On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  Chess will never have to explain to him or Reeny or Royal why such a house can still be her preserve. It’s theirs too.

  When Dad left, she bloomed for a week. Then it got to her. What had already got to him, Charles. Finally, and with the kind help of Uncle James, it got to all of them. That Dad, if he was leaving for good, would be taking the house along with him. In similar cases along the road here, the house-as-was had never survived.

  So Charles has marshaled his summer militia, from basement to attic, and now the tower, too. They’re holding the fort at least until autumn, when Chess goes away to school. A freeish one, chosen by Lexie—where to be erratic is almost okay. Though there have been rumbles. Chess is never really with the others, the school reports. “Take a look at her on the playing field—she’s always in back of the others. Behind. Wandering.” And yes, she did those marvelous stage-sets, does those weirdly original drawings. But her school’s like any school really; brilliance is never enough for them. So—off with her, to the doctor they recommend. Who tells them, and tells Lexie, who whispers it to him, Charles (in one of her frequent intra-child breaches of confidence, which all of them in turn are used to receiving): “‘Get her out of that house,’ the man says. But do you believe that Charles?—that the house is bad for her. This house is her refuge … isn’t it?” He says yes. Aggh, those doctors, Lexie says venomously—practical suggestion is not their line—and the school of course is closed. No skin off their backs. And we all know what it took in the first place, to get Chess to go there. How last summer, her first year away, healthy as she seemed when she came home, they all saw her deep relief as the house closed over her. Closed. Charles understood that, though in him it is only a tendency. The call of the place where you are ultimately known. In a way, every other place to come will involve pretense.

  So, in summer, Chess’ strangeness—which Reeny hates and fears, Royal dissects and Charles himself half-deifies and groans for—belongs to them. Their team is Royal the medic, Maureen the nurse if ever to be needed, himself the manager—and Chess. Chess is the quarry, and the goal. She has to outwit them—and the part of her that’s on their side—as she can. She’s under a spell she can’t stop. They understand that. Even Reeny’s “Why can’t she—” is no longer sighed. At the same time, they’re compelled to help her stop—and to pick up after her, repairing what can’t be helped. And to keep the whole proceedings—a parade that starts up again, like a millwheel, every morning—from the powers above. The team-members understand each other completely. Including Chess.

  But he’s exhausted. So is Maureen, who has never given her full approval. Concealment of any kind assails her own timid hope to be an ordinary adult, which to her is now the apex. Royal is not emotional, maybe too young for it. He himself is at the breaking point of energy and fidelity. Both. He can feel the long muscles of maturity forming in his arms and in his thoughts; he’s eighteen. He’s got to break with this cops-and-robbers posturing of childhood, and yet he yearns to keep it on; it belongs to the soul, to a purity he doesn’t want to leave behind. It’s what Chess has, at her worst and at her best, undivided—but kept together as one by her madness. It’s what he admires her for. But why does such purity of intent, of vision, create only mayhem and despair around it?

  To have no one to ask is what’s breaking him. No one to share Chess with. Her energy is endless. She’s possessed; he knows that. Her demon, which may destroy her, never tires. When under its dominion, wandering the house dressed in shorts maybe, in dead of a winter night when the furnaces are banked—she’s not even cold. He marvels that the adults haven’t noticed this among all her other oddities.

  Royal’s noting all of these down, for his future medical purposes. How for instance, at the very times when she’s her old humorous, cynic self—funny as hell, sharp as any customer and saner than anybody—her tall frame locomotes badly. As if it has to be kept shyer than her brain. She has the best legs of any girl in town, but shuffles them. Yet when Chess is in trouble—a phrase they took from Lexie—she moves like a starved beauty, a power thinning to its own wraith. Hormones, we bet, Roy says primly. “I discuss it with James.” Swearing that he’s not told James what’s going on. True or not, Charles envies him. Royal’s done what he hasn’t yet but knows he’s going to; he can’t yet face how, or when. Royal’s deserting, to the other side.

