On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  At first, he’d intended to write all this to James. Since their internship, James had written scores of letters to him from his travels; half-way on, Ray had found out they were not only to be shared with Lex and the kids, but to be kept. Now at last he could have returned the compliment. With an import James’s letters had never had. The real key to James was in those wives, and other women. In the way James liked to sleep with strangers, and the pace of it, he was almost a foreigner. Not like himself, brought up to a hygienic distaste for any flesh but the family’s. Which Lexie had almost been, by the time James brought him home. And normality takes over hard enough. Four children, no expense—or love—spared. Short of being analyzed he was as clinically aware of himself as most. Perhaps his own family had had a certain distaste even for its own flesh. His maternal grandmother after leaving instructions for the undertaker to pluck the hairs that grew on her toes, had arisen just before the end to manage this herself. That incident had helped send him into medicine. Before he understood that only vanity had caused it, or else that obsession with mortality which sent women into self-pity before their time.

  “Mortality’s more like it,” Lexie had offered. “At ninety-six.” She had a head on her shoulders, not always set square. But women, she said, were in charge of the basic facts. Which kept them as normal as they had to be. “Oh I’m fascinated with docs,” she’d said the night he met her. “Have to be, I work for them. But seriously—they show up our civilization, don’t you think? Plugging ahead like mad in the midst of it. And never giving it a thought.” At the time he’d counted this in as one of his attractions for her. Her talk since had made it clearer. He was to be her lead-in to the world. And must expect to be beaten for it.

  Except for an anxiety on James’s part now and then over Lexie, they didn’t speak of wives. No reason for her to see his letter to James; she’d know the conclusions in it soon enough. But he’d taken a precautionary measure. “In any case, don’t show this to Lex. I write her separately. But these are the facts.” Which are that work, not a wife, is the key to him. Twisted now out of its lock.

  In the end he’d mailed only that one of all the letters written on his balcony. Using the Hermes typewriter he’d had since college—just the toy a mother would give—he’s managed to handle all the personal notation of the years since; yes, it’s traveled light. Until the Spanish hospital. There, in its own weakened state, it seemed to be learning a newly liverish language caught from his own inflammation. The minute he finished that first letter, his eyes watering with the effort of feeling, he saw suspended above that dwarf keyboard, in blue, hepatic print Don’t trust James. When he asked himself why, the old machine, which was himself in a way, imprinted on the keys, without his touching them: Sunday afternoons.

  They’d been feeding him so much liquid, and such unfamiliar ones, and of course no alcohol or other dehydrants; under such treatment perhaps the brain is forced to make its own wine. Or in that alkali climate where the bones dry so serviceably into age, a compensating fleshy edema of the spirit occurs. Down below his balcony, when he first gets to it, the wind-abraded passersby distort like El Grecos. So that’s all it was three centuries ago then—good cloth.

  “They have marvelous cloth,” he writes Lexie on a Sunday afternoon. “I’ll bring you some.” On the following Sunday, she’ll read it over, sitting on the porch with James. Behind them, his spirit walks as it always has—behind them. The children too are trained not to break in on him. Next door is the smashing that attracts. “No depression,” he writes to her carefully, and to James looking over her shoulder. “As I often tell patients, in hospital one’s accessory education has a chance to come out. No renal symptoms in the eyes; if this typing’s off, blame the old Hermes. Have Charles cut the bamboo before it gets out of hand. Has the appointment at Joint Diseases been made for Royal? Ask Chessie—does the river still speak Swedish, saying ø, ø (he’d inked that in), near the dock? There’s a young nurse here, student, reminds me of Maureen.”

  It had been a terrific strain, to put himself in touch. He’d almost forgot to mention Maureen. Actually it was the woman who swept out the wards who reminded him of her—the same irritating patience. A dirt-swallower, our Maureen—of other people’s dirt. And so am I, he’d thought. He’d hailed Sister Isaac then, and had her put the typewriter under the bed.

  Was it depression, when the inner monologue brimmed out of the pores like sweat, when the blood-count seemed to attest to the patient himself the rate at which white lies could breed like corpuscles?

  In the night he woke out of hand, on a raft of bed-sheets criss-crossed with bamboo thoughts.

