The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Part 1

The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher.

Hortense Calisher.

INTRODUCTION.

by John Hollander.

WRITING AN APPRECIATION OF-and expressing appreciation for-a volume of more than twice-read tales is an allusive business. I remember now reading this wonderful collection for the first time nine years ago, and at that time remembering the occasions on which I first encountered some of them individually (reading "In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks" in the New Yorker) or in collections (having "Let.i.tia, Emeritus," still a favorite of mine, read aloud to me in enthusiastic wonder by a now-dead friend). The literal echoes of the New York City I had known in my own childhood, through a maternal grandfather not entirely unlike Hester Elkin's father in the stories grouped in Part II of this volume, have been overlaid by the more figurative ones of reencounters with originally recounted tales, which had since rebounded from intervening texts. Hortense Calisher has herself suggested a relation between the story "Heartburn" and her remarkable novel Journal from Ellipsia of over a decade later, but there may be a more general matter involved. "Heartburn," a kind of story that descends in American literature from Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a parable of skepticism, of doubt itself put in doubt by an age whose only faith rests on the authenticity of doubting. Its fable is based on our popular idiom of "swallowing something" as believing, just as the less starkly allegorical treatment of rural populations in New England, in the almost novella-length "The Summer Rebellion," beginning to be rea.s.sumed by the land itself is an expansion of the idiomatic "going to gra.s.s." Rereading both of these through the screen of acquaintance with Hortense Calisher's powerful recent novel Mysteries of Motion points up once again something true not only of this writer's own oeuvre, but of American fiction in general.

I suppose this might be called the matter of the novel as opposed to the matter of romance; of stories, as one might phrase the distinction, rather than tales. I use the latter word in Hawthorne's, rather than in Henry James's sense-although the latter's relation to the parabolic mode of the former is itself a matter of some interest-to distinguish the fabulous from the realistically fictional, to indicate the ground rules within which a tale like "In the Absence of Angels" unfolds its action as contrasted with the principles that provide the epistemological armature for a story like "The Middle Drawer" or the heartbreaking "The Coreopsis Kid." Certainly, Hortense Calisher's stories take their place in that central line of narrative that runs from Henry James and William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton through Scott Fitzgerald and Hortense Calisher's contemporary, the late John Cheever. (In the matter of genre alone, "Mrs. Fay Dines on Zebra" or "Night Riders of Northville" seem firmly entrenched in familiar territory, however unique their mode of handling.) But there is another strain-one James himself was unable totally to repress-which comes from Hawthorne and Melville and which has been most flagrantly exemplified since by Nathanael West and Thomas Pynchon, the tradition of prose romance. And here is to be found the province of those tales, and near tales like the very Jamesian "The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street."

Hortense Calisher's constant measurement of the claims of each of these traditions from the viewpoint of the other has given her whole body of fiction its great strength, its outstanding evidence of skill and meditative power aside. There are so many rings to the show, now, of the circus of fiction, even as there are to that of our lives, that it is almost a reader's relation to these texts themselves that seems to be evoked as a strange undersong by the remarkable lines at the end of "So Many Rings to the Show" where the husband and wife, newly married, have already been redeemed from illusion by an older reality: "So, in the darkness, he clung to her for a moment not as a lover but as he might cling to some foolish crony who had once been there together with him in the Arcady of the past." Thoughtful readers-and Hortense Calisher does not really write for readers who cannot think very well-will always feel that these stories have been there together with them in the past.

