False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  The elevator door opened and I followed her inside, stepping to the rear, although, except for the operator, an old Negro whose hat was his uniform, we were alone. Her form, bowed in front of me, had the simple, touching curve, drawn by a master, that comes with age. Perhaps I might hurt a fly, I thought, but toward you, rest assured, I intend none. Nevertheless, as we rose slowly together, I felt a heavy sadness. Probing, I recognized it for the familiar, sad portent that comes to us when we are about to enter a relationship; the shiver that comes even on the brink of love—as we descend knowingly toward what will change us—and will have its attendant crimes.

  As it happened, no plan was necessary. We stopped at the third floor. The old woman fumbled in her purse, then turned to the operator. “You know whether she’s home still? I forget my keys.”

  “I dunno,” he said. “I don’ take nobody down from there since I get back from lunch. I seen the kid walk down.”

  “They let him go out like that,” she muttered. “A baby.” She put her glove on the old man’s sleeve. “You wait, yes? I give you a quarter anyway.”

  “Dunno if the super’s around,” he answered. “And he never give me no passkey.” But he waited.

  She rang a bell at a door down to the left in the dark hall. After a long interval it opened, to a muffled exclamation. We heard the old woman’s whisper, “I forget my keys to that place. I have to come back.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Ma,” said a voice, “that’s the second day you’ve lost this week.”

  “You won’t lose, you won’t lose,” said the old woman. “I go back tomorrow. They don’t care.”

  “All right, all right. Well, come on in, what you standing—?”

  “I’ll go down again. I’ll go sit in the park by Johnny.”

  “Now listen. How many times I got to—” The voice jammed, then went on. “The kid don’t want. He’s gone on eight years old.” There was another pause. “Well,” said the voice, “out or in?” After a moment the door closed.

  The old man peered out of the elevator, then shook his head. “How do you like that?” he said. “How do you like that! She do that to me two-three times already. Ain’t never seen no quarter yet.” He put his hand on the starter. “Where to?”

  “What’s her name?” I said. “I see her around now and then, but I don’t know her name.”

  “Don’t know, sir. She ain’t a tenant.”

  “But she lives here.”

  “Eyuh. Come last month. Six-seven bags I tote in for her, that th’ oney quarter I seen yet.” He chuckled. “But she ain’t a tenant,” he added fretfully. “Forty-eight tenants here. Got enough on my hands keeping track those.”

  “Oh, she rooms then.”

  “Eyuh, she rooms,” he said. “Got her a room in her daughter-in-law-’s house.” A buzzer rang sharply. “Coming,” he muttered, and looked at me again, inquiring.

  “Ten,” I said. “Ten.” We rode up slowly, the cables sighing. How easy it was to follow, I thought. Got her a room in her daughter-in-law’s house. On the way out, I slipped him a dollar. He looked at me, mouth open.

  “Some of her quarters,” I said, and I heard his “Yessuh, yessuh!” break into chuckles as the door clanged and he went down.

  There was a window wide open in the hallway, and I leaned on its sill for a few moments, looking down at a court, a side street, and the riverside park. Up here the wind brought in a steady precipitation, settling on my arm, grinding like carborundum between the tiled floor and my heel. I knew this day too at this hour, the long, straight shadows peculiar to an island rectangular, as if the side streets, in dark, animal file, advanced on the avenues, and at one strike of the lights fell back and fawned. I still felt the portent. The lone history I had forced my way upon had not slaked it. Down below, the crowd moving on looked speciously joined. Ten flights up, however, need not be mistaken for the aspect of eternity, I thought, and walking on tiptoe, but taking my time about it like a reluctant conspirator, I went down.

  Outside, I walked downriver. The western sky was peachblow. Under its drag of light, over the seal-colored palisades, one could almost believe in a chariot descending the other side. Above us the welkin was forming, a blue that steadily accreted toward the dome, toward that mythological center which never leaves our hearts, born as we are of a race of whom each must believe, against all acquired knowledge, that wherever he stands is under the apex of the sky.

