The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher

by Hortense Calisher

  Mrs. Braggiotti pushed George away sharply. “My shoe! Oh, you’ve got dirt all over my shoe!” She bent down to brush it, real distress on her face.

  “What is it you do want, Etta?”

  Mrs. Braggiotti tilted her face up at him, her eyes clear, her forehead unfurrowed. “Why, I don’t want anything, George,” she said, in the same tone with which she had refused the sundae.

  Hester crept out of her niche and slid carefully around the door. Across the street, the other limestone houses were still there, withdrawn, giving out none of their meaning. Behind her, the dim island of the store no longer drew her with its promise of suspension, of retreat. Looking down at her hands, she thought suddenly that they were a good color; it was the lavender voile that was wrong. She wavered against the blind hush of the street, wishing it full of people she could jostle, buffet, and embrace. Down the block she saw Clara coming back, her skates clashing and chiming. She drew a long breath and stepped further out into the seminal sunlight.

  The Watchers

  THROUGH THE AQUEOUS SUMMER night, the shop lights along the avenue shone confusedly, like confetti raining through fog. From bench to bench in the narrow strip of park down the center, voices bumbled softly against one another, as from undersea diver to diver, through the fuzzy, dark medium of the evening.

  Over toward the river, groups of girls and boys in their teens foraged for mischief and experience in the anonymous blur of the shadows, but Hester, bound to her mother, sat between her and her father’s elderly cousins on a bench that they kept to themselves, repairing somewhat, by this separation, the déclassé gesture of sitting in the park. Across from them, in the big gray apartment house, Hester could see the long, lit string of their own windows—at one end the great, full swags of the Belgian-lace curtains of the living room, and around the corner the faint glow of her grandmother’s night light.

  Outwardly, it was because of her grandmother that their home swirled continuously with family company, but actually the visitors spent no more than a token time with the old lady, whom longevity had made remarkable but unapproachable other than as a household god. In reality, according to Hester’s mother’s exasperated comments, the visiting was a holdover from the bland, taken-for-granted gregariousness of the Southerner, whereby, in a rhythmic series of “droppings-in,” in corner tête-à-têtes of intramural gossip, they all reaffirmed the identity of the family and of themselves.

  Now, after the Sunday-night supper of cold cuts and cheese and pastry, most of the company had eddied away, and only three were left here with Hester and her mother—Rose and Martha, who lived in Newark and came only on Sunday, and Selena, who lived Hester did not quite know where but came most often of them all. Under the incomplete dark of the New York sky, their faces hobbled, uncertain and white, above their sombre, middle-aged dresses, and from time to time they pushed up sporadic remarks through the stifling heat.

  “When does Joe get back?” asked Martha.

  “Tomorrow morning,” said Hester’s mother. “This is his last trip for the year.”

  “Then you go to the country?” said Rose, with her plaintive whine, in which there was a hint of accusation.

  “Yes, to White Plains. The same house as last year,” said her mother, as if she regretted the disclosure. She would deplore their visits in conversation, behind their backs, but they would all come anyway, sending her into grudging paroxysms of hospitality.

  “Not a breath stirring,” said Martha, twitching her lip with a movement Hester could not really see but knew was there. Martha was a steady little person, dumpy-legged, with a face as creased and limited as her conversation. A milliner, working at home, she specialized in such oddly assembled trivia that Hester wondered often who bought them. She never went hatless and often appeared in rearrangements of the same materials, so that the lilies of the valley of last week, detached now from their wreath of green leaves, turned up limp but enduring on the orange velvet toque of the week before. Martha’s rooms, which Hester had once seen, had the same scattered look, as if her whole life were composed of bits of trimming and selvage that she endlessly, faithfully, turned and made do. On the speckled, polka-dotted, or mustily striped bosoms of her dresses, anchoring her together, there was always the gold brooch lettered “True Sisters,” symbol of a Jewish ladies’ organization that was her extracurricular glory. To Hester, it seemed that this must have some esoteric significance, about which she never dared inquire, since, in so doing, she would be delving impolitely into the personal springs that must lie under the trivia of Martha, would be asking of that cramped, undreaming little body, “Cousin Martha, to what is it you are True?” Another thing that lifted Martha from the ordinary was her tic, which consisted of a wetting of the lips and a side twitch of the mouth that occurred at regular intervals, whether or not she happened to be talking. At first repelled by it, then fascinated by the way Martha and those around her ignored it, Hester had finally come to watch for it and dwell upon it, for it seemed to her a sign that obscure, eternal forces nudged even at the commonplace Martha, twitching at her, saying, “Even under your polka-dotted bosom, under your bits and stuff, we are working, we are here.”

