On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  But it must be clear by now that, in so far as a man can be, he is a man built up of other people’s notations, even in his own mind. In the main, family references. Which may have been what he—instinctive as any of us—embarked on a family for. And on a profession too, though there he was pushed. He’s pushable. But as those who live with him have learned to accept—with an unusual twist to it. He’s pushable on the big things; there he’s like water. Or seems so. Maybe sliding back on himself on the end? There’s not been time enough for them to judge. But they all know that on the small, cranky issues he is a rod, adamant. Or his routine is. He will not be budged. On reflection, one can see what might make him as he is, in both instances. Since his character must wait on its expression by other persons—he waits too. And in turn, this of itself builds up to a kind of character—canny if not mean, residual. In addition, all fathers of our time, our place, are of course a kind of collaborative—even more than the mothers, if you look close. And in this—he collaborates.

  We must follow him now, up the steps. What happened—happens. So far, our notations, drawn from persons related to him, are almost inexcusably exact. And would be apologized for, except for that question always moot: Can those who aren’t aware of themselves really expect privacy? Isn’t privacy for those who know they have secrets, who know themselves at least in part?

  For those who do, the worst emotional mystery is a man or a woman, lived with—who doesn’t. Or who draws a blank. We must govern that—the family of such a person keeps saying to itself—or else tremble forever on the crater of the unperceived. Even to perceive him or her as that—is a gain.

  So Ray, has always been researched—chill word. And since his recent leaving—along every route possible. Charles is a route. The son as written to, and all that haunted library of a summer writing as a son, a brother, a man—to himself. Maureen when approached, is at first a burst of tears, no help—and then a surprising store, spontaneous. “Father wants to be very conventional. He’s like me.” Tears still dropping. “We can’t be freaky.” Though being compared to the Spanish maid-of-all-work—as a father’s sole greeting—does hurt. Royal says, walking alongside James on one of their city days together, “Daddy’s got no tact; he can’t lie.” Says Royal, a former expert. His foot-operations are refining him; he’s practicing truth and is turning out as good as it as he is at anything. Presently, he wants to be a psychoanalyst. “But Daddy’s witty too—you all never see it. He’s so sly. Remember what he said to you about his accountant? ‘Mr. Rooney has very touchy prerogatives.’ And what Mummy always quotes he said to her when he first met her? That he liked to play with his mental blocks, he had so many of them?”

  While Lexie, reported this last, looks guilty, remembering those stray aphorisms so cherished by her, polished up even, so that after years neither Ray nor she is sure whom they stemmed from, she even wondering if perhaps they aren’t fabricated out of her own need to be with a sentient man. Or later, out of wifely shame. “Ah, Lexie—” James will write, in response to her questioning later “—our recording angel-ess. Who believes that not to be aware is against the human covenant. You know I doubt that angels ever were female. Certainly not archangels. Research that for me, won’t you; I may be marrying a Japanese girl… And am far too busy, at my age, to write any sort of memoir.” From Honshu, still single, he’ll write “Our little dickey-bird, my nephew, tells me that my friend, your husband, has done just that, journal-style. (As you must know, your son Royal has skeleton-keys to all of us.) Extraordinary of Ray—if true. And yet oddly like him. He got the idea from you, of course—to examine himself. And us. For your sake. A triumph of a sort. On both sides, as should be. No doubt they’re simple enough observations, Ray being Ray. But you being you, will interpret them. And call it poetry. I’ve no doubt you’ll be grindingly fair. Naturally however, I remain on Ray’s side.”

  Up the steps now, up the steps. In Hector’s yellow shoes. There are two sets of front steps to most of these houses on the river’s terrace-side, this first set lifting you to the lawn level. Here, for this house, two huge horse-chestnuts border the flagstone path to its porch. Overhead, their tops combine. In the very center of the second story is a small sewing-room, now a bath, used mostly by Lexie and the girls. Though everybody uses it at one time or another, because of the tub’s great size. In spring, the bower of tree-tops presses its white cones inward to the bather. Through a pointed window, with a small ledge.

  Delay no longer. Now, up the porch-steps, firmed three years ago. He has his keyring, as well as his nocturnal habit, sharpened like a crackman’s over the years, of reentering his house noiselessly. For a while, when the two elder were babies, and Lexie by nine P.M. was exhausted—by that peculiar post-partum weariness which engulfs so many young wives in his district—he even wore sneakers for her sake.

