Extreme Magic by Hortense Calisher

Author:Hortense Calisher [Calisher, Hortense]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781480437395
Publisher: Little Brown
Published: 1960-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

If You Don’t Want to Live I Can’t Help You

MARY PONTHUS STEPPED OUTSIDE, into the straw-colored June morning, from the Fifth Avenue entrance of the bank to which, as administratrix of her nephew’s trust fund, she had just paid her usual call when in New York. In her size forty-two Liberty lawn and wide ballibuntl hat set firmly on unshorn white hair, she might have just stepped off a veranda in Tuxedo or Newport, from one of those corners where the dowagers affixed themselves. It would be a corner, perhaps, smelling pleasantly of Morny bath soap and littered with playing cards, over which the pairs of blue-veined hands with the buffed, pale nails would pass expertly, pausing to dip now and then into the large Beauvais handbags—hallmarks of Parisian honeymoons of forty years ago—that had outlasted the husbands and were likely to outlast the owners as well.

In fact, Mrs. Ponthus had not been on such a veranda since a morning thirty years ago, when news had been brought to her there of the drowning of her husband and son, while out sailing, in a sudden squall. Her summers, ever since, had been spent in a house on the grounds of the New England college from which she had been married and to which, desperate for occupation, she had returned to teach within a year after the news. Occasionally the summers had varied, with trips abroad to university friends made through correspondence over the slowly published critiques which had earned her a more than scholarly repute during those years when, while teaching, she herself had learned—and had finally brought her the honorary doctorate of letters that she was to be awarded here later in the day.

She walked south on the Avenue, reluctant to complete her errand, to keep her appointment with her nephew and her old acquaintance, the doctor who had once more been summoned to treat him. If she thought, momentarily, of her husband now, it was not of the tall young man standing in the boat in that aura of lost grace and virility with which the youthfully dead surrounded themselves. His influence had survived in other ways—in the money he had left her, which had not only exempted her from that professorial scratching for preferment out of which so many theses were born, but had allowed also her dearest extravagance, the subsidizing, now and then, of some young person of promise. It had survived too in the income siphoned through her to the son of his dead brother—the nephew Paul she was on her way to see. And for him, Paul, it had been, blameless in itself, perhaps the touch of ruin.

She turned down Lexington Avenue toward the old brownstone where Paul and Helen, or rather just Paul now, had the second floor front. Here the street had a nineteenth-century breadth which only pointed up the dullness of the facades on each side, houses without resurrectible charm, that still had escaped the ash-can vibrancy of a slum. Really, Paul had a homing instinct for the vitiated, the in-between.

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