  Next to Martha, Rose, her younger sister, whom she intermittently supported, made the muted small sounds that were meant to indicate delicately that her digestion, as usual, was not acting well. Rose was the only one of her father’s cousins whom Hester disliked. With the slack shoulders and drooping neck of the invalid, she sloped inward upon herself, as if it were only by an intense concentration on her viscera that their processes might be maintained, as if the fractional huff-huff of her heart would go on only so long as she was there to listen and bid it. About her there was always the cottony, medicinal smell of indefinite ailments which would never be confirmed, Hester felt unsympathetically, except by that astringent confirmer, death.

  “Want some soda, Rose?” asked her mother. “We could run across to the drugstore.”

  “No. I’ll be all right,” said Rose, satisfied that her distress had been noted. She turned toward Hester, whose stolidity she was always trying to court. “Getting such a big girl!” she said. “Why isn’t she at camp, with Kinny?”

  “She has to make up her algebra at summer school,” said her mother. “Besides, she says fourteen and a half is too old for camp.”

  “Fourteen years. Imagine!” said Martha, the involuntary spasm flicking over her face, like an oblique comment. “Why I can remember her in her bassinet!”

  “Yes,” said Hester, in a dreamy urgency to say it before anyone else could. “How time flies!”

  “Hester!” said her mother.

  From Selena, sitting rigid, unyielding, in the supple currents of the dark, came a stifled snort, whether of amusement or disapproval Hester could not quite tell. Of all the adjuncts to their household, Selena was the most constant and the most silent. Spare and dark-haired, the color of a dried fig, she wore odd off colors, like puce and mustard and reseda green. Although they did not become her, she carried them like an invidious commentary on the drab patterns around her, and her concave chest was heavily looped with the coral residue of some years’ stay in Capri as an art student, in her youth. She was the secretive spinster remnant of a branch of the family that had once been rich, so her concealment of her circumstances and her frequent presence at meals provoked occasional discussion as to whether she was still rich but miserly or had lost her money. “Poor Selena,” Hester’s father had once commented. “She’s hungry for people.” With her face pursed in her habitual contempt for the family of Philistines, she sat at their table nevertheless, partaking voraciously of something more than food.

  “Where does Selena live?” Hester had once asked her mother.

  “Oh, somewhere in Brooklyn,” her mother had answered indifferently. “In the house her mother left her, I think.”

  “Were you ever there?”

  “No-o.” Her mother had shaken her head, amused, with the depreciative smile of
those for whom Manhattan was New York. “Someone once told your father she’d sold it. No one really knows, though. She keeps very close.”

  “Did you ever see any of her paintings?”

  “She painted me once, holding you, just after you were born. Mother and child.” Her mother had laughed slightly.

  “What was it like? Can I see it?”

  “Oh!” Her mother had thrown up her hands, then brought them together, shaking her head in derision. “I don’t know where it went. I suppose she took it back.”

  It had been Selena’s mother, the old grandmother’s elder sister, who had sent the grandmother, long ago, from California, the silver service with the pistol-handled knives the family still used at dinner parties. With it had come the large cup and saucer, covered with beaten gold, that Hester and her brother, long used to hearing their father say, “That cup’s over a hundred years old!,” had taken to calling “the hundred-year cup.” Translating this to Selena, Hester privately visualized her as living in the narrow, high rooms of one of the single houses she associated with the very rich—in a house, perhaps, that was a kind of hundred-year cup of treasure, from which the humdrum touch of people would be inscrutably barred.

