The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher by Hortense Calisher

and bent toward the child, the sequins not quite concealing the middle-aged line from breast to hip, we heard her say, in a mellow voice, as if she were indulgently amused at both the child and herself—“Yes, darling! Christmas tree!”—and we felt ashamed, and liked her.
    We met the two of them again, as we were all herded docilely into one of the glass-bottomed sightseeing boats, and she told us her name. The little man, tentative and deferential in the background, was one of those hovering people whose names one never catches, and we never did, although she told us it too. Again we saw her, alone on the beach in front of the hotel, in a maillot that was still somewhat scandalous for that time. We were a little embarrassed for her, not at the suit, but at its cruel, sagging revelation, and I remember that both of us, looking away with the instinctive distaste of the young for the fading, glanced down with satisfaction at our own bodies. One of her arms was covered almost from wrist to elbow with diamond and sapphire bracelets, and she must have seen me staring at them, or trying not to. She laughed, on the same mellow note.
    “I’d feel naked without them.” She turned, and slid into the water. She swam well, better than either of us, her long, water-sallowed face, which once must have been very handsome, sinking deep into the fervid blue of the water, the one mailed arm flashing in the sun.
    In those days, the thing to do was to go down on the Monarch and come back on the Queen. The little stenographers squandering their vacation on off-season rates, an “interchangeable” wardrobe, and one shattering evening dress, the honeymooners, intent on seeming otherwise, all said it airily: “We came down on the Monarch and will go back on the Queen. ” On the return voyage, we met Mrs. Hawthorn and her vague companion again. The ship had run into bad weather, the usual October storms of the Caribbean, and at dinnertime, the little stenographers had been unable to appear in their evening dresses after all.
    Luke had been affected too, although I was not. After dinner alone, I wandered into one of the ornate lounges that hollowed the ship. Seated in one of the gold chairs, her lamé gown blending so well that at first I did not see her, was Mrs. Hawthorn. She beckoned to me.
    “I see you’re a good sailor, too,” she said. “I never get sick. Dave—the friend who is traveling with me—is down in his cabin.” There was the slightest emphasis on “his.” “Women are the stronger sex, I always say. You two are newlyweds. Aren’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Look,” she said. “Why don’t you and your husband come up to my stateroom and have champagne. It’s the best thing in the world for seasickness—and after all we really should celebrate for you two. Yes, do! We really must!”
    I went down to our cabin, and roused Luke. “You think you’re inveigling me,” he said. “But it’s really Mrs. Hawthorn who intrigues me.”
    We climbed the ladders from D deck to A. Up there, with no feel of more ship above us, the ocean, silhouetted against the looming slant of the stacks, seemed to shift its dark obliques more pervasively near us.
    “The water seems more intimate up here with the rich, doesn’t it?” I said.
    “Hmmm,” said Luke, “but it’s not an intimacy I care to develop at the moment.” I giggled, and lurching together, hip to hip, half with love, half with the movement of the deck, we entered Mrs. Hawthorn’s stateroom.
    The room was banked with flowers. Mrs. Hawthorn and her companion were waiting for us, sitting stiffly in the center of the blooms like unintroduced visitors in the anteroom of a funeral chapel. Wedged behind a coffee table blocked with bottles, Mrs. Hawthorn did not rise, but we greeted each other with that air of confederate gaiety adopted by hostess and guest at parties of whose success neither is sure. Across from her, behind an imitation hearth, a gas log burned