Authors: Hortense Calisher
And I add how “Since I’ll have to pick up my education piecemeal from now on,” I’ve already learned from my father-in-law-to-be that a veterinarian is a man who doesn’t kick dogs but doesn’t pat them either. Or allow them into the house.
Ray and I’ve already chosen the shabby Victorian mansion from which he will practice. And in which I will live—needless to say—so I don’t.
A lie. (What needed more to be said?) An inversion of the past by the future—which is at least me, lying on the river-bank, chilly but not dead, on grass that gets plushier as my thoughts grow clearer—in front of that same house.
Not angry, really. As my mother used to say in her lingo: “Concerned.” Taken me such a long time to realize I’ve no lingo of my own. But being in the nude here helps. And there are still some hours to dawn. When I must decide. Whether I’ll stay here, and wait to be found, with all my buttons not just buttoned, but off. Or whether I’ll get up just in time, and sneak back into the house.
That report to James was the first of many over the years, and in his fraternal eyes I’m accustomed to seeing his verdict, long since fixed. For no matter what’s going on in the newspapers or on the battlefields of civilization, while I mouse from stove to village, from planned-parenthood to puddings bidden straight from the natural egg—the word “hysterical” is what’s now firmly applied to me. Even by myself.
When did I first look around the hillocky streets of this white river-village to find the trees grimacing against the houses they shelter, the river running away to ask the city: “Su-boo-burbia, is that what her hystery-sterical is”?
The answer’s no.
That wasn’t lingo, that was prayer.
Why’s he have to take you thirty miles upriver?” Father said, just before the wedding.
After the ceremony, he said
“People
don’t grow, in places like that. It all goes into the chlorophyll.”
After that, he washed his hands of me. It was at the wedding that he met the lady with the nightgowns.
“Ray isn’t planning to grow, Father; he’s planning to settle.” Funny how I knew that, even then. And what was one lost erogenous zone?—at twenty I had them to spare. And had a strong interest in nightwear myself at the moment. Pink satin pajamas, the bridal night, and nile-green, panels blowing, the second day; then the honeymoon ascended by stages to a purple velvet hostess-gown; after the first Sunday, I planned a repeat. So, by easy cycles, to the door of the maternity ward. Four times.
Where we stand before God with a clutch of rubber nipples, or real ones, and we can never go back. Nor would I, if one could. Even if in my small way, I intend to change the imagery of the world to conform with what happens there.
In my small way, it’s not popular liberty I’m lying here for. Got that back in grade-school, like some of the blacks. Board of Education gave it to thirty thousand of the best pupils in the city—a little enamel flag that James could grow up to wear in his lapel or on his hatband, but which it was understood I could never fly from my grave—and
that’s
sibling jealousy … After which we were all back in private circumstances again, including the blacks.
So, lying on my riverbank, what do I want from the parliaments of the world? Membership? Sure, that’s okay. But come on, what good is it to me, or will it be, in my private practice, which is nothing like Ray’s? What profiteth it a woman even if she gain half the token world by genito-urinary contract? What she needs most, is to find her own lingo—and have them publish the Congressional Record in it. At least half of the time. (With automatic translation-boxes on the backs of all theatre-seats, park benches and public conveniences. Including the men’s room at Ray’s club, which they let the wives use once-a-month on Wednesdays—perhaps just above that little cigar-rest which is screwed to each lav door.)
And alongside the mirrors of all medicine-cabinets in private domiciles.
Meanwhile the world is thrashing toward dawn without much help from me—and what shall I be saying to whoever leans over this patch of ground which is not even our property—“I am your representative from the Nude?”
Since it appears that even to pee, I am not going inside to do it, and perhaps not ever—except to telephone James “I’m sailing southward. Meet me at 4
A.M.
, at the Morton Street Pier.” Friends welcome.
Let us organize me. It’s been done before.
Dear Ray:
For you are dear to me, as the customs allow.
You do not kick humans—and have been known to pat them.
I am a woman not entirely zoneless.
And the children have been consecutive. Four times.
Forgive me if I recall their births better than their conceptions. I know I was trained not to.
“You’ll forget it in a day,” the gynecologist says, with a fifty-dollar smile. “Your abdominal muscles are first-class.”
