The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Part 8

In the bedroom, the curtains were drawn, the night light on. The bed was piled with an abandoned muddle of silver wrappings, tissue paper, ribbons. He dropped the presents on the bed, tossed his hat after them, let his coat slip down on the familiar chair, and parted the curtains. It had a good view of the river, his house. He stood there, savoring it.

He was still there when a car door slammed and the family came up the path. The Christmas Eve pantomime, of course, held every year at the village hall. Georgie had on one of those white burnooses they always draped the boys in, and Sally, in long dress and coned hat, seemed to be a medieval lady. He saw that this year she had the waist for it. Eunice and Mrs. Lederer walked behind them. He tapped on the gla.s.s.

They raised their faces in tableau. The children waved, catcalled, and disappeared through the downstairs door. Mrs. Lederer followed them. Below, Eunice stared upward, in the shine from the tree-window. Behind him, he heard that sound made only by children-the noise of bodies falling up a staircase. As they swarmed in on him, she disappeared.

"You shoulda been to the hall," said Georgie, seizing him. "Christmas at King Arthur's court. I was a knight."

"Was it corny!" said Sally, from a distance. She caught sight of herself in a pier gla.s.s. "I was Guinevere."

"Had to do some last-minute shopping," said Grorley.

"I saw my bike!" said Georgie. "It's in the cellar."

"Oh ... Georgie!" said Sally.

"Well, I couldn't help seeing it."

"Over there are some Christmas Eve presents," said Grorley.

"Open now?" they said. He nodded. They fell upon them.

"Gee," said Georgie, looking down at the knife. "Is that neat!" From his tone it was clear that he, at least, was Schlumbohn's usual.

"Oh, Dad!" Sally had the necklace around her neck. She raised her arms artistically above her head, in the fifth position, minced forward, and placed their slender wreath around Grorley's neck. As she hung on him, sacklike, he felt that she saw them both, a tender picture, in some lurking pier gla.s.s of her mind.

The door opened, and Eunice came in. She shut it behind her with a "not before the servants" air, and stood looking at him. Her face was blurred at the edges; she hadn't decked herself out for anybody. She looked the way a tired, pretty woman, of a certain age and responsibilities, might look at the hour before dinner, at the moment when age and prettiness tussle for her face, and age momentarily has won.

"Look what I got!" Georgie brandished the knife.

"And mine!" Sally undulated herself. "Mums! Doesn't it just go!" She stopped, looking from father to mother, her face hesitant, but shrewd.

"Open yours, Mums. Go on."

"Later," said Eunice. "Right now I think Mrs. Lederer wants you both to help with the chestnuts."

"No fair, no fair," said Georgie. "You saw ours."

"Do what your mother says," said Grorley. The paternal phrase, how it steadied him, was almost a hearthstone under his feet.

"Oh, well," said Eunice, wilting toward the children, as she invariably did when he was stern with them. Opening the package he indicated, she drew out the bauble. Georgie rushed to look at it, awarded it a quick, cla.s.sifying disinterest, and returned to his knife.

"Oo-I know how to work those! Margie's sister has one," said Sally. She worked it. "If that isn't corny!" she gurgled. Eunice's head was bent over the gift. Sally straightened up, gave her and Grorley a swift, amending glance. "But cute!" she said. She flushed. Then, with one of the lightning changes that were the bane of her thirteen years, she began to cry. "Honestly, it's sweet!" she said.

Grorley looped an arm around her, gave her a squeeze and a kiss. "Now, shoo," he said. "Both of you."

When he turned back to the room, Eunice was looking out the window, chin up, her face not quite averted. Recognizing the posture, he quailed. It was the stance of the possessor of the stellar role-of the nightingale with her heart against the thorn. It was the stance of the woman who demands her scene.

He sighed, rat-tatted his fingers on a table top. "Well," he said. "Guess this is the season the corn grows tall."

