On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  Granted. But I mean to tell you.

  “We were taught only to connect with each other,” she said gruffly.

  And we couldn’t. No need to say.

  She’s touching his arm. “There’s something more, I’m not sure what. But we chose the village instead. I want to live by my own—.” Her mouth went wry, muting the rest of it. “And I want them to know.”

  How many patients had touched him on the arm like that—woman or man. Nobody must know, Doc. Doc, I can’t wait to let it out. The village always chose the village, one way or other—is she just discovering it?

  I want to live by my own images. That’s what she said. They all said. And I want the whole village to know.

  On a bush behind hers an opulently striped beach-towel unlike any of their own faded ones. In hospital he’d already warned himself of how the house and all in it would have acquired new objects, new facts and new people, a tide which would have swelled over the lump of him. There’s an underground of waterfront sex here. Does she now belong to it?

  “You’ll go on as you must.” He said that to all of them. Except himself. He made himself look at her—personally. She deserved it. “You have the right.”

  But if she’s going to do what he has a hunch she is, then he’ll have to stand by.

  He’s looking at her body, her face too. She’s forced him to. If he could have done that on his own—seen her true and whole in the altogether—how her body too would have smiled for him. Her face trembled, ready to be radiant. The long hysteria’s ending. Even he’s admitting it. She stood up, breasts forward. It was how she stood on her ledge. Would stand, if the children came down here.

  But they haven’t come. After adult parties, children sleep late.

  “This is the way—.” But it stuck in her throat. The children stick in her throat.

  “It’s growing light.” How different the light was here, complicated, offering him back his native life.

  What’s this? She’s reaching down for his jacket, drawing it toward her, bent over from the waist straight-knee’d, like a woman digging with a hoe too short for her. She’s slung the jacket over her shoulders, shrugging it close. The most humble gesture he’s ever had from her. Now we can talk, she’ll say though. Now—can’t we talk.

  She’s touching his shoe.

  Those gift shoes of his. So heavily perforated at the narrow wingtip. At the heel’s a flange reminding where spurs were, once. Not a father’s shoe.

  “Oh, they walked me here,” he said down to her. “They’ll—walk me back.”

  Her gaze traveled up him. “To the nuns?”

  She can feel his shock, vibrating all the way to his shoe. “How come—what makes you say that?”

  That’s it, then. What came spuming between the lines of every letter. He’s not a father anymore. He’s receded from it.

  She’s careful. “Oh—Bob Kellihy said it. ‘Don’t leave him too long with the nuns.’ Ah well, you know. Catholics. They always think that everyone.”

  He was breathing fast enough to remind him how sick he’d been. “Ah, ah, such women—” Sister Isaac said, raising her head from that last letter “—they have time to brood.” On what can take a man four months and three thousand miles to arrive at. With a whole hospital to help.

  Where, ward to ward, bed to bed, is as Catholic as he’d ever need to be. Faced with a piece of the public health so simple that even he can manage it. Yes—he’s going back.

  The light’s still lifting. The grass is still grass. “Oh yes, the Kellihys” he said from halfway across the world “—how are they?”

  “They’re having an affair.” Her voice floated up dryly. “With each other.”

  She’d hauled the jacket over her head, so that she had to peer up at him sideways. The nursing nuns, excused from wimples, still tilted their heads on this same slant. Did all woman have nun in them—as Sister said? As all men have monk. Nothing to do with celibacy. Or the red tawn of the penis, or the hanging, clitoral heat. Or even with parenthood. Something not to do with any of it.

  Even in that teaser, Bets?

  Struggling with her on the Kellihys’ spare-room couch, he’d knocked down some of Arthur’s silver-work; this happened every time. Shhh—she said at once. Below him her broad Cupid’s-bow mouth pouted for its kiss, her long corals swung between breasts—oddly enticing in their flatness—which had dropped. Four kids, was it? Or five? “No, Bob and I have an agreement. I only pet.” A word from his own mother’s archive. It had been the night of the christening party. He’d picked up a silver cup just finished for it, and handed it to her. “Your chaperone.”

