The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (7 page)

When we got to the main street of the town, it was crowded, but the clothing stores were closing. Luke rushed into a haberdashery shop and came out with a tie. At the dark end of the shopping district we found a shoe store whose proprietor, counting stock in his dim interior, opened his locked door. I bought a pair of silver, girl-graduate sandals, the first pair he showed me. “Gee, lady,” he said, as we whisked out of his shop, “I wish every lady was as quick as you.”

Smiling to ourselves, we reentered the car. There was a charm that hung about us then, and we were not insensible of it, even aware that it had more to do with our situation than ourselves. We were still guests in the adult world of “lady” and “gentleman”; lightly we rode anchor in their harbor, partook of its perquisites, and escaped again to our enviable truancy. The rest of the world—we saw it in their faces—would be like us if it could. On the way through Hawthornton, I looked for a florist shop, but we passed too quickly by.

Five miles through the woodland of the Hawthorns’ private road brought us to the house. There had been no others along the way. But the house that loomed before us, in a cleared area rather bleak and shrubless after the woods behind us, had no baronial mystery about it. By the lights under its porte-cochere, it looked to be about forty years old—one of those rambling, tasteless houses, half timbered, with thick stone porches, which “comfortably off” people built around the turn of the century, more for summer use, but providently made habitable for all year round. As we came to a stop under the porte-cochere, and the coupe’s engine died, I heard the rushing sound of water, and saw that we seemed to be on the tip of a promontory that ended several hundred feet beyond.

“We on a lake?”

“Only the Atlantic,” said Luke. “Don’t you ever know where you are? We’ve been driving toward it all afternoon.”

“Hardly ever,” I said. “But we seem to be fated to meet Mrs. H. on one ocean or another.”

A capped maid opened the door. Mrs. Hawthorn stood at the foot of the stairs to greet us. It was the first time I had seen her in black, a very low-cut, smart black, enlivened only by the cuff of bracelets on her right arm. It made her seem less of a “character,” placing her almost in my mother’s generation, although she may not have been quite that, and a little unsettling me. In my world, the different generations did not much visit each other, at least did not seek each other’s company as she had ours.

She made a breezy stir of our welcome, giving us each a hand, directing the houseman as to our bags, referring us to separate corners for a wash. “Drinks in the dining room. See you there.”

When we entered, she was seated at the long dining table, alone. Three places were set, not at the head, but down toward the middle, ours opposite hers. There was no evidence that anyone else was to dine, or had.

I remember nothing of the room, except my surprise. As we clicked glasses, were served, I tried to recall her voice as it had come over the wire to New York; certainly her airy chitchat had given me the impression that we were to be members of a house party. Otherwise, considering the gap between us of situation, money, age—how odd it was of her to have singled us out! Her conversation seemed to be newly flecked with slang, a kind of slang she perhaps thought we used. “That way for the johns,” she had said, directing us to the bathrooms, and now, speaking of Bermuda, she asked us if we had not thought it “simply terrif.” She had found European travel “rather a frost.”

“I get more of a boot out of cutting a dash at home,” she said, grinning.

A second manservant and maid were serving us. “I keep the estate staffed the way it’s always been,” she said. “Even though a good bit of the time it’s only just me. Of course we’ve had to draw in our horns in lots of ways, like everyone else. But I’ve washed enough dishes in Hawthornton, I always say.” She smiled down at her bracelets.

“Have you always lived in Hawthornton?” said Luke.

She nodded. “The Senator’s people have always had the mills here. The Hawthorn Knitting Mills. And my father was the town parson—also the town drunk. But I married the mill-owner’s son.” She chuckled, and we had to laugh with her, at the picture she drew for us. It was the same with all her allusions to her possessions—allusions which were frequent and childlike. As they ballooned into boasting, she pricked them, careful to show that she claimed no kind of eminence because of them.

What she did claim was the puzzling thing, for I felt that “the estate” meant something to her beyond the ordinary, and that her choice of our company was somehow connected with that meaning. Certainly she was shrewd enough to see that our scale of living was not hers, although for a while I dallied with the idea that a real social ignorance—that of the daughter of the down-at-the-heel parson, suddenly transmuted into the mill-owner’s wife—had kept her insensitive to all the economic gradations between, had made her assume that because we were “college people,” had been on the Bermuda boat, and had an anonymous East Side address, our jobs and our battered Chevy were only our way of drawing in our horns. But she did not seem to be really interested in who we were, or what our parents had been. Something about what we had, or were now, had drawn her to us; in her queer little overtures of slang she seemed to be wistfully ranging herself on our side. But I did not know what she imagined “our side” to be.