  Once more it was the hour of other people’s assignations. One grows to know, sometimes very late, that the private phenomenon one has nurtured so secretly in the breast is common to all. This hour that had grown along with me, up, up from my childhood, that I had brought along with me from Tuscana, had long since come to seem to me especially identified with the multifarious city—the hour when the lights went up willy-nilly in every breast and the unlucky held their breath at the sight of the lucky ones streaming by car, on foot, by wire toward their love or even their hate, their ambition, their piety—somewhere. I turned my back on the river that doubled its plangent depths on the other side of the low wall as suggestively as a sky, and walked rapidly eastward through the blocks that led toward Central Park. The streets were mediumly soiled here with a living, neither high nor low, that lacked the black, bituminous drama of impoverishment, and people moved on them still in the convention of silence, but under the pre-lamp, powdery air of evening, one could find a rhythm in that susurrus, as if they came forward in coda, subscribing toward a silent tune. The phlox were moving. They came forward singly, in pairs, and single again as I was—the vicious, the sweet, the broken and the indomitable, all intermixed, as who knew better than I? But my back was to the light and their faces touched to unison by the sunset compline. The ordinary were advancing; this was the ordinary thing. Once more I looked in at their window frame, this time holding the old woman’s history in my hand like a bit of jeweled dirt that had begged for notice, like a visa thrust into my palm. They bloomed quietly toward me and past me, face linked to domestic face in that temporary gilding, each moving patiently under the small arc of its personal death, pitting its slight shadow against the interplanetary sky, shadow to shadow, speciously joined. I walked hopelessly faster to annul them, like a man pacing his hitherto perfectly controlled garden and caught there by a sudden hallucination in which bushes burn voices, corollas clap their tongues and the power of the inanimate pollinates the air. Shadow pressed to classless shadow, they surrounded me and passed me, and I hurried through them as if I were in danger of being snatched into the orbit of the wheel they turned on, drawn forward into the blur of the willow plate. Then the street lamps glanced on, spreading a garish light even more reasonable than day, and I escaped.

  Through the park I met almost no one—a late mother wheeling one child and hurrying another, two mounted police, their heads and their horses’ eyes front, like monuments that moved, lastly five or six high-school boys with the slouch and sidewise peer of the slums, who shrank together, hands ganged in their pockets, conspired in excited whispers, and ran off in the self-induced paranoia of some imaginary, adolescent chase. After that I was alone until I reached the exit. There I turned and looked behind me, where there was no one. I listened for him, in the dark hollow of the archway. For him, for them, for whoever it should be. It comes so quietly, the counterstroke hidden in ourselves. I had never feared to be followed. Now I wished it.

  Three blocks over eastward, I hunted up a stationery store where I might buy my paper. Nowadays a real stationer’s is a rarity in New York, except near the business districts. These crannies are something else again. Tucked in some narrow nook lopped off a larger one and soon to have their trade lopped off altogether by the drugstore and the supermarket, they survive like the last crazy-corners of the off moment, of the few beleaguered notion-needs that will not fit into bars. Small people necessarily keep them, sweatered old men and women, emerging from the mouse-life behind the rear partition, wiping the mouth with the back of the hand. As with a b
ar, they cater much to the intermediate; Charon perhaps must keep such a place, purveying the late news and the final, obsessive bit of tobacco, the envelope to catch the midnight mail and the last telephone.

  There was no one behind the counter, but all its news wares lay disposed in front of it—these must be among the last stores in the city to dispense anything at all on neighborly trust. No doubt this is because of the article they vend; few who followed the news these days would not feel a grim, citizenly obligation to pay for it. I set down my coin, passed over the evening paper and took up a copy of the morning’s Times, feeling at the same time the dull, required guilt—dull because it was so abstract—that any conscientious man felt nowadays when, even once, he let the daily communiqués of cataclysm slide by without him. It was a hopeless guilt, the newsprint conscience, formed in him by being forced to attend the vast panoply of struggle, crimes international and small passional ones, at which he could not assist. He must be present at every agony in the garden, able meanwhile to bleed with only a few.

