The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (4 page)

“Well, well, well,” Robert said. His manners, always good, were never so to the point of clichés, which would be for him what nervous
gaffes
were for other people. He coughed, rubbed his cheek with the back of his hand, looked at the hand, and stuffed the Kleenex into the pocket of his shorts. “How was camp?”

Mario’s eyebrows went up. The girl was twenty, surely, Peter thought.

“All right,” she said. She gave Robert the stiff smile again and looked down into her lap. “I like helping children. They can use it.” Her hands folded on top of the gloves, then inched under and hid beneath them.

“Susan’s been counselling at a camp which broke up early because of a polio scare,” Robert said as he sat down. “She’s going to use Vince’s room while I’m away, until college opens.”

“Oh—” She looked up at Peter. “Then you aren’t Vince?”

“No. I just dropped in. I’m Peter Birge.”

She gave him a neat nod of acknowledgment. “I’m glad, because I certainly wouldn’t want to inconvenience—”

“Did you get hold of your mother in Reno?” Robert asked quickly.

“Not yet. But she couldn’t break up her residence term anyway. And Arthur must have closed up the house here. The phone was disconnected.”

“Arthur’s Susan’s stepfather,” Robert explained with a little laugh. “Number three, I think. Or is it four, Sue?”

Without moving, she seemed to retreat, so that again there was nothing left for the observer except the girl against the column, any one of a dozen with the short, anonymous nose, the capped hair, the foot arched in the trim shoe, and half an iris glossed with an expertly aimed photoflood. “Three,” she said. Then one of the hidden hands stole out from under the gloves, and she began to munch evenly on a fingernail.

“Heavens, you haven’t still got that
habit
!” Robert said.

“What a heavy papa you make, Roberto,” Mario said.

She flushed, and put the hand back in her lap, tucking the fingers under. She looked from Peter to Mario and back again. “Then you’re not Vince,” she said. “I didn’t think you were.”

The darkness increased around the lamps. Behind Peter, the court had become brisk with lights, windows sliding up, and the sound of taps running.

“Guess Vince fell asleep. I’d better get him up and send him on his way.” Robert shrugged, and rose.

“Oh, don’t! I wouldn’t want to be an inconvenience,” the girl said, with a polite terror which suggested she might often have been one.

“On the contrary.” Robert spread his palms, with a smile, and walked down the hall. They heard him knocking on a door, then his indistinct voice.

In the triangular silence, Mario stepped past Peter and slid the window up softly. He leaned out to listen, peering sidewise at the window to the right. As he was pulling himself back in, he looked down. His hands stiffened on the ledge. Very slowly he pulled himself all the way in and stood up. Behind him a tin ventilator clattered inward and fell to the floor. In the shadowy lamplight his too classic face was like marble which moved numbly. He swayed a little, as if with vertigo.

“I’d better get out of here!”

They heard his heavy breath as he dashed from the room. The slam of the outer door blended with Robert’s battering, louder now, on the door down the hall.

“What’s down there?” She was beside Peter, otherwise he could not have heard her. They took hands, like strangers met on a narrow footbridge or on one of those steep places where people cling together more for anchorage against their own impulse than for balance. Carefully they leaned out over the sill. Yes—it was down there, the shirt, zebra-striped, just decipherable on the merged shadow of the courtyard below.

Carefully, as if they were made of eggshell, as if by some guarded movement they could still rescue themselves from disaster, they drew back and straightened up. Robert, his face askew with the impossible question, was behind them.

After this, there was the hubbub—the ambulance from St. Luke’s, the prowl car, the two detectives from the precinct station house, and finally the “super,” a vague man with the grub pallor and shamble of those who live in basements. He pawed over the keys on the thong around his wrist and, after several tries, opened the bedroom door. It was a quiet, unviolent room with a tossed bed and an open window, with a stagy significance acquired only momentarily in the minds of those who gathered in a group at its door.

Much later, after midnight, Peter and Susan sat in the bald glare of an all-night restaurant. With hysterical eagerness, Robert had gone on to the station house with the two detectives to register the salient facts, to help ferret out the relatives in Ohio, to arrange, in fact, anything that might still be arrangeable about Vince. Almost without noticing, he had acquiesced in Peter’s proposal to look after Susan. Susan herself, after silently watching the gratuitous burbling of her father, as if it were a phenomenon she could neither believe nor leave, had followed Peter without comment. At his suggestion, they had stopped off at the restaurant on their way to her stepfather’s house, for which she had a key.

