The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (31 page)

“Katz!” said the crooning voice behind her. “Mr. Elkin is waiting. On you he
depends,
Katz.”

At the sound of her father’s name, the array on the mantelpiece merged and made sense. Set there, exactly as in the anteroom of Oakley and Company, were samples of all its products. Here were the bottles with their intricate labels: Lilac, Parma Violet, Coreopsis of Japan, and Triple Essence of California Rose. On tripods between them were the “compacts,” small rounds of satin centered with moiré rosebuds, each box containing a hard cake of powder, or a flaming oval of orange or purplish rouge. There was even a display of one of Mr. Elkin’s transient ventures—tiny vials of rosy or greenish liquid (each with a brass clip at its back), which had been designed to hook onto a lady’s corselette or inside the lacy masses of her
décolletage,
there to dispel a mysterious fragrance as she breathed—but which, Hester knew, had somehow or other “not caught on.” Set in the center of all this, flanked by many gilded cardboard trademarks, were two pictures.

She moved nearer. One was a picture of the Oakley office. The other was a picture of herself. It was a replica of one on her father’s desk downtown—of herself at the age of three, in white corduroy bonnet with lining frilling her solemn face, coat with belt absurdly far below the waist, the hem just touching the kid uppers of her patent boots. Scrawled in her father’s fancy hand, on this copy, however, an inscription ran right across the boots:
To Mr. and Mrs. Katz. Regards. From the Coreopsis Kid.

“Annnnh. Now!” said Mrs. Katz in a failing voice. Hester turned. Mr. Katz was on his feet. He still had a vague look of waiting for instruction, but he was vertical.

“Come,” said Mrs. Katz. She stepped nimbly in front of Mr. Katz, as if she were used to shielding him from notice. “You looking samples?” She pointed a knotty paw. “When Katz was in Lace.” She pointed again. “When he was Souvenirs.”

“What are those?” Hester indicated the far corner.

“Findings,” said Mrs. Katz. “Ledder Findings. Was before Buttons.” She followed Hester’s gaze to the mantel. “Annnnh,” said Mrs. Katz, folding her hands. “The
Company.
”

Behind her, Mr. Katz jackknifed so suddenly that Hester thought he had fallen over, until she saw that he was tugging at several packages which were piled on the floor under the mantel.

“Nah, nah, Katz.” said Mrs. Katz, with a fretful sob. She tweaked at the flannel. “Today is holiday, remember, Katz?”

There was a sharp rat-a-tat at the door.

“Annnnh,
Gott
,” Mrs. Katz sighed, and pulled Mr. Katz upright. She pressed her face close to Hester’s “Sometimes Katz cannot think how to come any place but home.
Versteh
?” she whispered. “So he brings them here, the bundles, and we go out togedder. Him to carry. Me to show where.”

There was another, louder knock at the door. “Like podnership, see?” whispered Mrs. Katz. She put a blunt forefinger against her pleading, wrinkled muzzle. “Sh-h-h. You are good girl,
nu
?” Then she scurried to the door. “Yes, yes! We are ready!” she cried, and flung the door open, bobbing low behind it, almost in a curtsy.

“Well, please come on then,” said Mr. Elkin, in a voice more indulgent than his expression. “Or we’ll never get there.” He looked at Mr. Katz, shook his head, then took Katz by the arm and led him out the door.

Hester and Mrs. Katz waited on the stoop while Mr. Katz was inserted in the front seat of the car, next to the driver. Mrs. Katz put a hand on Hester’s upper arm and squeezed it. “Big strong girl,” she muttered. She nodded closer, so that Hester again looked through the spectacles at the round, swimming eyes. “Sometimes I carry, too,” whispered Mrs. Katz.

Mrs. Katz was to have shared the back seat with the aunts, but with the mulishness of the timid, she pleaded the anxiety of her “podnership” and was finally allowed to get up front. From the back seat only her nodding bonnet was visible, next to the tartan shawl she had wrapped carefully around Katz.

Mr. Elkin got in one of the small seats facing the back, turning around to hand the driver a large engraved card. “Drive down to Washington Square and back up, whichever way they’ll let you go,” he said. “I think this will get you through.” He sat Hester on the little seat next to him and cradled her hand in his lap. “I want Hester to see the Arch.”

It was still very early. The car made good headway, creeping along the battered streets near the East River.

“How many boys will you have, Joe?” said Flora.

“Four, they said.”

“They say some of them …” Mamie said nervously. “
Basket
cases.”

