In the Absence of Angels

by Hortense Calisher

  This was Yorkville, but over on 95th, near the river, the stunted inhabitants had seemed to him at first like a race of anthropophagi whose faces he never would be able to distinguish one from the other. Stumbling once through one of these buildings, in search of a family that was about to be evicted, he had passed through room after room in which the varicolored women, sprawling on daybeds, or huddled around tables in shrieking atonal conversation, had paid no more attention to him than if he had been invisible. Passing on into the dark center of the building, he had found himself in a black windowless room where there was no light but the red sparks flying out from under the frying pan in which a girl with wild Hottentot hair was cooking fish. She had looked at him indifferently, as though she would not have been surprised if he had grown from the floor, and had replied hoarsely to his question: “Family? There ain’ no families here.” He had stood there for a moment in the disoriented blackness, feeling himself shrunk to a pinpoint, a clot in time, and it had seemed to him that he had penetrated to the nadir of the world, where personality was at an end.

  In the quiet planes of the room behind him, his father’s breathing went on, like a gentle, insistent susurrus from a world that had been. Only that morning, the radio, playing Grofé’s “Grand Canyon Suite,” with its swaying theme of the donkeys, had reminded him, as always, of one of his father’s favorite anecdotes, one that, as a boy, he had never heard without an ache of emulation, of desire for the avenues of action that would one day be his.

  “That summer I was eighteen, Mr. Motley sent me out all the way to San Francisco. Some responsibility for a boy, but I’d been working there in New York for him for two years, and he trusted me. Travelling on the Union Pacific, met a man in the dining-car, Colonel Yates, big mine-owner out there. Took a liking to me and invited me to stop off the next day and go down to one of his mines. I thought I shouldn’t stop off to do it, but he said ‘Listen, boy! You want to see the world, or not?’ So the next morning I got off with him, but when he saw me he said ‘God, boy! You can’t go down a mine in those clothes!’ You see, those days, every salesman of any account dressed to look the part, and I had on a three-button cutaway and a top hat.

  “ ‘Colonel,’ I said, ‘these are the only clothes I have.’ And it was true, too. He shook his head, but we went on anyhow, and when I saw that canyon we were going down into I wished I’d stayed home in New York. A drop down into nothing for miles, and the only way to go down it was a narrow little trail not wide enough for a man. What they did, they used these little Kentucky single-footers, mincing from side to side, one foot in front of the other. Well, I looked at that donkey, and he looked at me, and I flipped up my coat-tails and got on. Went all the way down that canyon with my top hat on my head, and my coat-tails hanging down behind!”

  The picture of his father, middle-sized, dapper, in the raw West of the eighties, brought back momentarily the pride and tenderness which had always been a part of the feeling that he supposed was meant by the term “filial.” As a boy he had never minded that his aging father had never joined in the baseball games like other fathers, or taken him swimming, for in his tales of the trotting-races at Saratoga, the fights in which John L. Sullivan had battered round after round bare-knuckled, the cockfights held secretly in a grimy cul-de-sac in New Orleans, had been the heady sense of an apprenticeship to the masculine world. And blending always with that gamy recall of the sporting world of the nineties had been the undercurrent that was implicit in his father’s knowing allusion, in the slow spreading smile of reminiscence, in the anecdote lopped off at an unsuitable part — an undercurrent that spread beneath his talk, moving provocatively under the lace of words like a musky perfume — the sense of beautiful women.

  Outside he could almost feel the subtle pressing of the sooty spring air, snubbing against the pane like an invitation. In his mind he traversed again the grim woodcut streets of his “district” wondering whether Sunday brought easement there, or whether there too, it was like a vacuum sucking the inhabitants into a realization of despair. He thought again of Anna Guryan, whom he had first visited two days before.

  The address had been that of an old tenement off Hester Street, most of the occupants of which were already on his list. On the paper-strewn gritty stoop he had met old Mr. Askenasi, evidently on his way to the barber-shop for the pre-Sabbath “shave with hot towels” to which the Jewish men, young and old, clung, throughout the humiliation of being on relief, as to a last shred of independence and manhood, though there might be no cholla for the table, or little tea for the glass.

