The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride

by Hortense Calisher

  Truly there must have been few like her, for she only laughed, as he told the mate later. “It’s because we daren’t,” she said. But a few more days later, speaking of her sister and the mate—which Jim didn’t mention to the mate, though Lottie may have—she said, “I don’t want to think about them; that’s who I don’t want to think of. I’ve told Lottie that!” Jim was left to wonder why, and to chalk it up to engagements. When he asked her, she said only again “I’d rather not think about them at all.”

  Despite which, the wedding was a double one. All the considerations which throng at such times had forced it. Counting in Oriskany, there were three houses to be disposed of, and two jobs. Here money came into it, with a bouncing surprise. The Pardees were indeed fairly poor now, but by the cleverly twisted will of a father not inclined to trust too long in horses or women, as soon as his daughters married men acceptable to the will’s trusteeship—and who would doubt that Jim and the mate would be—each girl would be ten thousand dollars rich. It was a will which mightn’t have held water if tried in court elsewhere—even as drawn by Sand Spring’s most prominent lawyer, whose partner was a trustee—but recall that in those small days, the town was the court. After that disclosure, came the effects, each to each, of that much money. Oriskany, the mate’s choice just as the idea of a garage had been, clearly fell to the mate; with Lottie’s dowry he could buy it on his own—and begin. Jim liked the Pardee house well enough, the more so for its being on water; he and Emily would take it, with fair compensation to the other two of course, and think awhile whether to sell, or stay and somehow make use of the land. The mate, because of the needs of his house, would have to give up his surveyor’s job; for the same reason, Jim would keep his factory one. The mate would need the car. All four would work together beforehand to put both houses in order, tidy for destiny—and dynasty. Jim’s house, the house of the two men’s bachelordom, would be sold.

  When the news of all this came out, the two men found that they had in all ways disposed of themselves just as the town had estimated and favored they would—and that the town was now ready to make them part of the town. People of the type who always offer themselves to such processes soon did so, the lawyer’s wife insisting on the use of her salon for the two weddings—both providentially without family to crowd it—while a few miles away, the rector where Jim as a barge child had attended his longest spell of Sunday school, now held out his church. Both offers were accepted, for two-thirty in the afternoon and four-thirty respectively; if it was to be a round-robin affair, hadn’t it been so from the beginning?

  The night before the wedding, the mate took the car and went off by himself. Just before he left, he stood in the archway of the dining room, looking at Jim, who was at the table, picking over old correspondence he wasn’t planning to take with him. The mate stared, until Jim looked up, inquiring. At this, the mate shook himself all over, as if out of sleep. “No,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to.” Then he went out. Jim must have been asleep when the mate came in, and slept on so late the next morning that the mate, up bright and early nevertheless, had to wake him—or else perhaps the mate never went to bed at all.

  On one of the rare, glorious afternoons then, which October in that region sometimes trails on into early November, the four participants assembled, attended by divers hats and feathers and waistcoats; among them, who should be there but the Skinners from Oriskany, the two veterans from Jim’s factory and the mate’s boss and apprentices, the banker, though without his wife who was too grand for it, and the librarian?—when one gets down to it, relations can always be found, on pre-winter Sunday afternoons, even eager to be. Their names and faces are darkness now, though the watch chains glow, the feathers still wave. Of the four principals, Emily was to be Lottie’s bridesmaid, then Lottie, as the first bride, would serve as her matron of honor; each of the two grooms, serving as each other’s best man, guarded in a pocket his friend’s marriage-ring. There were no other attendants. Neither bride was to be formally dressed. The lawyer was to officiate at the first wedding in his own parlor; he was also a judge. Since it was a civil ceremony, no one gave the bride away, but the lawyer’s wife came forward from the kitchen where she had been helping the maid with what was still called the “collation,” on the way doffing her apron and putting on a hat and a pair of gloves. And now we are privileged to set aside the bare facts of forty years ago, and stare.

  Lottie’s dress, it can now be seen, was one step too pink, as if she had tried to go beyond the candy-pink which was always so becoming to her, and had stretched too far, toward blood. It was hot in the lawyer’s high-ceilinged room with fireplace and furnace grate both running, and as the plump do, she sweated. The sweat was dainty enough, smelling of Sunday and fresh cotton knickers, but as the marriage service wore on between the four standing so close, the dark crescents under the bride’s arms were the serum-pink of separated blood, and the smell of the new satin made a man think of rutting. She remained dainty yet, with her thoughts falling back into dells of sweetness, and the mate beside, shoulders bulging and neck throttled by his collar, was the dancing bear. But at the end, it was the bear, with that great cry of Grandchildren!, who spoke.

