The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (13 page)

“Who do you mean?”

“My father and mother.”

“You mean … they don’t like Jews because they have to work for them sometimes?”

“Maybe,” said Werner, “but it is not what I mean.”

“It’s no disgrace, what anybody works at, over here.” I wasn’t sure I believed this, but it was what one was told. “Besides, they have the business.”

Werner turned his back on me, his shoulders humped up against the Palisades. “Inside them, they are servants.”

He turned back to face me, the words tumbling out with the torn confiding of the closemouthed. “They do not care about the
quality
of anything.” His voice lingered on the word. He jerked his head at the Mazola sign. “Butter maybe, instead of lard. But only because it is good for the business.”

“Everybody has something wrong with his family,” I muttered.

Werner folded his arms almost triumphantly and looked at me. “But we are not a family,” he said.

I got up and walked around the little grass plot. The way he had spoken the word
quality
stayed with me; it popped into my mind the time in spring when he and I had been sitting near the same old stone wall and two scarlet tanagers lit on it and strutted for a minute against the blue. You aren’t supposed to see tanagers in New York City. Sooner or later, though, you’ll see almost everything in New York. You’ll have almost every lousy kind of feeling too.

The river had a dark shine to it now. It smelled like a packinghouse for fish, but it looked like the melted, dark eyes of a million girls.

“I wish we were going up to the country this year,” I said. “I’d like to be there right now.”

“I hate the country!” Werner said. “That’s where they’re going to have the restaurant. They have almost enough money now.”

Then it all came out—in a rush. “Come on back,” he said. “They’re out. I want to show you something.”

All the way up the hill he talked: how his mother had worked as a housekeeper for a rich merchant after his father had left for America; how he had always been the child in the basement, allowed to play neither with the town children nor the merchant’s; how his mother would not agree to come over until his father had saved a certain sum, and then required that it be sent to her in dollars before she would sail. Then, in Yorkville, where they had only taken a larger room because the landlady insisted, they used to walk the garish streets sometimes, listening to the din from the cafés—
“Ist das nicht ein …? Ja, das ist ein …”
—but never going in for a snack or a glass of beer. “We breathed quiet,” I remember him saying, “so we would not have to use up too much air.”

And always, everything was for the restaurant. At Christmastime and birthdays they did not give each other presents, but bought copper pans, cutlery, equipment for the restaurant. They had their eye on an actual place, on a side road not too far from some of the fancy towns in Jersey; it was owned by a man whose wife was a cousin of Mrs. Hauser’s. It already had a clientele of connoisseurs who came to eat slowly, to wait reverently in a waft of roasting coffee, for the
Perlhuhn
and the
Kaiser-Schmarren.
The cousins were smart—they knew that Americans would pay the best for the best, and even wait a little long for it, in order to be thought European. But they had let the place get seedy; they did not have enough discipline for the long, sluggish day before the customers arrived, and they had not learned that while the Americans might wait out of snobbishness, they would not do so because the owners were getting drunk in the kitchen. The Hausers would be smarter still. They would serve everything of the best, at a suitably stately pace for such quality, and they would not get drunk in the kitchen.

He stopped talking when we got to his door. The whole time, he hadn’t raised his voice, but had talked on and on in a voice like shavings being rubbed together.

His room was dark and full of the cloying smell. He stood in front of the window, not turning the light on, and I saw that he was looking over at our place. I saw how it looked to him.

That was the summer radios first really came in. Almost everyone had one now. We hadn’t got one yet, but one of Nora’s boy friends had given her a small table model. There were a couple of them playing now at cross purposes, from different places on the court.

“Thursday nights they are broadcasting the concerts, did you know?” he said softly. “Sometimes someone tunes in on it, and I can hear, if I keep the window open. The echoes are bad … and all the other noises. Sometimes, of course, no one tunes it in.”

I wondered what he had to show me, and why he did not turn on the light.

“Today was my birthday,” he said. “I asked them for a radio, but of course I did not expect it. I am to get working papers. When they leave, I am to leave the high school.”

He walked away from the window and turned on the light. The objects on the bed sprang into sharp black and white: the tie disposed on the starched shirt, which lay neatly between the black jacket and pants. That’s what it was. It was a waiter’s suit.

“Of course I did not expect it,” he said. “I did not.”

