False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  “But you remember before that, natürlich?” said Demuth.

  Then I had taken up the tray and gone out without a word. And standing at the top of the dark stairwell, I had heard the Gott schütze dich, the blessing, trailing after me like a scarf—with the sound that words have which when spoken are already part of the past.

  “Everyone remembers,” I said. “You remember your German.”

  I saw him flinch. Then he answered me in kind, as people will. They turn the other cheek, but not their own. The mind is not Christian yet, nor ever was. “But you—” he said. He squinted at me shrewdly. “You, my fine friend—you seem to remember everything. Is it not so?”

  I had stood at the top of the stairs. And then I had done it. I had not dropped the tray. I had thrown it. I had sent it hurtling to the landing far below, all of it—the tray, the bottle and the thin, beautiful upstanding glass. And such had been the force of my arm that I had toppled after it to the bottom of the stair. Voices had opened out then from all levels, from the scullery to the fourth-floor eyrie, and had come toward me, marveling at how I had remained uninjured, hovering over me where I lay for a minute in the welter of wine and shards, with my mouth closed. All was smashed. And that was the end of the last day.

  “No …” I said. “Not everything.” I recognized this with fear. For to remember is to be in possession, to be safe, and although I remembered much, more than most, it was not all. I could forego the blank lapse between that last day and Tuscana—it had been merely the gap between. But there was something more. I could not recall, try as I might, what I had asked Frau Goodman and she had refused me. I could remember with all my being how it felt to trust, to ask. I knew the taste of the Madeira after she had refused me; I could have told him that it had the taste of justice. And I could remember how it felt to learn for the first time that the listener is not the friend. But I could not remember what I had asked.

  “Nun?” said Demuth. “Then let us proceed.” He settled in a chair, head thrown back, smiling, eyes half closed.

  I looked at him. He had slapped my wrist once; then had come the easy, abject tear. You are Hans Ulrich, he had said to me, returning to himself through me. I thought of Johnny, accusing me of believing, when he could no longer believe. Even Miss Pridden, who would not dare her own image in her aunt’s mirror, had not been too timid to dangle her faded trinkets, her postcard X before me, to see herself—not me—in me. And now my uncle. If I attracted the ambuscaded ones of this world, was it because they felt safe with me, already seeing that I was fated to be one of them? Or was it because they saw that I, only the listener, was nothing, was already less than they?

  “Mach schnell,” said Demuth. “The Kaffee-klatsch is almost over. Stand up. Steh auf! Recite now the poem.”

  I stood up. For some time now I had been taller than he. This was the first time I felt it. “I am not Hans Ulrich,” I said. “I am not Hans Ulrich!”

  He looked up, eyes wide, shaken back into focusing on me, shaken out of that inward stare they all have, the confiders—the self-lost look of a man threading a needle a mile and a half away. “But of co—I did not mean …” He stared at his lap. “I am tedious, hmmm. I have bored you. I am sorry … Perhaps you are right to feel … this is a stupid way to learn.” He smoothed one hand, its aging plumpness, over the crown of his head in the familiar gesture, but this time it was slow, wandering, and lingered doubtfully on the ridge that he was so proud of, as if he wondered how the ridge came there. “Perhaps you are right … one should remember only for oneself, hmmm?” He shrugged, and with it his face lightened. A gesture could always lift him. Perhaps it was bravery. Or the incurable optimism of those who can cure their spirits with long walks. “So we will manage without him, hmmm? And soon anyway, the books …”

  “Send them back,” I said.

  “Back?” He blinked.

  “When the books come. Send them back.”

  “You … do not wish any longer to … ?”

  “No.”

  He said nothing, but leaned forward, staring intently, as if he saw something. Dusk was settling in the room, in first one corner, then the other, like a returning old hound dog lapsing down with a sigh, recording its master with steady, faithful eyes.

  “I must be going,” I said. “There’s no late bus in summer.”

  “You will not come tomorrow?” He was still hunched in his chair.

