The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (30 page)

“Mother,” she said. “Why don’t I have a nickname? Why don’t I?”

Her mother’s needle speared a French knot. “Oh—I don’t know.” She held her work critically at arm’s length. “Daddy and I are just not a nickname family, maybe.”

“Nicknames come natural,” said Aunt Flora. “Drink more milk. Maybe one’ll float up.” She looked over at her Belle, her mouth smug.

Hester took a breath. “When the baby comes—will Daddy keep Mr. Katz?”

“Why, whatever put …?” Her mother glanced at the aunts, who looked down in their laps. “Why, that has nothing to. …” Mrs. Elkin expelled her breath in a chiding sigh, as if at some unknown transgressor. “There’s a limit to what one can do for some people. Sometimes it isn’t even a kindness to do it.” Reddened, she stared at Hester, with severity, as if some of the unseen offender’s guilt had rubbed off on her.

Hester stood up. At the far end of the lawn, her father and the uncles were talking business, ratifying their words with large, blue puffs from their long cigars. She walked toward them.

“What do you know!” said her mother behind her.

“Out of the mouths!” said Mamie. “Out of the mouths.”

Hester sat down on the grass near her father’s chair. He was lighting a fresh cigar, and absently passed her the band. “Coronas!” her mother had said this morning, watching her father carefully slit a brown box. “Nothing too good for them, I suppose. Coronas!” But during the week her father smoked Garcia Vegas. “Here’s a quarter, Hester. Run down and get me three Garcia Vegas.”

Bending over, she saw her face in the shiny guitar, sallow, shuttered, and long. It must lack some endearing lineament, against which people and language might cuddle. For it, a nickname was a status to be earned. Leaning against her father’s chair, she fell asleep, rocking the guitar. Sometimes, in her doze, it was Mr. Katz she rocked, sometimes it was herself.

During the next days, after the Elkins’ return to the city, all New York seemed brimming with more than the autumn season. At school assemblies, teachers rehearsed “The Red Cross Nurse,” “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding,” “In Flanders Field,” with a zest that lilted through and contravened even the saddest days. During the day, street corners knotted up with chattering crowds, and at night, Hester, dreaming uneasily of farms, was awakened by the sound of windows upflung to the halloos of newsboys who ran below with indistinct, curdled wails.

On the morning of the Armistice, racing home from school declared off for the day, she was certain that this morning, in her absence, the baby must have been born, too. Her mother however was there as usual in toque and wide, shapeless coat edged in martin, waiting for Hester to eat her creamed carrots and change into her pink crepe. It was dancing-school day, and they were to go, though, because of traffic and people already shoaling the streets, they were to leave early and take a cab.

They were an hour getting to the place, normally a short ride away, for not only were cars and buses creeping bumper to bumper, but people trailed heedlessly between them, poking their grin-split faces into cars, swarming on the platforms and roofs of the buses, as if on this one day bodies were more indestructible than machines. Inside the brownstone which housed the dancing academy there was an air of desertion. The little anterooms where private pupils received coaching in “toe,” or young men and women initiated each other into the wicked mysteries of the Turkey Trot, were dark and quiet. In the grand ballroom, the rows of gilt chairs, where the mothers usually knitted and watched, were empty, but a few mothers clustered around Mr. Duryea, a loose-jointed, very tall man whose length seemed the more exaggerated because all significant detail—toupee, dental plate, ribboned eyeglass—was crowded together at the top. Now he detached himself from the twittering group, clapped his hands, and the lesson began. No commotion in the street was to interfere with the verity of the two-step, the waltz. At the end of the lesson, however, Mr. Duryea, pairing off the pupils, presented the girl of each couple with a single American Beauty rose, from the long stem of which dripped streamers of red, white, and blue. As often had been the case before, he had left out Hester to dance with himself. With a nod to the pianist they were off, for chorus after chorus of a bounding, exultant waltz, Mr. Duryea bending low so that Hester might approximate the correct position with her arms, in her fist the rose of peace.

