The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride

by Hortense Calisher

  I regarded it, but was glad to feel full and strong in me the power to delay—“No, not yet. No travesty.”

  As for statutory nudity, it had no charms for me at this point, indeed the reverse; exhibitionism was at all costs to be avoided. Teeth were excellent and personal, eyes never in need of glasses—the clear green eyes born to lucky people of my complexion.

  Just then the stewardess knocked, and I watched my hands seek themselves.

  “Quite all right!” I managed to say—this time, God save us, with some proper daring in it, and a minute later I was taking off my rings.

  To my left there was a ventilator, whose exhaust slot must somewhere reach the outer air. The shuttles don’t fly very high, not nearly so high as the pan-orient jets on which I suppose I started my hunt for brahma in the first place. Crouched there, in my palm the little hoard to which I had added lapel-pin and pearls, I waited until we were well away from water, over a tiny settlement where I might predict, if not see, spire and gardens, a railway station too perhaps; then with a smile, imagining on whom that shower of peculiar manna, sent them down.

  Back in my seat again, I had certain canny misgivings, the tiresome ones of a woman with too many heads. How small did a diamond have to be not to burst its facets from such a height, how light a pearl, not to smash its baroque? I had retained my watch, and I had an hour to consider the lost rings of all those who had loved me, plus that most durable of all, the invisible wedding-band I had never let myself receive.

  What of love, then, for such a woman, for any—for anybody, what of love?

  My mother’s mother’s snakeband ring with emerald eye and my father’s father’s onyx seal I had worn joined on one finger, cabalistic bow to that minor hitch in the vortex of heredity which had caused me. Dear supervisors all, should they at the agency ever know the circumstances (and I might in time send them the case-record)—I could hear the descant that would follow, in the ballet of headshakes that always formalizes psychological gossip.

  … (Would it have been better if the departed’s trauma had come to her through some normal community way such as radiation sickness, instead of having been visited upon her via the single, traumatic shock of birth? … What hopes could be held for a girl whose own sibling would one day ask her, eighteen years to her sixteen: “Haven’t you begun to … lose any of it … all over, yet?” … And who then would add in a whisper, turning away a face already shorn of brow and lash, a head already ennobled to its own bone—“What about … down there?”) …

  Ah, we had our ribald humors, my brother and I, but that day wasn’t one of them, not when I had to answer him—for I was never to be as bad a case as he, and still have, though so faintly auburn, eyelashes—when I had to answer him … “No.” And on the record, I had a word of advice for them, my friends at the agency. Don’t be so quick to asperse birth, the plain fact of our beginnings. And don’t believe anything but the facts:

  Subject (who is I) and sibling born to elderly well-to-do émigré parents. Perhaps we were menopausal babies conceived after danger of such was deemed over, since both my parents, as distant cousins from same ancestral town, were well aware of hereditary traces.

  Both deceased during infancy of children, who were brought up under amiable legal guardianship, to best U.S. standards of oranges, lambchops, orthidonture and quarterly anti-pronation shoe-fittings.

  From extant pics of parents aetat 35, my father’s hairline may have been retouched, my mother’s even more susceptible to illusion.

  Hereditary condition well documented in European medical annals (though not endemic there) via easier observation in small, genealogically related loci, such as the German, North Sea town where my grandparents still reside.

  May or may not be Mendelian recessive, thought by some to be albino-related, no official name. (Not alopecia areata, which is temporary.)

  Males invariably lose facial as well as scalp-hair, fem, data less procurable though subject recalls, from youthful visit to grandparents, family portraits ranging back to the medieval, in which coif-line was shown almost as far back behind ears as a bridle.

  Classically appears at onset of puberty, when natal hair of a characteristically silky dark-red gives way to carroty coarse growth which in turn disappears partially or in toto, usually by time of patient’s majority. N.B. from subject: We were classical.

