The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Part 10

"I better find the key." She found it, in the pocket of the trousers collapsed on a chair. Holding it in her hand, she looked around the room, feeling that she must tidy it, but already its disorder had the subtle, irreparable flavor of desertion. No one here by that name now. The policy has changed. "How quick trouble is!" she murmured, and for a moment felt the thirty-year-old shock turn and reverberate in her heart. They left, locking the door behind them.

In the car he offered her a cigarette like a truce. "Will he be all right?" she asked.

He was silent until they had pulled away from the curb and were part of the traffic. "They're hard to kill."

"People with TB?"

He shook his head. "Sometimes I think I could go down the file in my office and tick them off. The ones who want to, and the ones who don't."

"Die, you mean?"

"No. Live."

She ground out her cigarette. "Pretty subtle distinction."

"No!" He kept his eyes on the traffic. "We're all subject to the normal human d.a.m.nations. We're all 'afraid to die.'" His voice was a faint, savage mimicry of Paul's. "But these people make their whole lives a deathbed-and expect the rest of us to gather round." He flicked her a glance. "And we do. We do."

"I can think of a lot of books, a lot of art, came out of some of them."

"No. Those were the ones who wanted to live most of all. Wasn't Keats a lunger? And still able to make such an expression of interest in the world?" His voice softened. "No-that's the crux of it-when you see that."

"Oh, if Paul had found his talent ..."

He grunted. "I oughtn't have blown up at Paul yesterday-but the man in before him was an old patient, a graduate of Dachau-and gangrene. Long since turned him over to an orthopedist. Fitted with a hand four years ago. He sells soap-but he wants to go back to being a printer. Barged in full of excitement to show me his new hand. Untied my tie-and tied it again."

He dug down on the gas pedal and they spurted ahead of the parallel traffic. "No, this is pre-Freud, something in the egg. Maybe we'll get so we can calibrate it in the kindergarten. The ones who are willing, and the ones who will have to be dragged. Try it on your friends sometime."

She looked out the window. The day was in full blare now, the air like an agar through which the outlines of people vibrated and doubled. "You're pretty arbitrary."

"No," he said. "The egg is arbitrary."

She was silent until they reached the university. "Anywhere along here."

He let her out at a corner. She thanked him, leaning for a moment on the car door. "And the others, Jamie? What do we do about them?"

He patted her hand and gave it back to her. "What do you do? What do I do?" he shrugged. "Visit as usual," he said, and tipped his hat and drove off.

She walked into a drugstore opposite the main building and ordered a sandwich and coffee. This place was a student haunt well known to her: three years ago she had been a visiting professor at the university. Even this late in the year it was packed with glossy boys and girls, talking and lolling with that combination of urgency and unpremeditated time for which they would be nostalgic the rest of their lives. She ate hurriedly, sitting among them with the sad anonymity of the outsider-a feeling as familiar to her home ground as here. With them, any age past their own was the outsider; any skin that had made its concessions or eye that had veined with memory was both beneath their notice and beyond it. One sat with them, skeletal at their feast, knowing something about them that they would be incapable of believing, that the skeleton, if challenged, would be unable to describe.

An hour later, however, seated on the platform in the immense white daze of the stadium, she felt closer to them than to her colleagues sitting on the dais with her in their annual empurplement of heat and dignity. So many of these were such dry sticks as collected wherever intellectual pursuits went on, kindling to occasions like this one with an inescapable air of having been rejected at better fires. Now the chancellor was making his address, and out into the air floated all the baccalaureate cognates-"war ... goal ... peace ... aspiration ... from our failing hands"-in a style that just skirted iambic pentameter, leaving one doubtful as to whether it ran from it or toward it. On his head he wore a little pillow of scarlet plush of whose heraldry she was ignorant, unless it signified an eminence that no longer bent the knee but rather must be protected from the jagged points of the stars. Now he spoke directly to the graduates, telling them, with the easy teleology of the safe, that certain wars were sacred, certain generations-perhaps theirs-divinely lost, and they lifted their faces toward him in a thousandfold ovoid innocence. If some among them saw privately that the emperor had no head but a pillow, ten years from now they would be less sure.

