In the Absence of Angels by Hortense Calisher

Author:Hortense Calisher [Calisher, Hortense]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480438910
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1951-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

In the Absence of Angels

BEFORE COCKCROW tomorrow morning, I must remember everything I can about Hilda Kantrowitz. It is not at all strange that I should use the word “cockcrow,” for, like most of the others here, I have only a literary knowledge of prisons. If someone among us were to take a poll — that lax, almost laughable device of a world now past — we would all come up with about the same stereotypes: Dickens’ Newgate, no doubt, full of those dropsical grotesques of his, under which the sharp shape of liberty was almost lost; or, from the limp-leather books of our teens, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” that period piece of a time when imprisonment could still be such a personal affair. I myself recall, from a grade-school reader of thirty years ago, a piece named “Piccola,” called so after a flower that pushed its way up through a crevice in a stone courtyard and solaced the man immured there — a general, of God knows what political coloration. Outside the window here, the only hedge is a long line of hydrangeas, their swollen cones still the burnt, turned pink of autumn, still at the stage when the housewives used to pick them and stand them to dry on mantels, on pianos, to crisp and gather dust until they were pushed, crackling, into the garbage, in the first, diluted sun of spring.

We here, women all of us, are in what until recently was a fashionable private school, located, I am fairly certain, somewhere in Westchester County. There was no business about blindfolds from the guards on the trucks that brought-us; rather, they let us sit and watch the flowing countryside, even comment upon it, looking at us with an indifference more chilling than if they had been on the alert, indicating as it did that a break from a particular truck into particular environs was of no import in a countryside that had become a cage. I recognized the Saw Mill River Parkway, its white marker lines a little the worse for lack of upkeep, but its banks still neat, since they came in November, after the grass had stopped growing. Occasionally — at a reservoir, for instance — signposts in their language had been added, and there were concentrations of other trucks like ours. They keep the trains for troops.

This room was the kindergarten; it has been cleared, and the painted walls show clean squares where pictures used to be, for they have not yet covered them with their special brand of posters, full of fists and flags. Opposite me is their terse, typed bulletin, at which I have been looking for a long time. Built into the floor just beneath it, there is a small aquarium of colored tile, with a spigot for the water in which goldfish must have been kept, and beyond is the door that leads to our “latrine” — a little corridor of miniature basins and pygmy toilets and hooks about three and a half feet from the floor.

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