The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Part 30

"After I'd sealed that letter to Ben and put it into the mail slot in the hall, I came back to my room. The envelope for Tyng, stained brown and shriveled, was lying where I'd left it. I picked it up, rolled it in some tissue from an old stocking box, and threw it into the basket. Then I went to the window and leaned on the sill. It was the holy time, a beautiful evening. A dusky wind was blowing, and the west was the color of a peach. I could feel the cold touch of the pearls at my throat, the warm cuddle of the jersey I'd just thrust my arms into; I thought I could even feel the lovely tickle of the blood running in my veins. It was spring, and my whole future was opening up again, full of oysters, music, lovers. A few foghorns were sounding on the river, and I wondered idly whether I would ever be able to set down exactly the emotion that sound always called up in me-as I had tried and failed to do so many times before.

"And after a while, as I leaned there, the words came, began to s.h.i.+mmer and hang in the air about me. There they were, armies of them, ready to be made into ropes for necks, ready for lovers to be put into, husbands, life. They danced in my mind like wild ponies that moved only to my command, with hooves sharp enough to kill, but forelocks meek enough to me.

"It had been a day. All in one day I'd found out I wasn't going to have Banjo, marry Ben, poison Tyng. It had been a day full enough for anyone. Except me-and perhaps you. ..."

Was she leaning forward? The voice was low now, farther back in its own mists than it had ever been, yet near enough for the quick of any ear.

"So I sat down at the desk again-what I wrote was published the next year. The world stretched all before me that evening, in profuse strains of unpremeditated-life. But I left the window, and began to write about it. ..."

No, it was the girl, leaning back, away, now stealthily rising. For a moment the figure stayed, a series of soft, dark ellipses lapsing to that poised, no longer tentative shoe. Then it ran. On the edge of the promenade it halted; then the wind, or a gesture of its own, tossed back the free-swinging hair and it was gone.

Did the voice know it was alone now? Had it planned it that way-to be left addressing that perfect, illimitable audience of one? For it was still speaking.

"So I left the window," it said, "and began to write about it. Beginning with the word 'I.'"

Night Riders of Northville.

ON SMOKY SPRING EVENINGS, from the windows of the commuter's train which rides through the lowlands of Jersey, the little bars, which are seldom more than a block or so from the stations, look like hot coals burning in the thin dusk. Spotted over the countryside, they send up their signal flares, promising the fought-off moment of excitement before you open the door-when it seems as if someone may just this minute have said: "Here is the place-the place," and the flat, sold feeling after the door is open, and you see that this is just about like any such place anywhere.

If, having missed your usual train perhaps, you stop off at the particular hole-in-a-corner which clings to your station-Joe's Place, or Morelli's, or the Rainbow Tavern-and you sit there over your gla.s.s, after your phone call, waiting for the taxi or the wife with the car-then you may find, after the quick rash of one-shot commuters is over, that you are alone, or almost alone, with perhaps a solitary, leather-jacketed baggageman musing over his beer on his stool down at the other end. And you wonder what keeps a joint like this alive.

Down in the thriving center of town, or settled here and there on its skirting streets, are places, certainly, which cater more specially to a man's sudden convivial needs, or to his malaises. Out on the highway which is never far from such a town, the roadhouses, each evening, corral the people who want steak, pizza, chicken-in-the-basket. There is a "good place to take the family and still get a drink," a haunt for the juke-box babies, a daytime spot which draws the lawyers from the courthouse over at the county seat, even a sw.a.n.k little box of a place where certain rich women of the town gather to sip away time from the huge carafe of it that confronts them each day between breakfast and the arrival of the evening train. And because no man or woman lives his life in just one context, sooner or later you may see a person who more properly belongs in a particular one of these places, seated, explicably or not, in another.

But the nondescript place where you are sitting now-could it be said to have a category? To whom or what could it cater, other than to the casual, modestly sated thirsts of its portion of two trainfuls a day of men homeward bound toward the snow shovel or the garden, or toward the less seasonal dictates of the television, the wife, and the children with egg on their chins? And as you rise, relievedly, to the toot of a horn outside, and exchange diffident nods with the owner, you decide that his reserve with you on this and other occasions is the case, not because you are not a regular, but because there are no regulars here. As you go out the door, you wonder idly how he hangs on here at all, and you imagine him of a Sunday, when the trains are all but stilled, totting up his supplier's bills and his receipts, and worrying about a better spot for trade.

Should you sit on there for a sufficient number of evenings, however, you might learn how wrong you were. For that place is one of a circuit of such places which certain men of the town ride ceaselessly, for reasons which neither appear to be simple nor are.

Take, for instance, the Rainbow Tavern at Northville, and four of its regulars-James De Vries, d.i.c.ky English, Jack Burdette, and Henry Lister. If you get to know the habits of these four, who are sure to appear there singly or in varying combinations almost every night of the week-and if you also happen to learn of a minor tragedy which befell one of them-then in the course of time you may also sense, although you may never quite be able to put your finger on it, the nature of that specialite de la maison which is served by the Rainbow Tavern.

