The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (55 page)

Meanwhile, allegory still pursued me, though from another corner. Other girls my age were becoming women, flirts, sirens—at least girls—without trouble, and some avidly; it was my mother’s cross that I had to be nagged there inch by recalcitrant inch. Daintiness, my mother said, was its essence; once a woman’s daintiness got through to a man, all consummations devoutly to be wished for—such as a trousseau of one’s own triple-monogrammed tea napkins—soon followed. To me the word was “daindee,” as our German cook crooned it—“Oooh, so daindee!” over anything fancy—and as she looked on her day off, a clumsy veil of white obscuring everything human, excess of starch in the blouse, powder on the neck, fish-net gloves on her honest, corned-beef hands. To me even a bath was an assault on one’s boundaries. Cleanliness was hypocrisy, dirt “sincere.” Still the other ethic followed me, ruthlessly inserted in my ear along with the morning and evening soapings, and always with some elaboration peculiar to my mother—witness her
divertissement
on the Safety Pin.

I belong to the tail end of the button-traumaed generation. The embarrassments of the zipper-reared are quite otherwise—gaps in the memory or the metal, a fear of being locked in. We lived in the opposite fear of—the very words still have a blush and a hush to them—things “dropping down.” Camisoles, panties and petticoats, even when snapped or hook-and-eyed, still required ceaseless vigilance with the needle—and thread was fallible, not nylon. Hence the reign of the safety pin, now used only by cleaners and babies. But the protocol of its use was strict. Emergency supply was always in the purse—in my mother’s a chain of small gold ones. In case of “accident” one retired somewhere—to the washroom at Wanamaker’s for instance—pinned “things up” and rushed home in a pink state of guilt, praying all the while that one would not be knocked down by a car on the way. For the core of the ethic—known, as I found later, to almost every girl of the era—was: “What if you are rushed suddenly to the hospital, and
there they discover
…?” Dream sequences often finished the line, sung above our shrinking forms by hosts of angelic interns forever lost to us: “She has a safety pin in her corset cover!” The worst offense, of course, against sense as well as neatness, was to start the day or the journey already pinned. Hence my mother’s variation, known to me always as The Gentleman from Philadelphia.

There was once a girl who was being courted by such a gentleman. Whether there was any significance in his origin, I don’t know; perhaps—this being the unsolicited detail with which my mother often fleshed a fable—he just was.
She
was one of those girls (not unknown to me) who were hastily groomed on the surface, at the cost of squalor below. For a while, said my mother, the girl was able to string him along. But, said she, you can’t string them along forever—tangentially I tag this as the single allusion she ever made to sex. There came a day when he arrived with intent to propose. It was a warm occasion; the girl was wearing a peekaboo blouse. Perhaps it was warm enough, say, for him to take off his driving goggles and lean closer. Anyway, just as he was about to declare … he saw that her shoulder strap was attached with—you’ve got it. The gentleman went back where he came from. And the girl is single yet.

It has since struck me that she was well shet of him. But at the time—“
Now
do you see?” said my mother, and I mumbled back, “Yerse.”

In time of course, through vanity and the sly connivance of the lingerie-makers, I became as “insincere” as any other “nice” woman, although I never quite convinced my mother of it—or myself. “Fine feathers,
on top
,” she would greet a new costume of mine, and sure enough, within minutes, some detail of my toilette would mysteriously unravel. I scrubbed my wedding ring until some of the stones fell out, because she had a habit of murmuring, “Dirty diamonds,” whenever she saw an overdressed woman, and I primped for hospital visits as courtesans once may have for their levées. Wanamaker’s was torn down, but I sometimes still dreamed myself in its washroom, standing there with the top button gone from my skirt waistband, holding one gaunt safety pin the size of a salmon’s skeleton. And I never was able to look a real safety pin straight in its fishy, faintly libidinous eye.

But now—let us return to that table in London. There sit the ladies, swan-necked and squinting—what does the slightly piscine shape of their squint remind me of?—at me. And there, somewhat blue-lawed about the jowl at the very plurality of the situation, sit the men. And me—what I am thinking? As any woman would be, of course, of what I have on underneath. Being me, I am also thinking that I am after all the child, at last the Good Child of my mother, and that the scene before me—although of course she could not possibly countenance it—is the accident we have both been waiting for all my life.

