The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Part 7

"It does not seem to have impaired my 'leadership,' as you call it," she had said at last, anger forcing the ga.s.sy word on to her tongue.

The flickering interest had revived in the fish stare opposite. Miss Shotwell had smiled almost in approval. "Perhaps we can use you after all," she had said. "We like them to be aggressive."

Them. In the past year she had indeed become one of "them," learning the caitiff acquiescence, the shiny readiness which would cover the segregation of self, acquiring that whole vocabulary of pretense forced upon those who must make themselves commercially valuable, or die.

She looked around now at the others herded together with her in the car. Perhaps her mistake had been to think that she was alone in this; perhaps each of her neighbors was sitting stiffened in the same intent misery before the deadening span of the day to come, each crouched protectively over the misfit hunch or sore of some disparity which had not fitted in. She looked again, but the set faces looked back at hers stonily, as if not all the prying tentacles of her pity could slip behind the mask which each had a.s.sumed for his journey through the ambuscade of the practical. Bending her head over the interlocked hands in her lap, she loosened them, cupped them softly over the unwanted extrusion of her compa.s.sion. Everybody, she said to herself in tentative kinship, each of them, of us, locked up alone with the felony of his private difference.

The car rocked to her station and she pressed out with the others, up the stairs into a brief interlude of sunshine and into the swinging door of the employees' entrance, kept constantly ajar by the procession of batting hands. Inside the olive green locker room she found the number of her own compartment and set her hat and coat away, smelling with a dull sense of recognition the bas.e.m.e.nt's odor of wax and disinfectant, interfused with the vague patchouli of congregated women. One after the other, as they took off the bright spring hats and coats which had differentiated them up to now, they sank into conformity, leveled by the common denominator of their dark dresses as if by the command of some sullen alchemist.

Nodding diffidently to the few she knew by sight, she joined them on the escalator to the main floor, her spirits sinking as she rose. Upstairs in the glove department where she had been a.s.sistant section manager for the past two months, the salesgirls lounged negligently behind the counters, waiting for the opening bell to ring and the first trickle of customers.

"Good morning," she said.

"'Morning, Miss Abel." They were polite but reserved, with the resentment of old stagers who see a neophyte brought in to supervise.

"Miss Baxter in yet?" She asked only to make conversation, but was warned by their suddenly innocent gazes. Baxter must have come in drunk again.

"She's behind-in the cubbyhole," said one of the girls, and bent over, stifling a snicker.

Behind the counter there was a door which led into the cavity under the escalator, a s.p.a.ce big enough for two people if one sat in the single chair and the other stood with head bent under the declivity of the ceiling. The girls seldom used it, ducking in for an aspirin, or when a garter had broken and there was not time to go off the floor. Once or twice, when the hysteria of milling people around her had overwhelmed her with a feeling of nakedness, of exposure to too much and too many, she had crept in there herself for a moment of poise. She opened the door and went in, closing it behind her.

Miss Baxter sat erect in the single chair, her angular shoulders squared tensely in one of the severely cut suits she wore daily. Miss Abel had never known her to wear a dress. Her cropped black hair was sleek from the brush, and her starched white shirt lay flat and crisp under one of the ties she affected, the cuffs projecting slightly from the jacket sleeves to show the only touch of vanity she allowed herself, onyx intaglio cuff links which clipped together like a man's. With her firm, pallid profile and small, almost lipless mouth, she had the anomalous attractiveness of a well-groomed boy who is knowing and bitter beyond his years. Reputed to be the best section manager on the floor, she had been recruited temporarily from the enormous book department to cover the glove section during the spring rush. Once or twice Miss Abel, longing for congeniality, had tried to get her to talk about books, of which she was supposed to have considerable knowledge, but had been not so much rebuffed as forestalled by the controlled distance of manner, the look of careful mistrust in the deepset eyes.

Miss Baxter grasped her own chin in one hand and gravely swung her head to one side, then back. "I daren't move it by itself," she said in her husky whiskey voice. Staring straight ahead, she uncurled the other hand in her lap to show a package of Life Savers. "Have one?" she said without moving further, and laughed.

"Can I get you anything?" Miss Abel put out a hand, but somehow she did not dare touch her.

In answer Miss Baxter, still erect, closed her eyes. "What a night!" she said. "Lois' job is folding, so we went on the town." The words came oddly from the closed face, with a kind of bravado perhaps made possible by it. "Know Lois Gow, up in the doctor's office?"

"Oh. Yes, of course." She remembered the girl mainly because of the pliant, hesitant manner which did not go with the nurse's uniform, and the suffused pink of her face, which always looked as if she were about to sneeze or break into tears.

