Authors: Hortense Calisher
He put his glasses on the better to see her, marveling at the distance he had roamed from her, even in thoughts that concerned her, even with her weight on his groin. His watch amazed him—not yet eleven. In the same moment that he bent to take her to him for the long hours which were not to be endured alone, he felt that the night’s solstice had passed, just as it does for a season, leaving no course but to endure. Braced against his wall, mentally he paced off the loft, knelt with his carpenter’s level, calculated inches between shelves. Running on nimbly through his maze of wire and wood to the finish, he opened the door—to the crowd—and laughed suddenly in his drowse. “Come in,” he said to them. “Come into the Drawing Room!” In that pleasant lightness, he thought he slept, while the moon outsoared their roof, leaving them in the never-quite-dark that is the comfort of cities. Head sunk on his chest, he did not look like a boy who had dozed off laughing. Now and then the subway, coiling below, stirred their island like that one; in an old mythology, whose castaways woke to find themselves on the hump of some mammoth of the deep. Fallen so, with all his family goods around him, he looked like a man uneasily drowsing at his post but still sentinel against his Indians, his burden across his knees. He looked like a householder.
And this is the way the night was, for that generation.
M
EANWHILE, IN THE APARTMENT
that Elizabeth had left forever, her mother and Mr. Pagani were just settling back after the late, light supper she had served them, the homely prospect of which he had gladly declared for against a publicly continued evening—it being well understood, when she had accepted his dinner offer, that neither was hungry for food. Back there at the Square, standing together more like joined parents than odd ones, they had suffered the long partings from those distant cousins who seemed always the last to leave any of the formal rites of existence. Sympathy bred between them as they stood there. She was so naturally warm with two old Pagani ladies mired in suddenly regurgitative memories. He was so forcefully adroit, ill as he was said to be, under the drunken arm of her brother-in-law, who, against the warning toot of the airport limousine, delayed to offer them the confidence, heavy as doubtful money, that many young people turned out better than they looked.
In the taxi, with the chest of her silver between them, they were almost merry over both these incidents. Up to now, she had thought his manners good, even too good for a man, rather like the taste of his gift to the bride (minutely carved pierced-ear gold retainer earrings of whose design even Elizabeth had approved) or, like the brusquerie of the card enclosed (
a retainer on your good opinion
), perhaps too observantly cold. Now, recalling his stance under her brother-in-law’s buffets, she was able to imagine how a man unable to live with physical flourish might cultivate small flourishes of taste. She knew he had seen the byplay with Elizabeth and the box—of which he made no mention.
Until he had seen it, Mr. Pagani had thought of Mrs. Jacobson only in her role in the week’s minuet they were all so traditionally engaged in, that is, scarcely at all. Now, as he directed the doorman to unload and carry up the silver chest that any normal man could have carried himself, he noticed that she spared him the affectation of not noticing—one of the more boring trials of his invalidism. By the time they were in the apartment they had passed a certain stage without a further word spoken. Neither’s tact was any longer a surprise to the other.
Now they were at the cheese, after the plainest of omelets, served however in Basque ramekins which Mr. Pagani recognized from a bicycle trip of his youth, after endive—dressed with that lightest of oils which so few knew to be Spanish, and after their mutual refusal of the tortoni she always had on hand in the refrigerator, in favor of some mandarin oranges she liked to keep, for the sight of them, on the sideboard, in a remarkably footed, large bowl. Over the crisp, ancestral napery with which all this was set out, her guest remarked that fine linen, which he always found so soothing to the spirit, was however only so in houses where it was still taken for granted—as here.
And now, approaching the coffee, if any awkwardness, so likely between two strangers with only the one subject, had altogether failed to appear, couldn’t she ascribe this to these very vanities of existence which were her pleasure and in her daughter’s presence her guilt?—almost wishing Elizabeth home again, to witness how these might serve. By now, she herself had stopped wondering just why she had asked him here. Like most people’s actions, Mrs. Jacobson’s emerged through a flutter of reasons from which she usually felt it a duty to extract one, all the more so since her sex was said to be unable. Recently, under Elizabeth’s eyes, she had been made to feel even more fluttered than most—the young were always at one to ascribe things singly.
