Extreme Magic

by Hortense Calisher

At the moment he was busied in converting an old Rochester lamp, object and task both rather out of line for a shop owner who seldom bothered with the humbler Victoriana and had his own finisher, but these pretensions were his trade’s and the neighborhood’s, not his own. The lamp belonged to a neighbor—if one could give that name to Sligo and his wife Marion, proprietors of an old waterfront “hotel” ten miles up the shore, really a restaurant-bar of the land smartened up with horse brasses for the Saturday afternoon country squires. And Callendar liked any task which let him look continually up and out at any one of the weathers of his own acreage, modest in size, but vast in trees through whose ancient swirl, layer upon layer toward the river, he could see, like a natural fence that gave him the limits he still so needed, glimpses of the waterline, even of the sky—but not of the opposite shore. For this he had bought the barn on a day’s decision, and the barn, in turn so neglectedly beautiful, so rescuable and then so emptily waiting, had brought him by gentle nudges to a trade that was no more out of line than any other for a man so nearly out of life.

  Ten years ago, he had been an ordinary young man of thirty-one, living with wife and three children—an infant, a boy of seven and a girl of two, in a split-level cottage in one of the developments outside Hartford, Connecticut, working as a company man for the largest in the constellation of insurance underwriters in that city, and doing well enough. Born nearby, married to a town girl, he had come of that lower-middle native stock, in name often resonantly Anglo-Saxon, which the boys from the great schools studding New England called “townies”—a class that, with the will, the luck and the proper scholarships, frequently ended up years later socially alongside of those same boys. With some of the luck, two army-earned years at an obscure business college, and no will beyond that of someday having his own agency, he had been contented enough, unlikely to end up anywhere except much as he was. But that year, while he had been away at the company’s convention plus special classes for men of his caliber, his house, catching fire at dead of night in a high November wind, four miles from the nearest hook and ladder and no waterpower when they got there, had burned, with all his family, to the ground. Two owners of badly scorched houses adjacent had urged him to join their suit against the contractor whose defective wiring had already been the subject of complaint. Even if he had been able to overcome his horror, there had been no need; as a model employee, he had had Ellen, little Chester, Constance, and even the baby heavily overinsured in every available form from straight life to special savings plans, college plans, mortgage, fire and endowment. He had managed to survive all the obsequies, the leaden vacation in Bermuda insisted upon by his office manager, even the return to a furnished room and restaurant meals in the best businessmen’s residence club in Hartford. It was only when the indemnity money came in, thousands upon rolling thousands of it, that he had gone out of his mind.

  The phone rang. “Guy? Polly Dahlgren here. How are you?”

  “Hi, Poll, how are you?” An Englishwoman, widow of a Swedish ceramist, she had continued to run their gift shop at Orient Point, the farther tip of Long Island, a place he imagined to be a seashore version of Garrison, in terms of quiet estate money ever more fringed by a louder suburbia, with here and there an air pocket for people like themselves. He had been careful never to see it, though now and then she asked him down, and he liked Poll. She liked him too much for a man who could only like. “What’s on your mind?” He’d said it too fast, sad for them both because he already knew.

  “Those silver luster canisters you said you’d seen a set of someplace, a dealer’s. Near where you fish.”

  “The Battenkill.” It was the first place he’d gone from the hospital, in the beginning with another patient, the stockbroker who’d taught him flycasting, then, for every one of the years since, on his own. “But that was last April.”

  “Collector down here went wild when she heard about them. Pay anything, if they’re what she wants.”

  “They wouldn’t cost all that much,” he said. “About two hundred for the four of them. If they’re still there. They just might be. I could find out for you. Or she could go see.”

  “Invalid, can’t. I do a little legwork for her now and then, expense-paid of course. Nice old gal.”

  “Well, why don’t you?” he said. “Beautiful country in August. And five or six dealers strung out along one lovely road. Not too far for a three-day weekend. With the parkways.”

  “Where is it, did you say? And the name?”

  “Vermont—New York border,” he said, “the Battenkill.” He couldn’t keep the dream of holy peace out of his voice, the years of gratitude. “The most beautiful trout stream in the world.” He’d never seen any other.

