False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  “I already said—my uncle had nothing—”

  “Uh-huh. I heard you.” He was trimming the last nail. “How come you here then?”

  “The witness was called,” said Dobbin. “He is not required to explain why he is here.” Did he suspect that I could not? “If he’s allowed to go on, no doubt that will appear. Do you wish to question him yourself, Mr. Lemon?”

  “Nah-h. I was born here, Mister Dobbin. But not yesterday.” He looked up for the first time. “And I say—that for your witnesses!” In the same instant the knife left his hand with a hard swish and embedded itself, handle up, a perfect mumblety-peg throw, in the desk just in front of me.

  I flinched back in reflex, then thrust my hand out for it. Lemon out-reached me.

  “Boys! Boys!” It was the minister who spoke, a curious reed from that bulk.

  “Tha-at’s right, Charlson, you tell us.” Lemon was standing. His head moved only an inch sideways on its fulcrum. “He’p us separate the me-en from the boys.”

  Men as fat as Charlson redden clearly; even Dobbin could not help staring for a minute without shame. Lemon lost none of his swagger. Coarseness freed him, allowing hits so low and near that men more tangled in decencies could only be jealous of it. Lemon, born so deft with the knife, had long since learned the uses of words that were unanswerable otherwise. Now he snapped the jackknife shut, balanced it on his palm for a second, then slapped it away in a pocket. “Well, who’s for leaving?” There was no doubt of whom he was addressing, although he still half faced Dobbin. Ignoring Charlson, he let his gaze rest on each in turn. “Well? You all going to sit on here, listen to this thing right through to the end? You just going to sit here?” He bent forward, nursing his thigh. “Now. There’s twenty-three men present on this jury. If just nine of us leave—no, even eight—there can’t be no further business. I say it’s time to break things up, maybe talk over our rights and privileges in private.” Lowering his voice, he spoke almost as if they were already alone. “Whether this fellow’s lyin’ or not—that won’t make no difference—you know that, don’t you?” He swept a fist in front of him. “Come on, what say!” He waited. “Rollins? Only takes two.” Hesitated. “Nellis?” One further corner his eye still refused. “Who’s to say we can’t walk right out if we want to, and not come back? Who’s to say we got to sit here?”

  Because Lemon was looking at Dobbin now, everyone looked there. Head cocked back, lips parted, Dobbin seemed to be waiting. While we watched, he slipped a cigarette from his pocket—quietly—as if the packet within must not be crackled, held his lighter in abeyance. Turning to the window, he seemed to take a respite from the room. Because he breathed like a man counting his breaths, we breathed with him. The wait, interminable to us, seemed not to bother him. Did he know what would come, or only gamble that something might? It came from behind him.

  “Sit down, Lemon,” said Semple.

  I heard Dobbin sigh.

  When Lemon sat down, it was almost as if he sank to his knees.

  Over on Hake’s side, the men around him stirred for the first time collectively. They had lived all their lives under a dominion of invisibles—governments, powers, subornations they had heard to exist, but never expected to see. But, even up to now, perhaps, they had only idly believed.

  Dobbin lit his cigarette. “I think possibly—there might be more interrogation on the part of the jury.” He surveyed them, lingered, as if with regret, on Hake, went past the assistant foreman—a stammerer, passed quickly over Charlson, as charity for the moment should, stopped at Nellis—who bent his head, and came to rest as all along intended. “Mr. Semple?”

  Semple. I have described him elsewhere—and can do it over and over: brown features, none of prominence, hair cut short, thick white hair, the look of extra energy this often gives a middle-aged man. Or did I err there, only interpret? Hair cut short—I had not said that before. Each time round, a detail adds itself, subtracts, but the whole avoids, like that retinal after-image the scudding eye can catch only by not pursuing, can never hold still and square. Dobbin’s head, that good medal, aligned itself at once in any light; Semple’s, struck over and over, remained—even when I faced it—blurred. He was a man of the most ordinary description—of that I am persuaded—but like all whom the mind raises to a special niche of good or evil, his description had already been given elsewhere. Even there that day, he sat in its nimbus, seen through the same vibrating haze that surrounds an object of love. He wore the hoodwink still. Only once, at the end, did it raise.

  “Would you care to question the witness, Mr. Semple?”

