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False Entry

A Novel

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

His Birth. The Goodmans.

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 over-artistic 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.

"Congratulations, Crossie!" he called. "I won't come in. I'm all over ink and dust, too grimy to meet a baby."

He wouldn't enter the room, explained my mother, with that jealous and delicate sense of pride in her betters which was the mark of her own class—which she carried with her to America, and was lost with there—he wouldn't enter the room because, although it would have been proper enough with a lady of his own sort, he knew that it would embarrass my mother.

"I'm sending you up some wine," he called. "You are to drink it, as much as you can. For you know, we shall be toasting the two of you, downstairs."

I can hear my mother saying that, her hand arrested over the old sewing machine in Fulham, or poking with contempt at the cornbread she learned to make over here. We shall be toasting the two of you downstairs.

The wine came, a cobwebby bottle, and she sipped it. Downstairs, there was music. Outside the window, rackety sounds and voices slipped by the night long, all the crowd-music of that night of peace, a sudden maying in November of all the young and old linking arms across the tennis courts and gardens of Golder's Green. Wrapped in the red-warmth of that wonderful household, she slept. And the next morning, her milk came in.

Tuscana. He Finds Himself to Be There.

Until my tenth year, then, I was in and out of that house. Do you know how it is when you are in pursuit of a woman, have reached her perhaps, but sense that she is not quite as concerned with you, how all the facts about her—whom she sees, where she is to be found at certain hours of the day—have for you a swollen intentness, how you add to and subtract from the doubled image you have of her, with the nervous madness of research? For all the years that I was intermittently in that house—the dressmaker's boy, holder of pins in boudoirs, maker of fourth or fifth at nursery games, fed with casual sweetness at the family table—for all those years I was in love; I was in love that way. I did not know this then of course, nor would the Goodmans ever have suspected how I felt about them, for their house was always full of accessory benevolences like me. And people like them, the "outgoing" ones, who spend themselves like gold motes on the air, never realize that what they dispense as generalized kindness, the single-hearted suck up as love. Silent-footed child that I was, as a boy like me had to be taught to be, on the days when I went there, claw-fingers clutching my mother's the long way out on the Underground, thinking of the second breakfast I would get and of all the coming hours of something more than food, on those days I was like a statue warmed down from its niche into living for a day, and at night, when I was returned to my corner, and until the next time, a fantasy of life remained behind my brow.

So then, I remember everything about that house. Everything. Not only its mold and feel and smell, that any child might keep, but floor by floor, leaf by leaf, the exact cinquefoil of its being. I can stand in its geography and print my track upon it, as a rabbit must sometimes stand, poised, in the lost warren he cannot hope to find again.

And, lilliputian again, I can remember the giants above. Family lore was dropped in that kitchen, glimpsed through the muddle of the cook's mind like the ring at the bottom of the Christmas custard; occasionally the older children, though usually distant, played at toss in front of me with an ornate secret or family fable. I hid it all away, the way Lady Rachel hid, in a Battersea box, under some bastings I took up to her one afternoon, the cachets she sometimes took when alone. And the thousands of conversations intoned, back and forth, back and forth above my head—I remember those—a Gregorian chant whose pattern appears slowly now down the apse of years, the lingua franca of giants, that now, giant myself, I understand. I can hear Sir Joseph's voice, the day he spoke to her about the cachets. I can see the hairs on Sir Joseph's hand.

And it was the old lady, Mrs. Goodman, who first made of me a confidant. Looking back, I see now that her eccentricity was really only a powerful refusal to have truck with the superficial, her incantatory way of talking only that ancestral harking back of the elders, which we reject to our loss. She was one of those interior monologuists who are driven by a lifelong need to see the formal design of their own lives, to fix its rubric firmly among the chapters of the world, and she ruminated best in the presence of a listener manqué—a servant, a stranger, or a child. Since she was also one of those blessed of the earth whose own family is the hub of their sky, it was of the Goodmans that, incessantly, I learned. She ranged her life, theirs, with the passion of a critic, and like the best of these, with a wildness of phrase and a soundness of judgment that gave me something of the method too. Listening, I knew for the first time what it was to make of oneself that gray, faceless well into which another does not dip, but pours. Not for years did I know that the services of the confidant, though apparently selfless, are never so. But it was not her fault, nor yet perhaps mine, that it was to be others' lives I ranged.

For, at ten, I was torn away. I say "torn" with reason, thinking of the ghost strength that underlies dead idiom. For, of our trek to America, the ship to Montreal, the long journey south to the town of Tuscana, even my first months in that wizened place (and even there, I gather, no one ever realized it of me), I know only by hearsay. I learned later, of course, that the Goodmans had closed the house in Golder's Green, following to Japan, with all their own bags and baggage and singsong, Sir Joseph, who held a government post there for some years. They were not the kind to leave dependents behind them like deserted cats, but my mother would never have let them know the extent of her dependence on them. And no one, not even I, knew mine. After some months, heeding the pleas of her only sister—younger than she, ailing, and married to a shrewd Birmingham millhand who had emigrated to a foreman's job in the States—she accepted the passage money they sent her, and we sailed.

Later, she always used to say that it was for me she had emigrated, but she never said why. Perhaps she could not phrase it, or would not, for hers were not the usual reasons for going to that new world for which she had a certain scorn even before she saw it; indeed, she was never to trust a country where a man, even a son, could rise so soon. I think she left England because I had already begun to look like my father. She was a plain woman who, against her own awareness of it, had let herself shine briefly in the sunny whim of a man whose handsome dash she could never have felt herself to have deserved; other women she could have borne, and probably had, but the manner of his death had disgraced her in the one milieu in which she took pride. And everyone had begun to say that I looked like him, like the specious face in the wedding picture I never saw until months after her death—one of those Burne-Jones faces the Irish produce now and then, with a hint of the spoiled angel in its sentimental modeling, in the blank, neoclassic eye. Unwillingly, that day, I marked the likeness too.

But of all that interim, of a period that must have been about four months, I remember nothing. It is the only part of my life I do not remember. Later there was no mention of illness; apparently through all that time I ate, responded in the ordinary way. When I was grown, and on a navy cruiser for the first conscious sea voyage of my life, I lay awake in my bunk all the first night out, straining for some kinetic memory of how it felt to be at sea. But none came. There is the day at Golder's Green that must have been the last day; there is the morning I awoke to myself, sitting before a breakfast bowl, in the tallow-soft heat of the house in Tuscana. There is nothing in between.

Sitting now, at the same time within the sound tape and outside it, I wake again that morning. Opposite me, someone has just said Goodman. I see the bowl, my hand stopped on the spoon, objects seen through a curtain of drizzle that a sudden wind parts clear. I look up into a long face with the cramp of illness on it, a face that I do not know. She speaks again, my aunt, in her thin, life-grudging voice, a voice I heard for the first time a moment ago.

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Excerpted from False Entry by Hortense Calisher. Copyright © 1961 Hortense Calisher. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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