Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel by Hortense Calisher

these clockwork episodes where no one ever forgot his lines whether answered or not, the door reopened and his one line came round again.
    “It’s I,” he said, or babbled, once more. “I saw the light.”

3. Wives, Fathers, and Converts
    A T LONDON AIRPORT, THE old man was taken in charge by his Rachel, no disciple, but a wife of certain sharp, foreign strengths that were at once evident in the muted, soft-coal air. A woman with a nose, she stood tall and long-necked within full dark draperies, awaiting them at the gateway like a black flamingo, and when the two of them left, the effect was of Sir Harry being carried off—and vastly pleased at it—under one superb black wing. Linhouse, invited to dine with them the following week at their flat in Holland Park, found him much improved, looking jauntily younger, and thinking of returning to the States after all, spurred on by his wife, who had never been there.
    Rachel—pronounced the French way, and otherwise called Madame (she refused to be a ladyship)—had actually been born Sinsheimer, a German refugee-from-Hitler, who by her service in the Resistance had long since been translated into French. A woman of somewhere between fifty and sixty, she had the self-contained beauty of one able to live up to such a magnificently hooked nose; all of her—sleek-knobbed hair, daubed brows and a strong skin now and then pink-wattled with energy—gave an impression of having been pomaded backwards from it. As Sir Harry’s third wife she was still his “young” one, no indication being given of where his place was in her succession of husbands—he was clearly so delighted to be the incumbent. If she wasn’t a disciple, then what was she?
    To Linhouse she appeared first off as one of those foreign women who were translated very quickly but never lost the hard core of themselves; whether what they kept was a kind of femininity, he couldn’t say. It appeared to him that she too might be a traveler, and for this reason he studied her carefully. In her crow-satins and midnight crepes, always some Gallic manipulation of the many colors of black, she had as many pockets as a concierge (she must have had them made that way), these currently inhabited by one or more of the Cahiers of Péguy. She might be a Catholic convert then, at least some of the time—why Linhouse thought of it that way he couldn’t say either, at least not at their first dinner. When it came about that, because of a worrying illness of his mother’s, he wasn’t going to leave the country immediately, the three of them had several dinners.
    On the second, it appeared that she was a Socialist, though not of the British variety, her husband’s, which she despised.
    “They have no clarté, ” she said, setting the word down on the cloth like a solid, where it sat like a small candle burning. “Look at him, he takes a title.”
    “Before I knew you. And only for service in the War Department,” said Sir Harry. At other times he was driven to protest his lack of aristocracy by citing his background—father a brewer, and not a rich one—and his university—Leeds.
    “I accept the aristocracy,” she said with a grin—and Linhouse for the first time was faintly reminded. “And the money, if we go to America, but it’s the lack of style. Politics, yes—la politique d’abord. But ’ere it ’ave no mystique.”
    She drew out one of the notebooks, entitled De la Grippe, then another, Encore de la Grippe, and yet another, Toujours de la Grippe, while Linhouse, pocket-dazzled, wondered where she would light—nearer hypochondria or Christian Science?—until he was made to understand that Péguy had written these particular issues during a bout of influenza. They were dated 1900. When it came out that she was now, almost three quarters of a century later, a passionate Dreyfusard, he thought he understood her better. He’d met women, men too, who yearned impossibly backwards toward eras temperamentally