“You look fine, Davy,” he said, smiling.
“You look fine too, Bob.”
“Sure. Oh sure,” he said, with a wry, self-derisive grimace. He indicated with his drink. “Look at us. Everyone looks fine. Householders all. Hard to believe we were the gents who took it full in the belly—depression, social consciousness.” His accent was a little slurred now. “And wars and pestilence,” he said more firmly. “Even if we were a little late for that.” He downed his drink.
“You in the war, Bob?” said Spanner, somewhat lamely.
“Me? Not me,” he said. “My kids were. Lost one—over Germany.” He walked over to the buffet, poured himself a drink, and was back, swiftly. “Sounds antiquated already, doesn’t it? Over Germany. We’re back to saying ‘in Germany’ now.” He went on quickly, as if he had a speech in mind that he would hold back if he thought it over.
“Remember the house I used to belong to? ‘Bleak House,’ they used to call it, sometimes, remember? The one that got into the news in the thirties because they hung a swastika over the door. Or maybe somebody hung it on them.” He drank again. “Could have been either way,” he said.
Spanner nodded. He had begun to be sick of the word “remember”; it seemed as if everyone, including his self of the night before, was intent on poking up through the golden unsplit waters of his youth the sudden sharp fin of some submerged reality, undefined, but about to become clear.
“They were a nice bunch of fellows in our time,” said Spanner.
“You know … Davy …” Anderson said. His voice trailed off. The fellow was apologetic; in his straight blue look there was a hint of guilt, of shame, as if he too, the previous night, had half dreamed and pondered, but unlike Spanner had met the dark occupant of his dreamings face to face.
“I wanted them to take you in,” Anderson said. “A few of us together could have pushed it through—but all the others made such a God-damned stink about it, we gave in. I suppose you heard.” He looked at Spanner, mistaking the latter’s unresponsiveness for accusation perhaps, and went on.
“If we hadn’t all been so damned unseeing, so sure of ourselves in those days …” He broke off. “Ah well,” he said, “that’s water over the dam.” And grasping Spanner’s shoulders, he looked down at him in an unsteady bid for forgiveness, just before he released him with a brotherly slap on the back, and turned away, embarrassed. Standing there, it was as if Spanner felt the flat of it, not between his shoulder blades, but stinging on his suddenly hot cheek—that sharp slap of revelation.
Point of Departure
AFTERWARD, LEANING THEIR ELBOWS on the mantel, they lit cigarettes and stared at each other warily. The late afternoon, seeping into the small apartment, pushed back its boundaries, melted them into shadow, intruding into the comfortably trivial box the long finger of space.
They were, she thought, like two people holding on to the opposite ends of a string, each anxious to let go first, or at least soon, without offending the other, yet each reluctant to drop the curling, lapsing bond between them. Always, afterward, there was the sense of a dialectic, a question not concluded; after the blind engulfment the two separate egos collected themselves painfully, slowly donned their bits of protective armor, and maneuvered once more for place.
It would be easy, good, she thought, to talk long and intimately afterward, to meet on close ground, divested of all pretense. But they never want this; they never do. The long, probing conversations that women tried to force upon them, getting closer to the nerve of personality—how they hated them, retreating from them brusquely into silence, sheepishly into the commonplace of the consolatory pat! Or, after the aura of wanting had ebbed, did they too feel a little bereft, bare, in front of the speculative, now disenchanted eyes opposite them; did they too conceal a fumbling need to linger a little longer in the dark recesses of emotion, to examine, to assess what had been separate, had blended, and now was separate again?
Doubting this, she could see him, so quickly, so expertly casual, leaving in a few minutes, gathering up his hat and his briefcase with a delicate assumption of reluctance, exhaling a last relieved whiff of tenderness into her ear. Out of some obscure pride she never went to the door with him; he never remarked on this but always closed the door very gently, like someone leaving a sickroom. She could imagine him standing on the doorstep downstairs, squaring his shoulders and making straight for a bar, eager to immerse himself quickly in the swapping masculine talk of baseball scores and prize fights, blow by blow—all the vicarious jaunty brag that sat upon him as inappropriately as a cockaded paper party hat, but that was indulged in alike, she knew, by the simple male and the clever.
