Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  Manoucher straightened his tie and hitched at the overcoat. It was polo-cloth color and cashmere, or maybe even vicuña, and the longest, thickest and no doubt lightest ever seen. No Briton had tailored it, no New York one either. A French expatriate from Algiers maybe, sodden with hashish. “Even it should happen—I do not tell him until his own wedding time is over, yes?” Manoucher said, in the sugary tones with which they said We are speaking the truth, you will understand, but not the truth. “That is his time; he should not be—worry-ed.” Only this last word being in the English in which Wert had continued to answer him.

  The thought of that ninety-year-old, spry in mind as he was, on his wedding-deathbed, being incantated over, tossed ribbons and chocolate, going through it, however it would be done, only to have the door closed at last on both his exertions and his suffering—it shouldn’t bear thinking of. Why instead should Wert feel that he himself, for all his panoramas, hadn’t yet had a life? “I suppose.”

  “We have our reasons, Mr. Wert. Always. Like you do.”

  Young Bakhtiary’s voice is cold now, adult, remote. Not a godson’s. What it says is: We know all the nuances. And now—would you like to cut things off?

  “I assume you know your father’s reasons then. Why for instance he would want to ask me that most extraordinary…personal—”

  Bakhtiary bowed his head, almost all the way to his vicuña breast.

  “But you can’t say. You’re not allowed to.”

  A headshake, violently yes.

  “Enough. Enough.” The boy might break his neck. Even the cabbie was staring.

  The doorman, of a higher caste, has turned his back. “Weddings—” Wert said. “I had only one of them.”

  The boy raises his head. How he does alternate his ages! “When we marry, we also give gifts.”

  “Do you.” He was thinking of Jenny’s “mouse,” tangled wet with both their fluids, and so long now in its body’s grave. If there was a grave. When he’d wanted to have his family ring, which Jenny always wore, buried with her, old Bakhtiary had whispered: “No, take it with you,” and when Bill persisted, had removed the ring himself, while the Venetian undertaker emitted a shocked Catholic sigh. “Son”—Bakhtiary had said in English—“grave-snatchers, don’t you see? What do you bet this man has a connection? In fact—” he’d said, switching loudly to Italian, “in Venice you can scarcely bury at all. Perhaps you want to send her and the ring home.” Wert could have done that through the Department, and with flags, too, but instead left her in Venice, ringless. Later, sending the ring via Bakhtiary’s kind offer to take care of such details for him—to the cousin in Georgia, who, awakened one morning by a solemn Iranian on her doorstep, had never got over it. Bakhtiary had had the ring delivered by hand.

  “Well, whatever he wants of me, he shall have,” Wert said. “Tell him—that it was black. The mouse was black.”

  For a moment Manoucher didn’t get it; then his head cocked, smiling sadly. “Thank you. And bless you.” They embraced, kissing cheeks. After a moment, Wert leaned on the cab door. “Shall I bring over your mother her sweater set?” he said in English.

  Manoucher grinned. “Already done.”

  And probably by hand. “I’m loathe to let you go,” Wert said, the old Farsi formalities liquid in his throat. “You can see, my dear friend, that I don’t want to.” He stood aside for Manouch to get in the cab. “Give your father my eternal love.” In Farsi it was easier. “Tell him I keep his letters always. And the copy he gave me of the Gulshan-i-Raz.”

  “He gave you—that?” When Manouch was caught off guard, the mask made by the mustache faded. One saw the man behind it.

  “I shall send it to your first son.”

  The boy sat back without speaking. Damn stupid of you, Wert. He stuck his head in the cab. “Manouch. The child will come. And in time, maybe, to have your father see the—what will it be?—the one hundred and seventieth of his line?”

  “The seventy-sixth. He exaggerates.” Was the kid smiling? No, but the man was.

  “Right. Still, you’re the seventy-fifth. To an American, that’s—what's your New York address by the way?”

  A card was slipped to him, bearing more numbers on it than he’d ever seen on one address. “Where’s that?”

  “Queens Boulevard.”

  They burst out laughing again. That used to happen—instant double laughter with the father. Who’d once said, Perhaps we two should be in oratorio.