  And in fancy I could read, over their shoulders, my evaluation (after group study of further history up to March 21st):

  Subject, aided by economic status and first-class appliances, has made excellent progress in resolving toward conventional norms the original handicap of birth. Irredentist impulses not to be taken too seriously. As cosmetic use of wigs gains community-wise, subject’s sense of unity with the general population will increase. Subject’s quasi-humorous diagnosis of her sublimation to be taken as a real testimonial to our profession, fine objectivity from one of the solidest gals in the office.

  And down in the corner of our biannual personality sheet I could even read a handwritten scrawl from my immediate supervisor: Mildly bizarre thoughts a good sign of nonrigidity. Do I detect a sign that my quiet one may be getting espoused? Hats off!

  With all the abstract sociological kindness going about the world, it’s hard to get a true story listened to on the level, even by oneself. What could I say, for instance, of my brother, become that perennial movie star whose trademark is hairlessness (in his case not however like old Von Stroheim, a villain, or a horror man like Peter Lorre, but cast as a straight romantic hero). Rumor has it that he is forbidden by contract to show so much as a single hair, some saying that he complies only by means of terrifying sessions of electrolysis, others that he keeps a young valet-of-the-tweezers ever by his side. When first out in the world, we used to envy one another, I him for his public baldness, he me for my disguise. Now we no longer saw each other, having usefully agreed, like enemies in entente, that we no longer had anything in common. Like many ties of love, ours was too painful to eat dinner with.

  And so—I looked at my watch—I was back to love again, only twenty minutes out of Logan. And I had two more rings to dispose of in memory.

  On the fourth finger of my right hand, where unmarried women often wear a parental diamond or an engagement ring that hasn’t worked out, I had worn, until yesterday, a small blue-white Tiffany in platinum, of the size given virgins by young men on modest budgets, as indeed it had been, by the one all hands would have said I should have married, the medical student, childhood friend and sole remaining witness of all my real changes, who had followed me East—and who had declined to make good his promise of marriage if I aborted the child he had already engendered.

  “We could adopt some,” I said.

  “No,” he replied, “I want our own first, if you don’t mind. I’m going to become a gynecologist.”

  And so he has done, fat as a woodchuck too, and full of Christmas cards. But he was thin then, and staunch, and what he said sounded unanswerable. I wanted to answer it, at the time still believing that the apogee of life would be to have one secret witness forever at my side.

  “But I mind!” I said. “I should mind forever. For them.” He shrugged, and I caught him looking with distaste at the wig I had just bought—the first one.

  “Children can learn to be bald,” he said.

  I was wounded beyond reason by this coldness.

  “Already we differ,” I said. “Not mine.”

  I handed him his ring back, strange gesture across the child I still carried (and stranger miscalculation?) for I understood his intent now—to bring me with it, out into the open.

  “Keep the ring at least,” he said. “Keep it until you marry. Until you do, girl with your looks and plans might find it useful. You can always tell them I died in a war.”

  Though I never did, it’s true that both colleagues and lovers have sometimes murmured to me that one should not cling to the past, so perhaps his ring had been part agent of what he would never
have done himself—helped me to hide the present that clung to me.

  When I tried again to return the ring, he grasped me, shook me, even repeated his cold remark.

  “Ours could learn!” he added, shouting. He stood there, hirsute and flawless, as his cards show him yet, the rufous glints all over the backs of his hands, not a spot of baldness in him anywhere, far as I could see, either of the body or the heart. And he could say that to me. It was a beautiful declaration, and I have never yet had another like it. But I knew at that moment why I was right to refuse him. To be acceptable, such declarations must come to the bald—from the bald.

  And so we arrive at the man from 128, if not for long.