The group of stories about Hester and Kinny Elkin and their family possesses a curious quality of interconnection, which is itself not novelistic. Each of them is totally self-contained, and ancillary characters and situations are generated by each story individually. And yet they are full of echoing and reflecting moments and scenes. The continuity that does exist is provided more by an authorial sensibility and critical consciousness than by the family and the German-Jewish middle-cla.s.s Manhattan of their milieu. "The Pool of Narcissus" and "The Sound of Waiting" embody two aspects-indeed, two phases-of the history of the incursions of parental s.e.xuality upon the disputed territory of adolescence. They are both cla.s.sic American stories of what the author herself calls "youth revolving before the prospect of the world." And yet there is a deeper, almost mythographic element, the stuff of tale rather than story, about them. Hester, in "The Pool of Narcissus," receives her intimation of s.e.xuality as in a darkened mirror of the sort in which we catch glimpses of ourselves unawares, and thereby almost unrecognized. Kinny, in "The Sound of Waiting," responds to an injunction provided by an echo of the past-he is going and doing likewise, having been vouchsafed an overhead sense of the familiarity (in all its senses) of erotic adventure. And yet innocence and experience, echo and mirror, nymph and youth, all combine and exchange roles in these two stories, and the precise questions that a literalist would raise about mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, are subsumed under the larger ones that wisdom would always want to ask about youth and age, memory and hope, fragility and force. They are surely stories, but their relation to one another is almost that of fable.

Every reader will want to perceive his or her own connections between these pieces, even as the author in her introduction sees her own, and I shall not pursue any further the matter of the overall figure (in Robert Frost's word) these stories make. But I cannot refrain from commending the reissuing of this volume as an important literary event. Hortense Calisher's collected stories const.i.tute a primary body of work by a major American writer of fiction; moreover, they represent the unrelinquished claims of serious fiction to that moral power that Martin Price has so effectively characterized in his recent critical study, Forms of Life. They are being republished at a moment when a minimal sensibility has become high fas.h.i.+on, when the writer's craft seems to have been consumed in authorial self-hatred, and a reductive grimness or ridiculousness, the humming and drumming of imaginative failure celebrated in naively imitative form, has become an authenticating imprimatur. These stories are the work of a master, and as such, they have a remarkable novelty. n.o.body who has never done scholarly research can perhaps understand how fresh the dusty air of the stacks of a major library can seem as compared with the tired raging, on the outside, of fas.h.i.+ons on their way to the grave. But even the slightest ironic comprehension of the gyrations of history can lead one to understand how the attribution of staleness and death to the breath of the past is itself a dead wind. In their continuity with a major American fictional tradition, as in their very means of realizing themselves beyond it, Hortense Calisher's stories celebrate the powers of moral imagination as deployed in narratives that half conceal, and half disclose, their own exemplary or fabulous nature. Her stories and tales are evergreen reminders of the n.o.bility of responsible, attentive, vulnerable and somehow triumphant consciousness.

A STORY IS AN APOCALYPSE, served in a very small cup. Still, it wants to be considered in its own company only. The presence of neighbors changes it. Worlds meant to be compacted only to themselves, b.u.mp. Their very sequence can do them violence. Even when all the stories are by the same hand.

Here are thirty-six, covering almost two decades, and combining three prior collections. In the Absence of Angels, here entire, was my first book as well; it is full of beginnings. Yet it too was a selection. By the time it went to press there were more stories available, and I continued to write them. Three years on, however, I began a novel which was to take another seven years to complete. After its publication came Tale for the Mirror, A Novella and Other Stories-a selection from among the shorter works written during that eleven-year interim. A second novel was followed by Extreme Magic-again a novella with stories. The two t.i.tle novellas are here omitted. All the stories are here, plus one which is new to book form. Since all three collections are only weakly chronological and follow no other natural order, I have felt free to desert their tables of contents for another arrangement entirely.

What I have done is to try for what a conductor asks of a program, or a composer would hope for if he had the concertizing of his own work-to sustain and pleasure the natural rhythms of an audience. These rhythms-the rise and fall of interest, the need to go from frivol to gloom, from dark to light, from female to male to the general, and from an untrustworthy reality to a joyously recognizable fantasy-I take to be much the same as my own.

One group of stories, those centered around the Hester-Kinny Elkin family, are related. They are indeed, my relations. Yet, in all quasi-autobiography, as one exorcises the family world the mere facts begin to disappear, in favor of the mere truth. Hester was certainly me. But Kinny, the boy in "A Box of Ginger," was also. When I found that out (in answer to a canny question from William Maxwell), I was the one surprised. I was to find this knowledge useful and comforting whenever I wrote of men and boys. There is no reason why they should not be our Bovarys.

