Read Online Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel by Hortense Calisher - Free Book Online
Authors: Hortense Calisher
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could settle down to being “the pretty American who is really more like us”—a role she’d been playing most of her life, and was now, except for the prettiness that had lasted best, getting harder and harder to define on both sides. She’d spent her life getting away from that same State of Maine which had provided her with enough stamina to do so, this energy of hers in turn having been mistaken by his father for that sexual one of which later performance had shown him to be so in need.
“The Americans have an orgiastic climate, a Puritan heritage, and whole infusions of mixed bloods,” his father had written happily—and finally. “They want most to be a political nation but their own climate and distances have outwitted them. The subsequent melee is wonderful. No, I won’t come back.”
Privately, Linhouse knew his parents had gotten away with blaming temperamental differences on national ones. His father, correspondent for a London newspaper and circuit lecturer, had always been careful to send very good maintenance, to keep a respectable housekeeper for visiting progeny, and never to be seen with young women who had too much fringe. Meanwhile he had sent volumes of Chesterfieldian advice to all, those letters to his wife usually ending on a sharply human note: “Send for Betty, I’ve had enough of her,” or “Time for Patrick, isn’t it? Good God, he’ll scarcely remember me!” His wife in her own meanwhile had kept her calendar full, her causes and acquaintances visited, a circle of admirers of the opera-escort type dancing round the Maypole of a lively establishment, and almost certainly no lover. So, with the help of Atlantic crossings almost as common as mailings, the personal facade of the family had been preserved.
It followed that of the four children conceived before it had become a facade—while his mother no doubt was thinking of dynasty and his father wasn’t thinking—all had emerged like Linhouse, with a strong sense of the personal quotient. None had been too shaken about psychically to make good enough use of a dowry so suspiciously regarded by the century; all, within the aberrations of that century, were leading exactly the dull to vivid lives of people brought up exactly otherwise. Perhaps they hadn’t yet made full use of it.
Linhouse, who by his and his grandparents’ preference had been reared by them, was the quiet one; no one had ever said dangerously so. As one of the sawed-in-half who more normally came of divorce, he found himself no more reserved in the face of experience than was wise, still open to it with enough of the élan that most probably was meted out in the egg. Maybe he was a divided man. He accepted differences between nations, between people, between the sexes—and on this last score, was rather certain of his own. This seemed to him comfortable. As a human being, exclusive of his larger social obligations, he expected to itch, to weep, hopefully to love, and regretfully to die.
Particularly re the itch, of course, the words of Linhouse senior, deceased, now reverberated. “If the children are to spend that much time in England with you, they must be made to understand what a marvelously topical people they are among. Politics is not the full explanation of my countrymen. Early in life we are taught to sympathize rather than to feel, and we have absolutely no short-term talent for domestic drama, i.e. ‘scenes.’ That’s all right, the children will get enough of that over here.” After some digression, to the effect that Americans rarely had sympathies but always thought they had feelings, he continued. “As to summer plans. Our personal system, like any, was simpler when the children were young. But advantages still accrue. Summer romance, for instance, is particularly pretty in England, or used to be. The English are by no means sexless, indeed are well able to produce downy-rose girls and Anglo-Greek boy babies in moments of absentmindedness,
“The Americans have an orgiastic climate, a Puritan heritage, and whole infusions of mixed bloods,” his father had written happily—and finally. “They want most to be a political nation but their own climate and distances have outwitted them. The subsequent melee is wonderful. No, I won’t come back.”
Privately, Linhouse knew his parents had gotten away with blaming temperamental differences on national ones. His father, correspondent for a London newspaper and circuit lecturer, had always been careful to send very good maintenance, to keep a respectable housekeeper for visiting progeny, and never to be seen with young women who had too much fringe. Meanwhile he had sent volumes of Chesterfieldian advice to all, those letters to his wife usually ending on a sharply human note: “Send for Betty, I’ve had enough of her,” or “Time for Patrick, isn’t it? Good God, he’ll scarcely remember me!” His wife in her own meanwhile had kept her calendar full, her causes and acquaintances visited, a circle of admirers of the opera-escort type dancing round the Maypole of a lively establishment, and almost certainly no lover. So, with the help of Atlantic crossings almost as common as mailings, the personal facade of the family had been preserved.
It followed that of the four children conceived before it had become a facade—while his mother no doubt was thinking of dynasty and his father wasn’t thinking—all had emerged like Linhouse, with a strong sense of the personal quotient. None had been too shaken about psychically to make good enough use of a dowry so suspiciously regarded by the century; all, within the aberrations of that century, were leading exactly the dull to vivid lives of people brought up exactly otherwise. Perhaps they hadn’t yet made full use of it.
Linhouse, who by his and his grandparents’ preference had been reared by them, was the quiet one; no one had ever said dangerously so. As one of the sawed-in-half who more normally came of divorce, he found himself no more reserved in the face of experience than was wise, still open to it with enough of the élan that most probably was meted out in the egg. Maybe he was a divided man. He accepted differences between nations, between people, between the sexes—and on this last score, was rather certain of his own. This seemed to him comfortable. As a human being, exclusive of his larger social obligations, he expected to itch, to weep, hopefully to love, and regretfully to die.
Particularly re the itch, of course, the words of Linhouse senior, deceased, now reverberated. “If the children are to spend that much time in England with you, they must be made to understand what a marvelously topical people they are among. Politics is not the full explanation of my countrymen. Early in life we are taught to sympathize rather than to feel, and we have absolutely no short-term talent for domestic drama, i.e. ‘scenes.’ That’s all right, the children will get enough of that over here.” After some digression, to the effect that Americans rarely had sympathies but always thought they had feelings, he continued. “As to summer plans. Our personal system, like any, was simpler when the children were young. But advantages still accrue. Summer romance, for instance, is particularly pretty in England, or used to be. The English are by no means sexless, indeed are well able to produce downy-rose girls and Anglo-Greek boy babies in moments of absentmindedness,
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