False Entry
A Novel
Hortense Calisher
To C. H.
II. Tuscana. He Finds Himself to Be There.
IV. More Goodmans. He Asks to Return.
VII. The Fair. The Cars of Tuscana.
VIII. Semple’s Store. The Hill.
III. My Mother and Miss Pridden.
VII. The Fourchette Office. The Shell. The Namesake.
VIII. Life Meets the Memoir. The Mannixes.
IX. A Day in 1936. Morning in Tuscana. The Courtroom. Evening at Home. He Leaves Tuscana.
I. The Upstairs World. Maartens. Mrs. Papp.
III. Pierre Returns to Tuscana. The Grand Jury Prepares. Lucine. The Jebbs.
IV. The Proceedings. Jurors Are Seen.
IV. Conversations and Farewells.
Innocence
T
RUTH. IN THESE DAYS
of so many trials by association, where a man A can show, with an infinity of fine brush strokes, how he once was an intimate of the man B, and the man B assert, with what only God might see to be craft or virtue, that he never knew the man A, I see truth as an old, hobbled unicorn limping through the forests of allegation and denial, pausing here and there to try to warm itself at some sun-foil of proof that shines for a moment through the trees. For my own strange history of third-hand listening and remembering—the history of a man formed by nature and circumstance to be the confidant, not of intimacy, but of convenience, and burdened therefore with the retentive, bruised memory of the lonely—has at least given me one bit of truth to hold for myself. It is perhaps the only such I will ever have firsthand, and it is this: I know that there are certain people in the world—two or three, for instance, that I can tick off at the moment—who either have never met me or do not even know that I exist, about whose lives I yet know enough, or so much, that I could claim entrance into their pasts with the most beautiful legalities of detail. Further, I am sure that my history in this respect is strange in emphasis only, not in kind. For I am certain that every person, even the most commonplace, if he could but search and construe his memory, holds within his orbit of power at least one other person to whom he could do the same.
False entry into another person’s life, into his present by means of his past; if it does not happen oftener it must be because of lack of malice, whim or need. And when well accomplished, it is like the successful murder or the hidden masterpiece—unheralded, unsung. For this would not be that dull blackmail which deals in lost babies and old peculations discovered, but a demand of which the debtor may remain forever unaware, and for which the blackmailer, his own sole witness, is a man paid off in the currency of his need. A man perhaps who for once wants his hand on the pulse of another’s life-beat, would for once see a human effect of which he is the cause—or perhaps merely an outsider who can bear no longer to stand beyond the gate.
Fancy him then, this man, standing daily, like the rest of you, in the oblique wash of conversation, rumor and murmurous fact that each night slides out to sea again like the refuse of a city. But this man is an eternal listener at the orchestrations of others, a hoarder of what others would never dream of saving, a reader of old telephone books, who never dares make the call. He saves, without reason, what a man C once said in drink about a man B; he retains gratuitously how the light fell exactly, and on what arrangements, in a house where he, long forgotten, was once the guest of a guest; he recalls how, at a dinner table long since dropped into limbo, shadow blacked the voice of the woman on his left at the sound of a certain name. And one night, as he sits in his evening agony of non-living, listening, hand near the dead phone, to the low, mnemonic mutter of other peoples’ lives, certain names, shadows, half-lights suddenly merge; all the mossy facts adhere, and he feels, formed under his hand, the stone. Shall he fling it—for if he does so, he himself will be the stone? Ahead of him, small but possible, is the entry, easy as the descent in Dante, and beyond it he hears a treble of voices, in whose singing he may join.
I know it can be done, for I have done it. First, when hardly more than a boy, in a small town in the southern part of what I still think of as
your
United States. That was when, using the chance secret left with me by Johnny Fortuna, I found out the mechanism of myself, and how it could be appeased. And later, but never again so seriously, with so many others. In a way, here in New York, I am doing it now. But here, as I know too well, it is still only the small social calisthenic that keeps one in trim for the greater risk. For here, winding myself as I have into Judge Mannix’s circle, and all too near his daughter’s heart, still it is only like looking at stereopticons on a laughing, nostalgic evening, while all the time one craves to hear, even to be, the huge orthophonic voice. So, soon, perhaps—in some place that must be the only real place—I shall need to do it again.
Let me explain. Let me tell you about it. You being the confidant’s confidant, the page to which he comes at last, carrying what could never be spoken across the dead-end bar at midnight, or whispered—as I have never dared whisper it—in the gentle hours, to the warm nipple of a woman.
I
WAS BORN, AN EIGHT
-months child, on Armistice Day of the First Great War, posthumous son of a British cavalry sergeant who had fallen some months before (not in battle, but on home encampment, while drunk, under the heel of a horse), to his widow, a dressmaker, lying in that day not in her own poor flat in World’s End, but in a hastily prepared sitting room on the second floor of the house of her patron, Lady Rachel Goodman—in Golder’s Green. So, there it is for what it is worth or weighs; I was born, perhaps by some already willful act of gestation, not in World’s End but in Golder’s Green.