Opposite, already a little absent, he stared at her a trifle wryly, pulling gratefully at his cigarette. Now, he knew, would begin the gentle process of disengagement that he had learned long ago, defensively, to perform so well. Now it would be like a game of gesture in which he excelled, in which it would be as if, smiling the tolerant smile of experience, he divested himself one by one of a series of clinging hands, until he stood again remote, inaccessible, free. Only later, when the warmth and almost all the conquest had worn away, would the slow rise of irritation with self and women begin, then the slight guilt of satiety that would enable the resolve to be made, and finally the shrug and the forgetfulness.
Regretfully, as if taking leave of a landscape that had pleased, he broke his glance from the eyes opposite him, looked down at the hand that lay perhaps intentionally near his on the mantel, curved upward, open. Warned, he had felt all afternoon the too recognizable air of intensity, of special pleading, that had surrounded her; in a woman of less taste it would have taken the form of a dress too tight, or a flock of bows in the hair. Intelligent women stimulated rather than repelled him, if they had the other attraction too; their withdrawals and defenses were heightened by subtleties that it was a challenge to explore and subdue. But in the end it was all the same—gazing up at you afterward with their liquid pained stare, detecting the coil of softness in you that half appreciated, half understood, they all pleaded for an avowal—of what?
The hand on the mantel brushed his, and was withdrawn.
“It’s pathetic, isn’t it,” she whispered, “the spectacle of people trying to reach one another? By any means. Everywhere.” There was a rush, a grating of honesty, in her tone that she deprecated immediately with a quick covering smile.
The remark hung too nakedly on the air. He nodded ruefully, and allowing his hand to touch hers for a moment, he stared into their palms, and they stood together for a moment, joined over the body of their failure.
Patting her shoulder in a light rhythm, one, two, three, he grasped her chin tight in his hand and looked down at her for quite a time.
“See you,” he said. “Better run for my train.” As he took up his hat and briefcase half embarrassedly, leaning against the mantel she was watching him silently, and it was so that he caught the last image of her as he let himself out the door, easing the knob to.
Blinking in the light of the outdoors, which was a lot stronger than one would suspect after that dim apartment of hers, he brought that image with him, but, shielding him, his mind shifted, rioting pleasurably among the warmer images of the early afternoon. All the way down the avenue from the park he carried these with him, until at Forty-second Street, sauntering toward Grand Central, he joined the streams of women carrying their light pastel packages of hose, ribbons, blouses—all the paraphernalia of women at the turn of a season. He was used to seeing them in the train, haggard after the day-long scavenger hunt for the hat to go with the shoes that went with the dress—riding home for the long ritual of unguents that would arm them once more. From his wife, and his sisters before her, he knew it well—the ritual that would transform the kimonoed, the oiled, the bepinned one into the handsome, curled, confident woman waiting at the door, Venus risen triumphant on a shell of empty boxes.
For a while now, out of a sense of the just, the caut
ious moment, he would be free, but inevitably he would be alert again to the puff of organdie at a throat, a mouth so richly, redly drawn over the scanter curve of lip beneath, a look, plaintive or ripe—the whole froth of femininity that they all put out like entangling scarves. They would be drawn to him too, often out of an awareness of his sensitivity to them, only to be confused by the proffered warmth for warmth of a relationship that ended, not in the conventional brutalities of a rejection they might have understood, but in the firm, knowing refusal to be involved in the abject spiritual surrender which they always ended up by demanding, for which they all longed.
Either they caught you young and eager, as he had been, and—nailed down by their allies, time and habit—incredibly, swiftly, you were a member of the country club, with a mortgage, while across the room, herded together with the others, in their unblushing, blatant discussions of the idiosyncrasies of husbands, they proclaimed your indenture to them—or else, in the byways of sub rosa relationships, there too, sooner or later, they strangled calm with their demoniacal need for finality, possession, grown all the stronger because it could not be socially displayed. Perhaps, he thought, it is the riddled period in which we live, in which people are driven endlessly upon one another, hoping to find, in the person of another one of the bewildered, the a priori love, the certainty, the touchstone.
