Standard Dreaming

by Hortense Calisher

  He sits down beside her. “Where did you go to school? You never said.”

  “Trained for a nurse, at Tufts. Thing to do up around Boston, then. I was sent up there. Didn’t finish.”

  Of course, married an interne at Massachusetts General instead. Jake has to go to Boston for Berners. She won’t.

  “But you had for instance biology. Even zoology?”

  “Probably. I can’t remember. Not zo’—though my roommate did. I had Alison instead.”

  “But if I told you a kind of outline in such a field, you could understand it?”

  “Doubt it. You forget, I work in a boutique. And Andrew always took care of things like that.”

  Like the income tax. Which was what most people thought the mysteries were—maybe they were right. And Andrew had taken care of death.

  “You’re going away?”

  “Texas.”

  Summer was a bad time for the group. There were other people with grown children who were only mulling would they have the married children down to wherever, or would the children have them? Everybody went somewhere, if only to Jones Beach. Her shop closed for August. She was an “active” person; she had to move life, dresses—daughters? She would rather do the wrong thing than nothing at all.

  Lately he had been forcing himself to remember that there were those others, a great train of life on which he and his unfortunates walked the darkened fringe. Last Sunday he had taken himself to the happiest place in the park, back of the old regiment house, between it and the seal pool, where there was always a flux of new babies, round, frilled and pied. And almost perfect, in the golden time before differentiation—no more work to be done on them.

  He smiled all afternoon and read Darwin. Nuts-in-May girls and striplings lean as wire sculpture cast their silver on his pages, passing in a tincture of sweat. “Nature, if I may be allowed to personify the natural preservation of survival of the fittest, cares nothing for appearances. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life.” But with extreme slowness.

  From the path in front of his knees a little boy careened, jarring Berners’ book from him, was reprimanded, and joggled on, the slap he had received echoing on down the eons of its pages. It may be metaphorically said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing throughout the world the slightest variations. The struggle for Life is most severe between Individuals of the Same Species. The path and the Sunday went on as before, vigorous and dusty, for a time. Natural selection will modify the structure of the young in relation to the parent, and of the parent in relation to the young. The long lilac afternoon, waning slower than any of this, pleasured him. But after a while he got up and left. A park, sad and sparkling, was always a temporary tale. His own little tragedy beleaguered him; he was impatient when it rested. He could not seem to rest it even in eternity; it was in the huff of his heart. One had to understand that about the species, he supposed. And more and more do not survive? But even Darwin, leading us in and out of the garden in the gentle calm of geology, stopped short at the extinction of us. He found those last pages of his some of the most affecting in human history—that even such a man could not believe in the end of it. Only lesser men, like himself?

  “Cool in here.” Sylvia was shivering.

  “Baba keeps it like the South.” Double windows, heavily shaded too, against the record shop yelling “Bogey! Bogey!” on the corner of Seventh Avenue, and the hot garbage lids stewing sweet-sour dinners for pickers and cats. “The white South.”

  “Natch. But where is she?”

  “Gone to get the girl from her father’s. Baba’s turn.” And afraid the girl wouldn’t come here straight.

  “You had the kid tested, I heard.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she has it? That thing that only Negroes get?”

  “Sickle-cell anemia? Oh, there’re a few Sicilian cases on record, but not over here. Yes, she has it.” On the children’s ward, the patients’ mothers called it The Neemy. Like a dance.

  She got up, took a candy from a bowl, then guiltily spat it out.

  “Eat it, you’re thin enough.” Surprisingly this was true. She wasn’t top-heavy anymore, but small, choice and gaunt.

  “Dieting a little. For down there. In Texas, being thinner is my only superiority. So’re you, Niels—thin. Listen, Niels, I’m leaving the group. I’m going to sit and watch my sister’s appleblossom kids and not even wish there’s anything wrong with them. I’m leaving this. Other people’s grief doesn’t help.” She fell into a chair and reached for the traveling bag. “Brrr, I’m cold as sin. Vitamin C.” She put a tablet in her mouth, waited, choked, and had to take it out. “What a pig I’m being. Is there a disease?—you can’t swallow.”