James De Vries, who is always called "the judge," out of deference to the fact that he was once, for several years, a justice of the peace, is the only one of the four who was born in Northville-and perhaps some of the deference is to this fact too. In a town where most of the men make their living elsewhere, he is one of those vanis.h.i.+ng few who subsist on their inherited knowledge of the place and the "connections" in it-a little banking, some law, a few real estate transactions, and a little politicking. He can tell you the real legend of the old Viner place, and what went on there in the old days, can search a t.i.tle in his mind before he has to refer to county records, and lives in the ground-floor apartment of the cupolaed house in which he was born-the house bought by his grandfather, who was a minor henchman of Boss Tweed. Although there has never been any suggestion of financial hanky-panky about his own reputation, there still clings to him, somehow, the equivocal aura of the man who turns a dollar because he is in the know. As he stands at the bar, with his hat brim turned low over his long, swart face, so that if you are near him and fairly tall you cannot glimpse anything but his mouth (for the judge is quite short, and in the manner of many short men, affects hats a little too high in the crown and wide of brim), he keeps a silence weighted faintly with an indication that silence is what he has come here for. If he is addressed, however, on a question of local affairs, he likes to p.r.o.nounce the answers in a measured, monotonous voice, although he will never keep the conversational ball rolling with the added fillip of a question or an opinion. He is at the bar briefly at five, at seven-thirty, and at ten, so precisely that Denis, the owner, often may answer a time query from one of the regulars: "Almost time for the judge's last round." He has two drinks at five, three at seven-thirty, and three at ten, always of straight bourbon with a dash of bitters, and always set before him by Denis as soon as he appears. He has probably not ordered out loud for years, never buys or is bought a drink, and has long since managed to convey, by this routine, that for him, liquor-something to be accomplished, as it were, as is a meal by a man not interested in the table-is never in any case a specific for some disreputable need. It is ironic, therefore, that in a place where casualness and haphazard spontaneity are part of the mores, the very carefulness of the judge's behavior has made him the oddity he imagines he is not.

For, often, when a man is to be found night after night in the same place, swaying deep in drink, progressing through the stereotype stages of the drunk-from the painful interest in each newcomer, the mumbled revelation to the bartender, down to the final, locked communion with the gla.s.s-often a common thing to be heard in the pitying undertones behind him is: "Nice guy though. They say his wife is a b.i.t.c.h." But in the Rainbow Tavern this is most commonly said of the judge. Not by any of the other three regulars, incidentally, for all the regulars share a solidarity of reticence about their affairs outside, one even stronger than is usual among men, perhaps, and peculiarly noticeable, since it suggests that, with them, home may be really the outside, and "inside" is here. No one knows the origin of this rumor about the judge, or any verification for it, for although the other three know each other in another context, the social life of the town-have visited each other in their homes, and even, by prearrangement, have brought their wives here, after the manner of men who twice a year tolerate ladies' night at the club-the judge does not know any of these people socially, and never brings his "outside" here. The rumor arises, possibly, because there is no worse place to hide than among the heightened awarenesses of others who are hiding too.

When a man walks into the Rainbow Tavern, it is often possible to tell his mood, at what stage in the circuit he is, or how full he is or intends to be, from the angle at which he wears his hat. d.i.c.ky English's hat is always tipped toward the back of his head. This is true of him wherever he is making an entrance, whether to the Rainbow or others of its ilk, to a party, to a meeting of one of the dozens of committees on which he is a prime mover, or to the smoker of the morning train. A buzzing, bustling, smart dresser of a man, in whose freshly barbered face, above his bow-tie, the slightly juvenile features are only healthfully obscured by a faintly moony, fortyish fat, d.i.c.ky, if not exactly a dream of fair women, is conceivably that of a number of fair typists in the office of which he is manager. Only longer acquaintance with him suggests that in his very trueness to form there is something much too credible. Watching d.i.c.ky at first, one is bored or amused by the larger-than-life verisimilitude of the man; later one wonders how, under such a bewildering collection of verisimilitudes, there can be a man at all. Here, one says, as he struts chestily into a conversation, or, his backside waggling in jaunty efficiency, is seen disappearing round the bend in the center of two or three cronies he has marshaled on an errand of pleasure-here is the eternal seller of tickets to raffles, the organizer of poker games and pig roasts; here is the life-of-the-party, in whom, as with so many such, there is just enough of the clown, the simpleton, the b.u.t.t-so that by his very betises he breaks down the united ice of others, warming them, even at the cost of ridicule, to that sense of occasion he craves.

To his intimates at the Rainbow, where his invariable greeting is "You're planning to go, aren't you?" his invariable adieu "Be sure to be there, now," d.i.c.ky pa.s.ses for a joiner, a mixer, a man whose compulsion barely escapes buffoonery, but is invaluable to those whose gregariousness is more wistful, less competent. He is sensitive to the needs of the company, too-a Rotarian in Rotary, a father among fathers, a fornicator among fornicators-always so long as he can go on talking. Even his drinking is versatile and somehow controlled; he is good for an elegiac, gossipy chat in a corner or for an all-night spree with the boys, but even in the midst of the spree he never seems personally drunk. Only when you see him at home, a paterfamilias outdoing all others, or at a roadhouse, perhaps, this time with the wife, to whom he is playing the uxoriously gallant part of the husband on his girl's night out, or in the morning smoker, where he persists in reading tidbits of news to men whose issues of the same paper are already slack and crumpled in their hands-only then may you realize that d.i.c.ky is more than a man who lives for the occasion-he is a man who cannot live without it, however small. Like those little mechanical toy men with the keys in their split, metal backs, he will scuttle around and around only as long as the original impetus lasts-one begins to imagine, behind the truckling rounds of his talk, a gasping prescience that, when he slackens, he will topple over on his side forever. He is a man who convinces himself into humanity only by the ululating sound of his own voice. And because one can imagine him en route to an experience, or possibly from it, but never actually in the middle of it, one can form conclusions as to d.i.c.ky's reasons for stopping so often at a place like the Rainbow, which is essentially, after all, en route.

