The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (24 page)

Sweet intoned a name she didn’t catch. “Great fan of yours, this young man. Great fan.” He beamed impartially at them and departed.

“You don’t have to
say
anything.” She smiled up at the young man.

“It’s true, though.” He spoke with a bluntness past having to be put at its ease. “Charles Baldwin put me on to your work.”

“Yes?” she said. She looked down the room. “I miss him here.”

He too looked down the room. “I loved Baldwin,” he said. “Even if you were only a student, he made you feel that you counted.”

She glanced at him more sharply. One seldom heard them use the word “love” in the quiet sense that he had used it—it was contrarily the one four-letter word they still spoke with a sense of shame.

“Yes,” she said. “He was a good man.”

“They never made too much of him here.”

“No,” she said. “I guess the good don’t dramatize easily.”

“That’s true!” he said with a rush. “True in books too, isn’t it?”

She nodded, smiling. “So then—you’re going to specialize in Medieval?”

He grinned at her and, grudgingly, she felt the familiar rictus of interest. Intelligent, of course, she warned herself, but then the room was full of intelligence, beady-eyed with it, full of quick-billed birds, and if the eyes of the younger ones seemed more luminous, it was only because they hadn’t quite learned when to drop the secondary lid, the filmy lid of conformism.

“No,” he said. “I’m giving up the graduate school. I haven’t told anyone yet. I’ve—I’ve got some notes for a book.”

“Oh?”

He bent his head, flushing. “Actually … I wrote a book. While I was in the Army. But I chucked that too. I had just enough sense to see how derivative it was.” He brought out the phrase, as they so often did, like a password.

“But we’re all that,” she said, hearing in her voice a melting note that she decried.

“But this wasn’t just style,” he said, raising his head. “It was full of the best prime anxiety—and all secondhand. It had everybody’s fingerprint on it except mine.”

“And your fingerprint?” she said. “What will that be?”

He drooped again. “Oh, I’m still in boot camp. I know that!” But his doldrums were only those of the young, easily routed by the tensing of a muscle, or rain drying on a pane. He reached toward a plate on the table and popped several pallid triangles into his mouth. “This lost-generation stuff we were tossed this aft—you believe that?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ve never been sure. It’s more important whether you believe it. All of you.”

“We get so confused,” he said. “They’ve got us staring at their navels, not our own. And we’ve got nothing to answer them with—yet.” He cast her a desperate smile and concentrated on an empty cup and saucer, pushing them back and forth on the table. “Guess I’m a freak or something. But I like being in the world. And if I write, oughtn’t it to have some—some of that in it? Oh, I was in the Army—I know there’s enough trouble to go around. But I have to earn mine—not inherit it!” He cast her another agonized glance and bent again to his game with the saucer. “Speech, speech,” he said.

“No,” she said slowly, “you’re not a freak,” and caught an echo of what she had said to Paul. No, you’re not a bastard. But what they are, she thought, I can’t tell them.

“Anyway, that’s why I’m leaving,” he said. “I told myself, okay, I helped mop up a war for them. But I’m damned if I’ll write their books for them.”

His voice was loud and she looked apprehensively around the room, but it had emptied and they were alone.

“I guess I shouldn’t get so angry,” he said, averting a cheek that was as mild as a child’s.

She leaned forward, peering at him with the habit of a lifetime. It’s just the glow they all have once, she told herself, nothing special. It’s like the gaudy light that clings to their first poems; one must always be suspicious of it, for it may be simply the peak of freshness attained at least once by everyone, like the transitory skin bloom on a plain girl.

“I seem to be angry practically all of the time,” he said. But his eyes, before he slanted them away again, were proud.

She looked at him. Maybe, she thought. But in any case why do I watch for it, why have I spent my life watching it? The Freudians would say I was still looking for a son. She drew a deep breath and leaned back. And if so, she thought, we are all, at any age past a certain one, hunting hopefully for our sons.

He’ll think me odd, she thought, staring at him this way without speaking. But she saw that he stood there dreaming, lost in a dream of his own oddness.

