The Callender Papers

by Cynthia Voigt

  “So you’re back,” he said, looking at me briefly, sharply. “You can set the table. We’ll eat in here.” His hands were deft, splitting the pods open and letting the peas fall into a stoneware bowl. “I thought you’d be hungry.”

  “I am,” I said. I had not eaten much at the lunch, despite having cleaned my plate. The servings were small at the Callender house.

  “Young McWilliams brought us a pheasant,” Mr. Thiel said.

  “Where is Mrs. Bywall?”

  “She’ll return after dark,” he said. “She likes to stay as long as she can with her family.”

  The meal tasted good to me. In fact, it was delicious. “You cook well,” I said, partly to thank him, partly because I was surprised.

  “I lived alone for many years and taught myself to cook. It isn’t hard.”

  “Why do you employ Mrs. Bywall?”

  “The house must be kept as well,” he reminded me. “How did you find the Callenders? Did you enjoy yourself?”

  “They have invited me to return next Sunday,” I said, not answering either of his questions.

  “What did you say to that?”

  “I accepted.”

  He nodded.

  “They went to a great deal of trouble for me,” I explained. Somehow, he made me feel that I should not have accepted.

  “Enoch Callender has ambitions,” Mr. Thiel answered. “His wife—has trouble meeting his notions of what is necessary in life.”

  “She has no help,” I defended her.

  “The villagers have long memories. It’s her own fault, as I see it. They made their beds.”

  “Was it only because of Mrs. Bywall?” I asked. “Mr. Callender said he had little money, and I think they cant afford servants. They are very unhappy, I think.”

  “Do you,” he said coldly.

  “Yes, I do.” I was a little angry. “They can’t seem to manage housework well, and yet they dress so beautifully, just for themselves. They have no friends. You, at least, have some friends.”

  “So they’re even worse off than I am,” he said. He uttered a harsh laugh. “They seem to have made a friend of you.”

  I didn’t contradict him, although I could have. After all, I did like Mr. Callender. He spoke to me as if I were an adult, and he listened to me when I spoke. “Mr. and Mrs. Callender were accustomed to a more social life, weren’t they? In New York? Something gayer, more civilized, more exciting. It’s clear they’ve lost a great deal. Yes, I sympathize with them.”

  “So I see,” Mr. Thiel said. He would have liked to drop the subject, I could tell that. But I continued. “Did Mr. Callender’s father deny him his inheritance?” I asked. “Is that what happened? Mr. Callender doesn’t speak respectfully of his father. Was it because of Mrs. Bywall?”

  Mr. Thiel looked angry, but he answered me. “Mrs. Bywall was only the last straw. But those two never got along. They never would have. They were two different kinds of people. Josiah preferred his daughter to his son.”

  “Why?” I asked. For a minute, I thought he would refuse to answer me, but at last he did, speaking unemotionally.

  “Josiah and his daughter shared concerns, for education and better living conditions for working people. They fought the injustice of the world whenever they could. Enoch was different: even as a child he was different, Irene said. She blamed herself, but I always thought he would have been as he was even if he had been raised differently. He got everything he wanted, but nothing satisfied him, there was never enough for him. And he didn’t care about learning or law or people. He cared only about pleasure, his own pleasure, and his own comfort. Many young men do, and like many young men he gambled, he was in debt, he purchased on credit and did not pay his bills. He not only had no concern for the things his father and sister cared about, he also never missed a chance to quarrel with them.

  “His sister, my wife, loved him, she always loved him. It was a failing in her, a blind spot. She said he was different from the rest of the world and should not be treated in the same way. She said he was a wild thing, not to be tamed, not to be thought of as good or bad. She indulged all his whims and yet more often than not he made her weep. Sometimes he made her angry. But she did love him. His father—couldn’t. Josiah felt guilty about that, of course, so Enoch could often get his own way with his father as well as Irene. Enoch tried to talk Josiah out of selling the factory and moving here. In that, at least, his father was firm. At first, Enoch simply refused to move out here, but Josiah forced him to.