  “Thank you,” Manoucher said. “For the mission. You cannot weiss how much.”

  Wert closed the cab door.

  The cabbie gave a last slap to its gleaming fender. “Lovely soi-ght, isn’t it? ’Aven’t the time for a cleanup on the usual.” He swung himself in. “Except I get one of these blokes…The Dorchester, mi-ind you. Soaking in oil these days. Roight? Tally-o!”

  Inside the cab, whose window was open, Manoucher, dark and erect, said no word.

  Wert drove home roiled with emotion. Landscapes of it were passing one another in his breast, which must have been empty-ready for them. Meshed, Manila, Venice, and Athens, Georgia—as seen through Jenny’s eyes. Teheran—though he’d never seen Bakhtiary there, or ever again since Venice. And Queens Boulevard, which he hadn’t yet seen. In his youth, some such interweaving was what he’d come to the Department for. Yet he could no longer see himself making any new moves for the future among these scenes, even though he had no thought of leaving them. Other people might be kindling to new passions, or like the old man—to further news from life. But these days Wert waited for others to set things going; his own letters to Bakhtiary had said as much. Very liberating it had been, never to get a moral reply, and few direct ones. By the time they got around to answering each other’s thoughts, these had faded gratefully past the contemporary. Any application to living could no longer be made.

  He meant to take out the box of letters and begin rereading backward, down to the first, under which reposed the red morocco box Bakhtiary had given him after the funeral—opened then and never since. It contained a small white, plaster death-mask of Jenny. “One can get anything made in Venice,” the old man said. “Better than a gravestone. One day you can break it. But not now.”

  Driving home, he began to be irked by the way the Bakhtiarys, father and son, were involving him. Not with their own private lives, which in spite of all the elegant public poetry, they kept hothouse dim. But if you were a serious friend, they would keep looping your own life around your neck, hanging it on you to confront you with it, as with the box, whose purpose had been: “Mourn now.”

  Wert parked the car again just off Kensington High, walked into the square where his flat was and entered the pub almost directly opposite, glad that he was in England where, having had so much of the real poetic thing, they’d developed antidotes for it. Neither a limbo nor a place to let go altogether, the Hartsdale was a spot where, though he was known, he might sit and consider his friends without having to acquire more of them. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock; he and Manoucher had dined early. He sat over a shandy, considering much, then went to the telephone, dialed the Garrick, and when it came on asked for Mrs. Vrouman.

  A female voice, presumably the kitchen’s, answered: “She’s gone for the evening.” No trick at all to get the voice to give him her home phone; should that tell him something? At the home number, a much superior female voice asked him to hold on, called out, “Helene Vrouman, Mrs. Vrouman,” came back to ask, “You’re not her mother’s nursing home?—ah, good,” and without fuss dealt him another number where he could reach her. He was further convinced of the woman’s prospectively tidy cool; he admired the Dutch. It always pleased him to find women of whatever class who pursued their solitary way with sure, businesslike steps—almost as if, had he been the one to die early, Jenny would have become one of them. Cleaving through life neither remarried nor a mere widow-pensioner, and with a certain quiet personal radicalism—though by now emotional only, not political. The third
telephone number had a familiarity he couldn’t place. He dialed it. “Dorchester, good evening,” the phone said.

  Crossing the road to his flat, he thought of the quiet dramaturgy of machines. They ought to be members of the Garrick, all breeds of them. Somewhere on the telephone boards a few tumblers had clicked, and here he was with more knowledge than he ought to have—small change as such details were these days. Mrs. Vrouman—a woman who did instead of didn’t, which he’d sensed already—might fade back now into the collage Wert had made of her, only forgetting the roll of bills, folded perhaps around a calling card. But Manoucher—who wouldn’t stay a boy any longer, and whose missions either in Iran or in New York might therefore not be a boy’s—troubled him. He was glad of his own flat coming up—in spite of its black-and-whiteness so comfortably chaired and bedded that he could always sleep off any ambition there. And so acceptably not his.

