Authors: Hortense Calisher
Or was that night the one when, in return for a remark about James, I smacked Charles on his cheekbone, seeing in the wide-open second after that my authority with him was forever gone?
Or was it the night… ? They parade before her, these nights, their alignments shifted beyond recall.
Does it matter? Like each of those nights, that one is all the nights together.
Though certainly it was the one when Charles, turning his time-wheel for their attention, said “Five hours ahead of us, roughly. Dad’ll be in the Casino. Or maybe in bed.”
And she thought—by himself? I wouldn’t censure him. Thing is, I can’t imagine him over there any better than I can at home.
… How is it I can imagine any friend at any time, giving them events either wildly devious or hilarious which still seem right for them as they must be, yet my own husband remains secret to me—separate? Is it because he himself is that sort of man, unimaginable by his nearest: Ray? Or because he’s Ray the father as well, the father-immediate, stalking battles that I am only wife to, and was only daughter to? The father—thrust into that corner, kicked upstairs to those more objective glories which had to become his, once he saw that first bloody birth emerge from my embattled legs and working crotch: that smeared child, with a dent in his head but smiling curlily, who was my body’s issue, glory arrived of my bearing down, who was Charles-to-be, the near-man I smacked—and merely a father’s dream. What’s fatherhood but a long dream Ray walks in because people do say? Maybe the women ought never let him see our battlefield, but only let him hear dimly, in medicine-man murmurs, of that powerful cave from which he comes in all his pretension. Never let him see birth or be sure of it—are there tribes who’ve done that?…
Certainly it was the night on which, knocking her fists together, ranging the four children with her eyes, she hears herself say “Anyone know a blessing?” And sees she’s sent all four of them mute. Her beloved menagerie, against whose hindparts she cracks her whip-tongue. She feels like a cat-trainer, left behind bars empty except for herself. When has her dominion ended?
Yet they see her; tonight they really see her, as happens less and less. More and more these days, they fault her for not seeing them. And she doesn’t quite. The image of her parenthood is dying, that’s it. On both sides.
“Anybody who knows one—” she quavers “—please say.”
Charles sullenly moves his wheel to half-past-one. Yes they’re eating late, eight-thirty. But that’s never been a sin before.
“Chili that bad, Lexie?” the main cook says. At thirteen, over three years ago, Chessie stopped calling her Ma.
“I know a blessing—” Maureen cries. Her glance falls, before the others. “But it’s for meat.”
Royal says “Eat a hot pepper, Ma?” in his brightest cherub-tone. Everybody breathing in time with him, he scrambles down and brings her the jar. Like hemlock, she thinks. Or tact. Which from one’s own children is toothsharp.
The jar holds red and green peppers of the hottest kind—like a vial of Stop and Go. Only she can eat them. Not that she likes them much, but it’s her talent, a city one. Nurtured ever since she’d heard Charles, then ten, say, in a boasting match with another boy—whose dad was a champ jogger—“My ma can eat hot peppers straight down.”
She chews a green one, and lets the tears sprout. Waving her hands helplessly to show them it isn’t just the vegetable. “This is how I feel.” She closes her eyes.
The
kitchen
is the blessing. Bedrooms go by ones and twos; the downstairs and halls of a house are by turns a crossing, a layabout land, a divide. But in the kitchen they clambered round me, still my parts, close with me between the ovenheat and the pores of the floor. The body of our bread we were, all together and love-buttered, or what passed for it—all reeky and not quite sour at the edges, like raw milk. That was a menagerie, then. Charles the serious giraffe, Maureen the faithful griffon, Royal the nipping marmoset—were the roles. And Chessie self-styled, whose mind even then burned on her mouth like a feversore—“I’ll be the snake.”
Clamber on all fours, dirty pantaloons—under my skirt and over my shoulder; I am the mother-animal of you all. And the only person of the afternoon, after school. I didn’t need to touch you, to feel it. The umbilical cord, winding up and downstairs and even into the garden, knotted us belly to elbow to ear. Father was for evenings. And Sundays—half.
These are my images. How can I make this known? Now that they leave me. What is the language?
She opens her eyes. Palms together. Is it a blessing? She bows her head, clenches, hoping. “To the closeness of flesh.”
