Authors: Hortense Calisher
He had just been taking off his glasses. Without any intent of cruelty—in the surprise with which one repeats a habitual gesture—he put them on again. But then he began to laugh. Probably there was a touch of hysterical release from this last month in it, but anyway he couldn’t help it. He rolled over and over with it, pounding the pillow, from which he rose, pointing a weak finger—only to fall back in another paroxysm.
At the core of the eye, lies the retina. Once it is “detached” as they say, even partially, the vision can never be the same. With the inner eye, it is that way also. She saw him there. Oh, she had her humor about her too, somewhere. With her outer eye, she could see well enough how she looked to him, even smile. When she spoke, though, it was from that dark, venous underground, always fresh with milk or blood, that he could never penetrate to, from which she herself had been running intermittently ever since she was thirteen—and to which now, in the full light of day, she was returned.
“Go on, laugh,” she said. “Go on, Pagani. Laugh.”
(They lied of course, when they said she wouldn’t remember it. What she remembered best was her great distance from others who could still suffer shades of feeling, their distance from her, who was all one shade. Later on, when they asked her about it, she lied, and said she didn’t remember it. How speak in the particular, of what should be all—one statement? Still later, when she asked herself, she responded also that she had forgotten. It had been the great obligatory scene of her life—hers—but nothing could make it a unique one. So she lied there, also, and said she did not remember it. It was an old wives’ tale.)
And now that the praeludium was over, with that expected chord which everybody had heard, the days offered themselves to the young Paganis—for what seemed a long time—in a mixed bag containing only many a minor good. Sometimes it was David, man of action, who appeared to be in the forefront of the family, holding aloft its banner, and Elizabeth who was the contemplative; sometimes it was she who set the tone of that psyche all families have—and now and again, walking with that lovely gait the world recognizes, they were one. In olden days, they would have had some actual ikon, household god to which or whom each would have had his and her duties, but here too their heritage, itself a mixture, left them free to—set their own course. Everything now conspired to help them believe they were doing so.
To Elizabeth with the child, crowned by it, life was ravished by circumstance. May, sweet nugget of the same, absorbed the unscheduled daylight hours, or corrected them to one; at night, sometimes carried to parties on her mother’s hip, she often allowed herself to be slipped into a quiet corner with others of her kind. Slowly her possessions entrenched themselves, trusted by her to bear it in upon her hosts that she was not leaving; gradually they learned to let all this creeping
art nouveau
abide. Meanwhile May, in return, offered them each day her small fistful of events. David from time to time patched together a film of these and sent it off to California, where each installment was extensively reviewed by letter, under the title with which Mr. Pagani had at once dubbed the whole continuity: “May’s
Meanwhile
.”
As was natural, some portion of her parents’ own almost always adhered to it. The field of dandelions where she was shown, a wandering topknot almost as bright-penny, lay just outside the wood where they went to hunt wood for Elizabeth, where they had found that large bole she would soon be working on. Here was May again, in the secondhand car her father had bought with his own earnings. For though the big opus was not yet done, indeed enlarged itself monthly, two smaller sections of it—one on certain architectural leftovers in the city, and one on its municipal sculpture—had been purchased by a university, share in the payment refused by the already well-heeled Barney, on the true grounds that these ideas had been David’s. More of the same, if he could turn up some, was on order.
Elizabeth, writing the letters that accompanied these installments, found herself a more eager correspondent now. Two addressees were more neutral than one—and she had found her subject, on which all of them could dwell. Under a still of May in the car—for an album which her own mother had started—she inscribed date and anecdote:
“The old bus makes a racket going up hills, probably needs a carbon job. First time out, I made a crack about it. We didn’t take it out again until last Sunday, more than a week later. What was our surprise to hear her say, clear as a bell, what I’d said. “Will this thing
exploge
?” At two-and-a-half! Can you believe it!”
The senior Paganis could well believe it. Though they had their accounts too, of the sniffles and nap-fevers a child could breed in a wink and a gust of wind, even hearing, safely afterwards, of the midnight croup, when Liz and Sonsie took turns walking the floor with the child upright on a shoulder, or of the time May got into the studio and cut her wrist, on a tool called a riffler that Elizabeth herself had never used—a half-inch more and it would have been the artery—the child of the pictures was the one they most truly believed. To Margot’s anxious query, not of course a suggestion, as to whether the studio could not be locked, she received an airmail answer:
It was. She opened it. We’ve taken other precautions now. You really can’t realize I’m a mother now too, can you.
