The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (25 page)

It was Juliet Hoffman, the pace-setter among the girls in the class, who spoke Mooley’s nickname first. A jeweler’s daughter, Juliet had achieved an eminence even beyond that due her curly profile, embroidered dresses, and prancing, leading-lady ways when, the Christmas before, she had brought as her present to teacher a real diamond ring. It had been a modest diamond, to be sure, but undoubtedly real, and set in real gold. Juliet had heralded it for weeks before and we had all seen it—it and the peculiar look on the face of the teacher, a young substitute whom we hardly knew—when she had lifted it from the pile of hankies and fancy notepaper on her desk. The teacher, over the syrupy protests of Mrs. Hoffman, had returned the ring, but its sparkle lingered on, iridescent around Juliet’s head.

On our way out at three o’clock that first day with Miss Totten, Juliet nudged at me to wait. Obediently, I waited behind her. Twiddling her bunny muff, she minced over to the clothes closet and confronted the new girl.

“I know you,” she said. “Mooley Davis, that’s who you are!” A couple of the other children hung back to watch.

“Aren’t you? Aren’t you Mooley Davis?”

I remember just how Mooley stood there because of the coat she wore. She just stood there holding her coat against her stomach with both hands. It was a coat of some pale, vague tweed, cut the same length as mine. But it wrapped the wrong way over for a girl and the revers, wide ones, came all the way down and ended way below the pressing hands.

“Where you been?” Juliet flipped us all a knowing grin. “You been in ungraded?”

One of Mooley’s shoulders inched up so that it almost touched her ear, but beyond that, she did not seem able to move. Her eyes looked at us, wide and fixed. I had the feeling that all of her had retreated far, far back behind the eyes which—large and light, and purposefully empty—had been forced to stay.

My back was to the room, but on the suddenly wooden faces of the others I saw Miss Totten’s shadow. Then she loomed thinly over Juliet, her arms, which were crossed at her chest, hiding the one V of white in her garments, so that she looked like an umbrella which had been tightly furled.

“What’s
your
name?” she asked, addressing not so much Juliet as the white muff which, I noticed now, was slightly soiled.

“Jooly-ette.”

“Hmm. Oh, yes. Juliet Hoffman.”

“Jooly-ette, it is.” She pouted creamily up at Miss Totten, her glance narrow with the assurance of finger rings to come.

Something flickered in the nexus of yellow wrinkles around Miss Totten’s lips. Poking out a bony forefinger, she held it against the muff. “You tell your mother,” she said slowly, “that the way she spells it, it’s
Juliet.
”

Then she dismissed the rest of us but put a delaying hand on Mooley. Turning back to look, I saw that she had knelt down painfully, her skirt-hem graying in the floor dust, and staring absently over Mooley’s head she was buttoning up the queerly shaped coat.

After a short, avid flurry of speculation we soon lost interest in Mooley, and in the routine Miss Totten devised for her. At first, during any kind of oral work, Mooley took her place at the blackboard and wrote down her answers, but later, Miss Totten sat her in the front row and gave her a small slate. She grew very quick at answering, particularly in “mental arithmetic” and in the card drills, when Miss Totten held up large Manila cards with significant locations and dates inscribed in her Palmer script, and we went down the rows, snapping back the answers.

Also, Mooley had acquired a protector in Ruby Green, the other Negro girl in the class—a huge, black girl with an arm-flailing, hee-haw way of talking and a rich, contralto singing voice which we had often heard in solo at Assembly. Ruby, boasting of her singing in night clubs on Saturday nights, of a father who had done time, cowed us all with these pungent inklings of the world on the other side of the dividing line of Amsterdam Avenue—that deep, velvet murk of Harlem which she lit for us with the flash of razors, the honky-tonk beat of the “numbahs,” and the plangent wails of the mugged. Once, hearing David Hecker, a doctor’s son, declare “Mooley has a cleft palate, that’s what,” Ruby wheeled and put a large hand on his shoulder, holding it there in menacing caress.

“She ain’ got no cleff palate, see? She talk sometime, ’roun’ home.” She glared at us each in turn with such a pug-scowl that we flinched, thinking she was going to spit. Ruby giggled.

“She got no cause to talk, ’roun’ here. She just don’ need to bother.” She lifted her hand from David, spinning him backward, and joined arms with the silent Mooley. “Me neither!” she added, and walked Mooley away, flinging back at us her gaudy, syncopated laugh.

