Herself
Authors: Hortense Calisher
An Autobiographical Work
Hortense Calisher
PART III: Seizures of Love and Work
PART IV: Pushing Around the Pantheon
P
UT YOUR EAR TO
an old faucet, do you hear the lifeblood of art drip-dripping, leaking like tapwater?—it’s only the old ivory-tower blues; she hears it every day. A faucet has realms of being for everybody; that is hers.
Meanwhile, ordinary life-under-death waits at the mousehole. She tosses it theater like everybody, learns like them to build honeycomb houses for whoever shall be there with her: the flesh of her body and other guests.
With the years, so much like other peoples’, this furnishment, as you know, turns to waxwork, family rooms staring shakily at time. Now and then, in spite of all she can do, one of the bodies she is in fealty with falls into death’s gigantic blanket—whooshed out of a mousehole!—they sink down down, lost lost, melded to the planetary hum.
Now is the time she must speak out her life—she never told that story. Of how she has spent her life trying to learn her own name.
Is this an autobiography she writes—when you’ll never get to know what she was doing that day in Wardour Street, at half-past three? Never a diary (she wrote other peoples’), partly a journal (travels with love did that), more than a memoir—for who wants to look back only?—she feeds it with fugitive soundings from a past she keeps up with, as with a correspondent more cogent than herself. If life is a minotaur to be found at the end of a confessive thread, then is this a new way of finding it?
Yes of course, it always is; you remember? This is the envelope to the life-bank, paying the interest but not the principal—not that, not yet. It’s the apologia played at dawn on the boarding house piano, by the unsuccessful suicide decamping to the West. And it’s the fruit carried every day to table with common bowl and knife, under the impression that someday she will fall to the floor in the fit of
grand mal
she always wanted—the great epilepsy-for-once.
“Life-talk, life-letters, that’s what it is,” she says. “It’s what’s left over after you’ve killed yourself laughing.”
It’s what the graffiti would say, on the tombstones of those who have been cremated. Or the letter one sometimes gets back from the P.O., addressed to oneself in one’s own hand.
It’s the note modern life leaves behind in the motel, saying “I was waiting for hope.”
And it has her name on it.
A
PPLES. THAT’S WHAT NEW
Yorkers of the 1930s remember. Apples of the Hesperides, neatly stalled on corner after corner, sold on the last trembling line of decency by men who were unwilling to beg. Sometimes a man had only two. We bought them, our Cézannes-to-be, with the nickel carfare home, and didn’t know it was our education we were bringing back. “You walked again!” said our middle-class mothers. “Forty blocks! My God, what am I going to do about those shoes?” And, for the first time, they might mean it.
Depression settled on us younger ones slow as the really big snowflakes. My father came home from a business trip, his face ashen, though still for
others
. “Decent family men stop you. They say nothing. When I took out my wallet—one wept.” 1929 had brought his business to the wall, but he still had it. We would always eat. And did. It never occurred to me that he and my mother were frantic, within their scale. Then it developed that college was no longer assumed for me. I mightn’t go. … I wasn’t to. “Go and be a secretary!” said my mother. “Like Mary.
Work
!” Mary!—my friend from the “wrong” neighborhood—two blocks away. My father said nothing; maybe he knew there were almost no secretaries any more.
But I had to go to college. All the books I still hadn’t read were there. And, in the way of the young, my methods were rough—and clean. Pride of my dancing school, I went and got the chorus job guaranteed to blow my mother’s cool—and me, of course, to sexual ruin. “I start on Monday,” I said. So, to college I went. The $400 for the first term was found, somewhere. I even had a short, frilled red crepe I could wear right now, and never wore out, for
boom
—that fall, skirts fell. And oh, yes, isn’t it all tender and charming and somehow gayer than now—as retrospect always is. But there was still to come the incredible gift the ’30s gave some of us. For I still didn’t know how rich we were.
At Barnard, where I took no sociology or economics (which wouldn’t have helped), I thought I was learning—how poor. I’d had to ask for a scholarship. But when the banks closed, many around me mourned for what their papas still had there. Another’s father had jumped from his skyscraper office into a large bloody pool of insurance. Meanwhile, I had one new dress per year, and almost no pocket money. So I worked. Summers and Saturdays. And a few more snowflakes fell.
Am I telling you about the decline of the middle class, or the rise of liberalism among the well fed? Indeed not, I still think sociology is for the simple-minded. I’m telling you how a “society” girl was prepared for her debut.
First job—hostess in a Happiness restaurant (later Schrafft’s), hours 11:00–3:00, wages $11 per week and lunch. There she learned: (a) waitresses whose pinched cheeks testify to one meal a day eat different from a girl to whom it’s just by-the-way; (b) professionals, who’ve worked up to what they are, hate those who get the job because of what
they
are; (c) to hate customers. And most important of all, in later life: never take the first table a hostess offers you. Saturdays, she worked as sales-clerk in a department store, where she learned to hate employers—particularly, among the buyers, a Miss Siff, whom she saw snarl to a manufacturer waiting outside the buying office—hat humbly in hand, a Homburg like
her
own father’s—“Get out.”