At that time my mother was past thirty, and must have looked then as she looked most of her life—composed face, short body and stout calves, crinkly brown hair with a look of roughness to it—one of those sturdy, plain women who seem to age little, because nothing in the way of beauty is ever expected of them. Her father had been in the cavalry also, a sergeant major in the Indian army, but unlike my unreliable father, of whom she spoke seldom, he had been one of those trusted noncommissioned officers who were the bone of the colonial service; we still had—carefully framed, and carried later even to Alabama—the testimonial pamphlet, heavy with august military titles, presented him at his retirement dinner, the picture of him as an erect, mutton-chopped pensioner (his uniformed chest solid with medals and ribbons tinted to a rainbow blur by an overartistic photographer), on the lawns of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, and the long, campaign-studded notice of his death, in the regimental gazette. And embedded in my mother’s reminiscences of him, I see now what she got from him, what I never saw so clearly before. Cockney in origin, he must have mothered so many subalterns, served as
fidus Achates
to so many of them returned as ranking officers, that, like many people of his station, he had absorbed, while never presuming upon it, much of their ethic and some of their tastes—as a butler might become, in a dictionary way, and at the most respectful distance, as much of a gentleman as his master. So it was that my mother, to whom it would never have occurred to change either her dumpy, black habit of dress or the varnish-
cum
-lithograph mediocrity of her parlor, could judge her clients, their drawing rooms, positions and reputations, with the strictness of a connoisseur. And, more important, lived, in her unimaginative way, as much by these judgments as in her parlor. Even by heredity, I see now, I come of a vicarious family.
Her connection with the Goodmans was a simple one. At sixteen, having shown some talent, my mother was apprenticed to a French dressmaking establishment in Lyons, with a final year in the main branch in Paris. They met there, the young Rachel Pereira, shopping for her trousseau with the old Mrs. Goodman, her generous and eccentric mother-in-law-to-be, and my mother (the midinette’s stiff bow at her nape, but the rest of her stolid and stubby in the midst of the other apprentices with their long noses, thin, subtle French lips, and coquettish feet), who had been pushed forward to serve
les Anglaises.
When they returned to England, she went with them, no doubt relinquished with relief by the
maîtresse
as too lacking in presence and guile, and until the wedding, six months away, she served as seamstress and maid to the softly winning,
primavera
bride. Later, when she set up her own business, the Goodmans were her mainstay, for the plain fact of it was that my mother was not a success. She had been too long exposed to gentility to be able to summon the imitative, glacéed arrogance required by the Bond Street salons, and at the same time her sense of style, corrupted by the French, was too vivid and strange for the suburban wives who would otherwise have been her natural trade. But with the Goodmans, with their slipper-easy affections, their Phoenician love of the purple, she was at home.
From my mother’s account of the day of my birth, blended with my childhood knowledge of that house, I know that day almost as if I had been present not only as a newborn wisp, but as if, under the waxed skin and sealed eyelids of my prematurely naked face, there were already working that blotting-paper power of recall which was to be the matrix of my mental life. She lay there physically hushed, my mother, anxious only because her milk had not yet come in, and there was talk that, because of the circumstances, it might not, and I lay there like a dropped doll—“Too quiet, the little man!” the housemaids hinted—at her side. The servants brought her her dinner—it would be in the covered dishes, flowered and gilded, of Carlsbad china (for although the Goodmans loved showy things, they were not the kind to use them only for show)—and the tray would be set on the lift near the stove in the kitchen and hauled up by one of the maids, who would notch the thick rope securely and then run up a flight to take the tray from the shaft that opened on every floor, to the left of the back stairs. Now and then, all through the day, young Lady Rachel herself kept coming in to see her, her auburn hair skewered in a puff high on her head—like a duchess who for some reason or other preferred to dress her hair like a char’s I always thought it—one of the vast peignoirs my mother was always making for her surrounding her like cumulus, for she was almost always expecting a child.
“How wonderful to be born on this day!” she said, no doubt pausing dreamily with a hand parting the curtains, for all the Goodmans had a way of dreaming at windows that for years I thought of obscurely as the habit of a class not mine. “And, Crossie”—my mother’s maiden name was Dora Cross—“too lovely of you to have had him here, for you know how I am always forgetting how to bathe a baby, from one to the other, will you trust me to practice on him? And there are all those new nappies you have run up—enough for a regiment!” They understood how to comfort, the Goodmans—it ran from them like balm.
Later, the children were brought in to see the newborn—Hannschen and Joseph of course not yet there, but Rosalind and Martin and James, younger than when I knew them, yet I can see them as they must have stood there, three pairs of wide, Goya eyes, toes curling in the gold-braided, pointed red leather slippers sent them each birthday by the uncle in Gibraltar. And after them, the grandmother herself, that marvelously muttering godmother-witch of a woman, carrying down, from the third-floor apartment that was like a crowded bibliography of Vienna, a cup of the strong coffee she brewed on her spirit-lamp—a word I have not thought of in thirty years—and served in one of the high cups that she would never let the heavy-handed serving girls touch. Last of all, just before supper, my mother said, Sir Joseph himself came. He came and stood at the door, dark-bearded orientalist amazingly down from that fourth-floor eyrie I never saw, from which he could seldom be routed, where he wrote the books for which he had been named on the King’s list.