The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher

by Hortense Calisher

  May-ry, who must have been about thirty at the time I speak of, was no old family retainer; she had come to work for us, her first job in New York, through an ad in the Times ten years back, when I was very little. Even then, our family had already been forty years away from the South. But my father’s memories of the first twenty years of his youth there were deep and final. At bedtime he would often tell us of Awnt Nell, the mammy who had brought him up, although he never mentioned her in public—“too many Southern colonels around already.” Awnt Nell had been a freedwoman; even before the War our grandmother, his mother, would never have servants of any other description. He was so firmly proud of this that when I found, flattened away in the old Richmond Bible, a receipt made out to my grandfather for insurance on a slave, I slipped it back and never taxed him with it.

  In any case, all that our tradition had boiled down to was my father’s insistence that my mother always keep colored help. This was hard on her, since, being German, she could never quite manage or understand them. She had an inflexibly either-or attitude toward trust, plus a certain jealousy of other people’s hardships, that made her stiff with those who had more of them. Also, without any reason to be, she was always a bit afraid of May-ry, referring to her whenever she could as “Die Schwarze.” My father did not like this, and often caught her up on it. And nobody, at any time, ever said “nigger” in our house.

  Meanwhile, May-ry and my father kept up their special allegiances. There were of course a thousand ways in which he knew the life she had come from, and she “knew” us. Whenever he would be heard embarking on one of the ritually flamboyant regional anecdotes that my mother couldn’t bear, May-ry usually was to be seen edging closer to the company, only as decorous as a uniform could make her, her mouth drawn out like a tulip ready to burst at the familiar denouement—which brought shriek after shriek of her released laughter, followed, under my mother’s glance, by a quick retirement. But she and my father also shared more particular sympathy, or professed to, over the rheumatism. As a young man, he had had to take an eighteen-week cure for his at Mount Clemens Spa, and like many diseases contracted early, it had kept him youthful, healthy, and appreciated; on a dull day a loud twinge of it would suddenly announce itself to the house—and to his best audience.

  May-ry’s rheumatism was of another sort. It was her euphemism for the fact that, periodically, she drank. Whenever she felt a long attack coming on, about every four months or so, she always absented herself from our house on a short trip to Roanoke, where she could lay up in the sun a little. We all were aware of the probable truth—that she was holing up in Harlem with one or the other of the people she had originally come up here with in the wake of the preacher who had brought them all North together. My father knew she drank, and she knew that he knew, but the fiction of Roanoke was always maintained. She was a child—and he loved all children. Just so long as she kept herself seemly in front of him (and she never did anything else), she was only doing what was expected of her, and he the same. “What you recommend I do for my rheumatiz, May-ry?” he might sometimes tease, but this was as far as he ever went.

  Once a year, on her paid vacation, May-ry did go to Roanoke. We knew this because just before she was due back, a case of jars of home-canned peaches always arrived. She liked to use them during the year and tell us something about the farm as each jar was opened; these were her anecdotes, and I knew all of the characters in them, from Mooma and Daddy Gobbo down to the cow that always stood with its head over the gate, like a cow in a primer. On rheumatism vacations no jars ever came; only, of a sudden, there would be May-ry back again, scrubbing at the moldings as if these had to be whitened like her sins, cooking up for my father everything she could sink in the brown butter he adored. Between these times, once in a while she failed to come back from her Thursday night off until Monday; when she returned, it would not be she who had been sick, but one of the friends “over on One Hundred Twenny-ninth Street.” But someone else there always had to phone for her, so we knew. On these occasions my mother would be furious. She wanted a German girl whose docile allegiance would be to her, whose ins and outs she would know the way my father knew May-ry’s. Patiently, he would explain these to her. “They’re children, that’s all. They can’t stand up to us. Never have been able to. Never will. But if you just give them their head a little, they’re the best servants in the world. And the loyalest.”

