Authors: Hortense Calisher
The Cove, when they came to it, received them with the remote clarity of a place abandoned by the daily, not yet seated in memory. In this interim, its outlines were cruder, theirs fading, as in those way-stations, sat in for too many hours, where it is finally the traveler who blurs. Yet, down in the street, they were still able to persuade themselves that here was only such a station, against whose semipoisonous attractions they now had drugs.
Upstairs, they wandered in the wrack of their effects as if these were emitting a light gas, not dangerous, for which there was however no antidote. Only May, settling down to toys she might have dropped yesterday, seemed to know without question the distinction between herself and the inanimate. Above her head, her parents worked briskly, ever more silently. A dull, offseason ache possessed them, as if they saw the world not as people see it in a powerful season, but through many little neuralgias of the mind. Already the room haunted itself morbidly forward toward others in turn disintegrating, not yet conceived—a procession whose connected secret would be no use to them, no matter how many times learned. Packing the books, the records, old easels, unused tools, they moved finickily, always wary, tidying as best they could the irreparable confusion of things with events. Once in a while they spoke, but like people who have really given up language. And now and then, they looked at each other dumbly, as if they at last understood the substance of which they were made.
They had sold the loft
in toto
, all but their “personal” things. A couple had come by, just on the door-to-door chance of it. Excitedly, they declared that they had first rung the bell weeks ago—the street was so unique. When for weeks then, they had seen no lights, they had tried again, and this time had had the luck to meet Mrs. Bailey upstairs, who’d told them of the prospect—Sonsie. They stood in the space vacated by May’s crib, other impedimenta of hers that had been transferred uptown—and marveled. Turning here, there, they congratulated each other on every arrangement. Many of these, almost forgotten by the owners, now returned to them newly. Between the four, like intelligences had quivered too, or almost—from girl to long-haired girl, from bearded young man to shaven—if the new pair had been taking another loft above, the four, in the course of things, would have been friends. Confronting the dazzling pair, the young Paganis, not quite so young, fell back a little, as if before some flaw that had given way in their own flesh, leaving them no more knowing, only humiliated. No, the other pair said, they had no child. Otherwise, everything else here was so much what they themselves would have chosen, it was hard to believe.
“I think—I’ll go for a walk,” he said now, his voice hushed. On his way to the door, he had to cross the rug where May lay with her toys. He stood looking down at her. She had fallen asleep, face upturned, in a bouquet of them, one shape in her fist, one in the crook of her arm, blocks scattered between her slack limbs, one tethering her lengthening hair. By the silent covenant of parents, he thrust an arm behind him; a small blanket was slipped in his hand. Before shutting the door, he knelt, tucking it round.
And now, though the child was in the room, their bodies no longer one, she felt herself to be as good as alone; she had willed herself to the child. Now she had time, as he did, to be separate.
Seconds later, when a knock came, she guessed at once who it would be. It was what David and she in then-place would have done. Not due in here for two days, they would have found themselves unable to pass by without a sneaked sight of their forward joy. It would be the couple.
It was Sonsie, in company-gingham and fresh eye-violet, lips parted in readiness—the new packet of tea in her hand.
There was nothing to be said—good-byes had been said weeks ago, with the exchange of a box of those compressed washcloths for the train, a wax figure with a wide-brimmed hat. But there was something so—both their faces were burning. Then, so luckily, Liz thought of the sleeping child behind her. Finger to her lips, she stood aside to display it. And Sonsie, making her woman’s soundless “Ah!” stretched her neck to admire; finger to her lips, Sonsie stole away.
And now, in her interim, the two sets of gestures, hers and his with the blanket, hers with Sonsie, kept returning to her mind. May woke with a cry, was trotted to the bathroom, fed, still in her drowse, from stores still on the shelves here, and put to sleep again—and still she walked again through those actions and others like them, all the covenanting gestures between people, the fingers to lips, the tucking in of blankets, the packet in the hand. Through all the weathers of the day, still others, in their small absolutes, passed her, from the time at toothbrush and stool to the evening setting of tables, with whichever dishes, to the turning on of lamps, of whatever lamps. If she spent all her days, she could not total them, or stop their tide. Either in fear of their benefice, or in its safety, she must conduct herself through them. Outside, in their own darkness, to a rippling unheeded, unending, they totaled themselves. Glancing in the cupboard, she saw what a snug harbor she was passing on, and warmed her hands at it. When he came back, if they had a mind to, they might still make a meal.
In Trinity churchyard, the centuries clashed in good stone, our side stretching toward that awesome gossip of the heavens which might still us all, the old side stumping itself crankily into the ground. He sat on his bench, watching their metaphor. It was of the good, visual kind he understood best, which while reserving his death, spoke to him meanwhile of his work and his life. All people thought of the end of the world, then and now; it was the supreme communal thought, as much of a dogma now as in medieval times. Once, he had wanted to do a documentary along that line: a series of old engravings, lithographs, not in chronology, but all of a kind that showed people, always people, either massed in crowds for their Red Sea Crossings, or in their provincial coveys, and all now re-edited—in each of the open-mouthed Dore faces dropped like doll-pennies on the page, a small bomb would be protruding; stuck in the great, bawling maws of the Rowlandsons, where once the tongue had been, would be the tongue-bomb. Final dissolve—for modernity—a line of subway posters bearing these same, simple graffiti, where once the moustache. And now, once again, he discarded it, as he had later on discarded his histories of the air—these were ideas that came to men in cities. Towers of the height of this one in front of him were that kind of temptation to the sight, their destruction so easily effected by the closing of an eye. Such ideas came to mind more easily under these towers than in the low, entrenched villages. But the truth was that no man could hold a communal thought in his mind for too long.