  “I might just do that,” she said. There was a pause. Then she spoke brusquely. “Like to go with me?” Into his silence, she said abruptly, “For the fish.”

  “Thanks, Poll, but I can’t—” Get away. She knew he could, any time. He plumped for the truth, at least some of it. “It’s particularly a place where I like to go alone.” As he went most places.

  “Right!” she said at once. “Nice of you to tell me that.” She understood that he had given her an intimacy. He did like her. “And now, give on those names.”

  He gave her the lot, extra warmly. This was what he was good at, and where he could be generous. “Don’t bother with the Graysons if you’re in a hurry. Retired couple, he’ll want to talk and she’ll want to show her collection. Goes in for ruby hanging lamps and anything doll-size, from tea sets to iron cookstoves. Has some good glass, but none of it for sale. One of those. Then, along the road north there’s a tidy little farmer’s wife, barn stuff mostly, woven comforters and moss-rose china et cetera, but cheaper than most. Doing it to send the older girl through beautician’s college.” He stopped, at a snort of amusement from the other end. “Hmm?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just that you can’t sell your specialty either. A pity. You’re so good at it.”

  “I know.” He smiled at her. “Don’t hold it against me. And listen now. The lady you want is named Katrina Bogardus—and she is a lady. Gets the early stuff from the big houses when they break up. Has a couple herself. Looks like a little French marquise and is a retired superintendent of schools.”

  “Record of sale then, if she’s sold. Or she’ll remember.” Poll’s voice was her business one, to remind him that though not strictly in the trade she knew as well as he the range of its characters from junkyard on—as varied as its stock and as severely appraisable.

  “Decidedly.” He hesitated, then warmed to his specialty. “And look, Poll, if you do have time, hit there on a Thursday, when her son-in-law visits. He’s a parson, I guess you’d call him, but you never saw anything like him in America, though he is one—minister, up-Hudson way. Dresses high Anglican and calls her mater—she must have had him re-finished somewhere. Right out of a British movie, the kind they don’t make any more.”

  “Barchester Towers,” she said.

  “Never saw it.”

  “A book.” Her voice risked tenderness again.

  He covered this with a rush. “And Poll, if she likes you—which I’m sure she will—she’ll take you upstairs to see the drawing room. Paneled. Moved from somewhere. Lowestoft to match. Your cup of tea, as I’ve heard you say.”

  “Pennies to pounds she liked you,” she said. “Well, I might do. And shall I mention your name?”

  “Oh, she wouldn’t know it,” he said. “I was just there once. And I don’t buy, you know—when I go up that way.”

  “I know,” she said. “You just go—for the fish.”

  “Ah, come on now.”

  “The way you go almost anywhere,” she said crossly. “Wonder you stay in business.” At once she was contrite, but too nice to say so. “I mean—” She knew he didn’t need money, and why. “Never you mind,” she said quickly. “Go on and do what you like to do, why not. And be grandmother to the rest of us. We can use it, all right,
all right…Well, good-by, Guy m’love, and thanks.”

  “Good-by, Poll.” There came the final, impossible silence in which he waited for her to hang up, and she didn’t.

  “Fancy,” she said, very soft for her. “And you were only there once…Well. See you sometime. Cheerio.”

  “Tell you what, Poll,” he said desperately. “On your way up there, why not stop by for—lunch. I’ll gather in some people. Or better still—on your way back, then we can have a gas about it.”

  “Right,” she said promptly. “Let you know. Or if not, you drop down here. Oh, no fear, I remember what you said about weekends. For the day. I’ll—gather some people.” One more pause. “Good-by, you bloody old fisherman, you,” she said very rapidly, and rang off.

  During his two years in the first-class establishment—its rolling golflands not thirty miles from here—into which relatives and the company had been able to put him on all that money (at a yearly maintaining fee of twice his former salary, and in the company of others similarly able to be as expensively aberrant or agonized) he had been led through the gentle craft world of the sanitarium, toward its own necessary fantasy of the goodness and wholeness entirely residual in the world. In that selective company of Wall Street alcoholics, matrons at the climacteric, schizophrenic young nymphs in riding habit, and highly placed failures of the barbiturate, even the other patients had been extra gentle with him, often—as the doctors were quick to see and use—extra reachable by him.

