On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  “What court?”

  “She wants Ray to be made to come home and take custody. I’m to insist.”

  “Has Ray ever—?”

  “No,” he says quickly. “Nothing about that. Or about you. Ever.”

  She sat down, stunned. “I don’t know whether to cry. Or to laugh.”

  “There you go.”

  “Eh?”

  “People usually say that the other way round.”

  “Last time I saw her, I didn’t know which. She’s still wearing those gray do-gooder clothes. Even in Florida.” I must use my head, she thinks. For the kids, I always can. “James … remember those custody cases she had? And the child-abuse ones? Remember how angry she used to get because mothers in the State are inviolate. ‘Because they’re made to be—’ she used to say ‘—not because they should.’ That’s it, James. She wants me to have all the advantages she didn’t have.” She lets herself laugh.

  “Maybe … She said to me ‘You and I did your sister a real bad turn. Even if this looks like another bad turn, we have to put it right.’”

  They laugh until they choke.

  “All women’re mad,” he says, backslapping her.

  “All women—have always been mad.” She says dutifully. Like a proverb. Or a quote.

  “Ayuh,” he clowns, in his old Maine accent, carried over the college winter from summers as a camp-counselor. “Ayuh. But now they know.”

  “I hope. You and Ray could, you know. Two medical men. In court.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “And who would I cable? For my rights?”

  “Look, Lex—it wasn’t my idea.”

  “You listened,” she said. “Just like—then.” She clasped the purple robe about her. Not casually. Seeing it. As she had all these years. “Ah, I don’t blame her, really; she was scared for me. Now I’ve reached the age where she can sympathize a little … Or she would like me to. Mutually. Her independence is maybe bitterer than she—calculated. Maybe she wouldn’t mind the sight of somebody else tasting some of the same. Even if it’s me. Or—especially me.” She threw up her hands.

  “Sis. You’re remarkable. You really are.”

  “Don’t say it like a disclaimer. Or an elegy.”

  He’s stripping the rhododendron branch. It won’t break. “Either you mutter or you flash. One never knows how to take you.”

  “I’m just learning, myself. James—I know why you and Mother got together on me. I don’t even blame you anymore. I just wish—I hadn’t had to learn it.”

  “Why? I mean—why wish?”

  “You and Mother were afraid of me, that’s why. The way—I’m afraid of… Chess. Oh—James.”

  She is in his arms. Not bothering to look up.

  They break apart.

  “Let’s go to the party.”

  In duo.

  But he said it first.

  “I’m ready.”

  “Not in that, Lex.”

  She looks down at herself. “I’ve had this robe since I married. It reminds me—of me.”

  He shrugs, “So many things do.”

  “Right. Just give me time; I’ll run out and change… Up, I mean.” She flashes that, brilliantly. “And when I come down—you can tell me about Ray.”

  Upstairs, she does what’s she’s never done before, but often half-meant to. One night perhaps, as a joke. Entering the bedroom of each child, she turns the bedclothes carefully down. Thinking in turn of each child.

  To dress takes her less time than she spent in any of the rooms.

  “That’s nice,” James says, when she comes back.

  “Yes.” The dress has chosen itself. Its dim, auroral flowers, pressed on sheer black, resemble the blotted garden of her mind. “Now. About Ray?”

  “He wrote me two months ago. Asking if I could get him a job in public health.”

  He’s watching her, the length of the porch between them. The whole river’s glistening now. “Well for God’s sake, Lexie. An internist. You can’t jump from private to public like that. Giving up your whole life’s work.”

  The hell you can’t. But she says nothing.

  “I wrote him—‘Ray, come home and we’ll talk about it. Don’t make a decision from sickness.’ He never answered back.”

  From sickness. From internal sickness. But those are the decisions you must.

  “Sis. Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  How separate Ray and I have been, then. On both sides. Two sea-bottom creatures fumbling up opposite walls, and forever dropping down again. Back to back … All this while Ray has had this relationship with himself.

  “I’ll tell you then. He’d better resign himself. He hasn’t the ghost of a chance. And he has this town in the palm of his hand.”

