Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel

by Hortense Calisher

  “Father was three parts Irish. I was brought up mostly by the fourth part, in Wiltshire. Mother’s an American, from Maine, if you know what that is, sir—but brought up partly in London. They married there, came—” he glanced at the window and away again, “here. My father fell in love with the States at once, from then on refused to leave it. Dead now. Mother always fancied London, wouldn’t live anywhere else. We children were shared out between, divided, not always evenly. I didn’t get to stay very long in the States until I was grown. Harvard. She’s got a brother at the Fogg, you see. Mother. But you might say my share was rather more”—Linhouse had given a slight bow—“on our side.” He had leaned back. Done rather neatly. He could do chit-chat well enough, except on doorsteps.

  “Gahn!” The old man shook his head, not at the information, Linhouse felt, but at the pace. The personal having been dealt with so much too summarily, he took the next step of politeness, that of general ideas, not too profound. “Solomon’s decision, eh. I happen to think that a man divided against himself isn’t such a bad idea. Liked a spot of difference in a person, my generation did. Really did, not just say. Expect we’re the last to feel comfortable with it.” He chuckled. “Hundred years from now, to get any differentiation, may have to take to sawing the babies in half.”

  “Because of genetic changes? Or psychological ones?”

  The old man made a face—a grown man asked by Johnnie to taste his alphabet soup. “They’re not so separate, you know. In the long run, psychology’s only what attaches to the other things. In the long run.” He looked down at his fists, carefully unclenched them and put his hands on his thighs. “No, it’ll be a matter of safety, don’t you see. Perfectly natural. For the young especially—ever watch a litter? When the physical world seems to be breaking up, everybody tries to be one and the same animal, mmmph? Or person.” He made a horse-jaw and smoothed it, telegraphing a joke he could still disown, if badly received. “Natural legacy too, of all this monotheism of the last few thousand years. Now that the people are to take the place of God, seems proper there should be only One of them, don’t you know.”

  Linhouse laughed, for the joke, and for the old gent’s mannerly try at switching the talk to Linhouse’s realm—that soup. He made a try at a return. “And the world’s to be one and the same place too, hmm? Or dozens of the same.”

  “Ah, that is American of you, that worry. Or rather, their side of you. All so afraid they’ll seem gauche for liking places that way.” He smiled. “Your provost or what d’ye call ’m apologized to me for the sameness of his house. Had to tell him I didn’t bother much about the difference of places.”

  “Not even—out there?” They were above the clouds now, on a clear, fleece night.

  Sir Harry looked sideways, delicately, and away. “I know the principle of heavier-than-air machines as well as anybody,” he said grumpily. “A nursemaid took me up in one of the fun-machines at Brighton, unfortunately early.” Then he winked. “I can be as psychological as anybody, too.” He leaned back, and once more relaxed his arms. “What’s out there is space. Not place, either nostalgic or political.”

  “Not just something for the Foreign Office, hmm.” Linhouse’s comment fell worse than flat in his own ears—it was the kind of chummy remark the untraveled made to him. She had been right. This was the way even a philosopher felt with these interstellar men nowadays. Even with one who wouldn’t look out of a window at twenty thousand feet up. “Still,” he said kindly—the old boy was only human—“you do hold with Lovell and Shapley? I gathered so, last night. That there is life out there?”

  The human old boy sat right up. Humanity in fact purpled him, not stinting that extra cragginess of forehead, eyeball and temple which so often gave skinny old men of distinction a look of having twice the number of features they’d been born with. “They—” He choked, and recovered. “—they … hold with me!”

  A moment later, seeing Linhouse’s alarm, he touched a hand to Linhouse’s shoulder. “Sorry. That’s the real nastiness of getting old—these absolutely uncontrollable rushes of ego. I’ll be snuffling my food next. Same last-minute greediness.” He coughed and looked away, to allow a mutual recovery of reticence. Then he forced himself to look steadily out and into that moving blue-black—at this height unstarred or coddled with cloud—which was being consumed by the plane but not diminished. He continued to look there, as if age had given him the courage.