  At first he had been in no condition to notice this. Later on, under the constant encouragement from above to help one another, he hadn’t questioned it. Sitting alongside one of the “Park Avenue” matrons, whose hair had been freshly hyacinthed in the on-grounds salon that morning, he and she had learned how to French-polish furniture; on leaving she had sent him—from an address that wasn’t Park but at another altitude he hadn’t yet been aware of—a box of the books on furniture and china which were still the best he owned. The exquisite young rider—who dressed to the nines at every hour of the day, was mortally afraid of men at less than a yard’s distance, and always had an animal beside her—had been willing to dismount from her horse, leave her Doberman behind, and walk with him—he had taken it to be because as a man he was still so nullified. The flycaster had taught him golf also, and like a legendary rich uncle turned up in a poor young man’s thirties, had opened to him, in the wistful after-dinner talk of a drinker on cure, a whole Barmecide’s feast of bon vivant living; this man, now lapsed between bed and occasional club window, Callendar still visited, and unlike the man’s own nephews, was received. He understood why now of course, long since grown used to that special kindness which in the hospital he had taken for the good manners the rich had been bred to even in their own sickness, awarded even to him who could teach them nothing, not even—as in the one try which had given him a setback—a knowledge of insurance. Only on leaving had he understood what he was to them, to anyone. Against their ills, mostly fugitive from the world, casualties from within, his case had the ghastly health of the man whose coup de grace had come from life itself, from outside. Against his accident, they still had hands to cross themselves. He was their extreme, the triple amputee at the sight of whom even the single-legged may still take heart.

  The phone rang.

  “Is this the eminent, the resourceful—”

  “Hello, Quent.” He prepared to laugh with Quentin Paterno, to join in with the preliminary conversation tic, a stutter of courage rather than larynx, with which his earliest customer-friend always had to start.

  “Spoilsport! Now I’ll have to begin all over.” He could hear the little man clear his throat, see the pudge of fist kneading potbelly, the bright brown eyes straining under nobly bald brow.

  “Is this the powerful schattchen, goodman extraordinary—?”

  “I dunno, Quent. What’s that?”

  “Marriage broker, you Christian.” Joke. So was Quentin. “Yop, you did it again, matchmaker. And I suppose you’ll say without even knowing it, like always.”

  “Ah, come on now.” Because he thought about people a lot generally, those introduced by him—anywhere from dinner guests, to the fellow who’d had a letter from him to a dealer-correspondent in the Rome where Callendar had never been himself, and had married her—almost always clicked, and sometimes paired off.

  “It’s just like any statistics, Quent,” he said. “Nobody remembers the ones that don’t come off.”

  “Well, this one did. The party was last night. I suppose they didn’t even call you, those young ingrates.”

  “No. But I can’t think who.” He shouldn’t have said that. Quent might take it to mean, who in Quent’s crowd? It was hard to think of them without the italic in which they thought of themselves.

  “Cast your mind back, in fact turn back, O Callendar.” No offense given then, except, in that painful laugh at his own joke, by Quent to Quent, who hurried on with the doomed rapidity of a man who had absolute pitch for the way he was sounding. “To a freezing night a nice guy, a Guy, is nice enough to come all the way in to hear my concert. A fall guy, in fact, for anyone his broken-down friends writes a play, paints a pitcher.”

  “Quent. Give.” If he was a faithful, even grateful audience, always using the tickets, not just buying them, he’d learned not to dwell on the fact that he was always audience.

  “Sorry.” If stopped in time, Quent could tune his delicate pitch to others. Exerted, it at once eased him. “After the concert, Guy. Carnegie Taproom. Remember our kid harpist, Violet? The one the orchestra boys were teasing? ‘Nobody-violates-me Violet,’ they call her. And the couple you bumped into at intermission, they run a shop in an old mill down in Bucks somewhere.”

  “New Hope,” he said. “Joe and Milly Pink.” The stuff they sold was terrible.

