False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

In that region, the time elegy, more than ordinarily elsewhere, is a part of normal conversation, being the recurrent chime of a place where friendship can revisit, fresh as ever after twenty years, on a street corner, where the talk of men, prowling the network of cousinship dead or alive, ticks away in those old houses of Usher as comfortably as a kitchen clock. No one in that room underestimated its importance. As Charlson began his ponderous move from the dais, everyone took for granted what he was after—to sound that chime in old Neil’s ear, to get him to play one of those tricks of fealty which were as common as coinage here—to get him somehow “to keep all this dark.” That it could be, in the county of old Fourchette, who would doubt? And if Dobbin did so, all reared here, whether or not in agreement, would understand it—as the final coincidence. So, in the spell of this knowledge, all were quiet as Charlson stepped down, carefully choosing his footing beneath the vast stomach, moving his arms like a prince regent. But it was not Dobbin he went to. He came to me. His great hands, planted down, starred the table in front of me.

  I can smell him yet—the odor of revelation—a fat man sweating after his own grace on a hot day. He didn’t betray them, only himself—from moment to moment. That was his vibration. His chin stretched forward, the pouch under it quivering like a tenor’s. “You saw the crosses. Tell us what they looked like.”

  We had reached the fundament. I knew it at once. The room knew it, as over and over in its chronicle it must have known such. Dobbin knew. His tired face, no longer wary, said it to me. Here’s your disorder. Relish it. There’s a chance, peered from history and gone again, that it may be divine. And back there in the faceless shadows, Johnny raised his eyes.

  “There were four.” I spoke from that long-gone hill. Before my eyes and Johnny’s the crater line of the dam site crested its tidal wave in an arc that took in half the world. Its four peaks rose like pediments. “One for each dam.”

  “Yes, yes, go on. Describe them.” He swung his head at me, fleshy Iaokanann, chestnut-curled.

  “It was a clear night. There wasn’t much wind—but it was enough.” I turned up my palms, almost in supplication. “That’s all.”

  “Is it?” The head swung. Suddenly he stretched his arms wide. “A cross looks like this, doesn’t it? And a Christian always sees a man on it!”

  I turned my head from that spectacle, that mouth agape. I saw him.

  The jury heard his whisper, not a question. “Doesn’t he.” All bent their heads away. No one wanted his exegesis. Leave us in our sty. All did except one.

  “Tell him, my son,” said my uncle. “The whole truth. You will remember.” He knew I would remember—and more. He knows me, as in his lifetime I was never to know him. He was the listener from behind.

  But I, who at twenty-one knew so much, did not recognize him. I was sick with another kind of learning. Back there in the shadows, Johnny stood very still.

  “I—I watched them for a long time.” Each cross streamed backward, image of a running man, his flesh a yellow mane behind him. “For a long time.” And in the end I had held out my arms to that Biblical glory. Here now in front of me, held out in place of mine toward it, were Charlson’s, at his side the young clerk’s face, lifted like an acolyte, reflecting it. Gathered round them were all who had assisted me, the men from the left as well as the right, Dobbin, my uncle and Semple. The truth had trumped me up to serve it. I had come to the top of the hill.

  “One of the crosses—the one on Dam Number Three—it was thicker than the others.” I whispered it. The apocalypse hits the eyes—long before it reaches the heart. It had taken seven years to reach mine.

  “I watched it,” I said. “I watched it until it fell.”

  Charlson had his face buried in his palms. Dobbin leaned toward him but did not touch him. A fly buzzed once, twice, between them. “Charlson,” said Dobbin. “It’s nearly six.”

  The great, bleared face lifted. “The two you’ll try,” it said. “Am I one?” Already it had shifted; petulance dyed it. “No? I should be!”

  “That reminds me,” said Hake. The words seemed absurd, his aspect no longer chilling; he was merely a man somewhat smaller, balder than the rest. “You realize there’s one name we haven’t yet on record?” It was typical of the way vengeance shrank as one went toward it—that this little man who wetted a forefinger as he turned each page should have to remind us of the one we had all forgotten. “The Exalted Cyclops.”

  They turned on him to look at him—all the jury on the left-hand side. Even I had forgotten him. To me he would never be ordinary. But even I must begin to doubt that the man sitting there was the one neck to squeeze, the One to stand in loco parentis to all the dread in the world.

