The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (63 page)

And there she had met Carolingus. Eighteen years older than she, he had still seemed a man whom many might be glad to marry—a very fine “beefy” with proconsular manners and profile, and all his curls. Actually he had been a cliché, poor dear Carolingus—old Baltimore French, old poor, old hat—and he had been very glad to marry her. For, by heredity, and unfortunately nothing else, he was a patron—an even sadder case than hers. They had recognized each other, or loved—in time it seemed the same thing—at once. The only way he could afford to retain her was to come live in her house, which he did, to her father’s delight—their mutual recognition too was a touching affair. Carolingus had been too shy to dine out (he had only the dispensing talent), and in time, with her and her father’s full acquiescence, the house and what it held might have been taken by any casual guest to be his. At eighty her father retired, and the two men could not have been happier, jogging along in a life of aristocratic pattern gone native, shooting over their two acres for rabbit instead of grouse, and serving up the game with an excellent dandelion wine. And in their contentment Arietta had been happy too. It was so difficult for a Minot not to be happy, not to see, in whatever dried facts and kernels of incident the day provided, the possibility of a soufflé. Even when Carolingus had not long survived her father, she could not avoid thinking that he was better so, just as she could not help seeing, as the long, curlicued, taupe coffin went down the front steps, that it looked exactly like the éclairs of which he had always been so fond.

And then of course, it had become her turn—to dine out. She had let no one know her real situation; she would have been plied with all usually offered an untrained widow—“rent your lovely rooms to teachers; become a nursery school aide”—all the genteel solutions that would trap her forever. No, she was still child enough of her race to risk all on its chimera: that somewhere there was a post where one might exercise an airy, impalpable training which could never be put down on any resumé, somewhere even in this taxable world.

So far, her efforts to renew her father’s contacts in New York had shown her only how faded they were, and how even those old and well-bred enough to remember the breed she sprang from, its always delicate aims, tended to misinterpret when the diner-out was female, however plain. These last months she had been looking about her in the Valley, among people like the Lampeys, whose kindness had the practicality which went with money still fresh in the till. Tonight, for instance, they were having her in to meet a Miss Bissle from Delaware, who was devoting to a state-wide program of hedge roses and bird sanctuaries her one-twenty-fifth share in a great-grandfather’s fortune in explosives, and whose secretary-companion had just died. The Lampeys, drawing Arietta out for Miss Bissle’s benefit, would no doubt ask her to repeat the story they particularly loved—about the time a zebra, a real zebra, had appeared in her garden—although she had other anecdotes she herself preferred. A humanist, she liked stories about people, and the zebra one was bad art besides, having no ending really, and an explanation that was sadly mundane. She would much rather tell about Claude and Henry Clay, about one of the Great Compromiser’s compromises that had never reached the historians. Or about Louis’s patron, a philanthropist who gave in kind only, and who, on being approached at his door by a panhandler who wanted money for a glass eye, was able to invite him into a
cabinet de travail
where he had a box of them. But considering the roses and birds, possibly the zebra was more in line.

Across the river, the last evening light shone on the silver roof of a New York Central streamliner; she had a few minutes’ walk and it was time. Courage, she said to herself, thinking of Roger. You are learning your trade a little late, that is all. You still have $126.35 worth of time. And maybe Miss Bissle would be a jolly hedonist who wanted a “good companion,” although this was not often the conclusion one drew from watching people who watched birds. Remember, in any case, that when the artist is good, it is still the patron who is on trial. Reaching up toward Yves, she blew the dust from his frame. Why should our art, she thought, the art of happiness, be such a drug on the market these days? On that note, she tilted her head and went out, swinging the skirt of her dress, luckily so dateless, and tapping sharply, almost as if she scolded it, the tambour desk.

Meanwhile, a few minutes away, the Lampeys and their house-guests, Miss Bissle and her second cousin Robert, were speaking of Arietta. Parker and Helen Lampey, a white-haired couple in their sixties, had started life together at Christian College, Missouri, but long since, owing to Parker’s rise to the extreme altitudes of international law, had accustomed themselves to the ponderous social mixture to be found there—Swiss bankers, German industrialists, American judge advocates and solid rich like the Bissles. Thirty years of moving intercontinentally had not made them raffish—so far as was known they had never felt an expatriate tingle. What it had done was to give them the eternally pink-cheeked, good-tempered look of summer people; they had in fact been summer people all over the world. By native standards they should have been suffering from all the ills of cosmopolitan riches and ease; actually money, comfort and change had kept them amiable, enabling them to be as kindly as they looked, though considerably more worldly. Parker held several directorships adjacent to Robert, whose share in the family fortune was much larger than Miss Bissle’s, and it was through him they had heard of her needs. And had at once thought of Arietta.