  “That Bets,” he said now. “The whole teaser apparatus. But she can’t.”

  “Really?” Down in the grass she’s plaiting is Betsy, besatined and beery, signing books of photographs she’s not in, tagging after the priests. Saying—as she did say once, and was brushed off for—Lexie—may I attend your class. “It’s all for Bob, you mean.”

  “Oh they’re fond—enough. Alcoholics like him can be very adroit sexually. That’s known.”

  Yes, it is.

  “But behind that front she puts up—oh the senior K’s know by now what they’re buying.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A mother. Bets is to the mother born. All she really likes is slipping them out.”

  “She tell you that? Evenings?”

  “Evenings and drunk. When she has a baby, she said. Then she feels her worth.”

  Ah poor Bets. Join the class.

  “But when she’s had the baby and is drunk. Then it’s the best.”

  “Ah—poor Bets.”

  Their eyes meet.

  He’s half-smiling. “Oh I went for it. The teaser part. I need to be encouraged. As you may recall.”

  “I recall.” The shame—cast on her own aggressiveness—that a woman—a girl—doggedly accepts. For the sake of the man. And the sex. Mother-reluctant, that’s what you were, Ray. And yes, I went for you—as young men went for jobs.

  He turned to look at the house. He’s a tall man; his legs are much the longest part of him. Seventeenth-century legs she called them during their courtship, awarding his bones the elegance she wanted from life. Looking up them, they’re a tower yet. Until you arrive at the eyes.

  “I won’t go in the house. Better just to leave again.”

  It’s true then. He wants to hide.

  “Put it on the market,” he’s saying. “You never really liked it.”

  What can I say? It was where I hid.

  “Some people think it already is,” she said. “Some—are still rooting for us.”

  “For the practice,” he said. “They get used to the same ear.”

  “Oh?” she said. “Oh. Of course.”

  “But I want out.”

  So he’s said it. This man of few words. While she who has so many is mum. Mother-mum. We don’t leave. We take cars to the bridge. Or tear the shopping-lists apart, face by face.

  She got to her feet. “Ray. I thought maybe—. Charlie’ll be on his own by fall. And Royal in hospital. I thought maybe that you and the girls—might like to stay on here for a while.”

  “No!”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not—safe.”

  She stared. Did they become mothers that quick, from a distance? “You can always lock the doors.”

  His hands were making that tic-like routine again. The heel of one, swiped hard on the palm of the other. The other hand reversed it. No, that’s not so great for a doctor. But would James still do as he’d warned her he might? A custody ruling against her? For her own good?

  “James will arrange them all right,” she said in fury. “I’ll insist on it.” In exchange for Royal. I know my own force. “But there’s no reason to trust him.” And you haven’t even seen what I’m telling you. That I’m the one leaving. “Ray. I said you could have them. The girls.”

  In the dissecting-room nausea used to heave him like thi
s. So that he used to rock, James said, like an old woman in church.

  “She knee’d me.” His head flung toward the house. “The way I taught her to.” His teeth scored a thumb. “And because I’m back.”

  On the upper road came the yearning siren of an ambulance. She glanced up, counting on her fingers as always. No, all are safe. Were safe. “You were in there?”

  Heaving, he nodded. Clasping himself, he dropped to his haunches. The dying siren is still faintly traceable. Like the scream she can never make.

  What’s he told her? In the somber precincts which she imagines his mind to inhabit, his automaton patrolled, trained not to observe itself. Or to take clues from others. When these pressed, when she did—it fled. But where?

  She dropped to the ground beside him. Arms around him she rocked with him, exchanging the same spongy, adolescent gulps. She’s no better at it than he is. Behind them the tin-voiced psychiatrist, forefinger on lips, stole away with high, exaggerated sickroom steps.

  Ray’s jacket, rooted in, turned up a handkerchief, big and European, a red darn in one corner. Tearing from the darn, he took the smaller strip, handing her the other. “I smell. I’m sorry.”

  His bedside manner. As cool and distant to himself as to any patient. If he revolts himself, if it’s sometimes human to, he will never realize it. This will always terrify her.

