Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel Read online

  Journal from Ellipsia

  A Novel

  Hortense Calisher

  Contents

  PART I

  1. Hobbies

  2. Soft Muzak

  3. Wives, Fathers, and Converts

  4. Send Jack

  PART II

  1. Say Au Revoir

  2. But Not Good-bye!

  3. Out

  4. And Around

  5. Up the Garden Path

  6. Off

  Entr’acte—Or: Get a Horse!

  PART III

  1. A Person from Out of Town

  2. Teatime

  3. Plain People

  4. Into the Maze

  5. Budding and Melting

  One Day

  The Envoy

  About the Author

  To C. H.

  Part I

  1. Hobbies

  ALTHOUGH THE AMPHITHEATER LENT to Linhouse for the occasion was a small one, it had all the usual properties of a rotunda, plus one. From his chair in the wings, looking past the large object—as yet he knew no other name for it—which he had managed to set mid-stage last evening, he had a full view of the place. After a while, he took from his pocket a couple of buns he hadn’t had time for in the coffee shop earlier and munched them, regarding the hall. Intended for use by the Center’s “medical” faculty at those surgical moments when abstract principia had to be humanly applied, its sealed, delicately thermostated air could also be steriled, though such weren’t his instructions today. Such must rarely be the case at an institute whose researches were so advanced that any practical application of them almost surely had to be performed elsewhere, preferably off the grounds. Indeed, among Fellows whose professional prefixes were almost always either bio, geo, phys or astro—with here and there an “anthro” or, like himself, “philo”—the term “medical” was altogether a misnomer—there was no such faculty. The term was a leftover from the will of a richly misguided donor, to get the bulk of whose bequest the institute had had to build this minor, neglected wing furnished with eccentricities among which a lecture hall capable of being temperature-controlled to all the half-degrees Fahrenheit between freezing and near-boiling was by far the most understandable.

  Meanwhile, the men and women Fellows, who with their assistants, wives or secretaries, were now beginning to straggle in, were having to do so through doors regularly spaced on the hall’s perimeter, opening from that encircling corridor whose light could have been violet, but today, like the general demeanor of the staff, was quite ordinary. No reason why there should be anything unusual in an event bound to occur now and then at any institution, other than that the deceased herself had asked that it take place here. Or—as was known only to Linhouse—that she had asked for it at all.

  From his own new-member’s tour of the entire Center three years ago, he recalled some of what he had seen through the many doors in the opposite wall of the corridor above, each of which led into or toward a maze of more complicated facilities. He had been told that none of the latter, taken alone, was in any way unscientific. On the contrary, each had been the latest of its kind, and might still be, if the Center hadn’t succeeded in misinterpreting the funds left for their care. Now and then, a Navy or Air Force team made use of one or other of the available setups, and there was always some newcomer to the staff who was sure to seize with delight on the very study cell for him, only to be defeated before the year was out by the very incoherence of his surroundings. The oddity lay in their haphazardness. Soundless exits of the tiny cells for parapsychological experiment lay cheek-by-jowl with the ironclad demispheres of various “ray” sciences whose prefixes were now intermingling, or with the foolproof glass-and-filter labs of those whose very names were not yet stabilized—all these in turn abutting on a series of model test rooms and tunnels for either projectiles or personae, bright little offices where the buboes of plague could be isolated or a computer had Lebensraum to brood, tight little fun-rooms where a man could survive without sleep or stimuli, recover from air-bubbles in his blood, learn to freeze or to fly.

  The donor of all this, a simple banker chap who, as he himself said, knew no more of science than the next man, had merely wished to hedge his bets. Just as humorously, he had demurred at the trustees naming anything after him; unlike those sad prey of the jokesters, the breed of Titsworth and Klingenstein who from birth must have been dying to see themselves monumented up there in stone, a plain Jacob Hobbs had no such need—not that the undergraduates could do much with that name. The trustees, reminding him that institutes like theirs had no undergraduates, left him unaware that kittenplay with the language often rose with higher learning. And knowing more than he about the modesty of donors, they let themselves be persuaded to reduce the height of the name carved on the facade to seven feet, and to replace a statue first projected for the entry with instead a simple fellow’s profile medallioned in bronze, scale one foot to the inch, embedded unobtrusively in the marble floor. So it was that, of the audience now steadily arriving by twos and threes or one and one, a probable half had said over the shoulder to a secretary, “Off to that memorial service for the vanished Mrs. Jamison. In Hobby Hall, if you need me. Can’t think why they’re holding it there.” And the rest, murmuring in the susurrus of telephone gossip, “I gather that Linhouse is the one who … mmm-hmmm,” had added, “Why on earth there, though? … Okay, I’ll meet you there. Inside. On Jake.”

  Earlier, in the coffee shop, Linhouse had overheard from the booth behind him enough to know the general trend.

  “Somebody always dies over the summer,” said the man of the couple. “Never fails.”

  “Officially lost, she’s supposed to be. Somebody at the bank was holding a letter saying if she hadn’t come back by a certain time the house was to be disposed of. And they got a letter later, from some district officer—would that be Africa? Anyway, that’s what I heard.”

