Cardinal Numbers: Stories

by Hob Broun

  The flock was long gone over the hill. Silver bubbles broke behind the weir. Woodbine and dog rose neatly shared a single trellis. The Virgin made a steamed pudding of blood and offal of which, until she coaxed his hand around a spoon, Zoltan took no more than he could admire with his eyes. She watched the motion of his burly stalwart arms. This was a different kind of grace. Not like her salad greens planted as radiant spokes from the wellhead, or like afternoon sun on the flank of a pail. Better. Not so definite. Zoltan explained that he’d been sent out with the animals just as soon as he could walk. Seasons might follow seasons without his seeing anyone, and so, not even wanting to, he had taught himself to sing. Lenore described without a blush what she did each night to fall asleep. They wanted to tell each other everything, or at least as much as could be remembered.

  Ilse had come far to reach the cave mouth, far enough that her naked legs were all cut up with nettles and sedge grass. The Leper vibrated. She asked for his invitation in such a sweet, warming voice. He said, do come in and sit right down there, all with the clapper of his bell. The Concubine did not seem the least bit nervous or shy. Cassius thought, well, I could be more than a creature, but he was still wary of a trick. She picked stones out of the packed clay floor and rhymed them. He presented her a birdwing fan. Side by side, their legs were a single description. I envy you, she said. Aging is merciless in my profession. The Leper was a young man. He was not surprised when she took down her beautiful hair and with it washed him up and down.

  Effigies dangled from the highest turret. Cactus blocked the pantry entrance and garbage crammed the bake ovens full. Whelping went on under slogans written in candle smoke on the walls of the ransacked library, and the old desert men traded puppies. There was an intricate system of demerits. Turtle eggs appeared at every dungeon level. The nights got longer. Loyalties went untested. Life was cheap.

  With grunts and bewilderment, the people massed to say contrition.

  Rodolfo said go in peace.

  THE DEEP BLUE EASTERN SKY

  OLIVIA FROM HER BEDROOM window watched the honeyed light of October sunset move slowly up the street of brownstones to cast long shadows and soften contours. It turned leafless trees to mahogany, flared richly on the windows opposite, alluding to darkwood interiors, a warm sepia comfort of roast meat and carved furniture. Olivia brushed out her long, light-brown hair. Night fell and the city filled itself with rhetoric.

  FROM the parlor of the house on West Seneca Street in Buffalo she had looked out at junipers in silhouette like hearse plumes. There you always knew you were at the edge of wilderness. Factory soot came down with the snow. The immigrant shanties were just waiting for a match. Her father saw, practically, that he would never grow beyond the ceramic insulator business. He gave Olivia two years at Rose Hill College for Women, and then sent her to Aunt Catherine in New York.

  “Make a good marriage,” he advised. “Better yourself. Move up.”

  Aunt Catherine had twice married well, first to an importer of wines and spirits, and then to a delicate scion. Her widow’s weeds were of the finest nankeen. She took her niece to the St. Regis for afternoon tea and was seated promptly. She showed how to use the mirror-lined entry of the Waldorf-Astoria’s Palm Garden to maximum effect without at the same time being seen to loiter. Discretion meant, equally, that custard be concealed under leaves of pastry and that the string quartet perform behind a lacquered screen.

  “The elegancies of life,” Aunt Catherine explained, “when indulged to excess, cease to be elegant.”

  Restraint was the method of gentility. No matter that Catherine thirty years ago would squat at the edge of a trash fire to pull hot mickeys out and pass them, split and steaming, to her brothers: The distance traveled might tempt one to put on airs, but you resisted, you smoothed over, and that was precisely the point.