  “The Exalted Cyclops is the supreme officer of a Klan and its official head,” I said. Give him his due; his head did not sink; the crescent eyelids gave me stare for stare. “He is to be a pattern for Klansmen … and he shall do such things as may be required of him by the laws of this Order.” And he had done them. But try as I might, I could not revive him in his original horror. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. I had always taken this to mean that the Lord would avenge. Now I began to see its real meaning. Vengeance is never ours. “E. V. Semple,” I said.

  Hake’s voice came, lagging too. “Check.”

  And now the room was already dispersing like an audience rustling at the coda, although everyone still remained in his chair. Anderson and Davis, speaking in twinned breath, moved for adjournment; in the low growl of assent, Dobbin went to the door. Everyone scuttled toward it with the strange, ragged seeking of crabs when the box is opened; sidling through it, no one, not even the righteous, seemed to wish to touch his brother. Outside, in tableau, Felix the guard gaped at the young clerk, just reverently giving up the minutes to Dobbin, who handed them in his turn to the pug-jawed man flanked by two unknowns—the judge.

  In the room with me, Nellis and his master remained, heads together, conferring. As quickly as anything in life, men sense their separation from the general. I too was once more only the witness. I walked the few steps to the window which had drawn me all the stages of that afternoon. Now that the heat of the day was over, the caretaker was mowing the green space between this wall and his cottage, moving in and out between the lines of his wife’s wash—faded nightdresses, child’s jumpers, pantaloons. This was all the mirror reflected when one drew near it—once again the world outside one at its passions and completions, once again the inner, monologuing eye. Had I expected that one brilliant burst of light to impose a helium noon here forever, hoped to look up, up—here at six in the evening—to a meridian quiver of larks?

  Behind me, those two, murmuring, evidently were finding words enough now. How should I pass them? When I turned they stopped talking. Then Nellis made as if to speak, but Semple, lifting an uncertain hand, stayed him.

  The hoodwink had raised. We took each other’s measure. Why had I troubled, asked that beaten face? Who was I? Who was he, around whose neck I had twined murder? Was he the accidental man? Was I?

  Where then was the adversary? If I gave Semple up, then I reentered the difficult, uncodified world. In that vast indiscriminate of pain wherever a child screamed, a neck or a mind was squeezed, a god or a man was hung—I would never find such another.

  “It wasn’t you,” said Semple. “Then—why?”

  I examined his face like a lover. Silently I answered, and left him. It wasn’t you. Then—who?

  Outside on the steps, I found my uncle waiting for me. Dusk had already spread its webs, through which my uncle’s features were tenuous, as mine must be. I was grateful for this, able to feel no other emotion. We fell into step without any exchange. Lights were being turned on for the spectral hour so protracted here at this season; through the open windows supper sounds came, gentled by it, to porches that seemed to drift, waiting. It was the kindest hour of the day. My uncle walked without haste, at a pace consonant with his evening reappearance. As we walked, I felt him to be rechargin
g himself with the burden of my mother, after the day’s business. Between that, just done, and what we walked to, words would have fallen idle. A valuable moment was passing forever for both of us; later it did not seem to me that we had made less of it than we would have, had we known.

  Two blocks from home, his hand on my arm stopped me where I was. We stood there, while he chose his words. By now I knew from what a granary these came, but I was not dwelling on it in my present state, only expectant of what I thought he meant to tell me: what we were to say, how we were to bring the news to my mother. I had to leave it to him.

  “You’re not to tell her you were there,” he said at last, as if he had heard me thinking. He brooded. “We’ll say nothing of this day. Nothing.”

  “Yes.” My mind was suspended, a blank thoroughfare. “What will you say to her? I mean, how will you—?” Far off, at the other end of exhaustion, I saw the evening before us. There was fear in her interest now. And she was so keen.

  We stood there for a fair time, two men pausing naturally on a street corner, while one chose his words. Finally, he found them.

  “I can lie,” he said in a low voice. The addendum came even more quietly. “Too.”

  So, in those final moments, we came to our understanding. It is a measure of his power that still, after all these years, I find it enough.

  We came almost to our own porch before we could make out the high, eccentric form of the wheel chair, which meant that she was there waiting in the shadows behind the railing, muffled in her scarves. Lucine had not yet lit the lamp. My mother, to spare us the sight of herself, had recently found herself fond of the gloaming. Through it her voice could come still untouched, as it came now.

