Authors: Hortense Calisher
“Seen enough?” Maury said softly. “Okey-doke. Now come on down to our place.” At the door, he paused. “Funny. How all the way up the same layout, people did so different. But this is the one for me. We’d a had what to spend—this is the one.”
“Do you all have the river?”
“Only from here on up. We get mostly the viaduct, but still high enough to be sunny. Of course, ours isn’t so fancy—Kreisl gives only the stove. Less stairs to climb, cheaper. Otherwise substantially the same.”
Going down the one spiral flight, she swung herself hand to hand along the ropes, with gusto.
“See you caught on.”
She nodded, already hearing “Ropes! Only Liz would discover—!” and her modest “Wacky, isn’t it. You’ll catch on.”
He knocked at the door again. “It’s us, Few.”
The opener of the door kept behind it. Urged past it by Maury, she was at first aware only of the room, the same indeed as above, but so bare that what it contained only niggled on its space, making it curiously smaller. When so little was owned as here, possessions could be left about in the true carelessness, in no hope of how they looked, what they were. Facing her was a small “center of activity” as the kitchen ads called it, containing a small stove (Kreisl gives it), a hodgepodge of tables, boxes, shelves that served variously and quite clearly for cooking, eating, dressing table (the one with a towel over it and a box of Kleenex). One could live here—there were probably all the necessities, a place to hang clothes in some corner, bed and bedding perhaps behind that screen; one was satisfied of this without interest to scan, render judgment as to just how clean it was or tangled, whether arrangements might be bettered. Once one got the hang of where things were, one could live here. That was all. In this small, decisive realm, there were no effects to abjure. This left the persons in it—its owners—pitilessly exposed, without possessions to speak for them. Although, in its way, of course, their realm spoke.
When she looked up, its owners were standing as if they knew this, their hands joined against her. The girl in the arch of Maury’s arm stood revealed—that was her posture—as very short, reaching only to his armpit. This enlarged him.
“Footie, meet Liz,” he said. “Liz Pagani, sculptor.”
“Oh n-not really!” she said. The room extracted this from her, handing it back to her as if it were her own six-year-old shed tooth. “Not yet.”
“Who’s
yet
,” said Maury. “And this is Footie, Fyush, Few—actress!” The girl nodded, with a set smile for the height he had given her, one hand spread on the chest of her jumper, a “gray sleeveless” much the same as Liz had worn to her own wedding. Her hair was long too, but its scanty, natural carrot had been slicked back to a knot at the crown, slanting cheekbones already broad, further widened by the way she had outlined her eyelids. She had the blunt muzzle of the plain redhead, the tiny, membraned, pink nose. When her lids were lowered, as now, two Japanese fish swam there, their tails curled at her temples. One was slightly smeared. Her free hand crept to it, then rested again on her chest. This thrust her hip out. “Pleased.”
“I’m awfully sorry to bother you,” said Liz.
“You nut buthering. We gut to show it.” She spoke from pursed lips, in the voice of a person accustomed to comments on its lowness. Glancing at Maury, she gave a quick, gulping shrug. “We gut.”
“Oy, good, you made coffee.” Maury patted her shoulder. Her head went way back, to look up at him. Walking past her to the coffeepot, he strode.
Left behind, the girls nibbled glances at one another. Last year, sitting opposite in the subway, their eyes might have sistered each other. Footie wore the regulation sandal, thonged between second toe and long. Liz’s feet squirmed in her shoes. Under those feather-fish eyes, more female prescient than Ivan’s, she saw her fitted coat, bought in at a sale by a mother who carried her daughter’s size in her head everywhere, put on her with a moaning “Not a copy of a Heim—a Heim. You could go anywhere.” Anywhere but here.
Footie half-touched the smeared eye. Under it, above the cheekbone—yes, Hungarian—there was a puff of swollen pink. “We having coffee, miss. Wunt you sit down?”
“I shouldn’t, really.” She caught sight of the crate that served as larder. A protocol, thrust swiftly from nowhere, told her she must. It was all they had. Because it was what they had, she must. She felt proud of knowing how to act when confronted with the rock bottom, the true bareness. “All right—
thanks
!”
