The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Read Online Free PDF

him a tin ventilator clattered inward and fell to the floor. In the shadowy lamplight his too classic face was like marble which moved numbly. He swayed a little, as if with vertigo.
    “I’d better get out of here!”
    They heard his heavy breath as he dashed from the room. The slam of the outer door blended with Robert’s battering, louder now, on the door down the hall.
    “What’s down there?” She was beside Peter, otherwise he could not have heard her. They took hands, like strangers met on a narrow footbridge or on one of those steep places where people cling together more for anchorage against their own impulse than for balance. Carefully they leaned out over the sill. Yes—it was down there, the shirt, zebra-striped, just decipherable on the merged shadow of the courtyard below.
    Carefully, as if they were made of eggshell, as if by some guarded movement they could still rescue themselves from disaster, they drew back and straightened up. Robert, his face askew with the impossible question, was behind them.
    After this, there was the hubbub—the ambulance from St. Luke’s, the prowl car, the two detectives from the precinct station house, and finally the “super,” a vague man with the grub pallor and shamble of those who live in basements. He pawed over the keys on the thong around his wrist and, after several tries, opened the bedroom door. It was a quiet, unviolent room with a tossed bed and an open window, with a stagy significance acquired only momentarily in the minds of those who gathered in a group at its door.
    Much later, after midnight, Peter and Susan sat in the bald glare of an all-night restaurant. With hysterical eagerness, Robert had gone on to the station house with the two detectives to register the salient facts, to help ferret out the relatives in Ohio, to arrange, in fact, anything that might still be arrangeable about Vince. Almost without noticing, he had acquiesced in Peter’s proposal to look after Susan. Susan herself, after silently watching the gratuitous burbling of her father, as if it were a phenomenon she could neither believe nor leave, had followed Peter without comment. At his suggestion, they had stopped off at the restaurant on their way to her stepfather’s house, for which she had a key.
    “Thanks. I was starved.” She leaned back and pushed at the short bang of hair on her forehead.
    “Hadn’t you eaten at all?”
    “Just those pasty sandwiches they sell on the train. There wasn’t any dinner.”
    “Smoke?”
    “I do, but I’m just too tired. I can get into a hotel all right, don’t you think? If I can’t get in at Arthur’s?”
    “I know the manager of a small one near us,” Peter said. “But if you don’t mind coming to my place, you can use my mother’s room for tonight. Or for as long as you need, probably.”
    “What about your mother?”
    “She’s away. She’ll be away for quite a while.”
    “Not in Reno, by any chance?” There was a roughness, almost a coarseness, in her tone, like that in the overdone camaraderie of the shy.
    “No. My father died when I was eight. Why?”
    “Oh, something in the way you spoke. And then you’re so competent. Does she work?”
    “No. My father left something. Does yours?”
    She stood up and picked up her bedraggled gloves. “No,” she said, and her voice was suddenly distant and delicate again. “She marries.” She turned and walked out ahead of him.
    He paid, rushed out of the restaurant, and caught up with her.
    “Thought maybe you’d run out on me,” he said.
    She got in the car without answering.
    They drove through the Park, toward the address in the East Seventies that she had given him. A weak smell of grass underlay the gas-blended air, but the Park seemed limp and worn, as if the strain of the day’s effluvia had been too much for it. At the Seventy-second Street stop signal, the blank light of a street lamp invaded the car.
    “Thought you might be feeling Mrs. Grundyish at my