  The telling thing was that he had stayed, and not only to quench Lemon. I thought I knew why—each of us drawn in his own way to the scene of the crime. It might be tactic for him to stay; it would be torture to leave our whispering phalanx behind him. The dreadful itch to revisit had come upon him. He longed to comprehend what he had done, as it looked in the eyes of others.

  “I could,” Semple said. “Along the lines of that day.”

  “Hold on there.” It was Hake again. “Aren’t we going to hear from that rule book first?”

  Dobbin, as if reluctant, checked his watch. I glanced at the clock up above; I had been here one hour. “Three-thirty,” said Dobbin. He raised his eyebrows, shrugged. “The day’s yet young.” Afternoon sessions ran until five-thirty. But I would have bet anything that Neil Dobbin almost never needed a watch to tell him the time. “Well—we did say, didn’t we?” He said. “Not all seventy-five pages, please—and I must ask the jury to restrict its questions as much as possible to what’s salient. That telegram from Washington might still get here today. And I’d like for us to get through the heart of the testimony before that.”

  I heard him with awe. “Whatever we do,” he had said the night before, “I want them to hear you reel off from that manual. Christ. It chills the blood, doesn’t it. There’s a man there, Hake, who may worry at you like a terrier. Let him. He knows what he’s doing. Let him take as long as he wants. Those other boys from Charlotte are sober and willing enough—but maybe it’s time the iron entered their souls.” Drawing the paper ring from his cigar, he had placed it carefully on the cloth. “And from then on,” he had said, touching its red and gold coronet with the tip of a finger, “they’re not likely to doubt your powers of recollection.”

  “We can check it later on, I trust, Mr. Dobbin?” said Hake. “By means of a copy?”

  “Yes,” said Dobbin. “Later on this afternoon, perhaps. I trust.” And lifting his chin, he nodded at me to begin.

  I could hear my heart beat as if it were across the room from me, the room a cave. I was on my own now, Johnny the mascot. I looked at Semple. Just as one dreams it—the wild image of what could never believably come to be. Once in one’s life just as one dreamed it. It had come to be. “Klansman’s Manual,” I said with dry lips. “Nineteen twenty-four. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. P. S. Etheridge—Chief of Staff and Imperial Klonsel.” I heard the men on Hake’s side stir in the small crepitations of the tense; I heard the absolute quiet on the other. My tongue was dry also. “Klonsel,” I repeated, and stopped. My tongue clove to my mouth, filling it.

  “Go on!” Dobbin spoke sharply.

  I could see the white page in front of me, bird-tracked with K’s. Down the page they went, like the track of feet, set down one after the other, of a long line of men stalking in secret procession. But I could not see the letters between them. Like underbrush, the gray, long sentences between. “I—” Here and there the fabric of silence gave way—the creak of a chair, a man shifting his knees. “I—just need the first line.”

  A titter came from the left. Frazer.

  Dobbin shielded his eyes with his hand.

  My hands were fisted in front of me. I pressed one thumb, bent at the knuckle, against the other straight one—K. What came next? K. I glanced upward.

  “The Order.” Semple spoke it softly. “The Name.”

  Had he too been waiting,
hoping in spite of himself for what could never—? How could one tell? His face had not changed. I noted a detail I had forgotten—the sharp fold of the eyelids, like halves of nutshells, that kept the pupils unfringed. These were brown, the color of the cul-de-sac. I saw it again, the annex room, heard the wardrobe door, big as a coffin lid, creaking. Past bladder-shapes of leather, iron and shadow, I walked to where twelve chairs enclosed a circle with exemplary neatness. Once again I leaned over their center, the hairline cross stirring at my breath. The pins came out easily. And now I no longer needed him. I turned to Dobbin, smiling. “The Order,” I said, “The Name. Forever hereafter it shall be known as KNIGHTS OF THE KU KLUX KLAN. Its Divisions: There shall be four Kloranic Orders of this Order, namely: The Order of citizenship, or K-UNO (Probationary) … Knights Kamellia, or K-DUO (Primary Order of Knighthood). Knights of the great Forrest, or K-TRIO (the Order of American Chivalry). Knights of the Midnight Mystery, or K-QUAD (Superior Order of Knighthood).