  “You’re late. How is it you’re together? Is anything wrong?”

  We had stopped at the bottom of the steps. He also may have been grateful for the dimness, preparing the face which, expressionless as it seemed to others, was not so to her. But his reply cut the dusk cleanly, deftly explaining all, even preparing for me, its only error in that it came too quick—for him.

  “Naught’s wrong. Mind, you might find your son a bit tiddly. We had a couple, down to the pub.”

  A shot from a rifle makes a clean kind of noise also, as any sportsman will tell you. The sound of the reloading, if you are near enough to hear it, is a little like a man clearing his throat. The first of the shots went through the latticework under the porch, into the dirt. With the second shot, or just before it, a broad light illumined us, trained from a porch several houses down on the opposite side. My uncle pulled me down with him; as we dropped, I thought he cried “Ireland.” I think neither of us was hit by that shot either. There was a third. The light went out with the last.

  Then we were left to the dimness, which, after the light, was almost dark. If “we” might still be said. I was not sure. Hit in the leg somewhere, I crawled to my uncle, but in the curious tie of instinct, it was for my mother, only inches and days away from death, that I was fearing. Then I heard her scream, the long, strong, hopeless cry of the chairbound. None of the shots had hit her then—or all of them.

  For he had preceded her. A slug from a gun of a size to hunt squirrels with can be minor, in certain parts of the thigh. But he had received it perfectly, from the hand of a good gamesman, in the chest.

  If I leaned forward, holding my smeared thigh, I could just barely make out his features. He was a man without effluence. What he liked, if he suffered, no man knew. Yet, sometimes, he moved. Most honest of men, his last words had been a lie for my mother’s sake, if one did not count the scarcely caught “Ireland” that had been meant to warn me. So he died, with all his virtues on him, and such sins as might be.

  “Who—who is there? Who?”

  I looked up. Tears blinded me, sprung from eyes which had not paused to note they had them. I had forgotten she was there.

  “Will no one come?” she said, in the small voice that converses with itself. “Then I must walk—somehow.” I heard her struggle. Then I heard her scream again for Lucine.

  Holding on to my wet thigh to keep the faint from me, I wondered why she did not speak to me. Then, my eyes clearing, I understood. Darkness had fallen—she could not see me.

  Before I could make myself known, she spoke again, from her side of the dark. Over and over it came, that ululation.

  “One of them is moving. One is. Oh God, oh God. Speak to me. Who is there? Who?”

  I had to answer her somehow, from my side of the dark. Out of the depths, I gave her my lifelong answer.

  “I.”

  PART IV

  Entry

  FOR THREE NIGHTS SINCE, I have sat here and written nothing. Confession, one assumes, will be like coming in out of a great wind. Instead, mine blew me on in a continuous circle. Over and over, my mother and I were taken to hospital, where my contemptible wound was dressed, where, toward morning, as soon as the sun affirmed an indifferent world, different to her, she died of hers. With every cell corrupted, she died upright, conscious, grieving. Over and over, I sat by her bedside, watching to what end might come, would come, that power of which I had inherited my dram’s worth. And over and over, Dobbin, waiting, my bags in hand, in the anteroom, plucked me from the still room and drove me ninety-five miles through the just glinting countryside, to the safety of a train. There, until it began again, the round ended.

  Last night, hoping to stop that haggard marathon, I broke the promise made to myself—not to read back. It did as I hoped. Even a memoir does not stand still. I was not the person who had first sat down.

  What have I learned, then. What have I learned? That we live between certain arcs, not self-imposed? Looking backward, as commemoration only, is not good enough. Death is. Tragedy resides not in the facts of existence, but in the mutations between. Change is the tragedy. Where else can we find hope then, except there?

  While I wrote, the telephone rang, at the same odd hour. It’s almost four. Ruth is back from London, then, with my letter. She rang at this time, so that I might know it was she. Also, because she too has her struggles, perhaps even her mystery. I’ve lost enough arrogance now to admit even that. I don’t refer to the commonplace that every human unit is a mystery. What if there should be something special which—how else could she have been so knowing, so drawn toward me? “You are so …” she said. And I asked “What?” and got my reply. “Honest.” The lives of others always look so active, so competent, so lacking in the specious—to ourselves. What if, all the time I have been monologuing here, she in her turn … ?