  In the meantime, I had had my further experiences in the dark, not many, and never with any candidate to whom I could see myself making any such avowal—despite which I sometimes found myself in serious need to repress the more ordinary part of my inheritance: almost any woman’s urge to avow. So I gave up such doings, and returned to the midnight safety of my old alleyways, to slouching in cool raincoats at the hot bedsides of their sick, sitting up at the wakes of their hardy sorrows, or kicking up the orange dawn in the circle of such derelicts as were too far gone to wonder at the presence of a lady at that fire. Weekends I spent emotion thriftily in the colorful melancholia of the museums and the Sunday exhibitions, quietly enjoying the arts and gems that were the property of the nation.

  For this conduct, the gods duly corrected my position in life as they saw fit, from the rear. I received a salary increase, my largest block of securities held a stock-split, and there fell due a trust fund for which I had done nothing but get older. In one of the galleries I was in the habit of visiting, there was a small picture, not for sale, a Picasso of a certain period of his so in sympathy with my life that when I stood in front of it my flesh crept toward it as if it were my ikon. I went to see it again, the money shining in my head, making my brain all one large emerald. And there I met him, or rather, his rich voice, coming round a plush, impressionist corner. I fell in love with what he was saying before I saw him.

  It was one of the tender, warm April afternoons that climb like vines from the most ruined steppes of a metropolis; rays of Central Park were falling all over the city and amoretti flew the wind. Any woman with verve in her veins was carrying her beauty like a cup. From my apartment, modestly high in Tudor City, I had seen that, and I was wearing my mother’s tourmalines, which are of a peculiar burnt color, like cream glazed by the cook’s salamander, plus a silk shift, sweater and sandals of the same, all designed to cast their tans against a skin that could not tan, and at the last minute I had put on the wig that was my bravest, most costly, favorite, if I could be said to have favorites among them, and unworn since I had last dined with my brother—a wig that was as flat to the face as a wig dares to be, and of a plain dark red. It was a wig that would not suffer a hat, nor would I have asked it to, but had anchored it instead with the best of many long-tried substances, pins not being possible for me. (If I mention these frail beauties, sands of makeshift, it is to remind myself, via all I have abjured, of the sterner exquisite I am to become.)

  Anyway, as always happens in these fateful meetings, I got there just in time and properly rigged for it, in time to hear him say to the dealer, in a voice rich enough to buy Picassos, which is what he was there for: “Ah, come on, Knoller, you have me over the barrel, if you’ll part with it. Kept thinking of it all the time I was away. Most of all in Bangkok. Monks with shaved heads, widows too, often just the common people. Modern Giacometti, sculpture without curls. I tell you, you’ve never seen the glory of the unadorned human head before. Of course, set against all that incredible gilt temple-patchwork, maybe any passing human skull is a Buddha. And it may be the Asiatic head only or the African—or that you get accustomed to seeing it in both sexes. I certainly never think of it in Rome.”

  There was a muffled remark from the dealer, and another rich, amused reply. “No, I guess the Western head can’t compete, not even the ones bared by nature.” And then, “Well, Knoller? What do you say?”

  He was standing, as I knew he must be, in front of my picture.

  “Here’s your rival,” Knoller said to him.

  I saw the eyes change, lit as if passed over by the salamander. He smiled at me, a tall, powerfully set man not yet fifty and only partially tonsured by time, lean cheeks with a center vertical like a knifed dimple, the strong nostrils that were said to go with large organs of generation, a mouth with a firm ripple. In the end, it was only the dealer who held out.

  An affair begun in that season, with the trees just on the point of flower, seems to keep pace with them, with the apple, the cherry and the peach. There was much that was invisible on both sides. His household, which I saw no point in entering, was being supervised for him by his French mother-in-law: I saw the dead wife’s picture, her gamine haircut and tiny phiz, like a stableboy in hornrims, and the two children, all three astride horses and wearing seedy clothes that did no justice to their mounts. They could live the preciously simple life that such money can, the kind that if one can forget what manages it at the top and sustains it from below, can sometimes even have a haystack whiff of the vagrant—and can make love in its own meadows. I was not seduced by its attractions, merely by him. When it rained, we stayed in the carriage-house, a mile from the main drive. I never stayed overnight, being always on the way to Boston, and when he came to the city we met, afternoons only, in the flat of one of his friends.