  “Grief.”

  But what has been inexplicable to him all along, he will report, is that even in the worst of their grief the parents continue to be so positive about the world; it was their young who raged at it, or mourned.

  Not one living species would transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. Darwin had said, signing off to his amphitheater, and of the species now living few would transmit progeny of any kind. But two sentences on: No cataclysm has ever desolated the wide world. Hence we may look forward with some confidence to a secure future of great length. In which all corporeal and mental endowments would tend to progress toward perfection. It always seemed to Berners that the writer of that last had grown old on the page. He imagined his son Raoul reading it.

  Sylvia was watching him. When one of the group was thinking about his child, the others usually knew. “I went up to that prison,” she said. “Jake’s. You went for him once.”

  “Couple of months ago.” And now, Jake had gone for him.

  “He said, ask for her under the name Tomashevsky, she never would use her married one. I never thought. Taylor, he must have changed his name after. God, I never connected it. Doris Tomashevsky. The one who—”

  Killed her own farrow. Not like a sow. Thoughtfully. After a lapse of some years.

  “—her little boy and girl.” She still gave it the holy intonation.

  “Only way he can bring himself to tell us. By sending us.”

  Berners will report that this is what he likes best about the group, that they have been emissaries of one another. This seems to him biblical. Or to belong to another century, of greater breadth. “He give you a message for her?”

  She nods, but doesn’t say. Probably the same one Jake had given him.

  “She’s gone on hunger strike,” Sylvia said. “She didn’t tell me. The guard.”

  “Hunger strike!” The versions were endless. “Did she say why?”

  She shook her head. “Well—one thing for Rebecca. She won’t have to come anymore.”

  They hold their breaths for each other.

  “Are we jealous?” he asks. “That her boy’s dead.”

  “I never dare think of Alison’s death. Only of mine. Sometimes I do think—what if I’d never had her? But I still always choose—” Her voice went hoarse. “I still want to carry the burden of loving, God help me to be a good masochist.”

  “They don’t,” he said. “The children.”

  Alison. Raoul. Over the distance, do they exert their soft, negative pressure?

  “I won’t believe that.”

  No, but when you do, will you begin to die of it?

  “Rebecca’s making herself a cinerarium,” Sylvia said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Funeral urn. She doesn’t like the ones the crematoriums provide.”

  “I can’t see her making just one.” He began to laugh.

  She joins him. “Terrible to laugh.”

  “Not at all.”

  Her eyes brim over. She hoots to a stop. “Death’s boutique.”

  “I never read Darwin without laughing now,” he says. “Do you know him? A life boutique. Do you know that even parakeets and canary birds drea
m?”

  “No. Just the name. No, I didn’t.”

  “Marvelous books. Marvelous unfinished books.”

  She looks at her watch. “Who else are we waiting for? Besides Baba.”

  He resists his desire to say—everybody. In the long run. But how is one to tell them? Ordinary people. He could tell a patient: I can’t repair you. But speak of the species to him, and he will think only that you are not talking about him.

  “Where’s Jacob?” she said.

  “Visiting.”

  “I’m glad. I can’t face him tonight.”

  “He’s going to phone in.” Off the shuttle from Boston.

  “She was neat as a pin, Niels. And that trustworthy face, Jacob’s face. If we’d been in a ladies’ room, she’d’ve been the one I’d ask ‘Watch my bag.’”

  “Infanticide doesn’t mean you steal. And thievery can mean love.” He smiled at her. “I might steal your bag.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t meet you in the ladies’ room…. Niels, how thin you are…. You too, you’re thin.”

  This isn’t sex, but that veil of unity which descends on victims. He will report that they have all come to love each other, in the end.

  “Who’s Jacob visiting for?” she said, knowing.

  “For—me.” And after he checks in, I’ll be leaving. It’ll be over. “There may be another man coming in the group. A doctor too. Name of Cohen.”

  “You’re leaving too!” she said.

