On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  The two Kellihys laugh. So this is the clan never seen. Or part of it.

  “Bob reveres you,” Lexie bursts out to Sean. “You’re his archangel.”

  He shrugs. “Because I’m a philosopher.”

  “No. Because you work.”

  The sister turns, stares.

  They see her now. They hadn’t yet.

  Bob returns.

  “Where is Arthur?” The sister’s wistful, almost.

  “You’ll catch him, Sis. When you change into a suit.”

  “The pool’s beautiful, Bob,” Sean says. “But that huge high-slide thing into the middle of it … and all that other, er—equipment. Almost a gymnasium.”

  “Not to worry. Rented,” Bob’s hands grope at his sides. For the telephones that wire him to the world, or release him from it. Working is hard work.

  “A gym in Gomorrah,” his sister says.

  Lexie stares at her. She may be an intellectual.

  “And Sodom.” A man ambles out the central doorway of the house, his blond head bent to examine the front of his black swimming-trunks. On which a snarling tiger is printed, jaws wide. “Jesus. We don’t get these in Westchester.” He straightens. “Oh there you are, James. See you’ve met them all, eh?” He hitches the trunks. “I disown these, though, I’m just the family friend.”

  And the mutual one. Her dress is draining to her feet.

  Westchester hasn’t been that good for Kevin Sheridan. He’s put on the uneasy, whitish weight of the man who gives up drink for food. And that double-amber bar-room tongue of his—for home truth? “We-ell, Lexie-love. James said you lived up here … And very becoming to you, too.”

  The Kellihys have turned to other customers.

  She wheels around to smack James across his face. But James, backing in, waving benignantly, escapes through the door.

  She smoothes her hair, instead. “It’s always a farce, over here.”

  “Tolerably. But you—my God, Lexie.”

  “A woman can never be thin enough.”

  “Rats. You’ve waked up, haven’t you.”

  The corners of his mouth always drew her. Firmer than the rest of him—except for that cock. It’s still good to have exchanged sexual pleasure with a partner who had given you confidence. Would it please Kevin though, to learn that his understanding is still the tiger she recalls best?

  She peers into the house-doorway, down the long center-hall which opens out onto the back.

  “No, he’ll keep off now. I made him bring me, you know.”

  “He tell you I was alone? Etcetera?”

  “I’ve known that for the past three months. He comes in the bar, you know. Always did. That’s where I met him. During the time you and I were on, he—”

  Stayed away. Tactfully. Yes, that would be James.

  “So you know the Kellihys. You never said.”

  “Went to school with Sean. Sometimes run into him. When I’m in town.” His eyebrows lift. The pock beneath one is from a dogbite as a boy. Other marks are new—natural. “So I never said.”

  “Anything.” She doesn’t even know the names of his kids.

  They stare.

  And then you—stayed away. She won’t say it, because she no longer feels it—that whole scenario. Desertions on street-corners, in houses, lovenests—the whole psychic-dependence story of the woman who’s left. To plead publicly, or mourn secretly—her scenario.

  “I won’t offer excuses,” he says. “There were some. Homely ones.”

  “How you use words. I learned a lot.”

  “Not from me, baby. You had it before.”

  “You squander words. I—hang onto them.”

  “Irish cadence, that’s all. My brother makes poetry of it.”

  “And you—.” She will say it. For the sake of all the scenarios that bar must have been witness to. “Made love with it.”

  “We’re using the past tense,” he said. “Aren’t we. Both of us.”

  But the breath of the party, that childish vanilla, is still blowing. The string trio is terrible. People are wandering toward it anyway.

  “Why’d you come?”

  “James keeps talking about you, you know. Talking you up. With a sort of pride. Noticed that even before I met you. He had me wanting to. And I wasn’t disappointed.”

  “Pride? James?”

  “You seem to be totally unaware. That you’re one of those persons … whom people keep in view.”

  “Me? Whatever for?”

  “I think it’s because you’re waiting,” he said. “With an energy we can all feel. And watching. Not only us.”

  That part of it’s not strange. She knows he’s right. In adolescence how scared she had been of it. And never told. Never yet. Say it to him. You can say it to him.

