Authors: Hortense Calisher
They’re coping. When, early one morning, one of Lexie’s treasured pair of Sandwich lamps was there on the livingroom floor, laid oddly prominent on the rug, the glass-bowl part unbroken but wrenched away from its brass stem, who sneaked it up to his workroom and fixed it before “anybody” came in?—while Reeny half-closed the sliding doors and watched, and in the kitchen Royal kept his mother occupied. They’ve each and all become masters of the sudden fit of bawled song, or of clomping like troglodytes—while the unmissed third of their trio spirits away Father’s desk-obelisk, lying on the mat outside his shut office, or the piano-score scrawled all over with pencil. Or while the two others slip away to stand worriedly outside Chess’ door. “Teen-age weirdos!” their mother says fondly, a gold shine in her eye, in her alto-happy voice. “You’re
all
nuts.”
They’ve given up counting how many poltergeist events there have been since the lamp—or must have been before. That incident’s now merely the one marking when they first knew it must be Chess. He’s since read up on poltergeists. “Fleers against the family,” one Scottish account said. Hers aren’t always committed at night. And the train of them—or what you’d have to call the theme of them—changes. Often in tune with outside incident. When Kellihys’ burned, for instance, the breakages stopped. The little fires began. Always—as if carefully—when they and their mother were in the house. Never when Lexie and Chess were alone there, or when everybody was going to be out. A little pile of shavings in a corner, once. A pile of clothes—an apron of Lexie’s, an old hat of Ray’s—smoking, not too negligently, in Chessie’s own fireplace. While she sat, downstairs.
“Ah c’mon Chess,” he said to her direct—she’ll take it, from him—“gonna burn the old folks, do it outside.” She’d let him clean it up. Listening mocking, but satisfied. Now nothing may happen for a day or two, but no longer is there a week or two between episodes. Getting shorter between; that scares him. Conversely, he’s finding he can say anything to her, and does, kidding from a tight chest. “Stop this jazz, will you, Sis; it’s wearing us out.” Or brashly “No look,
stop
it with the knives. Gives Reeny the creeps. And what are we going to do for steak?” For kitchen knives are being displayed on hearths and bathroom-floors, across a desk. And putting things back is beginning not to be the answer. Unless they can turn the house right side up, as fast as she can turn it inside out. As he’s learning with a sinking heart, the rate at which order can be restored after riot is never proportionate.
And sinking him ever lower is the slow, oncoming knowledge that she is grateful when charged. That she wants desperately, yes, to have her trouble recognized. That though she can be actressy through all of this, in some last trapped corner she’s not acting. That most of all she wants to be
coached
—on what she’s done. Above those long, thickly lashed brown eyes, the wing-shaped double space below the brow pinkens, with thanks. Behind the full, rebel mouth is a tremor, of a girl shaking violently in her effort to be—with others. While back of those cold cheeks, somewhere behind those features, though he can never place where, is the emanation she wants wrested from her. Love. It’s why he’s sure she will never hurt anybody, any of them.
“Chess, don’t threaten us,” he says desperately, once. Picking up the largest of the knives yet, on a landing. “Do something nice.” And openmouthed, hears, distanced in her throat, a ventriloquist
Thanks.
And she does do it, cooking breakfast like a chef from a far heaven for three days running—lingonberry pancakes, French toast flavored with kirsch, stuffed omelets, until they have to beg her to let down and she says, trembling “No, I better not.”
Even her cooking—inspired, Lexie calls it—is on the edge. Who stuffs omelets with cream, like gratitude melting? Or puts buttered mushrooms, like love-tokens, in the oatmeal? “Cook away,” he said, giving her a peck—he was the only one who could—“but spare me the honey on the radishes”—a conceit of his own—and she smiled.
When she’s like that, it’s hard to remember her as ever any other way. It’s then she’ll write the parody of
Pamela
on which her English teacher will mark “A clear, clean prose, almost as eighteenth-century as the original, yet yours. And publishable, gal.” It’s then that Chess, showing this to him scornfully, will march to her desk, twine herself there, scratching her hair into a haystick tumble, all of her gone soft and ordinary as any dormitory girl, and write two cool paragraphs that sends them both into stitches—a parody of the English teacher, signed “Gal.” At these blessed times he’ll bring his own term-papers to her for grammatical correction, which she will do thoughtfully—an artisan, without pride.