Even so, Kinny in "The Gulf Between" is my real brother, as a sibling seen. And by the time the young man in "The Sound of Waiting" and the young wife in "The Rabbi's Daughter" come along, it no longer matters that they are aspects of me; they are youth revolving before the prospect of the world and not yet aware who they are; he doesn't yet know that as a valet to memory only, he will sink back, as those parts of oneself do; she, whose feminism scarcely has a name, doesn't know that she will revolt. As for the Father and Mother, as I have just this moment seen, they do not change; they remain like the ushabti, the statuettes placed in the tomb so that its owner, dead or dreaming, may be served by them. In such stories, only the children mutate. And grow up to write them.

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 antic.i.p.ates 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 a 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." a.n.a.logies 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 cla.s.sical 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 s.p.a.ce 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 members.h.i.+p has been forming from the beginning. At any moment another may join them. Looking forward is looking back.

-H.C.

I.

In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks.

ON 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 cla.s.ses 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 b.u.t.toned 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 s.h.i.+ngled 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 b.u.t.ton 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 repet.i.tious 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 s.h.i.+bboleths, 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 embarra.s.sed 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, b.u.t.tery 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 a.s.sured 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.

Up in a sky as honestly blue as a flag, an airplane droned smartly toward Jersey. Out at Rye, the younger crowd at the club would be commandeering the hot blue day, the sand, and the water, as if these were all extensions of themselves. They would use the evening this way, too, disappearing from the veranda after a dance, exploring each other's rhythm-and-whiskey-whetted appet.i.tes in the backs of cars. They all thought themselves a pretty sophisticated bunch, the young men who had graduated not into a war but into its hung-over peace, the young girls attending junior colleges so modern that the deans had to spend all their time declaring that their girls were being trained for the family and the community. But when Peter looked close and saw how academic their sophistication was, how their undamaged eyes were still starry with expectancy, their lips still avidly open for what life would surely bring, then he became envious and awkward with them, like a guest at a party to whose members he carried bad news he had no right to know, no right to tell.

He turned on the ignition and let the humming motor prod him into a decision. He would drop in at Robert Vielum's, where he had dropped in quite often until recently, for the same reason that others stopped by at Vielum's-because there was always likely to be somebody there. The door of Robert's old-fas.h.i.+oned apartment, on Claremont Avenue, almost always opened on a heartening jangle of conversation and music, which meant that others had gathered there, too, to help themselves over the pauses so endemic to university life-the life of the mind-and there were usually several members of Robert's large acquaintance among the sub-literary, quasi-artistic, who had strayed in, ostensibly en route somewhere, and who lingered on hopefully on the chance that in each other's company they might find out what that somewhere was.

Robert was a perennial taker of courses-one of those nonmatriculated students of indefinable age and income, some of whom pursued, with monkish zeal and no apparent regard for time, this or that freakishly peripheral research project of their own conception, and others of whom, like Robert, seemed to derive a Ponce de Leon sustenance from the young. Robert himself, a large man of between forty and fifty, whose small features were somewhat cramped together in a wide face, never seemed bothered by his own lack of direction, implying rather that this was really the catholic approach of the "whole man," alongside of which the serious pursuit of a degree was somehow foolish, possibly vulgar. Rumor connected him with a rich Boston family that had remittanced him at least as far as New York, but he never spoke about himself, although he was extraordinarily alert to gossip. Whatever income he had he supplemented by renting his extra room to a series of young men students. The one opulence among his dun-colored, perhaps consciously Spartan effects was a really fine record-player, which he kept going at all hours with selections from his ma.s.sive collection. Occasionally he annotated the music, or the advance copy novel that lay on his table, with foreign-language tags drawn from the wide, if obscure, lat.i.tudes of his travels, and it was his magic talent for a.s.suming that his young friends, too, had known, had experienced, that, more than anything, kept them enthralled.

