Age by Hortense Calisher Read Free Book Online Page B

‘No—I’m being unfair. Or rather, inaccurate. That was her—nature. You could never put a finger on her. On what she was or where at the moment she might be. Meanwhile, over some months—or years in my case—she might be in your flat, your bed, and of course your purse, though always openly—and possibly even at your place of work.’ Many people found Gertrude jobs, he said usually interesting ones, always performed faithfully if briefly. ‘The one place she could not care to be was in your heart.’ There had apparently never been any question of being in hers.
    Yet though he lived with her for only a few years, it took double that number of years of living with me before he left off inadvertently referring to her as his wife. I understood. I wasn’t as wounded by that as he perhaps thought at the time, or even after so long, in front of Kit and Sherm. After all, I had had to excise Arturo, the long, long habit of him, if not the love.
    When you marry early, romantically and wrongly, you may still keep the image of the affair, and of the girl that was you still centered there, but lose the image of the man to the life you live with him. I have seen this even more clearly in the women who stay married to those men. The old Italian women who were my mother’s friends in Bridgeport, for instance—who could cite every slightest stage of their one and only affair. And then, on the following Sunday, there he was , they said, their old eyes alight, and scarcely connecting that he with the broken-toothed husband playing bocce with my father on the lawn.
    I called Rupert by Arturo’s name now and then, but as he became the girls’ father, only when it had something to do with them. And when the girls brought over snapshots of themselves with Arturo included I never learned to see him as that pudgy gentleman in striped trousers, whose fat, seraph smile was fended off with bank checks. What I saw, and still see, is the Arturo who the morning after I lost our baby said to me, aggrieved and balked of what I owed him: ‘Couldn’t you have held on to our little commendatore for just a little longer?’
    Rupert once rousted out a few pictures of Gertrude. The earliest showed a girl neither pretty nor plain, even anonymously median, but confident. Then came a woman much the same physically, whose sureness has become meditative, perhaps on what she already had had and could look forward to. She wears her hair pliably enough for any era and looks as if she can pass through an occasion without dressing specially for it. ‘Gertrude was a type,’ Rupert said. ‘Pliable, yes—and unchangeable. But the recognition of that was up to you. And the effect of this could be deep. As if she were telling you, “I won’t last.” Not warning you. Only presenting the fact, silently. But with no sadness one could see.’
    Her saga taught me something. Perhaps—to live too closely to love, and by it? Just as Arturo’s story helped Rupert to be a father, even of the lost son? We were what we were in part because of them. And wanted never to see them again.
    So, when that buzzer sounded I said to myself—She means to see us. Now. Why?
    And Rupert, who had just called her his wife, snapped back to being himself again, looking contrite. He doesn’t always know when he opts out like that, but he did this time. So once more she had affected both of us.
    ‘The MacNairs are in California,’ Rupert says to me, low. He has had my same thought.
    The MacNairs have the flat above. And poor Wallace’s, below ours, is vacant, waiting for the settling of the estate. The gallery on the first floor is closed for the weekend. That leaves us, who haven’t ordered anything, far as I know, nor expect anyone really. Not even Kit and Sherm, who sit there as people do when bells ring in other people’s houses—bright-eyed but unconcerned.
    ‘We—are not a hospice,’ Rupert says. How bright-eyed she has made him, too. A man in command, with not a