Authors: Hortense Calisher
He meant this, and had tried to teach David so—the only direction he would ever give him. No matter how tidy things were kept at the top, some current moving inscrutably beneath was bound to deflect them. Perhaps
it
had a single purpose, but since it moved in arcs imperceptibly slow or cursorily swift, never describable by compass beforehand—one called it a muddle. But there were ways that were not quite compromise, of gracefully giving in, to the point of riding arcs that would complete themselves in any case. He himself had no sure bills of particulars for this—no man did. He was like any traveler tracking what he had been led to believe was a subcontinent, whose daily rounding of its humps slowly hinted him the true enormity, on whom it was finally borne, as he climbed its scaly rocks and mapped the fixed hairs of its forests, that what he stood on was Leviathan. Down there, somewhere, it moved, but like that terra firma which one could never catch in the act of moving. He was that much enlightened beyond the norm, but no more. He knew only that it was there.
He nestled deeper in the chair. She was still studying him, in a pause that must be nudged, if the evening was to last long.
“Men really ask less of externals, you know. Often secretly, of course,” he said. But this was only to get her back to the real lure. The idea that men as a sex had collective secrets always amused women—that sort of treasury belonged to them. “Women, on the other hand, have to be conventional. I mean—whether they know it or not, they always are. Even the most gypsy-seeming—or whatever the flouters are calling themselves nowadays.” It was said with dash, but he shifted in the chair. Too common a crystal to please, no doubt, but his breath was worrying him. And the chair was overrated. Better get out of it, which would take effort—and in time to catch that night-clerk.
Whatever had made him look so suddenly disappointed—surely not at this date some vibration from the long-lost wife? She was more inclined to think it the shadow of a recent reversal with a woman, for charm like his, knowledge like his, came from living life at the fullest, no matter what. He was the unconventional one; no one had ever before paid her the compliment of talking to her in such simple profundities as she had always known were possible, even for her. For all her limits, she was woman enough to feel that he
knew
, and if she could keep him here long enough, might even tell her.
“Not gypsies,” she said. “I was in a gypsy place once, over in Brooklyn. They’re coppersmiths, you know, and we had a chafing dish we—anyway, it was a store. That’s the way they do here, settle in a store. And they’ve got heaps of things. Huge mattresses they make themselves, and quilts in circus colors. Piles of them. And the women have dozens of those skirts they wear to hide things in.” She offered this with pride, as not on the subject. “They just hide what they have, that’s all. But Elizabeth!” She leaned forward. “You know, I offered her her grandmother’s linen, after all it’s flax-spun and she says she likes things
basic
—and she just laughed. Oh, I know what they want. They want the kind of stuff they can pretend isn’t there. And it isn’t just Elizabeth. They belong to a whole crowd of kids live like that. Not from poor families either, and not just for a starter, some even with babies. They mean to
stay
that way!” She heard for herself, how she did seem unable to converse without harping on “things.” “Oh, I sound like the typical mother-of-the-bride. Which I am. And I know perfectly well how—” she spread her hands to the room, the very chair he sat in—“how I had to have ‘over-stuffed.’ Because my mother had ‘mission.’ But this!” She clasped her hands in her lap, unclasped them. “Do you think—do you think it’s because they’re artists?”
He found it quite touching, the humble way she said that word, had accepted it. “No. Oh, no.”
“I wasn’t sure. But I am sure, when they say they want nothing—that’s what they all say—they mean it. All of them!”
Because of an oppression in his chest that made his eyes water—the chair was simply not for him—he had to lean forward. He took her fingertips in his, looking at them as impersonally as a piano teacher. “Yes. Just as I said.
All
of them.”
Would she get it? Was she capable of it?
She was trying, head cocked to one side, fingers in his in the unembarrassed way of the blind seeking direction. Her mouth made a silent O, her whole face rosied. “You mean—it’s their convention—it’s just that it’s
theirs
?” She began to laugh, clapping her hands so suddenly, hunting a handkerchief, leaning back in such peals, that the vague, circular dazzle made him feel as if he had released a bird into the room. A continuing smile was all he had energy for; he sat there letting her laugh for him, a pleasant sensation, as if two might breathe as cheaply as one.