A small movement of her shoulder. The back of her head to him. Now protocol demanded that he talk, into her silence, dredging his self-abas.e.m.e.nt until he hit upon some remark which made it possible for her to turn, to rend it, to show it up for the heartless, illogical, tawdry remark that it was. He could repeat a list of the game birds of North America, or a pa.s.sage from the Congressional Record. The effect would be the same.

"Go on," he said, "get it over with. I deserve it. I just want you to know ... mentally, I'm out of the Village."

She turned, head up, nostrils dilated. Her mouth opened. "Get it ov-!" Breath failed her. But not for long.

Much later, they linked arms in front of the same window. Supper had been eaten, the turkey had been trussed, the children at last persuaded into their beds. That was the consolatory side of family life, Grorley thought-the long, Olympian codas of the emotions were cut short by the niggling detail. Women thought otherwise, of course. In the past, he had himself.

Eunice began clearing off the bed. "What's in those two? Father's and Mother's?"

"Oh Lord. I forgot Father."

"Never mind: I'll look in the white-elephant box." The household phrase-how comfortably it rang. She looked up. "What's in these then?"

"For Mother and Mrs. Lederer. Those leather satchel-things. Pinseal."

"Both the same, I'll bet."

He nodded.

Eunice began to laugh. "Oh, Lord. How they'll hate it." She continued to laugh, fondly, until Grorley smirked response. This, too, was familiar. Masculine gifts: the inappropriateness thereof.

But Eunice continued to laugh, steadily, hysterically, clutching her stomach, collapsing into a chair. "It's that hat," she said. "It's that s-specimen of a hat!"

Grorley's hat lay on the bed, where he had flung it. Brazenly dirty, limp denizen of bars, it reared sideways on a crest of tissue paper, one curling red whorl of ribbon around its crown. "L-like something out of Hogarth," she said. "The R-rounder's Return."

Grorley forced a smile. "You can buy me another."

"Mmmm ... for Christmas." She stopped laughing. "You know ... I think that's what convinced me-your coming back tonight. Knowing you-that complex of yours. Suppose I felt if you meant to stand us through the holidays, you meant to stand us for good."

Grorley coughed, bent to stuff some paper into the wastebasket. In fancy, he was stuffing in a picture too, portrait of Vida, woman of imagination, outdistanced forever by the value of a woman who had none.

Eunice yawned. "Oh ... I forgot to turn out the tree."

"I'll go down."

"Here, take this along." She piled his arms with crushed paper. In grinning afterthought, she clapped the hat on his head.

He went to the kitchen and emptied his arms in the bin. The kitchen was in chaos, the cookery methods of alt Wien demanding that each meal rise like a phoenix, from a flaming muddle belowstairs. Tomorrow, as Mrs. Lederer mellowed with wine, they would hear once again of her grandfather's house, where the coffee was not even roasted until the guests' carriages appeared in the driveway.

In the dining room, the table was set in state, from damask to silver nut dishes. Father would sit there. He was teetotal, but anecdotalism signs no pledge. His jousts as purchasing agent for the city of his birth now left both narrator and listener with the impression that he had built it as well. They would hear from Mother too. It was unfortunate that her bit of glory-her grandfather had once attended Grover Cleveland-should have crystallized itself in that one sentence so shifty for false teeth-"Yes, my father was a physician, you know."

Grorley sighed, and walked into the living room. He looked out, across the flowing blackness of the river. There to the south, somewhere in that jittering corona of yellow lights, was the apartment. He shuddered pleasurably, thinking of all the waifs in the world tonight. His own safety was too new for altruism; it was only by a paring of luck as thin as this pane of gla.s.s that he was safely hereon the inside, looking out.

Behind him, the tree shone-that trompe-l'oeil triumphant-yearly symbol of how eternally people had to use the spurious to catch at the real. If there was an angel at the top, then here was the devil at its base-that, at this season, anybody who opened his eyes and ears too wide caught the poor fools, caught himself, hard at it. Home is where the heart ... the best things in life are ... spin it and it says I. L.O.V.E. U.