  His tendernesses are strange, awkward. This is important. Do they come from love, or duty? Or other obediences? That sheepish gawk before a kiss. That side-long calculation, to sneak … Is this why poetry can’t be made of him?—or Lexie, shivering, won’t try? Photo-enlarge him wall-high—Charles did it for his birthday once—and here’s a man at a desk, prescribing in everybody’s best interest. The original, passing it daily, averted his eyes.

  “Ray doesn’t like to be made much of his mother said, smugly premarital. “But don’t ever let him delay, mind you; that would be the worst thing for a medical man” she says, mealy. “A word to the wise—” she whispered, almost human, “—my son does like to scuttle along.” Ray? young James said, betraying him, a quickly reassuring arm around his sister, “Why—at the hospital, he’s fine.”

  While that younger Ray hung his head between them all, sidelong. Did he already know what each of his family will learn early—that he can never quite make his emotional appointments? He’ll never refuse obligation, only delay it until it disappears or turns into another—chain on chain. Stubbornly scuttling along the bottom of things, he avoids all crimes—murder, sodomy, even adultery maybe—what do we really know of him and Betsy?—and gauchely, almost gently—love. Saying to others mutely, with a halting smile: You’ll not make anything classical out of me. Even Lexie will never be able to.

  Yet in ten minutes—he’s inside the door now, has eased it silently behind him and must be looking up the central stair—life is going to monster him. So that he’ll loom forever over his kin as a certain kind of ogre. Even when he’s in their presence they’re going to have to imagine him. Life’s caught up with him. This ogre of the inarticulate.

  The best way to imagine him is Hoppe’s. As provincial newspaperman used to these items, a homestyle Jean-Jacques. Born in the town—imagine that he’s come for his daily inheritance. He usually knows the house.

  The doc’s house is interesting, he reports, because it’s a layering, as all the older river-houses are. New England had its coach-roads which predicted the houses; York State has its rivers. In spite of the tower, this house isn’t American Gothic at all, but a bastard form of Hudson River-bracketed, and like any interim architectural style, marks a whole civilization gone by the boards. Note the pointed church-window, gone to bathroom, but still very important to the house. The downstairs rooms—the usual ones—are not our concern. Except to remark that the entire structure has horsehair-and-plaster-filled walls, now a regrettably lost art. Central staircase, revolutionary-straight.

  The doc is going to walk up it. At the top of the stairs, standing at the center stairwell, he’ll see down the wide hall to the back of the house, whose second story is built out onto the hill. Direct center to his gaze—and ours—are two bathrooms that look out back, added later and built side-by-side for late-nineteenth-century thrift: sturdy old pipes, copper of course, wooden dadoes that Lexie and the girls papered above, marble sinks. On the south rear corner, next to one bath, is the second girl’s room—Maureen’s. They tend to treat her as if she’s deaf; she partly acts it. She’s the one resembles Doc most, temperamentally. T’other
side of the other bath is the little lame one’s room—a smart cricket he is—I’d trust what he tells me, nothing soppy about that little master; how did Lexie ever breed him?

  As Doc stands up there—let him get this far—the front wings of the house, left and right, just to either side in back of him, jutting forward. There’s no stair-rail, never been one—he’ll have to balance himself. As usual. To his left and in back of him, facing the river, is his and Lexie’s room, amply made of two knocked together, the front half low and bayed, being older, the rear half high and square, to admit that old bed they picked up somewhere. Behind Doc’s right elbow is the girl Chessie’s room, front and north, also a bay, and a fireplace, the only upstairs one. Best is none too good for that poor girl; the mother treats her like a second wife. Between the girl and little Royal at the back on that side is the oldest boy’s room—Charles. He’s as much like his mother as a reasonably normal boy can be. Doesn’t know that; nor does she. Duty-bound personalities, both of them. A natural sympathy exists—transferred. His to his father. Hers?—not that simple. Not easy, to have a husband who looks to his son for moral guidance. And who maybe should. Note particularly that when Charles, at twelve or so, was allotted his own room, Doc said “Should he be so near Chess?”—and she couldn’t get him to explain.