Hearing her own name, she raised her head, but bent it quickly, for her own citation had begun. "For achievement in the world of letters ... for yeoman service to young candidates for that world ..." The university had already approached her with a plan for its administering, as scholarships, the money she used for her own scattered benefices, but the citation, laying no indelicate emphasis on these, circled lavishly around her own work. Timeo Danaos, she thought, but the praise lapped her with shameful warmth.

At a benedictory signal from the chancellor she went forward, bending to receive the brilliant capelet on her shoulders. He shook her hand, turning it with practiced dismissal, so that for a moment she faced her audience, a speaker who was not to be allowed to speak.

As she returned to her seat, Sweet, the head of the department, shot out a hand as if it had been tapped with a mallet and beamed violently, making a noise like a bubbling kettle, but already his face was angled toward the next to be honored, as were all the young faces before her. Tipped and oval, a thousand eggs of unknown impulse, they waited, dressed in their rented black, as if the old could not quickly enough take the young into the dark seminary of responsibility. If she had been allowed to speak, she thought, what would she have told them? That life gave no baccalaureates? That there was always the visit to be paid as usual, always the telephone call to be made?

At last the ceremony was over. With one final fanfare it smashed and dispersed, scattering its components over the grounds like bright and drab bits of gla.s.s from which no further pattern could be expected that day. She walked slowly, through family groupings, toward the Faculty Club, where her presence had been requested at tea and where there was a phone.

In the booth she dialed the number of Helen's office. It was not quite five o'clock.

"Manning and Coe, good afternoon."

"May I speak to Miss Bonner, please?"

She gave her own name, spelling it out. After an interval a second voice spoke. "What is it, please?"

"Helen? Is this Miss Bonner?"

There was a pause, then the voice spoke again. "Miss Bonner is no longer connected with this office."

It was close in the booth but she suddenly found herself shivering. "Can you tell me where I can reach her?"

Again the voice waited. "No," it said finally. "I'm sorry-but I cannot."

She drew a long breath. "If she-gets in touch with you, perhaps you'd give her a message?"

"What is the message." It was less a question than a statement.

"I'm calling for my nephew, Paul Ponthus. He is seriously ill in Lenox Hill Hospital. He would like to get in touch with her."

Over the wire she could hear the breathing of the other woman. She waited. "Yes," the voice said, and its weary inflection made her certain. "I'll see that she gets the message. If she calls. But I doubt if she will call."

When she left the booth she was still shivering. She hadn't seen Helen in over a year. But she was good at voices, good at inflections. The second voice had been Helen's.

In the Faculty Parlor she held herself apart from the chattering groups, drank two cups of hot tea and took a third to a seat in a corner. I caught a chill, she told herself, and knew that she had not. Most of us are such drifters, she thought, leaving our fates to erosion, our amputations to death and accident. When we see someone his own surgeon, we are filled with awe.

Through an open window at her side she heard children playing outside the chapel gates, exchanging the familiar twilight calls: "Where are You?" ... "I'm anyplace, where are You?" The cries rose gawkily, the sound of viols played by amateurs for whom the opulent instrument was yet too much. For an insistent moment she wished herself back there with them, with the sun going down in a clash of skates. Not to be here in his tea-colored room where the old condescendingly relaxed with the young, and the young were so ruddy and unaware of how powerfully they could condescend to the old. Not to be sitting here, an elderly voyeur, holding in my lap, like knitting, the severed nerve ends of two lives. But not quite yet the voyeur. There is still the visit to be made.