  Vade retro. I must keep to my line. Looking backward in itself is nothing. There is still the whole chapter of devices that my life has been since. The phone rang, but I didn’t answer it. I wasn’t ready for her. Not yet. Not quite.

  Chapter I. A Chapter of Devices.

  WHAT I REVEAL NOW is indeed a chapter of devices twenty years long—all to be summarized as briefly as possible except the last. From the outside, this second half of my life would certainly be chosen as the important one, bright with all the tangible events of manhood—war service, a career of sorts, a thin chain mail of affiliation with society—all that increasing clutter which we call maturation. Only I came to know, gradually and in secret, how the first half, bulging as the forehead of a fetus over the tentative face beneath, always overhung the other. For a long time I didn’t know this fully.

  When I returned to a New York still emptied by summer, I went directly to a small, cheap theatrical hotel I knew of in the West Forties, had my trunk transferred from the fraternity house to the hotel basement, and sat down at my narrow window facing the fire shaft, to consider. Life with no goal, in a small hotel room of that kind, on a round from bureau, to closet, to hall toilet, on a circuit of exits and returns for eating, can itself be obsessive. For two weeks, with such intermissions, I sat there, writing no letters, making no phone calls, the room’s buzzer never sounding for me except by mistake. No one known to me knew where I was. Against habit, I took
no great walks, did not even read. If I had an obsession, it was that I might meet the two in New York from whom I had absconded—Serlin, even though long since gone to New Hampshire—and Lovey. Therefore, though I knew it was foolish, I kept to the immediate district, avoiding the main library and shops, the garment section where Bijur’s was, and one nearby street, devoted to hats and artificial flowers, which Lovey sometimes frequented for bargains. These two had been my sole intimates; graduation and school dispersal had relieved me of most acquaintance. Those other two who had known me best were dead, my need for them numbed forever by the manner of their death, my role in it. Or so it seemed. I was as free of ties now as might fill any man with hope—or despair. No one knew where I was; no one here knew who I was. I was free to contemplate, if I wished, my identity. But this interim was the reverse of those three days before I had first left Tuscana, during which I had first dealt with that simple, cosmic drop into space, down whose shaft one falls soundlessly asking, “Who am I?” I’d my identity now, and my glands were choked with the bitter thing, my head split with it. I knew what I was now, and who. Or, in my innocence, so it seemed.

  Everything passes, a pendulum statement, neither good, neither bad. In people, this quality is shamefacedly called “contrariness” or worse, since we like to think of ourselves as faithful even to a bad situation, but it is often as much of a spur as ambition, and more often a part of the natural equipment. My scholarship money was almost gone, and jobs were still not to be had for the picking in 1939. Breaking from anonymity just long enough to apply to the college’s job bureau for whatever they had in the way of summer leftovers, I was surprised to find a niche that just suited: twenty-five dollars per week as one of a corps of all ages and status, both student and permanent, which was working on various encyclopedias, classical dictionaries, a vast project of all sorts of compendia, under the tutelage of a man as unusual in some ways as his name, one A. B. C. Lasch. Mr. Lasch had no personal monies to expend on omniscience, but was of that breed of devotee whose religious energy attracts backers, one of whom had deeded the large, slightly dilapidated Westchester estate in which the establishment was housed. Over it Mr. Lasch presided year after year—it was rumored that he was now a sixty who looked forty—a testimony of the contentment to be found in the quiet routines of a madness intelligibly pursued. Such a place, staffed inevitably with the “special,” who were then isolated morning after morning with the intangible, should have been prey to all the coterie ills—but these either melted away or were banished under Mr. Lasch’s arbitrary, impersonal, always light hand. He seemed to have effected some of that harmony whose will-o’-the-wisp certain colonies have pursued by theory; perhaps because, beyond the assemblage of fact for its own sake, he appeared to have no theories whatsoever. He had the advantage, of course, of excesses focused on a kind of norm—dictionaries need no excusing. But fact was king here; one could never get from Mr. Lasch any kind of a priori remark, personal or general, that preceded it. Surely he had his own story, but I, already something of a master, could never collect his, even as to whether his initials were the result of his idée fixe or its cause—a routine tease that merely drew his smile. It was clear that he spent all his juices of mind, sex, and heart on his compilations. Such a wine-squeezing should have left him sec as a centipede; instead one found a man as round and rubicund as some good abbot, genial without prattle, silent but not taciturn—happy.