Nothing to it, he said.
“But it’s my zone,” I say. “I can’t be expected to give up all of them.”
He laughs, without charging me more for it. “You won’t want to stay there long.”
So I shut my mouth. His office is in New York, and the women in our village cherish any good excuse for going there. I’m looking forward to nine months of it.
Since it’s to be a natural birth, you Ray, the father, are allowed in. I invite James too, as a brother and medical man, but he refuses. On the grounds that he’s a doctor of the public health only. I’m disappointed, but of course that is his field.
“The private is not my sphere, Lexie,” he says on the telephone. “Thanks a lot.”
You’re there in a peculiar capacity, Ray, for you. A doctor, with his hands tied. As a father, they’re even afraid you might faint. “Some do,” Dr. Gyno says, with his cutrate grin. The nurse agrees with him.
So then I ride in, Joan of Arc for a day. Into the stirrups for you, Girlbud—then into the burning bath. At the height, the flames are considerable. But I too have my hands tied. “She’s one of those who won’t scream,” I hear the nurse say scornfully. I thought I had; later she swore not. But perhaps that’s how they’re trained too.
… I remember you though, Ray, leaning over me like a spindle of damp wood which isn’t afraid it’ll ignite. The lower half of my body is almost totally consumed. I am on the point—the absolute point, of learning my lingo. And then I lost it…
“Scream for
me,
Lexie,” you said.
So I deliver silently.
A minute after, I’m watching all your antics like at a spectator-sport at which the tables have been suddenly turned.
“Breathe, you little bastard,” the doctor says, slapping. And inaccurate to the last.
Above your mask, you’re weeping. “A boy, Alexandra. But we’ll name him ‘Alex,’ you bet.” On the spot, you’re always generous.
“How are
you,
Mother?” the nurse said.
All my insides feel pearly now—the placenta, perhaps. I feel all nacre, the way I do when a man leaves me—mother-of-pearl. But it’s blood, I bet. If I choose to look down. I see they don’t want me to. Yes, it’s blood. My mouth falls open. Though never so wide as the opening down there. I see they want me to close up shop as quickly as decent. Nurse mops. I’m a little heady with what I’ve done down below. Why, I’ve given birth to all of you—is what I’m thinking. All of you. In my time. Why can’t I speak of it?
The baby does it for me.
“Wah!”—it says “—I’m the only normal one here.”
You know how children are.
“
Ev
eryone speaks for me,” I said.
I apologize to all of you, for remembering anyway. Such an unnatural act.
James reported that his friend Dr. Gyno thought I took things too hard. “‘Very poetical girl, is she, your sister?’” he said.
“And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘No. Over qualified.’”
But he never will tell me for what.
So the next time I go to Maternity, I scream like everybody else. And have many more visitors afterward. From our village road especially. People are shy, I begin to notice. Too shy to say how living really is—even the loud ones. Mutual screaming helps.
But then I stop going to hospital. “Four times, we agreed upon, Ray—remember? And of course you do. Words which are said—signed, sealed and delivered—are the way you remember your acts.” (Between phonecalls which take you gratefully away from them.) Your word is your bond. “Yes,” you say thoughtfully. “Perhaps we should rest from our labors for awhile. Having them so close—I warned you. But you were always—”
“Yes,” I say. “Hysterical.”
So after that, we make love for ourselves entirely. I agree with the Catholics; that’s dangerous. That way, you can better scrutinize the sex, and the partner.
So after a while we have rested entirely. Dear Ray.
“A
RE YOU ALL RIGHT?”
James says, maybe twelve years later.
Mud in my eye from a bad throw of Charlie my eldest, I scrape cookie-grease off a cushion, feed it to the dog, shunt her off the sofa and sit down haunchily in her warmth. It’s Friday, the Saint’s Day of the week, domestically. And in June, when the last Parents’ Day of the crayola crowd has just snaked its way three times round the school in tributary drawings, and on out into the blue. Soon will be summer, sand on the soles and the heart starred with weenie-roasts. When the first child first plays the piano, one cries. Two others, banished to the tower, breathe together on the Mellophone—which is a trainer for the French horn. In the dark of the landing, I breathe in unison. On hope, my instrument. These days I tremble with selflessness. That candy delight. Stuffed well in, it keeps the language down.
