The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (8 page)

“Is it—is this the night club?” I said.

“This is it, baby,” she said, and the way she said it made me feel as if she’d reached down and ruffled my curls. Instead, she reached up, and pressed a fuse box attached to the tree. For a minute, the red dazzle of the sign on the roof of the house made us blink.
GINGER AND HARRY’S
it said. There were one or two gaps in
GINGER,
and the second
R
of
HARRY’S
was gone, but the
AND
was perfect.

“Woods are death on electric lines,” she said. Leading the way up the flagged path to the door, she bent down, muttering, and twitched at the weeds that had pushed up between the flags.

She unlocked the door. “We no longer heat it, of course. The pipes are drained. But I had them build fires this afternoon.”

It was cold in the vestibule, just as it often was in the boxlike entrances of the roadhouses we knew, and, with its bare wood and plaster, it was just like them too—as if the flash and the jump were reserved for the sure customers inside. To our right was the hat-check stall, with its brass tags hung on hooks, and a white dish for quarters and dimes.

“I never had any servants around here,” said Mrs. Hawthorn. “The girls used to take turns in the cloakroom, and the men used to tumble over themselves for a chance to tend bar, or be bouncer. Lord, it was fun. We had a kid from Hollywood here one night, one of the Wampas stars, and we sneaked her in as ladies’ matron, before anyone knew who she was. What a stampede there was, when the boys found out!”

I bent down to decipher a tiled plaque in the plaster, with three initials and a date—1918. Mrs. Hawthorn saw me looking at it.

“As my mother used to say,” she said. “Never have your picture taken in a hat.”

Inside, she showed us the lounges for the men and the women—the men’s in red leather, hunting prints, and green baize. In the powder room, done in magenta and blue, with girandoles and ball fringe, with poufs and mirrored dressing tables, someone had hit even more precisely the exact note of the smart public retiring room—every woman a Pompadour, for ten minutes between dances.

“I did this all myself,” she said. “From top to bottom. Harry had a bad leg when he came back—he was in an army hospital before we got married. He gave me my wedding present ahead of time—enough to remodel the old place, or build a new one. I surprised him. I built this place instead.”

“Is his leg all right now?” I said.

“What?” she said.

“His leg. Is it all right now?”

“Yes, of course. That was donkey’s years ago.” She was vague, as if about a different person. Behind her, Luke shook his head at me.

“And now …” she said. “Now … come in where it’s warm.” And this time my ear picked up that tone of hers as it might a motif—that deep, rubato tone of possession fired by memory. She opened the door for us, but for a scant moment before, with her hand on the knob, she approached it as a curator might pause before his Cellini, or a hostess before the lion of her afternoon.

And here it was. The two fires burned at either end; the sultry hooded sidelights reflected here and there on the pale, unscarred dance floor. The little round tables were neatly stacked at its edge, all but one table that was set for service, as if now that it was 3
A.M.
or four, the fat proprietor and his headwaiter might just be sitting down for their morning bowl of soup. On the wall, behind the tables, flickered the eternal mural, elongated bal-masqué figures and vaudeville backdrops, painted dim even when new, and never meant to be really seen. It could be the one of the harlequin-faced young men with top hats and canes, doing a soft-shoe routine against an after-dark sky. Or it might be the one of the tapering Venuses with the not-quite bodies, behind prussian-blue intimations of Versailles. It didn’t matter. Here was the “Inn,” the “Club,” the “Spot,” the Glen Island, where one danced to Ozzie Nelson, the Log Cabin at Armonk, the one near Rumson, with the hot guitarist, the innumerable ones where, for an evening or a week of evenings, Vincent Lopez’s teeth glinted like piano keys under his mustache. The names would have varied somewhat from these names of the thirties, but here it was, with the orchestra shell waiting—the podium a little toward one end, so that the leader might ride sidesaddle, his suave cheek for the tables, his talented wrist for the band. Only the air was different, pure and still, without the hot, confectionery smell of the crowd. And the twin fires, though they were burning true and red, had fallen in a little, fallen back before the chill advance of the woods.

