False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  The door closed safely behind them. “Including—Bean?”

  As if in answer, they heard a shuffling, a scraping. It came from outside the back door; an animal, no animal. While they watched, the door opened. A dark hand appeared, set down an old leather satchel roped with clothesline, a corded wood box, a bulging string bag. She came in crabwise, pushing the baggage behind her with one gray, bare heel. Once in, she set down her shoes, rested the small of her back against the door. When she faced round and saw them, she straightened away from the door, hanging her head sideways, arching and lowering it, eyes large on them, cast down and raised again, standing so with her goods beside her—Lucine. Her face was a bad color, but whatever had affrighted it lay behind or ahead of her—not in them. While they watched, she slid out a foot, watching them, slipped the foot into its shoe, then the other, managing in the same movement to edge the satchel further into the room. When they still said nothing, she gave a sudden half-bob, begging permission, in the same instant taking it. Quick as an eel, she stowed the satchel in one corner, the box in another, where they fitted perfectly, in niches the small room never would have been thought to hold, as if all the way here she had been reflecting on her scrub-pail lore of it, saying to herself: the satchel will be out of their way under the sofa, the deal box just fit where the molding ends, behind the chair. When she stood up, her face had returned to its natural ocher, her figure, patted here and there, to its neat calm—a world away from that bare, searching heel. Arms folded, she looked down, expressionless, at the broken stuff on the table. Something, her breath perhaps, dislodged them as she hung over them. As they all watched, the large, mended piece gaped slowly at the jointure, the part with the handle rubbling over on its side. She shook her head, in ownership as well as blame, and went on to the corner where the cot was stacked. Taking it down, she turned, regarding them.

  “I’ll mek up the cot in t’yere,” she said softly. “You go on, get what res’ you can on it; t’aint only four. I’ll go ’long in there, sit with her.” This too must have been reflected. She put out her hand, just short of his uncle’s sleeve. “Mek it up good and nice for you, you go on. Less you get your res’, you be all tuckered out in the morning.” Soft as steel, her voice urged, speaking its ownership—they of her, she of them. “You go on, now hear? Less you be all tuckered, time you got to go to the courthouse. You go on.”

  And so next day—he went on, and all his entourage with him, in that small craft where each hand thought himself alone, rocked between darks and Orions while all thought themselves still, in a great estuary of the same.

  There come times in men’s lives when any accounts of their inner monologues cannot further explain them. Only their acts can record them then, as later they must record themselves. Such a time had come for Pierre.

  On that day his uncle, rising from his cot, left about an hour and a half late for his duty; his mother, awakening early to hers, curling up like a griffon on her pillows, silently let herself be tended by Lucine, saying only when time came to move her: “I’ll bide here.” He himself, not returning to bed, marked the day only by showering and changing his clothes. Lack of sleep benumbed them all, letting each harbor his shocks and his speech, promising a day without any heroic other than that needed to get through it. Meanwhile the weather had “gone in,” as people said here of those gray interims, blamed by some on the surrounding masses of water, when the sun went in and took the appearance of heat with it, leaving greens sharper, sounds cooler, people abstracted to shades in a lull like a midweek Sunday or a snow, during which some hastened to sit with their kind over minor husbandries, others sat away from them, paring their nails, hearing time bide. Is there an ecology for all climes perhaps, some balanced pause between a life and the lives around it, when the actionless can act?

  Pierre sat in his room as usual that morning, rereading one of the few books he had brought with him. Usually he kept his door closed until Lucine’s soft knock apprised him that she was going to shop, when he opened it in order to hear his mother’s bell. Today he did not close it. Around midmorning his mother suddenly asked for something to sew, a request not easy to satisfy now that the linens had been mended, and all the paraphernalia of her trade cleared away. Finally, at her direction, a packet of silk squares, their edges still raw, was found for her, where it had been lodged with others in one drawer of the old treadle sewing machine now stored in his room. He had glimpsed enough—edges of photographs, letters thin enough to be foreign, envelopes thick enough to be documentary, to know that he had come upon the hoarding-place for which as a boy he had sometimes pried, but now he did not pry. Scattered among the books on the shelf above his desk were certain ones any meddler might have assumed to be his own private mementos: the largest, a German dictionary with an inscription on the flyleaf, the oldest (faded to curiosa long before it could have been his) a bookseller’s trinket marked Affection’s Gift for 1845, the smallest, so insignificant that it must have been saved for a reason, a dime-store address book with one leaf gone. They were ranged above his head as brashly as the silver cups of the oarsman, as plainly as the purloined letter—the book he had been given, the one he had pinched, the one, first of his life, that he had bought—but any watcher might have seen as plainly that today he did not look at them.