But as she walked behind the girl, an old-woman-of-the-sea sat on her own shoulders, making her see with her mother’s eye, hear with her mother’s ear. From Footie’s topknot, one long lock dangled, Ondine. Hand to it as she swung her wide hips, despite her size she was not a dainty girl. She was walking as if she had heels on, and following the hard-apple curve of her calf, Liz saw her in high ones or in the skittishly run-down French boudoir ones the tarty little bits from the public high schools wore, her hair not as now, in the style that meant “art,” but in the huge air-bubble fringe, skewed over the forehead, that meant “films”—stunted little girls who thought of themselves as heart-faced, built for diminutives—Footie, Fyush, Few—who could be seen any day in the year along the Fordham Road bazaars, as perhaps last year she had been, prancing along on their slum-bowed legs, in twos or threes or alone, but always in self-drama, dime-a-dozen, any day in the year. Then, she would have met Maury. Who had been “offered to work” by Ivan.
She wondered whether they were married. Then blushed—for her mother.
“I take it black,” she said holding up the mug they had given her.
“So do we, so do we,” they said politely. They had to.
They sat close together now, like two birds in the nest, on one box, and they had seated her opposite, on the one chair. Now they fell silent, leaving it to her, after all, the seeker. Their eyes frozen, unable to leave hers, they sat close, while she felt herself grow altogether out of scale looking in at them, at their nest.
“I could’ve filled the place, easy,” said Maury softly. “Sanitation Day, uptown the good neighborhoods, what they put out you wouldn’t believe. Sofas, even. But—”
“I din want.” It seemed the first time the girl had really spoken. Her mouth hung open. She spoke to her navel, some intense tattoo she saw there. “I din want.”
“Start once wrong, she says, you don’t go back on it.” If it was her maxim, his staunch arm was faithful to it.
“Nut you culnt, but you woont.” Fyush spoke as softly. “Like Helga’s it would be. Like your mother’s.”
“I get a break, you’ll
still
have,” he said. “Or even a margin.”
The word brought cold into the room. Their dialogue was not for her. But when she put down her cup, they joined hands again, against her.
“Are you—are you in the theater too, Maury?” At the party where the green drink had been served, she had learned that this was how it was said, never ever “Are you on the stage?” Two young women, who, from their patented hair and figures like wax melted down a stick, she had assumed to be, had asked it of her—they had turned out to be models—and two young men had murmured it, “You in the theater, dear?” their eyes meanwhile, like almost everyone’s, on a girl, dressed like herself then, like Futtie here—who was. That girl, her round, boy-cherub head shaven “for that part, you know,” had hung on no one’s words, not even those which fell from her own prison-pale lips like rare gravel, but had seemed to be staring into a little cup where all the neuroses in the room were gathered to hers, all around her watching where she held it, hypnotically centered in her stubby, yellow-stained hand.
“In? You could say it. I monkey lights. Only trouble, I’m not in the union.”
“It’s very hard,” said Futtie. “The thitter.” Chin raised, she smiled suddenly, past Liz’s shoulder, across the room.
Liz turned, thinking a new person had entered it. The long rear wall held a solid line of posters like the one on the door upstairs. If she hadn’t been led straight in, she couldn’t have missed them.
“Joe saves them for her. All her favorites.” At that distance, not all the tags could be read, but the billboard code held. All the way down the line, heroes chinned life in the raw, blockbuster beauties offered it, each glimpsed from a heaven of word-bombs, a star on each megaphoned cloud.
“Even, he made one up for her special. Just brought it in one night, you could have knocked us over. ‘Here’s Fyush for someday,’ he says. ‘As drawn by someday Joe.’ What a guy! Except that it’s Futtie, you couldn’t tell a difference, it’s just exactly! Only with a redhead.”
Futtie gave a slight shrug. She gazed again at her navel. “The one at the end,” she said.
It seemed, indeed, exactly like.
“You must be going to miss them,” said Liz.
“To us, they been—like a family.” Maury’s head declined as he said it. “They split up for so long this time, it’s just bad luck for us.”