So, for the second time, we sat down to champagne with Mrs. Hawthorn. There was a big phonograph hidden in a corner; after a while she set it going, and we danced, Luke first with her, then with me. And now, as the champagne went to our heads, it was not the logs, or the chair arms that moved, but we who moved, looping and twirling to the succulent long-phrased music, laughing and excited with the extraordinary freedom of the floor. I thought of Dave, the little man, but Mrs. Hawthorn never mentioned his name. She was warm, gay—“like a young girl”—as I had heard it said now and then of an older woman. I had thought that this could not be so without grotesquerie, but now, with the wisdom of the wine, I imagined that it could—if it came from inside. She had the sudden, firm bloom of those people who really expand only in their own homes. For the first time, we were seeing her there.

Toward the evening’s height, she brought out some old jazz records, made specially for her, with the drum and cymbal parts left out, and from the wings back of the podium she drew out the traps, the cymbals, and the snare. In the old days, she told us, everybody who came did a turn. The turn with the drums had been hers. We made her play some of the songs for us, songs I remembered, or thought I remembered, from childhood, things like
Dardanella
and
Jadda Jadda Jing Jing Jing.
She had some almost new ones too—
Melancholy Baby,
and
Those Little White Lies.
We gave her a big hand.

Then, just as we began to speak of tiring, of going to bed because we had to drive back early the next day, she let the drumsticks fall, and put her fingers to her mouth. “Why, I forgot it!” she said. “I almost forgot to show you the best thing of all!” She reached up with the other hand, and turned off the big spotlight over the orchestra shell.

Once more, only the sidelights glowed, behind their tinted shades. Then the center ceiling light began to move. I hadn’t noticed it before; it was so much like what one expected of these places. That was the point—that it was. It was one of those fixtures made of several tiers of stained glass, with concealed slots of lights focused in some way, so that as it revolved, and the dancers revolved under it, bubbles of color would slide over their faces, run in chromatic patches over the tables, and dot the far corners of the room.

“Dance under it,” she said. “I’ll play for you.” Obediently, we put our arms around one another, and danced. She played
Good Night, Ladies.
The drums hardly sounded at all. When it was over, she let the sticks rest in her lap. The chandelier turned, silently. Oval blobs of light passed over her face, greening it and flushing it like long, colored tears. Between the lights, I imagined that she was looking at us, as if she knew something about us that we ourselves did not know. “It was lovely,” she said. “That first year.” And this time I could not have said which of her two voices she had used.

We left early the next morning. By prearrangement, she was to sleep late and not bother about us, and in a sense we did not see her again. But, as we drove down the private road, we stopped for a moment at a gap in the trees, to see the sun shining, great, over the sea. There was a tall, gray matchstick figure on the end of the dock. As we watched, it dove. She could not have seen us; probably she would not have wanted to. She was doing the exercise to keep her weight down, perhaps, or swimming around the dock, as she had done as a child. Or perhaps she was doing the only thing she cared to do alone. It was certainly she. For as the figure came up, we saw its arm—the one mailed arm, flashing in the sun.

During the next few years I often used to tell the story of our visit to Hawthornton. So many casual topics brought it up so naturally—Bermuda, the people one meets when one travels, the magnified eccentricities of the rich. When it became fashionable to see the twenties as the great arterial spurt of the century’s youth, I even told it that way, making her seem a symbol, a denizen of that time. I no longer speculated on why she had invited us; I never made that the point of the story. But for some time now I have known why, and now that I do, I know how to tell her story at last. For now that I know why, it is no longer Mrs. Hawthorn’s story. It is ours.

It is almost eighteen years since we were at Mrs. Hawthorn’s, just as it was then almost eighteen years since Harry had come back from France. I was never to meet anyone who knew them, nor was I ever to see her again. But I know now that there was never any special mystery about her and Harry. Only the ordinary mystery of the distance that seeps between people, even while they live and lie together as close as knives.

Luke is in the garden now. His face passes the window, intent on raking the leaves. Yet he is as far from me now as ever Harry was from Hawthornton, wherever Harry was that day. He and I are not rich; we do not have the externalizations of the rich. Yet, silently, silently, we too have drawn in our horns.

So, sometimes, when I walk in the woods near our house, it is to a night club that I walk. I sit down on a patch of moss, and I am sitting at the little round table on the unscarred floor. I fold my hands. Above me, the glass dome turns. I watch them—the two people, about whom I know something they themselves do not know. This is what I see:

It is a long, umber autumn afternoon. To the left the sun drops slowly, a red disc without penumbra. Along the country roads, the pines and firs are black-green, with the somber deadness of a tyro’s painting of Italy. Lights pop up in the soiled gray backs of towns. Inside the chugging little car the heater warms them; they are each with the one necessary person; they have made love the night before. The rest of the world, if it could, would be like them.

