On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  They are late. She’s both inside and outside the children’s story anyway. She sees clearly what she is to them. Seeing most clearly what she is not. She checks the time. It’s not four o’clock; it’s not nine.

  She walks the cat.

  At the secretarial school where her mother had made her go after high school, the pupils were unlike any of the girls she’d grown up with in the Village. “From the Boroughs, sounds like,” her mother said. Working for the masses, she could afford snobbery. “Well—you’re traveling.”

  Instead, she’d chummed briefly, before they all scattered to jobs, with two girls who defer to her city lore: Taylor Crimmins from Carolina, sent to Gibbs because it was still for ladies, even if they must work (and even if named for a General), and Nancy Leighton, brought up by the nuns of Brookline, Mass.—and from the starchy-plump looks of her, on what she called “perdaders” still. Taylor had been reared from birth to know what men could do to her—cast her into the pit of ignored life—if she couldn’t first strike one down. Nancy had been cautioned from birth against what a man could do when he struck.

  “The Jewish girls are all ready and buttered between the legs for it,” Taylor would say in the downright way her daintiness could go when stimulated.

  “They’ve no Christian sense of sin,” Nancy would answer. “The Italians, they’re more like us, being in the church. But they have to guard against being full-blooded. And after they’re married, they like it too much.”

  “Worry is their worry,” her own mother said of the Jews, when applied to. “The Italians, they’re just close.”

  She’d been wrapping her gray braid around her head, preparatory to going to an assemblage in one of the asphalt-covered halls she frequented, whose stony echoes and banged-up chairs seemed ready to lapse into a congregation of their own, the minute there was no human need for them. “Going to a meeting,” her mother was, to exposit on life—as if there was none of it at home. Perhaps there hadn’t been? One thing Renata had never done was ask her children to save her from anything. Knowing better than to ask their father. She’d always known best, and nowadays she and her independence shared a household—an old woman with an untrustworthy companion, arranged for her in earlier days, who no longer solaced her.

  “What’ll you do—?” her mother said back there, to Lexie’s question “—oh, I can prognosticate.” And never equivocate, her nose says, never shilly-shally like the restfully vague mothers some people had. Even long before then, Lexie had known that she went to her mother to be pierced. “Oh, you, Lexie—your father and I have each done you our particular dirt. Can’t be helped. Same with James. James’ll be careful—too careful, I think. But you—”

  She always gave her diagnosis the way she played her short repertoire at the piano—stolidly, to the end. “You Lexie? You’ll flounder.” Her gloves are old and loose. She draws them on as hard as if they’re new. Renata’s own mother ran away when Renata was ten; Renata brought the others up, and herself alongside. “You don’t only remind me of granma in the face.”

  Young Lexie sees the guilty face of the runaway being handed on and on, by gypsies maybe, until it reaches her; she herself will probably never even have a pair of really new gloves. From the front door, her mother runs back down the long hall to clutch her, tight. “Flounder strong, hah? For me?” Leaving young Lexie stunned, radiant. Her mother ran all the way down the hall to tell her. (No, to ask.)

  Walking the cat now, the river-road is deep in blue air, as if she’s wading through hyacinths which part as she breasts them, but the water washing the shore indigo is a river still, brinked from forces beyond the 49th parallel and over the edge of the geography book. She grasps a convenient paling, near the stalking cat; stares out. Is this travel? The cat spurts away, into the dark. Any sudden movement startles them, even a friend’s. Are we like that?—am I?

  On the opposite shore, the house-of-cloud has followed her. She addresses it: There is no market for my meditation. My language is not admitted. It would be no use for me to write for television.

  She opens her mouth wide as a changepurse, and screams for the cat.

  When she got back to the house, she went past the kitchen, bright with children fixing their own dinner, as had become the Saturday custom, and waving to them, ran up the backstairs to her ledge. The window was dusty, even cobwebbed, by the spiders that busied themselves in spring. Come autumn, though she knows nothing of their cycle, they’ll seem hoarders, nesters, different. In either case, a neglected house. In the webs-and-dirt she writes with a finger: For Sale.

