Free The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher by Hortense Calisher

against leaves, the scraping of the November wind.
    “Guess the switch from the house doesn’t work any more,” she said, half to herself. She took a flashlight from the compartment. “Wait here,” she said, and got out of the car. After she had gone, I opened the window and leaned across Luke, holding on to his hand. Above me, the stars were enlarged by the pure air. Off somewhere to the right, the flashlight made a weak, disappearing nimbus.
    Then, suddenly, the woods were en fête. Festoons of lights spattered from tree to tree. Ahead of us, necromanced from the dark wood, the pattern of a house sprang on the air. After a moment our slow eyes saw that strings of lights garlanded its low log-cabin eaves, and twined up the two thick thrusts of chimney at either end. The flashlight wigwagged to us. We got out of the car, and walked toward it. Mrs. Hawthorn was leaning against one of the illuminated trees, looking up at the house. The furs slung back from her shoulders in a conqueror’s arc. As we approached, she shook her head, in a swimmer’s shake. “Well, ladies and gents,” she said, in the cool, the vinaigrette voice, “here it is.”
    “Is it—is this the night club?” I said.
    “This is it, baby,” she said, and the way she said it made me feel as if she’d reached down and ruffled my curls. Instead, she reached up, and pressed a fuse box attached to the tree. For a minute, the red dazzle of the sign on the roof of the house made us blink. GINGER AND HARRY’S it said. There were one or two gaps in GINGER, and the second R of HARRY’S was gone, but the AND was perfect.
    “Woods are death on electric lines,” she said. Leading the way up the flagged path to the door, she bent down, muttering, and twitched at the weeds that had pushed up between the flags.
    She unlocked the door. “We no longer heat it, of course. The pipes are drained. But I had them build fires this afternoon.”
    It was cold in the vestibule, just as it often was in the boxlike entrances of the roadhouses we knew, and, with its bare wood and plaster, it was just like them too—as if the flash and the jump were reserved for the sure customers inside. To our right was the hat-check stall, with its brass tags hung on hooks, and a white dish for quarters and dimes.
    “I never had any servants around here,” said Mrs. Hawthorn. “The girls used to take turns in the cloakroom, and the men used to tumble over themselves for a chance to tend bar, or be bouncer. Lord, it was fun. We had a kid from Hollywood here one night, one of the Wampas stars, and we sneaked her in as ladies’ matron, before anyone knew who she was. What a stampede there was, when the boys found out!”
    I bent down to decipher a tiled plaque in the plaster, with three initials and a date—1918. Mrs. Hawthorn saw me looking at it.
    “As my mother used to say,” she said. “Never have your picture taken in a hat.”
    Inside, she showed us the lounges for the men and the women—the men’s in red leather, hunting prints, and green baize. In the powder room, done in magenta and blue, with girandoles and ball fringe, with poufs and mirrored dressing tables, someone had hit even more precisely the exact note of the smart public retiring room—every woman a Pompadour, for ten minutes between dances.
    “I did this all myself,” she said. “From top to bottom. Harry had a bad leg when he came back—he was in an army hospital before we got married. He gave me my wedding present ahead of time—enough to remodel the old place, or build a new one. I surprised him. I built this place instead.”
    “Is his leg all right now?” I said.
    “What?” she said.
    “His leg. Is it all right now?”
    “Yes, of course. That was donkey’s years ago.” She was vague, as if about a different person. Behind her, Luke shook his head at me.
    “And now …” she said. “Now … come in where it’s warm.” And this time my ear picked up that tone of hers as it might a