The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (35 page)

It was the closest to death Hester had ever been. Seated there alone at the great, round communal plate of the dining table, she felt herself all over, inwardly, for the abrasions that were proper to the circumstance, but found none—nothing except a shameful sense of excitement over an extraordinary drama in which everyone unwontedly exposed himself. Aunt Flora, who had come, in answer to Selena’s call, from her apartment a block away, had superseded Selena at the phone, as befitted a daughter of the deceased. With tears ruining the rouge on her aged-soubrette face, under the high white hair, she called number after number, bearing up remarkably until she got her party and identified herself, at which point she quavered, “Oh, Nettie!,” “Oh, Walter!,” and then burst into what seemed to be welcomed, cathartic tears.

I never cry over anything except myself, thought Hester guiltily, wondering whether, if they noticed her, they would expect her to be crying. Worriedly she tried to think of something that would make her cry, but nothing stirred in her except the neutral, dispassionate awareness, the ignoble spur of interest.

Dispossessed from her post, Selena came and sat down opposite her. She raised her brows in surprise at Hester’s still being up but said nothing, and her cheeks were hennaed with an unaccustomed tinge of participation. For a long time, the two of them sat there watching, while between them grew a tenuous thread of communion, as between two who sit at the edge of a party or a dance, sipping the moderate liqueur of observation, while around them swirl the tipsier ones, involved in a drunkenness the watchers do not share.

At last, Hester’s mother, who had been busying herself like a distraught hostess, noticed her and, with an enraged whisper, sent her away to bed. Since Hester had always felt that her mother in the presence of others talked to her rather for their benefit than for hers, the scolding rolled off her numbed, sleepy head, and she walked away untouched, undisturbed, down the long hall to her room, past the closed door of her grandmother’s bedroom. As she stood tentatively in the darkness of her own doorway, the door of the bedroom opened, and two men came out carrying a long wicker hamper, which they set down, securing the creaking cover, and then swung between them again, with a servile, devotional gait.

Sleepily pulling off her clothes, she was almost too tired to go through her nightly custom. She climbed onto the radiator under the window and stood there splayed out against the pane, feeling the familiar welling triumph of being suspended in space above people. She thought emulously of Selena, who remained apart, uninvolved, in her rich security of far places experienced, of distances apprehended. Bending down, she completed her ritual, sniffing at the jointure of the window, at its dark smell—a mixture of moisture and dust and the sharpening cool of night.

In bed, the last thing Hester remembered was the word “capri,” which rolled toward her, in her mind uncapitalized, like a small coral bead, but when the brilliant afternoon sun woke her the following day, and sent her nuzzling down into the bedclothes, with their comfortable odor of orris and of her carelessly washed flesh, it was the hamper she remembered. She saw again the sickening rhythm in which the two men had moved—conspirators, shuffling out between them the surprisingly dowdy appurtenance of death.

She reached under the bed, and, drawing out one of the books she kept secreted there, held it in her hand for a long time, but when her mother opened the door and surveyed her exasperatedly, she still had not opened it.

“I never saw a more indifferent girl!” said her mother. “Your father’s home and carrying on terribly. Everything falls on me!” She walked around the room, flipping back the bedclothes, picking up objects with the grim, abstracted compulsion of the housewife, the straightener, the manager. “Get up!” she said fiercely. “The funeral’s at four o’clock. Make yourself a little decent, for once. Get that hair out of your eyes!”

“Am I going to the funeral?” asked Hester.

“No,” said her mother. “Your father doesn’t approve of children being exposed to death.” Then she walked to the window and, slowly, measuredly, as if she were moving in time with a conventional elegy prescribed for the occasion, pulled the shade down firmly all the way to the sill and left the room. Chilled, Hester watched her go, wondering, as she dressed herself haphazardly, if the hard little correctnesses—the properness that seemed so difficult to acquire—crept in gradually as one grew, or whether, on some unspecified name day, one came of age, stepped into the finished, hypocritical shell, and was suddenly grown.

Once outside her door, she found the rest of the apartment sequestered and dim, as if some orderly person had just left, after solicitously muting the colors, numbing the sounds, strewing over everything the careful bleach of bereavement. From behind the closed door of her grandmother’s sitting room, she heard a low rustle of voices and, centered in them, an indescribable retching sound.

