The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Part 24

At that moment the cat, rubbing against Mrs. Wigham's legs, slid also against Mira's. With an electric recoil, Mira screamed and kicked it. The cat, flung several paces, humped and spat. Giuseppe, his mouth open, ran forward and picked it up in his arms.

Mrs. Wigham, immobile, used the handkerchief again to press her lips together. But it was too much for Miss Hulme, who rose telescopic in her suddenly military woollens, her hat a shako, her cheeks a murderous pink. "Really," she said, "but really this cannot be b-!" Her fist rose, the fist with the cane. Ah, thought Jane. She is. She is going to. The cane came down, an inch into the ground, missing Mira's foot by a hair.

There was a moment's silence. For Jane it was a moment of the deepest overtone, that ecstasy of the traveler who realizes that for once he is looking at what he came for. In a moment of almost alcoholic percipience she saw all the inward threads of the mise en scene; she saw the Reuters world of Mrs. Wigham, with a fringe of Vatican red; she saw the metro-golden s.h.i.+ne of California knocked against the Bayswater Road; down at the bottom she saw even her own little East Coast eye.

And now, it seemed almost as if Mira were going to make apology. Her head dropped to one side, her shoulder moved circularly, as if it wished to rub against Mrs. Wigham as had the cat. "I hate them," she said. "On the plane a woman have one in a box, and it claw me from hip to thigh." She bent and peeled her skirt upward to the waist, extending the thigh as a queen might her hand at levee. "On the United Air Lines," she said.

Behind Mrs. Wigham, Giuseppe stared with interest over the head of the cat. Mrs. Wigham moved indefinably, and Giuseppe retired in haste, leaving the door open behind him. Since she had not turned her head, her manner too had its touch of the royal. "Do let us go in," she said. "Cyril and James will have got back from their walk. They will be so delighted to meet you. And perhaps you would sing for us. Your friend tells us you have a charming voice."

Mira dropped her skirt down.

"Do," said Miss Hulme, rallying, although her hat retained its outrage. She paused to right it, to make amends. "A little Purcell, perhaps. I do so love the old madrigals. Or a ballad?"

Mira swung her head suspiciously to one side. She thinks she is being chivied, thought Jane. Or like an animal that must be persuaded it has not behaved badly.

Mrs. Wigham moved the door in invitation. Through it Jane saw the room beyond, recognizing the tone of the afternoon that might have been had she and Mrs. Wigham been alone. Tables confused under books, worn couches blotted with pillows and stained with periodicals, all the familiar droppings of the intellect, in the international sitting room of the mind. From an unseen corner came the sounds of gentlemen.

Mira stirred unexpectedly. "All right, I will sing." Her head rose, in the diva's pause. "I will sing-Bhramss' Lullaby." She advanced for entry, and Mrs. Wigham and Miss Hulme moved politely aside. She bent her head. "It is not needful," she said, almost jovial, and it seemed she was awkwardly attempting a joke. "It is not needful to wait for me because I am the star." And, as mutely, they all turned to follow her in, there at last was the cab.

Mira crossed to it without ceremony, leaving their farewells to Miss Moon. "Yes, perhaps so," said Mrs. Wigham to Jane, who thought it wise to share the cab. "We must have our chat another time." As the cab door closed, she leaned across Jane, to the others. "Cyril will be desolate not to have met you. And I have so enjoyed our afternoon." And from her smile, wide as a salmon's, as the cab drove off, it appeared that he would, that she had.

They rode down through Trastevere in silence. A darkness invested the cab, as if they rode through the white, siesta-stricken streets on the black, plangent core of Mira's impatience. As they crossed the Tiber she muttered, "I like to rest before a date!" and Miss Moon replied, "Well, you are resting. In the cab," in that reasonable tone, half-toady, half-governess, which made Jane wonder at the exact terms of her standing by Mira in Rome. As they rounded the immense white sugar loaf of the Victor Emmanuel monument, Miss Moon remarked that they were not far from where the Roman wolf was kept in its cage. Because of Romulus and Remus-of course, they knew that story? Mira shook her head, intent on twisting her ring in time to the wheels. Miss Moon told the story of Romulus and Remus. "And so, ever since," she concluded, "they keep a wolf, a female wolf, in a cage in the middle of Rome."

"What you mean a wolf!" Mira turned from the window. She stopped twisting the ring. That's what gives her such a queer intentness, thought Jane. She only does one thing at a time.

