False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  I WAS ALMOST FOURTEEN and had known Johnny about three years, the summer my mother married my uncle. My aunt had died some months before. Never too much of a person, her fretful dying by inches and years had long since squeezed her smooth of that roughened human surface which is needed to draw real feeling from others, yet her death left a curious incoherence in our household. Our invalid’s routine had regularized it, given it a purpose that the outside world, though avoided, might see if it cared to look; even more, the presence of the dying brings an edge of eternity into the air of a home, giving the most cramped household a bit of view. Certainly this was all my uncle and mother had shared until then, and now that the woman who had related them was removed, it must have been this, the need of some united front, more than propriety, that until the marriage was settled upon, made them uneasy with one another. It could hardly have been the fear of gossip alone that moved them, for the town would no longer have bothered to pay them even that intimacy—although my mother may have heard in her mind a lost, transatlantic echo of what would have been said and unsaid in World’s End. No, it would give us all a permanency, my mother said, and my uncle would help toward my education, or find me a place in the mill.

  She was sewing as usual, the evening she told me; Tuscana was one of three towns near the site of the great new dam the government was building in the river valley, and she had begun to find a small trade among the wives of the engineers from the North. The air was tight, with the binding summer heat I had never got used to, and although the evening light was still bland and I had polished the panes only the day before, there was no sparkle in them. My uncle had gone out for the one evening away a week he allowed himself. I thought of him sitting mum in the café he still called the “pub”—a sparely molded man with a dry eye and the sparse manners of those who are easier with machines than with people. He had a colorless justice about him that made him neutral to live with, but I wanted him no closer.

  When she had finished speaking, I listened to the late blasting on the river, wishing that one of the thunders would crack the inferior glass, yellow the gray air behind which I lived, and lift me like a rocket away. I cast about for something dauntless to say to her, some proposal that would knock outward the underworld walls of boyhood and made me at one blow a man. I thought of reminding her of the scholarship exams I had planned on, but they were still two years away. But after a moment, I mentioned them.

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “We must think of those.” She bent her head deeper over her sewing. “You will have a room to yourself then, to study in; that will be a help, eh?” A little time went by. Then she rose and made tea.

  When she returned with the tea things, the blastings had stopped and the panes were dark. I heard a train pass, a long freight, dragging into smaller and smaller falls its long chain of sound.

  “Could—could we not go home?” I said. I had never asked it.

  The cups clinked as she served them. Neither of us touched the tea. After a while, sitting with her hands folded, she shook her head. “This is home,” she could have said, evading, but she sat on, not denying that it was not.

  “Could we not—write to them?” For a long time now I had not once spoken of the Goodmans; by an evasion of my own I had managed not to think of them, except in bed at night, when, with my knuckles against my knees, I had sometimes tried to walk among them, putting myself to dream.

  “Them?” She raised her head in casual surprise.

  I breathed fast, the way one did before heaving up the stone wheel that covered the well in the yard. “The—Goodmans.”

  “Oh—” My mother’s soft ejaculation, light smile, plunged me down, even before she spoke further, into that gap down which the child falls, weightless, holding on to some stone of meaning which the giants have wafted aside like a feather. She was smiling, with that faint, sealing tribute people pay to the picnics of long ago, the pretty costumes they once have worn.

  “Ah,” she said, gently laughing, dismissing. “So you still remember.”

  I got up then, and moved for the first time away from her. At the age I was then, the past is our only littoral, sacred because it is all we have to go on; to minimize it, to step lightly across it and onward, to forget, is the treason of maturity. So I got up then and went to the window, and standing there, by an imitative act of memory, as their habit had been, I moved away from her, toward them. I saw young Martin, at the age I was now when we left them, glassy-eyed with rainy-day lethargy, rolling a marble back and forth along the sill; I saw Hannschen with her nose just above it. I put my hand on the curtain and I saw Lady Goodman, whom I always thought of as Lady Rachel, standing in one of her arrested pauses; I saw the old lady Mrs. Goodman at her window on the floor above, staring out upon Tiergartens and, Königsallees melted upon Golder’s Green in the faïence of the years. I saw all of them, watched by myself from behind.