  Poling the raft for a time was Borden Wheeley, a Miami internist who’d been the self-styled barker of their trip. Born a cracker (“The mind is as red as the neck,” Caldwell had whispered) Wheeley’d come to medicine from the ministry, and found himself giving so much free advice that he’d taken a degree in psychology “so’s he could ask patients to pay for it.” Now he had “every other worry-wort in the Sarasota Ayreach in my lap,” plus two farms “to invite you-all to, or a marina; take your pick”—and a Rolls-Royce. After dinner his eyes tended to water over how “Muh pappy never got to ride in it”—which effectively prevented him from seeing the check. “These here Spanish are more in touch with their feelings,” he said at every pause in the itinerary. (And now again, poling—with the bargepole he maybe knows deepdown you wouldn’t want to touch him with.) “Europeans are. And it ain’t all flamenco—look how they put themselves in touch. ’Cept for us crackers and a few Texans, you people all so tight-assed—.” He finished most sentences with a drink. “Like lab hamsters?” Caldwell had said. “Open the trap-door, and trot-trot out come the feelings? Which have tripled overnight? God help Sarasota? Borden sashayed out of his chair to shake a leg with the widowlady he’s picked up in Lisbon. “He’ps itself.”

  His “only enemy in the world” was DeBakey, the Texas heart-transplanter—“Ought to be in a Mexican jail.”

  “Transplantin’ pussy—why don’t he try that?” he’d said, attaching himself to Lexie in the Miami hotel diningroom two years ago. Sweeping an emphatic arm, he’d upset her drink, just served—and had gone on talking to the other men. She’d waited—not too long—for him to order her another. Then she’d taken Borden’s own drink, a Bloody Mary, and poured it carefully on the sleeve of his maroon-velvet blazer. “Now why’d you do that?—” Borden yelled, and quickly clowning “—this here come from the Via Venito.” When Lexie was truly angered the space between her eyes and brows, double most persons, flushed, along with the cheekbones, making a sudden harlequin mask of red. Once he himself had taken a mirror to it, to show her. It scared him. For her. Perhaps he’d never made that clear. Her voice though, grew softer. “Why did I do that, Borden? To keep you in touch.”

  In the nightmare, he’d called again and again for the Hermes, and when they brought it, their nuns’ eyes askance (“Ah, ah, poor man” he saw them exchange “it is his family”)—began a letter addressed to Charles: the first of a series whose changing addresses never get them—since they are never sent. “I am scared for your mother,” he wrote Charles. In the end he’d written all the children (though not this). Even writing to others, not necessarily family or even intimates—each night picking a different auditor.

  He has the letters with him now. Is he waiting for someone to collate all of this? If it could be taken out of painful med-school annotation, perhaps someone should? As an account of a journey, a disease, and perhaps, an American. He has them all now in his bag.

  Perhaps every family ought to have a central clearing bureau, such as hospitals shared with other social-service organisms. Where a member could apply for knowledge of himself to others, and in turn lay it on them. With an annual meeting, complete with sky-charts, where all might assess the family course through the cloudbanks. Or where a boardmember may rise to show his charred fingertips, crying “Wake up! This is Hell!”

  Would he
have said that. At any time?

  At a paling which borders a strip of uninhabited land leading out direct to the river, he stops and leans. People who owned land they never built on used to awe him. He would always have had to make use of it, or else sell. Now contrarily, he feels he’d like to acquire just such a piece of ground, to be saved out like those patches of the original prairie which one saw in the West. To be kept, raw and spendthrift, somewhere in the mind.

  Behind him, in a small square redbrick house across the road on the terrace side, a front window goes up. In it lives a skinny, agile spinster he’d once treated for erysipelas. Ever since, whenever his car met her bike, she smiled crumpledly from the deformed side of her face and lifted an arm in salute. Now he raises his left arm, holds it there in the dark, not turning round, and lets it fall again to his side. A streetlamp is near. After a minute, the window goes down.