Someone turned on the lights, the dusk at the window snapped to a sharper blue, and people, blinking in the orange brightness, plunged again into the rubble of talk. She looked down the room as one did at funerals, reunions, all the roll calls at which one took stock of the a.s.sessments of time. Brewster, that sorry sufferer from the worst of academic diseases, had retired into some cranky shade, taking with him his disappointment in himself. But Baldwin was gone too, the tall, bearded medievalist whose mind had been of such an opaline goodness that, staring into it, one almost saw striations of goodness that were one's own.

"Felicitations! Felicitations!" Sweet teetered on his heels before her, his clasped hands cherishing his tweed belly. "How does it feel, eh? How does it feel?" Having founded a career on repet.i.tion, he was not one to desert it for lesser purposes. "But they'll be wanting to meet you," he added. "Come take your turn at the urn. Ha! Turn at the urn."

He led her to the long table and installed her in front of the tea service. "Young chap you must meet," he whispered. "Just back to the graduate school from the Army. Did some brilliant emendations on The Pearl before he left. 'S matter of fact-if you should see your way clear-hm-he'd be one of our first candidates. Used to be a protege of poor Baldwin." She watched him shamble over to a group and detach a young man from it. She had always piqued him with her preference for Baldwin, a man of no great departmental or secular distinction. But the patronage of the dead, if useful, would not offend.

She looked at the boy Sweet was bringing toward her, a nice enough young man with his hair cut in that neat furze they all affected, his face still that printless mask which nature affected for them. For the first time she could not summon the friable tenderness, that perverse sense of her own youth whereby she seemed to herself really only a prisoner, caught in some gargantuan trap of flesh and years. For the first time she felt the great disinterest that was age. They keep coming, she thought, another and another. It's time I stopped running toward them, poking at them for whatever it was I was seeking. Perhaps it's time to admit what that was too-nothing much more than the bawling of an old cow with caked udders, lowing for a calf thirty years gone. I'll let the college have the money, let them handle it any way they wish. I'll take on Paul, for whom nothing can be done, and it will at least be better that the nothing be done by me than by Helen. People like Paul can be looked after quite easily out of duty; the agony comes only when they are looked after with hope.

Sweet intoned a name she didn't catch. "Great fan of yours, this young man. Great fan." He beamed impartially at them and departed.

"You don't have to say anything." She smiled up at the young man.

"It's true, though." He spoke with a bluntness past having to be put at its ease. "Charles Baldwin put me on to your work."

"Yes?" she said. She looked down the room. "I miss him here."

He too looked down the room. "I loved Baldwin," he said. "Even if you were only a student, he made you feel that you counted."

She glanced at him more sharply. One seldom heard them use the word "love" in the quiet sense that he had used it-it was contrarily the one four-letter word they still spoke with a sense of shame.

"Yes," she said. "He was a good man."

"They never made too much of him here."

"No," she said. "I guess the good don't dramatize easily."

"That's true!" he said with a rush. "True in books too, isn't it?"

She nodded, smiling. "So then-you're going to specialize in Medieval?"

He grinned at her and, grudgingly, she felt the familiar rictus of interest. Intelligent, of course, she warned herself, but then the room was full of intelligence, beady-eyed with it, full of quick-billed birds, and if the eyes of the younger ones seemed more luminous, it was only because they hadn't quite learned when to drop the secondary lid, the filmy lid of conformism.

"No," he said. "I'm giving up the graduate school. I haven't told anyone yet. I've-I've got some notes for a book."

"Oh?"

He bent his head, flushing. "Actually ... I wrote a book. While I was in the Army. But I chucked that too. I had just enough sense to see how derivative it was." He brought out the phrase, as they so often did, like a pa.s.sword.

"But we're all that," she said, hearing in her voice a melting note that she decried.

"But this wasn't just style," he said, raising his head. "It was full of the best prime anxiety-and all secondhand. It had everybody's fingerprint on it except mine."

"And your fingerprint?" she said. "What will that be?"