  “—like Amelia Earhart, hmm. Over the Galapagos.”

  “—New Guinea, maybe. After Jamison died here, she went back once herself, you know. Brought back a lot of stuff the museum had to turn down—except for him, she wouldn’t ever have been on the staff. This time they say she went without telling anyone where.”

  “—and thirty years later, a race of Western blonds. Not blond exactly … what was she.”

  “—I never thought she was so attractive.”

  “Women didn’t, honey.”

  “She was like some of those convent-bred liars I went to school with, butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth. And of course you never knew for sure if they were liars. But they sure knew how to rile the boys.”

  “—cold cat, though. Doubt if she’d start a race.”

  “Maybe not with you, dear … I gather Jack Linhouse is, er … making the speech.”

  “Oh that’s right, they were at one time, weren’t they. Why him, I always wondered.”

  “Men do. Honey.”

  She, she, she. Where she was concerned, this had always been the general trend. He’d managed to leave without finding out who the couple were, just as all the past week, after assimilating the shock of the news—the house was to be sold, and the bank was assuming—and of having to think of her at all after these long, self-curing months, he’d gone about fulfilling the terms of her request without letting himself consider them too closely. In the same way last night, while he was lugging that bequest of hers over here on the platform—and “lugging” was scarcely the word—he’d managed both not to be seen, which, considering the thing’s peculiarities might well have made a stir, nor to think about the matter too cautiously afterward. Almost complacently, he’d managed not to learn a great deal. As to why the l
east vain of women should have wanted this elaborate vanity of a service—though no one knew he hadn’t instigated it. As to where she’d gone last February and why, and how her bequest had come back, from wherever it had come—to be found waiting for him, in her house. Or whether it had been there ever since she’d left. He hadn’t seen it there a year back, not in his day. Altogether, the question was whether his own not inactive mind could stay off the whole business until that thing there, presumably bearing some record of a journey, might enlighten them all. As yet he knew nothing, and preferred it so. It wasn’t that he believed in her so firmly. But it was such a nice anodyne, after all she’d put him through, to have her believe in him.

  To Linhouse, still so shaken by the circumstance that had fallen on his calm, summer’s end return to the Center—and still sweating from last night’s getting to the hall what now rested on the low platform before him—it was at first incredible that few among the audience coming in had cast a passing glance at it, and none of those who’d done so had stopped before it, rapt—as he’d half expected. Nobody had paused, either to kneel down before the great thing under its bell-glass, or to touch that inches-thick but perfectly clear substance, or finally, to raise that cover and lift the thing beneath—with a cry. Having lifted it himself, he was sure of the cry.

  On second thought, he understood why not. Hobbs Hall was a Madame Tussaud’s of odd objects and apparatus, among which only the most ordinary thingumabob would be unusual, a can opener say, or a milk bottle. Or perhaps nobody finding even these would credit their simple use in this place, the opener surely made of magnesium, the milk bottle power-driven. In the quietest corners of this building one was likely to come upon, say a color organ, posing its still more silent sunsets. In this rotunda itself, a button he was shortly to press, as per her letter of instruction, would produce music, electronic music no doubt pushed to those ultimates which, as a concert buff, he was curious to hear. Around this place, the most unusual object would be what? A baby, probably. He looked out at the audience. Perhaps some hard-pressed wife-of-staff had brought one. No, no babies so far. The audience itself, then. In the increasingly exaggerate halls of science, people did have a tendency to look at least as funny as milk bottles. For unique objects then, he and his colleagues, as instant photoplasm first class, would have to do.

  He looked out at them with some irritation. Except for a few mavericks of the word, like himself, almost all were members of what he chose to think of as the really physical sciences, the rest belonging to those which were nearly or partly so. It was perfectly possible that to quite a number of them the object in front of him—and them—was, in a sense, ordinary. “Oh, mnya-as,” one might drawl, “Hed one down in the department. Hed naow luck with it,” or, “Marfelous! Neffer before het I upper toonity to upserve—!” or even, “Golly! This must be the one the aborigines brought down from Popocatepetl, just last year!” Then why hadn’t the writer of said letter chosen somebody from this talented array to execute her ceremony? He could answer that at least. She’d known him to be willing. He could be trusted not to refuse to make a fool of himself over her in public—having once done so in private.

  And a fool he would again be made. He stiffened suddenly, at the entrance of the Center’s publicity officer, a plump type with a smile on her like a soft cut in apple pie. In front of his colleagues, who had after all known of his connection, he had been prepared for ridicule. In turn they would have come prepared at best to submit to the ritual fifty minutes of eulogy and music anywhere allotted to a bygone member of a community, at worst to amuse themselves over his devotion to a woman whose disappearance from these parts had been rather more notable in his life than in theirs.