  I folded the paper under my arm, thinking of how many such days I had let pass by unsifted through this strange, frustrate bookkeeping. Yet I had been no anchorite—at least outwardly; from my undergraduate days on I had made the average social gestures of my generation. In a mild way I had campaigned for certain of its enlightened causes that still seemed to have a center to be left of; later I had fought its war as every young man does, singlehanded even in the absence of single combat. Afterwards I had tried earnestly to catch hold of any discernible prong reared up now and then from the hetero-homogeneous mass of cause that remained. Along with most, I had learned to pay my bit of money, fealty or action; in a modest way my name was available to certain rosters, my voice to certain committees and salons; I had shouldered my share of those compromises by which the modern man of good will deluded himself that he was engagé. Except for my bachelorhood and my somewhat unusual version of the subterranean departure that is in each of us, I could be the very model of the average cenobite, the community man. And I knew that under the mass of evidence accumulated daily against him, tuned in as he was to an enormous rack of sufferings of which he could at best anoint only a few, no medieval man had ever had to be as calloused as he. This was the daytime world. Actually he was absconding from it. Deep down under its superficially hale crust, each of us was keeping what nucleus he could. One might begin to suspect that there had never been such a race of anchorites in the history of the globe. One might imagine a host of us, driven back upon the memoir.

  In the rear of the store a man stepped halfway out of the one telephone booth, holding the coin returned to him by the coin box, then reconsidered and stepped back inside. He was a short man with a neat fringe of clipped, gray hair, a good suit that ciphered all of him except the wrinkled network of anxiety around his eyes. The booth had a seat in it and he sat there—after doggedly dialing what I fancied to be the same number—as if he had been tailored for it, gazing absently out the door, his free hand vacant on his knee. Suddenly he hung up and tried again. I could hear the signal, not the “busy” but the “don’t answer,” and I understood his compulsion; “not at home” but one dials again, persuaded that one has dialed in error; in lieu of that one dials someone else one owes a call to (if necessary going down the list of those one has neglected for years)—unwilling to accept the ultimate rejection from the air itself, by a machine. I held back an impulse to pass him the directory. Here, phone anyone—here’s a Mr. James Sugrue—no, that’s a forbidding name and a Maiden Lane number, won’t answer at this hour; here’s a more sympathetic one, Mrs. Anamaria Perez. Watching the hand on his knee, so open, patently waiting to be listened to, I all but addressed it. If all else fails, here’s my number; I’ll be home in ten minutes, and I understand this brand of telephonitis. Try this number in ten minutes, and at least for a moment there will be an answer, the blessed gap when the receiver is lifted. No harm in these surrealistic conversations with one another. In ten minutes, try me.

  I was about to turn away when the man in the booth got up and left it, went by me with a tip of the hand that said “It’s all yours now,” and out of the store. The proprietor’s idle eye was on me. I am not always so craven to the conventional. But it is human to alternate, and at times the very fear of my own strangeness will as suddenly make me bow to what is expected of me. I went in. And once inside, I felt the satisfaction, both fierce and submissive, of one on whom circumstance has forced what he had not courage enough to do on his own. Taking out my address book, I riffled through it in careful pantomime. Some of the names were almost lost even to me, burning in the faintest of recollection. Others belonged to distant cities, although that was no drawback now in a world where the rictus of communication had been perfected, stretching all our mouths agape. Some were dead, except to address books like mine. I had never been able to erase any of them; I kept them all. Still others, fresh and unrubbed, belonged to the present, in various levels: “How nice to hear from you!” it would be, or “Well, you’re a fine one!” And spotted among them were numbers, not many, belonging to certain sorties of the past, through each of which I had drawn a line. Hers was among these, still uncrossed. I studied them, sedulously avoiding the one.