And outside, “society” waited, for him and for me. Not a matter of the “400,” any more. Some of this I saw, of course, though with a strictly visual eye. … Southward of those Hudson River sunsets behind the college, along the flats below Riverside Drive, a squatter town had risen, tar-paper shacks that to us flapped carefree, Romany Rom in the breeze. … At the Savoy night club in Harlem, where a boyfriend was announcer (radio), I stomped almost as good as
them
, until replaced by a black girl supple as the two-foot bird of paradise on her head. … In the newspapers, certain farmers in the West were raging toward revolution—but when is a farmer ever real to New York? Or the Okies?—even then trickling toward Steinbeck, and to a clever, arty still in
Bonnie and Clyde
. … Politics was happening to many, for the first time. At school, the editor of the paper was pulled off it for writing sympathetically of Russia; we figured she’d met one, somewhere, at the parties of those parlor pinks ten years too old for us. …
Meanwhile, at home, we moved from ten rooms to four; my mother, “on the advice of her doctor,” now did her own housework; and the family business, on which so many relatives depended; went bankrupt. But we went on managing—my father, aged 70, got a job. How remarkable this now was for a man of any age, he never said. Soon, I would know.
And so would my boyfriends—a word deeded to me from the ’20s, along with some of its gaiety, of which we still had our own frolicsome kit bagful. (For a decade never knows for sure when it
is
one, or when it is over. We didn’t know we were “the ’30s” yet.) Among my male classmates, the architects worried the most, having been taught early that they depended on the promises an economy makes to itself. “Bodies will still need help,” the grinning medics said. “I’ll open a grocery store,” said the business types, laughing. “People always need food.” And that, of course, was to be—very true. Why, we were all of us brimming with expectation—of the world, the flesh, and maybe the devil, too. No one had explained to us that imagination wasn’t the same as “looking ahead.” Why should it be? But I’m no one to talk.
For—see now our society girl, poised on the brink of it, her shoes almost as pointed as they will be again in 1960, under what she doesn’t know is a maxi-skirt. She often wears her leotard for a blouse, belts her waist wherever, sometimes wears her grandmother’s jabots to fine effect, and under floppy hats, chandeliers her ears—whose lobes are unpierced, however, for that’s still only for immigrants. The Smith-Corona she writes her poems on is still partly owed for. Art
is
long. And time does fleet—already June, and the daisy chains breaking. Her greatest shock is that she must pay $20—four Saturdays—for her sheepskin. And when it comes, it isn’t sheep. So college has, after all, prepared her as her parents couldn’t; she’s a cynic now. … And so, full of Shelley in the head, chicken patties in the gut, and chicken feed in the pocket—I came out.
And the snow had fallen all around us. And “the world” had stopped. Or the money had. The world we were being presented to—was closed. Shut-up shop, most of it. No one wanted to let
us
in. But we were all still expected to remain
alive
. That, to me, is the surreal feel of the ’30s, and why we understood at once, with our wordless pulses, the inscapes of de Chirico and Magritte, and Tanguy. … Somewhere back of a landscape jammed to stillness, a machinery has stopped, leaving these dreams and artifacts to stare. We wander, half-dream and half-artifact among them, but
moving
, plasms that must feed, must breathe. We cannot stop our hearts. But no one lifts a finger to help us keep them going. …
In the face of nature, one can sometimes scrabble, and seed. But in a city, the metal and the electric, and the money, must move also—and the circulation of money is different from the circulation of the blood. Some eras obscure that; now it was nakedly appearing. I began to understand why the banker had jumped. A circulatory failure. He’d made
his
connection between money and life. We were all being asked to. While outside—or inside the fringe where people like me were—millions were being refused a chance to make any connection at all.
Job, job, job. A larky word now, a grace note, sweet or sour, to life’s general song. Then, it was like the tocsin start of the Beethoven
Fifth
: we-want-a-job; who’ll-give-us-one? Later, those notes were the victory theme of a war, reminding me. Guns or butter?—the ’30s was a war for beans. Outside the employment offices, hundreds rioted for a single opening. Beggars were not come-to-our-town but from it, dropping in
our
tracks. The poor were with us from dawn to dusk now. And in the end, they got me a job.
In the DPW—Department of Public Welfare—where I went to work, in the former Bank of America on 116th and Madison, we sat on orange crates, posting our disbursements and costs: the dole was the great industry now. Our office was a “precinct,” police style, and I was “the investigator.” When we went out, it was called “going into the field.” There. “How has client managed up to now?” was the query every case record had to answer, in dollars and cents, and in rent and Con Ed bills to show residence—a clear history of starvation in a face was not enough.
Each of us had 175 families per month to visit—all of them, it seemed, on the top fifth floor. I saw hall toilets for the first time—and all polyglot disease. One of my blocks had the highest TB rate in the U.S.A.: another was solidly prostitute. “Family?” a girl said to me. “There ain’ no
fam
ilies here.” In a dark cell, a 300-pound woman lay, her gangrenous leg glowing like radium: I had found her by a man’s answer down below—“Follow the smell.” I discovered the slum fear of city hospitals; 30 years later we are authenticating it.
“When the city marshal evicted a family, we were required to “cover it”; it was a common sight to see furniture and effects piled at the curb, remaining under snow and rain. Once, I “covered” an eviction on Sutton Place, rent $400, where the maid knew nothing, and the master, appearing over her shoulder, let loose obscenities I’ve never met since—not even in print. Daily, I was learning the language, and the country—mine. When a man was “away,” he was in prison: when a girl got pregnant, she “fell in.” The clean, up-tight workers in Yorkville showed me their canceled bankbooks with mute pride; a gangster’s family down on Rutgers Street paraded its royalty to me—Dutch Schultz. And we “workers” had our own jokes, some inadvertent, jotted on the emergency tickets we were always trying to give: “Woman in bed with doctor. Pay rent.” Or: “Nothing to eat in the house except a loaf of bread and a pot of caviar.” Or how, when I asked one kid the result of her Wassermann, she said in skat-rhythm, and with a finger snap, “Positive, hunnah. Poss
it-TIVE
!”