  “Guryan?” The old man had shaken his head. Then he had drawn back, pressing his lips together. “Taht one? You mean she will get on the relief too?” Throwing up his hands, he had exploded in a torrent of Yiddish. Then he had drawn closer. “Listen!” he had whispered in English, patting the other rhythmically on the shoulder for emphasis. “Since she has been here that door has never been closed. All hours of the night, men going up there. It is a shame for the other people in the house. Listen ...” But at the other’s guardedly professional lack of response he had broken off and gone on down the stoop, turning once to shake his head angrily with a glance that was like an accusation.

  He had found the door easily enough, on the ground floor to the left, as one entered the dank focus of smells that was the hall. Most of these apartments led directly into the kitchen from the hall, and his first impression as he entered was that the kitchen was far cleaner than most, partly perhaps because the furniture was so sparse and there was no litter of food, or evidence of where it might be stored. He had been prepared for one of the volubly evasive women who were flocking to the protective disguise of the relief rolls, or who were occasionally referred to him by the probation officers on a promise to “go straight,” many of them fat and aging, distinguished from the neighborhood women only by their carefully hammered hair and the clear aseptic finish of their make-up.

  He had found her sitting at the table, a small, deceptively young woman, her figure thin and unexuberant under the dark blue dress. To his first surprised glance she had appeared dated somehow, possibly because of the way she wore her hair, close to her head in the casque effect of the flapper period, with its sharp black wings pointed flatly against the white-powdered oval of her face. As she answered his formal questions in the slurred, unclassifiable monotone of her speech, her poised hands folded in her lap, he had been reminded of that Egyptian cat in the Museum, which had come through the erosive sands of the centuries and the trembling hands of archaeologists, to sit finally on its chill pedestal in the echoing gallery, regarding the modern world still with its glance of impenetrable dislike. He had found himself avoiding her unreflecting onyx gaze, which slid over him as if she were making some secret assessment of himself. Ruffled, he made a show of scrawling her answers in his notebook, a technique he hated and almost never used, partly because he had always felt too keenly the humiliation of those who were being probed, and partly because he had found soon enough that the intonations of misery were not easily forgotten.

  She had just been discharged from the hospital, she said, and had told them she had no means of support. They had told her to go to the relief. The janitor of the building was a friend of hers and had let her have the apartment free until the end of the month, since the rent collector had already made his rounds. The furniture? The janitor had lent her an old bed for the back room, and the kitchen set had been left by the previous occupant.

  In this neighborhood, where everything was sold and exchanged down to the very nail-parings of existence, where old men sat in front of stalls formed by their knees and the sidewalk, haggling over used shoestrings, a few screws and bent nails, even a single boot, he had known this could not be true. Even so, the kitchen table stood between them, irrefutably new, its white baked enamel surface shining like a statement.

  Raising his head to confront her with this, he had found that he could not say the bald words, and across the table he had se
en a thin film of triumph slide over the opaque slits of her eyes. With a gesture of finality she had risen for the first time and pulled the chain on the light bulb that hung over them. Behind her the two blotches of windows sprang forward onto his sight like two frames holding forth the dark. On one uncurtained sill there was a bottle. Reaching for it, she drew a shot-glass from the table drawer, and poured.

  “Anise. You have some.”

  He had refused, out of a conflict of reasons that were obscure to him, the least of which was that the rules of his job would have forbidden it. Gathering up his pencil and notebook, he retreated to the door, explaining hurriedly that he would let her know the decision of the office.

  She had opened the door for him, clasping it close against her to let him by.

  “All right. You come back and let me know. Any time.” A smile had widened her lips, spreading like oil, and just before the door closed, looking down, he had seen, like a revelation, an intimacy, the pink inner orifice of her mouth.

  Hurrying into the half-tones of the evening, all the way home in the swaying push of the subway, even now, as he leaned against the pane, he had retained in his mind, like the central core of an undifferentiated whirl of feeling, the image of the glass of anise waiting on the table, light radiating from its icy viscous white as from a prism.

