The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (2 page)

I had intended to do more about the Elkins. They were to be a grand first novel, of many story-chapters centering out like the spokes of a wheel. Gradually I saw that this wheel might be turning all my life. And that though I might at any time return with another spoke, I must now leave at once. When I did return, the tone (“Time, Gentlemen!” and “Songs My Mother Taught Me”) had altogether changed. Few of this group were written chronologically, none toward that end, and none of course came really from behind the eye of a child. So there was no obligation to begin the book with them. I put them in its center, where they may radiate.

I begin rather with the story in which I deserted the literal world forever, for the imaginary one. “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks” was also the story after whose appearance the press began poking the idea of novels at me, as if on my own I might never have thought of them. My answer at the time—made with that hauteur which is the other side of fright—was: If a tale can be told in seven thousand words, why use seventy? I still believe that. And I still feel that same respectful scare—at the thought of all the tales, long some of them, which wait to be told.

Meanwhile, scanning this table of contents, of course I see many connections with the novels that were to come. (And with some yet to come.) Sometimes a novel-in-progress may erupt a story sideways, as with “May-ry,” written while I was on the section of
False Entry
that takes place in the Southern United States (I had to give myself a guilty permission to delay the longer concentration: I’ve lost many stories by not doing so.) Conversely, I can see, if I’m not careful, that whoever wrote “The Watchers” might well write a novel narrated by “the heart doomed to watch itself feel,” that Spanner in “One of the Chosen” faintly anticipates the Judge in
The New Yorkers,
as the young Peter Birge in “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks” is very close, in the writer’s sympathies, to the hero of
Eagle Eye.
(As the “rabbi’s daughter” and her baby are kin to the young mother-and-child in
Textures of Life.
) I can see now why the young beauties who are just pulling off their blouses in “Songs My Mother Taught Me” will end up in
Queenie
in the buff. (Alongside Queenie’s political ancestress, “Ginevra Leake.”) And why, if one doesn’t strain at swallowing newts à la “Heartburn,” one may someday open one’s jaws wide enough to accommodate an eight-foot ellipse, swum in from the Elsewhere that only the uninitiate still call science-fiction, and as human a noncharacter as you ever wrote—of whom your English publisher will ask “Tell me. I have to know.
Was
he a Lesbian?”

To which you must close ears, eyes, and quickest—mouth. In case you were about to quip “No. She was Gulliver.” Analogies are everywhere—afterward. And though you would rather not, you can see them sharper than anybody.

I do see, more gladly, a certain temperament in the story form. Its very duration, too brief to make a new mode in, verges it always toward that classical corner where sits the human figure. And perhaps the genre flourishes best during those periods of life—both for authors and eras—when the human drama is easier accepted as the main one going. Whenever we lose this sense of ourselves as a train of people and gear, plodding eternally down the ages or purposefully up, we tend to dissipate into style—in every genre. The novel, that deceptively ragged cave, can take more echoing. For a time. And maybe more gear. But a loss of the humanist spirit will show up earliest in the shorter form, not because it is any more conservative, but because there is no space where that loss may hide. A story can have only one heart at a time, and it must palpitate visibly.

So doing, it can animate any idea, in any shape. A story may float like an orb, spread like a fan or strike its parallels ceaselessly on the page—as long as all its clues cohere. Language itself may
be
the idea. Many stories now being written are about the imperfect clueing between language and life. Or about the ugliness of shape. Often, after an upsurge in any art—such as we have had here in the past fifty years of the short story—artists tire of symmetry, of conclusiveness, and even of the very authority that such a renaissance brings. This is natural. The old avant-garde is coming back. Hail! In literature one need never say farewell.

I’ve grown to think that any art form is avant-garde to begin with, by having hurtled itself over and through our animal and psychic barriers to become—itself. How extraordinary of a statue not to be a stone—and for thousands upon thousands of quiet gazers to know this—at once. How odd of a story to be never only conversation, yet neither a poem nor a song.

