The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (75 page)

“And you would be the lady in Mrs. Berry’s. Such a nicely spoken woman, she was.”

“Oh yes, isn’t she,” said Mrs. Hazlitt. “I mean … I just came through the agent. But when you live in a person’s house—do you know her?”

“Just to speak. Half as long as me, they’d lived here. Fifteen years.” The old lady took the one letter Mrs. Hazlitt passed her, the yellow-fronted rent bill whose duplicate she herself had received this morning. “Ah well, we’re always sure of this one, aren’t we?” Nodding her thanks, she shuffled toward the elevator on built-up shoes shaped like hods. “Still, it’s a nice, quiet building, and lucky we are to be in it these days.”

There was such a rickety bravery about her, of neat habits long overborne by the imprecisions of age, of dowager hat set slightly askew by fingers unable to deal with a key yet living alone, that Mrs. Hazlitt, reluctant to shake the poor, tottery dear further, had to remind herself of the moment before their encounter.

“Last night?” The old blue eyes looked blank, then brightened. “Ah no, I must have taken one of my Seconals. Otherwise I’d have heard it surely. ‘Auntie,’ my niece always says—‘what if there should be a fire, and you there sleeping away?’ Do what she says, I do sometimes, only to hear every pin drop till morning.” She shook her head, entering the elevator. “Going up?”

“N-no,” said Mrs. Hazlitt. “I—have to wait here for a minute.” She sat down on the bench, the token bench that she had never seen anybody sitting on, and watched the car door close on the little figure still shaking its head, borne upward like a fairy godmother, willing but unable to oblige. The car’s hum stopped, then its light glowed on again. Someone else was coming down. No, this is the nadir, Mrs. Hazlitt thought. Whether I heard it or not, I’m obviously no longer myself. Sleeping pills for me too, though I’ve never—and no more nonsense. And no more questioning, no matter who.

The car door opened. “Wssht!” said Mrs. Finan, scuttling out again. “I’ve just remembered. Not last night, but two weeks ago. And once before that. A scream, you said?”

Mrs. Hazlitt stood up. Almost unable to speak, for the tears that suddenly wrenched her throat, she described it.

“That’s it, just what I told my niece on the phone next morning. Like nothing human, and yet it was. I’d taken my Seconal too early, so there I was wide awake again, lying there just thinking, when it came. ‘Auntie,’ she tried to tell me, ‘it was just one of the sireens. Or hoodlums maybe.’” Miss Finan reached up very slowly and settled her hat. “The city’s gone down, you know. Not what it was,” she said in a reduced voice, casting a glance over her shoulder, as if whatever the city now was loomed behind her. “But I’ve laid awake on this street too many years, I said, not to know what I hear.” She leaned forward. “But—she … they think I’m getting old, you know,” she said, in the whisper used to confide the unimaginable. “So … well … when I heard it again I just didn’t tell her.”

Mrs. Hazlitt grubbed for her handkerchief, found it and blew her nose. Breaking down, she thought—I never knew what a literal phrase it is. For she felt as if all the muscles that usually held her up, knee to ankle, had slipped their knots and were melting her, unless she could stop them, to the floor. “I’m not normally such a nervous woman,” she managed to say. “But it was just that no one else seemed to—why, there were people with lights on, but they just seemed to ignore.”

The old lady nodded absently. “Well, thank God my hearing’s as good as ever. Hmm. Wait till I tell Jennie that!” She began making her painful way back to the car.

Mrs. Hazlitt put out a hand to delay her. “In case it—I mean, in case somebody ought to be notified—do you have any idea what it was?”

“Oh, I don’t know. And what could we—?” Miss Finan shrugged, eager to get along. Still, gossip was tempting. “I did think—” She paused, lowering her voice uneasily. “Like somebody in a fit, it was. We’d a sexton at church taken that way with epilepsy once. And it stopped short like that, just as if somebody’d clapped a hand over its mouth, poor devil. Then the next time I thought—no, more like a signal, like somebody calling. You know the things you’ll think at night.” She turned, clearly eager to get away.

“But, oughtn’t we to inquire?” Mrs. Hazlitt thought of the taxis. “In case it came from this building?”

