In the Slammer With Carol Smith

by Hortense Calisher

  I am facing the glass office. The line of drums is on my left. We are eating from the same box of crackers he fed me when I first came to tea. ‘How did you know? About the sandwiches.’

  He slouches in the straight chair.

  ‘I grew up with politicals. There’s always a buried something else. At the bottom of their best convictions. When we met at the play, you and I, I had half a mind to leave you be. But I couldn’t. Nor when I left. Instead—I took the ticket, like those in Ahmed’s shop do, and hoped for the best. Because I knew better than them, I had more than a tinker’s chance. And more to gain.’

  ‘So the stationer’s name is Ahmed,’ I say. And it’s he who’s surprised.

  ‘I’m learning, that’s all. I’ve been learning since you left. Go on.’

  All the time I was in Africa, in my head things went badly for you, Carol. It’s called perspective. And as anybody who draws from the figure only will tell you, it’s a trick. She’s like a stunning idée fixe, I told myself. But with a flaw in it you can put your fist through.’ He swings a leg. ‘And so you can. And come through with a fistful.’ He eats the cracker. Gets himself a glass of water. Sits up straight. ‘The bullet in my arm put me right. If I’d died without seeing you again. So I hopped a plane. And on the plane, saw the London newspapers. With a recap of that story.’

  And knew it for mine?

  ‘You were the only clue. I knew it must be you.’

  ‘You put two and two together.’

  He is nodding, almost asleep. His head lifts. And two and two made five.’

  And he sits up, crackling with the energy your own wit can lend you.

  ‘I phoned her from the plane. “Madame had had dozens of calls since the interview,” I was told, and would see no one. But I back-tracked, some hundreds of miles, and flew to the island anyway. Stormed the castle.’ He smiles, not at me. The way all men did when they saw Carey. ‘I’d a hunch—there are passports we carry. Like skin. Perhaps the clerk at the hotel described me. She sure reneged when she saw me. Did she recognize me, from the rally? Or merely the name of who I said had introduced us? She recognized him.’

  He leans forward to grasp my hands. ‘I didn’t tell her anything, about the years between. That belongs to you. To her credit, she didn’t ask. It looked to be a short take. I didn’t see how to mention you. But she keeps those kids by her, like passports too. Or tokens. And just as I was about to make off, the boy says: “Are you a friend of my father’s?” And I say: “Not that I know of. But of a long ago friend of your mother’s. One of five.”’

  I see a pink stain on the sleeve of his shirt, but he fends me off. ‘It’s only serous fluid. They said the wound might seep.’ He finishes the water. ‘She’s a cool one. “I live by living in the present,” she says. “I’m not a loyal person.”… And I believe her. With one exception. So I say, “But a message like yours deserves an answer. That fifth girl—the one you lost—whatever happened to her, she’s made use of it. She has—found herself.… Madame doesn’t say anything. But the kid, he’s about thirteen, he leans forward and says: “How?”—and I don’t know how to answer him. But you have to answer a child.… So I say: “A kind of pilgrimage.” And he says, “For what? Where?” And I say, “She herself would have to say. But even on this island there must be people she’d be doing it for.”

  ‘Madame doesn’t say anything, only to the children—“Go and play.” But when I leave, I find she’s followed me out to the patio. “They’re adopted,” she says. “Nobody these days I’d want to be having children for. So, I invented myself, eh?” … Like a question. Like she’s still doing that.’

  The cracker-box is empty. He crushes it. ‘She followed me to the cab. Tells the driver to wait. When she comes back she leans in on me. “So Carol found our target for us, did she?” she says, “When we’d only sent her out for sandwiches. And found you in the bargain. Lucky bomb.” … And as the cab starts off, she shoves me this envelope.’ The bandaged arm tosses me it.

  She said ‘Carol.’ She did remember.

  The creamy envelope, thick as bone, has landed near the cracker-box. Two unrelated shapes. No wires, no waddings. I see that other table again, in still life. The agent of destruction on it is as mum as any known, even a noose. I hear the girl carrier from Canada: Here it is, the canister sinister.

  He’s got up and is rooting in the fridge, his back to me. A big man, he needs his food. ‘Wanted to open it. Didn’t want you hurt. Then I remind myself—you’ve a nerve, Martyn. What Carol’s survived, who’s stronger than that?’