He drooped again. "Oh, I'm still in boot camp. I know that!" But his doldrums were only those of the young, easily routed by the tensing of a muscle, or rain drying on a pane. He reached toward a plate on the table and popped several pallid triangles into his mouth. "This lost-generation stuff we were tossed this aft-you believe that?"

"I'm not sure," she said. "I've never been sure. It's more important whether you believe it. All of you."

"We get so confused," he said. "They've got us staring at their navels, not our own. And we've got nothing to answer them with-yet." He cast her a desperate smile and concentrated on an empty cup and saucer, pushing them back and forth on the table. "Guess I'm a freak or something. But I like being in the world. And if I write, oughtn't it to have some-some of that in it? Oh, I was in the Army-I know there's enough trouble to go around. But I have to earn mine-not inherit it!" He cast her another agonized glance and bent again to his game with the saucer. "Speech, speech," he said.

"No," she said slowly, "you're not a freak," and caught an echo of what she had said to Paul. No, you're not a b.a.s.t.a.r.d. But what they are, she thought, I can't tell them.

"Anyway, that's why I'm leaving," he said. "I told myself, okay, I helped mop up a war for them. But I'm d.a.m.ned if I'll write their books for them."

His voice was loud and she looked apprehensively around the room, but it had emptied and they were alone.

"I guess I shouldn't get so angry," he said, averting a cheek that was as mild as a child's.

She leaned forward, peering at him with the habit of a lifetime. It's just the glow they all have once, she told herself, nothing special. It's like the gaudy light that clings to their first poems; one must always be suspicious of it, for it may be simply the peak of freshness attained at least once by everyone, like the transitory skin bloom on a plain girl.

"I seem to be angry practically all of the time," he said. But his eyes, before he slanted them away again, were proud.

She looked at him. Maybe, she thought. But in any case why do I watch for it, why have I spent my life watching it? The Freudians would say I was still looking for a son. She drew a deep breath and leaned back. And if so, she thought, we are all, at any age past a certain one, hunting hopefully for our sons.

He'll think me odd, she thought, staring at him this way without speaking. But she saw that he stood there dreaming, lost in a dream of his own oddness.

Yes, they keep coming, she thought-another and another. And some of them will be the Pauls, who dramatize so easily, to love whom is the worst dead end of fate-for they will knock at every door and never be able to unlock their own. But these others will be coming too. They'll keep coming, the angry ones, another and another, and when they hold out, they are the bright specks on the retina of the world.

He turned. He had picked up the cup and saucer and was holding them out to her with a tentative smile.

She took them and held them, staring down into the cup. I can't help it, she thought; I'm of the breed that hopes. Maybe this one wants to live, she thought. Maybe this one wants to live. And when you see that-that's the crux of it. We are all in the dark together, but those are the ones who humanize the dark.

Pouring the cold tea into the cup, her hands trembled so that the cup clinked against the saucer, but when she held out the cup, staring up at him, her wrist was firm.

A Wreath for Miss Totten.

CHILDREN GROWING UP IN the country take their images of integrity from the land. The land, with its changes, is always about them, a pervasive truth, and their midget foregrounds are crisscrossed with minute dramas which are the animalcules of a larger vision. But children who grow in a city where there is nothing greater than the people br.i.m.m.i.n.g up out of subways, rivuleting in the streets-these children must take their archetypes where and if they find them.

In P.S. 146, between periods, when the upper grades were shunted through the halls in that important procedure known as "departmental," although most of the teachers stood about chatting relievedly in couples, Miss Totten always stood at the door of her "home room," watching us straightforwardly, alone. As, straggling and m.u.f.fled, we lined past the other teachers, we often caught s.n.a.t.c.hes of upstairs gossip which we later perverted and enlarged; pa.s.sing before Miss Totten we deflected only that austere look, bent solely on us.