"Think I can go on the floor, Abel?" Miss Baxter had opened her eyes, and was looking straight at her with her thin, slight smile. Except for the closed eyes, she had seemed up to now almost as she had on those other mornings when, rigidly controlled, exuding a powerful perfume of cinnamon, she had managed quite competently, handling both staff and customers with a dispatch which was, if anything, chillier than normal. But now, looking into the opened eyes, Miss Abel saw that the liquor had not glazed them but rather had melted from them some last cornea of reserve, so that, nude and pained, they focused beyond her, askance at some unalterable incubus.

"Look," said Miss Abel, "you've signed in, haven't you? Why don't you go to the rest room? I can cover up for you here."

Miss Baxter shook herself slightly. With that shake, policy shuttered her face and she was again the equilibrist, the authority.

"Quite a gal, aren't you?" she said. "Able Abel." She laughed. Then she put her head in her hands.

Miss Abel went out and closed the door behind her. Hurrying to the high desk behind which she would stand all day, she began needlessly to set its spa.r.s.e equipment in order. She couldn't have gone on the floor, she said to herself. Not with those eyes.

The rest of the morning she worked steadily to reduce the constantly forming queue of women in front of her. Just before noon, a cool voice said, "I'll take over now. Thanks." Miss Baxter stood beside her, resurrected and remote.

Miss Abel got her purse from the desk, signed out and left the floor. Outside the locker-room windows the day had turned greenish and it had begun to drizzle. She had no heart for battling one of the crowded restaurants outside and turned into the employees' cafeteria, where she ate her way through the flaccid "special plate," flavored for the general and made more tepid by the humid smell from the steam tables. Gratefully she remembered that it was Sat.u.r.day and, half-reluctantly, she visualized her usual date with Max.

As on many other Sat.u.r.day nights, she would prepare dinner for him, and they would sit over it in a coy, uncomfortable imitation of the domesticity they could not afford to make actual. If, during the past week, he had been called for part-time work in one of the biological-testing laboratories which allowed him, as a former fellow in chemistry, to make tests of blood and sputum, they would go to one of the movies on Fourteenth Street. Otherwise, while he talked ardently of his ambitions, his hopes, warming his self-confidence with her attention, she would watch the light on the humbled nape of his neck, the abnormal cleanliness of his hands, seeing in them something already intimidated, subdued. Either way, she thought, it would end in the half-fearful, fending love-making of the uninitiate, in that tentative groping, not toward affirmation but only toward escape, in which each caressed and comforted the affrighted, sad replica of himself.

She rose with a counterfeit briskness and went back upstairs. Signing in again, "Abel-12:45," she slipped into her station beside Miss Baxter.

At five o'clock when the two of them, working steadily together, had disposed of the last of the queue, the crowd in the store had thinned. It was raining hard outside now, and most of the customers, wandering along desultory and vacant-faced, were of the brand the clerks called "just looking." Miss Abel and Miss Baxter stood together behind the high pulpit of the desk, careful not to mar with more than fragmentary conversation their air of alert, executive readiness.

Along the aisle a small, nondescript woman teetered aimlessly toward them. She was no different from the scores of women who today-and tomorrow-would filter colorlessly through the store from the cardboard suburbs or the moderately respectable crannies of the city. A coat of some nameless but adequate fur flapped back from a dress which was indistinctly neither fussy nor smart. On her precise, mat hair a small flyaway hat with a veil halfway between coquetry and conservatism perched sharply to one side-denotation that its wearer might have lost touch with her sense of the ridiculous but not with her instinct for what was correct for her station in life. Beloved of some man, she would amble through the stores, coming home with a darling blouse or another pair of stubby, frilled shoes, or perhaps only with a sense of virtue at having viewed and resisted all the temptations of the bon marche except the paper bag of caramels from which she was now munching.

She stopped in front of them, just to one side, and stared frankly, curiously at Miss Baxter. Then, with her face screwed up in kittenish perplexity, she backed up, sidestepped, craned over to get a glimpse of Miss Baxter's legs.

"Is there something I can do for you?" There was an edge of insolence in Miss Baxter's tone which made Miss Abel catch her breath with apprehension. Sidling a glance from under the dropped lids of embarra.s.sment, she saw what she had never before seen in Miss Baxter's face-the creeping red of color.

"Well, uh, no." The woman t.i.ttered ingratiatingly. "I mean-I just couldn't tell whether-I mean I just wanted to see ... whether you had trousers on," she finished, the words coming out on a cozy gust of confidence. She smiled, and t.i.ttered again.

"Want to step around and take a really good look?" Miss Baxter's face was white again.

"Why, you-why, this is outrageous!" Rage did not dignify the woman's inadequate features. "Why, I could report you!"

"Get out." Miss Baxter's immobility was more offensive than her words.

"I'll report you for this!" Looking around for adherents, the woman met the bright, hushed stare of the clerks. Drawing her coat around her, she stalked off, her face working and mottled, the paper bag crackling convulsively in her hand.