  The envelope contains a note and a check. Written in the same big, loose sprawl in which she invited me to that other island, our senior year, the note says: ‘Hang on for us. This is a bribe.—Carey.’ The check, large or small according to one’s lights, and for the exact amount, never concealed from my classmates, of my annual trust fund interest payment, is signed Madame Fleurisse.

  I’m not hurt. The best one can ask for is to be remembered; even the street-souls I walk with don’t require more. As for the check, will it be spent? Those used to playing only for chips are inclined to spend freely. ‘Money must not become an emotion,’ my practical day-aunt would say. ‘Of course not,’ the music-aunt would reply, giggling. ‘It’s simply more than we can afford.’

  By then, with me home from school but out of the town’s spectrum, they could reveal themselves—and I now assess them—as the cheerful, quirky, undowntrodden pair they were.

  Yet in that household, with me as their charge, there would be no dreaming of men, of the sort that bubbles between even the stuffiest mothers, and their daughters: remembrances of courtship, coy allusions to after-prom kisses: ‘And there he was at the football game, with that other girl. But he came back, baby. Else you wouldn’t be here.’—Nor did I have father or brother to join in the badinage—‘Ah, they get us in the end, don’t they, boys?’

  I’d had no adolescent ‘assist’—I was told—toward those reveries of the probable partner that could push many a girl toward the dullest substitute. What partner could those two dream up for me? Or my four friends?

  I’d grown up thinking of males as ‘the opposite.’ But in me, what the college nurse in her sex survey termed ‘full-blooded’ would opt to have such sex as came my way. Moony and kicky in the backs of cars, or the bushes. With a crowd my day-time friends never knew about. On the stone floor with a prison guard, and retching afterward. Mute reachings in the hospital and the halfway house, little more than the foreplay of psyches trying to repair one another.

  Then, nothing. In my walking I had been chaste. As in the Cat Club. As in the barrio.… Touched by God, I had never ogled a cafe lounger up the stairs. Fumbled after, I had never let a supper-sharing bum spread my legs.

  Now Martyn has breached all that. Aided by my own warming, eager flesh. That sordid virgin is gone. But do I believe his epitaph to her history? Strong?

  Martyn has dug out two apples. Pale-green orbs from Washington State, that I had planned to admire, then eat, one each day. We munch them like kids who have discovered Mom’s hidden treat.

  ‘Refrigerators are kind to me,’ I say. ‘They’re always giving me surprises.’ Like the old box that Daisy Gold praised. Inside, on shelves roomier than here, there had waited the squeaky-clean woman I am now.

  ‘I’ll be kinder,’ Martyn says, getting up slowly. ‘I’ll bring us dinner. Jamaican place the troupe liked, over on Fourteenth. I’d planned to buy you lots of dinners. But this one—I’d like to bring home.’

  His jacket is hung on the one hook near the door. Mine is beneath. It’s worn, but still respectable. He smooths it. ‘The slavey they were blowing up the world for. And they sent her out for sandwiches.’

  The core of my humiliation. He’s put his finger on it.

  ‘Police caught me with the goods. I ate the evidence. Waiting in the station house.’

  ‘I’ll tell the restaurant they can be free with the spice.’

  I watch a
s he pats his wallet, shifts it from jacket to slacks. Male gestures, built on pockets, have a sweet forthrightness ours don’t have.

  As he hoists his coat on, the postcard on the bulletin board catches his eye. He reads.

  ‘The state of my world—’ I falter. ‘You’re not obligated.’

  Those sandy eyebrows that have scratched my belly, they shadow the eyes. ‘A tea party. Against the state of mine. Or what should be mine.’

  ‘So, I want to release you from your offer.’

  ‘Granted,’ he says with a rush. ‘I thought about it all the way over. In the air. It was a false offer. It was for you. To get you. Not for—’ He looks up at the bulletins, at that scrap of a card, white against the yellowed clips—‘your messages. You’ll have yours. I’ll have mine. Play-acting. Versus acts. Don’t expect we’ll ever resolve that rhythm. And why should we? Been around a long time, that rhythm. Our addition to the planet’s. And we can only play it by ear.… And that’s a long speech. Easier on a postcard. Maybe I’ll post one. “To Carol. With love.”’