  Leaning forward, Hester almost touched her hand softly to the coral hanging like strips of rosy twigs on Selena’s flatness.

  “I like it better this way,” she said, “than round and smooth, like my baby beads.”

  “Oh?” said Selena, raising the furry circumflexes of her eyebrows. “And why do you like it better?”

  Accustomed to asking why, rather than to being asked, Hester hesitated, startled. “It’s more real,” she said, finally.

  “Real?” echoed Selena, the harsh tang of her voice thrusting the word forward, like a marble, to be felt and examined. Through the dimness, Hester could see her long, saffron face poised on one side, listening, weighing the word and Hester’s use of it.

  Emboldened by attention, Hester went further. “Where did you get them all—the corals, I mean?” she asked.

  “On the island of Capri.” There was a sostenuto, heroic pride in her tone, in the lifting of her chin, that stirred the others, Hester thought, to embarrassment and impatience.

  “We’d better be going in,” said her mother. “It’s getting damp.”

  “What’s it like—Capri?” asked Hester, imitating Selena’s drawn-out Italian vowel.

  “You might see for yourself someday,” said Selena.

  “Me?” said Hester. “Why, nobody ever travels in our family, except Daddy.”

  “No?” said Selena. She leaned back on the bench, turning her face away from them, shaking the loops on her chest slightly with her bony fingers, producing the slack sound of imperfect castanets.

  “I really think …” said Hester’s mother.

  Across the street, through the sluggish air, there floundered a white, heavy figure, moving in starts and stops. It was Josie, the maid. As she ran, she gesticulated sidewise with her arms, wailing, “Meesis Elkin! Oh, Meesis Elkin!,” so that the people on the other benches turned to look at them.

  “Oh, that girl!” muttered her mother.

  Josie had reached them. “Granma!” panted Josie. “I took in the eggnog and I could not vake her. I think—Come quick!”

  “My God!” said Hester’s mother. “Joe will never forgive me!”

  Like a chorus, the three other women wheeled protectively around her, and, gathering up their long skirts, they all ran stumbling across the street to the entranceway of the apartment house. Catching up as they were entering the elevator, Hester tugged at her mother’s elbow.

  “Forgive you for what?” she said.

  “For letting his mother die while he’s away,” said her mother, staring ahead. As they entered the apartment, she turned savagely on Hester. “You go in your room and stay there!”

  The house filled almost magically with people, so no one noticed that Hester remained in the dining room, taking it all in, sitting alone on one of the ring of chairs that were ranged around the table like supernumeraries in a play. First had come the doctor, routed from his Sunday-night card game, on whom her mother and Rose and Martha hung, as if on a priest, as he came out of her grandmother’s bedroom now, solemnly nodding his head. Selena followed, a step behind them.

  “Selena, phone the others, will you?” said her mother.

  “Be glad to,” said Selena gruffly.

  What perplexed Hester was that she really seemed to be glad to. Sitting straight as an upholstered stick in front of the phone, she handled it with import, calling. Flora and Amy—the daughters of the dead one—and all the lesser relatives who would be offended if they were not among the first to be notified. Using the same formula as she got each number, she said not “your mother” or “your grandmother,” as the case might be, but “Aunt Bertha.” “I’m sorry to tell you,” she would say, “but just a little while ago Aunt Bertha …”

  It was the closest to death Hester had ever been. Seated there alone at the great, round communal plate of the dining table, she felt herself all over, inwardly, for the abrasions that were proper to the circumstance, but found none—nothing except a shameful sense of excitement over an extraordinary drama in which everyone unwontedly exposed himself. Aunt Flora, who had come, in answer to Selena’s call, from her apartment a block away, had superseded Selena at the phone, as befitted a daughter of the deceased. With tears ruining the rouge on her aged-soubrette face, under the high white hair, she called number after number, bearing up remarkably until she got her party and identified herself, at which point she quavered, “Oh, Nettie!,” “Oh, Walter!,” and then burst into what seemed to be welcomed, cathartic tears.