She will, too, thought Miss Abel. She kept her glance carefully apart from Miss Baxter. The clerks, heads bent ostentatiously over their books, returned to their tallying of the day's receipts.

With a thin, releasing sound, the five-thirty bell rang through the store. If I tell Baxter to get out quickly, she won't, thought Miss Abel. She said nothing. After a face-saving moment, Miss Baxter opened the desk drawer slowly and took out her purse.

"My turn to close up," said Miss Abel. "Good night."

"'Night," said Miss Baxter. She hesitated for a moment as if there were something she wanted to say, then gave a half-smile, as if the concession shamed her, and left.

Methodically Miss Abel set the desk to rights for Monday morning. Baxter had left without signing out. As she signed the chart for both of them with a grim feeling of conspiracy, she saw Mr. Eardley, the floor superintendent, a sandy-haired, middle-aged man with tiredly pleasant manners, being pulled toward her down the aisle by the gesticulating woman. They stopped in front of her.

"She isn't here," said the woman. "This girl will tell you, though. The idea!"

"Yes, Madam." Mr. Eardley looked at Miss Abel, his brows raised over his gla.s.ses in weary inquiry.

Miss Abel looked at the woman. She was still babbling angrily to Mr. Eardley and her silly hat, held on by elastic, was c.o.c.ked awry on her head, far beyond the angle of fashion. Even the exertions of her annoyance had not been able to endow her with individuality, but under stress the details of her person, so dependent on the commonplace, appeared disorderly, even daft.

Miss Abel looked past her at Mr. Eardley. Imperceptibly she shook her head and, raising her hand to her temple, she moved her index finger discreetly in the small circle, the immemorial gesture of derision.

As if he had caught a ball deftly thrown, Mr. Eardley nodded imperceptibly back. Turning quickly toward the woman, he burbled the smooth rea.s.surances of his trade. He took note of her name and address in a voice which was soothing and deferential, and on a wave of practiced apologies he urged the woman inexorably toward the door.

Miss Abel walked down to the bas.e.m.e.nt once more on one of the escalators which had stopped for the day, got her hat and coat and a spare umbrella from her locker and left the store. Under the jaundiced cast of the rain the faces of the people on the street looked froglike and repellent. In the subway she sat numbly in a catalepsy of fatigue, her feet squirming in her soggy, drenched shoes. She walked the long blocks from the station at a blind pace, the umbrella slanted viciously in front of her, her mind fixed on the chair at home.

At last she was there, and the dead, still air of the apartment welcomed her, inspiring a relief close to tears. Dropping off her damp clothes and soaked shoes, she put on a wrapper and mules and set a pot of water to boil. Usually when she came home she had cup after cup of dark coffee, but now the thought of its flavor, hearty and congenial, sickened her. Tea, meliorative and astringent, recalled those childhood convalescences when it had been the first sign of recovery, and half-medicine, half-food, it had settled the stomach and warmed the hands. She set a pot of tea to steep, brought the tray around in front of the chair and sat down. After a moment she kicked off the slippers with a dual thud which was like a signal to thought.

Looking back on the day, she curled her lip at the mawkish sentiments of that morning in the train, at the nascent fellowship which had seemed so plausible. The day seemed now like a labyrinth through which she had followed an infallible, an educative thread-to a monster's door.

Everybody, she thought, shivering. The woman in the store was "everybody." Multipled endlessly, she and her counterparts, varied slightly by the secondary markings of s.e.x, education, money, flowed in and out of the stores, in and out of all the proper stations in life, not touched by the miseries of difference but indomitably chewing the caramel cud of their own self-satisfaction. Escape into the long dream of books, behind the ramparts of your special talent or into some warm coterie of your own ilk, and they could still find you out with a judgment in proportion to the degree of your difference. The Misses Baxter they would pillory at once, with the nerveless teamwork of the dull; the Misses Abel might escape their gray encroaching s.m.u.tch of averageness for a while, behind some maquillage of compromise, only to find one day perhaps that the maquillage had become the spirit-that they had conquered after all.

They were even there, latent, in the rumpled letter, simple with love, still lying on her table. In the end they could push everything before them with the nod of their terrible consanguinity.

She moved deeper in the chair. Soon the boy, Max, would come, and in the desperate wrenches, the m.u.f.fled clingings of love-making they would try again to build up some dark mutual core of inalienable wholeness. For there was no closeness, she thought, no camaraderie so intense, so tempting as that of the rejected for the rejected. But in the end those others would still be there to be faced; in the end they were to be faced alone. Meanwhile she sat on, shivering a little, over the steaming tea, and making a circle of her body around the hardening nugget of herself, she clasped her chill, blanched feet in her slowly warming hands.

A Christmas Carillon.