Then one day, lolloping home after three, I suddenly remembered my books and tam, and above all my homework assignment, left in the pocket of my desk at school. I raced back there. The janitor, grumbling, unlocked the side door at which he had been sweeping and let me in. In the mauve, settling light the long maw of the gym held a rank, uneasy stillness. I walked up the spiral metal stairs feeling that I thieved on some part of the school’s existence not intended for me. Outside the ambushed quiet of Miss Totten’s room I stopped, gathering breath. Then I heard voices, one of them surely Miss Totten’s dark, firm tones, the other no more than an arrested gurgle and pause.

I opened the door slowly. Miss Totten and Mooley raised their heads. It was odd, but although Miss Totten sat as usual at her desk, her hands clasped to one side of her hat, lunch-box, and the crinkly boa she wore all spring, and although Mooley was at her own desk in front of a spread copy of our thick reader, I felt the distinct, startled guilt of someone who interrupts an embrace.

“Yes?” said Miss Totten. Her eyes had the drugged look of eyes raised suddenly from close work. I fancied that she reddened slightly, like someone accused.

“I left my books.”

Miss Totten nodded, and sat waiting. I walked down the row to my desk and bent over, fumbling for my things, my haunches awkward under the watchfulness behind me. At the door, with my arms full, I stopped, parroting the formula of dismissal.

“Good afternoon, Miss Totten.”

“Good afternoon.”

I walked home slowly. Miss Totten, when I spoke to her, had seemed to be watching my mouth, almost with enmity. And in front of Mooley there had been no slate.

In class the next morning, as I collected the homework in my capacity as monitor, I lingered a minute at Mooley’s desk, expecting some change, perhaps in her notice of me, but there was none. Her paper was the same as usual, written in a neat script quite legible in itself, but in a spidery backhand which just faintly silvered the page, like a communiqué issued out of necessity, but begrudged.

Once more I had a glimpse of Miss Totten and Mooley together, on a day when I had joined the slangy, athletic Miss Steele who was striding capably along in her Ground Grippers on the route I usually took home. Almost at once I had known I was unwelcome, but I trotted desperately in her wake, not knowing how to relieve her of my company. At last a stitch in my side forced me to stop, in front of a corner fishmongers’.

“Folks who want to walk home with me have to step on it!” said Miss Steele. She allotted me one measuring, stone-blue glance, and moved on.

Disposed on the bald white window-stall of the fish store there was a rigidly mounted eel which looked as if only its stuffing prevented it from growing onward, sinuously, from either impersonal end. Beside it were several tawny shells. A finger would have to avoid the spines on them before being able to touch their rosy, pursed throats. As the pain in my side lessened, I raised my head and saw my own face in the window, egg-shaped and sad. I turned away. Miss Totten and Mooley stood on the corner, their backs to me, waiting to cross. A trolley clanged by, then the street was clear, and Miss Totten, looking down, nodded gently into the black boa and took Mooley by the hand. As they passed down the hill to St. Nicholas Avenue and disappeared, Mooley’s face, smoothed out and grave, seemed to me, enviably, like the serene, guided faces of the children I had seen walking securely under the restful duennaship of nuns.

Then came the first day of Visiting Week, during which, according to convention, the normal school day would be on display, but for which we had actually been fortified with rapid-fire recitations which were supposed to erupt from us in sequence, like the somersaults which climax acrobatic acts. On this morning, just before we were called to order, Dr. Piatt, the principal, walked in. He was a gentle man, keeping to his office like a snail, and we had never succeeded in making a bogey of him, although we tried. Today he shepherded a group of mothers and two men, officiously dignified, all of whom he seated on some chairs up front at Miss Totten’s left. Then he sat down too, looking upon us benignly, his head cocked a little to one side in a way he had, as if he hearkened to some unseen arbiter who whispered constantly to him of how bad children could be, but he benevolently, insistently, continued to disagree.

Miss Totten, alone among the teachers, was usually immune to visitors, but today she strode restlessly in front of us and as she pulled down the maps one of them slipped from her hand and snapped back up with a loud, flapping roar. Fumbling for the roll-book, she sat down and began to call the roll from it, something she usually did without looking at the book and favoring each of us, instead, with a warming nod.

“Arnold Ames?”

“Pres-unt!”

“Mary Bates?”

“Pres-unt!”

“Wanda Becovic?”

