Authors: Hortense Calisher
He did not ask her to specify. “When you come back—you’ll come out to us, won’t you?”
She stared at the useful water.
“For at least six months of the year,” he said.
“For a visit.”
“Ah, I know your visits—a shower of presents, and away. But we mean to take care of you. You’re not going to get away from us.”
“Mmm,” she said. “Such presents as I mean to bring you! Why else do you think I have an empty trunk!”
“Oh, Margot.” He gave her up, but with a headshake and a smile.
She sparkled up at him. They might have been flirting, she with a man years too young, but still a man. “And in Paris, I shall buy another, what is the name of that wonderful luggage, begins with a V, I’ve always wanted one.” If she no longer believed quite as she had once in the efficacy of
things
, this was no time to begin living without them. One could live—one must—as if one still did believe. To be able to, even now—was what
he
had given her. It had been the spiritual experience of her life.
“Oh, Margot,” he said again.
Yes, David had given her up, for Elizabeth’s image of her—he wasn’t as discerning as his father, nor did she intend him to be. Let him think she had no idea of the coil at the heart of things. This was her lore—as she had pretended not to hear his father say. “Your father said—”
At once, he was alert.
“Your father said—that like most women, I had no religion. Only a simple faith in the faith of others.”
He seemed disappointed. She didn’t blame him.
“Listen, Margot—I want to ask you something.” He spoke as if in a hopeless cause. As he scratched his head, she remembered that he hadn’t had a mother. “Would you—would you let me talk to you about him, sometime?” He amended this. “Sometimes. I find that I—”
She was silent, only thinking how to say it. “I promise you. You may always take care of
me
, like that.”
“Oh—” he said. “What a beautiful way to—” Then he plunged on. “What I value most about him is that he never—even with his illness, through all of it—never tried to buy me in.”
“Buy you—” Where had he ever picked up that phrase? Then she saw, of course. From Elizabeth. Who had got it from her. Who had got it, no, not from her own people, really. From Ernest. What a weave!
And how to answer it? If she answered, “No, he never did,” if she let it rest there? Would
he
rest better? Or his son, here? Watching the two others coming back now, May’s hand squirming in her mother’s, she was about to do so.
“Oh—I don’t know—” she heard herself say then. The answer came from behind or below, using her mouth, but surely not hers. A corrective. “I think he’d’ve said—that he wasn’t quite sure himself, never was—whether or not he tried.” An exhaustion came over her, like a medium’s. “And that you oughtn’t to be either—that sure.” She was close to tears now, but at the same time profoundly lightened, as if someone had for years been offering her a medal which, only now good enough for it, she could allow herself to take. The flat voice was her own, now. “That’s—what
I
value him for.”
The tired, boyish face above hers looked thoughtful. She’d done her best, she told herself; she’d been as honest as his father would have wanted. Yet, when David had time to be disappointed, she was fairly certain that it would again be—in her.
“It’s almost time for the whistle, May!” said Elizabeth. “Get ready for a big noise.”
All four of them now stood together, Elizabeth taller by a head than her mother, David slightly taller than Elizabeth, by as many inches as he had exceeded his father, at the base of the line, the still unpredictable dot of the child. The time had come for clichés; all over the deck similar groups were hunting them. “So tall!” said the grandmother. “Always so much taller, you young ones. Whatever’s to become of the race!”
“Oh, there’s some gene, they say,” said David. “Keeps on dragging us back to the median. No danger of giants.”
“I don’t think May will be
too
—” said Elizabeth.
Each of the three in his own way smiled down at the child, looking to her to lift them up, yet be as they.
“Watch out for how things grow in California,” the grandmother said gaily. A pall fell, but that was happening all about them. She clasped her hands together. “Oh, it’s like any place. You’ll have friends.”
“Oh—friends—!” said Elizabeth.
“And the house, you’ll find that—”
“I expect you’ve done wonders,” said Elizabeth.
She refrained from answering that she’d done nothing to it—which would not be believed—or even from retorting that Elizabeth in time, in turn, would do them. These days it was her task to refrain. Little enough.