  “We all hold,” he said. “There isn’t a chance that there isn’t life out there. Or perhaps a proportion of one against it to—ten to the twentieth power number of chances—it does exist.” He turned away from the window, then back. “I don’t know if you know anything about this sort of—”

  “Nothing,” Linhouse said at once. It occurred to him that his own stance, voice, in fact whole mental field, was that of a man facing a firing squad. “Absolutely nothing.”

  His seatmate made the humble, sideways nod that a mandarin must get tired of making. “Well, let’s see—half the stars in the Milky Way have planetary systems, you know … For life forms resembling ours, what you’d ask first would be—” He shrugged. “Does it have water in a liquid state? … And so on. And so on.” He gave up, confronted by how to choose for this child at his knee. “Yes, there’ll be life.” He sighed. “Yes. Life.”

  Linhouse stared out there with him, looking at a lesser distance however, say from wherever they were now—well past Gander—and back. It shouldn’t take much more than that—say the time jump from London, between some streets less genteel than Sloane, and those of a town fifty miles up the Hudson—to cure him of the jolt that a woman had given him, in preferring some man from out of town. One of the first things he’d do when he got to London would be to take the boat that went down the Thames to the Greenwich Observatory, where time was monitored for the world over. Take a girl there for the day, that’s what he would. He turned back to Sir Harry.

  “Even beings like us, hmm? Or not too much different.” He was surprised to find himself hoping so; never would have thought he held that much brief for the race. But now he could feel for his fellow beings with the possibly kindred passion of a man left behind.

  “Bllmmph—ha!” The ejaculation was enough to startle some heads up front. Sorted from the old man’s repertoire, it appeared to be a major sneeze of amusement.

  “Anders!” he said out of his handkerchief, when able. “That’s what he thinks. Told me so at your party. ‘Universal biochemistry, first off!’ he says. ‘Check!’ says I. ‘Or that’s what they say.’ ‘Convergence,’ he says then. ‘Beings with the same needs, molded by the same natural forces, come to resemble. I assume you grant that!’ ‘Granted,’ says I. ‘Or that’s what they tell me. I’m only an astronomer.’ Well, Sir Harry,’ he says in the most benevolent way, nodding that conic section he uses for a head, ‘don’t you worry now, they’re going to be very like you and me.’” The old man exploded into laughter again, where Linhouse joined him. He continued. “‘Oh, good-oh, very nice,’ says I, ‘but you know I do worry a bit. Hope they won’t be too like us, you know. Don’t know about you, Anders, but I’ve got to have a woman once in a while.’ … May Rachel—that’s my wife—forgive me … And do you know what he said then? Trying to chaff, of course. ‘I’ve allowed for that,’ he said.

  “At heart he meant it though, don’t you see,” said Sir Harry. “Poor dreary little snipe, they’re always the ones, aren’t they. Fancies his own image just like God did, poor little bugger.”

  Linhouse was silent for a while. With an effort, he wrenched himself away from that doorstep. “Bright, though.” Since Anders first shone in his cradle, it must have been the thing to say.

  “Oh, very. Left your government, you know—Project Ozma—to do radio-telescopic work on his own. Broadcasting directional signals, electrical impulses. Hoping to receive. That sort of thing.”

  “Ozmo,” said Linhouse dreamily. “The way they name them. As if they themselves can’t quite bel
ieve. As if they still have to personify, in order to keep sane. The way primitives do. To keep their place in nature.” Too late, he remembered that his seatmate belonged to those he called “they.”

  “Like your hurricanes here,” the old man said slyly. “What was that last one in the newspapers—Edna?”

  “They do it alphabetically.” Linhouse grinned, and suddenly stretched as high as the plane’s confines would let him. Edna, Frances, Grace, Inez—no—Helen, Inez—Janice. He felt healthier, suddenly. The thing always to keep in mind, when a woman got one down, was that there were such a lot of them. “I’m misplaced at the Center, you know. I’m only a phil—classicist. The Carthaginian heresies are about the last I’ve heard of. Or is it Carthusian?” He felt lightheaded, if not gay. “Tell me. What Anders is doing—is it tenable?”

