On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

“After the party.”

  Yes, he’s grinning.

  “Well ’ray for Markie, anyway. Maybe all women are anthropologists.”

  “Huh?”

  Everything she says to James is awkward, pedantic, but part of her. “Been studying it.”

  “At that college?”

  “No. Recording privately. In the house. Oh James—this house. Sometimes it’s an igloo, with everybody learning how not to freeze the nose. From ordinary human contact. Other times it’s Tierra del Fuego—everybody warm as French toast … It is hot there, isn’t it?”

  “Never been.”

  “To me, you’ve been everywhere.” Scarcely showing it.

  “I stopped off to see Mother.”

  “How is she?”

  “Worried about you.”

  “I gather. She phoned. Maureen didn’t hang up.” She rose. “Think I’ll get us a drink … Hope you told Mother all about the matriarchs in Passawatomie—or wherever. I know she’ll be gratified.”

  When she got back with the drinks, he said “How are the kids?”

  “As usual. In hiding, from us.”

  “How’s your job?”

  “I quit.”

  He clicks his tongue. Whenever she quit a job in the early days, changing from office to office, thinking she was hunting the perfect job like all the receptionists, he used to say “Shah.”

  “I learned something.”

  “How can you learn from a job unless you keep it?” Yet his face in the moonlight looks oddly satisfied. She’s seen that look before. Always urging, yet glad.

  “J. J.’s an interesting man.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “The editor.”

  “Ah. Hah.”

  “No. But interesting. Know what he calls this town?”

  He waited. She drinks from her glass. Across from them, the water is a field, with an everbearing crop of ripples.

  “The village of unnatural acts.”

  Any town is, Hoppe said. But the topography of yours, Lexie, a single straggle of houses between water and hill, is almost a moral presentation.

  In the moonlight her brother stared at her uneasily. Yet he’s always done that; he’s only her brother. “Yes?”

  “Know that handsome girl who plays the piano; you made a pass at her once?”

  He smiled. “Nothing unnatural about that.”

  “No. She’s always having affairs. She has twin girls of sixteen, prettier than her; she’s only thirty-three. The girls do a lot of baby-sitting. And the father works late in the city. Underpaid. A guidance counselor. Last week he was brought up on charges of molesting a girl, on the late bus coming up here. You know, under his overcoat. She got him off, on grounds of overwork; seems he’s been brought up before.”

  “Spartan she. But nothing to what goes on in Passawatomie.”

  “But listen. Maureen tells me—the mother takes the twins’ sitting-money away from them, to spend on herself.”

  “That shocks you?”

  “Yes!” Because I understand it.

  “Why?”

  “The peculiar—pettiness of the crime.” She won’t say—femaleness. Not to him. “And then there’s the stealer on the road. Only at parties.” We never knew who. “Hoppe—that’s J. J.—told me who she is. She looks into other women’s bags. Nothing rifled except an addressbook maybe, or a grocery-list.” She did that to me once, I realize now, in her own house. “As if she just wants to know. And wants us to know that.”

  “Clever of you. To catch on.”

  No. Frightening. That I’m able to. “And our Lesbian pair? No one knew they each left kids behind them. Who are not allowed to visit them, Hoppe says. Ray went on call to them once; he says they scarcely know how to have sex with each other.” But can’t she understand that flight too? “And even that woman over there.” Just across from Kellihys’ on the bankside, the woman who keeps that backward son of hers on the porch in all weathers. “He must be in his twenties now. But she brings him home girls from Letchworth, Hoppe says—morons, you can hire them out for daywork. And feeds them the pill.”

  James always laughs silently, shoulders heaving. “The man’s a creep though, Lexie.”

  “No, most of those items are phoned into the paper. J. J. keeps them out.”

  She has her face in her palms, nodding slowly. Ordinary backchat would be beyond those phoners. Ordinary gossip, too. “They’re doing their field work. The only way they know how. Through the walls. They want to know what really goes on. If it all… really does go on.”

  “What, for Chrissake?”

  She dreams, scientifically.