  Then she goes down to the kitchen. And for an evening, is saved.

  Lying in the grass, where the first white beads of dew are now settling, that night now appears to her like a Breughel hanging unnoticed till then on her wall. Two boys, two girls, two younger, two older, one tall, one small, two of an even height; from moment to moment the alignments shift. The boys are conning a salad—“Keep out the worms!” a girl shrieks in scorn; the two girls have baked a cake. “Yah, remember the first cake she-ee—” the boys jeer back. “For a haffa cup sugar, who put salt?”

  Now and then one appeals to her as referee. Although both this habit and her authority are dwindling, tonight she’s deep in the human fabric, and honored too. What power she’s had over these souls before her! Over there is Charles, the oldest, who could have been named James. Or Alex, after her, and her grandfather. The power of the name. And of the nose—for in three of these faces her pudgy one, handed down scarcely blended, from the power of her own father, has pushed out Ray’s. To be sure, a slender version of Ray’s has appeared in Chessie, the older girl, insuring her beauty, what with those large soft eyes which descend—who would believe it?—from Ray’s father, the veterinarian.

  Chessie’s the difficult one. “The talented one,” people say, or ask? So many talents, but she’s always putting salt for sugar; will she qualify? Charlie is hellbent for aerodynamics, and these days silent as a deposed king—does she think this because he’s said to be “pure Ray”? He’s made a time-wheel to show them what his father may be doing at this moment in Monte Carlo and Spain, and Ray had given him a detailed itinerary which Charles has hung on the opposite wall. He’s jealous, even passionate about his father’s position in this house. Perhaps when the males are with themselves, do even their very features veer obediently due-male-center, toward the father and his family? Perhaps heredity’s a movable dock, which dips conformably with the weight of whoever’s standing on it.

  Now dinner’s on the table, prepared by children’s hands.

  “What a lovely sight,” she says, “—how magnificent,” and means it—she’s near tears. The rice steams with a biblical mist. Mustard pot, pepper, water pitcher march naive across table, in caravan. The chili glows. When the candle stumps are lit, she does cry. Finding that she can only make the dry face for it.

  “Mother!” This is Maureen, the in-betweener, the sturdy one with the least personal face. She’ll nurse me when I’m senile, Lexie thinks; Maureen will settle for a life of devotion if we’re not all very careful, but she plays the piano more than serviceably, like her maternal grandmother, always finishing the pieces to the end; perhaps if we push very gently we can at least get her out of that drysink of devotion she’s in, if not quite to the Juilliard. Or perhaps she’s only in that phase when adolescents crave service, when they go to be monks and nuns. Let her have it then. “Maureen—” Lexie says, smiling, “—my rock.”

  When little Royal, the youngest, creeps into her lap, though at going-on-ten he’s too old for it, she nuzzles him. Nobody jeers. Roy was born with one leg shorter than the other and a wry foot. His infirmity is good for the others; does he know this? It won’t sway him; look at the long James-jaw on him, those careful Ray-hands; he’s going to be a doctor too. And when asked what kind has already answered: “Like me.”

  … Was that the particular night also the one when Chessie burst out “Salt, salt, salt—what do I care?” an
d ran from the table, and was brought back by little Royal, the only one who could—because she knew he’d limped upstairs to do it? Or was it the evening of that day Maureen, the sturdy one, got lost in the city, losing her wallet too and just managing to quaver out the city corner she was phoning for Lexie to drive in and pick her up from, before her telephone dime went down? When we drove in here and Maureen saw the three others waiting on the steps, how she bloomed—a flowering. She’s begged the dime, on the corner—would I have been able to do that?

  Or was that night the one when, in return for a remark about James, I smacked Charles on his cheekbone, seeing in the wide-open second after that my authority with him was forever gone?

  Or was it the night… ? They parade before her, these nights, their alignments shifted beyond recall.

  Does it matter? Like each of those nights, that one is all the nights together.

  Though certainly it was the one when Charles, turning his time-wheel for their attention, said “Five hours ahead of us, roughly. Dad’ll be in the Casino. Or maybe in bed.”

