In the Absence of Angels

by Hortense Calisher

  At home now, their own lamps would be turned on soon for supper, and his father would rise, yawning, to go to the table, happy and complete in his belated role of paterfamilias if the family were all present, grumbling and swearing one of his strange oaths that were like no one else’s, if one of them were missing. “Phantasmagoria!” he would shout. “Where in God’s name does that boy find to go?” In the landscape of his mind he watched the image of his father collapse and dwindle with distance, heard the sonorous echo of his voice trickle and die; in his mind he pursued the image and the echo for a last minute, before he let them go.

  At the last station, he got out. It was still a long way to Hester Street, and he walked the odd-angled asymmetric streets with a delaying step, remembering his first experience of them last year, when the heat of summer had been a great blunting hand pushing the people out of doors, the whole area had had the smell of a dying fruit, and his clothes had felt like a cage.

  He stopped at last in front of the house. It must have rained recently down here. The carts and hagglers had deserted the block, leaving in the gutters pools that gave back the last light of the sky. A slate-colored breeze from the river blew brinily against the empty, peeling doorway.

  He walked inside and put his hand on the doorknob. Over on the river the foghorns spoke, making over and over their slow mysterious statement. He had never been able to decipher it until now. It is the sound of waiting, he thought. The sound of waiting.

  Cupped in his hand, the oily doorknob spread under his palm as if he were touching a slowly widening smile. He knocked. He heard a light-chain being pulled on in the back room, and the high-heeled sound of footsteps coming toward the door. After the first compromise, he thought, all others follow.

  Looking back through the open doorway, he saw the dome of the day melting downward irretrievably into the river. One by one, in the great pitted comb of the city, the evocative lights went on.

  The Pool of Narcissus

  WHEN THE MUSCHENHEIM limousine slid up to the curb, like a great, rolling onyx, it had hardly stopped before the chauffeur, in broadcloth cerements, leaped out and flourished open the door. Mrs. Muschenheim emerged slowly, her enormous bulk divided and encircled with ruchings, the elegiac balloon of velvet that compressed her black pompadour looking like the knob on the chess queen.

  Hester, watching intently from a cramped stone niche in the courtyard entrance, where she had been sitting in Sunday-afternoon stiffness, knew that this arrival was the signal that the birthday party at the Reuters’ was about to begin. While Mrs. Muschenheim stared before her with majesty, the chauffeur reverently brought forth several cake-boxes of a whiteness and size that drew awed murmurs from the kids around the entrance, then bore them smartly behind his employer as she lumbered through the courtyard and into the apartment house on her way up to the Reuters’, on the ninth floor.

  Hester could never decide which attracted her more — the elaborate sweets or the solemn pageantry of the Reuter family life. Sometimes she was given tastes from the boxes of mocha torte or glazed cherries when Clara, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of the Reuters, descending to Hester’s twelve-year level on bored, boyless afternoons, asked her upstairs, and the two of them hovered hopefully on the periphery of the stately orgies of pastry, coffee, and talk.

  The Reuters belonged to the solid phalanx of upper-middle-class German burgher families that moved in its own orbit in New York. During the first World War, just past, the women had learned to knit by the jerky American method and had bought Liberty Bonds stolidly, but through this period, as always, they lingered over the coffeepot on smoky winter afternoons, did their hair leaning over rivulets of scalloped dresser scarves made by the daughters of the house, and married off their sons and daughters to one another — not by compulsion but through the graceful pressure of cocoa parties together at the age of ten and dinner parties at the age of twenty.

  Hester detached herself painfully from her cold seat, permitted herself one superb glance around at the other kids, who did not share her entrée, and followed Mrs. Muschenheim in, just slowly enough not to catch the same elevator. She went up to her own family’s apartment, four floors below the Reuters’, and scurried back to her room, sliding off her coat. Because of the inactivity of Sunday afternoon, her new dress was still fresh. Ramming her barrette to a firmer hold on her hair, she burrowed in her bureau drawer for the tissue-wrapped handkerchief that would serve as her ticket of admittance to the birthday party. Holding it by its rosette of ribbon, she slipped out of the apartment, climbed the four flights to the Reuters’ floor, and rang the bell. Clara opened the door.

  “Oh, h’lo, Hester,” said Clara, her eyes on the little package.