  In the middle of the desert, of the forest, on the edge of Tical in Central Peten, or on the edge of the Ruwenzori that is the Congo, the traveler comes upon the hut. According to anthropology, always the hut of the other tribe. To whom his own is unknown as yet, or has been lost. Or in the Yellow River valley in Outer Mongolia. Or in Grand River, the Hudson, which is in outer America. In a village not Ys. Where daily, to that other tribe, you are lost.

  He’s watching her. “Whether what goes on?”

  “Acts.” By which she means to ask, as anthropologists do among themselves: What, brother, is natural?

  But James averts his face and says into the shadows, “Lexie. I did hear from Ray.”

  So.

  “Lexie? Don’t you want to hear?”

  “I do hear.” That you are still our go-between. And that things end as they begin.

  She got up, trembling with her own wisdom, which she mustn’t waste. “But I’d rather hear it from him.”

  Over James’s head, above the chaise, a branch of rhododendron had thrust itself through the wooden arch between porch roof and balustrade. He sat up, tugging viciously, trying to break the branch, or thrust it back. “Shah. Shah.” The old auntie expression their mother had scolded puddings with when they wouldn’t jell—does her brother recall that? Probably not. In the midst of a world which had mostly junked Freudian connections between people for less verbal ones, their mother’s “adjustments,” like some oldfashioned corset, hold them firm.

  He thrusts the branch back through the balustrade, where it wavers high. The moon is now above it.

  She laughs. “It wouldn’t have broken. You don’t know a damn about rhododendron.”

  He got up, slapping the chaise. “Is it any wonder I told the kids what I did? You’re not really all that irresponsible. Then why the hell do you go on playing it?”

  “Do I?” Yes, I do. “Training, I expect.” From being talked to by your profile. And others. It makes you turn round. And is a waste.

  “Where are the kids, by the way? Isn’t this late for them?”

  “Sent away, the whole pack. They’re better out of this fracas.”

  “Sent—all four of them?”

  “Chess did balk.” She makes herself shrug. “But she finally went. In such a costume, even for her. With Maureen bawling at her ‘Oh it’s all right for you, you’re seventeen. But I’m at the age where I need to be very conventional!’ … You suppose our Maureen has humor after all?”

  She smiles to herself. Leaf by leaf, in spite of all blight, they unfold for her.

  “So Chess balked did she. Are you surprised? That girl’s dependency on you is like a babe’s for the womb. And she went?”

  Before she can answer—that sudden, hard medical tone scares her so—he’s looming over her chair.

  “So you’ve done it. You’ve really done it.”

  “Done what?”

  “You’ve got rid of them. Mother always said you really wanted to.”

  Behind him, a kind of fire-bomb soars from a Kellihy chimney, pushing upward without noise, holding the moment over the trees, and falling—pray God—behind them. The party’s beginning.

  “So—where’d you send them, huh. To Dad? And to that chickie-whore wife of his, who’s always sighing she has no kids of her own to put her money on, nobody to be a chickie-grandmother to? ‘The
y could go to winter school here; I could outfit those girls’—she’s always nagging him. ‘Thought I was marrying me a family, Chawlie—and lookit us.’”

  More signals flower behind him. A whole sky’s golden sprouts, but he ignores them. “So that’s why you don’t want to hear about Ray.”

  Against that funhouse shower of lights, all his own angles clown him—the swelling jacket, sharp pants and long-tongued shoe. Under them, where’s the solemn boy who until this second her family-blunted eye still saw?

  Walking with either of his two exotic wives, he still seemed merely the square medical man, a little guyed by their tastes. But this country air will have none of him. He belongs now to a carnival apart. Those gassy caverns are really his eyesockets, in each of which a coal is burning. That jaw gapes just a trifle now; it never used to. What does it want to swallow, even more than girls? And on the crown of the head, where, so much saucier than James himself, Father’s coxcomb used to be, is a faded little cockette. What’s made her long James of the grasshopper legs and the scholar-soft eyes into this fake-fussy little man, yes, even little, who appears to be prying his way, or buying it, into the crowd in a Toulouse-Lautrec? Only one touch needed—at the lips, the tottering cigarette.