We took our coffee in what she referred to as “the big room”—at first it was hard to categorize as anything else. Large as a hotel lounge, it had something of the same imperviousness to personality. Sofas and club chairs, stodgy but solid, filled its middle spaces; there was a grand piano at either end, and all along the edges, beneath the irregularly nooked windows, there were many worn wicker-and-chintz settees. But, looking further, I saw the dark bookshelves filled with Elbert Hubbard editions, the burnt-leather cushions, of the kind that last a lifetime, scattering the wicker, the ponderous floor lamps, whose parchment umbrella shades were bound with fringe—and I began to recognize the room for what it was. This was a room from which the stags’ heads, the Tiffany glass had been cleared, perhaps, but it was still that room which lurked in albums and memoirs, behind pictures labeled
The Family at __. Summer of
1910.
Bottom row my son Ned, later to fall in the Ardennes, daughters Julie and Christine, and their school friend, Mary X, now wife of my son George.

“I never did much to this room except put in the pianos,” said Mrs. Hawthorn. “It’s practically the same as when we got married, the year Harry’s mother died, and he came back from France. We had some helluva parties here, though. Wonderful!” And now, as I followed her glance, I fancied that I detected in the room a faint, raffish overglaze of the early twenties, when I was too young to go to parties—here and there a hassock, still loudly black-and-white, a few of those ballerina book ends everyone used to have, and yes, there, hung in a corner, a couple of old batiks. Dozens of people could have sprawled here, the young men with their bell-bottomed trousers, the girls with their Tutankhamen eardrops, pointed pumps, and orange-ice-colored silk knees. The weathered wicker would have absorbed the spilled drinks without comment, and cigarette burns would have been hilariously added to the burnt-leather cushions. Yes, it could have been a hell of a room for a party.

Mrs. Hawthorn led us to the windows and pointed out into the dark, staring through it with the sure, commanding eye of the householder. “You can’t see, of course, but we’re on three bodies of water here—the river, the Sound, and the ocean. There’s the end of the dock—the Coast Guard still ties up there once in a while, although we don’t keep it up any more. When I was a kid, it used to be fitted out like a summer hotel. I used to swim around the point and watch them.” Then, I thought, she would not have been one of the three little girls in the bottom row of the picture—she would never have been in that picture at all.

She closed the curtain. “Let me show you your room, then we’ll be off.” She led us upstairs, into a comfortable, nondescript bedroom. “That’s my door, across the hall. Knock when you’re ready.”

“Oh, it won’t take a minute to change,” I said.

“Change? Dear, you don’t have to change.”

“Oh, but we’ve brought our evening things,” I said. “It’ll only take us a minute.” There was a slight wail to my voice.

“Really it won’t,” said Luke. “We’re awfully sorry if we’ve delayed you, but we’ll rush.”

We continued our protests for a minute, standing there in the hall. She leaned down and patted my shoulder, looking at me with that musing smile older women wore when they leaned over baby carriages. I had encountered that look often that year, among my mother’s friends. “No, run along, and never mind,” she said. “Nobody else is going to be there.”

In front of the mirror in our room, I ran a comb through my curls. “Nobody who
is
anybody, I suppose she meant. I can’t imagine why else she picked on us. And when I think of those awful shoes!”

“You can wear them at home,” said Luke. “I like women to be flashy around the house. Come on, you look wonderful.”

“I’m going to change to them anyway. They’ll dance better.”

“You’ll only have to dance half the dances.”

“Luke—” I slid my feet into the shoes and twisted to check my stocking seams. “Do you suppose that little man, Dave, will be there? Do you suppose we’re being used as a sort of
cover
?”

He laughed. “I don’t know. Come on.”

“Don’t you think it’s funny she doesn’t say where the Senator is? At least make his excuses or something?”

“Away on business, probably.”

“Well, why isn’t she in Washington with him, then? I would be—if it were you.”