  All that day he comported himself with awkward honesty, an especial openness, for what great eye at the transom? Watch a second-story man on his way to work at dusk, as he drops his quarter in the beggar’s cup, see how far from the cup his fingers are, spread wide at the root as a child’s. Follow tomorrow’s headline bogeyman today, on his way not to keep his black appointment, as he sees the movie twice, yawns at the marquee, trembles into conversation at the coffee counter, cedes his place in the bus queue, and still arrives on time. And Pierre too managed it so that some twenty years later his most inflexible arbiter, eager informer, might say here, “He was honest as the day—that day. As far as I know—he premeditated nothing.”

  That afternoon he had an errand which took him directly into Tuscana. He was to call at a house across town, pick up a wheel chair relinquished by the death of a woman there, and trundle it back home. Actually the chair was one of a scarce few circulated to chronic outpatients by the new hospital in Denoyeville, but since, as it happened, the woman had been a Mrs. Jebb, their former neighbor, politeness had delayed the exchange until after the funeral, which had been yesterday. Better not wait for the hospital delivery, Mr. Jebb had kindly informed them by telephone; better pick it up by hand, since it was no shape for car transport, and wheel it to its new destination. In the routine of respectable loss, the Jebbs would be “at home” today at four.

  Other afternoons, setting out for the daily walk without which his stint here would have been intolerable, he always paused below the porch steps for a minute, looking westerly down the few blocks that led to the center of town, then turned east, always on the same route, down the state road and along the three-and-a-half-mile bypass to Denoyeville, breaking into an easy track-pace on the way there, going at an amble on the way back. Denoyeville had been rebuilt on a single idea; in the middle distance of its dams, as he approached it, that idea still presided and was noble. Otherwise, once he got to its main street, walking between its seven-year brick antiquity and six-month shoddy, he was in the useful limbo of the quick, ledger-built American city, after-image of others even as one stood in it, lost to the closed eye quicker than one could say Ozymandias. Nothing in Denoyeville was ever likely to be older than its name. He was of the generation not yet repelled by this, but comforted. Usually he sat for a while, sweat-soaked and air-cooled, behind the plate glass of the big new Whelan chain drug, at a counter where, except for the hominy on the club breakfast, he might be anywhere south-of-winter, north-of-summer. Sitting there, for an hour or so he was once again on his own.

  This afternoon, in the way of things filial, he would have no time for that. He had an errand not his own. So, in the nature of things, after a pa
use below the porch steps, in which he seemed only to be looking into the general lull, he turned on his heel and walked west. So, late downbeat after the measure, we follow him.

  He came near the café, where he had never been inside. There would have been time and enough to stop and meditate there. But it had too much past—or not enough of one—for him to want to enter it now. He went by it.

  He came to the church where his mother was to marry his uncle. Had. A church is a proper place to meditate. But he remembered it too well with the light out over its door, and went on.

  There is a ring game that children play, with an “it” in the center, the rest in a ring, hidden. Thicket is needed. “Ring” may not move. “It” has three tries for the gaps in the circle. Here a boy confronts him in a bush. Another bars his way in the bramble. Between those trees is a third.

  Such a trio confronted him now, unseen by anyone but him, at three doors. One at the courthouse, one at the school, one at the store.

  Let the school come first, as it does for most. Its yard was null with summer, the door sealed. The boy there was no more distinct for him than for most men. He passed him quite easily.

