Tale for the Mirror (21 page)

Mrs. Fay folded her hands. Now someone would ask the other question. She gave a sigh. Next to her, her neighbor marveled. No, she was nothing like—no aureole. This one whisked herself in and out, like a conjuror’s pocket handkerchief. But the effect was the same. Small sensations, usually ignored, made themselves known, piped like a brigade of mice from their holes. There was a confused keenness in the ear…nose…air? One saw the draperies, peach-fleshed velour, and waited for their smell. The chandelier tinkled, an owl hooted, and a man could hear his own breath. The present, drawn from all its crevices, was here.

“But where did the beast come from?” said Miss Bissle.

Yes, it would be she, thought Arietta. The cousin, his glasses still off, was staring at her with eyes that were bright and vague. “A runaway,” she said in a cross voice. It always made her sulky to have to end the fun this way, with no punch line but fact. “There’s an animal importer up the mountain; we found out later. He buys them for zoos.” She turned pertly to the cousin. “Perhaps it was one of yours.”

“I can’t think when, Robert,” said Miss Bissle. “I’ve always known exactly where you were.”

Robert, before he replaced his glasses, had a vague impression that Mrs. Fay looked guilty, but she spoke so quickly that he must have been wrong.

“Parker,” she said, “did you and Helen ever hear about Greatgrandfather Claude, and Mr. Henry Clay?”

They hadn’t. Nor had they heard about Louis’s patron’s glass eye. Robert, saved, sank deeper in his chair. He was his father’s son after all, trained to fear the sycophant, and he brooded now on whether Mrs. Fay wanted something of him. Look how she had got round the Lampeys. Was she honest? Victor’s tonic honesty, he remembered, had spared no one; he never flattered individually but merely opened to dullards the gross, fine flattery of life alone. And what did he, Robert, want of her? If he closed his eyes, prisms of laughter floated past him, flick-flack, down the long cloth of another table; he could feel, there and here, the lax blush of the present in his limbs. He slouched in it, while Arietta told how, when Carolingus spoke for her, her father had said, “You know she has no
dot
.” And how Carolingus, who was slightly deaf, had replied, “I’ve no dough either.” And how in after years, both always amiably purported to be unsure of who had said which.

And then Robert sat up in his chair. For Arietta was telling the story of the “beefies” and “
les maigres
.”

So that’s it, he thought. I knew it, I knew it all the time. And in the recesses of his mind he felt that same rare satisfaction which came to him whenever he was able to add to a small fund he had kept in a downtown savings bank almost since boyhood, money separate from inheritance, made by his own acumen, on his own. I recognized her, he thought, and the feeling grew on him, as it had been growing all evening, that in the right company he was not such a dullard after all. He leaned back now and watched her—quiet now after her sally, unobtrusive whenever she chose. It was not wit she pretended to; her materials were as simple as a child’s. What was the quality she shared with Victor, born to it as the Bissles were born to money, that the others here felt too, for there was Lampey, murmuring ingenuously into his brandy-cup “Wonderful stuff, this, isn’t it?”—quite oblivious of the fact that it was his own—and there even was Emily, her broad feet lifted from the floor? Whatever Mrs. Fay did, its effect was as Victor’s had been, to peel some secondary skin from the ordinary, making wherever one was—if one was with her—loom like an object under a magnifying glass—large, majestic and there. She made one live in the now, as, time out of mind it seemed, he had once done for himself. But he did not know how she did it. Or whether she did. Watching her rise from her chair, begin to make her adieu, the thought came to him that he would not mind spending a lifetime finding out.

“Let me go with you,” he said, standing up. “Let me drive you home.”

But Emily had arisen too. “Mrs. Fay,” she said, her blinking fluttered, “have you had any experience with birds?”

Arietta smiled between them. How lucky she had recognized him, the real thing, poor dear, even if his sad little blague—out of
African Game Trails
of course, old Teddy Roosevelt, on half the bookshelves in Nigeria—was not.

“Do,” she said to him, “but let’s walk.” She turned to Miss Bissle. and let the truth escape from her with gusto. After all it was her own. “No, not really. Of course—I’ve shot them.” On the short way home, the river, lapping blandly, made conversation. Robert spoke once. “I don’t really think Emily would have suited you,” he said, and Mrs. Fay replied that it was nice of him to put it that way round.

At Arietta’s doorway, they paused. But it was imperative that she find out what was on his mind. Or put something there.