  Then it was “clop-clop and away” to the rectory, or to whatever sound by a lawyer’s Packard is made. If, on the way, anyone murmured, “Wouldn’t if he’d said he could see his children be enough?” then there is an advantage to double weddings, in that a lot about them is strange. Meanwhile, what an artist memory is, at leaving out what is unimportantly important—the sound those wheels made—and bringing forward instead the sound of shanks’ mare on gravel, as the rector leads us up the path and his wife doffs her apron and joins us! Emily, whose dress is unstained and as stiff as white icing, has chosen to be married in the church. The brief slice of afternoon between parlor and church is brilliant Finger Lakes weather, harvest weather, with the vines shorn but the grapes and pumpkins still gold and purple at every farmstall on the hills, and the cold November of Great Lakes weather still to come. It is the time when hills and water are in perfect balance here, that only time of the year. Inside the church, which has been warmed also, the four figures exchange places. The bride has a hat on, and this is only the chapel side of the church, but the Episcopal service falls in drapery behind her, folding back and back, like a wedding-train. A matron of honor in pink gives her away, or does what matrons do, very serviceably. This is a double-ring ceremony, but the mate and matron drop neither. Around these four, as the rector drones, the chapel gives its own responses. To the left, a high memorial window gave out the text And They Were Not Divided, in sun-dusty gothic citron and blue, but this meant death, and the four pairs of eyes turned casually away. Far back in the kind of history which got itself embossed in memorial windows, a pair were not divided even in death—but this had nothing to do with the couples here, at least now. Can you remember it, the time when death had nothing to do with you?—if remember can be called the proper word.

  To the right of the two couples who were joined as if in a knot by the rector, there was another window as high and wide, but so shielded by a hanging of church velour dustily roped back near the floor, that what it shielded they never saw, maybe only the sun and the air, the light and the damp. Above the rector’s head as it bent to them, but yards away behind it and lit with one votary lamp, the solid wall was incised with names whose worn gilding could not be read at that distance, though gold leaf was fresh on a text above. Throughout the ceremony, until the marriage-kiss, Jim’s eyes kept returning to it. After the first congratulations were over, he went up to the wall, as he said “to see what war it was.” The mate joined him there, and the rest of the party, already clustered at the church door, respectfully averted their attention from the two buddies, who were perhaps enjoying a last stray minute of bachelordom.

  Together, the two men looked up at the text above the names. Take what ye have, it said, and hold fast till I come.

  “Poor chaps,” said th
e mate. “‘Take what ye have.’ Well, I’ll take it—now.”

  Jim nodded, staring at the text above. “I can wait,” he answered it. “I’m not a soldier any more.”

  And it seemed to each of them that he spoke in his own voice.

  The rector, coming up behind them, said, “It’s the Civil War, the Civil. No part of this state had more Union dead than we did around here, did you know that? And hereabouts, this is the oldest church.”

  The two men nodded politely, and each took this moment to slip his ten dollars into the rector’s hand.

  As the party made ready to drive away from the church, few in it neglected to tell the young pairs that they had left their youth there. As the cars drew up again at the lawyer’s door for the wedding-feast, some kinder soul, gazing up at the cold blue over the rooftop, where a short sunset was nipping westward, murmured, “Applejack weather, now.”

  “And I’ll drink you under the table in it!” said the mate, leaping out first, and almost bashing in the front door before it was opened to him.

  Behind him, Lottie looked up at Jim and Emily as if, though married later than she, they were somehow her mentors still. “Will he really drink a lot of it?” she whispered. The mate heard her, and turned round. “I do a lot of everything,” he said, leaving no echo to wonder what his bride did know of her Jim, except Emily’s silently tucked smile, over what she knew of hers.

  Do you know how applejack from that part of upstate New York—not from the wine-hills but from the apple orchards—is made, or used to be; how the full brew of all that’s in it is frozen away from what won’t freeze, leaving nothing at the core of the ice but the apple brandy, nothing but almost pure alcohol? At the wedding-feast, some of the younger people circulated a vintage bottle of it—last year’s. In addition, two bottles of Great Western champagne were supplied by the lawyer’s wife. In spite of this, the mate, when requested to sing, stood hard as a rock, though he would warble none of his home songs or any of those which made his voice sound tenor, and concluded with those ballads of the late war in which everyone, musician or not, could join him. “It’s a long, long way to Tipperaree,” they sang, “it’s a long way, to go.” And “How long, oolong,” they sang, “you gonna be gone?” The songs all spoke in some such way, whether speaking of absences or windups. “There’s a long, long trail a-wiyunding,” the mate sang, “into the land of, my dreams,” and the others answered him, “Where the ni-ightin-gale is singing and a white, moon, beams.”

  So then, they all drove away in the cars that everyone either owned or had borrowed, and for a while after, all the houses of guest and host and principals were lighted up, then dark again—from the Pardees’ house on one side of Sand Spring, to the house in Oriskany, on the other. Only the little house waiting to be sold, the one where the two Jims had been, remained altogether dark. And it was a long, long time until morning.

  For more than a week of nights and days, those honeymoon nights and days when it is allowable for no phone to ring or horn to toot in the driveway, it was a long time until morning, until the one when, at four o’clock of a cold hour, the door out at Pardees’ house was pounded dead awake, and the two there, running down in their nightclothes, opened up to the sound of a car slipping away, and Lottie, fully clothed somehow or other, a shawl falling away from her, face dented and bloody, neck and arms bitten and scratched, as if she had met an animal in the woods, but the bloody marks dried brown, as if she had finally conquered it—fell through the door.

