On Keeping Women
Authors: Hortense Calisher
A Novel
Hortense Calisher
Touching Upon Youth
“D
ON’T NEVER FORGET YOU
come from a harbor city!” the father would say, walking his brood of brother and sister down to the end of the pier, early of a spring evening, and standing there with his eyes as satisfied and his hands as pat on his stomach as if he’d just fished this out of the water, like a dirty pedigree. The self-congratulation of city-dwellers is endless, they say, and never worse than when the city is New York.
So be it sister. That’s how you came to have it. And to be ruined by it. If ruin was to be lying as she was, a nude body in moonlight, on the riverbank just across the road from her own house, in the beautiful zoned village of Grand River, on the Hudson an hour due north of that harbor, on the river’s opposite shore. Would it get up, this body, toward morning, to creep whitely across the road again, through the door and back into the last eighteen years? Or would it continue to lie there, breasts rising and falling in the red sun—and for age thirty-seven not uncomely—until the first commuter bus, passing at six-forty daylight saving, reports to itself a woman’s body with a face not unknown to it—“My God, isn’t that Lexie,
Ray’s
wife?” lying at almost eye-level on the dais of the riverbank—“Not their property even … They have river rights, though …” and no, not dead—“No, it moved … What a thing for the children!”—but alive, uncommonly alive?
Hush now; quiet as the body seems, the riverbank it lies on is slipping its moorings, heading downstream like those coal-barges on which a deckhand is never seen, to wash in perhaps just at sunset, twenty-odd miles on and almost as many years back—at the Morton Street pier.
“There you are, boys and girls,” her father said. “Cargo always coming in.”
There wasn’t a spar on the rosy water, but we knew what he meant, James and I. Down under the unused pier, watery light clambered over the cold green fur on the poles that held us. Across the harbor, Jersey—or the rim of it that was really our Palisades, marred by a few factory-stacks and the brokenly gilded windows of what must be Weehawken—looked more content than it could possibly be. Except for the fact that it was looking at us.
At that hour, alone for the moment on a dead-end jetty in the part of town that was still called “the Village,” and as close to the slabbery Hudson as three seals on a rock, we
were
the city. And felt the responsibility, like any family who’d cut short dessert in order to stroll out there and accept that grandly yellow sky for all the rest of them still in their houses. Which we did for free, as their city-authorized agents. Who else but us knew so well the cycles here?—how, now that the ballplayers and ropeskippers were gone for the day, the boys with the knives would be returning later to be our muggers and cruisers, alongside the heavier clans who’d lasted through spaghetti and more, and would shortly be out, breathing anisette into the dark and walking that dog which deposited the largest turds in the neighborhood, while the poncho’ed young couples would be wheeling those grasshopper strollers in which the thin, bargain-cheap babies sat as stiffly awake as racing-car drivers. Next to arrive would be the lovers of any age, sex or duration, either flopping about in the dark or stilled by it, all like fish on the same hook. Followed by the after-midnight vomiters, coughing it up. Who else but us knew the cycles here? Why they did, all of them. And when we three were unable to get here, acted as agents for us.
We three were maybe elite in our persistence, coming on all evenings except rainy ones—although the energies that pushed father, brother and sister to that joint walk were not the same. Father’s “Don’t never!” was humorous, the kind of double-negative indulged in by a college graduate who, as an exchange-scholar in history, had seen the world—and Aberystwyth, Wales—but had declined into advertising later. He was at this time editor of a “house-organ” (or company newspaper) for a large, second-rate industrial firm with a name which sounded like
Western Electric
but wasn’t, and a plant located across the river, in back of those same Palisades.
Even our mother never properly remembered the many companies who successively employed our father, their names always compounded of prefixes and suffixes like
Therm, Aero
and
Dyne,
to signify the elements these outfits were geared for, and always faintly disagreeable to her and us. The current name held our daily destiny, or half of it, in its robot-like palm, yet we and it never met, and there probably wouldn’t be time to. My father had solved this for himself by calling each place
The Plant.
He was a faithful worker, usually not too overqualified for the jobs he held in their publicity or promotion departments, but maybe too well-liked by his colleagues ever to be a threat—and so always the first to be let go. His weakness was that he wasn’t working at what he would really like to, but never quite found out what that was. The plant found that out, every time. His compensation, over and above salary, was that even when working in New Jersey, or once as far away as Philadelphia, from which he’d sternly commuted without ever mentioning this to family friends—he’d always kept the city and us together.
At this time “the sunset advantages”, as he liked to say—or “the sunrise” as the case might be—were available to him “both coming and going”, since he at the moment was traveling to the plant via the West Shore Railroad, and the ferries to Manhattan which then connected it. Each evening he described to us how the New York skyline had looked as approached that dusk: “My God, tonight it was like a grail!” Often for my mother’s benefit adding hints of what the United Fruit Company, near where the ferry docked, was stocking. “Bananas, like a jungle!” Or “Tangerines, hon, get some, hunh? They must be cheap.” Now and again he told us how much wilder a scarlet the ferries had been when he was a boy down here, and how old Italian men, gruff but winsome, had played the violin on them.
The house we then lived in (after a descent from East Eighty-eighth Street during a lapse in funds) was a brownstone much like the one he’d grown up in, the same few blocks from the river, and we had rented a similar ground floor.
