The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride

by Hortense Calisher

  “Oh … but we didn’t—” said Lottie, and he stared at her, speaking there as if she were answering him, fat pullet-hands clasped at a chest with a depth curve in it like the beginning of a two-hearted valentine.

  Then steps sounded, and with her long, light stride Emily came in; she must have only been to the bathroom, or in the house somewhere. Though she might have been his first choice if he’d been offered one, he looked at her now with some enmity.

  “We weren’t going to—” Lottie said, a hand out toward the stove, her eyes on her sister. “Were we.”

  Emily said nothing right away; she had that power, not always an easy one for a woman to have. It gave him time to wonder if the picnic people had angered the sisters into retreat by their not buying, or was it the opposite entirely, that the sisters were too delicate with acquaintances to push their trade? But more than anything, he wondered not only why he never thought of the town’s doubletalk as much as he did here, but why he never understood it better than he did here—though from all sides. It never occurred to him, the lake air being as calm as Hiawatha here, and the quartered-oak floor of the bay jutting out so strong upon it with its cargo of housewifery—that its owners might not know themselves why they did what.

  Just then, the two men outside who knew him rapped on the glass. Weatherstripped though it was, it was no proof against their sharp summer voices.

  “Which one is it, Jim? Can’t have ’em both. Where’s your mate?”

  They kept up a chorus of this, knocking their tin mugs against the house, until a couple of the women came and got them, not without peering in themselves, though all that handwork women do makes them manage their eyes better.

  “See what you’re in for, Jim!” one of the men called out, and the other man, with a grinning wave of the hand said something too, but the lake air sopped it away. The white gloom of the afternoons in these parts came and settled, temporarily taking away the spring; always in these parts the winter comes and stands for a moment, in any season. The two girls watched it, a land-ghost they were used to, but Jim thought of canal weather, different always from the very land it traveled, the mornings blue with their own business and boat-notions, even in a freeze, or a fog. As for other ghosts, no matter what the mixture of names was around Sand Spring, none of the three saw anything but what was immediate. White people didn’t see Indian ghosts. Nor do many in the modern age see classical ones—though those three would have a chance at it.

  Lottie, at the glass, peered after the two men. “They must have been rushing the growler,” she said.

  Jim stayed mum; in addition to his inborn barge-quiet, he’d learned in France to get along by watching expressions. But Emily had already seen his, having picked up that talent right at home.

  “No,” he said, as if she’d pulled a string in him, “I don’t know what it means. Rushing the growler—what’s that?”

  “You can see he’s never lived over a stable, or near a saloon,” said Emily thoughtfully and over his head—as if she and her sister were standing in their shifts, talking him over at bedtime. Again, like last time, he had a sense of messages given and taken between her and him, if only by being withheld. She hadn’t much of a neckline. No criticism—but the differentiation was going to have to start somewhere. He had a sneaking wish that one of the sisters could have had a sign on her somewhere, such as having the name of some former girl of his who had worked out, or a string of amber beads like his mother’s. To trust entirely to luck in these matters had always seemed to him a bit dirty; it was more gentlemanly to proceed from choice.

  “Of course not,” said Lottie, equally over his head. “He grew up on a barge.”

  They often talk like this, very literal, very simple—the sugar-people, the fat ones. From which other people take it that they’re as simple inside, and what’s worse, they take it so themselves.

  Curiously enough, though he was thinking of them both in their shifts, it wasn’t Lottie he could see best, for all her marshmallow meat, but the other one. He could see her standing in hers in front of him, or even naked, thin and intense, more emotion to her than there was line, though she would have her points of it, and a little knock-kneed, like women with good legs often are. What he couldn’t quite see was whether she would be embarrassed. There was a chance she wouldn’t be. But what he could see—as clear ahead of him as that the men outside were still laughing and the sky behind them was a mackerel one—was that he would succeed with one of the sisters here. The question was—which?

