On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  At times he sides with both of them.

  “Women’ll do anything to make themselves memorable,” James said gloomily last time they saw him, opening his hall closet on his last wife’s wallpaper, which bared its orchid fangs at him. “Anything. From their execrably floral house-keeping—to poetry.” Grinning, he’d handed Lexie the poncho she’d worn into town straight from her class, reaching around her to tap the notebook protruding from its pocket. “Yah, they’ll hang their damp psyches out to dry anywhere. They’ll do anything, Ray, to stick in our hearts.”

  “Men write poetry,” she’d answered, clutching the notebook to her.

  “Right,” her brother said, “but for a man, Lexie—poetry’s a deed.”

  He himself’s bringing her the town leather-worker’s triumph, a portfolio polished to the tortoiseshell glint she loves; surely this time he’s hit it right. Maybe the gold tooling’s too much. But it’s on the inside, a discreetness he can point out. When he says, with careful malice, “Only your poems will see it,” Saying it—as her flickering eye will tell him at once—almost in her style.

  It hurts him, that she’s so aware. It puts the burden of being the denser, colder person always on him. It bores him. Like having in the house an aquatic plant which must be forever fed, so that the rest of the family may see the dark waters swirling this sea-anemone that lives with them. It kills him. Like the air around a mushroom that may or may not be malignant, which keeps casting its spores. But her awareness doesn’t fright him for her, as it does James. No, he admires the cellar-strength of her, hanging onto her own being as if it’s a kind of toolkit. Or will turn into one. Keeping her little miseries for a rainy day. But flashing out in an evening tarantella, with a Carmen smile, if you will just take her somewhere. It touches him.

  Why does he have to get away from it? Grinding in Hector’s left shoe, he stares up Ricer Street, only a hillpath meandering down to meet this road and mark the townline. Why? Because she can always tell him—why.

  She keeps their story. Ever rehearsing and improving it, like one of those caretakers who live in the basements of famous-family houses which are now museums on view. Had she really suffered from less opportunity, or from wider expectations than his—right from the start? Had the chicken come before the egg there?—no one will ever know for sure. But why had she crossed the road to him? When she came under his wing she was frightened stiff of her own demon demands, glad enough to huddle there, and grow. Sure, they pushed her to. Pushed him. Who hadn’t a story—he’d been reared to think—but merely a road. Both of us—we pushed ourselves. If couples were born with premonitory heraldic mottoes on them—branded in like genes (instead of acquired, like his college-plates, like her initialed ring from her father) then what would their escutcheon be? It’s under the skin, maybe, and comes out in the marriage, to twine above their heads like a garland slowly sinking with the years to thorn their linked necks: Frightened Young.

  Some marriages along the road here were homeopathic cures; a little of the same disease on each side permitted the couple to jog comfortably, as in a Siamese-twin truss—or to drown like Hero and Leander, in company. Others were allopathic unions; the mutual sight of a partner’s diseased acts induced a sharp refraction into health—sometimes on both sides. At which point the cure for all diseases of coupling—to separate—came as a surprise.

  He walked slower as he neared his house. One more bend now and he’ll see the old tower he’d had so many plans for, until the wasps and the children took over. With Lexie ever-ready with her romantic poultice, saying loud for the neighbors, and to everyone’s applause except his, “Plans are what a tower is for.” Maybe so, if you can remember daily, with the same incisive pain, what the plans were. She’d had her inner monologue from the beginning. With women, as he knows from his practice, it doesn’t wait for middle-age. “It’s how I live!” she flashed once at James. “It’s my way of—getting in.” To what he only wanted to get out of. His whole life with her had been a conversation, it seemed to him. In which he knew she thought he never said anything.

  In a way she preferred that. Having him—the provider who couldn’t provide the life she must get for herself—to thrash against, meanwhile. Alongside James, their interlocutor. Between the two of them, she was honing herself to a finepoint of readiness. She had the blunt, weaving strength of an animal on its way to a geneimprinted task, or niche or mate; she herself didn’t know which, yet. But against that, he and James showed up as the weaker ones, who’d “found” themselves too early.