  In the front areaway he passed the sturdy, smutted hedge which never grew. Then came a flight of the spruce stairs he much preferred to a lift. Inside, in the sitting room’s grate, there would be a fire laid pridefully high by the char whose away-all-day gentleman treasure he was; each night he lit it, a happy arsonist. On a lean marble table in the side hall he would find mail and packages brought in by the porter, who was old enough to love a lord and to settle for an American. A bottle of Bulmer’s cider was always ready beside his turned-down bed. No messages in his box. How did irritation enter in? Through what cracks?

  What he first thought he saw was a white furred arm reaching out from the grate and up past the mantel; then he saw the flowers on it, crusting thickly. He turned on a lamp. A potted plant the size of a small tree stood in front of the fireplace, one long dazzling branch arching toward the ceiling, then dipping gently to trail its blossom fingers almost in his brazier. Between that and his landlord’s plinth-like marble tables there’d obviously been no place to set the plant down except on the hearth. Was there a card? No, but on the table lay a ticket which said just that—No Card—from a shop just where he thought it would be—in back of Park Lane, near the Dorchester. If he knew anything about Iranians, the pot would be special too. He knelt. It was. Thick putty-colored ware, calligraphed with early indigo, manganese purple and eye-blue, the kind of pot one saw only in museums or mosques. Or should. Sometimes there was a rare flush of pink on them. He touched it, half smiling. A lesson in how to send an unbribable deputy-ambassador—a legal pot.

  He drew the curtains and turned on every light in the sitting room, rather as he did when he brought a woman here. To assure her of what was here and what uncozily wasn’t—and for later, to be able to turn the lights out. The plant was as tall as a girl might be; its buds and flowerets were unknown to him. By now he was accustomed only to a certain artificial language of flowers, anyway. He was aware, for instance, of those beaky bird-of-paradise blooms which in Southern California grew outside any dusty insurance office but in New York lorded it over the tables of flash restaurants—and that his mother’s favorite, the true American Beauty rose, seemed no longer to exist. His cousin liked freesias, which were available around her birthday. From an earlier time, there were garden sweetpeas, and those gardenias one had sent girls.

  This great spray of brown bark and flushed white must come from a fruit tree, or what once had been one, tamed now to a shrub. Not apple, and not so pink as the cherry blossoms in Washington. He had an idea it wasn’t from any of the places where London got its hothouse supply either—the Scilly Isles, Kent. Algiers, maybe? Gibraltar? Crouching on his heels, he leaned forward. Wound around the plant stem was a coil of what he could identify—those same tiny tree-orchids of spotty tiger and freckle-green which Nosworthy’s wife grew on the place they’d meant to retire to, before the blacks’ unrest. “Who’d have thought it of Jamaica?” Nosy had said, last time Wert went for a visit. “I tell you who should have. Us.” Nothing had rousted Nosy’s gloom, certainly not when Gail had said, “But Nosy dear, how could we have known? We never had a tour remotely near.”

  He went to get his bottle of Bulmer’s from his bedside and sat down again in front of this plant, or tree, with that strange wreath at its base. It was perfectly possible Bakhtiary had arranged for this flamboyant bouquet, maybe even to be made to some exotic specific from the Gulshan, which translated meant Rosebed of Mysteries. He saw Bakhtiary laughing up his sleeve—if his throat, in which the cells themselves must be spreading like fantasy, still allowed that. Hell. Who else could have sent that pot?

  An hour later, finished with all the cider in the fridge and starting on brandy, Wert was still sitting there. He seemed to himself to have lived always between two parallel tracks which, as far as he could see into future snows, were still separate. On the one hand, human nature was the same the wide seas over. Yet on the other hand, everywhere on those seas, and clinging to the gravels and fjords as well, there were clumps of people cohesively different. This was why the world didn’t work out, and he had a job.

  The big spray of fleshy blooms quivered now and then in a chill current which came from an unshuttable register; the British never really wanted to understand central heating, but like his old hotel in Manila, where the showers had been present but unconnected—they now provided it. Because of this inconveniently precious pot on his hearth, he couldn’t have the fire he preferred. It had taken over his sitting room, a warning. Its givers meant it so; he knew them. Never press a moral; give a gift that seeds the mind. Give no advice but poetry. And never confer a favor without first asking one, so that the one given may be acceptable. What favor were they going to ask—or confer—on him?