  “They hoped that when he married he would settle down. His wife brought him some money, but that didn’t last long. So he had to move here and he resented it. He said he was wasting himself here and quarreled constantly with his father. He never let up, always asking to return to the city, never missing an opportunity to denigrate his father’s hopes, choices. When I married his sister—well, he has never liked me. To answer your question then, no, I don’t think Mrs. Bywall was to blame. The years before, if anything, were to blame. Yes, Josiah cut him out of the will, unless there was no one else. Enoch does have a generous allowance. But nothing will ever be enough for him, unless he has everything. There are many people like that.”

  I thought about this, and how strongly Mr. Thiel apparently felt about Mr. Callender. I had never heard him make such a speech before, not even in his arguments with Aunt Constance.

  “Did you inherit the fortune?” I asked.

  “That is impertinent,” he said. He was right, and I apologized.

  Still, I had more questions. I didn’t know how long Mr. Thiel would continue the conversation. He did not look at me as he spoke, and his voice was cold; but he did continue speaking. So I persisted. “If Mr. Callender didn’t like his son, couldn’t he have tried to change him?”

  Mr. Thiel sighed patiently and explained in the voice of a teacher talking to a rather dull child: “He did try. He didn’t succeed. Irene was the only one who could talk sense to her brother, and even she couldn’t talk him into being what he did not want to be. Maybe she loved him too much. She tried to protect him from his father. She tried to protect his father from him. She tried to bring the two together. There was nothing she could do, but she wouldn’t admit that.”

  I considered all of this. Then I said, “If you look at it from his point of view, there is much to pity him for. Mr. Callender, that is.”

  Then Mr. Thiel did look at me with his steady dark eyes. His eyes seemed to probe into my mind. It was uncomfortable. “Of course,” he said, “that is true. However, if you believe that, then you must also believe that there is no importance to the question of right and wrong.” I understood what he was driving at. But he went on as if I needed to have things more clearly explained. “If you believe that you must also think that there is not Truth, beyond all of us human creatures.”

  “Do you mean God?”

  “No, I mean something human. God is in the realm of good and evil. Truth, the simple truth, the clear truth—that is for human beings.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “I mean,” he spoke carefully and even more slowly, “that if, for example, you feel sympathy for Mr. Callender because of what he has lost, as he sees it; if you take his point of view about things; if it is a right thing for Enoch to want to spend money for his own transient pleasures rather than for schools for poor children; then, you could have such a sympathy for everyone, in every situation, couldn’t you? And then everyone could be excused for anything, however cruel or destructive it is.”

  I understood what he meant. “But you felt sympathy for Mrs. Bywall,” I argued. “You saw things from her point of view.”

  “That was different,” he said.

  “Why?” I insisted. “She stole, didn’t she? That’s not right.”

  “She didn’t lie about what she’d done,” Mr. Thiel said. “She accepted her punishment.”

  Reluctantly, I found myself switching sides: “And she did it for the good of somebody else,
there is that, too.”

  Mr. Thiel thought about that. “No, that can’t be a good excuse, can it? Anybody could say they were doing a good deed for the sake of somebody else. John Wilkes Booth shot Mr. Lincoln for the sake of freedom for all men, he said.”

  “You think that the whole difference is in telling the truth,” I said slowly, thinking aloud now. “Did Mr. Callender lie?”

  Mr. Thiel didn’t answer this question. Instead he said, “The important thing is to find the truth. To be honest with yourself. Take slavery. Say a man has always owned slaves and always believed that they were not humans. So he treats a slave as if he were a cow or chicken, buys and sells, disciplines, even slaughters sometimes. You could understand how that slave owner felt and how he came to believe what he believed, couldn’t you?” I nodded. He continued, “But there is another man, a black man, equally a man. If you sympathize with the slave owner, you must accept slavery itself. Unless the most important thing is the truth.”

  “But you wouldn’t go to war, you were a Hider,” I protested. I thought I had gone too far, but after a long moment he did answer me.

