In the Absence of Angels

by Hortense Calisher

  “Why that dress?” asked her mother, with fair reason, for it was Hester’s best. “You remember Hester, Miss Onderdonk?” she added.

  Miss Onderdonk looked briefly at Hester with her watery, time-eclipsing stare. There was no indication that she knew Hester’s name, or ever had. One of the white cats lay resiliently on her lap, with the warning look of toleration common to cats when held. Miss Onderdonk, like the creek, might have lived suspended from last September to this, untouched by the flowing year, every crimp in her hair the same. And the parlor? It would have to be seen, for certain.

  Hester sat down quietly next to her mother, whose sewing went on and on, a mild substitute for conversation. For a while, Hester watched the long, important-looking shadows that encroached upon the hills, like enigmas stated every afternoon but never fully solved. Then she leaned carefully toward Miss Onderdonk. “May I go see your parlor?” she asked.

  Miss Onderdonk gave no sign that she had heard. It might have been merely the uncanny luck of the partly deaf that prompted her remark. “People come by here this morning,” she said. “From down to your place. Walk right into the parlor, no by-your-leave. Want to buy my antiques!”

  Mrs. Elkin, needle uplifted, shook her head, commiserating, gave a quick, consolatory mew of understanding, and plunged the needle into the next stitch.

  “Two women — and a man all ninnied out for town,” said Miss Onderdonk. “Old woman had doctored hair. Grape-colored! Hollers at me as if I’m the foreign one. Picks up my Leather-Bound Onderdonk History!” Her explosive breath capitalized the words. The cat, squirting suddenly from her twitching hand, settled itself, an aggrieved white tippet, at a safe distance on the lawn. “ ‘Put that down,’ I said,” said Miss Onderdonk, her eyes as narrow as the cat’s. “ ‘I don’t have no antiques,’ I said. ‘These here are my belongings.’ ”

  Mrs. Elkin put down her sewing. Her broad hands, with the silver-and-gold thimble on one middle finger, moved uncertainly, unlike Miss Onderdonk’s hands, which were pressed flat, in triumph, on her faded, flour-sack lap.

  “I told Elizabeth Smith,” Miss Onderdonk said. “I told her she’d rue the day she ever started taking in Jews.”

  The short word soared in an arc across Hester’s vision and hit the remembered, stereopticon picture of the parlor. The parlor sank and disappeared, a view in an album snapped shut. Now her stare was for her mother’s face, which was pink but inconclusive.

  Mrs. Elkin, raising her brows, made a helpless face at Hester, as if to say, “After all, the vagaries of the deaf ...” She permitted herself a minimal shrug, even a slight spreading of palms. Under Hester’s stare, she lowered her eyes and turned toward Miss Onderdonk again.

  “I thought you knew, Miss Onderdonk,” said her mother. “I thought you knew that we were — Hebrews.” The word, the ultimate refinement, slid out of her mother’s soft voice as if it were on runners.

  “Eh?” said Miss Onderdonk.

  Say it, Hester prayed. She had never before felt the sensation of prayer. Please say it, Mother. Say “Jew.” She heard the word in her own mind, double-voiced, like the ram’s horn at Yom Kippur, with an ugly present bray but with a long, urgent echo as time-spanning as Roland’s horn.

  Her mother leaned forward. Perhaps she had heard it, too — the echo. “But we are Jewish,” she said in a stronger voice. “Mr. Elkin and I are Jewish.”

  Miss Onderdonk shook her head, with the smirk of one who knew better. “Never seen the Mister. The girl here has the look, maybe. But not you.”

  “But —” Mrs. Elkin, her lower lip caught by her teeth, made a sound like a stifled, chiding sigh. “Oh, yes,” she said, and nodded, smiling, as if she had been caught out in a fault.

  “Does you credit,” said Miss Onderdonk. “Don’t say it don’t. Make your bed, lie on it. Don’t have to pretend with me, though.”

  With another baffled sigh, Mrs. Elkin gave up, flumping her hands down on her sewing. She was pinker, not with anger but, somehow, as if she had been cajoled.

  “Had your reasons, maybe.” Miss Onderdonk tittered, high and henlike. “Ain’t no Jew, though. Good blood shows, any day.”