  And she thought—by himself? I wouldn’t censure him. Thing is, I can’t imagine him over there any better than I can at home.

  … How is it I can imagine any friend at any time, giving them events either wildly devious or hilarious which still seem right for them as they must be, yet my own husband remains secret to me—separate? Is it because he himself is that sort of man, unimaginable by his nearest: Ray? Or because he’s Ray the father as well, the father-immediate, stalking battles that I am only wife to, and was only daughter to? The father—thrust into that corner, kicked upstairs to those more objective glories which had to become his, once he saw that first bloody birth emerge from my embattled legs and working crotch: that smeared child, with a dent in his head but smiling curlily, who was my body’s issue, glory arrived of my bearing down, who was Charles-to-be, the near-man I smacked—and merely a father’s dream. What’s fatherhood but a long dream Ray walks in because people do say? Maybe the women ought never let him see our battlefield, but only let him hear dimly, in medicine-man murmurs, of that powerful cave from which he comes in all his pretension. Never let him see birth or be sure of it—are there tribes who’ve done that?…

  Certainly it was the night on which, knocking her fists together, ranging the four children with her eyes, she hears herself say “Anyone know a blessing?” And sees she’s sent all four of them mute. Her beloved menagerie, against whose hindparts she cracks her whip-tongue. She feels like a cat-trainer, left behind bars empty except for herself. When has her dominion ended?

  Yet they see her; tonight they really see her, as happens less and less. More and more these days, they fault her for not seeing them. And she doesn’t quite. The image of her parenthood is dying, that’s it. On both sides.

  “Anybody who knows one—” she quavers “—please say.”

  Charles sullenly moves his wheel to half-past-one. Yes they’re eating late, eight-thirty. But that’s never been a sin before.

  “Chili that bad, Lexie?” the main cook says. At thirteen, over three years ago, Chessie stopped calling her Ma.

  “I know a blessing—” Maureen cries. Her glance falls, before the others. “But it’s for meat.”

  Royal says “Eat a hot pepper, Ma?” in his brightest cherub-tone. Everybody breathing in time with him, he scrambles down and brings her the jar. Like hemlock, she thinks. Or tact. Which from one’s own children is toothsharp.

  The jar holds red and green peppers of the hottest kind—like a vial of Stop and Go. Only she can eat them. Not that she likes them much, but it’s her talent, a city one. Nurtured ever since she’d heard Charles, then ten, say, in a boasting match with another boy—whose dad was a champ jogger—“My ma can eat hot peppers straight down.”

  She chews a green one, and lets the tears sprout. Waving her hands helplessly to show them it isn’t just the vegetable. “This is how I feel.” She closes her eyes.

  The kitchen is the blessing. Bedrooms go by ones and twos; the downstairs and halls of a house are by turns a crossing, a layabout land, a divide. But in the kitchen they clambered round me, still my parts, close with me between the ovenheat and the pores of the floor. The body of our bread we were, all together and love-buttered, or what passed for it—all reeky and not quite sour at the edges, like raw milk. That was a menagerie, then. Charles the serious giraffe, Maureen the faithful griffon, Royal the nipping marmoset—were the roles. And Chessie self-styled, whose mind even then burned on her mouth like a feversore—“I’ll be the snake.”

  Clamber on all fours, dirty pantaloons—under my skirt and over my shoulder; I am the mother-animal of you all. And the only person of the afternoon, after school. I didn’t need to touch you, to feel it. The umbilical cord, winding up and downstairs and even into the garden, knotted us belly to elbow to ear. Father was for evenings. And Sundays—half.

  These are my images. How can I make this known? Now that they leave me. What is the language?

  She opens her eyes. Palms together. Is it a blessing? She bows her head, clenches, hoping. “To the closeness of flesh.”

  Then events come fast, maybe to help her—who knows? When she puts forth this idea in class—that life shapes itself to aid or teach—the other women laugh. “Help you with what?” one says. She doesn’t know. Maybe she feels so only because she’s so poorly educated; while all the others in class are finishing college, she’s only starting it.