  “Oh, quite. What a government pays money for usually is, you know. Your place just gives him more leeway. To go off on his own track. Yes, quite tenable.” He looked at his seat-mate with that benevolence Linhouse had grown used to receiving at the Center—the distant pity with which Linhouse himself two hundred years ago might have gazed at men who professed no Latin. “There’s a cosmic evolution going on all the time, you know—new stars, new galaxies. Someday an Anders will hit the right one. We’re just—out of touch.”

  “Oh God,” said Linhouse. Frivolity was the only answer. “More messages. What hath God wrought, and so on. The music of the spheres, on Princess telephones?”

  “Simple arithmetic, more likely. Plus and minus. Then a primer will be sent. We’ll learn how to decipher. We already can receive.” His voice faded as he looked minimally at Linhouse, and the window.

  “And will Anders find his mate out there?” Linhouse’s voice, if the old man had been attending, had been nasty, sick once again with its obsession. Back there, the light in the rear room of the house had been on, cast on the pines. Anders had still been on the platform, of course. But the light could have been waiting for him. She had done that for Linhouse sometimes.

  And now he himself was a pinpoint in space, receding, in a space neither nostalgic nor political—nor even cerebral. Up to now he would have said that space, if it existed anywhere supremely did so where the hope of the world also rested—in the human head. Men on doorsteps knew better. Space was only what was between people. Even better, space was its own inhabitants, was its people. It came to him now, almost happily, that he was one of those who would never be able to see his universe except through his own quotient. Even if—under something newer and more tenable yet to come—he were to be the last man to do so. He saw himself as the last classicist, raising that banner. I accept that universe, he said to himself, to her. Mine. Me perturbe.

  Alongside him, the old man had smiled at the black stuff in the window, saying something under his breath which sounded like “eld” or “of eld.” The smile was the one with which old men stared at their future from easy chairs. “We’re babes there,” he added. “And you may take that as tenable also.”

  The plane, not a jet, was now bumping a headwind, its engines noisier each time it lifted from a pocket. What he said next was drowned, but from the shape of his lips, that same first syllable. Despite the droning, he continued to shape it, like an S.O.S. to a Land-ho too far off to be of use, but still sighted. When it came clearly, in the moment when the engines cut out, it sounded to Linhouse as if he were calling. “—elled. Almost all of us think it likely. We’ll have been excelled.”

  In the sudden deadness, passengers up ahead were looking at each other uneasily; this circling, suspended silence was connected in their minds with landings at airports, and the plane must be still mid-Atlantic. To Linhouse, no pilot, but once a parachutist, this free-floating sensation always brought back the spinal release of that mystic moment in the jump when one attained terminal velocity—when gravitation itself could do no more. It had been his one relationship to that world of the upper air which the man next to him was used to probing on such outer terms as made his own a nothing—and it too had been in the realm of the personal.

  He glanced at Sir Harry, at that old face now whitening in the bridgeless gap between its first nurse and what it knew. Against politeness, Linhouse put his hand on the other’s clenched one, and held it there. Space was personal. Then the engines took hold after the drop, and once again they were riding.

  “I’ll have that pill after all.” An eighty-year-old pink returned to his cheeks, with the water Linhouse brought him.

  “Anders,” he said then. His voice was colorless. “Shan’t ask what you have against him. Shouldn’t underestimate him at his job though, I shouldn’t.” He leaned back then, closing his eyes, clicking together teeth still his own, as if to nip between them this moment of nonreticence. His eyes reopened.

  “I mind me—” he said, and now he was only a charming old man with a wandering voice and a leftover manner, “of what a very nice American general once said to me. ‘Mrs. Partridge,’ said he—that was his wife—‘Mrs. Partridge is like you, sir. Never really lets her weight down in a plane.’” He slept.