"Fabelhaft! Isn't it?" he would say of the Mozart. "Remember how they did it that last time at Salzburg!" and they would all sit there, included, belonging, headily remembering the Salzburg to which they had never been. Or he would pick up the novel and lay it down again. "La plume de mon oncle, I'm afraid. La plume de mon oncle Gide. Eheu, poor Gide!"-and they would each make note of the fact that one need not read that particular book, that even, possibly, it was no longer necessary to read Gide.

Peter parked the car and walked into the entrance of Robert's apartment house, smiling to himself, lightened by the prospect of company. After all, he had been weaned on the salon talk of such circles; these self-fancying little bohemias at least made him feel at home. And Robert was cleverer than most-it was amusing to watch him. For just as soon as his satellites thought themselves secure on the promontory of some "trend" he had pointed out to them, they would find that he had deserted them, had gone on to another trend, another eminence, from which he beckoned, c.o.c.ksure and just faintly malicious. He harmed no one permanently. And if he concealed some skeleton of a weakness, some closeted Difference with the Authorities, he kept it decently interred.

As Peter stood in the dark, soiled hallway and rang the bell of Robert's apartment, he found himself as suddenly depressed again, unaccountably reminded of his mother. There were so many of them, and they affected you so, these charmers who, if they could not offer you the large strength, could still atone for the lack with so many small decencies. It was admirable, surely, the way they managed this. And surely, after all, they harmed no one.

Robert opened the door. "Why, h.e.l.lo-Why, h.e.l.lo, Peter!" He seemed surprised, almost relieved. "Greetings!" he added, in a voice whose boom was more in the manner than the substance. "Come in, Pietro, come in!" He wore white linen shorts, a zebra-striped beach s.h.i.+rt, and huaraches, in which he moved easily, leading the way down the dark hall of the apartment, past the two bedrooms, into the living room. All of the apartment was on a court, but on the top floor, so it received a medium, dingy light from above. The living room, long and pleasant, with an old white mantel, a gas log, and many books, always came as a surprise after the rest of the place, and at any time of day Robert kept a few lamps lit, which rouged the room with an evening excitement.

As they entered, Robert reached over in pa.s.sing and turned on the record-player. Music filled the room, muted but insistent, as if he wanted it to patch up some lull he had left behind. Two young men sat in front of the dead gas log. Between them was a table littered with maps, an open atlas, travel folders, gla.s.s beer steins. Vince, the current roomer, had his head on his clenched fists. The other man, a stranger, indolently raised a dark, handsome head as they entered.

"Vince!" Robert spoke sharply. "You know Peter Birge. And this is Mario Osti. Peter Birge."

The dark young man nodded and smiled, lounging in his chair. Vince nodded. His red-rimmed eyes looked beyond Peter into some distance he seemed to prefer.

"G.o.d, isn't it but hot!" Robert said. "I'll get you a beer." He bent over Mario with an inquiring look, a caressing hand on the empty gla.s.s in front of him.

Mario stretched back on the chair, smiled upward at Robert, and shook his head sleepily. "Only makes me hotter." He yawned, spread his arms languorously, and let them fall. He had the animal self-possession of the very handsome; it was almost a shock to hear him speak.

Robert bustled off to the kitchen.

"Robert!" Vince called, in his light, pouting voice. "Get me a drink. Not a beer. A drink." He scratched at the blond stubble on his cheek with a nervous, pointed nail. On his round head and retrousse face, the stubble produced the illusion of a desiccated baby, until, looking closer, one imagined that he might never have been one, but might have been sp.a.w.ned at the age he was, to mummify perhaps but not to grow. He wore white shorts exactly like Robert's, and his blue-and-white striped s.h.i.+rt was a smaller version of Robert's brown-and-white, so that the two of them made an ensemble, like the twin outfits the children wore on the beach at Rye.

"You know I don't keep whiskey here." Robert held three steins deftly balanced, his heavy hips neatly avoiding the small tables which scattered the room. "You've had enough, wherever you got it." It was true, Peter remembered, that Robert was fonder of drinks with a flutter of ceremony about them-cafe brule perhaps, or, in the spring, a Maibowle, over which he could chant the triumphant details of his pursuit of the necessary woodruff. But actually one tippled here on the exhilarating effect of wearing one's newest facade, in the fit company of others similarly attired.