  “So do I.” But I can handle it.

  Standing up again, she blew her nose with strong tweak, crumpled the strip into a ball and threw it, far.

  He watched it disappear. For a moment it floated; it was linen. He crumpled the darned half in his pocket. “Look—I’m going to ship out now. I’ll write.” First to Charles. To all of them in time—I’m no fiend. Charles was the only one he’d miss, but this a father must never say. Let her keep her own illusions about loving all of them.

  He’s never looked so canny to her. “And the kids, Ray?”

  “Handle it.”

  Aie. Relief—like a stomach-blow. Then power, bathing her. They were always mine.

  He’s getting up to go. He was never a father.

  Then she’s scrambling after him. But I was going to be the one. To leave.

  The trilling of the birds began again. Observing them had been his passion once; she never seemed to notice them. He watched her with interest, just as when a boy, eye to the grass, he used to watch the underleaf life. Conscientiously, as if in domestic habit, she seized his jacket from the ground; will she put it on again? No, she’s walking with it, absently whipping it in the wind. Still unseeing, she drapes it on a bush. The night before giving birth, women and dormice houseclean. Always foreshadowing, women are. Dooming themselves. Yet the fluid lines and swells of her have an easeful devotion to the ground and to their own rhythm which stings him with the same envy animals incite; if she were to pad off on all fours he wouldn’t be surprised.

  Facing the river, head bent—can she be smiling? Taken by vagary, she reminds him of the way indoor birds, perched in an aviary or hung in a cage at the vets, shift irrationally to the climate, or the visitors or their own innards—with exactly the same innerfixed eye.

  Now she’s standing in front of him, her feet planted apart. From going barefoot, her feet have broadened but acquired personae. The right one can pick up sticks; the left one’s still lady-delicate. “So—we’re both leaving. So this is the logical life.” Her breasts jut at him aggressively. “We-ll, will you look at them?” she said, eyeing down at them. “My two jokes.”

  The sun is up. Or its forward artillery, gilding her, the hillside, the house, in readiness. She stands tall, triumphant, a column of sunshine, blinding him.

  From beyond the hill, again the mad toularou-rou-rou of the ambulance. He tensed. “Where’s it coming from?”

  “Tappan. Coming back.”

  And over the hill to the hospital. He tracked it. Fading north, to where if he stayed on here he might be meeting it. A gray soothe of abdication closed over it.

  “So—both of us,” he said. “Yes, what a surprise. I thought it would only be you.”

  She’s speechless. She dropped back on her green hummock. A pillar, collapsed inward from its middle. Speech is her pride. It flashes over her—why. She equates it with getting there first.

  “For me to make the break—” he’s saying at her elbow. “At first I thought it was only the disease. You know me. But it was in me to do. All this time.” His face drooped at her in the ultimate shyness. Of self-understanding. “I was never sure you’d be ready to, tell the truth. Maybe I banked on it. James and I both.” His expression is sad, generous. “So I’ll be off soon, eh? I’ll go up the hill and borrow Charlie’s Volks. I know where he keeps the key.” He swallows. “Kept it.”

  The grass she was plucking turned to hay as she tore it. But I banked on you. From the beginning so help me, I must have banked on you. To stay. “Well, go on then, why don’t you.” From the bottomless sulk it came, fretful, spiteful—and yet humorous? “Go on, yes.” She looked down at her breasts. “We don’t want you—on our bus.”

  “Our?” When he was in his “surgery” his face still refocussed like this. Tightening his best feature, a marked triangularity of the upper lids. In a tender scrutiny not of her or any patient, but of his own inner fund of competence. Early on, this look had roused her like an aphrodisiac; she’d had spells of putting a hand on him at eleven o’clock in the morning in his own waiting-room, or luring him into the trumped-up partitions behind it, where in his first years he’d done his own biologicals. He’d thought her jealous of his trade. What she’d wanted was to sleep with that competence. Blending her envy of it in him, with him. By the time he came to bed, he’d always lost it. Or in the last years, even by merely crossing the little limbo passage which connected office with house. He’d never had the power to diagnose her.