As for Jack Burdette and Henry Lister, there is no need to take up separately two who are almost always together. They roomed together at college, went into business and married at about the same time, bought houses on adjoining streets in that fancy modern development in Northville before it was too evident that their wives would never get along, and refugees now, each from the disapproval of two wives, are ever more closely united in the deep beat.i.tudes of the bottle. Jack is a great beef of a man with a fine nose only just beginning to vein, and an extraordinarily sweet smile which, with the cleft in the first of his chins, forms a solitary fleur-de-lys above the others. He is one of those large, deceptively solid men who melt in drink: as the evening advances, the smile grows fixed on a face which recedes behind it like a huge, fair egg, the bottom outline of which has been drawn several times over by a wavering artist.

Seen over his shoulder, in that rich, Rembrandt-colored air of the Rainbow, which is half submerged smell, half expunged light, Henry Lister's face, mouse-sharp and precise, does not change at all. There is no mystery about Henry unless it is the absence of one. He is a neutral, common denominator of a man, whose only departure from the ordinary is his drinking; even the latter seems an effort to fill up the uncomfortable reservoir of his averageness. He is never out of place in any company he keeps, and never quite of it; he is a man who is always seen over someone else's shoulder-in this case Jack's.

Over the years, the a.s.sociation of these two has effected a likeness quite apart from looks-the kind of dual semblance which occurs in a long, uneventful marriage. Jack, who is an investment counselor, often surprises his business acquaintances with quite a bookish allusion, and Henry, who is in the trade department of a publis.h.i.+ng house, is considered by his colleagues to be pretty sharp on the market. During the business day, Jack's eye is remarkably clear and shrewd, notwithstanding the night before, and Henry's manner may be a little on the vague side, but at closing time in the Rainbow, after the long, matched session of gla.s.s for gla.s.s, it is Henry who gently leads the faltering Jack away from the bar and drives him home.

One might think that their wives-both childless, both graduates of the stern discipline of the evasive phone call, the mummified supper, the endless evening in the empty living room, of which there happens to be a counterpart not half a block away-one would think that they might pool their grievances in a sort of friends.h.i.+p too. Such is not the case, however. They hate each other-oddly enough each of the women saves her invective not for her rival, but for his wife. It is simpler that way perhaps. Or possibly it is easier to bear the onus of a rival than the presence of someone whose grievances are the same.

Once or twice Henry and Jack have been known to josh each other over this quirk of Alice's and Mary Lou's, but only in the cliches with which men refer to women at the Rainbow, where it is generally conceded that the ladies, all of them sphinxes, are worth the solving at times, but blessedly not here and now. Mostly, however, the two men sit on in silence, acc.u.mulating on the abacus of their bar bill an ever huger total of hours they have spent thus together, two eunuchs sitting in a quietude from which trouble has been castrated, at a comfortable, derisive distance from the harem.

This, then, was the way things stood with the four regulars, when Mrs. Henry Lister, on a pink May evening which contrasted, who knows how fiercely, with her sallow day, cut her wrists.

On this particular Monday night, when the phone rang in the booth at the Rainbow, the four men had the bar to themselves. This is often the case on Mondays, for at the Rainbow there is a discernible, taken-for-granted rhythm to the evenings of the week. Sunday is the big night; Denis is rarely able to close the place until four. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are slow; even Henry and Jack may not appear until after ten or perhaps not at all, presumably having gone home for a token dinner and been prevailed upon to stay. Thursdays are pretty normal, and Fridays the bar begins to expand again, with men who drink in a certain propriety, duty-bound, as it were, to honor the inception of the weekend. Sat.u.r.day is a poor night for the regulars, who are shunted out of their niche by celebrants who come (as the four indicate to each other with faint shrugs) apparently from nowhere, and Denis is kept busy shooing minors out of the place. But on Sunday nights the bar really hums, with an added group of familiars who arrive gratefully after the dearth of the day. Meeting on the station platform the morning after, the three regulars (for the judge, of course, does not commute) greet each other with reminiscent shakes of the head, eying each other's gray gills and red, granular eyelids, and sit at an understanding distance from each other in the smoker, retiring glumly behind their papers. If a man just makes the train by the skin of his teeth, this is the one morning on which he is not chaffed. Even d.i.c.ky English has learned to shut his face on Monday mornings.