  The water in front of them sheets golden, back and forth, back and forth, a hippodrome whose arrangements are made far below. The Tappan Zee’s the widest part of the Hudson—they like to say here. A salt river even up here, twenty-seven miles from the harbor. And navigable to its source. All along it, northward, there are villages which can be held in the palm of the hand.

  Southward is the harbor, and the shifty piers from which one can go anywhere. Traveler beware—of not being the traveler.

  “I give you up,” James says, passing a hand in front of her immobile eyes. “Let’s go … Oh wait. My trunks are in the car.”

  “They’re providing the swimsuits.” Under her dress, she already has her own bikini on. The tribe is sensitive to clothing; it must be theirs, and both original and appropriate. Helps cure being lost.

  “Shall we go down the steps and around the front way?” He’s diffident. “Or around back?”

  “Why—you’ve never been over there, have you. In all these years.” Of sitting on our porch, hearing the smashing. Or brother-in-law-watching Ray. “Let’s take the martini-path, huh?” Tonight is tonight.

  The path’s become a bamboo thicket again. End of April, after Ray left, she and Charles took scythes to the soft, pushing cane-sprouts; a month later, it was back. Now in August, it’s man-high.

  She can’t remember Ray’s face past ten years ago. Not the later face. But the one he might bring home—from nuns, and a sickness of his own—interests her.

  “We can’t get through here, Sis.”

  “Yes we can.” Taking his hand, she shows him how to sidle this way, that, always advancing, and without tearing his sportshirt. There must be dozens of such talents she’s had without noticing them. All of them to do with sidling, with the adjusting of objects to people, and vice versa, from day to day.

  On the Kellihy edge, the bamboo is charred; against village rules, have they been burning off again? Yet she admires. Some people simply will not adjust.

  Out in the clearing, great trees still half-hide the Kellihys’, a square white house, too big for its clapboard lines. Standing on the rise of hill between, turning, she can see her own winged and turreted house through other people’s eyes. Never hers, really, and for more than a century not the house of the people who built it, bought by Ray from the Morrises, who had it only nine years, it is still “the Appletons’,” who had it for twenty-five. Nobody in a village owns a house. Forget houses. Golden water’s floating through the trees.

  “Yes, you were wise to buy it,” James is saying. “A fine property!”

  If I can just sidle through, and past it. Property is murder.

  “And for the kids,” he says.

  On this side you can see the office-wing jutting back. In Britain—according to Ray who’d had a student’s tour of Edinburgh—a doctor’s office is called “the surgery.” He’d actually had a plaque made up, saying that. One foolish glimpse of it from the road, and he’d had it taken down again; she remembers that face of his. Perhaps if she’d had the plaque to see all day, would it have joined them closer? Or if she’d hung one alongside, saying, as she had joked at the time—“Wivery.” What’s the public health, against the private one? If you live in one, d
o you die from not having lived in the other?

  “Cat got your tongue?” her brother says. “Why Lex … what a face.”

  She must have lost the habit. The last time she wept was when Royal was born. For his foot. Mothers didn’t cry much, for themselves. Girlhood was a passion of tears, flung on a bed—and gratefully departed from. During the first year of marriage, that first hard swallow of the strange double solitude, she was now and then flung back. To be absolved by the first child. And to relapse only that once—with the last. She’s never wanted to weep for his father before.

  All that time, this other solitude, hobbling along beside her.

  Are Ray and I a tragedy? For I want to bawl, bawl. But it’s too deep for that, too deep. It belongs to the tragic rhythm of the fathers. I can feel it, but not transliterate.

  James is urging her along, out of the thicket. Locking her knees, she withstands him. He is frightened of her. She grips him.

  “Ray dreams,” she says shaking. “Ray dreams.” And I must tell the children, at once.

  “Mind your face,” James says after a minute. Wiping it for her with a handkerchief that smells of Bay Rum. He’s gawking over the hedge. “Everybody’s there.”

  Or everybody will be, in the peacock way of parties, with a feather on the village curls, or hat. Can’t come to Kellihys’ as yourself; that’s why their parties are so popular. Come as you’re not. That’s why the kids have been sent off. They already know what that is.

