Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel by Hortense Calisher Read Free Book Online Page A

telephones?”
    “Simple arithmetic, more likely. Plus and minus. Then a primer will be sent. We’ll learn how to decipher. We already can receive.” His voice faded as he looked minimally at Linhouse, and the window.
    “And will Anders find his mate out there?” Linhouse’s voice, if the old man had been attending, had been nasty, sick once again with its obsession. Back there, the light in the rear room of the house had been on, cast on the pines. Anders had still been on the platform, of course. But the light could have been waiting for him. She had done that for Linhouse sometimes.
    And now he himself was a pinpoint in space, receding, in a space neither nostalgic nor political—nor even cerebral. Up to now he would have said that space, if it existed anywhere supremely did so where the hope of the world also rested—in the human head. Men on doorsteps knew better. Space was only what was between people. Even better, space was its own inhabitants, was its people. It came to him now, almost happily, that he was one of those who would never be able to see his universe except through his own quotient. Even if—under something newer and more tenable yet to come—he were to be the last man to do so. He saw himself as the last classicist, raising that banner. I accept that universe, he said to himself, to her. Mine. Me perturbe.
    Alongside him, the old man had smiled at the black stuff in the window, saying something under his breath which sounded like “eld” or “of eld.” The smile was the one with which old men stared at their future from easy chairs. “We’re babes there,” he added. “And you may take that as tenable also.”
    The plane, not a jet, was now bumping a headwind, its engines noisier each time it lifted from a pocket. What he said next was drowned, but from the shape of his lips, that same first syllable. Despite the droning, he continued to shape it, like an S.O.S. to a Land-ho too far off to be of use, but still sighted. When it came clearly, in the moment when the engines cut out, it sounded to Linhouse as if he were calling. “ —elled. Almost all of us think it likely. We’ll have been excelled.”
    In the sudden deadness, passengers up ahead were looking at each other uneasily; this circling, suspended silence was connected in their minds with landings at airports, and the plane must be still mid-Atlantic. To Linhouse, no pilot, but once a parachutist, this free-floating sensation always brought back the spinal release of that mystic moment in the jump when one attained terminal velocity—when gravitation itself could do no more. It had been his one relationship to that world of the upper air which the man next to him was used to probing on such outer terms as made his own a nothing—and it too had been in the realm of the personal.
    He glanced at Sir Harry, at that old face now whitening in the bridgeless gap between its first nurse and what it knew. Against politeness, Linhouse put his hand on the other’s clenched one, and held it there. Space was personal. Then the engines took hold after the drop, and once again they were riding.
    “I’ll have that pill after all.” An eighty-year-old pink returned to his cheeks, with the water Linhouse brought him.
    “Anders,” he said then. His voice was colorless. “Shan’t ask what you have against him. Shouldn’t underestimate him at his job though, I shouldn’t.” He leaned back then, closing his eyes, clicking together teeth still his own, as if to nip between them this moment of nonreticence. His eyes reopened.
    “I mind me—” he said, and now he was only a charming old man with a wandering voice and a leftover manner, “of what a very nice American general once said to me. ‘Mrs. Partridge,’ said he—that was his wife—‘Mrs. Partridge is like you, sir. Never really lets her weight down in a plane.’” He slept.
    And Linhouse was left free to return to his doorstep—hers. This moment before obsession always