The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Read Online Free PDF Page A

timidly, as if she did not habitually shake hands but today would observe every custom she could.
    “How do you do?”
    “How do you do?” Peter said. The hand he held for a moment was small and childish, the nails unpainted, but the rest of her was very correct for the eye of the beholder, like the young models one sees in magazines, sitting or standing against a column, always in three-quarter view, so that the picture, the ensemble, will not be marred by the human glance. Mario took from her a red dressing case that she held in her free hand, bent to pick up a pair of white gloves that she had dropped, and returned them with an avid interest which overbalanced, like a waiter’s gallantry. She sat down, brushing at the gloves.
    “The train was awfully dusty—and crowded.” She smiled tightly at Robert, looked hastily and obliquely at each of the other two, and bent over the gloves, brushing earnestly, stopping as if someone had said something, and, when no one did, brushing again.
    “Well, well, well,” Robert said. His manners, always good, were never so to the point of clichés, which would be for him what nervous gaffes were for other people. He coughed, rubbed his cheek with the back of his hand, looked at the hand, and stuffed the Kleenex into the pocket of his shorts. “How was camp?”
    Mario’s eyebrows went up. The girl was twenty, surely, Peter thought.
    “All right,” she said. She gave Robert the stiff smile again and looked down into her lap. “I like helping children. They can use it.” Her hands folded on top of the gloves, then inched under and hid beneath them.
    “Susan’s been counselling at a camp which broke up early because of a polio scare,” Robert said as he sat down. “She’s going to use Vince’s room while I’m away, until college opens.”
    “Oh—” She looked up at Peter. “Then you aren’t Vince?”
    “No. I just dropped in. I’m Peter Birge.”
    She gave him a neat nod of acknowledgment. “I’m glad, because I certainly wouldn’t want to inconvenience—”
    “Did you get hold of your mother in Reno?” Robert asked quickly.
    “Not yet. But she couldn’t break up her residence term anyway. And Arthur must have closed up the house here. The phone was disconnected.”
    “Arthur’s Susan’s stepfather,” Robert explained with a little laugh. “Number three, I think. Or is it four, Sue?”
    Without moving, she seemed to retreat, so that again there was nothing left for the observer except the girl against the column, any one of a dozen with the short, anonymous nose, the capped hair, the foot arched in the trim shoe, and half an iris glossed with an expertly aimed photoflood. “Three,” she said. Then one of the hidden hands stole out from under the gloves, and she began to munch evenly on a fingernail.
    “Heavens, you haven’t still got that habit !” Robert said.
    “What a heavy papa you make, Roberto,” Mario said.
    She flushed, and put the hand back in her lap, tucking the fingers under. She looked from Peter to Mario and back again. “Then you’re not Vince,” she said. “I didn’t think you were.”
    The darkness increased around the lamps. Behind Peter, the court had become brisk with lights, windows sliding up, and the sound of taps running.
    “Guess Vince fell asleep. I’d better get him up and send him on his way.” Robert shrugged, and rose.
    “Oh, don’t! I wouldn’t want to be an inconvenience,” the girl said, with a polite terror which suggested she might often have been one.
    “On the contrary.” Robert spread his palms, with a smile, and walked down the hall. They heard him knocking on a door, then his indistinct voice.
    In the triangular silence, Mario stepped past Peter and slid the window up softly. He leaned out to listen, peering sidewise at the window to the right. As he was pulling himself back in, he looked down. His hands stiffened on the ledge. Very slowly he pulled himself all the way in and stood up. Behind