Yes, they keep coming, she thought—another and another. And some of them will be the Pauls, who dramatize so easily, to love whom is the worst dead end of fate—for they will knock at every door and never be able to unlock their own. But these others will be coming too. They’ll keep coming, the angry ones, another and another, and when they hold out, they are the bright specks on the retina of the world.

He turned. He had picked up the cup and saucer and was holding them out to her with a tentative smile.

She took them and held them, staring down into the cup. I can’t help it, she thought; I’m of the breed that hopes. Maybe this one wants to live, she thought.
Maybe this one wants to live.
And when you see that—that’s the crux of it. We are all in the dark together, but those are the ones who humanize the dark.

Pouring the cold tea into the cup, her hands trembled so that the cup clinked against the saucer, but when she held out the cup, staring up at him, her wrist was firm.

C
HILDREN GROWING UP IN
the country take their images of integrity from the land. The land, with its changes, is always about them, a pervasive truth, and their midget foregrounds are crisscrossed with minute dramas which are the animalcules of a larger vision. But children who grow in a city where there is nothing greater than the people brimming up out of subways, rivuleting in the streets—these children must take their archetypes where and if they find them.

In P.S. 146, between periods, when the upper grades were shunted through the halls in that important procedure known as “departmental,” although most of the teachers stood about chatting relievedly in couples, Miss Totten always stood at the door of her “home room,” watching us straightforwardly, alone. As, straggling and muffled, we lined past the other teachers, we often caught snatches of upstairs gossip which we later perverted and enlarged; passing before Miss Totten we deflected only that austere look, bent solely on us.

Perhaps, with the teachers, as with us, she was neither admired nor loathed but simply ignored. Certainly none of us ever fawned on her as we did on the harshly blond and blue-eyed Miss Steele, who never wooed us with a smile but slanged us delightfully in the gym, giving out the exercises in a voice like scuffed gravel. Neither did she obsess us in the way of the Misses Comstock, two liverish, stunted women who could have had nothing so vivid about them as our hatred for them, and though all of us had a raffish hunger for metaphor, we never dubbed Miss Totten with a nickname.

Miss Totten’s figure, as she sat tall at her desk or strode angularly in front of us rolling down the long maps over the blackboard, had that instantaneous clarity, one metallic step removed from the real, of the daguerreotype. Her clothes partook of this period, too—long, saturnine waists and skirts of a stuff identical with that in a good family umbrella. There was one like it in the umbrella-stand at home—a high black one with a seamed ivory head. The waists enclosed a vestee of dim, but steadfast lace; the skirts grazed narrow boots of that etiolated black leather, venerable with creases, which I knew to be a sign both of respectability and foot trouble. But except for the vestee, all of Miss Totten, too, folded neatly to the dark point of her shoes, and separated from these by her truly extraordinary length, her face presided above, a lined, ocher ellipse. Sometimes, as I watched it on drowsy afternoons, her face floated away altogether and came to rest on the stand at home. Perhaps it was because of this guilty image that I was the only one who noticed Miss Totten’s strange preoccupation with “Mooley” Davis.

Most of us in Miss Totten’s room had been together as a group since first grade, but we had not seen Mooley since down in second grade, under the elder and more frightening of the two Comstocks. I had forgotten Mooley completely, but when she reappeared I remembered clearly the incident which had given her her name.

That morning, very early in the new term, back in Miss Comstock’s, we had lined up on two sides of the classroom for a spelling bee. These were usually a relief to good and bad spellers alike, since it was the only part of our work which resembled a game, and even when one had to miss and sit down, there was a kind of dreamy catharsis in watching the tenseness of those still standing. Miss Comstock always rose for these occasions and came forward between the two lines, standing there in an oppressive close-up in which we could watch the terrifying action of the cords in her spindling gray neck and her slight smile as a boy or a girl was spelled down. As the number of those standing was reduced, the smile grew, exposing the oversize slabs of her teeth, through which the words issued in a voice increasingly unctuous and soft.

