasional discussion as to whether she was still rich but miserly or had lost her money. “Poor Selena,” Hester’s father had once commented. “She’s hungry for people.” With her face pursed in her habitual contempt for the family of Philistines, she sat at their table nevertheless, partaking voraciously of something more than food.

  “Where does Selena live?” Hester had once asked her mother.

  “Oh, somewhere in Brooklyn,” her mother had answered indifferently. “In the house her mother left her, I think.”

  “Were you ever there?”

  “No-o.” Her mother had shaken her head, amused, with the depreciative smile of those for whom Manhattan was New York. “Someone once told your father she’d sold it. No one really knows, though. She keeps very close.”

  “Did you ever see any of her paintings?”

  “She painted me once, holding you, just after you were born. Mother and child.” Her mother had laughed slightly.

  “What was it like? Can I see it?”

  “Oh!” Her mother had thrown up her hands, then brought them together, shaking her head in derision. “I don’t know where it went. I suppose she took it back.”

  It had been Selena’s mother, the old grandmother’s elder sister, who had sent the grandmother, long ago, from California, the silver service with the pistol-handled knives the family still used at dinner parties. With it had come the large cup and saucer, covered with beaten gold, that Hester and her brother, long used to hearing their father say, “That cup’s over a hundred years old!,” had taken to calling “the hundred-year cup.” Translating this to Selena, Hester privately visualized her as living in the narrow, high rooms of one of the single houses she associated with the very rich — in a house, perhaps, that was a kind of hundred-year cup of treasure, from which the humdrum touch of people would be inscrutably barred.

  Leaning forward, Hester almost touched her hand softly to the coral hanging like strips of rosy twigs on Selena’s flatness.

  “I like it better this way,” she said, “than round and smooth, like my baby beads.”

  “Oh?” said Selena, raising the furry circumflexes of her eyebrows. “And why do you like it better?”

  Accustomed to asking why, rather than to being asked, Hester hesitated, startled. “It’s more real,” she said, finally.

  “Real?” echoed Selena, the harsh tang of her voice thrusting the word forward, like a marble, to be felt and examined. Through the dimness, Hester could see her long, saffron face poised on one side, listening, weighing the word and Hester’s use of it.

  Emboldened by attention, Hester went further. “Where did you get them all — the corals, I mean?” she asked.

  “On the island of Capri.” There was a sostenuto, heroic pride in her tone, in the lifting of her chin, that stirred the others, Hester thought, to embarrassment and impatience.

  “We’d better be going in,” said her mother. “It’s getting damp.”

  “What’s it like — Capri?” asked Hester, imitating Selena’s drawn-out Italian vowel.

  “You might see for yourself someday,” said Selena.

  “Me?” said Hester. “Why, nobody ever travels in our family, except Daddy.”

  “No?” said Selena. She leaned back on the bench, turning her face away from them, shaking the loops on her chest slightly with her bony fingers, producing the slack sound of imperfect castanets.

  “I really think ...” said Hester’s mother.

  Across the street, through the sluggish air, there floundered a white, heavy figure, moving in starts and stops. It was Josie, the maid. As she ran, she gesticulated sidewise with her arms, wailing, “Meesis Elkin! Oh, Meesis Elkin!,” so that the people on the other benches turned to look at them.

  “Oh, that girl!” muttered her mother.

  Josie had reached them. “Granma!” panted Josie. “I took in the eggnog and I could not vake her. I think — Come quick!”

  “My God!” said Hester’s mother. “Joe will never forgive me!”

  Like a chorus, the three other women wheeled protectively around her, and, gathering up their long skirts, they all ran stumbling across the street to the entranceway of the apartment house. Catching up as they were entering the elevator, Hester tugged at her mother’s elbow.

  “Forgive you for what?” she said.

  “For letting his mother die while he’s away,” said her mother, staring ahead. As they entered the apartment, she turned savagely on Hester. “You go in your room and stay there!”

  The house filled almost magically with people, so no one noticed that Hester remained in the dining room, taking it all in, sitting alone on one of the ring of chairs that were ranged around the table like supernumeraries in a play. First had come the doctor, routed from his Sunday-night card game, on whom her mother and Rose and Martha hung, as if on a priest, as he came out of her grandmother’s bedroom now, solemnly nodding his head. Selena followed, a step behind them.

  “Selena, phone the others, will you?” said her mother.

  “Be glad to,” said Selena gruffly.

  What perplexed Hester was that she really seemed to be glad to. Sitting straight as an upholstered stick in front of the phone, she handled it with import, calling Flora and Amy — the daughters of the dead one — and all the lesser relatives who would be offended if they were not among the first to be notified. Using the same formula as she got each number, she said not “your mother” or “your grandmother,” as the case might be, but “Aunt Bertha.” “I’m sorry to tell you,” she would say, “but just a little while ago Aunt Bertha ...”

