The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (33 page)

“My dear Mother: Trust this finds you well and in good spirits. Everything is fine here. The meals are good and the rooms are nice and clean. I miss seeing you and my dear family, but the doctor says that everything is going as well as can be expected, though he still would like to see me go out West this fall. Please God, we will all see each other before then. Keep well and do not worry if I write seldom, as there is very little news here. Your affectionate son, Aaron.”

Rubbing the ball of one thumb ceaselessly in the palm of the other hand, his grandmother looked straight through him. He’d never noticed before how her head shook a little, as if blown by a slight, steady current from behind. “Read it again, Kinny,” she whispered.

He read it again, more quickly, thinking that its phrases sounded a lot like the letters his father sent home from his travels—“please God” and “trust you are well,” and signed always “Yrs. aff., Joe.”

“Let me have the letter.” Searching shakily in the side pocket of the chair, she brought out the thick, bevelled magnifying glass. Holding it almost under her nose, she inched it slowly along the letter, then the envelope, then back to the letter again. She sat for a long time with the letter in her lap; then a sharp movement of her arm sent the magnifying glass across the room, where it hit the couch and spun to the floor with the dull, rubbling sound of a top but did not break. He pressed his knees together, listening to the echo.

He saw that she was feeling for the cane. Frightened, he thrust it under her hand, but was reassured by the familiar heavy way she rested on him and pulled herself up in three marionette jerks. The two of them made their way to the sideboard. As she bent over the drawer, he saw the moisture from her eyes run six ways down the channels in her cheeks and fall into the drawer. Turning, she let her sticks of fingers brush his face in a dry gesture.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “You were good to try.” Thrusting the box into his hand, but not releasing it finally, she held her hands cupped around his, and for a moment, they rocked back and forth together, in a movement of complicity and love.

W
HEN THE MUSCHENHEIM LIMOUSINE
slid up to the curb, like a great, rolling onyx, it had hardly stopped before the chauffeur, in broadcloth cerements, leaped out and flourished open the door. Mrs. Muschenheim emerged slowly, her enormous bulk divided and encircled with ruchings, the elegiac balloon of velvet that compressed her black pompadour looking like the knob on the chess queen.

Hester, watching intently from a cramped stone niche in the courtyard entrance, where she had been sitting in Sunday-afternoon stiffness, knew that this arrival was the signal that the birthday party at the Reuters’ was about to begin. While Mrs. Muschenheim stared before her with majesty, the chauffeur reverently brought forth several cakeboxes of a whiteness and size that drew awed murmurs from the kids around the entrance, then bore them smartly behind his employer as she lumbered through the courtyard and into the apartment house on her way up to the Reuters’, on the ninth floor.

Hester could never decide which attracted her more—the elaborate sweets or the solemn pageantry of the Reuter family life. Sometimes she was given tastes from the boxes of mocha torte or glazed cherries when Clara, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of the Reuters, descending to Hester’s twelve-year level on bored, boyless afternoons, asked her upstairs, and the two of them hovered hopefully on the periphery of the stately orgies of pastry, coffee, and talk.

The Reuters belonged to the solid phalanx of upper-middle-class German burgher families that moved in its own orbit in New York. During the first World War, just past, the women had learned to knit by the jerky American method and had bought Liberty Bonds stolidly, but through this period, as always, they lingered over the coffeepot on smoky winter afternoons, did their hair leaning over rivulets of scalloped dresser scarves made by the daughters of the house, and married off their sons and daughters to one another—not by compulsion but through the graceful pressure of cocoa parties together at the age of ten and dinner parties at the age of twenty.

Hester detached herself painfully from her cold seat, permitted herself one superb glance around at the other kids, who did not share her entrée, and followed Mrs. Muschenheim in, just slowly enough not to catch the same elevator. She went up to her own family’s apartment, four floors below the Reuters’, and scurried back to her room, sliding off her coat. Because of the inactivity of Sunday afternoon, her new dress was still fresh. Ramming her barrette to a firmer hold on her hair, she burrowed in her bureau drawer for the tissue-wrapped handkerchief that would serve as her ticket of admittance to the birthday party. Holding it by its rosette of ribbon, she slipped out of the apartment, climbed the four flights to the Reuters’ floor, and rang the bell. Clara opened the door.

“Oh, h’lo, Hester,” said Clara, her eyes on the little package.

“’S for your mother’s birthday,” Hester muttered, and thrust the package at her.

