Extreme Magic

by Hortense Calisher

  “The minute I got back to my room I sat down and wrote him a letter saying I didn’t want to see him again. I didn’t understand quite why yet myself, so I lied and said I was in love with another man.

  “Two weeks later, Ben came to see me; I suppose he thought it just another dodge to bring him to his knees. Anyway, that’s just what he did—went down on his knees again, without even saying hello first, and asked me to marry him. Later he told a friend of mine that from the way I’d refused him—I knew I hadn’t been sad enough—it was clear I’d never be a woman of the world. I haven’t seen him since, but now and then I hear he’s around somewhere, technically alive. I sure don’t want to see him. Little does he know the very particular way he could crow over me—fainting on my doorstep or not, with or without his feet in those burlap bags…”

  An intensity of silence reigned now, a contest of quiet in which the speaker herself must have been wondering if she was to be allowed to get away with it like that—or whether the girl across from her was going to let her know that she was not.

  We can be quiet too, the silence said now. People like us…

  “What?” Was the voice relieved at not being let off? “Don’t mumble so…Ah, you want to know what it was—what both my husbands said when they left. Now, really! The listener ought to do some of the work. I’ve been telling you, actually, all the way along. OK, guess, then. Don’t be shy; go on, try.

  “Oh. You think it was more or less what I said to Ben—just before I ran? That’s very clever of you; you’re a very clever girl. That would be a twist, wouldn’t it? You’ve got talent, no doubt about it. Well, I shan’t say, but you listen now. You listen very carefully.

  “After I’d sealed that letter to Ben and put it into the mail slot in the hall, I came back to my room. The envelope for Tyng, stained brown and shriveled, was lying where I’d left it. I picked it up, rolled it in some tissue from an old stocking box, and threw it into the basket. Then I went to the window and leaned on the sill. It was the holy time, a beautiful evening. A dusky wind was blowing, and the west was the color of a peach. I could feel the cold touch of the pearls at my throat, the warm cuddle of the jersey I’d just thrust my arms into; I thought I could even feel the lovely tickle of the blood running in my veins. It was spring, and my whole future was opening up again, full of oysters, music, lovers. A few foghorns were sounding on the river, and I wondered idly whether I would ever be able to set down exactly the emotion that sound always called up in me—as I had tried and failed to do so many times before.

  “And after a while, as I leaned there, the words came, began to shimmer and hang in the air about me. There they were, armies of them, ready to be made into ropes for necks, ready for lovers to be put into, husbands, life. They danced in my mind like wild ponies that moved only to my command, with hooves sharp enough to kill, but forelocks meek enough to me.

  “It had been a day. All in one day I’d found out I wasn’t going to have Banjo, marry Ben, poison Tyng. It had been a day full enough for anyone. Except me—and perhaps you…”

  Was she leaning forward? The voice was low now, farther back in its own mists than it had ever been, yet near enough for the quick of any ear.

  “So I sat down at the desk again—what I wrote was published the next year. The world stretched all before me that evening, in profuse strains of unpremeditated—life. But I left the window, and began to write about it…”

  No, it was the girl, leaning back, away, now stealthily rising. For a moment the figure stayed, a series of soft, dark ellipses lapsing to that poised, no longer tentative shoe. Then it ran. On the edge of the promenade it halted; then the wind, or a gesture of its own, tossed back the free-swinging hair and it was gone.

  Did the voice know it was alone now? Had it planned it that way—to be left addressing that perfect, illimitable audience of one? For it was still speaking.

  “So I left the window,” it said, “and began to write about it. Beginning with the word ‘I.’”

  The Gulf Between

  TURNING THEIR BACKS ON the last fanfare of sunset over the river, Hester and Kinny Elkin, side by side, skated laboriously up the hill, toward Broadway. Ordinarily, they would have kept a more cynical distance between elder sister, gone past twelve, and younger brother, but today, in the sprawling ten-room apartment which had always been their home, the shape of things was being dismantled for removal to a sunless five rooms in the rear of the building, on the same floor. Neither was anxious to return to the uneasy place now revealing itself as no longer theirs.