Perhaps, with the teachers, as with us, she was neither admired nor loathed but simply ignored. Certainly none of us ever fawned on her as we did on the harshly blond and blue-eyed Miss Steele, who never wooed us with a smile but slanged us delightfully in the gym, giving out the exercises in a voice like scuffed gravel. Neither did she obsess us in the way of the Misses Comstock, two liverish, stunted women who could have had nothing so vivid about them as our hatred for them, and though all of us had a raffish hunger for metaphor, we never dubbed Miss Totten with a nickname.

Miss Totten's figure, as she sat tall at her desk or strode angularly in front of us rolling down the long maps over the blackboard, had that instantaneous clarity, one metallic step removed from the real, of the daguerreotype. Her clothes partook of this period, too-long, saturnine waists and skirts of a stuff identical with that in a good family umbrella. There was one like it in the umbrella-stand at home-a high black one with a seamed ivory head. The waists enclosed a vestee of dim, but steadfast lace; the skirts grazed narrow boots of that etiolated black leather, venerable with creases, which I knew to be a sign both of respectability and foot trouble. But except for the vestee, all of Miss Totten, too, folded neatly to the dark point of her shoes, and separated from these by her truly extraordinary length, her face presided above, a lined, ocher ellipse. Sometimes, as I watched it on drowsy afternoons, her face floated away altogether and came to rest on the stand at home. Perhaps it was because of this guilty image that I was the only one who noticed Miss Totten's strange preoccupation with "Mooley" Davis.

Most of us in Miss Totten's room had been together as a group since first grade, but we had not seen Mooley since down in second grade, under the elder and more frightening of the two Comstocks. I had forgotten Mooley completely, but when she reappeared I remembered clearly the incident which had given her her name.

That morning, very early in the new term, back in Miss Comstock's, we had lined up on two sides of the cla.s.sroom for a spelling bee. These were usually a relief to good and bad spellers alike, since it was the only part of our work which resembled a game, and even when one had to miss and sit down, there was a kind of dreamy catharsis in watching the tenseness of those still standing. Miss Comstock always rose for these occasions and came forward between the two lines, standing there in an oppressive close-up in which we could watch the terrifying action of the cords in her spindling gray neck and her slight smile as a boy or a girl was spelled down. As the number of those standing was reduced, the smile grew, exposing the oversize slabs of her teeth, through which the words issued in a voice increasingly unctuous and soft.

On this day the forty of us still shone with the first fall neatness of new clothes, still basked in that delightful anonymity in which neither our names nor our capacities were already part of the dreary foreknowledge of the teacher. The smart and quick had yet to a.s.sert themselves with their flying, staccato hands; the uneasy dull, not yet forced into recitations which would make their status clear, still preserved in the small, sinking corners of their hearts a lorn, fact.i.tious hope. Both teams were still intact when the word "mule" fell to the lot of a thin colored girl across the room from me, in clothes perky only with starch, her rusty fuzz of hair drawn back in braids so tightly sectioned that her eyes seemed permanently widened.

"Mule," said Miss Comstock, giving out the word. The ranks were still full. She had not yet begun to smile.

The girl looked back at Miss Comstock, soundlessly. All her face seemed drawn backward from the silent, working mouth, as if a strong, pulling hand had taken hold of the braids.

My turn, I calculated, was next. The procedure was to say the word, spell it out, and say it again. I repeated it in my mind: "Mule. M-u-l-e. Mule."

Miss Comstock waited quite a long time. Then she looked around the cla.s.s, as if asking them to mark well and early this first malfeasance, and her handling of it.

"What's your name?" she said.

"Ull-ee." The word came out in a glottal, mola.s.ses voice, hardly articulate, the l's scarcely p.r.o.nounced.

"Lilly?"

The girl nodded.

"Lilly what?"

"Duh-avis."

"Oh. Lilly Davis. Mmmm. Well, spell 'mule,' Lilly." Miss Comstock trilled out the name beautifully.

The tense brown bladder of the girl's face swelled desperately, then broke at the mouth. "Mool," she said, and stopped. "Mmm-oo-"