False Entry by Hortense Calisher

Author:Hortense Calisher [Calisher, Hortense]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781480437371
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter III. Pierre Returns to Tuscana. The Grand Jury Prepares. Lucine. The Jebbs.

AT THE LAST DITCH few of us have time for salutations. “You got my letter?” said his uncle, meeting him at the train, and he nodded, not knowing what else to do, because of what his mother had said in hers. Later on I shall have to be in hospital, and would rather see you before. Rollins was wrong. The clinic in Denoyeville gives me about three months at the outside. George knows, but is not sure that I do, so we do not speak of it. Mind you do not. Better so for now. God bless, she had said at the end, but no salutation. And as his uncle clasped his hand and looked into his face, he had his first sense of how people, huddled cipher to cipher on the embankment under the great, overarching span of death, might have no immediate use for names.

“You’ll find her changed,” said his uncle, and Pierre nodded again, unable to speak, finding his uncle so changed. His uncle’s face, even-featured to the point of anonymity, never in his remembrance sweated or flushed with drama, still persisted, but now it looked as if some gross amateur stagecraft had been at it, puttying at the cheeks, scoring lampblack under the eyes, making of it an anomaly beneath whose exaggerations the median man of fifty had disappeared, leaving the beholder in the wings to choose for himself whether this was an old man or a young. When last seen at this same train, his uncle, in a soiled shirt and tieless, nevertheless had had the air of a man caught short by a disaster with which he still felt able to deal. Now, in a dark suit and collar pin, his dress had the same excessive, finicky neatness of those houses, swept clean of every mortal odor, that wait for bereavement.

The car too, the same one, shone in the dark as they crossed the siding to it; she was still able to take a drive in it afternoons. There were no other cars waiting. Tuscana was no longer the main line. Eastward over the ridge there was a faint palpitation in the heavens that real newcomers might mistake for heat lightning, never suspecting, if arrived from the west instead of the north, the tremendous kingdom of light that lay beyond the hump of this one remaining hill. Once out on the main street, it would surround them, crowd them to the center of its fixed swarm, but here, on the old siding, Tuscana had remained to itself as it had in him, a pocket of darkness that had resisted everything but eternity. The car started painfully, needing to be coaxed. While they sat in it as it warmed up, his uncle fallen momentarily silent, crouched in the tender alertness toward mechanism that was his bond with the new world, every sluggish throb of gas-tinctured air breathed him, Pierre, back into his boyhood—if

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