"What I said, dear. A real she-wolf, just like the one Romulus and Remus had. In a cage in the heart of Rome."

Mira grunted. "What hearts, these people! She does not give suck now, yes?"

"Well, of course not!" said Miss Moon. "It's just a symbol, dear. And they only keep one."

"Fine people!" said Mira. "What a thing!"

"Mira has the dearest little girl at home," said Miss Moon, as if to explain this tenderness on the part of one who had just kicked a cat. "The dearest little four-and-a-half-year-old girl. Just crazy for her mummy. Just pining for her mummy to come home."

Well, no six-o'clock cab will get her there, thought Jane. She rubbed the stone in her pocket with a secret, appeasing touch.

Mira ignored this, bristling with some dark, libertarian sympathy that was as powerful as had been her impatience. "Crazy people!" she said. "What a thing!" When the cab drew up at the entrance of the Excelsior, she stood by unheeding while Miss Moon, over Jane's protest and with the alertness of a lady in waiting, paid the very large fare. As they stood on the steps twilight fawned upon them, tangling their lashes with yellow, and from inside the hotel they heard, like a finger drawn across the backbone, the fine tinkle of evening pursuits. Mira blinked, breathing hard. "What a thing!" she said, deep in her throat, before she turned and went inside. "What a thing, to keep a wolf in a cage!"

Left together on the steps of the gleaming entrance, Miss Moon and Jane each turned, hand held out, ready to make off. For there was nothing, each said to herself with an oblique inward glance, certainly nothing that they had in common.

"Well-" said Miss Moon.

"So pleased-" said Jane.

But it was that perilously soft hour of all great cities in the spring, when the evening rises to a sound like the tearing of silk and it is better not to be alone, to have some plan.

"Care to join me in a drink?" said Miss Moon.

"Well-perhaps just one," said Jane. I can't refuse, she told herself. I must buy her a drink, because of that fare. After that it will be time for the eight o'clock sitting at the pensione. And after that I can sit on the balcony, on the pretty side, the Pincio side, and write letters home. Or I can ask that nice girl at the next table to have a granita di caffe at Doney's. "Shall we go next door to the Flore?" she said. "Or if you'd like a walk-perhaps the Cafe Greco?" She was faintly proud of knowing both.

"Oh, no, let's go in here," said Miss Moon. As they entered the Excelsior her face brightened. "All California's here on spring location," she said, sotto voce, as she led Jane to a table near the door of the huge lounge, and they sat down. "And this is the bar that gets the play."

At the bar itself there was only a solitary young man, his tall legs wrapped around the bar stool, his blond, "clean-cut American" good looks bent in moody profile over his gla.s.s, his tweed back turned away from the groups settled here and there in cus.h.i.+oned niches, as if he uncomfortably knew none of them. It was clear that these others all knew, or knew of, each other. Not that everyone talked to everyone else. But as new people entered conversations were arrested: foursomes spoke deeply among themselves but their glances were asymmetric, and as couples rose, scattering nods, and strode from the arena, a buzz formed behind them. And to the careful watcher, there was still another unity. The women-the wives, that is, for most left hands bore a shock of light-were not all young, but they were younger. The men were beautifully textured as puddings in their minimizing pin-stripe cases, and their cheeks were flanks freshly pummeled by the steam bath, but their wives were their daughters. Opposite them the women sat narrow in luminous sheaths, their shoulders soft explosions of fur, their faces unclenching and closing, automatic as fans.

"Look! There's Sylvia Fairchild!" Miss Moon spoke out of the side of her mouth. She raised her sharp chin with a brilliant smile that faded as it was doubtfully returned. Quickly she redistributed the smile to one far corner, waved briefly to another. She took a vengeful sip of her Martini. "Believe it or not-she used to do my nails at Marshall Field's." The Martini sank farther, and she leaned back with a sigh. "Pretty soon I'll have to go upstairs and pound that typewriter. I simply have to lock myself in."

"Oh, you're staying here?" said Jane.

"Well, no, but I have a place to work in Mira's suite. She gets in a dreadful state when there's no-when she gets bored. And I like to be where the play is, you never know." One of the chattering groups strolled by, and Miss Moon leaned brightly toward Jane, speaking very distinctly. "For instance, I was just going to do a book, when I meet Mat Zipp, of Decca. Why do a book, he says, there's money in lyrics, and they're shorter. So I do, and it turns out I'm a natural." The group pa.s.sed. She waved to the waiter for another drink. "So then," she said in a lower tone, "so then what does he do but go and die on me, in a cab on the way to work. With my stuff in his briefcase, right there in the cab."