“I’d ask you in,” she said, “but I’ve nothing but dandelion wine.”

“I’ve never had any,” said Robert. “I’d like to try it.”

She led him through the hall, past the rack where Carolingus’s leather jacket hung, and her father’s, and the squirrel-skin weskit they had cured for Roger, then through the softly ruined downstairs rooms, up the stairs and into the little salon. It was an educative tour; it told him a great deal. And this was the family room; he sensed the intimate patchouli that always clung to the center of a house, even before he looked up and saw them all above the mantel, hanging on their velvet tree. While Arietta went for the wine, he moved forward to examine them. What a higgler’s collection they were, in their grim descent from ivory to pasteboard to Kodak, yet a firm insouciance went from face to face, as if each knew that its small idiom was an indispensable footnote to history, to the Sargents, Laverys, de Lászlós that people like him had at home. And
there
, in that small brown-tone. Yes, there.

“Take me round the portraits,” he said when she returned, and here too, since she also was on the wall, he learned. He saw that Carolingus must have been of an age near his own. “And who are they?” he said. “You missed that one.” They were sitting at a small escritoire on which she had placed the wine, and if he stretched a hand he could touch the faded brown-tone. “That’s my father as a boy, and his older brother, Victor.” What an absurd feeling happiness was. That must be its name. To feel as if such a sum, such a round sum had been deposited in that bank that he need never go there again. Not if he stayed here. As, in time, he thought, he could arrange.

Opposite him, Arietta fingered a drawer inside which the name of the desk’s first owner was inscribed—Marie-Claire, who had married for inclination but had got the rose-diamonds too. She stole a glance at her vis-a-vis. After all, she had recognized him, and in time, as she did remember, this and inclination could come to be almost the same. It was strange that he was no “beefy,” but she had already had one—and no doubt her tribe, along with the rest of the world, must move on. And he was very responsive. In time, she thought, the house would come to seem to him like his own.

“Wonderful stuff,” he was saying, holding up to the light one of the old green bottles into which Carolingus and her father had put the wine.

“Is it really?” said Arietta. “I was never any help to them on it.”

“What it wants,” he said, “is to be decanted, for the sediment. One does it against a candle flame. I was thinking—I might come by tomorrow. And show you.”

“Do—for company,” said Mrs. Fay. “Actually, one wine seems to me much like any other. I’ve got no palate for it. Women don’t, my father always used to say.”

“No, they don’t.” He was looking at her so deeply that she was startled. “Perfume kills it,” he said, and so intensely that, odd averral as it was, it hung over them both like an avowal of love.

Downstairs, she let him out the front door, and watched him to the end of the lane. Roger’s spaniel yipped, and over the hill another dog set up an answering cry. In the darkness, as she closed the door, she smiled, one of old Teddy’s sentences lumbering through her mind. “The hunter who wanders these lands sees the monstrous river-horse snorting, the snarling leopard and the coiled python, the zebras barking in the moonlight.” As she went back up the stairs, she wondered whether she would ever tell him. Some truths, as an honest companion, one spoke in jest; others, as a woman, one kept to oneself. At the moment it didn’t matter. Standing in the doorway of the little salon, she stretched her arms. “I’ve dined out!” she said to the pictures, to herself. “I’ve dined on zebra, and on hartebeest, and yes, I think, on…husband. I’ve dined well.”

Outside the hedge at the end of the lane, Robert watched the door close. He knew just how it would begin tomorrow; he would begin by asking her, as he had never asked anyone, to call him “Bi.” There would always be a temptation to say more—who, for instance, would understand about that day on the Brandywine better than she? But he must remember; with all she was—she was also a woman. They liked to be chosen for themselves. He must always be as mindful of that as of his incredible luck. And what utter luck it was! He swelled with the urge to tell someone about it. But there were not many in the world today who could appreciate precisely its nature. It was even possible that he himself was the last one extant of all those who once had. Standing in the shadow of the hedge, he whispered it to himself, as once a man had whispered it to his grandfather, over the cigar. “Lucky man,” he said to himself, “you have a Minot!”

O
N AN AFTERNOON LATE
in the Indian summer of 1918, on the lawn of the house from which the Elkin family was returning to the city the next day, a garden party was ending, and the talk there was all of the war, which was ending too. But inside the house—in a room called the “music” room because it held chairs in which no one could settle, a piano on which no one played, and a broken guitar slanted in a corner like a stricken figure—the Elkin child, Hester, lay on the floor, wishing that the war would never end and that a little old couple called the Katzes had never come to the party at all.