“Oh,
thank
you, Hester! She’ll be pleased,” said Clara with sweet artificiality. Both were aware that a handkerchief was not to be considered a real present but, rather, a kind of party currency. Then Clara dropped her adult tone. “Listen! Guess what!” she said, and hurried Hester along the hall toward her mother’s bedroom. Going past the piles of tissue paper and ribbon on the waxed foyer table, turning her head to peer back through the living-room doorway at the people gathered inside, Hester thought there was no place for a party like the Reuters’, where all the material panoply of life was treated with such devotion.

Both Mrs. Reuter, the grandmother, and her sister, Mrs. Enke, rivalled Mrs. Muschenheim in size. Their mammoth hips swelled like hoop skirts under their made-to-order dresses. Behind her nose glasses, Mrs. Reuter’s enlarged blue eyes melted innocently in the genial arrangement of red pincushions that was her face. From Mrs. Enke’s more elegant profile, wan folds draped away sculpturally, as befitted her long-standing widowhood. In this citadel of women, which included Clara and her mother, Mrs. Braggiotti, Mr. Reuter might have felt oppressed had he not been equally large, and likely to find, on his four-o’clock return from the lace business, various Adolphs and Karls, of severe clothes and superb, gold-linked linen, who had already deserted the garlanded cake plates for a bottle of schnapps, over which they would discuss the market. Once, Hester had even seen the German consul there, his domed head rolling and stretching out on his creased neck like a sea lion accepting the deference of the crowd. When, on such occasions, Mrs. Reuter’s eyes turned too explicitly to Hester’s grubby play dress and battered knees, the two girls played in Clara’s room with the frilled doll that had belonged to Clara’s mother, or made exploratory tours of the other bedrooms.

All the bedrooms were of such complete neatness that Hester had never been able to imagine the Reuter women as really going to bed at all, but saw them moving serenely through the night ready to meet the first caller of the day, their hair unawry, their watches pinned to their waists. To her, these rooms full of starched bolsters, where every plane was animated with linen and crisped with laces, seemed the ideal toward which any girl would aim her hope chest, but sanctuaries, nevertheless, in which it was improbable that any of the natural functions went on. The closet floors were not cluttered with stray shoes or saved boxes, and in the dresser drawers there were no broken earrings tumbled among cards from the upholsterer, bits of cornice off the mirror, and odd ends of elastic. Each object, useful and needed, reposed in a wash of space and calm. Mrs. Braggiotti’s room had, in addition, the aura of the romantically pretty woman.

In this room, Hester and Clara always went to the dresser first, passing from the etched-crystal tray, with its kaleidoscopic row of perfume bottles, whose number and style varied with Mrs. Braggiotti’s admirers, to the rosy pincushions, where, among hat daggers and florists’ pins, sometimes lay two great dinner rings, with rows of huge diamonds in pavements of smaller ones. These, Clara said, had been the Reuters’ gift to her mother on her marriage. Who or what Mr. Braggiotti was or had been, Hester had never been told. If she conceived of him at all, it was as an alien, a kind of slim, Italianate poniard that had once got embedded mistakenly in the firm dough of the Reuter household.

What drew Hester most in this room was the shoes. Clara would ostentatiously swing open the closet door, and there, in the soft cretonne pockets that covered it from base to top, were her mother’s thirty pairs of small, high-arched shoes, some in leathers of special kinds—snake or piped kidskin—but most of them dyed in pale costume shades that resembled in their gradations of color the row of sewing silks on a drygoods counter. Looking at them, Hester could see Mrs. Braggiotti, who, with her tilted nose, masses of true-blond hair, and bud mouth, was what every shag-haired girl staring into the Narcissus pools of adolescence hoped to see. Hester thought of her as she had often met her, riding down serenely in the elevator, a pale, wide hat just matching the flowers in her chiffon dress, a long puff of fur held carelessly against the faintly florid hips. Mixed with this image was a more perplexing vision, of Mrs. Braggiotti at the piano, where she played Chopin with much ripple and style but wearing a pince-nez that mercilessly puckered the flesh between her brows, giving her the appearance of a doll that had been asked to cope with human problems. Hester preferred to think of her as endlessly floating from one assignation to another in an endless palette of costumes that matched.

It was toward Mrs. Braggiotti’s dresser, then, that Clara pulled Hester, pointing out the huge bottle that stood on the tray, eclipsing all the others. “George gave it to her, just now!” said Clara.