During this particular first day of the business week, the city streets had been stroked with summer. When the evening train set down its pa.s.sengers in Northville, it could be seen that the leaves, although still new against the sky, were no longer single and choice. The air had a beautiful, clear expectancy about it, like the inside of a gla.s.s bell that was about to be rung. The door of the Rainbow, though not yet screened, had been ajar.

Now, with the bar to themselves, the four were settled restfully on their stools like convalescents from a mutual illness, just able to savor the malted dimness of the place in the safely muted company of their kind. Henry and Jack had been here since train time, the judge was in the middle of his second round, and d.i.c.ky had just breezed in.

"Some night last night, eh Denis?" said d.i.c.ky.

Denis nodded. He was a profound listener, with a repertoire of silent a.s.sent which ranged from the nod to a look of alert, pained sympathy which came, actually, from varicosed veins, but was a great help to his business.

d.i.c.ky tipped his hat further back on his head. "Hear Patterson's still on the town. They say he never did get home."

"In here about four o'clock for a minute," said Denis, polis.h.i.+ng a gla.s.s.

"Better watch himself lately." d.i.c.ky clapped his hands together, raised one to readjust his hat, looked about him minutely as if to search the possibilities of the hour, and let his arm sink around Jack's neck. "Howja do at the office today pal?"

Jack turned his head carefully within the crook of the encircling arm, and smiled his sweet, ponderous smile. "I died," he said.

"How about Henry, there? He looks able to sit up and take nourishment?"

Henry screwed his eyes shut appreciatively, but made no answer. Down at the left end of the bar, the judge looked owlishly into an empty gla.s.s, Denis moved quickly to replace it with the third and last of his round. And the telephone rang.

No one at the bar flinched in notice, although the telephone rings infrequently at the Rainbow. The phone knew better than to call for any of the men here.

Denis shuffled through the archway into the alcove which held the phone booth and the pinball machine. After a minute he returned, gestured at Henry, and returned to his polis.h.i.+ng. Henry pointed at himself with raised eyebrows, shrugged, and walked out of the booth. He was there for some time.

"Da-te-da, da-te-da, da-te-da," said d.i.c.ky, falsetto.

Jack hunched himself over the bar, lit a cigarette, dropped the match on the floor before it was quite dead, and rubbed it out with his shoe.

"Jesus Henry what's wrong?" said d.i.c.ky.

Henry stood in the archway, his face white, his arms dangling uncertainly at his sides. "The police. They took Alice to the hospital."

Jack lurched to his feet. "Something with the car, Hen?"

"She tried to ..." Henry turned his head from side to side. "She acted all right this morning," he said on a high note. "She acted perfectly O.K."

"Drive you down, fella?" said d.i.c.ky.

Henry seemed not to have heard him. He reached out and touched the bar surface, moving his hand along as if he expected to find a tab there. "They want to type my blood they said." He moved toward the door.

"I'll go with you, Hen." Jack went toward him, weaving a little.

"No," said Henry. His eyes returned to focus. He s.h.i.+vered. "No. Don't do that, Jack." He went out the door.

"Call me here. Call me if you need me." There was no answer except the current of air from the swinging door. They heard the splutter of a motor, its outraged whine and diminuendo. Through the door, which remained ajar, came the dark, stealing scents of May. After a minute, Denis walked over and closed it.

"She have a miss, you think?" whispered d.i.c.ky. No one answered him.

The judge coughed, and spoke. "Sold them that house they have. Over on Summit. Nine years ago, just before the rise. Nice little property." He shook his head, as if he could not be responsible for the way people mishandled the lives to which he had helped them attach a property of value. Then, glancing at the clock, he saw that it was time. Pulling his hat brim lower, he nodded and left.

"Well, guess I'm on my way too," said d.i.c.ky. "Drop you, Jack? Well, see you in the morning then." He eased himself halfway out the door, then poked his head back in. "Chilly," he said, shaking his head solemnly, and shut the door behind him.

It can be awkward, drinking alone at a bar. Is the man behind it wholly a servitor at such times, or must recognition be made of the fact that two human beings are together in an otherwise empty room? At such times it is good to be where one is known. Denis sat reading his newspaper, his sh.e.l.l-rims far down on his nose, his presence as sane and rea.s.suring as a night nurse. It was a racing final he read; occasionally he made a mark on it with a pencil, or rose to freshen Jack's gla.s.s. There were no other demands on his attention either from his customer or from the phone. Gradually the room, although it had no fireplace, took on the gutted look of a room in which a fire had died down. When the late freight chuffed by on her way to Newburgh, Denis went to the booth, called a cabby with whom he had an arrangement, shook Jack by the shoulder, and sent him home.

The next day, d.i.c.ky English, purveying the news to the smoker, had the field to himself. Henry, of course, was absent, and Jack did not appear for several days. On the second of these, the smoker heard, as the town had already heard, that Mrs. Henry Lister had m.u.f.fed it. She would survive. This was received as such news is. The suicide attempt which is successful has an awesome achievement about it, before which we quail, but bow. It is a terrible epitaph, but it is one, and its headstone will sooner or later be obscured like any other. But the incompetent who has botched, who has been retrieved against his will, has committed an indecency. He has brought his nakedness not to the tomb, but to the tea table. Later, his existence will fret us like that of the invalid whose ailment death refuses to dignify.