When the bad times come on her, he thinks “How could I ever forget? How could she?”
For even then, she never loses rationale. Rather, it’s as if the icy grip of the consecutive holds her in thrall; she’s remembering the black logic that other people forget.
It’s then he begins to surmise that the logic of the technically sane, even of the greatest, must have some little human stumble in it to keep them so. Each of the rigorous philosophers he sinks into for their mollifying ache of wonder, must have had it—exactly like the flaw which appears in each one of his own machines, work well though they do. So that, from Hobbes to Hume to Kant, and all those before and after, the universal spaces can be passed on for study—even to a lowly student-reader like him. Otherwise, without such a stumble, each one of those superheads could have turned the universe inside out—leaving only a circled black hole for those afterward. In mechanics, call the flaw simply a lack of perpetual motion. A machine has pathos, he often feels, watching one—because it’s only the sum of all its parts; even if each of these be perfect, the total fact of them will one day do it in.
Among these men, whose great heads range his own prospects like the severed stone heads bordering a picture he has of the Bodleian Library at Oxford (where he secretly wants to go)—what would be the common flaw, always transferable? Even to Schopenhauer (on whom he, Charles, is doing a thesis for the scholarship competition which might get him there), passed on even to that antiphilosopher, who tried to the whole works in—one small hitch which made his try impossible. He still had enough self-compassion to live.
She doesn’t have it. He should write his thesis on her.
If he could only give her some. Of that most ordinary life-stuff. Which any clod has, but she doesn’t. What appears to be her monstrous ego, dominating him and the others, is only the shadow of a vacuum, on the edge of which she’s pedaling for dear life, in order to stay with them. And she’s twice as vulnerable to suggestion as other people. Or magnetically so, in a complete radius. Sooner or later, at some hint from outside her, the dark needle within her—points.
The voices she hears have been the worst for them. Because they themselves at first believe in them. Even now they never doubt that she hears. In the main it is Lucy, a girl from her school, who calls and calls. “She keeps calling me.” On the telephone, they think—as who wouldn’t—though they’re never there when it rings for her. The legend of Lucy that she tells them is vivid and elusive at the same time. Lucy wants something; she comes to their house for it, but never while they’re there. She’s immured at home—an apartment in New York—and yet on the loose. She’s here, in the house. “Where?” they said, and went to find her. They even had an image of her—a rich girl, who had to cadge carfare. That day, they had all been in the house since the day before. They’d marked off the house, in territories. Rambling as it was, could it hide a stranger from them, with their years of hide-and-seek here? “The summer kitchen!” Royal said—he’s covered twice as much ground as anybody. But of course she wasn’t there. The only place she can be is in Chess’ room, with Chess.
“Gone,” said Chess. “She got scared.” She shrugs. “Let her spend the night somewhere. Maybe behind my fireplace.” And just in time, she grins. But they’ve caught her. In her own room.
Charles looks at the scrawling on the wallpaper—or as drawn, behind it.
Only Royal has the heart to be indignant. “Just yesterday I asked Roddy Kellihy. Whether he’d seen her go in or out of our house. A girl with short blond hair.”
Charles himself is ashamed, abased. As they get ever closer to Chess, is it better for her, or worse? Does she still feel safe in the house? Or should she be wrested out of it? If she were to be … He sees her—the big, serene doll she can be in her calm moments—packaged somehow like that forever, off in some other place. She was always the quietest, most beautiful baby of them all, Lexie always said; should she get away from Lex? From both of them? With each parent, the getting. away would have to be different. Or would it be no use? In any case, would the black needle, swinging slowly—point?
She never feels the need of redress though. To them, the parents. As when he leaves here, will surely happen to him. Chess thanks no one, for being born.
College will rescue him. He feels guilty for being glad. But how he wishes he belonged to one of those families—loving enough, far as he can see, or even fatly quarrelsome—who tentacle more healthily to outside life than to themselves and their own language. He has two friends like that, whom he admires but is mum with—and one like himself, with whom he has long talks.
Rocky’s family are devout Catholics, but at Charles’ age Rocky is already out of there, into a commune and living with a Jewish girl. “Roz’s family’s the same tight bunch as mine though; they take communion together night and morning—the rest of the world can talk to them later.
