Extreme Magic

by Hortense Calisher

  “Oh, definitely.”

  They clicked glasses with casual aim, and drank. Sitting back, they mused sternly for a while on their mutual hardness. Raising their chins like muezzins, they looked easterly, looking into the air, into what might be assumed to be the direction of Europe, that old archipelago of ideas and emotions, which would fade and return for them, fade and return, coming out for them now and then like an odor reviving on a damp day.

  “Still…” said Alastair. He leaned forward again, gazing down on the highway. “Still—everything’s laid on very nicely.”

  “Ja, ja. Very.”

  Shoulders touching, they looked down on the highway, down to where the cars were flashing by like toucans, bright red, hot pink and high yellow, under the aboriginal sun.

  A Christmas Carillon

  ABOUT FOUR WEEKS BEFORE Christmas, Grorley, in combined shame and panic, began to angle for an invitation to somewhere, anywhere, for Christmas Day. By this time, after six months of living alone in the little Waverly Place flat to which he had gone as soon as he and his wife had decided to separate, he had become all too well reacquainted with his own peculiar mechanism in regard to solitude. It was a mechanism that had its roots in the jumbled lack of privacy of an adolescence spent in the dark, four-room apartment to which his parents had removed themselves and three children after his father’s bankruptcy in ’29. Prior to that, Grorley’s childhood had been what was now commonly referred to as Edwardian—in a house where servants and food smells kept their distance until needed, and there were no neurotic social concerns about the abundance of either—a house where there was always plush under the buttocks, a multiplicity of tureens and napery at table, lace on the pillow, and above all that general expectancy of creature comfort and spiritual order which novelists now relegated to the days before 1914.

  That it had lasted considerably later, Grorley knew, since this had been the year of his own birth, but although he had been fifteen when they had moved, it was the substantial years before that had faded to fantasy. Even now, when he read or said the word “reality,” his mind reverted to Sunday middays in the apartment house living room, where the smudgy daylight was always diluted by lamps, the cheaply stippled walls menaced the oversized furniture, and he, his father and brother and sister, each a claustrophobe island of irritation, were a constant menace to one another. Only his mother, struggling alone in the kitchen with the conventions of roast chicken and gravy, had perhaps achieved something of the solitude they all had craved. To Grorley even now, the smell of roasting fowl was the smell of a special kind of Sunday death.

  Only once before now had he lived alone, and then too it had been in the Village, not far from where he presently was. After his graduation from City College he had worked a year, to save up for a master’s in journalism, and then, salving his conscience with the thought that he had at least paid board at home for that period, he had left his family forever. The following year, dividing his time between small-time newspaper job and classes, living in his $27 per month place off Morton Street, he had savored all the wonders of the single doorkey opening on the quiet room, of the mulled book and the purring clock, of the smug decision not to answer the phone to let even the most delightful invader in. Now that he looked back on it, of course, he recalled that the room had rung pretty steadily with the voices of many such who had been admitted, but half the pleasure had been because it had been at his own behest. That had been a happy time, when he had been a gourmet of loneliness, prowling bachelor-style on the edge of society, dipping inward when he chose. Of all the habitations he had had since, that had been the one whose conformations he remembered best, down to the last, worn dimple of brick. When he had house-hunted, last June, he had returned instinctively to the neighborhood of that time. Only a practicality born of superstition had kept him from hunting up the very street, the very house.

  He had had over two years of that earlier freedom, although the last third of it had been rather obscured by his courtship of Eunice. Among the girl students of the Village there had been quite a few who, although they dressed like ballerinas and prattled of art like painters’ mistresses, drew both their incomes and their morality from good, solid middle-class families back home. Eunice had been the prettiest and most sought after of these, and part of her attraction for some, and certainly for Grorley, had been that she seemed to be, quite honestly, one of those rare girls who were not particularly eager to marry and settle down. Grorley had been so entranced at finding like feelings in a girl—and in such a beautiful one—that he had quite forgotten that in coaxing her out of her “freedom” he was persuading himself out of his own.

