On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  He’s finished his beer. “I know how they do it, sure. But why?” Across the room, the girls shriek at him. “Because you men wouldn’t let us do more! … Because that’s all there is.” Roz, natty in a pair of the leather jeans she stitches for herself and Rock, looks up from her canvas. “Was, girls. Was.” Rocky puts up a ducking elbow. “Right, right. But save it, will you girls. Look, there’s only two of us.”

  When the three men who work at night come sleepily down the stairs, craving supper, he and Rock and they go out to the garage, where Rocky’s stashed a bottle his father gave him. “Dad comes over here all the time.” They pass the bottle. “The girls won’t drink whiskey anyway. Say it destroys the braincells. They won’t even get stoned any more. Say it’s bad for the genes.” Through the kitchen window they can see the girls’ heads, bent now over supper, dreamy and reserved. Sweethearts, all of them. If Chess were like them, if only. His throat aches, guiltily. For himself. “Your Dad not back yet, huh,” Rock says. “Look maybe you could start out here, as a single. We’ll work on it. Maybe we can swing the girls.”

  On the way home, he half yearns for it, heavy with what’s coming at him. Then thinks, no—not with that group, great as they are. Roz or no Roz, they’re too Catholic. Or call it that. Driving into his own driveway, he starts to laugh. At how Catholic those little darlings still are. Two hours out of here and he gets back his own jokes. Unfair, Immanuel Kant, yes, unfair. Since his own house is what gave him his jokes. He can hear his mother saying it to him after one of his schoolfights, or a sister-fight, or even one with her. “All right, Charles? Got back your jokes?”

  Lexie’s not in the kitchen, but waiting for him on the porch, in that soiled purple wrapper they all hate. For demeaning her. For her clinging to it. Rather let her drive to New York even, looking like somebody’s girlfriend. As one day Chess at her most sensible slyly had said. Waving his mother good-bye that day, he saw she’d learned how to corner the Volvo. Oh, let her return looking even the way she did for a while, as Royal said with a leer to him, “Cherry ripe.” Just let her not look as low and bedraggled as these days. Or as hard. Back then, at least Dad was here. Nowadays Royal has even curlier theories. Sitting at the top of his bed the other night, he’d said thoughtfully to Charles, who’d wound himself in a ball at the bottom, “I figured Chess would be better though. Now that Mom isn’t getting any.”

  It took Charles a minute to catch on; then he said as venomously as whispering allowed, “If it wasn’t I needed you for guard, I’d knock you back where that came from.” No, Royal said testily in his regular voice. “It wasn’t James. Nobody gives me credit.” Then froze and grabbed up his side of the blackjack deal, ready on the bedspread in case Chess came round the door. No—nothing. Not that night. But Royal’s the best guard of any of them.

  “That you, Charles?” his mother says from the porch when he comes in from Rocky’s. “Ah. You’re back. The girls are getting ready for the Village Hall. Or Maureen is … Look—Charles—?” She doesn’t even hear the desperation in her voice.

  He straightens to it. “Okay, okay, I’ll handle it. You going to the Kellihys’?” He hates even to say their name. “Me?” she says. “No.” And tightens the wrapper. He wants to give her a joke. “Why don’t you get out of that thing,” he hears himself say. “Know what Rocky says? He says you set the moral tone of this household.” Her mouth falls open, aghast. His too.

  So, tonight, he’s coped. Twice. First, at the Hall, among all the old biddies smirking at Chess—then afterwards. When, after their midnight cocoa, Royal sneaks to him. “Lucy is back.”

  Chess is in the library, sitting formally in her crushed brown hat, which tilts past the angle of chic. Reeny’s wail when they left—“That’s cra-zee!” hasn’t changed it, nor the biddies either. The strange, peaked antique dress, with its mournful bandings, hangs on her, irretrievably smart. So that, either way, she’d caught the attention she can never quite bear.

  The three of them surround her. We aren’t cornering her—any more than she corners herself, he thinks. Any truth that they tell her, she knows already, better than they do. But we have to tell her. For our own sake. She puts our world in jeopardy. Our system. We have to speak. We don’t hear Lucy. But we too have the right. Not to.

  “Chess—” he says, stepping forward as the elder. “We-re—giving up.”