Now, with the coffee, they had at last reached their real subject, in the comfortable knowledge that it was not their only one.
The young, she said, were so very demanding.
“And the middle-aged so very grateful.” His smile warmed the immobility with which he sat in his straight chair. He closed his eyes for a moment in which his ease, potent gratitude, spread like a force, and she recalled how ill he was said to be.
He reopened them quickly. “Oh, the young. Nobody’s really fitted to living with them. Not past their cradle.” He left her to make what she could of this, knowing that statements he always meant literally, and were to him only those crystals fused by ten years of trying to stay alive, others invariably handled like coals still warm from a very peculiar furnace. He could never express to her, of course, the full nature of his ease, about equal to that of an addict safe for a few hours in the humming blood-rise of his drug. For, out of the self-control demanded of his daily habits, one vice had been left to him, or had come. He would do almost anything to secure the company—of almost anybody—down the long hours of his insomniac night. Since he must spend those hours in a chair very much as now, this was not simple, though at home he had quite a roster willing to chat with him until he could tolerate himself again—until about four. They came, not out of pity, which never went far or long, but for the charm of his company, a fact he was able to take literally only after some years of it. The need born of living a muscle-wall away from death had never seemed to him as foreign as this resource which had answered it. Surprises, a whole lagniappe of them, it was said, gathered at once round the head of him who lived with one sparse goal—in his case, his fight, now won, to see David to manhood. Some men might hopefully adopt that line as doctrine; he knew it to be so from experience. Still, it was clearly not possible to tell this rueful, kindhearted woman, rather charming in her aura of muddles and precisions—and so patently eager to exchange with him the bruises of parenthood—that her company was exactly as necessary to him as that of the off-duty hotel clerk who had drunk his liquor and played gin with him last night, or that of the out-of-town buyer whose ripe ego, God bless the garment trade, he had plucked until almost dawn of the evening before. He wondered if Mrs. Jacobson played gin.
“I wish you could have seen the place,” she was saying. “I had to go way downtown to a—to a caterer’s, not too far from there. So I—dropped by. I wasn’t expecting too much of any loft. But that one!” She described it.
Up to now, his only reaction to this place—one of the 1910 vintage not yet reached by the wreckers, its dark-bayed exterior resembling the brownstones it had succeeded—had been relief at its having an elevator. Inside also, he saw now, its thick-walled ambling waste of space and doddery pediment belonged to that era when both builder and tenant harked back to the villa lost in the panic of 1907. He’d almost forgotten interiors like these, and how they refreshed him, the strewn superfluities that left the overtutored eye unguided, the evasive personality—mixed, or not up to the mark, if you will—which came of not having applied for one. The homes he’d grown used to, in a town where the 1920 section was the old one, were most of them staged, either to a period or to those broad manipulations which dramatized the functional, although there was evidence now of a super-subtle effort to mix things, break them up with a few canny irrelevancies—in fact to engage for what he saw here. The flow of man’s history, as seen through what he massed behind his hedge, how he cluttered his hearthstone, was eternally manipulatory too—in time even those houses would get what they wanted. But there was no denying the brittle, centrally produced look of any room furnished by only one generation.
Not that this room lacked signs of conscious effort, pretty tricks from the stores, lucky bits of chinoiserie with which its present owner, evidently priestess to the lucky find, would have added her impress. But under these he thought he could see at least two layers, one composed of certain lumpily art nouveau objects, of a kind often used as photographers’ props, that had come perhaps from “Ernest’s father’s gallery,” beneath these a second layer of some provincial flavor perhaps European, no longer definable, tenacious enough to have detached itself from objects altogether. No, this room had not engaged for just one generation, and it did not refresh, it
reminded
, each to his own—in his case, to the Massachusetts house where he had been born of an Italian father, New England mother, vaguely Portygee great-grandfather, the house whose sitting room, floated free of its objects also, had nevertheless been transported to the cottage in Monterey where his mother had sat in it like its concierge, staring at the Pacific as she had once stared at the Atlantic, until she had died in it—of his own ailment. How could he have forgotten them?—these eternal rooms that were never “done” because where living was the goal there was nothing one could do, whose surface, cannily resistant, suffered only the decorator-touch of life? No one under thirty could stand them. No one of twenty would ever want anything of them but out.