“Thanks. I was starved.” She leaned back and pushed at the short bang of hair on her forehead.

“Hadn’t you eaten at all?”

“Just those pasty sandwiches they sell on the train. There wasn’t any dinner.”

“Smoke?”

“I do, but I’m just too tired. I can get into a hotel all right, don’t you think? If I can’t get in at Arthur’s?”

“I know the manager of a small one near us,” Peter said. “But if you don’t mind coming to my place, you can use my mother’s room for tonight. Or for as long as you need, probably.”

“What about your mother?”

“She’s away. She’ll be away for quite a while.”

“Not in Reno, by any chance?” There was a roughness, almost a coarseness, in her tone, like that in the overdone camaraderie of the shy.

“No. My father died when I was eight. Why?”

“Oh, something in the way you spoke. And then you’re so competent. Does she work?”

“No. My father left something. Does yours?”

She stood up and picked up her bedraggled gloves. “No,” she said, and her voice was suddenly distant and delicate again. “She marries.” She turned and walked out ahead of him.

He paid, rushed out of the restaurant, and caught up with her.

“Thought maybe you’d run out on me,” he said.

She got in the car without answering.

They drove through the Park, toward the address in the East Seventies that she had given him. A weak smell of grass underlay the gas-blended air, but the Park seemed limp and worn, as if the strain of the day’s effluvia had been too much for it. At the Seventy-second Street stop signal, the blank light of a street lamp invaded the car.

“Thought you might be feeling Mrs. Grundyish at my suggesting the apartment,” Peter said.

“Mrs. Grundy wasn’t around much when I grew up.” The signal changed and they moved ahead.

They stopped in a street which had almost no lights along its smartly converted house fronts. This was one of the streets, still sequestered by money, whose houses came alive only under the accelerated, febrile glitter of winter and would dream through the gross summer days, their interiors deadened with muslin or stirred faintly with the subterranean clinkings of caretakers. No. 4 was dark.

“I would rather stay over at your place, if I have to,” the girl said. Her voice was offhand and prim. “I hate hotels. We always stopped at them in between.”

“Let’s get out and see.”

They stepped down into the areaway in front of the entrance, the car door banging hollowly behind them. She fumbled in her purse and took out a key, although it was already obvious that it would not be usable. In his childhood, he had often hung around in the areaways of old brownstones such as this had been. In the corners there had always been a soft, decaying smell, and the ironwork, bent and smeared, always hung loose and broken-toothed. The areaway of this house had been repaved with slippery flag; even in the humid night there was no smell. Black-tongued grillwork, with an oily shine and padlocked, secured the windows and the smooth door. Fastened on the grillwork in front of the door was the neat, square proclamation of a protection agency.

“You don’t have a key for the padlocks, do you?”

“No.” She stood on the curb, looking up at the house. “It was a nice room I had there. Nicest one I ever did have, really.” She crossed to the car and got in.

He followed her over to the car and got in beside her. She had her head in her hands.

“Don’t worry. We’ll get in touch with somebody in the morning.”

“I don’t. I don’t care about any of it, really.” She sat up, her face averted. “My parents, or any of the people they tangle with.” She wound the lever on the door slowly, then reversed it. “Robert, or my mother, or Arthur,” she said, “although he was always pleasant enough. Even Vince—even if I’d known him.”

“He was just a screwed-up kid. It could have been anybody’s window.”

“No.” Suddenly she turned and faced him. “I should think it would be the best privilege there is, though. To care, I mean.”

When he did not immediately reply, she gave him a little pat on the arm and sat back. “Excuse it, please. I guess I’m groggy.” She turned around and put her head on the crook of her arm. Her words came faintly through it. “Wake me when we get there.”

She was asleep by the time they reached his street. He parked the car as quietly as possible beneath his own windows. He himself had never felt more awake in his life. He could have sat there until morning with her sleep-secured beside him. He sat thinking of how different it would be at Rye, or anywhere, with her along, with someone along who was the same age. For they were the same age, whatever that was, whatever the age was of people like them. There was nothing he would be unable to tell her.

