In the Slammer With Carol Smith

by Hortense Calisher

  There’s no course of hardening for streetlife. It’s just that ease is too easy to get used to. If it’s not meant to last. Yet should sticking to principle bar enjoyment? I found myself cautioning: Carol, cozy up. In a minute I’ll reach for the folded paper brought in earlier that day, along with the tampons that are a luxury resumed. I enter drugstores easily now.

  In the hospital they had issued us sanitary pads only, and afterwards I had continued to use those, out of the very habit of passive obedience the hospital both exploited and said they were trying to rid us of. In any event, under the pills, one’s period can vanish, or be scant. But I have apparently normalized in this area as well. So, like the man I glimpse now and then on my nights in the park, who has a cellular phone he beds down with—I join with modern equipment as I can. ‘Guy just handed me it,’ he’d told me. ‘Outside a Third Avenue bar I hang out near. Wanted it out of his sight; he can’t pay the rent on it. Neither can I. Maybe it was on a drug-gang hotline? So far, nothing on it. But the cops see me talking on it, I don’t get chased.’

  Tonight I won’t be chased. Soon, at month’s end, I plan to be gone. Deserting those very seductions that have helped put me right. Back to those streets that most will see as what I can’t be cured of. But tonight—I’m thinking—I am cozy. Not doll-cozy, like a child. Adult cozy, in the housed style of those who are in control. The meal, however modest, is achieved, and full in the belly. In the small of my back is the ache-y release that comes from the menstrual flow. When the body, without theory, once more relinquishes motherhood. Surely I’m not brooding on that. Merely savoring the feel of that pseudo-child’s fingers in my own. Maybe no one has a true concept of what children are until you have one—and even then. What you need, Carol, is the larger view. So reach for it, your freebie newsheet. I do.

  And there, on the front page, is our story. Radical Fugitive Turns Herself In.

  Which one?

  Minna, the labor unionist. Who has plea-bargained, turned state’s evidence, or done whatever is professional.

  A ‘bulldog’ detective is quoted. ‘“Never gave up on it. She was the mastermind. Others were just amateurs.”’ There hadn’t been much of a case to be pursued; why had he?

  According to him, the owners of the damaged house—parents of Laura’s boyfriend, had refused to pursue, and had since died. Nor would the son-and-heir to the building cooperate. He and Laura had obviously never needed to go underground, having married instead. Interviews refused.

  Another named suspect, our Doris, mother of two, was now in treatment for breast cancer, diagnosis poor. But it was Minna’s culpability that had kept him at it. ‘“Because of how she had snuck under, hey? Teaching our American children, pretty-please as all get out.”’ In an L.A. high school. ‘“Advisor to the seniors. Chaperoned them at the prom, no less. Top salary with all benefits.”’

  But Carey, where is she?

  She is there. Second Section.

  Minna, that gray space of a human, is not, maybe by photographer’s choice. But Carey is. Full-length, in front of the hotel she was once hired to manage, and now owns. Not In Bermuda is the logo on the hotel’s tee-shirt she wears. ‘“We do that so as not to embarrass them,” Madame Fleurisse, as she prefers to be known, said mischievously. There have been rumors that she functions as a madam, but she denies the story as nonsense, alleging that for her customer-friends, some of them royal, there is no need. “They have each other.” The island where the hotel is located is underdeveloped, “And will so remain.”’

  The language of her interview is as queenly as her foot-high up-do coif. ‘“If you’re said to be in that trade, might at least follow suit.”’

  But the legs in the white shorts look the same. The two darkish children lean against her whites. A boy and a girl. ‘“I had a third, but it died.” Recently? “No—the first.”’

  Their father? “An American. From Boston, out of the Bahamas.”’

  I see her sobbing on my shoulder. Did she follow him? Or he her?

  For there is money; the island is a fief. ‘“My inheritance.”’

  From her father, the well-known diplomat? ‘“Good Lord, no.”’ From her mother, who has stood by her.

  Dead?

  ‘“Indeed not. The children call her Nanna Dowager. The whole island does. My mother has come into her own.”’