  “ ’S for your mother’s birthday,” Hester muttered, and thrust the package at her.

  “Oh, thank you, Hester! She’ll be pleased,” said Clara with sweet artificiality. Both were aware that a handkerchief was not to be considered a real present but, rather, a kind of party currency. Then Clara dropped her adult tone. “Listen! Guess what!” she said, and hurried Hester along the hall toward her mother’s bedroom. Going past the piles of tissue paper and ribbon on the waxed foyer table, turning her head to peer back through the living-room doorway at the people gathered inside, Hester thought there was no place for a party like the Reuters’, where all the material panoply of life was treated with such devotion.

  Both Mrs. Reuter, the grandmother, and her sister, Mrs. Enke, rivaled Mrs. Muschenheim in size. Their mammoth hips swelled like hoop skirts under their made-to-order dresses. Behind her nose glasses, Mrs. Reuter’s enlarged blue eyes melted innocently in the genial arrangement of red pincushions that was her face. From Mrs. Enke’s more elegant profile, wan folds draped away sculpturally, as befitted her long-standing widowhood. In this citadel of women, which included Clara and her mother, Mrs. Braggiotti, Mr. Reuter might have felt oppressed had he not been equally large, and likely to find, on his four-o’clock return from the lace business, various Adolphs and Karls, of severe clothes and superb, gold-linked linen, who had already deserted the garlanded cake plates for a bottle of schnapps, over which they would discuss the market. Once, Hester had even seen the German consul there, his domed head rolling and stretching out on his creased neck like a sea lion accepting the deference of the crowd. When, on such occasions, Mrs. Reuter’s eyes turned too explicitly to Hester’s grubby play dress and battered knees, the two girls played in Clara’s room with the frilled doll that had belonged to Clara’s mother, or made exploratory tours of the other bedrooms.

  All the bedrooms were of such complete neatness that Hester had never been able to imagine the Reuter women as really going to bed at all, but saw them moving serenely through the night ready to meet the first caller of the day, their hair unawry, their watches pinned to their waists. To her, these rooms full of starched bolsters, where every plane was animated with linen and crisped with laces, seemed the ideal toward which any girl would aim her hope chest, but sanctuaries, nevertheless, in which it was improbable that any of the natural functions went on. The closet floors were not cluttered with stray shoes or saved boxes, and in the dresser drawers there were no broken earrings tumbled among cards from the upholsterer, bits of cornice off the mirror, and odd ends of elastic. Each object, useful and needed, reposed in a wash of space and calm. Mrs. Braggiotti’s room had, in addition, the aura of the romantically pretty woman.

  In this room, Hester and Clara always went to the dresser first, passing from the etched-crystal tray, with its kaleidoscopic row of perfume bottles, whose number and style varied with Mrs. Braggiotti’s admirers, to the rosy pincushions, where, among hat daggers and florists’ pins, sometimes lay two great dinner rings, with rows of huge diamonds in pavements of smaller ones. These, Clara said, had been the Reuters’ gift to her mother on her marriage. Who or what Mr. Braggiotti was or had been, Hester had never been told. If she conceived of him at all, it was as an alien, a kind of slim, Italianate poniard that had onc
e got embedded mistakenly in the firm dough of the Reuter household.

  What drew Hester most in this room was the shoes. Clara would ostentatiously swing open the closet door, and there, in the soft cretonne pockets that covered it from base to top, were her mother’s thirty pairs of small, high-arched shoes, some in leathers of special kinds — snake or piped kidskin — but most of them dyed in pale costume shades that resembled in their gradations of color the row of sewing silks on a drygoods counter. Looking at them, Hester could see Mrs. Braggiotti, who, with her tilted nose, masses of true-blond hair, and bud mouth, was what every shag-haired girl staring into the Narcissus pools of adolescence hoped to see. Hester thought of her as she had often met her, riding down serenely in the elevator, a pale, wide hat just matching the flowers in her chiffon dress, a long puff of fur held carelessly against the faintly florid hips. Mixed with this image was a more perplexing vision, of Mrs. Braggiotti at the piano, where she played Chopin with much ripple and style but wearing a pince-nez that mercilessly puckered the flesh between her brows, giving her the appearance of a doll that had been asked to cope with human problems. Hester preferred to think of her as endlessly floating from one assignation to another in an endless palette of costumes that matched.