On the morning when Jack returned to the train, it was observed that he had the drained, pearly look of dedication of the man who is on the wagon. No comments were made, since it was known how close Jack had been to Henry-too close, it was a.s.sumed, for comfort. Not a few of the other men who had been riding the circuit a little too steadily were, over that weekend, unwontedly solicitous of their wives and gardens. But, the following week, when Henry, too, returned to the train, it was plain that the shaft which Mrs. Lister had aimed at her husband, had not only struck glancingly at his friend but had also sheared between the two. Their steps no longer joined naturally with each other's, when they greeted, it was with the creaking tact of constraint, and although they both were avoiding the Rainbow, they did not do so together.

When Henry, taking his month off early, took his wife down to Atlantic City, both the town and the smoker were relieved. It was felt that he had done the proper thing not only for his wife, but for the community. At present, for instance, it was neither natural to inquire after her, or to neglect to. But for a long time, even after things blew over, Henry would be a constriction on any company he kept-precisely because he had suffered no conventional loss.

Had he done so, however unusually, one could still have offered him the normal currency of condolence. One could have demonstrated one's fealty at the funeral parlor, or, meeting him at a later date, extended to him, according to the degrees of delicacy and acquaintance, either the mute clasp of the hand, or one of those ba.s.so-timbred remarks with which we acknowledge to one another that we are all as dust. Still later, after his sorrow was a little out of its black, one could have propelled him tenderly toward drink, as one propels a widow toward tears. As things were, however, Mrs. Lister, and death, in their brief affair together, had cuckolded Henry, had made of him, moreover, a man whose cuckoldry is known.

During the weeks of Henry's absence, Jack returned, little by little, to the Rainbow. Each evening he walked in earlier and stayed on later, until, rosy once more, he was back at the old routine. On those evenings when Denis judged him unfit to drive himself home the cabman was called. Or sometimes the cabby checked for himself, in a friendly sort of way.

On one of these evenings, just after Denis had made the call, Jack brought his gla.s.s down on the bar with a rap that raised Denis' startled glance from his paper, and leaned intently over the bar.

"Not the same around here, is it Denis?" he muttered. "Not the same." He looked into his gla.s.s, which he was swiveling in his hand. After a moment he looked up again. "It never will be the same," he said, in a voice suddenly free of rheum.

Denis, who, in his trade, witnessed few of the soaring denouements of drama, but often administered to its tag-ends and dispersals, kept his own counsel.

On another Monday night, this time late in June, d.i.c.ky, the judge, and Jack once more had the bar to themselves. It was again the time of the judge's second round, and d.i.c.ky, again, had just breezed in. There was nothing oddly Aristotelian about this unity of time, s.p.a.ce, and character; as must be clear by now, the very predictability of the Rainbow, the very rea.s.surance of the way in which evenings spent there tend to blur into one long, continuous evening, is a part of its stock in trade. This night, however was the one on which Henry Lister chose to return.

When he walked through the door, which was screened now, and had been closed against the humming insect tide of summer, his manner in no way admitted that this was a return, or that there had been, at any time, a choice to be made. Denis, alone of the men there, was not surprised. On the faces of the other friends there was a momentary flash, like that on a mirror turned once against the light and laid flat.

To the right of Jack, who was farthest down the bar, there were three empty stools. Henry sat down on the middle one of these.

"Evening," said Henry. "Judge ... Jack ... d.i.c.ky ... evening."

From the quiet chorus of greetings, d.i.c.ky's rose with verve. "Well look who's here! If he isn't a sight for sore eyes!" He walked over and pumped Henry's hand with unction. "Looking fit, boy," he added, in the low, secret tones of allegiance. "Real fit."

Behind him, the others stared into their drinks, but on Henry's face there was a singular look of grat.i.tude. It was as if d.i.c.ky, in doing what might be expected of d.i.c.ky, had shown him that whatever he had returned for was likely to be here too.

Now the other men began to talk, each punctuating his remarks with the helpful arc of his gla.s.s. They said little of local affairs, of all that can happen in a town, or a bar, while some one is away. They talked rather of things in the tenor of the times, of the National League and the American, of the price of government, and the probabilities of war. They spoke of the things people have to keep up to date on, no matter what has happened to them or where they have been.

Time pa.s.sed, enough for the judge to leave and return for his final call. When the judge was on his last drink of the evening, Henry bought a drink for the crowd, sliding down a stool to the one next to Jack's. "How about you, judge?" he said. "Break down and have an extra?"

This was an old gambit, and the judge made his accustomed response. "Oh no," he said, frowning, made for the door, as if frightened, and left. Behind him, the men smiled at each other, taking pleasure in the foibles of their kind. On Henry's face there was again the look of grat.i.tude.

After a while d.i.c.ky went into the alcove to play the pinball game. When the cabman poked his head with an inquiring look, Jack looked down at the floor. "Tell him never mind," said Henry's voice over his shoulder. "I'll drive you home."

It grew late, but the tawny light in the Rainbow deepened and mellowed, as if it, not the whiskey, had the power to turn men rubicund or gray. The silence purred, that silence of the Rainbow which is like the purring of a great tom resting from the rat cries of reality, from the quest for cream, and the squeaky, flagellant voices of women. From time to time came the ratchety-slat of the pinball machine, than which there is no more aimless sound in the world. And after a while, it was the same.