  It was outdoors that I was most daring, though the wig I wore was never again the red one. I got him to tell me, over and over, about the monks in Bangkok, and the widows. His own hairline, receded to well back of the crown and worn in a rough tuft there, I persuaded him to have cropped close by the barber, as many men do. His cranial bump was large, and the effect not very fine, but in certain half-lights, country dusks, I thought I could feel a kinship, surely in my case not perverse. He began even to think of publishing, under the auspices of the museum he served without fee as curator, a monograph on the nude head in ancient entablature (and life, of course); there was even, he said, a question of such as having existed beneath the elaborate Etruscan …

  “Ah well,” he said, breaking off and looking down at me fondly, “there’s always some question or other about the Etruscans. And why bother your pretty head—” Like any man, he thought that I was developing a flattering interest in his interests, and I, trembling on the verge of delight, thought that he—God help us, and all pairs of lovers. And, very gently indeed, the gods corrected us, from the rear.

  I raised myself on elbow, in the lush grasses on which the first pinched windfalls were lying. “I’ll shave my head for you!” I said. “I’ll—” Pride shook me for what I could show him, for what I could at last bare to that perceptive eye. “Then you can see what a Western head … I mean it.”

  His smile showed no incredulity at the depth of my devotion. Then he enfolded me. There flashed before me a sudden picture of the stripling wife, of those buried tastes which men, and women too, were said to have without knowing, but I blotted it out, blaming my over-educated inner eye. Yet I knew that for both of us it was the moment of the not impossible lover—or the moment just before.

  “No,” he said afterwards. “I’ll be the bald one. That’s still a man’s job.” He reached for me again. “Silly curls. I like them.” He rumpled them, paterfamilias.

  I gazed up at him from my end-of-summer headpiece, so artfully stained with sun-and-saltwater, and made myself remember, as I had been taught, that even in the love-duets of clods, the roles to be played are said to be endless. And then he asked to marry me. And then I invited him home.

  He came down the next week, the first of my vacation, and, if we wished it to be, of our honeymoon. Despite this, I had done no extra shopping, having told myself that all honeymoons were—or should be—a mere matter of unveiling. I had asked him to meet me at a downtown theatre-club where an African singer he had nev
er heard was appearing, and before I left my rooms I sat for a moment in their center, shivering in my décolletage, though it was warm September.

  The apartment was no nondescript; I had done better than that. It was the proper guise for a professional woman of some means and culture, created for the pleased surveillance of my colleagues, with here and there a few endearing—and safe—touches of family. Before I left, I locked the wig closet which had been put in off the dressing room, feeling as always, as I did so, that in a way I enclosed a seraglio of my selves.

  They are very human-looking: wigblocks. At least, mine were. And I had no intention of shocking my dear love by the sudden grotesque of such a lineup, or of in any way taking out on him whatever of the harsher facts had been dealt me. No, I only meant to break to him, by stages, what I already thought he suspected and was waiting for—as courtiers in the old tales waited, in the dark of the robing room or the bedhangings, for the queen’s maid to become the queen.

  As I passed a bookshelf, I took up a little Parian bust, of some bewigged English jurist, picked up not long before in a junkshop, only because, aside from its flowing eighteenth-century curls, it looked for all the world like him. I smoothed its marble profile. By gentle stages, stages even of delight, I should lead us both, I to my avowal, and he—to his Etruscan.

  Before I left, I paused to look out of my high window. The night sky stood at perfect cloud. Yet I shivered. Perhaps love makes mad only the completely normal.

  In the club, he stood up as I approached his table. I saw his look of puzzlement; I had expected it. “You’ve changed your hair again!” he said. “No, that’s not it, you’ve had it done the way you were wearing it when we first … ah, that was sweet of you. I always thought too, that it was redder that day, but I could never be—”