Grorley reached up absently and took off his hat. This is middle age, he thought. Stand still and hear the sound of it, bonging like carillons, the gathering sound of all the plat.i.tudes, sternly coming true.

He looked down at the hat in his hand. It was an able hat; not every hat could c.o.c.k a snook like that one. From now on, he'd need every ally he could muster. Holding it, he bent down and switched off the tree. He was out of the living room and halfway up the stairs, still holding it, before he turned back. Now the house was entirely dark, but he needed no light other than the last red sputter of rebellion in his heart. He crept down, felt along the wall, clasped a remembered hook. Firmly, he hung his hat in the hall. Then he turned, and went back up the stairs.

Il Pl:r D M K:r.

I WAS TAUGHT TO speak French with tears. It was not I who wept, or the other girls in my high-school cla.s.s, but the poet Verlaine-the one who wrote "II pl:r d m k:r." Inside forty slack American mouths, he wept phonetically for almost a semester. During this time, we were not taught a word of French grammar or meaning-only the International Phonetic Alphabet, the sounds the symbols stood for, and Verlaine translated into them. We could not even pick up the celebrated pen of our aunt. But by the time Verlaine and our teacher Mlle. Girard had finished with us, we were indeed ready to pick it up, and in the most cla.s.sically pa.s.sionate accents this side of the Comedie Francaise.

Mlle. Girard achieved her feat in this way. On the very first morning, she explained to us that French could never be spoken properly by us Anglo-Saxons unless we learned to reanimate those muscles of the face, throat, poitrine that we possessed-even as the French-but did not use. Ours, she said, was a speech almost without lilt, spoken on a dead level of intonation, "like a sobway train."

"Like this," she said, letting her jaw loll idiotically and choosing the most American subject she could find: "Ay wahnt sahm ay-iss cream." French, on the other hand, was a language pa.s.sionne and spirituel, of vowels struck without pedal, of "l's made with a sprightly tongue tip-a sound altogether unlike our "l," which we made with our tongues plopping in our mouths. By her manner, she implied that all sorts of national differences might be a.s.sumed from this, although she could not take the time to pursue them.

She placed a wiry thumb and forefinger, gray with chalk dust, on either side of her mouth. "It is these muscles 'ere I shall teach you to use," she said. (If that early we had been trained to think in phonetic symbols, we would have known that what she had actually said was "mslz.") When she removed her hand, we saw that she had two little, active, wrinkling pouches, one on either side of her mouth. In the ensuing weeks I often wondered whether all French people had them, and we would get them, too. Perhaps only youthful body tone saved us, as, morning after morning, she went among us pinching and poking our lips into grimaces and compelling sudden ventriloquisms from our astonished sinuses.

As a final coup, she taught us the cla.s.sic "r." "Demoiselles," she said, "this is an elegance almost impossible for Americans, but you are a special cla.s.s-I think you may do it." By this time, I think she had almost convinced herself that she had effected somatic changes in our Anglo-Saxonism. "C'est produit," she said, imparting the knowledge to us in a whisper, "by vibr-rating the uvula!"

During the next week, we sat there, like forty purring Renaults, vibrating our uvulas.

Enfin came Verlaine, with his tears. As a supreme exercise, we were to learn to declaim a poem by one of the famous harmonists of France, and we were to do it entirely by ear. (At this time, we knew the meaning of not one word except "ici!" with which, carefully admonished to chirp "p, not down!" we had been taught to answer the roll.) Years later, when I could read French, I came upon the poem in its natural state. To my surprise, it looked like this: II pleure dans mon coeur Comme il pleut sur la ville.

Quelle est cette langueur?

Qui penetre mon coeur?

O bruit doux de la pluie Par terre ...

And so on. But the way it is engraved on my heart, my ear, and my uvula is something else again. As hour after hour, palm to breast, wrist to brow, we moaned like a bevy of Ulalumes, making the exquisite distinction between "pleure" and "pleut," sounding our "r" like cat women, and dropping "l"s liquid as bulbuls, what we saw in our mind's eye was this: il pl:r d m k:r kom il p syr la vij kel e set lg:r ki penetr m k:r o bryi du d la plyi par te:r ...