“I made Robert come with me,” said Miss Bissle, “because Mary Thrace, the last one, you know—drank.” She was a large, gray pachyderm of a woman whose eyes blinked slowly. “And I don’t at all. You would think that would make it easier to notice in others, wouldn’t you? But it doesn’t. So I brought Robert.”

“Well, I do,” said her cousin, looking at his drink through the lower half of his bifocals. “Steadily. So you did just right.”

Parker smiled. He knew Robert, a quiet, abstemious sort, widowed early and childless, devoted to rather
sec
philanthropies since. One of those mild, almost expunged men for whom second or third generation fortune was a conscience, not a release.

“Why do men always make themselves out more colorful than they are?” said Miss Bissle, for whom Robert, past fifty, was still a younger cousin.

Helen Lampey glanced at Miss Bissle’s shoes, the flat, self-assured feet of a woman who would never know why. Her cousin looked the way most people who wore glasses like that did—round and tame.

“Is this Mrs. Fay outdoorsy?” said Miss Bissle. “Mary Thrace wasn’t.”

“I don’t know that one thinks of her as ‘out’ or ‘in,’” said Helen slowly. “What would you say, Parker?”

“Delightful either place. In Arietta’s company, where you are always seems just where you want to be. The father was just the same.”

Helen could see Miss Bissle thinking that this was not the way one got things
done.
“She had a year in Africa,” she said hastily. “I should think one would have to be … outdoorsy … there. And of course she grew up right here in the Hudson Valley—why, they caught a copperhead on their place only last year.”

“Still has the old place. Old family hereabouts, the Minots,” said Parker, rising to replenish the drinks.

“Minot!” Robert said softly. “Did you say—Minot?”

“Yes, ever know any of them? Understand they were quite a family at one time.” Busy with the drinks, he did not note Robert’s lack of response, covered in any case by Miss Bissle.

“Trigonocephalous contortrix,”
she said. “They don’t eat birds.”

Robert sat back in his chair. Yes, I knew a Minot, he thought. I knew Victor. Probably isn’t the same family; chances are it couldn’t be. Still, what Lampey had just said about the woman they were expecting—that was just the way Victor had been, turning life rosy and immediate wherever he was, and for adults too, as could be seen in the aureole that went round a room with him—not merely for Robert, the small boy on whom he had occasionally shone his great face, fair, hot and flame-colored as Falstaff’s sun. Looking back on Victor now from the modern distance, it seemed to Robert that he must have dreamed him—that day on the Brandywine for instance, 1912 it must have been, when Victor had taken him fishing, the same day he had insisted on letting Robert join the men lunching at Robert’s grandfather’s table before the stockholders’ meeting, and had fed the boy wine. Robert could see him now, jutting like a Rubens from even that portly group, the starched ears of the napkin he had tied around his cravat shining blue in the water-light reflected from walls that were white instead of walnut because of his choice, the napkin flecked, as lunch went on, with sauces Victor had conspired with the cook, the heavy company meanwhile tasting him with the same negligent appreciation they gave the food, as now and then he sent a sally rolling down the table like a prism, or bent over Robert, saying, “A little more claret with the water, Robert? … And now, if you please—a little more water with the claret.” After lunch, Robert had seen him give his grandfather a sheaf of papers, saying, “Here they are, Bi—Robert and I are going out after turtle.” As they left, one of the men said, “Bi—where do you get your cigars?”—it was Victor who had started people calling Robert’s grandfather “Bi.” “Victor gets them for me in Philadelphia.” At the man’s murmured envy, his grandfather had taken a careful puff, gently guarding the long, firm ash, and had smiled.

And that afternoon on the dock, sitting over the lines that the caramel-colored Negroes in the shack behind them had lent them, had been a time he had remembered always, like a recurrent dream—a day on which absolutely nothing had happened except sun, water and the lax blush of the wine in his limbs. And Victor—doing nothing all afternoon except what he did everywhere, making one feel that whatever you and he were doing at the moment was “it,” that where you were was “here.” They had caught, Robert recalled, two turtles; he remembered being warned of their bite, and informed, lovingly, of their soup. “Victor,” he had asked suddenly, “what are you in?”—meaning chemicals, cotton, tin, this being the way men in those days, at that table, had spoken of what they did. “Oh I’m not ‘in,’” had been the laughing answer. “You might say I’m—
with.
” Breathing hard, Victor had been peering in at the hamper that held the turtles. Robert had looked down at him. “So shall I be,” he had said. “Oh no you won’t. You’re already stuck with it, like these chaps. You’re already
in.
” Victor had risen, puffing. “Best you’ll be able to do is to have somebody around like me—way Bi does.” Robert had considered. “I’ll have you then if I may,” he had said.