“Oh, no, nothing like that, Mamie.” Mr. Elkin gnawed his mustache. “They wouldn’t.”

Hester saw the soldiers in her mind, baskets over their poor, mad heads, with holes woven for the strange, lucent eyes.

“Joe,” Flora’s voice cracked, parrotlike, above the motor hum. She motioned with her chin toward the front seat. “Is he always like that?” she said, lowering her voice. “Really, you ought to realize.”

“On and off,” said her father. “He’s not much use around the office any more. Still pretty fair on deliveries, though.”

Hester lowered her eyes to the hand held in her father’s and counted her breaths. In, out. In, out.

“Couldn’t you mail?” said Mamie.

“Oh …” said her father, looking vaguely out the window. “There’s always something.”

“You mean you see to it there’s something,” said Flora. “That business will collapse of its own dead weight one of these days.”

Mr. Elkin looked patiently back at the two who had been part of the dead weight for years. “They haven’t a soul. I’m trying to get them into a home.”

“Daddy,” said Hester, “what is the Corylopsis Kid?”

“The Coreopsis Kid?” Mr. Elkin squeezed her hand with an absent smile. “That’s you, m’dear.”

“Me?”

Mr. Elkin nodded over her head at the aunts. “Louis Orenstein, wasn’t it, who started it with that telegram the day she was born. ‘Three cheers for the Coreopsis Kid.’”

“What a fool you were that day, Joe,” said Flora, her jet beads quivering with chuckles. “What an old fool.”

“Why not?” said Mr. Elkin. “I’d waited a long time for that day.”

“And the telegrams
you
sent out later,” said Mamie with a pursed smile. “Eight hundred of them. ‘Greetings, from Oakley and Company and the Coreopsis Kid.’”

“Well, the line’s known from coast to coast,” said Mr. Elkin. “And so am I.” He looked down at Hester. “And so is Hester. When I’m on the road I get it all the time. ‘How’s the Coreopsis Kid, Joe?’”

Suddenly, turning a corner, they were at the Arch. It gleamed in front of them like an enormous croquet wicket massed with jewels. Then it was hidden by the blue bulk of a policeman. When he saw the card, his face cleared. “I’ll get you over to the curb, sir. You’ll have to wait there a bit, but we’ll get you through.”

At the curb, the people packed swelling behind the barrier looked enviously into the long car. The two aunts held up their bosoms, looking stiffly ahead with the hauteur of influence. The car edged into a line of others and stopped, pointing straight at the Arch. To the north, south, and west, phalanx after phalanx of waiting uniforms quivered in the early morning sun. Here and there commands sparked suddenly above a continuous surf of sound. To the left of the car, a horse curvetted and was reined in, his nostrils distended but still.

Hester looked at the Arch. Hung with a dazzle of light, it swayed with the sound of thousands of colors chiming softly together. It kept time with the dazzle in her chest, inside of which a music box tintinnabulated over and over, “Coreopsis … Coreopsis … Coreopsis Kid.”

She stood up, and stepped on Mamie’s foot. At Mamie’s sharp yelp, she sat down again.

“When that baby comes,” said Mamie, nursing her foot, “I know someone whose nose is going to be out of joint.”

“Mamie,” said Mr. Elkin, “sometimes you haven’t the sense of a mule.”

Hester stared at Mamie. Idly, she noted how well her aunt’s triangular mouth suited her sly bird-speech, was perhaps too small for anything more, but her own answer came from far below the stare. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess Daddy can afford us all.”

A murmur from the crowd drowned out her father’s guffaw. The lines of soldiers tautened, each to a single glitter. Waves of brass washed over them, and the glitter moved with the drums. Now everyone in the crowd was throwing something—packs of cigarettes, oranges, paper rosettes, and streamers of
tricolore.
The aunts dug down in a hamper and brought out things to throw, too. From the windows around the Square, confetti flaked and fell through the air. Some of the brilliant bits spiraled onto the car, and Hester, leaning against her father, raised her face to receive them, as she did in winter with the first, slow feathers of snow. Her father held her, as he would uphold them all. And there was no other quite so dashing name in the whole Oakley and Company line.

Then the band converged upon them. Its clangor invaded her chest. She burst into tears.

“What … what?” said her father, bending down.

“I loved it,” she whispered back. “I loved the war.” But her father shook his head, his smile half turning into a frown.

Mrs. Katz leaned over the back seat. Her arms and hands were crammed full, and her muzzle was pleated with glee, with the joy of having things to throw away. She pressed an orange into Hester’s hand.