  Weddings—the evening had been full of them, all airborne on the breath of Bakhtiary’s mortality, under that jaunty boast of his, “I shall smell roses all the way,” which one had only to cut shorter to see the meaning of: I shall smell. As your Jenny had, by nightfall. As one day—you. This branch dipping its gentle tip into his gift brazier—was it a rose? Named for a woman, as roses often were, or for queens? There must be a whole generation of girls named for that deposed queen whose picture used to be in every palace and hut. Like Manoucher’s Soraya, on whom he must call. Those tenacious tree-orchids, he had seen their like long before. That tenth anniversary bouquet sent him by Bakhtiary had been made of them—little Jenny-blooms with their green-pink tattery petals in handkerchief points. All of this was being done with their dreadful literalness. What was he being led through this evening, like a man wearing a blindfold it was time to drop?

  Women—the whole evening had been made to murmur suggestively of them.

  He was being urged to marry of course. But in all this sickly-sweet barrage there would be some steely hook of the practical. He was as sure of this as that he was now staring at an eighteenth-century pot identical with one long ago admired in Bakhtiary’s quarters at the Danieli. Its replica—in an artbook of their national museum’s treasures, which had been propped up behind it—was as Bakhtiary had said quizzically, “out on loan.” What the hook would be he couldn’t prefigure, any more than he could dispose of this particular pot by sending it home to his cousin. He had the letters, which might help. Last week’s was on his mantel. “One must learn from the physical,” Bakhtiary had written. “Everything in the universe is anticipated there.”

  Anticipate he must. Or wait to be embroiled? What saddened him now was that he had a year of grace to find out what he was targeted for—about the same time as Manoucher had, to produce a son. With the help of that wife. Even makers-and-shakers like the old man had to wait for grandsons; who knew but that with the help of the little girl from Ardebil he was hanging on for just that? Or to see Manoucher safely into harbor somewhere. Both, more likely. And in the rhythm of their ways, Wert too would have to wait with them. Because he was to be a legacy: “To my beloved son, Manoucher, for use in the profession he has nobly chosen: One tame diplomat, carefully cultivated.”

  Wert laughed. The flowers stirred. If that thing had been a woman instead, its nearest rosy
tip could have picked his breastpocket, or put a token there. He felt ashamed, a recent habit. To its giver he was that powerful entity which their like could spend a lifetime treading the waters of feeling with—a friend. In turn, they were friends beyond any shape of friendship Wert was likely to find at home. Certainly not with Nosworthy, whose only real allegiance, after the Department, was to his wife. As Bakhtiary had once commented, this was often the case with the Americans. “We are still very Elizabethan in my country, Bill,” he wrote, “in more ways than one. Have you noticed?” No, he’d have to read up on the Elizabethans, Wert wrote back, privately marveling at how his own slapdash education was being returned to him—from their side. Sometimes he did have the scholarship, and then his own brain was picked exhilaratingly. What had this senior friend, compared to whose lineage even this pot’s was new, ever really asked of William Graham Wert of Athens, Georgia, scion of only four known generations glossed by one part-time brigadier general? Only a correspondence.

  Better put the brandy away, or he might weep into his cup—a picnic mug marked St. Ives, left over from a weekend with the she-barrister. When young, he and Jenny had wanted to learn from existence what things were proper to weep for. Only with Bakhtiary had he continued that pursuit.

  The mug shot from him, but being of thick ware rolled oafishly on its side, where it did have a look of its round donor when she had her legs in the air. He’d had a pleasant enough time between them. Don’t asperse that shingle she can hang out, either—her name scripted in black-on-cream, high on a fine law-court door. Given the temper of the times at home, he might well soon have need of the kind of advice she could supply from behind a desk, with her legs strictly together. “Everybody’s now sunk in dollar-shame, for which somebody else must suffer,” Nosy had reported. What if that bloody intractable, wise, sweet, and wily ninety-year-old should leave money—and pride would call for a whack of it—to him, Wert? He was going to be given something inconvenient. He could feel that for sure.