Free Extreme Magic by Hortense Calisher

and ‘duplexes.’ All I really know is it has automatic heat, thank goodness, and room for the piano.” She clamped her lips suddenly on the hectic, chattering voice. Why had she had to mention the piano, especially since they were just passing Fifty-seventh Street, past Carnegie with all its clustering satellites—the Pharmacy, the Playhouse, the Russian restaurant—and in the distance, the brindled windows of the galleries, the little chiffoned store fronts, spitting garnet and saffron light? All her old life smoked out toward her from these buildings, from this parrot-gay, music-scored street.
    “Have you been able to keep up with your piano?” Helene’s head cocked, her eyes screened.
    “Not—not recently. But I’m planning a schedule. After we’re settled.” In the baby’s nap time, she thought. When I’m not boiling formulas or wash. In the evenings, while Dan reads, if I’m only—just not too tired. With a constriction, almost of fear, she realized that she and Dan had not even discussed whether the family on the other side of the house would mind the practicing. That’s how far I’ve come away from it, she thought, sickened.
    “All that time spent.” Her father stroked his chin with a scraping sound and shook his head, then moved his hand down to brace the basket as the cab swung forward on the green light.
    My time, she thought, my life—your money, knowing her unfairness in the same moment, knowing it was only his devotion, wanting the best for her, which deplored. Or, like her mother, did he mourn too the preening pride in the accomplished daughter, the long build-up, Juilliard, the feverish, relative-ridden Sunday afternoon recitals in Stengel’s studio, the program at Town Hall, finally, with her name, no longer Eleanor Goldman, but Elly Gold, truncated hopefully, euphoniously for the professional life to come, that had already begun to be, thereafter, in the first small jobs, warm notices?
    As the cab rounded the corner of Fifth, she saw two ballerinas walking together, unmistakable with their dark Psyche knots over their fichus, their sandaled feet angled outwards, the peculiar compensating tilt of their little strutting behinds. In that moment it was as if she had taken them all in at once, seen deep into their lives. There was a studio of them around the hall from Stengel’s, and under the superficial differences the atmosphere in the two studios had been much the same: two tight, concentric worlds whose aficionados bickered and endlessly discussed in their separate argots, whose students, glowing with the serious work of creation, were like trajectories meeting at the burning curve of interest.
    She looked at the cousins with a dislike close to envy, because they neither burned nor were consumed. They would never throw down the fixed cards. Conformity would protect them. They would marry for love if they could; if not, they would pick, prudently, a candidate who would never remove them from the life to which they were accustomed. Mentally they would never even leave Eighty-sixth Street, and their homes would be like their mothers’, like her mother’s, bibelots suave on the coffee tables, bonbon dishes full, but babies postponed until they could afford to have them born at Doctors Hospital. “After all the money Uncle Harry spent on her, too,” they would say later in mutually confirming gossip. For to them she would simply have missed out on the putative glory of the prima donna; that it was the work she missed would be out of their ken.
    The cab swung into the line of cars at the side entrance to Grand Central. Eleanor bent over the basket and took out the baby. “You take the basket, Dad.” Then, as if forced by the motion of the cab, she reached over and thrust the bundle of baby onto Helene’s narrow brown crepe lap, and held it there until Helene grasped it diffidently with her suede gloves.
    “She isn’t—she won’t wet, will she?” said Helene.
    A porter opened the