And so on.

Late in the term, Mme. Cecile Sorel paid New York a visit, and Mlle. Girard took us to see her in La Dame aux Camelias. Sorel's tea gowns and our own romantic sensibilities helped us to get some of her phthisic story. But what we marvelled at most was that she sounded exactly like us.

L'envoi comes somewhat late-twenty years later-but, like the tragic flaw of the Greeks, what Mlle. G. had planted so irrevocably was bound to show up in a last act somewhere. I went to France.

During the interim, I had resigned myself to the fact that although I had "had" French so intensively-for Mlle. G. had continued to be just as exacting all the way through grammar, dictee, and the rest of it-I still did not seem to "have" it. In college, my accent had earned me a brief eminence, but, of course, we did not spend much time speaking French, this being regarded as a frivolous addiction, the pursuit of which had best be left to the Berlitz people, or to tacky parlor groups presided over by stranded foreign widows in need of funds. As for vocabulary or idiom, I stood with Racine on my right hand and Rimbaud on my left-a cordon-bleu cook who had never been taught how to boil an egg. Across the water, there was presumably a nation, obscurcie de miasmes humains, that used its own speech for purposes of asking the way to the bathroom, paying off porters, and going shopping, but for me the language remained the vehicle of de Vigny, Lamartine, and Hugo, and France a murmurous orchestral country where the cieux were full of clarte, the oceans sunk in ombres profondes, and where the most useful verbs were souffler and gemir.

On my occasional encounters with French visitors, I would apologize, in a few choicely carved phrases that always brought compliments, for being out of practice, after which I retired-into English if they had it, into the next room if they hadn't. Still, when I sailed, it was with hope-based on the famous accent-that in France I would somehow speak French. If I had only known, it would have been far better to go, as an underprivileged friend of mine did, armed with the one phrase her husband had taught her-"Au secours!"

Arriving at my small hotel in Paris, I was met by the owner, M. Lampacher, who addressed me in arrogantly correct English. When we had finished our arrangements in that language, I took the plunge. "Merci!" I said. It came out just lovely, the "r" like treacle, the "ci" not down but cep.

"Ah, Madame!" he said. "You speak French."

I gave him the visitors' routine.

"You mock, Madame. You have the accent absolument pur."

The next morning, I left the hotel early for a walk around Paris. I had not been able to understand the boy who brought me breakfast, but no doubt he was from the provinces. Hoping that I would not encounter too many people from the provinces, I set out. I tramped for miles, afloat upon the first beatific daze of tourism. One by one, to sounds as of northern lights popping and sunken cathedrals emerging, all the postcards were coming true, and it was not until I was returning on the bus from Chaillot that, blinking, I listened for the first time that day.

Two women opposite me were talking; from their glances, directed at my plastic rain boots, they were talking about me. I was piqued at their apparent a.s.sumption that I would not understand them. A moment later, listening with closed eyes, I was glad that they could not be aware of the very odd way in which I was not understanding them. For what I was hearing went something like this: "rgard lameriken se kautu sekvnabl sa nespa purlsbl pvwarlesulje"

"a el nspavrem ik lezameriken akynrsblalotr"

"a wi [Pause] tykone mari la fijl d m dmi frer dre selwi [or sel] avek lbuk tylarktre emwa alo:r ldi swa:r el [or il] a fet yn fosku"

Hours later, in my room, with the help of the dictionary and Mlle. G.'s training in dictee, I pieced together what they had said. It seemed to have been roughly this: "Regarde, l'Americaine, ses caoutchoucs. C'est convenable, ca, n'est-ce-pas, pour l'ensemble. On peut voir les souliers."

"Ah, elles ne sont pas vraiment chics, les Americaines. Chacune ressemble a l'autre."

