False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  By this time, seated there, we’ve had our exchange on David, met supposedly in Düsseldorf in 1946, on my Western way home. My plane, lumbering through every stop from Karachi to Lisbon, had as a matter of fact put down there for an hour; in the realities of having been in a place without ever really having been there, the rest of the world, nearing that non-Euclidean point where all places will be intersections of one another, is veering more and more on my side. Careful not to say too much, too eagerly, of David, I do not notice at the time—only now—how little eager the Judge is to hear. I am more engaged in not noticing the wall in front of us, entirely covered with an enormous collection of stamps, oddly but exquisitely mounted. There are always these hazards. Walter received mail from philatelists every morning. Had Diddy shared this interest, of so many others the two of them had? Shall I risk it?

  “Some of these were David’s,” says the Judge, as if he had heard me, and I lean back. He never refers to his son except by the full name. What was the expression which had crossed his face when I used the other? Impatience? I am weighing it.

  “But most of the good ones were left to me by Walter Stern. Did you know him also?”

  One must choose. “I may have. I seem to have heard his name.”

  “He was there for a while; David’s best friend. Matter of fact, it was he who got David into that sort of work.” Expelling smoke, he gave a short, dry cough. “As usual.”

  “I may have met him there.”

  “You’d have remembered him.” A puff on the Upmann. He does not explain.

  The room is very quiet, a paneled rear one, dark except for the lamp. Anna has left us with the drinks, Ruth gone up to change. I am elated but nervous, hearing every creak of the chair as the Judge palms restlessly at the wheel, listening to the kind of silence, where people say too much, that I know so well. I wish to hear no confidences in this place. I suddenly realize this. I wish it to be exactly as it appears, and to be here in it. Nothing more.

  “Weren’t there—letters of his?” I say idly. “I seem to have come across a cataloguing somewhere.”

  “David’s. He edited them.” Again that dry cough.

  “I must look them up.”

  “Oh, I—shouldn’t bother, if I were you. Walter rather—over-idolized David. They aren’t—” The Judge, extending his small hand to a handsome celestial globe on his desk, gives it a spin, the same expression flitting his face as before. But the globe, in perfect order like everything here, revolves and revolves. “One’s son, of course. One’s son. But Walter—he was the man to be remembered.”

  I do not wish to examine this eulogy. Eulogies at best so often go awry, and when on persons unknown to one are best received without comment. Besides, Ruth is standing at the door.

  She has come there so quietly; has she heard us, him? Bare, her shoulders are fuller than one would have thought, her face, heightened for the evening, less girlish, less—forthright. She is standing so breathlessly still that the minute jewels in her pierced ears catch the light but do not wink.

  I am on my feet now, near the stamp wall, ready to leave.

  “The rarest is the triangular one, near the center.” He speaks in the slightly raised voice of a person resuming casual conversation. “Poor Walter; we were just bringing it home to him. Are you going out, my dear?”

  “Only with Pauli.”

  It’s permissible to wonder what lies beneath the surface of women. Why only?

  Meanwhile Anna, rung for, is being consulted by the Judge, under cover of which Ruth addresses me, as it happens, for the first time separately. “I’m happy to meet someone who knew Diddy.” She speaks softly, but with emphasis.

  “Likewise.” It is, I hope, my only stupidity of the evening, and I am relieved that her eyes, frank as a goosegirl’s even under their shading, are not on me, but still on her father. The earrings are quivering now, as if in the gentlest anger.

  Aloud, I admire the wall, actually a huge, blue-green relief map of the hemispheres, to which some of the unboxed stamps are affixed like butterflies. At first I think she does not hear me. “A beautiful arrangement.”

  “Yes,” she says. She will not deprecate. Set that way, her mouth does a little resemble his; otherwise, she is a graceful but much lesser version of the large, somewhat inhumanly handsome mother of the photograph framed in silver, of the portrait painted à la Sir John Lavery, both in the other room, not here—and now that I think of it, unreferred to in either. “Yes,” she says, turning back to me, “we are very beautifully arranged.”

