Tale for the Mirror (13 page)

“What’s ‘now’?” She looked down at her clenched hands. “People like me will always be on the outside…with people like you.”

He got up heavily from the bed and crossed to the window. God save us, he thought, us—the equivocal ones—from the ones who see life steadily, and see it whole. From those who can’t bury or evade the truth, but have to drag it out and beat it like a carpet. Who can say the raw, the open thing, that can never be glozed over again.

He stared out the window, twisting one hand around and around in his pants pocket. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go up to the Ewarts’.”

“No. I don’t want to go after all.”

“Well, for God’s sake,” he said, sore with his new effort, “you’re always the one who’s trying to drag me!”

“Because it was better than being alone together.” She shrugged, smiling crookedly up at him. “Besides…Saturday night…one always hopes for the best.”

“Come on then.” He met the smile with a placating one of his own.

“No, It’s just more of the same.”

“The same?”

“You know,” she said. “Like a record we all play once a week. Jim, hanging around, waiting for Esther to get drunk enough so she’ll go home, and Karen watching Lou for her reasons, and me watching you for mine. I just don’t want any part of it any more.”

He watched it almost jealously, that soft, flexible look of hers, which concealed the enviable certitude, the stubborn strength to reject, to decide.

“Well, what do you want to do?”

She looked away from him consciously. “I thought I’d go back home for a while. If you’re really on your feet now.”

“For a while? Or for good?” he said. For good, he thought. That’s what she asked, only a little while ago.

She was silent.

“What makes you think Utica, or any other place, isn’t more of the same, these days?” he said.

“It doesn’t matter where. I just can’t go on being an adjunct—any more!”

“And Libby?” He softened his voice suddenly, as if their joint concern might wake her, where their forgetfulness had not.

She put her head down in her hands, rubbing her concealed face back and forth. She’ll cry now, he thought, although he could not remember when he had last seen her cry, and he waited, almost with relief, for with women, the lucky women, this meant the dissolving of an issue, the haggled end of emotion—but she went on defeatedly rocking.

“Come on,” he said, after a moment. “I’ll fix us a drink.” He waited, and then put a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll have a party by ourselves.”

In the kitchen, his hands took over the mixing of the Martinis, picking out and combining the gin, the vermouth, the lemon peel, with disembodied competence. “This is real enough for you!” he thought. “Isn’t it? Isn’t it?” he said defensively to the dry voice in the anonymous room.

He thought of the crowd upstairs now at the Ewarts’, in the pattern, as Dorothy had said, pooling all their uncertainties of the week, drowning them in the fabricated bonhomie of Saturday night. The Ewarts, Syl and Harry, were a few years older than the average couple in the building and were both “in business”; perhaps it was a combination of these facts which led them into great spurts of energy, in which droves of people must be enlisted to help them kill the weekend’s frightening acreage of time. To their coarse-grained parties there came, patronizingly, the fledgling physicists, the writers on their way to a foothold, the confused but verbose young men with their foetally promising jobs in the government, in the State Department, or, like himself, in the universities. They came because they were at loose ends, or at odds with themselves or the wife, or roughened with the loneliness of the city, or, let it be said, because the Ewarts could serve the liquor they themselves could infrequently afford. And with each of them came the wife, in the new hair-do, the primary colored dress with its attempted primary appeal—all the intelligent, frustrated girls, fleeing from the diapers toward an evening in which they could forget their altered conceptions of themselves.

He held the Martini mixer up to the light, and stirred, forestalling the thought of Dorothy and himself with critical thoughts of the others. It’s true, what she said, he thought. Esther, having to drink herself into insensibility more and more often, with Jim doggedly watching, and Karen, flitting grimly, unobtrusively into the kitchen now and then to see that Lou’s reflex skirt-chasing doesn’t get him in more trouble than he can handle. And me, wrapped up in a corner. “For once let’s not think about me!” he said defiantly to the voice in the repudiated room. And through it all the Ewarts hurried like high-class orderlies, bright with reassurances to the sufferers, administering glasses, plates of food, or winks in the direction of the bathroom.