“Pres-unt!”

“Sidney Cohen?”

“Pres-unt!”

“L—Lilly Davis?”

It took us a minute to realize that Mooley had not raised her hand. A light, impatient groan rippled over the class. But Mooley, her face uplifted in a blank stare, was looking at Miss Totten. Miss Totten’s own lips moved. There seemed to be a cord between her lips and Mooley’s. Mooley’s lips moved, opened.

“Pres-unt!” said Mooley.

The class caught its breath, then righted itself under the sweet, absent smile of the visitors. With flushed, lowered lids, but in a rich full voice, Miss Totten finished calling the roll. Then she rose and came forward with the Manila cards. Each time, she held up the name of a state and we answered with its capital city.

Pennsylvania.

“Harrisburg!” said Arnold Ames.

Illinois.

“Springfield!” said Mary Bates.

Arkansas.

“Little Rock!” said Wanda Becovic.

North Dakota.

“Bismarck!” said Sidney Cohen.

Idaho.

We were afraid to turn our heads.

“Buh … Boise!” said Mooley Davis.

After this, we could hardly wait for the turn to come around to Mooley. When Miss Totten, using a pointer against the map, indicated that Mooley was to “bound” the state of North Carolina, we focused on one spot with such attention that the visitors, grinning at each other, shook their heads at such zest. But Dr. Piatt was looking straight at Miss Totten, his lips parted, his head no longer to one side.

“N-north Cal … Callina.” Just as the deaf gaze at the speaking, Mooley’s eyes never left Miss Totten’s. Her voice issued, burred here, choked there, but unmistakably a voice. “Bounded by Virginia on the north … Tennessee on the west … South Callina on the south … and on the east … and on the east …” She bent her head and gripped her desk with her hands. I gripped my own desk, until I saw that she suffered only from the common failing—she had only forgotten. She raised her head.

“And on the east,” she said joyously, “and on the east by the Atlannic Ocean.”

Later that term Miss Totten died. She had been forty years in the school system, we heard in the eulogy at Assembly. There was no immediate family, and any of us who cared to might pay our respects at the chapel. After this, Mr. Moloney, who usually chose
Whispering
for the dismissal march, played something slow and thrumming which forced us to drag our feet until we reached the door.

Of course none of us went to the chapel, nor did any of us bother to wonder whether Mooley went. Probably she did not. For now that the girl withdrawn for so long behind those rigidly empty eyes had stepped forward into them, they flicked about quite normally, as captious as anyone’s.

Once or twice in the days that followed we mentioned Miss Totten, but it was really death that we honored, clicking our tongues like our elders. Passing the umbrella-stand at home, I sometimes thought of Miss Totten, furled forever in her coffin. Then I forgot her too, along with the rest of the class. After all this was only reasonable in a class which had achieved Miss Steele.

But memory, after a time, dispenses its own emphasis, making a
feuilleton
of what we once thought most ponderable, laying its wreath on what we never thought to recall. In the country, the children stumble upon the griffin mask of the mangled pheasant, and they learn; they come upon the murderous love-knot of the mantis, and they surmise. But in the city, although no man looms very large against the sky, he is silhouetted all the more sharply against his fellows. And sometimes the children there, who know so little about the natural world, stumble still upon that unsolicited good which is perhaps only a dislocation in the insensitive rhythm of the natural world. And if they are lucky, memory holds it in waiting. For what they have stumbled upon is their own humanity—their aberration, and their glory. That must be why I find myself wanting to say aloud to someone: “I remember … a Miss Elizabeth Totten.”

M
Y FATHER, BORN IN
1862, and old enough to be my grandfather when I entered the world a year after his marriage to a woman twenty-two years younger than he, was by birth therefore a late Victorian. By 1900 he had already been of an age to have emigrated long since from South to North, and to have acquired both a business successful enough to permit him to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee at his usual haunts of Mouquin’s and Delmonico’s, and a rheumatism fashionable enough to require recuperation at Mount Clemens Spa. But like so many youngest sons of those large families whose fortunes have either declined or not been built, he had from the first shown a precocious, Alger-like energy which—in his case combined with some of the bright fairy-tale luck that comes to the third sons in Grimm—was to keep him all his life younger in appearance and temperament than others of his span, pushing him constantly toward modernity, even while he dragged his feet, protesting. During the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when I knew him best, he was, at the very least, early Edwardian.