Age by Hortense Calisher Read Free Book Online

trained on all the satisfactions of life—and this justly gives him a kind of rude distinction. His attitude toward nature supplements that, even if with the engaging pomp of ‘Woodman, spare that tree.’ But smart as he is, one can’t see him in any of the deeper convolutions of thought. His is a clubman’s response to the universe, socially and physically. Sherm became a link in the old boy chain of American letters quite early, and will wear that old-school tie all the way to Olympus; indeed there is where he will expect it to count most. Odd, then, that it’s only in words that his shrewdness shows through as coarse.
    As when he screwed his good eye at the bottles, and then at us. ‘So you two’re well fixed, eh?’ His massive head moves up down, up down in approval, even respect. ‘Well fixed.’
    I hadn’t heard that phrase since my mother, the calculator of the family, had employed it. It was always said of older people. Those who had money to begin with, or who had retired well.
    It’s a shock to hear Gemma and me so described. We have had two trades, after all, and Gemma is good with property.
    ‘I suppose we’re provided for. Barring the worst.’
    That word keeps cropping up. I have trouble these days with finding synonyms, or euphuisms. Only basic language will do.
    Gemma is crouching over the table, in profile too old for a bacchante, too young for a sphinx. ‘Where did you two stay? In London?’
    Kit says: ‘Get me my jacket, Sherm, will you? It’s in the bedroom.’ She’s shivering.
    Gemma’s arms move slower these days. She thinks I don’t see. But this time she’s quick. ‘Here, take this shawl.’ Lately she keeps them handy.
    ‘Thanks, duck.’ The shawl, a black, white, and orange wool one given Gemma by Czechoslovakia’s greatest poet when I was there years ago on a State Department tour, looks garish on Kit’s tailor-made.
    ‘You were always full of cures, Gemma,’ she says. ‘Nice Jewish ones, that worked. Remember that mustard plaster you made for me? That time I caught cold in that dreadful shack we four rented together in the Poconos?’
    I don’t remember that—or the Poconos. Were Sherm and Kit and we ever that close? I am remembering the poet, his ugly, generous sister, and every detail of that Prague flat, musty with a brother-sister relationship meticulously observed. I helped him get to a university here shortly after. That shawl is over twenty years old, like our friendship. The poems arrive in the mail, woven as tight as that wool. I send him mine in exchange. The world has recently crowned him, but it makes no difference. He and I—and a few others round the world—have a confraternity the Sherms wouldn’t understand. In fact we cure each other, against the Sherms.
    What’s Gemma looking so strange for?
    I’d lost track.
    ‘We always kept up with her,’ Kit’s saying. ‘Like we have with you. Though we never stayed with her. She’s always had some cuckoo arrangement—you know—with a man. But this time—she wrote to invite us. And it came—just as we needed it.’
    One never thinks of those two as needy. Either of money, or invitations. Certainly the patronage still flows from somewhere, though perhaps even to the grand old men not as once.
    ‘Get to the point, Kit,’ Sherm said. ‘So we went there. Down in Wandsworth—not very savory. But on a good underground line. That’s all right; we always travel light. And when you get there, a very handsome, big Victorian house. We thought it was a convent at first. You know, the kind that take in guests. We stayed in those in France. Plain and clean—and cheap. And this place was a lot like them. Only British instead of French. The sisters wearing headdresses but no habits. The refectory very cheery that first night, but not many at table. We asked if Kit and I would have to separate for the night—in France the man of a couple has to go to a nearby monastery—but the sister who served us laughed