Peter picked up his stein. "You and Vince all set for Morocco, I gather."

"Morocco?" Robert took a long pull at his beer. "No. No, that's been changed. I forgot you hadn't been around. Mario's been brus.h.i.+ng up my Italian. He and I are off for Rome the day after tomorrow."

The last record on the changer ended in an archaic battery of horns. In the silence while Robert slid on a new batch of records, Peter heard Vince's nail sc.r.a.pe, sc.r.a.pe along his cheek. Still leaning back, Mario shaped smoke with his lips. Large and facilely drawn, they looked, more than anything, accessible-to a stream of smoke, of food, to another mouth, to any plum that might drop.

"You going to study over there?" Peter said to him.

"Paint." Mario shaped and let drift another corolla of smoke.

"No," Robert said, clicking on the record arm. "I'm afraid Africa's demode." A harpsichord began to play, its dwarf notes hollow and perfect. Robert raised his voice a shade above the music. "Full of fas.h.i.+on photographers. And little come-lately writers." He sucked in his cheeks and made a face. "Trying out their pa.s.sions under the beeg, bad sun."

"Eheu, poor Africa?" said Peter.

Robert laughed. Vince stared at him out of wizened eyes. Not drink, so much, after all, Peter decided, looking professionally at the mottled cherub face before he realized that he was comparing it with another face, but lately left. He looked away.

"Weren't you going over, Peter?" Robert leaned against the machine.

"Not this year." Carefully Peter kept out of his voice the knell the words made in his mind. In Greenwich, there were many gravelled walks, unshrubbed except for the nurses who dotted them, silent and att.i.tudinized as trees. "Isn't that Landowska playing?"

"Hmm. Nice and cooling on a hot day. Or a fevered brow." Robert fiddled with the volume control. The music became louder, then lowered. "Vince wrote a poem about that once. About the Mozart, really, wasn't it, Vince? 'A lovely clock between ourselves and time.'" He enunciated daintily, pus.h.i.+ng the words away from him with his tongue.

"Turn it off!" Vince stood up, his small fists clenched, hanging at his sides.

"No, let her finish." Robert turned deliberately and closed the lid of the machine, so that the faint hiss of the needle vanished from the frail, metronomic notes. He smiled. "What a time-obsessed crowd writers are. Now Mario doesn't have to bother with that dimension."

"Not unless I paint portraits," Mario said. His parted lips exposed his teeth, like some white, unexpected flint of intelligence.

"Dolce far niente," Robert said softly. He repeated the phrase dreamily, so that half-known Italian words-"loggia," the "Ponte Vecchio," the "Lungarno"-imprinted themselves one by one on Peter's mind, and he saw the two of them, Mario and Roberto now, already in the frayed-gold light of Florence, in the umber dusk of half-imagined towns.

A word, m.u.f.fled, came out of Vince's throat. He lunged for the record-player. Robert seized his wrist and held it down on the lid. They were locked that way, staring at each other, when the doorbell rang.

"That must be Susan," Robert said. He released Vince and looked down, watching the blood return to his fingers, flexing his palm.

With a second choked sound, Vince flung out his fist in an awkward attempt at a punch. It grazed Robert's cheek, clawing downward. A thin line of red appeared on Robert's cheek. Fist to mouth, Vince stood a moment; then he rushed from the room. They heard the nearer bedroom door slam and the lock click. The bell rang again, a short, hesitant burr.

Robert clapped his hand to his cheek, shrugged, and left the room.

Mario got up out of his chair for the first time. "Aren't you going to ask who Susan is?"

"Should I?" Peter leaned away from the face bent confidentially near, curly with glee.

"His daughter," Mario whispered. "He said he was expecting his daughter. Can you imagine? Robert!"

