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Authors: Hortense Calisher
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especially if there is a touch of Irish in the family. But their deepest emotional shock is after all sunlight, and it is no wonder that in the long, greenish instances between they are forced to develop the pools, the literature and the society, and an addiction to warm drink. One must never forget also that ‘chaff’ is merely their natural defense; such a range of sympathy demands a constant cutting down of the candidates for it. The result of all this being that it is absolutely the ideal place to get rid of an emotional encumbrance!” As usual, the letter had a postscript. “N.B. Though Patrick is acquitting you admirably at Harvard—June marks splendid!—he’s a little under the weather otherwise and is joining you shortly. Send Jack.”
So Jack had been sent. In actual presence, his father hadn’t seemed nearly as wise—or perhaps had known quite well that his wisdom was of the epistolary kind. Certainly he’d done better with whichever children and countries happened to be at a distance. And now, from the severest distance, he was doing best of all.
For it was true, Linhouse thought, lounging on a summer’s day, at his mother’s flat, near one of her bell-glasses—the spirit of ridicule ran through this land like rheumatism; it was impossible to die of love here. Shelley, who hadn’t, slept Victorianly, his marble limbs sprawled in a crypt at the Oxford which had thrown him out in the body and readmitted him in the statue, surely the most naked thing in England. After that visit and other weekends, sailing-club or walking-tour, alone or accompanied and all as friendly as field, stream, and pub could make them, Linhouse sat for some days in the park with his mother, who was now convalescing.
Watching the pigeons, he understood even less why birds were the favorite fauna of the English, but more about the local attitude toward what might be phrased monosyllabically: Hop. The girl he’d chosen for his trip down the Thames danced at the Windmill Theatre but had turned out to be a bishop’s illegitimate daughter; her mother, it appeared, had remained in the vestry of life. The girl and he spent the night together, not without some political conversation.
He began to seek the company of other children of misalliance like himself. Almost everybody these days seemed to think himself or herself one of them—it was too simple. The days passed with a rubble and a twink, from furnace-groan—they had central heating in a way—to cufflinks and all the other knickknack medley of domestic sounds and routines that so easily became the permanent nostalgias of life. If he were to choose the coziest, it began to be the crowd of teacups waiting in the pre-dark of the kitchen cabinet in Wiltshire, in the house he would never again see. His vocabulary changed again with a natter and a patter and the echo of dozens of words a man could never decently use but kept hearing, the wireless keeping up the class war anxiously, Cockney on the Underground like two whelks talking, and the toy talk of two homos in Soho, two somos in Oho saying, “Oh all that sort of thing and tiddly-pom.” England redivivus. He was no longer in agony. Travel had cured him, or repatriated him. Like a good native son, he began to think of France for a change, but since money was ever more pressing—returned to the States.
On his return, by boat, the skyline smashed his teacups. Ah, stunning life, he thought, as the cab sped him from the docks, and he waited with respect for this land to assault him. The torn selvage of all coastal cities fluttered by him, all estuaries of the same debris, of what rust could and did corrupt, shot through with a nostalgia of oceans deserted for the single dull thud of land. He passed under the very mammoth that had brought him. Brave flashed the luxury bric-a-brac shops—stores. He thought with dread of his long-sealed flat—apartment. All along, he knew quite well what was happening.
In the naphtha gloom of
So Jack had been sent. In actual presence, his father hadn’t seemed nearly as wise—or perhaps had known quite well that his wisdom was of the epistolary kind. Certainly he’d done better with whichever children and countries happened to be at a distance. And now, from the severest distance, he was doing best of all.
For it was true, Linhouse thought, lounging on a summer’s day, at his mother’s flat, near one of her bell-glasses—the spirit of ridicule ran through this land like rheumatism; it was impossible to die of love here. Shelley, who hadn’t, slept Victorianly, his marble limbs sprawled in a crypt at the Oxford which had thrown him out in the body and readmitted him in the statue, surely the most naked thing in England. After that visit and other weekends, sailing-club or walking-tour, alone or accompanied and all as friendly as field, stream, and pub could make them, Linhouse sat for some days in the park with his mother, who was now convalescing.
Watching the pigeons, he understood even less why birds were the favorite fauna of the English, but more about the local attitude toward what might be phrased monosyllabically: Hop. The girl he’d chosen for his trip down the Thames danced at the Windmill Theatre but had turned out to be a bishop’s illegitimate daughter; her mother, it appeared, had remained in the vestry of life. The girl and he spent the night together, not without some political conversation.
He began to seek the company of other children of misalliance like himself. Almost everybody these days seemed to think himself or herself one of them—it was too simple. The days passed with a rubble and a twink, from furnace-groan—they had central heating in a way—to cufflinks and all the other knickknack medley of domestic sounds and routines that so easily became the permanent nostalgias of life. If he were to choose the coziest, it began to be the crowd of teacups waiting in the pre-dark of the kitchen cabinet in Wiltshire, in the house he would never again see. His vocabulary changed again with a natter and a patter and the echo of dozens of words a man could never decently use but kept hearing, the wireless keeping up the class war anxiously, Cockney on the Underground like two whelks talking, and the toy talk of two homos in Soho, two somos in Oho saying, “Oh all that sort of thing and tiddly-pom.” England redivivus. He was no longer in agony. Travel had cured him, or repatriated him. Like a good native son, he began to think of France for a change, but since money was ever more pressing—returned to the States.
On his return, by boat, the skyline smashed his teacups. Ah, stunning life, he thought, as the cab sped him from the docks, and he waited with respect for this land to assault him. The torn selvage of all coastal cities fluttered by him, all estuaries of the same debris, of what rust could and did corrupt, shot through with a nostalgia of oceans deserted for the single dull thud of land. He passed under the very mammoth that had brought him. Brave flashed the luxury bric-a-brac shops—stores. He thought with dread of his long-sealed flat—apartment. All along, he knew quite well what was happening.
In the naphtha gloom of
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