Then events come fast, maybe to help her—who knows? When she puts forth this idea in class—that life shapes itself to aid or teach—the other women laugh. “Help you with what?” one says. She doesn’t know. Maybe she feels so only because she’s so poorly educated; while all the others in class are finishing college, she’s only starting it.
Yet—here on the one hand is Ray being taken with hepatitis in Europe. Refusing to let her come over, although neighbors here would have coped. Refusing to allow James. Who however reports “After all, he’s never in his life been sick before. He wants to hide. The medical care is apparently adequate.”
“Wants to hide? From what?”
James is getting into his car to drive back to the city, to Morton Street. He lets the car door slam on his answer. “You should know.”
She watches the dust spurt from behind the rear wheels of James’s long-jawed, heavy-assed coupe. “From me?” she calls after it. “He’s hiding from me?” In the middle of the driveway, she stands perplexed. Ray in Europe. Which to her is a house-of-cloud which is real. Was it somehow characteristic of him to think of that continent, whose medical practices he faintly despises, as a place to hide?
The line between what they expect her to sense, but not to act on, is a bewildering one.
But the day’s such a spanking spring one that she stands there laughing, like a peasant who knows the almanac and how to live by it. James’s car so resembles James. Do you know that already, brother James? Then what is it we’re both unconscious of?
Yes events are helping. On the one hand as noted, there’s Ray in Europe. On the other hand, that same night is the one when she wakes to find Chessie standing over her in the four
A.M.
light.
“Kellihy’s is burning,” Chessie says.
“Ma!”
She leaps out of bed, a maréchal of France. In a nylon shortie. “Wake the others. Put on boots, sweaters, coats. Get to the front door.”
Outside the door, they peer north through the great trees, here since the Revolution some say, which so far have breasted two twentieth-century hurricanes. They are pine and hemlock, but in the dead orange glare behind them their fronds hang tropical. Kellihy’s garage is on fire—a three-car carriagehouse once, with a turreted servants’ quarters above. She hopes Violet and Arthur are out of it, then recalls that they too sleep in the main house.
Hastily she counts again the faces clustered toward her, yes four. Have I only four of these mine-pure diamonds?—how frivolous of me not to lay up more. Of this treasure. She’s amazed at the power she’s had—to make. These four complex footsoldiers, with the right armament of eyes and hearts—even counting Royal’s one little flaw, and all standing here booted and jacketed just as she’s asked—her regiment. Later she’ll feel greedy again to know their interiors, forever closed to her—but not now. “We’re three hundred yards from them,” she says. “I remember the house deed. And the wind is blowing away from us. Not toward.”
Charlie’s face is open with admiration. Ha, you’ve forgotten your father-wheel, Charlie, I can’t help observe—though this is no time for rivalry.
Royal pipes “Is it blowing toward them?” His face is bright with interest. What a doctor he’ll make.
Chessie’s hanging back. Oh girl, you worry me. “Chess—you were wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.”
Chessie weighs this—which she can never believe. Weighs her alter ego, Lexie. “What about the fire department. Shouldn’t we have called?”
“I did.” She says it lightly. Ego—avaunt. But her smile smiles.
Maureen’s face crumples. “Gabriel.” The cat.
“Oh darling. In or out?”
“In.”
“Ah, good. Good, darling; don’t you see?” She looks up at her house, theirs. All intact. “All right then; go back for him. Come right out.”
The others are restless. She knows her troops. “Charlie, you have your watch?” He nods alertly; he even swims with it.
“All right, then. You may all go back in. For five minutes only.” They groan. “Six. Charles, you’re responsible. You may each bring out what you want. Only what you can carry easily. Not too much.” They’re spraying from her like buckshot. “Mau-reen. Bring Gabe out on a lead.”
She’s almost grateful that Kirsten, their old boxer, is recently dead. Of age. She’s almost grateful for everything. She is qualified, her tight throat tells her. You are qualified, maréchal, for this. Now advance.
And bim-bam, the fire-engine arrives.
Royal’s still at her side. Although his spritely limp is twice the pace of most kids his size. “Royal. Don’t you want to get your stamp collection? No? There isn’t anything you want to rescue? I mean—the house is safe, I think. But just in case.” She quirks at him. “Isn’t it kind of fun—to choose?”
This is why the others went inside. She knows them well enough for that. Dreadful, how Royal is the one she always probes.