  “I watch the double spectacle of myself, that’s all.”

  “There you go.”

  “You didn’t come up here for that, surely.”

  “Oh I was fond of you … Though my fondness doesn’t reach far.”

  His sense of his own limitations is as acute as a woman’s; can this be what he seeks us out for, one after the other, searching for that tenderest sexual spot as other men go for our mounds? An overnight Don Juan, next morning nursing his maleness to size again, in the veiny morning of the hangover bar?

  “Oh I explained it to myself fine—why you left, Kevin.”

  “Tell me.”

  This is called flirting. When you interest a man with himself. He had done the same for her, hadn’t he—interested her in herself? “I told myself the landlord had served you a writ, for taking women in adultery. Or you’d found your eldest and most teenage son kneeling outside the door, blubbering ‘Poppa, come home to us.’ Or best of all, your wife had the clap. And you didn’t want to give me it.”

  He takes her left hand with his left one. “And you don’t really want to know why?”

  “Oh I know that. Your only reason was—you do it all the time.” And go home to Westchester, which is the boon place, the safe one. Where you keep your “old lady.” That canny, despairing, blond old neophyte—I saw her. Who pretends she’s asserting herself with you. Every time.

  She takes his right hand with hers, so that their joined hands form the box with which old folk-dances begin—“People use sex like money, don’t they?”—and they start to dance, to the terrible string band.

  He tightens his arm around her waist, drawing her to him, closing the square of space between them. “You don’t ask a dollar-bill where it comes from, do you? Maybe you should.”

  We’re not going to. Across the blended, musical grass, James waves at them—still alone, but moving briskly.

  “My brother, the pimp.” And I’m drunk already. With money in my pocket for more drink.

  “No, you’re wrong.”

  “Okay, the guilty pimp.”

  Never trust what you say at a party.” Kevin grips her lightly. “Or what you hear. That band’s going to have dreadful guilts, tomorrow morning.”

  They begin to waltz, as other couples are. It’s the only thing to do.

  Beyond them, still others are shaking themselves ragtime, out of the fringe of the dancers, toward the pool.

  His naked chest must find her dress scratchy. A woman’s thoughts texture always toward kindness. Toward the putative child. I want to jump out of that skin. Like a female slave, jumping out of the chariot taking her where she herself wants to go?

  At the thought of the tiger on his shorts, she begins to laugh. With her head on his chest, in direct radial with her own tiger further down, his head bent to hers, they begin circling toward the pit of themselves. Behind them, faint, faint, she hears the squelchy clop-clop that beach sandals make against the heel—a pair of these, following them for a time. Not James. Many people must be wearing them.

  From the porch above the dancers Bob calls out. “Have you seen Bets?”

  When the searchlights go on, Bob’s the only one not at the pool, though nobody
says. The two beams rove the horizon from a setup among some trees at the top of a ridge, their rays intersecting heavenwards and flanging down, one into the river, one into the hill—only to reappear. All faces strain upward to watch the moving fingers write—and say nothing. She sees dozens she knows. She strains toward them, and with them.

  “That’s right,” Kevin says. “Nobody up there.”

  Held in the searchlight beams each time, there in the streaky shadows of the vines at the back door, is Violet, a dowager out of Ebony magazine—massive cocoa-brown shoulders in black decolleté, a Roman-striped bandeau around a tiara of curls, and her mistress’s three-stand corals. Behind her a punchbowl glitters, and a three-tier bar, but Violet typically stands in front. Beyond the bar is the cabana. In front of its orange-and-black howdah-fringed stripes, Arthur stands, shining with gladiator oil, in silver trunks, and barechested except for a huge orange bow-tie. His hair is silver too, lustrous as the bands which clip his wrists. He bows, beckoning.

  “Yuck.” Kevin’s arms circle her from behind. “Ever see anything more minstrel-racist? Than the two of them?”

  “Oh no, they do it to themselves.” There’s no time to explain who bosses the color-charts at the Kellihys’. The searchlights cross, and stop—fixed. On Bets, who’s sitting guru-fashion in black mid-air. In a white bikini, Violet’s diamond dog-collar, and on her turbaned head, Violet’s canary-feather aigrette.