  He hadn’t realized this with any force until the children came, two within the first four years of the marriage. Before that, in the first fusion of love, it had seemed to Grorley that two could indeed live more delightfully alone than one, and added to this had been that wonderful release from jealousy which requited love brings—half the great comfort of the loved one’s presence being that, ipso facto, she is with no one else. During this period of happy, though enlarged privacy, Grorley confided to Eunice some, though not all, of his feelings about family life and solitude. He was, he told her, the kind of person who needed to be alone a great deal—although this of course excepted her. But they must never spend their Sundays and holidays frowsting in the house like the rest of the world, sitting there stuffed and droning, with murder in their hearts. They must always have plans laid well in advance, plans which would keep the two of them emotionally limber, so to speak, and en plein air. Since these plans were always pleasant—tickets to the Philharmonic, with after-theater suppers, hikes along the Palisades, fishing expeditions to little-known ponds back of the Westchester parkways, whose intricacies Grorley, out of a history of Sunday afternoons, knew as well as certain guides knew Boca Raton—Eunice was quite willing to accede. In time she grew very tactful, almost smug, over Grorley’s little idiosyncrasy, and he sometimes heard her on the phone, fending people off. “Not Sunday. Gordon and I have a thing about holidays, you know.” By this time, too, they had both decided that, although Grorley would keep his now very respectable desk job at the paper, his real destiny was to “write”; and to Eunice, who respected “imagination” as only the unimaginative can, Grorley’s foible was the very proper defect of a noble intelligence.

  But with the coming of the children, it was brought home to Grorley that he was face to face with one of those major rearrangements of existence for which mere tact would not suffice. Eunice, during her first pregnancy, was as natural and unassuming about it as a man could wish; she went on their Sunday sorties to the very last, and maintained their gallant privacy right up to the door of the delivery room. But the child of so natural a mother was bound to be natural too. It contracted odd fevers whenever it wished and frequently on Sundays, became passionately endeared to their most expensive sitter or would have none at all, and in general permeated their lives as only the most powerfully frail of responsibilities can. And when the second one arrived, it did so, it seemed to Grorley, only to egg the other one on.

  There came a morning, the Christmas morning of the fourth year, when Grorley, sitting in the odor of baked meat, first admitted that his hydra-headed privacy was no longer a privacy at all. He had created, he saw, his own monster; sex and the devil had had their sport with him, and he was, in a sense that no mere woman would understand, all too heavily “in the family way.” Looking at Eunice, still neat, still very pretty, but with her lovely mouth pursed with maternity, her gaze sharp enough for Kinder and Küche, but abstract apparently for him, he saw that she had gone over to the enemy and was no longer his. Eunice had become “the family” too.

  It was as a direct consequence of this that Grorley wrote the book which was his making. Right after that fatal morning, he had engaged a room in a cheap downtown hotel (he and Eunice were living out in Astoria at the time), with the intention, as he explained to Eunice, of writing there after he left the paper
, and coming home weekends. He had also warned her that, because of the abrasive effects of family life, it would probably be quite some time before “the springs of reverie”—a phrase he had lifted from Ellen Glasgow—would start churning. His real intention was, of course, to prowl, and for some weeks thereafter he joined the company of those men who could be found, night after night, in places where they could enjoy the freedom of not having gone home where they belonged.

  To his surprise, he found, all too quickly, that though his intentions were of the worst, he had somehow lost the moral force to pursue them. He had never been much for continuous strong drink, and that crude savoir-faire which was needed for the preliminaries to lechery seemed to have grown creaky with the years. He took to spending odd hours in the newspaper morgue, correlating, in a halfhearted way, certain current affairs that interested him. After some months, he suddenly realized that he had enough material for a book. It found a publisher almost immediately. Since he was much more a child of his period than he knew, he had hit upon exactly that note between disaffection and hope which met response in the breasts of those who regarded themselves as permanent political independents. His book was an instant success with those who thought of themselves as thinking for themselves (if they had only had time for it). Quick to capitalize upon this, Grorley’s paper gave him a biweekly column, and he developed a considerable talent for telling men of good will, over Wednesday breakfast, the very thing they had been saying to one another at Tuesday night dinner.