Both knew this equally. On May’s first birthday, when Margot had flown East, ostensibly to re-rent the apartment she still kept on there, the good intentions of each had made for a prepared formality—under which repression one lance from an old attitude had instantly pierced. “I’ve tried,” each said to herself—“she will not accept.” “
She
will not forbear.” For walk about as they might and did, under an obscurely tender knowledge they increasingly felt themselves to be sharing, in speech they were helpless—birds striking in midair. “May hasn’t yet made her suffer,” the elder thought, and the repetition made her sad. But from these encounters, Elizabeth rose refreshed, a phoenix-girl. If Margot’s presence would not let her be a mother, then she would be a girl again, rediscovering her need, in all this happy humdrum, to rebel and not forbear, even to shut off from May that new fount of knee-high wisdom which May herself had opened in her, and fling up the single hand again—to push against the weave. All this was fine for work—but lasted briefly. So it was not quite possible to say who had conquered whom.
As for David, he had gone to the Coast once since, on the excuse of showing his father sections of the new film, and of course there was never any trouble between those two, though each found the other more reserved. “It must be because he has
her
now,” David told himself. “Is it because he is beginning to
see
?” Mr. Pagani asked himself—and trembled against what David might turn and tell him. Meanwhile, the time was approaching when all five must really meet, foolish to delay that pleasure. May was old enough now to see California. California must see May. Jacques (Margot wrote), whose grumbles over his liver all but convinced them that he had one and might make good his eternal threat to take it home to France forever, must see her—they must see him. Mr. Pagani was never the one to press for this—he was the same as always.
This was the real news from the older ones, and the best—that everything was the same. Each side knew the marvel of this, but differently. David no longer worried, or had to remind himself to do so. To the younger lovers, the older couple had been returned to that plateau where all keep their parents; distance made the latter even more safely constant, and they sent no pictures; like all letter-writers who remain faithful but unseen, they did not change.
And this was the sum.
Though the young couple never spoke it aloud, it seemed to both that they now had everything. They saw their way clear to seeing life clear, in just those antitheses they had often glimpsed in the lives of others, and no longer thought of as grooves: the country, the city; leisure, work. On Sunday afternoons, on the last lap of the fifty miles between them and the discovered woods they thought of mystically as theirs, while they mused in the line of traffic that stretched ahead of them to the George Washington Bridge and the city, May nodding in her sling between them or blanketed safe in the back, all fours clutched to her bottle, they often spoke of the logic of someday buying a cottage or camp—terms for what resided in the mind of each as a piece of habitation untethered by price or drains, as mystic a refuge as their forest. They enjoyed a forward sense of this as probable but not yet possible, in the way one savors a night’s anchorage in a place where one would not want to stay forever, taking a double enjoyment in their sense of themselves as being on a temporary plateau but steadily climbing; the angle of incidence that their life was to take, though free and always to be spreading, was set. In time it occurred to them, laughing at themselves incontinently, that they really didn’t have to make these trips on Sunday, like people who worked a week of nine-to-five; thereafter, drawing imperious breaths as they loaded the car, they made it a habit to go on weekdays. After this, whenever they came across similar examples of the freedom which kept them special, they were careful to observe any gestures that went with it, in order to mark the fact that though they lived within the terms of other people, they chose theirs. It was at these times, when people saw them walking with that gait, that they appeared most united—one. Having another child was never voiced even in thought, since their triumvirate was still so ideal—this was one of the terms. But the warmth of people who have everything often overflows into a charitable desire to add to it. So they got a dog. A small tan mongrel, short of leg, long in the tail and utter in faith, it understood them immediately.
