The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (16 page)

And now I can look my children in the eye again. The Russians needn’t think themselves the only ones to rehabilitate people posthumously. We Southrons can take care of our own.

A
T A QUARTER OF
eight, young Miss Abel was prodded out of sleep as usual by the harsh clanging of the bell in the church around the corner. It went on for as much as forty or fifty times, each clank plummeting instantly into silence, as if someone were beating iron against a stone. She did not get up at once, but lay there, seeing herself rise with the precision of a somnambulist, go from bathroom to kitchenette in the blind actions which would dissolve the sediment of sleep still in her eyes, in her bones. In her throat, a sick resistance to the day had already begun its familiar mounting, the pulse of a constant ache on which sleep had put only a delusory quietus. Lying there, she wondered which unwitting day of the past had been the one on which she must have exchanged the bright morning dower of childhood, that indolent assurance that the day was a nimbus of possibilities, for this heavy ache that collected in the throat like a catarrhal reminder that as yesterday was dusty, so would be today.

There had been nothing in her childhood, certainly, to warrant that early dowered expectancy, nothing in the girlhood spent in her mother’s rooming house near that part of the Delaware River consecrated to the Marcus Hook refineries, where the great fungoid tanks bloomed oppressively over all, draining the frontal streets like theirs, which were neither country lanes nor town blocks, but only in-between passageways where the privet died hardily, without either pavement or neon to console one for its death. In that bland, unimpassioned climate the days had been blurred exhalations of the factories, the river and the people, dragging on into a darkness that was like the fainter, sooted, interchangeable breath of all of these. Perhaps the days had rung with expectancy for her, nevertheless, because from the first, for as long as she could remember, she had been so sure of getting out, away. As, of course, she had.

She swung sideways out of bed and clamped her feet on the floor, rose and trundled to the bathroom, the kitchenette. Boiled coffee was the quickest and most economical; watching the grounds spray and settle on the bubbling water, she took comfort from the small action. Everywhere in New York now toasters clicked, clocks rang, and people rising under the weight of the new day took heart from each little milestone of routine, like children, walking past a strange paling, who touch placatingly every third picket, hoping this will bring them through safe.

Fumbling without choice for one of the two dresses of the daily requisite black, she peered out the window into the alley beyond. The slick gray arms of the dwarfed tree, which grew, anonymous and mineral, from its humus of dust and concrete, were charitably fuzzed with light, and above them the water tanks and girders of the roofs beyond stood out against the fine yellow morning, clarified and glistening. Night could still down the city, absorbing it for all its rhinestone effrontery, but the mornings crept in like applicants for jobs, nuzzling humbly against the masked granite, saying hopefully, “Do you suppose … is there anything to be made of me?”

Behind her, except for the unmade bed, the room had the fierce, wooden neatness of the solitary, beginning householder. She turned from the window and made up the bed swiftly so that the immobile room might greet her so, with all its rigid charm of permanence, at nightfall. Now there was nothing out of place except the letter from her mother, read and left crumpled on the table the night before.

None of the rooms in the house at Marcus Hook had ever really belonged to her mother, her sister Pauline or herself. The changing needs of the roomers came first—the workmen who had a wife coming or a wife leaving, the spinsters who made a religion of drafts and the devotional bath, the elderly male and female waifs who had to “retrench” farther and farther back into the cheapest recesses of the house, until the final retrenchment, to the home of a relative, could be delayed no longer.

The family, forever shifting, took what was left over. The best times would have been when the three of them slept in the big front sitting-room together, had not these also been the bad periods when the larger rooms went begging, and they and the most unimportant, delinquent roomer were almost on the same footing. But at all times, mornings the kitchen was never clear of “privilegers,” evenings the parlor creaked and sighed with those for whom solitude was the worst of privileges. And late at night when, in no matter what bed or room one might be, there was still the padding in the corridors, the leakage of faucets, then the house rumored its livelihood most plainly of all, having no being other than in the sneaked murmurs, the soft crepitations of strangers.

