The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Part 15

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 k.n.o.b 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 cakeboxes 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-cla.s.s 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 entree, 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, rivalled Mrs. Muschenheim in size. Their mammoth hips swelled like hoop skirts under their made-to-order dresses. Behind her nose gla.s.ses, 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 s.p.a.ce 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, pa.s.sing 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 once 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, ma.s.ses of true-blond hair, and bud mouth, was what every s.h.a.g-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 a.s.signation 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 un.o.btrusive 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 gla.s.s 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, a.s.suredly. The hand wandered to the nape of her neck, patting the smooth hair, outlining, rea.s.suring. 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 unfurrowed. "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.

The Watchers.

THROUGH THE AQUEOUS SUMMER night, the shop lights along the avenue shone confusedly, like confetti raining through fog. From bench to bench in the narrow strip of park down the center, voices b.u.mbled softly against one another, as from undersea diver to diver, through the fuzzy, dark medium of the evening.

Over toward the river, groups of girls and boys in their teens foraged for mischief and experience in the anonymous blur of the shadows, but Hester, bound to her mother, sat between her and her father's elderly cousins on a bench that they kept to themselves, repairing somewhat, by this separation, the decla.s.se gesture of sitting in the park. Across from them, in the big gray apartment house, Hester could see the long, lit string of their own windows-at one end the great, full swags of the Belgian-lace curtains of the living room, and around the corner the faint glow of her grandmother's night light.

Outwardly, it was because of her grandmother that their home swirled continuously with family company, but actually the visitors spent no more than a token time with the old lady, whom longevity had made remarkable but unapproachable other than as a household G.o.d. In reality, according to Hester's mother's exasperated comments, the visiting was a holdover from the bland, taken-for-granted gregariousness of the Southerner, whereby, in a rhythmic series of "droppings-in," in corner tete-a-tetes of intramural gossip, they all reaffirmed the ident.i.ty of the family and of themselves.

Now, after the Sunday-night supper of cold cuts and cheese and pastry, most of the company had eddied away, and only three were left here with Hester and her mother-Rose and Martha, who lived in Newark and came only on Sunday, and Selena, who lived Hester did not quite know where but came most often of them all. Under the incomplete dark of the New York sky, their faces hobbled, uncertain and white, above their sombre, middle-aged dresses, and from time to time they pushed up sporadic remarks through the stifling heat.

"When does Joe get back?" asked Martha.

"Tomorrow morning," said Hester's mother. "This is his last trip for the year."

"Then you go to the country?" said Rose, with her plaintive whine, in which there was a hint of accusation.

"Yes, to White Plains. The same house as last year," said her mother, as if she regretted the disclosure. She would deplore their visits in conversation, behind their backs, but they would all come anyway, sending her into grudging paroxysms of hospitality.

"Not a breath stirring," said Martha, twitching her lip with a movement Hester could not really see but knew was there. Martha was a steady little person, dumpy-legged, with a face as creased and limited as her conversation. A milliner, working at home, she specialized in such oddly a.s.sembled trivia that Hester wondered often who bought them. She never went hatless and often appeared in rearrangements of the same materials, so that the lilies of the valley of last week, detached now from their wreath of green leaves, turned up limp but enduring on the orange velvet toque of the week before. Martha's rooms, which Hester had once seen, had the same scattered look, as if her whole life were composed of bits of tr.i.m.m.i.n.g and selvage that she endlessly, faithfully, turned and made do. On the speckled, polka-dotted, or mustily striped bosoms of her dresses, anchoring her together, there was always the gold brooch lettered "True Sisters," symbol of a Jewish ladies' organization that was her extracurricular glory. To Hester, it seemed that this must have some esoteric significance, about which she never dared inquire, since, in so doing, she would be delving impolitely into the personal springs that must lie under the trivia of Martha, would be asking of that cramped, undreaming little body, "Cousin Martha, to what is it you are True?" Another thing that lifted Martha from the ordinary was her tic, which consisted of a wetting of the lips and a side twitch of the mouth that occurred at regular intervals, whether or not she happened to be talking. At first repelled by it, then fascinated by the way Martha and those around her ignored it, Hester had finally come to watch for it and dwell upon it, for it seemed to her a sign that obscure, eternal forces nudged even at the commonplace Martha, twitching at her, saying, "Even under your polka-dotted bosom, under your bits and stuff, we are working, we are here."

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 ba.s.sinet!"

"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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sociated 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 circ.u.mflexes 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 embarra.s.sment 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, n.o.body 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 G.o.d!" 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 circ.u.mstance, 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.