  At his voice, Maureen steps to his side. She teeters there, on the edge of his confidence. “I can’t take it any more either. You’re treating us like we don’t count. Me. Like we’re dirt.” She falls back.

  He’s amazed. Maureen’s never spoken up for her life before. Chess has forced it.

  And here comes Royal, always slickly mum, stepping forward too. On him it looks threatening. On his little brother Roy.

  “Giving up?” Chess says. In her lap, the thin, blueish fingertips which finesse machines for him are turned up, yes, like a doll’s. Immobility is what she can’t shake. “On me?” He can see it’s a relief. And then she trembles.

  “Never on you, Sis.” Only on the chase. “Ohhhh, Sis.” Maureen, the fountain.

  But even Chess knows her sister’s tears are never for herself. “It’s Royal, don’t you see? Don’t trust him. He wants to put me in a hospital.” She slants at him, contemptuous. “Like him.”

  “But you’re healthy.” Maureen turns. “Do you, Roy? She’s stronger than any of us.”

  “Not in his kind of hospital. I told you.” Chess is white. “The kind Lexie worked in. Royal fools all of you. He’ll be the kind of doctor wants everybody sick. And none of you see why.”

  “I will not.” He’s still a little guy. They tend to forget that. His lower lip is even fluttering. “Why would I?”

  “To pay for your foot.” She tosses it casually. Beyond rancor—what nobody’s ever dared to say. Her sanity is awesome. There’s too much of it. Nobody can stand that much, Charles thinks.

  She turns to him. She always knows what he thinks. “Charles… Charles?”

  “I have to. If it goes on.” He squeezes his eyes shut, hard. “I’m going to have to… welsh. Chess.”

  She sits there. Then puts out a hand to him, soothing. “Don’t worry. They’re leaving, you know… You’ll all leave. But first—Lexie.” She has a bitter way with Lexie’s name, behind Lexie’s back. Like a magic formula, being tested. “L-Lexie,” she says now. As if their mother’s standing there. She hunches. Casting about, side to side, to each of them. Asking them. He can’t close his eyes. She makes a humble little mmm—aaa of pain, never heard before. “Maybe—could I stay—on?”

  Not even babyish. The real voice from the womb? Calling, beyond all jokes.

  “We two could get jobs and live together. In town. We’d make them let us,” Maureen says, stalwart. “Even in the fall. If you could’ve only kept that job. I know I could get one.” Maureen reminds him of those girls in the commune. He’s seeing them all through a long, dark telescope. All of what’s happening. It could only happen in a family as close as them.

  “What would she do about Lucy?” Royal says. His eyes screw cleverly.

  And what will we do, about him? Our little brother, who isn’t a traitor really, or a liar per se. But was born a little cheap. As if the foot itself had shriveled because the makings gave out.

  Chess stands up, tall. But not moving an inch toward him. Whichever her state of being, she has the breadth. Of a terrible openness maybe. But almost significant. “She went. For good.”

  “Yah, she was at the Village Hall. You said you saw her. Minute you got inside the door.”

  “Stop it, Roy,” his brother says.

  “No one confronts it,” Royal’s high, mimic voice says. “Only me.”

  The two others gape at the cheek of him.

  He’s right. But why does it have to be him?

  Nobody stops him from nearing Chess. Or sneering up at her. “How’s she come and go, huh, and none of us sees her. Or hears. On a UFO maybe? What kind of voice does she
have anyway, this Lucy?”

  “Soft. But I hear her.” She shrinks from him. To Charles. “I hear her.” Is he flagging?—she’s mutely asking. People’s energies flag after they’ve been with her for awhile—she knows that. Lowering her eyes, she dwindles. Sits down again in the chair. Her hat and dress follow her, loyally.

  “Chess. What does she want? What’s she saying?”

  She sits there bowed. A little croak comes out, human though. “‘Help.’”

