False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  Later, she always used to say that it was for me she had emigrated, but she never said why. Perhaps she could not phrase it, or would not, for hers were not the usual reasons for going to that new world for which she had a certain scorn even before she saw it; indeed, she was never to trust a country where a man, even a son, could rise so soon. I think she left England because I had already begun to look like my father. She was a plain woman who, against her own awareness of it, had let herself shine briefly in the sunny whim of a man whose handsome dash she could never have felt herself to have deserved; other women she could have borne, and probably had, but the manner of his death had disgraced her in the one milieu in which she took pride. And everyone had begun to say that I looked like him, like the specious face in the wedding picture I never saw until months after her death—one of those Burne-Jones faces the Irish produce now and then, with a hint of the spoiled angel in its sentimental modeling, in the blank, neoclassic eye. Unwillingly, that day, I marked the likeness too.

  But of all that interim, of a period that must have been about four months, I remember nothing. It is the only part of my life I do not remember. Later there was no mention of illness; apparently through all that time I ate, responded in the ordinary way. When I was grown, and on a navy cruiser for the first conscious sea voyage of my life, I lay awake in my bunk all the first night out, straining for some kinetic memory of how it felt to be at sea. But none came. There is the day at Golder’s Green that must have been the last day; there is the morning I awoke to myself, sitting before a breakfast bowl, in the tallow-soft heat of the house in Tuscana. There is nothing in between.

  Sitting now, at the same time within the sound tape and outside it, I wake again that morning. Opposite me, someone has just said Goodman. I see the bowl, my hand stopped on the spoon, objects seen through a curtain of drizzle that a sudden wind parts clear. I look up into a long face with the cramp of illness on it, a face that I do not know. She speaks again, my aunt, in her thin, life-grudging voice, a voice I heard for the first time a moment ago.

  Postman says a foreign package you’ve to go for yourself, Dora. Has to be opened at the mails by law, for fear of plants and beetles from out there. Likely from the Goodmans, eh?

  Very likely. My mother’s voice is muffled, heard as if from behind a door, that voice, or from under the sheets in the morning, when the dream-stuff is still cotton in the ears. My eyes slide sideways, as a horse’s must feel when the blinders come off. She is there, mantelpiece figure one does not often notice but would instantly miss, on her lap the familiar flood of sewing, but the air around her has a whitish prickle to it, like the sudden, flapped blankness on a home-screen cinema. Then, as I turn, the room is normal. Only the faintest drizzle remains, always settling but unseen; until the day of the hearing nine years from then it never quite left me; it is the color of Tuscana.

  The women go on talking, and I hear them, my aunt rummaging on as the chairbound do, my mother’s short replies.

  A fine country, says my aunt, to set itself above other nations’ insects. Cockchafers here like bustards, Dora, ants like grains of sand. And at night, always the moths nosing the windows, even a frost does not stop them.

  Frost. Are there frosts here? says my mother.

  Silk in the package maybe, Dora; will it be that sleazy Jap stuff to be found here in the stores?

  Not if it’s from them, says my mother.

  I listen, not knowing quite where I am, but only that I am, and knowing this because of an echo like a comfit just swallowed, a warmth in the ear, an echo on the tongue. Then my mother’s hand on my shoulders: Come along now, we’ll fetch the parcel from Goodmans, and I know what the comfit is.

  I get up from the table and put my hand in hers. “Shall we be going on the Underground?” I said.

  Everything in my life-to-be there is in that first walk in Tuscana. I traverse it again, inclining my head powerlessly to the right, to the left, from my useless rajah-seat in recall. We walked through the rows of company houses, a time-dirtied laundry line of houses hung once with Northern neatness and never again attended. We passed the twin-stacked mill where my uncle worked, and went along what I took to be the High street, a street too unfinished ever to know that it was one. Only the Negroes, their faces a black surprise to me, held to some invisible meridian along its length, and as they passed us, stepped aside. Down to the left was the funeral parlor from which my aunt would be buried a few years hence, across from it the church where my uncle, clinging practicably to morning tea and a house kempt as it would be “at home,” was to marry my mother. I passed a trio of buildings, unconscious of the unity they would one day have for me—the courthouse, the general store of Semple, the company factor, and the schoolhouse where I would go that first fall.

  “If there were only a little east in the wind!” said my mother faintly. “Never thought to hear myself say that!” she added quickly, but I was already back in the bus that wound through Fulham, hearing the passengers reassure one another, with the greenish valor of the permanently cold, that the east was out of the wind. Glancing down, I saw that my knees looked unfamiliar, not red and chapped as I remembered them, and my hands too. The air sickened against my face, pluming in my nostrils like moths. A slack drugstore scent, like cheap vanillin, followed us into the post office from outside. It was the shabby-sweet odor of the South that already I was smelling, the air of a people who had to put too much sugar on their lives.

  The man at the desk chatted, while we opened our parcel. I could not understand him at first, although I knew that he was joking. There were several lazy flies on his counter, and one of them lit on the pink-and-bronze kimono my mother lifted from the box.