For what I happen to have on underneath—nothing more of course, or less, than what thousands of Rockefeller Center secretaries, window mannequins and ladies out for the evening in Rochester, Elmira and Binghamton are wearing—is a La Belle Hélène Walzette, Model 11A56, Merrie Widowe Waiste Pincher, nyl. Ice. blk., size 36 B. Edwardian it may be, but not in execution; no amount of wine will unravel me—Seventh Avenue expertise has machine-tooled me into it and only the hotel chambermaid will get me out. And its modesty is unimpeachable—is, in fact, Mail Order. This, indeed, is the accident. For what I had ordered, in the rush before sailing, was the nyl. Ice. wht—in the catalogue very daindee, with the usual sprig of mashed ribbon rosebuds in the décolletage. But what I have got on—sent me by one of the Eumenides brooding darkly in Best’s warehouse—is the blk. And the blk. is not with rosebuds. Blissfully I feel, beneath my sweater, what it
is
with—something to end traumas forever. There, centered where once button or pin might have resided, now lies, locking me in by patents pending, a round red cabochon glass jewel about the size of a nickel, La Belle Hélène’s star ruby clasp, my order of merit, winking rosy and waiting for the light.

Or is it? Dare I? I look heavenward, seeing at first only a dim, brackish ceiling in St. John’s Wood. But in dreams one does not always rehearse only one’s anxieties. Sometimes one dreams that one is walking downtown in one’s Walzette, and wakes to find—that one is. And better yet—that Mother is watching. Here I am then, I say upwards. See me now, met with my accident just as you warned me, but in what aristocratic company! There sits Lady Catherine, who began it, surrounded by several others who may well count sixteen quarterings, whatever that is, among them—if not all in one. There indeed sits Mrs. Potter Palmer modern version, with her sweater-tureen in her hand. Mother, you were right. And now, if I do what it appears I must, aren’t I?

And immediately I am answered. Nothing supernatural about it—if there is any moral to this fable it is that, unbecoming as we at first may seem to our parents, in the end we become them. At the moment, however, I prefer to think that the suggestion comes via the grate, where a piece of nutty slack slides down,
sotto voce. Ask the lady across from you.

I do so. I tip Frau Ewig a wink toward the others, signaling, “Shall we join them?” She seems larger and redder in the face than when I last noticed her. Not to my entire surprise, she shakes her head imperceptibly. Under my stare her face empurples further.
“Kann nicht!”
she murmurs at last, her lips unmoving; and as her seams stretch with her breathing, I see why—underneath each of her vast arms, a baleful, metallic winking-back. I look the other way. More’s the pity! Anthropologist or no, Frau Ewig was reared in Vienna, and I think I know how. Like me. But I don’t see how I can help her. Still, a pity that in every apotheosis of the Good Child, there must be, clinging to the bottom of the ladder and gazing upward, a Bad.

My mother’s face, up there like a decal through which I can still see the ceiling, is of course seen by no one but me. She has her eyes closed, knowing, as usual, just what I am about to do, and she cannot quite approve this modern ending to her fable. But she also cannot help smiling. Listen to them, the heavenly host, not of angels but of interns, as leaning down with her in the center of the circle they sing it to me
a cappella, con amore …
“and now we discover … she has got …” (soft Gilbertian surprise) “No! She has not! … Yes she has, yes she
has,
she has got …”
(pianissimo, ma non troppo)
“a roo-oo-ooo-ooooby … yes, a ruby, ruby, ruby, ruby, ruby … a Star Ruby in her corset cover!”

And as, with my hand bent a little at the wrist, I make my gesture, all the company, leaning forward with interest—and perhaps even my mother—may see that I have.

H
E AND ESTHER WALKED OUT
of the marriage clerk’s office, past the other waiting couples and the wedding parties, out into the open air. Down here, the air had a remembered municipal grayness, as if its natural color had long since been gritted over with a light statistical dust. Surely he and Marie had gone to a different place to be married—or else this one had been remodeled. Jim recalled a dirty brownish cubicle stained with the tobacco-juice whiff of small-time political stews, and a clerk with a whine and a conniving eye. This afternoon, the office had shone with a kind of cleanly bureaucracy, and the clerk, cool and dentifriced, had refused Jim’s large tip with a grave, ritual shake of the head.

