Authors: Hortense Calisher
Four days passed, in sweet uneventfulness. May, never left out of sight, was her dear good self, and in a new way, almost a companion. Though heretofore she had always dogged her mother’s steps, never more than a pace behind them, now, falling into the background, she had more often to be looked for; it was eerie how she could find places in which to be lost but still near, and all without puckishness, so gravely, never seeming to hide. Now—when she was never spoken crossly to or refused a story, never put off by, “No more questions, no not one!” or by Liz’s phrase in extremis, “No! Mummy is a person, too. And Mummy wants a
quiet
time”—why did she just now one day lean her clasped hands on Liz’s knees and say, looking up so primly, “Do’n you want a quiet time?” It was almost as if she were somewhere amassing a little hoard of her own that she wished unnoticed. Though never a demonstrative child, now and then, with a certain art, she was. What could May be learning? The mother put such thoughts out of her mind. It was the bright interval, one in which a scare or two had even been surmounted without brewing to anything, and it was the longest to date, eight weeks. If the two hadn’t been alone, she would have felt almost light-hearted—and if that secret milestone she lived for (having told no one, not even David), the child’s third birthday, were not so near.
On the first reassuring morning, they had seen Dowlin. Each of the successive ones—she worked. The owner of a small gallery, the very man whom David had taken up to see the torso months back at the opening, back in that safe chapter of undifferentiated days, would take her for a two-man show in the spring, if she could give him a little more to choose from, even for possible sale. He had passed over her efforts in wood to meditate for a time on the wax ones. Their sameness, all stylized toward the same anger, all women, had contrarily pleased him. She set herself to be professional, to amass him an army of them, but after this long interval of her own, her fingers were not up to it, nor her heart, and she managed but two, both slack. Nevertheless, it calmed. The child, by now schooled not to touch anything in the studio, was content to sit in a corner, well away from the pans of water in which the slabs were melted, of which she was given cooled pieces for her own vague lumps and pies. As she bent there, now and then, for a rest, her mother modeled her.
She had been doing this almost absently, for longer than realized, perhaps even two hours, on that fourth morning when she put the figure down, rose to stretch, and turning, saw what she had done. Her fingers must have done it without her. For it was almost—May. Though it was the best she had ever done of her, she would say that much, no further. Her fingers must have done it without her. For the figure was not of the child at this moment bent in her corner, but of a child found out in one, caught on the run there, learning how to hide.
That afternoon, as on other fair ones, they went to the zoo, where no heart could be heavy, and where May had even found a small, blond-braided friend, who, like herself, no longer napped afternoons. Children often lost the habit of it along about this age, said the other’s mother—along about three.
They came home to the Cove just as it was dusking. At this; season, it was not unusual to see the stone-cutter’s wife, Mrs. Ivan as she was known, standing in her doorway—rather, it was a seasonal sign. Winters, the stolid family retreated behind its curtains on the far side of the warehouse where all their life was conducted, scarcely to be seen again during the cold except for the children, a girl and boy of eight and nine or so, glimpsed as they went off early “to the nuns,” mufflered to their narrow Alpine eyes, or on returning when, at a movement from a curtain, they were nipped inside. Summers they all left for some business venture in the country. But toward spring, for those few, short New York days, Mrs. Ivan, urged by some village atavism, came from behind her curtain to stand in the doorway, to lend the Slip, in which she was so strangely harbored, a gossip-on-the-stoop, village air. In the waning light, on this her first appearance of the year, she looked even more morality-tale than usual; kind witch, lady-porker, false neighbor whose gossip did not run to a nod. Today, she seemed even to be waiting. As they neared her, she scrutinized the child. She had heard of its seizures, perhaps, and wished to see for herself what manner of child—she would be like that. A ball of rage formed in its mother’s throat, draining to a complicated shame.
But, it was not like that. Because it wasn’t, her address—in the servile style of hostility when it wants something—was almost palatable. Against the lonely prospect of the evening’s fears, it seemed almost like one of the heartening domestic favors women are stirred to exchange at twilight, before dark. “The dress your little girl wears once—” She wanted to borrow it to copy the pattern, for her Gretel’s first communion. “The green and red one. With the smockings here, and here, the color
so
.” It was almost a tribute. From behind her curtain, she had observed well.