It was after this that Werner, when he whistled across the court, started using themes from here and there. Sometimes it was that last little mocking bit from
Till Eulenspiegel
when Till’s feet kick, sometimes it was the Ho-yo-to-ho of the Valkyries, sometimes the horns from the “Waltz of the Flowers.” It was always something we had heard at the Stadium, something we had heard together. When my father, to whom I had blabbed most of that evening with Werner, heard the whistle, his face would sometimes change red, as if he were holding his breath in anger against someone; then this would be displaced by the sunk, beaten look he sometimes brought home from Seventh Avenue, and he would shrug and turn away. He never said anything to Werner or to me.

The last night, the night it must have happened, was a Thursday a few weeks later. It was one of those humid nights when the rain just will not come, and even the hair on your head seems too much to carry around with you. We were all sitting in the dining room, brushing limply now and then at our foreheads. Nora was in one of her moods—the boy who had given her the radio had not phoned. She had it turned on and sat glowering in front of it, as if she might evoke him from it.

My father was standing at the window, looking up at the sky. The court had its usual noises, children crying, a couple of other radios, and the rumble from the streets. Once or twice some kid catcalled from a higher floor, and a light bulb exploded on the alley below.

My father leaned forward suddenly, and looked across the court, watching intently. Then he walked slowly over to the radio, stood in front of it a moment, and turned it on loud. We all looked at him in surprise. He didn’t think much of the thing, and never monkeyed with it.

I looked across the court at Werner’s window. I couldn’t see into its shadows, but it was open. I thought of the look on his face when he met us outside the Stadium walls and of his voice saying, “Sometimes no one tunes it in.” I would have whistled to him, but I couldn’t have been heard over the music—
Scheherazade,
it was—which was sweeping out loud and strong into the uneasy air.

My mother whispered a reproach to my father, then took a side look at his face, and subsided. I glanced around at Carol, Nora, all of us sitting there joined together, and for some reason or other I felt sick. It’s the weather, I thought, and wiped my forehead.

Then, in the square across the court, the blackness merged and moved. The window began to grind down. And then we heard Werner’s voice, high and desperate, louder even than the plashing waves of the Princess’s story—a long, loud wail.

“No! Please! Scheherazade is speaking!”

Then there were two figures at the window, and the window was flung up again. My mother clapped her hand against her face, ran over to the radio and turned it down low, and stood bent over with her back against it, her fist to her mouth. So it was that we heard Werner again, his words squeezed out, hoarse, but clear.
“Bitte, Mutter. Lass mich hören. Scheherazade spricht.”

Then the window came down.

The next evening the house was like a hive with what had happened. The Hausers had gone to the police. There had been one really personal thing in their house after all, and Werner had taken it with him. He had taken the whole of the cache in the wall safe, the whole ten thousand dollars for the restaurant.

The detectives came around to question me—two pleasant enough Dutch uncles who had some idea that Werner might have made a pact with me, or that I could give them some clues as to what had been going on inside him. I couldn’t tell them much of use. I wasn’t going to tell them to look over at the Stadium, either outside or in, although for years afterward I myself used to scan the crowds there. And I wasn’t fool enough to try to explain to them what I had hardly figured out yet myself—that nature abhors the vacuums men shape, and sooner or later pushes the hollow in.

Mr. and Mrs. Hauser stayed on, and as far as anyone could tell, kept on with their usual routine. They were still there when we moved—Luba had decided the air was better in Hollis, Queens. During the months while we were still at Hamilton Terrace though, my father acquired an odd habit. If he happened to pass the open dining room window when our large new radio was playing, he was likely to pause there, and look out across the court. Sometimes he shut the sash down hard, and sometimes he let it be, but he always stood there for a time. I never decided whether the look on his face was guilty or proud. I knew well enough why he stood there though. For it was from our house that the music had come. It was from our window that Scheherazade spoke.

