The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride by Hortense Calisher

only women are perfect for it. It seems to me in no way odd that Paris, the goal of so many professions from eaters to lovers, should also be mine. Not that the underside of New York is to be despised; a vagrant who has got even as far as one of its boroughs has come very far. But from books I’ve read, Bohèmes I’ve listened to, there appeared to be no place for one of our sort quite like the banks of the Seine, or perhaps the barges. (After that, with the onset of age and maybe wisdom, perhaps Athens.) And though from now on I mightn’t look it, I knew myself to be very conventional really, if not at heart, as they say, then perhaps from the bottom, where the conventions are more normally located. So, for Paris in the spring, I carried gauze.
    Then I shouldered my strap-bag. An Abercrombie pouch of fine leather and canvas, veteran of picnic weekends of yore, it made me look all too much like the poule de luxe of vagabonds, but time would soon darken us both, tanning us not with holiday but with the truths of exposure, like bright pennies in water. Then I turned to go.
    And then, it was my heart—which I have, oh I have—that rose in me, bubbled like a drain in which too much had been cast, but stood by for service as hearts do, imperfectly beating. The door to the wig closet was open—what use now, locks?—but I had intended to go straight past it. Had I? Had I forgotten what was hanging there? Have you?
    It hung in its own niche, well above the wigs, or did until yesterday—Knoller’s picture, Knoller’s Picasso. I have sometimes suspected it to be of rather too small a size for the general run of those of his works classified as of that period of his known as the “bone period,” but even if it shouldn’t really be a Picasso, neither the donor nor I had been bilked. Surely the blue behind the figures is his blue, the shore they sit on his pebble-crazed, wind-eaten shore, the canvas itself only a pause between two claps of wind. They are his figures, the two terrible bones with knobs for heads and an eye between them. Sad clasped, they sit against the blue, and how human is bone! Who, in their bleak sight, would call for hair, or even flesh, to cover it? But in their lower parts they are joined, as if to remember where flesh was quickest and bone may still be, in the parts where love is made. Sad clasped they sit, against the blue. I took off my last wig, and laid it before them.
    Though I might stand there until Christendom come again and all the bones did rise, I should never be as free, white and equal as they were. They were art and I was life, with a hey nonny nonny—I won’t say for which of us. Meanwhile, though I had already disposed of them by bequest—to Ernest—I found that I didn’t want him to have them after all, or not without me. Someday, they and I might present ourselves before him, for such a family reunion as is given to few stars of the cinema. In Californie, on my way to Paris, perhaps, on the odd beeline which is the zigzag one must expect of roads that were to be as open as mine. Meanwhile, I would take them along with me for my personal, the very psalm of my life, as sung by somebody else.
    I found they wouldn’t fit in the pouch as yet, someday perhaps, as needs wore out or were discarded. I wrapped them in a chamois—useful for windows, should I go out washing them—and put the picture in a Harvard book-bag, which it fitted exactly. Then I had a glass of water. Then I ate a chocolate. Then I went to the bathroom, came out again, shouldered both bags, and stood in front of the door. Scarved for the journey, but otherwise rather cold about the ears, my head hung down, a donkey awaiting its Giddy-ap and Gee. I stamped my foot at myself, but the door did not open. And finally, I was able to open it and then shut it behind me, first tossing the keys inside. So I abandoned the roost for the road, the long, sweet domestic life of “What-I-feel” for the sterner shake-a-leg of