Authors: Hortense Calisher
The girl sat there, eyes on the hands clasped in her lap, not seeing them, deep in a vampire greed to be this woman, to be inside the flesh of this woman who was taking her child home.
“Hon—” said the woman after a while. “You got anybody with you?”
After an interval, she was able to raise her coffin-lid, speak from there. “California. My husband.” It came out, a croak. “I couldn’t reach him. They’re all at a funeral.” She saw the funeral still going on out there, the hours unmoved, in celebration of all deaths everywhere.
“Your kid, he in there?”
After another interval, she was able to answer that also. “She.”
A nurse passed, looked in.
“California—” the woman said to the nurse, low. “And she—”
The nurse came up to her. “What’s your name, dear?”
“Pa-Pagani.” It was extraordinary, how the buried could speak, to the above-ground. When she got back there herself, she would tell them.
“Oh yes, your child’s just gone up. She’ll be down soon.” The nurse bent to look in her eyes, put a sharp hand on her. “You’re not going to keel over on me, now, are you? That’s right.” She paused, before leaving. “Bet you didn’t know they have something for meningitis now, they catch it soon enough.” She nodded brightly. “Sure, ever since Korea, the army camps. We got it then.” Going out, she passed another nurse. “I’m going off, now. Mmm—spinal.”
How well even the grass could be heard. Tap, tap.
“Menin—” said the woman. She crossed herself, then touched Liz with the same hand. “You hear her? In the war, hon. Lotta good things come out of the war.”
Traffic bypassed them now, on its way to the visiting.
“You a Catholic?” said the woman.
“My—mother…used. Used to be.” I would be anything they said to be. Up there with you—if I were still alive.
The woman was silent then, guarded. Did she perhaps feel it, the vampire breath upon her? “You pray,” she said suddenly. “In the blood, it don’t leave you.” Her hand came out in resolve, so careless of whether it was the coveted, the smiling alive. “Pray, hon.” It began to stroke, over and over. “You can always come back.”
Within the stone, the stone began to create itself, sweating tears.
“That’s right hon. Try to cry.”
Within the trachea, swallowed arrowhead, breath begins.
A shadow crossed her lap—on the floor, two shoes.
“California,” said the woman. “Alone, I guess. Her baby’s up there, for meningitis. A spinal tap.”
A cry. She was raised, bodily lifted. Back from the dead, he stared at her, David. They fed upon each other’s ravaged eyes.
“I flew all night,” he said. “I couldn’t get you. I flew all night.” She saw him—between the great wings, webbed and jointed, his peaked face, low-flying. You too. She could not say it.
“I know everything. They told me the ambulance. I had a time finding—” Though he surround her with his body, his flesh could not help her, being like hers. “They’ll soon have it. I talked to them. She’s already down.”
When the intern poked his head in, they were alone on the bench, crouched together.
“Pagani?” This one was a Chinese, with a perfect face snubbed to the universal one, the eye-folds lifted, as if wisdom reined them from behind. When he smiled, he was—“Your child doesn’t have meningitis,” he said. “She has bronchial pneumonia.”
“Pneu—” The word, repeated, peeled from her, a long rill of it—she was the spool. She turned to tell the woman. “Pneumonia, she only has pneumonia! Did you hear?” She turned to David—“She only has pneumonia”—to the other. “They cured penicillin with that…didn’t they. Long before the war.”
“Give her something to eat,” said the other. “She’s been here since they came in. Then you can see your baby. They’ve shifted her.” He smiled. “Yes, long before.”
She turned to the woman who was no longer there. “I only wanted to tell her—” The woman would want to know it—that the Jesus is a Chinese. She would want to know that. But she herself was already fading upward, above-ground. She looked down at her arms, melted again to flesh, vulnerable.
Left alone together, they recognized each other, in a long stare. He was back from the dead.
“I’m all right,” she said at last. I am Persephone. How did one say it? “I’m back.”
The pair sat, heads bent, near the bed in the ward where the child lay in the priceless, after-fever slumber, its lips wetted with rose, like the mouth of a vessel where essential oil had been burning. Down the long aisle between the uncurtained niches where the cribs lay, other couples, here and there a lone figure, hung over the bars and chortled, or stood, or sat like themselves, brooding on what they still had.