  I shifted my feet, not answering. I was to be asked that question often later on, often by women. I could never explain to them that my leaving had nothing to do with them as women.

  “Listen!” he said. “I have to tell you the truth. You have been beyond me for a long time now. With the books. But we could still talk. There are things—” He bit his lip. “I have lived longer. That should count for something.”

  This is what the old always say, I thought. For their own good, not ours. He had already told me otherwise. Each man remembers for himself.

  “All right then,” he said. “I am Hans Ulrich! And I remember many things. I could tell you … a life is worth something. Then you would be ahead of the gamble, hmmm … why should you have to wait to acquire?” He glanced at the dresser, at the thin packets of chocolate stacked there like a gambler’s cards.

  “I will come again … sometime,” I said. This is the lie that no one believes.

  “Moment!” he said. “Listen, for instance …” He began to talk very rapidly. “At home we were from Schwaben—the grandfather and the grandmother. Schwäbisch, that is the comic dialect of Germany. No matter what you say, how serious, it sounds annh-annh, like sheep talking. My mother was not their daughter—she was a Norddeutscher, from Hanover—and she was ashamed of them. They were a funny couple to look at too, he very small and she very tall and bony—der Spazierstock und der Kloss, my mother used to say—the walking stick and the dumpling. And they were not very smart, but they were very fond of one another, and always talking in their old Schwäbisch sayings, annh-annh together. When Americans came to the house, my mother would hide the two of them, or not introduce them. They always kept very still—they knew how they were and what was required.”

  He stopped for a moment, swallowed, then went on. “At my graduation party they were in the kitchen; I was ashamed too, and the principal was coming. But in the middle of it, the parlor door opens, and there is my grandmother. She does not want to come in, but my grandfather pushes her. She is wearing a hat with a feather. He is in his striped suit from the boat. He goes up to the American principal and says in German, “This is the grandmother, Herr Direktor.” My mother comes up behind them, very red, but before she can say anything, my grandfather screws up his eyes, opens his mouth wide in her face, and there comes out baa-aa like a sheep, in his Schwäbisch.” Demuth took a deep breath, leaning forward. “Jederma-ann ist etwas von jedem Ma-ann!” he bawled suddenly, and the words sprang from his mouth as if they had been waiting for years on his tongue, in a long, yeasty cry—a sheep’s bawl.

  He looked at me then, startled, the way one person looks at another when a faraway cry is heard late at night. “Verstehts du?” he whispered, glancing guiltily at the open door. “Did you understand? ‘Everybody is a little bit every—’? You understood what he said?” He shrugged. “But it was altogether so funny … no one could help laughing.” He was silent for a minute. Then one hand crept toward his crown, stopped halfway. “But the funniest of all … nicht?” he said. “That now I, Hans Ulrich … am the principal?”

  It was getting dark outside his window. In the shadowy room each corner had its faithful hound. Through the window came the mnemonic odor of night, dark river carrying its pearls to the diver, stealing forward even to this backwater room, to him, waiting outside his window for me.

  “I must go,” I said.

  He sat hunched in his chair, not moving. I had never seen him so still, palms on knees, head bent on rigid torso, all his seesawing suspended, as if he were tired of weighing himself at last. “Listen,” he
said. “Only listen …”

  No, I thought. To none of you, any longer. I must remember for myself. And if I listened to others, it would be for my own ends, reminding myself always that if ever I were to speak, that is the way others would listen to me. This was the lesson that was not in German. Out of all that he thought he had taught me, this remained. Perhaps I should have told him so. A life is worth something. But I moved toward the door.

  “Moment!” he said. “I think … now would be the time … yes, now …” He had not stirred. So people sit sometimes, holding themselves down in space, when they know how little their weight is. “If you would like now … to call me du?” he whispered.

  But I was already outside the door.

  Chapter VI. Ruth Telephones. Pierre.

