Authors: Hortense Calisher
“Not by you. And that’s what counts. The continuity.” He set the rosetted orange before her.
“For good or ill.” She smoothed the grainy, outer side of one thick petal with a suddenly intent finger. Once, tapping the lushly granulated gold skin, she had remarked that the Italian gardener’s new Sunday shoes were certainly made of it. She was always finding these analogies, compiling these notes on the basic stuffs of things. And as a woman who could squeeze raw, dark beef and offer him the blood to drink, or swab—with gentian violet—the impetigo scabs on the gardener’s child’s bottom, her acquired blushes concealed a dry inability to be shocked. Women were like near-sighted children, in their knowledge of surface detail, near-artists in their love of it. “Exactly!” he had caught her murmuring to herself over the Greek rugs. It had been their first weekend here, and he had had to probe for it, already knowing that speech was what embarrassed her, not the actions of love, never the substance. “Well if you must know,” she had said, running her hand first over the blond rug then on the dark, chin tilted, cheeks pink, the voice dryly at variance—“Pubic hair.”
“Why she’s really very much like you,” he said. “I’ve only just realized it.”
“Oh Lord, she couldn’t bear that!” she said, but she was already radiant.
When the phone rang, she was just reaching again for the orange.
They stared at one another. The phone was almost never used locally. Their only call had been to David, two nights ago, his answering call, the next morning, the only time it had rung.
“But he should be here by now,” he said. “If he borrowed Jacques’s new car, as he said he would, and that plane—got in on time. That car drives like the wind.”
“I know.”
“Hurry,” he said. “I can’t.” She was already gone.
And David drives like the wind, his heart told him. As he waited, he wondered whether anybody ever gave anybody up. He heard her voice calling then, saying that it was all right darling—that it was only Elizabeth.
He waited more tranquilly now, his breath tapering down in the rhythm of a dog lingering to crouch over a find, circling once or twice back to it, finally regaining its master’s side. Maybe the girl was coming after all, and the alignment they all now found momentarily queer would have a chance to work itself out in some amiable barn dance, alternately paired-off and foursquare. As yet, he couldn’t see the two women pairing off into those confidences supposedly natural between parent and child. But neither did he see the allegiances between any of them as necessarily shifting to what might be dangerous, merely because, as in some old riddle, his son’s wife was now his wife’s daughter, her daughter’s husband her husband’s son—the two younger ones skimmed on ahead of them, traveling their own center, just as before. What it had done for him, perhaps, was to bring him in even closer, in the role of observer already given him years ago by the heart that had given him so much. As for David and himself, once he might have said that the time of parallel confidences was over, terminated on the night he had discovered how ill he was. Now he would set it farther back, to the farthest vanishing point of not yet really having begun.
He glanced over his shoulder at the Pacific, the one lucent line of it through the in-powering trees. Short as life was, surely the continuity was long enough, spiral and devious enough for even this to happen, in time? The surprise of Margot had taught him once and for all that in some happy behind-the-scenes, parallels might be forever meeting as well as parting. And the recognition of this was the joy of having sons and daughters, the forward joy. It could happen that they would turn, or arrive—to see what he saw. It could happen at any time.
He sipped his coffee, his dog trotting nicely at his side. Probably the girl wasn’t coming after all, the two women were making such a thing of it on the phone, even working it all out perhaps over that disembodying wire others found so much more helpful than he. He much preferred to see the complete body of this our life, all the particulars in which it manifested itself over and over, all the tints and murmurs in which it repeated the obvious—and subtly deceived. Not that those who best guarded the repetition necessarily saw it—any more than a good midwife had to know why babies were born. Margot, so grounded in it, never gave a sign that she saw. By now, those two in there might even be quarreling, each from her parallel. Maybe the daughters, in the wide, abstract lens of youth, briefly saw a repetition they must guard against, but the mothers who guarded it never did. Might be, they couldn’t afford to.