He had reached Grand Central and the long sloping entrance to the suburban trains. Across the way his usual stop-in place beckoned with its promise of a muted jumble of light, noise, and clinking glassware in which feeling could be drowned. Perhaps it is worse for the women, he thought, but they are the worst—all of them Penelopes, trying to weave you into the fabric of their lives, building on you in one way or the other until you have to get out from under. Squaring his shoulders, he shifted his briefcase, and walked on toward the sure nepenthe, the comfortable glaze of the bar.
In the apartment, she stood still at the mantel, reluctant to acknowledge the gap in the room, to close it over finally with movement, change. At last she walked over to the sofa and sat down, shrinking into the cushion for its warmth. The room was always like this afterward, like a deserted theatre, and, half actress, half spectator, she sat and mulled over what had gone before, forming, as if into a stylized ballet, the whole interchange of responses that had been their meeting, forestalling, by this means, the sure humming rise of depression.
Her last exclamation, which had been as alienating to him, she knew, as the shock of a cry for help thrust suddenly into the most casual of conversations, had come from the heart, the heart that she knew, by unspoken agreement with him, with all of them perhaps, must always be held behind one. Only among the very young might it be otherwise, possibly … before they had acquired the destroying talent for compromise that eased—as it more and more deflated—the drama of experience.
Perhaps, she thought, curvetting so lightly, so “modernly,” as we have been taught to do, over the sharp stick of emotion, never daring the banal, the stark word, it is our reticences that trap us after all. It happened everywhere: behind the tidy doors of marriage, in the dark bed of adventure, or in the social bumpings against one another in the crowded rooms where people massed together protectively in frenetic gaiety, hiding stubbornly—“I am alone”—using liquor, music, sex, to say—“You, too?” It happened, sometimes, in rooms at the end of the day, after the scratch of gossip, the long political sighs, were done, and there was a lull, with people staring reflectively into their glasses, twirling the stems, that the lull deepened, a sentence died on the air, and it was as if everyone had plunged his arm into a deep well, searching, seeking—but no hands met and clasped.
She walked into the kitchen and poured herself a drink. Toward her through the window over the sink the stunted city trees stretched in the soft, mottled weather, all along their weak, cramped boughs, the sure, recrudescent leaves. It would be better if it were autumn now, she thought drearily, when people huddling together at concerts, at parties, in front of fires, can persuade themselves that they are huddled there together against the cold.
Tonight there were people coming in to talk. She knew beforehand how she would sit there, in the anodyne of company, cradling the warmth of what had been, while every so often, half savored because it gave a meaning to the hour, half pushed down lest it rise to the surface and become real hurt, there would come, like water washing over a sunken buoy, the little knell of sadness for something that had been, that had never quite been, that now had almost certainly ceased to be.
Letitia, Emeritus
HOLDING THE SMALL WHITE card so as not to bend it, Letitia Reynolds Whyte, aged twenty-four, looked cautiously up and down the main hallway of the school. Only the Senior girls were left in the school now, and most of them were in their rooms, lying on the beds in their underwear, talking dreamily of what they were going to do after graduation, the ones who were not getting married, who were only going to Europe with their parents, or just back to Locust Valley, or Silver Spring, or Charleston, listening enviously to the fluttery, conscious plans of those who were. Through the closed door of the Green Room down at the end of the hall she heard the laughter of the girls closeted there, rehearsing the skits for the Senior Banquet that evening. Tomorrow, hordes of parents would descend on the school for the graduation exercises, but today, the empty lawns outside—carefully shaven to a final unusual neatness that morning by Norval, the gardener—the echoing halls inside, all had had a hush over them, a left behind hush of desertions and departures, of feverish routines suspended, of another school year gone, and another deadened summer begun, in which only Miss Sopes—the Head—the colored cook, and Norval would be left to wait for fall. And, of course, Letitia.