  Hester stood up. “We’re in a book at home, too,” she said loudly. “ ‘The History of the Jews of Richmond, 1769–1917.’ ” Then she turned her back on Miss Onderdonk, who might or might not have heard, on her mother, who had, and stomped down the steps.

  At the foot of the lawn, she stopped behind a bush that hid her from the steps, feeling sick and let-down. She had somehow used Miss Onderdonk’s language. She hadn’t said what she meant at all. She heard her father’s words, amused and sad, as she had heard them once, over her shoulder, when he had come upon her poring over the red-bound book, counting up the references to her grandfather. “That Herbert Ezekiel’s book?” He had looked over her shoulder, twirling the gold cigar-clipper on his watch chain. “Well, guess it won’t hurt the sons of Moses any if they want to tally up some newer ancestors now and then.”

  Miss Onderdonk’s voice, with its little, cut-off chicken laugh, travelled down to her from the steps. “Can’t say it didn’t cross my mind, though, that the girl does have the look.”

  Hester went out onto the highway and walked quickly back to the farmhouse. Skirting the porch, she tiptoed around to one side, over to an old fringed hammock slung between two trees whose broad bottom fronds almost hid it. She swung herself into it, covered herself over with the side flaps, and held herself stiff until the hammock was almost motionless.

  Mrs. Garfunkel and Arline could be heard on the porch, evidently alone, for now and then Mrs. Garfunkel made one of the fretful, absent remarks mothers make to children when no one else is around. Arline had some kind of wooden toy that rumbled back and forth across the porch. Now and then, a bell on it went “ping.”

  After a while, someone came along the path and up on the porch. Hester lay still, the hammock fringe tickling her face. “Almost time for supper,” she heard Mrs. Garfunkel say.

  “Yes,” said her mother’s voice. “Did Hester come back this way?”

  “I was laying down for a while. Arline, dear, did you see Hester?”

  “No, Mummy.” “Ping, ping” went Arline’s voice.

  “ ‘Mummy’!” said Mrs. Garfunkel. “That’s that school she goes to — you know the Kemp-Willard School, on Eighty-sixth?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Elkin. “Quite good, I’ve heard.”

  “Good!” Mrs. Garfunkel sighed, on a sleek note of outrage. “What they soak you, they ought to be.”

  Arline’s toy rumbled across the porch again and was still.

  “She’ll come back when she’s hungry, I suppose,” said Mrs. Elkin. “There was a rather unfortunate little — incident, down the road.”

  “Shush, Arline. You don’t say?”

  Chairs scraped confidentially closer. Mrs. Elkin’s voice dropped to the low, gemütlich whisper reserved for obstetrics, cancer, and the peculations of servant girls. Once or twice, the whisper, flurrying higher, shook out a gaily audible phrase. “Absolutely wouldn’t believe —” “Can you imagine anything so silly?” Then, in her normal voice, “Of course, she’s part deaf, and probably a little crazy from being alone so much.”

  “Scratch any of them and you’re sure to find it,” said Mrs. Garfunkel.

  “Ah, well,” said Mrs. Elkin. “But it certainly was funny,” she added, in a voice velveted over now with a certain savor of reminiscence, “the way she kept insisting.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Mrs. Garfunkel rather flatly. “Yeah. Sure.”

  Someone came out on the back porch and vigorously swung the big bell that meant supper in fifteen minutes.

  “Care for a little drive in the Buick after supper?” asked Mrs. Garfunkel.

  “Why — why, yes,” said Mrs. Elkin, her tones warmer now with the generosity of one whose equipment went beyond the realm of bargains. “Why, I think that would be very nice.”

  “Any time,” said Mrs. Garfunkel. �
��Any time you want stamps or anything. Thought you might enjoy a little ride. Not having the use of a car.”

  The chairs scraped back, the screen door creaked, and the two voices, linked in their sudden, dubious rapprochement, went inside. The scuffling toy followed them.

  Hester rolled herself out of the hammock and stood up. She looked for comfort at the reasonable hills, whose pattern changed only according to what people ate; at the path, down which there was nothing more ambiguous than the hazel-eyed water or the flower that should be scarlet but was orange. While she had been in the hammock, the dusk had covered them over. It had settled over everything with its rapt, misleading veil.