  The upper levels of the city were vigilant, alert to every signal. Catherine’s house, at its demure, almost reticent address west of Madison Avenue, was furnished modestly, for comfort rather than display. To maintain it required but one in service: Delia from County Cork, who had been with Mrs. Howe since 1896. Sometimes, when Mum entertained, Delia brought Rose, her sister, to assist, but it was never more than once a week, there were never more than eight at table, and the dishes were simple: consommé, poached fish, an apple tart. Catherine, in her choice of guests, did not favor those who were “interesting,” who would “make an impression.” She set her store in the even temperament, the conversational style that seldom surprised. After the meal there might be lotto or whist (but never charades) or someone might play the piano, Strauss, for example, perhaps Victor Herbert, and by ten o’clock at the latest, one had retired.

  Olivia grew restless. Where were the young men, her introductions?

  “It doesn’t pay to be eager,” Aunt Catherine admonished her niece. “Don’t rush.”

  “Well, certainly, I wouldn’t want to reflect ill on you.”

  Olivia sulked. She had expected something else. Restriction went with Buffalo, where the chophouses and oyster saloons were exclusively for men, where a woman with a cigarette disturbed the peace. But if New York society meant more dreary constraint—rules of speech and dress and deportment—then what difference did it make to have come?

  SHE wrote in her diary: “I cannot please everyone, and so I shall please no one.” Then she let the nib rest on the paper so it would make a bloom of ink. Delia brought supper on a tray, macaroni in broth and an unbuttered roll.

  “I made it so mild,” she explained, “as you’re still feeling poorly.”

  “I’ll go to bed presently, Delia. I shan’t need you further.”

  With the precision of some kind of woodcraft, Olivia shredded the roll, watched the shreds swell with broth and turn gray. Then she covered the tray with the blue linen towel and placed it outside the door.

  She wrote: “Were I to die tomorrow, there would hardly be a dozen words to say about my life. This might be sad, but not, I think, so terrible.”

  AUNT Catherine agreed that there was no breach of good conduct in attending unescorted the Cooper Union summer lecture series, held on Wednesday and Friday afternoons. Ladies of refinement gathered in the hall to learn, or at least to hear, about formal gardens or Chinese porcelain or the migration of butterflies, and Olivia could come to no harm in their covey. Only now she was faced with her artless inabilities, her deficient taste. Buffalo, of course, had ill served her formation, that railhead city with its beer-pail taverns and bargemen’s dance halls, its mills and waterworks and foundries, its pride in noise, raw power, machinery. Should she tell those fine ladies she saw twice a week that the Indian name of Lake Erie meant “Walk-in-the-Water”? That once, at the Pan-American Exposition, she had seen Elena Granelli sing an aria from La Traviata? Well, it was better to say nothing at all. It was better not to be quaint.

  At the end of July, Dr. Mylon Weems gave a talk on his journey by camel from Damascus to Tabriz. Arriving late, Olivia took a seat in the back row next to a clean-shaven man who made rapid notes on a pad. He smiled everywhere—at the high ceiling, at his shorthand, at the loquacious Weems, at her. And then afterward, finding her under the lobby skylight, he quite gracefully, by way of explaining his scribbles, presented his card.

  WARD CHASE, ESQ.

  Reporter & Columnist

  for

  TOWN TOPICS

  “I’m afraid you came to the wrong place for an interesting story,” she said.

  “My job often calls for invention.”

  “I don’t know your publication,” she said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t.”

  Chase liked her blush very much, and the way she twisted the black strap of her purse around her white fingers.

  There he was the following Wednesday (“Lives of the Avignon Popes”), but only, he said, as a disinterested spectator. When on Friday there was a postponement, Olivia circled the block three times, only to feign having newly arrived when at last she found him on the wid
e granite steps, expectantly poised in the sun.

  Chase said: “I see how you are disappointed, but it’s such a lovely afternoon. Might I walk a little way with you? Perhaps to some café serving ice cream?”

  The pavement felt like glass. Olivia could scarcely breathe.

  But such drama, she discovered, did not have long to run. It was soon enough clear that Chase valued her innocence as a mentor, and not as a suitor.