  He strides to the table, fiddling with the housekeys that I’d put out to remind me to leave them for him at the stationers. ‘But I’ll do one thing for sure. Buy a bed.’

  At the door he stops. Is he afraid to leave me? ‘Damn. My sleeve’s wet through.’

  I help him peel the jacket off. His shirt-sleeve is sticky-wet. The dressing underneath soaked. ‘They changed it for me in the plane. The altitude. You swell.’

  ‘The hospital for you.’

  ‘Right. In the morning. St. Vincent’s. I know it well. We had bouts of pneumonia here. One pleurisy. They would strip to go barefoot.’ He sighs. ‘No, there’s a spare dressing in my bag. Give it here.’

  The wound is encrusted, not pretty, but neat. ‘Not inflamed. They told me what to look for, if it seeped.’ He opens the sealed dressing, but his one hand is clumsy.

  ‘Here, let me.’ I look for red streaks down the arm, but there are none. As I wrap the new dressing, I am careful not to have it adhere to the blond grizzle of hair, and insert one finger between dressing and underarm, so as not to bind.

  ‘You do a neat job.’

  ‘Saw it done. In the jug. Woman slashed another one. I was a trusty by then. Took her to the infirmary. This is serous fluid? That was blood. Lots.’

  ‘You need to see blood? To show sympathy?’

  ‘No.’ My voice is shaky.

  ‘But you thought you did.’

  He’s written ‘Love’ once. And just now said it. Can I?

  ‘It’s such a relief—’ I burst out. ‘Not to puzzle a person.’

  He says, ‘I hear what you say.’

  At the door, jacket on again, he says: ‘May take awhile.

  Not a short-order joint. And they can do African. You dip the meat-sauce from a bowl, using the vegetables or leaves as scoops. There are no implements. Everybody at the one bowl. A ritual to make one cry. With a peculiar comfort.… I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll halloo from downstairs.’ He sees my face. ‘Trust me? To come back.’

  I take breath. ‘Trust me? To stay?’

  When he’s gone I do a number of things. I return the Shelter-Pak that belongs here to its hook in the hall. There’s no hook for mine. Hung over the other it will bulk in the narrow aisle. In the cabinet under the bulletin board there’s a hammer and nails. I drive in a long nail and hang my pack. Inside, there’s a money pocket where I put the disability check when it first comes. Cashing it gives me a bad time. Soon that must stop. I stuff Carey’s check in the pocket, well down. I doubt that I’ll ever cash it, but I’ll keep it. It’s blood money. And that belongs in the record.

  I am walking in a circle. Past the two letters from Martyn, on the bulletin board where I have posted them, near the snapshot of his wife’s children. Past the office, on whose front panel the decal of a continent still clings. And finally, past the postcards on the table. Under the newly written ones is the promised one to Dr. Cee, written the winter I was released, but never sent. What I had wanted to say, what I said, had left no room for the address.

  Left foot twitches, toward the door. Right arm, ramrod, stays. I have appointments. With a keyboard. With a line of drums. With a long list of persons whom I may not see again. With the dead, as well.

  I stop at the window, exhausted. It is his turn to go for food, and I am grateful. We’ll eat the food that requires a bowl but no implements. A country that still harbors such a custom must have its graces. As will a home. He’ll buy a bed. I’ll buy—another towel? I won’t query whether the oldest child in that snapshot isn’t more than a trifle darker than the two younger ones. That may be what only a mother, or a woman of color who will keep her mouth shut, is entitled to see. Though should we have none of our own, would it be time to tell?

  When he comes back, and we’ve eaten, I’ll show him how I have learned to play the drums: slap-and-smooth with the palm, smooth and slap-slap, pound-pound, and thrum thrrumm-m. I’m no drummer, but to each his song. The more I play, the more I’m sure of to whom I owe the irregular rhythms I was born with.

  To that impractical person who giggled close to me but never came nearer. Who danced like a pigeon when she heard certain airs, but was distressed when I wanted a musical instrument. Who lent me to wear, the day I graduated, an enameled pin—‘from the attic,’ though never before seen there and vanished again, the day after I wore it—made of an old Canadian coin. Who said once, not looking anywhere special: ‘Poignant. To a degree.’ The more I thrum, the clearer I see her. My amateur mother—the musical aunt.