  I touched the curtain here in Tuscana, cut down from a patch quilt brought with us from there. The dressmaker’s roster, it was made up of anonymous snippets, but down at one end there was a piece of green damask I knew and had avoided, hating the mute screw of pain that lives in all those objects which survive from one part of us to the other. I put my forefinger on it—object swum so irrelevant and far.

  “That’s from the dining-room curtain,” I said.

  I fingered the wall beside it, and I was brushing the rubbed place on the olive-drab wall where the maids eased themselves in with the trays. I bent lower, still touching.

  “That’s where the splash was, where Molly dropped the tureen. ‘Lucky it wasn’t the Nailsea, eh, Molly?’ Sir Joseph said.” Hung on the kitchen wall back there was an old rolling pin of whorled Nailsea glass, given to Molly by her lover, a sailor from that town, with the warning legend that if it fell it would be a sign that he was lost at sea. Sir Joseph’s remark had become a catch phrase in the house, used when something broke, when a child tumbled, when a quarrel was mended.

  “When I fell on the stairs, he said it,” I said. I felt his arms picking me up, his hands testing my bones as he would his own childrens’, his tobacco richness as he set me down. “‘Lucky it wasn’t the Nailsea, eh?’ he said.”

  And standing there, between Sir Joseph and the widened eyes of my mother, I talked on, remembering, my tongue never fast enough for what I saw. Leaving the dining room, the smell of orange bitters from the open sideboard followed one, and, transliterated, clung to the wooden pineapple on the newel post in the hall. Have a care now, said Molly, passing me on the stair, for I was carrying the old lady’s afternoon half-bottle of Madeira. I saw myself stop on the landing to look at the light streaming through the leaded pane that showed the Knight of Malta with his white cross on his black robe, to hunt for the bit of misplaced red near his nose.

  “‘Stand just so,’ Martin said,” I said, “‘and if the light’s proper you’ll see the old Hospitaler bleed from the nose.’”

  “Enough! Enough!” said my mother, but I was already past her, almost among them, putting myself to dream. I passed Lady Rachel’s half-closed door, that room, muffled with voile, where she endlessly wanted to be resting, and I could almost see her murmur, hand at her forehead, the way she often would at the nursery hour, Hours to go, before good night.

  “Hours to go, before good night,” I whispered, going by, seeing, as I used to, the pale blue, ladylike hours that stretched before her until she could re-enter the muffled room.

  “Child! Child!” said my mother, but I was already on the third floor landing. I knocked on the door and opened it.

  The old lady looked up, as if from spinning. Da bist du! she said, all the past in her lap, and then I was in the room with her; I was there, with them.

  Here comes the handsome waiter, she said. And what does he say?

  “Guten Tag, gnädige Frau,” I said, very stiff with the tray.

  Ach, such ton he has, das kleine Herrgöttle von Bieberach, she said, grinning. You remember what that means?

&
nbsp; “Little Mr. God from Beeberock,” I said.

  Aha, she said. I see you have not forgotten.

  No, I have not forgotten, I have never forgotten, I was about to answer, but then, wee at the small end of the telescope, my mother cried out, and came forward. She cannot reach me, I thought, for now I am with them. I opened my mouth to answer, but the long arm grew and reached me, shaking, shaking, and I dropped the tray, and all was smashed.

  In bed that night, and nights after, I pressed my knuckles against my knees and waited, but I could not get back. It was because someone else knew now, I thought. Someone else had a paring of me. For now and then I caught my mother watching me. But she never spoke to me of the Goodmans again.

  Chapter V. Miss Pridden.

  ON THE DAY OF the wedding I was up early and dressed for school as usual, having all that week refused to attend the ceremony even in the serge suit they had hopefully got for me. They were leaving for Memphis immediately after; my uncle had taken a week off from the mill and had bought a second-hand car.

  Now, as I went about the room that was to be mine from tonight, I was almost glad of the week alone and of their going, only wanting them to know that it was I who dispensed with them. I had grown up some in the past weeks, if growth can be said to come by stations of recognition of what one cannot have. If my mother had not come in just then to say good-by to me in just that way, in just that dress, might I never have gone to look for Johnny that evening?

  But she did come, in that way, precisely minted for her eleven-o’clock business, and in that dress, with the sharpened waist, the unfamiliarly wide skirt with its assertive rustle. And for all the tender rue with which she reached for me, I saw the little raised comb of pride that hardens upon a woman, once she has a man again to show the world. I ducked her kiss.