She ran toward the warm neutrality of the kitchen. Josie was flusteredly scrabbling at batches of cookery, for which she had rooted out almost everything from the vast storecloset.

“Don’t touch nothing!” Josie said hastily. Then, contrarily, she pushed toward Hester a plateful of
palacsinta—
thin pancakes stuffed with sweetened cottage cheese or melted jelly, which she would never make on command but which would appear suddenly when she had been moved, perhaps, by homesickness for her own country or by a sense of occasion. As Hester ate, Josie hovered over her, sighing.

“T-t-t!” said Josie, rocking back and forth. “Is too bad.” Again Hester felt the flicker of guilt, as if someone had twanged a string inside her and had found it slack, without resonance.

She left the kitchen and crossed the hall to the dining room. Peering into the parlor through the French doors, dully masked with net, she made out a corner where chairs had been drawn aside to make room for what must be the coffin. Parting the doors stealthily, she went in, planning to see for herself the thing to which children must not be exposed.

As she entered, a figure seated in front of the coffin moved slightly. Terror of the unimaginable jumped in her, for the figure was tiny, bent, and dressed in spare black, as her grandmother had always been. Expelling her breath, she saw that this was a stranger, whose china teeth and thick, glossy brown wig, rimming her face like a hat, were both too big for her, giving her the appearance of a Punch-and-Judy doll that had been excessively repaired.

Hester drew back, but the woman, misinterpreting her withdrawal, motioned toward her ingratiatingly, with a custodian’s pride. Drawing Hester compellingly to the coffin’s side, the woman then stood with her hands bunched together at her neckbones, her bright, avian stare cocked sidewise as Hester looked down into the box.

Less wrinkled, whiter than in life, Hester’s grandmother extended her short length in the box, with the same finished, miniature look she had always had, with the same natural dignity. At any moment, Hester felt, she might unlock her eyes and say, “But how could you think I would not handle
this
decently, properly, too?” Shrinking from the gross casualness of the woman attitudinized beside her, Hester wavered nearer the box, and when she turned and ran from the room, it was from the live woman that she ran.

In the hallway, she collided with the hatted figure of her mother, and for a moment that soft collision with dim, powdery fragrance, with the half-remembered enveloping warmth of babyhood, clouded the barrier of properness between them.

“Who’s that little old woman in there?” Hester whispered.

“Who? Oh, she’s a professional watcher,” said her mother. She was carefully draping a thick veil over her hat. “Your grandmother was Orthodox, you know,” she added with a certain disdain. “Someone has to be with the dead until the burial, the next day.”

“Is that her
job
?” Hester whispered.

“It’s a volunteer society, I believe. I suppose women who have no other … I suppose one gives them
something
,” her mother said impatiently, with a final shake of herself. “Go stay with Josie,” she added, frowning.

Lingering in the hall, Hester watched her mother listen at the sitting-room door for a minute and then knock.

“Joe,” said her mother, “it’s almost time.”

The door opened and Hester’s father came out, surrounded by the hovering women: Flora and Amy—his sisters—and the cousins Rose and Martha. Selena was not among them. Her father looked blindly ahead of him, and half groans, the replica of the awful sound she had heard before, still shook him.

“Joe,” said her mother, “get ahold of yourself!”

He raised his head. “Ahold of myself!” he said. He bent his head again, and the women closed around him—the red-eyed, solicitous sisters first, then the border of cousins—and, moving their dark caravan slowly, steadily, they passed through the dim foyer and out the apartment door.

Hester tiptoed to the empty kitchen. Through the half-open door of Josie’s room, she saw her sleeping on her bed, openmouthed. Shutting the back door of the apartment softly behind her, Hester ran down the five flights of service stairs into the back court of the apartment house. Making a wide circle, she arrived at the front entrance and unobtrusively joined the audience of children and passersby that flanked it.

All along the street, the line of black cars waited in heavy perfection, closed to the great blond sea of the sun. From both corners, people converged upon them, like a stream of ants, and were met at the center by a gentleman with a fixed look of gravity, who murmured something to each of them, referred to a list in his hand, and, nodding, conducted them to one or another of the cars.