  Madame’s ‘husband’—or the father of her children merely?—had pleaded with her to bear his son and daughter on American soil. ‘“But of course I could not.”’ Or would not? Her reply: ‘“We are British subjects, all of us.”’ The children bear her name. Her real one. But of course, if there should ever be a need for her to testify in behalf of a certain party, she would come.

  For Minna?

  ‘“You bats?” Madame replied.’

  Then for whom?

  According to the detective, there was a fifth young woman at first thought to be an accessory. ‘Kind of an innocent hanger-on. When the house went, we found out later she wasn’t even there. Did some months in jail though, had a breakdown later—we weren’t proud of that.’ Where was she now?

  All parties had lost track of her. ‘“She traveled under several names later,”’ the detective said. ‘“Like she wanted to hide. Until there was a case, no need to keep tabs. So we let ourselves lose track. Do it all the time.”’

  ‘“We five were all innocents,” Madame Fleurisse said. “Minna wanted real targets. But we others just wanted to sign on. Maybe do a bit of damage. But not to hurt. And thanks to that accident—we didn’t. Yes, it was indeed an accident,” she said. “We barely got out of there. I’d been afraid that Minna and the others were centering more on target that day than we’d agreed. Central Park Fountain, actually. At midday. So I—well, in the scuffle it did go off. Lolly lost a finger, I understand—we fled our separate ways. But it must have been worth it to her. The parents wouldn’t go back to the place. She and her boyfriend rebuilt.”’

  I can see them at it. The boy wanted us all out. We never even called him by name. He was just Laura’s. She would rebuild him as well.

  ‘“The one you call the hanger-on,” Madame Fleurisse said. “We kind of did it for her, really. Even Laura, who is a bit of a louse. Even poor Dora who’s not much of a—just a nice sweet love. And Emmy, when her mind was hers. Maybe even Minna, the party hack, though she meant to do it in that style she always socked us with—Realpolitik. We were all using that girl, in our minds. She was the only real cause we’d ever come that close to. So we used her. And lost her. She was the real bomb.”’

  Had Madame Fleurisse any message for her co-conspirators?

  ‘“That is the message,” Madame Fleurisse said.’ But when asked the real name of the fifth woman, she would not reveal.

  I am standing up. Reading that last, I stare into the photo’s eyes as if I can force it to say. As if those cool eyes could hear me call: ‘Okay, Carey, it’s safe to. Or if you’re just holding it in your heart to leave me be, wherever I am now. Don’t. Go ahead.’

  Or if she can’t recall anything but the ‘Smith’? Not that hard to believe. Brought up by a string of short-term nannies who departed before they even got a suntan, she had their loose habits of endearment, calling me ‘Dickeybird,’ ‘Hop-to-it,’ ‘Peachblossom,’ ‘Thomasina Thumb,’ after all the books they must have read to her, hoping to stop her ears against the brute business in the room above.

  ‘It’s okay, if you don’t remember it. I’m remembering for both of us.’ But the photo does not reply.

  I am still standing up. I don’t cry. Blood is running down my leg. That seems as it should be. When a message pierces like the arrow always waited for.

  I am the bomb.

  ‘What is Lust?’

  When the minister my aunts favored because he was more than a preacher declared that text from the Sunday pulpit the congregation was not alarmed. Taking it for merely part of his What is the Way? sermons, that had included What is Church? Charity? Family? Episco
pal?—the answer to each being Love. However, the aunts, whose donations at times could be only stuffs from our attic that the minister’s wife did over for her blouses and his ties, had noticed at once that although he was wearing his robe, his tie was one of the loud ones from the local haberdashery. And in the vestry, in a meeting called for after the service, he did indeed reveal that he was leaving for a foreign mission, along with another woman, since his wife did not believe that either lust or Botswana was Love.

  At the time, my eighteen-year-old body would have settled for any reasonable solution. I would discover, like many, that college was almost as good as a migration. There I learned that sex, even when restricted to two persons, could be engaged in almost as a communal activity. What else was group-biking to campsites just too far to return from that night, where after woodfire and song, boys and girls slipped away to become men and women. It was autumn, when at dusk the sun and the moon might both be in the sky, and for better or worse that would later be an image retained.