  “Do not mind the dress,” she said, still reaching. And if I could bend from the sound tape now, I would bend toward her. Meeting her there, in that impossible tangent, I could explain to her that when we come of age in our own flesh we have more charity for the image of what our parents did to beget us, and after; that it is only the young who, harsh in their own straits, want to keep that image eunuch and dry. But the tape has no mercy; I answered her then.

  “It looks … like a client’s dress,” I said, and ran past her out of the house.

  In the yard, I reminded myself of the schoolbooks left behind in the room, but I did not go back. She did not come after me. A cardinal whistled, and other calls, still unknown to me, insinuated from bush to bush. Although it was only eight o’clock, and well on toward October, my jersey was already dark at the armpits with sweat. In the reticent, marine land I had come from, the birds were already long gone—perhaps some of them here to me. Outside the gate, the old car, heavily waxed by my uncle, sweated too, with a premarital shine. I closed the gate and went on to school.

  When I got out that afternoon, the town had a Friday hum to it; it was market day, and even the steady loungers in front of the courthouse had each his paper bundle or loaded cord bag. In the long mud alley back of the main street, the tenant farmers’ wives stood as usual at their slap-up stalls, behind strings of rabbits congealed in their own rust, limp fowl and garden greens, old gray cartons of dirt-flecked eggs. But beyond every turning now, raw orange in the late sun, lay the great Federal gash in the hills—its crater ready to rise. I remember now how, up on the main street, a few Negroes nudged in front of the wet red slick of a new store front, saying, “Chain store, man, chain store from the North,” and how two of their women, urged from behind, walked in; how, up ahead, some of the white mill hands coming off shift hunkered up at Semple’s new sign, lit ghoulish in the daylight, the town’s first scribble of neon blue.

  “Heavy traffic, hear tell, over to Charlotte,” one muttered, and half hearing, I knew he spoke of the government hiring hall across the dam site at Charlotte, empty at first, although the rates were higher than the mill, because they were also equal for white and colored alike, but filling slowly in recent weeks, now that it was pretty certain not a nigger dared show. And looking back, I see how change comes without guns, in the sudden crater in the farmland, the silent tribune without flags in the real-estate office, the tinkle on the bourses of small towns. Years later, the historian tells himself that had he been there he would have smelled its powder. It is not so, either for a civilization or a man. The chronicler and the chronicle can never meet. But a man is both; twinned by memory, he goes on trying.

  So, late downbeat always after the measure, we follow ourselves; I follow the boy who was I. I walked on down the street, slouching along in the pure cone of my own trouble, never smelling the hint that was already in the air for the town and for me—the hint of sulphur that steals up before the first tremor in the streets.

  Back there in front of Semple’s, craning above the shoulders of the millhands, I had caught a glimpse of Johnny’s blond head above the counter, helping Semple with trade. On Fridays he had to stay until nine. I lingered on a corner, the thought of the empty house dropping down, a tear-shaped blob of solder, inside me. To the right, in what had once been the old center of town before the mill came, a few antebellum houses, most of them flats now, huddled behind their columned porticos like thumb-soiled Parthenons from a schoolboy’s primer, sunken cobbles between them and the waterless, carved stone horse troughs that had sunk too, in gradual burial rite, almost to the ground. The Pridden place, painted an accusing white by the state funds from Montgomery, stood among them.

  I tried the door and found it locked, but I had permission for another entry, a narrow, wisteria-hidden jalousie that folded sideways and gave on to the back hall. As I parted the roped branches, slid the shutters back, and entered, I stood still for a minute, flooded with a sudden peculiar comfort. For a moment, standing there in the flattery of secret privilege, I was washed inward, past some gate, inside. I was to have other such moments in my life, involuntary shudders of comfort great and small, and they were always to be connected with secrecy, with some hermetic privilege that was mine alone. This time, displaced in its sudden, unexpected balm, listening to its rhythm with my head cocked upwards, I told myself obscurely that it must have come because the ceiling here, high and molded with antique frivolity, had a never-before-noticed look of some in my own country, of back there. Years were to pass before I knew otherwise, before I knew for sure that the alien is not national; his drum sounds from farther below. Some are born so easy and tactile to the world’s gates; others, yet so handsome and fully organed, are born without hands. I lowered my head, and the found heartbeat was gone, as it has always gone, and I was myself again, gnawing and humbly feral, outside.