  Well, he’s home again. And she’ll tell the road; she sells cosmetics door to door. Or perhaps he himself should knock on all those doors which line the road, the upper hill-road above it, and the cross-streets between—meanwhile naming each according to their diseases, which so often are entangled with their hopes. Not that this weighs on him, any more or less than it used to; it’s simply that he’s a patient now, and no longer wishes to treat their privacy, from a similar state. Privacy—is that the name of the feeling? Then he’s a carrier of it. He doesn’t wish to treat it, face to face. Let James do it. Who feels safe only when traveling.

  On the other side of the paling, in the rivermist, there’s James, in a silky English raincoat and flightbag marked with a large Red Cross, competently walking the waters of his ideal job. An anatomist born, James had trembled through his whole internship at the sight of live bodies being incontinently raw-sick, their blood pouring secrets he didn’t want to know. Cool as a saint otherwise, early as a student he’d linked up with Ray, whom he’d heard retching away into the gray sink off the dissectingroom. To Ray, who’d often treated dogs under his veterinarian father, his own reaction there was unaccountable. Humans were merely larger than dogs in most cases and not mute; indeed now and then in the ward, where he was quite comfortable, he saw all the hierarchies of dog among them—street-bitches who veiled their eyes, whimperless, and men who had the houndsmell of the ultimate stray.

  Together, he and James had done better at med school than if apart. Later, interning in the same hospital, where there’d been more than one pair of what James had called “joined lacks.” And like temperaments? James had thought so. “I anger patients, with my psychological bent.” When James was following it, he could look villainous, the long nose flaring, the eyes Scotch-shrewd. “You’re as a cold as I am in the consultingroom, Ray, but in you it comes out shy.” And not as bright, was implied. And no, he hadn’t been, surly. “What you need, Ray, is to bury yourself in life. A family.” And there was Lexie, wanting to bury herself the way girls do, and not sexually shy, like him. Smarter even, in James’s way, but dead-dumb about it, and without villainy. Still, her sexual aggression had come at him like intelligence; did she know that? Or the intelligence, buried, came on like sex? It had excited him, and frightened him too.

  “Chessie’s intelligent,” his daughter’s doctor said, probing him. While Lexie, who’d been there before, waited in the anteroom. He’d felt abashed—already in the examination-box. Yet the man wouldn’t look him in the eye. “Your hands, Doctor—” the man said. “—Why they’re just like your daughter’s.” He supposed they were. The long hands of a long frame, inherited. Piano hands, some said, admiringly—though he couldn’t. Chessie played well. “Ectomorph,” he’d said. And the man had suddenly met his eye. “Your daughter’s hands repel her. Any reason why?”

  He’d been almost relieved. What tiny games they played here! In contrast to what he’d been called in to see just that morning—a great liver-mass, crawling with cause and effect. “In her childhood you mean?” he answered. “Isn’t that what you should be telling us?” A smile from her doctor. That kind takes a lot from people. And should. “Dramatics, I think you’ll find it” Ray added. “On both sides.” Sure of course, man, Ray meant his wife—who else? That colorless silence they used, the touted therapeutic holding-back; let them treat a myeloma with it. “But I did have a grandmother. Who was that way.” Telling that story, he’d relaxed. Letting the man worm it out of him. “Yes, I sometimes despair over Lexie—same as I do over Chess.” And had had no thanks for it. “Ah—” the man said. End of the fifty minutes.

  Meeting Lexie in the vestibule, he’d found her stunned, remote. She took Chess so hard. But was incapable of holding back. For four blocks, to the parking-garage, she managed it. He had chattered, for him. “I told him about Grandmother. Sort of thing you tell psychiatrists. But you know—I don’t think the guy believed me. I think he thought I made it up.” Waiting for the attendant to bring down the car, he said “They’re just intermediaries. Half of them are in it because surgery gave them the shakes. I won’t take shit from them. Don’t you.” She said nothing, walking whitefaced to the car. Spent. He felt exhausted with her. “Anyway, I told him I’d do anything for Chess. Anything.” Inside the car, she turned heavy, priestess eyes on him. “So did I, so did I. In those exact words… But, Ray, Ray? Do we believe us?”

  Had he answered that finally? In the letter he shouldn’t have mailed? Sitting on his balcony, days later, tapping away at the Hermes, he’d heard it all from below, like from the prompter at the opera:

  James will tell Lex whatever I tell him. Always had.

