Authors: Hortense Calisher
She got up and went to the break in the wall of shrubs, where the narrow slit of sea was, and stood with her back to him.
“Point Lobos,” he said after a while. “Is that what you—?” On Point Lobos near the wild bird sanctuary, as near the primeval as a park might come, they’d seen a fat tourist mother, her back to the wilderness, posing to have her picture taken—bending down in her mother-hat to a begging squirrel—by one after the other of her five sons. Each one had had his picture taken with her—and the squirrel. An extreme case, Margot had told him, but if he took notice he would see that women who had sons only were always coarser-grained—breezier, more accustomed to a claque. Not softened, put off their confidence by the lash of daughters.
“Yes,” she said, turning. “That’s what I was thinking of, Point Lobos.”
She might or might not be. He didn’t need to know, blow-by-blow, what she was thinking—to know. “And which would you choose for her then, if you could choose?”
“A girl!” she said at once, fiercely. “A girl—so then
she
would see—Ah, I told you. We’re not as nice as you.”
“Imagine,” he said after a while. “Imagine. When he was eight, we took him with us one day to a vineyard up at Napa, you remember I told you. It was a summer afternoon, very dank and quiet in the winery but sunlit at the farther end, oh they had summer in those days, and he had such a time running down the aisles between the barrels—higher than a man they were, and the guide let him climb the ladder to one of them and look down. And later, we went inside and had some of the special wine to taste, him too, and the guide translated its name for him. And that night, when we came home, he refused his milk, oh so very politely. ‘No thank you,’ he said, ‘I think I’d like to try some more of that white foolishness.’…Ah, but I told you that story.”
“Yes,” she said. “…Did I ever—?…Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“Oh, you’ve heard it.”
“Go on. Tell me. About the shrimp.”
“Well—” She still had her back to him. “You know, she hadn’t ever seen one. And one night, when we were having them for dinner, we put one on the tray of her high chair—she wasn’t even two as yet. She picked it up and looked at it, put it down. Then she crooked her little forefinger beside the shrimp and stared and stared. And finally, she picked up the shrimp and said, in such a voice…‘Finger.’”
He nodded, saying nothing.
She left the hedge and came round to him, sitting on the arm of his chair, taking hold of his hand. “You raise me up.” Her voice was low.
His was quiet. “You—ground me.” These were old, near whispers, allusions to stories in no need of recounting.
“What is it we—?” She had his hand in both of hers, marking time with it. “They have so much yet to—I feel so sorry for…Oh, what is it we feel for them…oh what is it we know, and can’t say?”
He shook his head, not answering.
“It goes up, it goes down.” She still had hold of his hand. “Sometimes it displaces us—with them. Sometimes them, with us.”
So she saw it too. Another surprise.
“And in the end—” she said, “it—”
“Look!” he said. “There he is.”
A mile away or more in that clear air, the red car sped toward them, crept. Now it hid, dropped beneath, emerged for the long, straight stretch.
“Funny,” he said, “how a red car never fits into any kind of landscape. In L.A., with people maybe. Or in places like Miami, or Nice. But never, anywhere, just with the land.”
She gave a small cry, scarcely an “Oh,” pressing it back at once with his hand against her mouth, where the knuckles met teeth. “I want to go to Europe with you. With you.”
He caught his breath. At once she felt it. Warily, she drew her own breath, moving only to rest her forehead against his palm, slip her other hand to his wrist, where she listened. Are you all right? She asked it mutely.
He nodded, always honest with her. If anything, what had just been said had brought them nearer. Only, for a moment the landscape had seemed to change color—no, it was they. The color of what they were together had changed, as the quiet, implicit colors do when placed beside one that is stark. She was honest too, making no regrets, only bending her head to his bent one. They remained that way, hands clasped over a mutual wound, a mortal one, until the car was heard to turn down the narrow quarter-mile.
“Are we to tell him?” he whispered.
“No, she said not. No—that’s hers. We’re only to tell him—to call her. At once.”