ABOUT FOUR WEEKS BEFORE Christmas, Grorley, in combined shame and panic, began to angle for an invitation to somewhere, anywhere, for Christmas Day. By this time, after six months of living alone in the little Waverly Place flat to which he had gone as soon as he and his wife had decided to separate, he had become all too well reacquainted with his own peculiar mechanism in regard to solitude. It was a mechanism that had its roots in the jumbled lack of privacy of an adolescence spent in the dark, four-room apartment to which his parents had removed themselves and three children after his father's bankruptcy in '29. Prior to that, Grorley's childhood had been what was now commonly referred to as Edwardian-in a house where servants and food smells kept their distance until needed, and there were no neurotic social concerns about the abundance of either-a house where there was always plush under the b.u.t.tocks, a multiplicity of tureens and napery at table, lace on the pillow, and above all that general expectancy of creature comfort and spiritual order which novelists now relegated to the days before 1914.

That it had lasted considerably later, Grorley knew, since this had been the year of his own birth, but although he had been fifteen when they had moved, it was the substantial years before that had faded to fantasy. Even now, when he read or said the word "reality," his mind reverted to Sunday middays in the apartment house living room, where the smudgy daylight was always diluted by lamps, the cheaply stippled walls menaced the oversized furniture, and he, his father and brother and sister, each a claustrophobe island of irritation, were a constant menace to one another. Only his mother, struggling alone in the kitchen with the conventions of roast chicken and gravy, had perhaps achieved something of the solitude they all had craved. To Grorley even now, the smell of roasting fowl was the smell of a special kind of Sunday death.

Only once before now had he lived alone, and then too it had been in the Village, not far from where he presently was. After his graduation from City College he had worked a year, to save up for a master's in journalism, and then, salving his conscience with the thought that he had at least paid board at home for that period, he had left his family forever. The following year, dividing his time between small-time newspaper job and cla.s.ses, living in his $27 per month place off Morton Street, he had savored all the wonders of the single doorkey opening on the quiet room, of the mulled book and the purring clock, of the smug decision not to answer the phone or to let even the most delightful invader in. Now that he looked back on it, of course, he recalled that the room had rung pretty steadily with the voices of many such who had been admitted, but half the pleasure had been because it had been at his own behest. That had been a happy time, when he had been a gourmet of loneliness, prowling bachelor-style on the edge of society, dipping inward when he chose. Of all the habitations he had had since, that had been the one whose conformations he remembered best, down to the last, worn dimple of brick. When he had house-hunted, last June, he had returned instinctively to the neighborhood of that time. Only a practicality born of superst.i.tion had kept him from hunting up the very street, the very house.

He had had over two years of that earlier freedom, although the last third of it had been rather obscured by his courtship of Eunice. Among the girl students of the Village there had been quite a few who, although they dressed like ballerinas and prattled of art like painters' mistresses, drew both their incomes and their morality from good, solid middle-cla.s.s families back home. Eunice had been the prettiest and most sought after of these, and part of her attraction for some, and certainly for Grorley, had been that she seemed to be, quite honestly, one of those rare girls who were not particularly eager to marry and settle down. Grorley had been so entranced at finding like feelings in a girl-and in such a beautiful one-that he had quite forgotten that in coaxing her out of her "freedom" he was persuading himself out of his own.

He hadn't realized this with any force until the children came, two within the first four years of the marriage. Before that, in the first fusion of love, it had seemed to Grorley that two could indeed live more delightfully alone than one, and added to this had been that wonderful release from jealousy which requited love brings-half the great comfort of the loved one's presence being that, ipso facto, she is with no one else. During this period of happy, though enlarged privacy, Grorley confided to Eunice some, though not all, of his feelings about family life and solitude. He was, he told her, the kind of person who needed to be alone a great deal-although this of course excepted her. But they must never spend their Sundays and holidays frowsting in the house like the rest of the world, sitting there stuffed and droning, with murder in their hearts. They must always have plans laid well in advance, plans which would keep the two of them emotionally limber, so to speak, and en plein air. Since these plans were always pleasant-tickets to the Philharmonic, with after-theater suppers, hikes along the Palisades, fishing expeditions to little-known ponds back of the Westchester parkways, whose intricacies Grorley, out of a history of Sunday afternoons, knew as well as certain guides knew Boca Raton-Eunice was quite willing to accede. In time she grew very tactful, almost smug, over Grorley's little idiosyncrasy, and he sometimes heard her on the phone, fending people off. "Not Sunday. Gordon and I have a thing about holidays, you know." By this time, too, they had both decided that, although Grorley would keep his now very respectable desk job at the paper, his real destiny was to "write"; and to Eunice, who respected "imagination" as only the unimaginative can, Grorley's foible was the very proper defect of a n.o.ble intelligence.