And now that he was making his good-byes here, he got up from his bench and began walking among the graves. A healthy man lives by constantly discarding the idea of his death; in a place like this it was much easier than supposed. The supreme graveyard thought—it walked with him now—was, most naturally, of one’s life. By these low, brown nubbins, sad smooth dears, all personal, one was, for one’s own moment, consoled.
For one thing, he was out from under Barney—and without reproach. Death and the little maiden, a sad tale also, but irreproachable. Despite this, he was giving Barney all rights to the opus. Done, it was not a success; the essential, overdocumented, had slipped the sieve. But many sequences were salable, and these, over Barney’s protests, he was ceding. It was what his father would have done. And out there, living again in that house, he would begin, as he had not yet begun, to grieve for his father. By walking the path of his father’s insights, in the way he was walking this green-mounded aisle, he would come to it, and he would not be surprised if it took him the rest of his life. He was to try to keep in mind—and after this year it seemed within his powers, that other surprises would still come.
And treading that wonted path between surprise and compromise, he would carry his family along—it was his role. A man’s role was to see at least that he had one, to keep scanning it as honorably as he could; the women, meanwhile playing theirs to the hilt, never saw. Liz would make other friends, the loss of these too in time to be accepted. For if one took too sharp a look at the lives of one’s friends, one saw one’s own. The crowd here had been at a certain same ripeness for dispersal, one to be found even in California. They had all been the same age.
Walking the clear maze of this garden, he stooped now and then to touch these stones that made one see. Out there, treading his path, it was just possible that he might do something—unwonted. Here in the city, it was so hard not to see oneself as part of the fated mass; even for Liz, a native, it was hard. For women like her, the hardest might be to have to see themselves, as she perhaps would have to come to do, not as an artist, but as life’s model. If she thought he didn’t see that, it was because he had to stand aside from it, unable to bear her suffering, as she was unable to bear the child’s. While, for him—a man’s nativity had its uses. Perhaps a man always saw the formal image of his life best in the place where he had been born and grown. Out there, on those common streets posed against the battering ocean-heart, he could see himself seeing it. He saw.
He saw. If one could imagine a loom, or looms innumerable, warp-and-woof radiating everywhere, perhaps not even from a center. The texture was so tight that one could never see, even over as much as four years of it, where any one part had begun. From such tips as were given the senses, the movement seemed centripetal. Then, almost as if one lived on the top of a secret machine, the centrifuge sucked in. But all this was only the metaphor. All that happened was that now and then, the serpentine shifts of the ordinary…suddenly…added up. The real secret was, that all the time,
everybody knew
. By God. Everybody knew.
But how in God’s name would one show it pictorially? Or any way. It would be such an illumination of the obvious, stretched thin as a skin that enclosed all the world. It was not original enough. It had no center. It had no uses—this was why no one as yet had tried. Still…it was his—for his uses. Bending down, for luck he touched a grave.
When he rose, he found himself near the gate, not far from Captain Lawrence’s memorial. He risked no backward glance. Facing just as he was, he walked past the inscription, known by heart anyway, and through the gate. He himself was a man not dependent on friends, led or forced by no one, brave in the minor actions of life, a lonely householder scanning his skies. “In private life he was a Gentleman of the most generous and endearing qualities. The whole nation mourned his loss, and the Enemy contended with his Countrymen, who should most honor his remains.”
The waves washed over one, and there was never any permanent crossing. Back there, at that seaside of graves, it was easier to see this clearly, with less dismay, since there was no dishonor, even for the most vigorous of men, in being made frustrate by the sea.
When he opened the door, the child was asleep on the rug, covered just as he had left it. She, on the other hand, was stretched on the bed, in the room’s special light, the oblique honey-dark of this room at this hour. He turned on a lamp. Then he stretched himself beside her. They lay for a while in this privilege they had earned—of not speaking.
“She sleeps so,” he said after a while.
“I fed her. Big day.”
They lay there for a while, calm in effigy.
“Where did you walk?” she said. She could ask him, now.
Now he could tell her. “Trinity.”
“Trinity,” she said. “My, that far.”
The room was dark enough now for the continuity of shadows.
“I thought we might—stay for a bit,” she said. “I could make a meal.”
Nodding, he rubbed a forefinger back and forth, back and forth on her wrist. Otherwise, they lay quiet, calm as effigies who still owned enough movement to see each other in profile. If they had certain secrets, this no longer frightened them. They had shared enough each to want a secret place of his own where nothing was shared. They rested so, hands locked under the covers, not further troubling each other’s bodies. It was not uncomfortable here, in the safety of knowing at last what they were going to be. It was not the end of things, only no longer the beginning.
From his mound one turned and put his lips on the throat of the other. The down was gone from there, as he had known for a long time. He thought he cried it aloud, and as always, did not; it was the soundless cry that was woven into the very weave of life, that no one ever made.
Over the curve of his back, the one beneath him saw the shadow rising, not on the wall, not the palm tree of themselves, a thing apart from them. It had its identity now.
The child put one foot on each of her parents. Against the long room, her form, in all its weakness of outline, spoke to them of their own substance, for their forgiveness. Her great cheeks hung down heavy as she laughed down on them, as she bestrode them—this thing that was not of wax.
Hortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled
In the Absence of Angels
, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties. A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for
The Bobby Soxer
, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.
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