  “Sylvia—” How would she feel if she found her bad luck wasn’t personal? How does he? “You have such intuition. Did you ever think how so many of our children, almost all of them—?”

  But the door is flung back, a rush of hybrid noise comes with it; Baba enters, leading her girl by the hand. After them Mimi, in the black that always makes her seem retinue.

  When Baba, triumphantly holding the girl out to them, doesn’t move, Mimi slinks past her to the most retreated chair in the fernery. They know her story, her air says. She told it once.

  Baba’s girl is exquisite, one of those junior poppets that the times and the streets specialize in, girls and boys who seemed to Berners to tout both sex and their narrow lack of physical channels for it, in clothes that were a few streaks of leather, twig, string. Her flesh, what there is of it, is cocoa, a full upper lip and dimpled chin, all Baba to the last ditch except for the enormous, velvety, black-woman’s eyes—she should have had a mother like a good cow.

  Instead Baba, and a prancy dress-designer father who has already drawn up plans for her wedding dress and sends her one-hundred-dollar hand-beaded shoes. Which she throws at Baba. Who is wearing them. Because Baba respects them for what they are, and all this borderline junk is what makes life bearable—the corally pearlglass so grainy actually under the fingers, the tissue-silver so shiny real to the touch. And because the girl won’t?

  But he is learning that the psychological answer, after all the fuss over it, is still only the outside of the inside. Understanding people in that way obstructs the natural observation of them. He is seeing Baba as a bird in a forest, where the painted feathers flash in leaves beaded with rain. He tries to recall how the arcaded streets of Berne, a fifteenth-century museum to others, were once just a locus of stone leaves to a boy.

  “This is Adoree,” Baba says, and he sees how chimp is her slung-out arm, pushed-up jaw, feral eyes slanted with maternity—all saying “Mine.”

  They sit in the frozen leftovers of all the talk.

  This, after all the talk, is the species “them.”

  He can see Sylvia is embarrassed; She thinks they know too much about this girl. For decency.

  The girl herself need only stand there; they get the message. Her collarbone tells them, hollowed up under a sneering stuck-out shoulder, and her navel, bellicose as an op-art eye. This is not her forest.

  “Renee Adoree, hmmm,” Mimi says. “That movie star.” She doesn’t small-talk. This is the talk she has. “Gee, I always wanted a girl.”

  “Dory—” Baba says, pleading. “Don’t run off so quick.” What does she want from the girl, a curtsy, a dance for them? They know the posture.

  “Wheh the kids?” They know that posture too. Implacable blame.

  “Bobbie’s at the Fresh Air camp. Two whole weeks.” Baba says proudly.

  “Wheh Rennie?”

  Baba, feathers down, says duller, “He won’t say. But he swears he’s coming in to see you. Tonight. So you stay home, doll, hah?”

  They know—contradictorily—how the girl loves and defends her older brothers from Baba’s cheapness. Her white brothers.

  “’f he comes. ’ee comes, ah’ll cook fo’ em. Soul food.” She says it hungrily. But she herself is so thin Baba thought she was drugging. So they took tests. First that, then all of them. Minna’s friend had done it for them. Then Cohen had double checked.

  “Why do you talk that way!” Baba flashes. “She’s at the New Lincoln school, she can talk like anybody.”

  Standing, the girl, one heel lifted, silently and rapidly drums the leg, the heel not hitting. Sitting, she probably does the same. He recalls doing it unconsciously at that age, being reprimanded for it at table. An adolescent habit—Berners has often wondered whether it is sex related. He remembers being careful not to say “Fidgeter!”—as his father had to him—to Raoul.

  “Ain’ nobuddy black here. That’s why!”

  She shouldn’t have been let come, he thinks; she’s not enough to blame. We’ll be all bouleversé. When he thinks French, he is talking to his wife. A bourgeoise from Bordeaux, who until she died ran a typing school where she got her lovers, he saw nothing in her life or his that entitled them to a saint son.

  She sees he is looking at her. “You the guy has the gal in the jug?”