  “They had a son with them, a Princeton boy.”

  He barely remembered a boy who sat back, who should have been with the younger crowd. Yes, now. The Princeton boy, day boy probably, scholarship surely, who sat well back from all of them, most of all from his all-wrong parents, the mother in squaw blouse and skirt and no bridgework, the father wearing a huge free-form silver ring of his own design. “Yes, I remember now.” And the shy girl, from Oberlin, Ohio. Farm girl probably, or—if they had them out there—a townie. Who sat back. He had gone over and introduced them.

  “Those two,” said Quent. “That boy, that girl.”

  “Why, that’s fine!” he said. “They—they should do well together.”

  “Yeah, you have a fatality. Or a green thumb. And I have a headache. From the party.”

  “Nice of you to call me, anyway,” he said. And waited.

  “Matter-of-fact—” Quent said. “I’m in the slough, slow, sloo—of despond. Or how do you pronounce it.”

  “I dunno. If that’s what you called me for.” A pause.

  “Tell me,” said Quentin. “You heard of people named Benjamin? Must be near neighbors of yours.”

  “Two doors down,” said Guy, grinning. “And a half a mile away. Yes, I’ve heard of them. They own the house between us too, but keep it empty. A sort of buffer state between them and a commercial.”

  “Not now they don’t. They got the grandmother in it, Phoebe Jasper Aldrich. The Aldrich Chamber Concert Mrs. Aldrich. Library of Congress, and points west. You wouldn’t know.”

  “I read the papers.”

  “Then you know. They blow a horn in heaven, she hired the hall. Lucky the composer gets to feed at that trough. Trow. Troo. Give her credit, most the good ones do get.”

  “Oh?” he said, puzzled. Quent, rich enough by inheritance to own the house in Turtle Bay for which he kept Guy still buying, was too proud-poor in another ever to ask this kind of favor. “No—I’m afraid I don’t know them.”

  “Don’t anticipate, guileful Guy. I been asked. A little late in life, it’s true. To make music in that celestial company. This coming weekend.” When the mock accent dropped, then they were near
.

  He picked it up. “So?” And waited. It came as expected.

  “William.”

  As usual.

  “How?” he said, finally.

  “Pills…Oh, he’s all right. Resting quiet. We got to him.”

  As usual.

  “I knew in my bones last night, when he wouldn’t go with me. Always a sign, when he won’t leave the house. But I felt I had to go. It’s such a bind, you’re not supposed to show worry. Y’know?”

  “Mmm.” He knew.

  “You have to be tough with them,” said poor Quentin. “Especially when you’re family.”

  For this he had no answer. “He wasn’t asked up here?” he said. “To go with you.”

  “Oh, nothing personal,” Quentin said quickly. “Nobody gets to bring anybody up there. Not even wives. I told him. But he wouldn’t believe me. You know William.”

  “Yes.” Yes, he knew William. A swag of still true-blond hair over the high, narrow cranium of an underfed child—of which William had been one. A mouth set like a cherry pit in the slender jaw. And a nameless talent, or only the desire for one, harbored like a wound. William, barbiturate failure, still only a year away from true boy when first met.

  “Yes, I know William.” He had been the patient to whom Guy had tried to teach insurance. “Quent—” If I came down to stay—would he let you go? He already knew the answer, which would be given even now with pride: No. Only me. “No,” he said aloud, “I don’t suppose.”

  “Well anyway, that’s really why I called you. To get a line on them. I had some wild idea, maybe she would ask him up. But I can see now how ridiculous.” Quentin expelled a long, relieved sigh.

  “No, I don’t know a thing, I’ve never seen them. Except that they have cats.” One was nosing the screen door now.

  “Give me that high-class excuse of yours,” Quent said suddenly. “The one you use to beg off weekends with. You know. The one you give us.”

  He laughed, and gave it. “I say I like to be alone too much. Then they say ‘Oh, we’ll leave you alone!’ Then I say the simple truth, that I know they will, but I never can hit the right posture for it. I don’t know how to relax into being half-alone but not alone…Mightn’t do for you.”