  Does she know by now that she’s going to leave him?

  He won’t say even to himself how long he’s known. To Charles, once in a Chinese restaurant, in Boston where they’d gone college-hunting, he’d said, after their day and a half together, “When you three older ones leave … your mother and I—.” Bear witness that I’ve told you, he wanted to add, couldn’t. The restaurant had a violently painted almost bas-relief ceiling—a great wheel of the Chinese zodiac, intertwined with dragons in parrot-green and carmine, and mandarins with fleshy porcelain faces. Charles handled chopsticks well. Small expertises came easily to his son’s long, intent frame; he was a craftsman. Of people as well, Lexie said. Like any mother, she felt she had her children’s personalities on rein—if lightly. As if created for her interpretation. All mothers felt that, or most. Yet the world had misunderstood women’s possessiveness, she said. They didn’t so much want to own their children, as to interpret the world to them.

  But their own long, sibylline days worked against them, giving them certain powers they oughtn’t to have had. They ended up understanding the non-domestic world, the “worldly” one, with the finicky patience of onlookers who didn’t function there. Because Lexie hadn’t, she took on the job of understanding him instead; if no children had come, that might have been her life. He’d had childless men patients, husbands who were strangled by that, and some who were supported by it. But children take your place there.

  “If you do—” Charles had said, nipping a sliver of black mushroom between his sticks, and not waiting for his father to say “Do what?” “—will you keep on the house?” The boy was trembling, for all his show of control. “For us?”

  Such a jolt. All these years that he’d thought himself behind her, there. All that time, their allegiance had been to him.

  Aha, that lioness of understanding, your mother—we’ve passed her by. But what do I dare say to you?

  “That ceiling,” he’d answered. “Put together in some crummy factory gets joblots from Hong Kong.” And yet it looks so wise. “It’ll work out,” he says, craven. And sees in Charles’ face that he’s lost him. Because, as Charles’ mother often tells him, his father won’t confront.

  She wants him to confront what confronts her—that’s it. How dependent she is—even yet! A little melt of tenderness is still in him though, for the lovely gawk she was at Chessie’s age. Or a year or two beyond; he always loses track of Chessie’s age. Those two have the same deep scowl, almost malevolent. On Lexie’s plump, rainwashed skin at that age, looking almost humorous. Chess is a rod, unbendable. With the sallow skin of a Spanish heroine.

  He put his bag down on the road. That’s who the girl in the military portrait reminded him of. The thought of Chess weighs. “I carry her around in my mind like iron,” Lexie says. “And she knows that, Ray. When I don’t—this house takes over. The old house cooperates with us all—with me, God knows, but especially with Chess. It’s her dungeon, which is safe. And the other kids, they cope—Charles the most. When I see them at it, Ray, I die—for I don’t know what. Not for pity, not even for love; no, it’s beyond that. For youth and its terrors, maybe—seen once again. Ray?—do you ever see your youth and its terror any more? No, you don’t; I can see you don’t—do males escape it young?”

  She walks back and forth when she goes on like that, but always homing back to him. And always finally forgetting Chess. Sensibility, she’ll say—lovely word, isn’t it? Such a
fluttering—we think too much, and go on about it after. Our teacher at the college says we’re all suffering from it. God knows, I want to get rid of mine—I think. And then (she’s looking at him, dreamily)—And then, Ray—I think not. She’ll walk over to him, on the lapsing rhythm of that. He always knows the rhythm; maybe that’s his sensibility: Knowing what to expect. And getting ready to pay for it. She’s smiling by now, seductively. Ray, you don’t know whether I’m raving, do you—or whether I dam-well know what I’m about. Maybe it’s both, hmmm? Ray—she says in that beautiful gut-voice of hers, the one that knows it’s making conscious echoes but would slam you for remarking it: Ray, when I rave like this, what, what am I dying of?