They were still clasped that way when the driver of the car, brought up short by the gorse, stopped with a twist of the wheel, leaped out, slamming the door behind him and peeling off his goggles all in one movement, and walked toward them—gaily waving the goggles as he came. In the dazzle, the couple before him appeared to him in dark eclipse, as one figure, or as one bending over the other fallen. For a moment, the pang always in readiness in his own breast so interpreted it. Then, as he climbed, ran toward them over the stubble, they stood up together, arm in arm. As he neared them, their closeness to each other daunted him, but face to face, seemed merely a trick of the sunglasses they wore, a nearness that the blind might have—of a pair who were momentarily blind. When they took them off, he scarcely had time to say, in relief and amaze, how well they both looked, before they gathered him to them. As they fell back, hovered again, a parental tenderness smote him, for their childishness. For as they bore him toward the house, questing at him with their eyes, touching him with hesitant, timidly helping fingers, it seemed to him that they were bearing him along as if he were the one who was the invalid.
T
HE CHILD CAME WHEN
due, and though while it was in the womb they had planned to call a girl Electra or Alison, when it was born they named it Mary like almost anyone, soon shortened to Molly, and by the child herself to May. For though each stage of her growth, from breast to cup, from diaper to pot, seemed to last forever, at the same time each passed like the wind, and in no time at all she was speaking, then walking. Heavy at birth, more than nine pounds even in this day of scales on which no midwife weighed her own hand to the extra glorification of the family, her night-cries were strong, but ceased as soon as honored. At birth she had a mark like a red V or Y between nose and upper lip, which deepened when she howled, but was likely to disappear, the doctor said, in the way of most birthmarks along the median line. When it vanished, they were not able to say on which day it had gone. Now and then, the ghost of an allergy, to egg, to wheat, flitted over her pure, classic regime, but was said to be also of a kind that was outgrown. She spoke early, which girls were known to do, but did not walk until fourteen months, which seemed late, until they studied a book and found this to be exactly on line. Aside from the fact that she was beautiful and utterly theirs, she was all median. The child herself had the fat calm of a calyx that opened slowly; to hold her was to be reassured. Good as she was, if she sometimes exhausted them, it was only as the ownership of riches exhausts. For she was their thing, their greatest possession—and expression. She excused everything, from the condition of the house to those states of being which forbore examination. Hands in hers, they were drawn out upon the gentle plateau of the daily, into that great, blending chapter where no sharp events were. And for this, they now could not be blamed.
Even before birth the child had been helpful, as Liz proved to be one of the girls whom pregnancy turned bland and stilled, the hunger for achievement at rest between hands folded on bellies. “Even when I’m asleep now, I’m accomplishing!” she often said to David, laughing at a world in whose eyes anything she did now merited praise. And so now that she could turn to her work as if it were merely avocation, she returned to it. During the months before the studio area, luckily so fresh and bare, must become the nursery, and now that David was working night and day on the film with Barney, the loft became more and more her domain. For the time being, she embarked on a series of studies for the plaster, very large line-drawings of the figure, which both David and the crowd thought showable, plus one practice piece in wood, as yet shown to no one, in which she had tried to learn how to let the grain work for her—an oddly beveled torso posed for her by Sonsie, the girl upstairs.
As she came closer to “term,” the word itself like a darker overtone of the “semester” of schooltime, and so exact a one for this peculiar tableland of pregnancy—at in fact the precise month which the smiling obstetrician called the “impatient” one—she grew bored with the heavy-limbed, loose drawings, ashamed of their lack of neurotic fire. Besides, it was hard to work at anything large across the obstacle of her belly. What was needed was an object no bigger than fancywork. The figurines she did then, either in wax or compounds with a cerous feel to them, surprised her with their expertness, tricks that flowed from her fingers as if in waiting there, directed by some armature within herself. Otherwise, they differed little from the earlier ones, and wander as she tried, the best were always female. Those in wax had also that aura which comes from natural substance only. Clean as she kept her palms, gradually what was pinched and pressed between them took on a color not pink, not amber or gray—until in time it came to seem to her that in both ways, both from within and without, she was working on flesh.