  I’ll call Maartens, I thought suddenly, and putting in my dime, I dialed. He and Cecile were old hands; my wish to remain incognito in the city would be received without inquiry; no sudden conundrum in a friend’s nature could surprise them. The very bourgeois steadiness of the life they led made their place a beacon for certain tremulous acolytes of bohemia, less steady than they, whom one met there sometimes at dinner or of an evening—raw-eyed creatures (“a very fine sculptor,” Maartens might whisper) just getting over the drink, the dope, the breakdown, the girl. And like so many of my friends, they had never met any of the others. I grinned with relief as I waited, imagining Maartens’ huge laugh if I should take it in my head to say to him, with the proper wryness, “What do you think, eh? Yesterday I was at work.” All I needed was an interim away from the incessant scraping of my own awareness. Without a bit of company, the strongest of us sank into Schwärmerei. There was a certain justice in this day’s ending in a bit of his. Then I realized how long I had been listening without an answer. There was no one in.

  Calm deserted me then, and I too began calling—first the Maartenses again, then a succession of numbers from my address book, at random. Hysteria forms, I suppose, at some point of refusal between ourselves and what we at last take to be implacable. And for me—as, I suspect, for many—a special hysteria resides in the machine, to which we have come to attach that final implacability which used to be reserved, with more dignity, for death itself. For the machine is still speciously half ourselves. And when we rage against it as I did then, we rage against this. For, as I can remind myself now, I did not really choose numbers at random. I chose numbers belonging to people not quite vanished but superannuated: a faddish man I had once worked with and had dropped for overpressing me socially toward his “circles”; two jolly, free-talking magazine spinsters of whom age, plainness and lack of much sexual impulse had made substitute aunts to the general; one or two former girls of mine who had lived in the Village, the village of chancy, evanescent numbers owned by a floating population of such girls. They belonged, all of them, to that useful company in whose members one would never dream of confiding. At this hour, if existing still as I had left them, they would all be drink-hazy, drink-valiant—if they were home at all. None was. As I hung up on the last of them, several customers, off some bus perhaps, came in, deposited their coins for papers and went out, leaving the store empty again of trade. Through the glass panels of the booth I could see the front windows, faintly barred with neon that cast a fakir’s light on the pens and ink-bottles beneath. Night air came through the doorway, soft and remote as an animal’s pad on the palm. At his counter the proprietor rang up a sum on the register, then subsided again on his high stool in a semi-alert drowse, his fingers poised on t
he glass over his wares like a man seated at a planchette. Once more I put in my dime and listened. For my own ends, I thought. And at last I dialed.

  Three rings only, but already relief, alien as a blush, crept over me; because of her father in his wheelchair it was a household where there was always somebody there. And now that rescue was on its way I could afford, like most of us, to be contemptuous of it. The truth shamed me: that in this moment I would settle for anybody—only to be able to spell anyone, for a moment, into the hollow of my ear. Even my past sorties into a life here, a life there, had been more straightforward. They had kept the line of demarcation; they had come from choice. All that this day had brought me was what classically attacked the anchorite in his desert, the desperate itch toward the mirage of others. I could almost have hung up now, understanding Maartens in fraternal sadness, itching for the more honorable dominion of the nights when I searched for myself.

  It was Anna, the housekeeper, who answered. The Mannixes are a family of a type that still persists in New York, finding its servitors early, while its own members are young, and keeping them on, often only one and for life, in a manner more steadfast and personal than that of the rich. One recognizes at once in such households the odor of stability, compounded of furniture polish and the other smells of good service, all blended with a faithfulness responsibly returned. Anna had come to them, a greenhorn fresh from Czechoslovakia, in the nineteen-twenties along with their own children; the brief interim of her own marriage and widowhood, long since quenched almost from conversation, had not changed her—certainly not her conviction that nothing which happened to her would ever be as important as what happened to them. When she answered, I had an impulse to hang up—it was almost enough that the machine at last had listened—but I had already said “Hello.” I did not identify myself but I could tell that she knew me, as I knew the waxy cool of the niche in which she stood—in the probable aura of one of the meals that unfolded as regularly from her as if she concealed a cornucopia of them in the wide, starched storehouse of her bosom.