She looked up and down the hall again. All the teachers’ cubbyhole private offices were closed and locked, even the larger one at the very end, a former parlor, which was rated by “Papa Davis,” Professor Walter Wallace Davis, because he was the oldest, the most distinguished looking, and the only one who was a real professor, having come to Hyacinth Hall after the close of a career in Latin and Greek at the State University. Usually, long after the others had locked up and gone he could be found lingering in the musty brown room with the shabby davenport and the bronze lamp with the purple frosted grapes. “This is my real home, girls. My real home,” he would say, leaning forward and smiling expansively, rubbing the grapes with a restless, worrying hand. But today even he had gone home to his palsied sister in their dark old house across the bridge in Minetteville, although he would return tomorrow to address the parents, as he did every year at graduation.
Satisfied that no one was around, Letitia crossed the hall to the large Student Mail box which hung on the wall in its very center. Ordinarily the box was a plain drab, lettered “Hyacinth Hall” in white, a smart, monogram-like inscription which the elder, dead Miss Sopes, the Miss Sopes, in some fierce spinsterish urge, thwarted possibly as to bedspreads and guest towels, had always had imprinted on every wastebasket, towel, door, and object that attached to the Hall. This tradition, like every one which stemmed from the mourned competence of her sister, the present tremulous Miss Rosanna had of course carried on.
Today, in accordance with still another tradition, the box was covered, except for the slit for envelopes, with a large, fanned-out frill of stiff white paper, and stuck above it, a fancily inked sign said “Announcements.” All week long Senior girls had been surreptitiously seeking out the box and dropping in their white cards, or slips of pink or blue notepaper, when no one was looking. On Banquet night, the box, lifted from its hooks, would be set in the middle of the draped head table where the class officers sat, and after the jerkily rhymed class history had been read and the class prophecies for each girl had sent them all into gales of merriment, the class president, standing solemnly above the box, would dip her hand into it slowly, teasingly, and read off, one by one, the names and announcements of all the girls who were leaving Hyacinth Hall “engaged.” Each girl stood, was clap
ped for, walked forward smiling and reddened to the head table and was handed a long-stemmed rose, which she pinned to her shoulder and wore mincingly the rest of the evening. A girl could not just put any name, or even the name of her “steady” in the box. She had to be really, seriously engaged. Letitia knew, for Senior Banquet, since there were never any boys present, was one of the school functions she was allowed to attend. She had been to two of them already. Tonight’s would be the third.
After one more hesitant look around, she bent over the card in her hand, scrutinized it lovingly, tabbing each letter with a slow forefinger. Some of the girls even got themselves engaged just so they could announce it on Banquet night; just so they would not have to be one of the others barred from the flushed group of those who had been tapped, anointed, by love’s mysterious rose. Just a few nights ago, Letitia, leaning pressed against the locked connecting side door of her room, the door which led to Willa Mae Fordyce’s room on the other side, but was never opened, had heard Willa proclaiming to other murmurous visiting voices: “Why I’d count it a disgrace not to announce on Banquet night, really I would. I just wouldn’t feel graduated, honest!” And Willa had given a low, satisfied laugh. She had meant it too, for just this morning, Letitia, stealing breathlessly into Willa’s empty room through the unlocked regular door, had seen the slip readied on Willa’s desk. “Engaged. Wilhelmina Mary Fordyce and Homer Watson Ames.”
Letitia gave her own card a last admiring look. It was beautifully printed—the best she had ever done. In art class, Miss Tolliver would often pause, leaning over Letitia’s shoulder, and knitting together tenderly her gray, mock-fierce eyebrows, she would say, extra-loud: “’Titia, your copy-work is certainly real nice, dear. Truly lovely.” And shaking her head at some imaginary crony in the air, she would make a kind of soft sad sigh and pass on to the desk of the girl in front.
The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Page 46