  A car of teenagers jumbles past him. Damned old fool. He’s in the center of the road. I hear you. I hear her. Always have. I hear you, Lex—but you won’t admit it. To yourself. Because you’re speaking, growling—praying—to more than yourself. Or us. The family’s the only stage you have, that’s all. But we’re not your true audience. “My rages?” you said, when I scolded you for the children’s sake. “They’re my dowry, Ray. The girls’ll inherit them. And the boys will marry them. Even that little faker, Lord Fauntleroy. I already see it coming, in Charles.” Think back, Ray, she said, in that diagnostic voice they all hated for its smug roundup of their privacies—and for which she often begs their forgiveness, afterward. “Think back, Ray. Didn’t you marry it yourself?”

  She was wearing a puffed gown with long dripping sleeves that last night, looking as she had for the last year or so of their bedroom crisscrossings, no longer a wife domesticated to flannels or silk gone unmended, but newly lithe and bodily composed—though not for him. Newly imaged in self-respect (due to diet, she said)—but not because of him. She took hold of his coat, that last night. He was just in from a late hospital-call; no time in his schedule for loungerobes, if that’s what she wanted. He can still hear her. “Forgive me, Ray. I’m still such a goddam amateur.”

  At what?—he could have asked. Your days or your nights? But didn’t dare, and had gone on to the study, where he then slept. The formal nightgown, too elaborate for her, not her crazy-pretty style of daffiness, had been a replica of one Betsy wore incessantly. Did she know it? Or not? Or know without knowing in that way she had, which he could attest was not put on, but inborn.

  This time, for once, she’s answered him. In a postscript to the last letter he’d had from her before leaving for here. By now there may have been another. Since he wants no waiting fiesta, he’d sent no notice ahead. Even though lately her letters have warmed a little. Not into love, but as if she’s posting him her half of a dialogue. Which they must now agree to agree—does exist.

  “On that nightgown. Women in my—setup—have their closet cruelties. We do unto one another what we would do unto ourselves. But I’m learning.” She no longer said “Forgive.” As for the house-news—she’s having the tower shored up, on her own initiative. “Chess’s taken to going up there. When I asked if she wanted it for a studio to draw in, she wouldn’t say. It was after she got the job in town. She really did you know; she looked wonderful. But when she came home, she went up there and didn’t come down. The kids went after her, made a game of it, and finally got her to come down. But she didn’t take the job.” The warmest parts of her letters are often about Chess. Or the arrangements for Royal’s foot.

  Whenever he handed Sister Isaac one of Lexie’s letters, she immediately sat, laid it in her lap, patted her coif and clasped her hands over it before she began—exactly as she had come to do for one of their medical conferences. While Sister read, she bowed rhythmically to the privilege. He imagined each sentence as deposited in her store of them—kept for him. For though she never commented on the letters themselves, it became her custom at this time to render him her opinion on the progress of his own health—as if the whole procedure was in fact a medical rite. After this last letter, only six days ago, she’d folded her hands. “You are really ready now, non M’sieu le Docteur? To leave.” Then blushed dark, as over a breach of hospitality. “Cha, Isabela!” Hector muttered. But they must have talked. The mountains ever at the window had a way of moving into the room at these moments, active participants. As a river might be.

  From over their peaks, his own people speak to him, without benefit of telephone, in the nightsmoke. She in particular never stops. Over here he measures them all incessantly with the invalid’s egg-cup eye—reversible to large or small serving, soft-boiled or hard. To know people, they say, you have to know yourself. To know yourself—know them. A paradox blowing in the window from a mountain-top. But not dispelling the smoke.

  Hector’s cigar, a stub by then, revolved in his mouth.

  He himself said suddenly “Tell me what you think about this.” Tapping the letter in her lap. “About all of them.”