  Then came Somus. May-ry had always been allowed to entertain her many suitors, evenings and Sundays if she wished, in our kitchen, Father sometimes stopping in to chat with them, to let them know on what terms they were welcome, to have a little Southern cracker-barrel time—and to see that they were the right sort for May-ry. With Somus, this all vanished. Somus was the son of that same preacher of the Abyssinian Church of God who had brought May-ry up here, and he was the real reason (besides us, she said) why she had never married; she’d been in love with him, hopelessly until now, ever since they’d spatted mud pies together down home. Somus had quarreled with his own father almost from the moment they all came up here and had been away studying for a long time. Now he was here to take his civil-service examinations.

  Somus turned out to be just as handsome as she’d said he was. Rebel from the church he might be, but I could never see him, black in his black suit, without thinking Biblically, things like “the ram of God” and “His nose is as the tower of Lebanon that looketh forth toward Damascus.” There was not an inch of ornament upon him, beyond the strict ivory of his teeth, the white glare of his eye. Not that I saw much of him. When Somus took May-ry out, he did just that, took her out, never sat in our kitchen or ate in it; later on we knew that she’d had a bad time getting him to ring at the back door.

  Somus. Why he loved May-ry was not hard to tell, quite apart from the fact that she too was handsome, with a shapely mouth, a sweet breadth of brow and eye. She drank—and he didn’t approve of that. She dressed high and loud, not even in the New York way but in the bandanna bush colors that antedated Roanoke—and he was forever trying to get her to imitate that sister of his who wore navy blue with round organdy collars. She liked to dance at the Club Savoy—and it pained Somus to find himself still that good at it. Worst of all, she was the staunchest and most literal of Bible beaters, and to an emancipated man, this opium of his people must have been as the devil. So, all told, love between them was foreordained.

  She adored him, of course. He was just like his father, strong, dour, and, like many ministers’ sons before him, with the genes of faith coming up in him just as hot and strong in other ways—in the very form of his unbelief.

  I remember just when the trouble came. It could have been the red spring dress that sparked it. “Kah-whew!” I said, when she showed it to me. It was almost purple, and still trying. “Never get to heaven in that!” Heaven was a great topic between us. “Besides, it’ll run.”

  “Sho’ will.” She stuck out her chin, pushing her smile almost up to her nose, her nostrils taking deep draughts of the dress, as if it, all by itself, were perfume. “And me with it. All the way.”

  “May-ry, tell us about heaven.” It was a dull day.

  Always willing, she answered me, explicit as if it were Roanoke, as if we had just opened the largest peach jar of all. It was a nice fleshly style of heaven but not rowdy; a touch of the Savoy maybe, but enough pasture for the cow. Triumphant, in the red dress, she entered it.

  “Where’s Somus? Isn’t he there? Where he gonna be?” In these exchanges, exactly like my father, I used to fall into her language.

  She cast her head down, furred up her brows under a forehead as smooth as a melon. “He be there,” she said after a while, in a low voice. Pushing out her chin again, she asserted it. “You just wait and see. He be!” And in the same moment she whirled around and caught me at the icebox, my hand in the evening dessert. Washing my hand at the tap, she warned me, “You go on like you been doing, you gonna come to no good end.”

  “If I do—ho
w’m I gonna be up there, to see him!” She and I loved to crow at each other that way, to cap each other’s smart remarks, in the silly sequiturs of childhood. But this day, something else teased at me to tease her. It wasn’t my own unbelief; that had already been around for some time. But in other ways I could feel how I was going on, and I didn’t like it either. I was growing out of my childhood. Maybe, like somebody else, I envied her the perfection of hers.

  “Listen, May-ry,” I said, squinting. “Suppose … when you get there … it isn’t at all like you said it was. Suppose they don’t let you sashay around in any red dress—suppose they just hump you over your Bible in a plain old white one. No music either, except maybe a harp. Oh, May-ry—what the Sam Hill you gonna do if they give you a harp?”