  “You interest me,” he assured her. “You interest me no end.”

  She had never been flattered so before.

  “In a thoughtful way. Usefully. As an equal, if you see.”

  Olivia brought her hands up onto the marble counter, which was cool and slick, and said she did not know what to say.

  “Just let me open your eyes,” he said. “It’s what I do best.”

  And Olivia thought: If I hope seriously to attract a suitor, I first will need the guidance of a mentor.

  She blushed again. “May I have another lemonade?”

  Chase was a reporter. He made explicit the social dichotomy which Catherine but fussily implied—that between Sherry’s on Fifth Avenue and Rector’s on Broadway, between the carriage trade and the sporting crowd, between port and champagne, sole and lobster thermidor, reticence and ostentation, restraint and indulgence, careful decorum and opulent excess.

  “What may be deplored cannot be ignored,” he said. “The drawing rooms and clubs are obsolete.”

  They were riding in a hackney coach past Bustanoby’s, the Tivoli Palace theater, Murray’s Roman Gardens.

  “The real, immense drama of this continent is just beginning now,” he said. “And this is where you’ll find the players, not in some complacent enclave of old money.”

  They passed the Broadway Follies, Heffernan’s, the new Knickerbocker Hotel.

  “Blue blood ebbs,” he said, “and red blood rushes in.”

  THE fragrance of pomander balls, of lilac and clove, clung to Olivia’s nightdress. Avoiding the oval washstand mirror, she plaited her hair into one long braid. She thought of her mother, wasted with confusion, smelling of thirst. “Seclusion” was a word that went with the long blur of Buffalo winter. And poor mother, in her last season, would eat nothing but sliced raw potato with salt, chanting, “Tubers and roots, tubers and roots.” Olivia arranged herself under the bedding, knees bent to the wall, elbows pressing in. She heard clanking in the street, mutters, a hurt cat. And then everything was so still it felt as if she could blow out the windowpanes.

  IN September, with no more afternoon lectures to pretend, Olivia announced her enrollment in an evening sculpture class.

  “I need to broaden myself,” she said to Aunt Catherine. “Don’t you agree?”

  “Let me find you a private instructor.”

  “But this way I can be with other girls.”

  “Your father has placed you in my care, Olivia. I appreciate that trust, and so should you.”

  “But I’m fine, really I am.”

  “Let me suggest …”

  “And I’ve had my twenty-first birthday.”

  Olivia finally was able to dine where before she had only had lunch. The lavish interiors came to life. The colonnades and satin hangings, the gilt panels depicting imperial Rome, the crystal chandeliers and polished oak made more than a background; they dictated terms, defined possibility. These things were meant to stimulate, rather than intimidate. It was an open field, instead of an enclosure. You did not have to choose your words; shyness was unnecessary. The audience had reached the stage and it was playtime.

  She watched Kreutzer, the nickel king, swallow two dozen oysters from a beer stein while a Florodora Girl tickled his ear; she found out that Lady Eve Sidwich used lemon juice to make her hair blond, and the one was no more enlarged at this rate than the other was diminished.

  “The human scale,” Chase said, “can be played on a piano.”

  She learned to distinguish timbales from croustades, palmettes from mousselines on the hors d’oeuvre cart, and how to joke with Swiss waiters.

  Chase said: “You see? There’s nothing to it.”

  She saw boxers and magnates together, tunesmiths, philanthropists, ward heelers, dowagers, acrobats, rug dealers, French farce ingenues with their white arms bared—and the columnist Chase, collector of tidbits, knew all their names.

  “I wish I were a painter,” Olivia said.

  “No, no. The photograph is here. Oils and canvas are obsolete.”

  She tasted sorrel bisque and terrapin steak and pheasant breast, all for the first time. Between each course there came sherbet in white, or in mint or berry pink. And overhead, across a ceiling painted as the deep blue Eastern sky, electric stars were twinkling.