  Anna’s wholesome, blundering voice intervenes. “Sure, I got enough!”

  The Judge exchanges a smiling glance with me. People are kept in character by the servants they keep. “I’m informed that if Mr. Goodman can stay to dinner, he will not go unfed.”

  Unfortunately he cannot. But I too turn to Anna. “Why, you must be Anna,” I say. “You must be ‘Anna—my hosh’!”

  In the general and successful laughter, they escort me as far as the drawing-room door, Ruth wheeling her father. “New dress, my dear?” he says as we go. “Very pretty.” Nodding to him, nodding to me as I leave, she stands beside him, one hand on his chair, the long room behind. Modern as the dress is, she looks somewhat old-fashioned standing there, as grown daughters in their father’s houses sometimes do. But I have already lost, if I have ever had it, the power to see them as they are, scarcely even hearing Anna’s hearty “Come again!” as she shuts the door behind me. Going down their steps, I no longer hear what they have said or what they have not said, all drowned in what I have come for. Behind me it sounds in all its solid C major, the haven-note of the household that was never anywhere else, that was never anywhere. I go back there next week, to show him the Deming.

  So I slipped into that household, and if it fitted me like a glove, I took this as a happy instance of the character I expected of it, for just as I had my special footing there, I could count around me quite a train of others who, each in his own way, had theirs. Some were literal pensioners, poor gentlefolk who knew the place as one where they were often welcome to bask in the delicacies of existence; others, abstractly rich, came especially in the holiday seasons, for that seat at a private board for which one could not pay. The Judge himself went out a good deal to public functions but not many private ones; there he preferred to give rather than to be received. Ruth had her own charitable works, the hospital boards and welfare committees to which these days a woman of leisure might almost professionally belong, but she was ashamed of her leisure, as of some Edwardian vice which kept her behindhand in the world, and never brought these matters home. Good works were never mentioned at the Mannixes’ and by their attitude never thought of as such; temperamentally, they had been reared to do what they could, and if their dinner-table talk was as heavily crossed with the sociopolitical anxieties of the day as any other modern one of its class—by virtue of the Judge even more so—the problem of how to be personally good in a vicious world never troubled it, “the way things are” never being confused with “the way we are.” Yes, I thought often as I approached the house of an autumn or winter evening, preferably from the opposite side of the street so that I might better savor its serene lamps and stoop, wondering meanwhile whom I would meet behind its curtains, in front of a hearth almost always burning to the convivial tinkle of cup or glass, yes, it was a place to approach in pleasant prospect and at a saunter—an old-fashioned house. Would that long shadow be Pauli’s, once celebratedly there with his hostile Gaby (“Perhaps it would help him with her to bring her here to friends,” the Judge had remarked to Ruth, but it hadn’t); was that squat one penniless old Miss Augusta Selig, nursery compatriot of the Judge’s, whose opinions were of such reactionary vintage that such modernities as old-age assistance (on a pension from which she lived) must never be mentioned before her? And would that more anomalous shadow belong to snub-nosed young Edgar Halecsy, law clerk, whose mother still went to the Judge’s maiden sisters’ house to do the
ir hair and whose aunt, now dead, had been their milliner?—I had long, long thoughts, sometimes, on the occasions when I met Edgar there. Those several shadows might, on the other hand, belong to personages, or in today’s argot, “personalities,” bent on shedding at least as much light and dew as was to be received—for one never had the sense that the Mannixes restricted their company either way, the whole “line” of the household, as extended from the Judge, being that it had none, its virtue resting on being in any company the same. “We’re middle-class here,” I once heard him comment, and thought then of all the grounds on which he could be excused if the statement, with its faintest tinge of L’état c’est moi!, sounded rather as if it should have been “We are the middle class!”