  Does it seem to you that the climate intervenes less nowadays in conversations? In the old days there was more climate of course, you can be certain of that; has to be, to make them the olden days. But surely the climate came and stood of itself more in conversation than it does now; it expected to be watched—a matter of all kinds of lore from skies to a wet finger held to the wind—and it gave you time. He wetted a finger and held it up so that either girl stood to one side of it. There to the left was Lottie, waiting to be told, a ripe fruit maybe, but bunched very close to the bough. And there on the other side was Emily, in her upper lip that willful, deep trough down which a kiss might well slide against duty. Which way the wind blew was plain as his forefinger between them. In the bay window, blank now, the afternoon, special property of women such as these two could well come to be, took over. Mornings were child’s gold and the evening belonged to the married, the courting or the social. Night, where it was not for sleep, was for hawks and harried travelers, and thieves. But in towns like these, whatever their names, the afternoons were the special property of the spinster. He squinted at the two sisters along the finger. They would never get separated until they married. They would never marry until they got separate.

  “But your war-buddy,” said Lottie, “he was brought up in England.”

  He nodded, though only a woman would say it that way instead of just plain “buddy”; still, it showed interest, and as he told his mate later, she was the first to mention him. Otherwise, he could see they had no intention of telling what “rushing the growler” meant (though he could guess) or rather, they meant him to tease it out of them in more of these stretched conversations—and suddenly he had had enough of it; he had passed over that hairline divide which always hovers between what a man can take of female activity, and what—no matter how lively his motives of love or rape are—he can’t. He’d had all he could take of this fancywork that placed the heaviest burdens of meaning on the lightest nothings, especially since he saw that Emily, making one of her quiet moves that somehow always’ drew more notice than Lottie’s louder ones, was now at the great gray-helmeted stove, which must have a property that most of its kind didn’t, of holding heat without showing it. Or, were there any others of its kind?

  Now, when a house, an ordinary one by its neighborhood standards, it could be in Sand Spring or Flanders, begins to take on a special significance to a man (whether or not he can bear it), so that mere cakes become butterflies and stoves become eccentric or dear in character—and when that house has woman in it—take warning. For, in spite of all this heavy-light business, whimsy doesn’t come natural to women; most of the whimsy in the world comes out of the men. Look back on the books you were brought up on; see if I’m not right. Sure enough it was the sisters who had mentioned the stove was christened Bismarck, but who was to say what family historian or politicker had once named it? And who was it was looking at it now, thinking, as he said later, that it was looking right back at him through the grizzle-gray eyepiece of its armor like an old iron eunuch, not missing a thing or a person that came in the kitchen door?

  From inside one of its ovens, Lottie drew out another of those black cannonball pots somebody had provided this household with, the dark ages maybe. This time it was a smaller version, of a size to contain a potion, but on her setting it in front of him it only disclosed more of those damned yellow fluffs—he couldn’t get one more down him now if he was blessed for it, or even if he was to be offered o
ne of the women with it, she as nude as the fritter, both of them spitted on the devil’s toasting-fork. Outside the window, he saw that the tables were empty, the women and children scattered, most of the men of the picnic being gathered along the shoreline, strolling or in groups of jokers, and he longed for that pair who knew him to come and rescue him, with whatever guffaws. In the foreground, between him and them, on the table nearest to the window, one of their stoneware pitchers reared large, in another and a realer world. There was no barrier like a window. Mentally, he jumped through the glass—or the small Robin Goodfellow soul of him did, and landed neatly on the cold mouth-edge of the pitcher, just before it dove into what wasn’t lemonade, from what he could see of those waterside stragglers, but beer. Well—as he said to his mate later—luckily he was able to recall that there were still doors to that house, so he stood up politely enough, though he may have licked at his dry mouth a bit—and made ready to bolt.

  It was Lottie who leaned across him—to pick up one of the dainties in the pot. That double valentine she carried in front leaned with her, in fact splitting wide enough to show him, since it wasn’t a whore’s and her sister was standing right by her, that some kind of mental innocent owned it. It wasn’t this that got him.