“Throw!” she said, nodding her woolen lamb-curls. “Throw!”

Hester cupped the orange in her hand. It was round, perfect, like the world at this moment. If there was a flaw in it, it could not yet be seen. She held onto it for as long as she could. Then, closing her eyes tight, she threw it.

F
IVE STORIES BELOW, THE
hot white pavements sent the air shimmering upward. From the false dusk of the awning, Kinny, leaning out to watch the iridescent black top of the funeral car, smelled the indeterminate summer smell of freshly ironed linen and dust. Below, he could see his father help the aunts into the car and stumble in after them, and the car roll away to join the others at the cemetery. The winter before, at the funeral of his father’s other brother, everything had left from here, hearse and all. The house had been crowded with people who had entered without ringing and had seated themselves soundlessly in the parlor, greeting each other with a nod or a sidewise shake of the head, and for days there had been a straggling procession of long-faced callers, who had clasped hands with his father and mother and had been conducted, after a decent interval, to his grandmother’s rooms, where she lived somewhat apart from the rest of the family. They had all come out clucking, “She’s a wonderful woman, a won-der-ful old woman!,” had been given coffee, and had gone away. Today, there was no one, and the wide glaring street was blank with light.

“Kinny, where are you?”

“I’m in the parlor.”

“How many times have I told you to say ‘living room? Parlor!” His mother clicked her tongue as she came into the room. “Why didn’t you go to the Park?” She walked toward him and looked at him squarely, something he had noticed grown people almost never seemed to have time to do.

“Listen, Kinny!” Her voice had the conspiratorial tone that made him uncomfortable. “You’re not to let on to Grandma anything—anything about the funeral. It’s a terrible thing to grow to a great age and see your children go before you.” Her gaze had already shifted back to normal, slightly to the right of him and just above his head. “Don’t lean so far out the window!” She turned and went into the kitchen to help Josie, the maid. His family never sat down to a dinner for just themselves; there were always the aunts, or the innumerable cousins, who came to pay their short devoirs to Grandma and stayed interminably at her daughter-in-law’s table.

He wandered back into the room, dawdling. It
was
a parlor, very unlike the Frenchy living rooms of his friends. Opposite him, the wall was half covered by a tremendous needle-point picture, framed in thick, curdled gilt, of Moses striking the rock and bringing forth water at Meribah. “And Moses lifted up his hand,” it said in the big Doré Bible, “and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also.” The faces of Moses and the Israelites were done in such tiny stitches that they looked painted, and there was a little dog lapping at the gush of water, which had minute, glistening beads worked into it. Diagonally across the room from the picture, the wreathed cherubim of a Vernis-Martin cabinet were flanked by a green marble column, on which poised an anonymous metal girl, arms outflung against a verdigrised apple tree, which sprouted electric-light bulbs.

He went over and fingered the Victrola, the only relatively new thing in the room. Slanting back on its lemon-oiled shelves lay all the newly acquired Red Seal records: Galli-Curci in the sextet from “Lucia”; the Flonzaley Quartet, whose sprigged mustachios he knew well from the Victor catalogue; and Alma Gluck, singing “From the la-and of the sky-ee blue” and then “wawtah” very quick. He would have liked to play that one, or “Cohen on the Telephone,” but he was sure that he would not be allowed to today.

Walking into the hot, brassy clutter of the kitchen, he stopped at the icebox and drew himself a glass of water from a pipe that ran back into the ice chamber—a fixture in which his mother took pride but which he thought overrated.

“Can I have some of Dad’s French Vichy?” He wasn’t even sure that he liked its flat, mineral taste, but it was something of a feat to get it.

“No, you can’t,” said his mother, gingerly taking a tray of prune pockets out of the oven. “I can’t be sending to the drugstore all the time. Catering to the fads and fancies of a lot of—A boarding house, that’s what I’m running! You’d think they all
lived
here!”

“Mother, what did Uncle Aaron die of?” he said idly.

He already knew the answer. He rarely needed to ask an explicit question about family affairs. By picking up crumbs and overtones at the endless family gatherings, he had amassed his information. His Uncle Aaron had had pneumonia and had been convalescing on an upstate farm all spring. But his mother said, “Of old age, I guess,” and gazed past him. Kinny’s father, years older than she, was only a decade younger than the dead uncle. The family was getting down. His father had only sisters now. Kinny began to eat a prune pocket.