“Well, let’s go; let’s say ‘Good Evening’ to the evening!” he’d cry, after a spoonful of one of the boxed puddings my mother put to set the minute she came home from work—and we two always went. Once there, he made it clear that the sunset was the least of our advantages. “With this city at your back—” he’d sigh, and never finish. But we knew the end of that sentence: we could do anything, go anywhere.
“Which way is Paris, which way to Hong Kong?” we’d ask when we were younger, and he’d always pointed the same way, down the harbor. And the same hand scooped us back. Oh we wanted to travel; who didn’t? But when we got there, wherever it was, we’d always know we’d be its equals.
Our mother never came on these jaunts. A city social worker for eighteen years by then, promoted to supervisor for the last five, she alleged that she could see “old Gotham” and all her advantages just by rocking in her rocker—her feet up on a hassock, her salt-and-pepper hair loosed from its bun onto her shoulders—and by remembering her day. Each Christmas he gave her a new hassock. “Oh, I’ve adjusted to you, Charlie” she often said, in her lingo. Meaning that she was resigned to what Charlie said he got out of the city and his children’s response to it. After all, that was his career.
The last house, this was, the last one in which we were a city family and together; that’s how I remember it now. Also because my particular advantage was just then becoming clear to me, though hidden as well as I could hide. For of course our father hadn’t merely offered us New York’s beauties, but had also schooled us in its million-dollar choices, neighborhood by neighborhood. East Eighty-eighth Street had been the least successful to his mind; because of “too much Hitler,” Yorkville’s famous German cuisine, or its cranky small-craftsmen’s shops—upholstery, stained-glass—never much stirred him beyond a moody “You two’ll know Europe everywhere, even before you go.” So, just before the end of our tenure there, he’d been forced to stronger methods, seeing nothing wrong in a father of temperate habit and his teen-aged children canvassing the bars, which in those days were usually named for two-initialled Irishmen, and as he shortly concluded, “Provincial dull. And no preparation for Dublin whatsoever. Not that you two’ll need it, with your background.” We felt that too, very early—as with such a father, who wouldn’t? While we didn’t quite know what he was preparing us for, we knew that he was looking for it everywhere. And even after a dozen nightly rounds, and as many faces on and off the barroom floor, we hadn’t found P. J. Moriarty’s or M. L. Mackey’s that unrewarding, until our mother put a stop to it. “Your father’s an hysteric about this,” she’d said, pronouncing the “n” in “an” in her firm, totalitarian way. “When he works right in town, it always happens. Better that he should commute.” Shortly after, opportunity struck; he was canned again. We admired the way she not only weathered father’s job shifts but made psychological use of them. She’d adjusted damn well to those sunsets. And so of course had we.
Although by this time, brother James’ choices, lucky stiff, were well-fixed. Two important years older than me, he’d spent his most formative years near the Planetarium and the Museum of Natural History, when we were living on Central Park West, and during a time when Aerodyne or Thermaflux was so far down in Jersey that Father could do little more than arrive home to wheeze, “The ci-tee is a la-
bor
-a-toree,” Gilbert & Sullivan-style, and let James probe his advantages for himself. James had yearned first to be a Navaho, and failing that, an astronomer, but by the time of those spring nights on the pier he was seventeen, slated for Columbia pre-med in the fall, and through the kindness of our policeman on the block (Father again) had already seen his first corpse, at the morgue.
All that summer long, our pier-conversations were to be dotted with them, giving Father many a chance to point our James’s special opportunities. But the night when James had just that day seen his first—a drowning—is the night I recall best. For my own reasons as well.
“Palomino it was, the exact color of a palomino,” James said. “And swollen. The head was the shape of a sugarloaf. Those mountains they call sugarloaf.” He swallowed, and pulled his five fingers in a line from his nose. “Long.”
“Shame on you, James,” Father said. “Seeing all of those Western movies. Or seeing in terms of them. A boy like you. When you’ve got the morgue.”
A city boy, he meant. Good New Yorkers didn’t stoop to a lot of things. Father had whole lists of them. Increased by what he saw on the outskirts.
“Right,” I said. “That’s for people who have to go to drive-ins.” I was almost fifteen, brat-protective of myself on the outside, but mushy within.
“Never saw a real palomino,” James said, thoughtful. “Never had the opportunity. It was the head reminded me. Of a horse.” He leaned over the pier-edge, looking at the water, which because of lack of cooperation from the sky that evening was a tobacco-shadowed gray, occasionally rippling in the wind to a sheet of what could have been one of Father’s past products—duro-aluminium. With the second “i” put in because the plant making it had been a British Shell subsidiary. Every now and then a brief city wave chopped to a glint; that was the “i.”
“Good place for a suicide,” James said. “Wonder if they ever get them from here?”
The pier was crowding up with all the regulars.
“I don’t see what good the dead do you for medicine,” I said. “Until you’ve dissected them. And until the second year, you can’t.” I was jealous of him for having more to feed his imagination than I had, at my schlocky dayschool. Where I learned works like “schlocky.” A private school, but so full of the kids of social workers, teachers and radical lawyers, and so pre-selected to a “random” scattering around the norm, that it had gone simple on me. I was very much my father’s child, if he had only known.