“T-t-t!” said Josie, rocking back and forth. “Is too bad.” Again Hester felt the flicker of guilt, as if someone had twanged a string inside her and had found it slack, without resonance.
She left the kitchen and crossed the hall to the dining room. Peering into the parlor through the French doors, dully masked with net, she made out a corner where chairs had been drawn aside to make room for what must be the coffin. Parting the doors stealthily, she went in, planning to see for herself the thing to which children must not be exposed.
As she entered, a figure seated in front of the coffin moved slightly. Terror of the unimaginable jumped in her, for the figure was tiny, bent, and dressed in spare black, as her grandmother had always been. Expelling her breath, she saw that this was a stranger, whose china teeth and thick, glossy brown wig, rimming her face like a hat, were both too big for her, giving her the appearance of a Punch-and-Judy doll that had been excessively repaired.
Hester drew back, but the woman, misinterpreting her withdrawal, motioned toward her ingratiatingly, with a custodian’s pride. Drawing Hester compellingly to the coffin’s side, the woman then stood with her hands bunched together at her neckbones, her bright, avian stare cocked sidewise as Hester looked down into the box.
Less wrinkled, whiter than in life, Hester’s grandmother extended her short length in the box, with the same finished, miniature look she had always had, with the same natural dignity. At any moment, Hester felt, she might unlock her eyes and say, “But how could you think I would not handle this decently, properly, too?” Shrinking from the gross casualness of the woman attitudinized beside her, Hester wavered nearer the box, and when she turned and ran from the room, it was from the live woman that she ran.
In the hallway, she collided with the hatted figure of her mother, and for a moment that soft collision with dim, powdery fragrance, with the half-remembered enveloping warmth of babyhood, clouded the barrier of properness between them.
“Who’s that little old woman in there?” Hester whispered.
“Who? Oh, she’s a professional watcher,” said her mother. She was carefully draping a thick veil over her hat. “Your grandmother was Orthodox, you know,” she added with a certain disdain. “Someone has to be with the dead until the burial, the next day.”
“Is that her job?” Hester whispered.
“It’s a volunteer society, I believe. I suppose women who have no other … I suppose one gives them something,” her mother said impatiently, with a final shake of herself. “Go stay with Josie,” she added, frowning.
Lingering in the hall, Hester watched her mother listen at the sitting-room door for a minute and then knock.
“Joe,” said her mother, “it’s almost time.”
The door opened and Hester’s father came out, surrounded by the hovering women: Flora and Amy—his sisters—and the cousins Rose and Martha. Selena was not among them. Her father looked blindly ahead of him, and half groans, the replica of the awful sound she had heard before, still shook him.
“Joe,” said her mother, “get ahold of yourself!”
He raised his head. “Ahold of myself!” he said. He bent his head again, and the women closed around him—the red-eyed, solicitous sisters first, then the border of cousins—and, moving their dark caravan slowly, steadily, they passed through the dim foyer and out the apartment door.
Hester tiptoed to the empty kitchen. Through the half-open door of Josie’s room, she saw her sleeping on her bed, openmouthed. Shutting the back door of the apartment softly behind her, Hester ran down the five flights of service stairs into the back court of the apartment house. Making a wide circle, she arrived at the front entrance and unobtrusively joined the audience of children and passersby that flanked it.
All along the street, the line of black cars waited in heavy perfection, closed to the great blond sea of the sun. From both corners, people converged upon them, like a stream of ants, and were met at the center by a gentleman with a fixed look of gravity, who murmured something to each of them, referred to a list in his hand, and, nodding, conducted them to one or another of the cars.
Next to Hester, a woman nudged another. “The family,” she mouthed.
Now the grave man’s look deepened, became even more carved, as, with a stooping, comma-like posture, the list disregarded, he handed Hester’s parents and the aunts into the central car, bearing them along almost on his arm, as if they were the veritable royalty of grief. Behind them, Martha, in an aspiring headdress poised like an aigrette on a sparrow, and Rose, straighter than usual, were shunted into one of the rear cars by an assistant. By now, the cars were full, and the stragglers who still came were people, unfamiliar to Hester, who did not seem to expect to go with the cortege but passed on, whispering among themselves, into the building. Four men, dressed the same, and of a size, like dummies, emerged, carrying the coffin. At the curb they paused, shifting the weight between them, then slid it neatly into the hearse.
The carved gentleman raised his hand officiously toward his assistant. “All set,” he said.
Suddenly, walking alone, came Selena. Even today, she had been unable to resign herself to black and wore a dress the rubbed blue of plumskin, whose texture seemed flattened here and there by years of waiting in a box. Without the insignia of her coral, she looked somehow bereft, but she walked toward the gentleman in austere pride, on her cheeks the henna tinge of the night before.
The gentleman looked discomforted. “Only the immediate family,” he said placatingly.
“I am a member of the family,” said Selena in a secure contralto, but one hand opened and closed at her chest, seeking the reassurance of the corals, as if she might at any moment add, “The member from Capri.”
Bending nearer, the gentleman murmured an inquiry and agitatedly checked her answer against his list. “I am sorry,” he said in buttered tones, “but there seems to have been an oversight. Do you wish me to check with a member of …” He paused and allowed a delicate insinuation of disapproval to affect his face.
“No,” said Selena in a rusty voice. “Never mind.”
He bowed. “The family,” he said consolingly, “will receive friends of the deceased upstairs when they return.” He flicked a nod to his assistant, and with a sinuous deftness they inserted themselves into the hearse, which pulsed into a motion that reverberated sluggishly down the line of cars.
In a few minutes, the street was almost empty of cars and onlookers, except for Hester, who had crept behind one of the ironwork grilles in the courtyard, and Selena, who remained as if held by a need to see the last of the cars inexorably gone. Standing there in the open light of summer, she looked to Hester at once bizarre and dusty, like one of those oddly colored bits of bric-a-brac that seem mysterious and compelling in the back of the store but, when brought to the light by the excited purchaser, are seen to be lurid and unsuccessful. When the last car had gone, Selena stood there for a moment, her hand still nervously groping on her chest; then, slowly, with a ragged, indecisive gait, she turned and walked away.
Hester saw her recede down the long block, until she vanished around the corner. In her mind, like a frieze, she saw the added-up picture of Selena, always watching tentatively, thirstily, on the fringe of other people’s happenings, and fear grew in her as she became suddenly aware of her own figure, standing now in the hot sun. It was watching, too.
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 high-lighted 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 sidestreet, 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 ba
re 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.
The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Page 28