  Behind him on the sofa his father still slept, punctuating with his breath the quiet that pressed on the eardrums like a weight. For one warm moment it seemed almost possible to him that, shaking the slumped shoulders, touching the brown crepe hand, he might awaken his father beyond the present minute, into an awareness of him at last; in some long shared conversation, that backward elegiac glance would for once be forced fully, openly, on him, and he might say, “Father …was it so for you? …For what is it I wait?” Instantly the fantasy shrank, and he winced at the picture of the clumsy byplay that would really occur, knowing that between them lay the benumbing sleep of the years, a drowse from which it was not possible to awake.

  Outside the window there was sound, motion, involvement, even if only in one of his long aimless hegiras through the streets. He turned slowly and left the room. Down the long hall, the first door open on the right was that of his parents’ bedroom. Entering, he picked up the hairbrush from his father’s chifferobe and began brushing his hair.

  Even here, the sense of his father’s youth was present to him, like a minimizing mirror in which he saw himself. On the high chifferobe, neatly arranged, as were all his father’s accouterments, lay the silver toilette set of which the hairbrush, with a handle, in the old style, like a woman’s, was a part. There was a broad clothesbrush, then a narrower hat-brush, and a small stud-box, all with heavy intricately wrought tops of silver repoussé, in the center of each the flat shield with the monogram JHE, and a soap-box, like a huge Easter egg of plain silver, on its top the embossed head of a nymph with twining silver hair. One saw odd pieces of similar sets now, unwanted and forlorn, in the dusty jackdaw windows of Third Avenue junk shops, crowded among the sad statuary and implements of a period that was done but had not quite yet slipped into the cherishable patina of the antique. Holding the brush, he remembered.

  “Who do you suppose is in New York?” his father had chuckled from behind the Times one morning at breakfast, sitting there easy and fresh, wearing one of the dandified light silk ties and curious scarf-pins from the collection that crowded his dresser drawers, a mode that his wife could never persuade him to discard, that was as much a part of his style as the faint odor of cologne left clinging to the crumpled towels in the bathroom.

  “Letty Danvers,” said his father. “Arrived on the Queen Mary. Stopping at the Great Northern. That’s where they all used to stop in the old days.”

  “Who’s Letty Danvers?” he had asked, savoring the graceful English name on his tongue, sensing already, in his mother’s stiffness, the possibility of mischief. In the portfolio of family pictures there were several of unidentified women, mostly in profile, in the clear unshaded photographic style of another day, staring large-eyed and proud from under the curled fringe of their bangs. His mother would never confess to a knowledge of who they were. “Ask your father!” she would say, tossing back her head.

  “Why she was what they’d call a ‘diseuse’ now, I guess,” said his father reflectively. “The greatest of her day. I knew her, my God — years ago. You know that silver dresser set of mine? She gave me that.”

  “I always thought Mother gave it to you.” His mother shook her head, tightening her lips.

  “Maybe I’ll go and see her,” said his father. “Talk over old times.”

  “Kind of an elaborate present, wasn’t it?” he had said, watching his mother.

  “Not for those days,” said his father musingly, from behind the paper. Then, looking up, he had met his son’s arch glance, his wife’s bridling look.

  “Purely platonic!” he had growled. “Purely platonic, I assure you!”

  “Hmmm,” said his mother.

  His father had slammed the paper down on the table. “My God, Hattie, it was forty-five years ago. She was years older than I was. Why she must be damn near eighty years old!” He had stamped away from the table in a self-conscious huff, mock-angry, but pleased. For once, vanity had wrung from him the nearest allusion to his exact age that he would ever make. ...