  Sister nods formally. She’d expected this. Palms pressed against her spread knees, she stared into the folds of her habit, into some pocket where her secular wisdom was stored. “There are types, Doctor—pardon, women—who are like nuns without Jesus.” Adding, with a shoulder-squaring intake (of pride? he thought afterwards) “And sometimes, they are not nuns.” But when she was about to issue her third comment, and he’d said, urgently “Yes, yes,” Hector’d made a sign to her, and she didn’t reply.

  So here he is, the occasional streetlight glancing on him as he walks, showing him just as the brighter lamp at the townline had revealed him to the local busdriver: a tall daddylonglegs of a man, with the shouldering pathos of the recently ill. Nodding his bags and his “See you” down and off the high step with the reserve of a man deep between journeypoints and harboring himself. Dealing himself to himself close to the vest. Horrie, the night busman on the New York run for eight years now, knows him well. Saying a sharp “Hi” when he got on. But only “Right, Doc” when he asks to be let off more than a mile from his place. Yet a warmth had passed between them, as of men dealing to each other. On the plane just left, his silent seatmate, a man of middle-age with a resolute visor of hair, had smoothed his shaven chin continuously; now and then a forefinger painted an invisible moustache. In chat it developed he had never had facial hair. “Nor missed it.”

  What’s he missed about himself? Not wanting to live as she does, in a swirl of rhetoric. Is he a smaller man than he thinks, and merely yearning over the barrier-reef of his limitations? Or is he still the man of his younger hopes?—a vast, shady customer.

  He has to have more of himself to go on with. Before he decamps. So he’s come home.

  Nobody need write any more letters now. The unmailed ones in his bag will go into his study, and into the locked medical files; to wait there like the record of a dangerous journey not yet over. On which a man’s fidelity to his profession, to his very children is being questioned, and drawn by some magnetic needle to an as yet unidentified pole. So that the customary passions of his life—or what passed for these—are seen to be automata—not parts of a soul, but of a neighborhood. “Same thing might happen to a Spaniard from one cup of American water, I’m aware of that,” he’d told James in that one letter. “The colon prefers its own bacteria. Would he suffer from our freedoms, you think? I’m like that just now, in this oasis of nuns, and unfrocked monks. When you’re away from yourself you see your lacks.”

  The trip home has been the hardest; no wonder he’s walked the last part of it. A closet-cruelty to himself? Christ. Will he be able to undergo again all the illuminations she’s always scattering in front of him? Can he continue to fend off, to say to her—always silently—“I do not choose your lighted path”? He’ll keep the letters, but maybe never consult them. They exist, they have to be kept. They are his disease. A souvenir, from Jerusalem:

  And here’s the house. It shocks him. It has his name on it, even if well off to the office-side. Low-roofed there, and open to any bell. Tall on the house-side, and full of complicitous corners. Through this four o’clock world of brainy shadow, he can see that the tower has indeed
been shored. The lawn is passable. He can be sure that the bamboo’s been cut, and that it’s growing again. Beyond his own trees, Kellihys’ shows a lone attic-light on high, and a moving feverglow in the basement—nothing between. Not a bad score, for the Kellihys. But making his own dark house ride more steadfast. For one flash he sees each as a house among other houses, on a road. What makes people think that a man and a woman—whose lives are in perpetuity so other—can ever navigate a mutual destiny by means of such a house, of any house? That lamp over his door is a vampire lamp, bleeding out life and blanking all souls; it will burn, and lure, and come to nothing. A house is a game of pick-up-sticks, whose hoarded straws will outlast him, his family—and still fall. He must warn Charles.

  Then his eyes shift up. His mouth closes. The hour changes. He’s home.

  Upstairs, out there in the prow of the house, is its figurehead. Does it see him? The angle at which it sits—due north—suggests not. Perhaps it does, but refuses that side of its knowledge. Does he, down below there, see her as a blot-head drawing back into her own wallpaper—or as a real girl? Or even as elder daughter, as in the family casebook? They’ll never know which. On his part he would help if he could—and has tried.