  She walked around to the foot of the front steps. A thin, emery edge of autumn was in the air now. Inside, they must all be at supper; no one else had come by. When she walked into the dining room, they would all lift their heads for a moment, the way they always did when someone walked in late, all of them regarding her for just a minute with their equivocal adult eyes. Something would rise from them all like a warning odor, confusing and corrupt, and she knew now what it was. Miss Onderdonk sat at their table, too. Wherever any of them sat publicly at table, Miss Onderdonk sat at his side. Only, some of them set a place for her and some of them did not.

  The Middle Drawer

  THE DRAWER WAS always kept locked. In a household where the tangled rubbish of existence had collected on surfaces like a scurf, which was forever being cleared away by her mother and the maid, then by her mother, and, finally, hardly at all, it had been a permanent cell — rather like, Hester thought wryly, the gene that is carried over from one generation to the other. Now, holding the small, square, indelibly known key in her hand, she shrank before it, reluctant to perform the blasphemy that the living must inevitably perpetrate on the possessions of the dead. There were no revelations to be expected when she opened the drawer, only the painful reiteration of her mother’s personality and the power it had held over her own, which would rise — an emanation, a mist, that she herself had long since shredded away, parted, and escaped.

  She repeated to herself, like an incantation, “I am married. I have a child of my own, a home of my own five hundred miles away. I have not even lived in this house — my parents’ house — for over seven years.” Stepping back, she sat on the bed where her mother had died the week before, slowly, from cancer, where Hester had held the large, long-fingered, competent hand for a whole night, watching the asphyxiating action of the fluid mounting in the lungs until it had extinguished the breath. She sat facing the drawer.

  It had taken her all her own lifetime to get to know its full contents, starting from the first glimpses, when she was just able to lean her chin on the side and have her hand pushed away from the packets and japanned boxes, to the last weeks, when she had made a careful show of not noticing while she got out the necessary bankbooks and safe-deposit keys. Many times during her childhood, when she had lain blandly ill herself, elevated to the honor of the parental bed while she suffered from the “autointoxication” that must have been 1918’s euphemism for plain piggishness, the drawer had been opened. Then she had been allowed to play with the two pairs of pearled opera glasses or the long string of graduated white china beads, each with its oval sides flushed like cheeks. Over these she had sometimes spent the whole afternoon, penciling two eyes and a pursed mouth on each bead, until she had achieved an incredible string of minute, doll-like heads that made even her mother laugh.

  Once while Hester was in college, the drawer had been opened for the replacement of her grandmother’s great sunburst pin, which she had never before seen and which had been in pawn, and doggedly reclaimed over a long period by her mother. And for Hester’s wedding her mother had taken out the delicate diamond chain — the “lavaliere” of the Gibson-girl era — that had been her father’s wedding gift to her mother, and the ugly, expensive bar pin that had been his gift to his wife on the birth of her son. Hester had never before seen either of them, for the fashion of wearing diamonds indiscriminately had never been her mother’s, who was contemptuous of other women’s display, although she might spend minutes in front of the mirror debating a choice between two relatively gimcrack pieces of costume jewelry. Hester had never known why this was until recently, when the separation of the last few years had relaxed the tension between her mother and herself — not enough to prevent explosions when they met but enough for her to see obscurely, the long motivations of her mother’s life. In the European sense, family jewelry was Property, and with all her faultless English and New World poise, her mother had never exorcised her European core.

  In the back of the middle drawer, there was a small square of brown-toned photograph that had never escaped into the large, ramshackle portfolio of family pictures kept in the drawer of the old break-front bookcase, open to any hand. Seated on a bench, Hedwig Licht, aged two, brows knitted under ragged hair, stared mournfully into the camera with the huge, heavy-lidded eyes that had continued to brood in her face as a woman, the eyes that she had transmitted to Hester, along with the high cheekbones that she had deplored. Fat, wrinkled stockings were bowed into arcs that almost met at the high-stretched boots, which did not touch the floor; to hold up the stockings, strips of calico matching the dumpy little dress were bound around the knees.