  It was the closest to death Hester had ever been. Seated there alone at the great, round communal plate of the dining table, she felt herself all over, inwardly, for the abrasions that were proper to the circumstance, but found none — nothing except a shameful sense of
excitement over an extraordinary drama in which everyone unwontedly exposed himself. Aunt Flora, who had come, in answer to Selena’s call, from her apartment a block away, had superseded Selena at the phone, as befitted a daughter of the deceased. With tears ruining the rouge on her aged-soubrette face, under the high white hair, she called number after number, bearing up remarkably until she got her party and identified herself, at which point she quavered, “Oh, Nettie!,” “Oh, Walter!,” and then burst into what seemed to be welcomed, cathartic tears.

  I never cry over anything except myself, thought Hester guiltily, wondering whether, if they noticed her, they would expect her to be crying. Worriedly, she tried to think of something that would make her cry, but nothing stirred in her except the neutral, dispassionate awareness, the ignoble spur of interest.

  Dispossessed from her post, Selena came and sat down opposite her. She raised her brows in surprise at Hester’s still being up but said nothing, and her cheeks were hennaed with an unaccustomed tinge of participation. For a long time, the two of them sat there watching, while between them grew a tenuous thread of communion, as between two who sit at the edge of a party or a dance, sipping the moderate liqueur of observation, while around them swirl the tipsier ones, involved in a drunkenness the watchers do not share.

  At last, Hester’s mother, who had been busying herself like a distraught hostess, noticed her and, with an enraged whisper, sent her away to bed. Since Hester had always felt that her mother in the presence of others talked to her rather for their benefit than for hers, the scolding rolled off her numbed, sleepy head, and she walked away untouched, undisturbed, down the long hall to her room, past the closed door of her grandmother’s bedroom. As she stood tentatively in the darkness of her own doorway, the door of the bedroom opened, and two men came out carrying a long wicker hamper, which they set down, securing the creaking cover, and then swung between them again, with a servile, devotional gait.

  Sleepily pulling off her clothes, she was almost too tired to go through her nightly custom. She climbed onto the radiator under the window and stood there splayed out against the pane, feeling the familiar welling triumph of being suspended in space above people. She thought emulously of Selena, who remained apart, uninvolved, in her rich security of far places experienced, of distances apprehended. Bending down, she completed her ritual, sniffing at the jointure of the window, at its dark smell — a mixture of moisture and dust and the sharpening cool of night.

  In bed, the last thing Hester remembered was the word “capri,” which rolled toward her, in her mind uncapitalized, like a small coral bead, but when the brilliant afternoon sun woke her the following day, and sent her nuzzling down into the bedclothes, with their comfortable odor of orris and of her carelessly washed flesh, it was the hamper she remembered. She saw again the sickening rhythm in which the two men had moved — conspirators, shuffling out between them the surprisingly dowdy appurtenance of death.

  She reached under the bed, and, drawing out one of the books she kept secreted there, held it in her hand for a long time, but when her mother opened the door and surveyed her exasperatedly, she still had not opened it.

  “I never saw a more indifferent girl!” said her mother. “Your father’s home and carrying on terribly. Everything falls on me!” She walked around the room, flipping back the bedclothes, picking up objects with the grim, abstracted compulsion of the housewife, the straightener, the manager. “Get up!” she said fiercely. “The funeral’s at four o’clock. Make yourself a little decent, for once. Get that hair out of your eyes!”

  “Am I going to the funeral?” asked Hester.

  “No,” said her mother. “Your father doesn’t approve of children being exposed to death.” Then she walked to the window and, slowly, measuredly, as if she were moving in time with a conventional elegy prescribed for the occasion, pulled the shade down firmly all the way to the sill and left the room. Chilled, Hester watched her go, wondering, as she dressed herself haphazardly, if the hard little correctnesses — the properness that seemed so difficult to acquire — crept in gradually as one grew, or whether, on some unspecified name day, one came of age, stepped into the finished, hypocritical shell, and was suddenly grown.

  Once outside her door, she found the rest of the apartment sequestered and dim, as if some orderly person had just left, after solicitously muting the colors, numbing the sounds, strewing over everything the careful bleach of bereavement. From behind the closed door of her grandmother’s sitting room, she heard a low rustle of voices and, centered in them, an indescribable retching sound.

  She ran toward the warm neutrality of the kitchen. Josie was flusteredly scrabbling at batches of cookery, for which she had rooted out almost everything from the vast store-closet.