"Oh, my," said Jane. In her childhood she had been much at the mercy of a little girl who was always wanting to play house. Now you just be old Mrs. Brown, Jane, and I'll be Elise Harper, just married, and come to tea.

"So I do a narrative, weave all the stuff together, and almost sell Dolin and Markova on the idea of a ballet." She took a sip of the second Martini. "Then they split up."

"Oh, dear," said Jane. It struck her that she was still not a very good Mrs. Brown.

Behind Miss Moon, at some distance, there was a mirror in which Jane could just see herself-rather unvarnished, tailored and small against all this princely down. Not quite plain Jane though, she told herself, and not quite yet, she thought, looking her age. At home, when she put on a bare-necked summer cotton and served gin-and-tonic to the sprightlier clique of the faculty, it was often hardly credited that she was the mother of those two enormous boys.

"So then," said Miss Moon heavily, "I'm at the Park Lane, and who do I b.u.mp into but Grofe. Get him for music and you're set for the Festival Hall, everybody says. The English are suckers for Americana."

Behind her own image in the mirror, Jane saw the bent head of the young man. He bit his lip and recrossed his legs, still staring into his drink. Alone and out of place here, she thought, like me. It would be nice to talk to him, although the idea was, of course, absurd. That was the worst of being on one's own too long in a strange country, so far from the base of affections that steadied one at home. One dried up without some personal emotion; that was all it was. One could not forever be a lens. And at certain hours of the day one found oneself lingering with anyone, as she lingered here.

"Surely you know who Grofe is," said Miss Moon.

"Oh, yes, of course," said Jane. "Philip Morris. I mean the commercial. And isn't he Vladimir Dukelsky for cla.s.sical-oh, no, of course not-that's Vernon Duke." She thinks me an idiot, she thought, and I am to sit on here, waiting to hear how it was they didn't get Grofe. For from the grim, antiphonal way Miss Moon drew on her gla.s.s, it was clear that they hadn't.

"So then," said Miss Moon, but she interrupted herself to twinkle a hand at someone who pa.s.sed, to murmur an indistinct name.

I'll grab the check and go now, thought Jane. For it was no longer funny to watch Miss Moon. It was like seeing those women who hovered secretly at other women's dressing tables, to spray themselves avidly and cheaply with another person's scent.

I'll take the check and go now. She glanced at her watch. It was seven, that hour here when even the windows of pensione bedrooms were violet frames that turned one inside to say Look! to the empty room, to lie face downward, ears stopped against the bell-shake of evening, and say Listen! to the vacant bed. The hour when an experienced traveler knows better than to corner himself there. The hour when the lens turns upon oneself.

"And ... so then?" said Jane.

But Miss Moon was looking elsewhere again, and this time with such a different, such an unrehea.r.s.ed expression that Jane looked around too. It was Mira, standing at the entrance. Groomed now for people of importance, she had made herself, as women did, to be as like them as possible. Her dress was luminous too, cut with pale cleverness to conceal where it could no longer insist, and she stood encircled in a huge riband of fur. She looked sleeker and, in a powdery way, older. Perhaps she had seen this in some mirror before leaving, for now she reached up uncertainly and rumpled her tamed hair, as if to declare the girl she had been against the woman she was. She walked forward with a mannequin's glide, her smile full for the room, then turned her back to it and, with an eager, a crescent leaning, slipped her hand through the arm of the young man at the bar.

He looked up, then stood up, and on his face, handsomer even than in profile, one saw the snow marks of the goggles on the brown skin. But where the white circles on Mira's face were fretted like rose windows, his were still smooth. He was about thirty, that age when, with Americans, one often glimpses the young man looking through the palings of the man, and in his look, lightened with relief but somehow hangdog, one caught this now. As he and Mira left the bar, Mira saw the two women, Jane and Miss Moon. For the first time she really saw them. She looked directly into their eyes and she smiled. Then she and the young man pa.s.sed by them, walking slowly down the long room, and although Mira, nodding here and there with narrowed eyes, clung softly and proudly to the crook of his arm, it seemed almost that he was paraded on hers. A buzz formed behind them.

"She's a fool." Miss Moon breathed this to herself. Behind her gla.s.ses her eyes were bright and fixed. "It'll be all over the Coast in twenty-four hours."