The loft was their center; it was their
way
. As they approached the bridge, in this the third year, the city, hung there on the late blue in its stencils of sunlight, stepped forward to them like their own creation, weighted down at its farther end by that homestead, reached by its ropes, which they had long since come to call—in a gesture forgotten—either the Slip or the Cove. Elsewhere in the city, when they parted from friends or each other, on the steps of the Main Library perhaps, or inside the Modern, meanwhile looking like anybody else—for Elizabeth dressed “uptown” when she went there, and the child was kept a picture by its grandmother—nonchalance thrilled to pleasure as they murmured, “Back at the Slip at six” or “See you kids Thursday, at the Cove.” The wealth of what she had down there often overcame her right in the middle of Lord & Taylor’s; David still saw his own address with awe. Someone told them that it was mentioned in
Moby Dick
. Though they could not help anticipating the cachet of this at parties, David, always quicker at sensing pomp in himself, usually nullified it—once sending her into stitches by drawling, “Mm-hmmm. That’s where
all
the young marrieds.” In matter of fact, although, on streets nearby, they once or twice passed couples who resembled themselves enough to merit a second look, no one they knew or had heard of lived within a mile of them—any nearer than the new bohemia of the “East” Village. As they glided down the West Side Highway, under the “Heights” that now belonged to “the Germans” (refugees of thirty years ago, who had nothing to do with the Yorkville of Elizabeth’s parents), past the tired ballpark area of the newest Harlem, they thought of the city, like all New Yorkers, as utterly theirs—Elizabeth for having been born here, and David for having its ichor all the more in the veins because he had come. As evidence of this was the fact that each part of it had for them a social meaning which it took years to know. Impossible for them to live elsewhere than in its context—fish who would die out of these haunts that fed them a unique alga. In its godmotherly waters, even if they personally faulted, the city, friendly old savager of artists, shark-mother, helped them to keep on knowing who they were. This they took for granted.
And impossible to live in it except where they did—now that they had found it. Like any pioneers, they wanted no one else too near them, though there were other areas which by social meaning were right for their friends. On lower Riverside Drive, where the high-windowed towers gave back the gold in blobs and flashes, and one front was caught to a lurid, entire bronze, they exchanged smiles of scorn as they sped by. Here two couples of the crowd had defected to the solid apartments now returning to borderline bourgeois favor—and to all that went with this—baby-carriage mornings for mother, home on the bus for papa, and a half-time maid. Local contexts could not be shrugged off; these molded. If they themselves had not recently become privy to a circle that now seemed home to them, the melting of that first, early crowd would have been more alarming—one pair to the suburbs, two changes of heart (and profession) toward graduate school, two couples last seen grappling with an interest in their commercial jobs. As it was, Elizabeth was often frightened at the thought of it—they had all been so close. David, used to dormitory living, took these severances more stolidly, but she was not sure he saw the real tenor of them—it was not so much that the crowd had melted as the way they had, out of their own intention, back into life at large. Of the originals, only three had remained stalwart, two bachelor painters and a girl doing rather well in off-Broadway theater. They themselves were the sole couple—outside of Beatty and Dil, of course, those two who had moved on to new fringes but still were sometimes to be met and avoided, their experienced hanger’s-on eyes watching, ever more brightly purist, waiting for the Paganis, now that the latter were in the family way, to slide.
Luckily, they themselves could now return the look with some sophistication. The people they saw now, of whom one would never use that adolescent word “crowd”—though they gathered as self-protectively and excluded far more severely—had almost all taken that indefinable step, however small, past intention, into practice. Ah, what a difference, and oh the relief of it, now that they both had done—particularly for Elizabeth. For once David had given up (on which day?) any idea of being a painter, he had stepped forward with the lighthearted confidence of one who pursues his avocation, plus perhaps the confidence of the male—of whom vocation, whatever it may be, is expected. She hadn’t given him a hard time about it, turning it rather more harshly upon herself. For, six months after May’s birth, she still had not started to work again—she was afraid to begin. At times she blamed the school for abetting her too early in her misconception of herself—and saw them all back there, teachers and schoolmates both, expecting things of her, waiting for her to fulfill or fail. Some mornings she was sure she had risen in ardor to a workday that the baby had then eased away from her, piecemeal. Then, slowly it was borne in upon her, like a soundless clap of thunder of which she was not aware until it echoed, that no one (possibly not even David) was really awaiting anything else from her—at least not on the heights of what she demanded of herself. For this, she had no audience. Luckier than David (as some would see it), even in this day and age no other vocation was really expected of her. All her life long she could blame the baby, plead the house.