“This build—” For a moment Miss Finan looked scared, her chin trembling, eyes rounded in the misty, affronted stare that the old gave, not to physical danger, but to a new idea swum too late into their ken. Then she drew herself up, all five feet of her bowed backbone. “Not from here it wouldn’t. Across from that big place, maybe. Lots of riffraff there, not used to their money. Or from Third Avenue, maybe. There’s always been tenements there.” She looked at Mrs. Hazlitt with an obtuse patronage that reminded her of an old nurse who had first instructed her on the social order, blandly mixing up all first causes—disease, money, poverty, snobbery—with a firm illogic that had still seemed somehow in possession—far more firmly so than her own good-hearted parents—of the crude facts. “New to the city, are you,” she said, more kindly. “It takes a while.”

This time they rode up together. “Now you remember,” Miss Finan said, on leaving. “You’ve two locks on your door, one downstairs. Get a telephone put in by your bed. Snug as a bug in a rug you are then. Nothing to get at you but what’s there already. That’s what I always tell myself when I’m wakeful. Nothing to get at you then but the Old Nick.”

The door closed on her. Watching her go, Mrs. Hazlitt envied her the simplicity, even the spinsterhood that had barred her from imagination as it had from experience. Even the narrowing-in of age would have its compensations, tenderly constricting the horizon as it cramped the fingers, adding the best of locks to Miss Finan’s snugness, on her way by now to the triumphant phone call to Jennie.

But that was sinful, to wish for that too soon, what’s more it was sentimental, in just the way she had vowed to avoid. Mrs. Hazlitt pushed the button for Down. Emerging from the building, she looked back at it from the corner, back at her day of contrived exits and entrances, abortive conversations. People were hurrying in and out now at a great rate. An invisible glass separated her from them; she was no longer in the fold.

Later that night, Mrs. Hazlitt, once more preparing for bed, peered down at the streets through the slats of the Venetian blind. Catching herself in the attitude of peering made her uneasy. Darkening the room behind her, she raised the blind. After dinner in one of the good French restaurants on Third Avenue and a Tati movie afterwards—the French were such competent dispensers of gaiety—she could review her day more as a convalescent does his delirium—“Did I really say—do—that?” And even here she was addressing a vis-à-vis, so deeply was the habit ingrained. But she could see her self-imposed project now for what it was—only a hysterical seeking after conversation, the final breaking-point, like the old-fashioned “crisis” in pneumonia, of the long, low fever of loneliness unexpressed. Even the city, gazed at squarely, was really no anarchy, only a huge diffuseness that returned to the eye of the beholder, to the walker in its streets, even to the closed dream of its sleeper, his own mood, dark or light. Dozens of the solitary must be looking down at it with her, most of them with some
modus vivendi,
many of them booking themselves into life with the same painful intentness, the way the middle-aged sometimes set themselves to learning the tango. And a queer booking you gave yourself today, she told herself, the words lilting with Miss Finan’s Irish, this being the last exchange of speech she had had. Testing the words aloud, she found her way with accents, always such a delight to Sam, as good as ever. Well, she had heard a scream, had discovered someone else who had heard it. And now to forget it as promised; the day was done. Prowling the room a bit, she took up her robe, draped it over her shoulders, still more providently put it on. “Oh Millie,” she said, tossing the dark mirror a look of scorn as she passed it “you’re such a sensible woman.”

Wear out Mrs. Berry’s carpet you will, Millie, she thought, twenty minutes later by the bedroom clock, but the accent, adulterated now by Sam’s, had escaped her. Had the scream had an accent? The trouble was that the mind had its own discipline; one could remember, even with a smile, the story of the man promised all the gold in the world if he could but go for two minutes thinking of the word “hippopotamus.” She stopped in front of the mirror, seeking her smile, but it too had escaped. “Hippopotamus,” she said, to her dark image. The knuckles of one hand rose, somnambulist, as she watched, and pressed against her teeth. She forced the hand, hers, down again. I will say it again, aloud, she thought, and while I am saying it I will be sure to say to myself that I am saying it aloud. She did so. “Hippopotamus.” For a long moment she remained there, staring into the mirror. Then she turned and snapped on every light in the room.

Across from her, in another mirror, the full-length one, herself regarded her. She went forward to it, to that image so irritatingly familiar, so constant as life changed it, so necessarily dear. Fair hair, if maintained too late in life, too brightly, always made the most sensible of women look foolish. There was hers, allowed to gray gently, disordered no more than was natural in the boudoir, framing a face still rational, if strained. “Dear me,” she said to it. “All you need is somebody to talk to, get it out of your system. Somebody like yourself.” As if prodded, she turned and surveyed the room.