Now the couple neared them again, in their return pa.s.sage down the room. The young man's face was warm. Mira was still faintly smiling, and although this time the smile, fixed on the door, was for neither of the two women, to Jane, trembling suddenly in her tailored suit with a shock that was bitter and sororal, it came as if it was. Almost a grimace, it showed its teeth to an invisible mirror, denying with the lips the secret lines that a body must gather-the crow's feet of the armpit, the dented apple of the belly, the mapped crease, fine leather too long folded, that forms between the b.r.e.a.s.t.s. As Mira pa.s.sed her on the arm of the young man, her scent remained for a moment behind. It rested on Jane as if it were her own.

At the door, Mira and the young man paused. A rush of lilac came to them from the outside, and Mira's fur slid from shoulder to waist, a dropped calyx. The young man replaced it carefully. Her lips parted, watching him. It was a beautiful fur, manipulable as smoke. Before the arts of the furrier had dappled it, it might have been just the color of wolf.

Left together by the flicking of the door, the two women stared at one another.

"Traveling alone?" said Miss Moon.

Jane nodded.

"Divorced too?"

"No," said Jane. "I'm a widow." Her head lifted. "I have two boys."

Miss Moon seemed not to have heard this last. "Care to-join forces for dinner?"

No, thought Jane. Don't settle for anybody's company. As she does. As she has. Not yet. She gazed past Miss Moon, saw herself in the mirror, and looked quickly away. "Thanks," she said, and her voice was kind. "I'm afraid ... I have work to do too."

"Oh, you work," said Miss Moon eagerly. "What do you do?"

"I teach," said Jane. "In a university." I teach, an echo said inside her, and of course at home I have the two boys. And suddenly the echo, her breath, something, rammed itself hard against her chest, inside. Not enough, it said, beating behind the mapped crease between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Not enough. What a thing, it said, crying. What a thing!

"Well, back to the salt mines for us, eh?" said Miss Moon. Her voice was matey, unbearable. Just as if she too had smelled the scent, had heard the thing crying. As if she knew too that Jane, staring into the big, winged gla.s.ses, could see the two poor eyes beating against the gla.s.s.

And now they stood up quickly, gathered their purses and signaled for the waiter. When he came, they paid him with a dispatch unusual to women, and the lire notes left lying in his saucer were large enough for anybody here. For now they could not part quickly enough. For now, each said to herself, the other's company was no longer to be borne. No, it was not to be borne. Not now. Now that they both knew what it was they had in common.

Songs My Mother Taught Me.

SOME TEN YEARS AGO when I was for the first time in London-when, as a rather elderly innocent abroad, I was for the first time anywhere outside New York City except Rochester, Elmira, Binghamton, the Eastern Sh.o.r.e, a few summer resorts in New England and, at the age of twelve, Asbury Park, New Jersey-I attended a semi-diplomatic dinner party at which, after we had all drunk considerable amounts of several delightful wines, one of the ladies present suddenly peeled off her blouse.

Since the other guests, though moist and perfervid, were still upright in their chairs and conversation, the incident caused, even in that imperturbable company, a certain silence. Chitchat, suddenly quenched, faded off into one of those pauses where isolated sentences stand out sharply. The man on my left, whom I had placed tentatively as either a connoisseur of heraldry or a baiter of Americans, had been lecturing me on the purity of lineage maintained by German n.o.bility up to the last war. "Where else," he had just inquired, "can one find, even now, a person whose line shows sixteen quarterings?" Then he stopped short, as if contradicted by circ.u.mstance. Headily I rea.s.sured myself that quite without knowing it-and in the first week too-I must have scaled one of those dizzily international heights of society so often promised the provincial: a set so patrician that queens had no legs, emperors might be clothed exactly as they said they were, and ladies appeared in their quarterings without shame.

She was an exceedingly pretty young woman of about twenty-five with ma.s.ses of blond hair arranged ingenue, and a pair of truly enormous blue eyes swimming in some Venus-lymph, clear natural nacre in which a man, or indeed any onlooker, might well sink. Words like "truly" came inevitably to mind as one regarded them. As I did so, they spilled over pellucidly. Casting a reproachful look at her partner (later it was understood that he had dared her), turning down the corners of a lovely mouth rosied with wine and-though one hated to think it-stupidity, she gazed at us, clutching the discarded portion of her costume, then hung her head and let fall on her lavishly ruffled broderie anglaise corselet two neatly schooled tears.