But with the coming of the children, it was brought home to Grorley that he was face to face with one of those major rearrangements of existence for which mere tact would not suffice. Eunice, during her first pregnancy, was as natural and una.s.suming about it as a man could wish; she went on their Sunday sorties to the very last, and maintained their gallant privacy right up to the door of the delivery room. But the child of so natural a mother was bound to be natural too. It contracted odd fevers whenever it wished and frequently on Sundays, became pa.s.sionately endeared to their most expensive sitter or would have none at all, and in general permeated their lives as only the most powerfully frail of responsibilities can. And when the second one arrived, it did so, it seemed to Grorley, only to egg the other one on.

There came a morning, the Christmas morning of the fourth year, when Grorley, sitting in the odor of baked meat, first admitted that his hydra-headed privacy was no longer a privacy at all. He had created, he saw, his own monster; s.e.x and the devil had had their sport with him, and he was, in a sense that no mere woman would understand, all too heavily "in the family way." Looking at Eunice, still neat, still very pretty, but with her lovely mouth pursed with maternity, her gaze sharp enough for Kinder and Kuche, but abstract apparently for him, he saw that she had gone over to the enemy and was no longer his. Eunice had become "the family" too.

It was as a direct consequence of this that Grorley wrote the book which was his making. Right after that fatal morning, he had engaged a room in a cheap downtown hotel (he and Eunice were living out in Astoria at the time), with the intention, as he explained to Eunice, of writing there after he left the paper, and coming home weekends. He had also warned her that, because of the abrasive effects of family life, it would probably be quite some time before "the springs of reverie"-a phrase he had lifted from Ellen Glasgow-would start churning. His real intention was, of course, to prowl, and for some weeks thereafter he joined the company of those men who could be found, night after night, in places where they could enjoy the freedom of not having gone home where they belonged.

To his surprise, he found, all too quickly, that though his intentions were of the worst, he had somehow lost the moral force to pursue them. He had never been much for continuous strong drink, and that crude savoir-faire which was needed for the preliminaries to lechery seemed to have grown creaky with the years. He took to spending odd hours in the newspaper morgue, correlating, in a halfhearted way, certain current affairs that interested him. After some months, he suddenly realized that he had enough material for a book. It found a publisher almost immediately. Since he was much more a child of his period than he knew, he had hit upon exactly that note between disaffection and hope which met response in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of those who regarded themselves as permanent political independents. His book was an instant success with those who thought of themselves as thinking for themselves (if they had only had time for it). Quick to capitalize upon this, Grorley's paper gave him a biweekly column, and he developed a considerable talent for telling men of good will, over Wednesday breakfast, the very thing they had been saying to one another at Tuesday night dinner.

Grorley spent the war years doing this, always careful to keep his column, like his readers, one step behind events. With certain minor changes, he kept, too, that scheme of life which had started him writing, changing only, with affluence, to a more comfortable hotel. In time also, that savoir-faire whose loss he had mourned returned to him, and his success at his profession erased any guilts he might otherwise have had-a wider experience, he told himself, being not only necessary to a man of his trade, but almost unavoidable in the practice of it. He often congratulated himself at having achieved, in a country which had almost completely domesticated the male, the perfect pattern for a man of temperament, and at times he became almost insufferable to some of his married men friends, when he dilated on the contrast between his "continental" way of life and their own. For by then, Grorley had reversed himself-it was his weekends and holidays that were now spent cozily en famille. It was pleasant, coming back to the house in Tarrytown on Friday evenings, coming back from the crusades to find Eunice and the whole household decked out, literally and psychologically, for his return. One grew sentimentally fond of children whom one saw only under such conditions-Grorley's Sat.u.r.days were now spent, as he himself boasted, "on all fours," in the rejuvenating air of the skating rinks, the museums, the woods, and the zoos. Sundays and holidays he and Eunice often entertained their relatives, and if, as the turkey browned, he had a momentary twinge of his old mal de famille, he had but to remember that his hat was, after all, only hung in the hall.

It was only some years after the war that Eunice began to give trouble. Before that, their double menage had not been particularly unusual-almost all the households of couples their age had been upset in one way or another, and theirs had been more stable than many. During the war years Eunice had had plenty of company for her midweek evenings; all over America women had been managing bravely behind the scenes. But now that families had long since paired off again, Eunice showed a disquieting tendency to want to be out in front.

"No, you'll have to come home for good," she said to Grorley, at the end of their now frequent battles. "I'm tired of being a short-order wife."

"The trouble with you," said Grorley, "is that you've never adjusted to postwar conditions."

"That was your, nineteen-forty-six column," said Eunice. "If you must quote yourself, pick one a little more up-to-date." Removing a jewel-encrusted slipper-toe from the fender, she made a feverish circle of the room, the velvet panniers of her housegown swinging dramatically behind her. She was one of those women who used their charge accounts for retaliation. With each crisis in their deteriorating relationship, Grorley noted gloomily, Eunice's wardrobe had improved.

"Now that the children are getting on," he said, "you ought to have another interest. A hobby."