  She’s already smiling. James, whose shirt has been torn after all, is already swaggering.

  They creep through the trees, whispering the last gossip before plunging in.

  “Betsy’s invited the priest to come bless the pool.”

  “He coming?”

  “He doesn’t, he’ll be the only one on the road.”

  “Betsy started by borrowing everybody’s glasses. When the acceptances went over two hundred, she brought them all back. ‘We’re having a New York caterer; Alfie’s getting them for us,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that live!”

  “Only one cabana I can see. Maybe the whole two hundred’re inside it. Who’s Alfie?”

  “A restaurant in New York that’s their hangout. Where she and Bob go when they want to have an affair with one another. Alfie lends them the room at the back.”

  The hillside rumpling behind these houses that line the river has as many niches as a conservatory. Music is letting out from one or the other of these. There’s a sharp-fingered look to the shrubbery. The moon is riding high.

  “Must be having one at the moment,” her brother’s saying. “Isn’t that a string trio?” They’re at the crest of a rise. Dark shadows, moving over the lawn to the glitter ahead, can’t be identified yet. One of these lights its pipe, then goes dark again. Was that Hoppe?

  “Come meet the mutual friend.” James stretches out his hands, a smiling partner.

  This deflates her. For just a second. For the girl in Barbados. For all other girls. “Sure. Love to meet her.”

  Grabbing her hand, he skims her into the party, over the lawn and through the Hades-ranks, past greetings, past friends who merely wave. A striped cabana billows out at them, tawnily. Empty, no sheiks. The swimming-pool is black but gaudy, ready for the high mass. Silvering meanwhile with a few people, none of them bare yet, unless the bodies of those bobbing heads are, below. Or down at the bottom, is there that bogey of nighttime waterplay, the drowned body bare for always? Somebody slipped below, and ignored? As she and James run, saunter, skim, stopped by no one—how deft he is, really—that image flicks past her. Below the waterlilies brought by the nurserymen last Sunday, a body cooled past lotuses, lulling now and then to the splashing above, its nose scraping the concrete.

  Last year’s parties—what’s happened to her confidence? Town-parties. They skim by her. Would the face in the water be a woman’s or a man’s?

  There’s Bob. Up on the columned front porch, which is lit like a stage. Or a cafe. Without his headphones, he looks less like a frog. Having work makes him look younger. Bob has respectable work tonight; Bob’s a host. Bob’s receiving, at the top of the porch steps. In black-tie. No sign of Bets.

  “There,” James says, winded. A crowd is massed between them and the steps.

  Up there in the spotlight, Bob has an arm flung around a shorter man in black-tie also—from the outline of both heads, a brother. As intros are made, the two men rock slightly, side by side. Bob makes everything an act; it occupies. All the while his rueful, molasses-brown stare admits to you, like a prep-school boy treading the boards in a varsity show, “I’m no professional.”

  “Where do you suppose Bets is?” she murmurs. She’ll be the attraction. Once we greet Bob.

  The man of a pair coming back down from the steps answers her. “The rival faction is at the pool.” He and his partner are clearly on their way.

  Up on the porch, there’s a girl with Bob and the brother, half turned from the crowd below. Is she the one James has come with? Long brown hair, not a good figure, which is odd for James, though her dress is backless. She’s talking to several men, as James’s girls usually are. She’s not black.

  “Press on, Sis.”

  Politely, everybody is. Her foot gets on the first rung. “I was over here this afternoon. Bob was in the kitchen in a smoking-jacket, stirring a huge pot of soup.” The caterer’s men were working around him, stony-faced. Arthur the butler had gone to have his hair dyed. “Party or no party,” Bob’d said, ladling a fine stream on the air “—my kids get their soup.” When the men went out of the room, he said “Those apes.”

  Everybody knows Bob’s politics. All hirelings—the whole conspiratorial class—are the enemy. Except for the ones who live in his house to give it character. And love him like relatives. When he meets any of the others he’s butter in their hands, and ferociously glaring, slips them large tips.