In the Absence of Angels.

BEFORE c.o.c.kCROW TOMORROW MORNING, I must remember everything I can about Hilda Kantrowitz. It is not at all strange that I should use the word "c.o.c.kcrow," for, like most of the others here, I have only a literary knowledge of prisons. If someone among us were to take a poll-that lax, almost laughable device of a world now past-we would all come up with about the same stereotypes: d.i.c.kens' Newgate, no doubt, full of those dropsical grotesques of his, under which the sharp shape of liberty was almost lost; or, from the limp-leather books of our teens, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," that period piece of a time when imprisonment could still be such a personal affair. I myself recall, from a grade-school reader of thirty years ago, a piece named "Piccola," called so after a flower that pushed its way up through a crevice in a stone courtyard and solaced the man immured there-a general, of G.o.d knows what political coloration.

Outside the window here, the only hedge is a long line of hydrangeas, their swollen cones still the burnt, turned pink of autumn, still at the stage when the housewives used to pick them and stand them to dry on mantels, on pianos, to crisp and gather dust until they were pushed, crackling, into the garbage, in the first, diluted sun of spring.

We here, women all of us, are in what until recently was a fas.h.i.+onable private school, located, I am fairly certain, somewhere in Westchester County. There was no business about blindfolds from the guards on the trucks that brought us; rather, they let us sit and watch the flowing countryside, even comment upon it, looking at us with an indifference more chilling than if they had been on the alert, indicating as it did that a break from a particular truck into particular environs was of no import in a countryside that had become a cage. I recognized the Saw Mill River Parkway, its white marker lines a little the worse for lack of upkeep, but its banks still neat, since they came in November, after the gra.s.s had stopped growing. Occasionally-at a reservoir, for instance-signposts in their language had been added, and there were concentrations of other trucks like ours. They keep the trains for troops.

This room was the kindergarten; it has been cleared, and the painted walls show clean squares where pictures used to be, for they have not yet covered them with their special brand of posters, full of fists and flags. Opposite me is their terse, typed bulletin, at which I have been looking for a long time. Built into the floor just beneath it, there is a small aquarium of colored tile, with a spigot for the water in which goldfish must have been kept, and beyond is the door that leads to our "latrine"-a little corridor of miniature basins and pygmy toilets and hooks about three and a half feet from the floor. In this room, which has been lined with full-size cots and stripped of everything but a certain innocent odor of crayon and chalk, it is possible to avoid imagining the flick of short braids, the brief toddle of a skirt. It is not possible in the latrine.

They ring the school bell to mark off the hours for us; it has exactly the same naive, releasing trill (probably operated electrically by some thumb in what was the princ.i.p.al's office) as the bell that used to cue the end of Latin period and the beginning of math in the city high school where Hilda Kantrowitz and I were among the freshmen, twenty-five years ago. Within that school, Hilda and I, I see now, were from the first slated to fall into two covertly opposed groups of girls.

On the application we had all filled out for entrance, there was a line that said "Father's Business." On it I had put the word "manufacturer," which was what my father always called himself-which, stretching it only a little, is what I suppose he was. He had a small, staid leather-goods business that occupied two floors of an untidy building far downtown. When my mother and I went there after a shopping tour, the workers upstairs on the factory floor, who had banded together to give me a silver cup at my birth, would lean their stained hands on barrels and tease me jocularly about my growth; the new young girls at the cutting tables would not stop the astonis.h.i.+ngly rapid, reflex routine of their hands but would smile at me diffidently, with inquisitive, sidelong glances. Downstairs, on the office-and-sales floor, where there was a staff of about ten, one or the other of my uncles would try to take me on his lap, groaning loudly, or Harry Davidson, the thin, henpecked cousin-by-marriage who was the bookkeeper, would come out of the supply room, his paper cuffs sc.r.a.ping against a new, hard-covered ledger, which he would present to me with a mock show of furtiveness, for me to use for my poems, which were already a family joke.

The girls I went with, with whom I sat at lunch, or whom I rushed to meet after hours in the Greek soda parlor we favored, might too have been called, quite appositely, manufacturers' daughters, although not all of their fathers were in precisely that category. Helen's father was an insurance broker in an office as narrow as a knife blade, on a high floor of the most recent skysc.r.a.per; Flora's father (of whom she was ashamed, in spite of his faultless clothes and handsome head, because he spoke bad English in his velvety Armenian voice) was a rug dealer; and Lotte's father, a German "banker," who did not seem to be connected with any bank, went off in his heavy Homburg to indefinite places downtown, where he "promoted," and made deals, coming home earlier than any of the others, in time for thick afternoon teas. What drew us together was a quality in our homes, all of which subscribed to exactly the same ideals of comfort.