  Nothing that happens behind a window can’t be solved—is the way I’m feeling. I’m not bandaged; nobody’s shot me. But I’ve been winged.

  I wish I had been at the window in time to watch Martyn walk away just now. A man’s back, ignorant that it’s being watched, tells you more about the man. You can better judge the weight of the load he carries, that he thinks hidden when you and he are face to face. You can’t shoulder it, you have your own, and even when wounded he’s the stronger. Can you slog alongside?

  In from the cold, can I live as others do, yet keep in mind those who remain outside?

  On Martyn’s table, bottom of the pile of postcards are two others long-since inscribed. I extract the first one, written that same winter, also never sent. ‘Write me how it is out there,’ Dr. Cee had said, and I had, in a tiny orthography once taught us in art therapy.

  In the naive ups and downs of our summer, fish might float through air that is like bright water behind the trees; even on a sandy street you might be walking on sky; this is how the world should be, was begun.

  Winters, the sky fall-falls in bits that clog the ankles; fish scrounged from other climates lie behind the fishmonger’s plate-glass, at nine bucks a throw. The only birds about are those who companion you in the gray stone niches, or in the pavement hot-spots where we can ruffle those feathers we still own. People who are still called people have vanished behind closed doors. Doors are sacred entrances, to churches where we don’t belong.

  I hadn’t needed to mail it. His gift had achieved its purpose. A postcard is really for the sender. It tells you where you are. The orthography is excellent.

  The second card, inscribed in a rougher hand, bears no recipient. Yet it’s clear whom I’m addressing. I see how that other self of myself saw its mission to be:

  The collective reality—what an ogre it can be. But outside it and underneath it are those who do not speak.

  Here I am. Here we are.

  The state of the world is also the state of us.

  We are the state within the state.

  We send you this card——.

  And I must now reply:

  You alleyways that harbored me, who can shoulder your load alone? Do so, and isn’t it only a tramp’s bundle-on-a-stick?

  Now I’m on the ward of the ordinary. Pray for me. That as I become workaday enough to buy a watch, which is not the worst of fates, I will do more b
y it than count my days. That I won’t merely luxuriate in what I believe. That when I’m old I won’t be frightened at what I’ve become.

  Hell, it’s time. Not for either the 6 am or the 6 pm light to flick on; I know that much. By the time-sense deeper in the bone, independent of light, he should be back by now—shouldn’t he? This is the householder itch, the family unease that wants everybody safely in. Just so the day aunt used to stand in the candle-lit bay, waiting for the night aunt to return, a worm of worry extending from her bent form, but not affecting me. I knew my place. Yet one night I burst out jealously: ‘Why do you worry so about her?’ And the answer came from behind that crouched shape: ‘Because she has no fear.’ And like a bitter-lemon keynote I only now hear, ‘Nor do you.’

  Will Martyn fear for me? Will I fear for him, the domestic drip-dripping on us like the spots of candle wax not found on the window-seat until the next day. ‘Candles are for company, but you don’t have company, why are you always burning them?’ a schoolmate said to me. ‘We have to get rid of them,’ I’d answered. ‘They’re from the blackout during a war.’

  Repetition will woo Martyn and me, as it’s weaned me here. But I can imagine there’ll be enough of the bare. We’ll see to it. Unless the world gets there first. Which in one way or other it will. What do I know about the state of the world, except that it is us? In every house as in every alley—and at every grave. The sharpshooters are always anonymous.

  While the keys held in common hang on the hook where one person left them—I see them up there, and the other leaves them behind. In trust. But why had he bothered to say he would halloo? A halloo is from afar. Has he too felt the doubleness already stealing like a sweet fog around us? Perhaps he’ll phone his doubts from the restaurant. Or, never having got to it, from the street. ‘Afar’ wouldn’t have to be Africa. Or not yet.

  I drop to my knees, near the phone. Willing it to ring. Willing it not to, if the message is bad. There is a need, I’m sure, for—could one call it ‘singletude,’ as apart from living single? One would slip away now and then from the doubleness. Even in stealth, maybe. To walk, waist untwined, swinging in the alpine air of the lone meditation, ears stoppled against all communication from another skull. Only to come back sated, shivering with eagerness for the dual, as if reeled in on a tape. But one can’t urge that vision over a phone.