Waking that morning back in Harlem, the street had been full of young beards. They were like a second coming, to be seen everywhere, even in the corridors of the hospital—but one meant not to last. The older people, these were meant to last, long enough so that the young were assured of being. That was all that was meant, that nature ever meant. Then they might die. Beneath the covering multiplicity men had made for themselves, this was the way it had always been. And might be for eons yet. While the implacable empires build. And men think it important to know whether or not they are East or West, European or American. Had he really seen anything? Below all this, in the physical? To lift that multiple, psychological curtain men wove for themselves, was to dream—if not to die. One man’s dreaming, he thinks, walking to his demonstration. It’s all special—when you get to the dream. But he is glad this is a teaching hospital.
As he walks his corridor, Dr. Berners is making his report to us. He understands now that his sentence is for life—because of a certain loss, he will always report to us. But it is a relief to him to know who we are.
In the small waiting room back of the main amphitheater, he stands, prepped, masked, ready; he is always early here. They are waiting for the patient. But that is correct; it is the patient who should never wait. In these rooms for the first time since returning, he is surprised to recall how giggly and informal destiny is, over here. In Europe, a few weeks ago, he had refreshed himself at certain rotundas—his old medical school, to whose competence the world still came, and the courtyard, eternally rounded in bell and chapel, of the good fathers—whose roster had not fallen off. He had gone to both places partly because he had been brought up in them, but for another reason also. Bad flesh. What nowadays, did they make of it? For what secretly worries him is what he will do, or his hands or his brain—thus corrupted—will, when confronted with his next piece of it.
In that respect, can he be sure he is not simply a case of breakdown? Or one of conscience and sorrow? He has known artist-doctors who were besieged with doubt when away, as it were, from their desks—but he has never been one of them and knows none in his field. A surgeon lost his “touch” in ways appropriately physical, in Berners’ father’s day often from locomotor ataxia, in his own from alcohol. Decently letting the symptoms obscure their disease—that the “touch” which had been lost was confidence.
In each home place, school and hospital, he had found both men and concepts—and method too, under its surface modernities—much the same. As if the very cassocks and surgical aprons and coifs had gone on of themselves, with the same replica bodies under them, only the countenances being replaced. Even these he was sure could be found in facsimile, in the hospital going back at least as far as Aesculepius, in the good fathers well past Luther, to the Crusades. Over there, to be found to be the same as another, or as in times before, could still be honorable cause for congratulation. It was only over here that when you told a man or a woman he was the same as another, you insulted him. Home has soothed him, there. But his personal worry has come back with him, not to be resolved until in a moment or so, rubber to skin, his hand touches a hand.
He has had to come back here to find out what he is afraid of. Holding his own hands forward for the gloves, receiving them from that same nurse who snorts in her nose, he identifies it. A stray edge of gauze catches on his shaved cheek; he has always loved being masked. Others stand similarly, in the old slouches and alerts. The room is charged with their adrenalin. The pooled air wash-washes its own sound. There is that odor, to him like sapsego, or the melilot that flavors it, once used in plasters and poultices; to the others it will be whatever smell was early used on them. He is in the medical gambling hall. All septic reality is at bay. What he fears is impossible; all patients are seen well beforehand, some many times. No unknown is ever brought here. What he has been afraid of is that every hand brought him will be Raoul’s.
Walking forward into the amphitheater, he loiters with the others. The patient has not yet been brought up, a routine delay. Somewhere, on an elevator, in one of the incessant traffic jams of the present, he and she, old and young, lie dreaming, reassured. One man here dreams standing up. In the audience, Berners sees Smitters, back from Burma with his ruby—yes, on occasion the missing can be found. Cohen is already in Ceylon, hunting his leprosy—swinging his want of it before him like a warning bell? Berners misses him most, he was the next nearest; he is on his way to the wandering. Dr. Li-Lee is ill, terminally, but he would be the first to say not predestinedly; he has found a virus, he will die optimistically. Minna, who has come by certain dark dreams on her own—there must be thousands who have—is here after all, looking up at him devotedly. But that’s because he shares her secret; he has been with her to visit her child. All four of his brief nucleus are here with him either astrally or actually—his sharers of a moonlit night. They seem to him no more than that, nor less. Colleagues, with whom he has once spent a dreaming night out. He will report that they are not us. They alone—are not us.