She sipped the coffee, ate a roll, smoothing out her mother’s letter. “Mrs. Tregarthen, she lived in New York once, says you are down in a terrible neighborhood and for the same money you could get into a business girls club. The Tregarthens still have the sitting-room thank God. I am so glad you are fixed in the Section Manager job, all that time you studied was not wasted after all. They say even the elevator girls have to be college now. You must be on your feet a lot too, be sure you have the proper shoes. Will you use the store discount and buy Pauline a white dress for graduation, size 14, something not fancy I can dye later. Let me know how much. I am so glad of the discount.”

No use to explain again to her mother that she could only buy dark “employee” clothes for herself on the discount. She would send Pauline the dress and take care of the difference herself. All the four years of her scholarship her mother had worked to help her out, in mingled pride and worry over this queer chick who asked nothing better than to waste her real good looks over the books, after something, God knows what all, except that you could be sure it was something that couldn’t be touched or twisted to use, and at best could only be taught. Her mother had been right. The year she was graduated Ph.D.’s were a dime a dozen, and the colleges had still less use for Miss Abel, A.B. She had learned that “getting out” meant, sooner or later, having to “get in” somewhere else. But her mother was pleased, now that she was fixed in her job. And glad of the discount.

Now that she was ready, she stared possessively at the safe shell of the room, all she had been able to salvage of her dream of solitary, inviolate pursuit. Each morning she had to resist the binding urge to stay, nestled in familiarity. She forced herself to put her hand on the knob of the outer door, meanwhile contrarily building up the temptation of the ideal day. Projecting herself into the reassuring feel of the chair, she saw herself settled there for hours, retreated into the subtle stream of a book, hugging emotions siphoned through another’s words, immolating herself happily on the altar of a problem, an impasse, which might be dropped as one awakens from a dream, with the closing of the book. She wrenched the door open quickly and shut it behind her, giving it a shake to test the lock.

Once outside, she felt lighthearted, the decision for that day, at least, being over. Down here the neighborhood eased itself into living with the unconstraint of a slattern who has no plans. Across the street, in front of the Olive Tree Inn for Homeless Men, one of the flophouses run by the city, a few rumpled bums lounged like fallen dolls, staring vacantly with their frayed, inoffensive look. They were the safest people in the world to live among, she thought, for one could no more focus on their identities than they on the world around them; in their eyes there was never the shrewd look of the striving, but only the bleared gentleness of humiliation, and their dreams were not of women.

As she walked the long blocks westward to the BMT, the streets filled with people who had the crisp silhouette of destination, but as she neared them, going down the subway stairs, she could see the mouths still swollen with the unreserve of sleep, under the eyes the endearing childish puffs of the rudely awakened. Since she was travelling uptown against the morning rush, she got a seat almost at once and, settling into it, looked at the people opposite, who bobbed up and down with the blank withdrawal of the subwayite. Some mornings, translating them into their animal counterparts, she returned to the lidded stare immured in the bravely rouged, batrachian folds of some old harridan, traced the patient, naglike decline of a nose, watched the gibbon antics of the wizened messengers of the garment district as they pushed their eternally harrying, dwarfing packages. Once inside the store where she worked, exposed to them “on the floor,” they all became the customer, the enemy, sauntering along freely in their enviably uncaged day, striking at her with the inimical, demanding shafts of their eyes, but here, until then, she could feel a wave of tenderness, of identification with them, which possessed her with a pity that included herself.

Thinking of the varied jobs toward which the people in the car were travelling, she remembered the prying regard of Miss Shotwell, the head of the store’s “interviewing,” and heard again the chill beads of words which had dropped from the deceptive, ductile bloom of her face.

“We can get any number of college graduates these days. We’re only interested in those with a real vocation for merchandising.” The protuberant eyes scrutinized with a glance which seemed to come from the whole eyeball.