Outside, in the pink, operatic light, all the town guests, most of them Mr. Elkin’s elderly retainers, had just gone, looking almost rakish out of their city serge, in the foulards, pongees, and sere straws they had thought proper to the occasion. Her father, who was the head of the family and of the business which supported it, attracted retainers—as her mother often said—as if he were royalty. Even when they were no kin and useless to the point of impossibility, like old Mr. Katz, they swam knowingly toward him out of the sea of incompetents, and he kept them on, out of sympathy, some vanity, and an utter lack of the executive violence necessary to have off with their heads.

Today, all of them had eaten greedily of cakes whose scarce ingredients had been so happily procured, had partaken reverently of Mr. Elkin’s claret—meanwhile chattering thinly of what the end of the war boom might do to such claret-consuming incomes as the one which maintained them—and ancient relatives whom Hester had never before seen out of chairs had sat daringly on the grass. Toward the end of the party, Mr. Katz (thought of by Hester as her Mr. Katz), who had drunk no claret, had nevertheless been found sitting on the grass too, dazedly preoccupied in wrapping remnants of cake and ice cream, plates and all, in some napkins and a length of string, yards of which projected from a ball in his pants pocket and coiled fecklessly in his lap. He and his wife had just gone, gathered up and reassembled by Miss Lil, Mr. Elkin’s forelady, a tall old woman with dead-black hair and a face like a white Jordan almond, who had shepherded them into a taxi, flapped her draperies officiously over their humbled, retreating backs, and climbed in after them with a great show of agility, as one whose competence age had not affected.

Outside the window now, Hester’s mother and Mr. Elkin’s sisters, Aunt Mamie and Aunt Flora, clinked and murmured over retrospective cups of coffee. The aunts, as per custom, had come out from the city the night before, to “help” in their peculiar way—Flora to check interminably on Mrs. Elkin: “What you have to pay for this chicken, your butter, these berries, Hattie?” and to cap each of her sister-in-law’s responses with some triumphantly cawed instance of her own shrewdness in such matters. Mamie would clog the air with vague recipes out of their Southern girlhood, recipes which she seemed to think had an extra and regional delicacy either because these scorned Yankee exactitude for “a pinch” of this and “a piece the size of a walnut” of that, or had some little trick she could never quite recall—“a wild geranium leaf, I think it was”—or had no pertinence whatever to the occasion at hand, like okra soup, when the question was afternoon tea. In addition, both had to squelch any assumption on the part of the maid that they might be poor relations, and this they did by handily assuming any of Mrs. Elkin’s duties which were merely verbal, and by their keenly critical acceptance of service at one magpie sit-down snack after another.

“Good coffee,” said Flora.

“The last of the Mocha Joe got from his importer friend,” said Hester’s mother. It was in the nature of things that Flora’s remark was tinctured with disapproval, and Mrs. Elkin’s with a hint of scarcities to come.

“I mustn’t eat another thing,” added her mother. “Kozak says I’m not to gain another ounce beforehand. Did you know—I ate a pound and a half of Seckel pears the night before Hester was born!”

“No wonder she’s so greenish,” said Mamie’s pecking voice.

“I know, I know,” said her mother. “The summer hasn’t done a thing for her. Autointoxication, Kozak says. He thinks I ought to put her on a farm, let her get built up. I thought maybe next spring, when the time comes. Or afterwards.”

Hester inched closer to the window. The family had made the transition from Manhattan to White Plains very late this summer, because of that ailing of Mrs. Elkin’s which Hester knew to be connected with the impending birth of a baby. She had guessed this, just as she had long ago concluded that what her parents really wanted, and what they must have wanted her to be, was a boy. To the aunts, and Mr. Elkin’s brothers, all girls had been born. At fifty, Mr. Elkin had produced Hester, last in a line of six girl first cousins, the other five of whom—Isabelle, Lucille, Jessamine, Gertrude, and Caroline—were sitting in their own group on the lawn now. All of these were flamboyantly handsome young women, to whom the nine-year-old Hester had never once been likened except, ruefully, in the matter of sex. If the women in her family (as, possibly, in the world) seemed to be of peculiarly dominant natures, it might be because they must never admit to a value somewhat lowered because there were so many of them.