The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher by Hortense Calisher Page B

by a phone call, during which her voice came over the wire as gaily insistent as before. Would we come up for dinner and stay the night? We accepted without particular consideration, partly out of a reawakened interest in her and what she would be like at home with the Senator, and partly because it was a place to go with the Chevy—and no sense of the stringency of time had led us as yet to a carping evaluation of the people with whom we spent it.
    On the way up that Saturday, a run of about seventy miles, we drove steadily through a long, umber autumn afternoon. At our left the sun dropped slowly, a red disc without penumbra. Along the country roads, the escarpments of pines and firs were black-green, with the somber deadness of a tyro’s painting of Italy. Lights popped up in the soiled gray backs of towns, and a presage of winter tingled in our minds, its remembered icicle sliding down our spines. I was twenty-two, free, still catching up with a childhood where hot dogs had been forbidden. I made Luke stop for them twice. After that we drove silently, my head on Luke’s shoulder. Inside the chugging little car, the heater warmed us; we were each with the one necessary person; we had made love the night before.
    At seven, when we were expected, we were still twenty miles away. Luke stopped to phone. He came back to the car. “She says dinner will wait for us, not to rush. We’re to go on to a night club afterwards.”
    In a second my mind had raked over everything in my suitcase, had placed me at the dinner table—perhaps not quite at the Senator’s right—had moved me on to the little round table on the dance floor.
    “I just remembered,” I said. “I didn’t put in my evening shoes.”
    “ I just remembered,” said Luke. “I didn’t bring a proper tie.”
    We burst into laughter, “We’ll swing round by way of New London,” said Luke. “We can get things there.”
    When we got to the main street of the town, it was crowded, but the clothing stores were closing. Luke rushed into a haberdashery shop and came out with a tie. At the dark end of the shopping district we found a shoe store whose proprietor, counting stock in his dim interior, opened his locked door. I bought a pair of silver, girl-graduate sandals, the first pair he showed me. “Gee, lady,” he said, as we whisked out of his shop, “I wish every lady was as quick as you.”
    Smiling to ourselves, we reentered the car. There was a charm that hung about us then, and we were not insensible of it, even aware that it had more to do with our situation than ourselves. We were still guests in the adult world of “lady” and “gentleman”; lightly we rode anchor in their harbor, partook of its perquisites, and escaped again to our enviable truancy. The rest of the world—we saw it in their faces—would be like us if it could. On the way through Hawthornton, I looked for a florist shop, but we passed too quickly by.
    Five miles through the woodland of the Hawthorns’ private road brought us to the house. There had been no others along the way. But the house that loomed before us, in a cleared area rather bleak and shrubless after the woods behind us, had no baronial mystery about it. By the lights under its porte-cochere, it looked to be about forty years old—one of those rambling, tasteless houses, half timbered, with thick stone porches, which “comfortably off” people built around the turn of the century, more for summer use, but providently made habitable for all year round. As we came to a stop under the porte-cochere, and the coupe’s engine died, I heard the rushing sound of water, and saw that we seemed to be on the tip of a promontory that ended several hundred feet beyond.
    “We on a lake?”
    “Only the Atlantic,” said Luke. “Don’t you ever know where you are? We’ve been driving toward it all afternoon.”
    “Hardly ever,” I said. “But we seem to be fated to meet Mrs. H. on one ocean or another.”
    A capped