When she was eight months along, the smiling doctor, telling her that she was in every way normal, cautioned her against listening to old wives’ tales on what was awaiting her. The caution came too late; had there ever been a time early enough? She had always despised woman-talk, under which she had classed everything from recipes to that gothic joy with which women explored their insides. With her head, she still did, rejecting it all with the collegiate laugh given by her zoology class to the notion that carrying women frightened by mice would bear children resembling them. But all the time she must have been recording it—to despise. There must never have been a time, from childhood up, when she had not been listening. And now she could no more flounce away from this gossip than she could insert herself into the waistlines of six months ago, even though she knew this to be as temporary as her measurement—girls of today became Dianas again in six months. For the moment, she hung ashamedly on the edge of those communities the women at these times formed even with rivals or with the scorned—she would have done it with Mitzi, had they met.
The talk itself was as silly as ever, dignified in part when its great subject—the enormous thing that only they could do with their bodies—was confirmed by the great presence of some who were doing it, but immediately absurd in proportion to them; for such cockeyed celebrants there was alas no hope. For, though beneath all their duckings, one got an impression that they all saw the same Minotaur at the heart of things, the next moment, young and old had fled from that monster bison-face, in a rush of bric-a-brac. It was no wonder the men laughed. Yet the older women had something they half wished to impart to her—never any definition of what they guarded, just
how
. It seemed sad to her that this should be the case with those who saw so much—for in her present state, the women seemed to her the only ones who saw. No wonder the men laughed; they had to; they had nothing like. For the first time she began to think of David not as
David
, her husband, a person, a lover, but—with a divisive line so shadowy that it could scarcely be said to separate—as “men.” Here Sonsie, who had been so able to tell her the score the day she fainted—who always referred to her Joe, in a tone halfway between an awed Germanic
“der Voter”
and a shrugging Irish “himself,” as
Bailey
—here, once again, Sonsie helped.
“When
I
was eight months gone, oh brother,” said Sonsie now. Opposite the wooden torso of herself, for which she had posed kneeling, arms behind her like a bound Joan, she sat now for a twelve-inch doll of herself, knees spread comfortably in the kitchen chair she had brought from upstairs. A six-foot young Goliathess with the fine complexion of the chestnut-haired (on which she put no make-up except a perverse touch of violet eye-shadow worn as usual, above a housedress, as if in careless acknowledgment of some beauty others saw in her)—she was said to resemble old Clea, the famous model whom Liz had once seen at the League in the last days of that ancient nakedness, and once, jogging home on the bus afterwards: a blunted Venus in an apple-woman’s hat, her neck a ruined column in illusion veiling, on her the shadowy, violet impression, not of Renoir himself, by whom she could never have been seen, but of countless imitation Renoirs.
Sonsie, out of Hell’s Kitchen, an alcoholic mother of eight others and a short career at “artist’s balls”—taken from them twelve years ago at eighteen, by the twenty-year-older Bailey, to whom she remained a grateful slave, with the rages of a slave—had another-era look to her also, but only in the imagination of the onlooker, never in her own. If one dressed her up, one saw her perhaps in the gaslight era, an uncertain Lillian Russell in a swooping hat and dogcollar too big for her in all but size, sitting naive as a young lioness and as deadly, perhaps against the beef-red portieres of one of the tough-fancy restaurants where the politicos went to drink beer over white napery—one of them leaning toward her on a thick-knuckled hand with gold wedding ring, just one second before she gashed him with her paw. Sonsie herself never dressed up; as she herself was the first to say, she was a kitchen-wrapper girl at heart. Like many models, she had no personality for beauty, or at least not the right one. Inside her was a woman of no vanity and but one assurance Ninth Avenue had taught her, that physique was to fight with, fist, elbow and heel. Joe was perfect for her—they fought. She saw his hundred bucks a week at the drawing-board as entirely honorable, never allowing him to slip into the sour-Irish failure he craved. When he drank, they rioted. Otherwise they met seldom, at meals or in gigantic meetings-in-bed where only twins were fathered, two sets of them. In the ring of these, she now moved on the other side of things, a lady lion-tamer before whose whip, street-cubs since the age of two, they scattered and returned, to obey without psychic damage, scrub behind-the-ears without cringing, and cleanly adore. She had, naturally, the lightest hand for pastry. Barney, who’d known Joe before, said the two were types really, a pair to every tenement, but to Liz and somewhat less to David, their resounding saga was the real thing—by which they meant whatever least resembled themselves.