  Blue flame spurts as he lights it. “If you really had to, why didn’t you—.” The hand is shaking. He tosses his head with the first puff, a smoker’s bravado. “I have what they need. Everything.”

  He means she has what he needs. Or the kids have. He belongs in the ranks of those who can’t be personal. I see his shadow thin. The private is not his sphere. Verily. As they’d said in that freak church he took her to when he was fourteen and she eleven, where they danced round the ark on Sunday. And he watched me watch. Verily, James. And James, can I ever be angry with you again?

  “Funny—James. Mother must have wanted to get rid of us. I never thought of it before. All those puddings out of the same box.” When a boxworth didn’t jell, or burned, her mother always said to the box “Positively malevolent, you are.” “We thought she couldn’t cook, the poor clever woman. Maybe she even thought so herself. And remember those anti-male nightgowns she wore? Women in middle age—I know half a dozen like that around here.” Dumb flirts, who’ve turned slattern. Or onetime college-girls, who shear their napes, flatten their arches and address volunteer committees, with executive cool. “Dad’s pajamas. Remember the night she came down to the pier in them?” When she must have been just about my age. “And the men proudly take the sexual blame for it.” Vaunting their own neglect, or even their impotence. “And the doctors prescribe hormones.”

  “Never knew you to take the anti-male route.” James is pale.

  And I am reddening, a goddamn sororal rose.

  “It’s either that or go toward them, isn’t it?” While the fabric weaves on, down below. “Listen, Jimmy. Women don’t understand their own malevolences. But I want to. I must.”

  “Cut the fancy excuses. Just tell me where are the kids. Or I’ll smack you, I swear.”

  “Will you.” In spite of herself, the old sibling-sass. She looks down; she’s even stuck her chest out. But there are breasts on it, now. “And what’ll you do then?”

  “Cable Ray. To come for his rights.”

  “Which are?” Suddenly her teeth chatter at her. “Why’d you say that about Chess? You talk to her doctor?”

  “No. Why?”

  “You talk to all our doctors. After recommending them. You talked to mine.”

  “You didn’t have a doctor at the time.”

  What time does he mean?

  “I mean the one we called ‘Dr. Gyno,’” she said, staring.

  “Oh that. Yes, you gave birth to them, your claim to fame. As if you were riding in on a chariot, he said.”

  “So you did talk … What about Chess?”

  “Nobody has to talk about Chess. Surely you know that.”

  Behind her hand she makes a masked grimace. Oh good brother, you are surgical. Over at Kellihys’, the sparks have stopped.

  “She was already the image of you, at that same age. But already worse off, if you want it plain.”

  “What age?”

  He’s surprised. “Fifteen.”

  That night on the pier. When Mother snapped at you I’m the caseworker here. “James. Did you and mother have talks about me even before you went to medical school?”

  “You were pretty far out. And Father wouldn’t.”

  She can see them, the two social workers, diagnostic close—with cocoa afterwards.

  And when I was seventeen, the danger-age, you brought home Ray.

  “You and she boxed me in for fair, didn’t you. I’ll break my guts, not to box in Chess.”

  “You haven’t sent them to Mother—in that tiny flat?”

  “Don’t worry about them; they’re safe.” She needs to laugh, shriek, plant both her thumbs in his eyes like a pair of phalluses—figure out that last one when I’ve time.

  Better to bargain. Like them.

  “Listen, James. If Chess gets a job in town—can she go live with you? She likes Markie, gets along fine with her.” And with all blacks. Just like you, James. Their distance woos you, makes her feel comfortable. “And she could go to a doctor you recommend—she’s bounced this one.” Under cover of her robe, her hands grip each other. He’s certainly considering. That silence when tribes bargain, that’s what this is. “And perhaps … Royal. James—?” She’s never weighed her words so carefully for him. Or her children. “He’ll have to go to the Hospital for Joint Diseases twice a week in the fall. Perhaps he could bunk with you too. For the winter.”