All over the deck, the same cold wind was blowing, though faces flashed warm. The grandmother dropped to her knees, hugging the warm child. “What shall I bring you, eh, mmm, mmm, sweetheart, what shall I bring you?” Encircled, May trifled with the tiny, dark-blue watch. “Ah, she has taste, this one. Shall I find you one just like this, hmm? Yes, that’s what I’ll do! For when you’re grown-up!”
“Oh, Mother,” said Elizabeth. “You’ve corrupted her enough, already.”
The three turned to the child.
“Shall I?” said Margot, her eyes bright on May—who withdrew her hand.
“Mummy doesn’t have such a pretty watch,” said May.
The three brayed sudden laughter, quickly stifled, but that too was going on nearby, all around them.
“Whichever does she mean, do you suppose,” murmured her father.
The two women exchanged looks, dared not.
“I’ll tell you what she means,” said Margot. She stood up, put out a hand, halfway, to her daughter. “She means for me to give it to
you
.” The hand touched. A rueful smile crossed her face. “If I may.”
“Oh-h, Mother…
please
—”
“You always loved it—you know you did. Oh, I know you don’t like jewelry. For the color. And the shape.” The pin was already detached, the watch in its owner’s hand. “And I’d love to, I so want to…Elizabeth?…And I’ll have all the fun of buying another, you know!”
“Mother…will you please—” Elizabeth spoke
sotto voce
, glaring about her as she had done as an adolescent. There had been a time when she had been ashamed of her mother’s habit of carrying brown-paper parcels. Now she reddened sideways, disowning her mother’s untidy bagful of sentiment, for the benefit of anyone who might be looking. Only those were who were doing the same.
“Elizabeth,” said Margot, “will you for once in our lives—allow us grace on both sides. Will you, for once in your life, and mine—allow me to really give you something—of mine?” She held out the jewel. “It might be anything—a box—you know that. Won’t you…just for once…
take
.”
Hypnotized, the thin girl, the more worn of the two anyone would have said, stretched out her hand. She glanced away, but public leavetakings such as this one seemed to be made for just such conformities. Exchanges between the generations were being made without rancor on all sides of her. She turned back; was there even a greediness in her own eyes at last, for the thing itself, the helpful object? As she took the watch, the rueful smile passed to her face from her mother’s, as if this too was exchanged. And now, around them all hands clasped others, arms grasped children to steady them, faces pantomimed consolation—“We can’t speak now”—all firm, stand firm together now. The seismic blast came, enfolded them, exhausted itself above them. All knew where it really came from. It came from below.
In the silence, a child was heard crying. Not May. But May’s face crumpled. “I want to go home,” she whispered. The dents below her eyes began darkening.
“Oh darling, don’t
cry
—” said her mother. “You know what it—oh darling, please don’t.” The father knelt down also.
No, said the grandmother, I cannot stand it, to watch their diminishment. “May,” she said. “You’re going, we all must now. And look at us, we’re not crying.” Never say it the other way, poor dears, never say
don’t
. She tilted the child’s face. “Aha, we are really laughing, aren’t we? Because we know what a pretty we’re going to get from London.”
When a child succeeds in not crying, all hearts are rewarded.
“
Such
a pretty.”
“Lon-don,” said May. Her breath was even again, her color.
“How beautifully she says it. Oh, I know!—there’s a place there—a dollhouse! One with real furniture. Shall it be that?”
The child stood mum.
“Hurry, darling, there’s the all-off. Just say.”
In their tender, lowering circle, the child stood its ground, yet withdrew. “What you said you would,” she said. “Before.”
Their mouths opened; eyes stole glances. “The—?” Could it be? Of course it could. But they so wanted her to say it herself, to be able to cherish her for it. Their eyes and mouths prompted—
“The round thing,” said May.
And in the general laughter, she joined them, just as if she knew what they most expected of her kind—even of her. She clapped her hands with them as if she knew. She had lifted them up.
At the rail of the turning ship, the grandmother scanned and scanned the crowd massed at the wharfside, but could not find the two with their burden on a shoulder, though they had said they would be there. They were there somewhere, only smaller, shrunken, as one generation must always find itself at the ceremonials of another. She herself felt herself the ship’s figurehead—that large. She took out a handkerchief and held it to the breeze in their general direction, still unseeing. It was her ceremonial, after all. It could not be helped.