“Oh, yes of course! If you’ll just wait, I’ll go on up—”
Liz hesitated, glancing behind her for May, who was not there but at the unfamiliar doorway, a few yards down. How wise she looks, thought the mother—the way they look when one sees them like that, suddenly apart.
“I watch her,” said Mrs. Ivan. “Or my Gretel. Gretel!”
A blond girl with braids nipped from behind the window.
“Pat-ty!” crowed May.
“Oh, that’s not
Patty
!” said Liz, smiling indulgently. This girl was about twice the size and age—though there was more than that to the difference between two blond little girls with braids. This was a cold bit already, with the bad-china complexion of some South Germans—as if attempts at Meissen had been made. “She met a little girl named Patty at the zoo.”
“Can I take her inside, show her my new room?” said Gretel. “Can I?” She didn’t smile, but her repetition was childish enough to be nodded to.
Coming downstairs with-the dress—a gift from Margot—freshly laundered too, and so luckily not by her own indifferent hand—Liz felt salved. Under Mrs. Ivan’s thumbing of a plaid cotton fine as silk, her nodded I-told-you-so to an invisible crony (over the Irish lace collar), her quick squint at the label, the corners of Liz’s mouth lifted, in a hereditary twinge of Yorkville. She knew well enough what was venerated by the pigs-who-were-neat.
“You come inside now,” said the woman. The owner of such an article must now be asked to review
her
possessions; this was required, and this was her thanks.
They passed through the remembered train of box-rooms budding on one another with a respectability as infallible as cancer. Mrs. Ivan righted a faulty pillow with a fake groan, tested a table’s proud polish with a glum “T-t-t” and a sweep of the middle finger, and Liz, following, was able to murmur the proper responses—“Oh no, I don’t see how you—it’s all so immaculate!” But meanwhile, such a mournful start of yearning had gone over her at the three-years-back sight of all this, it was not credible—at the sight of those wooden bluebirds? So immaculately preserved—the context of the past, then, did not have to be beautiful? A valve opened for her, widening on all the bowknots, rosebud dreadfuls, knots in time that people bent over with sick smiles—heart-boxes. A first inkling came to her of what “the past” could mean to others and progressively to her, included in it a clanged sense that the moment itself was not revocable.
Gretel’s room restored her—such a travesty on girlhood, on pink-and-green. But the children were not in it, not in the kitchen.
“They in the studio,” said Mrs. Ivan. “You so nervous,
ja
, you only got one.”
They were not to be seen in the studio, that huge, scattered place. Confused by the cables, the machinery, she at first saw no one. Then she caught sight of Gretel in a far corner, too far across that floor still weighted with its crop of gravestones, a Tyrolean grotesque of a little girl rising knock-kneed, furtive, as if she had just done dirty on a grave.
“May!” Where was she—what had they—? “May!”
“She wannud play hide-seek.” Gretel smiled wretchedly, head moving on neck, hands kneading her crotch. “But I don’t spy her, nowhere.”
She was found almost at once of course, almost as quickly as Liz’s witch-glimpse of them, old bookplate terror, faded when she saw her, safe—stone-dust in her hair, dust clowned in a smear across her mouth, gazing up at them in droll gravity from the crawl-space, a tepee of up-ended marble, she had to be so carefully wooed from—but safe.
“Schmutzig!”
Crack! Mrs. Ivan’s apologies were transmitted via her daughter. She whispered them. “Why you let the baby shame herself?”
Gretel had her answer ready, shaken out of her by the slap from behind. “Because she’s a funny, isn’t she, Ma?” Head tilted at Liz, she smiled for real. She had been told. She knew. “She’s a funny, isn’t she?” Gretel said.
Cleanliness was not for the mean-spirited only. Upstairs in the loft, with the child bathed and fed, cleanly powdered with talc, she cuddled it on her lap, pressing the round, sweet-smelling crown to her breast in almost the early, flawless flesh-joy.
“Stille Nacht,”
she sang, as her mother had. Night was just settling in when she laid the child in its crib, slipping the rail half-down so that the child’s form could be seen from her bed, lingered there curved over with love touched its cool cheek with a light finger, and let it be. Tonight, David’s usual call would not come, for today was the funeral, and out there, hours back, it was still day. He was with many unknown people now; the certainty of that made him seem farther.