I go to the short-story world most perhaps for the multiplicity of its voices, which crowd in, endearingly intimate, approachable, from across terra firma whose scale one can almost see. For the writer, that world is as fell—in the sense of a knockdown blow—as any other. It’s the world where once I learned, and learn again laboriously, that a writer’s own voice may clap in many tongues, all the while the single meaning keeps chanting its Gregorian. Staring at these stories, I know that they have already arranged themselves. The stories of an individual writer are already a collective; that is
their
nature. Between the written ones—these rows of tumuli that I visit so rarely—and those other motes still searing toward me from the wide lens of the unwritten, a membership has been forming from the beginning. At any moment another may join them. Looking forward is looking back.

—H.C.

O
N AN AFTERNOON IN
early August, Peter Birge, just returned from driving his mother to the Greenwich sanitarium she had to frequent at intervals, sat down heavily on a furbelowed sofa in the small apartment he and she had shared ever since his return from the Army a year ago. He was thinking that his usually competent solitude had become more than he could bear. He was a tall, well-built young man of about twenty-three, with a pleasant face whose even, standardized look was the effect of proper food, a good dentist, the best schools, and a brush haircut. The heat, which bored steadily into the room through a Venetian blind lowered over a half-open window, made his white T shirt cling to his chest and arms, which were still brown from a week’s sailing in July at a cousin’s place on the Sound. The family of cousins, one cut according to the pattern of a two-car-and-country-club suburbia, had always looked with distaste on his precocious childhood with his mother in the Village and, the few times he had been farmed out to them during those early years, had received his healthy normality with ill-concealed surprise, as if they had clearly expected to have to fatten up what they undoubtedly referred to in private as “poor Anne’s boy.” He had only gone there at all, this time, when it became certain that the money saved up for a summer abroad, where his Army stint had not sent him, would have to be spent on one of his mother’s trips to Greenwich, leaving barely enough, as it was, for his next, and final, year at the School of Journalism. Half out of disheartenment over his collapsed summer, half to provide himself with a credible “out” for the too jovially pressing cousins at Rye, he had registered for some courses at the Columbia summer session. Now these were almost over, too, leaving a gap before the fall semester began. He had cut this morning’s classes in order to drive his mother up to the place in Connecticut.

He stepped to the window and looked through the blind at the convertible parked below, on West Tenth Street. He ought to call the garage for the pickup man, or else, until he thought of someplace to go, he ought to hop down and put up the top. Otherwise, baking there in the hot sun, the car would be like a griddle when he went to use it, and the leather seats were cracking badly anyway.

It had been cool when he and his mother started, just after dawn that morning, and the air of the well-ordered countryside had had that almost speaking freshness of early day. With her head bound in a silk scarf and her chubby little chin tucked into the cardigan which he had buttoned on her without forcing her arms into the sleeves, his mother, peering up at him with the near-gaiety born of relief, had had the exhausted charm of a child who has just been promised the thing for which it has nagged. Anyone looking at the shingled hair, the feet in small brogues—anyone not close enough to see how drawn and beakish her nose looked in the middle of her little, round face, which never reddened much with drink but at the worst times took on a sagging, quilted whiteness—might have thought the two of them were a couple, any couple, just off for a day in the country. No one would have thought that only a few hours before, some time after two, he had been awakened, pounded straight up on his feet, by the sharp, familiar cry and then the agonized susurrus of prattling that went on and on and on, that was different from her everyday, artlessly confidential prattle only in that now she could not stop, she could not stop,
she could not stop,
and above the small, working mouth with its eliding, spinning voice, the glazed button eyes opened wider and wider, as if she were trying to breathe through them. Later, after the triple bromide, the warm bath, and the crooning, practiced soothing he administered so well, she had hiccuped into crying, then into stillness at last, and had fallen asleep on his breast. Later still, she had awakened him, for he must have fallen asleep there in the big chair with her, and with the weak, humiliated goodness which always followed these times she had even tried to help him with the preparations for the journey—preparations which, without a word between them, they had set about at once. There’d been no doubt, of course, that she would have to go. There never was.