During the funeral days out there, he had carried his own livingness about with him like a tickle of the sexual—he knew his own size. Here, in this soiled, old municipal hospice of mottled gray zinc corridors vast as Edwardian sinks, castor-bean-smelling linoleum, he was not so sure. He had traveled thousands of air-miles, only to find himself yet in those orphic spaces between life and death; now in the way of the airsick, he needed to fasten his dizziness on some steady, oriented object. The cribbars, under their tan paint, were steel, set very close. The mattresses were raised extra-high—for easier nursing care, he supposed—but on the smooth metal legs, about a foot and a half from the floor, there was a contraption of plates and blocks whose use he could not decide, beyond the unlikely image of a creeping child. A nurse, carrying past her medicine tray, appeared not to have heard his comment. Two beds down, across an empty one, an old woman turned to him a clean, chimp face, the eyes in it as faded a calico as her sack-shape, its mouth crossed with a finger. “Rat-guards, boy dear. And that needed.” With which she turned her back on them, to the still form she guarded.
At his side, he saw that his wife, awake a minute ago, her face fallen in now, was asleep in her chair. He was sentinel. Through a window, past a dockside tangle of viaducts and alleys, he could see a corner of a building crony to this one and of the same pallor, the school where a child must go down here, would go if—when she grew. From the bland, palmland air, fruit colors, to this place, his passage had been too short—he knew how he had shrunk. Yet he knew better how to repair this than his wife would, his instincts being surer. For all that he saw the image of his child at six, swinging her book-bag through the dockside, home to her dark rope-climb, and saw it as a negative, an impossible one—it was not a matter of place only. Or if it was, it was not so in the secondary sense that his wife, for all her quickness, might still see it. It was a matter of a place in life.
He bent over the child. Opposed to its mother’s hoard of adages on the physical, which if queened over were her right and due, he had kept to himself one delicate secret, a small fatherhood that he had never told. In fever, the child had a certain smell to it, whether others had, he could not know—to him it meant her, only this one. He was the only one who knew. At first, he thought the odor lost to him under the sallow, city carbolic, and fought off an urge to steal out with the child’s body close under his arm, toward that coastal radiance, the candid palms. Then, bending even closer, almost touching, he stayed there, taking in that warm, toxic chypre from this bud in such sick flower—his.
Raising his head, he saw that his wife, awake, looked young again. Ahead of him, his thoughts leaped like salmon, and though he knew the legend of that immolation as well as anyone, rushed on. In their center, one hoarse rage spoke. “I want—” he said to her. “I want another one.”
Let her not understand—or not answer. It was his answer. Let her think he asked it for relief—from the terrible strain of having only one hostage. Yet, silent as she was, he saw or thought that she understood him. An answer flickered on her face, neither joyful nor sad, but complicitous. Life had not imposed this on them. He imposed it on her, his male answer to the agonies life imposed. It was what they were meant for; it was their excuse. They held each other eye-to-eye, in the sacred falsity of a moment they would remember—a crossing of the current, one that they themselves had made.
W
HEN DR. BODA PAID
the Slip an unsolicited house call about a month later—a fortnight after the Pagani child had been discharged from Dr. Dowlin’s splendid hospital, as
Bronchitis: recovered
—the one o’clock sun was running like hilarity along the Cove, dragging foot-traffic, even vendors into this coign. For two brilliantly hot weeks without a blow of wind, spring had burnt deep into its corners, stilling the greenish harbor voices, turning the dust to brine. The air squeaked with freshness, like pulled, newly washed hair. Distanced, the vendors’ cackle turned Portygee; gulls dropped to the garbage scows from Caribbean skies. Above the viaduct, a marine dazzle whitened to sail. Two young boys went by, bound for it with string, hooks and tin cans. A young couple strolling hand in hand—he in full beard, she with a waterfall of hair down her back, both black-trousered, both sandaled—lingered to glance up at the old factory, even to ring several long, unanswered peals at the side door, then walked on, casting back wistful, house-hunting glances. Upstairs, the three young Paganis were laughing over lunch.