  RUTH TELEPHONED TONIGHT. THAT likelihood has always been in the back of my mind these three weeks, or the chance that we might meet on the long daily walks I have been taking, partly in preparation for the evening’s task—movement, either in a vehicle or on my own two legs always stimulates thought, reminiscence—and partly because I am physically neither sedentary nor a solitary. All has been silent here. I am supposed to be away. But I miss exertion and I miss people, who are the food of thought. And since she and I live so near, I have formed the habit of taking a bus first to some other part of the town and walking there, often to the West Side, along the Hudson’s mock-regal streets, once or twice to Harlem, and once—on a Sunday so sun-calmed and sociable that I came almost to the point of breaking off my evening’s tryst—to the empty, lavender caverns of Trinity and Wall.

  The East Side is no use to me; it is the present, and it contains Ruth, that gentle woman who is nevertheless my present danger. Even on those other odd streets, I often look behind me now, something I have never done before, although I of necessity know well the attraction of watching others from behind. Curious, I suppose, that although I have never ruled out the eventuality that one of my own ilk, someone who had accumulated knowledge of me elsewhere, might use it to enter my life, I have never feared it. I should recognize the breed at once. And our way is not literally to shadow but to knit hearsay with accident.

  With Ruth it is different. It is not for nothing that the lover is called the follower. Even the world knows, laughing and condoning, the fantastic research of which the lover is capable, the wildly unfortuitous meetings on a corner, the hegiras that some have made halfway across the earth in order to be able to say to a certain face in a hotel vestibule, or to a voice on a blessedly local telephone exchange, “Fancy both of us being here!” So, now and then in my walks, I look behind me, although I know that if she follows me, she does it with love.

  In her eyes, the way I have acted toward her must be unforgivable. Or almost so, for I know well their endless forgiveness—women. They all have it, not only those like Ruth, warm and intelligent and chaste in the mind, where chastity should be, but the slut also, as the sentimentalists know, and even, as they often overlook, the woman enameled by money or eroded by a profession. Even the spinster has it, waiting for some man who has not yet arrived. If they are women they have it, a deep, self-paralyzing sea of trust, an endless remission for some man’s sins. And one seeks them for it almost as much as for their sex, although one may say this only privately in this country, where the sexual emotion must not deviate too far into any other, lest one fail to recognize what it is, or of which sex it is. I have therefore never enjoyed conscious brutality toward them. I have been guilty only of that other sort, committed by either side—the inescapable brutality of loving less than one is loved. And aware of this, have been even more careful to be kind, to observe that ritual tenderness which often reassures them more than love. But with Ruth I did not do this. For the first time I was brutal in the other sense. What I did was to sleep with her and not see her again.

  It has been a year now since I first walked into the Mannix household, armed as usual with my store of references. I came there not to know the Judge, although anyone would want to know him, but to know the household entière, one of those nucleal households that attract by virtue of their own warm enclosures, whose auras I can always recognize even from afar or second-hand, even as I recognized it in this one when Walter Stern, years back, used to tell me about it. By the time I came to know it actually, Mrs. Mannix was dead, and David, the son whom I was supposed to have known, dead too, but the household still had that vertu which does not die until the last arc of such a circle is gone. And Ruth, who must have been half grown when Stern—one of the accessory benevolences that such homes maintain—had first known them, was grown. A year, and for the last months of it, between Ruth and me, that familiar slow affair begun by a man and woman in the name of friendship, the friendship that steals its name from Plato and waits for it to be stolen by Psyche.

  She knew this before I did—I do not have to be gallant here. I was unalert to it because I had not come to that household for her. I had entered it, become its intimate under the usual false references, with the usual preknowledge, and, as for some time now, only the slight social risk. For some time now I had risked nothing more serious—a pickpocket keeping his fingers lithe. It might have been thought that I was growing toward society, warming myself down from my cold niche on its fringe. At times I almost persuaded myself that this was so, but in my heart I knew it was not. For, until now, the people I had chosen to enter upon were flotsam, people well out of tone with my daily life or beneath it—people like those in Tuscana that day of the hearing. But this time I had chosen not the random ones from whom one could easily abscond, but persons who belonged to the stratum of my life in New York, who were, as it were, contemporary with what I was now. Why, now, did I choose such a household, something I had never done before? What I came for was the same as always, the same inexplicable sensation. The control that comes from foreknowledge—that is part of it. Detachment—I take my place, specious as it is, in their midst. And in the possession of both these things, a covert sense that although I do no evil, I nevertheless strike a blow. But above all, a sense of the utter secrecy of myself. For when one is among people on false terms, then no matter what emotion one gives them, one really gives nothing away.