  Lexie’s going to be hardest to convince. Their whole technique of hiding Chess, of alternately not noticing and over-noticing, comes from his mother; teamwork has only extended it. Nowadays to beyond where it should sanely go; he knows that. “Chess is exactly like me when I was young,” their mother’s always said. But he and Maureen and Royal are not like Chess. Though young. It hurts them, that she won’t let herself see that. “Chess is in trouble,” Lexie’ll whisper to him at some town affair where they’re all together as a family—the PTA auction at Royal’s grammar-school, the Democrats’ bazaar. “Go cope, please, will you? Bring her over to your friends.” Or in reverse, she’ll even make use of Royal’s limp.” Chess, dance with him.”

  They’re coping. When, early one morning, one of Lexie’s treasured pair of Sandwich lamps was there on the livingroom floor, laid oddly prominent on the rug, the glass-bowl part unbroken but wrenched away from its brass stem, who sneaked it up to his workroom and fixed it before “anybody” came in?—while Reeny half-closed the sliding doors and watched, and in the kitchen Royal kept his mother occupied. They’ve each and all become masters of the sudden fit of bawled song, or of clomping like troglodytes—while the unmissed third of their trio spirits away Father’s desk-obelisk, lying on the mat outside his shut office, or the piano-score scrawled all over with pencil. Or while the two others slip away to stand worriedly outside Chess’ door. “Teen-age weirdos!” their mother says fondly, a gold shine in her eye, in her alto-happy voice. “You’re all nuts.”

  They’ve given up counting how many poltergeist events there have been since the lamp—or must have been before. That incident’s now merely the one marking when they first knew it must be Chess. He’s since read up on poltergeists. “Fleers against the family,” one Scottish account said. Hers aren’t always committed at night. And the train of them—or what you’d have to call the theme of them—changes. Often in tune with outside incident. When Kellihys’ burned, for instance, the breakages stopped. The little fires began. Always—as if carefully—when they and their mother were in the house. Never when Lexie and Chess were alone there, or when everybody was going to be out. A little pile of shavings in a corner, once. A pile of clothes—an apron of Lexie’s, an old hat of Ray’s—smoking, not too negligently, in Chessie’s own fireplace. While she sat, downstairs.

  “Ah c’mon Chess,” he said to her direct—she’ll take it, from him—“gonna burn the old folks, do it outside.” She’d let him clean it up. Listening mocking, but satisfied. Now nothing may happen for a day or two, but no longer is there a week or two between episodes. Getting shorter between; that scares him. Conversely, he’s finding he can say anything to her, and does, kidding from a tight chest. “Stop this jazz, will you, Sis; it’s wearing us out.” Or brashly “No look, stop it with the knives. Gives Reeny the creeps. And what are we going to do for steak?” For kitchen knives are being displayed on hearths and bathroom-floors, across a desk. And putting things back is beginning not to be the answer. Unless they can turn the house right side up, as fast as she can turn it inside out. As he’s learning with a sinking heart, the rate at which order can be restored after riot is never proportionate.

  And sinking him ever lower is the slow, oncoming knowledge that she is grateful when charged. That she wants desperately, yes, to have her trouble recognized. That though she can be actressy through all of this, in some last trapped corner she’s not acting. That most of all she wants to be coached—on what she’s done. Above those long, thickly lashed brown eyes, the wing-shaped double space below the brow pinkens, with thanks. Behind the full, rebel mouth is a tremor, of a girl shaking
violently in her effort to be—with others. While back of those cold cheeks, somewhere behind those features, though he can never place where, is the emanation she wants wrested from her. Love. It’s why he’s sure she will never hurt anybody, any of them.

  “Chess, don’t threaten us,” he says desperately, once. Picking up the largest of the knives yet, on a landing. “Do something nice.” And openmouthed, hears, distanced in her throat, a ventriloquist Thanks. And she does do it, cooking breakfast like a chef from a far heaven for three days running—lingonberry pancakes, French toast flavored with kirsch, stuffed omelets, until they have to beg her to let down and she says, trembling “No, I better not.”

