To Nowhere & Back

THE RAILWAY POLICE AND THE LAST TROLLEY RIDE by Hortense Calisher. 248 pages. Little, Brown. $5.

Hortense Calisher has a tidy and fervently loyal coterie whose members read everything she writes and pretend to understand it. They are courageous people, since understanding Hortense Calisher has to be an act of faith.

These two novellas illustrate how evanescent a Calisher point can be when it is pursued to its core. On the New York-to-Boston train, in The Railway Police, is a woman social worker who wears wigs to hide a hereditary baldness. Seeing a ticketless passenger led away by the railway cops, the social worker abruptly decides to follow his example --to be a vagrant; that is, to exercise "the right to be out of the organized world." Girdle, rings, bank account, wig --everything is abandoned for the park-bench life. Why?

The Last Trolley Ride, though longer, is hardly more substantial. In upstate New York, the orphaned sisters Lottie and Emily Pardee fry fritters in the bay window of their home. The sizzle attracts Jim Eck, who was born on a canal barge, and Jim's "war buddy," Jim Morgan. After a last ride on the trolley line, which is being shut down, these four marry. The trolley line is kept running in miniature in somebody's basement, and subsequently it is sent to the Smithsonian Institution.

Calisher plots, obviously, do not readily synopsize--like boiled water, they leave no residue. But the reader can enjoy a Calisher journey even though, like her trolley line, it ends up nowhere. The Calisher ear for words is poetical, and sometimes the click of wheel on track forms recognizable rhythms: "The spirit of picnics and cemetery visits is always feminine."

That may be enough to prevent the reader from getting off before the last stop. But when he does stay on to the end, there are the same questions that nagged him all along the route: "Where are we going? When do we get there?"

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