On this day the forty of us still shone with the first fall neatness of new clothes, still basked in that delightful anonymity in which neither our names nor our capacities were already part of the dreary foreknowledge of the teacher. The smart and quick had yet to assert themselves with their flying, staccato hands; the uneasy dull, not yet forced into recitations which would make their status clear, still preserved in the small, sinking corners of their hearts a lorn, factitious hope. Both teams were still intact when the word “mule” fell to the lot of a thin colored girl across the room from me, in clothes perky only with starch, her rusty fuzz of hair drawn back in braids so tightly sectioned that her eyes seemed permanently widened.

“Mule,” said Miss Comstock, giving out the word. The ranks were still full. She had not yet begun to smile.

The girl looked back at Miss Comstock, soundlessly. All her face seemed drawn backward from the silent, working mouth, as if a strong, pulling hand had taken hold of the braids.

My turn, I calculated, was next. The procedure was to say the word, spell it out, and say it again. I repeated it in my mind: “Mule. M-u-l-e. Mule.”

Miss Comstock waited quite a long time. Then she looked around the class, as if asking them to mark well and early this first malfeasance, and her handling of it.

“What’s your name?” she said.

“Ull—ee.” The word came out in a glottal, molasses voice, hardly articulate, the
l’s
scarcely pronounced.

“Lilly?”

The girl nodded.

“Lilly what?”

“Duh-avis.”

“Oh. Lilly Davis. Mmmm. Well, spell ‘mule,’ Lilly.” Miss Comstock trilled out the name beautifully.

The tense brown bladder of the girl’s face swelled desperately, then broke at the mouth. “Mool,” she said, and stopped. “Mmm—oo—”

The room tittered. Miss Comstock stepped closer.

“Mule!”

The girl struggled again. “Mool.”

This time we were too near Miss Comstock to dare laughter.

Miss Comstock turned to our side. “Who’s next?”

I half raised my hand.

“Go on.” She wheeled around on Lilly, who was sinking into her seat. “No. Don’t sit down.”

I lowered my eyelids, hiding Lilly from my sight. “Mule,” I said. “M-u-l-e. Mule.”

The game continued, words crossing the room uneventfully. Some children survived. Others settled, abashed, into their seats, craning around to watch us. Again the turn came around to Lilly.

Miss Comstock cleared her throat. She had begun to smile.

“Spell it now, Lilly,” she said. “Mule.”

The long-chinned brown face swung from side to side in an odd writhing movement. Lilly’s eyeballs rolled. Then the thick sound from her mouth was lost in the hooting, uncontrollable laughter of the whole class. For there was no doubt about it: the long, coffee-colored face, the whitish glint of the eyeballs, the bucking motion of the head suggested it to us all—a small brown quadruped, horse or mule, crazily stubborn, or at bay.

“Quiet!” said Miss Comstock. And we hushed, although she had not spoken loudly. For the word had smirked out from a wide, flat smile and on the stringy neck beneath there was a creeping, pleasurable flush which made it pink as a young girl’s.

That was how Mooley Davis got her name, although we had a chance to use it only for a few weeks, in a taunting singsong when she hung up her coat in the morning, or as she flicked past the little dust-bin of a store where we shed our pennies for nigger-babies and tasteless, mottoed hearts. For after a few weeks, when it became clear that her cringing, mucoused talk was getting worse, she was transferred to the “ungraded” class. This group, made up of the mute, the shambling, and the oddly tall, some of whom were delivered by bus, was housed in a basement part of the school, with a separate entrance which was forbidden us not only by rule but by a lurking distaste of our own.

The year Mooley reappeared in Miss Totten’s room, a dispute in the school system had disbanded all the ungraded classes in the city. Here and there, now, in the back seat of a class, there would be some grown-size boy who read haltingly from a primer, fingering the stubble of his slack jaw. Down in 4-A there was a shiny, petted doll of a girl, all crackling hairbow and nimble wheelchair, over whom the teachers shook their heads feelingly, saying: “Bright as a dollar! Imagine!” as if there were something sinister in the fact that useless legs had not impaired the musculature of a mind. And in our class, in harshly clean, faded dresses which were always a little too infantile for her, her spraying ginger hair cut short now and held by a round comb which circled the back of her head like a snaggle-toothed tiara which had slipped, there was this bony, bug-eyed wraith of a girl who raised her hand instead of saying “Present!” when Miss Totten said “Lilly Davis?” at roll call, and never spoke at all.