  Women love the inaccessible in a man; often I have seen them attribute it when it is not there. In any success I have had with them, I have always known this to be its deeper cause, although it is the last thing I would consciously use. When a man gives you his confidence, he does not necessarily ask for a token return; oddly, often he assumes that in giving you his intimacy, he has yours. But with a woman, confidences are the signal for love, and love asks a return. It craves a return in kind, applying endlessly for it, but it will settle for less—as I had often found. For I find it hard to believe that some men are frightened of sexuality. For me it is the one closeness I dare. For me, in the act of love, even without love, dissimulation is at rest, or in reflex. In that profound dissimulation there is a moment of trust.

  But this time I dared too close. In my sorties into other people’s lives, it had sometimes happened that I had had relations with women I found there, but they were always, like the others around them, persons of unmeditative mind. Once, in a situation that involved no women, I had however found myself dealing with a person of intelligence equal, probably superior to my own—Belden, the Communist bookseller. But that world, though the obverse of random, is as fixed in its own distortions as a world under water; itself an aberrant, it has little time to ruminate on personal aberrations, and in it even such a mind as Belden’s loses its percipience of people as they are—although I often suspected, beneath his conscious motives, a devious pattern that came near to resembling my own.

  But with Ruth I was dealing, first, with a world whose norms were my own surface norms. And I was dealing with a woman. The male imagination is more often extensive, galactic, flings itself robustly abroad. Women are miniaturists. They can imagine anything as possible, whorl within whorl, but they more often focus their flights on their own sm
all field of space. And, finally, I was dealing with the delicate, ciliated intelligence of love.

  And now I will let myself remember. It was afterwards, when we were lying together in the small room they call the library in her father’s house. Although I had often had women in my flat, I had never asked her there. Often, recently, she had been waiting to be asked. I did not examine my reluctance to let her see it, or see me there. I ignored the warning—my own alertness muffled, trying to tell me that she was a person to be feared.

  I had already, as I see now, ignored another warning. When she first began giving me her small confidences, telling me of her brief marriage, referring lightly to her first jejune experiences of girlhood, mentioning here and there some man she had known, I understood it at once—the old, old sexual plea saying, “This is the way it was. We look back on it together. And now I look to you. We look to each other.” It is the oldest gauntlet, and I responded at once, as most would to a woman like her. As a companion I had already begun to hold her dear. And this was not unique for me either with men or with women; always before, my will and need to be secret had told me when it was time to leave. But this time, simple as her confidences were, I found myself reluctant to hear them. I am never bored with another’s revelations, with the occult thrill that comes from listening. I was not likely to use what she told me; I had richer stores. And yet I wanted to seal her mouth. I did not want to listen to her confessions. I wanted to warn her—that I was a person to be feared.

  So we approached each other, the guileful and the guileless, and we met. Neither of us said a word.

  Lying together, palm to palm, after love, is like lying in another country that some Dives has allotted for ten minutes or more. The voices that speak there are already the voices of paradise lost. I remember what I thought when I withdrew my palm. I thought—I could love her, if it were not for myself. We spoke then, or she did, of how we had met, of all the stages that had brought us to this night, in the way women love to do, exactly as children ask again for a story, secure in the fairy-tale end. Her hair was across my forehead. I was only half listening. The moment, with its treble of voices, was over. I watched it as it sped away, pluming into the gathering distance, leaving one of its voices behind. If it were not for myself, I could love her.