Free Age by Hortense Calisher

used to wait for that command and then do the opposite. Having learned that Gertrude led you by many insignificant steps to the fait accompli—the path you didn’t see until it was behind you.
    ‘What a fine spread,’ I say. ‘Though we don’t eat many sweets.’ I reach for a cup, though. I so need that hot liquid repair. The waiter quickly pours me one. He’s ruddy-cheeked, observant. I don’t wish to clock my bodily processes but these days I can almost identify each—chest, bowel, veins—each an old pensioner holding out its cup. Only the brain will not speak to me direct.
    The two Sisters have seated themselves at the second table.
    Gemma says, ‘Why don’t they sit with us?’ Though she too has not yet sat down.
    The two sit silent, like domestic help discussed.
    ‘They like to sit at the window,’ Gertrude says. ‘They need to see the world.’
    ‘Don’t you?’
    ‘I am seeing it, Gemma, aren’t I?’
    Yes—she has got us to come.
    Again Gemma ignores her. ‘Sister—’
    They look up, in tandem.
    ‘You teach—dying as a vocation?’
    Sister McClellan says: ‘Theirs, yes. Not ours. Or not yet.’
    Sister Bond says more softly: ‘We sponsor them. Toward it.’
    Their charge says: ‘They say dying is a state of being. Just as living is, they say.’
    I see how they would need to sit to one side, and repair. I want to sit with them. I take an armchair nearby. Gemma takes another, nearest me.
    Gertrude says: ‘Kit and Sherm are late.’
    Not a quiver from the Sisters, though they may know why.
    ‘I spoke to Kit yesterday morning,’ Gemma says. ‘They planned on leaving. For New Hampshire.’
    I don’t like seeing those two faces that near—Gertrude’s and Gemma’s. One lifting her sharpened chin as if to say, ‘I’m dying. I can take it,’ the other rounding her shoulders, ‘I’m living. So can I.’
    ‘The rats—’ Gertrude says. ‘But their ship is sinking too.’ When I knew her she didn’t used to shrug. She didn’t have to. ‘So they’ve left, have they, those two mercenaries. With not even a good-bye.’
    The Sisters rise, to sit in her table’s two empty chairs.
    ‘No other takers,’ she says, looking up at them. ‘So shall we get this show on the road? Go back home, I mean.’
    ‘We would have to ask—’
    ‘—Mr Acker.’
    In posture too they are in perfect balance, a Yes and a—Perhaps. Gertrude peers at the table in front of her; she must not see too well. ‘I don’t relish sweets anymore either, even if allowed.’ She glances up at us. ‘The stuff they do allow me—you wouldn’t believe. Last night—caviar. Malossol. Acker can afford it. All right, girls—cable him.’
    ‘To come over?’ Gemma says.
    ‘Him? Rupert—you tell her.’
    ‘I have.’ But a woman like my wife doesn’t quite hear that kind of thing. ‘Gertrude probably hasn’t seen Acker in years.’
    ‘Three. The house at Wandsworth’s been going for just over two … Well, Rupert? Go on.’
    ‘Gertrude’s always lived by projects, for which people pay.’
    The father started that, the brothers kept on with it. Maybe they’re dead now but I wouldn’t bank on it. More likely—they’ve left too. I was only one of her long train of nonfamily. Acker would be the last.
    ‘Rupert. You’re not as honest as you once were. Men paid, Gemma.’
    To give Gertrude her rightful due, she always thought up projects that interested them. Often quite charitable ones, as now. Or, as in my case, the project was the man himself.
    ‘Generally, they paid to leave,’ she said. ‘But Rupert wouldn’t—pay. He tell you that, Gemma?’
    No, I never had. How I did what I had to do, on my own.
    I can scarcely see him, that young man whom the animal farm so helped. Wrestling of a night with a calf getting born, one of my own stock, and with the page I was trying to make my own too. Which I could do only if I paid no one for my getaway.
    Sister McClellan cleared her throat. Sister Bond