  For Hester, it was hard to believe that things back there would not be the same as they always had been at this hour, full of the settled ease of women from both sides of the family, dropped in for their afternoon coffee—white tablecloth, the cake plates with angels painted in their centers, cocoa for the children; to think of all this as not there to return to was like trying to hold in the ear two separate chords. Surely, when Josie, the maid, opened the door, her hectic look, both shaky and starched, would advise that the usual assortment of aunts and cousins was already sitting within, the two clans politely opposed as always, joined only on such topics as their common opinion of the Elkin maid. Silent on the things that mattered, they would be exchanging crumbs of agreement on whatever didn’t, across a little neutral sea where innuendo slid like eels; this was what adult “politeness” was. For the half-grown like herself, its counterpart was: to say, and appear to see—nothing. To rest on the yet safer swells of a bottom dark was what it had been to be a child.

  Meanwhile, in the exchanges that had gone on above, the women of her father’s family, no longer rich or beautiful, older than her mother by the same some twenty years as her father, had always held the upper hand. Allied closest to the household by their dependence on Mr. Elkin, on a business just large enough to be sometimes in important difficulties—and until recently, by their deference to her grandmother, the six-months-dead monarch of them all—something they owned had nevertheless kept them always the winners over her mother, and the family on her mother’s side.

  Her mother’s people, when momentarily left to themselves, to the thriftier gossip of their own smaller businesses, households, smaller everything, could often be heard to cluck a “T-t-t”ing disapproval of this quality, whatever it was, and—in the dead waits between those murmurs—to admire. As later comers to the country from a rural part of Bavaria, after fifty years here the men of her mother’s people still had fingers thick at the root, the women a strong village-sense of disaster. The Elkin lot, born in the laziest part of America, sometimes wasted time, and, on occasion, fortune—they knew how to waste. Her mother’s people were drawn daily to the comfort of it. Yet, if on those slow afternoons the Elkin women still triumphed, it was by the others’ subservience to what could be seen most clearly in the two lots of unframed family pictures, enemies tumbled together in an old breakfront’s drawer. For while her mother’s aunts and cousins were always taken at their rigid best, in full-length, marble-finish studies by Sarony—within the faultless drape of ballgown or teagown, perhaps gazing at a long dinner-ring on a forefinger, or all unconscious of a highlighted necklace—the Elkin women (by her mother’s comment and Hester’s own admission “foolish dressers”) were invariably shown to the waist only, emerging from that photographer’s mist which gave predominance to the face, these upheld proudly, as if something within, flowering from neck to brain, to hair wild or confined but always luxuriant, said, “We are more than we have. We are.”

  Ordinarily, Hester held both sides under advisement, and knew too well their estimate of her—on her case, as on Josie’s, they were joined. Today, however, she wished against hope that she might find them all there taking their comfort, however divided, as a sign to her that it was still there to take.

  “Race you down the new sidewalk,” said Kinny.

  On Fort Washington Avenue, the top of the hill, they wheeled sideways and rested, wheezing for breath. Before them, seen through the s
idestreet, the blinding bronze of the high windows on Broadway flashed like cymbals turning away from light, faded floor by floor, and went out. Here, the pebbly tan stone of the pavement changed to a smooth concrete, more dangerous to skate on, of a kind which slid under wheel silkily with a high, singing sound.

  “Ah no. Let’s not race.” Mostly, she let him win, not minding. It was the contest she minded. “Want to go down holding on, no knee-bend?” This was more dangerous, but a trial against the hill, not between themselves. But Kinny whizzed ahead, crouched over, shouting low insults to that imaginary combatant boys always carried with them, and disappeared around the corner.

  Knees straight, Hester, insolently balanced, clasped her hands in front of her and rolled down the hill after him, almost persuading herself that while she was immovable, the houses were being pulled past her on an endless tape. As she flew around the corner, another change in the sidewalk threw her forward, almost on her face, but she saved herself with a few hacking steps and slid down on the stoop of the corner house, pulling at her skate-straps with fingers numbed by the darkening air. During the moment in which she had turned the corner, the dusk had become palpable, in that gradual surge she could never arrest with her eyes.