Royal quirks up at her, in exact imitation. Dreadful, how this is the one she doesn’t trust. “Uh-uh. I
got
that.”
In spite of herself. “What?”
He shrugs, evasive. But he can’t bear not to tell her. “Me.” He measures her. His mind’s like a small gold whistle, ever quick to his lips.
“You
and me.”
Ah chilling, to know one’s own child. Once she’d heard a psychiatrist say thoughtfully, to the back of an insulter just then limping away, “Never trust a cripple.” Horrible. For a psychiatrist to say that. Yet she’d never forgotten. What the soft, muffling valves of motherhood should have shut out at once. She must be over-qualified.
Holding onto Royal, she watches the trees over at Kellihy’s. Through the thick trunks thin arcs of water fall gracefully. The fire leaping from the garage looks joyous. They’re wetting down the roof of the Kellihy house. Nothing flames there yet, except what all the neighbors already know. Several from the nearest houses cluster on the road in front of it, at a safe distance from the engines, three now, parked up the driveway. It’s the great house of the district; it can accommodate three. And has garages to burn. She won’t join the group down there; she knows their scratchy, Methodist whispers:
Rich, careless, youth, immoderate, booze, adultery, reckless, improvident
—
rich.
All these things being bright and beautiful as fire to them. She has a whisper of her own. It was the Kellihys’ Roddy with the matches of course, redheaded gleeful pyromaniac, son of poor Bob, the wired frog. Their roof is gleaming: shall she ask the firemen to spray hers? How powerful neighbors are with each others’ lives—is that what she’s learning?
“Where are the Kellihys?” Charles’ voice says. The three are back, Gabriel spitting and arching in Maureen’s arms.
“Watch out, he’ll scratch,” she says. “Even you.” Has Maureen brought nothing else for herself? Yes, her metronome.
Charles is carrying one of the machines he makes, on principles constantly changing, never explained. This is no doubt the latest one, bulbous at the core, but frailly pennanted. Under it, acting as its base, are the two green volumes of his book on parrots, in which the illustrative plates are made with actual feathers. He’s smug with choice.
Fearfully almost, she turns to Chess. Tall, elongated to more than willowy five-foot-ten, she’s dressed now in the old velvet opera-cloak she bought at a fair for its amber highlights—and brown depths. She has topped it with the vintage crushy hat she wears constantly, flipped up now a la Watteau. She stands ready to be mocked. Courting it, daring it; all her aggression is there. She has sad hands, and enormous style. The long fingers turn up at the tips; they’re trembling.
The children accept her. No adult ever knows what to say to her. She is mad with such fluency. And does so well at her books. From such brown depths.
Safer not to speak. Lexie salutes, then stays her hand, puzzled. Her daughter, in that hat and cloak, is an intended charade. A linedrawing, meant to—“The Picasso!” she cries, “The Picasso.” Bought by her and Ray early on. After the house, their most important purchase—barring her tenth-anniversary pearls. And the most revered object in it. A figure anomalous, in a hat and cloak.
Chess brings it out from under her arm. Unsmiling. But pleased.
She’ll be an artist, or a martyr
James had said of her.
She enjoys redress, after being mocked.
How can I leave them, Lexie thinks—these four personae so subtly risen up from the flesh given them, into tangles that only I know?
Chess holds the print out to the three others. Their heads hang over it like an Adoration. Bearing gifts.
In the grass, she stirs, clasps her knees, plucks a green spear, and lies down with it. The river is whitening, like her life. One can’t see a house on its mist anywhere. But yes, that was the moment, back there; that was it.
Back there, the children turn on her. Sometimes, without warning, they act as one. “What about you? You haven’t brought anything.” Nothing from our house, to save. They’ve ferreted her out. Her tigerish “I’ve
got
it!”, hugging their four heads to her, doesn’t please them. They dislike parental sentiment. “No, no,” they say. “Go back in like us. And choose.”
“Six minutes,” Charlie says, grinning.
They were right, she thinks now, chewing her blade of grass. When I hugged them, I was telling the truth unadorned. But children know early that truth-adorned is more likely the parental one. I’ve had to lie down here to remember that.
So she ran back to the house. From Chessie’s window, which faces north upriver, she can see the whole plan of the Kellihy fire, a siege already receding and on its way to be filed in village recollection. With certain embellishments.