  Next came the store, far down the baseline of his triangle, beneath its old scribble of neon blue. No Semple lounged under it now, creasing and recreasing his duck trousers to an ingoing line of creditors, allotting leeway to some with a nod or odd crook of his thumbs, refusing others with a stillness, a stare. Credit was being arranged for him elsewhere. As a stranger in town, Pierre himself would not know this, must not know it, think only, as he approaches the door with the hung sign which like others on the way will say CLOSED NOON WEDNESDAY, that this is the only reason the street is so empty, folk retreated somewhere behind their gray weather and their Wednesday. As a stranger, therefore, he approached the store. Half a yard from it he bent his head, sauntered by without looking. Perhaps he saw that it had a small annex or lumber-room; things catch on the periphery of sight that the eye does not will. The door to this was on the other side of it, hidden. So, if a boy stood there, he passed him.

  Now he faced the apex, the courthouse. Its steps lay directly across a square of park, behind two sentinel trees. A paved path circled the park and the courthouse walls.

  Politely as any outsider, he took the path. Just as he did so, a figure standing at the top of the high steps, boy or man, its features screened by the trees, turned and went inside. Judgment was always in session; this had nothing to do with him. He examined the face of the building like any tourist who would not bother to go inside to view its staple of flag and lectern, gloom-light that fluttered in women’s breastpins—who had no uncles there. Portcullis 1870, inscription above it too worn to read. “Nomen mutabilia sunt” perhaps—names are mutable—as would do for any court in the land. “Res autem immobilis.” “Ring” may not move. He drew a finger along the cornerstone, where there was an old watermark, flood mark, three feet or so above the foundation line. A few pariah dogs were always slumped there, for god-knows-what-all, not for warmth surely, perhaps fraternity. One of them, muzzle stretched on its paws, rolled up its eyes at him and measuredly thumped its tail. He shook his head at it, at the door up above. Once entered there—judges, Dobbins of whatever blood and petitioners alike—one was already in the dock.

  “Got me wrong,” he said aloud to the dog. “I’m a stranger here.” At once, not ten yards from him, he saw the gap in the circle—the mud alley where the farmers set their stalls on Fridays, that had been here always—as if the hypnotist had at last slapped him, stung himself awake. He ran toward it. Behind him, the dog, its brow wrinkled, again thumped its tail.

  Once in the alley he went at a brisk pace, just short of the one he kept for Denoyeville, otherwise he would get to the Jebbs before expected. Going along, he hummed. Down here, he opened his mouth so seldom that his voice had been rusty when it addressed the dog, but now he was up and about again in the jigtime, daytime world. “Do, act, speak, laugh!” he chanted to himself, as he sometimes did in that other world, where personality could be multiple. Here, between the iron bands of family, he had only one—perhaps everyone lost courage for alternatives there. This alley was grim now with the general Ash Wednesday, but he meant to visit it on its bright bourse-Friday, if only to remind himself, like an Alger hero at the scene of his first dollar, of the great bourse to which he had escaped. He stopped now, to look back at the obstacle race just run. There were no planes in the sky, not one since he had been here, to remind him that to some, Tuscana was invisible, not swinging alone as Arcturus, not holding all that there was to the human condition in its sphere. To the new men at the dam it was already bypassed. Those who revisit the buildings of childhood, it was said, always find them shrunken—the chandeliers to rushlight, to wickets all the imperial gates. It was the fault of his “familiar,” then, that cartographer of the condemned and accurate eyes, if the three buildings he had just passed, surely so small in the sight of some, seemed to him as large as they had ever been. Unless he was careful to keep chanting, they might yet appear—golden architraves floating on shadow—as seen once through other eyes, from the height of a hill long fallen, whose scale could never now be known.