  Aunt Catherine Howe had been waiting for at least an hour. Her mouth was tense and white at the corners.

  “A friend has reached me by telephone. I know where you have been.”

  Olivia groped, fell back on the sofa.

  “No more lies,” hissed her aunt.

  Coal was banked in the grate, and the room suffused with gaseous orange light.

  “I’ve done nothing ignoble.” Olivia opened her hands. “Nothing malicious.”

  “It isn’t the doing but the seeming.” Aunt Catherine turned her back. “And your indecency is plain.”

  “But it’s friendship. The best sort of friendship, really. He only wants to guide me. To show me how things work.”

  “All the time I spent on your instruction, and you haven’t understood a thing. We share that blame together, I suppose.”

  The room was too warm, too closed. And Catherine, who in her angular and calculated way had once seemed beautiful, now was an outgrowth of shadows.

  “You’ll have to go back north, of course,” she said. “But why?”

  “Because as anyone can see, my dear, it’s just where you belong.”

  IN her dream, the parlor on Seneca Street was lined with purple velvet, and the lamp wicks were turned up all the way. The table was set for a supper party, and the guests all were millionaire dogs.

  The elkhound said, “The pictures are more degrading than the dime novel because they represent real flesh and impart their low morality directly to the senses.”

  The schnauzer puffed his cigar. “All these nickelodeon merchants are Jews.”

  The “Mother” character, in fact wearing someone else’s face, counted out pickles.

  It did not seem important to know what the weather outside was like. The falls would still be making electricity and the parlor on West Seneca would go on smelling of kerosene.

  Their guests were not up to part singing. And when they caught on to the fruit pyramid, that it was made of wax, they turned ugly.

  Her dream was a globe, and revolving inside it, in black type on Western Union yellow tape, was a headline: LIFE AS PREY.

  Olivia woke gradually, in stages. She folded one ear over, feeling its cold edge. She recognized dawn without opening her eyes. “Paling in the east” came so insistently into her head, like ticking, that she had to get up and get away.

  She found Delia with her head tipped back against the pantry door, the sash of her wool plaid wrapper loose and brushing the floor. Delia said she couldn’t sleep for worrying about Rose and this boy she had fallen for head over heels. A boy from the docks, a scoundrel. She watched Delia rinse the pot with hot water and then put into it three measures of black tea from the square tin. She watched the stream from the kettle, and steam rebounding out the mouth of the white pot. Fine cracks in the glaze made it like the rolled shell of a hard-boiled egg. The neck and the base of the pot were edged in blue. The handle curved nicely. Delia said that at home in the hard times they boiled burnt crusts. She took down cups and Delia poured. The cream was just on the turn; it spread out in tiny ropes. Delia drizzled treacle off a thin souvenir spoon.

  She said: “My father needs me to come back. He can’t seem to get by on his own.”

  Delia blew across her cup. L
ight had come up to the window, and there was fog.

  She said: “It would be wrong to look on it as duty.”

  In the beading of the sideboard edge were hardened drops of varnish.

  And she said: “The ties that bind.”

  SOUTH SEA SENSATIONS

  DUMAS WAS FOND OF the Great Northwest, white mist and dark coniferous trees. He said it reminded him of the Apennines, where in fact he had never been. Lady Elaine cautioned him on his driving.

  “If we die, we die together.”

  “That sounds lovely,” she said. “But I’d like to be able to sit straight through the corners.”

  Looking at him in his coconut straw hat, the black preacher suit he said could go ten thousand miles without showing dirt, she thought: I’ll never leave, even if my heart would change.

  When he pulled in at a stand selling myrtlewood salad bowls, it was to offer the kid advice on how to improve his attraction. She disliked little Dumas habits (fancy jokes, too much pomade on his hair), but what she liked about him had size: that he was fair, never overused an advantage, didn’t feed on contempt for suckers and rubes. He was a gentleman. He could charm a bird right out of its cage, as she must have told him a thousand times.