We went home on the trolley or bus, Helen, Flora, Lotte, and I, to apartments or houses where the quality and taste of the bric-a-brac might vary but the linen closets were uniformly full, where the furniture covers sometimes went almost to the point of shabbiness but never beyond. Our mothers, often as not, were to be found in the kitchen, but though their hands kneaded dough, their knees rarely knew floors. Mostly, they were pleasantly favored women who had never worked before marriage, or tended to conceal it if they had, whose minds were not so much stupid as unaroused-women at whom the menopause or the defection of growing children struck suddenly in the soft depths of their inarticulateness, leaving them distraught, melancholy, even deranged, to make the rounds of the doctors until age came blessedly, turning them leathery but safe. And on us, their intransigent daughters, who wished to be poets, actresses, dancers, doctors-anything but merely teachers or wives-they looked with antagonism, secret pride, or dubious a.s.sent, as the case might be, but all of them nursing the sly prescience that marriage would almost certainly do for us, before we had quite done for ourselves.

This, then, was the group with which I began; in a curious way which I must make clear to myself, as one makes a will, it is the group with which, perhaps tomorrow, somewhere outside this fading, posthumous room, I choose to end. Not because, as we cl.u.s.tered, by turns giggling, indecisive, and impa.s.sioned, in our soda parlors, we bore already that sad consanguinity of those women who were to refuse to stay in their traditional places either as wives, whom we identified with our mothers, or as teachers, whom we identified with lemon-faced aunts, lonely gas rings, and s.e.xual despair. Hindsight gives us a more terrifying resemblance. Not as women but as people. Neither rich nor poor, we were among the last people to be-either by birth or, later, by conviction-in the middle.

For the rich, even while they spun in their baroque hysterias of possession, lived most intimately with the spectre of debacle. Like the poor, they were bred to the a.s.sumption that a man's thought does not go beyond his hunger, and, like them, their images of ruin were absolute. When the spectre of violent change arose in our century, as it had in every century, this time with two mouths, one of which said "Need is common!," the other of which answered "Therefore let thought be common!," it was the very rich and the very poor who subscribed first-the rich transfixed in their fear, the poor transfixed in their hope. Curious (and yet not so curious, I see now) that from us in the middle, swinging insecurely in our little median troughs of satisfaction, never too sure of what we were or what we believed, was to rise that saving, gradient doubt that has shepherded us together, in entrenchments, in ambush, and in rooms like these.

Two cots away from mine sits a small, black-haired woman of the type the French call mignonne; one would never a.s.sociate her with the strangely scored, unmelodic music, yawping but compelling, for which she was known. She is here for an odd reason, but we are all here for odd reasons. She is here because she will not write melody, as they conceive melody. Or, to be honest-and there is no time left here for anything but honesty-as most of us here would conceive melody. But we here, who do not understand her music, understand her reasons.

Down at the far end of the room, there is a gray, shadowy spinster who knows little of heresies concerning the diatonic scale. She is here because she believes in the probity of mice. All day long now, she sits on her bed in a trance of fear, but the story is that when they came to the college laboratory where for forty years she had bred mice and conclusions, she stood at first with her arm behind her, her hand, in its white sleeve, shaking a little on the k.n.o.b of the closed door. Then she backed up against the door to push it inward, to invite them in, their committee, with the statement she was to sign. Past all the cages she led them, stopping at each to explain the lineage of the generation inside, until, tired of the interminable recital, they waved the paper under her nose. Then she led them to the filing cabinets, unlocked the drawers, and persuaded them to pore over page after page of her crisscrossed references, meanwhile intoning the monotonous record of her historic rodent dead. Not until then, until the paper had appeared a third time, did she say to them, with the queer cogency of those whose virtue is not usually in talk, "No. Perhaps I will end by lying for you. But the mice will not."

She, the shadowy, weak-voiced woman, and I are alike in one thing, although I am not here after any action such as hers. They came quite conventionally to my suburban cottage, flung open the door, and loaded me on the truck without a word, as they had previously come to another poet, Volk, on his island off the coast of Maine, to Peterson, the novelist, in his neat brick box at the far end of Queens, to all the other writers who were alive because of being away from the city on the day it went down. Quite simply, they, too, have read Plato, and they know that the writer is dangerous to them because he cannot help celebrating the uncommonness of people. For, no matter what epithalamiums they may extort from us, sooner or later the individuality will reappear. In the very poems we might carpenter for them to march to, in the midst of the sanitized theses, the decontaminate novels, sooner or later we will infect their pages with the subversive singularity of men.

She-the biologist-and I are alike because we are the only ones here who do not cry at night. Not because we are heroic but because we have no more hostages for which to weep. Her mice are scattered, or already docilely breeding new dogma under the careful guidance of one of the trainees brought over here from their closed, incredible, pragmatic world-someone born after 1917, perhaps, who, reared among the bent probities of hungry men, will not trouble himself about the subornation of mice.

And I, who would give anything if my son were with me here, even to be suborned, as they do already with children, can afford to sit and dream of old integrities only because I, too, no longer have a hostage-not since the day when, using a missile whose rhythm they had learned from us, they cracked the city to the reactive dirt from which it had sprung-the day when the third-grade cla.s.s from the grammar school of a suburban town went on a field trip to the natural-history museum.