  Grorley spent the war years doing this, always careful to keep his column, like his readers, one step behind events. With certain minor changes, he kept, too, that scheme of life which had started him writing, changing only, with affluence, to a more comfortable hotel. In time also, that savoir-faire whose loss he had mourned returned to him, and his success at his profession erased any guilts he might otherwise have had—a wider experience, he told himself, being not only necessary to a man of his trade, but almost unavoidable in the practice of it. He often congratulated himself at having achieved, in a country which had almost completely domesticated the male, the perfect pattern for a man of temperament, and at times he became almost insufferable to some of his married men friends, when he dilated on the contrast between his “continental” way of life and their own. For by then, Grorley had reversed himself—it was his weekends and holidays that were now spent cozily en famille. It was pleasant, coming back to the house in Tarrytown on Friday evenings, coming back from the crusades to find Eunice and the whole household decked out, literally and psychologically, for his return. One grew sentimentally fond of children whom one saw only under such conditions—Grorley’s Saturdays were now spent, as he himself boasted, “on all fours,” in the rejuvenating air of the skating rinks, the museums, the woods, and the zoos. Sundays and holidays he and Eunice often entertained their relatives, and if, as the turkey browned, he had a momentary twinge of his old mal de famille, he had but to remember that his hat was, after all, only hung in the hall.

  It was only some years after the war that Eunice began to give trouble. Before that, their double ménage had not been particularly unusual—almost all the households of couples their age had been upset in one way or another, and theirs had been more stable than many. During the war years Eunice had had plenty of company for her midweek evenings; all over America women had been managing bravely behind the scenes. But now that families had long since paired off again, Eunice showed a disquieting tendency to want to be out in front.

  “No, you’ll have to come home for good,” she said to Grorley, at the end of their now frequent battles. “I’m tired of being a short-order wife.”

  “The trouble with you,” said Grorley, “is that you’ve never adjusted to postwar conditions.”

  “That was your nineteen-forty-six column,” said Eunice. “If you must quote yourself, pick one a little more up-to-date.” Removing a jewel-encrusted slipper-toe from the fender, she made a feverish circle of the room, the velvet panniers of her housegown swinging dramatically behind her. She was one of those women who used their charge accounts for retaliation. With each crisis in their deteriorating relationship, Grorley noted gloomily, Eunice’s wardrobe had improved.

  “Now that the children are getting on,” he said, “you ought to have another interest. A hobby.”

  Eunice made a hissing sound. “Nineteen-forty-seven!” she said.

  In the weeks after, she made her position clear. Men, she told him, might have provided the interest he suggested, but when a woman had made a vocation of one, it wasn’t easy to start making a hobby of several. It was hardly much use swishing out in clouds of Tabu at seven, if one had to be back to feel Georgie’s forehead at eleven. Besides, at their age, the only odd men out were likely to be hypochondriacs, or bachelors still dreaming of mother, or very odd men indeed.

  “All the others,” she said nastily, “are already on somebody else’s hearth rug. Or out making the rounds with you.” Worst of all, she seemed to have lost her former reverence for Grorley’s work. If he’d been a novelist or a poet, she said (she even made use of the sticky word “creative”), there’d have been more excuse for his need to go off into the silence. As it was, she saw no reason for his having to be so broody over analyzing the day’s proceedings at the U.N. If he wanted an office, that should take care of things very adequately. But if he did not wish to live with her, then he could not go on living with her. “Mentally,” she said, “you’re still in the Village. Maybe you better go back there.”