Peter moved farther away from the mobile, pressing face and, standing at the window, studied the gritty details of the courtyard. A vertical line of lighted windows, each with a glimpse of stair, marked the hallways on each of the five floors. Most of the other windows were dim and closed, or opened just a few inches above their white ledges, and the yard was quiet. People would be away or out in the sun, or in their brighter front rooms dressing for dinner, all of them avoiding this dark shaft that connected the backs of their lives. Or, here and there, was there someone sitting in the fading light, someone lying on a bed with his face pressed to a pillow? The window a few feet to the right, around the corner of the court, must be the window of the room into which Vince had gone. There was no light in it.

Robert returned, a Kleenex held against his cheek. With him was a pretty, ruffle-headed girl in a navy-blue dress with a red arrow at each shoulder. He switched on another lamp. For the next arrival, Peter thought, surely he will tug back a velvet curtain or break out with a heraldic flourish of drums, recorded by Red Seal. Or perhaps the musty wardrobe was opening at last and was this the skeleton-this girl who had just shaken hands with Mario, and now extended her hand toward Peter, tentatively, timidly, as if she did not habitually shake hands but today would observe every custom she could.

"How do you do?"

"How do you do?" Peter said. The hand he held for a moment was small and childish, the nails unpainted, but the rest of her was very correct for the eye of the beholder, like the young models one sees in magazines, sitting or standing against a column, always in three-quarter view, so that the picture, the ensemble, will not be marred by the human glance. Mario took from her a red dressing case that she held in her free hand, bent to pick up a pair of white gloves that she had dropped, and returned them with an avid interest which overbalanced, like a waiter's gallantry. She sat down, brus.h.i.+ng at the gloves.

"The train was awfully dusty-and crowded." She smiled tightly at Robert, looked hastily and obliquely at each of the other two, and bent over the gloves, brus.h.i.+ng earnestly, stopping as if someone had said something, and, when no one did, brus.h.i.+ng again.

"Well, well, well," Robert said. His manners, always good, were never so to the point of cliches, which would be for him what nervous gaffes were for other people. He coughed, rubbed his cheek with the back of his hand, looked at the hand, and stuffed the Kleenex into the pocket of his shorts. "How was camp?"

Mario's eyebrows went up. The girl was twenty, surely, Peter thought.

"All right," she said. She gave Robert the stiff smile again and looked down into her lap. "I like helping children. They can use it." Her hands folded on top of the gloves, then inched under and hid beneath them.

"Susan's been counselling at a camp which broke up early because of a polio scare," Robert said as he sat down. "She's going to use Vince's room while I'm away, until college opens."

"Oh-" She looked up at Peter. "Then you aren't Vince?"

"No. I just dropped in. I'm Peter Birge."

She gave him a neat nod of acknowledgment. "I'm glad, because I certainly wouldn't want to inconvenience-"

"Did you get hold of your mother in Reno?" Robert asked quickly.

"Not yet. But she couldn't break up her residence term anyway. And Arthur must have closed up the house here. The phone was disconnected."

"Arthur's Susan's stepfather," Robert explained with a little laugh. "Number three, I think. Or is it four, Sue?"

Without moving, she seemed to retreat, so that again there was nothing left for the observer except the girl against the column, any one of a dozen with the short, anonymous nose, the capped hair, the foot arched in the trim shoe, and half an iris glossed with an expertly aimed photoflood. "Three," she said. Then one of the hidden hands stole out from under the gloves, and she began to munch evenly on a fingernail.

"Heavens, you haven't still got that habit!" Robert said.

"What a heavy papa you make, Roberto," Mario said.

She flushed, and put the hand back in her lap, tucking the fingers under. She looked from Peter to Mario and back again. "Then you're not Vince," she said. "I didn't think you were."

The darkness increased around the lamps. Behind Peter, the court had become brisk with lights, windows sliding up, and the sound of taps running.

"Guess Vince fell asleep. I'd better get him up and send him on his way." Robert shrugged, and rose.

"Oh, don't! I wouldn't want to be an inconvenience," the girl said, with a polite terror which suggested she might often have been one.