  “Got the key?” Kinny swooped down beside her. She dug in her pocket and handed him the skate-key. From the curls of its broken, grayish string, a nickel fell out and rang on pavement speckled here with particles which would prickle into silver when the streetlights went on.

  “Buy us a chocolate bar?” said Kinny.

  “Let’s get a frank, and divvy.” Recently, her greediness had shifted away from the sweet to the sour. Herder’s frankfurters were served with a gamboge daub of mustard and a fringe of kraut. She picked up the nickel and spun it on the stone.

  “It’ll go down the grating,” he said.

  “We could fish for it with a magnet.” Between the dim edges of a pervading sadness, she saw herself looking for the magnet in the topsy-turviness of her room as she had left it this noon, bureaus emptied, bed stacked against the wall. Over her protests, the rattan toy chest had had its contents dumped into a carton, and had been packed with linen.

  She kicked off her skates and stood up. Swinging them by the thongs, she walked with him back up the hill on the Broadway side, feeling deflated and set down, her legs wobbling oddly on the suddenly still ground. All the interstices of the city were deepening with a chill color and people were passing quietly, their faces softened and reminiscent. She had a feeling that if she wet her finger and drew it through the air it would return stained with the dye of dusk. Even Mr. Mishnun, the old stationer, emerging from his stunted store to shoo out a small boy who had been snitching candy, paused for a minute, looking upward, abashed by the dumb, violet passage of the city into evening.

  Herder’s dairy was warm, insulated from the transit of the day by bright, particolored shelves and a smell of breads and peppercorns. She and Kinny ate slowly, served absent-mindedly by Mrs. Herder, who stood behind the counter, talking to a woman customer.

  “Ja, that’s the way it is,” said Mrs. Herder, nodding her head, smoothing together the crumbs and poppyseed on the cutting-board with her raw, boiled-looking hand. “That’s the way it is.”

  “Comes to everybody,” said the customer, grasping her bundle stolidly before her.

  “Sooner or later,” said Mrs. Herder, still nodding. Looking past them all into some mournful middle distance, she let out her breath in a long, confirming sigh. The nodding, like the last effort of a pendulum, quivered into ever shorter arcs, and stopped.

  To Hester, reared among so many elderly and middle-aged of both clans, these sad conversational cul-de-sacs of the grown had a sound both familiar and elusive. Though unable to define that central foreboding which, lurking always under the oblique talk, was acknowledged and propitiated by all, she recognized that some hovering bird, whether of time or death or doom, circled over all the grown, and that even while they confirmed its presence with this rallying of voices, each hoped secretly that this would forestall the moment when it would notice him in his cranny of safety—and pounce. Each said to himself cannily: “As long as I can speak of it to others, it is not yet here for me.”

  Kinny had darted out of the store, but Hester, chewing speculatively, stared at Mrs. Herder until the woman looked at her, inquiring.

  “Th—thank-you,” muttered Hester, and left, closing the door behind her with special care. As she stepped outside, the streetlamps went on, with their succinct “Now!” and the night was there.

  Far down the block of small old-fashioned shops still bare of neon, Kinny was peering into the weakly shining window of Pachmann’s jewelry store on the corner.

  “Looka here!” he called.

  She ran over and knelt down next to him. Against the darkened inner store, a single bulb in the window burned over rows of square cards spaced on humped-up red velvet, each card holding a single, gleaming nugget of lure. Behind them, a row of clocks told various times of day, all false except the large moving one in the center.

  “Keep looking in sideways!” Kinny knelt in front of the window, hooking an arm around its side. She knelt beside him. Through the glass corner she saw, refracted and shimmering, an airy replica of the whole display. Kinny’s plump fingers, exaggeratedly curved, poised over a man’s watch, dipped recklessly through it and alighted again, this time over a heart-shaped locket with an enameled American flag blowing in its center.