  Ah but it was always muddling—the images she had. When that happens—accuse. “That’s what you thought, didn’t you. A man coming for me on it. Who I’m waiting for?”

  He shook his head. “No. Or not exactly. What are you? Waiting for.”

  So thin a vision. She gripped the ground. “What I said. To be seen.”

  “Guess I’ve been alone too much.” He stared away from her. “With the religious. Who’re often very matter-of-fact.”

  She heard her own flat laugh. “On the subject of adultery?”

  No. On the subject of real thorns, in real flesh. And absolute desert-wanderings. “I thought you meant to board the bus. Or try.”

  “Board it.” Her glance swept down over herself. Clearly it had never crossed her mind.

  “We’d a case once.” On his balcony he’d sometimes thought of it. “Horrie let her on with the morning crowd without seeing her. Rest were too stunned to say. Bly saw her at the police station later. Said she was perfectly rational.” Just call me a streaker, she’d said. And let my children know.

  The sky is pink behind her, silhouetting her dark. “I never heard. You never said.”

  Nights you came home from town—from the hairdresser, with your hair electric from bed—how should you hear? Asking me to shake hands with my own sons. No, I never said.

  “They hushed it up.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Those two women I made a call on once? The younger one. The soft blonde. With the puzzled face.” She thinks he never notices.

  She didn’t move. “She left her children behind.”

  Over at the Kellihys a deep whimpf-whimpf began vibrating through the trees. The largest dishwasher in the world, it sounded like. The Kellihys are cleaning up.

  “Party?”

  She doesn’t answer. The lawn between her and him, them and the Kellihys, the river and all of them, stretches astrally, giving up the last of the dark.

  “Remember that young guy we found on the lawn once?” he said eagerly. “Remember?” Gave him coffee in my office, and offered him a paper examining-robe. No thanks doc, I’m fine, he said. “Been sleeping on a rainbow,
for a fact. My belly still feels the arch,” he’d said. And strode off free as air.

  He saw she was shivering. Elbow on knee, chin in hand, like Rodin’s The Thinker—though she’ll never in this life resemble it. “I wanted witnesses.” Her voice is hoarse. “When I should want—deeds.” She flung her arms up, to that audience of hers. And rolled over, face flat to the grass.

  Should he go now? She always left it to him! To be irresolute.

  Spain has made his ears sharp. Beyond the morning sounds thrusting the day up he hears a familiar ping-ping. The paper-boy here is earlier than most; the road’s accepted his zeal. Or the river has. What he himself will remember of this place forever is the barcarolle-ing splash of children in its water, the clickclack pingpong tracery of Charles and himself on the porch, even the muffled thump, impartially muted, of Royal’s foot.

  The paperboy’s as slow as he’s early; can’t see him yet through the trees. Or he’s stopping at Kellihys’, though it’s long past the first of the month. Short shrift he’ll get there if they’ve been giving parties. He himself has never sent them a bill. The Kellihys give our parties; they streak for us. But like all true partygivers, never on principle. So it doesn’t help.

  She’s still lying there as if she’ll knit herself to the grass. In a cleansing energy.

  He’ll remember her as a voice. Always a voice.

  The boys? They need no tallying, never have. Unlike as they are, they’re his body natural. Which remembers them.

  Add Maureen, dutifully—as the one he always forgets.

  And the other one. Don’t name her.

  He checks that window. Not there.

  A witness is not what he needs. He rubs his face, his hands. Yes brother-in-law. I need to hide. But that’s for later. Before that—a deed.

  Done. Such a small deed. He stands watching her.

  Eyes closed, lips pressed into weeds, she’s boarding the bus. Mounting its steps in her own skin, that last disguise. What’s the reason for this charade?—ah, she’ll tell them. How it is that women who meant to assert the personal confused it with the female.

  Passengers may include a few women who work the early shift at the next town’s paperbox factory, but by and large the aisles would be crammed with commuting men, cleanshaven and breakfasted. She’d stand just past the driver. Schedule-freak that he is, he won’t be stopping. But it wouldn’t help him to keep his head down.