  Once more, she considered. The dignity with which she mulled my cheap dialectic already smote me. She raised up and looked at me. “Then I wears my white dress, and I plays my harp,” she said, her lip trembling, “and I praises the Lord God.”

  I ran and kissed her. “You’ll look beautiful, I bet. You’ll look pyorely beautiful, pretty as pie.”

  “You hush,” she said, sharp and starched. “Stop that talking like a nigger, you hear?” Yes, I forgot to mention that. She was the only one who ever said it in our house.

  The next night, Thursday, Somus came to call for her. I was peeping, to see her in the dress, and that was the last time I saw him. Ram of God again, height six cubits and a span. May-ry looked beautiful. But in about an hour she came back alone, then went out again. I was the only one who saw her. We had the phone call the next morning, one of the several voices never identified but familiar. May-ry’s Mooma was taken bad. May-ry was already on her way down there.

  The Saturday afternoon she returned, nine days later, my mother was out, as May-ry had known she would be. I heard May-ry’s voice, talking low to my father, in the parlor. Usually the sight of the place, left to the mercies of the day cleaners from the agencies, would enrage her at once, emboldening her enough to fling off her good clothes for her cleaning smock, bind up her hair, and set to work, meeting no one’s eye and loudly scolding the air. But this time, I could see by peeping that she was sitting in the stiffest chair and had not even removed her gloves.

  “No, Mr. Joe,” she was saying, nervously holding on to her pocket-book. “No, suh—no.” No. She had to leave us. Somus say he wouldn’t marry her unless she did.

  I heard my father “remonstrate” with her, as he always called it. This meant that he was using the same comfort voice that he used on us when delegated by Mother to punish us, the voice with which he helped us toward the first stage of being good again, by mending the amour-propre that we ourselves had injured in being bad.

  It was all right, he was saying. Why, it was going to be all right! Whoever expected a girl like her to stay single? Especially when she was being spoken for by a fine boy like Somus. But what was all the fuss about? Mustn’t she know that all along we had expected it—that some day or other she was going to want to get married and live out? He put his hands on his spread knees and leaned back, shaking his speckled ruff of hair at her. “Lord, what you women won’t do to get a little torment.” This too was part of the comfort, to put the offense as quickly as possible in the realm of human nature.

  She didn’t answer him, although she opened and closed her mouth several times.

  “I see,” he said after a while, biting at his mustache, “Somus doesn’t want you to work at all.”

  Oh nossuh, it wasn’t that. She was able to say this clearly; then she fell to mumbling, her head all the way down. Then she was silent again. He had a hard time getting it out of her. It wasn’t that, she said at last. She and Somus would surely have to count on her doing day work. But Somus say what the use of her being up North if she work for home folks? Somus say she won’t really be up North until she stop working for people from home.

  And now my father really was nonplussed at first, then angry enough to stomp around the room. “Why, good God in heaven, girl!” (This was just what he always said to me at such times.) What in the name of the Lord had got her into such monkeyshines? Was she going to let that boy sell her down the river? Who was going to treat her better than us—not to mention pay! Didn’t she know right well, from talking to the other maids on the roof when she hung out the washing, how some people treated colored folks up here?

  Yes, she knew. She said it in a voice like the Victrola’s when something was wrong with its insides, her head hanging down. She didn’t expect to be as well off, she said. And she would never forget his kindness—us. But Somus.

  So, at last, my father played trumps.

  He was standing over her by this time, looking down. “Day job or not, you’re going to want some kind of steady family people, aren’t you?” He said “ain’t you” really, or close to it. “Don’t tell me he wants to make you into one of those pitiful agency creatures working from dawn to dusk, getting somebody else’s piled-up dirt every day!”

  No suh. For the first time, she looked at the moldings.

  “Then—” he said, and hesitated. “Now then, May-ry—” His voice dropped to a conspirator’s. He rubbed the red spot left on his nose by his pince-nez, as always when he was embarrassed. “Now then, May-ry, what about … what about Roanoke? You know you got to go there, times you get laid up. You know right well not everybody going to give you the time off we do.”