  He was walking slower now, checking the house numbers where there were any. The Jebbs must have gone down the ladder since leaving the high estate of the Higbys; this street petered out just ahead of him, almost at the railroad line. Yonder, where there had once been fields of weed that moved like wheat in the evening breath of the trains, now only one short one kept the divide. The opposite edge of the backs had crept nearer. A rim of shacks lined it, already harum-scarum with the rows of plants they potted in tins, unmatched curtains flying their savage motley, but the porches and chimneys were straight, not yet tumbledown, and the tar-paper covering, stamped to look like brick, slickly new. Here on this side the seedy houses, some derelict, all pale as Methodists gone far in drink, still had the indefinable look of the white dwelling. He found numbers nine and thirteen, no eleven, none marked Jebb. Eagerly he retraced his steps, looking for the special signs of life that marked the house of death on its post-interment day here—a concourse of women mostly, walking in with prepared faces, coming out, wry or pleased, with a bit of jet or a cookpot, trophy of agility as well as grief. The chair would be ceded to him in somewhat the same rhythm, in progression from sideline to sideboard, from random elegy to calculated bottle and cake: he knew how people were here, and not only here. He was half reluctant to miss this diversion, not scorning it, as usual with the young. Already he had begun to understand old people who attended funerals with which they had no earthly connection, patient ghouls hurried by age toward the gossip that might be eternal, old voyeurs after the single story (whose?), old humanists—all bending over the casket to look at the cut gem. And of course he must have the chair.

  “You come about the chair, h’aint you?” The question, echo, came from a man hurrying around the corner of number nine, on legs so short that he toddled. “Saw you from the window. Cain’t see this place from the road.” He led the way, the dumpy seat of his sawed-off pants grimaced this way, that, by his gait, toward a shambles of a cottage not much larger than its outhouse. On the porch, he stamped his boots long and virtuously, looking up at Pierre with soft, brown-bulb eyes. “Doggone if she warnt right! She held all along nobody’d come but you!” He was a compact gargoyle of a man, whose outline came to points at several places, at the high shoulder blades and the ears, between which an oval cranium rose like a darning egg, protected by a cap made out of the top of a woman’s stocking. Pierre remembered the deceased, the huge slattern in slippers, neighborhood fence-leaner, who had eased herself into their household the day his mother had been carried home. He had never seen Jebb until now—if this was Jebb. The mailbox, clamped to the porch post, showed another name. It said Bean.

  “She says to come on in and have something first.” The man swallowed shyly. “Won’t be no snap, lugging that thing all the way back to Rhine Stree
t.”

  So they surely knew him then; he was in the right place, or the wrong one. “No thanks, I won’t trouble you.” He stole another look at the mailbox. “I’ll just get the chair and go on.”

  “She says to.” The brown eyes shone trustfully up at him. Oracle, whoever “She” is, says to.

  “Come on!” a voice boomed from within, deep, but a woman’s. “Enough for a feast here.” Stooping to get under the door frame, the first thing he saw was the expected: humble table substituted for sideboard, pop bottles for liquor, food in a stiff array not yet broached except by the energetically breeding flies, to one side of all this a large box. “He would do it,” the voice added. “Told him only one to count on was you.”

  He followed the voice to its origin—the chair. “Chair,” as it might have been addressed, was prodigious—a high, oaken affair, pedaled, chained and levered, on tandem-size wheels—and chair was filled. An immense bulk of a woman sat in it, trunk-legs planted on the foot-rest, baby-shaped hands at the wheels. In the elephant-hide dimness she filled the chair without jointure, like one of those balloons that rode carnival carts, Buddha head lolling in a fixed, aerated smile. His first wild thought was that this was the waxwork exhibit itself, the deceased Mrs. Jebb, set up natural as life—that he had come a day too early after all. Then “She” rolled forward, saying “Howdy”; the short man urged a chair under his knees from behind, and there he was, wedged between them, tender focus of their inch-close solicitude, feeling extraordinarily like a dummy himself.

  “Here you are, now.” A loaded plate was thrust on his lap from the right—potato chips, grocer’s ham, cake indefinable, curdled slaw. “Eat hearty now.” Stocking-cap nodded at him pleasedly, over-extending it, like a child playing house. “She’d have liked that.” From Pierre’s left, the woman snorted, at the same time pushing into his grasp a pop bottle.