Extreme Magic by Hortense Calisher Page A

Her hands and feet, he remembered, were always cold. Somehow or other, looking at the picture, he didn’t think that central heating would improve them. “The living room is the curse,” she’d said. That’s it, he thought; that’s it. And this, Vida, is the season of the living room.
    He looked down into the street. The Village was all right for the summer, he thought. But now the periphery of the season had changed. In summer, the year spins on a youth-charged axis, and a man’s muscles have a spurious oil. But this is the end toward which it spins. Only three hundred days to Christmas. Only a month—a week. And then, every year, the damned day itself, catching him with its holly claws, sounding its platitudes like carillons.
    Down at the corner, carols bugled steamily from a mission soup-kitchen. There’s no escape from it, he thought. Turn on the radio, and its alleluia licks you with tremolo tongue. In every store window flameth housegown, nuzzleth slipper. In all the streets the heavenly shops proclaim. The season has shifted inward, Grorley, and you’re on the outside, looking in.
    He moved toward the phone, grabbed it, and dialed the number before he remembered that you had to dial the code for Tarrytown. He replaced the receiver. Whatever he had to say, and he wasn’t quite sure what, or how, it wasn’t for the ears of the kids or the Lederer woman. He jammed on his hat. Better get there first, get inside the door.
    Going up to Grand Central in the cab, he pressed his face against the glass. Everything had been taken care of weeks ago—the kids had been sent their two-wheelers, and he had mailed Eunice an extra-large check—one he hadn’t sent through the lawyer. But at five o’clock, Fifth Avenue still shone like an enormous blue sugar-plum revolving in a tutti-frutti rain of light. Here was the season in all its questionable glory—the hallmarked joy of giving, the good will diamanté. But in the cosmetic air, people raised tinted faces, walked with levitated step.
    In the train, he avoided the smoker, and chose an uncrowded car up front. At his station, he waited until all the gleaming car muzzles pointed at the train had picked up their loads and gone, then walked through the main street which led to his part of town. All was lit up here too, with a more intimate, household shine. He passed the pink damp of a butcher’s, the bright fuzz of Woolworth’s. “Sold out!” said a woman, emerging. “’S try the A & P.” He walked on, invisible, his face pressed to the shop window of the world.
    At Schlumbohn’s Credit Jewelry Corner he paused, feeling for the wallet filled with cash yesterday for the still not impossible yes over the phone. This was the sort of store that he and Eunice, people like them, never thought of entering. It sold watches pinned to cards, zircons, musical powder-boxes, bracelets clasped with fat ten-carat hearts, Rajah pearl necklaces and Truelove blue-white diamonds. Something for Everybody, it said. He opened the door.
    Inside, a magnetic salesgirl nipped him toward her like a pin. He had barely stuttered his wants before he acquired an Add-a-Pearl necklace for Sally, two Genuine Pinseal handbags for his mother-in-law and Mrs. Lederer, and a Stag-horn knife with three blades, a nailfile, and a corkscrew, for young George. He had left Eunice until last, but with each purchase, a shabby, telephoning day had dropped from him. Dizzy with participation, he surveyed the mottoed store.
    “Something…something for the wife,” he said.
    “Our lovely Lifetime Watch, perhaps? Or Something in Silver, for the House?” The clerk tapped her teeth, gauging him.
    He leaned closer, understanding suddenly why housewives, encysted in lonely houses, burbled confidences to the grocer, made an audience of the milkman. “We’ve had a—Little Tiff.”
    “Aw-w,” said the clerk, adjusting her face. “Now…let me see…” She kindled suddenly, raised a sibylline finger, beckoned him