“You won’t believe it until you see it,” she concluded, then caught herself—he would never be able to climb those stairs. And they hadn’t even thought of it, she said to herself, in awe of how cruelly the young could act, once given the chance to act for themselves. He and David had been as close—and they had never given that a thought. Her hand went out to him, then, recollecting itself, dropped to his coffee cup.
“Oh, but I do believe it, I already do,” he said. With care, this subject, so much dearer to her heart than his, could be pursued for some time. Indeed, face to face with what at first seemed paradox—that she, so imperfectly loved by her daughter, could not drop the question, while he, whose love for his son had ripened almost to its perfect end, had already done so—he was the one to be charmed. But it wasn’t paradox of course, but utter reason, A to B. Holding it in his hand, another small crystal, he had his surprise—they kept on coming apparently, even
after
the goal was achieved. Absently, or not quite, he let her refill his cup, which made two forbidden ones plus the morning one he was allowed.
“Of course, it’s to their credit, I suppose,” she said, “to want to begin small.”
“But it isn’t that way at all,” he said. “They’re beginning big.” With a sweep of his arm, much less constricted than he usually permitted himself, he cleared the room. “Big!”
“A clean sweep, you mean. Oh, I’m
sure
Elizabeth’s responsible for most of it.”
He returned her smile, not as sadly. Did she understand him, or herself? People more often did understand themselves—but couldn’t help themselves. If
having
to help himself had until now been his pedestal, it had now been removed. And suddenly, with a movement almost swift, he got up from his hard, straight chair and plumped himself into the low, overstuffed one opposite, the kind he was always envying others sprawled in with their chests lower than their knees. His bones had never got used to what his aorta required. Nestled there, he took up the thread again. “Well, after all, it’s a woman’s preoccupation, isn’t it? Externals?” His eyes were bright, teasing. Probably she wouldn’t yet admit her child a woman, certainly not with the eagerness with which he had even reassured David that the allowance would be increased in case of children, pushing him on to that provisional manhood which, happily, his own death could now only accelerate. That was by the way—he no more wished to talk of it than she, apparently, was willing to call him by his first name, Nicholas. But if there was anything that women would listen to for hours on end, it was generalizations about themselves—that is, other women. “Externals are very important to a woman,” he added.
“Externals?” she said blankly. He looked flushed and lively, not, after all, a man to be so pitied, perhaps not so ill. “Externals?” She let him see that she was even proud of it. “I guess so. But that’s it—
they
haven’t got any. Scarcely the common decencies. And no matter what she says—for a girl brought up as she was—” She flushed. “Not that I mean—that David—” She didn’t much know how he’d been brought up, had wondered. But a man who had done the job alone, and under his circumstance—was that what had kept him alone?—might well be sensitive.
“Oh, David and I, we’ve more or less muddled through, of course.” His tone was generous. In the tinted, hesitant face held up to his, there showed all the confusions that had kept it simple, of the kind of femininity she was either too unaware of to take pride in, or else had been shamed out of by that tight little bundle of certitudes, her daughter—of an old-fashioned need to be directed, to ameliorate, to serve. Pity from some types made him impatient, but from that perturbed face might be dealt with, much as one accepted the impulsive trinket of a child, as just what one needed—for he had lied. On the matter of externals, the life of Pagani father and son had been anything but disorganized; their house, down to the very inclines in place of steps, was one of the most clear-sighted houses to be found anywhere. As for the muddle beneath the surface for us all, or the devious current that made it seem so—she must all her life have been chivied into denying it. “You know—it’s really not such a bad way of doing it.”