Next to Hester, a woman nudged another. “The family,” she mouthed.

Now the grave man’s look deepened, became even more carved, as, with a stooping, comma-like posture, the list disregarded, he handed Hester’s parents and the aunts into the central car, bearing them along almost on his arm, as if they were the veritable royalty of grief. Behind them, Martha, in an aspiring headdress poised like an aigrette on a sparrow, and Rose, straighter than usual, were shunted into one of the rear cars by an assistant. By now, the cars were full, and the stragglers who still came were people, unfamiliar to Hester, who did not seem to expect to go with the cortege but passed on, whispering among themselves, into the building. Four men, dressed the same, and of a size, like dummies, emerged, carrying the coffin. At the curb they paused, shifting the weight between them, then slid it neatly into the hearse.

The carved gentleman raised his hand officiously toward his assistant. “All set,” he said.

Suddenly, walking alone, came Selena. Even today, she had been unable to resign herself to black and wore a dress the rubbed blue of plumskin, whose texture seemed flattened here and there by years of waiting in a box. Without the insignia of her coral, she looked somehow bereft, but she walked toward the gentleman in austere pride, on her cheeks the henna tinge of the night before.

The gentleman looked discomforted. “Only the immediate family,” he said placatingly.

“I am a member of the family,” said Selena in a secure contralto, but one hand opened and closed at her chest, seeking the reassurance of the corals, as if she might at any moment add, “The member from Capri.”

Bending nearer, the gentleman murmured an inquiry and agitatedly checked her answer against his list. “I am sorry,” he said in buttered tones, “but there seems to have been an oversight. Do you wish me to check with a member of …” He paused and allowed a delicate insinuation of disapproval to affect his face.

“No,” said Selena in a rusty voice. “Never mind.”

He bowed. “The family,” he said consolingly, “will receive friends of the deceased upstairs when they return.” He flicked a nod to his assistant, and with a sinuous deftness they inserted themselves into the hearse, which pulsed into a motion that reverberated sluggishly down the line of cars.

In a few minutes, the street was almost empty of cars and onlookers, except for Hester, who had crept behind one of the ironwork grilles in the courtyard, and Selena, who remained as if held by a need to see the last of the cars inexorably gone. Standing there in the open light of summer, she looked to Hester at once bizarre and dusty, like one of those oddly colored bits of bric-a-brac that seem mysterious and compelling in the back of the store but, when brought to the light by the excited purchaser, are seen to be lurid and unsuccessful. When the last car had gone, Selena stood there for a moment, her hand still nervously groping on her chest; then, slowly, with a ragged, indecisive gait, she turned and walked away.

Hester saw her recede down the long block, until she vanished around the corner. In her mind, like a frieze, she saw the added-up picture of Selena, always watching tentatively, thirstily, on the fringe of other people’s happenings, and fear grew in her as she became suddenly aware of her own figure, standing now in the hot sun. It was watching, too.

T
URNING THEIR BACKS ON
the last fanfare of sunset over the river, Hester and Kinny Elkin, side by side, skated laboriously up the hill, toward Broadway. Ordinarily, they would have kept a more cynical distance between elder sister, gone past twelve, and younger brother, but today, in the sprawling ten-room apartment which had always been their home, the shape of things was being dismantled for removal to a sunless five rooms in the rear of the building, on the same floor. Neither was anxious to return to the uneasy place now revealing itself as no longer theirs.

For Hester, it was hard to believe that things back there would not be the same as they always had been at this hour, full of the settled ease of women from both sides of the family, dropped in for their afternoon coffee—white tablecloth, the cake plates with angels painted in their centers, cocoa for the children; to think of all this as not there to return to was like trying to hold in the ear two separate chords. Surely, when Josie, the maid, opened the door, her hectic look, both shaky and starched, would advise that the usual assortment of aunts and cousins was already sitting within, the two clans politely opposed as always, joined only on such topics as their common opinion of the Elkin maid. Silent on the things that mattered, they would be exchanging crumbs of agreement on whatever didn’t, across a little neutral sea where innuendo slid like eels; this was what adult “politeness” was. For the half-grown like herself, its counterpart was: to say, and appear to see—nothing. To rest on the yet safer swells of a bottom dark was what it had been to be a child.