Victor’s face had been in shadow, the sun behind him, but after more than forty years Robert could still sense in him the unnameable quality that had sent him fishing in his cravat. “Mmm. If your father doesn’t get to you first,” he said. And Robert’s father had got to him first, as, in Victor’s old age, he had got to Victor. Not a hard man, his father, but a dull one, of the powerful new breed that cherished its dullness for its safety, and meant to impose that, along with the rest of its worldly goods, on its sons. “Like that brew we had at lunch?” Victor had said, as they trotted the hamper along the shore. “And well you might,” he said, mentioning a name, a year. “Pity I’ve only daughters,” he sighed. “Women’ve no palate. Perfume kills it.” Above them, atop the green dunes of lawn that swept to the water’s edge, a small figure waved at them, his grandfather, guests sped, sauntering the veranda alone. “Will I have one, d’ya think?” asked Robert. “Mmm, can’t tell yet.” Robert considered. His grandfather, colorless and quiet, seemed to him much like his father, who drank only Saratoga water. “Does Bi?” he said with interest. Victor smiled, waving back. “He’s got me,” he said.

And Grandfather was like me really, not like Father, Robert thought, returning to the Lampeys’, where conversation, as so often happened elsewhere, had rippled on without him. He was a dull man too, as I am, but like me with the different and often painful dimension of not valuing it, of knowing that somewhere, sometimes in the same room, conversation twinkled past him like a prism, a rosier life went by. Grandfather was like me. But Grandfather had Victor.

And looking at the door through which Emily’s possibility was to come, telling himself that it was midsummer madness—of Victor’s daughters one was dead and the other last heard of years ago in a nursing order in Louisiana—he still told himself that he would not be surprised, not at all, if the woman who came through the door were to be huge and serenely fair, a great Flemish barmaid of a woman, with Victor’s florid curls.

When Arietta walked through the door, he was surprised, at the depth of his disappointment. For what he saw was a slight woman, almost tiny, whose hair, sugared now like preserved ginger, might once, at youth’s best, have been russet, a small creature whose oddly tweaked face—one of those pulled noses, cheeks that looked as if each held the secret cherry of some joke—was the farthest possible from the classic sun-face he remembered. Even if she were some relation, she was nothing like. There was no point in asking, in opening a private memory to future rakings over whenever he paid a duty call on Emily. For what he was looking at, he reminded himself, all he was looking at was Emily’s future companion.

As the evening progressed, he was not so sure. For the Lampeys’ protégée remained dumb. From their baffled glances he judged that this was not usual; he himself would have guessed that Mrs. Fay’s ordinary manner, if she had any, was more mobile. But for whatever reason, her eyes remained veiled, her hands folded in the lap of her pale, somewhat archaic skirt. A certain stubborn aura spread from her, but nothing else, certainly nothing of the subtle emanation they had been promised, and but rarely a word. Only Emily, impervious to this as she was to so much, noticed nothing, intent on numbering the occasional sips Mrs. Fay took of her wine.

Nor could Arietta have explained. She could have said only that almost at once she had felt Miss Bissle to be a person she could never admire. Or tell the truth to, the truth about Miss Bissle being what it was. Not because Miss Bissle was dull—the best patrons necessarily had almost as much dullness as money—but that she did not suffer from it, whereas the real patrons, all the great ones, had a sweetening tremor of self-doubt at the core. If dullness was what had made them keep Minots, then this human (and useful) sweetening was what had made Minots keep them. But I must, thought Arietta. Roger, she said to herself. $126.35. Nevertheless, when Parker deftly introduced Nigeria, on which he had often heard her entertain, she heard herself furnish him three sentences on the cultivation of the cocoa nib, then fall still. It must be stage fright, her first professional engagement. Her father should have told her that the artist’s very piety and scruples were a considerable hindrance when the artist came down to dining out. In desperation she gulped the rest of her wine. Opposite her Miss Bissle blinked slowly at Robert, as if to say “I count on you.”