Free Extreme Magic by Hortense Calisher Page B

baby began to whimper. She made it comfortable for the night, diapering it quickly, clipping the pins in the square folds, raising the joined ankles in a routine that was like a jigging ballet of the fingers. Only after she had made herself ready for the night, hanging the dress quickly behind a curtain, after she had slipped the last prewarmed bottle out of its case and was holding the baby close as it fed, watching the three-cornered pulse of the soft spot winking in and out on the downy head—only then did she let herself look closely at her two hands.
    The difference between them was not enough to attract casual notice, but enough, when once pointed out, for anyone to see. She remembered Stengel’s strictures on practicing with the less able left one. “Don’t think you can gloss over, Miss. It shows!” But that the scrubbing hand, the working hand, would really “show” was her first intimation that the daily makeshift could become cumulative, could leave its imprint on the flesh with a crude symbolism as dully real, as conventionally laughable, as the first wrinkle, the first gray hair.
    She turned out the light and stared into the rushing dark. The physical change was nothing, she told herself, was easily repaired; what she feared almost to phrase was the death by postponement, the slow uneventful death of impulse. “Hundreds of girls like you,” she thought, fearing for the first time the compromises that could arrive upon one unaware, not in the heroic renunciations, but erosive, gradual, in the slow chip-chipping of circumstance. Outside the window the hills of the Hudson Valley loomed and receded, rose up, piled, and slunk again into foothills. For a long time before she fell asleep she probed the dark for their withdrawing shapes, as if drama and purpose receded with them.
    In the morning the porter roused her at six, returning an iced bottle of formula, and one warmed and made ready. She rose with a granular sense of return to the real, which lightened as she attended to the baby and dressed. Energized, she saw herself conquering whatever niche Dan had found for them, revitalizing the unknown house as she had other houses, with all the artifices of her New York chic, squeezing ragouts from the tiny salary spent cagily at the A & P, enjoying the baby instead of seeing her in the groggy focus of a thousand tasks. She saw herself caught up at odd hours in the old exaltation of practice, even if they had to hire a mute piano, line a room with cork. Nothing was impossible to the young, bogey-dispersing morning.
    The station ran past the window, such a long one, sliding through the greasy lemon-colored lights, that she was almost afraid they were not going to stop, or that it was the wrong one, until she saw Dan’s instantly known contour, jointed, thin, and his face, raised anxiously to the train windows with the vulnerability of people who do not know they are observed. She saw him for a minute as other passengers, brushing their teeth hastily in the washrooms, might look out and see him, a young man, interesting because he was alone on the platform, a nice young man in a thick jacket and heavy work pants, with a face full of willingness and anticipation. Who would get off for him?
    As she waited in the jumble of baggage at the car’s end, she warned herself that emotion was forever contriving toward moments which, when achieved, were not single and high as they ought to have been, but often splintered slowly—just walked away on the little centrifugal feet of detail. She remembered how she had mulled before their wedding night, how she had been unable to see beyond the single devouring picture of their two figures turning, turning toward one another. It had all happened, it had all been there, but memory could not recall it so, retaining instead, with the pedantic fidelity of some poet whose interminable listings recorded obliquely the face of the beloved but never invoked it, a whole rosary of