Eunice made a hissing sound. "Nineteen-forty-seven!" she said.

In the weeks after, she made her position clear. Men, she told him, might have provided the interest he suggested, but when a woman had made a vocation of one, it wasn't easy to start making a hobby of several. It was hardly much use swishing out in clouds of Tabu at seven, if one had to be back to feel Georgie's forehead at eleven. Besides, at their age, the only odd men out were likely to be hypochondriacs, or bachelors still dreaming of mother, or very odd men indeed.

"All the others," she said nastily, "are already on somebody else's hearth rug. Or out making the rounds with you." Worst of all, she seemed to have lost her former reverence for Grorley's work. If he'd been a novelist or a poet, she said (she even made use of the sticky word "creative"), there'd have been more excuse for his need to go off into the silence. As it was, she saw no reason for his having to be so broody over a.n.a.lyzing the day's proceedings at the U.N. If he wanted an office, that should take care of things very adequately. But if he did not wish to live with her, then he could not go on living with her. "Mentally," she said, "you're still in the Village. Maybe you better go back there."

Things were at this pa.s.s when Grorley's paper sent him to London, on an a.s.signment that kept him there for several months. He was put up for membership in one or two exclusively masculine clubs, and in their leonine atmosphere his outraged vanity-("creative" indeed!)-swelled anew. Finally, regrettably near the end of his stay, he met up with a redheaded young woman named Vida, who worked for a junior magazine by day, wrote poetry by night, and had once been in America for three weeks. She and Grorley held hands over the mutual hazards of the "creative" life, and on her lips the word was like a caress. For a woman, too, she was remarkably perceptive about the possessiveness of other women. "Yes, quite," she had said. "Yes, quite."

When she and Grorley made their final adieu in her Chelsea flat, she held him, for just a minute, at arm's length. "I shall be thinking of you over there, in one of those ghastly, what do you call them, living rooms, of yours. Everybody matted together, and the floor all over children-like beetles. Poor dear. I should think those living rooms must be the curse of the American family. Poor, poor dear."

On his return home in June, Grorley and Eunice agreed on a six-months trial separation prior to a divorce. Eunice showed a rather unfeeling calm in the lawyer's office, immediately afterward popped the children in camp, and went off to the Gaspe with friends. Grorley took a sublet on the apartment in Waverly Place. It was furnished in a monastic modern admirably suited to the novel he intended to write, that he had promised Vida to write.

He had always liked summers in town, when the real aficionados of the city took over, and now this summer seemed to him intoxicating, flowing with the peppery currents of his youth. In the daytime his freedom slouched unshaven; in the evenings the streets echoed and banged with life, and the moon made a hot harlequinade of every alley. He revisited the San Remo, Julius's, Chumley's, Jack Delaney's, and all the little Italian bars with backyard restaurants, his full heart and wallet carrying him quickly into the camaraderie of each. Occasionally he invited home some of the remarkables he met on his rounds-a young Italian bookie, a huge St. Bernard of a woman who drove a taxi and had once lived on a barge on the East River, an attenuated young couple from Chapel Hill, who were honeymooning at the New School. Now and then a few of his men friends from uptown joined him in a night out. A few of these, in turn, invited him home for the weekend, but although he kept sensibly silent on the subject of their fraternal jaunts, he detected some animus in the hospitality of their wives.

By October, Grorley was having a certain difficulty with his weekends. His list of bids to the country was momentarily exhausted, and his own ideas had begun to flag. The children, home from camp, had aged suddenly into the gang phase; they tore out to movies and jamborees of their own, were weanable from these only by what Grorley could sc.r.a.pe up in the way of rodeos and football games, and a.s.sumed, once the afternoon's treat was over, a faraway look of sufferance. Once or twice, when he took them home, he caught himself hoping that Eunice would ask him in for a drink, a chat that might conceivably lead to dinner, but she was always out, and Mrs. Lederer, the housekeeper, always pulled the children in as if they were packages whose delivery had been delayed, gave him a nasty nod, and shut the door.

For a few weekends he held himself to his desk, trying to work up a sense of dedication over the novel, but there was no doubt that it was going badly. Its best juice had been unwisely expended in long, a.n.a.lytic letters to Vida, and now, in her airmail replies, which bounced steadily and enthusiastically over the Atlantic, it began to seem more her novel than his. The Sunday before Thanksgiving, he made himself embark on a ski-train to Pittsfield, working up a comforting sense of urgency over the early rising and the impedimenta to be checked. The crowd on the train was divided between a band of Swiss and German perfectionists who had no conversation, and a horde of young couples, rolling on the slopes like puppies, who had too much. Between them, Grorley's privacy was respected to the point of insult. When he returned that night, he tossed his gear into a corner, where it wilted damply on his landlord's blond rug, made himself a hot toddy-with a spasm of self-pity over his ability to do for himself-and sat down to face his fright. For years, his regular intervals at home had been like the chewed coffee bean that renewed the wine-taster's palate. He had lost the background from which to rebel.