Here now, all was the same. Centered in her objects, among which she scarcely any longer drew a line between chosen and accreted, she took reassurance from their special gloaming. Gold and dark mingled as awaited, only angled now toward spring. The dog lay at his post, couched like an animal out of heraldry. From the window, a last iridescence flashed his collar: gules. And tonight, might she count her blessings, she had nothing else for which to wait.
The sky gathered at the window, of all the colors of black. After a while, she wished for music, but dared not disturb the child, so softly respiring. She composed herself on the bed, stretching a leg across his place, then, superstitiously withdrawing it, leaving a space free for his return, she burrowed deep, into the nest-sense, her nestlings numbered, into that wholesome dark. Down there, in the way some count sheep, she lay on a field of old summers, on the gone-to-seed garden that to a child had been pasture, above her shoulder, almost a companion, the lone faucet no one knew of, that at a mysterious interval, never to be counted upon, against function and with it, fed a drop to the field. There, she was not waiting for anything.
Heilige Nacht.
After a while, she flicked on the weakest lamp. Across that nest-sense, another had stolen, of how tenuously she was connected with the city. Today, she now recalled, had been Sunday, now that nadir of the week in which no one was likely to call. In recent months, their neglect of people, a gradually returning compass needle, had been pointed at them. Despite that, she watched the clock for some time: nine, then ten, ten-thirty—not now any more. Even in this building, above her, the Baileys, in a rare spell of amity, were away, all six together; above them, the pale boy, briefly a sitter, no longer lived here; of those others below, she would not let herself think. She could not help the waiting—it could not be unlearned. The silence in the room was like water rising. Under the lamp, stiffly sinking, she drowsed.
And awoke, thudding. To no click. To the quiet. A shelf of sleep still pressed her down. She lay there, listening to that which creeps subterranean, louder than noise. She heard the dog rise to its haunches, as if it too were listening. Pushing against the sleep that coffined her, she drew herself up on elbow. The dog sat, ears high, muzzle pointed. She saw what it saw. In a room alone, the sincere do not scream.
Opposite her, the child rose.
It rose like an object, moving without breath, eyes distorted, hands at the bedsheets, mouth open. In the moment before she flung herself upon it, it resembled an object trying to turn itself into creature, straining to create itself. She ran here, there, with it on her shoulder, in a panic maze-memory of the croup, and at last the eyes suffused, the choking came, and with it, on and on like a new but welcomed torture—the breath. On each breath, she writhed with it, until again the terrible stillness fell and again the rigid half-creature labored. Three times this happened. Then she got through, she never knew how, to Boda—not there—to the answering service, the doctor taking Boda’s calls, and at last, to the city ambulance. And the city, after all, responded well.
It allowed her to sit the rest of the night on a bench in its hospital, not in just the general waiting room downstairs, but in the smaller, privileged one of the terror-struck, just outside the ward. Though it could not allow her to enter the ward, since this was the section for infectious diseases, it sent an intern to speak to her personally—by the next morning, no later than ten o’clock. He listened with tolerance to her dazed answer to his “Kid’s an asthmatic, isn’t she?” with only slight impatience to the history of 103.6, and though she felt that this was not a fever up to his standards, he nodded a courteous “Yeah, after we brought her in, she had two.” He had come to inform her that the child, though now resting quietly, was reacting to tests for muscular response with what was known as a “meningismus,” which was not always definite, but could be confirmed. And after he had told her that the spinal tap they wished to perform was the test for meningitis, she was allowed to take her free way three flights down, and wait her turn at the phone. Then she returned upstairs, to her bench.
It was noon now, and the waiting room was sociable with parents come to take their well children home. A special hospital gaiety lingered on it, light as the floss on candy jars. She sat in it like a stone. The happier parents studiously averted their eyes from whatever plague was hers. “Oh, he’ll do fine, just fine!” said a woman just coming in, to a pair just leaving with a child in a wheel chair. “Mine’s leaving tomorrow!” she called out richly, to their retreating backs. “Ah-hah. Yeah. So long.” She came and sat down, on the bench. “Polio, that one had. Mine had the diphtheria.” She was all smiles. “Imagine, this day and age. We figure our landlord, he don’t fix the drains.” She was one wreathing, inner smile, her head moving circularly upon it, toward tomorrow.