These last weeks, the two elder had discovered how joy can haunt a life (for they now thought of theirs as one)—in what willful corners it makes itself found. Up there in the new yellow-and-blue ward, safe as a teddy bear, the child was mildly recovering, a solitary happily stunned by the numbers of children in whose midst, alert as a tadpole to its own species, she watched and even swam. When her parents visited, she received them well, but with a certain absence of mind, as if they were not the sole resource now—the pond was the thing. The loft, when they went home to it, suddenly bid for their attention like a garden once imaged, planted and left, and now re-risen—with the season. The dog greeted them like a pet ignored, enough to remind them of that other yoke of love, now temporarily lifted. Downstairs, below them, all was sealed for summer, deserted. They rose at random, went out for buns, stayed in for love. There, that other agreement remained, unspoken, but they were not indiscriminate. There were seasons; that was the thing. But ever so often they greeted one another newly, like people immured together in a cave, who turn to each other upon rescue, to congratulate themselves on having been shut up there with the right one.
Meanwhile, the cost of all this was to be covered very handily, and not by Mr. Pagani. It was disclosed that Jacques had left David a small cash bequest, plus his half-interest in the business. To David’s disclaimer of the latter, sent off at once, his father at once replied, in his own way gently disclaiming, not pressing David with any of the burdens of half-ownership now, entirely omitting mention of those which might someday arrive in full. He would hire a young man who might later buy in, half or all, as David might wish it; business of late, with two old fogies at the helm, had somewhat lagged. In any case, David’s allowance would now arrive, with some increase, as his own income—which his father knew would please. He was now truly on his own, his father the same. When last seen, at the funeral, Mr. Pagani, to be sure, had seemed smaller, but so he had seemed also at the wedding—it was merely the way, his son now knew, in which one generation invariably shrank, under the ceremonials of another. Best of all, now that they were three again, the child, home from that sunny, pastel place, seemed to have brought some of its spirit with her, to the Slip and to them. They had all had their shock and it had nulled; whatever might be repeated, some vibration—of waiting for it—had forever gone. At times it even seemed to them that the child consciously acquiesced in some buried statement that they were all now party to—which made their triumvirate the stronger. This could not be, of course. They no longer, of course, made love in front of her. Though still their object, more often now, she was sometimes May.
At this moment, she and her father were engaged in an old game she still found riotous—in which, slowly, with compressed smiles and scary eyes, they brought their foreheads closer across her table, until, darting forward, she brought hers against his with a huge “A-boo!” He never failed her; she always got there first.
“Watch your glasses,” said Liz. Clearing the table, turning on her heel, she sighed with abstract pleasure. “I think I’ll take her uptown. Too bad you have to go back to Barney. What a day!”
He removed the glasses just in time. “Golly. Her head is hard.” He shook his, with pride.
Below, in the depths of the old building, they heard the Ivans’ bell peal faintly, for the second time within the hour. As usual, they did not answer—they themselves had never had a bell. After a few minutes, there was a hallooing, repeated nearer.
“Meter man came yesterday,” she said. “Sounds like a telegram.”
They listened for the name. It was their own.
David went downstairs quickly. The man was standing just inside their open doorway, as if hypnotized by the shaft of midday sun, looking interestedly at his own shoe. As David approached, he stirred some dust with it, and watched the dust hang, floating like goldleaf, in the lovely, citric light.
“Why—it’s Dr. Boda—isn’t it!” Even in this improbable context, Boda’s tanned face, in the focus of the stairwell’s rich brown shadow, seemed such a usual one—usual as a face in Vermeer, and as limned. “Yes it is, how are you, Doctor? How nice of you to—” To what?
They shook hands.
“Sorry I was out of town when—” said Boda.
“Oh, that’s all right, after all you couldn’t—” David’s tone struck his own ear as much too large. “We heard you were at a medical conference.”
“Out of the country, yes. Rio. My wife and I. She needed—” He looked up at the stairs. His nonchalance was weak, that was it—he was after all not much older than David. A matter-of-fact young man really, yet by profession so far ahead in the daily shadow, always finding himself in such unordinary places, no wonder if he seemed—not yet accustomed. “Otherwise, I’d have come before. I—”
“You got a tan, I see. You’re looking very well.”