Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel by Hortense Calisher Page B

finished. “While she was down there. In Bucks. And ’Arry, grâce á Dieu, was at a congress in Cairo. Before Suez. An’ before ’e meet me.” Her proud head equated the two.
    “Oh.” No need to be that spirituelle, was his tone.
    “Non” she said “—not divorce.” She crossed her fingers over her mouth, and its belated smile. “Disparue,” she said. “She disappear.”
    Had he held an icicle in his hand again, there for a moment? Even now, looking back, he couldn’t say that he consciously had. These days, even the most ordinary man walked under the weight of so many crowns he changed with every step and never even saw, the crowns psychologica, para-psychologica and perhaps even astrologica—clouds of wire-and-fireflies gathering in on him once again from all the phantasms at which men, since Erasmus, had been daring to laugh.
    But he did ask his question. He must have thought he was changing the subject. “Do you never want to travel?” he’d said. “Elsewhere?”
    She’d looked past him, out of the window, over her glass of valedictory champagne. From her expression, she might have been seeing luminous Barbizons above the gray-prickle London street. But what she said was, rather anxiously, “In America, they will take good care of Harry?” She even pronounced the “h.”
    Just then, Harry himself reentered, carrying his farewell gift, a scholar’s compliment, that same pamphlet of which Linhouse would probably understand only the title. He presented it, then put an arm about his wife’s shoulder. “She wants me to go ahead of her to America, imagine! She thinks I’m strong enough!” His cheeks were slightly oranged by drink. He looked down at Linhouse, who was much the shorter man, with mettle. “And I may do. There’s an international congress at Berkeley in the autumn; they’re willing to pay my way.” He squeezed her shoulder, bare through its nun’s veiling. “But I’ll come back to bring you over, eh. Didn’t know I was training her up to be my assistant down at Bucks, did you, Linhouse? She had some math at Gottingen, before the war. I’ve some hobbies of my own down there; we may show that chap Anders a thing or two yet. Women are remarkable, you know, at some of these very painstaking operations. Getting so, once she gets down there, I can scarcely tear her away.”
    They stood there, arms unexpectedly laced about each other’s waist in more than friendship, like the mère and pire of a family inexplicably not present in photographs, valiant couple in their separate primes, who were now about to ascend to a bed where they might still find comfort in some massive reticulation of limb. It came to Linhouse—such hot flashes of insight came to the deserted—what the resemblance was. The smile under that nose of hers could still pearl so freshly, and with the same perverse calm—of creatures who might have been promised the end of the world on Tuesday. They none of them knew what they did or didn’t care for. They merely had the pockets made, and kept them at-the-ready. They were all of them natural converts.
    Lids lowered, she was accepting both the praise and the squeeze. “I so look forward to the time down there,” she said.
    Linhouse thanked them once more for dinner and pamphlet, promising to send on a small publication of his own. “Wish yours were all in Greek, Might have more chance of understanding it.” The dedication caught his eye. To my Wife, followed by: ay M + n = bx M (a—x N )
    “You understand that, I suppose,” he said to Rachel. She nodded on her long neck, her eyes very wide. He waited. She didn’t tell him. He said good-bye rather brusquely. When he turned again at the door, she hadn’t moved and seemed still to be staring at him, as in some primitive or else very sophisticated drawing, from one long Etruscan eye.
    The following week he saw his mother safely through her successful operation and contentedly ensconced in a nursing home where she