"Ah, oui. [Pause] Tu connais Marie, la filleule de mon demi-frere Andre-celui [or celle] avec le bouc. Tu l'as rencontre chez moi. Alors, lundi soir, elle [or il] a fait une fausse couche!"

One of them, then, had thought my boots convenient for the ensemble, since one could see the shoes; the other had commented on the lack of real chic among American women, who all resembled one another. Digressing, they had gone on to speak of Marie, the G.o.ddaughter of a stepbrother, "the one with the bouc. You have met him [or her, since one could not tell from the construction] at my house." Either he or Marie had made a false couch, whatever that was.

The latter I could not find in the dictionary at all. "Bouc" I at first recalled as "banc"-either Andre or Marie had some kind of bench, then, or pew. I had just about decided that Andre had a seat in the Chamber of Deputies and had made some kind of political mistake, when it occurred to me that the word had been "bouc"-goatee-which almost certainly meant Andre. What had he done? Or Marie? What the h.e.l.l did it mean "to make a false couch"?

I sat for the good part of an hour, freely a.s.sociating-really, now, the G.o.ddaughter of a stepbrother! When I could bear it no longer, I rang up an American friend who had lived in Paris for some years, with whom I was to lunch the next day.

"Oh, yes, how are you?" said Ann.

"Dead tired, actually," I said, "and I've had a slight shock. Listen, it seems I can't speak French after all. Will you translate something?"

"Sure."

"What does to 'faire une fausse couche' mean?"

"Honey!" said Ann.

"What?"

"Where are you, dear?" she said, in a low voice. "At a doctor's?"

"No, for G.o.d's sake, I'm at the hotel. What's the matter with you? You're as bad as the dictionary."

"Nothing's the matter with me," said Ann. "The phrase just means 'to have a miscarriage,' that's all."

"Ohhh," I said. "Then it was Marie after all. Poor Marie."

"Are you all right?"

"Oh, I'm fine," I said. "Just fine. And thanks. I'll see you tomorrow."

I went to bed early, a.s.suring myself that what I had was merely disembarkation jitters (what would the psychologists call it-transliteration syndrome?), which would disappear overnight. Otherwise it was going to be very troublesome having to retire from every conversation to work it out in symbols.

A month went by, and the syndrome had not disappeared. Now and then, it was true, the more familiar nouns and verbs did make their way straight to my brain, by-pa.s.sing the tangled intermediaries of my ear and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Occasionally, I was able to pick up an unpoetically useful phrase: to buy a bra.s.siere you asked for "something to hold up the gorge with"; the French said "Couci-couca" (never "Comme ci, comme ca") and, when they wanted to say "I don't know," turned up their palms and said "Schpuh." But meanwhile, my accent, fed by the lilt of true French, altogether outsoared the shadow of my night. When I did dare the phrases prepared carefully in my room for the eventualities of the day, they fell so superbly that any French vis-a-vis immediately dropped all thought of giving me a handicap and addressed me in the native argot, at the native rate-leaving me struck dumb.

New Year's Eve was my last night in Paris. I had planned to fly to London to start the new year with telephones, parties, the wireless, conversation, in a wild blaze of unrestricted communication. But the airport had informed me that no planes were flying the Channel, or perhaps anywhere, for the next twenty-four hours, New Year's Eve being the one night on which the pilots were traditionally "allowed" to get drunk. At least, it seemed to me that I had been so informed, but perhaps I libel, for by now my pa.s.sion for accurately understanding what was said to me was dead. All my pockets and purses were full of paper sc.r.a.ps of decoding, set down in vowel-hallucinated corners while my lips moved grotesquely, and it seemed to me that, if left alone here any longer, I would end by having composed at random a phonetic variorum for France.

In a small, family-run cafe around the corner from my hotel, where I had often eaten alone, I ordered dinner, successive cafes filtres, and repeated doses of marc. Tonight, at the elegiac opening of the new year, it was "allowed"-for pilots and the warped failures of educational sn.o.bbism-to get drunk. Outside, it was raining, or weeping; in my heart, it was doing both.