"Why, Lady Catherine!" our host said at once, and rising, he went round the table to her and poured her more wine, murmuring what I thought to be "How very sporting!" and capping it with-as he raised his own gla.s.s-"Bravo!"

Other gentlemen took up the plaudit. Lady Catherine, shyly consoled, raised her head, and I remembered her patronymic, ducally familiar even to me: one of her ancestresses, whom she was said to resemble, had been a wife of Henry the Eighth. From her round eyes two more pearls dropped, but this time surely with retrospective art-I wondered whether Henry, watching her ancestress' head fall, might not have thought to himself, "None of my other wives looked that good upside down."

What happened next I can only recount, not explain. It is true that, while we were only fourteen at table, the number of empty bottles ranged testimonially behind us must have totaled more than twice that. I have a vague impression that the male applause may have attained an ethnic intensity. Also that our host, bending over Lady Catherine, was a.s.suring her that she looked smas.h.i.+ng, and rather more respectable than the portrait of his grandmother as lady in waiting to Queen Alexandra. And that she, though retaining a disconsolate posture, was looking smug. What I know for sure is that when I next glanced at our hostess-a bishop's daughter-she too had peeled.

"She's upset the gravy boat, Mother!" I murmured delightedly, but of course no one paid any attention to me, or would have understood the reference if they had. No one there was likely to have heard of Mrs. Potter Palmer, much less of my mother. I shall shortly explain-for the benefit of readers who, although they may have caught the allusion to American social history, cannot possibly know anything of mine. But first let me complete the mise en scene of a moment in which were to be brought home to me all the old saws of my girlhood-a moment of truth in which, across so much water and over the ten years of my mother's sojourn in Mrs. Grundy's heaven, I could at last exclaim to her, "Mother, you were right!"

Of the seven women at table, six, including myself, were wearing the version of the currently fas.h.i.+onable (and easily doffable) "separates" known as "evening sweaters." There was nothing coincidental about this; the best houses were cold, even for London; rationing was still on and the English were burning an ineffectual sludge called, with their usual talent, "nutty slack." The one exception to the sweaters was also the only one of the others who was neither chic nor pretty, a vast, untidy woman opposite me-Frau Ewig, a noted anthropologist, recently returned from Sierra Leone-whose dress, showing so many possible means of separation that the eye was unable to choose the probable, looked somewhat as if, in order to appear in it at the party, she had first chopped several natives up. She, like the rest of us, had forgotten Lady Catherine in the sight of our hostess, who sat revealed, with the air of a prioress who had removed her wimple, in a rock-pink, ten-guinea model by Berle.

In the silence that followed I heard the clink of crystal-the gentlemen, according to their needs and natures, were either taking another drink or putting down the one they had. A muted cry of protest was heard-from Lady Catherine. I could have seconded it-for another reason. For glancing round at the other ladies, I sensed something infinitely feminine glissade from eye to eye. In prescience I closed mine. When I opened them, what I saw confirmed it. Every remaining lady-except the anthropologist and the American-had the upper part of her costume in her hand.

Now there was nothing essentially risky in the tableau before us: a number of ladies sitting, modestly swan-necked, in their foundations, is a sight familiar to every window-shopper. Besides, the temperature being what it was, I thought I could discern, between various lacy interstices, the fuzzier-than-flesh-tone of what Debenham & Freebody's (where I bought one the next morning) called a vest. No, the riskiness is often in the eye of the beholder. And this composite eye, twelve times magnified and stern as that of a nudist group eyeing the indecency of a visitor's clothing, was now fixed on my pied vis-a-vis and on me. Leave me there now, while we make our way back-by gravy boat and a sneaky trail of safety pins-to my mother. We shall return.

Moral instruction by moral ill.u.s.tration has long since disappeared from the training of the young. Metaphor itself is considered untrustworthy-likely to weaken the facts of what already is a pretty slippery reality-and every good parent knows that the parable is too "punitive" by far. My childhood was full of them, from boogieman to Bunyan, my parents belonging to a generation still very sure of its facts. And my mother's specialty was what might be called the "social" allegory. Obvious in design, single in target, it was part of the process by which she hoped to transform the unpromising grub at that very moment scratching its knee-scabs in front of her into something pretty and marriageable, designed to preside, with some of her own graces and others she aspired to, at a table even more elaborate than her own.