  The kitchen was cool, an old woman’s haven, with the musty dryness the old bring to a room, dry cool of bird-bones that need flannelette, subtemperate blood that wants its tea. Miss Pridden was out marketing, no doubt, with Perry, the small colored boy who came every week to carry, to whom she always paid, with the obligation of the noble, one of her scant supply of quarters, although the going rate was a dime. Once, early in my acquaintance with her, I had been there when he came, and she had dismissed him, saying, “I think perhaps my young friend here will help me today, thank you, Perry,” although I had seen the quarter change hands nevertheless. When we had returned that afternoon with the bundles, after we had stored the food away, she had offered me no money, but when tea came it was not as usual in the china pot, but in the full silver service with the urn for hot water, and on the table there was a plate of benné seed cakes. I had never seen the latter before, and did not know that they were the region’s token of aristocratic friendship. “’Tisn’t the same as your seedcake, ’s I recollect,” she said, for, as I found out later, she was always gleeful over what she knew of my country and often even spoke to me confederately of what she called “the Continent,” as if the fact of my foreign birth alone made me a qualified veteran of the Grand Tour.

  Thereafter, if I happened to come by on a Friday, the ce
remony was repeated, and I usually ate a cake or two for the honor I had learned was in them, as I listened to her reminiscences—because here I already knew so well what was expected of me—although I had not much taste for the flat perfume of either. For although Miss Pridden did not always descant of travel, she had, like so many I knew later, nothing to show of life but a tourist’s trinkets of memorabilia, legal tender as worn as the stamped shell one buys on the plage, open as the postcard with the X marking the room among the hundred rooms, her only poor treasure being that the X was hers. And already I had begun to form a taste for confidences of another order. What compels me are not the common postcards of another’s reminiscence, but the letters—letters from those dead emotions whose signals, faint from within the coffin, it is sometimes still possible to hear—of whose harmonics even the narrator is sometimes not aware. Or not as aware as the listener, as I.

  I left the kitchen, not sorry to find it, as I supposed then, quite empty, and stole into the library. But again the machine sticks, stopping me as I watch myself leave, teaching me, twenty-five years later, that the listener too, talented arranger that he is, may sometimes be unaware. Truly, memory is God; it lets not a sparrow fall. In its foreground the main characters reanimate, their talk flashes again, but beside them, in every corner, the small still life waits, just these apples—why picked by the painter to keep this significant flame? Behind me as I left, I did not see, waiting ready on the table, a plate of benné seed cakes. She must have put them out so on many a Friday, perhaps all. Yet I never marked them, that they were already hopefully there, the times I came. There they lie, trinkets neither useful nor germane, yet if I could, as I pass by now, I would take one—Miss Pridden’s X.

  But I went by them without seeing, on into the library, like any of the infrequent sightseers, or the official archivists who came perhaps once a year, and if Miss Pridden had been in the kitchen she would have taken this quite as custom, preserved as she was in the stiff, museum shadow of her aunt, surviving her like the browned curator rose still to be found between the heavy pages of some volume whose owner once, for irony, pressed it there. The aunt had been a spinster scholar, one of those composite bluestocking women of nineteenth-century America, whose tripartite names ring a vague and maudlin bell, of whom one is never sure whether it was temperance they espoused or Chautauqua, bloomers or transcendentalism, homeopathy or the vote. More a transplanted citizen of Boston and New York, she had bequeathed to Tuscana only the pride of her birth and death there—and the house with the books. Not long ago I came across an old account of her—working, as I do, for an encyclopedia has, in addition to its main satisfaction for me, these minor pleasures. And when I did so, the whole flavor of those shelves came back to me—the truncated English Ovid next to the feminist homiletic, the candied-violet Affection’s Gift hard by the pamphlet on Andersonville prison, all the balked ambience of those women whom society, seeking to destroy, first makes imperfectly male. Poor androgynous shelves, their contents bequeathed me little, but the room itself bound me forever in the opiate habit of books.