You
know, Chuck.” It’s a relief to nod. “Used to think that was all to the good,” Rocky says. “We-uns against the world. Or before the rest of it.” Rocky’s father and the girl’s are both lawyers, which Rocky is studying to be, though working in her father’s office because his own mother won’t let his own father do that for him now, or let Rocky back in the house.
“Mariolatry is what it is,” Rocky said this afternoon, waggling his beard at him, over a beer. The commune’s livingroom, in a cupolaed old house up the hill that eight couples have rented together, is neat as a pin. “Mary-what?” he asks. The girls who stay home—at least half the group’s—are in their own confab. They all know he has to get away from his own house, though not why. How sweet and open they are, moving like reeds in their own rhythm. “Cult of Mary, to you Charles. You Protestants mightn’t know it but you’re living under it, just the same. Your mother’s thin, and goes to college. Mine’s fat, and goes to church. Roslyn’s mother is a member of the League of Women Voters of Great Neck—and is fat or thin, depending. But they all three of them set the moral tone of their house.” Across the room the girls are now stretching a quilt or a canvas across some kind of loom. Two of them are in granny-skirts. Two are in halters and shorts. Roz, Rock’s-girl, is instructing them. “I’m kicked out of our house because of it,” Rocky grins, proud. “And into Roz’s Dad’s office because
her
mother thinks I’ll marry her. Right, Roz? And you, Chuck. You not careful, you gonna stay on to be head of your house, because of it.” They know about his father. Not about Chess. Half the commune says he can come live there, if he wants to get out and can get a job; half says he can’t come unless he brings a girl—a single would change the atmosphere.
“Mariolatry” he says, savoring it. He likes the longer words; they reach for him like pairs of hands, out of the mists of the philosophical systems he’s been reading in, all these stretched, prickling nights. It’s the universes which are stretching themselves before his very eyes, drawing him into the superspaces.
Logical positivism. Categorical imperative. Epistemological
—anything. He rarely looks the words up. His sense of the world is under his skin and only hunting its embodiment—let the surrounding text bear up the meaning and bring it to him. He feels like a trial-meet swimmer, training beforehand in the backstroke, the freestyle, the butterfly, not only to qualify but to find his stroke.
“The moral tone of a—” he says. In the kitchen at home, Lexie, cleaning the sink, telling Maureen once again how many teaspoonsful for the cocoa, says “Royal! Take those steps one at a time.” Tiptoes past him—you can get away with anything with her, if you’re reading a book; sighs after his father’s retreating back, “All right, Raymond. Only
tell
me,” slaps his own face for the dirty word on it, moons out at the river like a hunger-marcher looking for an imperial palace, and leans back in to the ping-pong table, saying “All right, Charles. Now teach me to slam!”
He’s finished his beer. “I know how they do it, sure. But why?” Across the room, the girls shriek at him. “Because you men wouldn’t let us do
more
! … Because that’s all there
is
.” Roz, natty in a pair of the leather jeans she stitches for herself and Rock, looks up from her canvas. “Was, girls.
Was
.” Rocky puts up a ducking elbow. “Right, right. But save it, will you girls. Look, there’s only two of us.”
When the three men who work at night come sleepily down the stairs, craving supper, he and Rock and they go out to the garage, where Rocky’s stashed a bottle his father gave him. “Dad comes over here all the time.” They pass the bottle. “The girls won’t drink whiskey anyway. Say it destroys the braincells. They won’t even get stoned any more. Say it’s bad for the genes.” Through the kitchen window they can see the girls’ heads, bent now over supper, dreamy and reserved. Sweethearts, all of them. If Chess were like them, if only. His throat aches, guiltily. For himself. “Your Dad not back yet, huh,” Rock says. “Look maybe you could start out here, as a single. We’ll work on it. Maybe we can swing the girls.”
On the way home, he half yearns for it, heavy with what’s coming at him. Then thinks, no—not with that group, great as they are. Roz or no Roz, they’re too Catholic. Or call it that. Driving into his own driveway, he starts to laugh. At how Catholic those little darlings still are. Two hours out of here and he gets back his own jokes. Unfair, Immanuel Kant, yes, unfair. Since his own house is what gave him his jokes. He can hear his mother saying it to him after one of his schoolfights, or a sister-fight, or even one with her. “All right, Charles? Got back your jokes?”