  “Try one,” she said, and though he choked a bit, of course he knew that she was addressing the tiny eatable she held pinched between two cushiony fingertips—and wasn’t even really offering it either. In fact she was murmuring to it like to a baby.

  “Day old, you’re different,” she said. “Way I like you best.” Then her lips parted softly, so that he saw the gleam on their jello-pink insides; then she nipped the poor thing—that’s the way he thought of it—between her milk-fine teeth, and it was gone, to what pinker recesses he could only imagine—and certainly did. But just before it went down her, the tip of her tongue came out partway to meet it, nothing gross, delicate as anything, indeed not like a bodily flicker, more intelligent. But it was this that got him.

  You are all bound to think of us as a generation that didn’t scarcely smell the dark angles of closeness, fleshly closeness, much less speak of them; isn’t true of course—how do you think you all got here? Never trust what one century thinks of another, much less one generation. It was only that we didn’t speak out so much in a crowd as you do. And you seem to us like a solid row of tongues hanging out day and night for excitement, and only getting dry for it, in all that wind. We see you falsely of course—as falsely forward as you see us backward. Don’t you think I know that and so calculate my vision of us both? And when you are able to correct yours that way, what’ll you be? Old?

  Anyway, it wasn’t too much of a mistake that saw Lottie’s tongue as the liveliest part of her, and jumped to her quick show of it as to a sexual flicker more common to other parts, which was where it took him. Not that he knew yet whether or not he’d made a choice.

  For leave it to Emily, as was learned later, to take up a moment of surprise, hers or anybody else’s, and kick it further up the ladder. What she did, or he thought he saw her do, was to leap past him, through the window. Anyway, she leaned across him, just as Lottie had done, but without stopping—and without the neckline of course—and continued past him, her apron skirts in serene sail, with perhaps a bit of ankle added—a sight of some interest, though not as piercing. A next moment’s revision told him that she had merely stepped gracefully through the bay, which opened French-style—but by this time she was already back over the sill, with the white pitcher clasped to her, and a smile. And in all of this, there was no competition with Lottie, though there was certainly something, just what—he couldn’t say. She set down the pitcher firm center on the table, reached an arm behind her the way queens sit, without looking, and appeared to pick a glass from the air there—unless anyone wished to note that her tidy little rump backed against a shelf. She poured from the pitcher. He was so dry, he would have drunk chicken’s blood. It was beer.

  She lifted her chin in time to his long swig of it, then bent her head again, tucking in her smile. “I rushed the growler,” she said.

  Lottie giggled. “It means to go down to the saloon for beer,” she said. “And to bring it back in a pitcher. Or a can.”

  So there the two of them were again, in unison.

  Or maybe not. For Emily, pouring him another, spoke singly into it, so that the glass he took held her question as well. “What’s your … buddy’s name?” she said.

  Jim looked into the glass before he drank, and it was a long moment before he answered. He was feeling that tickle of terror which comes from a person seeing ahead of him into life-probabilities which nature should have kept him from seeing, and ordinarily does. As his mate and he agreed much, much later, too late to be of any use, it was like looking at a map of the future—not dead cert, but a tour you could surely take—not knowing whether to learn it hard as you could, or to screw up your eyes and run on the double away from it. For there was Lottie, her eyes bright as candy in a curved jar. And sitting at the small table he had just deserted, leaning those heavy eyebrows on her knuckles, that girl who every time he saw her he thought should have been blackhaired, not brown. And here he was, and his mate, bumbling all over the map of New York by day, but—by this other map—not far. Any of them could count up the possibilities; perhaps these two already had. He was struck with the terror of it, and the charm. Two and two—but which?—makes four.