  Yet—here on the one hand is Ray being taken with hepatitis in Europe. Refusing to let her come over, although neighbors here would have coped. Refusing to allow James. Who however reports “After all, he’s never in his life been sick before. He wants to hide. The medical care is apparently adequate.”

  “Wants to hide? From what?”

  James is getting into his car to drive back to the city, to Morton Street. He lets the car door slam on his answer. “You should know.”

  She watches the dust spurt from behind the rear wheels of James’s long-jawed, heavy-assed coupe. “From me?” she calls after it. “He’s hiding from me?” In the middle of the driveway, she stands perplexed. Ray in Europe. Which to her is a house-of-cloud which is real. Was it somehow characteristic of him to think of that continent, whose medical practices he faintly despises, as a place to hide?

  The line between what they expect her to sense, but not to act on, is a bewildering one.

  But the day’s such a spanking spring one that she stands there laughing, like a peasant who knows the almanac and how to live by it. James’s car so resembles James. Do you know that already, brother James? Then what is it we’re both unconscious of?

  Yes events are helping. On the one hand as noted, there’s Ray in Europe. On the other hand, that same night is the one when she wakes to find Chessie standing over her in the four A.M. light.

  “Kellihy’s is burning,” Chessie says. “Ma!”

  She leaps out of bed, a maréchal of France. In a nylon shortie. “Wake the others. Put on boots, sweaters, coats. Get to the front door.”

  Outside the door, they peer north through the great trees, here since the Revolution some say, which so far have breasted two twentieth-century hurricanes. They are pine and hemlock, but in the dead orange glare behind them their fronds hang tropical. Kellihy’s garage is on fire—a three-car carriagehouse once, with a turreted servants’ quarters above. She hopes Violet and Arthur are out of it, then recalls that they too sleep in the main house.

  Hastily she counts again the faces clustered toward her, yes four. Have I only four of these mine-pure diamonds?—how frivolous of me not to lay up more. Of this treasure. She’s amazed at the power she’s had—to make. These four complex footsoldiers, with the right armament of eyes and hearts—even counting Royal’s one little flaw, and all standing here booted and jacketed just as she’s asked—her regiment. Later she’ll feel greedy again to know their interiors, forever closed to her—but not now. “We’re three hundred yards from them,” she says. �
�I remember the house deed. And the wind is blowing away from us. Not toward.”

  Charlie’s face is open with admiration. Ha, you’ve forgotten your father-wheel, Charlie, I can’t help observe—though this is no time for rivalry.

  Royal pipes “Is it blowing toward them?” His face is bright with interest. What a doctor he’ll make.

  Chessie’s hanging back. Oh girl, you worry me. “Chess—you were wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.”

  Chessie weighs this—which she can never believe. Weighs her alter ego, Lexie. “What about the fire department. Shouldn’t we have called?”

  “I did.” She says it lightly. Ego—avaunt. But her smile smiles.

  Maureen’s face crumples. “Gabriel.” The cat.

  “Oh darling. In or out?”

  “In.”

  “Ah, good. Good, darling; don’t you see?” She looks up at her house, theirs. All intact. “All right then; go back for him. Come right out.”

  The others are restless. She knows her troops. “Charlie, you have your watch?” He nods alertly; he even swims with it.

  “All right, then. You may all go back in. For five minutes only.” They groan. “Six. Charles, you’re responsible. You may each bring out what you want. Only what you can carry easily. Not too much.” They’re spraying from her like buckshot. “Mau-reen. Bring Gabe out on a lead.”

  She’s almost grateful that Kirsten, their old boxer, is recently dead. Of age. She’s almost grateful for everything. She is qualified, her tight throat tells her. You are qualified, maréchal, for this. Now advance.

  And bim-bam, the fire-engine arrives.

  Royal’s still at her side. Although his spritely limp is twice the pace of most kids his size. “Royal. Don’t you want to get your stamp collection? No? There isn’t anything you want to rescue? I mean—the house is safe, I think. But just in case.” She quirks at him. “Isn’t it kind of fun—to choose?”

  This is why the others went inside. She knows them well enough for that. Dreadful, how Royal is the one she always probes.