“Who’s he?”

“He’s
in love
with her.”

It was only recently that Hester had learned not to giggle at the term. Now the phrase fell on her ear like something dropping softly, momentously, from a tree.

“Is
she
in love with
him
?”

“How should I know?” Clara stared down her nose at her. Apparently, Hester had again made one of the major errors that were always emphasizing the age gap between them. Obviously, to Clara’s way of thinking (which must also be the adult one), the important thing was to
be
loved and to enjoy all the gestures thereof.

Without stopping to inspect the rest of the room, the girls went back along the hall and edged into the overheated living room. Mrs. Reuter was with a group near the door, and on the far side Mrs. Braggiotti, this time without the pince-nez, was playing the piano for a number of gentlemen gathered around her. “How pretty your dress is, my dear! Did your mother make it?” panted Mrs. Reuter, her glance approving Hester’s cleanliness, one hand blotting the drops of sweat from her hot face and just preventing them from falling on her gray satin prow.

“She did the flowers.” Hester looked down doubtfully at the lavender voile, its color harsh against her olive-brown hands. All over its skirt and sleeves, unsuccessfully tiered to hide her lankness, large bunches of multicolored flowers were worked at careful equidistance. It had been the tenant of her mother’s workbasket all the preceding summer.

“My, she does beautiful work!” Mrs. Reuter fingered the dress tenderly. “Did you have some Nesselrode?” She nodded to Hester and left her.

“That’s him,” Clara whispered, at Hester’s elbow.

“Where?”

“By the window,” said Clara. She left Hester and went over to her mother.

Looking, Hester saw a man somewhat under middle height standing near Mrs. Enke. Against the Wagnerian proportions of the others, he appeared unobtrusive but not negligible, as if their fleshy tide might flow past but not engulf him. There was something about his pleasant, even-featured face that was as firm and self-contained as a nut. He crossed the room to speak to Mrs. Braggiotti, whose head and neck made a pretty arc as she inclined upward toward him, her circlet of crystal beads shining in the afternoon sun. Clara pranced over to Hester again. “Guess what!” she said. “George is going to take you and me and Mama for a soda!”

“Maybe I better not go.”

“Oh, sure. It’s just to a drugstore, silly. He
owns
it—a nice one, not like the one downstairs. Over on Madison Avenue. You needn’t even tell your family you’re going. I’ll lend you a coat, and we can take turns on my skates. Come
on
!”

They walked the few blocks over to Madison Avenue, George and Mrs. Braggiotti far ahead, linked as sedately as any married couple. Combined with the cold thrill of the brilliant afternoon Hester felt the lovely unease of wearing someone else’s clothes. As they walked, they could glimpse the frozen brown fronds of the park between the tall buildings, on which the hard, white winter sun struck, audible as a gong.

Set discreetly into the limestone corner of a block of private houses, Sunday-quiet behind their fretworks of iron, the ruby urns of the Town Pharmacy sent out a message of mystery and warmth. George unlocked the door and let them in to the aromatic smells of the pharmacopoeia and vanilla. Rising from the long expanse of tiled floor, the glass shelves, serried with pomades and panaceas, looked housewifely and knowledgeable, as if filled with the lore of the ages. Clara rushed to the small marble counter near the door and balanced on one of the high, curved metal chairs.

“A sundae, George, with everything.”

“I don’t open until four, Madam,” he said, sliding off his coat and standing revealed in his suspenders and full, white shirtsleeves before he slipped on an alpaca jacket. Hester thought that he looked very intimate, but Mrs. Braggiotti, sitting formally on another chair, one pale-blue heel hooked over the rung, seemed not to notice. She refused a sundae, saying, “Oh, no, George, thanks. You know Mama’s dinners!,” in her high, untimbred voice.

After the sundaes, Hester and Clara went outside. Clara put on her skates and, promising not to take too long a turn, went grinding down the empty asphalt, rounded a corner, and was gone. Hester grew chilly waiting, and the sundae was cold inside her. Tiptoeing back around the half-open door into the store, she crouched down on a wooden box behind the marble counter and fingered the levers that controlled the soda water and syrups. Warm and hemmed in, she felt that it would be good to spend one’s life in this shadowy store, away from the airless routine of an apartment but suspended a step above the rough street—like being on a little island, with faucets for running water and a bathroom at the back. There was a movement at the darker end of the store.