  At her elbow, a woman says “What they’ve done here. Isn’t it unbelievable?”

  “Unbelievable,” she murmurs back. Glad that she’s at last in the swing of it… What have they done?

  James’s nose is up, sniffing.

  “Why do all parties smell the same?”

  He shrugs. “Human sweat. And bear grease. You should smell them in the Orient.”

  He thinks she never will. Unless Ray does get into public health. She wishes—that she were wishing for Ray. And recognizes that part of the party feeling. What’s it like to go with the wished-for one, to have that girlish conception fulfilled, at your side? Probably, then you stay at home.

  Down below the steps, the crowd is moving freely.

  People stammer in and out of the dark, ready for antics already anticipated in the dressingroom. Knowing that for the next six hours or more they’ll stand so, chat thus, do that, in the framework that is part social confirmation—what a going concern we humans are!—part social surprise. In a unisex cabana. A party was all recognition. If it worked.

  What if one could know all the artificial frameworks and rituals well beforehand, of a party, of a country even—and then move? Were societies where this was admitted more enjoyable? The exhaustion of rebellion, the waste of it, she thinks, is that so much energy is spent against the rituals, the framework—while the vital energies and justices escape. Was this why so many people of good will couldn’t be bothered? Passivity had its points.

  Perhaps she’ll write an essay on parties. And send it to Plaut. Labeled “For My Incomplete.”

  They go up another step, the next-to-last. “Is that her, James?”

  “Who?”

  The girl’s facing their way now. If she were pretty, her skin would be called “porcelain.” But as she’s plain, her eyes, nostrils and gums are merely outlined in thin, animal-pink.

  “Your friend.”

  “Her? No, I suspect that’s the Kellihy sister.” James says this through his teeth; they’re very near. One couple ahead of them now. Step lively. The last rung.

  “Not a her, anyway, dope
—” James says in his normal voice. “A him.” And they are up. “Ah, how do you do. How do you do, Mr. Kellihy.”

  Her heart pounds. Can it be Ray—whom James has brought back here? And they are going to take her to court.

  Bob never introduces. Present people are present friends. But he cases her pridefully; he likes his neighbors to shine when there are town-guests; she’ll do. And gets on to his usual eager burble. “Have you seen Bets?”

  No worry in it; somebody always knows where Bets is. The wonder starts when you see her.

  Bob leans close. He’s pink with sweat. “Bets and Violet were in the attic all afternoon; you shoulda joined them. Trying on each other’s jewelry. Drunk as coots.” He’s gleeful. A dirty story is what he’s telling them. Of history before it happens. “I finally hadda go up there, to break it up. ‘Steal what you want, Bets,’ I said. ‘And get the hell downstairs.’”

  “Violet does better here. Than when she worked for us,” the one who must be the brother says, smiling. “Mother doesn’t like jewelry.” He has an endearing gap between his two upper front teeth. “Hallo. I’m brother Sean.”

  “Yah, he’s my Irish one.” Bob’s proud.

  “Come on, Sean,” the longhaired girl says, “—Violet never worked. When I was a kid, she used to pay a neighbor’s boy—remember Slouchy Fitzgerald?—to give me my bath … Excuse me. I’m Bob’s sister.”

  “But that’s why I came over, Bob,” Lexie says. “This afternoon. I forgot to tell you. She’s been paying my Royal. To bathe your Dodo. Fifty-cent pieces. He has a cupboardful.”

  “So that’s where my Kennedy collection goes.” Bob goggles at James. “Smart boy, your nephew. I better watch my Dodo. She’s only three.”

  Somebody buttonholes Bob. He turns aside.

  “And a ringer for Bets,” his sister says, glancing at the brother. “Slouch only got dimes.”

  “I told Mother she ought to pension off Arthur and Violet, instead of passing them along,” Sean says, “She tried to give me Arthur. In a three-room flat.”

  He seems proud that his flat is modest. And is that philosophy for you? Or for a Kellihy?

  “Sean, I’m ashamed of you,” his sister says. “Arthur brought you up.”