  I never cry over anything except myself, thought Hester guiltily, wondering whether, if they noticed her, they would expect her to be crying. Worriedly she tried to think of something that would make her cry, but nothing stirred in her except the neutral, dispassionate awareness, the ignoble spur of interest.

  Dispossessed from her post, Selena came and sat down opposite her. She raised her brows in surprise at Hester’s still being up but said nothing, and her cheeks were hennaed with an unaccustomed tinge of participation. For a long time, the two of them sat there watching, while between them grew a tenuous thread of communion, as between two who sit at the edge of a party or a dance, sipping the moderate liqueur of observation, while around them swirl the tipsier ones, involved in a drunkenness the watchers do not share.

  At last, Hester’s mother, who had been busying herself like a distraught hostess, noticed her and, with an enraged whisper, sent her away to bed. Since Hester had always felt that her mother in the presence of others talked to her rather for their benefit than for hers, the scolding rolled off her numbed, sleepy head, and she walked away untouched, undisturbed, down the long hall to her room, past the closed door of her grandmother’s bedroom. As she stood tentatively in the darkness of her own doorway, the door of the bedroom opened, and two men came out carrying a long wicker hamper, which they set down, securing the creaking cover, and then swung between them again, with a servile, devotional gait.

  Sleepily pulling off her clothes, she was almost too tired to go through her nightly custom. She climbed onto the radiator under the window and stood there splayed out against the pane, feeling the familiar welling triumph of being suspended in space above people. She thought emulously of Selena, who remained apart, uninvolved, in her rich security of far places experienced, of distances apprehended. Bending down, she completed her ritual, sniffing at the jointure of the window, at its dark smell—a mixture of moisture and dust and the sharpening cool of night.

  In bed, the last thing Hester remembered was the word “capri,” which rolled toward her, in her mind uncapitalized, like a small coral bead, but when the brilliant afternoon sun woke her the following day, and sent her nuzzling down into the bedclothes, with their comfortable odor of orris and of her carelessly washed flesh, it was the hamper she remembered. She saw again t
he sickening rhythm in which the two men had moved—conspirators, shuffling out between them the surprisingly dowdy appurtenance of death.

  She reached under the bed, and, drawing out one of the books she kept secreted there, held it in her hand for a long time, but when her mother opened the door and surveyed her exasperatedly, she still had not opened it.

  “I never saw a more indifferent girl!” said her mother. “Your father’s home and carrying on terribly. Everything falls on me!” She walked around the room, flipping back the bedclothes, picking up objects with the grim, abstracted compulsion of the housewife, the straightener, the manager. “Get up!” she said fiercely. “The funeral’s at four o’clock. Make yourself a little decent, for once. Get that hair out of your eyes!”

  “Am I going to the funeral?” asked Hester.

  “No,” said her mother. “Your father doesn’t approve of children being exposed to death.” Then she walked to the window and, slowly, measuredly, as if she were moving in time with a conventional elegy prescribed for the occasion, pulled the shade down firmly all the way to the sill and left the room. Chilled, Hester watched her go, wondering, as she dressed herself haphazardly, if the hard little correctnesses—the properness that seemed so difficult to acquire—crept in gradually as one grew, or whether, on some unspecified name day, one came of age, stepped into the finished, hypocritical shell, and was suddenly grown.

  Once outside her door, she found the rest of the apartment sequestered and dim, as if some orderly person had just left, after solicitously muting the colors, numbing the sounds, strewing over everything the careful bleach of bereavement. From behind the closed door of her grandmother’s sitting room, she heard a low rustle of voices and, centered in them, an indescribable retching sound.

  She ran toward the warm neutrality of the kitchen. Josie was flusteredly scrabbling at batches of cookery, for which she had rooted out almost everything from the vast storecloset.

  “Don’t touch nothing!” Josie said hastily. Then, contrarily, she pushed toward Hester a plateful of palacsinta—thin pancakes stuffed with sweetened cottage cheese or melted jelly, which she would never make on command but which would appear suddenly when she had been moved, perhaps, by homesickness for her own country or by a sense of occasion. As Hester ate, Josie hovered over her, sighing.