  In prison, sex would come with a knife. In hospital, sex was forbidden, or frowned upon. In the halfway house, that boy and I had mostly swapped our woes. Later there would be a few dirty tricks in garages, with those who saw I was too beat to say no. In time, the medication, pushing me one stage past vulnerable, took care of me in its impersonal way. One is neutered. What is Lust, or indeed Love?

  Whatever rages behind the tiny nipples of the queenly little creature who had been here—and who had given every hint that she expected to be full-size in the marriage bed and in child-bed also—has never happened to me. I have never been avid for one person. Yet I have hoped to hear from passion.

  The virtue of the street is that you do not expect. I never looked that in the face before. And the political, even my young stance on it—can it so shrink the personal that you no longer dare?

  Now another life is lapping at me, as if I loll in a nest of little animal tongues. And someone is avid for me.

  Not strange that I believe this. Everything here is a bulletin board for him. His walls embrace me. The newspapers pile, like lazy or neglected conversation. Some talk we have already had, some we might. The paleface drums wait on call. While, in the bathroom, watched by those stiff half-ancestors of his, who whether they were the turbaned masters or their barelegged servants, were light-years apart from the mutton-chopped men and busked women who were half mine—I become the girl I might have been, wrapped lover-waiting, in her warm towel.

  It’s there that lust overtakes me, cupping my hand to breasts ripe and comely, spreading my legs to empty air. My fingernails, sharpened to ladylike ovals, scrape the tile. I filed the nails to go with the bangle on my wrist, recalling how the giver had saddened at the sight of their blunt squares. In my ears the blood thumps, ready. I suck water from the spigot, smooth my hot cheeks with his hands, stand up, beating my head with my fists, and run from Martyn and myself, out into the hall.

  That same night I begin sleeping in the bags hung there, one to a night, and night after night. For this I must give up my divided routine. I don’t find what I’m looking for. His smell.

  When long after dark, some nights later, a letter is slipped into the commercial mail slot that all tenant doors here retain, I hoist myself up from the floor, where I have been lying face down, and walk on all fours monkey-style to pick it up; it seems to me that I am truly animal now. If one that yearns to speak. But I have not been idle here. Someone from the stationer’s, noting that I haven’t been by, will have brought the letter; I can guess who. When I complete the task that has kept me inside here, I’ll read it, as a proper end to that labor. The earliest clippings and the dustiest are at the top, far above those I’d read. That must have been the reason for the ladder hung in the hall’s dark corner, a homemade set of wooden rungs, but from its dust not since disturbed. I find these simple household actions touching; perhaps he would think the same of what is in my pack.

  What I have been doing now is putting Martyn’s history together. ‘Collating’ it, as my two Boston scholars would have said. So that I may ponder what has brought him to make the offer he has, to a woman with a history like mine. When I think of his hostility to the PAK, as to some pet I over-cherish, I have to smile—and he is at once in the room. My intent is not that. Perhaps I shouldn’t open this second letter at all.

  The postmark is not from Pretoria but from Durban. I had heard of that city and its industries, at that rally where Martyn had observed me. We had come in protest against American companies who had investments in South Africa; in our ignorance we hadn’t thought of the banks.

  —For Laura, who had retroactively adopted the Holocaust though none of her family had been involved, apartheid had been merely ‘one of those separations.’ Her voice, so deaf to others, weathers the past well.

  ‘I understand they plotz them into three colors,’ she’d said, as we’d entered the arena. ‘Whites, pure blacks—natives, y’know?—and coloreds. Mixed. Which includes Asians as well. And the tribals are in separate townships. My mother’s been to Soweto, organizationally. She claims it was just de facto Mississippi. But she met some whites in South Africa who were benign, most of them Jews of course. Though not all.’ She’d reached out to pat Carey. ‘What’s “de facto” mean?’ Dora had asked. Carey said: And I suppose your mother picked up some art?’—

  Forgive them. That is what memory can do. And sometimes, not too late.