  Even her cooking—inspired, Lexie calls it—is on the edge. Who stuffs omelets with cream, like gratitude melting? Or puts buttered mushrooms, like love-tokens, in the oatmeal? “Cook away,” he said, giving her a peck—he was the only one who could—“but spare me the honey on the radishes”—a conceit of his own—and she smiled.

  When she’s like that, it’s hard to remember her as ever any other way. It’s then she’ll write the parody of Pamela on which her English teacher will mark “A clear, clean prose, almost as eighteenth-century as the original, yet yours. And publishable, gal.” It’s then that Chess, showing this to him scornfully, will march to her desk, twine herself there, scratching her hair into a haystick tumble, all of her gone soft and ordinary as any dormitory girl, and write two cool paragraphs that sends them both into stitches—a parody of the English teacher, signed “Gal.” At these blessed times he’ll bring his own term-papers to her for grammatical correction, which she will do thoughtfully—an artisan, without pride.

  When the bad times come on her, he thinks “How could I ever forget? How could she?”

  For even then, she never loses rationale. Rather, it’s as if the icy grip of the consecutive holds her in thrall; she’s remembering the black logic that other people forget.

  It’s then he begins to surmise that the logic of the technically sane, even of the greatest, must have some little human stumble in it to keep them so. Each of the rigorous philosophers he sinks into for their mollifying ache of wonder, must have had it—exactly like the flaw which appears in each one of his own machines, work well though they do. So that, from Hobbes to Hume to Kant, and all those before and after, the universal spaces can be passed on for study—even to a lowly student-reader like him. Otherwise, without such a stumble, each one of those superheads could have turned the universe inside out—leaving only a circled black hole for those afterward. In mechanics, call the flaw simply a lack of perpetual motion. A machine has pathos, he often feels, watching one—because it’s only the sum of all its parts; even if each of these be perfect, the total fact of them will one day do it in.

  Among these men, whose great heads range his own prospects like the severed stone heads bordering a picture he has of the Bodleian Library at Oxford (where he secretly wants to go)—what would be the common flaw, always transferable? Even to Schopenhauer (on whom he, Charles, is doing a thesis for the scholarship competition which might get him there), passed on even to that antiphilosopher, who tried to the whole works in—one small hitch which made his try impossible. He still had enough self-compassion to live.

  She doesn’t have it. He should write his thesis on her.

  If he could only give her some. Of that most ordinary life-stuff. Which any clod has, but she doesn’t. What appears to be her monstrous ego, dominating him and the others, is only the shadow of a vacuum, on the edge of which she’s pedaling for dear life, in order to stay with them. And she’s twice as vulnerable to suggestion as other people. Or magnetically so, in a complete radius. Sooner or later, at some hint from outside her, the dark needle within her—points.

  The voices she hears have been the worst for them. Because they themselves at first believe in them. Even now they never doubt that she hears. In the main it is Lucy, a girl from her school, who calls and calls. “She keeps calling me.” On the telephone, they think—as who wouldn’t—though they’re never there when it rings for her. The legend of Lucy that she tells them is vivid and elusive at the same time. Lucy wants something; she comes to their house for it, but never while they’re there. She’s immured at home—an apartment in New York—and yet on the loose. She’s here, in the house. “Where?” they said, and went to find her. They even had an image of her—a rich girl, who had to cadge carfare. That day, they had all been in the house since the day before. They’d marked off the house, in territories. Rambling as it was, could it hide a stranger from them, with their years of hide-and-seek here? “The summer kitchen!” Royal said—he’s covered twice as much ground as anybody. But of course she wasn’t there. The only place she can be is in Chess’ room, with Chess.

  “Gone,” said Chess. “She got scared.” She shrugs. “Let her spend the night somewhere. Maybe behind my fireplace.” And just in time, she grins. But they’ve caught her. In her own room.

  Charles looks at the scrawling on the wallpaper—or as drawn, behind it.

