Mysteries of Motion by Hortense Calisher

Author:Hortense Calisher [Calisher, Hortense]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385184069
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 1983-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

II.

ON A FREEZING SUNDAY in New York some weeks later, he left the hotel in the East Thirties which for years had maintained an abiding home for him in the form of a hamper of two suits of different weights, two pairs of shoes, a raincoat, a dinner jacket and a small monthly storage bill inscribed, “Your pied-à-terre in New York”—and set out for Queens in his rented car. The car had the heady vinyl smell which nowadays came with so much that was brand-new; its seat belt yawped at him like a jailor until he locked himself in. He was home. On the seat beside him, wrapped by Fortnum’s with the nanny care that sent biscuits unbroken round the world, was an unwieldy package containing an assortment of their finest, centered around one modest gift to be made at the true and highest Meshed level of eternal friendship—his own great-grand-uncle the brigadier general’s silver collapsible traveling cup. All of this packed together in one very large pot of interesting design. “Can’t afford to insure that, I’m afraid, sir,” the tail-coated clerk said, admiring it. “That’s all right,” Wert said. “Neither can I.”

He’d ended up buying a seat for the package in the plane to Washington, where it rode belted in like a passenger and spoken to coyly by the stewardess, after she’d finally agreed to allow it there. “Your wife’s not on the plane, sir?” He’d shaken his head, staring moodily at his package. “For the wedding of our very best friend. Friends.” He patted it. “Sorry your wife’s ill, sir.” The stewardess was sympathetically older than average; the airlines were permitting that. “The baby,” Wert said. When she passed by again, she reached down and straightened his companion’s seat belt. “Austrian wine cooler,” he said. “Break like crazy. Can’t think why they wanted it; they’ve been living together for years.”

Though he’d never had need of the fantasy life, he’d rather enjoyed being cast into the expected social frame. He had a lot of random experience and information going to waste. No trouble for instance, to find a home for that plant; he’d taken it at once to a dead colleague’s widowed mother, who still lived near Blenheim Park, in the glass-roofed atrium her husband had built for them out of complete disregard for the climate and an equal regard for an ancestor who had been the King’s astronomer. She had converted the house to a conservatory, planted its ground to tree nurseries and now lived in a hut at the bottom of her topiary garden. Where, when she and he stood there by moonlight—in the midst of a grass-and-pebble chessboard on which the thirty-two tree-chessmen whose queen skirts and turreted hats she herself had clipped loomed like adversaries about to move—she’d sighed, “To think that I once collected Belleek!”

From her dead son, who’d sighed over that, too, Wert knew what that was. What did most people do with the odd knowledge and peculiar people they collected throughout life?

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