  It was toward Mrs. Braggiotti’s dresser, then, that Clara pulled Hester, pointing out the huge bottle that stood on the tray, eclipsing all the others. “George gave it to her, just now!” said Clara.

  “Who’s he?”

  “He’s in love with her.”

  It was only recently that Hester had learned not to giggle at the term. Now the phrase fell on her ear like something dropping softly, momentously, from a tree.

  “Is she in love with him?”

  “How should I know?” Clara stared down her nose at her. Apparently, Hester had again made one of the major errors that were always emphasizing the age gap between them. Obviously, to Clara’s way of thinking (which must also be the adult one), the important thing was to be loved and to enjoy all the gestures thereof.

  Without stopping to inspect the rest of the room, the girls went back along the hall and edged into the overheated living room. Mrs. Reuter was with a group near the door, and on the far side Mrs. Braggiotti, this time without the pince-nez, was playing the piano for a number of gentlemen gathered around her. “How pretty your dress is, my dear! Did your mother make it?” panted Mrs. Reuter, her glance approving Hester’s cleanliness, one hand blotting the drops of sweat from her hot face and just preventing them from falling on her gray satin prow.

  “She did the flowers.” Hester looked down doubtfully at the lavender voile, its color harsh against her olive-brown hands. All over its skirt and sleeves, unsuccessfully tiered to hide her lankness, large bunches of multicolored flowers were worked at careful equidistance. It had been the tenant of her mother’s workbasket all the preceding summer.

  “My, she does beautiful work!” Mrs. Reuter fingered the dress tenderly. “Did you have some Nesselrode?” She nodded to Hester and left her.

  “That’s him,” Clara whispered, at Hester’s elbow.

  “Where?”

  “By the window,” said Clara. She left Hester and went over to her mother.

  Looking, Hester saw a man somewhat under middle height standing near Mrs. Enke. Against the Wagnerian proportions of the others, he appeared unobtrusive but not negligible, as if their fleshy tide might flow past but not engulf him. There was something about his pleasant, even-featured face that was as firm and self-contained as a nut. He crossed the room to speak to Mrs. Braggiotti, whose head and neck made a pretty arc as she inclined upward toward him, her circlet of crystal beads shining in the afternoon sun. Clara pranced over to Hester again. “Guess what!” she said. “George is going to take you and me and Mama for a soda!”

  “Maybe I better not go.”

  “Oh, sure. It’s just to a drugstore, silly. He owns it — a nice one, not like the one downstairs. Over on Madison Avenue. You needn’t even tell your family you’re going. I’ll lend you a coat, and we can take turns on my skates. Come on!”

  They walked the few blocks over to Madison Avenue, George and Mrs. Braggiotti far ahead, linked as sedately as any married couple. Combined with the cold thrill of the brilliant afternoon Hester felt the lovely unease of wearing someone else’s clothes. As they walked, they could glimpse the frozen brown fronds of the park between the tall buildings, on which the hard, white winter sun struck, audible as a gong.

  Set discreetly into the limestone corner of a block of private houses, Sunday-quiet behind their fretworks of iron, the ruby urns of the Town Pharmacy sent out a message of mystery and warmth. George unlocked the door and let them in to the aromatic smells of the pharmacopoeia and vanilla. Rising from the long expanse of tiled floor, the glass shelves, serried with pomades and panaceas, looked housewifely and knowledgeable, as if filled with the lore of the ages. Clara rushed to the small marble counter near the door and balanced on one of the high, curved metal chairs.

  “A sundae, George, with everything.”

  “I don’t open until four, Madam,” he said, sliding off his coat and standing revealed in his suspenders and full, white shirtsleeves before he slipped on an alpaca jacket. Hester thought that he looked very intimate, but Mrs. Braggiotti, sitting formally on another chair, one pale-blue heel hooked over the rung, seemed not to notice. She refused a sundae, saying, “Oh, no, George, thanks. You know Mama’s dinners!,” in her high, untimbred voice.