  “Its Nature: Six outstanding features are … are particularized in describing the nature of this Order. Klansmen will do well to fix them in mind … so that they will know the kind of an order they have joined.” I hesitated, went on.

  “Patriotic. One of the paramount purposes of this Order … is to exemplify a pure patriotism toward our country. Every Klansman is taught from the beginning of his connection with the movement that it is his duty to be patriotic toward our country. And … and when he knelt at the Sacred Altar of the Klan, he was solemnly and symbolically dedicated to the holy service of our country.

  “In its influence and its … its teachings and its principles … the Order seeks to generate … impart a spirit of loyalty to America … consecration to her ideals … fealty to her institutions … support of her government … obedience to her laws—and unselfish devotion to her interests.” Now I had it, at a clip.

  “Military,” I said. “This characteristic feature applies to its form of organization and its method of operations. It is so organized on a military plan that the whole power of the whole Order, or of any part of it, may be used in quick, united action for the execution of the purposes of the Order. There are definite, concrete tasks to be done—”

  In the pause I took for breath, Hake cleared his throat, a hoarse sound from those pale business lips. “Can the clerk get all of this down verbatim?”

  Boldly I answered for Dobbin. “Mr. Whitlock is the retired clerk of this court, a very experienced man.” Old Clarence Whitlock, known to me as a lightning gabbler of petitions, otherwise as Keeper of the Seal and recording Kligrapp, raised his great bagged eyes, mournfully clowned by death but still bypassed, and bent again to his pencil.

  And Dobbin’s face shone with my mastery, as once Demuth’s had done, hearing me on the terms of the Pacification of Ghent, fourteen pages from the Wars of the Roses—all once as swarming with blood-images as this, tracked, one after the other, by processions as alive as this. Standing there, on the steppingstone that lies, ego and innocence had built for me, I may even have seen into that unity of history where all its evils blended, but I had no more time for this than any other man, and chose one. I turned to the new men on the right.

  Nearest the middle, a small, round-headed young clerk, he looked to be, sat holding up the large nose that had forged ahead of him, its upturned nostrils as open, aspiring toward knowledge, as his mouth. I spoke to him.

  “Pages nineteen to twenty-one,” I said, “treat of The Invisible Empire, its two-fold Significance, Territorial Divisions and Conventions, plus a definition of what is therein termed The Alien World. If you wish, I can give any of this or the following in detail.” But he only stared at me and I went on, softly. “To page twenty-five: Membership in all its categories—which are Racial, Masculine, National, Religious, Mental, Character, Reputation, Vocation, Residence, Age, and How Membership is Attainable.” Still he said nothing, and I left him with that and passed on.

  Next to him was a man wearing thick glasses, whom I knew by sight as the pharmacist in the new Walgreen’s at Charlotte—a man always to be heard fuming restlessly back and forth behind his counter while at his compounds, grumbling at everything—from the weather to the state of the nation—on which his pharmacopoeia could give him no answer. He too was here, perhaps, in default of finding a single prescription. “Pages twenty-five to forty-two,” I said to him. “The Emperor of the Invisible Empire, His Responsibilities. The Imperial Klonvokation. The Imperial Kloncilium. Their Powers and Functions. The Imperial Wizard. His Position, Authority and Power.” He remained immobile.

  “Revenues, Realms and Provinces,” I said, pleading to those thick lenses. “How a Realm May be Organized. The Initial Klonverse. The Klorero.” I looked up and down their row and I could tell nothing. It must seem to them, as almost now it did to me, that I was reciting the black verse of nightmare, or only the comic thrill of a child’s campfire—at best some cabalism of a star too distant for combat.

  In desperation, I turned back to Dobbin. And Dobbin, himself barely wrested from dream, shaking his head like a man emerging from water, understood me. “And now the local Klans themselves,” he said. “The working units.” He brought his fist down, hard, on the table. All along the line, men, lulled in postures of enchantment, awoke.

  “Pages forty-two,” I said, “to the end.”

  Dobbin, lips parted, stood very close, as if we were to speak in chorus, match theme to theme. “What are the Requirements of a Klansman?”