Thanksgiving Day was the worst. The day dawned oyster-pale and stayed that way. Grorley slept as late as he could, then went out for a walk. The streets were slack, without the twitch of crowds, and the houses had a tight look of inner concentration. He turned toward the streets which held only shops, and walked uptown as far as Rockefeller Center. The rink was open, with its usual cast of characters-ricocheting children, a satiny, professional twirler from the Ice Show, and several solemn old men who skated upright in some Euclidian absorption of their own. Except for a few couples strolling along in the twin featurelessness of love, the crowd around the rink was type-cast too. Here, it told itself, it partic.i.p.ated in life; here in this flying spectacle of flag and stone it could not possibly be alone. With set, shy smiles, it glanced sideways at its neighbors, rounded its shoulders to the wind, turned up its collar, and leaned closer to the musical bonfire of the square. Grorley straightened up, turned on his heel, smoothed down his collar, and walked rapidly toward Sixth Avenue. He filled himself full of ham and eggs in one of the quick-order places that had no season, taxied home, downed a drink, swallowed two Seconal tablets, and went to bed.

The next morning, seated at his desk, he took a relieved look at the street. People were hard at their normal grind again; for a while the vacuum was past. But Christmas was not going to catch him alone. He picked up the phone. At the end of the day he was quite heartened. Although he had not yet turned up an invitation for Christmas Day, he had netted himself a c.o.c.ktail party (which might easily go on to dinner) for two days before, a bid to an eggnog party on New Year's Day, and one weekend toward the middle of December. A lot of people did things impromptu. A phone call now and then would fix him up somehow.

But by Christmas week he was haggard. He had visualized himself as bidden to share, in a pleasantly avuncular capacity, some close friend's family gathering; he had seen himself as indolently and safely centered, but not anch.o.r.ed, in the bright poinsettia of their day. Apparently their vision of him was cast in a harsher mold; they returned his innuendoes with little more than a pointed sympathy. Only two propositions had turned up, one from a group of men, alone like himself for one reason or another, who were forming a party at an inn in the Poconos, and one from a waif-like spinster-"Last Christmas was my last one with dear Mother"-who offered to cook dinner for him in her apartment. Shuddering, he turned down both of these. The last thing he wanted to do on that day was to ally himself with waifs of any description; on that day he very definitely wanted to be safely inside some cozy family coc.o.o.n, looking out at them.

Finally, the day before Christmas, he thought of the Meechers. Ted was that blue-ribbon bore, the successful account-executive who believed his own slogans, and his wife, a former social worker, matched him in her own field. Out of Ted's sense of what was due his position in the agency and Sybil's sense of duty to the world, they had created a model home in Chappaqua, equipped with four children, two Bedlingtons, a games room, and a part-time pony. Despite this, they were often hard up for company, since most people could seldom be compelled twice to their table, where a guest was the focus of a constant stream of self-congratulation from either end. Moreover, Ted had wormed his way into more than one stag party at Grorley's, and could hardly refuse a touch. And their Christmas, whatever its other drawbacks, would be a four-color job, on the best stock.

But Ted's voice, plum-smooth when he took the phone from his secretary, turned reedy and doubtful when he heard Grorley's inquiry. "Uh-oh! 'Fraid that puts me on the spot, fella. Yeah. Kind of got it in the neck from Sybil, last time I came home from your place. Yeah. Had a real old-fashioned ha.s.sle. Guess I better not risk reminding her just yet. But, say! How about coming up here right now, for the office party?"

Grorley declined, and hung up. Off-campus boy this time of year, that's what I am, he thought. He looked at his mantelpiece crowded with its reminders-greetings from Grace and Bill, Jane and Tom, Peg and Jack, Etcetera and Mrs. Etcetera. On top of the pile was another airmail from Vida, received that morning, picture enclosed. Sans the red in the hair, without the thrush tones of the a.s.senting voice, she looked a little long in the teeth. Her hands and feet, he remembered, were always cold. Somehow or other, looking at the picture, he didn't think that central heating would improve them. "The living room is the curse," she'd said. That's it, he thought; that's it. And this, Vida, is the season of the living room.

He looked down into the street. The Village was all right for the summer, he thought. But now the periphery of the season had changed. In summer, the year spins on a youth-charged axis, and a man's muscles have a spurious oil. But this is the end toward which it spins. Only three hundred days to Christmas. Only a month-a week. And then, every year, the d.a.m.ned day itself, catching him with its holly claws, sounding its plat.i.tudes like carillons.

Down at the corner, carols bugled steamily from a mission soup-kitchen. There's no escape from it, he thought. Turn on the radio, and its alleluia licks you with tremolo tongue. In every store window flameth housegown, nuzzleth slipper. In all the streets the heavenly shops proclaim. The season has shifted inward, Grorley, and you're on the outside, looking in.