The three of them sat looking into their laps, in that pause which comes when the sad circumstances of friends are emotionally spoken of—to a stranger. The pause lengthened into what Liz had come to think of as the house-hunting one. It was the one that came when all the closets had been looked into with proper shrieks of embarrassment and demur, the unmade beds had been passed by, the half-eaten meal apologized for, the babies smiled at—when all too much had been seen. Then the eye of both parties averted, and even when buyer had mentally turned on his heel at first glance, now for a moment he rocked on an ankle to save face for all concerned, maintaining a look on his own that said, “We-ell…” I’ll let you know. But surely
they
all knew she was taking it; Maury had known from the first; the coffee had been meant to, well, ratify it—their coming relationship. Though she was not sure they had too much in common, they were going to be friends of a sort—she was going to live here. That was really the trouble, they were all too young for this sort of business. They’d all been impulsively friendly in the quick way one’s elders always cautioned against, and now they didn’t quite know how to exchange money—between friends. None of them had yet acquired the hard business shell that made one able. She liked them the better—they all had this in common.
But when they seemed to flinch as she fumbled with her bag, it was really too much—too much theater. And too unfair, just because she happened to be the one replacing their Joe and their Sonsie—let them take a straight look at those friends of theirs. Nevertheless, she felt a flush rising. It was the way they were staring at her checkbook.
“It’s only a—deposit account, not a regular.” She flushed deeper, in anger at her own position in life—at her mother. They must not know the difference. Too unfair. “We’re really just—on a margin ourselves.”
“Ivan will cash,” said Maury. His hand was still locked in Few’s but he spoke away from her, to the side of him still free. Few was staring at her, Liz. “Make it out to Ivan Kostec.” He spelled it for her. “That way he’ll cash, give me my half. You don’t mind—did I explain that? So I can maneuver. Ordinary, I wouldn’t take.”
“I
know
,” she said, soothing, rounding the c, inserting the amount in numerals. “Sometimes it just
helps
.”
“This way you could move in any time, see? Tomorrow even.”
Fyush got up and walked away from him.
“Oh, we don’t have to rush.” Liz waved the check dry. “We’ve got Mother’s place, the way I told you. I mean, I’m
mad
to get in and
start
of course, but I wouldn’t want to push anybod—” She held the check out to him, with a smile. “’Ve you any idea though? When they expect to get their stuff out? Or are they going to sell off?”
“Stuff?” he said. “Whose?”
Behind her, she heard the girl make a movement.
“Why—” It was absurd to be made to refer to them as if she knew them intimately. “Why—Joe and Sonsie.”
“Oh, they don’t sell anything off ever,” he said. “With those kids, they’re always
getting
.” His mouth opened. “Oh hon. Oh hon, you got it all wrong, Joe’ll be back here, go on upstate for her. They always get together in the end.”
“But you said there was an empty.” She saw nothing but her own wail. “You
said
it.”
She opened her eyes at the touch of his hand.
“Why sure, hon, hey Liz, sure hon!” His long face nodded anxiously, large eyes consoled. “Sure there is, there is one.” He stepped a little back from her with a side movement of his hand, just a turning up of his palm.
Then, at once, at last she got it. Perhaps it was the way his head was bent, ever so slightly, as to a yoke.
Oh. She didn’t say it aloud, just made the shape. That was all she could do, once she saw it, Ivan and his margin, her money, that would help “maneuver” them out of here. Half.
“Oh—” she said, when she really saw it all. “Oh-h-oh.” They had been made to dig their own grave.
“You don’t worry, please,” he said stiffly. “We’ll make out.”
“Oh, the
bastard
.” The shit. If David were here, he could say all the flat, level words that at bottom only stuck to a man when they came from the mouth of another. She wished him here not to defend them, for that was useless, but to defend her to herself, for what she already knew she would do.
“Now—you got no call to say that,” he said. “He can help himself?” He drew his narrow shoulders together. “He knows we not—flop-artists.”
“Oh no,” she said. “I guess you’re right, I guess—” She was afraid she was going to cry—if she said any more. It wasn’t fair, she could see that, to take
them
to task, simply because she saw their little ovaled lives with more theater than they themselves did. Surely, it was better that they never do, that standing on their pretensions, they never see themselves as they were, as she could see them. She looked everywhere but at them—for they had been asked to dig, and they had done.
“It’s the same layout,” he said. “You could have just the same like them.” He nodded encouragement, on his face that muteness deeper than personal sweetness or repose. Burro, bird.
She nodded back, but her muteness was not the same as his. They are a different race from us. They know what their chances are; they have always known.