“I worked in a store for a year before I went to college. And all my summer jobs were in department stores.” She had sat there quietly, trying to shine with vocation, but thinking of those sweating miserable summers which had helped make possible the long winter hibernations in the libraries, she had wished herself back among the books, feeling the nausea of the displaced.

“H’mmm.” The sedulously fluffed hair bent over the folder on the desk between them. “Your extracurricular leadership record was really very good.” The head cocked to one side as if deliberating an article of purchase, then bent to the folder again in a gesture either habitual or posed, for the folder was closed. “Philosophy major, fine arts minor. That’s not so good. We’d rather have it business administration, let’s say, or mathematics.”

“Something—more concrete?”

“Exactly,” said Miss Shotwell, bringing her head back to center, her face obviously readied for the fulsome courtesies of rejection.

Behind the chic camouflage of her own smart appearance, that slick armor which she had learned to assume with the wiliness of the job-hunter, she had felt shaken with hatred for these people who had the power to let you in, who could annihilate, with a dainty, deprecatory finger, spheres of value which were not their own.

“It does not seem to have impaired my ‘leadership,’ as you call it,” she had said at last, anger forcing the gassy word on to her tongue.

The flickering interest had revived in the fish stare opposite. Miss Shotwell had smiled almost in approval. “Perhaps we can use you after all,” she had said. “We like them to be aggressive.”

Them. In the past year she had indeed become one of “them,” learning the caitiff acquiescence, the shiny readiness which would cover the segregation of self, acquiring that whole vocabulary of pretense forced upon those who must make themselves commercially valuable, or die.

She looked around now at the others herded together with her in the car. Perhaps her mistake had been to think that she was alone in this; perhaps each of her neighbors was sitting stiffened in the same intent misery before the deadening span of the day to come, each crouched protectively over the misfit hunch or sore of some disparity which had not fitted in. She looked again, but the set faces looked back at hers stonily, as if not all the prying tentacles of her pity could slip behind the mask which each had assumed for his journey through the ambuscade of the practical. Bending her head over the interlocked hands in her lap, she loosened them, cupped them softly over the unwanted extrusion of her compassion.
Everybody,
she said to herself in tentative kinship, each of them, of
us,
locked up alone with the felony of his private difference.

The car rocked to her station and she pressed out with the others, up the stairs into a brief interlude of sunshine and into the swinging door of the employees’ entrance, kept constantly ajar by the procession of batting hands. Inside the olive green locker room she found the number of her own compartment and set her hat and coat away, smelling with a dull sense of recognition the basement’s odor of wax and disinfectant, interfused with the vague patchouli of congregated women. One after the other, as they took off the bright spring hats and coats which had differentiated them up to now, they sank into conformity, leveled by the common denominator of their dark dresses as if by the command of some sullen alchemist.

Nodding diffidently to the few she knew by sight, she joined them on the escalator to the main floor, her spirits sinking as she rose. Upstairs in the glove department where she had been assistant section manager for the past two months, the salesgirls lounged negligently behind the counters, waiting for the opening bell to ring and the first trickle of customers.

“Good morning,” she said.

“’Morning, Miss Abel.” They were polite but reserved, with the resentment of old stagers who see a neophyte brought in to supervise.

“Miss Baxter in yet?” She asked only to make conversation, but was warned by their suddenly innocent gazes. Baxter must have come in drunk again.

“She’s behind—in the cubbyhole,” said one of the girls, and bent over, stifling a snicker.

Behind the counter there was a door which led into the cavity under the escalator, a space big enough for two people if one sat in the single chair and the other stood with head bent under the declivity of the ceiling. The girls seldom used it, ducking in for an aspirin, or when a garter had broken and there was not time to go off the floor. Once or twice, when the hysteria of milling people around her had overwhelmed her with a feeling of nakedness, of exposure to too much and too many, she had crept in there herself for a moment of poise. She opened the door and went in, closing it behind her.