  “Requirements. And all Klansmen are strictly enjoined to valiantly preserve and persistently practice the principles of pure Patriotism, Honor, Klannishness, and White Supremacy, ever keeping in mind and heart the sacred sentiment, peculiar purpose, manly mission and lofty ideals of this Order … loyalty to their Emperor and Imperial Wizard … faithful keeping of their Oath of Allegiance … constant, unwavering fidelity to every interest of the Invisible Empire … the influence of Klankraft to be properly promoted … and that they be blameless in preserving the grace, dignity and intent of their Charter forever.” I looked at Hake. “That’s not verbatim. But it’s the gist.”

  “Can you give the Charge?” said Dobbin. How impeccably he had learned last night’s brief lesson! Only now did it occur to me—why it might be he had accepted my story so readily. One man’s special recall, so weird to the general, would be no surprise to another of the same. But there was no time to consider this, now.

  “The Charge,” I said. “I (The Imperial Wizard) solemnly charge you to hold fast to the dauntless faith of our Fathers and to keep their spotless memory secure and unstained, and true to the traditions of our valiant sires, meet every behest of Duty … without fault, without fail, without fear and without reproach.”

  “What are the Offenses against the Order?” He had quickened the pace. I matched it.

  “The Major Offenses are treason against the United States of America, support of any foreign power, relinquishment of citizenship. Violating the Oath of Allegiance, Constitution or Laws of the Order. Disrespect of virtuous womanhood. Habitual drunkenness, profanity or vulgarity during a klonklave. Being responsible for the polluting of Caucasian blood through miscegenation, or the commission of any act unworthy of a Klansman. White men must not mix their blood with that of colored or other inferior races.”

  “How are offenses tried?”

  “By tribunal. In organized Realms, by a Grand Tribunal, composed of Hydras, Furies, Exalted Cyclops and similar statewide officials. In Klans, by the same on a local scale.”

  “Describe the Sitting of the Tribunal. Who are present?”

  “Klan officers, and eight Klansmen selected by lot, by a member wearing the hoodwink. A prosecutor. The defendant, represented by a member. Witnesses who are Klansmen.”

  “What are the Penalties?”

  “Reprimand. Suspension. Banishment. Ostracism in all things, by all members of the Order.”

  A low assent came from the left somewhere, like an “Amen” in church. On my rig
ht, the phalanx of heads slowly turned in that direction. I did not need to. Frazer again, quickly hushed by someone.

  Dobbin waited. “And—now—” he said, ponderous as he had been quick, his tone a signal that the recital was almost over. “The Oath of Allegiance. Will you oblige us?”

  “Obedience,” I said. I said it to Lemon, but he was looking elsewhere. “Secrecy.” Rollins also. “Fidelity.” And Nellis, long-chinned Nellis, the same. At Semple. “Nishness.”

  “Nishness!” said Hake. Throughout, he had been sitting arms folded, the polished knob of his head scarcely glinting. Now the word whistled from him, as if escaped through the small hole between the lips that Buddhas sometimes had. He leaned forward, in the pale summer suit that was cut like Dobbin’s. The young clerk beside him shifted with uneasy awe—this was the general superintendent. “You sure he isn’t dreaming some of this up? Jesus Christ, Dobbin. Nishness!”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” Dobbin said this over his shoulder, on his way to answer a knocking at the door. “Better if he were.” He opened the door on Felix the guard, who managed an inquisitive look round before he handed something over. Dobbin walked back slowly, reading what had been given him. “Better if he were,” he repeated absently, and shoved the yellow form into a pocket. He passed in front of me. “Sit down, will you please!” I sat down. When he was sure that he was the center of interest, he nodded in all the requisite directions, let himself slide by degrees into a chair, as a tall man can, and leaned back, hands clasped at his neck behind, long legs stretched before. He had us all where he wanted us. The clock said four.

  “Okay, Mr. Semple,” he said. “Your witness.”

  I answered quickly, before Semple could, feeling inordinately nimble, precise. With the recital just done, I thought, my second wind had come; really it was my first—the wind that had been blowing me toward this spot for a long, long time. Upborne in its current, I remembered many things at once—and they were all the same. Once again I felt the hermetic privilege of opening the side door of the Pridden place, the involuntary, peculiar comfort as I stood within the gate, inside. To none of you any longer, I thought, remembering the lesson that was not in German; to all who had asked to be called du I had listened, and now I too was speaking. I too entered the world—through a door that no one had expected, and for a brief time I saw that the light of Tuscana could be as brilliant as anywhere on earth.