  I wonder now whether Laura’s mother met any British. Below the clippings, whose slow descent to the eye-level present is a chronology, there is a small bookshelf, divided in three. In the first section are small mementos obviously British: a pipe rack with the seal of the Manchester maker; a small fake barometer from the Greenwich observatory, with the weather mark Always Fair; and an initialed silver traveling clock—are they the baggage a mother might impose? In the third section are her books. The space between is bare. I have put Martyn’s first letter there. The second joins it. His past rises from this speaking wall, part of the smell I crave.

  Martyn’s mother writes nursery tales, in the language she calls Worldese. She has revised Mother Goose in it, in terms culled from English, Dutch, Hindustani, Arabic, and French—‘all the basics one needs.’ That’s on an early book-jacket; on a later one she apologizes, regretting that she had not included Russian and Japanese. According to the book-jackets she has run for Parliament many times, but never made it. ‘I run so that people may read.’

  Martin must have spoken Worldese early. Educated in Capetown, which he bolted from, then Sydney, where an Australian uncle had property that for a time he helped manage, he first turns up in the news as an organizer of sports events for their native population, ‘with international competition in mind.’ Then it is Antwerp, where he does a movie short, using handsome drug addicts, all talking Afrikaans. ‘Filmed in the gray mists of racial violence,’ a foreign review says. I look closer at the photo. Not us. Not specifically. But I have learned from other clips what Afrikaans means.

  Martyn’s elder half-brother, full son of his landowner father, is a power in the national police. ‘For certain the young hot-head deserves the sentence,’ he was quoted at the time Martyn was jailed, and later hadn’t denied his role in that. ‘Safer there. And he wasn’t in long. But he’s clever, you know, like his doctor father. Coloreds make good scientists—look at India. But my kinsman—for this I don’t deny—must now make his protests from abroad. Not from the Transvaal. Or any roads that lead to it.’ And so Martyn had done, in any media that led to talk.

  ‘I have one son who’s been in pokey, one who houses and feeds me,’ his mother reports. ‘Is it any wonder I have to run for office?’

  ‘The more recent her interviews, the more incendiary,’ the Manchester Guardian reports: ‘And the official photos larger. Is the lady making history or navigating it?’ Scrawled in ink in the margin of that clipping, in flowing script that must be hers: ‘Hah. Same as you, dear boy. Both.’ In the photo in the last newsclip on
her, she is seated, cane at side. ‘Don’t use it. Shows where I stand.’ The cane has a pennant on it, the party’s lettering on it not decipherable. She is wearing a lace head-dress. ‘Dowagers have perks. And can you say for sure the Queen Mother didn’t send me it?’

  Few of the notices on Martyn himself are from his own country. Barring the jail ones, they tend to be in university-student rags, or broadsides with no source indicated. The singing troupe, opening in France, and elsewhere, and a one-act play performed at a Rights conference in Bern, get what must be wide coverage.

  I see how the Martyn I knew so briefly has himself learned to escape. Yet does what he must. In Bern, a young woman from a Human Rights magazine interviews him. ‘Though known as a brilliant monologist in his stage, screen, and song documents, and as an appealing actor in works not his own, he has no public dialogue. Rumor has it that his mother, a long-term dissident, is hostage in some way to that silence, but this both he and she deny. An octogenarian, and a character admired if not beloved even by rightists, she campaigns from home, whether under house arrest is not known.’

  On the small shelf of her publications all so cannily for children, there is a thin cookbook not hers: 750 Dishes From Overseas, compiled in 1945 by one Ivy Priestnall Holden of Cambridge, England, published ‘for New York and British palates,’ covering Europe but also ‘novelties’ from Canada and the British colonies. The compiler is deferent to the known cuisines but her heart is wide open to the colonials. All the recipes are by local women. Most are identified by province: ‘A Canadian Woman.’ ‘A New Zealand Housewife.’ They speak in one voice. As if over the shoulder, with timid authority, their hands meanwhile busy at a dozen other tasks.

  While I eat deli-or take-out dinners I have to get from blocks away, these women are my company. I allot them their hairdo’s, from spitcurls to high combs, their complexions, spotty to creamy, their weights. Some are massively breasted—best mother-style. Some are thin, with a colonial anxiety not always due to geography. A woman can be colonial in her own country. In her own house.