  “A memorial service, you say,” the provost had said on the telephone. “Dear me, I’m so sorry to hear … I did hear she’d left here … last year. Dear me … so young, I hope there was nothing out of the … of course she had no real connection here, except as Jamison’s widow … hmmm … Do you know … has she by any chance left a bequest? … on her own … mmm, yes. Of course the museum is very grateful, has always been, for what he left them … nothing like it in toto anywhere … I tell you what, Linhouse, you handle it, on your own, see? … No, I trust you perfectly … to get it official would take half a year of red—mmm … you know how these things are. Aah, and no need to have it under the aegis of the museum.” Terminally, the provost had sounded as grateful as if he’d been pleading with Linhouse for hours. “Thank you, Linhouse. And see my secretary if you want anything. Perhaps some of those little engraved cards.”

  And so Linhouse, still in the shock of having to do anything at all, had seen to the secretary, to the posted notices, the arrangements for the hall—to in fact everything, including last night’s experience. Or rather, she had, through her serenely imperative letter, awaiting him after so long. His judgment, admittedly already impaired, had been further taken in, he supposed, by the fact that her letter to him had arrived conventionally enough, through her bankers. And it had been after all what anyone strains to honor—a last request.

  What he hadn’t been prepared for, was the press. Had he need to be? The publicity officer—whose name always escaped people, though they never managed to do the same with her—was always reassuring everyone that her function was as much to suppress; it was certainly the case that even the Times had a special reportage for such scholarly failings as might be called human. And what the tabloids could do with a vanished anthropologist, much less the picture of this one, was inexhaustible. He looked down in the audience at Miss What’shername, at that face flattened to a smirk by constant snubbing, and couldn’t trust it. Perhaps it shouldn’t trust him.

  He reached up behind him and pushed number eight of the row marked “Lights” on the concert-size switch panel. The surgical glare muted to what seemed at first an ugly, nightclub rose. Number four produced a cinema dark of no use to him, but just right, he supposed, for the sound screen above the panel. He touched number eight again, as per the letter in which everything had been so femininely specified—the sheer silly gaiety of it even now reaching out for the works of him better than any pinch of perfume.

  Number eight’s glow was opera intermission rose-velvet really, a Covent Garden glow. Clear enough, nothing furtive. In it, the large bell-glass covering the “object” looked, except for its size, harmlessly like two cherished ones on his own mother’s mantel, even to its base of some black stuff close enough to their polished teak. Did bell-glasses normally come, however, to a height of something under five feet, by a width of over two? Could they be blown as thick as this and still remain more pellucid even than his mother’s? And granted all this, could they then be—?

  In the new light, he could still see the provost seat himself, other friends arriving. What might Linhouse be the agent of having brought here, to this storehouse where so much that was sinister to his eyes went unnoticed? Or, to the men out there, who hadn’t spent their lives nosing Greek as he had, was the object housed there in front of him (and even the one property which had made it so alarmingly easy to get here) so run-of-the-mill that any half-dozen of them could at once laughingly name it? From his world now so shaped by their alembic, he looked at them with humility, as men of his sort must nowadays. Jolly lucky he hadn’t at this point to name it to them, since the stigmata of his misspent life were apparently graven in him, even to his eyes. For ever since last evening, his eyes had kept telling him what the great shaggy oval under the glass was, and yet couldn’t be. In a certain shame he bent his glance away from all those sanhedrin out there in the front row, and stole another look. Yes, and for all its oddness. What it still seemed to him most to be, was—a book.

  He’d never seen one like it of course, a cylinder book, or one shaped like a dirigible flattened at either end and resting upright on one of them. Between these, the concentric leaves or pages, thick as discs, came naturally to their broadest circumference in the central pages, declining at either end to the sma
llest, which were of about the size of a child’s phonograph record, or a modest lily pad. The gradual, elliptic curve of the page ends, or cross sections, was counterparted by that of the spine and covers, these shagged to a thickness too vaguely patterned to be called tooled, yet not coarse, as if the broad hand of its maker had sometimes dreamed of Florentine. It was a book made by a Brancusi, or else a very gifted aborigine. And he thought he knew what the leather was, of which its entirety seemed to be made. In his childhood’s home library in Wiltshire, there had been books and even other articles made of what had then been called Hungarian leather, alum leather, or plain “white leather,” this made, according to his grandfather, by a process called “tawing” that kept the natural color of the skin. In that library’s shelves of anything from early parish registers to proceedings of ecumenical councils, there’d been books which to a five-year-old child had seemed almost as large as this one and some of shape almost as queer. And as that child, he’d been bred early to the presence of a certain beingness that persisted through all their thicks and thins, from the quartos that could lame a toe, to the silk missal that lay on the table like a handkerchief. For all he knew, this one, when uncovered, might talk on tape, or hum in braille, or even shoot out some gamma or gas which would require a memorial service for everyone here—nevertheless, he still recognized that presence in it. It had the beingness of a book.

  And now to face the music, in more than one way. An hour’s introit, to allow people to gather, was standard at these nondenominational performances. His watch now said two-thirty-five. The invitations had said three. He would give them an extra fifteen minutes for latecomers. Turning to the panel, he flicked a switch, to quick disappointment. The place was wired, like any other, for Muzak, which now began its mindless brain massage. He sighed. He’d been asked to sit with that thing over there from the time it was moved here. It had been almost dawn when he had settled it in place here.