Jim took Esther’s elbow and guided her through the corridors, down the steps to the pavement, where still more couples stood about in uncertain tableaux. Dingily new, the city edifices pressed too near, as if seen gigantically close in an opera glass, and looking at one façade, one felt another at the small of one’s back. Built in the hope of a Roman dignity, they had managed only a republican durability. They’re too close together, he thought—that’s it. There’s not enough space between them for majesty.

He hailed a cab, and got in after her. The driver looked inquiringly over a shoulder. “Drive uptown—up Fifth,” Jim said. The driver shrugged and started off.

Jim settled back and felt for Esther’s hand. As soon as they were away, out of that neighborhood, he would be released from his compulsion to compare, to remember. From here on, it would all be new. He was half aware that his unwilling memories were the more painful because his first marriage had been embarked upon in the same golden warmth and faith, the same sense of inevitability. It had been an October day, that day full of scudding cloud and changeableness, and this day, more than twelve years later, was all moist and May, with a muffled vibrato of approaching summer. But in essence each day held the same fixed dream of rightness, of an incredibly lucky voyage with the one person without whom the world dulled. In essence, one day had been, and one day was, the happiest day of his life. It was as if, carefully putting away a freshly inked guaranty in a drawer, he had come upon another, gilt-scrolled and bright and ridiculously voided by time.

He looked at Esther, her serenely musing profile nodding faintly up and down with the movement of the cab. He was beyond seeing her, he knew, in any literal terms as a tall, good-looking girl with dark-blond hair, with features whose imbalance, stopping just short of strangeness, struck one on further scrutiny with their curiously personal beauty. For four years now, from the very beginning of the affair, she had seemed to him a medal struck once, and superbly, for him. Now she looked, as always, fresh and lovely. She always dressed, with wise chic, for the second glance, but today, in a gray dress he had seen once before, and a small spray of veil, she had been perhaps especially careful to avoid the flowery smirk of the bride. Neither of them had brought any huge emphasis to bear on today’s ceremony, held as they had been by an unspoken agreement that for two who had so long been lovers this would be silly, perhaps gross. On their way downtown, stopping around the corner from her place to buy her a camellia at the florist shop they always went to, he had found a pleasing element of continuity, almost a safety, in the benedictory smile of the Greek, in the way he handed the flower, as usual, to Jim, and watched, bowing a little, while Jim handed the flower to Esther. She was wearing it pinned not on her shoulder but on her belt.

She looked around at him now with a smile, a slight pressure of the hand in his, then returned to her wide-eyed contemplation of the driver’s back, and he saw with a rush of warmth that she was surrounded by her own dream of rightness. If she was thinking of her own first wedding—that phlox-and-roses still life of a Connecticut lawn more than ten years back—he did not begrudge her this. Framed in black, it could lie in her memory only with the finality of a mourning card. The house and lawn of her parents had long since been sold; the boy, with whom she had never shared a house with, dead within two months in Korea, could only tug importunately now and then at the rim of her remembrance. In a frightening way, he envied her this cameo of a memory, which must have for her the perfect finish given only by death. For her, there was no Marie, no young Jimmie, standing forever wounded, forever suppliant, on the fringe of conscience.

He opened his mouth to speak, because one of them must soon speak, and closed it again, in fear of the random significance of the first thing to be said. It was a feeling like that on the birthdays of his boyhood, when he had hesitated, wary, at the childish chant “If you do it on your birthday, you do it all year around—if you cry on your birthday, you cry the whole year round.” The long affair had been an idyll, hardly shaken by the long divorce, so sure had they been of themselves and of the deep morality of the end in view. Now that they had it, he wanted to touch wood. He had never been more sure of the end; only the beginning troubled him a little.

“Decided where to, Mister?” the driver asked.

Jim looked over at Esther. She turned the palms of her hands upward, then clasped them lightly in her lap. “Where to …” she said, smiling, certain. He gave the driver the address of her apartment and leaned back, stretching his legs.

The cab turned down her street—still hers, even though he had come there for years and his things were there now. “Maybe we should have gone off to the country somewhere,” he said. “Would you have liked that?”