Anyone born in a city like that one, as I was, is a street urchin to the end of his days, whether he grew behind its plate gla.s.s and granite or in its ancient, urinous slums. And that last year, when it was said they were coming, I visited my city often, walking in the violet light that seeped between the buildings of its unearthly dusk, watching the multiform refractions of the crowd, telling myself "I do not care to survive this." But on the way up here, when, as if by intention, they routed our trucks through streets of fused slag and quagmire (which their men, tapping with divining rods, had declared safe), I sat there in one of the line of trucks, looking dry-eyed at the dust of stone. Was it when the cla.s.s was looking at the dinosaur, the Archaeopteryx, that the moment came? Was it while a voice, in soft, short syllables suited to his shortness, was telling him how a snake grew wings and became a bird, how a primate straightened its spine and became a man?

The room is quiet now, and dark, except for the moonlight that shows faintly outside on the hedge, faintly inside on the blurred harlequin tiles of the aquarium. Almost everyone is asleep here; even the person who rings the bell must be asleep, somewhere in one of the rooms in the wing they reserve for themselves. The little composer was one of the last who fell asleep; she cried for hours over the letter they brought her from her husband, also a musician, who wrote that he was working for them, that there could be glory in it, that if she would only recant and work with him, they would release his mother, and the daughter, and the son. The letter was couched in their orotund, professional phrases, phrases that in their mouths have given the great words like "freedom" and "unity" a sick, blood-sour sound. But tomorrow she will agree, and there is no one here who will blame her. Only the gray woman at the other end of the room and I sit hunched, awake, on our cots-taking the long view, who have no other. I sit here trying to remember everything I can about Hilda Kantrowitz, who was my age, my generation, but who, according to their paper on the wall, will not be here with us. Perhaps the last justification for people like me is to remember people like Hilda, even now, with justice.

What I see clearest about Hilda now is her wrists. I am looking back, with some trouble, at a girl who was never, except once, very important to me, and with some effort I can see thick braids of a dullish, unwashed blond, stray wisps from the top of them falling over her forehead, as if she had slept so and had not taken time for a combing. I cannot see her face from the side at all, but from the front her nostrils are long and drawn upward, making the tip of her nose seem too close to the flat mouth, which looks larger than it is because its lines are not definite but fade into the face. The eyes I cannot see at all as yet. She is standing for recitation, holding the Latin book, and her wrists are painfully sharp and clear, as if they were in the center of a lens. They are red-chapped, I suppose-and their flat bones protrude a long way from the middy cuffs. She does not know the recitation-she almost never does-but she does not t.i.tter or flush or look smart-alecky, the way the rest of us do when this happens. She just stands there, her eyelids blinking rapidly, her long nostrils moving, and says nothing, swaying a little, like a dog who is about to fall asleep. Then she sits down. Later on, I learn that it may be true-she may never get enough sleep.

We find this out by inference, Lotte and I, when the two of us are walking home together on a winter afternoon. That day, Lotte and I, who live near one another, have made a pact to spend our carfare on eatables and walk all the way home together. We have nearly reached 110th Street and Cathedral Parkway, having dribbled pennies in a store here, a store there, amiably debating each piece of candy, each sack of Indian nuts. In the west, as we walk toward it, there is a great well of dying light fading to apple-green over the river, which we cannot as yet see. The faces of the people hurrying past us have something flowerlike and open about them as they bloom toward us and recede. We are tiring, feeling mournful and waif-like, with a delightful sadness that we breathe upon and foster, secure in the warm thought of home.

Down the block, there is a last, curving oasis of stores before the blank apartment houses begin. After that comes the long hill, with the church park and the hospital on the other side. Lotte has a last nickel. We walk slowly, peering into the stores. Next to a grill whose blind front is stenciled with lines of tangerine and false-blue light, there is one more store with a weak bulb s.h.i.+ning. We press our faces against the gla.s.s of its door. It is a strange grocery store, if it is one, with no bakers' and bottlers' cardboard blurbs set in the window, no cherry brightness inside. Against its right-hand wall, galled wooden shelves hold a dark rummage of canned goods, with long, empty gaps between the brands. From a single line of cartons near the door on the lowest shelf, there is one hard, red glint of newness; these are packages of salt. Sprawled on the counter to the left, with her arms outflung between some box bottoms holding penny candy, there is a girl asleep. Her face, turned toward us, rests on a book whose thick, blunt shape we recognize almost as we do her. It is Hilda. Behind her, seen through the pane and the thin gruel of light, is the dim blotch of what looks like another room.

We confer, Lotte and I, in nudges, and finally Lotte pushes in ahead of me, her smothered giggle sounding above the rasp of a bell on the door. For a moment, it seems warmer inside-then not. A light is turned on in the back of the store, and we see that the second room is actually only a s.p.a.ce that has been curtained off. The curtains are open. A woman comes forward and shakes Hilda angrily by the shoulder, with a flood of foreign words, then turns to us, speaking in a cringing voice. Candy? Crackers? How much money we got? Her face has a strong look to it, with good teeth and a mouth limned in blackish hair. In the half room behind her, on one of two day beds, a boy sits up, huddling in a man's thick sweater whose sleeves cover his hands. A smaller child clambers down from the other bed and runs to stand next to his mother. He is too young to have much hair, and the sight of his naked head, his meagre cotton s.h.i.+rt, and his wet diaper drooping between his legs makes me feel colder.