  Once, going up their steps, and passed, as frequently, by the familiar person of unknown quantity going pleasedly down, inside I came upon the Judge emerging from his study with the unmistakable air of a man who has just performed a favor, tucked his pen or his wallet away. “That man, Tom Somers, was one of the U. S. Alien Property Custodians after World War One,” he commented. “Son of a rich American colonial in the Philippines. I met him during the depression, when he was down to working as a male nurse. Some men never recover from that kind of drop. Once in a while we chat stamps.”

  I ventured to joke. “This house—you’re really an illegal loan-shark business. Dealing in all kinds of sympathy. No redemption expected, even in heaven. All obligations assumed.”

  “Do we really appear so?” he asked. “I should hate to think—that we give the appearance—”

  I replied warmly that he was the last man to need to think of appearances.

  A man in a wheel chair is always a focal point of stillness in a room. The Judge, besides, is very economical of gesture. “Oh—we keep busy,” he said after a moment with no particular inflection, and the subject was closed. In conversation he adheres to that older school of courtesy which disclaims the personal; it gives him the air of a generation even prior to his own and makes him the most tolerable of invalids, who, giving no confidences, obtrudes no symptoms either. It’s fortunate that he is called Judge; I could never have brought myself to call him Simon. This intimacy I had just dared, first of its kind, showed, now that our acquaintance was six months gone, what my footing was. Something above a retainer (for what did I receive?) and well below a personage, I was that impartial friend with whom one may discuss the others, my allegiance to the members of the household themselves meanwhile being evenly distributed. For evenness is all, here; the Mannix establishment proudly upholds itself in the rich network of its obligations, and if there’s a suggestion of tapes and screws in the process, as of it also being upheld by them, I don’t see it. After six months without a rift or a change we all retain our original impression of each other.

  Anna came in just then. “I give Mr. Somers a box your vitamins. He don’t look good.”

  This time the Judge did throw up his hands. Anna affords him these releases, giving perfect service even to her eccentricities. “You see? It’s Anna who sets the tone of this house.”

  “Enough I set the table.” She’s very intelligent, Anna. I sometimes think she keeps up her thorniness as a convenience to all.

  “It certainly is,” I said. “You’re quite right. Anna’s a compulsive fattener. And if he and I don’t give you satisfaction, Anna, it’s not from want of trying, at least on my part.”

  “Him? He don’t even try. And you—” She surveyed me. I am interested in how I appear to Anna. I think I know how I appear to the others.

  She does not hesitate. A few months later, both of us aware of the direction in which I do not give satisfaction, she would not say it. “Even when you get marrit, you don’t get a belly.” Leaving, she flaps a hand at me. “You got bachelor bones.”

  “A token of admiring disapproval,” said the Judge. “Past a certain age, she mistrusts all the single. Her own sex, in such case, she finds stupid. Ours—if we’re not obvious rejects, then we’re too deep.” A few months later, he might not say this either.

  “Let’s hope I’m deep, then.” Comfortable, I could say it without a qualm.

  “Let’s hope you are.” Ruth, standing in the same doorway, was no apparition of quietness this time. Breezed in out of the wind, she looked gay and approachable, the way pretty women, pink-nosed and romantically furred, do in the autumn. I had not yet considered what complications might ensue here if I made love to her, not having seriously considered the latter either, although I found her an increasingly winning companion—graceful, responsive. Of late, her conversation with me had become a trifle artificial, for her. “Let’s hope you are; you’ll need it. Father’s Nigerian economist is coming—you remember Mr. Krupong? He’s a dear actually, but in front of father he will act the pontiff. Anna was dreadful, last time—I’m sure the poor man thought it was his color. Actually, it was because all those syllables cluttered up his eating.”

  “Never you mind,” said the Judge. “All taken care of. I’ve invited an extra. Dan Blount just blew in.”