Back in the returning cab, Hester held the bruised rose thoughtfully against her skirt, as one who was not easily to be tricked into believing that pink crepe and roses were her just and personal due. She glanced over at her mother. Sirens and whistles were keening overhead; as they drove slowly past a church they heard the continuous shrike-shrike of its bell. Her mother, holding her coat tightly around her, stared out fearfully at the crowds which caromed in the streets. Hester would not have been surprised if she had said, “Now that this has happened I must see about getting the baby born,” but her mother said nothing.

“Is the war really and truly over?” said Hester.

“Indeed it is, indeed it is,” said her mother, still looking out the window. Several people had been pushed off the curb nearest the cab. One of them, an elderly man, rose painfully, scrabbling for his hat.

Hester’s fingers tightened on the mauled rose. She put her hand on the fur band of her mother’s sleeve, then drew it back. There was no use asking her again about Mr. Katz. Just before they got out of the cab at their door, her hand crept out again and touched the sleeve. “Do you suppose … do you suppose it’s because I’m the
best
—that Mr. Duryea dances with me?”

Her mother, fumbling for change, looked up as if she were looking over the rims of eyeglasses, although she wore none. “Might be,” she said, and gave her a pat to hurry her out of the cab. “But it’s more likely because you’re far and away the tallest.”

In the weeks after the Armistice, the city faded slowly through an anticlimactic New Year into the liverish restlessness of off-season. It was now that almost weatherless time when even the sparrows seemed to idle in the trees, and through days the color of flat soda water one saw more clearly the chapped curbstones of the streets. At the Elkins’ there was quiet, too; even the number of family visitors had fallen off. A nurse had come to stay, whose only function seemed to be the arranging in the spare room of packages which arrived constantly, or to watch, squinting, while Mrs. Elkin, who spent most of her days in a wrapper, sat nibbling shamefacedly from little plates, or even from paper bags. Mornings Mr. Elkin could hardly be got out of the house, and he came home earlier and earlier, stopping to kiss Hester as she played, for the first time unsupervised, with the gangs of children in the streets.

There, as in the papers read aloud at the Elkin dinner table, the talk was all of a great victory parade with which the city was to greet General O’Ryan and the victorious Twenty-seventh. At Madison Square, statues and pylons of plaster were to form a Court of the Honored Dead. The Washington Arch was to be transformed into an electrified version of the Arc de Triomphe. Fifth Avenue was to have arches hung with glass jewels, in front of the longest continuous grandstand in history. And here, in the matter of the grandstand, history reached out to the Elkins’ dinner table. For according to the outcry in the papers, in spite of all that welter of plaster and wood and glass, no seats in the grandstand had been provided for those wounded soldiers who had been returned to their country in a condition which prevented their being honored either as part of the line of march—or in Madison Square. A group of merchants whose places of business fronted on Fifth Avenue had arranged, angrily and proudly, to accommodate these. Oakley and Company had been allotted four.

On the morning of the parade, Hester, waking before it was light, heard the milkman’s horse clopping in the street below. By the time she reached the window it had vanished, but she could still pick out the fading tramp of its hoofs and the lurch of the wagon as it stopped far down the block. The growing morning had a glinting change in it; there was a green trickiness in the March air, and paper scraps scuffled high above the streets. She dressed hurriedly, without calling for help in buttoning the backs of her camisole and sailor dress. Dragging a chair to the closet, she took from a high shelf a blue serge cape and a Milan straw hat with a broad band trailing from its rear. With luck, since her mother was not to be of the party watching the parade from the Oakley and Company premises, no one would notice that Hester was not wearing her winter coat and had substituted for woolen knee socks the short, pale silk ones which were always the true demarcation of spring.

At the breakfast table, occupied only by her father and the nurse, no one spoke. The nurse looked at them with that slit-eyed remoteness with which she regarded their family life, as if she were telling herself and them, “My concern, after all, is for my patient.” Mr. Elkin ate abstractedly, fidgeting without his newspaper, which had not yet arrived. They were to go in the touring car, for which they had a special permit. The streets were to be closed to all downtown traffic by eight.

Downstairs, the open car was waiting, the two aunts, here this time by invitation, already in the back seat. Hester got in between them, noting with disappointment that, except for the veils, they were dressed much as usual: Flora in the violent stripings and trembling arrays of jet on which hardly any extra would be noticeable, and Mamie in that lofty dowdiness which exempted her from style.

“How’s Hattie?” said Flora.

