False Entry by Hortense Calisher Read Free Book Online

dinner, sweet when appointed. There in Tuscana the street was empty; here in the city it is never so. Yet it seems to me that I have carried that particular hour with me ever since. It is the hour of other people’s assignations. No matter at what o’clock it comes, its light is entr’acte, its pitch pipe the tearing softness of tires speeding forward. Useless for the grown man to tell himself that it is formed only out of the Schwärmerei of dusk, or from the jealous, genital wakening at midnight. I listen and wait, as I did then, and just out of hearing, I hear it—the steady pasturing of the world at its longings. It is nothing, I tell myself, except the late purchasers at the flower barrows—but the purchase is thrust by the buyer into waiting hands nearby. It is only a family leaning against its railing—but leaning ruddy against each other. And in some other street, not mine, the women merge, classic under the lamps. In those far buildings, so aerially close, the teeth of a thousand luckier diners strike against pearls.
    Across the way, the lights went out on the lower floor. I went downstairs and waited outside Miss Pridden’s front door, although I knew by now that she would not come. When I had been there for a time, someone came out on the porch opposite and stood there in the shadows. I took a marble from my pocket and flung it at the feet of whoever was there. It skipped into the darkness, a lost bead.
    After a while, whoever was there came down the steps and along the cobbles. I moved forward, to feel the wind of his passage. He passed me, an old man with his head down, and I felt it. When he had gone, I moved on home.

Chapter VI. Ruth. The Place.
    S O, THEN, THAT EVENING I went looking for Johnny. At home the house had been the way a house is when it is significantly empty. Obedient djinn, it is there when you enter, but waits for you only to turn your back for its corners to dance and confabulate, for its antihuman cabala to begin. It was a mean box of a house, like all the others in the mill section—parlor, kitchen, and two inner compartments, over all of which my mother’s work baskets, the hung mementos of my grandfather, and all the other small muddle of our possessions spread only the thinnest stain of living, from which even my aunt’s collection of medicine bottles was missed when we heaved it away. Yet when I came in that night, it spoke up as powerfully as any mansion—“I am here, master, waiting: see how well and quiet I wait, to make you twice alone.”
    On the kitchen dresser there was a big spread, set out no doubt by Mrs. Boomer, the neighbor who was to do for me—a joint and a loaf under one of my mother’s best napkins, and a sweet I loved, that must have been sent out for—what the woman down the road who sold them called a “chess pie.” I ate heavily, first out of hunger, then, throwing aside the napkin, with a steady vengeance, sitting a while and then returning to the pie until I was sick of it, like a dog left among the dishes of several days’ feeding. Then, like a dog too, I left it and circled the rooms, picking and touching, leaning my forehead against the sour pine doorjambs, my shoulder against the tepid walls. Take a match to it and come away , I thought, knowing how, every season along here, two or three such houses snatched fire from their own dead heat and crumpled—not yet knowing how nothing ever burns in the past but what may still, at some later time, start up whole again, light-years away, all its corners complete.
    On the kitchen table there was an envelope with some money in it, the three dollars previously agreed upon for my week’s keep. My uncle, then, had no thought of wooing me with a new father’s largesse; a measured man, he allowed me no margin for hate. A tea tray nearby had some small change on it, and, precious to us as water from the Jordan, the black canister of Twining’s tea. This was my mother’s touch, setting out those small,