THE RAILWAY POLICE
by Hortense Calisher, 1966

Better known for her often protracted and intricate novels and for many memorable short stories, Hortense Calisher has written half a dozen pieces of fiction in novella form, not uniquely her own but nonetheless marked by her unmistakable voice. They are arguably best illustrated by "The Railway Police." It is in distinguished company with Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle" or Katherine Anne Porter's "Noon Wine" or with later works like Jim Harrison's "The Woman Lit by Fireflies" or Jane Smiley's "Good Will," in which neither extraneous plotlines nor judgmental asides by the author intrude to deflect the reader from a concentrated stare at human behavior in the process of coming to terms with the limitations of the self. In such works either the extraordinary is made to seem ordinary, or the ordinary is made to seem extraordinary—in "The Railway Police" the true and the false, what lies beneath the human masquerade—and by their conclusions the reader may be hard pressed to defend which is which. This is a familiar theme in Calisher's work—the masks that human beings wear for survival.

In the introduction to the volume Collected Stories, Calisher observed that a story was "an apocalypse, served in a very small cup." In "The Railway Police" the cup is only slightly larger—a 70-page monologue—but the apocalypse deserves capitalizing. A bald woman decides to face the world without her disguising wigs, insisting in the act that neither art imitates life nor that life imitates art. Instead, they are equidistant from a self only discovered when it refuses to let life and art masquerade as each other.

In the novella an unnamed narrator relates the events of the 24 hours preceding March 22, the first day of spring, the beginning of a new cycle, a rebirth. On a train bound for Boston, she witnesses the railway police take a man into custody. He has been hiding in the washroom, just sufficiently badly dressed to give himself away as a vagrant rather than a passenger. The epiphany the narrator experiences at that moment will alter her life, for she determines to become a vagrant too, an "honor-bright refuser of houses, clothing, income and other disguises," an action that has "boiled up out of meditation" for 20 years.

She systematically disposes of her portfolio and her girdle in the washroom, and she flies back to New York as soon as she reaches Boston, tossing her jewelry into the washroom ventilator once the plane is airborne. She empties her safety deposit box of money and calls on her lawyer to alter her will, leaving her estate to the Seamen's Institute. She then returns to her apartment for a final confrontation with herself. In her transformation there will be no "drama," no "travesty," no public display. Divesting herself of her clothing in favor of stout shoes and slacks, she bundles her many wigs—"the very psalm of my life, as sung by somebody else"—and locks the door behind her, with the keys inside, to face the future as a hobo. Whether she will "beg, steal, or wash dishes" she does not know, since "circumstances must be [her] moral instruction." After dispersing her money among her clients as anonymous gifts, she settles under a viaduct, curls up next to another vagrant, shares her coat with him for warmth, and is "born."

Pervading the whole of "The Railway Police" is the ongoing identification, through a series of references to earlier events involving her wigs and what they represent, of "the sterner exquisite I am to become." She has visited Bangkok to see hairless monks, shaved widows in mourning, and others bald merely because it is sanitary. In a swimming pool a man once tried to flirt by pulling off her bathing cap, only to fear that he had accosted a nun. In her wig closet 20 stylish coiffures in subtly varying hues are her secret coven, until 20 oval head shapes greet her in a multiple mirror image when she has whipped away their stylish curls, "lyric abstracts of the human head … one sad step away from art."

Calisher's assessment of art, or artifice, and its adversary as well as its alter ego, life or actuality, give "The Railway Police" its staggering power. No plot summary can convey the rich texture of her prose or the way in which the novella is constructed, in execution as well as in effect. As the narrator proceeds to relate the chronological events from impetus to action, she interweaves her history, in the process offering deadly accurate illustrations of at least three social masquerades. First, there is the inequity of the sexes. The narrator's twin brother—their congenital baldness had begun at puberty—is a Hollywood sex symbol whose glamorous appeal lies entirely in his hairlessness, while hers must be disguised. Second, there are class distinctions. A kindly client she has called on warns her about bedbugs in the couch, saying, "Dun sit, dolling. Om afraid fom de boggles, dun sit dere." Yet on a last visit, when the narrator is on her way to her viaduct, the client willingly joins her, now a bald hobo, on the couch and confesses that she has known all along about the wigs. "It's no trick at all to come down in the world," the narrator ruefully observes. Third is aesthetics. Her lover is ardent and intelligent, and he worships baldness in art, but a moment after she offers her bald skull to his lips, he shudders. Afterward he sends her a note: "Forgive me … and forget me. I am a dilettante." "The Railway Police" draws its authority not only from such details but also from the narrator's voice. Calisher's locutions are often indirect and occasionally arch, and a mandarin's calm pervades many of her novels and stories. Scenes potentially revulsive or hilarious are, instead, deeply moving. When the narrator of "The Railway Police" first offers herself to her lover without her wig, a moment toward which she has privately progressed with lethal humor to allay her apprehension, she observes that "men know earlier and better than we what the razor can do and what it can't." "Art and life is it?" she asks after he has rejected her: "I had taught him the difference."

The novella concludes not with an end but with a beginning: "Come, you narks, cops, feds, dicks, railway police, members of the force everywhere! Run with us! If the world is round, who's running after who?" The narrator has rejected a type of art in favor of a type of life, but because she cannot know the future, she may well be anticipating an observation Calisher makes in Herself, a later autobiographical work. The "inner life" of her ego seems to her "a pilgrim still in progress, shedding fears like skins, which with age … may well form again…." There is no authorial aside of this nature in "The Railway Police," but it is clearly felt throughout Calisher's remarkable fable.

—Bruce Kellner