  Long ago, Hester, in her teens, staring tenaciously into the drawer under her mother’s impatient glance, had found the little square and exclaimed over it, and her mother, snatching it away from her, had muttered, “If that isn’t Dutchy!” But she had looked at it long and ruefully before she had pushed it back into a corner. Hester had added the picture to the legend of her mother’s childhood built up from the bitter little anecdotes that her mother had let drop casually over the years.

  She saw the small Hedwig, as clearly as if it had been herself, haunting the stiff rooms of the house in the townlet of Oberelsbach, motherless since birth and almost immediately stepmothered by a woman who had been unloving, if not unkind, and had soon borne the stern, Haustyrann father a son. The small figure she saw had no connection with the all-powerful figure of her mother but, rather, seemed akin to the legion of lonely children who were a constant motif in the literature that had been her own drug — the Sara Crewes and Little Dorrits, all those children who inhabited the familiar terror-struck dark that crouched under the lash of the adult. She saw Hedwig receiving from her dead mother’s mother — the Grandmother Rosenberg, warm and loving but, alas, too far away to be of help — the beautiful, satin-incrusted bisque doll, and she saw the bad stepmother taking it away from Hedwig and putting it in the drawing room, because “it is too beautiful for a child to play with.” She saw all this as if it had happened to her and she had never forgotten.

  Years later, when this woman, Hester’s step-grandmother, had come to the United States in the long train of refugees from Hitler, her mother had urged the grown Hester to visit her, and she had refused, knowing her own childishness but feeling the resentment rise in her as if she were six, saying, “I won’t go. She wouldn’t let you have your doll.” Her mother had smiled at her sadly and had shrugged her shoulders resignedly. “You wouldn’t say that if you could see her. She’s an old woman. She has no teeth.” Looking at her mother, Hester had wondered what her feelings were after forty years, but her mother, private as always in her emotions, had given no sign.

  There had been no sign for Hester — never an open demonstration of love or an appeal — until the telephone call of a few months before, when she had heard her mother say quietly, over the distance, “I think you’d better come,” and she had turned away from the phone saying bitterly, almost in awe, “If she asks me to come, she must be dying!”

  Turning the key over in her hand, Hester looked back at the composite figure of her mother — that far-off figure of the legendary child, the nearer object of her own dependence, love, and hate — looked at it from behind the safe, dry wall of her own “American” education. We are told, she thought, that people who d
o not experience love in their earliest years cannot open up; they cannot give it to others; but by the time we have learned this from books or dredged it out of reminiscence, they have long since left upon us their chill, irremediable stain.

  If Hester searched in her memory for moments of animal maternal warmth, like those she self-consciously gave her own child (as if her own childhood prodded her from behind), she thought always of the blue-shot twilight of one New York evening, the winter she was eight, when she and her mother were returning from a shopping expedition, gay and united in the shared guilt of being late for supper. In her mind, now, their arrested figures stood like two silhouettes caught in the spotlight of time. They had paused under the brightly agitated bulbs of a movie-theatre marquee, behind them the broad, rose-red sign of a Happiness candy store. Her mother, suddenly leaning down to her, had encircled her with her arm and nuzzled her, saying almost anxiously, “We do have fun together, don’t we?” Hester had stared back stolidly, almost suspiciously, into the looming, pleading eyes, but she had rested against the encircling arm, and warmth had trickled through her as from a closed wound reopening.

  After this, her mother’s part in the years that followed seemed blurred with the recriminations from which Hester had retreated ever farther, always seeking the remote corners of the household — the sofa-fortressed alcoves, the store closet, the servants’ bathroom — always bearing her amulet, a book. It seemed to her now, wincing, that the barrier of her mother’s dissatisfaction with her had risen imperceptibly, like a coral cliff built inexorably from the slow accretion of carelessly ejaculated criticisms that had grown into solid being in the heavy fullness of time. Meanwhile, her father’s uncritical affection, his open caresses, had been steadiness under her feet after the shifting waters of her mother’s personality, but he had been away from home on business for long periods, and when at home he, too, was increasingly a target for her mother’s deep-burning rage against life. Adored member of a large family that was almost tribal in its affections and unity, he could not cope with this smoldering force and never tried to understand it, but the shield of his adulthood gave him a protection that Hester did not have. He stood on equal ground.