The child, grasping the white handkerchief given it, held it sturdily aloft.
Sooner or later, they would have had to do it anyway, to go back. So many personal things were still down there to be disposed of or packaged for the West—what better day than this glorious, still light, summer-saved one, along the path of which so much had already been dispatched? In their car, jammed in the throng of taxis bearing away from other ocean liners or toward them, the child strove from side to side and stamped with joy, shrieking answers to the deep proposals of the boats, giving away smiles at the window, a wild cherub flying, thriving. Under the streaming, effulgent light, pulses came and went on her, fed rainbow on the marvelous substance of which she was made; once again they saw that she was beautiful. And as they spoke, now and then, she tagged their speech; boat,
boat
, West,
West
—wherever their sentences ended on a note of departure, she echoed them.
“High, today, isn’t she.” He spoke from the side of his mouth; he was driving.
“Mmmmm.” They were nearing the time when it would no longer be possible to speak freely, though the child, when they spoke of her, gave no sign of hearing. “But I don’t think—
too
. It’ll be okay today, I think, I’m getting so I can tell.”
“You were always better with her, that way, always,” he said.
They let this statement—lie.
“One thing for sure,” he said, “Margot herself hasn’t changed.” She did not immediately answer him. “Your mother.” He spoke as if over the checkerboard—your move. “She hasn’t given in an inch.”
Still she did not answer him.
“You were always right about her, from the beginning,” he said. “We see clearer, then. And it isn’t that she won’t see the abstract—she can’t. Of course it’s what saves her, just now. In Paris, for Christ’s sake, she’s going to get a—some kind of trunk.”
“Oh—do you think—?” she said at last. “I thought—it seemed to me—that this time…she and I were—” She brought it out almost fearfully—“nearer.”
“Oh, she can feel,” he said at once. He glanced down. She wasn’t wearing the watch, had put it in her handbag. “But only on her terms. It’s part of her charm, of course. I suppose that’s what
he
found so—” He laughed slightly. “On about the level of May. It’s no wonder, the way the two of
them
—”
“Resemble.” Her voice was almost inaudible.
He seemed surprised. “Get on well, was all I meant.” Traffic was about to move. He risked a hand across May, now silent between them. “Don’t worry yourself, keed. After all, her highness here has us too, you know.” He clipped the wheel smartly. “I’m beginning to see that. And understand it. Very deeply.” He spoke in the firm, brash voice he sometimes adapted at parties, or in galleries, the voice for the technique of things. “The way a child goes. We set the example. Some things are—beyond our control. But
that
, my love—is up to us.”
She sat with her hands clasped, eyes lowered, as if in some church where, having entered to admire the chancel, he had suddenly informed her, “This is the one. To which we shall convert.”
“To get back to Margot,” he said in his natural voice. “I suppose that frivolous quality was a relief to him at first. My father. Until he found out it was also her strength.”
“Of
course
!” she said, turning to him. Her voice was full of light. “His influence. That’s what I saw in her. And I’d almost begun to think…if somebody’d changed…maybe it was I.”
“Oh, she’s caught—a certain patois, something like. The language of it—of his—” He broke off, as if there were no way to explain what his father had been like—or no need. “For a moment, even I thought—but she’s quite a little adapter, isn’t she. And if you live with a person like that, even for just a short time. One—like him.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t—get to know him better.” This was her natural voice too.
“Just as well,” he said. “Just as well we all didn’t get out West.”
She held her breath. None of them had ever said it that baldly: Just as well he didn’t know about it, about May. Just as well.
“I saw it at Jacques’s funeral, but it just didn’t register,” he said. “If I’d gone West at any time but the funeral, I’d have seen it.” His throat felt sore with the effort of believing what he was saying. “The way—
she
changed
him
.”
There were now so many confused voices in the car that it was no wonder they both fell silent—and traffic was moving again. Only the child chose to speak. “West,” she said softly, but no one noticed the clear articulation; it was only her little song. “West.”