Tale for the Mirror (2 page)

From then on, my intimacy with Ginny Doll dwindled. Now and then I dropped by on a hot summer day when no one else was around and I simply had to talk about a new beau. For on this score she was the perfect confidante, of course, hanging breathless on every detail. After each time, I swore never to go back. It was embarrassing where there was no exchange. Besides, she drove me nuts with that list, bringing it out like an old set of dominoes, teasing me about my fickleness to “Gawain.” I couldn’t seem to get it through her head that this was New York, not Lenchburg, and that I hadn’t seen any of those boys for years.

By the time I’d been away at college for a year, I was finished with her. Ginny Doll hadn’t gone—Mrs. Leake thought it made you hard. My mother occasionally met Ginny Doll on the avenue, and reported her as pursuing a round that was awesomely unchanged—errands for Mamma, dinners with the aunts, meetings of the Sons and Daughters—even the pug was the same. The Leakes, my father said once, had brought the art of the status quo to a hyaline perfection that was a rarity in New York, but one not much prized there. Who could have dreamed of the direction from which honor would one day be paid?

The last time I saw her was shortly after my engagement had been announced, when I received a formal note from the Leakes, requesting the pleasure of my and my fiancé’s company on an afternoon. I remembered with a shock that long ago, “down South,” as we had learned to say now, within that circle of friends whom one did not shuffle but lost only to feud or death, a round of such visits was
de rigueur.
I went alone, unwilling to face the prospect of Ginny Doll studying my future husband for noble analogues, and found the two Leakes behind a loaded tea table.

Mrs. Leake seemed the same, except for a rigidly “at home” manner that she kept between us like a fire screen, as if my coming alliance with a man rendered me incendiary, and she was there to protect her own interests from flame. Ginny Doll’s teeth had perhaps a more ivory polish from the constant, vain effort of her lips to close over them, and her dress had already taken a spinster step toward surplice necklines and battleship colors; it was hard to believe that she was, like myself, twenty-three. We were alone together only once, when I went to the bathroom and she followed me in, muttering something about hand towels, of which there were already a dozen or so lace-encrusted ones on the rod.

Once inside, she faced me eagerly, with the tight, held-in smile that always made her look as if she were holding a mashed daisy in her mouth. “It’s so exciting,” she said. “Tell me all about it!”

“I have,” I said, referring to the stingy facts that had been extracted over the tea table—that we were both history instructors and were going to teach in Istanbul next year, that no, I had no picture with me, but he was “medium” and dark, and from “up here.”

“I mean—it’s been so long,” she said. “And Mamma made me dispose of my book.” It took me a minute to realize what she meant.

She looked down at the handkerchief she always carried, worrying the shred of cambric with the ball of her thumb, the way one worries a ticket to somewhere. “I wondered,” she said. “Is he one of the ones
we
knew?”

The Leakes sent us a Lenox vase for a wedding present, and my thank-you note was followed by one from Ginny Doll, saying that I just must come by some afternoon and tell her about the wedding trip; Mamma napped every day at three and it would be just like old times. I never did, of course. I was afraid it would be.

Ten years passed, fifteen. We had long since returned from abroad and settled in Easthampton. My parents had died. The vase had been broken by the first of the children. I hadn’t thought of Ginny Doll in years.

Then, one blinding August afternoon, I was walking along, of all places, Fourteenth Street, cursing the mood that had sent me into the city on such a day, to shop for things I didn’t need and wouldn’t find. I hadn’t found them, but the rising masochism that whelms women at the height of an unsuccessful shopping tour had impelled me down here to check sewing-machine prices at a discount house someone had mentioned a year ago, on whose door I’d just found a sign saying “Closed Month of August.” In another moment I would rouse and hail a cab, eager enough for the green routines I had fled that morning. Meanwhile I walked slowly west, the wrong way, still hunting for something, anything, peering into one after the other of the huge glass bays of the cheap shoe stores. Not long since, there had still been a chocolate shop down here, that had survived to serve teas in a cleanliness which was elegance for these parts, but I wouldn’t find it either. New York lay flat, pooped, in air the color of sweat, but a slatternly nostalgia rose from it, as happens in the dead end of summer, for those who spent their youth there. This trip was a seasonal purge; it would be unwise to find anything.

“Why, Charlotte Mary! I do declare!”

I think I knew who it was before I turned. It was my youth speaking. Since my parents died, no one had addressed me in that double-barreled way in years.