  On the far side of the pool beneath her, lower-class trapezes, swing-bars, see-saws and pulley-weights crouch like the servitors in a throne room, before the soaring mastermodel in their midst.

  Bets is on top of the very high slide.

  “She wanted everybody to enter the party that way,” a woman behind them says. “By having to climb up the slide, and splash down. Only the pool was in the wrong place.”

  “Chut!” a man answered. “They’ll change it around in the morning … My God, is that the three-year-old she’s got with her—Dum-dum?”

  “Dodo.” The women always know the facts.

  The little girl climbing to the platform has on silvery net panties. And a head-feather like Bets’. Her chub little butt backs shyly against her mother.

  “Can the kid swim?” voices say.

  “Nothing kills a Kellihy,” one answers. “They all float.”

  “Oh Kev.”

  “Why Lex. What a face.”

  “It’s the Pasadena party, down to a T—the famous one Bets went to, once. The slide, the gym machines—everything. Bets is always yearning over it.” Glass in hand. “Oh Kevin, is that sad? Or not?”

  “Wait—.”

  Bets is urging a slim bottle into the child’s fists. Dodo waves it; she isn’t shy.

  “A split of champagne,” the voices say.

  “Wouldn’t you know.”

  “Hooray for Bets.”

  Out of the cheers and catcalls, a cool, penetrating call. “Betsy? What about the broken glass? If it falls in?”

  “That’s the sister,” Kevin says. “Always the little helper. And always right. She went to school with mine. I even dated her—one of my sister’s good works. We’re not in their money-class though.” He squeezes her. “And Sister ain’t in mine.”

  Upperclass Catholic. So that’s his milieu. Everything she knows about him—his assumed coarseness, the bedeviled drinking, his firm sense of his own style through all of it—shifts slightly to the right. And of course a Jesuit school.

  “What you laughing at?”

  And the encyclopedias. It also dovetails.

  “Oh, look.”

  Bets, expertly juggling child, bottle and herself, is taking off Dodo’s net panties, and slipping the champagne-bottle inside them. More cheers, when the crowd sees what she’s getting at. She bows, up there in the Pasadena dream-sky. Bottle and baby in hand, she’s never looked more maternal.

  A wonderful mother of a sort, Lexie thinks. The slapdash kind I can never be.

  The bottle smashes smartly against the slide. Naked Dodo chortles. Her mother holds up the panties with the shards dripping inside, and flings it safely to shore.

  “A clean break,” someone says. “The Kellihy luck. What’s she doing now? Oh no.”

  “Gather she didn’t get the Monsignor.” Kevin ear-kisses her. “Don’t tell nobody she makes the sign of the cross wrong.”

  Bets is poising herself on the slide. Dodo’s in her lap. A fine splash. They’re down.

  A silence, while they’re under. The little girl appears first, held aloft by a pair of arms, whose head is emerging slowly.

  It’s Bob, in a King Cole crown. Hauling himself and Dodo on the raft, he sits her on his shoulders and shakes his clasped hands at the crowd. The raft is large, and stacked with bottles. Behind it, Betsy’s feather rises like a periscope. Then she surfaces too, stage-bowing, arms spread like Titania, the little finger of each hand sticking up.

  “Safe,” the man behind them said. “The kid’s even laughing. They must have practiced it. Ah, look at poor Bob.” The big crown has slid down around his neck.

  “Betsy yelled something,” the woman said. “On the way down.”

  “‘Tonight in Hollywood!’—what else. Come on. There’s champagne on that raft.”

  Couple after couple are diving over the side to it. She sees the woman who also steals at parties, playing a passionate and excellent piano in the intervals. Tonight she has flowers in her hair, a hormonal signal to all. The man with her isn’t her lover, nor her husband either.

  And Kevin isn’t Ray.

  Other neighbors surround her, Hoppe’s anecdotes. Over there’s a redheaded man with a smile of gentle concupiscence on his face, who takes care of this as he can. If he seems uneasy, it’s not because of his wife, who’s at his side, but because of his mistress, who’s not. The two are watching her.