  “Nu’n but g’dole ’Mer’can bug,” he said.

  My mother said nothing, folding the kimono into the box, on top of the black brocaded slippers that were for me.

  As we left, he nodded and grinned. “Hurry back!” he said.

  Outside the door, I asked whether that meant we were to return soon for another parcel.

  My mother shook her head. “It’s what they say here when they mean ‘good-by.’”

  In our room that night, I put the slippers away. They were beautiful, but they were not what the others had had. They were not from an uncle in Gibraltar. Outside the window, from some unknown point in the hemisphere of night, a late train hooted a long sound. I did not know yet that it had a name—“the to-from Memphis train,” but I knew by now that it was an American sound. As I shut the drawer, it called once more. “Hurry back!” it said. “Hurry back.”

  Chapter III. Johnny Fortuna.

  WHENEVER I THINK OF Johnny Fortuna, who now, wherever he is, is a man older than myself, I see him only as he was that first autumn I knew him—a boy of fifteen, lying on his stomach in the leaves, talking into the afternoon distance. We always see the lost companions of our youth in some such way; they remain fixed for us against the scrubby haunts of our adolescence the way Icarus, in his own arabesque, remains fixed against history—at once exalted and drowned.

  At the school, whose poor resources were never enough for me, where almost at once I became too enviably the best pupil, Johnny was the worst; after a while, our common exclusion drew us together. He was not dull, only dulled, and I found him because I was too. At home, except for my uncle’s occasional outside evening drinking, performed as a workman’s due, without geniality or social compromise, our household, mistrusting the easy fondle of the town, never became part of it; my mother gardened suspiciously among alien flowers; at six we had an immutable tea; the windows, disciplining the weather, remained closed to the heat, open to the chill. Returning “home,” to England, was never mentioned; feverishly raising the flag of our isolation, we were at home.

  And Johnny’s household, one of two Polish caravanserais near the watchman’s shed back of the main-line signal, was one of those that exist for a town to despise. Like me, he had only a mother, but he and his brood of younger brothers and sist
ers had had more than one father. Mrs. Fortuna was visited at night, and stared down on the street in the daytime, by those men whose morality kept them from the colored quarter; if she took any revenge upon them it was in that her children, no matter how indiscriminately fathered, all had the blond bulletheads and blue eyes of Poles, as if she too kept a national pride. At night, concertina music rose late from her chimney stack, mingled, in the pulsing red air of the signal light, with the smell of mash.

  Semple was one of her regular visitors—I never knew him. I repeat it—I never knew him there, or in his store, where we happened not to trade, or in any of the chance walks of the town. There were seven thousand people in the town, and I had the matchless invisibility of my age. I saw him, of course, from time to time, as one does in a place like that, and he may have known of me as my uncle’s nephew, and glancingly passed me by. Once, in the street crowd outside my aunt’s funeral, we brushed, almost the closest we ever came to one another, but I never knew him. This is the point, the one that unhinges truth as people normally know it, the point I must make clear. Until the day of the hearing, I had never been made known to him; our hands had never greeted; we had never spoken; his eyes had never met mine. And now his name is a tremble to me forever. He is that mystery, the accidental man whom we unaccidentally wrong. For, the people to whom we have been something in love or in hate, whom we have discarded or been discarded by—these belong to the libretto; we can tinkle their themes over, all referent tunes. But the accidental man, who holds no meaning, holds all; his theme will never be finished, and will abide to the end. For of course I “knew” Semple—as the rememberer knows. I knew him from “around,” from the air, and from Johnny. I knew him from behind.

  He was a compact man, just over short, with thick, prematurely white hair, and the look of extra energy this often gives a middle-aged man. A cut above those who worked at the mill, he wore duck trousers most of the year, and these, sharply laundered below the knee but curiously rumpled and used in the region of his sex, gave the impression, as he lounged in the chair in front of his store, that his central energy came from there. He was held to be mean about money, but since his livelihood depended on how he issued credit, this may have been the verdict of those—most of the town, this would be—who could not manage their own. Johnny worked for him part-time in the store, and once, long before I was old enough to understand it, I heard it sniggered that this was the only way Semple ever paid Mrs. Fortuna. Johnny seemed to bear him no more grudge than any boy does the boss because the latter is one.

  Of his own home Johnny hardly ever spoke, but I took this for granted, for neither did I of mine. By an instinctive, unphrased agreement we never went to each other’s homes, never showed our friendship to the town. On certain afternoons, when my mother supposed me at the library, I did go there for a while—not to a real library, for the town had none, but to the old Victorian house, with its oddments of books, that the state maintained half as a memorial to the one notable woman whose birthplace Tuscana had been, half as an annuity for the curator, Miss Pridden, the dead woman’s old niece. Miss Pridden liked me, for the accent I had retained, no doubt, that echoed a faded sojourn of her youth, for the soft way I knew how to move among the precious objects she tended and to listen to her account of them, for the fact that I came at all. It was she who later tried to maneuver for me a scholarship to a college in the North. But on those days when I knew Johnny got off early, while she prosed over the books or fumbled with the tea in the pantry, I often managed my exit and ran down toward Semple’s store. Often when Johnny came out and saw me waiting, he barely nodded and moved ahead of me, kicking stones along the path we both knew we would take, and until we entered the woods, I kept my distance, for it seemed only natural to me that he should be ashamed of having no other companion than a boy, smart as he thought me, who was so much younger than he.