  “Don’t touch nothing!” Josie said hastily. Then, contrarily, she pushed toward Hester a plateful of palacsinta — thin pancakes stuffed with sweetened cottage cheese or melted jelly, which she would never make on command but which would appear suddenly when she had been moved, perhaps, by homesickness for her own country or by a sense of occasion. As Hester ate, Josie hovered over her, sighing.

  “T-t-t!” said Josie, rocking back and forth. “Is too bad.” Again Hester felt the flicker of guilt, as if someone had twanged a string inside her and had found it slack, without resonance.

  She left the kitchen and crossed the hall to the dining room. Peering into the parlor through the French doors, dully masked with net, she made out a corner where chairs had been drawn aside to make room for what must be the coffin. Parting the doors stealthily, she went in, planning to see for herself the thing to which children must not be exposed.

  As she entered, a figure seated in front of the coffin moved slightly. Terror of the unimaginable jumped in her, for the figure was tiny, bent, and dressed in spare black, as her grandmother had always been. Expelling her breath, she saw that this was a stranger, whose china teeth and thick, glossy brown wig, rimming her face like a hat, were both too big for her, giving her the appearance of a Punch-and-Judy doll that had been excessively repaired.

  Hester drew back, but the woman, misinterpreting her withdrawal, motioned toward her ingratiatingly, with a custodian’s pride. Drawing Hester compellingly to the coffin’s side, the woman then stood with her hands bunched together at her neckbones, her bright, avian stare cocked sidewise as Hester looked down into the box.

  Less wrinkled, whiter than in life, Hester’s grandmother extended her short length in the box, with the same finished, miniature look she had always had, with the same natural dignity. At any moment, Hester felt, she might unlock her eyes and say, “But how could you think I would not handle this decently, properly, too?” Shrinking from the gross casualness of the woman attitudinized beside her, Hester wavered nearer the box, and when she turned and ran from the room, it was from the live woman that she ran.

  In the hallway, she collided with the hatted figure of her mother, and for a moment that soft collision with dim, powdery fragrance, with the half-remembered enveloping warmth of babyhood, clouded the barrier of properness between them.

  “Who’s that little old woman in there?” Hester whispered.

  “Who? Oh, she’s a professional watcher,” said her mother. She was carefully draping a thick veil over her hat. “Your grandmother was Orthodox, you know,” she added with a certain disdain. “Someone has to be with the dead until the burial, the next day.”

  “Is that her job?” Hester whispered.

  “It’s a volunteer society, I believe. I suppose women who have no other …I suppose one gives them something,” her mother said impatiently, with a final shake of herself. “Go stay with Josie,” she added, frowning.

  Lingering in the hall, Hester watched her mother listen at the sitting-room door for a minute and then knock,

  “Joe,” said her mother, “it’s almost time.”

  The door opened and Hester’s father came out, surrounded by the hovering women: Flora and Amy — his sisters — and the c
ousins Rose and Martha. Selena was not among them. Her father looked blindly ahead of him, and half groans, the replica of the awful sound she had heard before, still shook him.

  “Joe,” said her mother, “get ahold of yourself!”

  He raised his head. “Ahold of myself!” he said. He bent his head again, and the women closed around him — the red-eyed, solicitous sisters first, then the border of cousins — and, moving their dark caravan slowly, steadily, they passed through the dim foyer and out the apartment door.

  Hester tiptoed to the empty kitchen. Through the half-open door of Josie’s room, she saw her sleeping on her bed, openmouthed. Shutting the back door of the apartment softly behind her, Hester ran down the five flights of service stairs into the back court of the apartment house. Making a wide circle, she arrived at the front entrance and unobtrusively joined the audience of children and passersby that flanked it.

  All along the street, the line of black cars waited in heavy perfection, closed to the great blond sea of the sun. From both corners, people converged upon them, like a stream of ants, and were met at the center by a gentleman with a fixed look of gravity, who murmured something to each of them, referred to a list in his hand, and, nodding, conducted them to one or another of the cars.

  Next to Hester, a woman nudged another. “The family,” she mouthed.

  Now the grave man’s look deepened, became even more carved, as, with a stooping, comma-like posture, the list disregarded, he handed Hester’s parents and the aunts into the central car, bearing them along almost on his arm, as if they were the veritable royalty of grief. Behind them, Martha, in an aspiring headdress poised like an aigrette on a sparrow, and Rose, straighter than usual, were shunted into one of the rear cars by an assistant. By now, the cars were full, and the stragglers who still came were people, unfamiliar to Hester, who did not seem to expect to go with the cortege but passed on, whispering among themselves, into the building. Four men, dressed the same, and of a size, like dummies, emerged, carrying the coffin. At the curb they paused, shifting the weight between them, then slid it neatly into the hearse.