To the north, above the rooftops, the electric mauve of midtown blanked out any auguries in the sky, but he wasn’t looking for anything like that. Tomorrow he would take her for a drive—whatever the weather. There were a lot of good roads around Greenwich.

T
HE LIGHT, GRITTY WIND
of a spring morning blew in on the doctor’s shining, cleared desk, and on the tall buttonhook of a man who leaned agitatedly toward him.

“I have some kind of small animal lodged in my chest,” said the man. He coughed, a slight, hollow apologia to his ailment, and sank back in his chair.

“Animal?” said the doctor, after a pause which had the unfortunate quality of comment. His voice, however, was practiced, deft, colored only with the careful suspension of judgment.

“Probably a form of newt or toad,” answered the man, speaking with clipped distaste, as if he would disassociate himself from the idea as far as possible. His face quirked with sad foreknowledge. “Of course, you don’t believe me.”

The doctor looked at him noncommittally. Paraphrased, an old refrain of the poker table leapt erratically in his mind. “Nits”—no—“newts and gnats and one-eyed jacks,” he thought. But already the anecdote was shaping itself, trim and perfect, for display at the clinic luncheon table. “Go on,” he said.

“Why won’t any of you come right out and say what you think!” the man said angrily. Then he flushed, not hectically, the doctor noted, but with the well-bred embarrassment of the normally reserved. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“You’ve already had an examination?” The doctor was a neurologist, and most of his patients were referrals.

“My family doctor. I live up in Boston.”

“Did you tell him—er …?” The doctor sought gingerly for a phrase.

One corner of the man’s mouth lifted, as if he had watched others in the same dilemma. “I went through the routine first. Fluoroscope, metabolism, cardiograph. Even gastroscopy.” He spoke, the doctor noted, with the regrettable glibness of the patient who has shopped around.

“And—the findings?” said the doctor, already sure of the answer.

The man leaned forward, holding the doctor’s glance with his own. A faint smile riffled his mouth. “Positive.”

“Positive!”

“Well,” said the man, “machines have to be interpreted after all, don’t they?” He attempted a shrug, but the quick eye of the doctor saw that the movement masked a slight contortion within his tweed suit, as if the man writhed away from himself but concealed it quickly, as one masks a hiccup with a cough. “A curious flutter in the cardiograph, a strange variation in the metabolism, an alien shadow under the fluoroscope.” He coughed again and put a genteel hand over his mouth, but this time the doctor saw it clearly—the slight, cringing motion.

“You see,” added the man, his eyes helpless and apologetic above the polite covering hand. “It’s alive. It
travels.
”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” said the doctor, soothingly now. In his mind hung the word, ovoid and perfect as a drop of water about to fall. Obsession. A beautiful case. He thought again of the luncheon table.

“What did your doctor recommend?” he said.

“A place with more resources, like the Mayo Clinic. It was then that I told him I knew what it was, as I’ve told you. And how I acquired it.” The visitor paused. “Then, of course, he was forced to pretend he believed me.”

“Forced?” said the doctor.

“Well,” said the visitor, “actually, I think he did believe me. People tend to believe anything these days. All this mass media information gives them the habit. It takes a strong individual to disbelieve evidence.”

The doctor was confused and annoyed. Well, “What then?” he said peremptorily, ready to rise from his desk in dismissal.

Again came the fleeting bodily grimace and the quick cough. “He—er … he gave me a prescription.”

The doctor raised his eyebrows, in a gesture he was swift to retract as unprofessional.

“For heartburn, I think it was,” added his visitor demurely.

Tipping back in his chair, the doctor tapped a pencil on the edge of the desk. “Did he suggest you seek help—on another level?”

“Many have suggested it,” said the man.

“But I’m not a psychiatrist!” said the doctor irritably.

“Oh, I know that. You see, I came to you because I had the luck to hear one of your lectures at the Academy. The one on ‘Overemphasis on the Non-somatic Causes of Nervous Disorder.’ It takes a strong man to go against the tide like that. A disbeliever. And that’s what I sorely need.” The visitor shuddered, this time letting the
frisson
pass uncontrolled. “You see,” he added, thrusting his clasped hands forward on the desk, and looking ruefully at the doctor, as if he would cushion him against his next remark, “you see—I am a psychiatrist.”