  Things were at this pass when Grorley’s paper sent him to London, on an assignment that kept him there for several months. He was put up for membership in one or two exclusively masculine clubs, and in their leonine atmosphere his outraged vanity—(“creative” indeed!)—swelled anew. Finally, regrettably near the end of his stay, he met up with a redheaded young woman named Vida, who worked for a junior magazine by day, wrote poetry by night, and had once been in America for three weeks. She and Grorley held hands over the mutual hazards of the “creative” life, and on her lips the word was like a caress. For a woman, too, she was remarkably perceptive about the possessiveness of other women. “Yes, quite,” she had said. “Yes, quite.”

  When she and Grorley made their final adieu in her Chelsea flat, she held him, for just a minute, at arm’s length; “I shall be thinking of you over there, in one of those ghastly, what do you call them, living rooms, of yours. Everybody matted together, and the floor all over children—like beetles. Poor dear. I should think those living rooms must be the curse of the American family. Poor, poor dear.”

  On his return home in June, Grorley and Eunice agreed on a six-months trial separation prior to a divorce. Eunice showed a rather unfeeling calm in the lawyer’s office, immediately afterward popped the children in camp, and went off to the Gaspé with friends. Grorley took a sublet on the apartment in Waverly Place. It was furnished in a monastic modern admirably suited to the novel he intended to write, that he had promised Vida to write.

  He had always liked summers in town, when the real aficionados of the city took over, and now this summer seemed to him intoxicating, flowing with the peppery currents of his youth. In the daytime his freedom slouched unshaven; in the evenings the streets echoed and banged with life, and the moon made a hot harlequinade of every alley. He revisited the San Remo, Julius’s, Chumley’s, Jack Delaney’s, and all the little Italian bars with backyard restaurants, his full heart and wallet carrying him quickly into the camaraderie of each. Occasionally he invited home some of the remarkables he met on his rounds—a young Italian bookie, a huge St. Bernard of a woman who drove a taxi and had once lived on a barge on the East River, an attenuated young couple from Chapel Hill, who were honeymooning at the New School. Now and then a few of his men friends from uptown joined him in a night out. A few of these, in turn, invited him home for the weekend, but although he kept sensibly silent on the subject of their fraternal jaunts, he detected some animus in the hospitality of their
wives.

  By October, Grorley was having a certain difficulty with his weekends. His list of bids to the country was momentarily exhausted, and his own ideas had begun to flag. The children, home from camp, had aged suddenly into the gang phase; they tore out to movies and jamborees of their own, were weanable from these only by what Grorley could scrape up in the way of rodeos and football games, and assumed, once the afternoon’s treat was over, a faraway look of sufferance. Once or twice, when he took them home, he caught himself hoping that Eunice would ask him in for a drink, a chat that might conceivably lead to dinner, but she was always out, and Mrs. Lederer, the housekeeper, always pulled the children in as if they were packages whose delivery had been delayed, gave him a nasty nod, and shut the door.

  For a few weekends he held himself to his desk, trying to work up a sense of dedication over the novel, but there was no doubt that it was going badly. Its best juice had been unwisely expended in long, analytic letters to Vida, and now, in her airmail replies, which bounced steadily and enthusiastically over the Atlantic, it began to seem more her novel than his. The Sunday before Thanksgiving, he made himself embark on a ski-train to Pittsfield, working up a comforting sense of urgency over the early rising and the impedimenta to be checked. The crowd on the train was divided between a band of Swiss and German perfectionists who had no conversation, and a horde of young couples, rolling on the slopes like puppies, who had too much. Between them, Grorley’s privacy was respected to the point of insult. When he returned that night, he tossed his gear into a corner, where it wilted damply on his landlord’s blond rug, made himself a hot toddy—with a spasm of self-pity over his ability to do for himself—and sat down to face his fright. For years, his regular intervals at home had been like the chewed coffee bean that renewed the wine-taster’s palate. He had lost the background from which to rebel.