  Like a boy building over and over the same tower from blocks grooved with use, he could reconstruct the times of his father. He watched him living with his young French friend, Louis Housselle, in the Prince Albert Apartments, home of the fancy theatre set of the day and their ardent hangers-on. He saw him, a few tables behind Diamond Jim Brady, betting on that famous marathon of the appetite, or leaning intimately toward women over the small round tables, almost eclipsed by the velvet swoop of their hats. In yachting clothes he leaned back jauntily, legs crossed, the hand with the ring draped easily on the chair; posing for a portrait he held the aquiline medallion of his profile sideways, the black curls cropped almost to the bone, on his shapely upper lip a feather of mustache. ...

  The rough bossing of the brush handle had left a pattern on his clenched hand. With a conscious, almost defiant gesture, he set the brush down askew in the long neat silver line. Stepping softly down the back hall, he let himself out of the apartment door. Avoiding the elevator, he hurried down the five flights of stairs and out into the street.

  As always before, the milling streets gave him back the feeling of action; the air blowing against his face set up an unreasoning tingle of anticipation. Flower shops, pastry shops, and stationery stores were all open; people wove in and out of them on their beelike errands. Down the perspective of the side street he could see the olive-green buses, their open decks crammed with people in vivid spring hats, rocketing by like floats.

  He ran down the intervening blocks. Wedging himself onto one of the buses he followed the line of people up the swaying stair. Upstairs the deck held the rows of people like a well-arranged tray, everyone coupled and spruce as a crowd just out of church, varied only by the restless dots of children.

  They rolled by the Museum and stopped. Clutching the change in his pocket, he thought of getting off there, but while he wavered between indecision and habit, the bus heaved on. He knew the Museum too well, anyhow, particularly the American Wing, where he had wandered too many desultory afternoons, past the snub, diffused faces of the Cassatts, the small violent Homers, pausing longer at the moon-racked Ryders, held for minutes before the unfathomable Sargent “Madame X.” By now it was too well-defined a theme in his routine of hope and ennui.

  At Fifty-seventh Street he got off and walked east. Stopping at the Kraushaar Galleries, he peered in at the blank dark doors. Several weeks ago they had been open one afternoon and he had wandered in. No one had intercepted him, and he had found himself in the midst of an “opening show” of French paintings, mostly Renoirs. Behind him the silky authoritative murmurs of approval or contempt went on almost unheard, for he had been held i
n front of the Renoirs by a shock of familiarity, of recognition. They sat there, the women of his father’s day, stiffly at their garden tables, under their enormous hats, in spade-shaped bodices, their faces and hair fretted by light and leaf shadow; in the dim blur of their boudoirs they curved over dressing tables their bodies of impermeable lavender and rose.

  Today the window held a few Flemish genre paintings in overpowering frames, and the interior was lifeless and dark. The plate glass gave him back a dusky astigmatic version of himself. He turned away. No one was coming down the long suave street; held there, gripped again by the drag of time draining away, he felt that no one would ever come. He waited, avoiding the knowledge of where he wanted to go. Time passes, he thought; perhaps one should go toward it. Far down the street, the thin line of the horizon was like a sealed eyelid waiting for him to lift it, to expose the huge wink of the future.

  Turning on his heel, he walked slowly eastward down the long street, which grew more squalid with every step, with the inevitability of a declining curve on a graph. At Second Avenue he mounted the rickety stairs of the “El” and caught a train that was just winding its parabola into the station.

  Jigging past the tenements in the settling dusk he watched the window scenes as they flicked by: a woman leaning over a sink, a man stretched out with his feet up, somnolent in a chair. Since childhood he had done this, hanging out from the tops of the buses on Fifth to catch a flash of a paneled drawing-room, a great brown wall of books, or people, muffled and vague behind a shimmering curtain; riding past in the veiled evening he had fondled these glimpses and enlarged upon them.

  In this neighborhood he could now, because of his work, fill out the scenes to the last detail of mohair armchairs and cracked, calendered walls. He knew well the sameness of the life that went on behind those window lights that were so sterile and graceless from inside — the endless arias of family quarrels, and the blind grapplings of love. Even so, as he walked or rode along, each appearing lamp stood out like a lighthouse of warmth that drew him in his lonely role of beholder; each was an evocation of possibility.