“Why—why Ginny Doll!” Had she not spoken, I would have passed her; she was dressed in that black, short-sleeved convention which city women were just beginning to use and looked, at first glance, almost like anyone. But at the gaspy catch of that voice I remembered everything about her. Here was the one mortal who must have stayed as much the same as anyone could, preserved in the amber of her status quo.

“Why, believe it or not, I was just thinking of you!” I said. It wasn’t strictly true; I had been thinking of Huyler’s, of old, expunged summers to which she faintly belonged. But early breeding stays with one, returning at odd times like an accent. I can still tell a half-lie, for the sake of someone else’s pleasure, as gracefully as anybody in Virginia.

While she extracted the number and names of my children, I revised my first impression of her. Age had improved her, as it does some unattractive girls—we were both thirty-seven. She still stooped heavily, as if the weight of her bust dragged at the high, thin shoulders, but she was better corseted, and had an arty look of heavy earrings and variegated bracelets, not Greenwich Village modern, but the chains of moonstones set in silver, links of carnelians and cameos that ladies used to bring back from Florence—I remembered Aunt Tot.

Something about her face had changed, however, and at first I thought it was merely the effect of her enormous hat (how had I missed it?)—the wide-brimmed “picture” hat, with an overcomplicated crown, often affected by women who fancied a touch of Mata Hari, or by aging demi-mondaines. Later, I was to find that this hat was Ginny Doll’s trademark, made for her in costume colors by the obscure family milliner to whom she still was loyal, whose fumbling, side-street touch saved the model from its own aspirations and kept it the hat of a lady. At the moment I thought only of how much it was just what Ginny Doll grown up would wear—one of those swooping discs under which romantic spinsters could visualize themselves leaning across a restaurant table at the not-impossible man, hats whose subfusc shadows came too heavy on the faces beneath them, and, well, too late. Here was her old aura of the ridiculous, brought to maturity.

“And how is your mother?” I asked, seeing Mrs. Leake as she still must be—tiny, deathless companion fly.

“Mamma?” She smiled, an odd smile, wide and lifted, but closed, and then I saw the real difference in her face. Her teeth had been pulled in. She had had them straightened. “Mamma’s
dead
,” said Ginny Doll.

“Oh, I’m sorry; I hadn’t heard—”

“Six years ago. It was her heart after all, think of it. And then I came into Aunt Tot’s money.” She smiled on, like a pleased child; until the day of her death, as I was to find, she never tired of the wonder of smiling.

“But don’t let’s stand here in this awful heat,” she said. “Come on up to the house, and Ida’ll give us some iced tea. Oh, honey, there’s so much to tell you!”

“Ida,” I said, enchanted. “Still Ida? Oh I wish I could, but I’m afraid I haven’t time to go all the way up there. I’ll miss my train.”

“But I don’t live uptown any more, darlin’, I live right down here. Come on.” I gave in, and instinctively turned east. Toward Gramercy Park, it would surely be, or Irving Place.

“No, this way.” She turned me West. “Right here on Fourteenth.”

I followed her, wondering, used as I was to the odd crannies that New Yorkers often seized upon with a gleefully inverted assumption of style. From Union Square just east of us, westward for several long blocks, this was an arid neighborhood even for tenements, an area of cranky shops being superseded by huge bargain chains, of lofts, piano factories, and the blind, shielded windows of textile agents. Nobody, really nobody lived here.

We turned in at the battered doorway of a loft building. Above us, I heard the chattering of machines. To the left, the grimy buff wall held a signboard with a row of company names in smudged gilt. Ginny Doll took out a key and opened a mailbox beneath. I was close enough to read the white calling card on it—
Ginevra Leake.

At that moment she turned, holding a huge wad of mail. “Honey, I guess I ought to tell you something about me, before you go upstairs,” she said. “In case it might make a difference to you.”

In a flash I’d tied it all together—the hat, the neighborhood, the flossy new name, my mother’s long-gone remark about unicorns. It wouldn’t be need of money. She had simply gone one Freudian step past Miss Lavalette Buchanan. She’d become a tart. A tart with Ida in the background to serve iced tea, as a Darley Leake would.

“I—what did you say?” I said.

She looked down tenderly at her clutch of mail. “I’ve joined the Party,” she said.

Familiar as the phrase had become to us all, for the moment I swear I thought she meant the Republican Party. “What’s that got—” I said, and then I stopped, understanding.

