Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel by Hortense Calisher Page A

theirs, couples knocking about Greenwich Village in raccoon coats, talking of what “Scott” said (and they didn’t mean Sir Walter), women who after the third bourbon of being some man’s “good sort,” spoke tearfully of bustles and la belle époque, and ordered a chartreuse. It was just luck even now for instance, if half the bright schoolboys in Britain got safely past the Yellow Book and out the other side. He himself, for all he knew, had come to his profession by some such pass, an early Greek or Roman one. There was only one trouble about Rachel—he couldn’t quite pin down her era. And the next time, what dropped from her, from reticule or marsupial pouch (how could he tell which?), was a mixed bag indeed: a pamphlet, Tea Ceremony in Role of Japanese Women; a reprint, this much-thumbed, of a lecture by her own husband, if Linhouse’s eye was accurate—;also W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, and a volume by Chateaubriand. She tucked them all back.
    Was she a feminist? Did she travel, or yearn to? He asked her.
    To the first query, Sir Harry answered for her, making his wife the little bow of a husband so much at one that he could speak. “In a bisexual world such as ours, women physically own the civilization already. Both sexes spend their lives concealing that from each other.”
    “Ah, we don’ want it, this world,” said Rachel. “We amuse ourselves— s’amuser ?—watching you work for it. For what you could have by default.” She spread her hands. “Non! Ce n’est pas ce que je veux — féminisme. It is an invention of man, that.”
    “What is it you want, nowadays?” Linhouse spread his own hands. It was catching. “Women, I mean.”
    She inspected her nails, but tossed him a keen, kind look, as if aware that someone in particular had entered here. “For it not to be nowadays, mebbee? ’Arry is right. We are very civilize’.”
    He looked up, to find ’Arry regarding him not nearly so kindly.
    They were momentarily alone, she and Linhouse, when he asked her the second question, on the eve of the couple’s departure for Bucks, where Harry had a house, half observatory and almost all glass, built for him by Mary, the second wife and the rich one.
    “Marie, I love ’er,” said Rachel. “A big damp pavilion, we cawn’ go there except summer. A mad, impossible ’ouse, not at all convenable. But we can watch the stars there. And if ’e get lumbago, it is Marie who get the blame.”
    Though so critical of the country, she never expressed any wish to leave it. Indeed, after the manner of the country itself, which had a way of tricking foreigners into its own prides, she could be distressfully local, ranging over the whole flower field of English accent, for instance, like a lady-in-waiting hunting patterns for a lambrequin to be embroidered for the Queen. She was likely to inform them mysteriously that Wykehamists spoke through cotton wool, Harrow and Marlborough men through linen, or to hush the man on the telly with a cry of “Kent!” or “Bethnal Green!” Though her mischief was better than her ear, once more Linhouse was reminded; wasn’t anthropology after all only localism to the n th? One couldn’t of course imagine Rachel on any man’s knee. In bed, an odalisque a la Jacques David, was where his mind (if it was his mind) placed her. But a teasing kinship trembled in the room. Perhaps it was the mockery of those who belonged to a tribe.
    A lurid thought struck him. “Marie?” he said, low. “Is she—does she live down there?”
    “Oui.”
    “Oh.”
    She let him simmer in his own cleverness.
    “In the spirit,” she said then.
    “Oh, dead! ” In his relief, he spoke rather loud. The aberrations of one’s friends could make one queasy, if they came too near.
    “Non.” Suddenly she burst into an uncontrolled laughter he’d never heard from her. All considered, it seemed to him a little late for it.
    “Oh, it was very comme il faut, ” she said, when she had