  He likes her for asking what he has. “No, I’m Dr. Berners, Adoree. How do you do?” If he’s good on the ward, it’s because he’s cool to their adversity, not to them—a practical man, median enough not to awe. But he would fall in a blubber before those dwindling, fourteen-year-old knees—one has a scab—for what he thinks she knows. Can it be that she knows Raoul? Or of him. Of the kind like him. And her. For in Berners’ dream they must all know each other, this kind of young. They would know the process. As animals once knew their places in the ark.

  “Ver’ well thank you. That big lady-man doctuh friend of yours don’t think!”

  “Minna talked to you?”

  Baba turns on him. The group has learned this about itself too; in the end they always turn on one another. In the sinking ship of blame. “Yah, that big kind dike friend of yours at the clinic, she told her. ‘Leave her be,’ I told her, ‘Leave her to me!’ But she gives me the stare, and says it’ll help us both to know what we’re in for. I say, ‘I don’t want to look!’”

  “Minna has a little girl she visits,” Berners says.

  “She take me in and lemme see the plates,” the young girl says dreamily. “In the mikascope. Ah tell uh ‘Done already show us ’ose V.D. ones in school. But I never seen those.’” As her tongue shifts, New Lincoln accent to old, she is smiling. At Baba. “She say, ‘V.D.? Oh you mean syph-i-lis.’” She twirls the word so prettily Berners suddenly remembers its origin—a shepherd youth. “She ask me, ‘You had biology?’ I say we had up to protozoa. ‘But I wudden have the V.D.,’ I tell her. ‘My mumma’s white. So lemme see what I got.’ So she shows me. I say, ‘Look at that pretty ole protozoo-ah. Right in my own blood!’ She say nuh-ooh, a proto is a much later form of life. I say, ‘You mean I don’ have the latest thing. Mumma won’t like that.’ An’ she say.” She lowers her voice like the little actress she is. “An’ she say, ‘You late enough.’”

  Canting her knees toward Baba, she brings out a pure trill of Harlem. “See mumma, I’m the latest thing.”

  The torturer is the tortured, Berners reminds himself. Every Christian knows it. We burn you for the hell we are dancing in. And the chains extend back, back. Poor Minna. He wonders about her child.
>
  A whisper from Baba. “See, see. See what I’m into?”

  Sylvia runs to her. “I see you should never have brought us here.” She holds Baba’s shakes. Looking at Berners. “This citadel we were supposed to have here. One sight of one of them—and it cracks. It’s no different from any telephone booth.”

  For a long while the world to him, its night caverns and fleeces flung as far as a window or an oceanliner or a jet could show him, had still been only as wide or sheltered as a telephone booth. “No.”

  The door from the stoop opens hesitantly; a boy blurs in, sideways, nearest to Berners, whose heart jumps. Not Raoul, but he could be—bearded, with that same posture Berners knows so well. Not a shamble. A disdain of more than general outline—of straight outline. Don’t look smart. Stand straight and you stand with the old guardsmen of the world.

  “Rennie!”

  Running into the crook of his long, gangling arm, the girl clasps him round the waist, her head in his armpit, looking up to his fringed smile. Given any thin profile and those straggle locks, they all do look alike—Raoul, who if still alive is reading the Six Theosophic Points of Jacob Boehme, or one of the other of the books which Berners too has at home in the pile of free education his son had once filially offered him—and Rennie the pusher, whose heroism is that he hasn’t yet offered his little sister anything. Like Christs, they all look to Berners—not the great representations or the odd ones, but the sweet lithographs in every room of the Fathers who had taught him. What did that do to these boys, in the secret mirrors of themselves?

  The telephone rings.

  Berners blanches, though this is Baba’s house. Sylvia too. Mimi, who is nearest, picks it up and answers in her cleaning-woman’s voice, “Hunter residence. The doctor? Yeah, he’s here.”

  “Jake? … Oh, John…. It’s my friend, Dr. Cohen…. John, you coming over? Oh. What? … No? naturally you don’t know yet…. Who found it? … So. Yes of course I’ll wait. We’re all waiting.” As I leave. He hangs up.