W
HEN YOUNG ALASTAIR PINES
came out from Leeds, England, to teach on an exchange fellowship at Pitt, a small college about a hundred miles from Detroit, Michigan, he was the second foreign teacher ever to be in residence there. Pitt, founded in the Eighteen-sixties by a Presbyterian divine, and still under a synod of that church, had kept its missionary flavor well up to the Second World War. Set in Pittston—a bland village of white and cream-colored houses whose green roofs matched, even in summer, dark lawns compelled by lamasery effort (and perhaps a cautious hint of divine favor) from the dry Michigan plain—the school had kept a surface calm even during the war. It was the centripetal calm of those who, living in the sacred framework of morning, noon and evening service and a perfect round of dedicatory suppers, could not help feeling ever so slightly chosen—of people whose plain living and high thinking was not that of poverty, but of ample funds conserved. Some of the college halls had been built as recently as the Thirties (when labor was so cheap) and the organ (though not baroque to the point of Episcopalianism) was first-rate. Salaries had lagged well behind. Since, however, the non-smoking rule was still in effect on campus, and no teacher was supposed to have wine or spirits in his larder, he was officially helped to escape the extravagances of the age, as well as some of its anxieties. True, the table set by most of the younger faculty was somewhat farinaceous, but this might be less Franciscan than Middle Western, since most of the teachers and students came from that region. A glance at the roster showed a global scattering of names which were American, not international; the Kowalskis and Swobodas were Poles and Czechs from Hamtramck in Detroit, the Ragnhilds and Solveigs from Minnesota, and so on. Alone in the catalogue until the advent of Mr. Pines, the name of Hans Weil—philologist and onetime professor of
Linguistik
at Bonn—represented a Europe not once, twice, or further removed.

With Hans Weil’s arrival in 1945, there had also come to Pittston the first of certain changes brought by the war. Like so many other scholars in the days of Hitler, Weil had been passed from hand to libertarian hand like a florin stamped “Freedom”—whisked, in his case, to London, via Holland, in 1939, and from London to Rochester, New York, in 1942, after which he was presumed to be on his own. In 1945, at his own behest, or rather at that of his wife, whose sister and brother-in-law, helped by the Weils to America, now had a flourishing but immovable dry-goods shop in Lansing, he had come to nearby Pitt as provisional candidate for a newly established chair in the humanities, and had remained there ever since. There was small need for philology at Pitt, most of whose students were on their way to being music teachers, social workers or ministers, and Weil, lacking new-world versatility, did not find it easy to “double” in related courses. Nevertheless, he had no fears for his job.

On this fine fall morning of the new term, as Weil walked across campus at his short, duck-footed pace, the beret that he wore for his baldness emphasizing Raphael curves of cheek which softened the fact that he was almost as old as the century, and—as he would blithely have admitted—as profane, he well knew that his value to Pitt went subtly beyond its being able to mutter behind him that he had recently refused an offer from Yale. Thirty years ago, he was thinking, if by some unlikely chance he had landed at Pittston, he might at least have had to grow a beard, and, under the old tradition that all German professors were a kind of nursery-uncle emissary from the land of sugared postcards and cuckoo clocks, might also have had to submit to being called “Dr. Hans,” or “Papa Weil.” But as things were, he was not even under any particular necessity of writing those little monographs that sometimes brought him an Eastern offer. For, since the war, the GI Bill, and an engineering endowment from one of the big labor unions in Detroit, although Pitt’s lawns were still clear of cigarette butts and its brains still Protestantly clear of fumes, a complexity had entered its air. Through the windows of the music department’s practice rooms, once so liturgically pure with Bach and Buxtehude, he could now hear Bartók, Khatchaturian and even Sauter-Finnegan squawking under official sanction. Opposite, in Knox Hall, although there were still two strong classes in scriptural exegesis and one on missions, called “The Protestant Evangel,” a visiting divine from Union Theological was treating of Kierkegaard, Niebuhr and Buber in a course called “Quest”—and all four of these classes were embarrassingly near a group of acolytes studying guided missiles, on the grant from the C.I.O.