Under a codex possibly marked "Accidents, Dinner"-for, as will be seen, a good proportion of my mother's tales revolved on accident-reposed Mrs. Potter Palmer. Famous arbiter of bygone Chicago society, she may be the model for performances slightly more rarefied than the one I know her for-as for me, I see her only in the att.i.tude of one. Eternally she presides at her exalted dinner table, from whose foot, in the worm's-eye view of my mother's imagination, she is all but obscured by the gravy boat suited to her station-to my mind about twice the size of our largest tureen. In her historic moment she knows nothing of us, but all is open to posterity-hovering above her now like helicopters, like damsel flies, we see all. Then it happens. Far down the length of the gilt-encrusted table-exactly center I make it for drama-a guest jars a servingman's wrist. A great gout of gravy erupts on the cloth.

My mother pauses; I return her look of high seriousness. Extrasensory perception or what you will, with not a word said between us, our images of that cloth are the same. As a superb embroiderer, my mother's chef d'oeuvre is her banquet cloth. Loaded with eyelet, scallop, punchwork, Valenciennes, fringe and insertion, lying even now on its cardboard cylinder between sheets of preservative blue paper, five years in the making, never used and none like it in the world-yet there on that august table, with a terrible brown blot on its middle, lies its twin.

The guest hangs his head, and no wonder. In unavoidable frisson the other guests, well-bred as they are, avert theirs. We gloat over the dreadful moment, knowing rescue is nigh. Mrs. Palmer, whose eagle eye-exactly like my mother's at her half-yearly dinner parties-sees everything while appearing to register nothing, pauses for a fraction in her elegant conversation. Then she makes her gesture-irreparable and immortal. I see her elbow, plump, white and shapely, a n.o.ble fin-de-siecle elbow suited to its duty, not covered with chicken-skin like mine. Carefully careless as Rejane, no doubt chatting gaily the while, she has swept it outward. Hail Mrs. Palmer, heroic hostess, who, in the imitation that is the ultimate of good manners, is seen now to have overturned, on that cloth, the tureen!

With years of reflection, this tale of my mother's, like another even more pertinent, came to have as many holes in it as the cloth had eyelets. Was it quite the thing to be so exemplary so publicly? Wouldn't the real acme of taste have been not to notice-had the guest felt better, or worse? It came to me that Mrs. Palmer's manner might someday merit the same comment as her money: too much of it. As a matter of fact, if they were being served by footmen, what was the tureen doing in front of her at all?

But at eleven or so, yes, moral ill.u.s.tration, when taken literally, can be dangerous. We were a family of many guests and many, though infrequently regal, dinners at which, since our household was small, I was often allowed up. Time went by while I waited for someone to have his accident, so that I might pridefully watch my mother's aristocratic amends. For months we seemed to feed no one but aunts and uncles; I knew my mother too well to think she would waste that sort of high style on them. But at last one of our guests obliged. He was a Dr. Nettel, fresh from a twenty-year stint in Egypt, who had once been one of my mother's suitors-perhaps it was my father's still sardonic eye on him that caused him to drop a fork into a vegetable dish that splattered wide.

To me, seated at my mother's left, all augured well; the cloth was damask only, but the vegetable was beet. I looked at my mother expectantly; when she did nothing I nudged her, pointing to the service dish of beets which, since it was maid's night out and we were short of footmen, reposed, family-style, in front of her. "Don't be ridiculous," she whispered, her lips sealed, her gaze on the horizon.

I had just been through my eighth-grade graduation-"Into thy hands we give the torch"-the n.o.blesse of our house it would seem, rested with me. I crooked my sharp elbow, bending my hand backward from the wrist as if it held a little pinch of something, meanwhile elegantly averting my head, as if to chitchat, toward Dr. Nettel, but since I could think of nothing to say I remained thus, bas-relief-perhaps he thought I was a.s.suming an Egyptian pose just for him. "Stiff neck?" said my father. My mother, knowing better, grabbed for the elbow; absorbed in the mental picture, profile, of myself, I jumped at the touch; between us we upset the ice pitcher. Diversion was thus created, though not as symmetrically as it would have been via beet. Later, before I went to bed, I was whacked. "Because you are so smart," said my mother between whacks, "and because you are absolutely unteachable." She was wrong. I had just learned for sure what I had always suspected-that we were irretrievably middle-cla.s.s.

