The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher by Hortense Calisher Page A

insolently, as if a fireplace burning in the middle of the sea might serve to keep the elements in their place.
    “Life on the hypotenuse,” said Luke. He retrieved a bunch of gladioli, and set them back on the erring horizontal of a table.
    Mrs. Hawthorn shifted her bracelets. “Dave is the florist in our home town—Hawthornton, Connecticut. I needed a rest, so Dave came down with me. Senator Hawthorn couldn’t get away. He’s the senator from there, you know.”
    Luke and I nodded, eager to let her see that we took her explanation at its face value, unwilling to appear abashed at the malpractices of the rich and worn. I imagined her life—the idle, probably childless woman, burdened with an exuberance no longer matched by her exterior, drawing toward her, with the sequins of wealth and difference, the self-conscious little man who was doggedly trying to fill the gap between them with the only largesse at his command—his abracadabra of flowers. Luke and I exchanged looks across the flowers, secure in our cocoon of beginnings, seeing before us an itinerary that repudiated compromise, and made no concessions to the temporal.
    As we drank, the fraudulent solidity of the room was displaced now and again by a deep, visceral sway that drained the chair arms from beneath our digging fingers, and the wine seemed only to accentuate the irrationality of the four of us so transiently, so unsuitably met. At one point, Mrs. Hawthorn told the blond, mild-featured Luke that he had a “sulphurous” look, which roused us all to unsteady laughter, and again I remember her asking, with the gaucherie so denied by her appearance, if he were a “college man.”
    Then, suddenly, with an incredulous look on his face, Dave, the little man, stood up. Edging backwards, he felt for the doorknob, caught it, and disappeared around it. Ignoring his defection, the three of us sat on; then Luke, with a wild look at me, lurched through the flapping door and was gone.
    Mrs. Hawthorn and I sat on for a moment, united in that smug matriarchy which joins women whose men have acted similarly and disgracefully. The heat from the burning log brought out the reek of the flowers, until it seemed to me that I had drunk perfume instead of champagne. Slowly the log up-ended and pointed toward the ceiling, but this too had slid far to the right, so that the room hung in a momentary armistice with the storm, the implacable hearth still glowing in its center. I stood up, and moved toward the door. It sidled toward me, and I achieved the corridor, but not before I had caught a last glimpse of Mrs. Hawthorn. She was sitting there like one of those children one often sees at dusk in the playground or the corner lot, still concentrated in fierce, solitary energy on the spinning top or the chalked squares of the deserted game, unwilling to admit the default of the others who have wilted, conceded in the afternoon’s end, and acquiescently gone home.
    By the time Luke and I had made our separate ways to the cabin, the ship had ridden out the storm area and was running smoothly. We would dock next morning in New York Harbor. We greeted each other, and slid limply into bed. Luke put his arms around me with a protectiveness tinged, I could not help thinking, with a relief that I had not proved so indomitable after all. For a second, I held him at arm’s length. “Tell me first,” I said. “Are you a college man?” Then we nestled together, in the excluding, sure laughter of the young.
    At the docking the next day, we got through the lines early, without seeing anyone we knew. We had exchanged addresses with Mrs. Hawthorn, never really expecting to see her again, and in the busy weeks after, during which we returned to our jobs and our life together, we forgot her completely.
    About a month later, sometime in November, we got a note from her, written in a large, wasteful hand on highly colored, expensive notepaper, and followed, when we did not immediately answer,