  After the sundaes, Hester and Clara went outside. Clara put on her skates and, promising not to take too long a turn, went grinding down the empty asphalt, rounded a corner, and was gone. Hester grew chilly waiting, and the sundae was cold inside her. Tiptoeing back around the half-open door into the store, she crouched down on a wooden box behind the marble counter and fingered the levers that controlled the soda water and syrups. Warm and hemmed in, she felt that it would be good to spend one’s life in this shadowy store, away from the airless routine of an apartment but suspended a step above the rough street — like being on a little island, with faucets for running water and a bathroom at the back. There was a movement at the darker end of the store.

  “Etta!” George’s voice said pleadingly. “Etta!”

  Hester peered out cautiously. Mrs. Braggiotti, hatless now, was pressed back against the prescription counter, leaning away from George, who stood in front of her with his hands against her waist.

  “No, George.” She reached along the counter to her hat, but he caught at her hand. They looked awkward, as if they were about to begin dancing but were not sure of the steps.

  “We’re not young enough to go on like this,” he said. “Courting, like a couple of kids.” Mrs. Braggiotti looked back at him woodenly, between her brows the same perplexed groove that she wore at the piano. She looked stilted, like an actress unsure of her lines. “Sometimes I think that’s all you want,” George said. “Someone hanging around.” His voice sank.

  Mrs. Braggiotti worked her blue shoe on the tiled floor, like a child enduring a familiar reproof.

  “Why do you always” — he gripped her shoulders — “do you always ...” He dropped his hands. “You can’t go on forever being the pretty Reuter girl. Not even you.”

  She reached along the counter again, her rings chipping the light, her hand smoothing the hat expertly, assuredly. The hand wandered to the nape of her neck, patting the smooth hair, outlining, reassuring. He seized her with a kiss that grew, his face deep red, his hand kneading around and around on her back, one dark, tailored thigh thrust forward against the watery design of her dress. Inside Hester, a buried pleasure turned over, and vague, ill-gotten rumors and confirmations chased in her head.

  Mrs. Braggiotti pushed George away sharply. “My shoe! Oh, you’ve got dirt all over my shoe!” She bent down to brush it, real distress on her face.

  “What is it you do want, Etta?”

  Mrs. Braggiotti tilted her face up at him, her eyes clear, her forehead unfur
rowed. “Why, I don’t want anything, George,” she said, in the same tone with which she had refused the sundae.

  Hester crept out of her niche and slid carefully around the door. Across the street, the other limestone houses were still there, withdrawn, giving out none of their meaning. Behind her, the dim island of the store no longer drew her with its promise of suspension, of retreat. Looking down at her hands, she thought suddenly that they were a good color; it was the lavender voile that was wrong. She wavered against the blind hush of the street, wishing it full of people she could jostle, buffet, and embrace. Down the block she saw Clara coming back, her skates clashing and chiming. She drew a long breath and stepped further out into the seminal sunlight.

  Old Stock

  THE TRAIN CREAKED through the soft, heat-promising morning like an elderly, ambulatory sofa. Nosing along, it pushed its corridor of paper-spattered floors and old plush seats through towns whose names — Crystal Run, Mamakating — were as soft as the morning, and whose dusty little central hearts — all livery stable, freight depot, and yard buildings with bricked-up windows and faded sides that said “Purina Chows” — were as down-at-the-heel as the train that strung them together.

  Hester, feeling the rocking stir of the journey between her thighs, hanging her head out of the window with her face snubbed against the hot breeze, tried to seize and fix each picture as it passed. At fifteen, everything she watched and heard seemed like a footprint on the trail of some eventuality she rode to meet, which never resolved but filled her world with a verve of waiting.

  Opposite her, her mother sat with the shuttered, conscious look she always assumed in public places. Today there was that added look Hester also knew well, that prim display of extra restraint her mother always wore in the presence of other Jews whose grosser features, voices, manners offended her sense of gentility all the more out of her resentful fear that she might be identified with them. Today the train rang with their mobile gestures, and at each station crowds of them got off — great-breasted, starched mothers trailing mincing children and shopping bags stuffed with food, gawky couples digging each other in the side with their elbows, girls in beach pajamas, already making the farthest use of their smiles and great, effulgent eyes. At each station, they were met by the battered Fords and wagons that serviced the farms which would accommodate them, where for a week or two they would litter the tight Catskill towns with their swooping gaiety and their weary, rapacious hope.