E
VER SINCE OUR STATE
Department published that address of Khrushchev’s to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, in which he noted the “posthumous rehabilitation” of a number of Russians who had been executed as enemies of the people, I’ve been nagged by the thought that I owe it to our bourgeois society to reveal what I know about the life of my friend Ginny Doll—or as she was known to her friends in the Party—Ginevra Leake. If you remember, Mr. Khrushchev’s speech was dotted with anecdotes that all wound to the same tender conclusion:

On February 4th Eihke was shot. It has been definitely established now that Eihke’s case was fabricated; he has been posthumously rehabilitated … Sentence was passed on Rudzutak in twenty minutes and he was shot. (Indignation in the hall) … After careful examination of the case in 1955 it was established that the accusation against Rudzutak was false. He has been rehabilitated posthumously … Suffice it to say that from 1954 to the present time, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court has rehabilitated 7,679 persons, many of whom were rehabilitated posthumously.

Being dead, Ginny Doll would certainly fall into the latter category if anyone chose to rehabilitate her, but since the manner of her death has elevated her, however erroneously, to martyrdom in the American branch of the Party, it’s unlikely that any of her crowd will see the need of arousing indignation in the hall. The task therefore devolves on me, not only as a friend of her girlhood, but as her only non-Party friend—kept on because I represented the past, always so sacred to a Southerner, and therefore no more disposable than the rose-painted lamps, walnut commodes and feather-stitched samplers in the midst of which she pursued life on the New York barricades, right to the end. If to no one else, I owe to the rest of us Southrons the rehabilitation of Ginny Doll, even if, as is most likely, it’s the last thing she’d want.

I first met Virginia Darley Leake, as she was christened, Ginny Doll as she was called by her mother and aunts, when she and I were about fifteen, both of us daughters of families who had recently emigrated from Virginia to New York, mine from Richmond, hers from Lynchburg the town that, until I grew up, I assumed was spelled “Lenchburg.” My father disliked professional Southerners, and would never answer invitations to join their ancestral societies. However, on one summer evening when he was feeling his age and there was absolutely no prospect of anyone dropping in to hear about it, he succumbed to momentary sentiment and went downtown to a meeting of the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy. He came back snorting that they were nothing but old maids of both sexes, just as he’d expected; he’d been trapped into seeing home a Mrs. Darley Lyon Leake who’d clung to him like a limpet when she’d found they both lived on Madison Avenue, and he warned my mother that he was afraid the woman would call—his actual phrase for Mrs. Leake being “one of those tiny, clinging ones you can’t get off your hands—like peach fuzz.”

Mrs. Leake—a tiny, coronet-braided woman with a dry, bodiless neatness—did call, but only, as she carefully explained to my mother, for the purpose of securing a Southern, presumably genteel playmate for her daughter. My mother was not Southern, but she shared her caller’s opinion of the girls Ginny Doll and I brought home from school. The call was repaid once, by my mother with me in tow, after which it was understood that any
entente
was to be only between us girls; my parents and Mrs. Leake never saw each other again.

On that first call I had been relieved to find how much the Leake household, scantily composed of only three females—Mrs. Leake, Ginny Doll and Ida, the cook—still reminded me of our own crowded one, in its slow rhythm and antediluvian clutter. Three years spent trying to imitate the jumpy ways of my New York girl friends had made me ashamed of our peculiarities; it was comforting to be reminded that these were regional, and that at least there were two of us on Madison Avenue.

With the alchemic snobbery of her kind, Mrs. Leake had decreed that the intimacy must be all one way; Ginny Doll could not come to us. So it was always I who went there, at first I didn’t quite know why. For, like many of the children introduced to me by my parents, and as quickly shed, Ginny Doll was a lame duck. It would be unfair to suggest that she and her mother were types indigenous only to the South; nevertheless, anybody down there would have recognized them at once—the small woman whose specious femininity is really one of size and affectation, whose imperious ego always has a socially proper outlet (Mrs. Leake wore her heart trouble on her sleeve), and whose single daughter is always a great lumpy girl with a clayey complexion. At fifteen, Ginny Doll was already extremely tall, stooped, and heavy in a waistless way; only her thin nose was pink, and her curves were neither joyous nor warm; her long hand lay in one’s own like a length of suet just out of the icebox and her upper teeth preceded her smile. One glance at mother and daughter predicted their history; by producing a girl of such clearly unmarriageable aspect, the neatly turned Mrs. Leake had assured herself of a well-serviced life until her own death—at a probable eighty. After that, Ginny Doll’s fate would have been clearer in Lenchburg, for the South has never lost its gentle, feudal way of absorbing its maiden ladies in one family sinecure or another. But up here in the amorphous North, there was no foretelling what might happen, much less what did.