Even in the glare of the lights, the naked black projected from the window, the room sent out to her, in half a dozen pleasant little touches, the same sense of its compatible owner that she had had from the beginning. There, flung down, was Mrs. Berry’s copy of
The Eustace Diamonds,
a book that she had always meant to read and had been delighted to find here, along with many others of its ilk and still others she herself owned. How many people knew good bisque and how cheaply it might still be collected, or could let it hobnob so amiably with grandmotherly bits of Tiffanyware, even with the chipped Quimper ashtrays that Mrs. Berry, like Mrs. Hazlitt at the time of her own marriage, must once have thought the cutest in the world. There were the white walls, with the silly, strawberry-mouthed Marie Laurencin just above the Beerbohm, the presence of good faded colors, the absence of the new or fauve. On the night table were the scissors, placed, like everything in the house, where Mrs. Hazlitt would have had them, near them a relic that winked of her own childhood—and kept on, she would wager, for the same reason—a magnifying glass exactly like her father’s. Above them, the only floor lamp in the house, least offensive of its kind, towered above all the table ones, sign of a struggle between practicality and grace that she knew well, whose end she could applaud. Everywhere indeed there were the same signs of the struggles toward taste, the decline of taste into the prejudices of comfort, that went with a whole milieu and a generation—both hers. And over there was, even more personally, the second bed.

Mrs. Hazlitt sat down on it. If it were moved, into the study say, a few things out of storage with it, how sympathetically this flat might be shared. Nonsense, sheer fantasy to go on like this, to fancy herself embarking on the pitiable twin-life of leftover women, much less with a stranger. But was a woman a stranger if you happened to know that on her twelfth birthday she had received a copy of
Dr. Dolittle,
inscribed to Helena Nelson from her loving father, if you knew the secret, packrat place in the linen closet where she stuffed the neglected mending, of another, in a kitchen drawer, full of broken Mexican terrines and clipped recipes as shamefully grimy as your own cherished ones, if you knew that on 2/11/58 and on 7/25/57 a Dr. Burke had prescribed what looked to be sulfa pills, never used, that must have cured her at the point of purchase, as had embarrassingly happened time and again to yourself? If, in short, you knew almost every endearing thing about her, except her face?

Mrs. Hazlitt, blinking in the excessive light, looked sideways. She knew where there was a photograph album, tumbled once by accident from its shunted place in the bookshelf, and at once honorably replaced. She had seen enough to know that the snapshots, not pasted in separately, would have to be exhumed, one by one, from their packets. No, she told herself, she already knew more than enough of Mrs. Berry from all that had been so trustfully exposed here—enough to know that this was the sort of prying to which Mrs. Berry, like herself, would never stoop. Somehow this clinched it—their understanding. She could see them exchanging notes at some future meeting, Mrs. Berry saying, “Why, do you know—one night, when I was in London—”—herself, the vis-à-vis, nodding, their perfect rapprochement. Then what would be wrong in using, when so handily provided, so graciously awaiting her, such a comforting vis-à-vis, now?

Mrs. Hazlitt found herself standing, the room’s glare pressing on her as if she were arraigned in a police line-up, as if, she reminded herself irritably, it were not self-imposed. She forced herself to make a circuit of the room, turning out each lamp with the crisp, no-nonsense flick of the wrist that nurses employed. At the one lamp still burning she hesitated, reluctant to cross over that last shadow-line. Then, with a shrug, she turned it out and sat down in the darkness, in one of the two opposing boudoir chairs. For long minutes she sat there. Once or twice she trembled on the verge of speech, covered it with a swallow. The conventions that guarded the mind in its strict relationship with the tongue were the hardest to flaunt. But this was the century of talk, of the long talk, in which all were healthily urged to confide. Even the children were encouraged toward, praised for, the imaginary companion. Why should the grown person, who for circumstance beyond his control had no other, be denied? As she watched the window, the light in the small gray house was extinguished. Some minutes later the doorman across the way disappeared. Without looking at the luminous dial of the clock, she could feel the silence aging, ripening. At last she bent forward to the opposite chair.