He left the window and sat down again in the big chair, and smoked one cigarette after another. Actually, for a drunkard—or an alcoholic, as people preferred to say these days—his mother was the least troublesome of any. He had thought of it while he packed the pairs of daintily kept shoes, the sweet-smelling blouses and froufrou underwear, the tiny, perfect dresses—of what a comfort it was that she had never grown raddled or blowzy. Years ago, she had perfected the routine within which she could feel safe for months at a time. It had gone on for longer than he could remember: from before the death of his father, a Swedish engineer, on the income of whose patents they had always been able to live fairly comfortably; probably even during her life with that other long-dead man, the painter whose model and mistress she had been in the years before she married his father. There would be the long, drugged sleep of the morning, then the unsteady hours when she manicured herself back into cleanliness and reality. Then, at about four or five in the afternoon, she and the dog (for there was always a dog) would make their short pilgrimage to the clubby, cozy little hangout where she would be a fixture until far into the morning, where she had been a fixture for the last twenty years.

Once, while he was at boarding school, she had made a supreme effort to get herself out of the routine—for his sake, no doubt—and he had returned at Easter to a new apartment, uptown, on Central Park West. All that this had resulted in was inordinate taxi fares and the repetitious nightmare evenings when she had gotten lost and he had found her, a small, untidy heap, in front of their old place. After a few months, they had moved back to the Village, to those few important blocks where she felt safe and known and loved. For they all knew her there, or got to know her—the aging painters, the newcomer poets, the omniscient news hacks, the military spinsters who bred dogs, the anomalous, sandalled young men. And they accepted her, this dainty hanger-on who neither painted nor wrote but hung their paintings on her walls, faithfully read their parti-colored magazines, and knew them all—their shibboleths, their feuds, the whole vocabulary of their disintegration, and, in a mild, occasional manner, their beds.

Even this, he could not remember not knowing. At ten, he had been an expert compounder of remedies for hangover, and of an evening, standing sleepily in his pajamas to be admired by the friends his mother sometimes brought home, he could have predicted accurately whether the party would end in a brawl or in a murmurous coupling in the dark.

It was curious, he supposed now, stubbing out a final cigarette, that he had never judged resentfully either his mother or her world. By the accepted standards, his mother had done her best; he had been well housed, well schooled, even better loved than some of the familied boys he had known. Wisely, too, she had kept out of his other life, so that he had never had to be embarrassed there except once, and this when he was grown, when she had visited his Army camp. Watching her at a post party for visitors, poised there, so chic, so distinctive, he had suddenly seen it begin: the fear, the scare, then the compulsive talking, which always started so innocently that only he would have noticed at first—that warm, excited, buttery flow of harmless little lies and pretensions which gathered its dreadful speed and content and ended then, after he had whipped her away, just as it had ended this morning.

On the way up this morning, he had been too clever to subject her to a restaurant, but at a drive-in place he was able to get her to take some coffee. How grateful they had both been for the coffee, she looking up at him, tremulous, her lips pecking at the cup, he blessing the coffee as it went down her! And afterward, as they flew onward, he could feel her straining like a homing pigeon toward their destination, toward the place where she felt safest of all, where she would gladly have stayed forever if she had just had enough money for it, if they would only let her stay. For there the pretty little woman and her dog—a poodle, this time—would be received like the honored guest that she was, so trusted and docile a guest, who asked only to hide there during the season of her discomfort, who was surely the least troublesome of them all.

He had no complaints, then, he assured himself as he sat on the burning front seat of the convertible trying to think of somewhere to go. It was just that while others of his age still shared a communal wonder at what life might hold, he had long since been solitary in his knowledge of what life was.