  The innocence of such a woman is unfathomable; believe J. J. Hoppe, it goes beyond the good. Bypasses it. But not in the style of a lady upstaging a peasant—there you’d be wrong. It’s the innocence of intelligence isolated—I told her once. And she replied, her heart pink on her cheeks, and in the holy voice kept for such subjects “The three i’s.” She’ll never get past language, that one. It’s at some such trading-post that women like her generally stop for good, I told her. Halfway—I said. “Skirting the steppes you scouted at thirteen?” she answered. “Leaning into the waterfall with my collapsible cup?” … There you have it. And them. They waken in full flesh, those women—to their digressed lives. It sensitizes them—she saw mine. But the windings of his mind were closed to her. Couldn’t bear to read it because she’s married it?—who said that, back there? Could be you’re right—little voice-in-the-crowd. Great readers, women are—but read right past the premonitory brute, always. Won’t see the cheapness of circumstance. Doc? He’s an item.

  Did he first creep pitty-pat into the his-her bedroom and see she wasn’t there? Down in her city, maybe, stretching those afternoons into nights. And no one hears him. And he’s home. He’s never gone for the river-dom of this house like she has; the office-wing is where he’s at. His profession is what keeps this strange guy mucked in reality—or did. But now he’s home. In the house-by-the-river that’s kept Lexie with him so long. She don’t know that, yet. The house hid it from her. Just as to the very last it hid from both her and him that—nestled in its ample corners and other-century opportunities—a band of four children can and does lead a totally separate life.

  Here he is though. We’ve followed him. Up onto the broad landing, where he stands in the not-quite dark. Suits him. Some of Doc’s patients—I, Hoppe, was among them—complain he’s too glad of another opinion. I like to have a man—I won’t have a woman at me medically—who’s definite about your disease, and about its afterlife too. Its prospects, and yours. If I’m sterile, say—should I let Lilian have the artificial impregnation she’s always nagging for? Yes or no? What I want is to be recognized for the item I am. But Doc—know that niggling little catch-in-the-throat he has, always saying “what-what?” I’d say that the man himself, when it came to do this or that, was always waiting for the specialist. Well—here I am.

  Here we all are, the whole town, watching. All except me prepared to pity him. Watch the door of the little center bath, I say. The daughter, Chessie, is going to come out of it.

  She’ll be in one of those crazy-pretty gowns of hers, and through that thin stuff it’s as clear as Darwin and Krafft-Ebing both, that her long bone-structure is a ditto for Doc’s. His bones are his imprint. Striking girl. After her mother worked for us, I cased the girl, looking for Lexie-spots. All in the head only, I found. Lexie’s brain, the farthest-out nerves of it, in that body—and making a terrible outcry. Happens. The child in question has to make the best of it. Doc’s legs look like a deer’s on that girl. And his long hands like the long hands of the Lady of Shalott—or a monk’s. Going to be a swinger, that girl. Who hates men. But will sink her teeth into herself.

  Go on, whisper, Grand River. Did the gown belong to Lex. Did the girl borrow it, like she often did with Lex. Or did Lex wear it once—and then give it to her.

  And now the main whisper. Does Doc think it is Lex?

  Really think you’re going to reach an answer, folks? Agghh—townfolk.

  Now then—we do know something real. What Doc said to her. From the other children? Maybe. Who knows who told who? In the end, they always tell a lot. In that kind of young circumstance. The child-guerrilla life can’t last. We always get to it.

  “Brought you a present,” he said, in Doc’s formal, even way. He has a standard voice. Can’t make much of it. Something doggy about it maybe; his father was a vet. But at this point, I’d say, is when the ogre begins to form on him. Some put it further back, to the disease. Some put it even further back. Either way—Doc’s going to kiss his daughter. Hear it, that little snigger?

  Done. On the mouth. But before he recognizes her? Or—and here it comes, the little item, out of its rustproof existential file—or then?

  Well, folks. We’re a village aren’t we. Of unnatural acts.

  She knees him, by God. We have that on oath. Or the nearest those specialists like the one who treated her ever come to it.