Meanwhile, allegory still pursued me, though from another corner. Other girls my age were becoming women, flirts, sirens-at least girls-without trouble, and some avidly; it was my mother's cross that I had to be nagged there inch by recalcitrant inch. Daintiness, my mother said, was its essence; once a woman's daintiness got through to a man, all consummations devoutly to be wished for-such as a trousseau of one's own triple-monogrammed tea napkins-soon followed. To me the word was "daindee," as our German cook crooned it-"Oooh, so daindee!" over anything fancy-and as she looked on her day off, a clumsy veil of white obscuring everything human, excess of starch in the blouse, powder on the neck, fish-net gloves on her honest, corned-beef hands. To me even a bath was an a.s.sault on one's boundaries. Cleanliness was hypocrisy, dirt "sincere." Still the other ethic followed me, ruthlessly inserted in my ear along with the morning and evening soapings, and always with some elaboration peculiar to my mother-witness her divertiss.e.m.e.nt on the Safety Pin.

I belong to the tail end of the b.u.t.ton-traumaed generation. The embarra.s.sments of the zipper-reared are quite otherwise-gaps in the memory or the metal, a fear of being locked in. We lived in the opposite fear of-the very words still have a blush and a hush to them-things "dropping down." Camisoles, panties and petticoats, even when snapped or hook-and-eyed, still required ceaseless vigilance with the needle-and thread was fallible, not nylon. Hence the reign of the safety pin, now used only by cleaners and babies. But the protocol of its use was strict. Emergency supply was always in the purse-in my mother's a chain of small gold ones. In case of "accident" one retired somewhere-to the washroom at Wanamaker's for instance-pinned "things up" and rushed home in a pink state of guilt, praying all the while that one would not be knocked down by a car on the way. For the core of the ethic-known, as I found later, to almost every girl of the era-was: "What if you are rushed suddenly to the hospital, and there they discover ...?" Dream sequences often finished the line, sung above our shrinking forms by hosts of angelic interns forever lost to us: "She has a safety pin in her corset cover!" The worst offense, of course, against sense as well as neatness, was to start the day or the journey already pinned. Hence my mother's variation, known to me always as The Gentleman from Philadelphia.

There was once a girl who was being courted by such a gentleman. Whether there was any significance in his origin, I don't know; perhaps-this being the unsolicited detail with which my mother often fleshed a fable-he just was. She was one of those girls (not unknown to me) who were hastily groomed on the surface, at the cost of squalor below. For a while, said my mother, the girl was able to string him along. But, said she, you can't string them along forever-tangentially I tag this as the single allusion she ever made to s.e.x. There came a day when he arrived with intent to propose. It was a warm occasion; the girl was wearing a peekaboo blouse. Perhaps it was warm enough, say, for him to take off his driving goggles and lean closer. Anyway, just as he was about to declare ... he saw that her shoulder strap was attached with-you've got it. The gentleman went back where he came from. And the girl is single yet.

It has since struck me that she was well shet of him. But at the time-"Now do you see?" said my mother, and I mumbled back, "Yerse."

In time of course, through vanity and the sly connivance of the lingerie-makers, I became as "insincere" as any other "nice" woman, although I never quite convinced my mother of it-or myself. "Fine feathers, on top," she would greet a new costume of mine, and sure enough, within minutes, some detail of my toilette would mysteriously unravel. I scrubbed my wedding ring until some of the stones fell out, because she had a habit of murmuring, "Dirty diamonds," whenever she saw an overdressed woman, and I primped for hospital visits as courtesans once may have for their levees. Wanamaker's was torn down, but I sometimes still dreamed myself in its washroom, standing there with the top b.u.t.ton gone from my skirt waistband, holding one gaunt safety pin the size of a salmon's skeleton. And I never was able to look a real safety pin straight in its fishy, faintly libidinous eye.

But now-let us return to that table in London. There sit the ladies, swan-necked and squinting-what does the slightly piscine shape of their squint remind me of?-at me. And there, somewhat blue-lawed about the jowl at the very plurality of the situation, sit the men. And me-what I am thinking? As any woman would be, of course, of what I have on underneath. Being me, I am also thinking that I am after all the child, at last the Good Child of my mother, and that the scene before me-although of course she could not possibly countenance it-is the accident we have both been waiting for all my life.