Picking up another orange, he rubbed its plump, cordovan gold and held it up to the break in the hedge where he could see the horizon, so clear in this air that the fruit, if dropped, would surely break a great hole in that flat plaque of sea. Men and women both, he too, were confused by their love of the particular, which all their ethic, East or West, taught was sinful. Once he too had thought of it as the surface frivol of existence. He saw it now with the hungry reverence of a man who had not too much time for it (and had had to keep this somewhat more steadily in mind than most) as what kept men from flying off the planet altogether, or a man from sinking into the saw-toothed fires at his own core.
Above him, the thin line of the coastal road was visible for some miles to that north from which David would be coming, then, as it approached, seemed to brim over its own escarpment in a great swing toward him and away, disappearing onward around the mountainside on its curving way south, the narrow quarter-mile track down from it to him only a windstroke in the brush. Cars passed now and then, at a breakneck pace dwarfed by the landscape; they could not match the silent speed of the road.
David hadn’t said whether he was bringing any finished film; in any case, there was no equipment for showing it down here. He himself had lost interest in his camera after that first attack of angina—not because he was coddling himself, but in the way any dying man might give up a passion for acrostic, in the face of the puzzle he was shortly to solve. And in a way that he could smile at now—for the surprises—he’d been made to find what he thought of as “the particular,” elsewhere. He’d been forced to. The flirt of pain at his center had kept him fresh for it, an observer no longer content with the eye—though no abler than anybody else to define what he saw. But at least he’d been made able to watch, with more benevolence than when young, those actions and objects of life which kept men so busy mincing down to the forgettable their terror at its shortness—under all of which an immanence remained. What this was, could never be phrased in metaphor—even though the same metaphor appeared to be in every breast, so that even at high noon on a desert day, standing in a white unbroken for miles by even a lizard’s head, the sanest traveler would mutter to himself or companion, “I thought I saw something move.”
Across from him, near the house wall, a piece of tapestry she had been working on lay on the garden seat, dew-damped but already bleaching dry again, in the poignant frivolity of all such work deserted, rather like a nineteenth-century pastel entitled, “The Dear One Absent”—yet even its lightness could stretch to the metaphor harbored for the human by all the inanimate—the absence of something, never far.
He began to worry again, but, straining, he could just barely hear her voice running on inside, not the words but the warm import—they were making it up. If he had a special allegiance even against Margot and himself, it was to the young. Once, when young enough himself to choose more freely, he’d thought he would be a gardener, until he’d found out that what so moved him, and still did, were the toddler trees in the nurseries—such good kindergartens of them marching up the inclines, or the intricately veiling bones—just before spring—of the younger, smaller woods. When the maple buds swelled, printing Japanese summer on the sky, it was already too late; it was a stage that could be defined, or one persuasive of such. And in the same way now, years later, he kept a life-pity for the young among people, who still believed in the summer and winter of things-as-now. The ambiguous in-between of seasons, if not the best, was the most truthful, for then, when the now was less defined, that other motion almost came through; he was almost persuaded—that he saw. He did not prefer these seasons. They had come.
She stood in the doorway, shielding her eyes against the light.
“Everything all right?” It was not his style of question. He had waited before saying it.
She nodded, with the faint smile she always gave when she first awakened, a smile for him, not for the world. When she sat down on the garden seat, he was about to laugh, without any hope of explaining why, for she had sat on the tapestry, squashing all his metaphor, and as usual, relieving him of it. He saw that she was reaching for her sunglasses, on the table several feet away, with that same, vague sleepiness. He got up and put them in her hand.
“Give me some coffee, would you? We must have talked for half an hour.” She came over to the table and sat down where she had been, the sunglasses still in her hand.
He gave her some, scrutinizing her. She so seldom asked him to do anything. “And, so now you feel—” He let it drop. They seldom pressed each other as to how they felt, rarely had to.
She took a long swig. “God, I was dry!” The swingy phrase was unlike her. “Now?” She drained the cup and set it down with an awkward clink, mulling into it just as she did each drowsy morning. “She’s pregnant.”
“Well,” he said finally. “Well.” Involuntarily, he looked up at the road.
“Oh, David doesn’t know.”