“You can’t know what you’ve done for me.” She dabbed her eyes. “I’ve never dared laugh at Elizabeth. They taught us not.” She sat straight up. “And the wretches know it, don’t they. That we aren’t allowed.”
He had to laugh. The pressure in his chest eased. “It’s only a temporary tyranny.” Actually, he had always carefully kept himself able to laugh at his son, to be seen doing so, for all their special circumstance, in the same way that he had been careful to send David away from him, to college.
“They’ll come round, you mean.”
“We’ve only to sit still.” It will coil round them. Whether
we
sit in the wrong chair or the right one. He felt in his pocket for the pills that were always there—not that he cared to stay to see it come. “Do you?—I suppose you do.”
“Do I what?”
“Sorry. Want to see them come round.”
“Probably I do.” She said it defiantly. “If what you say about women—but—tell me something else, would you?” In the same moment, she shook her head. “Never mind.” The question would only jump them back to the first stages of politeness, make her seem so foolish—
Are
they artists, the two of them?
“Come on, you owe it to me.” It would be another confidence from this funny little well of them, not to be plumbed perhaps in an evening.
“Well then—” She tempered it. “She’s left some work here. I’d—like to hear what you think of it.”
No! His protest seemed to him audible, did get him up from the chair. His antipathy—to giving these answers—had at least done that for him. People at home were always asking him for opinions like these, either because his own work was felt to be in alliance with the arts, or because, in spite of his good tailor and orderly silver hair, women especially saw something in his Italianate looks which they felt to be painterly—he was consulted in exactly the way that pharmacists were applied to with more ease than doctors, often indeed looking more professional. Few of his intimates knew that he had been a painter himself, for some years. He took a sip of water from a glass on the table. “I won’t give you a bill of particulars, you know. Can’t.” That was the real nature of his protest. What he might know of life, of the way it moved, wasn’t what people wanted. They wanted directions for tomorrow.
Going ahead of him down the long hall, she smiled at her fears that they might revert to mere politeness; motioning into Elizabeth’s room that stiff back ahead of her, she remembered the card enclosed with his gift. His honesty was incapable of first stages, both this and its effect on others a tribute to his illness. The mortally sick often made one feel that they harbored some tremendous secret they despaired of imparting. But it wasn’t about death that this man could tell her, if he would. As she watched him look about him, so pale and firm, she felt alive to the toes, almost in the expectancy of a verdict, not on Elizabeth, but on herself.
He was thinking that this room, young person’s as it was, already had its layers, perhaps the least of which were the drawings of various sizes, one or two assertively large, the litter of small figures done in some medium he couldn’t identify from here, grouped together on a bookcase, the line of life-size clay busts insistently before him, some wrapped in cloths but recently wet. It was of course the room of any of a thousand young persons, with its signs of successive projects laid by, of disorder alternated with strictures of that queer, self-imposed order which had nothing to do with neatness—a room, a picture which, if one knew it all now laid by, might be entitled “Situation Abandoned by a Young Girl.” As such, it had more natural pathos than was ever felt in the presence of the girl herself. Several photos of her, taken by David, were scattered about, and the assertion each made was clear enough to him—a face that would take a situation hard, not a face to ride the arc—or be gracious with those who did. As for David, who ever knew a son’s face for sure?
“Who knows?” he said. The number of objects in the room dizzied him, in so small a compass of time already so many strata, from the rows of fairy tales to the busts, on the bed a petticoat flung down like a tutu, forever.
“Oh, I know you can’t say. I just brought you in to see—just as I hope to see David’s. He’s very talented, I hear.”
“From Elizabeth, no doubt.”
“She has great faith in—”
“In them both.” He reexamined the face in the picture. No, it mightn’t be gracious with his son on that matter—why should it? It wouldn’t be so with itself.
She nodded, breathing carefully. He, flushed and almost garrulous, no longer seemed to be doing so. This was what she must have brought him here for—this exchange.