  “My … mate?” he said. The word buddy, for the comic strips, the sob-sisters of the Stars and Stripes even, and for the town of course—never crossed the two men’s lips. “My mate’s name?” He smiled to himself, a true bachelor’s smile, for from the odd-timeness of jobs and even meditation, he and his mate spent more time alone than the dinners they had together, though when these came about, the talk and the silences matched well enough; this was what it meant, having a mate. He let the smile broaden to include anybody in the room. “We’re twin-names,” he said. “I thought you knew.”

  On the sill where she had stepped over, a feather rested, blown in from nesting maybe though it was early for that, a clean feather silk-smooth at the top, not separated anywhere, with a fluff toward the pen-tip of it, from some middle-sized bird, nothing fancy, but whose tail nobody had yet put salt on. He smiled at it too. The sisters knew of the names, his and the mate’s; there wasn’t a chance that they didn’t; in a Sand Spring, the structure of the gossip at least let one see what were impossibilities too.

  Gently he reached down and picked up the feather. He wasn’t a picker-up of pins or a sufferer from any of the nerve twitches that came in about ten years later, but to a boy grown up on a deck, the soil that was so wild and itinerant under the feet of shore boys was always precious, as well as any stray pebble and shot from it. Whereas to a boy from the coal caverns, as his mate always remarked, a clean deck to walk on would have been like silver, and the towns the mate fell in love with, one after the other, were always clean. The two of them were opposites then, not unlike a pair of sisters. And this was enough of parallels, at least for now.

  He had no hat on, ever, so just before he bolted, he put the feather behind his ear. “Maybe that’s why we came to be buddies,” he said from outside, leaning back into the bay again. “My mate’s name is Jim.”

  II

  ORAL DESCRIPTION CANNOT TOUCH that spring—and not because it is gone—or that there will be others just like. Washlines left out on its evenings had a mystery, and even to the well-sighted, an arbor in a garden sank back in the twilight like an Italian arch. Projects were touched by it, or people were moved to them. Even the plans for a Ford agency were affected, the way a plain street, with plain maples and horse-chestnuts, is one morning littered with the wildest yellows and greens. And when the householder has swept these away, then down come the whites. It was a time of clearness and short, lovable mysteries, when a man may well be afflicted with a keenness of sight for things he has always known aren’t there.

  The mate had found his town. At
least—after days and days of his circuit-riding under those wind-glassy skies, toward horizons which were one moment riotous and the next second as neat and sharp as a pruned hedge—when he burst in on the dinner-chops with a statement to that effect, it was clear that the time had come; he had had to find it, just as much as if a giant traffic-hand had come down in the road before him, holding up a sign that said STOP THEN GO. As he said to Jim, if they weren’t to let themselves be chosen, they must choose. In this town that had found him, there was a house to which was already attached the means for just such a business, agency and garage, as they wanted, also a half-acre of frontage for expansion, also—unimportantly of course—an owner named Skinner. Skinner didn’t particularly want to sell; in fact, said the mate, the idea had not yet occurred to the man, but they were going to get that setup from him—in an honest way of course—if they had to hire three wolves to blow him out of there.

  “Three pigs, it was,” said Jim. “That story is the other way round. I mean—one wolf. Not even two.” But he had to laugh. The two of them looked at each other, grinning. They weren’t looking in any reflecting mirror. Jim couldn’t help knowing he was handsome, a tall, rolling-gaited man with a fresh complexion, whose pink cheeks annoyed him with their youth. The mate was shorter, though not as short as he looked, with a chiropractor’s neck and arms, or a pick-axer’s, and not bad-featured in a pugnacious way, but swart enough to keep him always at the razor, and not above a sneak of talcum on the jowls. Like many from the mines, he had a fine voice, the speaking one too—and he couldn’t help knowing from the women, beginning with his own mother, that he had a smile. And where Jim’s head was close-shaven enough for a phrenologist, so that in some lights his blond hair seemed white, the mate’s black crop shot forward in a forelock which made him look as if he was being pulled along by it—even to himself. Looking back at them both, they were a nice pair, part of the grinning being that they knew it. Slice either of them, and you’d get only honesty, tempered with need but not yet burnt by it.