  “Want it?” Pinching the image between thumb and forefinger, he tossed it to her. She cupped herself, almost expecting to receive it. The locket remained. If she shifted her head past a certain angle of interception, it blinked out, on. In the window, the real one had a solidity almost disappointing. Outside it, very slightly double-edged, the other bloomed with an added shine. She stretched out her own hand.

  “Holy mackerel!” said Kinny. “Will we catch it. Look at the time!”

  Grabbing up their skates, they scurried down a sidestreet into the doorway of their own apartment house. Its lobby had the deserted look of dinnertime. Far above them, the elevator hummed dispiritedly in its shaft, and came to a jouncing stop on some upper floor.

  “Wish we didn’t have to go in.” Kinny kicked glumly at the carpet, his ruddy face chapfallen and aggrieved under the jaundiced tan light here. Against the Oriental splendor of the lobby, his rotund figure in its eternally battered clothes caught at her sympathy like a humpty-dumpty version of herself.

  “Let’s walk up,” he said at last.

  Toiling up the stairs in front of him, past each hallway, past the closed doors of the Shoemakers, the Levys, the Kings and other residents she didn’t know, she visualized each family, unchanged and comfortable at their white-draped tables, behind them the maids serving unhurriedly from massive sideboards on which were ranged, permanent and secure, the tureens, the candlesticks, and the bowls of fruit. Only at the Elkins’ was there distortion beyond repair but not yet complete, where one groped absently for the displaced chair, the drawer that had been “there,” caught in the painful torsion of contexts not quite yet shelved into retrospect.

  “Wish we were leaving here altogether,” she said, as they reached their own floor. She put a hesitant hand on the bell.

  “Go on. Ring.” Kinny goosed her from behind. Swatting back at him, she was almost comforted, half convinced that behind the door everything would be unchanged. At this hour, her father would open it, crying, “Good God in heaven, where have you two been!” and even before they got their jackets off, her mother’s honing recitative against dirt would be at them to wash their hands. Hester, once she had slipped into the place at table marked by her own dented napkin ring, could then slip into her childish role of culprit permanently arraigned, in which, comfortably abraded, suspended between her parents’ personalities, she could regress into her revery with herself.

  Hester’s mother opened the door. Against the grotto welter of piled goods looming behind, her head, covered
with a white hand-towel pinned at the nape, had an air of heroic resolve, coifed for the worst, like the nurses in the recruiting posters that hung on the walls at school. She snapped on a brighter light, as if to bring their lateness into surer focus.

  “No consideration whatsoever—none at all!” she said. She shook her head, but her face had an abstracted look, and her hands, whose usual cleanliness in the midst of the grimiest task was to Hester half an attractive riddle, half a reproof, were dusty, and left a smear on the head-towel as she patted it irritably.

  “Daddy home?” asked Kinny.

  “Yes,” said his mother, looking at him sternly. “He came home early.” Kinny slipped past her.

  “Where’s Josie?” asked Hester.

  “You know Josie went to find a room in Yorkville,” said her mother. “We won’t have room for a sleep-in girl in the new place. Can’t you get it through your head that—?” She broke off in the long, exasperated sigh that was almost a reversion to her native Ach! To Hester, her mother’s face, formed with a beautiful inevitability of bone, much resembled a head of Venus in her Latin book, or would have, had it not had also the lurking contour of a plaintiveness ever-ready for some disaster sure to occur. Tonight, as always in time of crisis, her face had the triumphant look of disaster confirmed.

  For a moment she looked at Hester significantly, searchingly, in a way she had been doing of late, as if the fact of Hester’s being a girl, almost a woman, should make her rise to the stature of confidante. Then, as if what she saw only confirmed the impossibility of such an alliance, she threw up her hands and went back toward the kitchen.

  Hester went into the dining room. The polished table shone emptily.

  “’Lo, darlin’,” said her father. He was bent over the sideboard, tussling ineffectually with the rope bound around its doors in preparation for tomorrow’s moving. He patted her absently.