  Yes, Mr. Joe. She whispered it. And this was the point at which she stood up, stopped her hands from their fooling with each other, and looked straight ahead of her, as if she were going to speak a piece, or were attending a wedding. “Somus say I got to have that out with you too.” She spoke quietly, but she could not look at him. “I never did go there but once a year, on my vacation. And you all knowed it.”

  He actually put up a hand to ward her off. “Now, now, don’t you go and say anything foolish, girl. No need to do what you might regret later on.”

  “It’s true,” she said. Even her accent had shifted, hardening toward something like Somus’s—who, by some steady effort, had almost none. “I get drunk.” Then she turned gray, and started to shiver.

  My father stepped back, and he too changed color. It was almost as if she had touched him.

  Then a most peculiar scene took place. My father positively refused to consider, to treat, to discuss, to tolerate a hint of what she wanted to tell him and he knew as well as she did. That she’d been lying all these years and wanted the dear privilege of saying so. And she followed him around the room in circles after him, snuffling her “Mr. Joe” at him, all the time growing more halfhearted, confused—ever so often looking over her shoulder to see if Somus, that tower of strength, mightn’t have appeared there. But he hadn’t. He’d told her what she must do, and left her to it. He was a stern man, Somus, and a smart one—and he understood my father right down to the ground.

  Finally, she stopped in the middle of the room and screamed it, exactly like a baby repudiating the universe, her face all maw. “I never was down there but once a year, and you know it. I was getting drunk over on One Hun’ Twenny-ninth Street. And you know it, and you know it.” Rocking back and forth, she beat her foot on the ground. “I’m going there now. And I’m not coming back.” But by this time she was crying like a baby too.

  When my father took her to the back elevator, she was still weeping. “Now, now, we’ll just forget everything you said,” he said. “We’ll just forget this whole afternoon. Why, getting married is a serious thing, girl—no wonder you all upset.” His voice took on the dreaminess with which he told us our goodnights. “Hush now, hush. You just have yourself a good rest down there in Roanoke.” By the time he rang the bell for her, she was already nodding.

  When the elevator door opened, she turned back to him. “I’d ruther … ruther—” But then she choked up again, and we never did hear what.

  “Hush now,” he said, patting her into the elevator. “And when you come back … it’ll be ju
st like always, hear? Meantime, you send us up some of those peach jars.” As the door closed, she was still nodding.

  In the succeeding weeks, my mother and father kept a bet on. “You’ll see,” he’d say, even after the time had long since stretched beyond what May-ry had ever been away before. “She’ll have her jobs—and she’ll lose them. Nobody up here’s going to appreciate enough what she does do—and what she can’t. And she knows it, she knows it.” It was almost as if he were echoing May-ry, in a way. Other times, he just worried it aloud. He loved taking care of people. “Who’s going to take care of her like us?”

  Then, one morning, the box of jars came—the herald. But when the box was opened, the jars were found to be of grape—grape conserve. Now, grapes were all over the shops right here, at the time—it was October. “Idiots,” said my father. “What was the address on the outer wrapping?” But it had already gone down the dumbwaiter with the trash. I think my mother knew, but she never said. She was never much for children really. Except for my father. And after that, as more weeks went by and we began the endless series of German “girls” whom I never quite liked or my father either, he submitted, and spoke no more of colored help, or of May’ry. My mother had won, it appeared—and Somus.

  But I still yearned sometimes, and wondered. Did she go back to Roanoke? I tried hard as I could to recollect whether there had ever been talk of grape arbors on Fox Road in Roanoke—in the tales that had come out of the peach jars. There had been damson, I knew, and elderberry. Damson too sour for you folks, and all the berries goes to the wine. Had she ever said there were grapes? I couldn’t remember, though every now and again for years I tried. Had she sent them from there, or from Harlem? I knew well enough what the box meant, though, same as my father had. It meant pure spontaneity, and love.