  (“Mrs …. er—” they say he had the gall to ask poor Lexie, “is it true that Chessie’s father made a point of teaching both her and her sister the … er … art of self-defense? Eye-thumbing, and so forth? Made them practice it? With him?” And poor Lexie, by now numb with the life of her children, those Christian guerrillas, as they have now been revealed to be, will say sardonically—with that stricken, Aesop-smile growing on her—the narrator’s smile, ever in her mirror—she tells the friends who mark it, “It’s all true.”)

  The town gossip, here in the hall too now, is salacious. Did Doc erect—they want to ask—wouldn’t he of? Long time away, long disease. In a dirty foreign place full of dirty ideas. Give us an idea, Hoppe.

  Fuck off. Everybody tighten your bootstraps, belt and brain, and think of your own children. Or your sacred lacks. For here comes young Charles.

  And my stint’s over. J. J.’s had enough. Ask them for the rest of it. All of them. Even him, Doc.

  Will I meanwhile print my little item, as is, or otherwise? Do I ever? Unless it goes to court? I’ve got the story; that’s enough. That’s what attracted her to me, that I had them. But we’re not two of a kind. She’ll want to hang her story on the line, somewhere. It’s hers of course. And she’s not the gal to remain an item. That’s what attracted me to her. I like metaphysical cunt. Never have any luck with it. Oh, language is acts, yes. But leave that to Wittgenstein. Between a woman and a man—it’s dangerous.

  So hop to it, staff. What’ll I do with that item? What we always do. Bury it.

  Guerrilla Games

  CHARLES IS DEAD ASLEEP on Royal’s bed. After nights of not having enough of it. Reading philosophy downstairs, with his ears pricked. Or lying with the door to his own room ajar, until Chess noticed. She never saying. Each time just shutting it in passing, with those airy, deft fingers of hers, never making a sound. Whenever he comes to the miniature parts of a machine he’s making—a watchpin-size camshaft to be slid in, the frailest wire to be hooked—he’s always asked Chess. She moves between noises—his sister. Loudness is pain to her; nobody’s whisper escapes her. She always heard Dad come in, no matter how late. Lying stiff on her bed, eyes fixed on the wall. But she only began to hear voices when he left. It took Charles a long while to see why.

  Meanwhile, on nights when h
e and Maureen and Royal find it’s necessary—no need to take a vote—he shuts his own door ostentatiously and steals in to bunk with Roy. Whose nightlight insomnia is a part of the household. Roy’s door can be left ajar. Roy and Chess are the poles, the constants of their team of four. For different reasons, those two have to get what they personally want. Maureen and he, Charles—the sub-team—are maneuverable that way. Still, it’s agreed that what he and she want for all four of them—not adult standards, never, but a cautious compliance—is now the only thing to do. Against those standards—which loom ahead of them like furniture they don’t want—they’re all four a united front. With an aim which for the past months has fused them even against their one-time squabbles. Which seem to him now like the cast-off mittens of four other children entirely.

  Yet it’s a game they’re playing too, or else the three of them couldn’t stand it. Or maintain it as they have. A game in which the deer is real, but he and his brother and Maureen don’t hunt to kill, but to preserve. We’re conservationists, he tells them: Chess can stand anything, in one way—and nothing, in another. And this house is her only preserve.

  How can this be, when both their parents frighten her?

  “I’m their mix,” she said once, in one of those sleepwalker lulls which can come over her mid-sentence—when the voice takes over and meanwhile those same delicate fingers of hers, unnoticed by Chess, shred anything in them. Last week slipping her own gold watch-bracelet off and twisting it apart link by link, until he noticed. Maureen sneaked it off to the jeweler, blaming the dog. Royal, their front man, carping “He knows we don’t have a dog.” They’ll put the repaired watchband back on Chess’ dresser, and she’ll say nothing. But never do that again. Whatever does this in her never tries the same thing twice. It shifts objects, and catastrophes. That’s why half the time people never notice—even their mother. That’s why Chess is so hard to protect. Maybe only a team like theirs, nearer to groundlevel, to childhood offenses still in the blood, and to fairy-tale belief in their own powers—could manage it as they so far have. For on the subject of those damages that inflame adults—to possessions first, and then to principles—they’ve all had a short but bitter lifetime of training. On how to dim back such offenses in and among the other already broken adult toys and rules of the household—or else hide them utterly.