  He almost understands how it is. Must be. To be all metaphor, inside one’s self. So much so that all the masked meanings scramble one another, in the radio sense. Not via one powerful beam in the brain—like Russia turning Radio Free Europe’s broadcast into anti-sense. No, his sister’s body is all metaphor physically, every sensation maybe received doubly, triply, or in itself phantomized. Her own body’s the vacuum—full of electronic, electrochemical cries. So that the struggle in her brain—to keep to the simple meanings which other persons level at her in their modest unsick way—may be one of the most valiant in life. So that at times, trembling in one’s resonant flesh, one can only immobilize. Or report one’s body from that distance where the brain recoils from the symphonic horrors offered it.

  So that Chess sits there, two feet from him, en-towered in her Babeled flesh. Doomed—by her power of reason—to carry on. And by them.

  His mouth awry at the suffering, he kneels to her. He will force the halved metaphor together.

  She knows. She’s ready. Reaching up, her tapered fingers shaking, she straightens her hat.

  “Lucy?” he says.

  And now little Lord Royal, awake and collating at the head of the long brass bed, twice his own length, at whose feet Charles lies drugged—hears something. Like any good doctor, he doesn’t want to wake an exhausted sleeper unnecessarily. And he understands the quality of Charles’ sleep. His city visits to James—those peeps into James’s office and the international parliament of medicine, or into the carefully unreeled documentary of James’s own experience—are to him an introductory internship. These nights here, out and abroad on the plains of a family chase, are his laboratory. In which he alone isn’t terrorized. Even when he’s in hospital for himself, observation is his power-reserve. Which the mushy nurses applaud as bravery. Mean as his sister Chess can be, she understands him better than anybody. For study, what good are the healthy? Sick people are his health. As long as he can have a light on at night.

  And of course he’s a better guard than Charles. One must not care, James says—it spoils the vision. One must observe. Royal agrees. But Charles is wrong to worry that he would ever give James valuable information. Which might someday contribute to a thesis of his own. On how it can be that a person with Chess’ trouble—he’ll have to say “disease,” naturally—understands him, them all, better than anyone.

  Yes—there’s somebody down by the road. Although this room’s in the rear, the long central hall acts like a sounding-board, bringing in every river-enlarged trespass, to be enlarged by the hill at the back. If you hold quiet, you can hear the river lap. Yes, somebody’s on the porch. Not Lexie’s step. A man’s. With his mother probably, who’ll be barefoot in her usual way. Which she has no idea embarrasses them—Maureen especially. It’s a wonder she wears shoes to the city. Or would be, if he didn’t know what she goes there for. Which Chess took pains to tell them all. She watches her mother like a jealous twin, whom nothing escapes.

  “Your sister Chess wants to get back inside her mother,” James has told him. “They say we all do—but this is different.” James has told him a lot. “Chess is frightened of her too,” Royal told him. “Ah, all we family members lie heavily on each other,” James said, pushing him past an usher’s glare at the Academy of Medicine, where James was going to speak. “That’s because we know each other’s sicky secrets. Like I know for how long you wet the bed. But that needn’t matter now we’re friends, eh? Eh?” James’s face up there, like a hawk in a dinnerjacket, did give him the jumps. “No,” he’d said coolly. “Now that I’ve stopped.” Adding to himself: And once I get something on you.

  Very delicately, he’d reported some of this to his mother. “Family?” she said. “They accuse you. And only they can soothe.” But she bypassed him, on any dirt about James. He’ll have to wait until he gets to live in James’s house.

  He can see why Chess admires his mother, and hates her too—for being the healthier twin. And if what James says is true—as a kind of castle where you want to hide and they can’t let you. “Oh, Chessie does want to get away, deep down,” he told James jauntily. “Everybody sees it—except Lex.” Who James says keeps all knowledge of Chess underground. “As her all-but-mirror-image, which she cannot accept. Can you understand that, nephew?” Roy isn’t sure. “Well if you were my son, say—” James says, bearing so hard on Royal’s shoulder that he slipped going up the city morgue’s steps. “Sorry. If you were my firstborn boy, say. And I had a foot.”

  After a bit, Royal said he did understand. Inside the morgue, he kept unusually quiet. It was certainly the place for it. He didn’t blanch at the sights, not even the pickled ones. James was proud. “Not like your Dad.”

  Outside, James picked up on Your Mother, again. It was almost his favorite subject. “They’re disturbingly alike, Royal. Both powerhouses. But Lexie’s going to make it. Chessie’s a powerhouse blocked. You must prepare yourself, Royal. I fear your mother is going to make it—out of there.”