For what I happen to have on underneath-nothing more of course, or less, than what thousands of Rockefeller Center secretaries, window mannequins and ladies out for the evening in Rochester, Elmira and Binghamton are wearing-is a La Belle Helene Walzette, Model 11A56, Merrie Widowe Waiste Pincher, nyl. Ice. blk., size 36 B. Edwardian it may be, but not in execution; no amount of wine will unravel me-Seventh Avenue expertise has machine-tooled me into it and only the hotel chambermaid will get me out. And its modesty is unimpeachable-is, in fact, Mail Order. This, indeed, is the accident. For what I had ordered, in the rush before sailing, was the nyl. Ice. wht-in the catalogue very daindee, with the usual sprig of mashed ribbon rosebuds in the decolletage. But what I have got on-sent me by one of the Eumenides brooding darkly in Best's warehouse-is the blk. And the blk. is not with rosebuds. Blissfully I feel, beneath my sweater, what it is with-something to end traumas forever. There, centered where once b.u.t.ton or pin might have resided, now lies, locking me in by patents pending, a round red cabochon gla.s.s jewel about the size of a nickel, La Belle Helene's star ruby clasp, my order of merit, winking rosy and waiting for the light.

Or is it? Dare I? I look heavenward, seeing at first only a dim, brackish ceiling in St. John's Wood. But in dreams one does not always rehea.r.s.e only one's anxieties. Sometimes one dreams that one is walking downtown in one's Walzette, and wakes to find-that one is. And better yet-that Mother is watching. Here I am then, I say upwards. See me now, met with my accident just as you warned me, but in what aristocratic company! There sits Lady Catherine, who began it, surrounded by several others who may well count sixteen quarterings, whatever that is, among them-if not all in one. There indeed sits Mrs. Potter Palmer modern version, with her sweater-tureen in her hand. Mother, you were right. And now, if I do what it appears I must, aren't I?

And immediately I am answered. Nothing supernatural about it-if there is any moral to this fable it is that, unbecoming as we at first may seem to our parents, in the end we become them. At the moment, however, I prefer to think that the suggestion comes via the grate, where a piece of nutty slack slides down, sotto voce. Ask the lady across from you.

I do so. I tip Frau Ewig a wink toward the others, signaling, "Shall we join them?" She seems larger and redder in the face than when I last noticed her. Not to my entire surprise, she shakes her head imperceptibly. Under my stare her face empurples further. "Kann nicht!" she murmurs at last, her lips unmoving; and as her seams stretch with her breathing, I see why-underneath each of her vast arms, a baleful, metallic winking-back. I look the other way. More's the pity! Anthropologist or no, Frau Ewig was reared in Vienna, and I think I know how. Like me. But I don't see how I can help her. Still, a pity that in every apotheosis of the Good Child, there must be, clinging to the bottom of the ladder and gazing upward, a Bad.

My mother's face, up there like a decal through which I can still see the ceiling, is of course seen by no one but me. She has her eyes closed, knowing, as usual, just what I am about to do, and she cannot quite approve this modern ending to her fable. But she also cannot help smiling. Listen to them, the heavenly host, not of angels but of interns, as leaning down with her in the center of the circle they sing it to me a cappella, con amore ... "and now we discover ... she has got ..." (soft Gilbertian surprise) "No! She has not! ... Yes she has, yes she has, she has got ..." (pianissimo, ma non troppo) "a roo-oo-ooo-ooooby ... yes, a ruby, ruby, ruby, ruby, ruby ... a Star Ruby in her corset cover!"

And as, with my hand bent a little at the wrist, I make my gesture, all the company, leaning forward with interest-and perhaps even my mother-may see that I have.

So Many Rings to the Show.

HE AND ESTHER WALKED OUT of the marriage clerk's office, past the other waiting couples and the wedding parties, out into the open air. Down here, the air had a remembered munic.i.p.al grayness, as if its natural color had long since been gritted over with a light statistical dust. Surely he and Marie had gone to a different place to be married-or else this one had been remodeled. Jim recalled a dirty brownish cubicle stained with the tobacco-juice whiff of small-time political stews, and a clerk with a whine and a conniving eye. This afternoon, the office had shone with a kind of cleanly bureaucracy, and the clerk, cool and dentifriced, had refused Jim's large tip with a grave, ritual shake of the head.

Jim took Esther's elbow and guided her through the corridors, down the steps to the pavement, where still more couples stood about in uncertain tableaux. Dingily new, the city edifices pressed too near, as if seen gigantically close in an opera gla.s.s, and looking at one facade, one felt another at the small of one's back. Built in the hope of a Roman dignity, they had managed only a republican durability. They're too close together, he thought-that's it. There's not enough s.p.a.ce between them for majesty.

He hailed a cab, and got in after her. The driver looked inquiringly over a shoulder. "Drive uptown-up Fifth," Jim said. The driver shrugged and started off.