  And Linhouse was left free to return to his doorstep—hers. This moment before obsession always took over again was like those nights of his boyhood when, tucked down and ready, he waited before the red room of his sexual daydreams, half hating the curtain to rise. Then, once again her door opened to him waiting there, the motor chuffing away behind him, in the snow-still air. And once again he quavered out his sparkling first-and-only line, bubbled up out of him like the lackluster air in an all-night glass of carbonated water.

  She’d been clothed, of course; he’d had time to see that. It may have been for a moment they hung their heads over this. He’d had no time to sense whether or not the house behind her was swollen with man. The aura of sex, recent or to be, had always before seemed to him as apparent in that otherwise empty house as the echoes of a beautiful quarrel, but he’d had no time to stand there this day, listening. All his senses had been receiving the sense of what was no longer in her—vanished, he was somehow sure, not merely for him alone, but for all. For—he no longer felt himself particularly addressed. Nor would any other man feel so now—this was the surprise. For he could feel that it was not merely the case that she was lost to him only. She had managed to lose that gift which he had thought her powerless to discard.

  Sex had still been in the structure of that face well enough, in the willfully squared lip, the cabinet glow of the eye, the brow arched like a tiny lion whip over it. But could there be—for a woman or man—a willed menopause of the spirit, visible only in whatever it was the eye was now fixed on? As long as he stood still, that focus seemed to be through him and beyond him. But when he pressed forward to enter, her barring movement gave her away. Whatever she was vestal to—for that was the air of it—was in the house. It must be a person of course—whether or not this little island-craver understood it herself, her discipleship was surely, like his own, to the space that clotted about and in people. He had stood there transfixed however, in the full knowledge of all that this woman could push him to: first, obsession, and now such perversion as he’d never dreamed himself nearing, any closer to than in the worn grooves of his Greek translations. For if she were to ask him in, saying, “Stay!” with who-knows-what possibility in that subtly anthropological smile which the backroom had sometimes induced in her—he could see himself conniving. He could understand the emotions of a man willing—not eager, but willing—to undertake a ménage of three.

  In his airplane seat, Linhouse groaned. To occupy himself, he fiddled from his passport case a plastic wheel, souvenir from some other airline, which when properly spun and read provided the relative times of day between “representative cities”—i.e. airstops—everywhere. Only pick a station—Karachi, say—for in the midst of all this whirl of the wheel one must oneself be someplace—and the status of the entire rest of the world would then be clear, spooning its cereal, or deeply sleeping on the dugs of love. He spun the wheel. In Sa
n Francisco they were—, while in Bangkok—, while in Seattle—, but meanwhile, where was he? To use the wheel, one had to posit oneself somewhere.

  He glanced at the old man beside him, now perhaps roving those vast Alhambras which his inner vision was used to; what were the dreams of astronomers when not of nursegirls? In the Moorish tundra-dark at the back of, say Alpha Centauri—the only one of those sky-names Linhouse had heard of, as chief star of the nearest constellation, or perhaps it was galaxy—what were they doing there now on the peaks of their excellence, in relationship to, say—? Pick somewhere. He picked a doorstep under snow, on a Ramapo evening. Once more he waited there, dreadfully willing. Once more, from heights unscalable by him, she bent on him the traveler’s stare for the untraveled, before the door closed … And after a while, in the way of these clockwork episodes where no one ever forgot his lines whether answered or not, the door reopened and his one line came round again.

  “It’s I,” he said, or babbled, once more. “I saw the light.”

  3. Wives, Fathers, and Converts

  AT LONDON AIRPORT, THE old man was taken in charge by his Rachel, no disciple, but a wife of certain sharp, foreign strengths that were at once evident in the muted, soft-coal air. A woman with a nose, she stood tall and long-necked within full dark draperies, awaiting them at the gateway like a black flamingo, and when the two of them left, the effect was of Sir Harry being carried off—and vastly pleased at it—under one superb black wing. Linhouse, invited to dine with them the following week at their flat in Holland Park, found him much improved, looking jauntily younger, and thinking of returning to the States after all, spurred on by his wife, who had never been there.