Read Online The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher by Hortense Calisher - Free Book Online

maid opened the door. Mrs. Hawthorn stood at the foot of the stairs to greet us. It was the first time I had seen her in black, a very low-cut, smart black, enlivened only by the cuff of bracelets on her right arm. It made her seem less of a “character,” placing her almost in my mother’s generation, although she may not have been quite that, and a little unsettling me. In my world, the different generations did not much visit each other, at least did not seek each other’s company as she had ours.
    She made a breezy stir of our welcome, giving us each a hand, directing the houseman as to our bags, referring us to separate corners for a wash. “Drinks in the dining room. See you there.”
    When we entered, she was seated at the long dining table, alone. Three places were set, not at the head, but down toward the middle, ours opposite hers. There was no evidence that anyone else was to dine, or had.
    I remember nothing of the room, except my surprise. As we clicked glasses, were served, I tried to recall her voice as it had come over the wire to New York; certainly her airy chitchat had given me the impression that we were to be members of a house party. Otherwise, considering the gap between us of situation, money, age—how odd it was of her to have singled us out! Her conversation seemed to be newly flecked with slang, a kind of slang she perhaps thought we used. “That way for the johns,” she had said, directing us to the bathrooms, and now, speaking of Bermuda, she asked us if we had not thought it “simply terrif.” She had found European travel “rather a frost.”
    “I get more of a boot out of cutting a dash at home,” she said, grinning.
    A second manservant and maid were serving us. “I keep the estate staffed the way it’s always been,” she said. “Even though a good bit of the time it’s only just me. Of course we’ve had to draw in our horns in lots of ways, like everyone else. But I’ve washed enough dishes in Hawthornton, I always say.” She smiled down at her bracelets.
    “Have you always lived in Hawthornton?” said Luke.
    She nodded. “The Senator’s people have always had the mills here. The Hawthorn Knitting Mills. And my father was the town parson—also the town drunk. But I married the mill-owner’s son.” She chuckled, and we had to laugh with her, at the picture she drew for us. It was the same with all her allusions to her possessions—allusions which were frequent and childlike. As they ballooned into boasting, she pricked them, careful to show that she claimed no kind of eminence because of them.
    What she did claim was the puzzling thing, for I felt that “the estate” meant something to her beyond the ordinary, and that her choice of our company was somehow connected with that meaning. Certainly she was shrewd enough to see that our scale of living was not hers, although for a while I dallied with the idea that a real social ignorance—that of the daughter of the down-at-the-heel parson, suddenly transmuted into the mill-owner’s wife—had kept her insensitive to all the economic gradations between, had made her assume that because we were “college people,” had been on the Bermuda boat, and had an anonymous East Side address, our jobs and our battered Chevy were only our way of drawing in our horns. But she did not seem to be really interested in who we were, or what our parents had been. Something about what we had, or were now, had drawn her to us; in her queer little overtures of slang she seemed to be wistfully ranging herself on our side. But I did not know what she imagined “our side” to be.
    We took our coffee in what she referred to as “the big room”—at first it was hard to categorize as anything else. Large as a hotel lounge, it had something of the same imperviousness to personality. Sofas and club chairs, stodgy but solid, filled its middle spaces; there was a grand piano at either end, and all along the edges, beneath the irregularly