The sufferers, he thought. The prowlers in retreat from themselves. He put two glasses on a tray and looked at the light through the mixer for a last delaying time. It stared back at him like an unanswerable, viscous, lemon-watery eye.

He walked back with it into the bedroom. Dorothy was stretched out on the bed again, staring into the pillow.

“Want to go in the other room, or stay here?”

“Oh leave me be. Leave me be.”

He put the tray on the dressing table and sat down beside her with a brisk, overemphasized resolve.

“Come on,” he said, urging her up to a sitting position. “This’ll fix you up. We’ll rustle up some dinner later.”

They sat on the side of the bed together, sipping, not saying anything, as if they both sucked desperately at some potion of last resource. After a while he put a drink-loosened arm around her, using his other arm to refill the glasses, and they sat on in the growing dark, finishing the second drink, the third, watching with careful fixity the lambent points of their cigarettes. Outside the window, the light-studded evening converged, ramified, without them.

A tremor in her shoulder made him know, suddenly, that she was crying, and trying to conceal it. He was cleft with pity, and even a kind of possessive pride because she was the sort of woman who did not cry for show.

“Ah don’t,” he said. “Ah don’t.”

She gave her head an angry, backward shake. “I’m not trying to…oh you know!” she said, in a strangled whisper.

“I know.” He tightened the arm that was around her, and put his other hand blindly toward her. It met her face. She moved her face back and forth in his palm, and he felt the hot sidle of tears through his fingers.

“I’m afraid,” she said. “That’s all it is.”

“Afraid?” he said, delicately handling the sharp tool of the word. “What are you afraid of?”

“That’s it. I don’t know. I never used to be.”

He held her as she sobbed, knowing that for this, on which of all things he should have been most knowledgeable, there was no answer that he could give. But it seemed to him that the edged word, coming through the sweetish, gin-fogged air, came like a bond, a link which slit through the cocoon around himself. He began to kiss her with a kind of heavy sympathy for them both. Turning, they stretched out on the bed and made use of one another in a final spasm of escape.

Long after she slept he lay awake in the dark, which had a pallid incompleteness from the deflected street lights outside. After a while he got up noiselessly and looked at the glowing disc of the clock. It was only nine o’clock. He crossed to the other bed, his own, near the window, and picked up the sleeping child. Holding her, on his way to the crib in her own room, her warm, inert weight seemed to him like a burden he was inadequate to carry. “Parents like us!” he thought. This must be why we avoid them, the children, because they are the mirror we make for ourselves. They are the alternative of no evasion, on whose knife we are impaled. He put her down, tucking the light blanket carefully around her, and went back into the other room.

Through the window he saw and heard it—the Saturday night pattern—its neon blotted by haze, its multiplying, loose roar jingled into softness by the tricky distances of spring. It seemed to him that he heard in it, in that heightened blend of the hundreds of gurgling, cheeping noises of daily living, some of which were quickened for him by memories of aspiration or love, but now never more than quickened—that he heard all around him the endless echolalia of his time, his world, his trap. They were all down in the ditch with him, the prowlers, and the weak alarums of their malaise lacked even the dignity of the old ecclesiastical cry: “Father, what are we? And whither do we go?” For, in our cleverness, he thought, we know what we are, and in the sadness of no mystery, we know where we are going.

He looked down at the other sleeping figure, wondering what there was in the construction, the being of a face, that had once made it his vital necessity, and that now, by some combination of circumstance and familiarity as brutal as it was quiet, had been attenuated past recall. He looked down, waiting, wishing for a sense of ruin. For ruin implied salvage; it implied the loss of something dear. Where there was a sense of ruin, there might also be a sense of hope.

M
RS. BOWMAN, THE SMALL,
dark American woman walking up the Via Aurelia Antica in the sauterne Roman sunlight, was glad that she had worn the good brown pumps with the low French heels. “Take the Monteverdi bus from the Piazza Fiume,” Mrs. Wigham, the British journalist resident in Rome, had said on the phone. “After that, it’s a twenty-minute walk.” But of course it was turning out to be a very British twenty-minute walk, as the American had suspected it might.