  And Charles and Maureen—to their father. Charles to college, anyway. While Maureen keeps house. And she herself slips through the knothole. To the netherworld, or feather-world, of her choice, Tra la. Like mother, like child. Not quite. But there was a grandmother, the tribemen will say. Who really did it. Who left the children and ran.

  “It’s true,” he said. “Royal’s altogether outgrown the school here.”

  This horrible half-medical fantasy she’s concocted stuns her. What comes upon us, once we’re bargaining? Maybe it’s the logical life. Will she have to pass through that prism, whatever she’s dreaming? If you know what you dream.

  “I’ve not been trained to plan,” she says, “—and that’s God’s truth. I’ve been vagued out.”

  He turns on the porchlight. Down at the steps which lead from the lawn to the road, a light in the knobbed stone gateway switches on also.

  “Hey, don’t, I’m not dressed.” And down below, the line of glinting party-cars creeps, doubles back and inches on, as each driver sees that the available parking has stretched to farther north. In spite of herself, she leaned into the shaft of light to watch. “Like a snake molting, ever see one? We found them up the back, last year. In the old quarry. They still scrawl these hills … Okay, let’s turn off the light.”

  “Wait a minute. Lex … what do you mean—vagued out?”

  “Oh—.” She’s pleased to be asked. Her eyes unfocus on it. “Like there’s—too much empty space inside me.” She smiled at the precision of that. “That I can’t get rid of. The problem is—how to fill it. I’ve made a start.”

  “Have you.”

  “Stop staring so.” She reaches for the switch.

  He bars her. “When people have too private a language… other people stare.”

  She withdraws her hand. It trembles. “Oh James, that’s beautiful… if it’s friendly.” Better not to look at him, to see if it is. Slowly she presses her shaky hand with the firm one. “With Chess it’s hats, costumes. A kind of self-protection. Being freaky before they can say you are.” Saying: This is what I am. What my family, those fakirs, will not admit. “Poor Maureen, when they went off. It’s hard on her … Not on me so much.” She does look at him. “Well it really isn’t… but it’s a relief to talk about it. I never do, you know. Not even to—her father.” No, especially not to Ray. “James, I apologi
ze. For teasing you. They’re just down the road, all of them. All the children on the road. It’s going to be a real brawl, across the way. Not that the whole road doesn’t want to go to it; they’re mad to. So the Village Hall’s been set up for a kids’ party. With a couple of nice old committee-women to play piper. The kids can even sleep over there, if they want. But I doubt if ours will.”

  “Like Hamlin. A whole village would do that?”

  She laughs. “A resourceful one … Well for God’s sake. Don’t you believe me? One would think—what do you think? That I’ve put them in the pond?”

  Is it the light makes him blink, several times? “One never can be sure. How far passivity will go.”

  She stands up, then. Drawing the deepest breath. Glad she has the space for it. “Can you be so sure—of Ray’s?”

  And covers her mouth. Against what has come from it.

  “Right. If it ever comes into court, on whose side would I flop?” He laughs. Swinging himself up onto the balustrade, where he leans against the porchpost, facing toward the river, clasping his knees, nonchalantly false-young.

  She touches his shoulder. “Marry the Bajan girl. Get some kids of your own. If she’ll have you.”

  No answer. Maybe she won’t.

  “I meant that, then,” she says. “About the winter.”

  “If I can bear Chess, you mean. That I can have Royal.”

  “Not if you put it that way.”

  “Hadn’t you better? Begin to?”

  There is a tiny, bitter pill still given girls for menstrual cramps—a school nurse had first given it to her. She’d given it to Chess once. Feeling the link. Though she herself hasn’t used it in years, she tastes it now, a spark of gunpowder on the tongue. Tastes blue, Chess said.

  “You do grapple them,” he’s saying.

  “Ah, you’ve been with Mother, all right. She phones that, twice a week. Ever since Ray’s been away. ‘Oh Lex, don’t wait like I did. To see it all clear.’ I tell her ‘That’s your destiny. What else do you think old age is?’ I’ve been thinking about old age. Oughtn’t one? …”

  “Oh?”

  “Don’t sound so—doctorly.”

  “No wonder Mother’s worried. I meant what I said you know. About court.”