“Thank
you
,” he said. “But how come you got through college? There’s no Connecticut senator to Washington named Hawthorn.”

“Luke! I knew there was something fishy! Maybe there isn’t any Senator. Or maybe he’s divorced her, and nobody around here will know her. Or maybe she’s a little off, from his being dead, and wants to go on pretending he’s alive. With people like us—who wouldn’t know.”

He put back his head in laughter. “Now I know how you did get through college.” He kissed the back of my neck, and pushed me through the door. “State senator, dope,” he whispered, as we knocked at Mrs. Hawthorn’s.

“Ready?” She opened the door and held it back in such a way that we knew we were to look in. “This is the only room I changed,” she said. “I had it done again last year, the same way. I thought the man from Sloane would drop in his tracks when I insisted on the same thing. All that pink. Ninety yards of it in the curtains alone.” She laughed, as she had done at the child in Bermuda. “Of course I had no idea back then … I thought it was lovely, so help me. And now I’m used to it.”

We looked around. All that pink, as she had said. The room, from its shape, must be directly above the big room below; its great windows jutted out like a huge pink prow, overlooking the three bodies of water. Chairs with the sickly sheen of hard candy pursed their Louis Quatorze legs on a rose madder rug, under lamps the tinge of old powder puffs. There were a few glossy prints on the walls—nymphs couched like bonbons in ambiguous verdure. Marble putti held back the curtains, and each morning, between ninety yards of rosy lingerie, there would rise the craggy, seamed face of the sea.

Mrs. Hawthorn put her hand on one of the cherubs, and looked out. “We sailed from there on our honeymoon,” she said. “On the old Hawthorns’ yacht, right from the end of the dock. I remember thinking it would give, there were so many people on the end of it.” She took a fur from a chair, slung it around her shoulders, and walked to the door. At the door, she turned back and surveyed the room. “Ain’t it orful!” she said, in her normal voice. “Harry can’t bear it.”

She had two voices, I thought, as we followed her downstairs and got in the car she referred to as her runabout, that she’d made Harry give her in place of the chauffeur-driven Rolls. One voice for that tranced tale of first possession—when the house, the dock, the boudoir, Harry were new. And one for now—slangy, agnostic, amused.

She drove well, the way she swam, with a crisp, physical intensity. There had been bridle paths through these woods, she told us, but she hadn’t really minded giving up the horses; swimming was the only thing she liked to do alone. She swam every day; it kept her weight down to the same as when she married. “You’ll be having to pick yourself some exercise now too, honey,” she said, sighing. “And stick to it the rest of your days.”

We would turn on to the main road soon, I thought, probably to one of those roadhouses full of Saturday night daters such as Luke and I had been the year before, spinning out the evening on the cover charge and a couple of setups, and looking down our noses at the fat middle-agers who didn’t have to watch the tab, but were such a nuisance on the floor.

The car veered suddenly to the left, and reduced speed. Now we seemed to be riding on one of the overgrown paths. Twigs whipped through the open window and slurred out again as we passed. Beside me, Luke rolled up the window. We were all in the front seat together. No one spoke.

We stopped. We must be in the heart of the woods, I thought. There was nothing except the blind probe of the headlamps against leaves, the scraping of the November wind.

“Guess the switch from the house doesn’t work any more,” she said, half to herself. She took a flashlight from the compartment. “Wait here,” she said, and got out of the car. After she had gone, I opened the window and leaned across Luke, holding on to his hand. Above me, the stars were enlarged by the pure air. Off somewhere to the right, the flashlight made a weak, disappearing nimbus.

Then, suddenly, the woods were
en fête.
Festoons of lights spattered from tree to tree. Ahead of us, necromanced from the dark wood, the pattern of a house sprang on the air. After a moment our slow eyes saw that strings of lights garlanded its low log-cabin eaves, and twined up the two thick thrusts of chimney at either end. The flashlight wigwagged to us. We got out of the car, and walked toward it. Mrs. Hawthorn was leaning against one of the illuminated trees, looking up at the house. The furs slung back from her shoulders in a conqueror’s arc. As we approached, she shook her head, in a swimmer’s shake. “Well, ladies and gents,” she said, in the cool, the vinaigrette voice, “here it is.”