  And all this had come about because—as he’d accidentally discovered years later, when conducting the spellbound Charles through the endless lab-displays of a classmate of his own who was now a pathologist—he was markedly allergic to formaldehyde.

  Charles had come about because of it. His other favorite, after Chess. And Maureen, the forgettable. And little Lord Fauntleroy, as Ray’s own mother—a Daughter of the American Revolution who was suspiciously fond of the British side—liked to call the boy. And Royal’s foot.

  As a father, he knows himself to be in his own mind the same patched-together yet luminous figure that he is to others—and that this has affected him as a man. For knowledge of himself he has always depended on the reports of others to others, and on their final authority. They seem to expect this of him, and that he will be remote. Nor can one expect him to report himself with the exactitude that his wife reports herself. Women have a bee-like concentration on their own roles, forever bumbling into those pollens. And raging afterwards, when the group-smell, the hover and fever of the hive, follows after them. To repollinate.

  As a man, the punctilio with which they can phrase him can make him abject. They can even understand—or she can—that fatherdom doesn’t dog his consciousness at every step. But neither can fatherhood realize him to himself, in the way she’s always claimed her maternal bonds do her. The niche he’d always thought he had has slipped from him, slowly up-ending, rigid, burred, slaked, to show itself—only a shell.

  What’s dogging him is that he can’t tell her or them or even himself—what he’s bringing back to all of them. It would help to know whether he’s been not only the stilted, responsible but powerfully absent father here (as he’s often been told, or pridefully suspected) but whether he’s also been absentee-landlord to his whole life. If so, they won’t tell him; they can’t. He hasn’t given them enough to go on. She’s said it, time and again, and he begins to believe her. “Women are all adjective,” his lifelong friend James once said. “It’s not the best language.” All the while James’s first wife, that lambent little pouncer, sat muffled to the nose in her black, against her hard black walls, slowly divorcing him. James and he, going up to James’s roof to survey the city, had felt themselves to be its powerfully swimming verbs. Fools, his own wife had said, coming up after them, to stare. She’s all funeral, that one. But not for herself.

  For four months now, he himself’s been cut loose on a sea of adje
ctive—set adrift on the tinge and flush of things, rocking on the warble of emotions at bedsides after doctors have left them, smelling the cookery of his own muscles, hearing the backstairs crockery of the universe, at its slap and bang. Watching the whole stealth of the qualitative creep Joseph-coated over the sundial, and swallow it. Turmoil. But organized as any logic.

  Zut alors, hein-hein, jawohl, the hospital’s internationale of nuns said to him, along with the smooth Spanish he couldn’t hang onto, until the first one, who spoke English also, said, pushing under his chin one of the kidney-shaped zinc pans which must circle the cosmos, “Ah yes, Doctor. In sickness we carnify.” Sister Isaac Jogues’ plastic sunglasses perch like a spider on the hot globe of her face; in a moment will they crackle into flame—sputter, pop—and burn off? Her English was French-sprigged, but clear. “We grow into our flesh.” At night, her cooler face leaned over him, cameo. As it flitted the dark of the one electric bulb, art-nouveau spirals of words came from it. Smoke-rings he couldn’t decipher. The electricity seemed worn here. Possibly she was really asking him to spiritize? When he came to his senses, idling between blessed stations of bouillon, he was shocked to find that the smoke was real. The whole damned ward had been full of it. Each bed almost had had its cigarette. A disturbing rescue-hut, toxic and lifegiving in the same heave. Like his trip.

  He lets go the paling now, and walks on, avoiding a look at which houses he passes. As their medical server, he knows the story of each—but tonight means to obtrude his own. His yellow shoes go in front of him like another man’s; in fact don’t belong to him, though new. During his whole time, he’d worn ward-clothing; either he was still half in bed, or after hospital-gowns, his own one suit was too heavy, or the sportsjacket shouted “American!” The gray-cotton orderly’s pants-and-jacket they gave him was a comfortable uniform, like convalescence itself. Sister Isaac Jogues, named for a French missionary martyr—“In the New World, M. le Docteur”—and trained in France, had taken away his excuses, with the real reason for them. “Tcht, you’re a type wants to delay a little, non? ’T’sokay weetha me.”