Always the same nurses are here, bull-necked or heart-faced, and that intern with the long, naked Adam’s apple seen more often in the ministry; for thirty years Berners has seen this gangly one, and those two residents, one earnest, one glossy, and so on up through all the ladders of staff and visitors; today there is a man from the state, acting under that word states love—rehabilitate. After these, the second-year students are most numerous. A few now have unhygienic beards, as must often have been the case at one or the other of those earliest medical firsts here, though a picture he has of the small-town Kentucky Dr. McDowell’s first recorded entrance of the serous cavity in 1809, shows none. But neither does it show that huge, heavy ovarian cyst—had the surgeon, like old-fashioned pediatricians, weighed his hand with it?—brought forth like Western medicine’s first egg. In a daguerreotype Berners owns—it had hung in the uptown office—Warren and Morton, ready to perform ether anesthesia, are shown clean-shaven, but there are a few attending muttonchops. The girl on the operating table, in a white gown voluminous as a bride’s, looks like Erna—who had always hated the thing. Accusing him of humor, to a Swiss a compliment, he told her, but perhaps she was right. “I guess you’ve been asleep, Jane,” Warren reportedly said, receiving in answer, “I guess so, sir.” “Are you ready for the operation?” “Yes, sir, I am ready.” Whereupon he picked up her amputated leg and showed it to her, saying, “It is all done.”
Years ago, Berners, taken to see that old amphitheater still intact at Massachusetts General, had been told this story. He has a weakness—first shared with his grandfather—for these gawkily brutal “firsts” which always, even now, popped up in these “pioneer” countries which were still for some outside the first circle of the civilized. Perhaps this has to do with his feeling for America.
Down in the front rows, it is always the young bearded ones who appear to study him most fixedly. No doubt at the first acupuncture some such students, with their sparser Chinese chin-hairs, looked to the worried performing surgeon like the First Sage. It won’t matter, Berners thinks, looking at us. You are all the same. Can you take heart from it?
He can see that some of us are surprised that he is back. We, the Raouls—for now that he is alone, he can say that to himself; now that he no longer belongs anywhere. We who at times have been his sole amphitheater—almost alone. One of us had stopped him yesterday, saying crudely, “Heard you were staying over there? Where you belong.” For while we admire, we also resent; it’s in our juice, if we have it. But we’re also the ones who listen best.
Others of the older generation have expressed themselves more locally in whatever their own terms; yesterday, at a meeting, Stichmain, of his former hospital, had said to him, “Come back to us, eh? Nothing much over there. Sorry to hear about your son.” He is aware that people have heard different things. Always after a death or a tragedy, or a missing person, it’s they who must be satisfied.
So, looking at poor Stichmain, whose daughter, rumore
d dead of an overdose, should help him understand it, Berners had replied, “My son is—where he felt he belonged.”
What place is that? Where the son goes before the father does? Berners addresses his wife, who in the old biblical language has “gone before.” He no longer misses her, but she is here. We put our children in the abyss of life, you and I. All of us. Our going down, our own fall, is a nothing, without them. We go down into it, with them. We think of ourselves rightly, as them.
When they begin to think of death first, ahead of life—that is when it too will begin. When more sons and daughters than not say—“No.” When any race begins to die it is the child-cells that first say it. Then, gathering our syllogisms close as coats, let no father, from west to east, think of himself as the same as his child. That is where it begins.
Berners reports that he still believes in that far event so black to us. However, it has occurred to him that, in time, the dream of that dream may change us. He can’t tell us more; like most of us he is median. He dreams with us.
But if we must be further satisfied on the state of his son, he can tell us. Raoul will hang forever in the niche of his father’s mind. Dead, over and over, by the ordinary orthodoxies—autopsy, crucifixion by daily needles, war. Or alive, over and over alive and wandering.
Hang him on your walls; he is the uncollected place. “What have I to do with thee?” he says, turning to drink a glass of—is it hope? “Everything.”