“Wish I didn’t have to go,” said Mr. Elkin, getting in with the driver, “but the nurse is with her.”

“Any time?”

“Any time.”

“Isn’t this child dressed rather thin?” said Mamie.

The car started, drowning out Mamie’s remark. Hester squeezed down as far as possible between the aunts. Near her left ear, the tiny percussions of Flora’s jet went on and on in a rhythm that aped the car’s, then paused.

“What are we stopping for?” said Flora.

Hester, sitting up, saw that they had pulled up in front of one of the tenements on Amsterdam Avenue.

“I thought I better get the Katzes there with us,” said Mr. Elkin.

“Oh good
God,
Joe,” said Flora.

“I know, I know,” he answered. “Pull down those two extra seats, will you. Hester, you go on in and tell them we’re here. It’s the ground floor right.” He pointed up at a window. “Just knock and tell them. I don’t think there’s a bell.”

Hester went up the stoop and into a vestibule floored with linoleum, in it a great worn hole. The door groaned closed and she was left almost in the dark. Stairs rose sharply in front of her, their risers just visible. Far above, at least four flights higher, a skylight glimmered. There was no definite sound, but the building murmured, nevertheless, with the unseen nearness of people. The riband hanging down her back rustled in a steady, poking draught, and she flipped it quickly forward over her shoulder. A door at the right had a glass pane at the top, over which lozenge-patterned paper had been pasted. She knocked. She heard the tinkle of a plate or a spoon being pushed back, a creak, a tread—all the noises, begging for mystery, which sounded so exciting from behind closed doors.

The door opened and Mrs. Katz stuck her head out on a level with Hester’s. Her woolly fringe caught on the brim of the straw hat, and Hester looked for a moment straight through Mrs. Katz’s spectacles at eyes which rolled like large blue immies behind them.

“Annnnh!” said Mrs. Katz, clapping her hands. She patted Hester into the room and shut the door. “Katz! Katz, they are here. The child is here. Come, Katz!”

In the room, there was so much, so fantastically much, that at first Hester could not untangle Mr. Katz from the rest. This was not merely the furniture, which seemed to consist of innumerable small mounds, so swagged with throws and coverlets and scarves that tables could not be told from chairs. The walls, the surfaces of the mounds, the ceiling, from which objects hung on strings, the very air was crammed with such a miscellany that Hester’s eyes could not take it in, but had to stop, blinking, on one thing, until recognition set in. This thing resolved itself into Mr. Katz, who lay on one of the larger mounds, looking vaguely in front of him. He was dressed as he had been at the garden party, except for a wide collar of flannel which was tied around his neck with two long ears sticking up behind.

“Annnnh,” said Mrs. Katz, nodding and smiling at Hester. “He has with the throat.” Still nodding, she scuttled to Mr. Katz’s side and began pecking at him with little croons and pats. “Up, Katz. Come. Up!”

Hester stared at one of the walls of the corner in which Mr. Katz lay. It was tacked from top to bottom with scraps of lace, colored and plain, pleated and flat, fanned out straight or puffed in bows that quivered with dust. On a shelf above his head, several yards of it were festooned over drapery cards. Between these there was a signed picture of the banquet variety, and a placard which said
Henkel Brothers. Fine Laces and Veilings.
Beneath the shelf, almost touched by one of Mr. Katz’s flannel ears, there was a collar and cuff set, tacked in dainty alignment, as if waiting for a neck and two wrists to sprout neatly into place out of the wall.

Hester looked at the other side of the corner. This wall was cross-hatched with narrow shelves, dozens of them, on which there were ranged, almost there tinkled, an army of china trifles: Dutch boys, pagodas, slippers filled with pincushions, tankards and bud vases gilded with the names of towns or painted with simpering girls whose ringlets ended in a curl flowing artlessly over a shoulder. Among these, too, there were pictures, and one large placard—
Weinstein and Gaby. Jobbers to the trade.

Hester turned on her heel. Here was a far corner devoted to buttons, there, beyond it, objects she could not identify. Each section had its photographs and placards. Even among the things which swung from the ceiling—an assortment of feathers—there was a sizable plume to which a placard had been pinned. On the mantelpiece, arranged as in a showcase, there was something—familiar.