  Ruth and I burst out laughing; even the Judge just barely smiled. Blount is a journalist who is always blowing in from somewhere; in my short term here he’s done so twice before. Crises wreathe his head in an ever-changing trooping of the colors of all nations, and he can take you to six different nations in the course of one of his sentences, all of which—relic of constant interviews with the momentarily great—are couched interrogatively. “Do you think? … Would you say? … What is your feeling … ?”—his intonations were all rising ones. “Dan,” the Judge had said last time, “I live for the day when I hear you utter a declarative sentence.” He and Krupong would certainly take care of each other.

  “Better still,” said Ruth. “I’ve invited someone too.” A graceful woman removing her furs is a pretty sight also, until I catch in myself the sudden halt in the rhythm of the plexus, the current in the finger tips, with which we begin the heightened blood-mapping of the movements of another. Too late—once begun, the process is not to be stopped; from now on I shall be aware of wherever she is in a room, how poised and how far—and in the same instant am aware that this is already the case with her. And why not?—I’m no sister-seeker. Yet I wish that the clock could be pushed back to where we all were ten minutes before. Not here, I think. Too late.

  “Ah,” the Judge said idly, “who’s that, m’dear? Another woman, I hope, to even things out.”

  “Yes.” She may have hesitated, but if she did, I, involved with other things, did not notice it then. “I ran into her at the hospital. She’s doing volunteer work—with some of the laryngotomies. Alice Cooperman.”

  The Judge made no immediate response. Then, after a moment, “You’ve told Anna?”

  “Yes,” said Ruth. What a straightforward glance, face, she has, I think; the body, with its dancer’s control, perhaps less so. “Yes,” she repeated in her even way. “It’s quite all right with Anna.”

  Shortly after, the Judge went upstairs, as is his custom before dinner. He has one of those invalid seats which ride, elevator style, up the staircase. At the top, a second wheel chair awaits him. Ruth, Anna, or Charlie the chauffeur, if about, usually help him make the shift at ground level, but at the top of the stairs he always does so himself, as if this marks the transition to a world he willfully keeps private. By custom we don’t watch this, but happening to glance up, I see him, already chaired again, watching us; then, with a backward push to his wheel, he disappears.

  “Lucky he’s still able to do some of that for himself,” I said, “else there’d have to be a lot more running back and forth.” I was running along myself at the mechanical level one does when one’s thoughts are elsewhere, unsure as I was of where these were leading me, not really guarded.

  “Lucky?” Poised, she seemed to incline toward me without perceptibly moving. Her brows were raised. Should I have taken this to mean that the Judge, if he wished, could do more? Hung there, her head drooping, she was very near
me. “It wouldn’t be bearable otherwise,” she said. But I was busy interpreting her movements in my terms, in ours, and didn’t think to ask, “For whom?”

  Anna returned at that moment. “A message come from Miss Cooperman, Miss Ruth. Someone telephone it for her. She send you her love, but she ask you excuse her from dinner.”

  “Oh. I see.” Scarcely seeming to move from me, she has. “Thank you, Anna. Then there’ll be just the one extra. Mr. Blount.”

  But Anna doesn’t take her dismissal; stands there, hands pressed against her starched front, the fingers opened toward Ruth, old nurse looking at her grown child. Had she seen us, or even before we have, our status to be? That evening was the turning point, and Anna, in allowing herself this intimacy before me, was the first to show the turn. “Why you bodder?” she said. One would not have thought that Anna, all heavy Czech shrug and cackle, could speak so low. “Miss Ruth, what’s a use? Why you bodder him—now?” She glanced up at the stairwell. “Why you bodder yourself!” Recollecting herself, or me, she dropped her hands. Leaving, she flung back a warning more in her usual style. “You want change—that Mr. Ping-pong, he always come early.” Before we had a chance to feel the silence she left us with, her head came round the door again. “You look purdy ’nough, that dress,” she said with a side look at me, “you don’t need change.”