From a stir at the rear, Berners sees that the patient is being brought to him. His hands tremble docilely. Will they work again on flesh? They must decide. He is a returning animal. They will decide for him. In a physical light. What can the noise of the century do for him now? He hears its machines, all beneficent here, dripping sucrose on poison, soft clean air on emphysymous gas, blood given on blood shed. Tucked out of hearing of this good, resolved place are its other mills, lethally grinding. Above him, the yielding heavens are filled with both. Who can tell now what name other than twentieth ours will have in the amphitheater of the universe? Berners, glad of the mask of goodness he wears, invokes this room of other good masks. A patient, one of a species, a bit of our body, our flesh, is being brought to him. He is expected to work on two of us, unrelated to each other. For a minute he strains to recall which of us comes first on the morning’s schedule, the old one or the young one, a parent or a child. On everything else, his mind is clear. His hands are with Nature. They wait.
Now Berners asks us to gather round him. He asks us to help him make his report. We, his amphitheater, who have been through so many changes of face, must know by now who we are. We are all the parents and children in a man’s life story, beginning in arcades that antedate Chinese bodies in a mortuary, and not ending with an Adoree or Mei-ling. We are his Europe, and Cohen’s Ceylon. And this adopted country of his with its funny, jackdaw, anagram name of U.S.—which Berners has come back to, feeling it to be the best place for a man who knows he does not belong anywhere.
In Europe, what he had seen was Europe, still with its neat, Linnaean passion for the consecutive. If this melting pot of apple-tree centers, noble wounded mountains, park benches and their rotting sages is telling him anything, it is that life is not consecutive, not preserved down the geodetic ages in the thin gelee of national strains—but radiating from all its spores, even into the cancers of change.
Berners states that a man like him feels less at odds here. On the dark fringe. But he is aware that he reports to all of us. Even to those in the light. He remembers how he used to visualize the creation in his childhood, Christmas chains of us since the beginning, hung out to roast in the starlight. We are all of us, falling from our first resurrection ever into the abyss, arched heel over head with our toes in our faces. And outstretched hands.
The patient is wheeled in. We are that one, too.
Berners, trembling, leans over his species. Bad flesh, good flesh, bit of both. The hand is a grown man’s in its natural state, unmasked. Ready, if he repairs it, to scatter its chains past anything yet known of, to establish on yet other planets those sad streets that are its synonym. Bringing its dying, murdering seed along with it. Yes, he has seen this hand.
Berners’ own hands are powerless. He can’t make them rise. There’s a murmur in the audience, coughs, and one laugh. Next to Berners, a nurse makes a small, kind, feeling sound.
Gather round, everyone, to help. Tell him how man moves his soul forward by slow hectares of land. Or sea or ships. Across the ages, finally into the floating air. How Death never fails to move along with him. And Hope, the giant mutant, on its other side.
Persuade him, all, how maybe in a new land, a freshly cracked air, the sperm of the uncharted physical will breed us new. So may we be tossed, whipped, made to run our span again like royal interplanetary horses—the sport of Nature, who is king. To which sport we have added hope, and all our proud despairs come of it.
Berners’ hands are rising of themselves to grasp those on the table. We are all here with him; he knows who we are. We are that animal, which whether it is entering the sea of death or the ark of hope, turns equally to look back on itself. Berners and his son both have dreamed this, that they might run beneath the ark of life and see how it was moving. Along. And many a median man like him. There are always some who are enchanted with the ministries of life. He calls our attention to them. The Society of the Hand.
Berners’ have taken up their tools. Always at this point, he states the clinical aspects of the case, as he has been taught to do in his turn. To give direction. To the next. “We begin the surgery,” he says. “Which is a relationship.”
He bowed his head, and in his dream, his son anointed it.
And if this report is still Latin to you, forgive him—and the good fathers of Berne.
About the Author
Hortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled In the Absence of Angels, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties. A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for The Bobby Soxer, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1972 by Hortense Calisher
Cover design by Kelly Parr
978-1-4804-3896-5
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Standard Dreaming Page 9