Visiting Italian villas, if one had no car and must watch long cab fares, had a technique of its own. One had to be dressed to cope with the crammed
filobus,
the dodging between motorcycles on the steep walk afterward, the long, cobbled approaches to the houses themselves. But once there the
amour-propre
might have to cope with a room full of signoras dressed with their usual black and white graffito perfection or, worse still, with those of one’s own countrywomen who traveled preserved in some mysterious, transportable amber of their own native conveniences. Well, the new coat and the brown shoes would about do. She smiled to herself, remembering that she had read somewhere that a lady always traveled in brown.

The road was walled on each side, so that the sun scarcely glinted on the occasional green Vespa, red Lambretta or on herself, the only pedestrian. Here was a door set tight in the wall—number four, and number three had been minutes back. Number twenty-two might well be another mile away. Well, time is not
time
in Italy, she reminded herself. “My time is your time,” she sang under her breath, and walked on. After a while she came to the top of a hill and saw four priests approaching from the opposite direction, walking along in their inevitably coupled way. From above, the four black discs of their hats, with the round, center hubs of crown, looked like the flattened-out wheels of some ancient bas-relief vehicle. The wheels of the church, she thought, and crossed the road.

“
Per favore
,” she faltered. “
Il numero ventidue
—
e lontano
?” In a flood of smiles and gestures they waved her on. High above her head the embankments hid the greenery, making the way seem endless. From the dust of the road came the deciduous, stony smell of antiquity. Her lowered eyes caught sight of a pebble, smooth and egg-shaped, rather like the white jelly-bean stones her younger boy at home in the States had in his collection. She passed it, hesitated, and went back for it. I found it on the Via Amelia Antica, she would tell him. On Easter Sunday afternoon.

At home it would still be morning. Her boys, released from the school chapel, would be at dinner in the commons or horsing in the yard. It was a habit she had not been able to break, these six months away—this counting back to what time it was over there. She hadn’t wanted to go, she hadn’t. But “Go!” all the others on the faculty had said. After all—a sabbatical. Once in seven years. “And four of those a widow,” they must have whispered behind her. “Perhaps…over there…” Well, they would find her the same as before her sea change. At forty, forty-one, to range the world like a honing girl, the eye liquid, the breast a cave, was no more decent abroad than it would have been at home. One learned to be alone over here, as one had back there. It was like baggage. She slipped the stone into her pocket and went on.

At last she came to the high iron gates of number twenty-two. They swung open, released by the invisible keeper in the hut at the side, and at the end of a driveway shorter than most she came to the house—nothing of museum grandeur about it, like others she had visited, but low, extended in a comfortable way and about the size of her house at home. No one was about. “
Ciao
!” she would have liked to have called, but did not. “Hello?” she said, and waited. “Hell-lo-o.”

Mrs. Wigham came round the corner of her house, neatly gray-haired, sweatered and skirted in dun, a sensible Englishwoman at home in her garden, in whatever country that garden might be. “Ah, Mrs. Bowman, so happy to meet you,” she said. “The Maywoods wrote me about you. On leave from your post, they tell me.” They shook hands. “Sociology, is it not?” said Mrs. Wigham. “Are you going to be studying us for a book?”

“No,” said the American, laughing. “I tell myself I’m seeing and being.”

“Oh, well. No one ever does much work in Rome.” Mrs. Wigham led the way, past potting sheds, up a brief staircase, into the house and out again. “Two of your compatriots are here this afternoon,” she said. “A lady from Hollywood, perhaps you know her? Her husband owns a film company, something like that.” She mentioned a name, one of the pioneer, supercolossal names.

“Oh, yes, of course. No—I don’t know her,” said Mrs. Bowman.

“She’s here with a friend of hers sent me by our film man in London. A lady who writes for the films, I believe.” Mrs. Wigham, correspondent for a London daily, had that pale, weathered glance which was perhaps
de rigueur
for middle-aged British lady journalists. It had never seen mascara perhaps but, in a quietly topographical way, it had seen almost everything else. It rested thoughtfully now on Jane Bowman. “You know of
her,
possibly? A Miss Francine Moon?”