Free Extreme Magic by Hortense Calisher Page A

door. Eleanor followed her mother and father out and then reached back into the cab. “I’ll take her now.” She stood there hugging the bundle, feeling it close, a round comforting cyst of love and possession.
    Making her way through the snarled mess of traffic on the curb, Aunt Ruth came and stood beside her. “Remember what I told you!” she called to the departing driver, wagging her finger at him.
    “What did you tell him?” said Eleanor.
    “Hah! What I told him!” Her aunt shrugged, the blunt Russian shrug of inevitability, her shrewd eyes ruminant over the outthrust chin, the spread hands. “Can I fix life? Life in Brooklyn on sixty dollars a week? I’m only a medical doctor!” She pushed her hat forward on her braids. “Here! Give me that baby!” She whipped the baby from Eleanor’s grasp and held it with authority, looking speculatively at Eleanor. “Go on! Walk ahead with them!” She grinned. “Don’t I make a fine nurse? Expensive, too!”
    Down at the train, Eleanor stood at the door of the roomette while the other women, jammed inside, divided their ardor for the miniature between the baby and the telescoped comforts of the cubicle. At the end of the corridor, money and a pantomime of cordiality passed between her father and the car porter. Her father came back down the aisle, solid gray man, refuge of childhood, grown shorter than she. She stared down at his shoulder, rigid, her eyes unfocused, restraining herself from laying her head upon it.
    “All taken care of,” he said. “He’s got the formula in the icebox and he’ll take care of getting you off in the morning. Wish you could have stayed longer, darling.” He pressed an envelope into her hand. “Buy yourself something. Or the baby.” He patted her shoulder. “No…now never mind now. This is between you and me.”
    “Guess we better say good-by, dear,” said her mother, emerging from the roomette with the others. Doors slammed, passengers swirled around them. They kissed in a circle, nibbling and diffident.
    Aunt Ruth did not kiss her, but took Eleanor’s hands and looked at her, holding on to them. She felt her aunt’s hands moving softly on her own. The cousins watched brightly.
    “What’s this, what’s this?” said her aunt. She raised Eleanor’s hands, first one, then the other, as if weighing them in a scale, rubbed her own strong, diagnostic thumb back and forth over Eleanor’s right hand, looking down at it. They all looked down at it. It was noticeably more spatulate, coarser-skinned than the left, and the middle knuckles were thickened.
    “So…,” said her aunt. “So-o…,” and her enveloping stare had in it that warmth, tinged with resignation, which she offered indiscriminately to cabmen, to nieces, to life. “So…, the ‘rabbi’s daughter’ is washing dishes!” And she nodded, in requiem.
    “Prescription?” said Eleanor, smiling wryly back.
    “No prescription!” said her aunt. “In my office I see hundreds of girls like you. And there is no little pink pill to fit.” She shrugged, and then whirled on the others. “Come. Come on.” They were gone, in a last-minute flurry of ejaculations. As the train began to wheel past the platform, Eleanor caught a blurred glimpse of their faces, her parents and aunt in anxious trio, the two cousins neatly together.
    People were still passing by the door of the roomette, and a woman in one group paused to admire the baby, frilly in the delicately lined basket, “Ah, look!” she cooed. “Sweet! How old is she?”
    “Three months.”
    “It is a she?”
    Eleanor nodded.
    “Sweet!” the woman said again, shaking her head admiringly, and went on down the aisle. Now the picture was madonna-perfect, Eleanor knew—the harsh, tintype lighting centraled down on her and the child, glowing in the viscous paneling that was grained to look like wood, highlighted in the absurd plush-cum-metal fixtures of this sedulously planned manger. She shut the door.
    The