In the Absence of Angels by Hortense Calisher Page B

resembled a game, and even when one had to miss and sit down, there was a kind of dreamy catharsis in watching the tenseness of those still standing. Miss Comstock always rose for these occasions and came forward between the two lines, standing there in an oppressive close-up in which we could watch the terrifying action of the cords in her spindling gray neck and her slight smile as a boy or a girl was spelled down. As the number of those standing was reduced, the smile grew, exposing the oversize slabs of her teeth, through which the words issued in a voice increasingly unctuous and soft.
    On this day the forty of us still shone with the first fall neatness of new clothes, still basked in that delightful anonymity in which neither our names nor our capacities were already part of the dreary foreknowledge of the teacher. The smart and quick had yet to assert themselves with their flying, staccato hands; the uneasy dull, not yet forced into recitations which would make their status clear, still preserved in the small, sinking corners of their hearts a lorn, factitious hope. Both teams were still intact when the word “mule” fell to the lot of a thin colored girl across the room from me, in clothes perky only with starch, her rusty fuzz of hair drawn back in braids so tightly sectioned that her eyes seemed permanently widened.
    “Mule,” said Miss Comstock, giving out the word. The ranks were still full. She had not yet begun to smile.
    The girl looked back at Miss Comstock, soundlessly. All her face seemed drawn backward from the silent, working mouth, as if a strong, pulling hand had taken hold of the braids.
    My turn, I calculated, was next. The procedure was to say the word, spell it out, and say it again. I repeated it in my mind: “Mule. M-u-l-e. Mule.”
    Miss Comstock waited quite a long time. Then she looked around the class, as if asking them to mark well and early this first malfeasance, and her handling of it.
    “What’s your name?” she said.
    “Ull — ee.” The word came out in a glottal, molasses voice, hardly articulate, the l’s scarcely pronounced.
    “Lilly?”
    The girl nodded.
    “Lilly what?”
    “Duh-avis.”
    “Oh. Lilly Davis. Mmmm. Well, spell ‘mule,’ Lilly.” Miss Comstock trilled out the name beautifully.
    The tense brown bladder of the girl’s face swelled desperately, then broke at the mouth. “Mo’ol,” she said, and stopped. “Mmm — oo — ”
    The room tittered. Miss Comstock stepped closer.
    “Mule!”
    The girl struggled again. “Mool.”
    This time we were too near Miss Comstock to dare laughter.
    Miss Comstock turned to our side. “Who’s next?”
    I half raised my hand.
    “Go on.” She wheeled around on Lilly, who was sinking into her seat. “No. Don’t sit down.”
    I lowered my eyelids, hiding Lilly from my sight. “Mule,” I said. “M-u-l-e. Mule.”
    The game continued, words crossing the room uneventfully. Some children survived. Others settled, abashed, into their seats, craning around to watch us. Again the turn came around to Lilly.
    Miss Comstock cleared her throat. She had begun to smile.
    “Spell it now, Lilly,” she said. “Mule.”
    The long-chinned brown face swung from side to side in an odd writhing movement. Lilly’s eyeballs rolled. Then the thick sound from her mouth was lost in the hooting, uncontrollable laughter of the whole class. For there was no doubt about it: the long, coffee-colored face, the whitish glint of the eyeballs, the bucking motion of the head suggested it to us all — a small brown quadruped, horse or mule, crazily stubborn, or at bay.
    “Quiet!” said Miss Comstock. And we hushed, although she had not spoken loudly. For the word had smirked out from a wide, flat smile and on the stringy neck beneath there was a creeping, pleasurable flush which made it pink as a young girl’s.
    That was how Mooley Davis got her name, although we had a chance to use it only for a few weeks, in a taunting singsong when she