In the dark of the jobs where the men twirl for us, does James, now staring at me, and Ray, now having a cigar in his study, tremble the same?
“Yes, James,” I say. “Quite all right. The children are bringing me up.”
For the first time in our talks I haven’t answered him properly. I’ve dissatisfied him.
“Why won’t you have more help?” he says, veering to look round. “Ray says he could afford a full-time one, easily.”
“I am full-time.”
“A doctor’s wife. It’s demeaning.”
“Sorry. It’s a hobby of mine. That I can’t yet spare.” But I’m learning, learning. How to satisfy them all.
“You’re always—” he says. “Why are you so
always
—?”
Quickly I put a hand on his knee. “I know, I know. But in that case, what help is help?”
Ah, that’s better, his eyes tell me. This crazy sister of mine who’s not crazy, but just crazy enough. To keep him coming up here. To this house, whose occasional majesty—a river before the door, after all, and a tower to which one can send children—is dimmed by bum tricycles jammed into the privet-hedges, floors soft with the brown family-dirt that’s never sinister enough for a big clean-up but ought to be, and rugs reduced to string. And where the food is only reasonable. When he could be at a Saturday night dinnerparty for eight with some of his colleagues, in one of their cool Park Avenue compartments—wine and good linen, conversation like a tollroad for which he has a life-ticket, and an exquisitely clean divorcée, invited just for him. “Why do I keep on coming here—” he’s thinking—“because she’s my sister? She can’t be organized. We tried.”
He’d have been sitting in that brownstone of his—next-door to the very one in part of which we last lived as a family. At his desk maybe on the third and office floor—the first two and fifth floors being rented out, just as they were in such houses then. In front of him is his Chinese scroll which he bought in Thailand, his first big job. All the rest is the detritus of two wives. Hard black wallpaper with shiny tearoses in the big party-room above, soft grasspaper whooshed over every other. The topfloor tenants are maybe giving their party, to which they always ask him, and to which he always went, until a night his hostess squealed, introducing him, “Our landlord. Don’t worry about noise.” The groundfloor tenants have children of surprising collegiate beauty whose friends seem chosen for the same; they clatter up the steps and past him with faces that will launch ships. I’ll call Lexie, he thinks. Bus from the bridge. No need to take the car, never any girl there to drive back. Sometimes he thinks in time to bring us something, sometimes not.
I know why you come, brother James. But will I ever tell you why?
“Sorry about the potatoes,” I say. “I’ve had a spell of burning them.” Once it was puddings. The simple hostilities are the easiest on everybody. “Thanks for the wine.”
“The roast was delicious,” he says. “What’s that noise? Not your neighbor’s sunporch again?”
“We
have a sunporch. Bob’s and Betsy’s is a conservatory.” With one-hundred-seventy-five individual glass panes, some portion of which Betsy regularly smashes in.
Kellihy’s is the glamor house of the road, and they the glamor children, aged twenty-eight and twenty-nine. With children of their own, increased by two in the two years since they came. Ever so often, Bob inherits eighty thousand dollars or so, or perhaps the rich Catholic laity to which he belongs on both sides takes up a collection; yet often he and Bets cannot pay the paperboy. In their drawingroom—Betsy’s word for it—Bob sits in the center of crawling phone-wires, doing the endless business of a remittance man. He has plug-ins all over the house, dragging them from room to room, chair to chair; a special head-set’s forever clamped rosette-like to that groggy, choirboy mug of his, giving him the air of a man in a babycap. He’s painfully smart. Painful somewhere to him, I mean. And somehow, to watch. Whenever he does too much business of his own downtown, the family rescues him. No one here’s ever seen any of that clan with whom he is in constant communication in his mind.
“Yes, that’s Betsy.” Betsy’s father is a Judge in Connecticut, but she was once in a production at the Pasadena Playhouse. The clash in her consciousness is considerable. But she can’t cook, and motherhood is no help to her. “But the rhythm’s not bad yet. Maybe only a party. Did you hear cars?”
He hasn’t. It’s one of those magical nights though, when all the children are asleep or cuddled to themselves and the moon over the river hangs beckoning in the flawless windowpane—I won’t break it—and everybody you love is home. Everybody you think you love is home.