  Only Royal has the heart to be indignant. “Just yesterday I asked Roddy Kellihy. Whether he’d seen her go in or out of our house. A girl with short blond hair.”

  Charles himself is ashamed, abased. As they get ever closer to Chess, is it better for her, or worse? Does she still feel safe in the house? Or should she be wrested out of it? If she were to be … He sees her—the big, serene doll she can be in her calm moments—packaged somehow like that forever, off in some other place. She was always the quietest, most beautiful baby of them all, Lexie always said; should she get away from Lex? From both of them? With each parent, the getting. away would have to be different. Or would it be no use? In any case, would the black needle, swinging slowly—point?

  She never feels the need of redress though. To them, the parents. As when he leaves here, will surely happen to him. Chess thanks no one, for being born.

  College will rescue him. He feels guilty for being glad. But how he wishes he belonged to one of those families—loving enough, far as he can see, or even fatly quarrelsome—who tentacle more healthily to outside life than to themselves and their own language. He has two friends like that, whom he admires but is mum with—and one like himself, with whom he has long talks.

  Rocky’s family are devout Catholics, but at Charles’ age Rocky is already out of there, into a commune and living with a Jewish girl. “Roz’s family’s the same tight bunch as mine though; they take communion together night and morning—the rest of the world can talk to them later. You know, Chuck.” It’s a relief to nod. “Used to think that was all to the good,” Rocky says. “We-uns against the world. Or before the rest of it.” Rocky’s father and the girl’s are both lawyers, which Rocky is studying to be, though working in her father’s office because his own mother won’t let his own father do that for him now, or let Rocky back in the house.

  “Mariolatry is what it is,” Rocky said this afternoon, waggling his beard at him, over a beer. The commune’s livingroom, in a cupolaed old house up the hill that eight couples have rented together, is neat as a pin. “Mary-what?” he asks. The girls who stay home—at least half the group’s—are in their own confab. They all know he has to get away from his own house, though not why. How sweet and open they are, moving like reeds in their own rhythm. “Cult of Mary, to you Charles. You Protestants mightn’t know it but you’re living under it, just the same. Your mother’s thin, and goes to college. Mine’s fat, and goes to church. Roslyn’s mother is a member of the League of Women Voters of Great Neck—and is fat or thin, depending. But they all three of them set the moral tone of their house.” Across the room the girls are now stretching a quilt or a canvas across some kind of loom. Two of them are in granny-skirts. Two are in halters and shorts. Roz, Rock’s-girl, is instructing them. “I’m kicked out of our house because of it,” Rocky grins, proud. “And into Roz’s Dad’s office because her mother thinks I’ll marry her. Right, Roz? And you, Chuck. You not careful, you gonna st
ay on to be head of your house, because of it.” They know about his father. Not about Chess. Half the commune says he can come live there, if he wants to get out and can get a job; half says he can’t come unless he brings a girl—a single would change the atmosphere.

  “Mariolatry” he says, savoring it. He likes the longer words; they reach for him like pairs of hands, out of the mists of the philosophical systems he’s been reading in, all these stretched, prickling nights. It’s the universes which are stretching themselves before his very eyes, drawing him into the superspaces. Logical positivism. Categorical imperative. Epistemological—anything. He rarely looks the words up. His sense of the world is under his skin and only hunting its embodiment—let the surrounding text bear up the meaning and bring it to him. He feels like a trial-meet swimmer, training beforehand in the backstroke, the freestyle, the butterfly, not only to qualify but to find his stroke.

  “The moral tone of a—” he says. In the kitchen at home, Lexie, cleaning the sink, telling Maureen once again how many teaspoonsful for the cocoa, says “Royal! Take those steps one at a time.” Tiptoes past him—you can get away with anything with her, if you’re reading a book; sighs after his father’s retreating back, “All right, Raymond. Only tell me,” slaps his own face for the dirty word on it, moons out at the river like a hunger-marcher looking for an imperial palace, and leans back in to the ping-pong table, saying “All right, Charles. Now teach me to slam!”