  So then, as far as ever appeared, no one ever knew of our intimacy. In the time to come, after the hearing where, with Johnny long gone, I testified against Semple and the others, I had a shock of fear that certainly someone would come forward to bring out the old connection between Johnny and me, to say, “His testimony has no standing in law. He was never there. He is only using what belonged to a boy named Johnny Fortuna.” But no one did. I thought then, with the first access of my power, that I must be unique, the only one ever to do what I had done. Experience tells me now how unlikely it is that this should be so. You ordinary people, yes; you are our constant dupes, because you cannot imagine, you will not believe what the more meditative can do with the reservoirs of recall. Wisdom tells me now that there may well have been at least one other like me in Tuscana, whose memory could skulk his world like mine, who recognized what I had done—who knew. He did not come forward then, perhaps because he did not choose to or had other fish to fry. But he may have been there. Perhaps someday he will come from behind—and enter upon me.

  But now, when I return to those afternoons I waited for Johnny in the alley behind Semple’s store, when, after tossing a crumb to the gamecock Semple had penned there, we made our way by back paths to the rise above the town, and lay there in the ground myrtle, peeling switches, chewing sourgrass, Johnny always the talker, I the listener—I think first of what a tender balance Johnny kept on all the things he did not tell me. For he, who had been born with the caul of the town’s underside around him, who should have known of the place only what was hawked into the spittoon and raucoused after hours, never spoke to me of the town that way at all. What he used me for was as the repository of his innocence, that pitiable innocence which he could lay nowhere else. And because I was this, for a long time he kept my innocence too.

  What Johnny talked about was—normality as he saw it, or dreamed it to be. For years, as paper boy and delivery boy, he had had backdoor glimpses of most of the town, and certain of these he collected the way other boys gathered the stamps that meant the aromatic distances which might someday be achieved. As he leaned over the brink of the town, the curl of smoke from a chimney spoke to him of the baking day of the woman there, the trim lines of wash that ringed his favorite houses brought forth a litany of the routines that went on inside—the churchgoing, the bedtime stories for kids like his brothers and sisters, the evening games—and as the fathers came out to ply the hose on these chosen yards, he could tell of the lodges they belonged to, the bright purchases they were making by thrift or installment, even the minor affiliations of the children who leagued their lawns. He was like a man studying the etiquette of banquet silver, who himself owned but a knife and a spoon.

  There was one family by the name of Nellis that had once invited him in to dinner, and of this, and of a habit of theirs, he spoke often. “’Fore dinner they say grace there, you know what grace is? Only they don’t say nothin’, just join hands around the table.”

  We could see that house from where we lay, and each evening, as its orange lamp popped out on the dusk, he marked it, sometimes mentioning the grace, or another of their ways, sometimes not. “Nellis’s light,” he would always say, though, and this was always the signal for us to go down. On the way down, once or twice in the beginning, he offered a halting excuse for why he talked so, the way a lover sometimes flaunts a practical reason for his pursuit of what others might think an inutile love. He was going into business, he said, he was going to have an automobile agency, and in business one had to know about people, how they really were.

  And once, in the beginning too, when, as we descended, the light flared on in a house at the edge of niggertown, and I asked him, already half knowing, what the boys meant when they slanged the two women who lived there, he stopped on the path and hulked over me, eyes cracked close, his face suddenly wedge-shaped and Slav.

  “How come you ask me that?” he said. “How come you ask me?”

  “No reason, Johnny,” I said, retreating, “no reason,” and he relaxed then, thinking, as I did then, that there was not. I know now that if there is an original sin
in us, it is that intuitive mischief which drives us to ask the humpbacked to discourse on humps. But that time I was learning something else—to swallow the cud of myself. I learned that day the sad second lesson of the confidant—that he may remain only so long as he collaborates in the illusion that he is not there. After that, even on the day when Johnny, breaking his illusion for my sake, let me in on his real world and told me about Semple, I held still and listened only. It was what one had to do in order to be able to stay. And somewhere along in there, I suppose, in those afternoons with Johnny, I lost forever, if I had ever had it, what might have been my own power to confide. Like those savages who bury the ashes of their own fires, hide their combings and nail parings against the magic wreakings of the possible finder, I came too to sense the sovereignty of the finder, and to resolve that no one should ever have a paring of me. Gradually I became critic enough to know that Johnny’s vision of Tuscana rested like a bubble above the real one, but I never said anything. Time after time, I lay there passive on the hillside and let him spread his version of the town before us, golden as a Breughel, all its simple, wheaten actions simultaneous and side by side. And after a while, he made no more excuses. I guess by then he knew that his talking so was no more strange than my listening.

  Chapter IV. More Goodmans. He Asks to Return.