He moved toward the phone, grabbed it, and dialed the number before he remembered that you had to dial the code for Tarrytown. He replaced the receiver. Whatever he had to say, and he wasn't quite sure what, or how, it wasn't for the ears of the kids or the Lederer woman. He jammed on his hat. Better get there first, get inside the door.

Going up to Grand Central in the cab, he pressed his face against the gla.s.s. Everything had been taken care of weeks ago-the kids had been sent their two-wheelers, and he had mailed Eunice an extra-large check-one he hadn't sent through the lawyer. But at five o'clock, Fifth Avenue still shone like an enormous blue sugarplum revolving in a tutti-frutti rain of light. Here was the season in all its questionable glory-the hallmarked joy of giving, the good will diamante. But in the cosmetic air, people raised tinted faces, walked with levitated step.

In the train, he avoided the smoker, and chose an uncrowded car up front. At his station, he waited until all the gleaming car muzzles pointed at the train had picked up their loads and gone, then walked through the main street which led to his part of town. All was lit up here too, with a more intimate, household shine. He pa.s.sed the pink damp of a butcher's, the bright fuzz of Woolworth's. "Sold out!" said a woman, emerging. "'s try the A & P." He walked on, invisible, his face pressed to the shop window of the world.

At Schlumbohn's Credit Jewelry Corner he paused, feeling for the wallet filled with cash yesterday for the still not impossible yes over the phone. This was the sort of store that he and Eunice, people like them, never thought of entering. It sold watches pinned to cards, zircons, musical powder-boxes, bracelets clasped with fat ten-carat hearts, Rajah pearl necklaces and Truelove blue-white diamonds. Something for Everybody, it said. He opened the door.

Inside, a magnetic salesgirl nipped him toward her like a pin. He had barely stuttered his wants before he acquired an Add-a-Pearl necklace for Sally, two Genuine Pinseal handbags for his mother-in-law and Mrs. Lederer, and a Stag-horn knife with three blades, a nailfile, and a corkscrew, for young George. He had left Eunice until last, but with each purchase, a shabby, telephoning day had dropped from him. Dizzy with partic.i.p.ation, he surveyed the mottoed store.

"Something ... something for the wife," he said.

"Our lovely Lifetime Watch, perhaps? Or Something in Silver, for the House?" The clerk tapped her teeth, gauging him.

He leaned closer, understanding suddenly why housewives, encysted in lonely houses, burbled confidences to the grocer, made an audience of the milkman. "We've had a-Little Tiff."

"Aw-w," said the clerk, adjusting her face. "Now ... let me see. ..." She kindled suddenly, raised a sibylline finger, beckoned him further down the counter, and drew out a tray of gold charms. Rummaging among them with a long, opalescent nail, she pa.s.sed over minute c.o.c.ktail shakers, bird cages, tennis rackets, a tiny scroll bearing the words, "If you can see this, you're too darn close," and seized a trinket she held up for view. A large gold shamrock, hung on a chain by a swivel through its middle, it bore the letter I. on its upper leaf, on its nether one the letter U. She reversed it. L.O.V.E. was engraved across the diameter of the other side. The clerk spun it with her accomplished nail. "See?" she said. "Spin it! Spin it and it says I. L.O.V.E. U!"

"Hmmm ..." said Grorley, clearing his throat. "Well ... guess you can't fob some women off with just a diamond bracelet." She t.i.ttered dutifully. But, as she handed it to him with his other packages, and closed the gla.s.s door behind him, he saw her shrug something, laughing, to another clerk. She had seen that he was not Schlumbohn's usual, after all.

As he walked up his own street he felt that he was after all hardly anybody's usual, tonight. It was a pretty street, of no particular architectural striving. Not a compet.i.tive street, except sometimes in summer, on the subject of gardens. And, of course, now. In every house the tree was up and lit, in the window nearest the pa.s.ser-by. Here was his own, with the same blue lights that had lasted, with some tinkering on his part, year after year. Eunice must have had a man in to fix them.

He stopped on the path. A man in. She was pretty, scorned, and-he had cavalierly a.s.sumed-miserable. He had taken for granted that his family, in his absence, would have remained reasonably static. They always had. He'd been thinking of himself. Silently, he peeled off another layer of self-knowledge. He still was.

He walked up the steps wondering what kind of man might rise to be introduced, perhaps from his own armchair. One of her faded, footballish resurrections from Ohio State U., perhaps: Gordon, this is Jim Jerk, from home. Or would she hand it to him at once? Would it be: Dear, this is Gordon.

The door was unlocked. He closed it softly behind him, and stood listening. This was the unmistakable quiet of an empty house-as if the secret respiration of all objects in it had just stopped at his entrance. The only light downstairs was the glowing tree. He went up the stairs.