  Roy almost giggles. It’s fine training for a psychoanalyst. I fear, his uncle said.

  Nodding now at the chrome nightlamp whose shade refers back his image, he’s serious. Chess is prepared. How she’ll leave, is what he has to watch.

  Careful not to wake Charles, he eases his good foot to the floor, then his other, and goes to his desk for one of the notebooks he never bothers to hide. They think him too young to be investigated, or to be interesting; he counts on it. Since he has few resources as yet, the house being his lab, nothing in the natural funk of a household is ordinary to him. Opening a folder of data on the secondary body secretions—on ear-wax, which is suspected of some correlation with breast-cancer in women, and on what the British call toe-jam, whose possible harmony with the environment nobody seems to have followed—he turns to some recent notes on the menstrual cycles of his women. An overheard remark of his mother to Chessie—that they’re so alike they even menstruate at the same time—has put him onto it. Maureen’s not in on that cycle far as he can tell. But since she’s too neat to leave things lying about, and her general gush conceals her emotions, she’s a norm he won’t much bother with. The other two are what fascinate him.

  It’s been easy. Chess is so careless in the bathroom. And his mother so frank, about everything. Since Lexie sleeps like the drained dead at these times, and his father used to give her otherwise inexplicable iron shots, they were all told early about the functions of women—which openness his father pretended to approve. Though his mother’s unconcern about her nudity drives his father wild. She twits him with it; has a thing for it. Still flitting naked across the hall to the bathroom—except at those times. His father hates it when his mother comes to dinner in bare feet. If you ask Royal, it’s not natural of either of them.

  But Chess, during her and Lexie’s joint periods—which according to his record have synchronized four times out of the past seven—is much calmed. Except when Lexie goes to the city. To have lovers, Chess repeated, moral and hating. She plans to find out who Lexie meets, and call them up. And someday, she says, she’ll do the same as Lex. Maureen wouldn’t believe any of it. “You just came on early.” Reeny said.

  “Does Father know?” he’d asked. He was a year younger then. “Him?” Chess said. And Reeny shut her up.

  Charles thinks Father does know. Though Charles never will discuss it. Who Charles hates is Bets Kellihy. And what he calls the whole bog-rotten clan over there. Though he has a soft spot for Arthur, who makes him laugh. Arthur has a harder time than an
y poor butler should, Charles says. “But you go over there once more though, to bathe Dodo, I’ll beat the hell out of you.” That kid from the Missionary Institute, older than most paperboys, and a little odd from religion maybe; Charles was sent to pay him once. “Pay him for the Kellihys’ too—” Lexie said “—the boy looks so miserable.” Charles came back saying “The sods. The stinking sods.” Not to worry, his mother said. “We’ll get it back, from Bets.”

  Does Charles know about his father and Bets? There’s an innocence about his brother which awes Royal. Or a willingness to believe the best. When he asked Chess she snapped, “Look in your notebooks.” She knows Royal’s worth investigating. She knows everything.

  “Lexie’ll go to the party,” she said tonight. “You’ll see. She’ll even wear shoes to it.” Why else were they being packed off?—she said. Not just for them to be like other kids—hand it to Ma, she never did that to them. Chess, before going to the Hall, finally convinced to, is haughty, mocking. And in her own far-out eye marvelously dressed. Siding with Reeny, he isn’t so sure. “The lunks won’t get it,” Chess says airily. “But somebody will.” And one older boy had. But by that time, Lucy had arrived. And came all the way home with her.

  When Charles knelt to her, saying what he said, he and Reeny held their breath. Would Chessie rage, stalk off, or retreat? In their span she’s done all of these. But never what they expect.

  She said nothing. But her lips formed an Oh. She put out her hands, slowly, across something. Charles grasped them. The two of them held on. Like lightning, then, she broke away, leaping. Calling out, “‘Love and Friendship’!” They ran to the piano together and played it—as they had in their earlier teens. A Schubert duet with much crossing-over of hands. Higher and higher. Round and round. Loud. “Louder than the party!” she called. The music from the party wasn’t much yet—only a fever-clink sound of people, that stole in from next door and ripped off their silence, giving them nothing in return.