  The wife has a neat, unmemorable face and eyes slyly loose from it; sometimes she buttonholes other women with the suggestion that they sleep with him—“With my bad luck, I’m not enough for him”—doing this however only during the ordinary wifely day, at the supermarket perhaps or the butchershop, where this procuring may be seen as part of other duties. At parties she is always circumspect.

  Her husband keeps the mistress in a large white house down the road; he and his family live ten miles inland. Half the week he stops on the river road first on his way from the city, but sleeps home; the other half he dines at home like any householder, but sleeps away from it—where one may meet him and the mistress out for a morning constitutional. Regularity is what oppresses him sexually, but he hasn’t known how to get rid of it.

  Here comes the mistress. An Englishwoman, she dresses always in black jumper, and jersey tights of the same, stuck in leather gym shoes—a style which makes stylish women crumble—and has an air of meeting no one. Rumor gives her five children, so competently disposed of in the continental way that no American can cavil. She has short blackberry hair, a steely air of capability, and a set of teeth so perfectly white, plumb and forthcoming that despite her few darts of speech the upper jaw seems movable as well. One imagines her and the husband’s congress as a set of teeth slowly ingesting a smile.

  But at parties, when the irregular in people tends to show up, the husband’s smile grows again. When this happens, the mistress comes and stands at the wife’s side.

  As has happened now—Lexie sees why. The husband, who to date has never troubled over her, has seen that Kevin isn’t Ray.

  “H’are you, Lexie?” His smile is a shy throe.

  “Hi. Hi.” She hesitates, eyeing the wife. But loyal neighbors are expected to ask it. “How’s the back?”

  The wife’s eyes tiny themselves. “Ray better come home soon. That therapist Dr. Bly got me to is great.”

  Her husband’s head comes out at Lexie like a turtle’s. From under his womanshell. “Have you met Mrs. Tork?” Yes, he’s offering his Mrs. Tork as a sign: as you see, I’m available. When another woman interests him, he introduces Mrs. Tork.
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br />   “’Ja do.” Even when met, Mrs. Tork doesn’t meet. But an animal shudder ripples her jersey.

  “Kevin Sheridan here.” He’s grinning out and out. “Mind if I ask what’s the joke?”

  Tork measures him. “The card she got, from the therapist. ‘Happy August. And be sure to keep your hamstrings stretched.’”

  Kevin’s measuring her. Is there some bond? There appears to be. “Marvelous get-up, Mrs. Tork. Black Mass in the pool, maybe? Though your eyes are parson-blue.”

  The jaws open. She speaks as if from a rear twiddle of the tongue, or air-passage through the mandibles. “Know your brother, don’t I? The poet.”

  Kevin studies his trunks. “That’s my drinking brother.” Vaguest voice she’s ever heard from him. “Which reminds me …” He links arms with Lexie. “’Bye.” A ring to it like a wooden nickel’s. “’Bye.”

  As he and Lexie skim off, she looks back. Where are the five children, so competently cared for, of Mrs. Tork? Where are her own? We here are all twined in each others’ acts.

  “Don’t tell me the plot of those three,” Kevin’s saying. “It’s as clear as day.”

  “The way you are.” She’s careful to smile.

  “Do you mind?”

  “Wish I did.”

  “You need a drink.”

  She’s still looking back. “Didn’t her upper jaw move, when she stretched her mouth? Didn’t it?”

  “Like a hamstring. More moving parts at a party, better it is.” He waves at the moon, which is now sailing. “Moons, jaws, violins. And a good assortment of lower limbs … I need a drink.”

  The punchbowl’s surrounded by neighbors bouncing talk off Violet, who when high speaks a perfect stage-English, which she palms off as wit. She’s seventy, and bone-tired from rambling after her adored little pyromaniac and his sister, but vanity is her chiropractor, any day. And she has a prisoner’s sense of due north—the Kellihys don’t pay her anything at all. Tonight though, she won’t look at Lexie, and her enunciation’s dropped off. “What the name of this stuff?” she grumps, ladling. “Dunno. They made it.” Her elbow waggles at the caterer’s men who are manning the other and proper bar. “If it make you randy, that why we built the pool.”