Free On Keeping Women by Hortense Calisher Page A

recall.
    Does it matter? Like each of those nights, that one is all the nights together.
    Though certainly it was the one when Charles, turning his time-wheel for their attention, said “Five hours ahead of us, roughly. Dad’ll be in the Casino. Or maybe in bed.”
    And she thought—by himself? I wouldn’t censure him. Thing is, I can’t imagine him over there any better than I can at home.
    … How is it I can imagine any friend at any time, giving them events either wildly devious or hilarious which still seem right for them as they must be, yet my own husband remains secret to me—separate? Is it because he himself is that sort of man, unimaginable by his nearest: Ray? Or because he’s Ray the father as well, the father-immediate, stalking battles that I am only wife to, and was only daughter to? The father—thrust into that corner, kicked upstairs to those more objective glories which had to become his, once he saw that first bloody birth emerge from my embattled legs and working crotch: that smeared child, with a dent in his head but smiling curlily, who was my body’s issue, glory arrived of my bearing down, who was Charles-to-be, the near-man I smacked—and merely a father’s dream. What’s fatherhood but a long dream Ray walks in because people do say? Maybe the women ought never let him see our battlefield, but only let him hear dimly, in medicine-man murmurs, of that powerful cave from which he comes in all his pretension. Never let him see birth or be sure of it—are there tribes who’ve done that?…
    Certainly it was the night on which, knocking her fists together, ranging the four children with her eyes, she hears herself say “Anyone know a blessing?” And sees she’s sent all four of them mute. Her beloved menagerie, against whose hindparts she cracks her whip-tongue. She feels like a cat-trainer, left behind bars empty except for herself. When has her dominion ended?
    Yet they see her; tonight they really see her, as happens less and less. More and more these days, they fault her for not seeing them. And she doesn’t quite. The image of her parenthood is dying, that’s it. On both sides.
    “Anybody who knows one—” she quavers “—please say.”
    Charles sullenly moves his wheel to half-past-one. Yes they’re eating late, eight-thirty. But that’s never been a sin before.
    “Chili that bad, Lexie?” the main cook says. At thirteen, over three years ago, Chessie stopped calling her Ma.
    “I know a blessing—” Maureen cries. Her glance falls, before the others. “But it’s for meat.”
    Royal says “Eat a hot pepper, Ma?” in his brightest cherub-tone. Everybody breathing in time with him, he scrambles down and brings her the jar. Like hemlock, she thinks. Or tact. Which from one’s own children is toothsharp.
    The jar holds red and green peppers of the hottest kind—like a vial of Stop and Go. Only she can eat them. Not that she likes them much, but it’s her talent, a city one. Nurtured ever since she’d heard Charles, then ten, say, in a boasting match with another boy—whose dad was a champ jogger—“My ma can eat hot peppers straight down.”
    She chews a green one, and lets the tears sprout. Waving her hands helplessly to show them it isn’t just the vegetable. “This is how I feel.” She closes her eyes.
    The kitchen is the blessing. Bedrooms go by ones and twos; the downstairs and halls of a house are by turns a crossing, a layabout land, a divide. But in the kitchen they clambered round me, still my parts, close with me between the ovenheat and the pores of the floor. The body of our bread we were, all together and love-buttered, or what passed for it—all reeky and not quite sour at the edges, like raw milk. That was a menagerie, then. Charles the serious giraffe, Maureen the faithful griffon, Royal the nipping marmoset—were the roles. And Chessie self-styled, whose mind even then burned on her mouth like a feversore—“I’ll be the