  IV

  SO, THAT’S THE WINDUP, or the beginning of it, for those four, who seem to me too young ever to become grandparents to a generation like yours. You, standing here, only just old enough to be off to war or marriage, seem to me far older than they, and I shouldn’t be surprised if you felt it; your youth comes out in other ways. As for the forty years more of the story, you know all of it except for these few private parts of it now half exposed—plus whatever two old men can finally tell you. All the rest of it, you grew up with, and scarcely consider a story at all. It’s no news to you that the two Jims, though related to some of you only through their wives, are called “Grandfather” by all of you, so close are they to both you and each other, though one still calls the other “mate.” Nor is it any skin off your noses that although Jim and Emily had a fine parade of four children which surprisingly didn’t begin until several years after the marriage, and the mate had only one solitary cub, conceived when we all knew—nevertheless, four out of the six grandchildren stem from the mate. This is the way, in daily life, matters even themselves.

  That way, all the money the mate has made (not real tycoon wealth but the considerable estate, in company shares and accrued income, of a man who, during the Second World War, went from a small job in the Remington Arms Company to the directorship of small-arms contracts for its nearest rival) can be divided without strain, particularly since any farm he touches even in the most gentlemanly way, usually turns against him, into money too. Even then, big spender as he is on others, in the gifts that come up in him now and then like terrible belches, of generosity of course—like the sloop he gave Jim, who didn’t any more want one than the barge it was supposed to take the place of, or the coat Emily could only wear once a year on the New York City vacation, for who can wear mink in Sand Spring?—even then their brother-in-law, as he is still known to the town, is hard put to it to spend his money, maybe because his own home expenses are so small. For I suppose it never occurs to you—or has one of the women in the family told you, no doubt very romantically?—why your richer grandfather lives on in the small house that his friend brought him home from the wars to, in the twenties, the house which was once scheduled to be sold?

  Meanwhile, if Jim and Emily’s two grandchildren, with their parents, aunts and uncles before them, can only look forward to the glass-shelved mahogany-bookcases and modestly solid silver of a first-class Sand Spring Dutch Colonial built circa 1935, then it doesn’t matter anyway, since the second generation are all associated in a family business which no one would presume now to call matriarchal, and this generation in turn has only two to whom to hand it down. For anyone in town who assumes, as many do, that the mate has money in the Aswami Baking Company—put there at some time or other, either when it began, or in one of the crises which small businesses have, or when it was finally incorporated—is wrong. Emily and Jim could never have let him put a cent in it. After that night they couldn’t be in debt to him, and there must be no more partnership. In this way, Jim expresses silently his lifelong pity for his friend, to whom he expresses aloud only his equally and lifelong sincere admiration. And Emily, in her woman’s way or merely in Emily’s, was left free to expiate to herself or approve—whoever knew which with Emily?—what she would not do, that night or ever, for her sister, and indeed considered herself to have done for the mate. In this way, the three could remain as close as you have always known them to be. For no matter what tales you may have heard or not bothered to hear, only now is it becoming clearer, now that two old men have talked, how the four of them became three.

  Forty years ago or four hundred, to take in a woman bloody and beat from her husband, must be the same. They would bind her and bathe her, and once it was plain that no doctor was needed, perhaps when she had been fed and was asleep, then those two, still in their nightclothes and maybe with the tender muckiness of their own love still upon them, would sit down. The facts which later became common knowledge to the four of them (and only them) were these. Lottie’s wounds had only been surface ones; what with the dents and puffs and a few streaks of blood that could well be spared, it was only what another pair might have done in a night’s fierce cleaving—but made strange by the shawl and the hour, and that she had come at all. To say nothing of who had brought her. The mate had brought her, though under whose duress she did not say. For though restless at first—yes, that is the word—once she was tidy and had her tea in front of her, she appeared so calm and settled, so much in her right mind
or like her usual self, that though this was odd for the circumstances, they scarcely knew what to ask. He “came after” her, she told them, then she smiled at them as if they should surely understand this, kissed them each on a cheek and went, with her light, bouncing tread that never showed her weight, into her old room. But what did she expect them to do?

  When they phoned the mate, at first there was no answer, though they had given him time to reach home. He couldn’t answer at first, he told them later; he couldn’t bear to, because of the way they knew him, and he them. If he’d been a stranger, he said, he could have had it out with them—their bewilderment, or Jim’s—and his rage. He himself, he said, was never bewildered. “From the first hour,” he said, “I knew what I was up against.” Then he too said no more. But that was later, when they saw him. Over the phone, when at last they reached him, he said only, “No, I won’t come after her,” but it must have been chance that he used those words, surely meaning only that he chose not to come and get her, at least not just now.

  “Are you—all right yourself, mate?” said Jim. What a thing to have to ask!

  “No sight for the marketplace,” said the mate; then he couldn’t go on; he made the queerest sound that said he couldn’t, and hung up.