“Honey love,” she said. The moonstones rose, shining, on her breast. “I mean the Communist Party.”

“Ginny Doll Leake! You haven’t!”

“Cross my heart, I have!” she said, falling, as I had, into the overtones of our teens. “Cross my heart hope to die or kiss a pig!” And taking my silence for consent, she tossed her head gaily and led me up, past the Miller Bodice Lining, past the Apex Art Trays, to the top floor.

Ida opened the door, still in her white uniform, and greeted me warmly, chortling “Miss Charlotte! Miss Charlotte!” over and over before she released me. I don’t know what I expected to find behind her—divans perhaps, and the interchangeable furniture of Utopia built by R. H. Macy—certainly not what confronted me. For what I saw, gazing from the foyer where the abalone-shell lamp and the card tray reposed on the credenza as they had always done, was the old sitting room on Madison Avenue. Royal Doulton nymph vases, Chinese lamps, loveseats, “ladies” chairs, and luster candelabras, it was all there, even to the Bruxelles curtains through which filtered the felt-tasting air of Fourteenth Street. Obviously the place had been a huge loft, reclaimed with much expense and the utmost fidelity, “Lenchburg” Ascendant, wherever it might be. Even the positions of the furniture had been retained, with no mantel, but with the same feeling of orientation toward a nonexistent one. In the bathroom the rod held the same weight of ancestral embroidery. The only change I could discern was in the bedroom, where Ginny Doll’s nursery chintz and painted rattan had been replaced by Mrs. Leake’s walnut wedding suite and her point d’esprit spread.

I returned to the parlor and sat down on the loveseat, where I had always sat, watching, bemused, while Ida bore in the tray as if she had been waiting all that time in the wings. “The music box,” I asked. “Do you still have it?” Of course they did, and while it purled, I listened to Ginny Doll’s story.

After Mrs. Leake’s death, Aunt Tot had intended to take Ginny Doll on a world cruise, but had herself unfortunately died. For a whole year Ginny Doll had sat on in the old place, all Aunt Tot’s money waiting in front of her like a Jack Horner pie whose strands she dared not pull. Above all she craved to belong to a “crowd”; she spent hours weakly dreaming of suddenly being asked to join some “set” less deliquescent than the First Families of Virginia, but the active world seemed closed against her, an impenetrable crystal ball. Finally the family doctor insisted on her getting away. She had grasped at the only place she could think of, an orderly mountain retreat run by a neo-spiritualistic group known as Unity, two of whose Town Hall lectures she had attended with an ardently converted Daughter. The old doctor, kindly insisting on taking charge of arrangements, had mistakenly booked her at a “Camp Unity” in the Poconos. It had turned out to be a vacation camp, run, with a transparent disguise to which no one paid any attention, by the Communist Party.

“It was destiny,” said Ginny Doll, smiling absently at a wall on which hung, among other relics, a red-white-and-blue embroidered tribute to a distaff uncle who had been mayor of Memphis. “Destiny.”

I had to agree with her. From her ingenuous account, and from my own knowledge of the social habits of certain “progressives” at my husband’s college, I could see her clearly, expanding like a
Magnolia grandiflora
in that bouncingly dedicated air. In a place where the really eminent were noncommittal and aliases were worn like medals, no one questioned her presence or affiliation; each group, absorbed in the general charivari, assumed her to be part of another. In the end she achieved the
réclame
that was to grow. She was a Southerner, and a moneyed woman. They had few of either, and she delighted them with her vigorous enmity toward the status quo. Meanwhile her heart recognized their romantic use of the bogus; she bloomed in this atmosphere so full of categories, and of men. In the end she had found, if briefly, a categorical man.

“Yes, it must have been destiny,” I said. Only kismet could have seen to it that Ginny Doll should meet, in the last, dialectic-dusted rays of a Pocono sunset, a man named Lee. “Lighthorse Harry” or “Robert E.,” I wondered, but she never told me whether it was his first name or last, or gave any of the usual details, although in the years to come she often alluded to what he had said, with the tenacious memory of the woman who had once, perhaps only once, been preferred. It was not fantasy; I believed her. It had been one of those summer affairs of tents and flashlights, ending when “Party work” reclaimed him, this kind of work apparently being as useful for such purpose as any other. But it had made her a woman of experience, misunderstood at last, able to participate in female talk with the rueful ease of the star-crossed—and to wear those hats.