“Doesn’t—she hasn’t told?” That masked young face, from whom its own mother caught slang—he began to smile.
“She didn’t have a chance to—she only found out yesterday morning, after he left. She can’t be much more than a month gone. She’s going to have that test. But the doctor said he was certain.”
“So soon. Then, I gather they were—” He had always felt a distaste for this sort of probing, in the mouths of others. But the thought of his own provision to David, for just this, was so warming.
“Planning it?” She gazed like a sibyl at her own fingers. “No.” The breath she drew in repeating it made it come like a chord. “No.” She spread the fingers, regarding them. “She was as surprised—as if she’d just found out where they came from.”
“Shocked,” he said. “Ah, the poor dear.”
They were silent for some minutes.
“Funny—” she said. “I found out that I was, almost the same way. Paint. They have the whole place done, she said, except for her studio, and the morning after David left—yesterday—she was painting it with that rubber paint. The smell made her so ill—I gather she almost fainted. She never has, you know. Luckily, the girl from upstairs was there, an older one, with children.
She
told her.” She shook her head from side to side in the tiny, ebbing shake of reminiscence.
It occurred to him to wonder why people, when they made this remembering gesture, almost always did so negatively. “And how did you?” he said. “Find out.”
“Well, it wasn’t quite the same,” she said. “I think I really knew a lot more than she does—about those things. There were so many more women around our house when I was a child, all my aunts and grandmother, and they were so old-fashioned. I used to be in the kitchen and listen, and the old wives’ tales just dribbled down. ‘So many months
gone
’—that’s the way they used to say it. Once, my mother must have been having my sister, and they teased her for complaining about the fresh paint on the cupboards, and one of them whispered in German—as if I didn’t know German!—‘Mind the child!’”
“Maybe they meant you to know,” he said.
“Maybe. Anyway, after I was married, we were at Ernest’s mother’s for dinner, and I didn’t know yet, only I happened to mention that all the smoking at the office where I worked was making me ill, since they’d just painted it—and she suddenly looked wise. “Young wives always smell paint,’ she said. I was furious. And it turned out later of course, that I couldn’t smoke, the whole time. So it wasn’t exactly the same. Smoke.”
“I suppose
she
was furious,” he said, “when you told her that story.”
“How did you know!” she said. “Ah, you’d think I’d learn. All the very things that made me so—in my time…that I swore I’d never. Right from the beginning, ever since she was a child. Why can’t I help it?…But suddenly, I wanted so much to be back there, in one of those old Yorkville kitchens, that was all. They were so sweet and airy and full of everything. Always so full. And the women, in those high gingham aprons with the tight waistbands—why, the women were an altogether different shape, in those days.”
“They always are,” he said. “That’s the way they fool themselves. It doesn’t deceive
us
.”
“Ah, you!” she said. “Anyway. We made up.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. And it’s nice she has the studio.”
After a while, he glanced at his watch.
“
And
you,” she said. “Ah, you’re so much nicer than we are. I never even asked you what
you
—what time is it?”
“Little after eleven. Probably they stayed up all night, talking. He’s almost like a son to him too, you know. Old Jacques’s known him since he was born.”
They were both watching the road now. Along the top of the long swag, two cars crept toward them.
“There!” she said. “The hind car. It’s a red one.”
His sight was keener. “Not a Karmann Ghia. It could be hours yet.”
They were quiet again.
“Ever since he was born.” She made an echo of it. “And you? How do you—how does a father—?”
“How can one say, except concretely? It’s such a mixture. The first thing I thought of—when you said it—was that I was glad I’d already provided for the extra allowance.”
“You don’t think—he’ll think you’re only trying to—buy him in?”
He considered. Was he? Even as the great sea-and-sky-scape around him told him how impossible this was, to buy anyone into the fixed establishment of things in general, even though the jerky episodes of his own life, in retrospect as random as the wooden beads a child might string on an old shoelace, told him that there was no such establishment—was he still trying? “If he has a son—then I’ll ask him, David. Or no. I’ll wait twenty years or so, and ask him then.”