“Oh—he can draw. So could I. Doesn’t necessarily—” He took up one of the camera studies. “He’s got the makings of a first-class photographer though. Better than his father. Of course, I’m prejudiced.”
“Well—as a father—”
“Oh no, that’s not what I mean.” He was speaking far too rapidly and must stop—he knew the signs. “I was a painter once.” In surprise—not that it hurt him to say, but the nuisance way people always reacted to such revelations was why he never made them—he stopped.
“And you had to give it up.” She said this very softly, quite as expected.
“Some things are—taken out of our hands.” He was slow in answering, smiling at the very pomposity of it. But the platitudes, coiled in our sight as they were, were always the safest. First his wife’s death, leaving a son, then his own illness. Sickness and need of money were among the most acceptable of single reasons for anything, though there were others. He might never have had the nerve to give up on his own. In retrospect, he would never be sure how much his own hand had assisted the taker, only how relieved he had been—to be forced. David knew the story, for any good it might do him if the time came. When.
“Yes, they are out of our hands.”
Elizabeth
, she said to herself, the way she was, has been taken out of mine, but the expected sadness always to be rubbed from this amulet did not come. Instead, Elizabeth herself seemed to be standing here in the room she had left, nearer than ever before but relievedly far—too far to be helped—and already rubbing her own amulet. How sad! “That’s why you said you couldn’t—answer.” Her voice was almost fierce, the voice one used to oneself, or fast over the depths, to a friend. “Because
they
can’t say for themselves yet, which things will be, they don’t know whether—”
“Some of it, they can. Not
all
.” But never to be known which.
To ease the cramp in his chest, he walked about the room, which sometimes helped.
“Surely—” she said. There must be some way to defend them, to deny. “They’re just at the beginning.”
“They’ve begun.”
The group of small figures on the bookcase interested him, in the light at that end of the room just discernible as all done in the same dullish medium, related in attitude as one neared them, none more than eight inches high. He knelt in front of them; the bookcase was child-size. They were all female figures, young and old, together and alone, not as simple as Tanagras nor as calm, but with the same unity of gesture. In their half-lyric caricature, they had that still pure eccentric one sometimes saw in the work of
Wunderkinder
—or in the work of those still holding on to a power that could only be grasped with the smallest fist. No, there was never any surety, but for all his shrugs at the particular there was taste. If the girl could hold on like this—to a situation—then, perhaps? What was the dirtyish stuff she’d done them in? He picked up a figure, and stood up again to hold it under a lamp.
“Then—”
He turned. She was standing just behind him.
“Then—it’s out of our hands. Then, we can give
them
up.” She saw it clearly, like a door in a cloud. “Because we
have
to.” She smiled.
In utter surprise at what she was capable of, above all at that smile, he dropped the figure, which broke. He stooped to pick it up. In the pieces that clung to the armature he saw what it was made of, still flesh-colored on the inner side, the outer thumbed to that dirty indefinable which comes of the heat of the hand—it was wax. In the same moment, as the heavy piston of pain drove upward, its rod stiffening him from groin to tongue until it retracted again and he with it, he knew that he could never straighten with that inside him, that the best he could do was to let his legs crumple to the floor, get his back against the nearest wall. Through the siege that invaded his chest, such an old image in which he himself was the image, his chest the world, a bladder swelling to burst while his brain in the voice of a pea cried out for it to do so, that when it burst would be the world, he heard her voice mingled with his own, felt her fingers in his pocket where the pills were.
“There are two,” she was saying, “two sets of them. Can you manage to tell me—” and then, “never mind. I know what these are.” The crushed ampoule was held to his nostrils. He breathed. A pill was held to his lips. “Open your eyes—if you need water.” Eyes closed, he got it down. “Another?” Lips sealed, he refused it. Then he swung weightless, hung like an acorn from the point where she held his wrist. To fall from that point of life—or not. The painrod melted to pain-rhythm, to breath-pain—at last to that priceless rhythm which might almost be ignored. Ozone is the medium, his brain formed, informed. He opened his eyes. He was no longer the world. He was in it.