  “Any use I have in the world is in these—” he held out his hands. “So yes, I did do that, I ran away. Had my family been able to buy my way out as Josiah Callender’s father did for him, I’d have done that instead. I would not risk my own death, not until I had painted. It was a miserable life I led, except for the painting. Most people despised me. They were right in that. I despised myself. I would do the same thing again, however.”

  “Would you despise yourself again?”

  “Yes, that too.”

  That did not make sense to me. It seemed, from the way he described his choices, that there was no right decision Mr. Thiel could make. That confused me, because I was accustomed to the solutions arrived at by careful thought; but in this discussion, careful thought led me further from the solution. Mr. Thiel sat and watched me and said no more. I wondered why he had allowed the conversation to go on as long as it had. I did not flatter myself that he was growing interested in my character, so I wondered what his purpose was in talking with me.

  The next few weeks passed quietly. I worked every morning, studied with Mac in the afternoons, or explored the woods with him. Sometimes I helped Mrs. Bywall in the garden. I wrote letters to Aunt Constance and received letters from her. I told her everything, everything except my curiosity about the death of Mrs. Thiel and my determination to see if the papers held a clue to that mystery. It was not that I wanted to keep it a secret from her. No, I just wanted to spare her the pain that the memory would bring. I simply did not mention my thoughts about the chain of events of earlier years.

  Every Sunday I was taken to luncheon at the Callenders. I saw little of the children of the house, and it was soon apparent that I was Mr. Callender’s guest. Mrs. Callender never again spoke to me as she had that first time. She seldom spoke at all. The two boys and their sister managed not often to be present either before the meal or after, so that as a rule we were together only for the meal itself. Mr. Callender still insisted that they had an unusual fondness for me, but I could not agree. However, since the idea seemed to please him and there was no good to be accomplished by disabusing him, I did not point out the truth. Then, after washing up with Mrs. Callender and Victoria, who always joined us after that first week, I would walk with Mr. Callender. Those were the best parts of the afternoons.

  He must have had a wild streak as a young man. He could talk about gambling houses and the dockside area of New York in a way that brought them alive before me. I would never know those worlds for myself, but he enabled me to see into them, for a brief while. He made me understand what is called the “Underside of Life,” a world inhabited by ne’er-do-wells and actresses, by men and women who live a secret nighttime life. These were bold characters, some of them, with a lack of concern for their own safety, a love of the dramatic and daring and a disregard for the tenets of society. Others he spoke of were ruined by drink or addiction to gambling, and to worse things I gathered, but he only hinted at those. The society he described had its own aristocracy, as well as peasantry. He spoke of casinos, lit by crystal chandeliers and attended by handsome men with beautiful, bejeweled women on their arms. He spoke of the excitement of the cards, of men made rich or ruined by a turn of a wheel. He spoke of cutthroats, pickpockets, burglars and sharpers. “These desperate people commit illegal crimes,” he said. “And on the whole I prefer them to those who commit legal crimes, the moneylenders, the men who manipulate paper fortunes or who have lawyers to find out loopholes in the laws. These criminals I speak of risk it all,” he said, “and do not talk hypocritically about respectability. I’m a romantic, I know you’re thinking that, but you musn’t let your own rightness blind you to the rightness of others.” And he put his hands over his eyes, stumbling comically, to illustrate his point.

  But Enoch Callender was also well acquainted with respectable life in New York and could talk of balls and teas, of summer homes in Watch Hill and Newport. Sometimes he made mock of the respectable people, but he made them vivid, too; the old women sitting and watching each other like jealous monarchs, the debutantes and their esquires, the yacht racing and lawn tennis, operas and plays.

  Once, to my confusion, he insisted on teaching me to waltz. He said every young lady should know how to dance properly and would not attend me when I pointed out that dancing and balls could have little place in my life. He showed me the steps and then, singing the melody, held out his hands to me. It was as if he had read my secret wishes. We danced around and around the grassy dell. Gradually, I sang the tune with him and felt my legs, as they became accustomed to the steps, grow more confident, more quick. At last, dizzy, we stopped, and he gravely clapped his palms softly together, as if we had been at a ball. I laughed and did the same.

  “You have a light foot, Jean,” he said to me. I knew, but did not say so because I was still out of breath, that I danced well because he led me well, just as in singing there are some voices with which your own sounds truer, stronger. “You take me back to my youth,” he said. “Oh, there were balls I have danced at—with nobody more appealing than my present partners, I must own it—but let me tell you what it was like then.”

  He showed me worlds I would never inhabit. But after speaking with him, I knew more than I could have learned myself by living in them. His words stirred my imagination. They made me understand how large and various the world outside Cambridge was. “Don’t you want to see it, Jean?” he would exclaim. “Don’t you want to be out there? You can admit it to me, you can be sure I’ll understand.”

  “No,” I said. “No, I don’t think so. But I enjoy hearing about it from you.”

  “Why don’t you want to live it yourself?”

  “It would not suit me,” I said, I think correctly. “I am not at my best at gaiety. I am at my best in a sedate life. When things happen too quickly—”

  He shook his head and smiled at me with satisfaction. “You underestimate yourself, I suspect. I am willing to take your good opinion of Aunt Constance, that famous woman, but I don’t believe she appreciates the whole of you. You must not let yourself become too respectable. Keep yourself a little wild. What is life for, if not for the living of it?”

  His enthusiasm was contagious, and he could see it in my face. “Wouldn’t you like to see the world? Japan,” he said, “Tahiti, Rome, Kashmir, Madagascar.”

  “Of course,” I said. This did not seem to me related to what had gone before. “But one cannot do everything, one cannot have everything.”

  “Why not?” he asked with a laugh. “And even so, even if it is so, why shouldn’t the imagination want everything?”

  I enjoyed those times. My own tongue was loosened, and although he listened to what I said, he did not always take my words seriously, so that I came, myself, to take them less seriously. But somehow, I never spoke to him about his own family, and I never mentioned the unhappy events of ten years ago,
thoughts of which occupied so much of the rest of my time. He occasionally mentioned his father, bitter references. His sister he seldom spoke of, as if it were too painful for him to do so. I did not want to increase his burden of sorrow by bringing up my own questions.

  Yes, I liked Mr. Callender. He was so many things—quick and experienced, a man of adventures who knew strange and sometimes unsavory places and could make those places live in my imagination. It was exciting to be with him. He had, besides, a grace of his own. None of his gestures was awkward. He seemed a Renaissance man, able to do everything well and widely informed. Despite this, he did not make me feel awkward or clumsy or childish, as he so easily might have. He made me feel as graceful as himself, as rich in imagination, by including me in his memories, by talking with me so naturally. In his presence, I became more clever, less stiff and childishly ill at ease, as if some of his worldly charm could rub off and become part of my own being. And yet it was not a shallow friendship, I thought. I understood that a deep sorrow lay beneath his gaiety, and I admired the gallantry with which he went on with his life.

  Mr. Callender made me joyful. I looked forward eagerly to our meetings.

  I was aware, during the time, that I was earning Mr. Thiel’s respect. As he was, I must own, earning mine. We were not companionable, and I certainly did not feel I knew him well, but as long as the conversation stayed away from personal subjects he was willing to continue it. I myself had some interest in learning how his mind worked, and moreover, it seemed to me that if I listened carefully I might glimpse something of what he kept so carefully hidden. Sundays, when I returned from the Callenders’, Mr. Thiel and I would sit in the kitchen over a dinner he had prepared and talk about education, art, the nature of man. These conversations did not bubble or flow, they were halting, serious affairs. Most often, they began with a question I would ask. “Why do people give alms to beggars?” or “Did any of the African missionaries speak the language of the people among whom they went?” Mr. Thiel’s concern was not for the specific question, although he answered it thoughtfully as a rule, but for the general principle behind it. Often we had a fundamental disagreement and would find ourselves arguing the point from opposite sides. He assumed not only superior knowledge, but also superior understanding, which galled me. Often, I would be lying in my own bed before the proper response came to me; sometimes I even came to agree with him. I never told him this, of course; it wouldn’t have been wise, I knew instinctively, to let him feel he was winning me over. I needed to be as wary with him as he was with me.